Fire Hydrant of Freedom

Politics, Religion, Science, Culture and Humanities => Politics & Religion => Topic started by: Crafty_Dog on June 12, 2003, 11:06:21 AM

Title: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 12, 2003, 11:06:21 AM
Woof All:

  I open this thread for all WELL-WRITTEN and REASONED political rants and interesting thought pieces.  GOOD HUMORED Commentary welcome.

Woof,
Crafty Dog
-------------------------------
Ann Coulter

I could hardly breathe. Gulping for air, I started crying and yelling, "What do you mean? What are you saying? Why are the Clintons back again?"

Interviewing Hillary Clinton last Sunday night about her book Living History, ABC's Barbara Walters began with such hardball questions as:

"Are you a saint?"
"[Is it] tougher than being first lady, being a senator?"
"You know, you have been working on so many bills with Republicans. ... How do you turn old enemies into allies? ... I mean, no hard feelings?"
"How do you get on with this?"
"There were the accusations that [your husband] was a womanizer." I believe a DNA test revealed that they were more than accusations. "How'd you deal with it?"
Hillary dealt with it. Hillary is a survivor. As Walters said, Living History is a "wife's deeply personal account of being betrayed in front of the entire world." In fact, it was so deeply personal, it took several ghostwriters to get it right.

Walters brazenly probed the question on everyone's mind: How could Hillary be so brave, so strong, so downright wonderful? As Walters recounted, once our brave heroine even lived in Arkansas! Summarizing Hillary's sacrifice, Walters said: "You were young. You were smart. You had a future in Washington. But you gave it up to be with Bill Clinton, to move to Arkansas. ... Why on earth would you throw away your future?" Admittedly, even Bill Clinton couldn't wait to get out of Arkansas. Manhattanites cannot conceive of a greater hardship.

Walters also astutely observed that "in addition to being first lady, you're a mother." Will Hillary's mind-boggling feats never end? Usually such phony liberal amazement at the staggering heroism of women ends with the woman drowning all her children.

Describing interviews like these, New York Times television reviewer Alessandra Stanley said that Hillary was finally able to show her "grit, an outsize will and discipline that has nothing to do with gender." This, Ms. Stanley said, was a welcome change from Hillary's more recognized role as "an emblem of the modern female condition." So on one hand, Hillary has grit and determination. But on the other hand, she is a living, breathing icon. It's good to see the New York Times really going the extra mile to give both sides these days.

In "her" book, "Hillary" explains that the story of how Nelson Mandela forgave his jailers inspired her to forgive Bill for his infidelity. OK, but they locked up Mandela only once. Revealing more about herself than Hillary, Ms. Stanley claims that "millions of women have forgiven far worse of philandering husbands." Far worse? Really? No wonder liberal women hate men so much.

If you credit news reports, the public can't get enough of Hillary. The crush of ordinary people buying Hillary's book seems baffling in light of recent polls. According to an ABC poll, 48 percent of Americans have an unfavorable impression of Hillary, 53 percent of Americans don't want Hillary to ever run for president, and 7 percent of Americans have been date-raped by Bill Clinton.

First in line for Hillary's book at Barnes & Noble at Lincoln Center on Sunday night was Charles Greinsky, who told the New York Daily News he rushed out at midnight to get one of the first books because he supported Hillary's health-care plan. A few years ago, the Associated Press identified Greinsky more fully. It turns out he is "a longtime Clinton campaigner" from Staten Island, who has been the Clintons' guest several times both at the White House and at their home in Chappaqua, N.Y.

Lining up at midnight to buy Hillary's book is street theater for liberals. I suppose shelling out $30 to support the concept of Hillary is less dangerous than the pernicious nonsense liberals usually fund. Hillary has already gotten a record $8 million advance from Simon & Schuster for the book ? the most anyone has ever received for rewriting history. Hillary's acolytes could buy enough copies of her book to rebuild the World Trade Center, and she's not going to pocket more than that.

Another average individual eager to get Hillary's book was Greg Packer, who was the centerpiece of the New York Times' "man on the street" interview about Hillary-mania. After being first in line for an autographed book at the Fifth Avenue Barnes & Noble, Packer gushed to the Times: "I'm a big fan of Hillary and Bill's. I want to change her mind about running for president. I want to be part of her campaign."

It was easy for the Times to spell Packer's name right because he is apparently the entire media's designated "man on the street" for all articles ever written. He has appeared in news stories more than 100 times as a random member of the public. Packer was quoted on his reaction to military strikes against Iraq; he was quoted at the St. Patrick's Day Parade, the Thanksgiving Day Parade and the Veterans' Day Parade. He was quoted at not one ? but two ? New Year's Eve celebrations at Times Square. He was quoted at the opening of a new "Star Wars" movie, at the opening of an H&M clothing store on Fifth Avenue and at the opening of the viewing stand at Ground Zero. He has been quoted at Yankees games, Mets games, Jets games ? even getting tickets for the Brooklyn Cyclones. He was quoted at a Clinton fund-raiser at Alec Baldwin's house in the Hamptons and the pope's visit to Giants stadium.

Are all reporters writing their stories from Jayson Blair's house? Whether or not it will help her presidential ambitions,  Living History definitely positions Hillary nicely for a job as a reporter.

Ann Coulter is host of AnnCoulter.org
Title: political rant
Post by: matinik on June 12, 2003, 12:31:34 PM
cool article. ann as usual, articulated the issue well.
 one book that underline the clinton's misuse of public trust is  "derilection of duty". the authors name escapes me at the moment but it is by a former "football" holder who listed all the things bubba did when in office, one of which is actually losing the nuclear codes :shock:  :shock: ! think of it: lost code: no way to authorize counter strike. for a period of time the united states nuclear might was effectively neutralised. by it's own president. scary stuff. now hillary is sending out feelers for a posible run :shock: ?

god help us all

matinik
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 12, 2003, 12:35:24 PM
Some of you may have heard that AC was fired by National Review.  Here's some background:

--------------------------

The background story here is as follows. Coulter wrote a column, quoted by many, wherein she called upon America to invade Muslim countries and convert them to Christianity. Then she wrote another column--whose original words seem in dispute--which meandered upon the same lines. National Review Online ran the first column, but did not publish the second. At which point NRO and Coulter parted ways. She loudly claimed censorship; they said editorial judgement. Here's the editor's letter explaining his side. Not badly, I think.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

October 3, 2001

Dear Readers,

As many of you may have heard, we've dropped Ann Coulter's column from NRO [National Reviw Online]. This has sparked varying amounts of protest, support, and, most of all, curiosity from our readers. We owe you an explanation.

Of course, we would explain our decision to Ann, but the reality is that she's called the shots from the get-go. It was Ann who decided to sever her ties with National Review -- not the other way around.

This is what happened.

In the wake of her invade-and-Christianize-them column, Coulter wrote a long, rambling rant of a response to her critics that was barely coherent. She's a smart and funny person, but this was Ann at her worst -- emoting rather than thinking, and badly needing editing and some self-censorship, or what is commonly referred to as "judgment."

Running this "piece" would have been an embarrassment to Ann, and to NRO. Rich Lowry pointed this out to her in an e-mail (I was returning from my honeymoon). She wrote back an angry response, defending herself from the charge that she hates Muslims and wants to convert them at gunpoint.

But this was not the point. It was NEVER the point. The problem with Ann's first column was its sloppiness of expression and thought. Ann didn't fail as a person -- as all her critics on the Left say -- she failed as WRITER, which for us is almost as bad.

Rich wrote her another e-mail, engaging her on this point, and asking her -- in more diplomatic terms -- to approach the whole controversy not as a PR-hungry, free-swinging pundit on Geraldo, but as a careful writer.

No response.

Instead, she apparently proceeded to run around town bad-mouthing NR and its employees. Then she showed up on TV and, in an attempt to ingratiate herself with fellow martyr Bill Maher, said we were "censoring" her.

By this point, it was clear she wasn't interested in continuing the relationship.

What publication on earth would continue a relationship with a writer who would refuse to discuss her work with her editors? What publication would continue to publish a writer who attacked it on TV? What publication would continue to publish a writer who lied about it -- on TV and to a Washington Post reporter?

And, finally, what CONSERVATIVE publication would continue to publish a writer who doesn't even know the meaning of the word "censorship"?

So let me be clear: We did not "fire" Ann for what she wrote, even though it was poorly written and sloppy. We ended the relationship because she behaved with a total lack of professionalism, friendship, and loyalty.

What's Ann's take on all this? Well, she told the Washington Post yesterday that she loves it, because she's gotten lots of great publicity. That pretty much sums Ann up.

On the Sean Hannity show yesterday, however, apparently embarrassed by her admission to the Post, she actually tried to deny that she has sought publicity in this whole matter. Well, then, Ann, why did you complain of being "censored" on national TV? Why did you brag to the Post about all the PR?

Listening to Ann legalistically dodge around trying to explain all this would have made Bill Clinton blush.

Ann also told the Post that we only paid her $5 a month for her work (would that it were so!). Either this is a deliberate lie, or Ann needs to call her accountant because someone's been skimming her checks.

Many readers have asked, why did we run the original column in which Ann declared we should "invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity" -- if we didn't like it.

Well, to be honest, it was a mistake. It stemmed from the fact this was a supposedly pre-edited syndicated column, coming in when NRO was operating with one phone line and in general chaos. Our bad.

Now as far as Ann's charges go, I must say it's hard to defend against them, because they either constitute publicity-minded name-calling, like calling us "girly-boys" -- or they're so much absurd bombast.

For example:

Ann -- a self-described "constitutional lawyer" -- volunteered on Politically Incorrect that our "censoring" of her column was tantamount to "repealing the First Amendment." Apparently, in Ann's mind, she constitutes the thin blonde line between freedom and tyranny, and so any editorial decision she dislikes must be a travesty.

She sniffed to the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz that "Every once in awhile they'll [National Review] throw one of their people to the wolves to get good press in left-wing publications." I take personal offense to this charge. She's accusing us of betraying a friend for publicity, when in fact it was the other way around.

And, lastly, this "Joan of Arc battling the forces of political correctness" act doesn't wash. In the same 20 days in which Ann says -- over and over and over again -- that NR has succumbed to "PC hysteria," we've run pieces celebrating every PC shibboleth and bogeyman.
Paul Johnson has criticized Islam as an imperial religion. William F. Buckley himself has called, essentially, for a holy war. Rich Lowry wants to bring back the Shah, and I've written that Western Civilization has every right to wave the giant foam "We're Number 1!" finger as high as it wants.

The only difference between what we've run and what Ann considers so bravely iconoclastic on her part, is that we've run articles that accord persuasion higher value than shock value. It's true: Ann is fearless, in person and in her writing. But fearlessness isn't an excuse for crappy writing or crappier behavior.

To be honest, even though there's a lot more that could be said, I have no desire to get any deeper into this because, like with a Fellini movie, the deeper you get, the less sense Ann makes.

We're delighted that FrontPageMagazine has, with remarkable bravery, picked up Ann's column, presumably for only $5 a month. They'll be getting more than what they're paying for, I'm sure.

-- Jonah Goldberg
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 12, 2003, 05:06:05 PM
Woof Dog Russ:

  I've moved your Wood Allen post to this thread with an eye to saving the WW3 thread for more serious posts  :)  

Woof,
Crafty
---------------------


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 
LONDON, England (CNN) -- U.S. film director and comedian Woody Allen has made an advert for France in which he calls on Americans to put "petty" anti-French feelings behind them.

In an advert for the French Tourist Board he asks his fellow Americans to "forget about our differences."

The winner of three Oscars, including two for the 1978 comedy "Annie Hall," says he will defy a boycott of everything French by his fellow countrymen.

He will continue to eat French fries and French kiss his wife, he said.

The star asks the U.S. to forgive the French for their resistance to the latest war in Iraq. French President Jacques Chirac threatened to veto any U.S.-inspired second resolution in the U.N. Security Council which would have opened the way to military action.

Anti-French sentiments are so high that some sections in the U.S. retaliated by calling for a boycott of French products, with some going so far as to call for the renaming of French fries as freedom fries.

Some U.S. media lampooned the French as "cheese-eating surrender monkeys," while the number of U.S. tourists visiting France in the last three months has dropped by 15 percent.

"Recently there has been a lot of controversy between the countries, and I would hope that now the two countries could put all that behind them and start to build on what really has been a great friendship," Allen said in the video.

"No one will be petty about this and we can forget about our differences and I will not have to refer to my French fried potatoes as 'freedom fries' and I don't have to freedom kiss my wife when I really want to French kiss her. So let's pull together now."

The video, called "Let's Fall in Love Again," also features chef Daniel Boulud, New York firefighter Chris Jense and jazz musician Wynton Marsalis.

Allen, recently voted as one of the 100 greatest movie stars in a poll by British film fans, has long been a fan of French culture. Last year at the Cannes Film Festival he defended the strength of French democracy in the face of far-right prominence.

The comedian rejected a call by American Jews to boycott the festival because of recent anti-Semitic attacks in France and the rise of the far-right.

A long-standing fan of French culture, Allen is an obvious advertising choice, at least from a French point of view.

But the decision has raised eyebrows in the United States.

"Woody Allen is bizarre choice. ... Catherine Deneuve would have been good -- the boys would appreciate her, and Johnny Depp -- the girls would appreciate him. And he lives in Paris," said Ray Bennett, a Hollywood reporter.

"I don't know why they would use Woody Allen, I don't think he has a good reputation in New York, a lot of people don't like him, so I don't think it's a good idea," said one New Yorker, Julie Belcher.

In his film "Hollywood Ending," Allen -- who plays a blind director whose film was a hit in France but a flop in America -- says: "Here I am a bum, there I am a genius. Thank God the French exist."
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 17, 2003, 05:17:08 PM
If The Bush Administration Lied About WMD, So Did These People (Updated)By John HawkinsSince we haven't found WMD in Iraq yet, a lot of the anti-war/anti-Bush crowd is claiming that the Bush administration lied about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. The story being floated now is that Saddam had no WMD (or almost none) and that the Bush administration didn't tell the truth about the WMD threat.

Well, if they're going to claim that the Bush administration lied, then there sure are a lot of other people, including quite a few prominent Democrats, who have told the same lies since the inspectors pulled out of Iraq in 1998. Here are just a few examples of what I'm talking about...

"[W]e urge you, after consulting with Congress, and consistent with the U.S. Constitution and laws, to take necessary actions (including, if appropriate, air and missile strikes on suspect Iraqi sites) to respond effectively to the threat posed by Iraq's refusal to end its weapons of mass destruction programs." -- From a letter signed by Joe Lieberman, Dianne Feinstein, Barbara A. Milulski, Tom Daschle, & John Kerry among others on October 9, 1998

"This December will mark three years since United Nations inspectors last visited Iraq. There is no doubt that since that time, Saddam Hussein has reinvigorated his weapons programs. Reports indicate that biological, chemical and nuclear programs continue apace and may be back to pre-Gulf War status. In addition, Saddam continues to refine delivery systems and is doubtless using the cover of a licit missile program to develop longer- range missiles that will threaten the United States and our allies." -- From a December 6, 2001 letter signed by Bob Graham, Joe Lieberman, Harold Ford, & Tom Lantos among others

"Saddam's goal ... is to achieve the lifting of U.N. sanctions while retaining and enhancing Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs. We cannot, we must not and we will not let him succeed." -- Madeline Albright, 1998

"Iraq made commitments after the Gulf War to completely dismantle all weapons of mass destruction, and unfortunately, Iraq has not lived up to its agreement." -- Barbara Boxer, November 8, 2002

"The last UN weapons inspectors left Iraq in October of 1998. We are confident that Saddam Hussein retained some stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, and that he has since embarked on a crash course to build up his chemical and biological warfare capability. Intelligence reports also indicate that he is seeking nuclear weapons, but has not yet achieved nuclear capability." -- Robert Byrd, October 2002

"What is at stake is how to answer the potential threat Iraq represents with the risk of proliferation of WMD. Baghdad's regime did use such weapons in the past. Today, a number of evidences may lead to think that, over the past four years, in the absence of international inspectors, this country has continued armament programs." -- Jacques Chirac, October 16, 2002

"The community of nations may see more and more of the very kind of threat Iraq poses now: a rogue state with weapons of mass destruction, ready to use them or provide them to terrorists. If we fail to respond today, Saddam and all those who would follow in his footsteps will be emboldened tomorrow." -- Bill Clinton in 1998

"In the four years since the inspectors left, intelligence reports show that Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical and biological weapons stock, his missile delivery capability, and his nuclear program. He has also given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including Al Qaeda members, though there is apparently no evidence of his involvement in the terrible events of September 11, 2001. It is clear, however, that if left unchecked, Saddam Hussein will continue to increase his capacity to wage biological and chemical warfare, and will keep trying to develop nuclear weapons. Should he succeed in that endeavor, he could alter the political and security landscape of the Middle East, which as we know all too well affects American security." -- Hillary Clinton, October 10, 2002

"I am absolutely convinced that there are weapons...I saw evidence back in 1998 when we would see the inspectors being barred from gaining entry into a warehouse for three hours with trucks rolling up and then moving those trucks out." -- Clinton's Secretary of Defense William Cohen in April of 2003

"Iraq is not the only nation in the world to possess weapons of mass destruction, but it is the only nation with a leader who has used them against his own people." -- Tom Daschle in 1998

"Saddam Hussein's regime represents a grave threat to America and our allies, including our vital ally, Israel. For more than two decades, Saddam Hussein has sought weapons of mass destruction through every available means. We know that he has chemical and biological weapons. He has already used them against his neighbors and his own people, and is trying to build more. We know that he is doing everything he can to build nuclear weapons, and we know that each day he gets closer to achieving that goal." -- John Edwards, Oct 10, 2002

"I share the administration's goals in dealing with Iraq and its weapons of mass destruction." -- Dick Gephardt in September of 2002

"Iraq does pose a serious threat to the stability of the Persian Gulf and we should organize an international coalition to eliminate his access to weapons of mass destruction. Iraq's search for weapons of mass destruction has proven impossible to completely deter and we should assume that it will continue for as long as Saddam is in power." -- Al Gore, 2002

"We are in possession of what I think to be compelling evidence that Saddam Hussein has, and has had for a number of years, a developing capacity for the production and storage of weapons of mass destruction." -- Bob Graham, December 2002

"We have known for many years that Saddam Hussein is seeking and developing weapons of mass destruction." -- Ted Kennedy, September 27, 2002

"I will be voting to give the president of the United States the authority to use force - if necessary - to disarm Saddam Hussein because I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hands is a real and grave threat to our security." -- John F. Kerry

"We begin with the common belief that Saddam Hussein is a tyrant and a threat to the peace and stability of the region. He has ignored the mandates of the United Nations and is building weapons of mass destruction and the means of delivering them." -- Carl Levin, Sept 19, 2002

"Over the years, Iraq has worked to develop nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. During 1991 - 1994, despite Iraq's denials, U.N. inspectors discovered and dismantled a large network of nuclear facilities that Iraq was using to develop nuclear weapons. Various reports indicate that Iraq is still actively pursuing nuclear weapons capability. There is no reason to think otherwise. Beyond nuclear weapons, Iraq has actively pursued biological and chemical weapons.U.N. inspectors have said that Iraq's claims about biological weapons is neither credible nor verifiable. In 1986, Iraq used chemical weapons against Iran, and later, against its own Kurdish population. While weapons inspections have been successful in the past, there have been no inspections since the end of 1998. There can be no doubt that Iraq has continued to pursue its goal of obtaining weapons of mass destruction." -- Patty Murray, October 9, 2002

"As a member of the House Intelligence Committee, I am keenly aware that the proliferation of chemical and biological weapons is an issue of grave importance to all nations. Saddam Hussein has been engaged in the development of weapons of mass destruction technology which is a threat to countries in the region and he has made a mockery of the weapons inspection process." -- Nancy Pelosi, December 16, 1998

"Even today, Iraq is not nearly disarmed. Based on highly credible intelligence, UNSCOM [the U.N. weapons inspectors] suspects that Iraq still has biological agents like anthrax, botulinum toxin, and clostridium perfringens in sufficient quantity to fill several dozen bombs and ballistic missile warheads, as well as the means to continue manufacturing these deadly agents. Iraq probably retains several tons of the highly toxic VX substance, as well as sarin nerve gas and mustard gas. This agent is stored in artillery shells, bombs, and ballistic missile warheads. And Iraq retains significant dual-use industrial infrastructure that can be used to rapidly reconstitute large-scale chemical weapons production." -- Ex-Un Weapons Inspector Scott Ritter in 1998

"There is unmistakable evidence that Saddam Hussein is working aggressively to develop nuclear weapons and will likely have nuclear weapons within the next five years. And that may happen sooner if he can obtain access to enriched uranium from foreign sources -- something that is not that difficult in the current world. We also should remember we have always underestimated the progress Saddam has made in development of weapons of mass destruction." -- John Rockefeller, Oct 10, 2002

"Saddam?s existing biological and chemical weapons capabilities pose a very real threat to America, now. Saddam has used chemical weapons before, both against Iraq?s enemies and against his own people. He is working to develop delivery systems like missiles and unmanned aerial vehicles that could bring these deadly weapons against U.S. forces and U.S. facilities in the Middle East." -- John Rockefeller, Oct 10, 2002

"Whether one agrees or disagrees with the Administration?s policy towards Iraq, I don?t think there can be any question about Saddam?s conduct. He has systematically violated, over the course of the past 11 years, every significant UN resolution that has demanded that he disarm and destroy his chemical and biological weapons, and any nuclear capacity. This he has refused to do. He lies and cheats; he snubs the mandate and authority of international weapons inspectors; and he games the system to keep buying time against enforcement of the just and legitimate demands of the United Nations, the Security Council, the United States and our allies. Those are simply the facts." -- Henry Waxman, Oct 10, 2002
Title: Your Inner Caveman
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 26, 2003, 03:39:13 PM
SINGLE IN THE CITY
Guys, don't lose touch with your inner caveman  

By Samantha Bonar, Times Staff Writer


A group called Euro RSCG Worldwide has done a study of American men aged 21 to 48, purporting to deconstruct the 21st century man. If you are like me, you will find the results alarming.

According to the new study, "When asked to choose from a list of approximately three dozen words," only 20% of men described themselves as "sexy."

"The word today's men are most apt to assign themselves is 'caring,' selected by 74% of correspondents," the study said.

I don't want a caring man. I like my men moody, sullen, dark and distant. Disturbed, if you will. With deep thoughts they cannot articulate ? and big, strong arms. Caring? Ho-hum. My mom's caring.

When asked what they would choose if they could have only one wish, 35% of men said they want "to grow old with a woman I love." In second place (22%) was "to have happy, healthy kids." Third was "to have a circle of friends to support me unconditionally and whose company I enjoy" (10%).

I'd say these "new men" are more like old women.

The media has dubbed these girlie-guys "metrosexuals." They are said to be concentrated around big cities ? kind of like pollution. They are said to be knowledgeable about fashion and to enjoy shopping ? kind of like gay men ? but they are not gay.

The study results continued to sicken me. Today's men apparently care about "feeling and looking good": "In the business world, good grooming is essential for men today, according to 89% of the male respondents. Perhaps that's why nearly half the sample (49%) contend that there's nothing wrong with a man getting a facial or manicure."

I've never desired a man with baby-soft, exfoliated skin. There's something super-sexy about a man's rough lip and cheek and the "chin burn" it leaves behind. And if my date had polished nails I would escape out the bathroom window.

"The metrosexual represents the tipping point of a shift that parallels the process of the women's movement," reads a statement by Marian Salzman, chief strategy officer of Euro RSCG Worldwide.

My God. The men's women's movement? More like the fall of the Roman Empire. Onetime heroes fiddling with moisturizer and self-help books while Rome burns.

"In this new century, men are finding the courage to explore the female domain without fear of losing their status as 'real' men," Salzman continued.

It does take a certain amount of courage to face various waxing procedures, I will admit. But I don't want my men to fret about such things. I want them to worry about how they are going to sweep me off my feet, not how they are going to get those nasty calluses off their heels.

One of the best things about being a man, I have always thought, is that men get to worry about what they do and what they are rather than how they look. Why should we celebrate their joining women's narcissistic, consumerist party?

Men: Get out of Stepford while you still can!

Women want you scruffy and intense, not coiffed and chatty. It's your psychological complexity and physical roughness that make you so appealing to we on the softer, more emotional end of the species. We want the man about town, the man of his word and the man of the world, he who is his own man who works lots of man hours using his man power. Heck, I'll even take a man-ipulative man-ic-depressive over a metroweenie.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Samantha Bonar can be contacted at samantha. bonar@latimes.com.
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 01, 2003, 02:45:06 PM
BY DIANE RAVITCH
Tuesday, July 1, 2003 12:01 a.m. EDT

Students across the state of New York recently took their Regents' examinations, the tests that they must pass in order to get a high school diploma. A year ago, the state education department was embarrassed when Jeanne Heifetz, a vigilant parent in Brooklyn, announced her discovery that state officials had expurgated literary selections on the English examination. Words and sentences that might offend anyone had been quietly deleted from passages by writers such as Elie Wiesel, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Franz Kafka.

New York's penchant for bowdlerizing literature, it turns out, was not unique to the Empire State. The educational publishing industry follows very specific guidelines to ensure that school children are not exposed to words or topics that might be controversial, especially those that are related to gender, race, religion, or sex. I compiled a list of over 500 words that are banned by one or more publishers. Some are relatively obsolete, like "authoress" or "geezer," but others are everyday words that one is likely to encounter in the newspaper, like "landlord," "senior citizen," "dogma," "yacht" or "actress" (what would the late Katherine Hepburn have made of that?).


 

Since my book appeared, I have received a large number of letters from people in the educational publishing industry, offering fresh material about the sanitizing that occurs on a regular basis. In Michigan, the state does not allow mention of flying saucers or extraterrestrials on its test, because those subjects might imply the forbidden topic of evolution. A text illustrator wrote to say that she was not permitted to portray a birthday party because Jehovah's Witnesses do not believe in celebrating birthdays. Another illustrator told me that he was directed to airbrush the udder from his drawing of a cow because that body part was "too sexual."
A review of my book in the Scotsman, an Edinburgh newspaper, said that a well-known local writer for children sold a story to an American textbook company, along with illustrations. The U.S. publisher, however, informed her that she could not show a little girl sitting on her grandfather's lap, as the drawing implied incest. So, the author changed the adult's face, so that the little girl was sitting on her grandmother's lap instead. A contributor to a major textbook series prepared a story comparing the great floods in 1889 in Johnstown, Pa., with those in 1993 in the Midwest, but was unable to find an acceptable photograph. The publisher insisted that everyone in the rowboats must be wearing a lifevest to demonstrate safety procedures.

A freelance writer sent me the "bias guidelines" for a major publisher of texts and tests. The "bias guidelines" consist of advice to writers and editors about words and topics that must be avoided, as well as specifications for illustrations. Like other publishers, this one requires adherence to gender and ethnic balance. All lessons, test questions, and illustrations must reflect the following ratios: 50-50 male-female; 45% Caucasian; 25% African American; 22% Hispanic American; 5% Asian American; 5% American Indian and others; and 3% "persons with disabilities." These figures do not total 100%, nor do they represent actual U.S. Census numbers, but the principle of representation is well understood by writers and editors. American society, as represented in the textbooks, is perfectly integrated by race, ethnicity, gender, age, and disability.

When it comes to illustrations in textbooks, certain images--women cooking, men acting assertive, scenes of poverty, and old people walking with the aid of a cane or a walker--are likewise considered unacceptable. The specifications for photographs, I have learned, are exquisitely detailed. Men and boys must not be larger than women and girls. Asians must not appear as shorter than non-Asians. Women must wear bras, and men must not have noticeable bulges below the waist. People must wear shoes and socks, never showing bare feet or the soles of shoes, and their shoelaces must be solid black, brown, or white. People must never gesture with their fingers, nor should anyone be depicted eating with the left hand. Things to avoid: holiday decorations and scenes in which a church or a bar appears in the background.

There are so many rules, one wonders how they manage to keep track of them. Even after its national humiliation a year ago, the New York State Education Department still manages to make mistakes. On the last administration of the Regents' English examination in January, the state asked high school seniors to write about a poem by Matthew Arnold. However, the examination did not mention the name of this famous poem ("Dover Beach"); it inexplicably offered only one stanza of the four-stanza poem; and it changed or misquoted an important line. Instead of Arnold's exclamation, "Ah, love, let us be true to one another!" it stated, "Ah, friend, let us be true to one another!"


 

As the example shows, bowdlerization is not only dishonest, it leads to dumbing down of language and ideas. And of one thing I am convinced: The widespread censorship of language and ideas in education caused by the demands of advocacy groups will not end unless it is regularly exposed to public review and ridicule. The next time someone in a publishing office or a state education agency suggests deleting a literary passage from a test or textbook because it contains the word "anchorman" or shows a witch flying around on a broomstick, perhaps someone in the room will say, "Wait, if we do that, people will laugh at us."

Ms. Ravitch is author of "The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn" (Knopf, 2003).
Title: Political Rants
Post by: rogt on July 01, 2003, 03:53:16 PM
Woof All,

>I open this thread for all WELL-WRITTEN and REASONED political rants.
>GOOD HUMORED Commentary welcome.

Started off with an editorial from right-wing bully Anne Coulter, no
less!

>Ann Coulter

>Walters also astutely observed that "in addition to being first lady,
>you're a mother." Will Hillary's mind-boggling feats never end?
>Usually such phony liberal amazement at the staggering heroism of
>women ends with the woman drowning all her children.

In case Coulter didn't know, Andrea Yates (the woman who drowned all
5 of her children in June 2001, to whom I assume she's referring) and
her husband were as conservative and fundamentalist Christian as one
could find.  So it's pretty dishonest for her to imply that
"liberalism" was somehow to blame for this.

>In "her" book, "Hillary" explains that the story of how Nelson
>Mandela forgave his jailers inspired her to forgive Bill for his
>infidelity. OK, but they locked up Mandela only once. Revealing more
>about herself than Hillary, Ms. Stanley claims that "millions of
>women have forgiven far worse of philandering husbands." Far worse?
>Really? No wonder liberal women hate men so much.

If Coulter wants to slam out Bill over his infidelity, fine.  Have at
him.  But why the outrage over the fact that Hillary forgave him?
Given how vocally most conservatives register their support for
"family values", I'd think Coulter might find Hillary's decision
admirable.

As for this idea that "liberal women hate men so much", where's she
getting this idea?  Coulter may seem like some kind of "intellectual"
to people whose only source of political information is conservative
talk radio and right-wing media watch groups, but her "arguments"
largely consist of name-calling and ad hominem attacks on "the
liberals".

>Lining up at midnight to buy Hillary's book is street theater for
>liberals. I suppose shelling out $30 to support the concept of
>Hillary is less dangerous than the pernicious nonsense liberals
>usually fund. Hillary has already gotten a record $8 million advance
>from Simon & Schuster for the book ? the most anyone has ever
>received for rewriting history. Hillary's acolytes could buy enough
>copies of her book to rebuild the World Trade Center, and she's not
>going to pocket more than that.

I don't see Coulter donating any of the profits from her book sales
(or her lucrative career as right-wing media critic) to the 9/11
victims or the rebuilding of the trade center, so what exactly is the
meaning of the above criticism?

I have no love for Hillary myself, but it's obvious that Coulter and
her colleagues feel somewhat threatened by her.  I think they don't
like the fact that as much as they trash and ridicule Hillary and
"liberal" views altogether, both are actually quite popular.  Too bad
for Coulter that hundreds of people aren't lining up outside of
stores at midnight to buy a copy of *her* book.

Rog
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 01, 2003, 09:31:40 PM
Woof Rog et al:

  I could go at length on the merits of why I don't like her (a bag lady-- the $100k commodities deal that was a pay off to her husband the governor; a criminal-- the missing files from her law firm found in her quarters, the theft of White House furniture; her participation in peddling pardons;  a socialist-- the effort to socialize American medicine, etc etc etc) but instead I'll share the following:

Crafty
-----------------
Some Late Night TV show comments about our beloved Hillary........

"Hillary's got this huge book, it's a memoir of her life and times at the
White House. In the book she says when Bill told her he was having an
affair, she said 'I could hardly breath, I was gulping for air.'
No, I'm  sorry, that's what Monica said."
     David Letterman


"Hillary Clinton's book hits the stores this Monday. Oh
boy, it took her a long time to write it. But in her defense, every time she
tried to use the desk, Bill was always using it for a date."
       Jay Leno


"Hillary Clinton's 506-page memoirs comes out next week.
So much of her personality shines through, that in the end, you'll want
to sleep with an intern."
         Craig Kilborn


"In Hillary Clinton's new book 'Living History,' Hillary
details what it was like meeting Bill Clinton, falling in love with him,
getting married, and living a passionate, wonderful life as husband and
wife. Then on page two, the trouble starts."
         Jay Leno


"Hillary Clinton has finished her memoirs for publication
next year, while Bill has barely finished the first chapter. Well, in all
fairness, Fiction is a lot harder to write."
         Jay Leno

"Hillary Clinton, our junior senator from New York, announced that
she has no intentions of ever, ever running for office of the
President of the United States. Her husband, Bill Clinton, is bitterly
disappointed. He is crushed. There go his dreams of becoming a
two-impeachment family."
         David Letterman

"Last night, Se! nator Hillary Clinton hosted her first
party in her new home in Washington. People said it was a lot like the parties she used to host at the White House. In fact, even the furniture was the same."
         Jay Leno

"Senator Hillary Clinton is attacking President Bush for
breaking his campaign promise to cut carbon dioxide emissions, saying
a promise made, a promise broken. And then out of habit, she demanded that Bush spend the night on the couch."
         Late, Late Show host Craig Kilborn

"Hillary Clinton is the junior senator from the great state of New York.
When they swore her in, she used the Clinton family Bible. You know,
the one with only seven commandments."
         David Letterman

"CNN found that Hillary Clinton is the most admired woman in America.
Women admire her because she's strong and successful. Men admire her because she allows her husband to cheat and get away with it."
         Jay Leno
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: rogt on July 02, 2003, 12:31:21 PM
Woof All,

>I could go at length on the merits of why I don't like her (a bag
>lady-- the $100k commodities deal that was a pay off to her husband
>the governor;

I don't know the exact details of this deal, but it seems like $100k
is nothing compared to the $800k George W. Bush made from insider
trading while on the board of Harken Energy.  Not to mention the
personal between qhis administration and the Enron scandal.

>a criminal-- the missing files from her law firm found in her
>quarters, the theft of White House furniture;

Don't know about any missing papers (regarding what exactly?), but
did the Clintons really steal any White House furniture?  I've heard
the right-wingers make this claim over and over, but if you can cite
a source of hard evidence that they committed any such theft, I'd
like to see it.

>her participation in peddling pardons;

Oh, like Bush Sr. pardoned all of his fellow Iran-Contra
conspirators?  Not that this excuses what the Clintons did, but how
is it any worse than any other pardon-peddling by Republican
administrations?

>a socialist-- the effort to socialize American medicine, etc etc etc)

Trying to ensure that all Americans can get quality healthcare makes
her a "socialist" (a term to which you clearly attribute only
negative connotations)?  Have you ever heard Hillary (or any
Democrat) urge workers to "seize the means of production" or advocate
the abolition of private property rights?  If Hillary is a full-on
"socialist", then what do you consider merely "liberal"?

Rog
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 03, 2003, 09:24:32 PM
Hate My Father? No Ma'am!
By Glenn Sacks
 

 

The university professor began the first class of the semester by announcing that she was an "anti-imperialist, anti-heterosexist Marxist-feminist." She read us the famous quote from Robin Morgan, the leading feminist and former editor of Ms. Magazine, who said "kill your fathers, not your mothers."  Seeing the students' shocked faces, she added "Kill is too strong.  Hate your fathers, not your mothers."  I guess she was a moderate.

One of the male students in the class, obviously feeling chastised, said the defense I've heard young men say hundreds of times--"don't blame us for what happened to women in the past--blame our fathers and grandfathers."

I've ruminated darkly over those words many times, and when thinking of my father and grandfather, I can't help but be struck by the special burdens they shouldered as men, because they were men, and how these special burdens have now become a blank space in our history.

Hate my grandfather? My grandfather was a milkman.  A young immigrant who enlisted to fight in World War I out of gratitude to the country which had allowed him to escape Russian Czarist tyranny.  A man who, wounded in the decisive Battle of the Argonne Forest in 1918, received the Purple Heart and the French Croix de Guerre.  A tender father who stayed up half the night stroking the fevered brow of his sickly youngest daughter--a "daddy's girl"-- before going to work at three in the morning. A man who put his safety and even his life on the line during the violent union strikes and battles of the 1930s, because he believed that workers have the right to decent wages and living conditions.

Hate my father? The man who worked six days a week for 25 years yet somehow always had time to spend with me? Who never once let me down? Who worked 12 hour days when my sister and I were toddlers so he could ensure that we would be provided for? Who recalls sadly as he looks at his little granddaughter that he doesn't even remember what we looked like at that age, because he was rarely able to be home?

The successful feminist re-writing of the pre-feminist past as a virtual dark ages where men lived like nobles and women were their serfs is at the core of the "hate your father" idea. Tens of millions of male blue collar workers--who put their bodies on the line in the coal mines and steel mills so their wives and children could live in safety and comfort--have been turned into oppressors.  Their wives and children, for whom these men sacrificed so much, have been turned into their victims.  

Edited out of our history are the tragedies of millions of American men who were killed or maimed on what early trade unionists called the "battlefield of labor."  The miners who died in cave-ins, explosions, or of black lung disease.  The sailors and fisherman who died at sea. The oil refinery workers killed in explosions. The factory workers killed in industrial accidents. The construction workers who died carving train tracks and then highways through majestic mountain cliffs or the scorching desert.  The construction workers who died building our bridges, dams, high rises, stadiums, and apartments.

All of them have been forgotten, in part because there is no natural constituency which would like to remember them--the right generally does not dwell on yesterday's struggling blue collar workers and heroic union men, and the left is beholden to the feminists, for whom any mention of men as special contributors or as victims is strictly forbidden.

The only credit left for men is the military, and even this has been partially hijacked.  We now speak of "the men and women who fought and died in our wars" as if even one percent of our military casualties were ever suffered by women, or as if women were ever conscripted the way men were.

Feminists once excoriated our society--correctly--for ignoring the massive, hidden contributions of women in child-rearing and housework.  They asked new and important  questions like "Who cooked the last supper?" and, even better, "Who washed the dishes afterwards?"  But we have now come full circle--men's special and unique contributions (hazardous jobs, long work hours, long commutes, time away from the family, etc.) are ignored, and any reference to them as a male burden is "sexism."

I thought of this recently  when I took my young son to a large model train exhibition, one rich in 1940s and 1950s Americana.  Looking at the huge displays of trains cutting through mountain peaks, of bridges and railroad trusses towering hundreds of feet above canyons and rivers, of towns and their factories and coal mines, of the sheer industrial might of the old America, I felt torn inside.  I know that this was a world where many Americans were terribly mistreated--blacks, Latinos, some women, and often the working-class and the poor.  Yet I couldn't also help but feel a tug of nostalgia as I looked at a world which men--through their ingenuity, strength, and raw physical courage--had carved out of wilderness.  Men of my generation have endured relentless criticism,  and even the best of us must struggle just to attain the moral status automatically granted to women.  Yet in this older world, it seems,  there was respect for men and the special sacrifices they made.

And perhaps someday, the professor's dictum "hate your father" aside, there will be some respect for the sacrifices my father and grandfather made, the uniquely male sacrifices they made. Hate my father?  No ma'am!
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 28, 2003, 09:40:57 PM
"It doesn't get any better (worse?) than this.

"Jessie Jackson has added former Chicago democratic congressman Mel Reynolds to Rainbow/PUSH Coalition's payroll. Reynolds was among the 176 criminals excused in President Clinton's last-minute forgiveness spree.

"Reynolds received a commutation of his six-and-a-half-year federal sentence for 15 convictions of wire fraud, bank fraud and lies to the Federal Election Commission. He is more notorious, however, for concurrently serving five years for sleeping with an underage campaign volunteer.

This is a first in American politics: an ex-congressman who had sex with a subordinate... won clemency from a president who had sex with a subordinate... then was hired by a clergyman who had sex with a subordinate.

"His new job?

"Youth counselor!!!
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 06, 2003, 11:19:42 PM
Dan Rather, Jesse Jackson, Cokie Roberts, and a marine were hiking through the jungle one day when they were captured by cannibals.  They were tied up, led to the village, and brought before the chief.  The chief said, "I am familiar with your western custom of granting the condemned a last wish. Before we kill and eat you, do you have any last requests?"

Dan Rather said, "Well, I'm a Texan; so I'd like one last bowlful of hot, spicy chili." The chief nodded to an underling, who left and returned with the chili. Rather ate it all and said, "Now I can die content."

Jesse Jackson said, "You know, the thing in this life I am proudest of is my work on behalf of the poor and oppressed. So before I go, I want to sing "We Shall Overcome" one last time." The chief said, "Go right ahead, we're listening." Jackson sang the song, and then said, "Now I can die in peace."

Cokie Roberts said, "I'm a reporter to the end. I want to take out my tape recorder and describe the scene here and what's about to happen.  Maybe someday someone will hear it and know that I was on the job til the end."  The chief directed an aide to hand over the tape recorder, and Roberts dictated some comments. She then said, "Now I can die happy."  

The chief said, "And, Mr. Marine, what is your final wish?"  "Kick me in the ass," said the Marine.  "What?," said the chief. "Would you mock us in your last hour?"   No, I'm not kidding. I want you to kick me in the ass," insisted the Marine. So the chief untied the Marine, shoved him into the open, and proceeded to kick him in the ass. The Marine went sprawling, but then rolled to his knees, pulled a 9mm pistol from his waistband, and shot the chief dead. In the resulting confusion, he leapt to his haversack, pulled out an M16, and sprayed the cannibals with gunfire. In a flash, the cannibals were all dead or fleeing for their lives.

As the Marine was untying the others, they each asked him, "Why didn't you just shoot them? Why did you ask them to first kick you in the ass?"  "What!?" asked the Marine. "And have you assholes call me the aggressor?!?"
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 04, 2003, 12:44:26 PM
Moore's Law
The immorality of the Ten Commandments.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Wednesday, August 27, 2003, at 2:04 PM PT



The row over the boulder-sized version of the so-called "Ten Commandments," and as to whether they should be exhibited in such massive shape on public property, misses the opportunity to consider these top-10 divine ordinances and their relationship to original intent. Judge Roy Moore is clearly, as well as a fool and a publicity-hound, a man who identifies the Mount Sinai orders to Moses with a certain interpretation of Protestantism. But we may ask ourselves why any sect, however primitive, would want to base itself on such vague pre-Christian desert morality (assuming Moses to be pre-Christian).


The first four of the commandments have little to do with either law or morality, and the first three suggest a terrific insecurity on the part of the person supposedly issuing them. I am the lord thy god and thou shalt have no other ... no graven images ... no taking of my name in vain: surely these could have been compressed into a more general injunction to show respect. The ensuing order to set aside a holy day is scarcely a moral or ethical one, unless you assume that other days are somehow profane. (The Rev. Ian Paisley, I remember, used to refuse interviewers for Sunday newspapers even after it was pointed out to him that it's the Monday edition that is prepared on Sunday.) Whereas a day of rest, as prefigured in the opening passages of Genesis, is no more than organized labor might have demanded, perhaps during the arduous days of unpaid pyramid erection.

So the first four commandments have almost nothing to do with moral conduct and cannot in any case be enforced by law unless the state forbids certain sorts of art all week, including religious and iconographic art?and all activity on the Sabbath (which the words of the fourth commandment do not actually require). The next instruction is to honor one's parents: a harmless enough idea, but again unenforceable in law and inapplicable to the many orphans that nature or god sees fit to create. That there should be no itemized utterance enjoining the protection of children seems odd, given that the commandments are addressed in the first instance to adults. But then, the same god frequently urged his followers to exterminate various forgotten enemy tribes down to the last infant, sparing only the virgins, so this may be a case where hand-tying or absolute prohibitions were best avoided.

There has never yet been any society, Confucian or Buddhist or Islamic, where the legal codes did not frown upon murder and theft. These offenses were certainly crimes in the Pharaonic Egypt from which the children of Israel had, if the story is to be believed, just escaped. So the middle-ranking commandments, of which the chief one has long been confusingly rendered "thou shalt not kill," leave us none the wiser as to whether the almighty considers warfare to be murder, or taxation and confiscation to be theft. Tautology hovers over the whole enterprise.

In much the same way, few if any courts in any recorded society have approved the idea of perjury, so the idea that witnesses should tell the truth can scarcely have required a divine spark in order to take root. To how many of its original audience, I mean to say, can this have come with the force of revelation? Then it's a swift wrap-up with a condemnation of adultery (from which humans actually can refrain) and a prohibition upon covetousness (from which they cannot). To insist that people not annex their neighbor's cattle or wife "or anything that is his" might be reasonable, even if it does place the wife in the same category as the cattle, and presumably to that extent diminishes the offense of adultery. But to demand "don't even think about it" is absurd and totalitarian, and furthermore inhibiting to the Protestant spirit of entrepreneurship and competition.

One is presuming (is one not?) that this is the same god who actually created the audience he was addressing. This leaves us with the insoluble mystery of why he would have molded ("in his own image," yet) a covetous, murderous, disrespectful, lying, and adulterous species. Create them sick, and then command them to be well? What a mad despot this is, and how fortunate we are that he exists only in the minds of his worshippers.

It's obviously too much to expect that a Bronze Age demagogue should have remembered to condemn drug abuse, drunken driving, or offenses against gender equality, or to demand prayer in the schools. Still, to have left rape and child abuse and genocide and slavery out of the account is to have been negligent to some degree, even by the lax standards of the time. I wonder what would happen if secularists were now to insist that the verses of the Bible that actually recommend enslavement, mutilation, stoning, and mass murder of civilians be incised on the walls of, say, public libraries? There are many more than 10 commandments in the Old Testament, and I live for the day when Americans are obliged to observe all of them, including the ox-goring and witch-burning ones. (Who is Judge Moore to pick and choose?) Too many editorialists have described the recent flap as a silly confrontation with exhibitionist fundamentalism, when the true problem is our failure to recognize that religion is not just incongruent with
morality but in essential ways incompatible with it.
Title: Political Rants
Post by: milt on September 08, 2003, 01:11:39 PM
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2003/0309.marshall.html

The Post-Modern President
Deception, Denial, and Relativism: what the Bush administration learned from the French.

By Joshua Micah Marshall

Every president deceives. But each has his own style of deceit. Ronald Reagan was a master of baseless stories -- trees cause more pollution than cars -- that captured his vision of how the world should be. George H.W. Bush, generally conceded to be a decent fellow, tended to lie only in two circumstances: When running for president, or to save his own skin, as in Iran-Contra. Bill Clinton famously lied about embarrassing details of his private life, and his smooth, slippery rhetorical style made some people suspect he was lying even when he was telling the truth.

George W. Bush has a forthright speaking style which convinces many people that he's telling the truth even when he's lying. But in under three years, Bush has told at least as many impressive untruths as each of his three predecessors. (See The Mendacity Index, p.27) His style of deception is also unique. When Reagan said he didn't trade arms for hostages, or Clinton insisted he didn't have sex with "that woman," the falsity of the claims was readily provable--by an Oliver North memo or a stained blue dress. Bush and his administration, however, specialize in a particular form of deception: The confidently expressed, but currently undisprovable assertion. In his State of the Union address last January, the president claimed that Saddam Hussein had ties to al Qaeda and a robust nuclear weapons program, and that therefore we needed to invade Iraq. Even at the time, many military and intelligence experts said that the president's assertions probably weren't true and were based on at best fragmentary evidence. But there was no way to know for sure unless we did what Bush wanted. When the president said on numerous occasions that his tax cuts--which were essentially long-term rate reductions for the wealthy--would spur growth without causing structural deficits, most experts, again, cried foul, pointing out that both past experience and accepted economic theory said otherwise. But in point of fact nobody could say for sure that maybe this time the cuts might not work.

This summer, when it became clear that Iraq had no active nuclear weapons program--indeed showed no apparent evidence of any weapons of mass destruction at all--that the economy was still losing jobs, and that the administration's own budget office predicted deficits as far as it dared project, Bush's reputation for honesty took a turn for the worse. By the middle of July, only 47 percent of adults surveyed by Time/CNN said they felt they could trust the president, down from 56 percent in March. The president's response to all this was to make yet more confidently expressed, undisprovable assertions. He simply insisted that his tax cuts would create jobs--and who knows? Perhaps someday they will--and that American forces would eventually turn up evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. But by then, the press was beginning to pick up on deceptions in other policy areas--the redaction of evidence of global warming in EPA reports, the administration's refusal to provide Congress with any estimates whatsoever about the costs of the occupation of Iraq. The White House seemed guilty of what might be called persistent, chronic up-is-downism, the tendency to ridicule the possibility that a given policy might actually have its predictable adverse consequences, to deny those consequences once they have already occurred, or--failing that--to insist against all evidence that those consequences were part of the plan all along. By late July, even a paragon of establishment conservatism like Barron's columnist Alan Abelson was lamenting the president's "regrettable aversion to the truth and reality when the truth and reality aren't lovely or convenient."

The president and his aides don't speak untruths because they are necessarily people of bad character. They do so because their politics and policies demand it. As astute observers such as National Journal's Jonathan Rauch have recently noted, George W. Bush campaigned as a moderate, but has governed with the most radical agenda of any president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Indeed, the aim of most of Bush's policies has been to overturn what FDR created three generations ago. On the domestic front, that has meant major tax cuts forcing sharp reductions in resources for future government activism, combined with privatization of as many government functions as possible. Abroad, Bush has pursued an expansive and militarized unilateralism aimed at cutting the U.S. free from entangling alliances and international treaty obligations so as to maximize freedom of maneuver for American power in a Hobbesian world.

Yet this is not an agenda that the bulk of the American electorate ever endorsed. Indeed, poll after poll suggest that Bush's policy agenda is not particularly popular. What the public wants is its problems solved: terrorists thwarted, jobs created, prescription drugs made affordable, the environment protected. Almost all of Bush's deceptions have been deployed when he has tried to pass off his preexisting agenda items as solutions to particular problems with which, for the most part, they have no real connection. That's when the unverifiable assertion comes in handy. Many of the administration's policy arguments have amounted to predictions--tax cuts will promote job growth, Saddam is close to having nukes, Iraq can be occupied with a minimum of U.S. manpower--that most experts believed to be wrong, but which couldn't be definitely disproven until events played out in the future. In the midst of getting those policies passed, the administration's main obstacle has been the experts themselves--the economists who didn't trust the budget projections, the generals who didn't buy the troop estimates, intelligence analysts who questioned the existence of an active nuclear weapons program in Iraq. That has created a strong incentive to delegitimize the experts--a task that comes particularly easy to the revisionists who drive Bush administration policy. They tend to see experts as guardians of the status quo, who seek to block any and all change, no matter how necessary, and whose views are influenced and corrupted by the agendas and mindsets of their agencies. Like orthodox Marxists who pick apart mainstream economics and anthropology as the creations of 'bourgeois ideology' or Frenchified academic post-modernists who 'deconstruct' knowledge in a similar fashion, revisionist ideologues seek to expose "the facts" as nothing more than the spin of experts blinded by their own unacknowledged biases. The Bush administration's betes noir aren't patriarchy, racism, and homophobia, but establishmentarianism, big-government liberalism, and what they see as pervasive foreign policy namby-pambyism. For them, ignoring the experts and their 'facts' is not only necessary to advance their agenda, but a virtuous effort in the service of a higher cause.

Tinker Beltway

To understand the Bush administration's need and propensity for deception one must go back to the ideological warfare of the 1990s, which pitted Bill Clinton's New Democratic agenda against Newt Gingrich's Contract for America Republicanism. Clinton's politics were an updated version of early 20th century Progressivism, with its suspicion of ideology and heavy reliance on technocratic expertise. He argued that while government agencies or our relations with the international community might need reform, they were basically sound, and their proper use was to solve discrete problems. Crime on the rise? Put more cops on the street. Federal budget deficits out of control? Trim federal spending and nudge up taxes on the wealthy. Many in Washington debated whether Clinton's policies would work; some still argue that they didn't. But few ever questioned that their intent was to solve these specific problems.

Newt Gingrich and the House Republicans who came to power in 1995 held a very different, neo-Reaganite view. Deriding the whole notion of a federal response for every crisis, they argued that society's problems could be solved only through a radical reordering, both of government in Washington and of America's relationship with the world. This required tax cuts to drain money out of the Beltway; radically scaling back regulation on business; pulling America out of many international agreements; and cutting funding to the United Nations. The Gingrichites were not pragmatists but visionaries and revolutionaries. They wanted to overthrow the existing structure of American governance, not tinker with it.

The contest between these two worldviews played out during the middle 1990s, and eventually the public rendered its verdict at the ballot box. In 1996, Clinton decisively won re-election and Gingrich's GOP lost seats in the House. Then in 1998, at the height of impeachment, the House GOP lost even more seats ? marking the first time since 1934 that the party in the White House won seats during a mid-term election--and Clinton's job approval rating soared as high as it ever would during his eight years in office.

Voters had chosen problem-solving moderation over radical revisionism--and perceptive GOP leaders knew it. Following the 1998 electoral setback, they quieted their talk of revolution and mulled over how to soften their image. More and more of them gravitated towards the son of former president George H.W. Bush, the kindler, gentler Republican. Texas governor George W. Bush had a reputation as a pragmatist who made common cause with Democratic leaders in the Texas legislature. He launched his campaign for president not as an ideologue, but as a "compassionate conservative," who spoke the language of progressive problem-solving on issues such as education, and was perfectly willing to use the powers of the federal government to get results. Even when Bush proposed a massive tax cut during the Republican primaries, most commentators dismissed it as a campaign ploy to fend off his more conservative GOP rival, Steve Forbes. After ascending to the presidency without winning the popular vote, Bush was widely expected to compromise on the size of the tax cut.

It soon became clear, however, that Bush would govern very differently from how he ran. Instead of abandoning the tax cut, for instance, he became more determined to pass it, for rather than being a mere ploy, cutting taxes was a fundamental goal of his agenda. Politically, it was a policy on which each part of the once-fractious conservative base could agree on. It also rewarded the party's biggest donors. But most importantly, tax cuts would help shift the very premises of American governance. Republicans had come to view progressive federal taxation as the linchpin of Democrat strength. As Rep. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), an up-and-coming conservative, told The New Yorker's Nicholas Lemann during the 2001 tax debate, "[t]oday fewer and fewer people pay taxes, and more and more are dependent on government, so the politician who promises the most from government is likely to win. Every day, the Republican Party is losing constituents, because every day more people can vote themselves more benefits without paying for it." By this theory, the more the tax burden shifted from upper-middle-class and wealthy voters to those of the middle class, the more average voters would feel the sting of each new government program, and the less likely they would be to support the Democrats who call for such programs. To put it another way, it was a policy designed to turn more voters into Republicans, particularly the middle class. Without massive upper-bracket tax cuts, DeMint worried, "The Reagan message"--smaller government--"won't work anymore."

But telling the majority of voters that your tax policies are designed to shift more of the burden of paying for federal government onto them is not a very effective way of eliciting their support. So, instead, Bush pitched his tax cuts as the solution to whatever problems were most in the news at the time. During the election, he argued that tax cuts were a way to refund to voters part of a budget surplus that people like Alan Greenspan worried was growing too big. By early 2001, it became clear that those surpluses were never going to materialize. So the administration cooked up an entirely new rationale: The tax cut was needed as fiscal stimulus to pull the economy out of an impending recession. In other words, the tax cut that was tailor-made for a booming economy made equally good sense in a tanking one. When the economy eventually began to grow again but only at feeble levels, the administration insisted that things would have been worse without the tax cuts (another assertion impossible to prove or disprove). And when, because of that anemic growth, coupled with gains in productivity, the unemployment rate continued to rise, the administration had yet another excuse: A new round of tax cuts, they said, would generate jobs.

The same technique--invoking the problem of the moment to sell a predetermined policy agenda--came to characterize just about everything the administration would do. Take energy policy. Oilmen like the president and vice-president have wanted to drill in places like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) for years because of their generalized belief that U.S. energy supplies should be exploited as fully and rapidly as possible. But for a public increasingly enamored of the idea of protecting pristine wilderness areas, this rationale was insufficient to get the derricks pumping. Then, while the Bush administration was formulating their energy policy during the spring and summer of 2001, California had an "energy crisis." Suddenly, there was a big problem, and the administration had what it said was the perfect solution: Drilling in ANWR and giving free reign to energy producers. But California's shortage had nothing to do with marginal supplies of oil, and we now know it had everything to do with companies like Enron gaming an ill-conceived energy privatization regime in that state. When that became apparent, the administration didn't skip a beat. 9/11 came soon after, and instead of heading off an energy crisis, the administration pitched drilling in ANWR as a way to safeguard national security by weaning ourselves off from foreign oil supplies. Many pundits have mocked these constantly-shifting rationales as though the administration is somehow confused. But they only seem confused if you assume that the problem needing to be solved actually called forth the policy solution aimed at solving it. Once you realize that the desire for the policy is the parent of the rationale, and not the other way around, everything falls into place.

Trickle Down Deception

Iraq was the most telling example. Many neoconservatives from the first Bush administration had long regretted the decision to leave Saddam Hussein in power in 1991. During their years out of power, as these neocons hashed out a doctrine of post-Cold War American military primacy, Saddam's removal moved higher and higher up their list of priorities. He was, after all, the prime obstacle to U.S. dominance of the Middle East. And holding him in check was generating serious diplomatic and military damage in the region. Those plans to remove Saddam shot to the top of the White House's agenda within hours of the 9/11 attacks. The neocons believed that the threat of catastrophic terror required not just taking down al Qaeda but solving the root problem of Islamic terrorism by remaking the entire Middle East. And ousting Saddam was at the center of the plan. Outrage over the presence of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia--put there to contain Saddam--had helped Osama bin Laden recruit his jihadists. And installing a US-backed regime in Baghdad could, the neocons believed, help trigger a domino effect against the old order which would spread secular, democratic regimes throughout the region.

But that was just a theory. In practice, Saddam and al Qaeda were largely unconnected. In fact, the two goals were often at odds with each other. When the Pentagon needed its top special forces to lead the search for Saddam Hussein, Michael Duffy and Massimo Calabresi of Time reported, it simply reassigned the soldiers who had been on the hunt for Osama Bin Laden. Again, a newly apparent problem ? the al Qaeda terrorist threat ? was being used to advance an existing and largely unrelated policy goal.

The effort to make the Iraq-al Qaeda connection stick gave rise to the administration's grandest deception: The charge that Saddam was rapidly reconstituting his nuclear weapons program and might slip a nuclear bomb--or the chemical and biological weapons he was thought to have already--to bin Laden's terrorists. "We know he's got ties with al Qaeda," Bush said at an election rally in November 2002. "A nightmare scenario, of course, is that he becomes the arsenal of a terrorist network, where he could attack America and he'd leave no fingerprints behind." To make that scenario seem plausible, the administration had to muscle all manner of analysts at the CIA, the State Department, and elsewhere. These analysts knew the Middle East best and doubted the existence of any Saddam-al Qaeda link. Nor did they believe that Saddam's efforts to acquire nuclear weapons justified the crisis atmosphere the White House whipped up in the leadup to war.

The clash spilled into public view this summer, after American forces failed to find any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq at all. The media began to press White House officials on how false nuclear weapons claims had made their way into Bush's State of the Union address and other speeches. Administration officials have given shifting accounts, and tried to frame the story as a matter of procedural breakdown. But one former official of Bush's White House has suggested a more compelling psychological explanation. Writing in National Review Online this past July, former Bush speechwriter David Frum argued that "[t]he CIA's warnings on Iraq matters had lost some of their credibility in the 1990s. The agency was regarded by many in the Bush administration as reflexively and implacably hostile to any activist policy in Iraq. Those skeptics had come to believe that the agency was slanting its information on Iraq in order to maneuver the administration into supporting the agency's own soft-line policies."

We have since learned that it wasn't just mid-level aides who knew about and discounted the CIA's warnings, though we still don't know exactly how far up this dismissive attitude went. But Frum's point rings very true for those who followed the infighting between Bush appointees and the Agency over the last two years. Within the White House, the opinions of whole groups of agency experts were routinely dismissed as not credible, and unhelpful facts were dismissed as the obstructionist maneuverings of bureaucrats seeking to undermine needed change.

Indeed, this same tendency to dismiss expertise shaped the whole war effort. Just before the U.S. invaded Iraq, Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki--who had focused his tenure on peacekeeping and nation building--said that hundreds of thousands of soldiers would be needed to pacify and control Iraq. Days later, Paul Wolfowitz told another committee that Shinseki didn't know what he was talking about; the occupation, Wolfowitz said, would require far fewer troops. At the time, many took Wolfowitz's evident self-assurance as a sign that he knew something the general didn't. Now, it's clear that it was the other way around, and Wolfowitz was engaging in a typical undisprovable assertion. Senior officials like Wolfowitz set an example that trickled down the bureaucratic ladder. One Pentagon civil servant specializing in Middle East policy described to me how, a few months after 9/11, he was chastised by a superior, a political appointee, for delivering a negative assessment of a proposed policy in a briefing memo to the Secretary of Defense. The civil servant changed his assessment as instructed but still included a list of potential pros and cons. But that wasn't good enough either. The senior official told him, "'It's still not acceptable. Take out all the discussion of the cons and basically write there's no reason why we shouldn't [do this].' I just thought this was intellectually dishonest."

Hide the Baloney

That cavalier dismissal of expert analysis isn't limited to the national security arena. In the summer of 2001, the Bush administration was looking for a decision the President could make on the use of embryonic stem cells for medical research. His Christian conservative base wanted an outright prohibition. But such a ban would have alienated swing voters eager for the therapies that could come from that research, such as cures for Parkinson's disease. As Nicholas Thompson explained in these pages ("Science Friction," July/August 2003), Bush's advisors came up with a scheme they thought would pass muster with both the core and the swing voters: the President would limit research to only those stem cell lines which existed already. But before the decision was announced, federal scientists warned the administration that there simply weren't enough reliable existing lines to be useful to researchers. The White House ignored the warnings, which have subsequently proved all too accurate, and went ahead with the decision, thereby setting back crucial medical research for years.

Look at just about any policy or department of government and you're likely to see the same pattern. In July, Slate's Russ Baker reported that the Bush administration "muzzles routine economic information that's unfavorable." Last year, the administration simply stopped issuing a report that tracks factory closings throughout the country, the better to hide evidence of mass layoffs. The report was reinstated only after The Washington Post happened to notice the cancellation, disclosed only in a footnote to the Department of Labor's final report for 2002, issued on Christmas Eve.

The sidelining of in-house expertise is nowhere more apparent than on the environmental front. This Bush administration came into office just as the consensus was solidifying among scientists that human activity contributes to climate change. That consensus, however, ran counter to key administration goals, such as loosening regulations on coal-burning power plants and scuttling international agreements aimed at limiting fossil fuel emissions. Rather than change its agenda, the administration chose to discredit the experts. As GOP pollster Frank Luntz wrote in a memo just before the 2002 election: "The scientific debate [on global warming] is closing against us but is not yet closed. There is still an opportunity to challenge the science." The idea that global warming was a reality that actually had to be grappled with simply didn't occur to Luntz. Indeed, when questioned about whether administration policies might contribute to global warming, White House spokesmen direct reporters to the small, and rapidly diminishing, group of scientists who still doubt that humans contribute to the problem. In June, when the EPA released an Environmental Progress report, the administration edited out passages that described scientific concerns about global warming.

In any White House, there is usually a tension between the political agenda and disinterested experts who might question it. But what's remarkable about this White House is how little tension there seems to be. Expert analysis that isn't politically helpful simply gets ignored.

The Boys in Striped Pants

Educated, liberal-leaning professionals are apt to see this conflict as an open-and-shut case: Expertise should always trump ideology. This has been the case for over a century, ever since Progressive Era reformers took on corrupt city machines and elevated technocratic expertise above politics. Those early Progressives restructured government by turning functions hitherto run by elected officials over to appointed, credentialed experts. And many of the ways they refashioned government now seem beyond question. Few would challenge, for instance, our practice of assigning decisions at the FDA or CDC to panels of qualified scientists rather than political appointees.

On the other hand, anyone who's worked as a political appointee at the higher levels of government and tried to get anything new done has been frustrated by the myriad ways in which bureaucrats manipulate numbers and information in ways intended to thwart the new agenda and maintain the status quo. There is a long tradition in American politics of finessing policy initiatives past stubborn bureaucrats. Franklin Roosevelt, for instance, routinely used amateur diplomats and personal intermediaries to sidestep the professionals at Foggy Bottom ? the "boys in striped pants," he called them ? for fear that they would slow-roll, walk back or generally meddle in his chosen course in international affairs. As the historian Warren Kimball aptly notes, Roosevelt shared the conviction that foreign service officers believed that they had a "priestly monopoly against intervention by members of Congress, journalists, professors, voters and other lesser breeds."

All of this is to say that the Bush administration's unwillingness to be pushed around by the bureaucratic experts or to have their ideas hemmed in by establishment opinion isn't by itself a bad thing. Nor is this administration the first to ignore or suppress unhelpful data or analyses from experts that runs contrary to its agenda-?foolish as such conduct usually proves. But in this administration the mindset of deception runs deeper. If you're a revisionist?someone pushing for radically changing the status quo?you're apt to see "the experts" not just as people who may be standing in your way, but whose minds have been corrupted by a wrongheaded ideology whose arguments can therefore be ignored. To many in the Bush administration, 'the experts' look like so many liberals wedded to a philosophy of big government, the welfare state, over-regulation and a pussyfooting role for the nation abroad. The Pentagon civil servant quoted above told me that the standard response to warnings from the Joint Staff about potential difficulties was simply to say: "That's just the Joint Staff being obstructionist." Even if the experts are right in the particulars--the size of the deficit, the number of troops needed in Iraq--their real goal is to get in the way of necessary changes that have to be made.

Apr?s nous, le d?luge

In that simple, totalizing assumption we find the kernel of almost every problem the administration has faced over recent months--and a foretaste of the troubles the nation may confront in coming years. By disregarding the advice of experts, by shunting aside the cadres of career professionals with on-the-ground experience in these various countries, the administration's hawks cut themselves off from the practical know-how which would have given them some chance of implementing their plans successfully. In a real sense, they cut themselves off from reality. When they went into Iraq they were essentially flying blind, having disengaged from almost everyone who had real-world experience in how effective occupation, reconstruction and nation-building was done. And much the same can be said of the administration's take on economic policy, environmental policy, and in almost every sort of policy question involving science. Muzzling the experts helped the White House muscle its revisionist plans through. But in numerous cases it prevented them from implementing even their own plans effectively.

Everyone is compromised by bias, agendas, and ideology. But at the heart of the revisionist mindset is the belief that there is really nothing more than that. Ideology isn't just the prism through which we see world, or a pervasive tilt in the way a person understands a given set of facts. Ideology is really all there is. For an administration that has been awfully hard on the French, that mindset is...well, rather French. They are like deconstructionists and post-modernists who say that everything is political or that everything is ideology. That mindset makes it easy to ignore the facts or brush them aside because "the facts" aren't really facts, at least not as most of us understand them. If they come from people who don't agree with you, they're just the other side's argument dressed up in a mantle of facticity. And if that's all the facts are, it's really not so difficult to go out and find a new set of them. The fruitful and dynamic tension between political goals and disinterested expert analysis becomes impossible.

Doctrinaire as they may be in the realm of policy, the president's advisors are the most hard-boiled sort of pragmatists when it comes to gaining and holding on to political power. And there's no way they planned to head into their reelection campaign with a half-trillion-dollar deficit looming over their heads and an unpredictable, bleeding guerrilla war in Iraq on their hands. At the level of tactics and execution, the administration's war on expertise has already yielded some very disappointing, indeed dangerous results. And if that gets you worried, just remember that the same folks are in charge of the grand strategy too.

Joshua Micah Marshall is a Washington Monthly contributing writer and editor of www.talkingpointsmemo.com.
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 12, 2003, 10:24:12 PM
I see a lot of people yelling for peace but I have not  heard of a
plan for peace. So, here's one plan:

1. The US will apologize to the world for our "interference" in their
affairs, past &present. You know, Hitler, Mussolini, Tojo, Noriega,
Milosovich and the rest of those 'good ole boys.' We will never "interfere"
again.

2. We will withdraw our troops from all over the world, starting with
Germany, South Korea and the Philippines. They don't want us there.   We would station troops at our borders. No one sneaking through holes in the fence.

3. All illegal aliens have 90 days to get their affairs together and
leave. We'll give them a free trip home. After 90 days  the remainder will
be gathered up and deported immediately, regardless of who or where they are. France would welcome them.

4. All future visitors will be thoroughly checked and limited to 90
days unless given a special permit. No one from a terrorist nation would be allowed in. If you don't like it there, change it yourself and don't hide
here. Asylum would never be available to anyone.   We don't need any more cab drivers or 7-11 cashiers.

5. No "students" over age 21. The older ones are the  bombers.  If
they don't attend classes, they get a "D" and it's back home ,baby.

6. The US will make a strong effort to become self-sufficient energy
wise. This will include developing non-polluting sources of energy  ,but
will require a temporary drilling of oil in the Alaskan wilderness.  The
caribou will have to cope for a while.

7. Offer Saudi Arabia and other oil producing countries  $10 a barrel
for their oil. If they don't like it, we go some place else.  They can go
somewhere else to sell their production. (About a week of the wells filling
up the storage sites would be enough.)

8. If there is a famine or other natural catastrophe in the world,
we will not "interfere." They can pray to Allah or whomever, for seeds,
rain, cement or  whatever they need. Besides most of what we give them is stolen or given to the army. The people who need it most get very little, if anything.

9. Ship the UN Headquarters to an isolated island some  place.  We
don't need the spies and fair weather friends here. Besides,the building
would make a good homeless shelter or lockup for illegal aliens.

10. All Americans must go to charm and beauty school. That way, no
one can call us "Ugly Americans" any longer.

The Language we speak is ENGLISH.....learn it...or LEAVE...

Attributed to Robin Williams
Title: Political Rants
Post by: guest on September 13, 2003, 03:46:40 AM
hmm, now thats a possibilty!
Title: great thread
Post by: guest on September 13, 2003, 09:56:48 AM
:evil:

1. We saved hundreds of thousands of Kuwaiti Muslims in Gulf War I, and just as many Muslims during our Kosovo Operations (where the UN dropped the ball and we had to paint our planes in NATO colors to get the job done) and brought freedom to the nation of afganistan and Iraq (afganistan you could kill my daughter legally to punish me and Iraq had prisons for little kids whose parents didnt tow the line for the baath party).  Does the U.S.A we get any credit for this? No. I would love to blame poor public relations on our part, but that aint it. We are hated. We cannot make friends with extremists or with extremist governments. I am sure that everyone in Iran doesnt think we are the great Satan. We need to prove it by doing a serious cleanup in Afghanistan and Iraq.

2. If Amazon.com can tell me the last 100 things I have purchased, recommend product to me (table saws because I bought some woodworking books) and let me know when an author I have purchased has a new book out then why the hell cant we track everyone coming over our border through _legal_ channels (ports and airports). "Here is your tourist VISA m'am. You have to call the 1800 number on the back every 7 days or a warrant will be issued for your arrest and immediate deportation. Welcome to America." "Hello University/tech school/.etc... if you want us to issue an education visa we need to check the name and papers against the terrorist watch list. Have the individual go to the embassy in their home country or the immigration office here in the US for fingerprinting and to receive their passcode and 800 number to call in order to avoid arrest and deportation."

3. We have foreign nationals in the universities around this country studying 'nuculur' physics, bioengineering, cryptography, etc. We are teaching future bad guys. How about nothin but Liberal Arts for all foreign nationals? How about we start protecting some of our expensive and hard won knowledge (which is more valuable than oil or bombs).

4. The USA is exporting (outsourcing) thousands of tech and customer support jobs to India. We have issued and still issue thousands of work visas to foreigners. There are schools in India where they teach English with accent training (midwest, southern, etc.) so that Customer Service reps sound like americans. We have the highest unemployment rate in the last 25 years. We make it legal for them to work here. We take advantage of low cost of living and slave wages there (cost and efficiency). Oh, yeah, it is illegal for a foreigner to work in India and almost impossible to get a work visa. Trade deficit? How about a talent deficit. Nice.

5. You dont see a lot of legal immigrants saying "Gee, I cant wait to go back to <insert third world country here>. Before anyone gets there panties ina bunch, I am a citizen thanks to legal immigration 90 years ago (thanks grandma).

6. THere are police chiefs and sherrifs in this country who are announcing their cities as "safe for illegal immigrants". We are rewarding people who are breaking our laws. Gray "I never met a constituent I didnt pay off" Davis just signed a law making it legal for illegal (ILLEGAL AS IN NOT LEGAL AS IN CRIMINAL ACT OF BREAKING INTO THIS COUNTRY) immigrants to get drivers licenses.  "I know you broke the law, and use a lot of resources we are paying for in our sales, personal income and property taxes, but you seem like a nice guy so here is a drivers license". LEts reward them. The democrats in Cali call anyone who opposes the law "Anti Immigrant".

We need more common sense.
Title: Political Rants
Post by: mookie on September 24, 2003, 09:52:02 AM
From Neal Boortz to all of the bedwetting Liberals:
Please answer as many of the following questions as you can, and as many with a straight face as possible. Please answer quickly as you already have all of the answers.


1. Since George W. Bush is evil, and thought by some to be far more dangerous than Saddam Hussein, could you please list the instances you are aware of where George W. Bush has ordered the murder, torture and rape of American citizens, like yourself, who oppose his presidency.

2. Could you list any sites of mass graves of American citizens ordered to be killed by the Bush administration?

3. Further, could you please list the instances you are aware of when George W. Bush has ordered the murder of members of his own family.

4. Do you feel that Saddam Hussein possessed no weapons he was specifically forbidden to have by the UN; for example, the Scud missiles he fired into Kuwait during the first two weeks of the war?

5. How do you think Saddam was able to fire weapons that he didn't have?

6. Are inspectors inspectors, or are inspectors detectives?

7. How many more months would you have given Saddam Hussein to comply with the 17 UN resolutions, passed over 12 years?

8. If you owned an apartment building, for how many months would you allow a tenant to defy you to kick him out for not paying the rent he owes?

9. If the UN, and the previous administration, were convinced Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, and used that as a basis for their actions against Iraq, how do those reasons evaporate when applied by the Bush administration?

10. If the Bush administration, led by the evil GWB, lied about weapons of mass destruction in order to go to war, why haven't we found any WMD secretly planted by the Bush administration?

11. If you feel it would be too difficult to plant WMD in Iraq, because there are too many people watching, such that no one can do anything sneaky in Iraq, then why can't we find Saddam?

12. Do you disagree with the statement..."The weapons of mass destruction used in the 9/11 attacks were box-cutters"?

13. Do you think finding an airplane fuselage in a terrorist training camp in northern Iraq means terrorists were practicing hijackings? If not, for what purpose do you think they were using the airplane?

14. Knowing what little you may know about spy satellites, what do you think Iraq was hiding using the tunnel-digging equipment they bought from the French some 5 years ago?

15. Why do you think Iraq had a 'Higher Committee for Monitoring the Inspection Teams' headed by Hussein's Vice-President, and son, Qusay?

16. The fact that Iraq trained experts to foil UN weapons inspectors is documented not just by U.S. intelligence organizations, but by those of many other countries. Why do you think Iraq needed to use these tactics, if George W. Bush is lying?

17. In 1995, Iraq admitted it had biological weapons. They declared they had, for example, 8500 liters of anthrax. Where did they all go? If Iraq destroyed them, why would there be any need for more UN resolutions after that?

18. When do you think Iraq abandoned their existing Weapons of Mass Destruction program? What do you think was their motivation for abandoning it- the 17th time the UN said 'pretty please', or the fact that it was spending too much money that could used for social programs to improve the lives of Iraqi citizens?

19. Do you think the bio-weapons lab vehicles found in Iraq were being used as lunch wagons, or as mobile auto detail trucks?

20. If a terrorist organization attacked America tomorrow by spraying anthrax over a large city, would you blame George W. Bush for not doing enough?

21. Would Hillary?

22. How many minutes after the attack do you think it would take for Hillary to appear on CNN?

23. If an illegal U.S. president declares an illegal war, wouldn't the two cancel each other out?

Bonus Question: Do you think O.J. killed Ron and Nicole, or was he the victim of a massive conspiracy to plant evidence by many separate divisions of the LAPD?
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 10, 2003, 12:18:03 PM
E-mail Author
Author Archive
Send to a Friend
Print Version
 
 
 
 

October 10, 2003, 8:42 a.m.
Legends of the Fall
More myths about the current war.



?The war is against 'terror'." As a number of astute observers have reminded us, terror is a method, not an enemy. And we are no more in a war against it than we were once fighting the scourge of Zeros or the plague of Soviet MiGs.

 

   
 
 
 
 
 
       
   
   
 
Such vague, loose nomenclature is reassuring, of course, in our therapeutic society. It ensures that we are not really angry at any one person or nation, but rather at an abstraction ? as if somewhere there were soldiers with caps embroidered, " Republic of Terror," or crowds chanting "Up with Terror, Down with the USA," or perhaps thuggish leaders in sunglasses and khaki who beat their shoes at the U.N. and warn, "Terrorism will bury you."

In fact, those who employ terror of the type that culminated (rather than began) on September 11 are real people with real government backing. They cannot operate without money, havens, and at least passive complicity. Who are they? Aside from the deposed Taliban, al Qaeda, of course; but also Hezbollah and its sponsors in Iran ? as well as Islamofascist groups funded and abetted by Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. After 9/11, any autocratic country in the Middle East that had recently gone to war with the United States and cumulatively required 350,000 American air sorties, twelve years, $20 billion of policing, and occupation of two-thirds of its airspace to prevent genocide was an enemy, both de facto and ? given Iraq's violation of the armistice accords of 1991 ? de jure. That Abu Abbas and Abu Nidal were in Baghdad before the war, and al Qaeda afterward, is the expected calculus of the Hussein regime and its noxious fumes.

While we may be in various stages of bellicosity with differing states, the fact is that after September 11 we will either accept defeat and stay within our borders to fight a defensive war of hosing down fires, bulldozing rubble, arresting terrorist cells, and hoping to appease or buy off our enemies abroad ? or we will eventually have to confront Syria, Lebanon's Bekka Valley, Saudi Arabia, and Iran with a clear request to change and come over to civilization, or join the Taliban and Saddam Hussein.


STAGGERING COSTS AND CASUALTIES
Of course, a single dead American soldier is a tragedy, both for the nation and for the aggrieved family. But, by any historical measure, what strikes students of this war so far in its first two years is the amazing degree to which the United States has hurt its enemies without incurring enormous casualties and costs. So far there have been five theaters of conflict: Washington, New York, Pennsylvania, Afghanistan, and Iraq. After suffering about 3,000 dead, $100 billion in direct material damage in Manhattan and D.C., and perhaps another $1 trillion hit to the economy at large in areas as diverse as airline losses, increased security expenditures, and tourist and travel drop-offs, the United States has lost under 400 soldiers in defeating the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, and probably spent roughly $100 billion in direct military expenditures, with another $100 billion in slated reconstruction costs.

In terms of American military history, this is a staggering paradox. Usually the initial attacks that have prompted past American wars were relatively mild, while the subsequent reaction was costly ? in the manner that Fort Sumter paled in comparison with Shiloh, or Tonkin was not Hue, or Pearl Harbor was nothing like Iwo Jima. But 9/11 itself was much more deadly than all of the subsequent campaigns that have followed in the last two years. Unlike other wars, our present offensives going into the third year of fighting have cost far fewer lives than the first 25 months of any major conflict in American history ? the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, World War I, or World War II. But then, to see the logic of this anomaly, one must first accept the initial premise that we are currently in a war ? and millions of Americans apparently do not.


ANTIWAR FEELING IS RISING
Of course, we cringe in despair at Americans killed and billions of dollars in costs to rebuild Iraq. But what is truly strange about the opposition to military efforts since 9/11 is the absence of a serious alternative strategy. It is easy to quibble about going into Iraq or the problems of sniping, bombing, or power and water in Baghdad; but so far the opponents of the war have not advocated any of the measures that their spiritual forerunners in Vietnam found so successful in ending hostilities ? from sit-ins, daily demonstrations, and teach-ins, to military resistance and the cut-off of funding.

The Senate, which voted overwhelming to give President Bush the authority to fight in Iraq, has few voices who wish either to rescind that legal prerogative or to deny funds for it. Our supposed European enemies have organized no real counterbalance to pressure us to leave; even Sweden has not yet recalled its ambassador. French newspapers may blare, "The slowly rotting situation in Iraq, the Mideast and Afghanistan has destroyed the myth American omnipotence," but they don't tell us how removing the Taliban and Saddam Hussein is worse than selling weapons to them ? or why and how France lost 30 times more of its own citizens to heat in a month than we lost soldiers in battle in two years. Apparently French apartments are far more deadly places than the Pakistani border or the Sunni Triangle.

Here at home, the campuses are relatively quiet. The most recently announced Democratic presidential candidate, Gen. Clark, is on record praising the present administration for arresting the drift of prior years. And for all of Howard Dean's invective, he is no Eugene McCarthy, and thus has offered no proposals to end the appropriations for Iraq in lieu of empty slurs and smug criticisms.

Why? Besides the obvious fact that fewer American soldiers have been killed in two years of fighting than often were lost in one week in Vietnam, it is hard to rescind a war that has made the United States more secure and 26 million people freer ? and taken out the most odious fascist in the Middle East, who was once bombed by Bill Clinton without either Senate or U.N. approval. So when Wesley Clark in May 2001 applauded the Bush team for its efforts to restore deterrence, and most of the serious Democratic candidates supported the Clinton administration in its past bombing to prevent the spread of Saddam's WMDs, it is tricky now simply to convince anyone that the entire thing was cooked up in Texas.

Americans may be angry, but most of them are irritated with the Iraqis, for not assuming responsibility for their own fate and showing some gratitude for their liberation ? as well as the Arab world in general, whose "moderate" journalists and intellectuals are more critical of the new democratic council in Baghdad than the corrupt autocracies in Cairo, Damascus, and on the West Bank.




THE UNITED STATES IS ALONE AND ISOLATED
Which countries have become hostile to the United States in the wake of the Iraqi war? The United Kingdom? Australia? Spain? Italy? Have even India, Russia, or China turned away or threatened us? Have Jordan and Egypt thrown up their hands and joined the enemy?

Besides North Korea, Syria, and Iran, those states peeved at recent events are, in fact, a handful of countries ? Germany, France, Belgium, Sweden, Greece, Syria, Palestine, Algeria, and a few other Arab states. Many of them, as we speak, are still engaged in some sort of military relationship with the United States ? NATO coordination, Mediterranean patrolling, hosting of United States troops ? joint operations all subject to sudden cancellation at the pleasure of any of these governments. European elites might harp at GPS bombs, but the masses quietly at home, far away from the coffeehouses, acknowledge that the use of such precision weapons during the last decade ? whether in Belgrade, Kabul, or Baghdad ? hinged on one salient characteristic: They were intended to distinguish fascists from the victims of their state-sanctioned murder.



THE SO-CALLED WMD CRISIS
Ex post facto, all presidents are blamed for getting Americans into wars ? from Wilson in World War I to Reagan in Grenada, as incidents like Pearl Harbor, Tonkin, and the captive students in Grenada were all said to have been concocted. Did Lincoln, Wilson, Roosevelt, Johnson, and Reagan all lie, misjudge, or overreact to draw us into wars?

But, in contrast, this war was predicated on a variety of immediate reasons ? so much so that antebellum critics complained that the Bush administration was using a shot-gun approach in advancing too many causes for war: the broken agreements of 1991; twelve years of no-fly zones that were legal acts of war; Saddam's past invasions or attacks against four countries; genocide against the Kurds; violation of U.N. accords; the harboring of terrorists in a post-9/11 world; and a host of others. The WMD charge was also predicated on the Clinton administration's bombing and perhaps killing 1,000 Iraqis to take out Saddam's WMD capability; thus, according to popular belief here and abroad, these weapons once existed, and yet the bombing offered no proof of their destruction.

There is, however, a political crisis. Critics of the near-flawless military campaign of three weeks were stymied when none of their bleak scenarios came to pass: thousands killed; millions of refugees; governments toppled; terrorist attacks in the United States; mass starvation; and hundreds of U.N. camps. Thus in a frenzied election year they have turned to two backup positions: reconstruction as "quagmire" and WMDs as the sole (and fraudulent) reason for war. Both strategies are risky because they presuppose that a year from now Iraq will be worse, not better, and that there will be no forthcoming textual or eyewitness reports that such weapons in fact were hidden, exported, or secretly dismantled as some goofy gambit of an unhinged dictator.

Finally, rogue states like Iran and North Korea will soon emulate the strategy of Saddam Hussein ? but learning the critical lesson of first finishing their bombs before invading neighbors or confronting the United States. Thus the irony of this phony debate is that, in the future, an exasperated United States, in an act of unilateral defense, will reluctantly shy away from the thankless task of policing such regimes, and instead press on with its own military preparedness and missile defense ? allowing the more circumspect and purportedly sober EU and U.N. to pay blackmail or pass empty resolutions to deal with these new rogue nuclear states.

Good luck to them both.
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Lazyhound on October 15, 2003, 07:44:36 PM
Quote from: Crafty_Dog
I see a lot of people yelling for peace but I have not  heard of a
plan for peace. So, here's one plan:

[...]

Attributed to Robin Williams


Actually written by some guy on a Harley Davidson USENET group (http://www.snopes.com/politics/soapbox/williams.asp).
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Hermann Goering on October 16, 2003, 12:34:00 AM
"Why of course the people don't want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people don't want war neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."

--Hermann Goering (Nuremberg, 1946)


Gilbert, G.M. Nuremberg Diary. New York: Farrar, Straus and Company, 1947 (pp. 278-279)

http://www.snopes2.com/quotes/goering.htm
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 01, 2003, 09:00:09 AM
"Those Jews"

If only Israel and its supporters would disappear.


There are certain predictable symptoms to watch when a widespread amorality begins to infect a postmodern society: cultural relativism, atheism, socialism, utopian pacifism. Another sign, of course, is fashionable anti-Semitism among the educated, or the idea that some imaginary cabal, or some stealthy agenda - certainly not our own weakness - is conspiring to threaten our good life.

Well apart from the spooky placards (stars of David juxtaposed with
swastikas, posters calling for the West Bank to be expanded to "the sea")
that we are accustomed to seeing at the marches of the supposedly ethical antiwar movement, we have also heard some examples of Jew-baiting and hissing in the last two weeks that had nothing to do with the old crazies. Indeed, such is the nature of the new anti-Semitism that everyone can now play at it - as long as it is cloaked in third-world chauvinism, progressive thinking, and identity politics.

The latest lunatic rantings from Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad are nothing new, and we should not be surprised by his mindless blabbering about Jews and his fourth-grade understanding of World War II and the present Middle East. But what was fascinating was the reaction to his madness: silence from the Arab intelligentsia, praise from Middle Eastern leaders ("A brilliant speech," gushed Iran's "president" Mohammad Khatami), and worry from France and Greece about an EU proclamation against the slander. Most American pundits were far more concerned about the private, over-the-top comments of Gen. Boykin than about the public viciousness of a
head of state. Paul Krugman, for example, expressed the general mushiness of the Left when he wrote a column trying to put Mahathir Mohamad's hatred in a sympathetic context, something he would never do for a Christian zealot who slurred Muslims.

Much has been written about the usually circumspect Greg Easterbrook's
bizarre ranting about "Jewish executives" who profit from Quentin
Tarantino's latest bloody production. But, again, the problem is not so much the initial slips and slurs as it is the more calculated and measured
"explanation." Easterbrook's mea culpa cited his prior criticism of Mel
Gibson, as if the supposed hypocrisy of a devout and public Christian's
having trafficked in filmed violence were commensurate with the dealings of two ordinary businessmen who do not publicly embrace religion. Michael Eisner and Harvey Weinstein simply happen to be movie executives, with no stake in producing Jewish movies or public-morality films, but - like most in Hollywood - with a stake in making money from films. That they are Jewish has absolutely no bearing on their purported lack of morality - unless, of course, one seeks to invent some wider pathology, evoking historical paranoia about profiteering, cabals, and "the Jews."

Recently, Joseph Lieberman was hissed by an Arab-American audience in
Dearborn, Mich. when he briefly explained Israel's defensive wall in terms not unlike those used by Howard Dean and other candidates. What earned him the special public rebuke not accorded to others was apparently nothing other than being Jewish - the problem was not what he said, but who he was. No real apology followed, and the usually judicious and sober David Broder wrote an interesting column praising the new political acumen of the Arab-American community.

Tony Judt, writing in The New York Review of Books, has published one of the most valuable and revealing articles about the Middle East to appear in the last 20 years. There has always been the suspicion that European intellectuals favored the dismantling of Israel as we know it through the merging of this uniquely democratic and liberal state with West Bank neighbors who have a horrific record of human-rights abuses, autocracy, and mass murder. After all, for all too many Europeans, how else but with the end of present-day Israel will the messy Middle East and its attendant problems - oil, terrorism, anti-Semitism, worries over unassimilated Muslim populations in Europe, anti-Americanism, and postcolonial guilt - become less bothersome? Moreover, who now knows or cares much about what happened to Jews residing under Arab governments - the over half-million or so who, in the last half-century, have been ethnically cleansed from (and sometimes murdered in) Baghdad, Cairo, Damascus, and almost every Jewish community in
the Arab Middle East?

And what is the value of the only democratic government in a sea of
autocracy if its existence butts up against notions of third-world
victimhood and causes so much difficulty for the Western intelligentsia?
Still, few intellectuals were silly enough to dress up that insane idea
under the pretext of a serious argument (an unhinged Vidal, Chomsky, or Said does not count). Judt did, and now he has confirmed what most of us knew for years - namely, that there is an entrenched and ever-bolder school of European thought that favors the de facto elimination of what is now a democratic Jewish state.

What links all these people - a Muslim head of state, a rude crowd in
Michigan, an experienced magazine contributor, and a European public
intellectual - besides their having articulated a spreading anger against
the "Jews"? Perhaps a growing unease with hard questions that won't go away and thus beg for easy, cheap answers.

A Malaysian official and his apologists must realize that gender apartheid,
statism, tribalism, and the anti-democratic tendencies of the Middle East
cause its poverty and frustration despite a plethora of natural resources
(far more impressive assets than the non-petroleum-bearing rocks beneath parched Israel). But why call for introspection when the one-syllable slur "Jews" suffices instead?

And why would an Arab-American audience - itself composed of many who fled the tyranny and economic stagnation of Arab societies for the freedom and opportunity of a liberal United States - wish to hear a reasoned explanation of the complexities of the Israeli-Palestinian war when it was so much easier to hiss and moan, especially when mainstream observers would ignore their anti-Semitism and be impressed instead with the cadre of candidates who flock to Michigan?

How do you explain to an audience that Quentin Tarantino appeals both to teens and to empty-headed critics precisely because something is terribly amiss in America, when affluent and leisured suburbanites are drawn to scenes of raw killing as long as it is dressed up with "art" and "meaning"?

How could a Tony Judt write a reasoned and balanced account of the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict when to do so would either alienate or bore the
literati?

So they all, whether by design or laxity, take the easier way out -
especially when slurring "Israel" or "the Jews" involves none of the risks
of incurring progressive odium that similarly clumsy attacks against blacks, women, Palestinians, or homosexuals might draw, requires no real thinking, and seems to find an increasingly receptive audience.

You see, in our mixed-up world those Jewish are not a "people of color." And if there really is such a mythical monolithic entity in America as the
"Jews," they (much like the Cubans) are not easily stereotyped as
impoverished victims needing largesse or condescension, and much less are they eligible under any of the current myriad of rubrics that count for
public support. Israel is a successful Western state, not a failed
third-world despotism. Against terrible oppression and overt anti-Semitism, the Jewish community here and abroad found success - proof that hard work, character, education, and personal discipline can trump both natural and human adversity. In short, the story of American Jewry and Israel resonates not at all with the heartstrings of a modern therapeutic society, which is quick to show envy for the successful and cheap concern for the struggling.

This fashionable anti-Semitism and anti-Israelism - especially among
purported intellectuals of the Left - reveals a deep-seated, scary pathology that is growing geometrically both in and outside the West. For a Europe that is disarmed, plagued by a demographic nightmare of negative population growth and unsustainable entitlements, filled with unassimilated immigrants, and deeply angry about the power and presence of the United States, the Jews and their Israel provide momentary relief on the cheap. So expect that more crazy thoughts of Israel's destruction dressed up as peace plans will be as common as gravestone and synagogue smashing.

For the Muslim world that must confront the power of the patriarch, mullah, tribe, and autocrat if it is ever to share the freedom and prosperity of the rest of the world, the Jews offer a much easier target. So expect even more raving madness as the misery of Islamic society grows and its state-run media hunker down amid widespread unrest. Anticipate, also, more sick posters at C-SPAN broadcast marches, more slips by reasonable writers, and more anti-Israeli denunciations from the "liberals."

These are weird, weird times, and before we win this messy war against
Islamic fascism and its sponsors, count on things to get even uglier. Don't expect any reasoned military analysis that puts the post-9/11 destruction of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein's evil regime, along with the liberation of 50 million at the cost of 300 American lives, in any sort of historical context. After all, in the current presidential race, a retired general now caricatures U.S. efforts in Iraq and quotes Al Sharpton.

Do not look for the Islamic community here to acknowledge that the United States, in little over a decade, freed Kuwait, saved most of the Bosnians and Kosovars, tried to feed Somalis, urged the Russians not to kill Chechnyans, belatedly ensured that no longer were Shiites and Kurds to be slaughtered in Iraq, spoke out against Kuwait's ethnic cleansing of a third of a million Palestinians - and now is spending $87 billion to make Iraqis free.

That the Arab world would appreciate billions of dollars in past American
aid to Jordan, Egypt, and the Palestinian Authority, or thank America for
its help in Kuwait and Kosovo, or be grateful to America for freeing Iraq -
all this is about as plausible as the idea that Western Europeans would
acknowledge their past salvation from Nazism and Soviet Communism, or be grateful for the role the United States plays to promote democracy in Panama, Haiti, the Balkans, or the Middle East.

No, in this depressing age, the real problem is apparently our support for
democratic Israel and all those pesky Jews worldwide, who seem to crop up everywhere as sly war makers, grasping film executives, conspiratorial politicians, and greedy colonialists, and thus make life so difficult for the rest of us.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
  http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson200310310840.asp
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 28, 2003, 12:17:49 AM
Waiting for Allah
(some new additions and corrections)

< Bush's war has been the greatest thing that ever happened to Al Qaeda. If Bush were making progress in the war on terror, we wouldn't be seeing vastly more Al Qaeda attacks now than we saw before the Iraq war..Carl>

Conspiracy theories, as in the 1001 Arabian Nights stories, abound in the 21st century for the aged logic that the crackdown on the war on terror had increased as a result of crack down on terror. This wearied argument from the Arab street further stresses that because of the new crusade by the Bush administration there is a new holy war! These mushrooming sleepers cells and wide spread convoluted sympathies on the fringes of Islamic world exists because they need to heap the reasons of their failures on some one else, in the recent century it happened to be US, and last century it was colonialism.

Islam today is faced with new questions that need to be answered by the main body politic of Islam not Bush; that is how Muslim blood became the collateral damage in the jihad against infidels. For when guns are turned on one?s own as a result of an inability to act in the west, it has led to the failure of AlQaeda sympathizers and led to their implosion within their own confines, the fallout of which is now affecting Muslims at large. In an effort to bring total chaos they have waged war against their own people, in the month of Ramadan where even in times before the Prophet, the spilling of blood was prohibited. The blood orgies of AlQaeda have opened a lot of unopened eyes; the questions that were missed post 911 (as most of the blood was those of ?infidels?) are now being asked such why and what for. When Western blood is spilled, there is a gleeful silence, when Western interests are hurt, there is a universal sense of accomplishment in the fringe Islamic communities. This perverse pleasure taken in the miseries of the West is not what Islam preaches as its very message is peace and creation of the abode.

Wasted excess of squabble against US imperialism cannot be more exemplified by the life of a fringe youth within the Islamic world. He, who wakes up with a Proctor & Gamble mouthwash, a breakfast of Kellogg?s frosted wheats, wears Gap jeans, works on a Cisco-Intel-Microsoft based technology to connect to the internet whilst sipping Starbucks coffee lashes out at American way of life. The envy towards America, for it?s accomplishment through hard won freedoms, is nothing more than passive-aggressive aggression egged on by the sense of abject failure and underachievement of the leadership that failed them. A madrassa product can not be compared to an Oxbridge grad and this is the result of centuries of accumulated failure where ?innovation of thought? was denounced by Imam Al-Ghazali as heresy. Khuldoon, Sina, Ibn Ishaq, Khayyam, Biruni or Farabi you name it, for one or other reasons were declared heretics or were condemned as revisionaries by the clergy of the time, the efforts to arrest Islamic free thought in cocoon of time have been always triumphant as clergy took the front seat in championship of Islam. The silent majority spirit has always been trampled by determination and ?insight? of clergy to keep the masses in check, the inability to move with times and be a part of change left Islamic world directionless.

Clerical leadership has been the cause of decay, had it not been for the foresight of leaders like Sir Syed, the South Asian region would be as backward as those north in Asia. It is not an accident that Afghanistan does not have institutions like King Edward Medical College or the rail and canal systems. The continuous battles to refuse supremacy and struggle for false sovereignty have resulted into a country that has limbless thousands and still unable to connect to the world. Connect tribalism with a virulent form of extremist ideology and an explosive combination will lead to a self destruction of the societies, AlQaeda today is in on the forefront to achieve this ?failure? of a society like Afghanistan for places that are connecting to the world. Turkey is the target since it represents the ability of Islam to co-exist with democracy and freedom. In the Islamic world, the concept of pre-destination and born with the will of Allah overtook struggle for betterment, the idea of pre-destination became the vial of the Islamic world.

Palestinians feel aggrieved by Israeli aggression but their leadership have failed them during the course of this century by aligning themselves with losers. The issue of Palestine would not have risen had the Ottomans not aligned itself with the Germans in the First World War. The break up of the Ottoman Empire was the result of realignments within the world and the mufti Al Hussieni went to Hitler in World War 2 to produce Muslim recruits for the German army. Why should Islam become aligned with losers, why can?t we have the vision to connect with the winners? The Palestinian issue is at the core of the Islamic world but defeatism has become a currency and self-inflicted pain has become pleasure.

The war against civilized world was hatched by the loonies of the world when the icons of 'Democrats' were busy having flings in the sacred office of the White House; the appeasers after Cole incident had fired some misguided missiles on a Sudanese factories and some mud rubble in Afghanistan was destroyed but no consistent policy was followed since the hornets nest was considered to be far too sensitive. These vandals on the doors need men with resolve; the left with its self serving agenda does not have what it takes to face the criminals.

The ??lan? of global jihad against US and her citizens was carried out by the likes of Osama under an administration who never took it seriously. If taking the battle from streets of US to far flung areas of the world is not success what else should succeed! These extremists are and will be in constant hibernation and the challenge was to deny them sanctuaries in hinterlands of terror production factories that existed under Global Jihad Inc under the tutelage of countries like Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and others. Even Iran?s recent cooperation with IAEA represents how the threat of big sticks works across the board so comprehensively. Iran is ready today to open up its facilities of enrichment and that is one other success of areas that are benefiting from global containment of terror regimes.

US has today exactly done that, freedom of action that allows us to speak and differ is now a new coinage in the Arab world which is of historic magnitude. The very reason that an ?Iraqi can call Bush a usurper? is a success of war on terror, war on terror is a freedom from the shackles of primitiveness, and that is the big picture post 911 strategy that I understand it is not neoconism or a new crusade it is for the collective good of the world freeing Islam from people who want to hijack it in the name of blood orgies, from Bali to Istanbul the fight remains single minded resolve to free our world from influence of cave man who want to rob us our freedoms. The challenge to bring the Arab world out from the cave age and from the cradle of conspiracy theories to a giant step to incorporate a free press where ?expression of dissent? is guaranteed is an era of new self-determination for the medieval world; we the free people of the world are all united and the previous weak administration postponed reckoning with the ground realities that existed in our part of the world.

This administration sees it and hence its ability to convert the most hardened on its side, the likes of Musharraf, Prince Abdullah and Erdogan are ex-hardliners within the context of Islamic freedom movements however they are now the staunchest of the US allies. US needed the pivotal countries in Muslim world to carry its fight to the enemy, how strange that the left in US is unable to appreciate the alliance of the most unwilling that this administration have been able to sew. If this is not success of diplomacy, the carrying of a big stick and dangling of big carrots, what else is success? The fight against Al Qaeda mercenaries in the northern most lands of Pakistan and in the hinterland of Qasim province could have not been possible. The sleeper cells of Turks would have one day created havoc in the west as part of the EU and freedom of movement that would have come, now all this coming on surface is helping the cause in two ways. One is that the cancer is clear and presents itself as a defined target that can be confronted. Every suicide bombers leaves a trail that closes door for other 100 possible bombers. Turks in Istanbul or Saudis in Jeddah blowing themselves up are not in retaliation to US actions but as a result and inability of Al Qaeda to destroy western homes.

In a last ditch attempt, they are now on the path of self destruction. The streets that had gleefully expressed smiling adulations to the suicide bombers in Israel today find how horrendous these bombers can be. Saudis who complained that Israel should take no action against Palestinians even if they keep blowing the Israelis with these bombs are now on a crack down, the realization that this is ferocious beast out to take anyone who opposes their brand of medievalism. The Bush doctrine has set a whole region freed from the chains of the past. Yes, it will be upheaval and a mounting task to face but the street in the Arab lands fails to see how come Muslims is killing Muslims in a vendetta that is directed against west. The concept of collateral damages of the Islamic blood is now too difficult to handle for appeasers and naysayers in our part of the world. The reasoning that all this would have passed if no action would have been taken is the biggest fallacy. There is and was no sympathy to the western philosophy, according to the extremists. Islam promised the 1 billion faithful the rule of the world and what they have discovered is that they are at the bottom most wrung of the ladder as a result of their own failure. The rage of impotence combined with the blind craving to manage the human race through the 'will of Allah? is what propels hatred within the fringe elements.

It is dreams of rediscovering history of the golden age and the re-conquest of the world, like old Spain, propels many a lunatics to impose the will of 'Allah' on the unwilling. This is not about terror, rather this is about imposing a way of life through a 'regime of terror'. Appeasment only makes their work easier. Throwing a gauntlet like what Bush did makes it harder but it takes a very big man to do it. History has put this burden on a Texan who looked quite ordinary and for the left even stupid but he has taken this burden better than many a Sagittarius.

========
Just to be clear, I am not the author of this. I merely found it floating on the seas of the Internet.-- Crafty Dog
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Anonymous on November 28, 2003, 03:17:15 PM
I would agree that America is a great country and it is only one of a few countries in the whole world where "freedom" is being enjoyed by most citizens.

However, the American educational system should educate the citizenry at what cost this freedom and economic benefits that the citizens are fighting for to retain.

Lest, most Americans do not even know about their imperialistic past.  Only a few even know that the Philippines was a former US colony.

The Filipinos backed the US during their fight with Spain with the thought that the US would pass on the power to them. But what happened? The US invaded the Philippines.

People always talk about Hitler and the Holocaust, but only a select few know about what the US military did in Balangiga Town in Southern Philippines when a US officer ordered all male Filipinos over ten years old should be killed in retaliation for the death of approximately 50 US soldiers.

How about the US policy with the dictator Ferdinand Marcos? The US had to please Marcos for 20 years to be assured of tenure for the US military bases. But at what cost? The death of political prisoners, death of the citizenry from hunger.  The Philipines was the 2nd biggest economic power in East Asia next to Japan. Marcos plundered all of the money.
and who helped Marcos flee to Hawaii when the citizenry revolted? A US helicopter and plane flew his whole family for an escape. He and his family would have been tried and executed( as what happened in Romania), which would have served as a warning to all corrupt citizens. and what do we have today? A Philippine society that is in an economic standstill where a great number of the people live in poverty because of the actions of a corrupt few who continue on with their actions, unafraid.

I do not discount the fact that there have been a great protest from certain groups from different times in different places in the US against US policy in the whole world. And this is what makes America great. But to keep it great, the citizens must be informed of the wrong of the past so that it may not be repeated.

Do not get me wrong. I support the US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and I do admire the democratic system of the United States.

Happy Thanksgiving to all :P
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 02, 2003, 12:31:43 AM
The Chant Not Heard
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Published: November 30, 2003

I stood on the sidewalk in London the other day and watched thousands of antiwar, anti-George Bush, anti-Tony Blair protesters pass by. They chanted every antiwar slogan you could imagine and many you couldn't print. It was entertaining ? but also depressing, because it was so disconnected from the day's other news.
Just a few hours earlier, terrorists in Istanbul had blown up a British-owned bank and the British consulate, killing or wounding scores of British and Turkish civilians. Yet nowhere could I find a single sign in London reading, "Osama, How Many Innocents Did You Kill Today?" or "Baathists ? Hands Off the U.N. and the Red Cross in Iraq." Hey, I would have settled for "Bush and Blair Equal Bin Laden and Saddam" ? something, anything, that acknowledged that the threats to global peace today weren't just coming from the White House and Downing Street.

Sorry, but there is something morally obtuse about holding an antiwar rally on a day when your own people have been murdered ? and not even mentioning it or those who perpetrated it. Watching this scene, I couldn't help but wonder whether George Bush had made the liberal left crazy. It can't see anything else in the world today, other than the Bush-Blair original sin of launching the Iraq war, without U.N. approval or proof of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

Believe me, being a liberal on every issue other than this war, I have great sympathy for where the left is coming from. And if I didn't, my wife would remind me. It would be a lot easier for the left to engage in a little postwar reconsideration if it saw even an ounce of reflection, contrition or self-criticism coming from the conservatives, such as Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld, who drove this war, yet so bungled its aftermath and so misjudged the complexity of postwar Iraq. Moreover, the Bush team is such a partisan, ideological, nonhealing administration that many liberals just want to punch its lights out ? which is what the Howard Dean phenomenon is all about.

But here's why the left needs to get beyond its opposition to the war and start pitching in with its own ideas and moral support to try to make lemons into lemonade in Baghdad:

First, even though the Bush team came to this theme late in the day, this war is the most important liberal, revolutionary U.S. democracy-building project since the Marshall Plan. The primary focus of U.S. forces in Iraq today is erecting a decent, legitimate, tolerant, pluralistic representative government from the ground up. I don't know if we can pull this off. We got off to an unnecessarily bad start. But it is one of the noblest things this country has ever attempted abroad and it is a moral and strategic imperative that we give it our best shot.

Unless we begin the long process of partnering with the Arab world to dig it out of the developmental hole it's in, this angry, frustrated region is going to spew out threats to world peace forever. The next six months in Iraq ? which will determine the prospects for democracy-building there ? are the most important six months in U.S. foreign policy in a long, long time. And it is way too important to leave it to the Bush team alone.

On Iraq, there has to be more to the left than anti-Bushism. The senior Democrat who understands that best is the one not running for president ? Senator Joe Biden. He understands that the liberal opposition to the Bush team should be from the right ? to demand that we send more troops to Iraq, and more committed democracy builders, to do the job better and smarter than the Bush team has.

Second, we are seeing ? from Bali to Istanbul ? the birth of a virulent, nihilistic form of terrorism that seeks to kill any advocates of modernism and pluralism, be they Muslims, Christians or Jews. This terrorism started even before 9/11, and is growing in the darkest corners of the Muslim world. It is the most serious threat to open societies, because one more 9/11 and we'll really see an erosion of our civil liberties. Ultimately, only Arabs and Muslims can root out this threat, but they will do that only when they have ownership over their own lives and societies. Nurturing that is our real goal in Iraq.

"In general," says Robert Wright, author of "Nonzero," "too few who opposed the war understand the gravity of the terrorism problem, and too few who favored it understand the subtlety of the problem."

For my money, the right liberal approach to Iraq is to say: We can do it better. Which is why the sign I most hungered to see in London was, "Thanks, Mr. Bush. We'll take it from here."
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 12, 2003, 05:15:26 AM
When Does Politics Become Treason?
By J. Michael Waller

"Congressmen who willfully take actions during wartime that damage morale and undermine the military are saboteurs and should be arrested, exiled or hanged" - that's what President Abraham Lincoln said during the War Between the States. While none have suggested such extreme measures in the midst of the war on terrorism, Lincoln's approach illustrates the deadly seriousness of political responsibility in wartime and draws a fine line between legitimate political dissent and aiding the enemy. The Supreme Court eventually stopped Lincoln's policy of having treasonous lawmakers arrested and tried before military tribunals, but for decades after the war the late president's Republican Party successfully tagged the Democrats as the "party of treason."

Today's very different Democratic Party is said to be playing with treason - even by outraged leaders within its ranks - to destroy the nation's wartime Republican president. Critics aren't using that word lightly. But with many liberal politicians having cut their teeth in the protest movement against the war in Vietnam - a movement characterized by militant displays of support for the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese enemy - treason is something to be taken lightly. But two important political commentators with large national audiences recently have compiled damning indictments: Mona Charen in her best-selling Useful Idiots: How Liberals Got It Wrong in the Cold War and Still Blame America First (Regnery), and Ann Coulter in her blockbuster Treason: Liberal Treachery From the Cold War to the War on Terrorism (Crown/Forum). The main difference from Lincoln's day is that the president's enemies are attacking him in the name of "supporting our troops."

It started shortly after the liberation of Iraq when Senate Democrats asked the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence to examine whether faulty intelligence might have led President George W. Bush to mislead Congress and the public about the urgency of toppling Saddam Hussein. The committee chairman, Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), agreed to a probe in light of the panel's nonpartisan tradition since its founding in the 1970s. But in a sharp break with tradition, the Democrats on the committee, led by Vice Chairman Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) and pushed behind the scenes by Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), decided to turn the probe into a savage and bitterly partisan weapon against the White House.

Proof of the Democrats' intent came in early November when Fox News received a leaked memo authored by a Rockefeller staffer on the committee. According to the memo, the Democrats' strategy was to "pull the majority as far along as we can on issues that may lead to major new disclosures regarding improper or questionable conduct by administration officials. For example, in addition to the president's State of the Union speech, the chairman [Roberts] has agreed to look at the activities of the Office of the Secretary of Defense as well as [Under] Secretary [John] Bolton's office at the State Department. The fact that the chairman supports our investigations into these offices and cosigns our requests for information is helpful and potentially crucial." In other words: exploit the unique bipartisanship of the Intelligence Committee by launching fishing expeditions in the offices of the conservative policymakers at the Pentagon and the State Department, using the Republican committee chairman's signature as a fig leaf.

The plan ordered up by Rockefeller took the partisanship even further: "Assiduously prepare Democratic 'additional views' to attach to any interim or final reports the committee may release. Committee rules provide this opportunity and we intend to take full advantage."

Once the Republicans caught on and stopped cooperating, the plan called for Democrats to "prepare to launch an independent investigation when it becomes clear that we have exhausted the opportunity to usefully collaborate with the majority. We can pull the trigger on an independent investigation at any time - but we can only do so once." The timing, according to the memo, would involve pulling that trigger during the heated campaign season of 2004.

The plan was a gross breach of the committee's practices and, even as Americans were being killed in ambushes, it was aimed at hamstringing, in the words of the memo, "the senior administration officials who made the case for a unilateral, pre-emptive war."

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) was outraged. "For a quarter-century there has been a consensus in the Senate that the committee's nonpartisan tradition must be carefully safeguarded. Nothing else is acceptable. Why? Because this committee deals with information that is unique, that is privileged information, because of the dangerous and sensitive nature of the subject matter for which the Intelligence Committee ... has unique oversight.

"I came to the [Senate] floor because that critical tradition has now been willfully attacked. How can I say that? By this memo," Frist roared. "The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has been harmed by a blatant partisan attack. I have no earthly idea who wrote the memo. I do know why. I don't know who it was intended for, but I do know why. If you read the memo [available online at http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,102258,00.html], you can look. It is a sequence of steps spelled out. The sequence of steps proposed in this partisan battle plan for the committee itself is without question intended to sow doubt, to abuse the fairness of the committee chairman, Sen. Pat Roberts, to undermine the standing of the commander in chief at a time of war and to launch a partisan investigation through next year into the elections."

Intelligence professionals agree that the plan was a grave breach during time of war, showing reckless disregard for national security and national war aims. Frist, an ex-officio member of the committee, made three demands: that the author or authors of the memo step forward and identify themselves, that "the author or authors and the designated recipient or recipients disavow once and for all this partisan attack in its entirety" and for the perpetrators to make "a personal apology" to the committee chairman.

Almost incredibly to national-security specialists, that was all. No further sanctions. No nothing.

"Frist has emboldened the Democrats," warned a senior administration official at the time. And indeed, he did. For rather than repent, confess and seek forgiveness, Rockefeller openly admitted that his staff had done it with his full support and he accused Republicans of "stealing" the proof of the Democratic scheme to undermine the war effort from his staff computers. He and other Democrats demanded and received an official investigation of the "theft."

It was classical Clintonism. "When [Bill] Clinton got a [sexual favor] in the White House, he unleashed a thousand Lanny Davises and he won," says a senior Bush aide, referring to the former president's extremely aggressive and partisan lawyer. "The handling of the Rockefeller memorandum follows the same strategy."

A top figure in the national-security community fumes, "Some Democrat leaders are flirting with treason while the Republicans are acting like a bunch of sissies." But it isn't just Senate Republicans, the official concedes. "Where's the fight back from the White House?" Senators and congressmen have been reprimanded, censured, expelled, even put on trial for less. In some of Capitol Hill's pubs wags are urging, tongue in cheek, for Republicans to play hardball the way President Lincoln did. Shortly after signing the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, Lincoln spoke forcefully of the need to arrest, convict and, if necessary, execute congressmen who by word or deed undermined the war effort. At least one congressman was exiled and another awaited the gallows.

"Must I shoot a simple-minded soldier-boy who deserts, while I must not touch a hair of a wily agitator who induces him to desert? This is none the less injurious when effected by getting a father, or brother, or friend, into a public meeting, and there working upon his feelings till he is persuaded to write the soldier-boy that he is fighting in a bad cause, for a wicked Administration of a contemptible Government, too weak to arrest and punish him if he shall desert. I think that in such a case to silence the agitator and save the boy is not only constitutional, but withal a great mercy," Lincoln wrote in June 1863, after the arrest of Rep. Clement L. Vallandigham (D-Ohio).

The congressman's arrest was military, not political, Lincoln insisted: "His arrest was made because he was laboring, with some effect, to prevent the raising of troops; to encourage desertions from the Army; and to leave the rebellion without an adequate military force to suppress it. He was not arrested because he was damaging the political prospects of the Administration, or the personal interests of the commanding general, but because he was damaging the Army, upon the existence and vigor of which the life of the nation depends. He was warring upon the military, and this gave the military constitutional jurisdiction to lay hands on him."

Warring upon the military: Lincoln's words apply to some lawmakers today, but even the most bitter of them insist that they're doing it to "support the troops." The law might allow the U.S. military to arrest lawmakers who undermine military effectiveness or morale while in a theater of war. In considering the Lincoln-era arrests of treasonous congressmen, the Supreme Court ruled the arrests illegal because the politicians in question lived outside the war zone at the time of their actions.

Rhode Island Chief Justice Frank J. Williams, a scholar of the Lincoln era, has been mulling the question of such arrests and their applicability today. He studied the case of Rep. Lambdin P. Milligan (D-Ind.), a Copperhead who had tried, in solidarity with the Confederacy, to discourage enlistments after Lincoln called for raising troops in 1862. The Army arrested Milligan in October 1864. A military commission found him guilty of inciting insurrection and giving aid and comfort to the enemy in time of war, and sentenced him to be hanged on May 19, 1865.

"Condemned to hang, he invoked the habeas corpus writ," says Williams in a recent essay. "But by then the war was over, and the Court was prepared to act boldly. It ruled that Indiana, where Milligan resided and spoke, was not part of the 'theater of war' and that the civil courts there were 'open' and therefore available to conduct his trial. Under such a combination of circumstances, the writ could not be constitutionally suspended. The Milligan case, needless to say, has become the source of permanent consternation to the friends of presidential power."

Nearly a century later, Chief Justice Earl Warren called the Milligan case a "landmark" that "firmly established the principle that when civil courts are open and operating, resort to military tribunals for the prosecution of civilians is impermissible."

Modern scholars express little doubt about the legitimacy of the Milligan conviction. The issue is the authority of the military to do the arresting and prosecuting. According to Williams, the Milligan case "establishes the principle that the courts shall determine, even to the point of overriding the executive, what is the area of war and public danger, a principle that could well cause havoc with presidential effectiveness in an actual emergency."

Politicians feel freer to use more extreme rhetoric against the war on terrorism now that they have political cover from elders such as Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) and left-wing moneybags such as George Soros, who calls Bush more dangerous than the terrorists and has pledged millions to bring him down. As the war debate deteriorates from principle and practicality to partisanship, the once-important intolerance toward uttering words that comfort the enemy also is deteriorating. Combine that with the by-any-means-necessary approach to using the Senate Intelligence Committee as a partisan bludgeon and the question arises as to whether lawmakers can be trusted to police their own behavior.

Public censure long has been a tool that responsible legislators have wielded to punish or deter bad behavior from within their own ranks. The House and Senate have censured and expelled some of their more wayward colleagues, even invalidating their elections, but apart from the Civil War period such measures generally were reserved for financial corruption and sex crimes. In the 20th century, no lawmakers had action taken against them for behavior that may have lent aid and comfort to the enemy, according to Herbert Romerstein, a veteran congressional investigator and a historian of subversion in the United States. "Vietnam is the only time it comes to mind, and though there was widespread support for the enemy nobody was punished." Probably because the war had not formally been declared.

However, there were and are established precedents to punish lawmakers who reveal classified information. The most prominent, though largely forgotten, case is that of Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), who was accused repeatedly of revealing sensitive secrets in interviews with reporters, including leaking stories about U.S. intelligence intercepts of conversations of foreign leaders. In 1986, Leahy, then vice chairman of the Intelligence Committee, let an NBC reporter read a secret draft report on the emerging Iran-Contra scandal. The committee spent a half-year investigating and forced Leahy to resign from the panel.

It was perhaps the most serious breach in the committee's decadelong history, and it wasn't Leahy's only offense. He was long a suspected leaker of national-security secrets as part of his effort to discredit the Reagan administration and its policy of rolling back Soviet communism. The problem was the Senate Intelligence Committee leadership had no proof. Insight has learned that staffers on the committee set up a sting operation against Leahy to catch him in the act. In compiling documents for each senator on the committee, staff members made small alterations in the numbered copies reserved for Leahy, marking the text in small ways that would, if leaked, prove the identity of the leaker. The sting worked, hastening Leahy's exposure and resulting in his being forced to leave the committee in disgrace.

Like the United Nations, the current Senate appears unwilling to enforce its own rules and resolutions on security matters. The Republican response to the Intelligence Committee memorandum is proof of that, critics say, even though the committee's Rules of Procedure require immediate action in such cases. According to section 10.8, "The Committee shall immediately consider action to be taken in the case of any member of the Committee staff who fails to conform" to committee rules. "Such disciplinary action may include, but shall not be limited to, immediate dismissal from the Committee staff."

Meanwhile, of course, the Democrats are trying to make a criminal case of the GOP "theft" of the memorandum proving their plot against the war effort.

 

Note on sources: Given the recent controversy about the authenticity of quotations attributed to President Abraham Lincoln, Insight went directly to the primary source for the presidential statements about how to deal with congressmen who sabotage the war effort. This reporter found the quotes in a June 1863 letter that President Lincoln wrote, published that year in pamphlet form as "The Truth from an Honest Man: The Letter of the President," by King & Baird Printers in Philadelphia and distributed by the Union League. Insight thanks Herbert Romerstein for providing the original pamphlet from his collection.
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Anonymous on December 12, 2003, 06:13:59 PM
Crafty,

Quote
5. No "students" over age 21. The older ones are the bombers. If
they don't attend classes, they get a "D" and it's back home ,baby.


Are you sure Robin Williams wrote this thing? I don't think he's that stu$%d. The writer shows too much ignorance. Foreign graduate students contribute alot of funds to US Universities just to keep these esteemed American educational institutions afloat or at par with world standards.

The whole write-up shows much arrogance. I doubt that Robin Williams would ever write something like that. Moreso that that he married his children's Filipina nanny.
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 29, 2004, 10:15:15 AM
A Friendly Drink in a Time of War
by Paul Berman

 

A friend leaned across a bar and said, "You call the war in Iraq an antifascist war. You even call it a left-wing war-a war of liberation. That language of yours! And yet, on the left, not too many people agree with you."

 

"Not true!" I said. "Apart from X, Y, and Z, whose left-wing names you know very well, what do you think of Adam Michnik in Poland? And doesn't Vaclav Havel count for something in your eyes? These are among the heroes of our time. Anyway, who is fighting in Iraq right now? The coalition is led by a Texas right-winger, which is a pity; but, in the second rank, by the prime minister of Britain, who is a socialist, sort of; and, in the third rank, by the president of Poland-a Communist! An ex-Communist, anyway. One Texas right-winger and two Europeans who are more or less on the left. Anyway, these categories, right and left, are disintegrating by the minute. And who do you regard as the leader of the worldwide left? Jacques Chirac?-a conservative, I hate to tell you."

 

My friend persisted.

 

"Still, most people don't seem to agree with you. You do have to see that. And why do you suppose that is?"

 

That was an aggressive question. And I answered in kind.

 

"Why don't people on the left see it my way? Except for the ones who do? I'll give you six reasons. People on the left have been unable to see the antifascist nature of the war because . . . "-and my hand hovered over the bar, ready to thump six times, demonstrating the powerful force of my argument.

 

"The left doesn't see because -" thump!-"George W. Bush is an unusually repulsive politician, except to his own followers, and people are blinded by the revulsion they feel. And, in their blindness, they cannot identify the main contours of reality right now. They peer at Iraq and see the smirking face of George W. Bush. They even feel a kind of schadenfreude or satisfaction at his errors and failures. This is a modern, television-age example of what used to be called 'false consciousness.'"

 

Thump! "The left doesn't see because a lot of otherwise intelligent people have decided, a priori, that all the big problems around the world stem from America. Even the problems that don't. This is an attitude that, sixty years ago, would have prevented those same people from making sense of the fascists of Europe, too."


Thump! "Another reason: a lot of people suppose that any sort of anticolonial movement must be admirable or, at least, acceptable. Or they think that, at minimum, we shouldn't do more than tut-tut-even in the case of a movement that, like the Baath Party, was founded under a Nazi influence. In 1943, no less!"

 

Thump! "The left doesn't see because a lot of people, in their good-hearted effort to respect cultural differences, have concluded that Arabs must for inscrutable reasons of their own like to live under grotesque dictatorships and are not really capable of anything else, or won't be ready to do so for another five hundred years, and Arab liberals should be regarded as somehow inauthentic. Which is to say, a lot of people, swept along by their own high-minded principles of cultural tolerance, have ended up clinging to attitudes that can only be regarded as racist against Arabs.

 

"The old-fashioned left used to be universalist-used to think that everyone, all over the world, would some day want to live according to the same fundamental values, and ought to be helped to do so. They thought this was especially true for people in reasonably modern societies with universities, industries, and a sophisticated bureaucracy-societies like the one in Iraq. But no more! Today, people say, out of a spirit of egalitarian tolerance: Social democracy for Swedes! Tyranny for Arabs! And this is supposed to be a left-wing attitude? By the way, you don't hear much from the left about the non-Arabs in countries like Iraq, do you? The left, the real left, used to be the champion of minority populations-of people like the Kurds. No more! The left, my friend, has abandoned the values of the left-except for a few of us, of course."

 

Thump! "Another reason: A lot of people honestly believe that Israel's problems with the Palestinians represent something more than a miserable dispute over borders and recognition-that Israel's problems represent something huger, a uniquely diabolical aspect of Zionism, which explains the rage and humiliation felt by Muslims from Morocco to Indonesia. Which is to say, a lot of people have succumbed to anti-Semitic fantasies about the cosmic quality of Jewish crime and cannot get their minds to think about anything else.

"I mean, look at the discussions that go on even among people who call themselves the democratic left, the good left-a relentless harping on the sins of Israel, an obsessive harping, with very little said about the fascist-influenced movements that have caused hundreds of thousands and even millions of deaths in other parts of the Muslim world. The distortions are wild, if you stop to think about them. Look at some of our big, influential liberal magazines-one article after another about Israeli crimes and stupidities, and even a few statements in favor of abolishing Israel, and hardly anything about the sufferings of the Arabs in the rest of the world. And even less is said about the Arab liberals-our own comrades, who have been pretty much abandoned. What do you make of that, my friend? There's a name for that, a systematic distortion-what we Marxists, when we were Marxists, used to call ideology."

 

Thump! "The left doesn't see because a lot of people are, in any case, willfully blind to anti-Semitism in other cultures. They cannot get themselves to recognize the degree to which Nazi-like doctrines about the supernatural quality of Jewish evil have influenced mass political movements across large swaths of the world. It is 1943 right now in huge portions of the world-and people don't see it. And so, people simply cannot detect the fascist nature of all kinds of mass movements and political parties. In the Muslim world, especially."

Six thumps. I was done. My friend looked incredulous. His incredulity drove me to continue.

 

"And yet," I insisted, "if good-hearted people like you would only open your left-wing eyes, you would see clearly enough that the Baath Party is very nearly a classic fascist movement, and so is the radical Islamist movement, in a somewhat different fashion-two strands of a single impulse, which happens to be Europe's fascist and totalitarian legacy to the modern Muslim world. If only people like you would wake up, you would see that war against the radical Islamist and Baathist movements, in Afghanistan exactly as in Iraq, is war against fascism."

 

I grew still more heated.

 

"What a tragedy that you don't see this! It's a tragedy for the Afghanis and the Iraqis, who need more help than they are receiving. A tragedy for the genuine liberals all over the Muslim world! A tragedy for the American soldiers, the British, the Poles and every one else who has gone to Iraq lately, the nongovernmental organization volunteers and the occupying forces from abroad, who have to struggle on bitterly against the worst kind of nihilists, and have been getting damn little support or even moral solidarity from people who describe themselves as antifascists in the world's richest and fattest neighborhoods.

 

"What a tragedy for the left-the worldwide left, this left of ours which, in failing to play much of a role in the antifascism of our own era, is right now committing a gigantic historic error. Not for the first time, my friend! And yet, if the left all over the world took up this particular struggle as its own, the whole nature of events in Iraq and throughout the region could be influenced in a very useful way, and Bush's many blunders could be rectified, and the struggle could be advanced."

 

My friend's eyes widened, maybe in astonishment, maybe in pity.

 

He said, "And so, the United Nations and international law mean nothing to you, not a thing? You think it's all right for America to go do whatever it wants, and ignore the rest of the world?"

 

I answered, "The United Nations and international law are fine by me, and more than fine. I am their supporter. Or, rather, would like to support them. It would be better to fight an antifascist war with more than a begrudging UN approval. It would be better to fight with the approving sanction of international law-better in a million ways. Better politically, therefore militarily. Better for the precedents that would be set. Better for the purpose of expressing the liberal principles at stake. If I had my druthers, that is how we would have gone about fighting the war. But my druthers don't count for much. We have had to choose between supporting the war, or opposing it-supporting the war in the name of antifascism, or opposing it in the name of some kind of concept of international law. Antifascism without international law; or international law without antifascism. A miserable choice-but one does have to choose, unfortunately."

 

My friend said, "I'm for the UN and international law, and I think you've become a traitor to the left. A neocon!"

 

I said, "I'm for overthrowing tyrants, and since when did overthrowing fascism become treason to the left?"

 

"But isn't George Bush himself a fascist, more or less? I mean-admit it!"

 

My own eyes widened. "You haven't the foggiest idea what fascism is," I said. "I always figured that a keen awareness of extreme oppression was the deepest trait of a left-wing heart. Mass graves, three hundred thousand missing Iraqis, a population crushed by thirty-five years of Baathist boots stomping on their faces-that is what fascism means! And you think that a few corrupt insider contracts with Bush's cronies at Halliburton and a bit of retrograde Bible-thumping and Bush's ridiculous tax cuts and his bonanzas for the super-rich are indistinguishable from that?-indistinguishable from fascism? From a politics of slaughter? Leftism is supposed to be a reality principle. Leftism is supposed to embody an ability to take in the big picture. The traitor to the left is you, my friend . . ."

 

But this made not the slightest sense to him, and there was nothing left to do but to hit each other over the head with our respective drinks.

 

Paul Berman is the author of Terror and Liberalism. His book The Passion of Joschka Fischer will come out in the spring.
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 09, 2004, 11:23:49 PM
The Threat of Global Terrorism
Why Sept. 11 made Iraq's liberation necessary.

BY TONY BLAIR
Saturday, March 6, 2004 12:01 a.m. EST

(Editor's note: Mr. Blair delivered this speech in his constituency yesterday morning.)

No decision I have ever made in politics has been as divisive as the decision to go to war to in Iraq. It remains deeply divisive today. I know a large part of the public want to move on. Rightly they say the government should concentrate on the issues that elected us in 1997: the economy, jobs, living standards, health, education, crime. I share that view, and we are.

But I know too that the nature of this issue over Iraq, stirring such bitter emotions as it does, can't just be swept away as ill-fitting the preoccupations of the man and woman on the street. This is not simply because of the gravity of war; or the continued engagement of British troops and civilians in Iraq; or even because of reflections made on the integrity of the Prime Minister. It is because it was in March 2003 and remains my fervent view that the nature of the global threat we face in Britain and round the world is real and existential, and it is the task of leadership to expose it and fight it, whatever the political cost; and that the true danger is not to any single politician's reputation, but to our country if we now ignore this threat or erase it from the agenda in embarrassment at the difficulties it causes.





In truth, the fundamental source of division over Iraq is not over issues of trust or integrity, though some insist on trying to translate it into that. Each week brings a fresh attempt to get a new angle that can prove it was all a gigantic conspiracy. We have had three inquiries, including the one by Lord Hutton conducted over six months, with more openness by government than any such inquiry in history, that have affirmed there was no attempt to falsify intelligence in the dossier of September 2002, but rather that it was indeed an accurate summary of that intelligence.
We have seen one element--intelligence about some WMD being ready for use in 45 minutes--elevated into virtually the one fact that persuaded the nation into war. This intelligence was mentioned by me once in my statement to the House of Commons on 24 September and not mentioned by me again in any debate. It was mentioned by no one in the crucial debate on 18 March 2003. In the period from 24 September to 29 May, the date of the BBC broadcast on it, it was raised twice in almost 40,000 written parliamentary questions in the House of Commons; and not once in almost 5,000 oral questions. Neither was it remotely the basis for the claim that Saddam had strategic as well as battlefield WMD. That was dealt with in a different part of the dossier; and though the Iraq Survey Group have indeed not found stockpiles of weapons, they have uncovered much evidence about Saddam's program to develop long-range strategic missiles in breach of U.N. rules.

It is said we claimed Iraq was an imminent threat to Britain and was preparing to attack us. In fact this is what I said prior to the war on 24 September 2002: "Why now? People ask. I agree I cannot say that this month or next, even this year or next he will use his weapons."

Then, for example, in January 2003 in my press conference I said: "And I tell you honestly what my fear is, my fear is that we wake up one day and we find either that one of these dictatorial states has used weapons of mass destruction--and Iraq has done so in the past--and we get sucked into a conflict, with all the devastation that would cause; or alternatively these weapons, which are being traded right round the world at the moment, fall into the hands of these terrorist groups, these fanatics who will stop at absolutely nothing to cause death and destruction on a mass scale. Now that is what I have to worry about. And I understand of course why people think it is a very remote threat and it is far away and why does it bother us. Now I simply say to you, it is a matter of time unless we act and take a stand before terrorism and weapons of mass destruction come together, and I regard them as two sides of the same coin."





The truth is, as was abundantly plain in the motion before the House of Commons on 18 March, we went to war to enforce compliance with U.N. resolutions. Had we believed Iraq was an imminent direct threat to Britain, we would have taken action in September 2002; we would not have gone to the U.N. Instead, we spent October and November in the U.N. negotiating U.N. Resolution 1441. We then spent almost four months trying to implement it.
Actually, it is now apparent from the Survey Group that Iraq was indeed in breach of U.N. Resolution 1441. It did not disclose laboratories and facilities it should have; nor the teams of scientists kept together to retain their WMD, including nuclear expertise; nor its continuing research relevant to CW and BW [chemical and biological weapons]. As Dr Kay, the former head of the ISG [International Survey Group] who is now quoted as a critic of the war, has said: "Iraq was in clear violation of the terms of Resolution 1441". And "I actually think this [Iraq] may be one of those cases where it was even more dangerous than we thought."

Then, most recently is the attempt to cast doubt on the attorney general's legal opinion. He said the war was lawful. He published a statement on the legal advice. It is said this opinion is disputed. Of course it is. It was disputed in March 2003. It is today. The lawyers continue to divide over it--with their legal opinions bearing a remarkable similarity to their political view of the war.

But let's be clear. Once this row dies down, another will take its place and then another and then another.

All of it in the end is an elaborate smokescreen to prevent us seeing the real issue: which is not a matter of trust but of judgment.





The real point is that those who disagree with the war, disagree fundamentally with the judgment that led to war. What is more, their alternative judgment is both entirely rational and arguable. Kosovo, with ethnic cleansing of ethnic Albanians, was not a hard decision for most people; nor was Afghanistan after the shock of September 11; nor was Sierra Leone.
Iraq in March 2003 was an immensely difficult judgment. It was divisive because it was difficult. I have never disrespected those who disagreed with the decision. Sure, some were anti-American; some against all wars. But there was a core of sensible people who faced with this decision would have gone the other way, for sensible reasons. Their argument is one I understand totally. It is that Iraq posed no direct, immediate threat to Britain; and that Iraq's WMD, even on our own case, was not serious enough to warrant war, certainly without a specific U.N. resolution mandating military action. And they argue: Saddam could, in any event, be contained.

In other words, they disagreed then and disagree now fundamentally with the characterization of the threat. We were saying this is urgent; we have to act; the opponents of war thought it wasn't. And I accept, incidentally, that however abhorrent and foul the regime and however relevant that was for the reasons I set out before the war, for example in Glasgow in February 2003, regime change alone could not be and was not our justification for war. Our primary purpose was to enforce U.N. resolutions over Iraq and WMD.

Of course the opponents are boosted by the fact that though we know Saddam had WMD, we haven't found the physical evidence of them in the 11 months since the war. But in fact, everyone thought he had them. That was the basis of U.N. Resolution 1441.

It's just worth pointing out that the search is being conducted in a country twice the land mass of the U.K., which David Kay's interim report in October 2003 noted, contains 130 ammunition storage areas, some covering an area of 50 square miles, including some 600,000 tons of artillery shells, rockets and other ordnance, of which only a small proportion have as yet been searched in the difficult security environment that exists.





But the key point is that it is the threat that is the issue.
The characterization of the threat is where the difference lies. Here is where I feel so passionately that we are in mortal danger of mistaking the nature of the new world in which we live. Everything about our world is changing: its economy, its technology, its culture, its way of living. If the 20th century scripted our conventional way of thinking, the 21st century is unconventional in almost every respect.

This is true also of our security.

The threat we face is not conventional. It is a challenge of a different nature from anything the world has faced before. It is to the world's security, what globalization is to the world's economy.

It was defined not by Iraq but by September 11th. September 11th did not create the threat Saddam posed. But it altered crucially the balance of risk as to whether to deal with it or simply carry on, however imperfectly, trying to contain it.

Let me attempt an explanation of how my own thinking, as a political leader, has evolved during these past few years. Already, before September 11th the world's view of the justification of military action had been changing. The only clear case in international relations for armed intervention had been self-defense, response to aggression. But the notion of intervening on humanitarian grounds had been gaining currency. I set this out, following the Kosovo war, in a speech in Chicago in 1999, where I called for a doctrine of international community, where in certain clear circumstances we do intervene, even though we are not directly threatened. I said this was not just to correct injustice, but also because in an increasingly interdependent world, our self-interest was allied to the interests of others; and seldom did conflict in one region of the world not contaminate another. We acted in Sierra Leone for similar reasons, though frankly even if that country had become run by gangsters and murderers and its democracy crushed, it would have been a long time before it impacted on us. But we were able to act to help them and we did.

So, for me, before September 11th, I was already reaching for a different philosophy in international relations from a traditional one that has held sway since the treaty of Westphalia in 1648; namely that a country's internal affairs are for it and you don't interfere unless it threatens you, or breaches a treaty, or triggers an obligation of alliance. I did not consider Iraq fitted into this philosophy, though I could see the horrible injustice done to its people by Saddam.

However, I had started to become concerned about two other phenomena.

The first was the increasing amount of information about Islamic extremism and terrorism that was crossing my desk. Chechnya was blighted by it. So was Kashmir. Afghanistan was its training ground. Some 300 people had been killed in the attacks on the U.S.S Cole and U.S. embassies in East Africa. The extremism seemed remarkably well financed. It was very active. And it was driven not by a set of negotiable political demands, but by religious fanaticism.

The second was the attempts by states--some of them highly unstable and repressive--to develop nuclear weapons programs, CW and BW materiel and long-range missiles. What is more, it was obvious that there was a considerable network of individuals and companies with expertise in this area, prepared to sell it.





All this was before September 11th. I discussed the issue of WMD with President Bush at our first meeting in Camp David in February 2001. But it's in the nature of things that other issues intervene--I was about to fight for re-election--and though it was raised, it was a troubling specter in the background, not something to arrest our whole attention.
President Bush told me that on September 9th, 2001, he had a meeting about Iraq in the White House when he discussed "smart" sanctions, changes to the sanctions regime. There was no talk of military action.

September 11th was for me a revelation. What had seemed inchoate came together. The point about September 11th was not its detailed planning; not its devilish execution; not even, simply, that it happened in America, on the streets of New York. All of this made it an astonishing, terrible and wicked tragedy, a barbaric murder of innocent people. But what galvanized me was that it was a declaration of war by religious fanatics who were prepared to wage that war without limit. They killed 3,000. But if they could have killed 30,000 or 300,000, they would have rejoiced in it. The purpose was to cause such hatred between Muslims and the West that a religious jihad became reality; and the world engulfed by it.

When I spoke to the House of Commons on 14 September 2001 I said: "We know, that they [the terrorists] would, if they could, go further and use chemical, biological, or even nuclear weapons of mass destruction. We know, also, that there are groups of people, occasionally states, who will trade the technology and capability of such weapons. It is time that this trade was exposed, disrupted, and stamped out. We have been warned by the events of 11 September, and we should act on the warning."

From September 11th on, I could see the threat plainly. Here were terrorists prepared to bring about Armageddon. Here were states whose leadership cared for no one but themselves; were often cruel and tyrannical towards their own people; and who saw WMD as a means of defending themselves against any attempt external or internal to remove them and who, in their chaotic and corrupt state, were in any event porous and irresponsible with neither the will nor capability to prevent terrorists who also hated the West, from exploiting their chaos and corruption.

I became aware of the activities of A.Q, Khan, former Pakistani nuclear scientist, and of an organization developing nuclear weapons technology to sell secretly to states wanting to acquire it. I started to hear of plants to manufacture nuclear weapons equipment in Malaysia, in the Near East and Africa, companies in the Gulf and Europe to finance it; training and know-how provided--all without any or much international action to stop it. It was a murky, dangerous trade, done with much sophistication and it was rapidly shortening the timeframe of countries like North Korea and Iran in acquiring serviceable nuclear weapons capability.

I asked for more intelligence on the issue not just of terrorism but also of WMD. The scale of it became clear. It didn't matter that the Islamic extremists often hated some of these regimes. Their mutual enmity toward the West would in the end triumph over any scruples of that nature, as we see graphically in Iraq today.





We knew that al Qaeda sought the capability to use WMD in their attacks. Bin Laden has called it a "duty" to obtain nuclear weapons. His networks have experimented with chemicals and toxins for use in attacks. He received advice from at least two Pakistani scientists on the design of nuclear weapons. In Afghanistan al Qaeda trained its recruits in the use of poisons and chemicals. An al Qaeda terrorist ran a training camp developing these techniques. Terrorist training manuals giving step-by-step instructions for the manufacture of deadly substances such as botulinum and ricin were widely distributed in Afghanistan and elsewhere and via the internet. Terrorists in Russia have actually deployed radiological material. The sarin attack on the Tokyo Metro showed how serious an impact even a relatively small attack can have.
The global threat to our security was clear. So was our duty: to act to eliminate it.

First we dealt with al Qaeda in Afghanistan, removing the Taliban that succored them.

But then we had to confront the states with WMD. We had to take a stand. We had to force conformity with international obligations that for years had been breached with the world turning a blind eye. For 12 years Saddam had defied calls to disarm. In 1998, he had effectively driven out the U.N. inspectors and we had bombed his military infrastructure; but we had only weakened him, not removed the threat. Saddam alone had used CW against Iran and against his own people.

We had had an international coalition blessed by the U.N. in Afghanistan. I wanted the same now. President Bush agreed to go the U.N. route. We secured U.N. Resolution 1441. Saddam had one final chance to comply fully. Compliance had to start with a full and honest declaration of WMD programs and activities.

The truth is disarming a country, other than with its consent, is a perilous exercise. On 8 December 2002, Saddam sent his declaration. It was obviously false. The U.N. inspectors were in Iraq, but progress was slow and the vital cooperation of Iraqi scientists withheld. In March we went back to the U.N. to make a final ultimatum. We strove hard for agreement. We very nearly achieved it.

So we came to the point of decision. Prime ministers don't have the luxury of maintaining both sides of the argument. They can see both sides. But ultimately, leadership is about deciding. My view was and is that if the U.N. had come together and delivered a tough ultimatum to Saddam, listing clearly what he had to do, benchmarking it, he may have folded and events set in train that might just and eventually have led to his departure from power.

But the Security Council didn't agree.





Suppose at that point we had backed away. Inspectors would have stayed but only the utterly naive would believe that following such a public climb-down by the U.S. and its partners, Saddam would have cooperated more. He would have strung the inspectors out and returned emboldened to his plans. The will to act on the issue of rogue states and WMD would have been shown to be hollow. The terrorists, watching and analyzing every move in our psychology as they do, would have taken heart. All this without counting the fact that the appalling brutalization of the Iraqi people would have continued unabated and reinforced.
Here is the crux. It is possible that even with all of this, nothing would have happened. Possible that Saddam would change his ambitions; possible he would develop the WMD but never use it; possible that the terrorists would never get their hands on WMD, whether from Iraq or elsewhere. We cannot be certain. Perhaps we would have found different ways of reducing it. Perhaps this Islamic terrorism would ebb of its own accord.

But do we want to take the risk? That is the judgment. And my judgment then and now is that the risk of this new global terrorism and its interaction with states or organizations or individuals proliferating WMD, is one I simply am not prepared to run.

This is not a time to err on the side of caution; not a time to weigh the risks to an infinite balance; not a time for the cynicism of the worldly wise who favor playing it long. Their worldly wise cynicism is actually at best naivet? and at worst dereliction. When they talk, as they do now, of diplomacy coming back into fashion in respect of Iran or North Korea or Libya, do they seriously think that diplomacy alone has brought about this change? Since the war in Iraq, Libya has taken the courageous step of owning up not just to a nuclear weapons program but to having chemical weapons, which are now being destroyed. Iran is back in the reach of the IAEA. North Korea in talks with China over its WMD. The A.Q. Khan network is being shut down, its trade slowly but surely being eliminated.

Yet it is monstrously premature to think the threat has passed. The risk remains in the balance here and abroad.





These days decisions about it come thick and fast, and while they are not always of the same magnitude they are hardly trivial. Let me give you an example. A short while ago, during the war, we received specific intelligence warning of a major attack on Heathrow. To this day, we don't know if it was correct and we foiled it or if it was wrong. But we received the intelligence. We immediately heightened the police presence. At the time it was much criticized as political hype or an attempt to frighten the public. Actually at each stage we followed rigidly the advice of the police and Security Service.
But sit in my seat. Here is the intelligence. Here is the advice. Do you ignore it? But, of course intelligence is precisely that: intelligence. It is not hard fact. It has its limitations. On each occasion the most careful judgment has to be made taking account of everything we know and the best assessment and advice available. But in making that judgment, would you prefer us to act, even if it turns out to be wrong? Or not to act and hope it's OK? And suppose we don't act and the intelligence turns out to be right, how forgiving will people be?

And to those who think that these things are all disconnected, random acts, disparate threats with no common thread to bind them, look at what is happening in Iraq today. The terrorists pouring into Iraq, know full well the importance of destroying not just the nascent progress of Iraq toward stability, prosperity and democracy, but of destroying our confidence, of defeating our will to persevere.

I have no doubt Iraq is better without Saddam; but no doubt either, that as a result of his removal, the dangers of the threat we face will be diminished. That is not to say the terrorists won't redouble their efforts. They will. This war is not ended. It may only be at the end of its first phase. They are in Iraq, murdering innocent Iraqis who want to worship or join a police force that upholds the law not a brutal dictatorship; they carry on killing in Afghanistan. They do it for a reason. The terrorists know that if Iraq and Afghanistan survive their assault, come through their travails, seize the opportunity the future offers, then those countries will stand not just as nations liberated from oppression, but as a lesson to humankind everywhere and a profound antidote to the poison of religious extremism. That is precisely why the terrorists are trying to foment hatred and division in Iraq. They know full well, a stable democratic Iraq, under the sovereign rule of the Iraqi people, is a mortal blow to their fanaticism.

That is why our duty is to rebuild Iraq and Afghanistan as stable and democratic nations.

Here is the irony. For all the fighting, this threat cannot be defeated by security means alone. Taking strong action is a necessary but insufficient condition for defeating. Its final defeat is only assured by the triumph of the values of the human spirit.





Which brings me to the final point. It may well be that under international law as presently constituted, a regime can systematically brutalize and oppress its people and there is nothing anyone can do, when dialogue, diplomacy and even sanctions fail, unless it comes within the definition of a humanitarian catastrophe (though the 300,000 remains in mass graves already found in Iraq might be thought by some to be something of a catastrophe). This may be the law, but should it be?
We know now, if we didn't before, that our own self-interest is ultimately bound up with the fate of other nations. The doctrine of international community is no longer a vision of idealism. It is a practical recognition that just as within a country, citizens who are free, well educated and prosperous tend to be responsible, to feel solidarity with a society in which they have a stake; so do nations that are free, democratic and benefiting from economic progress, tend to be stable and solid partners in the advance of humankind. The best defense of our security lies in the spread of our values.

But we cannot advance these values except within a framework that recognizes their universality. If it is a global threat, it needs a global response, based on global rules.

The essence of a community is common rights and responsibilities. We have obligations in relation to each other. If we are threatened, we have a right to act. And we do not accept in a community that others have a right to oppress and brutalize their people. We value the freedom and dignity of the human race and each individual in it.

Containment will not work in the face of the global threat that confronts us. The terrorists have no intention of being contained. The states that proliferate or acquire WMD illegally are doing so precisely to avoid containment. Emphatically I am not saying that every situation leads to military action. But we surely have a duty and a right to prevent the threat materializing; and we surely have a responsibility to act when a nation's people are subjected to a regime such as Saddam's. Otherwise, we are powerless to fight the aggression and injustice which over time puts at risk our security and way of life.

Which brings us to how you make the rules and how you decide what is right or wrong in enforcing them. The U.N. Universal Declaration on Human Rights is a fine document. But it is strange the United Nations is so reluctant to enforce them.

I understand the worry the international community has over Iraq. It worries that the U.S. and its allies will by sheer force of their military might, do whatever they want, unilaterally and without recourse to any rule-based code or doctrine. But our worry is that if the U.N.--because of a political disagreement in its Councils--is paralyzed, then a threat we believe is real will go unchallenged.





This dilemma is at the heart of many people's anguished indecision over the wisdom of our action in Iraq. It explains the confusion of normal politics that has part of the right liberating a people from oppression and a part of the left disdaining the action that led to it. It is partly why the conspiracy theories or claims of deceit have such purchase. How much simpler to debate those than to analyze and resolve the conundrum of our world's present state.
Britain's role is try to find a way through this: to construct a consensus behind a broad agenda of justice and security and means of enforcing it.

This agenda must be robust in tackling the security threat that this Islamic extremism poses; and fair to all peoples by promoting their human rights, wherever they are. It means tackling poverty in Africa and justice in Palestine as well as being utterly resolute in opposition to terrorism as a way of achieving political goals. It means an entirely different, more just and more modern view of self-interest.

It means reforming the United Nations so its Security Council represents 21st century reality; and giving the U.N. the capability to act effectively as well as debate. It means getting the U.N. to understand that faced with the threats we have, we should do all we can to spread the values of freedom, democracy, the rule of law, religious tolerance and justice for the oppressed, however painful for some nations that may be; but that at the same time, we wage war relentlessly on those who would exploit racial and religious division to bring catastrophe to the world.

But in the meantime, the threat is there and demands our attention.

That is the struggle which engages us. It is a new type of war. It will rest on intelligence to a greater degree than ever before. It demands a difference attitude to our own interests. It forces us to act even when so many comforts seem unaffected, and the threat so far off, if not illusory. In the end, believe your political leaders or not, as you will. But do so, at least having understood their minds.

Mr. Blair is the British prime minister.
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 12, 2004, 10:19:00 AM
*  (no subject)  wontondon  3/12/04 09:52  
  Thicker than Oil
Putting to rest the Left's Iraq deceptions.
By Victor David Hanson

It has now been almost a year since the liberation of Iraq, the fury
of the antiwar rallies, and the publicized hectoring of Michael Moore,
Noam Chomsky, Sean Penn, and other assorted conspiracy freaks ? and we have enough evidence to lay some of their myths to rest.

I just filled up and paid $2.19 a gallon. How can that be, when the
war was undertaken to help us get our hands on "cheap" oil? Where is
the mythical Afghan pipeline when we need it?

"No Blood for Oil" (never mind the people who drove upscale
gas-guzzlers to the rallies at which they chanted such slogans) was
supposed to respond to one of two possibilities: American oil
companies were either simply going to steal the Iraqi fields, or
indirectly prime the pumps to such an extent that the world would be
awash with petroleum and the price for profligate Western consumers
would crash.

Neither came true. Iraqis themselves control their natural resources;
the price of gasoline, despite heroic restoration of much of Iraqi
prewar petroleum output, is at an all-time high.

So did Shell and Exxon want too much ? or too little ? pumping? Was
the Iraq conspiracy a messy crisis to disrupt production as an excuse
to jack up prices, or a surgical strike to garner Third-World
resources on the cheap to power wasteful American SUVs?

The truth is, as usual, far more simple. The United States never did
intend to steal or manipulate the oil market ? not necessarily because
we are always above such chicanery, but because it is nearly
impossible in a fungible market under constant global scrutiny, and
suicidal in the Byzantine politics of the Middle East.

Instead we have pledged $87 billion to secure and rebuild Iraq ? one
of the largest direct-aid programs since the Marshall Plan. Tens of
thousands of brave Americans risked their lives ? and hundreds have
died ? to end the genocide of Saddam Hussein, alter the pathological
calculus of the Middle East, and cease the three-decade support of
terrorism by Arab dictators.

The only credible critics on the left are those who make the argument
that Iraq never made any sense economically and "took away" money from health care, education, aid to poor, transportation, etc. (the litany
is familiar) at home ? although even this is a hard argument when
domestic spending has increased 8 percent per annum under the Bush
administration.

A year ago, almost no one claimed that we were far too na?ve,
idealistic, or stupid. No, Americans were forever conniving and
larcenous. Remember the invective about perpetual American
intervention? Tens of thousands of our troops poured into the Middle
East after the "excuse" of September 11. Right-wingers alleged that we
had turned from republic to a garrison empire in a new global ego
trip. Leftists assured us that we were greedy colonialists replicating
the British raj ? perhaps keen to corner the Iraqi date market or
exploit at slave wages the skilled workforce around Tikrit. Arab
fundamentalists prattled on about the American Crusaders and Zionists
out to steal holy lands and desecrate shrines ? no doubt convinced
that Billy Grahamites, if not blowing up ancient Buddhist statuary,
would soon be attaching crosses to minarets.

Yet since the very day the war started, the reality has been just the
opposite ? a constant desire for the bare-minimum amount of troops
abroad in as brief a deployment as possible. More sober military
observers have always fathomed that the dangers of the American
campaign were never that we were overrunning the Middle East in hope
of perennial occupation. Instead we ? as amateur interventionists who
have always had a very short attention span ? had too few troops to
fight the war, and fewer still to rebuild the country.

Even the chief, albeit private, worry of most Iraqis was mostly that
there were not enough American infidels to provide them security and
that we would leave too soon ? hardly the response one would expect to
old-style, foreign, pith-helmeted imperialists who had stayed too long.
Then there was the third-world exploited-peoples angle. At least, I
think that was one of the favorite themes of the peace rallies where
various groups ? from supporters of cop-killers to Puerto Rican
independence zealots ? spouted off about their shared racism,
victimhood, and oppression.

Surely one of the most astounding intellectual trends in our lifetime
has been this transmogrification of religious fascists and Middle East
autocrats ? the minions of Saddam, Arafat, Khaddafi, or the Iranian
mullahs ? into some sort of exploited peoples worthy of Western
forbearance for quite horrific dictatorships, theocracies, and all the
assorted pathologies that we have to come to associate with the modern
Middle East. The way things were going, belonging to Hamas or
Hezbollah soon might have earned one affirmative-action status on an
American campus.

Let's examine, instead, what really happened. While fellow Arabs did
little or nothing to free the Iraqi people ? but apparently both
cheated on and profited from the U.N. embargoes ? Americans set up a
consensual government. And for our part, American casualties so far
mirror roughly the racial make-up of our general population. So much
for the old Vietnam-era myth that people of color always die in
disproportionate numbers fighting rich people's wars. Our three top
officers most visible the last year in Iraq ? Generals Abizaid,
Sanchez, and Brooks ? are an Arab American, Mexican American, and
African American. The national-security adviser and the secretary of
state are minorities as well. And so on. This was a war about values ?
not race, class, or ethnicity.

Another myth was that of the "noble European" ? promulgated here at
home by American shysters like Michael Moore, who cashed in overseas,
fawning over the likes of Jacques Chirac (the guy who sealed the
French nuclear-reactor deal with Saddam) and Dominique de Villepin
(who wept over the Christ-like Napoleon's demise at Waterloo).
The truth again is very different; and John Kerry should be wary about
bragging that unnamed European leaders ? if true ? tell him that they
favor his election. Each week we learn how European companies were
knee-deep in the foul stream of forbidden supplies that flowed to
Saddam in violation of their hallowed U.N. statutes. And the most
recent European tired chorus ? "We support the needed Afghan
multilateral operation, but not the Iraq aggression" ? is proven false
by the fact that there are about ten times more American troops right
now in Europe than there are NATO soldiers in Afghanistan.

Sorry, a few thousand troops in Afghanistan doesn't cut it from a
continent with a larger population than that of the United States,
which in turn does the dirty work to ensure Europe's security.
Unilateral, multilateral, U.N., no U.N., Balkans, Iraq ? it doesn't
matter: The Europeans are never going to risk lives and treasure for
much of anything. The predictable NATO rule: The stationing of troops
is to be determined in direct proportion to the absence of both need
and danger.

But what about WMDs? Wasn't that a Bush fable? Forget that most ? from
Bill Clinton to John Kerry ? believed that they were there, and that
all the evidence about Saddam's arsenal is not yet in.

The truth is that almost everybody in the world believes that the war
had something to do with WMDs and nothing to do with Halliburton ?
except Western leftists. By going into Iraq we probably will find more
dangerous weapons in Libya than were stockpiled in Baghdad. The
president argued that we must depose Saddam Hussein to prevent scary
weapons from being used by rogue regimes. He did so, and suddenly Dr.
Khan, Khaddafi, and even a few mullahs seemed to wish to come clean.
The danger of promulgating the old mistruths about sacrificing blood
for oil, reviving colonialism, and suggesting the operation in Iraq
has led to disaster are manifold. First, ever-so-steadily, such
invective wears away support for an action that, by any historical
yardstick, was as successful as it was noble. The only peril to the
United States in Iraq would be a unilateral withdrawal before
stability and constitutional government are achieved. And the only
chance of that disaster happening would arise from our own continual
harping that wears down the will of the American people ? and those
asked to fight for us in the field.

The other worry is that there were, in fact, real concerns about the
entire campaign that have scarcely been addressed. While the media
hold conferences on university campuses about the morality of using
embedded reporters, they have simply refused to discuss the real
ethical crisis of the reporting of the war: that dozens of Western
journalists sent censored news accounts from Baghdad in the months
preceding the conflict and in fact during the actual fighting.

Unbeknownst to us, their dispatches always were monitored carefully by
"minders" and transmitted only through pay-offs and blackmail. None of
this was known at the time ? leading to the absurdity that on the day
Baghdad fell journalists suddenly came clean over uncensored mikes, as
if to say, "Oh, by the way, everything I sent out to you the last two
months was sort of censored by the Iraqi Ministry of Information."
So here we are a year later. We fuss about the WMD "myth"; enemies
scramble over its reality. We talk of our theft of third-world
resources ? and pay more for gas than ever before while the price of
Iraq's national treasure soars. We worry that we are too involved
abroad; those in Europe, Afghanistan, and Iraq claim there are not
enough of us over there. And we scream at each other that we are not
liked, even as those overseas express new respect for us.

No wonder, when asked for specific follow-ups about his general
criticisms of the Iraqi war in a recent Time magazine interview, a
resolute Kerry variously prevaricated, "I didn't say that," "I can't
tell you," "It's possible," "It's not a certainty," "If I had known,"
"No, I think you can still ? wait, no. You can't ? that's not a fair
question and I'll tell you why," ? employing the entire idiom and
vocabulary of those who are angry about Bush's removal of Saddam, but
neither know quite why nor what they would do differently.
Title: "Mobile phones ringing in the pockets of the bodies....
Post by: LG RUSS on March 14, 2004, 08:17:06 PM
March 14, 2004
      OP-ED COLUMNIST
      Origin of Species
      By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

      andan Nilekani, C.E.O. of the Indian software giant Infosys, gave me a
tour the other day of his company's wood-paneled global conference room in
Bangalore. It looks a lot like a beautiful tiered classroom, with a massive
wall-size screen at one end and cameras in the ceiling so that Infosys can
hold a simultaneous global teleconference with its U.S. innovators, its
Indian software designers and its Asian manufacturers. "We can have our
whole global supply chain on the screen at the same time," holding a virtual
meeting, explained Mr. Nilekani. The room's eight clocks tell the story:
U.S. West, U.S. East, G.M.T., India, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, Australia.

      As I looked at this, a thought popped into my head: Who else has such
a global supply chain today? Of course: Al Qaeda. Indeed, these are the two
basic responses to globalization: Infosys and Al Qaeda.

      Infosys said all the walls have been blown away in the world, so now
we, an Indian software company, can use the Internet, fiber optic
telecommunications and e-mail to get superempowered and compete anywhere
that our smarts and energy can take us. And we can be part of a global
supply chain that produces profit for Indians, Americans and Asians.

      Al Qaeda said all the walls have been blown away in the world, thereby
threatening our Islamic culture and religious norms and humiliating some of
our people, who feel left behind. But we can use the Internet, fiber optic
telecommunications and e-mail to develop a global supply chain of angry
people that will superempower us and allow us to hit back at the Western
civilization that's now right in our face.

      "From the primordial swamps of globalization have emerged two genetic
variants," said Mr. Nilekani. "Our focus therefore has to be how we can
encourage more of the good mutations and keep out the bad."

      Indeed, it is worth asking what are the spawning grounds for each.
Infosys was spawned in India, a country with few natural resources and a
terrible climate. But India has a free market, a flawed but functioning
democracy and a culture that prizes education, science and rationality,
where women are empowered. The Indian spawning ground rewards anyone with a
good idea, which is why the richest man in India is a Muslim software
innovator, Azim Premji, the thoughtful chairman of Wipro.

      Al Qaeda was spawned in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Afghanistan,
societies where there was no democracy and where fundamentalists have often
suffocated women and intellectuals who crave science, free thinking and
rationality. Indeed, all three countries produced strains of Al Qaeda,
despite Pakistan's having received billions in U.S. aid and Saudi Arabia's
having earned billions from oil. But without a context encouraging freedom
of thought, women's empowerment and innovation, neither society can tap and
nurture its people's creative potential ? so their biggest emotional export
today is anger.

      India, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan each spontaneously
generated centers for their young people's energies. In India they're called
"call centers," where young men and women get their first jobs and technical
skills servicing the global economy and calling the world. In Pakistan,
Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia they're called "madrassas," where young men,
and only young men, spend their days memorizing the Koran and calling only
God. Ironically, U.S. consumers help to finance both. We finance the
madrassas by driving big cars and sending the money to Saudi Arabia, which
uses it to build the madrassas that are central to Al Qaeda's global supply
chain. And we finance the call centers by consuming modern technologies that
need backup support, which is the role Infosys plays in the global supply
chain.

      Both Infosys and Al Qaeda challenge America: Infosys by competing for
U.S. jobs through outsourcing, and Al Qaeda by threatening U.S. lives
through terrorism. As Michael Mandelbaum, the Johns Hopkins foreign policy
professor, put it: "Our next election will be about these two challenges ?
with the Republicans focused on how we respond to Al Qaeda, and the losers
from globalization, and the Democrats focused on how we respond to Infosys,
and the winners from globalization."

      Every once in a while the technology and terrorist supply chains
intersect ? like last week. Reuters quoted a Spanish official as saying
after the Madrid train bombings: "The hardest thing [for the rescue workers]
was hearing mobile phones ringing in the pockets of the bodies. They
couldn't get that out of their heads."
Title: Re: "Mobile phones ringing in the pockets of the bodies
Post by: adam smith on March 15, 2004, 12:37:55 AM
wrong analogy.

Infosys - brought about by democratic capitalism
            - free market economy being promoted by Western countries  
              like the US and the UK
            - promotes concept of comparative advantage - whoever does
              something better produces and exports it for trade with other
              goods that other countries can
            - India has a comparative advantage of providing cheaper labor
              of equivalent US quality, US has comparative advantages in
              other things
            - ironic backlash --- US promoting democratic capitalism ---but
               can not provide IT labor with competitive wages that can not
               compet with India
            - solution --- develop on other resources that US has a better
              competitive potential to reap better economic benefits for US

Al Qaeda terrorism---- does not equal Infosys economic advantage that also favors US firms by making US companies more cost effective and benefits US economy in some ways by increasing profitability to US firms.

 US citizen's lives would be better served by politicians/public personalities searching for solutions --rather than finding blame or searching for others to blame to divert attention from their ineffective economic policies.  
 

Quote from: LG RUSS
March 14, 2004
      OP-ED COLUMNIST
      Origin of Species
      By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

      andan Nilekani, C.E.O. of the Indian software giant Infosys, gave me a
tour the other day of his company's wood-paneled global conference room in
Bangalore. It looks a lot like a beautiful tiered classroom, with a massive
wall-size screen at one end and cameras in the ceiling so that Infosys can
hold a simultaneous global teleconference with its U.S. innovators, its
Indian software designers and its Asian manufacturers. "We can have our
whole global supply chain on the screen at the same time," holding a virtual
meeting, explained Mr. Nilekani. The room's eight clocks tell the story:
U.S. West, U.S. East, G.M.T., India, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, Australia.

      As I looked at this, a thought popped into my head: Who else has such
a global supply chain today? Of course: Al Qaeda. Indeed, these are the two
basic responses to globalization: Infosys and Al Qaeda.

      Infosys said all the walls have been blown away in the world, so now
we, an Indian software company, can use the Internet, fiber optic
telecommunications and e-mail to get superempowered and compete anywhere
that our smarts and energy can take us. And we can be part of a global
supply chain that produces profit for Indians, Americans and Asians.

      Al Qaeda said all the walls have been blown away in the world, thereby
threatening our Islamic culture and religious norms and humiliating some of
our people, who feel left behind. But we can use the Internet, fiber optic
telecommunications and e-mail to develop a global supply chain of angry
people that will superempower us and allow us to hit back at the Western
civilization that's now right in our face.

      "From the primordial swamps of globalization have emerged two genetic
variants," said Mr. Nilekani. "Our focus therefore has to be how we can
encourage more of the good mutations and keep out the bad."

      Indeed, it is worth asking what are the spawning grounds for each.
Infosys was spawned in India, a country with few natural resources and a
terrible climate. But India has a free market, a flawed but functioning
democracy and a culture that prizes education, science and rationality,
where women are empowered. The Indian spawning ground rewards anyone with a
good idea, which is why the richest man in India is a Muslim software
innovator, Azim Premji, the thoughtful chairman of Wipro.

      Al Qaeda was spawned in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Afghanistan,
societies where there was no democracy and where fundamentalists have often
suffocated women and intellectuals who crave science, free thinking and
rationality. Indeed, all three countries produced strains of Al Qaeda,
despite Pakistan's having received billions in U.S. aid and Saudi Arabia's
having earned billions from oil. But without a context encouraging freedom
of thought, women's empowerment and innovation, neither society can tap and
nurture its people's creative potential ? so their biggest emotional export
today is anger.

      India, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan each spontaneously
generated centers for their young people's energies. In India they're called
"call centers," where young men and women get their first jobs and technical
skills servicing the global economy and calling the world. In Pakistan,
Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia they're called "madrassas," where young men,
and only young men, spend their days memorizing the Koran and calling only
God. Ironically, U.S. consumers help to finance both. We finance the
madrassas by driving big cars and sending the money to Saudi Arabia, which
uses it to build the madrassas that are central to Al Qaeda's global supply
chain. And we finance the call centers by consuming modern technologies that
need backup support, which is the role Infosys plays in the global supply
chain.

      Both Infosys and Al Qaeda challenge America: Infosys by competing for
U.S. jobs through outsourcing, and Al Qaeda by threatening U.S. lives
through terrorism. As Michael Mandelbaum, the Johns Hopkins foreign policy
professor, put it: "Our next election will be about these two challenges ?
with the Republicans focused on how we respond to Al Qaeda, and the losers
from globalization, and the Democrats focused on how we respond to Infosys,
and the winners from globalization."

      Every once in a while the technology and terrorist supply chains
intersect ? like last week. Reuters quoted a Spanish official as saying
after the Madrid train bombings: "The hardest thing [for the rescue workers]
was hearing mobile phones ringing in the pockets of the bodies. They
couldn't get that out of their heads."
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Russ on March 16, 2004, 02:10:22 PM
"US citizen's lives would be better served by politicians/public personalities searching for solutions --rather than finding blame or searching for others to blame to divert attention from their ineffective economic policies."

Agreed...., however, this is a structural comparison, not an economic comparison (as in, how these two organizations use modern technology to operate efficiently).

Therefore, based on this structural comparison, THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN's analogy is quite sound, whether or not you agree with his political opinion.

Leave the comparative advantage debate for the US versus Indian jobmarkets.   :)

-Russ
Title: Politics- Thai Style
Post by: Russ on March 17, 2004, 07:01:29 AM
BANGKOK, Feb 17 (Reuters) - Flick open the menu at the "Barbara" in central Bangkok and a picture of a blonde woman unwrapping her dressing gown beside a picture of fried garlic prawns tells you it is no ordinary restaurant.

"Truth is often stranger than fiction," the menu reads -- a better description of Chuwit Kamolvisit, owner of the coffee shop and adjoining massage parlour, than of the dishes on offer.

An accountant who graduated from one of Thailand's most prestigious universities, Chuwit has made millions since hopping a decade ago from the property business to the sex industry, one of the few areas unscathed by Asia's 1997-1998 economic crisis.

After a series of publicity stunts to expose corruption, a short jail term and a kidnapping he blames on bent policemen, the self-styled "massage parlour king" is plotting to become Bangkok governor in August elections likely to centre on morals.

Alarmed that nearly a third of Thais lose their virginity before they are 18, the government is ratcheting up a social order crusade popular with the middle class. It is considering a 10 p.m. curfew for teenagers and whether to shut nightclubs two hours earlier at midnight.

Chuwit has led sex industry employees on protests against the plans, which he says will ruin Bangkok as a tourist magnet. He dismisses establishment politicians as hypocrites.

"We don't need dinosaurs," Chuwit said. "And I know secrets about them no one else knows. They used to come here all the time before, but then suddenly they became family men overnight."

A musty office in a warren of bedrooms at the Copacabana, one of Chuwit's six massage parlours, serves as campaign headquarters for his First Thai Nation Party.

A golden Buddha image sits on one shelf and on another is a photograph of five women in evening dress draped over a portly, moustached Chuwit sporting a flowered Hawaiian shirt.

Windows are plastered with "We love Chuwit" stickers that will take an anti-corruption message to voters in the hope of upsetting candidates put up by the governing and main opposition parties.

The central plank of Chuwit's policy is to cut police numbers drastically to keep the men in uniform busy fighting crime rather than pushing paper.

He is undeterred by polls giving him just under five per cent of public support. Chuwit's nemesis, Deputy Prime Minister Purachai Piumsombun, who heads the government's social order drive, leads with 36.7 per cent.

CLEANING "DIRTY PEOPLE"

"I'm in the massage parlour industry. I clean bodies," Chuwit said. "And in politics, I'm going to clean some dirty people. I want to make Bangkok a city of happiness, a city of joy."

But Chuwit now wants to get out of the lucrative massage business because he has fallen foul of the police and they are making life difficult.

Undercover police had sex with five masseuses at a club last September and arrested them for prostitution -- dubbed the "get laid and raid" sting by Thai newspapers. Another club was shut down because it had more rooms than its licence allowed.

A bribe would have done the trick in the past, but the police now only take them from others and shun him, Chuwit said.

Chuwit's relations with the police began to deteriorate at the beginning of last year, when they arrested him for sending men to bulldoze bars on land he owns in central Bangkok.

He argues a company that sublet the land evicted the out-of-contract tenants. The case is still pending in court.

Angry at his treatment, Chuwit told reporters he had been paying high-ranking officers 12 million baht ($300,000) a month to keep his massage parlours up and running -- an accusation the police have denied vehemently.

Thais were stunned, but only because the claims were so open. Surveys showed 60 per cent of the public lost their already low levels of confidence in the police but many believed Chuwit's comments would shame them into reducing corruption.

Then Chuwit disappeared, to be found staggering but unharmed by a truck driver two days later. He insists he was drugged and abducted, but police say it was just another publicity stunt.

"I was kidnapped by four guys. They said 'stay cool, don't talk anymore'," Chuwit said. "It was absolutely the police. They didn't ask for money, they just wanted me to stop talking."

INTO THE GOLD FISH BOWL

The publicity caused a 70 per cent fall in Thai clientele at Chuwit-owned Victoria's Secret, Emanuelle and Honolulu, but Hong Kong and Singapore businessmen still flock there, he said.

In the "good old days" Chuwit was making 30 million baht profit a month from each massage parlour, which all gave a full return on investment within two years.

But Chuwit's clubs, in a busy area of Bangkok housing embassies and investment banks, still receive dozens of job applications a day from budding masseuses.

Next to the account books on Chuwit's desk, one form marked "approved", came with the comments: "Average body, yellowish skin, good-looking, nice manner, beautiful breasts".

At 2,000 baht for a basic jacuzzi and massage, a masseuse could make around 80,000 baht a month before tips for "extras", if she had three clients a day, Chuwit said.

A police sergeant's monthly salary is around 10,000 baht.

"You have to face the fact that Thailand's still a poor country. If people could earn enough, no one would sleep with someone they didn't know," Chuwit said.

"I tell the girls to save, but they have to send money to parents, aunts and uncles because they are the only earners."

With business down, only a dozen women with numbered tags sit on the red velvet steps in the "gold fish bowl", waiting for men to appear on the otherside of the glass wall to make a choice.

One offers a tour of Copacabana's suites, some with three bedrooms with jacuzzis and saunas, that open onto a living room with large-screen television and a dining table.

She opened a door to a "special" room, with two giant four-poster beds and two adjacent bath tubs, and giggled: "I don't know why, but this room is really popular with policemen."
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 24, 2004, 04:07:11 AM
Somewhere along the way, the Federal Courts and the Supreme Court have misinterpreted the U. S. Constitution. How could fifty States be wrong?

THIS IS VERY INTERESTING! Be sure to read the last two paragraphs.
America's founders did not intend for there to be a separation of God and state, as shown by the fact that all 50 states acknowledge God in their state constitutions:

Alabama 1901, Preamble. We the people of the State of Alabama, invoking the favor and guidance of Almighty God, do ordain and establish the following Constitution ...

Alaska 1956, Preamble. We, the people of Alaska, grateful to God and to those who founded our nation and pioneered this great land ....

Arizona 1911, Preamble. We, the people of the State of Arizona, grateful to Almighty God for our liberties, do ordain this Constitution...

Arkansas 1874, Preamble. We, the people of the State of Arkansas, grateful to Almighty God for the privilege of choosing our own form of government...

California 1879, Preamble. We, the People of the State of California, grateful to Almighty God for our freedom .....

Colorado 1876, Preamble. We, the people of Colorado, with profound reverence for the Supreme Ruler of Universe.

Connecticut 1818, Preamble. The People of Connecticut, acknowledging with gratitude the good Providence of God in permitting them to enjoy ...

Delaware 1897, Preamble. Through Divine Goodness all men have, by nature, the rights of worshipping and serving their Creator according to the dictates of their consciences ...

Florida 1885, Preamble. We, the people of the State of Florida, grateful to Almighty God for our constitutional liberty establish this Constitution...

Georgia 1777, Preamble. We, the people of Georgia, relying upon protection and guidance of Almighty God, do ordain and establish this Constitution...

Hawaii 1959, Preamble. We, the people of Hawaii, Grateful for Divine Guidance .. establish this Constitution.

Idaho 1889, Preamble. We, the people of the State of Idaho, grateful to Almighty God for our freedom, to secure its blessings ...

Illinois 1870, Preamble. We, the people of the State of Illinois, grateful to Almighty God for the civil, political and religious liberty which He hath so long permitted us to enjoy and looking to Him for a blessing on our endeavors.

Indiana 1851, Preamble. We, the People of the State of Indiana, grateful to Almighty God for the free exercise of the right to chose our form of government.

Iowa 1857, Preamble. We, the People of the State of Iowa, grateful to the Supreme Being for the blessings hitherto enjoyed, and feeling our dependence on Him for a continuation of these blessings . establish this
Constitution.
Kansas 1859, Preamble. We, the people of Kansas, grateful to Almighty God for our civil and religious privileges . establish this Constitution.

Kentucky 1891, Preamble. We, the people of the Commonwealth of Kentucky grateful to Almighty God for the civil, political and religious liberties...

Louisiana 1921, Preamble. We, the people of the State of Louisiana, grateful to Almighty God for the civil, political and religious liberties we enjoy.

Maine 1820, Preamble. We the People of Maine .. acknowledging with grateful hearts the goodness of the Sovereign Ruler of the Universe in affording us an opportunity ... and imploring His aid and direction.

Maryland 1776, Preamble. We, the people of the state of Maryland, grateful to Almighty God or our civil and religious liberty...

Massachusetts 1780, Preamble. We...the people of Massachusetts, acknowledging with grateful hearts, the goodness of the Great Legislator of the Universe ... in the course of His Providence, an opportunity ..and devoutly imploring His direction ..

Michigan 1908, Preamble. We, the people of the State of Michigan, grateful to Almighty God for the blessings of freedom ... establish this Constitution.

Minnesota 1857, Preamble. We, the people of the State of Minnesota, grateful to God for our civil and religious liberty, and desiring to perpetuate its blessings.

Mississippi 1890, Preamble. We, the people of Mississippi in convention assembled, grateful to Almighty God, and invoking His blessing on our work.

Missouri 1845, Preamble. We, the people of Missouri, with profound reverence for the Supreme Ruler of the Universe, and grateful for His goodness ... establish this Constitution .

Montana 1889, Preamble. We, the people of Montana, grateful to Almighty God for the blessings of liberty. establish this Constitution ...

Nebraska 1875, Preamble. We, the people, grateful to Almighty God for our freedom .. establish this Constitution ..

Nevada 1864, Preamble. We the people of the State of Nevada, grateful to Almighty God for our freedom establish this Constitution...

New Hampshire 1792, Part I. Art. I. Sec. V. Every individual has a natural and unalienable right to worship God according to the dictates of his own
conscience.

New Jersey 1844, Preamble. We, the people of the State of New Jersey, grateful to Almighty God for civil and religious liberty which He hath so long permitted us to enjoy, and looking to Him for a blessing on our
endeavors ...

New Mexico 1911, Preamble. We, the People of New Mexico, grateful to Almighty God for the blessings of liberty .

New York 1846, Preamble. We, the people of the State of New York, grateful to Almighty God for
our freedom, in order to secure its blessings.

North Carolina 1868, Preamble. We the people of the State of North Carolina, grateful to Almighty God, the Sovereign Ruler of Nations, for our civil, political, and religious liberties, and acknowledging our dependence upon Him for the continuance of those ...

North Dakota 1889, Preamble. We, the people of North Dakota, grateful to Almighty God for the blessings of civil and religious liberty, do ordain...

Ohio 1852, Preamble. We the people of the state of Ohio, grateful to Almighty God for our freedom, to secure its blessings and to promote our common ....

Oklahoma 1907, Preamble. Invoking the guidance of Almighty God, in order to secure and perpetuate the blessings of liberty ... establish this ..

Oregon 1857, Bill of Rights, Article I. Section 2. All men shall be secure in the Natural right, to worship Almighty God according to the dictates of their consciences..

Pennsylvania 1776, Preamble. We, the people of Pennsylvania, grateful to Almighty God for the blessings of civil and religious liberty, and humbly
invoking His guidance.

Rhode Island 1842, Preamble. We the People of the State of Rhode Island grateful to Almighty God for the civil and religious liberty which He hath so long permitted us to enjoy, and looking to Him for a blessing...

South Carolina, 1778, Preamble. We, the people of he State of South Carolina, grateful to God for our liberties, do ordain and establish this Constitution.

South Dakota 1889, Preamble. We, the people of South Dakota, grateful to Almighty God for our civil and religious liberties ... establish this

Tennessee 1796, Art. XI. III. That all men have a natural and indefeasible right to worship Almighty God according to the dictates of their conscience...

Texas 1845, Preamble. We the People of the Republic of Texas, acknowledging, with gratitude, the grace and beneficence of God.

Utah 1896, Preamble. Grateful to Almighty God for life and liberty, we establish this Constitution ....

Vermont 1777, Preamble. Whereas all government ought to ... enable the individuals who compose it to enjoy their natural rights, and other blessings which the Author of Existence has bestowed on man...

Virginia 1776, Bill of Rights, XVI ... Religion, or the Duty which we owe our Creator ... can be directed only by Reason ... and that it is the mutual duty of all to practice Christian Forbearance, Love and Charity
towards each other ..

Washington 1889, Preamble. We the People of the State of Washington, grateful! to the Supreme Ruler of the Universe for our liberties, do ordain this Constitution .....

West Virginia 1872, Preamble. Since through Divine Providence we enjoy the blessings of civil, political and religious liberty, we, the people of West Virginia .. reaffirm our faith in and constant reliance upon God...

Wisconsin 1848, Preamble. We, the people of Wisconsin, grateful to Almighty God for our freedom, domestic tranquility ..

Wyoming 1890, Preamble. We, the people of the State of Wyoming, grateful to God for our civil, political, and religious liberties ... establish this Constitution...

After reviewing acknowledgments of God from all 50 state constitutions, one is faced with the prospect that maybe, just maybe, the ACLU and the out-of-control Federal Courts are wrong!

"Those people who will not be governed by God will be ruled by tyrants."
William Penn
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 07, 2004, 10:18:30 AM
BOOK REVIEW


In defense of the Stars and Stripes
Anti-Americanism by Jean-Francois Revel, French-English translation by Diarmid Cammell

Reviewed by John Parker



All across the globe, from Sydney to Siberia, from Quebec to Patagonia, there is one sporting obsession that unifies the entire human race. Young and old, male and female, black, white and every shade in between, there is one pleasurable activity that unifies them all.

 

I'm speaking, of course, about America-bashing. (Why, did you think I was talking about something else?) By 2004, any remaining wisps of sympathy for the Americans who were forced to choose between jumping and burning alive in 2001 had long since dissipated, and the globe had returned to its former habit of treating the United States as the official whipping boy for all the world's ills.

Indeed, anti-Americanism has ascended from its former status as the preoccupation of a relative handful of Jurassic Marxists, professional victims, Third World whiners, and Islamo-fascist troglodytes to the level of a major new global religion. Like any religion, it has its saints (which include the likes of Che Guevara and Ho Chi Minh), its martyrs (the Rosenbergs, the Guantanamo Bay detainees and Saddam Hussein's sons), its high priests (Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore and Abu Bakar Ba'asyir), and its desperately over-eager wanna-bes (eg, Asia Times Online's very own Pepe Escobar, whose viewpoint on any issue can be predicted with absolute accuracy by simply asking "what interpretation of this situation will put the United States in the worst light?").

Curiously, however, while the religion has a hell (America), and a devil (George W Bush), it lacks both a heaven (the collectivist pipe dream having been found wanting) and a god (since the anti-Americans consider themselves as having evolved beyond the need for a deity - save their Islamist faction, which wants to impose its religion forcibly on everyone else). Still, the anti-American cult provides its legions of drooling adherents with the crucial element of any faith: the illusion of meaning in an otherwise meaningless existence. That priceless psychological salve, in this case, is the comforting delusion that, no matter how hypocritical, backward, bigoted, ignorant, corrupt or cowardly the cult's followers might otherwise be, at least they are better than those awful Americans.

Jean-Francois Revel is a distinguished French writer who has, for nearly all his working life, chosen the rockiest path any intellectual can choose: the path of true non-conformity (as distinct from the ersatz, self-described non-conformists one finds on any university campus in the Western world). Specifically, Revel has chosen to confront directly - not only in this volume, but in several earlier books that touched on the issue - the entrenched anti-Americanism of an entire generation of European intellectuals, particularly French ones. Like his countryman Emile Zola (whose explosive article "J'accuse" attacked French society's handling of the Alfred Dreyfus affair), he has dared to defend an unpopular scapegoat and, in so doing, has probably done more to earn the gratitude of Americans than any Frenchman since General Lafayette, who came to the aid of the American revolutionary cause.

The reason that Revel's attitude toward the US is so strikingly different from most of his compatriots is not difficult to find: indeed, one finds it on the very first page of this book, when the author reveals that he lived and traveled frequently in the US between 1970 and 1990. During this time, he had conversations with "a wide range of Americans - politicians, journalists, businessmen, students and university professors, Democrats and Republicans, conservatives, liberals and radicals, and people I met in passing from every walk of life". This simple action - talking to actual Americans and asking them what they think, as opposed to blindly regurgitating European conventional wisdom about what Americans think - was obviously the critical step in separating Revel from the smug, chauvinistic sheep who predominate in his intellectual class. It was a step that the vast majority of this class, then and now, have been unwilling to take: they simply cherish their prejudice against Americans too greatly to face the possibility that real, live examples might not conform to it.

In Monsieur Revel's case, these conversations led to his first book, Without Marx or Jesus, published in 1970. Thirty-four years ago, Revel was "astonished by evidence that everything Europeans were saying about the US was false"; sadly, this situation has not changed in the slightest in the intervening time. Indeed, if anything, the conventional wisdom about the United States is even more wrong today than it was then. Without Marx or Jesus made two main points: first, that major social/political developments taking place in the US in the late 1960s, such as the Vietnam War protests, the American Free Speech movement, and the sexual revolution, constituted a new type of revolution, distinct from the working-class uprising predicted by the Marxist theories then in fashion. Second, Revel predicted that the great revolution of the 20th century would turn out to be the "liberal revolution" - ie, the spread of multiparty democracy and market economics - rather than the "socialist revolution". The latter point may appear to be almost conventional wisdom today, but it was a bold assertion in 1970. Most of the book consisted of a point-by-point rebuttal of the reflexive anti-Americanism of the day, and correctly identified its main psychological wellspring: envious resentment due to Europe's loss of leadership status in Western civilization during the postwar era.

In this first book, Revel also described the definitive proof of the irrational origins of anti-American arguments: "reproaching the United States for some shortcoming, and then for its opposite ... a convincing sign that we are in the presence not of rational analysis, but of obsession". In the 1960s, the best example of this behavior was European attitudes toward US involvement in Vietnam. A startling number of French commentators developed a sudden amnesia about their country's own involvement in Indochina, and the fact that France, while embroiled in its ugly war with the Viet Minh, "frequently pleaded for and sometimes obtained American help". Thus the same French political class that begged president Dwight Eisenhower to send B-29s to save the Foreign Legion at Dien Bien Phu was only too quick to label the United States a "neo-imperialist", or worse, for subsequently intervening in the unholy mess that the preceding decades of French colonial misrule had largely created.

In Anti-Americanism, which is basically a sequel to Without Marx or Jesus, a more contemporary example of the same phenomenon is given: the nearly simultaneous criticism of the US for "arrogant unilateralism" and "isolationism". As Revel dryly observes, "the same spiteful bad temper inspired both indictments, though of course they were diametrically opposed".

Examples of this psychopathology are almost endless, but the Iraq crisis has certainly provided a profusion of new cases. For example, during the 12 years after 1991, the anti-American press was filled with self-righteous hand-wringing over what was billed as the terrible suffering of the Iraqi people under UN sanctions. But when the administration of President George W Bush abandoned the sanctions policy (a policy that, incidentally, had been considered the cautious, moderate course of action when it was originally adopted) in favor of a policy of regime change by military force - which was obviously the only realistic way to end the sanctions - did these dyspeptic howler monkeys praise the United States for trying to alleviate Iraqis' suffering? No, of course not - instead, without batting an eyelash, they simply began criticizing the United States for the "terrible civilian casualties" caused by bombing.

Innumerable cases like this have made it perfectly clear to Americans that they will automatically be despised no matter what policy option they select. Furthermore, the only rational reaction Americans could have to this situation is to keep their own counsel when it comes to foreign policy, and leave their fair-weather friends - or, more accurately, no-weather friends - at arm's length. Predictably, however, the anti-American cult has a third accusation pre-packaged and ready to go for this very reaction: the inexplicable reluctance of Americans to listen attentively to their perpetually peeved critics is the result of their "arrogant unilateralism"! (Naturally, the possibility that the anti-American cultists' own statements might have played a role in promoting this behavior is never even considered.)

The most notable characteristic of Anti-Americanism, as a text, is the blistering, take-no-prisoners quality of its prose. Even those diametrically opposed to Revel's views would be forced to acknowledge his skills as a pugnacious rhetorician who does not eschew sarcasm as a weapon.

A few examples will suffice: referring to anti-war banners that proclaimed "No to terrorism. No to war", Revel scoffs that this "is about as intelligent as 'No to illness. No to medicine'." Responding to the indictment of the United States as a "materialistic civilization", he says: "Everyone knows that the purest unselfishness reigns in Africa and Asia, especially in the Muslim nations, and that the universal corruption that is ravaging them is the expression of a high spirituality."

Addressing the claim of the Japanese philosopher Yujiro Nakamura that "American culture ignores [the] dark dimension" of human beings, the author observes: "Evidently, Nakamura has never read Melville, Poe, Hawthorne, Henry James, Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, [etc], to mention only a few explorers of the depths." And he is positively withering in his contempt for Japanese intellectuals who, in the wake of September 11, opined that America's wealth disqualifies it from speaking in the name of human rights: "Everyone knows that Japan has always been deeply respectful towards [human rights], as Koreans, Chinese and Filipinos can amply confirm." Revel opens his sixth chapter, "Being Simplistic", by recalling the "pitying, contemptuous sneers" that greeted president Ronald Reagan's characterization of the Soviet Union as an "evil empire", then retorts, "it is not apparent that subsequent progress in Soviet studies gives us grounds to call it the 'Benevolent Empire'." And he responds to the claim of conservative British writer Andrew Alexander that "the Cold War was an American plot" by saying: "Following a similar logic, one might build a case that the Hundred Years' War was a complete fabrication by Joan of Arc, who wanted star billing in a pseudo-resistance against the conciliatory, peace-loving English."

In general, Revel's barbs strike most accurately when aimed at his own country. For example, responding to the tired claim that the US is "not a democracy" because it has supported dictatorships in Third World countries, Revel notes: "The history of Africa and Asia swarms with dictatorships of every type ... supported by the French and the British ... But it would very much surprise French living [in that period] if you told them that they didn't live in a democratic country."

Another telling denunciation arises from the statements of Olivier Duhamel, a Socialist deputy in the European Union, who responded to the electoral success of French ultra-rightist Jean-Marie Le Pen by complaining that France was "catching up with the degenerate democracies [such as] the US, Austria and Italy". First, Revel comments on the idiocy of Duhamel's insinuation that the United States is degenerate because Frenchmen voted for an ultra-rightist, then concludes: "The strange thing is that it is always in Europe that dictatorships and totalitarian governments spring up, yet it is always America that is 'fascist'."

Of course, the danger of the author's biting approach is that it could alienate, rather than convince, his readers. But given that the hypocrisy of the anti-Americans has piled up so thickly in recent years that one practically needs a chainsaw to cut through it, there may be no other choice.

Many of Revel's observations about the anti-Americans, such as their amazingly recent advocacy (in many cases) of totalitarian communism, or the fact that many intellectuals in failed societies have sought to blame the US scapegoat instead of engaging in self-criticism, have been made before by other writers. He is at his most original, however, when analyzing the cultists' psychological motivations; for example, contrasting the motives of the anti-American left with the anti-American right. To wit, the left essentially regards the United States as a devil figure, one that it has clung to all the more tightly in the years since its former deity, Marxist collectivism, collapsed in an abyss of poverty and repression. The right, by contrast, resents the United States as a pretender to the throne of global leadership that rightfully belongs to Europe - conveniently ignoring the fact that World Wars I and II, communist ideology, and socialist-influenced economic policies, which are, in actuality, the main factors that resulted in US ascension, all originated entirely in Europe.

Revel also breaks new ground when he discusses the striking tendency of other countries to ascribe their own worst faults to the United States, in a curious "reversal of culpability". Thus the famously peace-loving Japanese and Germans excoriate the US for "militarism"; the Mexicans attack it for "electoral corruption" in the wake of the 2000 election; the British accuse it of "imperialism"; Arab writers condemn it after September 11 for "abridging press freedom" (of course, the Arab states have always been shining beacons of that freedom). The gold medal for jaw-dropping hypocrisy, however, goes to the mainland Chinese, whose unelected dictatorship routinely accuses the United States of "hegemonism". Having been the chief hegemon of Asia for most of the past 5,000 years, the Chinese are in a singularly weak position to condemn the practice. What they actually oppose, of course, is not "hegemonism" itself, but the possibility that any power other than China would dare to practice it.

France has been no exception to this universal rule. Former minister of foreign affairs Hubert Vedrine, in his book Les Mondes de Francois Mitterrand, wrote: "The foremost characteristic of the United States ... is that it has regarded itself ever since its birth as a chosen nation, charged with the task of enlightening the rest of the world." Of course, this was a wholly conventional allegation of US "arrogance", delivered to an adoring choir. But then, a discordant note - Revel alone has the temerity to observe: "What is immediately striking about this pronouncement, the obvious fact that jumps right out, is how perfectly it applies to France herself." The Gallic emperor proves embarrassingly unclothed, for virtually every "arrogant" assertion of uniqueness made by Americans has its uncannily similar counterpart made by Frenchmen: if Thomas Jefferson once said "the United States is the empire of liberty", then countless French politicians have asserted with equal megalomania, "France is the birthplace of the Rights of Man." If anything, Revel does not develop this point highly enough. For, to an American observer of countless anti-American diatribes, the most striking aspect of the United States they describe is how little it resembles the actual, physical United States, and how uncannily it resembles a doppelganger of the writer's own society.

Not every psychological trait of the anti-Americans is discussed by Revel. He does not go far enough, for example, in delineating the fundamentally onanistic character of their rhetoric; it is difficult to explain the obsessive, droning, almost pornographic quality of the criticism, and its deliberate ignorance of easily obtained contrary facts, without understanding that the primary motive of the critics is to obtain pleasure. After all, hasn't the main purpose of bigots and bullies since time immemorial been to build themselves up by tearing down their victims?

Another unmentioned aspect is the sheer adolescent pettiness of the criticism. This can be seen most clearly in international press coverage of the United States, which scarcely ever misses an opportunity to America-bash, even when reporting on areas that are in essence non-political, such as economic statistics and scientific discovery. Revel discusses the typical example of a story in the economics journal La Tribune, which gleefully announced "The End of Full Employment in the USA" when the US unemployment rate climbed to 5.5 percent in early 2001 (at the time, the French government was congratulating itself for reducing French unemployment to only twice this level). More recently, the British Broadcasting Corp gave exhaustive coverage to a technical problem with the US Mars Spirit Rover, but barely mentioned the successful effort to solve the problem. This spiteful editorial decision, and countless others like it, was typical of an organization in which balanced, accurate news coverage has become secondary to the holy task of denouncing Uncle Sam.

Finally, one must mention the increasingly ill-disguised anti-Semitism of many America-bashers. Of course, such toxic ideas are to be expected of reactionary Islamist fanatics, who are so profoundly ignorant that they practically regard Americans and Jews as synonymous. But one increasingly hears grumbling about "neo-conservatives" from non-Muslim critics who really want to say "scheming Jews", but dimly sense that this choice of words is not permissible. How delicious the human comedy is - that European elites, whose greatest crime, the Holocaust, has not even passed from living memory, should begin to re-enact that demagogic crime in their increasingly poisonous anti-American rhetoric, as though absolutely nothing had been learned in almost 60 years of postwar struggle to advance freedom, human rights and democracy! It may be that those who don't learn from the past are doomed to repeat it; but the apparent inability of Europeans, and others, to avoid such self-destructive cultural patterns raises the question of whether learning from the past is even possible.

Without a doubt, however, the defining trait of the cultists is their moral (if not physical) cowardice. While using Latin Americans as an examplar of this quality, Revel quotes the Venezuelan writer Carlos Rangel: "For Latin Americans, it is an unbearable thought that a handful of Anglo-Saxons, arriving much later than the Spanish and in such a harsh climate that they barely survived the first few winters, would become the foremost power in the world. It would require an inconceivable effort of collective self-analysis [emphasis mine] for Latin Americans to face up to the fundamental causes of this disparity. This is why, though aware of the falsity of what they are saying, every Latin American politician and intellectual must repeat that all our troubles stem from North American imperialism." In fact, the Latins are hardly unique in cowering tremulously at the prospect of "collective self-analysis": with minor changes in specifics, Rangel's fundamental point could apply equally well to most of Africa, the Slavic societies of Eastern Europe, the nations of the South Asian sub-continent, and last (but definitely not least) the benighted Arab world, which has repeatedly shown itself to be the global champion of finger-pointing and denial (as if that could make up for its glaring backwardness in virtually every other respect).

It is ironic, however, that so many East Asians would be drawn to the cult, since they, out of all the regions of the developing world, have the least reason to feel inferior to the United States (after all, many societies in the region have already surpassed the US by various objective criteria). It may be that in the Asian "school" of anti-Americanism, a different psychological dynamic is at work: since Asians are as convinced of their innate cultural superiority as all the other critics (though with infinitely more justification than most), it must make them very uncomfortable that, in almost every case, their societies' escape from thousands of years of static, inward-looking despotism only began when US, or British, influence arrived. In addition, of course, need one really point out the massive, obvious US influence on the postwar economic development, political evolution, and even the popular cultures of Asian societies? Or the fact that virtually the entire governing class of the most successful Asian economies was educated in the United States? It appears that some Asians feel subconsciously belittled by how much they owe the US, and respond by petulantly attacking their historic benefactor.

So is anti-Americanism just an exercise in onanistic hypocrisy, or does it have a real-world cost? It does, but the cost is not primarily the hurt feelings, or terrorist-caused deaths, of Americans - even if this was the main consequence, no one would care, since most of the world (to judge by their own words) already regards Americans as a non-human species, somehow introduced, one assumes, to North America by alien spacecraft. (Of course, this calculated, malicious demonization of Americans as "the other" is hugely ironic, since the US, due to its diverse ethnic composition and immigrant origins, arguably represents the entire human race more fully than any other single nation-state.) For decades, the anti-Americans have compared the US to the Roman Empire in the fond hope that a similar "decline and fall" would someday materialize (given that what followed the Roman collapse was centuries of war, ignorance, and barbarism, one questions their motives). Regrettably for the cultists, though, the US is large enough, is self-assured enough, and its political stability and economic momentum are great enough, that it will only continue to prosper regardless of their actions. To illustrate, countless commentators have parroted the cliche that the "war on terrorism" is unwinnable, but how many have noted the obvious, undeniable corollary that Osama bin Laden's self-declared war on the United States is equally unwinnable?

Therein lies another exquisite irony: the costs of anti-Americanism will be borne not by Americans, but by others. And their numbers are vast: Cubans, North Koreans, Zimbabweans, and countless others suffer and starve under their respective tyrannies because the democratic world's chattering classes, obsessed with denouncing the United States, can't be bothered with holding their criminal regimes to account. Meanwhile, in Iraq, fascist rabble, with no discernible political program save a pledge to kill more Americans, try desperately to extinguish the slightest hope of democracy, economic growth, and stability for that long-suffering land; but the world, instead of helping to beat back the wolves at the door, basks in anti-American schadenfreude. How countless are the political problems, cultural pathologies, and humanitarian disasters that fester unnoticed, all over the globe, as the anti-American cult, wallowing in ecstatic bigotry, desperately scrutinizes every utterance of the Bush administration for new critical fodder.

Indeed, it is not the slightest exaggeration to say that in 2004, anti-American sentiment has become the biggest single obstacle to human progress. It sustains repressive dictatorships everywhere; excuses corruption, torture, the oppression of women, and mass murder; provides ideological oxygen for vile, stupid "revolutionary movements" like the Maoist insurgents in Nepal; and has even promoted the spread of disease (as when, for example, Europeans haughtily dismissed Bush's AIDS initiative as insincere - God forbid that they should concur with any policy of the wicked Bush, even at the cost of a few million more African lives). By focusing monomaniacally on "why America is wrong", instead of asking "what is right", the global anti-American elite has massively failed to fulfill the most fundamental responsibility of the intellectual class: to provide dispassionate, truthful analysis that can guide society to make proper decisions. And it has contemptuously cast aside the irreplaceable, post-Cold War opportunity to irreversibly consolidate the "liberal revolution" praised by Revel - in which inheres the only true hope of lasting, global peace and development - all in the name of redressing the gaping psychological insecurities of its members.

None of this is to say that criticism of specific US policies, or aspects of US culture, is not entirely legitimate (and of course, inside the US, the ability to speak out publicly against such things is a cherished, constitutionally guaranteed, and frequently exercised right). Indeed, one is struck, when reading this book, by Revel's repeated emphasis of this very point. The author is hardly a universal apologist for US actions; in fact, he gives many examples of areas in which he disagrees with US government policies. However, Revel's critiques of the US, especially for American readers, can be easily differentiated from those of the anti-American cultists: his criticisms are reasonable, fair-minded, and based on accurate information; whereas those of the professional anti-Americans are unreasonable, unfair, and based on the willful disgregard of all contrary evidence. Rather than legitimate criticism, what Monsieur Revel, and I, deplore is the quasi-religious, obsessive, fanatical brand of anti-Americanism: the kind that blames the United States for every problem, everywhere, first, always, and forever; the kind that automatically identifies with, and supports, any criminal political thug anywhere on the globe, just because he happens to declare himself opposed to the United States; the kind that in essence has no other values or priorities at all, save the insatiable need to denounce the United States; the kind that is congenitally incapable of self-criticism, but searches endlessly, with inexhaustible creativity, for additional evidence that it can use for its interminable, tendentious show trial of the US.

I am reluctant to point out the weaknesses of Anti-Americanism, since I am in such profound agreement with its basic thesis. Nonetheless, in the interests of balance, there are some weak points.

First, the book is somewhat repetitive. The chapters are largely devoted to rebutting particular claims of the anti-Americanists - eg, that the United States promotes the allegedly nefarious globalization process (Chapter 2), that US culture is "extinguishing" others (Chapter 5), that US government policy is "simplistic" (Chapter 6), or that the United States is just about the worst society that has ever existed anywhere (Chapter 4). Partly as a by-product of this organizational scheme, similar types of material, eg denunciations of Islamic extremism, reappear in several different chapters.

Another problem is that, since the book was written in French primarily for a French audience, many of its specific examples refer to domestic French political figures and situations, which may not be familiar to international readers.

Finally, this reviewer noted at least one factual error. In a discussion of European reaction to the contested US presidential election of 2000, Revel asserts that no presidential elector has selected the minority candidate in its state since the beginning of the 19th century. (The US constitution provides for an indirect "electoral college" system for presidential elections, such that when an individual voter selects, say, the Democratic candidate for president, he or she is not actually voting for that candidate directly, but rather for a slate of "democratic electors" who, if the candidate wins a plurality in that state, are supposed to cast all the state's "electoral votes" for the Democrats.) In fact, there have been seven cases of "faithless electors" since 1948, most recently in 1988, when a Democratic elector in West Virginia selected vice presidential nominee Lloyd Bentsen for president, and presidential nominee Michael Dukakis for vice president (presumably, he thought Bentsen would make a better president). However, this error does not contradict the author's point, which is that incidents of this type have been rare. Also, European critics of the electoral-college system are somewhat tardy: Americans have been arguing for electoral-college reform for at least 200 years, and recently, 75 percent of Americans, or more, have expressed in polls a desire to elect the president directly.

These admitted flaws do not reduce the importance, and value, of Anti-Americanism as a necessary antidote to the poisonous torrent of crude, atavistic anti-US hatred that spews forth daily from newspapers, magazines, and websites around the world. In the introduction, Revel recalls how Without Marx or Jesus, 34 years ago, was also greeted with strident denunciations from the baying jackals of the anti-American cult. But predictably, this hysterical response (Revel's Italian translator even attempted to rebut the book's arguments in his footnotes) only served to pique the public's interest: ordinary readers were quick to sense that any writer who had struck such a nerve obviously had something important to say, and Without Marx or Jesus became a smash hit.

It is hardly surprising that this pattern was repeated with Anti-Americanism, which has topped the French best-seller list. (Curiously, and completely contrary to what foreign stereotypes would lead one to expect, the book has been much less successful in the US - this is primarily because the anti-American obsession is entirely one-way; most Americans are barely even aware the cult exists.) The book's success shows conclusively that at least some Europeans sense the hypocrisy and intellectual vacuity of the anti-Americanists, and are once again developing an appetite for a balanced, truthful depiction of the US, as opposed to the spurious fiction they have largely been spoon-fed thus far.

Clearly, this book will not reach the committed fanatics. However, one hopes that at least a handful of fair-minded, reasonable people in Asia, Europe and elsewhere, who have the requisite moral courage to consider contrary views, will read it. I have really only scratched the surface of I>Anti-Americanism's virtues in this review: for example, Chapter 2, which critiques the anti-globalization movement, is probably the most devastating indictment of that incoherent, infantile crusade ever committed to paper.

In our time, anti-Americanism has become a crushing, Stalinist orthodoxy, an ossified system of bigoted dogmas that ruthlessly ostracizes all who would question it. It has become boring, even to the French. In this atmosphere, Monsieur Revel's book is truly a breath of fresh air. I only wish I had written it.

Anti-Americanism by Jean-Francois Revel, French-English translation by Diarmid Cammell. English edition copyright 2003 by Encounter Books. ISBN: 1893554856, 176 pages, price US$25.95.
Title: Re: "Mobile phones ringing in the pockets of the bodies
Post by: joe on April 08, 2004, 11:18:44 AM
Quote from: LG RUSS
March 14, 2004
      OP-ED COLUMNIST
      Origin of Species
      By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

      andan Nilekani, C.E.O. of the Indian software giant Infosys, gave me a
tour the other day of his company's wood-paneled global conference room in
Bangalore. It looks a lot like a beautiful tiered classroom, with a massive
wall-size screen at one end and cameras in the ceiling so that Infosys can
hold a simultaneous global teleconference with its U.S. innovators, its
Indian software designers and its Asian manufacturers. "We can have our
whole global supply chain on the screen at the same time," holding a virtual
meeting, explained Mr. Nilekani. The room's eight clocks tell the story:
U.S. West, U.S. East, G.M.T., India, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, Australia.

      As I looked at this, a thought popped into my head: Who else has such
a global supply chain today? Of course: Al Qaeda. Indeed, these are the two
basic responses to globalization: Infosys and Al Qaeda.

      Infosys said all the walls have been blown away in the world, so now
we, an Indian software company, can use the Internet, fiber optic
telecommunications and e-mail to get superempowered and compete anywhere
that our smarts and energy can take us. And we can be part of a global
supply chain that produces profit for Indians, Americans and Asians.

      Al Qaeda said all the walls have been blown away in the world, thereby
threatening our Islamic culture and religious norms and humiliating some of
our people, who feel left behind. But we can use the Internet, fiber optic
telecommunications and e-mail to develop a global supply chain of angry
people that will superempower us and allow us to hit back at the Western
civilization that's now right in our face.

      "From the primordial swamps of globalization have emerged two genetic
variants," said Mr. Nilekani. "Our focus therefore has to be how we can
encourage more of the good mutations and keep out the bad."

      Indeed, it is worth asking what are the spawning grounds for each.
Infosys was spawned in India, a country with few natural resources and a
terrible climate. But India has a free market, a flawed but functioning
democracy and a culture that prizes education, science and rationality,
where women are empowered. The Indian spawning ground rewards anyone with a
good idea, which is why the richest man in India is a Muslim software
innovator, Azim Premji, the thoughtful chairman of Wipro.

      Al Qaeda was spawned in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Afghanistan,
societies where there was no democracy and where fundamentalists have often
suffocated women and intellectuals who crave science, free thinking and
rationality. Indeed, all three countries produced strains of Al Qaeda,
despite Pakistan's having received billions in U.S. aid and Saudi Arabia's
having earned billions from oil. But without a context encouraging freedom
of thought, women's empowerment and innovation, neither society can tap and
nurture its people's creative potential ? so their biggest emotional export
today is anger.

      India, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan each spontaneously
generated centers for their young people's energies. In India they're called
"call centers," where young men and women get their first jobs and technical
skills servicing the global economy and calling the world. In Pakistan,
Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia they're called "madrassas," where young men,
and only young men, spend their days memorizing the Koran and calling only
God. Ironically, U.S. consumers help to finance both. We finance the
madrassas by driving big cars and sending the money to Saudi Arabia, which
uses it to build the madrassas that are central to Al Qaeda's global supply
chain. And we finance the call centers by consuming modern technologies that
need backup support, which is the role Infosys plays in the global supply
chain.

      Both Infosys and Al Qaeda challenge America: Infosys by competing for
U.S. jobs through outsourcing, and Al Qaeda by threatening U.S. lives
through terrorism. As Michael Mandelbaum, the Johns Hopkins foreign policy
professor, put it: "Our next election will be about these two challenges ?
with the Republicans focused on how we respond to Al Qaeda, and the losers
from globalization, and the Democrats focused on how we respond to Infosys,
and the winners from globalization."

      Every once in a while the technology and terrorist supply chains
intersect ? like last week. Reuters quoted a Spanish official as saying
after the Madrid train bombings: "The hardest thing [for the rescue workers]
was hearing mobile phones ringing in the pockets of the bodies. They
couldn't get that out of their heads."




BANGALORE, India - Infosys Technologies Ltd., which has become India's second-largest software maker thanks largely to outsourced work from the West, is investing $20 million to create nearly 500 consulting jobs in the United States.
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 09, 2004, 10:58:01 PM
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 
  March 31, 2004
Response to Readership

I recently heard someone make a prediction that within the next fifty years there will likely be a civil war in Europe between "old" Europe and Muslims. That currently there is (at least) an ideological war being waged between European Socialism/Secularism vs. American Capitalism/Judeo-Christian-ism, with Muslims fighting both European and American concepts. Do you agree with this assessment? If so, could you speculate as to how you feel it will likely play itself out?

Hanson: I agree with your diagnosis, but believe that Europe already is aware that the old rules must change if it is to survive?witness immigration reform in Holland and Scandinavia. It is one thing to triangulate between the United States and the Arab world for short-term advantage; quite another to find oneself alienated from the heretofore supportive Americans without finding commesnurate  gratitude from the Middle East. Sensible people in Europe grasp this and are in a race with demagogues to change before it?s too late.
More "Response to Readership March 31"
 
 
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 
  March 27: Book Signing - San Jose Barnes & Noble - 4pm  Mexifornia
April 2: Public Lecture - UC Berkeley  - Military Power & Empire - 12 noon  
April 17: Book Signing - Fresno, CA Fig Garden Bookstore - 1 - 3pm - Between War & Peace
 
Click to view calendar
 
 
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 
 March 26, 2004, 8:36 a.m.
We Are Finishing the War
Anatomy of our struggle against the Islamicists.

Across the globe we watch the terrible drama play out. Car and suicide bombings in Baghdad are aimed at American aid givers, U.S. peacekeepers, Iraqi civilians, and provisional government workers. Spanish civilians are indiscriminately murdered ? as are Turks, Moroccans, Saudis, and Afghans.

President Musharraf is targeted by assassins. Synagogues are blown apart. Suicide murderers try to reach a chemical dump in Ashdod in hopes of gassing Jews to the pleasure of much of the Arab world and the indifference of Europe. Indeed, Palestinian murderers apologize for gunning down an Arab jogger in Jerusalem . . .

Read more "We are finishing the war"
Read more from the NRO
 
 
 April 4, 2004

The Mirror of Fallujah

No more passes and excuses for the Middle East

Victor Davis Hanson

What are we to make of scenes from the eighth-century in Fallujah? Random murder, mutilation of the dead, dismemberment, televised gore, and pride in stringing up the charred corpses of those who sought to bring food to the hungry? Perhaps we can shrug and say all this is the wage of Saddam Hussein and the thirty years of brutality of his Baathists that institutionalized such barbarity? Or was the carnage the dying scream of Baathist hold-outs intent on shocking the Western world at home watching it live? We could speculate for hours.

 
Yet I fear that we have not seen anything new. Flip through the newspaper and the stories are as depressing as they are monotonous: bombs in Spain; fiery clerics promising death in England, even as explosive devices are uncovered in France. In-between accounts of bombings in Iraq, we get the normal murdering in Israel, and daily assassination in Pakistan, Turkey, Morocco, and Chechnya. Murder, dismemberment, torture?these all seem to be the acceptable tools of Islamic fundamentalism and condoned as part of justifiable Middle East rage. Sheik Yassin is called a poor crippled ?holy man? who ordered the deaths of hundreds, as revered in the Arab World for his mass murder as Jerry Falwell is condemned in the West for his occasional slipshod slur about Muslims.
Yet the hourly killing is perhaps not merely the wages of autocracy, but part of a larger grotesquery of Islamic fundamentalism on display. The Taliban strung up infidels from construction cranes and watched, like Romans of old, gory stoning and decapitations in soccer stadiums built with UN largess. In the last two years, Palestinian mobs have torn apart Israeli soldiers, lynched their own, wired children with suicide bombing vests, and machine-gunned down women and children?between sickening scenes of smearing themselves with the blood of ?martyrs.? Very few Arab intellectuals or holy men have condemned such viciousness.

Daniel Pearl had his head cut off on tape; an American diplomat was riddled with bullets in Jordan. Or should we turn to Lebanon and gaze at the work of Hezbollah?its posters of decapitated Israeli soldiers proudly on display? Some will interject that the Saudis are not to be forgotten?whose religious police recently allowed trapped school girls to be incinerated rather than have them leave the flaming building unescorted, engage in public amputations, and behead adulteresses. But Mr. Assad erased from memory the entire town of Hama. And why pick on Saddam Hussein, when earlier Mr. Nasser, heartthrob to the Arab masses, gassed Yemenis? The Middle-East coffee houses cry about the creation of Israel and the refugees on the West Bank only to snicker that almost 1,000,000 Jews were ethnically cleansed from the Arab world.

And then there is the rhetoric. Where else in the world do mainstream newspapers talk of Jews as the children of pigs and apes? And how many wacky Christian or Hindu fundamentalists advocate about the mass murder of Jews or promise death to the infidel? Does a Western leader begin his peroration with ?O evil infidel? or does Mr. Sharon talk of ?virgins? and ?blood-stained martyrs??
Conspiracy theory in the West is the domain of Montana survivalists and Chomsky-like wackos; in the Arab world it is the staple of the state-run media. This tired strophe and antistrophe of threats and retractions, and braggadocio and obsequiousness grates on the world at large. So Hamas threatens to bring the war to the United States, and then back peddles and says not really. So the Palestinians warn American diplomats that they are not welcome on the soil of the West Bank?as if any wish to return when last there they were murdered trying to extend scholarships to Palestinian students.

I am sorry, but these toxic fumes of the Dark-Ages permeate everywhere. It won?t do any more simply to repeat quite logical exegeses. Without consensual government, the poor Arab Middle East is caught in the throes of rampant unemployment, illiteracy, statism, and corruption. Thus in frustration it vents through its state-run media invective against Jews and Americans to assuage the shame and pain. Whatever.

But at some point the world is asking: ?Is Mr. Assad or Hussein, the Saudi Royal Family, or a Khadafy really an aberration?all rogues who hijacked Arab countries?or are they the logical expression of a tribal patriarchal society whose frequent tolerance of barbarism is in fact reflected in its leadership? Are the citizens of Fallujah the victims of Saddam, or did folk like this find their natural identity expressed in Saddam? Postcolonial theory and victimology argue that European colonialism, Zionism, and petrodollars wrecked the Middle East. But to believe that one must see India in shambles, Latin America under blanket autocracy, and an array of suicide bombers pouring out of Mexico or Nigeria. South Korea was a moonscape of war when oil began gushing out of Iraq and Saudi Arabia; why is it now exporting cars while the latter are exporting death? Apartheid was far worse than the Shah?s modernization program; yet why did South Africa renounce nuclear weapons while the Mullahs cheated on every UN protocol they could?

No, there is something peculiar to the Middle East that worries the world. The Arab world for years has promulgated a quite successful media image as perennial victims?proud folks, suffering under a series of foreign burdens, while nobly maintaining their grace and hospitality. Middle-Eastern Studies programs in the United States and Europe published an array of mostly dishonest accounts of Western culpability, sometimes Marxist, sometimes anti-Semitic that were found to be useful intellectual architecture for the edifice of panArabism, as if Palestinians or Iraqis shared the same oppressions, the same hopes, and the same ideals as downtrodden American people of color?part of a universal ?other? deserving victim status and its attendant blanket moral exculpation. But the curtain has been lifted since 9-11 and the picture we see hourly now is not pretty.

Imagine an Olympics in Cairo? Or an international beauty pageant in Riyadh? Perhaps an interfaith world religious congress would like to meet in Teheran? Surely we could have the World Cup in Beirut? Is there a chance to have a World Bank conference in Ramallah or Tripoli? Maybe Damascus could host a conference of the world?s neurosurgeons?

And then there is the asymmetry of it all. Walk in hushed tones by a mosque in Iraq, yet storm and desecrate the Church of the Nativity in the West Bank with impunity. Blow up and assassinate Westerners with unconcern; yet scream that Muslims are being questioned about immigration status in New York. Damn the West as you try to immigrate there; try to give the Middle East a fair shake while you prefer never to visit such a place. Threaten with death and fatwa any speaker or writer who ?impugns? Islam, demand from Western intellectuals condemnation of any Christians who speak blasphemously of the Koran.

I have purchased Israeli agricultural implements, computer parts, and read books translated from the Hebrew; so far, nothing in the contemporary Arab world has been of much value in offering help to the people of the world in science, agriculture, or medicine. When there is news of 200 murdered in Madrid or Islamic mass-murdering of Christians in the Sudan, or suicide bombing in Israel, we no longer look for moderate mullahs and clerics to come forward in London or New York to condemn it. They rarely do. And if we might hear a word of reproof, it is always qualified by the ubiquitous ?but??followed by a litany of qualifiers about Western colonialism, Zionism, racism, and hegemony that have the effects of making the condemnation either meaningless or in fact a sort of approval.

Yet it is not just the violence, the boring threats, the constant televised hatred, the temper-tantrums of fake intellectuals on televisions, the hypocrisy of anti-Western Arabs haranguing America and Europe from London or Boston, or even the pathetic shouting and fist-shaking of the ubiquitous Arab street. Rather the global village is beginning to see that the violence of the Middle East is not aberrant, but logical. Its misery is not a result of exploitation or colonialism, but self-induced. Its fundamentalism is not akin to that of reactionary Hinduism, Buddhism, or Christianity, but of an altogether different and much fouler brand.

The enemy of the Middle East is not the West so much as modernism itself and the humiliation that accrues when millions themselves are nursed by fantasies, hypocrisies, and conspiracies to explain their own failures. Quite simply, any society in which citizens owe their allegiance to the tribe rather than the nation, do not believe in democracy enough to institute it, shun female intellectual contributions, allow polygamy, insist on patriarchy, institutionalize religious persecution, ignore family planning, expect endemic corruption, tolerate honor killings, see no need to vote, and define knowledge as mastery of the Koran is deeply pathological.

When one adds to this depressing calculus that for all the protestations of Arab nationalism, Islamic purity and superiority, and whining about a decadent West, the entire region is infected with a burning desire for things Western?from cell phones and computers to videos and dialysis, you have all the ingredients for utter disaster and chaos. How after all in polite conversation can you explain to an Arab intellectual that the GDP of Jordan or Morocco has something to do with an array of men in the early afternoon stuffed into coffee shops spinning conspiracy tales, drinking coffee, and playing board games while Japanese, Germans, Chinese, and American women and men are into their sixth hour on the job? Or how do you explain that while Taiwanese are studying logarithms, Pakistanis are chanting from the Koran in Dark-Age madrassas? And how do you politely point out that while the New York Times and Guardian chastise their own elected officials, the Arab news in Damascus or Cairo is free only to do the same to us?

I support the bold efforts of the United States to make a start in cleaning up this mess, in hopes that a Fallujah might one day exorcize its demons. But in the meantime, we should have no illusions about the enormity of our task, where every positive effort will be met with violence, fury, hypocrisy, and ingratitude.

If we are to try to bring some good to the Middle East, then we must first have the intellectual courage to confess that for the most part the pathologies embedded there are not merely the work of corrupt leaders but often the very people who put them in place and allowed them to continue their ruin.

So the question remains did Saddam create Fallujah or Fallujah Saddam?
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 15, 2004, 09:24:30 AM
THANK YOU FOR CHOOSING UNITED, MR. BIN LADEN
Wed Apr 14, 8:02 PM ET  Add Op/Ed - Ann Coulter to My Yahoo!
 


By Ann Coulter

Last week, 9/11 commissioner John Lehman revealed that "it was the policy (before 9/11) and I believe remains the policy today to fine airlines if they have more than two young Arab males in secondary questioning because that's discriminatory." Hmmm ... Is 19 more than two? Why, yes, I believe it is. So if two Jordanian cab drivers are searched before boarding a flight out of Newark, Osama bin Laden (news - web sites) could then board that plane without being questioned. I'm no security expert, but I'm pretty sure this gives terrorists an opening for an attack.

 

 

In a sane world, Lehman's statement would have made headlines across the country the next day. But not one newspaper, magazine or TV show has mentioned that it is official government policy to prohibit searching more than two Arabs per flight.


Meanwhile, another 9/11 commissioner, the greasy Richard Ben-Veniste, claimed to be outraged that the CIA (news - web sites) did not immediately give intelligence on 9/11 hijackers Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar to the FBI (news - web sites). As we now know -- or rather, I alone know because I'm the only person in America watching the 9/11 hearings -- Ben-Veniste should have asked his fellow commissioner Jamie Gorelick about that.


In his testimony this week, John Ashcroft (news - web sites) explained that the FBI wasn't even told Almihdhar and Alhazmi were in the country until weeks before the 9/11 attack -- because of Justice Department (news - web sites) guidelines put into place in 1995. The FBI wasn't allowed to put al-Qaida specialists on the hunt for Almihdhar and Alhazmi -- because of Justice Department guidelines put into place in 1995. Indeed, the FBI couldn't get a warrant to search Zacarias Moussaoui's computer -- because of Justice Department guidelines put into place in 1995.


The famed 1995 guidelines were set forth in a classified memorandum written by the then-deputy attorney general titled "Instructions for Separation of Certain Foreign Counterintelligence and Criminal Investigations," which imposed a "draconian" wall between counterintelligence and criminal investigations.


What Ashcroft said next was breathtaking. Prohibited from mounting a serious search for Almihdhar and Alhazmi, an irritated FBI investigator wrote to FBI headquarters, warning that someone would die because of these policies -- "since the biggest threat to us, OBL (Osama bin Laden), is getting the most protection."


FBI headquarters responded: "We're all frustrated with this issue. These are the rules. NSLU (National Security Law Unit) does not make them up. But somebody did make these rules. Somebody built this wall."


The person who built that wall described in the infamous 1995 memo, Ashcroft said, "is a member of the commission." If this were an episode of "Matlock," the camera would slowly pan away from Ashcroft's face at this point and then quickly jump to an extreme close-up of Jamie Gorelick's horrified expression. Armed marshals would then escort the kicking, screaming Gorelick away in leg irons as the closing credits rolled. Gorelick was the deputy attorney general in 1995.


The 9/11 commission has finally uncovered the proverbial "smoking gun"! But it was fired by one of the 9/11 commissioners. Maybe between happy reminiscences about the good old days of Ruby Ridge, Waco and the Elian Gonzales raid, Ben-Veniste could ask Gorelick about those guidelines. Democrats think it's a conflict of interest for Justice Scalia to have his name in the same phonebook as Dick Cheney (news - web sites). But there is no conflict of interest having Gorelick sit on a commission that should be investigating her.


Bill O'Reilly's entire summary of Ashcroft's testimony was to accuse Ashcroft of throwing sheets over naked statues rather than fighting terrorism. No mention of the damning Gorelick memo. No one knows about the FAA (news - web sites)'s No-Searching-Arabs counterterrorism policy. Predictions that conservatives have finally broken through the wall of sound coming from the mainstream media may have been premature.


When Democrats make an accusation against Republicans, newspaper headlines repeat the accusation as a fact: "U.S. Law Chief 'Failed to Heed Terror Warnings,'" "Bush Was Told of Qaida Steps Pre-9/11; Secret Memo Released," "Bush White House Said to Have Failed to Make al-Qaida an Early Priority."


But when Republicans make accusations against Democrats -- even accusations backed up by the hard fact of a declassified Jamie Gorelick memo -- the headlines note only that Republicans are making accusations: "Ashcroft Lays Blame at Clinton's Feet," "Ashcroft: Blame Bubba for 9/11," "Ashcroft Faults Clinton in 9/11 Failures."


It's amazing how consistent it is. A classic of the genre was the Chicago Tribune headline, which managed to use both constructs in a single headline: "Ashcroft Ignored Terrorism, Panel Told; Attorney General Denies Charges, Blames Clinton." Why not: "Reno Ignored Terrorism, Panel Told; Former Deputy Attorney General Denies Charges, Blames Bush"?


Democrats actively created policies that were designed to hamstring terrorism investigations. The only rap against the Bush administration is that it failed to unravel the entire 9/11 terrorism plot based on a memo titled: "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States."


I have news for liberals: Bin Laden is still determined to attack inside the United States! Could they please tell us when and where the next attack will be? Because unless we know that, it's going to be difficult to stop it if we can't search Arabs.
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 30, 2004, 05:57:24 AM
OH, DID WE SAY THAT????
It is amazing how the facts are unimportant to so many, and how soon they
forget! (Please read through to the bottom!)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"One way or the other, we are determined to deny Iraq the capacity to
develop weapons of mass destruction and the missiles to deliver them. That
is our bottom line." - President Clinton, Feb. 4, 1998

"If Saddam rejects peace and we have to use force, our purpose is clear. We
want to seriously diminish the threat posed by Iraq's weapons of mass
destruction program." - President Clinton, Feb. 17, 1998

Iraq is a long way from [here], but what happens there matters a great deal
here. For the risks that the leaders of a rogue state will use nuclear,
chemical or biological weapons against us or our allies is the greatest
security threat we face." - Madeline Albright, Feb 18, 1998

"He will use those weapons of mass destruction again, as he has ten times
since 1983." - Sandy Berger, Clinton National Security Adviser, Feb
18,1998

"[W]e urge you, after consulting with Congress, and consistent with the US
Constitution and laws, to take necessary actions (including, if
appropriate, air and missile strikes on suspect Iraqi sites) to respond
effectively to the threat posed by Iraq's refusal to end its weapons of
mass destruction programs." - Letter to President Clinton, signed by Sens.
Carl Levin (D-MI), Tom Daschle (D-SD), John Kerry (D - MA), and others Oct.
9,1998

"Saddam Hussein has been engaged in the development of weapons of mass
destruction technology which is a threat to countries in the region and he
has made a mockery of the weapons inspection process." - Rep. Nancy Pelosi
(D, CA), Dec. 16, 1998

"Hussein has chosen to spend his money on building weapons of mass
destruction and palaces for his cronies." > - Madeline Albright, Clinton
Secretary of State, Nov. 10, 1999

"There is no doubt that ... Saddam Hussein has invigorated his weapons
programs. Reports indicate that biological, chemical and nuclear programs
continue apace and may be back to pre-Gulf War status. In addition, Saddam
continues to redefine delivery systems and is doubtless using the cover of
a licit missile program to develop longer-range missiles that will threaten
the United States and our allies." - Letter to President Bush, Signed by
Sen. Bob Graham (D, FL,) and others, December 5, 2001

"We begin with the common belief that Saddam Hussein is a tyrant and threat
to the peace and stability of the region. He has ignored the mandated of
the United Nations and is building weapons of mass destruction and the
means of delivering them." - Sen. Carl Levin (D, MI), Sept. 19, 2002

"We know that he has stored secret supplies of biological and chemical
weapons throughout his country." - Al Gore, Sept. 23, 2002

"Iraq's search for weapons of mass destruction has proven impossible to
deter and we should assume that it will continue for as long as Saddam is
in power." - Al Gore, Sept. 23, 2002

"We have known for many years that Saddam Hussein is seeking and developing
weapons of mass destruction." - Sen. Ted Kennedy (D, MA), Sept. 27, 2002

"The last UN weapons inspectors left Iraq in October of 1998. We are
confident that Saddam Hussein retains some stockpiles of chemical and
biological weapons, and that he has since embarked on a crash course to
build up his chemical and biological warfare capabilities. Intelligence
reports indicate that he is seeking nuclear weapons..." - Sen. Robert Byrd
(D, WV), Oct. 3, 2002

"I will be voting to give the President of the United States the authority
to use force-- if necessary-- to disarm Saddam Hussein because I believe
that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hands is a real
and grave threat to our security." - Sen. John F. Kerry (D, MA), Oct.
9,2002

"There is unmistakable evidence that Saddam Hussein is working aggressively
to develop nuclear weapons and will likely have nuclear weapons within the
next five years .. We also should remember we have always underestimated
the progress Saddam has made in development of weapons of mass
destruction."- Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D, WV), Oct 10, 2002

"He has systematically violated, over the course of the past 11 years,
every significant UN resolution that has demanded that he disarm and
destroy his chemical and biological weapons, and any nuclear capacity. This
he has refused to do" - Rep. Henry Waxman (D, CA), Oct 10, 2002

"In the four years since the inspectors left, intelligence reports show
that Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical and biological
weapons stock, his missile delivery capability, and his nuclear program. He
has also given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including Al
Qaeda members.. It is clear, however, that if left unchecked, Saddam
Hussein will continue to increase his capacity to wage biological and
chemical warfare, and will keep trying to develop nuclear weapons." - Sen.
Hillary Clinton (D, NY), Oct 10, 2002

"We are in possession of what I think to be compelling evidence that Saddam
Hussein has, and has had for a number of years, a developing capacity for
the production and storage of weapons of mass destruction." - Sen. Bob
Graham (D, FL), Dec. 8, 2002

"Without question, we need to disarm Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal,
murderous dictator, leading an oppressive regime ... He presents a
particularly grievous threat because he is so consistently prone to
miscalculation ... And now he is miscalculating America's response to his
continued deceit and his consistent grasp for weapons of mass destruction
. So the threat of Saddam Hussein with weapons of mass destruction is real"
- Sen. John F. Kerry (D, MA), Jan. 23. 2003

SO NOW EVERY ONE OF THESE SAME DEMOCRATS SAY PRESIDENT BUSH LIED--THAT THERE NEVER WERE ANY WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION AND HE TOOK US TO WAR UNNECESSARILY!
=======================

Yes I know the saying goes, "Much Ado About Nothing" and unlike that Shakespearean play the Iraqi prisoner abuse is no comedy but it does involve politics of a sort.  It IS something.  For good and ill it will remain an issue.  On the one hand, right thinking Americans will abhor the stupidity of the actions, while on the other hand political glee will take control and fashion this minor event into some modern day My Lai massacre.

Some Arabs are asking for an apology.  I offer mine here, as stated below .

I am sorry that the last seven times the Americans took up arms and sacrificed the blood of our youth it was in the defense of Muslims (Bosnia, Kosovo, Gulf War 1, Kuwait, etc.)

I am sorry that no such call for an apology from the extremists came after 9/11.

I am sorry that all of the murderers on 9/11 were Arabs.

I am sorry that Arabs have to live in squalor under savage dictatorships.

I am sorry that their leaders squander their wealth.

I am sorry that their governments breed hate for the US in their religious schools.

I am sorry that Yasir Arafat was kicked out of every Arab country and highjacked the  Palestinian "cause."

I am sorry that no other Arab country will take in or offer more than a token amount of financial help to those same Palestinians.

I am sorry that the USA has to step in and be the biggest financial supporters of poverty stricken Arabs while the insanely wealthy Arabs blame the USA.

I am sorry that our own left wing elite and our media can't understand any of this.

I am sorry the United Nations scammed the poor people of Iraq out of the "food for oil" money so they could get rich while the common folk suffered.

I am sorry that some Arab governments pay the families of homicide bombers upon their death.

I am sorry that those same bombers are seeking 72 virgins. They can't seem to find one here on Earth.

I am sorry that the homicide bombers think babies are a legitimate target.

I am sorry that our troops died to free Arabs.

I am sorry they show so much restraint when their brothers in arms are killed.

I am sorry that Muslim extremists have killed more Arabs than any other group.

I am sorry that foreign trained terrorists are trying to seize control of Iraq and return it to a terrorist state.

I am sorry we don't drop a few dozen Daisy Cutters on Fallujah.

I am sorry that every time terrorists hide they find a convenient "Holy Site."

I am sorry they didn't apologize for flying a jet into the World Trade Center that collapsed and severely damaged St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church - one of OUR Holy Sites.

I am sorry they didn't apologize for flight 93 and 175, the USS Cole, the embassy bombings, and others.

I am sorry Michael Moore is American; he could feed a medium sized village in Africa.

I am sorry the French act like French.

America will get past this latest absurdity. We will punish those responsible because that's what we do.  We hang out our dirty laundry for all the world to see.  We move on. That's  why we are hated so much. We don't hide this stuff like all those Arab countries that are now demanding an apology.

Deep down inside when most Americans saw this in the news we were like...  so what?  We lost hundreds and then made fun of a few prisoners.
Sure it was wrong, sure it dramatically hurts our cause, but until captured we were trying to kill these same prisoners.  Now we're supposed to wring our hands because a few were humiliated?  Come on.  Our compassion is tempered with the vivid memories of our own people killed, mutilated and burnt amongst a joyous crowd of celebrating Fallujans.

If you want an apology from this American your gonna have a long wait. You have a better chance of finding those 72 virgins.
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 16, 2004, 01:07:28 PM
Feeding the Minotaur
Our strange relationship with the terrorists continues.

As long as the mythical Athenians were willing to send, every nine years, seven maidens and seven young men down to King Minos's monster in the labyrinth, Athens was left alone by the Cretan fleet. The king rightly figured that harvesting just enough Athenians would remind them of their subservience without leading to open rebellion ? as long as somebody impetuous like a Theseus didn't show up to wreck the arrangement.

 
Ever since the storming of the Tehran embassy in November 1979 we Americans have been paying the same sort of human tribute to grotesque Islamofascists. Over the last 25 years a few hundred of our own were cut down in Lebanon, East Africa, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Yemen, and New York on a semi-annual basis, even as the rules of the tribute to be paid ? never spoken, but always understood ? were rigorously followed.

In exchange for our not retaliating in any meaningful way against the killers ? addressing their sanctuaries in Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, or Syria, or severing their financial links in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia ? Hezbollah, al Qaeda, and their various state-sanctioned kindred operatives agreed to keep the number killed to reasonable levels. They were to reap their lethal harvests abroad and confine them mostly to professional diplomats, soldiers, or bumbling tourists, whose disappearance we distracted Americans would predictably chalk up to the perils of foreign service and exotic travel.

Despite the occasional fiery rhetoric, both sides found the informal Minoan arrangement mutually beneficial. The terrorists believed that they were ever so incrementally, ever so insidiously eroding America's commitment to a pro-Western Middle East. We offered our annual tribute so that over the decades we could go from Dallas to Extreme Makeover and Madonna to Britney without too much distraction or inconvenience.

But then a greedy, over-reaching bin Laden wrecked the agreement on September 11. Or did he?

Murdering 3,000 Americans, destroying a city block in Manhattan, and setting fire to the Pentagon were all pretty tough stuff. And for a while it won fascists and their state sponsors an even tougher response in Afghanistan and Iraq that sent hundreds to caves and thousands more to paradise. And when we have gotten serious in the postbellum reconstruction, thugs like Mr. Sadr have backed down. But before we gloat and think that we've overcome our prior laxity and proclivity for appeasement, let us first make sure we are not still captives to the Minotaur's logic.

True, al Qaeda is now scattered, the Taliban and Saddam gone. But the calculus of a quarter century ? threaten, hit, pause, wait; threaten, hit, pause, wait ? is now entrenched in the minds of Middle Eastern murderers. Indeed, the modus operandi that cynically plays on Western hopes, liberalism, and fair play is gospel now to all sorts of bin Laden epigones ? as we have seen in Madrid, Fallujah, and Najaf.

Much has been written about our problems with this postmodern war and why we find it so difficult to fully mobilize our formidable military and economic clout to crush the terrorists and their patrons. Of course, we have no identifiable conventional enemy such as Hitler's Panzers; we are not battling a fearsome nation that defiantly declared war on us, such as Tojo's Japan; and we are no longer a depression-era, disarmed, impoverished United States at risk for our very survival. But then, neither Hitler nor Mussolini nor Tojo nor Stalin ever reached Manhattan and Washington.

So al Qaeda is both worse and not worse than the German Nazis: It is hardly the identifiable threat of Hitler's Wehrmacht, but in this age of technology and weapons of mass destruction it is more able to kill more Americans inside the United States. Whereas we think our fascist enemies of old were logical and conniving, too many of us deem bin Laden's new fascists unhinged ? their fatwas, their mythology about strong and weak horses, and their babble about the Reconquista and the often evoked "holy shrines" are to us dreamlike.

But I beg to differ somewhat.

I think the Islamists and their supporters do not live in an alternate universe, but instead are no more crazy in their goals than Hitler was in thinking he could hijack the hallowed country of Beethoven and Goethe and turn it over to buffoons like Goering, prancing in a medieval castle in reindeer horns and babbling about mythical Aryans with flunkies like Goebbels and Rosenberg. Nor was Hitler's fatwa ? Mein Kampf ? any more irrational than bin Laden's 1998 screed and his subsequent grainy infomercials. Indeed, I think Islamofascism is brilliant in its reading of the postmodern West and precisely for that reason it is dangerous beyond all description ? in the manner that a blood-sucking, stealthy, and nocturnal Dracula was always spookier than a massive, clunky Frankenstein.

Like Hitler's creed, bin Ladenism trumpets contempt for bourgeois Western society. If once we were a "mongrel" race of "cowboys" who could not take casualties against the supermen of the Third Reich, now we are indolent infidels, channel surfers who eat, screw, and talk too much amid worthless gadgetry, godless skyscrapers, and, of course, once again, the conniving Jews.

Like Hitler, bin Ladenism has an agenda: the end of the liberal West. Its supposedly crackpot vision is actually a petrol-rich Middle East free of Jews, Christians, and Westerners, free to rekindle spiritual purity under Sharia. Bin Laden's al Reich is a vast pan-Arabic, Taliban-like caliphate run out of Mecca by new prophets like him, metering out oil to a greedy West in order to purchase the weapons of its destruction; there is, after all, an Israel to be nuked, a Europe to be out-peopled and cowered, and an America to be bombed and terrorized into isolation. This time we are to lose not through blood and iron, but through terror and intimidation: televised beheadings, mass murders, occasional bombings, the disruption of commerce, travel, and the oil supply.

In and of itself, our enemies' ambitions would lead to failure, given the vast economic and military advantages of the West. So to prevent an all out, terrible response to these predictable cycles of killing Westerners, there had to be some finesse to the terrorists' methods. The trick was in preventing some modern Theseus from going into the heart of the Labyrinth to slay the beast and end the nonsense for good.

It was hard for the Islamic fascists to find ideological support in the West, given their agenda of gender apartheid, homophobia, religious persecution, racial hatred, fundamentalism, polygamy, and primordial barbarism. But they sensed that there has always been a current of self-loathing among the comfortable Western elite, a perennial search for victims of racism, economic oppression, colonialism, and Christianity. Bin Laden's followers weren't white; they were sometimes poor; they inhabited of former British and French colonies; and they weren't exactly followers of the no-nonsense Pope or Jerry Falwell. If anyone doubts the nexus between right-wing Middle Eastern fascism and left-wing academic faddishness, go to booths in the Free Speech area at Berkeley or see what European elites have said and done for Hamas. Middle Eastern fascist killers enshrined as victims alongside our own oppressed? That has been gospel in our universities for the last three decades.

Like Hitler, bin Ladenism grasped the advantages of hating the Jews. It has been 60 years since the Holocaust; memories dim. Israel is not poor and invaded but strong, prosperous, and unapologetic. It is high time, in other words, to unleash the old anti-Semitic infectious bacillus. Thus Zionists caused the latest Saudi bombings, just as they have poisoned Arab-American relations, just as neo-conservatives hijacked American policy, just as Feith, Perle, and Wolfowitz cooked up this war.

Finally, bin Laden understood the importance of splitting the West, just like the sultan of old knew that a Europe trisected into Orthodoxy, Catholicism, and Protestantism would fight among itself rather than unite against a pan-Islamic foe. Hit the Spanish and bring in an anti-American government. Leave France and Germany alone for a time so they can blame the United States for mobilizing against a "nonexistent" threat, unleashing the age-old envy and jealously of the American upstart.

If after four years of careful planning, al Qaedists hit the Olympics in August, the terrorists know better than we do that most Europeans will do nothing ? but quickly point to the U.S. and scream "Iraq!" And they know that the upscale crowds in Athens are far more likely to boo a democratic America than they are a fascist Syria or theocratic Iran. Just watch.

In the European mind, and that of its aping American elite, the terrorists lived, slept, and walked in the upper aether ? never the streets of Kabul, the mosques of Damascus, the palaces of Baghdad, the madrassas of Saudi Arabia, or the camps of Iran. To assume that the latter were true would mean a real war, real sacrifice, and a real choice between the liberal bourgeois West and a Dark-Age Islamofascist utopia.

While all Westerners prefer the bounty of capitalism, the delights of personal freedom, and the security of modern technological progress, saying so and not apologizing for it ? let alone defending it ? is, well, asking a little too much from the hyper sophisticated and cynical. Such retrograde clarity could cost you, after all, a university deanship, a correspondent billet in Paris or London, a good book review, or an invitation to a Georgetown or Malibu A-list party.

Nearly three years after 9/11 we are in the strangest of all paradoxes: a war against fascists that we can easily win but are clearly not ready to fully wage. We have the best 500,000 soldiers in the history of civilization, a resolute president, and an informed citizenry that has already received a terrible preemptive blow that killed thousands.

Yet what a human comedy it has now all become.

The billionaire capitalist George Soros ? who grew fabulously wealthy through cold and calculating currency speculation, helping to break many a bank and its poor depositors ? now makes the moral equation between 9/11 and Abu Ghraib. For this ethicist and meticulous accountant, 3,000 murdered in a time of peace are the same as some prisoners abused by renegade soldiers in a time of war.

Recently in the New York Times I read two articles about the supposedly new irrational insensitivity toward Muslims and saw an ad for a book detailing how the West "constructed" and exaggerated the Islamic menace ? even as the same paper ran a quieter story about a state-sponsored cleric in Saudi Arabia's carefully expounding on the conditions under which Muslims can desecrate the bodies of murdered infidels.

Aristocratic and very wealthy Democrats ? Al Gore, Ted Kennedy, Howard Dean, and John Kerry ? employ the language of conspiracy to assure us that we had no reason to fight Saddam Hussein. "Lies," "worst," and " betrayed" are the vocabulary of their daily attacks. A jester in stripes like Michael Moore, who cannot tell the truth, is now an artistic icon ? precisely and only because of his own hatred of the president and the inconvenient idea that we are really at war. Our diplomats court the Arab League, which snores when Russians and Sudanese kill hundreds of thousands of Muslims but shrieks when we remove those who kill even more of their own. And a depopulating, entitlement-expanding Europe believes an American president, not bin Laden, is the greatest threat to world peace. Russia, the slayer of tens of thousands of Muslim Chechans and a big-time profiteer from Baathist loot, lectures the United States on its insensitivity to the new democracy in Baghdad.

Meanwhile, in Europe, Iraq, and the rest of the Middle East, we see the same old bloodcurdling threats, the horrific videos, the bombings, the obligatory pause, the faux negotiations, the lies ? and then, of course, the bloodcurdling threats, the horrific videos, the bombings...

No, bin Laden is quite sane ? but lately I have grown more worried that we are not.
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 02, 2004, 10:40:41 PM
Author unknown

I am John Kerry.

I was against the first Iraq war, I am against the second Iraq war, but I voted for it. Now I'm against it but I was for it. I support the UN.  I'm against terrorism and against the Iraq war. But I voted for the Iraq war.

So, I voted against the first war and supported the second war, wait...

I'm against gay marriage but for gay unions. I support gays but think the San Francisco mayor is wrong. I support gay marriages. No, wait, gay unions.

I'm Catholic. Wait, I'm Jewish. My granddad was Jewish. But I was raised
Catholic. What am I? I don't want to confuse people.

I am for abortions, but wait, I'm Catholic, and Catholics are pro-life. But I
might consider putting pro-life judges in office, but I'm not sure. I do know I voted for a pro-life judge once, but I stated that it was a mistake.

I hate the evil drug companies, and dub them like Frankenstein when I am hanging around Robert Kennedy, Jr. and the Natural Resources Defence Council. But when I am with Ron Reagan Jr. and Sarah Brady I say drug companies do too little R&D, because I favor tax-payer supported stem cell research and responsible cloning. But if Archbishop McCarren sees, or worse yet can hear me; then I am morally opposed to stem-cell research "on demand," and don't believe in cloning of non-consenting adults. I have never said that I believe that Canadians have the inalienable right to clone, but prefer that this whole matter be left up to the United Nations.

I went to Vietnam. But I was against Vietnam. I testified against fellow US
troops in Vietnam, threw my medals away and led others to do the same.  But I am a war hero.  Against the war.  I stated I threw my medals away then I threw my ribbons away.  I then revealed that I threw my ribbons away but not my medals, then lately I stated that I threw someone else's medals away and never threw anything of mine away. I believe ribbons and medals aren't the same thing.  Medals come with ribbons, so now I believe that ribbons and medals are the same thing besides the fact that ribbons are cloth and  medals are metal.

I wrote a book that pictured the US flag upside-down on its cover.  But now I fly and campaign in a plane with a large flag right-side up on it.  But
sometimes, we fly upside-down for fun.

I am for the common man, unlike Bush. I am against the rich. But my family is worth 700 million dollars has a jet and many SUVs. I am the common man.  I am against sending jobs overseas. My wife is a Heinz heir. Heinz has most of its factories offshore. I am against rewarding companies for exporting jobs as long as it is not Heinz.

I own $1 million in Wal-Mart stock. I believe Wal-Mart is evil by driving small business owners out of town. I am a capitalist and I own part of Wal-Mart but I am a good guy for small corporate America.

I own SUVs when I talk to my followers in Detroit, MI.  Teresa owns SUVs, I don't, when I talk to tree hugging followers. I have a campaign jet that gets .003 mpg, which is great fuel efficiency.

I am against making military service an issue in Presidential elections.  I
defended a draft dodger Clinton and stated that all serve in their own capacity whether they draft dodge or not. Did I mention, I served in Vietnam and am a hero?  Are you questioning my patriotism?  I served in Vietnam.  My opponent didn't.  I have three purple hearts!  I am a hero. I am qualified to run this country since I served.

I spent Christmas of 1968 in Cambodia, being shot at by the drunken
South Vietnamese and the Khmer Rouge, while President Nixon was lying to the country and saying that there were no troops in Cambodia. What's that you say, Nixon wasn't president in 1968, well it must have been some other President then. Who was that President with the a phony  Silver star [LBJ], it was probably him.  Are you sure the Khmer Rouge were not active until 1970, well I guess I must not have been there then. That's right I was actually in my base camp in Vietnam at least 55 miles from the Cambodian border and I spent the evening writing in my journal about being in Cambodia. I got confused after I said it so many times between 1968 and 1986. You can see now what living under Nixon did to all of us. When I went to Paris three times with Jane Fonda between 1970 and 1972  to meet with Lee Duc Tho, North Vietnam's foreign minister, we actually did not talk about politics. And also, that was probably not me but rather Roger Vadim who like me speaks fluent French and you can see why reporters for the Associated Press could get so confused.  But if it was me, I there on other business.

I am a real hero though, you just spend three minutes with the people who served with me and they will tell you. No, not those 200 plus veterans who served with me and say I lied, and not all those veterans that signed affadavits that say I am a phony, I mean just these 8 people that travel around with me as my band of brothers.

I am John Kerry.  I want to be your President.
Title: HAHA!
Post by: SB_Mig on September 03, 2004, 10:17:14 AM
LMFAO! That's good stuff.

After watching both conventions, I have to admit that I am more disillusioned with the state of our political system than ever. It's become a matter of which circus would you like to join? For the first time ever, I am actually considering a write-in vote for my cat.

The one thing that bugs me the most is the idea that either candidate is for "the common man". Folks, let's wake up and smell the coffee. NEITHER candidate even knows what the "common man" wants, needs, or worries about.

John Kerry is known to be the richest Senator in government with a personal fortune (or his wife's however you choose to look at it) in the area of $165 million to $626 million dollars. Hell, he dumped $850,000 of his own cash into his campaign. George Bush's net worth is somewhere in the area of $9 million to $26 million. Sounds pretty "common" to me. I guess you could argue that when compared to Kerry, Bush is just a "common" millionaire.

Neither candidate has ever held a "common man's" job (i.e. minimum wage). Owning a baseball team, working on your father's presidential campaign, being a district attorney, and becoming 4 term Governor (both candidates) are not "common man" jobs. Both went to Ivy League schools (not on scholarship), and I can pretty much guarantee that if either of them loses their "job" they don't have to worry about unemployment. And upon their retirement, neither has to worry about that Soc. Security check arriving on time.

The "common man" is not driven around by a chaffeur, does not own a ranch, a jet, a beach house, a winter home, nor can afford to send their offspring to private schools and universities (and again I am speaking about both candidates).

The "common man" does not attend $1000-$5000 a plate dinners unless he is serving tables. The "common man" can't take a paid vacation wherever, whenever 'cause he needs a break from a tough schedule of campaigning or making policy decisions.

The "common man" worries about his children's education, his mortgage payment, his monthly bills, getting food on the table, the rising cost of gas, getting healthcare (affordable or otherwise), and basically making it to the end of the year without going into debt. Again neither candidate has these concerns.

Having worked in the press covering campaigns, speeches, and appearances by mayors, governors, vice-presidents and presidents of both parties, I can tell you that the most time any candidate spends with "the common man" is limited to 5 minutes at best. Usually meeting "the common man" consists of a handshake and a "Thanks for coming out/your support".

"The common man" whose name is dropped by candidates while on the road (i.e. 'I met a man named Bob Hakenworth in Iowa the other day') are carefully screened individuals who are handpicked by assistants to the press secretary or candidate's "advance team". Your chances as "the common man" of just walking up to a candidate or president and voicing your concerns (and actually having them addressed) are slim to none.

Now, if anyone can explain to me how either candidate can relate to "the common man's" everyday problems (without the use of political rhetoric, either liberal or conservative) then I may start believing what they say. Either that, or find me a dishwasher who has run a successful presidential campaign.
Title: Along those lines...
Post by: SB_Mig on September 03, 2004, 10:22:57 AM
Here's a bit of information from yahoo.com.

Dear Jack:

We knew the presidential salary had been $200,000 for a number of years -- a relatively paltry sum considering the state of executive compensation these days -- but we were unsure of the salary our current president is drawing. We seem to recall hearing something a few months ago about a raise for our country's commander in chief.
We searched on "presidential salary," and on the first page of search results we received several relevant web sites and one amusing anomaly.

According to a CNN article dated July 16, 1999, the House voted earlier that week to increase the next president's salary to $400,000, which means George W. Bush, our 43rd president, makes twice as much as his predecessor, President Clinton.

After a little more research, we found a table that should put to rest any doubts that our country's former presidents are struggling to make ends meet. The National Taxpayers Union provides a Presidential Pension Graph that shows estimated pension benefits of former presidents. Bill Clinton stands to collect $7.29 million, the most of any living ex-president, while Ronald Reagan's pension is just over $2.5 million.

...and these aren't updated figures. Sounds pretty "common" to me!  :wink:
Title: Political Rants
Post by: pretty_kitty on September 03, 2004, 05:18:18 PM
http://www.kerryoniraq.com
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Anonymous on September 07, 2004, 11:20:57 PM
From www.danielpipes.org | Original article available at: www.danielpipes.org/article/2066

They're Terrorists - Not Activists
by Daniel Pipes
New York Sun
September 7, 2004

"I know it when I see it" was the famous response by a U.S. Supreme Court justice to the vexed problem of defining pornography. Terrorism may be no less difficult to define, but the wanton killing of schoolchildren, of mourners at a funeral, or workers at their desks in skyscrapers surely fits the know-it-when-I-see-it definition.

The press, however, generally shies away from the word terrorist, preferring euphemisms. Take the assault that led to the deaths of some 400 people, many of them children, in Beslan, Russia, on September 3. Journalists have delved deep into their thesauruses, finding at least twenty euphemisms for terrorists:

Assailants - National Public Radio.
Attackers ? the Economist.
Bombers ? the Guardian.
Captors ? the Associated Press.
Commandos ? Agence France-Presse refers to the terrorists both as "membres du commando" and "commando."
Criminals - the Times (London).
Extremists ? United Press International.
Fighters ? the Washington Post.
Group ? the Australian.
Guerrillas: in a New York Post editorial.
Gunmen ? Reuters.
Hostage-takers - the Los Angeles Times.
Insurgents ? in a New York Times headline.
Kidnappers ? the Observer (London).
Militants ? the Chicago Tribune.
Perpetrators ? the New York Times.
Radicals ? the BBC.
Rebels ? in a Sydney Morning Herald headline.
Separatists ? the Christian Science Monitor.
And my favorite:

Activists ? the Pakistan Times.
The origins of this unwillingness to name terrorists seems to lie in the Arab-Israeli conflict, prompted by an odd combination of sympathy in the press for the Palestinian Arabs and intimidation by them. The sympathy is well known; the intimidation less so. Reuters' Nidal al-Mughrabi made the latter explicit in advice for fellow reporters in Gaza to avoid trouble on the Web site www.newssafety.com, where one tip reads: "Never use the word terrorist or terrorism in describing Palestinian gunmen and militants; people consider them heroes of the conflict."

The reluctance to call terrorists by their rightful name can reach absurd lengths of inaccuracy and apologetics. For example, National Public Radio's Morning Edition announced on April 1, 2004, that "Israeli troops have arrested 12 men they say were wanted militants." But CAMERA, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America, pointed out the inaccuracy here and NPR issued an on-air correction on April 26: "Israeli military officials were quoted as saying they had arrested 12 men who were ?wanted militants.' But the actual phrase used by the Israeli military was ?wanted terrorists.'"

(At least NPR corrected itself. When the Los Angeles Times made the same error, writing that "Israel staged a series of raids in the West Bank that the army described as hunts for wanted Palestinian militants," its editors refused CAMERA's request for a correction on the grounds that its change in terminology did not occur in a direct quotation.)

Metro, a Dutch paper, ran a picture on May 3, 2004, of two gloved hands belonging to a person taking fingerprints off a dead terrorist. The caption read: "An Israeli police officer takes fingerprints of a dead Palestinian. He is one of the victims (slachtoffers) who fell in the Gaza strip yesterday." One of the victims!

Euphemistic usage then spread from the Arab-Israeli conflict to other theaters. As terrorism picked up in Saudi Arabia such press outlets as The Times (London) and the Associated Press began routinely using militants in reference to Saudi terrorists. Reuters uses it with reference to Kashmir and Algeria.

Thus has militants become the press's default term for terrorists.

These self-imposed language limitations sometimes cause journalists to tie themselves into knots. In reporting the murder of one of its own cameraman, the BBC, which normally avoids the word terrorist, found itself using that term. In another instance, the search engine on the BBC website includes the word terrorist but the page linked to has had that word expurgated.

Politically-correct news organizations undermine their credibility with such subterfuges. How can one trust what one reads, hears, or sees when the self-evident fact of terrorism is being semi-denied?

Worse, the multiple euphemisms for terrorist obstruct a clear understanding of the violent threats confronting the civilized world. It is bad enough that only one of five articles discussing the Beslan atrocity mentions its Islamist origins; worse is the miasma of words that insulates the public from the evil of terrorism.

From www.danielpipes.org | Original article available at: www.danielpipes.org/article/2066
Title: Political Rants
Post by: SB_Mig on September 08, 2004, 10:34:21 AM
How's about some military service records since everyone is up in arms about them?

Democrats

* Richard Gephardt: Air National Guard, 1965-71.
* David Bonior: Staff Sgt., Air Force 1968-72.
* Tom Daschle: 1st Lt., Air Force SAC 1969-72.

* Al Gore: enlisted Aug. 1969; sent to Vietnam Jan. 1971 as an army
journalist in 20th Engineer Brigade.

* Bob Kerrey: Lt. j.g. Navy 1966-69; Medal of Honor, Vietnam.

* Daniel Inouye: Army 1943-'47; Medal of Honor, WWII.
* John Kerry: Lt., Navy 1966-70; Silver Star, Bronze Star with Combat V,
Purple
Hearts.

* Charles Rangel: Staff Sgt., Army 1948-52; Bronze Star, Korea.

* Max Cleland: Captain, Army 1965-68; Silver Star & Bronze Star,
Vietnam.

* Ted Kennedy: Army, 1951-1953.

* Tom Harkin: Lt., Navy, 1962-67; Naval Reserve, 1968-74.

* Jack Reed: Army Ranger, 1971-1979; Captain, Army Reserve 1979-91.

* Fritz Hollings: Army officer in WWII, receiving the Bronze Star and
seven campaign ribbons.

* Leonard Boswell: Lt. Col., Army 1956-76; Vietnam, DFCs, Bronze Stars,
and Soldier's Medal.

* Pete Peterson: Air Force Captain, POW. Purple Heart, Silver Star and
Legion of
Merit.

* Mike Thompson: Staff sergeant, 173rd Airborne, Purple Heart.

* Bill McBride: Candidate for Fla. Governor. Marine in Vietnam; Bronze
Star with Combat V.

* Gray Davis: Army Captain in Vietnam, Bronze Star.

* Pete Stark: Air Force 1955-57

* Chuck Robb: Vietnam

* Howell Heflin: Silver Star

* George McGovern: Silver Star & DFC during WWII.

* Bill Clinton: Did not serve. Student deferments. Entered draft but
received 311.
 
* Jimmy Carter: Seven years in the Navy.

* Walter Mondale: Army 1951-1953

* John Glenn: WWII and Korea; six DFCs and Air Medal with 18 Clusters.

* Tom Lantos: Served in Hungarian underground in WWII. Saved by Raoul
Wallenberg.
 
Republicans

* Dennis Hastert: did not serve.
* Tom Delay: did not serve.
* Roy Blunt: did not serve.  
* Bill Frist: did not serve.
* Mitch McConnell: did not serve.
* Rick Santorum: did not serve.
* Trent Lott: did not serve.

* Dick Cheney: did not serve. Several deferments, the last by marriage.

* John Ashcroft: did not serve. Seven deferments to teach business.

* Jeb Bush: did not serve.
* Karl Rove: did not serve.

* Saxby Chambliss (The man who attacked Max Cleland's patriotism) did not serve  

* Paul Wolfowitz: did not serve.
* Vin Weber: did not serve.
* Richard Perle: did not serve.
* Douglas Feith: did not serve.
* Eliot Abrams: did not serve.
* Richard Shelby: did not serve.
* Jon Kyl: did not serve.
* Tim Hutchison: did not serve.
* Christopher Cox: did not serve.
* Newt Gingrich: did not serve.

* Don Rumsfeld: served in Navy (1954-57) as aviator and flight
instructor.

* G.W. Bush: six-year Nat'l Guard commitment (in four).  

* Ronald Reagan: due to poor eyesight, served in a non-combat role
making movies.

* B-1 Bob Dornan: Consciously enlisted after fighting was over in Korea.

* Phil Gramm: did not serve.

* John McCain: Silver Star, Bronze Star, Legion of Merit, Purple Heart
and Distinguished Flying Cross.

* Bob Dole: an honorable veteran.

* Chuck Hagel: two Purple Hearts and a Bronze Star, Vietnam.

* Duke Cunningham: nominated for Medal of Honor, Navy Cross, Silver
Stars, Air Medals, Purple Hearts.

* Jeff Sessions: Army Reserves, 1973-1986

* Colin Powell: Long career in military.

* Wayne Gilchrest: USMC in Vietnam; wounded in action.

* Don Nickles: Biography does not list military service.

* Dana Rohrabacher: did not serve.  
* John M. McHugh: did not serve.
* JC Watts: did not serve.

* Jack Kemp: did not serve. Knee, although continued in NFL for 8 years.


* Dan Quayle: Journalism unit of the Indiana National Guard.

* Rudy Giuliani: did not serve.
* George Pataki: did not serve.
* Spencer Abraham: did not serve.
* John Engler: did not serve.
* Lindsey Graham: National Guard lawyer.

* Arnold Schwarzenegger: AWOL from Austrian army base.  

* G.H.W. Bush: Pilot in WWII. Shot down by the Japanese.

* Tom Ridge: Bronze Star for Valor in Vietnam.

* Sam Johnson: Combat in Korea and Vietnam, POW in Hanoi.

* Ted Stevens: WWII pilot, DFCs, two Air Medals.

* John Warner: Served in the Navy during WWII as a RM3

* Heather Wilson: Air Force 1978-1989
* Gerald Ford: Navy, WWII

Pundits & Preachers
 
* Sean Hannity: did not serve.
* Rush Limbaugh: did not serve (4-F with a pilonidal cyst in the crack
of his buttocks)
* Bill O'Reilly: did not serve.
* Michael Savage: did not serve.
* George Will: did not serve.
* Chris Matthews: did not serve.
* Paul Gigot: did not serve.
* Bill Bennett: did not serve.
* Pat Buchanan: did not serve.
* John Wayne: did not serve.
* Pat Robertson: not, as claimed, a "combat veteran." A "Liquor
Officer."
* Bill Kristol: did not serve.
* Kenneth Starr: did not serve.
* Antonin Scalia: did not serve.
* Clarence Thomas: did not serve.
* Ralph Reed: did not serve.
* Michael Medved: did not serve.
* Charlie Daniels: did not serve.
* Ted Nugent: did not serve.
* Ollie North: At least he served.
Title: Political Rants
Post by: SB_Mig on September 08, 2004, 10:46:51 AM
So, the debate among my friends is this:

Which action is more reprehensible, supporting a war but not willing to fight in it OR not supporting a war, going to fight, and returning to discredit those still fighting?

My military friends give me one of two responses:

1) If you were ever in uniform you have the right to say whatever you want. And if you weren't, shut your piehole.

or

2) If you were ever in uniform, you support your comrades no matter what.

Anyone else got 2 cents on this?
Title: Linear Constructs
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on September 08, 2004, 04:32:50 PM
Against my better judgment I'll respond, though experience suggests these sorts of discussions devolve into a circular mishmash.

Serving your country does not automatically qualify you for elected office.

Not serving your country does not automatically disqualify you from elected office.

Lots of National Guard, Cost Guard, Air Force Reserve, etc. units end up in shooting wars; witness Korea and current deployments. For much of US history, reserve service doesn't mean you're in the rear with the gear.

Regardless of service, US citizens get to say what they want to, when they want to. Vets can choose not to dis other vets, and they can get their undies in a bunch when non-vets talk about vet issues, but the First Amendment to the constitution--the same constitution vets swore to uphold--guarantees the rights of everyone to say what they please.

In the context of the current presidential race, I think Bush's military record, or lack thereof, has been picked over pretty well. Think what you want of it, but there have been plenty of people who wish him ill in the strongest of terms eyeballing every available aspect of his service. Their findings have been reported extensively.

Where Kerry's concerned there's still a lot to be examined. The few things he has been pinned down on--Christmas in Cambodia, self-inflicted Purple Heart wounds--have demonstrated more than a degree of equivocation. My guess is there is plenty more to be found.

Bottom line for me is that framing the issue in an either/or manner isn't particularly constructive. But hey, I'm a non-vet discussing vet issues who believes American citizens should be able to say what they damn well please. Feel free to dismiss my opinion as it doesn?t adhere to the linear constructs as posed.
Title: Political Rants
Post by: SB_Mig on September 08, 2004, 05:11:08 PM
Buzwardo,

I wholeheartedly agree with the bottom line of your response:

American citizens should be able to say what they damn well please

As for the linear nature of the question being debated among my friends, the question was put to me in that manner and so I passed it on as such.  And yes, the debate (at least among my friends) has definitely devolved into a circular mishmash.  :lol: The original debate was whether or not an individual who had served had carte blanche when it came to discussing another service member's record. And you can see what a can of worms that opens :lol:

Bottom line for me is that framing the issue in an either/or manner isn't particularly constructive

Absolutely! I believe that one of the biggest problems in our society today is the lack of gray areas (i.e. everything is either black or white). I, for one, would love to hear a discussion of our society's issues (political, economic, industrial, environmental, etc.) that didn't become into a shouting match based solely on one's political stance/party.

Thanks for the response...

Miguel
Title: Political Rants
Post by: SB_Mig on September 16, 2004, 08:59:43 AM
Not sure if this video qualifies as a rant, but I think it's funny...

http://whitehousewest.com/
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 16, 2004, 09:24:17 AM
Woof Mig:

I can't get the video to open but this is horrendous:

"Americans must be able to trust the facts in political ads. Every voter has the right to truthful advertising.  Free speech is no defense to massive, purposeful fraud.

"You, the FCC, have an obligation to ensure that broadcast stations around the country do not transmit misleading, deceptive and fraudulent advertising.  

"We, the undersigned American citizens, demand that you require proof of fact before airing political advertisements.  Laws must change to protect our democracy. "

Said with love, but are you crazy?!?  You have to prove truth to a government agency before engaging in political speech?!?!?!?!?!?  Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, Naderian, whatever-- this is profoundly ass-backwards.

McCain-Feingold is one of the most pernicious pieces of legislation to pass in a long, long time and shame on President Bush for signing it, and shame on the Supreme Court for upholding it.  Our First Amendment has taken a serious blow with this.
Title: Political Rants
Post by: SB_Mig on September 16, 2004, 09:48:34 AM
"Said with love, but are you crazy?!? You have to prove truth to a government agency before engaging in political speech?!?!?!?!?!? Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, Naderian, whatever-- this is profoundly ass-backwards. "

I agree wholeheatedly. Freedom of speech means just that.

The site sucks, but the video is great. Will Ferrell doing an amazing GW impersonation.
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 16, 2004, 10:27:27 AM
Glad we agree on that!

This on Dan Rather:

http://www.lucianne.com/routine/images/09-16-04.jpg
Title: Political Rants
Post by: SB_Mig on September 16, 2004, 11:16:38 AM
That is too f-ing funny!

The media has sadly become a hotbed of ineptitude and shoddy reporting. From plagiarism (Jayson Blair) and the latest CBS blunder (hey, how about checking the veracity of your story before releasing it?), we should all be embarassed.

If I was a journalism major, I'd be considering a different career path.
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 16, 2004, 11:28:15 AM
If you liked that, try this rant from Ann Coulter :lol:
=============


C-BS
Ann Coulter
September 15, 2004

Why do TV commentators on CBS' forgery-gate insist on issuing lengthy
caveats to the effect that of course this was an innocent mistake and no one is accusing Dan Rather of some sort of "conspiracy," and respected newsman Dan Rather would never intentionally foist phony National Guard documents on an unsuspecting public merely to smear George Bush, etc., etc.?

I'll admit, there's a certain sadistic quality to such overwrought decency
toward Dan Rather. But how does Bill O'Reilly know what Dan Rather was
thinking when he put forged documents on the air? I know liberals have the paranormal ability to detect racism and sexism, but who knew O'Reilly could read an anchorman's mind just by watching him read the news?

What are the odds that Dan Rather would have accepted such patently phony documents from, say, the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth?

As we now know, CBS' own expert told them there were problems with the documents -- the main one being that they were clearly fakes dummied up at a Kinko's outlet from somebody's laptop at 4 a.m.

According to ABC News, document examiner Emily Will was hired by CBS to vet the documents. But when she raised questions about the documents' authenticity and strongly warned CBS not to use the documents on air, CBS ignored her. Will concluded: "I did not feel that they wanted to investigate it very deeply."

Within hours of the documents being posted on CBS' Web site, moderately observant fourth-graders across America noticed that the alleged early '70s National Guard documents were the product of Microsoft Word. If that wasn't bad enough, The New York Times spent the following week hailing Rather for his "journalistic coup" in obtaining the documents that no other newsman had (other than Jayson Blair).

By now, all reputable document examiners in the Northern Hemisphere dispute the documents' authenticity. Even the Los Angeles Times has concluded that the documents are fraudulent -- and when you fail to meet the ethical standards of the L.A. Times, you're in trouble.

In Dan Rather's defense, it must be confessed, he is simply a newsreader. Now that Walter Cronkite is retired, Rather is TV's real-life Ted Baxter without Baxter's quiet dignity. No one would ever suggest that he has any role in the content of his broadcast. To blame Dan Rather for what appears on his program would be like blaming Susan Lucci for the plot of "All My Children."

The person to blame is Ted Baxter's producer, Mary Mapes. Mapes apparently decided: We'll run the documents calling Bush a shirker in the National Guard, and if the documents turn out to be fraudulent we'll:

   a) Blame Karl Rove;

   b) Say the documents don't matter.

But if the documents are irrelevant to the question of Bush's Guard duty,
then why did CBS bring them up?  Why not just say: "The important thing is for you to take our word for it!"

Interestingly, the elite (and increasingly unwatched) media always make
"mistakes" in the same direction. They never move too quickly to report a story unfavorable to liberals.

In 1998, CNN broadcast its famous "Tailwind" story, falsely accusing the
U.S. military of gassing American defectors in Laos during the Vietnam War. (This was part of liberals' long-standing support for "the troops.") The publishing industry regularly puts out proven frauds such as: "I, Rigoberta Menchu" (a native girl's torture at the hands of the right-wing Guatemalan military), "Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture" (a liberal fantasy of a gun-free colonial America), "Fortunate Son: George W. Bush and the Making of an American President" (a book by a convicted felon with wild stories of George Bush's drug use), and the unsourced nutty fantasies of Kitty Kelley.

In a book out this week, Kelley details many anonymous charges against the Bush family, such as that Laura Bush was a pot dealer in college, George W. Bush was the first person in America to use cocaine back in 1968, and he also regularly consorted with a prostitute in Texas who was then silenced by the CIA.

Kelley backs up her shocking allegations with names of highly credentialed people -- who have absolutely no connection to the events she is describing. No one directly involved is on the record, and the people on the record have never met anyone in the Bush family. In other words, her stories have been "vetted" enough to be included on tonight's "CBS Evening News" with Dan Rather.

The New York Times review blamed Kelley's gossip mongering on "a cultural climate in which gossip and innuendo thrive on the Internet." Kelley has been writing these books for decades, so apparently, like the Texas Air National Guard, Kelley was on the Internet -- and being influenced by it -- back in the '70s. As I remember it, for the past few years it has been the Internet that keeps dissecting and discrediting the gossip and innuendo that the major media put out.

Curiously, all this comes at the precise moment that speculation is at a
fever pitch about whether Kitty Kelley is in the advanced stages of
syphilis. According to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious
Diseases: "Approximately 3 percent to 7 percent of persons with untreated syphilis develop neurosyphilis, a sometimes serious disorder of the nervous system.

Dr. Jonathan Zenilman, M.D., associate professor of medicine at Johns
Hopkins University, has found there is an "inter-relationship" between STDs and truck routes in Baltimore. I'm not at liberty to reveal the names of my sources, but there are three or four highly placed individuals in the publishing industry who say Miss Kelley or someone who closely resembles her is a habitue of truck routes in Baltimore.

While opinions differ as to whether Miss Kelley's behavior can be explained by syphilis or some other STD, people who went to Harvard -- and Harvard is one of the top universities in the nation -- say her path is consistent with someone in the advanced stages.

Amid the swirling dispute over her STDs, there is only one way for Kelley to address this issue: Release her medical records. As someone who would like to be thought of as her friend said anonymously: "For your own good, Ms. Kelley, I would get those medical records out yesterday." This doesn't have to be public. She may release her medical records to me, or if she'd be more comfortable, to my brothers.

Since TV commentators have assured me that Dan Rather is an equal
opportunity idiot, Kelley had better clear all this up before someone slips
this column to CBS. As a precaution I've written this on a 1972 Selectric
typewriter.
Title: Political Rants
Post by: SB_Mig on September 22, 2004, 09:29:54 AM
Rather's producer assured CBS execs on Guard papers
By Peter Johnson, USA TODAY

Mary Mapes, the Dallas-based producer of Dan Rather's controversial Sept. 8 60 Minutes segment questioning President Bush's military record, is the focus of attention following published reports that she arranged for her Texas source on the story to talk to a top aide to Democratic hopeful John Kerry.  

CBS News executives want to know why Mapes, one of Rather's most trusted producers, repeatedly assured them that both Bill Burkett and the documents he gave her could be trusted ? only to have both widely called into question by Internet bloggers and rival news organizations soon after 60 Minutes aired the story. On Monday, CBS said the story should have never run, and Rather apologized to viewers.

On Tuesday, it was revealed that Mapes arranged for Burkett to talk to a top aide to Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry.

Standard journalistic ethical practices forbid reporters from doing anything that could be perceived as helping a political campaign.

CBS News hopes to name an independent panel today that will investigate how Burkett, a Texas Democratic operative and opponent of President Bush, deceived 60 Minutes in its now-retracted story about Bush's military record ? and who at the network is responsible.

"It's clear that something went seriously wrong with the process," CBS Chairman Leslie Moonves said. He called the review "both necessary and important."

Mapes also produced 60 Minutes' follow-up segment a week ago in which Marion Knox, the secretary to the National Guard officer who supposedly wrote the disputed memos, Col. Jerry Killian, said the information in the documents was correct but that the memos themselves were fake.

But now, with Mapes' credibility seriously questioned, CBS News staffers say they're puzzled why Mapes is still apparently actively working on the memos story. CBS News spokeswoman Sandy Genelius refused to comment on that. She said that Mapes, 48, remains on CBS' payroll.

Neither Mapes nor Rather, who said recently that Mapes has his "trust, respect and admiration," could be reached for comment Tuesday.

Mapes is a popular producer at CBS News, which she joined in 1989. She worked mostly on The CBS Evening News, joining the Wednesday edition of 60 Minutes? called 60 Minutes II until the current season ? in 1999.

In television news and on newsmagazines such as 60 Minutes, producers do the lion's share of the reporting legwork, with correspondents and anchors such as Rather the stars who take credit ? or in this case, the blame. Rather, who identifies himself on The CBS Evening News as "reporting" from New York, is known in the industry as being very active in the nuts and bolts of actual reporting, but producers such as Mapes are the unseen hands behind the stories.

Until now, her reporting skills were close to the stuff of CBS News legend: Mostly recently, she and Rather broke one of the biggest stories of the year by uncovering photos of abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison.

Mapes, who is known as a fast, tenacious reporter with a quick wit and sense of humor, spent two months on the prison story getting it ready for broadcast. Network executives say she has spent five years digging into Bush's history in the Texas Air National Guard.

"She has done so many incredibly strong stories in her career here and at CBS News," said 60 Minutes producer Jeff Fager, who worked closely with her in recent years on 60 Minutes II before he replaced Don Hewitt at the helm of the Sunday version of the newsmagazine this summer.

"How this went so horribly wrong is hard to understand," Fager said.
Title: Political Rants
Post by: SB_Mig on September 22, 2004, 10:47:32 AM
Since I'm on a roll:


Fascism Anyone?
Laurence W. Britt

Free Inquiry readers may pause to read the ?Affirmations of Humanism: A Statement of Principles? on the inside cover of the magazine. To a secular humanist, these principles seem so logical, so right, so crucial. Yet, there is one archetypal political philosophy that is anathema to almost all of these principles. It is fascism. And fascism?s principles are wafting in the air today, surreptitiously masquerading as something else, challenging everything we stand for. The clich? that people and nations learn from history is not only overused, but also overestimated; often we fail to learn from history, or draw the wrong conclusions. Sadly, historical amnesia is the norm.

We are two-and-a-half generations removed from the horrors of Nazi Germany, although constant reminders jog the consciousness. German and Italian fascism form the historical models that define this twisted political worldview. Although they no longer exist, this worldview and the characteristics of these models have been imitated by protofascist1 regimes at various times in the twentieth century. Both the original German and Italian models and the later protofascist regimes show remarkably similar characteristics. Although many scholars question any direct connection among these regimes, few can dispute their visual similarities.

Beyond the visual, even a cursory study of these fascist and protofascist regimes reveals the absolutely striking convergence of their modus operandi. This, of course, is not a revelation to the informed political observer, but it is sometimes useful in the interests of perspective to restate obvious facts and in so doing shed needed light on current circumstances.

For the purpose of this perspective, I will consider the following regimes: Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Franco?s Spain, Salazar?s Portugal, Papadopoulos?s Greece, Pinochet?s Chile, and Suharto?s Indonesia. To be sure, they constitute a mixed bag of national identities, cultures, developmental levels, and history. But they all followed the fascist or protofascist model in obtaining, expanding, and maintaining power. Further, all these regimes have been overthrown, so a more or less complete picture of their basic characteristics and abuses is possible.

Analysis of these seven regimes reveals fourteen common threads that link them in recognizable patterns of national behavior and abuse of power. These basic characteristics are more prevalent and intense in some regimes than in others, but they all share at least some level of similarity.

1. Powerful and continuing expressions of nationalism. From the prominent displays of flags and bunting to the ubiquitous lapel pins, the fervor to show patriotic nationalism, both on the part of the regime itself and of citizens caught up in its frenzy, was always obvious. Catchy slogans, pride in the military, and demands for unity were common themes in expressing this nationalism. It was usually coupled with a suspicion of things foreign that often bordered on xenophobia.

2. Disdain for the importance of human rights. The regimes themselves viewed human rights as of little value and a hindrance to realizing the objectives of the ruling elite. Through clever use of propaganda, the population was brought to accept these human rights abuses by marginalizing, even demonizing, those being targeted. When abuse was egregious, the tactic was to use secrecy, denial, and disinformation.

3. Identification of enemies/scapegoats as a unifying cause. The most significant common thread among these regimes was the use of scapegoating as a means to divert the people?s attention from other problems, to shift blame for failures, and to channel frustration in controlled directions. The methods of choice?relentless propaganda and disinformation?were usually effective. Often the regimes would incite ?spontaneous? acts against the target scapegoats, usually communists, socialists, liberals, Jews, ethnic and racial minorities, traditional national enemies, members of other religions, secularists, homosexuals, and ?terrorists.? Active opponents of these regimes were inevitably labeled as terrorists and dealt with accordingly.

4. The supremacy of the military/avid militarism. Ruling elites always identified closely with the military and the industrial infrastructure that supported it. A disproportionate share of national resources was allocated to the military, even when domestic needs were acute. The military was seen as an expression of nationalism, and was used whenever possible to assert national goals, intimidate other nations, and increase the power and prestige of the ruling elite.

5. Rampant sexism. Beyond the simple fact that the political elite and the national culture were male-dominated, these regimes inevitably viewed women as second-class citizens. They were adamantly anti-abortion and also homophobic. These attitudes were usually codified in Draconian laws that enjoyed strong support by the orthodox religion of the country, thus lending the regime cover for its abuses.

6. A controlled mass media. Under some of the regimes, the mass media were under strict direct control and could be relied upon never to stray from the party line. Other regimes exercised more subtle power to ensure media orthodoxy. Methods included the control of licensing and access to resources, economic pressure, appeals to patriotism, and implied threats. The leaders of the mass media were often politically compatible with the power elite. The result was usually success in keeping the general public unaware of the regimes? excesses.

7. Obsession with national security. Inevitably, a national security apparatus was under direct control of the ruling elite. It was usually an instrument of oppression, operating in secret and beyond any constraints. Its actions were justified under the rubric of protecting ?national security,? and questioning its activities was portrayed as unpatriotic or even treasonous.

8. Religion and ruling elite tied together. Unlike communist regimes, the fascist and protofascist regimes were never proclaimed as godless by their opponents. In fact, most of the regimes attached themselves to the predominant religion of the country and chose to portray themselves as militant defenders of that religion. The fact that the ruling elite?s behavior was incompatible with the precepts of the religion was generally swept under the rug. Propaganda kept up the illusion that the ruling elites were defenders of the faith and opponents of the ?godless.? A perception was manufactured that opposing the power elite was tantamount to an attack on religion.

9. Power of corporations protected. Although the personal life of ordinary citizens was under strict control, the ability of large corporations to operate in relative freedom was not compromised. The ruling elite saw the corporate structure as a way to not only ensure military production (in developed states), but also as an additional means of social control. Members of the economic elite were often pampered by the political elite to ensure a continued mutuality of interests, especially in the repression of ?have-not? citizens.

10. Power of labor suppressed or eliminated. Since organized labor was seen as the one power center that could challenge the political hegemony of the ruling elite and its corporate allies, it was inevitably crushed or made powerless. The poor formed an underclass, viewed with suspicion or outright contempt. Under some regimes, being poor was considered akin to a vice.

11. Disdain and suppression of intellectuals and the arts. Intellectuals and the inherent freedom of ideas and expression associated with them were anathema to these regimes. Intellectual and academic freedom were considered subversive to national security and the patriotic ideal. Universities were tightly controlled; politically unreliable faculty harassed or eliminated. Unorthodox ideas or expressions of dissent were strongly attacked, silenced, or crushed. To these regimes, art and literature should serve the national interest or they had no right to exist.

12. Obsession with crime and punishment. Most of these regimes maintained Draconian systems of criminal justice with huge prison populations. The police were often glorified and had almost unchecked power, leading to rampant abuse. ?Normal? and political crime were often merged into trumped-up criminal charges and sometimes used against political opponents of the regime. Fear, and hatred, of criminals or ?traitors? was often promoted among the population as an excuse for more police power.

13. Rampant cronyism and corruption. Those in business circles and close to the power elite often used their position to enrich themselves. This corruption worked both ways; the power elite would receive financial gifts and property from the economic elite, who in turn would gain the benefit of government favoritism. Members of the power elite were in a position to obtain vast wealth from other sources as well: for example, by stealing national resources. With the national security apparatus under control and the media muzzled, this corruption was largely unconstrained and not well understood by the general population.

14. Fraudulent elections. Elections in the form of plebiscites or public opinion polls were usually bogus. When actual elections with candidates were held, they would usually be perverted by the power elite to get the desired result. Common methods included maintaining control of the election machinery, intimidating and disenfranchising opposition voters, destroying or disallowing legal votes, and, as a last resort, turning to a judiciary beholden to the power elite.

Does any of this ring alarm bells? Of course not. After all, this is America, officially a democracy with the rule of law, a constitution, a free press, honest elections, and a well-informed public constantly being put on guard against evils. Historical comparisons like these are just exercises in verbal gymnastics. Maybe, maybe not.

Note

1. Defined as a ?political movement or regime tending toward or imitating Fascism??Webster?s Unabridged Dictionary
Title: Shotgun Approach, Anyone?
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on September 22, 2004, 08:06:26 PM
I hear members of most fascist regimes also were breast fed as babies, utilized bipedal locomotion, and had at least one X chromosome.

Cast a net widely enough there's not much you won't catch.
Title: Political Rants
Post by: SB_Mig on September 23, 2004, 08:11:32 AM
Damn! I knew my mother was involved in this somehow!  :lol:
Title: Christopher Hitchens Piece
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on October 01, 2004, 03:30:18 PM
I often disagree with Christopher Hitchens, a self-described recovering Marxist, but the guy thinks deeply and writes well. More of his work can be found at this website:

http://users.rcn.com/peterk.enteract/


fighting words
Flirting With Disaster
The vile spectacle of Democrats rooting for bad news in Iraq and Afghanistan.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, Sept. 27, 2004, at 11:35 AM PT


There it was at the tail end of Brian Faler's "Politics" roundup column in last Saturday's Washington Post. It was headed, simply, "Quotable":

"I wouldn't be surprised if he appeared in the next month." Teresa Heinz Kerry to the Phoenix Business Journal, referring to a possible capture of Osama bin Laden before Election Day.

As well as being "quotable" (and I wish it had been more widely reported, and I hope that someone will ask the Kerry campaign or the nominee himself to disown it), this is also many other words ending in "-able." Deplorable, detestable, unforgivable. ?

The plain implication is that the Bush administration is stashing Bin Laden somewhere, or somehow keeping his arrest in reserve, for an "October surprise." This innuendo would appear, on the face of it, to go a little further than "impugning the patriotism" of the president. It argues, after all, for something like collusion on his part with a man who has murdered thousands of Americans as well as hundreds of Muslim civilians in other countries.

I am not one of those who likes to tease Mrs. Kerry for her "loose cannon" style. This is only the second time I have ever mentioned her in print. But I happen to know that this is not an instance of loose lips. She has heard that very remark being made by senior Democrats, and?which is worse?she has not heard anyone in her circle respond to it by saying, "Don't be so bloody stupid." I first heard this "October surprise" theory mentioned seriously, by a prominent foreign-policy Democrat, at an open dinner table in Washington about six months ago. Since then, I've heard it said seriously or semiseriously, by responsible and liberal people who ought to know better, all over the place. It got even worse when the Democratic establishment decided on an arm's-length or closer relationship with Michael Moore and his supposedly vote-getting piece of mendacity and paranoia, Fahrenheit 9/11. (The DNC's boss, Terence McAuliffe, asked outside the Uptown cinema on Connecticut Avenue whether he honestly believed that the administration had invaded Afghanistan for the sake of an oil or perhaps gas pipeline, breezily responded, "I do now.")

What will it take to convince these people that this is not a year, or a time, to be dicking around? Americans are patrolling a front line in Afghanistan, where it would be impossible with 10 times the troop strength to protect all potential voters on Oct. 9 from Taliban/al-Qaida murder and sabotage. We are invited to believe that these hard-pressed soldiers of ours take time off to keep Osama Bin Laden in a secret cave, ready to uncork him when they get a call from Karl Rove? For shame.

Ever since The New Yorker published a near-obituary piece for the Kerry campaign, in the form of an autopsy for the Robert Shrum style, there has been a salad of articles prematurely analyzing "what went wrong." This must be nasty for Democratic activists to read, and I say "nasty" because I hear the way they respond to it. A few pin a vague hope on the so-called "debates"?which are actually joint press conferences allowing no direct exchange between the candidates?but most are much more cynical. Some really bad news from Iraq, or perhaps Afghanistan, and/or a sudden collapse or crisis in the stock market, and Kerry might yet "turn things around." You have heard it, all right, and perhaps even said it. But you may not have appreciated how depraved are its implications. If you calculate that only a disaster of some kind can save your candidate, then you are in danger of harboring a subliminal need for bad news. And it will show. What else explains the amazingly crude and philistine remarks of that campaign genius Joe Lockhart, commenting on the visit of the new Iraqi prime minister and calling him a "puppet"? Here is the only regional leader who is even trying to hold an election, and he is greeted with an ungenerous sneer.

The unfortunately necessary corollary of this?that bad news for the American cause in wartime would be good for Kerry?is that good news would be bad for him. Thus, in Mrs. Kerry's brainless and witless offhand yet pregnant remark, we hear the sick thud of the other shoe dropping. How can the Democrats possibly have gotten themselves into a position where they even suspect that a victory for the Zarqawi or Bin Laden forces would in some way be welcome to them? Or that the capture or killing of Bin Laden would not be something to celebrate with a whole heart?

I think that this detail is very important because the Kerry camp often strives to give the impression that its difference with the president is one of degree but not of kind. Of course we all welcome the end of Taliban rule and even the departure of Saddam Hussein, but we can't remain silent about the way policy has been messed up and compromised and even lied about. I know what it's like to feel that way because it is the way I actually do feel. But I also know the difference when I see it, and I have known some of the liberal world quite well and for a long time, and there are quite obviously people close to the leadership of today's Democratic Party who do not at all hope that the battle goes well in Afghanistan and Iraq.

I have written before in this space that I think Bin Laden is probably dead, and I certainly think that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is a far more ruthless and dangerous jihadist, who is trying to take a much more important country into the orbit of medieval fanaticism and misery. One might argue about that: I could even maintain that it's important to oppose and defeat both gentlemen and their supporters. But unless he conclusively repudiates the obvious defeatists in his own party (and maybe even his own family), we shall be able to say that John Kerry's campaign is a distraction from the fight against al-Qaida.
Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. His new collection of essays, Love, Poverty and War, is forthcoming in October.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2107193/http://
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on October 04, 2004, 05:15:34 PM
The following was posted on the Naval Institute Proceedings Magazine web site: http://www.usni.org/proceedings/procurrenttoc.htm

I met Joe Galloway, referenced below, a couple weeks back at a miltary vehicle museum I do volunteer work for. Hadn't thought of him as an embedded reporter until now; Galloway's book We were Soldiers Once, and Young tells the story of a battle in Viet Nam's Ia Drang valley and was later adapted into a movie by Mel Gibson.

Lengthy article follows:


The military laments that its successes in Iraq and Afghanistan have gone unnoticed, while any bad news is immediately set on by a national media intent on painting every U.S. commitment as a quagmire. This might be true, but the military is not without responsibility for this state of affairs.

Military-media relations have improved since General William Sherman announced, ?I hate newspapermen. They come into camp and pick up their camp rumors and print them as facts. I regard them as spies, which, in truth, they are. If I killed them all there would be news from Hell before breakfast.?

Almost a century and a half later, no serving flag or general officers are on record advocating the extermination of journalists. Still, despite the success of the embed process and the tens of millions of dollars spent on public affairs infrastructure, relations continue to be strained. Military officers constantly lament that most of the successes in Iraq and Afghanistan went unnoticed, while every little setback or problem seemingly received national attention. Many believe national policy is set by the media intent on painting every U.S. military commitment as an unwinnable quagmire.

They are right.

But who is responsible for this state of affairs? While it is easy to blame the media for failing to get the true story or to accuse journalists of a liberal bias against military operations, this fails to identify the true culprit. The reason the military is losing the war in the media is because it has almost totally failed to engage, and where it has engaged, it has been with a mind-boggling degree of ineptitude. It is a strange circumstance indeed when virtually every senior officer agrees that the media can make or break national policy, but no more than a handful can name the top military journalist for The Washington Post, The New York Times, or The Wall Street Journal. Thousands of officers who spend countless hours learning every facet of their profession do not spend one iota of their time understanding or learning to engage with a strategic force that can make or break their best efforts.

The military is paying a high and continuing price for its inability to engage the media. There have been 30 years of studies, conferences, and meetings since Vietnam dealing with just this topic, and still the magic formula eludes the military. As the only embedded journalist in Iraq who still was carrying a military ID card (Army Reserve), I feel uniquely placed to comment on the military-media relationship. I served on active duty for more than a dozen years and came to journalism late. However, my stint in journalism focused on military affairs, which allowed me to develop a clear picture of the frustrations most journalists encounter when dealing with the military. Many readers will counter: But what about the frustrations of the military with the media? Who cares? That is like blaming enemy action for the failure of a brilliant plan. The media will always get a story out; it is the military?s responsibility to make sure that story is informed and correct. It is useless for officers to scream in frustration that the media got a story wrong, particularly if they did nothing to help journalists get it right.

As a journalist, when given an assignment, I will not fail. To a journalist, an assignment is the same as a mission order. If the people in the know will not tell me, I will go to their soldiers. If that does not work, I will go to the families of the soldiers and get the versions of the story their sons and daughters have sent them by e-mail. Then I will write the story based on what I was able to get from whatever source was available. All the after-the-fact howling in the world from those who think I got the story all wrong will have no effect. Even if I wanted to go back and fix it, I probably would not bother. The news cycle has moved on, and I have moved on with it.

Anyone who thinks a journalist is ethically bound to go back and fix wrong information or impressions is fooling himself. Even current military stories are competing for space against J-Lo?s latest wedding. Editors are not giving up space to rehash the past?historical record be damned. Besides, too many corrections will begin to make it look like I could not get the right story in the first place, and what compelling reason is there to make myself look incompetent?

Even with knowledge of how the military works, I still found virtually my every attempt to get information from public affairs officers (PAOs) to be akin to getting water from a stone. Many times I sat looking at the phone in disbelief at some answer or non-answer a PAO had given me. Too often, I hung up the phone and thought to myself, if the Secretary of Defense only knew how one of his PAOs was treating a man about to write a column for national distribution. Sometimes, I had to sit back and count off the reasons I should not just start writing mean little articles about the military.

After major combat operations ended, Time magazine took me home. My final article on the war and the military was called ?The Men Who Won the War.? This one article alone should have marked me as a journalist worth being nice to. So, when I called the PAOs at the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) to work out some access for my return to Iraq, I was stupefied by the response. My offer, which was given to half a dozen civilian and military public affairs folks over the course of 20 or 30 calls was pretty extraordinary. At a time when everyone in Iraq was screaming that the media were failing to cover the military?s accomplishments, I said I wanted to tell the country what was going right.

If given the right access, I told them, I probably could get the cover of a major newsweekly several times over the course of a couple of months. In addition, I had several national opinion magazines lined up that would publish all I could send them. I also was in conversations with producers of a network TV news magazine, and they were interested in doing a piece along the same positive lines. Finally, I reminded these public affairs people that Time and CNN were owned by the same company and that I probably would be able to get substantial air time during what I expected to be an extended stay in Iraq.

I was coming to Iraq to look for the news the rest of the media were missing. In short, I had an agenda that correlated exactly with the military?s and the CPA?s, but no one wanted to be bothered. Excuses about it being a hectic period should fall on deaf ears. At one point, I asked for access to Paul Bremer, civil administrator for Iraq, and was told I would have to get in line behind 250 other requests for the same thing. I reminded that PAO what I was bringing to the table and that it was ludicrous I should be placed in line behind a request from the Podunk Gazette. He hung up on me.

Giving up, I asked the 101st Airborne if I could re-embed with them and report on what they were doing. Within an hour of my e-mail request, I had a note from the commanding general telling me to hurry back. He said he had a lot of good news and it had to get out. An hour after his e-mail arrived, the 101st PAO office was on the phone telling me what flight I would be on going back to Iraq. Here was an organization that knew how to treat friendly journalists. It also helped that they have the best PAO of my acquaintance.

I could spout off more about the indignities, incompetence, and rudeness I have been subjected to by PAOs, but the high ground in this discussion is not going to be held by whining. It will be won and held with constructive solutions, and as luck would have it, I have some.

First, a few words about the embed process. What a wonderful idea. Anytime you can get a journalist living in the sand and mud with real soldiers it is a major plus. It is impossible for anyone to be associated with U.S. soldiers in combat and not walk away impressed. As one CBS reporter told me, ?I just had no idea our army was filled with such quality people.? When journalists are sharing the fatigue, deprivations, and danger of the soldiers they are covering, a new respect develops, and it is not long before the Galloway effect (Joe Galloway, a renowned military correspondent, has never written a bad thing about soldiers since he left Vietnam) takes hold.

While the embed process can be improved, such as by ensuring the journalists are mobile and have access to electrical power, I have only one major suggestion for the future. Make sure thought is given to placing embeds at places and levels appropriate for their organizations. My experience will illustrate why this is important. I was embedded at brigade headquarters and saw everything the brigade commander saw. All the other Time and Newsweek embeds were at lower levels. Just after the sandstorm-enforced halt in the assault on Baghdad, Time sent me the copy for that week?s cover story entitled ?Why Are We Losing? and asked me to find comments to feed into the story.

That day I saw Colonel David Perkins of the 3rd Infantry Division and talked to many of his officers. Their reaction to the story was, ?Tomorrow we laager up to refuel and rearm. The next day we move out to hit the Medina Division. It?s beat up, facing the wrong way, and does not know we?re coming. The day after that we ride onto Baghdad International Airport.? After a few calculations, I figured out Time was going to declare the war lost on the same day we entered Baghdad. This was not good.

I sent a note to Time telling them they were about to look very foolish. Unfortunately, I was alone in my estimation of the situation. All of the talking heads on TV were shouting about disaster. However, expert talking-head opinions on the threat Saddam?s paramilitaries were posing to the 3rd?s supply line were not in line with the reality I was witnessing. Battlefield commanders in Iraq, rather then being alarmed at attacks on the supply lines, were thankful, ?Isn?t it nice of them to come out of hiding in the cities and attack across open desert to be slaughtered.? In addition to the talking heads, most of my fellow embeds were echoing the disaster sentiment. When you are living in the dirt with an infantry platoon, it is easy to miss the progress that becomes visible when you get the big picture at a brigade headquarters or higher. After a six-hour meeting, the compromise at Time was to rename the story ?What Will It Take to Win.?

Newsweek went with the cover story ?Quagmire? in big red letters, which allowed  Time to claim a major journalistic coup by not looking as foolish as Newsweek.

The key point here is that it behooves the military to make sure the journalists with the most national impact are placed in locations where they will be able to get a full appreciation of events.

Now, some questions. Did anyone keep track of the embeds after the war was over? Were any of the media invited back to unit homecomings, unit formals, to view unit training, or to follow up on individuals they had covered during the war? Were any of them asked to join unit associations? In fact, there has been virtually no effort whatsoever to try to make the journalists, who shared the misery and danger of war, part of the team. A chance to bond hundreds of journalists to the military is being let slip away.

Each of these journalists should have been cultivated by the units they were with, as well as by the military as a whole. By giving them preferred access, the military would help many of their careers and bind them closer then ever. Some journalists, not given this kind of treatment, will scream that journalists covering the military this way will lose all objectivity. This is a facile argument and hardly worthy of comment. Why do the journalists who have the crime beat in New York City and hang out at One Police Plaza never get accused of being too cozy with the police force? How is it the White House Press Corps, which gets all kinds of privileged access and perks, is never accused of being too cozy with the President?

Neither should anyone in the military assume that just because journalists have been brought into the fold everything will be rosy. Joe Galloway has never said anything bad about the American soldier, but that has not stopped him from pointing his rhetorical weaponry at the Pentagon, the top brass, and the system whenever he has spotted a wrong or injustice. A journalist with a negative story is still going to publish. That is how he gets page one, promotions, and the praise of his peers. However, the military can expect to receive the benefit of the doubt more often than is now the case, and the journalists at least will know what they are talking about, making them more likely to get the story right.

The PAO process needs to be radically rebuilt. Critical to accomplishing this is reversing the passive mind-set of the PAO community such that it ceases being a filter for information and becomes actively engaged in making sure information gets out the door. There is no reason PAOs should be sitting back waiting for journalist inquiries or requests for interviews. Every day they should be out executing an aggressive media plan to get the military story in front of the public. This has to go beyond the sterility of a periodic press release or press briefing. It means spending every day trying to get important stories into the hands of journalists or facilitating stories already in the works.

To do this, military public affairs organizations need to employ some radical new business concepts.

Every businessperson knows that if you want to stay in business you have to anticipate customers? needs and supply them. PAOs have two customers?the organization they serve and the media who come to them for information. They are failing both. Ask your average PAO what information the command wants to get out next week or over the course of a year and the vast majority will give you a blank stare, or worse. Worse would include, ?We want to make sure everyone knows what a magnificent job the soldiers in this organization are doing. On a daily basis they are accomplishing the mission under the most . . .? Thank you, but journalists have all the pabulum they need. PAOs need to get more knowledgeable about the specifics of what their organizations are doing and then be aggressive in getting that story out.

When it comes to getting closer to or understanding the media, the PAO community is failing miserably. Yes, there are some bright lights, but they are few and far between. Programs such as ?Working with Industry? are a step in the right direction, but they are much too small to have any serious practical effect.

One step in the right direction would be to assign a captain/lieutenant to each of the major media organizations. I like to use the term ?reverse embed,? but that could be interpreted as having that officer reporting back to the Pentagon on what the media is doing. What I envision is not a spy, but an informed individual that members of a media group can turn to as a source. Someone who can explain that while a second lieutenant outranks a sergeant major, he gives him an order only at great peril. The manpower costs would be relatively insignificant (three networks, three major news magazines, three cable channels, and maybe a half dozen leading newspapers or syndicates). There is, of course, the chance the media organizations will be wary. This is easily overcome?offer it to only a few groups or on a first come, first served, basis and wait for the rest to clamor for their fair share.

Once in place, this individual could provide context for ongoing stories and facilitate journalist dealings with various commands (local PAOs). At the very least, it would not hurt to have a permanent goodwill ambassador inside organizations that often are viewed as hostile to all things military. It will take a long time before this officer is trusted by the editors, and many of those assigned this duty may feel entitled to combat pay. By its very nature, this will have to be a long-term effort, but I am sure it will not be too many years before the military-media attach? is being given space on the masthead of many media outlets.

A seemingly easy fix would be to give journalists a single point of contact at the higher level depending on what media they work for. For instance, a group of PAOs would be assigned to print magazines and another to news channels. Every journalist at Time or Fox News would know who to call for information. Long-term relationships would be built, and PAOs would gain a thorough understanding of the media with which they are working. Understandably, no PAO team would be able to answer every question that came in, but they would be able to point journalists in the right direction and facilitate contact with local PAOs who might have the information. A side benefit would be that they often would be able to give local PAOs a heads up. And if someone from the national media called a local PAO, that PAO would know who to alert about the inquiry. In an era when even what appears to be local trivia can have a strategic impact, this kind of intelligence would be critical in any attempt to get ahead of a story or at least to get the broad context of an event in journalists? hands.

In fact, failure to provide broader context to events is another major shortcoming of the PAO community. Recently, an article in The Washington Post screamed out about 91 cases of misconduct toward Iraqis being investigated by military authorities. U.S. soldiers and Marines were presented as marauding barbarians in tone if not in words. Some said this was an unfair portrait, but the article was correct in every factual detail. But what if there had been a PAO office somewhere that was responsible for putting this kind of information in context? Alerted by the captain/lieutenant assigned to the Post (who is passing information, not spying) or by the PAOs covering major newspapers, they would have gotten the gist of the article. Then they could have produced something like this:
   ?    .05% of soldiers in Iraq were accused of any misconduct toward Iraqis in the past year.
   ?     15% of New York?s Police Department is accused of some misconduct during the year.
   ?     .003% of military patrols have resulted in investigation.
   ?     .16% of NYPD patrols result in investigation.
   ?     Remove the incidents committed by one terribly led unit of prison guards (800th Military Police), and the military?s performance improves by more than 100%.
   ?     In an environment at least 850 times as deadly as New York City, with a force of tens of thousands of teenagers who have no police training and who are working in communities where they do not even know the language, the U.S. military has done its policing job with 1/300th of the complaints that NYPD receives annually.
   ?     On a per patrol basis, the military is 50 times less likely to receive a complaint than the NYPD.
   ?     In the past year, New York City has lost one officer in the line of duty, or .002% of its force.
   ?     Over the same period, the U.S. military in Iraq lost 842 or .7% of the in-country force (and 5,000 more wounded).

This kind of context could have been given to the article?s author before the story ran or to others after the fact. While even one case of misconduct is a tragedy, the above context puts a new complexion on the problem. The military no longer is a bunch of barbarians pillaging the Iraqi countryside. It is now clear that while there has been some abuse, the vast majority of our men and women in Iraq are doing a great job under very dangerous conditions.

The military would also do well to look into funding various media operations. The reason most embeds came home as soon as major combat operations ended is that it was costing a fortune to keep them in Iraq. News organizations were losing millions covering the war, but they could not decrease their coverage in the face of brutal competition. However, as soon as it was safe to pull the plug, the accountants made them do it. Just when it became critical for the military to have embeds who could tell the full story in Iraq, they vanished. The military needs to come up with a way to foot the bill for extended media operations.

There are several arguments against this. First, the military does not owe the media a stipend to cover their commercial enterprise. Many would claim the military is doing enough by giving journalists access and providing security. That is all well and good, except that it is the military that has a strong vested interest in getting out the entire story. New organizations will get enough copy to cover the news cycle from just a small office in Baghdad. If the military wants journalists to go see what is happening in the rest of the country and how soldiers are coping as they perform their missions, then it has to be ready to pony up the money to finance it. Otherwise, it is useless to complain about the lack of perspective journalists have on events because all they do is sit in offices in Baghdad. Given a choice, the journalists would all be out with the troops because that is where the accolades and Pulitzer Prizes are to be found.

The second objection is that this would give the appearance of a state-controlled media. This might be a long-term problem, but I do not see the media giving in to state control of content anytime soon. However, if we must have a solution, creating an independently administered fund that media outlets could draw on as required would fit the bill. It might be messy as each group fought over its share, but I am confident it would not take long before accommodations were made and some equilibrium achieved.

The military also would be well served by sending some of its more fluent and entertaining PAOs on regular tours of journalism classes throughout the country, possibly even teaching classes at universities. Here is a real chance for the military to catch budding journalists on the ground floor and educate them about the functions and realities of the military. There already are some programs to send fellows to places such as the Shorenstein Center for Press and Public Policy, but once again the numbers are too few to make a significant impact.

In addition, the military needs to expand and formalize programs to get media representatives out to any and all kinds of training and daily events. A lot of this is being done at the local level, but it needs to be expanded to include the national press. This does not mean that marksmanship training will find its way onto national news, but it will begin to establish a new tone and familiarity between the elite press and the military. Once again, I advocate that the military pick up the bill for all of this.

Not all journalists will accept these offers, but some will. Those who do should be brought into the fold. Each media person who shows up for anything should be made an honorary member of the unit, given a unit coin, put on the unit newsletter distribution list, and invited to every social event. This holds doubly true if the visiting journalist writes a negative story. Remember to be nice to the young journalists. You never know which one is going to become a news anchor.

Finally, the military needs to develop programs to get more of its senior officers and civilian officials in front of the press on a regular basis. Too many see the press as their enemy or something to be feared. If the media are the enemy, then the military needs to wade into them as if storming ashore on D-Day. Officers who will run any personal risk in combat to ensure mission accomplishment must learn to be equally fearless when dealing with this new foe. Besides, once they wade in, they might find the enemy is not so bad after all.

Mr. Lacey is a Washington-based writer focusing on defense and international affairs issues. He was embedded with the 101st Airborne during the war in Iraq.
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Whack job on October 07, 2004, 04:59:37 PM
http://www.ejectejecteject.com/

Very long, read part two only if you are short on time
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 14, 2004, 07:40:54 PM
To call this interesting read by Arthur Miller a "Political Rant" is an injustice, but I didn't know where else to put it

Crafty
=================

 

On politics and the art of acting

Arthur Miller

 

Here are some observations about politicians as actors. Since some of my best friends are actors, I don't dare say anything bad about the art itself. The fact is that acting is inevitable as soon as we walk out our front doors and into society. I am acting now; certainly I am not using the same tone as I would in my living room. It is not news that we are moved more by our glandular reactions to a leader's personality, his acting, than by his proposals or by his moral character. To their millions of followers, after all, many of them highly regarded university intellectuals, Hitler and Stalin were profoundly moral men, revealers of new truths. Aristotle thought man was by nature a social animal, and indeed we are ruled more by the social arts, the arts of performance--by acting, in other words--than anybody wants to think about for very long.

 

In our own time television has created a quantitative change in all this; one of the oddest things about millions of lives now is that ordinary individuals, as never before in human history, are so surrounded by acting. Twenty-four hours a day everything seen on the tube is either acted or conducted by actors in the shape of news anchormen and -women, including their hairdos. It may be that the most impressionable form of experience now for many if not most people consists in their emotional transactions with actors, which happen far more of the time than with real people. In the past, a person might have confronted the arts of performance once a year in a church ceremony or in a rare appearance by a costumed prince or king and his ritualistic gestures; it would have seemed a very strange idea that ordinary folk would be so subjected every day to the persuasions of professionals whose studied technique, after all, was to assume the character of someone else.

 

Is this persistent experience of any importance? I can't imagine how to prove this, but it seems to me that when one is surrounded by such a roiling mass of consciously contrived performances it gets harder and harder to locate reality anymore. Admittedly, we live in an age of entertainment, but is it a good thing that our political life, for one, be so profoundly governed by the modes of theater, from tragedy to vaudeville to farce? I find myself speculating whether the relentless daily diet of crafted, acted emotions and canned ideas is not subtly pressing our brains not only to mistake fantasy for what is real but to absorb this falseness into our personal sensory process. This last election is an example. Apparently we are now called upon to act as though nothing very unusual happened and as though nothing in our democratic process has deteriorated, including our claim to the right to instruct lesser countries on how to conduct fair elections. So, in a subtle way, we are induced to become actors, too. The show, after all, must go on, even if the audience is obligated to join in the acting.

 

Political leaders everywhere have come to understand that to govern they must learn how to act. No differently than any actor, Al Gore went through several changes of costume before finding the right mix to express the personality he wished to project. Up to the campaign he seemed an essentially serious type with no great claim to humor, but the presidential-type character he had chosen to play was apparently happy, upbeat, with a kind of Bing Crosby mellowness. I daresay that if he seemed so awkward it was partly because he had cast himself in a role that was wrong for him. As for George W. Bush, now that he is president he seems to have learned not to sneer quite so much, and to cease furtively glancing left and right when leading up to a punch line, followed by a sharp nod to flash that he has successfully delivered it. This is bad acting, because all the dire overemphasis casts doubt on the text. Obviously, as the sparkly magic veil of actual power has descended upon him, he has become more relaxed and confident, like an actor after he has had some hit reviews and knows the show is in for a run.

 

At this point I suppose I should add something about my own bias. I recall the day, back in the fifties, during Eisenhower's campaign against Adlai Stevenson, when I turned on my television and saw the general who had led the greatest invasion force in history lying back under the hands of a professional makeup woman preparing him for his TV appearance. I was far more naive then, and so I still found it hard to believe that henceforth we were to be wooed and won by rouge, lipstick, and powder rather than ideas and positions on public issues. It was almost as though he were getting ready to assume the role of General Eisenhower instead of simply being him. In politics, of course, what you see is rarely what you get, but Eisenhower was not actually a good actor, especially when he ad-libbed, disserving himself as a nearly comical bumbler with the English language when in fact he was a lot more literate and sophisticated than his public-speaking style suggested. As his biographer, a Life editor named Emmet John Hughes, once told me, Eisenhower, when he was still a junior officer, was the author of those smoothly liquid, rather Roman-style speeches that had made his boss, Douglas MacArthur, so famous. Then again, I wonder if Eisenhower's syntactical stumbling in public made him seem more convincingly sincere.

 

Watching some of our leaders on TV has made me wonder if we really have any idea what is involved in the actor's art, and I recall again a story once told me by my old friend the late Robert Lewis, director of a number of beautiful Broadway productions, including the original Brigadoon. Starting out as an actor in the late twenties, Bobby had been the assistant and dresser of Jacob Ben-Ami, a star in Europe and in New York as well. Ben-Ami, an extraordinary actor, was in a Yiddish play, but despite the language and the location of the theater far from Times Square, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, one of its scenes had turned it into a substantial hit with English-speaking audiences. Experiencing that scene had become the in thing to do in New York. People who had never dreamed of seeing a Yiddish play traveled downtown to watch this one scene, and then left. In it Ben-Ami stood at the edge of the stage staring into space and, with tremendous tension, brought a revolver to his head. Seconds passed, whole minutes. Some in the audience shut their eyes or turned away, certain the shot was coming at any instant. Ben-Ami clenched his jaws. Sweat broke out on his face. His eyes seemed about to pop out of his head; his hands trembled as he strove to will himself to suicide. More moments passed. People in the audience were gasping for breath and making strange asphyxiated noises. Finally, standing on his toes now as though to leap into the unknown, Ben-Ami dropped the gun and cried out, "Ikh ken nit!" I can't do it! Night after night he brought the house down; Ben-Ami somehow compelled the audience to suspend its disbelief and to imagine his brains splattered all over the stage.

 

Lewis, aspiring young actor that he was, begged Ben-Ami to tell him the secret of how he created this emotional reality, but the actor kept putting him off, saying he would tell him only after the final performance. "It's better for people not to know," he said, "or it'll spoil the show."

 

Then at last the final performance came, and at its end Ben-Ami sat in his dressing room with the young Lewis.

 

"You promised to tell me," Lewis said.

 

"All right. I'll tell you. My problem with this scene," Ben-Ami explained, "was that I personally could never blow my brains out. I am just not suicidal, and I can't imagine ending my life. So I could never really know how that man was feeling, and I could never play such a person authentically. For weeks I went around trying to think of some parallel in my own life that I could draw on. What situation could I be in where, first of all, I am standing up, I am alone, I am looking straight ahead, and something I feel I must do is making me absolutely terrified, and finally that whatever it is I can't do it?"

 

"Yes," Lewis said, hungry for this great actor's key to greatness. "And what is that?"

 

"Well," Ben-Ami said, "I finally realized that the one thing I hate worse than anything is washing in cold water. So what I'm really doing with that gun to my head is, I'm trying to get myself to step into an ice-cold shower."

 

Now, if we translate this situation to political campaigns, who are we really voting for? The self-possessed character who projects dignity, exemplary morals, and enough forthright courage to lead us through war or depression, or the person who is simply good at creating a counterfeit with the help of professional coaching, executive tailoring, and that whole armory of pretense that the groomed president can now employ? Are we allowed anymore to know what is going on not merely in the candidate's facial expression and his choice of suit but also in his head? Unfortunately, as with Ben-Ami, this is something we are not told until the auditioning ends and he is securely in office. After spending tens of millions of dollars, neither candidate--at least for me--ever managed to create that unmistakable click of recognition as to who he really was. But maybe this is asking too much. As with most actors, any resemblance between the man and the role is purely accidental.

 

The Stanislavsky system came into vogue at the dawn of the twentieth century, when science was recognized as the dominating force of the age. Objective scientific analysis promised to open everything to human control, and the Stanislavsky method was an attempt to systematize the actor's vagrant search for authenticity as he works to portray a character different from his own. Politicians do something similar all the time; by assuming personalities not genuinely theirs--let's say six-pack, lunchbox types--they hope to connect with ordinary Americans. The difficulty for Bush and Gore in their attempts to seem like regular fellas was that both were scions of successful and powerful families. Worse yet for their regular-fella personae, both were in effect created by the culture of Washington, D.C., and you can't hope to be president without running against Washington. The problem for Gore was that Washington meant Clinton, whom he dared not acknowledge lest he be challenged on moral grounds. As for Bush, he was forced to impersonate an outsider pitching against dependency on the federal government, whose payroll, however, had helped feed two generations of his family. There's a name for this sort of cannonading of Washington; it is called i acting. To some important degree both gentlemen had to act themselves out of their real personae into freshly begotten ones. The reality, of course, was that the closest thing on the political stage to a man of the people was Clinton the Unclean, the real goods with the six-pack background, whom it was both dangerous and necessary to disown. This took a monstrous amount of acting.

 

It was in the so-called debates that the sense of a contrived performance rather than a naked clash of personalities and ideas came to a sort of head. Here was acting, acting with a vengeance. But the consensus seems to have called the performances decidedly boring. And how could it be otherwise when both men seemed to be attempting to display the same genial temperament, a readiness to perform the same role and, in effect, to climb into the same warm suit? The role, of course, was that of the nice guy, Bing Crosby with a sprinkling of Bob Hope. Clearly they had both been coached not to threaten the audience with too much passion but rather to reassure that if elected they would not disturb any reasonable person's sleep. In acting terms there was no inner reality, no genuineness, no glimpse into their unruly souls. One remarkable thing did happen, though--a single, split-second shot that revealed Gore shaking his head in helpless disbelief at some inanity Bush had spoken. Significantly, this gesture earned him many bad reviews for what were called his superior airs, his sneering disrespect; in short, he had stepped out of costume and revealed his reality. This, in effect, was condemned as a failure of acting. In the American press, which is made up of disguised theater critics, substance counts for next to nothing compared with style and inventive characterization. For a millisecond Gore had been inept enough to have gotten real! And this clown wanted to be president yet! Not only is all the world a stage but we have all but obliterated the fine line between the feigned and the real.

 

Was there ever such a border? It is hard to know, but we might try to visualize the Lincoln-Douglas debates before the Civil War, when thousands would stand, spread out across some pasture, to listen to the two speakers, who were mounted on stumps so they could be seen from far off. There certainly was no makeup; neither man had a speechwriter but, incredibly enough, made it all up himself. Years later, Lincoln supposedly wrote the Gettysburg Address on scraps of paper while en route to a memorial ceremony. Is it imaginable that any of our candidates could have such conviction and, more importantly, such self-assured candor as to pour out his heart this way? To be sure, Lincoln and Douglas were civil, at least in the record of their remarks, but their attack on each other's ideas was sharp and thorough, revealing of their actual approaches to the nation's problems. As for their styles, they had to have been very different than the current laid-back cool before the lens. The lens magnifies everything: one slight lift of an eyelid and you look like you're glaring. If there is a single, basic requirement for success on television it is minimalization: whatever you are doing, do less of it and emit cool. In other words--act. In contrast, speakers facing hundreds of people without a microphone and in the open air must inevitably have been broader in gesture and even more emphatic in speech than in life. Likewise, their use of language had to be more pointed and precise in order to carry their points out to the edges of the crowd. And no makeup artist stood waiting to wipe up every bead of sweat on a speaker's lip; the candidates were stripped to their shirtsleeves in the summer heat, and people nearby could no doubt smell them. There may, in short, have been some aspect of human reality in such a debate.

 

Given the camera's tendency to exaggerate any movement, it may in itself have a dampening effect on spontaneity and conflict. There were times in this last campaign when one even wondered whether the candidates feared that to raise issues and engage in a genuine clash before the camera might set fire to some of the more flammable public. They chose instead to forgo the telling scowl or the passionate outburst in favor of that which ran less risk of a social conflagration: benign smiles on a glass screen.

 

No differently than with actors, the single most important characteristic a politician needs to display is relaxed sincerity. Ronald Reagan disarmed his opponents by never showing the slightest sign of inner conflict about the truth of what he was saying. Simpleminded as his critics found his ideas and remarks, cynical and manipulative as he may have been in actuality, he seemed to believe every word he said. He could tell you that atmospheric pollution came from trees, or that ketchup was a vegetable in school lunches, or leave the impression that he had seen action in World War II rather than in a movie he had made or perhaps only seen, and if you didn't believe these things you were still kind of amused by how sincerely he said them. Sincerity implies honesty, an absence of moral conflict in the mind of its possessor. Of course, this can also indicate insensitivity or even stupidity. It is hard, for example, to think of another American official whose reputation would not have been stained by saluting a cemetery of Nazi dead with heartfelt solemnity while barely mentioning the many millions, including Americans, who were victims of that vile regime. But Reagan was not only an actor; he loved acting, and it can be said that at least in public he not only acted all the time but did so sincerely. The second best actor is Clinton, who does occasionally seem to blush, but then again he was caught in an illicit sexual act, which is far more important than illegally shipping weapons to foreign countries. Reagan's tendency to confuse events in films with things that really happened is often seen as intellectual weakness, but in reality it was--unknowingly, of course--a Stanislavskian triumph, the very consummation of the actor's ability to incorporate reality into the fantasy of his role. In Reagan the dividing line between acting and actuality was simply melted, gone. Human beings, as the poet said, cannot bear very much reality, and the art of politics is our best proof. The trouble is that a leader comes to symbolize his country, and so the nagging question is whether, when real trouble comes, we can act ourselves out of it.

 

The first obligation of the actor, just as with the politician, is to get himself known. P. T. Barnum said it for all time when a reporter asked if he wasn't ashamed at having tricked the public. He had originated the freak show, which had drawn an immense audience to his Bridgeport, Connecticut, barn to see the bearded lady and the two-headed calf. But the show was such a great hit that his problem was how to get people to leave and make room for new customers. His solution was to put up a sign, with an arrow pointing to the door, that read, "This way to the Egress." Since nobody had ever seen an "egress" before, the place emptied satisfactorily, and the audience found itself in the street. The reporter asked if this ploy wouldn't anger people and ruin his reputation. Barnum gave his historic reply: "I don't care what they write about me as long as they spell my name right." If there is a single rubric to express the most basic requirement for political or theatrical success, this is it.

 

Whether he admits it or not, the actor wants not only to be believed and admired but to be loved, and what may help to account for the dullness of this last campaign was the absence of affection for either man, not to speak of love. By the end it seemed like an unpopularity contest, a competition for who was less disliked by more people than the other, a demonstration of negative consent. Put another way, in theatrical terms these were character actors but not fascinating stars. Ironically, the exception to all this lovelessness was-Nader, whose people, at least on television, did seem to adore their leader, even after he had managed to help wreck Gore and elect Bush, whom they certainly despised far more than they did Gore. At this point I ought to confess that I have known only one president whom I feel confident about calling "the President of the United States," and that was Franklin Roosevelt. My impulse is to say that he alone was not an actor, but I probably think that because he was such a good one. He could not stand on his legs, after all, but he took care never to exhibit weakness by appearing in his wheelchair, or in any mood but that of upbeat, cheery optimism, which at times he certainly did not feel. Roosevelt was so genuine a star, his presence so overwhelming, that Republicans, consciously or not, have never stopped running against him for this whole half-century.

 

The mystery of the star performer can only leave the inquiring mind confused, resentful, or blank, something that, of course, has the greatest political importance. Many Republicans have blamed the press for the attention Bill Clinton continued to get even out of office. Again, what they don't understand is that what a star says, and even what he does, is incidental to people's interest in him. When the click of empathic association is made with a leader, logic has very little to do with it and virtue even less. Obviously, this is not very encouraging news for rational people who hope to uplift society by reasoned argument. But then, not many of us rational folk are immune to the star's ability to rule.

 

The presidency, in acting terms, is a heroic role. It is not one for comedians, sleek lover types, or second bananas. To be credible, the man who acts as president must hold in himself an element of potential danger. Something similar is required in a real star.

 

Like most people, I had never even heard of Marion Brando the first time I saw him onstage not long after the end of World War II. The play was Truckline Cafe, a failed work by Maxwell Anderson that was soon to close, hardly a promising debut for an ambitious actor. The set is a shabby cafe on some country highway. It is after midnight, the place miserably lit and empty. There is a counter and a few booths with worn upholstery. A car is heard stopping outside. Presently, a young man wearing a worn-leather jacket and a cap strolls in, an exhausted-looking girl behind him.

 

He saunters down to center stage, looking around for a sign of life. For a long time he says absolutely nothing, just stands there in the sort of slouch you fall into after driving for hours. The moment lengthens as he tries to figure out what to do, his patience clearly thinning. Nothing has happened, he has hardly even moved, but watching him, the audience, myself included, is already spellbound. Another actor would simply have aroused impatience, but we are in Brando's power; we read him; his being is speaking to us even if we can't make out precisely what it is saying. It is something like an animal that has slipped from its cage. Is he dangerous? Friendly? Stupid? Intelligent? Without a word spoken, this actor has opened up in the audience a whole range of emotional possibilities, including, oddly enough, a little fear. Finally he calls out, "Anybody here?!" What a relief! He has not shot up the place. He has not thrown chairs around. All he wanted, apparently, was a sandwich.

 

I can't explain how Brando, wordlessly, did what he did, but he had found a way, no doubt instinctively, to master a paradox--he had implicitly threatened us and then given us pardon. Here was Napoleon, here was Caesar, here was Roosevelt. Brando had not asked the members of the audience merely to love him; that is only charm. He had made them wish that he would deign to love them. That is a star. That is power, no different in its essence than the power that can lead nations.

 

Onstage or in the White House, power changes everything, even how the aspirant looks after he wins. I remember running into Dustin Hoffman on a rainy New York street some years ago; he had only a month earlier played the part of the Lomans' pale and nervous next-door neighbor, Bernard, in a recording session with Lee Cobb of Death of a Salesman. Now as he approached, counting the cracks in the sidewalk, hatless, his wet hair dripping, a worn coat collar turned up, I prepared to greet him, thinking that with his bad skin, hawkish nose, and adenoidal voice some brave friend really ought to tell him to go into another line of work. As compassionately as possible I asked what he was doing now, and with a rather apologetic sigh he said, after several sniffles, "Well, they want me for a movie." "Oh?" I felt relieved that he was not about to collapse in front of me in a fit of depression. "What's the movie?"

 

"It's called The Graduate," he said.

 

"Good part?"

 

"Well, yeah, I guess it's the lead."

 

In no time at all this half-drowned puppy would have millions of people at his feet all over the world. And once having ascended to power, so to speak, it became hard even for me to remember him when he was real. Not that he wasn't real, just that he was real plus. And the plus is the mystery of the patina, the glow that power paints on the elected human being.

 

The amount of acting required of both President Bush and the Democrats is awesome now, given the fractured election and donation by the Supreme Court. Practically no participant in the whole process can really say out loud what is in his heart. They are all facing an ice-cold shower with a gun to their head. Bush has to act as though he were elected, the Supreme Court has to act as though it were the Supreme Court, Gore has to act as though he is practically overjoyed at his own defeat, and so on. Unfortunately, such roles generally require hard work ahead of time, and the closest thing I've seen so far to deliberately rehearsed passion was the organized mob of Republicans banging threateningly on the door of a Florida vote-counting office and howling for the officials inside to stop counting. I must confess, though, that as a playwright I would be flummoxed as to how to make plausible on the stage an organized stampede of partisans yelling to stop the count and in the same breath accusing the other side of trying to steal the election. I can't imagine an audience taking this for anything but a satirical farce.

 

An election, not unlike a classic play, has a certain strict form that requires us to pass through certain ordained steps toward a logical conclusion. When, instead, the form dissolves and chaos reigns, the audience is left feeling cheated and even mocked. After this last, most hallucinatory of elections, it was said that in the end the system worked, when clearly it hadn't at all. And one of the signs that it had collapsed popped up even before the decision was finally made in Bush's favor; it was when Dick Armey, the Republican majority leader in the House of Representatives, declared that he would simply not attend the inauguration if Gore were elected, despite immemorial custom and his clear obligation to do so. In short, Armey had reached the limits of his actor's imagination and could only collapse into playing himself. You cannot have a major performer deciding, in the middle of a play, to leave the scene without utterly destroying the whole illusion. For the system to be said to have worked, no one is allowed to stop acting.

 

The play without a character we can really root for is in trouble. Shakespeare's Coriolanus is an example. It is not often produced, powerful though it is as playwriting and poetry, no doubt because, as a totally honest picture of ambition in a frightening human being, the closest the play ever gets to love is Coriolanus' subservience to his mother. In short, it is a truthful play without sentimentality, and truthfulness, I'm afraid, doesn't sell a whole.tot of tickets or draw votes. Which inevitably brings me again to Clinton. Until the revulsion brought on by the pardon scandal, he was leaving office with the highest rating for performance and the lowest for personal character. People had prospered under his leadership, and, with whatever reluctance, they still connected with his humanity as they glimpsed it, ironically enough, through his sins. We are back, I think, to the mystery of the star. Clinton, except for those few minutes when lying about Monica Lewinsky, was relaxed on camera in a way any actor would envy. And relaxation is the soul of the art, because it arouses receptivity rather than defensiveness in an audience.

 

That receptivity brings to mind a friend of mine who, many years ago, won the prize for selling more Electrolux vacuum cleaners in the Bronx than any other door-to-door salesman. He once explained how he did it: "You want them to start saying yes. So you ask questions that they can't say no to. Is this 1350 Jerome Avenue? Yes. Is your name Smith? Yes. Do you have carpets? Yes. A vacuum cleaner? Yes. Once you've got them on a yes roll, a kind of psychological fusion takes place. You're both on the same side. It's almost like some kind of love, and they feel it's impolite for them to say no, and in no time you're in the house unpacking the machine." What Clinton projects is a personal interest in the customer that comes across as a sort of love. There can be no doubt that, like all great performers, he loves to act, he is most alive when he's on. His love of acting may be his most authentic emotion, the realest thing about him, and, as with Reagan, there is no dividing line between his performance and himself he is his performance. There is no greater contrast than with Gore or Bush, both of whom projected a kind of embarrassment at having to perform, an underlying tension between themselves and the role, and tension, needless to say, shuts down love on the platform no less than it does in bed.

 

On every side there is a certain amount of lamenting about the reluctance of Americans to condemn Bill Clinton, but rather than blaming our failed moral judgment I think we would do better to examine his acting. Clinton is our Eulenspiegel, the mythical arch prankster of fourteenth-century Germany who was a sort of mischievous and lovable folk spirit, half child, half man. Eulenspiegel challenged society with his enviable guile and a charm so irresistible that he could blurt out embarrassing truths about the powerful on behalf of the ordinary man. His closest American equivalent is Brer Rabbit, who ravishes people's vegetable gardens and, just when he seems to be cornered, charmingly distracts his pursuer with some outrageously engaging story while edging closer and closer to a hole down which he escapes. Appropriately enough, the word "Eulenspiegel" is a sort of German joke: it means a mirror put before an owl, and since an owl is blind in daylight it cannot see its own reflection. As bright and happy and hilariously unpredictable as Eulenspiegel is, he cannot see himself, and so, among other things, he is dangerous.

 

In other words, a star. Indeed, the perfect model of both star and political leader is that smiling and implicitly dangerous man who likes you.

 

In part because Gore and Bush were not threatening, their offer of protective affection was not considered important. Gore was so busy trying to unbend that he forfeited whatever menace he may have had. Bush did his best to pump up his chest and toughly turn down the corners of his mouth, but it was all too obviously a performance, and for too long his opponents failed to take him as anything more than the potential president of a fraternity. Risking immodesty, to say the least, he actually referred to himself as a "leader" and claimed that his forth-coming administration would fill the vacuum of "leadership." Caught time after time fouling up his syntax, thus shaking the image of manly command, he has improved since real power has descended upon him, and his sentences, saving on grammar, have gotten shorter and shorter--to the point where, at times, he comes close to sounding like a gunslinger in a Clint Eastwood film. He is, though, beginning to relax into his role and, like most presidents, may in the fullness of time come to seem inevitable.

 

The ultimate foundation of political power, of course, has never changed: it is the leader's willingness to resort to violence should the need arise. Adlai Stevenson may have seemed too civilized to resort to violence without a crippling hesitation, and Jimmy Carter was so clearly restrained by Christian scruple that a single military accident involving a handful of unfortunate soldiers destroyed all his credibility in one stroke. An American leader may deliver the Sunday lesson provided his sword is never out of reach, the two best examples being FDR and John Kennedy. But this type, which doesn't come along every day, is the aristocratic populist, and the aristocrat learns how to act at a very early age; it is part of his upbringing. A Nixon, on the contrary, has to learn as he goes along. Indeed, once he had ordered himself bugged, Nixon was acting during all his waking hours; his entire working life became a recorded performance.

 

The case of President Truman and the atom bomb is particularly rich in its references to acting and power. When several of the scientists who had built the first bomb petitioned Truman to stage a demonstration off the Japanese coast rather than dropping it on an inhabited city, he chose the latter course; the fear was that the first bomb might fail to work, encouraging the Japanese to refuse peace overtures even more resolutely. However frightful the consequences, it was better to bomb a city and in one flash bring the war to an end. The weakness in this reasoning is that if the bomb was so uncertain to explode, why drop it on a city, where Japanese scientists might examine and maybe even copy it? A more persuasive argument, I'm afraid, is that if the Japanese had been warned to expect a demonstration of a terrible new weapon, and it had been a dud, a dead iron ball splashing into the sea, Truman's unwillingness to kill would have threatened his leadership, and he, personally and symbolically, would have lost credibility. I'm not at all sure what I would have done in his position, confronted with the possibility of terrible American losses in a land invasion of Japan. But the issue is not Truman so much as the manifestations of power that people require their leaders to act out. Jesus Christ could not have beaten Hitler's Germany or Imperial Japan into surrender. And it is not impossible that our main reason for cloaking our leaders with a certain magical, extra-human, theatrical aura is to help disguise one of the basic conditions of their employment--namely, a readiness to kill for us.

 

Whether for good or for evil, it is sadly inevitable that all political leadership requires the artifices of theatrical illusion. In the politics of a democracy the shortest distance between two points is often a crooked line. While Roosevelt was stoutly repeating his determination to keep America out of any foreign war, he was taking steps toward belligerency in order to save England and prevent a Nazi victory. In effect, mankind is in debt to his lies. So from the tragic necessity of dissimulation there seems to be no escape. Except, of course, to tell people the truth, something hat doesn't require acting but may damage one's own party and, in certain circumstances, the human enterprise itself. Then what?

 

Then, I'm afraid, we can only turn to the release of art, to the other theater, the theater-theater, where you can tell the truth without killing anybody and may even illuminate the awesomely durable dilemma of how to lead without lying too much. The release of art will not forge a cannon or pave a street, but it may remind us again and again of the corruptive essence of power, its tendency to enhance itself at the expense of humanity. The late director and critic Harold Clurman called theater "lies like truth." Theater does indeed lie, fabricating everything from the storm's roar to the lark's song, from the actor's laughter to his nightly flood of tears. And the actor lies; but with all the spontaneity that careful calculation can lend him, he may construct a vision of some important truth about the human condition that opens us to a new understanding of ourselves. In the end, we call a work of art trivial when it illuminates little beyond its own devices, and the same goes for political leaders who bespeak some narrow interest rather than those of the national or universal good. The fault is not in the use of the theatrical arts but in their purpose.

 

Paradox is the name of the game where acting as an art is concerned. It is a rare, hardheaded politician who is at home with any of the arts these days; most often the artist is considered suspect, a nuisance, a threat to morality, or a fraud. At the same time, one of the most lucrative American exports, after airplanes, is art--namely, music and films. But art has always been the revenge of the human spirit upon the shortsighted. Consider the sublime achievements of Greece, the necrophilic grandeur of the Egyptians, the glory of the Romans, the awesome power of the Assyrians, the rise and fall of the Jews and their incomprehensible survival, and what are we left with but a handful of plays, essays, carved stones, and some strokes of paint on paper or the rock cave wall--in a word, art? The ironies abound. Artists are not particularly famous for their steady habits, the acceptability of their opinions, or their conformity with societal mores, but whatever is not turned into art disappears forever. It is very strange when you think about it, except for one thing that is not strange but quite logical: however dull or morally delinquent an artist may be, in his moment of creation, when his work pierces the truth, he cannot dissimulate, he cannot fake it. Tolstoy once remarked that what we look for in a work of art is the revelation of the artist's soul, a glimpse of God. You can't act that.

This essay was adapted from the 2001 Jefferson Lecture, sponsored annually by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Established in 1972, the Jefferson Lecture is the highest honor bestowed by the federal government for distinguished achievement in the humanities. Arthur Miller is the author of numerous plays, including Death of a Salesman and The Crucible. His memoir "A Line to Walk On" appeared in the November 2000 issue of Harper's Magazine.
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 24, 2004, 11:04:38 PM
THE FACES OF DENIAL


By RALPH PETERS October 24, 2004 -- EUROPEANS insist that the United States overreacted to 9/11. Conde scendingly, they observe that they've been dealing with terror ism successfully for three dec ades, that it can be
managed, that life goes on.

They're wrong.

What Europeans fail to grasp - what they willfully refuse to face - is that
the nature of terrorism has changed.

The alphabet-soup terrorists of the past - the IRA, ETA, PLO, RAF and the
rest - were essentially political organizations with political goals. No
matter how brutal their actions or unrealistic their hopes, their common
intent was to change a system of government, either to gain a people's
independence or to force their ideology on society.

The old-school terrorists that Europe survived did not seek death, although they were sometimes willing to die for their causes. None were suicide bombers, although a few committed suicide in prison to make a political statement.

Crucially, their goals were of this earth. All would have preferred to
survive to rule in a government that they controlled.

Now we face terrorists who regard death as a promotion - who reject secular ideologies and believe themselves to be instruments of their god's will.

Indeed, they hope to nudge their god along, to convince him through their
actions that the final struggle between faith and infidelity is at hand.
While they'd like to see certain changes here on earth - the destruction of
Israel, of the United States, of the West, of unbelievers and heretics
everywhere - their longed-for destination is paradise beyond the grave.

THE new terrorists are vastly more dangerous, more implacable and crueler than the old models. The political terrorists of the 1970s and '80s used bloodshed to gain their goals. Religious terrorists see mass murder as an end in itself, as a purifying act that cleanses the world of infidels. They don't place their bombs for political leverage, but to kill as many innocent human beings as possible.

Yesteryear's murderers of European politicians and businessmen by the old crowd seem almost mannerly compared to today's religion-fueled terrorists, who openly rejoice in decapitating their living victims in front of cameras.



When political terrorists hijacked airplanes, they hoped to draw attention
to their cause. When Islamic terrorists seize passenger jets, they do it to
kill as many people as possible.

The old terrorists were sometimes so rabid that they had to be killed or
imprisoned. But others became negotiating partners for governments. From Yasser Arafat to Gerry Adams, some gained international respectability. (It even may be argued that Adams became part of the solution, rather than simply remaining part of the problem.)

For today's apocalyptic terrorists, negotiations are no more than a tool to
be used in extreme situations, to allow them to live to kill again another
day. And no promises made to infidels need be honored.

The Islamic terrorists we now face will never become statesmen. They wish to shed our blood to fortify their faith, to impose their beliefs upon the world, to placate a vengeful god.

That doesn't offer much room for polite diplomacy. Islamic terrorists have
reverted to the most primitive of religious practices: human sacrifice.
Their brand of Islam is no "religion of peace." They're Aztecs without the
art. And it takes a Cortez to deal with them.

Europeans' experience of negotiating with political terrorists has allowed
them to deceive themselves into a false sense of security. Forgetting the
pain inflicted on their societies by tiny bands of assassins (whether the
Baader-Meinhof gang, the Red Brigades or the IRA-Provos), Europeans refuse to imagine what tens of thousands of fanatics bent on destruction might do if not faced down with courage and resolution.

It wasn't the United States that didn't "get" 9/11. It was the Europeans,
anxious that their comfortable slumber not be disturbed. They insist that
terrorism remains a law-enforcement problem, refusing even to consider that we might face a broad, complex, psychotic threat spawned by a failed civilization.

EUROPE will pay. And the price in the coming years will be much higher than any paid by the United States. Europe, not North America, is the vulnerable continent. Our homeland-security efforts, unfairly derided at home and abroad, are making our country markedly safer. Yes, we will be struck again. But "Old Europe" is going to be hit again, and again, and again.

American Muslims not only become citizens - they become good citizens.
Despite the assimilation hurdles that face every new group of immigrants,
our Muslims have opportunity and hope. A disaffected few may make headlines, but American Muslims overwhelmingly support their new country and do not wish it harm. They see no contradiction between faith in their god and faith in America. Our worries are their worries, and their dreams are our dreams.

Europe is another, grimmer story. Not a single European state - not even the United Kingdom - has successfully integrated its Muslim minority into
mainstream society.

While the United Kingdom has done the best job, countries such as France and Germany have time-bombs in their midst, large, excluded Muslim populations that the native majority regard as hopelessly inferior. If you want to see bigotry alive and well, visit "Old Europe."

It wasn't a random choice on the part of the 9/11 terrorists that led them
to do so much of their preparation in Europe. They know that American-Muslim communities won't offer hospitality to terrorists. But Germany, France, Spain and neighboring states contain embittered Islamic communities glad to see any part of the West get the punishment it "deserves."

As the United States becomes ever harder to strike - and as we respond so fiercely to those attacks that succeed - soft Europe, with its proximity to the Muslim world, its indigestible Muslim communities and its moral
fecklessness, is likely to become the key Western battleground in the
Islamic extremists' war against civilization.

Europeans don't want it to be so. But they are not going to get a choice.

Europeans are simply in denial. They've lived so well for so long that they
don't want the siesta from reality to end. One of the many reasons that
continental Europeans reacted so angrily to our liberation of Iraq was that
it made it harder than ever for them to sustain their myth of a benign world in which peace could be purchased and the government welfare checks would never stop coming.

America's crime was to acknowledge reality. It will be a long time before
Europeans forgive us.

IN many ways, the civilizations of North America and Europe are diverging. Eu rope has a crisis of values behind its failure of will. Their anxiety to tell everyone else what to do reflects their own uncertainty. Corrupt, selfish and cowardly, old Europe has fallen to moral lows not seen since 1945.

The one factor that will finally bring us closer again is terrorism.

In this horrid election year, we've heard endless complaints that Washington needs allies. Of course, we already have many allies. The old-thinkers just mean France and Germany. But the truth is that France and Germany - weak, blind, duplicitous and inept - will need us far more than we could ever need them.

The nature of terrorism has changed profoundly. It's no longer about
ideology, but about slaughter for its own sake. Nothing we could do would
placate these terrorists. They must be fought and destroyed, no matter how many decades that requires. For Europe to pretend otherwise harms the general counter-terror effort. But, above all, it sets Europe up for
calamity.

Ralph Peters is the author of "Beyond Terror: Strategy in a Changing World."
Title: Political Rants
Post by: SB_Mig on October 26, 2004, 10:48:36 AM
The Ghost of Vice President Wallace Warns: "It Can Happen Here"
by Thom Hartmann
 

The Republican National Committee has recently removed from their website an advertisement interspersing Hitler's face with those of John Kerry and other prominent Democrats.

This little-heralded step has freed former Enron lobbyist and current RNC chairman Ed Gillespie to resume his attacks on Americans who believe some provisions of Bush's PATRIOT Act, his detention of American citizens without charges, his willingness to let corporations write legislation, and the so-called "Free Speech Zones" around his public appearances are all steps on the road to American fascism.

The RNC's feeble attempt to equate Hitler and Democrats was short-lived, but it brings to mind the first American Vice President to point out the "American fascists" among us.

Although most Americans remember that Harry Truman was Franklin D. Roosevelt's Vice President when Roosevelt died in 1945 (making Truman President), Roosevelt had two previous Vice Presidents - John N. Garner (1933-1941) and Henry A. Wallace (1941-1945).

In early 1944, the New York Times asked Vice President Henry Wallace to, as Wallace noted, "write a piece answering the following questions: What is a fascist? How many fascists have
we? How dangerous are they?" Vice President Wallace's answer to those questions was published in The New York Times on April 9, 1944, at the height of the war against the Axis powers of Germany and Japan.

"The really dangerous American fascists," Wallace wrote, "are not those who are hooked up directly or indirectly with the Axis. The FBI has its finger on those. The dangerous American fascist is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a
Prussian way. The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power."

In this, Wallace was using the classic definition of the word "fascist" - the definition Mussolini had in mind when he claimed to have invented the word. (It was actually Italian philosopher Giovanni Gentile who wrote the entry in the Encyclopedia Italiana that said: "Fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power." Mussolini, however, affixed his name to the entry, and claimed credit for it.)

As the 1983 American Heritage Dictionary noted, fascism is: "A system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism."

Mussolini was quite straightforward about all this. In a 1923 pamphlet titled "The Doctrine of Fascism" he wrote, "If classical liberalism spells individualism, Fascism spells government." But not a government of, by, and for We The People - instead, it would be a government of, by, and for the most powerful corporate interests in the nation.

In 1938, Mussolini brought his vision of fascism into full reality when he dissolved Parliament and replaced it with the "Camera dei Fasci e delle Corporazioni" - the Chamber of the Fascist Corporations. Corporations were still privately owned, but now instead of having to sneak their
money to folks like Tom DeLay and covertly write legislation, they were openly in charge of the government.

Vice President Wallace bluntly laid out in his 1944 Times article his concern about the same happening here in America: " If we define an American fascist as one who in case of  conflict puts money and power ahead of human beings, then there are undoubtedly several million fascists in the United States. There are probably several hundred thousand if we narrow the definition to include only those who in their search for money and power are ruthless and deceitful. ... They
are patriotic in time of war because it is to their interest to be so, but in time of peace they follow power and the dollar wherever they may lead."

Nonetheless, at that time there were few corporate heads who had run for political office, and, in Wallace's view, most politicians still felt it was their obligation to represent We The People instead of corporate cartels. "American fascism will not be really dangerous," he added in the next paragraph, "until there is a purposeful coalition among the cartelists, the deliberate poisoners of public information..."

Noting that, "Fascism is a worldwide disease," Wallace further suggested that fascism's "greatest threat to the United States will come after the war" and will manifest "within the United States itself."

In Sinclair  Lewis's 1935 novel "It Can't Happen Here," a conservative southern politician is helped to the presidency by a nationally syndicated radio talk show host. The politician - Buzz Windrip - runs his campaign on family values, the flag, and patriotism. Windrip and the talk show host portray advocates of traditional American democracy as anti-American. When Windrip becomes President, he opens a Guantanamo-style detention center, and the viewpoint character of the book, Vermont newspaper editor Doremus Jessup, flees to Canada to avoid prosecution under new "patriotic" laws that make it illegal to criticize the President.

As Lewis noted in his novel, "the President, with something of his former good-humor [said]: 'There are two [political] parties, the Corporate and those who don't belong to any party at all, and so, to use a common phrase, are just out of luck!'  The idea of the Corporate or Corporative State, Secretary [of State] Sarason had more or less taken from Italy." And, President "Windrip's partisans called themselves the Corporatists, or, familiarly, the 'Corpos,' which nickname was generally used."

Lewis, the first American writer to win a Nobel Prize, was world famous by 1944, as was his book "It Can't Happen Here." And several well-known and powerful Americans, including Prescott Bush, had lost businesses in the early 1940s because of charges by Roosevelt that they were doing business with Hitler. These events all, no doubt, colored Vice President Wallace's thinking when he wrote: " Still another danger is represented by those who, paying lip service to democracy and the common welfare, in their insatiable greed for money and the power which money gives, do not hesitate surreptitiously to evade the laws designed to safeguard the public from monopolistic extortion.  American fascists of this stamp were clandestinely aligned with their German counterparts before the war, and are even now preparing to resume where they left off, after 'the  present unpleasantness' ceases."

Fascists have an agenda that is primarily economic. As the Free Dictionary (http://www.thefreedictionary.com/) notes, fascism/corporatism is ?an attempt to create a 'modern' version of feudalism by merging the 'corporate' interests with those of the state." Feudalism, of course, is one of the most stable of the three historic tyrannies (kingdoms, theocracies, feudalism) that ruled nations prior to the rise of American republican democracy, and can be roughly defined as "rule by the rich."

Thus, the neo-feudal/fascistic rich get richer (and more powerful) on the backs of the poor and the middle class, an irony not lost on author Thomas Frank, who notes in his new book "What's The Matter With Kansas" that, "You can see the paradox first-hand on nearly any Main Street in middle America - 'going out of business' signs side by side with placards supporting George W. Bush."  The businesses "going out of business" are, in fascist administrations, usually those of locally owned small and medium-sized companies.

As Wallace wrote, some in big business "are willing to jeopardize the structure of American liberty to gain some temporary advantage." He added, "Monopolists who fear competition and who distrust democracy because it stands for equal opportunity would like to secure their position against small and energetic enterprise [companies]. In an effort to eliminate the possibility of any rival growing up, some monopolists would sacrifice democracy itself."

But American fascists who would want former CEOs as President, Vice President, House Majority Whip, and Senate Majority Leader, and write legislation with corporate interests in mind, don't generally talk to We The People about their real agenda, or the harm it does to small businesses and working people. Instead, as Hitler did with the trade union leaders and the Jews, they point to a "them" to pin with blame and distract people from the harm of their economic policies.
 
In a comment prescient of George W. Bush's recent suggestion that civilization itself is at risk because of gays, Wallace continued: " The symptoms of fascist thinking are colored by environment
and adapted to immediate circumstances. But always and everywhere they can be identified by their appeal to prejudice and by the desire to play upon the fears and vanities of different groups in order to gain power. It is no coincidence that the growth of modern tyrants has in every case been heralded by the growth of prejudice. It may be shocking to some people in this country to realize that, without meaning to do so, they hold views in common with Hitler when they preach discrimination..."

But even at this, Wallace noted, American fascists would have to lie to the people in order to gain power. And, because they were in bed with the nation's largest corporations - who could gain control of newspapers and broadcast media - they could promote their lies with ease."The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact," Wallace wrote. "Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity, every crack in the
common front against fascism. They use every opportunity to impugn democracy."

In his strongest indictment of the tide of fascism the Vice President of the United States saw rising in America, he added, "They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection."

Finally, Wallace said, "The myth of fascist efficiency has deluded many people. ... Democracy, to crush fascism internally, must...develop the ability to keep people fully employed and at the same time balance the budget. It must put human beings first and dollars second. It must appeal to reason and decency and not to violence and deceit. We must not tolerate oppressive government or industrial oligarchy in the form of monopolies and cartels."

This liberal vision of an egalitarian America in which very large businesses and media monopolies are broken up under the 1881 Sherman Anti-TrustAct (which Reagan stopped enforcing, leading to the mergers & acquisitions frenzy that continues to this day) was the driving vision of the New Deal (and of "Trust Buster" Teddy Roosevelt a generation earlier).

As Wallace's President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, said when he accepted his party's renomination in 1936 in Philadelphia, "...out of this modern civilization, economic royalists [have] carved new dynasties.... It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction.... And as a result the average man once more confronts the problem that faced the Minute Man...."

Speaking indirectly of the fascists that Wallace would directly name almost a decade later, Roosevelt brought the issue to its core: "These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power." But, he thundered in that speech, "Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power!"

In 2004, we again stand at the same crossroad Roosevelt and Wallace confronted during the Great Depression and World War II. Fascism is again rising in America, this time calling itself compassionate conservatism."

The RNC's behavior today eerily parallels the day in 1936 when Roosevelt said, "In vain they seek to hide behind the flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the flag and the Constitution stand for."

It's particularly ironic that the CEOs and lobbyists who run the Republican National Committee would have chosen to put Hitler's fascist face into one of their campaign commercials, just before they launched a national campaign against gays and while they continue to arrest people who wear
anti-Bush T-shirts in public places.
 
 Thom Hartmann (thom@thomhartmann.com) is a Project Censored Award-winning best-selling author and host of a nationally syndicated daily progressive talk radio show. http://www.thomhartmann.com/ His most recent books are "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight," "Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights," and "We The People: A Call To Take Back America." His new book, "What Would Jefferson Do?: A Return To Democracy," based on four years of research in Jefferson's personal letters, begins shipping this
week from Random House/Harmony.
Title: Current Cyrstalnachts & Other Considerations
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on October 26, 2004, 08:24:47 PM
Uhm, so how do the sundry Cyrstalnachts occurring at RNC offices; the non-brown shirted union thugs early voters are forced to wade through in Florida and elsewhere; Democratic party bastions like Philadelphia who have more voters on the roles than census counted citizens; big lies about support for second amendment protections told by a candidate in camo; and so on, fit into the construct listed above?
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 29, 2004, 10:02:06 PM
Why Muslims always blame the West
 

Husain Haqqani International Herald Tribune
Saturday, October 16, 2004

WASHINGTON When Pakistan's military ruler, General Pervez Musharraf, warned against the descent of an "iron curtain" between the West and the Islamic world, he appeared to put the onus of avoiding confrontation only on the West.

The Palestinian issue and the pre-emptive war in Iraq have undoubtedly accentuated anti-Western sentiment among Muslims from Morocco to Indonesia. But the conduct and rhetoric of Muslim leaders and their failure to address the stagnation of their societies has also fueled the tensions between Islam and the West.

Relations between Muslims and the West will continue to deteriorate unless the internal crisis of the Muslim world is also addressed.

After 9/11, General Musharraf switched support from Afghanistan's Taliban to the U.S.-led war against terrorism. He has since received a hefty package of U.S. military and economic assistance and spoken of the need for "enlightened moderation."

According to an opinion poll conducted by the Washington-based Pew Research Center as part of its Global Attitudes Survey, 86 percent of Pakistanis have a favorable view of General Musharraf while 65 percent also support Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden is viewed favorably by large percentages in other Muslim countries with "moderate" rulers.

Quite clearly, some Muslims find it possible to like Musharraf, who is regarded by the U.S. as the key figure in the hunt for bin Laden, while admiring his quarry at the same time. The contradiction speaks volumes about the general state of confusion in parts of the Muslim world, including Pakistan.

Instead of hard analysis, which thrives only in a free society, Muslims are generally brought up on propaganda, which is often state-sponsored. This propaganda usually focuses on Muslim humiliation at the hands of others instead of acknowledging the flaws of Muslim leaders and societies.

The focus on external enemies causes Muslims to admire power rather than ideas. Warriors, and not scholars or inventors, are generally the heroes of common people. In this simplistic "us vs. them" worldview, both Musharraf and bin Laden are warriors against external enemies.

Ringing alarm bells about an iron curtain between the West and the Islamic world without acknowledging the internal flaws of Muslim rulers and societies helps maintain the polarization as well as the flow of Western aid for the flawed rulers.

Ironically, a cult of the warrior has defined the Muslim worldview throughout the period of Muslim decline. Muslims have had few victories in the last two centuries, but their admiration for the proverbial sword and spear has only increased.

Textbooks in Muslim countries speak of the victories of Muslim fighters from an earlier era. Orators still call for latter-day mujahedeen to rise and regain Islam's lost glory. More streets in the Arab world are named after Muslim generals than men of learning. Even civilian dictators in the Muslim world like being photographed in military uniforms, Saddam Hussein being a case in point.

In the post-colonial period, military leaders in the Muslim world have consistently taken advantage of the popular fascination with military power. The Muslim cult of the warrior explains also the relatively muted response in the Muslim world to atrocities committed by fellow Muslims.

While the Muslim world's obsession with military power encourages violent attempts to "restore" Muslim honor, the real reasons for Muslim humiliation and backwardness continue to multiply. In the year 2000, according to the World Bank, the average income in the advanced countries (at purchasing price parity) was $27,450, with the U.S. income averaging $34,260 and Israel's income averaging $19, 320.

The average income in the Muslim world, however, stood at $3,700. Pakistan's per capita income in 2003 was a meager $2,060. Excluding the oil-exporting countries, none of the Muslim countries of the world had per capita incomes above the world average of $7,350.

National pride in the Muslim world is derived not from economic productivity, technological innovation or intellectual output but from the rhetoric of "destroying the enemy" and "making the nation invulnerable." Such rhetoric sets the stage for the clash of civilizations as much as specific Western policies.

Ironically, Western governments have consistently tried to deal with one manifestation of the cult of the warrior - terrorism - by building up Muslim strongmen who are just another manifestation of the same phenomenon.
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 24, 2004, 12:50:45 PM
HOW TO STEAL A COUNTRY

By RALPH PETERS
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
November 24, 2004 -- UKRAINE remains an indepen dent state. For now. But last week's shamelessly rigged presidential-election results were engineered by Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin's security services.
Exit polling, opinion polling, international election observers, Ukrainian local authorities and the people agree that opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko, a pro-Western Democrat, won. But the pro-Moscow government of Ukraine claims that the spectacularly corrupt incumbent Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych received the major ity of votes.

Tens of thousands of demonstrators took to Kiev's streets in protest. Even Yanukovych has been wary of declaring his own victory. Yet Putin immediately extended his congratulations to the nervous "victor."

The Kremlin poured massive funding into the election campaign. The pro-Russian mafia that has a bully's grip on the Kiev government stuffed ballot boxes, manipulated absentee ballots, extorted votes and then simply changed the numbers to give Moscow's man a 49 percent to 46 percent lead.

This is the biggest test for democracy on Europe's frontier since the fall of the Soviet Union. Russia always seemed fated for a hybrid government ? part elections, part strongman rule ? but Ukraine could go either way. Especially in the country's west and center, Ukrainians have struggled for freedom for centuries.

But Russia regards Ukraine as its inalienable possession, stolen away as the U.S.S.R. collapsed.

Fatefully, the ties were never severed between the successors of the KGB in Moscow and Kiev. Now the grandchildren of the Russian thugs who mercilessly put down Nestor Makhno's Ukrainian revolt against the Bolsheviks, who slaughtered Ukraine's prosperous peasantry and murdered Ukraine's intelligentsia are back at work.

This election may have been Ukraine's last chance.

The tale begins almost a millennium ago. Converted to Christianity, Kiev was the jewel of the north, a magnificent city of churches and piety; Moscow was a shantytown. Then the Mongols came, destroying "Kievan Rus." Muscovy slowly expanded to fill the vacuum left by the destruction of the great Slavic civilization of the Steppes.

For centuries, Ukraine's Cossacks resisted Polish and Russian attempts to rob them of freedom. But by the end of the 18th century, Russia finally broke the Cossacks, dragooning them into its own military forces.

Subjugated, Ukraine responded with a 19th-century cultural revival. The Bolsheviks put an end to that. The first and greatest victims of Lenin and Stalin were the people of Ukraine.

Finally, in 1991, after six centuries, Ukraine regained its independence. Putin intends to take it away again.

With its declining population and threatened Far-Eastern territories, Russia desperately wants the additional population and strategic position of Ukraine back within its own borders, beginning as a "voluntary" federation. An ethnic-Russian population in eastern Ukraine serves as a fifth column.

Disgracefully, the international community appears ready to give Putin a free hand in subverting the freedom of a sovereign, democratic state. President Bush values his relationship with Putin, although Putin hasn't hesitated to undermine Washington's policies.

While constructive cooperation makes sense, there are times when the United States must draw a line ? unless we intend to make a mockery of our support for freedom and democracy.

This is one of those times. President Bush should not let a bunch of gangsters in Kiev and the sons of the KGB in Moscow destroy the hopes of a major European state. Ukraine isn't Russia's to steal.

The people of Ukraine who went to the polls to elect Viktor Yushchenko as their president, who want to be democratic, Western and free, need to hear from the White House. So does Mr. Putin.

If we allow Ukraine's freedom to be destroyed without so much as a murmur from our president, we will have betrayed the ideals we claim to support at home, in Iraq and around the world.

Ralph Peters worked as a Russia expert during his military career. (Colonel)
Title: Letter to Europe
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 29, 2004, 10:03:21 PM
An Open Letter to Europe by Harold E. Meyer

Hi. Are you nuts?

Forgive me for being so blunt, but your reaction to our reelection of President Bush has been so outrageous that I?m wondering if you have quite literally lost your minds. One of Britain?s largest newspapers ran a headline asking ?How Can 59 Million Americans Be So Dumb??, and commentators in France all seemed to use the same word ? bizarre -- to explain the election?s outcome to their readers. In Germany the editors of Die Tageszeitung responded to our vote by writing that ?Bush belongs at a war tribunal ? not in the White House.? And on a London radio talk show last week one Jeremy Hardy described our President and those of us who voted for him as ?stupid, crazy, ignorant, bellicose Christian fundamentalists.?

Of course, you are entitled to whatever views about us that you care to hold. (And lucky for you we Americans aren?t like so many of the Muslims on your own continent; as the late Dutch film maker Theo van Gogh just discovered, make one nasty crack about them and you?re likely to get six bullets pumped into your head and a knife plunged into your chest.) But before you write us off as just a bunch of sweaty, hairy-chested, Bible-thumping morons who are more likely to break their fast by dipping a Krispy Kreme into a diet cola than a biscotti into an espresso ? and who inexplicably have won more Nobel prizes than all other countries combined, host 25 or 30 of the world?s finest universities and five or six of the world?s best symphonies, produce wines that win prizes at your own tasting competitions, have built the world?s most vibrant economy, are the world?s only military superpower and, so to speak in our spare time, have landed on the moon and sent our robots to Mars ? may I suggest you stop frothing at the mouth long enough to consider just what are these ideas we hold that you find so silly and repugnant?

We believe that church and state should be separate, but that religion should remain at the center of life. We are a Judeo-Christian culture, which means we consider those ten things on a tablet to be commandments, not suggestions. We believe that individuals are more important than groups, that families are more important than governments, that children should be raised by their parents rather than by the State, and that marriage should take place only between a man and a woman. We believe that rights must be balanced by responsibilities, that personal freedom is a privilege we must be careful not to abuse, and that the rule of law cannot be set aside when it becomes inconvenient. We believe in economic liberty, and in the right of purposeful and industrious entrepreneurs to run their businesses ? and thus create jobs ? with a minimum of government interference. We recognize that other people see things differently, and we are tolerant of their views. But we believe that our country is worth defending, and if anyone decides that killing us is an okay thing to do we will go after them with everything we?ve got.

If these beliefs seem strange to you, they shouldn?t. For these are precisely the beliefs that powered Western Europe ? you -- from the Middle Ages into the Renaissance, on to the Enlightenment, and forward into the modern world. They are the beliefs that made Europe itself the glory of Western civilization and ? not coincidentally ? ignited the greatest outpouring of art, literature, music and scientific discovery the world has ever known including Michaelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Shakespeare, Bach, Issac Newton and Descartes.


Europe is Dying

It is your abandonment of these beliefs that has created the gap between Europe and the United States. You have ceased to be a Judeo-Christian culture, and have become instead a secular culture. And a secular culture quickly goes from being ?un-religious? to anti-religious. Indeed, your hostility to the basic concepts of Judaism and Christianity has literally been written into your new European Union constitution, despite the Pope?s heroic efforts to the contrary.

Your rate of marriage is at an all-time low, and the number of abortions in Europe is at an all-time high. Indeed, your birth rates are so far below replacement levels that in 30 years or so there will be 70 million fewer Europeans alive than are alive today. Europe is literally dying. And of the children you do manage to produce, all too few will be raised in stable, two-parent households.

Your economy is stagnant because your government regulators make it just about impossible for your entrepreneurs to succeed ? except by fleeing to the United States, where we welcome them and celebrate their success.

And your armed forces are a joke. With the notable exception of Great Britain, you no longer have the military strength to defend yourselves. Alas, you no longer have the will to defend yourselves.

What worries me even more than all this is your willful blindness. You refuse to see that it is you, not we Americans, who have abandoned Western Civilization. It?s worrisome because, to tell you the truth, we need each other. Western Civilization today is under siege, from radical Islam on the outside and from our own selfish hedonism within. It?s going to take all of our effort, our talent, our creativity and, above all, our will to pull through. So take a good, hard look at yourselves and see what your own future will be if you don?t change course. And please, stop sneering at America long enough to understand it. After all, Western Civilization was your gift to us, and you ought to be proud of what we Americans have made of it.

Herbert E. Meyer served during the Reagan Administration as Special Assistant to the Director of Central Intelligence and Vice Chairman of the CIA?s National Intelligence Council. His DVD on The Siege of Western Civilization is a nationwide best-seller.
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 05, 2004, 04:45:01 PM
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/douggiles/dg20041204.shtml

What is Man? Competition Attrition
Doug Giles

December 4, 2004


Nowadays, especially via TV and Hollywood, men are seen as despicable, cruel, pusillanimous, selfish, ineffectual oafs, veritable bumbling idiots who need women or some gay guy with a Queer Eye ? to help us through our primal fog towards metrosexual healing.

If you?re a guy who wants to keep his guy-ness and not trade it in for the androgynous pomosexual image of the 21st century, then you will receive more scorn than Michael Moore at a NRA luncheon. From the college classroom to the corporate boardroom, men have been meeting with man-hatred for quite some time now.

Look ? I?m sure men need some retooling, and I confess we do egregious things for which we need to take responsibility. Y?know, just the other day while I was on a hunting trip without my wife during our anniversary, after not bathing for 5 days, while eating cold refried beans out of a can, chasing the beans with a hot Budweiser and belching so loudly that a Bull Elk came to our cabin looking for a fight, I was thinking that maybe I need to take some etiquette classes.

However, the little tweaking that I?ll admit to needing with respect to balancing out my mannish weirdness will not be coming from our current culture of castration but from the scripture and from classical masculine values of days gone by (not from a re-run of Friends).

What are the basic elements of the masculine spirit? Well, from Homer to Gomer, from Abraham to the Apostle Paul, there are three primary traits that men, if properly raised and allowed to express their biology, will and should naturally exhibit.

They are the following:
? Competition
? Independence
? Responsibility

Let?s look at number one, competition. Guys will fight over anything ? and you know what? We?re supposed to. Probably the thing that separates the men from the ladies more than the Austin Power-like hair on our backs is man?s innate combative nature.

Take the animal kingdom, for instance. While on one of my glorious and many hunting trips, I had two bucks feeding in front of my stand about 75 yards away. To my right, out of a thick stand of trees, comes a doe in to feed with the grass-munchin? boys, and the next thing you know ? it?s a WWE match in a South Florida palmetto patch. The two young bucks commenced to smashing their heads together over Bambi?s cute sister. The kicker is ? while Frick and Frack are locked up vying for dominance ? a more mature buck appears and begins to walk off with the doe ? that is, until I shot him!

Male animals will fight over who gets to breed, who gets to eat, and who owns a particular piece of turf, and aside from our cell phones ? we bipods are no different. Men clash over women, ideas, politics, business, war, and if that does not suffice, we will make up stuff to wrangle over.

Nowadays, men are reviled and harangued for this traditionally esteemed and essential, God-wired, gung-ho spirit. It is this positive bellicose behavior that causes men to rightly protect, even to the point of death, women and kids from whatever threatens them. This is what men have been classically known for, and this is what should be re-tabled for men in this Age of Wussification.

In addition to and closely connected with this confrontational role, is the classic male mission of fetching vittles and acquiring a killer crib. Men looked for the new castle in a safer hamlet. Men sought increased opportunity for their kids and a greater slice of the bliss pie for the entire family.

And lastly, the male competitive spirit caused the production of a better breed of people. You know, in the animal kingdom, you don?t get to mate if you don?t exert your masculinity in the field by dominance.

The competitive spirit within the man, together with its spin-off fruits, is a must for our nation to continue to be the solid country it is. Sure, this viable spirited competitive distinctiveness, allowed to grow on its own, ungoverned by greatness, can fester into an O.J. However, the competitive spirit, governed by biblical ethics, has always produced powerful and productive patriarchs who were the backbone of whatever culture they grew up in. That?s why traditional Judeo-Christian communities invested so much time, capital and oomph in the ordering of this potential force through the institution of rights, rules and heroic narratives.

My ClashPoint is this: As society becomes more secular, dispensing with Judeo-Christian values that relate to man, and diluting the values which address their combativeness in a constructive fashion, man?s competitive bent will deteriorate rapidly into free-for-all competition, Scott Peterson weirdness, and success at all costs. On the flip side of that competition-minus-character coin is the current overcorrection of poo-pooing competition and turning men into Charmin-like creatures.

Traditional society esteemed and structured man?s aggressiveness, realizing that men who like to fight were a must for the good society. Our forebears bridled the bad fruits and released the good produce of combative behavior by recounting great biblical narratives, by conducting ceremonies, and by maintaining an ethical code built around properly releasing this warrior spirit.

Part two, Independence, to follow?
Attachments:
Title: I Was a Tool of Satan
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on December 09, 2004, 02:17:55 PM
A piece that wanders a bit out of Columbia Journalism Review


An Equal-Opportunity Offender Maps the Dark Turn of Intolerance

BY DOUG MARLETTE

Last year, I drew a cartoon that showed a man in Middle Eastern apparel at the wheel of a Ryder truck hauling a nuclear warhead. The caption read, "What Would Mohammed Drive?" Besides referring to the vehicle that Timothy McVeigh rode into Oklahoma City, the drawing was a takeoff on the "What Would Jesus Drive?" campaign created by Christian evangelicals to challenge the morality of owning gas-guzzling SUVs. The cartoon's main target, of course, was the faith-based politics of a different denomination. Predictably, the Shiite hit the fan.

Can you say "fatwa"? My newspaper, The Tallahassee Democrat, and I received more than 20,000 e-mails demanding an apology for misrepresenting the peace-loving religion of the Prophet Mohammed ? or else. Some spelled out the "else": death, mutilation, Internet spam. "I will cut your fingers and put them in your mother's ass." "What you did, Mr. Dog, will cost you your life. Soon you will join the dogs . . . hahaha in hell." "Just wait . . . we will see you in hell with all jews . . . ." The onslaught was orchestrated by an organization called the Council on American-Islamic Relations. CAIR bills itself as an "advocacy group." I was to discover that among the followers of Islam it advocated for were the men convicted of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. At any rate, its campaign against me included flash-floods of e-mail intended to shut down servers at my newspaper and my syndicate, as well as viruses aimed at my home computer. The controversy became a subject of newspaper editorials, columns, Web logs, talk radio, and CNN. I was condemned on the front page of the Saudi publication Arab News by the secretary general of the Muslim World League.

My answer to the criticism was published in the Democrat (and reprinted around the country) under the headline With All Due Respect, an Apology Is Not in Order. I almost felt that I could have written the response in my sleep. In my thirty-year career, I have regularly drawn cartoons that offended religious fundamentalists and true believers of every stripe, a fact that I tend to list in the "Accomplishments" column of my r?sum?. I have outraged Christians by skewering Jerry Falwell, Catholics by needling the pope, and Jews by criticizing Israel. Those who rise up against the expression of ideas are strikingly similar. No one is less tolerant than those demanding tolerance. Despite differences of culture and creed, they all seem to share the notion that there is only one way of looking at things, their way. What I have learned from years of this is one of the great lessons of all the world's religions: we are all one in our humanness.

In my response, I reminded readers that my "What Would Mohammed Drive?" drawing was an assault not upon Islam but on the distortion of the Muslim religion by murderous fanatics - the followers of Mohammed who flew those planes into our buildings, to be sure, but also the Taliban killers of noncompliant women and destroyers of great art, the true believers who decapitated an American reporter, the young Palestinian suicide bombers taking out patrons of pizza parlors in the name of the Prophet Mohammed.

Then I gave my Journalism 101 lecture on the First Amendment, explaining that in this country we do not apologize for our opinions. Free speech is the linchpin of our republic. All other freedoms flow from it. After all, we don't need a First Amendment to allow us to run boring, inoffensive cartoons. We need constitutional protection for our right to express unpopular views. If we can't discuss the great issues of the day on the pages of our newspapers fearlessly, and without apology, where can we discuss them? In the streets with guns? In caf?s with strapped-on bombs?

Although my initial reaction to the "Mohammed" hostilities was that I had been there before, gradually I began to feel that there was something new, something darker afoot. The repressive impulses of that old-time religion were now being fed by the subtler inhibitions of mammon and the marketplace. Ignorance and bigotry were reinventing themselves in the post-Christian age by dressing up as "sensitivity" and masquerading as a public virtue that may be as destructive to our rights as religious zealotry. We seem to be entering a Techno Dark Age, in which the machines that were designed to serve the free flow of information have fallen into the hands of an anti-intellectual mobocracy.

Twenty-five years ago, I began inciting the wrath of the faithful by caricaturing the grotesque disparity between Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker's televangelism scam and the Christian piety they used to justify it. I was then working at The Charlotte Observer, in the hometown of the Bakkers' PTL Club, which instigated a full-bore attack on me. The issues I was cartooning were substantial enough that I won the Pulitzer Prize for my PTL work. But looking back on that fundamentalist religious campaign, even though my hate mail included some death threats, I am struck by the relative innocence of the times and how ominous the world has since become - how high the stakes, even for purveyors of incendiary doodles.

One of the first cartoons I ever drew on PTL was in 1978, when Jim Bakker's financial mismanagement forced him to lay off a significant portion of his staff. The drawing showed the TV preacher sitting at the center of Leonardo Da Vinci's Last Supper informing his disciples, "I'm going to have to let some of you go!" Bakker's aides told reporters that he was so upset by the drawing that he fell to his knees in his office, weeping into the gold shag carpet. Once he staggered to his feet, he and Tammy Faye went on the air and, displaying my cartoons, encouraged viewers to phone in complaints to the Observer and cancel their subscriptions.

Jim Bakker finally resigned in disgrace from his PTL ministry, and I drew a cartoon of the televangelist who replaced him, Jerry Falwell, as a serpent slithering into PTL paradise: "Jim and Tammy were expelled from paradise and left me in charge."

One of the many angry readers who called me at the newspaper said, "You're a tool of Satan."

"Excuse me?"

"You're a tool of Satan for that cartoon you drew."

"That's impossible," I said. "I couldn't be a tool of Satan. The Charlotte Observer's personnel department tests for that sort of thing."

Confused silence on the other end.

"They try to screen for tools of Satan," I explained. "Knight Ridder human resources has a strict policy against hiring tools of Satan."

Click.

Until "What Would Mohammed Drive?" most of the flak I caught was from the other side of the Middle East conflict. Jewish groups complained that my cartoons critical of Israel's invasion of Lebanon were anti-Semitic because I had drawn Prime Minister Menachem Begin with a big nose. My editors took the strategic position that I drew everyone's nose big. At one point, editorial pages were spread out on the floor for editors to measure with a ruler the noses of various Jewish and non-Jewish figures in my cartoons.

After I moved to the Northeast, it was Catholics I offended. At New York Newsday, I drew a close-up of the pope wearing a button that read "No Women Priests." There was an arrow pointing to his forehead and the inscription from Matthew 16:18: "Upon This Rock I Will Build My Church." The Newsday switchboard lit up like a Vegas wedding chapel. Newsday ran an apology for the cartoon, a first in my career, and offered me a chance to respond in a column. The result - though the paper published it in full - got me put on probation for a year by the publisher. That experience inspired the opening scene of my first novel, The Bridge.

The novel's protagonist, a political cartoonist named Pick Cantrell, is fired after beating up his publisher and returns with his wife and son to North Carolina, where he confronts the ghosts of his past in the form of his grandmother, Mama Lucy, the family matriarch and his boyhood nemesis. In an attempt to show how the grandmother became such a formidable ogre, the book flashes back to mill life in the thirties, when Lucy, like my own grandmother, was bayoneted by a National Guardsman during a textile strike. There were obvious autobiographical elements of The Bridge. Like Pick, I would have beaten up my publisher if it had been legal. And The Bridge's fictional setting of Eno, North Carolina, is based loosely on Hillsborough, a former mill village where my ancestors once worked in the cotton mill's weave rooms and where I now live with my family. These days the town features an advanced white-wine-and-Brie-in-bulk community of writers and other bourgeois bohemians. Various members of the community were given highly fictionalized analogs in the novel, from a vegan restaurateur to a sex-toy manufacturer. But most of the book came straight from the imagination.

I'm not sure I expected my foray into what Mark Twain called the "littery" world to be a stroll through a Bloomsbury garden, but I surely did not expect the Taliban, or as some people in my town of Hillsborough called the literary terrorists who went after my book, "HillQaeda."

A neighbor of mine thought he recognized himself in the gay-writer character, Ruffin Strudwick, the author of a Civil War best seller, "told from the point of view of a female Confederate spy," which had "created an uproar among Civil War scholars by suggesting that the relationship between Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson was latently homosexual." It's true, my neighbor made a name for himself by taking on the fictional persona of a Confederate female (not a spy), but the fictional Strudwick was a composite. In fact, his troubled relationship with his father prompted Pat Conroy's sister to write and thank me for basing Strudwick on her brother. Their father, The Great Santini, "would just love how you made Pat gay," she said. The only literal trait my neighbor shared with Strudwick was a weakness for vintage costumes and red high-tops. If I had to defend myself for lifting those details, I would contend that dressing like that around a cartoonist amounts to entrapment.

Sadly, the title of my first chapter - "A Gift for Pissing People Off" - proved to be all too nonfictional. As the galleys of the novel circulated, the offended writer wept like a televangelist to anyone who would listen, claiming he had been viciously caricatured. Another local writer known for her "niceness" called urging me to change my book. Amused as I was to see literary sophisticates behaving like small-town provincials (this is North Carolina; hadn't they read Thomas Wolfe?), the smile was presently wiped off my face. A local publicist I had hired to promote my book called in tears after being told by the nice writer's husband that she would never work in this town again if she continued to represent me. Then the rector of the Episcopal church my family attended complained about the Strudwick character and, lest he be mistaken for the earthy minister in the novel, contacted my publisher and asked to have his name removed from the acknowledgments. This, of course, set off alarms within my publishing house, which brought in lawyers to vet the novel for libel.

Then the weeping writer's close friend who managed the campus bookstore at the University of North Carolina (where I had just become a visiting professor) canceled my book signing there. She tried to get other booksellers around the state to do likewise, on the ground that The Bridge was "homophobic trash." (Her bookstore sells T-shirts that proclaim, "I read banned books.")

Reviews were posted on Amazon.com trashing The Bridge, repeating the homophobia charge, all with similarly worded, weirdly personal talking points. A bit of verse was sent anonymously to my home address: "May maggots munch your belly-bone and rats chew on your ears . . . ." My wife, who had already been shunned on the street and at the local latt? bar, read it as a death threat.

I resisted the impulse to respond. My day job requires enough gladiatorial duty on behalf of free speech. And the attempts to censor my novel weren't really a First Amendment abuse: the government wasn't trying to shut me up (unless you count that state-owned campus bookstore) - only a bunch of unarmed and dangerous writers. Besides, my brothers and sisters in the free press covered my flank nicely. Syndicated columnist Kathleen Parker, for instance, called the attack "a panty-wadding fatwa," adding "I, for one, can't wait for the cartoon."

But how do you cartoon a cartoon? It's a problem of redundancy in this hyperbolic age to caricature an already extravagantly distorted culture. When writers try to censor other writers, we're in Toontown. We are in deep trouble when victimhood becomes a sacrament, personal injury a point of pride, when irreverence is seen as a hate crime, when the true values of art and religion are distorted and debased by fanatics and zealots, whether in the name of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the Prophet Mohammed, or a literary Cult of Narcissus.

It was the cynically outrageous charge of homophobia against my book that brought me around to the similarities between the true believers I was used to dealing with and the postmodern secular humanist Church Ladies wagging their fingers at me. The threads that connect the CAIR and the literary fatwas, besides technological sabotage, are entreaties to "sensitivity," appeals to institutional guilt, and faith in a corporate culture of controversy avoidance. Niceness is the new face of censorship in this country.

The censors no longer come to us in jackboots with torches and baying dogs in the middle of the night. They arrive now in broad daylight with marketing surveys and focus-group findings. They come as teams, not armies, trained in effectiveness, certified in sensitivity, and wielding degrees from the Columbia journalism school. They're known not for their bravery but for their efficiency. They show gallantry only when they genuflect to apologize.

The most disturbing thing about the "Mohammed" experience was that a laptop Luftwaffe was able to blitz editors into not running the cartoon in my own newspaper. "WWMD" ran briefly on the Tallahassee Democrat Web site, but once an outcry was raised, the editors pulled it and banned it from the newspaper altogether.

The cyberprotest by CAIR showed a sophisticated understanding of what motivates newsroom managers these days - bottom-line concerns, a wish for the machinery to run smoothly, and the human-resources mandate not to offend. Many of my e-mail detractors appeared to be well-educated, recent ?migr?s. Even if their English sometimes faltered, they were fluent in the language of victimhood. Presumably, victimization was one of their motives for leaving their native countries, yet the subtext of many of their letters was that this country should be more like the ones they emigrated from. They had the American know-how without the know-why. In the name of tolerance, in the name of their peaceful God, they threatened violence against someone they accused of falsely accusing them of violence.

With the rise of the bottom-line culture and the corporatization of newsgathering, tolerance itself has become commodified and denuded of its original purpose. Consequently, the best part of the American character - our generous spirit, our sense of fair play - has been turned against us. Tolerance has become a tool of coercion, of institutional inhibition, of bureaucratic self-preservation. We all should take pride in how this country for the most part curbed the instinct to lash out at Arab-Americans in the wake of 9/11. One of the great strengths of this nation is our sensitivity to the tyranny of the majority, our sense of justice for all. But the First Amendment, the miracle of our system, is not just a passive shield of protection. In order to maintain our true, nationally defining diversity, it obligates journalists to be bold, writers to be full-throated and uninhibited, and those blunt instruments of the free press, cartoonists like me, not to self-censor. We must use it or lose it.

Political cartoonists daily push the limits of free speech. They were once the embodiment of journalism's independent voice. Today they are as endangered a species as bald eagles. The professional troublemaker has become a luxury that offends the bottom-line sensibilities of corporate journalism. Twenty years ago, there were two hundred of us working on daily newspapers. Now there are only ninety. Herblock is dead. Jeff MacNelly is dead. And most of the rest of us might as well be. Just as r?sum? hounds have replaced newshounds in today's newsrooms, ambition has replaced talent at the drawing boards. Passion has yielded to careerism, Thomas Nast to Eddie Haskell. With the retirement of Paul Conrad at the Los Angeles Times, a rolling blackout from California has engulfed the country, dimming the pilot lights on many American editorial pages. Most editorial cartoons now look as bland as B-roll and as impenetrable as a 1040 form.

We know what happens to the bald eagle when it's not allowed to reproduce and its habitat is contaminated. As the species is thinned, the eco-balance is imperiled.

Why should we care about the obsolescence of the editorial cartoonist? Because cartoons can't say "on the other hand," because they strain reason and logic, because they are hard to defend and thus are the acid test of the First Amendment, and that is why they must be preserved.

What would Marlette drive? Forget SUVs and armored cars. It would be an all-terrain vehicle you don't need a license for. Not a foreign import, but American-made. It would be built with the same grit and gumption my grandmother showed when she faced down government soldiers in the struggle for economic justice, and the courage my father displayed as a twenty-year-old when he waded ashore in the predawn darkness of Salerno and Anzio. It would be fueled by the freedom spirit that both grows out of our Constitution and is protected by it - fiercer than any fatwa, tougher than all the tanks in the army, and more powerful than any bunker-buster.

If I drew you a picture it might look like the broken-down jalopy driven by the Joads from Oklahoma to California. Or like the Cadillac that Jack Kerouac took on the road in his search for nirvana. Or the pickup Woody Guthrie hitched a ride in on that ribbon of highway, bound for glory. Or the International Harvester Day-Glo school bus driven cross-country by Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters. Or the Trailways and Greyhound buses the Freedom Riders boarded to face the deadly backroads of Mississippi and Alabama. Or the moonbuggy Neil Armstrong commanded on that first miraculous trip to the final frontier.

What would Marlette drive? The self-evident, unalienable American model of democracy that we as a young nation discovered and road-tested for the entire world: the freedom to be ourselves, to speak the truth as we see it, and to drive it home.

(http://dougmarlette.com/img10.gif)
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 03, 2005, 12:10:00 AM
Sent to me by a friend in the Israeli IDF
===========================

ISRAELI ACHIEVEMENTS FRUSTRATE
FRENCH AMBASSADOR IN ENGLAND!

By Prof. D. Koller

Here is a capsule of accomplishments you may not be fully aware of. I thought you might find these statistics interesting.

The Middle East has been growing date palms for centuries. The average tree is about 18-20 feet tall and yields about 38 pounds of dates a year. Israeli trees are now yielding 400 pounds/year and are short enough to be harvested from the ground or a short ladder.

Israel, the 100th smallest country, with less than 1/1000th of the world's population, can lay claim to the following:

The cell phone was developed in Israel by Israelis working in the Israeli branch of Motorola, which has its largest development center in Israel. Most of the Windows NT and XP operating systems were developed by Microsoft-Israel.

The Pentium MMX Chip technology was designed in Israel at Intel. Both the Pentium-4 microprocessor and the Centrino processor were entirely designed, developed and produced in Israel.

The Pentium microprocessor in your computer was most likely made in Israel.

Voice mail technology was developed in Israel.

Both Microsoft and Cisco built their only R&D facilities outside the US in Israel.

The technology for the AOL Instant Messenger ICQ was developed in 1996 by four young Israelis.

Israel has the fourth largest air force in the world (after the U. S, Russia and China). In addition to a large variety of other aircraft, Israel's air force has an aerial arsenal of over 250 F-16's. This is the largest fleet of F-16 aircraft outside of the U. S.

According to industry officials, Israel designed the airline industry's most impenetrable flight security. U. S. officials now look to Israel for advice on how to handle airborne security threats.

Israel's $100 billion economy is larger than all of its immediate neighbors combined. Israel has the highest percentage in the world of home computers per capita.

Israel has the highest ratio of university degrees to the population in the world.

Israel produces more scientific papers per capita than any other nation by a large margin - 109 per 10,000 people -- as well as one of the highest per capita rates of patents filed.

In proportion to its population, Israel has the largest number of startup companies in the world. In absolute terms, Israel has the largest number of startup companies than any other country in the world, except the U. S. (3,500 companies mostly in hi-tech).

With more than 3,000 high-tech companies and startups, Israel has the highest concentration of hi-tech companies in the world -- apart from the Silicon Valley, U. S.

Israel is ranked #2 in the world for venture capital funds right behind the U. S.

Outside the United States and Canada, Israel has the largest number of NASDAQ listed companies.

Israel has the highest average living standards in the Middle East. The per capita income in 2000 was over $17,500, exceeding that of the UK.

On a per capita basis, Israel has the largest number of biotech startups.

Twenty-four per cent of Israel's workforce holds university degrees -- ranking third in the industrialized world, after the United States and Holland - and 12 per cent hold advanced degrees. Israel is the only liberal democracy in the Middle East.

In 1984 and 1991, Israel airlifted a total of 22,000 Ethiopian Jews at risk in Ethiopia, to safety in Israel.

When Golda Meir was elected Prime Minister of Israel in 1969, she became the world's second elected female leader in modern times.

When the U. S. Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya was bombed in 1998, Israeli rescue teams were on the scene within a day -- and saved three victims from the rubble.

Israel has the third highest rate of entrepreneurship -- and the highest rate among women and among people over 55 - in the world.

Relative to its population, Israel is the largest immigrant-absorbing nation on earth. Immigrants come in search of democracy, religious freedom, and economic opportunity.

Israel was the first nation in the world to adopt the Kimberly process, an international standard that certifies diamonds as "conflict free."

Israel has the world's second highest per capita of new books.

Israel is the only country in the world that entered the 21st century with a net gain in its number of trees, made more remarkable because this was achieved in an area considered mainly desert.

Israel has more museums per capita than any other country.

Medicine... Israeli scientists developed the first fully computerized, no-radiation, diagnostic instrumentation for breast cancer.

An Israeli company developed a computerized system for ensuring proper administration of medications, thus removing human error from medical treatment. Every year in U. S. hospitals 7,000 patients die from treatment mistakes.

Israel's Givun Imaging developed the first ingestible video camera, so small it fits inside a pill. Used to view the small intestine from the inside, the camera helps doctors diagnose cancer and digestive disorders.

Researchers in Israel developed a new device that directly helps the heart pump blood, an innovation with the potential to save lives among those with heart failure. The new device is synchronized with the heart's mechanical operations through a sophisticated system of sensors.

Israel leads the world in the number of scientists and technicians in the workforce, with 145 per 10,000, as opposed to 85 in the U. S., over 70 in Japan, and less than 60 in Germany. With over 25% of its work force employed in technical professions.

Israel places first in this category as well. A new acne treatment developed in Israel, the Clear Light device, produces a high-intensity, ultraviolet-light-free, narrow-band blue light that causes acne bacteria to self-destruct -- all without damaging surrounding skin or tissue.

An Israeli company was the first to develop and install a large-scale solar-powered and fully functional electricity generating plant, in southern California's Mojave desert.

All the above while engaged in regular wars with an implacable enemy that seeks its destruction, and an economy continuously under strain by having to spend more per capita on its own protection than any other country on earth.

AND THE FRENCH AMBASSADOR IN ENGLAND SAYS WE ARE NOTHING BUT A "SH***Y LITTLE COUNTRY"!!!

====================

Prof. D. Koller is at the Institute of Life Sciences, The Hebrew University.
Title: The Toothless Teeth Gnashers
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on February 04, 2005, 10:33:40 AM
Whoo, still trying to catch my breath after reading this one. No prisoners taken here:


February 04, 2005, 7:50 a.m.
The Global Throng
Why the world?s elites gnash their teeth.


Do we even remember "all that" now? The lunacy that appeared after 9/11 that asked us to look for the "root causes" to explain why America may have "provoked" spoiled mama's boys like bin Laden and Mohammed Atta to murder Americans at work? Do we recall the successive litany of "you cannot win in Afghanistan/you cannot reconstruct such a mess/you cannot jumpstart democracy there"? And do we have memory still of "Sharon the war criminal," and "the apartheid wall," and, of course, "Jeningrad," the supposed Israeli-engineered Stalingrad ? or was it really Leningrad? Or try to remember Arafat in his Ramallah bunker talking to international groupies who flew in to hear the old killer's jumbled mishmash about George Bush, the meanie who had ostracized him.

Then we were told that if we dared invade the ancient caliphate, Saddam would kill thousands and exile millions more. And when he was captured in a cesspool, the invective continued during the hard reconstruction that oil, Halliburton, the Jews, the neocons, Richard Perle, and other likely suspects had suckered us into a "quagmire" or was it now "Vietnam redux"? And recall that in response we were supposed to flee, or was it to trisect Iraq? The elections, remember, would not work ? or were held too soon or too late. And give the old minotaur Senator Kennedy his due, as he lumbered out on the eve of the Iraqi voting to hector about its failure and call for withdrawal ? one last hurrah that might yet rescue the cherished myth that the United States had created another Vietnam and needed his sort of deliverance.

And then there was the parade of heroes who were media upstarts of the hour ? the brilliant Hans Blixes, Joe Wilsons, Anonymouses, and Richard Clarkes ? who came, wrote their books, did their fawning interviews on 60 Minutes, Nightline, and Larry King, and then faded to become footnotes to our collective pessimism.

Do not dare forget our Hollywood elite. At some point since 9/11, Michael Moore, Sean Penn, Meryl Streep, Jessica Lange, Whoopi Goldberg, and a host of others have lectured the world that their America is either misled, stupid, evil, or insane, bereft of the wisdom of Hollywood's legions of college drop-outs, recovering bad boys, and self-praised autodidacts.

Remember the twisted logic of the global throng as well: Anyone who quit the CIA was a genius in his renegade prognostication; anyone who stayed was a toady who botched the war. Three- and four-star generals who went on television or ran for office were principled dissidents who "told the truth"; officers in the field who kept quiet and saved Afghanistan and Iraq were "muzzled" careerists. Families of the 9/11 victims who publicly trashed George Bush offered the nation "grassroots" cries of the heart; the far greater number who supported the war on terror were perhaps "warped" by their grief.

There were always the untold "minor" embarrassments that we were to ignore as the slight slips of the "good" people ? small details like the multibillion-dollar Oil-for-Food scandal that came to light due to the reporting of a single brave maverick, Claudia Rosett, or Rathergate, disclosed by "pajama"-clad bloggers without journalism degrees from Columbia, sojourns at the Kennedy School, or internships with the Washington Post. To put it into Animal Farm speak: elite New York Times, CBS News, and PBS good; populist bloggers, talk-radio, and cable news bad.

In place of Harry Truman and JFK we got John Kerry calling the once-maimed Prime Minister Allawi a "puppet," Senator Murray praising bin Laden's social-welfare work, Senator Boxer calling Secretary of State Rice a veritable liar for agreeing with the various casus belli that Boxer's own Senate colleagues had themselves passed in October 2002. And for emotional and financial support, the Democratic insiders turned to George Soros and Michael Moore, who assured them that their president was either Hitlerian, a dunce, or a deserter.

Then there was our media's hysteria: Donald Rumsfeld should be sacked in the midst of war; Abu Ghraib was the moral equivalent of everything from Saddam's gulag to the Holocaust; the U.S. military purportedly tried to kill reporters; and always the unwillingness or inability to condemn the beheaders, fascists, and suicide murderers, who sought to destroy any shred of liberalism. Meanwhile, the isolation of a corrupt Arafat, the withdrawal of 10,000 Americans from a Wahhabi theocracy, the transformation of the world's far-right monstrosities into reformed democracies, and the pull-back of some troops from Germany and the DMZ went unnoticed.

What explains this automatic censure of the United States, Israel, and to a lesser extent the Anglo-democracies of the United Kingdom and Australia? Westernization, coupled with globalization, has created an affluent and leisured elite that now gravitates to universities, the media, bureaucracies, and world organizations, all places where wealth is not created, but analyzed, critiqued, and lavishly spent.

Thus we now expect that the New York Times, Harper's, Le Monde, U.N. functionaries who call us "stingy," French diplomats, American writers and actors will all (1) live a pretty privileged life; (2) in recompense "feel" pretty worried and guilty about it; (3) somehow connect their unease over their comfort with a pathology of the world's hyperpower, the United States; and (4) thus be willing to risk their elite status, power, or wealth by very brave acts such as writing anguished essays, giving pained interviews, issuing apologetic communiqu?s, braving the rails to Davos, and barking off-the-cuff furious remarks about their angst over themes (1) through (3) above. What a sad contrast they make with far better Iraqis dancing in the street to celebrate their voting.

There is something else to this shrillness of the global throng besides the obvious fact of hypocrisy ? that very few of the world's Westernized cynical echelon ever move to the ghetto to tutor those they champion in the abstract, reside in central Africa to feed the poor, give up tenure to ensure employment for the exploited lecturer, or pass on the Washington or New York A-list party to eat in the lunch hall with the unwashed. Davos after all, is not quite central Bolivia or the Sudan.

First, there is a tremendous sense of impotence. Somehow sharp looks alone, clever repartee, long lists of books read and articles cited, or global travel do not automatically result in commensurate power. So what exactly is wrong with these stupid people of Nebraska who would elect a dense, Christian-like George Bush when a Gore Vidal, George Soros, Ben Affleck, Bruce Springsteen, or Ted Kennedy warned them not to?

If the American Left is furious over the loss of most of the nation's governorships and legislatures, the U.S. House, the Senate, the presidency, and soon the Supreme Court, the Europeans themselves are furious over America's power ? as if Red America is to Blue America as America is to Europe itself. Thus how can a mongrel culture of Taco Bell, Bud Light, and Desperate Housewives project such military and political influence abroad when the soft, subtle triangulation of far more cultured diplomats and sophisticated intellectuals from France, Germany, and Scandinavia is ignored by thugs from Iran, North Korea, and most of the Middle East?

Why would the world listen to a stumbling George Bush when it could be mesmerized by a poet, biographer, aristocrat, and metrosexual of the caliber of a Monsieur Dominique de Villepin? Why praise brave Iraqis lining up to vote, while at the same hour the defeated John Kerry somberly intones on Tim Russert's show that he really did go into Cambodia to supply arms to the mass-murdering Khmer Rouge ? a statement that either cannot be true or is almost an admission of being a party to crimes against humanity if it is.

Second, political powerlessness follows from ideological exhaustion. Communism and Marxism are dead. Stalin and Mao killed over 80 million and did not make omelets despite the broken eggs. Castro and North Korea are not classless utopias but thugocracies run by megalomaniac dictators who the world prays will die any minute. The global Left knows that the Cold War is over and was lost by the Left, and that Eastern Europeans and Central Americans probably cherish the memory of a Ronald Reagan far more than that of a Francois Mitterrand or Willy Brandt.

But it is still more disheartening than that. In the 1960s and 1970s we were told that free-market America was becoming an anachronism. Remember Japan, Inc., whose amalgam of "Asian Values" and Western capitalism presaged the decline of the United States? Europeanists still assured us that a 35-hour work week, cradle-to-grave entitlement, and secularism were to be the only workable Western paradigms ? before high unemployment, low growth, stagnant worker productivity, unassimilated minorities, declining birthrates, and disarmament suggested that just maybe something is going very wrong in a continent that is not so eager for either God or children.

Perhaps the result of this frustration is that European intellectuals damn the United States for action in Iraq, but lament that they could do nothing in the Balkans. Democrats at home talk of the need for idealism abroad, but fear the dirty road of war that sometimes is part of that bargain ? thus the retreat into "democracy is good, BUT..." So here we have the global throng that focuses on one purported American crime to the next, as it simmers in the luxury of its privilege, education, and sophistication ? and exhibits little power, new ideas, intellectual seriousness, or relevance.

In this context, the Iraqi elections were surely poorly attended, or illegitimate, or ruined by violence, or irrelevant, or staged by America ? or almost anything other than a result of a brave, very risky, and costly effort by the United States military to destroy a fascist regime and offer something better in its place.

Yet as Yeehah! Howard Dean takes over the Democratic party, as Kojo Annan's dad limps to the end of his tenure, and as a Saddam-trading Jacques Chirac talks grandly of global airfare taxes to help the poor, they should all ask themselves whether a weary public is listening any longer to the hyped and canned stories of their own courage and brilliance.

? Victor Davis Hanson is a military historian and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. His website is victorhanson.com.

http://nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson200502040750.asp
Title: Re: The Toothless Teeth Gnashers
Post by: alex on February 05, 2005, 03:32:02 AM
Quote from: buzwardo
Do we recall the successive litany of "you cannot win in Afghanistan/you cannot reconstruct such a mess/you cannot jumpstart democracy there"?


No, we don't. I recall an international effort by most of the nations that the author is attacking, to get retribution for a terrorist attack on America. Obviously that would get in the way of the "Euros and Liberals are all asshats" rant so never mind.
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 05, 2005, 06:52:46 AM
Woof Alex:

That's pretty witty. :lol:   In particular the UK, Australia, and Poland have been good friends to us in all this, with the UK being especially noteworthy.  Point gladly acknowledged.

That said, there were quite a few voices out there on Afghanistan as VDH says.  That you didn't notice them speaks well of you :) so may I offer that his words be taken as a matter of "If the shoe fits, wear it"?

CD

PS:  There is a reason this thread has the word "Rant" in its name :wink:
Title: Political Rants
Post by: alex on February 06, 2005, 03:01:46 AM
Quote from: Crafty_Dog


PS:  There is a reason this thread has the word "Rant" in its name :wink:



haha ok fair enough


Quote
Woof Alex:

That's pretty witty. :lol:   In particular the UK, Australia, and Poland have been good friends to us in all this, with the UK being especially noteworthy.  Point gladly acknowledged.

That said, there were quite a few voices out there on Afghanistan as VDH says.  That you didn't notice them speaks well of you :) so may I offer that his words be taken as a matter of "If the shoe fits, wear it"?

CD



In fact French Special Forces are still helping US troops in hunting for Osama Bin Laden. Most of Europe had troops in Afghanistan. Yet many people ignore that fact when labelling the French as traitors in the War On Terror, and Euros in general as lazy, corrupt, elitist bystanders.




Quote
Westernization, coupled with globalization, has created an affluent and leisured elite that now gravitates to universities, the media, bureaucracies, and world organizations, all places where wealth is not created, but analyzed, critiqued, and lavishly spent.


Quote
(1) live a pretty privileged life; (2) in recompense "feel" pretty worried and guilty about it; (3) somehow connect their unease over their comfort with a pathology of the world's hyperpower, the United States; and (4) thus be willing to risk their elite status, power, or wealth by very brave acts such as writing anguished essays, giving pained interviews, issuing apologetic communiqu?s, braving the rails to Davos, and barking off-the-cuff furious remarks about their angst over themes (1) through (3) above.


Those comments are pretty funny coming from a Fellow of Stanford University.
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 06, 2005, 06:29:42 AM
Woof Alex:

"In fact French Special Forces are still helping US troops in hunting for Osama Bin Laden. Most of Europe had troops in Afghanistan. Yet many people ignore that fact when labelling the French as traitors in the War On Terror, and Euros in general as lazy, corrupt, elitist bystanders."

Agreed that in some cases the support in Afghanistan was reasonably substantial, but in some cases it was rather minimalist and required pulling teeth.

Although I supported and despite some poor execution by our civilian leadership continue to support our efforts in Iraq and elsewhere, I readily agree that a fair case could and was made that our actions in Iraq were not a good idea and would end badly and the nations of Europe are free and sovereign (well maybe not so sovereign anymore with the Euro Union  :wink: ) to support us or not.

Where I think the anger with France and (certain elements elsewhere in Europe) comes is in its activities to actively sabatoge our play in Iraq.  These are NOT the actions of a friend.  I have not the time or mood to rehash this again, but it was France that:

1) sold the nuclear technology to SH that it was using in its efforts to go nuclear.  Thank God that the Israelis acted at Osirak to take it out-- otherwise we would have been facing a nuclear SH when he invaded Kuwait and the west would have lacked the will to oppose him, which IMHO means he would now be the ruler of the entire Arabian peninsula with all the power that comes from being militarily successful in this way and all the oil revenues he would be receiving.

BTW it was Chirac himself who was responsible for the sale of the nuke tech to SH and there has been extensive warm correspondence between the two of them over the years.

2) disallowed US overflights of France when we had to go after Qadaffi n Libya.

3) for some 20 years had a deal with various terrorist organizations that they could go through France as long as they left France alone

4) there's more of this sort of thing, but at 0600 this Sunday AM it slips my mind.

This is the background of France's perfidy in actively undercutting our play against SH.  

So far the investigations of the Oil for Food program show that three members of the UN Security Council were on the take: France, Russia and China.  (Not on the SC but also on the take were many other countries from Eruope and elsewhere as well.)  

Russia and China are not our friends, but France was supposed to be and its actions (and those of other Euro friends) have cost American lives by making things harder for us.  It is pretty natural for us to be upset about this.

What drives all of this?  In Chirac's case the answer appears to be pretty ugly.  As for the part of Europe that opposes us in our course of action (and I do note just how much of Europe does support us) here is one German's answer:

Woof,
Crafty Dog
=======================

ONE GERMAN WHO GETS IT

Matthias Dapfner, Chief Executive of the huge German publisher Axel Springer AG, has written a blistering attack in DIE WELT, Germany's largest daily newspaper, against the timid reaction of Europe in the face of the Islamic threat.

EUROPE - THY NAME IS COWARDICE
(Commentary by Mathias Dapfner CEO, Axel Springer, AG)

A few days ago Henry Broder wrote in Welt am Sonntag, "Europe - your family name is appeasement." It's a phrase you can't get out of your head because it's so terribly true.

Appeasement cost millions of Jews and non-Jews their lives as England and France, allies at the time, negotiated and hesitated too long before they noticed that Hitler had to be fought, not bound to toothless agreements.

Appeasement legitimized and stabilized Communism in the Soviet Union, then East Germany, then all the rest of Eastern Europe where for decades, inhuman, suppressive, murderous governments were glorified as the ideologically correct alternative to all other possibilities.

Appeasement crippled Europe when genocide ran rampant in Kosovo, and even though we had absolute proof of ongoing mass-murder, we Europeans debated and debated and debated, and were still debating when finally the Americans had to come from halfway around the world, into Europe yet again, and do our work for us.

Rather than protecting democracy in the Middle East, European appeasement, camouflaged behind the fuzzy word "equidistance," now countenances suicide bombings in Israel by fundamentalist Palestinians.

Appeasement generates a mentality that allows Europe to ignore nearly 500,000 victims of Saddam's torture and murder machinery and, motivated by the self-righteousness of the peace-movement, has the gall to issue bad grades to George Bush... Even as it is uncovered that the loudest critics of the American action in Iraq made illicit billions, no, TENS of billions, in the corrupt U. N. Oil-for-Food program.

And now we are faced with a particularly grotesque form of appeasement...How is Germany reacting to the escalating violence by Islamic fundamentalists in Holland and elsewhere? By suggesting that we really should have a "Muslim Holiday" in Germany.

I wish I were joking, but I am not. A substantial fraction of our (German) Government, and if the polls are to be believed, the German people, actually believe that creating an Official State "Muslim Holiday" will somehow spare us from the wrath of the fanatical Islamists.

One cannot help but recall Britain's Neville Chamberlain waving the laughable treaty signed by Adolf Hitler, and declaring European "Peace in our time".

What else has to happen before the European public and its political leadership get it? There is a sort of crusade underway, an especially perfidious crusade consisting of systematic attacks by fanatic Muslims, focused on civilians, directed against our free, open Western societies, and intent upon Western Civilization's utter destruction.

It is a conflict that will most likely last longer than any of the great military conflicts of the last century - a conflict conducted by an enemy that cannot be tamed by "tolerance" and "accommodation" but is actually spurred on by such gestures, which have proven to be, and will always be taken by the Islamists for signs of weakness.

Only two recent American Presidents had the courage needed for anti-appeasement: Reagan and Bush. His American critics may quibble over the details, but we Europeans know the truth. We saw it first hand: Ronald Reagan ended the Cold War, freeing half of the German people from nearly 50 years of terror and virtual slavery. And Bush, supported only by the Social Democrat Blair, acting on moral conviction, recognized the danger in the Islamic War against democracy. His place in history will have to be evaluated after a number of years have passed.

In the meantime, Europe sits back with charismatic self-confidence in the multicultural corner, instead of defending liberal society's values and being an attractive center of power on the same playing field as the true great powers, America and China.

On the contrary - we Europeans present ourselves, in contrast to those "arrogant Americans", as the World Champions of "tolerance", which even (Germany's Interior Minister) Otto Schily justifiably criticizes. Why? Because we're so moral? I fear it's more because we're so materialistic, so devoid of a moral compass.

For his policies, Bush risks the fall of the dollar, huge amounts of additional national debt, and a massive and persistent burden on the American economy - because unlike almost all of Europe, Bush realizes what is at stake - literally everything.

While we criticize the "capitalistic robber barons" of America because they seem too sure of their priorities, we timidly defend our Social Welfare systems. Stay out of it! It could get expensive! We'd rather discuss reducing our 35-hour workweek or our dental coverage, or our 4 weeks of paid vacation... Or listen to TV pastors preach about the need to "reach out to terrorists. To understand and forgive".

These days, Europe reminds me of an old woman who, with shaking hands, frantically hides her last pieces of jewelry when she notices a robber breaking into a neighbor's house.

Appeasement? Europe, thy name is Cowardice
Title: Political Rants
Post by: alex on February 06, 2005, 08:27:14 AM
Quote from: Crafty_Dog
Appeasement cost millions of Jews and non-Jews their lives as England and France, allies at the time, negotiated and hesitated too long before they noticed that Hitler had to be fought, not bound to toothless agreements.


....


Appeasement? Europe, thy name is Cowardice



That's also an interesting twisting of the facts to attack the Euros. FYI WWII started in 1939 when France and Britain declared war on Germany in support of their ally, Poland. The US entered the war in 1941 only after being attacked by both Germany and Japan and with a formal declaration of war from both.


Maybe the US should feel guilty for having "hesitated too long".







I don't want to turn my own posts into Euro-centric rants either by the way. The last thing I want to do is disrespect you in your own forum, so maybe we should drop it.

Incidentally although I thought the invasion of Iraq was a bad idea to start with I firmly believe that now the damage is essentially done (in terms of the cost in military and civilian lives) our only course is to finish the job as intended - doing everything we can to help build an economically functional, democratic Iraq. It is the only way to get even close to the end justifying the means.
Title: Sheesh. . . .
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on February 06, 2005, 10:57:46 AM
Quote
That's also an interesting twisting of the facts to attack the Euros. FYI WWII started in 1939 when France and Britain declared war on Germany in support of their ally, Poland. The US entered the war in 1941 only after being attacked by both Germany and Japan and with a formal declaration of war from both.

Maybe the US should feel guilty for having "hesitated too long".


Oh my goodness. There is no reason to believe that anything fruitful will spring from further discussion, but there are a couple of comments here that I'm afraid I can't abide

WWII started when France and Britain declared war? That measure utterly ignores causality; many better lines of demarcation exist. Perhaps it began when the treaty of Versailles was utterly abrogated by Germany; maybe it began when Hitler staged fake attacks from Poland he then used as pretext; then again maybe when the Fascists in Germany usurped power by extra-constitutional means best marks the date; or perhaps the onset of the Nazi's eugenic madness can be considered the start.

After trying long and hard to ignore Hitler's imperial ends, France and Britain finally and formally acknowledged that a madman's brinkmanship left them no other choice but to fight. Claiming WWII started when the obvious was acknowledged is like saying the AIDs epidemic began when HIV was named. In both instances a lot of death and destruction occurred long before the talking heads made formal noise.

As for any guilt the US should feel . . . the US was in the midst of an economic depression, a strong strain of isolationism had swept the land, a significant portion of the population traced its roots back to Germany, nations most proximate to the threat were embracing appeasement, and indeed the threat was on the other side of the freaking Atlantic ocean. The surprise is not that the US stayed out of the war for so long, the surprise is that despite all sorts of very compelling reasons to let the Euros settle their own affairs many US politicians took very large political risks that almost certainly lead the US into another war far removed from its shores.

Was Lend Lease a sign of US hesitance? How about the massive rearmament program undertaken in the midst of a depression? Perhaps supplying Chenault and allowing our fighter pilots to resign their commissions and fight in China shows how we sought to duck and cover? Maybe the massive intelligence effort started up from near scratch demarks our hesitance? Or perhaps American meddling merely demonstrates we are parochial dunces before the feces hits the fan, and hesitant fools if we wait for the sh*t storm to reach our shores.

Sheesh. . . .
Title: Re: Sheesh. . . .
Post by: alex on February 06, 2005, 11:59:41 AM
Quote from: buzwardo
Or perhaps American meddling merely demonstrates we are parochial dunces before the feces hits the fan, and hesitant fools if we wait for the sh*t storm to reach our shores.

Sheesh. . . .



Is that better than the logic which blames the whole of Europe for a world war which covered Europe, the Atlantic Ocean, Asia and the Pacific?

I do not blame the US for waiting until Pearl Harbour to realize the threat from the Axis powers. The fact remains that British and French soldiers and civilians were giving their lives to end the threat of National Socialism long before the Americans entered the war.

The current American trend towards citing European action pre-WWII as symptomatic of the same attitudes towards Iraq clearly ignore the fact that at best the US held the same "stick your head in the sand" attitude, but for longer - despite the fact that the threat from the Axis always DID include a direct threat to America, but from the West rather than the East.



This is not an attack on America for the action in Iraq. I can understand perfectly the logic behind the action. But I can also understand that people can disagree with the reasoning behind it without being Elitist-liberal Eurocowards, and referencing a war 60 years old fought under a totally different set of circumstances is a perfect example of an ad hominem attack on those who opposed this action in Iraq.

That's why writers always ignore Afghanistan when using this comparison - the fact that virtually every western nation supported the US in removing the Taliban (and still does in the hunt for Osama) makes a nonsense of the argument that Euros have some kind of character flaw dating back to 1933.
Title: Political Rants
Post by: alex on February 06, 2005, 12:27:08 PM
Incindentally

Quote
Or perhaps American meddling merely demonstrates we are parochial dunces before the feces hits the fan,


That clearly is the attitude that some people hold. I just want everybody to know, I don't agree with it. The trend towards generalized labelling of a people and/or culture as one thing or another, frankly makes me sick.

I am a great admirer of many aspects of American culture and values, this European "Yanks are dumb" snobbery is for ignorant jerks.
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on February 06, 2005, 04:32:45 PM
Like the warden says in Cool Hand Luke: ?What we got here . . . is failure to communicate.?

I?m home with two kids today both recovering from strep and so have exhausted my ration of thoughtful keyboard time for the day. Can?t escape the sensation, moreover, that all I?ll manage to do is further contribute to cascading non-sequiturs producing more heat than illumination. As such I?ll let things lie.

Will say that I?m a fan of well-crafted invective and so will continue to post select pieces when they cross my path. Not looking to pick on anyone in particular; just admire wordsmiths who can narrowly collimate their ire in a sensible fashion.
Title: Compare and Contrast
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on February 11, 2005, 10:41:59 AM
An effective use of the old compare and contrast essay:

Masters of the Game
The Left on Churchill and Summers.

If you're a liberal who's still moping like a dog whose food bowl has been moved, thanks to all the conservative victories of late, I have some words of encouragement for you: You guys are still way, way smarter than we are about some things.

Consider the current flap about Ward Churchill and the recent one about Harvard President Larry Summers.

Ward Churchill, as you've probably heard, is a tenured professor of "ethnic studies" at the University of Colorado. Until recently he was the chairman of the department. When invited to another school to give a talk, it came out that he had written an essay comparing the civilian victims of 9/11 to "little Eichmanns." This was a reference to Adolf Eichmann, the chief architect of the Holocaust.

Known for making factually unencumbered statements about the evils of America, Churchill recently gave an interview in which he said he wanted the "U.S. off the planet. Out of existence altogether." He thinks "more 9/11s" are necessary. He holds no Ph.D., and his scholarship ? for want of a better word ? is under relentless attack. Before the current kerfuffle, he'd attained whatever prominence he had by pretending he was an American Indian radical. He likes to pose with assault rifles. The Rocky Mountain News did a genealogical search of Churchill's past and found that he's basically a vanilla white guy playing Indian and enriching himself in the process. The American Indian Movement called Churchill a fraud years ago.

OK, flash back to the hysteria over Larry Summers. By now his auto-da-f? is old news. But let's recap. One of the most respected economists in America, president of Harvard University, and the former secretary of the Treasury, Summers was invited to a closed-door, off-the-record academic conference at which everyone was encouraged to think unconventionally. Warning his audience several times that he was going to be deliberately "provocative," he suggested that there might be some innate cognitive differences between men and women.

This is not a controversial hypothesis in macroeconomics, and it is losing its taboo status in psychology, genetics, and neuroscience. Thousands of peer-reviewed academic papers have been written on the differences between men and women when it comes to various cognitive functions. Note that I said "differences." Superiority and inferiority don't play into it, and Summers never said otherwise. Indeed, he ventured this hypothesis, after showing his obeisance to the more politically correct explanations: discrimination, not enough effort to recruit women, etc., etc.

So what was the reaction?

An MIT feminist biologist ? who moonlights as a feminist activist ? quickly got the vapors and stormed out of the room for fear of fainting. If she stayed any longer, she explained, she'd vomit. Derrick Jackson of the Boston Globe compared Summers to people who cavalierly bandy about the N-word or who thoughtlessly wear swastikas. One hundred members of the Harvard faculty drafted a letter demanding that he apologize. The National Organization for Women demanded that he resign.

The dean of engineering at the University of Washington called his comments "an intellectual tsunami." Since the Asian catastrophe had only just transpired, the tastelessness of the metaphor may not be as apparent now as it was then. Regardless, if his comments were a tsunami, Summers's critics have certainly cashed in on the disaster-relief effort.

Forced to apologize over and over, Summers was then bullied into appointing not one but two new "task forces" on gender equity. Staffed with 22 women and five men, the task forces will no doubt discover that much more work needs to be done and that Summers should apologize more.

In the Summers affair, free speech and academic freedom barely came up, except among a few conservative commentators and one or two academics who were already known for their political incorrectness. Instead, Summers was a pinata to be bashed for material rewards and to send the message that some subjects ? no matter what the evidence ? are simply taboo even for serious scholars to discuss in closed-door, off-the-record meetings.

Meanwhile, Ward Churchill, whose scholarship is a joke, whose evidence is tendentious at best, and who called the victims of 9/11 the moral equivalent of a man who sent babies to the gas chambers, is a hero of free speech. He has refused to apologize. Many conservatives are forced to defend free speech and "diversity" in academia while liberals let the NOWers feed on Summers's flesh.

Liberals may despise what Churchill said, but it's a matter of principle now. The normally insightful and fair Mort Kondracke declared on Fox News, "I really think it's useful for universities to have people like this around, to show students and the rest of us just how odious some of the ideas of the far Left are." Would Kondracke punt on a professor who'd endorsed slavery? I somehow doubt it.

Hopefully ? and, I think, probably ? someone will find enough academic fraud to fire Churchill for cause. No doubt, we'll hear from many on the left about the "chilling effect" such a move would have on "academic freedom," and many conservatives will clear their throats in embarrassment. You really have to marvel at how the other side has mastered this game.

http://nationalreview.com/goldberg/goldberg200502111210.asp
Title: Some Simple English for A$$hats
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on February 18, 2005, 04:14:47 PM
February 18, 2005, 1:05 p.m.
How to Euro-Speak
A phrasebook for the presidential tourist.

Denis Boyles



Europeans hate the way Americans talk. They think we're loud and uncouth and they don't like our jokes, except for
Michael Moore. Plus, they resent the fact that they?ve had to learn our language because if they didn?t we wouldn?t buy their stupid metric widgets or visit their overpriced ruins.

So when the president goes to Europe to give his speech to all the EU-niks in Brussels on Tuesday, it?s important that he speak clearly ? or at least clearfully. Because there are a few things he needs to say, and they can all be summed up in seven handy, easy-to-utter phrases:

1. Get a job. With their endless vacations and pint-sized workweeks, Europe can?t produce enough of anything ? including more Europeans ? to save themselves from doom. So the French and Germans have only one realistic strategy when it comes to revitalizing their comatose economies: Wait for the U.S. economy to rise high enough to float their petits bateaux. Meanwhile, the EU?s own reports have long shown the complete failure of the Lisbon strategy that was supposed to have the EU on a competitive par with the U.S. by 2010. Now, as noted in the EU Observer, the EU is failing to compete in technology and research, lagging behind not only the U.S., but also countries such as India. ?The EU is falling behind,? admitted EU commissioner Janez Potocnik. ?And we are now under pressure not only compared to our traditional rivals like the U.S. or Japan, but also China, India or Brazil. We are facing a much tougher competition in talent and knowledge than we are used to.? Why? ?We don?t want to achieve our economic growth by lowering the social or environmental standards.?

2. Clean up your mess. As reported here and elsewhere, French leadership of EU and U.N. missions in Congo and Ivory Coast, among other African countries, have led to massive moral and tactical failures as ?peacekeepers? have turned into rapists, thugs, robbers, and killers. In France, according to Le Monde, some survivors of the Rwanda genocide, which would have been impossible without French complicity, are finally being given a chance to ask for a hearing in a French court of law. This will almost certainly be blocked by the government, which has been covering up this gruesome scandal by burying it in slow-mo ?investigations? for a decade now.

3. Stop taking bribes. Humanitarian groups have been screaming about the crisis in Darfur for a long, long time. The U.S. calls what is happening there a ?genocide? ? but the EU won?t buy that because if it did, it?d be forced by law to intervene, something it not only doesn?t want to do, but, logistically, could barely do if it had to. The U.N. Security Council is paralyzed because France, Russia, and China have blocked sanctions against Sudan. They blocked the sanctions because they all have very large oil and other investments there. Of course, this was the same reason the French rendered Security Council resolutions meaningless before the Iraq invasion, so not surprisingly, as the BBC reports, France is doing the same thing once again. The EU has introduced even more delay in bringing peace to Darfur because of a new insistence that war crimes ? assuming anything ever occurs to bring them to justice ? be tried before the ICC, where the U.S. does not participate.

4. Since you can?t defend yourselves, get out of our way. NATO became a work-around for the U.S. in Iraq, and the alliance is now paralyzed because of the EU?s own ambitions, as the International Herald Tribune reports. ?There is paralysis between the EU and NATO,? the paper quotes an EU official as saying. ?We do not discuss anything serious.? If that?s the case, then why are we spending serious billions to keep the thing alive?

5. Knock off the eco-hypocrisy. The Europeans like to parade their agreement to abide by the provisions of the Kyoto pact like members of an Earth Shoe drill team. According to a piece in the IHT, ?[J?rgen] Strube, the chairman of BASF?s supervisory board, responds with a hint of impatience when asked how European industry plans to comply with the Kyoto Protocol, which requires Germany and 34 other countries to reduce their emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. As the treaty takes effect Wednesday, worries about its fairness are mixed with mild resentment [because] in their view? American and Chinese companies will not bear these extra costs.? The item is a pick-up of a New York Times story by Mark Landler, so of course the rather salient fact not reported is that neither France, Germany, nor the rest of the EU will comply with the treaty provisions either. They aren?t about to ?bear these extra costs? when they can barely afford to drive to the beach in August as it is. In fact, the EU has treated Kyoto like its now-toothless debt-limit treaty and given up on it altogether. ?Kyoto im Koma,? were the words of a memorable Suddeutsche Zeitung headline a little over a year ago when the EU?s Kyoto failure was first widely noticed.

6. Start a ?No European Left Behind? program. Anti-Semitism, like anti-Americanism, is a permanent part of the European cultural landscape. But, according to an EU study reported in Le Nouvel Observateur, the situation has ?seriously degraded? in the last five years. Anti-Semitism, needless to say, is a pretty reliable indicator of a lousy education. As a result, it?s impossible to make the French, Germans, Belgians, and others understand that Israel is a consequence of their own bloody history and that they therefore have a responsibility to protect that which they forced into creation. This lack of basic education shows sometimes even among those who go to fancy schools like Eton. In Britain, only a small fraction of people under 30 knew anything about Auschwitz until Prince Charles?s clever lad, Harry, decided to go partying with a swastika on his Nazi costume.

In France, it?s not at all uncommon to meet schoolchildren who have no clear understanding that their government eagerly collaborated in the Holocaust. ?We never learned that in school,? a couple of kids in Provence remarked. Because peace in the Middle East means a greater likelihood of peace in the world, European leaders must explain to their citizens their responsibilities regarding Israel, and stop playing enabler to anti-Semitic terrorism, as France is doing with Hezbollah by refusing to call the terrorists what they are ? and that would be terrorists to anyone but the French and Reuters. This quiet support of Hezbollah is hardly reported in the French press, as this rather disingenuous Lib?ration piece describing Chirac?s flying to Beirut suggests. The description of his gray suit is nice, though.

7. Jacques, Gerhard, get a better campaign issue. Chirac and Schr?der are running nations that, if they were American sitcoms, would be cancelled and sold to European TV networks where they?d run forever, dubbed and dumber. Both nations are in economic sloughs; the Germans in fact are approaching Weimar-levels of unemployment. If they ran on their records in their coming elections, they?d crash faster than this cheap laptop of mine. So for both of these guys, the only campaign issue available is anti-Americanism. In the case of Chirac, it?s just cynical opportunism, sort of what you?d expect from a guy wanted on fraud once he loses his office. In the case of Schr?der and especially German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, it?s blind ideology. As John Vinocur reports in the IHT, the small, cubical Schr?der is not hiding his ambition behind his arrogance:

[A] speech by Gerhard Schr?der, billed as a German-take-on-the-world and read out by Defense Minister Peter Struck (Schr?der called in sick), grated. The Bush folk, trying so hard to be Europe-amenable seven days before the president?s arrival, suddenly found themselves laboring not to look too wrong-footed, embarrassed or provoked by a message from the chancellor they did not fully expect ?

His text restated his determination that Germany get a UN Security Council seat cum veto power. It fled any mention of his quest to have the European Union lift its embargo on arms sales to China, a proposal that has enraged Congress across the board. And it urged an end to Iran?s isolation and consideration for the mullahs? ?legitimate security concerns? ? on a day when James Woolsey, a Clinton administration director of U.S. central intelligence, was asking a seminar panelist if he knew of a single shard of fact indicating that Iran was not about to produce atomic weapons. (No answer.)

This latest burst of anti-Americanism in France and Germany has been aimed not just at the policies of the American government and the war in Iraq but also the culture of the American people, the popularity of which is something Chirac described as an ?ecological disaster? during a visit to southeast Asia, just before the tsunami.

This kind of knee-jerk hatred colors the judgments of both men and their fellow citizens. If Germany and France hadn?t already demonstrated their ability to market brutal hatred during World War II, this might not matter. But to fan the flames of grotesque intolerance during a war on terror just to keep two political hacks out of their own growing unemployment lines is a bit much. If that?s worth deep-sixing the Atlantic ?alliance,? that?s jake. Or maybe we could give Germany our Security Council seat (and our share of the bills) on our way out of the U.N. Let Europe pay its own way for a decade or two. If Bush makes nothing else clear when he arrives in Brussels Monday night for a ?working dinner? with Chirac it should be that ultimately European anti-Americanism isn?t our problem. It?s Europe?s problem, and Euro-leaders should take the lead in solving it.

So there?s your seven-phrase speech, and good luck on that ?fence-mending? mission of yours, Se?or President. However, as a man who keeps a blind donkey in a pretty small pasture, I want to make a little suggestion: If you?re going to mend a fence, go for the barbed stuff, minimum two strand 12.5ga galvanized ? which, as you know, is just enough to cut the bull.

? Denis Boyles is author of Vile France: Fear, Duplicity, Cowardice and Cheese.
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 21, 2005, 07:58:10 AM
Unsung Victories
The effects of American policy throughout the Middle East are gradually being felt.



Last week, Mr. Abbas ordered the ruins of Yasir Arafat's Gaza headquarters cleared away. The Israelis had destroyed the building in 2002, and Mr. Arafat had kept the ruins as a kind of memorial. Suddenly, in a day, it was gone." ? New York Times, Sunday, February 13, 2005.

In the war against the Islamic fascists and their supporters there have been a number of unheralded victories that have played some role in changing the landscape of the Middle East and eroding the power of the Islamists.

     
The first bold move was to censure and then ignore Yasser Arafat for his complicity in unleashing suicide bombers, his rampant corruption, and his stifling of Palestinian dissidents. At the time of the change in American policy, other members of the quartet ? the Russians, the Europeans, and the U.N. ? were aghast. The "moderate" Arab world protested vehemently. Pundits here alleged Texas recklessness and clung to the silly idea of the Arafat/Sharon moral equivalence, as if a freely elected democratic leader, subject to an open press and a free opposition, was the same as a thug who ordered lynchings and jailed or murdered dissidents.

Review press accounts from the summer of 2002: Neither ally nor neutral approved of Bush's act of ostracism and instead warned of disaster. Danish Foreign Minister Per Stig Moeller, whose country then held the EU's rotating presidency, lectured that without dialogue with Arafat "Israel could not stop Palestinian violence through force." A circumspect Colin Powell visited the region often to smooth over hurt feelings and in the process to soften Bush's bold action. Dennis Ross, remember, had met with the American-subsidized Arafat almost 500 times, and it was said that the latter visited the Clinton White House more than any other foreign leader ? a fact apparently lost on the Palestinian street, which still spontaneously cheered on news of September 11.

Lost in all the controversy was the simple fact that Arafat had come to power through a rigged vote. He proceeded to corrupt the state, censure the media, and let thugs terrorize Palestinian reformers while he systematically looted public monies. His legacy was a ruined economy, murder, and systematic theft.

All knew this; few would say it publicly; none would do anything about it.

Calumny followed as the Israelis unilaterally went on to start their fence, take out the terrorist elite of Hamas, plan to abandon Gaza, and, pace Mr. Moeller, precisely through force crush the intifada. In those bleak months of suicide murdering, Arafat courted the world's sycophantic press as he railed against Sharon from his pathetic bunker at Ramallah.

Then something unexpected happened. Almost imperceptibly in his last two years, he devolved from a feared dictator to a defrocked terrorist to finally an irrelevant functionary. That metamorphosis proved critical as a prerequisite to his demise, as Arafat slowly lost his four-decade-acquired capital of intimidation ? critical for any Middle East autocrat ? and with it his grip on the popular imagination of the West Bank. In the Middle East a tyrant can look murderous or even psychopathic, but not impotent ? and especially not ridiculous.

Thus when he died, far from being sanctified as a mythical strongman, he was almost immediately forgotten and his legacy is currently undergoing a sort of Trotsky-like erasure. Postmortem stories almost immediately spread about absconded funds, tawdry fights broke out over his estate, and, mirabile dictu, a few signs of freedom emerged on the West Bank as elections mysteriously followed and with them renewed discussions of peace. The American ostracism did not ensure that we would see a settlement, only the chance that we could ? and that is some progress in the Middle East.

Later in April 2003, the United States withdrew its troops from Saudi Arabia ? most pilots and crews in the desert. The ostensible reason for their original deployment ? protection from Saddam Hussein's army in Kuwait and monitoring the no-fly zones ? was no longer valid. But many strategists thought Americans were still needed in the kingdom to ensure the free flow of the world's oil supply and perhaps to secure the royal family from the very terrorists that many in the clan had subsidized and abetted. Were we "abandoning" an "old and trusted" ally, or finally coming to our senses that the subsidized protection of a near-criminal state had to cease under the changed conditions of the post-Cold War Middle East?

In reality, Americans in uniform were subject to humiliating conditions, such as female military personnel being forced to veil when leaving bases, while helping to ready planes to protect a country where a great many were privately happy that 15 of their jihadists had murdered 3,000 Americans. Our presence among the "holy shrines" only played into bin Laden's hands, as his 1998 fatwa revealed. The Saudi state media often blamed the Americans or the Zionists for most of their own self-inflicted pathologies, hoping that such smears and billions in bribes to terrorists and Wahhabi fanatics might deflect popular outrage onto us.

But by withdrawing, the United States took the first steps in a long overdue disengagement from an autocratic dynasty that will either change under a consensual government into a titular and ceremonial royalty ? like the British crown heads ? or, as in the case of Iran's shah, be driven out by theocratic fundamentalists. Finally, the United States at last is beginning to cut loose from an octopus whose petroleum tentacles have wrapped deeply around banks, lobbyists, defense contractors, and lawyers in Washington and New York, both Republicans and Democrats, oilmen and multiculturalists alike. It is neither a wise nor a moral thing to have much to do with 7,000 royal cousins who have siphoned $700 billion from their country while unemployment there reaches 40 percent and while women, laborers from the third world, Christians, and assorted others are treated as undesirables.

Now in hindsight, few seem to object to the ostracism of Arafat or estrangement from Saudi Arabia. The moral?

As a rule of thumb in matters of the Middle East, be very skeptical of anything that Europe (fearful of terrorists, eager for profits, tired of Jews, scared of their own growing Islamic minorities) and the Arab League (a synonym for the autocratic rule of Sunni Muslim grandees and secular despots) cook up together. If a EU president, a Saudi royal, and a Middle East specialist in the State Department or a professor in an endowed Middle Eastern Studies chair agree that the United States is "woefully na?ve," "unnecessarily provocative" or "acting unilaterally," then assume that we are pretty much on the right side of history and promoting democratic reform. "Sobriety" and "working with Arab moderates" is diplo-speak for supporting or abetting an illiberal hierarchy.

There are other key decisions to be made that will go mostly unnoticed by the world's media. We should decide now to distance ourselves from the Mubarak regime, and to be ready for a dynastic squabble with the passing of the present strongman. We have over the years given $50 billion to that "moderate" dictatorship not to attack Israel ? as if it would really start a fifth war it would surely lose. It didn't.

But Egypt did unleash venom against us and become the intellectual nexus of Arab anti-Americanism. In the Arab world, a change in American policies to promote democracy was publicized as "anti-Arab" by state-run media ? in almost the identical manner that former support for the corrupt status quo was once condemned as "anti-Arab" by Middle East intellectuals. No matter: Despite the short-term lose-lose proposition, no one ever went wrong in the long-term by standing on the side of freedom.

No longer should we remain in thrall to any Arab government that with its left hand rounds up over-the-top terrorists, while with its right gives others less violent a pass to unleash virulent hatred of America. The Rubicon has been crossed in Iraq, and we can no longer watch Americans die for democracy in the Sunni Triangle while giving billions to a regime that kills off consensual government in Cairo. Diplomats can work out the details without sounding either moralistic or naive, smiling and assuring the Egyptians that our friendship will be only strengthened from a new understanding, as the money dries up and we part without acrimony ? even as in desperation Mubarak readjusts to his "helpful" role as a third-party interlocutor in Iraq and Palestine.

The American effort to democratize postwar Afghanistan and Iraq has placed a heavy burden on the United States to develop a coherent and consistent policy of supporting reformers throughout the Middle East. We should continue with demands for elections in a Lebanon free of a tyrannical Syria, elevate dissidents in Iran onto the world stage, pressure for change in the Gulf, and say goodbye to Wahhabi Saudi Arabia. If Western elites are really worried about the legitimacy of past elections in Iraq, let them go instead to Lebanon where they can worry first about having any at all, and then later complain about the proper degree of voter participation. The forces of history have been unleashed and we should cease apologizing for the deluge and instead steer the waves in the right direction.

Americans understandably focus on the hot wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet just as important are the unsung successes that received little praise, and then have a weird tendency to drift off into the collective global amnesia as if they arose from natural, not American-induced, reform.

? Victor Davis Hanson is a military historian and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. His website is victorhanson.com.


*   *   *
Title: More VDH
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on February 25, 2005, 11:21:44 AM
February 25, 2005, 7:48 a.m.
Merchants of Despair
Sort of for the war, sort of...
Victor Davis Hanson



Much of the recent domestic critique of American efforts in the Middle East has long roots in our own past ? and little to do with the historic developments on the ground in Iraq


1. "It's America's fault."

Some on the hard left sought to cite our support for Israel or general "American imperialism" in the Middle East as culpable for bin Laden's wrath on September 11. Past American efforts to save Muslims in Kosovo, Bosnia, Somalia, Kuwait, and Afghanistan counted for little. Even less thanks were earned by billions of dollars given to Egypt, Jordan, and the Palestinian Authority. The Islamofascist vision of a Dark Age world run by unelected imams ? where women were in seclusion, homosexuals were killed, Jews were terrorized, Christians were routed, and freedom was squelched ? registered little, even though such visions were by definition at war with all that Western liberalism stands for.

This flawed idea that autocrats supposedly hate democracy more for what it does rather than for what it represents is not new. On the eve of World War II isolationists on the right insisted that America had treated Germany unfairly after World War I and wrongly sided with British imperialism in its efforts to rub in their past defeat. "International Jewry" was blamed for poisoning the good will between the two otherwise friendly countries by demanding punitive measures from a victimized Germany. Likewise, poor Japan was supposedly unfairly cut off from American ore and petroleum, and hemmed in by provocative Anglo Americans.

By the late 1940s things had changed, and now it was the turn of the old Left, which blamed "fascists" for ruining the hallowed American-Soviet wartime alliance by "isolating" and "surrounding" the Russians with hostile bases and allies. The same was supposedly true of China: We were lectured ad nauseam by idealists and "China hands" that Mao "really" wanted to cultivate American friendship, but was spurned by our right-wing ideologues ? as if there were nothing of the absolutism and innate thuggery in him that would soon account for 50 million or more murdered and starved.

Ditto the animosity from dictators like Ho Chi Minh and Fidel Castro. The Left assured us instead that both were actually neo-Jeffersonians whose olive branches were crushed by Cold Warriors, and who then ? but only then ? went on to plan their own gulags in Vietnam and Cuba.

2. "Americans are weak."

Before we went into Afghanistan, we were hectored that the country's fierce people, colonial history, rugged terrain, hostile neighbors, foreign religion, and shattered infrastructure made victory unlikely. We also forget now how the Left warned us of terrible casualties and millions of refugees before the Iraq war, and then went dormant until the insurgents emerged. At that point it resurfaced to assure that Iraq was lost and precipitate withdrawal our only hope, only to grow quiet again after the recent Iraqi election ? a cycle that followed about the same 20-month timetable of military victory to voting in Afghanistan.

Now a new geopolitical litany has arisen: The reserves are "shattered"; North Korea, Syria, and Iran are untouchable while we are "bogged down" in the Sunni Triangle; a schedule for withdrawal from Iraq needs to be spelled out; there is no real American-trained Iraqi army; the entire Arab world hates us; blah, blah, blah...

In 1917, "a million men over there" was considered preposterous for a Potemkin American Expeditionary Force; by late 1918 it was chasing Germany out of Belgium. Charles Lindbergh returned from an obsequious visitation with Goering to warn us that the Luftwaffe was unstoppable. Four years later it was in shambles as four-engine American bombers reduced the Third Reich to ashes.

Japanese Zeroes, supposed proof of comparative American backwardness in 1941-2, were the easy targets of "Turkey Shoots" by 1944 as American fighters blew them out of the skies. Sputnik "proved" how far we were behind the socialist workhorse in Russia, even as we easily went to the moon first a little over a decade later. The history of the American military and economy in the 20th century is one of being habitually underestimated, even as the United States defeated Prussian imperialism, German Nazism, Italian fascism, Japanese militarism, and Stalinist Communism.

Nor in our more recent peacetime were we buried by stagflation, Jimmy Carter's "malaise," Japan, Inc., and all the other supposed bogeymen that were prophesized to overwhelm the institutional strength of the American state, its free-enterprise system, and the highly innovative and individualistic nature of the American people.

3. "They are supermen."

When suicide murderers dominated the news of the Intifada, followed by the car bombers and beheaders of the Sunni Triangle, many in the West despaired that there was no thwarting such fanatics. Perhaps they simply believed more in their cause than we did in ours. How can you stop someone who kills to die rather than merely dying to kill?

That Ariel Sharon in two years defeated the Intifada by decapitating the Hamas leadership, starting the fence, announcing withdrawal from Gaza, and humiliating Arafat was forgotten. In the same manner few now write or think about how the United States military went into the heart of darkness in Fallujah and simply destroyed or routed the insurgents of that fundamentalist stronghold in less than two weeks, an historic operation that ensured a successful turnout on election day and an eventual takeover by an elected Iraqi government.

So this paradox of exaggerating the strength of our weaker enemies is likewise an American trademark. Spiked-helmeted Prussians were considered vicious pros who would make short work of doughboy hicks who had trained with brooms and sticks. Indeed, the German imperial army of World War I may have been made up of the most formidable foot soldiers of any age. Still, it was destroyed in less than four years by supposedly decadent and corrupt liberal democracies.

The Gestapo was the vanguard of a new Aryan super-race, pitiless and proud in its martial superiority. How could soda-jockeys of the Depression ever fight something like the Waffen SS with poor equipment, little training, and a happy-go-lucky attitude rather than an engrained death wish? Rather easily as it turned out, as the Allies not only defeated Nazism but literally annihilated it in about five years. Kamikazes were also felt to be otherworldly in their eerie death cult ? who, after all, in the United States would take off to ram his Corsair or Hellcat into a Japanese ship? No matter ? the U.S. Navy, Marines, and Army Air Corps were not impressed, and rather quickly destroyed not merely the death pilots but the very culture that launched them.

4. "We are alone."

George Bush was said to have alienated the world, as if our friends in Eastern Europe, Britain, Australia, and a billion in India did not matter. Yet the same was said in 1941 when Latin America, Asia, and Africa were in thrall to the Axis. Neutrals like Spain, Argentina, and Turkey wanted little to do with a disarmed United States that had unwisely found itself in a two-front war with the world's most formidable military powers.

By the 1950s we seemed to have defeated Germany and Japan only to have subsequently "lost" China and Eastern Europe once more. Much of Asia and Latin America deified the mass-murdering Stalin and Mao while deriding elected American presidents. The Richard Clarks and Joe Wilsons of that age lectured about a paranoid Eisenhower administration, clumsy CIA work, and the general hopelessness of ever defeating global Communism, whose spores sprouted almost everywhere in the form of Nasserism, Pan-Arabism, Baathism, Castroism, and various "national liberationist" movements.

5. Why?

Why do Americans do all this to themselves? In part, the nature of an open society is constant self-critique, especially at times of national elections. Our successes at creating an affluent and free citizenry also only raise the bar ever higher as we sense we are closer to heaven on earth ? and with a little more perfection could walk more like gods than crawl as mere men.

There are also still others among us who are impatient with the give and take of a consensual society. They harbor a secret admiration for the single-mindedness of the zealot in pursuit of a utopian cause ? hence the occasional crazy applause given by some Americans to the beheading "Minutemen" of the Sunni Triangle or the "brave" "combat teams" who killed 3,000 on September 11.

Finally, the intellectual class that we often read and hear from is increasingly divorced from much of what makes America work, especially the sort of folk who join the military. They have little appreciation that the U.S. Marine Corps is far more deadly than Baathist diehards or Taliban remnants ? or that a fleet of American bombers with GPS bombs can do more damage in a few seconds than most of the suicide bombers of the Middle East could do in a year.

It is wise to cite and publicize our errors ? and there have been many in this war. Humility and circumspection are military assets as well. And we should not deprecate the danger of our enemies, who are cruel and ingenious. Moreover, we should never confuse the sharp dissent of the well-meaning critic with disloyalty to the cause.

But nor should we fall into pessimism, when in less than four years we have destroyed the two worst regimes in the Middle East, scattered al Qaeda, avoided another promised 9/11 at home, and sent shock waves of democracy throughout the Arab world ? so far at an aggregate cost of less than what was incurred on the first day of this unprovoked war. Car bombs are bad news, but in the shadows is the real story: The terrorists are losing, and radical reform, the likes of which millions have never seen, is right on the horizon. So this American gloominess is not new. Yet, if the past is any guide, our present lack of optimism in this struggle presages its ultimate success.

A final prediction: By the end of this year, formerly critical liberal pundits, backsliding conservative columnists, once-fiery politicians, Arab "moderates," ex-statesmen and generals emeriti, smug stand-up comedians, recently strident Euros ? perhaps even Hillary herself ? will quietly come to a consensus that what we are witnessing from Afghanistan and the West Bank to Iraq and beyond, with its growing tremors in Lebanon, Libya, Egypt, and the Gulf, is a moral awakening, a radical break with an ugly past that threatens a corrupt, entrenched, and autocratic elite and is just the sort of thing that they were sort of for, sort of all along ? sort of...
Title: NYT Newspeak
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on March 17, 2005, 01:10:11 PM
It's always amusing when Hitchens takes on newspeak contradictions.


This Was Not Looting
How did Saddam's best weapons plants get plundered?
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Tuesday, March 15, 2005, at 5:29 AM PT


Once again, a major story gets top billing in a mainstream paper?and is printed upside down. "Looting at Weapons Plants Was Systematic, Iraqi Says." This was how the New York Times led its front page on Sunday. According to the supporting story, Dr. Sami al-Araji, the deputy minister of industry, says that after the fall of Baghdad in April 2003, "looters systematically dismantled and removed tons of machinery from Saddam Hussein's most important weapons installations, including some with high-precision equipment capable of making parts for nuclear arms."

As printed, the implication of the story was not dissimilar from the Al-Qaqaa disclosures, which featured so much in the closing days of the presidential election last fall. In that case, a huge stock of conventional high-explosives had been allowed to go missing and was presumably in the hands of those who were massacring Iraqi civilians and killing coalition troops. At least one comment from the Bush campaign surrogate appeared to blame this negligence on the troops themselves. Followed to one possible conclusion, the implication was clear: The invasion of Iraq had made the world a more dangerous place by randomly scattering all sorts of weaponry, including mass-destruction weaponry, to destinations unknown.

It was eye-rubbing to read of the scale of this potential new nightmare. There in cold print was the Al Hatteen "munitions production plant that international inspectors called a complete potential nuclear weapons laboratory." And what of the Al Adwan facility, which "produced equipment used for uranium enrichment, necessary to make some kinds of nuclear weapons"? The overall pattern of the plundered sites was summarized thus, by reporters James Glanz and William J. Broad:

The kinds of machinery at the various sites included equipment that could be used to make missile parts, chemical weapons or centrifuges essential for enriching uranium for atom bombs.

My first question is this: How can it be that, on every page of every other edition for months now, the New York Times has been stating categorically that Iraq harbored no weapons of mass destruction? And there can hardly be a comedy-club third-rater or MoveOn.org activist in the entire country who hasn't stated with sarcastic certainty that the whole WMD fuss was a way of lying the American people into war. So now what? Maybe we should have taken Saddam's propaganda seriously, when his newspaper proudly described Iraq's physicists as "our nuclear mujahideen."

My second question is: What's all this about "looting"? The word is used throughout the long report, but here's what it's used to describe. "In four weeks from mid-April to mid-May of 2003 ? teams with flatbed trucks and other heavy equipment moved systematically from site to site. ? 'The first wave came for the machines,' Dr Araji said. 'The second wave, cables and cranes.' " Perhaps hedging the bet, the Times authors at this point refer to "organized looting."

But obviously, what we are reading about is a carefully planned military operation. The participants were not panicked or greedy civilians helping themselves?which is the customary definition of a "looter," especially in wartime. They were mechanized and mobile and under orders, and acting in a concerted fashion. Thus, if the story is factually correct?which we have no reason at all to doubt?then Saddam's Iraq was a fairly highly-evolved WMD state, with a contingency plan for further concealment and distribution of the weaponry in case of attack or discovery.

Before the war began, several of the administration's critics argued that an intervention would be too dangerous, either because Saddam Hussein would actually unleash his arsenal of WMD, or because he would divert it to third parties. That case at least had the merit of being serious (though I would want to argue that a regime capable of doing either thing was a regime that urgently needed to be removed). Since then, however, the scene has dissolved into one long taunt and jeer: "There were no WMD in Iraq. Liar, liar, pants on fire."

The U.N. inspectors, who are solemnly quoted by Glanz and Broad as having "monitored" the alarming developments at Al Hatteen and elsewhere, don't come out looking too professional, either. If by scanning satellite pictures now they can tell us that potentially thermonuclear stuff is on the loose, how come they couldn't come up with this important data when they were supposedly "on the ground"?

Even in the worst interpretation, it seems unlikely that the material is more dangerous now than it was two years ago. Some of the elements?centrifuges, for example, and chemical mixtures?require stable and controlled conditions for effectiveness. They can't simply be transferred to some kitchen or tent. They are less risky than they were in early 2003, in other words. If they went to a neighboring state, though ? Some chemical vats have apparently turned up on a scrap heap in Jordan, even if this does argue more for a panicky concealment than a plan of transfer. But anyway, this only returns us to the main point: If Saddam's people could have made such a transfer after his fall, then they could have made it much more easily during his reign. (We know, for example, that the Baathists were discussing the acquisition of long-range missiles from North Korea as late as March 2003, and at that time, the nuclear Wal-Mart of the A.Q. Khan network was still in business. Iraq would have had plenty to trade in this WMD underworld.)

Supporters of the overdue disarmament and liberation of Iraq, all the same, can't be complacent about this story. It seems flabbergasting that any of these sites were unsecured after the occupation, let alone for so long. Did the CIA yet again lack "human intelligence" as well as every other kind? The Bush administration staked the reputation of the United States on the matter. It won't do to say that "mistakes were made."

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2114820/
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 25, 2005, 11:45:36 AM
Woof All:

The classy Peggy Noonan was a speechwriter for President Ronald Reagan (e.g. his 40th Anniversary of Normandy speech and many others) and the author of "When Character was King" (stellar biography of Reagan) and other works.  IMHO a great writer.

Crafty
==========================


PEGGY NOONAN

In Love With Death
The bizarre passion of the pull-the-tube people.

Thursday, March 24, 2005 12:01 a.m. EST

God made the world or he didn't.

God made you or he didn't.

If he did, your little human life is, and has been, touched by the divine. If this is true, it would be true of all humans, not only some. And so--again, if it is true--each human life is precious, of infinite value, worthy of great respect.

Most--not all, but probably most--of those who support Terri Schiavo's right to live believe the above. This explains their passion and emotionalism. They believe they are fighting for an invaluable and irreplaceable human life. They are like the mother who is famously said to have lifted the back of a small car off the ground to save a child caught under a tire. You're desperate to save a life, you're shot through with adrenaline, your strength is for half a second superhuman, you do the impossible.

That is what they are trying to do.

They do not want an innocent human life ended for what appear to be primarily practical and worldly reasons--e.g., Mrs. Schiavo's quality of life is low, her life is pointless. They say: Who is to say it is pointless? And what does pointless even mean? Maybe life itself is the point.


I do not understand the emotionalism of the pull-the-tube people. What is driving their engagement? Is it because they are compassionate, and their hearts bleed at the thought that Mrs. Schiavo suffers? But throughout this case no one has testified that she is in persistent pain, as those with terminal cancer are.

If they care so much about her pain, why are they unconcerned at the suffering caused her by the denial of food and water? And why do those who argue for Mrs. Schiavo's death employ language and imagery that is so violent and aggressive? The chairman of the Democratic National Committee calls Republicans "brain dead." Michael Schiavo, the husband, calls House Majority Leader Tom DeLay "a slithering snake."

Everyone who has written in defense of Mrs. Schiavo's right to live has received e-mail blasts full of attacks that appear to have been dictated by the unstable and typed by the unhinged. On Democratic Underground they crowed about having "kicked the sh-- out of the fascists." On Tuesday James Carville's face was swept with a sneer so convulsive you could see his gums as he damned the Republicans trying to help Mrs. Schiavo. It would have seemed demonic if he weren't a buffoon.

Why are they so committed to this woman's death?

They seem to have fallen half in love with death.

What does Terri Schiavo's life symbolize to them? What does the idea that she might continue to live suggest to them?

Why does this prospect so unnerve them? Again, if you think Terri Schiavo is a precious human gift of God, your passion is explicable. The passion of the pull-the-tube people is not.

I do not understand their certainty. I don't "know" that any degree of progress or healing is possible for Terri Schiavo; I only hope they are. We can't know, but we can "err on the side of life." How do the pro-death forces "know" there is no possibility of progress, healing, miracles? They seem to think they know. They seem to love the phrases they bandy about: "vegetative state," "brain dead," "liquefied cortex."


I do not understand why people who want to save the whales (so do I) find campaigns to save humans so much less arresting. I do not understand their lack of passion. But the save-the-whales people are somehow rarely the stop-abortion-please people.

The PETA people, who say they are committed to ending cruelty to animals, seem disinterested in the fact of late-term abortion, which is a cruel procedure performed on a human.

I do not understand why the don't-drill-in-Alaska-and-destroy-its-prime-beauty people do not join forces with the don't-end-a-life-that-holds-within-it-beauty people.

I do not understand why those who want a freeze on all death penalty cases in order to review each of them in light of DNA testing--an act of justice and compassion toward those who have been found guilty of crimes in a court of law--are uninterested in giving every last chance and every last test to a woman whom no one has ever accused of anything.

There are passionate groups of women in America who decry spousal abuse, give beaten wives shelter, insist that a woman is not a husband's chattel. This is good work. Why are they not taking part in the fight for Terri Schiavo? Again, what explains their lack of passion on this? If Mrs. Schiavo dies, it will be because her husband, and only her husband, insists she wanted to, or would want to, or said she wanted to in a hypothetical conversation long ago. A thin reed on which to base the killing of a human being.

The pull-the-tube people say, "She must hate being brain-damaged." Well, yes, she must. (This line of argument presumes she is to some degree or in some way thinking or experiencing emotions.) Who wouldn't feel extreme sadness at being extremely disabled? I'd weep every day, wouldn't you? But consider your life. Are there not facets of it, or facts of it, that make you feel extremely sad, pained, frustrated, angry? But you're still glad you're alive, aren't you? Me too. No one enjoys a deathbed. Very few want to leave.

Terri Schiavo may well die. No good will come of it. Those who are half in love with death will only become more red-fanged and ravenous.
And those who are still learning--our children--oh, what terrible lessons they're learning. What terrible stories are shaping them. They're witnessing the Schiavo drama on television and hearing it on radio. They are seeing a society--their society, their people--on the verge of famously accepting, even embracing, the idea that a damaged life is a throwaway life.

Our children have been reared in the age of abortion, and are coming of age in a time when seemingly respectable people are enthusiastic for euthanasia. It cannot be good for our children, and the world they will make, that they are given this new lesson that human life is not precious, not touched by the divine, not of infinite value.

Once you "know" that--that human life is not so special after all--then everything is possible, and none of it is good. When a society comes to believe that human life is not inherently worth living, it is a slippery slope to the gas chamber. You wind up on a low road that twists past Columbine and leads toward Auschwitz. Today that road runs through Pinellas Park, Fla.

Ms. Noonan is a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal and author of "A Heart, a Cross, and a Flag" (Wall Street Journal Books/Simon & Schuster), a collection of post-Sept. 11 columns, which you can buy from the OpinionJournal bookstore. Her column appears Thursdays.
Title: With friends like these...
Post by: SB_Mig on March 28, 2005, 01:53:13 PM
Fortunately, you also have guys like this on Ms. Schiavo's side:   :roll:

Christian activist Randall Terry has reappeared in the news in recent days as the spokesman for the parents of Terri Schiavo. Terry, founder of the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue and the Society for Truth and Justice, appeared on Fox News at least four times in the past four days -- on the March 18 edition of Hannity & Colmes, and during live coverage of the Schiavo case on March 20 and March 21. But Terry has a controversial past that was not fully disclosed in any of his Fox News appearances or on the March 19 edition of National Public Radio's Weekend Edition, which aired a brief clip from Terry. In all but one of those instances, Terry was identified only as the Schindler family spokesman.

Only when Terry appeared on a March 21 "Fox News Alert" did another guest -- Fox News contributor and Democratic strategist Susan Estrich -- point out that Terry was "involved in the anti-abortion movement" and with Operation Rescue, which "operated outside the law."

On his own website, Terry noted that he "has been arrested over forty times for peaceful opposition to abortion," but he neglected to mention the details of his anti-abortion activities with Operation Rescue in the 1980s and 1990s. In an April 22, 2004, Washington Post article, staff writer Michael Powell summarized some of Terry's anti-abortion actions:

In 1988, Terry and his legions started standing in front of local abortion clinics, screaming and pleading with pregnant women to turn away. They tossed their bodies against car doors to keep abortion patients from getting out. They waved crucifixes and screamed "Mommy, Mommy" at the women. When Terry commanded, hundreds went jellyfish-limp and blockaded the "death clinics."

In 1989, a "Holy Week of Rescue" shut down a family planning clinic in Los Angeles. More than 40,000 people were arrested in these demonstrations over four years. Subtlety wasn't Terry's thing -- he described Planned Parenthood's founder, Margaret Sanger, as a "whore" and an "adulteress" and arranged to have a dead fetus presented to Bill Clinton at the 1992 Democratic National Convention.

Additional evidence suggests that actions by Terry and Operation Rescue may have provoked violence at abortion clinics. As the New York Times reported on July 20, 2001, "One of his [Terry's] most avid followers in Binghamton was James E. [sic: C.] Kopp, now charged in the 1998 murder of a doctor who performed abortions in Buffalo [New York]." Kopp was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to 25 years to life in prison. A November 6, 1998, Times report further detailed Terry's connection to Kopp:

In July 1988, when Randall Terry drove through the night from his home in Binghamton, N.Y., to Atlanta to start the series of anti-abortion protests that would finally put his new hard-line group, Operation Rescue, onto America's front pages, James Charles Kopp was in the van riding alongside him, said former leaders of Operation Rescue.

And when Mr. Terry was arrested on the first day of Operation Rescue's "Siege of Atlanta," Mr. Kopp followed him into jail, said the leaders, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Along with more than 100 other Operation Rescue members, according to some people who were there, Mr. Kopp remained in jail for 40 days and adhered to Mr. Terry's orders not to give a real name to the police or courts.

After his release, Mr. Kopp returned to Operation Rescue's Binghamton headquarters, and was there working alongside Mr. Terry as the group's power and influence in the anti-abortion movement surged in late 1988 and 1989, according to the former leaders of Operation Rescue.

Further, the Miami Herald reported on March 20 that Operation Rescue's "sympathizers continue to make an impact, some serving for the Bush administration."

As CNN noted on March 4, 1998, Terry was named in a lawsuit -- seeking to "force anti-abortion leaders to pay for damages caused in clinic attacks" -- which was filed by the National Organization for Women (NOW) under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, and Terry settled with NOW out of court. The New York Times reported on November 8, 1998, that Terry "filed for bankruptcy last week in an effort to avoid paying massive debts owed to women's groups and abortion clinics that have sued him." As the Los Angeles Times reported on February 28, Terry's use of bankruptcy law to avoid paying for the judgments against him helped prompt Senator Charles E. Schumer (D-NY) to propose an amendment to the bankruptcy bill recently passed by Congress that "specifically would prevent abortion opponents from using the bankruptcy code to escape paying court fines," although it was not included in the final version of the bill. Versions of that amendment appeared in earlier versions of the bankruptcy bill, which stalled action on it in 2002 and 2003 when "a core of House Republicans balked" at the provision, the Los Angeles Times noted.

According to a June 14, 2003, report by the conservative World Magazine (no longer available online, but reprinted on the right-wing bulletin board Free Republic), Terry solicited donations by declaring on his website that "The purveyors of abortion on demand have stripped Randall Terry of everything he owned," but failed to disclose that the money would be used to pay for his new $432,000 house. The report noted Terry's defense: "Terry told World that he wanted a home where his family will be safe and where 'we could entertain people of stature, people of importance. I have a lot of important people that come through my home. And I will have more important people come through my home.' " World noted that the same month he paid the deposit on his new home, a court ruled that Terry, who divorced his first wife and has remarried, "was not paying a fair share of child support." In an article on his website, Terry denounced the World report as "journalistic trash, a 'hit piece' of malice and misinformation."

Terry's words and personal life have also stirred controversy. As the Fort Wayne (Indiana) News Sentinel reported on August 16, 1993, at an anti-abortion rally in Fort Wayne, Terry said "Our goal is a Christian nation. ... We have a biblical duty, we are called by God to conquer this country. We don't want equal time. We don't want pluralism. ... Theocracy means God rules. I've got a hot flash. God rules." In that same speech, Terry also stated that "If a Christian voted for [former President Bill] Clinton, he sinned against God. It's that simple." According to a March 18, 2004, press release, Terry declared on his radio program that "Islam dictates followers use killing and terror to convert Western infidels." As The Washington Post reported on February 12, 2000, in his 1995 book The Judgment of God Terry wrote that "homosexuals and lesbians are no longer content to secretly live in sin, but now want to glorify their perversions." In a May 25, 2004, interview about his gay son with The Advocate, Terry stated that homosexuality is a "sexual addiction" that shouldn't be rewarded with "special civil rights."

According to the February 12, 2000, Washington Post report, Terry was censured by his church, the Landmark Church of Binghamton, New York, for a "pattern of repeated and sinful relationships and conversations with both single and married women." Terry denies the accusation.
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 07, 2005, 11:28:43 PM
NOONAN

'We Want God'
When John Paul II went to Poland, communism didn't have a prayer.

Thursday, April 7, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT

Everyone has spoken this past week of John Paul II's role in the defeat of Soviet communism and the liberation of Eastern Europe. We don't know everything, or even a lot, about the quiet diplomatic moves--what happened in private, what kind of communications the pope had with the other great lions of the 1980s, Reagan and Thatcher. And others, including Bill Casey, the tough old fox of the CIA, and Lech Walesa of Solidarity.

But I think I know the moment Soviet communism began its fall. It happened in public. Anyone could see it. It was one of the great spiritual moments of the 20th century, maybe the greatest.

It was the first week in June 1979. Europe was split in two between east and west, the democracies and the communist bloc--police states controlled by the Soviet Union and run by local communist parties and secret police.

John Paul was a new pope, raised to the papacy just eight months before. The day after he became pope he made it clear he would like to return as pope to his native Poland to see his people.

The communists who ran the Polish regime faced a quandary. If they didn't allow the new Pope to return to his homeland, they would look defensive and frightened, as if they feared that he had more power than they. To rebuff him would seem an admission of their weakness. On the other hand, if they let him return, the people might rise up against the government, which might in turn trigger an invasion by the Soviet Union.

The Polish government decided that it would be too great an embarrassment to refuse the pope. So they invited him, gambling that John Paul--whom they knew when he was cardinal of Krakow, who they were sure would not want his presence to inspire bloodshed--would be prudent. They wagered that he would understand he was fortunate to be given permission to come, and understand what he owed the government in turn was deportment that would not threaten the reigning reality. They announced the pope would be welcome to come home on a "religious pilgrimage."

John Paul quickly accepted the invitation. He went to Poland.

And from the day he arrived, the boundaries of the world began to shift.

Two months before the pope's arrival, the Polish communist apparatus took steps to restrain the enthusiasm of the people. They sent a secret directive to schoolteachers explaining how they should understand and explain the pope's visit. "The pope is our enemy," it said. "Due to his uncommon skills and great sense of humor he is dangerous, because he charms everyone, especially journalists. Besides, he goes for cheap gestures in his relations with the crowd, for instance, puts on a highlander's hat, shakes all hands, kisses children. . . . It is modeled on American presidential campaigns. . .  Because of the activation of the Church in Poland our activities designed to atheize the youth not only cannot diminish but must intensely develop. . .  In this respect all means are allowed and we cannot afford any sentiments."
The government also issued instructions to Polish media to censor and limit the pope's comments and appearances.

On June 2, 1979, the pope arrived in Poland. What followed will never be forgotten by those who witnessed it.

He knelt and kissed the ground, the dull gray tarmac of the airport outside Warsaw. The silent churches of Poland at that moment began to ring their bells. The pope traveled by motorcade from the airport to the Old City of Warsaw.

The government had feared hundreds or thousands or even tens of thousands would line the streets and highways.

By the end of the day, with the people lining the streets and highways plus the people massed outside Warsaw and then inside it--all of them cheering and throwing flowers and applauding and singing--more than a million had come.

In Victory Square in the Old City the pope gave a mass. Communist officials watched from the windows of nearby hotels. The pope gave what papal biographer George Weigel called the greatest sermon of John Paul's life.

Why, the pope asked, had God lifted a Pole to the papacy? Perhaps it was because of how Poland had suffered for centuries, and through the 20th century had become "the land of a particularly responsible witness" to God. The people of Poland, he suggested, had been chosen for a great role, to understand, humbly but surely, that they were the repository of a special "witness of His cross and His resurrection." He asked then if the people of Poland accepted the obligations of such a role in history.
The crowd responded with thunder.

"We want God!" they shouted, together. "We want God!"

What a moment in modern history: We want God. From the mouths of modern men and women living in a modern atheistic dictatorship.

The pope was speaking on the Vigil of Pentecost, that moment in the New Testament when the Holy Spirit came down to Christ's apostles, who had been hiding in fear after his crucifixion, filling them with courage and joy. John Paul picked up this theme. What was the greatest of the works of God? Man. Who redeemed man? Christ. Therefore, he declared, "Christ cannot be kept out of the history of man in any part of the globe, at any longitude or latitude. . . . The exclusion of Christ from the history of man is an act against man! Without Christ it is impossible to understand the history of Poland." Those who oppose Christ, he said, still live within the Christian context of history.

Christ, the pope declared, was not only the past of Poland--he was "the future . . . our Polish future."

The massed crowd thundered its response. "We want God!" it roared.

That is what the communist apparatchiks watching the mass from the hotels that rimmed Victory Square heard. Perhaps at this point they understood that they had made a strategic mistake. Perhaps as John Paul spoke they heard the sound careen off the hard buildings that ringed the square; perhaps the echo sounded like a wall falling.
The pope had not directly challenged the government. He had not called for an uprising. He had not told the people of Catholic Poland to push back against their atheist masters. He simply stated the obvious. In Mr. Weigel's words: "Poland was not a communist country; Poland was a Catholic nation saddled with a communist state."

The next day, June 3, 1979, John Paul stood outside the cathedral in Gniezno, a small city with a population of 50,000 or so. Again there was an outdoor mass, and again he said an amazing thing.

He did not speak of what governments want, nor directly of what a growing freedom movement wants, nor of what the struggling Polish worker's union, Solidarity, wanted.

He spokeof what God wants.

"Does not Christ want, does not the Holy Spirit demand, that the pope, himself a Pole, the pope, himself a Slav, here and now should bring out into the open the spiritual unity of Christian Europe . . .?" Yes, he said, Christ wants that. "The Holy Spirit demands that it be said aloud, here, now. . . . Your countryman comes to you, the pope, so as to speak before the whole Church, Europe and the world. . . . He comes to cry out with a mighty cry."

What John Paul was saying was remarkable. He was telling Poland: See the reality around you differently. See your situation in a new way. Do not see the division of Europe; see the wholeness that exists and that not even communism can take away. Rhetorically his approach was not to declare or assert but merely, again, to point out the obvious: We are Christians, we are here, we are united, no matter what the communists and their map-makers say.

It was startling. It was as if he were talking about a way of seeing the secret order of the world.

That day at the cathedral the communist authorities could not stop the applause. They could not stop everyone who applauded and cheered. There weren't enough jail cells.


But it was in the Blonie Field, in Krakow--the Blonia Krakowskie, the fields just beyond the city--that the great transcendent moment of the pope's trip took place. It was the moment when, for those looking back, the new world opened. It was the moment, some said later, that Soviet communism's fall became inevitable.
It was a week into the trip, June 10, 1979. It was a sunny day. The pope was to hold a public mass. The communist government had not allowed it to be publicized, but Poles had spread the word.

Government officials braced themselves, because now they knew a lot of people might come, as they had to John Paul's first mass. But that was a week before. Since then, maybe people had seen enough of him. Maybe they were tiring of his message. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad.

But something happened in the Blonie field.

They started coming early, and by the time the mass began it was the biggest gathering of humanity in the entire history of Poland. Two million or three million people came, no one is sure, maybe more. For a mass.

And it was there, at the end of his trip, in the Blonie field, that John Paul took on communism directly, by focusing on communism's attempt to kill the religious heritage of a country that had for a thousand years believed in Christ.

This is what he said:


Is it possible to dismiss Christ and everything which he brought into the annals of the human being? Of course it is possible. The human being is free. The human being can say to God, "No." The human being can say to Christ, "No." But the critical question is: Should he? And in the name of what "should" he? With what argument, what reasoning, what value held by the will or the heart does one bring oneself, one's loved ones, one's countrymen and nation to reject, to say "no" to Him with whom we have all lived for one thousand years? He who formed the basis of our identity and has Himself remained its basis ever since. . . .
As a bishop does in the sacrament of Confirmation so do I today extend my hands in that apostolic gesture over all who are gathered here today, my compatriots. And so I speak for Christ himself: "Receive the Holy Spirit!"

I speak too for St. Paul: "Do not quench the Spirit!"

I speak again for St. Paul: "Do not grieve the Spirit of God!"

You must be strong, my brothers and sisters! You must be strong with the strength that faith gives! You must be strong with the strength of faith! You must be faithful! You need this strength today more than any other period of our history. . . .

You must be strong with love, which is stronger than death. . . . When we are strong with the Spirit of God, we are also strong with the faith of man. . . . There is therefore no need to fear. . . . So . . . I beg you: Never lose your trust, do not be defeated, do not be discouraged. . . . Always seek spiritual power from Him from whom countless generations of our fathers and mothers have found it. Never detach yourselves from Him. Never lose your spiritual freedom.

They went home from that field a changed country. After that mass they would never be the same.


What John Paul did in the Blonie field was both a departure from his original comments in Poland and an extension of them.
In his first comments he said: God sees one unity of Europe, he does not see East and West divided by a gash in the soil.

In this way he "divided the dividers" from God's view of history.

But in the Blonie field he extended his message. He called down the Holy Spirit--as the Vicar of Christ and successor to Peter, he called down God--to fill the people of Poland, to "confirm" their place in history and their ancient choice of Christ, to confirm as it were that their history was real and right and unchangeable--even unchangeable by communists.

So it was a redeclaration of the Polish spirit, which is a free spirit. And those who were there went home a different people, a people who saw themselves differently, not as victims of history but as strugglers for Christ.

Another crucial thing happened, after the mass was over. Everyone who was there went home and turned on the news that night to see the pictures of the incredible crowd and the incredible pope. But state-controlled TV did not show the crowds. They did a brief report that showed a shot of the pope standing and speaking for a second or two. State television did not acknowledge or admit what a phenomenon John Paul's visit was, or what it had unleashed.

The people who had been at the mass could compare the reality they had witnessed with their own eyes with the propaganda their media reported. They could see the discrepancy. This left the people of Poland able to say at once and together, definitively, with no room for argument: It's all lies. Everything this government says is a lie. Everything it is is a lie.

Whatever legitimacy the government could pretend to, it began to lose. One by one the people of Poland said to themselves, or for themselves within themselves: It is over.

And when 10 million Poles said that to themselves, it was over in Poland. And when it was over in Poland, it was over in Eastern Europe. And when it was over in Eastern Europe, it was over in the Soviet Union. And when it was over in the Soviet Union, well, it was over.


All of this was summed up by a Polish publisher and intellectual named Jerzy Turowicz, who had known Karol Wojtyla when they were young men together, and who had gone on to be a supporter of Solidarity and member of Poland's first postcommunist government. Mr. Turowicz, remembering the Blonie field and the Pope's visit, told Ray Flynn, at the time U.S. ambassador to the Vatican, "Historians say World War II ended in 1945. Maybe in the rest of the world, but not in Poland. They say communism fell in 1989. Not in Poland. World War II and communism both ended in Poland at the same time--in 1979, when John Paul II came home."
And now he is dead. It is fitting and not at all surprising that Rome, to its shock, has been overwhelmed with millions of people come to see him for the last time. The line to view his body in St. Peter's stretched more than a mile. His funeral tomorrow will be witnessed by an expected two billion people, the biggest television event in history. And no one, in Poland or elsewhere, will be able to edit the tape to hide what is happening.

John Paul gave us what may be the transcendent public spiritual moment of the 20th century. "We want God." The greatest and most authentic cry of the human heart.

They say he asked that his heart be removed from his body and buried in Poland. That sounds right, and I hope it's true. They'd better get a big box.
Title: No Prisoners!
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on April 29, 2005, 10:15:53 AM
VDH takes no prisoners. . . .

April 29, 2005, 8:03 a.m.
On Being Disliked
The new not-so-unwelcome anti-Americanism.
Victor Davis Hanson


Last year the hysteria about the hostility toward the United States reached a fevered pitch. Everyone from Jimmy Carter to our Hollywood elite lamented that America had lost its old popularity. It was a constant promise of the Kerry campaign to restore our good name and "to work with our allies." The more sensitive were going to undo the supposed damage of the last four years. Whole books have been devoted to this peculiar new anti-Americanism, but few have asked whether or not such suspicion of the United States is, in fact, a barometer of what we are doing right ? and while not necessarily welcome, at least proof that we are on the correct track.

The Egyptian autocracy may have received $57 billion in aggregate American aid over the last three decades. But that largess still does not prevent the Mubarak dynasty from damning indigenous democratic reformers by dubbing them American stooges. In differing ways, the Saudi royal family exhibits about the same level of antagonism toward the U.S. as do the Islamic fascists of al Qaeda ? both deeply terrified by what is going on in Iraq. Mostly this animus arises because we are distancing ourselves from corrupt grandees, even as we have become despised as incendiary democratizers by the Islamists. Is that risky and dangerous? Yes. Bad? Hardly

At the U.N. it is said that a ruling hierarchy mistrusts the United States and that a culture of anti-Americanism has become endemic within the organization. No wonder ? the Americans alone push for more facts about the Oil-for-Food scandal, question Kofi Annan's breaches of ethics, and want investigations about U.N. crimes in Africa. If we are mistrusted for caring about those thousands who are inhumanely treated by a supposedly humane organization, then why in the world should we wish to be liked by such a group?

EU bureaucrats and French politicians routinely caricature Americans, whipping up public opinion against the United States, even as they fly here to profess eagerness to maintain the old NATO transatlantic ties. Is it to our discredit that what Europe has now devolved into does not like the United States?

Mexico, we are told, is furious at the United States. Mexico City newspapers routinely trash Americans. Vicente Fox usually sounds more like a belligerent than the occasional visitor at the presidential ranch. That is not so bad either.

In short, who exactly does not like the United States and why? First, almost all the 20 or so illiberal Arab governments that used to count on American realpolitik's giving them a pass on accounting for their crimes. They fear not the realist Europeans, nor the resource-mad Chinese, nor the old brutal Russians, but the Americans, who alone are prodding them to open their economies and democratize their corrupt political cultures. We must learn to expect, not lament, their hostility, and begin to worry that things would be indeed wrong if such unelected dictators praised the United States.

The United Nations has sadly become a creepy organization. Its General Assembly is full of cutthroat regimes. The Human Rights Commission has had members like Vietnam and Sudan, regimes that at recess must fight over bragging rights to which of the two killed more of their own people. The U.N. has a singular propensity to find flawed men to be secretary-general ? a Kurt Waldheim, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, or Kofi Annan. Blue-helmeted peace-keepers, we learn, are as likely to commit as prevent crimes; and the only thing constant about such troops is that they will never go first into harm's way in Serbia, Kosovo, the Congo, or Dafur to stop genocide. Even worse, the U.N. has proved to be a terrible bully, an unforgivable sin for a self-proclaimed protector of the weak and innocent ? loud false charges against Israel for its presence in the West Bank, not a peep about China in Tibet; tough talk about Palestinian rights, far less about offending Arabs over Darfur. So U.N. anti-Americanism is a glowing radiation badge, proof of exposure to toxicity.

The EU is well past being merely silly, as its vast complex of bureaucrats tries to control what 400 million speak, eat, and think. Its biggest concerns are three: figuring out how its nations are to keep paying billions of euros to retirees, unemployed, and assorted other entitlement recipients; how to continue to ankle-bite the United States without antagonizing it to the degree that these utopians might have to pay for their own security; and how not to depopulate itself out of existence. Europeans sold Saddam terrible arms for oil well after the first Gulf War. Democratic Israel or Taiwan means nothing to them; indeed, democracy is increasingly becoming the barometer by which to judge European hostility. Cuba, China, Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah ? not all that bad; the United States, Taiwan, and Israel, not all that good. Personally, I'd rather live in a country that goes into an anguished national debate over pulling the plug on a lone woman than one that blissfully vacations on the beach oblivious to 15,000 elderly cooked to well done back in Paris.

Mexico, enjoying one of the richest landscapes in the world, can't feed its own people, so it exports its poorest to the United States. Its own borders with Central America are as brutal to cross as our own are porous. Illegal aliens send back almost $50 billion, which has the effect of propping up corrupt institutions that as a result will never change. Given its treatment of its own people, if the Mexican government praised the United States we should indeed be concerned.

Who then are America's friends? Perhaps one billion Indians, who appreciated that at a time of recession we kept our economy open, and exported jobs and expertise there that helped evolve its economy.

Millions of Japanese trust America as well. Unlike the Chinese, who on script vandalized Japanese interests abroad in anguish over right-wing Japanese textbooks, Americans ? who at great cost once freed China ? without such violence urge the Japanese to deal honestly with the past. After all, the Tokyo government that started the war is gone and replaced by a democracy; in contrast, the Communist dictatorship that killed 50 million of its own and many of its neighbors is still in place in China. At a time when no one in Europe seems to care that Japan is squeezed between a nuclear North Korea and a nuclear China, the United States alone proves a reliable friend. The French, on spec, conduct maneuvers with the ascendant Communist Chinese navy.

Eastern Europeans do not find the larger families, religiosity, or commitment to individualism and freedom in America disturbing. Apparently, millions in South America don't either ? if their eagerness to emigrate here is any indication.

It is the wage of the superpower to be envied. Others weaker vie for its influence and attention ? often when successful embarrassed by the necessary obsequiousness, when ignored equally shamed at the resulting public impotence. The Cold War is gone and former friends and neutrals no longer constrain their anti-American rhetoric in fear of a cutthroat and nuclear Soviet Union. Americans are caricatured as cocky and insular ? as their popular culture sweeps the globe.

All that being said, the disdain that European utopians, Arab dictatorships, the United Nations, and Mexico exhibit toward the United States is not ? as the Kerry campaign alleged in the last election ? cause for tears, but often reason to be proud, since much of the invective arises from the growing American insistence on principles abroad.

America should not gratuitously welcome such dislike; but we should not apologize for it either. Sometimes the caliber of a nation is found not in why it is liked, but rather in why it is not. By January 1, 1941, I suppose a majority on the planet ? the Soviet Union, all of Eastern Europe, France, Italy, Spain, and even many elsewhere in occupied Europe, most of Latin America, Japan and its Asian empire, the entire Arab world, many in India ? would have professed a marked preference for Hitler's Germany over Churchill's England.

Think about it. When Europe orders all American troops out; when Japan claims our textbooks whitewash the Japanese forced internment or Hiroshima; when China cites unfair trade with the United States; when South Korea says get the hell off our DMZ; when India complains that we are dumping outsourced jobs on them; when Egypt, Jordan, and the Palestinians refuse cash aid; when Canada complains that we are not carrying our weight in collective North American defense; when the United Nations moves to Damascus; when the Arab Street seethes that we are pushing theocrats and autocrats down its throat; when Mexico builds a fence to keep us out; when Latin America proclaims a boycott of the culturally imperialistic Major Leagues; and when the world ignores American books, films, and popular culture, then perhaps we should be worried. But something tells me none of that is going to happen in this lifetime.

? Victor Davis Hanson is a military historian and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. His website is victorhanson.com.
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 19, 2005, 04:15:33 PM
May 17, 2005, 1:07 p.m.
The Smug Delusion of Base Expectations
Count me out of the Newsweek feeding frenzy.

We're in the grips of a pathology. And it's not media bias.

Here's the late-breaking news (you'll want to be sitting down for this): The mainstream media is ideologically liberal and instinctually hostile to George W. Bush, U.S. foreign policy, and the American military.

No kidding. Really. If you want to throw the off-switch for the cognitive part of your brain- as many conservatives seem only to happy to do this week- then, by all means, that is the story you want to run with in this latest media scandal.

Newsweek, in reckless pursuit of a scoop that might score the daily double of embarrassing the Bush administration while heaping more disrepute on the Left's favorite punching bag, Guantanamo Bay, falsely reported a martial toilet-flushing of the Koran. Oops, I'm sorry, I mean the Holy Koran- after all, I don't want to be left out of the new, vast right-wing "we can be just as nauseatingly pious as they can" conspiracy.

The false report, according to the New York Times, instigated "the most virulent, widespread anti-American protests" in the Muslim world since...well, since the last virulent, widespread anti-American protests in the Muslim world- particularly in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where at least 17 people have been killed.

That's right. The reason for the carnage is said- again and again, by media critics and government officials- to be a false report of Koran desecration. The prime culprit here is irresponsible journalism.

Is that what we really think?

Here's an actual newsflash- and one, yet again, that should be news to no one: The reason for the carnage here was, and is, militant Islam. Nothing more.

Newsweek merely gave the crazies their excuse du jour. But they didn't need a report of Koran desecration to fly jumbo jets into skyscrapers, to blow up embassies, or to behead hostages taken for the great sin of being Americans or Jews. They didn't need a report of Koran desecration to take to the streets and blame the United States while enthusiastically taking innocent lives. This is what they do.

The outpouring of righteous indignation against Newsweek glides past a far more important point. Yes, we're all sick of media bias. But "Newsweek lied and people died" is about as worthy a slogan as the scurrilous "Bush lied and people died" that it parrots. And when we engage in this kind of mindless demagoguery, we become just another opportunistic plaintiff-- no better than the people all too ready to blame the CIA because Mohammed Atta steered a hijacked civilian airliner into a big building, and to sue the Port Authority because the building had the audacity to collapse from the blow.

What are we saying here? That the problem lies in the falsity of Newsweek's reporting? What if the report had been true? And, if you're being honest with yourself, you cannot say-- based on common sense and even ignoring what we know happened at Abu Ghraib-- that you didn't think it was conceivably possible the report could have been true. Flushing the Koran down a toilet (assuming for argument's sake that our environmentally correct, 3.6-liters-per-flush toilets are capable of such a feat) is a bad thing. But rioting? Seventeen people killed? That's a rational response?

Sorry, but I couldn't care less about Newsweek. I'm more worried about the response and our willful avoidance of its examination. Afghanistan has been an American reconstruction project for nearly four years. Pakistan has been a close American "war on terror" ally for just as long. This is what we're getting from the billions spent, the lives lost, and the grand project of exporting nonjudgmental, sharia-friendly democracy? A killing spree? Over this?

In the affirmative-action context, conservatives have written trenchantly about the "soft bigotry of low expectations" - the promotion of a vile dependency-ethos that says "you don't need to strive for better," as a result of which many people who might, don't. Our cognate sense of the Islamic world has become the smug delusion of base expectations.

Someone alleges a Koran flushing and what do we do? We expect, accept, and silently tolerate militant Muslim savagery and lots of it. We become the hangin' judge for the imbeciles whose negligence "triggered" the violence, but offer no judgment about the societal dysfunction that allows this grade of offense to trigger so cataclysmic a reaction. We hop on our high horses having culled from the Left's playbook the most politically correct palaver about the inviolable sanctity of Holy Islamic scripture (and never you mind those verses about annihilating the infidels - the ones being chanted by the killers). And we suspend disbelief, insisting that things would be just fine in a place like Gaza if we could only set up a democracy - a development which, there, appears poised to empower Hamas, terrorists of the same ilk as those in Afghanistan and Pakistan who see comparatively minor indignities as license to commit murder.

"Minor indignities? How can you say something so callous about a desecration of the Holy Koran?" I say it as a member of the real world, not the world of prissy affectation. I don't know about you, but I inhabit a place where crucifixes immersed in urine and Madonna replicas composed of feces are occasions for government funding, not murderous uprisings. If someone was moved to kill on their account, we'd be targeting the killer, not the exhibiting museum, not the "artists," and surely not Newsweek.

I inhabit a world in which my government seeks accommodation with Saudi Arabia and China and Egypt, places where the practice of Christianity results in imprisonment...or worse; in which Jews have been driven from almost every country in the Middle East, and in which the goal of destroying their country, Israel, is viewed by much of the globe as legitimate foreign policy; and in which being a Christian, an animist, or the wrong kind of Muslim in Sudan is grounds for genocide ? something the vaunted United Nations seems to regard as more of a spectator sport than a cause of action.

In my world, militant Muslims, capitalizing on the respectful deference of others, have been known tactically to desecrate the Koran themselves: by rigging it with explosives, by using it to secrete and convey terrorist messages, and, yes, even by toilet-flushing parts of it for the nuisance value of flooding the bathrooms at Guantanamo Bay. Just as they have used mosques as sanctuaries, as weapons depots, and as snipers' nests.

There's a problem here. But it's not insensitivity, and it's not media bias. Those things are condemnable, but manageable. The real problem here is a culture that either cannot or will not rein in a hate ideology that fuels killing. When we go after Newsweek, we're giving it a pass. Again.

Andrew C. McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor, is a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.
================================


'NEWSWEEK DISSEMBLED, MUSLIMS DISMEMBERED!' By Ann Coulter
Wed May 18, 7:01 PM ET
 


When ace reporter Michael Isikoff had the scoop of the decade, a thoroughly sourced story about the president of the United States having an affair with an intern and then pressuring her to lie about it under oath, Newsweek decided not to run the story. Matt Drudge scooped Newsweek, followed by The Washington Post.

ADVERTISEMENT
 
 
 
 
When Isikoff had a detailed account of Kathleen Willey's nasty sexual encounter with the president in the Oval Office, backed up with eyewitness and documentary evidence, Newsweek decided not to run it. Again, Matt Drudge got the story.

When Isikoff was the first with detailed reporting on Paula Jones' accusations against a sitting president, Isikoff's then-employer The Washington Post -- which owns Newsweek -- decided not to run it. The American Spectator got the story, followed by the Los Angeles Times.

So apparently it's possible for Michael Isikoff to have a story that actually is true, but for his editors not to run it.

Why no pause for reflection when Isikoff had a story about American interrogators at Guantanamo flushing the Quran down the toilet? Why not sit on this story for, say, even half as long as NBC News sat on Lisa Meyers' highly credible account of     Bill Clinton raping Juanita Broaddrick?

Newsweek seems to have very different responses to the same reporter's scoops. Who's deciding which of Isikoff's stories to run and which to hold? I note that the ones that Matt Drudge runs have turned out to be more accurate -- and interesting! -- than the ones Newsweek runs. Maybe Newsweek should start running everything past Matt Drudge.

Somehow Newsweek missed the story a few weeks ago about Saudi Arabia arresting 40 Christians for "trying to spread their poisonous religious beliefs." But give the American media a story about American interrogators defacing the Quran, and journalists are so appalled there's no time for fact-checking -- before they dash off to see the latest exhibition of "Piss Christ."

Assistant Managing Editor Evan Thomas justified Newsweek's decision to run the incendiary anti-U.S. story about the Quran, saying that "similar reports from released detainees" had already run in the foreign press -- "and in the Arab news agency al-Jazeera."

Is there an adult on the editorial board of Newsweek? Al-Jazeera also broadcast a TV miniseries last year based on the "Protocols of the Elders Of Zion." (I didn't see it, but I hear James Brolin was great!) Al-Jazeera has run programs on the intriguing question, "Is Zionism worse than Nazism?" (Take a wild guess where the consensus was on this one.) It runs viewer comments about Jews being descended from pigs and apes. How about that for a Newsweek cover story, Evan? You're covered -- al-Jazeera has already run similar reports!

Ironically, among the reasons Newsweek gave for killing Isikoff's Lewinsky bombshell was that Evan Thomas was worried someone might get hurt. It seems that Lewinsky could be heard on tape saying that if the story came out, "I'll (expletive) kill myself."

But Newsweek couldn't wait a moment to run a story that predictably ginned up Islamic savages into murderous riots in     Afghanistan, leaving hundreds injured and 16 dead. Who could have seen that coming? These are people who stone rape victims to death because the family "honor" has been violated and who fly planes into American skyscrapers because -- wait, why did they do that again?

Come to think of it, I'm not sure it's entirely fair to hold Newsweek responsible for inciting violence among people who view ancient Buddhist statues as outrageous provocation -- though I was really looking forward to finally agreeing with Islamic loonies about something. (Bumper sticker idea for liberals: News magazines don't kill people, Muslims do.) But then I wouldn't have sat on the story of the decade because of the empty threats of a drama queen gas-bagging with her friend on the telephone between spoonfuls of Haagen-Dazs.

No matter how I look at it, I can't grasp the editorial judgment that kills Isikoff's stories about a sitting president molesting the help and obstructing justice, while running Isikoff's not particularly newsworthy (or well-sourced) story about Americans desecrating a Quran at Guantanamo.

Even if it were true, why not sit on it? There are a lot of reasons the media withhold even true facts from readers. These include:


A drama queen nitwit exclaimed she'd kill herself. (Evan Thomas' reason for holding the Lewinsky story.)


The need for "more independent reporting." (Newsweek President Richard Smith explaining why Newsweek sat on the Lewinsky story even though the magazine had Lewinsky on tape describing the affair.)


"We were in Havana." (ABC president David Westin explaining why "Nightline" held the Lewinsky story.)


Unavailable for comment. (Michael Oreskes, New York Times Washington bureau chief, in response to why, the day The Washington Post ran the Lewinsky story, the Times ran a staged photo of Clinton meeting with the Israeli president on its front page.)

Protecting the privacy of an alleged rape victim even when the accusation turns out to be false.

Protecting an accused rapist even when the accusation turns out to be true if the perp is a Democratic president most journalists voted for.

Protecting a reporter's source.
How about the media adding to the list of reasons not to run a news item: "Protecting the national interest"? If journalists don't like the ring of that, how about this one: "Protecting ourselves before the American people rise up and lynch us for our relentless anti-American stories."
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 20, 2005, 09:14:18 PM
Related to the 'nuclear option' debate below is the question of which nominees are 'extremists', in a negative sense.

What Sens. Schumer and Reid call extremists are exactly the type of jurists that candidate Bush said he would appoint. Almost 55 Senators share a similar view. By definition, a nominee chosen by an elected President and favored by a majority of senators is not far out of the mainstream, but the critics might be (IMO).

This controversial speech is cited by both sides of the Janice Rogers Brown confirmation argument. She seems to favor a market economy over a big government, collectivist system.

http://www.constitution.org/col/jrb/00420_jrb_fedsoc.htm

"A Whiter Shade of Pale": Sense and Nonsense
The Pursuit of Perfection in Law and Politics

Speech of Janice Rogers Brown,
Associate Justice, California Supreme Court

The Federalist Society
University of Chicago Law School
April 20, 2000, Thursday

Thank you. I want to thank Mr. Schlangen (fondly known as Charlie to my secretary) for extending the invitation and the Federalist Society both for giving me my first opportunity to visit the City of Chicago and for being, as Mr. Schlangen assured me in his letter of invitation, "a rare bastion (nay beacon) of conservative and libertarian thought." That latter notion made your invitation well-nigh irresistible. There are so few true conservatives left in America that we probably should be included on the endangered species list. That would serve two purposes: Demonstrating the great compassion of our government and relegating us to some remote wetlands habitat where ? out of sight and out of mind ? we will cease being a dissonance in collectivist concerto of the liberal body politic.

In truth, they need not banish us to the gulag. We are not much of a threat, lacking even a coherent language in which to state our premise. [I should pause here to explain the source of the title to this discussion. Unless you are a very old law student, you probably never heard of "A Whiter Shade of Pale."] "A Whiter Shade of Pale" is an old (circa 1967) Procol Harum song, full of nonsensical lyrics, but powerfully evocative nonetheless. Here's a sample:

"We skipped the light fandango
turned cartwheels cross the floor
I was feeling kinda seasick
but the crowd called out for more.

The room was humming harder
as the ceiling flew away.
When we called out for another drink
the waiter brought a tray."

There is something about this that forcibly reminds me of our current political circus. The last verse is even better.

"If music be the food of love
then laughter is its queen
and likewise if behind is in front
then dirt in truth is clean...."

Sound familiar? Of course Procol Harum had an excuse. These were the 60's after all, and the lyrics were probably drug induced. What's our excuse?

One response might be that we are living in a world where words have lost their meaning. This is certainly not a new phenomenon. It seems to be an inevitable artifact of cultural disintegration. Thucydides lamented the great changes in language and life that succeeded the Pelopennesian War; Clarendon and Burke expressed similar concerns about the political transformations of their own time. It is always a disorienting experience for a member of the old guard when the entire understanding of the old world is uprooted. As James Boyd White expresses it: "n this world no one would see what he sees, respond as he responds, speak as he speaks,"1 and living in that world means surrender to the near certainty of central and fundamental changes within the self. "One cannot maintain forever one's language and judgment against the pressures of a world that works in different ways," for we are shaped by the world in which we live.2

This is a fascinating subject which we do not have time to explore more thoroughly. Suffice it to say that this phenomenon accounts for much of the near hysterical tone of current political discourse. Our problems, however, seem to go even deeper. It is not simply that the same words don't have the same meanings; in our lifetime, words are ceasing to have any meaning. The culture of the word is being extinguished by the culture of the camera. Politicians no longer have positions they have photo-ops. To be or not to be is no longer the question. The question is: how do you feel.

Writing 50 years ago, F.A. Hayek warned us that a centrally planned economy is "The Road to Serfdom."3 He was right, of course; but the intervening years have shown us that there are many other roads to serfdom. In fact, it now appears that human nature is so constituted that, as in the days of empire all roads led to Rome; in the heyday of liberal democracy, all roads lead to slavery. And we no longer find slavery abhorrent. We embrace it. We demand more. Big government is not just the opiate of the masses. It is the opiate. The drug of choice for multinational corporations and single moms; for regulated industries and rugged Midwestern farmers and militant senior citizens.

It is my thesis today that the sheer tenacity of the collectivist impulse ? whether you call it socialism or communism or altruism ? has changed not only the meaning of our words, but the meaning of the Constitution, and the character of our people.

Government is the only enterprise in the world which expands in size when its failures increase. Aaron Wildavsky gives a credible account of this dynamic. Wildavsky notes that the Madisonian world has gone "topsy turvy" as factions, defined as groups "activated by some common interest adverse to the rights of other citizens or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community,"4 have been transformed into sectors of public policy. "Indeed," says Wildavsky, "government now pays citizens to organize, lawyers to sue, and politicians to run for office. Soon enough, if current trends continue, government will become self-contained, generating (apparently spontaneously) the forces to which it responds."5 That explains how, but not why. And certainly not why we are so comfortable with that result.

America's Constitution provided an 18th Century answer to the question of what to do about the status of the individual and the mode of government. Though the founders set out to establish good government "from reflection and choice,"6 they also acknowledged the "limits of reason as applied to constitutional design,"7 and wisely did not seek to invent the world anew on the basis of abstract principle; instead, they chose to rely on habits, customs, and principles derived from human experience and authenticated by tradition.

"The Framers understood that the self-interest which in the private sphere contributes to welfare of society ? both in the sense of material well-being and in the social unity engendered by commerce ? makes man a knave in the public sphere, the sphere of politics and group action. It is self-interest that leads individuals to form factions to try to expropriate the wealth of others through government and that constantly threatens social harmony."8

Collectivism sought to answer a different question: how to achieve cosmic justice ? sometimes referred to as social justice ? a world of social and economic equality. Such an ambitious proposal sees no limit to man's capacity to reason. It presupposes a community can consciously design not only improved political, economic, and social systems but new and improved human beings as well.

The great innovation of this millennium was equality before the law. The greatest fiasco ? the attempt to guarantee equal outcomes for all people. Tom Bethell notes that the security of property ? a security our Constitution sought to ensure ? had to be devalued in order for collectivism to come of age. The founders viewed private property as "the guardian of every other right."9 But, "by 1890 we find Alfred Marshall, the teacher of John Maynard Keynes making the astounding claim that the need for private property reaches no deeper than the qualities of human nature."10 A hundred years later came Milton Friedman's laconic reply: " 'I would say that goes pretty deep.'"11 In between, came the reign of socialism. "Starting with the formation of the Fabian Society and ending with the fall of the Berlin Wall, its ambitious project was the reformation of human nature. Intellectuals visualized a planned life without private property, mediated by the New Man."12 He never arrived. As John McGinnis persuasively argues:
"There is simply a mismatch between collectivism on any large and enduring scale and our evolved nature. As Edward O. Wilson, the world's foremost expert on ants, remarked about Marxism, 'Wonderful theory. Wrong species.'"13

Ayn Rand similarly attributes the collectivist impulse to what she calls the "tribal view of man."14 She notes, "[t]he American philosophy of the Rights of Man was never fully grasped by European intellectuals. Europe's predominant idea of emancipation consisted of changing the concept of man as a slave to the absolute state embodied by the king, to the concept of man as the slave of the absolute state as embodied by 'the people' ? i.e., switching from slavery to a tribal chieftain into slavery to the tribe."15

Democracy and capitalism seem to have triumphed. But, appearances can be deceiving. Instead of celebrating capitalism's virtues, we offer it grudging acceptance, contemptuous tolerance but only for its capacity to feed the insatiable maw of socialism. We do not conclude that socialism suffers from a fundamental and profound flaw. We conclude instead that its ends are worthy of any sacrifice ? including our freedom. Revel notes that Marxism has been "shamed and ridiculed everywhere except American universities" but only after totalitarian systems "reached the limits of their wickedness."16

"Socialism concentrated all the wealth in the hands of an oligarchy in the name of social justice, reduced peoples to misery in the name of shar[ed] resources, to ignorance in the name of science. It created the modern world's most inegalitarian societies in the name of equality, the most vast network of concentration camps ever built [for] the defense of liberty."17

Revel warns: "The totalitarian mind can reappear in some new and unexpected and seemingly innocuous and indeed virtuous form. [?]... t ... will [probably] put itself forward under the cover of a generous doctrine, humanitarian, inspired by a concern for giving the disadvantaged their fair share, against corruption, and pollution, and 'exclusion.'"18

Of course, given the vision of the American Revolution just outlined, you might think none of that can happen here. I have news for you. It already has. The revolution is over. What started in the 1920's; became manifest in 1937; was consolidated in the 1960's; is now either building to a crescendo or getting ready to end with a whimper.

At this moment, it seems likely leviathan will continue to lumber along, picking up ballast and momentum, crushing everything in its path. Some things are apparent. Where government moves in, community retreats, civil society disintegrates, and our ability to control our own destiny atrophies. The result is: families under siege; war in the streets; unapologetic expropriation of property; the precipitous decline of the rule of law; the rapid rise of corruption; the loss of civility and the triumph of deceit. The result is a debased, debauched culture which finds moral depravity entertaining and virtue contemptible.

But what if anything does this have to do with law? Quite a lot, I think. In America, the national conversation will probably always include rhetoric about the rule of law. I have argued that collectivism was (and is) fundamentally incompatible with the vision that undergirded this country's founding. The New Deal, however, inoculated the federal Constitution with a kind of underground collectivist mentality. The Constitution itself was transmuted into a significantly different document. In his famous, all too famous, dissent in Lochner, Justice Holmes wrote that the "constitution is not intended to embody a particular economic theory, whether of paternalism and the organic relation of the citizen to the State or of laissez faire."19 Yes, one of the greatest (certainly one of the most quotable) jurists this nation has ever produced; but in this case, he was simply wrong. That Lochner dissent has troubled me ? has annoyed me ? for a long time and finally I understand why. It's because the framers did draft the
Constitution with a surrounding sense of a particular polity in mind, one based on a definite conception of humanity. In fact as Professor Richard Epstein has said, Holmes's contention is "not true of our [ ] [Constitution], which was organized upon very explicit principles of political theory."20 It could be characterized as a plan for humanity "after the fall."

There is nothing new, of course, in the idea that the framers did not buy into the notion of human perfectibility. And the document they drafted and the nation adopted in 1789 is shot through with provisions that can only be understood against the supposition that humanity's capacity for evil and tyranny is quite as real and quite as great as its capacity for reason and altruism. Indeed, as noted earlier, in politics, the framers may have envisioned the former tendency as the stronger, especially in the wake of the country's experience under the Articles of Confederation. The fear of "factions," of an "encroaching tyranny"; the need for ambition to counter ambition"; all of these concerns identified in the Federalist Papers have stratagems designed to defend against them in the Constitution itself. We needed them, the framers were convinced, because "angels do not govern"; men do.

It was a quite opposite notion of humanity, of its fundamental nature and capacities, that animated the great concurrent event in the West in 1789 ? the revolution in France. Out of that revolutionary holocaust ? intellectually an improbable melding of Rousseau with Descartes ? the powerful notion of abstract human rights was born. At the risk of being skewered by historians of ideas, I want to suggest that the belief in and the impulse toward human perfection, at least in the political life of a nation, is an idea whose arc can be traced from the Enlightenment, through the Terror, to Marx and Engels, to the Revolutions of 1917 and 1937. The latter date marks the triumph of our own socialist revolution. All of these events were manifestations of a particularly skewed view of human nature and the nature of human reason. To the extent the Enlightenment sought to substitute the paradigm of reason for faith, custom or tradition, it failed to provide rational explanation of the significance of human life. It thus
led, in a sort of ultimate irony, to the repudiation of reason and to a full-fledged flight from truth ? what Revel describes as "an almost pathological indifference to the truth."21

There were obviously urgent economic and social reasons driving not only the political culture but the constitutional culture in the mid-1930's ? though it was actually the mistakes of governments (closed borders, high tariffs, and other protectionist measures) that transformed a "momentary breakdown into an international cataclysm."22 The climate of opinion favoring collectivist social and political solutions had a worldwide dimension.

Politically, the belief in human perfectibility is another way of asserting that differences between the few and the many can, over time, be erased. That creed is a critical philosophical proposition underlying the New Deal. What is extraordinary is the way that thesis infiltrated and effected American constitutionalism over the next three-quarters of a century. Its effect was not simply to repudiate, both philosophically and in legal doctrine, the framers' conception of humanity, but to cut away the very ground on which the Constitution rests. Because the only way to come to terms with an enduring Constitution is to believe that the human condition is itself enduring.

For complex reasons, attempts to impose a collectivist political solution in the United States failed. But, the political failure was of little practical concern, in a way that is oddly unappreciated, that same impulse succeeded within the judiciary, especially in the federal high court. The idea of abstract rights, government entitlements as the most significant form of property, is well suited to conditions of economic distress and the emergence of a propertyless class. But the economic convulsions of the late 1920's and early 1930's passed away; the doctrinal underpinnings of West Coast Hotel and the "switch in time" did not. Indeed, over the next half century it consumed much of the classical conception of the Constitution.

So secure were the intellectual underpinnings of the constitutional revolution, so self-evident the ambient cultural values of the policy elite who administered it, that the object of the high court's jurisprudence was largely devoted to the construction of a system for ranking the constitutional weight to be given contending social interests.

In the New Deal/Great Society era, a rule that was the polar opposite of the classical era of American law reigned. A judicial subjectivity whose very purpose was to do away with objective gauges of constitutionality, with universal principles, the better to give the judicial priesthood a free hand to remake the Constitution. After a handful of gross divisions reflecting the hierarchy of the elite's political values had been drawn (personal vs. economic rights, for example), the task was to construct a theoretical system, not of social or cultural norms, but of abstract constitutional weight a given interest merits ? strict or rational basis scrutiny. The rest, the identification of underlying, extraconstitutional values, consisted of judicial tropes and a fortified rhetoric.

Protection of property was a major casualty of the Revolution of 1937. The paradigmatic case, written by that premiere constitutional operative, William O. Douglas, is Williamson v. Lee Optical.23 The court drew a line between personal rights and property rights or economic interests, and applied two different constitutional tests. Rights were reordered and property acquired a second class status.24 If the right asserted was economic, the court held the Legislature could do anything it pleased. Judicial review for alleged constitutional infirmities under the due process clause was virtually nonexistent. On the other hand, if the right was personal and "fundamental," review was intolerably strict. "From the Progressive era to the New Deal, [ ] property was by degrees ostracized from the company of rights.25 Something new, called economic rights, began to supplant the old property rights. This change, which occurred with remarkably little fanfare, was staggeringly significant. With the advent of "economic right
s," the original meaning of rights was effectively destroyed. These new "rights" imposed obligations, not limits, on the state.

It thus became government's job not to protect property but, rather, to regulate and redistribute it. And, the epic proportions of the disaster which has befallen millions of people during the ensuing decades has not altered our fervent commitment to statism. The words of Judge Alex Kozinski, written in 1991, are not very encouraging." 'What we have learned from the experience of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union ... is that you need capitalism to make socialism work.' In other words, capitalism must produce what socialism is to distribute."26 Are the signs and portents any better at the beginning of a new century?

Has the constitutional Zeitgeist that has reigned in the United States since the beginning of the Progressive Era come to its conclusion? And if it has, what will replace it? I wish I knew the answer to these questions. It is true ? in the words of another old song: "There's something happening here. What it is ain't exactly clear."27

The oracles point in all directions at once. Political polls suggest voters no longer desire tax cuts. But, taxpayers who pay the largest proportion of taxes are now a minority of all voters. On the other hand, until last term the Supreme Court held out the promising possibility of a revival of what might be called Lochnerism-lite in a trio of cases ? Nollan, Dolan, and Lucas, Those cases offered a principled but pragmatic means-end standard of scrutiny under the takings clause.

But there are even deeper movements afoot. Tectonic plates are shifting and the resulting cataclysm may make 1937 look tame.

Lionel Tiger, in a provocative new book called The Decline of Males, posits a brilliant and disturbing new paradigm. He notes we used to think of a family as a man, a woman, and a child. Now, a remarkable new family pattern has emerged which he labels "bureaugamy." A new trinity: a woman, a child, and a bureaucrat."28 Professor Tiger contends that most, if not all, of the gender gap that elected Bill Clinton to a second term in 1996 is explained by this phenomenon. According to Tiger, women moved in overwhelming numbers to the Democratic party as the party most likely to implement policies and programs which will support these new reproductive strategies.

Professor Tiger is not critical of these strategies. He views this trend as the triumph of reproduction over production; the triumph of Darwinism over Marxism; and he advocates broad political changes to accommodate it.

Others do not see these changes as quite so benign or culturally neutral. Jacques Barzan finds the Central Western notion of emancipation has been devalued. It has now come to mean that "nothing stands in the way of every wish."29 The result is a decadent age ? an era in which "there are no clear lines of advance"; "when people accept futility and the absurd as normal[,] the culture is decadent."30

Stanley Rosen defines "our present crisis as a fatigue induced by ... accumulated decisions of so many revolutions."31 He finds us, in the spirit of Pascal, knowing "too much to be ignorant and too little to be wise."32

I will close with a story I like a lot. It's a true story. It happened on June 10, 1990. A British Airways jet bound for Malaga, Spain, took off from Birmingham, England. It was expected to be a routine flight. As the jet climbed through the 23,000-foot level, there was a loud bang; the cockpit windshield directly in front of the captain blew out. The sudden decompression sucked Captain Lancaster out of his seatbelt and into the hole left by the windscreen. A steward who happened to be in the cockpit managed to snag the captain's feet as he hurtled past. Another steward rushed onto the flight deck, strapped himself into the captain's chair and, helped by other members of the crew, clung with all his strength to the captain. The slipstream was so fierce, they were unable to drag the pilot back into the plane. His clothing was ripped from his body. With Lancaster plastered against the nose of the jet, the co-pilot donned an oxygen mask and flew the plane to Southampton ?approximately 15 minutes away ? and lande
d safely. The captain had a fractured elbow, wrist and thumb; a mild case of frostbite, but was otherwise unharmed.

We find ourselves, like the captain, in a situation that is hopeless but not yet desperate. The arcs of history, culture, philosophy, and science all seem to be converging on this temporal instant. Familiar arrangements are coming apart; valuable things are torn from our hands, snatched away by the decompression of our fragile ark of culture. But, it is too soon to despair. The collapse of the old system may be the crucible of a new vision. We must get a grip on what we can and hold on. Hold on with all the energy and imagination and ferocity we possess. Hold on even while we accept the darkness. We know not what miracles may happen; what heroic possibilities exist. We may be only moments away from a new dawn.

1 James Boyd White, When Words Lose Their Meaning (Univ. of Chicago Press 1984) p. 4.

2 Ibid.

3 F. A, Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (Univ. of Chicago Press 1994).

4 Golembiewski & Wildavsky, The Cost of Federalism (1984) Bare Bones: Putting Flesh on the Skeleton of American Federalism 67, 73.

5 Ibid.

6 Hamilton, The Federalist Papers No. 1 (Rossiter ed. 1961) p. 33.

7 Michael W. Spicer, Public Administration and the Constitution: A Conflict in World Views (March 1, 1994) 24 American R. of Public Admin. 85 [1994 WL 2806423 at *10].

8 John O. McGinnis, The Original Constitution and Our Origins (1996) 19 Harv. J.L.& Pub. Policy 251, 253.

9 Tom Bethell, Property Rights, Prosperity and 1,000 Years of Lessons, The Wall Street J. (Dec. 27, 1999) p. A19.

10 Ibid.

11 Ibid.

12 Ibid.

13 John O. McGinnis, The Original Constitution and Our Origins, supra, 19 Harv. J. L.& Pub. Policy at p. 258.

14 Ayn Rand, Capitalism the Unknown Ideal (New American Lib. 1966) pp. 4-5.

15 Ibid

16 Jean Francois Revel, Democracy Against Itself (The Free Press 1993) pp. 250-251.

17 Id. at p. 251.

18 Id. at pp. 250-251.

19 (198 U.S. at p. 75.)

20 Clint Bolick, Unfinished Business (1990) p. 25, quoting Crisis in the Courts (1982) The Manhattan Report on Economic Policy, Vol. V, No. 2, p. 4.

21 Jean Francois Revel, The Flight From Truth (Random House N.Y. 1991) p. xvi.

22 Id. at p. xxxvii.

23 348 U.S. 483.

24 Tom Bethell, The Noblest Triumph (St. Martin's Griffin, N.Y. 1998) p. 175.

25 Id. at p. 176.

26 Alex Kozinski, The Dark Lesson of Utopia (1991) 58 U.Chi. L.R. 575, 576.

27 Buffalo Springfield, For What It's Worth (1966).

28 Lionel Tiger, The Decline of Males (Golden Books, N.Y. 1999) pp. 21, 27.

29 Edward Rothstein, N.Y. Times (April 15, 2000) p. A l7.

30 Ibid.

31 Stanley Rosen, Rethinking the Enlightenment (1997) 7 Common Knowledge, p. 104.

32 Ibid.
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 24, 2005, 10:15:56 PM
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/05/22/INGUNCQHKJ1.DTL

Leaving the left
I can no longer abide the simpering voices of self-styled progressives -- people who once championed solidarity
Keith Thompson

Sunday, May 22, 2005

Nightfall, Jan. 30. Eight-million Iraqi voters have finished risking their lives to endorse freedom and defy fascism. Three things happen in rapid succession. The right cheers. The left demurs. I walk away from a long-term intimate relationship. I'm separating not from a person but a cause: the political philosophy that for more than three decades has shaped my character and consciousness, my sense of self and community, even my sense of cosmos.

I'm leaving the left -- more precisely, the American cultural left and what it has become during our time together.

I choose this day for my departure because I can no longer abide the simpering voices of self-styled progressives -- people who once championed solidarity with oppressed populations everywhere -- reciting all the ways Iraq's democratic experiment might yet implode.

My estrangement hasn't happened overnight. Out of the corner of my eye I watched what was coming for more than three decades, yet refused to truly see. Now it's all too obvious. Leading voices in America's "peace" movement are actually cheering against self-determination for a long-suffering Third World country because they hate George W. Bush more than they love freedom.

Like many others who came of age politically in the 1960s, I became adept at not taking the measure of the left's mounting incoherence. To face it directly posed the danger that I would have to describe it accurately, first to myself and then to others. That could only give aid and comfort to Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and all the other Usual Suspects the left so regularly employs to keep from seeing its own reflection in the mirror.

Now, I find myself in a swirling metamorphosis. Think Kafka, without the bug. Think Kuhnian paradigm shift, without the buzz. Every anomaly that didn't fit my perceptual set is suddenly back, all the more glaring for so long ignored. The insistent inner voice I learned to suppress now has my rapt attention. "Something strange -- something approaching pathological -- something entirely of its own making -- has the left in its grip," the voice whispers. "How did this happen?" The Iraqi election is my tipping point. The time has come to walk in a different direction -- just as I did many years before.

I grew up in a northwest Ohio town where conservative was a polite term for reactionary. When Martin Luther King Jr. spoke of Mississippi "sweltering in the heat of oppression," he could have been describing my community, where blacks knew to keep their heads down, and animosity toward Catholics and Jews was unapologetic. Liberal and conservative, like left and right, wouldn't be part of my lexicon for a while, but when King proclaimed, "I have a dream," I instinctively cast my lot with those I later found out were liberals (then synonymous with "the left" and "progressive thought").

The people on the other side were dedicated to preserving my hometown's backward-looking status quo. This was all that my 10-year-old psyche needed to know. The knowledge carried me for a long time. Mythologies are helpful that way.

I began my activist career championing the 1968 presidential candidacies of Robert Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy, because both promised to end America's misadventure in Vietnam. I marched for peace and farm worker justice, lobbied for women's right to choose and environmental protections, signed up with George McGovern in 1972 and got elected as the youngest delegate ever to a Democratic convention.

Eventually I joined the staff of U.S. Sen. Howard Metzenbaum, D-Ohio. In short, I became a card-carrying liberal, although I never actually got a card. (Bookkeeping has never been the left's strong suit.) All my commitments centered on belief in equal opportunity, due process, respect for the dignity of the individual and solidarity with people in trouble. To my mind, Americans who had joined the resistance to Franco's fascist dystopia captured the progressive spirit at its finest.

A turning point came at a dinner party on the day Ronald Reagan famously described the Soviet Union as the pre-eminent source of evil in the modern world. The general tenor of the evening was that Reagan's use of the word "evil" had moved the world closer to annihilation. There was a palpable sense that we might not make it to dessert.

When I casually offered that the surviving relatives of the more than 20 million people murdered on orders of Joseph Stalin might not find "evil'" too strong a word, the room took on a collective bemused smile of the sort you might expect if someone had casually mentioned taking up child molestation for sport.

My progressive companions had a point. It was rude to bring a word like "gulag" to the dinner table.

I look back on that experience as the beginning of my departure from a left already well on its way to losing its bearings. Two decades later, I watched with astonishment as leading left intellectuals launched a telethon- like body count of civilian deaths caused by American soldiers in Afghanistan. Their premise was straightforward, almost giddily so: When the number of civilian Afghani deaths surpassed the carnage of Sept. 11, the war would be unjust, irrespective of other considerations.

Stated simply: The force wielded by democracies in self-defense was declared morally equivalent to the nihilistic aggression perpetuated by Muslim fanatics.

Susan Sontag cleared her throat for the "courage" of the al Qaeda pilots. Norman Mailer pronounced the dead of Sept. 11 comparable to "automobile statistics." The events of that day were likely premeditated by the White House, Gore Vidal insinuated. Noam Chomsky insisted that al Qaeda at its most atrocious generated no terror greater than American foreign policy on a mediocre day.

All of this came back to me as I watched the left's anemic, smirking response to Iraq's election in January. Didn't many of these same people stand up in the sixties for self-rule for oppressed people and against fascism in any guise? Yes, and to their lasting credit. But many had since made clear that they had also changed their minds about the virtues of King's call for equal of opportunity.

These days the postmodern left demands that government and private institutions guarantee equality of outcomes. Any racial or gender "disparities" are to be considered evidence of culpable bias, regardless of factors such as personal motivation, training, and skill. This goal is neither liberal nor progressive; but it is what the left has chosen. In a very real sense it may be the last card held by a movement increasingly ensnared in resentful questing for group-specific rights and the subordination of citizenship to group identity. There's a word for this: pathetic.

I smile when friends tell me I've "moved right." I laugh out loud at what now passes for progressive on the main lines of the cultural left.

In the name of "diversity," the University of Arizona has forbidden discrimination based on "individual style." The University of Connecticut has banned "inappropriately directed laughter." Brown University, sensing unacceptable gray areas, warns that harassment "may be intentional or unintentional and still constitute harassment." (Yes, we're talking "subconscious harassment" here. We're watching your thoughts ...).

Wait, it gets better. When actor Bill Cosby called on black parents to explain to their kids why they are not likely to get into medical school speaking English like "Why you ain't" and "Where you is," Jesse Jackson countered that the time was not yet right to "level the playing field." Why not? Because "drunk people can't do that ... illiterate people can't do that."

When self-styled pragmatic feminist Camille Paglia mocked young coeds who believe "I should be able to get drunk at a fraternity party and go upstairs to a guy's room without anything happening," Susan Estrich spoke up for gender- focused feminists who "would argue that so long as women are powerless relative to men, viewing 'yes' as a sign of true consent is misguided."

I'll admit my politics have shifted in recent years, as have America's political landscape and cultural horizon. Who would have guessed that the U.S. senator with today's best voting record on human rights would be not Ted Kennedy or Barbara Boxer but Kansas Republican Sam Brownback?

He is also by most measures one of the most conservative senators. Brownback speaks openly about how his horror at the genocide in the Sudan is shaped by his Christian faith, as King did when he insisted on justice for "all of God's children."

My larger point is rather simple. Just as a body needs different medicines at different times for different reasons, this also holds for the body politic.

In the sixties, America correctly focused on bringing down walls that prevented equal access and due process. It was time to walk the Founders' talk -- and we did. With barriers to opportunity no longer written into law, today the body politic is crying for different remedies.

America must now focus on creating healthy, self-actualizing individuals committed to taking responsibility for their lives, developing their talents, honing their skills and intellects, fostering emotional and moral intelligence, all in all contributing to the advancement of the human condition.

At the heart of authentic liberalism lies the recognition, in the words of John Gardner, "that the ever renewing society will be a free society (whose] capacity for renewal depends on the individuals who make it up." A continuously renewing society, Gardner believed, is one that seeks to "foster innovative, versatile, and self-renewing men and women and give them room to breathe."

One aspect of my politics hasn't changed a bit. I became a liberal in the first place to break from the repressive group orthodoxies of my reactionary hometown.

This past January, my liberalism was in full throttle when I bid the cultural left goodbye to escape a new version of that oppressiveness. I departed with new clarity about the brilliance of liberal democracy and the value system it entails; the quest for freedom as an intrinsically human affair; and the dangers of demands for conformity and adherence to any point of view through silence, fear, or coercion.

True, it took a while to see what was right before my eyes. A certain misplaced loyalty kept me from grasping that a view of individuals as morally capable of and responsible for making the principle decisions that shape their lives is decisively at odds with the contemporary left's entrance-level view of people as passive and helpless victims of powerful external forces, hence political wards who require the continuous shepherding of caretaker elites.

Leftists who no longer speak of the duties of citizens, but only of the rights of clients, cannot be expected to grasp the importance (not least to our survival) of fostering in the Middle East the crucial developmental advances that gave rise to our own capacity for pluralism, self-reflection, and equality. A left averse to making common cause with competent, self- determining individuals -- people who guide their lives on the basis of received values, everyday moral understandings, traditional wisdom, and plain common sense -- is a faction that deserves the marginalization it has pursued with such tenacity for so many years.

All of which is why I have come to believe, and gladly join with others who have discovered for themselves, that the single most important thing a genuinely liberal person can do now is walk away from the house the left has built. The renewal of any tradition that deserves the name "progressive" becomes more likely with each step in a better direction.

Keith Thompson is a Petaluma writer and the author of "Angels and Aliens" and "To Be a Man." His work is at www.thompsonatlarge.com. Contact us at insight@sfchronicle.com.

Page C - 1
Title: "Spoons Don't Make Us Get Fat"
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on June 01, 2005, 03:51:47 PM
On Target ? Gun Owners Against Violence

By John J. Cahill
May 30, 2005

There is no group organized as Gun Owners Against Violence. At least no group with that name was found in a web search. There is an obvious reason. At least a reason obvious to gun owners. No such group is needed because all gun owners are against violence. Gun Owners Against Violence would be a redundant nomenclature, like Mammals for Breathing.

Gun owners are categorically against violence in our communities because that is a natural position for law-abiding civic minded members of our society. Violence involving firearms is particularly repugnant because too often the result is an illogical condemnation of equipment. Some people get mad at guns.

Gun owners I know get confused by emotional responses to hardware. These are folks like myself that have been at shooting matches large and small and have never observed a gun act out violently. At the Winter Range shooting match near Phoenix I was with 500 or so shooters in an area of a few acres. Each had a minimum of four guns as required to compete in that SASS Cowboy Shooting event. Most had spare guns too. Hardware does break. Spare hardware is a good thing.

Every shooter had at least two hundred rounds of ammo for each gun. None of those many guns or that considerable ammo acted out violently. All were well behaved, for several days. If you believe some guns are good and some are bad then you might conclude that was an impressive gathering of quite well mannered good guns. I don?t ascribe human qualities to machinery, so I just saw some real fine hardware and noted the pleasant and polite people, and great costumes.

I worked in corrections many years. I worked juvenile, not adult, but officers pay attention to the whole business so I made observations on the adult side. I observed that when guns are removed from a community, completely and totally removed, violence does not end. In fact, the result is the highest murder rate per capita of any community in our nation. But how can this be true?

Violence follows individuals who have threaded violence into their lives. Prisoners who have no access to guns will kill each other with toothbrushes melted and shaped into thrusting weapons, or with any scrap of metal, plastic, glass, even wood that can be fashioned into a stabbing or slashing implement. They will kill and maim each other with tools designed for kitchen work, custodial work, manufacturing, or with their bare hands. There is much violence in that population group, inside or outside of a controlled community, with or without guns.

My conclusion is that violence resides in the individual. Circumstances and backgrounds affect the behavior of each and every person, for better or worse. But the individual makes the decision. Guns don?t make anybody kill, cars don?t make anyone speed or drive drunk, spoons don?t make us get fat.

Never doubt that gun owners are against violence, but please do allow doubt to form when you are told that eliminating guns will decrease violence in a community.

http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/viewArticle.asp?articleID=507
Title: Lionization Tamer
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on June 02, 2005, 02:13:11 PM
Whenever the MSM all start singing from the same hymnal I figure it's time to seek another opinion. Found this in my wanderings.

For those who weren't around in those days in the mid-70s, there were a lot of spooky things going on. Back in my hippy days I hung with a lot of street worker and social activist types. Many of 'em had the special garbage truck show up to haul off their trash. A buddy of mine sent an unflattering cartoon featuring Richard Nixon to the National Lampoon; he was very proud of the letter he got back that basically said "Burn this thing, kid, or you'll end up on an enemies list so fast it'll make your head spin." I recall the Church hearings and remember being scandalized when some of the details of COINTELPRO were reported. In short I don't feel Felt is quite ready to be fitted with a halo. . . .



My Secret Life with W. Mark Felt
His agents probably broke into my office, and may have monitored my bedroom one night. Even as journalists hail the deeds of Deep Throat, no one should forget he was also an architect of the nefarious COINTELPRO spy program. The man truly knew a thing or two about illegal break-ins.

By Greg Mitchell

(June 01, 2005) -- I'll never know for sure, but it's possible that I was once on, ahem, fairly intimate terms with W. Mark Felt, the leak artist formerly known as Deep Throat.

Journalists and many others lionizing the former FBI official -- rightly -- for his contribution in helping to bring down Richard Nixon, should not overlook the fact that Felt was one of the architects of the bureau's notorious COINTELPRO domestic spying-and-burglary campaign. He was convicted in 1980 of authorizing nine illegal entries in New Jersey in 1972 and 1973 -- the very period during which he was famously meeting Bob Woodward in a parking garage. Only a pardon, courtesy of Ronald Reagan, kept him out of jail for a long term.

So the man knew a thing or two about illegal break-ins. COINTELPRO was the Patriot Act on steroids. And that's where I come in.

Back in the bad old/good old days of the early 1970s, a fellow I'll call "Stew" used to write, off and on, for a rather legendary magazine that I helped edit in New York City, before I went straight, called Crawdaddy. (We had plenty of other contributors, including Joseph Heller, P.J. O'Rourke, Tom Waits, Richard Price, William Burroughs, and Tony Kornheiser, to name a few.) Stew was a proudly left-wing guy, but from the fun-loving ex-Yippie side of the antiwar spectrum, as opposed to the violent Weatherman sector. By 1973, he had a bad ticker, and was pretty much retired from any organized political activity.

Stew had both the good and bad fortune to live in an isolated area of the Catskills, sharing a humble cabin on a hilltop near Hurley, N.Y., with his wife Judy (also a politico). Occasionally I spent a weekend with them there, or stopped by on the way to somewhere else.

In those days, at least one famous left-wing fugitive seemed to be on the loose at all times, ranging from Patty Hearst to Abbie Hoffman. Given their location, and backgrounds, Stew and Judy were, at least on paper -- or in the fertile minds of Mark Felt's FBI agents -- plausible candidates to, perhaps, shelter at least one of the runaways. So they'd joke about their phone being tapped, or spotting spooks hiding behind trees in the woods, or expecting to find a listening device installed somewhere in their house.

Well, as we used to say, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't watching you. Turns out all of those fears were justified, and then some, thanks to Mr. Deep Throat and the program he helped organize.

Our fears first spiked when someone broke into the Crawdaddy office on lower Fifth Avenue one night. The intruder busted the gate protecting our rear entrance, and opened a few drawers, but nothing of true value or embarrassment was missing. You might say, in the parlance of the time, that we were only "Felt up." Unfortunately, we had very little to hide, beyond Bruce Springsteen's home phone number.

Then, I got a call from Stew on a Sunday morning, Dec. 11, 1975. He had come out to his old car, parked in front of a friend's house in Greenwich Village, and noticed the band of grime on his rear bumper was brushed away in one spot. Investigating, he reached under the bumper -- and found a crude homing device, about the size of a pack of cigarettes, with a cute little antenna sticking out. He had no idea how long it had been there or who, exactly, had been following them.

Naturally, Crawdaddy's editor, Peter Knobler, called a photographer, and we published a story about the episode the following month, which drew national attention. Pardon my French, but I recall that we called the story, "Bug Up My Ass!" (Remember: I was still a boy.)

With this rather firm evidence in hand, the couple launched a lawsuit against the government. During the course of it, FBI documents were released, and we all learned that, indeed, G-men had hidden in the woods watching them -- and worse, had broken into their cabin at least half a dozen times. The feds also monitored all their mail at the local post office, and opened some of it. Of course, in my editorial duties, I had sent them many letters: Remember snail mail? They also perused the couple's bank records. What incriminating evidence did they find? Zip. Nada.

One of the agents, according to the documents, had the wonderful name of George T. Twaddle.

Oh, one more thing: A listening device had been planted in their bedroom. I used that bedroom at least once while I visited them -- with a girlfriend, no less.

This was all standard fare for many FBI agents at the time, when they weren't infiltrating, or even starting, lefty political groups. "There was no instruction to me," Felt later told Congress, "nor do I believe there is any instruction in the Inspector's manuals, that inspectors should be on the alert to see that constitutional values are being protected."

Stew and Judy managed to win a cash settlement from the government, though I forget the figure and the details. Still, I doubt if they are joining in the chorus of hero worship today for W. Mark Felt, who has good reason to prefer going down in the history books as Deep Throat, not Deep Doodoo.

________________

ADDENUDUM

Some of my fellow geezers may recall that the chief probe of COINTELPRO and similar lawless intelligence operations was carried out by the so-called Church Committee (headed by Senator Frank Church). It issued a chilling report in 1976 that briefly had tremendous impact. Here is one section that deals with Felt:

"Internal inspection at the FBI has traditionally not encompassed legal or ethical questions at all. According to W. Mark Felt, the Assistant FBI Director in charge of the Inspection Division from 1964 to 1971, his job was to ensure that Bureau programs were being operated efficiently...He could not recall any program which was terminated because it might have been violating someone's civil rights.

"A number of questionable FBI programs were apparently never inspected. Felt could recall no inspection, for instance, of either the FBI mail opening programs or the Bureau's participation in the CIA's New York mail opening project. Even when improper programs were inspected, the Inspection Division did not attempt to exercise oversight in the sense of looking for wrongdoing. Its responsibility was simply to ensure that FBI policy, as defined by J. Edgar Hoover was effectively implemented and not to question the propriety of the policy. Thus, Felt testified that if, in the course of an inspection of a field office, he discovered a microphone surveillance on Martin Luther King, Jr., the only questions he would ask were whether it had been approved by the Director and whether the procedures had been properly followed.

"When Felt was asked whether the Inspection Division conducted any investigation into the propriety of COINTELPRO, the following exchange ensued:

"Mr. FELT. Not into the propriety.

"Q. So in the case of COINTELPRO, as in the case of NSA interceptions, your job as Inspector was to determine whether the program was being pursued effectively as opposed to whether it was proper?

"Mr. FELT. Right, with this exception, that in any of these situations, Counterintelligence Program or whatever, it very frequently happened that the inspectors, in reviewing the files, would direct that a certain investigation be discontinued, that it was not productive, or that there was some reason that it be discontinued.

"But I don't recall any cases being discontinued in the Counterintelligence program."





Greg Mitchell is editor of E&P and author of, among other books, "Tricky Dick and the Pink Lady" (Random House, 1998).
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 07, 2005, 07:59:53 PM
THE GEOPOLITICAL INTELLIGENCE REPORT

The Motives of Deep Throat
June 07, 2005 17 56  GMT

By George Friedman

The United States (or at least its Baby Boomers) has been gripped by the
revelation that the fabled Deep Throat, the person who provided the
legendary Woodward and Bernstein the guidance needed to cover the Watergate scandal, was Mark Felt, a senior official in the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In spite of the claims of some, Felt was never high on the
list of suspects. The assumption was always that Deep Throat was a member of the White House staff, simply because he knew so much about the details of the workings of the Nixon White House. A secondary theory that floated around was that Deep Throat was someone from the CIA -- that the CIA, for some unclear reason, wanted to bring Nixon down.

The revelation that Deep Throat was a senior FBI official -- in fact, so
senior that he was effectively J. Edgar Hoover's heir at the FBI -- is full
of historical significance. Even more, it has significant implications
today, when U.S. intelligence and security forces are playing a dramatically enhanced role in American life, and when the question of the relationship between the constitutional life of the republic and the requirements of national security is at a cyclical pitch. If Felt is Deep Throat, then the history and implications of this revelation need to be considered.

This has absolutely nothing to do with the question of Nixon's guilt. It has
been proven beyond doubt that Nixon was guilty of covering up the Watergate burglary, a felony that required impeachment, even if presidents before him had committed comparable crimes. It is not proven, but we are morally certain, that Nixon knew about and possibly demanded the break-in both at the Democratic National Committee headquarters and in Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office. There are too many hints of this in the famous Nixon White House tapes -- and in the existence of an 18-minute gap inserted into one tape -- to doubt that. Nixon was guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors.

None of this, however, has anything to do with Mark Felt's motives in
leading Woodward and Bernstein to water and teaching them the fundamentals of drinking. Felt's motives are important regardless of whether Nixon was guilty because they tell us something about what was going on in the FBI at the time and how the FBI operated. That is what has to be thought through now.

Felt's position has been simply presented. He is portrayed as a patriot who was appalled by the activities of the Nixon White House. Having had Patrick Gray slipped in above him for the top Bureau job, Felt believed that resorting to the normal procedures of law enforcement was not an option. Gray, a Nixon appointee and loyalist, would have isolated or fired Felt if he tried that route, keeping Felt away from grand juries and the normal process of the legal system. The only course of action for Felt was, according to this theory, to leak information to the press. His selection of Woodward and Bernstein for the prize was happenstance. Felt needed national coverage, and that was provided by the Washington Post. Felt claimed a passing acquaintanceship with Bob Woodward, a very young and inexperienced reporter, and this became a convenient channel. In short, Felt was protecting the republic by the only means possible.

Let's consider who Felt was for a moment. He rose in the ranks of the FBI to serve as the No. 3 official, ranking behind only J. Edgar Hoover and
Hoover's significant other, Clyde Tolson. He reached that position for two
reasons: He was competent and, of greater significance, he was absolutely loyal to Hoover. Hoover was obsessed with loyalty and conformity. He expected his agents, even in the junior ranks, to conform to the standards of the FBI in matters ranging from dress to demeanor. Felt did not rise to be the No. 2 of the Hoover-Tolson team by being either a free-thinker or a gadfly. The most important thing to understand about Felt was that he was Hoover's man.

As Hoover's man, he had a front row seat to Hoover's operational principles.  He had to have known of Hoover's wire taps and the uses to which they were put. Hoover collected information on everyone, including presidents. It is well known at this point that Hoover collected information on John F. Kennedy's sexual activities before and during his tenure as president -- as he had with Martin Luther King -- and had used that information to retain his job.

Hoover stayed as head of the FBI for decades because he played a brutal and unprincipled game in Washington. He systematically collected derogatory information on Washington officials, tracking their careers for years. He used that information to control the behavior of officials and influential private citizens. Sometimes it was simply to protect his own position, sometimes it was to promote policies that he supported. At times, particularly later in his life, Hoover appeared to be exercising power for the sheer pleasure of its exercise.

One of Hoover's favorite tactics was the careful and devastating leak.
Hoover knew how to work the press better than just about anyone in
Washington. He used the press to build up his reputation as a crime fighter and to burnish the FBI's reputation. Reporters knew that maintaining good lines of communication with the FBI could make careers, while challenging the FBI could break them. In one famous case, Hoover leaked information to Life magazine that claimed that bodies were buried in the basement of a congressman who had angered Hoover. The rumor was that the congressman got Hoover to force Life to retract the story when the congressman threatened to go public about Hoover's homosexual relationship with Clyde Tolson. That part may or may not be true, but we know that the story was retracted.

In most Washington insider cases, Hoover was not interested in the grand
jury route. The information he collected frequently was less concerned with criminal behavior than embarrassing revelations. What Hoover wanted to do was shape the behavior of people to suit him. It was the threat of revelation -- coupled with judicious leaks to the press, proving that Hoover was prepared to go all the way with it -- that did the trick. Hoover perfected the devastating leak -- and Mark Felt did not rise to power in the FBI by failing to learn that lesson or by following ethical codes other than J. Edgar Hoover's.

The first point that is obvious is that Felt wanted to be director of the
FBI. When Hoover died and Tolson resigned, he expected to replace Hoover. When Nixon appointed Gray, it is clear from his book that Felt felt betrayed and angry. Gray was an outsider who, in his view, was loyal to the president and not to the Bureau. Now, forgetting for the moment that the president was Nixon, this raises the interesting question of whether the primary loyalty of a director of the FBI -- or any other security or intelligence organization -- ought to be to the organization he serves or to the president who appoints him. There are arguments on both sides, but when you take Nixon out of the equation, the elected president would seem to have prima facie status in the equation. Loyalty to an institution, not superseded by loyalty to democratic institutions, would appear to be
dangerous for a security force and a republic. On the other hand, insulation from politics might protect the organization, keeping it from being used as a political instrument. The question is complex. Felt chose to side with the institution.

One can debate the nature of the FBI. Felt himself admitted he was a
disgruntled employee. We can infer his loyalty to Hoover. What we have,
therefore, is a disgruntled FBI employee -- bitter at being passed over for
promotion, angry at having the legacy of his patron dismantled and running a covert operation against the White House. Within days of the Watergate Hotel break-in, Deep Throat -- Felt -- was telling Woodward of the role of E. Howard Hunt. That meant that Felt knew what had happened. He could not have known what had happened had he not inherited Hoover's mechanisms for monitoring the White House. It is clear that Gray was not given that mechanism, and it is clear that Gray didn't know about it -- since Nixon didn't know about it. But Felt did know about it. What the mechanism was, whether electronic eavesdropping or informants in the White House or some other means, is unclear, so we will refer to it as "the mechanism." What is clear is that Felt, without the knowledge of his director, was running an operation that had to precede the break-in. Hoover died in May 1972; the Watergate break-in occurred in August 1972. Felt did not have time to set up his own operation in the White House. He had clearly taken over Hoover's.

Felt could not admit that he had penetrated the White House. The No. 2 man at the FBI could have forced a grand jury investigation, but he did not force one because to do so, he would have had to reveal his covert mechanism in the White House. Felt didn't go to a grand jury not because he was boxed in, but because he could not reveal the means whereby he knew precisely what Nixon and his henchmen were up to. It is fascinating that in all the discussion of Felt as Deep Throat, so little attention has been paid to how Felt would have acquired -- and continued to acquire -- such precise intelligence. It has been pointed out that Felt could not have been the only Deep Throat because he could not personally have known all the things he revealed. That is true, unless we assume that Felt was the beneficiary of an intelligence operation run by Hoover for years deep into successive White Houses. If that is the case, then it makes perfect sense that Felt was the one and only Deep Throat.

Woodward and Bernstein, along with Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee,
didn't care, since they were being fed the goods. Nixon did care, and the
leaks further damaged him by triggering wild-goose chases in search of the source. In fact, one of the most important consequences of Felt's leaks was that the White House spasmed and started looking for the leak. It compounded Nixon's paranoia -- he really did have enemies. Indeed, the entire plumbers unit built to stop leaks in the White House has to be re-evaluated from the standpoint of the FBI operation and its leakages. It would be interesting to determine how many of the leaks Nixon was looking for originated with his suspects (people like Henry Kissinger) and how many were the results of Hoover's covert penetration. If we think of Hoover in his last days less as an ideologue and more as a megalomaniac, the notion that he was trying to cripple Nixon is not absurd.

However, what is clear is that the White House was deeply penetrated, and Felt was operating the mechanism of intelligence. It is also clear that Felt decided not to proceed with the legal route but instead to continue Hoover's tradition of controlling his environment by leaking information. For the leak, he chose a major newspaper with a great deal of credibility and two junior reporters sufficiently ambitious not to ask the obvious questions. That they were on the city desk and not the national desk was an added benefit, since they would lack the experience to understand what Felt was up to. Finally, Bradlee -- a close ally of the Kennedys and someone who despised Richard Nixon -- would be expected to fly top cover for the two minor reporters.

What is critical is how Felt managed Woodward and Bernstein. He did not
provide them with the complete story. Rather, he guided them toward the
story. He minimized what he revealed, focusing instead on two things. First, he made certain that they did not miss the main path -- that the scandal involved the senior staff of the White House and possibly the president himself. Second and more important, Felt made certain that the White House could not contain the scandal. Whenever the story began to wane, it was Felt who fed more information to Woodward and Bernstein, keeping the story alive and guiding them toward the heart of the White House -- yet usually without providing explicit information.

One consequence of this was John Dean. Felt, the veteran of many
investigations, knew that the best way to destroy a conspiracy was to
increase the pressure on it. At some point, one of the conspirators would
bolt to save himself. Felt couldn't know which one would bolt, but that
hardly mattered. As the revelations piled up, the pressure grew. At some
point, someone would break. It didn't have to be John Dean -- it could have been any of perhaps a dozen people. But Felt made certain that the pressure was there, treating the White House the way he would treat any criminal conspiracy.

What is most interesting in all of this is what Felt did not provide but had
to have known: Why did the White House order the break-in to Larry O'Brien's office? Why was the break-in carried out with such glaring incompetence? Consider the famous part in which a security guard removes a piece of tape blocking a door lock that had been placed horizontally rather than vertically, only to have it replaced by one of the burglars, leading to their discovery. If Felt had penetrated the White House and Committee to Re-elect the President deeply enough to be Deep Throat, then he had to know the reason for the break-in. And what else did he control in the White House? Were G. Gordon Liddy's people as stupid as they appeared, getting caught with revealing phone numbers on them? Could anyone be that stupid? Why was the break-in ordered, and why did professionals bungle it so badly?

This is the thing that Felt never gave to Woodward and Bernstein and which, therefore, Woodward and Bernstein never were able to explain. Yet Felt had to know it. The event wasn't random, and whatever else could be said about Nixon and his staff, they weren't stupid. They had their reasons, and it is hard to believe that Felt, who seemed to know everything about the conspiracy, didn't know this. We note -- in pure speculation -- that a covert operation not only uncover what is going on, but also can plant information that will trigger an action.

Richard Nixon was a criminal by the simplest definition of the term -- he
broke the law and tried to hide it. His best defense is that other
presidents were also criminals. Possibly, but that doesn't change Nixon's
status. His closest aides were also, in many cases, criminals. Woodward and Bernstein were lottery winners, selected by Felt precisely because they were easy to lead and asked few questions. Felt, the dispossessed heir of J. Edgar Hoover, played out the hand of his master. He used his position to bring down the president. That the president needed to be brought down is true. That he could have been brought down only by Felt's counterconspiracy is dubious.

There are three issues that must be raised here. One, does a senior FBI
official have the right to leak the fruits of a clandestine operation in the
White House to favored reporters in order to bring about a good outcome?
Two, does the press have a responsibility to report not only what is leaked to them but also to inquire about the motive of the leaker? Didn't the public need to know that Deep Throat was a senior FBI official -- and, at the very least, a disgruntled employee? Doesn't the manner in which the truth is known reasonably affect the public perception? Finally, and most  important, who will guard the guardians when all have agendas?

http://www.stratfor.com
Title: Reporting's a Shell Game and the Truth's the Pea
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on June 08, 2005, 12:09:12 PM
This is a pretty inside baseball matter; few who live outside the DC area will give a hoot. Still in the context of the above, amazing, post it does shed some light on the Washington Post's journalistic ethics, or lack thereof.

June 07, 2005, 7:50 a.m.
Political Post
Was the Washington Post used by Democratic operatives in Maryland?

By Stephen Spruiell

Last week, Vanity Fair scooped the Washington Post when it revealed the identity of the Post?s legendary anonymous source Deep Throat. Once Vanity Fair had reported that Deep Throat was actually W. Mark Felt of the FBI, speculation began to circulate about his motives for feeding information to the Post. Bob Shieffer on Face the Nation Sunday argued that Felt?s motives were unimportant, because his actions had saved America from becoming ?a nation of men, not laws.?

Fair enough. Suppose, however, that Deep Throat had orchestrated the Watergate break-in and then leaked to the Washington Post in order to frame his co-conspirators. Would his motives matter then? Judging by the Post?s recent reporting on a political scandal in Maryland, the motives of anonymous sources feeding information to the paper are not important if the result is a chance to relive the Post?s glory days of Watergate, if only in some small way.

E-spionage
In October of 2004, a Maryland state employee named Joseph Steffen entered into a discussion on FreeRepublic.com using the screen name ?NCPAC.? Another Free Republic user (or ?freeper?) using the screen name ?MD4Bush? engaged Steffen in a friendly way on the public message board. The two began exchanging private e-mails, in which they discussed longstanding rumors about the personal life of Baltimore mayor and likely 2006 Maryland gubernatorial candidate Martin O?Malley (D).
In early 2005, the e-mails were ?given? to the Washington Post by a source that remains unidentified in the paper?s reporting. Post reporter Matthew Mosk confronted Steffen, who verified that he had written them. When Maryland Governor Robert Ehrlich (R) found out that the Post was planning to portray Steffen as part of a coordinated effort to spread rumors about O?Malley, Ehrlich had little choice. He accepted Steffen?s resignation.

February 8, 2005 ? hours before the Post?s story appeared online ? MD4Bush posted excerpts from the private e-mails to a Free Republic message board. MD4Bush had underlined damaging passages and only posted e-mails that NCPAC had written ? even though according to Free Republic spokesman Kristinn Taylor, posting such private e-mails (or ?freepmails?) without permission is a violation of Free Republic posting guidelines. MD4Bush then vanished from the site and has not posted since.

The most obvious explanation for this behavior is that someone who knew that Steffen was NCPAC set him up. The Post did not report this strange activity. Instead, on February 11 Mosk and David Snyder co-wrote a story headlined: ?Uproar brings focus on role of bloggers.? The first half of the article focused on Free Republic, its history and its nature as a place where people traffic in rumors and gossip. But the last half posted more of the exchanges between MD4Bush and NCPAC. The Post chose paragraph 12 to reveal that MD4Bush ?drew Steffen into a private conversation and appeared to coax him to share more details about his role in spreading the rumor.? The Post printed the following exchange at the end of the article:

A few weeks later, MD4BUSH contacted NCPAC again, asking, ?If some of my friends and I were interested in keeping the story floating, do you have suggestions for us on how best to do it??
Here, Steffen backed away: ?I am sure you will understand, I cannot and will not offer suggestions that may be considered unethical concerning what you should do, campaign-wise. This is especially true concerning [Mayor O?Malley?s] personal life.

(Mosk declined to comment on the placement of information in the article.)

The Post abruptly shifted the focus of its coverage of the Steffen matter to his relationship to Gov. Ehrlich and his role in Ehrlich?s administration. Meanwhile, several other reporters, including Dave Collins and Jayne Miller of WBAL TV in Baltimore, started to investigate some of the more curious aspects of the story. For instance, it seemed interesting, Collins said, that the story breaking when it did simultaneously solved a political problem for the mayor (rumors that had plagued him for years) and focused the blame for those rumors on someone connected to his chief political opponent.

Over the course of the following months, reporters for WBAL TV, WBAL Radio and the Maryland Gazette uncovered the following bits of information that the Post neglected in its reporting:

Real Source of the Rumors

Rival coverage: WBAL Radio reported on the existence of a story that appeared in March of 2000 in the Washington Post, in which Mayor O?Malley?s wife mentioned the rumors (?That he?s running around on me. That he has been running around on me for years.?) and attributed them to political opponents from O?Malley?s days on the Baltimore City Council.

Post coverage: In its initial coverage of the Steffen story, the Post reported that the rumors had been ?widespread? for at least 18 months. However, the Post did not report that these rumors, according to the Mayor?s wife herself, originated from local political opponents from O?Malley?s days as a councilman. This information could have provided context for O?Malley?s charges, aired in the Post, that for 18 months Ehrlich himself had overseen an orchestrated campaign to smear him. After WBAL Radio reported on O?Malley?s wife?s comments, the Post also did a story.

Nature of the Private E-mails

Rival coverage: WBAL TV posted more of the e-mail exchanges between MD4Bush and NCPAC, demonstrating clearly that MD4Bush had asked leading questions and trying to prompt replies from NCPAC that would look as damaging as possible.

Post coverage: The Post reported extensively on Steffen?s e-mails, even creating a webpage for some of them. However, the Post failed to report the extent to which MD4Bush attempted to put words into NCPAC?s mouth (compare the WBAL TV story to the Post?s most thorough treatment of this angle: the ?Uproar brings focus on role of bloggers? story).

Blackmail Attempt

Rival coverage: Collins and Miller of WBAL TV, Thomas Dennison of the Maryland Gazette and others noticed that a third person had been cropped out of a now-famous picture of Gov. Ehrlich with his arm around Steffen ? a picture that had been anonymously distributed to all the local news outlets including the Post. Curious, Collins asked Ehrlich?s office about the identity of the missing person. At first, the governor?s office refused to cooperate with Collins. Then, Dennison asked the governor about the photo in public. Ehrlich spokesman Paul Schurick said, ?We had been very reluctant to release that photograph, because we didn?t see any advantage to it, but once that horse got out of the barn, we decided to go with it.?

On March 24, the governor?s office revealed that the third person in the photograph was a former state employee named Michelle Lane. Further, Ehrlich revealed that Lane had sent his office an e-mail on February 12, accusing him of masterminding a ?whisper campaign? against her and threatening to release information about Joseph Steffen that she said would damage the administration. Collins and Miller started looking for more information about Lane. From their reporting, the following timeline emerges:

 Lane and Steffen were friends at one point. When both worked for Ehrlich, they became close and exchanged e-mails often. At some point, however, they had a falling out and stopped communicating.

 While working for the state of Maryland, Lane asked for a promotion three times. Instead, in July 2004 she was let go.

 Weeks after she was fired, Lane began meeting with key members of the O?Malley administration. In one e-mail, according to Miller, she wrote that she had ?potentially useful information to share.?

When Collins started reporting these facts, he began to receive calls from important state Democrats, who all sounded like they were reading from the ?same script,? he said. ??Why are you guys trying to expose Deep Throat?? They all asked me that. And I said, ?Deep Throat was a source of information, and MD4Bush was possibly an operative. Don?t you see the difference?? And [they] didn?t.?

As Collins and Miller were filing these reports, someone sent an anonymous letter to the Baltimore City Paper attacking Collins?s credibility as a journalist. ?I do find it coincidental that it occurred in the middle of our aggressive pursuit of who is MD4Bush and trying to answer the question, ?Was this an orchestrated effort??? he said.

Post coverage: The Post story focused on Lane?s attorney?s claim, supported by documents she produced, that she was fired for trying to draw the governor?s attention to the state?s broken foster care system. The next day, the Post ran a story headlined, ?Md. foster care draws scrutiny; Ehrlich?s challenge to media on former state worker backfires.? The headline referred to Ehrlich?s challenge to reporters to identify MD4Bush, which he made during the press conference. Instead of accepting the challenge, the Post wrote a fawning profile of Michelle Lane as a courageous whistleblower who was fired for daring to speak truth to power. To date, the Post has not reported on Lane?s rebuffed attempts to get promoted or her recently acquired ties to Democrats.

The Post continues to focus its coverage almost exclusively on items that reflect well on O?Malley and poorly on Ehrlich. The Post has focused primarily on two things: Democrats in the state legislature who complain about Steffen?s role in the hiring and firing of state employees; and Steffen?s personal eccentricities. In the 28 stories Mosk wrote or co-wrote about Steffen, only three stories mention MD4Bush. One is the aforementioned story that focused more on Free Republic than anything. The other two quote Ehrlich officials challenging reporters to find out who MD4Bush is ? a challenge the Post has thus far refused to accept.

None of this necessarily proves an anti-Ehrlich bias at the Post. However, it is increasingly clear that the Post has been used by political operatives to simultaneously help O?Malley and hurt Ehrlich, and that the Post doesn?t seem to care. When asked if he shared this view of things, Mosk said, ?The articles about Steffen?s behavior reported on the actions of a man long associated with Ehrlich?s campaign activities ? actions that weren?t previously known. The reaction of the governor was to fire the aide, and the reaction of the mayor was to express concern and ask for an apology.

?What the reporting did is what we were supposed to do as reporters,? Mosk said. ?The reporting exposed an area of government activity that was not previously known to the public. I feel comfortable that the reporting did a public service.?

This answer does not address the matter of what a newspaper owes its readers when it uses (or is used by) anonymous sources. Post editor Leonard Downie Jr. tried to articulate a policy on the use of anonymous sources when he wrote in March of 2004:

? we will try to explain to readers why a source is not being named. We also will strive to tell our readers as much as we can about why such a source would be knowledgeable and whether the source has a particular point of view? We want at least one Post editor to know the identity of each unnamed source cited in the newspaper, as was the case during Watergate, so that editors can help decide whether to use the source in a story.

When I asked Mosk how he could trust the source who gave him the private e-mails from Free Republic, he reminded me that Steffen had confirmed that he had written the e-mails. But this does not tell his readers anything about the way in which these private e-mails were brought to the attention of the Post in the first place. Isn?t that important for readers to know? Don?t readers deserve to know why this source wasn?t named? What does this source have to hide? And why hasn?t the Post made available to its readers the entire e-mail exchange between NCPAC and MD4Bush? Or told its readers about how MD4Bush posted excerpts of the e-mails on Free Republic on February 8 and then vanished? By failing to answer these questions, the Post has failed to live up to its own guidelines.

Who is MD4Bush? ?We will find out,? Dave Collins told me. ?I have full confidence it?ll come out.? In addition to the reporting of Collins and Miller, Joseph Steffen has retained a lawyer, who said he is attempting to get MD4Bush?s account information from Free Republic. Hopefully the truth will come out before it gets to that point.

Does the Post care about MD4Bush?s identity? Mosk would not tell NRO whether the Post is investigating. It would be in the Post?s best interest to do so. It has already been scooped on the identity of one anonymous source this year.

? Stephen Sprueill reports on the media for National Review Online's new media blog, which debuts today.
Title: The Guantanamo Bay Gripes
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on June 15, 2005, 09:25:36 AM
I dunno, this piece comes dangerously close to allowing logic and good sense into the discussion. . . .


June 15, 2005, 7:48 a.m.
Gitmo by Any Other Name?
?is still necessary.
Jonah Goldberg


There?s a lot I don?t understand about the current hysteria over our prison facility at Guantanamo Bay. At the top of the list is why no one has mentioned Louis Pepe or Mamdouh Mahmud Salim.

Salim, a reputed top lieutenant of Osama bin Laden, was being held at the Metropolitan Correctional Center, a high security federal jail in lower Manhattan. Pepe was a guard there. On November 1, 2000, Salim plunged a sharpened comb into Pepe?s left eye and three inches into his brain. Salim and a compatriot also beat Pepe savagely, in their effort to get the guard?s keys and orchestrate an escape for himself and two fellow terrorists awaiting trial. Believing Pepe was dead, the attackers used his own blood to paint a Christian cross on his torso. Pepe was an experienced correctional officer, a member of the elite MCC Enforcers Disturbance Control, and he weighed in at 300 pounds. He survived the attack with brain damage, crippling disabilities, and an unending stream of surgeries.

The reason Pepe and Salim are relevant should be obvious. There are good guys and bad guys in this story, and as much as it pains some to hear it, we are the good guys. We are not talking about confused teenagers caught up in events larger than themselves. We aren?t talking about mistaken identities. We?re talking about the cream of our enemy?s crop in the war on terror.

Critics of the Bush administration are fond of the argument that the war in Iraq is a distraction from the real war on terror. John Kerry, Howard Dean, and countless others have argued that Iraq diluted our efforts in Afghanistan, the hunt for Osama Bin Laden, and the worldwide consensus on the need to destroy al Qaeda. That?s an argument worth having ? and we have had it many times over. But if it were all true and we had never invaded Iraq, we would still have Guantanamo and the problem of what to do with hardened, dedicated terrorists like Salim.

Of course, we could close Guantanamo, but if you actually support the war on terror you must recognize that we would still need someplace like it. A rose by any other name and all that. We can?t summarily execute every al Qaeda member we capture. Not just because that would raise legitimate moral and legal problems, but because we can?t win unless we interrogate these guys.

Senator Joe Biden said that while we should close Gitmo and release the occupants, we should also ?keep those we have reason to keep.? Huh? This is the logical equivalent of Solomon saying, ?Hey, let?s cut the baby in half after all.? Imagine if, instead of Gitmo, the issue was the death penalty. ?The death penalty should be abolished, but let?s execute the folks there?s a reason to execute.?

If we kept the ones ?we have reason to keep? ? which would probably mean all 500 or so current detainees ? but closed Gitmo, we could bring them to the United States. But this would be a legal quagmire, as it isn?t clear what their rights would be on U.S. soil. And it would be a disaster to treat them like common criminals with all of the usual constitutional rights. Nobody read these murderers their rights when they were seized in Afghanistan, and it?s not like the cast of ?CSI: Kabul? or ?Kandahar PD Blue? collected all the necessary forensic evidence to build a case against them. Does that mean we should just let them go? We certainly can?t set them free on American soil. And if we send them back to Afghanistan or Pakistan, it would be like giving them a do-over.

Any new Gitmo would quickly gain the same reputation as the old one because a) al-Qaida is under strict orders to allege all manner of abuses for propaganda purposes, especially now that such tactics have proved so useful, and b) because the ?international community? and other lovers of runny cheese desperately want such allegations to be true, regardless of the evidence. That the head of Amnesty International could call Gitmo, where we spend more money on the care and feeding of detainees than we do on our own troops, the ?Gulag of our time? is all the evidence we need for that. Caving into such bullying would send the unmistakable message that American can be rolled.

Now, none of this is to say that the U.S. military should have carte blanche to torture or harass detainees. There must be rules, and it is perfectly fair to debate what those rules should be. But unlike the lawless calamity of Abu Ghraib, the evidence is sparse that Guantanamo is anything like the house of horrors depicted by its detractors. In other words, if there are abuses, remedy them. If allegations are propagandistic lies, rebut them as best you can.

But caving into a defamation campaign in order to please those who cannot be pleased and aiding those who must not be aided is no way to support the war on terror or prevent more victims like Louis Pepe.
   
http://www.nationalreview.com/goldberg/goldberg200506150748.asp
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 18, 2005, 07:12:28 AM
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/GuestColumns/Ham20050617.shtmlWhere have all the good spines gone? To Sea.
Mary Katharine Ham (archive)


June 17, 2005
Well, the crab season is officially over. And I will never look at an all-you-can-eat crab leg buffet the same again.

I've been watching 'Deadliest Catch' a Discovery Channel mini-series about the world's most dangerous profession: Alaskan crab fishing. The show follows a handful of fishing boats through the crests and troughs of a five-day crab season. Five days. Sounds easy, right? Not when there is a quota for the fleet and you're competing against hundreds of other boats to haul in your share before Fish and Game calls the end of the season over a crackling radio.

Not when there's 37-degree water, freak 45-foot waves, and nothing but an ice-slicked deck and railing standing between you and the Bering Sea.

The men work days-long shifts, grabbing two hours' pillow time here and there, maximizing the number of 800-lb. crab pots they can throw and reel in during the abbreviated fishery. The pots, made of what looks like rusty chain link, crash into the sea and settle heavily on the green, muddy bottom, zipping 300 feet of rope over the railing behind them. Get a foot caught in that rope and you're gone; hit that water without a survival suit and you're gone; find your ship sitting under a squall and you're quite possibly gone.

As you would imagine, the fishermen are gruff, nary a one without dirty facial hair and dirtier language.

And I like them. Sure, there's a glint of crazy in some of their eyes and more than a hint of a barfight in many of their smiles, but they're all men who do hard work at great risk, hoping to hit it big, and go home better off. They understand the risks they take, they know the reward that?s possible, they weigh the costs and benefits, and they cast off.

These days, it?s helpful to watch a show like 'Deadliest Catch' to remind you of what Americans can be: responsible, grimly determined, and just plain tough. Sometimes it's easy to forget, especially so in the past couple of weeks.

First came the preeners of the Great Compromise:

"Thank God for this moment and for these colleagues of mine," said Sen. Robert Byrd.

"We have reached an agreement to try to avert a crisis in the United States Senate," said Sen. John McCain.

In the Bering Sea, on a ship called the Maverick, men expend far fewer words on far braver acts than bucking one's party leadership.

After that, the Senate let me down again when a red-blooded red-stater indulged in some public parliamentary blubbering'over President Bush?s nominee for ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton. As James Taranto put it in Tuesday's Best of the Web:

Voinovich was blubbering because John Bolton, a man who is purported to be socially rough-edged, is about to become America's ambassador to the U.N. This is not something that would make a normal person weep.
Back on the Fierce Allegiance and the Lady Alaska, men honor a friend who slipped overboard and out of their lives with a stiff upper lip and a moment of silence.

So, what does the State Department have to offer? A pamphlet that reminds us that 'Real Men Moisturize,' with several different lotions, even. It?s a good thing I know plenty of real American men who counter the image of this product-centric creature. Unfortunately, the people this pamphlet is aimed at Arab youth don't know a lot of real American men. And the cause of building bridges with that community is probably not well-served by flaunting our pliable gender constructs.

But these are just pockets of prissiness, right? No, I'm informed that this really is the new man, and I better get ready for him:

"The masculine ideal is being completely modified. All the traditional male values of authority, infallibility, virility and strength are being completely overturned," said Pierre Francois Le Louet, the agency's managing director.

According to this article- dateline, Paris- the new man also has the 'guts' to trade in a traditional wife for something more along the lines of wife swapping. Luckily, father/blogger/columnist and regular American guy with guts, James Lileks, takes some time to explain the term for the new man.

I hate to break it to these theorists, but it does not take guts for a young man to want to have multiple sex partners. It takes guts to settle down and have a family and rein in the roaming libido.  Back in the Bering Sea, Capt. Pete Liske calls home to discipline one of his nine adopted kids over the radio.

But perhaps the most emasculating whining in the past couple weeks has come from folks who actually believe Gitmo is a 'gulag.' When dealing with the would-be 20th hijacker of 9/11, these folks believe that loud Christina Aguilera music, dripping water, exposure to females, proximity to dogs, and thorough medical care constitute ?torture.? Democrat leaders and weak-kneed Republicans are mewling about closing Gitmo altogether.

On the Bering Sea, water that drips instead of gushes from the heavens would be a luxury, sleep deprivation is a perpetual state, and exposure to women would most assuredly not be considered torture.

Luckily, there's another man with guts who will inject some sense into the debate:

"The important thing here to understand is that the people that are at Guantanamo are bad people," Vice President Dick Cheney said.

By 'bad people,' he means enemy combatants who scorn military uniforms to gain strategic advantage by blending in with civilians. He means enemy combatants who are not technically entitled to Geneva Convention protections, but who get them at Gitmo, along with their fried chicken dinners. Closing Gitmo as a response to this kind of criticism would be an admission that we are the pedicuring, Kleenex-carrying society we?ve looked like lately.

We can't afford such an admission. Many seem to forget that we are engaged in a fight with an enemy that wants us all dead. All of us?civilian and military alike?because we are a many-hued, many-faithed nation and we like it that way; because our citizens can treat flags and holy texts in any way they wish without being killed; and because we let the womenfolk write columns, among many other transgressions.

It is not mere understanding that will win this fight and keep us alive. It is most certainly not preening or crying, or moisturizing, or shutting down prisons that will do the trick either.

Thank goodness we have folks like this, and this, and this, and many more who are willing to show some spine in this fight. There is a deadly storm at sea. To get through it, we need grizzly fishermen at the helm, not scuttling invertebrates.
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on June 22, 2005, 01:39:26 PM
How this story can be so uniformly ignored is beyond me. Maybe it's only interesting when the bomb actually goes off. . . .

Bauer: Major TV Networks Boycotted 'Hospital Bomber' Story
Wednesday, June 22, 2005 / 15 Sivan 5765

Despite the distribution of a video of the Arab suicide bomber who intended to blow up a hospital by the IDF, nearly all foreign news agencies chose to boycott the story altogether.

An outraged former undersecretary to US President Ronald Reagan and candidate for Republican Presidential nominee, Gary Bauer wrote a scathing critique of the world media?s decision to avoid the story.

Excerpts from Bauer?s letter:

?If you don't get the Fox News Channel then you didn't see any of the dramatic footage of the Israeli army's arrest yesterday of a 21-year old, female Palestinian homicide-bomber, strapped with 25 pounds of high-explosives, just moments before she was to commit mass-murder by detonating herself inside an Israeli hospital. No other television network featured the story.

?Utterly ignoring the extraordinary video of the homicide-bomber's arrest, both the BBC and CNN focused extensively on how much ?damage? Israel's early morning arrest - for which there was no video - of 55 Fatah and Islamic Jihad terrorists, described by CNN as ?Palestinian activists,? would cause to today's scheduled ?summit meeting? between Israeli Prime Minister Sharon and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.

?That only one network would air incredible footage of the seizure of a ticking human-bomb, just moments before she tried to murder hospital patients, means this story was not simply ignored by the mainstream media - it was boycotted by the mainstream media. Since nearly every aspect of this remarkable story contradicts everything the mainstream media has been trying to tell us about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, they just opted for the easiest way to handle it - denying it ever happened.

[?]

?Ignoring the story meant the networks didn't need to tell viewers that yesterday's homicide-bomber was not dispatched by terrorists of Islamic Jihad or Hamas, groups opposed to President Abbas, but was in fact working for the Al Aksa Martyrs Brigade, which is controlled by the political party Fatah, whose chairman is none other than President Abbas himself!

?Ignoring the story meant not having to reveal that the would-be-murderer had been traveling regularly to Israel for years on a valid medical pass, which granted the woman free treatment for burns she received in a home cooking accident, and was thus ruthlessly exploited by depraved terrorists whose shameless capacity to cynically manipulate goodness, in their pursuit of murder and death, knows no bounds.

[?]

?Ignoring the story meant not having to cover comments the female-terrorist made in a rare army supervised press conference in which she revealed what her mission was and who sent her. "I believe in death," she said on Israeli TV. "All my life I have been preparing to be a martyr. Mother, please forgive me for failing in [my] mission." Sentiments not exactly consistent with the line long peddled by the liberal media, and more recently even by the Bush administration, that Israel is the obstacle to "peace."

http://sandiego.cox.net/cci/apvideo/0620gaza_explo_300.wmv
Title: No Fingerbowls at Gitmo
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on June 23, 2005, 08:59:19 AM
Guantanamo Loses 5 Star Rating

By: Ann Coulter

If you still have any doubts about whether closing Guantanamo is the right thing to do, Jimmy Carter recently cleared that up by demanding that it be closed. With any luck, he'll try to effect another one of those daring "rescue" attempts. Here's a foolproof method for keeping America safe: Always do the exact 180-degree opposite of whatever Jimmy Carter says as quickly as possible. (Instead of Guantanamo, how about we close down the Carter Center?)

Sen. Dick Durbin says it is reminiscent of the "Nazis, Soviets in their gulags or some mad regime ? Pol Pot or others." (He then offered the typical Democrat "if/then" non-apology: i.e., "if my remarks offended anyone," based on the rather remote possibility any sentient, English-speaking adult who didn't hate America could have heard them and not been offended.)


Amnesty International calls Guantanamo a "gulag." Sen. Teddy Kennedy says he cannot condone allegations of near-drowning "as a human being." And Sen. Patrick Leahy calls it "an international embarrassment," as opposed to himself, a "national embarrassment."

On the bright side, at least liberals have finally found a group of people in Cuba whom they think deserve to be rescued.

In the interests of helping my country, I have devised a compact set of torture guidelines for Guantanamo.

It's not torture if:

* The same acts performed on a live stage have been favorably reviewed by Frank Rich of the New York Times;

* Andrew Sullivan has ever solicited it from total strangers on the Internet;

* You can pay someone in New York to do it to you;

* Karen Finley ever got a federal grant to do it;

* It's comparable to the treatment U.S. troops received in basic training;

* It's no worse than the way airlines treat little girls in pigtails flying to see Grandma.

It turns out that the most unpleasant aspect of life at Guantanamo for the detainees came with the move out of the temporary "Camp X-Ray." Apparently, wanton homosexual sex among the inmates is more difficult in their newer, more commodious quarters. (Suspiciously, detainees retailing outlandish tales of abuse to the American Civil Liberties Union often include the claim that they were subjected to prolonged rectal exams.) Plus, I hear the views of the Caribbean aren't quite as good from their new suites.

Even the tales of "torture" being pawned off by the detainees on credulous American journalists are pretty lame.

The Washington Post reported that a detainee at Guantanamo says he was "threatened with sexual abuse." (Bonus "Not Torture" rule: If it is similar to the way interns were treated in the Clinton White House.)

"Sign or you will be tortured!"

"What's the torture?"

"We will merely threaten you with horrible things!"

"That's it?"

"Shut up and do as we say, or we'll issue empty, laughable threats guaranteed to amuse you. This is your last warning."

One detainee in Afghanistan told a hyperventilating reporter for Salon that he was forced to stand with his arms in the air for "hours." Doctor, I still have nightmares about the time I was forced to stand with my arms up in the air ...

Others claimed they were forced into uncomfortable, unnatural positions, sort of like the Democrats' position on abortion. Next, the interrogators will be threatening to slightly undercook the Lemon Chicken!

According to Time magazine, this is how the "gulag of our time" treats the inmates: "The best-behaved detainees are held in Camp 4, a medium-security, communal-living environment with as many as 10 beds in a room; prisoners can play soccer or volleyball outside up to nine hours a day, eat meals together and read Agatha Christie mysteries in Arabic."

So they're not exactly raping the detainees with dogs at Guantanamo. (I still think the gift shop T-shirts that said "My dad went to Guantanamo and all I got was this lousy T-shirt" goes too far.)

The only question is: Why do Democrats take such relish in slandering their country? If someone was constantly telling vicious lies about you, would you believe they supported and loved you?

"I love John Doe, and that's why I accuse him of committing serial rape and mass murder. Oh, he doesn't do that? Yes, but how dare you say I don't love John Doe!"

And now back to our regular programming on Air America ...

http://www.iconoclast.ca/MainPage.asp?page=/NewPage16.asp
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on June 25, 2005, 10:08:04 PM
Hanson's scope and sweep always amazes. . . .

The Politics of American Wars
Islamists have proved adept at winning liberal exemption from criticism.
Victor Davis Hanson


For all the talk of imperial America, and our frequent "police actions," we are hardly militarists. Protected by two oceans, and founded on the principles of non-interference in Europe's bloody internecine wars, the United States has always been rightly circumspect about going to war abroad. The American people are highly individualistic, skeptical of war's utility, and traditionally distrustful of government ? and wary of the need of their sacrifice for supposed global agendas.

So we go to war reluctantly. And being human, our support for war hinges on its being short and economical, and waged for professed idealistic principles. Wars that drag on past three years ? from the Civil War to Vietnam ? can often lead to demonstrations and popular disdain.

By the same token, some politics are more compatible with the American perception of the need to fight.

It was not only Lincoln's gifted rhetoric that got the Union through Cold Harbor and the Wilderness, but after the war's initial months of hard fighting, his reinvention of the North's very aims, from a utilitarian struggle to restore the United States to a moral crusade to end slavery and the power of the plantationists for good. In that effort, he was willing to suspend habeas corpus, sidestep the Congress, and govern large chunks of the border states through martial law.

Woodrow Wilson intervened liberally in Central America. He led us to war against right-wing Prussian militarism. His "too proud to fight" slogan in was no time scrapped for the Fourteen Points, a utopian blueprint for the nations of the world, handed down by a former professor from his high and moralistic Olympus.

Few worried that Franklin Delano Roosevelt not only waged a savage global struggle against Italian, German, and Japanese fascism, but in the process did some pretty unsavory and markedly illiberal things at home. It was no right-wing nut who locked up Japanese Americans without regard for habeas corpus or ordered German agents to be shot as terrorists.

To end the dictatorial and genocidal plans of Slobodan Milosevic, liberal Bill Clinton was willing to bomb downtown Belgrade, commit American forces to a major campaign without U.S. Senate approval, and bypass the United Nations altogether. Few accused him of fighting an illegal war, contravening U.N. protocols, or cowardly dropping bombs on civilians. In all these cases, public opposition was pretty much muted, despite the horrendous casualties involved in some of the conflicts.

Some general principles, then, can guide us in determining American reactions to war, and they transcend even the notion of comparative sacrifice and cost. Progressives such as Wilson and Clinton, who, we are assured, hate war, can intervene far more easily, and are more likely to receive a pass from a hypercritical elite media.

In the end, they always seem forced to fight by circumstances, since their very liberal natures are supposed to abhor optional conflicts. FDR's wartime criminal-justice apparatus trumped anything that John Ashcroft could imagine, but it has remained relatively unexamined even to this day: Liberals must have had very good reasons to put non-white people in camps, so contrary to their innate notions of social justice.

Second, the United States seems to be more united against right-wing fascism than left-wing totalitarianism, perhaps because our elites in academia, journalism, and politics feel authoritarian dictators from the right lack the veneer of egalitarian empathy for the poor. In any case, we are more prone even today to assume the 6-8 million Hitler slaughtered puts him in a category far worse than Stalin or Mao, despite the fact that the two combined did away with ten times Hitler's tally.

During World War II, here at home we experienced nothing like the Rosenbergs or Alger Hiss working for the Axis, even though Soviet-inspired global Communism would end up liquidating 80 million in Russia and China alone. Fighting North Korea or North Vietnam ? or even waging the Cold War ? was a far more difficult enterprise than opposing the Kaiser, Hitler, Mussolini, or Tojo. Our successes were often due to the efforts of strong anti-Communist democrats such as Harry Truman, who could assure our influential universities, media, politicians, writers, actors, and foundations of the real danger, and the fact that the president had little choice but to go to war.

In this context, many had some apprehensions about the present so-called war on terror. Ostensibly, the Islamists who had pulled off September 11 largely fit past definitions of fascism and so should have galvanized universal traditional American furor.

The tribal followers of bin Laden advocated a return to a mythical age of ideological purity uncorrupted by modernism, democracy, or pluralism. Islamism certainly held no tolerance for other religions, much less any who were not extreme Muslims. Sexism and racism ? remember bin Laden's taunts about Africans, ongoing slavery in the Sudan, and the genocide in Darfur ? were an integral part of radical Islamist doctrine. Al-Qaeda was not so much chauvinistic as misogynistic. Substitute bin Laden's evocation of "believer" for the old "Volk," and the crackpot rants about world domination, purity, and the anti-Semitic slurs of "apes and pigs" fall into the old fascist slots.

It is no accident that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Mein Kampf are still popular sellers among zealots in some capitals of the Arab world. Was our war on terror, then, going to be morally clear to even the most progressive utopian, since our enemies lacked liberal pretensions and the charisma of a Stalin, Ho, Che, or Fidel that so often duped the gullible?

Hardly.

Two factors explain the current growing hysteria over Iraq, and they transcend the complex nature of the war and even the depressing media reports from the battlefield. First is the strange doctrine of multiculturalism that has become one of our most dominant boutique ideologies of the last few decades, as the United States experienced unleveled prosperity, leisure ? and guilt.

All cultures are of equal merit; failure and poverty abroad are never due to indigenous pathology but rather Western colonialism, racism, Christianity, and gender bias. The Other is never to be judged by our own "biased" standards of jurisprudence and "constructed" bourgeois notions of humanity; those poorer, darker, non-Christian, and non-English-speaking are to be collectively grouped as victims, deserving condescension, moral latitude, and some sort of reparations or downright cash grants. Senator Patti Murray gave us the soccer-mom version of this pathology when she once talked of the need to rival bin Laden's supposed humanitarian projects in Afghanistan, while Senator Durbin assures us from a private e-mail that poor suspects in Cuba (no longer terrorists who plot to butcher more thousands) suffer the similar fate of Hitler's victims.

As September 11 faded in our collective memory, Muslim extremists were insidiously but systematically reinvented in our elite presentations as near underprivileged victims, and themselves often adept critics of purported rapacious Western consumerism, oil profiteering, heavy-handed militarism, and spiritual desolation.

Extremists who would otherwise be properly seen in the fascistic mold were instead given a weird pass for their quite public and abhorrent hatred of non-believers and homosexuals, and their Neanderthal views of women. Beheadings, the murder of Christians, suicide bombings carried out by children, systematic torture ? all this and more paled in comparison to hot and cold temperatures in American jails on Cuba. Suddenly despite our enemies' long record of murder and carnage, we were in a war not with fascism of the old stamp, but with those who were historical victims of the United States. Thus problems arose of marshalling American public opinion against the supposedly weaker that posited legitimate grievances against Western hegemons. It was no surprise that Sen. Durbin's infantile rantings would be showcased on al-Jazeera.

When Western liberals today talk of a mythical period in the days after 9/11 of "unity" and "European solidarity" what they really remember is a Golden Age of Victimhood, or about four weeks before the strikes against the Taliban commenced. Then for a precious moment at last the United States was a real victim, apparently weak and vulnerable, and suffering cosmic justice from a suddenly empowered other. Oh, to return to the days before Iraq and Afghanistan, when we were hurt, introspective, and pitied, and had not yet "lashed out."

If one examines the infomercials of a bin Laden or Zawahiri, or the terrorist communiqu?s sent to the Westernized media, they are almost all rehashes of the Michael Moore Left, from "Bush lied" to "Halliburton" to "genocide" and "Gulag." This now famous "Unholy Alliance" of radical anti-Americans and reactionary jihadists is really a two-way street: Islamists mimic the old leftist critique of the United States, and the Western Left hopes that they in turn can at least tone down their rhetoric about knocking walls over gays or sending all women into burka seclusion ? at least long enough to pose as something like disposed Palestinians minus the Hamas bombs laced with feces, rat poison, and nails.

The second problem was that not only were we no longer clearly fighting a right-wing extremist ideology, but Texan, twangy, and conservative President Bush was hard to repackage into the reluctant liberal warrior in the image of Woodrow Wilson, FDR, Harry Truman, or Bill Clinton.

So there was never much room for error in this war. We are not talking in this postmodern era in terms of a past Democratic president invading Latin America, interring citizens in high-plains camps, hanging terrorist suspects, nuking cities, or bombing pharmaceutical factories in Africa, but, at least from the weird present hysteria, something apparently far worse ? like supposedly flushing a Koran at Guantanamo.

In a leisured and liberal society, it is very difficult in general for a conservative to wage war, because the natural suspicion arises ? as a result of the conservative's tragic view of human nature and his belief in the occasional utility of force ? that he enjoys the enterprise far more than a lip-biting progressive, who may in fact order more destruction. George H. W. Bush barely pulled off freeing Kuwait, but only because he fought on the ground for only four days, used the aegis of the U.N., pulled back on televised images of the so-called "Highway of Death," and was able to avoid going to Baghdad and dealing with a murdering despot still in power.

In contrast, once the metamorphosis of the Islamists from fascists to victimized critics of the West was underway, and once a suspect conservative like George Bush eschewed the old League of Nations utopianism, the fireside chat, and the "I feel your pain" persona of traditional Democratic war leaders, I feared we would have real trouble finishing this war.

Contrary to all recent popular wisdom, the war in Iraq is not a disaster, but nearing success. It has been costly and at times tragic, but a democracy is in place, accords are being hammered out with Sunni rejectionists, and the democratic reformist mindset is pulsating into Lebanon, Egypt, and the Gulf. This has only been possible because of the courage and efficacy of a much maligned military that, for the lapses of a small minority at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, has been compared to Stalin and Hitler.

If President Bush were a liberal Democrat; if he were bombing a white Christian, politically clumsy fascist in the heart of Europe; if al Qaeda and its Islamist adherents were properly seen as eighth-century tormenters of humanists, women, homosexuals, non-Arabs, and non-Wahhabi believers; and if Iraq had become completely somnolent with the toppling of Saddam's statue, then the American people would have remained behind the effort to dismantle Islamic fundamentalism and create the foundations to ensure its permanent demise.

But once the suicide murdering and bombing from Iraq began to dominate the news, then this administration, for historical reasons largely beyond its own control, had a very small reservoir of good will. The Islamists proved to be more adept in the public relations of winning liberal exemption from criticism than did the administration itself, as one nude Iraqi on film or a crumpled Koran was always deemed far worse than daily beheadings and executions. Indeed, the terrorists were able to morph into downtrodden victims of a bullying, imperialistic America faster than George W. Bush was able to appear a reluctant progressive at war with the Dark Age values of our enemies.

And once that transformation was established, we were into a dangerous cycle of a conservative, tough-talking president intervening abroad to thwart the poorer of the third world ? something that has never been an easy thing in recent American history, but now in our own age has become a propagandist's dream come true.
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 27, 2005, 04:05:30 PM
For the record, post WW2 Germans should be judged in their own right and not have the sins of their fathers visited upon them.
=================

 
 
 
Sent: Monday, June 27, 2005 2:27 PM
Subject: Ralph "The Heckler" Peters


GERHARD'S GROVEL
By RALPH PETERS

IN the bitter winter of 1077, Kaiser Heinrich IV, a vicious German politico, pursued the pope to a mountain castle to beg him to lift his excommunication. The pope let the emperor wait barefoot in the courtyard for three days before granting an audience.

When Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder visits the White House today, our president should at least keep him waiting three hours. Extend that morning meeting with the Deputy Plumber's Guild of Peoria. Presidents have to prioritize.

Bush won't be rude, of course. Besides, he's got more on his schedule than a burnt-out German hack ? he's got to get the chancellor in and out. It'll be enough to watch Schroeder squirm as he crawls to the Oval Office, begging to be taken seriously again.

Schroeder's so pathetic these days that it's almost ? almost ? tempting to pity him. He was never a man of substance, just a populist slimeball who told more lies in public than Bill Clinton did in private. But the Herr Kanzler figured he could coast on the legacy better men had left behind in Germany. He never had a program, just ambition.

And Schroeder blew it on every single front. With his penchant for grandstanding and an appetite for licking Jacques Chirac's boots, he made a great show of "standing up to Bush" while defending Saddam Hussein. In doing so, he wrecked an alliance of a half-century's standing that had allowed Germany a voice in world affairs it never deserved.

Think Germany's been forgiven? Talk to any American general or diplomat off the record.

At home, Schroeder lacked the vision or courage to undertake anything beyond cosmetic reforms of Germany's gasping economy. The result: the highest level of unemployment since the end of World War II, with developing-world joblessness in his country's industrial heartland.

The children of the Auschwitz guards love to lecture us about human rights. But they won't even give their youth hope for the future. How can a society claim to be humane when it condemns its citizens to lifelong unemployment and the humiliation of the dole?

Under Schroeder, Germany's educational system continued to deteriorate, the country's brain-drain accelerated, industry shifted jobs abroad and the Teutonic reputation for quality craftsmanship went into free-fall (pretty grim when the reliability rating of Mercedes is below that of Hyundai . . . ).

Now Schroeder's lies have caught up with him. Germans want him out. And he's desperate to end his dying chancellorship on any faintly positive note he can. So the Windbeutel invited himself to Washington and our president graciously offered to buy him lunch.

What does Schroeder want? Besides a free meal?

First, he wants a photo op that lets him pretend he's still taken seriously by the most powerful man in the world.

Second, he'll get down on his knees and promise to be good, good, good as gold if only Bush will back Germany's bid for a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council.

Bush would be as nutty as Howard Dean to agree. There are, indeed, a few countries deserving of a new reserved seat at the Security Council's Theater of the Absurd ? Brazil and India head the list ? but Germany's claim to a permanent chair falls somewhere between the aspirations of Liberia and Myanmar.

Why should a decaying, neurotic country with a recent history of massive genocide be granted a seat at the world's most exclusive table? Russia already fills that bill.

But Gerhard, having stabbed the American people in the back with a dull knife two years ago, is hoping against hope that our short historical memory will kick in and we'll forget that one of his favored parliamentarians compared Bush to Hitler ? and the chancellor didn't offer one word of apology.

Schroeder will blabber on about the long tradition of friendship between our two nations. Come again? We had to force democracy on the Germans at gunpoint. They sucked our strategic blood for 50 years and then chose Saddam Hussein over Uncle Sam.

Yeah, we're pals, Fritz. Here comes the big bratwurst.

Our president can afford to be gracious to the beggar on the South Lawn. Bush doesn't have to land any haymakers on the punch-drunk pol: Tony Blair, the British lion incarnate, is ripping off the chancellor's limbs in a diplomatic Monty Python skit.

Blair has given Chirac and Schroeder such a hammering over their refusal to reform the European Union's antiquated system of subsidies that even German newspapers have accepted that the Brit is right: The European Union can't heal itself without serious, painful changes.

Blair wants money moved from giveaway programs to research and development. Schroeder and Chirac want to keep rewarding Europe's unproductive and inefficient farmers and vintners for being unproductive and inefficient.

A week ago, Schroeder thought he saw an opening when Blair torpedoed the business-as-usual E.U. budget. Now he finds that even his longtime allies believe that Blair nailed it.

Justice doesn't always prevail in this complex, tormented world. But sometimes it does. It's lovely to see Chirac in the merde in France and Schroeder begging for mercy in D.C.

All we can hope is that President Bush doesn't succumb to one iota of pity: Don't forgive, don't forget. Schroeder's perfidy aided America's enemies. The chancellor should go home without so much as a souvenir fountain pen.

Bush should smile, listen, shake hands ? then let the "tin chancellor" suffer the consequences his duplicity brought down upon him.

Ralph Peters' is a retired Colonel.
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 01, 2005, 08:09:28 AM
A Police Perspective On Gun Control & Political Correctness


By

Jim Mortellaro
Source: New York State Fraternal Order Of Police 6-29-00

It's amazing what one has to believe to believe in gun control:
That the more helpless you are the safer you are from criminals.

That Washington DC's low murder rate of 69 per 100,000 is due to gun
control, and Indianapolis' high murder rate of 9 per 100,000 is due to
the lack of gun control.

That "NYPD Blue" and "Miami Vice" are documentaries.

That an intruder will be incapacitated by tear gas or oven spray, but if
shot with a .44 Magnum will get angry and kill you.

That firearms in the hands of private citizens are the gravest threat to
world peace, and China, Pakistan and Korea can be trusted with nuclear
weapons.

That Charlton Heston as president of the NRA is a shill who should be
ignored, but Michael Douglas as a representative of Handgun Control,
Inc. is an ambassador for peace who is entitled to an audience at the UN
arms control summit.

That ordinary people, in the presence of guns, turn into slaughtering
butchers, and revert to normal when the weapon is removed.

That the New England Journal of Medicine is filled with expert advice
about guns, just like Guns and Ammo has some excellent treatises on
heart surgery.

That one should consult an automotive engineer for safer seatbelts, a
civil engineer for a better bridge, a surgeon for spinal paralysis, a
computer programmer for Y2K problems, and Sarah Brady for firearms
expertise.

That the "right of the people peaceably to assemble," the "right of the
people to be secure in their homes," "enumeration's herein of certain
rights shall not be construed to disparage others retained by the
people," "The powers not delegated herein are reserved to the states
respectively, and to the people," refer to individuals, but "the right
of the people to keep and bear arms" refers to the states.

That the 2nd Amendment, ratified in 1787, allows the states to have a
National Guard, created by act of Congress in 1917.

That the National Guard, paid by the federal government, occupying
property leased to the federal government, using weapons owned by the
federal government, punishing trespassers under federal law, is a state
agency.

That private citizens can't have handguns, because they serve no militia
purpose, even though the military has hundreds of thousands of them, and
private citizens can't have assault rifles, because they are military
weapons.

That it is reasonable for California to have a minimum 2 year sentence
for possessing but not using an assault rifle, and reasonable for
California to have a 6 month minimum sentence for raping a female police
officer.

That it is reasonable to jail people for carrying but not using guns,
but outrageous to jail people for possessing marijuana.

That minimum sentences violate civil rights, unless it's for possessing
a gun.

That door-to-door searches for drugs are a gross violation of civil
rights and a sign of fascism, but door-to-door searches for guns are a
reasonable solution to the "gun problem."

That the first amendment absolutely allows child pornography and threats
to kill cops, but doesn't apply to manuals on gun repair.

That Illinois' law that allows any government official from Governor to
dogcatcher to carry a gun is reasonable, and the law that prohibits any
private citizen, even one with 50 death threats on file and a
million-dollar jewelry business, is reasonable. And it isn't a sign of
police statism.

That free speech entitles one to own newspapers, transmitters,
computers, and typewriters, but self-defense only justifies bare hands.

That gun safety courses in school only encourage kids to commit
violence, but sex education in school doesn't encourage kids to have
sex.

That the ready availability of guns today, with only a few government
forms, waiting periods, checks, infringements, ID, and fingerprinting,
is responsible for all the school shootings, compared to the lack of
school shootings in the 1950's and 1960's, which was caused by the
awkward availability of guns at any hardware store, gas station, and by
mail order.

That we must get rid of guns because a deranged lunatic may go on a
shooting spree at any time and anyone who owns a gun out of fear of such
a lunatic is paranoid.

That there is too much explicit violence featuring guns on TV, and that
cities can sue gun manufacturers because people aren't aware of the
dangers involved with guns.

That the gun lobby's attempt to run a "don't touch" campaign about kids
handling guns is propaganda, and the anti-gun lobby's attempt to run a
"don't touch" campaign is responsible social activity.

That the crime rate in America is decreasing because of gun control and
the increase in crime requires more gun control.

That 100 years after its founding, the NRA got into the politics of guns
from purely selfish motives, and 100 years after the Emancipation
Proclamation, the black civil rights movement was founded from purely
noble motives.

That statistics showing high murder rates justify gun control, and
statistics that show increasing murder rates after gun control are "just
statistics."

That we don't need guns against an oppressive government, because the
Constitution has internal safeguards, and we should ban and seize all
guns, therefore violating the 2nd, 4th, and 5th Amendments of that
Constitution, thereby becoming an oppressive government.

That guns are an ineffective means of self defense for rational adults,
but in the hands of an ignorant criminal become a threat to the fabric
of society.

That guns are so complex to use that special training is necessary to
use them properly, and so simple to use that they make murder easy.

That guns cause crime, which is why there are so many mass slayings at
gun shows.

That guns aren't necessary to national defense, which is why the army
only has 3 million of them.

That banning guns works, which is why New York, DC, and Chicago cops
need guns.

That the Constitution protects us, so we don't need guns, and can
confiscate them, thereby violating the 5th amendment of that
constitution.

That women are just as intelligent and capable as men and a woman with a
gun is "an accident waiting to happen".

That women are just as intelligent and capable as men, and gun makers'
advertisements aimed at women are "preying on their fears."

That a handgun, with up to 4 controls, is far too complex for the
typical adult to learn to use, as opposed to an automobile that only has
20.

That a majority of the population supports gun control, just like a
majority of the population used to support owning slaves.

That one should ignore as idiots politicians who confuse Wicca with
Satanism and exaggerate the gay community as a threat to society, but
listen sagely to politicians who can refer to a self-loading small arm
as a "weapon of mass destruction" and an "assault weapon."

That Massachusetts is safer with bans on guns, which is why Teddy
Kennedy has machinegun toting guards.

That most people can't be trusted, so we should have laws against guns,
which most people will abide by, because they can be trusted.

That a woman raped and strangled with her panties is morally superior to
a woman with a smoking gun and a dead rapist at her feet.

That guns should be banned because of the danger involved, and live
reporting from the battlefield, which can keep the enemy informed of
troop deployments, getting thousands of troops killed and perhaps losing
a war, is a protected act that CANNOT be compromised on.

That the right of online child pornographers to exist cannot be
questioned because it is a constitutionally protected extension of the
Bill of Rights, and the claim that handguns are for self defense is
merely an excuse, and not really protected by the Bill of Rights.

That the ACLU is good because it uncompromisingly defends certain parts
of the Constitution, and the NRA is bad, because it defends other parts
of the Constitution.

That police operate in groups with backup, which is why they need larger
capacity magazines than civilians, who must face criminals alone, and
therefore need less ammunition.

That we should ban "Saturday Night Specials" and other inexpensive guns
because it's not fair that poor people have access to guns too.

That guns have no legitimate use, but alcohol does, which is why we
issue cops beer instead of guns.

That police and soldiers are the dregs of society who were unfit to get
any real job, which perfectly qualifies them with the high moral
standards and keen intellects to handle these complicated tools and be
our guardians.

The article and other similar articles may be found at http://www.2ampd.net/
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 12, 2005, 10:40:42 PM
"All kinds of hypocrisy remained unchallenged. In my world of liberal London, social success at the dinner table belonged to the man who could simultaneously maintain that we've got it coming but that nothing was going to come; that indiscriminate murder would be Tony Blair's fault but there wouldn't be indiscriminate murder because 'the threat' was a phantom menace invented by Blair to scare the cowed electorate into supporting him."

Cool.

 
=============
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/Guardian/0,6961,,00.html> Guardian
Unlimited
Comment
Sunday July 10, 2005

Face up to the truth

We all know who was to blame for Thursday's murders... and it wasn't Bush and Blair
by Nick Cohen
 
 

The instinctive response of a significant portion of the rich world's
intelligentsia to the murder of innocents on 11 September was anything but robust. A few, such as Karlheinz Stockhausen, were delighted. The
destruction of the World Trade Centre was 'the greatest work of art
imaginable for the whole cosmos,' declared the composer whose tin ear failed to catch the screams.

Others saw it as a blow for justice rather than art. They persuaded
themselves that al-Qaeda was made up of anti-imperialist insurgents who were avenging the wrongs of the poor. 'The great speculators wallow in an economy that every year kills tens of millions of people with poverty, so what is 20,000 dead in New York?' asked Dario Fo. Rosie Boycott seemed to agree. 'The West should take the blame for pushing people in Third World countries to the end of their tether,' she wrote.

In these bleak days, it's worth remembering what was said after September 2001. A backward glance shows that before the war against the Taliban and long before the war against Saddam Hussein, there were many who had determined that 'we had it coming'. They had to convince themselves that Islamism was a Western creation: a comprehensible reaction to the International Monetary Fund or hanging chads in Florida or whatever else was agitating them, rather than an autonomous psychopathic force with reasons of its own. In the years since, this manic masochism has spread like bindweed and strangled leftish and much conservative thought.

All kinds of hypocrisy remained unchallenged. In my world of liberal London, social success at the dinner table belonged to the man who could
simultaneously maintain that we've got it coming but that nothing was going to come; that indiscriminate murder would be Tony Blair's fault but there wouldn't be indiscriminate murder because 'the threat' was a phantom menace invented by Blair to scare the cowed electorate into supporting him.

I'd say the 'power of nightmares' side of that oxymoronic argument is too
bloodied to be worth discussing this weekend and it's better to stick with
the wider delusion.

On Thursday, before the police had made one arrest, before one terrorist
group had claimed responsibility, before one body had been carried from the wreckage, let alone been identified and allowed to rest in peace, cocksure voices filled with righteousness were proclaiming that the real murderers weren't the real murderers but the Prime Minister. I'm not thinking of George Galloway and the other saluters of Saddam, but of upright men and women who sat down to write letters to respectable newspapers within minutes of hearing the news.

'Hang your head in shame, Mr Blair. Better still, resign - and whoever takes over immediately withdraw all our forces from Iraq and Afghanistan,' wrote the Rev Mike Ketley, who is a vicar, for God's sake, but has no qualms about leaving Afghanistan to the Taliban and al-Qaeda or Iraq to the Baath party and al-Qaeda. 'Let's stop this murder and put on trial those criminals who are within our jurisdiction,' began Patrick Daly of south London in an apparently promising letter to the Independent. But, inevitably, he didn't mean the bombers. 'Let's start with the British government.'

And so it went on. At no point did they grasp that Islamism was a
reactionary movement as great as fascism, which had claimed millions of
mainly Muslim lives in the Sudan, Iran, Algeria and Afghanistan and is
claiming thousands in Iraq. As with fascism, it takes a resolute
dunderheadedness to put all the responsibility on democratic governments for its existence.

I feel the appeal, believe me. You are exasperated with the manifold faults
of Tony Blair and George W Bush. Fighting your government is what you know how to do and what you want to do, and when you are confronted with totalitarian forces which are far worse than your government, the easy solution is to blame your government for them.

But it's a parochial line of reasoning to suppose that all bad, or all good,
comes from the West - and a racist one to boot. The unavoidable consequence is that you must refuse to support democrats, liberals, feminists and socialists in the Arab world and Iran who are the victims of Islamism in its Sunni and Shia guises because you are too compromised to condemn their persecutors.

Islamism stops being an ideology intent on building an empire from Andalusia to Indonesia, destroying democracy and subjugating women and becomes, by the magic of parochial reasoning, a protest movement on a par with Make Poverty History or the TUC.

Again, I understand the appeal. Whether you are brown or white, Muslim,
Christian, Jew or atheist, it is uncomfortable to face the fact that there
is a messianic cult of death which, like European fascism and communism
before it, will send you to your grave whatever you do. But I'm afraid
that's what the record shows.

The only plausible excuse for 11 September was that it was a protest against America's support for Israel. Unfortunately, Osama bin Laden's statements revealed that he was obsessed with the American troops defending Saudi Arabia from Saddam Hussein and had barely said a word about Palestine.

After the Bali bombings, the conventional wisdom was that the Australians
had been blown to pieces as a punishment for their government's support for Bush. No one thought for a moment about the Australian forces which stopped Indonesian militias rampaging through East Timor, a small country Indonesia had invaded in 1975 with the backing of the US. Yet when bin Laden spoke, he said it was Australia's anti-imperialist intervention to free a largely Catholic population from a largely Muslim occupying power which had bugged him.

East Timor was a great cause of the left until the Australians made it an
embarrassment. So, too, was the suffering of the victims of Saddam, until
the tyrant made the mistake of invading Kuwait and becoming America's enemy. In the past two years in Iraq, UN and Red Cross workers have been massacred, trade unionists assassinated, school children and aid workers kidnapped and decapitated and countless people who happened to be on the wrong bus or on the wrong street at the wrong time paid for their mistake with their lives.

What can the survivors do? Not a lot according to a Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. He told bin Laden that the northern Kurds may be Sunni but 'Islam's voice has died out among them' and they'd been infiltrated by Jews. The southern Shia were 'a sect of treachery' while any Arab, Kurd, Shia or Sunni who believed in a democratic Iraq was a heretic.

Our options are as limited When Abu Bakr Bashir was arrested for the Bali
bombings, he was asked how the families of the dead could avoid the fate of their relatives. 'Please convert to Islam,' he replied. But as the past 40
years have shown, Islamism is mainly concerned with killing and oppressing Muslims.

In his intervention before last year's American presidential election, bin
Laden praised Robert Fisk of the Independent whose journalism he admired. 'I consider him to be neutral,' he said, so I suppose we could all resolve not to take the tube unless we can sit next to Mr Fisk. But as the killings are indiscriminate, I can't see how that would help and, in any case, who wants to be stuck on a train with an Independent reporter?

There are many tasks in the coming days. Staying calm, helping the police
and protecting Muslim communities from neo-Nazi attack are high among them. But the greatest is to resolve to see the world for what it is and remove the twin vices of wilful myopia and bad faith which have disfigured too much liberal thought for too long.
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 14, 2005, 08:09:50 PM
Message: July 14, 2005

Make No Mistake: It's a War of Civilizations
By Ed Koch

The events of 9/11 and 7/7 will dominate the lives of
Americans and the British for generations to come.

Even if no more terrorist attacks are perpetrated against us --
regrettably, there will be -- those two acts of mass murder
will long be remembered. On 9/11, we suffered 2,986 dead
and 2,337 injured; On 7/7, the estimate is that 52 died and
700 were injured. English law enforcement has not yet
determined which group was responsible, although the
speculation is that al-Qaeda was involved. (now confirmed of course- Marc)

According to the U.S. government, the al Qaeda organization
is active in Europe, and other terrorist organizations are
associated with Islamic fanatics who live in more than 60
countries worldwide.

The various terrorist organizations are overwhelmingly
Muslim. I believe they are supported by millions of Muslims
around the world who are bent on destroying both Western
civilization and those Muslims, Christians and Jews who
believe in the Western values of democracy and tolerance. Of
course, not every Muslim is a fanatic or terrorist, as pointed
out by Abdel Rahman al-Rashed, the general manager of the
Al Arabiya television station, who said, "It is a certain fact
that not all Muslims are terrorists, but it is equally certain, and
exceptionally painful, that almost all terrorists are Muslims."
They are responsible for near daily suicide bombings in Iraq
that have deliberately murdered Iraqi police, military
personnel and thousands of innocent civilians -- men, women
and children.

We are truly in a war of civilizations. While the Muslim
fanatics do not have us on the run, they have won some major
victories. I count among those victories the submission of
France and Germany to the demands of Islamic fanatics, and
their refusal to stand with us in Iraq, despite the fact that we
are now there pursuant to a U.N. Security Council resolution
and at the request of the recently-elected Iraqi government.
Italy, which originally stood with us, has announced it will
leave Iraq by the end of the year. Prime Minister Berlusconi is
running for reelection and is worried that the Italian electorate
will throw him out of office as did Spanish voters to their
pro-Iraq war prime minister and his governing party after the
Madrid railroad bombings. The newly-elected Socialist
government in Spain withdrew its troops. Poland has already
withdrawn its troops.

The Secret Organization of al-Qaeda in Europe which issued
a statement taking responsibility for the London attack said
after berating Britain for its being in Iraq and Afghanistan,
"We still warn the governments of Denmark, Italy and all the
Crusader governments that they will meet the same fate if they don't pull their forces out of Iraq and Afghanistan."

Here we have it. For the Islamic terrorists, each and every one of their demands must be met by the Christian governments or they will suffer acts of terrorism. Every head of state has expressed outrage. For example, Chirac of France said, "I would like to express the full horror I feel at the terrorist attacks which bathed the British capital in blood this morning. I would like to express to all Londoners, to all of the British people, the solidarity, the compassion and the friendship of France and the French people."

What world leaders should have said is, "An attack upon any
one of us is an attack upon all of us and each of us now
pledges to send 10,000 troops to Iraq. We will not be
intimidated by terrorism."

Instead, they engaged in platitudes.

Today in Great Britain, George Galloway sits in the
Parliament, a former member of the Labor Party, who broke
away, joining the RESPECT party which ran in the last
election. Its major message is to blame Tony Blair for
supporting and joining forces with the U.S. in Iraq. Galloway
criticized Blair after 7/7 saying, "Tragically, Londoners have
now paid the price of the government ignoring such
warnings."  Galloway represents the vision of the Brits who
supported Neville Chamberlain in 1939. Blair, on the other
hand, represents the vision of Winston Churchill. Fortunately,
the British chose to reelect Tony Blair in the last election. Blair
understands the Islamic terrorists worldwide are bent on
killing Christians (Crusaders), Jews and Muslims who defy
them. In Iraq, they have killed thousands of innocent civilians
-- Shiites -- who recently voted for a democratic, tolerant
government.

In 1941, when Japan attacked us at Pearl Harbor and Hitler
declared war on the U.S. four days later, there were
opponents of the Roosevelt policy of supporting the survival
of a British government seeking to repel the pending Nazi
invasion. Many of them were allied with the America First
Committee led by Charles Lindbergh who sought to use
anti-Semitism to coalesce the country, blaming the Jews for
the world's ills. Under that umbrella organization, there were
Nazi supporters and others who sought to be neutral in what
was then clearly becoming a war of civilizations, pitting
European and American democracy against fascist
totalitarianism.

The America First Committee dissolved after December 7,
1941, and most of its adherents stood shoulder-to-shoulder
against the enemies of the U.S. and Western civilization.

In England, there were comparable groups and they too
dissolved. Will that happen now in England as a result of 7/7?
Has it happened in the U.S. as a result of 9/11? Regrettably,
not.

Should we stand aside in Iraq and elsewhere and allow the
terrorists to impose their will in that country and elsewhere
throughout the world? I think not. I believe that countries not
yet involved and unwilling to expend blood and money like
Germany, France and others to protect our democratic values
will rue their desertions from the cause of liberty and
tolerance.

In a recent New York Times article, Tom Friedman pointed
out, "The Muslim village has been derelict in condemning the
madness of jihadist attacks. When Salman Rushdie wrote a
controversial novel involving the prophet Muhammad, he was
sentenced to death by the leader of Iran. To this day -- to this
day -- no major Muslim cleric or religious body has ever
issued a fatwa condemning Osama bin Laden."

Regrettably, our "friends" who are appalled by 7/7 are guilty as well by their absence from the battlefields of Iraq where the war between civilizations is now being waged.


http://www.realclearpolitics.com/Commentary/com-7_14_05_EK.html


Ed Koch is the former Mayor of New York City.
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 15, 2005, 10:28:35 AM
Provenance unknown.
-----------------------------------------

 What?s worse than crawling under your beloved house and seeing the foundations rotten with decades of termite damage?
NOT crawling under your beloved house and seeing the foundations rotten with decades of termite damage.

I?ve been away for a while, doing a little thinking. Usually, my thoughts for these past few years have started at home and then taken me to Iraq, and the war. Lately, though, I have been thinking about Iraq, and my thoughts turn more and more to home.

I started thinking along these lines six months ago, after a young Marine shot and killed a wounded Iraqi in a mosque in Fallujah

The ideas behind this little adventure we are about to embark upon have changed enormously since then. I have, quite frankly, been at a loss to know how to put so many wide-ranging snapshots together into this montage, this image, this idea of Sanctuary that I think holds the key to many of the problems we face today.

Stay with me -- our first stop is not our destination, but it is a necessary one. So let me first take you on that original journey, and show you how events in Iraq can show us how to fight and win a much wider and deeper conflict, right here at home.

Now to hear some fellers tell it, the entire idea of ?Unlawful Combatants? came to Sith mastermind Darth Rover in a vision, and he instructed his familiars Chimpy McBushitler and Torture Master Rumsfeld to use it as an excuse to begin the unjustified savagery that is such an essential part of the American character.

Absent from this worldview is?well?just about everything.

During the actual Major Combat Operations of Iraqi Freedom, US generosity and grace toward defeated elements of the Iraqi regular army was in the highest tradition of the US Military, which is justifiably well-known for its benevolence toward a defeated adversary on the battlefield. Surrendering Iraqi regular units were given rations and medical care, and their officers were allowed to keep their sidearms as a show of respect and authority. I have not seen or heard of a single case of anything less than exemplary conduct regarding enemy regular-army soldiers.

So why were the Taliban and Al Qaeda and Fedayeen insurgents treated so differently? Why the hoods and shackles? Why the humiliation at Abu Graib?

It is not because these men shot at US soldiers. Regular Iraqi units, NVA units, North Korean Units, Germans, Japanese, Confederates and Redcoats have shot at American soldiers and upon their surrender their treatment has been, on the whole, exemplary. Why are these different?

It is not because they are opposing us. It is ? to put it as bluntly as possible ? because they are cheating ? cheating in a way that none of the above ever did.

They have willfully and repeatedly broken the covenant of Sanctuary.


 

What is the obvious difference between an enemy Prisoner of War, and an Unlawful Combatant? Suppose two of them were standing in a line-up. What one glaringly obvious thing sets them apart?

That?s right! One is wearing a uniform, and the other isn?t.

And why do soldiers wear uniforms?

It certainly is not to protect the soldier. As a matter of fact, a soldier?s uniform is actually a big flashing neon arrow pointing to some kid that says to the enemy, SHOOT ME!

And that?s exactly what a uniform is for. It makes the soldier into a target to be killed.

Now if that?s all there was to it, you might say that the whole uniform thing is not such a groovy idea. BUT! What a uniform also does -- the corollary to the whole idea of a uniformed person ? is to say that if the individual wearing a uniform is a legitimate target, then the person standing next to him in civilian clothes is not.

By wearing uniforms, soldiers differentiate themselves to the enemy. They assume additional risk in order to protect the civilian population. In other words, by identifying themselves as targets with their uniforms, the fighters provide a Sanctuary to the unarmed civilian population.

And this Sanctuary is as old as human history. The first civilized people on Earth, these very same Iraqis, who had cities and agriculture and arts and letters when my ancestors were living in caves, wore uniforms as soldiers of Babylon. This is an ancient covenant, and willfully breaking it is unspeakably dishonorable.

Now, imagine you are involved in street-to-street fighting?

We should actually stop right here. No one can imagine street-to-street fighting. It is a refined horror that you have lived through or you have not, and all I can do with the full power of my imagination does not get to the shadow of it. Nevertheless, there are men who have peered around corners in Fallujah, and Hue, and Carentan and a hundred unknown places; places where the enemy?s rifle may be leveled inches away from your nose, awaiting the last split-second of your young life.

Most of the time, you do not have time to think. A person jumps up from below a window three feet away. If he is wearing a grey tunic and a coal-scuttle helmet, it?s a Kraut and you let him have it before he kills you and your buddies. But what if he is wearing street clothes? What if he is smiling at you?

For brutal soldiers ? like the Nazi?s those of the far left accuse us of being precisely equal to ? this is a moot point. The SS killed everything that moved. They executed prisoners in uniforms, partisans, hostages and children. They were animals.

Our soldiers are civilized, compassionate and decent citizens doing a tough, horrible job. That means when they see someone who might be a civilian, they hesitate. That hesitation can and has killed them. And some people wonder why enemy soldiers without the honor and courage to wear a uniform are treated less than honorably after being captured by men full of courage and restraint.

Worse ? worse by far ? than the artificial safety given to enemies not wearing a uniform is the additional horror such behavior will inevitably inflict upon their own civilian population.

And it doesn?t hurt to point out ? repeatedly ? that the people they are putting at infinitely greater risk are supposedly the very people these so-called Muslim Warriors claim be trying to protect: their own women and children. Michael Moore has called these ruthless cowards the moral equivalent of our revolutionary Minutemen. I would point out to Mr. Moore that when confronted by an overwhelming enemy force, our Minutemen grabbed their guns, put their elderly, their women and their children behind them, and went out to face their adversary as far away from the weak and vulnerable as possible. These people do precisely the opposite. Our Minutemen fought for Freedom and Liberty; these fight for repression, state torture, and the right to force everyone to behave as they see fit. Am I surprised that Michael Moore cannot see this difference? I am not. The man has not seen his own toes for two decades, and they are a good deal closer to him than the streets of Fallujah.

Do those protesters ever wonder why prisoners of war in World War II movies ? soldiers -- trying to escape in civilian clothes would be shot as spies? A soldier out of uniform, a soldier trying to hide in the civilian population is gaining a one-time personal advantage, but that not the real sin. The real sin is that he is endangering the non-combatants. He is using civilians as cover. He is breaking down the barrier between the armed and the unarmed, the threat and the non-threat. He is trying to have it both ways.

Whenever there is war and invasion, there will be terrified civilians trying to get from one place to another. In the very early hours of Operation Iraqi Freedom, when we expected to be fighting the same Army that in the Gulf War fully honored the idea of uniformed troops, our soldiers discovered large numbers of unarmed, military-aged men in civilian clothes making for the rear. Many of these men were let through, and promptly took up arms and caused immeasurable damage before blending back into the population.

But they did much worse. Because after a few suicide bombers in civilian vehicles drove up to checkpoints and blew themselves and honor-abiding Coalition soldiers to bits, we have found ourselves having to treat all speeding civilian vehicles as hostile. We simply have no choice anymore. We did not simply decide to open fire on civilians; rather the enemy, in a cold and calculated decision repeated many, many times over, decided to violate the Sanctuary given to civilians to wage war on an American and British Army playing by the rules. They have made the line between civilian and soldier nonexistent. They did this, not us. They did it. They gained the benefits from it, and it has cost us dear. And so perhaps, in a world with less ignorance and more honesty, Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena ? who sped at a US roadblock, weaving, at more than 60 mph and in violation of warning shots -- would be pointing her finger at the people who violated this Covenant of Civilization, and not those being forced to make terrible decisions in order to preserve it.


War is hell, and soldiers have to live there. It is an unbearable burden; unbearable in the sense that not a single man and woman who has been fully exposed to war has ever come back home. Someone else comes back home. Sometimes, it is a better person. Sometimes a worse one. But they are different, all changed in the horror and crucible of war.

And so from the beginning of war, there exists between soldiers a bond that cannot be described. There is the obvious connection of a soldier to his comrades, but there is too a strong sense of respect and kinship with the soldier on the other side of No Man?s Land, shivering in cold wet places just the same, under orders and doing his job, too ? just wanting to get the thing over with and go home.

Surrender is a mercy in such a place. The idea that certain death may be avoided, that one might be willing to simply give up fighting and still survive, is mercy of the deepest blue. Surrendering enemy soldiers are often greeted with a warmth and understanding that friendly civilians do not receive, for they have shared in the misery and hardship of war in ways that we comfortable and safe civilians can never know.

Surrender, in war, is perhaps the ultimate of Sanctuaries. It is a way out when hope and rescue have fled the field. Honorable surrender has never been treated with shame by any American unit I have ever heard of.

And so, when groups of un-uniformed enemy soldiers waving white flags suddenly drop and open fire on unsuspecting, generous and honorable Americans, then the masters of these men have made a terrible bargain. They have destroyed the Sanctuary of Surrender, and eliminated for their own men a deep and abiding refuge in the nightmare of the battlefield.

They have done this to their own men. Not us. We have known of the brutality of the Iraqi army regarding prisoners from at least as far back as those taken and beaten during the first Gulf War, and as far as improvements over the intervening years, we might perhaps call Jessica Lynch to tell us of any newfound magnanimity on the part of the Ba?athists.

False surrender as a weapon of ambush is an abomination. When it is repeated, it is obvious that is not an aberration; it is policy. It is, like the abandonment of the uniform, a tactic to gain a short-term advantage that leads to long-term hardship and misery for their own troops. It is a Devil?s bargain, and they have had the Devil to pay for it ? as have we.

They violate the Sanctuary of the Uniform. They violate the Sanctuary of Surrender. And the most reprehensible of all is the violation of the Sanctuary of Mercy.

Throughout the insurgency, and especially in places like Fallujah, enemy fighters with real or feigned wounds have called for aid. Not often does a soldier who has been in combat look down upon the wounded of either side without horror and sympathy. In places like Fallujah and Iwo Jima and Antietam it is an easy thing to see one?s own reflection in that grimace and that agony.

So when a soldier out of uniform, who may have faked surrender to kill unsuspecting Americans, calls for aid and then willfully kills medics with a concealed grenade? where does that leave us? What unplumbed depths remain? When mercy is used as a weapon against the merciful, what horrors and abominations remain unplayed?

THAT, dear left-wing Citadels of Conscience, is what we are up against. That is what you support against the decency, honor and kindness you mock in your own countrymen as they build schools and hospitals and, indeed, an entire democracy. That is the definition of ?Unlawful Combatant.? It is not a legal nicety, and it is not a rhetorical flourish. It is a pattern of ruthlessness, deception and murder. And regardless of your motive, it is the side you find yourself taking.

These are the kind of men in Guantanamo. Who controls such men? And when busloads of men from Afghanistan and Syria and Jordan and Egypt and Iran, men without uniforms, men not under the control of any officer, men who follow no code of conduct other than an oath to kill any American, anywhere ? who among us with a gram of understanding and perspective can be surprised when such men are hooded and shackled on air transports? And being left to sleep in the open air is one thing in Northern Germany in the winter of ?44, and something else entirely in the middle of the goddam Caribbean! I mean, for the love of God, some of the people screaming themselves into a lather over such an outrage will pay tens of thousands of dollars for the same privilege a few miles away on a catamaran anchored off the coast of Jamaica.

And when people acting on the stage of their own moral outrage wonder when such men will be released, what do we say to them? When Osama bin Laden officially surrenders Al Qaeda on the deck of the USS Ronald Reagan? They have no government, they have no command structure, they have no objective but death. That is their great strength, and by God, it is also their weakness, and we would be fools ? absolute drooling idiots ? to let them have it both ways.

These fanatics have been rigorously coached to lie about mistreatment and torture, and despite this transparent fact, every utterance they make is breathlessly quoted and trumpeted by the press as absolute truth. The naked human pyramids, intimidation with dogs, sexual humiliation and threat of electroshock torture that marked a day or two of mistreatment at Abu Graib were the tools used by immature and untrained individuals precisely because the methods previously employed at that location ? removal of fingers and tongues and genitalia, electrified wire brushes, and the rape and murder of relatives before the eyes of the prisoner ? are so far beyond the horizon of what American interrogators are able to imagine doing that any comparison between the two betrays the moral blindness of those making the comparison.

Is humiliation the same as torture? It is not -- that's why the words are spelled differently. To get to the heart of the difference, assume you were a prisoner at Abu Graib, and your interrogator started to remove your fingers one by one with bolt cutters. How long would it take you to beg to be posed with women?s panties on your head? Yeah, I thought so.

This is not to excuse in any way the shameful behavior committed there by a few individuals who clearly are not fit to wear the uniform of the United States. They have disgraced us all and done incalculable damage. But if producing humiliation and fear is now to be defined as ?torture,? what international human rights organization will be appointed to help the surviving readers of The New York Times?

No system built on human behavior is perfect; they can only be good. What's a reasonable guess as to the number of sadistic, brutal and infantile Americans who so dishonored their uniforms at Abu Graib? Shall we say, perhaps fifteen? Fifteen who knew about what was happening, and countenenced it? So those fifteen, out of a total force of 150,000, completely negate the hard work, restraint, courage and compassion of the rest of the American presence in Iraq?

That is not ten percent bad apples. That is not one percent. That is not one-tenth of a percent. It is, in round numbers one percent of one per cent. What is the percentage of of criminals in the general population? A hundred times that? A thousand? Can college professors boast that kind of quality control? Can reporters? And yet this is all the press can obsess about, for over a year...the behavior of .0001 of the U.S. forces employed to liberate Iraq?

But remember, there is no bias in the media.

And by the way, has it not occurred to anyone that during the years since 9/11 there has not been a single terrorist attack on the United States? Do you think they simply stopped trying? Or have we been winning a secret war of information in dark rooms in Langley, Virginia? How many failed attempts have there been to kill you and your family in the past four years? Two? Twenty? One Hundred?

If we cannot use torture to get that information -- and we most emphatically should not and have not -- then what can we use? Anything? No intimidation? No sleep deprivation? No threats? No coersion? No drugs? What are we left with to persuade these killers to talk? The comfy chair?

It is not only possible, but likely, that many of the press elites who consider bright lights and harsh language as a form of ?torture interrogation? are alive today in places like New York and San Francisco precisely because of information gleaned from inmates at Abu Graib and Guantanamo Bay. I have no doubt of this whatsoever. What would their response be, I wonder, if standing at the funeral of their friends and children they discovered that the information needed to save their lives could have been obtained not through torture, but through fear of torture, or through humiliation and intimidation?

As you sit here reading this, there are men and women working around the clock using information obtained ? not just without torture, but humanely ? to keep us safe at night. They do this without any recognition or fanfare. But there are no less than ten televised award shows each year honoring those who do the best job at playing make-believe, and more often than not, the heroes they pretend to be are the soldiers and intelligence agents and policemen they so spectacularly spit upon the second the camera stops rolling.

We worship the wrong people. More on that in a moment.






There is one final layer of atrocity, a violation of the very core idea of Sanctuary as a place of safe haven that the insurgents in Iraq practice with abandon.

These religious fanatics, who will form a mob and tear a person limb from limb if he (or especially she) so much as looks askance at a copy of the Quran, routinely and methodically have used mosques ? even their most sacred mosques ? as ammunition dumps, staging areas and firing positions, viewing our decency and restraint as foolishness and weakness.

These acts have been recorded so many times that it has become banal. It?s just a fact. It?s what they do.

If they had genuine respect for their own religions and holy places they would give them the widest berth available, not turn them into command bunkers, ambush sites and staging areas.

Here is a violation of Sanctuary written as plainly as the eye can see. They use safe havens -- hospitals, hotels and places of worship -- as military fortresses because they are counting on our decency and honor to spare them from retaliation.

Actually, it is deeper than that. I suspect what they are really counting on is that sooner or later, such provocations have to be answered. And then there will be armies of useful idiots with television cameras and microphones and Expensive Hair, who will rally the full weight of recrimination and guilt and defeatism and accomplish for a few bearded lunatics what entire armored divisions could not achieve for them on the battlefield: Victory over the Americans.  

But what has shocked and dismayed me, way beyond the sadness and regret of our losses, has been the willingness, even the eagerness, among many on the left who want nothing more than to see our side lose.

Our soldiers are fighting and dying to install what any sane person can see is a widely-representative democracy, heroically elected at great personal risk. Opposing them are a shadow army of former secret policemen, state torturers, and foreign invaders of every stripe who kill Iraqi policemen, behead innocent Iraqi cabdrivers, and detonate car bombs at the opening of new schools and children?s centers. There may be an explanation for this support I am not seeing. I, for one, can not get past the idea that millions of Western Progressives would rather see a nation re-enslaved, or erupt in civil war, or have twenty thousand of their countrymen come home in boxes than admit that they were wrong.

And they have the audacity, the unmitigated gall, to claim the moral high ground?

I am trying my level best to understand how and why someone who professes to be for freedom for artists, homosexuals and women ? not to mention unlimited personal expression of every stripe -- can take the side of 8th Century religious fanatics who brag about murdering writers, stoning women, beheading homosexuals and instituting moral policemen at every street corner with unquestioned authority to beat, jail or execute anyone suspected of being insufficiently pious.

I used to wonder why civilizations fell. No longer. I see it now before my eyes, every day. Civilizations do not fall because the Barbarians storm the walls. The forces of civilization are far too powerful, and those of barbarism far too weak, for that to happen.

Civilizations fall because the people inside the Sanctuary throw open the gates.

Look around. Tell me what you see. Look at how the entire idea of civilization is under attack. Abandoning the ideas of civilization and savagery is tantamount to throwing open the gates. Maintaining a civilization takes work ? savagery, not so much. If both are equal then what?s the point?

Don?t think there?s any difference? Then here?s a little show-and-tell for you, Scooter:

When Newsweek runs an unsubstantiated rumor about flushing a Quran down the toilet, entire nations erupt into riots that leave many dead and more, likely, to follow. That is savagery.

Trained teams of Islamic murderers hijack four airliners, slit the throats of their crews, immolate their passengers as flying bombs and destroy the heart of a city and worse, and the most powerful people the world has ever known sit patiently trying to identify the perpetrators and then sacrifices its own children to reform a diseased and despotic region with overwhelming restraint and discretion ? that is civilization.

Really, all I?m trying to do here is prevent the fall of Civilization. Now far be it from me to be so arrogant as to think I can prevent the fall of Civilization with a single essay! It may take several essays; in fact, if things are worse than I feared it might take an entire book.

Here?s my thesis: Civilizations fall because they become so successful that their citizens become, over many generations of increasing security and prosperity, further and further away from the reality of the human condition. The quest for ?better? becomes so successful that after a few generations of hard work and ingenuity we have nothing left but the quest for ?perfect.? More and more effort produces fewer and smaller results, because the quest for perfection is asymptotic. Perfection is unattainable.
Title: Pig Pen Security
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on July 19, 2005, 10:16:41 AM
Homeland Pork
?Unless we waste money, the terrorists will win.?
Rich Lowry


NORTH POLE, ALASKA ? As I was driving through this town of less than 1,600 people just outside of Fairbanks the other day, an overwhelming sensation came over me ? of safety. Or at least that's what Congress wanted me to feel. Thanks to a senseless, but sadly typical, formula for spending federal homeland-security dollars, North Pole, Alaska, has been awarded more than half a million dollars for homeland-security rescue and communications equipment. This just in case the terrorists decide to try to shut down Santa Claus Lane. Fortunately, I am in a position to make a frontline report ? all seems quiet.
     
Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff is irritating certain U.S. senators by insisting that how federal homeland-security spending is allocated should have some relation to the risk of a terrorist attack in any given area. Where he has the authority to act on his own, Chertoff has pushed his department toward rationality. He moved, for instance, to limit the cities eligible for port-security grants to 66 from 366, thus eliminating Martha's Vineyard from the list (and exposing the extended Kennedy clan to attack by terrorist yacht). But Congress controls how homeland-security grants for first responders are doled out to the states, and its attitude is, "Unless we waste money, the terrorists will win."

Immediately after 9/11, Congress wrote a homeland-security spending formula into the Patriot Act, one of the provisions of that law that actually is a mistake. It says that every state gets .75 percent of the funding from two enormous federal grant programs that spend well over $1 billion a year. That eats up 40 percent of the funding. The other 60 percent is allocated on the basis of population, which is one risk factor for a terror attack, but only one. In other words, in a homeland-security effort that should be built on intelligence and risk analysis, Congress has created a system that is almost entirely random and beholden to the dictates of logrolling and pork-barrel spending.

This is a boon not just to North Pole, but to places like Wyoming. According to Veronique de Rugy of the American Enterprise Institute, the Equality State has only .17 percent of the nation's population, but gets .85 percent of federal homeland-security grants. That works out to $37.74 per capita for Wyoming, while New York state gets $5.41 per capita. De Rugy reports that Washington, D.C., is the only location that is both among the top 10 grant recipients and on a list of the 10 most at-risk localities.

Throwing around money in absurd fashion has resulted in, naturally enough, absurdities ? $18,000 for Segway scooters for the bomb squad in Santa Clara, Calif.; $30,000 in Lake County, Tenn., to buy a defibrillator to have on hand at high-school basketball games; $98,000 on training courses in Lenawee County, Mich., which no one bothered to attend. And on it goes. Billions of dollars in the grants haven't been spent on anything because they are gummed up in the bureaucratic pipeline, partly because some localities don't have the foggiest idea what to do with the money.

The House recently passed a bill to rationalize the funding formula, basing it almost entirely on risk-assessment by DHS. States would have to submit applications for grant money to address specific risks, and DHS would evaluate them accordingly. This is the basic approach advocated by the 9/11 commission. But the Senate has balked. Small-state senators have a disproportionate sway there, and last week they rejected the House approach, preferring a barely improved version of the status quo. These senators can't imagine any reason for being in Washington other than to shove lucre back to their home states ? for whatever reason.

If Congress can't straighten out the funding formula, maybe it will have to try a different approach, and relocate people from threatened urban areas to places like North Pole. We can be certain they would be well-secured here.

? Rich Lowry is author of Legacy: Paying the Price for the Clinton Years.
Title: Snark Hunt
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on July 21, 2005, 06:41:23 AM
In his inimitable way, Hitchens gets to the meat of the matter.

The poverty of our current scandal.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, July 18, 2005, at 1:10 PM PT

Writing to a friend in 1954, P.G. Wodehouse commented:
Are you following the McCarthy business? If so, can you tell me what it's all about? "You dined with Mr. X on Friday the tenth?" "Yes, sir." (Keenly) "What did you eat?" "A chocolate nut sundae, sir." (Sensation) It's like Bardell vs Pickwick.

Wodehouse of course was only affecting ignorance and making light of a ludicrously pompous and slightly sinister proceeding. But he was essentially correct in his lampooning of the McCarthy hearings, since even the most convinced anti-communist would not learn anything from the spectacle that he did not already know, and since the show trials managed to go on without producing either any evidence of any crime, or any evidence of any perpetrator, or any evidence of any victim.

It is the entire absence of the above three elements that makes the hunt for Karl Rove (who was once so confidently confused with I. Lewis Libby) so utterly Snark-like. In fact, in his column of July 17, Frank Rich was compelled to concede that the whole thing is absolutely nothing in itself, but is rather a sideshow to a much larger event: the deception of the Bush-Cheney administration in preparing an intervention in Iraq. I want to return to this, but one must first winnow out some other chaff and nonsense.

First, the most exploded figure in the entire argument is Joseph Wilson. This is for three reasons. He claimed, in his own book, that his wife had nothing to do with his brief and inconclusive visit to Niger. "Valerie had nothing to do with the matter," he wrote. "She definitely had not proposed that I make the trip." There isn't enough wiggle room in those two definitive statements to make either of them congruent with a memo written by Valerie Wilson (or Valerie Plame, if you prefer) to a deputy chief in the CIA's directorate of operations. In this memo, in her wifely way, she announced that her husband would be ideal for the mission since he had "good relations with both the Prime Minister and the former Minister of Mines (of Niger), not to mention lots of French contacts." If you want to read the original, turn to the Senate committee's published report on the many "intelligence failures" that we have suffered recently. I want to return to those, too.

Speaking to the Washington Post about the CIA's documents on the Niger connection, Wilson made the further claim that "the dates were wrong and the names were wrong." Again according to the Senate report, these papers were not in CIA hands until eight months after Wilson made his trip. He has since admitted to the same newspaper that he may have "misspoken" about this.

The third bogus element in Wilson's boastful story is the claim that Niger's "yellowcake" uranium was never a subject of any interest to Saddam Hussein's agents. The British intelligence report on this, which does not lack criticism of the Blair government, finds the Niger connection to be among the most credible of the assertions made about Saddam's double-dealing. If you care to consult the Financial Times of June 28, 2004, and see the front-page report by its national security correspondent Mark Huband, you will be able to review the evidence that Niger?with whose ministers Mr. Wilson had such "good relations"?was trying to deal in yellowcake with North Korea and Libya as well as Iraq and Iran. This evidence is by no means refuted or contradicted by a forged or faked Italian document saying the same thing. It was a useful axiom of the late I.F. Stone that few people are so foolish as to counterfeit a bankrupt currency.

Thus, and to begin with, Joseph Wilson comes before us as a man whose word is effectively worthless. What do you do, if you work for the Bush administration, when a man of such quality is being lionized by an anti-war press? Well, you can fold your tent and let them print the legend. Or you can say that the word of a mediocre political malcontent who is at a loose end, and who is picking up side work from a wife who works at the anti-regime-change CIA, may not be as "objective" as it looks. I dare say that more than one supporter of regime change took this option. I would certainly have done so as a reporter if I had known.

OK, then, how do the opponents of regime change in Iraq make my last sentence into a statement of criminal intent and national-security endangerment? By citing the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982. This law, which is one of the most repressive and absurd pieces of legislation on our statute book, was a panicky attempt by the right to silence whistle-blowers at the CIA. In a rough effort to make it congruent with freedom of information and the First Amendment (after all, the United States managed to get through the Second World War and most of the Cold War without such a law), it sets a fairly high bar. You must knowingly wish to expose the cover of a CIA officer who you understand may be harmed as a result. It seems quite clear that nobody has broken even that arbitrary element of this silly law.

But the coverage of this non-storm in an un-teacup has gone far beyond the fantasy of a Rovean hidden hand. Supposedly responsible journalists are now writing as if there was never any problem with Saddam's attempt to acquire yellowcake (or his regime's now-proven concealment of a nuclear centrifuge, or his regime's now-proven attempt to buy long-range missiles off the shelf from North Korea as late as March 2003). In the same way, the carefully phrased yet indistinct statement of the 9/11 Commission that Saddam had no proven "operational" relationship with al-Qaida has mutated lazily into the belief that there were no contacts or exchanges at all, which the commission by no means asserts and which in any case by no means possesses the merit of being true. The CIA got everything wrong before 9/11, and thereafter. It was conditioned by its own culture to see no evil. It regularly leaked?see any of Bob Woodward's narratives?against the administration. Now it, and its partisans and publicity-famished husband-and-wife teams, want to imprison or depose people who leak back at it. No, thanks. Many journalists are rightly appalled at Time magazine's collusion with a prosecutor who has proved no crime and identified no victim. Far worse is the willingness of the New York Times to accept the demented premise of a prosecutor who has put one of its own writers behind bars.

Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. His most recent book is Thomas Jefferson: Author of America.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2122963/
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 24, 2005, 09:56:44 PM
http://www.americanthinker.com/arti...article_id=4669

Much like a victim of spousal abuse,
The Left always seems to have an excuse
For barbarous behavior by terrorist thugs,
Their violence dismissed with self-blaming shrugs.
Oh, they just can?t help it, they just get so mad,
When we get them upset by behaving so bad.
It?s not really their fault that we suffer their blows;
We provoked them ourselves as everyone knows.

Like a cowering wife with her bruised blackened eye,
The Liberal defeatists just keep asking why;
What is it in us our tormentors despise?
What will gain us some favor in those angry eyes?
It must be our doing that sets them aflame;
Our own bad behavior that must bear the blame.
If we just appease them, we grovel and simper,
Perhaps we?ll avoid the mad wrath of their temper.

Battered wives learn what the Left cannot see:
Excusing brutal behavior will not set you free.
Appeasing these madmen just maddens them more,
Till someday they?ll come and kill three thousand more.
Quit making excuses for these murderous men,
You Liberal appeasers, who?d let terrorists win.
The only sure way to be free of their ire:
Defeat and destroy them; fight fire with fire.

Russ Vaughn is the Poet Laureate of The American Thinker
Title: What to Wear when you Come
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on August 01, 2005, 01:49:08 PM
"When you come for my guns?"

I guess I?m just tired of it all. Tired of the bogus definitions (see: "assault weapons" or "assault rifles") and the slanted or (far more commonly) just plain false statistics being quoted.

I guess I'm just tired of the endless attempts to find a "stealth" method to do away with all firearms ? most recently by the use of lawsuits aimed at bankrupting firearms manufacturers by holding them responsible for what some criminal does with their product.

Tired of the skewed reporting and glaring omissions in "news" stories.

Bet you didn?t know that, in the Appalachian Law School shooting of several years ago, the incident ended when two students got their guns and subdued the killer without firing a shot.

If you missed it, it?s not your fault. You see, in more than 200 reports, that little factoid was "conveniently" left out.

I?m tired of gun owners being portrayed as ignorant, gap-toothed simpletons whose only source of amusement is shooting anything that moves.

I?d be willing to stand a cross-section of gun owners up against any of the anti-gun crowd and bet hard money on which end of the IQ pool would be deepest. You see, I?ve sat around too many campfires listening to doctors, judges, airline pilots, business owners, teachers, and just plain hard working people talk. Most times, I decided to keep my mouth shut in order to not lower the level of discussion.

I?m tired of being told that the Constitution guarantees such things as abortions (nowhere mentioned), but does not recognize an individual?s right to "keep and bear" arms - even though those words can be read by all who care to do so.

I?m tired of hearing that we need just one more "reasonable gun law" when there are already thousands on the books that seem to be studiously ignored.

I?m tired of finding that most - if not all - of such proposed laws are nothing more than dishonest attempts aimed at the eventual confiscation of all firearms.

I?m tired of bringing reasoned and well-researched arguments to discussions of this topic only to be ignored or treated with polite contempt.

I?m tired of being told that I should take moral guidance on this issue from the likes of - let?s say - Ted Kennedy and others of his ilk. Sorry, I?ll have to check with Mary Jo Kopechne and get back to you on that one.

I?m tired of seeing concrete and obvious examples ignored.

Washington, D.C. and New York City have some of the toughest gun laws on the books. Their crime rates have been repeatedly shown to be (guess which) higher/lower than cities wherein gun ownership is less restricted.

I?m tired of being told that guns are the problem when, on any given day, I can turn on the news and hear about the latest atrocity we ? as a society ? have suffered. Therein, I inevitably find that: (1) it?s been perpetrated by some useless accretion of carbon with a "rap" sheet thicker than a telephone directory; and (2) said individual was still on the street because of a justice system that?s become more "system" than justice.

I?m a father, a former little league coach, an honorably discharged veteran, and a past president of the local PTA. I?ve been married to the same woman for 34 years. I?ve never been arrested and my last run-in with the law was a speeding ticket back in the mid-70?s.

I vote in every election. I give blood regularly. I have a degree in English Literature and another in Marine Biology. I spent a year in a Benedictine monastery studying to be a priest. However - because I choose to own firearms - to the major networks, liberal politicians everywhere, and the likes of Sarah Brady, I?m nothing more than a "gun nut."

I?ve finally accepted that there?s never going to be a balanced presentation of "my" side of the argument and I?m tired of that, too.

I guess I?ve finally reached the point where I?ve decided I will no longer be "reasonable" while the other side has never before, does not now, nor will they ever accord me the same courtesy. Therefore, I have a message for the anti-gun zealots out there. It?s from someone who?s perfectly normal and is basically your next door neighbor.

There used to be a bumper sticker that said: "You?ll get my gun when you pry my cold, dead fingers from the trigger."

You made fun of it and derided those who believed in the spirit of the idea it propounded.

Unfortunately, it?s not much seen any more and I?ve been unable to find one for my own use. Because of this, I?ve had to go out and make up one of my own.

It says: "When you come for my guns, bring yours. You?ll be needing them."

I think that about covers it.

Larry Simoneaux

Biography - Larry Simoneaux

Larry Simoneaux is a regular columnist for The Everett Herald in Washington state. He is a retired ship driver for the US Navy, and NOAA.
Title: Voter Suppresion Report
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on August 04, 2005, 01:45:24 PM
At the end of the last election there were a lot of charges made that Republicans worked to surpress voter turnout. Many of those charges were widely reported.

What follows is the American Center for Voting Rights examination of charges made against both Democrats and Republicans. I've posted the charges made against Democarts first.

Thinks it's worth noting that the most egregious charges are the least reported. You can find the report in total at:

http://www.ac4vr.com/reports/072005/default.html


Incidents Of Voter Intimidation & Suppression

(A) Five Democrat Operatives In Milwaukee Charged With Slashing Tires Of Republican Vans On Morning Of Election Day (60) (Exhibit E)

On Monday, January 24, 2005, five Democrat operatives were charged with felony counts of ?criminal damage to property? for slashing the tires of 25 get-out-the-vote vans rented by Republicans early on the morning of Election Day. The vans had been rented by Republicans to help transport observers and voters to the polls on Election Day. The five individuals charged in the case were all paid Democrat operatives. Two defendants in the case are the sons of prominent Milwaukee Democrats: U.S. Rep. Gwen Moore and former Acting Mayor Marvin Pratt, Chairman of the Kerry-Edwards campaign in Milwaukee. (61) The following is a list of the individuals charged with slashing tires on the morning of November 2, 2004, and their connections to the Democrat campaign in 2004:

Michael J. Pratt
Paid $7,965.53 by the Democratic Party of Wisconsin in 2004
Pratt?s father is former Acting Mayor Marvin Pratt, who chaired the Kerry-Edwards campaign in Milwaukee
Sowande Ajumoke Omodunde (a.k.a ?Supreme Solar Allah?)
Paid $6,059.83 by Gwen Moore for Congress and the Democratic Party of Wisconsin in 2004
Son of U.S. Rep. Gwen Moore (D-WI)
Lewis Gibson Caldwell, III
Paid $4,639.09 by Gwen Moore for Congress and the Democratic Party of Wisconsin in 2004
Lavelle Mohammad
Paid $8,858.50 by the Democratic Party of Wisconsin and America Coming Together ($966 for canvassing work in June and July) in 2004
Justin J. Howell
Paid $2,550.29 in 2004 by the Democratic Party of Wisconsin (62)
According to the criminal complaint filed in the case, on the day before the election, DNC consultant Opel Simmons witnessed individuals at the Democratic headquarters in Milwaukee discussing a plan to go to the Republican campaign office and cover it with yard signs, placards and bumper stickers. They referred to their plan as ?Operation Elephant Takeover.? However, upon learning that there were security guards at the Republican headquarters, they called off the operation. (63)
According to the complaint, at about 3 a.m. on Election Day, several people at the Democratic headquarters were gearing up for another project. Some of them dressed in what was described as ?Mission Impossible? type gear ? black outfits and knit caps. Simmons asked them what they were up to and warned them about the security guard. One of them told Simmons, ?Oh, man, you don?t want to know, you don?t want to know.? They were laughing and joking and continued to tell Simmons that he did not want to know what they were going to do. (64)

About 20 minutes later, the group returned to Democrat headquarters very excited, saying things like:

?They won?t go anywhere now, man, we got ?em, we got ?em?
?Man, I walked right past the security guard. He didn?t even know anything was going on.?
?That?s ?cause, you know, I was acting all crazy, you know, I was acting crazy. I even let him watch me piss.? (65)
The group went on talking about the affair and described the sound of the air escaping the tires. There was apparently much bragging as they described their various roles in the escapade. Mohammad was the ?deception guy? who walked around acting drunk. According to the criminal complaint, when Simmons asked them what was going on, defendant Michael Pratt told him, ?We got ?em. We hit the tires.? Simmons told investigators that at some point on Election Day a staffer at Democrat headquarters pulled an article on the tire-slashing incident from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel?s website. Simmons said that upon seeing the article, defendant Lavelle Mohammad said he wanted to frame it and put it on his wall. Simmons said he did not talk to any of the other defendants about the tire slashing incident over the course of Election Day. (66)
While the Kerry-Edwards campaign and state Democrats denied knowledge of the plan to vandalize the Republican get-out-the-vote vehicles, the vehicle used by the defendants was rented by Simmons, a political consultant from Virginia working for the DNC in Wisconsin. According to the criminal complaint filed in the case, Simmons told police that he had rented the vehicle ?to be used by his workers for their campaign activities.? When questioned by police on the night of November 2, Simmons said he knew that five of his workers were involved in slashing tires at Republican headquarters early that morning, and identified all five defendants to police. (67)

In all, forty tires on 25 separate vehicles were slashed in the incident causing $4,192.35 of damage to the tires, plus $1,125 in towing charges. Since the damage exceeded the $2,500 threshold for a felony, the five were charged with felony ?criminal damage to property,? which carries a maximum punishment of 3 1/2 years in prison and a $10,000 fine. The five defendants pleaded not guilty at their March 4 arraignments. (68) A trial was originally scheduled for mid-July, but has since been postponed until January 2006. (69)

(B) Court Issues Injunction Against Democrat Operatives Targeting Ohio Voters With Phone Calls Providing Deceptive Information to Voters

During the U.S. House Administration Committee hearings in March 2005, a common point of inquiry was the issue of phone calls made in an apparent effort to misdirect voters. The committee?s Ranking Member, Rep. Juanita Millender-McDonald (D-CA), stated that Ohio voters were ?disenfranchised? when ?voters were told ? that the presidential election would be on Wednesday the 3rd of November as opposed to November 2nd.? (70)

Ohio voters who had identified themselves as Republicans received telephone calls telling them that the election was to be held a day later than Election Day, that their polling locations had been changed and that they could only vote if they brought four separate pieces of identification to the poll. This information was intentionally deceptive and intended to direct voters to a polling place where they would not be able to cast a ballot.

The Marion County Common Pleas Court issued a temporary restraining order against the Marion and Greene County Democratic Parties, the Ohio Democratic Party and America Coming Together (ACT) enjoining them from making inaccurate and deceptive phone calls to targeted voters. (71) (Exhibit F) The judge originally assigned to the case recused himself because he had ?personally received a phone call? like the one described by the plaintiff in which incorrect information about date of the election and polling place was given, a point he noted in the Judgment Entry he signed effectuating his recusal. The Ohio Supreme Court appointed a visiting judge to hear the case who then issued a temporary restraining order against the county and state Democrat parties and against ACT. (72)

Judge David C. Faulkner ordered state and local Democrats and ACT to stop their calls ?misstating the date of the November 2, 2004 election? and ?directing [voters] to the wrong location to which they should report to vote.? (73) Faulkner?s restraining order specifically stopped the Democrats from the following activities:

?Any acts of interfering in any way with the rights of Ohio registered voters to vote in the November 2, 2004 election, including, but not limited to, telephoning or contacting in any way any such registered voters and misstating the date of the November 2, 2004 election, directing them to the wrong location to which they should report to vote, telling such voters that they must bring certain documentation to the polls in order to vote and suggesting to, telling or implying to said voters that there are procedural and/or documentary hurdles they must overcome in order to vote in the November 2, 2004 election.? (74)
The Marion County Democratic Party provided an affidavit in the case that explained its role in the matter. The affidavit, as completed by Cathy Chaffin, Chair of the Marion County Democratic Party, explained that Kerry-Edwards campaign staffers made the misleading phone calls blocked by Judge Faulker?s order. Chaffin stated in the affidavit that once she became aware that Kerry-Edwards staffers were using her office space to make calls giving ?the wrong polling location? to voters, she tried multiple times to get them to stop the calls, to the point of threatening to kick them out of the office if the calls did not stop. Below are the key points from Chaffin?s affidavit. (75)
The Marion County Democratic Party provided space to the Kerry-Edwards campaign for use as its campaign headquarters.
Ms. Chaffin became aware that Kerry-Edwards staffers were placing telephone calls to voters and giving out voting locations and ?that the wrong polling location was being given.?
Ms. Chaffin called Kerry-Edwards campaign staffer Jim Secreto and told him the activity must stop. She was assured that it would stop.
A few days later, Ms. Chaffin learned that the phone calls were continuing. She again told Mr. Secreto to stop and again was told that the activity would cease.
Finally, on Election Day, Ms. Chaffin learned that the telephone calls were still being made. At that time, she told Mr. Secreto that if the calls did not stop, he would have to leave Marion County Democratic Headquarters. (76)
The case is still pending before the Marion County Court of Common Pleas.
(C) Court Issues Injunction Against Democratic National Committee Ordering It To Stop Distributing Intimidating Materials To Republican Volunteers In Florida

On Election Day 2004, a Seminole County, Florida, court stopped the DNC and state Democratic Party from ?further intimidation? and dissemination of materials that were ?designed or intended to intimidate or unduly threaten the activities of poll watchers? organized by the Florida Republican Party. (77) (Exhibit G)

Florida law allows all candidates and political parties to have observers in polling places to monitor the conduct of the election. Both the Florida Republican Party and the state Democratic Party organized thousands of volunteers to participate in the election observers in polling locations across Florida. (78)

Under Florida law, the names and addresses of volunteer poll observers are filed with election officials in advance of the election. The DNC and Florida Democrat Partyic obtained these records on the identity of Republican poll observers and sought to prevent them from volunteering by sending them a letter threatening legal action against them personally. The letter, entitled ?IMPORTANT LEGAL NOTICE,? stated that each poll watcher receiving the document had ?now been provided notice of the law.? (79) (Exhibit H)

Individual volunteers who received the letter threatening legal action by the DNC went to court in Seminole County and obtained an injunction against the DNC and the Florida Democratic Party. (80) Seminole Circuit Judge Nancy Alley ordered the DNC, Florida Democratic Party and Democratic Executive Committee of Seminole County to stop ?further intimidation, further dissemination of these materials ? designed or intended to intimidate or unduly threaten the activities of poll watchers who are duly carrying out their responsibilities? granted under Florida law. The court ruled that the flyer constituted a ?misrepresentation of [poll observers?] legal rights and obligations.? (81) The DNC sought an emergency appeal of the trial court?s order to the Florida Appeals Court but was rebuffed. (82) (Exhibit I)

(D) Intimidating And Misleading Phone Calls To GOP Volunteers Made By President Bill Clinton And DNC General Counsel Joe Sandler In Florida

In addition to the intimidating letters sent by the DNC to Republican volunteers, the DNC paid for recorded phone calls to Republican poll observers? homes in Florida featuring the same message that the court in Seminole County found to be intimidating and misleading.

These phone calls were recorded by former President Bill Clinton and DNC General Counsel Joe Sandler. The call from Sandler said, ?Please be advised that any challenge to a voter must be stated in writing, under oath, and that you must have direct and first-hand knowledge of the voter?s ineligibility. Interfering with a citizen?s right to vote is a serious offense and swearing out a false statement is a felony. Violations will be referred to federal and state prosecutors.? The recording finished by noting, ?This call is paid for by the Democratic National Committee, www.democrats.org, not authorized by any candidate.? (83) (Exhibit J)

(E) Court Orders MoveOn.org To Cease Voter Intimidation And Harassment In Ohio

On Election Day, individuals in Franklin County, Ohio, were threatened and harassed at their polling places by agents of MoveOn.org after being asked about their voting preference and revealing their intention to vote Republican. Similar situations are alleged to have occurred elsewhere around the state and prompted a lawsuit filed in the Franklin County Common Pleas Court. Voters were intimidated by MoveOn.org in an attempt to dissuade them from voting for George W. Bush or in an attempt to harass them after they voted. (84) (Exhibit K)

Examples of such intimidation include one plaintiff who arrived at his polling place and was called over to a table operated by MoveOn.org that promised ?Free Coffee.? The plaintiff asked for a cup of coffee, was asked if he would voter for Kerry, and responded that he would not. The person at the table refused him a cup of coffee. The plaintiff then noticed that particular individual and others standing near the plaintiff?s car. When he exited the polling place, the MoveOn.org table was placed in front of his car, blocking his exit. When he asked them to move, the individuals harassed him, took his picture and recorded his license plate. (85)

Another voter noticed a loud and boisterous gentleman at her polling place wearing a ?Voting Rights Staff? badge and standing well within 100 feet of the polling place. In fact, he stood right outside one plaintiff?s voting booth and told her that she only had a few seconds left and needed to make her final vote. These plaintiffs sought, and received, a temporary restraining order against MoveOn.org. The complaint has subsequently been amended to include allegations of similar acts by agents of MoveOn.org that occurred elsewhere in the state. (86)

(F) Ohio Court Ordered Democrat Polling Place Challengers To Remove Deceptive Arm Bands and Badges

On Election Day, several Lucas County voters brought suit against the Lucas County Board of Elections and Democratic challengers in the polling place who were wearing armbands and/or badges identifying them as ?Voter Protection Staff,? ?Voting Rights Staff,? and other similar terms. The Lucas County Court of Common Pleas granted the temporary restraining order prohibiting the use of such intimidating insignia. (87) (Exhibit L)

(G) Violence Against Republican Volunteers In Philadelphia On Election Day

Philadelphia has a long history of vote fraud and intimidation. (88) According to press and police reports filed on November 2, this past election was no different. Reports indicate that Republican volunteers in Philadelphia were violently intimidated by Democrat activists on Election Day 2004.

One Republican activist, working as a Bush campaign legal volunteer to monitor the vote in Philadelphia, was ?cornered in a parking lot by roughly 10 large men, whom the police later identified as ?union goons.?? The men tried to tip over the minivan the Republican attorneys were sharing, ?punching it relentlessly, breaking parts off and failing to drag us out, they chased us in and out of the dense urban traffic.? It took ?a frantic 911 call and a police roadblock? to stop the assault, and the GOP volunteers ?had to be secreted out of town to safety by a police escort.? (89) (Exhibit M)

According to police reports filed after the incident, the union members? SUV was a rental vehicle. (90) (Exhibit N) On Election Day, rental vehicles were used all over the city ?primarily by the parties ? for transporting voters and election monitors.? (91)

(H) Union-Coordinated Violence And Intimidation Against Republican Campaign Offices And Volunteers

On October 5, a Bush-Cheney campaign volunteer in Orlando had his arm broken when trying to stop union activists from storming the campaign office. This incident was part of a series of simultaneous demonstrations coordinated by the AFL-CIO against Bush-Cheney campaign offices in 20 cities, intimidating campaign volunteers with violence and vandalism. In Orlando, AFL-CIO members stormed and ransacked the Bush-Cheney field office as part of what one local newscaster called a ?coordinated attack against the Bush-Cheney campaign.? Protesters also defaced posters of President Bush and dumped piles of letters on to the floor of the office. Several protesters in Orlando faced possible assault charges as a result of the incident. (92)

As part of the 20-city anti-Bush protest, more than 100 AFL-CIO members ?stormed? the Bush-Cheney campaign?s Miami office and ?pushed volunteers? inside. Three dozen union members rushed a campaign office in Tampa, shaking up elderly volunteers. (93) Union members staged an ?invasion? of the Republican campaign office in West Allis, Wisconsin, where police were called after 50 activists ?marched right in? and ?took over the place for about 30 minutes? with bullhorns and chanting. (94)

(I) Violence And Other Incidents of Intimidation

In 2004, Republicans were subject to an aggressive and sometimes violent campaign of harassment and intimidation orchestrated by Kerry supporters. At least three Bush-Cheney offices were shot at during the election season. A swastika was burned into the front yard of a Bush-Cheney supporter in Madison, Wisconsin. Other incidents included offices burglarized, windows smashed, tires slashed and other property damage. The following is a timeline of documented election-related violence and intimidation against the Bush-Cheney ?04 campaign and Republicans in 2004.

 

September 2, 2004: Gun Shot Fired Into Huntington, WV, Republican Headquarters. (95)

September 3, 2004: Windows Broken, Anti-Bush Messages Scrawled At Gallatin County, MT, Republican Headquarters. (96)

September 6, 2004: Huntington, WV, Republican Headquarters Egged. (97)

September 13, 2004: Swastika Drawn On Duluth, MN, Resident?s Lawn, Signs Also Defaced With Words ?Nazi? And ?Liar.? (98)

September 16, 2004: Community College Professor In Florida Punched Republican County Chairman In Face. (99)

September 22, 2004: West Elmira, NY, Resident Found Swastika Drawn On Bush Campaign Sign In His Yard. (100)

September 23, 2004: Office Ransacked During Break-In At Vilas County, WI, Republican Headquarters, Obscene Words And Graphic Pictures Sprayed On Campaign Signs. (101)

September 26, 2004: Windows Smashed And Signs Stolen At Oxford, MS, Bush-Cheney ?04 Headquarters. (102)

October 1, 2004: Laptops Of Executive And Field Director Stolen From Bush-Cheney ?04 Headquarters In Seattle, WA. (103)

October 1, 2004: Swastika Burned Into Front Yard Of Bush-Cheney ?04 Supporter In Madison, WI. (104)

October 2, 2004: Collinsville, OH, Resident Chains Down Bush-Cheney ?04 Signs After Several Signs Stolen And One Was Replaced With Kerry Sign. (105)

October 3, 2004: Burglary At Thousand Oaks, CA, Victory 2004 Headquarters Where Bush-Cheney ?04 Banner Was Stolen From Outside Premises. (106)

October 5, 2004: Gun Shots Fired Into Knoxville, TN, Bush-Cheney ?04 Office, Shattering Office?s Glass Front Doors. (107)

October 8, 2004: Two Men Were Caught On A Hidden Camera Tearing Down And Urinating On Bush-Cheney ?04 Sign In Akron, OH. (108)

October 9, 2004: Oxnard, CA, Supporter Placing Bush-Cheney ?04 In Yards Verbally Abused, Knocked Down And Had Signs Stolen. (109)

October 9, 2004: Bush-Cheney Signs Near Vail, CO, Cut In Half And Burned In ?Ransacking.? (110)

October 10, 2004: Office Windows Broken And Field Director?s Laptop Bag and Purse Stolen In Burglary At Canton, OH, Victory Office. (111)

October 11, 2004: Windows Broken, Petty Cash Stolen And Computers Tampered With In Burglary At Spokane, WA, Victory 2004 Headquarters. (112)

October 13, 2004: Walls And Windows Of York, PA, Victory 2004 Headquarters Vandalized With Pro-Kerry Spray-Paint And Signs Outside Destroyed. (113)

October 13, 2004: Window Smashed At Laconia, NH, Victory 2004 Headquarters. (114)

October 13, 2004: Kerry Supporter Caught Stealing Bush Sign In Cape Girardeau, MO, Pulled Knife On Sign?s Owner And Was Arrested. (115)

October 15, 2004: Someone Destroyed Large Plywood Bush-Cheney ?04 Sign, Then Tried To Smash Debris Though Glass Door Of Santa Fe, NM, Republican Party Headquarters. (116)

October 15, 2004: Someone Lined Window Sill With Bullet Casings At Littleton, NH, Republican Headquarters. (117)

October 16, 2004: Unknown Suspects Vandalized Large Bush-Cheney Campaign Sign In Hollister, CA, With Obscenities. (118)

October 17, 2004: Stickers Placed Over Windows Of Gettysburg, PA, Victory 2004 Headquarters. (119)

October 18, 2004: Eggs Thrown At Keene, NH, Victory 2004 Headquarters. (120)

October 18, 2004: 21 Protesters Arrested At Bush-Cheney ?04 Campaign Headquarters In Arlington, VA. (121)

October 20, 2004: Rocks Thrown Through Windows At Multnomah County, OR, Republican Party Headquarters. (122)

October 21, 2004: Bomb Threat Made Against Lake Havasu, AZ, Republican Party Headquarters. (123)

October 21, 2004: Windows Smashed At Multnomah County Republican Party Headquarters In Portland, OR. (124)

October 22, 2004: Break-In Discovered At Cincinnati, OH, Victory 2004 Headquarters. (125)

October 22, 2004: Break-In Discovered At Flagstaff, AZ, Victory 2004 Headquarters. Perpetrators gained entry by throwing a cinder block through a plate glass window. (126)

October 22, 2004: Chunk Of Concrete Tossed Through Glass Door Of Republican Headquarters In Santa Cruz, CA. (127)

October 23, 2004: Two Kerry Supporters Arrested After Stealing Pro-Bush Signs From Activist And Pushing Police Officer At Edwards Rally In St. Petersburg, FL. (128)


    
 Return To Index

Incidents Of Voter Intimidation & Suppression
(A) Charges Of Long Lines Orchestrated By Republicans To Suppress The Minority Vote
On June 2, 2005, Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean charged that Republicans caused long lines at polling places on Election Day to suppress the minority vote. Dean stated:
?The Republicans are all about suppressing votes: two voting machines if you live in a black district, 10 voting machines if you live in a white district. ? You know, the idea that you have to wait on line for eight hours to cast your ballot in Florida there?s something the matter with that. ? Well, Republicans, I guess, can do that because a lot of them never made an honest living in their lives.? (7)

Dean was just the latest Democrat leader to make this charge. In January 2005, the Rev. Jesse Jackson charged that ?blatant discrimination in the distribution of voting machines ensured long lines in inner-city and working-class precincts that favored John Kerry, while the exurban districts that favored President Bush had no similar problems.? (8) The Democrat staff of the House Judiciary Committee, led by Ranking Member Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), alleged in a January 2005 report that ?the misallocation of voting machines [in Ohio] led to unprecedented lines that disenfranchised scores, if not hundreds of thousands, of predominantly minority and Democratic voters.? The Conyers report specifically cited Franklin County, Ohio, as an area in which Republicans intentionally misallocated voting machines in order to cause long lines and disenfranchise minority voters. (9)

However, Democrat election officials in Franklin County and the U.S. Department of Justice have refuted this allegation. During the recent U.S. House Administration Committee hearing held in Columbus, William Anthony, Chairman of the Franklin County Democratic Party and County Board of Elections, flatly rejected the allegation that long lines were part of some effort to disenfranchise minorities and/or Democrat voters. Anthony further testified that long lines were not limited to minority and Democrat communities. Anthony stated under oath:

?Some have alleged that precincts in predominantly African American or Democratic precincts were deliberately targeted for a reduction in voting machines, thus creating the only lines in the county. I can assure you Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, both as a leader in the black community and Chairman of the local Democratic Party and a labor leader and Chairman of the Board of Elections, that these accusations are simply not true.? (10)

Anthony stated that ?on Election Day I spent several hours driving around the county in the rain and observed long lines in every part of our county, in urban and suburban neighborhoods, black and white communities, Democrat and Republican precincts.? He referred to those who made claims about long lines and disenfranchisement as ?conspiracy theorists? and ?Internet bloggers.? (11)

Anthony noted that the entire process for allocating voting machines in the county was controlled by a Democratic supervisor. (12) He cited three reasons for the long lines in Franklin County on Election Day 2004: increased voter turnout, static resources and an exceptionally long ballot. (13) Finally, Anthony was ?personally offended? by these allegations. As he told The Columbus Dispatch, ?I am a black man. Why would I sit there and disenfranchise voters in my own community? ? I feel like they?re accusing me of suppressing the black vote. I?ve fought my whole life for people?s right to vote.? (14)

In July 2005, the U.S. Department of Justice reported that its investigation of Franklin County found that the county ?assigned voting machines in a non-discriminatory manner.? As to charges of racial disparities in voting machine allocation, the Justice Department found that ?the allocation of voting machines actually favored black voters because more white voters were voting on each voting machine than black voters.? The Department reported that white precincts averaged 172 voters per machine, while black precincts averaged 159 voters per machine. Noting that elections in Franklin County ? and everywhere in Ohio ? are run by a six-member Board of Elections equally divided between Republicans and Democrats, the Department concluded that ?long lines were attributable not to the allocation of machines, but to the lack of sufficient machines to serve a dramatically enlarged electorate under any allocation.? (15) (Exhibit B)

(B) State Rep. John Pappageorge?s Statement That Republicans Needed To ?Suppress? The Detroit Vote
In the 2004 campaign, Democrats repeatedly cited a quote by 73-year-old Michigan state Rep. John Pappageorge as evidence of Republican plans to suppress the minority vote. In July 2004, Pappageorge was quoted by the Detroit Free Press as saying, ?If we do not suppress the Detroit vote, we?re going to have a tough time in this election.? Detroit is 83 percent African American. (16)
When questioned about his statement, Pappageorge said the quote was misunderstood and then apologized to every Detroit legislator in the state House of Representatives. Pappageorge stated, ?In the context that we were talking about, I said we?ve got to get the vote up in Oakland (County) and the vote down in Detroit. You get it down with a good message.? (17) Pappageorge immediately resigned from his position as a chairman of Michigan Veterans for Bush-Cheney. (18)

We have found no evidence of any plan by Pappageorge or others to suppress the minority vote in Detroit. In fact, minority voter participation in the presidential election in Michigan was up in 2004. (19) Voter turnout in Detroit increased in 2004 from 2000, and African American voters reportedly voted 95 percent for John Kerry. (20) Statements such as those by Pappageorge are highly inflammatory, even in the absence of any corresponding effort to suppress voter turnout. No political party, candidate or campaign should premise its success on a strategy of suppressing the participation of any class or group of voters, whatever that group of voters? racial or demographic characteristics. Rather, the political process works best when the parties, candidates and their campaigns focus on delivering a message that encourages their support and seeks to persuade voters to support their position.

(C) Charges That Republicans Spread Misinformation On Date of Election And Polling Places
In the weeks leading up to Election Day 2004, there were scattered reports of misinformation being spread about where and when the vote would take place. In Ohio, there were reports of fliers being distributed that said Republicans were to vote on Tuesday (November 2) and Democrats on Wednesday (November 3). Callers to nursing homes reportedly told senior citizens that the elderly were not allowed to vote and other callers directed people to the wrong polling places in African American neighborhoods or said voters who owed back child support or had unpaid parking tickets would be arrested if they came to the polls. (21)
No paid Republican operative has been linked to these misinformation efforts. A review of such incidents linked to paid Democrat operatives appears in the next section of this report. While we found no evidence that GOP operatives were responsible for these heinous acts, both the Republican and Democrat parties and law enforcement should be fully committed to investigating and prosecuting all reported efforts to misinform voters, or any effort to intentionally misdirect a voter so the voter will be denied the opportunity to participate in the election. What follows is a review of incidents in which it was charged that Republicans misinformed Democrat voters in 2004.

News reports indicate that in Franklin County, Ohio, a bogus flier was distributed telling Democrats to vote on Wednesday, November 3, the day after Election Day. The flier falsely claimed to be from the Franklin County Board of Elections. Republican operatives were never linked its distribution, and the Chairman of the Franklin County Democratic Party ?didn?t think it was a ploy by his Republican counterparts.? Election officials took action to counteract this false information. (22) Franklin County Elections Director Matthew Damschroder, a Republican, held a press conference to warn voters about the fraudulent flier and reemphasize that the election was indeed on November 2. The county Elections Board also mailed a post card to each of the more than 800,000 registered voters in the county informing them of their correct precinct and voting location at a cost of over $250,000 to the county. (23) These efforts by election officials to respond quickly to reports of voter misinformation are commendable and illustrate responsible action in response to this issue.

In Lake County, Ohio, some voters reportedly received letters on fake election board letterhead telling them that if they were registered by certain Democrat groups they would be unable to vote on Election Day. (24) The letter, headlined ?Urgent Advisory,? said that no one registered by NAACP, America Coming Together (ACT), or the John Kerry and Capri Cafaro campaigns would be able to vote because the groups had registered voters illegally. (25) ACT spokesman Jess Goode charged that the letter was ?proof positive that the Republicans are trying to steal the election in Ohio. They know they can?t win if all legitimate Ohio voters cast their ballots, so they?re kicking up a storm of voter intimidation and suppression.? (26) The Cleveland Plain Dealer reported that Lake County Sheriff Dan Dunlap was investigating the matter. We could find no evidence that any paid Republican operative was linked to these letters in Lake County.

In Milwaukee, a flier from the fictional group ?Milwaukee Black Voters League? was reportedly distributed in African American neighborhoods inaccurately telling voters they were ineligible if they voted previously in the year or if they had been convicted of any offense, no matter how minor. (27) The flier also warned, ?If you violate any of these laws, you can get ten years in prison and your children will get taken away from you.? (28) A spokesman for the Wisconsin Republican Party denounced the flier as ?appalling,? and a Bush-Cheney ?04 spokesman said the campaign would ?not tolerate any effort to suppress or intimidate voters.? (29) We were unable to find any reports of Republican operatives linked to the Milwaukee fliers.

At least some of the misleading information on voting locations came from the Kerry campaign itself. On Election Day, The Columbus Dispatch reported that hundreds of Columbus voters received directions to the wrong polling places after Kerry campaign canvassers ?mixed up the precincts in several Columbus neighborhoods.? While the Dispatch reported that the affected neighborhoods were ?predominantly pro-Kerry,? some residents were extremely unhappy after receiving directions to the wrong polling place. Dawn M. McCombs, 37, ?who complained to the Ohio Democratic Party about the error,? said ?This just really makes me mad ? It?s just stupid.? Columbus resident Yolanda Tolliver, who received one of the Kerry campaign fliers, was concerned about how the mistake might affect the area?s elderly and poor residents. ?We have people who have to work, and people who don?t work at all. They?re used to being discouraged. What happens is when they get frustrated, they won?t vote at all,? Tolliver said. Franklin County Board of Elections Director Matthew Damschroder said that while he didn?t think the distribution of the incorrect poll information was ?malicious,? it ?could disenfranchise a voter.? (30)

(D) McAuliffe Letter Alleging RNC-Funded Disenfranchisement
On October 13, DNC Chairman Terry McAuliffe sent a letter to RNC Chairman Ed Gillespie accusing Republicans of ?systematic efforts to disenfranchise voters ? to impose unlawful ID requirements in New Mexico, to throw eligible voters off the rolls in Clark County Nevada and to deprive voters of their rights to vote a provisional ballot in Ohio, among other examples.? The letter argued that while Republicans claimed to combat vote fraud, ?it is actually the Republicans who are engaging in vote fraud in Nevada, Oregon and potentially other states.? McAuliffe cited the example of a voter registration organization paid by the RNC that was accused of ?ripping up Democratic voter registration forms? in Nevada. (31)
McAuliffe?s reference to ?ripping up Democrat voter registration forms? was a reference to the charges leveled by a former employee of the voter registration firm Sproul & Associates. These charges were, however, later found to be without merit. In October 2004, former Sproul & Associates employee Eric Russell claimed to have witnessed his supervisors tearing up Democrat registration forms. Russell, who admitted to being a disgruntled employee upset about not being paid for work he claimed to have done, said he witnessed his supervisor shred eight to ten Democratic registration forms from prospective voters. (32)

On the basis of these allegations, the Nevada Democratic Party sued the state of Nevada to reopen voter registration only in Clark County. A state court judge rejected the suit, saying that Democrats? thin evidence of registration forms actually being destroyed did not justify reopening the registration process. (33)

In late October, Nevada Secretary of State Dean Heller announced that a state investigation of Eric Russell?s claims against Sproul found ?no evidence of an organized or concerted effort which would influence or impact the result of the elections in Clark County based on these allegations.? (34)

Allegations were also made that Sproul & Associates was registering Republicans exclusively and tearing up registration cards in Minnesota, Oregon, Pennsylvania and West Virginia. (35) While the Secretary of State and Attorney General launched investigations of Sproul?s activities in Oregon, there are no reports indicating any indictments or other legal actions taken against Sproul or its workers in these states. (36) The mere fact of these allegations and the other documented abuses of the voter registration process and incidents of voter registration fraud detailed in this report support reforming the process by which third-party groups participate in voter registration efforts and call for more accountability and oversight of third party voter registration efforts by election officials.

(E) Charges That Republicans Targeted Minority Precincts For Polling Place Challengers In Jefferson County, Kentucky
Prior to and since the 2003 elections, Democrats and their allies alleged that the Jefferson County, Kentucky, Republican Party?s placement of challengers in Democrat precincts was an attempt to suppress the African American vote by illegally targeting precincts in the county based on race. (37) Days before the 2003 gubernatorial election, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit accusing the county Republican Party of singling out minority Democrat precincts for intimidation through vote challengers. (38)
On November 4, Jefferson County Circuit Judge Thomas Wine denied the ACLU?s effort to ban GOP challengers from the polls and determined that their allegations of racial targeting were not supported by the evidence. Judge Wine found that Republicans placed challengers in county precincts without regard to any racial criteria. The judge ruled that the county Republican Party used a ?racially neutral? method of placing challengers, choosing those precincts ?with the highest percentage of registered Democratic voters vis-?-vis Republican.? Judge Wine noted that ?speculation alone? by the ACLU and Democrats about the challengers? placement was ?not sufficient? to merit a restraining order. According to Judge Wine?s order, state law entitled Republicans to have challengers at the polls on Election Day and barred such challengers from disrupting the election process by ?intimidating or harassing verbally? any voter, under penalty of being removed from the polling place. (39) (Exhibit C)

Despite the charge that Republicans were seeking to suppress the African American vote through their poll watcher program, the results of elections in 2003 and 2004 showed the opposite effect. In 2003, African American turnout actually increased in key county precincts targeted by Republicans for monitoring, and elections officials reported ?no problems? with the Republican poll watchers. (40) President Bush actually lost Jefferson County by a larger margin in 2004 than he did in 2000. John Kerry won the county by 5,592 votes in 2004, while Al Gore won it in 2000 by 4,849 votes. (41)

(F) Ohio Challenger Allegations
In the weeks leading up to the 2004 election, the issue of partisan challengers at polling places in Ohio became a lightning rod for charges voter intimidation and suppression. Ohio law allows observers who have been properly registered and credentialed by boards of election to be present at polling locations to observe the conduct of election. The observers are supervised by election officials and have a narrowly defined role. Ohio law allows each party, as well as candidates and issue campaigns, to appoint these observers, denominated as ?challengers? in the statutes. Both Republicans and Democrats applied to have thousands of challengers monitor the vote across Ohio on November 2. (42)
Republicans said they wanted challengers in polling places because of concerns about fraudulently registered voters in Ohio. (43) Democrats said they registered challengers only to watch the GOP observers, who they accused of trying to intimidate minority voters. The Rev. Jesse Jackson called the Republican challenger effort ?Old South politics, a type of intimidation.? (44)

Democrats ?filed lawsuits accusing the GOP of trying to suppress turnout and intimidate black voters? through their challenger program. One lawsuit, filed by civil rights activists Marian and Don Spencer, asked U.S. District Judge Susan J. Dlott of Cincinnati ?for an emergency restraining order barring partisan challengers from polling stations? in Ohio on the grounds that such challengers would ?intimidate black voters.? (45) Another lawsuit brought by Summit County Democrats asked U.S. District Judge John Adams of Akron to ?to declare unconstitutional a decades-old Ohio law that allows challengers to sit in polling places and challenge voters.? (46) Both Judge Dlott and Judge Adams held that the Ohio statute providing for challengers was unconstitutional and barred challengers from the polls on Election Day. (47) Neither Dlott or Adams ruled that the Republican challengers were intended to suppress minority voter participation. During the hearing before Judge Dlott Republicans were questioned extensively about the Republican challengers and the evidence established that the determination of which polling places Republican challengers observed was made without regard to any racial characteristic of the precincts in which challengers participated.

However, early on the morning of Election Day, a three-judge panel from the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati overturned the lower courts? rulings to allow challengers in Ohio polling places. The court ruled that the presence of Election Day challengers was allowed under state law, and that while registered voters should be able to cast ballots freely, there is also a ?strong public interest in permitting legitimate statutory processes to operate to preclude voting by those who are not entitled to vote.? (48) The Plaintiffs appealed the 6th Circuit?s ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court, but Associate Justice John Paul Stevens declined to hear the case, and thus refused to block the election challengers. Justice Stevens wrote that while the accusations leveled by the Plaintiffs were ?undoubtedly serious? time was too short for the court to render a proper decision. Stevens also expressed faith in local election officials in declining to hear the case by writing, ?I have faith that the elected officials and numerous election volunteers on the ground will carry out their responsibilities in a way that will enable qualified voters to cast their ballots.? (49)

Allegations that Republican challengers in the polls would ?intimidate and suppress the black vote? in Ohio in 2004, were spectacularly unfounded. African American turnout was up in predominantly black precincts in Ohio. In Cleveland, ?turnout was up nearly 22 percent [from 2000] and it went higher in some black wards.? In 2004, President Bush doubled his support from Ohio?s black voters from 2000. According to the Cleveland Plain Dealer, ?Black voters may have given President Bush the edge in Ohio.? (50) The paper also reported that the ?most feared delays of the election ? from Republican challengers questioning the validity of voters at the polls ? never materialized.? (51) According to the New York Times, ?there were no reports that large numbers of voters were being challenged or denied a ballot [in Ohio].? (52)

On April 28, 2005, U.S. District Judge Susan J. Dlott issued an order denying a second motion for preliminary injunction against Republicans, holding that no voter?s due process rights are violated by Ohio?s polling place challenger rules. Judge Dlott ruled that there was no evidence to support giving the plaintiffs any relief on any of their claims. (53) (Exhibit D)

The plaintiffs in the case had claimed that the procedures established by the Republican Secretary of State would deprive properly registered voters of the opportunity to vote. They asserted that a voter whose qualifications to vote were challenged would be denied rights because they might fail to fully answer questions put to them by the precinct judges. According to Judge Dlott, the plaintiffs ?failed to establish a likelihood of success on the merits of claims and have not shown that any irreparable injury has resulted or will result from the [challenge] procedures.? Judge Dlott held that the plaintiffs ?produced no evidence at the hearing that any eligible voter was wrongfully denied a ballot under [the Ohio challenger rules] in the November 2004 election or that such a voter would be denied a ballot in any future election.? Judge Dlott reasoned that ?while the magnitude of the burden of having one?s properly registered right to vote revoked is great, there is no evidence that it has happened or will happen in May?s primary.? (54)

It has been noted that it is not difficult to convince the winner of an election that the result was proper and the election was fair and honest. The difficulty is to assure the losing candidate and party that the election was legitimate. Providing openness and transparency in the conduct of elections is an important means to assure that voters and the participants in the election (the candidates and political parties) ? especially those who sought a different outcome - have confidence that the election has been conducted in a fair and honest manner and that the result is a legitimate expression of the will of the voters. The presence of observers in polling places deters attempts at vote fraud and also provides assurance that there was no misconduct by election officials. All political parties and candidates should have appropriate means to have observers in polling places. State law should allow a role for observers and should provide them a meaningful opportunity to monitor the conduct of the election without interfering with the lawful conduct of the election. As the Ohio and Kentucky litigation illustrate, the mere presence of observers in polling places also invites legal challenge that such a presence is in some manner discriminatory. The outcome of the Ohio and Kentucky litigation and the actual participation in the respective elections by minority voters suggests that claims of observers lawfully monitoring the conduct of the election does not deter participation by minority or other voters.
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 29, 2005, 04:38:29 PM
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/005/995phqjw.asp
 
A War to Be Proud Of
From the September 5 / September 12, 2005 issue: The case for overthrowing Saddam was unimpeachable. Why, then, is the administration tongue-tied?
by Christopher Hitchens
09/05/2005, Volume 010, Issue 47

 



LET ME BEGIN WITH A simple sentence that, even as I write it, appears less than Swiftian in the modesty of its proposal: "Prison conditions at Abu Ghraib have improved markedly and dramatically since the arrival of Coalition troops in Baghdad."

I could undertake to defend that statement against any member of Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International, and I know in advance that none of them could challenge it, let alone negate it. Before March 2003, Abu Ghraib was an abattoir, a torture chamber, and a concentration camp. Now, and not without reason, it is an international byword for Yankee imperialism and sadism. Yet the improvement is still, unarguably, the difference between night and day. How is it possible that the advocates of a post-Saddam Iraq have been placed on the defensive in this manner? And where should one begin?

I once tried to calculate how long the post-Cold War liberal Utopia had actually lasted. Whether you chose to date its inception from the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, or the death of Nicolae Ceausescu in late December of the same year, or the release of Nelson Mandela from prison, or the referendum defeat suffered by Augusto Pinochet (or indeed from the publication of Francis Fukuyama's book about the "end of history" and the unarguable triumph of market liberal pluralism), it was an epoch that in retrospect was over before it began. By the middle of 1990, Saddam Hussein had abolished Kuwait and Slobodan Milosevic was attempting to erase the identity and the existence of Bosnia. It turned out that we had not by any means escaped the reach of atavistic, aggressive, expansionist, and totalitarian ideology. Proving the same point in another way, and within approximately the same period, the theocratic dictator of Iran had publicly claimed the right to offer money in his own name for the suborning of the murder of a novelist living in London, and the g?nocidaire faction in Rwanda had decided that it could probably get away with putting its long-fantasized plan of mass murder into operation.

One is not mentioning these apparently discrepant crimes and nightmares as a random or unsorted list. Khomeini, for example, was attempting to compensate for the humiliation of the peace agreement he had been compelled to sign with Saddam Hussein. And Saddam Hussein needed to make up the loss, of prestige and income, that he had himself suffered in the very same war. Milosevic (anticipating Putin, as it now seems to me, and perhaps Beijing also) was riding a mutation of socialist nationalism into national socialism. It was to be noticed in all cases that the aggressors, whether they were killing Muslims, or exalting Islam, or just killing their neighbors, shared a deep and abiding hatred of the United States.

The balance sheet of the Iraq war, if it is to be seriously drawn up, must also involve a confrontation with at least this much of recent history. Was the Bush administration right to leave--actually to confirm--Saddam Hussein in power after his eviction from Kuwait in 1991? Was James Baker correct to say, in his delightfully folksy manner, that the United States did not "have a dog in the fight" that involved ethnic cleansing for the mad dream of a Greater Serbia? Was the Clinton administration prudent in its retreat from Somalia, or wise in its opposition to the U.N. resolution that called for a preemptive strengthening of the U.N. forces in Rwanda?

I know hardly anybody who comes out of this examination with complete credit. There were neoconservatives who jeered at Rushdie in 1989 and who couldn't see the point when Sarajevo faced obliteration in 1992. There were leftist humanitarians and radicals who rallied to Rushdie and called for solidarity with Bosnia, but who--perhaps because of a bad conscience about Palestine--couldn't face a confrontation with Saddam Hussein even when he annexed a neighbor state that was a full member of the Arab League and of the U.N. (I suppose I have to admit that I was for a time a member of that second group.) But there were consistencies, too. French statecraft, for example, was uniformly hostile to any resistance to any aggression, and Paris even sent troops to rescue its filthy clientele in Rwanda. And some on the hard left and the brute right were also opposed to any exercise, for any reason, of American military force.

The only speech by any statesman that can bear reprinting from that low, dishonest decade came from Tony Blair when he spoke in Chicago in 1999. Welcoming the defeat and overthrow of Milosevic after the Kosovo intervention, he warned against any self-satisfaction and drew attention to an inescapable confrontation that was coming with Saddam Hussein. So far from being an American "poodle," as his taunting and ignorant foes like to sneer, Blair had in fact leaned on Clinton over Kosovo and was insisting on the importance of Iraq while George Bush was still an isolationist governor of Texas.

Notwithstanding this prescience and principle on his part, one still cannot read the journals of the 2000/2001 millennium without the feeling that one is revisiting a hopelessly somnambulist relative in a neglected home. I am one of those who believe, uncynically, that Osama bin Laden did us all a service (and holy war a great disservice) by his mad decision to assault the American homeland four years ago. Had he not made this world-historical mistake, we would have been able to add a Talibanized and nuclear-armed Pakistan to our list of the threats we failed to recognize in time. (This threat still exists, but it is no longer so casually overlooked.)

The subsequent liberation of Pakistan's theocratic colony in Afghanistan, and the so-far decisive eviction and defeat of its bin Ladenist guests, was only a reprisal. It took care of the last attack. But what about the next one? For anyone with eyes to see, there was only one other state that combined the latent and the blatant definitions of both "rogue" and "failed." This state--Saddam's ruined and tortured and collapsing Iraq--had also met all the conditions under which a country may be deemed to have sacrificed its own legal sovereignty. To recapitulate: It had invaded its neighbors, committed genocide on its own soil, harbored and nurtured international thugs and killers, and flouted every provision of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. The United Nations, in this crisis, faced with regular insult to its own resolutions and its own character, had managed to set up a system of sanctions-based mutual corruption. In May 2003, had things gone on as they had been going, Saddam Hussein would have been due to fill Iraq's slot as chair of the U.N. Conference on Disarmament. Meanwhile, every species of gangster from the hero of the Achille Lauro hijacking to Abu Musab al Zarqawi was finding hospitality under Saddam's crumbling roof.

One might have thought, therefore, that Bush and Blair's decision to put an end at last to this intolerable state of affairs would be hailed, not just as a belated vindication of long-ignored U.N. resolutions but as some corrective to the decade of shame and inaction that had just passed in Bosnia and Rwanda. But such is not the case. An apparent consensus exists, among millions of people in Europe and America, that the whole operation for the demilitarization of Iraq, and the salvage of its traumatized society, was at best a false pretense and at worst an unprovoked aggression. How can this possibly be?

THERE IS, first, the problem of humorless and pseudo-legalistic literalism. In Saki's short story The Lumber Room, the naughty but clever child Nicholas, who has actually placed a frog in his morning bread-and-milk, rejoices in his triumph over the adults who don't credit this excuse for not eating his healthful dish:


"You said there couldn't possibly be a frog in my bread-and-milk; there was a frog in my bread-and-milk," he repeated, with the insistence of a skilled tactician who does not intend to shift from favorable ground.
Childishness is one thing--those of us who grew up on this wonderful Edwardian author were always happy to see the grown-ups and governesses discomfited. But puerility in adults is quite another thing, and considerably less charming. "You said there were WMDs in Iraq and that Saddam had friends in al Qaeda. . . . Blah, blah, pants on fire." I have had many opportunities to tire of this mantra. It takes ten seconds to intone the said mantra. It would take me, on my most eloquent C-SPAN day, at the very least five minutes to say that Abdul Rahman Yasin, who mixed the chemicals for the World Trade Center attack in 1993, subsequently sought and found refuge in Baghdad; that Dr. Mahdi Obeidi, Saddam's senior physicist, was able to lead American soldiers to nuclear centrifuge parts and a blueprint for a complete centrifuge (the crown jewel of nuclear physics) buried on the orders of Qusay Hussein; that Saddam's agents were in Damascus as late as February 2003, negotiating to purchase missiles off the shelf from North Korea; or that Rolf Ekeus, the great Swedish socialist who founded the inspection process in Iraq after 1991, has told me for the record that he was offered a $2 million bribe in a face-to-face meeting with Tariq Aziz. And these eye-catching examples would by no means exhaust my repertoire, or empty my quiver. Yes, it must be admitted that Bush and Blair made a hash of a good case, largely because they preferred to scare people rather than enlighten them or reason with them. Still, the only real strategy of deception has come from those who believe, or pretend, that Saddam Hussein was no problem.

I have a ready answer to those who accuse me of being an agent and tool of the Bush-Cheney administration (which is the nicest thing that my enemies can find to say). Attempting a little levity, I respond that I could stay at home if the authorities could bother to make their own case, but that I meanwhile am a prisoner of what I actually do know about the permanent hell, and the permanent threat, of the Saddam regime. However, having debated almost all of the spokespeople for the antiwar faction, both the sane and the deranged, I was recently asked a question that I was temporarily unable to answer. "If what you claim is true," the honest citizen at this meeting politely asked me, "how come the White House hasn't told us?"

I do in fact know the answer to this question. So deep and bitter is the split within official Washington, most especially between the Defense Department and the CIA, that any claim made by the former has been undermined by leaks from the latter. (The latter being those who maintained, with a combination of dogmatism and cowardice not seen since Lincoln had to fire General McClellan, that Saddam Hussein was both a "secular" actor and--this is the really rich bit--a rational and calculating one.)

There's no cure for that illusion, but the resulting bureaucratic chaos and unease has cornered the president into his current fallback upon platitude and hollowness. It has also induced him to give hostages to fortune. The claim that if we fight fundamentalism "over there" we won't have to confront it "over here" is not just a standing invitation for disproof by the next suicide-maniac in London or Chicago, but a coded appeal to provincial and isolationist opinion in the United States. Surely the elementary lesson of the grim anniversary that will shortly be upon us is that American civilians are as near to the front line as American soldiers.

It is exactly this point that makes nonsense of the sob-sister tripe pumped out by the Cindy Sheehan circus and its surrogates. But in reply, why bother to call a struggle "global" if you then try to localize it? Just say plainly that we shall fight them everywhere they show themselves, and fight them on principle as well as in practice, and get ready to warn people that Nigeria is very probably the next target of the jihadists. The peaceniks love to ask: When and where will it all end? The answer is easy: It will end with the surrender or defeat of one of the contending parties. Should I add that I am certain which party that ought to be? Defeat is just about imaginable, though the mathematics and the algebra tell heavily against the holy warriors. Surrender to such a foe, after only four years of combat, is not even worthy of consideration.

Antaeus was able to draw strength from the earth every time an antagonist wrestled him to the ground. A reverse mythology has been permitted to take hold in the present case, where bad news is deemed to be bad news only for regime-change. Anyone with the smallest knowledge of Iraq knows that its society and infrastructure and institutions have been appallingly maimed and beggared by three decades of war and fascism (and the "divide-and-rule" tactics by which Saddam maintained his own tribal minority of the Sunni minority in power). In logic and morality, one must therefore compare the current state of the country with the likely or probable state of it had Saddam and his sons been allowed to go on ruling.

At once, one sees that all the alternatives would have been infinitely worse, and would most likely have led to an implosion--as well as opportunistic invasions from Iran and Turkey and Saudi Arabia, on behalf of their respective interests or confessional clienteles. This would in turn have necessitated a more costly and bloody intervention by some kind of coalition, much too late and on even worse terms and conditions. This is the lesson of Bosnia and Rwanda yesterday, and of Darfur today. When I have made this point in public, I have never had anyone offer an answer to it. A broken Iraq was in our future no matter what, and was a responsibility (somewhat conditioned by our past blunders) that no decent person could shirk. The only unthinkable policy was one of abstention.

Two pieces of good fortune still attend those of us who go out on the road for this urgent and worthy cause. The first is contingent: There are an astounding number of plain frauds and charlatans (to phrase it at its highest) in charge of the propaganda of the other side. Just to tell off the names is to frighten children more than Saki ever could: Michael Moore, George Galloway, Jacques Chirac, Tim Robbins, Richard Clarke, Joseph Wilson . . . a roster of gargoyles that would send Ripley himself into early retirement. Some of these characters are flippant, and make heavy jokes about Halliburton, and some disdain to conceal their sympathy for the opposite side. So that's easy enough.

The second bit of luck is a certain fiber displayed by a huge number of anonymous Americans. Faced with a constant drizzle of bad news and purposely demoralizing commentary, millions of people stick out their jaws and hang tight. I am no fan of populism, but I surmise that these citizens are clear on the main point: It is out of the question--plainly and absolutely out of the question--that we should surrender the keystone state of the Middle East to a rotten, murderous alliance between Baathists and bin Ladenists. When they hear the fatuous insinuation that this alliance has only been created by the resistance to it, voters know in their intestines that those who say so are soft on crime and soft on fascism. The more temperate anti-warriors, such as Mark Danner and Harold Meyerson, like to employ the term "a war of choice." One should have no problem in accepting this concept. As they cannot and do not deny, there was going to be another round with Saddam Hussein no matter what. To whom, then, should the "choice" of time and place have fallen? The clear implication of the antichoice faction--if I may so dub them--is that this decision should have been left up to Saddam Hussein. As so often before . . .

DOES THE PRESIDENT deserve the benefit of the reserve of fortitude that I just mentioned? Only just, if at all. We need not argue about the failures and the mistakes and even the crimes, because these in some ways argue themselves. But a positive accounting could be offered without braggartry, and would include:

(1) The overthrow of Talibanism and Baathism, and the exposure of many highly suggestive links between the two elements of this Hitler-Stalin pact. Abu Musab al Zarqawi, who moved from Afghanistan to Iraq before the coalition intervention, has even gone to the trouble of naming his organization al Qaeda in Mesopotamia.

(2) The subsequent capitulation of Qaddafi's Libya in point of weapons of mass destruction--a capitulation that was offered not to Kofi Annan or the E.U. but to Blair and Bush.

(3) The consequent unmasking of the A.Q. Khan network for the illicit transfer of nuclear technology to Libya, Iran, and North Korea.

(4) The agreement by the United Nations that its own reform is necessary and overdue, and the unmasking of a quasi-criminal network within its elite.

(5) The craven admission by President Chirac and Chancellor Schr?der, when confronted with irrefutable evidence of cheating and concealment, respecting solemn treaties, on the part of Iran, that not even this will alter their commitment to neutralism. (One had already suspected as much in the Iraqi case.)

(6) The ability to certify Iraq as actually disarmed, rather than accept the word of a psychopathic autocrat.

(7) The immense gains made by the largest stateless minority in the region--the Kurds--and the spread of this example to other states.

(8) The related encouragement of democratic and civil society movements in Egypt, Syria, and most notably Lebanon, which has regained a version of its autonomy.

(9) The violent and ignominious death of thousands of bin Ladenist infiltrators into Iraq and Afghanistan, and the real prospect of greatly enlarging this number.

(10) The training and hardening of many thousands of American servicemen and women in a battle against the forces of nihilism and absolutism, which training and hardening will surely be of great use in future combat.

It would be admirable if the president could manage to make such a presentation. It would also be welcome if he and his deputies adopted a clear attitude toward the war within the war: in other words, stated plainly, that the secular and pluralist forces within Afghan and Iraqi society, while they are not our clients, can in no circumstance be allowed to wonder which outcome we favor.

The great point about Blair's 1999 speech was that it asserted the obvious. Coexistence with aggressive regimes or expansionist, theocratic, and totalitarian ideologies is not in fact possible. One should welcome this conclusion for the additional reason that such coexistence is not desirable, either. If the great effort to remake Iraq as a demilitarized federal and secular democracy should fail or be defeated, I shall lose sleep for the rest of my life in reproaching myself for doing too little. But at least I shall have the comfort of not having offered, so far as I can recall, any word or deed that contributed to a defeat.



Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. His most recent book is Thomas Jefferson: Author of America. A recent essay of his appears in the collection A Matter of Principle: Humanitarian Arguments for War in Iraq, newly published by the University of California Press.

 
 

? Copyright 2005, News Corporation, Weekly Standard, All Rights Reserved.
Title: Quelling Civil Disturbances
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on September 01, 2005, 03:55:26 PM
Possibly better posted under "Homeland Security." In the wake of social  pathologies emerging after hurricane Katrina, National Review Online republished the following:

September 01, 2005, 1:16 p.m.
A Riot Primer
The importance of using force to control the spread of urban riots.

By Eugene H. Methvin

EDITOR'S NOTE: This piece appeared in the June 10, 1991, issue of National Review.

Do we have to relearn every couple of decades ? at high cost in blood and treasure ? the ABCs of riot ignition and suppression?

Two recent outbursts of urban mass violence suggest we may be in for a chain reaction of anti-police rioting like the ones that erupted in Harlem and five other cities in 1964, followed by the bloody "long hot summer" riots in Watts, Newark, Detroit, Washington, and many other cities in 1965-68. Following the vicious Los Angeles police beating of Rodney King on March 3, police attempts to arrest street drunks, a routine occurrence, produced a minor riot in Houston and major violence in Washington, D.C.

In a drug-and-gang-infested neighborhood in Houston, on Saturday night, May 4, a solo policeman came upon a man who appeared intoxicated. The officer told the man he would have to go to jail. The man refused and shoved the officer. "At that time I noticed another man standing behind me with a video camera, filming the whole thing. It was an obvious setup," said Officer J. R. Deugenio, who wisely beat a retreat. A crowd of some 75 to 100 people gathered, and bottles and rocks rained down on his patrol car before he could escape. He reported hearing four or five shots. Two similar incidents had occurred in the same neighborhood on Saturday, April 20. In each case an officer's car was pelted with rocks, sticks, and bottles, and he was forced to yield a prisoner. Houston Police Chief Elizabeth M. Watson ordered her cops not to enter the area, less than a mile west of downtown, without backup.

In Washington, D.C., on Sunday, May 5, a black female police officer attempted to arrest a Hispanic man who was drinking and unruly on a street in the Mount Pleasant area, heavily populated by recent Central American immigrants. The man drew a knife and advanced, the officer reported, whereupon she shot and severely wounded him. The rumor spread that he was dead, shot while handcuffed. A flashfire of violence erupted as hundreds of youths set fire to police cars, smashed windows, and looted. Washington's new mayor, Sharon Pratt Dixon, at first ordered police to disperse crowds but make no arrests. The second night, running gangs of youths fought a thousand policemen, burning and looting as they spread out. Mayor Dixon then declared a curfew and ordered arrests, whereupon the violence subsided. Police made 230 arrests in three days.

City officials said no more than six hundred youths were involved and claimed a great triumph since no one died, in contrast to the 1968 riots, in which 13 people died. But merchants and residents in the area bitterly criticized the initial police inaction.

Mayor Dixon's no-arrest order precisely replicated the initial blunders of 1968. If other mayors and police chiefs follow her example, the nation will be in for a "long hot summer" indeed. For the lesson of history is plain: In riot situations, the earlier the police make arrests, and the more arrests they make, the lower will be the toll in life, limb, and property. And the cop on the street will not act decisively unless he feels he has the support of his superiors ? principally his chief and mayor.

The social phenomenon is well documented, but the books lie on library shelves, dusted off only once a generation or so by mayoral or presidential commissions. We need only look at Atlanta in 1905; East St. Louis in 1917; Charleston, Chicago, Washington, Boston, and Knoxville in 1919; Harlem in 1935; Detroit in 1943; and Harlem to Watts to Washington and nearly everywhere else in 1964-68.

Moral Holiday
In a nutshell: Riots begin when some set of social forces temporarily overwhelms or paralyzes the police, who stand by, their highly visible inaction signaling to the small percentage of teenaged embryonic psychopaths and hardened young adults that a moral holiday is under way. This criminal minority spearheads the car-burning, window-smashing, and blood-letting, mobbing such hate targets as blacks, or white merchants, or lone cops. Then the drawing effect brings out the large crowds of older men, and women and children, to share the Roman carnival of looting. Then the major killing begins: slow runners caught in burning buildings and-as civic forces mobilize-in police and National Guard gunfire.

The books are on the shelf- let the responsible authorities in city hall and police headquarters check them out.

The time to halt a riot is right at the start, by pinching off the criminal spearhead with precise and overwhelming force. The cops will usually be caught flat-footed (no pun intended) by the initial outbreak. But they need to spring into a pre-arranged mobilization that should always be as ready in every major city as the fire-department or hospital disaster-response program.

While Detroit Burned
In the worst urban riots of the 1960s ? Watts, Newark, Detroit, and Washington ? the police did nothing or next to it for the first several hours. Deaths and property destruction soared. Contrast what happened in Toledo 36 hours after Detroit's outburst.

There, five hundred young men began breaking windows along a six-block stretch. The fourth police cruiser arriving radioed: "Do you want us to observe?" That such a question should even have been asked was damning proof that Americans had let years of extreme court rulings and hysterical "police brutality" propaganda paralyze our last line of defense against criminal anarchy.

Yet in Toledo the answer snapped back steely and clear. Police Chief Tony Bosh happened to be monitoring the radio and he barked: Arrest every lawbreaker you can ? and meet illegal force with legal force!"

Just as quickly, Toledo's mayor requested and Ohio Governor James Rhodes called in five hundred National Guardsmen to stand behind police in reserve, with well-publicized orders to kill if necessary to maintain order. They were never needed. Toledo's police arrested 22 people (nine for possessing firebombs) in the first three hours. That was almost triple the number Detroit and Newark police arrested in the same period.

Chief Bosh laid out for a Senate committee the criminal records, "some as long as your arm," of the rioters jailed in his city's three-day eruption. Of the 126 adults a startling 105 had prior arrests, averaging six apiece. Every single one of the 22 young adults jailed in the first three hours had criminal records; they averaged only twenty years old and three prior arrests apiece. The twenty young men jailed on firebomb charges averaged four apiece.

The result of the quick arrest policy: Toledo's trouble hardly earned the name "riot." No one died ? not one person, looter, policeman, or innocent bystander. The will that Toledo's civil authorities displayed, like a heavy rain on a kindling forest fire, made the difference between "incident" and "insurrection." They withdrew the one essential ingredient for a major riot: implied official permission for criminals and rowdies to coalesce and rebel.

As Santayana said, those who do not study history are condemned to repeat it.

   
http://www.nationalreview.com/flashback/flashback200509011316.asp
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 04, 2005, 02:51:51 PM
by Robert Tracinski

It has taken four long days for state and federal officials to figure out how to deal with the disaster in New Orleans. I can't blame them, because it has also taken me four long days to figure out what is going on there. The reason is that the events there make no sense if you think that we are confronting a natural disaster.

If this is just a natural disaster, the response for public officials is obvious: you bring in food, water, and doctors; you send transportation to evacuate refugees to temporary shelters; you send engineers to stop the flooding and rebuild the city's infrastructure. For journalists, natural disasters also have a familiar pattern: the heroism of ordinary people pulling together to survive; the hard work and dedication of doctors, nurses, and rescue workers; the steps being taken to clean up and rebuild.

Public officials did not expect that the first thing they would have to do is to send thousands of armed troops in armored vehicle, as if they are suppressing an enemy insurgency. And journalists--myself included--did not expect that the story would not be about rain, wind, and flooding, but about rape, murder, and looting.

But this is not a natural disaster. It is a man-made disaster.

The man-made disaster is not an inadequate or incompetent response by federal relief agencies, and it was not directly caused by Hurricane Katrina. This is where just about every newspaper and television channel has gotten the story wrong.

The man-made disaster we are now witnessing in New Orleans did not happen over the past four days. It happened over the past four decades. Hurricane Katrina merely exposed it to public view.

The man-made disaster is the welfare state.

For the past few days, I have found the news from New Orleans to be confusing. People were not behaving as you would expect them to behave in an emergency--indeed, they were not behaving as they have behaved in other emergencies. That is what has shocked so many people: they have been saying that this is not what we expect from America. In fact, it is not even what we expect from a Third World country.

When confronted with a disaster, people usually rise to the occasion. They work together to rescue people in danger, and they spontaneously organize to keep order and solve problems. This is especially true in America. We are an enterprising people, used to relying on our own initiative rather than waiting around for the government to take care of us. I have seen this a hundred times, in small examples (a small town whose main traffic light had gone out, causing ordinary citizens to get out of their cars and serve as impromptu traffic cops, directing cars through the intersection) and large ones (the spontaneous response of New Yorkers to September 11).

So what explains the chaos in New Orleans?

To give you an idea of the magnitude of what is going on, here is a description from a Washington Times story:

"Storm victims are raped and beaten; fights erupt with flying fists, knives and guns; fires are breaking out; corpses litter the streets; and police and rescue helicopters are repeatedly fired on.

"The plea from Mayor C. Ray Nagin came even as National Guardsmen poured in to restore order and stop the looting, carjackings and gunfire....

"Last night, Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco said 300 Iraq-hardened Arkansas National Guard members were inside New Orleans with shoot-to-kill orders.

" 'These troops are...under my orders to restore order in the streets,' she said. 'They have M-16s, and they are locked and loaded. These troops know how to shoot and kill and they are more than willing to do so if necessary and I expect they will.' "

The reference to Iraq is eerie. The photo that accompanies this article shows National Guard troops, with rifles and armored vests, riding on an armored vehicle through trash-strewn streets lined by a rabble of squalid, listless people, one of whom appears to be yelling at them. It looks exactly like a scene from Sadr City in Baghdad.

What explains bands of thugs using a natural disaster as an excuse for an orgy of looting, armed robbery, and rape? What causes unruly mobs to storm the very buses that have arrived to evacuate them, causing the drivers to drive away, frightened for their lives? What causes people to attack the doctors trying to treat patients at the Super Dome?

Why are people responding to natural destruction by causing further destruction? Why are they attacking the people who are trying to help them?

My wife, Sherri, figured it out first, and she figured it out on a sense-of-life level. While watching the coverage last night on Fox News Channel, she told me that she was getting a familiar feeling. She studied architecture at the Illinois Institute of Chicago, which is located in the South Side of Chicago just blocks away from the Robert Taylor Homes, one of the largest high-rise public housing projects in America. "The projects," as they were known, were infamous for uncontrollable crime and irremediable squalor. (They have since, mercifully, been demolished.)

What Sherri was getting from last night's television coverage was a whiff of the sense of life of "the projects." Then the "crawl"--the informational phrases flashed at the bottom of the screen on most news channels--gave some vital statistics to confirm this sense: 75% of the residents of New Orleans had already evacuated before the hurricane, and of the 300,000 or so who remained, a large number were from the city's public housing projects. Jack Wakeland then gave me an additional, crucial fact: early reports from CNN and Fox indicated that the city had no plan for evacuating all of the prisoners in the city's jails--so they just let many of them loose. There is no doubt a significant overlap between these two populations--that is, a large number of people in the jails used to live in the housing projects, and vice versa.

There were many decent, innocent people trapped in New Orleans when the deluge hit--but they were trapped alongside large numbers of people from two groups: criminals--and wards of the welfare state, people selected, over decades, for their lack of initiative and self-induced helplessness. The welfare wards were a mass of sheep--on whom the incompetent administration of New Orleans unleashed a pack of wolves.

All of this is related, incidentally, to the apparent incompetence of the city government, which failed to plan for a total evacuation of the city, despite the knowledge that this might be necessary. But in a city corrupted by the welfare state, the job of city officials is to ensure the flow of handouts to welfare recipients and patronage to political supporters--not to ensure a lawful, orderly evacuation in case of emergency.

No one has really reported this story, as far as I can tell. In fact, some are already actively distorting it, blaming President Bush, for example, for failing to personally ensure that the Mayor of New Orleans had drafted an adequate evacuation plan. The worst example is an execrable piece from the Toronto Globe and Mail, by a supercilious Canadian who blames the chaos on American "individualism." But the truth is precisely the opposite: the chaos was caused by a system that was the exact opposite of individualism.

What Hurricane Katrina exposed was the psychological consequences of the welfare state. What we consider "normal" behavior in an emergency is behavior that is normal for people who have values and take the responsibility to pursue and protect them. People with values respond to a disaster by fighting against it and doing whatever it takes to overcome the difficulties they face. They don't sit around and complain that the government hasn't taken care of them. They don't use the chaos of a disaster as an opportunity to prey on their fellow men.

But what about criminals and welfare parasites? Do they worry about saving their houses and property? They don't, because they don't own anything. Do they worry about what is going to happen to their businesses or how they are going to make a living? They never worried about those things before. Do they worry about crime and looting? But living off of stolen wealth is a way of life for them.

The welfare state--and the brutish, uncivilized mentality it sustains and encourages--is the man-made disaster that explains the moral ugliness that has swamped New Orleans. And that is the story that no one is reporting.

Source: TIA Daily -- September 2, 2005
_________________
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on September 04, 2005, 10:45:35 PM
Get Off His Back (Updated)
By Ben Stein
Published 9/2/2005 11:59:59 PM

A few truths, for those who have ears and eyes and care to know the truth:

1.) The hurricane that hit New Orleans and Mississippi and Alabama was an astonishing tragedy. The suffering and loss of life and peace of mind of the residents of those areas is acutely horrifying.

2.) George Bush did not cause the hurricane. Hurricanes have been happening for eons. George Bush did not create them or unleash this one.

3.) George Bush did not make this one worse than others. There have been far worse hurricanes than this before George Bush was born.

4.) There is no overwhelming evidence that global warming exists as a man-made phenomenon. There is no clear-cut evidence that global warming even exists. There is no clear evidence that if it does exist it makes hurricanes more powerful or makes them aim at cities with large numbers of poor people. If global warming is a real phenomenon, which it may well be, it started long before George Bush was inaugurated, and would not have been affected at all by the Kyoto treaty, considering that Kyoto does not cover the world's worst polluters -- China, India, and Brazil. In a word, George Bush had zero to do with causing this hurricane. To speculate otherwise is belief in sorcery.

5.) George Bush had nothing to do with the hurricane contingency plans for New Orleans. Those are drawn up by New Orleans and Louisiana. In any event, the plans were perfectly good: mandatory evacuation. It is in no way at all George Bush's fault that about 20 percent of New Orleans neglected to follow the plan. It is not his fault that many persons in New Orleans were too confused to realize how dangerous the hurricane would be. They were certainly warned. It's not George Bush's fault that there were sick people and old people and people without cars in New Orleans. His job description does not include making sure every adult in America has a car, is in good health, has good sense, and is mobile.

6.) George Bush did not cause gangsters to shoot at rescue helicopters taking people from rooftops, did not make gang bangers rape young girls in the Superdome, did not make looters steal hundreds of weapons, in short make New Orleans into a living hell.

7.) George Bush is the least racist President in mind and soul there has ever been and this is shown in his appointments over and over. To say otherwise is scandalously untrue.

8.) George Bush is rushing every bit of help he can to New Orleans and Mississippi and Alabama as soon as he can. He is not a magician. It takes time to organize huge convoys of food and now they are starting to arrive. That they get in at all considering the lawlessness of the city is a miracle of bravery and organization.

9.) There is not the slightest evidence at all that the war in Iraq has diminished the response of the government to the emergency. To say otherwise is pure slander.

10.) If the energy the news media puts into blaming Bush for an Act of God worsened by stupendous incompetence by the New Orleans city authorities and the malevolence of the criminals of the city were directed to helping the morale of the nation, we would all be a lot better off.

11.) New Orleans is a great city with many great people. It will recover and be greater than ever. Sticking pins into an effigy of George Bush that does not resemble him in the slightest will not speed the process by one day.

12.) The entire episode is a dramatic lesson in the breathtaking callousness of government officials at the ground level. Imagine if Hillary Clinton had gotten her way and they were in charge of your health care.

God bless all of those dear people who are suffering so much, and God bless those helping them, starting with George Bush.

**** UPDATE: Sunday, Sept. 4, 2005, 2:13 p.m.:

More Mysteries of Katrina:

Why is it that the snipers who shot at emergency rescuers trying to save people in hospitals and shelters are never mentioned except in passing, and Mr. Bush, who is turning over heaven and earth to rescue the victims of the storm, is endlessly vilified?

What church does Rev. Al Sharpton belong to that believes in passing blame and singling out people by race for opprobrium and hate?

What special abilities does the media have for deciding how much blame goes to the federal government as opposed to the city government of New Orleans for the aftereffects of Katrina?

If able-bodied people refuse to obey a mandatory evacuation order for a city, have they not assumed the risk that ill effects will happen to them?

When the city government simply ignores its own sick and hospitalized and elderly people in its evacuation order, is Mr. Bush to blame for that?

Is there any problem in the world that is not Mr. Bush's fault, or have we reverted to a belief in a sort of witchcraft where we credit a mortal man with the ability to create terrifying storms and every other kind of ill wind?

Where did the idea come from that salvation comes from hatred and criticism and mockery instead of love and co-operation?

http://www.americanprowler.com/dsp_article.asp?art_id=8693
Title: Political Rants
Post by: SB_Mig on September 07, 2005, 01:32:50 PM
An Imperfect Storm
How race shaped Bush's response to Katrina.
By Jacob Weisberg
Posted Wednesday, Sept. 7, 2005, at 12:59 PM PT


With the exception of Secretary of State Condi Rice, nearly every black person I've seen quoted in the press or on television?and most every white liberal?believes that African-Americans suffered disproportionately from government neglect in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Those being pulled from waist-deep corpse water sometimes put the case much more bluntly.

But what is the evidence that race itself?as opposed to such determinants as poverty, bad luck, geography, bureaucratic incompetence, and daunting logistics?deepened the misery of African-Americans in New Orleans? In that city, as in many others, blacks as a group were more prey to harm of many sorts because of the historic legacy of slavery, segregation, and discrimination. But those who, like me, think race was a factor in other ways as well ought to be able to give some account of how racial bias made the catastrophe worse.

At the heart of the matter is the racial pattern of American constituency politics. I don't think Kanye West can support his view that George W. Bush just doesn't care about black people. But it's a demonstrable matter of fact that Bush doesn't care much about black votes. And that, in the end, may amount to the same thing.

Blacks as a group have voted Democratic since the 1930s. The GOP has not courted them in any real way since the 1960s, focusing instead on attracting white constituencies hostile to civil rights and African-Americans in general. Even many conservatives now accept blame for this ugly, recent history. In July, Ken Mehlman, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, apologized (http://www.gop.com/News/Read.aspx?ID=5631) to the NAACP for those in his party he said had been "looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization."

Yet the underlying racial dynamic of party politics hasn't changed at all under Mehlman's boss. Though he appointed the first and the second African-American secretaries of state, Bush seldom (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/14/AR2005071401728.html) appears before black audiences. Beyond his interest in education, he has little to say about issues of social and urban policy. Bush has never articulated an approach, other than faith-based platitudes and tax cuts, to bettering the lives of African-Americans. And indeed, has not bettered them. The percentage of blacks living in poverty (http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/histpov/hstpov2.html), which diminished from 33 percent to less than 23 percent during the Clinton years, has been rising again under Bush. In 2000, Bush got 8 percent of the black vote. In 2004, he got 11 percent. Because African-Americans constitute only 12 percent of the population, it's possible for Republicans to neglect them and still win elections. Indeed, as Mehlman indicated, neglecting them has often helped Republicans win.

Because they don't see blacks as a current or potential constituency, Bush and his fellow Republicans do not respond out of the instinct of self-interest when dealing with their concerns. Helping low-income blacks is a matter of charity to them, not necessity. The condescension in their attitude intensifies when it comes to New Orleans, which is 67 percent black and largely irrelevant to GOP political ambitions. Cities with large African-American population that happen to be in important swing states may command some of Karl Rove's respect as election time approaches. But Louisiana is small (9 electoral votes) and not much of a swinger these days. In 2004, Bush carried it by a 57-42 margin. If Bush and Rove didn't experience the spontaneous political reflex to help New Orleans, it may be because they don't think of New Orleans as a place that helps them.

Considered in this light, the actions and inactions now being picked apart are readily explicable. The president drastically reduced budget requests from the Army Corps of Engineers to strengthen the levees around New Orleans because there was no effective pressure on him to agree. When the levees broke on Tuesday, Aug. 30, no urge from the political gut overrode his natural instinct to spend another day vacationing at his ranch. When Bush finally got himself to the Gulf Coast three days later, he did his hugging in Biloxi, Miss., which is 71 percent white, with a mayor, governor, and two senators who are all Republicans. Bush's memorable comments (http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/03/national/nationalspecial/03assess.html) were about rebuilding Sen. Trent Lott's porch and about how he used to enjoy getting hammered (http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Bush-Struggling-with-Katrina.html) in New Orleans. Only when a firestorm of criticism and political damage broke out over the federal government's callousness did Bush open his eyes to black suffering.

Had the residents of New Orleans been white Republicans in a state that mattered politically, instead of poor blacks in city that didn't, Bush's response surely would have been different. Compare what happened when hurricanes Charley and Frances hit Florida in 2004. Though the damage from those storms was negligible in relation to Katrina's, the reaction from the White House (http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/09/20040906-1.html)was instinctive, rapid, and generous to the point of profligacy (http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/sfl-femacoverage,0,6697347.storygallery?coll=sfla-news-utility). Bush visited hurricane victims four times in six weeks and delivered relief checks personally. Michael Brown of FEMA, now widely regarded as an incompetent political hack, was so responsive that local officials praised the agency's performance (http://www.sptimes.com/2004/08/17/Weather/Unlike_Andrew__aid_s_.shtml).

The kind of constituency politics that results in a big life-preserver for whites in Florida and a tiny one for blacks in Louisiana may not be racist by design or intent. But the inevitable result is clear racial discrimination. It won't change when Republicans care more about blacks. It will change when they have more reason to care.


Jacob Weisberg is editor of Slate and co-author, with Robert E. Rubin, of In an Uncertain World.
Title: The Racial Gong
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on September 07, 2005, 02:33:30 PM
Though the usual suspects are beating the racial gong, a look at the numbers suggests the the equation is a lot more complex than the race baiters would have it. I'd argue underwriting failure with tax dollars had a lot more to do with the pathologies emerging in New Orleans than any putative racist policy. The following underlines those points.



September 07, 2005, 8:29 a.m.
A Fuller Picture
Beginning to understand what we are seeing in New Orleans.
Michael Novak


There has been something askew in the reporting from New Orleans. It has bothered me for a week now. Finally, when I took a look at the 2000 census data on New Orleans, a lot became clearer.

According to the Census, the population of New Orleans in 2000 was 485,000 of whom 326,000 were black, 136,000 white, and the remaining ten thousand or so each, Asian or Hispanic.

If 75-80 percent of the population evacuated the city safely before the storm hit, as everybody is reporting, that means that far more than half the black population escaped safely before the storm slammed into the city. Even if all those who did not evacuate were black ? and that is manifestly not true ? 25 percent of the total population is only 121,000. Twenty percent is 96,000. By far the majority of blacks in New Orleans, who numbered as the storm began some 326,000, evacuated in advance.

Even they lost much, maybe everything, but at least they were not caught in the roiling water.

Secondly, I have heard ever since reading about Huey Long of the 1930s that Louisiana is one of the most corrupt and dependency-prone states in the Union. Of all the cities in the south, New Orleans seems the one most welfare-oriented, least entrepreneurial, most state-dependent, and least economically dynamic. More than any other southern city, it is "Old South" rather than "New South." That, of course, is part of its charm. It refuses the modern bustle, says "Slow down, Be easy." It lulls. Its charm seduces. And it is also the prototypical, old-time welfare-state city.

The Census report shows what that means in vivid detail. In 2000, there were only 25,000 two-parent families in New Orleans with children under 18. By contrast, there were more than 26,000 female householders with children under 18, and no husband present. In other words, slightly more mothers all alone with children than married-couple mothers.

In addition, there were more than 18,000 householders who were more than 65 years old and living alone. Of these, most would normally be female.

If you add together the 26,000 female householders with children under 18, no husband present, and the 18,000 householders more than 65 years old and living alone, that is an estimated 40,000 female-headed households. That explains the pictures we are seeing on television, which are overwhelming female, most often with young children. The chances of persons in this demographic being employed full-time, year round, and with a good income, are not high. The chances of them living in poverty, and without an automobile, are exceedingly high.

In the future, city planners should carefully count in advance the numbers of persons who fall in this demographic when they formulate evacuation plans. Female householders all by themselves with children or over 65 are statistically likely to be severely disadvantaged in thinking about options for the future, disadvantaged in not having the means to determine their own destiny, and disadvantaged with respect to the habits of mind that accustom them to taking charge of their own future. Special provision will need to be made for helping them. They are likely to be accustomed to being taken care of by the state.

The younger mothers among them have been abandoned by those they should have been able to count on, the males in their lives. The over-65s (in urban areas) are likely to be totally dependent on Social Security and other government benefits, without private pensions or homeownership of their own. In emergencies, such persons need someone else to take care of them. It is wrong to throw them, at this point, solely on their own resources. Some will be able to manage that, but by no means all.

Is this not what our eyes are showing us among those who failed to evacuate in time? To be sure, thousands of those taking refuge are men, and some are married couples, and some are white, Hispanic, or Asian. More research could show that my own hypotheses ? and even visual observations ? are wrong. But the Census data helps explain to me what my eyes are seeing.

Another question that bothers me: I would also really like to know what happened to the better-off blacks and whites of New Orleans, who escaped before the storm hit. How many have lost their homes? How many have loved ones still unaccounted for?

What are things now like in those lovely suburbs around New Orleans?

It is not only those who did not evacuate in time that seem to have suffered horribly. I would love to see more reporting about the middle class ? and sympathy for them, too. They are Katrina's victims, too.

Is it possible that many of them will not receive the insurance payments they are counting on, in order to get their lives started up again at a level not too far below where they were before the storm hit? Have they taken a permanent hit? How will many cope with that?

The poor may suffer worst of all, but they are not the only ones to taste bitter ashes in times of calamity, and to find their souls tested. Those of the middle class who worked hard (maybe even worked their way out of poverty), played by the rules, and set aside some resources for times of trouble, also deserve our help. Especially just at that exact moment when everything they made so many sacrifices to attain has been taken from them.

It was just then that Job was tried. So might we all be.

? Michael Novak is the winner of the 1994 Templeton Prize for progress in religion and the George Frederick Jewett Scholar in Religion, Philosophy, and Public Policy at the American Enterprise Institute. Novak's own website is www.michaelnovak.net.

   
http://www.nationalreview.com/novak/novak200509070829.as
Title: Political Rants
Post by: SB_Mig on September 07, 2005, 03:46:28 PM
Excellent article.

I heard an economist on the radio the other day saying that while in terms of human cost Katrina was a catastrope, most people don't realize what an economic disaster the storm caused. He pointed out that in looking at New Orleans' general population:

Middle class victims will become lower middle/lower class

Lower class will become working poor (if they can find jobs)

Working poor will likely become homeless/destitute

Not to mention the burden put on the states taking in refugees.

We're all in for a long haul...
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 09, 2005, 09:23:51 AM
http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110007229

Oil for Food as Usual
The U.N.'s worst critics couldn't invent what the Volcker report shows.

Friday, September 9, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT

"The scandal, quote, unquote, is, in my view, nonsense." Thus did Denis Halliday, a former United Nations Assistant Secretary General, opine in November 2004 on the U.N.'s Oil for Food program. With the release Wednesday of Paul Volcker's fourth report on Oil for Food, we have the clearest account yet of what this quote-unquote scandal is really about.

Let's begin with what this scandal is not about, at least not fundamentally. It is not about the dubious business practices of the Swiss Inspections company Cotecna, which was improperly awarded a multimillion-dollar Oil for Food contract while employing Secretary-General Kofi Annan's son Kojo, although this taught us something about the nepotism that typifies U.N. dealings. Nor is it about Kofi Annan's personal probity, which had been called into question by evidence that he was aware of, and tried to influence, the Cotecna bid. Mr. Volcker has found no conclusive proof on this score.

In other words, Oil for Food is not about some isolated incidents of perceived or actual wrongdoing during the course of a seven-year effort to maintain sanctions on Iraq, monitor its oil flows and feed its people. Oil for Food is a story about what the U.N. is. And our conclusion from reading the 847-page report is that the U.N. is Oil for Food.

To better understand the scandal, it helps to distinguish its political and managerial components. Responsibility for administering the program fell primarily to the U.N. Secretariat, which established the Office of Iraq Program (OIP) under the direction of Benon Sevan.

But the program itself was designed by members of the U.N. Security Council following protracted negotiations with the government of Saddam Hussein. It was the Security Council, for example, that approved Saddam's right to choose the companies, contractors and middlemen with whom Iraq would do business, and through which the entire program was corrupted. The Security Council also ran its own supervisory "661 Committee," named after the 1990 Security Council resolution that imposed sanctions on Iraq following its invasion of Kuwait.

The result of this bifurcated structure was that real responsibility for overseeing Oil for Food fell between two stools--and into the lap of Mr. Sevan and his staff. Mr. Volcker's previous reports tell us that Mr. Sevan was in the pay of the Iraqi government.

The current report adds to our knowledge of what the Iraqis got for their money. For example, Mr. Sevan and his staff failed to inform the Secretariat and the 661 Committee of the extent of Iraq's various kickback schemes--involving as many as 2,500 companies--and dismissed media reports about them as "groundless allegations, provocative suggestions and factual mistakes." Mr. Sevan also fought tooth-and-nail the Bush Administration's successful attempt to impose retroactive pricing standards on the sale of Iraqi oil, which helped curb some of Saddam's abuses.

However, part of the reason Mr. Sevan was able to get away with his malfeasance was that neither the Secretariat nor the 661 Committee showed any appetite to exercise their fiduciary obligations. Mr. Annan testified to the Committee that Mr. Sevan worked directly for the 661 Committee. Yet as the report acidly notes, "the difficulty with the Secretary-General's view is that he appointed Mr. Sevan and he created OIP in the first place." Maybe former Enron CEO Kenneth Lay should call Mr. Annan to testify as an expert witness at his trial.

This is an excerpt from the latest report of Paul Volcker's Independent Inquiry Committee on the United Nations' Oil for Food program. Benon Sevan, the former director of the Office of Iraq Program (OIP) that oversaw Oil for Food, has been accused by the Committee of taking nearly $150,000 in bribes from Iraq. "The 38th Floor" refers to Secretary General Kofi Annan's offices at U.N. headquarters. The "661 Committee" was a U.N. Security Council body, outside of Mr. Annan's Secretariat, which helped oversee the Oil for Food program.

"When interviewed by the Committee, the Secretary General, the Deputy Secretary-General [Louise Frechette] and [Chief of Staff Iqbal] Riza each struggled to rationalize the role of the 38th Floor in overseeing OIP. Instead, they offered conflicting views of their own responsibilities as well the functions of Mr. Sevan vis-a-vis the program. These inconsistencies demonstrate a basic confusion within the highest offices of the Secretariat. . . .

"When interviewed by the Committee, the Secretary General insisted that the program was "a very transparent operation"-"one of the most transparent programs [he has] seen" in terms of the process it required for reports to be made by the Secretariat to the Security Council. However, significant information was routinely withheld from the 661 Committee. Despite mounting evidence of a widespread kickback scheme, the Secretary General's quarterly reports never mentioned the emerging problem. . . .

"To be sure, the Secretary General and Deputy Secretary General were apparently not aware of the full scope of evidence that OIP had accumulated and, clearly, Mr. Sevan bears responsibility for withholding information. . . . But the Secretary-General and Deputy Secretary-General (and Mr. Riza) were aware of the kickback scheme at least as early as February 2001. The Secretary General discussed the kickback allegations and other sanctions violations with Mr. Sevan on numerous occasions. . . .

"In the final analysis, Mr. Sevan ran a $100 billion program with very little oversight from the supervisory authority that created his position and OIP. Through a combination of an unclear reporting structure, a lack of supervision by the 38th Floor, and a general unwillingness to recognize and address significant issues on the part of the Secretary General and Deputy Secretary General, Mr. Sevan had substantial autonomy to shape the program's direction. He failed to resist and challenge the Iraqi regime's rampant sanctions violations through which the regime diverted billions of dollars away from the humanitarian effort."
Mr. Annan is also on record telling the Committee he viewed Oil for Food as "a very transparent operation." Yet as the report shows, Mr. Annan was himself complicit in covering up Iraqi violations of the sanctions regime. Specifically, Mr. Annan was aware of the kickback issue from at least February 2001, yet "the Secretary General's quarterly reports never mentioned the emerging problem." (See the report excerpt nearby.)

Why Mr. Annan chose to see no evil on Iraqi sanctions violations, much less use his bully pulpit to denounce it (as he later denounced the Iraq war as "illegal"), is an interesting question. Our sense is that the U.N. Secretariat as a whole took the view that the sanctions regime was immoral and that Saddam was within his rights to break free of it.

Whatever the case, the Secretariat had a more than willing partner in the 661 Committee, and for reasons that are more easily comprehended. Iraq regularly steered contracts to Security Council members it believed were friendly to its political interests. Russian companies, for instance, did $19 billion in oil deals with Iraq, and French companies sold Saddam $3 billion in humanitarian assistance (much of which, the report notes, was diverted for Iraqi military purposes).

It's no coincidence, comrade, that France and Russia, as well as China (which did its own thriving business with Saddam) consistently downplayed the kickback allegations and pushed to have the sanctions regime eased. Only the U.S. and Britain made any effort to monitor Oil for Food for fraud, although even these efforts were lackluster until the Bush Administration came to office. We should also note the U.S. was itself guilty of looking the other way when it came to Iraq's oil smuggling through allies Jordan and Turkey.

So it was that the largest fraud ever recorded in history came about. Press reports often cite the overall size of Oil for Food at $60 billion, but Mr. Volcker's report makes clear that the real figure was in excess of $100 billion. From this, Saddam was able to derive $10.2 billion from illicit transactions. But the important point is that he was able to steer 10 times that sum toward his preferred clients in the service of his political aims.

None of this happened by accident. Mr. Volcker's report is replete with examples of incompetent U.N. oversight and tales of political wrangling among the permanent members of the Security Council. But the abiding fact is that it was the Western powers, not Saddam, who wanted Oil for Food at virtually any cost, because it offered the appearance of a meaningful policy in the absence of a real one, namely regime change. And it was the political convenience of this chimera that led the U.S. and the U.K. to tolerate, and the rest of the Security Council to feast on, the opportunities for corruption that were inscribed in the very nature of the program.

As for the U.N., it proved its worth to Saddam as the one hall of mirrors in which such shenanigans could take place. Yet even now we are told that "at least" Oil for Food fed the Iraqi people when they were on the edge of starvation, and this is accounted a U.N. success. That is false. Oil for Food offered a lifeline of cash and influence to a regime that was starving its people. The program did not corrupt the U.N. so much as exploit its essential nature. Now Mr. Annan wants to use this report as an endorsement of his "reform" proposals. Only at the U.N. could he dare to think he could get away with this.
Title: Political Rants
Post by: SB_Mig on September 09, 2005, 11:15:05 AM
:roll:

1. Bush: "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees"

On the September 1 broadcast of ABC's Good Morning America, President Bush told host Diane Sawyer, "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees" that protected New Orleans from flooding. Sawyer did not challenge Bush's claim, despite numerous, repeated warnings by government officials, experts, and the media that a major hurricane could cause levee breaches resulting in catastrophic flooding. A September 2 New York Times front page article repeated Bush's false claim without challenge -- even though a Times editorial (http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/02/opinion/02fri1.html) the same day declared, "Disaster planners were well aware that New Orleans could be flooded by the combined effects of a hurricane and broken levees."

A September 5 CNN.com article (http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/09/03/katrina.chertoff/) reported that Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff falsely told reporters that "planners" did not predict a breach of the levees that would flood the city. As CNN.com reported, Chertoff said, "That 'perfect storm' of a combination of catastrophes exceeded the foresight of the planners, and maybe anybody's foresight." But unlike the Times, CNN.com noted that "officials have warned for years that a Category 4 [hurricane] could cause the levees to fail." The CNN.com article added that in an August 31 interview (http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0508/31/lkl.01.html) on CNN's Larry King Live, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) director Michael Brown said, "That Category 4 hurricane caused the same kind of damage that we anticipated. So we planned for it two years ago. Last year, we exercised it. And unfortunately this year, we're implementing it." But in the same Larry King Live interview, Brown responded to complaints that rescue efforts were not moving quickly enough by insisting, "And I must say this storm is much, much bigger than anyone expected."

Additionally, as journalist Joshua Micah Marshall noted (http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2005_09_04.php#006437) in his Talking Points Memo weblog, National Hurricane Center director Max Mayfield "talked about the force of Katrina during a video conference call?http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/08/images/20050828-1_p082805pm-0101-515h.html) to President Bush at his ranch in Crawford, Texas" on August 28 [St. Petersburg Times, 8/30/05 (http://www.sptimes.com/2005/08/30/State/For_forecasting_chief.shtml)]. The Washington Post quoted Mayfield (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/05/AR2005090501590_pf.html) on September 6: "They knew that this one was different. ... I don't think Mike Brown or anyone else in FEMA could have any reason to have any problem with our calls. ... They were told ... We said the levees could be topped."

2. Chertoff strained credulity in defense of Bush, claimed levee breaks and massive flooding came as a surprise -- more than 12 hours after local media reported them

On September 4, Chertoff appeared (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9179790/) on NBC's Meet the Press and attempted to explain Bush's discredited claim (http://mediamatters.org/items/itembody/200509020001) that "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees." After host Tim Russert asked Chertoff how the president could "be so wrong, be so misinformed," Chertoff suggested that Bush had been referring to newspaper reports the morning after the storm that New Orleans had "dodged a bullet" because the eye of the storm had passed to the east of the city. But more than 12 hours before the appearance of those headlines in print, a post on the weblog of the New Orleans Times-Picayune -- dated August 29, 2 p.m. CT -- reported, "City Hall confirmed a breach of the levee along the 17th Street Canal at Bellaire Drive, allowing water to spill into Lakeview." This initial report on the Times-Picayune weblog was followed (http://www.nola.com/newslogs/breakingtp/index.ssf?/mtlogs/nola_Times-Picayune/archives/2005_08.html#074923) throughout the afternoon and evening of August 29 by reports of other levee breaks and massive flooding.

While Chertoff said he recognized that the city's levee system failed sometime Monday night or Tuesday morning -- in fact, the first breaks occurred earlier, as noted above and as Think Progress noted in its detailed Hurricane Katrina timeline -- he insisted that "it was midday Tuesday that I became aware of the fact that there was no possibility of plugging the gap and that essentially the lake [Pontchartrain] was going to start to drain into the city." According to Chertoff, this "second catastrophe really caught everybody by surprise" and was a major reason for the delay in the government's emergency response.

Questioning Chertoff further, Russert pointed out that the Times-Picayune published a five-part series (http://www.nola.com/hurricane/?/washingaway/) in June 2002, in which it warned (http://www.nola.com/hurricane/index.ssf?/washingaway/thebigone_1.html) that if a large hurricane hit New Orleans, the city's levees would likely be topped or broken -- resulting in catastrophic flooding and thousands of deaths. Russert added that "last summer FEMA, who reports to you, and the LSU Hurricane Center, and local and state officials did a simulated Hurricane Pam in which the levees broke. ... Thousands drowned."

Chertoff then clarified, "What I said was not that we didn't anticipate that there's a possibility the levees will break. What I said was, in this storm, what happened is, the storm passed and passed without the levees breaking on Monday. Tuesday morning, I opened newspapers and saw headlines that said 'New Orleans Dodged the Bullet,' which surprised people. What surprised them was that the levee broke overnight and the next day and, in fact, collapsed. That was a surprise."

Even accepting as true Chertoff's incredible suggestion that he -- the secretary of Homeland Security -- and the president of the United States relied on the print media for their information on the situation in New Orleans, as Think Progress points out (http://thinkprogress.org/2005/09/07/rumsfeld-headlines/), had administration officials "bothered to read the full text of the three articles they found with favorable headlines, they would have realized that federal government help was needed immediately." Moreover, while Chertoff did not indicate which headlines (http://thinkprogress.org/2005/09/07/rumsfeld-headlines/) he was referring to, many newspapers -- in addition to the Times-Picayune -- did report on broken levees and significant flooding. For example, on August 30, the Los Angeles Times reported (http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-hurricane30aug30,0,7918696.story) that a levee break had occurred by late morning August 29, with water from the break "spill[ing] through the area, flooding the town's two main shelters and swamping the local National Guard armory, leaving even public safety officials homeless."

Or Chertoff could have turned on the television. On the August 30 broadcast of NBC's Today, NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams reported at 7:05 a.m. ET, "There has been a huge development overnight ... the historic French Quarter, dry last night and it is now filling with water. This is water from nearby Lake Pontchartrain; the levees failed overnight."

Indeed, Chertoff's and Bush's professed ignorance notwithstanding, the federal government was well aware of the continuing threat of the levees breaking. Just hours after the storm passed on Monday, August 29, FEMA director Brown confirmed that the potential for catastrophic flooding remained. In an interview with Brown, NBC Today co-host Matt Lauer noted, "In New Orleans, in particular, they're worried about the levees giving way or the canals not holding, and they're worried about toxic runoff." Brown responded that even though the storm had weakened, there was still a 15- to 20-foot storm surge causing "the water out of Lake Pontchartrain and the Gulf and the Mississippi continue to converge upon Louisiana." Brown added, "So we're still ready for a major disaster."

3. Brown: "We've provided food to the people at the Convention Center so that they've gotten at least one, if not two meals, every single day"

On the September 2 broadcast of NBC's Today, FEMA director Brown told host Katie Couric, "We've provided food to the people at the [New Orleans' Morial] Convention Center so that they've gotten at least one, if not two meals, every single day." Couric did not challenge this statement.

But on September 1, NBC News photojournalist Tony Zumbado reported (http://msnbc.msn.com/id/9160710/) on MSNBC Live:

ZUMBADO: I can't put it into words the amount of destruction that is in this city and how these people are coping. They are just left behind. There is nothing offered to them. No water, no ice, no C-rations, nothing, for the last four days. They were told to go to the convention center. They did, they've been behaving. It's unbelievable how organized they are, how supportive they are of each other. They have not started any melees, any riots. They just want food and support. And what I saw there I've never seen in this country. We need to really look at this situation at the convention center. It's getting very, very crazy in there and very dangerous. Somebody needs to come down with a lot of food and a lot of water.

4. Chertoff: "Apparently, some time on Wednesday, people started to go to the convention center spontaneously"

On the September 1 edition of CNN's Paula Zahn Now, Brown claimed, "Every person in that convention center, we just learned about that today [Thursday, September 1]." During a September 4 interview with Chertoff on CNN Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer, host Blitzer replayed Brown's comments. In response, Chertoff said:

CHERTOFF: Well, I mean, this is clearly something that was disturbing. It was disturbing to me when I learned about it, which came as a surprise. You know, the very day that this emerged in the press, I was on a video conference with all the officials, including state and local officials. And nobody -- none of the state and local officials or anybody else -- was talking about a convention center. The original plan, as I understand it, was to have the Superdome be the place of refuge, of last resort. Apparently, some time on Wednesday, people started to go to the convention center spontaneously.

Chertoff's claim that hurricane survivors sought refuge in the convention center under their own initiative echoed his September 4 Meet the Press interview, in which he suggested, "We became aware of the fact at some point that people began to go to the convention center on their own, spontaneously, in order to shelter there." Chertoff's statements were false, but neither Blitzer nor Russert challenged them.

Though scenes of thousands of hurricane victims awaiting water, food, and buses at the convention center were not broadcast on television until Thursday, September 1, Chertoff and Brown would have had access to media reports about the convention center before then. As early as August 29, Times-Picayune staff writer Bruce Nolan wrote an article for the Newhouse News Service in which he reported, "City officials said they might open the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center as a temporary refuge to shelter an estimated 50,000 people made homeless by the storm." Nolan's article (http://www.nola.com/weblogs/print.ssf?/mtlogs/nola_Times-Picayune/archives/print075002.html) appeared in the Times-Picayune on August 30.

Beginning August 31, other reports of survivors at the convention center emerged:

Knight Ridder, August 31: "Derwin DeGruy had been kicked out of two hotels, the first on Sunday right before the storm hit, and the second one on Tuesday morning after it hit. He and about 50 other people found makeshift shelter on a ramp leading to the mall and parking garage at the New Orleans Convention Center. They rigged places for people to go to the bathroom, pooled their water for the babies, placed some blankets on the concrete and decided to wait and see what happened."

Associated Press, August 31: "The 37-year-old banker -- who admitted to looting some food from a nearby supermarket -- said the hotel guests were told they were being taken to a
convention center, but from there, they didn't know."

Associated Press, August 31: "After several hours, a small fleet of rented moving trucks showed up to take the people to the downtown convention center so they could be taken out of the city. Police herded people up metal ramps like cattle into the unrefrigerated boxes."
By September 1, when Brown claimed FEMA first learned about the situation at the convention center, TV networks were broadcasting footage of thousands of survivors waiting for water, food, and evacuation buses. Despite Chertoff's later insistence that New Orleans residents "spontaneously" converged on the convention center, the September 1 broadcast of ABC's Nightline included footage of a law enforcement official instructing survivors to go there:

SURVIVOR: Ain't nobody helping us.

LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICIAL: I understand.

SURVIVOR: No, ain't nobody doing anything for us.

LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICIAL: Y'all got to go to the convention center.

5. Chertoff pointed fingers: "New Orleans officials and the state officials ... called for the Superdome to be the refuge of last resort"

In his September 4 interview on NBC's Meet the Press, Chertoff attempted to place blame for the conditions at the Superdome solely with state and local officials. Chertoff asserted, "My understanding is, and again this is something that's going to go back -- we're going to go back over after the fact -- is the plan that the New Orleans officials and the state officials put together called for the Superdome to be the refuge of last resort."

But this claim is misleading at best. As The Washington Post reported on September 3 (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/03/AR2005090301653_pf.html) , a FEMA official acknowledged participating in meetings in which the plan to use the Superdome as a shelter for thousands of evacuees was discussed:

Brown, the agency's director, told reporters Saturday in Louisiana that he did not have a sense of what was coming last weekend.

"I was here on Saturday and Sunday, it was my belief, I'm trying to think of a better word than typical -- that minimizes, any hurricane is bad -- but we had the standard hurricane coming in here, that we could move in immediately on Monday and start doing our kind of response-recovery effort," he said. "Then the levees broke, and the levees went, you've seen it by the television coverage. That hampered our ability, made it even more complex."

But other officials said they warned well before Monday about what could happen. For years, said another senior FEMA official, he had sat at meetings where plans were discussed to send evacuees to the Superdome. "We used to stare at each other and say, 'This is the plan? Are you really using the Superdome?' People used to say, what if there is water around it? They didn't have an alternative," he recalled.

Moreover, the plan to use the Superdome as a shelter for evacuees was widely known. The 2002 Times-Picayune series on the potential for a catastrophic hurricane reported (http://www.nola.com/hurricane/index.ssf?/washingaway/thebigone_1.html) that of the estimated 200,000 New Orleans residents who would likely remain in the city, "ome will be housed at the Superdome, the designated shelter in New Orleans for people too sick or infirm to leave the city."

6. Chertoff falsely minimized federal government's role in Katrina response as subordinate to states

The Bush administration has responded to criticism of its role in the Katrina disaster by attempting to deflect blame onto state and local officials in Louisiana [The New York Times, 9/5/05 (http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/05/national/nationalspecial/05bush.html?ex=1283572800&en=6fea4620b7c96ac5&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss) ]. One way they are doing that is to claim that the federal government's role in a natural disaster of this magnitude is to provide support to state and local governments and work at their behest. Conservative media figures immediately fell into line, echoing the administration's claim that the federal government's role was subordinate. In fact, the Department of Homeland Security's December 2004 National Response Plan clearly indicates that in these situations, the federal government will pre-empt state and local efforts and provide immediate assistance to the affected area.

On September 1, two days after the levees were breached, Chertoff, at a press conference announcing the start of "National Preparedness Month 2005," characterized the federal role in response to Katrina as that of providing support to state and local officials: "The Department of Homeland Security will continue to work with federal, state and local partners to support efforts on the ground in Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi and Florida. We are working tirelessly to make sure that federal resources are being applied where they are needed all across the Gulf" [Federal News Service, 9/1/05]. But on September 2, Chertoff told reporters that the situation had changed and that federal agencies would now take over the primary role: "The fact of the matter is, this set of catastrophes has broken any mold for how you deal with this kind of weather devastation, and so we're going to break the mold in terms of how we respond. The federal government is not going to play merely its customary role in giving all necessary support to first responders. The federal government is going to step up and take a primary role, working with state and locals to deal with the outcome of this tragedy." [National Public Radio, 9/3/05]

But Chertoff's September 1 statement ignored the administration's own homeland security response plan, which directed the federal government to act on its own authority to quickly provide assistance and conduct emergency operations following a major catastrophe, pre-empting state and local authorities if necessary. According to DHS' December 2004 National Response Plan (NRP) (http://www.dhs.gov/interweb/assetlibrary/NRPbaseplan.pdf#page=61), "catastrophic events," such as what occurred in New Orleans, call for heightened and "proactive" federal involvement to manage the disaster. The response plan listed "guiding principles" to govern the response to these major events. The "Guiding Principles for Proactive Federal Response" (http://www.dhs.gov/interweb/assetlibrary/NRPbaseplan.pdf#page=61) make clear that, in these "catastrophic" cases, the federal government will operate independently to provide assistance, rather than simply supporting or cajoling state authorities:

The primary mission is to save lives; protect critical infrastructure, property, and the environment; contain the event; and preserve national security.
Standard procedures regarding requests for assistance may be expedited or, under extreme circumstances, suspended in the immediate aftermath of an event of catastrophic magnitude.

Identified Federal response resources will deploy and begin necessary operations as required to commence life-safety activities.

Notification and full coordination with States will occur, but the coordination process must not delay or impede the rapid deployment and use of critical resources. States are urged to notify and coordinate with local governments regarding a proactive Federal response.

State and local governments are encouraged to conduct collaborative planning with the Federal Government as a part of "steady-state" preparedness for catastrophic incidents."
The NRP also says that, when responding to a catastrophic incident, the federal government should start emergency operations even in the absence of clear assessment of the situation. "A detailed and credible common operating picture may not be achievable for 24 to 48 hours (or longer) after the incident," the NRP's "Catastrophic Annex" (http://www.dhs.gov/interweb/assetlibrary/NRP_FullText.pdf#page=359) states. "As a result, response activities must begin without the benefit of a detailed or complete situation and critical needs assessment."

A September 5 Los Angeles Times article quoted former FEMA chief of staff Jane Bullock saying that "[t]he moment the president declared a federal disaster [on Aug 29], it became a federal responsibility. ... The federal government took ownership over the response." Moreover, DHS' own website declares that DHS "will assume primary responsibility on March 1st [2005] for ensuring that emergency response professionals are prepared for any situation. This will entail providing a coordinated, comprehensive federal response to any large-scale crisis and mounting a swift and effective recovery effort."

7. Wash. Post, Newsweek, Gingrich falsely claimed that Blanco did not declare a state of emergency

In recent days, two news articles falsely reported that Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco had failed to declare a state of emergency, which had supposedly hampered the federal response. An article in the September 13 edition of Newsweek claimed that "Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco seemed uncertain and sluggish, hesitant to declare martial law or a state of emergency, which would have opened the door to more Pentagon help." Likewise, a September 4 Washington Post article incorrectly claimed that "As of Saturday [Sept. 3], Blanco still had not declared a state of emergency," citing an anonymous senior Bush administration official. (The Washington Post's article was later corrected, although Newsweek has yet to correct its article.) Fox News political analyst Newt Gingrich repeated the point on the September 5 O'Reilly Factor, saying, "As you [O'Reilly] point out, the governor [Blanco] failed to call the emergency. And initially, it was the governor who had to call an emergency." In fact, as the Post later noted, Blanco declared (http://gov.louisiana.gov/2005%20%20proclamations/48pro2005-Emergency-HurricaneKatrina.pdf) a state of emergency on August 26.

8. Gingrich falsely claimed that Nagin could "have kept water pumped out" of city had he ensured that pumps worked

On the September 5 O'Reilly Factor, Gingrich also claimed that if New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin had been able to keep the New Orleans pumps working, the flood waters could have been pumped out of the city. "[F]irst of all, the mayor of New Orleans had a real obligation to make sure the four pumps could work. Three of them didn't. It would have kept water pumped out." In fact, New Orleans has 22 "notoriously fickle" pumping stations, according to an August 31 New York Times article. The Times also reported that, according to Dr. Shea Penland, a coastal geologist, "When the pumping systems are in good shape, it can rain an inch an hour for about four to six hours and the pumps can keep pace. More than that, the city floods." The Times also noted that "[e]fforts to add backup power generators to keep [the pumps] all running during blackouts have been delayed by a lack of federal money." A June 2002 Times-Picayune article, part of a series exploring the probable consequences of a major hurricane hitting New Orleans, indicated that New Orleans' pumps would have been overwhelmed by the rapidly rising floodwaters:

Soon waves will start breaking over the levee.

"All of a sudden you'll start seeing flowing water. It'll look like a weir, water just pouring over the top," [Louisiana State University engineer Joseph] Suhayda said. The water will flood the lakefront, filling up low-lying areas first, and continue its march south toward the river. There would be no stopping or slowing it; pumping systems would be overwhelmed and submerged in a matter of hours.

"Another scenario is that some part of the levee would fail," Suhayda said. "It's not something that's expected. But erosion occurs, and as levees broke, the break will get wider and wider. The water will flow through the city and stop only when it reaches the next higher thing. The most continuous barrier is the south levee, along the river. That's 25 feet high, so you'll see the water pile up on the river levee."
Title: Triaging Blame
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on September 09, 2005, 02:36:07 PM
As fun as it is to whup on Bush--accusing him of all manner of nefarious schemes when not naming him an utter dunce--my take is that there is plenty of blame to go around. Think Krauthhammer does an effective job of blame triage here, though I'd move his final point about the American people up a notch or two.

Assigning blame
Charles Krauthammer

September 9, 2005


WASHINGTON -- In less enlightened times, there was no catastrophe independent of human agency. When the plague or some other natural disaster struck, witches were burned, Jews were massacred and all felt better (except the witches and Jews).

     A few centuries later, our progressive thinkers have progressed not an inch. No fall of a sparrow on this planet is not attributed to sin and human perfidy. The three current favorites are: (1) global warming, (2) the war in Iraq and (3) tax cuts. Katrina hits and the unholy trinity is immediately invoked to damn sinner-in-chief George W. Bush.

     This kind of stupidity merits no attention whatsoever, but I'll give it a paragraph. There is no relationship between global warming and the frequency and intensity of Atlantic hurricanes. Period. The problem with the evacuation of New Orleans is not that National Guardsmen in Iraq could not get to New Orleans, but that National Guardsmen in Louisiana did not get to New Orleans. As for the Bush tax cuts, administration budget requests for New Orleans flood control during the five Bush years exceed that of the five preceding Clinton years. The notion that the allegedly missing revenues would have been spent wisely by Congress, targeted precisely to the levees of New Orleans, and reconstruction would have been completed in time, is a threefold fallacy. The argument ends when you realize that, as The Washington Post notes, ``the levees that failed were already completed projects."

     Let's be clear. The author of this calamity was, first and foremost, Nature (or if you prefer, Nature's God). The suffering was augmented, aided and abetted in descending order of culpability by the following:

     1. The mayor of New Orleans. He knows the city. He knows the danger. He knows that during Hurricane Georges in 1998, the use of the Superdome was a disaster and fully two-thirds of the residents never got out of the city. Nothing was done. He declared a mandatory evacuation only 24 hours before Hurricane Katrina hit. He did not even declare a voluntary evacuation until the day before that, at 5 p.m. At that time, he explained that he needed to study his legal authority to call a mandatory evacuation and was hesitating to do so lest the city be sued by hotels and other businesses.

     2. The Louisiana governor. It's her job to call up the National Guard and get it to where it has to go. Where the Guard was in the first few days is a mystery. Indeed, she issued an authorization for the National Guard to commandeer school buses to evacuate people on Wednesday afternoon -- more than two days after the hurricane hit and after much of the fleet had already drowned in its parking lots.

     3. The head of FEMA. Late, slow and in way over his head. On Thursday he says on national television that he didn't even know there were people in the Convention Center, when anybody watching television could see them there destitute and desperate. Maybe in his vast bureaucracy he can assign three 20-year-olds to watch cable news and give him updates every hour on what in hell is going on.

     4. The president. Late, slow and simply out of tune with the urgency and magnitude of the disaster. The second he heard that the levees had been breached in New Orleans, he should have canceled his schedule and addressed the country on national television to mobilize it both emotionally and physically to assist in the disaster. His flyover on the way to Washington was the worst possible symbolism. And his Friday visit was so tone-deaf and politically disastrous that he had to fly back three days later.

     5. Congress. Now as always playing holier-than-thou. Perhaps it might ask itself who created the Department of Homeland Security in the first place. The congressional response to all crises is the same -- rearrange the bureaucratic boxes, but be sure to add one extra layer. The last four years of DHS have been spent principally on bureaucratic reorganization (and real estate) instead of, say, a workable plan for as predictable a disaster as a Gulf Coast hurricane.

     6. The American people. They have made it impossible for any politician to make any responsible energy policy over the last 30 years -- but that is a column for another day. Now is not the time for constructive suggestions. Now is the time for blame, recriminations and sheer astonishment. Mayor Nagin has announced that, as bodies are still being found and as a public health catastrophe descends upon the city, he is sending 60 percent of his cops on city funds for a little R&R, mostly to Vegas hotels. Asked if it was appropriate to party in these circumstances, he responded: ``New Orleans is a party town. Get over it.'
Title: Let's Plant some Axioms and Watch them Grow
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on September 09, 2005, 07:28:53 PM
Not sure anything Buckley says can be construed as a rant, but this is as close as he gets to one.


September 09, 2005, 1:33 p.m.
Post-Katrina Doublethought
William Buckley

The war against stable thought blazes on, the objective being to put the blame on the Bush administration for what happened in New Orleans.

Thomas Friedman of the New York Times personalizes even further. The administration has a "tax policy . . . dominated by the toweringly selfish Grover Norquist ? who has been quoted as saying: 'I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.?" You would think that Mr. Friedman would leave a little place in life for hyperbole ? what would he do with the political poets who speak of the "end" of hunger and disease? But he hangs onto the metaphor: "Mr. Norquist is the only person about whom I would say this: I hope he owns property around the New Orleans levee that was never properly finished because of a lack of tax dollars. I hope his basement got flooded." Planted axiom: the unrepaired levee in New Orleans is the result of a shortage of federal dollars.

Across that editorial page we have the argument placed a little differently. Not that Maureen Dowd will neglect an opportunity to anthropomorphize Katrina. No, she explains, the tragedy was the result of the Bush political family, Dick Cheney being the next in line. What was he doing when Katrina struck? He was "reportedly . . . shopping for a $2.9 million waterfront estate in St Michael's" ? which is a ?retreat in the Chesapeake Bay where Rummy" ? the Secretary of Defense ? "has a weekend home."

"As the water recedes," Dowd explains, "more and more decaying bodies will testify to the callous and stumblebum administration response to Katrina's rout of 90,000 square miles of the South." Another planted axiom. It is that the Bush Administration, to return to the language of Mr. Friedman, "has engaged in a tax giveaway since 9/11 that has had one underlying assumption: There will never be another rainy day."

The gravamen against Bush becomes plain: The Bush administration insisted "on cutting more taxes, even when that has contributed to incomplete levees and too small an army to deal with Katrina, Osama, and Saddam at the same time.?

The proposition that the Federal Government under George W. Bush has been shortchanging welfare is in astonishing conflict with the figures. Under Bush, federal spending increases have been at the fastest rate in 30 years. Non-defense discretionary spending under Bush has grown by 35.7 percent, the highest rate of federal government growth since the presidencies of Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson.

Again, the planted axiom is that the New Orleans levee has been for years a national pustule that George Bush refused to lance because he didn't want to drain the money needed by Dick Cheney to buy his waterfront estate. If New Orleans was conspicuous for its vulnerability, why hadn't the city?s articulate mayor, or his fellow Democrat the articulate governor, said something about it? Why did it not figure in the demands of the Democratic party at its convention in Boston? How explain the silence on the subject of candidate John Kerry?

It is tempting to weigh directly the cost of repairing the levee, and the size of the tax cuts. But what is going to pay for all the ounces of prevention we could contingently use on all the frontiers of national vulnerability? To single out the levee is on the order of blaming the destruction of the Twin Towers on the architects who situated them where they were. The first-level threat to America is a nuclear bomb, then biological and chemical weapons. What preemptive precautions should be taken against the development of such weaponry? What Republicans are objecting to federal expenses on those fronts?

We have been promised reports on Katrina from almost every official body, legislative and executive. It diminishes confidence in purposive thought to lose oneself in polemical theater. Grover Norquist uses his own language. But he could be using that of John Adams, who warned that the government seeks to turn every contingency into an excuse for amassing power in itself. Or that of Woodrow Wilson, who said that the history of liberalism is the history of man's efforts to restrain the growth of government. If New Orleans is a land doomed by nature, then nature's reach needs to be tamed, or else yielded to. The critics have not yet charged that movement away from New Orleans was prohibited by George Bush.


http://www.nationalreview.com/buckley/wfb200509091333.asp
Title: Glenn Beck is an idiot...
Post by: SB_Mig on September 10, 2005, 11:43:04 AM
:evil:

Who is this jackass!?

From the September 9 broadcast of The Glenn Beck Program:

BECK: Let me be real honest with you. I don't think anybody on talk radio -- I don't think anybody in their right mind is going to say this out loud -- but I wonder if I'm the only one that feels this way. Yesterday, when I saw the ATM cards being handed out, the $2,000 ATM cards, and they were being handed out at the Astrodome. And they actually had to close the Astrodome and seal it off for a while because there was a near-riot trying to get to these ATM cards. My first thought was, it's not like they're going to run out of the $2,000 ATM cards. You can wait! You know, stand in line. Maybe it's because I'm the kind of guy, when I go to a buffet, I either have to be first in line, or I'm the very last. Because I know there's going to be extra food, and I just won't stand in the line. I'll wait until all the suckers go get their food, and then I'll go get mine. Or if I'm really hungry, I hate to admit this -- and really, I don't even have to be really hungry. If I'm really being a pig, I will kind of, like, hang out around the buffet table before the line is -- you know, chat with people right around the table: "Oh, they just opened the line! Let's go!" And then you're first in line.

When you are rioting for these tickets, or these ATM cards, the second thing that came to mind was -- and this is horrible to say, and I wonder if I'm alone in this -- you know it took me about a year to start hating the 9-11 victims' families? Took me about a year. And I had such compassion for them, and I really wanted to help them, and I was behind, you know, "Let's give them money, let's get this started." All of this stuff. And I really didn't -- of the 3,000 victims' families, I don't hate all of them. Probably about 10 of them. And when I see a 9-11 victim family on television, or whatever, I'm just like, "Oh shut up!" I'm so sick of them because they're always complaining. And we did our best for them. And, again, it's only about 10.

But the second thought I had when I saw these people and they had to shut down the Astrodome and lock it down, I thought: I didn't think I could hate victims faster than the 9-11 victims. These guys -- you know it's really sad. We're not hearing anything about Mississippi. We're not hearing anything about Alabama. We're hearing about the victims in New Orleans. This is a 90,000-square-mile disaster site, New Orleans is 181 square miles. A hundred and -- 0.2 percent of the disaster area is New Orleans! And that's all we're hearing about, are the people in New Orleans. Those are the only ones we're seeing on television are the scumbags -- and again, it's not all the people in New Orleans. Most of the people in New Orleans got out! It's just a small percentage of those who were left in New Orleans, or who decided to stay in New Orleans, and they're getting all the attention. It's exactly like the 9-11 victims' families. There's about 10 of them that are spoiling it for everybody.
Title: Political Rants
Post by: rogt on September 12, 2005, 11:10:47 AM
Yeah, Glenn is pretty &*@%ing hateful.  

Another of his ilk, Michael Savage, was also going off last week about the ATM cards.  His issues were 1) people could somehow manage to get more than one card and 2) by just handing out cash to "these people" we run the risk of them spending it on crack and marijuana.  Gee, how anybody could think this was racist is beyond me.

With all of these multi-million dollar "reconstruction" contracts being given out like Halloween candy to W's corporate buddies, I don't think I've heard a single right-wing loudmouth complain that executives might spend the money on scotch and hookers instead rebuilding that Iraqi hospital.

Rog
Title: Political Rants
Post by: SB_Mig on September 13, 2005, 09:19:55 AM
:x

Newsweek, Sept. 19, 2005 issue -

It's a standing joke among the president's top aides: who gets to deliver the bad news? Warm and hearty in public, Bush can be cold and snappish in private, and aides sometimes cringe before the displeasure of the president of the United States, or, as he is known in West Wing jargon, POTUS. The bad news on this early morning, Tuesday, Aug. 30, some 24 hours after Hurricane Katrina had ripped through New Orleans, was that the president would have to cut short his five-week vacation by a couple of days and return to Washington. The president's chief of staff, Andrew Card; his deputy chief of staff, Joe Hagin; his counselor, Dan Bartlett, and his spokesman, Scott McClellan, held a conference call to discuss the question of the president's early return and the delicate task of telling him. Hagin, it was decided, as senior aide on the ground, would do the deed.

The president did not growl this time. He had already decided to return to Washington and hold a meeting of his top advisers on the following day, Wednesday. This would give them a day to get back from their vacations and their staffs to work up some ideas about what to do in the aftermath of the storm. President Bush knew the storm and its consequences had been bad; but he didn't quite realize how bad.

The reality, say several aides who did not wish to be quoted because it might displease the president, did not really sink in until Thursday night. Some White House staffers were watching the evening news and thought the president needed to see the horrific reports coming out of New Orleans. Counselor Bartlett made up a DVD of the newscasts so Bush could see them in their entirety as he flew down to the Gulf Coast the next morning on Air Force One.

How this could be?how the president of the United States could have even less "situational awareness," as they say in the military, than the average American about the worst natural disaster in a century?is one of the more perplexing and troubling chapters in a story that, despite moments of heroism and acts of great generosity, ranks as a national disgrace.

President George W. Bush has always trusted his gut. He prides himself in ignoring the distracting chatter, the caterwauling of the media elites, the Washington political buzz machine. He has boasted that he doesn't read the papers. His doggedness is often admirable. It is easy for presidents to overreact to the noise around them.

But it is not clear what President Bush does read or watch, aside from the occasional biography and an hour or two of ESPN here and there. Bush can be petulant about dissent; he equates disagreement with disloyalty. After five years in office, he is surrounded largely by people who agree with him. Bush can ask tough questions, but it's mostly a one-way street. Most presidents keep a devil's advocate around. Lyndon Johnson had George Ball on Vietnam; President Ronald Reagan and Bush's father, George H.W. Bush, grudgingly listened to the arguments of Budget Director Richard Darman, who told them what they didn't wish to hear: that they would have to raise taxes. When Hurricane Katrina struck, it appears there was no one to tell President Bush the plain truth: that the state and local governments had been overwhelmed, that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was not up to the job and that the military, the only institution with the resources to cope, couldn't act without a declaration from the president overriding all other authority.

The war in Iraq was a failure of intelligence. The government's response to Katrina?like the failure to anticipate that terrorists would fly into buildings on 9/11?was a failure of imagination. On Tuesday, within 24 hours of the storm's arrival, Bush needed to be able to imagine the scenes of disorder and misery that would, two days later, shock him when he watched the evening news. He needed to be able to see that New Orleans would spin into violence and chaos very quickly if the U.S. government did not take charge?and, in effect, send in the cavalry, which in this case probably meant sending in a brigade from a combat outfit, like the 82nd Airborne, based in Fort Bragg, N.C., and prepared to deploy anywhere in the world in 18 hours.

Bush and his advisers in his "war cabinet" have always been action-oriented, "forward leaning," in the favorite phrase of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. They dislike lawyers and sometimes brush aside legalistic (and even sound constitutional) arguments. But this time "Rummy" opposed sending in active-duty troops as cops. Dick Cheney, who was vacationing in Wyoming when the storm hit, characteristically kept his counsel on videoconferences; his private advice is not known.

Liberals will say they were indifferent to the plight of poor African-Americans. It is true that Katrina laid bare society's massive neglect of its least fortunate. The inner thoughts and motivations of Bush and his top advisers are impossible to know for certain. Though it seems abstract at a time of such suffering, high-minded considerations about the balance of power between state and federal government were clearly at play. It's also possible that after at least four years of more or less constant crisis, Bush and his team are numb.

The failure of the government's response to Hurricane Katrina worked like a power blackout. Problems cascaded and compounded; each mistake made the next mistake worse. The foe in this battle was a monster; Katrina flattened the Gulf Coast with the strength of a vengeful god. But human beings, beginning with the elected officials of the City of New Orleans, failed to anticipate and react in time.

Congressional investigations will take months to sort out who is to blame. A NEWSWEEK reconstruction of the government's response to the storm shows how Bush's leadership style and the bureaucratic culture combined to produce a disaster within a disaster.

Ray Nagin, the mayor of New Orleans, didn't want to evacuate. New Orleanians have a fatalistic streak; their joyful, jazz-blowing street funeral processions are legendary. After many near misses over the years since Hurricane Betsy flooded 20 percent of the city in 1965, longtime residents prefer to stay put. Nagin's eye had long been on commerce, not catastrophe. A former executive at Cox Communications, he had come to office in 2002 to clear out the allegedly corrupt old guard and bring new business to the city, which has not prospered with New South metropolises like Atlanta. During Nagin's mayoral campaign, the promises were about jobs, not stronger floodwalls and levees.

Bush and his advisers in his "war cabinet" have always been action-oriented, "forward leaning," in the favorite phrase of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. They dislike lawyers and sometimes brush aside legalistic (and even sound constitutional) arguments. But this time "Rummy" opposed sending in active-duty troops as cops. Dick Cheney, who was vacationing in Wyoming when the storm hit, characteristically kept his counsel on videoconferences; his private advice is not known.

Liberals will say they were indifferent to the plight of poor African-Americans. It is true that Katrina laid bare society's massive neglect of its least fortunate. The inner thoughts and motivations of Bush and his top advisers are impossible to know for certain. Though it seems abstract at a time of such suffering, high-minded considerations about the balance of power between state and federal government were clearly at play. It's also possible that after at least four years of more or less constant crisis, Bush and his team are numb.

The failure of the government's response to Hurricane Katrina worked like a power blackout. Problems cascaded and compounded; each mistake made the next mistake worse. The foe in this battle was a monster; Katrina flattened the Gulf Coast with the strength of a vengeful god. But human beings, beginning with the elected officials of the City of New Orleans, failed to anticipate and react in time.

Congressional investigations will take months to sort out who is to blame. A NEWSWEEK reconstruction of the government's response to the storm shows how Bush's leadership style and the bureaucratic culture combined to produce a disaster within a disaster.

Ray Nagin, the mayor of New Orleans, didn't want to evacuate. New Orleanians have a fatalistic streak; their joyful, jazz-blowing street funeral processions are legendary. After many near misses over the years since Hurricane Betsy flooded 20 percent of the city in 1965, longtime residents prefer to stay put. Nagin's eye had long been on commerce, not catastrophe. A former executive at Cox Communications, he had come to office in 2002 to clear out the allegedly corrupt old guard and bring new business to the city, which has not prospered with New South metropolises like Atlanta. During Nagin's mayoral campaign, the promises were about jobs, not stronger floodwalls and levees.

Bush and his advisers in his "war cabinet" have always been action-oriented, "forward leaning," in the favorite phrase of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. They dislike lawyers and sometimes brush aside legalistic (and even sound constitutional) arguments. But this time "Rummy" opposed sending in active-duty troops as cops. Dick Cheney, who was vacationing in Wyoming when the storm hit, characteristically kept his counsel on videoconferences; his private advice is not known.

Liberals will say they were indifferent to the plight of poor African-Americans. It is true that Katrina laid bare society's massive neglect of its least fortunate. The inner thoughts and motivations of Bush and his top advisers are impossible to know for certain. Though it seems abstract at a time of such suffering, high-minded considerations about the balance of power between state and federal government were clearly at play. It's also possible that after at least four years of more or less constant crisis, Bush and his team are numb.

The failure of the government's response to Hurricane Katrina worked like a power blackout. Problems cascaded and compounded; each mistake made the next mistake worse. The foe in this battle was a monster; Katrina flattened the Gulf Coast with the strength of a vengeful god. But human beings, beginning with the elected officials of the City of New Orleans, failed to anticipate and react in time.

Congressional investigations will take months to sort out who is to blame. A NEWSWEEK reconstruction of the government's response to the storm shows how Bush's leadership style and the bureaucratic culture combined to produce a disaster within a disaster.

Ray Nagin, the mayor of New Orleans, didn't want to evacuate. New Orleanians have a fatalistic streak; their joyful, jazz-blowing street funeral processions are legendary. After many near misses over the years since Hurricane Betsy flooded 20 percent of the city in 1965, longtime residents prefer to stay put. Nagin's eye had long been on commerce, not catastrophe. A former executive at Cox Communications, he had come to office in 2002 to clear out the allegedly corrupt old guard and bring new business to the city, which has not prospered with New South metropolises like Atlanta. During Nagin's mayoral campaign, the promises were about jobs, not stronger floodwalls and levees.

But on Saturday night, as Katrina bore down on New Orleans, Nagin talked to Max Mayfield, head of the National Hurricane Center. "Max Mayfield has scared me to death," Nagin told City Councilwoman Cynthia Morrell early Sunday morning. "If you're scared, I'm scared," responded Morrell, and the mandatory order went out to evacuate the city?about a day later than for most other cities and counties along the Gulf Coast.

As Katrina howled outside Monday morning and the windows of the Hyatt Hotel, where the mayor had set up his command post, began popping out, Nagin and his staff lay on the floor. Then came eerie silence. Morrell decided to go look at her district, including nearby Gentilly. Outside, Canal Street was dry. "Phew," Morrell told her driver, "that was close." But then, from the elevated highway, she began seeing neighborhoods under eight to 15 feet of water. "Holy God," she thought to herself. Then she spotted her first dead body.

At dusk, on the ninth floor of city hall, the mayor and the city council had their first encounter with the federal government. A man in a blue FEMA windbreaker arrived to brief them on his helicopter flyover of the city. He seemed unfamiliar with the city's geography, but he did have a sense of urgency. "Water as far as the eye can see," he said. It was worse than Hurricanes Andrew in 1992 and Camille in 1969. "I need to call Washington," he said. "Do you have a conference-call line?" According to an aide to the mayor, he seemed a little taken aback when the answer was no. Long neglected in the city budget, communications within the New Orleans city government were poor, and eventually almost nonexistent when the batteries on the few old satellite phones died. The FEMA man found a phone, but he had trouble reaching senior officials in Washington. When he finally got someone on the line, the city officials kept hearing him say, "You don't understand, you don't understand."

Around New Orleans, three levees had overtopped or were broken. The city was doomed. There was no way the water could be stopped. But, incredibly, the seriousness of the situation did not really register, not only in Washington, but at the state emergency command post upriver in Baton Rouge. In a squat, drab cinder-block building in the state capital, full of TV monitors and maps, various state and federal officials tried to make sense of what had happened. "Nobody was saying it wasn't a catastrophe," Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu told NEWSWEEK. "We were saying, 'Thank you, God,' because the experts were telling the governor it could have been even worse."

Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, a motherly but steely figure known by the nickname Queen Bee, knew that she needed help. But she wasn't quite sure what. At about 8 p.m., she spoke to Bush. "Mr. President," she said, "we need your help. We need everything you've got."

Bush, the governor later recalled, was reassuring. But the conversation was all a little vague. Blanco did not specifically ask for a massive intervention by the active-duty military. "She wouldn't know the 82nd Airborne from the Harlem Boys' Choir," said an official in the governor's office, who did not wish to be identified talking about his boss's conversations with the president. There are a number of steps Bush could have taken, short of a full-scale federal takeover, like ordering the military to take over the pitiful and (by now) largely broken emergency communications system throughout the region. But the president, who was in San Diego preparing to give a speech the next day on the war in Iraq, went to bed.

By the predawn hours, most state and federal officials finally realized that the 17th Street Canal levee had been breached, and that the city was in serious trouble. Bush was told at 5 a.m. Pacific Coast time and immediately decided to cut his vacation short. To his senior advisers, living in the insular presidential bubble, the mere act of lopping off a couple of presidential vacation days counts as a major event. They could see pitfalls in sending Bush to New Orleans immediately. His presence would create a security nightmare and get in the way of the relief effort. Bush blithely proceeded with the rest of his schedule for the day, accepting a gift guitar at one event and pretending to riff like Tom Cruise in "Risky Business."

Bush might not have appeared so carefree if he had been able to see the fearful faces on some young police officers?the ones who actually showed up for roll call at the New Orleans Second District police headquarters that morning. The radio was reporting water nine feet deep at the corner of Napoleon and St. Charles streets. The looting and occasional shooting had begun. At 2 o'clock on the morning of the storm, only 82 of 120 cops had obeyed a summons to report for duty. Now the numbers were dwindling; within a day, only 28 or 30 officers would be left to save the stranded and fight the looters, recalled a sad and exhausted Capt. Eddie Hosli, speaking to a NEWSWEEK reporter last week. "One of my lieutenants told me, 'I was looking into the eyes of one of the officers and it was like looking into the eyes of a baby'," Hosli recalled. "It was just terrible." (When the AWOL officers began trickling back to work last week, attracted in part by the promise of five expense-paid days in Las Vegas for all New Orleans cops, Hosli told them, "You've got your own demons to live with. I'm not going to judge you.")

At emergency headquarters in Baton Rouge, confusion raged. Though more than 100,000 of its residents had no way to get out of the city on their own, New Orleans had no real evacuation plan, save to tell people to go to the Superdome and wait for buses. On Tuesday, the state was rounding up buses; no, FEMA was; no, FEMA's buses would take too long to get there ... and so on. On Tuesday afternoon, Governor Blanco took her second trip to the Superdome and was shocked by the rising tide of desperation there. There didn't seem to be nearly enough buses, boats or helicopters.

Early Wednesday morning, Blanco tried to call Bush. She was transferred around the White House for a while until she ended up on the phone with Fran Townsend, the president's Homeland Security adviser, who tried to reassure her but did not have many specifics. Hours later, Blanco called back and insisted on speaking to the president. When he came on the line, the governor recalled, "I just asked him for help, 'whatever you have'." She asked for 40,000 troops. "I just pulled a number out of the sky," she later told NEWSWEEK.

The Pentagon was not sitting idly. By Tuesday morning (and even before the storm) the military was moving supplies, ships, boats, helicopters and troops toward the Gulf Coast. But, ironically, the scale of the effort slowed it. TV viewers had difficulty understanding why TV crews seemed to move in and out of New Orleans while the military was nowhere to be seen. But a TV crew is five people in an RV. Before the military can send in convoys of trucks, it has to clear broken and flooded highways. The military took over the shattered New Orleans airport for emergency airlifts, but special teams of Air Force operators had to be sent in to make it ready. By the week after the storm, the military had mobilized some 70,000 troops and hundreds of helicopters?but it took at least two days and usually four and five to get them into the disaster area. Looters and well-armed gangs, like TV crews, moved faster.

In the inner councils of the Bush administration, there was some talk of gingerly pushing aside the overwhelmed "first responders," the state and local emergency forces, and sending in active-duty troops. But under an 1868 law, federal troops are not allowed to get involved in local law enforcement. The president, it's true, could have invoked the Insurrections Act, the so-called Riot Act. But Rumsfeld's aides say the secretary of Defense was leery of sending in 19-year-old soldiers trained to shoot people in combat to play policemen in an American city, and he believed that National Guardsmen trained as MPs were on the way.

The one federal agency that is supposed to handle disasters?FEMA?was dysfunctional. On Wednesday morning, Senator Landrieu was standing outside the chaotic Superdome and asked to borrow a FEMA official's phone to call her office in Washington. "It didn't work," she told NEWSWEEK. "I thought to myself, 'This isn't going to be pretty'." Once a kind of petty-cash drawer for congressmen to quickly hand out aid after floods and storms, FEMA had improved in the 1990s in the Clinton administration. But it became a victim of the Iron Law of Unintended Consequences. After 9/11 raised the profile of disaster response, FEMA was folded into the sprawling Department of Homeland Security and effectively weakened. FEMA's boss, Bush's close friend Joe Allbaugh, quit when he lost his cabinet seat. (Now a consultant, Allbaugh was down on the Gulf Coast last week looking for contracts for his private clients.) Allbaugh replaced himself with his college buddy Mike Brown, whose last private-sector job (omitted from his official resume) had been supervising horse-show judges for the International Arabian Horse Association. After praising Brown ("Brownie, you're doing a heck of job"), Bush last week removed him from honchoing the Katrina relief operation. He was replaced by Coast Guard Vice Adm. Thad Allen. The Coast Guard was one agency that performed well, rescuing thousands.

Bad news rarely flows up in bureaucracies. For most of those first few days, Bush was hearing what a good job the Feds were doing. Bush likes "metrics," numbers to measure performance, so the bureaucrats gave him reassuring statistics. At a press availability on Wednesday, Bush duly rattled them off: there were 400 trucks transporting 5.4 million meals and 13.4 million liters of water along with 3.4 million pounds of ice. Yet it was obvious to anyone watching TV that New Orleans had turned into a Third World hellhole.

The denial and the frustration finally collided aboard Air Force One on Friday. As the president's plane sat on the tarmac at New Orleans airport, a confrontation occurred that was described by one participant as "as blunt as you can get without the Secret Service getting involved." Governor Blanco was there, along with various congressmen and senators and Mayor Nagin (who took advantage of the opportunity to take a shower aboard the plane). One by one, the lawmakers listed their grievances as Bush listened. Rep. Bobby Jindal, whose district encompasses New Orleans, told of a sheriff who had called FEMA for assistance. According to Jindal, the sheriff was told to e-mail his request, "and the guy was sitting in a district underwater and with no electricity," Jindal said, incredulously. "How does that make any sense?" Jindal later told NEWSWEEK that "almost everybody" around the conference table had a similar story about how the federal response "just wasn't working." With each tale, "the president just shook his head, as if he couldn't believe what he was hearing," says Jindal, a conservative Republican and Bush appointee who lost a close race to Blanco. Repeatedly, the president turned to his aides and said, "Fix it."

According to Sen. David Vitter, a Republican ally of Bush's, the meeting came to a head when Mayor Nagin blew up during a fraught discussion of "who's in charge?" Nagin slammed his hand down on the table and told Bush, "We just need to cut through this and do what it takes to have a more-controlled command structure. If that means federalizing it, let's do it."

A debate over "federalizing" the National Guard had been rattling in Washington for the previous three days. Normally, the Guard is under the control of the state governor, but the Feds can take over?if the governor asks them to. Nagin suggested that Lt. Gen. Russel Honore, the Pentagon's on-scene commander, be put in charge. According to Senator Vitter, Bush turned to Governor Blanco and said, "Well, what do you think of that, Governor?" Blanco told Bush, "I'd rather talk to you about that privately." To which Nagin responded, "Well, why don't you do that now?"

The meeting broke up. Bush and Blanco disappeared to talk. More than a week later, there was still no agreement. Blanco didn't want to give up her authority, and Bush didn't press. Jindal suggested that Bush appoint Colin Powell as a kind of relief czar, and Bush replied, "I'll take that into consideration." Bush does not like to fire people. He told Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff to go down to Louisiana and sort out the various problems. A day later FEMA's Brown was on his way back to Washington.

Late last week, Bush was, by some accounts, down and angry. But another Bush aide described the atmosphere inside the White House as "strangely surreal and almost detached." At one meeting described by this insider, officials were oddly self-congratulatory, perhaps in an effort to buck each other up. Life inside a bunker can be strange, especially in defeat.

Bad news rarely flows up in bureaucracies. For most of those first few days, Bush was hearing what a good job the Feds were doing. Bush likes "metrics," numbers to measure performance, so the bureaucrats gave him reassuring statistics. At a press availability on Wednesday, Bush duly rattled them off: there were 400 trucks transporting 5.4 million meals and 13.4 million liters of water along with 3.4 million pounds of ice. Yet it was obvious to anyone watching TV that New Orleans had turned into a Third World hellhole.

The denial and the frustration finally collided aboard Air Force One on Friday. As the president's plane sat on the tarmac at New Orleans airport, a confrontation occurred that was described by one participant as "as blunt as you can get without the Secret Service getting involved." Governor Blanco was there, along with various congressmen and senators and Mayor Nagin (who took advantage of the opportunity to take a shower aboard the plane). One by one, the lawmakers listed their grievances as Bush listened. Rep. Bobby Jindal, whose district encompasses New Orleans, told of a sheriff who had called FEMA for assistance. According to Jindal, the sheriff was told to e-mail his request, "and the guy was sitting in a district underwater and with no electricity," Jindal said, incredulously. "How does that make any sense?" Jindal later told NEWSWEEK that "almost everybody" around the conference table had a similar story about how the federal response "just wasn't working." With each tale, "the president just shook his head, as if he couldn't believe what he was hearing," says Jindal, a conservative Republican and Bush appointee who lost a close race to Blanco. Repeatedly, the president turned to his aides and said, "Fix it."

According to Sen. David Vitter, a Republican ally of Bush's, the meeting came to a head when Mayor Nagin blew up during a fraught discussion of "who's in charge?" Nagin slammed his hand down on the table and told Bush, "We just need to cut through this and do what it takes to have a more-controlled command structure. If that means federalizing it, let's do it."

A debate over "federalizing" the National Guard had been rattling in Washington for the previous three days. Normally, the Guard is under the control of the state governor, but the Feds can take over?if the governor asks them to. Nagin suggested that Lt. Gen. Russel Honore, the Pentagon's on-scene commander, be put in charge. According to Senator Vitter, Bush turned to Governor Blanco and said, "Well, what do you think of that, Governor?" Blanco told Bush, "I'd rather talk to you about that privately." To which Nagin responded, "Well, why don't you do that now?"

The meeting broke up. Bush and Blanco disappeared to talk. More than a week later, there was still no agreement. Blanco didn't want to give up her authority, and Bush didn't press. Jindal suggested that Bush appoint Colin Powell as a kind of relief czar, and Bush replied, "I'll take that into consideration." Bush does not like to fire people. He told Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff to go down to Louisiana and sort out the various problems. A day later FEMA's Brown was on his way back to Washington.

Late last week, Bush was, by some accounts, down and angry. But another Bush aide described the atmosphere inside the White House as "strangely surreal and almost detached." At one meeting described by this insider, officials were oddly self-congratulatory, perhaps in an effort to buck each other up. Life inside a bunker can be strange, especially in defeat.
Title: REPOST...
Post by: SB_Mig on September 13, 2005, 09:31:53 AM
BAD CUT AND PASTE JOB...HERE'S THE REPOST:

Sept. 19, 2005 issue - It's a standing joke among the president's top aides: who gets to deliver the bad news? Warm and hearty in public, Bush can be cold and snappish in private, and aides sometimes cringe before the displeasure of the president of the United States, or, as he is known in West Wing jargon, POTUS. The bad news on this early morning, Tuesday, Aug. 30, some 24 hours after Hurricane Katrina had ripped through New Orleans, was that the president would have to cut short his five-week vacation by a couple of days and return to Washington. The president's chief of staff, Andrew Card; his deputy chief of staff, Joe Hagin; his counselor, Dan Bartlett, and his spokesman, Scott McClellan, held a conference call to discuss the question of the president's early return and the delicate task of telling him. Hagin, it was decided, as senior aide on the ground, would do the deed.

The president did not growl this time. He had already decided to return to Washington and hold a meeting of his top advisers on the following day, Wednesday. This would give them a day to get back from their vacations and their staffs to work up some ideas about what to do in the aftermath of the storm. President Bush knew the storm and its consequences had been bad; but he didn't quite realize how bad.

The reality, say several aides who did not wish to be quoted because it might displease the president, did not really sink in until Thursday night. Some White House staffers were watching the evening news and thought the president needed to see the horrific reports coming out of New Orleans. Counselor Bartlett made up a DVD of the newscasts so Bush could see them in their entirety as he flew down to the Gulf Coast the next morning on Air Force One.

How this could be?how the president of the United States could have even less "situational awareness," as they say in the military, than the average American about the worst natural disaster in a century?is one of the more perplexing and troubling chapters in a story that, despite moments of heroism and acts of great generosity, ranks as a national disgrace.

President George W. Bush has always trusted his gut. He prides himself in ignoring the distracting chatter, the caterwauling of the media elites, the Washington political buzz machine. He has boasted that he doesn't read the papers. His doggedness is often admirable. It is easy for presidents to overreact to the noise around them.

But it is not clear what President Bush does read or watch, aside from the occasional biography and an hour or two of ESPN here and there. Bush can be petulant about dissent; he equates disagreement with disloyalty. After five years in office, he is surrounded largely by people who agree with him. Bush can ask tough questions, but it's mostly a one-way street. Most presidents keep a devil's advocate around. Lyndon Johnson had George Ball on Vietnam; President Ronald Reagan and Bush's father, George H.W. Bush, grudgingly listened to the arguments of Budget Director Richard Darman, who told them what they didn't wish to hear: that they would have to raise taxes. When Hurricane Katrina struck, it appears there was no one to tell President Bush the plain truth: that the state and local governments had been overwhelmed, that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was not up to the job and that the military, the only institution with the resources to cope, couldn't act without a declaration from the president overriding all other authority.

The war in Iraq was a failure of intelligence. The government's response to Katrina?like the failure to anticipate that terrorists would fly into buildings on 9/11?was a failure of imagination. On Tuesday, within 24 hours of the storm's arrival, Bush needed to be able to imagine the scenes of disorder and misery that would, two days later, shock him when he watched the evening news. He needed to be able to see that New Orleans would spin into violence and chaos very quickly if the U.S. government did not take charge?and, in effect, send in the cavalry, which in this case probably meant sending in a brigade from a combat outfit, like the 82nd Airborne, based in Fort Bragg, N.C., and prepared to deploy anywhere in the world in 18 hours.

Bush and his advisers in his "war cabinet" have always been action-oriented, "forward leaning," in the favorite phrase of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. They dislike lawyers and sometimes brush aside legalistic (and even sound constitutional) arguments. But this time "Rummy" opposed sending in active-duty troops as cops. Dick Cheney, who was vacationing in Wyoming when the storm hit, characteristically kept his counsel on videoconferences; his private advice is not known.

Liberals will say they were indifferent to the plight of poor African-Americans. It is true that Katrina laid bare society's massive neglect of its least fortunate. The inner thoughts and motivations of Bush and his top advisers are impossible to know for certain. Though it seems abstract at a time of such suffering, high-minded considerations about the balance of power between state and federal government were clearly at play. It's also possible that after at least four years of more or less constant crisis, Bush and his team are numb.

The failure of the government's response to Hurricane Katrina worked like a power blackout. Problems cascaded and compounded; each mistake made the next mistake worse. The foe in this battle was a monster; Katrina flattened the Gulf Coast with the strength of a vengeful god. But human beings, beginning with the elected officials of the City of New Orleans, failed to anticipate and react in time.

Congressional investigations will take months to sort out who is to blame. A NEWSWEEK reconstruction of the government's response to the storm shows how Bush's leadership style and the bureaucratic culture combined to produce a disaster within a disaster.

Ray Nagin, the mayor of New Orleans, didn't want to evacuate. New Orleanians have a fatalistic streak; their joyful, jazz-blowing street funeral processions are legendary. After many near misses over the years since Hurricane Betsy flooded 20 percent of the city in 1965, longtime residents prefer to stay put. Nagin's eye had long been on commerce, not catastrophe. A former executive at Cox Communications, he had come to office in 2002 to clear out the allegedly corrupt old guard and bring new business to the city, which has not prospered with New South metropolises like Atlanta. During Nagin's mayoral campaign, the promises were about jobs, not stronger floodwalls and levees.

But on Saturday night, as Katrina bore down on New Orleans, Nagin talked to Max Mayfield, head of the National Hurricane Center. "Max Mayfield has scared me to death," Nagin told City Councilwoman Cynthia Morrell early Sunday morning. "If you're scared, I'm scared," responded Morrell, and the mandatory order went out to evacuate the city?about a day later than for most other cities and counties along the Gulf Coast.

As Katrina howled outside Monday morning and the windows of the Hyatt Hotel, where the mayor had set up his command post, began popping out, Nagin and his staff lay on the floor. Then came eerie silence. Morrell decided to go look at her district, including nearby Gentilly. Outside, Canal Street was dry. "Phew," Morrell told her driver, "that was close." But then, from the elevated highway, she began seeing neighborhoods under eight to 15 feet of water. "Holy God," she thought to herself. Then she spotted her first dead body.

At dusk, on the ninth floor of city hall, the mayor and the city council had their first encounter with the federal government. A man in a blue FEMA windbreaker arrived to brief them on his helicopter flyover of the city. He seemed unfamiliar with the city's geography, but he did have a sense of urgency. "Water as far as the eye can see," he said. It was worse than Hurricanes Andrew in 1992 and Camille in 1969. "I need to call Washington," he said. "Do you have a conference-call line?" According to an aide to the mayor, he seemed a little taken aback when the answer was no. Long neglected in the city budget, communications within the New Orleans city government were poor, and eventually almost nonexistent when the batteries on the few old satellite phones died. The FEMA man found a phone, but he had trouble reaching senior officials in Washington. When he finally got someone on the line, the city officials kept hearing him say, "You don't understand, you don't understand."

Around New Orleans, three levees had overtopped or were broken. The city was doomed. There was no way the water could be stopped. But, incredibly, the seriousness of the situation did not really register, not only in Washington, but at the state emergency command post upriver in Baton Rouge. In a squat, drab cinder-block building in the state capital, full of TV monitors and maps, various state and federal officials tried to make sense of what had happened. "Nobody was saying it wasn't a catastrophe," Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu told NEWSWEEK. "We were saying, 'Thank you, God,' because the experts were telling the governor it could have been even worse."

Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, a motherly but steely figure known by the nickname Queen Bee, knew that she needed help. But she wasn't quite sure what. At about 8 p.m., she spoke to Bush. "Mr. President," she said, "we need your help. We need everything you've got."

Bush, the governor later recalled, was reassuring. But the conversation was all a little vague. Blanco did not specifically ask for a massive intervention by the active-duty military. "She wouldn't know the 82nd Airborne from the Harlem Boys' Choir," said an official in the governor's office, who did not wish to be identified talking about his boss's conversations with the president. There are a number of steps Bush could have taken, short of a full-scale federal takeover, like ordering the military to take over the pitiful and (by now) largely broken emergency communications system throughout the region. But the president, who was in San Diego preparing to give a speech the next day on the war in Iraq, went to bed.

By the predawn hours, most state and federal officials finally realized that the 17th Street Canal levee had been breached, and that the city was in serious trouble. Bush was told at 5 a.m. Pacific Coast time and immediately decided to cut his vacation short. To his senior advisers, living in the insular presidential bubble, the mere act of lopping off a couple of presidential vacation days counts as a major event. They could see pitfalls in sending Bush to New Orleans immediately. His presence would create a security nightmare and get in the way of the relief effort. Bush blithely proceeded with the rest of his schedule for the day, accepting a gift guitar at one event and pretending to riff like Tom Cruise in "Risky Business."

Bush might not have appeared so carefree if he had been able to see the fearful faces on some young police officers?the ones who actually showed up for roll call at the New Orleans Second District police headquarters that morning. The radio was reporting water nine feet deep at the corner of Napoleon and St. Charles streets. The looting and occasional shooting had begun. At 2 o'clock on the morning of the storm, only 82 of 120 cops had obeyed a summons to report for duty. Now the numbers were dwindling; within a day, only 28 or 30 officers would be left to save the stranded and fight the looters, recalled a sad and exhausted Capt. Eddie Hosli, speaking to a NEWSWEEK reporter last week. "One of my lieutenants told me, 'I was looking into the eyes of one of the officers and it was like looking into the eyes of a baby'," Hosli recalled. "It was just terrible." (When the AWOL officers began trickling back to work last week, attracted in part by the promise of five expense-paid days in Las Vegas for all New Orleans cops, Hosli told them, "You've got your own demons to live with. I'm not going to judge you.")

At emergency headquarters in Baton Rouge, confusion raged. Though more than 100,000 of its residents had no way to get out of the city on their own, New Orleans had no real evacuation plan, save to tell people to go to the Superdome and wait for buses. On Tuesday, the state was rounding up buses; no, FEMA was; no, FEMA's buses would take too long to get there ... and so on. On Tuesday afternoon, Governor Blanco took her second trip to the Superdome and was shocked by the rising tide of desperation there. There didn't seem to be nearly enough buses, boats or helicopters.

Early Wednesday morning, Blanco tried to call Bush. She was transferred around the White House for a while until she ended up on the phone with Fran Townsend, the president's Homeland Security adviser, who tried to reassure her but did not have many specifics. Hours later, Blanco called back and insisted on speaking to the president. When he came on the line, the governor recalled, "I just asked him for help, 'whatever you have'." She asked for 40,000 troops. "I just pulled a number out of the sky," she later told NEWSWEEK.

The Pentagon was not sitting idly. By Tuesday morning (and even before the storm) the military was moving supplies, ships, boats, helicopters and troops toward the Gulf Coast. But, ironically, the scale of the effort slowed it. TV viewers had difficulty understanding why TV crews seemed to move in and out of New Orleans while the military was nowhere to be seen. But a TV crew is five people in an RV. Before the military can send in convoys of trucks, it has to clear broken and flooded highways. The military took over the shattered New Orleans airport for emergency airlifts, but special teams of Air Force operators had to be sent in to make it ready. By the week after the storm, the military had mobilized some 70,000 troops and hundreds of helicopters?but it took at least two days and usually four and five to get them into the disaster area. Looters and well-armed gangs, like TV crews, moved faster.

In the inner councils of the Bush administration, there was some talk of gingerly pushing aside the overwhelmed "first responders," the state and local emergency forces, and sending in active-duty troops. But under an 1868 law, federal troops are not allowed to get involved in local law enforcement. The president, it's true, could have invoked the Insurrections Act, the so-called Riot Act. But Rumsfeld's aides say the secretary of Defense was leery of sending in 19-year-old soldiers trained to shoot people in combat to play policemen in an American city, and he believed that National Guardsmen trained as MPs were on the way.

The one federal agency that is supposed to handle disasters?FEMA?was dysfunctional. On Wednesday morning, Senator Landrieu was standing outside the chaotic Superdome and asked to borrow a FEMA official's phone to call her office in Washington. "It didn't work," she told NEWSWEEK. "I thought to myself, 'This isn't going to be pretty'." Once a kind of petty-cash drawer for congressmen to quickly hand out aid after floods and storms, FEMA had improved in the 1990s in the Clinton administration. But it became a victim of the Iron Law of Unintended Consequences. After 9/11 raised the profile of disaster response, FEMA was folded into the sprawling Department of Homeland Security and effectively weakened. FEMA's boss, Bush's close friend Joe Allbaugh, quit when he lost his cabinet seat. (Now a consultant, Allbaugh was down on the Gulf Coast last week looking for contracts for his private clients.) Allbaugh replaced himself with his college buddy Mike Brown, whose last private-sector job (omitted from his official resume) had been supervising horse-show judges for the International Arabian Horse Association. After praising Brown ("Brownie, you're doing a heck of job"), Bush last week removed him from honchoing the Katrina relief operation. He was replaced by Coast Guard Vice Adm. Thad Allen. The Coast Guard was one agency that performed well, rescuing thousands.

Bad news rarely flows up in bureaucracies. For most of those first few days, Bush was hearing what a good job the Feds were doing. Bush likes "metrics," numbers to measure performance, so the bureaucrats gave him reassuring statistics. At a press availability on Wednesday, Bush duly rattled them off: there were 400 trucks transporting 5.4 million meals and 13.4 million liters of water along with 3.4 million pounds of ice. Yet it was obvious to anyone watching TV that New Orleans had turned into a Third World hellhole.

The denial and the frustration finally collided aboard Air Force One on Friday. As the president's plane sat on the tarmac at New Orleans airport, a confrontation occurred that was described by one participant as "as blunt as you can get without the Secret Service getting involved." Governor Blanco was there, along with various congressmen and senators and Mayor Nagin (who took advantage of the opportunity to take a shower aboard the plane). One by one, the lawmakers listed their grievances as Bush listened. Rep. Bobby Jindal, whose district encompasses New Orleans, told of a sheriff who had called FEMA for assistance. According to Jindal, the sheriff was told to e-mail his request, "and the guy was sitting in a district underwater and with no electricity," Jindal said, incredulously. "How does that make any sense?" Jindal later told NEWSWEEK that "almost everybody" around the conference table had a similar story about how the federal response "just wasn't working." With each tale, "the president just shook his head, as if he couldn't believe what he was hearing," says Jindal, a conservative Republican and Bush appointee who lost a close race to Blanco. Repeatedly, the president turned to his aides and said, "Fix it."

According to Sen. David Vitter, a Republican ally of Bush's, the meeting came to a head when Mayor Nagin blew up during a fraught discussion of "who's in charge?" Nagin slammed his hand down on the table and told Bush, "We just need to cut through this and do what it takes to have a more-controlled command structure. If that means federalizing it, let's do it."

A debate over "federalizing" the National Guard had been rattling in Washington for the previous three days. Normally, the Guard is under the control of the state governor, but the Feds can take over?if the governor asks them to. Nagin suggested that Lt. Gen. Russel Honore, the Pentagon's on-scene commander, be put in charge. According to Senator Vitter, Bush turned to Governor Blanco and said, "Well, what do you think of that, Governor?" Blanco told Bush, "I'd rather talk to you about that privately." To which Nagin responded, "Well, why don't you do that now?"

The meeting broke up. Bush and Blanco disappeared to talk. More than a week later, there was still no agreement. Blanco didn't want to give up her authority, and Bush didn't press. Jindal suggested that Bush appoint Colin Powell as a kind of relief czar, and Bush replied, "I'll take that into consideration." Bush does not like to fire people. He told Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff to go down to Louisiana and sort out the various problems. A day later FEMA's Brown was on his way back to Washington.

Late last week, Bush was, by some accounts, down and angry. But another Bush aide described the atmosphere inside the White House as "strangely surreal and almost detached." At one meeting described by this insider, officials were oddly self-congratulatory, perhaps in an effort to buck each other up. Life inside a bunker can be strange, especially in defeat.
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 13, 2005, 09:48:18 AM
Well this piece certainly belongs here in the Rant thread because it certainly isn't news reporting.

It leaves out the extraordinary sequence of incompetent f8ckups of Nagin and Blanco. I am left looking like a jewish Don King as I read about them.  Even as the article tries to maximize the blame for Bush, who certainly could and should have grasped the gravity of it all sooner, it glosses over that the "steely"  :P  :roll:  gov.  refused to grant Fed intervention.

I despise Newspeak.

Try this for State level incompetence:  http://stolenthunder.blogspot.com/2005/09/accusation-revealed.html


Marc
Title: Political Rants
Post by: SB_Mig on September 13, 2005, 11:36:34 AM
The thing that bugs me the most about the situation is that everyone that should have been in charge is going to come away from this free and clear...
Title: Political Rants
Post by: rogt on September 13, 2005, 04:25:41 PM
Really.  What does it mean for Bush to "take responsibility" if this doesn't include suffering some serious negative consequences, like stepping down or firing somebody?
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Howling Dog on September 14, 2005, 06:17:31 AM
Woof, I agree. Bush did take the blame on the Federal level. The head of Fema (Brown) stepped down. Is that what you had in mind Rog?
Brown should probably have been fired, but he was indeed publicly humiliated into resigning. There is plenty of blame to go around on this one.
Should blame not trickle down to the state and local level as well? Example, the 1000 school buses that sit under water, that were never manned to aid in the evacution of the people of New Orleans?
Leagaly loaded a school bus can haul just under 50 people. Loaded to the gills who knows.......
With all the advance warning of the huricane one would think this should have been a option....? Esp in the poor areas where people could not get out?
                                                      Tom
P.S. Hopefully we can all agree there is procedure that needs to be followed in events like this.
I think it unfair to blame someone else when people don't do THEIR part in following procedure, and get the ball rolling.
You know what they say about the word ASSUME.
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 14, 2005, 06:24:36 AM
I'd quibble with the notion of responsibility trickling down to the state and local level-- rather THIS IS EXACTLY WHERE THE PRINCIPAL REPSONSIBILTY LAYS.
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on September 14, 2005, 08:40:02 AM
And, in reference to the above, it's the way the emergency plan reads. I work with an emergency rescue team; all triggers get pulled locally and then escalate, and it's the local jurisdiction's responsibility to send a coherant request for assistance up the line.

Though at times like this federal authorities are expected to have an omniscience that frankly flabbergasts me, the truth of the matter is that the locals are the ones who should have the best grasp of the situation, and are the ones who need to send that info up the line in a useful manner.
Title: Political Rants
Post by: SB_Mig on September 14, 2005, 09:09:24 AM
State and local officials should have to pay for their blunders. If the mayor/governor/senators of N.O/LA had any cojones they would resign as well. But that's asking waaaay too much of elected officials. As for Bush accepting responsibility, great, but what does that mean?

And the school buses everyone keeps talking about and "why weren't they used"?

1) Such a claim presumes an availability of resources (e.g., experienced drivers, fuel).

2) Workable logistics (e.g., sufficient means of notifying and getting residents to departure points, sufficiently clear roads for multiple trips out of town and back, adequate facilities within a reasonable driving distance capable of providing shelter, food, and water to a large number of people for an indeterminate period of time on short notice) that may or may not have been present.

3) There's no guarantee that all the buses shown were even in working condition

As we saw in the days after the hurricane, none of the above existed. Again, the responsibility of the state and locals. As for the Feds I hate to think it takes that long to realize that the locals can't hack it, time for us to step to the plate.
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 14, 2005, 09:19:26 AM
Sorry, not buying.  This storm was seen coming well in advance and the mayor COMPLETELY fornicated up with exceedlingly last minute response.  

Forgive me if this is a repost, but have you seen this?


=============

The Best-Laid Plan: Too Bad It Flopped
By DAVID BROOKS
Among the many achievements of the human race - Chartres Cathedral, the Mona Lisa - surely the New Orleans emergency preparedness plan must rank among the greatest, and the fact that this plan turned out to be irrelevant to reality should not detract from its stature as a masterpiece of bureaucratic thinking.

The plan (which is viewable online at
www.cityofno.com/portal.aspx?portal=46&tabid=26) begins with the insight: Be prepared. Or as the plan puts it, "Individuals with assigned tasks must receive preparatory training to maximize operations."

The plan lays out a course of action so that all personnel will know exactly
what to do in case of a hurricane. The Office of Emergency Preparedness will coordinate with the Louisiana Office of Emergency Preparedness in
conjunction with the Comprehensive Emergency Management Plan by taking full advantage of the courses offered by the Louisiana Emergency Preparedness Association and other agencies "as well as conferences, seminars and workshops that may from time to time be available, most notably state hurricane conferences and workshops and the National Hurricane Conference."

In addition, the plan continues, the administrative and training officer of
the Office of Emergency Preparedness will maintain close communication with the state training officer of the L.O.E.P., making sure workshops are
conducted at the Emergency Support Function level, reviewing Emergency
Operating Center/E.S.F. standard operating procedures and undertaking more "intensive work sessions with elements of the emergency response
organizations in order to enhance unified disaster planning."

One can imagine the PowerPoint presentations! The millions of cascading
bullet points! The infinity of hours spent planning a hurricane response
that would make a Prussian officer gasp with reverence!

Furthermore, the plan instructs the O.E.P. director to execute Mass Casualty Incidents scenarios; work with the Association of Contingency Planners and other groups to coordinate disaster organization responses; coordinate, facilitate and encourage other agencies to conduct emergency
self-assessments; engage in assessment processes in preparation for the
Agency Disaster Report; and produce after-action reports with the O.E.P.
shelter coordinator in conjunction with the Louisiana Statewide Hurricane
Exercise.

The paper flow must have been magnificent! The quality of the facilitating
must have been surpassed only by the magnificence of the interfacing!

The New Orleans emergency preparedness plan offers a precise communications strategy, so all city residents will know exactly where to go in times of crisis. It recommends that two traffic control officers be placed at each key intersection. It recommends busing the thousands of residents unable to evacuate themselves to staging areas prestocked with food.

In short, the plan was so beautiful, it's too bad reality destroyed it. The
plan's authors were not stupid or venal. They are doubtless good public
servants who worked in agencies set up to prepare for this storm. And yet
their elaborate plan crumbled under the weight of the actual disaster.

But of course this illustrates the paradox at the heart of the Katrina
disaster, which is that we really need government in times like this, but
government is extremely limited in what it can effectively do.

Katrina was the most anticipated natural disaster in American history, and
still government managed to fail at every level.

For the brutal fact is, government tends toward bureaucracy, which means
elaborate paper flow but ineffective action. Government depends on planning, but planners can never really anticipate the inevitable complexity of events. And American government is inevitably divided and power is inevitably devolved.

For example, the Army Corps of Engineers had plenty of money (Louisiana
received more than any other state), but that spending was carved up into
little pork barrel projects. There were ample troops nearby to maintain
order, but they were divided between federal and state authorities and
constrained by regulations.

This preparedness plan is government as it really is. It reminds us that
canning Michael Brown or appointing some tough response czar will not change the endemic failures at the heart of this institutional collapse.

So of course we need limited but energetic government. But liberals who
think this disaster is going to set off a progressive revival need to
explain how a comprehensive governmental failure is going to restore
America's faith in big government.
Title: Political Rants
Post by: prentice crawford on September 14, 2005, 10:51:54 AM
The levees were built in 1927 mainly to protect New Orleans from the yearly floods of the Mississippi River. Since that time plans were drawn up to increase the number of levees and shore up areas that were considered unable to withstand a direct hit from a major hurricane. The Army Corps of Engineers tried numerous times to implement those plans during the 50s and 60s. They were sued by enviromentalist who said wetlands would be adversely affected by these new levees and the shoreing up of old levees. They won.
                                     WOOF P.C. :oops:
Title: Political Rants
Post by: SB_Mig on September 14, 2005, 10:52:18 AM
In short, the plan was so beautiful, it's too bad reality destroyed it. The
plan's authors were not stupid or venal. They are doubtless good public
servants who worked in agencies set up to prepare for this storm. And yet
their elaborate plan crumbled under the weight of the actual disaster.


Best paragraph I've read yet. I shudder to think of what Los Angeles County's emergency plan looks like.

Amazing how reality will step in and kick you in the face no matter what the "plan". Mother Nature has a great way of showing us who's really the boss.

As for:

"But liberals who think this disaster is going to set off a progressive revival need to explain how a comprehensive governmental failure is going to restore America's faith in big government."

To me, the disaster is a perfect example of how little we can rely on any sized government when the **** hits the giant, high speed fan.

And did anyone ever have faith in big government?  :wink:
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 14, 2005, 01:35:09 PM
Actually quite a few people did and do.  Amongst them is the junior senator from NY who sought to nationalize the 14.7% of GDP that is health care when her husband was president.
Title: Political Rants
Post by: rogt on September 14, 2005, 01:44:03 PM
Tom,

Quote

Woof, I agree. Bush did take the blame on the Federal level. The head
of Fema (Brown) stepped down. Is that what you had in mind Rog?


Five of the top eight FEMA officials had little or no professional
experience in managing emergency services or disaster relief.
"Brownie" was director of judging for the Arabian Horse Association
before joining FEMA. Three of the five top officials for operations in
natural disasters and nine of ten regional directors were working in
an acting capacity.

I wouldn't say the disaster is all Bush's fault, but I think he
appointed "Brownie" and all these other unqualified hacks to FEMA
positions as a reward for their past service in one or both of his
election campiagns, figuring they'd never actually have to do anything
and if some real emergency did come up, he could simply replace them
with people who actually knew what they were doing.

Given what thousands of people from New Orleans are looking at as
a result of the disaster, it's hard for me to have much sympathy for Brown,
who'll no doubt return to an otherwise wealthy, comfortable existence.

Rog
Title: Procedural Pontificators
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on September 14, 2005, 02:14:36 PM
Quote
I wouldn't say the disaster is all Bush's fault, but I think he
appointed "Brownie" and all these other unqualified hacks to FEMA
positions as a reward for their past service in one or both of his
election campiagns, figuring they'd never actually have to do anything
and if some real emergency did come up, he could simply replace them
with people who actually knew what they were doing.


Let's not forget that "Brownie" was vetted by 535 professional second guessers in congress. These days as we're being endlessly reminded about the solemn advise and consent role of congress as nominee Roberts gets the dog and pony show rolled out, let's be sure to take these procedural pontificates at their word. If they have a duty to examine things before the vote then they have an obligation to shoulder the blame after it.
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Howling Dog on September 14, 2005, 03:54:06 PM
Woof Rog, No argument, "Brownie" was a screw up and apparently appointed on the buddie system.
I would even venture to say that in this day and age, Bush made a totally irresponsible choice in what proved to be a position that did in the end really matter. I would even go one step further and say, If Bush was truly concerned with protecting America in the war on terror he would have chosen for the head of FEMA a better qualified person. Just for fun I will say.......maybe Bush didn't thikn the guy could be THAT incompetent. :wink:
Iam sure all the Bush haters will exploit this to the MAX.
                                             Tom
Title: Political Rants
Post by: prentice crawford on September 15, 2005, 07:49:56 AM
Just a reminder,
  Brownie, had already responded to three major hurricane relief efforts and was highly praised for his oversight of  FEMA during those events. He was however, blamed for makeing some pay outs to quickly, resulting in some fraud. Oh how soon we forget. :wink:
                                             Woof P.C.
Title: Political Rants
Post by: rogt on September 15, 2005, 10:08:01 AM
As an example of what it means to "take responsibility", the state of Louisiana is bringing charges of negligent homicide against the owners of a nursing home in which 34 patients drowned in the flooding.  Louisiana's Attorney General is quoted as saying "They were repeatedly warned that this storm was coming.  In effect, their inaction resulted in the deaths of these people."

The nearby Memorial Medical Center contained the bodies of 45 other patients who died from exposure to the heat while waiting for a rescue that didn't come for days.  The corpses of dozens more people who died waiting for a delayed rescue were pulled out of the Superdome and Convention Center, and who knows how many more will be recovered from the rest of city.

If the nursing home owners are in fact guilty of negligence that resulted in the deaths of patients who weren't evacuated, then why isn't the Bush administration just as guilty of inaction that resulted in a lot more deaths?
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Howling Dog on September 15, 2005, 10:18:25 AM
Woof, Good luck with that thought Rog. I suppose the same case could be made MORE for the mayor of N.O. since I view him more DIRECTLY responsible to the citzens of N.O.

Prentice, Its not a matter of what Brownie did in the past, but the fact that he never got into the Katrina game, shoot bro. he never got off the bench.

I think that was quite eveident when they wouldn't even allow him to speak to the press. :?
                                                Tom
Title: Preparing for the Next Awareness Crisis
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on September 15, 2005, 11:14:33 AM
Perhaps this piece speaks to FEMA's priorities. Not exactly the way I'd triage things. . . .

FEMA to the Rescue
The essentials prep work.
John Derbyshire

[On seeing the suffering caused by Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, a close friend of mine contacted his local FEMA office to offer his services as a volunteer. He was told to report the following morning for an Orientation Class. All volunteers, he was told, must complete this class before being sent into the disaster area. My friend kindly provided me with a copy of the class schedule. I have reproduced the first two pages of the schedule below.]

Week One: The Volunteer as Citizen

Day 1: Diversity Awareness

The area affected by Hurricane Katrina includes a diverse population of many ethnicities, national origins, immigrations statuses, and faith traditions. In carrying out relief work, it is important that our workers and volunteers exhibit proper sensitivity to relief recipients from all backgrounds. Volunteers will undergo appropriate training, including the ?privilege walk,? basic Spanish-language instruction, and brief study of passages from the Q?u?r?a?n, the Bhagavad Gita, the Dhammachakkappavattana Sutra, and the collected speeches of Marcus Garvey.

Day 2: Harassment Awareness

Volunteers working with FEMA employees come under the scope of federal rules on sexual harassment, as set out in relevant EEOC guidelines. These guidelines will be reviewed and discussed. All volunteers must demonstrate full awareness of sexual harassment issues, both as they apply to other aid workers and volunteers, and as affecting aid recipients. Class events will include a taped lecture by Prof. Anita Hill, class staging of a one-act drama Tailhook Torment, and the ever-popular Packwood Pi?ata.

Day 3: Profiling Avoidance

Few behaviors give more offense, and few are as inimical to social harmony, as profiling. In our efforts to restore the social environment in the disaster area, we must strenuously avoid all appearance of profiling. All aid recipients must be dealt with on a basis of strict equality. In this workshop, attendees will study and discuss police profiling on the New Jersey Turnpike, airport security screening procedures, and the maligh effects of stereotyping on academic performance. This day?s session also includes a one-hour written test to screen volunteers for Islamophobia.

Day 4: GLBTQA Awareness

Our country has a dark record of oppression and discrimination towards orientational minorities. Because of this, we need to show particular sensitivity towards aid recipients from the gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, questioning, and asexual minorities. This day?s session will involve group case studies led by qualified, credentialed GLBTQA-awareness trainers, including HIV-positive persons. Rubber gloves, condoms, and dental dams will be supplied.

Day 5: Liability Awareness

While the federal government and its agencies are exempt from most liability issues, volunteers who are not federal employees need to be aware of their susceptibility to lawsuits alleging nuisance, negligence, trespass, etc. Experienced courtroom professionals will address the class, and there will be a case study: ?Punishing Good Deeds ? The Good Samaritan as Defendant.?

Week Two: The Volunteer as Custodian of the Environment

Day 1: Diversity in Nature ? Protecting Endangered Species.

When conducting disaster-relief operations, we must bear in mind that the environment exists not only for humans, but for our friends in the animal and vegetable kingdoms. Wetland species are especially vulnerable?
Title: Political Rants
Post by: prentice crawford on September 15, 2005, 12:02:30 PM
Hey Tom,
  Brownie, didn't know what effect  the levee failing would have on the situation. He was getting his info from the locals who didn't know how bad it was. When I heard the levee had failed, My first thought was, well most of the people are out. Sure he F up but who didn't.
                                      Woof P.C.
Title: Political Rants
Post by: prentice crawford on September 15, 2005, 01:57:02 PM
Hey Guys,
 I didn't notice any post that pointed out that the Coast Guard was there early and very effective in their efforts not only in New Orleans but the entire zone of destruction along the coast. I'm thinking that instead of big government agencies running the show maybe the Coast Guard should call the shots in future disasters of this nature: afterall it's what they do everyday.
                                    Woof P.C.
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 15, 2005, 09:56:56 PM
Buzwardo:

I shared your FEMA post elsewhere and have been challenged on its authenticity.  How/where did you come across this?
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on September 16, 2005, 07:23:09 AM
Crafty:

National Review Online:

http://nationalreview.com/derbyshire/derbyshire200509150838.asp
Title: Supreme Court Circumlocutions
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on September 16, 2005, 09:49:01 AM
I'm in the awkward position of being someone who generally supports abortion freedom, but who loathes the dubious and destructive manner by which it was arrived at. Krauthammer does a good job here of spelling my feelings out.

Roe v. Roberts
By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, September 16, 2005; A31


In our lifetime has there been a more politically poisonous Supreme Court decision than Roe v. Wade ? Set aside for a moment your thoughts on the substance of the ruling. (I happen to be a supporter of legalized abortion.) I'm talking about the continuing damage to the republic: disenfranchising, instantly and without recourse, an enormous part of the American population; preventing, as even Ruth Bader Ginsburg once said, proper political settlement of the issue by the people and their representatives; making us the only nation in the West to have legalized abortion by judicial fiat rather than by the popular will expressed democratically.

The corruption continues 32 years later. You could see it played out hour by hour in the Senate confirmation hearings of Judge John Roberts. Question upon question that pretended to be about high constitutional principle was really about abortion in ill-concealed disguise.

Senators asked gravely about how deeply Roberts believes in upholding precedent. Do you think that any of the Democrats were concerned whether Roberts would uphold Richmond v. Croson , the precedent that outlawed racial quotas in municipal contracting? Or Boy Scouts v. Dale , which permitted the exclusion of gay Scout leaders?

This is all about Roe . Take the lines of interrogation about Roberts's belief in the right to privacy. They are not asking about search and seizure in your home. They are asking about the "right to choose" (a brilliant locution that expunges the ugly word abortion from all political debate about abortion) -- what Roberts in 1981 correctly termed the "so-called 'right to privacy,' " a skepticism he is now required to disavow.

Why? Because everyone knows what happened to Robert Bork when he forthrightly and honestly denied some kind of separate, newly hatched right to privacy.

And then there are the learned Judiciary Committee disquisitions on "originalism" -- the judicial philosophy by which Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas try to anchor the Constitution in something real, i.e., the meaning of the words as intended and understood at the time they were written.

Originalism is itself highly problematic, the worst judicial philosophy except for all the others, because they permit unmoored and arbitrary constitutional interpretation -- and thus unmoored and arbitrary judicial power. The learned senators, however, really don't care much about originalism, except to the extent that it would, almost by definition, make Roberts a categorical opponent of Roe . Which is why Roberts denies that he has any ideology, any "overarching judicial philosophy," and is nothing more than an ad hoc, bottom-up type of guy.

Maybe he is. Maybe he isn't. But he knows that if he dares to say otherwise, he gets Borked. If, on the other hand, he pretends to have a mind so scrubbed of theory that he is at a loss to explain gravitation itself, he gets to be chief justice of the United States for 40 years.

In 2000 Al Gore declared that he would not nominate a justice who did not support Roe. Dianne Feinstein says today that if she determines that Roberts opposes Roe , she will be compelled to vote against him. For Democrats, abortion is an open litmus test. For Republicans, it is a test of agility: Can they find the nominee who might be against Roe but has been circumspect enough not to say so publicly and who will be clever enough to avoid saying so at his confirmation hearings?

Circumspect and clever Roberts has been. No one really knows. But I predict two things: (a) Chief Justice Roberts will vote to uphold Roe v. Wade , and (b) his replacing his former boss, Chief Justice William Rehnquist, will move the court only mildly, but most assuredly, to the left -- as measured by the only available yardstick, the percentage of concurrences with the opinions of those conservative touchstones, Scalia and Thomas.

I infer this not just by what Roberts has said in his hearings -- that he supports Griswold v. Connecticut , that he deeply respects precedent and that he finds Roe itself worthy of respect. That is little beyond boilerplate. I infer it from his temperament, career and life history as an establishment conservative who prizes judicial modesty above all. Which means that while he will never repeat Roe , he will never repeal it and be the cause of the social upheaval that repeal would inevitably bring.

Not that this in any way disqualifies Roberts in my conservative eyes. He is a perfectly reasonable traditional conservative, who will be an outstanding chief justice. He is just not a judicial revolutionary. If you're a conservative looking for a return to the good old days, you'll be disappointed. And if you're a liberal who lives for the good old days because that's all that liberalism has left, tell Chuck Schumer to relax.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/15/AR2005091502141.html
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 16, 2005, 10:21:13 AM
Mostly I agree.

Bork was a superior legal intellect who was viciously abused personally and dishonestly demagogued on the merits of many issues-- all to the lasting damage of our political culture to this day.

That said, IMO he was and is completely wrong on the issue of privacy.   There IS a Constitutional right to privacy and it is to be found, along with the right to self-defense, in the 9th Amendment.

On this issue alone, I opposed his ascension to the Supreme Court.

Whatever one's opinion on the abortion issue, the right to privacy does not supersede however the right to life; we may not murder someone in the privacy of our home for example.  Thus the Roe decision is an abortion in and of itself and a perfect example of judiical imperialism.
Title: Political Rants
Post by: prentice crawford on September 16, 2005, 10:24:38 AM
Has anyone been following what the european media has been saying about the aftermath of the hurricane? They seem to be happy about it, which in light of their own failure to save the 40 thousand people who  slowly died during the heatwave that hit awhile back, makes them look less and less like friends.  :(
                                     Woof P.C.
Title: Political Rants
Post by: milt on September 16, 2005, 10:28:25 AM
Quote from: Crafty_Dog

Whatever one's opinion on the abortion issue, the right to privacy does not supersede however the right to life; we may not murder someone in the privacy of our home for example.


A fetus is not "someone."

-milt
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 16, 2005, 10:35:04 AM
THAT is precisely the FIRST question.

The second question is "WHO gets to decide?"

Where in the Constitution does it say that the Supreme Court gets to decide?

At the time of Roe, it was decided by the elected branches of government at the state level-- which seems quite correct to me.

If Roe is overruled, it does not mean an end to abortion.  It means a return to the respective states deciding.  In that the majority of the population in most states wants some forms of abortion, in those cases there will be some forms of abortion.
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Howling Dog on September 16, 2005, 12:25:22 PM
Woof, Milt says a fetus is not "someone".

Neither is a baby a boy or a boy a man, but given the chance to live they both will/ would be..........
                                                   Tom
Title: Political Rants
Post by: prentice crawford on September 16, 2005, 02:35:25 PM
My view of individual rights play heavy on my views about abortion. I think a womans right to choose is a valid right. However, my view of when human life begins plays heavy on my view that no one should choose to abort living human tissue created by God,( not man ) and that God will be the judge in this matter. Our rights to be free thinking, self- determined individuals with a will and a mind to choose our own course of action, were God given. So choose wisely ladies.  :shock:
                                           Woof P.C.
Title: Flirting w/ Disaster
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on September 19, 2005, 11:53:39 AM
Out of curiosity, if Nagin's calls for citizens to return to New Orleans before there is potable water, electricity, 911 service, and a coherant evacuation plan succeed, should another storm come along will the easily foreseeable results still be Bush's fault?


New Orleans Mayor Defends Return Plan
Relief Chief Says It's Still 'Very, Very Soon to Try and Do That'
By MARY FOSTER, AP

NEW ORLEANS (Sept. 18) - New Orleans' mayor has the authority to let residents return to his hurricane-damaged city, but the Coast Guard official in charge of the federal disaster response said Sunday that all the information from health and environmental experts recommends against it.
      
Coast Guard Vice Adm. Thad Allen plans to meet with Mayor Ray Nagin on Monday and develop what he called a logical plan to repopulate the city.

If Allen gets his way, that repopulation won't start on Monday, as the mayor planned, but it will be soon.

"I wouldn't want to attach a time limit to it, but it includes things like making sure there's potable water, making sure there's a 911 system in place, telephone, a means to notify people there is an approaching storm so you can evacuate it with the weakened levee situation," Allen said on NBC's "Meet the Press" Sunday.

"We can do that, and we can do that fairly soon, but it's very, very soon to try and do that this week," he said.

Nagin didn't appear ready to back down Saturday as he defended his plan to return up to 180,000 people to the city within a week and a half despite concerns about the short supply of drinking water and heavily polluted floodwaters.
      
"We must offer the people of New Orleans every chance for a sense of closure and the opportunity for a new beginning," he said.

He wants the Algiers, Garden District and French Quarter sections to reopen over the next week and a half, bringing back more than one-third of the city's half-million inhabitants, though city officials have backed off a specific date for reopening the famous French Quarter. The areas were spared the worst of Hurricane Katrina's flooding.

Nagin said his plan was developed in cooperation with the federal government and balances safety concerns and the needs of citizens to begin rebuilding.

But Allen said he had spoken personally with the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency and the director for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and returning now wouldn't be advised. A prime public health concern is the tap water, which in most of the city remains unfit for drinking and bathing, he said.

"We really support his plan to restart New Orleans," Allen said. "We are right in sticking with his vision. It's a matter of timing and creating the, enabling the structures that will allow us to do this safely."

Those structures would include an evacuation plan if another storm hits the region and threatens an already delicate levee system, he said.

There are also still bodies to be recovered. Allen said over 90 percent of the primary house-to-house sweep was complete, but some homes are still under water and searchers will have to return.

On Sunday, the death toll in Louisiana increased by more than 60 to 646, according to the state Department of Health and Hospitals. That raised the total Gulf Coast deaths linked to the hurricane to 883.

Despite floodwater remaining in some areas and a lack of residents in the city, business owners were allowed back in to some sections of the city to begin the long process of cleaning up and rebuilding, part of Nagin's plan to begin reviving the city by resuming a limited amount of commerce.

But confronted with damage that could take months to repair, many said hopes for a quick recovery may be little more than a political dream.

"I don't know why they said people could come back and open their businesses," said Margaret Richmond, owner of an antiques shop on the edge of the city's upscale Garden District that was looted. "You can't reopen this. And even if you could, there are no customers here."

The Wal-Mart store in uptown New Orleans, built within the last year, survived the storm but was destroyed by looters.

"They took everything -- all the electronics, the food, the bikes," said John Stonaker, a Wal-Mart security officer. "The only thing left are the country-and-western CDs."

If the store had not been looted, it could be open in two weeks, Stonaker said. Now he doubts it will be open by January.

In the French Quarter, the hum of generators, the thumping of hammers and the whir of power tools cut through the air Saturday as business owners were allowed in to survey the damage and begin cleaning up. Some threw an impromptu street party, complete with a traditional feast of red beans and rice.

At the famous French Quarter restaurant, The Court of Two Sisters, director of food and beverages Andrew Orth was removing plywood from the windows on Saturday morning. The coolers lost power and the food was rotting. Orth estimated it would take several weeks to get the restaurant ready to serve diners again.

"We couldn't open even if the electricity was on," he said.

Associated Press Writer Doug Simpson contributed to this report from Baton Rouge.

9/18/2005 13:34:36
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 19, 2005, 12:41:20 PM
I find myself with a strong gut instinct to let Freedom solve most things.  If people want to put their shoulder to the wheel and take hold of their own lives, , , , sounds good to me.
Title: FEMA Primary Source
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on September 19, 2005, 12:42:03 PM
An interesting "primary source" here.

A FEMA Volunteer Judges The FEMA Response As She Saw It
Written by Jodi Witte

Monday, September 19, 2005

Dear Friends and Family,
I just got home from 15 days in New Orleans and the surrounding areas.  I am tired, and I am emotional.  But mostly I am angry.  I am angry at the news--the television stations, the newspapers--for what I view is a grossly misrepresented placement of blame.  For those of you who know me, you know I work for FEMA as an "intermittent employee" of a disaster response team.  My team, called VMAT or Veterinary Medical Assistance Team, is part of the response branch of FEMA known as the National Disaster Medical System.

Let me tell you how "awful" FEMA's response was from someone who was there on the front lines working for FEMA.

President Bush declared a state of emergency prior to Katrina's landfall due to its strength and location.  This is not normally done before a hurricane makes landfall.  Damn good work by George W., in my honest opinion.  This opened the door for our federal teams to pre-deploy assets in nearby locations so that we were ready when Katrina did hit.  I was contacted by FEMA before the hurricane hit, asking for my availability and to place me on alert.  Many teams were moved into the region including 2 VMAT teams.   My team was mobilized immediately after landfall and I arrived in the area before New Orleans had completely filled with water, before we even realized how bad it was truly going to be.  FEMA responded immediately and with unprecedented numbers of responders.  There were DMAT teams inside the Super Dome before the levee broke.  Never before had so many FEMA teams and personnel been sent into a disaster.

One thing you must understand: the DMAT, VMAT, and DMORT teams that make up the National Disaster Medical System are NOT "first responders."  Our job is to supplement overwhelmed communities if needed.  The initial responsibility lies with the state.  If they become overwhelmed in the aftermath of a disaster where their local hospitals, medical, veterinary, and mortuary assets cannot handle the magnitude of the disaster, we come in and augment their resources.  It takes 24 to 48 hours to mobilize the federal assets in normal circumstances.  We come from every state in the United States, leaving our jobs and families behind at the drop of a hat to help where ever it is needed.  Our cache of equipment and medical supplies must either be moved from our home base or from the federal warehouses in Maryland by truck or plane.  This takes time.  But we were there before Katrina hit and many more arrived immediately after even before knowing the full scope of this disaster.

So why is FEMA being blamed?  I'm not exactly sure.  I really am not. Yes, FEMA was overwhelmed.  God sakes how could it not be?  This hurricane has been the largest natural disaster the United States has had on record.  Nothing can compare.  We train and train for almost anything.  We try to be ready.  But no one was ready for how bad this truly was.  I am sure there were some bad decisions made high up, and of that I cannot deny.  It was a logistical nightmare to get the teams placed and the supplies sent in.  Some stuff arrived too late.  But, seeing how hard the FEMA employees worked to help the people and animals of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama makes me angry and very, very sad to hear us put down so bad on television and in the news.

One day, just a couple days after New Orleans was under water, I was stationed in the New Orleans airport.  This is where I was the first week.  The airport was where all the buses and helicopters that were rescuing people from the city brought them first.  They came in the thousands to the airport and went through lines holding their last bit of possessions, which included a small amount of clothing or keepsakes and often times their pets.  Yes, they got to bring their pets with them on the buses and helicopters.  I know because I was there.  I saw them.  They came in and were triaged by FEMA medical personnel. Minor injuries or illnesses were treated with the utmost care and love by FEMA DMAT teams and then they took their place in line through concourse C to board planes to shelters where they could receive follow up medical treatment.  The very ill were moved into the D concourse area for more thorough medical care and support in a true MASH hospital set up right there inside the airport.  I walked through this area frequently and watched as DMAT members held hands of people critically and gravely ill, cared for them, helped them in so many ways trying to save their lives and to comfort those who could not be saved.

 I walked through feces, urine, blood, and vomit covering the floor of the airport.  I watched custodians working tirelessly to clean up the floor even though it was soiled again as soon it was cleaned.  People were handed water and food as soon as they arrived.  Those who were well, moved through an endless line to concourse B to board both commercial and military planes going to shelters in other states.  I walked the lines of concourse B, C, and D as did other members of my VMAT team to provide any needed veterinary care to the pets who were evacuated with their families.  We cared for stray animals that arrived at the airport too.  See, the coast guard and military helicopters were picking up stray animals if they had room when they would rescue people from the city. FEMA personnel did everything possible to comfort and care for the people of New Orleans.  I know because I was one of them, and I did everything I could for them, and I saw with my own eyes what the others were also doing.
 

 
This is a photo on the FEMA website.  What you don't see here is that this little dog is sitting below the hospital gurney of his master who was critically ill inside one of the DMAT MASH tents.  I walked through this medical tent to check on the dog with a couple other members of my VMAT team.  The nurse had given the dog a dish of water and was feeding him some crackers.  We promised the man we would bring back some food for his dog.  He was very thankful as he laid there with IVs going.  I returned a few minutes later with one other member of my team, bringing a Ziploc bag of dog food.  When we arrived they were moving him to a different stretcher because he needed to be medivac'ed out on a helicopter for more intense medical care.  The helicopter pilot told us he cannot take the dog unless its in a crate.  I stepped up to talk to the very ill man.  I asked him if he would let me care for his dog while he went to the hospital.  He grabbed my hand and had tears in his eyes as he begged me to help him take his dog with him because it was all he had left in the world.  There was nothing else. I looked into this man's eyes as he cried.  He was a middle aged white man with cuts and scrapes all over him.  His face was puffy and feverish with infection.
 
I then looked at the DMAT nurse and the Coast Guard pilot.  Both looked back at me with very grave expressions and each asked me to please find a crate for the dog so he can go with the man.  My teammate and I both knew right then that this man may not make it and we had to make sure he got to spend as much time as possible with his dog.

There was no way we were going to make him leave his dog behind. We took off running and found an empty crate.  It was a bit too small for the dog, but would work temporarily.  We returned and found the pilot waiting for us with the man.  Once we got the dog in the crate and on the stretcher with the man, he again took my hand and thanked us as we cried together.  He said "you have no idea what you have done for me and I will never forget it."  Then he was wheeled away toward the waiting helicopter.
 
So, at the end of this day--a 29 hour shift that I spent at the airport--I arrived back at our bunk location, a building on the campus of LSU where we slept on the floor, and I got to see the news on one of the cable networks.  I was absolutely outraged at the reports of the lack of response by FEMA.  I changed to another cable news network and saw the same thing there.  What they don't mention when they talk about FEMA is the people who make up FEMA's response, working countless hours, pouring their very heart and soul into this response despite being slammed and criticized all over the news.
 
I cried with sadness and anger at how we are viewed all over the world.  I am a FEMA responder who cannot wear my FEMA badge in public in Louisiana because everyone thinks we are so terrible.  Do they even yet mention how hard we have worked for the people and animals of Louisiana?  No, maybe they never will.
 
Just yesterday the radio was criticizing the fact that FEMA had so many trucks filled with water and supplies that were just sitting somewhere and was costing $600 per day each to sit and wait.  Does anyone realize this is the right thing to do?  There is already a tremendous amount of water and supplies in the areas.  The reason there are trucks waiting full of more supplies and water is so they can move at a moments notice to where ever they are needed at any time. Would they rather have the extra supplies sitting in a warehouse where they would have to wait to secure trucks, then load the supplies and water, then move them out?  No.  They complain about the lack of quick response by FEMA yet don't get the whole concept that these supplies and water sitting in trucks ready to go is for quick response and now they criticize FEMA readiness without realizing it.  The contradictions in the news is ridiculous.
 
Now 13 days after I first saw the news reporting how awful FEMA is, I still remain proud to be a member of FEMA, and I am proud of the work I did in New Orleans and I am proud to work for the federal government headed up by a strong and brave president.  It was not easy, and things may not have gone perfectly, but we did and continue to do amazing work there even if no one knows it because they will only look at what went wrong instead of so much that went right.

About the Writer: Jodi Beck Witte is a veterinary technician and weapons of mass destruction specialist for a FEMA disaster response team and manages an animal health website http://www.animalhelp.com. Jodi receives e-mail at jwitte@animalhelp.com.

http://www.chronwatch.com/content/contentDisplay.asp?aid=16863
Title: Rewarding Failure & Punishing Success
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on September 20, 2005, 09:26:01 AM
As somone who spent  a big chunk of his life running restaurants, and who was often times the only white boy in the kitchen, I've had to contend with various manifestations of the welfare state, the most common one being folks who only wanted to work long enough to regain unemployment benefits and then sought a way to be taken off the schedule that wouldn't make them ineligible for unemployment insurance. I understood the game, knew how to counter it, and hence never had a successful unemployment insurance claim brought against me. Word spread and folks who were into that scam curiously stopped trying to get short term gigs in restaurants I ran.

Those up close and personal dealings with a manifestation of the welfare state on a micro level leave the following macro level thoughts ringing true.

September 20, 2005, 8:16 a.m.
?Bold, Persistent Experimentation?
Post-Katrina is a time for changing.
Rich Lowry

It is the other flood: The outpouring of concern for the poor of New Orleans. According to nearly every journalist in America, our consciousness has been raised about the invisible scourge of poverty in this country, and nothing is too much to ask when addressing the plight of the disadvantaged evacuees of New Orleans. They should get every form of aid possible ? except, that is, assistance that might help give them more control over their lives.
     
The most controversial parts of the Bush aid package for New Orleans are the ones that attempt to free the poor from the tentacles of government bureaucracy. He wants to give the unemployed personal accounts to assist in their job search and create a $500 million program to fund school vouchers for displaced children to attend private schools. The current political climate is premised on the notion that no one should say "no" to any Katrina-related program, but Democrats will attempt to veto these proposals.

One argument that has always been advanced to block aid to poor families who want to send their children to private schools is that, in effect, the government can't afford it; it will starve public schools of funding. But no one in Washington has any credibility to say the federal government can't afford anything, since there is very little that this Congress and administration isn't funding fulsomely. Will $500 million for vouchers bleed public-education spending? That's hard to see when President Bush increased federal education spending 65 percent during his first term.

The objection to these Bush proposals isn't fiscal, but philosophical. They serve to undermine the principle of government dependency that underpins the contemporary welfare state, and to which liberals are utterly devoted. In a reversal of the old parable, liberals don't want to teach people how to fish if they can just give them federally funded seafood dishes instead.

The unemployed now get 26 weeks of federal unemployment benefits, which are often extended and also supplemented by various state programs. This is a social safety net that can become a trap. The longer and more generous benefits are, the less incentive someone has to find work (see Germany in particular and Western Europe generally for examples of the phenomenon at work). The Bush program would establish accounts that unemployed people could use as they see fit for education, training programs and child care to support their job search. If they find a job within 13 weeks they can keep up to $1,000 of the $5,000 account.

This would reverse the traditional incentive of unemployment benefits; it would do an end run around work-force investment boards, the state-level bureaucracies that now eat up federal dollars; it would allow each person to tailor federal aid to his own needs and strengths. It would be at least a step toward preserving individual initiative from the enervating clutch of bureaucracy.

The education vouchers, meanwhile, make private school available to kids who had suffered in the atrocious New Orleans public system and help preserve the choice many families had already made. Out of 248,000 students in the broader New Orleans area, 61,000 went to private schools. Opponents of the voucher proposals want to say to bereft families of those private-school students, "Congratulations, you lost everything, and we hope your children now get trapped in public schools on top of it."

New Orleans was partly a catastrophe of the welfare state, which has subsidized inner cities with countless billions of dollars throughout the past 30 years, with little to show for it except more social breakdown. The past few weeks should be the impetus for "bold, persistent experimentation," as Franklin D. Roosevelt put it, in the country's social programs. Instead, we are likely to get more spending on more of the same, and eventually everyone's attention will shift once again from the shame of New Orleans and the persistent failure of the welfare state.
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 22, 2005, 09:30:32 AM
For those who don't know, PN was a noted speechwriter for President Reagan and author of two books about him including "When Character was King" which I highly recommend.  She writes regularly for the WSJ and is one class act IMHO.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Thursday, September 22, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT

PEGGY NOONAN

'Whatever It Takes'
Is Bush's big spending a bridge to nowhere?

George W. Bush, after five years in the presidency, does not intend to get sucker-punched by the Democrats over race and poverty. That was the driving force behind his Katrina speech last week. He is not going to play the part of the cranky accountant--"But where's the money going to come from?"--while the Democrats, in the middle of a national tragedy, swan around saying "Republicans don't care about black people," and "They're always tightwads with the poor."

In his Katrina policy the president is telling Democrats, "You can't possibly outspend me. Go ahead, try. By the time this is over Dennis Kucinich will be crying uncle, Bernie Sanders will be screaming about pork."

That's what's behind Mr. Bush's huge, comforting and boondogglish plan to spend $200 billion or $100 billion or whatever--"whatever it takes"--on Katrina's aftermath. And, I suppose, tomorrow's hurricane aftermath.



George W. Bush is a big spender. He has never vetoed a spending bill. When Congress serves up a big slab of fat, crackling pork, Mr. Bush responds with one big question: Got any barbecue sauce? The great Bush spending spree is about an arguably shrewd but ultimately unhelpful reading of history, domestic politics, Iraq and, I believe, vanity.

This, I believe, is the administration's shrewd if unhelpful reading of history: In a 50-50 nation, people expect and accept high spending. They don't like partisan bickering, there's nothing to gain by arguing around the edges, and arguing around the edges of spending bills is all we get to do anymore. The administration believes there's nothing in it for the Republicans to run around whining about cost. We will spend a lot and the Democrats will spend a lot. But the White House is more competent and will not raise taxes, so they believe Republicans win on this one in the long term.

Domestic politics: The administration believes it is time for the Republican Party to prove to the minority groups of the United States, and to those under stress, that the Republicans are their party, and not the enemy. The Democrats talk a good game, but Republicans deliver, and we know the facts. A lot of American families are broken, single mothers bringing up kids without a father come to see the government as the guy who'll help. It's right to help and we don't lose by helping.

Iraq: Mr. Bush decided long ago--I suspect on Sept. 12, 2001--that he would allow no secondary or tertiary issue to get in the way of the national unity needed to forge the war on terror. So no fighting with Congress over who put the pork in the pan. Cook it, eat it, go on to face the world arm in arm.

As for vanity, the president's aides sometimes seem to see themselves as The New Conservatives, a brave band of brothers who care about the poor, unlike those nasty, crabbed, cheapskate conservatives of an older, less enlightened era.



Republicans have grown alarmed at federal spending. It has come to a head not only because of Katrina but because of the huge pork-filled highway bill the president signed last month, which comes with its own poster child for bad behavior, the Bridge to Nowhere. The famous bridge in Alaska that costs $223 million and that connects one little place with two penguins and a bear with another little place with two bears and a penguin. The Bridge to Nowhere sounds, to conservative ears, like a metaphor for where endless careless spending leaves you. From the Bridge to the 21st Century to the Bridge to Nowhere: It doesn't feel like progress.

A lot of Bush supporters assumed the president would get serious about spending in his second term. With the highway bill he showed we misread his intentions.

The administration, in answering charges of profligate spending, has taken, interestingly, to slighting old conservative hero Ronald Reagan. This week it was the e-mail of a high White House aide informing us that Ronald Reagan spent tons of money bailing out the banks in the savings-and-loan scandal. This was startling information to Reaganites who remembered it was a fellow named George H.W. Bush who did that. Last month it was the president who blandly seemed to suggest that Reagan cut and ran after the attack on the Marine barracks in Lebanon.

Poor Reagan. If only he'd been strong he could have been a good president.

Before that, Mr. Mehlman was knocking previous generations of Republican leaders who just weren't as progressive as George W. Bush on race relations. I'm sure the administration would think to criticize the leadership of Bill Clinton if they weren't so busy having jolly mind-melds with him on Katrina relief. Mr. Clinton, on the other hand, is using his new closeness with the administration to add an edge of authority to his slams on Bush. That's a pol who knows how to do it.

At any rate, Republican officials start diminishing Ronald Reagan, it is a bad sign about where they are psychologically. In the White House of George H.W. Bush they called the Reagan administration "the pre-Bush era." See where it got them.

Sometimes I think the Bush White House needs to be told: It's good to be a revolutionary. But do you guys really need to be opening up endless new fronts? Do you need--metaphor switch--seven or eight big pots boiling on the stove all at the same time? You think the kitchen and the house might get a little too hot that way?

The Republican (as opposed to conservative) default position when faced with criticism of the Bush administration is: But Kerry would have been worse! The Democrats are worse! All too true. The Democrats right now remind me of what the veteran political strategist David Garth told me about politicians. He was a veteran of many campaigns and many campaigners. I asked him if most or many of the politicians he'd worked with had serious and defining political beliefs. David thought for a moment and then said, "Most of them started with philosophy. But they wound up with hunger." That's how the Democrats seem to me these days: unorganized people who don't know what they stand for but want to win, because winning's pleasurable and profitable.

But saying The Bush administration is a lot better than having Democrats in there is not an answer to criticism, it's a way to squelch it. Which is another Bridge to Nowhere.



Mr. Bush started spending after 9/11. Again, anything to avoid a second level fight that distracts from the primary fight, the war on terror. That is, Mr. Bush had his reasons. They were not foolish. At the time they seemed smart. But four years later it is hard for a conservative not to protest. Some big mistakes have been made.

First and foremost Mr. Bush has abandoned all rhetorical ground. He never even speaks of high spending. He doesn't argue against it, and he doesn't make the moral case against it. When forced to spend, Reagan didn't like it, and he said so. He also tried to cut. Mr. Bush seems to like it and doesn't try to cut. He doesn't warn that endless high spending can leave a nation tapped out and future generations hemmed in. In abandoning this ground Bush has abandoned a great deal--including a primary argument of conservatism and a primary reason for voting Republican. And who will fill this rhetorical vacuum? Hillary Clinton. She knows an opening when she sees one, and knows her base won't believe her when she decries waste.

Second, Mr. Bush seems not to be noticing that once government spending reaches a new high level it is very hard to get it down, even a little, ever. So a decision to raise spending now is in effect a decision to raise spending forever.

Third, Mr. Bush seems not to be operating as if he knows the difficulties--the impossibility, really--of spending wisely from the federal level. Here is a secret we all should know: It is really not possible for a big federal government based in Washington to spend completely wisely, constructively and helpfully, and with a sense of personal responsibility. What is possible is to write the check. After that? In New Jersey they took federal Homeland Security funds and bought garbage trucks. FEMA was a hack-stack.

The one time a Homeland Security Department official spoke to me about that crucial new agency's efforts, she talked mostly about a memoir she was writing about a selfless HS official who tries to balance the demands of motherhood against the needs of a great nation. When she finally asked for advice on homeland security, I told her that her department's Web page is nothing but an advertisement for how great the department is, and since some people might actually turn to the site for help if their city is nuked it might be nice to offer survival hints. She took notes and nodded. It alarmed me that they needed to be told the obvious. But it didn't surprise me.

Of the $100 billion that may be spent on New Orleans, let's be serious. We love Louisiana and feel for Louisiana, but we all know what Louisiana is, a very human state with rather particular flaws. As Huey Long once said, "Some day Louisiana will have honest government, and they won't like it." We all know this, yes? Louisiana has many traditions, and one is a rich and unvaried culture of corruption. How much of the $100 billion coming its way is going to fall off the table? Half? OK, let's not get carried away. More than half.

Town spending tends to be more effective than county spending. County spending tends--tends--to be more efficacious than state spending. State spending tends to be more constructive than federal spending. This is how life works. The area closest to where the buck came from is most likely to be more careful with the buck. This is part of the reason conservatives are so disturbed by the gushing federal spigot.

Money is power. More money for the federal government and used by the federal government is more power for the federal government. Is this good? Is this what energy in the executive is--"Here's a check"? Are the philosophical differences between the two major parties coming down, in terms of spending, to "Who's your daddy? He's not your daddy, I'm your daddy." Do we want this? Do our kids? Is it safe? Is it, in its own way, a national security issue?



At a conservative gathering this summer the talk turned to high spending. An intelligent young journalist observed that we shouldn't be surprised at Mr. Bush's spending, he ran from the beginning as a "compassionate conservative." The journalist noted that he'd never liked that phrase, that most conservatives he knew had disliked it, and I agreed. But conservatives understood Mr. Bush's thinking: they knew he was trying to signal to those voters who did not assume that conservatism held within it sympathy and regard for human beings, in fact springs from that sympathy and regard.

But conservatives also understood "compassionate conservatism" to be a form of the philosophy that is serious about the higher effectiveness of faith-based approaches to healing poverty--you spend prudently not to maintain the status quo, and not to avoid criticism, but to actually make things better. It meant an active and engaged interest in poverty and its pathologies. It meant a new way of doing old business.

I never understood compassionate conservatism to mean, and I don't know anyone who understood it to mean, a return to the pork-laden legislation of the 1970s. We did not understand it to mean never vetoing a spending bill. We did not understand it to mean a historic level of spending. We did not understand it to be a step back toward old ways that were bad ways.

I for one feel we need to go back to conservatism 101. We can start with a quote from Gerald Ford, if he isn't too much of a crabbed and reactionary old Republican to quote. He said, "A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you have."

The administration knows that Republicans are becoming alarmed. Its attitude is: "We're having some trouble with part of the base but"--smile--"we can weather that."

Well, they probably can, short term.

Long term, they've had bad history with weather. It can change.



Here are some questions for conservative and Republicans. In answering them, they will be defining their future party.

If we are going to spend like the romantics and operators of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society;

If we are going to thereby change the very meaning and nature of conservatism;

If we are going to increase spending and the debt every year;

If we are going to become a movement that supports big government and a party whose unspoken motto is "Whatever it takes";

If all these things, shouldn't we perhaps at least discuss it? Shouldn't we be talking about it? Shouldn't our senators, congressmen and governors who wish to lead in the future come forward to take a stand?

And shouldn't the Bush administration seriously address these questions, share more of their thinking, assumptions and philosophy?

It is possible that political history will show, in time, that those who worried about spending in 2005 were dinosaurs. If we are, we are. But we shouldn't become extinct without a roar.

Ms. Noonan is a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal and author of "John Paul the Great: Remembering a Spiritual Father," forthcoming in November from Penguin, which you can preorder from the OpinionJournal bookstore. Her column appears Thursdays
Title: Hydrogen Hucksters
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on September 23, 2005, 03:24:27 PM
It's always fun to encounter an iconoclast. This piece looks at hydrogen as a fuel, does the math, and comes to a conclusion the environmental types won't like.


The case for nuke cars?it's called 'hydrogen.'
BY PATRICK BEDARD
October 2005

Funny thing about hydrogen cars: If we were all driving them now, the President's FreedomCAR initiative would be anteing up its $1.8 billion to invent the gasoline engine. Freeing us from hydrogen would be "the moral equivalent of war," to use the words of a long-past energy-crisis president. Gasoline would be the miracle fuel. It would save money by the Fort Knoxful. It would save energy by the Saudi Arabiaful.

To see why this is so, let's look at the numbers. And for once, we're talking about a miracle fuel without speculation. We can see exactly how the "gasoline economy" would work by looking back to a year that's already happened. In 2000, gasoline consumption averaged 8.47 million barrels per day. Gas contains 5.15 million British thermal units of energy per barrel. For big numbers like this, it's customary to think in "quads," or quadrillion BTUs. So the gasoline energy used by motor vehicles in the year 2000 worked out to 16 quads.

Now let's do the same driving in hydrogen cars. Hydrogen is the most plentiful element on earth, but there's no underground pool of it we can drill into. All of nature's hydrogen atoms come married to other atoms in earnestly stable relationships. It takes an industrial process to break apart those marriages to obtain pure hydrogen in a form that can be used by fuel cells.

Think of fuel cells as black boxes into which we put hydrogen on one side and oxygen from the atmosphere on the other. Out the bottom come water and a small electrical current. There is no such thing as free power, of course. If you get power out when you let hydrogen and oxygen get married in a fuel cell, then you must put power into the process of divorcing them.

The industrial divorcing of water molecules is known as electrolysis. This is fuel by immaculate conception, according to most greenies. To make the chemistry work, you must put in 39.4 kilowatt-hours of energy for each kilogram of hydrogen you expect to liberate. Unfortunately, the electrolysis process is only 70 percent efficient. So the total energy input must be 56.3 kilowatt-hours per kilogram of hydrogen.

This energy to be added must come from somewhere. The U.S. has an excellent supply of coal. Coal-fired powerplants are about 40 percent efficient, so 140.8 kilowatt-hours of coal energy are required to net the 56.3 kilowatt-hours of electricity to produce our one kilogram of hydrogen.

My source for these calculations is Donald Anthrop, Ph.D., professor emeritus of environmental studies at San Jose State University, in a Cato Institute report.

In a perfect world, the fuel cell in our car would produce 33.4 kilowatt-hours of useful energy from each kilogram of hydrogen, and 6.0 kilowatt-hours would go to water vapor, giving you back your net investment of 39.4 kilowatt-hours at the electrolysis plant. But the world is not perfect, and the best fuel cells are only about 70 percent efficient. So the energy yield is 23.3 kilowatt-hours.

One more loss must be reckoned with. Hydrogen is a gas. It's lighter than air. Remember, it was the stuffing for the airship Hindenburg. Hydrogen gas (at atmospheric pressure and room temperature) containing the same energy as a gallon of gasoline takes up 3107 gallons of space. To make a useful auto fuel, Anthrop says it must be compressed to at least 4000 psi (Honda uses 5000 psi in the FCX; GM is trying for 10,000). The energy required to do that further trims the yield to 17.4 kilowatt-hours. Pressures higher than 4000 would increase miles available from each fill but cost more energy for compression. Liquefying hydrogen, which BMW advocates, costs upward of 40 percent of hydrogen's energy content.

So far, the numbers say this: Starting with 140.8 kilowatt-hours of energy from coal gives you 17.4 kilowatt-hours of electrical power from the fuel cell to propel the car, or an energy efficiency of 12 percent.

Anthrop goes on to estimate the fuel-cell power needed for the 2.526 billion miles driven in the U.S. in 2000. According to Southern California Edison, the electricity needed per mile for passenger cars is at least 0.46 kilowatt-hour. For the whole U.S. vehicle fleet, that works out to 1.16 trillion kilowatt-hours. You'll need 32 quads of coal, which is twice the energy actually consumed in 2000 with gasoline.

As for global-warming implications, the use of hydrogen from coal instead of gasoline would produce a 2.7-fold increase in carbon emissions.

Of course, all of today's electricity doesn't come from coal. But even with the current mix of sources, including natural gas, nuclear, hydro, solar, and wind, that much hydrogen would raise our carbon output to about twice the 2000 level.

The enviros like to talk about renewable energy. Anthrop has done those calculations as well. Hydro power is our largest source of green electricity, but it would take 15 times the current amount for an all-hydrogen vehicle fleet. Given the pressure to remove existing dams, it's unlikely we'll have any additional hydroelectricity.

Photovoltaic cells? Anthrop says it takes about eight years of cell output to make back the electrical power originally consumed in manufacturing the cell.

Wind power? It defies calculation, in part because wind blows only intermittently.

Virtually all the hydrogen produced today, about 50 million tons worldwide, comes from natural gas. The process, called "steam reforming," is only about 30 percent efficient, much less, he says, "than if the natural gas were simply burned" in the generating plant.

Producing enough hydrogen to replace gasoline by reforming natural gas would increase our gas consumption by 66 percent over 2002's usage. And don't forget the carbon emissions.

That leaves the unspeakable?nukes.

Presumably, BMW knows all of this, yet it has been thumping the tub for hydrogen since the 1970s. Along with hundreds of other invitees, I attended BMW's hydrogen hootenanny at Paramount Pictures in 2001. Mostly, it amounted to a day of corporate preening before California's greenies. Still, BMW is famously brave in confronting technology. Does it have a plan? I summed up the science of this column, in writing, and passed it up through BMW's official channels, along with the obvious question: Where will the necessary quads and quads of energy come from for hydrogen cars? That was nearly two years ago. BMW has not answered.

No answer, of course, is the anwer.
Title: A Vietnam Analogy Primer
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on September 26, 2005, 12:34:54 PM
Why Iraq is not like Vietnam: A Primer for the Geopolitically Challenged

by Mac Johnson
Posted Sep 26, 2005

One of the many negative consequences of America?s defeat in The Vietnam War has been the uncontrolled proliferation of Vietnams since then.

Nicaragua threatened to become another Vietnam.  Lebanon nearly became another Vietnam.  Had Grenada been only slightly larger than a manhole cover and lasted one more hour, it would have become a Caribbean-Style Vietnam.  The invasion of Panama was rapidly degenerating into a Narco-Vietnam, right up until we won.  Likewise, the First Gulf War was certainly developing into another Vietnam, but then sadly, it ended quickly and with few casualties.

For people of a certain age or political stripe, Vietnam is like Elvis: it?s everywhere.  For example, during a long wait at a Chinese Buffet in Georgetown in 1987, Ted Kennedy was reported to have exclaimed ?QUAGMIRE!? and attempted to surrender to a Spanish-speaking busboy.

And that was probably the smart thing to do, because the lesson of Vietnam is: it is best to lose quickly, so as to avoid a quagmire.  It could be argued that the real lesson of Vietnam is that it badly damages a country?s reputation and character to lose at all.  But that is not at all supported by the evidence.  Nope, Vietnam taught us that winners know when to lose immediately.  Entire wars have been fought by countries that have failed to realize this.

No country was therefore more prepared to fight a long unconventional war against grimy little terrorists in strange distant places than America, who learned how to lose in Vietnam.

Thus, it is with considerable joy that those who are ready to teach the lesson of Vietnam (LOSE NOW BEFORE IT?S TOO LATE!), find that they finally have another war that has lasted longer than John Kerry?s first position on it.  Obviously, they crow, we have stepped into some deep Vietnam in Iraq.

The best course of action is to therefore withdraw from Iraq immediately, allow the country to become an oil-producing Al-Qaeda Super-state and retreat to within our secure borders --where no terrorist will ever touch us.  Oh, and begin the political positioning to win election in 2008 on an ?I KNEW IT WAS VIETNAM RIGHT AWAY!? platform.

And I guess you could argue that might be the right thing to do, if only the Iraq conflict were actually like Vietnam in some way.  Disappointingly, other than smelly peacenik rallies and the American press preparing daily to report an Iraqi ?Tet offensive,? the similarities are pretty meager.

The differences, by contrast, are obvious and glaring --but that?s no reason to interrupt a good ?OH GOD! IT?S VIETNAM!? national flashback.  Unless, that is, you want America to win Iraq, rather than lose Vietnam again out of habit.  For that minority of the populace, I present a few tiny little differences between Iraq and Vietnam, ranging from the mundane and material, to the moral and philosophical.

1. The Iraqi insurgency has no universal philosophy capable of attracting Iraq?s entire populace.  The Viet Cong were, I?m told, Communists.  Communism was a worldwide movement preaching a fanciful utopian equality among man, and with a substantial following on every Continent.  It could appeal to intellectuals and peasants, workers and soldiers.  It was a philosophical movement proselytizing universal solidarity.  You never knew who might become a commie.  Every South Vietnamese could be an enemy sympathizer or agent.

The Iraqi insurgency is principally a Sunni Arab tribal affair.  Shiites and Sunnis are not converting one another at all, and have not for the last few hundred years.  The Iraqi Kurds are a nation within a nation and running their own affairs very well.  In this insurgency, the Sunni Arabs (20% of the population) are fighting for continued domination of the Kurds and Shiites (20% and 60% of the population respectively).  This is a cause that the Shiites and Kurds are unlikely to embrace with much enthusiasm.  Were there not a single other difference between the Vietnam and Iraq conflicts, this one would totally disqualify any comparison.  Anyone can become a Communist.  Black men do not join the Klan.  Likewise, the Iraqi insurgency cannot draw recruits from the Shiite and Kurdish majority while espousing a philosophy of Sunni Arab Supremacism.   The worst case, then, is that the population splits 4 to 1 in favor of the new government.  Thus, it can get ugly, but the issue is not really in doubt, long term.

2. The Iraqi insurgency has no inviolable state in which to openly organize the population; and we are not fighting for a tie with that inviolable state.  North Vietnam was a real country, with a border that we could not cross for geopolitical reasons.  Inside that country, the Communists trained and rested, worked in weapons factories on a par with any in Asia, controlled broadcasts, recruiting centers, schools, the police, the courts, the roads, and ports full of foreign supply ships.  We never invaded North Vietnam and so they could never, ever, lose the war.  Every week they sent troops and advisors out of their safe home base to invade South Vietnam in little waves.  Every week we sat outside the border and played goalie against the most recent wave.  Essentially, we fought from the outset of the Vietnam War for a tie: the continued existence of both a North and a South Vietnam.

The Sunni insurgents have no such luxury.  We are in their hometowns, their fields, their roads, their skies, their rivers.  They have no country.  We took it already. They have holes in the ground and basement bomb factories.  The North Vietnamese fielded a modern air force that could often shoot down our most advanced planes.  The Sunni insurgents strap bombs to donkey carts.  They cannot openly recruit or train, because ?their? country is full of Shiites, Kurds and other Sunni Arabs that arrest, shoot, and bomb them constantly.

3. The Sunni insurgents have no Soviet or Chinese support.  A few truckloads of trouble from Syria and Iran cannot in any way compare to the massive material support that the Vietnamese Communists received from the Soviet Union and Red China.  Support to North Vietnam from ?comrades abroad? was estimated by the CIA at $400 million in 1965.  That would be $2 billion per year adjusted for inflation.  There is no comparable aid for our enemies in Iraq.  Additionally, There is no KGB-like worldwide intelligence organization, with agents all over the US government, feeding information to the insurgents.  That is worth more than money, and it did us much harm in Vietnam.

4. North and South Vietnam had a combined population 22% of that of the United States in 1970.  Iraq has a population less than 9% of today?s United States.  The Sunni Arab population of Iraq is less than 2% that of the US.  The scale of today?s problem is in a whole different league than Vietnam ?a much more minor league.

5. The Communist forces of Vietnam had 20 years of experience in guerilla combat against the Japanese and French before America ever sent one soldier into what we call ?the? Vietnam War.  The Sunni insurgents had little established guerilla war capacity at start.  Their inexperience costs them greatly.

6. There were no polling places in Hanoi during the war.  The effect of elections in Iraq has been remarkable.  In just a few months, since the first democratically elected government of Iraq took power, the whole war has changed character for the Iraqis.  The issue is no longer as simple as Sunni rebels fighting an infidel occupier.  It is now Iraqi majority vs. Iraqi minority.  The most effective propaganda weapon the insurgents had is gone, never to return.  The Sunni mainstream that boycotted the first elections has seen control of Iraq swept away from them by millions of other Iraqis.  Now most Sunni leaders are telling their people to vote in the upcoming referendum on the Constitution.  They dare not ignore an election again.  The Vietnamese Communists never faced this dilemma.

7. There was no oil in Vietnam.  Eventually, the money to be made from Iraq?s oil will give rise to a self-interested alliance of leaders with one common goal: profitable stability.  Revenue streams pave their own banks.

8. There is no military draft in today?s US army.  The insurgents know they are not fighting unwilling whiners freshly failed-out of the Communications Program at Kent State.  (OK, no one has ever failed out of a Communications Program, but still you get the point).  The morale of our soldiers is high and in the insurgents? face.  It is only our civilians that threaten to go wobbly.

9. The Communists had never ruled South Vietnam.  By contrast, the Baathist have ruled Iraq.  The Iraqi people know who they are, and how they will really rule.  No one believes they fight for a worker?s paradise.  Saddam Hussein has been recruiting allies for us for the last twenty years, with his mass graves, prisons and rape rooms.

10. Who is Iraq?s Ho Chi Minh?  Iraq?s war is tribal and local.  The closest thing to a grand leader is Shiite Grand Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani, and he?s on Democracy?s side.  Majorities LOVE democracy.

11.  In Vietnam, it was obvious that American withdrawal would probably lead to South Vietnamese defeat.  No one can say that US withdrawal would lead to Shiite surrender or that the Kurds could even be kept within the nation of Iraq.  Our coalition is more than a match for the insurgents.  The insurgents can never defeat the new government in the sense of taking control of the whole country. Their only hope is to cause chaos and carve out local wartime autonomy.  By contrast, the new Iraqi government can totally defeat the insurgents and take control of the whole country.  The insurgents know they are fighting for only a part of the country, at best.

12.  The Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army were not killing one another.  Zarqawi?s foreign Sunni terrorists and the native Sunni insurgents are shooting at each other, and more and more.  Imagine, for a moment, if the United States Military and the New Iraqi Army were ambushing each other between battles with the insurgents.  How much media attention would that produce?  What would it say about the alliance?  The two main forces of the insurgency actually have begun shooting at each other.  The locals think Zarqawi is mad.  Zarqawi thinks the locals are traitors to Islam and weak.

13.  Ho Chi Minh was not, at any point during the Vietnam War, sitting in a box with a French Lawyer while awaiting trial and execution by his vengeful former subjects.  Saddam Hussein is.  There is a certain demonstration of lost power in that.  And Zarqawi could join him any day.

But other than all that, Iraq is just Vietnam all over again --and in High Definition on Cable.  Now consider one last reason why the two wars are not alike, one that goes to the heart of the issue and should be more than enough to shore up even Chuck Hagel: A loss in Vietnam was not going to bring newly energized Viet Cong recruits into New York or San Francisco with truck-bombs or a suitcase nuke to finish us off.  A loss in Iraq--regardless of why the war was begun, or how bad we want to go home, or how little most Americans care about giving foreigners democracy or toiletries--will energize our enemies, as only a historic victory on the world stage can.

If you liked what our quick, casualty-saving withdrawal from Somalia did for us at the Khobar Towers, at our embassies in East Africa, at the waterline of the USS Cole, and at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, then you?ll love what a quick ?casualty-saving? withdrawal from Iraq will do for us for the next twenty years.  It?ll finally make you stop worrying about Vietnam.

http://www.humaneventsonline.com/article.php?id=9300
Title: Political Rants
Post by: rogt on September 26, 2005, 02:06:29 PM
The right-wingers sure do get defensive when anybody makes the comparison between Iraq and Vietnam.

We would never have gotten through (and won) WW1 and WW2 if the American public weren't willing to deal with wars that drag on for years and involve massive casualties.  The "lesson of Vietnam" is that the public must be convinced that the cause is worth the price in order for them to support the war.  Even if the public is willing to swallow a bunch of BS to justify a war, they're only going to do it for so long.
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on September 26, 2005, 02:54:00 PM
rogt says:
Quote
The right-wingers sure do get defensive when anybody makes the comparison between Iraq and Vietnam.


Don't think there's a defensive element to the piece in question. Sarcastic, ironic, caustic, annoyed, exasperated, and so on, sure, but defensive? That fellow was very much on offense.

Quote
We would never have gotten through (and won) WW1 and WW2 if the American public weren't willing to deal with wars that drag on for years and involve massive casualties. The "lesson of Vietnam" is that the public must be convinced that the cause is worth the price in order for them to support the war. Even if the public is willing to swallow a bunch of BS to justify a war, they're only going to do it for so long.


Don't think the analogy stands up 'cause there are a lot of other variables unaccounted for. The one that galls me most are the 90-second passion plays most issues are turned into by the mewling class, aka the press. Their incessant, usually partisan, polarization makes discourse subtler than "no blood for oil" and the ilk pretty darn difficult. My guess is that if, in 1913 or 1942 every living room had a glass teat sitting in it dishing up predigested bits of polarized pabulum and earnest half witticisms the outcomes of those conflicts would have been vastly different.
Title: Never one to Mince Metaphors
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on September 26, 2005, 03:48:00 PM
fighting words
Anti-War, My Foot
The phony peaceniks who protested in Washington.
By Christopher Hitchens
Updated Monday, Sept. 26, 2005, at 11:19 AM PT

Saturday's demonstration in Washington, in favor of immediate withdrawal of coalition forces from Iraq, was the product of an opportunistic alliance between two other very disparate "coalitions." Here is how the New York Times (after a front-page and an inside headline, one of them reading "Speaking Up Against War" and one of them reading "Antiwar Rallies Staged in Washington and Other Cities") described the two constituenciess of the event:
The protests were largely sponsored by two groups, the Answer Coalition, which embodies a wide range of progressive political objectives, and United for Peace and Justice, which has a more narrow, antiwar focus.

The name of the reporter on this story was Michael Janofsky. I suppose that it is possible that he has never before come across "International ANSWER," the group run by the "Worker's World" party and fronted by Ramsey Clark, which openly supports Kim Jong-il, Fidel Castro, Slobodan Milosevic, and the "resistance" in Afghanistan and Iraq, with Clark himself finding extra time to volunteer as attorney for the g?nocidaires in Rwanda. Quite a "wide range of progressive political objectives" indeed, if that's the sort of thing you like. However, a dip into any database could have furnished Janofsky with well-researched and well-written articles by David Corn and Marc Cooper?to mention only two radical left journalists?who have exposed "International ANSWER" as a front for (depending on the day of the week) fascism, Stalinism, and jihadism.

The group self-lovingly calling itself "United for Peace and Justice" is by no means "narrow" in its "antiwar focus" but rather represents a very extended alliance between the Old and the New Left, some of it honorable and some of it redolent of the World Youth Congresses that used to bring credulous priests and fellow-traveling hacks together to discuss "peace" in East Berlin or Bucharest. Just to give you an example, from one who knows the sectarian makeup of the Left very well, I can tell you that the Worker's World Party?Ramsey Clark's core outfit?is the product of a split within the Trotskyist movement. These were the ones who felt that the Trotskyist majority, in 1956, was wrong to denounce the Russian invasion of Hungary. The WWP is the direct, lineal product of that depraved rump. If the "United for Peace and Justice" lot want to sink their differences with such riffraff and mount a joint demonstration, then they invite some principled political criticism on their own account. And those who just tag along ? well, they just tag along.

To be against war and militarism, in the tradition of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, is one thing. But to have a record of consistent support for war and militarism, from the Red Army in Eastern Europe to the Serbian ethnic cleansers and the Taliban, is quite another. It is really a disgrace that the liberal press refers to such enemies of liberalism as "antiwar" when in reality they are straight-out pro-war, but on the other side. Was there a single placard saying, "No to Jihad"? Of course not. Or a single placard saying, "Yes to Kurdish self-determination" or "We support Afghan women's struggle"? Don't make me laugh. And this in a week when Afghans went back to the polls, and when Iraqis were preparing to do so, under a hail of fire from those who blow up mosques and U.N. buildings, behead aid workers and journalists, proclaim fatwahs against the wrong kind of Muslim, and utter hysterical diatribes against Jews and Hindus.

Some of the leading figures in this "movement," such as George Galloway and Michael Moore, are obnoxious enough to come right out and say that they support the Baathist-jihadist alliance. Others prefer to declare their sympathy in more surreptitious fashion. The easy way to tell what's going on is this: Just listen until they start to criticize such gangsters even a little, and then wait a few seconds before the speaker says that, bad as these people are, they were invented or created by the United States. That bad, huh? (You might think that such an accusation?these thugs were cloned by the American empire for God's sake?would lead to instant condemnation. But if you thought that, gentle reader, you would be wrong.)

The two preferred metaphors are, depending on the speaker, that the Bin-Ladenists are the fish that swim in the water of Muslim discontent or the mosquitoes that rise from the swamp of Muslim discontent. (Quite often, the same images are used in the same harangue.) The "fish in the water" is an old trope, borrowed from Mao's hoary theory of guerrilla warfare and possessing a certain appeal to comrades who used to pore over the Little Red Book. The mosquitoes are somehow new and hover above the water rather than slip through it. No matter. The toxic nature of the "water" or "swamp" is always the same: American support for Israel. Thus, the existence of the Taliban regime cannot be swamplike, presumably because mosquitoes are born and not made. The huge swamp that was Saddam's Iraq has only become a swamp since 2003. The organized murder of Muslims by Muslims in Pakistan, Iraq, and Afghanistan is only a logical reaction to the summit of globalizers at Davos. The stoning and veiling of women must be a reaction to Zionism. While the attack on the World Trade Center?well, who needs reminding that chickens, or is it mosquitoes, come home to roost?

There are only two serious attempts at swamp-draining currently under way. In Afghanistan and Iraq, agonizingly difficult efforts are in train to build roads, repair hospitals, hand out ballot papers, frame constitutions, encourage newspapers and satellite dishes, and generally evolve some healthy water in which civil-society fish may swim. But in each case, from within the swamp and across the borders, the most poisonous snakes and roaches are being recruited and paid to wreck the process and plunge people back into the ooze. How nice to have a "peace" movement that is either openly on the side of the vermin, or neutral as between them and the cleanup crew, and how delightful to have a press that refers to this partisanship, or this neutrality, as "progressive."

Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. His most recent books include Love, Poverty, and War and Thomas Jefferson: Author of America.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2126913/
Title: JC ain't PC
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on September 27, 2005, 09:11:37 AM
As an agnostic I have a hard time getting worked up about most religious tempests. Still, the tizzy inspired here about a reference to Christ in a speech to Ivy League freshpersons inspires more than a shake of the head.

September 27, 2005, 8:12 a.m.
?God Fearing? Dartmouth
Ivy overreaction.

By Stefan Beck

It's become a truism that student government is the bailiwick of shallow, egotistical resume-padders. Tracy Flick, the junior-varsity Lady Macbeth of the 1999 movie Election, was instantly recognizable, as was her nemesis, Tammy Metzler. Remember Tammy's speech? "The same pathetic charade happens every year, and everyone makes the same pathetic promises just so they can put it on their transcripts to get into college." Hard to argue with that. The odd thing is that sometimes the Tracy Flicks go off to college and do it all over again.

A few days ago, a friend of mine pointed me to a Convocation speech given by Noah Riner '06, Dartmouth's student-body president, to the class of '09. I scanned the page, a pastiche of quotes by Martin Luther King Jr., Shakespeare, Bono. Why had my friend given me this? "It mentions Jesus," he explained. "People will go berserk."

So it does. It mentions Jesus, and then Bono mentions Jesus, and then Riner passes the baton to Dr. King ? perhaps thinking nobody will wise up to the Lord's presence. I confess that at this point, I thought my friend was indulging a bit of right-wing paranoia. Surely nothing as banal, as reliably soporific, as Riner's address could rankle anyone. Surely people didn't even listen to these things.

As it happens, I couldn't have been more wrong. The bored work in mysterious ways, and a number of Dartmouth students saw the speech as a fine occasion for an attention-grabbing moral tantrum. The Daily Dartmouth's "Verbum Ultimum" allowed that "Riner had every right, as a member of a community that values the freedom of speech, to speak freely about what matters to him." But he chose an "inappropriate forum" ? perish the thought ? and "[preached] his faith from a commandeered pulpit." Clearly, Riner is corrupting the youth of Hanover. Somebody fetch the hemlock.

The Student Assembly's vice president for student life (savor that deliciously Orwellian title), Kaelin Goulet '07, resigned immediately. "I consider his choice of topic for the Convocation speech reprehensible and an abuse of power," she said. Addressing Riner directly, she wrote: "Your first opportunity to represent Student Assembly to the incoming freshmen was appalling. You embarrass the organization; you embarrass yourself. . . . I pity the freshmen in Leede Arena yesterday."

Got all that? Pity is something you feel for hurricane refugees, not for the "victims" of a convocation speech. Woe betide the student who hears Christ's name in an "inappropriate forum"! It's almost as though Goulet saw Riner as Father Karas and the freshmen as a host of demons, writhing in agony beneath a spray of verbal holy water. This is condescension distilled to its essence. Usually it's the college acting in loco parentis, not the other students. What we are witnessing here is trickle-down ideology, with students employed as a sort of Securitate for their administrative overseers.

Could Goulet really have felt anything like the outrage and disappointment on display in her letters? Let's examine Riner's sole reference to Jesus:

Jesus' message of redemption is simple. People are imperfect, and there are consequences for our actions. He gave His life for our sin so that we wouldn't have to bear the penalty of the law; so we could see love. The problem is me; the solution is God's love: Jesus on the cross, for us.
It may be unusual for a student speech, but the Edict of Worms it is not.

Another Student Assembly member, Tim Andreadis '07, complained that Riner "did not clearly label his religiously charged comments as reflecting his own beliefs." A lack of clear labels ? that's the real problem, isn't it? Just as Andreadis doubtless expects his plastic baggies to be clearly labeled a choking hazard, so he expects every word out of a fellow student's mouth to be accompanied by an explicit disclaimer. Who needs in loco parentis when so many students are big enough to pull their own Huggies on?

And let's not leave out Paul Heintz '06, whose crudely hieroglyphic "Guy & Fellow" comic strip "parodied" Riner's speech. In the strip, a stick figure with Riner's head says, "Jesus, together you and I shall rule the world and vanquish all those infidels and looters and rioters." Pot-smoking Jesus replies, "Yo, chill out, dawg. Take a hit of this sh** and chill the f*** out." Pot-smoking Jesus! How marvelously transgressive! Now have a gingersnap and back to the nursery with you.

As responses to the speech go, this had at least the merit of being too demotic to match the self-righteousness of all those pompous op-eds and public resignations. Of course, this made it no less embarrassing.

Is it worth training the Doppler radar on this teacup tempest? Higher education will always have its dull speeches, its Tracy Flicks, its outsize outrage. After a while, most students will forget about this and go on to something useful. But none of that is the real story. The fascinating ? and disappointing ? thing is that something as ordinary and blameless as religious belief should seem such a terrifying menace to college students. And what delicate little Hummels those students have become: They use tepid terms like "community" and "inappropriate" and "alienating" and then congratulate themselves for their sensitivity. I pray they never have to face something more trying than words ? but I certainly wouldn't count on it.

? Stefan Beck is assistant editor of the New Criterion.
   
http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/beck200509270812.asp
Title: Islamofascist & Free Exercise of Choice
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on September 30, 2005, 10:21:14 AM
Think this piece overreaches and ulitmately flounders, but it does make several points that resonate. I've always felt, for instance that those with martial skills who choose peace are a lot more worthy of respect than the mewling peace protesters who gather for the cameras. The former opt on a regular basis not to slap idiots upside the head while the latter embraces an emotional onanism and exhibitionism that does little more than manufacture foolishness. This piece speaks to a similar dichotomy.

Liberals and Islamofascists
September 29th, 2005

What merit is there in not stealing because you fear that your hand will be cut off? In not drinking because you have no alcohol? In not being aroused by a woman in a burqa?

An Islamofascist walks the streets of America and sees a man enter a massage parlor. "What an immoral society!" he thinks. He does not notice the men who do not go in. He sees the temptations Americans are subject to, but not their resistance to those temptations. He sees their immorality, but not their morality.

Americans are free to be either moral or immoral. How immoral would our enemies be if they were free?

America is free to be immoral, but when America is moral, its morality is genuine?because it is free to be immoral. No one praises prison inmates for not breaking into houses?or Saudi women for not having automobile accidents.

The Islamofascist cannot conceive of morality without coercion. To the Islamofascist, coercion is morality, and freedom is immorality. Freedom is license to him, not the arena in which we choose good or evil. Morality is imposed and external, not free and internal.

To the Biblically-grounded Christian or Jew, ?the battle line between good and evil runs through the heart of every man,? in the glorious words of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. For too many Muslims, the battle line between good and evil runs between the Islamic world and the world yet to be conquered.

Christians and Jews do have a duty to fight evil outside themselves, but their primary adversary must always be the enemy within. The rhetoric of Islamofascists reverses this priority, sometimes to the point of completely forgetting their own sins. America does not need lessons in sexual morality from men who take baths and perfume themselves in expectation of the seventy-two virgins they will each enjoy as soon as they blow themselves up next to Christians or Jews.

Ideological Affinities

Unfortunately, many in the West also see only the sins of America. They also confuse license and freedom, repression and self-control, taxation and charity. They also equate good conduct motivated by fear of temporal rulers and good conduct motivated by love of God and man.

Above all, they too focus on the sins and alleged sins of others to the exclusion of their own sins and thereby equate changing someone else?s behavior with doing the right thing. The most moral people are, in their view, the people who most vigorously condemn traditional American values. An ordinary person might strive to benefit society by giving to a charity or volunteering; they strive to benefit society by promoting political and social change.

They confuse poverty imposed by an economic system and voluntary poverty, destitution and poverty of spirit, backwardness and protection of the environment. They think that Americans are more materialist than people with fewer material goods?as if people in other countries don?t desire the same things. They think that socialism is compatible with Christianity and capitalism is not, forgetting that socialism is as much a system for producing material goods as capitalism is, just a less efficient one. They think that there is something inherently wrong with wanting a car that does not break down or a computer that does not crash, but cars, computers, and other consumer goods are not evil. Making idols of them is evil; putting them to good use is not. They think that because Native Americans were technologically backward, they must have been environmentalists. Again and again, they confuse morality with constraint: the constraint of poverty, the constraint of inefficiency, the constraint of backwardness, ultimately the constraint of tyranny.

To their way of thinking, the Internal Revenue Service is a charitable organization, like the Red Cross or the Salvation Army; indeed it is more charitable because contributions to it are involuntary. Charity consists precisely in the taking of the money. Taxation is thus a virtue in and of itself, reflecting the merit of the society imposing it.

Money that is freely given falls short of true charity because it lacks the element of coercion essential to their morality. How can a society be moral if it allows people to forgo charity? What kind of charity is it that allows people not to give?

Morality consists in telling other people what to do, and charity consists in aiding the poor with other people?s money. Thus, Hillary Clinton says that conservatives place too much emphasis on ?private morality? (obeying the Ten Commandments) and not enough emphasis on ?public morality? (obeying her).

But surely I am being unfair. What, other than enemies, does Hillary Clinton share with Islamofascists? Liberals in America support gay rights; Islamofascists want to stone homosexuals. Liberals are feminists; Islamofascists don?t want to let women out of the house. Liberals hate war; the terrorists want to set the world ablaze with it.

Well, similar contradictions were not too much for liberals in the Cold War. The Soviet Union did not embody their values. Or so they tell us.

On the other hand, the communists did hold up before their apologists a utopian vision, while the Islamofascists don?t even bother to present a positive message. It turns out that the Islamofascists know a lot of things that we don?t. For instance, that a message of pure negativity has as much appeal as the demagogic ideal of a world without poverty or strife. Liberals are just as energetic in explaining away the mass murder of Kurdish villagers by Saddam Hussein as they were in praising Potemkin villages in the Soviet Union. How long does it take a liberal to turn a discussion of the use of poison gas on Kurds to a discussion of the evils of Reagan and Bush?

So perhaps liberals are not responding to the Islamofascist message after all. They will simply excuse the behavior of enemies of the United States no matter how opposed the values of those enemies are to the values of liberals. Indeed, liberals and Islamofascists are opposites. Or so they tell us.

However, as the agreement between liberals and Islamofascists on the fundamental issue of the relationship between freedom and morality suggests, there is a deep ideological affinity between liberals and Islamofascists. They do not simply share hatred of President Bush. They are bound by more than their enemies.

An examination of the history of Islam and of the relationship of the West to it shows that there are always those in the West who will make common cause with Islam. Without their aid, Islam would have long ago collapsed.

Out of pure expediency or Realpolitik, Western merchants will trade with Islamic enemies of the West and even sell them arms, and Western powers will ally themselves with Islam, as when the Austro-Hungarian Empire allied with the Ottoman Empire in World War I or when the United States and the Soviet Union vied for allies in the Middle East during the Cold War.

Out of what might be called ideological expediency, some in the West have attempted to take ideological advantage of the Islamic threat. During the height of religious strife in Europe, for instance, many Protestants saw in Islam a critique of Catholicism similar to their own, and many Catholics saw in it a warning against schism and heresy. This ideological expediency can develop into a genuine ideological affinity, as is happening today and has been happening for hundreds of years.

For a striking example of this ideological expediency/affinity, ask yourself who wrote the following poem, translated from the original German. Hint: the author was not a Muslim.

A Song to Mahomet

See the mountain spring
Flash gladdening
Like a glance of stars;
Higher than the clouds
Kindly spirits
Fuelled his youth
In thickets twixt the crags.
Brisk as a young blade
Out of cloud he dances
Down to marble rocks
And leaps again
Skyward exultant.
Down passages that hang from peaks
He chases pebbles many-coloured,
Early like a leader striding
Snatches up and carries onward
Brother torrents.
Flowers are born beneath his footprint
In the valley down below,
From his breathing
Pastures live.
Yet no valley of the shadows
Can contain him
And no flowers that clasp his knees,
Blandishing with looks of love;
To the lowland bursts his way,
A snake uncoiling.
Freshets nestle
Flocking to his side. He comes
Into the lowland, silver sparkling
And with him the lowland sparkles,
And the lowland rivers call,
Mountain freshets call exultant:
Brother, take your brothers with you,
With you to your ancient father,
To the everlasting ocean,
Who with open arms awaits us,
Arms which, ah, open in vain
To clasp us who are craving for him;
Avid sands consume us
In the desert, sun overhead
Will suck our blood, blocked by a hill
To pools we shrink! Brother, take us,
Take your lowland brothers with you,
Take your brothers of the mountains,
To your father take us all!
Join me then!
And now he swells
More lordly still; one single kin,
They loft the prince and bear him high
Onward as he rolls triumphant,
Naming countries, in his track
Towns and cities come to be.
On he rushes, unrelenting,
Leaves the turrets tipped with flame,
Marble palaces, creation
Of his plentitude, behind him.
Cedar houses he like Atlas
Carries on his giant shoulders;
Flags a thousand rustling flutter
In the air above his head,
Testifying to his glory.
So he bears his brothers, bears
His treasures and his children surging
In a wave of joy tumultuous
To their waiting father?s heart.

Who is it who says that Muhammad makes the lowland sparkle, that flowers spring from his footsteps and cities from his track? Who is it who celebrates the tumultuous joy of Muhammad?s followers and the plenitude of his creation?
"A Song to Mahomet" was written in 1772-1773 by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the least romantic of the German Romantics, the least insane of the German intellectual giants of the last 250 years.

Goethe was not an aberration. Anyone wishing to understand the long tradition of Western affinity with Islam, a tradition that is as old as Islam itself, should read Islam and the West by Bernard Lewis, especially the chapter "Gibbon on Muhammad," in which Lewis says

"the image of Muhammad as a wise, tolerant [!], unmystical [!], and undogmatic [!] ruler became widespread in the period of the Enlightenment, and it finds expression in writers as diverse as Goethe, Condercet, and Voltaire." [exclamation points added]

What started as the (rather absurd) idea that Muhammad was a forerunner of Luther and Calvin and that Islam could as a result be an ally of the Protestants against Roman Catholicism morphed into the (also absurd) idea that Islam was refreshingly free from the dogmatism of Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular and that it could as a result be an ally of the Enlightenment against the forces of darkness, that is, Christianity, which in turn morphed into the (beyond absurd) idea that Islam is an innocent victim of the warmongering Bush Administration and that as a result progressives in the United States should stand with the resistance in Iraq against imperialism, Zionism, Neo-Conservatism, capitalism, globalism, unilateralism, consumerism, racism, sexism, speciesism, heterosexism, homophobia, Halliburton, homework, hot weather, hurricanes, homemakers, electoral fraud, SUVs, McDonalds, AIDS, Starbucks, Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, conservative bloggers, censorship, carnivorousness, second-hand smoke, the CIA, cell phone rays, and impurities in paint thinner.

George Orwell said that only university professors could be stupid enough to believe that the capitalist democracies were no better than Nazi Germany. Stupidity, or at least education, must be more widespread in our day because an equivalent belief is held by respectable churchman and tenured radical alike. America is no better than Iraq under Saddam Hussein or Iran under Ayatollah Khomeini, they think, and we should not impose our way of life on others.

Of course, most Americans had more in mind imposing death on Hussein and Khomeini than our way of life on Iraq and Iran, but the charm of this belief is that it appeals to robed religious leaders as much as to campus radicals in academic gowns, not to speak of similarly appareled sheiks.

Liberals posing as Christians reason, if one can call it reason, as follows: Sexual exploitation is all around us, along with crass materialism and a callous disregard for the unfortunate. Americans are spoiled, selfish, and stupid. Our insatiable desire to remake the world in our image is matched only by our ignorance of it. Who are we to tell people how they should live? The United States is the only country ever to drop atomic bombs on anyone. We have tens of thousands of nuclear weapons, but we begrudge other nations even a few. What hypocrites! What right do we have to tell Iran and North Korea that they can?t have nuclear weapons?

The radicals fear that we will create a virtuous Iraq, these Christians that we will create an immoral one. The trouble is that nowadays one can hardly tell the difference between the radicals and some religious leaders. Certainly the difference between debauched sinners and Anglican bishops is increasingly indiscernible. Madonna is a slut who found religion and went whoring after false gods; they might as well make her an archbishop of certain denominations.

The bishops of some churches think that we could have peace for the asking. We have asked. Have they not heard the answer? "Peace! Peace!" they cry, though there is no peace. They fancy themselves prophetic witnesses to an unjust society. Unjust it may be, though not as unjust as they think, but if they are prophets, all that is necessary for prophecy is to repeat what network anchors say. They style themselves learned and get their information from newspapers, television, government radio, and oddball magazines. What have these prophets ever foreseen?

They call us to charity and denounce us for donating our best blood and hundreds of billions of dollars to the freedom of Iraq. They say that we are addicted to consumer goods and shriek when we spend our money to help the most downtrodden. They call us racists when we fight for the well being of Arabs. They call us Crusaders as we spread religious freedom. They call us selfish as we give them money. They attribute our prosperity to exploitation of the Third World, but never refuse the donations we give them out of our allegedly ill-gotten gains. They repeat enemy propaganda and huffily complain that we doubt their patriotism.

Islamofascists, religious big wigs, and campus radicals say that America is ruled by plutocrats who use sex to sell to a consumer society. Then Saudi moneybags buy girls from India and Pakistan, American prelates hide child molesters from the police, and campus radicals, who say that what they do in the privacy of their own bedrooms is none of our business, celebrate ?transgressive? sexual acts in public. Certainly, these groups deserve each other. But do the rest of us deserve them?
Title: Carlin on Katrina?
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on October 07, 2005, 01:04:27 PM
I can't vouch that this was truly penned by George Carlin, but as someone who grew up with all his comedy LPs (back in those prehistoric days when CDs had two sides and were much bigger) this certainly sounds like something he'd say.

George Carlin on Katrina (funny)
email going around

Been sitting here with my ass in a wad, wanting to speak out about the bullshit going on in New Orleans. For the people of New Orleans... First we would like to say, Sorry for your loss. With that said, Lets go through a few hurricane rules: (Unlike an earthquake, we know it's coming)

#1. A mandatory evacuation means just that..Get the hell out.

Don't blame the Government after they tell you to go. If they hadn't said anything, I can see the argument. They said get out... if you didn't, it's your fault, not theirs. (We don't want to hear it, even if you don't have a car, you can get out.)

#2. If there is an emergency, stock up on water and non-perishables. If you didn't do this, it's not the Government's fault you're starving.

#2a. If you run out of food and water, find a store that has some.

(Remember, shoes, TV's, DVD's and CD's are not edible. Leave them alone.)

#2b. If the local store has been looted of food or water, leave your neighbor's TV and stereo alone. (See # 2a) They worked hard to get their stuff. Just because they were smart enough to leave during a mandatory evacuation, doesn't give you the right to take their stuff...it's theirs, not yours.

#3. If someone comes in to help you, don't shoot at them and then complain no one is helping you. I'm not getting shot to help save some dumbass who didn't leave when told to do so.

#4. If you are in your house that is completely under water, your belongings are probably too far gone for anyone to want them. If someone does want them, let them have them and hopefully they'll die in the filth. Just leave!

(It's New Orleans, find a voodoo warrior and put a curse on them)

#5. My tax money should not pay to rebuild a 2 million dollar house, a sports stadium or a floating casino. Also, my tax money shouldn't go to rebuild a city that is under sea level. You wouldn't build your house on quicksand would you? You want to live below sea-level, do your country some good and join the Navy.

#6. Regardless of what the Poverty Pimps Jessie Jackson and Al Sharpton want you to believe, The US Government didn't create the Hurricane as a way to eradicate the black people of New Orleans; (Neither did Russia as a way to destroy America). The US Government didn't cause global warming that caused the hurricane (We've been coming out of an ice age for over a million years).

#7. The government isn't responsible for giving you anything. This is the land of the free and the home of the brave, but you gotta work for what you want. McDonalds and Wal-Mart are always hiring, get a damn job and stop spooning off the people who are actually working for a living.

President Kennedy said it best..."Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country."

Thank you for allowing me to rant.

George Carlin
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 09, 2005, 06:53:06 AM
Snopes says its not GC-- but its got his spirit I think.
Title: Political Rants
Post by: SB_Mig on October 17, 2005, 09:03:16 AM
On message
By Lewis H. Lapham
Harper's Magazine, October 2005

"But I venture the challenging statement that if American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens, then Fascism and Communism, aided, unconsciously perhaps, by old-line Tory Republicanism, will grow in strength in our land." -Franklin D. Roosevelt, November 4, 1938

In 1938 the word "fascism" hadn't yet been transferred into an abridged metaphor for all the world's unspeakable evil and monstrous crime, and on coming across President Roosevelt's prescient remark in one of Umberto Eco's essays, I could read it as prose instead of poetry -- a reference not to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse or the pit of Hell but to the political theories that regard individual citizens as the property of the government, happy villagers glad to wave the flags and wage the wars, grateful for the good fortune that placed them in the care of a sublime leader. Or, more emphatically, as Benito Mussolini liked to say, "Everything in the state. Nothing outside the state. Nothing against the state."

The theories were popular in Europe in the 1930s (cheering crowds, rousing band music, splendid military uniforms), and in the United States they numbered among their admirers a good many important people who believed that a somewhat modified form of fascism (power vested in the banks and business corporations instead of with the army) would lead the country out of the wilderness of the Great Depression -- put an end to the Pennsylvania labor troubles, silence the voices of socialist heresy and democratic dissent. Roosevelt appreciated the extent of fascism's popularity at the political box office; so does Eco, who takes pains in the essay "Ur-Fascism," published in The New York Review of Books in 1995, to suggest that it's a mistake to translate fascism into a figure of literary speech. By retrieving from our historical memory only the vivid and familiar images of fascist tyranny (Gestapo firing squads, Soviet labor camps, the chimneys at Treblinka), we lose sight of the faith-based initiatives that sustained the tyrant's rise to glory. The several experiments with fascist government, in Russia and Spain as well as in Italy and Germany, didn't depend on a single portfolio of dogma, and so Eco, in search of their common ground, doesn't look for a unifying principle or a standard text. He attempts to describe a way of thinking and a habit of mind, and on sifting through the assortment of fantastic and often contradictory notions -- Nazi paganism, Franco's National Catholicism, Mussolini's corporatism, etc. -- he finds a set of axioms on which all the fascisms agree. Among the most notable:

The truth is revealed once and only once.

Parliamentary democracy is by definition rotten because it doesn't represent the voice of the people, which is that of the sublime leader.

Doctrine outpoints reason, and science is always suspect.

Critical thought is the province of degenerate intellectuals, who betray the culture and subvert traditional values.

The national identity is provided by the nation's enemies.

Argument is tantamount to treason.

Perpetually at war, the state must govern with the instruments of fear. Citizens do not act; they play the supporting role of "the people" in the grand opera that is the state.

Eco published his essay ten years ago, when it wasn't as easy as it has since become to see the hallmarks of fascist sentiment in the character of an American government. Roosevelt probably wouldn't have been surprised.

He'd encountered enough opposition to both the New Deal and to his belief in such a thing as a United Nations to judge the force of America's racist passions and the ferocity of its anti-intellectual prejudice. As he may have guessed, so it happened. The American democracy won the battles for Normandy and Iwo Jima, but the victories abroad didn't stem the retreat of democracy at home, after 1968 no longer moving "forward as a living force, seeking day and night to better the lot" of its own citizens, and now that sixty years have passed since the bomb fell on Hiroshima, it doesn't take much talent for reading a cashier's scale at Wal-Mart to know that it is fascism, not democracy, that won the heart and mind of America's "Greatest Generation," added to its weight and strength on America's shining seas and fruited plains.

A few sorehead liberal intellectuals continue to bemoan the fact, write books about the good old days when everybody was in charge of reading his or her own mail. I hear their message and feel their pain, share their feelings of regret, also wish that Cole Porter was still writing songs, that Jean Harlow and Robert Mitchum hadn't quit making movies. But what's gone is gone, and it serves nobody's purpose to deplore the fact that we're not still riding in a coach to Philadelphia with Thomas Jefferson. The attitude is cowardly and French, symptomatic of effete aesthetes who refuse to change with the times.

As set forth in Eco's list, the fascist terms of political endearment are refreshingly straightforward and mercifully simple, many of them already accepted and understood by a gratifyingly large number of our most forward-thinking fellow citizens, multitasking and safe with Jesus. It does no good to ask the weakling's pointless question, "Is America a fascist state?" We must ask instead, in a major rather than a minor key, "Can we make America the best damned fascist state the world has ever seen," an authoritarian paradise deserving the admiration of the international capital markets, worthy of "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind"? I wish to be the first to say we can. We're Americans; we have the money and the know-how to succeed where Hitler failed, and history has favored us with advantages not given to the early pioneers.

We don't have to burn any books.

The Nazis in the 1930s were forced to waste precious time and money on the inoculation of the German citizenry, too well-educated for its own good, against the infections of impermissible thought. We can count it as a blessing that we don't bear the burden of an educated citizenry. The systematic destruction of the public-school and library systems over the last thirty years, a program wisely carried out under administrations both Republican and Democratic, protects the market for the sale and distribution of the government's propaganda posters. The publishing companies can print as many books as will guarantee their profit (books on any and all subjects, some of them even truthful), but to people who don't know how to read or think, they do as little harm as snowflakes falling on a frozen pond.

We don't have to disturb, terrorize, or plunder the bourgeoisie.

In Communist Russia as well as in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, the codes of social hygiene occasionally put the regime to the trouble of smashing department-store windows, beating bank managers to death, inviting opinionated merchants on complimentary tours (all expenses paid, breathtaking scenery) of Siberia. The resorts to violence served as study guides for free, thinking businessmen reluctant to give up on the democratic notion that the individual citizen is entitled to an owner's interest in his or her own mind.

The difficulty doesn't arise among people accustomed to regarding themselves as functions of a corporation. Thanks to the diligence of out news media and the structure of our tax laws, our affluent and suburban classes have taken to heart the lesson taught to the aspiring serial killers rising through the ranks at West Point and the Harvard Business School -- think what you're told to think, and not only do you get to keep the house in Florida or command of the Pentagon press office but on some sunny prize day not far over the horizon, the compensation committee will hand you a check for $40 million, or President George W. Bush will bestow on you the favor of a nickname as witty as the ones that on good days elevate Karl Rove to the honorific "Boy Genius," on bad days to the disappointed but no less affectionate "Turd Blossom." Who doesn't now know that the corporation is immortal, that it is the corporation that grants the privilege of an identity, confers meaning on one's life, gives the pension, a decent credit rating, and the priority standing in the community? Of course the corporation reserves the right to open one's email, test one's blood, listen to the phone calls, examine one's urine, hold the patent on the copyright to any idea generated on its premises. Why ever should it not? As surely as the loyal fascist knew that it was his duty to serve the state, the true American knows that it is his duty to protect the brand.

Having met many fine people who come up to the corporate mark -- on golf courses and commuter trains, tending to their gardens in Fairfield County while cutting back the payrolls in Michigan and Mexico -- I'm proud to say (and I think I speak for all of us here this evening with Senator Clinton and her lovely husband) that we're blessed with a bourgeoisie that will welcome fascism as gladly as it welcomes the rain in April and the sun in June. No need to send for the Gestapo or the NKVD; it will not be necessary to set examples.

We don't have to gag the press or seize the radio stations.

People trained to the corporate style of thought and movement have no further use for free speech, which is corrupting, overly emotional, reckless, and ill-informed, not calibrated to the time available for television talk or to the performance standards of a Super Bowl halftime show. It is to our advantage that free speech doesn't meet the criteria of the free market. We don't require the inspirational genius of a Joseph Goebbels; we can rely instead on the dictates of the Nielsen ratings and the camera angles, secure in the knowledge that the major media syndicates run the business on strictly corporatist principles -- afraid of anything disruptive or inappropriate, committed to the promulgation of what is responsible, rational, and approved by experts. Their willingness to stay on message is a credit to their professionalism.

The early twentieth-century fascists had to contend with individuals who regarded their freedom of expression as a necessity -- the bone and marrow of their existence, how they recognized themselves as human beings. Which was why, if sometimes they refused appointments to the state-run radio stations, they sometimes were found dead on the Italian autostrada or drowned in the Kiel Canal. The authorities looked upon their deaths as forms of self-indulgence. The same attitude governs the agreement reached between labor and management at our leading news organizations. No question that the freedom of speech is extended to every American -- it says so in the Constitution -- but the privilege is one that musn't be abused. Understood in a proper and financially rewarding light, freedom of speech is more trouble than it's worth -- a luxury comparable to owning a racehorse and likely to bring with it little else except the risk of being made to look ridiculous. People who learn to conduct themselves in a manner respectful of the telephone tap and the surveillance camera have no reason to fear the fist of censorship. By removing the chore of having to think for oneself, one frees up more leisure time to enjoy the convenience of the Internet services that know exactly what one likes to hear and see and wear and eat. We don't have to murder the intelligentsia.

Here again, we find ourselves in luck. The society is so glutted with easy entertainment that no writer or company of writers is troublesome enough to warrant the compliment of an arrest, or even the courtesy of a sharp blow to the head. What passes for the American school of dissent talks exclusively to itself in the pages of obscure journals, across the coffee cups in Berkeley and Park Slope, in half-deserted lecture halls in small Midwestern colleges. The author on the platform or the beach towel can be relied upon to direct his angriest invective at the other members of the academy who failed to drape around the title of his latest book the garland of a rave review.

The blessings bestowed by Providence place America in the front rank of nations addressing the problems of a twenty-first century, certain to require bold geopolitical initiatives and strong ideological solutions. How can it be otherwise? More pressing demands for always scarcer resources; ever larger numbers of people who cannot be controlled except with an increasingly heavy hand of authoritarian guidance. Who better than the Americans to lead the fascist renaissance, set the paradigm, order the preemptive strikes? The existence of mankind hangs in the balance; failure is not an option. Where else but in America can the world find the visionary intelligence to lead it bravely into the future -- Donald Rumsfeld our Dante, Turd Blossom our Michelangelo?

I don't say that over the last thirty years we haven't made brave strides forward. By matching Eco's list of fascist commandments against our record of achievement, we can see how well we've begun the new project for the next millennium -- the notion of absolute and eternal truth embraced by the evangelical Christians and embodied in the strict constructions of the Constitution; our national identity provided by anonymous Arabs; Darwin's theory of evolution rescinded by the fiat of "intelligent design"; a state of perpetual war and a government administering, in generous and daily doses, the drug of fear; two presidential elections stolen with little or no objection on the part of a complacent populace; the nation's congressional districts gerrymandered to defend the White House for the next fifty years against the intrusion of a liberal-minded president; the news media devoted to the arts of iconography, busily minting images of corporate executives like those of the emperor heroes on the coins of ancient Rome.

An impressive beginning, in line with what the world has come to expect from the innovative Americans, but we can do better. The early twentieth-century fascisms didn't enter their golden age until the proletariat in the countries that gave them birth had been reduced to abject poverty. The music and the marching songs rose with the cry of eagles from the wreckage of the domestic economy. On the evidence of the wonderful work currently being done by the Bush Administration with respect to the trade deficit and the national debt -- to say nothing of expanding the markets for global terrorism -- I think we can look forward with confidence to character-building bankruptcies, picturesque bread riots, thrilling cavalcades of splendidly costumed motorcycle police.
Title: Mao's New Bio
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on October 24, 2005, 02:47:42 PM
While lamenting fascism here at home, let's not forget to celebrate the accomplishments of social heros like Mao.

The real Mao
 
Lorne Gunter
National Post

Monday, October 24, 2005

A new biography of Mao Tse-Tung is forcing the Chinese to re-examine their views of the Great Helmsman. The book appears to be causing at least as much ideological dyspepsia among Mao's Western admirers, of whom there are still many.

Mao: The Unknown Story, by the wife-and-husband team of Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, demonstrates convincingly that the founding dictator of communist China was a thug, not a secular saint. He was always as willing to kill his rivals and supporters as his opponents, always bourgeois, arrogant and self-absorbed, and never cared much for the peasants he pretended to champion. Peasants, to Mao, were nothing but convenient political tools who helped sustain the cult of personality that brought him to power, and foot soldiers he could send to their deaths to advance his massive re-engineering schemes or consolidate his hold on authority.

According to communist myth, Mao was the man who came closer than anyone to implementing Marxism in the way Marx and Lenin envisioned it -- as a dictatorship of the proletariat wisely overseen by benevolent, selfless champions of the people.

Since the 1970s, when the truth about the economic failures and political violence of Soviet communism began seeping out from behind the Iron Curtain, Marxism's Western apologists have had to cling to ever smaller bits of intellectual flotsam.

First came the denials. The truth was not the truth, but rather a capitalist plot perpetrated to discredit Communism and divert Westerners' attention from the rot and disparity in their own nations.

When even socialists in the Western intelligentsia -- the professors, playwrights, authors, journalists and political theorists -- could no longer deny the ruin and repression in the Soviet bloc, there followed the canard that the ugliness of communism was a recent development, the fault of thick-headed brutes like Leonid Brezhnev or monsters such as Joseph Stalin. Their deeds, it was argued, didn't taint the ideology itself.

But thanks to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and later the fall of the Soviet Union and the opening of the KGB's archives, it became unavoidably clear that the famines, pogroms, forced relocations and other evils had been part of Soviet communism from the start, and that Lenin, for all his outward fatherly gentleness, had been as murderous and corrupt as the rest. Yet some defenders of Marxism still maintained that their theory could be salvaged in some other nation, even if the Soviet experiment had ended in fiasco.

For such diehards, Mao Tse-Tung was an icon. He brought health care to the people, and land reform and women's rights. He introduced universal education. By the strength of his will, he modernized one of the world's most backward countries.

Even as 1997's Black Book of Communism and other sources began revealing how Mao had executed tens of millions in his greed for power and his insane attempts to remake Chinese society, his apologists remained on-message. That was the "old" Mao, they argued, who came into being only after the Gang of Four had taken control of his mind; the young Mao was still to be revered.

In, Mao: The Unknown Story, Chang and Halliday dispel the impression that there were two Maos -- the brilliant, charismatic chairman of the Long March up till the Great Leap Forward; and the ageing drug-addicted sex addict, in thrall to his manipulative wife and her political allies .

There was never a good Mao.

Long before the 1949 revolution, while he was still in opposition to the Chinese Nationalists, Mao was slaughtering any anyone who got in his way -- communist or otherwise. In the 1930s, for instance, he declared more than 4,000 officers in the Red army to be subversives, and had them horribly tortured then killed.

According to the authors, who conducted 10 years of research, much of it in previously untapped Chinese and Russian files, Mao was also a Russian toady and a Japanese collaborator during Japan's inhuman occupation of China. He let his own first wife die rather than delay a non-essential military campaign, invented the most famous tales of his own heroism, had 70 million Chinese purged (more than 10% of the population at the time), and seldom walked during the famous Long March. (He had himself carried on a litter as he read.)

With Stalin, Lenin and Mao all discredited, what heroes do surviving Marxists have left? Kim Jong-Il? Fidel Castro? Don't laugh: As Mao, The Unknown Story makes clear, we should never underestimate a leftist's ability to venerate a mass murderer with a straight face.

http://www.canada.com/national/nationalpost/news/issuesideas/story.html?id=d254fe38-8d12-4a5d-855f-8bdea6acd74f
Title: Che, Beyond the T-Shirt
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on October 24, 2005, 03:14:52 PM
And let's not forget that paragon of revolutionary virtue, Che.

Fidel's Executioner
By Humberto Fontova
FrontPageMagazine.com | October 14, 2005

This is the fourth article in our "Leftwing Monsters" series, the first of which featured Humberto Fontova's profile of Fidel Castro. "Leftwing Monsters" is a feature of www.discoverthenetworks.org where the entire series will be archived -- The Editors.

In August of 1960, a year and a half after Che Guevara entered Havana ahead of his "column" of "guerrillas," Time magazine featured the revolutionary comandante on its cover and crowned him the "Brains of the Cuban Revolution." (Fidel Castro was "the heart" and Raul Castro "the fist.")

"Wearing a smile of melancholy sweetness that many women find devastating," read the Time article, "Che guides Cuba with icy calculation, vast competence, high intelligence and a perceptive sense of humor."
 
"This is not a Communist Revolution in any sense of the term," The New York Times had declared a year earlier. "Fidel Castro is not only not a Communist, he is decidedly anti-Communist."
 
"It would be a great mistake," Walter Lippmann wrote in the Washington Post that same month, "even to intimate that Castro's Cuba has any real prospect of becoming a Soviet satellite."
 
A few months earlier the London Observer had observed: "Mr. Castro's bearded youthful figure has become a symbol of Latin America's rejection of brutality and lying. Every sign is that he will reject personal rule and violence."
 
Time magazine was in perfect sync with her major-media peers -- utterly wrong. Guevara was no more the brains of the Cuban Revolution than Cheka-head Felix Drezhinsky had been the brains of the Bolshevik Revolution, or Gestapo chief Himmler the brains of the National Socialist Revolution, or KGB head Beria the brains behind Stalinism. In fact Che performed the same role for Fidel Castro as Drezhinsky performed for Lenin, Himmler for Hitler and Beria for Stalin. Che Guevara was the Castro regime?s chief executioner.
 
Under Che, Havana's La Cabana fortress was converted into Cuba's Lubianka. He was a true Chekist: "Always interrogate your prisoners at night," Che commanded his prosecutorial goons, "a man is easier to cow at night, his mental resistance is always lower." [1]
 
A Cuban prosecutor of the time who quickly defected in horror and disgust named Jose Vilasuso estimates that Che signed 400 death warrants the first few months of his command in La Cabana. A Basque priest named Iaki de Aspiazu, who was often on hand to perform confessions and last rites, says Che personally ordered 700 executions by firing squad during the period. Cuban journalist Luis Ortega, who knew Che as early as 1954, writes in his book Yo Soy El Che! that Guevara sent 1,897 men to the firing squad.
 
In his book Che Guevara: A Biography, Daniel James writes that Che himself admitted to ordering "several thousand" executions during the first year of the Castro regime. Felix Rodriguez, the Cuban-American CIA operative who helped track him down in Bolivia and was the last person to question him, says that Che during his final talk, admitted to "a couple thousand" executions. But he shrugged them off as all being of "imperialist spies and CIA agents."
 
Vengeance, much less justice, had little to do with the Castro/Che directed bloodbath in the first months of 1959. Che's murderous agenda in La Cabana fortress in 1959 was exactly Stalin's murderous agenda in the Katyn Forest in 1940. Like Stalin's massacre of the Polish officer corps, like Stalin's Great Terror against his own officer corps a few years earlier, Che's firing squad marathons were a perfectly rational and cold blooded exercise that served their purpose ideally. His bloodbath decapitated literally and figuratively the first ranks of Cuba's anti-Castro rebels.
 
Five years earlier, while still a Communist hobo in Guatemala, Che had seen the Guatemalan officer corps with CIA assistance rise against the Red regime of Jacobo Arbenz and send him and his Communist minions hightailing into exile. (For those leftists who still think that Arbenz was an innocent "nationalist" victimized by the fiendish United Fruit Company and their CIA proxies, please note: Arbenz sought exile not in France or Spain or even Mexico -- the traditional havens for deposed Latin-American politicians -- but in the Soviet satellite, Czechoslovakia. Also, the coup went into motion, not when Arbenz started nationalizing United Fruit property, but when a cargo of Soviet-bloc weapons arrived in Guatemala. "Arbenz didn't execute enough people," was how Guevara explained the Guatemalan coup's success. [2]
 
Fidel and Che didn't want a repeat of the Guatemalan coup in Cuba. Equally important, the massacres cowed and terrorized. Most of them came after public trials. And the executions, right down to the final shattering of the skull with the coup de grace from a massive .45 slug fired at five paces, were public too. Guevara made it a policy for his men to parade the families and friends of the executed before the blood, bone and brain spattered firing squad.
 
Had Ernesto Guevara De La Serna y Lynch not linked up with Raul and Fidel Castro in Mexico city that fateful summer of 1955--had he not linked up with a Cuban exile named Nico Lopez in Guatemala the year before who later introduced him to Raul and Fidel Castro in Mexico city-- everything points to Ernesto continuing his life of a traveling hobo, mooching off women, staying in flophouses and scribbling unreadable poetry. Che was a Revolutionary Ringo Starr. By pure chance, he fell in with the right bunch at just the right time and rode their coattails to fame. His very name "Che" was imparted by the Cubans who hob-knobbed with him in Mexico. Argentines use the term "Che" much like Cubans use "Chico" or Michael Moore fans use "dude." The Cubans noticed Guevara using it so they pasted it to him. And it stuck.
 
Fidel had brought the recently monikered "Che" on the Granma invasion of Cuba as the rebel group's doctor, based on his bogus credentials. On the harrowing boat ride through turbulent seas from the Yucatan to Cuba's Oriente province in the decrepit old yacht, a rebel found Che lying comatose in the boat's cabin. He rushed to the commander, "Fidel, looks like Che's dead!"
 
"Well, if he's dead," replied Castro. "Then throw him overboard." In fact Guevara was suffering the combined effects of seasickness and an asthma attack. [3] Evidently, Che was not regarded as an invaluable member of the expedition at the time.  
 
But today his famous photo by Alberto Korda ranks as the most reproduced print in the world. Last year Burlington Industries introduced a line of infant wear bearing his famous image. Even the Pope, on his visit to Cuba in 1998, spoke approvingly about Che's "ideals." Che owes all this hype and flummery to the century's top media swindler, Fidel Castro, who also dispatched the hero deliberately to his death. As those who know say "Fidel only praises the dead."
 
                                    ******
 
As for the rest of Time's assertions, other than his competence at murdering bound, gagged and blindfolded men, Che Guevara failed spectacularly at everything he attempted in his life. First he failed as Argentine medical student. Though he's widely described as a medical doctor by his hagiographers (Castaneda, Anderson, Taibo, Kalfon) no record exists of Guevara's medical degree. When Cuban-American researcher Enrique Ros inquired of the Rector of the University of Buenos Aires and the head of its Office of Academic Affairs for copies or proof of said document, Ros was variously told that the records had been misplaced or perhaps stolen. [4]
 
In 1960 Castro appointed Che as Cuba's "Minister of Economics." Within months the Cuban peso, a currency historically equal to the U.S. dollar and fully backed by Cuba's gold reserves, was practically worthless. The following year Castro appointed Che as Cuba's Minister of Industries. Within a year a nation that previously had higher per capita income than Austria and Japan, a huge influx of immigrants and the 3rd highest protein consumption in the hemisphere was rationing food, closing factories, and hemorrhaging hundreds of thousands of it's most productive citizens from every sector of its society, all who were grateful to leave with only the clothes on their back.
 
Most observers attribute this to "Communist mismanagement." Che himself confessed to his multiple economic errors and failings. Actually, given the goal of Cuba's ruler since January of 1959 -- i.e., absolute power -- the Cuban economy has been expertly managed. Castro inherited a vibrant free market economy in 1959 (something unique among communist rulers). All the others -- from Lenin to Mao to Ho to Ulbricht to Tito to Kim Il Sung --took over primitive and/or chaotic, war ravaged economies.
 
A less megalomaniacal ruler would have considered that a golden goose had landed in his lap. But Castro wrung its neck. He deliberately and methodically wrecked Latin America's premier economy. A Cuban capitalist is a person that couldn?t be controlled, Castro reasoned then, and continues to do so to this day. Despite a flood of tourism and foreign investment for over a decade, Cuba in 2005 is as essentially as poor (and Communist) as it was in 1965 or worse. The Castro brothers are vigilant in these matters.
 
Che actually believed in the socialist fantasy. When he pronounced in May of 1961 that under his tutelage the Cuban economy would boast an annual growth rate of 10% he seemed to believe it.
 
Castro didn't care. He simply knew as a result he'd be running Cuba like his personal plantation, with the Cuban people as his cattle.
 
This is where libertarian/free-market ideologues get it wrong. They insist that with the lifting of the embargo, capitalism will sneak in and eventually blindside Castro. All the proof is to the contrary. Capitalism didn't sweep Castro away or even co opt him. He blindsided it. He swept it away. He's not Deng or Gorbachev. In 1959 Castro could have easily left most of Cuba's economy in place, made it obedient to his whims, and been a Peron, a Franco, a Mussolini ? the idol of his youth. He could have grabbed half and been a Tito. He could have demanded a piece of the action from all involved and been a Marcos, a Trujillo, a Mobutu, a Suharto. But this wasn't enough for him.
 
Castro lusted for the power of a Stalin or a Mao. And he got it  
 
                                *****************
 
Che Guevara's most famous book is titled Guerrilla Warfare. His famous photo is captioned "Heroic Guerrilla." On the other hand his most resounding failure came precisely as a guerrilla, while there is no record of him prevailing in any bona-fide guerrilla battle. In fact, there are precious few accounts that he actually fought in anything properly described as a battle. The one that describes his most famous military exploit is referred to as "The Battle of Santa Clara," which took place in December 1958. The loss of this "battle" by the Batista forces is alleged to have caused Batista to lose hope and flee Cuba. To commemorate this historic military engagement, Castro has built a Che Guevara museum in Santa Clara.
 
"One Thousand Killed in 5 days of Fierce Street Fighting," proclaimed a New York Times headline on Jan 4, 1959 about the battle. "Commander Che Guevara appealed to Batista troops for a truce to clear the streets of casualties" the articles continued. "Guevara turned the tide in this bloody battle and whipped a Batista force of 3,000 men."
 
"Those of us who were there can only laugh at this stuff," say participants on both sides who live in exile today. [5] In fact, the Battle of Santa Clara--despite what those early versions of Jayson Blair reported -- was a puerile skirmish. Che Guevara's own diary mentions that his column suffered exactly one casualty (a soldier known as El Vaquerito) in this ferocious "battle." Other accounts put the grand total of rebel losses as from three to five men. Most of Batista's soldiers saw no reason to fight for a crooked, unpopular regime that was clearly doomed. So they didn't fire a shot, even those on the famous "armored train," that Guevara supposedly attacked and captured.
 
Today that armored train is a major tourist attraction in Santa Clara. The train, loaded with 373 soldiers and $4M worth of munitions, was sent from Havana to Santa Clara in late December of 1958 by Batista's high command as a last ditch attempt to halt the rebels. Che's rebels in Santa Clara bulldozed the tracks and the train derailed just outside of town. Then a few rebels shot at it and a few soldiers fired back. No one was hurt. Soon some rebels approached brandishing a truce flag and one of the train's officers, Enrique Gomez, walked out to meet them. Gomez was brought to meet Comandante Guevara.
 
"What's going on here!' Che shouted. "This isn't what we agreed on!"
 
Gomez was puzzled. "What agreement?" he asked.[6] It turned out, unbeknownst to the troops inside, Guevara had used funds the revolutionaries had raised from anti-Batista Cubans to buy the train and all its armaments had from its corrupt commander Colonel Florentino Rossell, who had already fled to Miami. The price was either $350,000 or $1,000,000, depending on the source. [7]
 
Actually Che had every reason to be upset. Actual shots fired against his troops? Here's another eye-witness account regarding Che's famous "invasion" of las Villas Province shortly before the famous "battle" of Santa Clara. "Guevara's column shuffled right into the U.S. agricultural experimental station in Camaguey. Guevara asked manager Joe McGuire to have a man take a package to Batista's military commander in the city. The package contained $100,000 with a note. Guevara's men moved through the province almost within sight of uninterested Batista troops." [8]
 
Francisco Rodriguez Tamayo was a Rebel captain who had been in on many of these transactions but he defected mere months after the Rebel victory. In an El Diario de Nueva York article dated June 25th 1959 he claimed that Castro still had $4,500,000 left in that "fund" at the time of the Revolutionary victory. "I don't know what might have happened to that money.? Rodriguez Tamayo adds.
 
Yet immediately after the Santa Clara bribe and skirmish, Che ordered 27 Batista soldiers executed as "war criminals." Dr. Serafin Ruiz was a Castro operative in Santa Clara at the time, but apparently an essentially decent one. "But Comandante" he responded to Che's order. "Our revolution promises not to execute without trials, without proof. How can we just....?"
 
"Look Serafin" Che snorted back. "If your bourgeois prejudices won?t allow you to carry out my orders, fine. Go ahead and try them tomorrow morning--but execute them NOW!" [9] It was a Marxist version of the Red Queen's famous line to Alice in Wonderland: "Sentence first--verdict afterwards!"  
 
Che Guevara's own diary puts the grand total of his forces' losses during the entire two-year long "civil war" in Cuba at 20, about equal to the average number dead during Rio de Janeiro's carnival every year. To put it briefly, Batista's army barely fought.
 
Officials in Cuba's U.S. embassy at the time became a little skeptical about all the battlefield bloodshed and heroics reported in the New York Times and investigated. They ran down every reliable lead and eyewitness account of what the New York Times kept reporting as bloody civil war with thousands dead in single battles.
 
They found that in the entire Cuban countryside, in those two years of "ferocious" battles between rebel forces and Batista troops, the total casualties on both sides actually amounted to 182. [10] New Orleans has an annual murder rate double that.
 
Typically, Che Guevara doesn't even merit credit for the perfectly sensible scheme of bribing rather than fighting Batista's army. The funds for these bribes derived mostly from Fidel's snookering of Batista's wealthy political opponents, convincing them that he was a "patriotic Cuban, a democrat," and that they should join, or at least help fund, his 26th of July Movement in order to bring democracy and prosperity to Cuba.
 
In late 1957 Castro signed an agreement called ?The Miami Pact? with several anti-Batista Cuban politicians and ex-ministers in exile at the time. Most of these were quite wealthy. Indeed if the term, "rich, white Miami Cuban exiles," that liberals scornfully use against current Cuban-Americans ever fit -- it was for the mulatto Batista?s liberal opponents, for Fidel Castro's early backers. Among these was former president Carlos Prio who Batista had ousted in his (bloodless) coup in 1952, along with many of Prio's ministers and business cronies.
 
In fact, Guevara went ballistic over the Miami Pact, when he first learned of it, over this shameful deal with "bourgeois" elements. "I refuse to lend my historic name to that crime!" he wrote. "We rebels have proffered our asses in the most despicable act of buggery that Cuban history is likely to recall!" [11]
 
It was despicable buggery for sure. But Che had the buggerers and the buggerees reversed. Lenin coined the term "Useful Idiots," but to this day Castro remains history's virtuoso at snaring and employing them.
 
That a "guerrilla war" with "peasant and worker backing" overthrew Batista is among the century's most widespread and persistent academic fables. No Cuban Castroites who participated actually believe this. The Associated Press dispatches about Castro and Che's "war" were actually concocted and written by Castro's own agent in New York, Mario Llerena, who admits as much in his book, The Unsuspected Revolution. Llerena was also the contact with Castro's most famous publicity agent, the New York Times, Herbert Matthews. National Review's famous 1960 cartoon showing a beaming Castro, "I got my job through the New York Times!" nailed it.
 
To give them credit, most of Castro's comandantes knew their Batista war had been an elaborate ruse and gaudy clown show. After the glorious victory, they were content to run down and execute the few Batista men motivated enough to shoot back (most of these were of humble background), settle into the mansions stolen from Batistianos, and enjoy the rest of their booty.
 
British historian Hugh Thomas, though a leftist Labour Party member who sympathized with Castro's revolution, studied mountains of records and simply could not evade the truth. His massive and authoritative historical volume Cuba sums it up very succinctly: "In all essentials Castro's battle for Cuba was a public relations campaign, fought in New York and Washington."
 
Che Guevara, himself, possessed an immense capacity for self-deception. On a state visit to Czechoslovakia in 1960 his Cuban companions pointed out the numerous prostitutes on the streets and in the very hotel where they stayed. Che nodded wearily. Back in Cuba when one of them winked and brought up the prostitutes Che flared indignantly. "I didn't see any prostitutes there!" [12]
 
The Cubans looked at each other shrugging but knew better than to press the issue. Che didn't want to remember the sight of prostitutes. He wanted to convince himself that such a thing was impossible in a glorious Socialist nation, a sister republic.
 
That gift for self-deception probably led him to believe the guerrilla war fable. And while trying to duplicate it in Bolivia he paid for his obtuseness and wishful thinking with his life. In Cuba, Che couldn't find anyone to fight against him. In the Congo, scene of another of his guerrilla forays, he couldn't find anyone to fight with him. In Bolivia he finally started getting a tiny taste of both. In short order he was betrayed by the very peasants he set out to liberate (but who didn't see it quite that way), brought to ground and killed.
 
Shortly after entering Havana with the revolutionary forces, Che was already advising, equipping and dispatching guerrilla forces in an attempt to duplicate the Cuban Revolution in the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Panama, Nicaragua and Venezuela. Every one of those guerrilla forces (which were Cuban Communist-led and staffed) was wiped out in short order, usually to the last man. Rafael Trujillo and Luis Somoza weren't about to follow Batista's example of pussyfooting against guerrillas.
 
A few years later Che equipped, advised and sent more guerrillas to Argentina and Guatemala. Again they were stamped out almost to a man. These guerrilla expeditions cost the lives of two of Che's fatally credulous friends: the Argentine Jorge Masseti and the Guatemalan Julio Caceres.
 
Leftist "scholars" complain about The Bay of Pigs invasion as "Yankee intervention" (though every single invader, including the commanders was Cuban) against an innocent nationalist revolution that wished only to be left alone. They might revisit the documentary evidence. In fact Castro and Che launched five of their own versions of the Bay of Pigs invasions before the U.S. had even started contingency planning for theirs.
 
Castro seemed to know these invasions to spark revolutions were futile. But for Castro they still had a handy rationale. "These foreigners are nothing but troublemakers," he told a Cuban rebel named Lazaro Ascencio right after the revolutionary triumph. "Know what I'm going to do with Che Guevara? I'm going to send him to Santo Domingo and see if Trujillo kills him." [14]
 
How serious was Castro? We can only guess. But found a way for Che to earn his keep and stay of trouble in Cuba by assigning him as commander of La Cabana, the fortress where political prisoners were held and killed.
 
Che's role in "Imperialism's First Defeat!" as Castro refers to the Bay of Pigs invasion merits mention. The American invasion plan included a ruse in which a CIA squad dispatched three rowboats off the coast of western Cuba in Pinar Del Rio (350 miles from the true invasion site) loaded with time release Roman candles, bottle rockets, mirrors and a tape recording of battle.
 
The wily Guerrilla Che immediately deciphered the imperialist scheme. That little feint 300 miles away at the Bay of Pigs was a transparent ruse, he determined. The real invasion was coming in Pinar Del Rio. Che stormed over to the site with several thousand troops, dug in, locked, loaded and waited for the "Yankee/mercenary" attack. They braced themselves as the sparklers, smoke bombs and mirrors did their stuff offshore.
 
Three days later the (literal) smoke and mirror show expended itself and Che's men marched back to Havana. Somehow Che had managed to wound himself in the heated battle against the tape recorder. The bullet pierced Che's chin and excited above his temple, just missing his brain. The scar is visible in all post April ?61 pictures of Che (the picture we see on posters and T shirts was taken a year earlier.)
 
Cuban novelist Guillermo Cabrera Infante, a Fidelista at the time, speculates the wound may have come from a botched suicide attempt. Che hagiographers John Lee Anderson, Carlos Castaneda and Paco Taibo insist it was an accident, Che's own pistol going off just under his face.
 
 
Jorge Castaneda in his Companero: The Life and Death of Che Guevara cannot resist giving Che some credit for "Imperialism's First Defeat." The Mexican author (and recent foreign minister) writes that Che's role was "crucial," explaining that Cuba's 200,000 man militia played a "central role in the victory." The training of these militia had been in the hands of Che since 1960. "Without Che" Castaneda gushes, "the militias would not have been reliable."
 
Here's a summary of the Battle of the Bay of Pigs, and the militia's performance: 51,000 Castro troops and militia with limitless Soviet arms, including tanks and planes and batteries of heavy artillery met 1400 mostly civilian exile freedom-fighters most with less than a months training. These men carried only light arms and one day's ammunition. The Che-trained militia hit them, then immediately halted and fled hysterically.
 
They were ordered back, probed hesitantly again, got mauled again and retreated in headlong flight again. They marched back again, many at gun-point, and rolled in battery after battery of Soviet 122 mm Howitzers. They rained 2000 rounds of heavy artillery into lightly-armed men they outnumbered 50 -1. ("Rommel's crack Afrika Corps broke and ran under a similar bombardment," explains Bay of Pigs historian Haynes Johnson.) Then Castro's unopposed air force strafed the invaders repeatedly and at will.
 
The invaders stood their ground to the last man and the militia was forced to probe yet again -- and retreat again in headlong flight. They eventually stopped and brought in reinforcements. (50-1 was not enough.) They rained another Soviet artillery storm on the utterly abandoned and hopelessly outnumbered freedom fighters and finally moved in to overwhelm them -- after three days of effort in which the invaders hadn't eaten, drank or slept, and had run out of ammunition. Castro's forces took 5200 casualties in the process. The freedom fighters suffered 114. [14]
 
Che did show up at the battle site, but the day the shooting ended. He walked into a building strewn with captured and wounded freedom-fighters and looked around with his wry Argentine smile. "We're going to execute every one of you," he barked. Then he turned on his heels and walked out. [15] As usual, Castro had a much shrewder plan for the prisoners. His regime reaped a propaganda windfall and 62 million American dollars when JFK ransomed them back.
 
In fact, Castro was fuming at his Militia's performance. A week after the battle he visited some of the freedom-fighters in their Havana prison cells. One had been an old acquaintance from college. "Hombre, If I had 20,000 men like you guys," Castro beamed to his old friend. " I'd have all of Latin America in my hands right now!" [16]
 
                              *****************
 
One of the longest and bloodiest guerrilla wars on this continent was fought not by Fidel and Che but against Fidel and Che -- and by landless peasants. Farm collectivization was no more voluntary in Cuba than in the Ukraine. And Cuba's kulaks had guns, a few at first anyway, and put up a heroic resistance until the Kennedy-Khrushchev deal during the ?Cuban Missile Crisis? finally starved them of supplies. Cubans know this war as "The Escambray Rebellion."
 
It's rarely reported, but Che Guevara had a very bloody hand in one of the major anti-insurgency wars on this continent. Seventy to 80 percent of these rural anti-communist peasant guerrillas were executed on the spot on capture. "We fought with the fury of cornered beasts" was how one of the few lucky ones who escaped alive described the guerrillas' desperate freedom-fight against the totalitarian agendas of the Cuban regime. (In 1956, when Che linked up with the Cuban exiles in Mexico city, one of them recalls Che railing against the Hungarian freedom-fighters as "Fascists!" and cheering their extermination by Soviet tanks.)
 
In 1962 Che got a chance to do more than cheer from the sidelines. "Cuban militia units (whose training and morale Jorge Castaneda insists we credit to Che) commanded by Russian officers employed flame-throwers to burn the palm-thatched cottages in the Escambray countryside. The peasant occupants were accused of feeding the counterrevolutionaries and bandits." [17]
 
The Maoist line about how "a guerrilla swims in the sea which is the people, etc.," fit Cuba's anti-Communist rebellion perfectly. Raul Castro himself admitted that his government faced 179 bands of "counter-revolutionaries" and "bandits." at the time.
 
So in a massive "relocation" campaign reminiscent of the one Spanish General Valerinao "The Butcher" Weyler carried out against Cubans during their war of independence at the turn of the century, Castro's Soviet trained armed forces ripped hundreds of thousands of rural Cubans from their ancestral homes at gunpoint and herded them into concentration camps on the opposite side of Cuba.
 
According to evidence presented to the Organization of American States by Cuban-exile researcher Dr. Claudio Beneda 4000 anti-Communist peasants were summarily executed during this rural rebellion.
 
Time magazine notwithstanding, Fidel Castro -- and Fidel Castro alone -- was the "brains" of the Cuban Revolution. And part of his acumen was his proficiency at sizing up his revolutionary companeros, then delegating jobs -- then eliminating them in various ways as circumstances dictated. With Guevara he performed masterfully. First he assigned him to be commander of Havana's La Cabana fortress, which Che promptly converted to a prison and killing field.
 
"Crazy with fury I will stain my rifle red while slaughtering any enemy that falls in my hands! My nostrils dilate while savoring the acrid odor of gunpowder and blood. With the deaths of my enemies I prepare my being for the sacred fight and join the triumphant proletariat with a bestial howl!"
 
Che Guevara wrote these lines while in his early twenties, before he had gotten his hands on any such enemy. The passage appears in Che's Motorcycle Diaries, recently made into a heartwarming film by Robert Redford -- the only film to get a whooping standing ovation at the Sundance Film Festival. It seems that Redford omitted this inconvenient portion of Che's diaries form his touching tribute.
 
 Two weeks after Che entered Havana and took his post at La Cabana fortress, Castro saw his instincts as a personnel manager fully vindicated. The "acrid odor of gunpowder and blood" never reached Guevara's nostrils from actual combat. It always came from the close range murder of bound, gagged and blindfolded men. "We must create the pedagogy of the paredon (firing squad.)" Che instructed his Revolutionary Tribunals: "We don't need proof to execute a man. We only need proof that it's necessary to execute him. A revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate." [18]
 
Actually, Che Guevara was anything but a "cold killing machine." The term implies a certain detachment or nonchalance towards murder. In fact Che gave ample evidence of enjoying it. Almost all Cubans who knew him and are now in exile and able to talk freely (Jose Benitez, Mario Chanes de Armas Dariel Alarcon among others ) recall Che Guevara as a classic psychopath.
 
In January 1957, shortly after landing in Cuba aboard the yacht Granma with Fidel and Raul Castro, Che sent a letter to his discarded wife, Hilda Gadea. "Dear vieja (i.e, ?Ole Lady? -- on top of everything else, Che was also a notorious misogynist) I'm here in Cuba's hills, alive and thirsting for blood." [19] His thirst would soon be slaked.
 
In that very month, January 1957 Fidel Castro ordered the execution of a peasant guerrilla named Eutimio Guerra who he accused of being an informer for Batista's forces. Castro assigned the killing to his own bodyguard, Universo Sanchez. To everyone's surprise, Che Guevara -- a lowly rebel soldier/medic at the time (not yet a comandante -- volunteered to accompany Sanchez and another soldier to the execution site. The Cuban rebels were glum as they walked slowly down the trail in a torrential thunderstorm. Finally the little group stopped in a clearing.
 
Sanchez was hesitant, looking around, perhaps looking for an excuse to postpone or call off the execution. Dozens would follow, but this was the first execution of a Castro rebel by Castro's rebels. Suddenly without warning Che stepped up and fired his pistol into Guerra's temple. "He went into convulsions for a while and was finally still. Now his belongings were mine." Che wrote in his Diaries.
 
Shortly afterwards, Che's father in Buenos Aires received a letter from his prodigal son. "I'd like to confess, papa', at that moment I discovered that I really like killing." [20]
 
This attitude caught Castro's eye. More executions of assorted "deserters" informers" and "war criminals" quickly followed, all with Che's enthusiastic participation. One was of a captured Batista soldier, a 17-years old boy totally green to the guerrilla "war," hence his easy capture. First Che interrogated him.
 
"I haven't killed anyone, comandante," the terrified boy answered Che. "I just got out here! I'm an only son, my mother's a widow and I joined the army for the salary, to send it to her every month...don't kill me!" He blurted out when he heard Che's unmoved reply, "Don't kill me!--why?"
 
The boy was trussed up, shoved in front of a recently dug pit and murdered. [21] Fidel was privy to these events. He thought executing Batista soldiers was incredibly stupid, compared to the propaganda value of releasing them since most weren't fighting anyway. But recognized the value of executions in intimidating other Cubans, and recognized Che's value as someone who enjoyed the job. By the summer of 1957 Che Guevara had been promoted to full-fledged Major or "comandante," the Rebel army's highest rank. His fame was spreading.
 
But not all the revolutionaries were favorably impressed. In mid-1958 one of the rebels was wounded and made his way to a Dr. Hector Meruelo in the nearby town of Cienfuegos. The good doctor patched him up and a few weeks later informed him that he was well enough to return to Che's column.
 
"No, doctor," the boy responded. Please be discreet with this because it could cost me my life, but I've learned that Che is nothing but a murderer. I'm a revolutionary but I'm also a Christian. I'll go and join Camilo's column (Camilo Cienfuegos) --but never Che's." [22]
 
As commander of the La Cabana prison, Che often insisted on shattering the skull of the condemned man by firing the coup de grace himself. When other duties tore him away from his beloved execution yard, he consoled himself with watching the executions. Che's office in La Cabana had a section of wall torn out so he could watch his firing squads at work.
 
A Rumanian journalist named Stefan Bacie visited Cuba in early 1959 and was fortunate enough to get an audience with the already famous leader, whom he had also met briefly in Mexico city. The meeting took place in Che's office in La Cabana. Upon entering, the Rumanian saw Che motioning him over to his office's newly constructed window.
 
Stefan Bacie got there just in time to hear the command of fuego, hear the blast from the firing squad and see a condemned prisoner man crumple and convulse. The stricken journalist immediately left and composed a poem, titled, "I No Longer Sing of Che." ("I no longer sing of Che
any more than I would of Stalin," go the first lines.) [23]
 
A Cuban gentleman named Pierre San Martin was among those jailed by Che Guevara in the early months of the Cuban Revolution. In an El Nuevo Herald article from December 28, 1997 San Martin recalled the horrors: ?Thirteen of us were crammed into a cell. Sixteen of us would stand while the other sixteen tried to sleep on the cold filthy floor. We took shifts that way. Dozens were led from the cells to the firing squad daily. The volleys kept us awake. We felt that any one of those minutes would be our last.
 
One morning the horrible sound of that rusty steel door swinging open startled us awake and Che's guards shoved a new prisoner into our cell. He was a boy, maybe 14 years old. His face was bruised and smeared with blood. "What did you do?" We asked horrified. "I tried to defend my papa," gasped the bloodied boy. "But they sent him to the firing squad."
 
Soon Che's guards returned. The rusty steel door opened and they yanked the boy out of the cell. "We all rushed to the cell's window that faced the execution pit," recalls Mr. San Martin. "We simply couldn't believe they'd murder him.
 
"Then we spotted him, strutting around the blood-drenched execution yard with his hands on his waist and barking orders--Che Guevara himself. 'Kneel down!' Che barked at the boy.
 
"Assassins!" we screamed from our window.
 
?I said: KNEEL DOWN!" Che barked again.
 
The boy stared Che resolutely in the face. "If you're going to kill me," he yelled, "you'll have to do it while I'm standing! Men die standing!"
 
"Murderers!" the men yelled desperately from their cells. "Then we saw Che unholstering his pistol. He put the barrel to the back of the boys neck and blasted. The shot almost decapitated the young boy.
 
"We erupted?'Murderers!--Assassins!'" His murder finished, Che finally looked up at us, pointed his pistol, and emptied his clip in our direction. Several of us were wounded by his shots."
 
After a hard day at the office, Che repaired to his new domicile in Tarara, 15 miles outside Havana on the pristine beachfront (today reserved exclusively for tourists and Communist party members, by the way). The "austere idealist," Che, hadn't done too badly for himself in this real estate transaction, known in non-revolutionary societies as theft.
"The house was among the most luxurious in Cuba," writes Cuban journalist Antonio Llano Montes. ''Until a few weeks prior, it had belonged to Cuba's most successful building contractor. The mansion had a boat dock, a huge swimming pool, seven bathrooms, a sauna, a massage salon and several television sets. One TV had been specially designed in the U.S. and had a screen ten feet wide and was operated by remote control (remember, this was 1959.) This was thought to be the only TV of its kind in Latin America. The mansion's garden had a veritable jungle of imported plants, a pool with waterfall, ponds filled with exotic tropical fish and several bird houses filled with parrots and other exotic birds. The habitation was something out of A Thousand and One Nights.
 
Llano Montes wrote the above in exile. In January 1959 he didn't go quite into such detail in his article which appeared in the Cuban magazine Carteles. He simply wrote that, "Comandante Che Guevara has fixed his residence in one of the most luxurious houses on Tarara beach."
 
Two days after his article ran, while lunching at Havana's El Carmelo restaurant, Llano Montes looked up from his plate to see three heavily armed Rebel army soldiers instructing him to accompany them. Shortly the journalist found himself in Che Guevara's La Cabana office, seated a few feet in front of the Comandante's desk which was piled with papers.
 
It took half an hour but Che finally made his grand entrance, "reeking horribly, as was his custom" recalls Llano Montes. "Without looking at me. He started grabbing papers on his desk and brusquely signing them with 'Che.? His assistant came in and Che spoke to him over his shoulder. "I'm signing these 26 executions so we can take care of this tonight.'
 
"Then he got up and walked out. Half an hour later he walks back in and starts signing more papers. Finished signing, he picks up a book and starts reading -- never once looking at me. Another half hour goes by and he finally puts the book down. 'So you're Llano Montes,' he finally sneers, 'who says I appropriated a luxurious house.'
 
"I simply wrote that you had moved into a luxurious house, which is the truth," replied Llano Montes.
 
"I know your tactics!" Che shot back. "You press people are injecting venom into your articles to damage the revolution. You're either with us or against us. We're not going to allow all the press foolishness that Batista allowed. I can have you executed this very night. How about that!"
 
"You'll need proof that I've broken some law" responded Montes.
 
"'We don't need proof. We manufacture the proof,' Che said while stroking his shoulder length hair, a habit of his. One of his prosecutors, a man nicknamed 'Puddle-of-blood' then walked in and started talking. 'Don't let the stupid jabbering of those defense lawyers delay the executions!' Che yelled at him. 'Threaten them with execution. Accuse them of being accomplices of the Batistianos.' Then Che jerked the handful of papers from Mr. Puddle and started signing them.
 
"This type of thing went on from noon until 6:30 PM when Che finally turned to his aides and said. 'Get this man out of here. I don't want him in my presence.'" [24]
 
This was Che's manner of dealing with defenseless men. He acted this way when he held the hammer. Against armed men on an equal footing his behavior was markedly different. Two years earlier in the Sierra, Castro had ordered Che to take command over a guerrilla faction led by a fellow 26th of July Movement rebel named Jorge Sotus, who had been operating in an area north of the area where Fidel and Che were and had actually been confronting and fighting Batista's army. Che and a few of his men hiked over to Sotus command station and informed him that Che was now in command.
 
"Like hell," responded Sotus.
 
"It's Fidel's order," responded Guevara. "We have more military experience than you and your group."
 
"More experience in running and hiding from Batista's army perhaps," Sotus shot back. Che dithered and Sotus added. "Besides my men and I aren't about to take orders from a foreigner." [25]
 
Che backed off, hiked back and informed Fidel who didn't press the issue. But a few weeks after Batista's flight and Castro's triumph, Sotus was arrested without warning and shoved in the Isle of Pines prison. The intrepid Sotus managed to escape, made his way to the U.S. and joined an exile paramilitary group, taking part in many armed raids against Cuba from south Florida until the Kennedy-Khrushchev deal ended them.
 
Guevara also had a run in with a rebel group named the Second Front of the Escambray. These operated against Batista in the Escambray mountains of Las Villas province. When Che's column entered the area in late 1958, Che sought to bring these guerrillas under his command and met much resistance, especially from a comandante named Jesus Carreras who knew of Che's Communist pedigree. Again Guevara didn't press the issue.
 
A few weeks into the January 1959 triumph Carreras and a group of these Escambray commanders visited Che in La Cabana to address the issue of how they'd been frozen out of any leadership roles in the new regime. On the way in, Carreras ran into a rebel he'd known in the anti-Batista fight and stopped to chat while the rest of the group entered Che's office. Once the group was inside, Che began to rip into Carreras (who was still not present) as a drunkard, a womanizer, a bandit and a person he'd never appoint to any important position.
 
Midway into Che's tirade, Carreras entered the office, having overheard much while outside. "Che went white," recall those present. An enraged Carreras jumped right in his face and Che backed off. Finally Carreras challenged Che to a duel, "right outside in the courtyard," he pointed.
 
"How is it possible," Che quickly smiled, "that two revolutionary companeros get to such a point simply because of a misunderstanding?"
 
The subject was dropped and they turned to other issues, but a year later Jesus Carreras found himself a prisoner in a La Cabana dungeon. A few months later he was defiantly facing a firing squad. Fuego! The volley shattered his body. And yes, Che was watching from his window. [26]
 
                                   ********
 
Even the New York Times admits that the first two months of the Cuban Revolution saw 568 firing squad executions. A study by Cuban-American Scholar Armando Lago doubles that figure. One by Dr. Claudio Beneda triples it. The preceding "trials" shocked and nauseated all who witnessed them. They were shameless farces, sickening charades. Guevara clarified the matter. "Evidence is an archaic bourgeois detail," he explained. "We execute from revolutionary conviction." [27]
 
Not that the slaughter ended after the first few months, as most "scholars" imply. In December 1964 Che addressed the U.N. General Assembly. "Yes, we execute, " he declared to the claps and cheers of that august body. "And we will keep executing as long as it is necessary. This is a war to the death against the Revolution's enemies."
 
According to the Black Book of Communism those executions had reached 14,000 by the end of the decade. (Cuba is a small country. In American terms, this would amount to more than three million executions.)
 
On the eve of his trip to New York, Che gave a speech in Santiago Cuba where he declared: "We must learn the lesson of absolute abhorrence of imperialism. Against that class of hyena there is no other medium than extermination!" [28]
 
Two years earlier, Guevara had gotten tantalizingly close to that medium. "If the missiles had remained we would have used them against the very heart of the United States, including New York," he told the London Daily Worker in November of 1962. "We must never establish peaceful co-existence. We must walk the path of victory even if it costs millions of atomic victims." [29]
 
"Extermination," Che stressed. "Millions of atomic victims," he said for the record. "Pure hate, as the motivating force," he repeatedly declared.  
 
                                **************
 
Time also erred regarding Che's sense of humor, which was on par with Nurse Ratched's. As most Latin Americans of a certain age know, Che was a ringer for a Mexican Movie star of the fifties named Cantinflas. Shortly after Che entered Havana, one of Cuba's traditionally sassy newspapermen made sport of this resemblance.
 
He did it exactly once. Those firing squads were working triple-shifts at the time. The reporter heeded Che's warning not to do it again.
 
Che's first decree when his guerrillas captured the town of Sancti Spiritus in central Cuba during the last days of the skirmishing against Batista's army, outlawed alcohol, gambling and regulated relations between the sexes. Popular outcry and Fidel's good sense made him rescind the order.
 
"I have no home, no woman no parents, no brothers and no friends," wrote Guevara. "My friends are friends only so long as they think as I do politically." [30]
 
In 1960 at a town named Guanahacabibes in extreme Western Cuba, Che initiated Cuba's concentration camp system. "We send to Guanahacabibes people who have committed crimes against revolutionary morals. . it is hard labor...the working conditions are harsh..." [31]
 
Among the many categories of criminals against revolutionary morals were "delinquents." Please take note Che T-shirt wearers: this "delinquency" involved drinking, vagrancy, disrespect for authorities, laziness and playing loud music. Among the more hilarious manifestations of Che idolatry was the rock musician Carlos Santana's grand entrance to the 2005 Academy Awards ceremony where he stopped, swung open his jacket, and proudly displayed his Che T-shirt as the cameras clicked.
 
By the late 60's among the tens of thousands of inmates at Guanahacabibes and the rest of the UMAP concentration camp system in Cuba were "roqueros," hapless Cuban youths who tried to listen to Yankee-Imperialist rock music. Carlos Santana, was grinning widely -- and oh so hiply -- while proudly sporting the symbol of a regime that made it a criminal offense to listen to Carlos Santana.
                           
                                  *********
 
 
By late 1964 Minister of Industries' Che had so badly crippled Cuba's economy and infrastructure and so horribly impoverished and traumatized it's work force that the Russians themselves were at wits end. They were subsidizing the mess, and it was getting expensive -- much too expensive for the paltry geopolitical return. "This is an underdeveloped country?!" Anastas Mikoyan had laughed while looking around on his first visit to Cuba in 1960. The Soviets were frankly tickled to have a developed and civilized country to loot again, the countries of Eastern Europe after WWII.
 
Alas, the looting, at first, went in the opposite direction. Castro was no chump like Ulbricht or Gomulka. A French Socialist economist, Rene Dumont, tried advising Castro as the wreckage of Cuba's economy spiraled out of control. "The Cuban Revolution has gone farther in its first three years than the Chinese in its first ten," he observed. [32] Hence the mess.
 
As Cuba's Minister of Industries, Che wanted to refashion human nature. With hapless Cubans as his guinea pigs, he was intent on creating a "new socialist man," diligent, hard-working, obedient, free from all material incentives and always ready to go with the program-- in brief, lobotomized shirkers or smartalecks who offered lip would find themselves behind the barbed wire, watchtowers and guard dogs of Guanahacabibes in short order.
 
Interestingly, Jack Nicholson whose film character in One Flew Over The Cuckoo?s Nest continually ran afoul of Nurse Ratched is among Communist Cuba's most frequent visitors and Castro's most fervent fans. "Fidel Castro is a genius!" gushed Nicholson after a visit in 1998. "We spoke about everything," the actor rhapsodized. "Castro is a humanist like President Clinton. Cuba is simply a paradise!" This may have more to it than the usual Hollywood vacuity upstairs. "My job was to bug Jack Nicholson's room at the hotel Melia Cohiba when he visited Cuba," says high-ranking Cuban intelligence defector Delfin Fernandez, from Madrid today, "with both cameras and listening devices. Most people have no idea they are being watched while they are in Cuba. But their personal activities are filmed under orders from Castro himself. Famous Americans are the priority objectives of Castro's intelligence." [33]
 
One day Che decided that Cubans should learn to play and like soccer (futbal) like the citizens of his native Argentina. A Sugar plantation named Central Macareno near Cienfuegos had been recently stolen from its American owners (not that most Sugar plantations in Cuba were American-owned as leftist mythology holds. Barely one-third were.) The plantation also included a huge orchard of Mango, Avocado and Mamey trees that were just starting to give fruit. Che ordered them all cut down and the ground razed in order to construct a soccer field.
 
A year later the field was weed grown, pot-holed and unusable. The decaying trunks of the formerly fruit-yielding trees were still piled up around the edges of the field even as most Cubans scrambled for fresh fruit on the new black market (under that arch-villain of leftist lore, Batista, Cubans had no need for a black market.) At any rate, it seemed that--the threat of Guanahacabibes or not-- Che's Cuban subjects simply didn't take to Che's futbal. [34]
 
Che's fetish to "industrialize" Cuba immediately and by decree, as he thought his role model Stalin had "industrialized" the Soviet Union, ended Cuba's status as a relatively developed and civilized country. In one of his spasms of decrees, Che ordered a refrigerator factory built in Cienfuegos, a pick and shovel factory built in Santa Clara, a pencil factory built in Havana. Supply? Demand? Costs? Such bourgeois details didn't interest Che. None of the factories ended up producing a single product.
 
Che railed against the chemists in the newly socialized Coca-Cola plant because the Coke they were producing tasted awful. Some of the flustered chemists responded that it was Che who had nationalized the plant and booted out the former owners and managers, who took the secret Coca-Cola formula with them to the United States. This impertinence was answered with the threat of Guanahacabibes.
 
During this time Che's ministry also bought a fleet of snow plows from Czechoslovakia. Che had personally inspected them and was convinced they could easily be converted into sugar cane harvesting machines, thus mechanizing the harvest and increasing Cuba's sugar production. The snowplows in fact squashed the sugar cane plants, cut them off at the wrong length and killed them. Four years into the revolution Cuba's 1963 sugar production was less than half of its pre-Revolutionary volume.
 
The Soviets themselves finally put their foot down. Their Cuban lark was getting expensive. In 1964 they told Castro that Che had to go. Castro knew who buttered his bread and had never much liked Che anyway. Besides, the Revolution was well entrenched by then, and in any case there were many willing executioners now, so Che might have outlived his usefulness.
 
Here we come to another hoary myth spun by Che's hagiographers: his "ideological" falling out with the Soviets. Che's pureness of revolutionary heart, we're told, led him to clash with the corrupt Soviet nomenklatura.
 
In fact it was a purely practical conflict. The Russians were fed up and simply refused to bankroll Che's harebrained economic fantasies any longer. Che saw the writing on the wall. In December 1964, right after his visit to the U.N., he visited his friend Ben Bela in Algeria and delivered his famous anti-Soviet speech, branding them, "accomplices of imperialist exploitation." [35]
           
To many it looked like Che was setting the stage for a role as the Trotsky of his generation. Che probably saw it as a more seemly role than that of a hopeless economic bumbler.
 
When he touched down in Havana after the speech, the regime's press was absolutely mute regarding both his speech and his recent return. Soon he was invited to visit the Maximum Leader and Raul. In fact, Maximum Brother Raul had just returned from Mother Russia itself, where Che's Algeria speech had caused quite a stir. As soon as he got within earshot, both Castros ripped into Guevara as undisciplined, ungrateful and plain stupid.
 
"Fidel!" Che shot back. "Dammit, show me some respect! I'm not Camilo!" Che's wife, Aleida (he'd ditched Hilda by then) was forced to jump in between the men, exclaiming, "I can't believe such a thing is happening between longtime companeros." [36]
 
Che finally went home were he found his telephone lines cut. Much evidence points to Che being held in house arrest at this point. [37] And it was under that house arrest that a seriously chastened--and apparently frightened, after all, who better knew the consequences of upsetting the Maximum Leader? -- Che composed his famous "Farewell Letter to Fidel," in which his groveling and fawning was utterly shameless.
 
"I deeply appreciate your lessons and your example ? my only fault was not to have had more faith in you since the first moments in the Sierra, not having recognized more quickly your qualities as a leader and a revolutionary. I will take to my new fields of battle the faith that you have inculcated." and on and on in relentless toadying. [38]
 
Che's few public appearances between his return from Algeria and his departure for the Congo always found him in the company of state security personnel. His Cuban welcome had worn out. By April 1965 he was in Tanzania with a few dozen black Cuban military men. Code named "Tatu," Che and his force entered the eastern Congo, which was convulsed at the time (like now) by an incomprehensible series of civil (actually, mostly tribal) wars.
 
Tatu's mission was to help the alternately Soviet and Chinese backed "Simbas" of the Congolese red leader, Laurent Kabila. These were fighting the forces of the western-backed Moise Tshombe. Tshombe's forces consisted of Belgian foreign legionnaires, mercenaries under the famous "Mad" Mike Hoare, Congolese who opposed Kabila, and a handful of Cuban Bay of Pigs veterans sent by the CIA. The Cubans were mostly pilots who provided close-in air support for "Mad" Mike.
 
Here's Mike Hoare's opinion, after watching them in battle, of his CIA allies: "These Cuban CIA men were as tough, dedicated and impetuous a group of soldiers as I've ever had the honor of commanding. Their leader [Rip Robertson] was the most extraordinary and dedicated soldier I've ever met." [39]
 
Together Mad Mike, Rip and the Cubans made short work of Kabila's "Simbas," who were murdering, raping and munching (many were cannibals) their way through many of the defenseless Europeans still left in the recently abandoned Belgian colony.
 
"Tatu's" first military mission was plotting an attack on a garrison guarding a hydroelectric plant in a place called Front Bendela on the Kimbi River in Eastern Congo. Che's masterstroke was to be an elaborate ambush of the garrison. Tatu himself was stealthily leading his force into position when ambushers became the ambushed. Che lost half his men and barely escaped with his life. [40]
 
His African allies started frowning a little more closely at Tatu's c.v. and asking a few questions (but in Swahili, which he didn't understand.) Tatu's next clash with the mad dogs of imperialism was at a mountaintop town called Fizi Baraka. And another hideous rout ensued. Che admits as much in his Congo Diaries, but he blames it all on Congolese who were terrible soldiers. Yet, for some reason, the Congolese on Hoare's side seemed to fight rather well.
 
One thing that did impress the Simbas about Tatu, was that, "he never went down to the river to wash." [41]
 
                             *****************
 
Tatu's Congo mission was soon abandoned as hopeless and in a humiliating retreat across Lake Tanganyika Che and the Castro Cubans barely escaped Africa with their lives. Che now set his sights on Bolivia for the next guerrilla adventure, for living his dream of turning the Andes "into the Sierra Maestra of the Continent," for creating "two, three many Vietnams."
 
 
It would be difficult to imagine a more cockamamie plan for Bolivia than Che's. Under President Paz Estenssoro in 1952-53 Bolivia had undergone a revolution of sorts, with an extensive land reform that -- unlike Che?s and Fidel's -- actually gave ownership of the land to the peasants, the tillers of the soil themselves, much like Douglas McArthur's land reform in post-war Japan. Even crazier, Che himself, during his famous motorcycle jaunt had visited Bolivia and witnessed the positive results of the reform. Still, his amazing powers of self-deception prevailed.
 
Che convinced himself that in a section of Bolivia where the population consisted -- not of landless peasants -- but of actual homesteaders, he'd have the locals crowding into his recruitment tent to sign up with a bunch of foreign communists to overthrow the government that had given them their land, a series of rural schools and left them completely unmolested to pursue their lives. These were Indians highly suspicious of foreigners and especially of white foreigners, to boot. Che was undaunted by any of these facts. Hasta la victoria siempre! as he liked to say. At this stage in his life Che was probably more deluded than Hitler in his Bunker.
 
There is no evidence that Castro took the Bolivian mission seriously. His Soviet patrons were certainly not behind it. They knew better. They'd seen every guerrilla movement in Latin America wiped out. The only thing these half-baked adventures accomplished was to upset the Americans, with whom they'd cut a splendid little deal during the Missile Crisis to safeguard Castro. Why blow this arrangement with another of Che's harebrained adventures? Much better to work within the system in Latin America, reasoned the Soviets at this time, subtly subverting the governments by using legitimate Communist parties. A few years later Allende's electoral victory in Chile seemed to bear the Soviets out.
 
In fact, the East German female guerrilla, Tamara Bunke or "Tania" who linked up with Che in Bolivia (they'd met as early as 1961 and were reputedly lovers) was actually a KGB-STASI agent sent to keep an eye on Che. [42] Alas, poor "Tania" ( remember Patty Hearst's Symbianese Liberation Army moniker?) was mowed down by machine gun fire along with her entire "rearguard" group after a Bolivian peasant relayed their position to the army and helped plan an ambush.
 
The Bolivian Communist party itself stood aloof from Che's final mission. It's head, Mario Monje, was a faithful follower of the Soviet party-line. The only Bolivians Che managed to recruit were renegade Communists and Maoists. Che's guerrilla force averaged 40-45 members and was pompously named the "National Liberation Army." Yet at no point during its 11 month venture did Bolivians make up more than half of its members. And most of these came from the cities and areas far distant from the guerrilla base. The rural population shunned their "National Liberation Army" like a plague.
 
"We cannot develop any peasant support," Che admits in his diaries. "But it looks like by employing planned terror (emphasis mine) we may at least neutralize most of them. Their support will come later."
 
It never did. It was the campesinos themselves who kept reporting the guerrilla's whereabouts to the army, with whom they were generally on excellent terms. And for an excellent reason: it was composed mainly of Bolivian campesinos, not bearded foreigners who stole their livestock.
 
Among the unreported idiocies regarding Che's Bolivian debacle, was how he split his forces into a vanguard and a rearguard in April of 1967, whereupon they got hopelessly lost and bumbled around , half-starved, half-clothed and half-shod, without any contact for 6 months -- though they were usually within a mile of each other. [43] They didn't even have WWII vintage walkie-talkies to communicate. Che's masterful Guerrilla War, gives no explanation for such a tactic.
 
Dariel Alarcon, a Cuban who was one of the three guerrillas who ma
Title: Political Rants
Post by: LazMartinez on October 25, 2005, 07:22:43 AM
Buzwardo,
  Thank you.  My family immigrated from Cuba after the revolution so every time I see some little snot walking around with a Che T-shirt, oh how I just want to slap them.  I'm reading Felix Rodriguez's autobiography "Shadow Warrior" now and I especially love how the book starts out with Che's dead body.  :twisted:

  I've tried to explain to people what an insult it is to see the damn shirts, caps, posters, etc.. and the best way that I can do it to say, try to imagine someone walking around with a shirt of twins sewn together with the title, "Josef Mengele's wacky world of science", or something to that effect.

   For what it's worth, I remember a story my grandmother told me one time about Guevara, this article gives it a little more credibility in my eyes now.  I don't remember if it was pre or post revolution but the story goes that he would walk around Havana with a few of his goons, looking for enemies of the revolution.  He would walk up to them and ask them "Hey, what do they call you?" when they gave their name he'd reply, "No, that's whay they called you." and he would shoot them.  

   Funny thing is, Che's grandson loves the USA.  I saw him in an interview playing an rock and roll on an electric guitar with a dollar bill on it.  8)

Laz
Title: Whups!
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on October 25, 2005, 08:17:03 AM
Whups, I just noted that the long article cut off, presumeably because of a limit on post size. The link can be found at:

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=19823
Title: Context and Rosa Parks
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on October 27, 2005, 02:27:50 PM
Interesting, counterintuitive piece on Rosa Parks, government, the private sector, and segregation.

Rosa Parks and history

By Thomas Sowell

Oct 27, 2005

Syndicated columnist

The death of Rosa Parks has reminded us of her place in history, as the black woman whose refusal to give up her seat on a bus to a white man, in accordance with the Jim Crow laws of Alabama, became the spark that ignited the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

 Most people do not know the rest of the story, however. Why was there racially segregated seating on public transportation in the first place? "Racism" some will say -- and there was certainly plenty of racism in the South, going back for centuries. But racially segregated seating on streetcars and buses in the South did not go back for centuries.

 Far from existing from time immemorial, as many have assumed, racially segregated seating in public transportation began in the South in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

 Those who see government as the solution to social problems may be surprised to learn that it was government which created this problem. Many, if not most, municipal transit systems were privately owned in the 19th century and the private owners of these systems had no incentive to segregate the races.

 These owners may have been racists themselves but they were in business to make a profit -- and you don't make a profit by alienating a lot of your customers. There was not enough market demand for Jim Crow seating on municipal transit to bring it about.

 It was politics that segregated the races because the incentives of the political process are different from the incentives of the economic process. Both blacks and whites spent money to ride the buses but, after the disenfranchisement of black voters in the late 19th and early 20th century, only whites counted in the political process.

 It was not necessary for an overwhelming majority of the white voters to demand racial segregation. If some did and the others didn't care, that was sufficient politically, because what blacks wanted did not count politically after they lost the vote.

 The incentives of the economic system and the incentives of the political system were not only different, they clashed. Private owners of streetcar, bus, and railroad companies in the South lobbied against the Jim Crow laws while these laws were being written, challenged them in the courts after the laws were passed, and then dragged their feet in enforcing those laws after they were upheld by the courts.

 These tactics delayed the enforcement of Jim Crow seating laws for years in some places. Then company employees began to be arrested for not enforcing such laws and at least one president of a streetcar company was threatened with jail if he didn't comply.

 None of this resistance was based on a desire for civil rights for blacks. It was based on a fear of losing money if racial segregation caused black customers to use public transportation less often than they would have in the absence of this affront.

 Just as it was not necessary for an overwhelming majority of whites to demand racial segregation through the political system to bring it about, so it was not necessary for an overwhelming majority of blacks to stop riding the streetcars, buses and trains in order to provide incentives for the owners of these transportation systems to feel the loss of money if some blacks used public transportation less than they would have otherwise.

 People who decry the fact that businesses are in business "just to make money" seldom understand the implications of what they are saying. You make money by doing what other people want, not what you want.

 Black people's money was just as good as white people's money, even though that was not the case when it came to votes.

 Initially, segregation meant that whites could not sit in the black section of a bus any more than blacks could sit in the white section. But whites who were forced to stand when there were still empty seats in the black section objected. That's when the rule was imposed that blacks had to give up their seats to whites.

 Legal sophistries by judges "interpreted" the 14th Amendment's requirement of equal treatment out of existence. Judicial activism can go in any direction.

 That's when Rosa Parks came in, after more than half a century of political chicanery and judicial fraud.

Find this story at: http://www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/thomassowell/2005/10/27/173033.html
Title: Culture War Casualties
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on October 31, 2005, 02:06:07 PM
Whew, no punches pulled here.

Truth on Trial
By Phyllis Chesler
FrontPageMagazine.com | October 31, 2005

Are we winning the war against terror or more precisely, against the death-cult ideology of extreme hate that employs terror as one of its weapons? America, Britain and Israel have all committed significant sums of money to fight back militarily and to ensure civilian safety. However, we must fight another very hot war, one which will ultimately decide whether Western Civilization lives or dies. This is a war we are not winning and some argue that it is a war we have not yet even begun to fight.

I am talking about The Culture War, the war that must be fought to oppose the campaign of lies and propaganda that Islamists and western Stalinists launched against the West, beginning with Israel, arguably anywhere from forty to seventy years ago.

The Culture War is a very hot war: no prisoners are taken, no mercy is shown. And there are now penalties for trying to tell the truth about the danger of jihad or about the barbaric and pathological nature of militant Islam today. Indeed, if you try to discuss the Islamic religious and gender apartheid and its dangerous proliferation into Europe and North America (i.e. there have been honor killings in Cincinnati, St. Louis, Chicago, Jersey City, Toronto, as well as all over Europe and in the Muslim world), this is what will happen to you:
 
If you tell these truths in the Arab and Muslim world, you?ll be beheaded, probably tortured, certainly jailed, exiled if you are lucky. Many Muslim and Christian dissidents have suffered precisely this fate. There are no more Jews there, the Islamist Caliphate has rendered the entire Middle East Judenrein long ago. Try to say this in Europe and you might be butchered, as Theo Von Gogh was, or simply imprisoned in purdah, veiled, or threatened, forced to go into hiding, or honor-murdered as so many Muslim girls and women are.
 
Try to tell the moral tragedy that the United Nations represents, or the even greater tragedy that the word ?Palestine? has come to represent objectively, and therefore in a non-politically correct way, on European and on North American campuses, or on the increasingly left-dominated liberal media airwaves, and you may not be shot on the spot, but you will be slandered and called a ?racist? and a ?fascist.? I have been called both.
 
If you are a North American intellectual, you may not be imprisoned or be-headed but you will be heckled, mocked, and shunned. You might need security in order to speak. If you?re a feminist, you will no longer be taken seriously as an intellectual, nor will you be ?heard.?
 
Expose the permanent Intifada against Western Civilization and against the Jews and you will be sued and driven into exile, as Oriana Fallaci has been, or sued and prevented from traveling to certain countries, as Rachel Ehrenfeld has been. You will be sued and silenced in all those places where you were once published, even lionized. Dare to say that the torturer and genocidal tyrant, Saddam Hussein, is on trial today only because of America and Iraq?s sacrifice and their bold vision of democracy and you will be called a reactionary, a liar, a fool, and the worse epithet of all: a conservative.
 
Both Western leftists and Islamists brandish many tools against America and Israel in this war. Their first weapon is the systematic misuse of language. Mainstream and liberal newspapers write about ?insurgents,? not ?terrorists,? whom they describe as ?martyrs,? not ?killers, and as ?freedom fighters,? not as ?well educated evil men.?
 
Anti-American and anti-Israel demonstrators, who are clearly and visibly filled with hate and rage, are described as ?peace activists.? Anti-Semitism is legitimized, while the slightest criticism of Islam is banned because of the disallowance of ?Islamophobia.? Telling the truth has become an offense which is unprotected by free speech doctrines, which instead protect the telling of lies.
 
I was once held captive in Kabul, Afghanistan. I experienced, first-hand, what life is like in a Muslim country, one that has never been colonized by the West.  I learned that it was both foolish and dangerous to romanticize Third World countries. And, I learned first-hand, that evil and barbarism exist a priori, and are not caused by western imperialism or colonialism or by the ?Zionist entity.? It?s where I also learned to reject the doctrine of multiculturalism, that teaches that all cultures are equal, formerly colonized cultures even more so. This leads to isolationism and non-interventionism and condemns millions of civilians to Islamist torture, terror and genocide.
 
Although, to their credit, a handful of feminist activists and journalists have sounded the alarm, once America invaded Afghanistan, these very activists, all Democratic Party operatives, swiftly opposed the military routing of the Taliban. And why? Because the expedition had not been undertaken, apparently, with women in mind. It?s as if they did not think that bin Laden?s terrorism kills women too.
 
I hold the Western academy, including the feminist academy, which has been utterly Palestinianized, responsible for failing to expose and condemn the realities of Islamic gender apartheid. I know feminist graduate students who are busy ?de-constructing? the veil, polygamy and arranged marriage as possible expressions of feminist or female power?no different than the bikini. None have congratulated President Bush on his excellent choice of Condoleeza Rice as Secretary of State and none have given her the slightest credit for her pro-woman, pro-human rights and pro-Israel speeches.
 
The number of lies being told in the Western academy and among western activists are literally beyond belief. Here?s one: Mohammed was really great to women, especially to one Safiya bint Huyay whom he married?even though she was Jewish. Yes. But first he beheaded her father and her husband and exterminated her entire village. And then he forced poor Safiya to convert to Islam before he married her. This disinformation campaign leaves me speechless.
 
Our own intelligentsia?our professors?are so politically correct and so multi-culturally relativist, that they refuse to call ?barbaric? the act of stoning a woman to death because she was raped or because she refused to marry her first cousin. Nor will they denounce subjecting women to genital mutilation and public gang-rape as ?barbaric.? Nor did American media commentators who showed the Palestinian lynching of two Israeli reservists in Ramallah in 2000 describe the event, which they played over and over again, as ?barbaric.?
 
The intelligentsia did not describe what was done to us on 9/11 as ?barbaric? either. Indeed, I know American and European intellectuals who are convinced that America and Israel are the greatest barbarians of all, and that we deserved 9/11. According to Islamists and Western academics and journalists, Bin Laden is not an ?Islamo-fascist." To them, President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Ariel Sharon are the ?Nazi fascists.?
 
And then there is that vast industry of Palestinian, Arab League and United Nations funded and distributed doctored footage and fake film massacres, fake gun battles, the faked death of Palestinian children at Jewish and Israeli hands. Our Islamist opponents have turned out this propaganda nonstop around the world.
 
As propagandists, they are far more sophisticated than Goebbels, and far more patient. We cannot afford to underestimate their skill at telling Big Lies. Islamists understood that if they funded madrassas in the East and Middle Eastern Institutes in the West, and if they funded the total Palestinianization of the United Nations and of every international human rights group, that in thirty to fifty years, they would have brainwashed generations to see things their way.
 
Islam is sacred -- it cannot be insulted. Imagined slights are as important as real slights. Lies have as much weight as the truth. Whether American military forces did or did not flush a Koran down the toilet does not matter. What matters is that Muslims thought they did. No penance is good enough to atone for this crime.
 
Millions of people have been systematically brainwashed against America, against Israel, against Jews, against women and against the western concept of truth, objectivity, truth-telling, and independent thinking. All are under siege.
 
We have a serious fifth column in our midst, one that has made common cause with Islamists against us, one that has been well funded by Arab oil billionaires for more than forty years. Now, George Soros too, a fifth column General who, for a variety of reasons, has actually been leading the cultural war against the West. They are fools?but they are dangerous fools. Do they think they will be spared because they are so politically correct? Do they think that they would enjoy the same freedom of speech in Mecca or Tehran that they enjoy in the West?
 
What must we do in the face of this tyrannical threat? We must rescue language. It must bear some relationship to the truth and morality. Everything is not relative. It is not all Rashomon. We must not allow our media or academics to continue to insist that Islam is not the problem, but that even if it is, that we cannot say so, lest we be deemed racist. We must teach the history of jihad against infidels, and the history of how infidels (Jews, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, Zoroastrians) were treated under Islam. We must insist that criticism of America and Israel be balanced, not pathological, obsessive and cult-like as it is now. We must insist on civility in public discourse. We must model it for the coming generations.
 
We must fund seriously a collective effort to combat vulgar lies and vilification, the propaganda against us which has brainwashed countless generations.
 
We need a War Room effort to counter the Big Lies. We need international radio and television channels to educate people. We need to teach people about intellectual diversity and tolerance.
 
This country has birthed two significant waves of feminism. We must now take that feminist vision global. We need our foreign policy to contain serious provisions about women?s rights abroad. Otherwise, democracy cannot and will not evolve or flourish in Muslim countries.
 
The way I see it, everything is at stake. This is a time when we must all be heroes. We must all stand up to evil in our lifetime. We must acknowledge that Islamist terrorism is evil and has no justification. We must teach this to our children. We must support Muslim and Arab dissidents in their fight against Islamic tyranny and gender apartheid. We can do this. We must do this. Otherwise, we will die, and our history and our values and our entire way of life will die with us. If we fail, we will betray all that we believe in as a free people.
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 06, 2005, 01:35:34 PM
November 04, 2005, 8:40 a.m.
The Real Global Virus
The plague of Islamism keeps on spreading.

Either the jihadists really are crazy or they apparently think that they
have a shot at destabilizing, or at least winning concessions from, the
United States, Europe, India, and Russia all at once.

Apart from the continual attacks on civilians by terrorists in Iraq,
Afghanistan, and the West Bank, there have now been recent horrific assaults in New Dehli (blowing up civilians in a busy shopping season on the eve of a Hindu festival), Russia (attacking police and security facilities), London (suicide murdering of civilians on the subway), and Indonesia (more bombing, and the beheading of Christian schoolgirls). The loci of recent atrocities could be widely expanded (e.g., Malaysia, North Africa, Turkey, Spain) ? and, of course, do not forget the several terrorist plots that have been broken up in Europe and the United States.

The commonalities? There are at least three.

First, despite the various professed grievances (e.g., India should get out
of Kashmir; Russia should get out of Chechnya; England should get out of
Iraq; Christians should get out of Indonesia; or Westerners should get out
of Bali), the perpetrators were all self-proclaimed Islamic radicals.
Westerners who embrace moral equivalence still like to talk of abortion
bombings and Timothy McVeigh, but those are isolated and distant memories.  No, the old generalization since 9/11 remains valid: The majority of Muslims are not global terrorists, but almost all such terrorists, and the majority of their sympathizers, are Muslims.

Second, the jihadists characteristically feel that dialogue or negotiations
are beneath them. So like true fascists, they don?t talk; they kill. Their
opponents ? whether Christians, Hindus, Jews, or Westerners in general ? are, as infidels, de facto guilty for what they are rather than what they supposedly do. Talking to a Dr. Zawahiri is like talking to Hitler: You can?t ? and it?s suicidal to try.

Third, there is an emboldened sense that the jihadists can get away with
their crimes based on three perceptions:

(1) Squabbling and politically correct Westerners are decadent and outnumber the U.S. Marines, and ascendant Islamicism resonates among millions of Muslims who feel sorely how far they have fallen behind in the new globalized world community ? and how terrorism and blackmail, especially if energized by nuclear weapons or biological assets, might leapfrog them into a new caliphate.

(2) Sympathetic Muslim-dominated governments like Malaysia or Indonesia will not really make a comprehensive effort to eradicate radical Islamicist breeding grounds of terror, but will perhaps instead serve as ministries of propaganda for shock troops in the field.

(3) Autocratic states such as Pakistan, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Iran share outright similar political objectives and will offer either stealthy
sanctuary or financial support to terrorists, confident that either denial,
oil, or nuclear bombs give them security .

Meanwhile, Westerners far too rarely publicly denounce radical Islam for its sick, anti-Semitic, anti-female, anti-American, and anti-modernist rhetoric. Just imagine the liberal response if across the globe Christians had beheaded schoolgirls, taken over schoolhouses to kill students, and shot school teachers as we have witnessed radical Muslims doing these past few months.

Instead, Western parlor elites are still arguing over whether there were al
Qaedists in Iraq before the removal of Saddam Hussein, whether the suspicion of WMDs was the real reason for war against the Baathists, whether Muslim minorities should be pressured to assimilate into European democratic culture, and whether constitutional governments risk becoming intolerant in their new efforts to infiltrate and disrupt radical Muslim groups in Europe and the United States. Some of this acrimony is understandable, but such in-fighting is still secondary to defeating enemies who have pledged to destroy Western liberal society. At some point this Western cannibalism becomes not so much counterproductive as serving the purposes of those who wish America to call off its struggle against radical Islam.

Most Americans think that our present conflict is not comparable with World War II, in either its nature or magnitude. Perhaps ? but they should at least recall the eerie resemblance of our dilemma to the spread of global fascism in the late 1930s.

At first few saw any real connection between the ruthless annexation of
Manchuria by Japanese militarists, or Mussolini?s brutal invasion of
Ethiopia, or the systematic aggrandizement of Eastern-European territory by Hitler. China was a long way from Abyssinia, itself far from Poland. How could a white-supremacist Nazi have anything in common with a
racially-chauvinist Japanese or an Italian fascist proclaiming himself the
new imperial Roman?

In response, the League of Nations dithered and imploded (sound familiar?). Rightist American isolationists (they?re back) assured us that fascism abroad was none of our business or that there were conspiracies afoot by Jews to have us do their dirty work. Leftists were only galvanized when Hitler finally turned on Stalin (perhaps we have to wait for Osama to attack Venezuela or Cuba to get the Left involved). Abroad even members of the British royal family were openly sympathetic to German grievances (cf. Prince Charles?s silence about Iran?s promise to wipe out Israel, but his puerile Edward VIII-like lectures to Americans about a misunderstood Islam). French appeasement was such that even the most humiliating concession was deemed preferable to the horrors of World War I (no comment needed).

We can, of course, learn from this. It?s past time that we quit worrying
whether a killer who blows himself up on the West Bank, or a terrorist who shouts the accustomed jihadist gibberish as he crashes a jumbo jet into the World Trade Center, or a driver who rams his explosives-laden car into an Iraqi polling station, or a Chechnyan rebel who blows the heads off schoolchildren, is in daily e-mail contact with Osama bin Laden. Our present lax attitude toward jihadism is akin to deeming local outbreaks of avian flu as regional maladies without much connection to a new strain of a deadly ? and global ? virus.

Instead, the world?if it is to save its present liberal system of free
trade, safe travel, easy and unfettered communications, and growing
commitment to constitutional government?must begin seeing radical Islamism as a universal pathology rather than reactions to regional grievances, if it is ever to destroy it materially and refute it ideologically.

Yet the antidote for radical Islam, aside from the promotion of
democratization and open economies, is simple. It must be militarily
defeated when it emerges to wage organized violence, as in the cases of the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan, Zarqawi?s terrorists in Iraq, and the various killer cliques in Palestine.

Second, any who tolerate radical Islam should be ostracized. Muslims living in the West must be condemned when they assert that the Jews caused 9/11, or that suicide bombing is a legitimate response to Israel, or that Islamic immigrants? own unique culture gives them a pass from accustomed assimilation, or that racial and religious affinity should allow tolerance for the hatred that spews forth from madrassas and mosques ? before the patience of Western liberalism is exhausted and ?the rules of the game? in Tony Blair?s words ?change? quite radically and we begin to see mass invitations to leave.

Third, nations that intrigue with jihadists must be identified as the
enemies of civilization. We often forget that there are now left only four
major nation-states in the world that either by intent or indifference allow
radical Islamists to find sanctuary.

If Pakistan were seriously to disavow terrorism and not see it as an asset
in its rivalry with India and as a means to vent anti-Western angst, then
Osama bin Laden, Dr. Zawahiri, and their lieutenants would be hunted down tomorrow.

If the petrolopolis of Saudi Arabia would cease its financial support of
Wahhabi radicals, most terrorists could scarcely travel or organize
operations.

If there were sane governments in Syria and Iran, then there would be little refuge left for al Qaeda, and the money and shelter that now protects the beleaguered and motley collection of ex-Saddamites, Hezbollah, and al Qaedists would cease.

So in large part four nations stand in the way of eradicating much of the
global spread of jihadism ? and it is no accident that either oil or nuclear
weapons have won a global free pass for three of them. And it is no accident that we don?t have a means to wean ourselves off Middle East oil or as yet stop Iran from becoming the second Islamic nuclear nation.

But just as importantly, our leaders must explain far more cogently and in
some detail ? rather than merely assert ? to the Western public the nature of the threat we face, and how our strategy will prevail.

In contrast, when the American public is still bickering over WMDs rather
than relieved that the culprit for the first World Trade Center bombing can
no longer find official welcome in Baghdad; or when our pundits seem more worried about Halliburton than the changes in nuclear attitudes in Libya and Pakistan; or when the media mostly ignores a greater percentage of voters turning out for a free national election in the heart of the ancient caliphate than during most election years in the United States ? something has gone terribly, tragically wrong here at home.

? Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. His
latest book is A War Like No Other. How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War.
Title: Political Rants
Post by: prentice crawford on November 06, 2005, 07:55:43 PM
Doesn't this guy know it's more important for liberal democrats to gain power than to save the West?
                                     Woof P.C.
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 07, 2005, 06:14:11 AM
The Suicide Bombers Among Us
Theodore Dalrymple

All terrorists, presumably, know the dangers that they run, accepting them as an occupational hazard; given Man?s psychological makeup?or at least the psychological makeup of certain young men?these dangers may act as an attraction, not a deterrent. But only a few terrorists use their own deaths as an integral means of terrorizing others. They seem to be a breed apart, with whom the rest of humanity can have little or nothing in common.

Certainly they sow panic more effectively than other terrorists. Those who leave bombs in public places and then depart, despicable as they are, presumably still have attachments to their own lives, and therefore may be open to dissuasion or negotiation. By contrast, no threat (at first sight) might deter someone who is prepared to extinguish himself to advance his cause, and who considers such self-annihilation while killing as many strangers as possible a duty, an honor, and a merit that will win ample rewards in the hereafter. And Britain has suddenly been forced to acknowledge that it has an unknown number of such people in its midst, some of them home-grown.

The mere contemplation of a suicide bomber?s state of mind is deeply unsettling, even without considering its practical consequences. I have met a would-be suicide bomber who had not yet had the chance to put his thanatological daydream into practice. What could possibly have produced as embittered a mentality as his?what experience of life, what thoughts, what doctrines? What fathomless depths of self-pity led him to the conclusion that only by killing himself and others could he give a noble and transcendent meaning to his existence?

As is by now well known (for the last few years have made us more attentive to Islamic concepts and ways of thinking, irrespective of their intrinsic worth), the term ?jihad? has two meanings: inner struggle and holy war. While the political meaning connotes violence, though with such supposed justifications as the defense of Islam and the spread of the faith among the heathen, the personal meaning generally suggests something peaceful and inward-looking. The struggle this kind of jihad entails is spiritual; it is the effort to overcome the internal obstacles?above all, forbidden desires?that prevent the good Muslim from achieving complete submission to God?s will. Commentators have tended to see this type of jihad as harmless or even as beneficial?a kind of self-improvement that leads to decency, respectability, good behavior, and material success.

In Britain, however, these two forms of jihad have coalesced in a most murderous fashion. Those who died in the London bombings were sacrificial victims to the need of four young men to resolve a conflict deep within themselves (and within many young Muslims), and they imagined they could do so only by the most extreme possible interpretation of their ancestral religion.

Young Muslim men in Britain?as in France and elsewhere in the West?have a problem of personal, cultural, and national identity. They are deeply secularized, with little religious faith, even if most will admit to a belief in God. Their interest in Islam is slight. They do not pray or keep Ramadan (except if it brings them some practical advantage, such as the postponement of a court appearance). Their tastes are for the most part those of non-Muslim lower-class young men. They dress indistinguishably from their white and black contemporaries, and affect the same hairstyles and mannerisms, including the vulpine lope of the slums. Gold chains, the heavier the better, and gold front teeth, without dental justification, are symbols of their success in the streets, which is to say of illicit enrichment.

Many young Muslims, unlike the sons of Hindus and Sikhs who immigrated into Britain at the same time as their parents, take drugs, including heroin. They drink, indulge in casual sex, and make nightclubs the focus of their lives. Work and careers are at best a painful necessity, a slow and inferior means of obtaining the money for their distractions.

But if in many respects their tastes and behavior are indistinguishable from those of underclass white males, there are nevertheless clear and important differences. Most obviously, whatever the similarity between them and their white counterparts in their taste for sex, drugs, and rock and roll, they nevertheless do not mix with young white men, even in the neighborhoods devoted to the satisfaction of their tastes. They are in parallel with the whites, rather than intersecting with them.

Another obvious difference is the absence of young Muslim women from the resorts of mass distraction. However similar young Muslim men might be in their tastes to young white men, they would be horrified, and indeed turn extremely violent, if their sisters comported themselves as young white women do. They satisfy their sexual needs with prostitutes and those whom they quite openly call ?white sluts.? (Many a young white female patient of mine has described being taunted in this fashion as she walked through a street inhabited by Muslims.) And, of course, they do not have to suffer much sexual frustration in an environment where people decide on sexual liaisons within seconds of acquaintance.

However secular the tastes of the young Muslim men, they strongly wish to maintain the male dominance they have inherited from their parents. A sister who has the temerity to choose a boyfriend for herself, or who even expresses a desire for an independent social life, is likely to suffer a beating, followed by surveillance of Stasi-like thoroughness. The young men instinctively understand that their inherited system of male domination?which provides them, by means of forced marriage, with sexual gratification at home while simultaneously freeing them from domestic chores and allowing them to live completely Westernized lives outside the home, including further sexual adventures into which their wives cannot inquire?is strong but brittle, rather as communism was: it is an all or nothing phenomenon, and every breach must meet swift punishment.

Even if for no other reason, then (and there are in fact other reasons), young Muslim males have a strong motive for maintaining an identity apart. And since people rarely like to admit low motives for their behavior, such as the wish to maintain a self-gratifying dominance, these young Muslims need a more elevated justification for their conduct toward women. They find it, of course, in a residual Islam: not the Islam of onerous duties, rituals, and prohibitions, which interferes so insistently in day-to-day life, but in an Islam of residual feeling, which allows them a sense of moral superiority to everything around them, including women, without in any way cramping their style.

This Islam contains little that is theological, spiritual, or even religious, but it nevertheless exists in the mental economy as what anatomists call a ?potential space.? A potential space occurs where two tissues or organs are separated by smooth membranes that are normally close together, but that can be separated by an accumulation of fluid such as pus if infection or inflammation occurs. And, of course, such inflammation readily occurs in the minds of young men who easily believe themselves to be ill-used, and who have been raised on the thin gruel of popular Western culture without an awareness that any other kind of Western culture exists.

The dissatisfactions of young Muslim men in Britain are manifold. Most will experience at some time slighting or downright insulting remarks about them or their group?the word ?Paki? is a term of disdainful abuse?and these experiences tend to grow in severity and significance with constant rehearsal in the mind as it seeks an external explanation for its woes. Minor tribulations thus swell into major injustices, which in turn explain the evident failure of Muslims to rise in their adopted land. The French-Iranian researcher Farhad Khosrokhavar, who interviewed 15 French Muslim prisoners convicted of planning terrorist acts, relates in his book, Suicide Bombers: Allah?s New Martyrs, how some of his interviewees had been converted to the terrorist outlook by a single insulting remark?for example, when one of their sisters was called a ?dirty Arab? when she explained how she couldn?t leave home on her own as other girls could. Such is the fragility of the modern ego?not of Muslims alone, but of countless people brought up in our modern culture of ineffable self-importance, in which an insult is understood not as an inevitable human annoyance, but as a wound that outweighs all the rest of one?s experience.

The evidence of Muslims? own eyes and of their own lives, as well as that of statistics, is quite clear: Muslim immigrants and their descendants are more likely to be poor, to live in overcrowded conditions, to be unemployed, to have low levels of educational achievement, and above all to be imprisoned, than other South Asian immigrants and their descendants. The refusal to educate females to their full capacity is a terrible handicap in a society in which, perhaps regrettably, prosperity requires two household incomes. The idea that one is already in possession of the final revealed truth, leading to an inherently superior way of life, inhibits adaptation to a technically more advanced society. Even so, some British Muslims do succeed (the father of one of the London bombers owned two shops, two houses, and drove a new Mercedes)?a fact which their compatriots interpret exactly backward: not that Muslims can succeed, but that generally they can?t, because British society is inimical to Muslims.

In coming to this conclusion, young Muslims would only be adopting the logic that has driven Western social policy for so long: that any difference in economic and social outcome between groups is the result of social injustice and adverse discrimination. The premises of multiculturalism don?t even permit asking whether reasons internal to the groups themselves might account for differences in outcomes.

The BBC peddles this sociological view consistently. In 1997, for example, it stated that Muslims ?continue to face discrimination,? as witness the fact that they were three times as likely to be unemployed long-term as West Indians; and this has been its line ever since. If more Muslims than any other group possess no educational qualifications whatsoever, even though the hurdles for winning such qualifications have constantly fallen, it can only be because of discrimination?though a quarter of all medical students in Britain are now of Indian subcontinental descent. It can have nothing whatever to do with the widespread?and illegal?practice of refusing to allow girls to continue at school, which the press scarcely ever mentions, and which the educational authorities rarely if ever investigate. If youth unemployment among Muslims is two and a half times the rate among whites, it can be only because of discrimination?though youth unemployment among Hindus is actually lower than among whites (and this even though many young Hindus complain of being mistaken for Muslims). And so on and so on.

A constant and almost unchallenged emphasis on ?social justice,? the negation of which is, of course, ?discrimination,? can breed only festering embitterment. Where the definition of justice is entitlement by virtue of group existence rather than reward for individual effort, a radical overhaul of society will appear necessary to achieve such justice. Islamism in Britain is thus not the product of Islam alone: it is the product of the meeting of Islam with a now deeply entrenched native mode of thinking about social problems.

And it is here that the ?potential space? of Islamism, with its ready-made diagnosis and prescriptions, opens up and fills with the pus of implacable hatred for many in search of a reason for and a solution to their discontents. According to Islamism, the West can never meet the demands of justice, because it is decadent, materialistic, individualistic, heathen, and democratic rather than theocratic. Only a return to the principles and practices of seventh-century Arabia will resolve all personal and political problems at the same time. This notion is fundamentally no more (and no less) bizarre or stupid than the Marxist notion that captivated so many Western intellectuals throughout the 20th century: that the abolition of private property would lead to final and lasting harmony among men. Both conceptions offer a formula that, rigidly followed, would resolve all human problems.

Of course, the Islamic formula holds no attraction for young women in the West. A recent survey for the French interior ministry found that 83 percent of Muslim converts and reconverts (that is, secularized Muslims who adopted Salafism) in France were men; and from my clinical experience I would bet that the 17 percent of converts who were women converted in the course of a love affair rather than on account of what Edward Gibbon, in another context, called ?the evident truth of the doctrine itself.?

The West is a formidable enemy, however, difficult to defeat, for it exists not only in the cities, the infrastructure, and the institutions of Europe and America but in the hearts and minds even of those who oppose it and wish to destroy it. The London bombers were as much products of the West as of Islam; their tastes and their desires were largely Westernized. The bombers dressed no differently from other young men from the slums; and in every culture, appearance is part, at least, of identity. In British inner cities in particular, what you wear is nine-tenths of what you are.

But the Western identity goes far deeper. One of the bombers was a young man of West Indian descent, whose half-sister (in his milieu, full siblings are almost unknown) reports that he was a ?normal? boy, impassioned by rap music until the age of 15, when he converted to Islam. It need hardly be pointed out that rap music?full of inchoate rage, hatred, and intemperance?does not instill a balanced or subtle understanding of the world in its listeners. It fills and empties the mind at the same time: fills it with debased notions and empties it of critical faculties. The qualities of mind and character that are attracted to it, and that consider it an art form worthy of time and attention, are not so easily overcome or replaced. Jermaine Lindsay was only 19, four years into his conversion from rap to Islam, when he died?an age at which impulsivity is generally at its greatest, requiring the kind of struggle for self-mastery that rap music is dedicated to undermining. Islam would have taught him to hate and despise what he had been, but he must have been aware that he still was what he had been. To a hatred of the world, his conversion added a self-hatred.

The other bombers had passions for soccer, cricket, and pop music. They gave no indication before their dreadful deeds of religious fanaticism, and their journeys to Pakistan, in retrospect indications of a growing indoctrination by fundamentalism, could have seemed at the time merely family visits. In the meantime, they led highly Westernized lives, availing themselves of all the products of Western ingenuity to which Muslims have contributed nothing for centuries. It is, in fact, literally impossible for modern Muslims to expunge the West from their lives: it enters the fabric of their existence at every turn. Usama bin Ladin himself is utterly dependent upon the West for his weaponry, his communications, his travel, and his funds. He speaks of the West?s having stolen Arabian oil, but of what use would oil have been to the Arabs if it had remained under their sands, as it would have done without the intervention of the West? Without the West, what fortune would bin Ladin?s family have made from what construction in Saudi Arabia?

Muslims who reject the West are therefore engaged in a losing and impossible inner jihad, or struggle, to expunge everything that is not Muslim from their breasts. It can?t be done: for their technological and scientific dependence is necessarily also a cultural one. You can?t believe in a return to seventh-century Arabia as being all-sufficient for human requirements, and at the same time drive around in a brand-new red Mercedes, as one of the London bombers did shortly before his murderous suicide. An awareness of the contradiction must gnaw in even the dullest fundamentalist brain.

Furthermore, fundamentalists must be sufficiently self-aware to know that they will never be willing to forgo the appurtenances of Western life: the taste for them is too deeply implanted in their souls, too deeply a part of what they are as human beings, ever to be eradicated. It is possible to reject isolated aspects of modernity but not modernity itself. Whether they like it or not, Muslim fundamentalists are modern men?modern men trying, impossibly, to be something else.

They therefore have at least a nagging intimation that their chosen utopia is not really a utopia at all: that deep within themselves there exists something that makes it unachievable and even undesirable. How to persuade themselves and others that their lack of faith, their vacillation, is really the strongest possible faith? What more convincing evidence of faith could there be than to die for its sake? How can a person be really attached or attracted to rap music and cricket and Mercedes cars if he is prepared to blow himself up as a means of destroying the society that produces them? Death will be the end of the illicit attachment that he cannot entirely eliminate from his heart.

The two forms of jihad, the inner and the outer, the greater and the lesser, thus coalesce in one apocalyptic action. By means of suicide bombing, the bombers overcome moral impurities and religious doubts within themselves and, supposedly, strike an external blow for the propagation of the faith.

Of course, hatred is the underlying emotion. A man in prison who told me that he wanted to be a suicide bomber was more hate-filled than any man I have ever met. The offspring of a broken marriage between a Muslim man and a female convert, he had followed the trajectory of many young men in his area: sex and drugs and rock and roll, untainted by anything resembling higher culture. Violent and aggressive by nature, intolerant of the slightest frustration to his will and frequently suicidal, he had experienced taunting during his childhood because of his mixed parentage. After a vicious rape for which he went to prison, he converted to a Salafist form of Islam and became convinced that any system of justice that could take the word of a mere woman over his own was irredeemably corrupt.

I noticed one day that his mood had greatly improved; he was communicative and almost jovial, which he had never been before. I asked him what had changed in his life for the better. He had made his decision, he said. Everything was resolved. He was not going to kill himself in an isolated way, as he had previously intended. Suicide was a mortal sin, according to the tenets of the Islamic faith. No, when he got out of prison he would not kill himself; he would make himself a martyr, and be rewarded eternally, by making himself into a bomb and taking as many enemies with him as he could.

Enemies, I asked; what enemies? How could he know that the people he killed at random would be enemies? They were enemies, he said, because they lived happily in our rotten and unjust society. Therefore, by definition, they were enemies?enemies in the objective sense, as Stalin might have put it?and hence were legitimate targets.

I asked him whether he thought that, in order to deter him from his course of action, it would be right for the state to threaten to kill his mother and his brothers and sisters?and to carry out this threat if he carried out his, in order to deter others like him.

The idea appalled him, not because it was yet another example of the wickedness of a Western democratic state, but because he could not conceive of such a state acting in this unprincipled way. In other words, he assumed a high degree of moral restraint on the part of the very organism that he wanted to attack and destroy.

Of course, one of the objects of the bombers, instinctive rather than articulated, might be to undermine this very restraint, both of the state and of the population itself, in order to reveal to the majority of Muslims the true evil nature of the society in which they live, and force them into the camp of the extremists. If so, there is some hope of success: physical attacks on Muslims (or on Hindus and Sikhs ignorantly taken to be Muslims) increased in Britain by six times in the immediate aftermath of the bombings, according to the police. It wouldn?t take many more such bombings, perhaps, to provoke real and serious intercommunal violence on the Indian subcontinental model. Britain teems with aggressive, violent subgroups who would be only too delighted to make pogroms a reality.

Even if there is no such dire an eventuality, the outlook is sufficiently grim and without obvious solution. A highly secularized Muslim population whose men nevertheless wish to maintain their dominance over women and need a justification for doing so; the hurtful experience of disdain or rejection from the surrounding society; the bitter disappointment of a frustrated materialism and a seemingly perpetual inferior status in the economic hierarchy; the extreme insufficiency and unattractiveness of modern popular culture that is without value; the readiness to hand of an ideological and religious solution that is flattering to self-esteem and allegedly all- sufficient, and yet in unavoidable conflict with a large element of each individual?s identity; an oscillation between feelings of inferiority and superiority, between humiliation about that which is Western and that which is non-Western in the self; and the grotesque inflation of the importance of personal existential problems that is typical of modern individualism?all ensure fertile ground for the recruitment of further ?martyrs? for years to come.

Surveys suggest that between 6 and 13 percent of British Muslims?that is, between 98,000 and 208,000 people?are sympathetic toward Islamic terrorists and their efforts. Theoretical sympathy expressed in a survey is not the same thing as active support or a wish to emulate the ?martyrs? in person, of course. But it is nevertheless a sufficient proportion and absolute number of sympathizers to make suspicion and hostility toward Muslims by the rest of society not entirely irrational, though such suspicion and hostility could easily increase support for extremism. This is the tightrope that the British state and population will now have to walk for the foreseeable future; and the sweet dream of universal cultural compatibility has been replaced, in a single day, by the nightmare of permanent conflict.
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 09, 2005, 05:08:40 PM
By Joseph Farah
? 2005 WorldNetDaily.com

OK, enough is enough.

It's clear France is no longer in control of its population.

It's clear millions within its borders are struggling for freedom and independence.

It's clear that these people are not rioting for the sake of rioting, they are responding to oppression from French authorities.

It's clear that their uprising cannot be met with state violence, because that would only lead to a cycle of violence.

It's clear that these freedom-fighters ? whom I have dubbed "Paristinians" ? want a state of their own.

It's clear that the international community must force France to the negotiating table with these freedom fighters to begin the peace process that will inevitably lead to the creation of an autonomous, independent state of "Paristine."


If it's good enough for Israel, it's good enough for the French surrender monkeys who have been leaders of the global movement to force the Jewish state into appeasement of terrorists.

We've got to stop referring to this "intifada" in France as "riots." This is a movement for self-determination. This is a movement for independence. This is a movement for freedom from imperialism.

The analogy is apt.

That's not "Fr?re Jacques" they're singing in France. It's "Fire Jacques."

The president of France can see the cinder in the eye of others, but is missing the beam in his own.

What's good for the goose liver is good for the gander liver.

The chicken cordon bleu has come home to roost.

It's time for France to stop the hypocrisy.

It's time for the French to take a dose of the medicine they have been handing out to the Jews of Israel.

It's time to end the apartheid within its population. It's time for France to stop treating those poor, Muslim immigrants as second-class citizens. It's time to accept the only permanent solution that can address the root problem in French society ? the recognition of the Paristinians as a legitimate negotiating partner.

Enough rubber bullets!

Enough police repression!

Enough calls for restraint!

Enough with the threats!

Before this cycle of violence spreads throughout all of Europe, France needs to do the right thing.

The French have been speaking out of both sides of their mouths for too long. They've been speaking out of both of their nostrils for too long, too. If appeasement was the solution in Iraq, it's the solution for the "Paristinian" revolt. If appeasement was the solution for Hitler, it's the solution for the "Paristinian" revolt. If appeasement was the solution for Israel in dealing with its "Palestinian" problem, it's the solution for France's "Paristinian" uprising.

As I mentioned yesterday in my column, if France has these kinds of systemic problems with its Muslim population, then it is time to partition France. It's time for an independent Muslim state to be created. After all, isn't that what France and other European nations have determined is the proper solution for Israel?

These are not just riots. This is an intifada ? just like the one begun in 2000 within and around Israel.


France and other countries, including the United States, have demanded that Israel meet those attacks with land concessions to the rioters and suicide bombers. That is the only viable, long-term solution, they say. They claim this violence will never cease until those oppressed by Israel are granted an independent, autonomous state of their own.

Why should the solution be any different in France?

Stop the violence! Now ? not at a snail's pace. The time has come to begin talks with the "Paristinians" about their own future homeland of "Paristine."  
Attachments:
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 10, 2005, 11:38:23 AM
How to lose friends and alienate people

Nov 10th 2005
From The Economist print edition

 

 
 

 

 
 
 


The Bush administration's approach to torture beggars belief

THERE are many difficult trade-offs for any president when it comes to diplomacy and the fight against terrorism. Should you, for instance, support an ugly foreign regime because it is the enemy of a still uglier one? Should a superpower submit to the United Nations when it is not in its interests to do so? Amid this fog, you would imagine that George Bush would welcome an issue where America's position should be luminously clear?namely an amendment passed by Congress to ban American soldiers and spies from torturing prisoners. Indeed, after the disastrous stories of prisoner abuse in Abu Ghraib, Guant?namo Bay and Afghanistan, you might imagine that a shrewd president would have sponsored such a law himself to set the record straight.

 

But you would be wrong. This week saw the sad spectacle of an American president lamely trying to explain to the citizens of Panama that, yes, he would veto any such bill but, no, ?We do not torture.? Meanwhile, Mr Bush's increasingly error-prone vice-president, Dick Cheney, has been across on Capitol Hill trying to bully senators to exclude America's spies from any torture ban. To add a note of farce to the tragedy, the administration has had to explain that the CIA is not torturing prisoners at its secret prisons in Asia and Eastern Europe?though of course it cannot confirm that such prisons exist.

 

The nub of the torture debate is an amendment sponsored by John McCain, a Republican senator who was himself tortured by the Vietnamese. The amendment, based on the American army's own field manual and passed in the Senate by 90 votes to nine, states that ?no individual in the custody or under the physical control of the United States government, regardless of nationality or physical location, shall be subject to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.? Mr McCain's aim was simple enough: to clear up any doubt that could possibly exist about America's standards.

 

That doubt does, alas, exist?and has been amplified by the administration's heavy-handed efforts to stifle the McCain amendment. This, after all, is a White House that has steadfastly tried to keep ?enemy combatants? beyond the purview of American courts, whose defence secretary has publicly declared that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to the battle against al-Qaeda and whose Justice Department once produced an infamous memorandum explaining how torture was part of the president's war powers. The revelation in the Washington Post that the CIA maintains a string of jails, where it can keep people indefinitely and in secret, only heightens the suspicion that Mr Cheney wants the agency to keep using ?enhanced interrogation techniques?. These include ?waterboarding?, or making a man think he is drowning.

 

Although Mr Cheney has not had the guts to make his case in public, the argument that torture is sometimes justified is not a negligible one. Khalid Sheik Mohammed, presumed to be in one of the CIA's ?black prisons?, is thought to have information about al-Qaeda's future plans. Surely it is vital to extract that information, no matter how? Some people think there should be a system of ?torture warrants? for special cases. But where exactly should the line be drawn? And are the gains really so dramatic that it is worth breaking the taboo against civilised democracies condoning torture? For instance, Mr McCain argues that torture is nearly always useless as an interrogation technique, since under it people will say anything to their tormentors.

 

If the pragmatic gains in terms of information yielded are dubious, the loss to America in terms of public opinion are clear and horrifically large. Abu Ghraib was a gift to the insurgency in Iraq; Guant?namo Bay and its dubious military commissions, now being examined by the Supreme Court, have acted as recruiting sergeants for al-Qaeda around the world. In the cold war, America championed the Helsinki human-rights accords. This time, the world's most magnificent democracy is struggling against vile terrorists who thought nothing of slaughtering thousands of innocent civilians?and yet the administration has somehow contrived to turn America's own human-rights record into a subject of legitimate debate.

Mr Bush would rightly point out that anti-Americanism is to blame for some of the opprobrium heaped on his country. But why encourage it so cavalierly and in such an unAmerican way? Nearly two years after Abu Ghraib, the world is still waiting for a clear statement of America's principles on the treatment of detainees. Mr McCain says he will keep on adding his amendment to different bills until Mr Bush signs one of them. Every enemy of terrorism should hope he does so soon.
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 13, 2005, 09:06:19 AM
EUROPE - THY NAME IS COWARDICE
By Matthias Doepfner* | Davids Medienkritik
04.04.05 | A few days ago Henry Broder wrote in Welt am Sonntag, "Europe - your family name is appeasement." It's a phrase you can't get out of your head because it's so terribly true.

Appeasement cost millions of Jews and non-Jews their lives as England and France, allies at the time, negotiated and hesitated too long before they noticed that Hitler had to be fought, not bound to toothless agreements.

Appeasement legitimized and stabilized Communism in the Soviet Union, then East Germany, then all the rest of Eastern Europe where for decades, inhuman, suppressive, murderous governments were glorified as the ideologically correct alternative to all other possibilities.

Appeasement crippled Europe when genocide ran rampant in Kosovo, and even though we had absolute proof of ongoing mass-murder, we Europeans debated and debated and debated, and were still debating when finally the Americans had to come from halfway around the world, into Europe yet again, and do our work for us.

Rather than protecting democracy in the Middle East, European appeasement, camouflaged behind the fuzzy word "equidistance," now countenances suicide bombings in Israel by fundamentalist Palestinians.

Appeasement generates a mentality that allows Europe to ignore nearly 500,000 victims of Saddam's torture and murder machinery and, motivated by the self-righteousness of the peace-movement, has the gall to issue bad grades to George Bush... Even as it is uncovered that the loudest critics of the American action in Iraq made illicit billions, no, TENS of billions, in the corrupt U. N. Oil-for-Food program.

And now we are faced with a particularly grotesque form of appeasement... How is Germany reacting to the escalating violence by Islamic fundamentalists in Holland and elsewhere? By suggesting that we really should have a "Muslim Holiday" in Germany.

I wish I were joking, but I am not. A substantial fraction of our (German) Government, and if the polls are to be believed, the German people, actually believe that creating an Official State "Muslim Holiday" will somehow spare us from the wrath of the fanatical Islamists.

One cannot help but recall Britain's Neville Chamberlain waving the laughable treaty signed by Adolf Hitler, and declaring European "Peace in our time".

What else has to happen before the European public and its political leadership get it? There is a sort of crusade underway, an especially perfidious crusade consisting of systematic attacks by fanatic Muslims, focused on civilians, directed against our free, open Western societies, and intent upon Western Civilization's utter destruction.

It is a conflict that will most likely last longer than any of the great military conflicts of the last century - a conflict conducted by an enemy that cannot be tamed by "tolerance" and "accommodation" but is actually spurred on by such gestures, which have proven to be, and will always be taken by the Islamists for signs of weakness.

Only two recent American Presidents had the courage needed for anti- appeasement: Reagan and Bush.

His American critics may quibble over the details, but we Europeans know the truth. We saw it first hand: Ronald Reagan ended the Cold War, freeing half of the German people from nearly 50 years of terror and virtual slavery. And Bush, supported only by the Social Democrat Blair, acting on moral conviction, recognized the danger in the Islamic War against democracy. His place in history will have to be evaluated after a number of years have passed.

In the meantime, Europe sits back with charismatic self-confidence in the multicultural corner, instead of defending liberal society's values and being an attractive center of power on the same playing field as the true great powers, America and China.

On the contrary - we Europeans present ourselves, in contrast to those "arrogant Americans", as the World Champions of "tolerance", which even (Germany's Interior Minister) Otto Schily justifiably criticizes. Why? Because we're so moral? I fear it's more because we're so materialistic, so devoid of a moral compass.

For his policies, Bush risks the fall of the dollar, huge amounts of additional national debt, and a massive and persistent burden on the American economy - because unlike almost all of Europe, Bush realizes what is at stake - literally everything.

While we criticize the "capitalistic robber barons" of America because they seem too sure of their priorities, we timidly defend our Social Welfare systems. Stay out of it! It could get expensive! We'd rather discuss reducing our 35-hour workweek or our dental coverage, or our 4 weeks of paid vacation... Or listen to TV pastors preach about the need to "reach out to terrorists. To understand and forgive".

These days, Europe reminds me of an old woman who, with shaking hands, frantically hides her last pieces of jewelry when she notices a robber breaking into a neighbor's house.

Appeasement? Europe, thy name is Cowardice.
Title: VDH on Simpering Revisionists
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on November 18, 2005, 10:31:10 AM
November 18, 2005, 8:18 a.m.
War & Reconstruction
For Bush?s critics, even hindsight is cloudy.
Victor Davis Hanson

This is the mantra of the extreme Left: "Bush lied, thousands died." A softer version from politicians now often follows: "If I knew then what I know now, I would never have supported the war."

These sentiments are intellectually dishonest and morally reprehensible for a variety of reasons beyond the obvious consideration that you do not hang out to dry some 150,000 brave Americans on the field of battle while you in-fight over whether they should have ever been sent there in the first place.

Consider the now exasperating (and tired) argument that almost anyone who looked at the intelligence data shared the same opinion about the threat of weapons of mass destruction ? former presidents, U.S. congressmen, foreign governments, Iraqi exiles, and numerous intelligence organizations.

The prewar speeches of aJay Rockefeller and Hillary Clinton sparked and sizzled with somber warnings about biological and chemical arsenals ? and, yes, nuclear threats growing on the horizon. Politicians voted for war at a time of post-9/11 furor and fear, when anthrax was thought to have been scattered in our major cities and the hysteria over its traces evacuated government buildings. In response, the Democrats beat their breasts to prove that they could out-macho the "smoke-em-out" and "dead-or-alive" president in laying out the case against Saddam Hussein, especially after the successful removal of the Taliban.

To argue recently, as Howard Dean has, that the president somehow had even more intelligence data or additional information beyond what was given to the Senate Intelligence Committee can make the opposite argument from what was intended- the dangers seemed even greater the more files one read attesting to Saddam's past history, clear intent, formidable financial resources, and fury at the United States. If the Dean notion is that the president had mysterious auxiliary information, then the case was probably even stronger for war, since no one has yet produced any stealth document that (a) warned there was no WMDs, and (b) was knowingly withheld from the Congress.

A bewildered visitor from Mars would tell Washingtonians something like: "For twelve years you occupied Saddam's airspace, since he refused to abide by the peace accords and you were afraid that he would activate his WMD arsenal again against the Kurds or his neighbors. Now that he is gone and for the first time you can confirm that his weapons program is finally defunct, you are mad about this new precedent that you have established: Given the gravity of WMD arsenals, the onus is now on suspect rogue nations to prove that they do not have weapons of mass destruction, rather than for civilization to establish beyond a responsible doubt that they do?"

Even more importantly, the U.S. Senate voted to authorize the removal of Saddam Hussein for 22 reasons other than just his possession of dangerous weapons. We seem to have forgotten that entirely.

If the Bush administration erred in privileging the dangers of Iraqi WMDs, then the Congress in its wisdom used a far broader approach (as Sen. Robert Byrd complained at the time), and went well beyond George Bush in making a more far-reaching case for war ? genocide, violation of U.N. agreements, breaking of the 1991 armistice accords, attempts to kill a former U.S. president, and firing on American aerial patrols. It was the U.S. Senate ? a majority of Democrats included ? not Paul Wolfowitz, that legislated a war to reform and restore the wider Middle East: "...whereas it is in the national security of the United States to restore international peace and security to the Persian Gulf region".

So read the senators' October 2002 resolution. It is a model of sobriety and judiciousness in authorizing a war. There are facts cited such as the violation of agreements; moral considerations such as genocide; real worries about al Qaeda's ties to Saddam (e.g., "...whereas members of al-Qaida, an organization bearing responsibility for attacks on the United States, its citizens, and interests, including the attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, are known to be in Iraq"); fears of terrorism (" ...whereas Iraq continues to aid and harbor other international terrorist organizations, including organizations that threaten the lives and safety of American citizens."

No doubt many Democrats in the Senate who voted to authorize the war took their cue from Bill Clinton's own November 1998 indictment of bin Laden (still, how does one indict an enemy that has declared war on you?) that explicitly stressed the connection between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein: "In addition, al Qaeda reached an understanding with the government of Iraq that al Qaeda would not work against that government and that on particular projects, specifically including weapons development, al Qaeda would work cooperatively with the government of Iraq."

Thus the honest and moral argument for the now contrite would be something like: "I know now that Saddam did not try to kill a former president, did not commit genocide, did not attack four of his neighbors, did not harbor anti-American terrorists, did not ignore U.N. and 1991 peace accords, and did not attack Americans enforcing U.N.-mandated no-fly zones ? and so I regret my vote."

Or if the former supporters of the war had character, they would be more honest still: "Yes, Saddam was guilty of those other 22 writs, but none of them justified the war that I voted for, and I should not have included them in the resolution."

Or they could be more truthful still: "I didn't really want a war, and only threw in the bit about al Qaeda and Saddam. So I just voted for the authorization in case some crisis emerged and the President had to act swiftly."

I doubt any will ever say, "I voted to cover myself: If the war proved swift and relatively low-cost like Bosnia or Afghanistan, I was on record for it; if it got bad like Mogadishu or Lebanon, then I wasn't the commander-in-chief who conducted it."

Given such an incriminating record, what then is really at the heart of the current strange congressional hysteria?

Simple ? the tragic loss of nearly 2,100 Americans in Iraq.

The "my perfect war, your messy postbellum reconstruction" crowd is now huge and unapologetic. It encompasses not just leftists who once jumped on the war bandwagon in fears that Democrats would be tarred as weak on national security (a legitimate worry), but also many saber-rattling conservatives and Republicans ? including those (the most shameful of all) who had in earlier times both sent letters to President Clinton and Bush demanding the removal of Saddam and now damn their commander-in-chief for taking them at their own word.

In the triumphalism after seeing Milosevic go down without a single American death, the Taliban implode at very little cost, and Saddam removed from power with little more than 100 fatalities, there was the assumption that the United States could simply nod and dictators would quail and democracy would follow. Had we lost 100 in birthing democracy and not 2,000, or seen purple fingers only and not IEDs on Dan Rather's nightly broadcasts, today's critics would be arguing over who first thought up the idea of removing Saddam and implementing democratic changes.

So without our 2,100 losses, nearly all the present critics would be either silent or grandstanding their support ? in the manner that three quarters of the American population who polled that they were in favor of the war once they saw the statue of Saddam fall.

In short, there is no issue of WMD other than finding out why our intelligence people who had once missed it in the First Gulf War, then hyped it in the next-or what actually happened to all the unaccounted for vials and stockpiles that the U.N. inspectors swore were once inside Iraq.

So the real crux is a real legitimate debate over whether our ongoing costs-billions spent, thousands wounded, nearly 2,100 American soldiers lost-will be worth the results achieved. Post facto, no death seems "worth it". The premature end of life is tangible and horrendous in a way that the object of such soldiers' sacrifices-a reformed Middle East, a safer world, enhanced American safety, and freedom for 26 million-seems remote and abstract.

Nevertheless, that is what our soldiers died for: a world in which Middle East dictators no longer murder their own, ruin their won societies, and then cynically use terrorism to whip up the Arab street and deflect their own self-induced miseries onto the United States. This is the calculus that led to 9/11, and the reason why Saddam gave sanctuary to 1980s terrorists, the killer Yasin who failed in his first attempt to take down the twin towers, and the likes of Zarqawi.

While the U.S. military conducts a brilliant campaign to implement democratic reform that is on the eve of ending with an Iraqi parliament, while there has been no repeat of promised 9/11 attacks here at home, and while the entire dictatorial Middle East from Lebanon and Syria to Egypt and Libya is in crisis ? baffled, furious, or impressed by a now idealistic United States pushing for something different and far better ? our intellectual and political elite harp on "WMD, WMD, WMD..."

Sadder still, they stay transfixed to this refrain either because polls show that it is good politics or it allows them a viable exit from an apparently now unpopular war.

But no, not so fast.

History has other lessons as well ? as we know from the similar public depression during successful wars after Washington's sad winter at Valley Forge, Lincoln's summer of 1864, or the 1942 gloom that followed Pearl Harbor and the fall of the Philippines, Singapore, and Wake Island. When this is all over, and there is a legitimate government in the Middle East that represents the aspirations of a free people, the stunning achievement of our soldiers will be at last recognized, the idealism of the United States will be appreciated, our critics here and abroad will go mute ? and one of the 23 writs for a necessary war of liberation will largely be forgotten.

? Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. His latest book is A War Like No Other. How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War.
   
http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson200511180818.asp
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 21, 2005, 08:11:30 AM
HOW TO LOSE A WAR
By RALPH PETERS

QUIT. It's that simple. There are plenty of more complex ways to lose a war, but none as reliable as just giving up.

Increasingly, quitting looks like the new American Way of War. No matter how great your team, you can't win the game if you walk off the field at half-time. That's precisely what the Democratic Party wants America to do in Iraq. Forget the fact that we've made remarkable progress under daunting conditions: The Dems are looking to throw the game just to embarrass the Bush administration.

Forget about the consequences. Disregard the immediate encouragement to the terrorists and insurgents to keep killing every American soldier they can. Ignore what would happen in Iraq ? and the region ? if we bail out. And don't mention how a U.S. surrender would turn al Qaeda into an Islamic superpower, the champ who knocked out Uncle Sam in the third round.

Forget about our dead soldiers, whose sacrifice is nothing but a political club for Democrats to wave in front of the media. After all, one way to create the kind of disaffection in the ranks that the Dems' leaders yearn to see is to tell our troops on the battlefield that they're risking their lives for nothing, we're throwing the game.

Forget that our combat veterans are re-enlisting at remarkable rates ? knowing they'll have to leave their families and go back to war again. Ignore the progress on the ground, the squeezing of the insurgency's last strongholds into the badlands on the Syrian border. Blow off the successive Iraqi elections and the astonishing cooperation we've seen between age-old enemies as they struggle to form a decent government.

Just set a time-table for our troops to come home and show the world that America is an unreliable ally with no stomach for a fight, no matter the stakes involved. Tell the world that deserting the South Vietnamese and fleeing from Somalia weren't anomalies ? that's what Americans do.

While we're at it, let's just print up recruiting posters for the terrorists, informing the youth of the Middle East that Americans are cowards who can be attacked with impunity.

Whatever you do, don't talk about any possible consequences. Focus on the moment ? and the next round of U.S. elections. Just make political points. After all, those dead American soldiers and Marines don't matter ? they didn't go to Ivy League schools. (Besides, most would've voted Republican had they lived.)

America's security? Hah! As long as the upcoming elections show Democratic gains, let the terrorist threat explode. So what if hundreds of thousands of Middle Easterners might die in a regional war? So what if violent fundamentalism gets a shot of steroids? So what if we make Abu Musab al-Zarqawi the most successful Arab of the past 500 years?

For God's sake, don't talk about democracy in the Middle East. After all, democracy wasn't much fun for the Dems in 2000 or 2004. Why support it overseas, when it's been so disappointing at home?

Human rights? Oh, dear. Human rights are for rich white people who live in Malibu. Unless you can use the issue to whack Republicans. Otherwise, brown, black or yellow people can die by the millions. Dean, Reid & Pelosi, LLC, won't say, "Boo!"

You've got to understand, my fellow citizens: None of this matters. And you don't matter, either. All that matters is scoring political points. Let the world burn. Let the massacres run on. Let the terrorists acquire WMD. Just give the Bush administration a big black eye and we'll call that a win.

*


The irresponsibility of the Democrats on Capitol Hill is breathtaking. (How can an honorable man such as Joe Lieberman stay in that party?) Not one of the critics of our efforts in Iraq ? not one ? has described his or her vision for Iraq and the Middle East in the wake of a troop withdrawal. Not one has offered any analysis of what the terrorists would gain and what they might do. Not one has shown respect for our war dead by arguing that we must put aside our partisan differences and win.

There's plenty I don't like about the Bush administration. Its domestic policies disgust me, and the Bushies got plenty wrong in Iraq. But at least they'll fight. The Dems are ready to betray our troops, our allies and our country's future security for a few House seats.

Surrender is never a winning strategy.

Yes, we've been told lies about Iraq ? by Dems and their media groupies. About conditions on the ground. About our troops. About what's at stake. About the consequences of running away from the great struggle of our time. About the continuing threat from terrorism. And about the consequences for you and your family.

What do the Democrats fear? An American success in Iraq. They need us to fail, and they're going to make us fail, no matter the cost. They need to declare defeat before the 2006 mid-term elections and ensure a real debacle before 2008 ? a bloody mess they'll blame on Bush, even though they made it themselves.

We won't even talk about the effect quitting while we're winning in Iraq might have on the go-to-war calculations of other powers that might want to challenge us in the future. Let's just be good Democrats and prove that Osama bin Laden was right all along: Americans have no stomach for a fight.

As for the 2,000-plus dead American troops about whom the lefties are so awfully concerned? As soon as we abandon Iraq, they'll forget about our casualties quicker than an amnesiac forgets how much small-change he had in his pocket.

If we run away from our enemies overseas, our enemies will make their way to us. Quit Iraq, and far more than 2,000 Americans are going to die.

And they won't all be conservatives.

Ralph Peters is a retired Army officer.
Title: A Whiter Shade of Wail
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on November 29, 2005, 12:26:56 PM
November 29, 2005, 8:32 a.m.
White (Phosphorous) Lies
Antiwar accusations aren?t as hot as critics think.

By Michael Fumento

Time again to try to cripple the U.S. military effort in Iraq. It's not enough that it sometimes seems like whenever we bomb a terrorist safe house we're accused of killing 40 civilians and no terrorists. (Why is it always 40?) Nor that we're told we must turn the prisons at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay into genteel facilities fit for Martha Stewart. Now the defeat-niks are screaming about our use of white phosphorus during the bloody battle for Fallujah last year.

Capable of being packed into a huge array of munitions, WP burns on contact with air and is highly useful for smoke-screening, smoke-marking, and as an anti-personnel weapon.

WP is hardly new, having been first used in the 19th century and subsequently in both world wars. Nor should it be news that it was used at Fallujah. An article in the March-April 2005 issue of Field Artillery explicitly details the use of WP during the battle.

Yet it's being treated as a major new revelation because of an Italian documentary, now available on the Internet, titled Fallujah: The Hidden Massacre." It's as if the use of WP necessarily involves a massacre, or as if there haven't been awful massacres in recent years using nothing but machetes and clubs.

Further, there's no proof of any wrongdoing in the video itself. Rather it relies on "explanations" exclusively from the narrator and other anti-war zealots.

This includes the infamous Giuliana Sgrena, the reporter for the Italian Communist-party newspaper Il Manifesto, allegedly seized by courteous kidnappers. In turn for her release they conveniently demanded what she had also been demanding: Italy's withdrawal from the war. Her articles are so viciously anti-American they'd make Al Jazeera blush.

There are several accusations against our WP usage.

Some allege that it is outlawed by the Geneva Convention as a chemical weapon. Therefore our using it puts us in the same category as Saddam Hussein ? or so claims the hugely popular far-left blogsite Daily Kos. But according to the more authoritative GlobalSecurity.org, "White phosphorus is not banned by any treaty to which the United States is a signatory."

Is it a chemical? Sure! So is something else you may have heard of called "gunpowder." And those chemicals used in high explosives? Yup, they're chemicals too.

Another charge is that contact with WP can cause awful and sometimes fatal burns. But painless ways of killing and destroying such as Star Trek's beam weapon phasers have yet to be developed. On the other hand, the vipers we cleaned out of Fallujah were just days earlier sawing off civilian heads with dull knives. Sound like a pleasant way to die?
Fact is, the soldier's weapon of choice remains high explosives. WP's best uses aren't against personnel at all, but to the extent it is employed this way its most practical application is flushing the enemy out of foxholes and trenches so that they can either surrender or be killed.

It's also claimed that civilians were "targeted" with WP, and the Italian video does display dead civilians. But how does this show they were the intended victims, rather than accidental casualties? It's not like when terrorists detonate bombs in crowded marketplaces or at weddings, where the intent is pretty clear.

Regardless of the weapon, how can you possibly avoid noncombatant deaths when the enemy not only hides among civilians but hides as civilians ? in total violation of the Geneva Convention, for those of you keeping track?

Further, the dead civilians in the video are wearing clothing. Both the film's narrator and another of those defeat-nik "experts," former Marine Jeff Englehart, try to explain this away by saying WP can burn flesh while leaving clothes intact. But true weapons experts, such as GlobalSecurity.org Director John Pike, say there's no such black magic. "If it hits your clothes it will burn your clothes," he told reporters.

As daily news reports illustrate in brilliant red Technicolor, the greatest threat to Iraqi civilians are the terrorists. If we want to save civilians, our soldiers must be free to use the best legal equipment available to kill those terrorists and to continue liberating Iraq.

? Michael Fumento is a former paratrooper who was embedded with the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Force this year at Camp Fallujah. He's also a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C.

http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/fumento200511290832.asp
Title: VDH on Moral Authority in Iraq
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on December 02, 2005, 09:37:26 AM
December 02, 2005, 8:15 a.m.
A Moral War
The project in Iraq can succeed, and leave its critics scrambling.
Victor Davis Hanson

Almost everything that is now written about Iraq rings not quite right: It was a ?blunder?; there should have been far more troops there; the country must be trisected; we must abide by a timetable and leave regardless of events on the ground; Iraq will soon devolve into either an Islamic republic or another dictatorship; the U.S. military is enervated and nearly ruined; and so on.

In fact, precisely because we have killed thousands of terrorists, trained an army, and ensured a political process, it is possible to do what was intended from the very beginning: lessen the footprint of American troops in the heart of the ancient caliphate.

Save for a few courageous Democrats, like Senator Joe Lieberman, who look at things empirically rather than ideologically, and some stalwart Republicans, most politicians and public intellectuals have long bailed on the enterprise.

This is now what comprises statesmanship: Some renounce their earlier support for the war. Others, less imaginative, in Clintonian (his and hers) fashion, take credit for backing the miraculous victory of spring 2003, but in hindsight, of course, blame the bloody peace on Bush. Or, better yet, they praise Congressman Murtha to the skies, but under no circumstances go on record urging the military to follow his advice.

How strange that journalists pontificate post facto about all the mistakes that they think have been made, nevertheless conceding that here we are on the verge of a third and final successful election. No mention, of course, is ever made about the current sorry state of journalistic ethics and incompetence (cf. Jayson Blair, Judy Miller, Michael Isikoff, Bob Woodward, Eason Jordan). A group of professionals, after all, who cannot even be professional in their own sphere, surely have no credibility in lecturing the U.S. military about what they think went wrong in Iraq.

Of course, the White House, as is true in all wars, has made mistakes, but only one critical lapse ? and it is not the Herculean effort to establish a consensual government at the nexus of the Middle East in less than three years after removing Saddam Hussein. The administration?s lapse, rather, has come in its failure to present the entire war effort in its proper moral context.

We took no oil ? the price in fact skyrocketed after we invaded Iraq. We did not do Israel?s bidding; in fact, it left Gaza after we went into Iraq and elections followed on the West Bank. We did not want perpetual hegemony ? in fact, we got out of Saudi Arabia, used the minimum amount of troops possible, and will leave Iraq anytime its consensual government so decrees. And we did not expropriate Arab resources, but, in fact, poured billions of dollars into Iraq to jumpstart its new consensual government in the greatest foreign aid infusion of the age.

In short, every day the American people should have been reminded of, and congratulated on, their country?s singular idealism, its tireless effort to reject the cynical realism of the past, and its near lone effort to make terrible sacrifices to offer the dispossessed Shia and Kurds something better than the exploitation and near genocide of the past ? and how all that alone will enhance the long-term security of the United States.

That goal was what the U.S. military ended up so brilliantly fighting for ? and what the American public rarely heard. The moral onus should have always been on the critics of the war. They should have been forced to explain why it was wrong to remove a fascist mass murderer, why it was wrong to stay rather than letting the country sink into Lebanon-like chaos, and why it was wrong not to abandon brave women, Kurds, and Shia who only wished for the chance of freedom.

Alas, that message we rarely heard until only recently, and the result has energized amoral leftists, who now pose as moralists by either misrepresenting the cause of the war, undermining the effort of soldiers in the field, or patronizing Iraqis as not yet civilized enough for their own consensual government.

We can draw down our troops not because of political pressures but because of events on the ground. First, the Iraqi military is improving ? not eroding or deserting. The canard of only ?one battle-ready brigade? could just as well apply to any of the Coalition forces. After all, what brigade in the world is the equal of the U.S. military ? or could go into the heart of Fallujah house-to-house? The French? The Russians? The Germans? In truth, the Iraqi military is proving good enough to hold ground and soon to take it alongside our own troops.

Despite past calls here to postpone elections, and threats of mass murder there for those who participated in them, they continue on schedule. And the third and last vote is the most important, since it will put a human face on the elected government ? and the onus on it to officially sanction U.S. help and monetary aid or refuse it.

Saddam?s trial will remind the world of his butchery. Despite all the ankle-biting by human-rights groups about proper jurisprudence, the Iraqis will try him and convict him much more quickly than the Europeans will do the same to Milosevic (not to mention the other killers still loose like Gen. Mladic and Mr. Karadzic), posing the question: What is the real morality ? trying a mass murderer and having him pay for his crimes, or engaging in legal niceties for years while the ghosts of his victims cry for justice?

More importantly, we can also calibrate our progress by examining the perceived self-interest of the various players, here and abroad.

The Sunnis ? no oil, a minority population, increasing disgust with Zarqawi, a shameful past under Saddam ? will participate in the December elections in large numbers. They now have no choice other than either to be perpetual renegades and terrorists inside their own country or to gain world respect by turning to democracy. The election train is leaving in December and this time they won?t be left at the station.

Zarqawi and the radical Islamicists are slowly being squeezed as only a war at their doorstep could accomplish. Critics of Iraq should ask if we were not fighting Zarqawi in Iraq, where exactly would we be fighting Islamic fascists ? or would the war against terror be declared over, won, lost, dormant, or ongoing, with the U.S. simply playing defense?

Instead, what Iraq did is ensure that al Qaeda?s Sunni support is being coopted by democracy. Jordan, the terrorists? old ace in the hole that could always put a cosmetic face on its stealthy support for radicals, has essentially turned on Zarqawi and with him al Qaeda. Syria is under virtual siege and its border sanctuary now a killing zone. Bin Laden can offer very little solace from his cave. And somehow Islamists have alienated the United States, Europe, Russia, China, Australia, Japan, and increasingly Middle East democracies like those in Afghanistan, Turkey, and Iraq, and reform movements in Lebanon and Jordan.

Decision day is coming when Zarqawi?s bombers will have to choose either to die, or, like a Nathan Bedford Forrest (?I?m a goin? home?), quit to join the reform-seeking majority. That progress was accomplished only by the war in Iraq, and without it we would be back to playing a waiting game for another 9/11, while an autocratic Middle East went on quietly helping terrorists without consequences, either afraid of Saddam or secretly enjoying his chauvinist defiance.

Kurds and Shiites support us for obvious reasons ? no other government on the planet would risk its sons and daughters to give them the right of one man/one vote. They may talk the necessary talk about infidels, but they know we will leave anytime they so vote. After the December election, expect them ? and perhaps the Sunnis as well ? quietly to ask us to stay to see things through.

Europe is quiet now. Madrid, London, Paris, and Amsterdam have taught Europeans that it is not George Bush but Islamic fascism that threatens their very existence. Worse still, they rightly fear they have lost the good will of the United States that so generously subsidized their defense ? an entitlement perhaps to be sneered at during the post-Cold War ?end of history,? but not in a new global war against Islamic terrorists keen to acquire deadly weapons.

Our military realizes that it can trump its brilliant victories in removing the Taliban and Saddam Hussein by birthing democracy in Iraq ? or risk losing that impressive reputation by having a new Lebanon blow up in its face. China, Japan, India, Russia, Korea, Iran, and other key countries are all watching Iraq ? ready to calibrate American deterrence by the efficacy of the U.S. military in the Sunni Triangle. Our armed forces have already accomplished what the British and the Soviets could never do in Afghanistan; what the Russians failed to accomplish in Chechnya; and what we came so close to finishing in Vietnam. They won?t falter now when they are so close to winning an almost impossibly difficult war, one that will be recognized by friends and enemies as beyond the capability of any other military in the world.

The Left now risks losing its self-proclaimed moral appeal. It had trashed the efforts in Iraq for months on end, demanded a withdrawal ? only recently to learn from polls that an unhappy public may also be unhappy with it for advocating fleeing while American soldiers are in harm?s way. Another successful election, polls showing Iraqis overwhelmingly wishing us to stay on, visits by elected Iraqi officials asking continued help, and a decreasing American footprint will gradually erode the appeal of the antiwar protests ? especially as triangulating public intellectuals and pundits begin to quiet down, fathoming that the United States may win after all.

The administration realizes that as long as it stays the course and our military remains confident we can win, we will ? despite defections in the Congress, venom in the press, and cyclical lows in the polls. In practical political terms, only the administration, not the Congress or the courts, can choose to cease our efforts in Iraq. Rightly or wrongly, the Bush administration will be judged on Iraq: If we lose, the president will be seen as a tragic LBJ-like figure who squandered his initial grassroots support in a foreign quagmire; if we win, he will be remembered, in spirit, as something akin to a Harry Truman, and, in deed, an FDR who won a critical war against impossible odds, and restored the security of the United States.

George Bush may well go down in history as a less-effective leader than his father or Bill Clinton; but unlike either, he may also have a real chance to be remembered in that select class of rare presidents whom history records as having saved this country at a time of national peril and in the face of unprecedented criticism. Bush?s domestic agenda hinges on Iraq: If he withdraws now, his proposals on taxes, social security, deficit reduction, education, and immigration are dead. If he sees the Iraq project through, these now-iffy initiatives will piggyback on the groundswell of popular thanks he will receive for reforming the Middle East.

Strangely, I doubt whether very many would agree with much of anything stated above ? at least for now. But if the administration can emphasize the moral nature of this war, and the military can continue its underappreciated, but mostly successful efforts to defeat the enemy and give the Iraqis a few more months of breathing space, who knows what the current opportunists and pessimists will say by summer.Will they say that they in fact were always sorta, kinda, really for removing Saddam and even staying on to see democracy work in Iraq?

? Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. His latest book is A War Like No Other. How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War.

    
http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson200512020815.asp
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 03, 2005, 09:56:23 AM
Imagine MNF Being Covered Like Iraq

By Jon Ham
November 30, 2005

RALEIGH - Watching Monday Night Football the other night, it occurred to me that if one imagined the mainstream media covering that game the way they cover the war in Iraq (or the economy), the absurdity of their
reporting would be plain for all to see.

       INDIANAPOLIS - The Indianapolis Colts, seeking to silence critics
who say they are overrated, fell short of that mark on Monday night by
outscoring the Pittsburgh Steelers by a mere 3-point margin in the first
quarter.

   Despite the unspectacular first-quarter margin, Colts head coach
Tony Dungy insisted that his team was winning the battle. "Hey, we're up
three," said Dungy. "In my book that's a lead." But critics pointed out
that the Colts gained their lead only as a result of a desperation 80-yard
pass by quarterback Peyton Manning to Marvin Harrison on their first play
of the game.

       "That score was based on subterfuge and was patently unfair," said
one critic, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation by league officials. "It amounted to abuse of opposing players to fool them like that."

       Despite scoring on their first snap of the game, and later scoring a
field goal to go up 10-0, the Colts allowed Pittsburgh to score with only
1:18 left in the first quarter. Colt critics demanded that Dungy
acknowledge that he had made coaching mistakes in the quarter, but he
refused to do so.

       The Colts have become a target of critics since going undefeated so
far this year. That so many Colt players have openly expressed a desire to go undefeated the whole season is seen as arrogance and a sense of
exceptionalism by many, causing many former friends to turn against them.

       The staunch Pittsburgh defense, though out-manned and out-gunned,
managed to battle the Colts to a standstill in the second quarter, allowing
them only six points. Those familiar with the Colts say this second-quarter
swoon reveals a lack of depth on offense due to unmet recruitment goals
during the off-season.

       The insurgent Steelers, striking sporadically with lesser equipment
against the hegemonic Colts, inflicted serious damage with several tackles, a sack and some pass breakups, holding Indianapolis to only two field goals in the 15-minute span. Observers said it looked as if the tide were turning in favor of the insurgent Steelers.

       In the third period, the Steelers again held the Colts to a single
touchdown, damaging the Colts' aura of invincibility and giving hope to the insurgents that their time would come. Some critics pointed to the stands as some Colt fans began filing out, saying that this showed the Colts losing support at home.

       The Steelers were even stronger in the final period, holding the
Colt juggernaut to a mere three points. "I think Indianapolis was just in
the wrong game, at the wrong place at the wrong time," one Colt critic was heard to say.

      The final score, by the way, was Colts 26, Steelers 7
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 14, 2005, 10:06:25 AM
The Panic Over Iraq
What they're really afraid of is American success.

BY NORMAN PODHORETZ
Monday, December 12, 2005 12:01 a.m. EST

Like, I am sure, many other believers in what this country has been trying to do in the Middle East and particularly in Iraq, I have found my thoughts returning in the past year to something that Tom Paine, writing at an especially dark moment of the American Revolution, said about such times. They are, he memorably wrote, "the times that try men's souls," the times in which "the summer soldier and the sunshine patriot" become so disheartened that they "shrink from the service of [their] country."

But Paine did not limit his anguished derision to former supporters of the American War of Independence whose courage was failing because things had not been going as well on the battlefield as they had expected or hoped. In a less famous passage, he also let loose on another group:


'Tis surprising to see how rapidly a panic will sometimes run through a country. . . . Yet panics, in some cases, have their uses . . . Their peculiar advantage is, that they are the touchstones of sincerity and hypocrisy, and bring things and men to light, which might otherwise have lain for ever undiscovered.
Thus, he explained, "Many a disguised Tory has lately shown his head," emboldened by the circumstances of the moment to reveal an opposition to the break with Britain that it had previously seemed prudent to conceal.
The similarities to our situation today are uncanny. We, too, are in the midst of a rapidly spreading panic. We, too, have our sunshine patriots and summer soldiers, in the form of people who initially supported the invasion of Iraq--and the Bush Doctrine from which it followed--but who are now abandoning what they have decided is a sinking ship. And we, too, are seeing formerly disguised opponents of the war coming more and more out into the open, and in ever greater numbers.

Yet in spite of these similarities, there is also a very curious difference between the American panic of 1776-77 and the American panic of 2005-06. To put it in the simplest and starkest terms: In that early stage of the Revolutionary War, there was sound reason to fear that the British would succeed in routing Washington's forces. In Iraq today, however, and in the Middle East as a whole, a successful outcome is staring us in the face. Clearly, then, the panic over Iraq--which expresses itself in increasingly frenzied calls for the withdrawal of our forces--cannot have been caused by the prospect of defeat. On the contrary, my twofold guess is that the real fear behind it is not that we are losing but that we are winning, and that what has catalyzed this fear into a genuine panic is the realization that the chances of pulling off the proverbial feat of snatching an American defeat from the jaws of victory are rapidly running out.





Of course, to anyone who relies entirely or largely on the mainstream media for information, it will come as a great surprise to hear that we are winning in Iraq. Winning? Militarily? How can we be winning militarily when, day after day, the only thing of any importance going on in that country is suicide bombings and car bombings? When neither our own troops nor the Iraqi forces we have been training are able to stop the "insurgents" from scoring higher and higher body counts? When every serious military move we make against the strongholds of these dedicated and ruthless adversaries is met with "fierce resistance"? When, for every one of them we manage to kill, two more seem to pop up?
Winning? Politically? How can we be winning politically when the very purpose for which we allegedly invaded Iraq has been unmasked as a chimera? When every step we force the Iraqis to take toward democratization is accompanied by angry sectarian strife between Shiites and Sunnis and between Arabs and Kurds? When our clumsy efforts to bring the Sunnis into the political process have hardly made a dent in their support for the insurgency? When the end result is less likely to be the stable democratic regime we supposedly went there to establish than a civil war followed by the breakup of Iraq into three separate countries?

There has been one great exception to this relentless drumbeat of bad news. It occurred in January 2005, in the coverage of the first election in liberated Iraq. To the astonishment of practically everyone in the world, more than eight million Iraqis came out to vote on election day even though the Islamofascist terrorists had threatened to slaughter them if they did. This very astonishment was a measure of how false an impression had been created of the state of affairs in Iraq. No one fed by the mainstream media could have had the slightest inkling that these eight million people were actually there, so invisible had they been to reporters who spent all their time interviewing the discontented Iraqi man-in-the-street and to cameras seemingly incapable of focusing on anything but carnage and rubble.

But the mainstream media soon recovered from the shock. By October, on the morning after a second ballot in which the new Iraqi constitution was ratified by fully 79% of the electorate, the Washington Post ran its announcement of these inspiring results on page 13. As for the paper's front page, the columnist Jeff Jacoby would note that it


was dominated by a photograph, stretched across four columns, of three daughters at the funeral of their father, . . . who had died from injuries suffered during a Sept. 26 bombing in Baghdad. Two accompanying stories, both above the fold, were headlined "Military Has Lost 2,000 in Iraq" and "Bigger, Stronger, Homemade Bombs Now to Blame for Half of U.S. Deaths." A nearby graphic--"The Toll"--divided the 2,000 deaths by type of military service.
In sum, in the words of the Australian blogger Arthur Chrenkoff:

Death, violence, terrorism, precarious political situation, problems with reconstruction, and public frustration (both in Iraq and America) dominate, if not overwhelm, the mainstream media coverage and commentary on Iraq.
About a year ago, concerned that he might have been exaggerating when he made this assertion on the basis of his "gut feeling," Mr. Chrenkoff decided to check it out more scientifically. So he did "a little tally" of the stories published or broadcast all over the world on a single average day (which happened to be Jan. 21, 2005). Here are some of the numbers that, with the help of the Google News Index, he was able to report from that one day:

2,642 stories about Condoleezza Rice's confirmation hearings, in the context of grilling she has received over the administration's Iraq policy.


1,992 stories about suicide bombings and other terrorist attacks.


887 stories about prisoner abuse by British soldiers.


216 stories about hostages currently being held in Iraq.


761 stories reporting on activities and public statements of insurgents.


357 stories about the antiwar movement and the dropping public support for involvement in Iraq.


182 stories about American servicemen killed and wounded in operations.


217 stories about concerns for fairness and validity of Iraqi election (low security, low turnout, etc.).


107 stories about civilian deaths in Iraq.


123 stories noting Vice President Cheney's admission that he had underestimated the task of reconstruction.


118 stories about complicated and strained relations between the U.S. and Europe.


121 stories discussing the possibility of an American pullout.


27 stories about sabotage of Iraqi oil infrastructure.
As against all this, the good news made a pathetic showing:

16 stories about security successes in the fight against insurgents.


7 stories about positive developments relating to elections.


73 stories about the return to Iraq of stolen antiquities.
Obviously, then, the reporters and their editors in the mainstream media have been working overtime to show how badly things have been going for us in Iraq.
Meanwhile, the op-ed pundits, the academic theorists and the armchair generals have chimed in with analyses blaming it all on the incompetence of the president and his appointees. By now, the proposition that the aftermath of the invasion has been marked by one disastrous blunder after another is accepted without question or qualification by just about everyone: open opponents of the Bush Doctrine eager to prove that they were right to denounce the invasion; Democrats whose main objective is to discredit the Bush administration; and erstwhile supporters who have lost heart and are looking for a way to justify their desertion.

But the charge of incompetence has also been hurled by strong supporters of the Bush Doctrine in general and of the invasion of Iraq in particular, whose purpose is to prod the people running the operation into doing a better job. The most authoritative such supporter, Eliot A. Cohen of Johns Hopkins, has expressed a


desire--barely controlled--to slap the highly educated fool who, having no soldier friends or family, once explained to me that mistakes happen in all wars, and that the casualties are not really all that high, and that I really shouldn't get exercised about them.
Now, this person may well have deserved a slap for being presumptuous toward a distinguished military historian, or for insensitivity in downplaying casualties when speaking to the father of an infantry officer on his way to Iraq. But at the risk of exposing myself as another highly educated fool, I must confess that I too think we need to be reminded that mistakes happen in all wars, and that the casualties in this one are very low by any historical standard.




Before measuring Iraq in these two respects, I want to look more closely at some of the actions taken by the Bush administration that are universally accepted as mistakes, and to begin by pointing out that the main one is based on an outright falsification of the facts. This is the accusation that no thought was given to what would happen once we got to Baghdad and no plans were therefore made for dealing with the aftermath of the combat phase. Yet the plain truth is that much thought was given to, and many plans were made for dealing with, horrors that everyone expected to happen and then, mercifully, did not. Among these: house-to-house fighting to take Baghdad, the flight of a million or more refugees, the setting of the oil fields afire, and the outbreak of a major civil war.
As for the insurgency, even if its dimensions had accurately been foreseen, it would still have been impossible to eliminate it in short order. To cite Mr. Cohen himself:


If the insurgencies in Northern Ireland, Israel/Palestine, Sri Lanka, and Kashmir continue, what reason do we have to expect this one to end so soon?
A related group of alleged "mistakes" turn out on closer inspection to be judgment calls, concerning which it is possible for reasonable men to differ. The most widely circulated of these--especially among supporters of the war on the right--is that there were too few American "boots on the ground" to mount an effective campaign against the insurgency. Perhaps. And yet the key factor in fighting a terrorist insurgency is not the number of troops deployed against it but rather the amount and quality of the intelligence that can be obtained from infiltrating its ranks and from questioning prisoners (a task made all the more difficult for us by the campaign here at home to define torture down to the point where it would become illegal to subject even a captured terrorist to generally accepted methods of interrogation).
Finally, there are "mistakes" that were actually choices between two evils--choices that had to be made when it was by no means obvious which was the lesser of the two. The best example here is the policy of "de-Baathification." This led to a disbanding of the Iraqi army, whose embittered Sunni members were then putatively left with nothing to do but volunteer their services to the insurgency. Yet allowing Saddam Hussein's thugs to continue controlling the army would have embittered the Shiites and the Kurds instead, both of whom had suffered greatly at the hands of the Sunni minority. Is it self-evident that this would have been better for us or for Iraq?

However, even if I were to concede for the sake of argument that every one of these accusations was justified, I would still contend that they amounted to chump change when stacked up against the mistakes that were made in World War II--a war conducted by acknowledged giants like Roosevelt and Churchill. Tim Cavanaugh, in a posting on the website of Reason magazine, has offered a partial list of such blunders and the lives that were lost because of them: "American Marines were slaughtered at Tarawa because the pre-invasion bombardment of the island was woefully deficient. Hundreds of American paratroopers were killed by American anti-aircraft fire during landings in Italy--for that matter the entire campaign up the Italian boot was an obvious waste of time, resources, and lives that prevented the western Allies from getting seriously into the war until the middle of 1944. . . . In late 1944, Allied commanders failed to anticipate that the Germans would attack through Belgium despite their having done so in 1914 and 1940." In brief, Cavanaugh concludes, "On any given week, World War II offered more [foul-ups] and catastrophes than anything that has been seen in postwar Iraq."

And I would also still say, as I have said before, that the number of American casualties in Iraq is minimal as compared with the losses suffered in past wars: in World War II, 405,399; in Korea, 36,574; in Vietnam, 58,209. Similarly, the mistakes--again assuming they were mistakes rather than debatable judgment calls--committed in the first year after the fall of Saddam were relatively inconsequential when measured against those made in the aftermath of the Allied victories over Germany and Japan.





Several Iraqi bloggers, and many letters written by American soldiers in the field that have found their way onto the Internet, paint a very different picture. Like Arthur Chrenkoff, these close-range observers do not overlook the persistence of major problems, and they do not deny that we still have a long way to go before Iraq becomes secure, stable and democratic. But they document with great detail the amazing progress that has been made, even under the gun of Islamofascist terrorism, in building--from scratch--the political morale of a country ravaged by "posttotalitarian stress disorder," in setting up the institutional foundations of a federal republic, in getting the economy moving, and in reconstructing the physical infrastructure.
The columnist Max Boot, who has himself been free with charges of incompetence, and who takes the position that we should have put more troops into Iraq, can (like Eliot Cohen) see clearly through his own reservations to provide a good summary of the situation as it now stands:


For starters, one can point to two successful elections . . ., on Jan. 30 and Oct. 15, in which the majority of Iraqis braved insurgent threats to vote. The constitutional referendum in October was particularly significant because it marked the first wholesale engagement of Sunnis in the political process. . . . This is big news. The most disaffected group in Iraq is starting to realize that it must achieve its objectives through ballots, not bullets.
Moving on to the economy, Mr. Boot (relying on a Brookings Institution report) tells us that "for all the insurgents' attempts to sabotage the Iraqi economy," per capita income has doubled since 2003 and is now 30% higher than it was before the war; that the Iraqi economy is projected to grow at a whopping 16.8% in 2006; and that there are five times as many cars on the streets than in Saddam Hussein's day, five as many more telephone subscribers, and 32 times as many Internet users.
Finally, Mr. Boot points out that whereas not a single independent media outlet existed in Iraq before 2003, there are now 44 commercial TV stations, 72 radio stations, and more than 100 newspapers.

To all of this we can add the 3,404 public schools, 304 water and sewage projects, 257 fire and police stations, and 149 public-health facilities that had been built as of September 2005, with another 921 such projects currently under construction.

As for the military front, a November 2005 report by the Committee on the Present Danger cites an example of what is being accomplished by American troops:


In the recent Operation Steel Curtain on the Syrian border, our troops detained more than 1,000 suspected insurgents. One hundred weapons caches were found and cleared. Since January, 116 of Zarqawi's lieutenants have been killed or captured.
The CPD report also notes the steady strengthening of the Iraqi armed forces, and the increasing degree of responsibility they are assuming in the fight against the insurgency:

[Since July] Iraq's armed forces . . . have added 22 new battalions, and 5,500 police-service personnel have been trained and equipped (as have some 2,000 special-police commanders). Coalition senior officers report that 80 Iraqi battalions now are able to fight alongside our troops and 36 are "generally able to conduct independent operations." More than 20 of the coalition's forward-operating bases have been turned over to the Iraqi army.
The CPD supports the campaign in Iraq. Anthony H. Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies is (to put it mildly) unfriendly to the Bush Doctrine and all its works. But Mr. Cordesman concurs with the CPD assessment. Citing slightly different statistics, he notes

continued increase in the number of Iraqi units able to take the lead in combat operations against the insurgency . . . progress of Iraqi units in assuming responsibility for the battle space . . . [and] continued increase in the number of units and individuals trained, equipped, and formed into operational status.
What this means in concrete terms is laid out by Newsweek's Fareed Zakaria, also no great admirer of how the Bush administration has conducted the Iraq campaign:

For two years, when reporters would ask how it was possible that the mightiest military in history could not secure a five-kilometer stretch of road, the military responded with long, jargon-filled lectures. . . . Then one day this summer the military was ordered to secure the road. . . . Presto. Using Iraqi forces, the road was secured. Similar strategies have made cities like Najaf, Mosul, Tal Afar and even Falluja much safer today than they were a year ago.



Why is there so little public awareness of these things? One young reporter, who proudly proclaims his membership in the mainstream media, has been only too happy to provide an explanation:

As long as American soldiers are getting killed nearly every day, we're not going to be giving much coverage to the opening of multimillion dollar sewage projects. American lives are worth more than Iraqi shit.
Observe, in this clever and brutal formulation, the professed concern with American casualties. From it, one might imagine that the statement is worlds away from the hostility to American military power--and to America in general--that pervaded the radical left in the 1960s and that in a milder liberal mutation came to be known as the "post-Vietnam syndrome." And it is certainly true that the antiwar movement spawned by Vietnam rarely had a tear to shed for the American lives that were being lost there. But the newfound tenderness toward our troops in Iraq does not in the least reflect a change in attitude toward the use of force by the United States. To the contrary, the relentless harping on American casualties by the mainstream media is part of an increasingly desperate effort to portray Iraq as another Vietnam: a foolish and futile (if not immoral and illegal) resort to military power in pursuit of a worthless (if not unworthy) goal.
Mark Twain once famously said that reports of his death were greatly exaggerated. So it was, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, with the post-Vietnam syndrome. During those early weeks, a number of commentators were quick to proclaim the birth of an entirely new era in American history. What Dec. 7, 1941 had done to the isolationism of old, they announced, Sept. 11, 2001 had done to the Vietnam syndrome. Politically speaking, it was dead, and the fallout from the Vietnam War--namely, the hostility to America and especially to American military power--would follow it into the grave.

As is evident from the coverage of Iraq in the mainstream media, such pronouncements were more than a little premature: the Vietnam syndrome is still alive and well. But equally apparent is that the reporters and editors to whom it is a veritable religion understand very clearly that success in Iraq could deal the Vietnam syndrome a mortal blow. Little wonder, then, that they have so resolutely tried to ignore any and all signs of progress--or, when that becomes impossible, to dismiss them as so much "shit."

This, however, is at least a kind of tribute to our progress, if a perverse one. The same cannot be said of the opponents of the Bush Doctrine in the universities and think tanks, who are unwilling even to acknowledge that more and better things are happening in Iraq and the broader Middle East than are dreamed of in their philosophy.

Take Zbigniew Brzezinski, who left the academy to serve as Jimmy Carter's national security adviser and is now a professor again. In a recently published piece entitled "American Debacle," Mr. Brzezinski began by accusing George W. Bush of "suicidal statecraft," went on to pronounce the intervention in Iraq (along with everything else this president has done) a total disaster, and ended by urging that we withdraw from that country "perhaps even as early as next year." Unlike the late Sen. George Aiken of Vermont, who once proposed that we declare victory in Vietnam and then get out, Mr. Brzezinski wants to declare defeat in Iraq and then get out. This, he mysteriously assures us, will help restore "the legitimacy of America's global role."

Now I have to admit that I find it a little rich that George W. Bush should be accused of "suicidal statecraft" by, of all people, the man who in the late 1970s helped shape a foreign policy that emboldened the Iranians to seize and hold American hostages while his boss in the Oval Office stood impotently by for almost six months before finally authorizing a rescue operation so inept that it only compounded our national humiliation.

And where was Mr. Brzezinski--famed at the time for his anticommunism--when the President he served congratulated us on having overcome our "inordinate fear of communism"? Where was Mr. Brzezinski--known far and wide for his hard-line determination to resist Soviet expansionism--when Cyrus Vance, the then secretary of state, declared that the Soviet Union and the United States had "similar dreams and aspirations," and when Mr. Carter himself complacently informed us that containment was no longer necessary? And how was it that, despite daily meetings with Mr. Brzezinski, Mr. Carter remained so blind to the nature of the Soviet regime that the invasion of Afghanistan, as he himself would admit, taught him more in a week about the nature of that regime than he had managed to learn in an entire lifetime? Had the cat gotten Mr. Brzezinski's tongue in the three years leading up to that invasion--the same tongue he now wags with such confidence at George W. Bush?





But even if Mr. Brzezinski's record over the past 30 years did not disqualify him from dispensing advice on how to conduct American foreign policy, this diatribe against Mr. Bush would by itself be enough. For here he looks over the Middle East, and what does he see? He sees the United States being "stamped as the imperialistic successor to Britain and as a partner of Israel in the military repression of the Arabs." This may not be fair, he covers himself by adding; but not a single word does he say to indicate that the British created the very despotisms the United States is now trying to replace with democratic regimes, or that George W. Bush is the first American president to have come out openly for a Palestinian state.
Again Mr. Brzezinski looks over the Middle East, and what does he see? He sees the treatment of prisoners in Abu Ghraib, and by extension Guantanamo, causing the loss of America's "moral standing" as a "country that has stood tall" against "political repression, torture, and other violations of human rights." And that is all he sees--quite as though we never liberated Afghanistan from the theocratic tyranny of the Taliban, or Iraq from the fascist despotism of Saddam Hussein. But how, after all, when it comes to standing tall against "political repression, torture, and other violations of human rights," can such achievements compare with a sanctimonious lecture by Jimmy Carter followed by the embrace of one Third World dictator after another?

Then for a third time Mr. Brzezinski looks over the Middle East, and what does he see? He sees more and more sympathy for terrorism, and more and more hatred of America, being generated throughout the region by our actions in Iraq; and in this context, too, that is all he sees. About the momentous encouragement that our actions have given to the forces of reform that never dared act or even speak up before, he is completely silent--though it is a phenomenon that even so inveterate a hater of America as the Lebanese dissident Walid Jumblatt has found himself compelled to recognize. Thus, only a few months after declaring that "the killing of U.S. soldiers in Iraq is legitimate and obligatory," Mr. Jumblatt suddenly woke up to what those U.S. soldiers had actually been doing for the world in which he lived:


It's strange for me to say it, but this process of change has started because of the American invasion of Iraq. I was cynical about Iraq. But when I saw the Iraqi people voting [in January 2005], eight million of them, it was the start of a new Arab world.
The columnist Michael Barone has listed some of the developments that bear out Jumblatt's judgment:

[The] progress toward democracy in Iraq is leading Middle Easterners to concentrate on the question of how to build decent governments and decent societies. We can see the results--the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon, the first seriously contested elections in Egypt, Libya's giving up WMD's, the Jordanian protests against Abu Musab Zarqawi's recent suicide attacks, and even a bit of reform in Saudi Arabia.
Even in Syria, reports the Washington Post's David Ignatius:

People talk politics . . . with a passion I haven't heard since the 1980s in Eastern Europe. They're writing manifestos, dreaming of new political parties, trying to rehabilitate old ones from the 1950s.
And not only in Syria. As the democratic activist Saad Eddin Ibrahim, who, like Mr. Jumblatt, originally opposed the invasion of Iraq, told Mr. Ignatius's colleague Jim Hoagland:

Those [in the Middle East] who believe in democracy and civil society are finally actors . . . [because the invasion of Iraq] has unfrozen the Middle East, just as Napoleon's 1798 expedition did. Elections in Iraq force the theocrats and autocrats to put democracy on the agenda, even if only to fight against us. Look, neither Napoleon nor President Bush could impregnate the region with political change. But they were able to be midwives.
Nor are such changes confined to the political sphere alone. According to a report in The Economist, a revulsion against terrorism has begun to spread among Muslim clerics, including some who, like the secular Mr. Jumblatt, were only recently applauding its use against Americans:

Moderate Muslim clerics have grown increasingly concerned at the abuse of religion to justify killing. In Saudi Arabia, numerous preachers once famed for their fighting words now advise tolerance and restraint. Even so rigid a defender of suicide attacks against Israel . . . as Yusuf Qaradawi, the star preacher of the popular al-Jazeera satellite channel, denounces bombings elsewhere and calls on the perpetrators to repent.
Zbigniew Brzezinski may be wrongheaded, but he is neither blind nor stupid. Why, then, his willful silence in the face of all these signs of progress? I can only interpret it as the product of a rising panic. No less than the denizens of the mainstream media, he is desperately struggling to salvage a worldview that, like theirs, should have been but was not killed off by 9/11 and that, like theirs, may well suffer a truly mortal blow if the Bush Doctrine passes through the great test of fire it is undergoing in Iraq.




Mr. Brzezinski's worldview is a syncretistic mix of foreign-policy realism (with its emphasis on stability and the sanctity of national borders) and liberal internationalism (with its unshakable faith in compromise, consensus and international institutions). In this he differs somewhat from another former national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, a Republican who occupied the office under George W. Bush's father and whose own commitment to the realist perspective is pure and unadulterated.
In spite of this difference, the two men are at one in regarding the war in Iraq as a disastrous distraction from the really important business to which we should be attending in the Middle East--namely, the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. In an article published some months before the invasion and entitled "Don't Attack Saddam," Mr. Scowcroft wrote:


Possibly the most dire consequence [of attacking Saddam] would be the effect in the region. The shared view in the region is that Iraq is principally an obsession of the U.S. The obsession of the region, however, is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. If we were seen to be turning our backs on that bitter conflict, there would be an explosion of outrage against us.
Evidently he still holds to this view. So does Mr. Brzezinski, who attacks "the Bush team" for having transformed "a manageable, though serious, challenge of largely regional origin into an international debacle," and who urges us to get out of Iraq, the sooner the better, so that we can shift our focus back to where it really belongs--"the Israeli-Palestinian peace process."
Well, whether the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is truly "the obsession of the region" or, rather, a screen for other things, it certainly is the obsession of Messrs. Brzezinski and Scowcroft, as it is of almost everyone else who looks at the Middle East from the so-called realist perspective and to whom stability is the great desideratum. Even from that perspective, however, the nonstop preoccupation with Israel would seem to be warranted only if the conflict with the Palestinians were the main cause of instability throughout the region.

This is indeed what Messrs. Brzezinski, Scowcroft, and most other members of the realist school believe. (But not Henry Kissinger, the leading realist of them all. Even though he is skeptical about the possibility of democratizing the Middle East, Mr. Kissinger favored the invasion of Iraq and thinks that victory there is essential. Nor does he believe that the war between the Palestinians and Israel is the most important problem in the world, or even in the Middle East.)

Yet the realities to which the realists are so deferential in the abstract make utter nonsense of this idea. Since the birth of Israel in 1948, there have been something like two dozen wars in the Middle East (variously involving Egypt, Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, Iran and Iraq) that have had nothing whatever to do with the Jewish state, or with the Palestinians. In one of these alone--the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-88--more lives were lost than in all the wars involving Israel put together.

The obsessive animus against Israel goes hand in hand with the overall strategy for dealing with the Middle East that prevailed before 9/11, and to which Messrs. Brzezinski and Scowcroft are still married, heart and soul and mind. The best and most succinct description of that strategy was given by President Bush himself in explaining why 9/11 had driven him to reject it in favor of a radically different approach:


For decades free nations tolerated oppression in the Middle East for the sake of stability. In practice, this approach brought little stability and much oppression, so I have changed this policy.
And again:

In the past, . . . longstanding ties often led us to overlook the faults of local elites. Yet this bargain did not bring stability or make us safe. It merely bought time, while problems festered and ideologies of violence took hold.
We learn from Jeffrey Goldberg of The New Yorker that, when Condoleezza Rice quoted these words to Scowcroft (her former mentor), he responded that the policy Bush was rejecting had actually brought us "50 years of peace." (What, asked James Taranto of The Wall Street Journal, "do you call someone" who can describe the many wars that have been fought in the Middle East in the past five decades as "50 years of peace"? Mr. Taranto's sardonic answer: "A 'realist.' ")
In addition to remaining convinced that the old way of doing things was right, Mr. Scowcroft is utterly disdainful of the new approach being followed by George W. Bush, which (as I like to describe it) is to make the Middle East safe for America by making it safe for democracy. "I believe," he told Jeffrey Goldberg, "that you cannot with one sweep of the hand or the mind cast off thousands of years of history." But the despotisms in the Middle East are not thousands of years old, and they were not created by Allah or the Prophet Muhammad. All of them were established after World War I--that is, less than a century ago--by the British and the French.

This being the case, there is nothing "utopian" about the idea that such regimes--planted with shallow roots by two Western powers--could be uprooted with the help of a third Western power, and that a better political system could be put in their place. And, in fact, this is exactly what has been happening before our very eyes in Iraq. In the span of three short years, Iraq, liberated by the United States from the totalitarian tyranny of Saddam Hussein, has taken one giant step after another toward democratization. Yet Mr. Scowcroft can still assure us that "you're not going to democratize Iraq," and certainly not "in any reasonable time frame."

As with Mr. Brzezinski, so again it seems that nothing else but panic can explain so astonishing a degree of denial.





Like the mainstream media and the theorists in the academy and the think tanks, the Democratic Party--fearing that it might be frozen out of power for a very long time to come--is also in a panic over the signs that George W. Bush's new approach to the greater Middle East is on the verge of passing the test of Iraq. Hence the veritable hysteria with which the Democrats have recently tried to delegitimize the war: first by claiming (three years after the fact!) that it had begun with a lie, and then by declaring that it was ending in a defeat. Leaning heavily on the turn in public opinion largely brought about by reports in the mainstream media and the lucubrations of the theorists, the Democrats--with the notably honorable exception of Sen. Joseph Lieberman--now joined in by clamoring openly for a withdrawal of American forces from Iraq.
A goodly number of these Democrats (party chairman Howard Dean and Rep. Cynthia McKinney, to name only two) are the "Tories" of today, in the sense of having from the very beginning stood openly and unambiguously against the revolution in foreign policy represented by the Bush Doctrine and now being put to the test in Iraq. But a much larger number of Democrats fit more smoothly into Tom Paine's category of "disguised" Tories. These are the congressmen and senators who in their heart of hearts were against the resolution authorizing the president to use force against Saddam Hussein, but who--given the state of public opinion at the time--feared being punished at the polls unless they voted for it. Now, however, with public opinion moving in the other direction, they have been emboldened to "show their heads."

Finally, we have a certain number of Democrats who correspond to "the summer soldiers and the sunshine patriots" of the American Revolution. One of them is Rep. John Murtha, who backed the invasion of Iraq because (to give him the benefit of the doubt) he really thought it was the right thing to do, but who has now bought entirely into the view that all is lost and that the only sensible course is to turn tail:


The war in Iraq is . . . a flawed policy wrapped in illusion. . . . Our military is suffering. The future of our country is at risk. We cannot continue on the present course. It is evident that continued military action is not in the best interests of the United States of America, the Iraqi people, or the Persian Gulf region. . . . Our troops have become the primary target of the insurgency. They are united against U.S. forces and we have become a catalyst for violence. U.S. troops are the common enemy of the Sunnis, Saddamists, and foreign jihadists. . . . Our military has done everything that has been asked of them, the U.S. cannot accomplish anything further in Iraq militarily. It is time to bring them home.
It seems never to have occurred to Mr. Murtha that talk of this kind could only confuse and demoralize the troops for whose welfare, and for whose sufferings, he expresses such concern. By all accounts, those troops are very proud of what they are accomplishing in Iraq. How then could they not be confounded when a respected congressman--a former Marine, no less--declares that they have been fighting for nothing, nothing whatsoever, and when for saying so he gets a standing ovation from his fellow Democrats? How could they not be demoralized to be told that there is no point in going on because their very presence in Iraq is making things worse for everyone concerned?
And how, by the same token, could talk of this kind fail to give new heart to the Islamofascist terrorists--just when they are on the run? How could they not be delighted to see the elected representatives of the American people carrying on a heated debate in which the only questions at issue are how quickly to bug out of Iraq, and whether to fix a timetable and a deadline? How could they not feel vindicated when, after being surprised by the fierce reaction of the Americans to 9/11, they now behold fresh evidence for believing that Osama bin Laden was right after all when he called us a paper tiger?

On the other hand, if (as the president intended all along, as he reiterated in his great speech of Nov. 30 at Annapolis, and as is prescribed in the recently declassified "National Strategy for Victory in Iraq") American forces are drawn down only at the rate and to the extent that they can be replaced with similar numbers of Iraqi soldiers and policemen fully capable of taking over, the joy now being felt by the Islamofascists will commensurately be replaced by dread. For no one knows better than they that, once up to snuff and on their own, the new Iraqi forces will be less inhibited than the Americans by moral considerations and accordingly much more ruthless in the way they fight.





Tom Paine grew so disgusted with "the mean principles that are held by the Tories," with the hypocrisy of the disguised Tories, and with the shrinking from hardship of the summer soldiers and the sunshine patriots of 1776-77 that he finally gave up trying to persuade them:

I have been tender in raising the cry against these men, and used numberless arguments to show them their danger, but it will not do to sacrifice a world to either their folly or their baseness.
And so, "quitting this class of men . . . who see not the full extent of the evil that threatens them," Paine turned "to those who have nobly stood, and are yet determined to stand the matter out," and rested his hopes on them.
These hopes, we know and thank God for it, were not disappointed. And neither will be the hopes of those today who likewise see "the full extent of the evil that threatens" us; who understand the necessity of the war that our country has been waging against it; who recognize the moral, political, and intellectual boldness of how George W. Bush has chosen to fight this war; and who take pride in the nobility of what the United States, at whose birth Tom Paine assisted, is now, more than 200 years later, battling to achieve in Iraq and, in the fullness of time, in the entire region of which Iraq is so crucial a part.

Mr. Podhoretz is editor-at-large of Commentary and author of 10 books, most recently "The Norman Podhoretz Reader," edited by Thomas L. Jeffers (Free Press, 2004). This article will appear in Commentary's January issue.
Title: Political Rants
Post by: SB_Mig on December 14, 2005, 10:34:52 AM
CHALLENGE BUSH 'VICTORY' STRATEGY
Thursday, December 01, 2005 - FreeMarketNews.com

The Democrats are not happy with the Bush Administration "exit strategy" called the National Strategy for Victory in Iraq. The Libertarian party isn't either. In a press release, the Libertarian Party, called the president's document "a weak attempt to counter the growing criticism of the administration's handling of the Iraq occupation, and increasing discontent with the country's overall foreign policy objectives.

"Instead of providing a detailed, honest plan for removing American soldiers from harm's way in Iraq, the 35-page document outlines a set of vague goals that appear to be nothing more than exhausted, political rhetoric. Although the paper is filled with subheadings containing glittering generalities such as 'Victory in Iraq is a Vital U.S. Interest,' and 'Failure is Not an Option,' it fails to answer essential questions about the methodology and timeframe for troop withdrawal."

The party notes that the "Victory' Strategy" merely bolsters the claims that Bush's Iraq policy is "working," in spite of the evidence that after almost three years, "the facts show that only one Iraqi battalion exists" with the capacity for independent operation. Michael Dixon, Chairman of the Libertarian National Committee, calls it "an irrefutably weak attempt by the Bush Administration to satisfy domestic political pressures while evading the issue of exiting Iraq."

While President Bush avoids the "flagrant failures" of invading and remaining in Iraq, he noted, "American military personnel continue to be wounded and killed on a daily basis. To date, the Libertarian Party remains the only political group that has devised a sensible plan for American withdrawal from Iraq."

To learn more about the Libertarian Party's Iraq Exit Strategy, visit www.lp.org/plan.
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 14, 2005, 10:44:38 AM
I've run 3x for US Congress for the Libertarian Party (1984, 1988, 1992) but I part ways with the majority of the party on this one.

PS:  My campaign slogan in 1992 was "If you continue to vote for the lesser of two evils, you will continue to get the evil of two lessers."
Title: Of Boils and Budding Liberty
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on December 16, 2005, 08:30:56 AM
December 16, 2005, 7:10 a.m.
Lancing the Boil
We quietly keep on killing terrorists, promoting elections in Iraq, pressuring Arab autocracies to democratize, and growing the economy.
Victor Davis Hanson


For some time, a large number of Americans have lived in an alternate universe where everything is supposedly going to hell. If you get up in the morning to read the New York Times or Washington Post, watch John Murtha or Howard Dean on the morning talk shows, listen to National Public Radio at noon, and go to bed reading Newsweek it surely seems that the administration is incommunicado (cf. ?the bubble?), the war is lost (?unwinnable?), the Great Depression is back (?jobless recovery?), and America about as popular as Nazi Germany abroad (?alone and isolated?).

But in the real adult world, the economy is red-hot, not mired in joblessness or relegating millions to poverty. Unemployment is low, so are interest rates. Growth is high, as is consumer spending and confidence. Our Katrina was hardly as lethal as the Tsunami or Pakistani earthquake. Thousands of Arabs are not rioting in Dearborn. American elderly don?t roast and die in the thousands in their apartments as was true in France. Nor do American cities, like some in China, lose their entire water supply to a toxic spill. Americans did not just vote to reject their own Constitution as in some European countries.

The military isn?t broken. Unlike after Vietnam when the Russians, Iranians, Cambodians, and Nicaraguans all soon tried to press their luck at our expense, most of our adversaries don?t believe the U.S. military is losing in Iraq, much less that it is wise now to take it on. Instead, the general impression is that our veteran and battle-hardened forces are even more lethal than was true of the 1990s ? and engaging successfully in an almost impossible war.

Nor are we creating new hordes of terrorists in Iraq ? as if a young male Middle Eastern fundamentalist first hates the United States only on news that it is in Iraq crafting a new Marshall Plan of $87 billion and offering a long-oppressed people democracy after taking out Saddam Hussein. Even al Jazeera cannot turn truth into untruth forever.

Instead, the apprentice jihadist is trying to win his certification as master terrorist by trying his luck against the U.S. Marines abroad rather than on another World Trade Center at home ? and failing quite unlike September 11.

Like it or not, wars are usually won or lost when one side feels its losses are too high to continue. We have suffered terribly in losing 2,100 dead in Iraq; a vastly smaller enemy in contrast may have experienced tens of thousands of terrorists killed, and is finding its safe havens and money drying up. Panic about Iraq abounds in both the American media and the periodic fatwas of Dr. Zawahiri ? but not in the U. S. government or armed forces.

The world does not hate the United States. Of course, it envies us. Precisely because it is privately impressed by our unparalleled success, it judges America by a utopian measure in which anything less than perfection is written off as failure. We risk everything, our critics abroad almost nothing. So the hope for our failures naturally gives reinforcement to the bleak reality of their inaction.

The Europeans expect our protection. The Mexicans risk their lives to get here. Indians and Japanese want closer relations. The old commonwealth appreciates our strength in defense of the West. Even the hostile Iranians, North Koreans, Cubans, Venezuelans, Chinese, and radical Islamists ? despite the saber-rattling rhetoric ? wonder whether we are na?ve and idealistic rather than cruel and calculating. All this we rarely consider when we read of anti-Americanism in our major newspapers or hear another angry (and usually well-off) professor or journalist recite our sins.

Al Zarqawi is in a classical paradox: He can?t defeat the American or Iraqi security forces or stop the elections. So he must dream up ever more macabre violence to gain notoriety ? from beheading Americans on the television to mass murdering Shiites to blowing up third-party Jordanians. But such lashing out only further weakens his cause and makes the efforts of his enemies on the battlefield easier, as his Sunni base starts to see that this psychopath really can take his supporters all down with him.

The Palestine problem is not even worse off after Iraq. Actually, it is far better with the isolated and disgraced Arafat gone, the fence slowly inching ahead, the worst radical Islamic terrorists on the West Bank in paradise, Israel out of Gaza, and the world gradually accepting its diplomatic presence. The real hopeless mess was 1992-2000 when a well-meaning Bill Clinton, Madeline Albright, and Dennis Ross still deluded themselves that a criminal gang leader like Yasser Arafat was a legitimate head of state or that you could start to end an endless war by giving his thugs thousands of M-16s.

The European way is not the answer, as we see from the farcical negotiations over Iran?s time bomb. Struggling with a small military, unsustainable entitlement promises, little real economic growth, high unemployment, falling birth rates, angry unassimilated minorities, and a suicidal policy of estrangement from its benefactor the United States, Europeans show already an 11th-hour change of heart as we see in the Netherlands, Denmark, Germany, and soon in France.

Europe?s policy about Iran?s nuclear program can best be summed up as ?Hurry up, sane and Western Israel, and take out this awful thing ? so we can damn you Zionist aggressors for doing so in our morning papers.?

The administration did not prove nearly as inept in the Iraqi reconstruction as the rhetoric of its opposition was empty. The government?s chief lapse was not claiming the moral high ground for a necessary war against a fascist mass murderer ? an inexplicable silence now largely addressed by George Bush?s new muscular public defense of the war. In contrast, we can sadly recall all the alternative advice of past critics across the spectrum: invade Iraq in 1998, but get out right now; trisect Iraq; attack Syria or Iran; retreat to the Shiite south; put in hundreds of thousands of more troops; or delay the elections.

Donald Rumsfeld?s supposed gaffe of evoking ?Old Europe? is trumped tenfold and almost daily by slurs that depict Abu Ghraib as worse than Saddam, Guantanamo as the work of Hitler, Stalin, or Pol Pot, Bush as the world?s greatest terrorist, the effort to democratize Iraq as unwinnable, and American troops terrorizing Iraqi women and children.

Most Americans may grumble after reading the latest demonization in the press of Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld, but they are hardly ready to turn over a complex Middle East to something like a President John Kerry, Vice President Barbara Boxer, Secretary of State Howard Dean, National Security Advisor Nancy Pelosi, and Secretary of Defense John Murtha ? with a kitchen cabinet of Jimmy Carter and Sandy Berger.

So at year?s end, what then is happening at home and abroad?

For the last three years we have seen a carbuncle swell as the old Vietnam War opposition rematerialized, with Michael Moore, the Hollywood elite, and Cindy Sheehan scaring the daylights out of the Democratic establishment that either pandered to or triangulated around their crazy rhetoric. The size of the Islamicist/Baathist insurrection caught the United States for a time off guard, as was true also of the sudden vehement slurs from our erstwhile allies in Europe, Canada, and Asia. Few anticipated that the turmoil in Iraq would force the Syrians out of Lebanon, the Libyans to give up their WMDs, and the Egyptians to hold elections ? and that all the killing, acrimony, and furor over these developments would begin to engulf the Middle East and threaten the old order.

In the face of that growing ulcer of discontent, we quietly kept on killing terrorists, promoting elections in Iraq, pressuring Arab autocracies to democratize, and growing the economy. All that is finally lancing the boil, here and abroad ? and what was in there all along is now slowly oozing out, making the cure seem almost as gross as the malady.

? Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. His latest book is A War Like No Other. How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War.

http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson200512160710.asp
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 16, 2005, 03:22:03 PM
http://www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/ToddManzi/2005/12/16/178937.html

Is it Harder to Kill Terrorists or Get a Job?
Dec 16, 2005
by Todd Manzi

The position of Democrats seems to be that it is easier to hunt down and kill terrorists than it is to make a living flipping burgers. Democrats are telling us we should withdraw from Iraq, so that the Iraqis will have an incentive to stand up and fight for themselves. When it comes to the War on Poverty, however, Democrats want the federal government to continue assisting the needy indefinitely.

Which is easier, learning how to fight terrorists in Iraq or finding a way to make a living in the United States? Our steady stream of immigrants would indicate the latter, but the rhetoric of Democrats points to the former.

Perhaps it?s time to help the Democrats understand the challenge we face regarding the security of Iraq. Using a football analogy might be helpful.

Let?s say the U.S. military is like the best NFL team to ever take the field. The terrorists might be like the worst junior college team. The Iraqis who are joining the military are men who have never played football. If you just toss them the ball and tell them to go play football, they will get slaughtered. Literally.


Individually, the Iraqis need to be trained how to fight. Then they need to be trained how to fight as a team. Then they need leadership to direct them so they can properly execute big picture strategies. But that?s not enough. The trainers have to be trained so that Iraq can have a self-sufficient military.

If all the best minds in the NFL were brought together, how long would it take them to teach others how to train, field and coach a team that could compete against an already functioning junior college team?

Of course, it?s silly to compare war to football. Lives are on the line in Iraq and this is not a game. But it does serve as a reminder that our mission in Iraq is to stand by the brave men who are coming forward and putting their lives on the line to defend their country. The U.S. military provides the stability that gives Iraqi men the confidence needed to commit to the cause.

Democrats are doing their best to undermine that confidence.

They are sending the message to Iraqi men that they may lose the safety provided by our soldiers. Those who advocate immediate withdrawal are making the enormously difficult job in Iraq much harder than it already is.

Here at home, Democrats send an entirely different message to welfare recipients. The message to this group is that the federal government will stand beside them indefinitely.

For these people, Democrats want to provide unlimited support, programs and financial aid. We have a bloated bureaucracy tasked with providing unending handouts.

It is time to admit the war on poverty is a quagmire and the federal government should withdraw. The Constitution never authorized us to enter this war in the first place. Let?s send a strong message to the individual states: we are going to cut and run from the war on poverty. There is no need to point fingers about who lied us into this war. We don?t have to highlight the numerous mistakes that were made. Nor do we have to identify who benefited themselves by getting elected to office under the cover of fighting poverty. All we need to do is assess the situation and act accordingly.

Does anyone want to defend the progress or accomplishments we have made with our efforts fighting the war on poverty? Anyone?

To be fair to Democrats, let?s accurately assess the situation in Iraq and act accordingly. Four years and three months ago, the United States was attacked, and the global War on Terror began. President Bush did not bow to the pressure he was under to initiate a quick response. He acted thoughtfully, patiently and unbelievably competently.

Our first attack in the War on Terror was to cut off much of their financing. Then we took control of Afghanistan. Next, we debated whether President Bush had the authority to invade Iraq. The president asked Congress to provide the authority and they did. Then we debated whether we should go to war in Iraq or not. President Bush even took the time to go back to the U.N. to get another resolution supporting the invasion of Iraq. After all that, we still waited and gave the dictator one last chance to avoid war. That was the first year and a half of our War on Terror.

Next, we defeated the Iraqi army and took control of the country. We hunted down the tyrant and pulled him from his rat hole. We handed over sovereignty of the country to the Iraqi people. We provided stability as they had elections and ratified a constitution. Now, we are training Iraqis in how to train themselves to do the job of keeping their own country safe from future terrorist threats.

Wow.

We have accomplished a lot in a short period. The War on Terror has been much more successful than the war on poverty, but both of these wars should end as soon as possible. How about if we compromise with the Democrats? As we draw down our troop levels in Iraq, we will also reduce the size of our federal welfare bureaucracy. On the day we are completely out of Iraq, we will also completely eliminate all federal welfare.

Democrats have proposed the theory that a group of people will not become independent and self-sufficient if they can rely on support from the U.S. government. We should test that theory here at home to see if Democrats might be right.
Title: Of Ouija and Iran
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on December 19, 2005, 12:49:53 PM
I always enjoy these tounge in cheek ouija board channelings of reknowned spook James Angleton, but I never know what to make of them.


December 19, 2005, 8:33 a.m.
The Truth About Tenet
James Jesus Angleton explains it all.
Michael Ledeen


"Oh, come on! You expect me to believe that?"

I was recently back at the ouija board with my old friend, the late James Jesus Angleton, once upon a time the head of CIA Counterintelligence. I had wanted to talk to him about the latest warnings from the interminable 9/11 Commission, a.k.a. The Monologue That Will Not Die, that we hadn't done enough with homeland security. I knew his view of the commission was much like mine ? namely that these guys need a day job. Or maybe a Caribbean cruise. Or maybe a proper spanking. But he didn't want any of it, he was all worked up over Iran, and he had a wild theory about what was going on.

JJA: "Be logical for once, don't always assume that the CIA is totally incompetent. You only hear about the bad things, the screw-ups, the accidents. No one's going to tell you about the brilliant operations."

ML: "All right, everybody knows that. But to suggest that somehow the CIA maneuvered the Iranian elections, and got Ahmadi Nezhad into the presidency, that's just wacky."

JJA: "Has anyone ever doubted CIA's ability to manipulate the Iranian populace? How did the shah get to power in the first place?"

ML: "Yeah, but only the craziest Iranians think that CIA has accomplished anything there since the 1950s."

JJA: "Good news. But some day this generation's Archie Roosevelt will tell the inside story of how the CIA managed to recruit this guy from central casting, the perfect person to get the West to take the Iranian threat seriously, the perfect person to terrify undecided Iranians and get them ready to take desperate measures, into office."

ML: "Is there any evidence at all?"

JJA: "You bet there is. There's Tenet."

ML: "Tenet's gone, fired."

JJA: "The hell you say. He left surrounded by glory and adulation. He got the damn medal, didn't he? You think the president didn't know what he was doing?"

ML: "What was he doing? I thought it was a disgrace."

JJA: "He was giving the award in advance, because he knew he wouldn't be able to praise Tenet afterwards, if the operation worked."

ML: "So you think that Tenet..."

JJA: "Tenet pretended to leave. He had to. He and the president realized that the only way to generate public support for a vigorous campaign of regime change in Iran, was if everyone was totally frightened. But the mullahs were too smart to let that happen, they had all these sly reformers who pretended to be somehow ready to make a nice deal with us. You know, Rafsanjani, Khatami, all those smooth talkers with their clever slogans tailor made for Western intellectuals, "dialogue of civilizations," etc. etc..."

ML: "And so, you're saying, CIA spotted Ahmadi Nezhad, recruited him, and..."

JJA: "And ran him. And bought off enough mullahs to get him named president."

ML: "And now?"

JJA: "And now they're running him. That is, Tenet's running him. That's what Tenet is doing. Forget all that nonsense about writing a book. He'll never write a book. He's too busy sabotaging Iran."

ML: "Let me try to follow this, please. Are you also saying that those guys that left when Goss came in are part of the scheme?"

JJA: "Well, obviously. I mean, a new guy comes in and the top two officers from the Operations Directorate just pack up and leave? Give me a break. It was all coordinated, all staged, the usual disinformation for a gullible public. And they went for it, didn't they?"

ML: "Yes, it all made perfect sense. It was time to clean house and so Goss was brought in to do the dirty work."

JJA: "Hahahahaha, you went for it too. Hahaha. The two most important guys in the building had their feelings hurt by that nasty old congressman, and they just couldn't bear it, and they left. Let's see, how many directors had they survived already? Four? Five? Six? I can't count them all. But this one was just too much. And where did they go to work, did anyone notice that?"

ML: "Yeah, they went to work for Scowcroft."

JJA: "Exactly, the buddy of George H. W. Bush, the former director of what?"

ML: "You're turning into a conspiracy-theory nutcase."

JJA: "What do you mean, turning into? What do you think counterintelligence is, anyway?"

I couldn't stand it anymore. You're of course free to believe whatever you want, I think it's ridiculous. Even if it does somehow explain everything.

? Michael Ledeen, an NRO contributing editor, is most recently the author of The War Against the Terror Masters. He is resident scholar in the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute
Title: Mid-East Political Overview
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on December 22, 2005, 02:02:49 PM
VDH pegs another series of dynamics.


December 22, 2005, 8:23 a.m.
Why Not Support Democracy?
Our orphan policy in the Middle East.
Victor Davis Hanson

Why still no big-font, front-page headlines screaming, ?Millions Vote in Historic Middle East Election!? or ?Democracy Comes At Last To Iraq? or ?America?s Push for Iraqi Democracy Working??

Besides the politics of gloom ? Bush at home and America abroad are always wrong ? and the weariness with the violence, there has sadly been too small a constituency for trusting that Arabs should run their own affairs through consensual government.

Remember the ingredients of the good old American foreign policy in the Middle East ? the one that operated before the bad-new days of neoconservatism?

One, oil thirst increasingly became the overriding consideration, even in areas like Palestine, Lebanon, or Egypt, where there was very little petroleum, but enough instability to affect the larger allegiance of Islamic oil-exporting nations. Earlier rivalry among Western nations had morphed into collective fear of the ever-growing Chinese-energy appetite ? always colored by the specter of past oil boycotts, shooting at tankers in the Gulf, and perennial terrorist threats against the oilfields. So if a nation pumped oil, then its government avoided scrutiny.

Two, anti-Communism was another stimulus, specifically the effort to keep the Soviet Union and its satellites from controlling the Persian Gulf, or using their Baathist surrogates to promote petrol-fed anti-Western terrorism. Much of the mess of the Middle East today derives from a Soviet-style, unworkable, amoral state apparatus imposed upon a traditional tribal society at various times in Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Yemen ? and our own desperation to support any unsavory autocrat who would stop such Communists. So if a strongman fought Communists, he was O.K. with us.

Three, after the Six-Day War of 1967, we alone supported Israel to ensure that it was not surrounded and eliminated by neighboring Arab autocracies ? none of whom had ever held a free election. So if a regime tried to destroy Israel?what else would you expect?

Four, billions of freely circulating petrodollars created creepy ties between Western defense contractors, universities, lobbyists, and think tanks, and illiberal regimes of the Gulf. For every crass Western merchant who insisted on selling advanced weaponry to Arab dictatorships, there was always a subsidized Middle East scholar who could on spec damn American foreign policy and/or excuse Middle East illiberalism. So if a petrocracy spread some cash, it got a pass from the United States.

Five, popular opinion on the Right was swayed by traditional isolationism ? none of those crazy people are worth a single American dollar or life ? and Cold War realism: we deal with the awful world as it is and let the gods worry about others? morality. So if all of ?em stayed over there, that?s all you need to know.

Six, the Left?s multiculturalism was more cynical. Its chief tenet was that no system could be any worse than the West?s. Thus we had no business in applying our moral ?constructs? to judge indigenous cultures by criticizing such things as polygamy, gender apartheid, dictatorship, anti-Semitism, or religious intolerance. Arab intellectuals often praised the American Left, but the latter was every bit as intertwined in the old pathological status quo as the most cynical realist. So who is to say that they are brutalizing their own, when we do the same over here?

Most of the time, the American public was oblivious to all this, as long as there were no gas lines and the annual Middle East harvest of American diplomats and soldiers was kept to a minimum. This complacency ended, however, when the Middle East mess that began in November 1979 with the Iranian storming of the American embassy culminated in the attacks of September 11.

Given the past history and current politics in the region, it is no wonder that near-hysterics accompanied America?s radical alternative post-9/11 strategy of attempting to prompt democratic reform ? by force in the case of the worst fascistic states like Afghanistan and Iraq, by isolation and ostracism in the case of Syria and Iran, and through often-embarrassing persuasion in the case of the Gulf states, North Africa, and Egypt.

Oilmen feared their infrastructure would be blown up in war or fall into the hands of Islamists if the sheiks fell.

Lobbyists and businessmen could not see why their short-term profits with autocrats were not merely good for the American economy, but could be made to promote the national interest of the United States as well.

Any Leftists who were not simply against anything that America was for feebly argued that democratic reform could only come from within and should arise within the parameters of socialism rather than crass American-style capitalism.

Worse still, the emphasis on democracy came from George Bush, an anathema to the Democrats who otherwise should have supported the new idealism. Anything that went wrong in Iraq was seen as spurring a spike in the polls for Democratic candidates as we entered our third national election since 9/11.

In perhaps the stupidest move in American political history, the mainstream Democratic party got suckered into buying Howard Dean?s shady investments in American failure ? and so turned its back on the Iraqi democratic experiment hours before millions went to the polls in that country?s third and most successful free election.

In short, the promotion of democracy has been an orphan policy, without any parentage of past support or present special interests. It proved to be easily caricatured all at once as na?ve by the right and imperialistic on the left. Thus on the war The American Conservative is now almost indistinguishable from the Nation.

Only by understanding this labyrinth of competing interests can we see why the most successful election in Middle East history, birthed by the United States, gained almost no immediate thanks or praise, here or abroad.

Yet think of the dividends that are already accruing from this most hated of policies. Voting, along with constitutional rule, a reformed economy, and American military protection of its infancy, alone are undermining both the appeal of the Islamic fascists and precluding a reactionary counter-response by the usual dictators who promise a restoration of order. If the domino trends in Eastern Europe and Latin America are any indication, Iraqi democracy will prove more destabilizing to theocratic Iran than the latter is to the new Iraq. Indeed, the only alternative choice besides the bad one of taking out the Iranian nuclear complex and the worse one of letting it mature to Armageddon, is hoping that democratic fervor spreads across the border from Iraq.

The sight of purple fingers may eventually silence the Europeans abroad and the Left at home. And constitutional governments ? even if they voice anti-Americanism as they do in Turkey, or bother our liberal sensibilities as they do in Afghanistan ? will be far less likely to attack each other and draw us back in. More importantly, the consistent support for constitutional government relieves us of much of the constant subterfuge and stealthy machinations of supporting this clique or that dictator. Instead, democracy is a transparent policy that reflects American values.

Truly elected leaders of the Middle East will do more to further the interest and security of the United States, and put an end to the al Qaedists, Assads, and Saddams, than all the Saudi Royals, Mubaraks, and assorted kings, generals, and dictators put together.

We don?t need Peoria or even a struggling Eastern European democracy, just the foundations for something that can allow Muslims to follow the lead of those who participate in government in India, Malaysia, or Turkey and accept the rule of law ? and don?t strap on bombs to kill Americans with either government help or hurrahs from a disenfranchised mob. And we see results already right before our eyes. After all, there are really only two countries in the Middle East where thousands fight each day against Islamic terrorists who threaten their newly-won freedom ? the legitimate governments in Kabul and Baghdad.

So here we have this most amazing paradox of pushing democracy: a policy that is distrusted by almost every entrenched special interest and at odds with every ?ism ? and yet one that alone can erode Islamic fascism and make the United States more secure. Odder still, the Democratic party at home is the least enthusiastic about the democratic parties in Iraq.

Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is the author, most recently, of A War Like No Other. How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War
    
http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson200512220823.asp
Title: Victims of Victory
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on December 30, 2005, 08:32:07 PM
December 29, 2005, 8:21 a.m.
The Plague of Success
The paradox of ever-increasing expectations.
Victor Davis Hanson


After September 11 national-security-minded Democratic politicians fell over each other, voting for all sorts of tough measures. They passed the Patriot Act, approved the war in Afghanistan, voted to authorize the removal of Saddam Hussein, and nodded when they were briefed about Guantanamo or wiretap intercepts of suspect phone calls to and from the Middle East.

After the anthrax scare, the arrests of dozens of terrorist cells, and a flurry of al Qaeda fatwas, most Americans thought another attack was imminent ? and wanted their politicians to think the same. Today's sourpuss, Senator Harry Reid, once was smiling at a photo-op at the signing of the Patriot Act to record to his constituents that he was darn serious about terrorism. So we have forgotten that most of us after 9/11 would never have imagined that the United States would remain untouched for over four years after that awful cloud of ash settled over the crater at the World Trade Center.

Now the horror of 9/11 and the sight of the doomed diving into the street fade. Gone mostly are the flags on the cars, and the orange and red alerts. The Democrats and the Left, in their amnesia, and as beneficiaries of the very policies they suddenly abhor, now mention al Qaeda very little and Islamic fascism hardly at all.

Apparently due to the success of George Bush at keeping the United States secure, he, not Osama bin Laden, can now more often be the target of a relieved Left ? deserving of assassination in an Alfred Knopf novel, an overseer of Nazi policies according to a U.S. senator, a buffoon, and rogue in the award-winning film of Michael Moore. Yes, because we did so well against the real enemies, we soon had the leisure to invent new imaginary ones in Bush/Cheney, Halliburton, the Patriot Act, John Ashcroft, and Scooter Libby.

Afghanistan in October, 2001, conjured up almost immediately warnings of quagmire, expanding Holy War at Ramadan, unreliable allies, a trigger-happy nuclear Pakistan on the border, American corpses to join British and Russian bones in the high desert ? not a seven-week victory and a subsequent democracy in Kabul of all places.

Nothing in our era would have seemed more unlikely than democrats dethroning the Taliban and al Qaeda ? hitherto missile-proof in their much ballyhooed cave complexes that maps in Newsweek assured us rivaled Norad's subterranean fortress. The prior, now-sanctified Clinton doctrine of standoff bombing ensured that there would be no American fatalities and almost nothing ever accomplished ? the perfect strategy for the focus-group/straw-poll era of the 1990s.

Are we then basking in the unbelievable notion that the most diabolical government of the late 20th century is gone from Afghanistan, and in its place are schools, roads, and voting machines? Hardly, since the bar has been astronomically raised since Tora Bora. After all, the Afghan parliament is still squabbling and a long way from the city councils of Cambridge, La Jolla, or Nantucket ? or maybe not.

The same paradox of success is true of Iraq. Before we went in, analysts and opponents forecasted burning oil wells, millions of refugees streaming into Jordan and the Gulf kingdoms, with thousands of Americans killed just taking Baghdad alone. Middle Eastern potentates warned us of chemical rockets that would shower our troops in Kuwait. On the eve of the war, had anyone predicted that Saddam would be toppled in three weeks, and two-and-a-half-years later, 11 million Iraqis would turn out to vote in their third election ? at a cost of some 2100 war dead ? he would have been dismissed as unhinged.

But that is exactly what has happened. And the reaction? Democratic firebrands are now talking of impeachment.

What explains this paradox of public disappointment over things that turn out better than anticipated? Why are we like children who damn their parents for not providing yet another new toy when the present one is neither paid for nor yet out of the wrapper?

One cause is the demise of history. The past is either not taught enough, or presented wrongly as a therapeutic exercise to excise our purported sins.

Either way the result is the same: a historically ignorant populace who knows nothing about past American wars and their disappointments ? and has absolutely no frame of reference to make sense of the present other than its own mercurial emotional state in any given news cycle.

Few Americans remember that nearly 750 Americans were killed in a single day in a training exercise for D-Day, or that during the bloody American retreat back from the Yalu River in late 1950 thousands of our frozen dead were sent back stacked in trucks like firewood. Our grandparents in the recent past endured things that would make the present ordeal in Iraq seem almost pedestrian ? and did all that with the result that a free Germany could now release terrorists or prosperous South Korean youth could damn the United States between their video games.

Instead, we of the present think that we have reinvented the rules of war and peace anew. After Grenada, Panama, Gulf War I, Serbia, Kosovo, Bosnia, Afghanistan, and the three-week war to remove Saddam, we decreed from on high that there simply were to be no fatalities in the American way of war. If there were, someone was to be blamed, censured, or impeached ? right now!

Second, there is a sort of arrogant smugness that has taken hold in the West at large. Read the papers about an average day in Washington D.C., Los Angeles, Detroit, or even in smaller places like Fresno. The headlines are mostly the story of mayhem ? murder, rape, arson, and theft. Yet, we think Afghanistan is failing or Iraq hopeless when we watch similar violence on television, as if they do such things and we surely do not. We denigrate the Iraqis' trial of Saddam Hussein ? as if the Milosevic legal circus or our own O.J. trial were models of jurisprudence. Still, who would have thought that poor Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti, a mass-murdering half-brother of Saddam Hussein, would complain that Iraqi television delayed lived feeds of his daily outbursts by whimpering, "If the sound is cut off once again, then I don't know about my comrades but I personally won't attend again. This is unjust and undemocratic."

A greater percentage of Iraqis participated in their elections after two years of consensual government than did Americans after nearly 230 years of practice. It is chic now to deprecate the Iraqi security forces, but they are doing a lot more to kill jihadists than the French or Germans who often either wire terrorists money, sell them weapons, or let them go. For what it's worth, I'd prefer to have one Jalal Talabani or Iyad Allawi on our side than ten Jacques Chiracs or Gerhard Schroeders.

Third, our affluent society is at a complete disconnect with hard physical work and appreciation of how tenuous life was for 2,500 years of civilization. Those in our media circus who deliver our truth can't weld, fix a car, shoot a gun, or do much of anything other than run around looking for scoops about how incompetent things are done daily in Iraq under the most trying of circumstances. Somehow we have convinced ourselves that our technologies and wealth give us a pass on the old obstacles of time and space ? as if Iraq 7,000 miles away is no more distant than Washington is from New York. Perhaps soldiers on patrol who go for 20 hours without sleep with 70 pounds on their back are merely like journalists pulling an all-nighter to file a story. Perhaps the next scandal will be the absence of high-definition television in Iraq ? and who plotted to keep flat screens out of Baghdad.

The result of this juvenile boredom with good news and success? Few stop to reflect how different a Pakistan is as a neutral rather than as the embryo of the Taliban, or a Libya without a nuclear-weapons program, or a Lebanon with Syrians in it, or an Iraq without Saddam and Afghanistan without Mullah Omar. That someone ? mostly soldiers in the field and diplomats under the most trying of circumstances ? accomplished all that is either unknown or forgotten as we ready ourselves for the next scandal.

Precisely because we are winning this war and have changed the contour of the Middle East, we expect even more ? and ever more quickly, without cost in lives or treasure. So rather than stopping to praise and commemorate those who gave us our success, we can only rush ahead to destroy those who do not give us even more.

Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is the author, most recently, of A War Like No Other. How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War

http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson200512290821.asp
Title: Measuring Political Bias
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on January 01, 2006, 09:36:42 PM
No doubt misfiled here as it's not a rant, but this qualitative approach appears eliminate subjective variables. Think it's interesting to note that Fox News is not as far to the right of center as say CBS News or NY Times is left.


http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/news_columnists/article/0,1299,DRMN_86_4353049,00.html

UCLA political science professor Timothy Groseclose, and University of Missouri at Columbia economist Jeffrey Milyo collaborated on a study of bias in the media.
Kopel: New study detects media's liberal tilt
Professors find most media 'significantly to the left of the average U.S. voter'

December 31, 2005

People argue a lot about whether the national mainstream media is politically biased, but such arguments are often impressionistic. Earlier this month, professors Tim Groseclose of UCLA and Jeffrey Milyo of the University of Missouri published the results of an investigation using rigorous quantitative analysis.

In A Measure of Media Bias, the authors start by examining the ratings of members of Congress, according to Americans for Democratic Action (ADA). Founded in 1947 by liberals such as Hubert Humphrey and Arthur Schlesinger, the ADA is an excellent gauge of mainstream liberal opinion. The average ADA rating for a member of Congress is 50.1, so a person with a 50 percent ADA rating is almost exactly in the middle of the current American political spectrum.

Groseclose and Milyo looked at how often members of Congress cited the 200 leading think tanks and interest groups in their speeches in Congress. Congresspersons with a lower ADA rating were more likely to cite groups such as the Heritage Foundation, the Christian Coalition, and the National Taxpayers Union. Congresspersons with a higher ADA rating were more likely to cite groups such as the Economic Policy Institute and the Children's Defense Fund.

For example, the average ADA score of a congressperson who cites the American Conservative Union is 16 percent. The average ADA score of a congressperson who cites the National Organization for Women is 79 percent.

Notably, the Groseclose and Milyo study did not require anyone to put a label on a think tank - such as whether the Brookings Institution is liberal, moderate, or conservative. (Its congressional citers have a 53 percent average ADA score.) Rather, the study simply observes which groups are cited by which members of Congress.

Next, the researchers and their assistants counted citations to these same groups in the media, and calculated an ADA rating for each media outlet based on the citations. So if a newspaper cited a mix of groups very similar to groups cited by Sen. John Kerry, the newspaper would have the same ADA rating as Kerry: 88 percent.

Two major media outlets were to the right of the American political midpoint: The Washington Times, at 35 percent, and Fox (the nightly news with Brit Hume) at 40 percent.

Three outlets were slightly left, but still close to the center: The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, CNN NewsNight with Aaron Brown, and ABC's Good Morning America - all at 56 percent.

The majority of the media clustered in the 60 to 69 range - significantly to the left of the average U.S. voter. These outlets were (in order of increasing leftishness) ABC's World News Tonight, NBC Nightly News, USA Today, the Today show, Time, U.S. News & World Report, NPR Morning Edition, Newsweek, CBS Early Show, and The Washington Post. Every one of these outlets was further from the American political midpoint than was Fox News.

At the far left of the major media spectrum were the Los Angeles Times (70), CBS Evening News (74), The New York Times (74), and The Wall Street Journal (85). The ratings were based only on news stories, so the left-leaning opinion pages at the Los Angeles Times and right-leaning opinion pages at The Wall Street Journal had no effect.

The authors conclude: "Our results show a strong liberal bias." Even so, most of the media are much more moderate than Congress itself, where the average Democrat has an 84, and the average Republican a 16.

The study, which builds on previous work by Groseclose and Mil- yo, appears in the November issue of The Quarterly Journal of Economics. It is available online at www.polisci.ucla.edu/faculty/groseclose/Media.Bias.pdf.

You can read various critiques of the study, and its previous iterations, on the Internet. The authors address and refute many of these arguments in their paper.

In any case, no critique undermines the relative rankings of the media outlets - that, for example, The New York Times is much further left than The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, or that the three major newsweekly magazines are nearly identical ideologically.

The study did not cover all the sources from which the Denver dailies draw their national and international stories. But of the sources which were studied, every source which supplies a significant amount of news content to a Denver paper (New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times) has a major leftward bias. The finding suggests that the Denver papers could improve their overall balance by including some stories from The Washington Times or from other sources without such a pronounced leftward tilt.

By the way, my left-leaning counterpart on this column, Jason Salzman, and I calculated our ADA scores based on 2003-2004 Senate votes. I scored a 16 percent, while Jason got a 91. We agree, however, that there are objective standards by which media bias can be judged. That's one reason we often agree with the critiques that the other raises in our columns.

Dave Kopel is research director at the Independence Institute, an attorney and author of 10 books. He can be reached at davekopel@RockyMountainNews.com.
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 02, 2006, 02:47:49 AM
"At the far left of the major media spectrum were the Los Angeles Times (70), CBS Evening News (74), The New York Times (74), and The Wall Street Journal (85)."

I'm completely comfortable with the basic conclusion of the piece.  Indeed, as an ex-New Yorker I'll vouch for the NY Slimes, and as an Angeleno, I vouch for the Left Angeles Times, but the WSJ is the furthest left of all?!?!?  I understand that they are not talking about the editorial page, but , , , get serious.
Title: Perpetual Petroleum Prognostications
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on January 20, 2006, 12:21:42 PM
Not quite a rant so filed here by default. Next time someone tells you we are running out of oil, or play the "no blood for oil" card, point 'em at this piece.

"Estimates of the world's oil reserves have risen faster than production."   
Oil is a nonrenewable resource. Every gallon of petroleum burned today is unavailable for use by future generations. Over the past 150 years, geologists and other scientists often have predicted that our oil reserves would run dry within a few years. When oil prices rise for an extended period, the news media fill with dire warnings that a crisis is upon us. Environmentalists argue that governments must develop new energy technologies that do not rely on fossil fuels. The facts contradict these harbingers of doom:

World oil production continued to increase through the end of the 20th century.

Prices of gasoline and other petroleum products, adjusted for inflation, are lower than they have been for most of the last 150 years.
Estimates of the world?s total endowment of oil have increased faster than oil has been taken from the ground.

How is this possible? We have not run out of oil because new technologies increase the amount of recoverable oil, and market prices ? which signal scarcity ? encourage new exploration and development. Rather than ending, the Oil Age has barely begun.

    History of Oil Prognostications
   
The history of the petroleum industry is punctuated by periodic claims that the supply will be exhausted, followed by the discovery of new oil fields and the development of technologies for recovering additional supplies. For instance:

Before the first U.S. oil well was drilled in Pennsylvania in 1859, petroleum supplies were limited to crude oil that oozed to the surface. In 1855, an advertisement for Kier?s Rock Oil advised consumers to ?hurry, before this wonderful product is depleted from Nature?s laboratory.?1
In 1874, the state geologist of Pennsylvania, the nation?s leading oil-producing state, estimated that only enough U.S. oil remained to keep the nation?s kerosene lamps burning for four years.2

   "Warnings of U.S. oil shortages were made before the first well was drilled in 1859."
   
Seven such oil shortage scares occurred before 1950.3 As a writer in the Oil Trade Journal noted in 1918: At regularly recurring intervals in the quarter of a century that I have been following the ins and outs of the oil business[,] there has always arisen the bugaboo of an approaching oil famine, with plenty of individuals ready to prove that the commercial supply of crude oil would become exhausted within a given time ? usually only a few years distant.4

1973 Oil Embargo.

    "After the revolution in Iran, oil prices returned to the long-term average of $10 to $20 a barrel, in real terms."   
The 1973 Arab oil embargo gave rise to renewed claims that the world?s oil supply would be exhausted shortly. ?The Oil Crisis: This Time the Wolf Is Here,? warned an article in the influential journal Foreign Affairs.5 Geologists had cried wolf many times, acknowledged the authors of a respected and widely used textbook on economic geology in 1981; ?finally, however, the wolves are with us.? The authors predicted that the United States was entering an incipient 125-year-long ?energy gap,? projected to be at its worst shortly after the year 2000.6

The predictions of the 1970s were followed in a few years by a glut of cheap oil:

The long-term inflation-adjusted price of oil from 1880 through 1970 averaged $10 to $20 a barrel.7

The price of oil soared to over $50 a barrel in inflation-adjusted 1996 U.S. dollars following the 1979 political revolution in Iran.8 [See Figure I.]
But by 1986, inflation-adjusted oil prices had collapsed to one-third their 1980 peak.9

   "When projected shortages failed to appear, doomsayers made new predictions."   


When projected crises failed to occur, doomsayers moved their predictions forward by a few years and published again in more visible and prestigious journals:

In 1989, one expert forecast that world oil production would peak that very year and oil prices would reach $50 a barrel by 1994.10
In 1995, a respected geologist predicted in World Oil that petroleum production would peak in 1996, and after 1999 major increases in crude oil prices would have dire consequences. He warned that ?[m]any of the world?s developed societies may look more like today?s Russia than the U.S.?11

A 1998 Scientific American article entitled ?The End of Cheap Oil? predicted that world oil production would peak in 2002 and warned that ?what our society does face, and soon, is the end of the abundant and cheap oil on which all industrial nations depend.?12

Similar admonitions were published in the two most influential scientific journals in the world, Nature and Science. A 1998 article in Science was titled ?The Next Oil Crisis Looms Large ? and Perhaps Close.?13 A 1999 Nature article was subtitled ?[A] permanent decline in global oil production rate is virtually certain to begin within 20 years.?14

1990s Oil Glut.

However, rather than falling, world oil production continued to increase throughout the 1990s. Prices have not skyrocketed, suggesting that oil is not becoming more scarce:

Oil prices were generally stable at $20 to $30 a barrel throughout the 1990s. [See Figure I.]

In 2001, oil prices fell to a 30-year low after adjusting for inflation.
Furthermore, the inflation-adjusted retail price of gasoline, one of the most important derivatives of oil, fell to historic lows in the past few years. [See Figure II.]

    Reserves versus Resources   
Nonexperts, including some in the media, persistently predict oil shortage because they misunderstand petroleum terminology. Oil geologists speak of both reserves and resources.

Reserves are the portion of identified resources that can be economically extracted and exploited using current technology.
Resources include all fuels, both identified and unknown, and constitute the world?s endowment of fossil fuels.

Oil reserves are analogous to food stocks in a pantry. If a household divides its pantry stores by the daily food consumption rate, the same conclusion is always reached: the family will starve to death in a few weeks. Famine never occurs because the family periodically restocks the pantry.

Similarly, if oil reserves are divided by current production rates, exhaustion appears imminent. However, petroleum reserves are continually increased by ongoing exploration and development of resources. For 80 years, oil reserves in the United States have been equal to a 10- to 14-year supply at current rates of development.15 If they had not been continually replenished, we would have run out of oil by 1930.

    How Much Oil Is Left?
   
Scaremongers are fond of reminding us that the total amount of oil in the Earth is finite and cannot be replaced during the span of human life. This is true; yet estimates of the world?s total oil endowment have grown faster than humanity can pump petroleum out of the ground.16

The Growing Endowment of Oil.

Estimates of the total amount of oil resources in the world grew throughout the 20th century [see Figure III].

In May 1920, the U.S. Geological Survey announced that the world?s total endowment of oil amounted to 60 billion barrels.17
In 1950, geologists estimated the world?s total oil endowment at around 600 billion barrels.

From 1970 through 1990, their estimates increased to between 1,500 and 2,000 billion barrels.

In 1994, the U.S. Geological Survey raised the estimate to 2,400 billion barrels, and their most recent estimate (2000) was of a 3,000-billion-barrel endowment.

By the year 2000, a total of 900 billion barrels of oil had been produced.18 Total world oil production in 2000 was 25 billion barrels.19 If world oil consumption continues to increase at an average rate of 1.4 percent a year, and no further resources are discovered, the world?s oil supply will not be exhausted until the year 2056.

    "Oil shales may hold another 14,000 billion barrels -- a 500 year supply."   

Additional Petroleum Resources.

The estimates above do not include unconventional oil resources. Conventional oil refers to oil that is pumped out of the ground with minimal processing; unconventional oil resources consist largely of tar sands and oil shales that require processing to extract liquid petroleum. Unconventional oil resources are very large. In the future, new technologies that allow extraction of these unconventional resources likely will increase the world?s reserves.

Oil production from tar sands in Canada and South America would add about 600 billion barrels to the world?s supply.20
Rocks found in the three western states of Colorado, Utah and Wyoming alone contain 1,500 billion barrels of oil.21
Worldwide, the oil-shale resource base could easily be as large as 14,000 billion barrels ? more than 500 years of oil supply at year 2000 production rates.22
Unconventional oil resources are more expensive to extract and produce, but we can expect production costs to drop with time as improved technologies increase efficiency.

    The Role of Technology   

With every passing year it becomes possible to exploit oil resources that could not have been recovered with old technologies. The first American oil well drilled in 1859 by Colonel Edwin Drake in Titusville, Pa. ? which was actually drilled by a local blacksmith known as Uncle Billy Smith ? reached a total depth of 69 feet (21 meters).

Today?s drilling technology allows the completion of wells up to 30,000 feet (9,144 meters) deep.

The vast petroleum resources of the world?s submerged continental margins are accessible from offshore platforms that allow drilling in water depths to 9,000 feet (2,743 meters).

The amount of oil recoverable from a single well has greatly increased because new technologies allow the boring of multiple horizontal shafts from a single vertical shaft.

Four-dimensional seismic imaging enables engineers and geologists to see a subsurface petroleum reservoir drain over months to years, allowing them to increase the efficiency of its recovery.
New techniques and new technology have increased the efficiency of oil exploration. The success rate for exploratory petroleum wells has increased 50 percent over the past decade, according to energy economist Michael C. Lynch.23

    Hubbert?s Prediction of Declining Production   

Despite these facts, some environmentalists claim that declining oil production is inevitable, based on the so-called Hubbert model of energy production. They ignore the inaccuracy of Hubbert?s projections.

Problems with Hubbert?s Model.

In March 1956, M. King Hubbert, a research scientist for Shell Oil, predicted that oil production from the 48 contiguous United States would peak between 1965 and 1970.24 Hubbert?s prediction was initially called ?utterly ridiculous.?25 But when U.S. oil production peaked in 1970, he became an instant celebrity and living legend.

    "Environmentalists now tie their predictions of declining energy supplies to M. King Hubbert's model of energy production -- which has been consistently inaccurate."
   
Hubbert based his estimate on a mathematical model that assumes the production of a resource follows a bell-shaped curve ? one that rises rapidly to a peak and declines just as quickly. In the case of petroleum, the model requires an accurate estimate of the size of the total oil endowment.26 His best estimate of the size of petroleum resources in the lower 48 states was 150 billion barrels. His high estimate, which he considered an exaggeration, was 200 billion barrels.

Based on these numbers, Hubbert produced two curves showing a ?best? estimate of U.S. oil production and a ?high? estimate. The claimed accuracy of Hubbert?s predictions are largely based on the upper curve ? his absolute upper limit [see Figure IV].

Hubbert set the absolute upper limit for peak U.S. oil production at roughly 3 billion barrels a year, and his best or lower estimate of peak future U.S. crude oil production was closer to 2.5 billion barrels.
As early as 1970, actual U.S. crude oil production exceeded Hubbert?s upper limit by 13 percent.

By the year 2000, actual U.S. oil production from the lower 48 states was 2.5 times higher than Hubbert?s 1956 ?best? prediction.
Production in the 48 contiguous states peaked, but at much higher levels than Hubbert predicted. From about 1975 through 1995, Hubbert?s upper curve was a fairly good match to actual U.S. production data. But in recent years, U.S. crude oil production has been consistently higher than Hubbert considered possible.

    "U.S. oil production has been higher than Hubbert thought possile."   
Hubbert?s 1980 prediction of U.S. oil production, his last, was substantially less accurate than his 1956 ?high? estimate.27 In the year 2000, actual U.S. oil production from the lower 48 states was 1.7 times higher than his 1980 revised prediction [see Figure V].

In light of this, it is strange that Hubbert?s predictions have been characterized as remarkably successful. While production in the United States is declining, as Hubbert predicted, it is doing so at a much slower rate. Furthermore, lower production does not necessarily indicate the looming exhaustion of U.S. oil resources. It shows instead that at current prices and with current technology, less of the remaining petroleum is economically recoverable.

Hubbert?s Prediction for Natural Gas.

In 1998, Peter McCabe of the U.S. Geological Survey showed that energy resources do not necessarily follow Hubbert-type curves, and even if they do a decline in production may not be due to exhaustion of the resource.28

For example, Hubbert also predicted future U.S. natural gas production. This prediction turned out to be grossly wrong. As of 2000, U.S. natural gas production was 2.4 times higher than Hubbert had predicted in 1956.29

The Production Curve for Coal.

Production of anthracite coal in Pennsylvania through the 19th and 20th centuries followed a Hubbert-type curve more closely than any other known energy resource. Production started around 1830, peaked around 1920, and by 1995 had fallen to about 5 percent of its peak value. However, the supply of Pennsylvania anthracite coal is far from exhausted. If production were to resume at the all-time high rate of 100 million short tons per year, the resource base would support 190 years of production. Production declined not because the resource was depleted but because people stopped heating their homes with coal and switched to cleaner-burning oil and gas.30

    "U.S. production in 2000 was 1.7 times higher than Hubbert projected in 1980."   

The primary problem with a Hubbert-type analysis is that it requires an accurate estimate of the total resource endowment. Yet estimates of the total endowment have grown systematically larger for at least 50 years as technology has made it possible to exploit petroleum resources previously not considered economical. Hubbert-type analyses of oil production have systematically underestimated future oil production. This will continue to be the case until geologists can produce an accurate and stable estimate of the size of the total oil endowment.

    Is an Oil Economy Sustainable?   

In the long run, an economy that utilizes petroleum as a primary energy source is not sustainable, because the amount of oil in the Earth?s crust is finite. However, sustainability is a misleading concept, a chimera. No technology since the birth of civilization has been sustainable. All have been replaced as people devised better and more efficient technologies. The history of energy use is largely one of substitution. In the 19th century, the world?s primary energy source was wood. Around 1890, wood was replaced by coal. Coal remained the world?s largest source of energy until the 1960s when it was replaced by oil. We have only just entered the petroleum age.31

    "Without innovation, no technology is sustainable."   

How long will it last? No one can predict the future, but the world contains enough petroleum resources to last at least until the year 2100. This is so far in the future that it would be ludicrous for us to try to anticipate what energy sources our descendants will utilize. Over the next several decades the world likely will continue to see short-term spikes in the price of oil, but these will be caused by political instability and market interference ? not by an irreversible decline in supply.

David Deming of the University of Oklahoma?s School of Geology and Geophysics is an Adjunct Scholar with the NCPA.

http://www.ncpa.org/pub/bg/bg159/
Title: Recycled Silliness
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on January 27, 2006, 03:08:44 PM
My biggest pet peeve is recycling, a lamebrained scam by any objective measure. The day they start issuing tickets for how I sort my trash is the day I start dropping Dr. Pepper cans into the garbage of the local sweetness and light Nazis.

Recycle This!
Separating tin cans and pizza boxes and exposing the facts about the High Church of Recycling.
by James Thayer
01/26/2006 12:00:00 AM


ELIAS ROHAS is a garbage hauler in Seattle. He works for Rabanco/Allied Waste Industries and his beat is Magnolia, the city's tony westernmost neighborhood. According to the Seattle Times, Rohas has been on the job 14 years. He slowly cruises Magnolia streets, using his truck's mechanical arm to lift and dump curbside garbage bins.

Since the first of the year Rohas has enjoyed a new responsibility, one shared by Seattle policemen: he can officially determine who is breaking the law, and issue a ticket.

On January 1, placing more than 10 percent recyclable materials into a garbage bin became illegal in Seattle. An offending bin is tagged with a bright yellow slip that announces, "Recycle. It's not garbage anymore." The un-emptied bin is then left at the curb in hopes that the homeowner will learn the lesson and remove the reusable material by next week's collection. Businesses that offend three times are fined $50.

Seattle's proudly progressive leaders were alarmed when, almost two decades after voluntary recycling programs were initiated in the city--recycling rates had stalled at about 40 percent of the total amount of waste. Too many bottles and too much paper were still finding their way to the eastern Oregon landfill that receives Seattle's garbage.

So after a year-long $450,000 television, radio and newspaper education campaign, the mandatory recycling law went into effect at the first of the year. The goal is to raise the percentage of recyclables to sixty percent of total waste. Seattle is not alone, of course; many other cities, from Philadelphia to Honolulu, also have mandatory recycling programs. But these laws are based on myth and followed as faith.


RECYCLING FEELS RIGHT. Echoing widespread Seattle sentiment (85 percent of the city's citizens approve of curbside recycling), the Seattle Times editorial board has concluded that "Recycling is a good thing." After all, using a bottle twice must be better than using it once, saving resources and sparing the landfill.

The truth, though, is that recycling is an expense, not a savings, for a city. "Every community recycling program in America today costs more than the revenue it generates," says Dr. Jay Lehr of the Heartland Institute.

A telling indicator is that cities often try to dump recycling programs when budgets are tight. As Angela Logomasini, director of risk and environmental policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, points out in the Wall Street Journal, every New York City mayor has attempted to stop the city's recycling program since it was begun in 1989. Mayor David Dinkins tried, but changed his mind when met with noisy criticism. Rudy Giuliani tried, but was sued by the Natural Resources Defense Council, which won the case. Mayor Bloomberg has proposed temporarily ending the recycling program because, as Logomasini notes, it costs $240 per ton to recycle and only $130 per ton to send the material to a landfill. The numbers for other areas are roughly comparable. The net per-ton cost of recycling exceeds $180 in Rhode Island, while conventional garbage collection and disposal costs $120 to $160 per ton.

The funds go for trucks and collectors and inspectors and bureaucrats. Clemson professor Daniel K. Benjamin points out that Los Angeles has 800 trucks working the neighborhoods, instead of 400, due to recycling. Radley Balko at aBetterEarth.Org, a project of the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University, writes, "That means extra wear and tear on city streets, double the exhaust emissions into the atmosphere, double the man hours required for someone to drive and man those trucks, and double the costs of maintenance and upkeep of the trucks." Jerry Taylor of the Cato Institute says costs include "the energy necessary to deliver the recyclables to the collection centers, process the post-consumer material into usable commodities for manufacturers, and deliver the processed post-consumer material to manufacturing plants." Franklin Associates, which provides consulting services for solid waste management, estimates that curbside recycling is 55 percent more expensive, pound for pound, than conventional garbage disposal.


CITY BUDGETS aren't the only victims of recycling. Citizens also have a significant cost--their time. Seattle Public Utilities researchers (in collaboration with University of California, Davis) conducted a survey in 2005 that indicated 98 percent of Seattle households participate in the curbside recycling program, and that 16 minutes are spent recycling per household. The city contains 260,000 households, which means each week Seattleites spend almost 8,500 work days recycling. Working days lost in traffic jams are commonly cited by proponents of HOV lanes, bike paths, and light rail. Nary a word is heard about lost time when the topic is recycling.

And what are those 16 minutes spent doing? Sorting, extracting, rinsing, bundling, and stomping. In Seattle, household batteries can be put into the garbage, but not rechargeable batteries. Plastic soda bottles can be recycled, but not plastic flower pots. Plastic shopping bags go into the recycle bin (bundle them first), but not plastic produce bags or plastic freezer wrap bags. Plastic cottage cheese tubs, yes, but not plastic six-pack rings. Frozen food boxes go into the recycle bin, but not paper plates. Cardboard, sure, but not if a pizza came in it, and make sure to flatten the box. And remove any tape. Cereal boxes, yes, but pull out the liner. Typing paper, of course, but sort out the paper punch holes, as those little dots can't be recycled. Hardback books, okay, but wrestle off the covers. Metal hangers, yes: aluminum foil, no. Tin cans, you bet, but rinse them, and push the lid down into the can. No loose lids can go in the recycle bin. And no confetti.

So at least it's a fun 16 minutes. There are out-of-pocket expenses, too: Rod Kauffman, president of the Building Owners and Managers Association of Seattle and King County, says this sorting will add 10 percent to a building's janitorial bills.


IF WE WEREN'T RECYCLING, wouldn't the landfills soon overflow? Al Gore certainly thinks so, as he claimed we are "running out of ways to dispose of our waste in a manner that keeps it out of either sight or mind." Nonsense. Clemson Professor Daniel K. Benjamin notes that rather than running out of space, overall capacity is growing. "In fact," he says, "the United States today has more landfill capacity than ever before." He adds that the total land area required to contain every scrap of this country's garbage for the next 100 years would be only 10 miles square. The Nevada Policy Research Institute's numbers are even more dramatic: an area 44 miles square and 120 feet deep would handle all of America's garbage for the next millennium.

America's image of landfills was fixed decades ago, and is that of Staten Island's Fresh Kills, a vast swampy expanse of detritus, with huge Caterpillar tractors trundling over it, and clouds of seagulls obscuring everything above ground. Fresh Kills received New York's garbage for 53 years before it was closed in 2001. Modern landfills have nothing in common with the place. Benjamin says that new landfills are located far from groundwater supplies, and are built on thick clay beds that are covered with plastic liners, on top of which goes another layer of sand or gravel. Pipes remove leachate, which is then treated at wastewater plants. Escaping gas is burned or sold. A park or golf course or industrial development eventually goes over the landfill.

Fresh Kills also looked dangerous, a veritable soup of deadly poisons and nasty chemicals, seeping and dissolving and dispersing. But that's not the case with new landfills. Daniel Benjamin writes, "According to the EPA's own estimates, modern landfills can be expected to cause 5.7 cancer-related deaths over the next 300 years--just one death every 50 years. To put this in perspective, cancer kills over 560,000 people every year in the United States."

But what about saving precious resources by recycling? Almost 90 percent of this country's paper comes from renewable forests, and to say we will someday run out of trees is the same as saying we will some day run out of corn. According to Jerry Taylor, we are growing 22 million acres of new forest each year, and we harvest 15 million acres, for a net annual gain of 7 million acres. The United States has almost four times more forested land today than it did 80 years ago.

Are we running out of that other staple of recycle bins, glass? All those wine and beer bottles are manufactured from silica dioxide, the fancy term for sand, which Jay Lehr points out is the most abundant mineral in the earth's crust.

Nor will we ever suffer a shortage of plastic, which is made from petroleum byproducts. Today more petroleum reserves are being discovered than are being used up. And plastics can now also be synthesized from farm products. Lehr concludes, "We are not running out of, nor will we ever run out of, any of the resources we recycle."

Why then do we go to all this trouble for so little--or no--reward? Lehr says it's because "we get a warm and fuzzy feeling when we recycle." Richard Sandbrook who was executive director of the International Institute for Environment and Development, said, "Environmentalists refuse to countenance any argument which undermines their sacred cow."

The Seattle Times concludes, "Recycling is almost a religion in Seattle." An irrational religion, says Professor Frank Ackerman, who specializes in environment policy at Tufts University. But his arguments cut little weight here in the Northwest. We attend the church of recycling, where perfervid faith compensates for lack of factual support.

Seattle Public Utilities estimates that 1 in 10 garbage bins will contain too much recyclable material, and so will be left full on the curb. Hauler Elias Rohas said they aren't hard to spot. "We can tell right away," he told the Times. He said the sound of glass is unmistakable, and that paper adds bulk without weight. "You can tell even when it's in the bag."


James Thayer is a frequent contributor to The Daily Standard. His twelfth novel, The Gold Swan, has been published by Simon & Schuster.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/006/603wxcce.asp
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 07, 2006, 02:19:24 PM
Posted Saturday, Feb. 4, 2006, at 4:31 PM ET

 

Cartoon Debate
The case for mocking religion
By Christopher Hitchens

As well as being a small masterpiece of inarticulacy and self-abnegation, the statement from the State Department about this week's international Muslim pogrom against the free press was also accidentally accurate.

 

"Anti-Muslim images are as unacceptable as anti-Semitic images, as anti-Christian images, or any other religious belief."

 

Thus the hapless Sean McCormack, reading painfully slowly from what was reported as a prepared government statement. How appalling for the country of the First Amendment to be represented by such an administration. What does he mean "unacceptable"? That it should be forbidden? And how abysmal that a "spokesman" cannot distinguish between criticism of a belief system and slander against a people. However, the illiterate McCormack is right in unintentionally comparing racist libels to religious faith. Many people have pointed out that the Arab and Muslim press is replete with anti-Jewish caricature, often of the most lurid and hateful kind. In one way the comparison is hopelessly inexact. These foul items mostly appear in countries where the state decides what is published or broadcast. However, when Muslims republish the Protocols of the Elders of Zion or perpetuate the story of Jewish blood-sacrifice at Passover, they are recycling the fantasies of the Russian Orthodox Christian secret police (in the first instance) and of centuries of Roman Catholic and Lutheran propaganda (in the second). And, when an Israeli politician refers to Palestinians as snakes or pigs or monkeys, it is near to a certainty that he will be a rabbi (most usually Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the leader of the disgraceful Shas party) and will cite Talmudic authority for his racism. For most of human history, religion and bigotry have been two sides of the same coin, and it still shows.

 

Therefore there is a strong case for saying that the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, and those who have reprinted its efforts out of solidarity, are affirming the right to criticize not merely Islam but religion in general. And the Bush administration has no business at all expressing an opinion on that. If it is to say anything, it is constitutionally obliged to uphold the right and no more. You can be sure that the relevant European newspapers have also printed their share of cartoons making fun of nuns and popes and messianic Israeli settlers, and taunting child-raping priests. There was a time when this would not have been possible. But those taboos have been broken.

 

Which is what taboos are for. Islam makes very large claims for itself. In its art, there is a prejudice against representing the human form at all. The prohibition on picturing the prophet?who was only another male mammal?is apparently absolute. So is the prohibition on pork or alcohol or, in some Muslim societies, music or dancing. Very well then, let a good Muslim abstain rigorously from all these. But if he claims the right to make me abstain as well, he offers the clearest possible warning and proof of an aggressive intent. This current uneasy coexistence is only an interlude, he seems to say. For the moment, all I can do is claim to possess absolute truth and demand absolute immunity from criticism. But in the future, you will do what I say and you will do it on pain of death.

 

I refuse to be spoken to in that tone of voice, which as it happens I chance to find "offensive." ( By the way, hasn't the word "offensive" become really offensive lately?) The innate human revulsion against desecration is much older than any monotheism: Its most powerful expression is in the Antigone of Sophocles. It belongs to civilization. I am not asking for the right to slaughter a pig in a synagogue or mosque or to relieve myself on a "holy" book. But I will not be told I can't eat pork, and I will not respect those who burn books on a regular basis. I, too, have strong convictions and beliefs and value the Enlightenment above any priesthood or any sacred fetish-object. It is revolting to me to breathe the same air as wafts from the exhalations of the madrasahs, or the reeking fumes of the suicide-murderers, or the sermons of Billy Graham and Joseph Ratzinger. But these same principles of mine also prevent me from wreaking random violence on the nearest church, or kidnapping a Muslim at random and holding him hostage, or violating diplomatic immunity by attacking the embassy or the envoys of even the most despotic Islamic state, or making a moronic spectacle of myself threatening blood and fire to faraway individuals who may have hurt my feelings. The babyish rumor-fueled tantrums that erupt all the time, especially in the Islamic world, show yet again that faith belongs to the spoiled and selfish childhood of our species.

 

As it happens, the cartoons themselves are not very brilliant, or very mordant, either. But if Muslims do not want their alleged prophet identified with barbaric acts or adolescent fantasies, they should say publicly that random murder for virgins is not in their religion. And here one runs up against a curious reluctance. ? In fact, Sunni Muslim leaders can't even seem to condemn the blowing-up of Shiite mosques and funeral processions, which even I would describe as sacrilege. Of course there are many millions of Muslims who do worry about this, and another reason for condemning the idiots at Foggy Bottom is their assumption, dangerous in many ways, that the first lynch mob on the scene is actually the genuine voice of the people. There's an insult to Islam, if you like.

 

The question of "offensiveness" is easy to decide. First: Suppose that we all agreed to comport ourselves in order to avoid offending the believers? How could we ever be sure that we had taken enough precautions? On Saturday, I appeared on CNN, which was so terrified of reprisal that it "pixilated" the very cartoons that its viewers needed to see. And this ignoble fear in Atlanta, Ga., arose because of an illustration in a small Scandinavian newspaper of which nobody had ever heard before! Is it not clear, then, that those who are determined to be "offended" will discover a provocation somewhere? We cannot possibly adjust enough to please the fanatics, and it is degrading to make the attempt.

 

Second (and important enough to be insisted upon): Can the discussion be carried on without the threat of violence, or the automatic resort to it? When Salman Rushdie published The Satanic Verses in 1988, he did so in the hope of forwarding a discussion that was already opening in the Muslim world, between extreme Quranic literalists and those who hoped that the text could be interpreted. We know what his own reward was, and we sometimes forget that the fatwa was directed not just against him but against "all those involved in its publication," which led to the murder of the book's Japanese translator and the near-deaths of another translator and one publisher. I went on Crossfire at one point, to debate some spokesman for outraged faith, and said that we on our side would happily debate the propriety of using holy writ for literary and artistic purposes. But that we would not exchange a word until the person on the other side of the podium had put away his gun. (The menacing Muslim bigmouth on the other side refused to forswear state-sponsored suborning of assassination, and was of course backed up by the Catholic bigot Pat Buchanan.) The same point holds for international relations: There can be no negotiation under duress or under the threat of blackmail and assassination. And civil society means that free expression trumps the emotions of anyone to whom free expression might be inconvenient. It is depressing to have to restate these obvious precepts, and it is positively outrageous that the administration should have discarded them at the very first sign of a fight.

 

 

Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. His most recent book is Thomas Jefferson: Author of America. His most recent collection of essays is titled Love, Poverty, and War.
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on February 07, 2006, 09:44:44 PM
Herbert E. Meyer: Take Out the Mullahs ? Tonight
The American Thinker | February 7th, 2006 | Herbert E. Meyer


To think clearly about the looming crisis with Iran, close your eyes and imagine that you?re standing outside your children?s school. It?s 2:55pm, and you?re chatting amiably with other parents while waiting for the 3pm bell to ring.  Suddenly you see a man running toward the school, holding a hand grenade and shouting: ?I hate kids.  I welcome death.?


Now, what do you propose to do?


One option is to engage your fellow parents in a dialogue about the serious and complex questions raised by the running man with the grenade.


For instance, you might try to calculate precisely how long it will take him to reach the school.  When he does reach the school, will he stop or go inside?  If he does go inside, will he run toward the basement, or toward the auditorium where the third and fourth grades have been brought to watch a video?  (It?s probably about ?safe sex? ? but what the schools teach our kids is another subject for another day.)  Is the hand grenade real, or might it be a fake?  If the grenade is real, does the man really know how to pull the pin?  And if he does, how big will be blast radius be and what?s the potential number of casualties?


And why is the man doing this?  Is he really a vicious killer?  Or is he a harmless but mentally disturbed individual who didn?t take his medication today and slipped out of the house without being noticed by his wife?  Or is this just a case of a well-meaning but very misguided protester who?s mad at the Bush administration for not signing the Kyoto accords, or who?s upset because dolphins are still getting caught in tuna nets?  Oh, and is it possible that in addition to the hand grenade he?s got a gun inside his coat pocket?


Should you try to talk with the man?  Or would it be better to notify the school?s principal, and perhaps suggest he call the police?


And remember?while you and your fellow parents debate all this, the distance between the man holding the grenade and your kids is narrowing.


The Option to Act


Your other option is to take the man down ? now, this minute, however you can ? and to sort out the mess later.


If you go for this option, it?s because you believe that anyone who runs toward a school with what appears to be a live grenade while shouting ?I hate kids.  I welcome death? forfeits all rights to a cautious, comprehensive inquiry about his motives and real capabilities.  If it turns out that the grenade was a fake, or that the man is a harmless nut who really wouldn?t hurt a fly ? too bad.  And if the man or his family sues you or the school district for injury or wrongful death ? so what.


If you choose this option, it?s because you understand that when someone puts your children?s lives at risk, the instinct for survival trumps the analytic process.  Take too long to think, and you may lose the opportunity to act ? and it?s impossible to accurately project when this line will be crossed until you?re already over it.


Okay, now let?s turn our attention to Iran.


The country is led by individuals who are proven, ruthless killers.  Several of them ? most especially the country?s president, Mahmoud Amadinejad ? are visibly insane.  They have launched huge programs to develop nuclear weapons and the missiles to deliver them, and Iran has both the money and talent to pull it off.  They have pledged to wipe at least one country off the map ? Israel?and they don?t like us, either.


In response, our diplomats are fanning out to engage our allies in ?frank and comprehensive? consultations about the looming, potential crisis.  They are even struggling mightily to bring non-allies including France, Russia and China into the dialogue.  Our State Department is ?cautiously optimistic? that the issue will eventually be brought to the U.N. Security Council.


Meanwhile, members of Congress are demanding to know how much time we have before it will be too late to act.  Just last week the Director of National Intelligence, John Negroponte, testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee that in the judgment of our country?s intelligence experts, Iran ?probably? hasn?t yet built a bomb or gotten its hands on enough fissile material to build one.  Over in Vienna the International Atomic Energy Agency estimates that it will be several years, at least, before Iran?s mullahs have a nuke.


What Can We Do?


Based on public comments by officials of the Bush Administration and of various European and Asian governments, there are four options on the table for dealing with Iran:  First, do nothing since Iran won?t actually have nukes for several years ? and hope that the mullahs really aren?t serious about using them.  Second, engage the mullahs diplomatically in hopes of dissuading them from pursuing their present course.  Third, help trigger a revolution by providing as much covert support as possible to those within Iran ? students and a growing range of worker organizations, for example ? who are already demonstrating against their hated regime.  And fourth, launch a military strike on Iran?s nuclear facilities to destroy, or at least delay, that country?s weapons programs.


Alas, none of these options is any good.  The first is feckless, and the second is hopeless.  The third ? helping support a revolution ? is terrific, but even under the best possible circumstances would take a long time to bear fruit.  And the fourth option ? taking out the nuclear facilities with military force ? is extraordinarily difficult to execute, runs the real risk of igniting a political explosion throughout the Moslem world, and in any case it isn?t imminent.


Meanwhile, with each day that passes the distance between Iran?s mullahs and nuclear weapons is narrowing.  And remember:  Take too long to think, and you may lose the opportunity to act ? and it?s impossible to accurately project when this line will be crossed until you?re already over it.


Indeed, we may already be over the line.  While it may be correct, as Director Negroponte has testified, that Iran ?probably? hasn?t yet built a bomb or gotten its hands on enough fissile material to build one?it also may not be correct.  Given our intelligence community?s recent track record, it would be foolhardy to place much confidence in this judgment.  Generally, countries trying to build nuclear weapons succeed sooner rather than later ? usually to the great surprise of Western intelligence services.  And isn?t it possible that Iran already has a bomb or two that it bought rather than built itself?  When the Soviet Union fell apart in 1991 there were the so-called ?loose nukes? that the Soviet military wasn?t able to account for.  Make a list of those countries with the money and desire to get its hands on one of these weapons ? and Iran tops the list.


It Isn?t Only Nukes


Most worrisome, while everyone in Washington is focusing on nuclear weapons, no one has uttered so much as a peep about the possibility that Iran may be developing chemical or biological weapons.  These weapons are far less costly than nuclear weapons, and the technology required to develop them is more widely available.  And since a cupful of anthrax or botulism is enough to kill 100,000 people, our ability to detect these weapons is ? zilch.  So why wouldn?t the mullahs in Teheran order the development of chemical and biological weapons?  If they really do plan to wipe Israel ? or us ? off the map, these will do the job just as well as nukes.  And if reports are true that Saddam Hussein had such weapons before the war and shipped them out to Syria and Iran before we attacked in 2003 ? then the mullahs already have stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons.


Simply put, Iran?s nuclear weapons program, combined with the murderous comments of that country?s president, is the political equivalent of a man running toward your children?s school holding a hand grenade and shouting ?I hate kids.  I welcome death.?  The risk of taking time?to think, to talk, to analyze, to co-ordinate with other countries ? is just too high.  We know where Amadinejad and the mullahs work, and we ought to know where they live.  (And if we don?t know, the Israelis do and would be more than happy to lend a hand.)  We have cruise missiles, Stealth fighters, and B-1 bombers that can fly from the US to Teheran, drop their lethal loads, then return to the US without ever landing en route.  We have skilled, courageous Special Forces teams that can get themselves on the ground in Teheran quietly and fast.


The question is whether we still have within us the instinct for survival.  If we do, then our only course is to act ? now, this minute, however we can ? and to take out the mullahs.  Tonight.

Herbert E. Meyer served during the Reagan Administration as Special Assistant to the Director of Central Intelligence and Vice Chairman of the CIA?s National Intelligence Council.  His DVD on The Siege of Western Civilization  has become an international best-seller.

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles.php?article_id=5227
Title: Sensitivity and the Fearless MSM
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on February 08, 2006, 12:29:11 PM
The end of civilization was a joke

By Kathleen Parker

Feb 8, 2006

What if the world went up in a mushroom cloud over a cartoon - or because of a photograph of some reveler dressed up like a pig?

Well, of course, that would be absurd, a comedy, a Clouseauean flick about a bumbling inspector, right? No, that would be a documentary about the end of civilization circa 2006 - unless we come to our senses.

The cartoon implosion now rocking the Muslim world - featuring embassy burnings, threats of 9-11 sequels and the Arab street equivalent of the Terrible Twos - is based on equal parts fake photographs and a default riot mode looking for an excuse. Extreme propaganda on one side and a lack of fortitude on the other have brought us near the brink of extinction through a global act of accidental self-mockery.

The world isn't mad over cartoons; the world IS a cartoon.

The dozen Danish drawings everyone by now has heard about - but not necessarily seen thanks to our own media's sanctimonious sensitivity to insanity - were mild by modern satirical standards. In brief, the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten last September published 12 cartoons that depicted Muhammad in various poses. The worst of them showed the Prophet wearing a bomb-turban.

Naturally, the Muslim world has gone insane.

And unnaturally, much of the Western world has retreated into fetal repose. Only in Europe did a few newspapers republish the allegedly offensive cartoons, while most American papers have genuflected to the altar of multiculturalism.

One after another, editors have explained their decision not to run the images for fear of offending American Muslims. Never mind that the same papers, notably The Boston Globe, felt no such compunction in the past when they defended "Piss Christ," a photograph of crucifix submerged in urine. Or the Virgin Mary covered in feces.

Meanwhile, querulous Americans still reliant on traditional media are left in the kind of darkness admired by Islamic states. How are they to debate and make a judgment about the cartoons without seeing them?

They can go to the blogosphere, that's how.

The Internet is now the only place Americans can view the cartoons and, as a bonus, learn that much of the outrage now seething through the Middle East was stoked not by the cartoons in question, but by three bogus photographs circulated by the (peace-loving) Islamic Society of Denmark. A spokesman for the group said they circulated the photos to demonstrate Denmark's Islamophobia.

Except that the photographs weren't published in Denmark or elsewhere on terra firma. One of them, allegedly depicting Muhammad dressed like a pig, is in fact a photo of Frenchman Jacques Barrot as he participated in last August's annual French Pig-Squealing Championships in Trie-sur-Baise. And that's no joke.

The pig photograph, lifted from an MSNBC story, is posted at neanderNews.com, where other blogs (Gateway Pundit and Counter Terrorism Blog) also are credited with reporting the photoscam. The other photos (origins unknown), including one of a man dressed in Arab garb being mounted by a dog, are the sort of images bored college students Photoshop in dorm rooms late at night.

Whether Islamophobia inspired any of these images is a question for documentarians to explore. Meanwhile, fear for our future is an appropriate response to mass insanity. But potentially more dangerous than short-fused fanatics is our own cowardice in declining to treat this madness as anything but inexcusably barbaric.

Instead, we kneel in apology for our own hard-won principles. Newspapers especially deserve contempt for their spineless refusal to deal honestly with this controversy. Instead of publishing the cartoons and explaining why free expression is central to the West's survival, editors with few exceptions have swaddled themselves in the blankie of "sensitivity."

Kudos and curtseys to Philadelphia Inquirer editor Amanda Bennett, who published one of the cartoons along with a story about the controversy. For her trouble, she has been visited by Muslim protesters who promise to return if the paper doesn't apologize. Bennett deserves not just congratulations, but solidarity from other newspapers that have a fresh opportunity to prove their mettle.

Incensed Iranians are preparing to lob a few cartoon bombs of their own with a Holocaust cartoon competition. Fine. All comers are welcome to the free-speech fray. Far better that we wage the war of ideas with words and images than with bombs and bullets.

That's the beauty of free expression, in honor of which - and as an opportunity to teach - American newspapers surely will print the Iranian cartoons. Won't they?

Kathleen Parker is a popular syndicated columnist and director of the School of Written Expression at the Buckley School of Public Speaking and Persuasion in Camden, South Carolina.


http://www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/kathleenparker/2006/02/08/185589.html
Title: Penal Pandering
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on February 16, 2006, 10:23:22 PM
The criminal constituency

By JOHN R. LOTT JR.

February 16, 2006

WASHINGTON -- If you can't win elections, change the rules.
Despite warnings from people such as the chairman of Maryland's State Board of Elections that the new rules are inviting voter fraud, the General Assembly has pushed through regulations weakening safeguards on provisional ballots, absentee ballots and a long early voting period.

Not satisfied, the legislature now wants to make it easier for convicted murderers, rapists, armed robbers and other violent criminals to vote. Overall, 150,000 felons would be eligible.

When asked if the felon voting bill was motivated to defeat Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr.'s re-election bid this year, Del. Jill P. Carter, a Baltimore Democrat, replied, "Of course that's the reason."

The power to deny voting rights to ex-convicts now rests with the states, so standards vary across the country. The 14th Amendment to the Constitution explicitly allows for states to deny felons the right to vote.

Maryland Democrats are not alone in wanting to let felons vote. Last year, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Sen. John Kerry introduced the Count Every Vote Act, which would restore voting rights to felons who had completed their prison terms, parole or probation.

Maryland Democrats are proposing even more liberal rules and would allow any convict who is not imprisoned or waiting to serve a prison sentence to cast a ballot. Similar legislation is being pushed in other states.

Democrats have a good reason to want ex-convicts to vote: Felons overwhelmingly vote for Democrats.

In recent academic work, Jeff Manza and Marcus Britton of Northwestern University and Christopher Uggen of the University of Minnesota estimated that Bill Clinton pulled 86 percent of the felon vote in 1992 and a whopping 93 percent in 1996.

The researchers found that about one-third of felons vote when given the chance. So if all 150,000 eligible Maryland felons are re-enfranchised, about 50,000 will cast ballots, and Democrats will pick up a net gain of 40,000 votes. Mr. Ehrlich still would have won in 2002, but his margin would have been cut by almost two-thirds.

At the national level, the study's results indicate that the felon vote would have given Democrats the White House in 2000 and control of the Senate from 1986 to 2004.

Felons voting for liberals is not just something we see in the United States. The Canadian Liberal Party recently passed legislation letting criminals vote while they are still in prison. Before the most recent election, a Canadian TV reporter said he went "from cell to cell, [where] prisoner after prisoner told [the reporter] they were voting Liberal, with no exceptions."

But why shouldn't felons be able to vote if they have paid their debt to society?

It is hardly a radical notion to penalize felons long after they have left prison or completed parole. Laws deny ex-cons the right to hold office, to retain professional licenses (lawyers, for example, lose their ability to practice) or business licenses, to work for the government, or to serve as an officer in a publicly traded company. In some cases, felons can lose their right to inherit property, to collect pension benefits or even to get a truck-driving license. In fact, in most states, the loss of voting rights does not last as long as other prohibitions.

Post-sentence penalties are placed not only on criminals who have committed felonies, but also on those who have committed misdemeanors. This includes, under federal law, the right to own a gun. It's doubtful that Maryland or national Democrats will be crusading to restore that right any time soon.

My guess is that most felons care more about getting good jobs than they do about the right to vote.

There are important reasons for banning felons, particularly violent ones, from voting. When people harm others, we learn something about them. Do we want someone who has committed multiple rapes helping determine how much money will be spent on social programs that help rape victims? Do we want convicted child molesters or murderers voting to determine what police budgets will be?

Democrats appear to be angling not for the votes of centrists but for the votes of the most dedicated left-wing constituency in America: criminals.

Do most Americans really believe that felons constitute a minority group that deserves such special favors?

John R. Lott Jr. is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. His e-mail is jlott@aei.org.

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bal-op.felons16feb16,0,5189088.story?coll=bal-oped-headlines
Title: Forgotten Franchise
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on February 22, 2006, 09:22:35 AM
James Bovard: Ignorance is the American people?s great enemy
By JAMES BOVARD
Commentary
7 hours, 40 minutes ago

IGNORANCE IS dragging down democracy. Most Americans are increasingly on automatic pilot, paying less attention to each new war, each new power grab, each new Presidential assertion. But citizens need not slavishly follow every public debate in order to tilt the playing field against demagoguery.

The typical voter fails to comprehend even the basics of government. Most Americans do not know the name of their representative in the House, the length of terms of House or Senate members, or what the Bill of Rights purportedly guarantees, according to surveys by the University of Michigan.

A survey by the Polling Company after the 2002 congressional election revealed that less than one-third of Americans knew ?that the Republicans controlled the House of Representatives prior to the election.? Almost two-thirds of Americans cannot name a single Supreme Court justice, according to another Polling Company survey.

An American Bar Association poll last summer found that barely half of respondents recognized the three branches of the federal government, and even fewer knew what ?separation of powers? meant. Yet, that issue goes to the heart of controversies including the recently disclosed wiretapping program and congressional meddling in the Terri Schiavo case.

Power grabs by politicians are rarely accompanied by multiple-choice questions for the benefit of citizens. Instead, when the President is seizing new power, he can deploy his prestige and top advisers with focus-group-tested phrases. The President can address the nation in choreographed settings with hand-picked audiences guaranteed to applaud. Few citizens have the knowledge (or the self-confidence) to resist such tidal waves.

The number of government agencies that can accost, prohibit, tax, impound, impede, detain, subpoena, confiscate, search, indict, fine, audit, interrogate, wiretap, sanction and otherwise harass and subjugate citizens or their property and rights has skyrocketed. But few citizens have made a corresponding buildup of knowledge of their rights and government processes. It takes more than invocations of high school civics lessons to rescue ordinary people in the bureaucratic crosshairs.

With the rise of the Internet, it has become much easier to find politicians? speeches, proposed new laws and media reports and analyses of government policies. Still, people probably spend a hundred times longer online checking out pornography sites than they do tracking down government abuses.

It is unrealistic to expect the typical American to become a devoted reader of the Congressional Record or of Supreme Court decisions ? to say nothing of the footnotes in dissenting opinions. But the political system can be improved even if most citizens don?t immerse themselves in the arcana of government.

The key is not the raw amount of data ingested, but a more enlightened attitude. An ounce of skepticism is worth a shelf of federal registers. The U.S. system of government functioned fairly well in its early decades partly because citizens were wary of politicians offering favors.

The more deference government receives, the more damage politicians can inflict. Government has expanded in recent decades in part because many people forgot the perils of permitting some people to acquire sweeping power over them. Americans should recall why Thomas Jefferson trumpeted the need to ?bind? all rulers ?down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.?

But even with the right attitude, Americans must read more about political developments and pay closer attention ? especially when politicians raise the stakes with saber-rattling for war or propose sweeping new laws. Reading the Bill of Rights takes less time than watching a Super Bowl halftime show. If people don?t know the basic rules of the game, they will be oblivious when the government fouls them.

Even if the majority continues to be apathetic about almost all political issues, the rise of a savvier minority can make a difference. Every 1 percent of the population that understands and opposes unjust policies sharply raises the cost of political abuse. Remembering past political falsehoods and follies can stack the deck in favor of prudence and liberty.

In 1693, William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania, declared, ?Let the people think they govern, and they will be governed.? Penn?s words should make Americans recognize the choice between knowledge and subjugation. People must either better understand government and politicians, or kiss their remaining rights and liberties good-bye.

James Bovard is the author, most recently, of ?Attention Deficit Democracy.?

http://www.unionleader.com/article.aspx?headline=James+Bovard%3a+Ignorance+is+the+American+people?s+great+enemy&articleId=2e4d37fb-0640-4fcf-a992-fddadc3a083b
Title: No Shame, with Gain
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on February 23, 2006, 11:25:33 AM
February 23, 2006
Madness in the Middle East and in the West
By David Warren

On the front of the Arabic index page of the Al-Qassam website, any reader yesterday would have found an animated cartoon. It consists of the Star of David -- the symbol of the Jewish faith -- being obliterated by a mushroom cloud.

Al-Qassam speaks for the ?militant wing? of Hamas, the party that recently won the Palestinian election, by a landslide. The distinction between Hamas and its militant wing is meaningless. Western reporters habitually make this distinction, and stress that the ?non-militant? branches of Hamas run orphanages and distribute welfare. This is like implying that President Bush is not responsible for the Pentagon, because the U.S. government also has a Department of Health and Human Services. It is a brainless distinction, that can only serve to confuse people.

Hamas, like the PLO before it, is reasonably adept at managing the ?useful idiots? in the Western media. It does not take much. If you flip over from their Arabic to their English website, you will find much that is frightening, but couched in a mealy-mouth that is less than candid about the party?s chief purpose. According to its own charter, this is killing Jews. In their defence, I could say of many Western newsmen, that they cannot conceive of an organization so evil, that this would be its principal purpose. They should remember the Holocaust, and wake up.

Hamas is now the duly elected government of ?Palestine?. Because it rejects the late Yasser Arafat?s nominal undertakings, in English only, to recognize Israel?s right to exist, and to condemn terrorist violence, Western governments feel obliged to cut the very generous funding with which the Palestinian Authority has been supported.

Enter the Organization of the Islamic Conference, based in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. The OIC?s members include all 56 of the world?s majority-Muslim states, plus quasi-state Palestine. No other organization of states exists for the purpose of advancing a religion. Most of these states are authoritarian regimes, or absolute monarchies; a few are counted as democracies, with qualifications necessary in every case. The OIC contains a fair selection of the world?s poorest and most desperate countries, but also, six of the world?s 15 largest arms importers (and none of the suppliers). It is rapidly becoming the respectable front for what Salman Rushdie called, "Paranoid Islam, which blames outsiders, ?infidels?, for all the ills of Muslim societies, and whose proposed remedy is the closing of those societies to the rival project of modernity.?

Pakistan has now called an ?emergency meeting? (almost all the OIC?s meetings are such), to deal with the issue of the Danish cartoons. And no sooner called, than many members have put the funding of Hamas on the agenda. Such oil-rich states as Saudi Arabia and Iran already direct money to Palestine, explicitly to encourage violence against Israelis (e.g. bounties to the families of suicide-bombers). And there being no credible opposition to the scheme, we cannot doubt the OIC will officially replace the U.S., the European Union, and Israel, as the financial backers of the Palestinian regime under Hamas. By doing which, they all explicitly condone terrorism.

Some dubious cartoons in a private Danish provincial newspaper -- versus psychopathic graphics on an official website, unambiguously projecting the extermination of the Jews. Or if you want better, listen again to President Ahmadinejad of Iran, member in good standing of the OIC, repeatedly promising to ?wipe Israel off the map?, while his country races to produce nuclear missiles.

On the Danish cartoon front, here is what Prof. Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, the Turk who is the OIC?s current secretary-general, is demanding: ?The OIC member states expect from the European Union to identify Islamophobia as a dangerous phenomenon and to observe and combat it like in the cases of xenophobia and anti-Semitism, by creating suitable observance mechanisms and revising its legislation, in order to prevent the recurrence of the recent unfortunate incidents.? (He makes similar demands of the United Nations.)

In other words, Europe must monitor and censor its media, and introduce criminal punishments, to prevent any affront to Islam ever happening again.

What makes this poignant is that, Javier Solana, the EU?s bureaucrat-in-chief, who has already delivered several obsequious apologies, gratuitously on behalf of all Europe, has personally promised Prof. Ihsanoglu that action will be taken. According to one report, he is considering going to Jeddah to make an act of obeisance before the assembled Muslim foreign ministers. Similar, continuing, cringing apologies are coming from politicians in many Western countries -- and contrived gestures of ?respect for Islam? from Western media.

This beggars the mind. The West is apologizing for what? And to whom?

Were we crazy to start, or has our bedwetting fear of Muslim fanatics deprived us of our judgement?

The more we apologize, the more we appease, the larger the demands will get. Yet we have not one prominent politician in the West, able to stand before the OIC and say, ?How dare you!?

Copyright 2006 Ottawa Citizen

Send To a Friend

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/Commentary/com-2_23_06_DW.html
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 27, 2006, 09:56:39 PM
Jihadi Turns Bulldog
The Taliban's former spokesman is now a Yale student. Anyone see a problem with that?

Monday, February 27, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST

Never has an article made me blink with astonishment as much as when I read in yesterday's New York Times magazine that Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi, former ambassador-at-large for the Taliban, is now studying at Yale on a U.S. student visa. This is taking the obsession that U.S. universities have with promoting diversity a bit too far.

Something is very wrong at our elite universities. Last week Larry Summers resigned as president of Harvard when it became clear he would lose a no-confidence vote held by politically correct faculty members furious at his efforts to allow ROTC on campus, his opposition to a drive to have Harvard divest itself of corporate investments in Israel, and his efforts to make professors work harder. Now Yale is giving a first-class education to an erstwhile high official in one of the most evil regimes of the latter half of the 20th century--the government that harbored the terrorists who attacked America on Sept. 11, 2001.

"In some ways," Mr. Rahmatullah told the New York Times. "I'm the luckiest person in the world. I could have ended up in Guantanamo Bay. Instead I ended up at Yale." One of the courses he has taken is called Terrorism-Past, Present and Future.

Many foreign readers of the Times will no doubt snicker at the revelation that naive Yale administrators scrambled to admit Mr. Rahmatullah. The Times reported that Yale "had another foreigner of Rahmatullah's caliber apply for special-student status." Richard Shaw, Yale's dean of undergraduate admissions, told the Times that "we lost him to Harvard," and "I didn't want that to happen again."





In the spring of 2001, I was one of several writers at The Wall Street Journal who interviewed Mr. Rahmatullah at our offices across the street from the World Trade Center. His official title was second foreign secretary; his mission was to explain the regime's decision to rid the country of two 1,000-year-old towering statues of Buddha carved out of rock 90 miles from the Afghan capital, Kabul. The archeological treasures were considered the greatest remaining examples of third- and fifth-century Greco-Indian art in the world. But Taliban leader Mullah Omar had ordered all statues in the country destroyed, calling them idols of infidels and repugnant to Islam.
Even Muslim nations like Pakistan denounced the move. Mr. Rahmatullah, who at the time claimed to be 24 but now says he was lying about his age and was actually two years younger, cut a curious figure in our office. He wore a traditional Afghan turban and white baggy pants and sported a full beard. His English, while sometimes elliptical, was smooth and colloquial. He made himself very clear when he said the West had no business worrying about the statues, because it had cut off trade and foreign aid to the Taliban. "When the world destroys the future of our children with economic sanctions, they have no right to worry about our past," he told us, according to my notes from the meeting.

He smiled as he informed us that the statues had been blown up with explosive charges only after people living nearby had been removed. He had no comment on reports that Mullah Omar had ordered 100 cows be sacrificed as atonement for the Taliban government's failure to destroy the Buddhas earlier.

As for Osama bin Laden, Mr. Rahmatullah called the Saudi fugitive a "guest" of his government and said it hadn't been proved that bin Laden was linked to any terrorist acts, despite his indictment in the U.S. for planning the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. He said that if the embassy bombings were terrorist acts, then so was the Clinton administration's firing cruise missiles into his country in an attempt to kill bin Laden. "You killed 19 innocent people," he told us.

After the meeting I walked him out. I vividly recall our stopping at a window as he stared up at the World Trade Center. We stood there for a minute chatting, but I don't recall what he said. He then left. I next thought about him a few months later, on Sept. 11, as I stood outside our office building covered in dust and debris staring at the remains of the towers that had just collapsed. I occasionally wondered what had happened to Mr. Rahmatullah. I assumed he either had died in the collapse of the Taliban regime, had been jailed, or was living quietly in the new, democratic Afghanistan.

From newspaper clips I knew that his visit to the Journal's offices was part of a PR tour. He visited other newspapers and spoke at universities, and the State Department had granted him a meeting with midlevel officials. None of the meetings went particularly well. At the University of Southern California, Mr. Rahmatullah expressed irritation with a question about statues that at that point hadn't yet been blown up. "You know, really, I am asked so much about these statues that I have a headache now," he moaned. "If I go back to Afghanistan, I will blow them."

Carina Chocano, a writer for Salon.com who attended several of his speeches in the U.S., noted the hostility of many of his audiences. "A lesser publicist might have melted down," she wrote. "But the cool, unruffled and media-smart Hashemi instead spun his story into a contemporary parable of ironic iconoclasm," peppering his lectures with "statue jokes."

But sometimes his humor really backfired. At a speech for the Atlantic Council, Mr. Rahmatullah was confronted by a woman in the audience who lifted the burkha she was wearing and chastised him for the Taliban's infamous treatment of women. "You have imprisoned the women--it's a horror, let me tell you," she cried. Mr. Rahmatullah responded with a sneer: "I'm really sorry to your husband. He might have a very difficult time with you."

A videotape of his cutting remark became part of Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11," and infuriated the likes of Mavis Leno, wife of "Tonight Show" host Jay Leno. Mrs. Leno helped found the Feminist Majority's Campaign to Stop Gender Apartheid in Afghanistan and devoted countless hours to focusing public attention on the plight of Afghanistan's women and girls. "I will never, ever abandon these women," she often said before the Taliban's overthrow. Here's hoping she has saved some of her outrage for Yale's decision to welcome Mr. Rahmatullah with open arms.

In his interview with the New York Times, Mr. Rahmatullah, said that if he had to do it all over, he would have been less "antagonistic" in his remarks during his U.S. road tour. "I regret the way I spoke sometimes. Now I would try to be softer. A little bit." Just a little?

Today, when he is asked if Afghanistan would be better off if the Taliban were still in charge, Mr. Rahmatullah, has a mixed answer: "Economically, no. In terms of security, yes. In terms of general happiness, no. In the long-term interests of the country? I don't think so. I think the radicals were taking over and doing crazy stuff. I regret when people think of the Taliban and then think of me--that feeling people have after they know I was affiliated with them is painful to me." Note that the government official who represented the Taliban abroad now claims to have been only "affiliated" with them.

Even though he evinces only semiregret for his actions in service to the Taliban, there is evidence that he has become quite a charmer. After the fall of the Taliban, he resumed a friendship he had developed with Mike Hoover, a CBS News cameraman who, according to a 2001 Associated Press story, had visited Afghanistan three times as a guest of the Taliban. Mr. Hoover inspired Mr. Rahmatullah to think about going to the U.S. to finish his studies. "I thought he could do a lot as a student/teacher," said Mr. Hoover. He persuaded Bob Schuster, an attorney friend of his from Wyoming who had gone to Yale, to help out. As the Times reported, "Schuster called the provost's office to ask how an ex-Taliban envoy with a fourth-grade education and a high-school equivalency degree might go about applying to one of the world's top universities."

Intrigued by Mr. Rahmatullah, Dean Shaw arranged for his admission into a nondegree program for special students. He apparently has done well, so far pulling down a 3.33 grade-point average.





There is something to be said for the instinct to reach out to one's former enemies. America's postwar reconciliation with the Japanese and Germans has paid great dividends. But there are limits.
During a trip to Germany I once ran into a relative of Hans Fritsche, the top deputy to Josef Goebbels, whom the Guardian, a British newspaper, once described as "the Nazi Propaganda Minister's leading radio spokesman [whose] commentaries were among the main items of German home and foreign broadcasting." After the war he was tried as a war criminal at Nuremberg, but because he had only given hate-filled speeches, he was acquitted of all charges in 1946. In the early 1950s, he applied for a visa to visit the U.S. and explain his regret at having served an evil regime. He was turned down, to the everlasting regret of the relative with whom I spoke. She noted that Albert Speer, Hitler's former architect, was also turned down for a U.S. visa even after he had completed a 20-year prison sentence and had written a best-selling book detailing Hitler's madness.

I don't believe Mr. Rahmatullah had direct knowledge of the 9/11 plot, and I don't think he has ever killed anyone. I can appreciate that he is trying to rebuild his life. But he willingly and cheerfully served an evil regime in a manner that would have made Goebbels proud. That he was 22 at the time is little of an excuse. There are many poor, bright students--American and foreign alike--who would jump at the opportunity to attend Yale. Why should Mr. Rahmatullah go to the line ahead of all of them? That's a question Yale alumni should ask when their alma mater comes looking for contributions.

President Bush, who already has a well-known disdain for Yale elitism from his student days there, may also have some questions. In the wake of his being blindsided by his own administration over the Dubai port deal, he should be interested in finding out exactly who at the State Department approved Mr. Rahmatullah's application for a student visa.
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 03, 2006, 07:33:50 AM
Syriana feeds our enemies hatred



Mar 3, 2006
by Charles Krauthammer ( bio | archive | contact )


WASHINGTON -- Nothing tells you more about Hollywood than what it chooses to honor. Nominated for best foreign film is "Paradise Now,'' a sympathetic portrayal of two suicide bombers. Nominated for best picture is "Munich,'' a sympathetic portrayal of yesterday's fashion in barbarism: homicide terrorism.

But until you see "Syriana,'' nominated for best screenplay (and George Clooney, for best supporting actor) you have no idea how self-flagellation and self-loathing pass for complexity and moral seriousness in Hollywood.
"Syriana's'' script has, of course, the classic liberal tropes such as this stage direction: "The Deputy National Security Advisor, MARILYN RICHARDS, 40's, sculpted hair, with the soul of a seventy year-old white, Republican male, is in charge'' (Page 21). Or this piece of over-the-top, Gordon Gekko Republican-speak, placed in the mouth of a Texas oilman: "Corruption is our protection. Corruption is what keeps us safe and warm. ... Corruption ... is how we win'' (Page 93).
But that's run-of-the-mill Hollywood. The true distinction of "Syriana's'' script is the near-incomprehensible plot -- a muddled mix of story lines about a corrupt Kazakhstan oil deal, a succession struggle in an oil-rich Arab kingdom and a giant Texas oil company that pulls the strings at the CIA and, naturally, everywhere else -- amid which, only two things are absolutely clear and coherent: the movie's one political hero and one pure soul.

The political hero is the Arab prince who wants to end corruption, inequality and oppression in his country. As he tells his tribal elders, he intends to modernize his country by bringing the rule of law, market efficiency, women's rights and democracy.
What do you think happens to him? He, his beautiful wife and beautiful children are murdered, incinerated, by a remote-controlled missile, fired from CIA headquarters in Langley, no less -- at the very moment that (this passes for subtle cross-cutting film editing) his evil younger brother, the corrupt rival to the throne and puppet of the oil company, is being hailed at a suitably garish ``oilman of the year'' celebration populated by fat and ugly Americans.
What is grotesque about this moment of plot clarity is that the overwhelmingly obvious critique of actual U.S. policy in the real Middle East today is its excess of Wilsonian idealism in trying to find and promote -- against a tide of tyranny, intolerance and fanaticism -- local leaders like the Good Prince. Who in the greater Middle East is closest to "Syriana's'' modernizing, democratizing paragon? Without a doubt, President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, a man of exemplary -- and quite nonfictional -- personal integrity, physical courage and democratic temperament. Hundreds of brave American (and allied NATO) soldiers have died protecting him and the democratic system they established to allow him to govern. On the very night the Oscars will be honoring "Syriana,'' American soldiers will be fighting, some perhaps dying, in defense of precisely the kind of tolerant, modernizing Muslim leader that "Syriana'' shows America slaughtering.
It gets worse. The most pernicious element in the movie is the character who is at the moral heart of the film: the physically beautiful, modest, caring, generous Pakistani who becomes a beautiful, modest, caring, generous ... suicide bomber. In his final act, the Pure One, dressed in the purest white robes, takes his explosives-laden little motorboat head first into his target. It is a replay of the real-life boat that plunged into the USS Cole in 2000, killing 17 American sailors, except that in ``Syriana's'' version, the target is another symbol of American imperialism in the Persian Gulf -- a newly opened liquefied natural gas terminal.
The explosion, which would have the force of a nuclear bomb, constitutes the moral high point of the movie, the moment of climactic cleansing, as the Pure One clad in white merges with the great white mass of the huge terminal wall, at which point the screen goes pure white. And reverently silent.
In my naivete, I used to think that Hollywood had achieved its nadir with Oliver Stone's "JFK,'' a film that taught a generation of Americans that President Kennedy was assassinated by the CIA and the FBI in collaboration with Lyndon Johnson. But at least it was for domestic consumption, an internal affair of only marginal interest to other countries. "Syriana,'' however, is meant for export, carrying the most vicious and pernicious mendacities about America to a receptive world.
Most liberalism is angst- and guilt-ridden, seeing moral equivalence everywhere. "Syriana'' is of a different species entirely -- a pathological variety that burns with the certainty of its malign anti-Americanism. Osama bin Laden could not have scripted this film with more conviction.

Charles Krauthammer is a 1987 Pulitzer Prize winner, 1984 National Magazine Award winner, and a columnist for The Washington Post since 1985.
__________________
Title: Cheering Crowds, no Civil Strife
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on March 05, 2006, 10:05:37 AM
Bitch slapping the New York Times and the MSM in general. . . .

DUDE, WHERE'S MY CIVIL WAR?
By RALPH PETERS - In Iraq

BAGHDAD

I'M trying. I've been trying all week. The other day, I drove another 30 miles or so on the streets and alleys of Baghdad. I'm looking for the civil war that The New York Times declared. And I just can't find it.

Maybe actually being on the ground in Iraq prevents me from seeing it. Perhaps the view's clearer from Manhattan. It could be that my background as an intelligence officer didn't give me the right skills.

And riding around with the U.S. Army, looking at things first-hand, is certainly a technique to which The New York Times wouldn't stoop in such an hour of crisis.

Let me tell you what I saw anyway. Rolling with the "instant Infantry" gunners of the 1st Platoon of Bravo Battery, 4-320 Field Artillery, I saw children and teenagers in a Shia slum jumping up and down and cheering our troops as they drove by. Cheering our troops.

All day - and it was a long day - we drove through Shia and Sunni neighborhoods. Everywhere, the reception was warm. No violence. None.

And no hostility toward our troops. Iraqis went out of their way to tell us we were welcome.

Instead of a civil war, something very different happened because of the bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samarra. The fanatic attempt to stir up Sunni-vs.-Shia strife, and the subsequent spate of violent attacks, caused popular support for the U.S. presence to spike upward.

Think Abu Musab al-Zarqawi intended that?

In place of the civil war that elements in our media declared, I saw full streets, open shops, traffic jams, donkey carts, Muslim holiday flags - and children everywhere, waving as our Humvees passed. Even the clouds of dust we stirred up didn't deter them. And the presence of children in the streets is the best possible indicator of a low threat level.

Southeast Baghdad, at least, was happy to see our troops.

And we didn't just drive past them. First Lt. Clenn Frost, the platoon leader, took every opportunity to dismount and mingle with the people. Women brought their children out of their compound gates to say hello. A local sheik spontaneously invited us into his garden for colas and sesame biscuits.

It wasn't the Age of Aquarius. The people had serious concerns. And security was No. 1. They wanted the Americans to crack down harder on the foreign terrorists and to disarm the local militias. Iraqis don't like and don't support the militias, Shia or Sunni, which are nothing more than armed gangs.

Help's on the way, if slowly. The Iraqi Army has confounded its Western critics, performing extremely well last week. And the people trust their new army to an encouraging degree. The Iraqi police aren't all the way there yet, and the population doesn't yet have much confidence in them. But all of this takes time.

And even the police are making progress. We took a team of them with us so they could train beside our troops. We visited a Public Order Battalion - a gendarmerie outfit - that reeked of sloth and carelessness. But the regular Iraqi Police outfit down the road proved surprisingly enthusiastic and professional. It's just an uneven, difficult, frustrating process.

So what did I learn from a day in the dust and muck of Baghdad's less-desirable boroughs? As the long winter twilight faded into haze and the fires of the busy shawarma stands blazed in the fresh night, I felt that Iraq was headed, however awkwardly, in the right direction.

The country may still see a civil war one day. But not just yet, thanks. Violence continues. A roadside bomb was found in the next sector to the west. There will be more deaths, including some of our own troops. But Baghdad's vibrant life has not been killed. And the people of Iraq just might surprise us all.

So why were we told that Iraq was irreversibly in the throes of civil war when it wasn't remotely true? I think the answers are straightforward. First, of course, some parties in the West are anxious to believe the worst about Iraq. They've staked their reputations on Iraq's failure.

But there's no way we can let irresponsible journalists off the hook - or their parent organizations. Many journalists are, indeed, brave and conscientious; yet some in Baghdad - working for "prestigious" publications - aren't out on the city streets the way they pretend to be.

They're safe in their enclaves, protected by hired guns, complaining that it's too dangerous out on the streets. They're only in Baghdad for the byline, and they might as well let their Iraqi employees phone it in to the States. Whenever you see a column filed from Baghdad by a semi-celeb journalist with a "contribution" by a local Iraqi, it means this: The Iraqi went out and got the story, while the journalist stayed in his or her room.

And the Iraqi stringers have cracked the code: The Americans don't pay for good news. So they exaggerate the bad.

And some of them have agendas of their own.

A few days ago, a wild claim that the Baghdad morgue held 1,300 bodies was treated as Gospel truth. Yet Iraqis exaggerate madly and often have partisan interests. Did any Western reporter go to that morgue and count the bodies - a rough count would have done it - before telling the world the news?

I doubt it.

If reporters really care, it's easy to get out on the streets of Baghdad. The 506th Infantry Regiment - and other great military units - will take journalists on their patrols virtually anywhere in the city. Our troops are great to work with. (Of course, there's the danger of becoming infected with patriot- ism . . .)

I'm just afraid that some of our journalists don't want to know the truth anymore.

For me, though, memories of Baghdad will be the cannoneers of the 1st Platoon walking the dusty, reeking alleys of Baghdad. I'll recall 1st Lt. Frost conducting diplomacy with the locals and leading his men through a date-palm grove in a search for insurgent mortar sites.

I'll remember that lieutenant investigating the murder of a Sunni mullah during last week's disturbances, cracking down on black-marketers, checking up on sewer construction, reassuring citizens - and generally doing the job of a lieutenant-colonel in peacetime.

Oh, and I'll remember those "radical Shias" cheering our patrol as we passed by.

Ralph Peters is reporting from Forward Operating Base Loyalty, where he's been riding with the 506th Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division.


http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/opedcolumnists/64677.htm
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 08, 2006, 07:44:40 AM
A Call to the Muslims of the World
from a Group of Freethinkers and
Humanists of Muslim Origin


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

www.annaqed.com
Dear Friends,

The tragic incidents of September 11 have shocked the world. It is unthinkable that anyone could be so full of hate as to commit such heinous acts and kill so many innocent people. We people of Muslim origin are as much shaken as the rest of the world and yet we find ourselves looked upon with suspicion and distrust by our neighbours and fellow citizens. We want to cry out and tell the world that we are not terrorists, and that those who perpetrate such despicable acts are murderers and not part of us. But, in reality, because of our Muslim origins we just cannot erase the "stigma of Islamic Terrorism" from our identity!

What most Muslims will say:

"Islam would never support the killing of innocent people. Allah of the Holy Qur'an never advocated killings. This is all the work of a few misguided individuals at the fringes of society. The real Islam is sanctified from violence. We denounce all violence. Islam means peace. Islam means tolerance."

What knowledgeable Muslims should say:

That is what most Muslims think, but is it true? Does Islam really preach peace, tolerance and non-violence? The Muslims who perpetrate these crimes think differently. They believe that what they do is Jihad (holy war). They say that killing unbelievers is mandatory for every Muslim. They do not kill because they wish to break the laws of Islam but because they think this is what true Muslims should do. Those who blow-up their own bodies to kill more innocent people do so because they think they will be rewarded in Paradise. They hope to be blessed by Allah, eat celestial food, drink pure wine and enjoy the company of divine consorts. Are they completely misguided? Where did they get this distorted idea? How did they come to believe that killing innocent people pleases God? Or is it that we are misguided? Does really Islam preach violence? Does it call upon its believers to kill non-believers? We denounce those who commit acts of violence and call them extremists. But are they really extremists or are they following what the holy book, the Qur'an tells them to do? What does the Qur'an teach? Have we read the Qur'an? Do we know what kind of teachings are there? Let us go through some of them and take a closer look at what Allah says.

What the Qur'an Teaches Us:

We have used the most widely available English text of the Qur'an and readers are welcome to verify our quotes from the holy book. Please have an open mind and read through these verses again and again. The following quotes are taken from the most trusted Yusufali's translation of the Qur'an.

The Qur'an tells us: "not to make friendship with Jews and Christians" (5:51), "kill the disbelievers wherever we find them" (2:191), "murder them and treat them harshly" (9:123), "fight and slay the Pagans, seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem" (9:5). The Qur'an demands that we fight the unbelievers, and promises "If there are twenty amongst you, you will vanquish two hundred: if a hundred, you will vanquish a thousand of them" (8:65).

Allah and his messenger want us to fight the Christians and the Jews "until they pay the Jizya [a penalty tax for the non-Muslims living under Islamic rules] with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued" (9:29). Allah and his messenger announce that it is acceptable to go back on our promises (treaties) and obligations with Pagans and make war on them whenever we find ourselves strong enough to do so (9:3). Our God tells us to "fight the unbelievers" and "He will punish them by our hands, cover them with shame and help us (to victory) over them" (9:14).

The Qur'an takes away the freedom of belief from all humanity and relegates those who disbelieve in Islam to hell (5:10), calls them najis (filthy, untouchable, impure) (9:28), and orders its followers to fight the unbelievers until no other religion except Islam is left (2:193). It says that the "non-believers will go to hell and will drink boiling water" (14:17). It asks the Muslims to "slay or crucify or cut the hands and feet of the unbelievers, that they be expelled from the land with disgrace and that they shall have a great punishment in world hereafter" (5:34). And tells us that "for them (the unbelievers) garments of fire shall be cut and there shall be poured over their heads boiling water whereby whatever is in their bowels and skin shall be dissolved and they will be punished with hooked iron rods" (22:19-22) and that they not only will have "disgrace in this life, but on the Day of Judgment He shall make them taste the Penalty of burning (Fire)" (22:9). The Qur'an says that "those who invoke a god other than Allah not only should meet punishment in this world but the Penalty on the Day of Judgment will be doubled to them, and they will dwell therein in ignominy" (25:68). For those who "believe not in Allah and His Messenger, He has prepared, for those who reject Allah, a Blazing Fire!" (48:13). Although we are asked to be compassionate amongst each other, we have to be "harsh with unbelievers", our Christian, Jewish and Atheist neighbours and colleagues (48:29). As for him who does not believe in Islam, the Prophet announces with a "stern command": "Seize ye him, and bind ye him, And burn ye him in the Blazing Fire. Further, make him march in a chain, whereof the length is seventy cubits! This was he that would not believe in Allah Most High. And would not encourage the feeding of the indigent! So no friend hath he here this Day. Nor hath he any food except the corruption from the washing of wounds, Which none do eat but those in sin." (69:30-37) The Qur'an prohibits a Muslim from befriending a non-believer even if that non-believer is the father or the brother of that Muslim (9:23), (3:28). Our holy book asks us to be disobedient towards the disbelievers and their governments and strive against the unbelievers with great endeavour" (25:52) and be stern with them because they belong to Hell (66:9). The holy Prophet prescribes fighting for us and tells us that "it is good for us even if we dislike it" (2:216). Then he advises us to "strike off the heads of the disbelievers"; and after making a "wide slaughter among them, carefully tie up the remaining captives" (47:4). Our God has promised to "instill terror into the hearts of the unbelievers" and has ordered us to "smite above their necks and smite all their finger-tips off them" (8:12). He also assures us that when we kill in his name "it is not us who slay them but Allah, in order that He might test the Believers by a gracious trial from Himself" (8:17). He orders us "to strike terror into the hearts of the enemies" (8:60). He has made the Jihad mandatory and warns us that "Unless we go forth, (for Jihad) He will punish us with a grievous penalty, and put others in our place" (9:39). Allah speaks to our Holy Prophet and says "O Prophet! strive hard against the unbelievers and the hypocrites, and be stern against them. Their abode is Hell - an evil refuge indeed" (9:73).

He promises us that in the fight for His cause whether we slay or are slain we return to the garden of Paradise (9:111). In Paradise he will "wed us with Houris (celestial virgins) pure beautiful ones" (56:54), and unite us with large-eyed beautiful ones while we recline on our thrones set in lines (56:20). There we are promised to eat and drink pleasantly for what we did (56:19). He also promises "boys like hidden pearls" (56:24) and "youth never altering in age like scattered pearls" (for those who have paedophiliac inclinations) (76:19). As you see, Allah has promised all sorts or rewards, gluttony and unlimited sex to Muslim men who kill unbelievers in his name. We will be admitted to Paradise where we shall find "goodly things, beautiful ones, pure ones confined to the pavilions that man has not touched them before nor jinni" (56:67-71). In the West we enjoy freedom of belief but we are not supposed to give such freedom to anyone else because it is written "If anyone desires a religion other than Islam (submission to Allah), never will it be accepted of him; and in the Hereafter He will be in the ranks of those who have lost (All spiritual good) (3:85). And He orders us to fight them on until there is no more tumult and faith in Allah is practiced everywhere (8:39).

As for women the book of Allah says that they are inferior to men and their husbands have the right to scourge them if they are found disobedient (4:34). It advises to "take a green branch and beat your wife", because a green branch is more flexible and hurts more. (38:44). It teaches that women will go to hell if they are disobedient to their husbands (66:10). It maintains that men have an advantage over the women (2:228). It not only denies the women's equal right to their inheritance (4:11-12), it also regards them as imbeciles and decrees that their witness is not admissible in the courts of law (2:282). This means that a woman who is raped cannot accuse her rapist unless she can produce a male witness. Our Holy Prophet allows us to marry up to four wives and he licensed us to sleep with our slave maids and as many 'captive' women as we may have (4:3) even if those women are already married. He himself did just that. This is why anytime a Muslim army subdues another nation, they call them kafir and allow themselves to rape their women. Pakistani soldiers allegedly raped up to 250,000 Bengali women in 1971 after they massacred 3,000,000 unarmed civilians when their religious leader decreed that Bangladeshis are un-Islamic. This is why the prison guards in Islamic regime of Iran rape the women that in their opinion are apostates prior to killing them, as they believe a virgin will not go to Hell.

Dear fellow Muslims:

Is this the Islam you believe in? Is this your Most Merciful, Most Compassionate Allah whom you worship daily? Could Allah incite you to kill other peoples? Please understand that there is no terrorist gene - but there could be a terrorist mindset. That mindset finds its most fertile ground in the tenets of Islam. Denying it, and presenting Islam to the lay public as a religion of peace similar to Buddhism, is to suppress the truth. The history of Islam between the 7th and 14th centuries is riddled with violence, fratricide and wars of aggression, starting right from the death of the Prophet and during the so-called 'pure' or orthodox caliphate. And Muhammad himself hoisted the standard of killing, looting, massacres and bloodshed. How can we deny the entire history? The behaviour of our Holy Prophet as recorded in authentic Islamic sources is quite questionable from a modern viewpoint. The Prophet was a charismatic man but he had few virtues. Imitating him in all aspects of life (following the Sunnah) is both impossible and dangerous in the 21st century. Why are we so helplessly in denial over this simple issue?

When the Prophet was in Mecca and he was still not powerful enough he called for tolerance. He said "To you be your religion, and to me my religion" (109:6). This famous quote is often misused to prove that the general principle of Qur'an is tolerance. He advised his follower to speak good to their enemies (2: 83), exhorted them to be patient (20:103) and said that "there is no compulsion in religion" (2:256). But that all changed drastically when he came to power. Then killing and slaying unbelievers with harshness and without mercy was justified in innumerable verses. The verses quoted to prove Islam's tolerance ignore many other verses that bear no trace of tolerance or forgiveness. Where is tolerance in this well-known verse "Alarzu Lillah, Walhukmu Lillah." (The Earth belongs to Allah and thus only Allah's rule should prevail all over the earth.).

Is it normal that a book revealed by God should have so many serious contradictions? The Prophet himself set the example of unleashing violence by invading the Jewish settlements, breaking treaties he had signed with them and banishing some of them after confiscating their belongings, massacring others and taking their wives and children as slaves. He inspected the youngsters and massacred all those who had pubic hair along with the men. Those who were younger he kept as slaves. He distributed the women captured in his raids among his soldiers keeping the prettiest for himself (33:50). He made sexual advances on Safiyah, a Jewish girl on the same day he captured her town Kheibar and killed her father, her husband and many of her relatives. Reyhana was another Jewish girl of Bani Quriza whom he used as a sex slave after killing all her male relatives. In the last ten years of his life he accumulated two scores of wives, concubines and sex slaves including the 9 year old Ayesha. These are not stories but records from authentic Islamic history and the Hadiths. It can be argued that this kind of behaviour was not unknown or unusual for the conquerors and leaders of the mediaeval world but these are not the activities befitting of a peaceful saint and certainly not someone who claimed to be the Mercy of God for all creation. There were known assassinations of adversaries during the Prophet's time, which he had knowledge of and had supported. Among them there was a 120 year old man, Abu 'Afak whose only crime was to compose a lyric satirical of the Prophet. (by Ibn Sa'd Kitab al Tabaqat al Kabir, Volume 2, page 32) Then when a poetess, a mother of 5 small children 'Asma' Bint Marwan wrote a poetry cursing the Arabs for letting Muhammad assassinate an old man, our Holy Prophet ordered her to be assassinated too in the middle of the night while her youngest child was suckling from her breast. (Sirat Rasul Allah (A. Guillaume's translation "The Life of Muhammad") page 675, 676).

The Prophet did develop a 'Robin Hood' image that justified raiding merchant caravans attacking cities and towns, killing people and looting their belongings in the name of social justice. Usama Bin Laden is also trying to create the same image. But Robin Hood didn't claim to be a prophet or a pacifist nor did he care for apologist arguments. He did not massacre innocent people indiscriminately nor did he profit by reducing free people to slaves and then trading them.

With the known and documented violent legacy of Islam, how can we suddenly rediscover it as a religion of peace in the free world in the 21st century? Isn't this the perpetuation of a lie by a few ambitious leaders in order to gain political control of the huge and ignorant Muslim population? They are creating a polished version of Islam by completely ignoring history. They are propagating the same old dogma for simple believing people in a crisp new modern package. Their aim: to gain political power in today's high-tension world. They want to use the confrontational power of the original Islam to catalyse new conflicts and control new circles of power.

Dear conscientious Muslims, please question yourselves. Isn't this compulsive following of a man who lived 1400 years ago leading us to doom in a changing world? Do the followers of any other religion follow one man in such an all-encompassing way? Who are we deceiving, them or ourselves? Dear brothers and sisters, see how our Umma (people) has sunk into poverty and how it lags behind the rest of the world. Isn't it because we are following a religion that is outdated and impractical? In this crucial moment of history, when a great catastrophe has befallen us and a much bigger one is lying ahead, should not we wake up from our 1400 years of slumber and see where things have gone wrong?

Hatred has filled the air and the world is bracing itself for its doomsday. Should we not ask ourselves whether we have contributed, wittingly or unwittingly, to this tragedy and whether we can stop the great disaster from happening?

Unfortunately the answer to the first question is yes. Yes we have contributed to the rise of fundamentalism by merely claiming Islam is a religion of peace, by simply being a Muslim and by saying our shahada (testimony that Allah is the only God and Muhammad is his messenger). By our shahada we have recognized Muhammad as a true messenger of God and his book as the words of God. But as you saw above those words are anything but from God. They call for killing, they are prescriptions for hate and they foment intolerance. And when the ignorant among us read those hate-laden verses, they act on them and the result is the infamous September 11, human bombs in Israel, massacres in East Timor and Bangladesh, kidnappings and killings in the Philippines, slavery in the Sudan, honour killings in Pakistan and Jordan, torture in Iran, stoning and maiming in Afghanistan and Iran, violence in Algeria, terrorism in Palestine and misery and death in every Islamic country. We are responsible because we endorse Islam and hail it as a religion of God. And we are as guilty as those who put into practice what the Qur'an preaches - and ironically we are the main victims too. If we are not terrorists, if we love peace, if we cried with the rest of the word for what happened in New York, then why are we supporting the Qur'an that preaches killing, that advocates holy war, that calls for the murder of non-Muslims? It is not the extremists who have misunderstood Islam. They do literally what the Qur'an asks them to do. It is we who misunderstand Islam. We are the ones who are confused. We are the ones who wrongly assume that Islam is the religion of peace. Islam is not a religion of peace. In its so-called "pure" form it can very well be interpreted as a doctrine of hate. Terrorists are doing just that and we the intellectual apologists of Islam are justifying it. We can stop this madness. Yes, we can avert the disaster that is hovering over our heads. Yes, we can denounce the doctrines that promote hate. Yes, we can embrace the rest of humanity with love. Yes, we can become part of a united world, members of one human family, flowers of one garden. We can dump the claim of infallibility of our Book, and the questionable legacy of our Prophet.

Dear friends, there is no time to waste. Let us put an end to this lie. Let us not fool ourselves. Islam is not a religion of peace, of tolerance, of equality or of unity of humankind. Let us read the Qur'an. Let us face the truth even if it is painful. As long as we keep this lie alive, as long as we hide our head in the sands of Arabia we are feeding terrorism. As long as you and I keep calling Qur'an the unchangeable book of God, we cannot blame those who follow the teachings therein. As long as we pay our Khums and Zakat our money goes to promote Islamic expansionism and that means terrorism, Jihad and war. Islam divides the world in two. Darul Harb (land of war) and Darul Islam (land of Islam). Darul Harb is the land of the infidels, Muslims are required to infiltrate those lands, proselytize and procreate until their numbers increase and then start the war and fight and kill the people and impose the religion of Islam on them and convert that land into Darul Islam. In all fairness we denounce this betrayal. This is abuse of the trust. How can we make war in the countries that have sheltered us? How can we kill those who have befriended us? Yet willingly or unwillingly we have become pawns in this Islamic Imperialism. Let us see what great Islamic scholars have had to say in this respect.

Dr. M. Khan the translator of Sahih Bukhari and the Qur'an into English wrote: "Allah revealed in Sura Bara'at (Repentance, IX) the order to discard (all) obligations (covenants, etc), and commanded the Muslims to fight against all the Pagans as well as against the people of the Scriptures (Jews and Christians) if they do not embrace Islam, till they pay the Jizia (a tax levied on the Jews and Christians) with willing submission and feel themselves subdued (as it is revealed in 9:29). So the Muslims were not permitted to abandon "the fighting" against them (Pagans, Jews and Christians) and to reconcile with them and to suspend hostilities against them for an unlimited period while they are strong and have the ability to fight against them. So at first "the fighting" was forbidden, then it was permitted, and after that it was made obligatory" [Introduction to English translation of Sahih Bukhari, p.xxiv.]

Dr. Sobhy as-Saleh, a contemporary Islamic academician quoted Imam Suyuti the author of Itqan Fi 'Ulum al- Qur'an who wrote: "The command to fight the infidels was delayed until the Muslims become strong, but when they were weak they were commanded to endure and be patient". [ Sobhy as_Saleh, Mabaheth Fi 'Ulum al- Qur'an, Dar al-'Ilm Lel-Malayeen, Beirut, 1983, p. 269.]

Dr. Sobhy, in a footnote, commends the opinion of a scholar named Zarkashi who said: "Allah the most high and wise revealed to Mohammad in his weak condition what suited the situation, because of his mercy to him and his followers. For if He gave them the command to fight while they were weak it would have been embarrassing and most difficult, but when the most high made Islam victorious He commanded him with what suited the situation, that is asking the people of the Book to become Muslims or to pay the levied tax, and the infidels to become Muslims or face death. These two options, to fight or to have peace return according to the strength or the weakness of the Muslims." [ibid p. 270]

Other Islamic scholars (Ibn Hazm al-Andalusi, Ga'far ar-Razi, Rabi' Ibn 'Ons, 'Abil-'Aliyah, Abd ar-Rahman Ibn Zayd Ibn 'Aslam, etc.) agree that the verse "Slay the idolaters wherever you find them" (9:5) cancelled those few earlier verses that called for tolerance in the Qur'an and were revealed when Islam was weak. Can you still say that Islam is the religion of peace?

We propose a solution.

We know too well that it is not easy to denounce our faith because it means denouncing a part of ourselves. We are a group of freethinkers and humanists with Islamic roots. Discovering the truth and leaving the religion of our fathers and forefathers was a painful experience. But after learning what Islam stands for we had no choice but to leave it. After becoming familiar with the Qur'an the choice became clear: It is either Islam or humanity. If Islam thrives, then humanity will die. We decided to side with humanity. Culturally we are still Muslims but we no longer believe in Islam as the true religion of God. We are humanists. We love humanity. We work for the unity of humankind. We work for equality between men and women. We strive for the secularization of Islamic countries, for democracy and freedom of thought, belief and expression. We decided to live no longer in self-deception but to embrace humanity, and to enter into the new millennium hand in hand with people of other cultures and beliefs in amity and in peace.

We denounce the violence that is eulogized in the Qur'an as holy war (Jihad). We condemn killing in the name of God. We believe in the sanctity of human life, not in the inviolability of beliefs and religions. We invite you to join us and the rest of humanity and become part of the family of humankind - in love, camaraderie and peace.

End

www.annaqed.com
Title: Context and Second Guessing Swill
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on March 24, 2006, 11:57:00 AM
Once again VDH kicks vicious booty. . . .

March 24, 2006, 7:26 a.m.
Hard Pounding
Who will keep his nerve?
Victor Davis Hanson


If I could sum up the new orthodoxy about Iraq, it might run something like the following: ?I supported the overthrow of the odious Saddam Hussein. But then the poor postwar planning, the unanticipated sectarian strife and insurrection, the mounting American losses, the failure to find weapons of mass destruction ? all that and more lost my support. Iraq may or may not work out, but I can see now it clearly wasn?t worth the American effort.?

Aside from the old rehash over disbanding the Iraqi army or tardiness in forming a government, three observations can be made about this ?readjustment? in belief. First, the nature of the lapses after March 2003 is still the subject of legitimate debate; second, our mistakes are no more severe than in most prior wars; and third, they are not fatal to our cause.

Consider the most frequently alleged errors: the need for more troops; the need to have restored immediate order; and the need to have had up-armored vehicles and some tactical counterplan to improvised explosive devices.

In none of these cases, was the manner of the solution all that clear-cut ? especially since on the first day of the war the United States was trying to avoid targeting civilians, avoiding infrastructure as much as possible, and waging a supposed war of liberation rather than one of punitive annihilation.

Had we brought in another 200,000 troops to secure Iraq, the vast increases in the size and cost of American support might not have been commensurate within an increased ability to put down the insurrection, which from the beginning was decentralized and deliberately designed to play off larger concentrations of conventional patrolling Americans ? the more targets the better.

The insurrection broke out not so much because we had 200,000 rather than 400,000 troops in country; but rather because a three-week strike that decapitated the Baathist elite, despite its showy ?shock and awe? pyrotechnics, was never intended, World War II-like, to crush the enemy and force terms on a shell-shocked, defeated, and humiliated populace. Many of our challenges, then, are not the war in Iraq per se, but the entire paradox of postmodern war in general in a globally televised world.

And if the point of Iraq was to stress ?Iraqification? and avoid too large an American footprint in the Middle East, then ubiquitous Americans may have posed as many problems as they solved ? with two or three Green zones rather than one. Instead of drawing down to 100,000 we might now be talking of hoping to keep below 300,000 troops.

Past history suggests that military efficacy is not so much always a question of the number of troops ? but rather of how they are used. Especially large American deployments can foster dependency rather than autonomy on the part of the Iraqi security forces. Each month, fewer Americans are dying in Iraq, while more Iraqis are fighting the terrorists ? as it becomes clear to them that some enormous occupation force is not on its own going to save the Iraqis? democracy for them.

The looting should have been stopped. But by the same token, after the statue fell, had the U.S. military begun immediately to shoot looters on sight ? and that was what restoring order would have required ? or carpet bombed the Syrian and Iranian borders to stop infiltration, the outcry would have arisen that we were too punitive and gunning down poor and hungry people even in peace. I fear that 400,000 peacekeepers, given the rules of postbellum engagement, would have been no more likely to shoot thieves than would 200,000.

We forget that one of the reasons for the speed of the American advance and then the sudden rush to stop military operations ? as was true in the first Gulf War ? was the enormous criticism leveled at the Americans for going to war in the first place, and the constant litany cited almost immediately of American abuses involving excessive force. Shooting looters may have restored order, but it also would have now been enshrined as an Abu-Ghraib-like crime ? a photo of a poor ?hungry? thief broadcast globally as an unarmed victim of American barbarism. We can imagine more ?Highway of Death? outrage had we bombed concentrations of Shiites pouring in from Iran or jihadists from Syria going to ?weddings? and ?festivals? in Iraq.

Throughout this postmodern war, the military has been on the horns of a dilemma: Don?t shoot and you are indicted for being lax and allowing lawlessness to spread; shoot and you are gratuitously slandered as a sort of rogue LAPD in camouflage. We hear only of the deliberately inexact rubric ?Iraqi civilian losses? ? without any explanation that almost all the Iraqi dead are either (1) victims of the terrorists, (2) Iraqi security forces trying to defend the innocent against the terrorists, or (3) the terrorists themselves.

Legitimate questions arise as to whether America? army is too small, or whether requisite political support for military operations is too predicated on the 24-hour news cycle. But all those are issues transcending the war in Iraq. In retrospect, up-armoring humvees would have been wise from the very outset ? so would having something remotely comparable to a Panzerfaust in 1943, more live than dud torpedoes in 1942, or deploying a jet at the beginning of the Korean War that could compete with a Russian Mig 15.

So again, the proper question is not whether there were tragic errors of judgment in Iraq ? but to what degree were they qualitatively different from past errors that are the stuff of war, to what degree were they addressed and corrected, and to what degree did their commission impair the final verdict of the mission?

Instead of this necessary ongoing discussion, we are left with former hawks that clamor ad nauseam for the secretary of Defense?s resignation as a sort of symbolic atonement for their own apparently collective lament that the postwar did not turn out like the aftermaths of Panama, Kosovo, Afghanistan, or Gulf War I. All that angst is about as helpful as perpetually damning Turkey for not letting the 4th ID come down from the north into the Sunni Triangle at the beginning of the war.

It is often said we had no plan to deal with postwar Iraq. Perhaps. But the problem with such a simplistic exegesis is that books and articles now pour forth weekly from disgruntled former constitutional architects and frustrated legal experts who once rushed in to draft Iraqi laws, or angry educationists and bankers whose ideas about school charters or currency regulations were not fully implemented. Somebody apparently had some sort of plan ? or the legions that went into the Green Zone in Spring 2003 wouldn?t have been sent there immediately in the first place.

Yes, we had zillions of plans alright ? but whether they were sufficient to survive the constant and radically changing cycles of war is another matter, especially in a long-failed state plagued with fundamentalism, tribalism, chaos, insurrection, and Sunni, Shiite, and Baathist militias whose leadership had been routed rather than its military crushed. The best postwar plans do not work as they should when losing enemies feel that they won?t be flattened and a successful attacker feels it can?t really flatten them.

In March 2004 perhaps our initial manner of enacting the ?plan? ? train the Iraqi security forces, craft a consensual government, and put down the terrorists ? was thwarted by our inexperience and naivet?. But by March 2006, the identical plan seems to be working far better ? precisely because, as in all wars, we have adapted, modified, and nuanced our way of fighting and nation-building, as American fatalities decrease and Iraqis step up to fight for their freedom.

Nothing in this war is much different from those of the past. We have fought suicide bombers in the Pacific. Intelligence failures doomed tens of thousands ? not 2,300 ? at the Bulge and Okinawa. We pacified the Philippines through counterinsurgency fighting. Failure to calibrate the extent of Al Zarqawi?s insurrection pales before the Chinese crossing of the Yalu.

Even our current clinical depression is typically American. In July 1864, Lincoln was hated and McClellan and the Copperheads who wished a cessation of war and bisection of country canonized. Truman left office with the nation?s anger that he had failed in Korea. As George Bush Sr. departed, the conventional wisdom was that the budding chaos and redrawing of the map of Eastern Europe would prompt decades of instability as former Communists could not simply be spoon fed democracy and capitalism. During Afghanistan by week five we were in a quagmire; the dust storm supposedly threatened our success in Iraq ? in the manner that the explosion of the dome at Samarra marked the beginning of a hopeless civil war that ?lost? Iraq.

The fact is that we are close to seeing a democratically elected government emerge, backed by an increasingly competent army, pitted against a minority of a minority in Zaraqawi?s Wahhabi jihadists.

While we worry about our own losses, both human and financial, al Qaeda knows that thousands of its terrorists are dead, with its leadership dismantled or in hiding ? and most of the globe turning against it. For all our depression at home, we can still win two wars ? the removal of Saddam Hussein and the destruction of jihadists that followed him ? and leave a legitimate government that is the antithesis of both autocracy and theocracy.

Syria is out of Lebanon ? but only as long as democracy is in Iraq. Libya and Pakistan have come clean about nuclear trafficking ? but only as long as the U.S. is serious about reform in the Middle East.

And the Palestinians are squabbling among themselves, as democracy is proving not so easy to distort after all ? a sort of Western Trojan Horse that they are not so sure they should have brought inside their walls. When has Hamas ever acted as if it has a "sort of" charter to "sort of" destroy Israel? We worry that Iran is undermining Iraq. The mullahs are terrified that the democracy across the border may undermine them ? as if voting and freedom could trump their beheadings and stonings.

Ever since 9/11 we have been in a long, multifaceted, and much-misunderstood war against jihadists and their autocratic enablers from Manhattan to Kabul, from Baghdad to the Hindu Kush, from London and Madrid to Bali and the Philippines. For now, Iraq has become the nexus of that struggle, in the heart of the ancient caliphate, rather than the front once again in Washington and New York. Whose vision of the future wins depends on who keeps his nerve ? or to paraphrase the Duke of Wellington at Waterloo, ?Hard pounding, gentlemen; but we will see who can pound the longest.?


? Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is the author, most recently, of A War Like No Other. How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War.
   
http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson200603240726.asp
Title: Peaceful Folly
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on March 27, 2006, 02:06:53 PM
The tyrant's best friend
 
Lorne Gunter
National Post

Monday, March 27, 2006

 
George Orwell detested tyrants, Communist and fascist alike. But he reserved a special contempt for pacifists.

"Those who 'abjure' violence can only do so because others are committing violence on their behalf."

Orwell saw pacifists as self-superior freeloaders capable of indulging their naive beliefs only because brave men and women were prepared to lay down their lives to defend them.

And Orwell didn't even know the Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT) whose members had to be rescued in Iraq last week by daring British, Canadian, American and Iraqi commandos.

He knew their type, though.

In his 1945 essay Notes on Nationalism, Orwell explains, "The majority of pacifists either belong to obscure religious sects or are simply humanitarians who object to taking life and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond that point. But there is a minority ... whose real though unadmitted motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration for totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writing ... they do not as a rule condemn violence as such, but only violence used in defence of the western countries."

He certainly had the CPT pegged.

They are not in Iraq to stop war. They are there, instead, to thwart what they call the "illegal occupation" by Western forces.

By their use of words, they have chosen sides. CPT volunteers may not take up arms in support of the Iraqi insurgency -- their shallow thinking is at least consistent on that point -- but war is not their enemy, nor peace their sole objective.

They do not condemn the violence on both sides equally, even though that is what real pacifists would do.

The trio released last week claimed they had been in Iraq to uncover human rights abuses. Yet before their abduction, they had canvassed only Iraqis opposed to the coalition for lists of grievances. They weren't seeking to convince both sides of the futility of battle. Rather, they were looking to make a case against American and British action -- only.

And since being released, Canadians Harmeet Sooden and Jim Loney, and Brit Norman Kember, have made only excuses for their abductors. They have charged that the presence of foreign troops in Iraq created the conditions that led to their kidnapping, but never once disparaged their abductors' motives.

They haven't even been able to condemn those who murdered their colleague Tom Fox, the American CPT member kidnapped along with them last Nov. 26, whose bullet-riddled corpse was found near a railway line earlier this month.

But you can bet had Fox been killed or even merely injured during the rescue attempt, the CPT would have screeched indignantly about the brutality of coalition forces and demanded Congressional and Parliamentary inquiries, so great is their hypocritical commitment to non-violence.

There have even been reports in London's Daily Telegraph that CPT leaders back home were vaguely aware of ongoing intelligence and special forces efforts to free Sooden, Loney and Kember, but had demanded no action be taken until the rescuers could be certain no one -- not even a kidnapper -- would be killed.

How arrogant.

Not only were rescuers expected to put their lives on the line to free idealists who blamed the rescuers for their abduction (even though it was the idealists' own silly actions had gotten them kidnapped in the first place), the idealists' colleagues back in the West were demanding the brave soldiers, spies and informants double their risk just so their mission would be carried out in a way that didn't offend the idealists' beliefs.

Writing in Partisan Review in 1942, Orwell explained "This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side you automatically help out that of the other." That is why "Pacifists are the objective allies of tyrants," rather than crusaders or martyrs for peace, as they like to see themselves.

Because free countries tolerate pacifists' views and actions -- just look at the extraordinary efforts coalition countries took to locate and save the CPT hostages -- "pacifism can act more effectively against democracy than for it."

The smug moralists of the CPT may fool themselves by thinking they are making the world freer and more peaceful. In truth, they are likely achieving the opposite.

http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/columnists/story.html?id=e0d757cb-a57a-4807-9b20-2995486e2205
Title: Radical Islam: The Greater Threat
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on March 28, 2006, 01:16:11 PM
The Islamic threat is greater than German and Soviet threats were

By Dennis Prager

Mar 28, 2006

Only four types of individuals can deny the threat to civilization posed by the violence-supporting segment of Islam: the willfully naive, America-haters, Jew-haters and those afraid to confront evil.

Anyone else sees the contemporary reality -- the genocidal Islamic regime in Sudan; the widespread Muslim theological and emotional support for the killing of a Muslim who converts to another religion; the absence of freedom in Muslim-majority countries; the widespread support for Palestinians who randomly murder Israelis; the primitive state in which women are kept in many Muslim countries; the celebration of death; the "honor killings" of daughters; and so much else that is terrible in significant parts of the Muslim world -- knows that civilized humanity has a new evil to fight.

Just as previous generations had to fight Nazism, communism and fascism, our generation has to confront militant Islam.

And whereas there were unique aspects to those evils, there are two unique aspects to the evil emanating from the Islamic world that render this latest threat to humanity particularly difficult to overcome.

One is the number of people who believe in it. This is a new phenomenon among organized evils. Far fewer people believed in Nazism or in communism than believe in Islam generally or in authoritarian Islam specifically. There are one billion Muslims in the world. If just 10 percent believe in the Islam of Hamas, the Taliban, the Sudanese regime, Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism, bin Ladin, Islamic Jihad, the Finley Park Mosque in London or Hizbollah -- and it is inconceivable that only one of 10 Muslims supports any of these groups' ideologies -- that means a true believing enemy of at least 100 million people. Outside of Germany, how many people believed in Nazism? Outside of Japan, who believed in Japanese imperialism and militarism? And outside of universities, the arts world or Hollywood, how many people believed in Soviet-style totalitarianism?

A far larger number of people believe in Islamic authoritarianism than ever believed in Marxism. Virtually no one living in Marxist countries believed in Marxism or communism. Likewise, far fewer people believed in Nazism, an ideology confined largely to one country for less than one generation. This is one enormous difference between the radical Islamic threat to our civilization and the two previous ones.

But there is yet a second difference that is at least as significant and at least as frightening: Nazis and Communists wanted to live and feared death; Islamic authoritarians love death and loathe life.

That is why MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) worked with the Soviet Union. Communist leaders love life -- they loved their money, their power, their dachas, their mistresses, their fine wines -- and were hardly prepared to give all that up for Marx. But Iran's current leaders celebrate dying, and MAD may not work, because from our perspective, they are indeed mad. MAD only works with the sane.

There is much less you can do against people who value dying more than living.

The existence of an unprecedentedly large number of people wishing to destroy decent civilization as we know it -- and who celebrate their own deaths -- poses a threat the likes of which no civilization in history has had to confront.

The evils committed by Nazism and Communism were, of course, greater than those committed by radical Islam. There has been no Muslim Gulag and no Muslim Auschwitz.

But the threat is far more serious.

Dennis Prager is a radio talk show host, author, and contributing columnist for Townhall.com.


Find this story at: http://www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/dennisprager/2006/03/28/191502.html
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 30, 2006, 11:49:08 PM
Patriots, Then and Now
With nations as with people, love them or lose them.

Thursday, March 30, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST

I had a great experience the other night. I met some of the 114 living recipients of the Medal of Honor, the nation's highest military award. It was at their annual dinner, held, as it has been the past four years, at the New York Stock Exchange.

I met Nick Oresko. Nick is in his 80s, small, 5-foot-5 or so. Soft white hair, pale-pink skin, thick torso, walks with a cane. Just a nice old guy you'd pass on the street or in the airport without really seeing him. Around his neck was a sky-blue ribbon, and hanging from that ribbon the medal. He let me turn it over. It had his name, his rank, and then "1/23/45. Near Tettington, Germany."

Tettington, Germany. The Battle of the Bulge.

When I got home I looked up his citation on my beloved Internet, where you can Google heroism. U.S. Army Master Sgt. Nicholas Oresko of Company C, 302nd Infantry, 94th Infantry Division was a platoon leader in an attack against strong enemy positions:


Deadly automatic fire from the flanks pinned down his unit. Realizing that a machinegun in a nearby bunker must be eliminated, he swiftly worked ahead alone, braving bullets which struck about him, until close enough to throw a grenade into the German position. He rushed the bunker and, with pointblank rifle fire, killed all the hostile occupants who survived the grenade blast. Another machinegun opened up on him, knocking him down and seriously wounding him in the hip. Refusing to withdraw from the battle, he placed himself at the head of his platoon to continue the assault. As withering machinegun and rifle fire swept the area, he struck out alone in advance of his men to a second bunker. With a grenade, he crippled the dug-in machinegun defending this position and then wiped out the troops manning it with his rifle, completing his second self-imposed, 1-man attack. Although weak from loss of blood, he refused to be evacuated until assured the mission was successfully accomplished. Through quick thinking, indomitable courage, and unswerving devotion to the attack in the face of bitter resistance and while wounded, M /Sgt. Oresko killed 12 Germans, prevented a delay in the assault, and made it possible for Company C to obtain its objective with minimum casualties.
Nick Oresko lives in Tenafly, N.J. If courage were a bright light, Tenafly would glow.




I met Pat Brady of Sumner, Wash., an Army helicopter medevac pilot in Vietnam who'd repeatedly risked his life to save men he'd never met. And Sammy Davis, a big bluff blond from Flat Rock, Ill., on whom the writer Winston Groom based the Vietnam experiences of a character named Forrest Gump. Sgt. Davis saved men like Forrest, but he also took out a bunch of bad guys. And yes, he was wounded in the same way as Forrest. That scene in the movie where Lyndon Johnson puts the medal around Tom Hanks's neck: that's from the film of LBJ putting the medal on Sammy's neck, only they superimposed Mr. Hanks.
I talked to James Livingston of Mount Pleasant, S.C., a Marine, a warrior in Vietnam who led in battle in spite of bad wounds and worse odds. I told him I was wondering about something. Most of us try to be brave each day in whatever circumstances, which means most of us show ourselves our courage with time. What is it like, I asked, to find out when you're a young man, and in a way that's irrefutable, that you are brave? What does it do to your life when no one, including you, will ever question whether you have guts?

He shook his head. The medal didn't prove courage, he said. "It's not bravery, it's taking responsibility." Each of the recipients, he said, had taken responsibility for the men and the moment at a tense and demanding time. They'd cared for others. They took care of their men.

Other recipients sounded a refrain that lingered like Taps. They felt they'd been awarded their great honor in part in the name of unknown heroes of the armed forces who'd performed spectacular acts of courage but had died along with all the witnesses who would have told the story of what they did. For each of the holders of the Medal of Honor there had been witnesses, survivors who could testify. For some great heroes of engagements large and small, maybe the greatest heroes, no one lived to tell the tale.

And so they felt they wore their medals in part for the ones known only to God.

In a brief film on the recipients that was played at the dinner, Leo Thorsness, an Air Force veteran of Vietnam, said something that lingered. He was asked what, when he performed his great act, he was sacrificing for. He couldn't answer for a few seconds. You could tell he was searching for the right words, the right sentence. Then he said, "I get emotional about it. But we're a free country." He said it with a kind of wonder, and gratitude.

And of course, he said it all.





What this all got me thinking about, the next day, was . . . immigration. I know that seems a lurch, but there's a part of the debate that isn't sufficiently noted. There are a variety of things driving American anxiety about illegal immigration and we all know them--economic arguments, the danger of porous borders in the age of terrorism, with anyone able to come in.
But there's another thing. And it's not fear about "them." It's anxiety about us.

It's the broad public knowledge, or intuition, in America, that we are not assimilating our immigrants patriotically. And if you don't do that, you'll lose it all.

We used to do it. We loved our country with full-throated love, we had no ambivalence. We had pride and appreciation. We were a free country. We communicated our pride and delight in this in a million ways--in our schools, our movies, our popular songs, our newspapers. It was just there, in the air. Immigrants breathed it in. That's how the last great wave of immigrants, the European wave of 1880-1920, was turned into a great wave of Americans.

We are not assimilating our immigrants patriotically now. We are assimilating them culturally. Within a generation their children speak Valley Girl on cell phones. "So I'm like 'no," and he's all 'yeah,' and I'm like, 'In your dreams.' " Whether their parents are from Trinidad, Bosnia, Lebanon or Chile, their children, once Americans, know the same music, the same references, watch the same shows. And to a degree and in a way it will hold them together. But not forever and not in a crunch.

So far we are assimilating our immigrants economically, too. They come here and work. Good.

But we are not communicating love of country. We are not giving them the great legend of our country. We are losing that great legend.

What is the legend, the myth? That God made this a special place. That they're joining something special. That the streets are paved with more than gold--they're paved with the greatest thoughts man ever had, the greatest decisions he ever made, about how to live. We have free thought, free speech, freedom of worship. Look at the literature of the Republic: the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Federalist papers. Look at the great rich history, the courage and sacrifice, the house-raisings, the stubbornness. The Puritans, the Indians, the City on a Hill.

The genius cluster--Jefferson, Hamilton, Adams, Madison, Franklin, all the rest--that came along at the exact same moment to lead us. And then Washington, a great man in the greatest way, not in unearned gifts well used (i.e., a high IQ followed by high attainment) but in character, in moral nature effortfully developed. How did that happen? How did we get so lucky? (I once asked a great historian if he had thoughts on this, and he nodded. He said he had come to believe it was "providential.")

We fought a war to free slaves. We sent millions of white men to battle and destroyed a portion of our nation to free millions of black men. What kind of nation does this? We went to Europe, fought, died and won, and then taxed ourselves to save our enemies with the Marshall Plan. What kind of nation does this? Soviet communism stalked the world and we were the ones who steeled ourselves and taxed ourselves to stop it. Again: What kind of nation does this?

Only a very great one. Maybe the greatest of all.

Do we teach our immigrants that this is what they're joining? That this is the tradition they will now continue, and uphold?

Do we, today, act as if this is such a special place? No, not always, not even often. American exceptionalism is so yesterday. We don't want to be impolite. We don't want to offend. We don't want to seem narrow. In the age of globalism, honest patriotism seems like a faux pas.

And yet what is true of people is probably true of nations: if you don't have a well-grounded respect for yourself, you won't long sustain a well-grounded respect for others.





Because we do not communicate to our immigrants, legal and illegal, that they have joined something special, some of them, understandably, get the impression they've joined not a great enterprise but a big box store. A big box store on the highway where you can get anything cheap. It's a good place. But it has no legends, no meaning, and it imparts no spirit.
Who is at fault? Those of us who let the myth die, or let it change, or refused to let it be told. The politically correct nitwit teaching the seventh-grade history class who decides the impressionable young minds before him need to be informed, as their first serious history lesson, that the Founders were hypocrites, the Bill of Rights nothing new and imperfect in any case, that the Indians were victims of genocide, that Lincoln was a clinically depressed homosexual who compensated for the storms within by creating storms without . . .

You can turn any history into mud. You can turn great men and women into mud too, if you want to.

And it's not just the nitwits, wherever they are, in the schools, the academy, the media, though they're all harmful enough. It's also the people who mean to be honestly and legitimately critical, to provide a new look at the old text. They're not noticing that the old text--the legend, the myth--isn't being taught anymore. Only the commentary is. But if all the commentary is doubting and critical, how will our kids know what to love and revere? How will they know how to balance criticism if they've never heard the positive side of the argument?

Those who teach, and who think for a living about American history, need to be told: Keep the text, teach the text, and only then, if you must, deconstruct the text.

When you don't love something you lose it. If we do not teach new Americans to love their country, and not for braying or nationalistic reasons but for reasons of honest and thoughtful appreciation, and gratitude, for a history that is something new in the long story of man, then we will begin to lose it. That Medal of Honor winner, Leo Thorsness, who couldn't quite find the words--he only found it hard to put everything into words because he knew the story, the legend, and knew it so well. Only then do you become "emotional about it." Only then are you truly American.

Ms. Noonan is a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal and author of "John Paul the Great: Remembering a Spiritual Father," (Penguin, 2005), which you can order from the OpinionJournal bookstore. Her column appears Thursdays.
Title: Political Rants
Post by: prentice crawford on April 03, 2006, 10:03:28 AM
Woof,
  Anyone interested in making their views known to their Senators about amnesty for illegal aliens or enforceing our immigration laws by prosecuting employers who hire them, can call the Senate switch board at (202) 224- 3121 and ask for the office of your state Senators and they will put you in direct contact with the Senator you name.
                   P.C.
Title: Death Rattle?
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on April 03, 2006, 02:58:08 PM
When Islam Breaks Down
Theodore Dalrymple

My first contact with Islam was in Afghanistan. I had been through Iran overland to get there, but it was in the days of the Shah?s White Revolution, which had given rights to women and had secularized society (with the aid of a little detention, without trial, and torture). In my naive, historicist way, I assumed that secularization was an irreversible process, like the breaking of eggs: that once people had seen the glory of life without compulsory obeisance to the men of God, they would never turn back to them as the sole guides to their lives and politics.

Afghanistan was different, quite clearly a pre-modern society. The vast, barren landscapes in the crystalline air were impossibly romantic, and the people (that is to say the men, for women were not much in evidence) had a wild dignity and nobility. Their mien was aristocratic. Even their hospitality was fierce. They carried more weapons in daily life than the average British commando in wartime. You knew that they would defend you to the death, if necessary?or cut your throat like a chicken?s, if necessary. Honor among them was all.

On the whole I was favorably impressed. I thought that they were freer than we. I thought nothing of such matters as the clash of civilizations, and experienced no desire, and felt no duty, to redeem them from their way of life in the name of any of my own civilization?s ideals. Impressed by the aesthetics of Afghanistan and unaware of any fundamental opposition or tension between the modern and the pre-modern, I saw no reason why the West and Afghanistan should not rub along pretty well together, each in its own little world, provided only that each respected the other.

I was with a group of students, and our appearance in the middle of a country then seldom visited was almost a national event. At any rate, we put on extracts of Romeo and Juliet in the desert, in which I had a small part, and the crown prince of Afghanistan (then still a kingdom) attended. He arrived in Afghanistan?s one modern appurtenance: a silver convertible Mercedes sports car?I was much impressed by that. Little did I think then that lines from the play?those of Juliet?s plea to her mother to abrogate an unwanted marriage to Paris, arranged and forced on her by her father, Capulet?would so uncannily capture the predicament of some of my Muslim patients in Britain more than a third of a century after my visit to Afghanistan, and four centuries after they were written:

Is there no pity sitting in the clouds That sees into the bottom of my grief? O sweet my mother, cast me not away! Delay this marriage for a month, a week, Or if you do not, make the bridal bed In that dim monument where Tybalt lies. How often have I been consulted by young Muslim women patients, driven to despair by enforced marriages to close relatives (usually first cousins) back ?home? in India and Pakistan, who have made such an unavailing appeal to their mothers, followed by an attempt at suicide!

Capulet?s attitude to his refractory daughter is precisely that of my Muslim patients? fathers:

Look to?t, think on?t, I do not use to jest. Thursday is near, lay hand on heart, advise: And you be mine, I?ll give you to my friend; And you be not, hang, beg, starve, die in the streets, For by my soul, I?ll ne?er acknowledge thee, Nor what is mine shall ever do thee good. In fact the situation of Muslim girls in my city is even worse than Juliet?s. Every Muslim girl in my city has heard of the killing of such as she back in Pakistan, on refusal to marry her first cousin, betrothed to her by her father, all unknown to her, in the earliest years of her childhood. The girl is killed because she has impugned family honor by breaking her father?s word, and any halfhearted official inquiry into the death by the Pakistani authorities is easily and cheaply bought off. And even if she is not killed, she is expelled from the household?O sweet my mother, cast me not away!?and regarded by her ?community? as virtually a prostitute, fair game for any man who wants her.

This pattern of betrothal causes suffering as intense as any I know of. It has terrible consequences. One father prevented his daughter, highly intelligent and ambitious to be a journalist, from attending school, precisely to ensure her lack of Westernization and economic independence. He then took her, aged 16, to Pakistan for the traditional forced marriage (silence, or a lack of open objection, amounts to consent in these circumstances, according to Islamic law) to a first cousin whom she disliked from the first and who forced his attentions on her. Granted a visa to come to Britain, as if the marriage were a bona fide one?the British authorities having turned a cowardly blind eye to the real nature of such marriages in order to avoid the charge of racial discrimination?he was violent toward her.

She had two children in quick succession, both of whom were so severely handicapped that they would be bedridden for the rest of their short lives and would require nursing 24 hours a day. (For fear of giving offense, the press almost never alludes to the extremely high rate of genetic illnesses among the offspring of consanguineous marriages.) Her husband, deciding that the blame for the illnesses was entirely hers, and not wishing to devote himself to looking after such useless creatures, left her, divorcing her after Islamic custom. Her family ostracized her, having concluded that a woman whose husband had left her must have been to blame and was the next thing to a whore. She threw herself off a cliff, but was saved by a ledge.

I?ve heard a hundred variations of her emblematic story. Here, for once, are instances of unadulterated female victimhood, yet the silence of the feminists is deafening. Where two pieties?feminism and multiculturalism?come into conflict, the only way of preserving both is an indecent silence.

Certainly such experiences have moderated the historicism I took to Afghanistan?the naive belief that monotheistic religions have but a single, ?natural,? path of evolution, which they all eventually follow. By the time Christianity was Islam?s present age, I might once have thought, it had still undergone no Reformation, the absence of which is sometimes offered as an explanation for Islam?s intolerance and rigidity. Give it time, I would have said, and it will evolve, as Christianity has, to a private confession that acknowledges the legal supremacy of the secular state?at which point Islam will become one creed among many.

That Shakespeare?s words express the despair that oppressed Muslim girls feel in a British city in the twenty-first century with much greater force, short of poisoning themselves, than that with which they can themselves express it, that Shakespeare evokes so vividly their fathers? sentiments as well (though condemning rather than endorsing them), suggests?does it not??that such oppressive treatment of women is not historically unique to Islam, and that it is a stage that Muslims will leave behind. Islam will even outgrow its religious intolerance, as Christian Europe did so long ago, after centuries in which the Thirty Years? War, for example, resulted in the death of a third of Germany?s population, or when Philip II of Spain averred, ?I would rather sacrifice the lives of a hundred thousand people than cease my persecution of heretics.?

My historicist optimism has waned. After all, I soon enough learned that the Shah?s revolution from above was reversible?at least in the short term, that is to say the term in which we all live, and certainly long enough to ruin the only lives that contemporary Iranians have. Moreover, even if there were no relevant differences between Christianity and Islam as doctrines and civilizations in their ability to accommodate modernity, a vital difference in the historical situations of the two religions also tempers my historicist optimism. Devout Muslims can see (as Luther, Calvin, and others could not) the long-term consequences of the Reformation and its consequent secularism: a marginalization of the Word of God, except as an increasingly distant cultural echo?as the ?melancholy, long, withdrawing roar? of the once full ?Sea of faith,? in Matthew Arnold?s precisely diagnostic words.

And there is enough truth in the devout Muslim?s criticism of the less attractive aspects of Western secular culture to lend plausibility to his call for a return to purity as the answer to the Muslim world?s woes. He sees in the West?s freedom nothing but promiscuity and license, which is certainly there; but he does not see in freedom, especially freedom of inquiry, a spiritual virtue as well as an ultimate source of strength. This narrow, beleaguered consciousness no doubt accounts for the strand of reactionary revolt in contemporary Islam. The devout Muslim fears, and not without good reason, that to give an inch is sooner or later to concede the whole territory.

This fear must be all the more acute among the large and growing Muslim population in cities like mine. Except for a small, highly educated middle class, who live de facto as if Islam were a private religious confession like any other in the West, the Muslims congregate in neighborhoods that they have made their own, where the life of the Punjab continues amid the architecture of the Industrial Revolution. The halal butcher?s corner shop rubs shoulders with the terra-cotta municipal library, built by the Victorian city fathers to improve the cultural level of a largely vanished industrial working class.

The Muslim immigrants to these areas were not seeking a new way of life when they arrived; they expected to continue their old lives, but more prosperously. They neither anticipated, nor wanted, the inevitable cultural tensions of translocation, and they certainly never suspected that in the long run they could not maintain their culture and their religion intact. The older generation is only now realizing that even outward conformity to traditional codes of dress and behavior by the young is no longer a guarantee of inner acceptance (a perception that makes their vigilantism all the more pronounced and desperate). Recently I stood at the taxi stand outside my hospital, beside two young women in full black costume, with only a slit for the eyes. One said to the other, ?Give us a light for a fag, love; I?m gasping.? Release the social pressure on the girls, and they would abandon their costume in an instant.

Anyone who lives in a city like mine and interests himself in the fate of the world cannot help wondering whether, deeper than this immediate cultural desperation, there is anything intrinsic to Islam?beyond the devout Muslim?s instinctive understanding that secularization, once it starts, is like an unstoppable chain reaction?that renders it unable to adapt itself comfortably to the modern world. Is there an essential element that condemns the Dar al-Islam to permanent backwardness with regard to the Dar al-Harb, a backwardness that is felt as a deep humiliation, and is exemplified, though not proved, by the fact that the whole of the Arab world, minus its oil, matters less to the rest of the world economically than the Nokia telephone company of Finland?

I think the answer is yes, and that the problem begins with Islam?s failure to make a distinction between church and state. Unlike Christianity, which had to spend its first centuries developing institutions clandestinely and so from the outset clearly had to separate church from state, Islam was from its inception both church and state, one and indivisible, with no possible distinction between temporal and religious authority. Muhammad?s power was seamlessly spiritual and secular (although the latter grew ultimately out of the former), and he bequeathed this model to his followers. Since he was, by Islamic definition, the last prophet of God upon earth, his was a political model whose perfection could not be challenged or questioned without the total abandonment of the pretensions of the entire religion.

But his model left Islam with two intractable problems. One was political. Muhammad unfortunately bequeathed no institutional arrangements by which his successors in the role of omnicompetent ruler could be chosen (and, of course, a schism occurred immediately after the Prophet?s death, with some?today?s Sunnites?following his father-in-law, and some?today?s Shi?ites?his son-in-law). Compounding this difficulty, the legitimacy of temporal power could always be challenged by those who, citing Muhammad?s spiritual role, claimed greater religious purity or authority; the fanatic in Islam is always at a moral advantage vis-?-vis the moderate. Moreover, Islam?in which the mosque is a meetinghouse, not an institutional church?has no established, anointed ecclesiastical hierarchy to decide such claims authoritatively. With political power constantly liable to challenge from the pious, or the allegedly pious, tyranny becomes the only guarantor of stability, and assassination the only means of reform. Hence the Saudi time bomb: sooner or later, religious revolt will depose a dynasty founded upon its supposed piety but long since corrupted by the ways of the world.

The second problem is intellectual. In the West, the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment, acting upon the space that had always existed, at least potentially, in Christianity between church and state, liberated individual men to think for themselves, and thus set in motion an unprecedented and still unstoppable material advancement. Islam, with no separate, secular sphere where inquiry could flourish free from the claims of religion, if only for technical purposes, was hopelessly left behind: as, several centuries later, it still is.

The indivisibility of any aspect of life from any other in Islam is a source of strength, but also of fragility and weakness, for individuals as well as for polities. Where all conduct, all custom, has a religious sanction and justification, any change is a threat to the whole system of belief. Certainty that their way of life is the right one thus coexists with fear that the whole edifice?intellectual and political?will come tumbling down if it is tampered with in any way. Intransigence is a defense against doubt and makes living on terms of true equality with others who do not share the creed impossible.

Not coincidentally, the punishment for apostasy in Islam is death: apostates are regarded as far worse than infidels, and punished far more rigorously. In every Islamic society, and indeed among Britain?s Muslim immigrants, there are people who take this idea quite literally, as their rage against Salman Rushdie testified.

The Islamic doctrine of apostasy is hardly favorable to free inquiry or frank discussion, to say the least, and surely it explains why no Muslim, or former Muslim, in an Islamic society would dare to suggest that the Qu?ran was not divinely dictated through the mouth of the Prophet but rather was a compilation of a charismatic man?s words made many years after his death, and incorporating, with no very great originality, Judaic, Christian, and Zoroastrian elements. In my experience, devout Muslims expect and demand a freedom to criticize, often with perspicacity, the doctrines and customs of others, while demanding an exaggerated degree of respect and freedom from criticism for their own doctrines and customs. I recall, for example, staying with a Pakistani Muslim in East Africa, a very decent and devout man, who nevertheless spent several evenings with me deriding the absurdities of Christianity: the paradoxes of the Trinity, the impossibility of Resurrection, and so forth. Though no Christian myself, had I replied in kind, alluding to the pagan absurdities of the pilgrimage to Mecca, or to the gross, ignorant, and primitive superstitions of the Prophet with regard to jinn, I doubt that our friendship would have lasted long.

The unassailable status of the Qu?ran in Islamic education, thought, and society is ultimately Islam?s greatest disadvantage in the modern world. Such unassailability does not debar a society from great artistic achievement or charms of its own: great and marvelous civilizations have flourished without the slightest intellectual freedom. I myself prefer a souk to a supermarket any day, as a more human, if less economically efficient, institution. But until Muslims (or former Muslims, as they would then be) are free in their own countries to denounce the Qu?ran as an inferior hodgepodge of contradictory injunctions, without intellectual unity (whether it is so or not)?until they are free to say with Carlyle that the Qu?ran is ?a wearisome confused jumble? with ?endless iterations, longwindedness, entanglement??until they are free to remake and modernize the Qu?ran by creative interpretation, they will have to reconcile themselves to being, if not helots, at least in the rearguard of humanity, as far as power and technical advance are concerned.

A piece of pulp fiction by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, first published in 1898, when followers of the charismatic fundamentalist leader Muhammad al-Mahdi tried to establish a theocracy in Sudan by revolting against Anglo-Egyptian control, makes precisely this point and captures the contradiction at the heart of contemporary Islam. Called The Tragedy of the Korosko, the book is the story of a small tourist party to Upper Egypt, who are kidnapped and held to ransom by some Mahdists, and then rescued by the Egyptian Camel Corps. (I hesitate, as a Francophile, to point out to American readers that there is a French character in the book, who, until he is himself captured by the Mahdists, believes that they are but a figment of the British imagination, to give perfidious Albion a pretext to interfere in Sudanese affairs.) A mullah among the Mahdists who capture the tourists attempts to convert the Europeans and Americans to Islam, deriding as unimportant and insignificant their technically superior civilization: ? ?As to the [scientific] learning of which you speak . . . ? said the Moolah . . . ?I have myself studied at the University of Al Azhar at Cairo, and I know that to which you allude. But the learning of the faithful is not as the learning of the unbeliever, and it is not fitting that we pry too deeply into the ways of Allah. Some stars have tails . . . and some have not; but what does it profit us to know which are which? For God made them all, and they are very safe in His hands. Therefore . . . be not puffed up by the foolish learning of the West, and understand that there is only one wisdom, which consists in following the will of Allah as His chosen prophet has laid it down for us in this book.? ?

This is by no means a despicable argument. One of the reasons that we can appreciate the art and literature of the past, and sometimes of the very distant past, is that the fundamental conditions of human existence remain the same, however much we advance in the technical sense: I have myself argued in these pages that human self-understanding, except in purely technical matters, reached its apogee with Shakespeare. In a sense, the mullah is right.

But if we made a fetish of Shakespeare (much richer and more profound than the Qu?ran, in my view), if we made him the sole object of our study and the sole guide of our lives, we would soon enough fall into backwardness and stagnation. And the problem is that so many Muslims want both stagnation and power: they want a return to the perfection of the seventh century and to dominate the twenty-first, as they believe is the birthright of their doctrine, the last testament of God to man. If they were content to exist in a seventh-century backwater, secure in a quietist philosophy, there would be no problem for them or us; their problem, and ours, is that they want the power that free inquiry confers, without either the free inquiry or the philosophy and institutions that guarantee that free inquiry. They are faced with a dilemma: either they abandon their cherished religion, or they remain forever in the rear of human technical advance. Neither alternative is very appealing; and the tension between their desire for power and success in the modern world on the one hand, and their desire not to abandon their religion on the other, is resolvable for some only by exploding themselves as bombs.

People grow angry when faced with an intractable dilemma; they lash out. Whenever I have described in print the cruelties my young Muslim patients endure, I receive angry replies: I am either denounced outright as a liar, or the writer acknowledges that such cruelties take place but are attributable to a local culture, in this case Punjabi, not to Islam, and that I am ignorant not to know it.

But Punjabi Sikhs also arrange marriages: they do not, however, force consanguineous marriages of the kind that take place from Madras to Morocco. Moreover?and not, I believe, coincidentally?Sikh immigrants from the Punjab, of no higher original social status than their Muslim confr?res from the same provinces, integrate far better into the local society once they have immigrated. Precisely because their religion is a more modest one, with fewer universalist pretensions, they find the duality of their new identity more easily navigable. On the 50th anniversary of Queen Elizabeth?s reign, for example, the Sikh temples were festooned with perfectly genuine protestations of congratulations and loyalty. No such protestations on the part of Muslims would be thinkable.

But the anger of Muslims, their demand that their sensibilities should be accorded a more than normal respect, is a sign not of the strength but of the weakness?or rather, the brittleness?of Islam in the modern world, the desperation its adherents feel that it could so easily fall to pieces. The control that Islam has over its populations in an era of globalization reminds me of the hold that the Ceausescus appeared to have over the Rumanians: an absolute hold, until Ceausescu appeared one day on the balcony and was jeered by the crowd that had lost its fear. The game was over, as far as Ceausescu was concerned, even if there had been no preexisting conspiracy to oust him.

One sign of the increasing weakness of Islam?s hold over its nominal adherents in Britain?of which militancy is itself but another sign?is the throng of young Muslim men in prison. They will soon overtake the young men of Jamaican origin in their numbers and in the extent of their criminality. By contrast, young Sikhs and Hindus are almost completely absent from prison, so racism is not the explanation for such Muslim overrepresentation.

Confounding expectations, these prisoners display no interest in Islam whatsoever; they are entirely secularized. True, they still adhere to Muslim marriage customs, but only for the obvious personal advantage of having a domestic slave at home. Many of them also dot the city with their concubines?sluttish white working-class girls or exploitable young Muslims who have fled forced marriages and do not know that their young men are married. This is not religion, but having one?s cake and eating it.

The young Muslim men in prison do not pray; they do not demand halal meat. They do not read the Qu?ran. They do not ask to see the visiting imam. They wear no visible signs of piety: their main badge of allegiance is a gold front tooth, which proclaims them members of the city?s criminal subculture?a badge (of honor, they think) that they share with young Jamaicans, though their relations with the Jamaicans are otherwise fraught with hostility. The young Muslim men want wives at home to cook and clean for them, concubines elsewhere, and drugs and rock ?n? roll. As for Muslim proselytism in the prison?and Muslim literature has been insinuated into nooks and crannies there far more thoroughly than any Christian literature?it is directed mainly at the Jamaican prisoners. It answers their need for an excuse to go straight, while not at the same time surrendering to the morality of a society they believe has wronged them deeply. Indeed, conversion to Islam is their revenge upon that society, for they sense that their newfound religion is fundamentally opposed to it. By conversion, therefore, they kill two birds with one stone.

But Islam has no improving or inhibiting effect upon the behavior of my city?s young Muslim men, who, in astonishing numbers, have taken to heroin, a habit almost unknown among their Sikh and Hindu contemporaries. The young Muslims not only take heroin but deal in it, and have adopted all the criminality attendant on the trade.

What I think these young Muslim prisoners demonstrate is that the rigidity of the traditional code by which their parents live, with its universalist pretensions and emphasis on outward conformity to them, is all or nothing; when it dissolves, it dissolves completely and leaves nothing in its place. The young Muslims then have little defense against the egotistical licentiousness they see about them and that they all too understandably take to be the summum bonum of Western life.

Observing this, of course, there are among Muslim youth a tiny minority who reject this absorption into the white lumpenproletariat and turn militant or fundamentalist. It is their perhaps natural, or at least understandable, reaction to the failure of our society, kowtowing to absurd and dishonest multiculturalist pieties, to induct them into the best of Western culture: into that spirit of free inquiry and personal freedom that has so transformed the life chances of every person in the world, whether he knows it or not.

Islam in the modern world is weak and brittle, not strong: that accounts for its so frequent shrillness. The Shah will, sooner or later, triumph over the Ayatollah in Iran, because human nature decrees it, though meanwhile millions of lives will have been ruined and impoverished. The Iranian refugees who have flooded into the West are fleeing Islam, not seeking to extend its dominion, as I know from speaking to many in my city. To be sure, fundamentalist Islam will be very dangerous for some time to come, and all of us, after all, live only in the short term; but ultimately the fate of the Church of England awaits it. Its melancholy, withdrawing roar may well (unlike that of the Church of England) be not just long but bloody, but withdraw it will. The fanatics and the bombers do not represent a resurgence of unreformed, fundamentalist Islam, but its death rattle.

http://www.city-journal.org/html/14_2_when_islam.html
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 04, 2006, 09:02:56 AM
Buz:

That was one fine piece of writing.

Crafty
Title: Political Rants
Post by: pretty_kitty on April 21, 2006, 06:29:19 AM
Not really a rant, but I didn't know where else to put it--Crafty
-------------------------------

This is a review of a museum exhibition in today?s NYT.
Ed
 
Exhibition Review
The Anti-Semitic Hoax That Refuses to Die

By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/r/edward_rothste
in/index.html?inline=nyt-per>
Published: April 21, 2006
Washington
 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/21/arts/design/21holo.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&
pagewanted=all#secondParagraph#secondParagraph> Skip to next paragraph

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection
A Mexican edition, published in 2005, of "The Protocols of the Elders of
Zion."
"A Dangerous Lie: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" opens today at the
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. The museum is open
daily, 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.; Tuesdays and Thursdays through mid-June, 10
a.m. to 7:50 p.m. Free timed passes are required for the permanent
collection but not for the special exhibition; call (800) 400-9373.
Information: (202) 488-0400.
Readers? Opinions
 
<http://forums.nytimes.com/top/opinion/readersopinions/forums/arts/artistsan
dexhibitions/index.html?page=recent> Forum: Artists and Exhibitions
A SMALL cloth is draped over each digit of a giant hand, each finger puppet
inscribed with a symbol. One is a dollar sign: a reference to international
capital in all its manifestations. There is also the sign of the Masons,
since for centuries that secret society has been caricatured as insidious
and manipulative, without recognizing, perhaps, that its own strings were
being pulled.
There is the hammer and sickle, symbolizing a Communist world that no longer
possesses fearsome power but was once, apparently, under the sway of an even
greater master. The cross is there, for the church has supposedly been
enslaved by the same forces. And there is a swastika, for even Nazism,
according to this particular vision, arose out of the deep maneuverings of a
group prepared to sacrifice six million of its own so its larger aims might
be realized in the creation of an imperial state.
And controlling them all is the hand, its palm inscribed with a Jewish star.

Such is the cover art for a Spanish-language edition of "The Protocols of
the Elders of Zion" published last year in Mexico.
Mexico is not alone. Look around the small space allotted to a new
exhibition opening today at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum here
? "A Dangerous Lie: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" ? and the intensity
and extent of agreement are striking. For more than a century "The
Protocols" has made its way into many languages, selling untold numbers of
copies, portraying Jews as demonic schemers.
Said to be the minutes of a secret council of Jews discussing their plot for
world domination, this slim volume, first published in Russia in 1905, has
become a nearly sacred text for political and religious movements ranging
from American nativism and German Nazism to Arab Islamicism.
Henry Ford was captivated by the idea of Jewish financiers plotting to
undermine the United States; he became a proselytizer for "The Protocols" in
his newspaper, The Dearborn Independent.
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/h/adolf_hitler/i
ndex.html?inline=nyt-per> Hitler, an admirer of Ford, was introduced to "The
Protocols" by the Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg, and cited it in "Mein
Kampf." More than 23 editions of "The Protocols" were published by the Nazi
party over 20 years.
During the last half-century, it has also become a canonical text in the
Islamic world. One edition on display here, printed in Pakistan in 1969, was
presented by King Faisal of Saudi Arabia to state visitors in the 1970's,
its jacket showing a snake, representing the Jews, wrapped around the
crescent of Islam while casting its glance over the entire Eastern
Hemisphere. Another edition is an Arabic translation of "The Protocols" that
was posted on the Palestinian State Information Services Web site until
protests led to its removal last year.
Now "The Protocols" would presumably be affirmed with less embarrassment:
the Palestinian Authority is presently controlled by the militant Islamist
organization
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/h/hamas/i
ndex.html?inline=nyt-org> Hamas, whose 1988 covenant could almost be read as
a rewrite of "The Protocols." "Our struggle against the Jews is very great
and very serious," that covenant says. "With their money, they took control
of the world media, news agencies, the press, publishing houses,
broadcasting stations and others," it declares of Jews.
"They aim at undermining societies, destroying values, corrupting
consciences, deteriorating character and annihilating Islam," it says,
asserting that Jews were behind the French and Russian revolutions, the
Freemasons, the Rotary Clubs, imperialism, the two world wars, the
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/u/united_
nations/index.html?inline=nyt-org> United Nations, the drug trade and
alcoholism. It cites a source: "Their plan is embodied in 'The Protocols of
the Elders of Zion.' "
Unfortunately, this exhibition, organized by Daniel Greene, while
illuminating as far as it goes, doesn't do more than briefly refer to that
charter. It also only cursorily summarizes the perspective of the various
editions of "The Protocols" on display. And the text of "The Protocols"
itself can be read only on two pages of an open book.
Evidence that "The Protocols" was forged is scarcely more detailed, revealed
primarily in a wall-size reproduction of part of the 1921 Times of London
expos? that demonstrated that the book was cribbed from an 1864 polemic by
the French writer Maurice Joly attacking Napoleon III: "Dialogue in Hell
Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu." The words of Joly's villain,
Machiavelli, were later put into the mouths of conspiratorial Jews.
But what an opportunity was missed in not doing more with this exhibition!
For the tale of how this volume was forged ? which only recently came to
light with the release of Soviet-era files, suggesting that it was written
by Mathieu Golovinski, a Russian exile living in France in 1898 ? is
remarkable in itself. So are the peculiarities of its sources, which also
include an 1868 novel, "Biarritz" by Hermann Goedsche, which describes a
nocturnal meeting of rabbis in a Prague cemetery, where they discuss plans
for world domination. So a royalist Russian used the fantastical imaginings
of a German and the antiroyalist text of a Frenchman imitating the arguments
of an Italian, in order to defame Jews.
The text itself also demands more analysis. One reason for its resiliency
despite its demonstrably faked origins is that it is not just another
anti-Semitic tract. Its intellectual trappings reflect something profound
about anti-Semitism itself.
Conspiracy theorists abound in all arenas, of course, and there is surely
something satisfying about seeing varied sources of villainy so swiftly
click into place as manifestations of a single master plan. Advocates of
"The Protocols" are undeterred by evidence that the book is forged: it
reveals, they say, a higher truth.
That truth, though, is not really about Jews. Reading the text itself (which
can be found at  <http://ddickerson.igc.org/protocols.html>
ddickerson.igc.org/protocols.html), one is shocked not at its anti-Semitism,
but at its knotty, pseudophilosophic assertions; "The Protocols" really is
ersatz Machiavelli. It is astounding that something so difficult has been so
appealing.
"Men with bad instincts are more in number than the good," states its
opening sally; they are "beasts of prey" who can only be governed by
cunning. Their greatest delusion, asserts the purportedly Jewish narrator,
is their growing belief in liberalism. But political freedom is a "bait,"
being offered to them by Jews, who are using it to undermine the traditional
order. Soon societies everywhere, the narrator says, will fall prey to the
"despotism of capital, which is entirely in our hands."
A catalog of threatening modernity is being boasted of: liberal rights
proliferate, faith falters, commerce rules, citizens are seduced by
"corruption and luxury." "Think carefully of the successes we arranged for
Darwinism, Marxism, Nietzscheism," the Jews in "The Protocols" say, and look
what "disintegrating" effect these ideas have had. These Jews claim to be
undermining the world with "disenchantments" in order to take it over.
This forgery encapsulates the image of the cosmopolitan Jew as the
unprincipled molder of modernity.
But modernity and liberalism are never really meant seriously by these Jews;
the ideas are manipulations, fabrications. In addition these Jews sound as
if they could confirm
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/a/al_qaed
a/index.html?inline=nyt-org> Al Qaeda or Islamist movements in their
indictments against the West. The Jews of "The Protocols," in their
determination to dissolve national boundaries in pursuit of power and
profit, could also as easily be associated with globalization, inspiring
anti-Americanism as much as anti-Semitism. "The Protocols" feeds into a wide
variety of resentments and longings for a premodern world.
But the really astonishing thing is this: These Jews, in secretly planning
to overturn the very forces of liberalism and modernity they have just
created are doing just what their anti-Semitic nemeses desire. That is not
the only point of agreement. Look at the Jews' approach in "The Protocols."
They believe in absolute power. They will brook no opposition. They will use
the rights and values of liberalism to undermine it, exploiting its
weaknesses. They will be patient and ruthless and unrelenting.
Hitler once said he used similar techniques for similar ends. He did. So do
the Islamists. If "The Protocols" has found such resonance among
anti-Semites across the world, it is partly because, in its villainous Jews,
they see images of what they yearn to be.
Title: NYT Reign of Error
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on April 21, 2006, 02:26:45 PM
Always fun to watch the New York Times get bitch slapped.

Pinch Gets Punched
April 21st, 2006

Arthur Ochs ?Pinch? Sulzberger, Jr., the scion of a family dynasty founded by his great grandfather, is well into the process of destroying the patrimony handed to him on a silver platter. Even worse, the whole world is starting to notice, something which will make other family members distinctly unhappy. And because the family controls the election of a majority of the board of directors of the New York Times Company, despite owning a tiny fraction of the actual equity (thanks to a two class system of shares), this unhappiness could affect Pinch?s tenure in office.

No less an authority on corporate governance than Arianna Huffington, whose credentials are impeccable in matters of marriage, family fortunes, inheritance, and society soirees, noted on her eponymous website:

I hear the Sulzberger clan is also getting an earful from friends on the dinner party circuit from New York to Paris

Wall Street is Not Pleased

Quite a bit of ink, and billions of pixels have been expended over the open challenge launched against Pinch?s reign or error by the company?s fourth largest investor, Morgan Stanley Investment Management. At the company?s annual meeting Tuesday, holders of 28% of the company?s equity voted against  the management slate of directors, effectively saying in public that they want to dump Pinch and his cronies, as would happen in almost any publicly-held company performing as dismally as the Times.

There is delicious irony aplenty in the spectacle of a self-righteous lefty like Pinch, whose editorial page imperiously advises other companies on the fairness and morality of their corporate governance, clinging to power on the basis of a stock ownership scheme which disenfranchises the owners of the vast majority of equity, allowing them to elect only 30% of the board of directors. But as securities law professor and blogger Steven Bainbridge authoritatively points out,

Morgan Stanley bought Class A shares in the Times knowing that the Sulzbergers were in charge and would remain so by virtue of the dual class stock structure. Morgan Stanley knew or should have known that dual class stock presents a serious agency cost problem because incumbents who cannot be voted out of office are almost impossible to discipline. Morgan Stanley accepted whatever trade-offs the deal entailed as appropriate compensation for that risk.

He?s absolutely correct that no legal case can be successfully waged against the dual class shareholder arrangement. Moreover, The American Thinker has been warning shareholders in the New York Times Company for at least two years that Pinch Sulzberger?s management team has been dissipating the company?s formidable assets, and driving the company in the wrong direction. Smart investors like Morgan Stanley and other institutions and individuals should have noticed that the company doubled-down on newsprint operations through the expensive purchase of properties like the Boston Globe in negative growth New England, just as the internet was eating away at the newspaper industry, that the company has held onto local television stations as the market values have declined in the face of cable and internet competition, and that the company paid lavishly for its first acquisition in the internet industry.

And if any of the MBAs on Wall Street took the time to tease the underlying data out of the company?s 10-K reports (as Jack Risko and I did), where it was carefully buried, they would find that the core cash cow business, the metropolitan print edition of the New York Times, has been in a steep decline, milked to support the national edition?s growth, which has leveled off and not achieved profitability anything like the declining metro edition.

Given the impossibility of a Class A shareholder revolt actually ousting Pinch and his family-elected directors, either through elections or the courts, why did Morgan Stanley publicly stand against the management slate, even leaking word of its vote in advance?

The answer lies in the company?s balance sheet. The New York Times Company has been taking on debt to finance itself. In 2001, the company?s debt-to-equity ratio was 1 part debt to 1.51 parts equity. By 2005, the ratio was close to 1 to 1 (1.08, to be exact).  The company is still generating cash from operations, but it must also invest considerable sums, and so depends on the financial markets to sell commercial paper and other debt instruments.

Pinch?s Palace

Most notably, the company is in the process of developing a lavish new headquarters building in New York City (taking advantage, by the way, of public money incentives aimed at helping to rebuild New York in the wake of 9/11). The project is currently expected to cost over a billion dollars, though the company shares this cost with its developer-partner.

But the New York Times Company (and its shareholders) will still need to come up with almost 400 million dollars more to complete the Taj Mahal it is erecting as Pinch?s monument to himself. That?s quite a palace for company whose shares are down 40-some percent in the last year, and whose assets are deployed mostly in declining businesses like newspapers and broadcast television stations.

As the company?s 10-K blandly notes:

We have funded, and will continue to fund, our share of capital contributions from cash from operations and external financing sources.

Those external financing sources are now officially on notice from Morgan Stanley and several other major institutions that management is not, in their opinion, to be entrusted with the stewardship of the company?s assets.

And also on notice are members of the extended Sulzberger clan. If the company needs to cut its dividend to throw ?cash from operations? into Pinch?s palace because ?external financing sources? won?t throw in their bucks at an acceptable price, then some of those Class B shareholders might become very unhappy campers.

The next family reunion of the Sulzbergers ought to be interesting.

Thomas Lifson is the editor and publisher of The American Thinker.  He is a graduate of and former faculty member at Harvard Business School.
Title: Breathless Press Hypocrisy
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on April 24, 2006, 02:33:07 PM
Joseph Wilson's Revenge
Why no special prosecutor for the latest CIA leak case?
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, April 24, 2006, at 1:31 PM ET

If Mary O. McCarthy should ever be so desperate as to need a character witness, or to require one so badly that she must stoop to my level, I declare in advance that I shall step forward pro bono. I am quite willing to accept that whatever she did or did not do or say about the surreptitious incarceration of al-Qaida suspects overseas (and let's not prejudge this), she did it from the most exalted motives.

I accept this because, however much of her hard-earned money she threw away on making a donation to the John Kerry presidential campaign, she is obviously more than a mere partisan. Back in 1998, she wrote a formal memo to President Clinton about his decision to bomb the Al-Shifa factory outside Sudan's capital of Khartoum. I wrote a slew of articles at the time to prove that this wild Clintonian action was wag-the-doggery, pure and simple. (You can look it up if you like in my book No One Left To Lie To.) At that time, I interviewed a number of CIA people, both on and off the record, and came to the conclusion that it was the wrong factory in the wrong place and had been blitzed mainly because of Clinton's difficulties with Monica Lewinsky. The clincher was the direct plagiarism of his own hysterical speech of justification from the glib speech delivered by Michael Douglas, trying to de-knicker Annette Bening in the mediocre film The American President. If George Bush had even tried to pull anything like this, he would have been impeached by now, or so I hope.

Several senior CIA officials, and people in other departments, also let their dissent be known. I might instance Jack Downing, head of the agency's directorate of operations as well as the chief of the Africa bureau, and also Milton Bearden, veteran of many a covert op in Africa, who agreed to be interviewed by me for the record. On Oct. 27, 1999, the New York Times got around to publishing an article by James Risen in which it was made plain that Madeleine Albright had suppressed a report from the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research casting grave doubt on the Al-Shifa intelligence. The only person who still maintains that the factory was Osama Bin Laden's place for mixing Saddam Hussein's chemicals is Richard Clarke, who has been rather quiet on that subject lately. (He could well have been right at that, but not about this particular factory: See my Slate article on Clarke's Sudan contradictions.)

That was an exceptionally rich harvest of high-level disagreement overridden by a sitting president. And it strengthened the case for, to put it no higher, more "transparency" in the famously overpaid and underperforming CIA. This case has become no weaker, to say the least, in the years of George Tenet and other Clinton holdovers who left us under open skies on Sept. 11, 2001.

But now, instead of being rewarded for her probity, Mary McCarthy has been given the sack. And the New York Times rushes to her aid, with a three-hankie story on April 23, moistly titled "Colleagues Say Fired CIA Analyst Played by the Rules." This is only strictly true if she confined her disagreement to official channels, as she did when she wrote to Clinton in 1998. Sadly enough, the same article concedes that McCarthy may have lied and then eventually told the truth about having unauthorized contact with members of the press.

Well! In that case the remedy is clear. A special counsel must be appointed forthwith, to discover whether the CIA has been manipulating the media. All civil servants and all reporters with knowledge must be urged to comply, and to produce their notes or see the inside of a jail. No effort must be spared to discover the leaker. This is, after all, the line sternly proposed by the New York Times and many other media outlets in the matter of the blessed Joseph Wilson and his martyred CIA spouse, Valerie Plame.

I have a sense that this is not the media line that will be taken in the case of McCarthy, any more than it was the line taken when James Risen and others disclosed the domestic wiretapping being conducted by the NSA. Risen's story is also the object of an investigation into unlawful disclosure. One can argue that national security is damaged by unauthorized leaks, or one can argue that democracy is enhanced by them. But one cannot argue, in the case of a man who says that his CIA wife did not send him to Niger, that the proof that his wife did send him to Niger must remain a state secret. If one concerned official can brief the press off the record, then so can another.

It has long been pretty obvious to me that the official-secrecy faction within the state machinery has received a gigantic fillip from the press witch hunt against Lewis Libby and Karl Rove. What bureaucrat could believe the luck of an editorial campaign to uncover and punish leaking? A campaign that furthermore invokes the most reactionary law against disclosure this century: the Intelligence Identities Protection Act? It was obvious from the first that the press, in taking Wilson and Plame at their own estimation, was fashioning a rod for its own back. I await the squeals that will follow when this rod is applied, which it will be again and again.

Joseph Wilson update: In my article last week on Wilson's utter failure to notice the visit of Saddam Hussein's chief nuclear diplomat to Niger, I mentioned his substitution of another Iraqi name?Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf?as having just possibly approached some Niger businessmen and officials at an OAU summit in Algeria in 1999. Sahaf is now better known to us as the risible figure of "Baghdad Bob," which allowed Wilson to make mock of the whole thing. It is almost irrelevant when set beside the visit of Wissam al-Zahawie to Niger itself the same year, but at the time he attended the Algiers meeting, "Baghdad Bob" was?as I ought to have known and have since found out?Saddam Hussein's foreign minister. This fact is not mentioned in Wilson's terrible book, either. And Sahaf still had time to meet with some people from a tiny African state known only for its uranium!

Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. His most recent book is Thomas Jefferson: Author of America. His most recent collection of essays is titled Love, Poverty, and War.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2140496/
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 29, 2006, 06:38:16 PM
SPIES & LIES
By RALPH PETERS
April 28, 2006 -- IF a street-corner thug knowingly receives stolen goods for profit, he goes to jail. If a well-educated, privileged journalist profits from receiving classified information - stolen from our government - he or she gets a prize.
Is something wrong here?
Media outlets, including the generally responsible Washington Post, have had fits over a few retired generals' unclassified criticism of the Secretary of Defense, while simultaneously insisting on their own right to receive and publish our nation's wartime secrets - and to shield the identities of unethical bureaucrats who betray our nation's trust.
Since the Vietnam era, reporters have convinced themselves that they are the real heroes in any story. The archways above our journalism faculties soon may sport the maxim: "The Press can do no wrong."
But the press can do wrong. And it does it with gusto. Let me tell you what the illegal receipt and exploitation of our nation's secrets used to be called: Espionage. Spying. Yet today's "real" spies cause less harm to our national security than self-righteous journalists do.
A NATION at war must keep secrets. The media can't plead that classified documents just fell into their hands, obligating them to publish our secrets out of a noble respect for truth. That's bull, and every journalist knows it. Could a punk down on the block claim that, since he was offered a gun, he was obligated to aim it and pull the trigger?
Many in the media not only want to re-write election results and change national policies - they've been re-writing history, too. On the entertainment-and-propaganda side, George Clooney produced a gorgeous, seductive and whoppingly dishonest film about journalism last year, "Good Night, and Good Luck."
Deftly re-arranging the fall of Sen. Joseph McCarthy - by slighting the fact that only the Department of the Army had the guts to stand up to Tailgunner Joe at the height of his powers (a civilian lawyer for the Army asked the famous question, "Senator, have you no shame?") - the film leads the viewer to believe that a lone journalist, Edward R. Murrow, broke the senator's evil spell.
Of course, crediting the Army with the courage to defend the Constitution would have played havoc with the left-wing view of civil-military relations. But the greater omission had to do with Murrow's background. He made his bones with courageous radio coverage of the London Blitz. And he didn't feel compelled to tell the Nazi side of the story and help us feel Hitler's pain.
Edward R. Murrow kept secrets. Lots of them. He wanted the Allies to win. He even respected those in uniform. So he - and other journalists - remained silent about the landing exercise that went tragically awry at Slapton Sands, and about many another bad-for-morale event that might've made a hot headline. He kept D-Day-related secrets, too.
Do even our most self-adoring journalists really think that Edward R. Murrow would have published secret documents about prisons for senior Nazis during wartime?
NONE of us wants our media to engage in propaganda. We'd just like them to refrain from harming our country for selfish ends.
Which brings us to the Pulitzer-Prize-winning (and still not confirmed) story that claimed to reveal secret prisons holding a few high-ranking terrorists in Eastern Europe: If such facilities existed, what harm did they do to our country or the world? On the other hand, proclaiming their existence played into the hands of terrorists and America-haters.
That Pulitzer Prize wasn't really for journalism. It was a political statement. No one's going to get a journalism award for reporting on the War on Terror's successes or progress in Iraq. Only left-wing children get a prize.
AFTER laboring in the intelligence vineyards for over two decades, I can assure you of a few things: First, there are no super-top-secret, black-helicopter, kidnap-American-Idol-judges conspiracies hidden since 1776. Second, there are legitimate secrets that must be protected - usually because revealing them would tip our collection methods or operational techniques to our country's mortal enemies (as the secret-prisons story did).
I can assure you of a third thing, too: If an intelligence professional saw a genuine threat to the Constitution or to the rights of his or her fellow citizens, he or she would step forward - and be justified in doing so.
But pique over your presidential candidate's defeat or mere disagreement with a policy does not justify anyone - intelligence professional or political appointee - in passing classified information to a party not authorized to receive it.
This applies to White House staffers, too, no matter how senior. The law should take its course, in every case, from the briefing room to the newsroom. The Washington culture of leaks is a bipartisan disgrace - and a real-and-present danger to our security.
WE face savage enemies who obey no laws, honor no international conventions, treaties or compacts, and who believe they do the will of a vengeful god. Under the circumstances, we need to be able to keep an occasional secret.
So I would ask three questions of those journalists chasing prizes by printing our wartime secrets:
* Can you honestly claim to have done our nation any good?
* Did you weigh the harm your act might cause, including the loss of American lives?
* Is the honorable patriotism of Edward R. Murrow truly dead in American journalism?
If you draw a government (or contractor) paycheck and willfully compromise classified material, you should go to jail. If you are a journalist in receipt of classified information and you publish it to the benefit of our enemies, you should go to jail (you may, however, still accept your journalism prize, as long as the trophy has no sharp edges). And consider yourself fortunate: The penalty for treason used to be death.
When a journalist is given classified information, his or her first call shouldn't be to an editor. It should be to the FBI.
Title: Oily Interests
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on May 04, 2006, 04:01:56 PM
New Offshore Drilling = More Oil and Fish

by Humberto Fontova
Posted May 03, 2006

That clique of noisy, well-heeled and politically powerful south Florida voters is at it again. And as usual, Gov. Jeb Bush and Sen. Mel Martinez are pandering shamelessly. Never mind the national interest. This cantankerous group's archaic prejudices still prevail. Never mind simple logic. Their emotions still guide our national policy to the frustration of the rest of the nation, to the detriment of our economic well-being and to the bitter amusement of much of the world.

Never mind almost half a century of visible evidence against their moss-ridden bugaboos. Their zealotry, intransigence and apparently incurable block-headedness again prevail. This groveling by Republican politicians to a fringe group of highly emotional Florida voters is a national scandal by now. It's high time these hotheads in Florida got with the national program. They need to shed their petty obsessions with the past and start assessing the national interest soberly and in light of current developments, not stale policies enacted in the heat of hysteria almost half a century ago. Most outrageous of all, their policies hurt the very people they claim to help.

I refer, of course, to offshore oil drilling, currently banned off Florida because of rich pressure groups. That shock and awe at the gas pump might wake up a few people. There's something called the law of supply and demand. Rant and rave all you want, bellow and whine all you want, throw as many tantrums as you want, hold as many rain dances as you want, hold as many s?ances with ghosts as you want, sacrifice as many virgins as you want, burn as many witches as you want -- but no amount of legislation or wishful thinking will abolish it.

We need more oil and there are millions of barrels offshore, especially in the eastern Gulf of Mexico off Florida. Soon Fidel Castro himself with the help of Spanish and Chinese oil companies (who are not subject to U.S. environmental rules) will be drilling for it barely 45 miles of the Florida coast. This raises the fascinating prospect of Florida beaches fouled by the very oil we'll later use to fuel the SUVs to transport us to those beaches -- all purchased from Communists who crave to blow us up.

Only politicians could create such a prospect.

Actually the fouling of beaches is a long shot. The environmental dangers of oil exploration and extraction rank right up with the marvels of Cuba's healthcare as modern man's most zealously cherished fables. It's the transportation of oil that accounts for the overwhelming number of oil spills. Recall the Valdez, the Cadiz, and the Argo Merchant. These were all tanker spills.

And even these (though hyped hysterically as environmental catastrophes) always play out as minor blips, those pictures of oil soaked seagulls notwithstanding. To the horror and anguish of professional greenies, Alaska's Prince William Sound recovered completely. More birds get fried by landing on power lines and smashed to pulp against picture windows in one week than perished from three decades of oil spills.

In fact, Florida's gorgeous and tourist-packed beaches have suffered from an ugly oil spill. It happened summer of 1976 off Panama City and Destin, by far the most beautiful beaches in America. That sugar white sand and those emerald waters were fouled from a tanker spill. The current drilling ban will make another such spill more likely. The ban not only puts us at the mercy of shaky sheikdoms and Hugo Chavez for oil, it also means we'll need to keep transporting that oil stateside -- typically to refineries in Louisiana and Texas. This path takes those tankers smack in front of Florida's beaches.

But there's another resource shortage that more drilling would solve. "Big-Fish Stocks Fall 90 Percent Since 1950," said a National Geographic headline a couple years ago. "Our demand for seafood appears to be insatiable. From giant blue marlin to mighty blue fin tuna, and from tropical groupers to Antarctic cod, industrial fishing has scoured the global ocean. There is no blue frontier left."

Then let's create a new fishing frontier, using offshore oil platforms and the explosion of marine life that always accompany their installation. It happened here in Louisiana. The observable evidence is overwhelming. The verdict is in. Of the 3,739 offshore oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico nowadays, 3,203 lie off the Louisiana coast. We love offshore oil drilling, and not just for the loot (taxes) extorted from oil companies for the privilege.

"Environmentalists" wake up in the middle of the night sweating and whimpering about offshore oil platforms only because they've never seen what's under them. This proliferation of marine life around the platforms turned on its head every "expert" opinion of its day. The original plan, mandated by federal environmental "experts" back in the late '40s, was to remove the big, ugly, polluting, environmentally hazardous contraptions as soon as they stopped producing. Fine, said the oil companies.

About 15 years ago some wells played out off Louisiana and the oil companies tried to comply. Their ears are still ringing from the clamor fishermen put up. Turns out those platforms are going nowhere, and by popular demand of those with a bigger stake in the marine environment than any "environmentalist."

Every "environmental" superstition against these structures was turned on its head. Marine life had EXPLODED around these huge artificial reefs. Louisiana produces on third of America's seafood In fact a study by Louisiana State University shows that 85% of Louisiana offshore fishing trips involve fishing around these structures and that there's 50 times more marine life around an oil production platform than in the surrounding Gulf bottoms. Louisiana produces one-third of America's commercial fisheries -- because of, not in spite of, these platforms.

All of this and not one major oil spill in half a century -- not one. As more assurance, today's drilling technology compares to the one used only 20 years ago about like the Kitty Hawk compares to a jumbo jet. The one that gave us the Santa Barbara Oil Spill in 1969 compares to today's like a fossil.

Market forces, not meddlesome bureaucrats, account for cleaner, safer oil drilling. A deep-water drilling rig might cost $1 billion. This thing has to produce oil daily -- hourly(!) -- to recoup such a gargantuan investment. A blowout and spill would shut them down for weeks. No oil company could stay in business that way.

In 1986 Louisiana started the Rigs to Reef program, a cooperative effort by oil companies, the feds and the state. This program literally pays the oil companies to keep the platforms in the Gulf. Now they just cut them off at the bottom and topple them over as artificial reefs; more than 60 have been toppled thus far.

Louisiana wildlife and fisheries officials were recently invited to Australia to help them with a similar program. Think about it: here's the nation with the Great Barrier Reef, the world's biggest natural reef, the world's top dive destination, asking for help from Louisiana about developing exciting dive and fishing sites by using the very structures that epitomize (in greenie eyes) environmental disaster.

Mark Ferrulo, a Florida "environmental activist" who lobbies incessantly against offshore drilling called Louisiana's coastal waters "the nation's toilet."

Then Florida's fishing fleet must love fishing in toilets. And her restaurants must love serving what's in them. Many of the red snapper you eat in Florida restaurants are caught around Louisiana's oil platforms. We see the Florida-registered boats tied up to them constantly. Sometimes we can barely squeeze in.

It also turns out that Louisiana's natural reefs are much healthier than the much-protected and pampered Florida reefs. The Flower Garden coral reefs lie off the Louisiana-Texas border. Unlike any of the Florida Keys reefs, they're surrounded by dozens of offshore oil platforms that have been pumping away for the past 40 years. Yet according to G.P. Schmahl, a Federal biologist who worked for decades in both places, "The Flower Gardens are much healthier, more pristine than anything in the Florida Keys. It was a surprise to me, and I think it's a surprise to most people."

"A key measure of the health of a reef is the amount of area taken up by coral," according to a report by Steve Gittings, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's science coordinator for marine sanctuaries. "Louisiana's Flower Garden boasts nearly 50 percent coral cover ... in the Florida Keys ... it can run as little as 5 percent."

The panorama under an offshore oil platform staggers the most experienced divers. I've seen divers fresh from the Cayman's Wall surface from under an oil platform too wired on adrenaline to do anything but stutter and wipe spastically at the snot that trails to their chins. I've seen an experienced scuba-babe fresh from Belize climb out from under a platform gasping and shrieking at the sights and sensations, oblivious to the sights and sensations she was providing with her bikini top near her navel.

http://www.humaneventsonline.com/article.php?print=yes&id=14450
Title: The CIA and Search & Seizure
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on May 10, 2006, 09:37:33 AM
May 10, 2006, 6:19 a.m.
Unwarranted Criticism
General Hayden?s reading of the Fourth Amendment is correct, and his critics are mistaken.

By Adam White

General Michael Hayden has been nominated to direct the CIA, but his confirmation may have less to do with the CIA than with the formerly Hayden-led National Security Agency (NSA)?or, more specifically, with the NSA?s widely-publicized surveillance of communications between U.S. persons and suspected terrorist organizations. Already, critics point to Hayden?s January 2006 speech at the National Press Club, where his explanation of the rights afforded by the Fourth Amendment was received with great hostility.

Hayden was right and his critics were wrong. The next CIA director?s understanding of the Fourth Amendment entirely comports with the text of the amendment and with the Supreme Court?s interpretation of it.

In his January speech, Hayden was confronted by Knight-Ridder?s Jonathan Landay over the protections of the Fourth Amendment. The exchange, reprinted Monday on Editor & Publisher?s website, bears reprinting in full:

LANDAY: Jonathan Landay with Knight Ridder. I'd like to stay on the same issue, and that had to do with the standard by which you use to target your wiretaps. I'm no lawyer, but my understanding is that the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution specifies that you must have probable cause to be able to do a search that does not violate an American's right against unlawful searches and seizures. Do you use ?

GEN. HAYDEN: No, actually ? the Fourth Amendment actually protects all of us against unreasonable search and seizure.

LANDAY: But the ?

GEN. HAYDEN: That's what it says.

LANDAY: But the measure is probable cause, I believe.

GEN. HAYDEN: The amendment says unreasonable search and seizure.

LANDAY: But does it not say probable ?

GEN. HAYDEN: No. The amendment says ?

LANDAY: The court standard, the legal standard ?

GEN. HAYDEN: ? unreasonable search and seizure.

LANDAY: The legal standard is probable cause, General. You used the terms just a few minutes ago, "We reasonably believe." And a FISA court, my understanding is, would not give you a warrant if you went before them and say "we reasonably believe"; you have to go to the FISA court, or the attorney general has to go to the FISA court and say, "we have probable cause."

And so what many people believe ? and I'd like you to respond to this ? is that what you've actually done is crafted a detour around the FISA court by creating a new standard of "reasonably believe" in place of probable cause because the FISA court will not give you a warrant based on reasonable belief, you have to show probable cause. Could you respond to that, please?

GEN. HAYDEN: Sure. I didn't craft the authorization. I am responding to a lawful order. All right? The attorney general has averred to the lawfulness of the order.

Just to be very clear ? and believe me, if there's any amendment to the Constitution that employees of the National Security Agency are familiar with, it's the Fourth. And it is a reasonableness standard in the Fourth Amendment. And so what you've raised to me ? and I'm not a lawyer, and don't want to become one ? what you've raised to me is, in terms of quoting the Fourth Amendment, is an issue of the Constitution. The constitutional standard is "reasonable." And we believe ? I am convinced that we are lawful because what it is we're doing is reasonable.

Hayden?s critics unanimously sided with Landay; sharp (often mocking) denunciations quickly appeared on Media Matters, Daily Kos, Countdown with Keith Olbermann (?Well, maybe they have a different Constitution over there at the NSA?), and elsewhere.

This week, following Hayden?s nomination, Editor & Publisher republished the Hayden-Landay exchange under the headline, ?Hayden, Likely Choice for CIA Chief, Displayed Shaky Grip on 4th Amendment at Press Club.? And just yesterday, Fred Kaplan wrote an article for Slate in which he relates part of the exchange. He then comments, "This is startling. Elsewhere in the speech, Hayden said, 'If there's any amendment to the Constitution that employees of the National Security Agency are familiar with, it's the Fourth.' And he doesn't know that it requires ?probable cause? as the criterion for ?reasonable? search? ... Hayden may have dug his own hole with this one.? The speech will probably be reprinted by many other critics in coming weeks, and an enterprising member of the Senate Intelligence Committee may very well quote the speech during Gen. Hayden?s confirmation hearing. But such critics would read the Fourth Amendment as poorly as Landay did.

As the Fourth Amendment provides (emphasis added),

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

On its face, the amendment only provides for protection against unreasonable searches and seizures, while it later provides that no warrant shall issue without ?probable cause.? Landay and Hayden?s critics mistakenly apply the ?probable cause? requirement to the ?searches and seizures? provision. That reading is erroneous on its face; to apply the amendment?s warrant requirements to the searches and seizures clause would also require that searches be supported ?by oath or affirmation,? with the objects of the search described in advance. Hayden?s reading?that searches must only be ?reasonable??is the better reading.

Hayden?s critics? mistaken reading of the Fourth Amendment is not even supported by the Supreme Court?s decisions. True, the Supreme Court, in interpreting and applying the searches and seizure provision, has in many cases equated ?probable cause? with ?reasonableness,? even in cases where a warrant is not required. But the Court has explicitly warned that the two terms are not equivalent in all circumstances. In the Vernonia School District 47J v. Acton (1995), for example, the Court roundly rejected Hayden?s critics? reading of the amendment (emphasis in original):

Warrants cannot be issued, of course, without the showing of probable cause required by the Warrant Clause. But a warrant is not required to establish the reasonableness of all government searches; and when a warrant is not required (and the Warrant Clause therefore not applicable), probable cause is not invariably required either. A search unsupported by probable cause can be constitutional, we have said, ?when special needs, beyond the normal need for law enforcement, make the warrant and probable-cause requirement impracticable.?

Critics can argue whether the government?s surveillance program satisfies the ?special needs? requirement spelled out by the Supreme Court, but they can?t argue that the Fourth Amendment (either on its face or as interpreted by the Supreme Court) requires that all searches be supported by probable cause. Such criticism of Gen. Hayden would be both unwarranted and unreasonable.

?Adam J. White was recently a clerk on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. His article on Justice Robert Jackson?s draft opinions in the Korean War-era Steel Seizure Cases will appear in the Albany Law Review later this year.



National Review Online - http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ODgxN2VkMzA3MTFjNWFmNzZjNzZiODVlYzI3YTdiZTc=
Title: On the Anvil
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on May 11, 2006, 10:05:34 AM
May 11, 2006, 6:10 a.m.
In Our Backyard
If only McCain and Kennedy lived on ranches in southern Arizona.

By Leo W. Banks

I know how to kill the McCain-Kennedy immigration bill and the illusions that inspire it. We need every citizen to spend a day at John and Pat King's Anvil Ranch in southern Arizona. The experience would create an overnight revolution in America's view of this domestic crisis.

The Kings live every day with barking dogs, vandalism, guns at their bedside, trash on their land, and most tragically, human remains. The bodies of seven illegals were found on the 50,000-acre Anvil last year.

?Can you imagine dying of heat prostration out there?? says Pat King, a 62-year-old former nurse. ?It has got to be the most awful thing. I wish the two countries would get together and stop this. In this whole 50-mile area, there is no law. It's a frontier.?

I visited the Anvil a week ago Sunday. The night before, the Minutemen had wrapped up a month-long watch at the ranch, and the nationwide demonstrations to demand rights for illegal immigrants would begin the next morning.

I've visited many Arizona ranches, and it always surprises me how quickly I can travel from Tucson to a combat zone. It takes 50 minutes to reach Anvil's headquarters in heavily-crossed Altar Valley, located to the southwest of the city. Even with that proximity, most people in Tucson?to say nothing of Maine or Washington, D.C.?live in blissful ignorance of the worsening situation here.

When Pat discusses the problem with friends, they say, ?Don't you think you're exaggerating?? No one would ask that if they saw the 40 bicycles stacked against one of the Anvil's out-buildings. They're the favored means of transportation for drug smugglers, who pack their cargo onto saddlebags and pedal across our border, then abandon the bikes.

As for vandalism, Pat describes what they experience today as ?wanton,??water troughs filled with garbage, pipes cut, valves hammered to pieces. She jokes that they're thinking of putting a tetherball by the troughs to occupy the illegals so they aren't so destructive.

?You have to understand, we're under siege here,? she says. ?Every day my son and husband check water and fences and redo the damage they've done. Not to get on with our work, but to undo the damage. Every. Day.?

Micaela McGibbon, Pat's daughter, took me on a ranch tour, and in one mile we crossed 30 smuggling trails. In a wash, we inspected sophisticated brush huts in which illegals rest during trips north.

But this nightmare comes right to the Kings' doorstep. Imagine living under permanent stakeout. The Kings do. They removed mesquite trees from around their house because illegals would hide underneath them and wait for the house to empty.

For nine years, the family has been unable to leave home unless someone stays to guard against burglars. They celebrate Christmas in shifts. On Christmas Eve, Pat's son and daughter-in-law go to Tucson to visit family, and when they return John and Pat go on Christmas morning.

Micaela can no longer do chores unless accompanied by her father or a brother, and taking her 4-year-old daughter out on horseback is forbidden. ?We can't go anywhere without an escort,? Micaela says.

The Kings have complained to politicians and law enforcement for years. ?They talk this rule of law stuff, but it doesn't mean a thing,? Pat says. ?When you realize nothing's going to happen, you have to do self-protection.?

During their April watch, Minutemen spotted 1,501 illegals on the Anvil, and of these the Border Patrol arrested 500. But it turned into a circus. ACLU volunteers showed up every day to monitor and harass the Minutemen, at times sounding car horns and flashing lights to alert the illegals that the Border Patrol was coming.

This is the border crisis in microcosm?confused Americans rush to defend lawbreakers while ignoring, even demonizing, law-abiding citizens who suffer daily affronts to basic liberties on land their family has tended for 115 years.

The Anvil's location, 38 miles north of the border, means that by the time illegals arrive there, they've been walking for days and are sometimes in desperate shape.

Between May and August last year, cowboy Jason Cathcart found four sets of human remains. He came to dread spotting what looked like little white balls in the distance. Those ?balls? turned out to be human skulls.

In March, a man arrived at the Anvil's front gate so distraught that he ran into the yard and tried to impale himself on a pitchfork. Later he took up a bale hook and used the pointed end to slash his throat.

?This is what life is like in the Altar Valley,? says Pat.

Certainly the McCain-Kennedy bill will do nothing to change life here. Pat likens the bill, with its plan for amnesty, a guest-worker program, and negligible enforcement, to swatting flies in your house with the doors and windows wide open.

Ask yourself: Would the Altar Valley be a war zone if McCain lived here? If Kennedy's Hyannis Port compound were magically transplanted to southern Arizona, how long do you think it'd be before he rewrote his bill? The first time Kennedy saw 30 illegals dashing across his property, he'd trip over his Guatemalan lawn guy rushing to the Senate floor to demand enforcement.

That's one of the American tragedies at play here, the abandonment of ordinary citizens by our country's elites, and most strikingly, the abandonment of the very laws they themselves have written.

The resulting invasion has driven legal Arizona residents from their land, including John King's aunt. She lived south of the Anvil for more than 40 years, but sold out rather than keep fighting a battle the federal government has no intention of winning.

Pat thinks the street demonstrators?she calls them cowards?need to show their bravery by returning to Mexico and changing that country, not ours.

?We did that with the Boston Tea Party,? she says. ?We were taxed without representation and we rose up and changed it. I think the students in the streets and these young ACLU individuals here are being used. When you talk to them you realize it's all emotion. There's no logic. They don't have a clue.?

When it comes to what's really happening on our southern border, neither does the rest of the country. But that would change if every American spent a day at the Anvil.

?Leo W. Banks is a writer in Tucson.



National Review Online - http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NjljMTQxZWM2MWQxMjQ0NzdjZGYzNGRhMGY5MjBkN2Y=
Title: Missed Connections
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on May 15, 2006, 04:17:53 PM
To connect the dots, you have to see the dots


May 14, 2006

BY MARK STEYN SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST
 

Here are two news stories from the end of last week. The first one you may have heard about. As "The Today Show's" Matt Lauer put it:


"Does the government have your number? This morning a shocking new report that the National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone records of tens of millions of Americans."

The second story comes from the United Kingdom and what with Lauer's hyperventilating you may have missed it. It was the official report into the July 7 bus and Tube bombings. As The Times of London summarized the conclusions:

"Mohammad Sidique Khan, the leader of the bomb cell, had come to the attention of MI5 [Britain's domestic intelligence agency] on five occasions but had never been pursued as a serious suspect . . .

"A lack of communication between police Special Branch units, MI5 and other agencies had hampered the intelligence-gathering operation;

"There was a lack of co-operation with foreign intelligence services and inadequate intelligence coverage in . . ."

Etc., etc., ad nauseam.

So there are now two basic templates in terrorism media coverage:

Template A (note to editors: to be used after every terrorist atrocity): "Angry family members, experts and opposition politicians demand to know why complacent government didn't connect the dots."

Template B (note to editors: to be used in the run-up to the next terrorist atrocity): "Shocking new report leaked to New York Times for Pulitzer Prize Leak Of The Year Award nomination reveals that paranoid government officials are trying to connect the dots! See pages 3,4,6,7,8, 13-37."

How do you connect the dots? To take one example of what we're up against, two days before 9/11, a very brave man, the anti-Taliban resistance leader Ahmed Shah Massoud, was assassinated in Afghanistan by killers posing as journalists. His murderers were Algerians traveling on Belgian passports who'd arrived in that part of the world on visas issued by the Pakistani High Commission in the United Kingdom. That's three more countries than many Americans have visited. The jihadists are not "primitives". They're part of a sophisticated network: They travel the world, see interesting places, meet interesting people -- and kill them. They're as globalized as McDonald's -- but, on the whole, they fill in less paperwork. They're very good at compartmentalizing operations: They don't leave footprints, just a toeprint in Country A in Time Zone B and another toe in Country E in Time Zone K. You have to sift through millions of dots to discern two that might be worth connecting.

I'm a strong believer in privacy rights. I don't see why Americans are obligated to give the government their bank account details and the holdings therein. Other revenue agencies in other free societies don't require that level of disclosure. But, given that the people of the United States are apparently entirely cool with that, it's hard to see why lists of phone numbers (i.e., your monthly statement) with no identifying information attached to them is of such a vastly different order of magnitude. By definition, "connecting the dots" involves getting to see the dots in the first place.

Sen. Pat Leahy (D-Vt.) feels differently. "Look at this headline," huffed the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee. "The secret collection of phone call records of tens of millions of Americans. Now, are you telling me that tens of millions of Americans are involved with al-Qaida?"

No. But next time he's flying from D.C. to Burlington, Vt., on a Friday afternoon he might look at the security line: Tens of millions of Americans are having to take their coats and shoes off! Are you telling me that tens of millions of ordinary shoe-wearing Americans are involved with al-Qaida?

Of course not. Fifteen out of 19 of the 9/11 killers were citizens of Saudi Arabia. So let's scrap the tens of millions of law-abiding phone records, and say we only want to examine the long-distance phone bills of, say, young men of Saudi origin living in the United States. Can you imagine what Leahy and Lauer would say to that? Oh, no! Racial profiling! The government's snooping on people whose only crime is "dialing while Arab." In a country whose Transportation Security Administration personnel recently pulled Daniel Brown off the plane as a security threat because he had traces of gunpowder on his boots -- he was a uniformed U.S. Marine on his way home from Iraq -- in such a culture any security measure will involve "tens of millions of Americans": again by definition, if one can't profile on the basis of religion or national origin or any other identifying mark with identity-group grievance potential, every program will have to be at least nominally universal.

Last week, apropos the Moussaoui case, I remarked on the absurdity of victims of the London Blitz demanding the German perpetrators be brought before a British court. Melanie Phillips, a columnist with the Daily Mail in London and author of the alarming new book Londonistan, responded dryly, "Ah, but if we were fighting World War Two now, we'd lose."

She may be right. It's certainly hard to imagine Pat Leahy as FDR or Harry Truman or any other warmongering Democrat of yore. To be sure, most of Pat's Vermont voters would say there is no war; it's just a lot of fearmongering got up by Bush and Cheney to distract from the chads they stole in Florida or whatever. And they're right -- if, by "war," you mean tank battles in the North African desert and air forces bombing English cities night after night. But today no country in the world can fight that kind of war with America. If that's all "war" is, then (once more by definition) there can be no war. If you seek to weaken, demoralize and bleed to death the United States and its allies, you can only do it asymmetrically -- by killing thousands of people and then demanding a criminal trial, by liaising with terrorist groups in Afghanistan and Pakistan and then demanding the government cease inspecting your phone records.

I yield to no one in my antipathy to government, but not everyone who's on the federal payroll is a boob, a time-server, a politically motivated malcontent or principal leak supplier to the New York Times. Suppose you're a savvy mid-level guy in Washington, you've just noticed a pattern, you think there might be something in it. But it requires enormous will to talk your bosses into agreeing to investigate further, and everyone up the chain is thinking, gee, if this gets out, will Pat Leahy haul me before the Senate and kill my promotion prospects? There was a lot of that before 9/11, and thousands died.
Title: VDH on AAA
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on May 19, 2006, 11:06:46 AM
May 19, 2006, 6:26 a.m.
Anti-Anti-Americanism
Dealing with the crazy world after Iraq.

By Victor Davis Hanson

How does the United States deal with a corrupt world in which we are blamed even for the good we do, while others are praised when they do wrong or remain indifferent to suffering?

We are accused of unilateral and preemptory bullying of the madman Mr. Ahmadinejad, whose reactors that will be used to ?wipe out? the ?one-bomb? state of Israel were supplied by Swiss, German, and Russian profit-minded businessmen. No one thinks to chastise those who sold Iran the capability of destroying Israel.

Here in the United States we worry whether we are tough enough with the Gulf sheikdoms in promoting human rights and democratic reform. Meanwhile China simply offers them cash for oil, no questions asked. Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez pose as anti-Western zealots to Western naifs. The one has never held an election; the other tries his best to end the democracy that brought him to power. Meanwhile our fretting elites, back from Europe or South America, write ever more books on why George Bush and the Americans are not liked.

Hamas screams that we are mean for our logical suggestion that free American taxpayers will not subsidize such killers and terrorists. Those in the Middle East whine about Islamophobia, but keep silent that there is not allowed a Sunni mosque in Iran or a Christian church in Saudi Arabia. An entire book could be written about the imams and theocrats?in Iran, Egypt, the West Bank, Pakistan, and the Gulf States?who in safety issue fatwas and death pronouncements against Americans in Iraq and any who deal with the ?infidel,? and yet send their spoiled children to private schools in Britain and the United States, paid for by their own blackmail money from corrupt governments.

You get the overall roundup: the Europeans have simply absorbed as their own the key elements of ossified French foreign policy?utopian rhetoric and anti-Americanism can pretty much give you a global pass to sell anything you wish to anyone at anytime.

China is more savvy. It discards every disastrous economic policy Mao ever enacted, but keeps two cornerstones of Maoist dogma: imply force to bully, and keep the veneer of revolutionary egalitarianism to mask cutthroat capitalism and diplomacy, from copyright theft and intellectual piracy to smiling at rogue clients like North Korea and disputing the territorial claims of almost every neighbor in sight.

Oil cuts a lot of idealism in the Middle East. The cynicism is summed up simply as ?Those who sell lecture, and those who buy listen.? American efforts in Iraq?the largest aid program since the Marshall Plan, where American blood and treasure go to birth democracy?are libeled as ?no blood for oil.? Yet a profiteering Saudi Arabia or Kuwait does more to impoverish poor oil-importing African and Asian nations than any regime on earth. But this sick, corrupt world keeps mum.

And why not ask Saudi Arabia about its now lionized and well-off al-Ghamdi clan? Aside from the various Ghamdi terrorists and bin-Laden hangers-on, remember young Ahmad, the 20-year-old medical student who packed his suicide vest with ball bearings and headed for Mosul, where he blew up 18 Americans? Or how about dear Ahmad and Hamza, the Ghamdis who helped crash Flight 175 into the South Tower on September 11? And please do not forget either the Saudi icon Said Ghamdi, who, had he not met Todd Beamer and Co. on Flight 93, would have incinerated the White House or the Capitol.

So we know the symptoms of this one-sided anti-Americanism and its strange combination of hatred, envy, and yearning?but, so far, not its remedy. In the meantime, the global caricature of the United States, in the aftermath of Iraq, is proving near fatal to the Bush administration, whose idealism and sharp break with past cynical realpolitik have earned it outright disdain. Indeed, the more al Qaeda is scattered, and the more Iraq looks like it will eventually emerge as a constitutional government, the angrier the world seems to become at the United States. American success, it seems, is even worse than failure.

Some of the criticism is inevitable. America is in an unpopular reconstruction of Iraq that has cost lives and treasure. Observers looked only at the explosions, never what the sacrifice was for?especially when it is rare for an Afghan or Iraqi ever to visit the United States to express thanks for giving their peoples a reprieve from the Taliban and Saddam Hussein.

We should also accept that the United States, as the world?s policeman, always suffers the easy hatred of the cops, who are as ankle-bitten when things are calm as they are desperately sought when danger looms. America is the genitor and largest donor to the United Nations. Its military is the ultimate guarantor of free commerce by land and sea, and its wide-open market proves the catalyst of international trade. More immigrants seek its shores than all other designations combined?especially from countries of Latin America, whose criticism of the United States is the loudest.

Nevertheless, while we cannot stop anti-Americanism, here (a consequence, in part, of a deep-seeded, irrational sense of inferiority) and abroad, we can adopt a wiser stance that puts the onus of responsibility more on our critics.

We have a window of 1 to 3 years in Iran before it deploys nuclear weapons. Let Ahmadinejad talk and write?the loonier and longer, the better, as we smile and ignore him and his monstrous ilk.

Let also the Europeans and Arabs come to us to ask our help, as sphinx-like we express ?concern? for their security needs. Meanwhile we should continue to try to appeal to Iranian dissidents, stabilize Iraq and Afghanistan, and resolve that at the eleventh hour this nut with his head in a well will not obtain the methods to destroy what we once knew as the West.

Ditto with Hamas. Don?t demonize it?just don?t give it any money. Praise democracy, but not what was elected.

We should curtail money to Mr. Mubarak as well. No need for any more sermons on democracy?been there, done that. Now we should accept with quiet resignation that if an aggregate $50 billion in give-aways have earned us the most anti-American voices in the Middle East, then a big fat zero for Egypt might be an improvement. After all, there must be something wrong with a country that gave us both Mohammad Atta and Dr. Zawahiri.

The international Left loves to champion humanitarian causes that do not involve the immediate security needs of the United States, damning us for inaction even as they are the first to slander us for being military interventionists. We know the script of Haiti, Mogadishu, and the Balkans, where Americans are invited in, and then harped at both for using and not using force. Where successful, the credit goes elsewhere; failure is always ours alone. Still, we should organize multinational efforts to save those in Darfur?but only after privately insisting that every American soldier must be matched by a European, Chinese, and Russian peacekeeper.

There are other ways to curb our exposure to irrational hatred that seems so to demoralize the American public. First, we should cease our Olympian indifference to hypocrisy, instead pointing out politely inconsistencies in European, Middle Eastern, and Chinese morality. Why not express more concern about the inexplicable death of Balkan kingpin prisoners at The Hague or European sales of nuclear technology to madmen or institutionalized Chinese theft of intellectual property?

We need to reexamine the nature of our overseas American bases, elevating the political to the strategic, which, it turns out, are inseparable after all. To take one small example: When Greeks pour out on their streets to rage at a visiting American secretary of State, we should ask ourselves, do we really need a base in Crete that is so costly in rent and yet ensures Greeks security without responsibility or maturity? Surely once we leave, those brave opportunistic souls in the streets of Athens can talk peace with the newly Islamist Turkish government, solve Cyprus on their own, or fend off terrorists from across the Mediterranean.

The point is not to be gratuitously punitive or devolve into isolationism, but to continue to apply to Europe the model that was so successful in the Philippines and now South Korea?ongoing redeployment of Americans to where we can still strike in emergencies, but without empowering hypocritical hosts in time of peace.

We must also sound in international fora as friendly and cooperative as possible with the Russians, Chinese, and the lunatic Latin American populists?even as we firm up our contingency plans and strengthen military ties of convenience with concerned states like Australia, Japan, India, and Brazil.

The United States must control our borders, for reasons that transcend even terrorism and national security. One way to cool the populist hatred emanating from Latin America is to ensure that it becomes a privilege, not a birthright, to enter the United States. In traveling the Middle East, I notice the greatest private complaint is not Israel or even Iraq, but the inability to enter the United States as freely as in the past. And that, oddly, is not necessarily a bad thing, as those who damn us are slowly learning that their cheap hatred has had real consequences.

Then there is, of course, oil. It is the great distorter, one that punishes the hard-working poor states who need fuel to power their reforming economies while rewarding failed regimes for their mischief, by the simple accident that someone else discovered it, developed it, and then must purchase it from under their dictatorial feet. We must drill, conserve, invent, and substitute our way out of this crisis to ensure the integrity of our foreign policy, to stop the subsidy of crazies like Chavez and Ahmadinejad, and to lower the world price of petroleum that taxes those who can least afford it. There is a reason, after all, why the al-Ghamdis are popular icons in Saudi Arabia rather than on the receiving end of a cruise missile.

So we need more firm explanation, less loud assertion, more quiet with our enemies, more lectures to neutrals and friends?and always the very subtle message that cheap anti-Americanism will eventually have consequences.

? Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is the author, most recently, of A War Like No Other. How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War.


National Review Online - http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=N2RlYjRmMGM0NzIyZTA2NjFkZjg2Y2ZjNzI0MjdjMDM=
Title: Presidential Fortitude
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on May 23, 2006, 09:52:50 AM
May 23, 2006, 6:08 a.m.
The Bravest President
This guy is good.

By Michael Novak

Now when he is at his lowest point yet in the polls is the time for those who love and admire President Bush to say so. Depending on the final success of his already successful campaign to bring the rudiments of democracy to Afghanistan and Iraq, George W. Bush, #43, may go down as a truly great president, who against fierce odds turned the entire Middle East in a new, more democratic, and more creative direction.
But I do not want to argue here the question of his greatness (I have heard voices call him the worst ever) because the question of ranking is above my pay grade and my foresight.

What I do want to argue is that, after Washington and Lincoln, Bush is the bravest of our presidents. He has faced the most intense fire, hatred, contempt, heavily moneyed and bitterly acidic partisan opposition, underhandedness, betrayal, of any president in the last hundred years. He has faced hostility over a longer time, in possibly the most dangerous period of international warfare in our national history. He has remained constant, firm, decided, and generous (to a fault) with his opponents.

He has faced almost unbroken contempt from the academy, from the mainstream press, from Democratic elites, from Moveon and all the other holders of the Democratic-party purse strings, from the Democratic Congress, from his treacherous (if not treasonous) Central Intelligence Agency, and from many levels of the permanent State Department. Almost every day, he has been pummeled and undermined by powerful forces of American power. Still, he has stayed firm, with clear arguments, and an even clearer vision.

On the number-one issue facing the nation?the war declared upon us by fascists who pretend to be religious?he has not wavered, he has not bent, he has stayed on course and true.

In Iraq, civil society, nearly comatose under Saddam Hussein, is today alive and full of vitality. Newspapers and television and magazines are full of diversity and energy, political parties multiply, private associations are functioning by the thousands, most of the country is more secure than some American cities. Iraqi exiles from around the world, far from fleeing, are coming back in droves.

In Paris, France, more cars may have been set on fire this past year than car bombings in Baghdad. In the decade of the Algerian war some time ago there may have been more bombings in France per week than there are now in Iraq. A tiny band of extremists, led by a crafty but crazed Jordanian, are still capable of impressive resourcefulness and ruthless killing, especially within camera reach of the hotels in Baghdad, where the American press is bunkered down. But they represent only a small fringe of Iraqi voters?and of course they loathe democracy with all their writhing intestines.

Despite the depredations, beheadings, and homicide bombings aimed at American public opinion, and especially elite opinion, President Bush has bravely kept his focus on eliminating one by one the dwindling band of terrorists, on the reconstruction of Iraqi civil society, and on the ability of Iraqi parties to broker and bargain and argue themselves into consensus in a political manner.

Whatever American voters may say of him to opinion pollsters?and his polls are now very low indeed?the survival of democracy in Iraq will in the future count as an enormous achievement. Moreover, the exchange in Arab minds of the "big idea" of democracy for the grand illusions of the past (Arab nationalism, Arab socialism, Baathist dictatorship, pan-Arabism), may a generation from now confer on President Bush the unmistakable honor of having been one of those presidents who actually changed the course of history. A president who changed the course of history, yes?and also one who did so against unprecedented opposition at home, bitter and hysterical opposition, even from those who were formerly of the party of democracy, human rights, and international outreach.

It takes more bravery to continue walking calmly through immense hostility at home, than to face down a foreign foe, with a united nation at one's back. This, as I say, is a very brave president.

It may also turn out that, despite currently swirling furies, the president's stout refusal to be merely partisan or to throw red meat to some of his best supporters (he knew as well as anybody what they most wanted now), alongside the five interlinked courses of action he proposed, will have empowered a much more thorough immigration reform than seemed possible even four weeks earlier.

Despite a normal diet of failures and setbacks, common to all presidents, it is also worth counting up his steady, always surprising successes in cutting taxes, in reshaping the Supreme Court, in getting personal Social Security accounts and personal medical accounts on the agenda of public discussion (the first president since Roosevelt to touch the third rail and live to tell of it), and in presiding over the most amazing economy in the world during the past six years.

Polls may be fickle. Notable accomplishments endure, as rock-solid facts. The full record of this president may yet turn out to be as highly ranked as his bravery is bound to be.

If you were in his shoes, would you not prefer the fame of 30 years from now to popularity in your own time? Being popular is neither within one's own control nor, in the larger scheme, a goal worth pursuing. Doing the right thing steadily, as best one can, is.

I like this guy. And I admire his guts, and his decency.

? Michael Novak is the winner of the 1994 Templeton Prize for progress in religion and the George Frederick Jewett Scholar in Religion, Philosophy, and Public Policy at the American Enterprise Institute. Novak's own website is www.michaelnovak.net.



National Review Online - http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MDU5ZDdlZTJmNTg3ZTM5OTc4MjJkYzdjOWFlMTBmNGE=
Title: VDH on Iraq and Memorial Day
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on May 26, 2006, 09:33:41 AM
May 26, 2006, 7:19 a.m.
Looking Back at Iraq
A war to be proud of.

By Victor Davis Hanson

There may be a lot to regret about the past policy of the United States in the Middle East, but the removal of Saddam Hussein and the effort to birth democracy in his place is surely not one of them. And we should remember that this Memorial Day.

Whatever our righteous anger at Khomeinist Iran, it was wrong, well aside from the arms-for-hostages scandal, to provide even a modicum of aid to Saddam Hussein, the great butcher of his own, during the Iran-Iraq war.

Inviting the fascist Baathist government of Syria into the allied coalition of the first Gulf War meant that we more or less legitimized the Assad regime?s take-over of Lebanon, with disastrous results for its people.

It may have been strategically in error not to have taken out Saddam in 1991, but it was morally wrong to have then encouraged Shiites and Kurds to rise up?while watching idly as Saddam?s reprieved planes and helicopters slaughtered them in the thousands.

A decade of appeasement of Islamic terrorism, with retaliations after the serial attacks?from the first World Trade Center bombing to Khobar Towers and the USS Cole?never exceeding the occasional cruise missile or stern televised lecture, made September 11 inevitable.

A decade was wasted in subsidizing Yasser Arafat on the pretense that he was something other than a mendacious thug.

I cite these few examples of the now nostalgic past, because it is common to see Iraq written off by the architects of these past failures as the ?worst? policy decision in our history, a ?quagmire? and a ?disaster.? Realists, more worried about Iran and the ongoing cost in our blood and treasure in Iraq, insist that toppling Saddam was a terrible waste of resources. Leftists see the Iraq war as part of an amoral imperialism; often their talking points weirdly end up rehashed in bin Laden?s communiqu?s and Dr. Zawahiri?s rants.

But what did 2,400 brave and now deceased Americans really sacrifice for in Iraq, along with thousands more who were wounded? And what were billions in treasure spent on? And what about the hundreds of collective years of service offered by our soldiers? What exactly did intrepid officers in the news like a Gen. Petreus, or Col. McMaster, or Lt. Col Kurilla fight for?

First, there is no longer a mass murderer atop one of the oil-richest states in the world. Imagine what Iraq would now look like with $70 a barrel oil, a $50 billion unchecked and ongoing Oil-for-Food U.N. scandal, the 15th year of no-fly zones, a punitative U.N. embargo on the Iraqi people?all perverted by Russian arms sales, European oil concessions, and frenzied Chinese efforts to get energy contracts from Saddam.

The Kurds would remain in perpetual danger. The Shiites would simply be harvested yearly, in quiet, by Saddam?s police state. The Marsh Arabs would by now have been forgotten in their toxic dust-blown desert. Perhaps Saddam would have upped his cash pay-outs for homicide bombers on the West Bank.

Muammar Khaddafi would be starting up his centrifuges and adding to his chemical weapons depots. Syria would still be in Lebanon. Washington would probably have ceased pressuring Egypt and the Gulf States to enact reform. Dr. Khan?s nuclear mail-order house would be in high gear. We would still be hearing of a ?militant wing? of Hamas, rather than watching a democratically elected terrorist clique reveal its true creed to the world.

But just as importantly, what did these rare Americans not fight for? Oil, for one thing. The price skyrocketed after they went in. The secret deals with Russia and France ended. The U.N. petroleum perfidy stopped. The Iraqis, and the Iraqis alone?not Saddam, the French, the Russians, or the U.N.?now adjudicate how much of their natural resources they will sell, and to whom.

Our soldiers fought for the chance of a democracy; that fact is uncontestable. Before they came to Iraq, there was a fascist dictatorship. Now, after three elections, there is an indigenous democratic government for the first time in the history of the Middle East. True, thousands of Iraqis have died publicly in the resulting sectarian mess; but thousands were dying silently each year under Saddam?with no hope that their sacrifice would ever result in the first steps that we have already long passed.

Our soldiers also removed a great threat to the United States. Again, the crisis brewing over Iran reminds us of what Iraq would have reemerged as. Like Iran, Saddam reaped petroprofits, sponsored terror, and sought weapons of mass destruction. But unlike Iran, he had already attacked four of his neighbors, gassed thousands of his own, and violated every agreement he had ever signed. There would have been no nascent new democracy in Iran that might some day have undermined Saddam, and, again unlike Iran, no internal dissident movement that might have come to power through a revolution or peaceful evolution.

No, Saddam?s police state was wounded, but would have recovered, given high oil prices, Chinese and Russian perfidy, and Western exhaustion with enforcement of U.N. sanctions. Moreover, the American military took the war against radical Islam right to its heart in the ancient caliphate. It has not only killed thousands of jihadists, but dismantled the hierarchy of al Qaeda and its networks, both in Afghanistan and Iraq. Critics say that we ?took our eye off the ball? by going to Iraq and purportedly leaving bin Laden alone in the Hindu Kush. But more likely, al Qaeda took its eye off the American homeland as the promised theater of operations once American ground troops began dealing with Islamic terrorists in Iraq. As we near five years after September 11, note how less common becomes the expression ?not if, but when? concerning the next anticipated terror attack in the U.S.

Some believe that the odyssey of jihadists to Iraq means we created terrorists, but again, it is far more likely, as al Qaeda communiqu?s attest, that we drew those with such propensities into Iraq. Once there, they have finally shown the world that they hate democracy, but love to kill and behead?and that has brought a great deal of moral clarity to the struggle. After Iraq, the reputation of bin Laden and radical Islam has not been enhanced as alleged, but has plummeted. For all the propaganda on al Jazeera, the chattering classes in the Arab coffeehouses still watch Americans fighting to give Arabs the vote, and radical Islamists in turn beheading men and women to stop it.

If many in the Middle East once thought it was cute that 19 killers could burn a 20-acre hole in Manhattan, I am not sure what they think of Americans now in their backyard not living to die, but willing to die so that other Arabs might live freely.

All of our achievements are hard to see right now. The Iraqis are torn by sectarianism, and are not yet willing to show gratitude to America for saving them from Saddam and pledging its youth and billions to give them something better. We are nearing the third national election of the war, and Iraq has become so politicized that our efforts are now beyond caricature. An archivist is needed to remind the American people of the record of all the loud politicians and the national pundits who once were on record in support of the war.

Europeans have demonized our efforts?but not so much lately, as pacifist Europe sits on its simmering volcano of Islamic fundamentalism and unassimilated Muslim immigrants. Our own Left has tossed out ?no blood for oil??that is, until the sky-rocketing prices, the U.N. Oil-for-Food scandal, and a new autonomous Iraqi oil ministry cooled that rhetoric. Halliburton is also now not so commonly alleged as the real casus belli, when few contractors of any sort wish to rush into Iraq to profit.

?Bush lied, thousands died? grows stale when the WMD threat was reiterated by Arabs, the U.N., and the Europeans. The ?too few troops? debate is not the sort that characterizes imperialism, especially when no American proconsul argues that we must permanently stay in large numbers in Iraq. The new Iraqi-elected president, not Donald Rumsfeld, is more likely to be seen on television, insisting that Americans remain longer.

A geography more uninviting for our soldiers than Iraq cannot be imagined?7,000 miles away, surrounded by Baathist Syria, Wahhabist Saudi Arabia, and theocratic Iran. The harsh landscape rivals the worst of past battlefields?blazing temperatures, wind, and dust. The host culture that our soldiers faced was Orwellian?a society terrorized by a mass murderer for 30 years, who ruled by alternately promising Sunni, Shiite, and Kurdish collaborationists that cooperation meant only that fewer of their own would die.

The timing was equally awful?in an era of easy anti-Americanism in Europe, and endemic ingratitude in the Muslim world that asks nothing of itself, everything of us, and blissfully forgets the thousands of Muslims saved by Americans in Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Kuwait, Somalia, and the billions more lavished on Jordanians, Palestinians, and Egyptians.

And here at home? There are few Ernie Pyles in Iraq to record the heroism of our soldiers; no John Fords to film their valor?but legions to write ad nauseam of Abu Ghraib, and to make up stories of flushed Korans and Americans terrorizing Iraqi women and children.

Yet here we are with an elected government in place, an Iraqi security force growing, and an autocratic Middle East dealing with the aftershocks of the democratic concussion unleashed by American soldiers in Iraq.

Reading about Gettysburg, Okinawa, Choisun, Hue, and Mogadishu is often to wonder how such soldiers did what they did. Yet never has America asked its youth to fight under such a cultural, political, and tactical paradox as in Iraq, as bizarre a mission as it is lethal. And never has the American military?especially the U.S. Army and Marines?in this, the supposedly most cynical and affluent age of our nation, performed so well.

We should remember the achievement this Memorial Day of those in the field who alone crushed the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, stayed on to offer a new alternative other than autocracy and theocracy, and kept a targeted United States safe from attack for over four years.

? Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is the author, most recently, of A War Like No Other. How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War.



National Review Online - http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZmRiZDliMjI2Y2Y0Yjg2MmUxOWYzMDVhOGM5NzExZjE=
Title: The Protecting Incumbents from Accountability Act
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on June 01, 2006, 10:10:27 AM
Blacking Out Speech
McCain-Feingold?s assault on freedom.

By Newt Gingrich

In the election of 1800, Thomas Jefferson became president and swept his party into power due, in part, to the country?s overwhelming opposition to the Sedition Act of 1798. This act was a deliberate attempt by the Federalists in power to silence their political opponents.

The McCain-Feingold campaign-finance law enacted in 2002 is an equally dangerous modern-day assault on the First Amendment. It could more accurately be called the McCain-Feingold censorship law because it stifles political speech, protects incumbent politicians and consolidates power in Washington. This law is of the Congress, by the Congress, and for the Congress, because it protects members of Congress by silencing opposing points of view.

McCain-Feingold explicitly rejects James Madison?s warning in Federalist 10 that the destruction of liberty in pursuit of ?curing the mischief of factions? is worse than the disease itself.

Madison and Thomas Jefferson were very sensitive to limitations on free speech because they lived through the Federalist efforts to criminalize political speech that was critical of the government. In response to the Sedition Act, Madison helped author the Virginia legislature?s resolution that declared the act unconstitutional and stated that the law ?ought to produce universal alarm, because it is leveled against that right of freely examining public characters and measures, and of free communication among the people thereon, which has ever been justly deemed, the only effectual guardian of every other right.?

Jefferson helped write Kentucky?s resolution, which called the Sedition Act a momentous regulation that wounds ?the best rights of the citizen? and stated that ?it would consider a silent acquiescence [to it] as highly criminal.?

Today we are seeing the most systematic effort to censor and repress political speech by those in power since the Federalist overreach of the 18th century.

This is no exaggeration. The ongoing litigation between Wisconsin Right to Life (WRTL) and the Federal Election Commission (FEC) is a clear example of this.

WRTL attempted to air several issue ads in Wisconsin in the summer of 2004 calling on citizens to urge both of Wisconsin?s U.S. Senators to oppose the filibustering of federal judicial appointments. McCain-Feingold however, which Wisconsin Senator Feingold cosponsored, contains a free speech ?blackout period? before elections in which radio and television ads mentioning a candidate are deemed ?electioneering communications? and are thus illegal. Therefore, since Senator Feingold was up for reelection in 60 days, this Wisconsin grassroots organization could not exercise their First Amendment rights and hold their elected representative accountable.

In Maine, we are now seeing the same thing happen again. The Christian Civic League of Maine (CCL) wants to broadcast a grassroots lobbying advertisement calling on Maine?s senators?by name?to support the federal Marriage Protection Amendment before the Senate votes on it next week. The FEC objected and argued in federal district court that the Maine Christian Civic League can?t use the Senators names in the ad because it would fall within the McCain-Feingold free speech blackout period before Maine?s June 13 primary election. The FEC won and this case is now on appeal to the Supreme Court, although with each passing day CCL is prohibited from running its grassroots advocacy ad.

This is horribly wrong. What would the Founding Fathers have thought of such free speech ?blackout periods?? The days leading up to an election ought to be filled with debate. Free speech and activism, by informing and organizing the public, empower average citizens to promote a cause they believe in and to demand honest and responsive representation. Instead, the incumbent politicians that supported McCain-Feingold prefer to keep us quiet and prevent us from making noise about their records as Election Day gets closer.

A great travesty of the law is that it makes it harder for candidates of middle-class means to run for office at all. Instead, we have the example of how one candidate spent $100 million personally to buy a Senate seat, then a governorship, but while in the Senate voted for McCain-Feingold to limit every middle-class citizen to $2,500 in donations per election campaign. These rules move us dangerously closer to a plutocracy where the highest bidder can buy a seat.

In 1994, the Contract with America was a commitment to restore the bond of trust between individuals and their elected officials, putting the interests of the American people above all else. By limiting the ability of individuals or a collective group of individuals to participate and voice their opinion Congress is breaking this bond.

We must repeal McCain-Feingold as the necessary first step towards reaffirming a bond of trust between the American people and their elected representatives.

A truly functioning campaign system would take power out of Washington and return it to its owners?the American people. Such a system would allow individuals to make unlimited contributions to candidates for Congress in their district, so long as it is reported immediately on the Internet and is transparent and accessible.

Once the American people come to understand the nature of McCain-Feingold?s assault on liberty, there is no doubt that the final outcome will be the same today as it was for the Sedition Act: repeal. Those skeptical of seeking this reform should consider the words of Ronald Reagan: ?If you're afraid of the future, then get out of the way, stand aside. The people of this country are ready to move again.?

?Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of Winning the Future: A 21st Century Contract with America.
 


National Review Online - http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NTFjYzI2MDBhYjM3OTNlN2EzZTE4ZGZjNDhlNDRlYjU=
Title: The Global Warming Sky isn't Falling
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on June 05, 2006, 04:17:58 PM
david harsanyi | staff columnist
Chill out over global warming
By David Harsanyi
Denver Post Staff Columnist
DenverPost.com

You'll often hear the left lecture about the importance of dissent in a free society.

Why not give it a whirl?

Start by challenging global warming hysteria next time you're at a LoDo cocktail party and see what happens.

Admittedly, I possess virtually no expertise in science. That puts me in exactly the same position as most dogmatic environmentalists who want to craft public policy around global warming fears.

The only inconvenient truth about global warming, contends Colorado State University's Bill Gray, is that a genuine debate has never actually taken place. Hundreds of scientists, many of them prominent in the field, agree.

Gray is perhaps the world's foremost hurricane expert. His Tropical Storm Forecast sets the standard. Yet, his criticism of the global warming "hoax" makes him an outcast.

"They've been brainwashing us for 20 years," Gray says. "Starting with the nuclear winter and now with the global warming. This scare will also run its course. In 15-20 years, we'll look back and see what a hoax this was."

Gray directs me to a 1975 Newsweek article that whipped up a different fear: a coming ice age.

"Climatologists," reads the piece, "are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for the climatic change. ... The longer the planners delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope with climatic change once the results become grim reality."

Thank God they did nothing. Imagine how warm we'd be?

Another highly respected climatologist, Roger Pielke Sr. at the University of Colorado, is also skeptical.

Pielke contends there isn't enough intellectual diversity in the debate. He claims a few vocal individuals are quoted "over and over" again, when in fact there are a variety of opinions.

I ask him: How do we fix the public perception that the debate is over?

"Quite frankly," says Pielke, who runs the Climate Science Weblog (climatesci.atmos.colostate.edu), "I think the media is in the ideal position to do that. If the media honestly presented the views out there, which they rarely do, things would change. There aren't just two sides here. There are a range of opinions on this issue. A lot of scientists out there that are very capable of presenting other views are not being heard."

Al Gore (not a scientist) has definitely been heard - and heard and heard. His documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth," is so important, in fact, that Gore crisscrosses the nation destroying the atmosphere just to tell us about it.

"Let's just say a crowd of baby boomers and yuppies have hijacked this thing," Gray says. "It's about politics. Very few people have experience with some real data. I think that there is so much general lack of knowledge on this. I've been at this over 50 years down in the trenches working, thinking and teaching."

Gray acknowledges that we've had some warming the past 30 years. "I don't question that," he explains. "And humans might have caused a very slight amount of this warming. Very slight. But this warming trend is not going to keep on going. My belief is that three, four years from now, the globe will start to cool again, as it did from the middle '40s to the middle '70s."

Both Gray and Pielke say there are many younger scientists who voice their concerns about global warming hysteria privately but would never jeopardize their careers by speaking up.

"Plenty of young people tell me they don't believe it," he says. "But they won't touch this at all. If they're smart, they'll say: 'I'm going to let this run its course.' It's a sort of mild McCarthyism. I just believe in telling the truth the best I can. I was brought up that way."

So next time you're with some progressive friends, dissent. Tell 'em you're not sold on this global warming stuff.

Back away slowly. You'll probably be called a fascist.

Don't worry, you're not. A true fascist is anyone who wants to take away my air conditioning or force me to ride a bike.
Title: Political Rants
Post by: milt on June 06, 2006, 11:06:55 AM
Swift Boating the Planet
By PAUL KRUGMAN

A brief segment in "An Inconvenient Truth" shows Senator Al Gore questioning James Hansen, a climatologist at NASA, during a 1989 hearing. But the movie doesn't give you much context, or tell you what happened to Dr. Hansen later.

And that's a story worth telling, for two reasons. It's a good illustration of the way interest groups can create the appearance of doubt even when the facts are clear and cloud the reputations of people who should be regarded as heroes. And it's a warning for Mr. Gore and others who hope to turn global warming into a real political issue: you're going to have to get tougher, because the other side doesn't play by any known rules.

Dr. Hansen was one of the first climate scientists to say publicly that global warming was under way. In 1988, he made headlines with Senate testimony in which he declared that "the greenhouse effect has been detected, and it is changing our climate now." When he testified again the following year, officials in the first Bush administration altered his prepared statement to downplay the threat. Mr. Gore's movie shows the moment when the administration's tampering was revealed.

In 1988, Dr. Hansen was well out in front of his scientific colleagues, but over the years that followed he was vindicated by a growing body of evidence. By rights, Dr. Hansen should have been universally acclaimed for both his prescience and his courage.

But soon after Dr. Hansen's 1988 testimony, energy companies began a campaign to create doubt about global warming, in spite of the increasingly overwhelming evidence. And in the late 1990's, climate skeptics began a smear campaign against Dr. Hansen himself.

Leading the charge was Patrick Michaels, a professor at the University of Virginia who has received substantial financial support from the energy industry. In Senate testimony, and then in numerous presentations, Dr. Michaels claimed that the actual pace of global warming was falling far short of Dr. Hansen's predictions. As evidence, he presented a chart supposedly taken from a 1988 paper written by Dr. Hansen and others, which showed a curve of rising temperatures considerably steeper than the trend that has actually taken place.

In fact, the chart Dr. Michaels showed was a fraud ? that is, it wasn't what Dr. Hansen actually predicted. The original paper showed a range of possibilities, and the actual rise in temperature has fallen squarely in the middle of that range. So how did Dr. Michaels make it seem as if Dr. Hansen's prediction was wildly off? Why, he erased all the lower curves, leaving only the curve that the original paper described as being "on the high side of reality."

The experts at www.realclimate.org, the go-to site for climate science, suggest that the smears against Dr. Hansen "might be viewed by some as a positive sign, indicative of just how intellectually bankrupt the contrarian movement has become." But I think they're misreading the situation. In fact, the smears have been around for a long time, and Dr. Hansen has been trying to correct the record for years. Yet the claim that Dr. Hansen vastly overpredicted global warming has remained in circulation, and has become a staple of climate change skeptics, from Michael Crichton to Robert Novak.

There's a concise way to describe what happened to Dr. Hansen: he was Swift-boated.

John Kerry, a genuine war hero, didn't realize that he could successfully be portrayed as a coward. And it seems to me that Dr. Hansen, whose predictions about global warming have proved remarkably accurate, didn't believe that he could successfully be portrayed as an unreliable exaggerator. His first response to Dr. Michaels, in January 1999, was astonishingly diffident. He pointed out that Dr. Michaels misrepresented his work, but rather than denouncing the fraud involved, he offered a rather plaintive appeal for better behavior.

Even now, Dr. Hansen seems reluctant to say the obvious. "Is this treading close to scientific fraud?" he recently asked about Dr. Michaels's smear. The answer is no: it isn't "treading close," it's fraud pure and simple.

Now, Dr. Hansen isn't running for office. But Mr. Gore might be, and even if he isn't, he hopes to promote global warming as a political issue. And if he wants to do that, he and those on his side will have to learn to call liars what they are.
Title: Inconvenient Complexities
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on June 06, 2006, 05:08:33 PM
Jeepers, that darn global warming sounds every bit as scary as that awful nuclear winter many of these same folks were wringing their hands about 20 years back. Clearly an activist government needs to intervene with a massive pogrom of spending and regulation.

I work with an adjunct professor who is also a NASA publicist at Goddard, where James Hansen is seen as a grandstanding short-timer looking to make a splash on the way out. Alas, you don't get into the papers if you make moderate statements about climate change. Vast Republican coverups of of crucial data always get their share of ink, though.

As for Mister Doctor Professor Krugman, the Krugman Truth Squad (http://www.randomjottings.net/archives/cat_krugman_truth_squad.html) does a great job or revealing just how inane Krugman consistently is. An econ expert who makes as many econ gaffs as Krugman--gaffs he resists correcting with a legendary obstinacy--hardly recommends him as a climatoligist, or janitor, for that matter.

Not sure there's much point to deconstructing John Kerry and the Swift Boaters, though there was a great article published about the topic yesterday (http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2006/06/the_truth_john_kerry_and_the_n.html). As that may be, somehow the energy spent ballyhooing Bush's forged National Guard records evaporates when the topic of Christmas in Cambodia or Kerry's lucky CIA hat comes up. I think the record clearly indicates Kerry is a JFK wannabe who spent an inordinate amount of time trying to replicate Kennedy's career trajectory. Perhaps he should note that the original JFK was nowhere near as whiny, pompous, and shrill.

Nor am I inclined to give the topic of global warming the treatment it's due. I note that straightforward two or three variable science experiments can have widely divergent outcomes, as such it astounds me that people can bring an almost religious fervor and conviction to an event as multivariable as climate change. I note further that 75 percent of the planet is water, 90 percent of which is unexplored and hence supporting a huge, unmeasured, biomass, one variable among many for which there simply is no data. But gross ignorance never keeps the prophets of doom from demanding drastic change.
Title: Gore's Gaseous Emmissions
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on June 09, 2006, 05:24:04 PM
Al Gore's Force of Nature


"We [humans] are the most powerful force in nature."  Al Gore

Chances are, you're way too cool for global warming.

As the reader of a hip, indie-rock, alt-lifestyle mag like this one, I'm guessing the whole "climate change crisis" thing just doesn't do it for you. Well, don't feel bad, because you're right:

This really IS your father's global warming crisis.

Without baby boomers, there is no global warming. Not because boomers are uniquely gaseous, but because they are uniquely egotistical. The notion that, as Al Gore put it on my radio station last week, humans are "baking the planet to death" can only be swallowed whole by those whose appetite for self-importance has reached global proportions.

For boomers like Al Gore, nothing ever happened in the world until it happened to them. The first president ever assassinated was JFK; no war had ever been protested or opposed before Vietnam; government corruption was invented by Nixon and Bill Clinton proved the boomers could all still get laid.

And nobody knew how to read a thermometer until 1975. Oops, I better make that "1985," because in '75 baby boomers were still reading the Newsweek cover story about a coming ice age and how we would all freeze to death unless "political leaders ? take positive action to compensate for climate change."

Fortunately for all concerned, the boomers weren't in power yet and we did not take drastic action. And, just in case Mr. Gore hasn't noticed, we also didn't freeze to death.

And now it's time to take drastic action to save us all from global warming because, well, because Al Gore and his "save the [insert favorite mammal here]" pals are going to save the planet, dammit! Whether we need it or not.

I could fill this column with statistics and studies from prominent scientific journals poking holes in Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. The world is not baking to death. Even the whack jobs pushing the Kyoto treaty are only talking about a global temperature increase of 0.6 degrees Celsius over the past 100 years. (We're doomed!) That will likely go up another degree or so in the next century, assuming we don't spend $400 billion a year implementing Kyoto. If we do spend the money, that increase goes down by a whopping 0.17 degrees. (We're saved!)

And Gore is wrong about the angry Earth Mother sending unusually powerful hurricanes to kill us in her anger over the 2000 election scandal. Hurricane experts Max Mayfield and Bill Grey continue to explain (and Al continues to ignore) that hurricane activity is related to the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, a steady pattern of warming and cooling waters in the Atlantic.

And no, the polar ice caps are not about to melt away and no, global flooding isn't about to turn Tennessee into beachfront property. In fact, most of the Antarctic ice sheet got colder from 1966 to 2000, and while both poles have been losing some ice in the past five years on their edges, their interior ice and snow masses have been increasing. The net result? According to a study published in the Journal of Glaciology last year, if current trends hold the oceans will rise 0.05 millimeters a year. That means 1,000 years from now, the seas will have risen ? two inches! Head for the hills!

And on, and on, and on ?

Nobody is denying that the earth's temperature is changing. It's always changing. Why, the "Little Ice Age" drove humans out of parts of northern Europe in the 17th century. And if Al Gore had been around, he'd have no doubt roamed the land predicting global catastrophe if we didn't abandon our ox carts and stop burning charcoal.

What rational people reject isn't climate change, but rather the baby boomer fantasy that, this time, climate change is somehow different and special. That's the fantasy of someone who believes "we're the most powerful force in nature!"

Ponder that arrogance for a moment. We puny humans are, in Gore's imagination, more important to the Earth's ecosystem than volcanoes or tsunamis. We SUV drivers and backyard grillers are a greater force than the lunar tides or even gravity. Why, we're more powerful than the sun!

If this were ancient Egypt, we'd all be worshipping ourselves!

Which is what Al Gore's gaseous emissions are really all about.

http://www.free-times.com/Usual_Suspects/suspects.html
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 15, 2006, 11:36:23 AM
Printer Friendly

July 10, 2006
The Israel Enigma
by Victor Davis Hanson
Tribune Media Services

What explains most of the world's dislike of Israel ?

Since Israeli settlers withdrew from Gaza in 2005, Palestinian terrorists have replied by consistently shooting homemade Qassam rockets at civilian targets inside Israel . Just recently, they've kidnapped a soldier and a hitchhiker (who has been killed) ? and promised to do the same to others.

You'd expect these terrorist attacks on Israel to be viewed by responsible nations as similar to the jihadist violence we read about daily around the world ? radical Islamists beheading Russian diplomats over Chechnya , plotting to do the same to the Canadian prime minister or threatening murder over insensitive Danish cartoons.

But that isn't the case at all. Israel is always seen as a special exception that somehow deserves what it gets.

Other states can retaliate with impunity, brutally killing thousands of Muslim terrorists, while Israel is condemned when it takes out a few dozen.

When in late 1999 Russians stormed Grozny , thousands of Chechnya Muslims died. Yet the press was mostly silent. Baathist Syria went after the Muslim Brotherhood in 1982, wiping out much of the city of Hama and killing perhaps more than 10,000. Not many U.N. resolutions or international refugee efforts there.

To this day, no one knows the horrific body count from the Islamic insurrection in Algeria . Darfur finally earns occasional airtime, but only after tens of thousands have perished.

But Israel 's 2002 "siege" of the West Bank town Jenin, where less than 80 died on both sides, was evoked as "genocide" by those in the Middle East who often deny the real one that took 6 million Jewish lives. When Israel retaliates by air to terrorism, it is dubbed a "blitz" by the press ? as if it were akin to the Nazis carpet-bombing London .

Israel 's border fence is referred to as a "Berlin Wall," but you never hear Egypt 's nearby massive concrete barrier to keep Palestinians in Gaza described that way.

Then there is the open sore of the West Bank "occupation." Even if you forget that a series of offensive wars to destroy Israel in part originated from Palestine, or that Israel has given up land acquired by war in its perennial hope for "land for peace," what is so unique about the West Bank that drowns out all other crises over contested ground (from islands like Cyprus and the Falklands to entire countries like Tibet)? Why has tiny Israel alone earned more U.N. resolutions of condemnation than all those offered against all other nations of the world combined?

It is not as if Israel is a rogue state. For over a half-century, it's been the only liberal democracy in the Middle East . Israeli scientists have given the world everything from innovative computer software to drip-irrigation technology.

Oil explains some of the weird discrepancy in how the world views certain countries. It warps policymaking. Take away Iranian and Arab petroleum ? and thus the risk of another oil embargo or rigged price hike ? and Western fears of Middle East oil states would diminish. Naked self-interest determines the foreign policy of most nations.

The size of Israel factors in here as well. Israel has a population of not much more than 6 million and is surrounded by nearly 350 million Muslim Arabs. Most of the world counts heads ? and adjusts attitudes accordingly.

The old anti-Semitism is, of course, another ingredient that accounts for the animus shown Israel . Even sensitive, multicultural Westerners care little that Arab "allies" often portray Jews as "pigs" and "apes" in their state-run media. Odious tracts like "Mein Kampf" still sell briskly in Palestine , and Iranian and Gulf money subsidizes a mini-industry of holocaust denial.

Finally, as we know from our own southern border, anytime a successful Westernized nation is adjacent to a poorer Third World country, primordial emotions like honor and envy cloud reason. Rather than concede that Western-style democracy, capitalism, personal freedom and the rule of law explain why a prosperous, stable Israel arose from scrub and rock, Palestinians fixate on "Zionism," "colonialism" and "racism."

No wonder they do. Otherwise they would have to grapple with intractable and indigenous tribalism, gender apartheid, militias and religious fundamentalism, while building an open society based on the rule of law.

 In some ways, Israel 's values and success most resemble the United States .

And that raises a final question: Is Israel hated by the world for supporting us ? or are we hated for supporting it? Or is it both?
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 20, 2006, 05:03:02 PM
July 20, 2006
Patience is Wearing Thin

By Victor Davis Hanson

The conventional wisdom is that the United States is so tied down that it can't do much about the rocket attacks on Israel, the blatant sponsorship of terrorists by Iran and Syria, or the Iranian nuclear program.
Oil prices are already sky-high. Any unilateral American action might disrupt tight global supplies. That would derail the economies of our Western allies and only further enrich enemies with windfall profits.
Trying to win hearts and minds for the fragile democracy in Iraq also means we can't afford to offend Arab sensitivities elsewhere. And a lame-duck George Bush, low in the polls and facing uncertain congressional elections this fall, certainly doesn't want to involve the American taxpayer with more costly commitments abroad.

But despite that sound conventional wisdom, an exasperated West is running out of choices in the Middle East.
For years, the Arab world clamored for the Israel "problem" to be solved. Then peace and security would at last supposedly reshape the Middle East. The Western nations understood the "problem" as being Israeli retention of lands it had captured in Sinai, the West Bank, Gaza, Syria and Lebanon after defeating a series of Arab forces bent on destroying the Jewish state.
But after the Israeli departure from Sinai, Gaza and Lebanon, and billions of dollars in American aid to Egypt, Jordan and the Palestinians, there is still not much progress toward peace. Past Israeli magnanimity was seen as weakness. Now Israel's reasoned diplomacy has earned it another round of kidnapping, ransom and rocket attacks.
Finally, the world is accepting that the Middle East problem was never about so-called occupied land -- but only about the existence of Israel itself. Hezbollah and Hamas, and those in their midst who tolerate them (or vote for them), didn't so much want Israel out of Lebanon and Gaza as pushed into the Mediterranean altogether. And since there will be no second Holocaust, the Israelis may well soon transform a perennial terrorist war that they can't easily win into a conventional aerial one against a terrorist-sponsoring Syria that they can.
For its part, the United States has spent thousands of lives and billions in treasure trying to birth democracy in Iraq. We wished to end our old cynical support for Middle East dictators that earned us such scorn and instead give liberated Iraqis a choice other than either theocracy or autocracy.
In multilateral fashion, America has also welcomed the help of the European Union, the United Nations, China and Russia in convincing the Iranians of the folly of producing nuclear weapons. But like Hezbollah and Hamas, Iran does not wish to parley -- just as the beheaders and kidnappers in Iraq don't, either.
The two most liberal societies in Europe -- Denmark and the Netherlands -- welcomed almost anyone to their shores from the Middle East. Their multicultural hospitality was supposed to have led to a utopian "diverse" nation of various races, nationalities and religions.
Instead, such liberality has earned both small nations pariah status in the Muslim world for the supposed indiscretions of a few freewheeling filmmakers and cartoonists.
Yet for all their threats, what the Islamists -- from Hezbollah in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley to the Iranian government in Tehran to the jihadists in Iraq's Sunni Triangle -- don't understand is that they are slowly pushing tired Westerners into a corner. If diplomacy, or aid, or support for democracy, or multiculturalism, or withdrawal from contested lands, does not satisfy radical Islamists, what would?
Perhaps nothing.
What then would be the new Western approach to terrorism? Hard and quick retaliation -- but without our past concern for nation-building, or offering a democratic alternative to theocracy and autocracy, or even worrying about whether other Muslims are unfairly lumped in with Islamists who operate freely in their midst.
Any new policy of retaliation -- in light both of Sept. 11 and the messy efforts to birth democracies in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon and the West Bank -- would be something of an exasperated return to the old cruise-missile payback. Yet in the new world of Iranian nukes and Hezbollah missiles, the West would hit back with something far greater than a cruise missile.
If they are not careful, a Syria or Iran really will earn a conventional war -- not more futile diplomacy or limited responses to terrorism. And history shows that massive attacks from the air are something that the West does well.
So in the meantime, let us hope that democracy prevails in Iraq, that our massive aid is actually appreciated by the Middle East, that diplomacy ultimately works with Iran, that Syria quits supporting terrorists, and that Hamas and Hezbollah cease their rocket attacks against Israel -- more for all their sakes than ours.
Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and author, most recently, of "A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War." You can reach him by e-mailing author@victorhanson.com.
©2006 Tribune Media Services

Page Printed from: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/art...ring_thin.html at July 20, 2006 - 01:09:29 PM CDT_uacct = "UA-31527-1";urchinTracker();
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 22, 2006, 05:35:28 AM
An Appropriate Response
               E-MailPrint Save
 
By RICHARD PERLE
Published: July 22, 2006
Washington

ISRAEL must see the current fighting through to a conclusion that is unambiguously a defeat for Hezbollah and Hamas.

The world?s diplomats, always generous with advice for the Israelis, cheered when Israel withdrew from Lebanon in 2000. They pretended not to notice as Hezbollah poured Iranian-supplied rockets into Lebanon: first a hundred, then a thousand, then ten thousand and even more. None of the world?s foreign ministries described Israel?s failure to respond to Hezbollah?s arming as a disproportionate response to an obvious menace.

The word ?disproportionate? re-emerged in recent days as a criticism of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert?s epiphany: Israel is a country that two terrorist organizations, Hamas and Hezbollah, are dedicated to destroying, and following the advice of diplomats to respond ?proportionately? would leave those terrorists free to pursue that goal.

Israel must now deal a blow of such magnitude to those who would destroy it as to leave no doubt that its earlier policy of acquiescence is over. This means precise military action against Hezbollah and its infrastructure in Lebanon and Syria, for as long as it takes and without regard to mindless diplomatic blather about proportionality. For what appears to some to be a disproportionate response to small incursions and kidnappings is, in fact, an entirely appropriate response to the existential struggle in which Israel is now engaged. ? RICHARD PERLE, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and Assistant Secretary of Defense from 1981 to 1987.
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 22, 2006, 08:29:04 PM
Printer Friendly

July 21, 2006
A Strange War
Israel is at last being given an opportunity to unload on jihadists.
by Victor Davis Hanson
National Review Online

Sum up the declarations of Hezbollah?s leaders, Syrian diplomats, Iranian nuts, West Bank terrorists, and Arab commentators ? and this latest Middle East war seems one of the strangest in a long history of strange conflicts. For example, have we ever witnessed a conflict in which one of the belligerents ? Iran ? that shipped thousands of rockets into Lebanon, and promises that it will soon destroy Israel, vehemently denies that its own missile technicians are on the ground in the Bekka Valley. Wouldn?t it wish to brag of such solidarity?

Or why, after boasting of the new targets that his lethal missiles will hit in Israel , does Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah (?We are ready for it ? war, war on every level?) now harp that Israel is hitting too deep into Lebanon ? Don?t enemies expect one another to hit deep? Isn?t that what ?war on every level? is all about?

Meanwhile, why do the G-8 or the United Nations even talk of putting more peacekeeping troops into southern Lebanon, when in the past such rent-a-cops and uniformed bystanders have never stopped hostilities? Does anyone remember that it was Hezbollah who blew up French and American troops who last tried to provide ?stability? between the warring parties?

Why do not Iran and Syria ? or for that matter other Arab states ? now attack Israel to join the terrorists that they have armed? Surely the two-front attack by Hamas and Hezbollah could be helped by at least one conventional Islamic military. After promising us all year that he was going to ?wipe out? Israel , is not this the moment for Mr. Ahmadinejad to strike?

And why ? when Hezbollah rockets are hidden in apartment basements, then brought out of private homes to target civilians in Israel ? would terrorists who exist to murder noncombatants complain that some ?civilians? have been hit? Would not they prefer to lionize ?martyrs? who helped to store their arms?

We can answer these absurdities by summing up the war very briefly. Iran and Syria feel the noose tightening around their necks ? especially the ring of democracies in nearby Afghanistan , Iraq , Turkey , and perhaps Lebanon . Even the toothless U.N. finally is forced to focus on Iranian nukes and Syrian murder plots. And neither Syria can overturn the Lebanese government nor can Iran the Iraqi democracy. Instead, both are afraid that their rhetoric may soon earn some hard bombing, since their ?air defenses? are hardly defenses at all.

So they tell Hamas and Hezbollah to tap their missile caches, kidnap a few soldiers, and generally try to turn the world?s attention to the collateral damage inflicted on ?refugees? by a stirred-up Zionist enemy.

For their part, the terrorist killers hope to kidnap, ransom, and send off missiles, and then, when caught and hit, play the usual victim card of racism, colonialism, Zionism, and about every other -ism that they think will win a bailout from some guilt-ridden, terrorist-frightened, Jew-hating, or otherwise oil-hungry Western nation.

The only difference from the usual scripted Middle East war is that this time, privately at least, most of the West, and perhaps some in the Arab world as well, want Israel to wipe out Hezbollah, and perhaps hit Syria or Iran . The terrorists and their sponsors know this, and rage accordingly when their military impotence is revealed to a global audience ? especially after no reprieve is forthcoming to save their ?pride? and ?honor.?

After all, for every one Israeli Hezbollah kills, they lose ten. You are not winning when ?victory? is assessed in terms of a single hit on an Israeli warship. Their ace-in-the-hole strategy ? emblematic of the entire pathetic Islamist way of war ? is that they can disrupt the good Western life of their enemies that they are both attracted to and thus also hate. But, as Israel has shown, a Western public can be quite willing to endure shelling if it knows that such strikes will lead to a devastating counter-response.

What should the United States do? If it really cares about human life and future peace, then we should talk ad nauseam about ?restraint? and ?proportionality? while privately assuring Israel the leeway to smash both Hamas and Hezbollah ? and humiliate Syria and Iran, who may well come off very poorly from their longed-for but bizarre war.

Only then will Israel restore some semblance of deterrence and strengthen nascent democratic movements in both Lebanon and even the West Bank . This is the truth that everyone from London to Cairo knows, but dares not speak. So for now, let us pray that the brave pilots and ground commanders of the IDF can teach these primordial tribesmen a lesson that they will not soon forget ? and thus do civilization?s dirty work on the other side of the proverbial Rhine.

In this regard, it is time to stop the silly slurs that American policy in the Middle East is either in shambles or culpable for the present war. In fact, if we keep our cool, the Bush doctrine is working. Both Afghans and Iraqis each day fight and kill Islamist terrorists; neither was doing so before 9/11. Syria and Iran have never been more isolated; neither was isolated when Bill Clinton praised the ?democracy? in Tehran or when an American secretary of State sat on the tarmac in Damascus for hours to pay homage to Syria ?s gangsters. Israel is at last being given an opportunity to unload on jihadists; that was impossible during the Arafat fraud that grew out of the Oslo debacle. Europe is waking up to the dangers of radical Islamism; in the past, it bragged of its aid and arms sales to terrorist governments from the West Bank to Baghdad .

Some final observations on Hezbollah and Hamas. There is no longer a Soviet deterrent to bail out a failed Arab offensive. There is no longer empathy for poor Islamist ?freedom fighters.? The truth is that it is an open question as to which regime ? Iran or Syria ? is the greater international pariah. After a recent trip to the Middle East, I noticed that the unfortunate prejudicial stares given to a passenger with an Iranian passport were surpassed only by those accorded another on his way to Damascus .

So after 9/11, the London bombings, the Madrid murders, the French riots, the Beslan atrocities, the killings in India, the Danish cartoon debacle, Theo Van Gogh, and the daily arrests of Islamic terrorists trying to blow up, behead, or shoot innocent people around the globe, the world is sick of the jihadist ilk. And for all the efforts of the BBC, Reuters, Western academics, and the horde of appeasers and apologists that usually bail these terrorist killers out when their rhetoric finally outruns their muscle, this time they can?t.

Instead, a disgusted world secretly wants these terrorists to get what they deserve. And who knows: This time they just might.

?2006 Victor Davis Hanson
Title: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 04, 2006, 07:56:14 AM
TOO NICE TO WIN?
ISRAEL'S DILEMMA
By JOHN PODHORETZ

July 25, 2006 -- WHAT if liberal democracies have now evolved to a point
where they can no longer wage war effectively because they have achieved a
level of humanitarian concern for others that dwarfs any really cold-eyed
pursuit of their own national interests?

What if the universalist idea of liberal democracy - the idea that all
people are created equal - has sunk in so deeply that we no longer assign
special value to the lives and interests of our own people as opposed to
those in other countries?

What if this triumph of universalism is demonstrated by the Left's
insistence that American and Israeli military actions marked by an
extraordinary concern for preventing civilian casualties are in fact
unacceptably brutal? And is also apparent in the Right's claim that a war
against a country has nothing to do with the people but only with that
country's leaders?

Can any war be won when this is the nature of the discussion in the
countries fighting the war? Can any war be won when one of the combatants
voluntarily limits itself in this manner?

Could World War II have been won by Britain and the United States if the two
countries did not have it in them to firebomb Dresden and nuke Hiroshima and
Nagasaki?

Didn't the willingness of their leaders to inflict mass casualties on
civilians indicate a cold-eyed singleness of purpose that helped break the
will and the back of their enemies? Didn't that singleness of purpose extend
down to the populations in those countries in those days, who would have and
did support almost any action at any time that would lead to the deaths of
Germans and Japanese?

What if the tactical mistake we made in Iraq was that we didn't kill enough
Sunnis in the early going to intimidate them and make them so afraid of us
they would go along with anything? Wasn't the survival of Sunni men between
the ages of 15 and 35 the reason there was an insurgency and the basic cause
of the sectarian violence now?

If you can't imagine George W. Bush issuing such an order, is there any
American leader you could imagine doing so?

And if America can't do it, can Israel? Could Israel - even hardy, strong,
universally conscripted Israel - possibly stomach the bloodshed that would
accompany the total destruction of Hezbollah?

If Lebanon's 300-plus civilian casualties are already rocking the world,
what if it would take 10,000 civilian casualties to finish off Hezbollah?
Could Israel inflict that kind of damage on Lebanon - not because of world
opinion, but because of its own modern sensibilities and its understanding
of the value of every human life?

Where do these questions lead us?

What if Israel's caution about casualties among its own soldiers and
Lebanese civilians has demonstrated to Hezbollah and Hamas that as long as
they can duck and cover when the missiles fly and the bombs fall, they can
survive and possibly even thrive?

What if Israel has every capability of achieving its aim, but cannot unleash
itself against a foe more dangerous, more unscrupulous, more unprincipled
and more barbaric than even the monstrous leaders of the Intifada it managed
to quell after years of suicide attacks?

And as for the United States, what if we have every tool at our disposal to
win a war - every weapons system we could want manned by the most superbly
trained military in history - except the ability to match or exceed our
antagonists in ruthlessness?

Is this the horrifying paradox of 21st century warfare? If Israel and the
United States cannot be defeated militarily in any conventional sense, have
our foes discovered a new way to win? Are they seeking victory through
demoralization alone - by daring us to match them in barbarity and knowing
we will fail?

Are we becoming unwitting participants in their victory and our defeat? Can
it be that the moral greatness of our civilization - its astonishing focus
on the value of the individual above all - is endangering the future of our
civilization as well?
Title: Neville Chamberlain Please Phone Home
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on August 05, 2006, 12:08:48 AM
The Brink of Madness
A familiar place.

By Victor Davis Hanson

When I used to read about the 1930s ? the Italian invasion of Abyssinia, the rise of fascism in Italy, Spain, and Germany, the appeasement in France and Britain, the murderous duplicity of the Soviet Union, and the racist Japanese murdering in China ? I never could quite figure out why, during those bleak years, Western Europeans and those in the United States did not speak out and condemn the growing madness, if only to defend the millennia-long promise of Western liberalism.

Of course, the trauma of the Great War was all too fresh, and the utopian hopes for the League of Nations were not yet dashed. The Great Depression made the thought of rearmament seem absurd. The connivances of Stalin with Hitler ? both satanic, yet sometimes in alliance, sometimes not ? could confuse political judgments.

But nevertheless it is still surreal to reread the fantasies of Chamberlain, Daladier, and Pope Pius, or the stump speeches by Charles Lindbergh (?Their [the Jews?] greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our government?) or Father Coughlin (?Many people are beginning to wonder whom they should fear most ? the Roosevelt-Churchill combination or the Hitler-Mussolini combination.?) ? and baffling to consider that such men ever had any influence.

Not any longer.

Our present generation too is on the brink of moral insanity. That has never been more evident than in the last three weeks, as the West has proven utterly unable to distinguish between an attacked democracy that seeks to strike back at terrorist combatants, and terrorist aggressors who seek to kill civilians.

It is now nearly five years since jihadists from the Arab world left a crater in Manhattan and ignited the Pentagon. Apart from the frontline in Iraq, the United States and NATO have troops battling the Islamic fascists in Afghanistan. European police scramble daily to avoid another London or Madrid train bombing. The French, Dutch, and Danish governments are worried that a sizable number of Muslim immigrants inside their countries are not assimilating, and, more worrisome, are starting to demand that their hosts alter their liberal values to accommodate radical Islam. It is apparently not safe for Australians in Bali, and a Jew alone in any Arab nation would have to be discreet ? and perhaps now in France or Sweden as well. Canadians? past opposition to the Iraq war, and their empathy for the Palestinians, earned no reprieve, if we can believe that Islamists were caught plotting to behead their prime minister. Russians have been blown up by Muslim Chechnyans from Moscow to Beslan. India is routinely attacked by Islamic terrorists. An elected Lebanese minister must keep in mind that a Hezbollah or Syrian terrorist ? not an Israeli bomb ? might kill him if he utters a wrong word. The only mystery here in the United States is which target the jihadists want to destroy first: the Holland Tunnel in New York or the Sears Tower in Chicago.

In nearly all these cases there is a certain sameness: The Koran is quoted as the moral authority of the perpetrators; terrorism is the preferred method of violence; Jews are usually blamed; dozens of rambling complaints are aired, and killers are often considered stateless, at least in the sense that the countries in which they seek shelter or conduct business or find support do not accept culpability for their actions.

Yet the present Western apology to all this is often to deal piecemeal with these perceived Muslim grievances: India, after all, is in Kashmir; Russia is in Chechnya; America is in Iraq, Canada is in Afghanistan; Spain was in Iraq (or rather, still is in Al Andalus); or Israel was in Gaza and Lebanon. Therefore we are to believe that ?freedom fighters? commit terror for political purposes of ?liberation.? At the most extreme, some think there is absolutely no pattern to global terrorism, and the mere suggestion that there is constitutes ?Islamaphobia.?

Here at home, yet another Islamic fanatic conducts an act of al Qaedism in Seattle, and the police worry immediately about the safety of the mosques from which such hatred has in the past often emanated ? as if the problem of a Jew being murdered at the Los Angeles airport or a Seattle civic center arises from not protecting mosques, rather than protecting us from what sometimes goes on in mosques.

But then the world is awash with a vicious hatred that we have not seen in our generation: the most lavish film in Turkish history, ?Valley of the Wolves,? depicts a Jewish-American harvesting organs at Abu Ghraib in order to sell them; the Palestinian state press regularly denigrates the race and appearance of the American Secretary of State; the U.N. secretary general calls a mistaken Israeli strike on a U.N. post ?deliberate,? without a word that his own Blue Helmets have for years watched Hezbollah arm rockets in violation of U.N. resolutions, and Hezbollah?s terrorists routinely hide behind U.N. peacekeepers to ensure impunity while launching missiles.

If you think I exaggerate the bankruptcy of the West or only refer to the serial ravings on the Middle East of Pat Buchanan or Jimmy Carter, consider some of the most recent comments from Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah about Israel: ?When the people of this temporary country lose their confidence in their legendary army, the end of this entity will begin [emphasis added].? Then compare Nasrallah?s remarks about the U.S: ?To President Bush, Prime Minister Olmert and every other tyrannical aggressor. I want to invite you to do what you want, practice your hostilities. By God, you will not succeed in erasing our memory, our presence or eradicating our strong belief. Your masses will soon waste away, and your days are numbered [emphasis added].?

And finally examine here at home reaction to Hezbollah ? which has butchered Americans in Lebanon and Saudi Arabia ? from a prominent Democratic Congressman, John Dingell: ?I don?t take sides for or against Hezbollah.? And isn?t that the point, after all: the amoral Westerner cannot exercise moral judgment because he no longer has any?

An Arab rights group, between denunciations of Israel and America, is suing its alma mater the United States for not evacuating Arab-Americans quickly enough from Lebanon, despite government warnings of the dangers of going there, and the explicit tactics of Hezbollah, in the manner of Saddam Hussein, of using civilians as human shields in the war it started against Israel.

Demonstrators on behalf of Hezbollah inside the United States ? does anyone remember our 241 Marines slaughtered by these cowardly terrorists? ? routinely carry placards with the Star of David juxtaposed with Swastikas, as voices praise terrorist killers. Few Arab-American groups these past few days have publicly explained that the sort of violence, tyranny, and lawlessness of the Middle East that drove them to the shores of a compassionate and successful America is best epitomized by the primordial creed of Hezbollah.

There is no need to mention Europe, an entire continent now returning to the cowardice of the 1930s. Its cartoonists are terrified of offending Muslim sensibilities, so they now portray the Jews as Nazis, secure that no offended Israeli terrorist might chop off their heads. The French foreign minister meets with the Iranians to show solidarity with the terrorists who promise to wipe Israel off the map (?In the region there is of course a country such as Iran ? a great country, a great people and a great civilization which is respected and which plays a stabilizing role in the region?) ? and manages to outdo Chamberlain at Munich. One wonders only whether the prime catalyst for such French debasement is worry over oil, terrorists, nukes, unassimilated Arab minorities at home, or the old Gallic Jew-hatred.

It is now a clich? to rant about the spread of postmodernism, cultural relativism, utopian pacifism, and moral equivalence among the affluent and leisured societies of the West. But we are seeing the insidious wages of such pernicious theories as they filter down from our media, universities, and government ? and never more so than in the general public?s nonchalance since Hezbollah attacked Israel.

These past few days the inability of millions of Westerners, both here and in Europe, to condemn fascist terrorists who start wars, spread racial hatred, and despise Western democracies is the real story, not the ?quarter-ton? Israeli bombs that inadvertently hit civilians in Lebanon who live among rocket launchers that send missiles into Israeli cities and suburbs.

Yes, perhaps Israel should have hit more quickly, harder, and on the ground; yes, it has run an inept public relations campaign; yes, to these criticisms and more. But what is lost sight of is the central moral issue of our times: a humane democracy mired in an asymmetrical war is trying to protect itself against terrorists from the 7th century, while under the scrutiny of a corrupt world that needs oil, is largely anti-Semitic and deathly afraid of Islamic terrorists, and finds psychic enjoyment in seeing successful Western societies under duress.

In short, if we wish to learn what was going on in Europe in 1938, just look around.

? Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is the author, most recently, of A War Like No Other. How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War.

National Review Online - http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZDBhMzg5Mzk4NjQ5MjM5OTJhZjRjMWQ4OWMzNDhmMzk=
Title: "World Opinion" is an @$$
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on August 06, 2006, 07:49:34 AM
"World opinion" is worthless
By Dennis Prager
Tuesday, August 1, 2006
If you are ever morally confused about a major world issue, here is a rule that is almost never violated: Whenever you hear that "world opinion" holds a view, assume it is morally wrong.

And here is a related rule if your religious or national or ethnic group ever suffers horrific persecution: "World opinion" will never do a thing for you. Never.

"World opinion" has little or nothing to say about the world's greatest evils and regularly condemns those who fight evil.

The history of "world opinion" regarding the greatest mass murders and cruelties on the planet is one of relentless apathy.

Ask the 1.5 million Armenians massacred by the Ottoman Turks;

or the 6 million Ukrainians slaughtered by Stalin;

or the tens of millions of other Soviet citizens killed by Stalin's Soviet Union;

or the 6 million Jews murdered by the Nazis and their helpers throughout Europe;

or the 60 million Chinese butchered by Mao;

or the 2 million Cambodians murdered by Pol Pot;

or the millions killed and enslaved in Sudan;

or the Tutsis murdered in Rwanda's genocide;

or the millions starved to death and enslaved in North Korea;

or the million Tibetans killed by the Chinese;

or the million-plus Afghans put to death by Brezhnev's Soviet Union.

Ask any of these poor souls, or the hundreds of millions of others slaughtered, tortured, raped and enslaved in the last 100 years, if "world opinion" did anything for them.

On the other hand, we learn that "world opinion" is quite exercised over Israel's unintentional killing of a few hundred Lebanese civilians behind whom hides Hezbollah -- a terror group that intentionally sends missiles at Israeli cities and whose announced goals are the annihilation of Israel and the Islamicization of Lebanon. And, of course, "world opinion" was just livid at American abuses of some Iraqi prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad. In fact, "world opinion" is constantly upset with America and Israel, two of the most decent countries on earth, yet silent about the world's cruelest countries.

Why is this?

Here are four reasons:

First, television news.

It is difficult to overstate the damage done to the world by television news. Even when not driven by political bias -- an exceedingly rare occurrence globally -- television news presents a thoroughly distorted picture of the world. Because it is almost entirely dependent upon pictures, TV news is only capable of showing human suffering in, or caused by, free countries. So even if the BBC or CNN were interested in showing the suffering of millions of Sudanese blacks or North Koreans -- and they are not interested in so doing -- they cannot do it because reporters cannot visit Sudan or North Korea and video freely. Likewise, China's decimation and annexation of Tibet, one of the world's oldest ongoing civilizations, never made it to television.

Second, "world opinion" is shaped by the same lack of courage that shapes most individual human beings' behavior. This is another aspect of the problem of the distorted way news is presented. It takes courage to report the evil of evil regimes; it takes no courage to report on the flaws of decent societies. Reporters who went into Afghanistan without the Soviet Union's permission were killed. Reporters would risk their lives to get critical stories out of Tibet, North Korea and other areas where vicious regimes rule. But to report on America's bad deeds in Iraq (not to mention at home) or Israel's is relatively effortless, and you surely won't get killed. Indeed, you may well win a Pulitzer Prize.

Third, "world opinion" bends toward power. To cite the Israel example, "world opinion" far more fears alienating the largest producers of oil and 1 billion Muslims than it fears alienating tiny Israel and the world's 13 million Jews. And not only because of oil and numbers. When you offend Muslims, you risk getting a fatwa, having your editorial offices burned down or receiving death threats. Jews don't burn down their critics' offices, issue fatwas or send death threats, let alone act on such threats.

Fourth, those who don't fight evil condemn those who do. "World opinion" doesn't confront real evils, but it has a particular animus toward those who do -- most notably today America and Israel.

The moment one recognizes "world opinion" for what it is -- a statement of moral cowardice, one is longer enthralled by the term. That "world opinion" at this moment allegedly loathes America and Israel is a badge of honor to be worn proudly by those countries. It is when "world opinion" and its news media start liking you that you should wonder if you've lost your way.
Title: Punishing Honesty and Rewarding Duplicity
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on August 07, 2006, 11:25:06 AM
The Last Honest Man
By Robert Kagan
Sunday, August 6, 2006; Page B07

Twenty-nine Democratic senators voted in the fall of 2002 to authorize the invasion of Iraq. There isn't enough room on this page to list the Democratic foreign policy experts and former officials, including those from the top ranks of the Clinton administration, who supported the war publicly and privately -- some of whom even signed letters calling for the removal of Saddam Hussein. Nor is there any need to list the many liberal, and conservative, columnists on this and other editorial pages around the country who supported the war, or the many prominent journalists who provided the reporting that helped convince so many that the war was necessary.

The question of the day is, what makes Joe Lieberman different? What makes him now anathema to a Democratic Party and to liberal columnists who once supported both him and the war? Why is there now a chance he will lose the Democratic primary in Connecticut after so many years of faithfully serving that state and his own party?

It will not be because he is a bad Democrat. As others have pointed out, on the broadest range of social, economic and even foreign policy issues he has been a stalwart member of his party. Indeed, the questioning of his Democratic credentials is absurd given that he was, after all, the party's candidate for vice president in 2000.

It will not be because he is a hawk. Lest anyone forget, Lieberman was put on the 2000 ticket partly because he was a foreign policy and defense hawk, and most emphatically on the question of Iraq. In the 1990s he was the leading sponsor of a Senate resolution, which eventually passed with 98 votes, to provide money to Iraqis for the express purpose of overthrowing Hussein. This was what made him attractive to Democrats in 2000. It made him a fitting companion to that other hawk on the ticket, Al Gore. For remember, Gore, too, had gained the nomination as a relative hard-liner on foreign policy, including policy on Iraq.

If Lieberman loses, it will not even be because he supported the war. Almost every leading Democratic politician and foreign policymaker, and many a liberal columnist, supported the war. Nor will he lose because he opposes withdrawing troops from Iraq this year. Most top Democratic policymakers agree that early withdrawal would be a mistake. Nor, finally, is it because he has been too chummy with President Bush. Lieberman has offered his share of criticism of the administration's handling of the Iraq war and of many other administration policies.

No, Lieberman's sin is of a different order. Lieberman stands condemned today because he didn't recant. He didn't say he was wrong. He didn't turn on his former allies and condemn them. He didn't claim to be the victim of a hoax. He didn't try to pretend that he never supported the war in the first place. He didn't claim to be led into support for the war by a group of writers and intellectuals whom he can now denounce. He didn't go through a public show of agonizing and phony soul-baring and apologizing in the hopes of resuscitating his reputation, as have some noted "public intellectuals."

These have been the chosen tactics of self-preservation ever since events in Iraq started to go badly and the war became unpopular. Prominent intellectuals, both liberal and conservative, have turned on their friends and allies in an effort to avoid opprobrium for a war they publicly supported. Journalists have turned on their fellow journalists in an effort to make them scapegoats for the whole profession. Politicians have twisted themselves into pretzels to explain away their support for the war or, better still, to blame someone else for persuading them to support it.

Al Gore, the one-time Clinton administration hawk, airbrushed that history from his record. He turned on all those with whom he once agreed about Iraq and about many other foreign policy questions. And for this astonishing reversal he has been applauded by his fellow Democrats and may even get the party's nomination.

Apparently, amazingly, dispiritingly, it all works. At least in the short run, dishonesty pays. Dissembling pays. Forgetting your past writings and statements pays. Condemning those with whom you once agreed pays. Phony self-flagellation followed by self-righteous self-congratulation pays. The only thing that doesn't pay is honesty. If Joe Lieberman loses, it will not be because he supported the war or even because he still supports it. It will be because he refused to choose one of the many dishonorable paths open to him to salvage his political career.

He is the last honest man, and he may pay the price for it. At least he will be able to sleep at night. And he can take some solace in knowing that history, at least an honest history, will be kinder to him than was his own party.

Robert Kagan, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and transatlantic fellow at the German Marshall Fund, writes a monthly column for The Post.
Title: "An Inability to Recognize and Confront Evil"
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on August 08, 2006, 11:50:13 AM
August 08, 2006

The Left's Inability to Confront Evil

By Dennis Prager

On July 28, 2006, a Muslim entered the building of the Seattle Jewish Federation and shot every Jew he saw, murdering one woman and wounding five others.

On the same day, Mel Gibson was arrested on DUI charges and while intoxicated let loose with anti-Semitic invective at the Jewish police officer who arrested him.

Question: Which story has most troubled the Left?

The answer is known to any American who can hear or read.

So, the real question is: Why? Why has the shooting and murder of Jews elicited less angst from the Left than the anti-Semitic statements made by Mel Gibson when drunk?

The answers are very troubling. As Time magazine said about global warming (but never about Islamic terror), "Be worried, very worried."

We should be worried about this: The liberal world fears -- and much of it loathes -- fundamentalist Christians considerably more than it does fundamentalist Muslims.

This is as true of most Jewish liberals -- even though conservative Christians are Israel's and the Jews' most loyal supporters and even though Nazi-like anti-Semitism permeates much of the Muslim world -- as it is of most other liberals, certainly including the mainstream media.

That is why Jewish writer Zev Chafets wrote in the Los Angeles Times, "On the same day Gibson got into trouble in Malibu, a fellow named Naveed Afzal Haq brought a pistol to the Jewish Federation office in Seattle and shot six women, killing one. Two days later, this personal jihad -- one of the most gory anti-Jewish crimes in American history -- got second billing on the ADL website, under "Mel Gibson's Apology for Tirade 'Insufficient.' " (For the record, the ADL later announced it had accepted Mel Gibson's apology.)

This is one more example of the greatest flaw of contemporary liberalism -- its inability to recognize and confront the greatest evils. Since the 1960s, when liberalism became indistinguishable from the Left -- e.g., when New York Times positions became indistinguishable from those of The Nation -- liberals tended to attack opponents of evil far more than those who actually committed evil. The Left (around the world) was far more antagonistic to Ronald Reagan than to Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, and far more disturbed by anti-Communism than by Communism.

So, too, today. For example, with few exceptions (the liberal columnist Thomas Friedman being one of the most notable) one only hears conservatives use the term "Islamo-fascism." Nearly the entire academic world that discusses the issue is far more concerned with the threat of "Islamophobia" than of Islamo-fascism. Liberal and left-wing anger is largely reserved for conservatives and especially conservative Christians, while analogous antipathy about Islamic groups with genocidal designs on Israel or America is largely to be found on the Right.

The liberal doctrine on fundamentalist American Christians is that they are the moral equivalent of fundamentalist Muslims and constitute a similar threat to our republic. As bestselling author Karen Armstrong said to Bill Moyers on PBS, "Fundamentalists are not friends of democracy. And that includes your fundamentalists in the United States."

Regarded by the liberal media as perhaps the greatest living historian and commentator on religion, Karen Armstrong does not even see the Muslim fundamentalist support for murder of innocents as a distinguishing feature. According to Armstrong, "Christian fundamentalists in the United States have committed fewer acts of terror than the others for two main reasons: they live in a more peaceful society . . . [and they] believe that the democratic federal government of the United States will collapse without their needing to take action: God will see to it" [beliefnet.com].

The antipathy toward Christian fundamentalists and conservatives is why Mel Gibson's anti-Semitic statements trouble the Left more than Naveed Haq and the genocidal anti-Semitism permeating the Muslim world. And what is it about those Christians that most disturbs the Left? That they talk in terms of good and evil and believe the former must fight the latter, precisely the area of the Left's greatest weakness.
Title: More Semanitc Foolishness
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on August 08, 2006, 12:37:00 PM
Terrorism? What's That?
The U.N. has a deeply dangerous definitional problem.

By Claudia Rosett

Among the many reasons to beware the United Nations as a vehicle for peace in Israel, Lebanon, or any other part of the globe now threatened by Islamic terrorists, there is one item so obvious that in the current debate over ?ceasefires? and Security Council resolutions it has almost entirely escaped notice. Quite simply, while terrorism may be the defining security threat of our time, the U.N. has failed ? literally ? to define it.

If that sounds like a minor semantic lapse, far removed from the bloody conflict in Israel and Lebanon, it is anything but. The free world faces a war in which victory ? if one may be allowed such a blunt word these days ? starts with understanding the real nature and tactics of our enemies. So, with top U.N. officials calling for instant peace that would effectively equate ?both sides? in the war launched out of Lebanon last month by Hezbollah against Israel, I e-mailed the U.N. Secretary-General?s office recently to ask: Does the U.N. consider Hezbollah a terrorist group?

Back from one of Kofi Annan?s spokesmen came the answer: ?The designation of ?terrorist? would require a definition of what terrorism entails.?

Let us note that in the case of Hezbollah, the group has entailed enough atrocities to have earned it the nickname, ?the A-Team of Terrorism,? even before Hezbollah on July 12 launched its killing-kidnapping-and- rocket-firing assault on Israel. Hezbollah?s prior record entails well over two decades of kidnappings, hijackings, suicide bombings, massacres, and collateral carnage worldwide, in countries including Lebanon, Israel, Spain, Denmark, Germany, France, and Argentina. Created by the totalitarian ayatollahs of Iran just after their 1979 Islamic revolution; trained and bankrolled by Iran; supported by Syria; seasoned in extortion and smuggling operations reaching as far as South America, Canada, and the U.S.; open to alliances with other terrorist groups; peddling terrorist propaganda internationally on its Al-Manar TV station; dedicated to the destruction of Israel and seeking ultimately to supplant the workings of free societies with its Iran-spawned creed and practice of terror? Hezbollah among its butcheries to date has murdered more Americans than any other terrorist group except al Qaeda.

But because the United Nations has not defined ?terrorism,? the U.N. does not regard Hezbollah as a terrorist group.

The U.N. does, of course, have a stack of ?counter-terrorism? resolutions, and bestrides a dozen or so ?international counter-terrorism conventions.? But without a clear definition of what terrorism entails, U.N. member states ? including the liveliest terror sponsors ? pay no penalty for interpreting these measures in any warped way they might choose, or effectively ignoring them altogether. The result is that even the U.N. resolutions passed a few years ago sanctioning a highly abbreviated list of a few hundred Taliban and al Qaeda affiliates worldwide have been at best erratically enforced. Back in late 2003, a group of terrorism experts employed by the U.N. to monitor member-states? compliance with these sanctions became bold enough to report publicly and in detail some of the gross delinquencies of specific nations. The U.N. dissolved the group of experts, and replaced it with one more easily muffled.

A former member of the now-defunct, outspoken U.N. counterterrorism-monitoring group, Victor Comras, explained to me in a phone interview last week that achieving a serious international definition of terrorism is a ?huge issue.? Once an objective criterion for terrorism exists, said Comras, ?At least you have the foundation for asking that concrete actions be taken.?

Without that definition, as Comras wrote this past March, ?countries remain free to define for themselves which groups are terrorists and which are ?freedom fighters.?? Comras observed that ?Saudi Arabia uses this distinction, for example, to get away with funding Hamas, while Iran and Syria use it to provide funds and support to Hezbollah.? Beyond that, he noted, ?Many other countries have also used it to avoid taking steps to freeze funds or take other civil or criminal action against those individuals or groups which they support.?

The U.N. failure on this score is no accident. It is a direct result of what the U.N. is, and how it works ? a collective, saddled with procedures that tend to favor despots over democrats. In the matter of coming up with a global definition of terrorism, the job falls to the General Assembly?s legal committee ? the so-called Sixth Committee? which includes all 192 member states, and operates in practice by consensus. In that setting, the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) ? whose 57 members include such terror-linked states as Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Iran ? has for years insisted that any definition of terrorism exempt the OIC?s pet terrorists. These the OIC would prefer to define ? notes Comras ? as ?engaged in so-called ?struggles against colonial domination and foreign occupation.??

At the same time, the OIC and assorted ?unaligned? states have been demanding that regular armed forces of sovereign states, already subject to other international rules of engagement, be subject to U.N. rules concerning terrorism. That would clear the way to officially invert reality to the extent that by U.N. lights, Islamic terrorists would qualify as liberators, and democratic states trying to defend themselves could be treated as terrorists.

Wisely, the U.S. and some of our allies have refused to sign on to this Big Brother universe (though on some issues, such as the affable view of Palestinian terrorism, and chronic condemnations of democratic Israel, the U.N. seems to dwell there already). Under pressure from the U.S. last year, Kofi Annan departed from U.N. habit long enough to propose a genuine definition of terrorism ? only to have it shot down by the U.N. committee-consensus process. And there the matter sits. While terrorism looms ever larger as an Islamic-fascist tactic and threat to the free world ? which the U.N. was originally meant to protect ? the task of defining terrorism remains bottled up in the U.N. legal committee.

This gridlock goes far to explain why Annan, apparently forgetting his reform pitch of last year, has been calling with the regularity of a cuckoo clock for an immediate ?ceasefire? in the current conflict. In doing so, he ignores the desperately lopsided setup of any deal in which Israel would be constrained by U.N. words on paper while the terrorists ? by definition, if only the U.N. had one ? can be reliably stopped only at gunpoint. That asymmetry is pretty much the arrangement that incubated this war in the first place. Israel complied with U.N. rules and withdrew six years ago from Lebanon. Hezbollah violated the rules, expanding its protection rackets and stockpiling illicit weapons under the terror-neutral gaze of U.N. ?peacekeepers,? until it was ready to strike.

The gap in the U.N. lexicon also helps explain why, when Annan?s deputy-secretary-general Mark Malloch Brown sat down for an interview last week with the Financial Times, he felt free to deliver the Orwellian line: ?It is not helpful to couch this war in the language of international terrorism.?

Wallowing instead in the jargon of peace in our time, Malloch Brown went on to suggest that for Israel?s attackers, Hezbollah, there must concessions, and eventually ?a settlement which addresses the political issues of their cause as well as the military ones.? These bland words mask the terrorist nitty-gritty that Hezbollah?s ?cause? includes the takeover of Lebanon and the extinction of Israel. Musing that Hezbollah does have its wayward aspects, and in its rocket assaults on Israel ?is making no effort to hit military targets; it?s just a broadside against civilian targets,? Malloch Brown arrived at the I?m-O.K.-You?re-O.K. conclusion that ?It?s all very challenging.?

And as the Bush administration has increasingly turned to the United Nations in this crisis, the U.N. fog has been seeping into America?s political discourse. Instead of talking about killing, capturing, and defeating the terrorists of Hezbollah, or moving immediately to hold to account Hezbollah?s backers in Baathist Damascus and nuclear-bomb-building Teheran, our own political leaders are now maneuvering via the U.N. for a ?cessation of hostilities.?

This has produced a peculiar delicacy of phrase even from President Bush. The U.S. government, with good reason, includes Hezbollah in its list of ?Foreign Terrorist Organizations.? But in a press conference Monday, Bush skirted this category, instead labeling Hezbollah ?a political party with a militia that is armed by foreign nations.? Sorry, but Hezbollah is not at core a political party. It is an Iranian-Syrian-backed terrorist militia with a Lebanese political front.

There is a deeply dangerous reluctance in the democratic world to face up to the extent of the war already declared and being waged against us ? manifest in terrorist attacks on New York, Madrid, London, Bali, Bombay, and beyond, and especially against Israel, which is fighting right now on the front lines. These terrorists, and their sponsors, watch and learn from each other. In the battles ahead, if the U.S. takes its cues from a U.N. unable even to define terrorism, let alone defy it, the result will be that terrorists ? protected by their patrons at the U.N. itself ? will continue in graphic and ruinous terms to define it for us.

? Claudia Rosett is a journalist-in-residence with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.



National Review Online - http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MWQyNWM2MDA2Mjk1ZWRhOTU1M2MzYzc1NTE2ODQ4YzQ=
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 11, 2006, 07:50:18 PM
'Mass-Murder' Foiled
August 11, 2006; Page A12

Americans went to work yesterday to news of another astonishing terror plot against U.S. airlines, only this time the response was grateful relief. British authorities had busted the "very sophisticated" plan "to commit mass murder" and arrested 20-plus British-Pakistani suspects. As we approach the fifth anniversary of 9/11 without another major attack on U.S. soil, now is the right moment to consider the policies that have protected us -- and those in public life who have fought those policies nearly every step of the way.

It's not as if the "Islamic fascists" -- to borrow President Bush's description yesterday -- haven't been trying to hit us. They took more than 50 lives last year in London with the "7/7" subway bombings. There was the catastrophic attack in Madrid the year before that left nearly 200 dead. But there have also been successes. Some have been publicized, such as a foiled plot to poison Britain's food supply with ricin. But undoubtedly many have not, because authorities don't want to compromise sources and methods, or because the would-be terrorists have been captured or killed before they could carry out their plans.

In this case the diabolical scheme was to smuggle innocent-looking liquid explosive components and detonators onto planes. They could then be assembled onboard and exploded, perhaps over cities for maximum horror. Multiply the passenger load of a 747 by, say, 10 airliners, and this attack could have killed more people than 9/11. We don't yet know how the plot was foiled, but surely part of the explanation was crack surveillance work by British authorities.

* * *
"This wasn't supposed to happen today," a U.S. official told the Washington Post of the arrests and terror alert. "It was supposed to happen several days from now. We hear the British lost track of one or two guys. They had to move." Meanwhile, British antiterrorism chief Peter Clarke said at a news conference that the plot was foiled because "a large number of people" had been under surveillance, with police monitoring "spending, travel and communications."

 
Let's emphasize that again: The plot was foiled because a large number of people were under surveillance concerning their spending, travel and communications. Which leads us to wonder if Scotland Yard would have succeeded if the ACLU or the New York Times had first learned the details of such surveillance programs.

And almost on political cue yesterday, Members of the Congressional Democratic leadership were using the occasion to suggest that the U.S. is actually more vulnerable today despite this antiterror success. Harry Reid, who's bidding to run the Senate as Majority Leader, saw it as one more opportunity to insist that "The Iraq war has diverted our focus and more than $300 billion in resources from the war on terrorism and has created a rallying cry for international terrorists."

Ted Kennedy chimed in that "it is clear that our misguided policies are making America more hated in the world and making the war on terrorism harder to win." Mr. Kennedy somehow overlooked that the foiled plan was nearly identical to the "Bojinka" plot led by Ramzi Yousef and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to blow up airliners over the Pacific Ocean in 1995. Did the Clinton Administration's "misguided policies" invite that plot? And if the Iraq war is a diversion and provocation, just what policies would Senators Reid and Kennedy have us "focus" on?

Surveillance? Hmmm. Democrats and their media allies screamed bloody murder last year when it was leaked that the government was monitoring some communications outside the context of a law known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. FISA wasn't designed for, nor does it forbid, the timely exploitation of what are often anonymous phone numbers, and the calls monitored had at least one overseas connection. But Mr. Reid labelled such surveillance "illegal" and an "NSA domestic spying program." Other Democrats are still saying they will censure, or even impeach, Mr. Bush over the FISA program if they win control of Congress.

This year the attempt to paint Bush Administration policies as a clear and present danger to civil liberties continued when USA Today hyped a story on how some U.S. phone companies were keeping call logs. The obvious reason for such logs is that the government might need them to trace the communications of a captured terror suspect. And then there was the recent brouhaha when the New York Times decided news of a secret, successful and entirely legal program to monitor bank transfers between bad guys was somehow in the "public interest" to expose.

For that matter, we don't recall most advocates of a narrowly "focused" war on terror having many kind words for the Patriot Act, which broke down what in the 1990s was a crippling "wall" of separation between our own intelligence and law-enforcement agencies. Senator Reid was "focused" enough on this issue to brag, prematurely as it turned out, that he had "killed" its reauthorization.

And what about interrogating terror suspects when we capture them? It is elite conventional wisdom these days that techniques no worse than psychological pressure and stress positions constitute "torture." There is also continued angst about the detention of terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay, even as Senators and self-styled civil libertarians fight Bush Administration attempts to process them through military tribunals that won't compromise sources and methods.

In short, Democrats who claim to want "focus" on the war on terror have wanted it fought without the intelligence, interrogation and detention tools necessary to win it. And if they cite "cooperation" with our allies as some kind of magical answer, they should be reminded that the British and other European legal systems generally permit far more intrusive surveillance and detention policies than the Bush Administration has ever contemplated. Does anyone think that when the British interrogate those 20 or so suspects this week that they will recoil at harsh or stressful questioning?

Another issue that should be front and center again is ethnic profiling. We'd be shocked if such profiling wasn't a factor in the selection of surveillance targets that resulted in yesterday's arrests. Here in the U.S., the arrests should be a reminder of the dangers posed by a politically correct system of searching 80-year-old airplane passengers with the same vigor as screeners search young men of Muslim origin. There is no civil right to board an airplane without extra hassle, any more than drivers in high-risk demographics have a right to the same insurance rates as a soccer mom.

* * *
The real lesson of yesterday's antiterror success in Britain is that the threat remains potent, and that the U.S. government needs to be using every legal tool to defeat it. At home, that includes intelligence and surveillance and data-mining, and abroad it means all of those as well as an aggressive military plan to disrupt and kill terrorists where they live so they are constantly on defense rather than plotting to blow up U.S.-bound airliners.

As the time since 9/11 has passed, many of America's elites have begun to portray U.S. government policies as a greater threat than the terrorists themselves. George Soros and others have said this explicitly, and their political allies in Congress and the media have staged a relentless campaign against the very practices that saved innocent lives this week. We doubt that many Americans who will soon board an airplane agree.
Title: "Islamic Fascists," A Neologism in Context
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on August 16, 2006, 11:42:19 AM
What Is 'Islamofascism'?

By Stephen Schwartz


"Islamic fascists" -- used by President George W. Bush for the conspirators in the alleged trans-Atlantic airline bombing plot -- and references by other prominent figures to "Islamofascism," have been met by protests from Muslims who say the term is an insult to their religion. The meaning and origin of the concept, as well as the legitimacy of complaints about it, have become relevant -- perhaps urgently so.

I admit to a lack of modesty or neutrality about this discussion, since I was, as I will explain, the first Westerner to use the neologism in this context.

In my analysis, as originally put in print directly after the horror of September 11, 2001, Islamofascism refers to use of the faith of Islam as a cover for totalitarian ideology. This radical phenomenon is embodied among Sunni Muslims today by such fundamentalists as the Saudi-financed Wahhabis, the Pakistani jihadists known as Jama'atis, and the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. In the ranks of Shia Muslims, it is exemplified by Hezbollah in Lebanon and the clique around President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran.

Political typologies should make distinctions, rather than confusing them, and Islamofascism is neither a loose nor an improvised concept. It should be employed sparingly and precisely. The indicated movements should be treated as Islamofascist, first, because of their congruence with the defining characteristics of classic fascism, especially in its most historically-significant form -- German National Socialism.

Fascism is distinguished from the broader category of extreme right-wing politics by its willingness to defy public civility and openly violate the law. As such it represents a radical departure from the tradition of ultra-conservatism. The latter aims to preserve established social relations, through enforcement of law and reinforcement of authority. But the fascist organizations of Mussolini and Hitler, in their conquests of power, showed no reluctance to rupture peace and repudiate parliamentary and other institutions; the fascists employed terror against both the existing political structure and society at large. It is a common misconception of political science to believe, in the manner of amateur Marxists, that Italian fascists and Nazis sought maintenance of order, to protect the ruling classes. Both Mussolini and Hitler agitated against "the system" governing their countries. Their willingness to resort to street violence, assassinations, and coups set the Italian and German fascists apart from ordinary defenders of ruling elites, which they sought to replace. This is an important point that should never be forgotten. Fascism is not merely a harsh dictatorship or oppression by privilege.


Islamofascism similarly pursues its aims through the willful, arbitrary, and gratuitous disruption of global society, either by terrorist conspiracies or by violation of peace between states. Al-Qaida has recourse to the former weapon; Hezbollah, in assaulting northern Israel, used the latter. These are not acts of protest, but calculated strategies for political advantage through undiluted violence. Hezbollah showed fascist methods both in its kidnapping of Israeli soldiers and in initiating that action without any consideration for the Lebanese government of which it was a member. Indeed, Lebanese democracy is a greater enemy of Hezbollah than Israel.

Fascism rested, from the economic perspective, on resentful middle classes, frustrated in their aspirations and anxious about loss of their position. The Italian middle class was insecure in its social status; the German middle class was completely devastated by the defeat of the country in the First World War. Both became irrational with rage at their economic difficulties; this passionate and uncontrolled fury was channeled and exploited by the acolytes of Mussolini and Hitler. Al-Qaida is based in sections of the Saudi, Pakistani, and Egyptian middle classes fearful, in the Saudi case, of losing their unstable hold on prosperity -- in Pakistan and Egypt, they are angry at the many obstacles, in state and society, to their ambitions. The constituency of Hezbollah is similar: the growing Lebanese Shia middle class, which believes itself to be the victim of discrimination.

Fascism was imperialistic; it demanded expansion of the German and Italian spheres of influence. Islamofascism has similar ambitions; the Wahhabis and their Pakistani and Egyptian counterparts seek control over all Sunni Muslims in the world, while Hezbollah projects itself as an ally of Syria and Iran in establishing regional dominance.

Fascism was totalitarian; i.e. it fostered a totalistic world view -- a distinct social reality that separated its followers from normal society. Islamofascism parallels fascism by imposing a strict division between Muslims and alleged unbelievers. For Sunni radicals, the practice of takfir -- declaring all Muslims who do not adhere to the doctrines of the Wahhabis, Pakistani Jama'atis, and the Muslim Brotherhood to be outside the Islamic global community or ummah -- is one expression of Islamofascism. For Hezbollah, the posture of total rejectionism in Lebanese politics -- opposing all politicians who might favor any political negotiation with Israel -- serves the same purpose. Takfir, or "excommunication" of ordinary Muslims, as well as Hezbollah's Shia radicalism, are also important as indispensable, unifying psychological tools for the strengthening of such movements.

Fascism was paramilitary; indeed, the Italian and German military elites were reluctant to accept the fascist parties' ideological monopoly. Al-Qaida and Hezbollah are both paramilitary.

I do not believe these characteristics are intrinsic to any element of the faith of Islam. Islamofascism is a distortion of Islam, exactly as Italian and German fascism represented perversions of respectable patriotism in those countries. Nobody argues today that Nazism possessed historical legitimacy as an expression of German nationalism; only Nazis would make such claims, to defend themselves. Similarly, Wahhabis and their allies argue that their doctrines are "just Islam." But German culture existed for centuries, and exists today, without submitting to Nazi values; Islam created a world-spanning civilization, surviving in a healthy condition in many countries today, without Wahhabism or political Shiism, both of which are less than 500 years old.

But what of those primitive Muslims who declare that "Islamofascism" is a slur? The Washington Post of August 14 quoted a speaker at a pro-Hezbollah demonstration in Washington, as follows: "'Mr. Bush: Stop calling Islam "Islamic fascism,' said Esam Omesh, president of the Muslim American Society, prompting a massive roar from the crowd. He said there is no such thing, 'just as there is no such thing as Christian fascism.'"

These curious comments may be parsed in various ways. Since President Bush used the term "Islamic fascists" to refer to a terrorist conspiracy, did Mr. Omesh (whose Muslim American Society is controlled by the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood) intend to accept the equation of Islam with said terrorism, merely rejecting the political terminology he dislikes? Probably not. But Mr. Omesh's claim that "there is no such thing as Christian fascism" is evidence of profound historical ignorance. Leading analysts of fascism saw its Italian and German forms as foreshadowed by the Ku Klux Klan in the U.S. and the Russian counter-revolutionary mass movement known as the Black Hundreds. Both movements were based in Christian extremism, symbolized by burning crosses in America and pogroms against Jews under the tsars.

The fascist Iron Guard in Romania during the interwar period and in the second world war was explicitly Christian -- its official title was the "Legion of the Archangel Michael;" Christian fascism also exists in the form of Ulster Protestant terrorism, and was visible in the (Catholic) Blue Shirt movement active in the Irish Free State during the 1920s and 1930s. Both the Iron Guard and the Blue Shirts attracted noted intellectuals; the cultural theorist Mircea Eliade in the first case, the poet W.B Yeats in the second. Many similar cases could be cited. It is also significant that Mr. Omesh did not deny the existence of "Jewish fascism" -- doubtless because in his milieu, the term is commonly directed against Israel. Israel is not a fascist state, although some marginal, ultra-extremist Jewish groups could be so described.

I will conclude with a summary of a more obscure debate over the term, which is symptomatic of many forms of confusion in American life today. I noted at the beginning of this text that I am neither modest nor neutral on this topic. I developed the concept of Islamofascism after receiving an e-mail in June 2000 from a Bangladeshi Sufi Muslim living in America, titled "The Wahhabis: Fascism in Religious Garb!" I then resided in Kosovo. I put the term in print in The Spectator of London, on September 22, 2001. I was soon credited with it by Andrew Sullivan in his Daily Dish, and after it was attributed to Christopher Hitchens, the latter also acknowledged me as the earliest user of it. While working in Bosnia-Hercegovina more recently, I participated in a public discussion in which the Pakistani Muslim philosopher Fazlur Rahman (1919-88), who taught for years at the University of Chicago (not to be confused with the Pakistani radical Fazlur Rehman), was cited as referring to "Islamic fascists."

If such concerns seem absurdly self-interested, it is also interesting to observe how Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, dealt with the formulation of Islamofascism as an analytical tool. After a long and demeaning colloquy between me and a Wikipedian who commented negatively on an early book of mine while admitting that he had never even seen a copy of it, Wikipedia (referring to it collectively, as its members prefer) decided it to ascribe it to another historian of Islam, Malise Ruthven. But Ruthven, in 1990, used the term to refer to all authoritarian governments in Muslim countries, from Morocco to Pakistan.

I do not care much, these days, about Wikipedia and its misapprehensions, or obsess over acknowledgements of my work. But Malise Ruthven was and would remain wrong to believe that authoritarianism and fascism are the same. To emphasize, fascism is something different, and much worse, than simple dictatorship, however cruel the latter may be. That is a lesson that should have been learned 70 years ago, when German Nazism demonstrated that it was a feral and genocidal aberration in modern European history, not merely another form of oppressive rightist rule, or a particularly wild variety of colonialism.

Similarly, the violence wreaked by al-Qaida and Hezbollah, and by Saddam Hussein before them, has been different from other expressions of reactionary Arabism, simple Islamist ideology, or violent corruption in the post-colonial world. Between democracy, civilized values, and normal religion on one side, and Islamofascism on the other, there can be no compromise; as I have written before, it is a struggle to the death. President Bush is right to say "young democracies are fragile ... this may be [the Islamofascists'] last and best opportunity to stop freedom's advance." As with the Nazis, nothing short of a victory for democracy can assure the world's security.

Stephen Schwartz is Executive Director of the Center for Islamic Pluralism.

http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=081606C
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: SB_Mig on August 24, 2006, 09:33:42 AM
"Rockey I": If it sounds too good to be true...

The good news is that CNN seems to have finally stop obsessing over John Mark Karr. Instead, they've found a new soap opera to go ga-ga over, Katrina survivor Rockey Vaccarella who drove his FEMA trailer from his home in ravaged St. Bernard Parish to Washington with "the hope" of convincing President Bush to meet with him.

You can see why TV loves this story (the guy's named 'Rockey,' for cryin' out loud!), because to those who pay casual attention, i.e., the vast majority of viewers, the parallels to another news story are striking.

It was exactly one year ago that the headlines were all about Bush, on another lengthy vacation in Crawford, refusing to meet with an average American who was devastated by a tragedy -- Cindy Sheehan, whose son was killed in Iraq. It was a publicity bloodbath, and it rolled right into the horrors of Katrina and a seemingly indifferent White House, beginning the long slide in Bush's approval rating.

Now comes Rockey, a plain-talking character who lost it all in Katrina, who nearly died in the hurricane, forced to hang onto a rope for four hours (some of that was captured on film), and now wants to government to do more for Katrina victims. And what a difference a year makes -- not only did Bush, not in Crawford but hard at work in the White House, meet with this "average American," but check out the glowing praise our president received in return.

First, here's the way that the media spun the meeting: A triumph for the little guy:

CNN's RICK SANCHEZ: I don't know if you were watching a couple days ago, but you might remember that we talked to a man named Rockey Vaccarella. I got a lot of phone calls on this interview. He's a Katrina victim who was driving to the White House with a FEMA trailer. And he seemed to strike a nerve with people. He's there now. He's actually been invited inside. He wanted to go and met with the president. Well, guess what, the president has decided to meet with him. Last night he met with Donald Powell (ph), the government's point man for rebuilding the Gulf Coast. Told him just what he and his family went through during Katrina.

A minute later:
SANCHEZ: And amazing his persistence because he was originally told that the president was just busy. Look, he's not going to be able to meet with you._

SOLEDAD O'BRIEN: He's like, that's all right. I'm still going._

SANCHEZ: I'm going to hang out there._

O'BRIEN: I've driven all this way._

SANCHEZ: He was confident when he told us that the president would come out and find a way to talk to him.

Here's so here's what Rockey told the nation just now on TV:

You know, it's really amazing when a small man like me from St. Bernard Parish can meet the President of the United States. The President is a people person. I knew that from the beginning. I was confident that I could meet President Bush.

And my mission was very simple. I wanted to thank President Bush for the millions of FEMA trailers that were brought down there. They gave roofs over people's head. People had the chance to have baths, air condition. We have TV, we have toiletry, we have things that are necessities that we can live upon.
But now, I wanted to remind the President that the job's not done, and he knows that. And I just don't want the government and President Bush to forget about us. And I just wish the President could have another term in Washington.

This guy is a symbol of the misery that so many people in Louisiana and Mississippi? If we didn't know any better, this couldn't have been more of home run for Bush if the whole thing had been set up by Karl Rove.

Hmmmmm...

In fact, we had a hunch -- that maybe, just maybe, Rockey Vaccarella had a background himself in GOP politics.

And, whaddya know? Turns out that the earthy Vaccarella -- a highly successful businessman in the fast-food industry -- is indeed a Republican pol, having run unsuccessfully under the GOP banner for a seat on the St. Bernard Parish commission back in 1999. Here is part of his bio that ran in the New Orleans Times-Picayune on Oct. 15, 1999:

ROCKEY VACCARELLA_PERSONAL_Republican_35. Born in New Orleans. Grew up in Arabi and Chalmette. Lived 11 years in_Meraux._Married, two children._Graduated from Chalmette High, 1982. Attended St. Bernard Community_College._Director of operations, Lundy Enterprises, as manager of 31 Pizza Hut_restaurants and 450 employees. Former general restaurant manager of Popeye's Chicken & Biscuits on East Judge Perez Drive in Chalmette.
And in fact, Vaccarella seemed very confident that he would be meeting with Bush when he left home, to the point where he had a date scheduled and everything:

Dinner with the President is planned for the evening of August 22nd.

As it turned out, dinner last night was with the White House aide running Katrina relief, and he met Bush at the White House today. Close enough. Before he left Louisiana earlier this month, Vaccarella made it clear that he's no Cindy Sheehan:

"We want to thank President Bush and the American people for everything they have done so far for south Louisiana and the Gulf Coast region but, to remind everyone that the job is not complete and to please do whatever is possible to help clean-up and re-build so our people can return home."

Shouldn't the media be a tad more skeptical about events like these? And isn't the fact that Vaccarella was once a Republican candidate for office a relevant fact that should be mentioned, to help viewers place his effusive, nationally televised praise in context. With Vaccarella the "Katrina soundbite" of the day, TV is not reporting this (http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-08-20-katrina-promises_x.htm):

The job of clearing debris left by the storm remains unfinished, and has been plagued by accusations of fraud and price gouging. Tens of thousands of families still live in trailers or mobile homes, with no indication of when or how they will be able to obtain permanent housing. Important decisions about rebuilding and improving flood defenses have been delayed. And little if anything has been done to ensure the welfare of the poor in a rebuilt New Orleans.

This is a White House that has pledged, as you recall, ?create our own reality? and they're doing it again. How many times we will in the media act as Charlie Brown, kicking with futility at the phony football that Rove and this White House hold out for us, again and again and again.

http://www.attytood.com/archives/003647.html
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 26, 2006, 01:22:12 PM
Ben Stein on commitment.

Sunday, August 20, 2006

Looking for the Will Beyond the Battlefield - New York Times: "IT'S been a
bitter month or so."

Mighty Israel, the redeemer of faith in what free men and women can do with
arid desert if they are motivated, redeemer of faith that maybe there is a
place for the Jews as a sovereign people and technological superpower, has
been fought to a standstill by Hezbollah.

Can it possibly be that Hezbollah is better motivated, better led, better
dug in and better armed than the Israeli army, which is supposed to be the
best army, pound for pound, in the world? Can it be that Israel, which used
to beat whole armies of countries like Egypt and Syria, has been humbled by
a few thousand very well-motivated and well-armed men firing from between
apartment buildings?

Or could it be that what's different this time is the trumpet and,
specifically, its uncertain sound? Israel geared up for a huge offensive,
then called it off, then huffed and puffed, then called it off again, then
said, "Watch out, this time we're really going to blow your house down," and
then called it off again.

Now, Israel's very survival is on the line, and it is a tiny state, about
the size of New Jersey. If Israel cannot get it together to fight a serious
war against a group, Hezbollah, that the State Department identifies as a
terrorist organization, who will?

So, Israel, which was supposed to be the shining light of how peace is won,
is not shining as bright - despite President Bush's extreme support for a
good long time.

Terrorists are still hatching plots against the air traffic system of the
West, and this time bigger and worse than before.

Obviously, Al Qaeda is far from dead. We have much to fear from it still.
The fact that the suspects were almost all home-grown Britons makes the
situation that much more frightening and unpredictable. How long will it be
until American-born terrorists strike against American targets?

We are a big country and we have a lot of unhappy people. How long until
they organize themselves to kill? Not long, I am afraid.

While we're at it, yes, it's miraculous and wonderful that the plot was
foiled, if it was. But now the whole Western world will be seriously
inconvenienced in its travel for years, maybe decades. Isn't this already a
victory for our enemies? Isn't this already a blow against world business?
Might it be enough to push our already slowed growth into a recession?
But the worst is what is to come: I got a jolting hint of this when I read
the obituary for John L. Weinberg, who ran Goldman Sachs from 1976 to 1990.
Mr. Weinberg was 81 when he died this month in Greenwich, Conn., after a
lifetime of major achievement. I had the pleasure of dealing with him when
he and I were a lot younger and I was in law school, also studying finance,
at Yale.

My dear old father was a friend of his father, the venerable Sidney J.
Weinberg, who ran Goldman Sachs from 1930 to 1969. My dad wangled a job
interview for me with John Weinberg, an unprepossessing figure but obviously
a smart guy. After some talk, he offered me a job. I would start by spending
two years sitting at a desk until late at night going over spreadsheets.
"Really?" I asked. That did not seem to be so glamorous. "Yes, really," he
said. "That's how we all start."
I turned it down and became a poverty lawyer instead. But what I did not
know about John Weinberg was that even though he was rich and well
connected, as a young man he joined the Marines to fight the Japanese in the
Pacific, then fought again in Korea. That was America's ruling class then.

The scions of the rich went off to fight.

My longtime pal and idol, Peter M. Flanigan - a former high honcho of
Dillon, Read; a high aide to my ex-boss, Richard M. Nixon; and heir to a
large brewing fortune - was once a naval aviator. My father left a
comfortable job in Washington to join the Navy. The father of my pal Phil
DeMuth left a successful career to be an Army Air Corps pilot, flying
death-defying missions over Burma. Congressmen resigned to serve. Senators
resigned to serve. Professional athletes resigned to serve in the uniform.

Now, who's fighting for us in the fight of our lives? Brave, idealistic
Southerners. Hispanics from New Mexico. Rural men and women from upstate New
York. Small-town boys and girls from the Midwest. Do the children of the
powers on Wall Street resign to go off and fight? Fight for the system that
made them rich? Fight for the way of life that made them princes? Surely,
you jest.

And that's the essence. The other side considers it a privilege to fight and
die for its beliefs. Those on the other side cannot wait to line up to blow
themselves up for their vision of heaven. On our side, it's: "Let the other
poor sap do it. I've got to make money." How can we fight this fight with
the brightest and best educated rushing off and working night and day to do
private equity deals and derivatives trading? How can we fight this fight
with the ruling class absent by its own sweet leave?

I keep thinking, again, that if Israel, with its back to the sea, cannot
muster the will to fight in a big way, then the fat, faraway U.S.A. will
never be able to do it. I keep saying this and it terrifies me.

We're in a war with people who want to kill us all and wreck our
civilization. They're taking it very seriously. We, on the other hand, are
worrying about leveraged buyouts and special dividends and how much junk
debt the newly formed private entity can support before we sell it to the
ultimate sucker, the public shareholder.

We're worrying whether Hollywood will forgive Mel Gibson and what the next
move is for big homes in East Hampton. We're rearranging the deck chairs on
the Titanic. The terrorists are the iceberg.

WHAT stands between us and the iceberg are the miraculously brave men and
women of the armed forces.

They're heroes and saints as far as I'm concerned. But can they do it
without the rest of us? Can they do it while we're all working on our tans
and trying to have our taxes lowered again? How can we leave them out there
all alone to die for us when we treat the war to save civilization as
something we can just wish away?

If we don't win this war against the terrorists, there's not
going to be business as usual ever again. If the terrorists get to their
goal, there's not going to be a stock exchange or hedge funds or Bain
Capital or the Carlyle Group or even Goldman Sachs. If the terrorists get
their way - and so far, they're getting their way - there's not going to be
business, period.

Everyone with the really big money at stake is - again - bidding for the
best deck chairs as the iceberg looms, not so far, any longer, under the
surface, and very large and very cold and very solid.

Ben Stein is a lawyer, writer, actor and economist. E-mail:
ebiz@nytimes.com.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 02, 2006, 09:37:58 AM
September 1, 2006
The Waiting Game
Do we really need further convincing of the threat we face?
by Victor Davis Hanson
National Review Online

Hezbollah?s black-clad legions goose-step and stiff-arm salute in parade, apparently eager to convey both the zeal and militarism of their religious fascism. Meanwhile, consider Hezbollah?s ?spiritual? head, Hassan Nasrallah ? the current celebrity of an unhinged Western media that tried to reinvent the man?s own self-confessed defeat as a victory. Long before he hid in the Iranian embassy Nasrallah was on record boasting: ?The Jews love life, so that is what we shall take away from them. We are going to win because they love life and we love death.?

Iran?s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad trumps that Hitlerian nihilism by reassuring the poor, maltreated Germans that there was no real Holocaust. Perhaps he is concerned that greater credit might still go to Hitler for Round One than to the mullahs for their hoped-for Round Two, in which the promise is to ?wipe? Israel off the map.

The only surprise about the edition of Hitler?s Mein Kampf that has become a best seller in Middle Eastern bookstores is its emboldened title translated as ?Jihadi? ? as in ?My Jihad? ? confirming in ironic fashion the ?moderate? Islamic claim that ?jihad? just means ?struggle,? as in an ?inner struggle? ? as in a Kampf perhaps.

Meanwhile, we in the West who worry about all this are told to fret instead about being ?Islamophobes.? Indeed, a debate rages over the very use of ?Islamic fascism? to describe the creed of terrorist killers ? as if those authoritarians who call for a return of the ancient caliphate, who wish to impose of 7th-century sharia law, promise death to the Western ?crusader? and ?Jew,? and long to retreat into a mythical alternate universe of religious purity and harsh discipline, untainted by a ?decadent? liberal West, are not fascists. It is almost as if Alfred Rosenberg has returned in a kaffiyeh to explain why Jews really are apes and pigs, and why we must recapture the spirit of our primitive ancestors.

Next, in the manner that Hitler was to be understood as victimized by the Versailles Treaty, so too we hear the litany of perceived grievances against the Islamic fascists ? George Bush, the West Bank, Gaza, or now Lebanon. But does anyone remember that bin Laden quip, four years before 9/11, when Mr. Bush was still governor of Texas: ?Mentioning the name of Clinton or the American government provokes disgust and revulsion.?

Even as we split hairs over whether terrorists flocked to, or were created by, Iraq, the jihadists make no such distinctions between their theaters of operation. Listen to al Qaeda?s Aymin al-Zawahiri: ?The Jihad movement is growing and rising. It reached its peak with the two blessed raids on New York and Washington. And now it is waging a great heroic battle in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, and even within the Crusaders? own homes.?

?Even within the Crusaders? own homes? would include, I think, the planned attacks against opponents of the Iraq war, such as Canada and Germany. Their often shrill, and sometimes blatantly anti-American, antagonism to the 2003 war still earned them no exemption from efforts to chop off the head of the Canadian prime minister or to blow up hundreds of Germans on passenger trains.

Here at home we witness ?al-Qaedism? ? fanatics shooting Jews in Seattle, murder at the Los Angeles airport, an SUV running over innocent pedestrians in San Francisco or driving over students in North Carolina, sniping in Maryland. And we shrug them all off. Surely such incidents can be explained, are not connected, occur at random ? anything other than the truth that the constant harangues of the Islamic fascists really do filter down, even if randomly and spontaneously, to a number of angry and alienated young Muslim males in the West.

Some cling to the notion that Islamic rage is not the manifestation of an elemental hatred, but is merely about land. That?s about what bin Laden said in 1998 when he urged all Muslims to murder all the Americans: ?to kill the Americans and their allies ? civilians and military ? is an obligation incumbent upon every Muslim who can do it and in any country ? this until the Asqa Mosque (Jerusalem) and the Holy Mosque (Mecca) are liberated from their grip.?

But the long overdue withdrawal of soldiers from Saudi Arabia (who were out in a godforsaken desert and nowhere near the ?Holy Mosque?) had no more effect on al Qaeda than did the Israeli departure from Gaza and Lebanon on Hamas and Hezbollah. As in the case of Hitler?s serial demands for return of the ?stolen? German Sudetenland and then Czechoslovakia, land was never the real issue. Perceived loss of pride and status, hatred of the Jews, and unbridled contempt for a liberal West were.

The truth is that we are in a pause, a lull in a great storm that broke upon us five years ago on September 11. We are waiting to see when and where and how ? not really if ? the Iranians test their envisioned bomb. ?Another 9/11? is now part of the lexicon, suggesting that most Americans accept that an amorphous enemy that tries to knock down the Sears Tower, to blow up the Holland tunnel, to explode airliners over the Atlantic, and to slaughter commuters from London to Madrid to the Rhine may finally get lucky once ? and that once could be a death warrant for thousands of Westerners.

After 9/11 we were at war with a fascist creed that had trumped any damage to the homeland wrought by all earlier enemies, whether Germans, Italians, Japanese, or Russians. But now, five years later, we are in a holding pattern, waiting in a classic bellum interruptum ? whether in exhaustion from this long war in Afghanistan and Iraq, or complacent due to our very success hitherto in preventing jihadists from enacting mass murder in the United States.

So we are in limbo ? a sort of war, a sort of peace. Lulls of this nature are not such rare things in history. The Athenians and the Spartans between 421-415, or the Western Europeans between October 1939 and May 1940, likewise thought the squall had passed ? the respite a sign that the enemy was satiated, or was occupied elsewhere, or had had a change of heart, or that times of transient calm might mean permanent peace

We all wish it were so, but in private also fear that the worst ? whether from al Qaeda, Iran, or their epigones ? is to come.

Our pundits and experts scoff at all this concern over Islamic fascism ? as crude propaganda, neo-conservative war mongering, a veiled agenda to do Israel?s bidding, conspiracies to finish turning America from a republic into an empire, or just old-fashioned paranoia.

Their argument for thinking the danger is slight is that either we have already won, or we don?t really have a credible enemy to defeat other than a few thugs better left to the FBI and federal attorneys: the jihadists may sound like Nazis; but they lack a nation-state and thus the means to harm the West to any great degree. Intent is irrelevant, if the means are absent. Sure, there is a Mein Kampf, but no Wehrmacht in the Middle East.

There are three rejoinders to this notion that the Islamic fascists are hardly serious enemies, and cannot be compared to the old-time fascists who once started a war that led to 50 million deaths.

First, Islamic fascism is already the creed of the government of an oil-rich and soon to be nuclear Iran. Secular authoritarians like Pakistan?s Pervez Musharraf could easily fall, and the nation?s nuclear arsenal with him, into the hands of the madrassa Islamists. It is not inconceivable to envision several nuclear bombs among one or more theocratic governments in the years to come.

Second, in an age of weapons of mass destruction, global terrorism, and culpable deniability, authoritarian Middle Eastern regimes can, without being traced, subsidize and sanction killers, who in turn, with the right weapons, can kill and maim tens of thousands.

Third, in an interconnected and often fragile world, the mere attempt to blow up trains, jets, and iconic buildings results anyway in millions of dollars in damage to the West: ever more expensive airline security, cancelled flights, and money-losing delays and interruptions in a general climate of fear.

Each time Mr. Ahmadinejad opens his mouth, or Mr. Nasrallah shoots off a primitive rocket, the global stock market can dip, and the price of petroleum spikes. A good dissertation is needed to ascertain how many billions of dollars Ahmadinejad has conned for his theocracy by means of his creepy rhetoric alone, through price hikes on the daily export of his oil. Since this war has progressed, oil has gone up from $25 a barrel to over $70, now adding an additional $500 billion per annum to the coffers of Middle East dictatorships.

Given Iraq, Afghanistan, and the acrimony at home ? so similar to the debate right before Pearl Harbor over the earlier discounted fascist threat to the United States ? we apparently are waiting for the enemy to strike again, before renewing the offensive.

So while we keep our defenses up at home, foster democracy in the heart of the Middle East in Afghanistan and Iraq, and hope the globalized march of modernity undermines jihadism faster than it can disrupt the 21st century, we also wait ? for the next blow that we know will come.

?2006 Victor Davis Hanson
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 12, 2006, 09:35:36 AM
   
 GLOBAL VIEW
By BRET STEPHENS   


 
 
 
 
   
     
 
 
 
 

   
 RECENT COLUMNS
September 12
? The Liberals' War
September 5
? In Britain, the Jihadi Is Us

MORE
 


   SEARCH PAST COLUMNS

Search for these words:
 
 
Display all columns

 
advertisement
TODAY'S MOST POPULAR 
 
 
1. The Winners Are...
2. Insider Trading Sends Buy Signs
3. Detroit Finally Learns Tough Lesson
4. H-P Scandal Casts CEO Into Spotlight
5. Expanding Probes Increase Heat on Dell

ABOUT BRET STEPHENS

 
Bret Stephens is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board. He joined the Journal in New York in 1998 as a features editor and moved to Brussels the following year to work as an editorial writer for the paper's European edition. In 2002, Mr. Stephens, then 28, became editor-in-chief of the Jerusalem Post, where he was responsible for its news, editorial, electronic and international divisions, and where he also wrote a weekly column. He returned to his present position in late 2004 and was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum the following year.
Mr. Stephens was raised in Mexico City and educated at the University of Chicago and the London School of Economics. He lives with his family in New York City. He invites comments to bstephens@wsj.com.

 
The Liberals' War
September 12, 2006; Page A21

"When I was 19, I moved to New York City. . . . If you had asked me to describe myself then, I would have told you I was a musician, an artist and, on a somewhat political level, a woman, a lesbian and a Jew. Being an American wouldn't have made my list. On Sept. 11, all that changed. I realized that I had been taking the freedoms I have here for granted. Now I have an American flag on my backpack, I cheer at the fighter jets as they pass overhead and I am calling myself a patriot."

-- Rachel Newman, "My Turn" in Newsweek, Oct. 21, 2001

Here's a puzzle: Why is it so frequently the case that the people who have the most at stake in the battle against Islamic extremism and the most to lose when Islamism gains -- namely, liberals -- are typically the most reluctant to fight it?

It is often said, particularly in the "progressive" precincts of the democratic left, that by aiming at the Pentagon, the World Trade Center and perhaps the Capitol, Mohammed Atta and his cohorts were registering a broader Muslim objection to what those buildings supposedly represented: capitalism and globalization, U.S. military power, support for Israel, oppression of the Palestinians and so on.

 
But maybe Ms. Newman intuited that Atta's real targets weren't the symbols of American mightiness, but of what that mightiness protected: people like her, bohemian, sexually unorthodox, a minority within a minority. Maybe she understood that those F-16s overhead -- likely manned by pilots who went to church on Sunday and voted the straight GOP ticket -- were being flown above all for her defense, at the outer cultural perimeter of everything that America's political order permits.

This may be reading too much into Ms. Newman's essay. Yet after 9/11 at least a few old-time voices on the left -- Christopher Hitchens, Bruce Bawer, Paul Berman and Ron Rosenbaum, among others -- understood that what Islamism most threatened wasn't just America generally, but precisely the values that modern liberalism had done so much to promote and protect for the past 40 years: civil rights, gay rights, feminism, privacy rights, reproductive choice, sexual freedom, the right to worship as one chooses, the right not to worship at all. And so they bid an unsentimental good-bye to their one-time comrades and institutions: the peace movement, the pages of the Nation and the New York Review of Books, "the deluded and pathetic sophistry of postmodernists of the left, who believe their unreadable, jargon-clotted theory somehow helps liberate the wretched of the earth," as Mr. Rosenbaum wrote in the New York Observer in 2002.

Five years on, however, Messrs. Hitchens, Bawer et al. seem less like trendsetters and more like oddball dissenters from a left-liberal orthodoxy that finds less and less to like about the very idea of a war on Islamic extremism, never mind the war in Iraq. In the September issue of the Atlantic Monthly, James Fallows, formerly Jimmy Carter's speechwriter, argues that the smart thing for the U.S. to do is declare victory and give the conflict a rest: "A state of war with no clear end point," he writes, "makes it more likely for a country to overreact in ways that hurt itself." Further to the left, a panoply of "peace" groups is all but in league with Islamists. Consider, for instance, QUIT! -- Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism -- a group that, in its hatred for Israel, curiously fails to notice that Tel Aviv is the only city in the Middle East that annually hosts a gay-pride parade.

An instinct for pacifism surely goes some way toward explaining the left's curious unwillingness to sign up for a war to defend its core values. A suspicion of black-and-white moral distinctions of the kind President Bush is fond of making about terrorism -- a suspicion that easily slides into moral relativism -- is another.

But there are deeper factors at work. One is appeasement: "Many Europeans feel that a confrontation with Islamism will give the Islamists more opportunities to recruit -- that confronting evil is counterproductive," says Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born, former Dutch parliamentarian whose outspoken opposition to Islamism (and to Islam itself) forced her repeatedly into hiding and now into exile in the United States. "They think that by appeasing them -- allowing them their own ghettoes, their own Muslim schools -- they will win their friendship."

A second factor, she says, is the superficial confluence between the bugaboos of the Chomskyite left and modern-day Islamism. "Many social democrats have this stereotype that the corporate world, the U.S. and Israel are the real evil. And [since] Islamists are also against Israel and America, [social democrats] sense an alliance with them."

But the really "lethal mistake," she says, "is the confusion of Islam, which is a body of ideas, with ethnicity." Liberals especially are reluctant to criticize the content of Islam because they fear that it is tantamount to criticizing Muslims as a group, and is therefore almost a species of racism. Yet Muslims, she says, "are responsible for their ideas. If it is written in the Koran that you must kill apostates, kill the unbelievers, kill gays, then it is legitimate and urgent to say, 'if that is what your God tells you, you have to modify it.'"

A similar rethink may be in order among liberals and progressives. For whatever else distinguishes Islamism from liberalism, both are remarkably self-absorbed affairs, obsessed with maintaining the purity of their own values no matter what the cost. In the former case, the result too often is terror. In the latter, the ultimate risk is suicide, as the endless indulgence of "the other" obstructs the deeper need to preserve itself. Liberal beliefs -- and the Rachel Newmans of the world -- deserve to be protected and fought for. A liberalism that abandons its own defense to others does not, something liberals everywhere might usefully dwell on during this season of sad remembrance.

 
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: SB_Mig on September 13, 2006, 10:11:48 AM
Commentary by Keith Olbermann
September 11, 2006

Half a lifetime ago, I worked in this now-empty space. And for 40 days after the attacks, I worked here again, trying to make sense of what happened, and was yet to happen, as a reporter. All the time, I knew that the very air I breathed contained the remains of thousands of people, including four of my friends, two in the planes and -- as I discovered from those "missing posters" seared still into my soul -- two more in the Towers.

And I knew too, that this was the pyre for hundreds of New York policemen and firemen, of whom my family can claim half a dozen or more, as our ancestors. I belabor this to emphasize that, for me this was, and is, and always shall be, personal.

And anyone who claims that I and others like me are "soft,"or have "forgotten" the lessons of what happened here is at best a grasping, opportunistic, dilettante and at worst, an idiot whether he is a commentator, or a Vice President, or a President.

However, of all the things those of us who were here five years ago could have forecast -- of all the nightmares that unfolded before our eyes, and the others that unfolded only in our minds -- none of us could have predicted this.

Five years later this space is still empty.
Five years later there is no memorial to the dead.
Five years later there is no building rising to show with proud defiance that we would not have our America wrung from us, by cowards and criminals.
Five years later this country's wound is still open.
Five years later this country's mass grave is still unmarked.
Five years later this is still just a background for a photo-op.

It is beyond shameful.

At the dedication of the Gettysburg Memorial -- barely four months after the last soldier staggered from another Pennsylvania field -- Mr. Lincoln said, "we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract."
Lincoln used those words to immortalize their sacrifice.

Today our leaders could use those same words to rationalize their reprehensible inaction. "We cannot dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground." So we won't.

Instead they bicker and buck pass. They thwart private efforts, and jostle to claim credit for initiatives that go nowhere. They spend the money on irrelevant wars, and elaborate self-congratulations, and buying off columnists to write how good a job they're doing instead of doing any job at all.

Five years later, Mr. Bush, we are still fighting the terrorists on these streets. And look carefully, sir, on these 16 empty acres. The terrorists are clearly, still winning.

And, in a crime against every victim here and every patriotic sentiment you mouthed but did not enact, you have done nothing about it.

And there is something worse still than this vast gaping hole in this city, and in the fabric of our nation. There is its symbolism of the promise unfulfilled, the urgent oath, reduced to lazy execution.

The only positive on 9/11 and the days and weeks that so slowly and painfully followed it was the unanimous humanity, here, and throughout the country. The government, the President in particular, was given every possible measure of support.

Those who did not belong to his party -- tabled that.
Those who doubted the mechanics of his election -- ignored that.
Those who wondered of his qualifications -- forgot that.

History teaches us that nearly unanimous support of a government cannot be taken away from that government by its critics. It can only be squandered by those who use it not to heal a nation's wounds, but to take political advantage.
Terrorists did not come and steal our newly-regained sense of being American first, and political, fiftieth. Nor did the Democrats. Nor did the media. Nor did the people.

The President -- and those around him -- did that.

They promised bi-partisanship, and then showed that to them, "bi-partisanship" meant that their party would rule and the rest would have to follow, or be branded, with ever-escalating hysteria, as morally or intellectually confused, as appeasers, as those who, in the Vice President's words yesterday, "validate the strategy of the terrorists."

They promised protection, and then showed that to them "protection" meant going to war against a despot whose hand they had once shaken, a despot who we now learn from our own Senate Intelligence Committee, hated al-Qaida as much as we did.

The polite phrase for how so many of us were duped into supporting a war, on the false premise that it had 'something to do' with 9/11 is "lying by implication."

The impolite phrase is "impeachable offense."

Not once in now five years has this President ever offered to assume responsibility for the failures that led to this empty space, and to this, the current, curdled, version of our beloved country. Still, there is a last snapping flame from a final candle of respect and fairness: even his most virulent critics have never suggested he alone bears the full brunt of the blame for 9/11. Half the time, in fact, this President has been so gently treated, that he has seemed not even to be the man most responsible for anything in his own administration.

Yet what is happening this very night?

A mini-series, created, influenced -- possibly financed by -- the most radical and cold of domestic political Machiavellis, continues to be televised into our homes.

The documented truths of the last fifteen years are replaced by bald-faced lies; the talking points of the current regime parroted; the whole sorry story blurred, by spin, to make the party out of office seem vacillating and impotent, and the party in office, seem like the only option.

How dare you, Mr. President, after taking cynical advantage of the unanimity and love, and transmuting it into fraudulent war and needless death, after monstrously transforming it into fear and suspicion and turning that fear into the campaign slogan of three elections? How dare you -- or those around you -- ever "spin" 9/11?

Just as the terrorists have succeeded -- are still succeeding -- as long as there is no memorial and no construction here at Ground Zero. So, too, have they succeeded, and are still succeeding as long as this government uses 9/11 as a wedge to pit Americans against Americans.

This is an odd point to cite a television program, especially one from March of 1960. But as Disney's continuing sell-out of the truth (and this country) suggests, even television programs can be powerful things.

And long ago, a series called "The Twilight Zone" broadcast a riveting episode entitled "The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street."

In brief: a meteor sparks rumors of an invasion by extra-terrestrials disguised as humans. The electricity goes out. A neighbor pleads for calm. Suddenly his car -- and only his car -- starts. Someone suggests he must be the alien. Then another man's lights go on. As charges and suspicion and panic overtake the street, guns are inevitably produced. An "alien" is shot -- but he turns out to be just another neighbor, returning from going for help. The camera pulls back to a near-by hill, where two extra-terrestrials are seen manipulating a small device that can jam electricity. The veteran tells his novice that there's no need to actually attack, that you just turn off a few of the human machines and then, "they pick the most dangerous enemy they can find, and it's themselves."

And then, in perhaps his finest piece of writing, Rod Serling sums it up with words of remarkable prescience, given where we find ourselves tonight: "The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices, to be found only in the minds of men.

"For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy, and a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all its own -- for the children, and the children yet unborn."

When those who dissent are told time and time again -- as we will be, if not tonight by the President, then tomorrow by his portable public chorus -- that he is preserving our freedom, but that if we use any of it, we are somehow un-American...When we are scolded, that if we merely question, we have "forgotten the lessons of 9/11"... look into this empty space behind me and the bi-partisanship upon which this administration also did not build, and tell me:

Who has left this hole in the ground?

We have not forgotten, Mr. President.

You have.

May this country forgive you.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 17, 2006, 07:32:36 AM
CRADLE OF HATE
By RALPH PETERS

September 15, 2006 -- ISLAMIST terror is a deadly threat we have barely
begun to address. Yet religion-fueled fanaticism in the Middle East
shouldn't surprise us: The tradition pre-dates the Prophet's birth by
thousands of years.

Terrorists just have better tools these days.

What should amaze us isn't the terrorists' strength, which has limits, but
the comprehensive failure of Middle Eastern civilization. Given all the
wealth that's poured into the region, its vast human resources and all of
its opportunities for change, the mess the Middle East has made of itself is
stunning.

Beyond Israel, the region hasn't produced a single first-rate government,
army, economy, university or industry. It hasn't even produced convincing
second-raters.

Culturally, the region is utterly noncompetitive. Societies stagnate as
populations seethe. To the extent it exists, development benefits the
wealthy and powerful. The common people are either ignored or miserably
oppressed - and not just the women.

Operation Iraqi Freedom wasn't so much an invasion as a last-minute rescue
mission - an attempt to give one major Middle Eastern state a
two-minutes-to-midnight chance to develop a humane, democratic government.

It may not work. But we'd better hope it does.

The Middle East's failure on every front enabled the rise of the
terrorists - as well as the empowerment of other religious extremists,
secular dictators and political parties willing to poison electorates with
hatred.

The popular culprit for the mess is Islam. And there can be no doubt that
the faith's local degeneration has been catastrophic for the region. By far
the most numerous victims of "Islam Gone Wild" have been Middle Eastern
Muslims.

But we can't be content with a single explanation for a civilization's
failure, as powerful as the answer may appear. Yes, Islamist governments
fail miserably. But so do secular Arab, Persian and Pakistani governments
(whose leaders belatedly play the Islamic card).

Yes, the culture is Islamic, even in nominally secular states. But we have
to ask some very politically incorrect questions that cut even deeper.

Many of the social, governmental and psychological structures at the core of
Middle Eastern societies pre-date Islam. Authoritarian government; a
slave-like status for women; pervasive corruption; labor viewed as an evil
to be avoided; the relegation of learning to narrow castes; economies that
rely on trade rather than productivity to generate wealth, even the
grandiose rhetoric - all were in place long before Islam appeared.

The repeated failures we've witnessed go far beyond a religion on its
sickbed. Instead of Islam being the Middle East's problem, what if Islam's
problem is the Middle East?

Were Christianity and Judaism "saved" because they escaped the Middle East?
Were these other two great monotheist religions able to master the power of
knowledge and human potential because they were driven from their
stultifying cultural and geographic origins? Did the Diaspora and the
subsequent Muslim destruction of the cradle of Christianity ultimately save
these two faiths?

The Middle East is a straitjacket that turns religions mad. We got away.

A dozen years ago, I wrote that "culture is fate." And culture is tied to
soil. My travels over the intervening years have only deepened that
conviction. Regions have distinct cultures that endure long beyond the
shelf-life predicted for them by academics.

The stunning conquests Islam made in its early centuries may have been its
undoing - a faith secure in its heartlands never had to worry about its
survival thereafter. Despite gruesome invasions, Islam remained safely
rooted in its native earth.

As "refugee religions," Christianity and Judaism had to struggle to
survive - the latter still struggles today. For all of the pop theories
blaming the Rise of the West on germs, dumb luck or sheer nastiness, the
truth is that Judeo-Christian civilization was hardened by mortal threats -
including horrendous internal conflicts.

We got tough. And the tough got going.

It isn't an accident that the industrial revolution took off in
resource-poor Britain, or that the poverty-ridden contin- ent of Europe
invented new means of exerting power.

In exile, the Judeo-Christian civilization grew up on the global mean
streets. MiddleEastern Islam suffered from easy wealth, luxury and a
narcotic regional heritage.

We changed, they froze. An Assyrian tyrant, such as the murderous
Ashurbanipal - who reigned over 1,200 years before Mohammed's birth -would
understand the governments, societies and disciplinarian religion of today's
Middle East. The West would baffle him.

Since the Renaissance, the West fixed its gaze on the future. Islamic
civilization sought to freeze time, to cling to a dream of a lost paradise,
part Islamic Baghdad, part Babylon.

Shocked awake over the past few centuries, some Middle Easterners realized
they had to change. But they didn't know how. Modernization sputtered out.
Pan-Arabism foundered on greed and corruption.

The shah tried to buy the "good parts" of Western civilization, but the
pieces didn't work on their own. Next, Iran tried theocracy - government by
bigots. Didn't work either.

"Oil-rich" Saudi Arabia has a per capita GDP half that of Israel's (whose
sole resource is people). Dubai has shopping malls - selling designer goods
with Western labels.

Today's fanatics can hurt us, but can't destroy us. Their fatal ability is
to drag their civilization down to an even lower level.

The problem is that the Middle East hasn't been able to escape the Middle
East.
Title: Whom the Crocodile Eats Last
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on September 17, 2006, 10:17:55 AM
Victor Davis Hanson
September 16, 2006 6:37 PM
Depressing Times

Oriana Fallaci, RIP, the Pope, and a Sad Age

Rarely has the death of a public intellectual affected me as much as the passing of Oriana Fallaci. I never met her, and only received a brief note once from her accompanying a copy of The Rage and the Pride. The story of her career is well known, but her death, at this pivotal time, was full of paradoxes and yet instruction as well.
Radical Islam is, among other things, a patriarchal movement, embedded particularly in the cult of the Middle-Eastern male, who occupies a privileged position in a society that can be fairly described as one of abject gender apartheid. Islamism is also at war with the religious infidel, not just the atheist?and, in its envy and victimhood, fueled by a renewal of the age-old hatred of the Christian.

But so far, with very few exceptions other than the lion, Christopher Hitchens, the courageous William Shawcross, and a few others, the Left has either been neutral or anti-American in this struggle. And few Christians in positions of influence and respect have publicly defended their faith and the civilization that birthed it.
Candor, after all, can get one killed, exiled, or ostracized?whether a Danish cartoonist, a Dutch filmmaker, a Wall Street Journal reporter, or a British-Indian novelist. So here, ill and in her seventies, returned Ms. Fallaci one last time to take up the hammer and tongs against radical Islam?a diminutive woman of the Left and self-proclaimed atheist who wrote more bravely on behalf of her civilization than have most who are hale, males, conservatives, or Christians.

Her fiery message was as timely as it was caricatured and slandered: Muslims who leave the Middle East to live under the free aegis of the West have a moral duty to support and protect the civilization that has welcomed them, rather than romanticize about what they have forsaken; Christianity is more than a religion, but also a powerful emblem of the force of reason, in that it seeks to spread belief by rational thought as well as faith; and that affluent and leisured Westerners, bargaining away their honor and traditions out of fear and for illusory security, have only emboldened radical Islam that seeks to liquidate them.

I wish she were still alive to scoff at the politically correct, the appeaser, and the triangulator, but alas she is gone, defiant to the last.

Bene dictum?

And what are we to make of poor Benedict XVI, the scholastic, who, in a disastrous display of public sensitivity, makes the telling point, that Christianity, in its long evolution to the present, has learned to forsake violence, and to defend its faith through appeals to reason?and thus can offer its own experience in the current crisis of Islam. And by quoting from the emperor rhetorician Manuel Paleologus?whose desperate efforts at strengthening the Morea and the Isthmus at Corinth a generation before that awful Tuesday, May 29, 1453 all came to naught?the Pope failed to grasp that under the tenets of radical Islam of the modern age, context means little, intent nothing, learning less than zero. If a sentence, indeed a mere phrase can be taken out of context, twisted, manipulated to show an absence of deference to Islam, furor ensues, death threats follow, assassins load their belts?even as the New York Times or the Guardian issues its sanctimonious apologies in the hope that the crocodile will eat them last.

We learned the now familiar rage with the Danish cartoons, Theo Van Gogh, the false flushed Koran story, the forced change of ?Operation Infinite Justice? to ?Enduring Freedom?, the constant charges of ?Islamaphobia?, and a horde of other false grievances that so shook the West, traumatized in fear of having its skyscrapers, planes, trains, buses, nightclubs, and synagogues blown apart or its oil cut off.

So, yes, we know the asymmetrical rules: a state run-paper in Cairo or the West Bank, a lunatic Iranian mullah, a grand mufti from this or that mosque, can all rail about infidels, ?pigs and apes?, in language reminiscent of the Third Reich?and meet with approval in the Middle East and silence in the West. But for a Westerner, a Tony Blair, George Bush, or Pope Benedict to even hint that something has gone terribly wrong with modern Islam, is to endure immediate furor and worse. In short, no modern ideology, no religious sect of the present age demands so much of others, so little of itself.

In matters of the present war, I have given up on most of the neoconservatives, many of whom, following the perceived pulse of the battlefield, have either renounced their decade-long, pre-September11 rants to remove Saddam (despite the 140,000 brave souls still on the field of battle who took them at their word), or turned on the President on grounds that he is not waging the perfect fight and thus is not pursuing the good war. The Paleo-right is as frightening as is the lunatic Left. My old Democratic party is long dead, their jackals trying to tear apart the solitary and stumbling noble stag Joe Liebermann, the old center taken over by the Kerry and Soros billionaires, and the guilt-ridden academic, celebrity and media cadres.

So we really are left with very little in these pivotal times?the will of George Bush, of course, the Old Breed unchanged since Okinawa and the Bulge that still anchors the US military, the courage and skill of a very few brave writers like a Hitchens, Krauthammer, and the tireless and brilliant Mark Steyn, but very, very few others. No, this is an age in which we in the West make smug snuff movies about killing an American President, while the Taliban and the Islamists boast of assassinating the Pope.
So long may you run, Ms. Fallaci, you who by now have learned that, yes, there is a soul, and, yes, yours was indeed saved for eternity if only for its singular courage and honesty alone. And dear Pope: clarify, contextualize, express sorrow over the wrong interpretation of your remarks, but please don?t apologize for the Truth?not now, not ever.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 18, 2006, 02:05:54 PM
Woof All:

I'm not quite sure where to put this piece.  "Dialog with Muslims" and "Free Speech vs. Islamo Fascism" are close, but not quite right.  In that the views herein are strong and passionate I'm putting it here, even though here too it does not quite fit.

Regardless, what one thinks of the conclusions, a strong erudite piece of writing.

TAC,
CD
==============

Jihad, the Lord's Supper, and eternal life
By Spengler

Jihad injures reason, for it honors a god who suffers no constraints on his caprice, unlike the Judeo-Christian god, who is limited by love. That is the nub of Pope Benedict XVI's September 12 address in Regensburg, Germany. It promises to be the Vatican's most controversial utterance in living memory.

When a German-language volume appeared in 2003 quoting the same analysis by a long-dead Jewish theologian, I wrote of "oil on the flames of civilizational war". [1] Now the same ban has been

 

preached from St Peter's chair, and it is a defining moment comparable to Winston Churchill's "Iron Curtain" speech at Fulton, Missouri, in 1946. Earlier this year, Benedict's elliptical remarks to former students at a private seminar in 2005, mentioned in passing by an American Jesuit and reported in this space, created a scandal. [2] I wrote at the time that even the pope must whisper when it comes to Islam. We have entered a different stage of civilizational war.

The Islamic world now views the pontiff as an existential threat, and with reason. Jihad is not merely the whim of a despotic divinity, as the pope implied. It is much more: jihad is the fundamental sacrament of Islam, the Muslim cognate of the Lord's Supper in Christianity, that is, the unique form of sacrifice by which the individual believer communes with the Transcendent. To denounce jihad on theological grounds is a blow at the foundations of Islam, in effect a papal call for the conversion of the Muslims.

Just before then-cardinal Ratzinger's election as pope last year, I wrote, "Now that everyone is talking about Europe's demographic death, it is time to point out that there exists a way out: convert European Muslims to Christianity. The reported front-runner at the Vatican conclave ... Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, is one of the few Church leaders unafraid to raise the subject." [3] The Regensburg address oversteps the bounds of dialogue and verges upon the missionary. A great deal has changed since John Paul II kissed the Koran before news cameras in 1999. The boys and girls of the Catholic youth organization Communione e Liberazione that Ratzinger nurtured for a generation will have a great deal to talk to their Muslim school-fellows about.

No more can one assume now that Europe will slide meekly into dhimmitude.


In that respect [I wrote during the conclave] John Paul II recalled the sad position of Pius XII, afraid to denounce publicly the murder of Polish priests by Nazi occupiers - let alone the murder of Polish Jews - for fear that the Nazis would react by killing even more. It is hard to second-guess the actions of Pius XII given his terrible predicament, but at some point one must ask when the Gates of Hell can be said to have prevailed over St Peter.
Specifically, Benedict stated that jihad, the propagation of Islam by force, is irrational, because it is against the Reason of God. Citing a 14th-century Byzantine emperor to the effect that Mohammed's "decree that the faith he preached should be spread with the sword" as "evil and inhumane" provoked headlines. But of greater weight is the pope's observation that Allah is a god whose "absolute transcendence" allows no constraint, to the point that Allah is free if he chooses to promote evil. The great German-Jewish theologian Franz Rosenzweig explained the matter more colorfully than did the pope, as I reported three years ago in the cited review:


The god of Mohammed is a creator who well might not have bothered to create. He displays his power like an Oriental potentate who rules by violence, not by acting according to necessity, not by authorizing the enactment of the law, but rather in his freedom to act arbitrarily ... Providence thus is shattered into infinitely many individual acts of creation, with no connection to each other, each of which has the importance of the entire creation. That has been the doctrine of the ruling orthodox philosophy in Islam. Every individual thing is created from scratch at every moment. Islam cannot be salvaged from this frightful providence of Allah ... despite its vehement, haughty insistence upon the idea of the god's unity, Islam slips back into a kind of monistic paganism, if you will permit the expression. God competes with God at every moment, as if it were the colorfully contending heavenful of gods of polytheism.
It is amusing to see liberal Jewish commentators in the United States, eg, the editorial page of the September 16 New York Times, deplore the pope's remarks, considering that Rosenzweig said it all the more sharply in 1920.

Benedict's comments regarding Islam served as a preamble to a longer discourse on the unity of faith and reason. "Is the conviction that acting unreasonably contradicts God's nature merely a Greek idea, or is it always and intrinsically true?" Benedict asked, and answered his own question: "I believe that here we can see the profound harmony between what is Greek in the best sense of the word and the biblical understanding of faith in God." It is not, however, the reasoned side of Benedict's remarks to which Muslims responded, but rather the existential.

Rather than rail at the pope's characterization of Islam, Muslims might have responded as follows: "Excuse me, Your Holiness, but did we hear you say that you represent a religion of reason, whereas Allah is a god of unreason? Do you not personally eat the body and blood of your god - at least things that you insist really are his flesh and blood - every day at Mass? And you accuse us of unreason!" That is a fair rebuttal, but it opens up Islam's can of worms.

True, we are not pottering about in this pilgrim existence to be rational. Today's Germans are irrational, and know that their time has past, and therefore desist from bearing children. What mankind - Christian, Muslim and Jew, and all - demand of God is irrational. We want eternal life! Christians do not want what the Greeks wanted - Socrates' transmigration of souls, nor the shadow existence of Homer's dead heroes in Hades. That is an unreasonable demand if ever there was one.

Before the Bible was written, the Babylonian hero Gilgamesh learned that his quest for immortality was futile. The demigods of Greece, mortals favored by Olympians, suffered a tedious sort of immortal life as stars, trees or rivers. The gods of the heathens are not in any case eternal, only immortal. They were born and they will die, like the Norse gods at the Ragnorak, and their vulnerability projects the people's presentiment of its own death. To whom, precisely, have the gods offered eternal life prior to the appearance of revealed religion? Eternal life and a deathless mortality are quite different things.

But what is it that God demands of us in response to our demand for eternal life? We know the answer ourselves. To partake of life in another world we first must detach ourselves from this world in order to desire the next. In plain language, we must sacrifice ourselves. There is no concept of immortality without some concept of sacrifice, not in any culture or in any religion. That is a demand shared by the Catholic bishops and the Kalahari Bushmen.

God's covenant with Abraham is unique and singular in world history. A single universal and eternal god makes an eternal pact with a mortal that can be fulfilled only if Abraham's tribe becomes an eternal people. But the price of this pact is self-sacrifice. That is an existential mortal act beyond all ethics, as Soren Kierkegaard tells us in Fear and Trembling. The sacraments of revealed religion are sublimated human sacrifice, for the revealed god in his love for humankind spares the victim, just as God provided a ram in place of the bound Isaac on Mount Moriah. Among Jews the covenant must be renewed in each male child through a substitute form of human sacrifice, namely circumcision. [4] Christians believe that a single human sacrifice spared the rest of humankind.

Jihad also is a form of human sacrifice. He who serves Allah so faithfully as to die in the violent propagation of Islam goes straight to paradise, there to enjoy virgins or raisins, depending on the translation. But Allah is not the revealed god of loving kindness, or agape, but - pace Benedict - a god of reason, that is, of cold calculation. Islam admits no expiatory sacrifice. Everyone must carry his own spear.

We are too comfortable, too clean, too squeamish, too modern to descend into the terrible space where birth, death and immortality are decided. We forget that we cannot have eternal life unless we are ready to give up this one - and this the Muslim knows only through what we should call the sacrament of jihad. Through jihad, the Muslim does almost precisely what the Christian does at the Lord's Supper. It is the sacrifice of Jesus that grants immortal life to all Christians, that is, those who become one with Jesus by eating his flesh and drinking his blood so that the sacrifice also is theirs, at least in Catholic terms. Protestants substitute empathy identification with the crucified Christ for the trans-substantiated blood and flesh of Jesus.

Christians believe that Jesus died on the cross to give all men eternal life, on condition that they take part in his sacrifice, either through the physical communion of the Catholic Church or the empathetic Communion of Protestantism. From a Muslim vantage point, the extreme of divine humility embodied in Jesus' sacrifice is beyond reason. Allah, by contrast, deals with those who submit to him after the calculation of an earthly despot. He demands that all Muslims sacrifice themselves by becoming warriors and, if necessary, laying their lives down in the perpetual war against the enemies of Islam.

These are parallel acts, in which different peoples do different things, in the service of different deities, but for the same reason: for eternal life.

Why is self-sacrifice always and everywhere the cost of eternal life? It is not because a vengeful and sanguineous God demands his due before issuing us a visa to heaven. Quite the contrary: we must sacrifice our earthly self, our attachment to the pleasures and petty victories of our short mortal life if we really are to gain the eternal life that we desire. The animal led to the altar, indeed Jesus on the cross, is ourselves: we die along with the sacrifice and yet live, by the grace of God. YHWH did not want Isaac to die, but without taking Abraham to Mount Moriah, Abraham himself could not have been transformed into the man desirous and deserving of immortal life. Jesus died and took upon him the sins of the world, in Christian terms, precisely so that a vicarious sacrifice would redeem those who come to him.

What distinguishes Allah from YHWH and (in Christian belief) his son Jesus is love. God gives Jews and Christians a path that their foot can tread, one that is not too hard for mortals, to secure the unobtainable, namely immortal life, as if by miracle. Out of love God gives the Torah to the Jews, not because God is a stickler for the execution of 613 commandments, but because it is a path upon which the Jew may sacrifice and yet live, and receive his portion of the World to Come. The most important sacrifice in Judaism is the Sabbath - "our offering of rest", says the congregation in the Sabbath prayers - a day of inactivity that acknowledges that the Earth is the Lord's. It is a sacrifice, as it were, of ego. In this framework, incidentally, it is pointless to distinguish Judaism as a "religion of works" as opposed to Christianity as a "religion of faith".

To Christians, God offers the vicarious participation in his sacrifice of himself through his only son.

That is Grace: a free gift by God to men such that they may obtain eternal life. By a miracle, the human soul responds to the offer of Grace with a leap, a leap away from the attachments that hold us to this world, and a foretaste of the World to Come.

There is no Grace in Islam, no miracle, no expiatory sacrifice, no expression of love for mankind such that each Muslim need not be a sacrifice. On the contrary, the concept of jihad, in which the congregation of Islam is also the army, states that every single Muslim must sacrifice himself personally. Jihad is the precise equivalent of the Lord's Supper in Christianity and the Jewish Sabbath, the defining expression of sacrifice that opens the prospect of eternity to the mortal believer. To ask Islam to become moderate, to reform, to become a peaceful religion of personal conscience is the precise equivalent of asking Catholics to abolish Mass.

Islam, I have argued for years, faces an existential crisis in the modern world, which has ripped its adherents out of their traditional existence and thrust them into deadly conflicts. What was always latent in Islam has now come to the surface: the practice of Islam now expresses itself uniquely in jihad. Benedict XVI has had the courage to call things by their true names. Everything else is hypocrisy and self-delusion.

Postscript
Regarding Benedict XVI's statement that the characterization of the Prophet Mohammed did not reflect his "personal opinion": In 1938, at the peak of Stalin's terror, a Muscovite called the KGB to report that his parrot had escaped. The KGB officer said, "Why are you calling us?" The Muscovite averred, "I want to state for the record that I do not share the parrot's political opinions."

Notes
1. See Oil on the flames of civilizational war, December 2, 2003.
2. See When even the pope has to whisper, January 10, 2006.
3. The crescent and the conclave, April 19, 2005.
4. See The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son: The Transformation of Child Sacrifice in Judaism and Christianity, by Jon D Levinson (Harvard; Cambridge 1993).

(Copyright 2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing .)
Title: Roots of the ACLU
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on September 21, 2006, 07:50:15 PM
ACLU: Conceived In Tyranny

INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
Posted 9/21/2006

The Enemy Within: From the beginning, the American Civil Liberties Union has aligned itself with America's adversaries. Its unrelenting strategy has been to twist our Constitution into a weapon against American values and security.

ACLU founder and longtime executive director Roger Baldwin's infamous quote still haunts his organization today, a quarter-century after the radical activist's death:
"I am for socialism, disarmament and ultimately for abolishing the state itself as an instrument of violence and compulsion. I seek social ownership of property, the abolition of the propertied class, and sole control by those who produce wealth. Communism is the goal."

It's a statement that's been repeated and reprinted so many times, some Americans might be numbed rather than outraged upon hearing it again. But it's no urban legend. The man who started the organization that claims to be the leading safeguard of the U.S. Constitution did say it, along with plenty of statements mirroring those sentiments.

Baldwin was already steeped in communist thought when in the late 1910s he jump-started the American Union Against Militarism, which was established to oppose the U.S. effort in World War I. Within the AUAM ? the progenitor of the ACLU ? Baldwin formed the Bureau of Conscientious Objectors to defend war resisters. He also joined the anti-war socialist People's Council.

In 1918, Baldwin pleaded guilty to his own draft dodging and was sentenced to a year in prison. He told his local draft board he refused to perform military service and "any service whatever designed to help the war." He opposed the draft in principle, during war or peacetime, or "for any purpose whatsoever."
That didn't mean Baldwin or the ACLU was pacifist, anti-violence or anti-oppression. In 1934 in an article in Russia Today, he described himself as "anti-capitalist and pro-revolutionary." According to Baldwin, "When that power of the working class is once achieved, as it has been only in the Soviet Union, I am for maintaining it by any means whatever."

The Soviet Union, he said, "has already created liberties far greater than exist elsewhere in the world. . . . It is genuine, and it is the nearest approach to freedom that the workers have ever achieved."

In Baldwin's view, American workers had "no real liberties save to change masters," and if they only understood their own interests, "Soviet workers' democracy would be their goal."

Catholic League President William Donohue, author of "The Politics of the American Civil Liberties Union," recounts how Baldwin, during a guided tour of the Soviet Union in 1927, was confided to by his tour guide, who "broke down and confessed that the secret police ran the country and deliberately concealed from fellow travelers the terrible torture that took place behind closed doors."

Baldwin later admitted to his biographer Peggy Lamson that he was "too prejudiced" to let that revelation affect his thinking. He told her, "Great upheavals like the Russian Revolution have their price, I told myself."

In the 1930s, Congress investigated the ACLU and found it to be "closely affiliated with the communist movement in the United States, and fully 90% of its efforts are on behalf of communists who have come into conflict with the law." According to the congressional investigation's conclusion, "It claims to stand for free speech, free press and free assembly, but it is quite apparent that the main function of the ACLU is to attempt to protect the communists in their advocacy of force and violence to overthrow the government."

The Soviet Union may be long dead, but as Fox News' Bill O'Reilly writes in his soon-to-be-released book "Culture Warrior," the ACLU "is still using Baldwin's strategy, wrapping itself in the flag and defending the rights of the 'folks.' Unless, of course, the folks are Christians, Boy Scouts, parents who want to know if their underage daughters are having abortions, or concerned Americans who want sexual predators who hurt children held accountable."

In the guise of protecting our constitutional rights, the ACLU does everything from defending child molestation advocates (as in the case of the North American Man/Boy Love Association in Massachusetts in 2000) to preventing our armed forces from recruiting; it sued the Defense Department this year for "violating American high school students' privacy rights."

As Congress discovered over 70 years ago, the ACLU doesn't stand for free speech; it stands against America.

http://www.investors.com/editorial/editorialcontent.asp?secid=1501&status=article&id=243727412764090
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: SB_Mig on September 21, 2006, 08:16:55 PM
Please...  :?

"In 1918..."

"In 1934 in an article in Russia Today..."

"...a guided tour of the Soviet Union in 1927"

"In the 1930s, Congress investigated the ACLU..."


Buzz, I like your posts so at least give me some recent history. Quoting facts from the 1910-1930's about the ACLU and the Communist menace really don't mean much. I may not agree with the ACLU but negative press from the '30s ain't gonna cut it.




Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on September 22, 2006, 10:09:52 AM
Quote
Buzz, I like your posts so at least give me some recent history. Quoting facts from the 1910-1930's about the ACLU and the Communist menace really don't mean much. I may not agree with the ACLU but negative press from the '30s ain't gonna cut it.

Ya know, if I had any sort of sense that yesterday's Marxists had done some sort of soul searching and learned the lessons of the gulags et al I'd probably consider this ancient history, too. Alas, though many of the hard core left take pains to conceal their former Communist inclinations, I don't get the sense that they've taken to heart the lessons of Stalin and sundry other butchers embracing Marxist ideology.

When the ACLU gets around to filing an amicus brief in support of the second amendment or individual property rights I'll be ready to conclude they are shedding their Marxist roots. 'Til then this sort of reflection strikes me as germane.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: SB_Mig on September 22, 2006, 05:52:04 PM
Old article, but worth a read:

http://www.enterstageright.com/archive/articles/0700aclu.htm

The hypocrisy of the ACLU

By Dr. Jeremy Blanks
web posted July 3, 2000

I consider myself to be a Constitutionalist and a believer in Jeffersonian principles. Some may ask, what is a Constitutionalist or Jeffersonian principles? Well, in general terms it means that I strongly support the Constitution as the law of this land and especially the Bill of Rights. Specifically, it means that I believe in individual rights. There are numerous organizations out there that support and fight every day for these rights. The National Rifle Association (NRA) is such a group as is the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). The ACLU is well known for its court, political, and media battles in support of First, Fourth, Fifth, Tenth, etc. Amendment rights. I am drawn to these organizations, due to my beliefs, and I generally support their positions in defending and preserving our rights from those that would limit or remove them.. However, I have become concerned about the ACLU, which has decided that the Second Amendment is not worthy of their support as are the other individual rights specifically listed in the Bill of Rights.

The ACLU takes this odd position on the Second Amendment for two primary reasons, along with a fall back stance. First, they have decided that the term "the people" that is contained in the Second Amendment does not apply to "the people" as it does in all of the other rights contained in the Bill of Rights. Instead, they take the position that this is a collective right and can only be assigned to a militia group, such as the National Guard, which means that Congress can limit or remove gun ownership as they see fit. Secondly, they cite the 1939 Supreme Court case of US. vs. Miller, as proof that the Supreme Court agrees with their beliefs. And finally, they take the fall back position that even if their first two reasons do not hold water, the Second is now outdated because the founding fathers could not have envisioned the type of arms that are currently available and the dangers of a few using firearms in criminal activity outweigh the value of this right to society.

Let's first address the position of the ACLU that the Second Amendment is a collective right rather than an individual one. Their entire position rests on the assumption that the term "the people" in the Second Amendment is different from the term "the people" that is used everywhere else in the Constitution and throughout the Bill of Rights. In further support of their position, the ACLU argues that the term militia is made in reference to something like the National Guard. Many people buy into these arguments without taking a close look at the Second Amendment and other supporting documentation. However, if one takes the time to only mildly explore the actual meanings here, they come to a very different conclusion. For example, the only way to assume that "the people" is a collective right in the Second Amendment is to apply that very same definition to much if not all of the Constitution and Bill of Rights. Of course, that would mean that rights such as freedom of speech, press, etc. could be interpreted as collective rights rather than individual ones and therefore subject to limitations and removal of such rights listed for "the people" by Congress and other legislative bodies. Of course, that's exactly what the ACLU's position is on the Second Amendment, but in all other cases the ACLU does not support such a stance and has made it their only goal to oppose such things. How could the ACLU take such an odd position? Well, maybe it's that term "militia." When it comes to the term "militia" and this assumption by the ACLU, there is a significant body of information, which clearly indicates that the term "militia" means every able-bodied and law-abiding person. In addition, there are no quotes or written documents from the founders that would even lead one to suspect anything other than the definition commonly accepted by most constitutional scholars, i.e. the militia is the people. If anything, there is a wide collection of quotes that say just the opposite as compared to the ACLU's assumption. A few of the major ones are as follows:

    "I ask, who are the militia? They consist now of the whole people, except a few public officers." George Mason, Virginia's U.S. Constitution Ratification Convention, 1788.

    "That the people have a right to keep and bear arms; that a well regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, trained to arms, is the proper, natural, and safe defense of a free state." George Mason, Virginia ratification convention, 1788.

    "What plan for the regulation of the militia may be pursued by the national government is impossible to be foreseen...Little more can reasonably be aimed at with the respect to the people at large than to have them properly armed and equipped." James Madison, Federalist No. 29.

    "The said Constitution [shall] be never construed to authorize Congress to infringe the just liberty of the press, or the rights of conscience, or to prevent the people of the United States, who are peaceable citizens, from keeping their own arms." Samuel Adams, Massachusetts' U.S. Constitution ratification convention, 1788.

    "Militias, when properly formed, are in fact the people themselves and include all men capable of bearing arms." Richard Henry Lee, Letters from The Federal Farmer, 1788.

    "Who are the militia? Are they not ourselves? Congress have no power to disarm the militia. Their swords and every other terrible implement of the soldier, are the birthright of an American...The unlimited power of the sword is not in the hands of either the federal or state governments, but, where I trust in God it will ever remain, in the hands of the people." Federal Gazette, June 18, 1789.

Clearly, the ACLU's position here is not supported by any of the words of the founders nor is it supported when viewed against the rest of the Constitution and Bill of Rights. Without a doubt, one must conclude on this point that the Second Amendment is an individual right and the ACLU is absolutely wrong.

The second stance by the ACLU that involves the 1939 Supreme Court case of U.S. vs. Miller is equally flawed as their first belief. This case is the only time the Supreme Court has had the opportunity to directly rule on the constitutionality of federal firearm statues during the 20th century. In this case, the court ruled that "in the absence of any evidence that the use or possession of a shotgun with a barrel of less than eighteen inches has a reasonable relationship or use in a militia, we cannot say that the Second Amendment guarantees the right of one to keep such an instrument." In addition, the Court ruled that the weapon in question was not any part of the ordinary military equipment or that its use could contribute to the common defense. Clearly, for the keeping and bearing of a firearm to be constitutionally protected, the firearm should be a militia or military type weapon. Also, the Court noted that the militia consisted of "all males physically capable of acting in concert for the common defense when called for service these men were expected to appear bearing arms supplied by themselves and of the kind in common use at the time." The court implicitly rejected the belief that only those members of a specific militia are covered under the Second Amendment when it did not discuss whether there should be evidence that the defendants met the qualifications for inclusion in the militia. Clearly, they understood that the militia was all of the people. The rulings from this case are not supportive of the ACLU's position whatsoever, and in fact one could easily make an argument that if challenged, the bans on certain types of semiautomatic rifles, such as that included in the Brady Crime Bill and found in states such as New Jersey and California, are unconstitutional and would be struck down if challenged. As with the first position of the ACLU, one must conclude that there is little or no evidence to support their position. In fact, one would have to argue that the evidence supporting the opposite view presented by Second Amendment advocates is overwhelming.

The fallback position taken by the ACLU on the Second Amendment is possibly the most damaging to their overall position on individual rights. The ACLU argues that even if their first two stances are incorrect, as has been abundantly shown here and in other articles, the Second Amendment is still subject to any restrictions set forth by Congress, because the founders could not have foreseen the development of modern small arms and the potential danger from the few that would cause harm with firearms outweigh their overall value. Besides the fact that millions of crimes are prevented each year because law-abiding citizens possess firearms, the problem with this position is that the same argument applies to any of the individual rights listed in the Bill of Rights. In fact, such an argument has been used against the ACLU during court battles over the First Amendment. For example, surely the founders could not have expected the development of hate groups and their use of the First Amendment to further their divisive message. The vast majority of Americans, myself included, find such positions to be reprehensible and offensive, but yet the ACLU has fought many battles to insure that these people have the right to spread their message of hate. One could easily argue that the damage caused by racism and hate in this country are significant and in reality far more damaging on a much larger scale than anything a shotgun in ones closet could ever cause. Another example of where the ACLU has strongly opposed any regulation on the First Amendment rights is the Internet. Unquestionably, the founders could not have anticipated the development and explosion of use of the Internet as we have today and will experience in the coming decades. There are many great advantages to the Internet and we have only begun to scratch the surface, but yet there is also a dark side to the Internet. For example, there are negative Internet sites that range from groups spreading their messages of hate and lies, to descriptions of bomb making devices and how-to manuals, and finally to pornography. Does the existence of a few negative sites out of the millions of good sites mean that the entire Internet should be regulated and the First Amendment restricted? The ACLU says no. As with their first two positions on the Second Amendment, the ACLU's fallback position again does not hold water. With any freedom, there will always be those that abuse it and take advantage of the situation to further their positions. There will always be new challenges to any right and new ways to use it. Some good and some of a questionable nature. This is true of the Second Amendment as well as the First and other amendments. This is simply the price of freedom.

Having gone through this process of dissecting the position of the ACLU on the Second Amendment, the question now becomes why do they take such an odd stance that is counter to their supposed beliefs in individual rights? Why do they not join the NRA and other Second Amendment advocates in supporting all individual rights? I believe the answer comes down to a couple of issues. First, the vast majority of the members and leadership of the ACLU have never fired or maybe even held a firearm. Their knowledge base around firearms has been developed through movies, television, and the media. Therefore, many view firearms and firearm owners as a threat. Furthering their perceived fear of firearms is a belief that various firearm related activities, such as hunting, are unacceptable in a civilized society. And lastly, their lack of contact with firearms and knowledge around the subject makes it easy for them to believe that the rights listed under the Second Amendment are, in the arena of individual rights, unnecessary and even expendable. Until the members and leadership of the ACLU overcome their hypocritical desire to lessen the individual rights of those that they don't understand or agree with, they will never truly be viewed as an organization interested in supporting individual rights. Rather, they will be considered just another special interest group with a "holier than thou" belief system when it comes to the Second Amendment. Let's all hope that the ACLU quickly realizes the error of their ways on this topic and in turn joins the NRA in the fight for civil rights.

Dr. Jeremy Blanks is a Senior Research Scientist with the leading R&D company in the world. He has a wide range of interests, but lately has focused on the right to self defense.
Title: Of Roots & Retreat
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on October 02, 2006, 09:09:57 AM
Traitors to the Enlightenment
Europe turns its back on Socrates, Locke, et al.

By Victor Davis Hanson

The first Western Enlightenment of the Greek fifth-century B.C. sought to explain natural phenomena through reason rather than superstition alone. Ethics were to be discussed in the realm of logic as well as religion. Much of what Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, and the Sophists thought may today seem self-evident, if not at times nonsensical. But that century was the beginning of the uniquely Western attempt to bring to the human experience empiricism, self-criticism, irony, and tolerance in thinking.

The second European Enlightenment of the late 18th century followed from the earlier spirit of the Renaissance. For all the excesses and arrogance in its thinking that pure reason might itself dethrone religion ? as if science could explain all the mysteries of the human condition ? the Enlightenment nevertheless established the Western blueprint for a humane and ordered society.

But now all that hard-won effort of some 2,500 years is at risk. The new enemies of Reason are not the enraged democrats who executed Socrates, the Christian zealots who persecuted philosophers of heliocentricity, or the Nazis who burned books. No, they are a pampered and scared Western public that caves to barbarism ? dwarves who sit on the shoulders of dead giants, and believe that their present exalted position is somehow related to their own cowardly sense of accommodation.

What would a Socrates, Galileo, Descartes, or Locke believe of the present decay in Europe ? that all their bold and courageous thinking, won at such a great cost, would have devolved into such cheap surrender to fanaticism?

Just think: Put on an opera in today?s Germany, and have it shut down, not by Nazis, Communists, or kings, but by the simple fear of Islamic fanatics.

Write a novel deemed critical of the Prophet Mohammed, as did Salman Rushdie, and face years of ostracism and death threats ? in the heart of Europe no less.

Compose a film, as did Theo Van Gogh, and find your throat cut in ?liberal? Holland.

Or better yet, sketch a cartoon in postmodern Denmark, and then go into hiding.

Quote an ancient treatise, as did the pope, and learn your entire Church may come under assault, and the magnificent stones of the Vatican offer no refuge.

There are three lessons to be drawn from these examples. In almost every case, the criticism of the artist or intellectual was based either on his supposed lack of sensitivity or of artistic excellence. Van Gogh was, of course, obnoxious and his films puerile. The pope was woefully ignorant of public relations. The cartoons in Denmark were amateurish and unnecessary. Rushdie was an overrated novelist, whose chickens of trashing the West he sought refuge in finally came home to roost. The latest Hans Neuenfels adaptation of Mozart?s Idomeneo was silly.

But isn?t that precisely the point? It is easy to defend artists when they produce works of genius that do not offend popular sensibilities ? Da Vinci?s Mona Lisa or Montesquieu?s Spirit of the Laws ? but not so when an artist offends with neither taste nor talent. Yes, Pope Benedict is old and scholastic; he lacks both the smile and tact of the late Pope John Paul II, who surely would not have turned for elucidation to the rigidity of Byzantine scholarship. But isn?t that why we must come to the present Pope?s defense ? if for no reason other than because he has the courage to speak his convictions when others might not?

Note also the constant subtext in this new self-censorship: fear of radical Islam and its gruesome appendages of beheadings, suicide bombings, improvised explosive devices, barbaric fatwas, riotous youth, petrodollar-acquired nuclear weapons, oil boycotts and price hikes, and fist-chanting mobs.

In contrast, almost daily in Europe, ?brave? artists caricature Christians and Americans with impunity. Why?

For a long list of reasons, among them most surely the assurance that they can do this without being killed. Such cowards puff out their chests when trashing an ill Oriana Fallaci or Ariel Sharon or beleaguered George W. Bush in the most demonic of tones, but prove sunken and sullen when threatened by a Dr Zawahri or a grand mufti of some obscure mosque.

Second, almost every genre of artistic and intellectual expression has come under assault: music, satire, the novel, films, academic exegesis. Somehow Europeans have ever-so-insidiously given up the promise of the Enlightenment that welcomed free thought of all kinds, the more provocative the better.

So the present generation of Europeans really is heretical, made up of traitors of a sort, since they themselves, not just their consensual governments or some invader across the Mediterranean, have nearly destroyed their won freedoms of expression ? out of worries over oil, or appearing as illiberal apostates of the new secular religion of multiculturalism, or another London or Madrid bombing.

Europe boldly produces films about assassinating an American president, and routinely disparages the Church that gave the world the Sermon of the Mount, but it simply won?t stand up for an artist, a well-meaning Pope, or a ranting filmmaker when the mob closes in. The Europe that believes in everything turns out to believe in nothing.

Third, examine why all these incidents took place in Europe. Since 2000 it has been the habit of blue-state politicians to rebuke the yokels of America, in part by showing us a supposedly more humane Western future unfolding in Europe. It was the European Union that was at the forefront of mass transit; the EU that advanced Kyoto and the International Criminal Court. And it was the heralded EU that sought ?soft? power rather than the Neanderthal resort to arms.

And what have we learned in the last five years from its boutique socialism, utopian pacifism, moral equivalence, and cultural relativism? That it was logical that Europe most readily would abandon the artist and give up the renegade in fear of religious extremists.

Those in an auto parts store in Fresno, or at a NASCAR race in southern Ohio, might appear to Europeans as primordials with their guns, ?fundamentalist? religion, and flag-waving chauvinism. But it is they, and increasingly their kind alone, who prove the bulwarks of the West. Ultimately what keeps even the pope safe and the continent confident in its vain dialogues with Iranian lunatics is the United States military and the very un-Europeans who fight in it.

We may be only 30 years behind Europe, but we are not quite there yet. And so Europe has done us a great favor in showing us not the way of the future, but the old cowardice of our pre-Enlightenment past.

? Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is the author, most recently, of A War Like No Other. How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War.



National Review Online - http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=M2JlMzJhNjIxZGZkYjdmZGU0ZGUyOWM3MzEwMTk0ZWQ=
Title: Cindy and Hugo and Cash, Oh My
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on October 17, 2006, 03:58:03 PM
UN, seats for sale, Hugo Chavez buying

Cindy Sheehan's friend in need

By John Burtis

Tuesday, October 17, 2006

The news is as cruel lately as the Midwest's Children's Blizzard.

First you find out that Cindy Sheehan was a paid shill of the Kerry campaign all along, that she dabbles in the darker side of the internet, and you dab at a reflexive tear at that news.

And then, just when your frappacino has crept its way up your gizzard far enough to be thoroughly disheartening, you learn that Venezuela is busy purchasing its way to becoming the next member of the UN's fabled Security Council.

We all knew that the UN is nothing but the rottenest of all imaginable boroughs. It is a place where crude oil, baby food, careers, women, votes, children, and every conceivable brand of office equipment is for sale on the open market to the highest or quickest bidder.

The UN is an open and perfidious auction house where dollars are the accepted currency, but Euros, rubles, francs, pengos, and even the lowly rupee can be used to sway the end user, receiver, and owner of the private account - if it can be piled high enough - where the specie will come to rest after its hectic flight across open borders, boundaries, aisles, desk tops, and bus seats.

And the money may travel well, in tourist class, or be transported in greasy paper bags, plastic sacks, cellophane wrappers, food containers, and lunch boxes. It can even be carried wrapped around the common hamburger or tuna sandwich, and maybe even the sock.

But the money goes through the UN just as surely as the sun and moon rise, or as one wag put it, like pate through a goose. And the pay off will always land in a finely manicured and baby soft paddy cake, usually offered quietly by a tarted up foreign dignitary or his coat holder.

Today we are witnessing one of the greatest sell offs in even the fabled UN's extortionate history. Hugo Chavez, through his UN ambassador and his good graces, is disbursing hundreds of millions of dollars on the floor of the General Assembly -- which is looking a lot like the floor of the NY Stock exchange, littered as it is with Hugo's IOUs - to any country willing to vote for Venezuela's being added to the Security Council.

Thanks to Senor Chavez and his full, spontaneous, and unsurpassed generosity, hospitals, schools, free oil, discounted oil, natural gas, pocket money, show money, Texas bankrolls, jewelry, palatial homes, and vacation junkets, and the glowing hagiographical testimonials and the cloyingly obsequious blandishments issued from the offices of Representative Bill Delahunt (D-MA), Governor Bill Baldacci (D-ME), and Representative Bernie Sanders (I-VT), are being sent to the non-aligned members of General Assembly as they prepare to climb aboard the forward looking socialist band wagon and vote for Venezuela.

Money, new construction, armaments, and bad will toward Bush are flooding the capitals, the warehouses of the power brokers in the non-aligned capitals, and their banks. And thanks to the largesse of Herr Chavez, who will be smashing the power of the Council and thwarting the US at every turn, he'll be doing it all on the backs of his poorest people, of course, if he can eke out a win.

And boy, Hugo will have a field day, thanks to his ceremonial passing of the dough. He'll be able to fortify Hamas, Hezbollah, al-Qaeda, Osama, the Taliban, the Tamil Tigers, Mr. Gadahn, Fidel Castro, the Lackawanna boys, and the Sandinistas for a start.

Mr. Chavez will be able to erect monuments to Mr. "Che" Guevara, aid in the needed rehabilitation of the Rosenbergs, rebuild the lost memorials to Mr. Stalin and Mr. Felikhs Dzerzhinsky, dry clean the memory of Walter Ulbricht, and resurrect the good old days of communism.

Hugo Chavez will be busy indeed if he can just carry the day with the floor vote.

All the while, he can kick Mr. Bush and Ambassador John Bolton in the teeth at every turn, an outcome important to both Hugo and, of course, to the new Democrats.

The new Democrats will profit the most if Hugo can destroy the actions of the General Assembly because they can show themselves to be the great conciliators, once they win control of the House and Senate.

John "Live Shot" Kerry will rise, pontificate, quibble, waffle, strut and preen, cast a great shadow, and finally offer to go to New York and meet with this latest criminal cabal for America's sake. And he will adduce, with oppressive and lifeless theatricality, as will any other new Democrat with perhaps a less elephantine delivery, whatever Mr. Chavez requires, if only he promises not to ask for quite so much in the future and promises to behave.

But you never can tell.

Mr. Chavez may not win his expensive quest for the Security Council, despite the millions spent in his pilgrimage for a purchased seat in this rotten borough on Turtle Bay.

Mr. Kerry may not get to greet Mr. Chavez in New York as a brother if the new Democrats fail to seize control of America next month, despite his own purchase of a lifetime sinecure in Massachusetts.

The first vote did not secure the sufficient number of ballots for Mr. Chavez to stymie Mr. Bush at the UN, despite the monies poured into the non-aligned countries. More money must still be piped into the willing hands of the third world's bandits for this hurdle to be over topped.

And to secure Mr. Chavez's rightful place at the UN, beyond the heaps of funny money, the casting of crooked votes, and the hurried arm twisting, the new Democrats may have to start phoning the penny ante autocrats for their little socialist brother.

Cindy Sheehan's friend's in need. And a friend in need is a friend indeed.

   John Burtis is a former Broome County, NY firefighter, a retired Santa Monica, CA, police officer. He obtained his BA in European History at Boston University and is fluent in German. He resides in NH with his wife, Betsy.

http://www.canadafreepress.com/2006/burtis101706.htm
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 17, 2006, 04:04:43 PM
"First you find out that Cindy Sheehan was a paid shill of the Kerry campaign all along, that she dabbles in the darker side of the internet, and you dab at a reflexive tear at that news."

I missed this.  Would someone fill me in please?
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on October 17, 2006, 04:27:02 PM
"First you find out that Cindy Sheehan was a paid shill of the Kerry campaign all along, that she dabbles in the darker side of the internet, and you dab at a reflexive tear at that news."

I missed this.? Would someone fill me in please?

Bloggers are starting to speak about a new book being published. I generally don't post stuff like this as I'm not acquainted with the sources, but you can find some bon mots of undetermined accuracy here:

http://www.conservativeswithattitude.com/wordpress/
Title: Whimpering Toward the Dark Ages
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on October 30, 2006, 03:08:04 PM
October 30, 2006
The Dark Ages
Live from the Middle East
by Victor Davis Hanson
Tribune Media Services

The most frightening aspect of the present war is how easily our pre-modern enemies from the Middle East have brought a stunned postmodern world back into the Dark Ages.

Students of history are sickened when they read of the long-ago, gruesome practice of beheading. How brutal were those societies that chopped off the heads of Cicero, Sir Thomas More and Marie Antoinette. And how lucky we thought we were to have evolved from such elemental barbarity.

Twenty-four hundred years ago, Socrates was executed for unpopular speech. The 18th-century European Enlightenment gave people freedom to express views formerly censored by clerics and the state. Just imagine what life was like once upon a time when no one could write music, compose fiction or paint without court or church approval?

Over 400 years before the birth of Christ, ancient Greek literary characters, from Lysistrata to Antigone, reflected the struggle for sexual equality. The subsequent notion that women could vote, divorce, dress or marry as they pleased was a millennia-long struggle.

It is almost surreal now to read about the elemental hatred of Jews in the Spanish Inquisition, 19th-century Russian pogroms or the Holocaust. Yet here we are revisiting the old horrors of the savage past.

Beheading? As we saw with Nick Berg and Daniel Pearl, our Neanderthal enemies in the Middle East have resurrected that ancient barbarity ? and married it with 21st-century technology to beam the resulting gore instantaneously onto our computer screens. Xerxes and Attila, who stuck their victims' heads on poles for public display, would've been thrilled by such a gruesome show.

Who would have thought centuries after the Enlightenment that sophisticated Europeans ? in fear of radical Islamists ? would be afraid to write a novel, put on an opera, draw a cartoon, film a documentary or have their pope discuss comparative theology?

The astonishing fact is not just that millions of women worldwide in 2006 are still veiled from head-to-toe, trapped in arranged marriages, subject to polygamy, honor killings and forced circumcision, or are without the right to vote or appear alone in public. What is more baffling is that in the West, liberal Europeans are often wary of protecting female citizens from the excesses of Sharia law ? sometimes even fearful of asking women to unveil their faces for purposes of simple identification and official conversation.

Who these days is shocked that Israel is hated by Arab nations and threatened with annihilation by radical Iran? Instead, the surprise is that even in places like Paris or Seattle, Jews are singled out and killed for the apparent crime of being Jewish.

Since Sept. 11, the West has fought enemies who are determined to bring back the nightmarish world that we thought was long past. And there are lessons Westerners can learn from radical Islamists' ghastly efforts.

First, the Western liberal tradition is fragile and can still disappear. Just because we have sophisticated cell phones, CAT scanners and jets does not ensure that we are permanently civilized or safe. Technology used by the civilized for positive purposes can easily be manipulated by barbarians for destruction.

Second, the Enlightenment is not always lost on the battlefield. It can be surrendered through either fear or indifference as well. Westerners fearful of terrorist reprisals themselves shut down a production of a Mozart opera in Berlin deemed offensive to Muslims. Few came to the aid of a Salman Rushdie or Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh when their unpopular expression earned death threats from Islamists. Van Gogh, of course, was ultimately killed.

The Goths and Vandals did not sack Rome solely through the power of their hordes; they also relied on the paralysis of Roman elites who no longer knew what it was to be Roman ? much less whether it was any better than the alternative.

Third, civilization is forfeited with a whimper, not a bang. Insidiously, we have allowed radical Islamists to redefine the primordial into the not-so-bad. Perhaps women in head-to-toe burkas in Europe prefer them? Maybe that crass German opera was just too over the top after all? Aren't both parties equally to blame in the Palestinian, Iraqi and Afghan wars?

To grasp the flavor of our own Civil War, impersonators now don period dress and reconstruct the battles of Shiloh or Gettysburg. But we need not show such historical reenactment of the Dark Ages. You see, they are back with us ? live almost daily from the Middle East.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 10, 2006, 06:22:35 PM

PEGGY NOONAN

Concession Stands
Politicians are at their best when acknowledging defeat.

Friday, November 10, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST

In a way they never tell the truth until the concession speech. That's when nothing they say can hurt them anymore. They're worn to the bone and they've been in a struggle and it's over, and suddenly some basic, rock-solid, dumb knowledge of what they've been involved in--a great nation's life--comes loose and declares itself.

Rep. Harold Ford of Tennessee, who lost his Senate race, said he'd wanted to be in government since he was 4 years old, that people had taken a risk on him, that he was grateful. "I love my country," he said. "Don't lose faith in this great thing called America."

Sen. Lincoln Chafee up in Rhode Island said America is divided; "common ground is becoming scarce." He'd miss those in the Senate "who take their responsibility to govern more seriously than their personal ambitions."

From Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, a demonstration of patriotic civility. He praised his opponent as a human being--"a fine man, he'll do a fine job for the state."

Sen. George Allen, gentleman of Virginia, said, "We are placed here on earth to do something well." He vowed to do all he could to help Jim Webb come in and serve in the U.S. Capitol.

Oh, that the new ones would carry in what the old ones have finally learned, or finally meant, or said.





It was the first real post-9/11 election, in that it was shaped not by the trauma itself but by public response to decisions taken after the trauma. Turnout was high. America is awake, alive, bristles. In the races for Senate, 25 million said "stay with the Republicans," while 31 million said "no, move on."
We have divided government. Good, and for many reasons. One: It confuses our enemies. "Who do we hate now?" they ask in their caves, "the evil woman from San Francisco or the old infidel from Texas? Which do we hate more? And if we hate them both does that...unite them?"

We are in a 30-year war. It is no good for it to be led by, identified with, one party. It is no good for half the nation to feel estranged from its government's decisions. It's no good for us to be broken up more than a nation normally would be. And straight down the middle is a bad break, the kind that snaps.

We all have things we would say to the new Congress if we could. We are a country that makes as many speeches in the shower as it sings songs. I would say this: Focus on the age you live in. Know what it is. Know what's coming. The old way is over; the old days are over; the old facts and habits of mind do not pertain, or no longer fully pertain.

This is the age we live in: One day in the future either New York or Washington or both will be hit again, hard. It will be more deadly than 9/11. And on that day, those who experience it, who see the flash or hear the alarms, will try to help each other. They'll be good to each other. An elderly conservative congresswoman will be unable to make it down those big old Capitol steps, and a young liberal congressman will come by and pick her up in his arms and carry her. (I witnessed a moment somewhat like this during a Capitol alarm two years ago, when we were told to run for our lives.) I would say: Keep that picture in mind. Cut to the chase, be good to each other now.

Make believe it's already happened. That's the only attitude that will help us get through it when it does. I do not mean think like Rodney King. We can't all get along, not on this earth. But we can know what time it is. We can be serious, and humane. We can realize that we're all in this together and owe each other an assumption of good faith.

There are rogue states and rogue actors, there are forces and nations aligned against us, and they have nukes and other weapons of mass destruction, and some of them are mad. Know this. Walk to work each day knowing it, not in a pointlessly fearful way but in a spirit of "What can I do to make it better?"

What can you do in two years? The common wisdom says not much. But here's a governing attitude: First things first.

Do all you can to keep America as safe as possible as long as possible. Make sure she's able to take a bad blow, a bad series of them. Much flows from this first thing, many subsets. Here is only one: Strengthen and modernize our electrical grid. When the bad thing comes we will need to be able to make contact with each other to survive together. Congress has ignored this for years.

Make America in the world as safe as possible by tending to and building our friendships in the world, by causing no unnecessary friction, by adding whatever possible and necessary emollients. In your approach to foreign affairs, rewrite Teddy Roosevelt: Speak softly, walk softly, and carry a big stick.

Much flows from this, including Iraq. This involves a huge and so far unanswered question: How to leave and not make it all infinitely worse. America will never accept a long war whose successful end even its most passionate proponents cannot convincingly envision or articulate. And America will never allow a repeat of the pictures of 1975, with desperate people who'd thrown their lot with us clinging to the skids of helicopters fleeing the U.S. Embassy. We will never get over Vietnam. And it's to our credit that we won't.

Those to me are the two big things. Much follows them, and flows from them. But to make some progress on these two things in the next two years would be breathtaking.
Title: Singing in the Rain
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on November 10, 2006, 06:46:38 PM
Six Reasons
Why Tuesday wasn't that bad.
by Noemie Emery
11/10/2006 3:00:00 PM


1. It has to rain sometime.

Some people seem to believe that their party could and should stay in power forever, always holding all branches of government, and that any loss any time is inexcusable, and always is somebody's fault. This is insanity. No party has enough of the people, or enough of the truth, to make this sustainable: The system is built around balance of power, frequent reverses, enforced House cleanings, and changes in tone. As David Brooks notes, lack of power corrupts absolutely. In the 1950's, having lost the White House for five elections running, Republicans produced Joe McCarthy. In the past decade, Democrats lost Congress and some very tight races, and produced Michael Moore. Few conservatives are morose at the loss of the House, which ought to flip every decade for reasons of hygiene. Turn the rascals out, and bring in new rascals. And then throw the new rascals out.

2. If it has to rain sometime, let it rain now.

If you must have a bloodletting--and most presidents need one--this is the time for it. Better now than 2002, which was still the beginning; better now than 2004, which was presidential; better now than two years from now, which is presidential again. Let the Democrats vent, relish their triumph, and blow off some of the steam that would have exploded in 2008. Actually, this result drains the left of one of the big advantages held by the out-party after eight years of other-side dominance: the natural hunger for change. A centrist conservative who is stylistically different from Bush now has a better chance in '08, as a change from both the president, and from a left that is bound to pick up some baggage. Some of its chairs are accidents waiting to happen, and the strains in its caucus are evident. Will it be beloved by the '08 election? We'll see.

3. Adversity Rocks.

Sometimes, good outcomes can be too rich for one's health. In 1992 and 2004, two bright politicians named Bill Clinton and George W. Bush won big elections, carried both houses of Congress, and were hailed far and wide as political geniuses who had cemented the gains of their parties for the next generation. Both proceeded at once to take leave of their senses, and had their rears kicked hard two years later. As it turns out, people work well on a short leash under pressure, when they are aware they are being watched constantly, and know an opposition nearly at parity is well-poised to strike. The Republican Congress was the making of Clinton, who became so great on defense that people forgot he was a klutz when on the offensive, and Bush gained his reputation as a political wizard in a come-from-behind race against Governor Ann Richards; when facing Democratic control back in Austin, and governing in Washington on a razor-thin margin, after losing the popular vote. Bush has got to get back to the agile politician that he was when he was fighting adversity. It's not as if he doesn't know how.

4. This is still, after all, a center-right country.

The old allocation of conservative-moderate-liberal seems to have changed not a bit.

5. Iraq?

If Iraq is the killer they think it is, why did Ned Lamont lose 60-40 to two 'war' candidates in sky-blue Connecticut ; and why do McCain and Guiliani, two of the biggest hawks in the country, lead all comers in 2008 polls?

6. 'The conservative movement is dead!'

Not even Rasputin has died so many times as the modern conservative movement, which has been dying since mere moments after its birth. It first died in the 1982 midterms; it died a second time with Iran-Contra; a third time in 1992, when Bush pere lost to Bill Clinton; again in 1996, and after the 1998 midterms; a fifth time during the Florida recount, and now, wouldn't you know it, the damned thing is dying again. Of course, this time it IS dead, but, but they said that the last time, and all the times previous. It has been shot, strangled, stabbed, beaten, stomped on, had its hands cuffed and been tossed into the Neva River, and, sure enough, a short time later, is rising up with a grin. And it will again.

Noemie Emery is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD and the author of the forthcoming Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families (Wiley).

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/012/934pzlak.asp
Title: Dems to AQ
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 11, 2006, 04:45:01 PM
Dear Al Qaeda:

We the Democrats of the United States have won a major victory. The voice of the people has knocked the arrogant George Bush and his Republican Party, led by religious Christian fanatics on the Right Wing, to a historic defeat.

With this defeat, the imperialistic NeoCons?who are tools of Israel? have also been defeated. You probably have read how they have turned on President Bush and are retreating from their earlier aggressive ways. This is good, and we will welcome them back into the wide tent of the Democrat Party; where they once flourished.

You probably have also read how 87% of American Jews voted for change; change in our Iraq policy; change in our domestic policy; and change in the way we work with Islamic countries around the world. They understand the bias that concerns you. And they voted for change.

You see. It is not the Democrats in America who are against you. In fact, it is not even the Jews in America who are against you. We like you and can work with you. We accept that fact that America is evil. We are a wicked country who abuse the poor, give tax breaks to the rich and don?t speak French. We want to become more like Europe and it wasn?t our fault that you were forced to not like us.

But now the American people have issued us a mandate. The Christian Right will return to the closet and never come out again. And when the fanatic Christians among us get out of the political sphere...and there is no place for private religious beliefs in our system of government; we can finally become the progressive country we should be.

Therefore we beg you to stop your Jihad and let us all get along.

Please stop killing us?.and we know you are not doing it on purpose. Please forgive us our weaknesses. And please have patience with us. We will get out of Iraq and Afghanistan as quickly as we can. We will stop our illegal wiretaps of your fund raising efforts. We will make sure to not check Muslims at our airports. And we will release and reward all of our illegal detainees at Guantanamo. We will even turn Abu Grab into a modern Madras where you can teach the wisdom of the Prophet.

And most importantly; because we have the support of 87% of American Jews; and as most Jews in the world are a bit embarrassed by Israel; we will drop our support of Israel and insist that they restore the rights of all Palestinians. There is no need for a State of Israel because all Jews are safe within Europe and America. The holocaust is a thing of the past and we agree with you that Israel; or as our French colleague once said: ?that sh**ty little country? should be no more.

We hope that with all the above, that you will want to live in peace with us. And we wish you peace.

Love,

Nancy Polosi
Dick Durbin
Chuck Schummer
Carl Levin
Harry Reid
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: G M on November 13, 2006, 12:05:27 AM
http://hotair.com/archives/2006/11/12/video-nancy-pelosi-addresses-the-nation-on-snl/

GM:?

I'm getting that this is no longer available.

Also, pretty please with a cherry on top, give a description of URLS and articles that you post.

Marc


Title: "Angleton" on NYT's Newfound Security Concerns
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on November 13, 2006, 02:11:41 PM
Interesting imputation here that the New York Times developed concern over the release of captured Iraqi documents not because they might help Iran's nuclear program, but because they would demonstrate that WMD development and terrorist training were both active in pre-war Iraq. Might mess up the Democratic "mandate" if those sorts of facts emerged.

From the Gates, On Robert Gates
Angleton speaks.

By Michael Ledeen


I hadn?t spoken with my favorite spook, the late James Jesus Angleton, for some time, in part because my ouija board had been in the shop for repairs, and in part because I assumed he was busy, what with Halloween and the Day of the Dead coming in rapid succession in late October and early November. But the torrent of recent articles about intelligence regarding Iraq obviously required investigation, and I was delighted when the ouija board hummed smoothly into gear, and within a minute or two his gravely voice was chuckling away, interrupted by the occasional cough.

ML: Are you still smoking? Haven?t they banned it yet?

JJA: HERE? You must be kidding.

ML: Sorry, I forgot. Fire and brimstone in every home, right?

JJA: Hah! They don?t call it paradise for nothing...

ML: Good news. Any good cigars?

JJA: I had a wonderful pre-Colombus Dominican a couple of days ago. Great stuff. But surely you didn?t wake me up to talk about tobacco.

ML: No, indeed I didn?t. I wanted to ask you what you made of the recent New York Times story about the government website that had to be shut down because some people thought there was sensitive information about, uh, how to make nukes.

JJA: Haha, the New York Times is suddenly concerned about keeping secrets. How droll. This from the crowd that wrote about the CIA giving nuclear blueprints directly to the Iranians? This from the people who wrote about the intercept program on terrorist financing? Anyway, I think you?ve left out some important details about what you call the website story.

ML: Yeah, well, you can?t put everything into one question, can you? The Times reported that there was sensitive material in some of the newly declassified Iraqi documents that had been posted...

JJA: Posted over the objections of the Intelligence Community (Negroponte in first person), in large part because the IC said it was all old news anyway, and they needed their translators and analysts to work on current intelligence.

ML: Yes, and posted only after three Republicans insisted on it: Senators Roberts and Santorum, and Representative Hoekstra.

JJA: Precisely. That?s two Intelligence Committee chairmen ? Roberts and Hoekstra ? and the third-ranking member of Senate leadership. They obviously thought that the IC was sitting on information that might be pertinent to the debate over Iraq, and there was lot of material ? 48,000 boxes of the stuff ? and obviously at the rate the IC was moving, it would be the fourth millenium before the information came out.

ML: So you think Negroponte was happy to shut down the site?

JJA: Has anyone asked why the whole site was blacked out? Couldn?t they have simply removed the document and left up the rest?

ML: Good question. And, as you say, there?s quite a political spin on the story, isn?t there? In essence ?the conservatives? are blamed for the release of sensitive information that could help the Iranian nuclear program.

JJA: Well, it?s convenient for many reasons. First of all, it?s convenient for the IC if it turns out the Iranians are closer to the bomb than the official estimates say, which is roughly ten years out. And it?s good cover for the IC, which as always wants to control the information.

ML: Speaking of Iran, do you think Gates is really the long nose of Jim Baker?s camel reaching into the Pentagon?

JJA: Actually he was a hell of an analyst at CIA. Bill Casey loved him, and his work on Soviet matters was so good that the moonbats from the Agency lined up to attack him when he was nominated to succeed Casey. And as for wanting to negotiate with the Iranians, I thought we?d been doing that for 27 years, or have I missed something?

ML: No, that?s certainly right. Do you think he?d be any good on the Iraqi documents mess?

JJA: Look, you keep asking about Gates changing policies, but that misses the point. Policy isn?t going to change just because there?s a new SecDef. Rice, Hadley, and Bush make the policy, and Gates is a team player, he?s always been loyal to the White House, he never took on State, and he?s good at working with Congress. He?s a professional bureaucrat, not a firebrand, not an ideologue, as they love to say.

ML: Couldn?t agree more, he?s an establishment figure, a talented one at that, and if anyone really wants to look for the Baker/Scowcroft ?takeover? of the administration, they need to go back to the original lineup: Rice, Hadley, Powell, Armitage. All had worked for Bush 43, all were ?realists,? all professional managers. So we?ve probably seen the last of even the few documents that were put out for the world to see, don?t you think?

JJA: The president had to be pounded by three leading members of Congress to get him to order Negroponte to start posting the documents, and as soon as the New York Times story came out, his former chief of staff, Andy Card, was chanting ?I told you so? to any journalist who would listen. If the White House won?t ride herd on the IC, it isn?t going to happen. The IC had sold the administration on the theory ? which I still think is false ? that they had gotten the WMDs story all wrong, and that Saddam really had nothing to do with terrorism. Even the handful of documents that were posted had many indications that there were indeed WMDs, including a very active deception operation to prevent us from finding them, and some pretty convincing evidence of ties to terrorist groups, including al Qaeda. That was bad for them, and they were very happy to shut down the whole website.

ML: Yeah, that?s really the main point, isn?t it? They blanked the screen, it wasn?t just a question of the nuclear stuff.

JJA: Just so. Their whole post-invasion narrative was in danger of being discredited, and they couldn?t have that.

ML: And the Dems?

JJA: You think Alcee Hastings wants those documents public? Hahahahahaha......

ML: Reid? Pelosi?

JJA: There you go again. They ran on the ?Bush Lied, People Died? mantra. They have no interest at all in having people looking at the actual facts. Quite the opposite, in fact. And Bush, Rice, and Hadley are on the run now, and it would actually make them very nervous if it turned out there?s convincing evidence Saddam had WMDs, and was in cahoots with Osama.
Meanwhile, everyone?s missed one of the most interesting aspects of the shakeup, if you look at the ?old? CIA guys now in high positions...

At which point there was a funny humming sound from the ouija board.

ML: Can you still hear me?

JJA: You bet...somebody ought to take a look at Bill Casey?s Return from the Dead...now there?s a story...

And I?d lost him. Casey returning from the dead? What?s the deal with that?

 ? Michael Ledeen, an NRO contributing editor, is most recently the author of The War Against the Terror Masters. He is resident scholar in the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute.



 
 

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

National Review Online - http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZGQ2YzNiNTMyYWI5YjM3NGFlY2VhZTExODI3NjhjYzc=
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: G M on November 13, 2006, 04:46:23 PM
http://hotair.com/archives/2006/11/12/video-nancy-pelosi-addresses-the-nation-on-snl/

GM:?

I'm getting that this is no longer available.

Also, pretty please with a cherry on top, give a description of URLS and articles that you post.

Marc




It was a new SNL skit. Worth a laugh. I will work on it Guro Crafty.  :-D
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 13, 2006, 05:56:08 PM
U.S. must prove it's a staying power

November 12, 2006
BY MARK STEYN Sun-Times Columnist

On the radio a couple of weeks ago, Hugh Hewitt suggested to me the terrorists might try to pull a Spain on the U.S. elections. You'll recall (though evidently many Americans don't) that in 2004 hundreds of commuters were slaughtered in multiple train bombings in Madrid. The Spaniards responded with a huge street demonstration of supposed solidarity with the dead, all teary passivity and signs saying "Basta!" -- "Enough!" By which they meant not "enough!" of these murderers but "enough!" of the government of Prime Minister Aznar, and of Bush and Blair, and troops in Iraq. A couple of days later, they voted in a socialist government, which immediately withdrew Spanish forces from the Middle East. A profitable couple of hours' work for the jihad.
I said to Hugh I didn't think that would happen this time round. The enemy aren't a bunch of simpleton Pushtun yakherds, but relatively sophisticated at least in their understanding of us. We're all infidels, but not all infidels crack the same way. If they'd done a Spain -- blown up a bunch of subway cars in New York or vaporized the Empire State Building -- they'd have re-awoken the primal anger of September 2001. With another mound of corpses piled sky-high, the electorate would have stampeded into the Republican column and demanded the U.S. fly somewhere and bomb someone.

The jihad crowd know that. So instead they employed a craftier strategy. Their view of America is roughly that of the British historian Niall Ferguson -- that the Great Satan is the first superpower with ADHD. They reasoned that if you could subject Americans to the drip-drip-drip of remorseless water torture in the deserts of Mesopotamia -- a couple of deaths here, a market bombing there, cars burning, smoke over the city on the evening news, day after day after day, and ratcheted up a notch or two for the weeks before the election -- you could grind down enough of the electorate and persuade them to vote like Spaniards, without even realizing it. And it worked. You can rationalize what happened on Tuesday in the context of previous sixth-year elections -- 1986, 1958, 1938, yada yada -- but that's not how it was seen around the world, either in the chancelleries of Europe, where they're dancing conga lines, or in the caves of the Hindu Kush, where they would also be dancing conga lines if Mullah Omar hadn't made it a beheading offense. And, as if to confirm that Tuesday wasn't merely 1986 or 1938, the president responded to the results by firing the Cabinet officer most closely identified with the prosecution of the war and replacing him with a man associated with James Baker, Brent Scowcroft and the other "stability" fetishists of the unreal realpolitik crowd.

Whether or not Rumsfeld should have been tossed overboard long ago, he certainly shouldn't have been tossed on Wednesday morning. For one thing, it's a startlingly brazen confirmation of the politicization of the war, and a particularly unworthy one: It's difficult to conceive of any more public diminution of a noble cause than to make its leadership contingent on Lincoln Chafee's Senate seat. The president's firing of Rumsfeld was small and graceless.

Still, we are all Spaniards now. The incoming speaker says Iraq is not a war to be won but a problem to be solved. The incoming defense secretary belongs to a commission charged with doing just that. A nostalgic boomer columnist in the Boston Globe argues that honor requires the United States to "accept defeat," as it did in Vietnam. Didn't work out so swell for the natives, but to hell with them.

What does it mean when the world's hyperpower, responsible for 40 percent of the planet's military spending, decides that it cannot withstand a guerrilla war with historically low casualties against a ragbag of local insurgents and imported terrorists? You can call it "redeployment" or "exit strategy" or "peace with honor" but, by the time it's announced on al-Jazeera, you can pretty much bet that whatever official euphemism was agreed on back in Washington will have been lost in translation. Likewise, when it's announced on "Good Morning Pyongyang" and the Khartoum Network and, come to that, the BBC.

For the rest of the world, the Iraq war isn't about Iraq; it's about America, and American will. I'm told that deep in the bowels of the Pentagon there are strategists wargaming for the big showdown with China circa 2030/2040. Well, it's steady work, I guess. But, as things stand, by the time China's powerful enough to challenge the United States it won't need to. Meanwhile, the guys who are challenging us right now -- in Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, North Korea and elsewhere -- are regarded by the American electorate like a reality show we're bored with. Sorry, we don't want to stick around to see if we win; we'd rather vote ourselves off the island.

Two weeks ago, you may remember, I reported on a meeting with the president, in which I'd asked him the following: "You say you need to be on the offense all the time and stay on the offense. Isn't the problem that the American people were solidly behind this when you went in and you toppled the Taliban, when you go in and you topple Saddam. But when it just seems to be a kind of thankless semi-colonial policing defensive operation with no end . . . I mean, where is the offense in this?"

On Tuesday, the national security vote evaporated, and, without it, what's left for the GOP? Congressional Republicans wound up running on the worst of all worlds -- big bloated porked-up entitlements-a-go-go government at home and a fainthearted tentative policing operation abroad. As it happens, my new book argues for the opposite: small lean efficient government at home and muscular assertiveness abroad. It does a superb job, if I do say so myself, of connecting war and foreign policy with the domestic issues. Of course, it doesn't have to be that superb if the GOP's incoherent inversion is the only alternative on offer.

As it is, we're in a very dark place right now. It has been a long time since America unambiguously won a war, and to choose to lose Iraq would be an act of such parochial self-indulgence that the American moment would not endure, and would not deserve to. Europe is becoming semi-Muslim, Third World basket-case states are going nuclear, and, for all that 40 percent of planetary military spending, America can't muster the will to take on pipsqueak enemies. We think we can just call off the game early, and go back home and watch TV.

It doesn't work like that. Whatever it started out as, Iraq is a test of American seriousness. And, if the Great Satan can't win in Vietnam or Iraq, where can it win? That's how China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, Venezuela and a whole lot of others look at it. "These Colors Don't Run" is a fine T-shirt slogan, but in reality these colors have spent 40 years running from the jungles of Southeast Asia, the helicopters in the Persian desert, the streets of Mogadishu. ... To add the sands of Mesopotamia to the list will be an act of weakness from which America will never recover.

?Mark Steyn, 2006

Title: The Paper of Record, Except When it's Not
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on November 14, 2006, 08:41:36 PM
False Alarm
The New York Times usually favors making information public.
by The Editors
11/13/2006, Volume 012, Issue 09


For the second time this year, the New York Times has taken an interest in the vast collection of documents captured in postwar Iraq. The Times first noticed these materials six months ago, when the U.S. government began posting images of them on the Internet. In a dismissive report, the Times noted that intelligence professionals opposed the document release but had gone along under pressure from Republicans engaged in a quixotic attempt to find an ex post facto justification (terror connections, weapons of mass destruction efforts) for the Iraq war.

By now, thousands of documents have been posted, and last Friday, the Times wrote about them for a second time in its lead story on page one. The government had posted on the site a captured document detailing Iraqi plans for a nuclear weapon dating back to the first Gulf war, in 1991, when Iraq was less than a year away from completing a bomb. This was foolish and dangerous, the Times article suggested, as it provided a road map possibly useful to Iran and others seeking to build nuclear weapons. In their misbegotten effort to justify the Iraq war, the Times said, congressional Republicans, "conservative publications," and "amateur historians" had caused documents to be released that jeopardized national security. As a result of the Times's harrumphing, the government promptly shut down the document website.

Let us first reiterate what ought to be obvious. The U.S. government should not release documents that damage national security. In a speech this summer, House Intelligence Committee chairman Pete Hoekstra reported that the intelligence community had classified and withheld more than 30 percent of the Iraqi documents it has reviewed. If the intelligence community nevertheless released nuclear plans that really could be helpful to Iran, et al. (which is unclear), then it shouldn't have. Neither Hoekstra nor "conservative publications" nor "amateur historians" urged potentially dangerous disclosures. They simply urged that citizens be allowed to read for themselves what was found in the files of Saddam's regime in order to judge claims about terror connections and WMD threats.

The New York Times usually favors making information public. Indeed, twice in the past two years it has published details about eavesdropping and finance-tracking efforts by the U.S. government, two of the most effective and most closely guarded programs in the war on terror. The Times stubbornly defended that reporting even after government officials said the articles had done significant damage to national security. No matter, countered the Times, the public has a right to know.

But not about Saddam and the captured Iraqi records. And when the documents did begin to trickle out, the Times summoned only enough interest to dismiss the effort as a waste of time. So people who get their news from the Times may not know about the contents of documents that have already been released. One lays out plans for "Blessed July," an Iraqi regime-sponsored terrorist plot targeting Western interests in northern Iraq and Europe. Another mandates that the Iraqi regime pay foreign terrorists in the country at the same rate it paid its homegrown terrorists in the Saddam Fedayeen. Yet another details an offer from Hamas to stage suicide attacks against Americans. Still another presents a detailed plan for "utilizing" Arab suicide bombers. And on it goes.

And there are other interesting documents that have not yet been released, but whose existence has been reported here and in other publications, as well as in official government reports.

There's the one that confirms Saddam Hussein's Iraq trained thousands of non-Iraqi terrorists from 1998 to 2003. And the one that shows the Iraqi regime provided money and weapons to Abu Sayyaf, an al Qaeda affiliate in the Philippines. And the one that lists hundreds of jihadists imported from Gulf countries before the war. And the one demonstrating that for a decade, ending only with its overthrow, Saddam Hussein's regime harbored and financed the man who had mixed the chemicals for the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, the native Iraqi Abdul Rahman Yasin. It's a document that might be relevant to the national debate--now in its fifth year--about whether Iraq is part of the war on terror or a distraction from it. And yet the Times has not once mentioned it in its pages.

That news apparently isn't fit to print, which is why the document-release project, enlisting the attention of thousands of ordinary, interested web readers, is valuable. Of course the intelligence community should make sure that potentially dangerous information is not released. But as long as the New York Times remains an advocate of secrecy and suppression of debate, the American people should see for themselves the evidence about the nature and activities of Saddam's regime.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/012/906fprub.asp?pg=1
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 28, 2006, 11:31:45 PM
OPINIONJOURNAL FEDERATION

Losing the Enlightenment
A civilization that has lost confidence in itself cannot confront the Islamists.

BY VICTOR DAVIS HANSON
Wednesday, November 29, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST

 Our current crisis is not yet a catastrophe, but a real loss of confidence of the spirit. The hard-won effort of the Western Enlightenment of some 2,500 years that, along with Judeo-Christian benevolence, is the foundation of our material progress, common decency, and scientific excellence, is at risk in this new millennium.

But our newest foes of Reason are not the enraged Athenian democrats who tried and executed Socrates. And they are not the Christian zealots of the medieval church who persecuted philosophers of heliocentricity. Nor are they Nazis who burned books and turned Western science against its own to murder millions en masse.

No, the culprits are now more often us. In the most affluent, and leisured age in the history of Western civilization--never more powerful in its military reach, never more prosperous in our material bounty--we have become complacent, and then scared of the most recent face of barbarism from the primordial extremists of the Middle East.

What would a beleaguered Socrates, a Galileo, a Descartes, or Locke believe, for example, of the moral paralysis in Europe? Was all their bold and courageous thinking--won at such a great personal cost--to allow their successors a cheap surrender to religious fanaticism and the megaphones of state-sponsored fascism?

Just imagine in our present year, 2006: plan an opera in today's Germany, and then shut it down. Again, this surrender was not done last month by the Nazis, the Communists, or kings, but by the producers themselves in simple fear of Islamic fanatics who objected to purported bad taste. Or write a novel deemed unflattering to the Prophet Mohammed. That is what did Salman Rushdie did, and for his daring, he faced years of solitude, ostracism, and death threats--and in the heart of Europe no less. Or compose a documentary film, as did the often obnoxious Theo Van Gogh, and you may well have your throat cut in "liberal" Holland. Or better yet, sketch a simple cartoon in postmodern Denmark of legendary easy tolerance, and then go into hiding to save yourself from the gruesome fate of a Van Gogh. Or quote an ancient treatise, as did Pope Benedict, and then learn that all of Christendom may come under assault, and even the magnificent stones of the Vatican may offer no refuge--although their costumed Swiss Guard would prove a better bulwark than the European police. Or write a book critical of Islam, and then go into hiding in fear of your life, as did French philosophy teacher Robert Redeker.

And we need not only speak of threats to free speech, but also the tangible rewards from a terrified West to the agents of such repression. Note the recent honorary degree given to former Iranian President, Mohammad Khatami, whose regime has killed and silenced so many, and who himself is under investigation by the Argentine government for his role in sponsoring Hezbollah killers to murder dozens of Jewish innocents in Buenos Aires.





There are many lessons to be drawn from these examples, besides that they represent a good cross-section of European society in Denmark, England, France, Germany, Holland, and Italy. In almost every case, the lack of public support for the threatened artist or intellectual or author was purportedly based either on his supposed lack of sensitivity, or of artistic excellence.
Van Gogh, it was said, was obnoxious, his films sometimes puerile. The academic Pope was perhaps woefully ignorant of public relations in the politically correct age. Were not the cartoons in Denmark amateurish and unnecessary? Rushdie was an overrated novelist, whose chickens of trashing the West he sought refuge in finally came home to roost. The latest Hans Neuenfels's adaptation of Mozart's "Idomeneo" was apparently as silly as it was cheaply sensationalist. And perhaps Robert Redeker need not have questioned the morality of Islam and its Prophet.

But isn't that fact precisely the point? It is easy to defend artists when they produce works of genius that do not challenge popular sensibilities--Da Vinci's "Mona Lisa" or Montesquieu's "Spirit of the Laws"--but not so when an artist offends with neither the taste of a Michelangelo nor the talent of a Dante. Yes, Pope Benedict is old and scholastic; he lacks both the charisma and tact of the late Pope John Paul II, who surely would not have turned for elucidation to the rigidity of Byzantine scholarship. But isn't that why we must come to the present Pope's defense--if for no reason other than because he has the courage to speak his convictions when others might not?

Note also the constant subtext in this new self-censorship of our supposedly liberal age: the fear of radical Islam and its gruesome methods of beheadings, suicide bombings, improvised explosive devices, barbaric fatwas, riotous youth, petrodollar-acquired nuclear weapons, oil boycotts and price hikes, and fist-shaking mobs, as the seventh century is compressed into the twenty-first.

In contrast, almost daily in Europe, "brave" artists caricature Christians and Americans with impunity. And we know what explains the radical difference in attitudes to such freewheeling and "candid" expression--indeed, that hypocrisy of false bravado, of silence before fascists and slander before liberals is both the truth we are silent about, and the lie we promulgate.

There is, in fact, a long list of reasons, among them most surely the assurance that cruel critics of things Western rant without being killed. Such cowards puff out their chests when trashing an ill Oriana Fallaci or a comatose Ariel Sharon or beleaguered George W. Bush in the most demonic of tones, but they prove sunken and sullen when threatened by a thuggish Dr. Zawahiri or a grand mufti of some obscure mosque.

Second, almost every genre of artistic and intellectual expression has come under assault: music, satire, the novel, films, academic exegesis, and education. Somehow Europeans have ever so insidiously given up the promise of the Enlightenment that welcomed free thought of all kinds, the more provocative the better.

Yes, the present generation of Europeans really is heretical, made up of traitors of a sort. They themselves, not just their consensual governments, or the now-demonized American Patriot Act and Guantanamo detention center, or some invader across the Mediterranean, have endangered their centuries-won freedoms of expression--and out of worries over oil, or appearing as illiberal apostates of the new secular religion of multiculturalism, or another London or Madrid bombing. We can understand why outnumbered Venetians surrendered Cyprus to the Ottomans, and were summarily executed, or perhaps why the 16th-century French did not show up at Lepanto, but why this vacillation of present-day Europeans to defend the promise of the West, who are protected by statute and have not experienced war or hunger?

Third, examine why all these incidents took place in Europe, where more and more the state guarantees the good life even into dotage, where the here and now has become a finite world for soulless bodies, where armies devolve into topics of caricature, and children distract from sterile adults' ever-increasing appetites. So, it was logical that Europe most readily of Westerners would abandon the artist and give up the renegade in fear of religious extremists who brilliantly threatened not destruction, but interruption of the good life, or the mere charge of illiberality. Never was the Enlightenment sold out so cheaply.





We on this side of Atlantic also are showing different symptoms of this same Western malaise, but more likely through heated rhetoric than complacent indifference--given the events of September 11 that galvanized many, while disappointing liberals that past appeasement had created monsters rather than mere confused, if not dangerous rivals. The war on terror has turned out to be the torn scab that has exposed a deep wound beneath, of an endemic Western self-loathing--and near mania that our own superior education and material wealth have not eliminated altogether the need for force and coercion.
Consider some of the recent rabid outbursts by once sober, old-guard politicians of the Democratic Party. West Virginia Senator Jay Rockefeller insists that the world would be better off if Saddam were still running Iraq. Congressman John Murtha, of Pennsylvania, rushed to announce that our Marines were guilty of killing Iraqis in "cold blood" before they were tried. Illinois Senator Richard Durbin has compared our interrogators at Guantanamo Bay to Nazis and mass murderers, while Massachusetts Senator John Kerry said our soldiers have "terrorized" Iraqi women and children. The same John Kerry warned young Americans to study or they would end up in the volunteer army in Iraq--even though today's soldiers have higher educational levels than does the general public. But furor as well as fear, not logic, drives us in West to seek blame among the humane among us rather than the savagery of our enemies.

Billionaire leftist philanthropists seem to be confused about the nature of American society and politics that gave them everything they so sumptuously enjoy. Ted Turner of CNN fame and fortune said he resented President Bush asking Americans, after 9/11, to take sides in our war against Islamic terrorists. George Soros claimed that President Bush had improved on Nazi propaganda methods. Dreaming of killing an elected president, not a mass-murdering Osama Bin Laden, is a new national pastime. That is the theme of both a recent docudrama film and an Alfred Knopf book.

What are the proximate causes here in America that send liberal criticism over the edge into pathological hysteria? Is it only that George Bush is a singular polarizing figure of Christian and Texan demeanor? Or is the current left-wing savagery also a legacy of the tribal 1960s, when out-of-power protestors felt that expressions of speaking bluntly, even crudely, were at least preferable to "artificial" cultural restraint?

Or does the anger stem from the fact, that until last week, the Democrats had not elected congressional majorities in 12 years, and they've occupied the White House in only eight of the last 26 years. The left's current unruliness seems a way of scapegoating others for a more elemental frustration--that without scandal or an unpopular war they cannot so easily gain a national majority based on European-based beliefs. More entitlements, higher taxes to pay for them, gay marriage, de facto quotas in affirmative action, open borders, abortion on demand, and radical secularism--these liberal issues, at least for the moment, still don't tend to resonate with most Americans and so must be masked by opponents' scandals or overshadowed by a controversial war.

Just as the Europeans are stunned that their heaven on earth has left them weak and afraid, so too millions of Americans on the Left are angry that their own promised moral utopia is not so welcomed by the supposedly less educated and bright among them. But still, what drives Westerners, here and in Europe, to demand that we must be perfect rather than merely good, and to lament that if we are not perfect we are then abjectly bad--and always to be so unable to define and then defend their civilization against its most elemental enemies?

There has of course always been a utopian strain in both Western thought from the time of Plato's "Republic" and the practice of state socialism. But the technological explosion of the last 20 years has made life so long and so good, that many now believe our mastery of nature must extend to human nature as well. A society that can call anywhere in the world on a cell phone, must just as easily end war, poverty, or unhappiness, as if these pathologies are strictly materially caused, not impoverishments of the soul, and thus can be materially treated.

Second, education must now be, like our machines, ever more ambitious, teaching us not merely facts of the past, science of the future, and the tools to question, and discover truth, but rather a particular, a right way of thinking, as money and learning are pledged to change human nature itself. In such a world, mere ignorance has replaced evil as our challenge, and thus the bad can at last be taught away rather than confronted and destroyed.

Third, there has always been a cynical strain as well, as one can read in Petronius's "Satyricon" or Voltaire's "Candide." But our loss of faith in ourselves is now more nihilistic than sarcastic or skeptical, once the restraints of family, religion, popular culture, and public shame disappear. Ever more insulated by our material things from danger, we lack all appreciation of the eternal thin veneer of civilization.

We especially ignore among us those who work each day to keep nature and the darker angels of our own nature at bay. This new obtuseness revolves around a certain mocking by elites of why we have what we have. Instead of appreciating that millions get up at 5 a.m., work at rote jobs, and live proverbial lives of quiet desperation, we tend to laugh at the schlock of Wal-Mart, not admire its amazing ability to bring the veneer of real material prosperity to the poor.

We can praise the architect for our necessary bridge, but demonize the franchise that sold fast and safe food to the harried workers who built it. We hear about a necessary hearing aid, but despise the art of the glossy advertisement that gives the information to purchase it. And we think the soldier funny in his desert camouflage and Kevlar, a loser who drew poorly in the American lottery and so ended up in Iraq--our most privileged never acknowledging that such men with guns are the only bulwark between us and the present day forces of the Dark Ages with their Kalashnikovs and suicide belts.

So we are on dangerous ground. History gives evidence of no civilization that survived long as purely secular and without a god, that put its trust in reason alone, and believed human nature was subject to radical improvement given enough capital and learning invested in the endeavor. The failure of our elites to amplify their traditions they received, and to believe them to be not merely different but far better than the alternatives, is also a symptom of crisis in all societies of the past, whether Demosthenes' Athens, late imperial Rome, 18th-century France, or Western Europe of the 1920s. Nothing is worse that an elite that demands egalitarianism for others but ensures privilege for itself. And rarely, we know, are civilization's suicides a result of the influence of too many of the poor rather than of the wealthy.





But can I end on an optimistic note in tonight's tribute to Winston Churchill, who endured more and was more alone than we of the present age? After the horror of September 11, we in our sleep were also given a jolt of sorts, presented with enemies from the Dark Ages, the Islamic fascists who were our near exact opposites, who hated the Western tradition, and, more importantly, were honest and without apology in conveying that hatred of our liberal tolerance and forbearance. They arose not from anything we did or any Western animosity that might have led to real grievances, but from self-acknowledged weakness, self-induced failure, and, of course, those perennial engines of war, age-old envy and lost honor--always amplified and instructed by dissident Western intellectuals whose unhappiness with their own culture proved a feast for the scavenging Al-Qaedists.
By past definitions of relative power, al-Qaeda and its epigones were weak and could not defeat the West militarily. But their genius was knowing of our own self-loathing, of our inability to determine their evil from our good, of our mistaken belief that Islamists were confused about, rather than intent to destroy, the West, and most of all, of our own terror that we might lose, if even for a brief moment, the enjoyment of our good life to defeat the terrorists. In learning what the Islamists are, many of us, and for the first time, are also learning what we are not. And in fighting these fascists, we are to learn whether our freedom can prove stronger than their suicide belts and improvised explosive devices.

So we have been given a reprieve of sorts with this war, to regroup; and, in our enemies, to see our own past failings and present challenges; and to rediscover our strengths and remember our origins. We can relearn that we are not fighting for George Bush or Wal-Mart alone, but also for the very notion of the Enlightenment--and, yes, in the Christian sense for the good souls of those among us who have forgotten all that as they censor cartoons and compare American soldiers to Nazis.

So let me quote Winston Churchill of old about the gift of our present ordeal:

"These are not dark days: these are great days--the greatest days our country has ever lived."

Never more true than today.

Mr. Hanson is a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution, a distinguished fellow of Hillsdale College, and author most recently of "A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War." This article is adapted form a speech he delivered at the Claremont Institute's annual dinner in honor Sir Winston Churchill.


 
Title: Campus Speaker Censorship
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on November 29, 2006, 01:08:51 PM
Mob Rule on College Campuses
Cinnamon Stillwell
Wednesday, November 29, 2006



America's college campuses, once thought to be bastions of free speech, have become increasingly intolerant toward the practice. Visiting speakers whose views do not conform to the prevailing left-leaning political mind-set on most campuses are at particular risk of having their free speech rights infringed upon.

While academia has its own crimes to atone for, it's the students who have become the bullies as of late. A disturbing number seem to feel that theirs is an inviolate world to which no one of differing opinion need apply. As a result, everything from pie throwing to disrupting speeches to attacks on speakers has become commonplace.

Conservative speakers have long been the targets of such illiberal treatment. The violent reception given to Jim Gilchrist, founder of the Minuteman Project, an anti-illegal immigration group, at Columbia University in October is a recent example. Gilchrist had been invited to speak by the Columbia University College Republicans, but was prevented from doing so by an unruly mob of students. What could have been mere heckling descended into yelling, screaming, kicking and punching, culminating in the rushing of the stage and Gilchrist being shuttled off by security.

The fact that the rioting students could be heard yelling, "He has no right to speak!" was telling. Apparently, in their minds, neither Gilchrist nor anyone else with whom they disagree has a right to express their viewpoints. In any other setting this would be called exactly what it is -- totalitarianism. But in the untouchable Ivy League world of Columbia, it was chalked up to student activism gone awry. While condemning the incident, Columbia University President Lee Bollinger has yet to apologize to Gilchrist or to conclude the supposed investigation into the affair. In other words, mob rule won the day.

Bay Area PC Intolerance

Such behavior is certainly not limited to East Coast universities. Last February at San Francisco State University, former liberal activist-author turned conservative activist-author David Horowitz had his entire speech shouted down by a group of protesters. Composed primarily of students and other members of the Spartacus Youth Club, a Trotskyist organization, the group stood in the back of the room shouting slogans and comments at every turn.

Even this was not enough to warrant their removal, so Horowitz and his audience, which included me, simply had to suffer through the experience. Horowitz, whose speech centered on his Academic Bill of Rights, took on his critics and attempted to engage them in dialogue, with varying degrees of success. But those who actually came to hear him speak, whether out of sympathy for his views or out of a desire to tackle them intellectually, were unable to do so fully because of the actions of a few bullies.

It is not only conservative speakers who are at risk of having their free speech rights trampled upon on American college campuses. Those who dare criticize radical Islam in any way, shape or form tend to suffer the same fate.

In 2004, UC Berkeley became the locus for bullying behavior during a speech by Islam scholar Daniel Pipes. I was witness to the spectacle, one I'll never forget. Members of the Muslim Student Association and other protesters formed a disruptive group in the audience, shouting, jeering and chanting continually. They booed loudly throughout and called Pipes everything from "racist" and "Zionist" (which in their minds is an insult) to "racist Jew" -- all because Pipes had the audacity to propose that moderate Muslims distance themselves from extremist elements in their midst; that in tackling terrorism authorities take into account the preponderance of Muslim perpetrators and that Israel has a right to exist peacefully among its neighbors.

This was hardly the first time that UC Berkeley students had espoused hostility toward speakers with "unpopular" views or those hailing from "unpopular" countries such as Israel. Nonetheless, it was a wake-up call for many in the audience who had not yet experienced first-hand the intimidation of the mob.

Muslim Reformers Silenced

Recently, reformers from within the Muslim world itself have been on the receiving end of such treatment. Whether it be the work of student groups or faculty, insurmountable security restrictions and last-minute cancellations have a strange way of arising whenever such figures are invited to speak on college campuses.

Arab American activist and author Nonie Darwish was to speak at Brown University earlier this month, when the event was canceled because her views were deemed "too controversial" by members of the Muslim Students' Association. Given that Darwish is the author of the recently released book, "Now They Call Me Infidel: Why I Renounced Jihad for America, Israel and the War on Terror," such claims are hardly unpredictable. Like most Muslim reformers, Darwish must overcome the resistance within her own community, aided and abetted by misguided liberal sympathizers, in order to get her message across.

Darwish was born and raised a Muslim in Egypt and later lived in Gaza. It was during this time that she had several experiences that led her to reject the anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism with which she was indoctrinated as a child. She eventually emigrated to the United States and has since dedicated her life to exposing the ways that hatred and intolerance are crippling the Muslim world and leading to violence against non-Muslims.

Her pro-Israel views led to an invitation from the campus Jewish group Hillel to speak at Brown University. Unfortunately, the very same organization later backed out, fearing that their relationship with the Muslim Students' Association would be harmed by the experience. But if such a relationship is based on mutually assured censorship, then it's hardly worth preserving. In the end, all of Brown's students missed out on what would undoubtedly have been a thought-provoking experience.


Word has it that Brown University has re-invited Darwish to speak, no doubt in response to the furor, so perhaps students will have that opportunity after all.

Terrorists Recant

Walid Shoebat, a former PLO terrorist turned Christian convert and outspoken anti-jihadist, fared slightly better at Columbia University in October. Shoebat is the author of "Why I Left Jihad: The Root of Terrorism and the Return of Radical Islam." He was invited to speak by the Columbia College Republicans, along with former Lebanese terrorist Zachariah Anani and former Nazi Hitler Youth member and German soldier, Hilmar von Campe. All three have renounced their former anti-Semitic views and dedicated themselves to exposing radical Islam in a no-holds-barred fashion.

They managed to give their presentation, but the turnout was greatly impacted by last-minute changes to security policies implemented in the wake of the Jim Gilchrist debacle. As a result, 75 to 120 people who had RSVP'd for the event were turned away at the door because only Columbia students and 20 guests were allowed to attend. An e-mail sent out 3 hours before the event was the only forewarning, and as one would expect, most of those planning to attend didn't receive it in time. The event had been widely advertised in the blogosphere, and those denied entry were not only greatly inconvenienced but also greatly disappointed.

Members of student groups who had boycotted the event were much cheerier at the prospect of a low turnout. A post at the blog for the Blue and White, Columbia's undergraduate magazine, expressed eagerness for "pretty pictures of empty chairs." Unfortunately, they got their wish, to the detriment of open discourse at Columbia.

Illiberal Mob Rule

It's a sad state of affairs indeed when the figures of moderation and reform that many who call themselves liberal or progressive should in theory support are instead shunned in the name of political correctness. For how can one expect to promote progress while helping to stifle the voices at its heart?

People such as Shoebat and Darwish, who literally risk their lives to call attention to a grave threat to all our rights, are the true freedom fighters of our day. But far too many accord that label to those who choose to effect political change by blowing themselves up in a crowd of civilians or by randomly lobbing rockets into homes and schools or by promoting hatred of other religions. By excusing such behavior and simultaneously helping to suppress reformers, liberal student groups are in fact aiding the very totalitarian forces they claim to oppose. They have in effect become part of the problem, not part of the solution.

It would be nice if we could look to our colleges and universities as the bearers of progress, but at this rate it seems an unlikely prospect. If we are to truly promote an atmosphere of intellectual openness, respectful political debate and the free flow of ideas on campus, then we must stem the tide of thuggery, bullying and intolerance that threatens to subsume future generations.

Otherwise, we cede the day to mob rule.

Cinnamon Stillwell is a San Francisco writer. She can be reached at cinnamonstillwell@yahoo.com. Read her blog at cinnamonstillwell.blogspot.com/.


URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/g/a/2006/11/29/cstillwell.DTL
Title: Pay No Attention to the Educator Behind the Curtain
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on December 02, 2006, 06:04:44 PM
Linked at the bottom, this piece is well annotated and links many interesting places.

The Dream Palace of Educational Theorists

 by John Derbyshire (Dec. 2006)
 
Education is a subject I find hard to contemplate without losing my temper.  In the present-day U.S.A., education is basically a series of rent-seeking rackets.
 
There is the public school racket, in which homeowners and taxpayers fork out stupendous sums of money to feed a socialistic extravaganza in which, when its employees can spare time from administration, “professional development” sabbaticals, and fund-raising for the Democratic Party, boys are pressed to act like girls, and dosed with calming drugs if they refuse so to act; girls are encouraged to act like boys by taking up advanced science, math, and strenuous sports, which few of them have any liking or aptitude for; and boys and girls alike are indoctrinated in the dubious dogmas of “diversity” and political correctness.

• There is the teacher-unions racket , in which people who only work half the days of the year are awarded lifetime tenure and lush pensions on the public fisc, subject to dismissal for no offense less grave than serial arson or piracy on the high seas.

• There is the federal Department of Education racket, aptly summed up by the teacher-union boss who declared, when the Department was established by Jimmy Carter, that he now belonged to the only labor union to have its very own cabinet officer.  The DoE is also much beloved by politicians, who can posture as kiddie- and family-friendly by periodically voting to tip boxcar-loads of taxpayers’ money into this bureaucratic black hole.
 
• There is the homework racket, exposed in Alfie Kohn’s book The Homework Myth  —basically, a device for getting parents to do teachers’ work for them.
 
• There is the teacher-training racket, in which the “professional” training of our nation’s educators has been placed in the hands of the clinically insane.  You think I exaggerate?  I offer you Dr. Kamau Kambon, a product of our teacher-training colleges—an atypical product only in that he has so many “professional” degrees.  According to his Wikipedia entry:  “Dr. Kambon holds a B.A. degree in education/history, a master's degree in physical education, both a M.A. and a M. Ed. degree in education/administration, and an Ed. D. in urban education/curriculum and instruction.”  Phew!  This is one very thoroughly teacher-trained dude!  Listen to what Dr. Kambon has to say about the proper priorities for American educators here.  There is a wellnigh infinite supply of news stories about teacher-college lunacy at websites like that of the estimable F.I.R.E., and Rita Kramer wrote a fine, if horribly depressing, book on the topic.
 
Towering over all these lesser scams is the college racket, a vast money-swollen credentialing machine for lower-middle-class worker bees.  American parents are now all resigned to the fact that they must beggar themselves to purchase college diplomas for their offspring, so that said offspring can get low-paid outsource-able office jobs, instead of having to descend to high-paid, un-outsource-able work like plumbing, carpentry, or electrical installation.
 
(Professionals have their own credentialing systems:   You may have graduated law school, but you’ll still have to pass the bar exam, and so on.  Then why make aspiring lawyers go to law school?  Presumably for the same reason we insist on cube jockeys having bachelor’s degrees from accredited four-year colleges.  Why not let them study up at home from Teaching Company DVDs, then sit for a state-refereed common exam when they feel they’re ready?  Why not let lawyers learn on the job from books and as articled clerks, the way they used to?  I don’t know.  College-going is just an irrational thing we do, the way upper-class German men used to acquire dueling scars, the way women in imperial China had their feet bound.  Griggs vs. Duke Power probably has something to do with it.  Since, following that decision, employers are not permitted to test job applicants to see how intelligent they are, the employers seek a college degree as a proxy for intelligence.)
 
*    *    *    *    *
 
And then there is the strange, precious little world of education theorists.  Readers of the New York Times were given a glimpse into that world on November 26th, when the Sunday magazine of that paper ran a piece titled “What It Takes to Make a Student,” by staff journalist Paul Tough.  The story is billed on the magazine’s cover under the different heading:  “Still Left Behind—What It Will Really Take to Close the Education Gap.”  Which gap would that be?  “[T]he achievement gap between black and white students, and the one between poor and middle-class students.”  Ah.  So, two gaps then, actually.
 
Let’s cut to the chase here.  What will it take to close those gaps?  I turned to the end of Mr. Tough’s article.
 
The evidence is now overwhelming that if you take an average low-income child and put him into an average American public school, he will almost certainly come out poorly educated.  What the small but growing number of successful schools demonstrate [sic] is that the public-school system accomplishes that result because we have built it that way.  We could also decide to create a different system, one that educates most (if not all) poor minority students to high levels of achievement.  It is not yet entirely clear what that system might look like—it might include not only KIPP-like structures and practices but also high-quality early-childhood education, as well as incentives to bring the best teachers to the worst schools—but what is clear is that it is within reach.
 
“KIPP” is an acronym for Knowledge is Power Program, a network of intensive college-preparatory schools for inner-city kids started up in 1994 by two idealistic young teachers, David Levin and Michael Feinberg, in Houston.  There are now 52 of these schools nationwide.  They get good results, but this is not very surprising.  KIPP schools have long hours (typically 7:30am to 5:00pm), a longer than average school year, and strict standards of behavior.  KIPP schools are covered in Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom’s 2003 book No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning, where more of the game is given away:  “[T]here is an application process that tends to—and is intended to—discourage families unlikely to cooperate with the school.  Indeed, one of the five pillars upon which the KIPP schools rest is ‘choice and commitment.’  ...the fact that these are schools of choice is not incidental to their success.”  For sure it is not.
 
All the recommendations offered by Mr. Tough—and by other education theorists, like the Thernstroms—have little trapdoors built into them like this.  Look back at Mr. Tough’s prescription:  “...but also high-quality early-childhood education.”  Oh, like Head Start?  That landmark Great Society educational program, launched in 1965, is still going strong.  The Thernstroms reported that 20 million children had passed through it when they wrote their book, at a cost to the federal taxpayer of $60 billion.  They go on to report that while there is some slight, disputable evidence of marginal benefits for white children from Head Start, “It does not seem to have improved the educational achievement of African-American children in any substantial way.”  Whether it has done anything for Hispanic children is not known.
 
Similarly with “incentives to bring the best teachers to the worst schools.”  Setting aside the fact that you are dealing with a line of work whose labor union is armed with thermonuclear weapons, even supposing you could establish a free market in public-school teachers, how could the worst schools—inner-city schools serving black neighborhoods—ever outbid leafy, affluent suburbs for those “best teachers”?  And how many “best teachers” are there, anyway?  As the Thernstroms point out, a lot of these prescriptions for school reform assume an unlimited supply of “saints and masochists”—teachers like those in the KIPPS schools, who, Mr. Tough tells us, work 15 to 16 hours a day.  I am sure there are some people who enter the teaching profession with the desire to crunch their way daily across the crack-vial-littered streets of crime-wrecked inner-city neighborhoods in order to put in 15-hour working days, but I doubt there are many such.
 
*    *    *    *    *
 
If you read much Ed Biz theorizing, you find yourself wondering how a single field of human enquiry can contain so much error and folly.  One answer is that educationalists wilfully—ideologically, in fact—ignore the understanding of human nature that the modern human sciences are gradually attaining, and cling doggedly to long-exploded theories about how human beings develop from infancy to adulthood.  From false premises they proceed to false conclusions.
 
The long and short of this new understanding is that human beings are much less malleable than everyone supposed half a century ago, and much less malleable than “blank slate” leftists—a category that includes practically all education theorists—have ever, for reasons not difficult to fathom, been willing to contemplate.
 
Reading recent results out of the human sciences always brings to my mind those “shape memory alloys” that so fascinate materials scientists.  These are metal alloys that “remember” their original geometry, and can be made to return to it, or something close to it, usually by heating, after any amount of deformation and pressure.
 
So it is with humanity.  We come into the world with a good deal of our life course pre-ordained in our genes.  At age three or so we begin to interact with other children outside our home, with results that depend in part on us, and in part on where our home is situated.  We pass through various educational processes—formalized extensions of that out-of-home environment, and also highly location-dependent.  We end up as adults with personalities and prospects that are, according to the latest understandings, around 50 percent innate and pre-ordained, around 50 percent formed by “non-shared environment” (not shared, that is, with siblings raised in the same home by the same parents—a somewhat controversial concept in its precise contents, but clearly consisting mostly of those out-of-home experiences), and 0-5 percent formed by “shared environment”—mainly parenting style.
 
(And we then, having reached adulthood, regress a little to our pre-ordained shape, like one of those peculiar alloys.  It is a curious fact, well supported by a mass of evidence, that the heritable components of our personality and intelligence become more marked as we age.  The IQs of 40-year-olds correlate better with those of their parents or siblings than do the IQs of 20-year-olds.  The advice traditionally given to young men contemplating marriage—“Get a good look at her mother”—is very sound.)
 
You would never know any of this from reading Ed Biz propaganda pieces like Paul Tough’s in the New York Times magazine.  For example, he gives good coverage of some research on parenting.  However, all the research he cites is premised on the notion that parents can mold their children in different ways by treating them differently.  Parents do this and the kids turn out like this;  if the parents had done that, then the kids would have turned out like that.
 
He does not cite any of the research showing that aside from very extreme approaches—e.g. locking a child in a broom cupboard for the first four years of its life—parenting  style makes very little difference to life outcomes.  (Though parental decisions influencing the non-shared environment—e.g. where parents choose to live—may make a great deal of difference.)  Parents behave aggressively towards children; the children grow up aggressive;  See!—the parents’ aggression caused that outcome!  Well, not necessarily.  What about child-to-parent effects—innately difficult kids drive their parents to aggressive distraction?  What about genes?  The kids have their parents’ genes, and most features of human personality—including aggressiveness—are highly heritable.
 
None of that for Mr. Tough.  Genes?  What are you, some kind of Klansman or Nazi?  No, no, no, the kids are little blank slates for teachers, parents, and politicians to work their magic on,  These undesirable outcomes—these mysterious test-score gaps, these dropping-outs and delinquencies—arise only because we are chanting the wrong spells!
 
A very good rule of thumb when reading child-development literature is that any study that has not taken careful account of heritable factors—by comparing identical twins raised together or separately, fraternal twins ditto ditto, non-twin siblings ditto ditto—is utterly and completely worthless.  That sentence is (a) true, and (b) guaranteed to get you thrown out of a high window if spoken aloud at any gathering of education theorists.
 
Certainly Mr. Tough will have none of it.  The child is a blank slate.  Parents act on it, causing this and this.  Then teachers act on it, causing that and that.  Bingo!—you have a finished adult.  Or, as Mr. Tough summarizes the interesting (but perfectly gene-free) work of sociologist Annette Lareau:  “[G]ive a child X, and you get Y.”  So simple!  One wonders if there has ever been an education theorist who has actually raised children, or retained any memory of his own childhood.
 
*    *    *    *    *
 
In the end, all left-liberal prescriptions for educational improvement end up with two demands:  that governments should spend more money on schools, and that parents should work harder at parenting.
 
Never mind that the spending-improves-education theory has been tested to destruction.  Never mind that the demographics of the Western world are in free fall because of the ever-increasing demands in time and money placed on parents.  (Raising two children in suburban America, I dream fondly but futilely of my own 1950s English childhood, when by far the commonest words I heard from my parents were:  “Go out and play.  Make sure you’re back in time for supper.”  How on earth did civilization survive?)
 
Never mind that obstructionist, feather-bedding teacher unions firmly control one of our nation’s two big political parties.  Never mind the mountains of evidence from the human sciences that everything education theorists and their liberal camp followers like Mr. Tough believe about human nature is false.  Never mind, never mind.  The Ed Biz show must go on—for the sake of the children, you know.

http://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm?frm=4844&sec_id=4844
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 04, 2006, 12:43:18 PM
http://www.suntimes.com/news/steyn/1...teyn03.article

Here's the meat of the article, starting about halfway through:

Quote:
Don't get me wrong, I like a Friars' Club Roast as much as the next guy and I'm sure Jim Baker kibitzing with John Kerry was the hottest ticket in town. But doesn't it strike you as just a tiny bit parochial? Aside from Senator Kerry, I wonder whether the commission thought to hear from anyone such as Goh Chok Tong, the former prime minister of Singapore. A couple of years back, on a visit to Washington just as the Democrat-media headless-chicken quagmire-frenzy was getting into gear, he summed it up beautifully:

''The key issue is no longer WMD or even the role of the U.N. The central issue is America's credibility and will to prevail.''

As I write in my new book, Singaporean Cabinet ministers apparently understand that more clearly than U.S. senators, congressmen and former secretaries of state. Or, as one Baker Commission grandee told the New York Times, ''We had to move the national debate from whether to stay the course to how do we start down the path out.''

An ''exit strategy'' on those terms is the path out not just from Iraq but from a lot of other places, too -- including Iran, North Korea, Sudan, Venezuela, Russia, China, the South Sandwich Islands. For America would be revealed to the world as a fraud: a hyperpower that's all hype and no power -- or, at any rate, no will. According to the New York Sun, ''An expert adviser to the Baker-Hamilton commission expects the 10-person panel to recommend that the Bush administration pressure Israel to make concessions in a gambit to entice Syria and Iran to a regional conference . . .''

On the face of it, this sounds an admirably hard-headed confirmation of James Baker's most celebrated soundbite on the Middle East ''peace process'': ''F - - k the Jews. They didn't vote for us anyway.'' His recommendations seem intended to f - - k the Jews well and truly by making them the designated fall guys for Iraq. But hang on: If Israel could be forced into giving up the Golan Heights and other land (as some fantasists suggest) in order to persuade the Syrians and Iranians to ease up on killing coalition forces in Iraq, our enemies would have learned an important lesson: The best way to weaken Israel is to kill Americans. I'm all for Bakerite cynicism, but this would seem to f - - k not just the Jews but the Americans, too.

It would, furthermore, be a particularly contemptible confirmation of a line I heard Bernard Lewis, our greatest Middle Eastern scholar, use the other day -- that ''America is harmless as an enemy and treacherous as a friend.'' To punish your friends as a means of rewarding your enemies for killing your forces would seem to be an almost ludicrously parodic illustration of that dictum. In the end, America would be punishing itself. The world would understand that Vietnam is not the exception but the rule.

It has been strange to see my pals on the right approach Iraq as a matter of inventory and personnel. Many call for more troops to be sent to Baghdad, others say the U.S. armed forces overall are too small and overstretched. Look, America is responsible for 40 percent of the planet's military spending: It spends more money on its armed forces than the next 43 biggest militaries combined, from China, Britain and France all the way down the military-spending hit parade to Montenegro and Angola. Yet it's not big enough to see off an insurgency confined to a 30-mile radius of a desert capital?

It's not the planes, the tanks, the men, the body armor. It's the political will. You can have the best car in town, but it won't go anywhere if you don't put your foot on the pedal. Three years ago, when it was obvious Syria and Iran were violating Iraq's borders with impunity, we should have done what the British did in the so-called ''Confrontation'' with Indonesia 40 years ago when they were faced with Jakarta doing to the newly independent state of Malaysia exactly what Damascus and Tehran are doing to Iraq. British, Aussie and Malaysian forces sent troops on low-key, lethally effective raids into Indonesia, keeping the enemy on the defensive and winning the war with barely a word making the papers. If the strategic purpose in invading Iraq was to create a regional domino effect, then playing defense in the Sunni Triangle for three years makes no sense. We should never have wound up hunkered down in the Green Zone. If there has to be a Green Zone, it should be on the Syrian side of the border.

Perhaps the Baker Commission's proposals will prove not to be as empty and risible as those leaked. But, if they are, the president should pay them no heed. A bipartisan sellout -- the Republicans cut and the Democrats run -- would be an awesome self-humiliation of the United States. And once the rest of the world figures it out, it'll be America that's the Green Zone.

© Mark Steyn, 2006 
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 19, 2006, 07:08:29 AM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymLJz3N8ayI&eurl=
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 24, 2007, 03:28:13 PM
The State of the Union is a Disaster:
PJM in Seattle
January 23, 2007 3:36 AM

The Speech George Bush Should Make Tuesday Night

Exclusive to PJM by Jules Crittenden

Don’t bother standing up or clapping, any of you. I already know who won the election, and I know how you feel.
I come before you tonight not to make amends, not to make it good, curry any favor or find any middle ground.
I am, more or less, a lame duck. You’ve had your 100 hours of party time. I know. I won’t get any legislation passed without some major bottom-kissing. Maybe something on illegal aliens. That health insurance thing I’ll be talking about later tonight is pretty much for show. I know it isn’t going anywhere. A proposal to raise middle-class taxes for a healthcare plan you don’t even want? What was I thinking?
None of that really matters. Not now. Those are peacetime issues we’ve been bickering about for a long time, and I don’t expect we’ll resolve them anytime soon.
So what is the best thing I can do tonight? I can tell you the truth. What none of you want to hear. What you’ve been stopping your ears to. The ugly truth.
The State of the Union is a disaster. I did my best, but I made mistakes, and my best wasn’t good enough.
We went to war without building up our army, and now, I am trying to make up for that.
But that is not the disaster.
The disaster is that you, Congress and the American people, do not care to fight.



Faced with a fundamental challenge to our own security, to everything we believe in, to the world order to peace and security for which we and our parents fought so hard for so many years, you now want to pretend like none of these threats are real. You want to surrender to the evil I have been telling you about. An evil that, unchecked, can consume large parts of the world and threatens to usher in a dark age.
You didn’t like it when I talked about evil. Sounded too simple, too uncompromising, too moralistic. Too … biblical.
I don’t know what else you call people who fly passenger jets into office buildings; who rape women in front of their husbands and children, and execute their opponents in acid baths; who seek to spread tyrannical and archaic religious regimes that enslave women and stifle fundamental freedoms. Who want to dominate the world’s primary oil fields with nuclear weapons.
I call it evil. Works for me.
I’ve heard all the comparisons between Iraq and Vietnam. George Bush’s Vietnam. The myopia is astonishing, even for me, George Bush, who you all think just isn’t that smart. But I learned something in school: People who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
Didn’t you learn anything from Vietnam? Didn’t you see what happened when your predecessors in Congress, disgruntled and responding to public opinion polls just like you are, voted repeatedly to undermine an ally that was fighting for its survival and making headway against evil? There, I’ve said it again. Millions of people were murdered or imprisoned.
And then, those who wished us ill … the evil-doers … evil, evil evil … took advantage of our weakness.
The Soviet Union, evil personified, invaded Afghanistan, knowing we’d do nothing about it. Iran defied all international norms, took our sovereign embassy and held our people hostage for 444 days. They knew we’d do nothing about it. It was a massive humiliation we have been paying for with our own precious blood ever since.
Where do you think this war we are now engaged in started, anyway? Just ask Osama bin Laden, veteran of the Afghan war against the Soviets, what lesson he learned from two decades of American appeasement and withdrawal in the face of provocation.
Now, you want to negotiate with two of the world’s primary sponsors of terrorism, who are directly involved in support of the terrorists who murder our soldiers. You want to make an arrangement by which we will exit Iraq, and leave it to them. To loot, to murder, to fight over, while the rest of the world’s evil regimes look on, see our weakness, and plot their own moves.
You can try that, with resolutions, by cutting spending for troops in the field, as you seek the short-term satisfaction of withdrawal. But I remain President of the United States, and as long as I am, I will be no lame duck in this fight.
I will engage evil directly where I find it, in Iraq and in Iran. With an aggressive and ruthless new strategy and a plan to build our army as we should have a long time ago, I will show the American people that we can fight and we can win. I expect that the American people, though misled by their press and many of their elected representatives, will see results and will get it. Because the American people are a people who in the end don’t give up, don’t stop fighting, refuse to lose, and will choose to win. I have faith in them.
Oh, there’s another one of those words you don’t like.
A nation that is not willing to fight for what it believes in, for its place in the world, is not worthy of its own ideals. But that is not America. I now intend to help America restore its faith in itself. By fighting this necessary fight that we cannot afford to lose.
So … are you with me, or against us?


Jules Crittenden is an editor and columnist for the Boston Herald.
Crittenden’s web page is at Forward Movement.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 29, 2007, 08:44:01 AM
Old U.S.S.R. made Old Europe look new

By Mark Steyn

John O'Sullivan's new book The President, The Pope And The Prime Minister has a marvelous account of the funeral of Yuri Andropov. In case you've forgotten, he was one of those late-period Soviet leaders who looked like he'd been plucked in haste from the local embalmer's and propped up against the balcony for the May Day parade. When he was eventually pronounced (officially) dead in 1984, Margaret Thatcher was prevailed upon by an aide to stop at a shoe store en route to the airport and get some fleece-lined boots for the chilly February burial. She grumbled about the cost all the way to Moscow. There she met Andropov's successor, Konstantin Chernenko, whom the Politburo had anointed as the next cadaver-in-chief. And, after shaking hands with him, she stopped complaining about the cost of her Kremlin boots. "They were a prudent long-term investment," she told her aide.


More like short-term. Vice President George H. W. Bush was nearer to the mark when he said goodbye to the U.S. Embassy staff after the Andropov funeral: "Next year, same time, same place." Close enough. Chernenko died 13 months later.

 


The decrepitude of the Politburo waxworks and their Eastern European clients embodied the ideological health of communism: Andropov and Chernenko were the sclerosis of the regime made wan flesh. With democracies, decrepitude is harder to spot. Our leaders are younger, and even in the U.S. Senate — the nearest the Western world has to a Brezhnevite politburo — new blood occasionally shows up: Barack Obama is hot, hip, happening, even if none of his political ideas are. But old whines in new bottles sell better than old whines in old bottles, as John Kerry evidently concluded. Last week, the senator took to the floor and reduced himself to tears as he announced that he'd regretfully decided not to run for president again. John Edwards shoveled him into the landfill oistory with some oleaginous boilerplate about Kerry's readiness to "respond to any call to serve his country." Was anybody calling? And why would they? What does Senator Kerry weep for other than his own thwarted ambition? What did he stand for? What was his vision other than a belief in his own indispensability?


Alas, the air of Andropovian exhaustion is not confined to Massachusetts. In the State of the Union, the president (as presidents are wont to do on Tuesday nights in January) spoke about energy, but he didn't seem to have any. Five years ago, when he was genuinely engaged by the subject, he wanted to drill in ANWR and go nuclear: He was energetic about energy. When both those excellent ideas went nowhere, President Bush retreated to some familiar bromides about vague targets and new regulations and increased efficiencies: His list was listless.


This seems to suit the Democrats. The only energy displayed by Nancy Pelosi was the spectacular leap to her feet within a nano-second of the president mentioning Darfur. Up went Madam Speaker and the entire Democratic caucus like enthusiastic loons on a gameshow. Darfur! We're all in favor of Darfur. People are being murdered! Hundreds of thousands! We oughtta do something! Like, er, jump up and down when it's mentioned in a speech. And, er, call for the international community to mobilize. Maybe one of those leathery old '60s rockers could organize an all-star concert or something. If Darfur were indeed a game show, the Sudanese would quickly discover it's one of those ones where you come on down to discover you've missed out on all the big prizes but you're not going away empty-handed: No, sir, here's your very own SAVE DARFUR! T-shirt autographed by Nancy Pelosi and George Clooney.


Darfur is an apt symbol of early 21st century liberalism: What matters is that you urge action rather than take any. On Iraq, meanwhile, the president declared: "Let us find our resolve, and turn events toward victory." And the Dems sat on their hands.


The American left has long deplored Bush's rhetorical reliance on such vulgar conceits as "good" and "evil." But it seems even "victory" is a problematic concept, and right now the momentum is all for defeat of one kind or another. America is talking itself into willing a defeat that has not (yet) occurred on the ground, and would be fatally damaging to this nation's credibility if it did. Last year Arthur M. Sulzberger Jr., publisher of the New York Times, gave a commencement address of almost parodic boomer narcissism, hailing his own generation for their anti-war idealism. Advocating defeat first time round, John Kerry estimated America might have to relocate a few thousand local allies. As it happens, millions died in Vietnam and Cambodia. And the least the self-absorbed poseurs like Sulzberger could do is occasionally remember that the world is about more than their moral vanity.


The open defeatists on the Democrat side and the nuanced defeatists among "moderate" Republicans seem to think that big countries can choose to lose small wars. After all, say the "realists," Iraq isn't any more important to Americans than Vietnam was. But a realpolitik cynic knows the tactical price of everything and the strategic value of nothing. This is something on an entirely different scale from the 1930s: Seventy years ago, Britain and Europe could not rouse themselves to focus on a looming war; today, we can't rouse ourselves even to focus on a war that's happening right now. Read 100 percent of the Democratic presidential candidates' platforms and a sizeable chunk of the Republicans': We're full of pseudo-energy for phantom crises and ersatz enemies, like "global warming.''


The other day I was reading an account of the latest genius idea from Britain. The carbon emission-trading system imposed by Kyoto is absurd and entirely ineffectual, but in London David Cameron now wants to apply it to hamburgers. Over there, a Big Mac costs three bucks or so. But, if children eat too many, the consequent problems of juvenile obesity will be a further strain on the National Health Service. So Cameron wants to impose some sort of Kyotoesque calorie-trading system on fast-food purveyors whereby McDonald's would have some trans fat cap imposed on it to ensure they pick up the tab for what that $3 Big Mac really costs society.


And David Cameron is the leader of the alleged Conservative Party.


He's also living in a country whose major cities have been hollowed out by Islamist cells. Nevertheless, as England decays into Somalia with chip shops, taxing the chip shops is the Conservatives' priority.


The civilized world faces profound challenges that threaten the global order. But most advanced democracies now run two-party systems in which both parties sell themselves to the electorate on the basis of unaffordable entitlements whose costs can be kicked down the road, even though the road is a short cul-de-sac and the kicked cans are already piled sky-high. That's the real energy crisis.

Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 29, 2007, 10:33:43 AM
Second rant of the day:

 22% of Fox Poll hope surge fails (UPDATED)

Do you personally want the Iraq plan President Bush announced last week to succeed?

16-17 Jan 07
———————————-Yes—No-(Don’t know)
Average————————63%-22—-15
Democrats——————-51%-34—-15
Republicans——————79%-11—-10
Independents—————-63%-19—-17
22% (34% of self-identified Democrats) don't want the plan to succeed? 11% of self-identified Republicans? 15% "don't know" if they want it to succeed?  What can these idiots be thinking? Are they "Patriotic Terrorists"?
 
From the Huffington Post
 
 
 Greg Gutfeld
Bio     

01.25.2007
New Trend On The Rise: The Patriotic Terrorist (168 comments )
READ MORE: United States, Iraq
Whenever I visit this lovely blog, I usually run into someone - a "leftist," if you will - who finds pleasure in things that make our country or the President look bad. I suppose I could say these angry types are no better than cheerleaders for terrorism. After all, both entities - the left and terrorists - seem to share the same desire: to put the US, humiliatingly, in its place.


But I would be wrong to say such things. Very wrong. Of course, "dissent is patriotic," and the left is only critical of America because it simply loves our country much more than I do.

That's why calling them terrorists would be intolerant and pretty shameful.

But what about "patriotic terrorists?"

That's kinda neat.

What is a patriotic terrorist?

It is an American who claims to love his or her country while enjoying the enemy's success against said country. It is a person who gets deeply offended if you question their patriotism, while also appearing to share the same ideals of the more spirited folk who like to blow up innocent people.

Patriotic terrorists love America with so much intensity that it appears to the untrained eye that they hate it. But it's actually the most powerful form of "tough love" known to man, woman and Rosie O'Donnell. Patriotic terrorists love America so much that they realize it needs an intervention - and real terror is the only way to enable that intervention. In fact, to keep a mammoth, arrogant superpower like America in check, terrorism is the only thing we've got. Noam Chomsky knew this from the start, making him a patriotic terrorist of the highest order.

This is why he gets the chicks.

Hey, I bet you've probably wondered why Al Qaeda hasn't struck in the US since 9/11. They don't have to. It has its own offshoot franchise here at work already. Patriotic Terrorists.

Think about how much both groups have in common!

-Both patriotic terrorists and Al Qaeda want the US to abandon Iraq, for that reveals Bush and America to be monstrous, laughable failures. It does not matter to either group that the withdrawal from Iraq will make post-Vietnam look like an afternoon at Ikea shopping for a Hoggbo innerspring mattress.

-For patriotic terrorists and real terrorists, car bombs going off is music to their ears. It proves that you can't offer democracy to troubled countries, as long as you've got terrorists standing in your way. And that's great news for everyone who believes in checks and balances between the haves and the have nots! (Note: "haves" means the US. "Have nots" means those who hate the US)

-Patriotic terrorists and the more committed terrorists both believe that infractions at Guantanamo Bay are far worse than anything a genocidal dictator could muster, and such horrors possess far more PR potential in denigrating the US than anything involving Ed Begley Jr.

-Both patriotic terrorists and Al Qaeda terrorists believe the US desires to control the Middle East, empower evil Israel and expand it's power base at the expense of innocent Arab lives. But both groups also realize that the US is too stupid to achieve these goals - and that makes being a patriotic terrorist loads of fun!

Are you a patriotic terrorist?

If you are intensely critical of the US, while tolerating homicidal enemies who condemn everything you previously claimed you are for - human rights, voting rights, gay rights, women's rights, porn - then you're a patriotic terrorist.

If you talk about tolerance constantly - and hilariously tolerate genocide and suicide bombers because those actions undermine your more intimate opposition, the American right - then you're a patriotic terrorist.

The only difference between a patriotic terrorist and a real one? Real terrorists are simply patriotic terrorists who've taken the extra step - choosing to actually die for their beliefs - rather than simply talking about them at Spago. If Tim Robbins, Sean Penn, Michael Moore, and their ilk had real cojones, they'd all be wearing cute black vests - but stuffed with more than dog-eared copies of Deterring Democracy.

Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 15, 2007, 03:10:10 AM
WSJ

Awaiting the Dishonor Roll
February 15, 2007; Page A18
Congress has rarely been distinguished by its moral courage. But even grading on a curve, we can only describe this week's House debate on a vote of no-confidence in the mission in Iraq as one of the most shameful moments in the institution's history.

On present course, the Members will vote on Friday to approve a resolution that does nothing to remove American troops from harm's way in Iraq but that will do substantial damage to their morale and that of their Iraqi allies while emboldening the enemy. The only real question is how many Republicans will also participate in this disgrace in the mistaken belief that their votes will put some distance between themselves and the war most of them voted to authorize in 2002.

The motion at issue is plainly dishonest, in that exquisitely Congressional way of trying to have it both ways. (We reprint the text nearby.) The resolution purports to "support" the troops even as it disapproves of their mission. It praises their "bravery," while opposing the additional forces that both President Bush and General David Petreaus, the new commanding general in Iraq, say are vital to accomplishing that mission. And it claims to want to "protect" the troops even as its practical impact will be to encourage Iraqi insurgents to believe that every roadside bomb brings them closer to their goal.

 
As for how "the troops" themselves feel, we refer readers to Richard Engel's recent story on NBC News quoting Specialist Tyler Johnson in Iraq: "People are dying here. You know what I'm saying . . . You may [say] 'oh we support the troops.' So you're not supporting what they do. What they's (sic) here to sweat for, what we bleed for and we die for." Added another soldier: "If they don't think we're doing a good job, everything we've done here is all in vain." In other words, the troops themselves realize that the first part of the resolution is empty posturing, while the second is deeply immoral.

All the more so because if Congress feels so strongly about the troops, it arguably has the power to start removing them from harm's way by voting to cut off the funds they need to operate in Iraq. But that would make Congress responsible for what followed -- whether those consequences are Americans killed in retreat, or ethnic cleansing in Baghdad, or the toppling of the elected Maliki government by radical Shiite or military forces. The one result Congress fears above all is being accountable.

We aren't prone to quoting the young John Kerry, but this week's vote reminds us of the comment the antiwar veteran told another cut-and-run Congress in the early 1970s: "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?" The difference this time is that Speaker Nancy Pelosi and John Murtha expect men and women to keep dying for something they say is a mistake but also don't have the political courage to help end.

Instead, they'll pass this "non-binding resolution," to be followed soon by attempts at micromanagement that would make the war all but impossible to prosecute -- and once again without taking responsibility. Mr. Murtha is already broadcasting his strategy, which the new Politico Web site described yesterday as "a slow-bleed strategy designed to gradually limit the administration's options."

In concert with antiwar groups, the story reported, Mr. Murtha's "goal is crafted to circumvent the biggest political vulnerability of the antiwar movement -- the accusation that it is willing to abandon troops in the field." So instead of cutting off funds, Mr. Murtha will "slow-bleed" the troops with "readiness" restrictions or limits on National Guard forces that will make them all but impossible to deploy. These will be attached to appropriations bills that will also purport to "support the troops."

"There's a D-Day coming in here, and it's going to start with the supplemental and finish with the '08 [defense] budget,'' Congressman Neil Abercrombie (D., Hawaii) told the Web site. He must mean D-Day as in Dunkirk.

All of this is something that House Republicans should keep in mind as they consider whether to follow this retreat. The GOP leadership has been stalwart, even eloquent, this week in opposing the resolution. But some Republicans figure they can use this vote to distance themselves from Mr. Bush and the war while not doing any real harm. They should understand that the Democratic willingness to follow the Murtha "slow-bleed" strategy will depend in part on how many Republicans follow them in this vote. The Democrats are themselves divided on how to proceed, and they want a big GOP vote to give them political cover. However "non-binding," this is a vote that Republican partisans will long remember.

History is likely to remember the roll as well. A newly confirmed commander is about to lead 20,000 American soldiers on a dangerous and difficult mission to secure Baghdad, risking their lives for their country. And the message their elected Representatives will send them off to battle with is a vote declaring their inevitable defeat.

Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 20, 2007, 03:24:20 PM
More Al-Qaedism?

Over four years ago, I wrote of a phenomenon I dubbed “Al-Qaedism” to explain why random violence and terrorism by individual Muslims—while not connected with al-Qaeda per se—were still a danger. Often the ill or unhappy try to justify their own failings of inadequacy with a sort of cosmic Islamic rage against the West—one also often abetted by our own failure to counter our enemies’ rhetoric or eagerness to hush up the psychology of such attacks:

“Rather than confront the reality of past character flaws, mental instability, failed marriages, or the bleak future of no money, dead-end jobs, or social ostracism, the al Qaedist — whether an erstwhile Black Muslim, a Middle Eastern immigrant with a criminal past, or mixed-up pampered suburbanites who dabble in fundamentalism — seeks notoriety for his crimes, and therein perhaps at last a sense of importance.”

Beside the numerous examples I listed in that 2002 article, we have witnessed since a number of similar killings—especially Muslim drivers trying to run down others in a sort of politicized road rage, that were officially not listed as acts of terrorism. In this regard, I remember especially the 2006 attack in San Francisco by Omeed Aziz Popal, who apparently chose the area around a Jewish community center to run over people. And then the same year, there was the similar car ramming at the University of North Carolina by Mohammed Reza Taheri-azar, a graduate student apparently furious over our treatment of Muslims abroad.

I recall all this in the context of the latest shootings in Utah by Solejman Talovic, a Bosnian Muslim, and the recent ramming of Tennessee students by cabdriver Ibrihim Ahmed.

None of these are organized terrorist acts, much less orchestrated by al Qaeda. Rather, the constant furor against the West and sense of victimhood that reverberates in the radical mosques, madrassas, and in worldwide Islamic media, often enhanced and abetted by Western Leftist hysteria, reaches many in a vague and haphazard way to instill a sort of paranoia and desire to lash out at “them”.

And now and again, those with mental problems, or plagued with a sense of failure, or angry about some such grievance, will strike out in terrorist fashion. Likewise we now learn that the sick Ali Abu Kamal, who in 1997 went up the Empire State Building to kill random Americans (he murdered one and wounded several others), was not just despondent over financial losses as reported. But, as his family now brags, Kamal was furious at Israel and America—again a way of rationalizing personal setbacks through cosmic issues that once again reflects the effects of Islamist propaganda on unhinged minds.

The only mystery is that in our politically-correct efforts to deny the possibility of any and all links between such random violence and formal radical Islam, we then go to the other extreme, and deny there is any loose connection at all with perceived Muslim grievance. And that sadly only results in wide scale public cynicism that once again authorities appear hedging for political reasons.

Keep Quiet

U.S. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton announced to the world that she wants a 90-day deadline to start pulling American troops from Iraq. Other Democrats in Congress, according to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, will soon declare their intentions to cut-off of US funding for all military deployments in Iraq.

Well aside from the paradox that the Congress had just approved unanimously the appointment of Gen. David Petraeus (the hero in the recent spate of anti-Bush books on Iraq) to take command of coalition forces in Iraq—the planner of a surge over 20,000 American troops into Baghdad—it is always a mistake in war to assure enemies of our intention not to fight any longer (unless of course you are indifferent to losing).

Do We remember all that?

The most famous example was the 1974 Foreign Relations Act. Passed in the wake of Watergate scandal, the congressional resolution cut off all military assistance to the South Vietnamese government. But that pubic stand-down only encouraged the North Vietnamese communists to violate the Paris peace accords and renew the war—without any more worries of U.S arms shipments or air strikes.

The Neutrality Acts of the 1930s, passed by an isolationist Congress, forbade U.S. military assistance to, or trade in war material with, any belligerent, regardless of whether they were aggressors or victims. Such actions of “conscious” only emboldened Nazi Germany, Italy, and Japan to attack democracies and other neutral states. Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo were convinced that whatever their provocations, the United States had no stomach to stand up to any of them, or even to join Britain and France in a united front of resistance. World War II with its 50 million dead followed.

Often even mere assurances of restraint by American officials, that suggest either inaction or weariness, have had the same effect as congressional resolutions in assuring interested observers that the United States would either not act in the face of aggression—or tire more quickly of ongoing fighting than their our enemies.

In a routine policy address Cold War warrior and Secretary of States Dean Acheson once warned the communist bloc that the American defensive perimeter in the Pacific went from Aleutians to Japan to the Ryukyus and onto the Philippine Islands. But Acheson, perhaps inadvertently, left out the Korean Peninsula. Many argued at the time that this omission gave the green light for the communists to invade South Korea in 1950 on their erroneous assumption that the United States would not intervene in an area outside its sphere of influence. Three years and hundreds of thousands of war dead followed.

Jimmy Carter had a far worse habit of telegraphing his intention to enemies. In 1977 he declared that America had outgrown its “inordinate fear of communism”. But by that time, global communism from Stalin to Mao had killed nearly 100 million of its own and invaded dozens of natural countries. Nothing “inordinate” about that.

So next when Carter made it clear that he would not retaliate immediately against Iran for storming of the US embassy in November 1979, it was not much of a surprise that the Soviet Union quickly invaded Afghanistan—unafraid of an America that wouldn’t use force to free its own diplomats or punish those who took them.

In a July 1990 in a meeting with Saddam Hussein, then American ambassador Arpil Glaspie purportedly assured the Iraqi government that “ we have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait.” Saddam attacked Kuwait a little more than a week later.

In everyone of our wars, there have been terrible setbacks—winter 1776, summer 1864, spring 1918, winter 1942, autumn 1974, and now winter 2007. In almost all of these weeks of depression, there were terrible blunders, and ensuing grumblings about the conduct of the war. Any time we announced our intention in advance to quit or scale back, we later came to regret it; and on the far more numbers occasions when we did not, we did not.

If in peacetime it is wise to keep quiet and carry a big stick, in war it is even more critical not to assure our enemies that we won’t fight to achieve victory.
Title: North on Moscow-Tehran Ties
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 25, 2007, 09:16:04 PM
Moscow-Tehran Ties
Thursday , February 22, 2007

By Lt. Col. Oliver North
Washington, D.C. — “The lion and the bear are hunting the eagle.” That's how a refugee from Tehran's reigning ayatollahs put it when he called me this week about recent developments in his homeland. The lion to which my friend referred was on the coat of arms of nearly every Persian king for more than a thousand years. The bear, of course, is imperial Russia. And we're the bird.

It's an apt metaphor. Vladimir Putin, Moscow's current czar, is behaving like a bear awakened from hibernation — hungry and territorial. His recent words condemning U.S. foreign policy are mirrored by actions — both overt and covert — aimed at undermining U.S. national security. While eschewing animal symbols on their green, white and red flag, the Islamic radicals running Iran's theocracy act like lions on the prowl — dangerous to any prey. And while the simile is unlikely in nature — the lions and bears in my friend's parable have certainly teamed up to hunt the eagle. The only trouble with the allegory is that the United States is acting more like an ostrich than an eagle. A few examples:

Last week Mr. Putin told European leaders gathered in Munich "the United States has overstepped its national borders in every way." He claimed that the U.S. is forcing weaker nations to “acquire weapons of mass destruction" and defended Moscow's recent sale of $700 million worth of TOR-M1 anti-aircraft batteries to Iran. And in an effort to sound less like a bear and more like a Democrat running for the U.S. presidency, he declared that “wars, local and regional conflicts, have only grown in number" and charged America with taking "unilateral, illegitimate actions" in Iraq and elsewhere that "have not managed to resolve any problems, but made them worse."

This week, General Nikolai Solovtsov, commander of Russia's strategic missile forces, warned the U.S. against installing anti-ballistic missile (ABM) defenses in Eastern Europe. Construction is scheduled to begin on an ABM interceptor site in Poland and a radar array in the Czech Republic later this year. Both are components of a U.S.-NATO defense system to shield against a nuclear attack. In a clear-cut effort to intimidate the Czechs and the Poles to reconsider their participation, General Solovtsov suggested that Russia may abrogate the 1987 Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty and observed that “[Russia's] strategic missile forces will be capable of targeting these facilities.”

While Moscow was busy dusting off its Cold War nuclear attack plans, Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency — the United Nation's toothless “nuclear watchdog” — told the U.N. Security Council that Iran has increased production of weapons-grade uranium and decreased cooperation with the IAEA. ElBaradei told the Financial Times that Iran would be able to enrich uranium on an industrial scale within six months, having now developed the technology to do so.

The phrase “industrial scale” is diplo-speak for “sufficient to build nuclear weapons.” U.S. and British intelligence agencies believe that much of the technology being used by Iranian engineers to construct 3,000 gas centrifuges to enrich uranium is being obtained from Moscow. In response to this frightening report, Russia's ambassador to the U.N. once again threatened to veto any resolution tightening sanctions on Tehran.

For their part, the lions in Iran have clearly stated their perspective on nuclear arms. In December 2001, Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani publicly announced that a nuclear exchange “would not leave any thing in Israel but the same thing would just produce [minor] damages in the Muslim world." Last week, after rejecting an offer for multi-party talks on stopping the production of fissile nuclear material, Iran's mercurial President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad accused the U.S. of pursuing false peace initiatives while secretly plotting with Israel to "hit Islamic countries," presumably with nuclear weapons.

But Moscow and Tehran aren't just cooperating on weapons of mass destruction. Last week, U.S. and allied officials in Baghdad presented irrefutable evidence that Iran has been supplying advanced weaponry to anti-coalition forces and killing Americans — charges Mr. Ahmadinejad describes as "excuses to prolong the stay" of U.S. forces in Iraq.

On Wednesday, Iraqi terrorists downed another U.S. helicopter — the eighth in the last five weeks. A U.S. commander on the ground told me that “nearly new SA-14 and SA-16 man-portable surface-to-air missiles are now being used against us” in Iraq. Source of the weapons: Russia — sold to Iran and slipped across the porous border for delivery to Iranian supported terror cells operating inside Iraq. That's cooperation between the bear and the lion, indeed.

Meanwhile, there is no “Eagle-Eye” on this burgeoning Moscow-Tehran nexus of evil. Our mainstream media remains fixated on the never-ending Anna Nicole Smith soap opera. The State Department is furiously cranking out press releases on how Condi is going to convene yet another “Israeli-Palestinian Peace Process.” And the navel-gazers in Congress busy themselves by doing all things possible to damage the commander-in-chief — regardless of the consequences to our troops in harm's way.

Those who think none of this matters should consider the comments of Iran's “Supreme Spiritual Guide.” After meeting this week with Syrian President Bashar Assad, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — the leading “Lion” in Tehran — said that "the position of [President George W.] Bush is so weak that even members of his own party criticize him." It's time for the Eagle to pull his head out of the sand.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 04, 2007, 08:39:09 AM
§ 953. Private correspondence with foreign governments.

Any citizen of the United States, wherever he may be, who, without authority of the United States, directly or indirectly commences or carries on any correspondence or intercourse with any foreign government or any officer or agent thereof, with intent to influence the measures or conduct of any foreign government or of any officer or agent thereof, in relation to any disputes or controversies with the United States, or to defeat the measures of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.

This section shall not abridge the right of a citizen to apply himself, or his agent, to any foreign government, or the agents thereof, for redress of any injury which he may have sustained from such government or any of its agents or subjects.
18 U.S.C. § 953 (2004).




1146 GMT -- UNITED STATES, SYRIA -- U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi met with
Syrian President Bashar al Assad on April 4, despite calls against the visit
by the White House. A member of Pelosi's delegation said the speaker planned
to discuss Syria's suspected support for rebels in Iraq as well as the
country's support for Lebanon-based Hezbollah and the Palestinian movement
Hamas.


Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: G M on April 04, 2007, 01:10:43 PM
Terrorists endorse Pelosi's 'good policy of dialogue'
Militants call House speaker's visit 'brave' and hope for talks with Iran
Posted: April 4, 2007
2:14 p.m. Eastern

By Aaron Klein
© 2007 WorldNetDaily.com



U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.

JERUSALEM – House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's visit today to Syria – in which she called for dialogue with Damascus – was "brave" and "very appreciated" and could bring about "important changes" to America's foreign policy, including talks with "Middle East resistance groups," according to members of terror organizations here whose top leaders live in Syria.

One terror leader, Khaled Al-Batch, a militant and spokesman for Islamic Jihad, expressed hope Pelosi would continue winning elections, explaining the House speaker's Damascus visit demonstrated she understands the Middle East.

Pelosi's visit was opposed by President Bush, who called Syria a "state sponsor of terror."


"Nancy Pelosi understands the area (Middle East) well, more than Bush and Dr. (Condoleeza) Rice," said Al-Batch, speaking to WND from Gaza. "If the Democrats want to make negotiations with Syria, Hamas, and Hezbollah, this means the Democratic Party understands well what happens in this area and I think Pelosi will succeed. ... I hope she wins the next elections."

Islamic Jihad has carried out scores of shootings and rocket attacks, and, together with the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades terror group, has taken responsibility for every suicide bombing in Israel the past two years.

Ramadan Shallah, overall chief of Islamic Jihad, lives in Syria, as does Hamas chieftain Khaled Meshaal. Israel has accused the Syrian-based Hamas and Islamic Jihad leadership of ordering militants in the West Bank and Gaza Strip to carry out terror attacks.

Al-Batch expressed hope Pelosi and the Democratic Party will pressure Bush to create dialogue with Syria and Middle East "resistance movements" and prompt an American withdrawal from Iraq.

"Bush and Dr. Rice made so many mistakes in the Middle East. Just look at Palestinian clashes and Iraq. But I think some changes are happening for the Bush administration's foreign policy because of the hand of Nancy Pelosi. I think the Democratic Party can do things the best. ... Pelosi is going down a good road by this policy of dialogue," he said.

Abu Abdullah, a leader of Hamas' military wing in the Gaza Strip, said the willingness by some lawmakers to talk with Syria "is proof of the importance of the resistance against the U.S."

"The Americans know and understand they are losing in Iraq and the Middle East and that their only chance to survive is to reduce hostilities with Arab countries and with Islam. Islam is the new giant of the world."

"Pelosi's visit to Syria was very brave. She is a brave woman," Jihad Jaara, a senior member of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades terror group and the infamous leader of the 2002 siege of Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity, told WND. "I think it's very nice and I think it's much better when you sit face to face and talk to (Syrian President Bashar) Assad. It's a very good idea. I think she is brave and hope all the people will support her. All the American people must make peace with Syria and Iran and with Hamas. Why not?" Jaara said.

Pelosi, the most senior U.S. official to visit Syria in two years, sat next to Assad earlier today in front of camera crews before starting their meeting at his hilltop palace overlooking Damascus. The Syrian president then reportedly took Pelosi to lunch at a restaurant in a restored house in Damascus' historic district, according to witnesses.

At a press conference after the meeting, Pelosi said that during her talks with Assad she "determined that the road to Damascus is the road to peace."

"We came in friendship, hope," she said.

The House speaker also said she conveyed an Israeli message to Assad that the Jewish state was ready to resume peace talks.

"(Our) meeting with the president enabled us to communicate a message from Prime Minister (Ehud) Olmert that Israel was ready to engage in peace talks as well," Pelosi told reporters.

Syria has demanded a complete Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights, strategic mountainous territory that looks down on Israeli and Syrian population centers twice used by Syria to mount invasions into Israel.

Syria, which signed a military alliance with Iran, openly hosts Hamas and Islamic Jihad leaders. Israel says Syria has been allowing large quantities of weapons to be transported from its borders to the Lebanese-based Hezbollah militia, which last summer engaged in a war with the Jewish state. Syria has been accused of supporting the insurgency against U.S. troops in Iraq; generating unrest in Lebanon; and has been widely blamed for the 2005 assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.

Bush criticized visits by Pelosi and other lawmakers saying they sent "mixed messages" to the region and undermined U.S. policy.

"Photo opportunities and/or meetings with President Assad lead the Assad government to believe they're part of the mainstream of the international community," Bush told reporters in Washington. "In fact, they're a state sponsor of terror."

Pelosi is not the only lawmaker to recently visit Syria. A congressional delegation including three Republicans traveled to Damascus Sunday stating they believe there is an opportunity for dialogue with the Syrian leadership.

Last month, Ellen Sauerbrey, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for population, refugees and migration, held talks in Damascus in a public gesture widely seen as an expression of Washington's willingness to engage Damascus.

Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: ccp on April 05, 2007, 09:33:20 PM
***Abu Abdullah, a leader of Hamas' military wing in the Gaza Strip, said the willingness by some lawmakers to talk with Syria "is proof of the importance of the resistance against the U.S."***

This says it all.  It verifies exactly what W. says, and that is that Pelosi and the crats undermine us all.  You won't see this statement on the clinton news network!  Maybe on Fox.  But you will hear them quote W. as though he is an idiot.

I know. Our freedom of speech and diversity makes us strong.

While we talk - they build nuclear bombs.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: SB_Mig on April 06, 2007, 08:53:57 AM
Quote
It verifies exactly what W. says, and that is that Pelosi and the crats undermine us all.

I guess you missed this part of the article:

Pelosi is not the only lawmaker to recently visit Syria. A congressional delegation including three Republicans traveled to Damascus Sunday stating they believe there is an opportunity for dialogue with the Syrian leadership.

Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: ccp on April 06, 2007, 11:06:15 AM
Nice try

No I didn't miss part of the article.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: SB_Mig on April 06, 2007, 12:36:34 PM
So...the republicans were over there for tea and crumpets?

It seems to me that "...the willingness by some lawmakers to talk with Syria" would include the Republicans in the visiting delegation as well, would it not?
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: G M on April 06, 2007, 01:11:12 PM
The only Americans that should be in Syria are SpecOps/SOCOM calling in airstrikes.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: SB_Mig on April 06, 2007, 01:18:23 PM
GM -

Thank you!
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: G M on April 06, 2007, 01:31:29 PM
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=25042_Dilettante_vs._Hizballah_-_Lebanon_Paper_Rips_Pelosi&only

Pelosi hammered for her stupidity.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: G M on April 08, 2007, 06:09:45 AM
http://www.terrorismawareness.org/
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: ccp on April 08, 2007, 11:07:50 AM
SB_Mig,

It sounds like we are mostly on the same page.   You take issue with a minor point on my part and ignore the main point of my post that is that Pelosi's trip plays right into the hands of our enemies.

I think you know full well the Demorcrats lead en mass (except for a few like Lieberman) in conveying to our enemies our weaknesses.
So a few cans went there as well.  Why you harp on this beats me.  Does this make you feel superior?  Wise guy.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: G M on April 08, 2007, 07:18:42 PM
http://hotair.com/archives/2007/04/08/video-lieberman-says-pelosis-trip-to-syria-was-bad-for-america/

Lieberman is right.
Title: Contrast
Post by: ccp on April 09, 2007, 08:26:59 AM
While Iran teaches children to be warriors willing to die and go to heaven for their God our children sell their stories for a quick buck.  Remember the descriptions of Iran sending 100,000 teenage boys accross no-man's land in their war with Iraq.  The boys' mission was to clear the mine fields for the older soldiers.  Even the Iraqis were aghast at seeing this.

I do not want to disparage our brave men and women who serve for us or those of our closest ally Britain, but I feel the contrast serves to underscore what in my opinion is the misjudgement of some our leaders/pols who think they can chat their way out of this:

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/article-23391981-details/Outrage+as+Iran+captives+cash+in/article.do

I couldn't agree more with Sen Leiberman or Bolton on this issue.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: SB_Mig on April 09, 2007, 11:31:31 AM
ccp -

Uhm...

The point you made was this:

Quote
This says it all.  It verifies exactly what W. says, and that is that Pelosi and the crats undermine us all.

Let me re-phrase my response so as not to offend:

You neglected to mention the Republican lawmakers and their visit to Syria. Heck, even the President called them out on it:

Quote
Bush criticized visits by Pelosi and other lawmakers saying they sent "mixed messages" to the region and undermined U.S. policy.

I feel that anyone going over there is an idiot and if we're going to parcel out blame we should do it across both sides of the aisle. I am frankly tired of the Red/Blue, 'Crat/Repub, our side is better than your side, we (re: either party) are the good guys b***s***. It's about time that we start calling all politicians out for their failings and irresponsible behavior. Maybe then they would actually get some work done...but I'm not counting on it.

My point was, if your gonna have a beef with politicians, spread the blame.

Your only responses have been to call me a wise guy and ask me if my responses make me feel somehow superior. What's up with that?  :?

Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: DougMacG on April 09, 2007, 02:39:10 PM
My opinion is that the labels ARE helpful even when exceptions are available.  Pelosi is the highest ranking Democrat.  Can't we just all talk and get along is a philosophy from her side of the aisle - primarily.  Bush, not these few congressmen, was chosen to represent his side of the aisle to run for Pres and lead foreign policy if elected.  The Bush policy for the most part seeks to avoid adding stature to thugs like Assad and Ahmedinajad and for the most part I agree.

In hindsight(IMO), the valid correction - that a few R's were included and the fact that labels don't tell the whole story - could have been added to the discussion without blame for omission.  FWIW, I have seen CCP dish out plenty of criticisms at either side of the aisle at his own choosing.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: G M on April 09, 2007, 07:50:14 PM
The quick and dirty assessment is: The republicans are fighting a half-assed war against the global jihad while the dems (with a few exceptions) think the global jihad is just some neocon conspiracy to enrich Halliburton, and if there actually are terrorists, read enough Noam Chomsky books and they'll be mollified.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: DougMacG on April 09, 2007, 11:21:52 PM
GM, interesting comments.

 "dems (with a few exceptions) think the global jihad is just some neocon conspiracy..."

It is true that the vocal left put more energy into blaming Bush etc. than blaming the enemy for our troubles.  They also pretend that nothing was the matter in Iraq before 'we' went in and messed it up.  There was a Hillary parody on Saturday Night Live illustrating that everyone knows and accepts that all these statements and positions on Iraq and the so-called war on terror are just what is necessary to win power.  It's is doubtful that these wroters oppose her, so I take their underlying message to be that everyone understands the silly anti-war and anti-American-power rhetoric is just saying what is necessary to get nominated and elected. The same people would expect that she or others would be thoughtful and responsible leaders AFTER being elected.  In other words, getting to power is more important than fighting the enemy only because they are out of power.  If they were in power they would fight the enemy.  That theory is tested with the changeover of power in congress.  As a party, Dems have the possibility to vote for an immediate end to all funding of the hostilities they allegedly oppose.  But as they get closer to power they back off of their own rhetoric.  Through Google news I found evidence from our favorite source - world socialist web site: "

In a declaration of support for an extended and open-ended US occupation of Iraq, two leading Democratic senators (Carl Levin, Chuck Schumer) told national television audiences Sunday that under no circumstances would the Democratic congressional majority cut off funding for the war."

--

Meanwhile on the other side:  "The republicans are fighting a half-assed war against the global jihad"

My first reaction:  I think the Republican problem has been more about inability to communicate rather than lack of resolve or action.  My God, they formed a coalition and took down the Taliban almost instantly after 9/11.  They killed, captured and interragated terrorists as fast and aggressively as possible up to the point of drawing heavy criticism from all directions and are still doing it.  They largely shut down the financial networks that suported terror.  They took down Saddam Hussein including the cumbersome hurdles of securing  congressional and UN security council approvals.  We have the  Patriot Act and the surveillance program and whatever other protection and enforcement programs we don't even know about. 

Saddam was cowering in a rat hole while the Americans marched freely above.  The central, former leadership of al Qaida can't so much as use a telephone to make a call, and Iran is right now isolated from its last protectors on the security council.

Critics ask the question: WHERE is Osama hding?  I see the more telling questions: Where is Saddam now and WHY is Osama hiding???

I share your frustration, but I wouldn't characterize the efforts as half assed.  JMHO.



Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: G M on April 10, 2007, 12:02:54 AM
Doug,

Though i'd agree with the positives you cite, there are profound flaws with the way the current administration has fought this war. Here are a few:

1. In the early days post 9/11 we were scared and we were pissed. No one knew just how dangerous we were but they didn't want to find out. "With us or with the terrorists" was a doctrine with teeth. Pakistan did initially help us because they feared we'd go to war with them as well. Iran couldn't be quieter, Syria was docile and superficially helpful. Less than 6 years and now partisan politics trumps nat'l survival and Iran and Syria feel free to create the "Next Vietnam" the dems are aching for.

2. To quote a friend from DHS "9/12/2001, the borders should have been closed tighter than turtle pussy". When Beslan comes to America's shores (It's when, not if) and any of the terrorists are found to have entered from Canada or Mexico, Bush will bear the blame as his legacy forever.

3. 9/11/2001 was the cue that the nat'l security infastructure wasn't geared to fighting this new war. Sadly the CIA/NSA/NRO/DIA and others is still ready to play spy vs. spy with the Soviets. There should have been a wave of firings/retirements throughout the nat'l security entities. Instead, we have political correctness undercutting any serious attempt at counterterrorist initiatives.

4. There should have been a national mobilization akin to WWII. The US military should be much bigger and better armed and the nation should be at war, not just the Army and Marines.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: DougMacG on April 10, 2007, 10:00:02 AM
GM, Thanks for that. I was hoping to draw out why you felt that way and I likewise agree with your points.  I see most of the failures coming from the cumbersome nature of this huge democracy with our limits on power and multiple viewpoints trying to exert itself.  The electorate can't fully support the mission when the leaders are sloppy and inconsistent in explaining it.  Authorization of congress for the Iraq war would not have passed with bipartisan support without the promise to take it to the security council.  The approval of the security council would not have happened without framing the justification in terms of WMD and violations of the UN's previous resolutions.  The Iraq mission would not have bogged down so badly had we not given Saddam months and months and months to clean up weapons sites and prepare for an insurgency that would outlive him andif the enemy didn't know that support erodes with every American they kill.  The Syrians and Iranians cannot seriously feel militarily threatened by America when they see the quagmire in Iraq, the disapproval polls, and the anti-war momentum broadcasted continuously.  In the face of all that I guess I have even more admiration for the resolve of the leaders of this effort, though again, not their ability to communicate.  I think the above explains why Pakistan, Syria and Iran no longer feel heat from the promise that "either you are with us or you are against us".

I agree whole heatedly with your point about borders. National security is the reason IMO to support borders enforcement as tight as you so graphically describe. lol.  I am pro-free-trade, pro-legal-immigration and pro-guest-worker etc, but only in the context that America chooses and controls the numbers and needs that we fill with approvals for legal entry.  How can we possibly invest so much in security - hundreds of billions or trillions(?) of dollars, lose our right to walk from the ticket counter onto an airplane etc, and then have no idea who, why, where from, or how many people are entering our country???  Up here (MN) we joke about those pesky Canadians procuring our medical services and infiltrating our hockey games.  Other places they may complain about Mexicans.  But when we allow an illegal industry to flourish to the point of becoming organized crime, how can we not think we are also welcoming the next wave of terrorists?

Border politics, they say, is tricky.  You can't risk offending today's Hispanic-Americans or future voters who my be legalized along the way.  To me, an Hispanic American citizen is one of us,  not a minority.  I find it condescending to think people of certain origin cannot see a connection between border control and national security.  (Comments welcome)




Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 10, 2007, 12:23:58 PM
I'll put aside commenting on border/Mexican immigration issues to focus this post on what I feel have been some of the great failings of the Bush-Rumbo leadership:

1) I'll accept that they were clueless about what they would find, but the response time to the insurgency was grossly negligent.  As Richard Barnett points out, we need to have a qualified team for coming on the field after we are done killing people and breaking things.   Instead we kind of wandered in circles clueslessly for 18-24 months.

2) The failure to control/close the border with Syria, with Iran, with Saudi Arabia:  This is a military mission, and one that we could have and should have accomplished.  The reason we didn't was too few troops and the reason that we did not adjust to this reality is Rumbo and his theories of small, high tech and fast moving military. He's right as far as he goes, but did not and does not see that boots on the ground are essential for this mission.

3)  The boots on the ground thing goes to a terrible failure on the President's part to speak up in 2003 and 2004 to increase the size of the military and the commitment.  Even Senator Kerry called for 40,000 more troops for the military in the 2004 campaign.  Bush could have done so and asked for even more with zero political cost but he did not.  Instead he and Rumbo thrashed our troops hard.  Now that the Dhimmicrats have won Congress he fires Rumbo (instead of during the summer when it could have done some good for the elections) and now he seeks to increase the size of the military by 90,000 when it is much, much harder to inspire people to take this courageous step-- especially with a broad lack of confidence in the competence of leadership.

4) In the Geopolitical Matters thread RickN made an extremely cogent post. 
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: SB_Mig on April 10, 2007, 01:27:13 PM
Crafty,

Excellent points. Two questions I would pose:

1) Seeing as we are heading into a political quagmire here in the States (Dems controlling votes, but completely inefficient at governing and Repubs too concerned about saving face/the Presidential election to think about much else), are there any viable political options for the situation in Iraq the Middle East at this point?

2) Is there a solution besides turning that part of the world into a glass factory or complete withdrawal of US forces with which the American public would be satisfied? And if so, who would be able to push that solution forward?

I ask the questions here, but will be happy to move them if necessary.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 10, 2007, 03:25:48 PM
Woof SB:

Good questions.  Please post them on WW3, War in the Mid-east, Geopolitical Matters or some analogous thread.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 19, 2007, 10:13:43 PM
 
As to Prison Planet, Jones is a complete wacko. Just read his topics, everything is a conspiracy. 9-11 was caused by the government and explosives planted. The planes were remote controlled. FDR provoked Pearl Harbor. If this is your source for news.............
 
Now, to address some other things, I allow Bill Whittle of http://www.ejectejecteject.com/ to take over by excerpts:
 
I think the entire nation owes a deep and profound debt of gratitude to the editors of Popular Mechanics magazine. Their debunking of the 9/11 conspiracy was not only first-rate journalism. It was an act of vital national importance. It was heroic.

But Popular Mechanics?! That sort of article should have been front page, above the fold in The New York Times, The LA Times, Washington Post, and all of the other 'media watchdogs' that are -- or so I am assured -- determined to safeguard the republic by presenting the truth.

There are only two small mites I might add to that monumental work.

This whole ball of earwax got started when a French author (by way of gratitude, I presume, for the hundreds of thousands of Americans killed defending his country from a tyranny they themselves were unwilling to fight) claimed that the hole in the Pentagon was far too small to have been caused by a jet. It must have been a missile!

All of these 9/11 conspiracy sites have museum-grade idiots stating what 'obviously' happens at velocities and temperatures that they are flat-out incapable of understanding. Not only are these people too stupid to understand the physics involved with what they are bloviating about -- they are too stupid to realize that they are too stupid.

An airplane is a hollow, extremely light-weight tube of aluminum, cunningly designed to lift not one ounce more than is necessary for safe flight in rough weather. An airplane is as fragile as a hollow-boned bird, and for the same reasons. The Pentagon, on the other hand, is a fortress, and as a matter of one of the very few pieces of good luck on that awful day, the side hit by American Flight 77 happened to be the only one of the five sides that had been recently reinforced to withstand a truck bomb attack.

Now if you have ever seen a bird fly into a window pane, you may realize that it does not leave a nice bird-shaped hole in the window. That is because in each historical conflict between the ground and an airplane, the ground has won every time.

Here's something to prove the point far better than any words could ever do. It is a video of an F-4 Phantom being launched into a reinforced wall at over 500 mph. The Phantom is a big airplane -- not as big as a jetliner, certainly, but far sturdier in construction. When you watch this video, you will see that massive-looking fighter jet simply vaporize into a plume of aluminum dust. Nothing comes through the other side. It. Just. Disappears.

My other small contribution -- which may be widely stated, although I have not seen it -- is to grant this revolting premise for a moment and envision the consequences.

The 9/11 Truthers claim that the twin towers were brought down by controlled demolition. Okay.

Have you ever seen a controlled demolition? Shows like this are all over The Discovery Channel. Do these people realize how all of the insulation and paneling must be stripped away from the support beams? Do they not understand how these beams must be cut open and the explosives placed with great care? Have they not any idea of the amount of time this takes -- months -- and the forest of wires that runs through the structure to the detonating mechanism? Have they given no thought -- none? -- to what an enormous job this is, and how much work goes into getting these explosives exactly where they need to be?

Apparently not. They just figure someone leaves a suitcase somewhere, I guess.

Anyone who has ever -- ever -- seen what is required to bring down a building of that size knows that the site is a disaster area of det cord, pulled paneling, and huge bundles of explosives taped to the structural columns across many floors. Has no one considered that this all had to be started after everyone went home on Monday night and before people reported for work the next day? On multiple floors of two of the busiest public spaces in the world?

No one noticed this on Tuesday morning? Hey Jim, what do you suppose that huge bundle of plastic explosives is doing there where the water cooler used to be? And where do those wires go? Well, must be some logical explanation. Let's get some coffee and bagels.

Now you're talking!

Of all the people in those buildings that morning, no one -- no one -- saw any wires anywhere? No one asked why the drywall was torn down and replaced with grey stuff duct-taped into place? None of the firemen rushing into those burning towers, checking all those floors for survivors -- none of them noticed the building was rigged to explode? That it might possibly be worth a small call on the radio?

My father was interred at Arlington National Cemetery in 2002. I will never forget that day. It changed my life, and it was the event that started me writing here at Eject! Eject! Eject!

The man who coordinated that service was on a hill about a half-mile from that side of the Pentagon on the morning of September 11th, 2001. He told me that they had been informed that something was going on in New York that morning. Then he heard something that he said he thought was a missile attack -- a roar so loud and so far beyond a normal jet sound that he looked up at that exact moment expecting to die.

What he saw emerge from the trees overhead, perhaps a hundred feet above him, was American Airlines Flight 77 as it went by in a silver blur, engines screaming in a power dive as it hit the near side of the Pentagon. He told me -- to my face -- that body parts had rained down all over that sacred field. Just like red hail on a summer day. Those body parts are buried in a special place at the base of that hill.

Now. If Rosie O'Donnell and the rest of that Lunatic Brigade is right and I am wrong, then that man -- that insignificant Army chaplain and his Honor Guard of forty men -- are all liars. He is lying to me for Halliburton and Big Oil. That Chaplain -- and all of those decent, patriotic young men in the Honor Guard, and all the commuters on the roads who saw an American Airlines jet instead of a missile -- all of those people are liars and accessories to murder. And all of the firefighters who went into buildings rigged to explode were pre-recruited suicide martyrs dying for George W. Bush's plans for world conquest. Remember: NOTHING that happened on September 11th needed any more explanation than what was obvious from the second impact... namely, that Islamic terrorists hijacked four American aircraft and flew three of them into their targets. To try to convince people of missile attacks and rigged explosives and mystery jets is nothing more than an intentional assault on reason and common sense, one that damns the innocent and protects those mass murderers with our blood on their hands.

It's an obscenity. It's a filthy, God-damned, criminal obscenity. Nothing less.

Coexist!

You’ve probably seen this word spelled out with various religious symbols.

Who can argue with this? Not me, certainly.

What I CAN argue with is the idea that if only enough stupid, warlike Americans would just get on the Coexist train, then the world would be a happy and peaceful garden. Who else are the people with these bumper stickers preaching to, if not their ill-informed, knuckle-dragging neocon fellow commuters?

Unfortunately, here’s where reality inserts its ugly head. There is no more multi-cultural society on earth than the United States. The United States owns the patent on Coexisting religions and ethnicities. Drive half a mile though any major US urban area and you will see more ancient ethnic enemies living cheek by jowl in harmony than any other spot on the planet. Thursday morning water cooler conversations about Dancing with the Stars wallpaper over more ancient ethnic and religious murders than history has been able to record, and this despite Hollywood and the news media’s deepest efforts to remind you on a daily basis that the black or Hispanic or Asian or white friend in the next cube is secretly seething with racial hatred just beneath that placid veneer.

Americans are able to coexist because they have subjugated, if not abandoned, those ancient religious and ethnic hatreds to join a larger family, that larger family being America. And this is why, if you truly value the idea of coexistence, you should be dead set against multi-cultural grievance and identity politics, which do nothing but pit one ethnic group against the others and reinforce, rather than dilute, ancient resentments and grievances.

Now as it turns out, there is one member of the human family that seems to be having a little difficulty with the whole coexist thing. Muslims are at war with Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan, they are fighting Animists in Africa, Hindus in Kashmir, Buddhists in Southeast Asia…they are blowing up nightclubs and schools and police stations and trains and buses and skyscrapers and are under daily orders to kill Jews on sight anywhere in the world.

I don’t mind preaching so much as preaching to the choir. When I see Coexist bumper stickers in Islamabad and Cairo and especially Riyadh to the degree I see them in Venice, California, I will be a happy man. They will make a very welcome sight covering over the Death to the Infidel! stickers that seem to be somewhat outselling Coexist messages in that part of the world. Until then I think we should coexist and carry a big stick.

End U.S. Imperialism Now!

Can I just take another quick second of your precious time to put this one to bed once and for all?

It is a staple of the left to accuse the US of “Imperialism.” That so many people can level such a charge with a straight face is a testament to the efficacy of forty years of standards-free education reform here and around the world.

An “Empire” is defined as a nation state that has political control over other nation states, and uses that political control to extract the wealth and resources from the subjugated country.

The United States of America does not have any political control over any other sovereign nation on the face of the Earth. We have influence, but influence is to control as a rich uncle is to a prison warden. That’s all you need to know. The entire idea of American Empire and U.S. Imperialism is dead on its face after that. No control means no empire. Period.

But we do have a large footprint in the rest of the world, and have military bases all across the globe. Is that a form of empire?

Look, the whole point of having an empire is to take the wealth out of the colonies and return them to enrich the home country. The US not only does not pull in the resources of other nations…it does exactly the reverse. We pump billions and billions of dollars annually into those nations that host our facilities, and the minute any one of those nations decides we are no longer welcome, we pack our bags, leave and turn those billion-dollar institutions over to the host country. (Look up Subic Bay and Clark Air Base in the Philippines for some recent examples)

This is not “imperial behavior.” It is, in fact, the precise opposite of imperial behavior. I guess somehow STOP U.S. ANTI-IMPERIALISM just doesn’t have the same snap somehow for the North Korean-backed International A.N.S.W.E.R. crowd. Color me shocked.

There are millions of people – actually, probably billions now – who genuinely believe that the wealth of the US was stolen from third world countries. This is one of the great perks of living a life free of the ability to think critically and do a little research. I have heard this slander repeated so many times I decided to look into some actual numbers to see if there is anything to this charge. This is a perfect example of how critical thinking allows you to see the unseen. That attitude, Google and ten minutes is all you need to shoot lies like this down in flames.

Okay. The US Per capita income is $41,300. That of a poor, third world country –Djibouti, say -- is $2,070.

Now it gets interesting. The US gross domestic product – the value of everything we produce in a year -- was last measured as $12 trillion, 277 billion dollars (hundreds of millions of dollars being too insignificant to count in this economy).

The GDP of Djibouti is 1 billion, 641 million US dollars.

A little basic arithmetic shows me that the US has a GDP 7,481 times greater than Djibouti. A 365 day year, composed of 24 hours in a day, yields 8,760 hours per year. Hang on to that for a sec.

Now, let’s suppose the U.S. went into Djibouti with the Marines, and stole every single thing that’s produced there in a year…just grant the premise and say we stole every goddam thing they make. If we hauled away all of Djibouti’s annual wealth, how long would it run the U.S. Economy, which is 7,481 times greater?

Well, 8,760 hours divided by 7,481 gives you an answer of 1.17 hours. In other words, it takes the U.S. 1.17 hours to produce what Djibouti produces in a year.

If the US really did go in and steal everything that the bottom thirty countries in the world produce, it might power the US economy for two or three days.

Conversely, the billions and billions of dollars the US spends annually in aid, rent, etc. – plus uncounted billions more from private American charities – would supply the entire GDP of Djibouti for hundreds of years.

Where’s your Imperialism argument now?

War is not the Answer

Okay. I’m listening. What is the answer?

No, you don’t get to say I don’t know but I know it's not war! If you admit you don’t know what the answer is, then it logically follows that you are in no position to say what it is not.

With regards to Iraq, Saddam started a suicidal war with Iran, and then with the United States. He then proceeded to break every single element of his cease-fire agreement…shooting at allied airplanes trying to belatedly enforce no-fly zones to prevent him from massacring even more of his own people, continuing with a well-documented and undeniable effort to obtain nuclear weapons, and all the rest.

So what is the answer, Mr. Moral Superiority? Sanctions? We sanctioned him for 13 years. He bribed the UN and stole billions of dollars for new palaces and industrial shredders for the opposition. Should we just leave him alone? The New York Times reported a few days ago that Saddam was a year or two away from a nuclear weapon. Do you trust the man’s judgment after Iran and Kuwait? I don’t.

War is an ugly, messy, filthy business, and the greatest slander I have seen in these last three years is the idea that somehow the pro-war crowd thinks war is a great thing. War is an awful thing. And yet I am pro war in this case. How can that be?

This is probably the most useful thing I’ll write in this essay:

Doves think the choice is between fighting or not fighting. Hawks think the choice is between fighting now or fighting later.

If you understand this, you understand everything that follows. You don’t need to think the other side is insane, or evil. Both hawks and doves are convinced they are doing the right thing. But it seems to me there is a choice between peace at any price and a peace worth having.

We cannot undo the invasion and compare that timeline to the one we have. The only data we can use to compare these philosophies is embedded in the pages of history. What does history show?

I cannot think of a single example where appeasement – giving in to an aggressive adversary in the hope that it will convince them to become peaceful themselves – has provided any lasting peace or security. I can say in complete honesty that I look forward to hearing of any historical example that shows it does.

What I do see are barbarian forces closing in and sacking Rome because the Romans no longer had the will to defend themselves. Payments of tribute to the barbarian hordes only funded the creation of larger and better-armed hordes. The depredations of Viking Raiders throughout Northern Europe produced much in the way of ransom payments. The more ransom that was paid, the more aggressive and warlike the Vikings became. Why? Because it was working, that’s why. And why not? Bluster costs nothing. If you can scare a person into giving you his hard-earned wealth, and suffer no loss in return, well then you my friend have hit the Vandal Jackpot. On the other hand, if you are, say, the Barbary Pirates, raiding and looting and having a grand time of it all, and across the world sits a Jefferson – you know, Mr. Liberty and Restraint – who has decided he has had enough and sends out an actual Navy to track these bastards down and sink them all… well, suddenly raiding and piracy is not such a lucrative occupation. So, contrary to doomsayers throughout history, the destruction of the Barbary Pirates did not result in the recruitment of more Pirates. The destruction of the Barbary Pirates resulted in the destruction of the Barbary Pirates.

And it is just so with terrorism. When the results of terrorism do the terrorist more harm than good, terrorism will go away. We need to harm these terrorists, not reward them, if we ever expect to see the end of them.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 05, 2007, 06:20:49 AM
TWO WARS - AND NO LEADERSHIP
TERROR'S TWO FACES & OUR FAILURES
 July 3, 2007 -- WE'RE not fighting a single war against terrorists. We're stuck in two. The past few days saw both conflicts hit the headlines. And we're still not serious about either one.
One war in this global struggle involves Sunni-Arab fanatics, exemplified by al Qaeda, who believe not only that the atrocities they commit will revive the caliphate - a romanticized religious empire - but that their merciless brand of Islam is destined to rule the world.

Our other fight is with Shia extremists, such as the god-gangsters wrecking Iran, Muqtada al-Sadr's thugs and Hezbollah. Their goals are regional (for now): They want to master the heart of the Middle East and gain hegemony over the world's oil supply.

In London, then in Glasgow, we saw attempts (blessedly incompetent ones - thanks, Allah!) to generate mass civilian casualties, challenge Britain's new government and strengthen the U.K.'s appeasement faction. The terrorists involved weren't the "wretched of the earth" beloved in left-wing mythology, but included at least two doctors, as well as other middle-class immigrants.

Behind all the jihadi nonsense, this was a revenge plot by madmen for imagined wrongs. Like all religious fanatics, the would-be murderers (burn, baby, burn) weren't really serving any god, but acting out their struggle with personal demons. It was classic Sunni terrorism - 9/11 re-invented by the Three Stooges.

In the Shia terror war, a U.S. military spokesman in Iraq yesterday finally admitted the serious role that Iran and its clients play in the bombing, kidnapping and cold-blooded murder of our troops. Back in March, our forces busted Ali Mussa Daqduq - a Hezbollah bomb, ambush and abduction expert - in Basra. He wasn't on vacation.

Media speculation holds that Iran, which funds and equips Hezbollah, called in some chips and forced Daqduq to take a leave of absence from Lebanon to help Tehran's al Quds commandos train Iraqi Shias to kill Americans more efficiently.

What's wrong is the notion that Daqduq was press-ganged. Shia terror also crosses borders, if still only regionally. The terrorists are "cross-leveling" expertise with enthusiasm, not reluctance.

Within both the Sunni and the Shia terror co-ops, we're seeing a level of collaboration that's utterly missing in the West. And the Iran-backed rise of Sunni Hamas makes it look as if they're increasingly willing to work across sectarian lines, if it helps them defeat Israel, the West and moderate Arab governments.

They'll get back to killing each other in good time. But right now they want to kill us. Meanwhile, we want to persuade them that we're nice guys.

The most effective action we ever launched against Sunni terror was the destruction of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. We took away the terrorists' safe-haven state, still the greatest loss suffered by Qaeda and Sunni fanaticism. Even if no Democratic presidential aspirant will admit it, al Qaeda has never recaptured the authority it lost.

Shia extremists have a safe-haven state, too: Iran. But the Bush administration ran out of steam when Iraq didn't turn into Iowa. Aware that Tehran's commandos were active in Iraq, supplying weapons, training and direct supervision of attacks that targeted Americans, we did nothing. An Iranian diplomatic passport turned out to be a better form of body armor than anything our troops wear.

Patience isn't a virtue when a hostile government's killing your soldiers. Our timidity only encouraged Iran, which has paid no serious penalties. Tehran has been given free rein not only in Iraq, but also in Lebanon and Gaza.

An invasion of Iran isn't the answer. But selective strikes against the infrastructure of the Revolutionary Guards (and the Quds Force in particular), as well as against Tehran's security services, are the minimum needed to get the regime's attention. Our Air Force's combat capabilities are distinctly under-utilized: It's time for 30 seconds over Tehran. Let's see if those F-22s really work.

Sanctions? Diplomacy? Tell it to the troops in Walter Reed. Or in Arlington.

Oh, I wish we could just buy every terrorist a pint of Ben & Jerry's and make him feel all mushy about surfer-girls in bikinis. But it ain't going to happen. If you want to win any war, you have to kill the enemy until he gives up trying to kill you. Instead, our response to terror is the equivalent of a lawsuit.

If military action isn't a perfect answer, appeasement is never the answer. Give in to terrorists' demands, and you'll only get more demands. Britain is paying for its reluctance to crack down hard on extremist mosques and hate speech - even though most British Muslims would be glad to be rid of the fanatics. Fair play doesn't work if the other side refuses to play fair.

Here at home, we face maddening calls to extend to captured terrorists the legal rights enjoyed by American citizens. Stop and think about that - really think about it. We're bleeding in multiple wars, and we want to send in the lawyers?

Perhaps the biggest lie told since 9/11 is that we must wage war according to our values. If we'd tried that in World War II, we'd still be fighting in the Philippines and struggling to reach the Rhine. In war, the point is to win. Nothing else matters. And you don't get credit for manners.

Our global position isn't eroding because we're stuck in Iraq or because Europeans are mad at us (they're always mad at us). We're losing ground because our leaders, Democrat and Republican, still don't believe we're at war. They live in perfect safety and don't really care if you or your children die, as long as you vote for them.

If roadside bombs were going off on Capitol Hill, we'd punish Iran ferociously and stop treating captured terrorists like white-collar crooks. But as long as the IEDs only kill and cripple our soldiers and Marines, neither political party gives a damn.

Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: ccp on July 07, 2007, 07:00:13 AM
I gotta love a lotta the lines like these:

***Behind all the jihadi nonsense,***

***They'll get back to killing each other in good time. But right now they want to kill us. Meanwhile, we want to persuade them that we're nice guys.***

***But the Bush administration ran out of steam when Iraq didn't turn into Iowa***.

***Oh, I wish we could just buy every terrorist a pint of Ben & Jerry's and make him feel all mushy about surfer-girls in bikinis. Instead, our response to terror is the equivalent of a lawsuit.***

***Here at home, we face maddening calls to extend to captured terrorists the legal rights enjoyed by American citizens. Stop and think about that - really think about it. We're bleeding in multiple wars, and we want to send in the lawyers?***

Are all the crat candidates laywers?  Hillary who says it's a scandal that Bush commuted Libby's sentence for perjury yet, herself is a worldclass psychopathic liar.  Bill who will give us 'his' definition of terrorism before sending his 'army' of NYC/DC liberal lawyers (many of whom I am quite sorry to say are my fellow Jews who you would think would know better when fighting Jihadists).   Edwards who will lead a class action personal injury suit against the radical Muslims.  Obama who thinks we can settle our lawsuit agianst Osama by just leaving the "politics of personal destruction" outside the courtroom of the world.
Kusinich who thinks we just need to make Willie Nelson Secretary of State and send him to Tehran to sing "ON the Road Again".

Joe Lieberman, Cheney, Bush and the temporary Ambassador to the UN (I am going blank on his name for the moment) who seem to view it the way portrayed in this article.

I agree with them.  If the MM is to be believed then I am in the minority.




Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: SB_Mig on July 07, 2007, 11:13:28 AM
Quote
Are all the crat candidates laywers?

How about the Republican contenders?

Republican nominees who have practiced law:

Fred Thompson
Rudy Giuliani
Sam Brownback
Duncan Hunter
Jim Gilmore

...and don't forget Joe Lieberman.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: ccp on July 07, 2007, 12:44:06 PM
More on my favorite gal who deserves a good verbal spankin'.  Thanks to Dick Morris who is ready willing and able to express better than me my own thoughts on the matter:

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/DickMorrisandEileenMcGann/2007/07/06/do_the_clintons_now_support_jail_time_for_perjurers

The problem with treating the terrorists like criminals worthy of a police crackdown (like the luny right wing fringe with ex front man Timothy Mcveigh) is the terrorists are being sponsored by governments: like Iran, no. Korea, China, and others.

Except for Lieberman we will not see anything else from the Democratic side.  Not that I am anamored by all the cans either.  For me its Newt, then Romney, then either McCain or Guliani.  At this point I don't see what is impressive about Thompson except the antiabortionists needed him for their sole cause.

On the left *maybe* I could live with Richardson just because he is well spoken, talented, smart and seems more or less a straight arrow.  I admit I don't know a lot of his views yet though.

As for attorneys I much prefer former prosecutors like Guliani rather than tort or defense laywers (who are not about *our* defense).
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Howling Dog on July 08, 2007, 04:01:12 PM
Woof, I think this definitely falls under the category of "Political Rant" :-P
I think Cindy Sheehan needs a psych eval. :roll:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070708/ap_on_el_ho/cindy_sheehan_pelosi
                                                                       TG
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 09, 2007, 08:24:45 AM
editorial in The New York Observer, often called the paper of the liberal elite, described Mr. Clinton as ‘an untrustworthy lowlife who used people for his own purposes and then discarded them. How could they have been fooled so badly?’...[M]illions of Americans, including political hacks, media toadies, and grass-roots dupes, were unflinchingly loyal to Clinton throughout a scandal-drenched eight years, during which it was credibly charged or proven that he: seduced a 21-year-old White House intern, groped a visitor in the Oval Office, paid his way out of a pants-dropping charge, was credibly accused of rape, organized a White House hit team to assassinate the reputation of his accusers; took money from Chinese communist donors; entertained known criminals, drug dealers and arms smugglers at private White House gatherings; hid subpoenaed documents in the living quarters of the White House; rented out the Lincoln bedroom; sold seats on Air Force One; violated the War Powers Act; bombed an aspirin factory in Sudan; never uttered a word of regret for the 19 innocent babies and children who were burned to death at Waco; used the IRS and the FBI to attack political enemies; used taxpayer-paid lawyers and aides to defend himself against charges of sexual misconduct; lied under oath; lied when not under oath; shredded documents; suborned perjury; tampered with witnesses and obstructed justice... I remain hopeful that in time, the legacy of the Clinton presidency will be that its classic wretchedness awakened the American people from a soul-numbing, moral stupor.” —Linda Bowles
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: G M on July 14, 2007, 07:02:24 PM
http://newsbusters.org/node/14095

Don't question the left's patriotism though....
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: SB_Mig on July 17, 2007, 11:36:44 AM
I found this article a little on the weird side, especially coming from someone who considers themselves a "true conservative"...

Or Face the End of Constitutional Democracy
Impeach Now

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

Unless Congress immediately impeaches Bush and Cheney, a year from now the US could be a dictatorial police state at war with Iran.

Bush has put in place all the necessary measures for dictatorship in the form of "executive orders" that are triggered whenever Bush declares a national emergency. Recent statements by Homeland Security Chief Michael Chertoff, former Republican senator Rick Santorum and others suggest that Americans might expect a series of staged, or false flag, "terrorist" events in the near future.

Many attentive people believe that the reason the Bush administration will not bow to expert advice and public opinion and begin withdrawing US troops from Iraq is that the administration intends to rescue its unpopular position with false flag operations that can be used to expand the war to Iran.

Too much is going wrong for the Bush administration: the failure of its Middle East wars, Republican senators jumping ship, Turkish troops massed on northern Iraq's border poised for an invasion to deal with Kurds, and a majority of Americans favoring the impeachment of Cheney and a near-majority favoring Bush's impeachment. The Bush administration desperately needs dramatic events to scare the American people and the Congress back in line with the militarist-police state that Bush and Cheney have fostered.

William Norman Grigg recently wrote that the GOP is "praying for a terrorist strike" to save the party from electoral wipeout in 2008.
Chertoff, Cheney, the neocon nazis, and Mossad would have no qualms about saving the bacon for the Republicans, who have enabled Bush to start two unjustified wars, with Iran waiting in the wings to be attacked in a third war.

The Bush administration has tried unsuccessfully to resurrect the terrorist fear factor by infiltrating some blowhard groups and encouraging them to talk about staging "terrorist" events. The talk, encouraged by federal agents, resulted in "terrorist" arrests hyped by the media, but even the captive media was unable to scare people with such transparent sting operations.

If the Bush administration wants to continue its wars in the Middle East and to entrench the "unitary executive" at home, it will have to conduct some false flag operations that will both frighten and anger the American people and make them accept Bush's declaration of "national emergency" and the return of the draft. Alternatively, the administration could simply allow any real terrorist plot to proceed without hindrance.

A series of staged or permitted attacks would be spun by the captive media as a vindication of the neoconsevatives' Islamophobic policy, the intention of which is to destroy all Middle Eastern governments that are not American puppet states. Success would give the US control over oil, but the main purpose is to eliminate any resistance to Israel's complete absorption of Palestine into Greater Israel.

Think about it. If another 9/11-type "security failure" were not in the works, why would Homeland Security czar Chertoff go to the trouble of convincing the Chicago Tribune that Americans have become complacent about terrorist threats and that he has "a gut feeling" that America will soon be hit hard?

Why would Republican warmonger Rick Santorum say on the Hugh Hewitt radio show that "between now and November, a lot of things are going to happen, and I believe that by this time next year, the American public's (sic) going to have a very different view of this war."

Throughout its existence the US government has staged incidents that the government then used in behalf of purposes that it could not otherwise have pursued. According to a number of writers, false flag operations have been routinely used by the Israeli state. During the Czarist era in Russia, the secret police would set off bombs in order to arrest those the secret police regarded as troublesome. Hitler was a dramatic orchestrator of false flag operations. False flag operations are a commonplace tool of governments.

Ask yourself: Would a government that has lied us into two wars and is working to lie us into an attack on Iran shrink from staging "terrorist" attacks in order to remove opposition to its agenda?

Only a diehard minority believes in the honesty and integrity of the Bush-Cheney administration and in the truthfulness of the corporate media.

Hitler, who never achieved majority support in a German election, used the Reichstag fire to fan hysteria and push through the Enabling Act, which made him dictator. Determined tyrants never require majority support in order to overthrow constitutional orders.

The American constitutional system is near to being overthrown. Are coming "terrorist" events of which Chertoff warns and Santorum promises the means for overthrowing our constitutional democracy?

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: DougMacG on July 17, 2007, 12:00:21 PM
I don't know what happened to Paul Craig Roberts but I liked him better before.  He enjoys the by-line of working for Reagan and the WSJ in the past but didn't get those jobs by advancing the types of views he writes now for anti-war.com and for 911 conspiracy sites.  His impeach-now view would make sense if he backed up his Bush staged the terrorism claim with a shred of evidence. No matter what actions Bush does or does not take with Iran, we aren't going to be in a "dictatorial police state" next year.  The '08 elections will be held on schedule, and it was misguided Jihadists, not an American conspiracy, who brought down the towers. JMHO.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: SB_Mig on July 17, 2007, 12:29:00 PM
Yeah, it kind of tripped me out to see how far over the edge he's leaning (if he hasn't already gone over it).
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 17, 2007, 12:40:55 PM
"A series of staged or permitted attacks would be spun by the captive media as a vindication of the neoconsevatives' Islamophobic policy, the intention of which is to destroy all Middle Eastern governments that are not American puppet states. Success would give the US control over oil, but the main purpose is to eliminate any resistance to Israel's complete absorption of Palestine into Greater Israel."

WTF?!?

SB Mig, do you have a URL for this piece?

Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: SB_Mig on July 17, 2007, 01:31:04 PM
Passed on via email:

http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts07162007.html

I'm putting this up there with one of the more bizarre articles I've read this year.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 19, 2007, 07:54:00 AM
WSJ:

'Slow-Motion Tantrum'
A ruling so silly, the dissenting judge didn't even bother read it.

BY DENNIS G. JACOBS
Thursday, July 19, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT

(Editor's note: Dennis Jacobs is chief judge of the Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. This is his opinion, concurring in part and dissenting in part, in Husain v. Springer, which the court decided last Friday. The entire opinion is available here.)

I concur in the majority's result insofar as it affirms the dismissal of some claims, but I dissent insofar as it reverses the grant of qualified immunity.


I concede that this short opinion of mine does not consider or take into account the majority opinion. So I should disclose at the outset that I have not read it. I suppose this is unusual, so I explain why.





The majority has fulfilled its responsibility to explain at some length its vacatur of a part of the district court's judgment. But this is not a case that should occupy the mind of a person who has anything consequential to do. In a nutshell, the editors of the College Voice student newspaper used it as a campaign flyer to promote the self-styled radicals of the "Student Union" party in a long-ago student election, and the college president, finding that the partisan use of student-activity funds made a mockery of the election rules, directed that the election be re-run. The gist of the complaint is that the editors' speech was chilled, which is deemed to be a bad thing.
This is a case about nothing. Injunctive relief from the school's election rules is now moot (if it was ever viable); and plaintiffs' counsel conceded at oral argument that the only relief sought in this litigation is nominal damages. Now, after years of litigation over two dollars, the majority will impose on a busy judge to conduct a trial on this silly thing, and require a panel of jurors to set aside their more important duties of family and business in order to decide it. See Amato v. City of Saratoga Springs, 170 F.3d 311, 322-23 (2d Cir. 1999) (Jacobs, J., concurring) (noting that a trial over one dollar is a "wasteful imposition on the trial judge and on the taxpayers and veniremen").

With due respect to my colleagues in the majority, and to whatever compulsion they feel to expend substantial energies on this case, I fear that the majority opinion (44 pages of typescript) will only feed the plaintiffs' fantasy of oppression: that plutocrats are trying to stifle an upsurge of Pol-Potism on Staten Island. Contrary to the impression created by the majority's lengthy formal opinion, this case is not a cause célèbre; it is a slow-motion tantrum by children spending their graduate years trying to humiliate the school that conferred on them a costly education from which they evidently derived small benefit. A selection from the illiterate piffle in the disputed issue of the College Voice is set out in the margin for the reader's fun.1





On the merits, I would affirm for the reasons given in Judge Gershon's careful and thorough opinion (which I have read).
President Springer's decision to re-run the election was (to apply the governing standard) not unreasonable in light of clearly established law. The school adopted election rules intended to level the playing field and limit the use of student-activities funds for election-related purposes. President Springer's decision was based on her view that the May 1997 issue of the College Voice was "a thinly veiled student activity fee funded piece of campaign literature for the Student Union slate." The majority remands for a trial on whether the college president acted on an impermissible belief that a school newspaper funded by (compelled) student-activities fees should be balanced.

I think that the First Amendment protects the freedom of the press and that this protection should be strongest when a newspaper prints election-related content at election time. But this area of the law is (unfortunately) far from clear.

In 2003, six years after the student-government election at issue, the Supreme Court upheld numerous limitations on speech during election time--in an opinion that could open the way to direct regulation of a newspaper if its election coverage becomes too "slanted" or "biased." See McConnell v. Fed. Election Comm'n, 540 U.S. 93, 283-86 (2003) (Thomas, J., concurring in part and dissenting in part). In 2004, this Court upheld a state election law that provided for the regulation of news stories about candidates based on the discretionary rulings of the law's administrators. See Landell v. Sorrell, 382 F.3d 91, 181-82 (2d Cir. 2004) (Winter, J., dissenting), rev'd sub nom. Randall v. Sorrell, 126 S. Ct. 2479 (2006). That discretion to ensure a "fair" election is the same kind of discretion that President Springer exercised here.

In this light, it cannot be said that in 1997 there was a clear line between a viewpoint-based reprisal against a campus newspaper and [ii] the implementation of neutral and constitutional election standards. In any event, a school administrator should not have to become a constitutional-law professor in order to save herself from personal liability when giving a needed lesson in fair play.





This prolonged litigation has already cost the school a lot of money that could better have been spent to enrich course offerings or expand student day-care. If this case ends with a verdict for plaintiffs (anything is possible with a jury), the district court will have the opportunity to consider whether the exercise merits an award of attorneys' fees in excess of one-third of two dollars.




Footnote
1. One student journalist laments that he is no longer the friend of the incumbent president of the student government: "I am very sad today. I lost a friend; his name is Joe Canale. . . . Things changed on April 9, 1997. It was a pizza day I won't forget. . . . Joe did not shake my hand and all he said to me, in a rather drone voice, was 'Getting ready for the elections?' From that point on I knew, Joe had disowned me, all because of my affiliation with [the Student Union]. . . . 'When I found out he renounced my friendship, because of my affiliation with Student Union, I adopted the slogan 'Joe Must Go' to console me in my hour of need.' "

Another article denounces "pizza politics": free pizza at student events is "another of the perverse policies set forth by this bureaucratic institution. The pizza is most certainly not 'free.' It was paid for, in full, by the student body of the College of Staten Island, it belongs to them. The pizza is the property of the student body, not of the student government." The same writer is agitated by a student-government planned "Solidarity/Unity Fest" which included a "velcro wall, a climbing mountain, a gladiator joust, a laser tag maze, human bowling, a bungee run, a Velcro wall [another velcro wall?], human fooseball [sic], face painters, jugglers, mimes, 12 different carnival style games and things of that nature." According to the author, this "Fest" was an "attempt[] to coerce votes out of the student body in exchange for carnal pleasures." The article closes with a call to "end the evil tyranous [sic] reign of the current [student government] by whatever means necesaary [sic]."

The paper's coverage of a "so-called Mayoral Forum" complains that the two political

parties "have historically been slaves to the Wall Street corporate tycoons, while either ignoring or killing the working class and poor people of this city and nation."

An editorial sets out the goals of the paper: "We oppose the poisonous divisions fostered on the basis of race by the bosses, who make Black and white workers fight each other for the crumbs off their table . . . even though it is the workers who produce all the wealth." The paper "seeks to engage all those who are committed to fighting exploitation and oppression in common action against the common enemy...capitalism." (ellipsis in original).

The issue features the Student Union's "12-Pt. Program For Change," including a call to "END CORPORATE CONTROL OF THE BOOKSTORE" so that it can "be returned immediately to the student body." The reason: "CUNY in general and CSI in particular have become the crown jewel in [Barnes & Noble's] campaign of corporate terror."
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 20, 2007, 10:29:41 AM
TWISTING INTEL
DEMS DISTORT TERROR REPORT

 July 19, 2007 -- DEMOCRATS on Capitol Hill have complained for years that the White House "cherry-picks" intelligence. Yesterday, that's exactly what the Dems did themselves with the just-declassified summary of a National Intelligence Estimate on terrorism.
While preparing for their congressional pajama party Tuesday night (D.C. escort services reportedly had a slow evening), the Dems showed once again that, as wretched as the Bush administration can be, it remains a safer bet in the Age of Terror.

The Dems want to have it both ways. They claim we're not fighting al Qaeda. Then they insist we abandon Iraq to al Qaeda.

And, as a capper, no leading Democrat praised our military when it was revealed yesterday that we captured the senior Iraqi in al Qaeda, Khaled al-Mashhadani. Wouldn't want any good news reaching the voters . . .

The intelligence report in question said, in essence, that, after the devastating blow we struck against al Qaeda in Afghanistan, the terrorists have regained some strength in their safe haven on Pakistan's Northwest Frontier. It doesn't say that al Qaeda is stronger than ever - although that's what the Dems imply.

In 2001, al Qaeda had a country of its own. Today, it survives in isolated compounds. And guess which "veteran warrior" wants to go get them?

Sen. Barack Obama. Far too important to ever serve in the military himself, Obama thinks we should invade Pakistan.

Go for it, Big Guy. Of course, we'll have to reintroduce the draft to find enough troops. And we'll need to kill, at a minimum, a few hundred thousand tribesmen and their families. We'll need to occupy the miserable place indefinitely.

Oh, and Pakistan's a nuclear power already teetering on the edge of chaos.

Barack Obama, strategist and military expert. Who knew?

Not that the problem in Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas isn't serious. We should be hitting high-value targets there from the air and employing special operations forces - despite the consequences for the Musharraf government. (Or maybe we could just send in Obama Girl? She'd look hot in a burqa.)

Field Marshall Obama's fire-for-effect belligerence underscores the sad truth that the Dems are perfectly willing to squander the lives of our troops. They just don't want any casualties that might lead to positive results before the 2008 election.

So what's the truth about terrorism? Is the threat worse today than it was in 2001? Why can't we get Osama? Why do the terrorists keep coming?

(We'll skip the embarrassing-for-the-Democrats question about why the terrorists have been unable to strike our country since 9/11.)

Islamist terrorism is about the catastrophic, self-inflicted failure of the Muslim world of the greater Middle East. It's their bad, not ours. They're humiliated, jealous, hateful, stunningly incompetent - and angry about it. And the situation isn't about to change.

We'll face Islamist terror for decades to come. Although only the military can lead this fight, terrorism is like crime in the sense that we'll never eliminate it entirely. But (also as with crime) that doesn't mean it isn't worth reducing terrorism as much as we can.

Does the fact that rapes still occur mean that we should stop arresting rapists? Does our failure to stop all murder mean we should let murderers run wild? Of course not. You nail every criminal you can and make the world safer. But it will never be perfectly safe.

Same with terror.

We have to fight Islamist terrorists tenaciously. And for all its appalling faults, the administration has done a good job on that count. The proof is that we haven't seen 9/11, Act II.

Oh, we will be struck again. It's inevitable. No matter how good you are, the enemy gets in a lick now and then. But an eventual terrorist success won't mean it wasn't worth interdicting all of the other terrorist plots leading up to it.

Every day we live in safety is a win for the good guys.

What about getting bin Laden? Finding a single individual among 6 billion human beings is tough. Look how long it took us to find the Unabomber right here at home (and he didn't have a fanatical protection network). And we only busted him when his own brother turned him in. Still, I'm confident that, one day, we'll see Osama's corpse. And I hope that the Soldier or Marine who kills him has the rocks to plant an American flag in his eye-socket.

Meanwhile, we're killing al Qaeda members (mostly Saudis, thanks) in droves in Iraq. That's a good thing, folks. But the Dems want to call it off: They'd allow a defeated al Qaeda to rebound and declare a strategic victory.

Want to help the terrorists find a new wave of recruits? Give them a win in Iraq.

Bush has gotten plenty wrong. But at least the guy fights. Unlike the Clinton administration - which did all it could to avoid taking serious action against the terrorists as they struck us again and again around the world.

The 9/11 attacks were the culmination of the Clinton presidency. Do we really want to go back there?

If the Dems have a workable plan to put a permanent end to Islamist terror, let's hear it. Prove me wrong. But if they haven't got a serious plan, they need to shut up and help.

Wouldn't it be great if members of Congress - from both parties - could put our country and the safety of its citizens ahead of shabby politicking?

They lie, you die.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: rogt on July 20, 2007, 10:38:03 AM
TWISTING INTEL
DEMS DISTORT TERROR REPORT

Source for this article?

Quote
Sen. Barack Obama. Far too important to ever serve in the military himself, Obama thinks we should invade Pakistan.

Yeah, unlike those brave, selfless college Republicans who are happy to provide "support" (which as far as I can see amounts to harassing Muslim groups and getting Ann Coulter to come give speeches on their campuses) back here but strangely can't be bothered to join up themselves.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: DougMacG on July 20, 2007, 11:31:39 AM
Scolding of Crafty aside, I found this source/link: Ralph Peters, NY Sun, http://www.nypost.com/seven/07192007/postopinion/opedcolumnists/twisting_intel_opedcolumnists_ralph_peters.htm

The political point goes both ways regarding military service.  I find it petty when used in that context.  Maybe the author is having some fun or getting revenge with the people who tortured Bush who did serve and Cheney who used college deferments like most who could.  Obviously it is not a prerequisite for Democrats as none of the front runners served nor for Republicans. I agree. I believe in civilian rule of the country and our military. I wish the cheapshot artists would check the candidates for competence on economic issues as closely as they check for military service.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: G M on July 20, 2007, 12:42:37 PM
TWISTING INTEL
DEMS DISTORT TERROR REPORT

Source for this article?

Quote
Sen. Barack Obama. Far too important to ever serve in the military himself, Obama thinks we should invade Pakistan.

Yeah, unlike those brave, selfless college Republicans who are happy to provide "support" (which as far as I can see amounts to harassing Muslim groups and getting Ann Coulter to come give speeches on their campuses) back here but strangely can't be bothered to join up themselves.

Rogt,

Want to cite some examples of "harrassment" of muslim groups by college republicans? Which political party is the party of choice of the majority  of the military and law enforcement officers? Why is that?
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: rogt on July 20, 2007, 05:04:27 PM
Scolding of Crafty aside, I found this source/link: Ralph Peters, NY Sun, http://www.nypost.com/seven/07192007/postopinion/opedcolumnists/twisting_intel_opedcolumnists_ralph_peters.htm

The political point goes both ways regarding military service.  I find it petty when used in that context.  Maybe the author is having some fun or getting revenge with the people who tortured Bush who did serve

Being in the Texas Air National Guard may technically qualify as "service", but I'm sure you'll agree it isn't exactly in the same category as combat in Vietnam.

Quote
Obviously it is not a prerequisite for Democrats as none of the front runners served nor for Republicans. I agree. I believe in civilian rule of the country and our military. I wish the cheapshot artists would check the candidates for competence on economic issues as closely as they check for military service.

John Kerry (while not a current front runner) actually was in combat in Vietnam, and the Republican cheapshot artists had a field day with the whole "swift boat" affair.

But I do agree that we'd all be better off if there was less cheap shots and more focus on substantive issues.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 20, 2007, 05:09:17 PM
Good idea!

So, will we be hearing from you in response to GM's question:  "Want to cite some examples of "harrassment" of Muslim groups by college Republicans?" ?
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: rogt on July 20, 2007, 05:16:48 PM
We have at least that one example that's well-covered in the "Danish cartoons" thread.  I'm not going to argue it again.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 20, 2007, 05:18:52 PM
Its a long thread.  Since you know what you're looking for, would you be so kind as to give the post number within the thread?  Thank you.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: rogt on July 20, 2007, 05:27:01 PM
No, I'm not going to bother.  You want details, you do the work of searching for it.  Like I said, I'm not going to argue it again.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Howling Dog on July 20, 2007, 05:38:51 PM
Woof GM, So then are you saying we are NOT winning the war on global Jihad?
Surley your not advocating for your last post of nuking Mecca?
What is the goal of the global war on Jihad anyway? In other words......How is it won?
I personally feel that we are by no means serious about this "war on terror" When 6 years after 9/11 we still are not going after the number one terrorist in the world with serious intent. (Bin Laden)
All that smoke we are blowing about....not taking going into Pakistan "off the table" Is pure BS, and anyone with half a brain knows Musharrif(sp) is playing us like a cheap guitar.
Hes been playing both sides for years.
In my opinon the whole things a farce........yet in the mean time weve some how managed to mess up Iraq and get a pretty good Jihad started there.......
In all honesty Sadaam Husein was messed up.......but there was a certain amount of stability in that country, after years and billions we can not say that today......
                                                                                  TG
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 20, 2007, 05:40:16 PM
Rog:

Hey, its your asssertion-- if you can't be bothered to do the leg work neither can I. :roll:
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: G M on July 20, 2007, 06:03:24 PM
Woof GM, So then are you saying we are NOT winning the war on global Jihad?
Surley your not advocating for your last post of nuking Mecca?
What is the goal of the global war on Jihad anyway? In other words......How is it won?
I personally feel that we are by no means serious about this "war on terror" When 6 years after 9/11 we still are not going after the number one terrorist in the world with serious intent. (Bin Laden)
All that smoke we are blowing about....not taking going into Pakistan "off the table" Is pure BS, and anyone with half a brain knows Musharrif(sp) is playing us like a cheap guitar.
Hes been playing both sides for years.
In my opinon the whole things a farce........yet in the mean time weve some how managed to mess up Iraq and get a pretty good Jihad started there.......
In all honesty Sadaam Husein was messed up.......but there was a certain amount of stability in that country, after years and billions we can not say that today......
                                                                                  TG

Tom,

We've won tactical victories, killed a lot of low and mid level jihadis. I've seen documents captured in Afghanistan that lay out the al qaeda 100 year plan for establishing the global caliphate. What's our 10 year plan? As you'll note, out of the US citizens posting here, a number think there isn't a war worth fighting. So, do we give up on trying to establish a free muslim nation and put a strongman on our payroll instead? Obviously Pakistan, like the Saudis is our ally in name only. Still, going into Pakistan in force quite possibly could result in Mushy getting a state funeral and Pakistan formally becoming nuclear "Alqaedastan".

As far as nuking Mecca, i'm very serious. Mecca holds a special position in islamic theology. The world's muslims having to bow 5 times a day towards America's newest nuclear test site would have a crisis of faith that couldn't be answered. No Mecca, probably no 72 virgins for martyrs either. Much like MacArthur making the Japanese Emperor go on Japanese radio to tell Japan he was just a man and not a divine being did much to end internal resistance in Japan. We've beaten fanatics before, it required lots of killing and a few nuclear weapons.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Howling Dog on July 21, 2007, 10:15:19 AM
Woof GM, I just wanted to clarify my position on the global war on terror.
I'am all for fighting it, though I think we need to be doing a much better/smarter job of fighting it.
I think it uunexcusable that six years later we still have not gotten Bin Laden esp since I'am sure we have a good idea where he's at.
Mushy has survived more than on attempt on his life and that for him, in my opinon is the nature of  his beast...esp since hes decided to play both sides.......mostley I think he just plays us.
We could kill as many low level mid level jihadis as we want......and it won't diminish the number of such named much.
My thought is that the "radical" Islam is more the main stream  than most people want to admit.
I thnk concentrated efforts on "radical" leaders and selective targeting is or would be much more effective and cost a heck of a lot less.
Looking back on Iraq....I'am at least willing to admit I made a mistake there, because I fully supported the invasion and take out of Sadaam....but looking back I feel we created more of a jihad than helped the situation, and its cost us dearly and will continue to do so....because now I feel we are obligated to see this thru till its fixed if ever it would or will be.

Going back to selective targeting Jihad, and including Iraq.......tell me why if were so serious about what were doing....why is Sadr still walking the earth?

Here is my view in a nutshell regarding the global war on terror.....We screwed that up when we went into Iraq.
Afghanastan is still quite ify...and my dollar says if and when we leave it.........it too falls back to the Taliban.(at least as it stands today)
What the "H" were we then thinking by trying to take on Iraq at the same time..... my opinon a personal vendetta by Bush.
                                                                             TG
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: G M on July 21, 2007, 03:01:40 PM
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/013/904pffgs.asp

The 9/11 Generation
Better than the Boomers.
by Dean Barnett
07/30/2007, Volume 012, Issue 43


In the 1960s, history called the Baby Boomers. They didn't answer the phone.

Confronted with a generation-defining conflict, the cold war, the Boomers--those, at any rate, who came to be emblematic of their generation--took the opposite path from their parents during World War II. Sadly, the excesses of Woodstock became the face of the Boomers' response to their moment of challenge. War protests where agitated youths derided American soldiers as baby-killers added no luster to their image.

Few of the leading lights of that generation joined the military. Most calculated how they could avoid military service, and their attitude rippled through the rest of the century. In the 1970s, '80s, and '90s, military service didn't occur to most young people as an option, let alone a duty.

But now, once again, history is calling. Fortunately, the present generation appears more reminiscent of their grandparents than their parents.

I've spent much of the past two weeks speaking with young people (and a few not-so-young) who have made the decision to serve their country by volunteering for the military. Some of these men have Ivy League degrees; all of them are talented and intelligent individuals who--contrary to John Kerry's infamous "botched joke" ("Education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. And if you don't, you get stuck in Iraq")--could have chosen to do anything with their lives. Having signed up, they have either gone to Iraq or look forward to doing so. Not surprisingly, the mainstream media have underreported their stories.

One of the excesses of the 1960s that present-day liberals have disowned and disavowed since 9/11 is the demonization of the American military. While every now and then an unrepentant liberal like Charlie Rangel will appear on cable news and casually accuse U.S. troops of engaging in baby-killing in Iraq, the liberal establishment generally knows better. They "support" the American military--at least in the abstract, until it does anything resembling fighting a war.

In search of a new narrative, 21st-century liberals have settled on the "soldiers are victims" meme. Democratic senators (and the occasional Republican senator who's facing a tough reelection campaign) routinely pronounce their concern for our "children" in Iraq. One of the reasons John Kerry's "botched joke" resonated so strongly was that it fit the liberals' narrative. The Democratic party would have you believe that our soldiers are children or, at best, adults with few options: In short, a callous and mendacious administration has victimized the young, the gullible, and the hopeless, and stuck them in Iraq.

But this narrative is not just insulting to our fighting men and women, it is also grossly inaccurate.

Kurt Schlichter is a lieutenant colonel in the California National Guard. A veteran of the first Gulf war, he's now stateside and commands the 1-18th Cavalry, 462-man RSTA (Reconnaissance, Surveillance, and Target Acquisition) squadron attached to the 40th Infantry Brigade Combat Team. The last media representative he spoke with before I contacted him was a New York Times stringer who wanted Schlichter's help in tracking down guardsmen who were "having trouble because they got mobilized."

In describing his unit, Schlichter says, "Our mission is to operate far out in front of the main body of the brigade to find and keep in contact with the enemy, report on its activities, and call in air or artillery fire on it. We are very lightly armed--speed, stealth, and smarts are our best weapons--and our Cav scouts work out of humvees or on foot." Their squadron motto is "Swift and Deadly."

Colonel Schlichter talks about the soldiers he commands with unvarnished admiration. He has 20-year-olds serving under him who have earned combat badges. As to why these young men are willingly and eagerly putting themselves in harm's way, Schlichter flatly declares, "The direction comes from themselves. They like to be challenged."

One of the soldiers in Colonel Schlichter's 1-18th is 28-year-old Sergeant Joseph Moseley. The outline of Moseley's story matches the liberal narrative of the "soldier victim." A junior college student, he served four years in the Army and then four years in the National Guard. During his stint in the Guard, Moseley got mobilized. He went to Iraq, where he had a portion of his calf muscle torn away by an IED. He has since returned to the United States and is undergoing a rigorous rehab program, which he describes as "not always going smoothly." It's virtually impossible that Sergeant Moseley will recover fully from his injuries.

Yet when asked about his time in Iraq, Moseley speaks with evident pride. He says the fact that he took the brunt of the IED's blow means he did his job. None of the men serving under him was seriously injured. When asked how he would feel about being characterized as a victim, Sergeant Moseley bristles. "I'm not a victim," he says. "It's insulting. That's what we signed up for. I knew what I was doing."

Tom Cotton is another soldier who knew what he was doing. When 9/11 occurred, Cotton was in his third year at Harvard Law School. Like most Americans, he was "shocked, saddened, and angered." Like many on that day, he made a promise to serve his country.

And Cotton meant it. After fulfilling the commitments he had already made, including clerking for a federal judge and going to work for a large Washington law firm, Cotton enlisted in the Army. He jokes that doing so came with a healthy six-figure pay cut.

Cotton enlisted for one reason: He wanted to lead men into combat. His recruiter suggested that he use the talents he had spent seven years developing at Harvard and join the JAG Corps, the Armed Forces' law firm. Cotton rejected that idea. He instead began 15 months of training that culminated with his deployment to Iraq as a 2nd lieutenant platoon leader with the 101st Airborne in Baghdad.

The platoon he led was composed of men who had already been in Baghdad for five months. Cotton knew that a new platoon leader normally undergoes a period of testing from his men. Because his platoon was patrolling "outside the wire" every day, there was no time for Cotton and his men to have such a spell. He credits what turned out to be a smooth transition to his platoon's noncommissioned officers, saying, "The troops really belong to the NCOs." After six months, Cotton and his platoon redeployed stateside.

While in Iraq, Cotton's platoon was awarded two Purple Hearts, but suffered no killed in action. His larger unit, however, did suffer a KIA. When I asked Cotton for his feelings about that soldier's death, the pain in his voice was evident. After searching for words, he described it as "sad, frustrating, angry--very hard, very hard on the entire company."

He then added some thoughts. "As painful as it was, the death didn't hurt morale," he said. "That's something that would have surprised me before I joined the Army. Everyone in the Infantry has volunteered twice--once for the Army, once for the Infantry. These are all grown men who all made the decision to face the enemy on his turf. The least you can do is respect them and what they're doing."

Now serving in the Army in Virginia, still enjoying his six-figure pay cut, Tom Cotton says he is "infinitely happy" that he joined the Army and fought in Iraq. "If I hadn't done it," he says, "I would have regretted it the rest of my life."

Regardless of their backgrounds, the soldiers I spoke with had a similar matter-of-fact style. Not only did all of them bristle at the notion of being labeled victims, they bristled at the idea of being labeled heroes. To a man, they were doing what they saw as their duty. Their self-assessments lacked the sense of superiority that politicians of a certain age who once served in the military often display. The soldiers I spoke with also refused to make disparaging comparisons between themselves and their generational cohorts who have taken a different path.

But that doesn't mean the soldiers were unaware of the importance of their undertaking. About a month ago, I attended the commissioning of a lieutenant in the Marine Corps. The day before his commissioning, he had graduated from Harvard. He didn't come from a military family, and it wasn't financial hardship that drove him into the Armed Forces. Don't tell John Kerry, but he studied hard in college. After his commissioning, this freshly minted United States Marine returned to his Harvard dorm room to clean it out.

As he entered the dorm in his full dress uniform, some of his classmates gave him a spontaneous round of applause. A campus police officer took him aside to shake his hand. His father observed, "It was like something out of a movie."

A few weeks after his commissioning, the lieutenant sent me an email that read in part:

I remember when I was down at Quantico two summers ago for the first half of Officer Candidates School. The second to last day I was down there--"Family Day," incidentally--was the 7/7 bombings. The staff pulled us over and told us the news and then said that's basically why they're so hard on us down there: We're at war and will be for a long time, and the mothers of recruits at MCRD and at Parris Island right now are going to be depending on us one day to get their sons and daughters home alive.

When I was in England last week, I talked to an officer in the Royal Navy who had just received his Ph.D. He was saying he thought the larger war would last 20-30 years; I've always thought a generation--mine in particular. Our highest calling: To defend our way of life and Western Civilization; fight for the freedom of others; protect our friends, family, and country; and give hope to a people long without it.
It is surely a measure of how far we've come as a society from the dark days of the 1960s that things like military service and duty and sacrifice are now celebrated. Just because Washington and Hollywood haven't noticed this generational shift doesn't mean it hasn't occurred. It has, and it's seismic.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: G M on July 21, 2007, 03:45:06 PM
War Crimes   
By Jamie Glazov
FrontPageMagazine.com | July 20, 2007

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Lieutenant Colonel Robert "Buzz" Patterson, United States Air Force (Retired), the Vice-Chairman for Move America Forward and the author of two New York Times best sellers, Dereliction of Duty: The Eyewitness Account of How Bill Clinton Compromised America’s National Security and Reckless Disregard: How Liberal Democrats Undercut Our Military, Endanger Our Soldiers, and Jeopardize Our Security. His new book, just released, is War Crimes: The Left’s Campaign to Destroy the Military and Lose the War on Terror.


 
FP: Buzz Patterson, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

Patterson: Hi Jamie. It’s great to be back with you. Thank you for the opportunity.
 
FP: And it's great to talk to you again.
 
So what inspired you to write this book?

Patterson: Virtually since September 12, 2001, as fires still smoldered at Ground Zero and the Pentagon, elements of the American Left mobilized against their country and created a de facto alliance with our Islamofascist enemies. I'd retired from the Air Force only 11 days prior to the attacks and I was increasingly shocked that so many of my fellow citizens could choose not to support our military and our commander-in-chief in an obvious time of war. There were Americans who wanted to see their own nation defeated. As a serviceman, I guess I was naive, but the reality that citizens I'd sworn to protect and defend for 20 years could hate their nation so intensely floored me.
 
Early on in America's involvement in Iraq I noticed a tremendous disconnect between what our media was reporting as "truth" and what I was hearing from my friends and peers actually doing the fighting there. This is the first "internet war" we've ever fought and our soldiers have access to all of the media that those of us stateside do, that is internet access, CNN, Fox, etc.  In conversations and e-mails, the troops I spoke with routinely voiced concern and outrage over what they were seeing coming from home.  Increasingly they told me that what they were experiencing on the ground in Iraq, the ground truth, was not what they were seeing portrayed on the media.
 
My initial thesis for War Crimes was that the American media were intentionally undermining the efforts of our president and our troops.   I visited Iraq in 2005 to see for myself. After speaking to hundreds of soldiers I realized that the subversive opposition to the war was much bigger than just the media -- it was also Democrat politicians, academics at U.S. colleges and high schools, non-governmental "peace" organizations and the popular culture of Hollywood. War Crimes is an indictment of the Left by servicemen and women fighting a just and noble war.
 
FP: Can you tell us a bit more about your trip to Iraq? What were some of your observations and experiences? Did you see anything that you did not expect?
 
Patterson: I went over with a group from the pro-troop, pro-war on terror organization Move America Forward. It was one of the most profound experiences of my life. I served 20 years in the Air Force and was involved in combat operations as a pilot but my experiences were from above, from the sky. This was my first real insight into our ground forces, Army and Marines, how they operate in war time, what drives them, what their particular military culture is about. I was amazed at their high morale and dedication. It was a tremendous honor to be with them.
 
We went in July, which is the worst possible time to go to Iraq, and the conditions were oppressive. The temperatures hit about 125 degrees. The air was filled with a talcum powder-like sand that made it difficult to breathe.  I fully expected to find some morale and motivation issues amongst our troops but I didn't. In fact, quite the opposite, the morale, professionalism and devotion to duty were off the charts high. I interviewed hundreds of soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines yet found one who was disaffected and miserable. The rest I spoke with, and I'm talking all ranks here, general down to private, were sharp, motivated and acutely aware of why they were there.
 
One of the other themes that struck me was how passionate the troops were for their mission and how disgusted, quite frankly, they were with the American media and some politicians. For the most part they didn't hold back in their condemnation of the media, leftist politicians, anti-war organizations such as Code Pink, and the Hollywood pop culture. It was this passion and commitment that really spoke to me and motivated me to tell their story in War Crimes.
 
FP: Tell us your thoughts on the Left's de facto alliance with Islamofascism.

Patterson: The bottom line is the Left in this country only wins when America loses. Its a tried-and-true principle founded in the anti-war efforts of Vietnam and the 1960s. To bring down "the man" during Vietnam meant to oppose your country and side with the Communist enemies we faced in North Vietnam, the Soviet Union, North Korea, China and Cuba.  The U.S. military never lost a battle throughout the Vietnam War but mainstream media, anti-American radicals and defeatist Democrats colluded to lose the war any way. The Left successfully parlayed the international humiliation and defeat of Vietnam in political capital in Washington, DC and, as a result, elected a radical House and Senate in 1974 and Jimmy Carter to the presidency in 1976.
 
An almost identical scenario is playing out today. Democrats, and their allies on the Left, have entered into an informal alliance with Islamofascism. They retook the House and Senate last year based on their anti-war, anti-Bush positions. Their hopes to regain the White House in 2008 hinge on turning Iraq and the greater global war against Islamofascism into defeat. They never offer a platform or strategy to address national security or the War on Terror, only a constant drum beat of negativity and defeatism.
 
Examine the rhetoric. Congressman John Murtha calls our Marines "cold blooded murderers." Senator Dick Durbin morally equates our troops serving at Guantanamo Bay with Hitler's Nazis, Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge and Soviets in their gulags. Michael Moore releases his anti-American, anti-military screed Fahrenheit 9/11 and receives marketing assistance in Lebanon from Hezbollah (the terrorist organization that’s been killing Americans since 1983).  Columbia University professor Nichole De Genova tells a gathering of 3000 students that "the only true heroes are those who find ways that help defeat the U.S. military."
 
This sort of behavior and rhetoric is not only irresponsible, it’s subversive. It plays right into the Islamofascist game plan, it emboldens our enemy and it results in the war being prolonged and American deaths.
 
FP: What is the impulse that drives the Left to reach out in solidarity to radical Islam. The Left has always pretended to be the great knight in shining armor when it comes to gay rights, women’s rights, democratic rights and minority rights etc. But now the Left genuflects in the direction of a monstrous and barbaric anti-progressive force that represents the most gay-hating, women-hating, minority-hating and democracy-hating entity on earth. What’s your psychological diagnosis of this mindset?
 
Patterson: The Left is so blinded by their pathological hatred for their own nation that defeatism is their only recourse. They cannot credit the United States and its armed forces with success because, to them, America and especially the U.S. military are the real enemies. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. As such, they have declared war on their own nation and our military.
 
Plus, with their de facto alliance with Islamofascists, the Left believes that an anti-war movement will bring them political capital, as it did during Vietnam. By inflating Vietnam into the symbol of American imperialism, Leftists achieved their real goals—power in Washington, D.C. (where they could cripple the war machine) and control of the nation’s universities and editorial offices. Their strategizing for exactly that outcome with the war in Iraq and the greater global ideological war with Islamic extremism. They are placing their failed ideology and egocentric political desires above the nation's security and the service of our men and women in uniform. It’s disgusting.
 
The internal enemy we face from within is one we have to defeat to be successful in Iraq and elsewhere. It won't be easy. The Left’s campaign against America’s War on Terror is a well-coordinated, well-financed operation that involves individuals and institutions from all parts of our society. Leading Democratic politicians, major media outlets, academia, popular culture, and a host of deep-pocketed radical organizations combine to form a Fifth Column that undermines our military’s heroic efforts in this global campaign.
 
FP: What are the ingredients of the Left's Fifth Column? What is it comprised of?

Patterson: The Fifth Column today is comprised of academics, liberal politicians, big media, anti-war organizations and Hollywood. Notice that these are all institutions with a monopoly on communications and messages. Academics such as Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, and Ward Churchill are revered on college campuses for their imperialist America and anti-military views.  They indoctrinate our young adults with their twisted ideology. Democrat politicians with partisan ego-centric agendas selfishly sacrifice the country's national security and the lives of our soldiers for their careers.  Major media such as the big television networks, the New York Times and the Washington Post consistently misrepresent or distort the facts emanating from Iraq and leak highly-classified government programs. "Peace" organizations such as Code Pink and United for Peace and Justice, funded by big money from the Ford Foundation, George Soros, etc, publicly denounce the commander-in-chief and our troops as war criminals.
 
FP: How is this book unique and original?
 
Patterson: This is the only book that I'm aware of that frames a comprehensive argument against the Left but relies on the voices and observations of those actually doing the fighting -- the soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines. I conducted hundreds of interviews, many in Iraq, with our troops and their frustration with and enmity toward the Left is very revealing.  They see quite clearly that they can't be beaten military. Their only prospect of losing comes from subversive elements in America and lack of resolve of elected representatives in Washington, DC.
 
For example, Army Sergeant Eddie Jeffers said that he sees "the enemy is transitioning from the Muslim extremists to Americans.  The enemy is becoming the very people whom we defend with our lives."
 
Air Force Major Eric Egland told me that "the troops number one frustration has been the media reporting. The way the pres mishandled Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay had a tremendous negative effect on us. It inflamed the Iraqis at a time when we were making great progress in Iraq."
 
Also referring to the media, Army First Sergeant Jeff Nuding said "You (the American press) are creating greater risk for me personally (and) you create added danger for my soldiers. You feed into enemy, yes enemy, propaganda efforts in yielding unlimited access to pre-staged voices with calculated intent...You diminish and demean our service...Never, never claim to support the soldiers, you don't, you never will in any meaningful way until you can see your prejudices for what they are." Nuding also said "We daily see the gross distortions. We can't recognize the caricature they (the media) scratch out, neither in our fellow soldiers, nor on the battleground. I know they claim to be objective but really they're nothing more than accomplices in the face of this evil."
 
FP: How do you see the future of this war? Will the Left force a premature withdrawal? What must we do to win? Can we? Is there any room for optimism?
 
Patterson: We have to win, there really is no alternative. We can win and we are winning in Iraq. General David Patraeus and men and women in uniform are doing tremendous things within the "surge." They will win if we let them.
 
Again, we need to focus on the institutions within our nation that are aggressively seeking to undermine the war effort. There is absolutely no way that Al Qaeda and the insurgents in Iraq can defeat our enemy. They have to rely on withering resolve and duplicitous politics on the part of Americans. Just as the North Vietnamese relied on western media, the anti-war movement and wobbly-kneed American politicians, so too are Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri. It's incumbent upon us to ensure that doesn't happen, not just for the sake of the Iraqi people and their future, but for our national security and the security of the Middle East.
 
The Left is doing everything they can to force a premature withdrawal. That would be catastrophic. Secular violence on an incredible scale would immediately follow our withdrawal. Eventually, Iran and Al Qaeda would own Iraq and the world's second largest oil reserves. Iraq would be the launching pad for the exporting of terror world wide, and they would visit us again. Turkey, just to the north, would probably move to protect its southern borders. It would be extremely ugly and absolutely unnecessary. The fact that so many Democrats and big media types are either naive to the realities or choosing to ignore them for political expediency and/or their hatred for President George Bush is incredibly troubling.
 
Ultimately, we will prevail. America doesn't like to lose nor squander the sacrifices of our troops. Ultimately, patriotic Americans will prevent the Left from turning a just and noble cause into defeat. Hopefully, books like War Crimes will educate the American public to the threat that comes from within and re-energize the nation to demand victory, to insist on victory.
 
FP: Buzz Patterson, thank you for joining Frontpage Interview.
 
Patterson: Jamie, it’s been a real pleasure. Thank you so much for what you and the great folks at FrontPage Magazine do to get the truth out there.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 31, 2007, 08:51:39 AM
President Bush's Broken Promises
By MICHAEL RUBIN
July 31, 2007; Page A14

During his last 18 months in office, President Bush confronts a broader set of international crises than in his first 18 months. While pundits blame unilateralism and the Iraq war, the deterioration of Washington's relations with once-staunch allies has less to do with a lack of diplomacy and more to do with its kind.

Too often, the administration has sacrificed long-term credibility for short-term calm. Take Turkey. At the June 2004 NATO summit in Istanbul, President Bush promised Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan that the U.S. military would shut down Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) terrorists in Iraq. He did not. Three years later, the Turks no longer trust U.S. promises and may send their army into Iraqi Kurdistan.

Already the damage to U.S. prestige is severe. Once among America's closest allies, Turkey, according to a Pew Global Attitudes Project poll last month, is the most anti-American country in the world. Only 9% of Turks have a favorable impression of the U.S.; 83% hold the opposite view. Most blame U.S. inaction against the PKK.

On June 24, 2002, Mr. Bush declared, "The United States will not support the establishment of a Palestinian state until its leaders engage in a sustained fight against the terrorists and dismantle their infrastructure." Less than a year later the State Department reversed course, eliminating the cessation of terror as a precondition for engagement. Palestinian terrorism grew.

While the White House condemns Hamas terrorism, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah movement, to which Mr. Bush promised a half billion dollars in July, is equally culpable. A year ago Fatah's military wing threatened to "strike at the economic and civilian interests of these countries [the U.S. and Israel], here and abroad," and it claimed responsibility for a rocket attack on the Israeli town of Sderot in June.

Empty promises of accountability encourage terror by diminishing the costs of its embrace.

While terrorists benefit, Arab liberals pay the price for the president's rhetorical reversals. His promise in the second inaugural speech to "support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture" rings hollow as Egyptian police beat, arrest and sodomize protestors rallying to demand the rule of law.

Mr. Bush has yet to act on his promise to resolve the case of Palestinian banker Issam Abu Issa, whose visa the State Department revoked in February 2004 as he prepared to testify before the House Financial Services Committee on Palestinian Authority corruption. Nor has the president fulfilled a promise to demand the release of Libyan dissident Fathi Eljahmi, imprisoned by Moammar Ghadafi since March 2004. State Department officials say Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice will visit the Libyan dictator this autumn, regardless of Mr. Jahmi's fate.

On June 5, 2007, Mr. Bush endorsed the Prague Declaration, which calls upon governments to instruct diplomats "to actively and openly seek out meetings with political prisoners and dissidents committed to building free societies through non-violence," and announced that he'd tasked Secretary Rice to implement it. U.S. embassies in the Middle East have yet to reach out to any dissident or political prisoner.

Increasingly, friends view Washington as an unreliable ally; foes conclude the U.S. is a paper tiger. This latter conclusion may transform broken promises into a national security nightmare.

Way back in April 2001, the president established a moral redline when he declared that the U.S. would do "whatever it took to help Taiwan defend herself" in the face of Chinese aggression. But amid Beijing's steady military build-up, Mr. Bush stood in the Oval Office beside Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao and condemned Taiwanese President Chen Shui-bian for holding a referendum on missile defense. Unlike his predecessors, Mr. Bush has yet to send a single cabinet-level official to demonstrate commitment to the island nation. Such contradictions may raise doubt in Beijing and encourage Chinese officials to test U.S. resolve.

After promising Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi in May 2003 that Washington would "not settle for anything less than the complete, verifiable and irreversible dismantlement of nuclear weapons program," Mr. Bush directed his administration to do just that. Despite the administration's self-congratulations over its ephemeral deal with North Korea in February of this year, the fact remains that, against its allies' wishes, Washington acquiesced to Pyongyang's continued custody of its reactor and nuclear weapons. This broken promise is guaranteed to haunt the next U.S. administration.

Kicking diplomatic problems down the road is not a strategy. Addressing crises with insincere promises is as counterproductive as treating a hemorrhagic fever with a band-aid. Empty promises exacerbate crises. They do not solve them. While farsighted in his vision, it is the president's failure to abide by his word that will most shape his foreign policy legacy. It would be ironic if he justifies the "Bush lied, people died" rhetoric of protestors across the White House lawn in Lafayette Park, though not for the reasons they believe.

Mr. Rubin, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is editor of the Middle East Quarterly.
WSJ
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: DougMacG on July 31, 2007, 12:56:00 PM
Interesting post, no shoot the messenger is intended with my 2cents worth aimed back at Mr. Rubin.

First point in my mind on foreign policy is that this administration has broken its back in the effort to KEEP its promises, namely the fight in Iraq and efforts to shut down the functional organizations of known terrorists.  If we had the slightest support at home or from our allies in the current struggles we might have won already and have the resources to help Turkey secure its border (before we secure ours).  If I recall correctly, the first thing to go wrong in this war was when Turkey, our alleged ally and NATO member, shut down our access into Iraq from the north. That cost us time, lives and resources that are now hard to come by.  Being an ally is a 2-way street.  While we are almost the only ones doing anything to secure Iraq, Turkey says we aren't doing enough? How do I say nicely...f*** them.

His recap of 2002 statements about Israel and Palestinian issues reminds me of parent child explanations I have had to make with my daughter.  Sometimes we change our plans with new circumstances or new strategies.  I have no idea what the right answers are with the Palestinians, but I hope that in an 8 year presidency we have the right to change our approaches and change our thinking.  Criticism aside, we ARE doing enough to encourage middle east peace.

The President's promise to encourage democratic movements rings hollow in Egypt???  Once again, my God, we aren't doing enough in the Middle East??? And an American intervention in Egypt would be welcomed by whom?  Certainly not the Egyptians or the Democrats or media in America.  Or the voters.

We backstabbed Japan on North Korea???  We were the ones who insisted on the 6 party talks to INCLUDE JAPAN and correctly refused to let this be N.Korea vs. USA issue.  I wish we could bomb their facilities into oblivion but no one can say that would have eased the anti-US sentiments around the globe or satisfied one critic.

Likewise with Taiwan.  They weren't crushed under G.W.Bush's watch.  Without US backing they would have been.  Dealing with China without war is a delicate situation and whatever Bush's cowboy image may be, we mostly used finesse to get cooperation and no one (other than perhaps me) seriously thinks we should be bringing down the regime and liberating the people.

"Kicking diplomatic problems down the road is not a strategy."  - Yes it is.  Achieving stability in Iraq and defeat of current adversaries does help the democratic movements elsewhere and make the world smaller for the remaining bloody tyrants and rogue regimes. JMHO.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: DougMacG on August 09, 2007, 08:11:25 PM
A brief political insight from Paul Mirengoff of Powerlineblog.com this week.   Opposing replies welcome. 

The difference between a liberal and a leftist

Democrats are fond of arguing that we should withdraw from Iraq so we can fight more effectively on the "real" battlefields in the war on terror in Afghanistan and perhaps Pakistan. But at the Contentions blog, Max Boot maintains that defeat in Iraq will make it more difficult to fight in Afghanistan and to counter terrorists in Pakistan. Boot points to a report in the Washington Post that Pakistan's dictator Musharraf has complained that his leverage over tribal militants has slipped because their leaders are less fearful of the U.S. given our difficulties in Iraq. Boot suggests that U.S. withdrawal from Iraq would accentuate this trend.

The point is a rather obvious one -- failure to succeed at war reduces a nation's ability to exert influence and emboldens a nation's enemies and potential enemies. This may not be a rationale for continuing to fight a lost cause. However, recent developments in Iraq strongly suggest that the cause there is not lost.

If the Democrats push for defeat in Iraq under these circumstances, it would be difficult not to conclude that either (a) they would like to see the U.S. unable to exert influence in the world or (b) they have no understanding of how the world works. Option (a) provides a good working definition of an American leftist; option (b) of an American liberal.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Howling Dog on August 10, 2007, 07:03:59 AM
I will take a minor stab at this ...Esp since its the Poilitcal rants thread and I cant hardly go wrong ranting :lol:.
I'am not for pulling out of Iraq. The battle field there is real...problem is we are figthing groups there NOW that we were not fighting until WE went there more specificly Iraqi Sunni's and Shites. Were they or are they terrorists? Probably not. We created this enemy when we invaded their country.
As far as Afghanastan and Pakastan goes.....garunteed if our troops are fighting in Iraq they are definetly not fighting in Afghanastan or Pakastan against those types who have a more difinitvie history of attacking our embassays, our navy ships and out homeland. Much more of an enemy I would rather see us fighting.....also a more rightous war in my book.

Again I'am not for removing our troops from Iraq, but a stronger military presence around the tribal areas of Pakastan would probably do something about "emboldening" tribal militants.......Of course they are emboldend now theres virtually no pressure on them at this time.

As for failure to succeed in war......as far as Iraq goes.....in this context I think we have failed....not lost, just done a very poor job of succeeding.(failing to succeed)
The escalation is working......thats good. It was called for at least two years ago(maybe longer?)
How long will we sustain it, and what are we going to call a victory is my question.

Also are we going to get agressive and take the war in Iraq to those who would oppose peace in Iraq or fight a passive war and continue as before and just put out fires when they start?

I still say long term we plan on staying in Iraq militarily, for an indefinite period of time to protect "our intrests" in the mideast
That in my opinion was more the reason we went into Iraq, THAN ANY OTHER.
                                                               TG
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: DougMacG on August 10, 2007, 03:08:42 PM
Hi Tom, I was trying to hide over here on rants to avoid further discussion with you on Iraq :)

As I told a friend recently, I don't believe we had bin Laden in our grasp or sights and then just let go because those exact fighters of ours were suddenly needed in Iraq.  In Afghanistan, we have more allies helping us, and like you say we had more immediate justification.  OTOH, once al Qaida leadership fled, we are left to fight the Taliban whose main 'crime' was to harbor al Qaida (who fled).  The story of heroin crop yields seems to me as just negativists looking for data and finding it.  Are we managing crops fields or fighting terror.  Afghanistan pre-war was an economy, as George Gilder put it, incapable of manufacturing a flashlight.  BTW, isn't the plant of heroin also source of legal drugs such as morphine I received after being hit by a car?

You supported the invasion then.  You support staying now.  We all suffer war fatigue and for me I am experiencing that lakeside, sipping something cool on a beautiful and comfortable Minnesota summer afternoon.  Imagine how the soldiers feel in desert heat.

So we second guess and use hindsight to judge strategies, and that's okay.  That's what these boards are for.  We should have surged sooner? Maybe. We should have known this would be difficult.  Maybe we needed our accumulated knowledge base in Iraq for this surge to succeed, if it is.  And maybe these tactics would have cost more lives if tried sooner.  I don't know.  For me, rather than blame the prosecutors of the war, it is a little more obvious to blame the dissenters of the war for lifting the spirits and giving the enemy encouragement to keep going in spite of all the errors they too have made.

Americans will stay on to watch the peace post-war?  I suppose so.  We are still in europe and Asia.   Not really a hidden agenda when the repeated theme is to fight them there so we won't have to fight them here.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Howling Dog on August 10, 2007, 05:12:47 PM
Hi Doug, Sorry you don't like conversing with me. I'am beleive it or not I'am supporter of our mideast efforts more so than a negativist.
I served six years in the USN, and the military has a way of getting into your blood. More than anything Iam extremely proud of our troops and the courage they display on a daily baisis.
However, I try very hard to be a realist and I'am certainly no sheep that blindly follows.
Lets put things into perspective. If my job approval rating was 36% how long should I expect to hold my job? :roll: Congress as well holds a similar approval rating.
I think the world a better place without Sadaam Husien and his hell spawn children....Hower the thing I didn't know about which I blame or government for not being more sensitive to and prepaired for and having a better plan for was....How truly disfunctional Iraq and all its tribal factions were/are......As has proven true...getting rid of Sadaam Husien was the easy part restoring a  sense of normalcy has proven quite difficult. We should have been better prepaired for this.....I'am fairly sure this is the reason why Bush SR. did not take out Sadaam when he had a much better chance with much more rightous reason.

It truly makes my head spin from day to day trying to figure out who were fighting and who our allies are, Sunni....no Shites...no thats the Mahdi militia.....yes but the Sunnis are more closley tied to A'Q.....WOW!! Where does this end?

As for the fatigue of the war aspect....well not so much, but fatigue towards how we are fighting it.
Yes we seem to still be fighting the same way its just that we have more troops there now.
A fact plain and simple, you can't fight a war to win, by fighting a LIMITED WAR. Which is exactly what we are doing.
Ok my rant on Iraq.

I agree we didn't let Osama go by going into Iraq.......My problem there is the 6 years following 9/11 and we still haven't gotten him nor are we even operating where he is beleived to be......Thats just CRAZY Its really hard to comprehend when you think about it. The WORLDS most wanted man enjoys safe haven in a place like Pakistan. Bizzare is all I can say.

As for the heroin trade its pretty commonly known to go hand in hand with terrorists  not to mention the war on drugs Herion is a biggie don't forget :-D
So yea we need to be minding the fields and keeping money out of terrorists hands.....I could even tolerate a herion crop in Afghanastan......If it were'nt a RECORD CROP....Remmeber we are there and as you stated so are other militarys world wide.

As for poppys being used to make morphine.....I'am fairly certain that all pharm. morphine is syntheticly made in a lab.
If that were not the case we could certainly legitimize the poppy growing, pay the farmers for their crop....even pay them a premium price and ship all the poppys to the U.S. or any legit labs to be made into legal morphine.....it would be awesome and great for the Afghan economy.......Sorry.

As for our premenante presence in Iraq.......c'mon ....its oil and making sure it gets out world wide.....remember when I said I served in the USN 6 years?  3 Of those were on a aircraft carrier...where do you think I spent the most time?
Hint: persion gulf/Gulf of Oman.....since we no longer have troops in Saudi Arabia......Iraq will be the next best place.....Hey from Iraq we can sqweeze the Saudi's and Iranians at the same time while sitting on the number 3 oil producer in the world(IRAQ)......
It would be nice if we could trust Washington to do the right things unfortunatly tooo many agendas get in the way of that.....Sucks.....
                                                    TG
Now thats a RANT :-D

Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Howling Dog on August 17, 2007, 04:25:01 PM
I hope that we can continue to engage in the friendly conversation with which weve all grown to love.
I hope that all who are for the war in Iraq and those who are against it and all the in betweeners are willing to take the needed responsiblitys that come with war...and the seriousness that engaging in war brings.
Having said that.....I suppose that most all who read or listen to the daily news know that this week it was announced that the military suffered its highest suicide rate this year, in 26 yerars.....If I'am not mistaken there were 99 suicides by military personel this year.
The number of troops suffering from POST traumatic stress syndrome is through the roof...........yet we continue to subject our guys and gals to repeated and extended tours in Iraq.
My question quite simply is how many tours should a soldier be made to endure.....
If I'am not mistaken it was quite uncommon for a soldier to do more than 2 tours in Vietnam......why do we assume that our troops can endure more than that today?
Also as a side note and a personal opinion of mine......
The vietnam war was what instituted the begining of what is now our homeless Americans......These men came back to America, but were never able to go home....and wander the streets of good ole U.S.A. lost to the world they live in....
(It is pretty widley known that a good number of homless are vietnam vets)

Who then will take care of the Iraq wounded......both the physically and the mentally wounded....we are already showing it won't be our military or its government.......
                                                                  TG
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Howling Dog on August 18, 2007, 07:38:34 AM
I consider myself some what of a moralist, beleiving in right and wrong.....also believing in being responsible for right and wrong as well as responsible for our actions and the repercusions for them encompasing the full spectrum of such actions.
In this context It is our war in Iraq.
I made my last post on this thread with such reagard.
I think our troops and their well being is grossly over looked by our happy leap into a war with whomever we convienetly decide we are figthing in Iraq at any particular time.
My point here being if one would take a few minutes to sit down and think of all the responsiblities that we should morally look out during, and when this war is some day over I think we may decide that a war in Iraq was not worth the cost(thinking full spectrum) cost$$$$, killed innocents ,our boys killed maimed and wounded ect......
I also think that when its over or at least we pull out our troops(which we eventually will and everyone knows its comming)
we will duck our responsiblity to those Iraqi people who were innocent in our assult on their country.......let alone our own American citizens.
I know my views and opinions are not popular on this pro war forum.......but I merly add them as a source of balance.
Just like many here complain that the main stream media onley reports the bad thats happening in the mideast.......

The cost of war is huge........think of all who are affected......whos going to take responsiblity?
My personal feeling is confusion, as to why we are in Iraq, and what we are trying to accomplish........putting that into respect to what was going on there, before we went in there, kinda has me shrugging my shoulders with a "wtf"?
                                                                                TG
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: DougMacG on August 19, 2007, 04:47:53 PM
Tom, all - Combining my reply to Tom's from two threads over to here in Rants-  The back and forth is nice, but in general I prefer if someone else jumps in.  From a time management perspective, I plan to answer or post only when I think I have something to add that hasn't already been said.  I don't have any unique or inside info on Iraq or foreign policy except to explain my own opinions and why I think this way. We are looking at the same information and drawing different views. I don't see any sign of minds changing.

I recognize that you served and I didn't and I am grateful and always remembering of that.

Picking what I answer,I won't get to everything- 

"One mans terrorist is another mans patriot."  - No, I don't share the moral equivalent view that comment implies to me.  If you join me in bank robberies and the cops are our enemy that doesn't change which side has the patriots and which side has the terrorists.  Maybe it's a judgment or opinion, and maybe it takes fifty years to sort it all out, but there is a difference.  There's no moral symmetry IMO between this American intervention and the fight of the Jihadists.  If we can't draw that distinction here I don't see how you could in any past conflict either.  Why was it okay to fight Japan and Germany but not these thugs.

Another huge difference in thinking, Tom wrote: "The Kurd massacares happend 20 years ago. These things were not going on when we went into Iraq to "liberate" the people."  -My view is diametrically opposed to that.  Time elapsing doesn't remove anything about the crimes against humanity for me except perhaps the freshness of the evidence, and gassing the Kurds was far from being Saddam's only or most recent crime.  If a people live with a gun to their heads and they do exactly as they are told and then are not killed, I say life is still lost and terror and violence have been committed although death and damage may be hard to measure.  I join this with opposing the view that we are responsible for al Qaida's damage to Iraq.  These are show stopping differences.

"Do you think its been worth it so far"  - Again it's different thinking. The value to me doesn't change easily.  I also don't know how to explain to anyone who disagrees that a half million American lives were worth it to win WWII - I just have to say yes IMO it was clearly the right thing to do and the cost is an unbelievable tragedy.  This is no less important.  Yes we misjudged and bogged down and changed tactics and gained battleground information and added resources and changed leaders and stayed resolved to win, if momentum and victory are possible before either a new President changes course or until congress ends it.  Yes I think fighting and winning this war now is better than the alternatives such as leaving Saddam in power then or leaving unfinished now.  The 'viewed as liberators' and all will cooperate scenario isn't what played out.  We underestimated our enemy, their numbers, their will and their abilities.  Hunting them down in all neighborhoods simultaneously is the current strategy and we'll see how that goes.  I support it and wish them speedy success.

The point is beautifully stated in Crafty's post from the cabinet secretary of India.  His context I think is global, meaning more difficult than Iraq: 28.There is no end in sight to the US military operations against the Neo Al Qaeda and the Neo Taliban even almost six years after the operations started. This is nothing to be surprised about. Victory in the war is not for tomorrow or the day after. There is no doubt that the US will one day ultimately prevail over the jihadi terrorists. It has to in order to protect its homeland. But that day is still far off."(end quote)   In Iraq the battle is joined and I believe a) we will win and b) it was worth it.

"You also did not answer my question as to what would be considered a"victory" in Iraq."  - I have written about that in the past.  I'll describe it here the best I can.  The American part of the war is 'over' when the Iraqi security forces can provide basic security. Then American troops can fortress back from the front line and reduce numbers significantly.  The war itself is won when the  preponderance of activities in Iraq having to do with commerce, family, religion, self-government,  communities and recreation etc. overshadow the remnants of war. 



Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Howling Dog on August 19, 2007, 07:35:33 PM
Doug, Thanks for your responses. I appreciate them and certainly respect them......and I understand not wanting to go back and forth...as I said in my last post I have been hoping to provoke some of the others here...so far no takers :|.

When you refer to criminals and cops your right in saying that its a wrong analogy to equivlate a terrrorist and a patriot.
However I would contend that not all those that engage our troops fall into the terrorist category.
I think a good many view us as occupiers in thier soverign country trying to impose our will and our idealogy on them and they are not willing to accept it.....nor should they be forced to in my opinion.......
I think freedom means a person is free to live his life as he pleases :wink:
Weather we agree with the life style or not.
Though yes those who attack innocent civilians and blow up markets and the like are definetly terrorists......but again I contend that was not going on in Iraq till we got there.
When you talk about fighting Jihadists....there again your using generic terminalogy for convenince sake....but there again....What kind of Jihad was going on in Iraq before we got there?
Are there or were there not better places to engage Jihadists than Iraq....If thats really what we wanted to do....How about the Sudan or Somolia? Definatly the Sudan qualifys as Muslims as committing genocide against Christian farmers but yet we sit by and watch it happen with a 2 MILLION death count probable.
 Still Why Iraq? I said this before concerining Sadaam and Jihad.....Sadaam was not even a good Muslim let alone a jihadist....I think that thought to be quite wrong and out of context.
Very bold of you to equate Sadaam with the likes of Hitler(or the Iraq war with ww2)....hardly but ok.......
No one will argue Sadaam a bad guy and needed to be removed from power....Now all I ask is we take responsiblity for removing him from power.
Is that too much to ask?
I WILL PUT THIS QUESTION OUT TO ANYONE WHO WANTS TO ANSWER, TO ANSWER........
IF the Iraqi people choose to not live in a free and democratic society and want to live under Islamic rule and law should they not have the right to do so?
It seems to me those who are most willing to fight and fight the hardest in Iraq are the ones who want to live that way.
Where are all those folks who dream to be free from the tyranny of Islam?  Oh I know.....they defected with the 110,000 AK 47'S :|
                                                                             TG
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: DougMacG on August 20, 2007, 10:07:15 AM
"I would contend that not all those that engage our troops fall into the terrorist category. "

They are terrorizing the countryside, the roadside, the neighborhoods and the mosques.  They are terrorists.  They are not "engaging" our troops, they are hiding and taking hostages.  Set aside the involvement of America as a foreign country, they are fighting the freely elected government of their own country and the security forces trying to establish peace.

There were two wars in Iraq.  The one against Saddam is long over and only under debate for historical perspective.  The war continuing will result either in what you described as "a free and democratic society" and of course it will pass laws that are based on the traditions and rules of Islam, a peaceful and socially strict religion.  The American goal includes the first part, free and democratic, the second part that they can't take on the same qualities we rightly or wrongly fought - WMD programs and sponsoring or harboring terrorists, and third, the American interest is to have it remain one country with an internal balancing of power which turns out to be the hardest. 

"but there again....What kind of Jihad was going on in Iraq before we got there?"

And there again we are not fighting Saddam.  That war is over.  We are fighting an alternative power who would like to fill the vacuum, to oppress same or worse than Saddam as they do in Iran, to threaten the world's oil supply with saber rattling as the Mulluhs constantly do, and to take the riches of the 3rd largest oil reserves to arm and finance and export terror, worse than before. 

"Very bold of you to equate Sadaam with the likes of Hitler(or the Iraq war with ww2)....hardly but ok......."

Please no straw man argument.  The war against Saddam is over (broken record), we are fighting an opposing vision for Iraq that I described above.  I don't equate Saddam with Hitler, I equate Nazism with the Jihadist movement, which I think you acknowledge is real and global - call it by whatever name  you like, Radical Islamic Fundamentalism, Islamofascism, etc.  Like Soviet communism and Nazi fascism, in the real world radical Islamic fundamentalism doesn't face free and fair elections and isn't content to capture one country and not export terror and destabilization.

"No one will argue Sadaam a bad guy and needed to be removed from power....Now all I ask is we take responsiblity for removing him from power.  Is that too much to ask?"

Thank you for conceding the first part; that was not at all clear in your recent posts or elsewhere in this one. For the second part, isn't that exactly why we are fighting - taking responsibility for the vacuum we created.

"Where are all those folks who dream to be free from the tyranny of Islam?  Oh I know.....they defected with the 110,000 AK 47'S"

To me that statement implies a view that the majority favor a collapse of the budding new democratic government.  I don't believe that.  The innocent civilians in the neighborhoods should be reluctant to stick their neck out publicly siding with Americans or the current government the day before we pull the plug and they face slaughter from the victory of the terrorists.  OTOH, as they see security and democracy taking shape, the citizens seem to be more and more helpful with reliable information, and accurate info is the only way we know the difference between a bomb builder and a plumber.  With reliable information we win.  Without it we lose.  JMHO.

Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Howling Dog on August 20, 2007, 01:34:33 PM
Doug,I don't plan a long response. I think it quite conveniant that you equate Iraq in two seperate wars. The second would not be going on had we not created the "vacuum" as you state it. Thats true plain and simple...we gave the jihadists a battle ground that they did not have before....
I notice you did not respond to my assertion that there were better places world wide to confront Jihadists....so how do you feel about the Sudan?
Anyway......Just something for you to consider in your quest to justify this war that we started.
There are 110,000 missing ak47's that were issued to Iraqi's that we were training.
Are you Understanding that what your saying is that we were training 110,000 terrorists until they took off with the weapons?
If that be true then I say were pretty damn carless with who we give weapons to and certainly have no business being a super power.
We know that these 110,000 were not Bathists as we banned them from this type of authority.
forget about what you think my previous statement implies and look at it from a realsistc perspective.
Were we training 110,000 terrorists or not.
                                                                                      TG
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: SB_Mig on August 20, 2007, 02:48:55 PM
Interesting back and forth. I won't get long in my contributions. Also, not much of a rant, so I can move it if necessary.

Quote
IF the Iraqi people choose to not live in a free and democratic society and want to live under Islamic rule and law should they not have the right to do so?

SHORT ANSWER:

Yes. But it depends on who you ask.

REALITY:

I believe that the current U.S. administration does not want to leave until a secular government is in place. The chances of that happening or slim to none (I'm guessing closer to none).

Quote
Were we training 110,000 terrorists or not.

SHORT ANSWER:

No.

REALITY:

The current Iraqi army, police force, and government (local and national) are so rife with corruption that I'm guessing a good percentage of anything that is sent over there "takes a walk".

I've come to the following conclusions (so far):

1) The surge seems to be working
2) Unless we kick the Iraqi government in the crotch and tell them to get it together, they never will
3) The only way the Iraqi government will know that we are serious about them taking charge is to say "Hey fellas, we're giving you a year to sort it out. After that, we're outta here."

Militarily the tide seems to be turning. Politically speaking, the Iraqi fat cats are scared but still corrupt and powerful enough to milk the situation for all it's worth, while allowing soldiers and civilians to die around them. I would predict that whenever we decide to leave, a HUGE percentage of their legislature will suddenly discover that they have business to tend to in another country, for say, an indefinite period of time.  :wink:
Title: VDH on Military History & More, Part I
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on August 20, 2007, 02:49:46 PM
Howdy Tom,

Afraid I'm not much inclined to join this fray. Strikes me that you're flinging a lot of pasta at the wall and seeing what sticks; I don't have time to sort through the results. Any one of your statements would take an essay to reply to in full and, as I've noted in previous conversations, I'm not much inclined to put more energy into answering a question than you do asking it.

Do think several pieces already posted, and this one attached, speak to many of your points. The fact that issues addressed in these pieces don't enter your end of the conversation suggests you're not paying them any heed. Folks who think far more deeply than me--and get paid for it to boot--have spoken to many of your questions. I've no reason to think any effort of mine will display more cogency or sate your queries any better than posted pieces that speak directly to the questions you've asked.

I will note that you are making a lot of hay out of the 110,000 "lost" AKs. Don't know if they'll prove as mythical as the flushed Guantánamo Koran or are indeed a significant blunder. A cursory study of military history, however, reveals that blunders are part of any conflict. The omniscience expected by today's armchair generals never ceases to amaze me; compared and contrasted to earlier efforts now held in high regard the war in Iraq is no more blunder filled than any and likely could be argued to be less so.

A VDH essay on the study of war follows.

Why Study War?
Military history teaches us about honor, sacrifice, and the inevitability of conflict.

Victor Davis Hanson
Summer 2007

Try explaining to a college student that Tet was an American military victory. You’ll provoke not a counterargument—let alone an assent—but a blank stare: Who or what was Tet? Doing interviews about the recent hit movie 300, I encountered similar bewilderment from listeners and hosts. Not only did most of them not know who the 300 were or what Thermopylae was; they seemed clueless about the Persian Wars altogether.

It’s no surprise that civilian Americans tend to lack a basic understanding of military matters. Even when I was a graduate student, 30-some years ago, military history—understood broadly as the investigation of why one side wins and another loses a war, and encompassing reflections on magisterial or foolish generalship, technological stagnation or breakthrough, and the roles of discipline, bravery, national will, and culture in determining a conflict’s outcome and its consequences—had already become unfashionable on campus. Today, universities are even less receptive to the subject.

This state of affairs is profoundly troubling, for democratic citizenship requires knowledge of war—and now, in the age of weapons of mass annihilation, more than ever.

I came to the study of warfare in an odd way, at the age of 24. Without ever taking a class in military history, I naively began writing about war for a Stanford classics dissertation that explored the effects of agricultural devastation in ancient Greece, especially the Spartan ravaging of the Athenian countryside during the Peloponnesian War. The topic fascinated me. Was the strategy effective? Why assume that ancient armies with primitive tools could easily burn or cut trees, vines, and grain on thousands of acres of enemy farms, when on my family farm in Selma, California, it took me almost an hour to fell a mature fruit tree with a sharp modern ax? Yet even if the invaders couldn’t starve civilian populations, was the destruction still harmful psychologically? Did it goad proud agrarians to come out and fight? And what did the practice tell us about the values of the Greeks—and of the generals who persisted in an operation that seemingly brought no tangible results?

I posed these questions to my prospective thesis advisor, adding all sorts of further justifications. The topic was central to understanding the Peloponnesian War, I noted. The research would be interdisciplinary—a big plus in the modern university—drawing not just on ancient military histories but also on archaeology, classical drama, epigraphy, and poetry. I could bring a personal dimension to the research, too, having grown up around veterans of both world wars who talked constantly about battle. And from my experience on the farm, I wanted to add practical details about growing trees and vines in a Mediterranean climate.

Yet my advisor was skeptical. Agrarian wars, indeed wars of any kind, weren’t popular in classics Ph.D. programs, even though farming and fighting were the ancient Greeks’ two most common pursuits, the sources of anecdote, allusion, and metaphor in almost every Greek philosophical, historical, and literary text. Few classicists seemed to care any more that most notable Greek writers, thinkers, and statesmen—from Aeschylus to Pericles to Xenophon—had served in the phalanx or on a trireme at sea. Dozens of nineteenth-century dissertations and monographs on ancient warfare—on the organization of the Spartan army, the birth of Greek tactics, the strategic thinking of Greek generals, and much more—went largely unread. Nor was the discipline of military history, once central to a liberal education, in vogue on campuses in the seventies. It was as if the university had forgotten that history itself had begun with Herodotus and Thucydides as the story of armed conflicts.

What lay behind this academic lack of interest? The most obvious explanation: this was the immediate post-Vietnam era. The public perception in the Carter years was that America had lost a war that for moral and practical reasons it should never have fought—a catastrophe, for many in the universities, that it must never repeat. The necessary corrective wasn’t to learn how such wars started, went forward, and were lost. Better to ignore anything that had to do with such odious business in the first place.

The nuclear pessimism of the cold war, which followed the horror of two world wars, also dampened academic interest. The postwar obscenity of Mutually Assured Destruction had lent an apocalyptic veneer to contemporary war: as President Kennedy warned, “Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind.” Conflict had become something so destructive, in this view, that it no longer had any relation to the battles of the past. It seemed absurd to worry about a new tank or a novel doctrine of counterinsurgency when the press of a button, unleashing nuclear Armageddon, would render all military thinking superfluous.

Further, the sixties had ushered in a utopian view of society antithetical to serious thinking about war. Government, the military, business, religion, and the family had conspired, the new Rousseauians believed, to warp the naturally peace-loving individual. Conformity and coercion smothered our innately pacifist selves. To assert that wars broke out because bad men, in fear or in pride, sought material advantage or status, or because good men had done too little to stop them, was now seen as antithetical to an enlightened understanding of human nature. “What difference does it make,” in the words of the much-quoted Mahatma Gandhi, “to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy?”

The academic neglect of war is even more acute today. Military history as a discipline has atrophied, with very few professorships, journal articles, or degree programs. In 2004, Edward Coffman, a retired military history professor who taught at the University of Wisconsin, reviewed the faculties of the top 25 history departments, as ranked by U.S. News and World Report. He found that of over 1,000 professors, only 21 identified war as a specialty. When war does show up on university syllabi, it’s often about the race, class, and gender of combatants and wartime civilians. So a class on the Civil War will focus on the Underground Railroad and Reconstruction, not on Chancellorsville and Gettysburg. One on World War II might emphasize Japanese internment, Rosie the Riveter, and the horror of Hiroshima, not Guadalcanal and Midway. A survey of the Vietnam War will devote lots of time to the inequities of the draft, media coverage, and the antiwar movement at home, and scant the air and artillery barrages at Khe Sanh.

Those who want to study war in the traditional way face intense academic suspicion, as Margaret Atwood’s poem “The Loneliness of the Military Historian” suggests:

Confess: it’s my profession
that alarms you.
This is why few people ask me to dinner,
though Lord knows I don’t go out of my
    way to be scary.
Historians of war must derive perverse pleasure, their critics suspect, from reading about carnage and suffering. Why not figure out instead how to outlaw war forever, as if it were not a tragic, nearly inevitable aspect of human existence? Hence the recent surge of “peace studies” (see “The Peace Racket”).

The university’s aversion to the study of war certainly doesn’t reflect public lack of interest in the subject. Students love old-fashioned war classes on those rare occasions when they’re offered, usually as courses that professors sneak in when the choice of what to teach is left up to them. I taught a number of such classes at California State University, Stanford, and elsewhere. They’d invariably wind up overenrolled, with hordes of students lingering after office hours to offer opinions on the battles of Marathon and Lepanto.

Popular culture, too, displays extraordinary enthusiasm for all things military. There’s a new Military History Channel, and Hollywood churns out a steady supply of blockbuster war movies, from Saving Private Ryan to 300. The post–Ken Burns explosion of interest in the Civil War continues. Historical reenactment societies stage history’s great battles, from the Roman legions’ to the Wehrmacht’s. Barnes and Noble and Borders bookstores boast well-stocked military history sections, with scores of new titles every month. A plethora of websites obsess over strategy and tactics. Hit video games grow ever more realistic in their reconstructions of battles.

The public may feel drawn to military history because it wants to learn about honor and sacrifice, or because of interest in technology—the muzzle velocity of a Tiger Tank’s 88mm cannon, for instance—or because of a pathological need to experience violence, if only vicariously. The importance—and challenge—of the academic study of war is to elevate that popular enthusiasm into a more capacious and serious understanding, one that seeks answers to such questions as: Why do wars break out? How do they end? Why do the winners win and the losers lose? How best to avoid wars or contain their worst effects?

A wartime public illiterate about the conflicts of the past can easily find itself paralyzed in the acrimony of the present. Without standards of historical comparison, it will prove ill equipped to make informed judgments. Neither our politicians nor most of our citizens seem to recall the incompetence and terrible decisions that, in December 1777, December 1941, and November 1950, led to massive American casualties and, for a time, public despair. So it’s no surprise that today so many seem to think that the violence in Iraq is unprecedented in our history. Roughly 3,000 combat dead in Iraq in some four years of fighting is, of course, a terrible thing. And it has provoked national outrage to the point of considering withdrawal and defeat, as we still bicker over up-armored Humvees and proper troop levels. But a previous generation considered Okinawa a stunning American victory, and prepared to follow it with an invasion of the Japanese mainland itself—despite losing, in a little over two months, four times as many Americans as we have lost in Iraq, casualties of faulty intelligence, poor generalship, and suicidal head-on assaults against fortified positions.

It’s not that military history offers cookie-cutter comparisons with the past. Germany’s World War I victory over Russia in under three years and her failure to take France in four apparently misled Hitler into thinking that he could overrun the Soviets in three or four weeks—after all, he had brought down historically tougher France in just six. Similarly, the conquest of the Taliban in eight weeks in 2001, followed by the establishment of constitutional government within a year in Kabul, did not mean that the similarly easy removal of Saddam Hussein in three weeks in 2003 would ensure a working Iraqi democracy within six months. The differences between the countries—cultural, political, geographical, and economic—were too great.

Instead, knowledge of past wars establishes wide parameters of what to expect from new ones. Themes, emotions, and rhetoric remain constant over the centuries, and thus generally predictable. Athens’s disastrous expedition in 415 BC against Sicily, the largest democracy in the Greek world, may not prefigure our war in Iraq. But the story of the Sicilian calamity does instruct us on how consensual societies can clamor for war—yet soon become disheartened and predicate their support on the perceived pulse of the battlefield.

Military history teaches us, contrary to popular belief these days, that wars aren’t necessarily the most costly of human calamities. The first Gulf War took few lives in getting Saddam out of Kuwait; doing nothing in Rwanda allowed savage gangs and militias to murder hundreds of thousands with impunity. Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, and Stalin killed far more off the battlefield than on it. The 1918 Spanish flu epidemic brought down more people than World War I did. And more Americans—over 3.2 million—lost their lives driving over the last 90 years than died in combat in this nation’s 231-year history. Perhaps what bothers us about wars, though, isn’t just their horrific lethality but also that people choose to wage them—which makes them seem avoidable, unlike a flu virus or a car wreck, and their tolls unduly grievous. Yet military history also reminds us that war sometimes has an eerie utility: as British strategist Basil H. Liddell Hart put it, “War is always a matter of doing evil in the hope that good may come of it.” Wars—or threats of wars—put an end to chattel slavery, Nazism, fascism, Japanese militarism, and Soviet Communism.

Military history is as often the story of appeasement as of warmongering. The destructive military careers of Alexander the Great, Caesar, Napoleon, and Hitler would all have ended early had any of their numerous enemies united when the odds favored them. Western air power stopped Slobodan Miloševi?’s reign of terror at little cost to NATO forces—but only after a near-decade of inaction and dialogue had made possible the slaughter of tens of thousands. Affluent Western societies have often proved reluctant to use force to prevent greater future violence. “War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things,” observed the British philosopher John Stuart Mill. “The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse.”

Title: VDH on Military History & More, Part II
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on August 20, 2007, 02:50:30 PM
Indeed, by ignoring history, the modern age is free to interpret war as a failure of communication, of diplomacy, of talking—as if aggressors don’t know exactly what they’re doing. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, frustrated by the Bush administration’s intransigence in the War on Terror, flew to Syria, hoping to persuade President Assad to stop funding terror in the Middle East. She assumed that Assad’s belligerence resulted from our aloofness and arrogance rather than from his dictatorship’s interest in destroying democracy in Lebanon and Iraq, before such contagious freedom might in fact destroy him. For a therapeutically inclined generation raised on Oprah and Dr. Phil—and not on the letters of William Tecumseh Sherman and William Shirer’s Berlin Diary—problems between states, like those in our personal lives, should be argued about by equally civilized and peaceful rivals, and so solved without resorting to violence.

Yet it’s hard to find many wars that result from miscommunication. Far more often they break out because of malevolent intent and the absence of deterrence. Margaret Atwood also wrote in her poem: “Wars happen because the ones who start them / think they can win.” Hitler did; so did Mussolini and Tojo—and their assumptions were logical, given the relative disarmament of the Western democracies at the time. Bin Laden attacked on September 11 not because there was a dearth of American diplomats willing to dialogue with him in the Hindu Kush. Instead, he recognized that a series of Islamic terrorist assaults against U.S. interests over two decades had met with no meaningful reprisals, and concluded that decadent Westerners would never fight, whatever the provocation—or that, if we did, we would withdraw as we had from Mogadishu.

In the twenty-first century, it’s easier than ever to succumb to technological determinism, the idea that science, new weaponry, and globalization have altered the very rules of war. But military history teaches us that our ability to strike a single individual from 30,000 feet up with a GPS bomb or a jihadist’s efforts to have his propaganda beamed to millions in real time do not necessarily transform the conditions that determine who wins and who loses wars.

True, instant communications may compress decision making, and generals must be skilled at news conferences that can now influence the views of millions worldwide. Yet these are really just new wrinkles on the old face of war. The improvised explosive device versus the up-armored Humvee is simply an updated take on the catapult versus the stone wall or the harquebus versus the mailed knight. The long history of war suggests no static primacy of the defensive or the offensive, or of one sort of weapon over the other, but just temporary advantages gained by particular strategies and technologies that go unanswered for a time by less adept adversaries.

So it’s highly doubtful, the study of war tells us, that a new weapon will emerge from the Pentagon or anywhere else that will change the very nature of armed conflict—unless some sort of genetic engineering so alters man’s brain chemistry that he begins to act in unprecedented ways. We fought the 1991 Gulf War with dazzling, computer-enhanced weaponry. But lost in the technological pizzazz was the basic wisdom that we need to fight wars with political objectives in mind and that, to conclude them decisively, we must defeat and even humiliate our enemies, so that they agree to abandon their prewar behavior. For some reason, no American general or diplomat seemed to understand that crucial point 16 years ago, with the result that, on the cessation of hostilities, Saddam Hussein’s supposedly defeated generals used their gunships to butcher Kurds and Shiites while Americans looked on. And because we never achieved the war’s proper aim—ensuring that Iraq would not use its petro-wealth to destroy the peace of the region—we have had to fight a second war of no-fly zones, and then a third war to remove Saddam, and now a fourth war, of counterinsurgency, to protect the fledgling Iraqi democracy.

Military history reminds us of important anomalies and paradoxes. When Sparta invaded Attica in the first spring of the Peloponnesian war, Thucydides recounts, it expected the Athenians to surrender after a few short seasons of ravaging. They didn’t—but a plague that broke out unexpectedly did more damage than thousands of Spartan ravagers did. Twenty-seven years later, a maritime Athens lost the war at sea to Sparta, an insular land power that started the conflict with scarcely a navy. The 2003 removal of Saddam refuted doom-and-gloom critics who predicted thousands of deaths and millions of refugees, just as the subsequent messy four-year reconstruction hasn’t evolved as anticipated into a quiet, stable democracy—to say the least.

The size of armies doesn’t guarantee battlefield success: the victors at Salamis, Issos, Mexico City, and Lepanto were all outnumbered. War’s most savage moments—the Allied summer offensive of 1918, the Russian siege of Berlin in the spring of 1945, the Battle of the Bulge, Hiroshima—often unfold right before hostilities cease. And democratic leaders during war—think of Winston Churchill, Harry Truman, and Richard Nixon—often leave office either disgraced or unpopular.

It would be reassuring to think that the righteousness of a cause, or the bravery of an army, or the nobility of a sacrifice ensures public support for war. But military history shows that far more often the perception of winning is what matters. Citizens turn abruptly on any leaders deemed culpable for losing. “Public sentiment is everything,” wrote Abraham Lincoln. “With public sentiment nothing can fail. Without it nothing can succeed. He who molds opinion is greater than he who enacts laws.” Lincoln knew that lesson well. Gettysburg and Vicksburg were brilliant Union victories that by summer 1863 had restored Lincoln’s previously shaky credibility. But a year later, after the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Petersburg, and Cold Harbor battles—Cold Harbor claimed 7,000 Union lives in 20 minutes—the public reviled him. Neither Lincoln nor his policies had changed, but the Confederate ability to kill large numbers of Union soldiers had.

Ultimately, public opinion follows the ups and downs—including the perception of the ups and downs—of the battlefield, since victory excites the most ardent pacifist and defeat silences the most zealous zealot. After the defeat of France, the losses to Bomber Command, the U-boat rampage, and the fall of Greece, Singapore, and Dunkirk, Churchill took the blame for a war as seemingly lost as, a little later, it seemed won by the brilliant prime minister after victories in North Africa, Sicily, and Normandy. When the successful military action against Saddam Hussein ended in April 2003, over 70 percent of the American people backed it, with politicians and pundits alike elbowing each other aside to take credit for their prescient support. Four years of insurgency later, Americans oppose a now-orphaned war by the same margin. General George S. Patton may have been uncouth, but he wasn’t wrong when he bellowed, “Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser.” The American public turned on the Iraq War not because of Cindy Sheehan or Michael Moore but because it felt that the battlefield news had turned uniformly bad and that the price in American lives and treasure for ensuring Iraqi reform was too dear.

Finally, military history has the moral purpose of educating us about past sacrifices that have secured our present freedom and security. If we know nothing of Shiloh, Belleau Wood, Tarawa, and Chosun, the crosses in our military cemeteries are just pleasant white stones on lush green lawns. They no longer serve as reminders that thousands endured pain and hardship for our right to listen to what we wish on our iPods and to shop at Wal-Mart in safety—or that they expected future generations, links in this great chain of obligation, to do the same for those not yet born. The United States was born through war, reunited by war, and saved from destruction by war. No future generation, however comfortable and affluent, should escape that terrible knowledge.

What, then, can we do to restore the study of war to its proper place in the life of the American mind? The challenge isn’t just to reform the graduate schools or the professoriate, though that would help. On a deeper level, we need to reexamine the larger forces that have devalued the very idea of military history—of war itself. We must abandon the naive faith that with enough money, education, or good intentions we can change the nature of mankind so that conflict, as if by fiat, becomes a thing of the past. In the end, the study of war reminds us that we will never be gods. We will always just be men, it tells us. Some men will always prefer war to peace; and other men, we who have learned from the past, have a moral obligation to stop them.

Studying War: Where to Start

While Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War, a chronicle of the three-decade war between Athens and Sparta, establishes the genre of military history, the best place to begin studying war is with the soldiers’ stories themselves. E. B. Sledge’s memoir of Okinawa, With the Old Breed, is nightmarish, but it reminds us that war, while it often translates to rot, filth, and carnage, can also be in the service of a noble cause. Elmer Bendiner’s tragic retelling of the annihilation of B-17s over Germany, The Fall of Fortresses: A Personal Account of the Most Daring, and Deadly, American Air Battles of World War II, is an unrecognized classic.

From a different wartime perspective—that of the generals—U. S. Grant’s Personal Memoirs is justly celebrated as a model of prose. Yet the nearly contemporaneous Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman is far more analytical in its dissection of the human follies and pretensions that lead to war. Likewise, George S. Patton’s War As I Knew It is not only a compilation of the eccentric general’s diary entries but also a candid assessment of human nature itself.

Fiction often captures the experience of war as effectively as memoir, beginning with Homer’s Iliad, in which Achilles confronts the paradox that rewards do not always go to the most deserving in war. The three most famous novels about the futility of conflict are The Red Badge of Courage, by Stephen Crane, All Quiet on the Western Front, by Erich Maria Remarque, and August 1914, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. No work has better insights on the folly of war, however, than Euripides’ Trojan Women.

Although many contemporary critics find it passé to document landmark battles in history, one can find a storehouse of information in The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World, by Edward S. Creasy, and A Military History of the Western World, by J. F. C. Fuller. Hans Delbrück’s History of the Art of War and Russell F. Weigley’s The Age of Battles center their sweeping histories on decisive engagements, using battles like Marathon and Waterloo as tools to illustrate larger social, political, and cultural values. A sense of high drama permeates William H. Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Mexico and History of the Conquest of Peru, while tragedy more often characterizes Steven Runciman’s spellbinding short account The Fall of Constantinople 1453 and Donald Morris’s massive The Washing of the Spears, about the rise and fall of the Zulu Empire. The most comprehensive and accessible one-volume treatment of history’s most destructive war remains Gerhard L. Weinberg’s A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II.

Relevant histories for our current struggle with Middle East terrorism are Alistair Horne’s superb A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954–1962, Michael Oren’s Six Days of War, and Mark Bowden’s Black Hawk Down. Anything John Keegan writes is worth reading; The Face of Battle remains the most impressive general military history of the last 50 years.

Biography too often winds up ignored in the study of war. Plutarch’s lives of Pericles, Alcibiades, Julius Caesar, Pompey, and Alexander the Great established the traditional view of these great captains as men of action, while weighing their record of near-superhuman achievement against their megalomania. Elizabeth Longford’s Wellington is a classic study of England’s greatest soldier. Lee’s Lieutenants: A Study in Command, by Douglas Southall Freeman, has been slighted recently but is spellbinding.

If, as Carl von Clausewitz believed, “War is the continuation of politics by other means,” then study of civilian wartime leadership is critical. The classic scholarly account of the proper relationship between the military and its overseers is still Samuel P. Huntington’s The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations. For a contemporary J’accuse of American military leadership during the Vietnam War, see H. R. McMaster’s Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam.

Eliot A. Cohen’s Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leadership in Wartime is purportedly a favorite read of President Bush’s. It argues that successful leaders like Ben-Gurion, Churchill, Clemenceau, and Lincoln kept a tight rein on their generals and never confused officers’ esoteric military expertise with either political sense or strategic resolution.

In The Mask of Command, Keegan examines the military competence of Alexander the Great, Wellington, Grant, and Hitler, and comes down on the side of the two who fought under consensual government. In The Soul of Battle, I took that argument further and suggested that three of the most audacious generals—Epaminondas, Sherman, and Patton—were also keen political thinkers, with strategic insight into what made their democratic armies so formidable.

How politicians lose wars is also of interest. See especially Ian Kershaw’s biography Hitler, 1936–1945: Nemesis. Mark Moyar’s first volume of a proposed two-volume reexamination of Vietnam, Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954–1965, is akin to reading Euripides’ tales of self-inflicted woe and missed chances. Horne has written a half-dozen classics, none more engrossing than his tragic To Lose a Battle: France 1940.

Few historians can weave military narrative into the contemporary political and cultural landscape. James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom does, and his volume began the recent renaissance of Civil War history. Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August describes the first month of World War I in riveting but excruciatingly sad detail. Two volumes by David McCullough, Truman and 1776, give fascinating inside accounts of the political will necessary to continue wars amid domestic depression and bad news from the front. So does Martin Gilbert’s Winston S. Churchill: Finest Hour, 1939–1941. Donald Kagan’s On the Origins of War and the Preservation of Peace warns against the dangers of appeasement, especially the lethal combination of tough rhetoric with no military preparedness, in a survey of wars from ancient Greece to the Cuban missile crisis. Robert Kagan’s Dangerous Nation reminds Americans that their idealism (if not self-righteousness) is nothing new but rather helps explain more than two centuries of both wise and ill-considered intervention abroad.

Any survey on military history should conclude with more abstract lessons about war. Principles of War by Clausewitz remains the cornerstone of the science. Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Art of War blends realism with classical military detail. Two indispensable works, War: Ends and Means, by Angelo Codevilla and Paul Seabury, and Makers of Modern Strategy, edited by Peter Paret, provide refreshingly honest accounts of the timeless rules and nature of war.

—Victor Davis Hanson




http://www.city-journal.org/html/17_3_military_history.html
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Howling Dog on August 20, 2007, 03:10:59 PM
Buzwardo, I'am not trying to fling pasta.......What I'am trying to get accross with little success is....... Contrary to wishfull thinking.
NOT EVERYONE who opposes us or is fighting against us, is a TERRORIST.
Simple as that.
It seems the concensous on this forum is were in a out right war with hard core Jihadists spawned from the loins of Bin Laden himself.....that simply is not true. Not to say, there are not SOME hardcore Jihadists fighting in Iraq.

Then on the other hand I feel  like guys like SADR are terrorists and we let them take part in Government.
That is kinda some of the B.S. I'am trying to bring to light.

I like SB_Migs answers.....
As for the posts yea they are great......But your right I don't read all of them......I work for a living and don't have the time.......I'am much like main stream America and get most of my info from the 6oclock news....generally accurate to a certain extent and no more biased than any other.......depending on who you talk to.
                                                              TG
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: DougMacG on August 20, 2007, 04:24:49 PM
Tom wrote: "I notice you did not respond to my assertion that there were better places world wide to confront Jihadists....so how do you feel about the Sudan?"

Give me a break, yes I did in my own way.  I spelled out dangers in Iraq that are not the same as in the Sudan: [If al Qaida and the terrorists win in Iraq they will] "take the riches of the 3rd largest oil reserves to arm and finance and export terror, worse than before." - Most third world tyranny locations are tragedies.  Iraq is explosive.  Besides oil, 3 reasons Iraq is unique are location, location, location, relating to Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Israel and other hot spots.

How the hell do you think I feel about genocide in Sudan (where is that angry face symbol)? Different than you or others? I would like to find a justification to depose and hang every genocidal dictator across the globe, time permitting, and they will all be more nervous when we are winning in Iraq than when we are losing.

I adamantly disagree with you that we started this war.  Saddam did that.  Saddam justified this war and finally some American President noticed it. He invaded Kuwait, was driven out, saved his skin by signing a 4-page surrender agreement which I have read and then he violated everything in it.

I don't write for a consensus here and I've never met anyone else on the board.  I know Crafty only through writings over a period of years.  In the short time I've been here I've seen most sides of most issues represented.

Let's get a fresh start on a different subject.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Howling Dog on August 20, 2007, 05:25:26 PM
Doug, If you read my post from sunday night I agreed that you need not engage my posts any longer..maybe it was not translated well but it was what I meant.
Feel free to not answer my posts as they will not be directed towards you personally from this point further......with the exception of my last comment :-D
You and I seem to be crossing paths in a simple agreement...Oil and who gets it....now your talking strategy in Iraq.
Still even if AQ did get control of Iraqs oil....they would have to sell it to finance their Jihad (agreed)We could still buy it :wink:

Not to mention we want it as bad or worse than they do....By the way a gallon of gas in Iraq is 5dollars for those who can afford to buy it.
One last comment on "who" we are fighting in Iraq.......Lets for sake of argument reverse our roles, Iraq has invaded the U.S. and started to kick down our doors and impose its will on us.
How would you respond?
Not to mention "Shock and Awe" prior to kicking down our doors :roll:
Need I remind you that for some strange reason we were not greeted as "liberators"

Then again as you informed me that was "the first Iraq war" where we were fighting Sadaam....pretty sure that was our best chance at being the good guys :lol:
Now that were in the Second Iraq war.....pretty sure were back to being the great Satan :evil:
Sure hope this all works out and we all get a geat big Hug from the people of Iraq.....when we finally convince them we know whats best for them, or klll them for thier own good.
                                                       TG
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: DougMacG on August 20, 2007, 08:31:16 PM
Tom,  I did not give you my "talking strategy"; I gave you honest, heartfelt opinions on matters of life and death.  In return you acknowledge no validity and return with condescension.  What a bummer it was investing the time I did.   - Doug
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 21, 2007, 12:20:44 AM
Woof Tom:

I'm rather proud of this forum.  By and large I think the level of the material contributed here and the commentary thereon is quite a bit above the level of the generic six o'clock news report.

I really didn't know where you got this idea that anyone here thinks that everyone shooting at us is an Islamofascist or the idea that no one is articulating strategy , , , until I read your post of two posts ago.  The answer was so blindingly simple that it hadn't occurred to me-- you're not reading many of the posts that people are taking the time to make in response to what you ask and what you say. :roll:

"As for the posts yea they are great......But your right I don't read all of them......I work for a living and don't have the time.......I'am much like main stream America and get most of my info from the 6oclock news....generally accurate to a certain extent and no more biased than any other.......depending on who you talk to."

If you think the typical evening TV news report is intelligent, informed and fairly accurate and its bias level is not worth noting, I'm not really sure what to say other than you might consider reading in depth around here if and when you have the time.  And if you don't have the time to read what people post in response to you, then why should I respond to what to me also appears to be pasta flinging?
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Howling Dog on August 21, 2007, 03:05:02 AM
Doug,In truth I appreciate your heart felt opinions. What you view as condecending is just a frustrated me who can't get a point acknowledged.
Crafty, I personally think a little more frank discussion would be good for your forum......The first thing I look at when I see a new article posted is how long is it, then I try to determine do I have enough time to read it.....A lot of times by the time I get back to the articel its buried behind many others....MY OPINON a forum of all articles posted is simply dry and boring a little dialogue ofr disscusion brings flavor esp when all are not in agreement on them.

There again, most who post the articeles here are pro war and I could equally contend a pretty fair slant in Bias as well....I've learned along tme ago not to beleive everything I read of hear.....I also try to employ a little logic and reasoning.
I think in so doing....I maintain a pretty equal balance.
I will at this piont.....do as some of my friends have done here in the past, Crafty you know who they are and refrain from posting where my post neither get acknoledged as at least possible nor logical.
Thanks for your time.
Doug I especially appreciate your honest and open dialogue.......
                                                                 TG
I still think my posts deserve some thought or consideration..........By the way no time to check for typos in this post.....Got to go to work.... Have a nice day.... :|
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 21, 2007, 07:54:12 AM
I certainly agree that there is a certain orientation around here-- this is a forum, not a news organization, but I think on the whole we are dedicated to a search for truth and there is far more fact and quality analysis to be found here than on the typical TV broadcast featuring some Barbie and Ken dolls.

I easily understand that some of the posts are long  and not everyone has time to read all of them BUT when someone participates in the conversation, it makes sense to me that that someone should be reading the answers that people took the time to paste or write before posting again-- then you would know whether your point has been acknowledged or not. 

Once again, NO ONE here says everyone fighting us is an Islamofascist-- indeed I think most of the posts written here are quite aware that the situation is quite complex-- for example, try reading the posts by Stratfor that I make here analyzing the situation-- at the same time I think Michael Yon, who writes from the front lines as few do, persuasively makes the point that AQ stirs up a goodly percentage of the discord with which we are dealing.  I've brought his site and his reports specifically to your attention to answer your question on this point.  Have you read them?

Yes, OF COURSE some of the people fighting us do so out of some nationalistic impulse.  Forgive me, but I think the point rather obvious and frequently made in many of the posts here, so when you write as if it isn't, I'm left not sure what to say.  I also think that this nationalistic impulse on the part of the Sunnis has seen a change in strategy in Anbar, which last year had been written off by the conventional wisdom of the MSM.  However, the Sunnis who were so motivated, now seem to be working with us rather well-- now that they have gotten a taste of AQ!-- and now that they are getting a taste of Shiite hit squads!

That other person to whom you refer took the pretty special position of actually opposing American success.  Frankly, that message around here is going to receive a tough reception!

You made a post a few days ago that I thought represented a particularly clear example of an unsound thought process and at the time I answered that I was out of town on a keyboard that is tough to work with and that when I got home I would take a stab at explaining why I thought so.  I'm still here in Temecula with a laptop that is irritating to work with, so my response on this particular point will have to wait a bit more.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Howling Dog on August 21, 2007, 01:41:41 PM
I think the real problem with the tv news is not as to weather they report fact or quality, but more what they report....IE pro or negetive......In other words whats reported on tv is not well recieved on this forum.
Lets face it, when a broadcast is made thats seen round the world there has to be a certain amount of credibility to it.....As for the ken and Barbie anchors that report it........who cares what the person looks like thats bringing the news as long as they bring it.
As for not reading the posts that are posted in response to conversation......I onley recall Guro Crafty of late pointing out that a particular post was in fact made as a response to a question or Idea...any that I know or knew were posted as respones I READ.
I do read a good many of the articles posted here or at least in part......I'am getting the impression here that the thought is I don't read ANY......simply not true. I read them as time permits....often theres simply too many or the post is too long.

I have read Micheal Yons blog......and its good......though it is a feel good about whats going on view....and it is onley ONE mans blog.....hardley can one man cover a entire war on his BLOG.
Funny that you make that acknowledgement that there is a "nationlistic impulse" the way I hear things from this forum is that its all AQ or blood thirsty "JIHADISTS"
No one has yet told me how we identify AQ as AQ.....but they sure get blammed for everything......I think that quite conveniant.......Hope someone will be able soon to tell me how AQ are positivley identified.
In closing, My opinon is that its quite a stretch that we went into Iraq to fight terrorists, AQ or Jihadists....which is now the popular line.
I remember when it was regime change, and to bring a free and democratic  government that was to be a model to the mideast, and Sadaam and his Bathist party were the terrorists :|

Anyway I'am often reminded of a quote from Johnny Cochran at the OJ Simpson trial:
"They have their version of the truth, we have our version of the truth.....then theres the truth"
He smiled and walked away...
                                                                    TG
By the way........the approval rating on the Iraq war falls into the 30% percentile range to me that means....if I hear this forum right...70% of America and most of our allies, and the world are wrong. :wink:
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: G M on August 21, 2007, 07:25:07 PM
War and the Fallacies of Our Critics   
By Bernard Chapin
FrontPageMagazine.com | 8/21/2007

Most of us are best known by our first names or from some sort of professional prefix, but scholar and writer, Dr. Victor Davis Hanson, is often described by the simple acronym of “VDH.” His authoritative analysis of world events, foreign policy, classics, and military history has endeared him to many conservatives over the course of the last decade.

Dr. Hanson is a Senior Fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, and also a professor emeritus at California University, Fresno. His columns are nationally syndicated for Tribune Media Services. I first became aware of him in 2001 after coming across Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power. It was also in that year that he first began writing for National Review. All told, Dr. Hanson has written or edited 16 books since his career began. Most recently he published, A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War. He also maintains a personal website that includes many of his works along with original insight from other writers. In 2002, he received the Eric Breindel Award for opinion journalism.

BC: Thanks so much for giving us some of your time, Dr. Hanson. First off, let me ask a general question. Do you think that, as a result of Iraq, the American people have a much more negative view of the military today than they have at any other point in history?

Victor Davis Hanson: Not at all. They realize that our military has fought both effectively and humanely in often impossible conditions. Most of the negative coverage—whether Newsweek's flushed Koran story, John Murtha's rush-to-judgment condemnation of the Marines accused of atrocities, or the New Republic's recent embarrassing fable about supposed American savagery-reveals bias of the left, not empirical research.

The military conducted a transparent investigation of Haditha, allows access to Guantanamo, rebuked those responsible for misleading statements about Pat Tillman, and punished those culpable for the roguery of Abu Ghraib. Can the New York Times, Newsweek, CNN, or the New Republic claim it makes fewer errors, or is as candid in redressing its mistakes? I fear only the ripples of a defeat in Iraq: quite unfairly the military would be blamed and Vietnam-like for a generation weakened by internal dissension, an external loss of prestige, and a new bellicosity from our enemies.

BC: With all the incessant criticism and umbrage caused by the invasion and our continued policing of Iraq, do you think it will be possible for America to fight and win any wars in the future? I mean, won’t we always lose the home front? Currently, it seems as if, among the mainstream media and the Democratic Party, no level of casualties is acceptable.

VDH: The richer, more leisured a society becomes of smaller and smaller families, the harder it is to deploy sons and daughters to the 7th ring of the Inferno like Iraq. And with world therapeutic news coverage, the postmodern dilemma is not only casualties (one can lose very few before open revolt at home ensues), but the morality of killing the enemy as well.

To many Americans, war is obsolete and can be legislated or condemned out of existence-as if an Ahmadinejad, Saddam, or Hugo Chavez cared much what the US, UN, or EU pontificates about.

In the present, we have used force in Grenada, Panama, the Gulf, the Balkans, and Afghanistan and Iraq on the principle of ending illiberal regimes before they threaten regional stability and cost us eventually far higher from neglect than intervention.

Under Bush this has been demonized as 'preemption' and 'unilateralism', even though, unlike Clinton against Serbia, he tried to involve the UN and got prior congressional approval. Like it or not, we will see less preemption, and more reaction, and the American people should be ready for the consequences, especially if we flee Iraq. Iran, North Korea, and Islamic terrorists, to say nothing of a Russia or China, operate on the principle of deterrence-their aggression checked only by a sober calculation of perceived costs versus benefits. Let us hope that American technology, a small cadre of 19th century brave souls in the military, and innate American know-how can save us from ourselves in the hours of war and peril to come.

BC: How do you think the current state of affairs will affect future Presidential decision-making in regards to military action? Perhaps I’m wrong, but how can any Commander in Chief function if the public begins referring to him as a “war criminal” after only a few bombing sorties?

VDH: He really can't. Almost all of al Qaeda's critiques of the US are recycled from Western leftists. Like rust, such Pavlovian hatred of a capitalist free West never sleeps, and the only way to counter it is with logic, reason-and victory. Should we win in Iraq—victory defined as something like Kurdistan—then even the most opportunistic critics will grow quiet. But seem weak and lose—and then even a John Murtha or Kerry can sound like Michael Moore or Sean Penn. We need more explanation of our aims and values in Iraq—and in postmodern war in general-less assertion if we are to counter the lies of the left, from "no blood for oil" to "Bush is a war criminal."

BC: What do you make of the political argument that only people in the military should speak of military affairs? Also, what of the practice of people like Michael Moore walking around wanting to know why Senators and Congressmen aren’t sending or signing-up their sons to fight in Iraq as if there is a personal basis for determining the course of national action?

VDH: And only oncologists can comment on cancer treatment or farmers the nation's food supply? As for the Chicken-hawk argument-first, there are no fronts in this war since 9/11; nearly as many were killed in Manhattan as during combat in Iraq. Second, this is a volunteer military where rights, responsibilities, and dangers are well understood. Third, each American according to his station contributes to the war effort-since out of a cohort of many millions of 18-25 year olds, only a few can serve in the front lines. In general, the military appreciates those who support its efforts more than those who either condemn it or think it is naively fooled by Halliburton profiteers.

BC: Over the years have you noticed, among the general public, a certain level of increased hostility towards the study of military history? If so, did such attitudes begin to form during the period of the Vietnam War?

VDH: Yes, then and during the 1980s, the rise of "theory" in our universities when there was a general withdrawal from empiricism, facts, dates, personages, etc, a movement that allowed the glib but uneducated to spin grand suppositions without the burden of proof or research. But there is a paradox—movies and books dealing with war and its histories are eagerly sought out by the public, while university press publications on the holy trinity of race, class, and gender go unread. And to repeat the cancer simile: do cancer doctors like cancer any more than military historians like war? Should we ignore studying tumors because, like war, they maim and kill?

BC: Another political question…this idea of American interests. In some quarters, it is only acceptable for the United States to take military action if it somehow does not advance our interests. Where does such an attitude come from? How did we reach the point wherein a nation is not expected to act in ways that further their interests?

VDH: "Interest" can be defined in a variety of ways, both material and spiritual. Bombing Milosevic was irrelevant to the security of the US, but important to the psyche of the American people that we did not allow a genocide to continue that we had the means to stop. Since the 1960s, we have promulgated the notion that the sins of mankind—slavery, racism, imperialism, colonialism—were uniquely the sins of the West, and the corollary that no other culture could be worse than our own. The result was this strange bifurcation on the left: liberal leaders and elites (more and more those affluent and exempt from the drudgery of 8-5 labor) still wished to live affluent lifestyles, enjoy the accoutrements of capitalism, and yet to damn the system in the abstract that produced such bounty as a sort of mechanism of alleviating guilt on the cheap.

Now we see the ultimate reification of that hypocrisy is someone like John Edwards whose house, hair, and speaking fees about poverty are in a quite different nation from the one he worries about. The left can quibble about what constitutes national interest, but that is a luxury of peace and affluence: even it, when gas for its Volvos is nonexistent, or its wood for its elegant floors forbidden, or the safety of its elite schools is threatened will consider that it has "interests" worth protecting.

BC: Is there a tendency among people on the left to view history as a means rather than an end? I ask you this because I have heard quite often, “why you would want to study that?” As if subjects devoid of political value are not worth examining. Could it be that, as a product of their own “political engagement,” leftists may believe that we only study those events which directly concern us?

VDH: Marxism lied to us that history is only the story of material interest, rather than the narrative often of the psyche, emotion, and only perceived self-interests. Nations really do go to war over principle, honor and pride. Perhaps I'm mistaken, but I don't think there was oil in the Falklands. More generally, history has become in the university a medieval morality tale, in which we deconstruct the past to find those guilty of sins against gender, race, and class, and then use the standards of the present to condemn them postfacto on grounds of illiberality—as if someone illiterate five centuries ago without electricity, running water, a toilet, or antibiotics should have been as racially sensitive or tolerant of the "other" or as environmentally conscious as we are in Palo Alto or Madison.

In general we forgot that education is simply the ability to translate daily chaos into abstract wisdom of the ages—impossible without a data bank of names, dates, concepts, and a methodology of inductive inquiry; in turn both impossible without a liberal education of languages, literature, history, philosophy, and basic science.

BC: For what reason should non-policy makers study military history? What unique advantages does the discipline offer its students?

VDH: I wrote a long essay on this in the current City Journal [subscriber only, at the moment]. History started with Herodotus and Thucydides as the exclusive study of war, in which the crucible of human experience was best probed and understood. Like it or not, war cannot be legislated away; its best prevention is knowledge of why it starts, how it is conducted, and why and how it ends—and that is only learned by study of the past.

BC: Along the lines of the last question, what do you say to those who ask why you want to study “war?” Personally, I have always thought that in stressful conditions our true nature is most apparent.

VDH: War is a human phenomenon of the ages. Its manifestations—arrows, flintlocks, atomic bombs—change, but its essence is an unchanging human nature driven by fear, honor, and perceived self-interest, with emotions like envy, jealousy, and bullying its catalysts. I agree: as Thucydides put it, war strips off our thin veneer of civilization and reveals human nature in its most honest and disturbing raw essence. Studying war gives us an appreciation of that patina of culture, and why it is so critical to protect and preserve it lest we devolve into our innately natural selves.

Bernard Chapin is a writer and school psychologist living in Chicago. His first book, Napalm is the Scent of Justice, was a fictional account of a radical feminist United States; his latest book concerns the implosion of a school he worked at and loved: Escape from Gangsta Island: A School's Progressive Decline.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 29, 2007, 08:39:49 PM
While I certainly did not care for Gonzales and I think Ann Coulter often is wide of the mark and sometimes infantile,  this piece does make some fair points:

Reno 911
by Ann Coulter

Posted: 08/29/2007 Print This
 Forward
 Feedback
 Digg This!
 Subscribe
Sponsored By:
 
This week, congressional Democrats vowed to investigate Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' firing of himself. Gonzales has said he was not involved in the discussions about his firing and that it was "performance-based," but he couldn't recall the specifics.

Right-wingers like me never trusted Gonzales. But watching Hillary Rodham Clinton literally applaud the announcement of Gonzales' resignation on Monday was more than any human being should have to bear. Liberals' hysteria about Gonzales was surpassed only by their hysteria about his predecessor, John Ashcroft. (Also their hysteria about Bush, Rove, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Libby, Rice, Barney and so on. They're very excitable, these Democrats.)

Liberals want to return the office to the glory years of Attorney General Janet Reno!



There is reason to believe Reno is precisely the sort of attorney general that Hillary would nominate, since Reno was widely assumed to be Hillary's pick at the time. As ABC News' Chris Bury reported the day Reno was confirmed: "The search for an attorney general exemplifies Hillary Clinton's circle of influence and its clout. ... The attorney general-designate, Janet Reno, came to the president's attention through Hillary Clinton's brother, Hugh Rodham."

Let's compare attorneys general:

 -- Civilians killed by Ashcroft: 0

 -- Civilians killed by Gonzales: 0

 -- Civilians killed by Reno: 80

Reno's military attack on a religious sect in Waco, Texas, led to the greatest number of civilians ever killed by the government in the history of the United States. More Americans were killed at Waco than were killed at any of the various markers on the left's via dolorosa -- more than Kent State (4 killed), more than the Haymarket Square rebellion (4 killed), more than Three Mile Island (0 killed).

-- Innocent people put in prison by Ashcroft: 0

-- Innocent people put in prison by Gonzales: 0

-- Innocent people put in prison by Reno: at least 1 that I know of

As Dade County (Fla.) state attorney, Janet Reno made a name for herself as one of the leading witch-hunters in the notorious "child molestation" cases from the '80s, when convictions of innocent Americans were won on the basis of heavily coached testimony from small children.

Charged by Reno's office in 1984 with child molestation, Grant Snowden was convicted on the manufactured testimony of one such child, who was 4 years old when the abuse allegedly occurred.

Snowden, the most decorated police officer in the history of the South Miami Police Department, was sentenced to five life terms -- and was imprisoned with people he had put there. Snowden served 11 years before his conviction was finally overturned by a federal court in an opinion that ridiculed the evidence against him and called his trial "fundamentally unfair."

In a massive criminal justice system, mistakes will be made from time to time. But Janet Reno put people like Snowden in prison not only for crimes that they didn't commit -- but also for crimes that never happened. Such was the soccer-mom-induced hysteria of the '80s, when innocent people were prosecuted for fantastical crimes concocted in therapists' offices.

-- Number of obvious civil rights violations ignored by Ashcroft: 0

-- Number of obvious civil rights violations ignored by Gonzales: 0

-- Number of obvious civil rights violations ignored by Reno: at least 1

On Aug. 19, 1991, rabbinical student Yankel Rosenbaum was stabbed to death in Crown Heights by a black racist mob shouting "Kill the Jew!" as retaliation for another Hasidic man killing a black child in a car accident hours earlier.

In a far clearer case of jury nullification than the first Rodney King verdict, a jury composed of nine blacks and three Puerto Ricans acquitted Lemrick Nelson Jr. of the murder -- despite the fact that the police found the bloody murder weapon in his pocket and Rosenbaum's blood on his clothes, and that Rosenbaum, as he lay dying, had identified Nelson as his assailant.

The Hasidic community immediately appealed to the attorney general for a federal civil rights prosecution of Nelson. Reno responded with utter mystification at the idea that anyone's civil rights had been violated.

Civil rights? Where do you get that?

Because they were chanting "Kill the Jew," Rosenbaum is a Jew, and they killed him.

Huh. That's a weird interpretation of "civil rights." It sounds a little harebrained to me, but I guess I could have someone look into it.

It took two years from Nelson's acquittal to get Reno to bring a civil rights case against him.

-- Number of innocent civilians accused of committing heinous crimes by Ashcroft: 0

-- Number of innocent civilians accused of committing heinous crimes by Gonzales: 0

-- Number of innocent civilians accused of committing heinous crimes by Reno: at least 1

Janet Reno presided over the leak of Richard Jewell's name to the media, implicating him in the Atlanta Olympic park bombing in 1996, for which she later apologized.

I believe Reno also falsely accused the Miami relatives of Elian Gonzalez of violating the law, which I am not including in her record of false accusations, but reminds me of another comparison.

Number of 6-year-old boys deported to totalitarian dictatorships by Ashcroft: 0

Number of 6-year-old boys deported to totalitarian dictatorships by Gonzales: 0

Number of 6-year-old boys deported to totalitarian dictatorships by Reno: 1

Not until Bush became president was the media interested in discussing the shortcomings of the attorney general. Whatever flaws Alberto Gonzales has (John Ashcroft has none), we don't have to go back to the Harding administration to find a worse attorney general.

From the phony child abuse cases of the '80s to the military assault on Americans at Waco, Janet Reno presided over the most egregious attacks on Americans' basic liberties since the Salem witch trials. These outrageous deprivations of life and liberty were not the work of fanatical right-wing prosecutors, but liberals like Janet Reno.

Reno is the sort of wild-eyed zealot trampling on real civil rights that Hillary views as an ideal attorney general, unlike that brute Alberto Gonzales. At least Reno didn't fire any U.S. attorneys!

Oh wait --

Number of U.S. attorneys fired by Ashcroft: 0

Number of U.S. attorneys fired by Gonzales: 8

Number of U.S. attorneys fired by Reno: 93
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 05, 2007, 02:50:59 AM
Gen. Petraeus, the Real War and the Option Missing From the September Debate on American National Security

Dear Friend,

Next Monday, I will give a speech at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) marking six years since 9/11 and outlining the larger war we should have been waging in order to defeat our terrorist enemies on a worldwide basis.

My speech at AEI is designed to make the case for a larger and more productive dialogue about what we need to accomplish in the Real War we're engaged in -- not only in Iraq and Afghanistan but also in dealing with our enemies on a larger strategic scale, including Iran, Syria, al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas and the worldwide forces of terrorism that want to destroy our civilization and eliminate our freedoms.

We will webcast the speech beginning next Monday evening, September 10, and also post the text of it online at Newt.org and AmericanSolutions.com.

The reason I am speaking out is simple: We need a war-winning option, and today we do not have such an option.

Let me explain.

What's Missing in Our National Debate About 'The War'

Next week will be the sixth anniversary of the enemy attack on the United States on 9/11. Six years ago, more than 3,000 innocent civilians were murdered by an evil barbaric force, an irreconcilable wing of Islam that seeks to repress women, eliminate religious freedom and punish personal liberty.

For six years, we have been at war on a worldwide basis with a movement funded largely by Saudi Arabian and Iranian sources.

For six years, we have failed to confront the scale of our enemy, the direct threat of nuclear and biological weapons if possessed by that enemy, and the scale and nature of the strategy needed to win the larger war with that enemy.

Next week, Gen. David Petraeus, who did a brilliant job in his two previous tours of Iraq and is the best counterinsurgency Army general America has, will issue his report on how the "surge" is working in Iraq.

And yet next week, our elites will continue to hide in the smaller argument about Iraq and avoid the larger argument about the global war.

When the analysis and debate on that report begins, there will be an important option missing.


The 'Stay the Course' Camp Versus the 'Lose Quickly' Camp

The debate over the Petraeus Report will rapidly be divided into two predictable camps.

There will be a "stay the course" camp advocating doing more of what we are already doing, hanging on and hoping for the best. This will be led by President Bush and echoed by his most loyal supporters in the Republican Party.

There will be a "let's lose quickly to end the American casualties" camp that will reject the Petraeus Report. This camp will note that we have failed to achieve a promised land of peace and stability in Iraq, and therefore, we should legislate defeat in the United States Congress rather than allow Gen. Petraeus to continue his efforts to engage Iraq to help defeat the enemy.

The Missing Option: A War-Winning Strategy

What will be missing in this debate is a third choice: "a war-winning strategy."

The great tragedy of the six years since 9/11 is that we have not had a national debate about the scale of our opponents, the depth of their hatred for our way of life and the very real threat that they will acquire nuclear and biological weapons. With the former, they may kill hundreds of thousands of Americans in our cities. With the latter, millions of Americans could die in a deliberate attack.

There is no debate about the potential for a second holocaust in which millions die if Israel is overwhelmed with nuclear weapons or if the missiles Hezbollah fires from Southern Lebanon are launched with chemical warheads or if a coalition of terrorist forces backed by Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia simply wear down the Israeli will to resist.

Iraq and Afghanistan Are Campaigns Within the Larger War

Imagine that Lincoln had tried to assess Antietam and Gettysburg without thinking about the larger war for the preservation of the Union.

Imagine that FDR had tried to assess Pearl Harbor or Guadalcanal or Kasserine Pass without looking at the larger war with Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan and Fascist Italy.

Clearly, any battle report which focused only on Iwo Jima or Guadalcanal or the Battle of the Bulge would have been so negative that many Americans would have wanted to quit the war.

Yet, in World War II, Americans understood that they were involved in a larger life-and-death struggle for the very survival of their civilization. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill knew they had to rally the American and British people to a hard, violent war with tyranny, and they brilliantly described the necessity of defending what they called "our Christian civilization" against Paganism and totalitarianism.

Because the American and British people understood what was at stake and because they believed there was a larger strategy for victory, they were prepared to endure defeats, frustrations and casualties to get to victory.

Once we accept that we are in a larger war, the assessment of Iraq and Afghanistan changes and the options available to win in both campaigns changes.

The Tragedy of Next Week's Debate

The tragedy is that next week there will be a debate between "staying the course" and "legislating defeat."

Both will be wrong.

Legislating defeat is more wrong than simply staying the course. Yet, staying the course is wholly inadequate to the long-term challenge of winning the larger war.

By focusing the country on a stay-the-course-versus-legislated-defeat choice, we have left no space for a dialogue about how to win the war.

Legislating Defeat Will Be Tragically Wrong, a Major Victory for Our Enemies and a Major Defeat for the United States

Let me be absolutely clear: I am unalterably opposed to legislating defeat.

And from talking to thousands of you across the country, including those in our armed forces, I know that the American people are opposed to defeat as well.

We know that defeat in Iraq will be a disaster for America, for the Iraqi people and for the cause of freedom and the rule of law.

If the American Congress legislates defeat, it will have taken on its shoulders the burden of politically defeating the United States at a time when it is impossible for our enemies to militarily defeat us.

If the "Reid-Pelosi Defeat America" legislation passes, every terrorist group on the planet will rejoice.

If the leftwing, pro-defeat activists celebrate a victory over Gen. Petraeus and President Bush, they will be joined in their celebration by every anti-American group around the world.

Legislating defeat should not be an acceptable option for any American who cares about our national security and who wants to defeat the enemy who attacked us on 9/11.

Staying the Course Is Inadequate

Yet as wrong as legislating defeat is, the present strategy of staying the course is simply not good enough.

As long as Northwest Pakistan (Waziristan) is a sanctuary, the Taliban can never be defeated.

As long as we have failed to create a better economy in which growing and processing drugs is no longer the best way to earn a living, Afghanistan will never be safe.

As long as Iran is allowed to ship weapons into Iraq, we will never fully bring stability to Iraq.

As long as Syria is allowed to serve as a transit point for foreign terrorists coming into Iraq, we will never fully defeat the insurgent forces.

As long as Saudi sources finance the spread of Wahhabism across the planet and the Wahhabists continue to advocate Jihad and martyrdom, the flow of new terrorist recruits willing to die will continue.

As long as the current dictatorship runs Iran and works every day to create nuclear weapons and to sustain terrorists groups such as Hezbollah, Hamas and the professional state-sponsored terrorists of the Iranian Guard units, our civilization will not be safe.

We Are Faced With a Large Worldwide Threat, and We Need a Large Worldwide Strategy for Victory

The greatest need in American policy today is for a strategy to win the larger war.

A strategy for a larger war requires a much more thorough statement of the scale of our enemies and their preparations.

A strategy for a larger war will involve some very difficult and, at times, frightening conversations about who is helping our enemies and what it may take to cut off that aid.

Confronting the Real War on its worldwide terms will require fundamental changes in national security, homeland security, budgets and preparations.

Setting out to win the larger war will require a new tempo and new rhythm for our bureaucracies and new determination to insist on real changes both in America and abroad.

My speech at AEI September 10 at 10:00 a.m. ET will outline the scale of changes required to win the real war.

Anticipating the Patraeus Report

We already know from a variety of sources, including interviews with Gen. Petraeus, what his report will contain.

Gen. Petraeus will report that things have improved, that we are a long way from winning but we are gaining ground, and that we need more time and more patience. The report will indicate that the military situation in Iraq is improving faster than the political situation but that both are promising.

However, we should be prepared for the probability that the enemy has spent the last several months planning and preparing to launch devastating attacks to coincide with the release of the report.

Our enemies understand how Washington works, and they understand how the media work. They increasingly plan the timing of their attacks in an effort to undermine the resolve of our politicians and our public by perfecting their influence of the war coverage in our news media.

If the enemy fails to attack during the debate over the report, it will be a modest help to Gen. Petraeus and President Bush.

If the enemy does succeed in a series of deadly attacks during the debate over the report, those attacks will be seized upon by the American news media and the pro-defeat left as proof that legislating defeat is the right solution.

Who Do You Trust? Gen. Petraeus or Gen. Pelosi?

No matter what happens that week, given a choice between the self-appointed political generals of Capitol Hill and the professional soldiers and Marines who have dedicated their lives to studying the art of war, it is a lot safer bet to believe in Gen. Petraeus' analysis than Gen. Pelosi's.

This upcoming debate is going to be the most serious effort to legislate the defeat of America in a generation.

No one should underestimate what is at stake. Please tune in to my speech September 10, and let your representatives know that we've had enough debating defeat. It's time for a serious discussion of what it takes for victory.

Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: SB_Mig on September 05, 2007, 10:22:27 AM
Quote
Because the American and British people understood what was at stake and because they believed there was a larger strategy for victory, they were prepared to endure defeats, frustrations and casualties to get to victory.

Unfortunately, one of the biggest failures of this administration has been its inability to make its own citizens understand what is at stake.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: G M on September 05, 2007, 11:56:28 AM
Quote
Because the American and British people understood what was at stake and because they believed there was a larger strategy for victory, they were prepared to endure defeats, frustrations and casualties to get to victory.

Unfortunately, one of the biggest failures of this administration has been its inability to make its own citizens understand what is at stake.

Very true. The MSM and it's democratic party masters haven't helped either. Outside of Joe Liberman, what dem has taken a stand against the global jihad?
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: SB_Mig on September 05, 2007, 03:17:04 PM
No one that I can think of...

GM, why do you think that it's been so hard to rally support for defense against Islamic militants? Are we as a country that blind to danger? Or is it just not politically correct to identify danger anymore?

Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 05, 2007, 03:40:24 PM
THAT is a profoundly important question, one perhaps worthy of its own thread.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: G M on September 05, 2007, 04:49:36 PM
No one that I can think of...

GM, why do you think that it's been so hard to rally support for defense against Islamic militants? Are we as a country that blind to danger? Or is it just not politically correct to identify danger anymore?



A good question with a complex answer. Let me collect my thoughts. New thread Crafty, or do I post it here?
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 05, 2007, 05:34:02 PM
New thread.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: G M on September 07, 2007, 07:08:39 PM
http://www.dailygut.com/index.php?i=3245

bonus weekend gregalogue! BIN LADEN'S TAPE!

So you've seen the latest message from our favorite goat-toucher Usama bin Laden. In it, he criticizes Americans for reelecting, instead of punishing, Bush, as well as harping on Democrats for not securing a retreat from Iraq. He also mentions global warming and praises Noam Chomsky, the patron saint of the left.

It was at this point, I thought I was listening to Keith Olbermann. That's when it dawned on me. Bin Laden isn't just a terrorist. He's worse. A liberal!


So, when one political party shares a war-time agenda with the guy who's trying to end your civilization, isn't it time to stop renewing Bill Maher's contract? I mean, if Usama wrote these sentiments on a job application, he could land a spot on the View.

You know, I didn't realize bin laden was following US politics that closely. He must watch the Daily Show. But the whole thing seems like Usama's latest video dating offer to America's left. "Lonely, bored goat-herder, into Jihad, mass murder, and figs, seeks fellow 'Progressive' for long term relationship. I enjoy long walks in the desert. And goats. Lets end western civilization together! (AND YES, THIS IS MY REAL BEARD!)

But there's a hint of desperation to all this. UBL is no longer calling for America's destruction. Now, he's begging us to leave the middle east. Which means, he's running out of hummus. It's clear he would love to call things "even" and check into the Yemen Hilton for a nice bath.

Just remember: only a man who's losing it quotes Chomsky. Usama's on the ropes. Let's keep him there. Until he's at the end of one.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 10, 2007, 08:40:54 AM
Not really a rant, but I put it here anyway:

Listening to Petraeus
The president had the courage to change course on Iraq. Does Congress?

BY JOHN MCCAIN AND JOE LIEBERMAN
Monday, September 10, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT

Today, Gen. David Petraeus--commander of our forces in Iraq--returns to Washington to report on the war in Iraq and the new counterinsurgency strategy he has been implementing there. We hope that opponents of the war in Congress will listen carefully to the evidence that the U.S. military is at last making real and significant progress in its offensive against al Qaeda in Iraq.

Consider how the situation has changed. A year ago, al Qaeda in Iraq controlled large swaths of the country's territory. Today it is being driven out of its former strongholds in Anbar and Diyala provinces by the surge in U.S. forces and those of our Iraqi allies. A year ago, sectarian violence was spiraling out of control in Iraq, fanned by al Qaeda. Today civilian murders in Baghdad are down over 50%.

As facts on the ground in Iraq have improved, some critics of the war have changed their stance. As Democratic Congressman Brian Baird, who voted against the invasion of Iraq, recently wrote after returning from Baghdad: "[T]he people, strategies, and facts on the ground have changed for the better, and those changes justify changing our position on what should be done."





Unfortunately, many more antiwar advocates continue to press for withdrawal. Confronted by undeniable evidence of gains against al Qaeda in Iraq, they acknowledge progress but have seized on the performance of the Iraqi government to justify stripping Gen. Petraeus of troops and derailing his strategy.
This reasoning is flawed for several reasons.

First, whatever you think of the performance of Iraq's national leaders, the notion that withdrawing U.S. troops will "shock" them into reconciliation is unsupported by evidence or experience. On the contrary, ordering a retreat will only serve to unravel the hard-fought gains we have won.

The recent National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq was unequivocal on this point: "Changing the mission of Coalition forces from a primarily counterinsurgency and stabilization role"--the Petraeus strategy--"to a primary combat support role for Iraqi forces and counterterrorist operations"--which most congressional Democrats have been pressing for--"would erode security gains achieved thus far."

This judgment is echoed by our commanders on the ground. Consider the words of Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, who is leading the fight in central Iraq: "In my battlespace right now, if soldiers were to leave . . . having fought hard for that terrain, having denied the enemy their sanctuaries, what happens is, the enemy would come back."

In addition, while critics are right that improved security has not yet translated into sufficient political progress at the national level, the increased presence of our soldiers is having a seismic effect on Iraq's politics at the local level.

In the neighborhoods and villages where U.S. forces have moved in, extremists have been marginalized, and moderates empowered. Thanks to this changed security calculus, the Sunni Arab community--which was largely synonymous with the insurgency a year ago--has been turning against al Qaeda from the bottom-up, and beginning to negotiate an accommodation with the emerging political order. Sustaining this political shift depends on staying the offensive against al Qaeda--which in turn depends on not stripping Gen. Petraeus of the manpower he and his commanders say they need.

We must also recognize that the choice we face in Iraq is not between the current Iraqi government and a perfect Iraqi government. Rather, it is a choice between a young, imperfect, struggling democracy that we have helped midwife into existence, and the fanatical, al Qaeda suicide bombers and Iranian-sponsored terrorists who are trying to destroy it. If Washington politicians succeed in forcing a premature troop withdrawal in Iraq, the result will be a more dangerous world with our enemies emboldened. As Iran's president recently crowed, "soon we will see a huge power vacuum in the region . . . [and] we are prepared to fill the gap."





Whatever the shortcomings of our friends in Iraq, they are no excuse for us to retreat from our enemies like al Qaeda and Iran, who pose a mortal threat to our vital national interests. We must understand that today in Iraq we are fighting and defeating the same terrorist network that attacked on 9/11. As al Qaeda in Iraq continues to be hunted down and rooted out, and the Iraqi Army continues to improve, the U.S. footprint will no doubt adjust. But these adjustments should be left to the discretion of Gen. Petraeus, not forced on our troops by politicians in Washington with a 6,000-mile congressional screwdriver, and, perhaps, an eye on the 2008 election.
The Bush administration clung for too long to a flawed strategy in this war, despite growing evidence of its failure. Now advocates of withdrawal risk making the exact same mistake, by refusing to re-examine their own conviction that Gen. Petraeus's strategy cannot succeed and that the war is "lost," despite rising evidence to the contrary.

The Bush administration finally had the courage to change course in Iraq earlier this year. After hearing from Gen. Petraeus today, we hope congressional opponents of the war will do the same.

Mr. McCain is a Republican senator from Arizona. Mr. Lieberman is an Independent Democratic senator from Connecticut.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 11, 2007, 08:16:46 AM

WSJ
Trashing Petraeus
MoveOn.org, and the new standards of Democratic debate.

Tuesday, September 11, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT

Important as was yesterday's appearance before Congress by General David Petraeus, the events leading up to his testimony may have been more significant. Members of the Democratic leadership and their supporters have now normalized the practice of accusing their opponents of lying. If other members of the Democratic Party don't move quickly to repudiate this turn, the ability of the U.S. political system to function will be impaired in a way no one would wish for.

Well, with one exception. MoveOn.org, the Democratic activist group, bought space in the New York Times yesterday to accuse General Petraeus of "cooking the books for the White House." The ad transmutes the general's name into "General Betray Us."

"Betrayal," as every military officer knows, is a word that through the history of their profession bears the stain of acts that are both dishonorable and unforgivable. That is to say, MoveOn.org didn't stumble upon this word; it was chosen with specific intent, to convey the most serious accusation possible against General Petraeus, that his word is false, that he is a liar and that he is willing to betray his country. The next and obvious word to which this equation with betrayal leads is treason. That it is merely insinuated makes it worse.

MoveOn.org calls itself a "progressive" political group, but it is in fact drawn from the hard left of American politics and a pedigree that sees politics as not so much an ongoing struggle but a final competition. Their Web-based group is new to the political scene, but its politics are not so new. More surprising and troubling are the formerly liberal institutions and politicians who now share this political ethos.





In an editorial on Sunday, the New York Times, after saying that President Bush "isn't looking for the truth, only for ways to confound the public," asserted that "General Petraeus has his own credibility problems." We read this as an elision from George Bush, the oft-accused liar on WMD and all the rest, to David Petraeus, also a liar merely for serving in the chain of command. With this editorial, the Times establishes that the party line is no longer just "Bush lied," but anyone who says anything good about Iraq or our effort there is also lying. As such, the Times enables and ratifies MoveOn.org's rhetoric as common usage for Democrats.
Late last week, for instance, we heard it said of General Petraeus that, "He's made a number of statements over the years that have not proven to be factual." This was from Harry Reid, the Majority Leader of the U.S. Senate.

The Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Tom Lantos, said Thursday that General Petraeus would not be the author of his report; it would be written "by Administration political operatives." He opened yesterday's hearing, moments before General Petraeus was to speak, by saying, "We cannot take anything this Administration says on Iraq at face value."

So far, only two Democrats that we are aware of have repudiated this political turn. Joe Lieberman, already ostracized from the party for dissent, called the MoveOn ad an "act of slander that every member of the Congress--Democrat and Republican--has a solemn responsibility to condemn." And Joe Biden, after the MoveOn ad was read to him on "Meet the Press" Sunday, replied: "I don't buy into that. This is an honorable guy. He's telling the truth."

These are the exceptions. Another of the party's activist groups, Democracy for America, released a statement about the time General Petraeus began to speak: "It is offensive that our commander-in-chief has ordered a four-star general to mislead Congress."

As General Petraeus finished his statement yesterday, Senator Chris Dodd's Presidential campaign spammed an email about "the accuracy" of the report: "The fact that there are questions about General Petraeus's report is not surprising given that it was brought to you by this White House." Thus in Mr. Dodd's view, General Petraeus, returned from the Iraq battlefield, is a complicit ventriloquist's dummy.





Can this really be the new standard of political rhetoric across the Democratic Party? There was a time when the party's institutional elites, such as the Times, would have pulled it back from reducing politics to all or nothing. They would have blown the whistle on such accusations. Now they are leading the charge.
Under these new terms, public policy is no longer subject to debate, discussion and disagreement over competing views and interpretations. Instead, the opposition is reduced to the status of liar. Now the opposition is not merely wrong, but lacks legitimacy and political standing. The goal here is not to debate, but to destroy.

Today General Petraeus testifies before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Its Democratic Members include Joe Biden, Chris Dodd, Barack Obama, John Kerry, Barbara Boxer and Jim Webb. This would be the appropriate setting to apologize to General Petraeus for the MoveOn.org ad. Or let it stand.

Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 12, 2007, 09:45:16 PM
From the Halls of Malibu to the Shores of Kennedy
by Ann Coulter

Democrats claim Gen. David Petraeus' report to Congress on the surge was a put-up job with a pre-ordained conclusion. As if their response wasn't.

Democrats yearn for America to be defeated on the battlefield and oppose any use of the military -- except when they can find individual malcontents in the military willing to denounce the war and call for a humiliating retreat.

It's been the same naysaying from these people since before we even invaded Iraq -- despite the fact that their representatives in Congress voted in favor of that war.

Mark Bowden, author of "Black Hawk Down," warned Americans in the Aug. 30, 2002, Los Angeles Times of 60,000 to 100,000 dead American troops if we invaded Iraq -- comparing an Iraq war to Vietnam and a Russian battle in Chechnya. He said Iraqis would fight the Americans "tenaciously" and raised the prospect of Saddam using weapons of mass destruction against our troops, an attack on Israel "and possibly in the United States."

On Sept. 14, 2002, The New York Times' Frank Rich warned of another al-Qaida attack in the U.S. if we invaded Iraq, noting that since "major al-Qaida attacks are planned well in advance and have historically been separated by intervals of 12 to 24 months, we will find out how much we've been distracted soon enough."

This week makes it six years since a major al-Qaida attack. I guess we weren't distracted. But it looks like al-Qaida has been.

Weeks before the invasion, in March 2003, the Times' Nicholas Kristof warned in a couple of columns that if we invaded Iraq, "the Turks, Kurds, Iraqis and Americans will all end up fighting over the oil fields of Kirkuk or Mosul." He said: "The world has turned its back on the Kurds more times than I can count, and there are signs that we're planning to betray them again." He announced that "the United States is perceived as the world's newest Libya."

The day after we invaded, Kristof cited a Muslim scholar for the proposition that if Iraqis felt defeated, they would embrace Islamic fundamentalism.

We took Baghdad in about 17 days flat with amazingly few casualties. There were no al-Qaida attacks in America, no attacks on Israel, no invasion by Turkey, no attacks on our troops with chemical weapons, no ayatollahs running Iraq. We didn't turn our back on the Kurds. There were certainly not 100,000 dead American troops.

But liberals soon began raising yet more pointless quibbles. For most of 2003, they said the war was a failure because we hadn't captured Saddam Hussein. Then we captured Saddam, and Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean complained that "the capture of Saddam has not made America safer." (On the other hand, Howard Dean's failure to be elected president definitely made America safer.)

Next, liberals said the war was a failure because we hadn't captured Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Then we killed al-Zarqawi and a half-dozen of his aides in an air raid. Then they said the war was a failure because ... you get the picture.

The Democrats' current talking point is that "there can be no military solution in Iraq without a political solution." But back when we were imposing a political solution, Democrats' talking point was that there could be no political solution without a military solution.

They said the first Iraqi election, scheduled for January 2005, wouldn't happen because there was no "security."

Noted Middle East peace and security expert Jimmy Carter told NBC's "Today" show in September 2004 that he was confident the elections would not take place. "I personally do not believe they're going to be ready for the election in January ... because there's no security there," he said.

At the first presidential debate in September 2004, Sen. John Kerry used his closing statement to criticize the scheduled Iraqi elections saying: "They can't have an election right now. The president's not getting the job done."

About the same time, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan said he doubted there would be elections in January, saying, "You cannot have credible elections if the security conditions continue as they are now" -- although he may have been referring here to a possible vote of the U.N. Security Council.

In October 2004, Nicholas Lemann wrote in The New Yorker that "it may not be safe enough there for the scheduled elections to be held in January."

Days before the first election in Iraq in January 2005, The New York Times began an article on the election this way:

"Hejaz Hazim, a computer engineer who could not find a job in computers and now cleans clothes, slammed his iron into a dress shirt the other day and let off a burst of steam about the coming election.

"'This election is bogus,' Mr. Hazim said. 'There is no drinking water in this city. There is no security. Why should I vote?'"

If there's a more artful articulation of the time-honored linkage between drinking water and voting, I have yet to hear it.

And then, as scheduled, in January 2005, millions of citizens in a country that has never had a free election risked their lives to cast ballots in a free democratic election. They've voted twice more since then.

Now our forces are killing lots of al-Qaida jihadists, preventing another terrorist attack on U.S. soil, and giving democracy in Iraq a chance -- and Democrats say we are "losing" this war. I think that's a direct quote from their leader in the Senate, Harry Reid, but it may have been the Osama bin Laden tape released this week. I always get those two confused.

OK, they knew what Petraeus was going to say. But we knew what the Democrats were going to say. If liberals are not traitors, their only fallback argument at this point is that they're really stupid.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: rogt on September 14, 2007, 10:54:05 PM
Carried over from the "Why we fight" thread.

Quote
Way to misrepresent my position there, snookums.  I consider a US "victory" to be the worst possible outcome because the war itself is a criminal enterprise which, whether you agree with it or not, is a defensible position.  There's a big difference between that and and simply hating America (or some such juvenile  BS), which you imply.

**It is a defensible position, for an enemy of America.

It's unfortunate that you see it this way.  I guess if "America" is basically a thug with the right to do whatever the hell it wants because it's got the muscle, then yes, I'm an enemy.

Quote
I believe i've asked you in the past and you couldn't answer what law you allege has been violated.

I'm not a lawyer, but as I understand it, international law is very clear about "aggressive war" (attacking a sovereign nation that hasn't attacked you) being a big no-no.  We either accept the authority of international law or we don't, but I don't see it as even debatable that we violated it.

Quote
So what exactly do you do?

**I'm a cop.**

I have to admit that I often get a little nervous around cops (especially if they're pulling up behind me), but with very few exceptions the cops I've actually spoken with were perfectly nice guys just trying to do their jobs like professionals.

I get the feeling that your image of "the left" is some absurd caricature.  I live in Oakland, CA, and there are plenty of hippie types (mostly in Berkeley) that annoy the living *&@% out of me.  But most of the people around here who would probably identify as "the left" are just decent, hard working people who want see America work harder towards making it's people's lives better, and they'd rather see the troops back here living their lives than off fighting a senseless war.  It's pretty tough to argue that these are bad things to want.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 14, 2007, 11:30:02 PM
Rog:

"I'm not a lawyer, but as I understand it, international law is very clear about "aggressive war" (attacking a sovereign nation that hasn't attacked you) being a big no-no.  We either accept the authority of international law or we don't, but I don't see it as even debatable that we violated it."

While in law school, I studied "international law", was on the Board of Directors of the Society of International law for the school, and received the Parker Award for International Law.  None of which means diddly I know, but at least membership in the Soc. for Intl Law got me a 10 day trip to Cuba during the brief period at the end of the Carter years when it was legal to do so.  My one year in law, in Washington DC, was for a firm that billed itself as an international law firm.

What I carried away from this was that a lot of it was utterly meaningless and really more a matter of Conflict of Laws i.e. a determination of whose law applies. 

For example, one case on which I briefly worked was about a client whom had a ship seized in Iran shortly before the Khomeni Revolution.  Jurisdiction in US Federal Court was obtained and proceedings began.  Then the Khomeni govt. nationalized the company that had seized our client's ship.  Not recognizing the jurisdication of US federal court, it stopped showing up and we won a default judgement on the merits.  All that remained was a determination of damages.  Then the US-Iranian Claims tribunal was set up for all pending disputes between the US, its citizens, and Iran and its citizens.  Question presented:  Did the Claims tribunal have to accept the US federal court default decision and rule only on damages, or did it the case get litigated de novo?

Concerning our decision to go into Iraq being illegal or not, IMHO President Bush committed an error in going back to the UN after receiving Resolution 1441, which I would argue empowered us to go in as a legal matter.  As a political matter though, the President thought it better to go back for ,  , , re-approval.

IMHO there really is no coherent thing such as international law.  When has the UN gotten upset for the French going into west Africa, or NATO into Serbia-Croatia?  I don't recall any General Assembly votes on any of that or other similar cases.  OTOH it was a big deal when Saddam invaded Kuwait.  OTOH it wasn't a big deal when the Arabs tried wiping out Israel.  OTOH , , , well you get the idea.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: G M on September 15, 2007, 12:27:20 AM
Carried over from the "Why we fight" thread.

Quote
Way to misrepresent my position there, snookums.  I consider a US "victory" to be the worst possible outcome because the war itself is a criminal enterprise which, whether you agree with it or not, is a defensible position.  There's a big difference between that and and simply hating America (or some such juvenile  BS), which you imply.

**It is a defensible position, for an enemy of America.

It's unfortunate that you see it this way.  I guess if "America" is basically a thug with the right to do whatever the hell it wants because it's got the muscle, then yes, I'm an enemy.

**Just like it thuggishly threw it's weight around in asia and europe in the 40's? Flexing it's muscles to end the 3rd. Reich....and it was Japan that bombed Pearl Harbor right? "FDR lied, Nazis died".**

Quote
I believe i've asked you in the past and you couldn't answer what law you allege has been violated.

I'm not a lawyer, but as I understand it, international law is very clear about "aggressive war" (attacking a sovereign nation that hasn't attacked you) being a big no-no.  We either accept the authority of international law or we don't, but I don't see it as even debatable that we violated it.

**As usual, your bumper sticker grasp of geopolitics doesn't begin to approach reality. The Gulf War was ended by a cease fire agreement which Saddam violated flagrantly. President Clinton was also faced with Saddam's violations and mostly resorted to letters and sticking to economic sanctions that only starved Iraqi children while the Saddam palace construction initiative surged forward aside from the token and ineffectual military strikes he did. Was President Clinton violating international law when he launched "Operation Desert Fox"?

Saddam was killing Kurds, Shiites and anyone he suspected of disloyalty. Read one of Clinton's letters here: http://www.fas.org/spp/starwars/offdocs/w960708.htm

Read this article from 7/2000.  http://www.meib.org/articles/0007_me1.htm

Post 9/11, President Bush had the following options:

1. Keep the toothless sanctions in place while Saddam funded terrorists and potentially developed WMD that could be passed on to terrorists.

2. Drop the toothless sanctions and ignore the above listed potential threats. Cross his fingers and hope the next attack on an American city wasn't with something made in Iraq.

3. Risk his easy re-election, go before congress and get the authorization to remove Saddam, which he did. Here is PUBLIC LAW 107–243.
http://www.c-span.org/resources/pdf/hjres114.pdf



Quote
So what exactly do you do?

**I'm a cop.**

I have to admit that I often get a little nervous around cops (especially if they're pulling up behind me), but with very few exceptions the cops I've actually spoken with were perfectly nice guys just trying to do their jobs like professionals.

I get the feeling that your image of "the left" is some absurd caricature. 

**Aside from reading leading left blogs and periodicals (I was reading "Mother Jones" back in the 80's, when I was young and gullible actually believed that garbage) and my time brushing up against academia (I'll someday post my paper "The American Male, Threat or Menace?" written for the professor that announced she was a lesbian-feminist and taught the Dworkin "rape-culture" theory in my class on sex crimes) I had an ex-girlfriend who was a model for current academic thought. She's teaching at a ivy league school the last I heard from her. So I know today's left very well from firsthand experience, not distant stereotypes.**

 I live in Oakland, CA, and there are plenty of hippie types (mostly in Berkeley) that annoy the living *&@% out of me.  But most of the people around here who would probably identify as "the left" are just decent, hard working people who want see America work harder towards making it's people's lives better, and they'd rather see the troops back here living their lives than off fighting a senseless war.  It's pretty tough to argue that these are bad things to want.

**The Kurds' lives are much, much better since Saddam's rule ended. Many other Iraqis are doing much better. Once upon a time, the American left was supposed to be about freeing the oppressed, which is what we did in Iraq. Why now does the left love and supprt monsters like Saddam today?**
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 15, 2007, 06:55:07 AM
GM:

I'd love to read the "The American Male: Threat or Menace" piece!  If you have it handy, would you be so kind as to email it to me?
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: rogt on September 15, 2007, 08:46:50 AM
It's unfortunate that you see it this way.  I guess if "America" is basically a thug with the right to do whatever the hell it wants because it's got the muscle, then yes, I'm an enemy.

**Just like it thuggishly threw it's weight around in asia and europe in the 40's? Flexing it's muscles to end the 3rd. Reich....and it was Japan that bombed Pearl Harbor right? "FDR lied, Nazis died".**

So all of a sudden every war we get into is another WW2?  They're all pretty much the same as you see it?

Has the US ever been in a war that wasn't justified?  Or do our leaders just decide we need to go to war and that's all that matters as far as GM is concerned?

Quote
I believe i've asked you in the past and you couldn't answer what law you allege has been violated.

Quote
I'm not a lawyer, but as I understand it, international law is very clear about "aggressive war" (attacking a sovereign nation that hasn't attacked you) being a big no-no.  We either accept the authority of international law or we don't, but I don't see it as even debatable that we violated it.

**As usual, your bumper sticker grasp of geopolitics doesn't begin to approach reality.

Spare me.  Nobody in this forum bases their opinions on any kind of real political expertise, so we're all pretty much "bumper sticker politicians" here.  You being a cop (what kind of cop, exactly?) makes you no more of an expert than does me being a software engineer.

Quote
I get the feeling that your image of "the left" is some absurd caricature.

**Aside from reading leading left blogs and periodicals (I was reading "Mother Jones" back in the 80's, when I was young and gullible actually believed that garbage) and my time brushing up against academia (I'll someday post my paper "The American Male, Threat or Menace?" written for the professor that announced she was a lesbian-feminist and taught the Dworkin "rape-culture" theory in my class on sex crimes) I had an ex-girlfriend who was a model for current academic thought. She's teaching at a ivy league school the last I heard from her. So I know today's left very well from firsthand experience, not distant stereotypes.**

I agree that some of the stuff coming out of academia is pretty ridiculous (like some college in Southern California offering a class on YouTube as a social phenomenon?), but I would still argue that most of "the left" is regular working people who simply want to have a better life and some semblance of social justice.

Quote
**The Kurds' lives are much, much better since Saddam's rule ended. Many other Iraqis are doing much better. Once upon a time, the American left was supposed to be about freeing the oppressed, which is what we did in Iraq. Why now does the left love and supprt monsters like Saddam today?**

Excuse me, but I recall that it was Reagan, Rumsfeld, Bush Sr, etc. and not "the left" that supported Saddam all throughout the 80s, most notably during the time when he was gassing Kurds and committing all the atrocities now cited as justification for our invasion.  That's a simple fact.

I've never met or spoken to any war protester that loved (or even slightly liked) Saddam, but I have heard some say (as well as many Iraqis) that life in Iraq under Saddam was preferable to life in Iraq under the current US occupation.  That's not love for Saddam but a simple statement of fact.  According to this article:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/26/AR2006092601721.html

Clear majorities of Iraqis (with the exception of the Kurds) want an immediate withdrawal of US forces.  Apparently (although I don't have a reference right now) smaller, but still pretty clear, majorities of Iraqis consider violent attacks on US forces to be justified.  Maybe there are "other Iraqis" who are doing better, but I think you're exaggerating their numbers.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: rogt on September 15, 2007, 08:59:04 AM
IMHO there really is no coherent thing such as international law. 

So as far as you're concerned, the Nuremburg Trials were basically a one-time deal we used to go after the Nazis, and they set no precedents that would have any relevance today?  IIRC, the NT established that main crime of the Nazis was "aggressive war", from which all of their other crimes ultimately originated. 

For a government convinced of the righteousness of it's decision to invade Iraq, the Bush administration took a lot of pains to argue (unsuccessfully) that Iraq represented an immediate threat to us.  Clearly it occurred to somebody in the BA that our action would be seen as "aggressive war" under international law and that we should have some defense (however lame) against that accusation.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 15, 2007, 09:04:38 AM
C'mon Rog.  I didn't say it doesn't exist.  I simply said it lacks coherence.

"Concerning our decision to go into Iraq being illegal or not, IMHO President Bush committed an error in going back to the UN after receiving Resolution 1441, which I would argue empowered us to go in as a legal matter.  As a political matter though, the President thought it better to go back for ,  , , re-approval.

IMHO there really is no coherent thing such as international law.  When has the UN gotten upset for the French going into west Africa, or NATO into Serbia-Croatia?  I don't recall any General Assembly votes on any of that or other similar cases.  OTOH it was a big deal when Saddam invaded Kuwait.  OTOH it wasn't a big deal when the Arabs tried wiping out Israel.  OTOH , , , well you get the idea"

I would also add that international law was rarely invoked against the Soviet Empire's sundry expansions.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: G M on September 15, 2007, 11:12:19 AM
GM:

I'd love to read the "The American Male: Threat or Menace" piece!  If you have it handy, would you be so kind as to email it to me?

I'll have to transcribe it. I saw it a while ago and laughed. I think I got B despite the obvious sarcasm.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: G M on September 15, 2007, 01:05:04 PM
It's unfortunate that you see it this way.  I guess if "America" is basically a thug with the right to do whatever the hell it wants because it's got the muscle, then yes, I'm an enemy.

**Just like it thuggishly threw it's weight around in asia and europe in the 40's? Flexing it's muscles to end the 3rd. Reich....and it was Japan that bombed Pearl Harbor right? "FDR lied, Nazis died".**

So all of a sudden every war we get into is another WW2?  They're all pretty much the same as you see it?

****No, much like WWII, we are in a fight for the survival of our nation and western civilization. Iraq is one front in that war. Why can't you see that?****

Has the US ever been in a war that wasn't justified?  Or do our leaders just decide we need to go to war and that's all that matters as far as GM is concerned?

****No, unlike you I research and read source documents rather just tossing out slogans like "illegal war".****

Quote
I believe i've asked you in the past and you couldn't answer what law you allege has been violated.

Quote
I'm not a lawyer, but as I understand it, international law is very clear about "aggressive war" (attacking a sovereign nation that hasn't attacked you) being a big no-no.  We either accept the authority of international law or we don't, but I don't see it as even debatable that we violated it.

****Again, what part of "violated the cease fire agreement" don't you understand?****

**As usual, your bumper sticker grasp of geopolitics doesn't begin to approach reality.

Spare me.  Nobody in this forum bases their opinions on any kind of real political expertise, so we're all pretty much "bumper sticker politicians" here.  You being a cop (what kind of cop, exactly?) makes you no more of an expert than does me being a software engineer.

****I was dealing with right wing militia groups back in the early/mid 90's, my first training on terrorism was from an FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force years before 9/11. After 9/11 I gave up a dream job as a District Attorney's Investigator to go to work for the USG, where I developed material used in anti-terrorism training today. I received training in Open Source Intelligence gathering, OPSEC and Improvised Explosive Devices among other things. I've written threat assessments/risk analyses for various entities and have consulted as a terrorism SME for a join federal/local task force investigating a cold case related to terrorism.****

Quote
I get the feeling that your image of "the left" is some absurd caricature.

**Aside from reading leading left blogs and periodicals (I was reading "Mother Jones" back in the 80's, when I was young and gullible actually believed that garbage) and my time brushing up against academia (I'll someday post my paper "The American Male, Threat or Menace?" written for the professor that announced she was a lesbian-feminist and taught the Dworkin "rape-culture" theory in my class on sex crimes) I had an ex-girlfriend who was a model for current academic thought. She's teaching at a ivy league school the last I heard from her. So I know today's left very well from firsthand experience, not distant stereotypes.**

I agree that some of the stuff coming out of academia is pretty ridiculous (like some college in Southern California offering a class on YouTube as a social phenomenon?), but I would still argue that most of "the left" is regular working people who simply want to have a better life and some semblance of social justice.

****I'd cite California as exhibit A for the damage leftist ideas can do. "Social Justice" sounds nice, but is in fact just a marxist codeword for all sorts of bad policies that run counter to core American concepts.****

Quote
**The Kurds' lives are much, much better since Saddam's rule ended. Many other Iraqis are doing much better. Once upon a time, the American left was supposed to be about freeing the oppressed, which is what we did in Iraq. Why now does the left love and supprt monsters like Saddam today?**

Excuse me, but I recall that it was Reagan, Rumsfeld, Bush Sr, etc. and not "the left" that supported Saddam all throughout the 80s, most notably during the time when he was gassing Kurds and committing all the atrocities now cited as justification for our invasion.  That's a simple fact.

****Lost in your simplicity is that at that time the Cold War was center stage and Saddam was a useful foil to contain Iran's expansionist shiite jihad. Still, Saddam was much more of a client state of the Soviets than he ever was of ours.****

I've never met or spoken to any war protester that loved (or even slightly liked) Saddam, but I have heard some say (as well as many Iraqis) that life in Iraq under Saddam was preferable to life in Iraq under the current US occupation.  That's not love for Saddam but a simple statement of fact.  According to this article:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/26/AR2006092601721.html

Clear majorities of Iraqis (with the exception of the Kurds) want an immediate withdrawal of US forces.  Apparently (although I don't have a reference right now) smaller, but still pretty clear, majorities of Iraqis consider violent attacks on US forces to be justified.  Maybe there are "other Iraqis" who are doing better, but I think you're exaggerating their numbers.

****Wanting the US out is very different than wanting Saddam back. You have to view some of that through the arab cultural mindset. Iraq is complex and difficult, still I find where we are today to be a better position than leaving Saddam in place. I'd rather see Iraq develop into a halfway decent country rather than just install another dictator that would be useful for us in the short term. Certainly abandoning Iraq to Iran and Al Qaeda isn't a viable option.****
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: rogt on September 15, 2007, 03:35:03 PM
So all of a sudden every war we get into is another WW2?  They're all pretty much the same as you see it?

****No, much like WWII, we are in a fight for the survival of our nation and western civilization. Iraq is one front in that war. Why can't you see that?****

Sorry, but I don't buy this "one front" business.  Either Iraq was an actual, immediate threat or it wasn't.

Quote
Has the US ever been in a war that wasn't justified?  Or do our leaders just decide we need to go to war and that's all that matters as far as GM is concerned?

****No, unlike you I research and read source documents rather just tossing out slogans like "illegal war".****

Clearly you have no meaningful response, hence you resort to insults.  Clearly this is SOP for GM.

Quote
I'm not a lawyer, but as I understand it, international law is very clear about "aggressive war" (attacking a sovereign nation that hasn't attacked you) being a big no-no.  We either accept the authority of international law or we don't, but I don't see it as even debatable that we violated it.

****Again, what part of "violated the cease fire agreement" don't you understand?****

I don't recall Bush saying we had to go to war because Saddam violated a cease-fire.  I do recall him saying Iraq definitely had working WMD and was months away from having the capability to nuke us, both of which turned out to be complete BS.  Clearly this doesn't matter to you.

Quote
Spare me.  Nobody in this forum bases their opinions on any kind of real political expertise, so we're all pretty much "bumper sticker politicians" here.  You being a cop (what kind of cop, exactly?) makes you no more of an expert than does me being a software engineer.

****I was dealing with right wing militia groups back in the early/mid 90's, my first training on terrorism was from an FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force years before 9/11. After 9/11 I gave up a dream job as a District Attorney's Investigator to go to work for the USG, where I developed material used in anti-terrorism training today. I received training in Open Source Intelligence gathering, OPSEC and Improvised Explosive Devices among other things. I've written threat assessments/risk analyses for various entities and have consulted as a terrorism SME for a join federal/local task force investigating a cold case related to terrorism.****

That does sound like an interesting record.  I'm kind of surprised that somebody with your background seems so willing to take so many of our government's claims regarding Iraq, terrorism, etc. at face value.

Quote
I agree that some of the stuff coming out of academia is pretty ridiculous (like some college in Southern California offering a class on YouTube as a social phenomenon?), but I would still argue that most of "the left" is regular working people who simply want to have a better life and some semblance of social justice.

****I'd cite California as exhibit A for the damage leftist ideas can do. "Social Justice" sounds nice, but is in fact just a marxist codeword for all sorts of bad policies that run counter to core American concepts.****

Depends what you consider "core American concepts" I suppose.  Clearly you and I don't agree on what those are.  For a state as horrible as you seem to think California is, an awful lot of people pay a lot of money to live here.

Quote
Excuse me, but I recall that it was Reagan, Rumsfeld, Bush Sr, etc. and not "the left" that supported Saddam all throughout the 80s, most notably during the time when he was gassing Kurds and committing all the atrocities now cited as justification for our invasion.  That's a simple fact.

****Lost in your simplicity is that at that time the Cold War was center stage and Saddam was a useful foil to contain Iran's expansionist shiite jihad. Still, Saddam was much more of a client state of the Soviets than he ever was of ours.****

BS.  You guys love to cite "cold war expediency" as a catch-all excuse for all kinds of unsavory, un-American things we did back then.  I don't dispute that Saddam was a monster and thug, but where you and I disagree is that I think Rumsfeld, Bush Sr, etc. should also be made to answer for their crimes in supporting him.  Otherwise, all we've done is impose victor's justice.  But clearly that's not a problem for you.  After all, you never know when another Saddam will come along somewhere else who might be useful to us for a while, right?

Quote
Clear majorities of Iraqis (with the exception of the Kurds) want an immediate withdrawal of US forces.  Apparently (although I don't have a reference right now) smaller, but still pretty clear, majorities of Iraqis consider violent attacks on US forces to be justified.  Maybe there are "other Iraqis" who are doing better, but I think you're exaggerating their numbers.

****Wanting the US out is very different than wanting Saddam back.

To my knowledge, nobody on "the left" has ever called for reinstating Saddam in power.  Can you cite an instance of this?  Regardless, I think you'll agree that the probability of this happening now is exactly 0%.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 15, 2007, 03:58:45 PM
Rog: I don't recall Bush saying we had to go to war because Saddam violated a cease-fire.  I do recall him saying Iraq definitely had working WMD and was months away from having the capability to nuke us, both of which turned out to be complete BS.  Clearly this doesn't matter to you.

MD  Actually the failure of SH to live up to the conditions of the cease fire was exactly the point of Resolution 1441.  SH, reassured by the French that they would via the UN leash us from going in and apparently to bluff Iran, pretended to have/be developing WMD.  The blame for our getting it wrong is his-- not ours.

ROG:  That does sound like an interesting record.  I'm kind of surprised that somebody with your background seems so willing to take so many of our government's claims regarding Iraq, terrorism, etc. at face value.

MD:  Will that background and your surprise cause any shift in your thinking?  Why/why not?
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: rogt on September 15, 2007, 04:30:05 PM
Rog: I don't recall Bush saying we had to go to war because Saddam violated a cease-fire.  I do recall him saying Iraq definitely had working WMD and was months away from having the capability to nuke us, both of which turned out to be complete BS.  Clearly this doesn't matter to you.

MD  Actually the failure of SH to live up to the conditions of the cease fire was exactly the point of Resolution 1441.  SH, reassured by the French that they would via the UN leash us from going in and apparently to bluff Iran, pretended to have/be developing WMD.  The blame for our getting it wrong is his-- not ours.

I'm no senator or general and I was pretty sure Saddam didn't have any such capabilities.  No matter what he claimed, the UN weapons inspectors stated clearly that they found no evidence that he did.  I find it hard to believe that so many people in our government and intelligence agencies (who presumably know a lot more than me) could be so easily fooled.

Quote
ROG:  That does sound like an interesting record.  I'm kind of surprised that somebody with your background seems so willing to take so many of our government's claims regarding Iraq, terrorism, etc. at face value.

MD:  Will that background and your surprise cause any shift in your thinking?  Why/why not?

All I can say is that if GM wants to shift my thinking, he could include more verifiable facts (and maybe some interesting accounts of his own unique experiences) and less of the snide, backhanded comments and insults when making his points.  A little more "friends at the end of the day" spirit would also make me a little more open to his point of view.  :)
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: G M on September 15, 2007, 05:45:45 PM
So all of a sudden every war we get into is another WW2?  They're all pretty much the same as you see it?

****No, much like WWII, we are in a fight for the survival of our nation and western civilization. Iraq is one front in that war. Why can't you see that?****

Sorry, but I don't buy this "one front" business.  Either Iraq was an actual, immediate threat or it wasn't.

*****Bill Clinton believed Saddam was a threat. Lots of dems agreed. *****

http://www.house.gov/pelosi/priraq1.htm


Statement on U.S. Led Military Strike Against Iraq

December 16, 1998

As a member of the House Intelligence Committee, I am keenly aware that the proliferation of chemical and biological weapons is an issue of grave importance to all nations. Saddam Hussein has been engaged in the development of weapons of mass destruction technology which is a threat to countries in the region and he has made a mockery of the weapons inspection process.

The responsibility of the United States in this conflict is to eliminate weapons of mass destruction, to minimize the danger to our troops and to diminish the suffering of the Iraqi people. The citizens of Iraq have suffered the most for Saddam Hussein's activities; sadly, those same citizens now stand to suffer more. I have supported efforts to ease the humanitarian situation in Iraq and my thoughts and prayers are with the innocent Iraqi civilians, as well as with the families of U.S. troops participating in the current action.

I believe in negotiated solutions to international conflict. This is, unfortunately, not going to be the case in this situation where Saddam Hussein has been a repeat offender, ignoring the international community's requirement that he come clean with his weapons program. While I support the President, I hope and pray that this conflict can be resolved quickly and that the international community can find a lasting solution through diplomatic means.

******So, was Nancy supporting an illegal war when she supported Clinton's military strikes?*****

Quote
Has the US ever been in a war that wasn't justified?  Or do our leaders just decide we need to go to war and that's all that matters as far as GM is concerned?

****No, unlike you I research and read source documents rather just tossing out slogans like "illegal war".****

Clearly you have no meaningful response, hence you resort to insults.  Clearly this is SOP for GM.

******Pointing out your painful lack of knowledge isn't an insult, though if you wish to take it as one there is nothing I can do about it.*****

Quote
I'm not a lawyer, but as I understand it, international law is very clear about "aggressive war" (attacking a sovereign nation that hasn't attacked you) being a big no-no.  We either accept the authority of international law or we don't, but I don't see it as even debatable that we violated it.

****Again, what part of "violated the cease fire agreement" don't you understand?****

I don't recall Bush saying we had to go to war because Saddam violated a cease-fire.  I do recall him saying Iraq definitely had working WMD and was months away from having the capability to nuke us, both of which turned out to be complete BS.  Clearly this doesn't matter to you.

******Again, if you'll read http://www.c-span.org/resources/pdf/hjres114.pdf you'll see the official reasons we went into Iraq, not media soundbites.*****

Quote
Spare me.  Nobody in this forum bases their opinions on any kind of real political expertise, so we're all pretty much "bumper sticker politicians" here.  You being a cop (what kind of cop, exactly?) makes you no more of an expert than does me being a software engineer.

****I was dealing with right wing militia groups back in the early/mid 90's, my first training on terrorism was from an FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force years before 9/11. After 9/11 I gave up a dream job as a District Attorney's Investigator to go to work for the USG, where I developed material used in anti-terrorism training today. I received training in Open Source Intelligence gathering, OPSEC and Improvised Explosive Devices among other things. I've written threat assessments/risk analyses for various entities and have consulted as a terrorism SME for a join federal/local task force investigating a cold case related to terrorism.****

That does sound like an interesting record.  I'm kind of surprised that somebody with your background seems so willing to take so many of our government's claims regarding Iraq, terrorism, etc. at face value.

******I don't take anything at face value. I research. I can say that it's my opinion that the USG has a policy of downplaying/diminishing terror related incidents CONUS, which flies in the face of "Bush hypes terror for political gain" as he's often accused of. Again read the source documents. Read the indictment of OBL issued by the US DOJ in 1998 for interesting information concerning al Qaeda and Saddam.*****

Quote
I agree that some of the stuff coming out of academia is pretty ridiculous (like some college in Southern California offering a class on YouTube as a social phenomenon?), but I would still argue that most of "the left" is regular working people who simply want to have a better life and some semblance of social justice.

****I'd cite California as exhibit A for the damage leftist ideas can do. "Social Justice" sounds nice, but is in fact just a marxist codeword for all sorts of bad policies that run counter to core American concepts.****

Depends what you consider "core American concepts" I suppose.  Clearly you and I don't agree on what those are.  For a state as horrible as you seem to think California is, an awful lot of people pay a lot of money to live here.

*****Funny, I live in one of those western states that was serious impacted by Californians fleeing California. My opinion is that bad policies have California heading into a socioeconomic crisis of epic scale. I guess we'll see if i'm proven correct in time.*****

Quote
Excuse me, but I recall that it was Reagan, Rumsfeld, Bush Sr, etc. and not "the left" that supported Saddam all throughout the 80s, most notably during the time when he was gassing Kurds and committing all the atrocities now cited as justification for our invasion.  That's a simple fact.

****Lost in your simplicity is that at that time the Cold War was center stage and Saddam was a useful foil to contain Iran's expansionist shiite jihad. Still, Saddam was much more of a client state of the Soviets than he ever was of ours.****

BS.  You guys love to cite "cold war expediency" as a catch-all excuse for all kinds of unsavory, un-American things we did back then.  I don't dispute that Saddam was a monster and thug, but where you and I disagree is that I think Rumsfeld, Bush Sr, etc. should also be made to answer for their crimes in supporting him.  Otherwise, all we've done is impose victor's justice.  But clearly that's not a problem for you.  After all, you never know when another Saddam will come along somewhere else who might be useful to us for a while, right?

*****The real world requires choices between bad and worse more often than not. FDR allied himself with Stalin to beat Hitler, and Stalin was a monster. "If Hitler invaded hell I would make at least a favorable reference to the devil in the House of Commons." -Winston Churchill*****

Quote
Clear majorities of Iraqis (with the exception of the Kurds) want an immediate withdrawal of US forces.  Apparently (although I don't have a reference right now) smaller, but still pretty clear, majorities of Iraqis consider violent attacks on US forces to be justified.  Maybe there are "other Iraqis" who are doing better, but I think you're exaggerating their numbers.

****Wanting the US out is very different than wanting Saddam back.

To my knowledge, nobody on "the left" has ever called for reinstating Saddam in power.  Can you cite an instance of this?  Regardless, I think you'll agree that the probability of this happening now is exactly 0%.

******Michael Moore's portrayal of a wonderful, peaceful Iraq prior to the war is common with the left. As if there was no problem and then we attacked so Haliburton could get rich. Again, it's an illegal war then so were Clinton's military strikes.*****
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 15, 2007, 05:56:30 PM
"I find it hard to believe that so many people in our government and intelligence agencies (who presumably know a lot more than me) could be so easily fooled."

Well, the CIA missed the collapse of the Soviet Empire.  Intel failures are NOT a great rarity.  As has been noted here many times, MOST intel agencies thought it probable/plausible that SH had or was working on WMD.  The Dems thought so as long ago as 1998 when regime change became the official policy of the US govt.  C'mon Rog, how many times do you need to see the quotes of the various big name Dems during the Clinton administration who thought that SH had/wes going for WMD?  His failure to live up to his obligations to prove to the UN he had disposed of the WMD is precisely why there was an UN embargo!!!  Its precisely why the UN passed Resolution 1441!!! Yet for some reason which eludes logic you insist on trying to portray things as "I find it hard to believe that so many people in our government and intelligence agencies (who presumably know a lot more than me) could be so easily fooled."

Its things like this that lead some to despair of serious conversation with you.


Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: G M on September 15, 2007, 06:10:30 PM
http://www.fas.org/irp/news/1998/11/98110602_nlt.html

06 November 1998

****Who was President at this time?****

TEXT: US GRAND JURY INDICTMENT AGAINST USAMA BIN LADEN

4. Al Qaeda also forged alliances with the National Islamic Front in
the Sudan and with the government of Iran and its associated terrorist
group Hezballah for the purpose of working together against their
perceived common enemies in the West, particularly the United States.
In addition, al Qaeda reached an understanding with the government of
Iraq that al Qaeda would not work against that government and that on
particular projects, specifically including weapons development, al
Qaeda would work cooperatively with the Government of Iraq.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: G M on September 15, 2007, 06:23:05 PM
June 17, 2004, 8:40 a.m.
Iraq & al Qaeda
The 9/11 Commission raises more questions than it answers.


The 9/11 Commission's staff has come down decidedly on the side of the naysayers about operational ties between Saddam Hussein's regime and Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network. This development is already being met with unbridled joy by opponents of the Iraq war, who have been carping for days about recent statements by President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney that reaffirmed the deposed Iraqi regime's promotion of terror.

The celebration is premature. The commission's cursory treatment of so salient a national question as whether al Qaeda and Iraq confederated is puzzling. Given that the panel had three hours for Richard Clarke, one might have hoped for more than three minutes on Iraq. More to the point, though, the staff statements released Wednesday — which seemed to be contradicted by testimony at the public hearing within minutes of their publication — raise more questions than they answer, about both matters the staff chose to address and some it strangely opted to omit.

The staff's sweeping conclusion is found in its Statement No. 15 ("Overview of the Enemy"), which states:

Bin Laden also explored possible cooperation with Iraq during his time in Sudan, despite his opposition to Hussein's secular regime. Bin Laden had in fact at one time sponsored anti-Saddam Islamists in Iraqi Kurdistan. The Sudanese, to protect their own ties with Iraq, reportedly persuaded Bin Laden to cease this support and arranged for contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda. A senior Iraqi intelligence officer reportedly made three visits to Sudan, finally meeting Bin Laden in 1994. Bin Laden is said to have requested space to establish training camps, as well as assistance in procuring weapons, but Iraq apparently never responded. There have been reports that contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda also occurred after Bin Laden returned to Afghanistan, but they do not appear to have resulted in a collaborative relationship. Two senior Bin Laden associates have adamantly denied that any ties existed between al Qaeda and Iraq. We have no credible evidence that Iraq and al Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States.
Just taken on its own terms, this paragraph is both internally inconsistent and ambiguously worded. First, it cannot be true both that the Sudanese arranged contacts between Iraq and bin Laden and that no "ties existed between al Qaeda and Iraq." If the first proposition is so, then the "[t]wo senior Bin Laden associates" who are the sources of the second are either lying or misinformed.

In light of the number of elementary things the commission staff tells us its investigation has been unable to clarify (for example, in the very next sentence after the Iraq paragraph, the staff explains that the question whether al Qaeda had any connection to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing or the 1995 plot to blow U.S. airliners out of the sky "remains a matter of substantial uncertainty"), it is fair to conclude that these two senior bin Laden associates may not be the most cooperative, reliable fellows in town regarding what bin Laden was actually up to. Moreover, we know from press reports and the administration's own statements about the many al Qaeda operatives it has captured since 9/11 that the government is talking to more than just two of bin Laden's top operatives. That begs the questions: Have we really only asked two of them about Iraq? If not, what did the other detainees say?


Inconvenient Facts
The staff's back-of-the-hand summary also strangely elides mention of another significant matter — but one that did not escape the attention of Commissioner Fred Fielding, who raised it with a panel of law-enforcement witnesses right after noting the staff's conclusion that there was "no credible evidence" of cooperation. It is the little-discussed original indictment of bin Laden, obtained by the Justice Department in spring 1998 — several weeks before the embassy bombings and at a time when the government thought it would be prudent to have charges filed in the event an opportunity arose overseas to apprehend bin Laden. Paragraph 4 of that very short indictment reads:
Al Qaeda also forged alliances with the National Islamic Front in the Sudan and with the government of Iran and its associated terrorist group Hezballah for the purpose of working together against their perceived common enemies in the West, particularly the United States. In addition, al Qaeda reached an understanding with the government of Iraq that al Qaeda would not work against that government and that on particular projects, specifically including weapons development, al Qaeda would work cooperatively with the Government of Iraq.
(Emphasis added.) This allegation has always been inconvenient for the "absolutely no connection between Iraq and al Qaeda" club. (Richard Clarke, a charter member, handles the problem in his book by limiting the 1998 indictment to a fleeting mention and assiduously avoiding any description of what the indictment actually says.)

It remains inconvenient. As testimony at the commission's public hearing Wednesday revealed, the allegation in the 1998 indictment stems primarily from information provided by the key accomplice witness at the embassy bombing trial, Jamal Ahmed al-Fadl. Al-Fadl told agents that when al Qaeda was headquartered in the Sudan in the early-to-mid-1990s, he understood an agreement to have been struck under which the jihadists would put aside their antipathy for Saddam and explore ways of working together with Iraq, particularly regarding weapons production.

On al Qaeda's end, al-Fadl understood the liaison for Iraq relations to be an Iraqi named Mahmdouh Mahmud Salim (a.k.a. "Abu Hajer al Iraqi"), one of bin Laden's closest friends. (There will be a bit more to say later about Salim, who, it bears mention, was convicted in New York last year for maiming a prison guard in an escape attempt while awaiting trial for bombing the embassies.) After the embassies were destroyed, the government's case, naturally, was radically altered to focus on the attacks that killed over 250 people, and the Iraq allegation was not included in the superseding indictment. But, as the hearing testimony made clear, the government has never retracted the allegation.

Neither have other important assertions been retracted, including those by CIA Director George Tenet. As journalist Stephen Hayes reiterated earlier this month, Tenet, on October 7, 2002, wrote a letter to Congress, which asserted:

 Our understanding of the relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda is evolving and is based on sources of varying reliability. Some of the information we have received comes from detainees, including some of high rank.   We have solid reporting of senior level contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda going back a decade.   Credible information indicates that Iraq and Al Qaeda have discussed safe haven and reciprocal nonaggression.   Since Operation Enduring Freedom, we have solid evidence of the presence in Iraq of Al Qaeda members, including some that have been in Baghdad.   We have credible reporting that Al Qaeda leaders sought contacts in Iraq who could help them acquire W.M.D. capabilities. The reporting also stated that Iraq has provided training to Al Qaeda members in the areas of poisons and gases and making conventional bombs.   Iraq's increasing support to extremist Palestinians coupled with growing indications of relationship with Al Qaeda suggest that Baghdad's links to terrorists will increase, even absent U.S. military action.
Tenet, as Hayes elaborated, has never backed away from these assessments, reaffirming them in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee as recently as March 9, 2004.
Is the commission staff saying that the CIA director has provided faulty information to Congress? That doesn't appear to be what it is saying at all. This is clear — if anything in this regard can be said to be "clear" — from the staff's murky but carefully phrased summation sentence, which is worth parsing since it is already being gleefully misreported: "We have no credible evidence that Iraq and al Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States." (Italics mine.) That is, the staff is not saying al Qaeda and Iraq did not cooperate — far from it. The staff seems to be saying: "they appear to have cooperated but we do not have sufficient evidence to conclude that they worked in tandem on a specific terrorist attack, such as 9/11, the U.S.S. Cole bombing, or the embassy bombings."

Kabul...Baghdad...
The same might, of course, be said about the deposed Taliban government in Afghanistan. Before anyone gets unhinged, I am not suggesting that bin Laden's ties to Iraq were as extensive as his connections to Afghanistan. But as is the case with Iraq, no one has yet tied the Taliban to a direct attack on the United States, although no one doubts for a moment that deposing the Taliban post-9/11 was absolutely the right thing to do.
I would point out, moreover, that al Qaeda is a full-time terrorist organization — it does not have the same pretensions as, say, Sinn Fein or Hamas, to be a part-time political party. Al Qaeda's time is fully devoted to conducting terrorist attacks and planning terrorist attacks. Thus, if a country cooperates with al Qaeda, it is cooperating in (or facilitating, abetting, promoting — you choose the euphemism) terrorism. What difference should it make that no one can find an actual bomb that was once in Saddam's closet and ended up at the Cole's hull? If al Qaeda and Iraq were cooperating, they had to be cooperating on terrorism, and as al Qaeda made no secret that it existed for the narrow purpose of inflicting terrorism on the United States, exactly what should we suppose Saddam was hoping to achieve by cooperating with bin Laden?

Of course, we may yet find that Saddam was a participant in the specific 9/11 plot. In that regard, the commission staff's report is perplexing, and, again, raises — or flat omits — many more questions than it resolves.

Don't Forget Shakir
For one thing, the staff has now addressed the crucial January 2000 Malaysia planning session in a few of its statements. As I have previously recounted, this was the three-day meeting at which Khalid al Midhar and Nawaf al Hazmi, eventual hijackers of Flight 77 (the one that hit the Pentagon), met with other key 9/11 planners. The staff's latest report, Statement Number 16 ("Outline of the 9/11 Plot"), even takes time to describe how the conspirators were hosted in Kuala Lampur by members of a Qaeda-affiliated terror group, Jemaah Islamiah. But the staff does not mention, let alone explain, let alone explain away, that al Midhar was escorted to the meeting by Ahmed Hikmat Shakir.
Shakir is the Iraqi who got his job as an airport greeter through the Iraqi embassy, which controlled his work schedule. He is the man who left that job right after the Malaysia meeting; who was found in Qatar six days after 9/11 with contact information for al Qaeda heavyweights — including bin Laden's aforementioned friend, Salim — and who was later detained in Jordan but released only after special pleading from Saddam's regime, and only after intelligence agents concluded that he seemed to have sophisticated counter-interrogation training. Shakir is also the Iraqi who now appears, based on records seized since the regime's fall, to have been all along an officer in Saddam's Fedayeen.

Does all this amount to proof of participation in the 9/11 plot? Well, in any prosecutor's office it would be a pretty good start. And if the commission staff was going to get into this area of Iraqi connections to al Qaeda at all, what conceivable good reason is there for avoiding any discussion whatsoever of Shakir? At least tell us why he is not worth mentioning.

Prague Problem
One thing the staff evidently thought it was laying to rest was the other niggling matter of whether 9/11 major domo Mohammed Atta met with Iraqi intelligence officer Ahmed al-Ani in Prague in April 2001. The staff's conclusion is that the meeting is a fiction. To say its reasoning is less than satisfying would be a gross understatement. Here's the pertinent conclusion, also found in Statement Number 16:
We have examined the allegation that Atta met with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague on April 9 [2001]. Based on the evidence available — including investigation by Czech and U.S. authorities plus detainee reporting — we do not believe that such a meeting occurred. The FBI's investigation places him in Virginia as of April 4, as evidenced by this bank surveillance camera shot of Atta withdrawing $8,000 from his account. Atta was back in Florida by April 11, if not before. Indeed, investigation has established that, on April 6, 9, 10, and 11, Atta's cellular telephone was used numerous times to call Florida phone numbers from cell sites within Florida. We have seen no evidence that Atta ventured overseas again or re-entered the United States before July, when he traveled to Spain under his true name and back under his true name.
This is ground, again, that I've recently covered. To rehearse: Czech intelligence has alleged that Atta was seen in Prague on April 8 or 9, 2001. Atta had withdrawn $8,000 cash from a bank in Virginia on April 4 and was not eyeballed again by a witness until one week later, on April 11. The new detail added by the staff is that Atta's cell phone was used in Florida on three days (April 6, 9 and 10) during that time frame. Does this tend to show he was in Florida rather than Prague? It could, but not very convincingly. Telling us Atta's cell phone was used is not the same as telling us Atta used the cell phone.

Atta almost certainly would not have been able to use the cell phone overseas, so it would have been foolish to tote it along to the Czech Republic — especially if he was traveling clandestinely (as the large cash withdrawal suggests). He would have left it behind. Atta, moreover, had a roommate (and fellow hijacker), Marwan al-Shehhi. It is certainly possible that Shehhi — whom the staff places in Florida during April 2001 — could have used Atta's cell phone during that time.

Is it possible that Atta was in Florida rather than Prague? Of course it is. But the known evidence militates strongly against that conclusion: an eyewitness puts Atta in Prague, meeting with al-Ani; we know Atta was a "Hamburg student" and represented himself as such in a visa application; it has been reported that the Czechs have al-Ani's appointment calendar and it says he was scheduled to meet on the critical day with a "Hamburg student"; and we know for certain that Atta was in Prague under very suspicious circumstances twice in a matter of days (May 30 and June 2, 2000) during a time the Czechs and Western intelligence services feared that Saddam, through al-Ani, might be reviving a plot to use Islamic extremists to bomb Radio Free Europe (a plot the State Department acknowledged in its annual global terror report notwithstanding that the commission staff apparently did not think the incident merited mention).

I am perfectly prepared to accept the staff's conclusion about Atta not being in Prague — if the commission provides a convincing, thoughtful explanation, which is going to have to get a whole lot better than a cell-phone record.

What is the staff's reason for rejecting the eyewitness identification? Is the "Hamburg student" entry bogus? Since the staff is purporting to provide a comprehensive explanation of the 9/11 plot — the origins of which it traces back to 1999 — what is their explanation for what Atta was doing in Prague in 2000? Why, when the staff went into minute detail about the travels of other hijackers (even when it conceded it did not know the relevance of those trips), was Atta's trip to Prague not worthy of even a passing mention? Why was it so important for Atta to be in Prague on May 30, 2000 that he couldn't delay for one day, until May 31, when his visa would have been ready? Why was it so important for him to be in Prague on May 30 that he opted to go despite the fact that, without a visa, he could not leave the airport terminal? How did he happen to find the spot in the terminal where surveillance cameras would not capture him for nearly six hours? Why did he go back again on June 2? Was he meeting with al-Ani? If so, why would it be important for him to see al-Ani right before entering the United States in June 2000? And jumping ahead to 2001, if Atta wasn't using cash to travel anonymously, what did he do with the $8000 he suddenly withdrew before disappearing on April 4? If his cell phone was used in Florida between April 4 and April 11, what follow-up investigation has been done about that by the 9/11 Commission? By the FBI? By anybody? Whom was the cell phone used to call? Do any of those people remember speaking to Atta at that time? Perhaps someone would remember speaking with the ringleader of the most infamous attack in the history of the United States if he had called to chat, no?

Are these questions important to answer? You be the judge. According to the 9/11 Commission staff report, bin Laden originally pressed the operational supervisor of the 9/11 attacks, Khalid Sheik Mohammed (KSM), "that the attacks occur as early as mid-2000," even though bin Laden "recognized that Atta and the other pilots had only just arrived in the United States to begin their flight training[.]" Well I'll be darned: mid-2000 is exactly when Atta made his two frenetic trips to Prague immediately before heading to the United States to begin that flight training.

The commission staff next says, "n 2001, Bin Laden apparently pressured KSM twice more for an earlier date. According to KSM, Bin Laden first requested a date of May 12, 2001," and then proposed a date in June or July. Well, what do you know: all those dates are only weeks after Atta may have had some reason to drop everything and secretly run to Prague for a meeting with al-Ani.   
Or maybe it's just a coincidence.

— Andrew C. McCarthy, a former chief assistant U.S. attorney who led the 1995 terrorism prosecution against Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and eleven others, is an NRO contributor.


   
   
 


    
http://www.nationalreview.com/mccarthy/mccarthy200406170840.asp
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: G M on September 15, 2007, 06:36:18 PM
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/05/31/60minutes/printable510795.shtml


60 Minutes: The Man Who Got Away
May 31, 2002

(CBS) Abdul Rahman Yasin is the only participant in the first attempt to blow up the World Trade Center in 1993 who was never caught. Yasin, who was indicted in the bombing but escaped, was interviewed by CBS News' Lesley Stahl in an Iraqi installation near Baghdad last Thursday, May 23. Stahl's report appeared on 60 Minutes, Sunday June 2nd.

Abdul Rahman Yasin fled to Iraq after the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993. He lived as a free man for a year, but the authorities in Iraq tell CBS News they put him in prison in 1994. After 9/11, President Bush put Yasin on a new most wanted list, with a $25 million reward.

Yasin tells Stahl that the twin towers were not the terrorists' first choice. Ramzi Yousef, the so-called mastermind of the '93 attack, had something else in mind.

"[Yousef] told me, 'I want to blow up Jewish neighborhoods in Brooklyn.'" But after scouting Crown Heights and Williamsburg, Yasin says, Yousef had a better idea.

"Ramzi Yousef told us to go to the World Trade Center… 'I have an idea we should do one big explosion rather than do small ones in Jewish neighborhoods,'" Yasin says.

They figured the World Trade Center would serve as a more efficient target. "The majority of people who work in the World Trade Center are Jews," Yasin says.

U.S. officials say they never knew that Jewish neighborhoods in Brooklyn were on the original hit list of Yousef and his lieutenant, Mohammed Salameh.

Yasin, 40, says he is sorry for what he did and that the bombers, whom he said he met for the first time while living in a Jersey City apartment building, talked him into it.

"[Yousef and Salameh] used to tell me how Arabs suffered a great deal and that we have to send a message that this is not right … to revenge for my Palestinian brothers and my brothers in Saudi Arabia," Yasin tells Stahl. He adds that they also prodded him about being an Iraqi who should avenge the defeat of Iraq in the Gulf War.

Yasin confirms that Yousef was the maker of the bomb used in the attack and that Yousef learned the process in a terrorist camp in Peshawar, Pakistan, before entering the United States.

"He said that in Peshawar there were schools that taught" bomb-making.

Asked if he knew that Yousef had been trained to come to the United States as a terrorist to make bombs and blow things up, Yasin says, "I knew that after I started working with them."

Yasin was picked up by the FBI a few days after the bombing in an apartment in Jersey City, N.J., that he was sharing with his mother. He was so helpful and cooperative, giving the FBI names and addresses, that they released him.

Yasin says he was even driven back home in an FBI car.

60 Minutes has independently confirmed that the man interviewed is, indeed, Yasin, whose picture is on the FBI Web site along with Osama bin Laden, one of President Bush’s 22 most-wanted terrorists.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: G M on September 15, 2007, 06:42:48 PM
U.S.: Iraq sheltered suspect in '93 WTC attack
By John Diamond, USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — U.S. authorities in Iraq say they have new evidence that Saddam Hussein's regime gave money and housing to Abdul Rahman Yasin, a suspect in the World Trade Center bombing in 1993, according to U.S. intelligence and law enforcement officials.
The Bush administration is using the evidence to strengthen its disputed prewar assertion that Iraq had ties to terrorists, including the al-Qaeda group responsible for the Sept. 11 attack. But President Bush, in contrast with comments Sunday by Vice President Cheney, said Wednesday, "We've had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved."

Cheney had said on NBC's Meet the Press Sunday that "we don't know" if Iraq was involved but said some suggestive evidence had surfaced. He asserted that the campaign in Iraq is striking at terrorists involved in the attacks. Cheney also disclosed the new evidence about the 1993 suspect on the program, but he did not name Yasin.

Military, intelligence and law enforcement officials reported finding a large cache of Arabic-language documents in Tikrit, Saddam's political stronghold. A U.S. intelligence official who spoke on condition of anonymity said translators and analysts are busy "separating the gems from the junk." The official said some of the analysts have concluded that the documents show that Saddam's government provided monthly payments and a home for Yasin.

Yasin is on the FBI's list of 22 most-wanted terrorist fugitives; there is a $25 million reward for his capture. The bureau questioned and released him in New York shortly after the bombing in 1993. After Yasin had fled to Iraq, the FBI said it found evidence that he helped make the bomb, which killed six people and injured 1,000. Yasin is still at large.

Even if the new information holds up — and intelligence and law enforcement officials disagree on its conclusiveness — the links tying Yasin, Saddam and al-Qaeda are tentative.

The World Trade Center bombing was carried out by a group headed by Ramzi Yousef, who is serving a 240-year prison term. Federal authorities say Yousef's group received financial support from al-Qaeda via Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks. But a direct al-Qaeda role in the 1993 attack hasn't been established.

 

 
 
Find this article at:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2003-09-17-iraq-wtc_x.htm
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: rogt on September 15, 2007, 07:23:49 PM
\
******So, was Nancy supporting an illegal war when she supported Clinton's military strikes?*****

Absolutely.  You'll never hear me defending the Democrats.

Crafty writes:
Quote
As has been noted here many times, MOST intel agencies thought it probable/plausible that SH had or was working on WMD. 

But if it wasn't true, how is it possible that everybody in MOST intel agencies seriously believed it?  It just doesn't seem plausible to me, for many other reasons too.

Quote
The Dems thought so as long ago as 1998 when regime change became the official policy of the US govt.

You guys seem to think the Democrats are blind, stupid, evil, or all of the above 99% of the time (and frankly, I agree), but you clearly have no issues with them on their decision to support the war.  I consider them pretty much as complicit as Bush & co. in all of this, so don't expect what they "believe" to mean all that much to me.

Quote
Its things like this that lead some to despair of serious conversation with you.

Don't think the feeling isn't mutual here.  :)
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 15, 2007, 07:37:08 PM
"The Dems thought so as long ago as 1998 when regime change became the official policy of the US govt.


"You guys seem to think the Democrats are blind, stupid, evil, or all of the above 99% of the time (and frankly, I agree), but you clearly have no issues with them on their decision to support the war.  I consider them pretty much as complicit as Bush & co. in all of this, so don't expect what they "believe" to mean all that much to me."

The point under discussion at the moment is the belief that there was an unacceptable risk that SH had/was developing WMD.  My point is that, contrary to your original comment, it was NOT only the Bush White House that believed and propagaged this, but also included a remarkably broad and diverse spectrum intel agencies of many countries, the UN  :-o , 1998 Democrats, post 911 Republicans, etc
Title: Greenspan - a second class ass
Post by: ccp on September 15, 2007, 08:03:00 PM
I have to say this guy is one total jerk.

OK he claims Clinton is a towering intellect - like you guessed it - himself.

I gotta love this one:

"Greenspan interviewed Clinton for the book and clearly admires him. "President Clinton's old-fashioned attitude toward debt might have had a more lasting effect on the nation's priorities. Instead, his influence was diluted by the uproar about Monica Lewinsky." When he first heard and read details of the Clinton-Lewinsky encounters, Greenspan writes, "I was incredulous. 'There is no way these stories could be correct,' I told my friends. 'No way.' " Later, when it was verified, Greenspan says, "I wondered how the president could take such a risk. It seemed so alien to the Bill Clinton I knew, and made me feel disappointed and sad."

I am no towering intellect, yet I was not fooled by a blatant serial bull shit artist like Clinton for one second.  But alas, the greatest mind (in his own mind) of the Fed was fooled.  Well I guess this self serving jerk (didn't he sleep around with some Holywood starlets?) is not as sharp as he thinks.
Title: Republican power is ancient history soon
Post by: ccp on September 16, 2007, 08:32:08 AM
The high water mark for Republicans was 2000.  It may well be another 50 years before we see that party come back.  With the Latin wave it is government controlled by Democrats from here on in as it looks now:

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/DickMorrisandEileenMcGann/2007/09/14/dems_great_senate_hopes
Title: The more things change , , ,
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 24, 2007, 09:17:58 AM
“The mania for giving the Government power to meddle with the private affairs of cities or citizens is likely to cause endless trouble, through the rivalry of schools and creeds that are anxious to obtain official recognition, and there is great danger that our people will lose our independence of thought and action which is the cause of much of our greatness, and sink into the helplessness of the Frenchman or German who expects his government to feed him when hungry, clothe him when naked, to prescribe when his child may be born and when he may die, and, in time, to regulate every act of humanity from the cradle to the tomb, including the manner in which he may seek future admission to paradise.” —Mark Twain
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: DougMacG on September 25, 2007, 10:26:03 AM
Commenting on Crafty's quote of Mark Twain - Scary how true that became!  ... and

CCP's post of Republican trouble in the senate this year with Dick Morris' analysis:
"It may well be another 50 years before we see that party come back."

The senate may look bleak for Republicans in 2008 because of numbers and matchups, but the thin Democratic majority in the unpopular house is also up for re-election.  I see two scenarios: one, if conventional wisdom prevails and Hillary becomes President because of the demographics and momentum cited, then the electorate who seem to unconsciously support divided government could cross votes in the close swing districts.  If Hillary success is based on the model of her husband,then her party will likely be hurt down the ticket.

The other unmentioned scenario is that some Republican with a conservative message could win the contest of competing philosophies and thus win some coattails. 

Even if Republicans lose 3 seats in the senate, the majority still falls in the 51-59 seat range unable to do business without minority support.  The lessons of 2008 are not yet known, but almost every scenario I can see involves divided government.

I find Morris to be a polling and demographic expert, but his take on my state "liberal Minnesota" is half wrong.  Statewide elections have split about 50-50 over the last two decades.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 25, 2007, 11:24:41 PM
COLUMBIA'S LOSS
THE MESSAGE IT WON'T HEAR
 
What's Columbia afraid of? An ROTC cadet walking back to his dorm at Princeton. September 25, 2007 -- THE Iranian president's welcome to Columbia - following a self-serving whine by the university's president - reflected brainless activism, not academic freedom.
It was the professoriate imitating Hollywood's embrace of terrorists.

We hear a great deal about the dumbing down of students, but the real problem has been the dumbing down of the teaching class.

Yes, there's been a media fuss over President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's propaganda opportunity. But that just makes the faculty-lounge "heroes" feel even more self-righteous. Anyway, post-modern professors seek publicity, not knowledge.

And we give it to the weasels.

Meanwhile, Columbia denies our military's ROTC programs the chance to recruit and teach on campus - ostensibly because of the Congress-approved "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy. Of course, it's just a cultural issue when Ahmadinejad executes homosexuals (although, according to him, there aren't any in Iran).

The ban on ROTC isn't really about gay rights, though. The professors and student-activists behind it believe they're punishing the wicked, wicked Pentagon. Well, let me break the truth to Professor Bunkum: The military doesn't need Ivy League recruits. We're doing just fine without them, thanks.

The victims of the ban are students - who are denied one of the greatest career opportunities our country has to offer. Certainly, not every weenie scribbling a master's thesis on "Cold War-era gender oppression in Archie comics" is meant for a military career. But for the right student the chance to serve would be, literally, the chance of a lifetime.

For the sake of argument, let's set aside all talk of the rewards of serving a higher cause. Selfishly, a military career is an incredible chance for the right individual. My military friends and I can attest that no one ever retired from the Army thinking, Gee, I wish I'd spent my life selling time-shares in Orlando.

The richness of a career in uniform came home to me again a few weeks ago, when I had dinner with a just-retired Army buddy, Col. Tom Wilhem. We were celebrating: He'd recently bought his family their first it's-really-ours home near Ft. Leavenworth, Kan. (Worst of all, from the counter-culture perspective, Tom's family is intact, loving and happy.)

In his three decades of service, Tom had ridden ponies across the steppes and slept in Mongol yurts. He'd bow-hunted big game around the world, convinced the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders to entertain his troops in the Yugoslav ruins - and been chased through the mountains by a Russian helicopter gunship.

As we sat and reminisced, we hooted over the adventures of our other comrades - friends closer than any to be made in the civilian world. We recalled being the first Americans ever to touch remote spots of the globe. Between the two of us, we'd seen a hundred countries, watched multiple wars and helped shape national policies behind the scenes.

We'd stood on different sides of the Khyber Pass and gone on secret counter-drug operations, wandered through the African bush, penetrated fundamentalist-run refugee camps and survived more crises than Lindsay Lohan. Tom rode his antique motorcycle through tribal gun-battles. I'd dodged cobras while jogging in the Golden Triangle.

Talking with Tom conjured the scene in "Blade Runner" when the android played by Rutger Hauer drags Harrison Ford back up to the roof and, before expiring, tries to communicate the wonders he's seen: exploding galaxies and the death of worlds.

Tom and I may not have seen galaxies disintegrate, but we did see empires collapse, humanity torn asunder and the human condition far removed from the shopping mall. Along the way, we encountered realms of beauty far beyond any tourist's itinerary.

Graduates of Columbia will never know what they missed. My pals and I laugh about identity-crisis adults who pay to go on Outward Bound trips. The Army paid us to go.

Meanwhile, the punk egotism poisoning Ivy League faculties prevents even those students who wouldn't measure up to military standards from learning about the richness of the United States beyond the Peter Pan world of the campus. Ahmadinejad may be a Holocaust-denier, but Columbia's faculty denies our nation's history, determined to cast America as the villain.

The profs don't just despise our military - they despise you.

Well, the Army will go on, whether or not young men and women from Columbia, Harvard or Yale sign up to serve. But, thanks to hypocritical professors who want to "protect" them (are students enrolled at Columbia unable to think for themselves?), the Ivy grads will miss a chance to count something other than extra-marital affairs as great adventures.

Back in the 1960s, higher education stopped being about the students and became a theater for the Freudian insecurities of PhDs. In the '70s, their hysterics led to numerous campuses booting out ROTC programs.

The price paid by our military? We now have the best motivated, most professional and best educated armed forces in our history.

The result for the students? President Ahmadinejad - Israel-hater, religious fanatic and sponsor of terror - commands the stage at Columbia, where our veterans are unwelcome.

Who really loses?

Ralph Peters' memoir of his adventure travels in uniform, "Looking for Trouble" is due out next year.

Title: Cut and Paste Smear Points
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on October 11, 2007, 06:49:28 PM
Hmm, I'm overcome by a sense of déjà vu: dubious talking point snippets lifted from dubious sources are used in an ad hominen fashion to dismiss an author by attacking him or her, rather than speaking to the points they made. I know I've seen this somewhere before. . . .


October 11, 2007
Radical Islam's Willing Bloggers
By Patrick Poole

The burgeoning left wing smear industry, set up to manufacture attacks on conservatives, has its own radical Islam sector. I know this by personal experience.

Earlier this week I reported that a known HAMAS operative was scheduled to speak at the Ohio State Capitol later this month (see Thomas Lifson's related blog entry). Within hours, a leftist attack blogger affiliated with the Ohio Democratic Party had published an ad hominem broadside in response parroting talking points prepared by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).

Lenin used to crow about the West's "useful idiots" -- politicians, intellectuals and journalists who were either ideologically blinded or just plain stupid to not take Soviet Communism's drive to conquer the world seriously. But in the present war against Islamo-Fascism, some on the Left are more than duped, they appear to be in service to the radical Islamic agenda.

My article published Monday concerned the appearance of Anisa Abd El Fattah (her nom de jihad; lit. "Anisa, servant of the conquest") at an "interfaith" forum to be held in the Ohio Statehouse atrium on October 28th. Fattah previously headed an organization called the United Association for Studies and Research (UASR), which one convicted terrorist leader admitted was "the political command for HAMAS in the United States."  UASR was also founded by HAMAS deputy political director and Specially Designated Global Terrorist Mousa Abu Marzook. Fattah also co-authored two books with current HAMAS spokesman Ahmed Yousef, one of her former colleagues at UASR who fled the US in 2005 and immediately reappeared as part of the HAMAS leadership. She was also a paid consultant for more than a decade to convicted terrorist leader Abdurahman Alamoudi's American Muslim Council.

With breakneck speed, an attack piece posted by blogger Brian Guilfoos of Plunderbund appeared launching into a number of supposedly damning personal tidbits about me. Since I am such an evil character, Guilfoos argued, everything I said about this HAMAS operative must be false and driven by rampant Islamophobia. Classic ad hominem.

But there were two curious elements to this leftist attack blogger's post. The first is that all the information Guilfoos cited was contained in a dossier complied by CAIR and circulated by CAIR national vice-chairman Ahmad Al-Akhras (a Columbus-area resident). Al-Akhras and his associates have been circulating the CAIR dossier, which has gone through several editions, with a significant amount of personal information about me, including personal financial details, work history, and even information on my family members, to Ohio and Franklin County Democratic Party operatives and establishment media representatives. After I exposed an Al-Akhras business partner sitting on the county's Homeland Security oversight board, a position his associate was forced to resign from, Al-Akhras hired a student intern on a 90-day project to do nothing but opposition research on me (Al-Akhras solicited prospective candidates on a closed email list of local Islamic extremists, an email I obtained from an anonymous dissenting member of the list).
One amusing highlight taken from the first version of the CAIR dossier, dated July 24th and bearing Al-Akhras' name, is this insightful discovery:

A Hilliard, Ohio resident and a 1986 graduate of Hilliard Davidson High School. Patrick S. Poole is a self-described "writer" who is "single, straight, Protestant, a smoker and a drinker". [fn19]...On his MySpace, Mr. Poole has a total of ten "friends".
The fact that I'm overweight, balding, and wear glasses didn't make the dossier's final editor's cut, but there is allegedly much to be discerned by the fact that I have ten "friends" on MySpace (perhaps I need to accept more of those friend invites from "Candy", "Misty", and "Lula"?), and that I occasionally both drink and smoke. What escaped CAIR's notice, however, is that sometimes I smoke and drink at the same time! How deep does my infidelity run! I seriously wonder why Mr. Guilfoos didn't expound further on these stunning findings in CAIR's razor-sharp psychological profile of yours truly.

The other curious element to both Guilfoos' attack piece is that taxpayers may be footing the bill for his political blogging and for Al-Akhras to circulate CAIR's dossier. Most of Guilfoos' blog posts, all political-related, appear during business hours, when one might assume he should be tending to his job as systems analyst for the Ohio Supercomputer Center. Unless he works the graveyard shift, perhaps.

And emails I obtained through an Open Records Act request finds that CAIR's Ahmad Al-Akhras has been emailing copies of their dossier to political operatives during work hours when one might assume he was supposed to be tending to his job as assistant director of transportation for the Mid-Ohio Regional Planning Commission (MORPC). Another graveyard shift employee?

Both the Ohio Supercomputer Center (a division of the Ohio Board of Regents) and MORPC are publicly-funded institutions. Maybe someone should look into that? If someone does, they also might want to look into the multiple anti-Israel rallies Al-Akhras has organized and led at the Federal Courthouse in Downtown Columbus during business hours. Where can I get a job like that?

So what damning information did Guilfoos supposedly uncover about me? Did he obtain copies of my cancelled paychecks from the global Zionist conspiracy? Did he publish those much-rumored pictures of me wearing a dog collar and leash crouching at Mistress Ann Coulter's high-heeled feet? No such luck.

Apparently, my grave crime for which anything I say should immediately be deemed categorical lies is that I'm a Christian. And since I'm a Christian that takes my faith seriously, I must be a Christian Reconstructionist, and therefore want to overthrow the government and install a Christian theocracy, Guilfoos implies. He couldn't even be bothered to identify something I had actually said, but rather, connected me to something someone I know said 25 years ago, and concluded that "it is reasonable to believe that (they) share a number of opinions" without providing any evidence of this alleged agreement. And according to Guilfoos, I'm also connected to Sun Myung Moon by eight degrees! What further proof is needed?

He didn't even mention that I once worked for someone who worked for a major Christian Reconstruction writer three decades ago, though he's now a deacon in the Roman Catholic Church, which otherwise might ruin the narrative, except they can expand the conspiracy connecting me to both Sun Myung Moon and Pope Benedict! And to cap it all off, someone once spent 3,000 words describing how I was personally connected to the Illuminati conspiracy. How that didn't get included in CAIR's dossier and Guilfoos' attack piece is anyone's guess.

The problem with this CAIR-fed narrative is that I've been among the most active and public critics of Christian Reconstruction 2.0, known as "Federal Vision" theology. I've even gone so far as creating and editing for several years a website dedicated to challenging this most recent incarnation of Christian Reconstructionism. Furthermore, my own denomination, the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), of which I am an ordained officer, was the first to explicitly reject this theology in the 1980s, and just a few months ago overwhelmingly adopted a report harshly criticizing its newest manifestation.

It must be disappointing to Ahmad Al-Akhras and CAIR that after so much money they've spent researching my background and so much time spent poring through hundreds of my articles and blog posts, this is the best that they can come up with to attack me.

But with an immediate crisis at hand (my revealing of Fattah's appearance at the State Capitol), sometimes you have to go with what you've got. Fortunately, they have bloggers available on stand-by like Brian Guilfoos, who will present this "research" as their own.

Other leftist bloggers, such as the Cleveland Plain Dealer's Jill Miller Zimon have taken Guilfoos' story and embellished it further. Zimon comments that my reporting of the HAMAS operative appearing at the Ohio Statehouse is "baiting and particularly he uses Jews and Judaism and Israel in a way that many Jews never would". Like Guilfoos, she doesn't provide any evidence, of course, and I the only mention of "Jews and Judaism and Israel" were comments made by Fattah herself, but who needs evidence?

Patrick Poole is an occasional contributor to American Thinker, and also the Executive Director of Central Ohioans Against Terrorism.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2007/10/radical_islams_willing_blogger.html
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 18, 2007, 06:12:35 AM
WSJ

Gen. Sanchez's Scream
He indicted everyone involved in Iraq, including the media and Congress.

BY DANIEL HENNINGER
Thursday, October 18, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT

Over the past weekend there were front-page accounts everywhere of Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez's description of the war in Iraq as a "nightmare." The New York Times led its story this way:

"In a sweeping indictment of the four-year effort in Iraq, the former top commander of American forces there called the Bush administration's handling of the war 'incompetent' and said the result was 'a nightmare with no end in sight.' " Gen. Sanchez said this last Friday to a gathering of reporters and editors in Washington who cover military affairs. It was a dramatic denunciation from the man who led U.S. forces in Iraq from 2003 to 2004.

On Monday my colleague John Fund wrote an item for the Journal editorial page's daily email newsletter, Political Diary, noting that most of the news reports of the speech had failed to note that Gen. Sanchez had also severely criticized the press's performance in Iraq. "For some of you," Gen. Sanchez said to the reporters, "the truth is of little to no value if it does not fit your own preconceived notions, biases and agendas."

By now I was curious to see what Gen. Sanchez actually did say. The full text is an indictment all right, of everyone connected to this war--the president, the press, Congress, the bureaucracy and maybe the country itself.





Gen. Sanchez was running the U.S. war effort in Iraq when the Abu Ghraib scandal blew up, though an investigation absolved him.
It's possible to dismiss some of what he says as over the top or to cavil with the particulars. One cannot really know how extensively Gen. Sanchez's views are shared across the officer corps. But there is a discomfiting, Cassandra-like quality to this speech. It is a scream of rage.

Whatever happens in Iraq, this country at some point will have to think seriously (if possible) about the war's effects on its politics and its institutions. Gen. Sanchez's scream is as good a place as any to start.

With elided excerpts, I'll summarize what he said. Body armor recommended.

• The media. "It seems that as long as you get a front-page story there is little or no regard for the 'collateral damage' you will cause. Personal reputations have no value and you report with total impunity and are rarely held accountable for unethical conduct. . . . You assume that you are correct and on the moral high ground."

"The speculative and often uninformed initial reporting that characterizes our media appears to be rapidly becoming the standard of the industry." "Tactically insignificant events have become strategic defeats." And: "The death knell of your ethics has been enabled by your parent organizations who have chosen to align themselves with political agendas. What is clear to me is that you are perpetuating the corrosive partisan politics that is destroying our country and killing our service members who are at war."

• The Bush administration. "When a nation goes to war it must bring to bear all elements of power in order to win. . . . [This] administration has failed to employ and synchronize its political, economic and military power . . . and they have definitely not communicated that reality to the American people."

• Congress and politics. "Since 2003, the politics of war have been characterized by partisanship as the Republican and Democratic parties struggled for power in Washington. . . . National efforts to date have been corrupted by partisan politics that have prevented us from devising effective, executable, supportable solutions. These partisan struggles have led to political decisions that endangered the lives of our sons and daughters on the battlefield. The unmistakable message was that political power had greater priority than our national security objectives."

• The bureaucracies. Gen. Sanchez argues that "unity of effort" was hampered by the absence of any coordinated authority over the war effort of the bureaucracies: "The Administration, Congress and the entire interagency, especially the Department of State, must shoulder the responsibility for this catastrophic failure."

"Clearly," he says, "mistakes have been made by the American military in its application of power. But even its greatest failures in this war can be linked to America's lack of commitment, priority and moral courage in this war effort. . . . America has not been fully committed to win this war."

He says leaving Iraq is not an option, and he has no doubt about the threat: "As a nation we must recognize that the enemy we face is committed to destroying our way of life."

In sum, what Gen. Sanchez is describing here is a nation that is at risk and is in a state of disunity. Does disunity matter? He is saying that in war, it does.

In politics, a degree of disunity is normal. But in our time, partisan disunity has become the norm. The purpose of politics now is to thwart, to stop.

We may have underestimated how corrosive our disunity has been on the troops in Iraq, and how deeply it has damaged us.





Those of us in politics--politicians, reporters, bureaucrats--are largely inured to all this, and we seem to have assumed that the system shares our infinite capacity for antipathy and tumult. But is this occupational toughness natural to politics, or is it cynicism? I don't think the soldiers or the American people see the difference.
Arguably it is the proper role of politics to intervene, to question. But during Vietnam and again now, we haven't been able to avoid simultaneously putting troops on the battlefield while fighting bitterly amongst ourselves at home for the length of the war.

The U.S. officer corps is aware of this. While no one is talking about a stab in the back, they may conclude that the home front and its institutions are unable to, or will not, protect their back.

One may ask: Will we ever want to do this again? Are we able to undertake military missions that prove difficult? Or is the projection of U.S. military power into the world an idea that now irreparably divides the American people? Before November 2008, we had better have some answers, from our presidential candidates and from ourselves.


Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. His column appears Thursdays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.
Title: Disenfranchise the Religious Right to Kill
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on November 06, 2007, 09:45:08 AM
Orson Scott Card: Civilized Religion
The Rhinoceros Times, Greensboro, NC ^ | November 01, 2007 | Orson Scott Card


There are those who would like to tell you that no religion is civilized, but these tend to be people whose ignorance of history is so profound as to appear deliberate.

Human beings sometimes do terrible things, and when they do, they invariably find reasons to invoke their belief system, whatever it is, to excuse their bad behavior.

Thus Communists have committed their barbarities in the name of "the good of the people," just as Christians and Muslims and practically everybody else, when they decided certain people needed killing or oppressing, found a way to excuse themselves in the name of whatever they thought gave them superior authority.

In most cases, though, religions – particularly those with gods – also offer a mitigating force against violence and barbarity. While the conquistadors busily planted crosses wherever they decided native Americans needed enslaving, there were in fact Catholic priests who labored mightily – and with much success – to prevent as much mistreatment of the native people as they could, and to preserve what they could of their culture.

No one could seriously argue that the conquistadors conquered because of their purported Christian faith. But the fact that in almost every place the Spanish conquered, large populations of Indians survived, can be credited to Christianity.

That's because Christianity, like other civilizing religions, has an ideology that attempts to suppress warlike behavior and personal violence. So even though hypocrites could violate Christian doctrine and claim to be Christians while doing it, there were always Christians to openly contradict them, and the plain language of Jesus was on the side of those who abjured violence.

Sometimes, though, religion itself (whether or not it has any gods) becomes the actual cause of instead of the excuse for the barbarity. That is, the tenets of the religion promote rather than try to suppress violence and conquest.

It happens that at this moment we are at war with a worldwide terrorist conspiracy whose slaughters are excused by an appeal to actual doctrines in the religion of Islam.

That is, the plain language of the Quran justifies warfare and killing, and long tradition within Muslim culture takes those tenets literally. There are those who will claim that "Islam is a peaceful religion" and that jihad – holy war – is really about "personal struggle." I rejoice that some Muslims choose to take these passages in the Quran figuratively – but the language is there, and Islamofascist murderers of al Qaeda, Hamas, the Taliban, Hezbollah, and the theocratic government of Iran take it very literally.

Large portions of the people professing Islam believe that God has given them, not just the right, but the duty to kill people who, by their doctrines, "deserve" to die.

Freedom of Religion

The US Constitution guarantees freedom of religion, and while that has recently been twisted into an instrument of oppressing and suppressing American Christianity, it still stands as an American ideal.

Whatever dark deeds are in Christianity's past, the fact remains that with a few ugly exceptions, America has been a place where the various sects of Christianity and all other civilized religions have declared a truce.

Surely we can say that the essence of our freedom of religion is that every individual in the United States has the right to change his religion whenever and however he wants.

Except Muslims. Because it is the belief of Muslims throughout the world that it is the duty of good Muslims to kill any Muslim who converts to a different faith.

Now, most American Muslims would probably be outraged by that sentence. "I don't believe in killing people who convert away from Islam," they would insist. "We don't kill anybody."

But they cannot deny that the doctrine is widespread and openly taught throughout the Muslim world, and any American growing up Muslim is likely to be taught that doctrine at some point, by someone. And the more fundamentalist they become, the more likely they are to believe they have the duty to kill apostates – those that break the faith.

And this religion operates inside the United States, invoking the protection the Constitution provides to religions within its borders. Similarly, Islam operates in European nations with similar protections for religion.

To threaten to kill anyone who leaves an organization is one of the hallmarks of organized crime: Once you have joined the Mob, you don't leave it alive. Only with Islam, most of its members are born into it – they never had a choice. Yet if they decide they believe something other than Muslim doctrine, there will be Muslims who think it is their duty to kill them.

This brand of Islam denies its members any freedom of conscience.

No matter how moderate many American Muslims might be, there are among them many others who believe that no Muslim has the right to change religions. A "former Muslim" who is still breathing is an offense to them. So even the moderate Muslims who may believe in freedom are not free. They run the serious risk, if they ever leave Islam, of being murdered by one of the not-so-moderate Muslims.

So the question is: Does a religion that believes in denying freedom of religion to others deserve the same protection as religions that uphold freedom of religion?

No Constitutional Right Is Absolute

It is an established principle of constitutional law that none of the rights granted in the Constitution is absolute. Freedom of speech, for instance, has its limits. Civil libertarians may have struck down obscenity laws, thus legalizing four-letter words like f– and s– and c–; but the very same people enacted hate-speech and hate-crime laws, as well as laws against work-place discrimination, that in effect illegalize other words, like n– and k– and s– and w– and ... you get the idea.

Everybody knows that words are not just words, they are also actions, and some actions, even if they consist of words, can and should be banned by law.

The same is true of the right to freedom of assembly. You have to have a parade permit before you can obstruct traffic with your demonstration. And somehow the Supreme Court decided that it is constitutional to ban kneeling and praying too close to an abortion clinic.

Freedoms come with limitations and responsibilities, and the law recognizes this.

When it comes to freedom of religion, Mormons like me are keenly aware of the fact that there are well-established limits to what religions can do. Back in the 19th century, when the Mormon Church promoted the practice of polygyny (one man, multiple wives), the church tried and failed to get the Supreme Court to protect that practice under the freedom of religion clause in the Constitution.

The Supreme Court held on that occasion that the Constitution did not allow religions to engage in practices that were grossly offensive to the moral standards of the rest of the country. You can gather and preach and teach, but the moment you engage in a practice that offends public decency, limitations kick in.

How did the government enforce the anti-polygamy laws? The Mormon Church was disincorporated, its property seized (including church meetinghouses and temples), and its leaders arrested or driven into hiding.

States also got in the act. Idaho, with a large Mormon population, forbade anyone to vote or hold public office who believed in "celestial marriage" – in those days a doctrinal code-word for polygamy. Utah, in order to be admitted to the union, had to have a state constitutional ban that could never be amended, forbidding the practice of polygamy.

The Mormon Church capitulated with a manifesto in 1890 professing that we no longer taught or condoned plural marriage.

Still, there was a widespread perception that the Mormons would only pretend to adhere to the law, while secretly preaching and practicing polygamy. There were even Mormons who thought it was all a smokescreen to fool the outside world. But by 1907, it was clear to everyone that the church leadership was serious about eliminating polygamy as a practice and a teaching in the Church.

For the past hundred years, the fastest way to get kicked out of the Mormon Church is to preach or practice plural marriage. When TV shows like the ludicrous Big Love give the impression that the Mormon Church really condones polygamy, it is a lie.

Even when the Mormon Church goes into countries where polygamy is legal – many nations in Africa, for instance – polygamous converts to the church are required to separate from (while still providing support for) all wives except the first.

In order to be credible in our claim to have abandoned polygamy, we had to become the most anti-polygamist church in America – in the world. And we did, even if we still don't get much credit for it.

That's how a religion that is adjudged to be barbaric goes about civilizing itself to be worthy of the protection of the US Constitution.

Civilizing American Islam

Personally, I'm glad my church gave up polygamy long before I was born. But when I compare the Mormon practice of polygamy with the Muslim doctrine of killing apostates, I think it makes polygamy look a lot milder, don't you?

It is dangerous in the extreme for America to tolerate, as a religion, a group of people who openly preach – including to children and adolescents – that it is their unique right to kill those who leave their religion, and also unbelievers who act against their religion.

It's perfectly all right for a religion to preach and believe that someday their believers will cover the whole earth. A lot of Christians believe that, and so do a lot of Muslims, and that's fine – as long as you believe that this is to be accomplished either by voluntary religious conversion or by divine intervention.

People of one faith can coexist with people of any other faith as long as they all agree that each has the right to offer membership to anyone who comes to believe their doctrine, and to actively solicit such conversions.

You can hate it when someone converts away – you can hold a funeral for the person who converted. What you can't do is make the funeral literal rather than symbolic.

Right now, because the Church of Political Correctness is the established church of the American elite, Islam has had extraordinary tolerance for these dangerous, violent, anti-American doctrines that are frequently taught among them. Mostly they are in denial, pretending that American Muslims don't teach these things.

But even if only five percent of the imams are preaching the right-to-kill doctrine, it poses a direct danger to American citizens, since this is precisely the doctrine that justifies terrorist massacres as well as individual terrorism against Muslims who wish to leave that religion.

I bet that a significant number of American Muslims – maybe even most of them – would very much like to separate themselves from that doctrine and those who preach it.

But there are several reasons why this is very, very hard to do.

First, the Wahhabists of Saudi Arabia send enormous amounts of money to America and other countries all around the world, in order to support the teaching of their particular brand of Islam – which specifically teaches this dangerous, barbaric doctrine.

Second, Islam is not, strictly speaking, an organized religion. Since Islam has long asserted the right to govern and there is no separation of church and state, Muslim governments have been the only authorities that could determine what was and was not tolerable belief and practice. So in America and Europe, where Islam is not the governing power (yet), there is no authority that can say that this Muslim teacher or group is legitimate and that one is not.

It's Time for Islam to Organize

Let's suppose that the American government wakes up to the danger of extending the protection of the Constitution to all Muslims. Let's suppose a law was enacted stating that the laws respecting freedom of religion apply only to religions that allow freedom of conversion. If you do not allow any of your members age 18 or older to change religions without loss of life, liberty or property, then you get no protection from the Constitution.

We could go farther, and say because the government has a monopoly on the power (within constitutional limitations) to deprive citizens of life, liberty or property, then any religion that claims such rights, whether or not it can be proven to have acted on that claim, does not qualify as a religion when it comes to constitutional protections.

Nobody will be locked up or thrown out of the country just for being Muslim or believing or preaching Muslim doctrine.

But any Muslim congregation that has not rejected the right-to-kill doctrine must pay full taxes on its property and its members get no tax deduction for their contributions.

And those that actively taught the right to kill could be treated, like the Mormon Church once was, as a subversive organization, to be disincorporated, its property seized and its funds blocked.

Furthermore, the FBI will not be barred from observing and tracking members of congregations that have not rejected the right-to-kill doctrine as if they were members of subversive organizations – since they would be.

However, when such laws are enacted, there would be a grace period of a year in which American Muslim religious communities could join one or more national or regional certifying groups, rather like the various Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian and other national sectarian groups or conventions.

All the member congregations would attest that they would not tolerate any teaching of the right-to-kill doctrine in their mosques or among their membership – just the way the Mormon Church had to give up its practice of polygamy and stop teaching it anywhere in the church in order to be legally recognized.

Is This Un-American?

I can hear civil libertarians screaming: This is the government trying to dictate what people believe!

But it is nothing of the kind. It is the government declaring that its hands-off treatment of religion only applies to religions that also have a hands-off policy toward people who belong to or join with other religions.

It doesn't interfere with Muslims' right to convert other people to their faith, just with their ability to teach that Muslims have a "right" to kill people who convert away from Islam or who otherwise offend Muslim sensibilities.

There's no test oath, no spying on people's consciences. But American Muslim organizations have to have as their stated policy a repudiation of the widespread Muslim doctrine of a right or duty to kill infidels of any kind.

Nor would this target Islam specifically. Let this law apply to all religious groups equally: any religion that insists on teaching a right to kill would lose its legitimacy as a religion.

And don't kid yourself – we already have the IRS actively deciding what qualifies as a church when it comes to tax deductions. You can't just declare your home a religious meetinghouse and therefore exempt from property taxes. The IRS will insist that you meet certain (vague) standards.

This standard will be clear and universally applied, and any religion that can't sign it does not qualify as a civilized religion anyway.

But now I'll tell you the law that Muslims would like to have in force: No one can proselytize for any religion except Islam, under the severest penalties. That's the law in most Muslim countries.

If America enacts a law simply requiring Muslims (and all other religions) to reject any claim to have a right to kill unbelievers, you can bet there will be bloody riots all over the Muslim world. That's because, worldwide, Muslims believe that no one has a right to restrict them in any way, while they have the right to restrict everybody else right up to and including the death penalty.

This one-sided view is the opposite of the American way. It is the opposite of religious freedom. And any Muslims who claim the right to restrict others while accepting no restrictions themselves are a danger to every free society on earth.

It's Good for Islam, Too

The irony is that the right to kill is the doctrine that guarantees the corruption of Islam from the start. If people are only Muslims under fear of the death penalty, then how do we know there are any real Muslim believers at all?

Only when people are free to leave a religion can you take their claim to be true believers seriously.

So if America enacted such a law, then only in America would Islam exist in any kind of purity, because only in America would you be sure that anyone claiming to be Muslim really meant it and wasn't saying it for fear of some other Muslim killing him.

Remember when Salman Rushdie was put under a death penalty by the Iranian ayatollahs? I remember that people were shocked when one-time rock star Cat Stevens, a convert to Islam, publicly stated that of course Muslims had a duty to kill apostates like Rushdie.

But Cat Stevens was merely speaking the openly taught doctrine. And because he had freely converted to Islam, he apparently didn't mind.

But we should mind, not as Christians or Jews, but as Americans – and as civilized people. We believe that the only people who should have the power to take life, deny liberty, or seize property are those who have been certified by governments elected by the majority of citizens.

Right from the beginning, Islam has been a barbaric force in the world – invading "infidel" nations and oppressing unbelievers in every land they conquer. There is no such thing as a Muslim nation that was not forcibly converted in the first instance. Islam has been anti-freedom from the start. Its famous "tolerance" of Jews and Christians would be regarded as vile intolerance if anyone proposed such policies today, in a free Western country.

It is time for Islam to join the civilized world – the world where people can preach for and believe in and join with, argue against and doubt and quit any religion they want. Freedom of religion is a recent and hard-won concept, so it would be absurd to criticize Islam for being a few hundred years behind the West on this issue.

However, the time has come, with people committing barbaric crimes around the world in the name of the Muslim right-to-kill doctrine, for the peaceful majority of Muslims to commit to their opposition to that doctrine – and to organize themselves so that they can excommunicate (disqualify as Muslims) any Muslim who does not reject that teaching.

Up to now, the only way that Muslims could kick a Muslim out of the Muslim faith was to kill him. It's time for them to set up an authoritative mechanism to allow them to excommunicate those who make all Muslims look barbaric.

Then, when Muslims themselves are able to excommunicate the barbarians and forbid them to call themselves legitimate Muslims, the religion of Islam can be accepted and trusted as another civilized religion, worthy of the protections of the Constitution.

Meanwhile, however, it is time for us to stop extending the protection of the Constitution to those who, under the guise of religion, are actively promoting the right to deprive Americans of their civil rights – including the right to continue breathing.

http://greensboro.rhinotimes.com/1editorialbody.lasso?-token.folder=2007-11-01&-token.story=166096.112113&-token.subpub=
Title: The Hearts & Minds myth
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 07, 2007, 09:32:45 AM

The hearts-and-minds myth
Sorry, but winning means killing
By Ralph Peters
Mastering the languages, cultural nuances, beliefs and taboos that prevail in a theater of war, area of operations or tactical environment is vital to military success. It's much easier to kill people you understand.
Beyond that, cultural insights ease routine operations and negotiations, the training of local forces and the development of intelligence. Environmental mastery helps us avoid making unnecessary enemies. But that is where the advantages end in conflicts of blood and faith: No amount of cultural sensitivity inculcated in U.S. troops will persuade fanatic believers to discard their religion, nor can any amount of American empathy change a foreign thug's ethnic identity.

Frustrated with the difficulties facing us in Iraq after being denied both adequate troop strength and the authority to impose the rule of law in the initial days of our occupation, U.S. military commanders responded with a variety of improvisations, from skillful "kinetic ops" to patient dialogue. Nothing achieved enduring results — because we never had the resources or the fortitude to follow any effort through to the end, and our enemies had no incentive to quit, surrender or cooperate. We pacified cities with force but lacked the forces to keep them pacified. We rebuilt schools, but our enemies taught us how easy it was to kill teachers. Accepting that it was politically impossible on the home front, we never conducted the essential first step in fighting terrorists and insurgents: We failed to forge a long-term plan based on a long-term commitment. Instead, we sought to dissuade fanatics and undo ancient rivalries with stopgap measures, intermittent drizzles of money and rules of engagement tailored to suit the media, not military necessity.
 

It is astonishing that our efforts have gone as well as they have.
Yet no honest soldier or Marine would argue that we could not have done better — and should have done better. Setting aside, for now, the inept leadership from the Rumsfeld Pentagon and the fateful, if not fatal, lack of adequate troop strength, we're left with one crippling deficiency on the part of our leadership: The unwillingness to recognize the nature of the various conflicts underway simultaneously in Iraq.
With an obtuseness worthy of the left's caricatures of military officers, we drew the wrong lessons from the wrong historical examples, then did exactly the wrong things. Enmeshed in bitter conflicts over religion and ethnicity resurgent after decades of suppression, senior officers ignored myriad relevant historical examples and focused instead on the counterinsurgency campaigns with which they were comfortable — and that were as instructive as dismantling a toaster to learn how to fix a computer.

Reality's delete key
Officers looked to operations in Malaya, Vietnam, Northern Ireland and, occasionally, Algeria for positive and negative examples. Yet not one of those political struggles is relevant to the situation in Iraq (or Afghanistan). As for the pertinent examples of insurgencies rooted in religious or ethnic fanaticism, such as the Moro Insurrection, Bloody Kansas, the Sepoy Mutiny, the Mahdist Wars, the various European Anabaptist risings, the Thirty Years' War, the Armenian Genocide, Nagorno-Karabagh, the destruction of Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Kashmir, the Pueblo Revolt, the Ghost-Dance Rebellion, 1,300 years of uninterrupted warfare between the Islamic and Judeo-Christian civilizations, and several thousand other examples dating back to the savagery chronicled in the Old Testament; well, the lessons they suggest are, to say the least, politically incorrect. So we hit the delete key on reality.
Our civilian and uniformed leaders have engaged in comforting fantasies about the multilayered conflicts we're in, while speaking in numbing platitudes. Now we're back to "winning hearts and minds."
We can't do it. Not in the Islamic world. Arabs — Sunni or Shiite, in Iraq and elsewhere — are so battered psychologically that many need to blame the West, Israel, unbelievers, Shiites, Sunnis, Kurds and the ice-cream man for their failures. Any chance we had of winning the minds, if not the hearts, of the biddable minority in Iraq was thrown away when we failed to enforce the rule of law the moment Baghdad fell. Proclamations of American generosity fall short when you cannot walk your neighborhood streets without fear.

Even with the limited forces we had on hand three-and-a-half years ago, we could have done more. But the Bush administration and our military leaders had fallen into the politically correct trap that spares the murderer at the expense of his victims. We weren't ready to kill enough of the right people. As a result, our enemies have been able to spend more than three years killing the people we meant to liberate. Our reluctance to kill evil men proved murderous to innocent men, women and children, and our unwillingness to do what needed to be done leaves us at least partly responsible for the thousands of Iraqis killed and maimed by acts of terrorism — as well as for our own unnecessary losses.
The law of war is immutable: Those unwilling to pay the butcher's bill up front will pay it with compound interest in the end.
Mush, not rigor

The new counterinsurgency doctrine the Army and Marines are developing gets the language right initially, noting that no two insurgencies are identical and that each must be understood on its own terms. Then it veers into nonsense, typified by the insupportable claim that a defection is always better than a surrender, a surrender is always better than a capture and a capture is always better than a kill. That's intellectual mush. And it's just plain wrong.
It's Malaya again, with doughty Brits hacking through the jungle to pip-pip-wot-ho those wily communists. It's Kit Carson Scouts in Vietnam and faithful Montagnards. It's the PX at Tan Son Nhut air base (oops, almost wrote "Balad"). It's the nonveteran John Wayne starring in "The Green Berets" and proving beyond any doubt that all good Vietnamese instinctively loved Americans and dreamed of drinking Cokes in suburban freedom. It's Mel Gibson reprising Pickett's Charge in the Ia Drang valley — and winning this time!

The well-intentioned drafters of our counterinsurgency doctrine are mining what they've recently read without serious analysis. Do they really believe that a Sunni Arab insurgent in Kirkuk is going to see the light and declare that, from now on, he's a Kurd? Or that a Shiite militiaman in the Mahdi Army is going to wake up and decide, "Twelfth Imam, Shmim-mam! I'm going to become a Sunni and move to Ramadi!"? Does anyone outside the nuthouse political left really believe that friendly persuasion will disarm al-Qaida in Iraq? Isn't a crucial lesson of Guantanamo that irredeemable prisoners are a strategic liability?
Our doctrine writers are in danger of producing a tome on procreation that doesn't mention sex.
We are in the middle of a multilayered, multisided struggle for supremacy between intolerant religious factions and age-old ethnic rivals. And we pretend that it's just another political struggle amenable to a political solution — because it's more pleasant to think so, because we believe we know what to do in such circumstances, because facing reality would force us to drastically change the way we behave in combat, and because acknowledging the truth about the situation in Iraq would demand that we question every goofball cliché about the human preference for peace that we've bought into for the past half-century.
Yet, unless we accept the truth about the kind of wars we're in — and inevitably will face in the future — we're going to continue to make a botch of things.

Blood ties, bloody gods
The political insurgencies of the last century were easy problems compared to this century's renewed struggles of blood and belief. In political insurgencies, some of the actors can, indeed, be converted. A capture may be better than a kill. Compromise may be possible. Dialogue is sometimes a useful tool, although even political insurgencies are best resolved from a position of indisputable military strength. Men who believe, often hazily, in an ideology occasionally can be converted — or bought. The political beliefs of the masses are fickle. Defeats discourage those with mundane goals. And a political struggle within a population otherwise united by its history can end in reconciliation even after horrible bloodshed — as in the American Civil War, the Risorgimento, the gruesome Mexican revolutions of 1910-20 and the civil wars in Vietnam, Greece and many another gore-drenched, relatively homogeneous states.
Violence arising from differences of religious confession, race or ethnicity is profoundly different — and far more difficult to quell. Generally, such struggles are brought to an end only through a great deal of killing. One side — or all — must be bled out. Whether cast as divinely sanctioned liberation struggles or simply about one bloodline getting its own back from another, these conflicts over God's will and ancestral wrongs are never amenable to reason. Self-righteous journalists love to claim that the first casualty of war is truth, but that's a self-serving lie; the first casualty of any form of violence is reason, that weakest and most disappointing of learned human skills.
__________________
Our exclusive focus on recent political insurgencies misleads us, because wars over tribe and God are humankind's oldest legacy, while the conflicts we choose to study all fall within a brief historical interval that stands as an aberration — the twilight decades of the Age of Ideology, which ran from 1775 to 1991, a blink in historical terms. Now we have reverted to the human norm of killing one another over interpretations of the divine will and ancient blood ties. We don't have to like it — and we won't — but we must recognize the reality confronting us. We have returned to the historical mainstream. The tribes want tribute. The gods want blood. And the killers are ready to help.

The road to Srebrenica was paved with pious platitudes, the path to 9/11 with wishful thinking. Presidents and generals may declare endlessly that we're not engaged in a religious war or that ethnic factions can be reconciled, but the first claim is a lie and the second relies for its fulfillment on intrusive military power and a strength of will greater than that of the factions in question. We are, indeed, engaged in religious wars — because our enemies have determined that these are religious wars. Our own refusal to understand them as such is just one more debilitating asymmetry. As for ethnic reconciliation, call me when Kosovo's Muslims and Serb Christians reintegrate their communities, form joint neighborhood-watch committees and vote for each other's political candidates (and check the ingredients of the casserole that Ivo's wife brought to the potluck, nonetheless).

Blood and budget deficits
If we want achievements commensurate with the risks we undergo and the costs we pay in blood and budget deficits, we must overcome our revulsion at the truth. Saying nice things about war to please the media or to placate noisome academics is useless, anyway, because they'll always oppose what the U.S. government does — even when, as with a dictator's overthrow and a war of liberation, our government implements the left's long-standing agenda. We must stop belching out chipper slogans and fleeing to simplistic models for answers. We have to start thinking beyond our moral comfort zones. When generals lack intellectual integrity, privates die for nothing.
Above all, we must regain our perspective on what truly matters. We must get over our impossible dream of being loved as a nation, of winning hearts and minds in Iraq or elsewhere. If we can make ourselves liked through our successes, that's well and good. But the essential requirements for the security of the U.S. are that our nation is respected and our military is feared. Our lack of resolve and mental rigor has brought us close to sacrificing both of these advantages. And a nation that is not respected encourages foreign chicanery, while a military that is not feared invites attack.

The Marine Corps entered Iraq with a motto that captured the essence of what our efforts should have involved: "No better friend, no worse enemy." That restatement of the carrot-and-stick approach to military operations expressed in simple terms how to fight just about any kind of enemy — including insurgents and terrorists. The problem is that no American leader, in uniform or in a $3,000 suit, lived up to the maxim consistently. Instead, we applied it in fits and starts as we tried to make friends with our enemies. In the clinch, we defaulted to the carrot.
Consider how many potential turning points we missed: We failed to enforce the rule of law while all Iraq was terrified of us and anxious for clear orders. We failed to occupy the predictable trouble spots early on and in force. We failed to display sufficient imagination and courage to break up the artificial country we inherited from Saddam Hussein and a pack of Europeans at Versailles. With our typical dread of short-term costs, we passed up repeated and justified chances to kill Muqtada al-Sadr, inflating his image in the process — and paying a far higher price in the long term than we would have paid had we acted resolutely and promptly. We needed Henry V and got Hamlet. Our leaders fled from victory in the First Battle of Fallujah. Now an administration with a flagging will is determined to withdraw our troops prematurely — Mission Accomplished, Act II. And all the while our soldiers and Marines have paid the price — while re-enlisting to pay it again and again.
Our men and women in uniform deserve better. They're dying not only of roadside bombs but of phony morality imposed by those who face no risks themselves. Spare a terrorist, kill a soldier. Spare a terrorist leader, kill our soldiers by the hundreds.

We want to treat a country torn by rival visions of a punitive god and drenched in ethnic bloodshed as if it needs only a bit of political tinkering. We're not looking for exit strategies, just exit excuses.
The longer we wait to study and learn from the relevant conflicts of the past, the more American blood we'll squander. We have to be tough on ourselves, forcing each other to think beyond the deadly platitudes of the campus, the campaign trail and the press briefing. Begin by listing the number of religion-fueled uprisings throughout history that were quenched by reason and compromise — call me collect if you find a single one. Then list the ethnic civil wars that were solved by sensible treaties without significant bloodshed. Next, start asking the really ugly questions, such as: Hasn't ethnic cleansing led to more durable conditions of peace than any more humane approach to settling power relations between bloodlines? Monstrous as it appears, might not the current neighborhood-by-neighborhood ethnic and confessional cleansing in Iraq make that country more, rather than less, likely to survive as a confederation? Shouldn't we be glad when fanatics kill fanatics? Are all successes in the war on terrorism merely provisional? Is this a struggle that unquestionably must be fought by us but that began long before our country existed and will continue for centuries to come? Is there a historical precedent for coping with violent religious fanatics that does not include bloodshed to the point of extermination?

Even beyond these military and strategic issues, deeper questions about humanity — the individual and the mass — await serious minds. The one useful result of the coming generations of fanaticism will be to rid our own cultural bloodstream of the poison of political correctness, white lies that lead to black results. Why does humankind love war? And yes, the word is "love." Does religious competition have biological roots? Is the assertion of ethnic supremacy as natural as the changing of the seasons? Is genocide in our genes? We do not have to celebrate unpleasant answers, but, if humanity is ever to make the least progress in reducing mass violence, we need to face those answers honestly.
The American military knew how to deal with conflicts of blood and faith. But we do not study our own history when the lessons make us uneasy. During the Moro Insurrection, the U.S. Army lived up to the Marine Corps' motto for Operation Iraqi Freedom. For the peaceful inhabitants of the southern Philippines, our soldiers and administrators were benefactors. For the Moro warriors, they were the worst enemies those fanatics had ever faced. Of course, we didn't have CNN filming our Gatling guns at work, but, then, we may need to banish the media from future battlefields, anyway. Our brutal response to the brutality of Muslim fanatics kept the peace until the Japanese invasion four decades later. And no peace lasts forever — four decades qualifies as a big, big win.

The religious movement that fired the Boxer Rebellion could only be put down through massacre. The same need to rip the heart out of violent millenarian movements, enabling societies to regain their balance, applied from 1520s Germany and 1840s China through the 19th-century Yucatan and the Sudan, down to the Islamist counterrevolution today. Only massive killing brought peace. Only extensive killing will bring peace.
We need to grasp the basic truth that the path to winning the hearts and minds of the masses leads over the corpses of the violent minority. As for humanitarianism, the most humane thing we can do is to win our long struggle against fanaticism and terrorism. That means killing terrorists and fanatics.
__________________
Title: Noonan
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 16, 2007, 06:29:49 AM
On Setting an Example
Being a "beacon to the world" is more challenging than it sounds.

Friday, November 16, 2007 12:01 a.m. EST

I thought I'd say a word for the Beaconists.

This election year we will, sooner or later, be asked to think about, and concentrate on, what American foreign policy should be in the future. We will have to consider, or reconsider, what challenges we face, what the world really is now after the Cold War and after 9/11, what is needed from America, and for her.

In some rough and perhaps tentative way we will have to decide what philosophical understanding of our national purpose rightly guides us.

Part of the debate will be shaped by the tugging back and forth of two schools of thought. There are those whose impulses are essentially interventionist--we live in the world and must take part in the world, sometimes, perhaps even often, militarily. We are the great activist nation, the spreader of political liberty, the superpower whose meaning is made clear in action.

The other school holds profound reservations about all this. It is more modest in its ambitions, more cool-eyed about human nature. It feels more bound by the old advice attributed to one of the Founding Generation, that we be the friend of liberty everywhere but the guarantor only of our own.

Much has changed in the more than two centuries since he said that: many wars fought, treaties made, alliances forged. And yet as simple human wisdom, it packs a wallop still.

Those who feel tugged toward the old Founding wisdom often use the word "beacon." It is our place in the scheme of things, it is our fate and duty, to be a beacon of liberty. To stand tall and hold high the light. To be an example, to be an inspiration, to encourage. We do not invent constitutions and impose them on other countries; instead they, in their restlessness, in their human desire to achieve a greater portion of freedom, will rise up in time and create their own constitution. And because they created it, and because it reflects their conception of justice, they will hold it more dearly.

So we are best, in the world as it is now, the beacon, not the bringer, of freedom. We are its friend, not its enforcer.

As a foreign policy this sounds, or has been made to sound, unduly passive. We'll sit around being a good example and the rest of them can take a hike. But if you want to be a beacon, it's actually a hard job. It involves activism. You can't be a beacon unless as a nation you're in pretty good shape. You can't be a beacon unless you send forth real light. You can't be a beacon unless you really do inspire.

Do we always? No. We're not always a good example for the world. And so, for the coming holiday, a few baseline areas, some only stylistic, in which we could make our light glow brighter in--and for--the world.





It would be good to have the most visible symbols of our country, the president and the Congress, be clean. So often they seem not to be. They are scandal-ridden, or an embarrassment, or seem in the eyes of the world to be bought and paid for by special interests or unions or industries or professions. Whether you are liberal or conservative, you agree it is important that the world be impressed by America's leaders, by their high-mindedness and integrity. Leaders who are not dragged through the mud because they actually don't bring much mud with them. There is room for improvement here.
To be a beacon is to speak softly to the world, with dignity, with elegance if you can manage it, or simple good-natured courtesy if you can't. A superpower should never shout, never bray "We're No. 1!" If you're No. 1, you don't have to.

To be a beacon is to have a democracy in which issues of actual import are regularly debated. Instead our political coverage consists of daily disquisitions on "targeted ads," "narratives," "positioning" and "talking points." We really do make politicians crazy. If a politician cares only about his ads and his rehearsed answers, the pundits call him inauthentic. But if a politician ignores these things to speak of great issues we say he lacks "fire in the belly" and is incompetent. So many criticisms of politicians boil down to: He's not manipulating us well enough! We need more actual adults who are actually serious about the business of the nation.

To be a beacon is to keep the economic dream alive. We're still good at this. The downside is the rise in piggishness that tends to accompany prosperity. It is not good to embarrass your nation with your greed. It disheartens those who are doing their best but are limited, or unlucky, or just haven't made it work yet. It is good when you have it not to keep it all but to help the limited, and unlucky, and those who just haven't made it work yet. Keep it going, Porky.

To be a beacon is to continue another thing we're good at, making the kind of citizens who go into the world and help it: the doctors, the scientists, the nurses. They choose to go and help. The world notices, and says, "These are some kind of people, these Americans."

To be a beacon is to support the creation of a culture that is not dark, or sulfurous, or obviously unwell. We introduce our culture to our new immigrants each day through television. Just for a moment, imagine you are a young person from Africa or South America, a new American. You come here and put on the TV, for even the most innocent know that TV is America and America is TV, and you want to learn quickly. What you see is an obvious and embarrassing obsession with sex, with violence, with sexual dysfunction. You see the routine debasement of women parading as the liberation of women.





Conservatives have wrung their hands over this for a generation. But really, if you are a new immigrant to our country, full of hope, animated in part by some sense of mystery about this country that has lived in your imagination for 20 years, you have got to think: This is it? This ad for erectile dysfunction? Oh, I have joined something that is not healthy.
Sad to think this. They want to have joined a healthy and vibrant and well-balanced nation, not a sick circus.

I haven't even touched upon poverty, the material kind and the spiritual kind. I haven't touched on a lot. But if we were to try harder to be better, if we were to try harder to be and seem as great as we are, we wouldn't have to bray so much about the superiority of our system. It would be obvious to all, as obvious as a big light in the darkness.

To be a brighter beacon is not to choose passivity, or follow a path of selfishness. It would take energy and commitment and thought. We've always had a lot of that.

A happy Thanksgiving to all who love the great and fabled nation that is still, this day, the hope of the world.

Ms. Noonan is a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal and author of "John Paul the Great: Remembering a Spiritual Father" (Penguin, 2005), which you can order from the OpinionJournal bookstore. Her column appears Fridays on OpinionJournal.com.

Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 22, 2007, 02:39:22 PM
Back in August, this speech from Newt:

http://edition.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/08/08/gingrich/index.html#cnnSTCVideo

(click the video, the article next to it is quite different)
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 04, 2007, 08:41:04 AM
Islam and Teddy Bears
December 4, 2007

Sudan's President yesterday pardoned Gillian Gibbons, jailed last Sunday for insulting Islam -- an offense so arbitrarily constructed these days, it's getting hard to avoid. The British teacher incurred the wrath of the Islamic regime, otherwise busy slaughtering fellow Muslims in Darfur, by allowing her mostly Muslim students at an English school in Khartoum to name a teddy bear "Muhammad."

In a rally on Friday, thousands of protesters, many armed with clubs and swords, called for Ms. Gibbons's death. The faithful were angry that she was sentenced to "only" 15 days after being threatened with 40 lashes and six months. Her early release and the fact that Europe has been spared similar demonstrations of Muslim piety as during the 2005-2006 Danish Muhammad-cartoon riots, is probably the best one can say about this affair.

"I have great respect for the Islamic religion and would not knowingly offend anyone," Ms. Gibbons said. But what she intended doesn't matter. In the paranoid vision of Muslim fanatics, even a stuffed toy can be part of the "plot against Islam." Where believers are determined to feel insult where none was intended and, worse, use violence to revenge any slight, imagined or real, interreligious dialogue becomes, let's say, problematic. While Ms. Gibbon's ordeal seems over, thanks largely to Western pressure, another woman is still feeling the full justice of Shariah law. In Saudi Arabia, a gang rape victim was sentenced to six months and 200 lashes. Her crime? When the then-19-year-old woman was abducted by her tormentors, she was in a car alone with an unrelated man.

The Girl of Qatif, as the rape victim is known, is not as lucky as Ms. Gibbons. The Saudi Foreign Minister, responding yesterday to the White House's criticism of the punishment as "outrageous," showed his sympathy -- for the barbaric treatment accorded the woman. "What is outraging about this case" he told reporters, "is that it is being used against the Saudi government and people."

A measure of a society's moral stature is how it treats its weakest members. In the Middle East, women are among the most vulnerable. Western media and women-rights groups usually greet female subjugation in the Muslim world as a nonevent. This time, Ms. Gibbons and the Saudi rape victim received broad press coverage as well as expressions of support from Western governments. We await the day that more Muslims speak out against violence perpetrated against women in the name of their religion.

WSJ
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 04, 2007, 08:44:59 AM
Second post of the morning:

The Allure of Tyranny
December 4, 2007; Page A20
'It is ultimately a cruel misunderstanding of youth to believe it will find its heart's desire in freedom," says Leo Naphta, the great character of Thomas Mann's "The Magic Mountain." "Its deepest desire is to obey." On Sunday, voters as far apart as Caracas and Vladivostok took to the polls and put Naphta's theory to a practical test.

 
In Russia, the result of parliamentary elections was a triumph for President Vladimir Putin: His party, United Russia, won 64% of the vote. Add that to the votes taken by the Kremlin's allies and the Putin tally reaches 80%, with the principal "democratic" opposition represented (at 11.5%) by the Communists. The vote sets up Mr. Putin, an exceptionally fit 55, to rule Russia for another four-year term, and perhaps several terms beyond that.

By happy contrast, Hugo Chávez's effort to establish himself as Venezuela's president-for-life via a constitutional referendum seems to have failed by a narrow margin. Even so, an astonishing 49% of voters were prepared, according to the official count, to permanently forgo the opportunity to choose a president other than Mr. Chávez.

 
The phenomenon in which masses of people enthusiastically sign away their democratic rights is not new: It happened in Germany and Austria in the 1930s. But it's one that Americans especially have a hard time coming to grips with. The freedom agenda may no longer be in vogue, but most Americans implicitly endorse George Bush's view that "eventually, the call of freedom comes to every mind and every soul." When it doesn't -- when, in fact, it is consciously and deliberately spurned -- we rationalize it in ways that go only so far in offering a persuasive account of the dark allure of tyranny.

Culture is one rationalization. The word is invoked by everyone from self-described Burkean conservatives to left-wing cultural relativists to explain the supposed failure of some benighted corners of the world to adopt and sustain democratic norms. In this view, Africa and the Arab world are too tribal; the Muslim world makes no distinction between the divine and the mundane; Latin America cannot find a stable middle ground between populism and paternalism; the Chinese are too used to emperors and mandarins, the Russians too used to czars and bureaucrats. And so on.

But cultural determinism often runs afoul of reality: The example of China is counterexampled by Taiwan; Zimbabwe by Botswana; Jeddah by Dubai; President Chávez by President Álvaro Uribe in neighboring Colombia. Like baseball statistics, culture has a way of explaining a lot until it suddenly explains nothing.

A second line has it that the Putins and Chávezes of the world owe their popularity to bread-and-circuses tactics: the canny manipulation of the media, their appeal to nationalism and xenophobia, bureaucratic patronage and above all the benefit of having petrodollars to shower on favored constituencies.

Here the argument is that the two men rule by what amounts to an elaborate hoax. Yet that only begs the question of why the hoax is so widely believed. Venezuelans and Russians can travel abroad, and still have considerable (albeit diminishing) access to foreign sources of news and opinion; they can read the anxious op-eds warning of creeping dictatorship. In Venezuela, that might have even tipped the scales in Sunday's vote. Yet in Russia, "outside meddling" has had no measurable effect on Mr. Putin's overwhelming and genuine popularity, which seems only to have been enhanced by the perception that the West increasingly fears and mistrusts him.

Perhaps the most conventional theory is that Messrs. Putin and Chávez, like most autocrats, ultimately rule through a combination of intimidation and dirty tricks. Thus in a Saturday op-ed in this newspaper, Russian opposition leader Garry Kasparov asks why Mr. Putin feels compelled to engage in "heavy-handed campaigning if he knows he and United Russia are going to win?" Mr. Kasparov's answer is that the president "is very aware of how brittle his power structure has become."

Plainly the fear factor is central to the politics of both countries. But neither is it the whole story. Russians and Venezuelans alike elected their current leaders with bitter memories of democracy: economic collapse and social chaos under Boris Yeltsin; the incompetent revolving-door governments of Rafael Caldera and Carlos Andrés Pérez. Messrs. Putin and Chávez both came to office promising to reverse the disintegrating trend with what the British Prime Minister Anthony Eden once called "the smack" -- he meant the word in its physical sense -- "of firm government." Their track records over the past eight years represent, if nothing else, the fulfillment of that promise, and the widespread gratitude that promise-keeping engendered.

That is the crucial context in which Chavismo and Putinism need to be understood. "The totalitarian phenomenon," observed the late French political philosopher Jean-Francois Revel, "is not to be understood without making allowance for the thesis that some important part of every society consists of people who actively want tyranny: either to exercise it themselves or -- much more mysteriously -- to submit to it. Democracy will therefore always remain at risk."

There is a lesson here for President Bush, who in headier moments seems to forget that freedom's goodness must first be demonstrated instrumentally -- that is, in terms of what it tangibly delivers -- before it can be demonstrated morally or spiritually. There is a broader lesson here, too, that while tyranny may ripen in certain political climates, it springs from sources deep within ourselves: the yearning for a politics without contradictions; the terror inscribed in the act of choice.

Thank goodness there is usually more to human nature than that, as courageous Venezuelans proved Sunday. Other times, that's all there is. Welcome to Mr. Putin's democracy.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 06, 2008, 06:59:59 PM
http://gmroper.mu.nu/sleepwalking_into_a_nightmare_-_gingrich_transcript
 

====================


Subject: Sleepwalking Into a Nightmare, by Newt Gingrich


Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich delivered the following remarks to a Jewish National Fund meeting Nov. 15 at the Selig Center:

I just want to talk to you from the heart for a few minutes and share with you where I think we are.

I think it is very stark. I don't think it is yet desperate, but it is very stark. And if I had a title for today's talk, it would be sleepwalking into a nightmare. 'Cause that's what I think we're doing.

I gave a speech at the American Enterprise Institute Sept. 10 at which I gave an alternative history of the last six years, because the more I thought about how much we're failing, the more I concluded you couldn't just nitpick individual places and talk about individual changes because it didn't capture the scale of the disaster.
 
And I had been particularly impressed by a new book that came out called Troublesome Young Men, which is a study of the younger Conservatives who opposed appeasement in the 1930's and who took on Chamberlain.
 
It's a very revealing book and a very powerful book because we tend to look backwards and we tend to overstate Churchill's role in that period. And we tend to understate what a serious and conscientious and thoughtful effort appeasement was and that it was the direct and deliberate policy of very powerful and very willful people. We tend to think of it as a psychological weakness as though Chamberlain was somehow craven. He wasn't craven. Chamberlain had a very clear vision of the world, and he was very ruthless domestically.
 
And they believed so deeply in avoiding war with Germany that as late as the spring of 1940, when they are six months or seven months into they war, they are dropping leaflets instead of bombs on the Ruhr, and they are urging the British news media not to publish anti-German stories because they don't want to offend the German people. And you read this book, and it makes you want to weep because, interestingly, the younger Tories who were most opposed to appeasement were the combat veterans of World War I, who had lost all of their friends in the war but who understood that the failure of appeasement would result in a worse war and that the longer you lied about reality, the greater the disaster.

And they were severely punished and isolated by Chamberlain and the Conservative machine, and as I read that, I realized that that's really where we are today.
 
Our current problem is tragic. You have an administration whose policy is inadequate being opposed by a political left whose policy is worse, and you have nobody prepared to talk about the policy we need. Because we are told if you are for a strong America, you should back the Bush policy even if it's inadequate, and so you end up making an argument in favor of something that can't work. So your choice is to defend something which isn't working or to oppose it by being for an even weaker policy. So this is a catastrophe for this country and a catastrophe for freedom around the world. Because we have refused to be honest about the scale of the problem.

Let me work back. I'm going to get to Iran since that's the topic, but I'm going to get to it eventually.

Let me work back from Pakistan. The dictatorship in Pakistan has never had control over Wiziristan. Not for a day. So we've now spent six years since 9/11 with a sanctuary for Al-Qaida and a sanctuary for the Taliban, and every time we pick up people in Great Britain who are terrorists, they were trained in Pakistan.

And our answer is to praise Musharraf because at least he's not as bad as the others. But the truth is Musharraf has not gotten control of terrorism in Pakistan. Musharraf doesn't have full control over his own government. The odds are even money we're going to drift into a disastrous dictatorship at some point in Pakistan. And while we worry about the Iranians acquiring a nuclear weapon, the Pakistanis already have 'em, So why would you feel secure in a world where you could presently have an Islamist dictatorship in Pakistan with a hundred-plus nuclear weapons? What's our grand strategy for that?

Then you look at Afghanistan. Here's a country that's small, poor, isolated, and in six years we have not been able to build roads, create economic opportunity, wean people off of growing drugs. A third of the GDP is from drugs. We haven't been able to end the sanctuary for the Taliban in Pakistan. And I know of no case historically where you defeat a guerrilla movement if it has a sanctuary. So the people who rely on the West are out-bribed by the criminals, outgunned by the criminals, and faced with a militant force across the border which practiced earlier defeating the Soviet empire and which has a time horizon of three or four generations. NATO has a time horizon of each quarter or at best a year, facing an opponent whose time horizon is literally three or four generations. It's a total mismatch.

Then you come to the direct threat to the United States, which is Al-Qaida. Which, by the way, we just published polls. One of the sites I commend to you is AmericanSolutions.com. Last Wednesday we posted six national surveys, $428,000 worth of data. We gave it away. I found myself in the unique position of calling Howard Dean to tell him I was giving him $400,000 worth of polling. We have given it away to both Democrats and Republicans.
 
It is fundamentally different from the national news media. When asked the question "Do we have an obligation to defend the United States and her allies?" the answer is 85 percent yes. When asked a further question "Should we defeat our enemies?" - it's very strong language - the answer is 75 percent yes, 75 to 16.

The complaint about Iraq is a performance complaint, not a values complaint.

When asked whether or not Al-Qaida is a threat, 89 percent of the country says yes. And they think you have to defeat it, you can't negotiate with it. So now let's look at Al-Qaida and the rise of Islamist terrorism.

And let's be honest: What's the primary source of money for Al-Qaida?  It's you, recirculated through Saudi Arabia. Because we have no national energy strategy, when clearly if you really cared about liberating the United States from the Middle East and if you really cared about the survival of Israel, one of your highest goals would be to move to a hydrogen economy and to eliminate petroleum as a primary source of energy.

Now that's what a serious national strategy would look like, but that would require real change.

So then you look at Saudi Arabia. The fact that we tolerate a country saying no Christian and no Jew can go to Mecca, and we start with the presumption that that's true while they attack Israel for being a religious state is a sign of our timidity, our confusion, our cowardice that is stunning.

It's not complicated. We're inviting Saudi Arabia to come to Annapolis to talk about rights for Palestinians when nobody is saying, "Let's talk about rights for Christians and Jews in Saudi Arabia. Let's talk about rights for women in Saudi Arabia."

So we accept this totally one-sided definition of the world in which our enemies can cheerfully lie on television every day, and we don't even have the nerve to insist on the truth. We pretend their lies are reasonable. This is a very fundamental problem. And if you look at who some of the largest owners of some of our largest banks are today, they're Saudis.

You keep pumping billions of dollars a year into countries like Venezuela, Iran and Saudi Arabia, and Russia, and you are presently going to have created people who oppose you who have lots of money. And they're then going to come back to your own country and finance, for example , Arab study institutes whose only requirement is that they never tell the truth. So you have all sorts of Ph.D.s who now show up quite cheerfully prepared to say whatever it is that makes their funders happy - in the name, of course, of academic freedom. So why wouldn't Columbia host a genocidal madman? It's just part of political correctness. I mean, Ahmadinejad may say terrible things, he may lock up students, he may kill journalists, he may say, "We should wipe out Israel," he may say, "We should defeat the United States," but after all, what has he done that's inappropriate? What has he done that wouldn't be repeated at a Hollywood cocktail party or a nice gathering in Europe?

And nobody says this is totally, utterly, absolutely unacceptable. Why is it that the No. 1 threat in intelligence movies is the CIA?

I happened the other night to be watching an old movie, To Live and Die in L.A., which is about counterfeiting. But the movie starts with a Secret Service agent who is defending Ronald Reagan in 1985, and the person he is defending Ronald Reagan from is a suicide bomber who is actually, overtly a Muslim fanatic. Now, six years after 9/11, you could not get that scene made in Hollywood today.

Just look at the movies. Why is it that the bad person is either a right-wing crazed billionaire, or the CIA as a government agency. Go look at the Bourne Ultimatum. Or a movie like the one that George Clooney made, which was an absolute lie, in which it implied that if you were a reformist Arab prince, that probably the CIA would kill you. It's a total lie. We actually have SEALs protecting people all over the world. We actually risk American lives protecting reformers all over the world, and yet Hollywood can't bring itself to tell the truth:

(a) because it's ideologically so opposed to the American government and the American military; and,
(b) because it's terrified that if it said something really openly, honestly true about Muslim terrorists, they might show up in Hollywood. And you might have somebody killed as the Dutch producer was killed.

And so we're living a life of cowardice, and in that life of cowardice we're sleepwalking into a nightmare.

And then you come to Iran. There's a terrific book. Mark Bowden is a remarkable writer who wrote Black Hawk Down, has enormous personal courage. He's a Philadelphia newspaper writer, actually got the money out of the Philadelphia newspaper to go to Somalia to interview the Somalian side of Black Hawk Down. It's a remarkable achievement. Tells a great story about getting to Somalia, paying lots of cash, having the local warlord protect him, and after about two weeks the warlord came to him and said, "You know, we've decided that we're very uncomfortable with you being here, and you should leave."

And so he goes to the hotel, where he is the only hard-currency guest, and says, "I've got to check out two weeks early because the warlord has told me that he no longer will protect me." And the hotel owner, who wants to keep his only hard-currency guest, says, "Well, why are you listening to him? He's not the government. There is no government." And Bowden says, "Well, what will I do?" And he says, "You hire a bigger warlord with more guns," which he did. But then he could only stay one week because he ran out of money.

But this is a guy with real courage. I mean, imagine trying to go out and be a journalist in that kind of world, OK? So Bowden came back and wrote Guest of the Ayatollah, which is the Iranian hostage of 1979, which he entitled, "The First Shots in Iran's War Against America." So in the Bowden world view, the current Iranian dictatorship has been at war with the United States since 1979. Violated international law. Every conceivable tenet of international law was violated when they seized the American Embassy and they seized the diplomats. Killed Americans in Lebanon in the early '80s. Killed Americans at Khobar Towers in '95 and had the Clinton administration deliberately avoid revealing the information, as Louis Freeh, the director of the FBI, has said publicly, because they didn't want to have to confront the Iranian complicity.

And so you have an Iranian regime which is cited annually as the leading supporter of state terrorism in the world. Every year the State Department says that. It's an extraordinary act of lucidity on the part of an institution which seeks to avoid it as often as possible.

And you have Gen. Petraeus come to the U.S. Congress and say publicly in an open session, "The Iranians are waging a proxy war against Americans in Iraq."
Title: Newt part 2
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 06, 2008, 07:00:52 PM



I was so deeply offended by this, it's hard for me to express it without sounding irrational. I'm an Army brat. My dad served 27 years in the infantry. The idea that an American general would come to the American Congress, testify in public that our young men and women are being killed by Iran, and we have done nothing, I find absolutely abhorrent.

So I'm preparing to come and talk today. I got up this morning, and a friend had sent me yesterday's Jerusalem Post editorial, which if you haven't read, I recommend to you. It has, for example, the following quote: "On Monday, chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said, 'The problem of the content of the document setting out joint principles for peace-making post-Annapolis has not been resolved. One of the more pressing problems is the Zionist regime's insistence on being recognized as a Jewish state. We will not agree to recognize Israel as a Jewish state. There is no country in the world where religious and national identities are intertwined.' "

What truly bothers me is the shallowness and the sophistry of the Western governments, starting with our own. When a person says to you, "I don't recognize that you exist," you don't start a negotiation. The person says, "I literally do not recognize" and then lies to you. I mean the first thing you say to this guy is "Terrific. Let's go visit Mecca. Since clearly there's no other state except Israel that is based on religion, the fact that I happen to be Christian won't bother anybody." And then he'll say, "Well, that's different."

We tolerate this. We have created our own nightmare because we refuse to tell the truth. We refuse to tell the truth to our politicians. Our State Department refuses to tell the truth to the country. If the president of the United States, and again, we're now so bitterly partisan, we're so committed to red-vs.-blue hostility, that George W. Bush doesn't have the capacity to give an address from the Oval Office that has any meaning for half the country. And the anti-war left is so strong in the Democratic primary that I think it's almost impossible for any Democratic presidential candidate to tell the truth about the situation.

And so the Republicans are isolated and trying to defend incompetence. The
Democrats are isolated and trying to find a way to say, "I'm really for strength as long as I can have peace, but I'd really like to have peace, except I don't want to recognize these people who aren't very peaceful."

I just want to share with you, as a grandfather, as a citizen, as a historian, as somebody who was once speaker of the House, this is a serious national crisis. This is 1935 or 1936, and it's getting worse every year.

None of our enemies are confused. Our enemies don't get up each morning and go, "Oh, gosh, I think I'll have an existential crisis of identity in which I will try to think through whether or not we can be friends while you're killing me." Our enemies get up every morning and say, "We hate the West. We hate freedom." They would not allow a meeting with women in the room.

I was once interviewed by a BBC reporter, a nice young lady who was only about as anti-American as she had to be to keep her job. Since it was a live interview, I
turned to her halfway through the interview and I said, "Do you like your job?" And it was summertime, and she's wearing a short-sleeve dress. And she said, "Well, yes." She was confused because I had just reversed roles. I said, "Well, then you should hope we win." She said, "What do you mean?" And I said, "Well, if the enemy wins, you won't be allowed to be on television."

I don't know how to explain it any simpler than that.

Now what do we need?

We need first of all to recognize this is a real war. Our enemies are peaceful when they're weak, are ruthless when they're strong, demand mercy when they're losing, show no mercy when they're winning. They understand exactly what this is, and anybody who reads Sun Tzu will understand exactly what we're living through. This is a total war. One side is going to win. One side is going to lose. You'll be able to tell who won and who lost by who's still standing. Most of Islam is not in this war, but most of Islam isn't going to stop this war. They're just going to sit to one side and tell you how sorry they are that this happened. We had better design grand strategies that are radically bigger and radically tougher and radically more honest than anything currently going on, and that includes winning the argument in Europe , and it includes winning the argument in the rest of the world. And it includes being very clear, and I'll just give you one simple example because we're now muscle-bound by our own inability to talk honestly.

Iran produces 60 percent of its own gasoline. It produces lots of crude oil but only has one refinery. It imports 40 percent of its gasoline. The entire 60 percent is produced at one huge refinery.

In 1981, Ronald Reagan decided to break the Soviet empire. He was asked what's your vision of the Cold War. He said, "Four words: We win; they lose." He was clearly seen by The New York Times as an out-of-touch, reactionary, right-wing cowboy from California who had no idea what was going on in the world. And 11 years later the Soviet Union disappeared, but obviously that had nothing to do with Reagan because that would have meant he was right. So it's just a random accident the Soviet Union disappeared.

Part of the war we waged on the Soviet Union involved their natural gas supply because we wanted to cut off their hard currency. The Soviets were desperate to get better equipment for their pipeline. We managed to sell them through third parties very, very sophisticated American pipeline equipment, which they were thrilled to buy and thought they had pulled off a huge coup. Now we weren't playing fair. We did not tell them that the equipment was designed to blow up. One day in 1982, there was an explosion in Siberia so large that the initial reflection on the satellites looked like there was a tactical nuclear weapon. One part of the White House was genuinely worried, and the other part of the White House had to calm them down. They said, "No, no, that's our equipment blowing up."

In the 28 years since the Iranians declared war on us, in the six years since 9/11, in the months since Gen. Petraeus publicly said they are killing young Americans, we have not been able to figure out how to take down one refinery. Covertly, quietly, without overt war. And we have not been able to figure out how to use the most powerful navy in the world to simply stop the tankers and say, "Look, you want to kill young Americans, you're going to walk to the battlefield, but you're not going to ride in the car because you're not going to have any gasoline."

We don't have to be stupid. The choice is not cowardice or total war. Reagan unlocked Poland without firing a shot in an alliance with the pope, with the labor unions and with the British. We have every possibility if we're prepared to be honest to shape the world. It'll be a very big project. It's much closer to World War II than it is to anything we've tried recently. It will require real effort, real intensity and real determination. We're either going to do it now, while we're still extraordinarily powerful, or we're going to do it later under much more desperate circumstances after we've lost several cities.

We had better take this seriously because we are not very many mistakes away from a second Holocaust. 'Three nuclear weapons' is a second Holocaust. Our enemies would like to get those weapons as soon as they can, and they promise to use them as soon as they can.

I suggest we defeat our enemies and create a different situation long before they have that power.

Newt
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 20, 2008, 09:11:16 PM
Its been a while since Ann wrote something that I respected, but I find this one dead on:
===============

How to Keep Reagan Out of Office
by Ann Coulter

Posted: 02/20/2008 Print This
 Forward
 Feedback
 Digg This!
 Subscribe
Sponsored By:
 
Inasmuch as the current presidential election has come down to a choice among hemlock, self-immolation or the traditional gun in the mouth, now is the time for patriotic Americans to review what went wrong and to start planning for 2012.

How did we end up with the mainstream media picking the Republican candidate for president?

It isn't the early primaries, it isn't that we allow Democrats to vote in many of our primaries, and it isn't that the voters are stupid. All of that was true or partially true in 1980 -- and we still got Ronald Reagan.

We didn't get Ronald Reagan this year not just because there's never going to be another Reagan. We will never again get another Reagan because Reagan wouldn't run for office under the current campaign-finance regime.

Three months ago, I was sitting with a half-dozen smart, successful conservatives whose names you know, all griping about this year's cast of presidential candidates. I asked them, one by one: Why don't you run for office?

Of course, none of them would. They are happy, well-adjusted individuals.

Reagan, too, had a happy life and, having had no trouble getting girls in high school, had no burning desire for power. So when the great California businessman Holmes Tuttle and two other principled conservatives approached Reagan about running for office, Reagan said no.

But Tuttle kept after Reagan, asking him not to reject the idea out of hand. He formed "Friends of Reagan" to raise money in case Reagan changed his mind.

He asked Reagan to give his famous "Rendezvous With History" speech at a $1,000-a-plate Republican fundraiser in Los Angeles and then bought airtime for the speech to be broadcast on TV days before the 1964 presidential election.

The epochal broadcast didn't change the election results, but it changed history. That single broadcast brought in nearly $1 million to the Republican Party -- not to mention millions of votes for Goldwater.

After the astonishing response to Reagan's speech and Tuttle's continued entreaties, Reagan finally relented and ran for governor. In 1966, with the help, financial and otherwise, of a handful of self-made conservative businessmen, Reagan walloped incumbent Edmund G. (Pat) Brown, winning 57 percent of the vote in a state with two Democrats for every Republican.

The rest is history -- among the brightest spots in all of world history.

None of that could happen today. (The following analysis uses federal campaign-finance laws rather than California campaign-finance laws because the laws are basically the same, and I am not going to hire a campaign-finance lawyer in order to write this column.)

If Tuttle found Ronald Reagan today, he couldn't form "Friends of Reagan" to raise money for a possible run -- at least not without hiring a battery of campaign-finance lawyers and guaranteeing himself a lawsuit by government bureaucrats. He'd also have to abandon his friendship with Reagan to avoid the perception of "coordination."

Tuttle couldn't hold a $1,000-a-plate fundraiser for Reagan -- at least in today's dollars. That would be a $6,496.94-a-plate dinner (using the consumer price index) or a $19,883.51-a-plate dinner (using the relative share of GDP). The limit on individual contributions to a candidate is $2,300.

Reagan's "Rendezvous With History" speech would never have been broadcast on TV -- unless Tuttle owned the TV station. Independent groups are prohibited from broadcasting electioneering ads 60 days before an election.

A handful of conservative businessmen would not be allowed to make large contributions to Reagan's campaign -- they would be restricted to donating only $2,300 per person.

Under today's laws, Tuttle would have had to go to Reagan and say: "We would like you to run for governor. You are limited to raising money $300 at a time (roughly the current limits in 1965 dollars), so you will have to do nothing but hold fundraisers every day of your life for the next five years in order to run in the 1970 gubernatorial election, since there clearly there isn't enough time to raise money for the 1966 election."

Also, Tuttle would have to tell Reagan: "We are not allowed to coordinate with you, so you're on your own. But wait -- it gets worse! After five years of attending rubber chicken dinners every single day in order to raise money in tiny increments, you will probably lose the election anyway because campaign-finance laws make it virtually impossible to unseat an incumbent.

"Oh, and one more thing: Did you ever kiss a girl in high school? Not even once? If not, then this plan might appeal to you!"

Obviously, Reagan would have returned to his original answer: No thanks.

Reagan loved giving speeches and taking questions from voters. The one part of campaigning Reagan loathed was raising money. Thanks to our campaign-finance laws, fundraising is the single most important job of a political candidate today.

This is why you will cast your eyes about the nation in vain for another Reagan sitting in any governor's mansion or U.S. Senate seat. Pro-lifers like to ask, "How many Einsteins have we lost to abortion?" I ask: How many Reagans have we lost to campaign-finance reform?

The campaign-finance laws basically restrict choice political jobs, like senator and governor -- and thus president -- to:

(1) Men who were fatties in high school and consequently are willing to submit to the hell of running for office to compensate for their unhappy adolescences -- like Bill Clinton, Rudy Giuliani, Mike Huckabee and Newt Gingrich. (Somewhere in this great land of ours, even as we speak, the next Bill Clinton is waddling back to the cafeteria service line asking for seconds.)

(2) Billionaires and near-billionaires -- like Jon Corzine, Steve Forbes, Michael Bloomberg and Mitt Romney -- who can fund their own campaigns (these aren't necessarily sociopaths, but it certainly limits the pool of candidates).

(3) Celebrities and name-brand candidates -- like Arnold Schwarzenegger, George Bush, Giuliani and Hillary Clinton (which explains the nation's apparent adoration for Bushes and Clintons -- they've got name recognition, a valuable commodity amidst totalitarian restrictions on free speech).

(4) Mainstream media-anointed candidates, like John McCain and B. Hussein Obama.

What a bizarre coincidence that a few years after the most draconian campaign-finance laws were imposed via McCain-Feingold, our two front-runners happen to be the media's picks! It's uncanny -- almost as if by design! (Can I stop now, or do you people get sarcasm?)

By prohibiting speech by anyone else, the campaign-finance laws have vastly magnified the power of the media -- which, by the way, are wholly exempt from speech restrictions under campaign-finance laws. The New York Times doesn't have to buy ad time to promote a politician; it just has to call McCain a "maverick" 1 billion times a year.

It is because of campaign-finance laws like McCain-Feingold that big men don't run for office anymore. Little men do. And John McCain is the head homunculus.

You want Reagan back? Restore the right to free speech, and you will have created the conditions that allowed Reagan to run.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: DougMacG on February 25, 2008, 05:49:25 PM
This WSJ piece with local conservative commentator Jason Lewis (who occasionally subs for Rush L.) ripping Minnesota's Republican Governor Tim Pawlenty has relevance in the Presidential thread because because Pawlenty is a possible running mate for McCain, but I will put it here because it's a rant.  Pawlenty is a very down to earth, super nice guy.  I have had face to face political talks with him several times.  Republican governors in Democrat states, like Mitt and Ahhnold, perhaps serve some purpose in slowing down the liberal freight train of new programs and taxes, but to be popular and re-elected they do not move, represent or lead anyone in a conservative direction IMO. 

Pawlenty's Record
By JASON LEWIS
February 23, 2008; Page A8

"The era of small government is over . . . government has to be more proactive, more aggressive."
-- Tim Pawlenty, 2006.

Minnesota's 47-year-old governor is now one of a handful of names being bandied about as a possible running mate for John McCain. But if the Arizona senator wants to unite conservative Republicans behind him, there are better choices.

First elected in 2002, Mr. Pawlenty got off to a good start by holding the line on taxes in the face of a $4.5 billion state deficit. That shortfall equaled 15% of the state's $28 billion biennial budget, and the pressure on the governor to break his no-new-taxes pledge was unrelenting. Nonetheless, he showed resolve in dealing with Minnesota's recalcitrant liberal elite.

But in 2005, signs of his "progressive" instincts emerged. In a quest for new revenue, Mr. Pawlenty supported a 75 cents per-pack cigarette tax. He called it a "health impact" fee. No one was fooled. User fees are generally charged to ensure that those who use a government service pay for the cost of providing that service. In this case, however, it was obvious that smokers were just being tapped to fund health-care entitlement programs.
[Tim Pawlenty]

Following the tax hike, the governor pushed through a state-wide smoking ban in workplaces, restaurants and bars. Aggressive, Nanny-state government seems to be big with Republican governors these days -- although policies such as smoking bans do little to stem the costly tide of state-run health care.

In 2006, liberal Democrats (there is no other kind here) proposed a universal health-care behemoth to cover all residents. Mr. Pawlenty responded with a more limited proposal to expand the state's child health-care program, Minnesota Care, to cover all children. More recently, the governor's Health Care Transformation Task Force recommended imposing a mandate -- à la Massachusetts -- on residents to buy health insurance.

On prescription drugs, Mr. Pawlenty set up the state's RX Connect Program to import price-controlled Canadian drugs. The South St. Paul populist also advocated a temporary ban on ads paid for by pharmaceutical companies. Not exactly the stuff of which markets are made.

Not everything has been bleak for the right during Mr. Pawlenty's tenure. Last session he vetoed several major spending bills pushed by the Democratic Farmer Labor Party; they were so profligate that his vetoes elicited barely a whimper from Minnesota's reliably liberal media. Nevertheless, Mr. Pawlenty has presided over back-to-back biennial budget increases of 12.4% and 9.8% respectively. Last year the governor's proposed budget survived essentially intact but still spent the state's $2 billion surplus, with half the general fund increase going to education. Minnesota, with five million people, now has a biennial budget of nearly $35 billion.

Mr. Pawlenty's proactive government stance extends to support for mass transit and sport stadium subsidies, as well as for hiking the state's minimum wage, which is now $6.15 an hour for large employers (the federal minimum wage is $5.85). But it is education and the environment where Mr. Pawlenty hopes to establish his progressive bona fides.

He calls for accountability in education, but does little to buck the most powerful lobby in state politics, Education Minnesota. Indeed, Mr. Pawlenty has courted the unions, telling the Minnesota Business Partnership that "I can't have the Republican governor talk about changing the school system without having the support and help of the teachers' union and my friends on the other side of the aisle. It just won't work."

On the environment, Mr. Pawlenty imposed some of the most aggressive renewable energy mandates in the country. Other states will be requiring, in coming years, that energy producers get 20% of their electricity from "renewable" sources such as wind, solar or animal manure. In Mr. Pawlenty's Minnesota, the state's largest utility will be required to generate 30% of its power from renewable sources by 2020.

Mr. Pawlenty is using his influence through the National Governor's Association to export his ideas across state lines. The NGA meets in Washington, D.C. next week. Look for Mr. Pawlenty to be on hand and stumping for renewable mandates.

In April, Mr. Pawlenty delivered the remarks that probably best reveal his views on the environment. "It looks like we should have listened to President Carter," he told the Minnesota Climate Change Advisory Group. "He called us to action, and we should have listened. . . . Climate change is real. Human behavior is partly and may be a lot responsible. Those who don't think so are simply not right. We should not spend time on voices that say it's not real."

At times it seems that Mr. Pawlenty's first political instinct is to placate liberal critics, as he did following the collapse of the I-35 bridge in Minneapolis last August. When Rep. James Oberstar, a Democrat, tried to exploit the tragedy that killed 13 people and injured 100 others -- by blaming it on a lack of federal gas tax revenue -- Mr. Pawlenty responded by calling for a state gas tax increase. Thankfully, the governor started backpedaling on that idea almost immediately after proposing it. He now promises to veto any tax increase to come out of the legislature this year (handing down one such veto yesterday).

That's good. But it doesn't mean that he'll be able to deliver the state for Mr. McCain. In the run-up to Super Tuesday earlier this month, Mr. Pawlenty stumped hard for Mr. McCain only to watch as Republican voters delivered Minnesota overwhelmingly to Mitt Romney.
Title: WSJ: With extreme prejudice (Kerry still an idiot)
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 21, 2008, 10:21:24 PM
With Extreme Prejudice
By JAMES TARANTO
March 21, 2008

Remember John Kerry? He was the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee, lauded by his supporters for his intellect and his nuance, as compared with the simpleminded George W. Bush. Having lost the election, he decided to sit out the 2008 contest. He recently endorsed Barack Obama, and earlier this week he sat down with the editorial board of the Standard-Times (New Bedford, Mass.) to make the case for his candidate.

It's a real jaw-dropper. ABC News's Jake Tapper sums it up:

Kerry said that a President Obama would help the US, in relations with Muslim countries, "in some cases go around their dictator leaders to the people and inspire the people in ways that we can't otherwise."
"He has the ability to help us bridge the divide of religious extremism," Kerry said. "To maybe even give power to moderate Islam to be able to stand up against this radical misinterpretation of a legitimate religion."
Kerry was asked what gives Obama that credibility.
"Because he's African-American. Because he's a black man. Who has come from a place of oppression and repression through the years in our own country."
An African-American president would be "a symbol of empowerment" for those who have been disenfranchised around the world, Kerry said, "an important lesson for America to show Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, other places in the world where disenfranchised people don't get anything."
One obvious question: What do the events of this week, involving Obama's own church, tell us about his ability to "stand up against" a "radical misinterpretation of a legitimate religion"? Nothing very encouraging in this columnist's view, but many observers view Obama much more charitably in this regard than we do.

What is really striking about Kerry's case for Obama, though, is that it rests on what may be the crudest stereotyping we have ever observed. Commentary's Abe Greenwald has a chuckle over Kerry's racial stereotyping of Obama:

Where is this "place of oppression and repression" in which Obama has suffered "through the years"? Hawaii? Harvard? The Senate? We should find out immediately and do something about this horrific crisis.
But Kerry isn't just stereotyping blacks. He is stereotyping Muslims too. And he is drawing an equivalence between American blacks, a racial minority in one country, and Middle Eastern Muslims, a religious majority in a whole region.

Never mind that, as Greenwald points out, "Arab Muslims [are] none too happy with their black countrymen in northern Africa." Never mind that in some African countries, notably Sudan and Mauritania, Arab Muslims still enslave blacks.

To Kerry, it seems, all "oppressed peoples" look alike. The man has all the intellectual subtlety of a third-rate ethnic studies professor.
Title: Good Times if,, ,
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 05, 2008, 08:52:55 AM

Friday Feature /Really Good Times Ahead, If...
~~~~~~~~~~~~
STEVE FORBES, www.Forbes.com (04/04/08): Our next President will look like
an economic genius if he or she doesn't goof up by raising taxes,
continuing the Bush weaken-the-dollar policy or sitting by while agencies
such as the FCC issue stupid regulations.

Yes, the new Oval Office occupant will have to clean up the Bush/Bernanke
monetary mess. But don't be misled by stock market gloom and lurid
headlines on the credit crisis. The U.S. and, indeed, the global economy
are on the verge of another surge of breathtaking innovations. As you'd
expect, major breakthroughs are evolving around the Internet, whose IP
traffic could grow fiftyfold by 2015. In January Bret Swanson, a fellow at
the Progress & Freedom Foundation, in conjunction with George Gilder, of
the Discovery Institute, released a report about a dazzling future of
movie downloads, Internet video and an explosion in business traffic.
Real-time 3-D will become a reality. Each month YouTube traffic is 50
petabytes; in comparison, annual original cable, television and radio
content created is 100 PB. In other words, YouTube matches traditional
media's annual content every two months. And this kind of creativity and
social interaction is only just beginning.

The implications for medicine are staggeringly positive. Imagine, Swanson
points out, digital medical imaging being able to examine your brain 1,024
ways. As he also notes, "[All this] will require a dramatic expansion of
bandwidth, storage and traffic management capabilities in core, edge,
metro and access networks. In the U.S., currently lagging Asia, the total
new network investments will exceed $100 billion by 2012."

Peter Huber, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and an
extraordinarily insightful observer of technology, wrote in his Feb. 25
FORBES column ("Techno-Optimism"): "Scientists will soon bioengineer
bacteria to melt oil out of tar sands, turn grass into diesel fuel and
scavenge natural resources of every kind out of low-grade, thinly
dispersed deposits. They can design drugs to replace, boost or suppress
anything in nature. … Within a decade or two sensors will allow
microprocessors to see, hear and feel far better than we can.
Microengineered materials are simultaneously transforming the manufacture
of clothes, cars, jets--just about everything people make--because they're
far stronger, lighter and more functional than metals, plastics and
natural fibers."

The next President must overhaul the FCC, lest it--with the connivance of
lobbyist-influenced Congress--gum up these advances with stifling
regulations or by enacting net neutrality, which would have politicians
and bureaucrats fixing prices for access to broadband networks. Such price
controls would halt investments in expanding capacity. It's happened
before: Congressional/FCC price controls in the mid-1990s cratered
investment in fiber-optics projects, which enabled South Korea and others
to leap past us. Observe Swanson and Gilder: "South Korea, with just
one-sixth the population of the U.S., now approaches the U.S. in Internet
traffic. [The country] deployed fiber-optic networks sooner than the U.S.
did. South Korea also was an aggressive first builder of 3G [broadband]
mobile networks."

Are you listening, Senators McCain, Obama and Clinton?
Title: Our Lives, Our Fortunes, our Sacred Honor
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 07, 2008, 09:04:00 AM
Our Lives, our Fortunes, our sacred Honor
Mark Alexander
From Patriot Post Vol. 07 No. 27; Published 3 July 2007 | Print  Email  PDF

OIF---A new dawn "Our cause is noble; it is the cause of mankind!" --George Washington

Our nation began with these stirring words in the Declaration of Independence: "When in the Course of human Events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation." Now, 231 years later, they still ring true.

We may envision the Founders as rash, rowdy rebels. Not so. Already accomplished in fields of endeavor, they were settled in character and reputation. They deemed their decision necessary, and their first thought was of "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind." They were men of purpose and principle, who well understood the peril of choosing to declare independence from Great Britain. Dr. Benjamin Rush wrote to John Adams, "Do you recollect the pensive and awful silence which pervaded the House when we were called up, one after another, to the table of the President of Congress to subscribe to what was believed by many at that time to be our death warrants?"

The Founders reasoned that the colonials were compelled to the separation, outlining a detailed list of particulars describing the King of Great Britain's "long train of abuses and usurpations" that could end only in an intended "absolute despotism" and "establishment of absolute tyranny over these states." They appealed that the free citizens they represented therefore had both a right and a duty "to alter their former systems of government" and "to provide new guards for their future security."

They further explained, "In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people." They had been patient, measured and restrained in responding to the incursions on their freedoms but could be so no longer.

The central passage of the Declaration's opening is the document's most famous, suggesting the form of government truly fit for a free people: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. -- That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, -- That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."

The Founders sought liberty, not license -- rather than a loosening of restraints, a freedom to pursue right. The objective was citizens' safety and happiness, later called "the common defense," "the general welfare," and the "blessings of liberty." The mottos of the American Revolution were "No King but King Jesus!" and "Rebellion to Tyrants is Obedience to God."

Given their experiences with a leader who had violated the laws supposed to control his own conduct as much as theirs, the Founders sought to avoid the instability of democracy or of oligarchy, in which one or a handful of people can overturn the foundations by a simple vote or decree. Fisher Ames warned, "The known propensity of a democracy is to licentiousness which the ambitious call, and ignorant believe to be liberty." John Witherspoon referred to pure democracy as "very subject to caprice and the madness of popular rage." The Founders ultimately chose a constitutional democratic republic -- based on the foundation of the reliable rule of law, responsive to the people's "consent of the governed" through representation of the citizens, predicated on the virtue of the people.

The colonists came to these shores with a learned tradition of liberty, and this new land offered a manner of living that further taught freedom. Our performance in upholding this heritage is mixed. We are divided as a nation, no longer pressing toward unity and allegiance to shared principles. Facile commentary lauds comity as the antidote for what the Founders derided as faction, applauding the elitist establishment fetish for bipartisanship. But they are exactly wrong. Indeed, bipartisanship today is more akin to factionalism than are those adhering to the two major political parties out of principle.

There remains one crucial question: What are we willing to risk to salvage the heritage our Founders handed down to us? Our warriors in the field have demonstrated that they stand in the direct line from our Patriot Founders -- prepared to sacrifice all in service. Many activist citizens gave time, effort and resources to turn aside the Senate's recent attempts to foist a dangerous change in immigration laws on the nation. But the United States as a nation is not as secure as at its tenuous beginnings.

The signers of the Declaration concluded their treatise, "We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States.... And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor." Do we citizens, inheritors of the Republic bequeathed us, still stand ready to hazard even half so much?

Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 10, 2008, 08:26:42 AM
The Airline Bomb Plot
April 10, 2008; Page A14
Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John McCain brought their presidential campaigns to the Petraeus-Crocker hearings on Iraq this week. An Iraq-based reporter appearing on one of the cable networks in the evening said the hearings struck him as oddly decoupled from the daily reality of war for the Iraqi people and U.S. troops there. Yup, never hurts to pinch yourself hard on entering presidential campaign space right now.

The three candidates addressed Gen. David Petraeus in tones of high gravitas equal to the thin altitude of the American presidency. Sen. Obama colloquied with Gen. Petraeus about the status of al Qaeda in Iraq – asking whether the terrorist organization could "reconstitute itself" and said that he was looking for "an endpoint."

 
WSJ's Wonder Land columnist Dan Henninger discusses the disconnect between U.S. politics and global terrorism. (April 9)
Here's another hypothetical: Would this conversation be different today if in August 2006 seven airliners had taken off from Terminal 3 at Heathrow Airport, bound for the U.S. and Canada and each carrying about 250 passengers, and then blew up over the Atlantic Ocean?

It is a hypothetical because, instead of the explosions, British prosecutors this week presented their case against eight Muslim men arrested in August 2006 and charged with conspiring to board and blow up those planes.

The details emerging from that case are quite remarkable and will be summarized shortly. Pause to reflect on the ebb and flow of public debate that has occurred over how free societies should order themselves after two airliners full of passengers knocked down the World Trade Center Towers on Sept. 11 in 2001.

The view that 9/11 "changed everything" did not hold up under the weight of our politics. Divisions re-emerged between Democrats and Republicans, in office and on the streets. These fights reignited over the Patriot Act, Guantanamo and the warrantless wiretap bill (or "FISA" revision). These arguers stopped to stare momentarily at their televisions when Islamic terrorists committed mass murder in the 2004 Madrid train bombing and the 2005 London subway bombing.

One sometimes gets the feeling that our policy debates over national security and the journalism that travels with them float, as it were, at 30,000 feet above the reality of the threat on the ground. A novelist or filmmaker, alert to the personal demons that drive modern terror, would with fiction better clarify what is at stake. Start with the details of the eight defendants now on trial in England.

The names of the accused plotters, all men in their 20s, are Abdullah Ahmed Ali, Assad Sarwar, Tanvir Hussain, Mohammed Gulzar, Ibrahim Savant, Arafat Khan, Waheed Zaman and Umar Islam. They lived around London, in Walthamstow, Leyton, Plaistow and Barking. Most are Pakistanis.

Abdullah Ahmed Ali was caught on a wiretap telling his wife that he wished to bring his baby son along on the suicide mission. She resists. His suicide video, intended to become public after the planes blew up and shown at trial, promises "floods of martyr operations against you" and "your people's body parts decorating the streets."

Waheed Zaman studied biomedical science at London Metropolitan University. In his video Zaman says, "I have been educated to a high standard. I could have lived a life of ease but instead chose to fight for the sake of Allah's Deen [religion]."

Umar Islam mocks complacent Brits: "Most of you too busy, you know, watching Home and Away and EastEnders, complaining about the World Cup, drinking your alcohol." This would be fascinating as one nut's reason for murder. It is instead the basis for an ideology to justify blowing up thousands.

The prosecution said a computer memory stick on one of the men at his arrest listed the targeted flights. They were: United Airlines Flight 931 to San Francisco; UA959 to Chicago; UA925 to Washington; Air Canada 849 to Toronto; AC865 to Montreal; American Airlines 131 to New York and AA91 to Chicago. The first flight would depart at 2:15 p.m., the last at 4:50 p.m., allowing all to be aloft and out of U.S. or British airspace when they fell.

The private intelligence-analysis agency, Stratfor, concludes from the trial that "al Qaeda remains fixated on aircraft as targets and, in spite of changes in security procedures since 9/11, aircraft remain vulnerable to attack."

The men planned to take the bomb pieces onboard for assembly: empty plastic bottles, a sugary drink powder, hydrogen peroxide and other materials to be detonated with the flash on disposable cameras.

The arrests of the men, who say they are innocent, were the result of broad and prolonged surveillance. For months, the suspects were bugged, photographed and wiretapped.

Here in the U.S., our politics has spent much of the year unable to vote into law the wiretap bill, which is bogged down, incredibly, over giving retrospective legal immunity to telecom companies that helped the government monitor calls originating overseas. Even granting there are Fourth Amendment issues in play here, how is it that Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama cannot at least say that class-action lawsuits against these companies are simply wrong right now?

Philip Bobbitt, author of the just released and thought-provoking book, "Terror and Consent," has written that court warrants are "a useful standard for surveillance designed to prove guilt, not to learn the identity of people who may be planning atrocities." Planning atrocities is precisely the point.

"Atrocity" is a cruel and ugly word, but it has come to define the common parameters of the world we inhabit. It is entertaining to watch the candidates trying to convince the American people of their ability to be presidential. It would be more than nice to know, before one of them turns into a real president this November, what they will do – or more importantly, will never do – to stop what those eight jihadists sitting in the high-security Woolwich Crown Court in London planned for seven America-bound airliners over the Atlantic Ocean.

WSJ
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: ccp on April 10, 2008, 07:38:22 PM
I'm incredulous to hear BO tell us we are less safe now than beofre 911.

I guess that is supported by the fact we have not had a single recureence since :|

I spoke with a phsyician colleauge who is from Paskitan.  He felt the violence will never end there.

His from the eastern portion but the western Paskitani terrorists have been taking their Jihad accross the country and are now hitting targets all over.

He says you can't negotiate with them, you can't fight them, you can't do anything about it.  In part, because you don't even know who most of them are.  You don't know who sympathizes with them and who are your enemy. People are afraid to fight back.  They or their families might be next.  It is sheer terror.

Yet BO thinks we are worse off here.

I'll take McCain anyday.   
Title: Newt on High Energy Prices
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 13, 2008, 11:32:35 AM

We Can Thank Shortsighted Politicians for High Energy Prices
The starting point of any discussion of America's energy future has to be this: Shortsighted politicians have created the current energy crisis.

For decades left-leaning politicians have advocated higher prices and less energy. They were going to save the environment by punishing Americans into driving less and driving smaller cars. Now their policies have succeeded with a vengeance.

The very left wing politicians who favored a policy of no oil and gas exploration, no use of coal, no development of nuclear power, and no aggressive development of new technologies are now panic-stricken that their policies of higher prices have led to higher prices.

And now the same shortsighted, dishonest politicians who created the crisis are blaming everyone but themselves for the crisis. Because they refuse to be honest about the policies which led to this crisis, they can't be honest about the policies that will lead us out of it.

The politicians want scapegoats. The American people just want solutions.

The Solution? A Pro-Investment, Pro-Creativity, Pro-Production Energy Coalition
Politicians with vision -- working with entrepreneurs, scientists, and engineers -- could rapidly replace

 

 the current shortages and high prices with a flood of new energy at lower prices. And America's current vulnerability to blackmail by foreign dictators could rapidly be turned into virtual independence with a North American energy strategy that includes Canada and Mexico.

The key is to create a new coalition of Americans who favor greater investment, greater discovery, greater creativity, and greater production.

That coalition could lead to a new era of American prosperity with a more prosperous economy, more abundant energy, a healthier environment, and greater national security.

The Current Crisis of High Prices and Limited Supply
The fact is, with leadership that unleashes the potential of the American people, there is no reason why America can't have safe, abundant, and relatively inexpensive energy.

America still has the world's largest supply of fossil fuels. We have more coal than any other country by a huge margin. We have abundant oil and gas reserves. We have the potential for nuclear, wind, solar and biofuels in tremendous quantities.

And, critically, America is still technologically the most advanced nation in the world, despite decades of bad policies. We have the potential for enormous breakthroughs in future technologies such as hydrogen power.

Without Real Change the Energy Problem Will Get Much Worse
The second inescapable fact of America's energy future is this: India and China are realities. As they become more prosperous their people want to have better lives. And having better lives means using more and more energy.

This year Asia bought more cars than the United States for the first time in history. The pressure for more energy on a worldwide basis is going to continue to grow.

The only solutions to the current high prices and scarcity are higher energy supply and/or lower energy demand.

In the long run we will almost certainly find dramatic breakthroughs including electric cars (super hybrids) and hydrogen-powered vehicles.

But in the short and near term, oil is going to remain the primary source of energy for transportation. And any strategy that does not substantially increase the production of oil and the use of coal is a strategy for much higher prices and growing scarcities.

The Left's Strategy is Anti-Oil and Anti-Coal
Yet the current strategy of the left is anti-oil and anti-coal.

It is a recipe for very high prices for Americans who drive.

It is a recipe for higher inflation as the cost of energy is driven through the entire economy.

It is a recipe for growing vulnerability to blackmail by foreign dictatorships.

And it is a recipe for starving poor people in the third world. The price of oil has a much bigger impact on the cost of food than the production of biofuels. Higher oil prices mean higher fertilizer and transportation prices. Combine that with the impact of speculators and really destructive government policies (including the Left's opposition to scientifically improved food production), and you have a formula for starvation for the poorest people.

Americans Support Energy Independence, Innovation, Incentives, and Nuclear Power
At AmericanSolutions.com you can view the Platform of the American People, a collection of 91 planks with the support of the majority of Democrats, independents, and Republicans.

The Platform shows that the American people overwhelmingly agree that we should use our resources to become independent from foreign dictators.

Brazil recently discovered two very large oil fields in the Atlantic Ocean. They are so large that they will make Brazil completely independent from Middle Eastern oil.

This is important because the Minerals Management Service has estimated a mean of 85.9 billion barrels of undiscovered recoverable oil and a mean of 419.9 trillion cubic feet of undiscovered recoverable natural gas in the Federal Outer Continental Shelf of the United States. And that estimate does not include any Brazil-size surprise discoveries.

The Platform also shows that Americans believe deeply in the power of technology, incentives, and innovation to develop new sources of energy and new methods of energy conservation. For example:


"We can solve our environmental problems faster and cheaper with innovation and new technology than with more litigation and more government regulation. (79 to 15)


If we use technology and innovation and incentives we do not need to raise taxes to clean up our environment. (68 to 29)"

And Americans also believe in the safety and reliability of nuclear energy.


"We support building more nuclear power plants to cut carbon emissions. (65 to 28)"

The First Step: Replace Warner-Lieberman with Domenici
In a sign of how out of touch the Congress is with the current realities of the average American, the Senate is planning to bring up the Warner-Lieberman bill. This "tax and trade" bill will be an economic disaster. A better name for it would be "The China and India Full Employment Act" because it is going to raise the costs of doing business in America so dramatically that most future factories will be built outside the United States.


SUMMARY OF WARNER-LIEBERMAN


FINANCIAL COSTS OF WARNER-LIEBERMAN


ESTIMATED JOB LOSS DUE TO WARNER-LIEBERMAN

"Tax and trade" is a more accurate term than "cap and trade" because buried in this bill is a massive tax increase which will lead to a much bigger federal government with much more bureaucracy and a much smaller private sector operating only with the permission of federal bureaucrats.


LEARN MORE ABOUT CAP AND TRADE

At a time when the American driver is already complaining about the cost of gasoline and the American homeowner is beginning to complain about the cost of natural gas and home heating oil, the Warner-Lieberman bill will make those costs much worse.

Instead of turning to Warner-Lieberman, the Senate would send a better signal to the American people by taking up the American Energy Production Act, sponsored by New Mexico Senator Pete Domenici (R)


LEARN MORE ABOUT THE AMERICAN ENERGY PRODUCTION ACT

Where the Warner-Lieberman bill is one more step toward higher prices, more scarcity, and less production, the Domenici Bill is a first step toward trying to increase production.

If the Senate votes to bring up the Domenici Bill, they are beginning to get the message that we want more energy and lower prices.

The Next Steps to Clean, More Abundant, Lower Cost Domestic Energy
After switching focus from the Warner-Lieberman bill to the Domenici bill, here are the next steps toward an energy abundant American future:


Change federal law to give all states with offshore oil and gas the same share of federal royalties Wyoming gets for land-based resources (48%). Today most states get zero royalties from offshore oil and gas development while states like Wyoming reap 48% of federal royalties for its land-based oil and gas. If Richmond, Tallahassee, and Sacramento suddenly had the potential to find billions of dollars a year in new revenues, their willingness to tolerate new oil and gas development with appropriate environmental safeguards might go up dramatically.


Change federal law to allow those states that want to permit exploration with appropriate safeguards to do so. Companies could be required to post bonds to pay for any environmental problems, and a share of the state and federal revenues from new offshore development could be set aside to finance biodiversity and national park projects.


Allow companies engaged in oil and gas exploration and development to write off their investments in one year by expensing all of it against their tax liabilities. This will lead to an explosion of new exploration and development.


Immediately renegotiate the clean coal (FutureGen) project for Illinois to get it built as rapidly as possible (see the chapter in Real Change for rapid contracting techniques with incentives that can reduce construction time from years to months). It is utterly irrational for the Department of Energy to postpone the most advanced clean coal project in America (LEARN MORE ABOUT DOE'S FAILURE ON FUTURE GEN).

Coal is America's most abundant and lowest-cost energy resource. If clean coal technologies can be demonstrated to produce power with virtually no carbon release, then coal becomes environmentally very acceptable. America IS the Saudi Arabia of coal. We simply must fund the most advanced experiment and get on with using our most abundant resource.


Congress should pass a series of tax-free prizes to accelerate innovation in developing new technologies for using coal. The result will be a better environment, more energy independence, and more energy at lower cost. Eliminate half the Department of Energy bureaucracy and turn the money into paying for prizes. America will get a much bigger, faster return on its investment.


Develop a tax credit for refitting existing coal plants. There are a lot of existing coal plants which are going to be around for a long time. The most efficient way to make them more environmentally acceptable is to create a tax credit for retrofitting them with new methods and new technologies.


Pass a streamlined regulatory regime and a favorable tax regime for building nuclear power plants.


Make the solar power and wind power tax credits permanent to create a large scale industry dedicated to domestically produced renewable fuel. A contractor recently told me about a solar project he had planned for the American southwest that is now being built in Spain because he distrusts the American Congress and is tired of it playing games with short-term tax credits. We have enormous opportunities in solar, wind, and other renewable fuels; and they can be developed with a stable tax policy.


Develop long distance transmission lines to move wind power from the Dakotas to Chicago. The potential is there for an enormous amount of electricity generation, but it is locked up geographically because the neighboring states have no reason to be helpful. The Dakotas can generate the power and Chicago can use the power, but the federal government may have to make the connection possible.


Allow the auto companies to use their tax credits for the cost of flex fuels cars, hybrids, and the development of hydrogen cars including necessary retooling for manufacturing. The American auto companies have billions in tax credits, but they have no profits to turn the tax credits into useful money. The federal government could make the tax credits refundable and therefore useful if they were spent on helping solve the energy problem. This would be a win-win strategy of much greater power than the fight over CAFE standards.

Conservation as a Parallel, Co-Equal Strategy with Production
At the same time we work to increase production of energy, we must work to find ways to increase energy conservation. There are a number of steps that can be taken.

Congressman Roy Blunt notes that we currently spend eight times more money on federal subsidies for low income heating than we spend on modernizing homes so they don't use as much energy.

A variety of tax credits should be developed to accelerate maximum efficiency in energy use and to accelerate the replacement of inefficient systems with more modern, more efficient systems.

The Choice is Ours
The time has come for Americans to demand a fundamental change in energy policy.

If we want less expensive gasoline, then we have to demand the policies that will increase the supply of oil and reduce its cost.

If we want a reliable energy policy that reduces our dependence on foreign dictatorships, then we have to demand greater use of American resources and American technology.

If we want these changes to come before we are blackmailed or bankrupted by foreign dictatorships, then we must demand that politicians cut through the red tape, change the bureaucracy, and get the job done.

And if our elected officials want to stick with the current scarcity-producing, high price-resulting energy policies, then its time to retire them for leaders who want more production at lower cost.

The choice is ours.

Your friend,

Newt Gingrich
Title: WSJ: The Next American Frontier
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 19, 2008, 12:26:28 PM


The Next American Frontier
By MICHAEL S. MALONE
May 19, 2008; Page A15

The entire world seems to be heading toward points of inflection. The developing world is embarking on the digital age. The developed world is entering the Internet era. And the United States, once again at the vanguard, is on the verge of becoming the world's first Entrepreneurial Nation.

At the Chicago World's Fair in 1893, Frederick Jackson Turner delivered a paper to the American Historical Association – the most famous ever by an American historian. In "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," he noted that, according to the most recent U.S. census, so much of the nation had been settled that there was no longer an identifiable western migration. The very notion of a "frontier" was obsolete.

 
Ryan Inzana 
For three centuries the frontier had defined us, tantalized us with the perpetual chance to "light out for the territories" and start our lives over. It was the foundation of those very American notions of "federalism" and "rugged individualism." But Americans had crossed an invisible line in history, entering a new world with a new set of rules.

What Turner couldn't guess was that the unexplored prairie would become the uninvented new product, the unexploited new market and the untried new business plan.

The great new American frontiers proved to be those of business, science and technology. In the course of the 20th century, Americans invented more milestone technologies and inventions, created more wealth and leisure time, and reorganized their institutions more times than any country had ever done before – despite a massive economic depression and two world wars. It all reached a crescendo in the magical year of 1969, with the creation of the Internet, the invention of the microprocessor and, most of all, a man walking on the moon.

Along with genetic engineering, we are still busily spinning out the implications of these marvels. Yet it is becoming increasingly apparent that the cultural underpinnings of these activities have changed in some fundamental way.

We still have schools, but a growing number of our children are studying at home or attending private schools – and those in public schools are doing ever more amounts of their class work on the Internet.

We still have companies and corporations, but now they are virtualized, with online work teams handing off assignments to each other 24/7 around the world. Men and women go to work, but the office is increasingly likely to be in the den. In 2005, an Intel survey of its employees found that nearly 20% of its professionals had never met their boss face-to-face. Half of them never expected to. Last summer, when the Media X institute at Stanford extended that survey to IBM, Sun, HP, Microsoft and Cisco, the percentages turned out to be even greater.

Newspapers are dying, networks are dying, and if teenage boys playing GTA 4 and World of Warcraft have any say about it, so is television. More than 200 million people now belong to just two social networks: MySpace and Facebook. And there are more than 80 million videos on YouTube, all put there by the same individual initiative.

The most compelling statistic of all? Half of all new college graduates now believe that self-employment is more secure than a full-time job. Today, 80% of the colleges and universities in the U.S. now offer courses on entrepreneurship; 60% of Gen Y business owners consider themselves to be serial entrepreneurs, according to Inc. magazine. Tellingly, 18 to 24-year-olds are starting companies at a faster rate than 35 to 44-year-olds. And 70% of today's high schoolers intend to start their own companies, according to a Gallup poll.

An upcoming wave of new workers in our society will never work for an established company if they can help it. To them, having a traditional job is one of the biggest career failures they can imagine.

Much of childhood today is spent, not in organized sports or organizations, but in ad hoc teams playing online games such as Half Life, or competing in robotics tournaments, or in constructing and decorating MySpace pages. Without knowing it, we have been training a whole generation of young entrepreneurs.

And who is going to dissuade them? Mom, who is a self-employed consultant working out of the spare bedroom? Or Dad, who is at Starbuck's working on the spreadsheet of his new business plan?

In the past there have been trading states like Venice, commercial regions like the Hanseatic League, and even so-called nations of shopkeepers. But there has never been a nation in which the dominant paradigm is entrepreneurship. Not just self-employment or sole proprietorship, but serial company-building, entire careers built on perpetual change, independence and the endless pursuit of the next opportunity.

Without noticing it, we have once again discovered, and then raced off to settle, a new frontier. Not land, not innovation, but ourselves and a growing control over our own lives and careers.

And why not? Each step in the development of American society has been towards an ever-greater level of independence, freedom and personal liberty. And as the rest of the world catches up to where we were, we've already moved on to the next epoch in the national story.

But liberty exacts its own demands. Entrepreneurial America is likely to become even more innovative than it is today. And that innovation is likely to spread across society, not just as products and inventions, but new ways of living and new types of organizations.

The economy will be much more volatile and much more competitive. In the continuous fervor to create new institutions, it will become increasingly difficult to sustain old ones. New political parties, new social groupings, thousands of new manias and movements and millions of new companies will pop up over the next few decades. Large corporations that don't figure out how to combine permanence with perpetual change will be swept away.

This higher level of anarchy will be exciting, but it will also sometimes be very painful. Entire industries will die almost overnight, laying off thousands, while others will just as suddenly appear, hungry for employees. Continuity and predictability will become the rarest of commodities. And if the entrepreneurial personality honors smart failures, by the same token it has little pity for weakness. That fraction of Americans – 10%, 20% – who still dream of the gold watch or the 30-year pin will suffer the most . . . and unless their needs are somehow met as well, they will remain a perpetually open wound in our society.

Scary, exciting, liberating, frustrating, infinitely ambitious and thoroughly amnesic. If you live in a high-tech community like Silicon Valley or Redmond or Austin, you already live in this world. It's hard to imagine more exciting places to be.

For all of our fears about privacy and security, for all the added pressures that will be created by heightened competition and clashing ambitions, America as an entrepreneurial nation will reward each of us with greater independence – and perhaps even greater happiness – than ever before. It waits out there for each of us. Being good entrepreneurs, it's time to look ahead, develop a good plan, and then bet everything on ourselves.

Mr. Malone's next book is "The Protean Corporation" (Random House). This essay was adapted from a recent speech at Santa Clara University.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 23, 2008, 10:02:20 AM
The Death of Conservatism Is Greatly Exaggerated
By FRED D. THOMPSON
May 23, 2008

Recent congressional losses, President George W. Bush's unpopularity, and bleak generic ballot poll numbers have conservatives fearing the "liberalization" of America – a move toward secularization, the growth of government, stagnation, mediocrity and loss of freedom.

Yet there is still a way to revive the conservative cause. Doing so will require avoiding the traps of pessimism or election-year quick fixes. Conservatives need to stand back for a moment and think about our philosophical first principles.

Conservatives value the lessons of history and respect faith and tradition. They are skeptical of mass movements, perfect solutions and what often passes for "progress." At the same time, they recognize that change is inevitable. They also know that while man is prone to err, he is capable of great things and is meant to be free in an unfettered market of ideas, not subjugated by a too-powerful government.

These were the principles relied upon by our Founding Fathers, and which paved the way for a Constitution that delineated the powers of the central government, established checks and balances among its branches, and further diffused its power through a system of federalism. These principles led to a market economy, the primacy of the rule of law and the abolition of slavery. They also helped to establish liberal trade policies and to meld idealism and realism in our foreign and military policies.

The power of conservative principles is borne out in the most strong, prosperous and free country in the history of the world. In the U.S., basic constitutional government has been preserved, foreign tyrannies have been defeated, our failed welfare system was reformed, and the confiscatory income tax rates of a few decades ago have been substantially reduced. This may be why the party where most conservatives reside, the Republican Party, has won seven of the last 10 presidential elections.

Still, a lot of the issues that litter the political battlefield today put conservatives on the defensive. What are we going to do to fix the economy, the housing market, health-care costs and education? Some conservatives try to avoid philosophical confrontation with liberals, often urging solutions that would expand the government while rationalizing that the expansion would be at a slightly slower rate.

This strategy simply has not worked. Conservatives should stay true to their principles and remember:

- Congress cannot repeal the laws of economics. There are no short-term fixes without longer term consequences.

- In a free and dynamic country with social mobility, there will be great opportunity but also economic disparity, especially if the country has liberal immigration policies and a high divorce rate.

- An education system cannot overcome the breakdown of the family, and the social fabric that surrounds children daily.

- Free markets, not an expanding and more powerful government, are the solution to today's problems. Many of these problems, such as health-care costs, energy dependency and the subprime mortgage crisis, were caused in large part by government policies.

It's not that conservatives today no longer believe in the validity of these principles. They just find it difficult to stand strong when the political winds are blowing so hard against them. To be sure, standing by conservative principles does not always guarantee success at the ballot box – it did for Ronald Reagan, but not for Barry Goldwater. But abandoning these principles doesn't ensure victory either. Circumstances often play the deciding role. Is there any doubt that the Carter administration's misery index and the Iranian hostage crises allowed Reagan to prevail in 1980?

In this unpredictable world, conservatives should adhere to their fundamental ideals. These ideals have brought our country much success, and may well win the day again. Conservatives must have faith that, more often than not, Americans will make the sacrifices necessary to preserve national security and prosperity.

A political party that adheres to conservative principles should have continuing success – especially if its leadership believes in those principles and is able to articulate them.

Mr. Thompson, a former U.S. senator from Tennessee, was a candidate for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination.
WSJ
Title: WSJ: How Bush sold the War
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 27, 2008, 08:31:08 AM
 

How Bush Sold the War
By DOUGLAS J. FEITH
May 27, 2008; Page A21

In the fall of 2003, a few months after Saddam Hussein's overthrow, U.S. officials began to despair of finding stockpiles of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. The resulting embarrassment caused a radical shift in administration rhetoric about the war in Iraq.

President Bush no longer stressed Saddam's record or the threats from the Baathist regime as reasons for going to war. Rather, from that point forward, he focused almost exclusively on the larger aim of promoting democracy. This new focus compounded the damage to the president's credibility that had already been caused by the CIA's errors on Iraqi WMD. The president was seen as distancing himself from the actual case he had made for removing the Iraqi regime from power.

 
AP 
This change can be quantified: In the year beginning with his first major speech about Iraq – the Sept. 12, 2002 address to the U.N. General Assembly – Mr. Bush delivered nine major talks about Iraq. There were, on average, approximately 14 paragraphs per speech on Saddam's record as an enemy, aggressor, tyrant and danger, with only three paragraphs on promoting democracy. In the next year – from September 2003 to September 2004 – Mr. Bush delivered 15 major talks about Iraq. The average number of paragraphs devoted to the record of threats from Saddam was one, and the number devoted to democracy promotion was approximately 11.

The stunning change in rhetoric appeared to confirm his critics' argument that the security rationale for the war was at best an error, and at worst a lie. That's a shame, for Mr. Bush had solid grounds for worrying about the dangers of leaving Saddam in power.

In the spring of 2004, with the transfer of sovereign authority to the Iraqis imminent, the president was scheduled to give a major speech about Iraq. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld received an advance draft and he gave it to me for review. In keeping with the new trend, the drafted speech focused on the prospects for Iraqi democracy.

White House officials understandably preferred to declare affirmative messages about Iraq's future, rather than rehash the government's intelligence embarrassments. Even so, I thought it was a strategic error for the president to make no effort to defend the arguments that had motivated him before the war. Mr. Bush's political opponents were intent on magnifying the administration's mistakes regarding WMD. On television and radio, in print and on the Internet, day after day they repeated the claim that the undiscovered stockpiles were the sum and substance of why the U.S. went to war against Saddam.

Electoral politics aside, I thought it was important for national security reasons that the president refute his critics' misstatements. The CIA assessments of WMD were wrong, but they originated in the years before he became president and they had been accepted by Democratic and Republican members of Congress, as well as by the U.N. and other officials around the world. And, in any event, the erroneous WMD intelligence was not the entire security rationale for overthrowing Saddam.

On May 22, 2004, I gave Mr. Rumsfeld a memo to pass along to National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and the president's speechwriters. I proposed that the speech "should deal with some basics – in particular, why we went to war in the first place." It would be useful to "make clear the tie-in between Iraq and the broader war on terrorism" in the following terms: The Saddam Hussein regime "had used WMD, supported various terrorist groups, was hostile to the U.S. and had a record of aggression and of defiance of numerous U.N. resolutions."

In light of 9/11, the "danger that Saddam's regime could provide biological weapons or other WMD to terrorist groups for use against us was too great" to let stand. And other ways of countering the danger – containment, sanctions, inspections, no-fly zones – had proven "unsustainable or inadequate." I suggested that the president distinguish between the essential U.S. interests in Iraq and the extra benefits if we could succeed in building democratic institutions there: "A unified Iraq that does not support terrorism or pursue WMD will in and of itself be an important victory in the war on terrorism."

Some of the speech's rhetoric about democracy struck me as a problem: "The draft speech now implies that we went to war in Iraq simply to free the Iraqi people from tyranny and create democracy there," I noted. But that implication "is not accurate and it sets us up for accusations of failure if Iraq does not quickly achieve 'democracy.'"

As was typical, the speech went through multiple drafts. Ms. Rice's office sent us a new version, and the next day I wrote Mr. Rumsfeld another set of comments – without great hope of persuading the speechwriting team. The speech's centerpiece, once again, was the set of steps "to help Iraq achieve democracy." One line in particular asserted that we went to Iraq "to make them free." I dissented:

- "This mixes up our current important goal (i.e., getting Iraq on the path to democratic government) with the strategic rationale for the war, which was to end the danger that Saddam might provide biological or [other] weapons of mass destruction to terrorists for use against us."

- "There is a widespread misconception that the war's rationale was the existence of Iraqi WMD stockpiles. This allows critics to say that our failure to find such stockpiles undermines that rationale."

- "If the President ignores this altogether and then implies that the war's rationale was not the terrorism/state sponsorship/WMD nexus but rather democracy for Iraqis, the critics may say that he is changing the subject or rewriting history."

Again, I proposed that the president distinguish between achieving our primary goal in Iraq – eliminating a security threat – and aiming for the over-and-above goal of democracy promotion, which may not be readily achievable.

Mr. Bush gave his speech at the Army War College on May 24, as Iraq was entering into the last month of its 14-month occupation by the U.S. The president declared: "I sent American troops to Iraq to defend our security, not to stay as an occupying power. I sent American troops to Iraq to make its people free, not to make them American. Iraqis will write their own history, and find their own way."

I had hoped the president would explain why sending American troops to Iraq had helped defend our security, but he did not. The questionable line about sending those troops to make Iraq's people free had remained in the speech. And it was rather late to be promising the Iraqis that we would not stay as an occupying power but instead let them find their own way.

The president had chosen to talk almost exclusively about Iraq's future. His political opponents noticed that if they talked about the past – about prewar intelligence and prewar planning for the war and the aftermath – no one in the White House communications effort would contradict them. Opponents could say anything about the prewar period – misstating Saddam's record, the administration's record or their own – and their statements would go uncorrected. This was a big incentive for them to recriminate about the administration's prewar work, and congressional Democrats have pressed for one retrospective investigation after another.

But the most damaging effect of this communications strategy was that it changed the definition of success. Before the war, administration officials said that success would mean an Iraq that no longer threatened important U.S. interests – that did not support terrorism, aspire to WMD, threaten its neighbors, or conduct mass murder. But from the fall of 2003 on, the president defined success as stable democracy in Iraq.

This was a public affairs decision that has had enormous strategic consequences for American support for the war. The new formula fails to connect the Iraq war directly to U.S. interests. It causes many Americans to question why we should be investing so much blood and treasure for Iraqis. And many Americans doubt that the new aim is realistic – that stable democracy can be achieved in Iraq in the foreseeable future.

To fight a long war, the president has to ensure he can preserve public and congressional support for the effort. It is not an overstatement to say that the president's shift in rhetoric nearly cost the U.S. the war. Victory or defeat can hinge on the president's words as much as on the military plans of his generals or the actions of their troops on the ground.

Mr. Feith was under secretary of defense for policy from July 2001 until August 2005. This article is adapted from his new memoir, "War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism" (HarperCollins).
Title: You can't appease everybody
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 28, 2008, 06:49:30 PM
Ann has become , , , uneven in recent years, but this one works for me.

You Can't Appease Everybody
by Ann Coulter

Posted: 05/28/2008
 
After decades of comparing Nixon to Hitler, Reagan to Hitler and Bush to Hitler, liberals have finally decided it is wrong to make comparisons to Hitler. But the only leader to whom they have applied their newfound rule of thumb is: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
 
While Ahmadinejad has not done anything as starkly evil as cut the capital gains tax, he does deny the Holocaust, call for the destruction of Israel, deny the existence of gays in Iran and refuses to abandon his nuclear program despite protests from the United Nations. That's the only world leader we're not allowed to compare to Hitler.

President Bush's speech at the Knesset two weeks ago was somewhat more nuanced than liberals' Hitler arguments. He did not simply jump up and down chanting: "Ahmadinejad is Hitler!" Instead, Bush condemned a policy of appeasement toward madmen, citing Neville Chamberlain's ill-fated talks with Adolf Hitler.

Suspiciously, Bush's speech was interpreted as a direct hit on B. Hussein Obama's foreign policy -- and that's according to Obama's supporters.

So to defend Obama, who -- according to his supporters -- favors appeasing madmen, liberals expanded the rule against ad Hitlerum arguments to cover any mention of the events leading to World War II. A ban on "You're like Hitler" arguments has become liberals' latest excuse to ignore history.


Unless, of course, it is liberals using historical examples to support Obama's admitted policy of appeasing dangerous lunatics. It's a strange one-sided argument when they can cite Nixon going to China and Reagan meeting with Gorbachev, but we can't cite Chamberlain meeting with Hitler.

There are reasons to meet with a tyrant, but none apply to Ahmadinejad. We're not looking for an imperfect ally against some other dictatorship, as Nixon was with China. And we aren't in a Mexican stand-off with a nuclear power, as Reagan was with the USSR. At least not yet.

Mutually Assured Destruction was bad enough with the Evil Empire, but something you definitely want to avoid with lunatics who are willing to commit suicide in order to destroy the enemies of Islam. As with the H-word, our sole objective with Ahmadinejad is to prevent him from becoming a military power.

What possible reason is there to meet with Ahmadinejad? To win a $20 bar bet as to whether or not the man actually owns a necktie?

We know his position and he knows ours. He wants nuclear arms, American troops out of the Middle East and the destruction of Israel. We don't want that. (This is assuming Mike Gravel doesn't pull off a major upset this November.) We don't need him as an ally against some other more dangerous dictator because ... well, there aren't any.

Does Obama imagine he will make demands of Ahmadinejad? Using what stick as leverage, pray tell? A U.S. boycott of the next Holocaust-denial conference in Tehran? The U.N. has already demanded that Iran give up its nuclear program. Ahmadinejad has ignored the U.N. and that's the end of it.

We always have the ability to "talk" to Ahmadinejad if we have something to say. Bush has a telephone. If Iranian crop dusters were headed toward one of our nuclear power plants, I am quite certain that Bush would be able to reach Ahmadinejad to tell him that Iran will be flattened unless the planes retreat. If his cell phone died, Bush could just post a quick warning on the Huffington Post.

Liberals view talk as an end in itself. They never think through how these talks will proceed, which is why Chamberlain ended up giving away Czechoslovakia. He didn't leave for Munich planning to do that. It is simply the inevitable result of talking with madmen without a clear and obtainable goal. Without a stick, there's only a carrot.

The only explanation for liberals' hysterical zealotry in favor of Obama's proposed open-ended talks with Ahmadinejad is that they seriously imagine crazy foreign dictators will be as charmed by Obama as cable TV hosts whose legs tingle when they listen to Obama (a condition that used to be known as "sciatica").

Because, really, who better to face down a Holocaust denier with a messianic complex than the guy who is afraid of a debate moderated by Brit Hume?

There is no possible result of such a meeting apart from appeasement and humiliation of the U.S. If we are prepared to talk, then we're looking for a deal. What kind of deal do you make with a madman until he is ready to surrender?

Will President Obama listen respectfully as Ahmadinejad says he plans to build nuclear weapons? Will he say he'll get back to Ahmadinejad on removing all U.S. troops from the region? Will he nod his head as Ahmadinejad demands the removal of the Jewish population from the Middle East? Obama says he's prepared to have an open-ended chat with Ahmadinejad, so I guess everything is on the table.

Perhaps in the spirit of compromise, Obama could agree to let Iran push only half of Israel into the sea. That would certainly constitute "change"! Obama could give one of those upbeat speeches of his, saying: As a result of my recent talks with President Ahmadinejad, some see the state of Israel as being half empty. I prefer to see it as half full. And then Obama can return and tell Americans he could no more repudiate Ahmadinejad than he could repudiate his own white grandmother. It will make Chris Matthews' leg tingle.

There is a third reason to talk to dictators, in addition to seeking an ally or as part of a policy of Mutually Assured Destruction.

Gen. Douglas MacArthur talked with Japanese imperial forces on Sept. 2, 1945. There was a long ceremony aboard the USS Missouri with full press coverage and a lot of talk. It was a regular international confab!

It also took place after we had dropped two nukes on Japan and MacArthur was officially accepting Japan's surrender. If Obama plans to drop nukes on Ahmadinejad prior to their little chat-fest, I'm all for it. But I don't think that's what liberals have in mind.
Title: Pipes: The enemy has a name
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 20, 2008, 06:31:54 AM
The Enemy Has a Name
by Daniel Pipes
Jerusalem Post
June 19, 2008
http://www.danielpipes.org/article/5629

 Send  Comment  RSS Share:     

If you cannot name your enemy, how can you defeat it? Just as a physician must identify a disease before curing a patient, so a strategist must identify the foe before winning a war. Yet Westerners have proven reluctant to identify the opponent in the conflict the U.S. government variously (and euphemistically) calls the "global war on terror," the "long war," the "global struggle against violent extremism," or even the "global struggle for security and progress."

This timidity translates into an inability to define war goals. Two high-level U.S. statements from late 2001 typify the vague and ineffective declarations issued by Western governments. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld defined victory as establishing "an environment where we can in fact fulfill and live [our] freedoms." In contrast, George W. Bush announced a narrower goal, "the defeat of the global terror network" – whatever that undefined network might be.

"Defeating terrorism" has, indeed, remained the basic war goal. By implication, terrorists are the enemy and counterterrorism is the main response.

But observers have increasingly concluded that terrorism is just a tactic, not an enemy. Bush effectively admitted this much in mid-2004, acknowledging that "We actually misnamed the war on terror." Instead, he called the war a "struggle against ideological extremists who do not believe in free societies and who happen to use terror as a weapon to try to shake the conscience of the free world."

A year later, in the aftermath of the 7/7 London transport bombings, British prime minister Tony Blair advanced the discussion by speaking of the enemy as "a religious ideology, a strain within the world-wide religion of Islam." Soon after, Bush himself used the terms "Islamic radicalism," "militant Jihadism," and "Islamo-fascism." But these words prompted much criticism and he backtracked.

By mid-2007, Bush had reverted to speaking about "the great struggle against extremism that is now playing out across the broader Middle East." That is where things now stand, with U.S. government agencies being advised to refer to the enemy with such nebulous terms as "death cult," "cult-like," "sectarian cult," and "violent cultists."

In fact, that enemy has a precise and concise name: Islamism, a radical utopian version of Islam. Islamists, adherents of this well funded, widespread, totalitarian ideology, are attempting to create a global Islamic order that fully applies the Islamic law (Shari‘a).

Thus defined, the needed response becomes clear. It is two-fold: vanquish Islamism and help Muslims develop an alternative form of Islam. Not coincidentally, this approach roughly parallels what the allied powers accomplished vis-à-vis the two prior radical utopian movements, fascism and communism.

First comes the burden of defeating an ideological enemy. As in 1945 and 1991, the goal must be to marginalize and weaken a coherent and aggressive ideological movement, so that it no longer attracts followers nor poses a world-shaking threat. World War II, won through blood, steel, and atomic bombs, offers one model for victory, the Cold War, with its deterrence, complexity, and nearly-peaceful collapse, offers quite another.

Victory against Islamism, presumably, will draw on both these legacies and mix them into a novel brew of conventional war, counterterrorism, counterpropaganda, and many other strategies. At one end, the war effort led to the overthrow of the Taliban government in Afghanistan; at the other, it requires repelling the lawful Islamists who work legitimately within the educational, religious, media, legal, and political arenas.

The second goal involves helping Muslims who oppose Islamist goals and wish to offer an alternative to Islamism's depravities by reconciling Islam with the best of modern ways. But such Muslims are weak, being but fractured individuals who have only just begun the hard work of researching, communicating, organizing, funding, and mobilizing.

To do all this more quickly and effectively, these moderates need non-Muslim encouragement and sponsorship. However unimpressive they may be at present, moderates, with Western support, alone hold the potential to modernize Islam, and thereby to terminate the threat of Islamism.

In the final analysis, Islamism presents two main challenges to Westerners: To speak frankly and to aim for victory. Neither comes naturally to the modern person, who tends to prefer political correctness and conflict resolution, or even appeasement. But once these hurdles are overcome, the Islamist enemy's objective weakness in terms of arsenal, economy, and resources means it can readily be defeated.
Title: Ajami: Anti-Americanism is mostly hype
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 23, 2008, 11:17:33 AM
WSJ

Anti-Americanism Is Mostly Hype
By FOUAD AJAMI
June 23, 2008; Page A17

So America is unloved in Istanbul and Cairo and Karachi: It is an annual ritual, the June release of the Pew global attitudes survey and the laments over the erosion of America's standing in foreign lands.

 
David Gothard 
We were once loved in Anatolia, but now a mere 12% of Turks have a "favorable view" of the U.S. Only 22% of Egyptians think well of us. Pakistan is crucial to the war on terror, but we can only count on the goodwill of 19% of Pakistanis.

American liberalism is heavily invested in this narrative of U.S. isolation. The Shiites have their annual ritual of 10 days of self-flagellation and penance, but this liberal narrative is ceaseless: The world once loved us, and all Parisians were Americans after 9/11, but thanks to President Bush we have squandered that sympathy.

It is an old trick, the use of foreign narrators and witnesses to speak of one's home. Montesquieu gave the genre its timeless rendition in his Persian Letters, published in 1721. No one was fooled, these were Parisian letters, and the Persian travelers, Rica and Usbek, mere stand-ins for an author taking stock of his homeland after the death of Louis XIV and the coming of an age of enlightenment and skepticism.

"This King is a great magician. He exerts authority even over the minds of his subjects; he makes them think what he wants," Rica writes from Paris. "You must not be amazed at what I tell you about this prince: there is another magician, stronger than he. This magician is called the Pope. He will make the King believe that three are only one, or else that the bread one eats is not bread, or that the wine one drinks is not wine, and a thousand other things of the same kind." Handy witnesses, these Persians.

The Pew survey tells us that some foreign precincts show a landslide victory for Barack Obama. France leads the pack; fully 84% of those following the American campaign are confident Mr. Obama will do the right thing in foreign policy, compared with 33% who say that about John McCain. There are similar results in Germany, and a closer margin in Britain. The populations of Jordan, Turkey and Pakistan have scant if any confidence in either candidate.

The deference of American liberal opinion to the coffeehouses of Istanbul and Amman and Karachi is nothing less than astounding. You would not know from these surveys, of course, that anti-Americanism runs deep in the French intellectual scene, and that French thought about the great power across the Atlantic has long been a jumble of envy and condescension. In the fabled years of the Clinton presidency, long before Guantanamo, the torture narrative and the war in Iraq, American pension funds were, in the French telling, raiding their assets, bringing to their homeland dreaded Anglo-Saxon economics, and the merciless winds of mondialisation (globalization).

I grew up in the Arab world in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and anti-Americanism was the standard political language – even for those pining for American visas and green cards. Precious few took this seriously. The attraction to the glamorous, distant society was too strong in the Beirut of my boyhood.

It is no different today in Egypt or Pakistan. And what people tell pollsters who turn up in their midst with their clipboards? In Hosni Mubarak's tyranny, anti-Americanism is the permissible safety valve for Egyptians unable to speak of their despot. We stand between Pharaoh and his frustrated people, and the Egyptians railing against America are giving voice to the disappointment that runs through their life and culture. Scapegoating and anti-Americanism are a substitute for a sober assessment of what ails that old, burdened country.

Nor should we listen too closely to the anti-American hysteria that now grips Turkey. That country was once a serious, earnest land. It knew its place in the world as a bridge between Europe and Islam. But of late it has become the "torn country" that the celebrated political scientist Samuel Huntington said it was, its very identity fought over between the old Kemalist elites and the new Islamists.

No Turkish malady is caused by America, and no cure can come courtesy of the Americans. The Turks giving vent to anti-Americanism are doing a parody of Europe: They were led to believe that the Europe spurning them, and turning down their membership in its club, is given to anti-Americanism, so they took to the same fad. Turkish anti-Americanism is no doubt fueled by the resentment within Turkey of the American war in Iraq that gave protection and liberty to the Kurds. No apology is owed the Turks; indeed, it is they who must reconsider their intolerance of minorities. If the Turks were comfortable with the abnormality of Iraq under Saddam Hussein, it is they who have a problem.

And if there is enthusiasm for Barack Obama on foreign shores, his rise to fame and power must be a tribute to the land that has made this possible. Where else would a boy of marginality and relative poverty find his way to the peak of political life? Certainly not in his father's Kenya, where the tribal origins of the Obamas would have determined young Barack's life-chances. In an Arab world hemmed in by pedigree, where rulers bequeath power to their sons and the lot of the sons is invariably that of the fathers, the tale of Obama is fantasy.

There are lines, and barriers, of race which bedevil Arab lands, and they will be there awaiting a President Obama should he prevail in November. Consider a recent speech by Libya's erratic ruler, Moammar Gadhafi, to his countrymen.

He said he feared that Mr. Obama, as a "black man," might succumb to an "inferiority complex" if he were to come to power. "This is a great menace because Obama might turn out to be more white than the whites, exaggerating his persecution and disdain of blacks. The statements of our Kenyan brother with an American nationality about Jerusalem, and his support for Israelis, and his slighting of the Palestinian people is either a measure of his ignorance of international politics or a lie perpetrated on the Jews in the course of an election campaign."

There is no need to roam distant lands in search of indictments of America's ways. Tales of our demise appear every day in our media. Yes, it is not perfect, this republic of ours. But the possibilities for emancipation and self-improvement it affords are unmatched in other lands.

Meanwhile, a maligned American president now returns from a Europe at peace with American leadership. In France, Germany and Italy, center-right governments are eager to proclaim their identification with American power. Jacques Chirac is gone. Now there is Nicolas Sarkozy, who offered a poetic tribute last November to the American soldiers who fell on French soil, before a joint session of the U.S. Congress. "The children of my generation," he said, "understood that those young Americans, 20 years old, were true heroes to whom they owed the fact that they were free people and not slaves. France will never forget the sacrifice of your children."

The great battle over the Iraq war has subsided, and Europeans who ponder the burning grounds of the Islamic world know the distinction between fashionable anti-Americanism and the international order underpinned by American power. George W. Bush may have been indifferent to political protocol, but he held the line when it truly mattered, and the Europeans have come to understand that appeasement of dictators and brigands begets its own troubles.

It is one thing to rail against the Pax Americana. But after the pollsters are gone, the truth of our contemporary order of states endures. We live in a world held by American power – and benevolence. Nothing prettier, or more just, looms over the horizon.

Mr. Ajami, a Bradley Prize recipient, teaches at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of "The Foreigner's Gift" (Free Press, 2006).
Title: VDH
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 15, 2008, 08:52:08 AM
Ruing A Return Of The Old World Order
By VICTOR DAVIS HANSON | Posted Thursday, August 14, 2008 4:30 PM PT

Russia invades Georgia. China jails dissidents. China and India pollute at levels previously unimaginable. Gulf monarchies make trillions from jacked-up oil prices. Islamic terrorists keep car bombing.

Meanwhile, Europe offers moral lectures, while Japan and South Korea shrug and watch — all in a globalized world that tunes into the Olympics each night from Beijing.

"Citizens of the world" were supposed to share, in relative harmony, our new "Planet Earth," which was to have followed from an interconnected system of free trade, instantaneous electronic communications, civilized diplomacy and shared consumer capitalism.

But was that ever quite true? In reality, to the extent globalism worked, it followed from three unspoken assumptions:

First, the U.S. economy would keep importing goods from abroad to drive international economic growth.

Second, the U.S. military would keep the sea lanes open, and trade and travel protected. After the past destruction of fascism and global communism, the Americans — as global sheriff — would continue to deal with the occasional menace like a Moammar Gadhafi, Slobodan Milosevic, Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Kim Jong-il or the Taliban.

Third, America would ignore ankle-biting allies and remain engaged with the world — like a good, nurturing mom who at times must put up with the petulance of dependent teenagers.

But there have been a number of indications recently that globalization may soon lose its American parent, who is tiring, both materially and psychologically.

The United States may be the most free, stable and meritocratic nation in the world, but its resources and patience are not unlimited. Currently, it pays more than a half trillion dollars per year to import $115-a-barrel oil that is often pumped at a cost of about $5.

The Chinese, Japanese and Europeans hold trillions of dollars in U.S. bonds — the result of massive trade deficits. The American dollar is at historic lows. We are piling up staggering national debt. Over 12 million live here illegally and freely transfer more than $50 billion annually to Mexico and Latin America.

Our military, after deposing Milosevic, the Taliban and Saddam, is tired. And Americans are increasingly becoming more sensitive to the cheap criticism of global moralists.

But as the United States turns ever so slightly inward, the new globalized world will revert to a far poorer — and more dangerous — place.

Liberals like presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama speak out against new free-trade agreements and want existing accords like NAFTA readjusted.

More and more Americans are furious at the costs of illegal immigration — and are moving to stop it. The foreign remittances that help prop up Mexico and Latin America are threatened by any change in America's immigration attitude.

Meanwhile, the hypocrisy becomes harder to take. After all, it is easy for self-appointed global moralists to complain that terrorists don't enjoy Miranda rights at Guantanamo, but it would be hard to do much about the Russian military invading Georgia's democracy and bombing its cities.

Al Gore crisscrosses the country, pontificating about Americans' carbon footprints. But he could do far better to fly to China to convince them not to open 500 new coal-burning power plants.

It has been chic to chant "No blood for oil" about Iraq's petroleum — petroleum that, in fact, is now administered by a constitutional republic. But such sloganeering would be better directed at China's sweetheart oil deals with Sudan that enable the mass-murdering in Darfur.

Due to climbing prices and high government taxes, gasoline consumption is declining in the West, but its use is rising in other places, where it is either untaxed or subsidized.

So, what a richer but more critical world has forgotten is that in large part America was the model, not the villain — and that postwar globalization was always a form of engaged Americanization that enriched and protected billions.

Yet globalization, in all its manifestations, will run out of steam the moment we tire of fueling it, as the world returns instead to the mind-set of the 1930s — with protectionist tariffs; weak, disarmed democracies; an isolationist America; predatory dictatorships; and a demoralized gloom-and-doom Western elite.

If America adopts the protectionist trade policies of Japan or China, global profits plummet. If our armed forces follow the European lead of demilitarization and inaction, rogue states advance. If we were to treat the environment as do China and India, the world would become quickly a lost cause

If we flee Iraq and call off the war on terror, Islamic jihadists will regroup, not disband. And when the Russians attack the next democracy, they won't listen to the United Nations, the European Union or Michael Moore.

Brace yourself — we may be on our way back to an old world, where the strong do as they will, and the weak suffer as they must.
Title: Buchanan: Blowback from Bear Baiting
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 15, 2008, 10:20:02 AM
Second post of the AM:
========================

Blowback From Bear-Baiting
08/15/2008 
 
Mikheil Saakashvili's decision to use the opening of the Olympic Games to cover Georgia's invasion of its breakaway province of South Ossetia must rank in stupidity with Gamal Abdel-Nasser's decision to close the Straits of Tiran to Israeli ships.

Nasser's blunder cost him the Sinai in the Six-Day War. Saakashvili's blunder probably means permanent loss of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

After shelling and attacking what he claims is his own country, killing scores of his own Ossetian citizens and sending tens of thousands fleeing into Russia, Saakashvili's army was whipped back into Georgia in 48 hours. Continued
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sponsored Links:
Newt Gingrich Weekly: Winning the Future
Newt Gingrich Weekly: Winning the Future
Barack Obama Exposed! A Human Events Special Report
Newt Gingrich Weekly: Winning the Future
Barack Obama Exposed! A Human Events Special Report

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Vladimir Putin took the opportunity to kick the Georgian army out of Abkhazia, as well, to bomb Tbilisi and to seize Gori, birthplace of Stalin.

Reveling in his status as an intimate of George Bush, Dick Cheney and John McCain, and America's lone democratic ally in the Caucasus, Saakashvili thought he could get away with a lightning coup and present the world with a fait accompli.

Mikheil did not reckon on the rage or resolve of the Bear.

American charges of Russian aggression ring hollow. Georgia started this fight -- Russia finished it. People who start wars don't get to decide how and when they end.

Russia's response was "disproportionate" and "brutal," wailed Bush.

True. But did we not authorize Israel to bomb Lebanon for 35 days in response to a border skirmish where several Israel soldiers were killed and two captured? Was that not many times more "disproportionate"?

Russia has invaded a sovereign country, railed Bush. But did not the United States bomb Serbia for 78 days and invade to force it to surrender a province, Kosovo, to which Serbia had a far greater historic claim than Georgia had to Abkhazia or South Ossetia, both of which prefer Moscow to Tbilisi?

Is not Western hypocrisy astonishing?

When the Soviet Union broke into 15 nations, we celebrated. When Slovenia, Croatia, Macedonia, Bosnia, Montenegro and Kosovo broke from Serbia, we rejoiced. Why, then, the indignation when two provinces, whose peoples are ethnically separate from Georgians and who fought for their independence, should succeed in breaking away?

Are secessions and the dissolution of nations laudable only when they advance the agenda of the neocons, many of who viscerally detest Russia?

That Putin took the occasion of Saakashvili's provocative and stupid stunt to administer an extra dose of punishment is undeniable. But is not Russian anger understandable? For years the West has rubbed Russia's nose in her Cold War defeat and treated her like Weimar Germany.

When Moscow pulled the Red Army out of Europe, closed its bases in Cuba, dissolved the evil empire, let the Soviet Union break up into 15 states, and sought friendship and alliance with the United States, what did we do?

American carpetbaggers colluded with Muscovite Scalawags to loot the Russian nation. Breaking a pledge to Mikhail Gorbachev, we moved our military alliance into Eastern Europe, then onto Russia's doorstep. Six Warsaw Pact nations and three former republics of the Soviet Union are now NATO members.

Bush, Cheney and McCain have pushed to bring Ukraine and Georgia into NATO. This would require the United States to go to war with Russia over Stalin's birthplace and who has sovereignty over the Crimean Peninsula and Sebastopol, traditional home of Russia's Black Sea fleet.

When did these become U.S. vital interests, justifying war with Russia?

The United States unilaterally abrogated the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty because our technology was superior, then planned to site anti-missile defenses in Poland and the Czech Republic to defend against Iranian missiles, though Iran has no ICBMs and no atomic bombs. A Russian counter-offer to have us together put an anti-missile system in Azerbaijan was rejected out of hand.

We built a Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline from Azerbaijan through Georgia to Turkey to cut Russia out. Then we helped dump over regimes friendly to Moscow with democratic "revolutions" in Ukraine and Georgia, and tried to repeat it in Belarus.

Americans have many fine qualities. A capacity to see ourselves as others see us is not high among them.

Imagine a world that never knew Ronald Reagan, where Europe had opted out of the Cold War after Moscow installed those SS-20 missiles east of the Elbe. And Europe had abandoned NATO, told us to go home and become subservient to Moscow.

How would we have reacted if Moscow had brought Western Europe into the Warsaw Pact, established bases in Mexico and Panama, put missile defense radars and rockets in Cuba, and joined with China to build pipelines to transfer Mexican and Venezuelan oil to Pacific ports for shipment to Asia? And cut us out? If there were Russian and Chinese advisers training Latin American armies, the way we are in the former Soviet republics, how would we react? Would we look with bemusement on such Russian behavior?

For a decade, some of us have warned about the folly of getting into Russia's space and getting into Russia's face. The chickens of democratic imperialism have now come home to roost -- in Tbilisi.
Title: Evan Sayet's Right to Laugh
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 19, 2008, 01:12:17 PM

http://dirtyharrysplace.com/?p=3763
Title: Coulter
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 03, 2008, 11:19:02 PM
The Best Man Turned Out To Be A Woman

 
John McCain's choice of Sarah Palin, governor of Alaska, as his running mate finally gave Republicans a reason to vote for him -- a reason, that is, other than B. Hussein Obama.

The media are hopping mad about McCain's vice presidential selection, but they're really furious over at MSNBC. After drawing "Keith (plus) Obama" hearts on their denim notebooks, Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews stayed up all night last Thursday, writing jokes about Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, the presumed vice presidential pick. Now they can't use any of them.

So the media are taking it out on our brave Sarah and her 17-year-old daughter.  They claimed Palin was chosen only because she's a woman. In fact, Palin was chosen because she's pro-life, pro-gun, pro-drilling and pro-tax cuts. She's fought both Republicans and Democrats on public corruption and does not have hair plugs like some other vice presidential candidate I could mention. In other words, she's a "Republican."

As a right-winger, Palin will appeal to the narrow 59 percent of Americans who voted for another former small-market sportscaster: Ronald Reagan. Our motto: Sarah Palin is only a heartbeat away!

If you're going to say Palin was chosen because she's a woman, you're going to have to demonstrate that the runners-up were more qualified. Gov. Tim Pawlenty seems like a terrific fellow and fine governor, but he is not obviously more qualified than Palin.

As for former governor of Pennsylvania Tom Ridge and Democratic Sen. Joe Lieberman, the other also-rans, I can think of at least 40 million unborn reasons she's better than either of them.

Within the first few hours after Palin's name was announced, McCain raised $4 million in campaign donations online, reaching $10 million within the next two days. Which shortlist vice presidential pick could have beaten that?

The media hysterically denounced Palin as "inexperienced." But then people started to notice that she has more executive experience than B. Hussein Obama -- the guy at the top of the Democrats' ticket.

They tried to create a "Troopergate" for Palin, indignantly demanding to know why she wanted to get her ex-brother-in-law removed as a state trooper. Again, public corruption is not a good issue for someone like Obama, Chicago pol and noted friend of Syrian National/convicted felon Antoin Rezko.

For the cherry on top, then we found out Palin's ex-brother-in-law had Tasered his own 10-year-old stepson. Defend that, Democrats.

The bien-pensant criticized Palin, saying it's irresponsible for a woman with five children to run for vice president. Liberals' new talking point: Sarah Palin: Only five abortions away from the presidency.

They claimed her newborn wasn't her child, but the child of her 17-year-old daughter. That turned out to be a lie.

Then they attacked her daughter, who actually is pregnant now, for being unmarried. When liberals start acting like they're opposed to pre-marital sex and mothers having careers, you know McCain's vice presidential choice has knocked them back on their heels.

But at least liberal reporters had finally found someone their own size to pick on: a 17-year-old girl.

Speaking of Democrats with newborn children, the media weren't particularly concerned about John Edwards running for president despite his having a mistress with a newborn child.

While the difficult circumstances of Palin's pregnant daughter are being covered like a terrorist attack on the nation, with leering accounts of the 18-year-old father, the media remain resolutely uninterested in the parentage of Edwards' mistress's love child. Except, that is, the hardworking reporters at the National Enquirer, who say Edwards is the father.

As this goes to press, the latest media-invented scandal about Palin is that McCain didn't know her well before choosing her as his running mate. He knew her well enough, though admittedly, not as well as Obama knows William Ayers.

John F. Kennedy, who was -- from what the media tell me -- America's most beloved president, detested his vice president, Lyndon Johnson.

Until Clinton interviewed Al Gore one time before choosing him as his vice presidential candidate, he had met Gore only one other time: when Gore was running for president in 1988 and flew to Little Rock seeking Clinton's endorsement. Clinton turned him down.

To this day, there's no proof that Bill Clinton ever met one-on-one with his CIA director, James Woolsey, other than a brief chat after midnight the night before Woolsey's nomination was announced.

Barring some all-new, trivial and probably false story about Palin -- her former hairdresser got a parking ticket in 1978! -- the media apparently intend to keep being hysterical about McCain's alleged failure to "vet" Palin properly. The problem with this argument is that it presupposes that everyone is asking: "HOW DID THIS HAPPEN?"

No one's saying that.

Attacks on McCain's "vetting" process require the media to keep claiming that Palin has a lot of problems. But she doesn't have any problems. Remember? Those were all blind alleys.

Unfortunately, for the ordinary TV viewer hearing nonstop hysteria about nonspecific "problems," it takes a lot of effort to figure out that every attack liberals have launched against Palin turned out to be a lie.

It's as if a basketball player made the winning shot in the last three seconds of the game and liberals demand that we have a week-long discussion about whether the player should have taken that shot. WHAT IF HE MISSED?

With Palin, McCain didn't miss.
Title: Re: Political Rant, energy and geopolitics
Post by: DougMacG on September 05, 2008, 09:07:39 AM
A political rant-  I hate to over simplify, but isn't nearly the whole Russian problem rooted in the distortions of energy prices and the Russian hold over Europe, Turkey, Ukraine, Georgia, etc.?  Same for Iran and others.  If energy was legal, affordable and plentiful, wouldn't these rogue economies have to actually produce something else to make money and then be too busy in their enterprises to blow us up or invade their neighbors?  Same for the slowness in the American economy.  Other than high taxes, over-regulation and government messing up heathcare and other markets, aren't energy prices the main drag on the economy right now?

Several people here wanted Newt leading the ticket and that didn't fly but he hit the nail on the head with "Drill here, drill now, pay less" Even that is oversimplified because we need ALL forms of energy.  We need to build nuclear plants here, now, if we plan to plug in a significant part of our transportation system soon.  Natural gas is back in the discussion. Natural gas from the ground, natural gas from coal, I don't care if it comes from the cows. It's a great fuel, let's go.  Legalize production.  Find ways.  Get government back in the business of ensuring public safety, not blocking production.

And what's up with burning food to produce energy and then the bewilderment when we discover food prices went up and hit the poorest people hardest.  What kind of 'liberal' policy is that?  I just drove through Iowa and Nebraska to get to Colorado.  The government punishes you heavily to drive your car but makes you use taxpayer money and government mandates to put destroyed food (ethanol) in your tank.  The Iowa primary is over.  Can't the adults agree soon that this policy is horrible???

Of course one of the reasons for the stall in energy production was the confusion created over global warming.  It reminds me of the Y2K scare.  Did you all survive that one? lol. Up here in 'hockey mom' country (MN) I just put away all my air conditioners, none were used at all this summer while the winter was one of the longest and coldest in recent years.  Try fact checking the oceans rising allegation and see if anything definitive jumps out.  Looks to me like 20cm in 120 years with zero acceleration.  Where the arctic ice is melting the sea level is actually falling.  Hmmm...

Speaking of hockey moms, at the hockey arenas in the parking lots you can often count 15-20 SUV's or light trucks in a row before you see a sedan, much less a tiny car.  The reason is because hockey driving involves carrying people and hockey bags with lots of equipment, often through snow and ice, and the people involved typically have other hobbies that involve liberties beyond the liberal vision of federally funded trolley car trains to government approved, clustered home developments. 

End this rant with a hope that McCain's selection of the energy governor gives him cover to flop his anti-ANWR position and the hope that she can use that distinction to circle Sen. Biden in the debate, on domestic AND foreign policy.  If she gets a word in edgewise.  JMHO.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 16, 2008, 09:09:33 PM
Now THIS is a rant!!!

http://www.atlah.org/broadcast/ndnr09-03-08.html

ROTFLMAO!
Title: A Confederacy of Narcissists
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on September 23, 2008, 08:36:15 AM
That indeed was a rant.

This might not qualify as one, though:

September 19, 2008, 0:30 p.m.

The Undefended City
No despair.

By Bill Whittle

When I first got to college, back in the last few weeks of the Seventies, I finally got a chance to see an ordinary game of Dungeons and Dragons. My immediate inclination was to play as a Paladin: the pinnacle of Lawful Good, a character required to dash in and fight overwhelmingly powerful evil forces anywhere and at whatever odds. These contests were short, depressing and hilarious, but all D&D really came down to in the end was slaying small monsters, taking their gold, buying slightly better gear and then slaying slightly larger monsters. Why not just save some time and become a Vorpal Sword distributor? Then you get the weapons and the gold, and people bring them both to you. And so a larval conservative was born. And I never played again.

That was the attitude I took into The Lord of the Rings when the first of the trilogy appeared in 2001, just a few months after the Two Towers actually did fall and the idea of good and evil suddenly became — to me and no doubt to you too — a great deal less ironic and a great deal more real.

And there, in the darkness, staring up at that screen, I marveled at this monumental font of deep and eternal ideas: the aversion to facing danger, even when it is right in front of us; the value of old and true allies; the corrosive force of addiction; responsibility forsaken, then reclaimed… and through it all the fear that we may be lesser sons of greater fathers, and that we may no longer have the courage or the will to defend the City entrusted to our care.

This, and more, what was what John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was trying to teach me, down that dark river of the future — and he ought to know. The Lord of the Rings was written between 1937 through 1949… years of dark waters, indeed.

A few years before Tolkien put pen to paper, an event took place that a man of his education would have undoubtedly been aware. On February 9th, 1933, the ruling elite of the world’s great Civilization held a debate in the Oxford Union. With thunderclouds growing dark across the English Channel, at a time when resolute action could still have averted the worst catastrophe the world has ever known, these elites resolved that “This House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country.”

The Resolution passed by a vote of 275 to 153. Needless to say, this vote did not avert the fight. It guaranteed it.

How much of the weight of that, I wonder, sat along side him as he penned page after page about the decline of the Men of the West. For taken in its entirety, The Lord of the Rings is about the collective regeneration of the will and courage of a previous age, and ends with the hope that the greatest days of the City lie yet ahead.

I live a few miles from Santa Monica High School, in California. There, young men and women are taught that America is “a terrorist nation,” “one of the worst regimes in history,” that it’s twice-elected leader is “the son of the devil,” and dictator of this “fascist” country. Further, “patriotism” is taught by dragging an American flag across the classroom floor, because the nation’s truest patriots, as we should know by now, are those who are most able to despise it.

This is only high school, remember: in college things get much, much worse.

Two generations, now, are being raised on this poison, and the reason for that is this: the enemies of this city cannot come out and simply say, “Do not defend the city.” Even the smartest among us can see that is simple treason. But they can say, “The City is not worth defending.” So they say that, and they say that all the time and in as many different ways as they are able.

If you step far enough back to look at the whole of human history, you will begin to see a very plain rhythm: a heartbeat of civilization. Steep climbs out of disease and ignorance into the light of medicine and learning — and then a sudden collapse back into darkness. And it is in that darkness that most humans have lived their lives: poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

The pattern is always the same: at the height of a civilization’s powers something catastrophic seems to occur — a loss of will, a failure of nerve, and above all an unwillingness to identify with the values and customs that have produced such wonders.

The Russians say a fish rots from the head down. They ought to know. It may not be factually true that Nero fiddled while Rome burned, the saying has passed into common usage because the image as the ring of truth to it: time and time again, the good and decent common people have manned the walls of the city, and have been ready to give their lives in its defense, only to discover too late that some silk-robed son of a bitch has snuck out of the palace at midnight and thrown open the gates to the barbarians outside.

And how is this done, this “throwing open of the gates?” How are defenders taken off the walls?

Well, most of what I learned about Vietnam I learned from men like Oliver Stone. This self-loathing narcissist has repeatedly tried to inculcate in me a sense of despair and outrage at my own government, my own culture, my own people and ultimately myself. He tried to convince me — and he is a skillfull man — that my own government murdered my own President for political gain. I am told daily in those darkened temples that rogue CIA elements run a puppet government, that the real threat to the nation comes from the generals that defend it, or from the businessmen that provide the prosperity we take for granted.

I sit with others in darkened rooms, watching films like Redacted, Stop-Loss, and In the Valley of Elah, and see our brave young soldiers depicted as murderers, rapists, broken psychotics or ignorant dupes –visions foisted upon me by bitter and isolated millionaires such as Brian de Palma and Paul Haggis and all the rest.

I’ve been told this story in some form or another, every day of every week of the past 30 years of my life. It wasn’t always so.

But it is certainly so today. And standing against all this hypnotic power — the power of the mythmakers in Hollywood, the power of the information peddlers in the media, the corrosive power of America-hating professors on every campus in America… against all that we find an old warrior — a paladin if ever there was one — an old, beat-up warhorse standing up in defense of his city one last time. And beside him: a wonder. A common person… just a regular mom who goes to work, does a difficult job with intelligence and energy and grace and every-day competence and then puts it away to go home and have dinner with the family.

Against all of that stand these two.

No wonder they must be destroyed. Because — Sarah Palin especially — presents a mortal threat to these people who have determined over cocktails who the next President should be and who now clearly mean to grind into metal shards the transaxle of their credibility in order to get the result they must have. Truly, they are before our eyes destroying the machine they have built in order to get their victory. What the hell is so threatening to be worth that?

Only this: the living proof that they are not needed. Not needed to govern, not needed to influence and guide, not needed to lecture us on our intellectual and moral failings which are visible only from the heights of Manhattan skyscrapers or the palaces up on Mulholland Drive. Not needed. We can do it — and do it better — without all of them.

When all is said and done, Civilizations do not fall because of the barbarians at the gates. Nor does a great city fall from the death wish of bored and morally bankrupt stewards presumably sworn to its defense. Civilizations fall only because each citizen of the city comes to accept that nothing can be done to rally and rebuild broken walls; that ground lost may never be recovered; and that greatness lived in our grandparents but not our grandchildren. Yes, our betters tell us these things daily. But that doesn’t mean we have to believe it.

Ask the common people of all politics and persuasions aboard Flight 93 whether greatness and courage has deserted America. Through this magical crystal ball — the one we are using right now — we common people can speak to one another. And by reminding ourselves and those around us of who we are, where we came from, what we have achieved together and of the marvels we have yet to achieve, we may laugh in the face of despair and mock those people that think a man with an MBA from Harvard knows more about running a gas station than the man that actually runs the gas station.

It is the small-town virtues of self-reliance, hard work, personal responsibility, and common-sense ingenuity — and not those of the preening cosmopolitans that gape at them in mixed contempt and bafflement — that have made us the inheritors of the most magnificent, noble, decent and free society ever to appear on this earth. This Western Civilization… this American City… has earned the right to greet each sunrise with a blast of silver trumpets that can bring down mountains.

And what, really, is a Legion of Narcissists and a Confederacy of Despair against that?

— Bill Whittle lives and works in Los Angeles.

National Review Online - http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=OGVlY2RhOGM0MWE5MjNmMGM2ZjY0NzcxMjMzMTc5NWI=
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Chad on September 23, 2008, 03:28:47 PM
Sorry this article was too embedded to cut and paste. Well worth the read, however.

5 Myths About Those Civic-Minded, Deeply Informed Voters
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/05/AR2008090502666.html (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/05/AR2008090502666.html)
Title: Burning Down the Housing Market
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on September 26, 2008, 02:27:16 PM
This could be posted under several topics:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5tZc8oH--o
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 26, 2008, 05:08:23 PM
 :-D :cry: :-D :cry: :cry: :cry:
Title: Re: Political Rants, government's failed meddling in housing markets
Post by: DougMacG on September 30, 2008, 08:52:45 AM
Fannie Mae bragged to Dems through the Black Congressional Caucus about (bad) loans made into the community that were based on race and location rather than credit worthiness and the value of the asset. That's my read on the statement in this video as the meddlers and the buffoons are caught congratulating each other about bad lending practices:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usvG-s_Ssb0

It's amazing that Republicans and objective media (an unfortunate oxymoron) can't identify the policies and the people that got us to collapse BEFORE they ask us to pay our way out.  Bush, McCain et al all put a higher priority on making nice and forging deals instead of straight talk and consequences.  Result: Bush takes the blame and the McCain candidacy is punished by association while the Obama political philosophy is a perfect match with the programs that already failed.  So we learn nothing and move on.

The "Community Reinvestment Act" should have been a welfare program subject to their own 'pay as you go rules' and transparency to the public and the taxpayer instead of fraudulently hidden and bundled with pretend private market investments.

It isn't 'affordable housing' when you put people into housing they can't afford. 

The direct result of these phony and fraudulent investments is to artificially drive up 'values' making the community that already lacks sufficient income and work ethic even LESS affordable to those not receiving the phony subsidy, like an honest homeowner who plans to pay the entire 30 year loan.

So who were these heroic politicians and what were their arguments as the congressional committees faced off with the regulators as the writing started to become visible on the wall in 2004-2005?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MGT_cSi7Rs&eurl=http://www.redstate.com/

Maxine Waters D-Calif.: Through nearly a dozen hearings, we were frankly trying to fix something that wasn’t broke. Mr. Chairman, we do not have a crisis at Freddie Mac, and particularly at Fannie Mae, under the outstanding leadership of Franklin Raines (Obama adviser who barely avoided prosecution for fraud.)

Gregory Meeks D-NY: … I’m just pissed off at OFHEO [the regulators trying to warn Congress of insolvency at the GSEs], because if it wasn’t for you, I don’t think we’d be here in the first place. … There’s been nothing that indicated that’s wrong with Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac has come up on its own … The question that then comes up is the competence that your agency has with reference to deciding and regulating these GSEs.

Lacy Clay D-MO: This hearing is about the political lynching of Franklin Raines. (White House budget director under President Bill Clinton received 91.1 million from the corrupt GSE)

Barney Frank: I don’t see anything in this report that raises safety and soundness problems. (Now blames Bush and Republicans for "deregulation"!)
--

If I have to watch political commercials this autumn, I would like to see these sleazy characters on screen across the fruited plain in their own words, not just letting a few videos stay hidden on right wing internet sites.

PMI - Private Mortgage Insurance - is where you charge people extra for making a loan they can already ill-afford.  As a landlord I know extremely well that charging extra to high risk applicants with lousy finances does NOT cause you to collect more money.  The AIG failure was based on this phony scheme that lenders mandated on borrowers to compensate for their own bad lending practices.  Now we own it.  Good grief.

Whenever you hear terms like GSE's Government Supported Enterprises, and Public-Private Partnerships, please holler, scream, protest, vomit and consult your own copy of the constitution to see how far we have gone astray. Which article in the constitution (not the equal protection clause) establishes the proper role of government to partner up with selected businesses to make extraordinary amounts money and pay friends and contributors bonuses before fall belly up due to the lack any semblance of profit and loss market discipline or requirement to compete to succeed.

Opponents of markets and freedom (see above) always pick out failures in the LEAST free of markets - healthcare, housing, college tuition, energy - to show that market capitalism can't be trusted and must be 'overseen' by jackasses like we see in the committee meeting video linked above.

Foreclosure, the right of the lender to take back the property, the process that politicians like Hillary, Obama, and the congress want to stop is the cornerstone of home ownership.  Without it, ordinary people could not 'own' their own home and pay for it over their income producing years.  A mortgage is a claim against the property - the right to foreclose and take back.  That right is almost non-existent with the statutory delays and restrictions from the wisdom of our 'regulators'.  The period of time a lender is forced to wait under smart regulations should be at least partly dependent on the amount of equity ownership that the borrower paid or accumulated.  In cases where the borrower has NO money at stake and the lender is carrying all the risk, the grace period for missing a payment should be measured in minutes.  Then out they go.  JMHO.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on September 30, 2008, 09:09:54 AM
Quote
It's amazing that Republicans and objective media (an unfortunate oxymoron) can't identify the policies and the people that got us to collapse BEFORE they ask us to pay our way out.  Bush, McCain et al all put a higher priority on making nice and forging deals instead of straight talk and consequences.  Result: Bush takes the blame and the McCain candidacy is punished by association while the Obama political philosophy is a perfect match with the programs that already failed.  So we learn nothing and move on.

Wow. Very cogent analysis.
Title: Coulter
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 01, 2008, 05:33:34 AM
“Under [Bill] Clinton, the entire federal government put massive pressure on banks to grant more mortgages to the poor and minorities. Clinton’s secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Andrew Cuomo, investigated Fannie Mae for racial discrimination and proposed that 50 percent of Fannie Mae’s and Freddie Mac’s portfolio be made up of loans to low- to moderate-income borrowers by the year 2001. Instead of looking at ‘outdated criteria,’ such as the mortgage applicant’s credit history and ability to make a down payment, banks were encouraged to consider nontraditional measures of credit-worthiness, such as having a good jump shot or having a missing child named ‘Caylee.’ Threatening lawsuits, Clinton’s Federal Reserve demanded that banks treat welfare payments and unemployment benefits as valid income sources to qualify for a mortgage. That isn’t a joke—it’s a fact. ... In 1999, liberals were bragging about extending affirmative action to the financial sector. Los Angeles Times reporter Ron Brownstein hailed the Clinton administration’s affirmative action lending policies as one of the ‘hidden success stories’ of the Clinton administration, saying that ‘black and Latino homeownership has surged to the highest level ever recorded.’ Meanwhile, economists were screaming from the rooftops that the Democrats were forcing mortgage lenders to issue loans that would fail the moment the housing market slowed and deadbeat borrowers couldn’t get out of their loans by selling their houses. A decade later, the housing bubble burst and, as predicted, food-stamp-backed mortgages collapsed. Democrats set an affirmative action time-bomb and now it’s gone off.” —Ann Coulter
Title: Water at Gulliver'
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 13, 2008, 08:17:25 PM
America Will Remain the Superpower When the tide laps at Gulliver's waistline, it usually means the Lilliputians are already 10 feet under.By BRET STEPHENS
Article
 more in Opinion »Email Printer Friendly Share:
 Yahoo Buzz  MySpace Digg  Text Size   
Constantinople fell to the Ottomans after two centuries of retreat and decline. It took two world wars, a global depression and the onset of the Cold War to lay the British Empire low.

 
APSo it's a safe bet that the era of American dominance will not be brought to a close by credit default swaps, mark-to-market accounting or (even) Barney Frank.

Not that there's a shortage of invitations to believe otherwise. Almost in unison, Germany's finance minister, Russia's prime minister and Iran's president predict the end of U.S. "hegemony," financial and/or otherwise. The New York Times weighs in with meditations on "A Power That May Not Stay So Super." Der Spiegel gives us "The End of Hubris." Guardian columnist John Gray sees "A Shattering Moment in America's Fall From Power."

Much of this is said, or written, with ill-disguised glee. But when the tide laps at Gulliver's waistline, it usually means the Lilliputians are already 10 feet under. Before yesterday's surge, the Dow had dropped 25% in three months. But that only means it had outperformed nearly every single major foreign stock exchange, including Germany's XETRADAX (down 28%) China's Shanghai exchange (down 30%), Japan's NIKK225 (down 37%), Brazil's BOVESPA (down 41%) and Russia RTSI (down 61%). These contrasts are a useful demonstration that America's financial woes are nobody else's gain.

On the other hand, global economic distress doesn't invariably work at cross-purposes with American interests. Hugo Chávez's nosedive toward bankruptcy begins when oil dips below $80 a barrel, the price where it hovers now. An identical logic, if perhaps at a different price, applies to the petrodictatorships in Moscow and Tehran, which already are heavily saddled with inflationary and investor-confidence concerns. Russia will also likely burn through its $550 billion in foreign-currency reserves faster than anticipated -- a pleasing if roundabout comeuppance for last summer's Georgian adventure.

Nor does the U.S. seem all that badly off, comparatively speaking, when it comes to its ability to finance a bailout. Last month's $700 billion bailout package seems staggeringly large, but it amounts to a little more than 5% of U.S. gross domestic product. Compare that to Germany's $400 billion to $536 billion rescue package (between 12% and 16% of its GDP), or Britain's $835 billion plan (30%).

Of course it may require considerably more than $700 billion to clean out our Augean Stables. But here it helps that the ratio of government debt to GDP in the U.S. runs to about 62%. For the eurozone, it's 75%; for Japan, 180%.

It also helps that the U.S. continues to have the world's largest inflows of foreign direct investment; that it ranks third in the world (after Singapore and New Zealand) for ease of doing business, according to the World Bank; and that its demographic trends aren't headed toward a tall and steep cliff -- as they are in the EU, Russia, Japan and China.

Above all, the U.S. remains biased toward financial transparency. I am agnostic as to whether mark-to-market accounting is a good idea; last month's temporary ban on short-selling financials seemed a bad one.

But a system that demands timely and accurate financial disclosure and doesn't interfere with price discovery will invariably prove more resilient over time than a system that does not make such demands. If Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were financial time bombs of one kind, then surely China's state-owned enterprises are time bombs of another. Can anyone determine with even approximate confidence the extent of their liabilities?

This isn't to say that the abrupt failure of the SOEs would be in anyone's interests, including the U.S.'s. But one of the unremarked ironies of the present crisis is that America's financial vulnerabilities came fully into view months before Europe's (or the rest of the world's) did. That's one reason the dollar has rallied in recent months. It's also why the U.S. is likely to come through the crisis much more quickly than, say, Japan, which spent the better part of the 1990s hiding its own banking crisis from itself.

Exactly how -- and how quickly -- the U.S. does come through is anyone's guess. Recessions are periodic facts of economic life that tend to last anywhere between six and 16 months. Severe recessions or depressions are fundamentally political events that can last a decade or longer -- however long economic policy remains bad.

If the next administration is wise, it will do what it can to help the markets clear, let the recession take its course, and do what it can to preserve intact a financial system that has served us splendidly. If it is unwise, it will embark on several years of grandiose social experimentation. Either way, the United States will eventually regain its economic footing and maintain its place.

Write to bstephens@wsj.com
Title: Prager: Two Americas
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 20, 2008, 10:43:07 AM
There Are Two Irreconcilable Americas
By Dennis Prager
It is time to confront the unhappy fact about our country: There are now two Americas. Not a rich one and a poor one; economic status plays little role in this division.

There is a red one and a blue one.

For most of my life I have believed, in what I now regard as wishful thinking, that the right and left wings have essentially the same vision for America, that it's only about ways to get there in which the two sides differ. Right and left share the same ends, I thought.

That is not the case. For the most part, right and left differ in their visions of America and that is why they differ on policies.

Right and the left do not want the same America.

The left wants America to look as much like Western European countries as possible. The left wants Europe's quasi-pacifism, cradle-to-grave socialism, egalitarianism and secularism in America. The right wants none of those values to dominate America.

The left wants America not only to have a secular government, but to have a secular society. The left feels that if people want to be religious, they should do so at home and in their houses of prayer, but never try to inject their religious values into society. The right wants America to continue to be what it has always been -- a Judeo-Christian society with a largely secular government (that is not indifferent to religion). These opposing visions explain, for example, their opposite views concerning nondenominational prayer in school.

The left prefers to identify as citizens of the world. The left fears nationalism in general (this has been true for the European left since World War I), and since the 1960s, the American left has come to fear American nationalism in particular. On the other side, the right identifies first as citizens of America.

The left therefore regards the notion of American exceptionalism as chauvinism; the United Nations and world opinion are regarded as better arbiters of what is good than is America. The right has a low opinion of the U.N.'s moral compass and of world opinion, both of which it sees as having a much poorer record of stopping genocide and other evils than America has.

The left is ambivalent about and often hostile to overt displays of American patriotism. That is why, for example, one is far more likely to find American flags displayed in Orange County, Calif., on national holidays than in liberal neighborhoods in West Los Angeles, Manhattan or San Francisco.

The left subscribes to the French Revolution, whose guiding principles were “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity." The right subscribes to the American formula, “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness." The French/European notion of equality is not mentioned. The right rejects the French Revolution and does not hold Western Europe as a model. The left does. That alone makes right and left irreconcilable.

The left envisions an egalitarian society. The right does not. The left values equality above other values because it yearns for an America in which all people have similar amounts of material possessions. This is what propels the left to advocate laws that would force employers to pay women the same wages they pay men not only for the same job but for “comparable” jobs (as if that is objectively ascertainable). The right values equality in opportunity and strongly believes that all people are created equal, but the right values liberty, a man-woman based family and other values above equality.

The left wants a world -- and therefore an America -- devoid of nuclear weapons. The right wants America to have the best nuclear weapons. The right trusts American might more than universal disarmament.

The left wants to redefine marriage to include same-sex couples for the first time in history. The right wants gays to have equal rights, but to keep marriage defined as man-woman. This, too, constitutes an irreconcilable divide.

For these and other reasons, calls for a unity among Americans that transcends left and right are either naive or disingenuous. America will be united only when one of them prevails over the other. The left knows this. Most on the right do not.

COPYRIGHT 2008 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: SB_Mig on October 20, 2008, 10:49:10 AM
Quote
America will be united only when one of them prevails over the other.

And that is a d*mn shame. A homogenous, non-debate filled, toe the party line country that is either left or right is just about the  last place in the world I want to live.
Title: Fair and Balanced Unabashed Bias
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on October 27, 2008, 07:26:46 PM
Media's Presidential Bias and Decline
Columnist Michael Malone Looks at Slanted Election Coverage and the Reasons Why

Column By MICHAEL S. MALONE
Oct. 24, 2008 —

The traditional media are playing a very, very dangerous game -- with their readers, with the Constitution and with their own fates.

The sheer bias in the print and television coverage of this election campaign is not just bewildering, but appalling. And over the last few months I've found myself slowly moving from shaking my head at the obvious one-sided reporting, to actually shouting at the screen of my television and my laptop computer.

But worst of all, for the last couple weeks, I've begun -- for the first time in my adult life -- to be embarrassed to admit what I do for a living. A few days ago, when asked by a new acquaintance what I did for a living, I replied that I was "a writer," because I couldn't bring myself to admit to a stranger that I'm a journalist.

You need to understand how painful this is for me. I am one of those people who truly bleeds ink when I'm cut. I am a fourth-generation newspaperman. As family history tells it, my great-grandfather was a newspaper editor in Abilene, Kan., during the last of the cowboy days, then moved to Oregon to help start the Oregon Journal (now the Oregonian).

My hard-living -- and when I knew her, scary -- grandmother was one of the first women reporters for the Los Angeles Times. And my father, though profoundly dyslexic, followed a long career in intelligence to finish his life (thanks to word processors and spellcheckers) as a very successful freelance writer. I've spent 30 years in every part of journalism, from beat reporter to magazine editor. And my oldest son, following in the family business, so to speak, earned his first national byline before he earned his drivers license.

So, when I say I'm deeply ashamed right now to be called a "journalist," you can imagine just how deep that cuts into my soul.

Now, of course, there's always been bias in the media. Human beings are biased, so the work they do, including reporting, is inevitably colored. Hell, I can show you 10 different ways to color variations of the word "said" -- muttered, shouted, announced, reluctantly replied, responded, etc. -- to influence the way a reader will apprehend exactly the same quote. We all learn that in Reporting 101, or at least in the first few weeks working in a newsroom.

But what we are also supposed to learn during that same apprenticeship is to recognize the dangerous power of that technique, and many others, and develop built-in alarms against them.

But even more important, we are also supposed to be taught that even though there is no such thing as pure, Platonic objectivity in reporting, we are to spend our careers struggling to approach that ideal as closely as possible.

That means constantly challenging our own prejudices, systematically presenting opposing views and never, ever burying stories that contradict our own world views or challenge people or institutions we admire. If we can't achieve Olympian detachment, than at least we can recognize human frailty -- especially in ourselves.

Reporting Bias

For many years, spotting bias in reporting was a little parlor game of mine, watching TV news or reading a newspaper article and spotting how the reporter had inserted, often unconsciously, his or her own preconceptions. But I always wrote it off as bad judgment and lack of professionalism, rather than bad faith and conscious advocacy.

Sure, being a child of the '60s I saw a lot of subjective "New" Journalism, and did a fair amount of it myself, but that kind of writing, like columns and editorials, was supposed to be segregated from "real" reporting, and, at least in mainstream media, usually was. The same was true for the emerging blogosphere, which by its very nature was opinionated and biased.

But my complacent faith in my peers first began to be shaken when some of the most admired journalists in the country were exposed as plagiarists, or worse, accused of making up stories from whole cloth.

I'd spent my entire professional career scrupulously pounding out endless dreary footnotes and double-checking sources to make sure that I never got accused of lying or stealing someone else's work -- not out of any native honesty, but out of fear: I'd always been told to fake or steal a story was a firing offense & indeed, it meant being blackballed out of the profession.

And yet, few of those worthies ever seemed to get fired for their crimes -- and if they did they were soon rehired into even more prestigious jobs. It seemed as if there were two sets of rules: one for us workaday journalists toiling out in the sticks, and another for folks who'd managed, through talent or deceit, to make it to the national level.

Meanwhile, I watched with disbelief as the nation's leading newspapers, many of whom I'd written for in the past, slowly let opinion pieces creep into the news section, and from there onto the front page. Personal opinions and comments that, had they appeared in my stories in 1979, would have gotten my butt kicked by the nearest copy editor, were now standard operating procedure at the New York Times, the Washington Post, and soon after in almost every small town paper in the U.S.

But what really shattered my faith -- and I know the day and place where it happened -- was the war in Lebanon three summers ago. The hotel I was staying at in Windhoek, Namibia, only carried CNN, a network I'd already learned to approach with skepticism. But this was CNN International, which is even worse.

I sat there, first with my jaw hanging down, then actually shouting at the TV, as one field reporter after another reported the carnage of the Israeli attacks on Beirut, with almost no corresponding coverage of the Hezbollah missiles raining down on northern Israel. The reporting was so utterly and shamelessly biased that I sat there for hours watching, assuming that eventually CNNi would get around to telling the rest of the story & but it never happened.

The Presidential Campaign

But nothing, nothing I've seen has matched the media bias on display in the current presidential campaign.

Republicans are justifiably foaming at the mouth over the sheer one-sidedness of the press coverage of the two candidates and their running mates. But in the last few days, even Democrats, who have been gloating over the pass -- no, make that shameless support -- they've gotten from the press, are starting to get uncomfortable as they realize that no one wins in the long run when we don't have a free and fair press.

I was one of the first people in the traditional media to call for the firing of Dan Rather -- not because of his phony story, but because he refused to admit his mistake -- but, bless him, even Gunga Dan thinks the media is one-sided in this election.

Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not one of those people who think the media has been too hard on, say, Republican vice presidential nominee Gov. Sarah Palin, by rushing reportorial SWAT teams to her home state of Alaska to rifle through her garbage. This is the big leagues, and if she wants to suit up and take the field, then Gov. Palin better be ready to play.

The few instances where I think the press has gone too far -- such as the Times reporter talking to prospective first lady Cindy McCain's daughter's MySpace friends -- can easily be solved with a few newsroom smackdowns and temporary repostings to the Omaha bureau.

No, what I object to (and I think most other Americans do as well) is the lack of equivalent hardball coverage of the other side -- or worse, actively serving as attack dogs for the presidential ticket of Sens. Barack Obama, D-Ill., and Joe Biden, D-Del.

If the current polls are correct, we are about to elect as president of the United States a man who is essentially a cipher, who has left almost no paper trail, seems to have few friends (that at least will talk) and has entire years missing out of his biography.

That isn't Sen. Obama's fault: His job is to put his best face forward. No, it is the traditional media's fault, for it alone (unlike the alternative media) has had the resources to cover this story properly, and has systematically refused to do so.

Why, for example to quote the lawyer for Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., haven't we seen an interview with Sen. Obama's grad school drug dealer -- when we know all about Mrs. McCain's addiction? Are Bill Ayers and Tony Rezko that hard to interview? All those phony voter registrations that hard to scrutinize? And why are Sen. Biden's endless gaffes almost always covered up, or rationalized, by the traditional media?

Joe the Plumber

The absolute nadir (though I hate to commit to that, as we still have two weeks before the election) came with Joe the Plumber.

Middle America, even when they didn't agree with Joe, looked on in horror as the press took apart the private life of an average person who had the temerity to ask a tough question of a presidential candidate. So much for the standing up for the little man. So much for speaking truth to power. So much for comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable, and all of those other catchphrases we journalists used to believe we lived by.

I learned a long time ago that when people or institutions begin to behave in a matter that seems to be entirely against their own interests, it's because we don't understand what their motives really are. It would seem that by so exposing their biases and betting everything on one candidate over another, the traditional media is trying to commit suicide -- especially when, given our currently volatile world and economy, the chances of a successful Obama presidency, indeed any presidency, is probably less than 50/50.

Furthermore, I also happen to believe that most reporters, whatever their political bias, are human torpedoes & and, had they been unleashed, would have raced in and roughed up the Obama campaign as much as they did McCain's. That's what reporters do. I was proud to have been one, and I'm still drawn to a good story, any good story, like a shark to blood in the water.

So why weren't those legions of hungry reporters set loose on the Obama campaign? Who are the real villains in this story of mainstream media betrayal?

The editors. The men and women you don't see; the people who not only decide what goes in the paper, but what doesn't; the managers who give the reporters their assignments and lay out the editorial pages. They are the real culprits.

Bad Editors

Why? I think I know, because had my life taken a different path, I could have been one: Picture yourself in your 50s in a job where you've spent 30 years working your way to the top, to the cockpit of power & only to discover that you're presiding over a dying industry. The Internet and alternative media are stealing your readers, your advertisers and your top young talent. Many of your peers shrewdly took golden parachutes and disappeared. Your job doesn't have anywhere near the power and influence it did when your started your climb. The Newspaper Guild is too weak to protect you any more, and there is a very good chance you'll lose your job before you cross that finish line, 10 years hence, of retirement and a pension.

In other words, you are facing career catastrophe -- and desperate times call for desperate measures. Even if you have to risk everything on a single Hail Mary play. Even if you have to compromise the principles that got you here. After all, newspapers and network news are doomed anyway -- all that counts is keeping them on life support until you can retire.

And then the opportunity presents itself -- an attractive young candidate whose politics likely matches yours, but more important, he offers the prospect of a transformed Washington with the power to fix everything that has gone wrong in your career.

With luck, this monolithic, single-party government will crush the alternative media via a revived fairness doctrine, re-invigorate unions by getting rid of secret votes, and just maybe be beholden to people like you in the traditional media for getting it there.

And besides, you tell yourself, it's all for the good of the country . . .

This is the opinion of the columnist and in no way reflects the opinion of ABC News.

Michael S. Malone is one of the nation's best-known technology writers. He has covered Silicon Valley and high-tech for more than 25 years, beginning with the San Jose Mercury News as the nation's first daily high-tech reporter. His articles and editorials have appeared in such publications as The Wall Street Journal, the Economist and Fortune, and for two years he was a columnist for The New York Times. He was editor of Forbes ASAP, the world's largest-circulation business-tech magazine, at the height of the dot-com boom. Malone is the author or co-author of a dozen books, notably the best-selling "Virtual Corporation." Malone has also hosted three public television interview series, and most recently co-produced the celebrated PBS miniseries on social entrepreneurs, "The New Heroes." He has been the ABCNews.com "Silicon Insider" columnist since 2000.

Title: Big Tent GOP
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 31, 2008, 01:53:52 PM
Back to a Big-Tent GOP?

    *
      By KIMBERLEY A. STRASSEL


All eyes are on Tuesday. For the GOP, the real question is Wednesday.

That's the day the party will survey the damage of the 2008 election, and have to decide what it wants to be. Even if John McCain pulls out a win, the Grand Old Party will be in trouble. Contrary to recent liberal pronouncements, the conservative movement is not dead. But the GOP response to Tuesday will determine how long it remains on life support.

The GOP's problems are a result of a failure of action, not of philosophy. Everything, including this election, shows we remain a center-right country. If Barack Obama wins, it will be because he has doggedly (if not always believably) run to the right on everything from national security (wiretapping) to "tax cuts," guns and social issues.

Democrats may also achieve big gains in the House and Senate. But their wins in 2006 were the result of the party's decision to run "conservative" candidates -- pro-life, pro-gun and populist on economics. Democratic gains this year will come via similar candidates. The nation hasn't moved left; the Democratic Party has leaned right.

Because Nancy Pelosi and her old liberal bulls will likely overreach, the GOP will have an opportunity. But the risk is that Tuesday's results will cause panic, and exacerbate the reactionary, backward-looking behavior that has already done so much damage to the party.
[Potomac Watch] Getty Images

Republicans love to recollect Ronald Reagan, though they forget why. Reagan's strength was looking to the future -- and framing the issues of the day for Americans. When the focus had been balanced budgets, he made the issue the need for economic growth. When the debate had been détente, Reagan turned it into the need for a strong America. That tradition continued with the Contract with America, welfare reform, government reform, tort reform. George W. Bush tackled education.

Reagan's other great strength was not distinguishing between red and blue America. He offered a set of principles, and invited anyone who broadly subscribed to those principles into his political house. The result was that unlikely coalition of fiscal conservatives, defense hawks and social conservatives. These were the days of Reagan Democrats, of victories in states that now seem unwinnable to the GOP.

The further Republicans have moved away from this playbook, the further its fortunes have declined. The GOP was thrown out in 2006 because it had failed to evolve on the new issues facing Americans -- spiraling health-care costs, dwindling energy supplies, out-of-control entitlements. It spent its last years divvying up pork. As it has hit the electoral rocks, the party has also turned inward, harping on immigrants and gay marriage.

So come Wednesday, the Democrats will be energized -- and the GOP must make a choice.

The worst GOP instinct would be to mimic Britain's Tories after their 1997 shellacking by Tony Blair, becoming a "no" party that spends so much time howling against the opposition it forgets what to howl for. It could curl up and stoke bitter cultural fights (immigration, abortion) to rev up a dwindling base. It could cede its fortunes to an unreformed old guard who will happily wait out their retirements in the minority. It would be easy to do all this; the party has already had practice.

The other option is for the GOP to start elevating the new generation of reformers -- folks like Virginia Rep. Eric Cantor or Wisconsin's Paul Ryan. With them comes a new intellectual focus on today's issues. (See Mr. Ryan's recent blueprint for reforming taxes, entitlements and health care.) The Republican high point this year was when the party united to fix the energy mess. That ought to tell it something.

The party could also go back to recruiting real professionals ahead of career politicians. That's how the Senate obtained Dr. Tom Coburn who, because he isn't a lifer, hasn't been afraid to shame colleagues on earmarks or obscene spending.

Just as important, the party could again open its arms to those who should, naturally, gravitate to the GOP. Today's ballooning Hispanic community is socially conservative, the sort of up-and-comers who would appreciate lower taxes, more opportunity. America's YouTube generation is naturally entrepreneurial, and doesn't like anyone telling them what to do. If Republicans could tap into these sentiments, they'd widen the tent.

Doing so does not involve altering conservative principles. Politicians like former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush have shown it is possible to be for law and order, even while welcoming immigrants who want the American dream; and that it's possible to be pro-life without braying on the subject in a way that offends suburban moderates.

This transformation is necessary even if Mr. McCain wins. His difficulties have stemmed from his own struggle to articulate answers to the biggest American worries.

Parties have to evolve. This is a GOP opportunity, if it is smart enough to take it.

Write to kim@wsj.com
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: ccp on October 31, 2008, 02:42:24 PM
***Republicans love to recollect Ronald Reagan, though they forget why. Reagan's strength was looking to the future***

Yes. Well said.

***Today's ballooning Hispanic community is socially conservative, the sort of up-and-comers who would appreciate lower taxes, more opportunity. America's YouTube generation is naturally entrepreneurial, and doesn't like anyone telling them what to do***

This one kind of makes me laugh.  If this was the case the Latinos would be voting McCain as would the younger folks who at least according to all we hear on the news are overwhelmingly for BO.

And as for Latinos, Bush tried to reach out to them with only limited success.  Which ever party can grab the lions share of their votes has the future.  It is ironic that the most recent immigrants have electoral control over the future of the this country.  But that appears to be the case.

Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 31, 2008, 06:06:47 PM
Bush received some 40-45% of the Latino vote in Texas for governor and did well when running for President too including a very strong majority of the Cuban vote in Florida.

What you say is precisely why he was so gung ho for amnesty and what has happened nationally with the Latino vote is exactly what happened to the Republican Party in CA after Gov. Wilson supported an initiative about no benefits for illegals.

Gore was shameless as VP in working to get the illegals vote for Dems, and BO will be worse with driver licenses for illegals, motor voter laws, and massive amnesty.

The Republicans are in a real existential bind on this issue.   

If we want to continue this discussion lets take it over to the immigration thread.
Title: Buchanan
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 04, 2008, 02:18:26 PM
But Where Did Bush Go Wrong?
by  Patrick J. Buchanan

After losing control of the Senate and 30 House seats in 2006, the GOP is bracing for losses of six to nine in the Senate, and two dozen to three dozen additional seats in the House.  If the party "were a dog food," says Rep. Tom Davis, "they would take us off the shelf." Bush's approval is 25 percent. Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton left office with ratings more than twice as high. But while John McCain and others have deplored the Bush failures, what, exactly, did he do wrong?

What were the policy blunders to which Republicans vehemently objected at the time?

That Bush is a Big Government Republican is undeniable. His two great social spending initiatives, prescription drug benefits for seniors under Medicare and No Child Left Behind, so testify. But how many Republicans opposed Bush on these initiatives? How many have called for the abolition of either program, or for raising payroll taxes to pay for prescription drugs?

McCain now supports the Bush judges and justices and the Bush tax cuts, as do almost all Republicans.

True, Bush sought amnesty for illegal aliens and backs the free-trade globalism that exported our manufacturing base and 3 million to 4 million jobs. But McCain is even more enthusiastic about both.

Does the party dissent on free trade and mass immigration?

Two-thirds of Americans now believe the Iraq war a mistake. Yet, all but a few Republicans backed the war. At the time of "Mission Accomplished!" in May 2003, the nation gave Bush a 90 percent approval rating, as his father had after Desert Storm.

What turned America against the war was not the decision to invade, oust Saddam, destroy the weapons of mass destruction and depart, but the long, bloody slog, the five-year war, with nearly 5,000 dead, that Iraq became. It was not the lightning war of Tommy Franks, with journalists riding tanks into Baghdad, that soured America, but the unanticipated duration and cost of the war.

Yet, Republicans still believe that the war was not a mistake, only mishandled. And now that Gen. Petraeus got it right in Iraq, they say, we should pursue the Petraeus policy in Afghanistan.
 
How many Republicans have repudiated the Bush Doctrine that got us into Iraq -- the belief that only by making the world democratic can we keep America secure and free?
 
Americans no longer believe that, if ever they did. And history proves them right. For Iraq has never been democratic, and America has always been free. Yet, the Republican Party has never renounced the Bush Doctrine
 
Indeed, it is being applied today in Afghanistan.
 
That war, too, after we failed at Tora Bora to capture or kill bin Laden, has become a long slog to create a democratic Afghanistan, which, like a democratic Iraq, has never before existed.
 
In Afghanistan, we are entering the eighth year of war with victory further away than ever. The Taliban grows stronger. U.S. casualties are surging. Opium exports are breaking records. Our NATO allies grow weary. Even the Brits are talking of reconciliation with the Taliban, perhaps accepting a dictator.
 
These two wars helped to cripple the Bush presidency and end the GOP ascendancy. Yet, at the highest levels of the party, one hears no serious questioning of the ideology that produced these wars. McCain has pledged to stay in Iraq until "victory" and send 10,000 more troops to Afghanistan.
 
Nor have Republicans objected to the U.S. air strikes that have killed hundreds of Afghans, or the Predator strikes that have inflamed Pakistan or the helicopter raid into Syria that humiliated Damascus and enraged the population. If Republicans disagree with these policies and actions, their voices are muted.
 
Bush is for facing down Russia and bringing Georgia and Ukraine into NATO. Does any Republican disagree? For McCain is more hawkish than Bush when it come to Moscow.
 
The party says it is losing because the economy went south. But who caused that? Was it not because Republicans colluded with Democrats in pushing "affordable housing," subprime mortgages, for folks who could not afford houses? Is the GOP prepared to demand tough terms for home loans? Was it not GOP presidents who appointed the Fed chairmen who pumped up the money supply and created the bubble? How many Republicans objected to the easy money when the going was good?
 
The country wishes to be rid of the Bush policies and the Bush presidency. But where does the Republican Party think Bush went wrong, other than to be asleep at the wheel during Katrina?
 
The GOP needs to confront the truth: The failure of the Bush presidency lies not in a failed execution of policy but in the policies themselves and the neoconservative ideology that informed them. Yet, still, the party remains in denial, refusing to come to terms with the causes of its misfortune. One expects they will be given the time and opportunity for reflection soon.
 
"The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars but in ourselves.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: ccp on November 04, 2008, 03:31:47 PM
***Was it not because Republicans colluded with Democrats in pushing "affordable housing," subprime mortgages, for folks who could not afford houses? Is the GOP prepared to demand tough terms for home loans? Was it not GOP presidents who appointed the Fed chairmen who pumped up the money supply and created the bubble? How many Republicans objected to the easy money when the going was good?***

Well there is a concept of "compassionate conservatism".  The reason this concept arose dear Patrick is becasue the nature of this country is changing.  And if the republicans don't change they will continue to swim upstream against a demographic current that does not see that trickle down is going to work for them.

***"The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars but in ourselves.***

The fault does lie with ourselves.  But not for the reason you state dear Patrick.  It is because the cans cannot preach the same old tired mantra of tax cuts and let the market take care of itself.  Not unless you want to spend your life trying to sell a plan to a majority of new Americans who are skeptical.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: DougMacG on November 05, 2008, 07:19:25 AM
First I concede a point CCP made earlier that McCain would do better (and did better) in this environment than a more conservative Republican.  It was a number of people who brought down the Republican party as we knew it.  McCain, yes, but mostly Bush.  Not just for his mistakes but for his inability to communicate when he did things right.  How pathetic that a sitting President had to run and hide for months during the election.

On the other side of communication is Obama who even in his gracious 'unifying' speech still contends this is the worst economy of the last 100 years, but employment is down less than one percent.

Unfortunately from my point of view the terms elected-Republican and conservative are mutually exclusive.  Fannie Mae wasn't governed conservatively.  Federal spending wasn't run conservatively.  Even a pro-war decision wasn't executed conservatively from a pro-war taxpayer's point of view.

Back to McCain.  I didn't want to write negatively before the polls close, but  now take a look at the recent political career of McCain prior to the campaign.  My question, did McCain fight Republicans when they were right or did he fight them when they were wrong? 

His biggest fights were: Campaign finance reform - a HORRIBLE law that led to his own demise.  Opposing Bush tax cuts - wrong by his own admission.  Opposing drilling in ANWR - political fodder, had nothing to do with the environment or the caribou and just conceded a huge symbolic point to the opposition.  Immigration - caved on principle and lawfulness just to pander to a totally unappreciative audience.  Supported cap and trade - don't get me started, the best explanation was Obama's saying he looked forward to bankrupting the clean coal industry and McCain did not and could not draw a distinction!  My outlets are connected to coal and no one is building nuclear or anything else to replace it.  McCain conceded the issue before the general election began.  Torture - McCain has credibility here, but drew blurry lines impugning the Americans and hurting the war effort.  Spending - I know he opposes earmarks, a minor item, but why didn't he scream bloody murder as Republicans poured more and more money into ALL spending.  If he did I didn't hear it.  And for all his fighting with his own party, he failed to pin blame for the subprime industry or any other else on his opponents.  He's just too nice of a guy, so he let's Bush and the republicans take full blame with his silence.  (Skipping over some things he did right - this is a rant)

McCain fought Republicans hard but if he had won he helped in leaving fewer Republicans around to support him.  Zero coattails even in losing.  Of course a McCain presidency would also have been a failure with the Pelosi-Reid congress setting most of the agenda.

One example I posted previously of McCain hurting Republicans was our other senator from MN, Amy Klobuchar, a political clone of Hillary without all the charisma.  Every time her opponent tried to paint her as too liberal for MN she managed to point out that she had John McCain on her side of a vote or issue, opposing tax cuts, drilling, etc.

The party now in ruins has always had competing factions among the right wingers and centrists.  The conventional wisdom is still that the R's need to move away from conservatism to win.  McCain should have been a perfect centrist to win states like ours, after all a McCain clone and ally Tim Pawlenty is our twice elected governor.  But McCain lost MN by 10 points and did even worse in neighboring Wisconsin, also of mixed politics.  When people want a Democrat, they don't choose Democrat-lite.  When people want Republicans out, they don't put a maverick Republican in. 

The alleged wisdom is that R's can strategically reach to the center and the right wing has no choice but to support the centrist, the maverick.  If we choose a conservative, we may energize 'the base' but the center goes Democrat.  Two problems with that wisdom.  It doesn't match the election reults we have had.  Wishy washy republicans have done lousy (Bob Dole, GHW Bush reelection for examples), what kind of support do they get, luke warm? While candidates at least running as conservatives have generally fared well, at least since Goldwater.  This was a Goldwater style year.  It took us 16 years of meandering, incompetent government from both sides that nearly took down the republic to snap out of that.  I hate to think how old I will be the new socialism and surrender fad passes.

Meanwhile, I stand by my belief that big tents are for circuses.  I am here to seek out which policies are best and support them regardless of winning or losing elections. 

I supported McCain and voted for McCain without regrets, but never gave a penny and as a precinct chair never held a meeting or organized a rally.  He wasn't the choice of Republicans out of principle IMO, he was a marketing choice that Republican primary voters were hoping that others would like.  It didn't work.


Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: G M on November 05, 2008, 07:28:04 AM
Six months to a year and the public will want the adults in charge again. Our first "affirmative action" president will have people wistfully longing for W.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: JDN on November 05, 2008, 08:01:14 AM
Longing for W?  That will never happen...  Anybody but...

Did you notice GM; it was an OVERWHELMING victory for Obama and the Democrats.   :evil:
"A return of Camelot".  "The people have spoken". Etc. etc. etc.

"I think this is the passing of an old order," CNN senior political analyst David Gergen said as the results rolled in Tuesday night and the outcome became increasingly evident.

"I think what we see ... is a new coalition, a new order emerging. It isn't quite there, but with Barack Obama, for the first time, it's won. It is the Latino vote we just heard about. It is the bigger black vote that came out. Very importantly, it's the youth vote, the 18-to-29-year-old," said the Harvard University professor and former presidential adviser.  Watch Obama pay tribute to McCain »

Bottom line; McCain was "thumped" both in the electoral college and in the popular vote.

Give him his due - he is your President elect.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 05, 2008, 08:17:10 AM
lets take this over to the 2008 Presidential Election thread.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 05, 2008, 09:39:24 AM
AGAIN, lets take this over to the 2008 Presidential thread.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: ccp on November 06, 2008, 09:17:22 AM
Well BOs first announced decision for White House Chief of Staff does not bode well for any hope of bipartisanship.
But I agree with those who say lets give him a chance.  I hope he *will* be great.  But I admit I am very skeptical, and this choice is certainly a bad first sign.
Did you see Dick Morris who stated Emanual will use BO for his personal gain and is someone who play to the Washington inside Crat establishment?  Interesting. 
Title: Reagan: The Speech
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 06, 2008, 09:49:27 AM
Thread coherence please!

CCP, your comment belongs in The Coming Clusterfcuk or Politics.  This thread is for Political Rants.   Here's one from 44 years ago:

TAC,
Marc
===============
Program Announcer: Ladies and gentlemen, we take pride in presenting a thoughtful address by Ronald Reagan. Mr. Reagan:

Reagan: Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you and good evening. The sponsor has been identified, but unlike most television programs, the performer hasn't been provided with a script. As a matter of fact, I have been permitted to choose my own words and discuss my own ideas regarding the choice that we face in the next few weeks.

I have spent most of my life as a Democrat. I recently have seen fit to follow another course. I believe that the issues confronting us cross party lines. Now, one side in this campaign has been telling us that the issues of this election are the maintenance of peace and prosperity. The line has been used, "We've never had it so good."

But I have an uncomfortable feeling that this prosperity isn't something on which we can base our hopes for the future. No nation in history has ever survived a tax burden that reached a third of its national income. Today, 37 cents out of every dollar earned in this country is the tax collector's share, and yet our government continues to spend 17 million dollars a day more than the government takes in. We haven't balanced our budget 28 out of the last 34 years. We've raised our debt limit three times in the last twelve months, and now our national debt is one and a half times bigger than all the combined debts of all the nations of the world. We have 15 billion dollars in gold in our treasury; we don't own an ounce. Foreign dollar claims are 27.3 billion dollars. And we've just had announced that the dollar of 1939 will now purchase 45 cents in its total value.

As for the peace that we would preserve, I wonder who among us would like to approach the wife or mother whose husband or son has died in South Vietnam and ask them if they think this is a peace that should be maintained indefinitely. Do they mean peace, or do they mean we just want to be left in peace? There can be no real peace while one American is dying some place in the world for the rest of us. We're at war with the most dangerous enemy that has ever faced mankind in his long climb from the swamp to the stars, and it's been said if we lose that war, and in so doing lose this way of freedom of ours, history will record with the greatest astonishment that those who had the most to lose did the least to prevent its happening. Well I think it's time we ask ourselves if we still know the freedoms that were intended for us by the Founding Fathers.

Not too long ago, two friends of mine were talking to a Cuban refugee, a businessman who had escaped from Castro, and in the midst of his story one of my friends turned to the other and said, "We don't know how lucky we are." And the Cuban stopped and said, "How lucky you are? I had someplace to escape to." And in that sentence he told us the entire story. If we lose freedom here, there's no place to escape to. This is the last stand on earth.

And this idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except the sovereign people, is still the newest and the most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man.

This is the issue of this election: whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capitol can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.

You and I are told increasingly we have to choose between a left or right. Well I'd like to suggest there is no such thing as a left or right. There's only an up or down: [up] man's old -- old-aged dream, the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order, or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism. And regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would trade our freedom for security have embarked on this downward course.

In this vote-harvesting time, they use terms like the "Great Society," or as we were told a few days ago by the President, we must accept a greater government activity in the affairs of the people. But they've been a little more explicit in the past and among themselves; and all of the things I now will quote have appeared in print. These are not Republican accusations. For example, they have voices that say, "The cold war will end through our acceptance of a not undemocratic socialism." Another voice says, "The profit motive has become outmoded. It must be replaced by the incentives of the welfare state." Or, "Our traditional system of individual freedom is incapable of solving the complex problems of the 20th century." Senator Fulbright has said at Stanford University that the Constitution is outmoded. He referred to the President as "our moral teacher and our leader," and he says he is "hobbled in his task by the restrictions of power imposed on him by this antiquated document." He must "be freed," so that he "can do for us" what he knows "is best." And Senator Clark of Pennsylvania, another articulate spokesman, defines liberalism as "meeting the material needs of the masses through the full power of centralized government."

Well, I, for one, resent it when a representative of the people refers to you and me, the free men and women of this country, as "the masses." This is a term we haven't applied to ourselves in America. But beyond that, "the full power of centralized government" -- this was the very thing the Founding Fathers sought to minimize. They knew that governments don't control things. A government can't control the economy without controlling people. And they know when a government sets out to do that, it must use force and coercion to achieve its purpose. They also knew, those Founding Fathers, that outside of its legitimate functions, government does nothing as well or as economically as the private sector of the economy.

Now, we have no better example of this than government's involvement in the farm economy over the last 30 years. Since 1955, the cost of this program has nearly doubled. One-fourth of farming in America is responsible for 85% of the farm surplus. Three-fourths of farming is out on the free market and has known a 21% increase in the per capita consumption of all its produce. You see, that one-fourth of farming -- that's regulated and controlled by the federal government. In the last three years we've spent 43 dollars in the feed grain program for every dollar bushel of corn we don't grow.

Senator Humphrey last week charged that Barry Goldwater, as President, would seek to eliminate farmers. He should do his homework a little better, because he'll find out that we've had a decline of 5 million in the farm population under these government programs. He'll also find that the Democratic administration has sought to get from Congress [an] extension of the farm program to include that three-fourths that is now free. He'll find that they've also asked for the right to imprison farmers who wouldn't keep books as prescribed by the federal government. The Secretary of Agriculture asked for the right to seize farms through condemnation and resell them to other individuals. And contained in that same program was a provision that would have allowed the federal government to remove 2 million farmers from the soil.

At the same time, there's been an increase in the Department of Agriculture employees. There's now one for every 30 farms in the United States, and still they can't tell us how 66 shiploads of grain headed for Austria disappeared without a trace and Billie Sol Estes never left shore.

Every responsible farmer and farm organization has repeatedly asked the government to free the farm economy, but how -- who are farmers to know what's best for them? The wheat farmers voted against a wheat program. The government passed it anyway. Now the price of bread goes up; the price of wheat to the farmer goes down.

Meanwhile, back in the city, under urban renewal the assault on freedom carries on. Private property rights [are] so diluted that public interest is almost anything a few government planners decide it should be. In a program that takes from the needy and gives to the greedy, we see such spectacles as in Cleveland, Ohio, a million-and-a-half-dollar building completed only three years ago must be destroyed to make way for what government officials call a "more compatible use of the land." The President tells us he's now going to start building public housing units in the thousands, where heretofore we've only built them in the hundreds. But FHA [Federal Housing Authority] and the Veterans Administration tell us they have 120,000 housing units they've taken back through mortgage foreclosure. For three decades, we've sought to solve the problems of unemployment through government planning, and the more the plans fail, the more the planners plan. The latest is the Area Redevelopment Agency.

They've just declared Rice County, Kansas, a depressed area. Rice County, Kansas, has two hundred oil wells, and the 14,000 people there have over 30 million dollars on deposit in personal savings in their banks. And when the government tells you you're depressed, lie down and be depressed.

We have so many people who can't see a fat man standing beside a thin one without coming to the conclusion the fat man got that way by taking advantage of the thin one. So they're going to solve all the problems of human misery through government and government planning. Well, now, if government planning and welfare had the answer -- and they've had almost 30 years of it -- shouldn't we expect government to read the score to us once in a while? Shouldn't they be telling us about the decline each year in the number of people needing help? The reduction in the need for public housing?

But the reverse is true. Each year the need grows greater; the program grows greater. We were told four years ago that 17 million people went to bed hungry each night. Well that was probably true. They were all on a diet. But now we're told that 9.3 million families in this country are poverty-stricken on the basis of earning less than 3,000 dollars a year. Welfare spending [is] 10 times greater than in the dark depths of the Depression. We're spending 45 billion dollars on welfare. Now do a little arithmetic, and you'll find that if we divided the 45 billion dollars up equally among those 9 million poor families, we'd be able to give each family 4,600 dollars a year. And this added to their present income should eliminate poverty. Direct aid to the poor, however, is only running only about 600 dollars per family. It would seem that someplace there must be some overhead.

Now -- so now we declare "war on poverty," or "You, too, can be a Bobby Baker." Now do they honestly expect us to believe that if we add 1 billion dollars to the 45 billion we're spending, one more program to the 30-odd we have -- and remember, this new program doesn't replace any, it just duplicates existing programs -- do they believe that poverty is suddenly going to disappear by magic? Well, in all fairness I should explain there is one part of the new program that isn't duplicated. This is the youth feature. We're now going to solve the dropout problem, juvenile delinquency, by reinstituting something like the old CCC camps [Civilian Conservation Corps], and we're going to put our young people in these camps. But again we do some arithmetic, and we find that we're going to spend each year just on room and board for each young person we help 4,700 dollars a year. We can send them to Harvard for 2,700! Course, don't get me wrong. I'm not suggesting Harvard is the answer to juvenile delinquency.

But seriously, what are we doing to those we seek to help? Not too long ago, a judge called me here in Los Angeles. He told me of a young woman who'd come before him for a divorce. She had six children, was pregnant with her seventh. Under his questioning, she revealed her husband was a laborer earning 250 dollars a month. She wanted a divorce to get an 80 dollar raise. She's eligible for 330 dollars a month in the Aid to Dependent Children Program. She got the idea from two women in her neighborhood who'd already done that very thing.

Yet anytime you and I question the schemes of the do-gooders, we're denounced as being against their humanitarian goals. They say we're always "against" things -- we're never "for" anything.

Well, the trouble with our liberal friends is not that they're ignorant; it's just that they know so much that isn't so.

Now -- we're for a provision that destitution should not follow unemployment by reason of old age, and to that end we've accepted Social Security as a step toward meeting the problem.

But we're against those entrusted with this program when they practice deception regarding its fiscal shortcomings, when they charge that any criticism of the program means that we want to end payments to those people who depend on them for a livelihood. They've called it "insurance" to us in a hundred million pieces of literature. But then they appeared before the Supreme Court and they testified it was a welfare program. They only use the term "insurance" to sell it to the people. And they said Social Security dues are a tax for the general use of the government, and the government has used that tax. There is no fund, because Robert Byers, the actuarial head, appeared before a congressional committee and admitted that Social Security as of this moment is 298 billion dollars in the hole. But he said there should be no cause for worry because as long as they have the power to tax, they could always take away from the people whatever they needed to bail them out of trouble. And they're doing just that.

A young man, 21 years of age, working at an average salary -- his Social Security contribution would, in the open market, buy him an insurance policy that would guarantee 220 dollars a month at age 65. The government promises 127. He could live it up until he's 31 and then take out a policy that would pay more than Social Security. Now are we so lacking in business sense that we can't put this program on a sound basis, so that people who do require those payments will find they can get them when they're due -- that the cupboard isn't bare?

Barry Goldwater thinks we can.
Title: Reagan: The Speech part 2
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 06, 2008, 09:50:36 AM


At the same time, can't we introduce voluntary features that would permit a citizen who can do better on his own to be excused upon presentation of evidence that he had made provision for the non-earning years? Should we not allow a widow with children to work, and not lose the benefits supposedly paid for by her deceased husband? Shouldn't you and I be allowed to declare who our beneficiaries will be under this program, which we cannot do? I think we're for telling our senior citizens that no one in this country should be denied medical care because of a lack of funds. But I think we're against forcing all citizens, regardless of need, into a compulsory government program, especially when we have such examples, as was announced last week, when France admitted that their Medicare program is now bankrupt. They've come to the end of the road.

In addition, was Barry Goldwater so irresponsible when he suggested that our government give up its program of deliberate, planned inflation, so that when you do get your Social Security pension, a dollar will buy a dollar's worth, and not 45 cents worth?

I think we're for an international organization, where the nations of the world can seek peace. But I think we're against subordinating American interests to an organization that has become so structurally unsound that today you can muster a two-thirds vote on the floor of the General Assembly among nations that represent less than 10 percent of the world's population. I think we're against the hypocrisy of assailing our allies because here and there they cling to a colony, while we engage in a conspiracy of silence and never open our mouths about the millions of people enslaved in the Soviet colonies in the satellite nations.

I think we're for aiding our allies by sharing of our material blessings with those nations which share in our fundamental beliefs, but we're against doling out money government to government, creating bureaucracy, if not socialism, all over the world. We set out to help 19 countries. We're helping 107. We've spent 146 billion dollars. With that money, we bought a 2 million dollar yacht for Haile Selassie. We bought dress suits for Greek undertakers, extra wives for Kenya[n] government officials. We bought a thousand TV sets for a place where they have no electricity. In the last six years, 52 nations have bought 7 billion dollars worth of our gold, and all 52 are receiving foreign aid from this country.

No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size. So, governments' programs, once launched, never disappear.

Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we'll ever see on this earth.

Federal employees -- federal employees number two and a half million; and federal, state, and local, one out of six of the nation's work force employed by government. These proliferating bureaus with their thousands of regulations have cost us many of our constitutional safeguards. How many of us realize that today federal agents can invade a man's property without a warrant? They can impose a fine without a formal hearing, let alone a trial by jury? And they can seize and sell his property at auction to enforce the payment of that fine. In Chico County, Arkansas, James Wier over-planted his rice allotment. The government obtained a 17,000 dollar judgment. And a U.S. marshal sold his 960-acre farm at auction. The government said it was necessary as a warning to others to make the system work.

Last February 19th at the University of Minnesota, Norman Thomas, six-times candidate for President on the Socialist Party ticket, said, "If Barry Goldwater became President, he would stop the advance of socialism in the United States." I think that's exactly what he will do.

But as a former Democrat, I can tell you Norman Thomas isn't the only man who has drawn this parallel to socialism with the present administration, because back in 1936, Mr. Democrat himself, Al Smith, the great American, came before the American people and charged that the leadership of his Party was taking the Party of Jefferson, Jackson, and Cleveland down the road under the banners of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin. And he walked away from his Party, and he never returned til the day he died -- because to this day, the leadership of that Party has been taking that Party, that honorable Party, down the road in the image of the labor Socialist Party of England.

Now it doesn't require expropriation or confiscation of private property or business to impose socialism on a people. What does it mean whether you hold the deed to the -- or the title to your business or property if the government holds the power of life and death over that business or property? And such machinery already exists. The government can find some charge to bring against any concern it chooses to prosecute. Every businessman has his own tale of harassment. Somewhere a perversion has taken place. Our natural, unalienable rights are now considered to be a dispensation of government, and freedom has never been so fragile, so close to slipping from our grasp as it is at this moment.

Our Democratic opponents seem unwilling to debate these issues. They want to make you and I believe that this is a contest between two men -- that we're to choose just between two personalities.

Well what of this man that they would destroy -- and in destroying, they would destroy that which he represents, the ideas that you and I hold dear? Is he the brash and shallow and trigger-happy man they say he is? Well I've been privileged to know him "when." I knew him long before he ever dreamed of trying for high office, and I can tell you personally I've never known a man in my life I believed so incapable of doing a dishonest or dishonorable thing.

This is a man who, in his own business before he entered politics, instituted a profit-sharing plan before unions had ever thought of it. He put in health and medical insurance for all his employees. He took 50 percent of the profits before taxes and set up a retirement program, a pension plan for all his employees. He sent monthly checks for life to an employee who was ill and couldn't work. He provides nursing care for the children of mothers who work in the stores. When Mexico was ravaged by the floods in the Rio Grande, he climbed in his airplane and flew medicine and supplies down there.

An ex-GI told me how he met him. It was the week before Christmas during the Korean War, and he was at the Los Angeles airport trying to get a ride home to Arizona for Christmas. And he said that [there were] a lot of servicemen there and no seats available on the planes. And then a voice came over the loudspeaker and said, "Any men in uniform wanting a ride to Arizona, go to runway such-and-such," and they went down there, and there was a fellow named Barry Goldwater sitting in his plane. Every day in those weeks before Christmas, all day long, he'd load up the plane, fly it to Arizona, fly them to their homes, fly back over to get another load.

During the hectic split-second timing of a campaign, this is a man who took time out to sit beside an old friend who was dying of cancer. His campaign managers were understandably impatient, but he said, "There aren't many left who care what happens to her. I'd like her to know I care." This is a man who said to his 19-year-old son, "There is no foundation like the rock of honesty and fairness, and when you begin to build your life on that rock, with the cement of the faith in God that you have, then you have a real start." This is not a man who could carelessly send other people's sons to war. And that is the issue of this campaign that makes all the other problems I've discussed academic, unless we realize we're in a war that must be won.



Those who would trade our freedom for the soup kitchen of the welfare state have told us they have a utopian solution of peace without victory. They call their policy "accommodation." And they say if we'll only avoid any direct confrontation with the enemy, he'll forget his evil ways and learn to love us. All who oppose them are indicted as warmongers. They say we offer simple answers to complex problems. Well, perhaps there is a simple answer -- not an easy answer -- but simple: If you and I have the courage to tell our elected officials that we want our national policy based on what we know in our hearts is morally right.

We cannot buy our security, our freedom from the threat of the bomb by committing an immorality so great as saying to a billion human beings now enslaved behind the Iron Curtain, "Give up your dreams of freedom because to save our own skins, we're willing to make a deal with your slave masters." Alexander Hamilton said, "A nation which can prefer disgrace to danger is prepared for a master, and deserves one." Now let's set the record straight. There's no argument over the choice between peace and war, but there's only one guaranteed way you can have peace -- and you can have it in the next second -- surrender.

Admittedly, there's a risk in any course we follow other than this, but every lesson of history tells us that the greater risk lies in appeasement, and this is the specter our well-meaning liberal friends refuse to face -- that their policy of accommodation is appeasement, and it gives no choice between peace and war, only between fight or surrender. If we continue to accommodate, continue to back and retreat, eventually we have to face the final demand -- the ultimatum. And what then -- when Nikita Khrushchev has told his people he knows what our answer will be? He has told them that we're retreating under the pressure of the Cold War, and someday when the time comes to deliver the final ultimatum, our surrender will be voluntary, because by that time we will have been weakened from within spiritually, morally, and economically. He believes this because from our side he's heard voices pleading for "peace at any price" or "better Red than dead," or as one commentator put it, he'd rather "live on his knees than die on his feet." And therein lies the road to war, because those voices don't speak for the rest of us.

You and I know and do not believe that life is so dear and peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery. If nothing in life is worth dying for, when did this begin -- just in the face of this enemy? Or should Moses have told the children of Israel to live in slavery under the pharaohs? Should Christ have refused the cross? Should the patriots at Concord Bridge have thrown down their guns and refused to fire the shot heard 'round the world? The martyrs of history were not fools, and our honored dead who gave their lives to stop the advance of the Nazis didn't die in vain. Where, then, is the road to peace? Well it's a simple answer after all.

You and I have the courage to say to our enemies, "There is a price we will not pay." "There is a point beyond which they must not advance." And this -- this is the meaning in the phrase of Barry Goldwater's "peace through strength." Winston Churchill said, "The destiny of man is not measured by material computations. When great forces are on the move in the world, we learn we're spirits -- not animals." And he said, "There's something going on in time and space, and beyond time and space, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty."

You and I have a rendezvous with destiny.

We'll preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we'll sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.

We will keep in mind and remember that Barry Goldwater has faith in us. He has faith that you and I have the ability and the dignity and the right to make our own decisions and determine our own destiny.

Thank you very much.

Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 09, 2008, 08:15:05 AM
This guy is very smart and very funny.  I hope he goes bigtime:

http://hotair.com/archives/2008/11/06/video-zo-on-the-aftermath/
Title: Constitutional Convergence
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on November 12, 2008, 05:39:16 AM
As Reason blogger Jesse Walker notes:

Convergence in Action
A socialist columnist writes a libertarian article for a conservative magazine.

I don't agree with all the points, but do enjoy a good screed when I encounter one.

November 17, 2008 Issue   

A Long Train of Abuses


By Alexander Cockburn

If there’s one thing defenders of civil liberties know, it’s that assaults on constitutional freedoms are bipartisan. Just as constitutional darkness didn’t first fall with the arrival in the Oval Office of George W. Bush, the shroud will not lift with his departure and the entry of President Barack Obama.

As atrocious as the Bush record on civil liberties has been, there’s no more eager and self-righteous hand reaching out to the Bill of Rights to drop it into the shredder than that of a liberal intent on legislating freedom. Witness the great liberal drive to criminalize expressions of hate and impose fierce punitive enhancements if the criminal has been imprudent enough to perpetrate verbal breaches of sexual or ethnic etiquette while bludgeoning his victim to death.

No doubt the conservatives who cheered Bush on as he abrogated ancient rights and stretched the powers of his office to unseen limits would have shrieked if a Democrat had taken such liberties. But now Obama will be entitled to the lordly prerogatives Bush established.

Growing up in Ireland and the United Kingdom, I gazed with envy at the United States, with its constitutional protections and its Bill of Rights contrasting with the vast ad hoc tapestry of Britain’s repressive laws and “emergency” statutes piled up through the centuries. Successive regimes from the Plantagenet and Tudor periods forward went about the state’s business of enforcing the enclosures, hanging or transporting strikers, criminalizing disrespectful speech, and, of course, abolishing the right to carry even something so innocuous as a penknife. Instructed by centuries of British occupation, my native Ireland, I have to say, took a slightly more relaxed attitude. My father once asked an Irish minister of justice back in the 1960s about the prodigious size and detail of the Irish statute book. “Ah, Claud,” said the minister equably, “our laws are mainly for guidance.”

President Bush was also a man unbound by law, launching appalling assaults on freedom, building on the sound foundation of kindred assaults in Clinton’s time, perhaps most memorably expressed in the screams of parents and children fried by U.S. government forces in the Branch Davidian compound in Waco. Clinton, too, flouted all constitutional war powers inhibitions, with his executive decision to rain bombs on the civilian population of the former Yugoslavia.

Bush has forged resolutely along the path blazed by Clinton in asserting uninhibited executive power to wage war, seize, confine, and torture at will, breaching constitutional laws and international treaties and covenants concerning the treatment of combatants. The Patriot Act took up items on the Justice Department’s wish list left over from Clinton’s dreadful Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, which trashed habeas corpus protections.

The most spectacular abuses of civil liberties under Bush, such as the prison camp at Guantanamo, are acute symptoms of a chronic disease. The larger story of the past eight years has been the great continuity between this administration and those that have come before. The outrages perpetrated against habeas corpus under Republicans and Democrats alike, for example, have been innumerable, many of them little publicized. Take the case of people convicted of sexual felonies, who reach the end of their stipulated terms only to find that they face continued imprisonment without any specified terminus, under the rubric of “civil confinement,” a power as fierce as any lettre de cachet in France’s ancien régime.

Free speech is no longer a right. Stand alongside the route of a presidential cavalcade with a humble protest sign, and the Secret Service or local law enforcement will haul you off to some remote cage labeled “Designated Protest Area.” Seek to exercise your right to dispense money for a campaign advertisement or to support a candidate, and you will fall under the sanction of McCain-Feingold, otherwise known as the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002.

In the case of public expressions of protest, we may expect particular diligence by the Secret Service and other agencies in the Obama years, though his reneging on a campaign promise to accept only public financing has stopped campaign-finance reform in its tracks. Liberals joyously eying Obama’s amazing $150 million haul in his final weeks have preserved a tactful silence on this topic, after years of squawking about the power of the corporate dollar to pollute democracy’s proceedings.

Worse than in the darkest days of the ’50s, when Americans could have their passports revoked by fiat of the State Department, citizens and legal residents no longer have the right to travel freely even inside the nation’s borders. Appearance on any of the innumerable watch lists maintained by government agencies means inability to get on a plane. And today you need your papers for more than just travel. The Indiana statute recently approved by the Supreme Court demands that persons lacking “proper” ID only cast provisional ballots, with a bureaucratic apparatus for subsequent verification. Thus, Americans no longer have an unimpaired right to vote, even if of appropriate age.

The late Murray Kempton used to tell me he remembered that Alf Landon, campaigning against FDR and specifically Social Security back in 1936, used to shout to the crowds words to the effect of “Mark my words, those Social Security numbers will follow you from cradle to grave.” Landon was right. Today you might as well have the SS number tattooed on your forehead, along with all other significant “private” data, preferably in some bright hue so the monitoring cameras along highways and intersections can get a clean hit. “Drill baby drill” has been the war cry of the government’s data-mining programs throughout the Bush years, and we can expect no improvement ahead.

Fourth Amendment protections have likewise gone steadily downhill. Warrantless wiretappers had a field day under Bush, and Congress reaffirmed their activities in the FISA bill, for which Obama voted in a turnaround from previous pledges. Incoming vice president Joe Biden can claim a significant role here since he has been an ardent prosecutor of the war on drugs, used since the Harrison Act of 1914—and even before then with the different penalties attaching to opium as used by middle class whites or Chinese—to enhance the right of police to enter, terrorize, and prosecute at will. Indeed, the war on drugs, revived by President Nixon and pursued vigorously by all subsequent administrations, has been as powerful a rationale for tearing up the Constitution as the subsequent war on terror. It’s like that with all wars. Not far from where I live in northern California, combating narcotics was the excuse for serious inroads in the early 1990s into the Posse Comitatus statutory inhibition on use of the U.S. military in domestic law enforcement, another constitutional abuse whose roots have continued to sink deeper during the Bush years.

In the past eight years, Bush has ravaged the Fourth Amendment with steadfast diligence, starting with his insistence that he could issue arrest warrants if there was reason to believe a noncitizen was implicated in terrorist activity. Seized under this pretext and held within America’s borders or in some secret prison overseas, the captive had no recourse to a court of law. Simultaneously, the “probable cause” standard, theoretically disciplining the state’s innate propensity to search and to seize, has been systematically abused, as have the FBI’s powers under the “material witness” statute to arrest and hold their suspects. Goodbye habeas corpus.

Not only individual liberties but federalism and the rights of states have been relentlessly eroded in the Bush years, often amidst liberal cheers at such excrescences as the No Child Left Behind law. Property rights, too, have suffered great setbacks. Government’s power to seize land under the canons of “eminent domain” received sinister buttress by the Supreme Court in the 2005 Kelo decision.

Have there been any bright patches in the gloom? I salute one: the vindication of the Second Amendment in the Supreme Court’s recent Heller decision, written by Justice Scalia. Liberals would do well to acknowledge the wisdom of that ruling, just as conservatives should recognize the continuity between the outrages they decried under Clinton and the strip-mining of American liberties that has taken place under Bush.

Alexander Cockburn is coeditor of the newsletter and website CounterPunch (counterpunch.org) and has written a biweekly column for The Nation for many years. Next spring CounterPunch Books will publish his A Short History of Fear: The Rise and Fall of Global Warming.

http://www.amconmag.com/article/2008/nov/17/00010/
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: G M on November 12, 2008, 07:16:33 AM
Very emotional and very unrooted in reality.
Title: Illiteracy & Incomprehension
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on November 13, 2008, 07:34:11 AM
If you can overlook the leftward bias, this rant makes its points.

America the Illiterate

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20081110_america_the_illiterate/

Posted on Nov 10, 2008

By Chris Hedges

We live in two Americas. One America, now the minority, functions in a print-based, literate world. It can cope with complexity and has the intellectual tools to separate illusion from truth. The other America, which constitutes the majority, exists in a non-reality-based belief system. This America, dependent on skillfully manipulated images for information, has severed itself from the literate, print-based culture. It cannot differentiate between lies and truth. It is informed by simplistic, childish narratives and clichés. It is thrown into confusion by ambiguity, nuance and self-reflection. This divide, more than race, class or gender, more than rural or urban, believer or nonbeliever, red state or blue state, has split the country into radically distinct, unbridgeable and antagonistic entities.

There are over 42 million American adults, 20 percent of whom hold high school diplomas, who cannot read, as well as the 50 million who read at a fourth- or fifth-grade level. Nearly a third of the nation’s population is illiterate or barely literate. And their numbers are growing by an estimated 2 million a year. But even those who are supposedly literate retreat in huge numbers into this image-based existence. A third of high school graduates, along with 42 percent of college graduates, never read a book after they finish school. Eighty percent of the families in the United States last year did not buy a book.

The illiterate rarely vote, and when they do vote they do so without the ability to make decisions based on textual information. American political campaigns, which have learned to speak in the comforting epistemology of images, eschew real ideas and policy for cheap slogans and reassuring personal narratives. Political propaganda now masquerades as ideology. Political campaigns have become an experience. They do not require cognitive or self-critical skills. They are designed to ignite pseudo-religious feelings of euphoria, empowerment and collective salvation. Campaigns that succeed are carefully constructed psychological instruments that manipulate fickle public moods, emotions and impulses, many of which are subliminal. They create a public ecstasy that annuls individuality and fosters a state of mindlessness. They thrust us into an eternal present. They cater to a nation that now lives in a state of permanent amnesia. It is style and story, not content or history or reality, which inform our politics and our lives. We prefer happy illusions. And it works because so much of the American electorate, including those who should know better, blindly cast ballots for slogans, smiles, the cheerful family tableaux, narratives and the perceived sincerity and the attractiveness of candidates. We confuse how we feel with knowledge.

The illiterate and semi-literate, once the campaigns are over, remain powerless.  They still cannot protect their children from dysfunctional public schools. They still cannot understand predatory loan deals, the intricacies of mortgage papers, credit card agreements and equity lines of credit that drive them into foreclosures and bankruptcies. They still struggle with the most basic chores of daily life from reading instructions on medicine bottles to filling out bank forms, car loan documents and unemployment benefit and insurance papers. They watch helplessly and without comprehension as hundreds of thousands of jobs are shed. They are hostages to brands. Brands come with images and slogans. Images and slogans are all they understand. Many eat at fast food restaurants not only because it is cheap but because they can order from pictures rather than menus. And those who serve them, also semi-literate or illiterate, punch in orders on cash registers whose keys are marked with symbols and pictures. This is our brave new world.

Political leaders in our post-literate society no longer need to be competent, sincere or honest. They only need to appear to have these qualities. Most of all they need a story, a narrative. The reality of the narrative is irrelevant. It can be completely at odds with the facts. The consistency and emotional appeal of the story are paramount. The most essential skill in political theater and the consumer culture is artifice. Those who are best at artifice succeed. Those who have not mastered the art of artifice fail. In an age of images and entertainment, in an age of instant emotional gratification, we do not seek or want honesty. We ask to be indulged and entertained by clichés, stereotypes and mythic narratives that tell us we can be whomever we want to be, that we live in the greatest country on Earth, that we are endowed with superior moral and physical qualities and that our glorious future is preordained, either because of our attributes as Americans or because we are blessed by God or both.

The ability to magnify these simple and childish lies, to repeat them and have surrogates repeat them in endless loops of news cycles, gives these lies the aura of an uncontested truth. We are repeatedly fed words or phrases like yes we can, maverick, change, pro-life, hope or war on terror. It feels good not to think. All we have to do is visualize what we want, believe in ourselves and summon those hidden inner resources, whether divine or national, that make the world conform to our desires. Reality is never an impediment to our advancement.
The Princeton Review analyzed the transcripts of the Gore-Bush debates, the Clinton-Bush-Perot debates of 1992, the Kennedy-Nixon debates of 1960 and the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858. It reviewed these transcripts using a standard vocabulary test that indicates the minimum educational standard needed for a reader to grasp the text. During the 2000 debates, George W. Bush spoke at a sixth-grade level (6.7) and Al Gore at a seventh-grade level (7.6). In the 1992 debates, Bill Clinton spoke at a seventh-grade level (7.6), while George H.W. Bush spoke at a sixth-grade level (6.8), as did H. Ross Perot (6.3). In the debates between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon, the candidates spoke in language used by 10th-graders. In the debates of Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas the scores were respectively 11.2 and 12.0. In short, today’s political rhetoric is designed to be comprehensible to a 10-year-old child or an adult with a sixth-grade reading level. It is fitted to this level of comprehension because most Americans speak, think and are entertained at this level. This is why serious film and theater and other serious artistic expression, as well as newspapers and books, are being pushed to the margins of American society. Voltaire was the most famous man of the 18th century. Today the most famous “person” is Mickey Mouse.

In our post-literate world, because ideas are inaccessible, there is a need for constant stimulus. News, political debate, theater, art and books are judged not on the power of their ideas but on their ability to entertain. Cultural products that force us to examine ourselves and our society are condemned as elitist and impenetrable. Hannah Arendt warned that the marketization of culture leads to its degradation, that this marketization creates a new celebrity class of intellectuals who, although well read and informed themselves, see their role in society as persuading the masses that “Hamlet” can be as entertaining as “The Lion King” and perhaps as educational. “Culture,” she wrote, “is being destroyed in order to yield entertainment.”

“There are many great authors of the past who have survived centuries of oblivion and neglect,” Arendt wrote, “but it is still an open question whether they will be able to survive an entertaining version of what they have to say.”

The change from a print-based to an image-based society has transformed our nation. Huge segments of our population, especially those who live in the embrace of the Christian right and the consumer culture, are completely unmoored from reality. They lack the capacity to search for truth and cope rationally with our mounting social and economic ills. They seek clarity, entertainment and order. They are willing to use force to impose this clarity on others, especially those who do not speak as they speak and think as they think. All the traditional tools of democracies, including dispassionate scientific and historical truth, facts, news and rational debate, are useless instruments in a world that lacks the capacity to use them.

As we descend into a devastating economic crisis, one that Barack Obama cannot halt, there will be tens of millions of Americans who will be ruthlessly thrust aside. As their houses are foreclosed, as their jobs are lost, as they are forced to declare bankruptcy and watch their communities collapse, they will retreat even further into irrational fantasy. They will be led toward glittering and self-destructive illusions by our modern Pied Pipers—our corporate advertisers, our charlatan preachers, our television news celebrities, our self-help gurus, our entertainment industry and our political demagogues—who will offer increasingly absurd forms of escapism.

The core values of our open society, the ability to think for oneself, to draw independent conclusions, to express dissent when judgment and common sense indicate something is wrong, to be self-critical, to challenge authority, to understand historical facts, to separate truth from lies, to advocate for change and to acknowledge that there are other views, different ways of being, that are morally and socially acceptable, are dying. Obama used hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign funds to appeal to and manipulate this illiteracy and irrationalism to his advantage, but these forces will prove to be his most deadly nemesis once they collide with the awful reality that awaits us.
Title: There is no such thing as "bipartisanship in DC"
Post by: ccp on November 13, 2008, 08:12:59 AM
Talk of "bipartisanship" is as always just that - talk.
OK here is another sign the Dems are all talk.   Lets bring Bush in to "investigate him" and his administration.   Does anyone think this is not just a ploy to deflect criticism of the incoming BO/Clinton administration from the mess we are facing?  Here we go again.  And BO who spoke of change during his campaign is bringing back all the "I want a job" Clinton hangers on from the 90s.   And we all know how partisan they all are.

If he does pick any "can" for a cabinet post it will only to take them out of the opposition and make him into a crat.  Anyone remember Cohen who basically became a hack for Clinton.
Is he still in politics?

By CHARLIE SAVAGE
Published: November 12, 2008
WASHINGTON — When a Congressional committee subpoenaed Harry S. Truman in 1953, nearly a year after he left office, he made a startling claim: Even though he was no longer president, the Constitution still empowered him to block subpoenas.

“If the doctrine of separation of powers and the independence of the presidency is to have any validity at all, it must be equally applicable to a president after his term of office has expired,” Truman wrote to the committee.

Congress backed down, establishing a precedent suggesting that former presidents wield lingering powers to keep matters from their administration secret. Now, as Congressional Democrats prepare to move forward with investigations of the Bush administration, they wonder whether that claim may be invoked again.

“The Bush administration overstepped in its exertion of executive privilege, and may very well try to continue to shield information from the American people after it leaves office,” said Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, who sits on two committees, Judiciary and Intelligence, that are examining aspects of Mr. Bush’s policies.

Topics of open investigations include the harsh interrogation of detainees, the prosecution of former Gov. Don Siegelman of Alabama, secret legal memorandums from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel and the role of the former White House aides Karl Rove and Harriet E. Miers in the firing of federal prosecutors.

Mr. Bush has used his executive powers to block Congressional requests for executive branch documents and testimony from former aides. But investigators hope that the Obama administration will open the filing cabinets and withdraw assertions of executive privilege that Bush officials have invoked to keep from testifying.

“I intend to ensure that our outstanding subpoenas and document requests relating to the U.S. attorneys matter are enforced,” said Representative John Conyers Jr., Democrat of Michigan and chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. “I am hopeful that progress can be made with the coming of the new administration.”

Also, two advocacy groups, the American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights First, have prepared detailed reports for the new administration calling for criminal investigations into accusations of abuse of detainees.

It is not clear, though, how a President Barack Obama will handle such requests. Legal specialists said the pressure to investigate the Bush years would raise tough political and legal questions.

Because every president eventually leaves office, incoming chief executives have an incentive to quash investigations into their predecessor’s tenure. Mr. Bush used executive privilege for the first time in 2001, to block a subpoena by Congressional Republicans investigating the Clinton administration.

In addition, Mr. Obama has expressed worries about too many investigations. In April, he told The Philadelphia Daily News that people needed to distinguish “between really dumb policies and policies that rise to the level of criminal activity.”

“If crimes have been committed, they should be investigated,” Mr. Obama said, but added, “I would not want my first term consumed by what was perceived on the part of Republicans as a partisan witch hunt, because I think we’ve got too many problems we’ve got to solve.”

But even if his administration rejects the calls for investigations, Mr. Obama cannot control what the courts or Congress do. Several lawsuits are seeking information about Bush policies, including an Islamic charity’s claim that it was illegally spied on by Mr. Bush’s program on wiretapping without warrants.

And Congressional Democrats say that they are determined to pursue their investigations — and that they expect career officials to disclose other issues after the Bush administration leaves. “We could spend the entire next four years investigating the Bush years,” Mr. Whitehouse said.

But if Mr. Obama decides to release information about his predecessor’s tenure, Mr. Bush could try to invoke executive privilege by filing a lawsuit, said Peter Shane, a law professor at Ohio State University.

In that case, an injunction would most likely be sought ordering the Obama administration not to release the Bush administration’s papers or enjoining Mr. Bush’s former aides from testifying. The dispute would probably go to the Supreme Court, Mr. Shane said.

The idea that ex-presidents may possess residual constitutional powers to keep information secret traces back to Truman.

In November 1953, after Dwight D. Eisenhower became president, the House Un-American Activities Committee subpoenaed Truman to testify about why he had appointed a suspected Communist to the International Monetary Fund.

Truman decided not to comply and asked his lawyer, Samuel I. Rosenman, for help. But there was little time for research.

Edward M. Cramer, a young associate at Mr. Rosenman’s law firm, recalled being summoned with two colleagues to their boss’s office at 6 p.m. and told to come up with something. The next morning, they helped dictate Truman’s letter telling the panel he did not have to testify — or even appear at the hearing.

“I think, legally, we were wrong” about whether Truman had to show up, Mr. Cramer, now 83, said in a phone interview from his home in New York.

But the committee did not call the former president’s bluff. It dropped the matter, and Truman’s hastily devised legal claim became a historical precedent.

In 1973, President Nixon cited Truman’s letter when he refused to testify or give documents to the committee investigating the Watergate scandal.

Mr. Cramer recalled, “Nixon used it, and we said ‘Oh, Jesus, what have we done?’ ”

The first judicial backing for the idea that former presidents wield executive privilege powers came in 1977, as part of a Supreme Court ruling in a case over who controlled Nixon’s White House files. The decision suggested that Nixon might be able to block the release of papers in the future. But it offered few details, and Nixon never sought to do so.

In 1989 and 1990, judges presiding over criminal trials related to the Iran-contra affair blocked requests by defendants to make former President Ronald Reagan testify and release his diaries.

But the Supreme Court has never made clear how far a former president may go in trying to block Congressional demands for documents and testimony — or what happens if a president disagrees with a predecessor about making information public.

“There is no relevant precedent on the books,” Mr. Shane said.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 13, 2008, 08:45:38 AM
BBG's post of Hedges reminds of us the wisdom of the Founding Fathers that not everyone should be voting , , , :evil:
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: ccp on November 13, 2008, 03:30:56 PM
***The core values of our open society, the ability to think for oneself, to draw independent conclusions, to express dissent when judgment and common sense indicate something is wrong, to be self-critical, to challenge authority, to understand historical facts, to separate truth from lies, to advocate for change and to acknowledge that there are other views, different ways of being, that are morally and socially acceptable, are dying.***

I don't know about all this.  To some extent some of this gibberish.  So the proliferation of information has made us dumber?

How can anyone compare a Lincoln Douglas debate to present Presidential debates?  Why in those days few people other than educated white man voted!

And they didn't have ear catching slogans in the 1800s?  Whatever happened to "remember the Alamo"?

While times have certainly changed the more I read about the past the more I think humanity is the same now as thousands of years ago.  We don't change though we do change the world around us.
Title: Another parting gift from Bush
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 20, 2008, 12:43:57 AM
BUSH’S LEGACY: EUROPEAN SOCIALISM
By Dick Morris
11.19.2008
Published on TheHill.com on November 18, 2008.

The results of the G-20 economic summit amount to nothing less than the seamless integration of the United States into the European economy. In one month of legislation and one diplomatic meeting, the United States has unilaterally abdicated all the gains for the concept of free markets won by the Reagan administration and surrendered, in toto, to the Western European model of socialism, stagnation and excessive government regulation. Sovereignty is out the window. Without a vote, we are suddenly members of the European Union. Given the dismal record of those nations at creating jobs and sustaining growth, merger with the Europeans is like a partnership with death.


At the G-20 meeting, Bush agreed to subject the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and our other regulatory agencies to the supervision of a global entity that would critique its regulatory standards and demand changes if it felt they were necessary. Bush agreed to create a College of Supervisors.

According to The Washington Post, it would “examine the books of major financial institutions that operate across national borders so regulators could begin to have a more complete picture of banks’ operations.”

Their scrutiny would extend to hedge funds and to various “exotic” financial instruments. The International Monetary Fund (IMF), a European-dominated operation, would conduct “regular vigorous reviews” of American financial institutions and practices. The European-dominated College of Supervisors would also weigh in on issues like executive compensation and investment practices.

There is nothing wrong with the substance of this regulation. Experience is showing it is needed. But it is very wrong to delegate these powers to unelected, international institutions with no political accountability.

We have a Securities and Exchange Commission appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate, both of whom are elected by the American people. It is with the SEC, the Treasury and the Federal Reserve that financial accountability must take place.

The European Union achieved this massive subrogation of American sovereignty the way it usually does, by negotiation, gradual bureaucratic encroachment, and without asking the voters if they approve. What’s more, Bush appears to have gone down without a fight, saving his debating time for arguing against the protectionism that France’s Nicolas Sarkozy was pushing. By giving Bush a seeming victory on a moratorium against protectionism for one year, Sarkozy was able to slip over his massive scheme for taking over the supervision of the U.S. economy.

All kinds of political agendas are advancing under the cover of response to the global financial crisis. Where Franklin Roosevelt saved capitalism by regulating it, Bush, to say nothing of Obama, has given the government control over our major financial and insurance institutions. And it isn’t even our government! The power has now been transferred to the international community, led by the socialists in the European Union.

Will Obama govern from the left? He doesn’t have to. George W. Bush has done all the heavy lifting for him. It was under Bush that the government basically took over as the chief stockholder of our financial institutions and under Bush that we ceded our financial controls to the European Union. In doing so, he has done nothing to preserve what differentiates the vibrant American economy from those dying economies in Europe. Why have 80 percent of the jobs that have been created since 1980 in the industrialized world been created in the United States? How has America managed to retain its leading 24 percent share of global manufacturing even in the face of the Chinese surge? How has the U.S. GDP risen so high that it essentially equals that of the European Union, which has 50 percent more population? It has done so by an absence of stifling regulation, a liberation of capital to flow to innovative businesses, low taxes, and by a low level of unionization that has given business the flexibility to grow and prosper. Europe, stagnated by taxation and regulation, has grown by a pittance while we have roared ahead. But now Bush — not Obama — Bush has given that all up and caved in to European socialists.

The Bush legacy? European socialism. Who needs enemies with friends like Bush?
Title: Equal Participation in Unequal Ends
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on November 22, 2008, 06:44:20 AM
Progressives and Obama's Acceptable Blackness
American Thinker ^ | November 22, 2008 | Miguel A. Guanipa
Posted on November 22, 2008

On the eve of Clarence Thomas' Supreme Court nomination, a cry went out throughout the land. It was that of fire breathing liberals who could not believe that a conservative president would dare appoint a conservative judge to the highest court in the nation. Although the president had picked someone of African-American descent, who was also more than qualified to fulfill the role of Supreme Court Justice, such considerations were swiftly trumped by the fact that Mr.Thomas was not pledged to walk in lockstep with the abiding progressive weltanschauung; in other words, he was not viewed by liberals as the "right" kind of black man.   

Likewise, many from the left frowned disappointingly at President George W. Bush's choice of General Colin Powell for the office of Secretary of State.  Some even referred to Mr. Powell as a modern day Uncle Tom, congenially submissive and overly accommodating to the erratic whims of his war hungry superiors. The same Colin Powell was not long ago lauded by the main stream media for his ringing endorsement of now president elect Barack Obama.

Another promising black American named Condoleezza Rice, who later assumed the role vacated by General Powell, also had to endure condemnation from the acerbic tongues of the liberal elite, who simply could not countenance another breach of their presumed monopoly on diversity by an impudent Republican president. Moreover, like her predecessor, the newly appointed Secretary of State also appeared equally comfortable with the preemptory offense rationale upheld by the same hubristic regime

And so progressives -- who periodically like to commend themselves for the sincerity of their empathy with the plight of all minorities -- have been mostly engaged in unsuccessful attempts to frustrate and overturn what otherwise, could have been hailed as truly historic appointments. Ironically, their most notable accomplishment is that in the process, they have robed the black community of rare opportunities to celebrate some rather significant milestones in this country's heartbreaking journey of race relations.

Now that a black man, with decidedly leftist fringe credentials, has been chosen as future president of the United States, liberals fancy themselves playing a part in the shaping of history.  In concert with their anointed figure head, they successfully orchestrated what they deemed to be the proper conditions under which African-Americans are granted the opportunity -- permission? -- to rejoice in the advancement of one of their own.  More importantly, the diligent -- and at times inglorious -- efforts of that self-congratulatory aristocracy of closet anarchists known as  progressives, have also yielded what the media gleefully proclaims is a widespread assent to their utopian social compact. 

But as with every grandiose vision, there is never a want of colossal ironies.

Consider the Freedom of Choice Act, which Barack Obama has promised to sign into law as soon as he takes office. Its innocuous name belies the fact that F.O.C.A. will aggressively seek to standardize unrestricted national access to abortion on demand.  Planned and unplanned babies safely residing in the womb, and at any stage of development, will be legally stripped of their status as persons. As such, they will not enjoy the constitutional benefit of protection from the state. 

Our founders naively allowed a derivative ontological exception in order to justify the enslavement of another group of voiceless citizens. And this irony is compounded by the  cruelly indifferent statistics which report that the vast majority of unborn children, aborted daily in this country in the name of choice, are disproportionably representative of the same demographic group from which Obama enjoyed the most enthusiastic support during this past election season.

Secondly, Obama will be taken to task by his equally extremist peers in congress, for a swift passage of the so called Fairness Doctrine. As with most pieces of legislation Democrats seem to have a penchant for crafting, this one is ostensibly worded to deliver exactly the opposite effect of what its title purports to champion.

In short, public air radio broadcasters will be required, at their own expense, to grant equal time to those in the opposition for retaliatory expositions of their views, despite the fact that historically, such views have failed to guarantee sustained interest from a sponsorship willing audience. As it is a well known fact that conservatives dominate in the medium, what is billed as an equal opportunity for all voices to be heard, is simply a targeted attempt by progressives to gradually silence the kind of free speech they find personally objectionable. 

The irony here is that this foreboding development constitutes a betrayal of one of the most foundational freedoms guaranteed by the constitution, which again, the  once disenfranchised ancestral kin of Obama's most loyal contingency plainly understood, having endured personal battles for the right to speak in a free society without fear of retribution.

And finally, the crown jewel of Obama's looming progressive initiatives:  compulsory redistribution of wealth from the few "haves" to the many "have-nots", succinctly outlined for one "Joe the Plumber" in a rare pre-coronation unscripted moment.

Intended to assuage economic disparities, such schemes only tend to inflame social tensions, especially amongst those who rightly perceive their roles as equal participants in what is admittedly a less than perfect system. With any luck, the measure will not be a catalyst to something Obama -- I think -- wants to avoid: the furious resurgence of racially motivated class warfare. 

But Obama's ideological entrenchment in what is nothing more than a socialist template, may have blinded him to the fact that he has been presented with a unique leadership opportunity -- as the first African-American elected to office -- to promote the time tested principle that equal participation generally means an equal stake in prosperity and advancement. Ironically (again) this is a principle for which Obama's own personal journey, and that of those who came before him - under the auspices of a Republican administration no less -- present a rather compelling case.

It was, after all, Obama himself who once declared that he did not wish for people to elect him simply because of the color of his skin. He may rest assured that that is the least of the reasons why progressives -- who will soon be requiring that their agendas be expeditiously implemented - have seen to it that he become their leader.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/11/progressives_and_obamas_accept.html
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 02, 2008, 10:29:46 AM
Great scathingly funny rant from Fred Thompson in the clip at http://www.fredpac.com/ on the Meltdown and how to fix it.
Title: Enough
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on December 03, 2008, 08:55:33 AM
Enough of Radical Islam
Ben Shapiro

Wednesday, December 03, 2008

Enough with the pseudonyms. Western civilization isnt at war with terrorism any more than it is at war with grenades. Western civilization is at war with militant Islam, which dominates Muslim communities all over the world. Militant Islam isnt a tiny minority of otherwise goodhearted Muslims. Its a dominant strain of evil that runs rampant in a population of well over 1 billion.

Enough with the psychoanalysis. They dont hate us because of Israel. They dont hate us because of Kashmir. They dont hate us because we have troops in Saudi Arabia or because we deposed Saddam Hussein. They dont hate us because of Britney Spears. They hate us because we are infidels, and because we dont plan on surrendering or providing them material aid in their war of aggressive expansion.

Enough with the niceties. We dont lose our souls when we treat our enemies as enemies. We dont undermine our principles when we post more police officers in vulnerable areas, or when we send Marines to kill bad guys, or when we torture terrorists for information. And we dont redeem ourselves when we close Guantanamo Bay or try terrorists in civilian courts or censor anti-Islam comics. When it comes to war, extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, and moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.

Enough with the words. Talking with Iran without wielding the threat of force, either economic or military, wont help. Appealing to the United Nations, run by thugs and dictators ranging from Putin to Chavez to Ahmadinejad, is an exercise in pathetic futility. Evil countries dont suddenly decide to abandon their evil goals -- they are forced to do so by pressure and circumstance.

Enough with the faux allies. We dont gain anything by pretending that Saudi Arabia and Pakistan are true allies. They arent. At best, they are playing both sides of the table. We ought to be drilling now in order to break OPEC. Building windmills isnt going to cut it. We should also be backing India to the hilt in its current conflict with Pakistan -- unless Pakistan can destroy its terrorist element, India should be given full leeway to do what it needs to do. Russia and China, meanwhile, are facilitating anti-Western terrorism. Treating them as friends in this global war is simply begging for a backstabbing.

Enough with the myths. Not everyone on earth is crying out for freedom. There are plenty of people who are happy in their misery, believing that their suffering is part and parcel of a correct religious system. Those people direct their anger outward, targeting unbelievers. We cannot simply knock off dictators and expect indoctrinated populations to rise to the liberal democratic challenge. The election of Hamas in the Gaza Strip is more a rule than an exception in the Islamic world.

Enough with the lies. Stop telling us that Islam is a religion of peace. If it is, prove it through action. Stop telling us that President-elect Barack Obama will fix our broken relationship with the Muslim world. They hate Obama just as much as they hated President George W. Bush, although they think Obama is more of a patsy than Bush was. Stop telling us that we shouldnt worry about the Islamic infiltration of our economy. If the Saudis own a large chunk of our banking institutions and control the oil market, they can certainly leverage their influence in dangerous ways.

Enough. After the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, the plane downed in Pennsylvania, the endless suicide bombings, shootings and rocket attacks in Israel, the Bali bombings, the synagogue bombing in Tunisia, the LAX shootings, the Kenyan hotel bombing, the Casablanca attacks, the Turkey synagogue attacks, the Madrid bombings, the London bombings, and the repeated attacks in India culminating in the Mumbai massacres -- among literally thousands of others -- its about time that the West got the point: were in a war. Our enemies are determined. They will not quit just because we offer them Big Macs, Christina Aguilera CDs, or even the freedom to vote. They will not quit just because we ensure that they have Korans in their Guantanamo cells, or because we offer to ban The Satanic Verses (as India did). They will only quit when they are dead. It is our job to make them so, and to eliminate every obstacle to their destruction.

So enough. No more empty talk. No more idle promises. No more happy ignorance, half measures, or appeasement-minded platitudes. The time for hard-nosed, uncompromising action hasnt merely come -- its been overdue by seven years. The voice of our brothers blood cries out from the ground.

http://townhall.com/columnists/BenShapiro/2008/12/03/enough_of_radical_islam
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: SB_Mig on December 03, 2008, 09:20:29 AM
Enough with editorial writers who rant about how we've had enough of (fill in the blank) but offer no suggestions or solutions.  :wink:

That said, I do agree with the 99.9% of the article
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 03, 2008, 10:11:32 AM
My read of the piece is that it is quite clear in its suggestion-- that we get our minds right.  Unlike the general tenor of this forum  :wink: :lol:  our leadership fears to name the enemy.  The enemy is not an immoral technique.  The enemy is the fascistic streak of Islam-- its remaining Satanic Verses if you will  :wink:  In short, it is a simple and profoundly important "suggestion" the piece makes.  Know that there is a mass world-wide movement that wars on us.  The strategy?  "We win.  They lose" (President Reagan)
Title: Declaration of Dependence
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on December 05, 2008, 04:05:47 PM
An amusing screed from Macho Sauce productions:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNxG0Eo3QtY[/youtube]

Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: DougMacG on December 05, 2008, 06:37:02 PM
BBG - That was an excellent video.  I looked at his website and saw that he has a martial arts background.  Here is another video of his, Alfonso Rachel vs. a pretend Obama,  political debate mixed with fight scenes:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbW64215HA8
Title: Sowell
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 09, 2008, 06:53:41 AM
The Meaning of Mumbai
By Thomas Sowell

Will the horrors unleashed by Islamic terrorists in Mumbai cause any second thoughts by those who are so anxious to start weakening the American security systems currently in place, including government interceptions of international phone calls and the holding of terrorists at Guantanamo?

Maybe. But never underestimate partisan blindness in Washington or in the mainstream media where, if the Bush administration did it, then it must be wrong.

 Contrary to some of the more mawkish notions of what a government is supposed to be, its top job is the protection of the people. Nobody on 9/11 would have thought that we would see nothing comparable again in this country for seven long years.

Many people seem to have forgotten how, in the wake of 9/11, every great national event-- the World Series, Christmas, New Year's, the Super Bowl-- was under the shadow of a fear that this was when the terrorists would strike again.

They didn't strike again here, even though they have struck in Spain, Indonesia, England and India, among other places. Does anyone imagine that this was because they didn't want to hit America again?

Could this have had anything to do with all the security precautions that liberals have been complaining about so bitterly, from the interception of international phone calls to forcing information out of captured terrorists?

Too many people refuse to acknowledge that benefits have costs, even if that cost means only having no more secrecy when making international phone calls than you have when sending e-mails, in a world where computer hackers abound. There are people who refuse to give up anything, even to save their own lives.

A very shrewd observer of the deterioration of Western societies, British writer Theodore Dalrymple, said: "This mental flabbiness is decadence, and at the same time a manifestation of the arrogant assumption that nothing can destroy us."

There are growing numbers of things that can destroy us. The Roman Empire lasted a lot longer than the United States has lasted, and yet it too was destroyed.

Millions of lives were blighted for centuries thereafter, because the barbarians who destroyed Rome were incapable of replacing it with anything at all comparable. Neither are those who threaten to destroy the United States today.

The destruction of the United States will not require enough nuclear bombs to annihilate cities and towns across America. After all, the nuclear destruction of just two cities was enough to force Japan to surrender-- and the Japanese had far more willingness to fight and die than most Americans have today.

How many Americans are willing to see New York, Chicago and Los Angeles all disappear in nuclear mushroom clouds, rather than surrender to whatever outrageous demands the terrorists make?

Neither Barack Obama nor those with whom he will be surrounded in Washington show any signs of being serious about forestalling such a terrible choice by taking any action with any realistic chance of preventing a nuclear Iran.

Once suicidal fanatics have nuclear bombs, that is the point of no return. We, our children and our grandchildren will live at the mercy of the merciless, who have a track record of sadism.

There are no concessions we can make that will buy off hate-filled terrorists. What they want-- what they must have for their own self-respect, in a world where they suffer the humiliation of being visibly centuries behind the West in so many ways-- is our being brought down in humiliation, including self-humiliation.

Even killing us will not be enough, just as killing Jews was not enough for the Nazis, who first had to subject them to soul-scarring humiliations and dehumanization in their death camps.

This kind of hatred may not be familiar to most Americans but what happened on 9/11 should give us a clue-- and a warning.

The people who flew those planes into the World Trade Center buildings could not have been bought off by any concessions, not even the hundreds of billions of dollars we are spending in bailout money today.

They want our soul-- and if they are willing to die and we are not, they will get it.

(I'd rather we kill them than we die,  :-) but Sowell has the gist of the right idea )
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: G M on December 09, 2008, 02:20:37 PM
Gosh, reminds me of something somebody has been arguing for years....  :evil:
Title: '. . . a dreadful bore, incurable doofus, sadist and and epic idiot. . ."
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on December 10, 2008, 06:20:17 PM


Che Guevara on the Silver Screen

 By Humberto Fontova  Wednesday, December 10, 2008

“SENTENCE first – VERDICT afterwards,” said the Queen.
“Nonsense!” said Alice loudly.
“Off with her head!” the Queen shouted at the top of her voice.
– Alice In Wonderland

They say Lewis Carroll was a serious dope fiend, his mind totally scrambled on opium, when he concocted “Alice in Wonderland.” A place where the sentence comes first and the verdict afterward? Where people who protest the madness are sentenced to death themselves ?

Such a place rolled out the red carpet for Benicio del Toro this past weekend. I refer to Havana Cuba which put on the Havana Film Festival where the 4 ½ hour movie “Che,” was the main feature. In May del Toro won the Cannes Film Festiva’l’s “best actor” award for his role as Che Guevara in the movie he co-produced and Steven Soderbergh directed.

While accepting the “best actor” award at Cannes Benicio del Toro gushed: “I’d like to dedicate this to the man himself, Che Guevara!” as the crowd erupted in a thunderous ovation."I wouldn’t be here without Che Guevara, and through all the awards the movie gets you’ll have to pay your respects to the man!”

In a flurry of subsequent interviews in Europe del Toro equated Che Guevara with Jesus Christ and told a Spanish interviewer, “Ideologically I feel very close to Che.”

Alas, (outside Havana and Cannes) the movie has met with mostly scathing reviews. Variety’s Todd McCarthy branded the movie “defiantly nondramatic” and “a commercial impossibility.” New York Magazine calls it, “something of a fiasco.”

Soderbergh and Benicio Del Toro, actually had an intriguing and immensely amusing theme if only they’d known how to plumb it. Soderbergh hails Guevara as “one of the most fascinating lives in the last century.”

Almost all who actually interacted with Ernesto Guevara (and are now free to express their views without fear of firing squads or torture chambers) know that the The Big Question regarding Ernesto, the most genuinely fascinating aspect of his life, is: how did such a dreadful bore, incurable doofus, sadist and and epic idiot attain such iconic status?

The answer is that this psychotic and thoroughly unimposing vagrant named Ernesto Guevara had the magnificent fortune of linking up with modern history’s top press agent, Fidel Castro, who for going on half a century now, has had the mainstream media anxiously scurrying to his every beck and call and eating out of his hand like trained pigeons.

Had Ernesto Guevara De La Serna y Lynch not linked up with Raul and Fidel Castro in Mexico city that fateful summer of 1955--had he not linked up with a Cuban exile named Nico Lopez in Guatemala the year before who later introduced him to Raul and Fidel Castro in Mexico city — everything points to Ernesto continuing his life of a traveling hobo, panhandling, mooching off women, staying in flophouses and scribbling unreadable poetry.

Not to be outdone in the trained pigeon department, while making their film, Soderbergh and Del Toro repeatedly visited Havana to coo and peck away as anxiously as Herbert Matthews, Dan Rather or Barbara Walters while the regime tossed out its propaganda crumbs. Del Toro and Soderbergh , on top of relying on Che’s diaries (published in Havana by Cuba’s propaganda Ministry and edited by Fidel Castro who wrote the introduction) for the script, also obtained recollections from Che’s widow and many of his former underling executioners. These all currently serve as ministers in a totalitarian regime. “We wanted to show the real character” boasts Soderbergh. Absolutely no chance of any hanky panky with the historical record from these sources!

“I met him [Fidel Castro] for about five minutes,” Del Toro said. “He knew about the project and he said to me that he was very happy (I’ll bet!) that we had spent so much time researching the subject. And why shouldn’t Castro be ecstatic wth the film? Most of del Toro and Soderbergh’s “research” time was spent with Cuba’s propaganda Ministry.

“I’m here in Cuba’s hills thirsting for blood,” Che wrote his abandoned wife in 1957. “Dear Papa, today I discovered I really like killing,” he wrote shortly afterwards. Alas, this killing very rarely involved combat, it come from the close-range murder of bound and blindfolded men and boys.

“When you saw the beaming look on Che’s face as the victims were tied to the stake and blasted apart,” said a former political prisoner to this writer, “you knew there was something seriously, seriously wrong with Che Guevara.”

In fact the one genuine accomplishment in Che Guevara’s life was the mass-murder of defenseless men and boys. Under his own gun dozens died. Under his orders thousands crumpled. At everything else Che Guevara failed abysmally, even comically. Yet Soderbergh and Del Toro skip over these fascinating quotes and Che’s one genuine accomplishment as a revolutionary.

Alas, taking on Fidel Castro as agent has it’s drawbacks, as former colleagues all attest: “Fidel only praises the dead.” So prior to whooping up his revolutionary sidekick, Fidel Castro sent him “to sleep with the fishes.”

“Most of the people I met that knew him,” says Del Toro, “when they spoke about him, there was a sense that they were talking about a family member that they cared about with infinite love.”

Indeed, Fidel Castro’s expressions of love for his former sidekick must have misted Del Toro’s eyes.

Too bad Soderbergh and Del Toro didn’t interview the former CIA officers who revealed to this writer how Fidel Castro himself, via the Bolivian Communist party, constantly fed the CIA info on Che’s whereabouts in Bolivia. Including Fidel Castro’s directive to the Bolivian Communists regarding Che and his merry band might have also added drama. “Not even an aspirin,” instructed Cuba’s Maximum Leader to his Bolivian comrades, meaning that Bolivia’s Communists were not to assist Che in any way “not even with an aspirin,” if Che complained of a headache.

But utterly starstruck by their subject and slavishly compliant to Fidel Castro’s script and casting calls, all these fascinating plots and subplots flew right over Soderbergh and Del Toro’s heads.

Fidel Castro’s influence over the Western “intelligentsia” can only be described as magical, and renders any public evaluation of his regime among the smart set completely devoid of logic. To wit:

He jailed and tortured at a rate higher than Stalin and refuses (unlike Apartheid South Africa, Pinochet’s Chile and Somoza’s Nicaragua) to allow Amnesty International or the Red Cross to inspect his prisons. Yet Cuba sat on the U.N.’s Human Rights Committee and upon visiting New York as the U.N.’s keynote speaker in 1995, Newsweek magazine hailed Castro as “The Hottest Ticket in Manhattan!” and Time as “The Toast of Manhattan!” referring to the social swirl that engulfed him and the autograph hounds who mobbed him from among New York’s smart set.

His legal code mandates 2 years in prison for anyone overheard cracking a joke about him. Yet Jack Nicholson and Chevy Chase sing his praises.

He abolished Habeas corpus while his chief hangman (Che Guevara himself) declared that “judicial evidence is an archaic bourgeois detail.” Yet Harvard Law School invited him as their guest of honor, then erupted in cheers and tumultuous ovations after his every third sentence.

He drove out a higher percentage of Jews from Cuba than Czar Nicholas drove from Russia. Yet Shoah Foundation Founder Stephen Spielberg, considered his dinner with Fidel Castro, “the eight most important hours of my life.”

He’s a lily-white European soldier’s son who forcibly overthrew a Cuban government where Blacks served as President of the Senate, Minister of Agriculture, Chief of Army, and Head of State (Fulgencio Batista, the grandson of slaves, and born in a palm-roofed shack). Then jailed the longest suffering black political prisoner of modern history (Eusebio Penalver who suffered longer in Castro’s dungeon’s than Nelson Mandela suffered in South Africa’s). Today the prison population in Stalinist/Apartheid Cuba is 90 percent black while only 9 percent of the ruling Stalinist party is black. He sentenced other blacks (Dr. Elias Biscet, Jorge Antunez) to 20-year sentences essentially for quoting Martin Luther King in a public square. Yet he’s a hero to the Congressional Black Caucus and receives frequent accolades and even passionate bear hugs from Charles Rangel and Jesse Jackson.

He converted a nation with a higher per capita income than half of Europe, the lowest inflation rate in the Western hemisphere, a larger middle class than Switzerland and a huge influx of immigrants into one that repels Haitians. Yet, Colin Powell and the London Times, (owned by Rupert Murdoch) have recognized “the Castro Revolution’s achievements.”

In brief, except among “right-wing crackpots,” Cuba is ritually discussed, not with facts or reasoned observations, but with handy (and bogus) clichés.

Che Guevara’s delight in slaughtering Cubans was made possible only because these Cubans were completely defenseless at the time. Bound and blindfolded was his preference. And in that very manner they were lined up in front of his firing squads. In other settings featuring firearms (held by others) the troubled Argentine quivered with fear.

On Oct. 8 1967, for instance, upon finally encountering armed and determined enemies, Che quickly dropped his fully-loaded weapons. “Don’t shoot!” he whimpered. “I’m Che! I’m worth more to you alive than dead!”

For some reason del Toro and Soderbergh’s movie omits this scene.

http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/6867
Title: Che Chic
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on December 11, 2008, 03:48:21 PM
Interesting little documentary about "Che chic."

http://reason.tv/video/show/622.html
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: SB_Mig on December 12, 2008, 10:27:33 AM
IMHO the best political editorial of the year.

*Caution* some bad language...

"You know, this used to be a helluva good country"
Reflections on a post-NPSM America

Nick Gillespie | December 11, 2008

Author's note: This column is about politics and hence is filled with profanity and heaping helpings of excretory imagery. The faint of heart should evacuate this page immediately, like patrons at a Golden Corral buffet once the cheese sauce runs out.

There's a scene in Easy Rider, a movie that is all about America's manifest inability to redeem itself at the last minute, in which George Hanson, the small-town lawyer played by Jack Nicholson, sighs, "You know, this used to be a helluva good country. I can't understand what's gone wrong with it."

The good news for George Hanson is that shortly after making this observation, he gets beaten to death by a bunch of rednecks wielding baseball bats.

The bad news for those of us who are alive in the post-American Century century is that we're witnessing a seemingly endless series of what I've come to call "national pants-shitting moments." By this term of art, I mean situations that are simply too terrifying and unbelievable to take at face value. To do so is to admit that things are just so existentially fucked that you almost literally lose control of your most basic bodily functions. Which is, I'm told by people who are supposed to know, what happens to you when you know you are going to die. I don't include horror shows like the Oklahoma City bombing or the 9/11 attacks in this category because they are plain evil, pure and simple. What's integral to a national pants-shitting moment (NPSM) is that as it unfolds, you're being told that what is plainly true is not in fact what's happening. And you really don't want to believe what you know to be true.

The first NPSM I recall fully came on August 20, 1998, the day that Bill Clinton ordered bombing runs on terrorist sites in Sudan and Afghanistan. It was also, as you may recall, the same 24-hour-period during which Monica Lewinsky delivered grand jury testimony on the then-pressing matter of whether the president had lied under oath (he had).

Unless you were retarded, or Hillary Clinton, you could only draw one honest conclusion (a conclusion shared by nearly 50 percent of the country at the time): The bombings proceeded not from even a semblance of sober, rational calculation of the national interest or an attempt to protect American lives and property, but from a desperate desire of a sitting chief executive to cover his ass. I'm not pretending to have been naive back then, to have thought that foreign policy—or domestic policy, for that matter—was some noble, idealistic undertaking.

But Clinton's actions were breathtaking, even—or especially—among those of us who are totally cynical about the intentions and outcomes of state power. There was simply no way to account for his actions, except in a way that no one really wanted to believe. And he took our breath away again in December 1998 by bombing Iraq on the evening before the House of Representatives was voting on articles of impeachment, thereby delaying the proceedings. If Clinton was doing what he plainly was doing, he revealed a secret skeleton key to history that unlocked a treasure-trove of despair. What else in American history has happened because of such base, stupid, and vulgar motivations? How incompetent could government actors be that they would think they could get away with such shit? (Which, of course, he did.)

It seems to me that ever since those bombings we've been moving faster than Capt. James T. Kirk on a green-skinned alien toward a complete breakdown of legitimacy in politics. The 2000 election ended in a dead heat and each party in Bush v. Gore employed precisely the opposite arguments they claimed as first principles (the Dems went for a state's rights case while the Republicans pushed a federal case; the same ideological gender-bending was evident in the grotesque Terri Schiavo case a few years later). You can't fault Bush, Gore, and their minions for slugging it out to the bitter end, but you don't have to believe them when they try to pretend that they actually have principles.

The Bush administration's case for invading Iraq was a house built on sand and the only question remains whether anyone in the Bush administration other than the good soldier Colin Powell believed what he was saying at the time. But even beyond all those infinitely disturbing questions about whether people in a position to know really believed in weapons of mass destruction, there was something more screwy going on. Those of us who are not party hacks were forced to witness Democrats, who had been so bellicose during the Clinton years, suddenly become peaceniks. And Republicans, who were against sending even our bombs, much less our boys, overseas to the former (and god forbid, the future) Yugoslavia or anywhere else when a Democrat ran the military, suddenly come out in favor of not just nation-building but region-sculpting. And now we've got a president-elect who somehow ran as the peace candidate who has talked about increasing the size of the military, invading Pakistan or Iran, and finally getting American forces into Darfur.

Fast-forward to the past eight weeks or so and feelings of dizziness and epistemological irritable bowel syndrome have reached uncontainable levels. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson appears virtually out of nowhere to inform us that the U.S. economy will collapse if Congress doesn't pass the economic equivalent of the Patriot Act. In eight days, no less. Congress passed it and the markets still tanked. So Paulson changes his mind about what the bailout is for. And then again. Or maybe he simply loses his mind (watch him on the TV sometime with the sound turned off). The important thing is that the former head of Goldman Sachs has given his company $25 billion in tax dollars (at a minimum) and the government is on the hook for oh about $8.5 trillion in direct subsidies and guarantees related to various bailouts. Which Republicans are already blaming on Obama, who has yet to take office. And Democrats keep talking about how Bush and the Republicans deregulated everything, when the exact opposite is true.

Carmakers beg for more money from Congress (they got some earlier this fall) and will almost certainly get something either now or in a couple of months. Whatever partial nationalization that follows will be touted as necessary to rescue...free enterprise, just like with the financial sector. We're in the middle of a meltdown caused by easy money. The government-approved solution? Even easier money, especially for homeowners. Or at least the ones who have demonstrated an inability to pay (if you're up to date on your mortgage or rent, go fuck yourself). We've got to jump-start the economy, prime the pump, put confidence back into the markets by spending today and saving tomorrow. Go figure. Trust them, they know what they're doing. President-elect Barack Obama is promising a stimulus package for an economy that has received more stimulation than John Holmes in Saturday Night Beaver. No third term for Bush. But maybe one for Bill Clinton. Hope. Change. Tom Daschle. Boolah-boolah.

And then, as a semi-comical cherry on the very top of this shit sundae is the bizarre arrest of Gov. Rod Blagojevich (D-Ill.) for, among other things, allegedly trying to sell the Senate seat being vacated by Obama for as much as...$1 million (cue the Dr. Evil impersonation). According to ABC News, the Justice Department claims it has tapes of Blago saying things such as, "I've got this thing, it's fucking golden, and, uh, uh, I'm just not giving it up for fuckin' nothing." That's only the tip of the iceberg, when it comes to Blagojevich and whatever pols he takes down with him.

In a fundamental way, we know that all the charges are true, against Blago and every other politician, now and forever, amen. At least since some time in the 1960s, when Lyndon Johnson's credibility gap grew bigger than his gall bladder scar and his dog's ears combined, or, at the very latest, in the early '70s, when Richard Nixon mumbled that he wasn't a crook (thereby acknowledging that he was in fact one), we've known that the worst thing we can imagine about our politicians is true. My father, born during the Harding administration for god's sake, averred that everyone always knew this was the case. But it's almost as if we are now conjuring up our own national nightmares, like some weird character from a Harry Potter novel. There are some good politicians, of course, but even when they are trying to do the right thing, they screw everything up, it seems. And of course much of the time, they are not even particularly concerned with doing the right thing.

Which explains historically low presidential approval ratings and congressional ratings that barely make it out of the high teens.

And in this sense, the George Hanson character from Easy Rider had it all wrong. This never was a "helluva good country," at least when it came to politicians. We just pretended it was. Certainly, after a decade or more of NPSMs up the ying-yang (apologies, but we are talking about politics, which driveth all decent men and women mad), it's impossible to have any illusions. We are a nation of Depends wearers, even those of us who are half the age of John McCain.

And here's one final turn of the screw, the worm, whatever. According to the authors of the depressing yet persuasive (and unpublished!) paper "Regulation and Distrust," the less we believe in government, the more of it we will demand.

Writing in July, Philippe Aghion, Yann Algan, Pierre Cahuc, and Andrei Shleifer argue that "distrust influences not just regulation itself, but the demand for regulation. Using the World Values Survey, we show both in a cross-section of countries, and in a sample of individuals from around the world, that distrust fuels support for government control over the economy. What is perhaps most interesting about this finding...is that distrust generates demand for regulation even when people realize that the government is corrupt and ineffective."

That's just one more horrible, deep-rumbling-in-the-very-depth-of-our-bodies-and-souls truth that stands revealed before us, at the end of the Clinton-Bush years. And, sadly because history is a dream from which we cannot awake, the Bush-Obama years, which have already started.

Nick Gillespie is the editor-in-chief of Reason.tv and Reason.com.
Title: Pot Labels Kettle Racist
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on December 22, 2008, 08:44:05 AM
Primary and Secondary Racism
Mike S. Adams
Monday, December 22, 2008

Ann Coulter was right when she said the essence of being a liberal is having one set of rules for oneself and an entirely different set of rules for other people. Similarly, it could be asserted that the essence of liberal arts education is developing one set of theories that apply only to other people. Few better examples can be found than in the case of labeling theory, which derives from the pseudo-science of sociology.

Frank Tannenbaum had a number of valid points when, in the 1930s, he established some basic premises of labeling theory. He argued that, as a juvenile, everyone engages in some form of delinquent behavior. And he correctly pointed out that not everyone who engages in delinquency is caught and, therefore, labeled “delinquent.”

Tannenbaum was also correct in saying that parents, teachers, and peers sometimes over-react to juveniles caught in an act of delinquency. He was again on firm ground in asserting that these occasional over-reactions could actually produce more delinquency.

Surely, those who are labeled delinquent are less likely to be invited to associate with those who haven’t. And ostracism from conformists can lead to delinquent associations where the strengthening of deviant tendencies can occur.

Writing just a few years after Tannenbaum, Edwin Lemert did a lot to shape labeling theory into its present form. It is a form popular with progressives everywhere.

Lemert argued that people can engage in delinquency for any number of biological, sociological, or psychological reasons. Delinquency produced by any of these broad (categories of) factors is called “primary deviance.” But Lemert’s real contribution to various progressive causes (and socialist policies) flows from his explanation of a form of delinquency known as “secondary deviance.”

Lemert believed that if an individual was caught in an act of primary deviance, he was likely to be placed under greater subsequent scrutiny by parents, teachers, and various agents of social control. This, of course, meant the child was more likely to be caught engaging in delinquency again. Adopting Lemert’s premises, it is easy to understand how a vicious cycle could develop.

At some point, of course, the child might internalize the notion that he is a “deviant,” a “delinquent,” or just generally “bad.” This could lead to higher rates of delinquency. When it does, according to Lemert, “secondary deviance” has occurred. Many of us have come to dub this process, perhaps somewhat simplistically, as the “self-fulfilling prophecy.”

Notions such as “secondary deviance” and “self-fulfilling prophecy” have done much to undermine the integrity of public education in this country. If you learned to read in first grade in the 1970s, you remember the “yellowbirds,” “redbirds,” and “bluebirds” reading groups. Labeling theorists thought it would be better to call a child a “yellowbird” than to call him “slow.”

(Author’s Note: I was a “yellowbird” in first grade and we all knew we were slow. We just contented ourselves with beating up the “bluebirds” during recess. Fortunately, due to the kindness of my favorite teacher Elsie Stephenson, I eventually became a “redbird.”).

Regrettably, all of this emphasis on self-esteem and negative labeling has resulted in many schools doing away with letter grades altogether. And when the kids play games at recess they are often forbidden from keeping score. They don’t want anyone to suffer the emotional trauma that results from being labeled a “loser” – even if for a day.

Liberal progressives have spent years taking a theory from sociology and applying it increasingly to the field of education. These progressives have shown a clear interest in the question of whether negative labels (e.g., “criminal,” “dumb”) are more frequently applied to blacks and other historically victimized groups.

But, curiously, one area of research remains unexplored: What impact does labeling someone a “racist” have on his self-image – and his propensity for future acts of racism?

Frank Tannenbaum, if he were alive today, might argue that everyone engages in some form of racist behavior. And he might point out that not everyone who engages in racism is caught and labeled “racist.”

Tannenbaum might also say that parents, teachers, and peers sometimes over-react to juveniles caught in an act of racial insensitivity. He would be on firm ground in asserting that these occasional over-reactions could actually produce more racial insensitivity.

Surely, those who are labeled “racist” are less likely to be invited to associate with those who haven’t. And ostracism from non-racists can lead to racist associations where the strengthening of racist tendencies can occur.

Lemert might agree that people can engage in racism for any number of biological, sociological, or psychological reasons. Racism produced by any of these broad (categories of) factors could be called “primary racism.”

Lemert might also agree that if an individual is caught in an act of primary racism, he is likely to be placed under greater subsequent scrutiny by parents, teachers, and various agents of social control. This, of course, means the child is more likely to be caught engaging in racial insensitivity again. Adopting Lemert’s premises, it is easy to understand how a vicious cycle could develop.

At some point, of course, the child might internalize the notion that he is a “racist” or just generally “bigoted.” This could lead to higher rates of bigotry. When it does, one might say that “secondary racism” has occurred. Many of us might call this a “self-fulfilling prophecy.”

We all know that liberals often manufacture cases of racism in order to keep liberalism alive. But we need more research in the pseudo-science of sociology in order to determine how reckless accusations of racism are actually creating more real racism in America. The research can be used to test whether liberals really believe in labeling theory and whether they are willing to apply it to their own conduct.

If liberals really do believe in labeling theory, they should reconsider their own careless accusations of racism. If not, they should fess up, assign grades, and let children keep score during recess.

Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 07, 2009, 09:14:28 AM
Gresham's Law


eidelberg@foundation1.org



Gresham’s Law Updated
By Paul Eidelberg

Some four centuries ago, English financier Sir Thomas Gresham formulated what has come to be known as “Gresham’s Law,” according to which coins having the least intrinsic value supplant coins having a higher intrinsic value.

Gresham’s Law is the dominant law in the domain of politics, where falsehoods and half-truths or “spin” drive out plain-spoken truths. The ideal of democratic politics is compromise and expedience as opposed to principles, and this seems to exclude truth.

Stated another way: politics is a struggle for power, and to gain power in a democratic society one must go with the mainstream, the center of the political spectrum, where vagueness trumps moral clarity.

Democracy’s political elites insist on your being a “moderate,” a “centrist,” a “pragmatist,” a “pluralist.” Why? Well, to put it plainly, there is no truth. In this democratic age, everything is “relative.”

To refute an opponent nowadays you don’t have to examine his opinions on logical and empirical grounds; it’s enough to call him a “right-winger” or a “hawk.” I say “right-winger” and “hawk” rather than “left-winger” and “dove” because left-wingers and doves dominate the media, including the media of education. Thus, if you are a critic of indiscriminate freedom or of a leveling egalitarianism, the democracy’s ruling elites label you a “reactionary” or a “fascist.” And if you are a critic of the Middle East “peace process,” they label you a “war-monger.”

This dishonest way of dealing with matters of life and death is typical of academics tainted by moral relativism. I have especially in mind morally neutral or “value-free” political scientists. Thus, in an op-ed piece appearing in The Jerusalem Post, one Hebrew University political scientist said that to require more than 51% in a referendum on whether Israel should withdraw from the Golan Heights is to succumb to “Kahanism.” The “reason”? It would render nugatory the votes of Israel’s Arab citizens! No direct comment on this example of intellectual dishonesty or of Gresham’s Law is necessary.

That falsehoods and half-truths are a commonplace in political science is indicated by the fact that political scientists never refer to any politician as “mendacious.” To do so is to make a “value-judgment” which “value-free” (or “worth-less”) political scientists must avoid if they are to be “objective” or “scientific.” A “value-free” political science must therefore be a “truth-free” political science, hence unscientific.

But since “value-free” or morally neutral political science will be found only in democracies, it follows that democratic political scientists are lackeys of democracy—understandably, for democracy endows them with academic freedom. You will never hear them criticizing democracy. This suggests that morally neutral political scientists identify with the Power Elite or Establishment. Indeed, they are part of the Establishment. There is dilemma here.
Morally neutral political scientists are by definition opposed to tradition, especially a religious-based tradition, which proclaims eternal truths and condemns falsehoods and half-truths.

Religion is therefore the main competitor of “value-free” or “truth-free” political science. This is why the political scientist alluded to above opposes an extraordinary majority on the Golan referendum issue—opposes it because it would be a manifestation of what he calls “Jewish exclusivity.” Which means he opposes Jewish peoplehood or nationhood. That’s the objective of those (including nominal or assimilated Jews) who advocate the establishment of an Arab state in Judea and Samaria, the heartland of the Jewish people.

Evident here is the operation of Gresham’s Law: the bad driving out the good. Notice, however, that insofar as political science is “value-free” or “truth-less,” it cheapens and undermines the values and truths of the society in which this political science holds sway. It renders all values equal, and it reduces truths to myths or are merely personal narratives. This is postmodern political science, and it is subversive.

But inasmuch as this political science will be found only in democracies, it follows that “value-free” or morally neutral political science is subversive of democracy. The same may be said of the news media insofar as their mandarins are the products of morally neutral political science. But wait!

Since the media are dominated by the Left; they are not at all morally neutral. Consider the current conflict between Israel and Hamas. A perusal of CNN or BBC reveals they are biased against Israel, which is to say they favor Hamas, a terrorist organization that uses women and children as human shields, an organization, moreover, whose Covenant calls for Israel’s eradication. Dominating these media, therefore, is not moral neutrality but moral reversal. Or to put it terms of Greshem’s Law, those who support Hamas would have the bad supplant the good.
Title: Septuagenarians for Mao Tse Tung
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on January 07, 2009, 11:31:11 AM
This piece had me busting a gut, particularly this line regarding the senior senator from MA:  "Really, is there no one else available in the state of Massachusetts who can drop his Rs and vote dependably Maoist?"

Get out of the way, you old fogies
By David Harsanyi
Posted: 01/07/2009 12:30:00 AM MST

Warning: This column is replete with ageism — a hazardous prejudice to have in a nation growing progressively older.

The average American's life expectancy (or, as it's referred to in Washington, the "junior senator") is now a crusty 77 years.

The hippies told us not to trust anyone over 30. What about 70? There are 22 senators who have reached this seasoned plateau; another four are 69. So, despite the promise of impending "change," Washington, in reality, still resembles a (painfully slow-moving) gerontocracy.

When I drop dead — excuse me, "pass away" — I expect to have a remote control and an alcoholic beverage in hand, a white Cadillac out front and a rigid belief that government owes me stuff. Politicians, it seems, only stop working to move into a correctional facility or a pine box. Really, are they so exceptional that we can't let them go?

Some of you will argue that as Washington begins negotiating a "New New Deal" massive stimulus plan, it is advantageous to have on hand more than a third of sitting Senate members with first- hand experience of the Great Depression.

According to USA Today, the average age of a House member this term will be 57 — which is a day nursery compared to the Senate, where the average age now stands at 63. Both are records.

Thirty years after Ted Kennedy griped about Ronald Reagan's advanced age, the man serves as a 76-year-old, nine-term senator recovering from brain-tumor surgery. Really, is there no one else available in the state of Massachusetts who can drop his Rs and vote dependably Maoist?

An average adult would not trust Sen. Robert Byrd (who is 91) to pet-sit their mutt for fear that the unfortunate creature might accidentally turn up in chili con carne. Yet, Byrd sits on the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee, where he doles out massive amounts of taxpayer funds for West Virginia landmarks with "Byrd" in the title. Fortunately, this session Byrd has lost his chairmanship to make way for a young whippersnapper in Hawaii's Daniel Inouye, who is 84.

And, sure, there has been some progress in the Senate with the ousting of Alaskan criminal Ted Stevens (85). The youth movement continued in the House with the ejection of 82-year-old John Dingell from his chairmanship of the House Energy and Commerce Committee to make way for Henry Waxman, who comes in at a stylish 69.

Then there are Supreme Court justices, who in many ways hold power beyond that of legislators. Certainly the position entails a far higher level of intellectual rigor. The average age in that institution is 69. Five justices are over 70 and another two are over 60. Justice John Paul Stevens is 88.

In 2004, six in 10 Americans believed that there should be a mandatory retirement age for Supreme Court justices — probably because, like myself, they often can't get their childrens' names straight, much less remember what the Third Amendment says. (Though, in the end, we all stand united against the quartering of soldiers.)

Many older Americans will claim to be sharper and more physically active in their 80s than I am in my 30s. That's not saying much. Our creaky leaders should understand that it is in our best interest for them to step aside and use their latter-life precocious enthusiasm and energy in the private sector.

Sadly, it seems these elderly public "servants" have an inability to allow national treasures — themselves — to stop giving.

Theoretically, it would be nice to allow citizens to vote for anyone they please, young or old. But since we already have a minimum, constitutionally mandated age limit to serve in place, why not a maximum age? How about at least placing it wherever the average life expectancy falls?

Because, right now, Washington looks more like Del Boca Vista than America.

Reach columnist David Harsanyi at 303-954-1255 or dharsanyi@ denverpost.com.

http://www.denverpost.com/harsanyi/ci_11388160
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: DougMacG on January 08, 2009, 10:41:04 AM
Corruption and cronyism in Chicago probably deserves its own topic but I'll just throw this in rants.

http://www.suntimes.com/news/education/1365268,CST-NWS-inspect07.article

 Chicago Public Schools' cappuccino bill: $67,000
'A WASTE OF MONEY' | Report says staffers skirted rules to buy 30 coffeemakers, changed athletes' grades, falsified addresses

January 7, 2009

BY ART GOLAB Staff Reporter agolab@suntimes.com

Chicago public school bureaucrats skirted competitive bidding rules to buy 30 cappuccino/espresso machines for $67,000, with most of the machines going unused because the schools they were ordered for had not asked for them, according to a report by the CPS Office of Inspector General.

That was just one example of questionable CPS actions detailed in the inspector general's 2008 annual report. Others included high school staffers changing grades to pump up transcripts of student athletes and workers at a restricted-enrollment grade school falsifying addresses to get relatives admitted.

In the case of the cappuccino machines, central office administrators split the order among 21 vocational schools to avoid competitive bidding required for purchases over $10,000. As a result CPS paid about $12,000 too much, according to Inspector General James Sullivan. "We were able to find the same machines cheaper online," he said.

"We also look at it as a waste of money because the schools didn't even know they were getting the equipment, schools didn't know how to use the machines and weren't prepared to implement them into the curriculum," Sullivan said.

CPS spokesman Michael Vaughn said CPS plans to change its purchasing policy so that competitive bidding kicks in when a vendor accumulates $10,000 worth of orders, no matter how many schools are involved. One person was fired and disciplinary action is pending against three others, he said.

The grade-changing took place at an unidentified high school, where student athletes grades were boosted, then, after transcripts were issued for college admission offices, the grades were changed back. The culprits could not be identified because passwords allowing entry to the grading system were shared by a number of people, Sullivan said. A new record system has tighter security, he said.

At Carson Elementary, an overcrowded school in Gage Park where even neighborhood kids were restricted from enrolling, five lower- level employees got six relatives into the school by falsifying addresses. Sixty-nine students from outside the attendance area got in, but they didn't even bother to lie about their addresses. CPS had to spend as much as $252,000 to bus kids who live in the neighborhood to other schools, Sullivan said.

Vaughn said the employees involved have resigned, been fired or will be fired.
Title: Repudiating Reason
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on January 10, 2009, 06:37:51 PM
In the face of this madness, some facts (Must Read on Gaza)
The London Spectator ^ | January 10, 2009 | Melanie Phillips

Here are some facts that the western media might just possibly by some strange and uncharacteristic oversight fail to report.

The Israel Defence Force blog shows what it says is a captured Hamas map showing how Hamas are using the inhabitants of an entire neighbourhood as human shields by lacing it with a web of explosive devices. The Israel Foreign ministry says:

The map shows that snipers are positioned at the entrance of the A-Tawil mosque and in the mosques next to it and describes the directions the snipers are aiming. It indicates that explosives are planted in the entrances of civilian homes.

Israel also says this shows Hamas preparing to fire a rocket from a rocket launcher in a Gaza school yard; it also says another sequence in the video shows Hamas rockets being fired during the ‘humanitarian pause’.

Here an embedded Israeli journalist describes what he found when he was allowed into Gaza a few days ago:

We come across a local family in one of the buildings. Grandparents, a few young parents, some children and a few toddlers. Sitting on a rug, their legs are covered in blankets and two soldiers are standing guard nearby. ‘What about them?’ I ask. ‘They're free to go if they want to, but they don't want to,’ said Eilon Perry, Givati's operations officer. ‘They informed us they would be staying in the house and we have no choice but to accept that.’

The family suddenly notices the cameras, and immediately, the expression on their faces changes. ‘We have no food,’ they say in Arabic, as one of the youngsters suggests we interview him in English about their plight. Givati troops are extremely concerned about being portrayed as abusing innocent civilians. Perry points to a stack of canned goods, water bottles and other provisions. ‘We provided some of that and they cook and eat quite well,’ he said. The Palestinians seem to understand him and one of them smiles. It's a war – they had to try.

Here is another insight into the manipulation of media images in Gaza:

A Palestinian journalist in Gaza said members of the Palestinian media are ‘directing’ civilians to cry and telling them what to say in interviews: ‘A mother of one of the martyrs stood by the door of the intensive care unit while crying... relatives and those around her were telling her what she should say to the television cameras: “Say your son [before he died] prayed and went out.” Another tells her: “Curse the Arab leaders”.. The journalists [in the hospitals] are going overboard in their insensitivity and taking advantage of the [difficult] moments, with the explanation that they are showing this to the world. One cameraman told a mourning mother: “Hit your face, cry, do some action.”’

And here is a Gazan voice that is almost never heard:

A Palestinian girl in Gaza whose family members died in Gaza Dec. 28 in an Israeli air attack held Hamas responsible. ‘I say Hamas is the cause, in the first place, of all wars,’ the girl told Palestinian TV.

Other Arabs agree. The Jerusalem Post reports:

The Egyptian movie star Adel Imam expressed understanding for Israel’s military operation in the Gaza Strip and blamed Hamas for the violence. He is quoted in The Jerusalem Post saying: ‘Hamas ignored our warnings and chose to lead an asymmetrical war. It's preferable for Hamas to stop [the rocket attacks]. They should have known that Israel wasn't going to receive the attacks with roses.'

Meanwhile, in the midst of the vicious western jihad against Israel one British Muslim voice has been heard most bravely speaking the truth. Shiraz Maher writes in the Telegraph that Muslims should condemn not Israel but Hamas:

Israel is responding to a barrage of Hamas rockets which threaten its citizens who live in the south. Indeed, around 10 per cent of the Israeli population now lives within striking distance of katyusha rockets. All this follows the unilateral withdrawal of Israeli settlements in Gaza in 2005, after which Hamas swept to power and turned ‘the Strip’ into its own paramilitary playground, using it as a springboard to launch a campaign of sustained and indiscriminate attacks into southern Israel.

...Since the start of the conflict Hamas has carried out extra-judicial killings of – or, put bluntly, murdered – more than 30 of its citizens who it suspects of ‘colluding’ with Israel. And how has it responded to the death of Palestinian children? In a televised broadcast the Hamas leader, Mahmoud Zahar, declared that Israel has ‘legitimised the murder of their own children by killing the children of Palestine. They have legitimised the killing of their people all over the world by killing our people.’

British Islamists have proved themselves only too willing to oblige. Reports this week suggest that some participants on Islamist chat forums have been drawing up "hit lists" of prominent British Jews. One contributor writing on the discussion board of the Muslim Public Affairs Committee (MPAC) said, ‘lets hope that an unfortunate event happens and they end up being killed someway [sic]’. The group later removed those comments, but such views are indicative of the hatred that is out there.

As Shiraz says, British Muslims have to make a choice – between supporting Hamas terrorism and supporting Israeli democracy. Unfortunately, such moral integrity and scruple for the truth is currently being swamped by the frenzied hatred and demonisation of Israel, not just amongst British Muslims but the media and intelligentsia.

Finally Colonel Richard Kemp, former Commander of British forces in Afghanistan and Northern Ireland and a former intelligence adviser to the Cabinet Office, has commented thus on the war in Gaza:

...only international pressure on Hamas can see an end to this conflict, together with a long-term commitment for an international force to control Gaza. The only real reason for hope in the whole desperate situation is that Israel now enjoys the warmest relations with most of its neighbouring Arab states. And fearful of encouraging Islamist extremists in their own countries, the last thing these governments can afford is any kind of success for Hamas... Despite Israel's extraordinary measures a tragically high number of innocent civilians have been killed and wounded. That is the inevitability of Hamas's way of fighting. Avoiding civilian casualties when fighting among the people is always difficult. When combating an enemy that uses human shields it is impossible.

In tomorrow’s Sunday Times, Dominic Lawson quotes Col Kemp further:

Kemp told me that ‘Hamas deploys suicide attackers including women and children, and rigs up schools and houses with booby-trap explosives. Its leaders knew as a matter of certainty this would lead to civilian casualties if there was a ground battle. Virtually every aspect of its operations is illegal under international humanitarian law – ‘war crimes’ in the emotive language usually reserved for the Israelis’.

Colonel Kemp points out that if the IDF had no regard for civilian lives it would never have leafleted and telephoned residents in Gaza, warning them when it was about to attack their area: after all, that also gives Hamas notice – hardly the act of an army devoted to military victory at all costs. Similarly, the IDF’s unilateral commitment to a daily three-hour ceasefire to permit the evacuation (to Israel) of casualties, and for the passage of ‘humanitarian aid’, also allows Hamas time to regroup and redeploy for future attacks.

Indeed. So much is blindingly obvious. The fact that such demonstrable truths are not being acknowledged but wickedly ignored and Israel accused instead of behaving like Nazis demonstrates that a large section of Britain’s ruling class has simply repudiated reason itself.

http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/3223606/in-the-face-of-this-madness-some-facts.thtml
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: G M on January 11, 2009, 07:06:32 AM
Israel is far, far more restrained in it's dealing with it's enemies than i'd ever be. Israel could turn Gaza into a parking lot in an afternoon without losing a single soldier, yet they pay in blood to save the lives of those that teach their children hate and terror.
Title: Murder Spree by people who refuse to ask for directions
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 14, 2009, 06:18:29 PM
Murder Spree by People Who Refuse to Ask For Directions
by  Ann Coulter

01/14/2009
 
 
In a front-page article on Jan. 2 of this year, The New York Times took a brief respite from its ongoing canonization of Barack Obama and returned to its series on violent crimes committed by returning GIs, or as I call it: "U.S. Military, Psycho Killers."

The Treason Times' banner series about Iraq and Afghanistan veterans accused of murder began in January last year but was quickly discontinued as readers noticed that the Times doggedly refused to provide any statistics comparing veteran murders with murders in any other group.

So they waited a year, hoping readers wouldn't notice they were still including no relevant comparisons.


What, for example, is the percentage of murderers among veterans compared to the percentage of murderers in the population at large -- or, more germane, in the general population of young males, inasmuch as violent crime is committed almost exclusively by young men?

Any group composed primarily of young men will contain a seemingly mammoth number of murderers.

Consider the harmless fantasy game, Dungeons and Dragons -- which happens to be played almost exclusively by young males. When murders were committed in the '80s by (1) young men, who were (2) Dungeons and Dragons enthusiasts, some people concluded that factor (2), rather than factor (1), led to murderous tendencies.

Similarly, for its series about how America's bravest and finest young men are really a gang of psychopathic cutthroats, the Times triumphantly produced 121 homicides committed by veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars in order to pin the blame for the murders on the U.S. military.

Perhaps the Times' next major expose could be on how a huge percentage of murderers are people who won't ask for directions or share the TV remote.

Let's compare murders by veterans to murders by other 18- to 35-year-olds in the U.S. population at large. From 1976 to 2005, 18- to 24-year-olds -- both male and more gentle females -- committed homicide at a rate of 29.9 per 100,000. Twenty-five- to 35-year-olds committed homicides at a rate of 15.8 per 100,000.

Since 9/11, about 1.6 million troops have served in either Iraq or Afghanistan. That makes the homicide rate among veterans of these wars 7.6 per 100,000 -- or about one-third the homicide rate for their age group (18 to 35) in the general population of both sexes.

But fewer than 200,000 of the 1.6 million troops who served in Iraq and Afghanistan have been women, and the murder rate for the general population includes both males and females. Inasmuch as males commit nearly 90 percent of all murders, the rate for males in those age groups is probably nearly double the male/female combined rates, which translates to about 30 to 55 murderers per 100,000 males aged 18 to 35.

So comparing the veterans' rate of murder to only their male counterparts in the general population, we see that Iraq and Afghanistan veterans are about 10 times less likely to commit a murder than non-veterans of those wars.

But as long as the Times has such a burning interest in the root causes of murder, how about considering the one factor more likely to create a murderer than any other? That is the topic we're not allowed to discuss: single motherhood.

As I describe in my new book, "Guilty: Liberal 'Victims' and Their Assault on America," controlling for socioeconomic status, race and place of residence, the strongest predictor of whether a person will end up in prison is that he was raised by a single parent. (The second strongest factor is owning a Dennis Kucinich bumper sticker.)

By 1996, 70 percent of inmates in state juvenile detention centers serving long-term sentences were raised by single mothers. Seventy percent of teenage births, dropouts, suicides, runaways, juvenile delinquents and child murderers involve children raised by single mothers. Girls raised without fathers are more sexually promiscuous and more likely to end up divorced.

A 1990 study by the left-wing Progressive Policy Institute showed that, after controlling for single motherhood, the difference in black and white crime disappeared.

Various studies come up with slightly different numbers, but all the figures are grim. A study cited in the far left-wing Village Voice found that children brought up in single-mother homes "are five times more likely to commit suicide, nine times more likely to drop out of high school, 10 times more likely to abuse chemical substances, 14 times more likely to commit rape (for the boys), 20 times more likely to end up in prison, and 32 times more likely to run away from home."

With new children being born, running away, dropping out of high school and committing murder every year, it's not a static problem to analyze. But however the numbers are run, single motherhood is a societal nuclear bomb.

Many of these studies, for example, are from the '90s, when the percentage of teenagers raised by single parents was lower than it is today. In 1990, 28 percent of children under 18 were being raised in one-parent homes -- mother or father, divorced or never-married. By 2005, more than one-third of all babies born in the U.S. were illegitimate.

That's a lot of social problems in the pipeline.

Think I'm being cruel? Imagine an America with 60 to 70 percent fewer juvenile delinquents, teenage births, teenage suicides and runaways, and you will appreciate what the sainted "single mothers" have accomplished.

Even in liberals' fevered nightmares, predatory mortgage dealers, oil speculators and Ken Lay could never do as much harm to their fellow human beings as single mothers do to their own children, to say nothing of society at large.

But the Times won't run that series because liberals adore single motherhood and the dissolution of traditional marriage in America. They detest the military, so they cite a few anecdotal examples of veterans who have committed murder and hope that no one asks for details.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 16, 2009, 06:30:33 AM
THE DEMONS OF GAZA
By RALPH PETERS

January 10, 2009 --
Israel hasn't killed a single civilian in the Gaza Strip. Over a hundred civilians have died, and Israeli bombs or shells may have ended their lives. But Israel didn't kill them.

Hamas did.

It's time to smash the lies. The lies of Hamas. The UN lies. And the save-the-terrorists lies of the global media.  There is no moral equivalence between Hamas terrorists and Israeli soldiers. There is no gray area. There is no point in negotiations.  Hamas is a Jew-killing machine. It exists to destroy Israel. What is there to negotiate? 

When Hamas can't kill Jews, it's perfectly willing to drive Palestinian civilians into the line of fire - old men, women and children. Hamas herds the innocent into "shelters," then draws Israeli fire on them. And the headline-greedy media cheer them on.

Hamas isn't fighting for political goals. "Brokered agreements" are purely means to an end. And the envisioned end is the complete destruction of Israel in the name of a terrorist god. Safe in hidden bunkers or in Damascus, the Hamas leadership is willing to watch an unlimited number of civilians and even street-level terrorists die.

Lives, too, are nothing but means to an end. And dead kids are the coins that keep the propaganda meter ticking.

All Hamas had to do to prevent Israel's act of self-defense was to leave Israel unmolested by terror rockets. All Hamas needs to do now to stop this conflict and spare the Palestinian people it pretends to champion is to stop trying to kill Israelis and agree to let Israel exist in peace.

Hamas didn't, and Hamas won't.

Now Israel has to continue its attack, to wreak all the havoc it can on Hamas before a new American president starts meddling. If Israel stops now, Hamas can declare victory just for surviving - despite its crippling losses. While it's impossible to fully eliminate extremism, killing every terrorist leader hiding in a Gaza bunker is the only hope of achieving even a temporary, imperfect peace. The chance may not come again.

And don't worry about "creating a power vacuum." Let the Palestinians pick up their own pieces. Even anarchy in Gaza is better for Israel than Hamas.

Israelis, Americans and Westerners overall share a tragic intellectual blind spot: We're caught in yesterday's model of terrorism, that of Arafat's PLO, of the IRA, the Red Brigades or the Weather Underground. But, as brutal as those organizations could be, they never believed they were on a mission from God.

Yesteryear's terrorists wanted to change the world. They were willing to shed blood and, in extreme cases, to give their own blood to their causes. But they didn't seek death. They preferred to live to see their "better world."  Now our civilization faces terrorists who regard death as a promotion. They believe that any action can be excused because they're serving their god. And their core belief is that you and I, as stubborn unbelievers, deserve death.

Their grisly god knows no compromise. To give an inch is to betray their god's trust entirely. Yet we - and even some Israelis - believe it's possible to cut deals with them.

In search of peace, Israel handed Gaza to the Palestinians, a people who had never had a state of their own. As thanks, Israel received terror rockets. And the Palestinian people got a gang war.

Peace is the last thing Hamas terrorists and gangsters want. Peace means the game is up. Peace means they've disappointed their god. Peace means no more excuses. They couldn't bear peace for six months.

This is a war to the bitter end. And we're afraid to admit what it's about.

It's not about American sins or Israeli intransigence. It's about a sickness in the soul of a civilization - of Middle-Eastern Islam - that can only be cured from within. Until Arabs or Iranians decide to cure themselves, we'll have to fight.

Instead, we want to talk. We convince ourselves, against all evidence, that our enemies really want to talk, too, that they just need "incentives" (the diplomat's term for bribes). The apparent belief of our president-elect that it's possible to negotiate with faith-fueled fanatics is so naive it's terrifying.

Yet, it's understandable. Barack Obama's entire career has been built on words, not deeds, on his power to persuade, not his power to deliver. But all the caucuses, debates, neighborhood meetings and backroom deal-making sessions in his past haven't prepared him to "negotiate" with men whose single-minded goal is Israel's destruction - and ours.

If Obama repeats the same "peace-process" folly as his predecessors, from Jimmy have-you-hugged-your-terrorist-today? Carter through Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, he'll be devoured before he knows he's been bitten.

How many administrations have to repeat the identical error of believing that, deep down inside, terrorists, gunmen and warlords really want peace every bit as much as we do? Israel's enemies aren't just looking to cut a sharp deal. They want to destroy Israel.

Which part of what they shout in our faces is so hard to understand? Israel's foes have been preaching Jew-hatred for so long that even the "moderates" can't turn back now.

And why does the global left hate Israel so? Why would they pull out the stops to rescue Hamas?

Because Israel exposed the lie that a suffering people can't lift itself up through hard work, education and discipline. Israel didn't need the help of a hundred condescending NGOs and their misery junkies.

Because the Holocaust is a permanent embarrassment to Europeans. They need to believe that Israelis are kosher Nazis.

Because, from the safety of cafes and campuses, it's cool to call terrorists "freedom fighters." It makes you feel less guilty when you hit up daddy (or the state) for money. I mean, dude, it's not like you have to, like, live with them or anything, you know?



Because, above all, the most-destructive racists in the world today are mainstream leftists. Want the truth? The Left codes Israel as white and, therefore, inherently an oppressor. Israel is held to the highest standard of our civilization and our legal codes - and denied the right to self-defense.

But the Left tacitly believes that people with darker skins are inferior and can't be expected to behave at a civilized level. Leftists expect terrorist movements or African dictators to behave horribly. It's the post-modern, latte-sucking version of the "little brown brother" mentality.

The worst enemies of developing societies have been leftists who refuse to hold them to fundamental standards of governance and decency. But, then, the Left needs developing societies to fail to prove that the system's hopelessly stacked against them.

A battered, impoverished, butchered people built a thriving Western democracy in an Eastern wasteland. Israel can never be forgiven for its success.

In this six-decade-old conflict that Israel's intractable neighbors continue to force upon it, there not only are no good solutions, but, thanks to the zero-sum mentality of Islamist terrorists, there aren't even any bad solutions - short of nuclear genocide - that would bring an enduring peace to the Middle East.

And even the elimination of Israel wouldn't be enough. The terrorists would fight among themselves, while warring upon less-devout fellow Muslims.

All Israel can do is to fight for time and buy intervals of relative calm with the blood of its sons and daughters. By demanding premature cease-fires and insisting that we can find a diplomatic solution, we strengthen monsters and undercut our defenders.

And don't believe the propaganda about this conflict rallying Gaza's Palestinians behind Hamas. That's more little-brown-brother condescension, assuming all Arabs are so stupid they don't know who started this and who's dragging it out at their expense.

Gaza's people may not care much for Israelis, but they rue the day they cast their votes for Hamas. Hamas is killing them.

Ralph Peters is a retired U.S. Army officer and the author of "Looking For Trouble."
Title: Jewish Lesbians for Jihad
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on January 22, 2009, 10:48:23 AM
This screed has its over the top and disjointed elements, but does a pretty good job of indicting far left nitwits and their ilk.

Editorial Article

Dr. Dalit Baum and the Academic Lesbians for Jihad

By Lee Kaplan www.isracampus.org.il

If you were to seek an example of an Israeli "academic" serving as a full-time instrument of campus anti-Israel indoctrination, you would be hard pressed to find a better one than Mathematics Professor turned Women's Studies "scholar," Dalit Baum.

She keeps getting herself hired as a professor in the field of Women's Studies or "Peace Studies" (she once taught Women's Studies at the University of Haifa). Baum is actually nothing more than an itinerant pseudo-scholar in anti-Israel incitement. In certain circles she is renowned for her anarchist anti-Israel pontifications, which have made her a guest lecturer against Israel on the university circuit, especially on the American Left Coast. She has been invited to teach and lecture at University of California - San Diego, California State University at Monterey Bay, twice at University of California - Santa Cruz, even at the prestigious University of California- Berkeley.

Baum has a PhD degree in math, earned from Hebrew University in 1995. But no one invites her to lecture about that. Her campus hosts want her because of her malicious Jew-hating political opinions and also thanks to her opinions about female homosexuality. She proclaims that Israel is the root of all evil in the world. She is an active member in the pro-terror anti-Semitic International Solidarity Movement (ISM). Baum herself invented the anarchist group "Black (or sometimes Dirty) Laundry," which calls for Israeli "apartheid," I guess meaning existence, to be destroyed. Its slogan is "Transgendered, Not (population) Transfer!" Interestingly, even CLAF, a Lesbian Feminist organization in Israel, refuses to have anything to do with Black Laundry. Its web site solicits contributions to be sent to it via the Communist Party front group "Coalition of Women for a Just Peace." She has preferred to demonstrate in Israel against allowing freedom of speech to those with whom she disagrees.

Back in Israel these days, Baum is teaching (if that is the right word) at the "Community School for Women," a lesbian feminist "school" she helped found. Baum, a loudly self-proclaimed lesbian, has managed to connect her anti-Israel animus to support for the greatest homophobes and persecutors of homosexuals in the world, the Arab Islamofascists and the Muslim states. There homosexuality is often a capital offense. She is a leading member of a group calling itself "QUIT," which stands for "Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism," a homosexual anti-Israel anarchist/Marxist group set up to demonize Jews and Israelis while excusing Arab homophobia and persecution of homosexuals. Dalit Baum embraces and supports the very same people who would kill her for being gay!! Perhaps that explains why she has never ventured into any Muslim country to preach her ideas.

Dalit Baum scored a major personal victory in the American university system in 2003 when she managed to get appointed as a "Woman of Peace" lecturer for 8 weeks at the University of California - San Diego's Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice. It should be noted that programs in "peace studies" in the American university system (sometimes copied in Israel) are really just fronts for Marxist indoctrination programs against capitalism, against Western and Israeli self-defense against terrorism, and in favor of terrorist groups. The Kroc for whom the Kroc Institute is named is a pro-jihad Marxist "philanthropist," best known for her attempts to recruit an Islamist with close ties to al-Qaeda and Hamas to come to the United States as a "visiting scholar," an idea blocked by the American government. Kroc is the widow of McDonald's hamburger franchise king Ray Kroc. She was the driving force behind that plan to import Tariq Ramadan, a scion of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan al-Banna.

Baum's bio on the UC San Diego program's website reads: "Dalit Baum is a young Israeli peace activist and teacher who has worked for eight years to expose injustice and promote equality in communities long caught in deadly and devastating conflict. The grassroots organizer and lesbian feminist has led, inspired, or confronted those who could not or would not see the connection between denial of human rights and the on-going and escalating violence of the Palestinian-Israeli confrontations. She renewed an older program when she started a new Women in Black vigil in Tel Aviv; she expanded existing peace efforts by working from its inception with The Coalition of Women for a Just Peace, which brought many peace efforts together for concerted action; and, she created Black Laundry, a community of lesbians, gay men and transgenders (sic) against the occupation (sic) and for social justice. Additionally, she worked as a teacher and group facilitator at the Community School for Women , a school (sic) she helped found in 1999, whose mission calls on it (sic) to look at issues of poverty, marginalized ethnicity and national oppression at the same time."

The bio then goes on to celebrate the fact that she has participated in three demonstrations per week in Israel against the Israeli government and in favor of the demands of the Palestinians. As for her academic achievements, Baum has not produced a single book or article in an academic math journal. Her actual career is as a "peace activist" and rabble rouser accusing Israel of violating "peace" through its actions of self-defense.

When she is not leading "Dyke Marches (evidently her term)," Dalit Baum is a pseudo-scholar who has been able to open doors internationally to lecture to college students against the state of Israel and its right to defend itself thanks to her lesbianism and associations with some radical feminists. She obsessively denounces Israeli self-defense as contrary to "peace," lacing her proclamations about herself being a victim of societal oppression against homosexuals and women.

An example of her "scholarly work" can be seen in the course syllabus for a summer session course she taught at University of California - Santa Cruz, where she was dignified with the title of Visiting Professor of Women's Studies. The course was entitled "Violence and Non-violence in Social Change." Holding a Math PhD is the only qualification needed to be called a professor at that state-funded institution, where many a department head is more interested in political indoctrination than education.

The use of the term "non-violence" by Baum is the standard doubletalk among the "anarchist" crowd; when "direct action activists" like Baum and her friends serve as human shields for terrorists, violently assault IDF soldiers, and vandalize Israel's security fence, they claim they are using nonviolent tactics. But when Israel builds a Security Fence to keep out suicide bombers and other Arab serial killers, then the Jewish state is engaging in violence and state terror. The reading material in Baum's course syllabus contains only articles published by activists in the ISM and others who are virulently opposed to Israel's existence. There is nothing there for students to learn about terrorist attacks that maim and kill Israelis. Israel in the Baum course is nothing more than an abuser of human rights, guilty of oppression.

Interestingly, a newspaper reporter who attended one of Baum's lectures on that campus reported about how Baum deliberately distorted information or used contortions repeatedly in her presentation to give false impressions against and demonize the Jewish state, all the while passing such a presentation off as scholarship. Nevertheless she was invited back a second time to "teach" at UC Santa Cruz in a discipline unrelated to her PhD, this time as a Lecturer.

At another University of California web site, Baum's area of expertise was titled "Queering the Peace Movement in Israel/Palestine." Apparently she is very popular with women in the annihilate-the-Jews protest movement.

Baum "reinvents" her academic background when she stages demonstrations against the Israeli government in support of Israel's enemies. While she taught math at UCSD back in 1996, ever since she has been teaching jihad. The "Women in Black" chapter Baum takes credit for resurrecting in Tel Aviv routinely insists they are for a "two-state solution;" but then insist the Arabs have an unconditional "Right of Return" to areas inside pre-1967 Israel so that they can dismantle the Jewish state. Although "Women in Black" claim to be for "peace," their own statements, actions, and associations tell another story. They call areas even within the "Green Line" (the 1949 armistice line with Jordan) "Zionist occupied territory." Speakers at their events routinely endorse violence. The "Women in Black" have led public screaming sessions of "Palestine Will Be Free/From The River to the Sea." Their literature always presents Israel as an unprovoked aggressor, and never even mentions (let alone condemns) the 60 years of terrorism and aggression against the Jewish State. Their members routinely demonstrate together with the most venomous anti-Semites on the planet.

On the website of the Coalition of Women for Peace is a rant by Baum entitled, "Who Profits?" in which she implies that because corporations build Jewish homes in the West Bank and Gaza, and because Palestinians are employed there, therefore the "occupation" is just a moneymaking scheme. She calls for "direct action" (terrorism and sabotage) against such corporations. What wonderful scholarly reasoning. The real moneymaker is Dalit Baum milking campus anti-Semitism to get paid a buck and promote her agenda.

Baum created an organization of anti-Semitic Lesbians calling itself Black Laundry (it includes some gay Arabs), who meet in gay bars in Israel. Baum accuses the Jewish state of oppressing homosexuals, even while the Hamas murders and kneecaps them. Black Laundry members of course never convene in the areas controlled by the Palestinian Authority to protest "oppression" of homosexuals. We wonder why.

Dalit Baum is in the business of "making anarchy." She has come out in support of Hamas. She has consistently signed petitions endorsing a boycott of Israel and Israeli goods. She openly supports Palestinian "resistance," and we all know what that word means when people like Baum use it. That educational institutions in America and Israel allow people like her access to students is abominable.

http://www.isracampus.org.il/third%20level%20pages/Editorial%20-%20Lee%20Kaplan%20-%20Dalit%20Baum.htm
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: DougMacG on January 25, 2009, 11:07:07 AM
Since weather is now political, I offer my comments on Minnesota winters as a political rant.  Like a hurricane victim in a hurricane zone, I know the reaction is - why do you live there, you fools.  I'll leave the positive aspects of changing seasons to another post with hopefully deeper thoughts.  Before food stamps on a credit card and free health care, we used to say that MN winters keep the riff-raff out.  It's pretty hard to live under a bridge with the weather we've been having.

One of Paul Wellstone's failings was to continue the lobby for 'cold weather assistance' to cold places.  And that was before the global warming scare.  How can we hope to pay less for others, the risks they take and the mistakes they make - to re-build in flood zones, storm zones, wild fire zones etc. - if we keep telling people in Mississippi, Alabama and Arkansas that one of the nation's most prosperous states needs national help with our utility bills...

Last week was cold by our standards.  The week before was below zero from Monday through Friday, and yes, that includes the highs!  Last night I overheard a weather head speaking of a gradual warm up starting with a wake up temp of 9 below tomorrow.  We had a cold December also.  One point is that any Minnesotan who anecdotally says it isn't as cold these days as it used to be is probably wintering in Arizona.

Yesterday (Saturday) at 8am my daughter and I drove across the Twin Cities to her ski race along the Wisconsin border which was again plagued with weather advisories.  As we drove along the cities' southern freeway, both of us suddenly became aware of an amazingly brilliant rainbow we were driving toward.  I took off my sunglasses to see if that was part of the illusion but it was only more beautiful and brilliant without them.  The strangest part was that the sky was 100% blue - no clouds, no rain (hopefully that is obvious) and no snow.  All I can gather was that the moisture content of the air was so cold that it was no longer gaseous but containing microscopic crystals of ice instead, playing reflective games with the flow of sunshine to the earth.  I don't recall that happening so dramatically before.

Twice during the coldest week I lost control of my car momentarily on scraped roads with no recent precipitation of any kind, at 30 mph in a 40 zone  one evening and going 20 mph in a 30 zone the following morning.  Mind you, I am an experienced and expert winter driver, just ask me, lol.  The causes I think were: a) car exhaust contains moisture which instantly freezes to the road at these temps, b) road salt doesn't melt ice below -20 F and sand doesn't stick, and c) letting off the gas  with a front wheel drive car is a form of braking with the front tires, like downshifting.  The only way to re-gain control was to lightly re-touch the accelerator to again pull forward before it went into a spin.  In my case both times I was lucky there was no one in front of me!  I was amazed during the coldest week how many cars I saw off the road that appeared to be 'victims' of one car accidents, also with how many cars looked like they pulled over without a mishap along the sides of the freeways, either spooked by the conditions or maybe with a mechanical problem on cars that looked very new.  Belts, hoses and lubricants don't like the extremes any more than mammals do.

One major school district shut down because their politically correct biodiesel buses had their fuel supplies turn to jello which doesn't flow through the fuel lines and into injectors at these temps.  Live and learn.

On the coldest of all the cold mornings, I went out to start a car.  Like predicting who will win a fight by just looking at them, it is not always obvious which car will start at the coldest temp.  In my case it was a tiny Honda that out matched the stronger minivan and even the car that had been resting in the cold garage.  For the first few miles I noticed a new problem - the turn signals didn't work.  Later they did, so I realized it had something to do with extreme cold on the electrical contacts. Presumably moisture from ambient air was on the contacts, was unmelted by the low amperage attempting to flow across and failing to make a connection.  I wonder if Pelosi and the gang figured that in as they social engineer us our next millivolt powered transportation system with hampster-wheel generators. Can you imagine what size battery a Chevy volt will need to heat the passenger compartment of a comfortable sized car at 30 below zero and defrost the windshield if we remove the gas power from the heat system?

My political point is that will you of all please make sure that politicians from San Francisco or Hawaii or anywhere else do not decide which ride is right for you, for your family, for your climate, for your profession, for your activities, ski races, hockey games, camping trips etc. etc. etc.  There are considerations and decisions that people make in their lives about what is best for them regarding where they live, what they drive and everything else, that are not best handled at your state capital, in Washington DC or at some global conference of corrupt kleptocrats.  Even if you forget some of the reasons why these people don't know what is best for you, please cling to what individual liberties and choices you have left with every vote you make.   - Doug
Title: Left and Right
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on January 26, 2009, 08:27:37 PM
Saturday, January 3, 2009
Pilar Rahola

Pilar Rahola

Pilar Rahola is a Spanish politician, journalist and activist. She is a passionate defender of the United States and Israel and an indefatigable fighter against anti-Semitism. All these despite being ideologically from the left. Her articles are published in Spain and throughout some of the most important newspapers in Latin America. She is the recipient of major awards by Jewish organizations.

I came across this speech and felt that it was worthwhile placing it in my blog. I translated it and assume full responsibility for any errors. If you want to visit her blog, you can do so by clicking here: Pilar Rahola. Some of her articles translated into English.

Why don’t we see demonstrations against Islamic dictatorships in London, Paris, Barcelona? Or demonstrations against the Burmese dictatorship? Why aren’t there demonstrations against the enslavement of millions of women who live without any legal protection? Why aren’t there demonstrations against the use of children as human bombs where there is conflict with Islam? Why has there been no leadership in support of the victims of Islamic dictatorship in Sudan? Why is there never any outrage against the acts of terrorism committed against Israel? Why is there no outcry by the European left against Islamic fanaticism? Why don’t they defend Israel’s right to exist? Why confuse support of the Palestinian cause with the defense of Palestinian terrorism? An finally, the million dollar question:Why is the left in Europe and around the world obsessed with the two most solid democracies, the United States and Israel, and not with the worst dictatorships on the planet? The two most solid democracies, who have suffered the bloodiest attacks of terrorism, and the left doesn’t care.

And then, to the concept of freedom. In every pro Palestinian European forum I hear the left yelling with fervor: “We want freedom for the people!” Not true. They are never concerned with freedom for the people of Syria or Yemen or Iran or Sudan, or other such nations. And they are never preoccupied when Hammas destroys freedom for the Palestinians. They are only concerned with using the concept of Palestinian freedom as a weapon against Israeli freedom. The resulting consequence of these ideological pathologies is the manipulation of the press.

The international press does major damage when reporting on the question of the Israeli-Palestinian issue. On this topic they don’t inform, they propagandize. When reporting about Israel the majority of journalists forget the reporter code of ethics. And so, any Israeli act of self-defense becomes a massacre, and any confrontation, genocide. So many stupid things have been written about Israel, that there aren’t any accusations left to level against her. At the same time, this press never discusses Syrian and Iranian interference in propagating violence against Israel; the indoctrination of children and the corruption of the Palestinians. And when reporting about victims, every Palestinian casualty is reported as tragedy and every Israeli victim is camouflaged, hidden or reported about with disdain.

And let me add on the topic of the Spanish left. Many are the examples that illustrate the anti-Americanism and anti-Israeli sentiments that define the Spanish left. For example, one of the leftist parties in Spain has just expelled one of its members for creating a pro-Israel website. I quote from the expulsion document: “Our friends are the people of Iran, Libya and Venezuela, oppressed by imperialism, and not a Nazi state like Israel.”

In another example, the socialist mayor of Campozuelos changed Shoah Day, commemorating the victims of the Holocaust, with Palestinian Nabka Day, which mourns the establishment of the State of Israel, thus showing contempt for the six million European Jews murdered in the Holocaust. Or in my native city of Barcelona, the city council decided to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the creation of the State of Israel, by having a week of solidarity with the Palestinian people. Thus, they invited Leila Khaled, a noted terrorist from the 70’s and current leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a terrorist organization so described by the European Union, which promotes the use of bombs against Israel. And so on and so on.

This politically correct way of thinking has even polluted the speeches of president Zapatero. His foreign policy falls within the lunatic left, and on issues of the Middle East he is unequivocally pro Arab. I can assure you that in private, Zapatero places on Israel the blame for the conflict in the Middle East, and the policies of foreign minister Moratinos reflect this. The fact that Zapatero chose to wear a kafiah in the midst of the Lebanon conflict is no coincidence; it’s a symbol.

Spain has suffered the worst terrorist attack in Europe and it is in the crosshairs of every Islamic terrorist organization. As I wrote before, they kill us will cell phones hooked to satellites connected to the Middle Ages. An yet the Spanish left is the most anti Israeli in the world.

And then it says it is anti Israeli because of solidarity. This is the madness I want to denounce in this conference.

Conclusion:

I am not Jewish. Ideologically I am left and by profession a journalist. Why am I not as anti Israeli as my colleagues? Because as a non-Jew I have the historical responsibility to fight against Jewish hatred and currently against the hatred for their historic homeland, Israel. To fight against anti-Semitism is not the duty of the Jews, it is the duty of the non-Jews.

As a journalist it is my duty to search for the truth beyond prejudice, lies and manipulations. The truth about Israel is not told. As a person from the left who loves progress, I am obligated to defend liberty, culture, civic education for children, coexistence and the laws that the Tablets of the Covenant made into universal principles. Principles that Islamic fundamentalism systematically destroys. That is to say that as a non-Jew, journalist and lefty I have a triple moral duty with Israel, because if Israel is destroyed, liberty, modernity and culture will be destroyed too.

The struggle of Israel, even if the world doesn’t want to accept it, is the struggle of the world.

http://portalofideas.blogspot.com/2009/01/pilar-rahola.html
Title: WSJ: Do Palestinians really want 2 state solution?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 26, 2009, 10:00:47 PM
Good one.  I will look into that site:

=========================

By JOSEF JOFFE | From today's Wall Street Journal Europe
What if there is no solution? With the war in Gaza slipping into an uneasy truce, peacemakers will now descend on the Middle East. That includes George Mitchell, President Obama's special envoy to the region.

But is peace possible? The real message of Gaza may be a bloody and cruel testimony to intractability. How shall we count the ways? Annapolis, Wye, Taba, Camp David, Oslo . . . all the way back to 1947 when the Arabs refused the original two-state solution. Looking at this tale of doom, the proverbial visitor from Mars would ask in all innocence: "Could it be that the Palestinians actually don't want two states?"

No, not if we listen to what Palestinian leaders say and write, especially in Arabic and with no CNN team around. It's one state from the "river to the sea," and the blood-curdling oratory is not just anti-Israel, it is eliminationist anti-Semitic echoing Hitler and Himmler. This is not hyperbole. Just read the daily compilation in English on www.memri.org and recoil in horror. But let's be statesmanlike about this ("you know, the flowery language of the Arabs") and look at the strategic games both sides play. Double-statehood is not the first prize in this game, alas.


In 2005, Israel withdrew from Gaza. Our man from Mars would have thought: Now is the time for the Palestinians to really build a state, as they couldn't previously when Yasser Arafat was in charge and the Israeli army in place. Instead, the Palestinians elected Hamas, which thrust the three no's at Israel: no recognition, no negotiation, no acceptance (of the Oslo Accords).

The "conversation" was not about statehood but about will. It was Kassam time, with Hamas firing the missiles and Israel tightening the blockade. This is known, in the media vernacular, as a "spiral of violence." But if the missiles were the answer to the blockade, why did Hamas target the border passages and the power plant next door that supplied Gaza with electricity?

So much irrationality makes perfect sense if we posit a different strategic game. Hamas's object is provoking Israel to prove that it doesn't care about the consequences. Indeed, it wants bad things to happen to its own people. This will mobilize the "Arab street" and the world's media against Israel while demonstrating its absolute imperviousness to pain and threats of more. "Bring it on," is great for Hamas's credibility, pride and honor, but for the purpose of statehood, it would behave very differently. It would wheel and deal, cajole and dissimulate. It would play quid pro quo, not Kassams against F-16s.

Naturally, Israel couldn't allow Hamas to dictate the rules, and so it began to ready a massive counterstrike by last summer. Hamas miscalculated in 2008 as Hezbollah did in 2006. Each thought it could humiliate and cow Mr. Big without triggering retaliation. Recall Hezbollah chief Nasrallah, who admitted that he never would have authorized forays into Israel if he had foreseen the reaction. Hamas was unluckier still, for Israel was a lot more successful in Gaza than in southern Lebanon in 2006.

For Israel, the object was "never again." Never again would it allow deterrence to lapse, or its reputation for swift and efficient military force to suffer. With the country's credibility restored, you might ask: Isn't this precisely the moment for another Annapolis or Taba, where Arafat extracted even better terms than at Camp David in 2000? Alas, the Abba Ebban cliché about the Palestinians never missing an opportunity to miss an opportunity is true.

The reason is that double-statehood is not their No. 1 priority. They want it all, and if they can't get it, they would rather nurse their honor, pride and sense of righteous victimhood than engage in the sordid business of compromise. At any rate, the simple two-state solution is now off the table. Most Israelis (minus the settlers and their supporters) have come around to two states. But never again will Israel vacate territory (as in Gaza) without making sure that it won't turn into a strategic springboard against the heartland. Never again will Israel relinquish control over a border like the Philadelphi Corridor that served as entry point for Iranian missiles into Gaza. It will insist on a strategic presence in the Jordan Valley.

Nor can Israel yield military control over the West Bank. What a twist of fate. Today, it is the Israeli Defense Force that guarantees the survival of Fatah and President Mahmoud Abbas against Hamas, Jihad and their Iranian sponsors. Here is the bitter irony. Fatah might want to make peace, but doesn't have the power to deliver; Hamas has the power, but it doesn't want peace, dreaming about a "final solution" that wipes Israel off this part of the map.

This is why the Obama administration is looking at yet another disappointment. The upside is that today Palestine is less than ever the "core" of the Middle East conflict. The real issue is Iran and its reach for regional hegemony. The conventional wisdom has it that peace for Palestine would weaken Tehran's mischief potential, robbing it of a rallying point for the Arab masses. Actually, it is the other way round. Iran will use its power, through its proxies, to demolish whatever deal might be hashed out by Israel and the Palestinian Authority.

For Iran's game is not a two-state solution, let alone peace. Rather, its object is to intimidate America's Arab supporters and to eliminate Israel as America's strongest regional ally. So for the Obama administration, Israel/Palestine has become an intractable sideshow on a vastly enlarged stage that extends from Haifa to Herat.

American (and European) good offices should be designed to manage rather than to solve a conflict that still defies solution. The object of intercession ought to be a stable truce. Preventing another eruption means closing off all conduits for offensive weaponry. The U.S. and the European Union can offer Hamas a benign tit for tat: Stop the terror and gain wondrous economic benefits like copious investments and easier movement of goods and people -- provided the money doesn't again disappear in the pockets of the Palestinian leadership, as it did in Arafat's days.

It took Israel 40 years to push Fatah from terrorism to teeth-gnashing acceptance. The Levant will be a lot happier place if Hamas turns out to be a faster learner.

Mr. Joffe is publisher-editor of Die Zeit, and a fellow at the Institute for International Studies and the Hoover Institution, both at Stanford University.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: ccp on January 27, 2009, 06:38:42 AM
Crafty,
Did you see this "breaking news" on CNN yesterday?  I couldn't help but feel BO was insulting his own country.  HE speaks as though the problems in the Middle East are all the result of the past several years ie George Bush and not problems that have been cycling for thousands of years.  He spoke that Americans that we need to learn all Muslims are not terrosists (how dare him speak for us in that way).  As an American, as a Jew, as a citizen of the US who appreciates Ws efforts to protect us I felt angry and disgusted by his downing us and the previous president.  BO has already lost me.  He sounds like a naive fool to boot.  He thinks his (non)genius argument is going to solve everything.  My wife said he looks like he will be the deer who eventually gets caught in the headlights.

And I agree with your articles conclusion that Palestinians do not want a two state solution.  They have had 62 years to agree to this if they did and still - no peace.

****Obama tells Arabic network US is 'not your enemy'
         Buzz Up Send
Writer Paul Schemm, Associated Press Writer – 16 mins ago AP – In an image made from a video provided by Al-Arabiya, President Barack Obama is interviewed in Washington …
President Barack Obama on Tuesday chose an Arabic-language satellite TV network for his first formal television interview as president, delivering a message to the Muslim world that "Americans are not your enemy."

The interview underscored Obama's commitment to repair relations with the Muslim world that have suffered under the previous administration.

The president expressed an intention to engage the Middle East immediately and his new envoy to the region, former Sen. George J. Mitchell, was expected to arrived in Egypt on Tuesday for a visit that will also take him to Israel, the West Bank, Jordan, Turkey and Saudi Arabia.

"My job to the Muslim world is to communicate that the Americans are not your enemy," Obama told the Dubai-based Al-Arabiya news channel, which is privately owned by a Saudi businessman.

Obama said the U.S. had made mistakes in the past but "that the same respect and partnership that America had with the Muslim world as recently as 20 or 30 years ago, there's no reason why we can't restore that."

During his presidency, former President George W. Bush gave several interviews to Al-Arabiya but the wars he launched in Iraq and Afghanistan prompted a massive backlash against the U.S. in the Muslim world.

Al-Arabiya has scored interviews with top U.S. officials in the past, including Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

The channel is seen by some in Washington as more balanced in its coverage than its Qatar-funded rival Al-Jazeera, which the previous White House administration complained had an anti-American bias.

Obama called for a new partnership with the Muslim world "based on mutual respect and mutual interest." He talked about growing up in Indonesia, the Muslim world's most populous nation, and noted that he has Muslim relatives.

The new president said he felt it was important to "get engaged right away" in the Middle East and had directed Mitchell to talk to "all the major parties involved." His administration would craft an approach after that, he said in the interview.

"What I told him is start by listening, because all too often the United States starts by dictating," Obama told the interviewer.

The president reiterated the U.S. commitment to Israel as an ally and to its right to defend itself. But he suggested that both Israel and the Palestinians have hard choices to make.

"I do believe that the moment is ripe for both sides to realize that the path that they are on is one that is not going to result in prosperity and security for their people," he said, calling for a Palestinian state that is contiguous with internal freedom of movement and can trade with neighboring countries.

On Tuesday, Gaza's fragile truce was threatened when a bomb detonated by Palestinian militants exploded next to an Israeli army patrol along the border with Gaza, killing one soldier and wounding three.

Obama also said that recent statements and messages issued by the al-Qaida terror network suggest they do not know how to deal with his new approach.

"They seem nervous," he told the interviewer. "What that tells me is that their ideas are bankrupt."

In his latest message on Jan. 14, al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden said Obama had been left with a "heavy inheritance" of Bush's wars.

Shortly after the election, the network's number two, Ayman al-Zawahri used a demeaning racial term for a black American who does the bidding of whites to describe Obama.

The message suggested the terror network was worried Obama could undermine its rallying cry that the U.S. is an enemy oppressor.****

Title: Davos Divas Despair
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on January 29, 2009, 06:28:54 PM
Peter Foster: More Davos ‘globaloney’
Posted: January 29, 2009, 7:03 PM by NP Editor
Peter Foster, DavosNow that the WEF’s self-styled global governors are faced with a major crisis, they are clueless
By Peter Foster

The typically pretentious theme of this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos is “Shaping the Post-Crisis World.” But didn’t Davos shape the pre-crisis world, and thus the crisis itself? The annual Alpine gabfest has long been the epicentre of ‘globaloney,’ a mixture of serious discussion, subversive ideas and outright flakery. It has certainly never — as some critics believe — been about promoting capitalism. Rather it has always been a mercantilist stew in which big businessmen, big government and big international bureaucracy get together to suck both the collective thumb and the collective teat. Its ideological heart is the impossible UN dream of “global governance,” and of a corporate sector moving “beyond” mere profits to take on the heavy mantles of social responsibility, sustainable development, Global Compacts and Millennium Development Goals.

However, now that the WEF’s self-styled global governors are faced with the major crisis that they have long predicted, but probably never really expected, they are clueless. WEF founder Klaus Schwab, a Rolodex socialist in the mould of former UN poobah Maurice Strong, can, like a villain from Atlas Shrugged, only berate greed and call for “better” regulation and “improved” institutions and more pulling together. The global governors never really expected, or wanted, to actually govern, but rather to sit like limpet jockeys on the back of the corporate sector, making infinite demands in order to salve their own sanctimoniousness, and using the poor and the ”climate crisis” as their whips.

In fact, Davos Man has his fingerprints all over the present crisis. Subprime loans were the very model of corporate social responsibility, of putting communities and people before profits. Meanwhile a perfect Davos-type deal is taking shape to address the crisis: big government is bailing out big business — in particular, big banking — with trillions of taxpayers’ dollars. Davos-ees, present in either body or spirit, are shuffling around the funds of those not present, or represented. The archetypal Davos Man, guilty speculator George Soros, is rejoicing in the profit potential. All that’s required is for the major banks to hold onto the “good” assets and let the rest wind up in too-truly named “bad banks,” as stranded crap wholly owned by taxpayers. Mr. Soros admitted this week that he would be interested in investing in the “good” banks “since the margins are very high.”

Given this shameful model, and their own culpability, it is perhaps not surprising that not too many bankers have actually turned up at Davos this year. However, lots of big politicians are there to provide posturing and light relief. The biggest disappointment is that President Obama could not be present so that attendees might touch the hem of his garment. Still, the first day of the conference saw speeches from both Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and Chinese leader Wen Jiabao, who were given a prominent platform to bash the U.S. and capitalism (which should never, ever, be regarded as synonymous). Even the terminally leftish British Guardian remarked “How dismal that the Davos ideal of the post-crisis age is being championed by men so fond of armies, executions and the secret police.” Dismal? Or entirely appropriate?

Mr. Putin demonstrated that although Kremlin oligarch-style cronyism may be the Davos model, he hasn’t quite grasped the elements of global back scratching. He was asked by computer whiz Michael Dell how companies such as Dell might help Russia develop its IT sector and the economy more broadly. “We don’t need any help,” snapped the increasingly unpopular czar. “We are not invalids.”

Mr. Putin might also have taken umbrage at Sir Laurence Olivier’s son, Richard, a corporate trainer, putting on a seminar on “Leadership Lessons from Macbeth” rather than those of the Russian Prime Minister. According to Mr. Olivier, “The dark black magic of Macbeth has a particular resonance this year at Davos. It’s about how people who have bloody, murderous or greedy thoughts attract bloody, murderous or greedy spirits.”

Apparently Mr. Olivier was thinking of Lehman Brothers rather than those rumoured to have been offed by the Putin regime. Still, Mr. Olivier’s flakiness at least had some substance, unlike the cryptic meanderings of WEF leader Mr. Schwab.

Mr. Schwab wrote a piece for the International Herald Tribune on Wednesday to coincide with the opening of the conference. He has wittered on for decades about how “we” — that is, the people at Davos — are going to “govern globalization.” But it seems that dozens of conferences haven’t come up with much beyond boilerplate. Mr. Schwab declared without fear of cliché that the current crisis was a “wake-up call.” Everything apparently needs overhauling, especially thinking. We must move from “ego” capitalism to “eco” capitalism. “We will not be able to hide from our responsibility to work together to rebuild shattered economies and institutions.”

Who is this “we,” and who elected Klaus Schwab to organize it?

Far from presenting coherent solutions to the current crisis, Davos this week is a cacophony of contradictory policies coming, at one end, from those who are calling for “mixed economies” and “European” models, and at the other from those who are warning about the dangers of protectionism and lousy regulation, and pointing out that there are no alternatives to open markets and capitalism as a generator of wealth and welfare. (Thank you, Rupert Murdoch.)

Meanwhile, at the World Social Forum, the “alternative” Davos in Belem, Brazil, this week, there was reported to be “little outright gloating” at the state of the world economy. After all, what ultimately pays for radical NGO protests — or WEF posturing — but capitalism?

http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fpcomment/archive/2009/01/29/peter-foster-more-davos-globaloney.aspx
Title: A thoroughly depressing rant
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 30, 2009, 04:15:59 PM
The Suicide Of Marlboro Man

The Price Of Freedom Is Slavery. Sort Of. A Little Anyway

 








The other days I was reading G. Gordon Liddy's book of conservative nostalgia, When I Was a Kid, This Was a Free Country. He paints a sunset picture of former times when America was free, farmers could fill in swamps without violating wetland laws, and guns were just guns. People were independent and had character, and made their own economic decisions. The market ruled as it ought, and governmental intrusion was minimal.

The picture is accurate. I lived it. I wish it would come back, which it won't. It was a world certain to kill itself.

What happens is that, in an independent-minded rural county full of hardy yeomen, the density of population grows, either nearby or at distant points on each side. A highway comes through because the truckers lobby in Washington wants it. Building a highway is A Good Thing, because it represents Progress, and provides jobs for a year.

It also makes the country accessible to the big city fifty miles away. A real-estate developer buys 500 acres along the river from the self-reliant character-filled owner. He does this by offering sums of money that water the farmer's eyes.

First, 500 houses go up in a bedroom suburb called Brook Dale Manor. A year later, 500 more go up at Dale View Estates. This is A Good Thing, because the character-filled independent now-former farmer is exercising his property rights, and because building the suburb creates jobs. The river now looks ugly as the devil, but this is a wacko issue.

At Safeway corporate headquarters, way off God knows where, the new population shows up as a denser shade of green on a computer screen. A new Safeway goes in along the highway. This is A Good Thing, exemplifying free enterprise in action and creating jobs in construction. Further, Safeway sells cheaper, more varied and, truth be known, better food than the half-dozen mom-and-pop stores in the county, which go out of business.

Soon the mall men in the big city hear of the county. A billion-dollar company has no difficulty in buying out a character-filled, self-reliant farmer who makes less than forty thousand dollars a year. A shopping center arrives with a Wal-Mart. This is A Good Thing, etc. Wal-Mart sells almost everything cheaply.

It also puts most of the stores in the country seat out of business. With them go the restaurants, which no longer have the walk-by traffic previously generated by the stores. With the restaurants goes the sense of community that flourishes in a town with eateries and stores and a town square. But this is granola philosophy, appealing only to meddlesome lefties.

K-Mart arrives, along with, beside the highway, McDonald's, Arby's, Roy Rogers, and the other way stations on route to coronary occlusion. Strip development is A Good Thing because it represents the exercise of economic freedom. The county's commerce is now controlled by distant behemoths to whom the place is the equivalent of a pin on a map.

This is A Good Thing. The jobs in these outlets are secure and comfortable. The independent, character-filled frontiersmen are now low-level chain employees, no longer independent because they can be fired.

A third suburb, Brook Manor View Downs, appears. The displaced urbanites in these eyesores now outnumber the character-filled etcs. They are also smarter, have lawyers among their ranks, and co-operate. They quickly come to control the government of the county.

They want city sewerage, more roads, schools, and zoning. The latter isn't unreasonable. In a sparsely settled county, a few hogs penned out back and a crumbling Merc on blocks don't matter. In a quarter-acre yuppie ghetto, they do. Next come leash laws and dog licenses. The boisterous clouds of floppy-eared hounds turn illegal.

Prices go up, as do taxes. The profits of farming and commercial crabbing in the river do not go up. The farmers and fishermen are gradually forced to sell their land to developers, and to go into eight-to-fiving. Unfortunately you cannot simultaneously be character-filled and independent and be afraid of your boss. A hardy self-reliant farmer, when he becomes a security guard at the Gap, is a rented peon. The difference between an independent yeoman and a second-rate handyman is independence.

People make more money, and buy houses in Manor Dale Mews, but have less control over their time, and so no longer build their own barns, wire their houses, and change their own clutch-plates. Prosperity is A Good Thing. Its effect is that the children of the hardy yeoman become dependent on others to change their oil, fix their furnaces, and repair their boats.

The new urban majority are frightened by guns. They don't hunt, knowing that food comes from Safeway and its newly-arrived competitor, Giant. They do not like independent countrymen, whom they refer to as rednecks, grits, and hillbillies. Hunting makes no sense to them anyway, since the migratory flocks are vanishing with the wetlands.

Truth be told, it isn't safe to have people firing rifles and shotguns in what is increasingly an appendage of the city. The clout of the newcomers makes it harder for the independent whatevers to let their weapons even be seen in public. The dump is closed to rat-shooting.

The children of the hardy rustics do not do as well in school as the offspring of the commuting infestation, and are slowly marginalized. Crime goes up as social bonds break down. Before, everyone pretty much knew everyone and what his car looked like. Strangers stood out. Teenagers raised hell, but there were limits. Now the anonymity of numbers sets in and, anyway, there's no community any longer.

And so the rural character-filled county becomes another squishy suburb of pallid yups who can't put air in their own tires. The rugged rural individualists become cogs in somebody else's wheel. Their children grow up as libidinous mall monkeys drugging themselves to escape boredom. The county itself is a hideous expanse of garish low-end development . People's lives are run from afar.

What it comes to is that the self-reliant yeoman's inalienable right to dispose of his property as he sees fit (which I do not dispute) will generally lead to a developer's possession of it. The inalienable right to reproduce will result in crowding, which leads to dependency, intrusive government, and loss of local control.

I'd like to live again in Mr. Liddy's world. Unfortunately it is self-eliminating. Freedom is in the long run inconsistent with freedom, because it is inevitable exercised in ways that engender control. As a species, we just can't keep our pants up. But it was nice for a while.
http://www.fredoneverything.net/Liddy.shtml
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: ccp on January 31, 2009, 06:37:22 AM
Well there are many predictions of the present problems much of it caused by ever increasing populations and competition.
I remember a poster from the Gilder and later DMG board, Mark Gerber who around 2000 posted his model predicted it would be time to get out of the stock market in 2008.  He concluded this based on demographics of aging US population, increased entitlement demands, and perhaps increased international competition for finite world resources.

I wonder if he acted on his model.  His prediction was uncannily correct in retrospect.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 31, 2009, 09:47:28 AM
Good memory on your part!

I remember Mark from the Gilder and then the David Gordon days, but not this.
Title: Krauthammer
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 02, 2009, 04:25:03 AM
Fighting For And Freeing Muslims Is Nothing To Be Apologizing For
By CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER | Posted Friday, January 30, 2009 4:20 PM PT

Every new president flatters himself that he, kinder and gentler, is beginning the world anew. Yet, when Barack Obama in his inaugural address reached out to Muslims with "to the Muslim world, we seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect," his formulation was needlessly defensive and apologetic.

Is it "new" to acknowledge Muslim interests and show respect to the Muslim world? Obama doesn't just think so, he said so again to millions in his al-Arabiya interview, insisting on the need to "restore" the "same respect and partnership that America had with the Muslim world as recently as 20 or 30 years ago."

Astonishing. In these most recent 20 years — the alleged winter of our disrespect of the Islamic world — America did not just respect Muslims, it bled for them. It engaged in five military campaigns, every one of which involved — and resulted in — the liberation of a Muslim people: Bosnia, Kosovo, Kuwait, Afghanistan and Iraq.

The two Balkan interventions — as well as the failed 1992-93 Somali intervention to feed starving African Muslims (43 Americans were killed) — were humanitarian exercises of the highest order, there being no significant U.S. strategic interest at stake.

In these 20 years, this nation has done more for suffering and oppressed Muslims than any nation, Muslim or non-Muslim, anywhere on earth. Why are we apologizing?

And what of that happy U.S.-Muslim relationship that Obama imagines existed "as recently as 20 or 30 years ago" that he has now come to restore? Thirty years ago, 1979, saw the greatest U.S.-Muslim rupture in our 233-year history: Iran's radical Islamic revolution, the seizure of the U.S. embassy, the 14 months of America held hostage.

Which came just a few years after the Arab oil embargo that sent the United States into a long and punishing recession. Which, in turn, was preceded by the kidnapping and cold-blooded execution by Arab terrorists of the U.S. ambassador in Sudan and his charge d'affaires.

This is to say nothing of the Marine barracks massacre of 1983, and the innumerable attacks on U.S. embassies and installations around the world during what Obama now characterizes as the halcyon days of U.S.-Islamic relations.

Look. If Barack Obama wants to say, as he said to al-Arabiya, I have Muslim roots, Muslim family members, have lived in a Muslim country — implying a special affinity that uniquely positions him to establish good relations — that's fine.

But it is both false and deeply injurious to this country to draw a historical line dividing America under Obama from a benighted past when Islam was supposedly disrespected and demonized.

As in Obama's grand admonition: "We cannot paint with a broad brush a faith as a consequence of the violence that is done in that faith's name." Have "we" been doing that, smearing Islam due to a small minority?

George Bush went to the Islamic Center in Washington six days after 9/11, when the fires of Ground Zero were still smoldering, to declare "Islam is peace," to extend fellowship and friendship to Muslims, to insist that Americans treat them with respect and generosity of spirit.

And America listened. In these seven years since 9/11 — seven years during which thousands of Muslims rioted all over the world (resulting in the death of more than 100) to avenge a bunch of cartoons — there's not been a single anti-Muslim riot in the United States to avenge the greatest massacre in U.S. history.

On the contrary. In its aftermath, we elected our first Muslim member of Congress and our first president of Muslim parentage.

"My job," says Obama, "is to communicate to the American people that the Muslim world is filled with extraordinary people who simply want to live their lives and see their children live better lives."

That's his job?

Do Americans think otherwise? Does he think he is bravely breaking new ground? George Bush, Condoleezza Rice and countless other leaders offered myriad expressions of that same universalist sentiment.

Every president has the right to portray himself as ushering in a new era of this or that. Obama wants to pursue new ties with Muslim nations, drawing on his own identity and associations. Good.

But when his self-inflation as redeemer of U.S.-Muslim relations leads him to suggest that pre-Obama America was disrespectful or insensitive or uncaring of Muslims, he is engaging not just in fiction but in gratuitous disparagement of the country he is now privileged to lead.

© 2008 Washington Post Writers Group
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: ccp on February 02, 2009, 07:35:45 AM
Well I am glad Charles is saying it like it is despite being at George Will's dinner with BO the Great.
I was also highly offended by BO's interview with the Arab news program, as should all of those US men and women who died and fought in the noted engagements.

Naturally not one peep from the MSM.  I coudn't imagine any other President going abroad and insulting his own country like this and *getting away with it*.

Not even Jimmy Carter.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: ccp on February 02, 2009, 10:04:54 AM
Tell me this is not the exact frown Clinton used to express his "heartfelt" remorse and sorrow:

http://www.welt.de/english-news/article3133031/Tom-Daschle-apologizes-for-tax-issue.html
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 02, 2009, 11:14:25 AM
That's funny.

So is this:

"The more interviews Speaker Pelosi gives explaining how vital the STD industry is to restarting the U.S. economy, the more I find myself hearing 'syphilis' every time she says 'stimulus.' In late September, America was showing the first signs of 'primary stimulus' â?? a few billion lesions popping up on the rarely glimpsed naughty bits of the economy: the subprime mortgage racket, the leverage kings. Now, the condition has metastasized in a mere four months into the advanced stages of 'tertiary stimulus,' with trillions of hideous, ever more inflamed pustules sprouting in every nook and cranny as the central nervous system of the body politic crumbles into total insanity -- until it seems entirely normal for the second in line of presidential succession to be on TV gibbering away about how vital the federalization of condom distribution is to economic recovery. The rules in this new 'post-partisan' era are pretty simple: If the Democratic Party wants it, it's 'stimulus.' If the Republican Party opposes it, it's 'politics.'" --columnist Mark Steyn
Title: WSJ: The Normalization of Evil
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 03, 2009, 10:04:46 AM
By JUDEA PEARL
This week marks the seventh anniversary of the murder of our son, former Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. My wife Ruth and I wonder: Would Danny have believed that today's world emerged after his tragedy?

 
Reuters/Corbis
Jimmy Carter.
The answer does not come easily. Danny was an optimist, a true believer in the goodness of mankind. Yet he was also a realist, and would not let idealism bend the harshness of facts.

Neither he, nor the millions who were shocked by his murder, could have possibly predicted that seven years later his abductor, Omar Saeed Sheikh, according to several South Asian reports, would be planning terror acts from the safety of a Pakistani jail. Or that his murderer, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, now in Guantanamo, would proudly boast of his murder in a military tribunal in March 2007 to the cheers of sympathetic jihadi supporters. Or that this ideology of barbarism would be celebrated in European and American universities, fueling rally after rally for Hamas, Hezbollah and other heroes of "the resistance." Or that another kidnapped young man, Israeli Gilad Shalit, would spend his 950th day of captivity with no Red Cross visitation while world leaders seriously debate whether his kidnappers deserve international recognition.

No. Those around the world who mourned for Danny in 2002 genuinely hoped that Danny's murder would be a turning point in the history of man's inhumanity to man, and that the targeting of innocents to transmit political messages would quickly become, like slavery and human sacrifice, an embarrassing relic of a bygone era.

But somehow, barbarism, often cloaked in the language of "resistance," has gained acceptance in the most elite circles of our society. The words "war on terror" cannot be uttered today without fear of offense. Civilized society, so it seems, is so numbed by violence that it has lost its gift to be disgusted by evil.

I believe it all started with well-meaning analysts, who in their zeal to find creative solutions to terror decided that terror is not a real enemy, but a tactic. Thus the basic engine that propels acts of terrorism -- the ideological license to elevate one's grievances above the norms of civilized society -- was wished away in favor of seemingly more manageable "tactical" considerations.

This mentality of surrender then worked its way through politicians like the former mayor of London, Ken Livingstone. In July 2005 he told Sky News that suicide bombing is almost man's second nature. "In an unfair balance, that's what people use," explained Mr. Livingstone.

But the clearest endorsement of terror as a legitimate instrument of political bargaining came from former President Jimmy Carter. In his book "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid," Mr. Carter appeals to the sponsors of suicide bombing. "It is imperative that the general Arab community and all significant Palestinian groups make it clear that they will end the suicide bombings and other acts of terrorism when international laws and the ultimate goals of the Road-map for Peace are accepted by Israel." Acts of terror, according to Mr. Carter, are no longer taboo, but effective tools for terrorists to address perceived injustices.

Mr. Carter's logic has become the dominant paradigm in rationalizing terror. When asked what Israel should do to stop Hamas's rockets aimed at innocent civilians, the Syrian first lady, Asma Al-Assad, did not hesitate for a moment in her response: "They should end the occupation." In other words, terror must earn a dividend before it is stopped.

The media have played a major role in handing terrorism this victory of acceptability. Qatari-based Al Jazeera television, for example, is still providing Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi hours of free air time each week to spew his hateful interpretation of the Koran, authorize suicide bombing, and call for jihad against Jews and Americans.

Then came the August 2008 birthday of Samir Kuntar, the unrepentant killer who, in 1979, smashed the head of a four-year-old Israeli girl with his rifle after killing her father before her eyes. Al Jazeera elevated Kuntar to heroic heights with orchestras, fireworks and sword dances, presenting him to 50 million viewers as Arab society's role model. No mainstream Western media outlet dared to expose Al Jazeera efforts to warp its young viewers into the likes of Kuntar. Al Jazeera's management continues to receive royal treatment in all major press clubs.

Some American pundits and TV anchors didn't seem much different from Al Jazeera in their analysis of the recent war in Gaza. Bill Moyers was quick to lend Hamas legitimacy as a "resistance" movement, together with honorary membership in PBS's imaginary "cycle of violence." In his Jan. 9 TV show, Mr. Moyers explained to his viewers that "each [side] greases the cycle of violence, as one man's terrorism becomes another's resistance to oppression." He then stated -- without blushing -- that for readers of the Hebrew Bible "God-soaked violence became genetically coded." The "cycle of violence" platitude allows analysts to empower terror with the guise of reciprocity, and, amazingly, indict terror's victims for violence as immutable as DNA.

When we ask ourselves what it is about the American psyche that enables genocidal organizations like Hamas -- the charter of which would offend every neuron in our brains -- to become tolerated in public discourse, we should take a hard look at our universities and the way they are currently being manipulated by terrorist sympathizers.

At my own university, UCLA, a symposium last week on human rights turned into a Hamas recruitment rally by a clever academic gimmick. The director of the Center for Near East Studies carefully selected only Israel bashers for the panel, each of whom concluded that the Jewish state is the greatest criminal in human history.

The primary purpose of the event was evident the morning after, when unsuspecting, uninvolved students read an article in the campus newspaper titled, "Scholars say: Israel is in violation of human rights in Gaza," to which the good name of the University of California was attached. This is where Hamas scored its main triumph -- another inch of academic respectability, another inroad into Western minds.

Danny's picture is hanging just in front of me, his warm smile as reassuring as ever. But I find it hard to look him straight in the eyes and say: You did not die in vain.

Mr. Pearl, a professor of computer science at UCLA, is president of the Daniel Pearl Foundation, founded in memory of his son to promote cross-cultural understanding
Title: Sincere Apologies, Inc.
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on February 04, 2009, 05:21:14 AM
All the President’s Men, Too
In Washington, the same old same old.

By David Kahane

The paranoid thriller is a Hollywood staple, especially during Republican administrations. You know, the one where an innocent man who looks remarkably like Pinch Sulzberger is being hounded by sinister forces, all of whom look remarkably like Richard Nixon. Cars mysteriously blow up, friends vanish, telephones are tapped until our beleaguered hero finally realizes it’s all a sinister government plot that only the New York Times can expose. I’m thinking of such films as Three Days of the Condor, The Parallax View, Winter Kills, and, of course, All the President’s Men.

Those days are gone, especially now that we on the left have realized that the CIA has been on our side all along. For years, we assumed Langley was the heart of darkness, until along came Joe Wilson and his super-top-secret wife-cum-Vanity Fair model, Valerie Plame. Then the scales fell from our eyes: They hate Bush too! If and when Jason Bourne comes back, it will be as a heroic Agency black op, a liberal Jack Bauer who singlehandedly closes Gitmo while personally delivering Khalid Sheik Mohammed to some very special friends in a particularly dark corner of Egypt and then showing up in black tie to dine on wagyu steak at the White House. The film would end as Matt Damon leans over and whispers something in Obama’s ear; the president nods and they both share a good chuckle as the credits roll and a Kanye West rap song bursts from the soundtrack.

But today, in the bright, blinding sunshine of the reflected glory of the wondrous transparency of The One, we have, um, a different kind of problem: Try as he might, Obama just can’t seem to find an honest man or woman to serve either in his Caesar’s Wife cabinet or in his congressional delegation.

Call it All the President’s Men II: Tom Daschle! Timothy Geithner! Charles Rangel! If they were Republicans, imagine the hiding the Contessa Brewers of the world would be giving this trio of refugees from the IRS, how high the dudgeon, how spluttering the outrage over the free car and driver, the IMF monies, the undocumented nannies, the apartments in Harlem, and the unreported vacation-home rental income. Taxes? We don’t pay no stinkin’ taxes! Somewhere, the ghost of Leona Helmsley is smiling and stroking her pet Maltese, “Trouble.”

Luckily, there’s the tried-and-true Sandy Berger DefenseTM: It was an honest mistake! Good ol’ Sandypants, the pride of Millerton, N.Y., skating out of the National Archives with classified material and then, you know, destroying it. Why, no less an authority on felonious behavior than Billy Jeff Blythe III excused Berger by chalking it up to simple sloppiness. Yes, that’s just the quality we need in a national security adviser—sloppiness!

In the same way, the Tax Trio has basically said: oops! Daschle, in fact, has pronounced himself “disappointed” by his erroneous tax returns. “I am deeply embarrassed and disappointed by the errors that required me to amend my tax returns,” said Tom Thumb in a contrite, heartfelt note of apology to his former Senate BFFs. “I apologize for the errors and profoundly regret that you have had to devote time to them.” There—all better now? Good thing he’s not a lobbyist or, you know, married to one, or his nomination would really be in trouble.

And then there’s the ineffable Chris Dodd, for some unfathomable reason Connecticut’s longest-serving senator, who by dint of parentage and physiognomy was born to play the role of a Tammany Hall thug, shaking down local businessmen while professing his solicitude for widows and orphans. Instead, he’s the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee and, entirely coincidentally, the top recipient of “campaign contributions” from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which just so happened to go belly up on his watch. (Yes, this is the same Chris Dodd whose father—coincidentally a senator from Connecticut—was censured by his colleagues for the coincidental misuse of campaign funds.) Now comes the news that Chris is refinancing his hinky Countrywide mortgages, which just proves he was no Friend of Angelo after all. Apology accepted!

You see, this is the genius of progresso-world, the new alternative universe that began on January 20, in which you’ll be living for at least the next four years. We liberals have long believed that up is really down, black is really white, in is really out, men are really women, good is really evil, and vice versa. Not that we can prove it, mind you, but in our hearts we believe it, which is even better. Progresso-world allows us to live out our fantasies with—and here’s the best part—absolutely no adverse consequences, to us at least.

Didn’t pay your taxes? In wingnut-world, you pay fines and interest, you go to jail, and your wife and kids get sold into slavery. In progresso-world, you say: “I forgot!” and everything is hunky-dory. Why, you may become the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, get nominated for the Orwellianly named Department of Health and Human Services, or, if you play your cards right, even get to be secretary of the Treasury and command the IRS yourself!

Stole classified information and trashed it? In wingnut-world, you get arrested, put on trial, sent to Guantánamo, and executed. In progresso-world, you cop a plea, pay a fine, get probation, lose your law license, and get stripped of your security clearance for a couple of years, or until a new Democratic administration comes to power. Plus, of course, you apologize: “I deeply regret the actions that I took at the National Archives two years ago, and I accept the judgment of the court,” said Sloppy Sandy at his sentencing in 2005. Problem solved!

So maybe it’s a dumb idea for me to try to make a movie out of this one. Rangel, Geithner, Daschle, Dodd—all these President’s Men are good, honorable, decent Democrats, who only want to do what is right for our country. They’re self-sacrificing public servants, willing to forego the blandishments of private enterprise to selflessly serve the American people at this crucial time. Why, any day now, Chris Dodd will live up to his promise to release the paperwork on his two Countrywide mortgages and everything will be A-OK.

What the hell was I thinking?
 
— David Kahane has never had a mortgage from Countrywide, always paid his taxes, and never stole anything from the National Archives, which is why he is working as a hack screenwriter in Hollywood, instead of living it up in Washington. You can feel sorry for him at kahanenro@gmail.com.

— David Kahane is a nom de cyber for a writer in Hollywood. “David Kahane” is borrowed from a screenwriter character in The Player.
National Review Online - http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=OGU1NjJiYWM3ZDAyN2I1ODczZjFhYWExNDUyYzg5YTY=
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: ccp on February 04, 2009, 08:13:43 AM
The next time posters here get annoyed when I mention the system is rigged in favor of those with money and there does need to be better oversight and a leveler playing field you may want to read this.  The music/entertainment industry is all the same.
This is only the tip of the iceberg.  "Free markets" only rants for Hannity, Limbaugh et al is nice and ok up to an extant, but does not address this crap.  And most people know this and that is why there is an audience for the politicians who play to the "little guy" and because conservatives refuse to address this they will have a hard time growing their base.  Colin Powell is right!  Limbaugh helped me survive the slime of the Clinton years, but he is actually more idealistic than the left but in a different way.     

****AP  – Executive: SEC ignored warnings about Madoff
 Reuters – Accused swindler Bernard Madoff enters a car at the rear service entrance to his home at a luxury apartment … WASHINGTON – The man who waged a decade-long campaign to alert regulators to problems in the operations of fallen money manager Bernard Madoff told Congress Wednesday that he had feared for his physical safety.

Harry Markopolos also assailed the Securities and Exchange Commission in his first appearance before lawmakers. The SEC failed to act despite receiving credible allegations of fraud from Markopolos about Madoff's operations over a decade.

Because of the agency's inaction, "I became fearful for the safety of my family," Markopolos said.

He told a House subcommittee hearing that "the SEC is ... captive to the industry it regulates and is afraid" to bring big cases against prominent individuals. The agency "roars like a lion and bites like a flea," Markopolos said.

Madoff, a prominent Wall Street figure, was arrested in December after allegedly confessing to bilking investors of more than $50 billion in what the authorities say was a giant Ponzi scheme, possibly the largest ever. His repeated warnings to SEC staff that Madoff was running a massive pyramid scheme have cast Markopolos as an unheeded prophet in the scandal.

"The SEC was never capable of catching Mr. Madoff. He could have gone to $100 billion" without being discovered, Markopolos testified at the hearing. "It took me about five minutes to figure out he was a fraud."

Markopolos, a securities industry executive and fraud investigator, brought his allegations to the SEC about improprieties in Madoff's business starting in 2000. He fruitlessly pursued the quest through this decade with agency staff from Boston to New York to Washington, but the regulators never acted.

Now thousands of victims who lost money investing in Madoff's fund, which was separate from his securities brokerage business, have been identified. Among them are ordinary people and Hollywood celebrities — as well as big hedge funds, international banks and charities in the U.S., Europe and Asia. Life savings have evaporated, foundations have been wiped out and at least one investor apparently was pushed to commit suicide.

And the SEC has been sustaining volleys of criticism from lawmakers and investor advocates over its failure to discover Madoff's alleged fraud, which could be the biggest Ponzi scheme ever, despite the credible allegations brought to it over years.

Markopolos said he determined there was no way Madoff could have been making the consistent returns he claimed using the trading strategy he touted to prospective investors.

Madoff, who was at one point chairman of the Nasdaq Stock Market and sat on SEC advisory committees, was "one of the most powerful men on Wall Street and in a position to easily end our careers or worse," Markopolos said.

Calling the SEC "nonfunctional" and harmful to the reputation of the U.S. as a global financial leader, Markopolos recommended ways to revamp the agency, including replacing its senior staff and establishing a central office to receive complaints from whistleblowers.

Also due to testify before the House Financial Services subcommittee were five top SEC officials, including the agency's enforcement director Linda Thomsen, and the head of its inspections division Lori Richards.

In December, Christopher Cox, then the SEC chairman, pinned the blame on the agency's career staff for the failure over a decade to detect what Madoff was doing. He ordered the SEC's inspector general, H. David Kotz, to determine what went wrong. Kotz has expanded his inquiry to examine the operations of the divisions led by Thomsen, who has been the enforcement chief since mid-2005, and Richards, who has held that position since mid-1995.

Thomsen and Richards defended their actions at a Senate hearing last week over the SEC's failure to uncover Madoff's alleged fraud scheme. Members of the Senate Banking Committee were scarcely satisfied with explanations given by the two officials and by Stephen Luparello, the interim chief executive of the brokerage industry's self-policing organization.

That organization, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, was headed until December by Mary Schapiro, President Barack Obama's new SEC chief. Schapiro has said that because Madoff carried out the scheme through his investment business and FINRA was empowered to inspect only the brokerage operation, it wasn't possible for the organization to discover it.****

Title: Thank god we have smart people running things now!
Post by: G M on February 04, 2009, 08:28:08 AM
http://hotair.com/archives/2009/02/04/pelosi-500-million-jobs-lost-every-month/comment-page-1/#comments

Wow, the economy is worse than I thought!
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: DougMacG on February 04, 2009, 01:19:11 PM
"The next time posters here get annoyed when I mention the system is rigged in favor of those with money and there does need to be better oversight and a leveler playing field you may want to read this."

 - FWIW, I don't know any conservative who opposes having the federal government govern.  We pay for an SEC, anti-trust enforcement, an FCC, an FTC, an EPA, an ATF, an FBI, an IRS and the worthless agencies that 'watched over' the corrupt, government-sponsored, mortgage giants.  We deserved oversight, bought and paid for.  Instead we passed laws telling them to make MORE bad loans and to package, hide and disguise them. 

90% of the budget is transfer payments.  Opposing some of that does not mean  looking away from anti-competitive or fraudulent practices in the marketplace.

I would add that we lack a watchdog media for oversight in business (Enron? Music Industry?) and to expose failure in government programs.  Why didn't one investigative reporter at any mainstream outlet smell a rat with Madoff or Enron or Freddie Mac and sink their teeth in?  As long as we care more about Michael Phelps than our economic system, I guess we get what we deserve.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: SB_Mig on February 04, 2009, 02:39:46 PM
Quote
As long as we care more about Michael Phelps than our economic system, I guess we get what we deserve.

Bingo!
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: ccp on February 05, 2009, 09:18:35 AM
Doug,
I agree with you.
If only the government would oversee what they are supposed to.  But the media is less about news now than entertainment. The SEC reminds me of the copyright office. The system is broken.  Even those with integrity are not inclined to risk jobs, speak out, "get involved", or are hamstrung by lack of authority, lack systems in place to deal with the problems, etc.
We don't need bigger government just better and more transparent.  But this is all a dream.  BO certainly is not going to do anything when he brings in many of the same unethical characters as before.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 05, 2009, 11:19:58 AM
"The one good thing about taxes is that we don't get all the government we pay for."  Will Rogers
Title: Only Government Can Save Us from Government Failure
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on February 13, 2009, 05:40:53 AM
February 13, 2009, 0:00 a.m.

Into the Belly of the Beast
If you’re a socialist on the way down, you were never really a capitalist on the way up.

By Jonah Goldberg

OK, things aren’t going well. Good people are losing their jobs. Every day the deficit is looking more and more like the Great Pit of Carkoon, which, as we all remember, was that giant hole with a ravenous monster inside it that ate Boba Fett in Return of the Jedi. “In its belly,” quoth C-3PO, “you will find a new definition of pain and suffering as you are slowly digested over a thousand years.” In this case, pain and suffering will inevitably take the form of inflation of Zimbabwean proportions and proctologically intrusive taxes that will make every April 15th seem like a thousand years.

Our elected representatives in Washington sold the “American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009” as a stimulant for the economy, but it is, in fact, Viagra for the leviathan state. The legislation effectively repeals welfare reform, the single most successful domestic policy of the 1990s. I must have been in the bathroom during that debate.

It’s no wonder lovers of limited government and fetishists for free markets are moping like dogs whose food bowls have been moved. Alan Greenspan has repudiated capitalism. George Bush paid for Barack Obama’s expansion of government with the proceeds from a fire sale on his last remaining free-market principles. Not only are we nationalizing the banks, but the legislators overseeing the banking industry regulate about as well as I play the left-handed harpsichord. Christopher Dodd, chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, who got a sweetheart mortgage from Countrywide and carried water for Fannie Mae like Gunga Din, should be testifying before his own committee in an orange jumpsuit in exchange for early release. Instead, he’s spewing righteous indignation about the malfeasance of the people who used to buy him lunch.

Meanwhile, a bunch of banking CEOs appeared before the House Financial Services Committee this week. Don’t get me wrong: These executives should be holding cardboard signs on the side of the road these days (“Will Float Derivatives for Food”), but they at least know what they’re talking about. One congressman after another berated the CEOs for making bad loans and having shaky balance sheets. Fair enough. But they also berated them for not using bailout money to make more bad loans, which would keep their balance sheets shaking like Keith Richards at a detox spa.

Rep. Maxine Waters (D., Calif.), who last May vowed to nationalize the oil industry if it didn’t cut gas prices, spent her interrogation time sounding like the sort of person who waits in line at the DMV while having a conversation with her handbag, only to finally ask the clerk why he’s wasting her time. The Atlantic’s Megan McArdle writes that watching Waters interrogate the CEOs was “like watching your crazy aunt challenge your boyfriend to prove that fairies aren’t real.”

One of the great things about capitalism is that, unlike socialism or, say, Bobby Knight, it can deal with failure. In fact, capitalism needs failure. Joseph Schumpeter called this “creative destruction.” Your grandmother called it “making lemonade out of lemons.” The beauty of free markets is that firms learn from their mistakes or they lose money, shrink, and then go out of business. Governments, meanwhile, grow from their mistakes and learn to make money from them.

Under normal circumstances, the financial inferno would cause a lot of pain, but it would also burn away a lot of deadwood. The strongest firms would survive, and newer, healthier businesses would sprout from the ashes. Plummeting housing prices would make homes affordable for first-time buyers again, particularly those with good credit who live within their means.

Sure, we would still have a stimulus bill, with tax cuts and infrastructure spending and, yes, silly pork projects. And that would be fine. We would even have some kind of bailout of the banking industry, which became a mess in part because people like Christopher Dodd and Maxine Waters tried to play the banker in their own personal game of Monopoly.

But that’s not what we got. Instead, the old adage “Everyone’s a capitalist on the way up and a socialist on the way down” is kicking in. The thing is, if you’re a socialist on the way down, you were never really a capitalist on the way up. Capitalism requires putting your own capital at risk.

What we do have is a grand adhocracy where “government,” a.k.a. Barack Obama, Timothy Geithner, Nancy Pelosi, and a dozen others, will figure everything out as they go. Businesses will rise or fall based on their skill at kissing up to the government.

And as sure as shinola, when government fails again, we’ll be told that only government can save us.


— Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large of National Review Online and the author of Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning.

Title: False claims about Lincoln
Post by: ccp on February 13, 2009, 06:33:25 AM
BBG,

IF you saw BOs speech yesterday it was exceptionally presented.  His use of Abe Lincoln to try to justify big government was interesting for its paradox, contradictions and outright deception.  Like Alinskly said, convince your adversaries you are one of them and you will be able to change them (more or less).
The speech included tons of rhetoric that any conservative would have loved to hear regarding personal responsibility, "bootstraps", the American spirit and yet in the same speech he claims we need big government to "save the Union".  I don't recall hearing one iota of the class warfare his policies engender.
When Abe Lincoln was President there were no such things as entitlements.  I know of zero evidence Lincoln would have ever thought that was necessary.  It was also extrememly galling to here him use Lincoln's temporary suspension of habeus corpus during wartime as justification for going outside the bounds of the Constitution during his administration push for policies that are top heavy with a political agendas.
Yet this same stunt man will gladly and quickly admonish W for using boderline legal tactics against those who threaten and plan to kill Americans and our allies as a stain on our reputation.
Yet it is no problem when it is him using it for political gain.

This guy is worse than Clinton to me.  Not only is he vastly narcissistic but he is supremely arrogant.  I can't see Clinton seemed arrogant.  FWIW I didn't Reagan as either.

Title: Friedman: Open Door Bailout
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 13, 2009, 12:30:56 PM

Often I find Thomas (not George!) Friedman to have a rather exagerated sense of himself and possessed of an instinct for the specious, but this piece makes some very pertient points:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/11/opinion/11friedman.html?_r=1

The Open-Door Bailout
THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: February 10, 2009
Bangalore, India

Leave it to a brainy Indian to come up with the cheapest and surest way to stimulate our economy: immigration.

“All you need to do is grant visas to two million Indians, Chinese and Koreans,” said Shekhar Gupta, editor of The Indian Express newspaper. “We will buy up all the subprime homes. We will work 18 hours a day to pay for them. We will immediately improve your savings rate — no Indian bank today has more than 2 percent nonperforming loans because not paying your mortgage is considered shameful here. And we will start new companies to create our own jobs and jobs for more Americans.”

While his tongue was slightly in cheek, Gupta and many other Indian business people I spoke to this week were trying to make a point that sometimes non-Americans can make best: “Dear America, please remember how you got to be the wealthiest country in history. It wasn’t through protectionism, or state-owned banks or fearing free trade. No, the formula was very simple: build this really flexible, really open economy, tolerate creative destruction so dead capital is quickly redeployed to better ideas and companies, pour into it the most diverse, smart and energetic immigrants from every corner of the world and then stir and repeat, stir and repeat, stir and repeat, stir and repeat.”

While I think President Obama has been doing his best to keep the worst protectionist impulses in Congress out of his stimulus plan, the U.S. Senate unfortunately voted on Feb. 6 to restrict banks and other financial institutions that receive taxpayer bailout money from hiring high-skilled immigrants on temporary work permits known as H-1B visas.

Bad signal. In an age when attracting the first-round intellectual draft choices from around the world is the most important competitive advantage a knowledge economy can have, why would we add barriers against such brainpower — anywhere? That’s called “Old Europe.” That’s spelled: S-T-U-P-I-D.

“If you do this, it will be one of the best things for India and one of the worst for Americans, [because] Indians will be forced to innovate at home,” said Subhash B. Dhar, a member of the executive council that runs Infosys, the well-known Indian technology company that sends Indian workers to the U.S. to support a wide range of firms. “We protected our jobs for many years and look where it got us. Do you know that for an Indian company, it is still easier to do business with a company in the U.S. than it is to do business today with another Indian state?”

Each Indian state tries to protect its little economy with its own rules. America should not be trying to copy that. “Your attitude,” said Dhar, should be “ ‘whoever can make us competitive and dominant, let’s bring them in.’ ”

If there is one thing we know for absolute certain, it’s this: Protectionism did not cause the Great Depression, but it sure helped to make it “Great.” From 1929 to 1934, world trade plunged by more than 60 percent — and we were all worse off.

We live in a technological age where every study shows that the more knowledge you have as a worker and the more knowledge workers you have as an economy, the faster your incomes will rise. Therefore, the centerpiece of our stimulus, the core driving principle, should be to stimulate everything that makes us smarter and attracts more smart people to our shores. That is the best way to create good jobs.

According to research by Vivek Wadhwa, a senior research associate at the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School, more than half of Silicon Valley start-ups were founded by immigrants over the last decade. These immigrant-founded tech companies employed 450,000 workers and had sales of $52 billion in 2005, said Wadhwa in an essay published this week on BusinessWeek.com.

He also cited a recent study by William R. Kerr of Harvard Business School and William F. Lincoln of the University of Michigan that “found that in periods when H-1B visa numbers went down, so did patent applications filed by immigrants [in the U.S.]. And when H-1B visa numbers went up, patent applications followed suit.”

We don’t want to come out of this crisis with just inflation, a mountain of debt and more shovel-ready jobs. We want to — we have to — come out of it with a new Intel, Google, Microsoft and Apple. I would have loved to have seen the stimulus package include a government-funded venture capital bank to help finance all the start-ups that are clearly not starting up today — in the clean-energy space they’re dying like flies — because of a lack of liquidity from traditional lending sources.

Newsweek had an essay this week that began: “Could Silicon Valley become another Detroit?” Well, yes, it could. When the best brains in the world are on sale, you don’t shut them out. You open your doors wider. We need to attack this financial crisis with green cards not just greenbacks, and with start-ups not just bailouts. One Detroit is enough.

Title: VDH: Hardly the Best and the Brightest
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 16, 2009, 09:12:43 AM
http://www.victorhanson.com/articles/hanson021609.html
 
 
February 16, 2009
Hardly the Best and Brightest
by Victor Davis Hanson
Tribune Media Services

Most historians agree that earthquakes, droughts or barbarians did not unravel classical Athens or imperial Rome.

More likely the social contract between the elite and the more ordinary citizens finally began breaking apart — and with it the trust necessary for a society's collective investment and the payment of taxes. Then civilization itself begins to unwind.

Something like that has been occurring lately because of the actions on Wall Street and in Washington, D.C. The former "masters of the universe" who ran Wall Street took enormous risks to get multimillion-dollar bonuses, even as they piled up billions in debt for their soon-to-be-bankrupt companies.

Financial wizards like Robert Rubin at Citicorp, Richard Fuld at Lehman Brothers and Franklin Raines at Fannie Mae — all of whom made millions as they left behind imploding corporations — had degrees from America's top universities. They had sophisticated understanding of hedge funds, derivatives and sub-prime mortgages — everything, it seems, but moral responsibility for the investments of millions of their ordinary clients.

The result of such speculation by thousands of Wall Street gamblers was that millions of Americans who played by the rules, and put money each month away in their 401(k) plans and elsewhere, lost much of their retirement savings. Many likely will have to keep working well into their 60s or 70s, and delay passing on their jobs to a new generation awaiting employment.

Yet most disgraced Wall Street elites will retain their mega-bonuses and will not go to jail. Their legacy is having destroyed the financial confidence of a society that depends on putting capital safely away to be directed for investment by responsible overseers.

A sort of unraveling of the entire system of credit and debt may follow from the loss of confidence in Wall Street. Ads on radio now blare out to the rest of us how to renegotiate our mortgages, how to avoid paying the IRS and how to walk away from freely incurred credit-card debt. We hear not to trust in mutual funds or even banks — but instead, like medieval hoarders, to revert to the age-old safety of gold.

Apparently, the institutions run by our elites aren't trustworthy, so why should we put any faith in them?

Meanwhile, we are learning that the brightest and best-educated Americans at the highest levels of government simply refuse to pay their required taxes. Yet because the IRS audits a tiny percentage of taxpayers, voluntarily compliance with our tax code is the glue that holds together a sophisticated society and separates it from a failed state.

Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., is the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee that oversees our tax laws. But his lawyer recently admitted that Rangel didn't report some $75,000 in income.

Timothy Geithner is the new Treasury secretary and oversees the IRS. Yet Geithner improperly wrote off his son's summer camp fees as a dependent-care expense, and failed to pay thousands of dollars in Social Security and Medicare taxes.

Then there is former Sen. Tom Daschle, who was nominated to be secretary of Health and Human Services. It was revealed that he owed the IRS over $140,000 in taxes on unreported free limo services; as a result, he had to ask President Obama to withdraw his nomination.

Nancy Killefer, who just withdrew her name from consideration as "performance czar," did not pay required taxes for domestic help.

The husband of Labor secretary nominee, Hilda Solis, had over a dozen liens for back taxes on his property and just now paid up amid public outcry. (The issue is relevant, since the couple filed a joint income tax return.)

Daschle, Geithner, Killefer and Solis did not disclose their tax liabilities until they were nominated to high office and scrutinized by the press.

And they apparently did not pay their back taxes until their appointments were in jeopardy from public disclosures. That raises disturbing questions: Would we have known about such tax dodging had our best and brightest not wished career advancement in government? And would they have ever paid up if they had not been caught?

Take your pick — on the one side, we have free-market capitalists who took huge amounts of money as their companies eroded the savings of tens of millions; on the other, we have supposedly egalitarian liberals who skipped paying taxes.

The result is the same. Our best educated, wealthiest and most connected in matters of finance proved our dumbest — and our political leaders were less than ethical in meeting their moral responsibilities as citizens.

If ordinary Americans were to follow the examples of Wall Street and Washington elites, the nation would neither collect needed revenue nor invest its capital. All that is a recipe for national decline and fall.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: ccp on February 16, 2009, 10:00:27 AM
You know Crafty,
I think the Republicans could get popular again if they get new blood and if they get take "Reaganism" to the next level.

We need a national effort for the party to get new people who are committed not just in talk but in deed to stop the corruption in Washington.  Unfortunately we hear this every cycle - yet we need to find a way to break this.   

We need to get rid of the the financial interest in lobbyists  - they can be heard but not able to buy representatives.  One way this would work is to legislate that bills only tackle one issue at a time.  We can't pass bills that have hundreds of pages with benefits to local districts of the influenced.

We need to legislate the Federal dollars only really gets spent on Federal issues.  Why and where did become the norm for Federal government to be spending Federal tax dollars that goes out to state or local programs.  That is the root of the corrupt process in my opinion.  This is a real opportunity for Republicans to clean house.  Yet to do so they need to clean there own house.

Limbaugh IS wrong.  Reaganism is NOT enough.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 16, 2009, 10:20:55 AM
May I ask you to take this to

http://dogbrothers.com/phpBB2/index.php?topic=1748.0
Title: Holder Calls Kettle Cowardly
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on February 20, 2009, 12:44:46 PM
HEATHER MAC DONALD
Nation of Cowards?
So says Eric Holder, but what’s really cowardly is racial dishonesty.
19 February 2009

Attorney General Eric Holder, a Clinton administration retread, wants to revive Bill Clinton’s National Conversation on Race. (What’s next? Hillarycare?) Holder recently told his Justice Department employees that the United States was a “nation of cowards” for not talking more about race. “It is an issue we have never been at ease with and, given our nation’s history, this is in some ways understandable,” Holder said. “If we are to make progress in this area, we must feel comfortable enough with one another and tolerant enough of each other to have frank conversations about the racial matters that continue to divide us.”

Is he nuts? Leave aside for a moment Holder’s purely decorative call for a “frank” conversation about race. The Clinton-era Conversation also purported to be frank, and we know what that meant: a one-sided litany of white injustices. Please raise your hand if you haven’t heard the following bromides about “the racial matters that continue to divide us” more times than you can count: Police stop and arrest blacks at disproportionate rates because of racism; blacks are disproportionately in prison because of racism; blacks are failing in school because of racist inequities in school funding; the black poverty rate is the highest in the country because of racism; blacks were given mortgages that they couldn’t afford because of racism. I will stop there.

Not only do colleges, law schools, almost all of the nation’s elite public and private high schools, and the mainstream media, among others, have “conversations about . . . racial matters”; they never stop talking about them. Any student who graduates from a moderately selective college without hearing that its black students are victims of institutional racism—notwithstanding the fact that the vast majority of black students there will have been deliberately admitted with radically lower SAT scores than their white and Asian comrades—has been in a coma throughout his time there.

Education bureaucrats maintain an incessant harangue on white racism because they see the writing on the wall: most students are indifferent to race and just want to get along. If left to themselves, they would go about their business perfectly happily and color-blindly, and the race industry would wither on the vine. Thus the institutional imperative to remind black students constantly about their victimization and the white students about their guilt. Last month, the elite Phillips Academy at Andover proudly announced a student presentation on White Privilege: A History and Its Role in Education. Would the student have come up with such a topic on her own without the school’s educators deliberately immersing her in such trivial matters? Of course not.

But if Attorney General Holder is really sincere about wanting a “frank” conversation about race, he should put the following items on the agenda:

The American electorate. The country just elected its first black president. And it actually didn’t talk a lot about Barack Obama’s race during the election, thank heavens, because most Americans were more interested in the candidate’s ideas than in his skin color. There were undoubtedly hundreds of thousands of people who wouldn’t vote for Obama because of his race. I would guess that their average age was 75. There is no question that a great many geriatric Americans continue to harbor the rankest racism for blacks, but guess what? They’re not going to be around for much longer. Young people growing up in the last 30 years live on a different planet when it comes to racial attitudes—until the educrats start playing with their minds.

We might also talk about those legions of older, black Americans who have held on to their love of country and belief in its ideals, despite having been subjected to America at its worst. I have had the privilege to speak to many such individuals for my work, and they have broken my heart with their dignity and nobility. Rather than reflexively consulting professional race activists for insights into race in America, the media and politicians might for once seek some voices that contradict the mandatory “angry black male” trope.

Crime. Holder told his Justice Department employees that they had a special responsibility to advance racial understanding, according to the Associated Press. Uh-oh. Before and during Holder’s first stint at Justice, when he served as Clinton’s deputy attorney general, the department’s civil rights division specialized in slapping onerous federal consent decrees on police departments. Its assumption was that racial disparities in cops’ stop-and-arrest rates reflected police racism, not racial disparities in crime rates.

Before Holder and his attorneys revive that practice, they should study certain facts that remain taboo in the mainstream media. For instance, the homicide rate for black men between the ages of 18 and 24 is well over ten times that of whites. And disparities in other violent-crime rates are just as startling. In New York City, one of the nation’s safest large cities, 83 percent of all gun assailants were black during the first six months of 2008, according to victims and witnesses, though blacks make up only 24 percent of the city’s population. Add Hispanic perps, and you account for 98 percent of all shootings in New York City. The face of violent crime in cities is almost exclusively black or brown. That explains why someone might feel a sense of trepidation when approached by a group of black youths. That’s not racism; it’s the reality of crime. And it’s that reality that determines whom the police stop, frisk, and arrest.

Education. Commentators on NPR’s “black” show, News and Notes, recently groused about the lack of black policy experts on the Sunday talk shows but ignored the possibility that the education gap might have something to do with it. Blacks, they said, need to be twice as qualified as whites to get a job. Let’s look at the evidence. The black high school drop-out rate approaches 50 percent. On the 2006 SAT, the average score in the critical-reading section was 434 for blacks, 527 for whites, and 510 for Asians; in the math section, 429 for blacks, 536 for whites, and 587 for Asians; and in the writing section, 428 for blacks, 519 for whites, and 512 for Asians. America’s lousy showing in international math, science, and reading tests compared with Japan and Western Europe is influenced in large part by the low scores of blacks and Hispanics. If blacks and Hispanics performed at the level that whites do, the U.S. would lead all industrialized nations in reading and would lead Europe in math and science, according to a study published in the Phi Delta Kappan in 2005.

Likewise, after their first year of legal education, 51 percent of blacks labor in the bottom tenth of their class; two-thirds reside in the bottom fifth. Blacks are four times as likely as whites to fail the bar exam on the first try. Until such achievement disparities are eliminated, any allegations of racial discrimination in the absence of proportional numbers of black policy wonks—or law partners, chemists, engineers, or investment bankers—is absurd, especially when the nation’s elite institutions are doing everything they can to recruit black students, professors, and employees. Perhaps Holder could confront the stigma against academic achievement among many black youth, who deride studying and staying out of trouble as “acting white.”

The family. Closing the educational achievement gap will be difficult as long as the black illegitimacy rate is nearly 71 percent, compared with a white rate of 26 percent. Taxpayers foot the bill for this family breakdown—when fatherless children who never learned self-control and self-discipline disrupt classrooms and prevent other children from learning, and when the same fatherless children get sucked up into gang life and fail to connect with the world of work and responsibility. Many poor single mothers work heroically to raise law-abiding sons, but the odds are against them.

When communities resist an influx of Section 8 housing-voucher holders from the inner city, say, they are reacting overwhelmingly to behavior. Skin color is a proxy for that behavior. If inner-city blacks behaved like Asians—cramming as much knowledge into their kids as they can possibly fit into their skulls—the lingering wariness towards lower-income blacks that many Americans unquestionably harbor would disappear. Are there irredeemable racists among Americans? To be sure. They come in all colors, and we should deplore all of them. But the issue of race in the United States is more complex than polite company is usually allowed to express. If Eric Holder wants to crank up our racial preoccupations even further, let him at least do so with a full airing of the facts.

Heather Mac Donald is a contributing editor of City Journal and the John M. Olin Fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

http://www.city-journal.org/2009/eon0219hm.html?PHPSESSID=e20e3211f8c3ff75616537d0159ea8a3
Title: Re: Political Rants - Housing prices
Post by: DougMacG on February 20, 2009, 01:13:58 PM
What is the 'right' price level for housing?

It was propped up artificially by government policies.  The unrealistically high prices were unsustainable and led to the eventual and unavoidable collapse in home prices along with the end of residential construction, the layoffs of the workers, the rise of unemployment, the collapse of the securities markets, the fall of the banks and the economic depression world-wide - to put it lightly.

The Obama-Pelosi response:  We need to artificially re-prop up home prices.

Median price home in America is/was around 200k.  Should it be higher?  Should it be lower?  Which branch and departments of government should set housing price levels?  Maybe we could call Nixon's Price-Wage board back in...

Speaking of generational theft, who does this help?  I own homes but it doesn't help me either way.  My primary residence isn't for sale, so the eight-fold increase I've earned on paper just leads to eight-plus-fold increases in property taxes.  My rental properties can't be cashed out because of impending capital gains increases at the federal level and confiscatory taxes on the inflationary gains at the state level as well.  I can't even move out of state to avoid capturing that income in this state.

Do artificially high home prices help the young people who hope to branch off on their own and buy and live in at least as nice a place as they grew up in?  - NO!

Sorry I'm having so much trouble adapting to our new fascist-socialist system and they haven't even finished working on healthcare.  Soon you will have your heart stints specified by the people who picked our bridge gusset plates.  Good luck.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: ccp on February 20, 2009, 02:23:59 PM
"It was propped up artificially by government policies"

good point


"Sorry I'm having so much trouble adapting to our new fascist-socialist system"

So am I.  Every day I keep hearing about one new goernment take over program after another.  Today was the one about they are going to monitor every mile to tax us.  I suppose the GPS systems will be tied directly into our credit cards so they can bill us that way like an EZPass card.

We will not be able to do anything without consent, without taxation, without political correctness.

Yet the disgusting hypocrisy of it all is the Left's criticism of the Bush administration for monitoring of people while looking for terrorists.  Yet they are happy to monitor us and control what they do as so long as it is within their view of correct behavior and "social justice".


Title: Ike's second warning
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 22, 2009, 09:10:51 AM
Ike’s Not So Famous Second Warning
by Dwight Schultz

On Saturday January 17, 2009, during the Fox 4 0′clock news hour, Shepard Smith recalled the anniversary of President Eisenhower’s famous 1961 farewell address to the nation, but he only mentioned one of  Ike’s threat warnings, the one that reminded us to beware of the “Military Industrial Complex.” This warning came from a military man, so it’s been a turn of phrase that slobbers off the lips of suspicious lefty infants shortly after they’re forced to abandon the nipple and accept Marx.



So I shouted at Shepard, “What’s wrong with threat number two, you big beautiful blue eyed capitalist! What’s wrong with Fox News and your staff? There are only two warnings in that speech for God’s sake, if you’re going to honor a historical document maybe somebody could at least read it, and maybe for once in almost fifty years remind us of Ike’s second warning: “…that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.” Does anything come immediately to mind when you read that?  Ike goes on, “…Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity.” And, “The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present - and is gravely to be regarded.”

Do you think Ike was warning us that politicians like Al Gore and Barack Obama could cuddle with the scientific technological elite alike and, oh, I don’t know, maybe get behind Obama’s plan to tax your breath?  Do you think that perhaps some time in the near future you might not be considered a person but a carbon footprint … does something like that sound  ridiculous?

Have you seen how fast Obama has placed environmental academic hysterics and socialists in positions of real power? Steven Chu, John Holdren, Carol Browner and others are there to see to it that every exhaust in your life is a financial event favorable to the government.  So how is it that one of Ike’s warnings became famous and the other a historical ghost note?

It’s really not hard to grasp.  Our educational institutions monitor and control historical information and also educate and train the future guardians of public discourse — the indispensable journalists we read, see, and hear every day. By definition both the media and our nation’s scholars digest information and parcel it out in what should be an honest and thoughtful way. They digested Ike’s warning about the military and saw fit to warn us 10 billion times that the military is bad and needs to be feared and pushed off campus. They digested Ike’s warning about universities, scholars, federal money, science and policy, then gave it to Helen Thomas to scatter on some hot house tomatoes in the Nevada desert. It doesn’t get any simpler.

Think about this: How many times have you heard that the debate over anthropogenic global warming has ended?  When and where was this debate? The mere recitation of the words, “the debate has ended” closed the discussion without you having ever heard it because, get it! It’s ended! Get It! Neat trick! Gore says the debate has ended….McCain says the debate has ended…Obama says the debate has ended …Hanson says the debate has ended, and no one in the media wants to ask, “What debate?” When? Where?  Was there a scientific or political debate… or, God forbid, both, and who was for and who was against?

Gore’s film “An Inconvenient Truth,” has by now been proven to be almost a 100% big fat lie, and yet there is no media outcry against it or price for Gore to pay because he is supporting the scientific technological elite who want to hold public policy captive to the carbon tax that Socialists and Democrats have wanted since the 1992 Rio summit.

This is a clear example of years of liberal bias in protective favor of the university media structure. It just takes a lot of repetition and a strong ideological preference for saying: American military bad! American university good! CO2 bad! Tax our breath! Raise the tuition! Kick the Marines off campus! Long live man made global warming and the tax dollars we shall inherit from it. STING shall be our band and “Every Breath You Take” shall be our song … revenue streams for eternity.

Repeat after me this slogan … or, if you would rather stick this on the backside of your transportation vehicle , please do and remember, paying higher taxes is patriotic, so breathe baby, breathe for your country, just don’t breathe behind our back and not let us see you, ‘cause we’re talk’n money now, baby! The debate has ended!

…Hmmm?

Warning number two? What warning? Oh, you mean the military thing? We’ve taken care of that. Here’s Matt Damon’s number, he’ll tell you all about it. He went to Harvard you know. Remember, be upscale, don’t listen to Rush Limbaugh, breathe! And did I tell you to pay your taxes and act patriotic, especially when they’re going up?

Gotta run, I’m meeting Tom Daschle, Laurie David, Tyrano-Soros and secretary Geithner for lunch.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: ccp on February 25, 2009, 08:24:48 AM
Lincolnesque he certainly is not.  Clintonesque he certaily is.  No wonder when he has an army of the Clinton gang advising him.

When I heard this statement I had to turn him off last night:

"Not because I believe in bigger government - I don't."

What a bold faced lie.

Clinton tried to con us with the same story.  Most of any of his government cuts were military related.

Now BO, the most liberal guy out there with a history drenched in support of goernment programs, who recently signed on to the largest government spending bill in history, with loads of support for big government political programs has the nerve to stand up there and state this.

I know of no evidence wherein Abe ever made this kind of phoney statement to Americans.

And as predictable the Dem talking heads are and will continue to be out in droves,
"oh he said everything he had to"
"he was marvelous at going out of his way to alleviate our fears"
" he laid out his agenda parcel and post"
"he was reassuring to all Americans"

Despite a record of trashing American values and for the last month doing the opposite.

Do others see this is just me?

 
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: G M on February 25, 2009, 10:41:52 AM
Everyone but the kool-aid drinkers see it. This is why the market continues to spiral downward.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 25, 2009, 11:02:48 AM
If America and the American Creed are to survive, those of us who still "get it" must stand strong and make the case.  When others lose their heads, we must keep ours and make the case.    The gathering clusterfcuk will cure a lot of people of believing in the liberal fascist tooth fairy-- we must be able to show that we saw what was happening, called it, and stood by our principles-- and show them the way to apply them to our situations.

I hope this forum contributes to our cause.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: G M on February 25, 2009, 11:15:11 AM
"Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing...after they have exhausted all other possibilities."
  --  Winston Churchill
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Chad on February 25, 2009, 04:38:55 PM
Awesome reply to the BHO speech by a supporter: http://www.ireport.com/docs/DOC-219930

Worth watching in it's entirety, pretty good rant- I could go with about 75% of it. esp. nuclear power.
Title: Re: Political Rants - America copying western Europe
Post by: DougMacG on March 05, 2009, 10:57:12 AM
I posted recently in "Islam in Europe" that Sweden will host the Davis Cup tennis this weekend versus Israel in Sweden's third largest city Malmo and allow no spectators due to Sweden's inability to provide security.  Imagine if you will the Super Bowl, World Series or the Masters golf at Augusta played without spectators.  What a sad state of affairs that would be.

Curious, I looked a bit into the history and demographics of Malmo which is on the southern tip of Sweden, just a bridge away from Copenhagen, Denmark - home of the Islamic prophet cartoon controversy.  From Wikipedia:

-
"By 1985, Malmö had lost 35,000 inhabitants and was down to 229,000. However, the toughest difficulties were yet to emerge. Between 1990-95, Malmö lost about 27,000 jobs, and its economy was seriously strained.

However, thanks to several government-funded projects, Malmö started to emerge as its current modern incarnation by 1995. Malmö has the highest proportion of individuals of non-Scandinavian extraction of any Swedish city. It remains a city of sharp social divide and high unemployment."
-

Reviewing this Swedish 'border' experience, they built an economy on government funded projects (stimulus bill), they offer free health care to anyone, whether you work or not, whether you paid in or not, whether you are a citizen or not, and now they have a massive population of non-Swedish speaking, non-Scandinavian people with high unemployment, high crime and total lack of security - so bad that they are unable to host a tennis match.

And we want to copy them.

As we Americans head full-force toward becoming a United socialist State in the western European tradition of powerful central government with free-everything guaranteed it is interesting to note that Sweden, Canada and France have since elected right-leaning governments that are unable to put the socialist-welfare toothpaste back in the tube.   - Doug

Title: VDH: The Triumph of Banality
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 05, 2009, 01:48:08 PM
http://www.victorhanson.com/articles/hanson030409.html
 
 
March 4, 2009
The Triumph of Banality
Obama didn't invent dishonesty in political discourse — but he has a talent for it.
by Victor Davis Hanson
National Review Online

One of the most tired rhetorical tropes in Washington starts with, “We must . . . ” In the age of Obama, this is now usually followed by “Get the cost of our health care under control,” or “Invest in the education of our youth,” or “Spend wisely.” Such promises usually devolve into pleas for more money. They rarely explore how we ended up in the first place with such severe crises in health care and education — and with trillions in borrowing to spend trillions more that we do not have.

The cost of health care is spiraling out of control, and not just because the proverbial evil “they” (fill in the blank: pharmaceutical companies, insurance companies, medical corporations, trial lawyers, etc.) charge too much. Such profit-mongering entities may well gouge us, owing to a lack of competition, fear of lawsuits, or government mandates and interference. Yet the larger culprit is, of course, we the people. The cost of our health care is soaring because, to be frank, that health care is usually very good, and it does things routinely that almost no one else in the world contemplates — such as providing 83-year-olds with heart-valve replacements, 78-year-olds with hip and knee replacements, and those who drink, smoke, and are chronically obese with drugs and weekly doctor visits.

When I grew up in rural California in the 1960s, an obese uncle in his early 70s had “heart trouble.” That translated into some nitroglycerin tablets, and otherwise about the same regimen offered President Eisenhower after his in-office heart attack: Try to quit smoking, eat less, more bed rest — and good luck!

Forty years later, that same patient would have a bypass, and an expensive battery of medications and weekly follow-up doctor visits — and would make it not to 73 years old (as my uncle was when he died), but to 78 or 80, or even 90.

If we wish to get health-care costs under control, then we should at least be honest with the American people and admit that we are all paying a collective fortune largely for three reasons: (1) to keep functioning into their 60s those who drank, smoked, and ate too much and in a past era would have passed on at 60; (2) to give us all an extra three to five years of mobility and functionality after we reach 75; (3) to fit us up with IVs, feeding tubes, and respirators so that in our last six months of life we can die in a rest home or among machines and specialists in a hospital rather than in our own home with a few morphine tablets for pain and a bowl of soup with a straw on the nightstand.

My dentist warned me in 1962 to brush three times a day, since he could predict a depressing train of events to come for most of the more fortunate rural patients who could pay for his care: surely fillings in your 20s and 30s, hopefully caps in your 40s, maybe root canals and crowns in your 50s, and, unfortunately, false teeth after that. And now? We confidently expect all sorts of restorative dentistry and tooth implants to such a degree that the old common sight of a normal American middle-class fellow with a couple of missing teeth or even a shiny, crass glistening gold incisor is now the exception.

Again, health care is expensive because Americans, with some good reason, have decided that the ancient tragic view — we all age and break down, and pay for the sins of our 20s and 30s in our 50s and 60s — can at last be replaced by the therapeutic promise of vigor and health into our 80s.

What could be done? President Obama could try some honesty. Thus he might say, “We are spending hundreds of billions to keep us healthy, vital, and alive in ways unimaginable a few years ago. To keep our part of the bargain, we must then encourage the aging to remain active and working — and delay retirement. If we are living to 80 rather than 65, then surely we can start receiving Social Security benefits at 67 rather than at 62. What we save in postponed payouts can go to the greater cost of keeping us alive to 80.”

President Obama also promises historic new rates of high-school and college graduation. Again, he seems to think the present problem is the absence of money — as if brilliant, gifted, and motivated young people are ending up at McDonald’s rather than doing quantum physics because the bogeymen “they” raised the bar and didn’t give them enough college scholarship support.

More banality. The truth is quite different. First, too many of contemporary minority youth — the growing Hispanic and African-American underclass that may well soon make up 40 percent of our nation’s student body — for a variety of reasons beyond the government’s control (e.g., from inordinate patterns of illegitimacy; greater absence of two-parent families; above-average parental drug use, incarceration rates, and felony convictions; and a pervasive ethic of machismo that disdains “acting white” with your nose in a book), simply are not as competitive as other students in grade and high schools. In reaction, the good-hearted state, at the 11th hour of college entry, seeks to ensure an equality of result through affirmative action, set-asides, de facto quotas, and government subsidies. When poorly prepped minority students subsequently do not graduate from college at rates commensurate with other groups, the Left cries “racism” — and we are again back to asking for more money rather than a radical change of heart.

President Obama apparently cannot say, “Americans — each time you have a child out of wedlock, each time you take an illicit drug, each time you break the law or go to jail, each time you romanticize brutality rather than honor scholarship, each time you allege the racism of the others rather than look into your own soul, you do your own small part in ensuring that we might not educate your child as we should — no matter how many thousands of dollars we lavish upon him.”

Second, for all American youth, too much government money, not too little, is pouring into education. From some 20 years’ experience in higher public education in California, I have come to know a familiar student profile:

Age: 18–30
Units enrolled: 6–9
Residence: Still at home
Job: 20 hours a week at minimum wage to pay for car, insurance, video games, entertainment incidentals (but not rent, food, laundry, etc.)
Major: Either undeclared or changing
Goal: Return to school every other semester, work part-time, party, and put off becoming autonomous

Such students, in today’s grade-inflated university, are able to get Cs and Bs for F and D work, to cobble together state and federal loans, student work assistance, and grants — and to delay growing up while they sleepwalk through a largely therapeutic curriculum. Eric Holder may call us cowards for not discussing race more openly, but if he were to examine the current class offerings at a California public university, or read the syllabi of the courses, he would quickly discover that race, class, and gender are the common themes — an approach designed to encourage grievance and separatism, which consumes precious student hours at the expense of real learning in the liberal arts and hard sciences.

If President Obama is serious about education, then he might also remonstrate with universities to bare their books, keep their costs below the rate of inflation, mandate a cutoff of student support after four years, insist that the BA or BS degree be contingent on some sort of final exit examination, re-examine tenure — and invest in vocational and trade schools rather than continue subsidizing community-studies, sociology, education, and physical-education degrees. One brilliant plumber, gifted carpenter, or adept auto mechanic does more for the American economy (and our collective values) than a dozen 20-something sociology majors in progress.

All government officials talk of spending wisely, but they never tell us the true extent of their financial malfeasance. Imagine if last week, in his address to Congress, President Obama had said something like the following: “We must cut spending, since the borrowed money must come from somewhere. Either we print more paper dollars, and eventually ruin the value of our currency in the manner now common in Zimbabwe or Argentina; or we continue to borrow from the Chinese, Japanese, and Europeans, and therefore mortgage both our honor and our autonomy; or, in the manner of War Bonds during the Second World War, we will have to ask you all to forgo stocks, 401(k)s, and real-estate investments, and instead each month, as part of your patriotic duty, buy U.S. government savings bonds that garner almost no interest, to subsidize our nation’s lavish borrowing and spending.”

Only that way could we have an honest national debate on whether the proposed high-speed rail between Vegas and LA is worth making Americans soon pay $10 for a Big Mac; or whether federally subsidized community organizing justifies more begging for help from the Communist government in Beijing; or whether we would all like to accept 0.05 interest on our government bonds to finance the mortgage bailout of those in arrears on their home debt.

In short, for each word devoted to spending, we need one word of honest exegesis about “paying for it.”

For the last 20 years, all our presidents have talked much about health care, education, and spending, while saying little. Either they were not honest enough to tell us the truth — or they were convinced that, like children, we simply couldn’t handle it if they did.

©2009 Victor Davis Hanson
Title: Bush and BO as CIC
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 05, 2009, 02:40:31 PM
Second post of the afternoon:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIHz5tevLAw&eurl=http://dogbrothers.com/phpBB2/index.php?topic=1718.200

 http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2007/09/20070903-1.html
Title: Re: Political Rants - It Ain't Your Money to Spend
Post by: DougMacG on March 07, 2009, 07:53:30 PM
This belongs in music but it is political so I will enter it as a rant - a beautiful, beautiful rant.  The Obama-resistance movement now has a tune...

Hey Washington, It Ain't Your Money to Spend

http://www.4shared.com/get/90054955/bfbba3c/It_Aint_Your_Money_to_Spend.html

If the link doesn't work try the artist's website: http://kathleensings.com/

  Hey Washington ...

   IT AIN'T YOUR MONEY TO SPEND! ©

2009, Words by Steve Jones, Music by Kathleen Stewart

Don't spend my grandson's paycheck.
He's only two years old.
With Obama in the White House,
His future's bought and sold.
Stop this immoral spending spree.
Stop assaulting our liberty.
Let me help you comprehend:
It ain't your money to spend.

Born and bred for freedom.
Got me a lot of rights.
They're all but disappearing
Before your fiscal appetites.
You're taking the fruit of my labor
To give your next-door neighbor.
I'll say it from beginning to end:
It ain't your money to spend.

It ain't your money to spend.
You're acting like a bunch of jerks.
I'm the one who earned it.
I'm the one who works.
Your income redistribution
Doesn't jibe with the Constitution.
So I got a little message to send:
It ain't your money to spend.

You started a spending orgy and then,
You made me long for Georgie again.

You gave some cash to ACORN.
Those folks are so corrupt.
All the pork and all payoffs,
It makes me want to erupt.
Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi,
The scariest folks since Bela Lugosi.
Let me help you comprehend.
It ain't your money to spend.

It ain't your money to spend.
You're acting like a bunch of jerks.
I'm the one who earned it.
I'm the one who works.
Your income redistribution
Doesn't jibe with the Constitution.
So I got a little message to send:
It ain't your money to spend.
Title: WSJ: Whither the dither?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 08, 2009, 10:14:15 PM
By JAMES TARANTO
We never thought we'd say this, but former Enron adviser Paul Krugman has a pretty good column in today's New York Times. It's a tough criticism of the Obama administration but, unlike Krugman's hundreds of anti-Bush columns, it is not a rant. Krugman is concerned that President Obama is not treating the crisis in America's financial institutions with sufficient urgency:

Among people I talk to there's a growing sense of frustration, even panic, over Mr. Obama's failure to match his words with deeds. The reality is that when it comes to dealing with the banks, the Obama administration is dithering. Policy is stuck in a holding pattern. . . .
Why do officials keep offering plans that nobody else finds credible? Because somehow, top officials in the Obama administration and at the Federal Reserve have convinced themselves that troubled assets, often referred to these days as "toxic waste," are really worth much more than anyone is actually willing to pay for them--and that if these assets were properly priced, all our troubles would go away.
Krugman argues, somewhat counterintuitively, that the administration is inhibited by free-market ideology:

Officials still aren't willing to face the facts. They don't want to face up to the dire state of major financial institutions because it's very hard to rescue an essentially insolvent bank without, at least temporarily, taking it over. And temporary nationalization is still, apparently, considered unthinkable.
Krugman has a Nobel Prize in Economics, so we will leave it to others of comparable expertise to evaluate his diagnosis of and prescription for the problem. Politically, however, it strikes us that he is missing the bigger picture.

Podcast
James Taranto discusses Obama's skewed priorities.
Obama is a popular new president with a mandate for "change" and big partisan majorities in both houses of Congress. The public, quite understandably, is terribly nervous about the economy. If Obama had a clear plan for dealing with the current crisis--whether Krugman's or something along different lines--surely he would have little problem generating political support for it.

The problem is that the president's priorities lie elsewhere. Charles Krauthammer makes the point in his column today:

With our financial house on fire, Obama makes clear both in his speech and his budget that the essence of his presidency will be the transformation of health care, education and energy. Four months after winning the election, six weeks after his swearing-in, Obama has yet to unveil a plan to deal with the banking crisis.
What's going on? "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste," said chief of staff Rahm Emanuel. "This crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not do before."
And as Reuters reports from Brussels, Emanuel isn't the only one saying it:

[Secretary of State Hillary] Clinton told young Europeans at the European Parliament that global economic turmoil provided a fresh opening. "Never waste a good crisis . . . Don't waste it when it can have a very positive impact on climate change and energy security," she said.
Blogress Ann Althouse, an Obama supporter, remarks: "What if George Bush or Dick Cheney had said something like that openly? It's the kind of line that people used to imagine Bush people saying in secret."

Obama is brazenly doing what the left accused Bush of: cynically using the first major crisis of his presidency as an excuse to pursue his own ideological agenda. But as evidenced by the lack of major terror attacks on U.S. territory since 2001, Bush at least did what was necessary to answer the immediate crisis. Even Paul Krugman acknowledges Obama has fallen short on that score.
Title: De Toquevelle and Ledeen
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 09, 2009, 08:45:23 AM
second post of the day

"That [tyrannical government] power is absolute, minute, regular, provident and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?" --French historian Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859)

 
Are we the lobsters?
LIBERTY
"Most of us imagine the transformation of a free society to a tyrannical state in Hollywood terms, as a melodramatic act of violence like a military coup or an armed insurrection. [Alexis de] Tocqueville knows better. He foresees a slow death of freedom. The power of the centralized government will gradually expand, meddling in every area of our lives until, like a lobster in a slowly heated pot, we are cooked without ever realizing what has happened. The ultimate horror of Tocqueville's vision is that we will welcome it, and even convince ourselves that we control it. There is no single dramatic event in Tocqueville's scenario, no storming of the Bastille, no assault on the Winter Palace, no March on Rome, no Kristallnacht. We are to be immobilized, Gulliver-like, by myriad rules and regulations, annoying little restrictions that become more and more binding until they eventually paralyze us. ... Permitting the central government to assume our proper responsibilities is not merely a transfer of power from us to them; it does grave damage to our spirit. It subverts our national character. In Tocqueville's elegant construction, it 'renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent; it circumscribes the will within a narrower range and gradually robs a man of all the uses of himself.' Once we go over the edge toward the pursuit of material wealth, our energies uncoil, and we become meek, quiescent and flaccid in the defense of freedom." --author Michael Ledeen
Title: Glenn Beck
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 19, 2009, 12:01:23 AM
The few times I've caught Glenn Beck he has seemed to me a mental mediocrity, but this is one great rant.  Maybe I need to give him another look:

http://www.youdecidepolitics.com/2009/03/17/video-glenn-beck-breaks-down-aig-bonus-scandal/
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: ccp on March 20, 2009, 07:21:58 AM
American culture or whatever you want to call it is not something to be proud of anymore IMHO.
When the mainstream media is constantly calling BOs showing up on Jany Leno as a "historical event"  :roll: all I can think is we have sunk to ever new lows:

"Obama tells Leno he was stunned by AIG bonuses"  :roll:
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: G M on March 22, 2009, 05:59:25 PM
- Works and Days - http://pajamasmedia.com/victordavishanson -

Thoughts About Depressed Americans
Posted By Victor Davis Hanson On March 20, 2009 @ 11:43 pm In Uncategorized | 156 Comments

 Why are so many Americans so depressed about things these days? It is perhaps not just the economy.

 I think the answer is clear: all the accustomed referents, the sources of security, of knowledge and reassurance appear to be vanishing. Materially, we still enjoy a sumptuous lifestyle in comparison with past generations—and the world outside our borders. America remains the most sane and successful society on the planet.

But there is a strange foreboding, a deer-in-the-headlights look to us that we may be clueless Greeks in the age of Demosthenes, played-out Romans around AD 450, or give-up French in late 1939—with a sense it cannot go on. Why? Let us count the ways.

1)   About Broke. The collective debt is simply staggering, $1.7 trillion in borrowing this year alone. $3.5 trillion is our annual budget, and by 2012 what we all owe will be well over $15-17 trillion. (No fears: the President promises to triple the Bush deficit, but by the end of his “first” term “halve” the deficit, as if tripling and then halving it is not increasing it.)

Today while President Obama railed against AIG bonuses (imagine damning the bonuses you signed into law to the execs from whom you took over $100,000 in campaign donations!)—the congressional budget office “found” another trillion or so dollars in anticipated deficits that Team Obama lost.

So after Obama, the next President will campaign on “I promise a $1 trillion annual surplus for eight years to pay off the last eight, so we can then start over paying off the old $11 trillion shortfall.”

The rub is not just that we are inflating—no, ruining—our currency. And the problem is still more than the fact that we are destroying the lives of the next generation, whose collective budgets will be consumed largely with health care for us baby-boomers, and interest payments on our debts. (If I get to be 87, can we keep asking 500 or so Chinese to put off false teeth to lend me their money for a hip replacement?)

I think instead the worst element is a sort of ill-feeling about ourselves, an unhappiness as we look in the mirror and see what we are doing to our dignity in this, the hour of our crisis.

We are starting to fathom that when times got iffy, we lacked the resilience of the proverbial Joads and the grit of that tough Depression-era generation, and certainly we seem different sorts from those who built and flew B-17s amid the Luftwaffe.

Instead, this generation has gone quite stark raving mad the last seven months, hysterical, and decided we would simply borrow, charge it, print money, blame, accuse—almost anything other than roll up our sleeves, take a cut in our standard of living, pay off what we owe, admit  that we lived too high on the hog, and find a certain nobility in shared sacrifice.

So again, here we are reduced to begging the Chinese to subsidize our life-styles, while 500 million of their own poor make their American counterparts of the lower classes here seem like well-heeled grandees.

2) Fides? We have almost destroyed the concept of trust: we don’t think there is any accuracy in AIG statements; don’t really believe GM will make it on its own,  or that Goldman-Sachs is honestly run.

All our icons—Ford, General Electric, Citibank, Bank of America—in a mere generation imploded by their own hands, and now we don’t have any real idea of what went wrong, and believe their captains don’t either.

When Barack Obama says the economy will soon grow at a 4.6 annual rate, I simply don’t believe him. I don’t believe Sec. Geithner’s reconstruction of when he knew about the AIG bonuses, or that he simply forgot to pay his payroll taxes.

If  Chris Dodd were to say that gravity exists, I could be sure we would float into the stratosphere. If Barack Obama said he was against renditions, I’d assume he had merely renamed them “transfers.” I do know that as we run up more trillions in debt the next four years, Obama will be in perpetual campaign mode with the same tired mantra “The Bush deficit mess I inherited” to screaming and adoring crowds.

3.) A Certain Coarseness. We also are wearied by a certain crassness in American society in ways we have not seen before—or at least since the mid-19th century. Sorry, I don’t want my President joshing about the Special Olympics on Leno. I don’t want him on Leno at all in his perpetual PR mode. I don’t want him drawing  out his picks for the final four on TV. I don’t want him paid for rewriting/revising/ condensing/whatever his earlier book while he’s supposed to be President, or ribbing Gordon Brown about his tennis game in patronizing fashion, or giving the British a pack of un-viewable DVDs after they, in exchange, offered a tasteful gift of historic importance.

I was always an advocate of informality, of casualness, but now when on a plane, in a restaurant, at Starbucks, I am struck by the rare well-dressed person who does not crowd. How odd the extra-polite woman, who conducts herself with charm and grace at the counter, or the gentleman who opens doors, says excuse me, and whose intelligent conversation I enjoy listening in on—like a dew drop to someone thirsting in the desert. In contrast, when the punk walks by, with radio blaring, mumbling obscenities, flashing the ‘I’ll kill you’ stare,” it all leaves me in depression.

Worse still, on the opposite end of the scale, is the master of the universe who elbows his way onto a plane while he blares on the telephone and blocks the aisle. I feel creepy after walking through an electronics store and seeing some of the video game titles and covers.

 In short, I don’t want to hear any more Viagra or Cialis ads, no more douche commercials—please no more talking heads about penises that are enlarging, hardening, stimulated on the public air waves.

The sum of these foul parts is smothering us. I don’t want to know that there is a new sex clinic opening in Fresno, or hear another ad about how I can skip out on my credit card debt, or that some sort of food is stuck to my intestinal walls like spackle and paste unless I buy some gut cleansing product.

At some point, we need to say enough is enough, and try to find some sense of honor and decorum in these times of crisis. My god, the entire country has become some sort of Rousseauian nightmare, as if the Berkeley Free Speech Area circa 1970 is now the public domain, as if the culture of the Folsom cell block is now the national ethos.

4) What is good/bad? We are depressed and listless and angry also because I think that we fear we have lost all sense of calibration. We can’t tell what is good and what is god-awful. Where does a Paris Hilton or Britney Spears come from? What can they do? What determines a modern poem’s line break?

Is there any transcendence in the rap album of the month? A Marxist folk singer like old Peter Seeger always had more talent in his little finger than the sum total of Madonna. How did a modern-day Cleon like Barney Frank become the national spokesman of populist outrage against Wall Street.

One, just one, novel of a Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe even, is worth more than what has been written collectively in the last ten years. T. S. Eliot in a day could write better poetry than what has been composed in all the creative writing departments in the United States over the last twenty years—and we are going to give more billions under Obama to “education.”

At some point, again, we need to establish criteria of excellence, regardless of ideology, politics, or of fashion. We honor actors like De Niro and Pacino because we instinctively feel they are talented and are at least shadows of the old breed; a David Petraeus seems like a Matthew Ridgway come to save us in Korea.

We yearn for an ex-President Truman or Eisenhower—and instead get Jimmy Carter. David McCullough sells books because he is talented, can tell a story, is reliable, has a sense of what is the essence of history—and won’t lecture us about his own agenda at a conference on transvestites in the Union Army. I allow that a perpetual adolescent Sean Penn can act (sort of), but a Jack Palance or Richard Boone of the second-tier could exhibit more stage presence, more auctoritas in a split second of exposure than Penn could achieve in a month at the dais.

(5) Yes/No/Sorta/Maybe We sense we are trimmers and redistributors, and wouldn’t dare build a new dam a transcontinental railroad, a new 8 -lane freeway.

Instead we would sue, file reports, argue, quit, delay—anything other than conceive a majestic idea and finish it, sighing, “It is not perfect, but damn good enough and will do.” Instead, here in California we are simply destroying agriculture by drying up its sources of water-giving life—a once brilliant farming that was the sum total of millions of brave lives from 1880 to 2000 who took a desert and fed the world.

Instead, ensconced in the Berkeley Hills or Woodside, our elites demand of better others to save for them not people, but a smelt, a minnow, or a newt-like creature that must have the  entire Kings or San Joaquin River as it dumps its precious cargo out to sea.

So as scare snow melts, it goes out to the ocean, gratifying a lawyer or professor in Palo Alto that rivers flow as they did in the 19th-century, as millions of acres go fallow, hundreds of thousands lose jobs, and we feel so morally superior to those of the past who really were our moral superiors.

It is easy to dismiss our ancestors as illiberal, or with the caveat “Oh, but if we were as poor as they were, we’d have to prove just as tough”, but we still sense they were different in the sense of far better. When I drive up to see those Sierra dams poured in the 1920s, one wonders how they made such things with only primitive machines, and in contrast, are amazed with our sophisticated tools, we do so much less.

This self-congratulatory generation can hardly, as we are learning, build a Bay Bridge again. Yet when we see on the Internet pictures of a new aircraft carrier we are stunned in amazement—we did that? We built such a powerful, sophisticated ship? We—at least someone— can actually still do things on rare occasion like that?

The American people are, to be frank, nauseated by the archetype of a John Edwards, who never created anything other than a legacy of bankrupting doctors in order to enrich himself.  I’d prefer one gall bladder surgeon to fifty Botox experts, a good Perkins engine mechanic to 1,000 deconstructionists at the MLA, one competent chemist to fifty government attorneys.

For the present I think that we have enough social service bureaucrats, enough consultants, enough PhDs that will lecture  how race/class/gender has made us, our air, our dogs even, so unfair. We simply are thirsty for the unapologetic doer, who never says he’s sorry for himself or his country or his ancestors, but instead thinks and plans how he can build something better and leave it for others–the age old agrarian commandment “make sure you leave a better farm than you inherit.” Where are they all, in the grave?

We all seem to stare at the rare genius under a semi, working on the transmission, or someone on a catwalk riveting a girder, or a teacher who can wade into an unruly class and say “damn it, we are going to learn calculus one way or another”.

My complaint against Hollywood actors is not that they are talentless, though many are; or that they talk in the same tones as women did sixty years ago, but that they have no imprint, no trademark of individuality. In short, to paraphrase Orwell, “If it paid better, they’d be fascists.”

I think we responded to Mickey Rourke’s brief renaissance, not because he survived while being drug-addled, or was punched out, or reckless, but because he showed, as a torn-cat, a certain dignity, a certain courage of being so very different from the norm. Yes, at this point we are so desperate for talent and singularity we will take eccentricity bordering on nihilism. 

So there you have this rant.

Why are Americans hesitant, bewildered after the arrival of the Messiah?

Not for the reason our President attests about high unemployment or shaky GDP or the lack of national health care.  We simply are ashamed of our profligacy; we don’t trust those who should be trusted; we put up with the crass and honor the mediocre and ugly; and we fight and bicker over the distribution, never over a share in the creation.

Hope and change, indeed.

Article printed from Works and Days: http://pajamasmedia.com/victordavishanson

URL to article: http://pajamasmedia.com/victordavishanson/thoughts-about-depressed-americans/
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: ccp on March 22, 2009, 07:05:24 PM
GM, that piece is very thought provoking to me.  After the worst ten years of my life watching everyone around us willing to take bribes to rob us of Katherine's music lyrics I no longer have much appreciation for humanity in general.  When it comes to money people are truly a disappointment to say the least.  The phrase, "everyone has a price" is if not completely true than nearly so from what I have seen.  Like one of the victims of the ponzi scheme of the guy who crashed his plane in Florida said, "I have never witnessed this level of dishonesty in my whole life, I at the age of 51 (now) can certainly relate.  Only my expereince was and still is 100 times worse.  Friends, family, neighbors, young, old white, black, Latino, mothers, fathers, it made no difference.  When it came to money, or getting back stage passes, or getting in on the easy action any concern for me or my wife with any common decency, respect, fairness, or the usual politeness went right out the window.

All I can say when one experiences such inhumanity one starts to ask questions that have probably been asked for thousands of years by millions throughout the history of mankind.

I have often been questioning myself and wondering if it is "this generation" or just that we know more about ouselves, and more about the human race than we ever did that seems so depressing?

I am not sure.  Surely there were terrible people before.  Just look at the slavery, the butchery, the inhumanity throughout history.
Did anyone else catch the show on Nat Geo - Washington unbuckled - George W. - no not this one - the original one - George Washington had a child from a slave.  As did (we all know now, Thomas Jefferson).  Woodrow Wilson's second wife fooled the entire country for months about the real condition of the Pres after he had a devastating stroke so that he and she would not have to relinquish power to the VP.  Calvin Coolidge was supposedly caught in the closet with a teenage girl.  Franklin Roosevelt we now know had his girlfriend(s), while so did Eleanor have hers and maybe a male military officer to boot ("bi" - i guess?).  John Kennedy not only had steady streams of hookers but one who was probably an East German spy.  Herbert Hoover who appeared to have a file on every politician in Washington got Kennedy off the hook in return for continuing on as FBI chief.  Similar extortion scams with dirt on every important person within the beltway kept him as the head of the FBI for 47 years.

So in context, what Clinton did was really not such a big deal.  Yet, it is a big deal. It is a big deal when our leaders and the system they work in are and is so corrupt.   Maybe it just isn't new.  It's just that it is in our faces all day long now.  Maybe it's not that *this* generation is any worse then those previous.  I don't know really.  I am just trying to figure it all out.  Like victoms of the Jewish, Turkish, Cambodian, Rwanda, Ukranian, holocausts, the 60 or 70 million that died in the two World Wars, the millions of Balcks who were slaves, for 300 years and second class citizens for another 100.  Of course I can go on but you see the point.

The greatest generation also was segregated.  The generation before them drove the Indians off the map.  The generation before them treated those of another race as animals

McCain was right about campaign finance reform.  Republicans ciritized him and mocked him.  Why because they had the edge in fundraising.  Not because of any idealistic beliefs.

The truth is all our leaders appear to be spending too much time fundraising.  And having to do so because campaigns are expensive.  Advertising rips them off.  And thus they almost have to accept money.  How could they not become corrupt.

Surely this is not new.  Surely those before us were not all saints (except my father).

That said - I just can't decide if it is this generation - or - humanity in general.

I guess I digress.

 

Title: Have We the people lost the American republic the Founding Fathers forge for us?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 23, 2009, 06:05:46 AM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jeYscnFpEyA&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fhotair%2Ecom%2Farchives%2F2009%2F03%2F18%2Fred%2Dmeat%2Dangry%2Dguy%2Ddressed%2Das%2Dfounding%2Dfather%2Dcalls%2Dfor%2Dmarch%2Don%2Ddc%2Dor%2Dsomething%2F&feature=player_embedded

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKFKGrmsBDk&feature=related
Title: Noonan on BO (lite)
Post by: ccp on March 24, 2009, 08:11:23 AM
Watching for a few minutes (all I can stand) BO on 60 minutes leaves me with the impression this is guy maked Clinton't narcissm look mild.  But Clinton didn't come off as pompous and arrogant as this guy.  Plus Clinton was more of a realist while this guy is a true idealogue.  One can see the more power this guy gets, seizes, the more euphoric he appears.  He is in my opinion far more dangerous to this country and the world than Jimmy Carter:

OPINION: DECLARATIONS MARCH 20, 2009 Neither a Hedgehog Nor a Fox The unbearable lightness of Obama's administration.By PEGGY NOONAN
He is willowy when people yearn for solid, reed-like where they hope for substantial, a bright older brother when they want Papa, cool where they probably prefer warmth. All of which may or may not hurt Barack Obama in time. Lincoln was rawboned, prone to the blues and freakishly tall, with a new-grown beard that refused to become an assertion and remained, for four years, a mere and constant follicular attempt. And he did OK.

Such impressions—coolness, slightness—can come to matter only if they capture or express some larger or more meaningful truth. At the moment they connect, for me, to something insubstantial and weightless in the administration's economic pronouncements and policies. The president seems everywhere and nowhere, not fully focused on the matters at hand. He's trying to keep up with the news cycle with less and less to say. "I am angry" about AIG's bonuses. The administration seems buffeted, ad hoc. Policy seems makeshift, provisional. James K. Galbraith captures some of this in The Washington Monthly: "The president has an economic program. But there is, so far, no clear statement of the thinking behind the program."

 
Associated PressThis in part is why the teleprompter trope is taking off. Mr. Obama uses it more than previous presidents. No one would care about this or much notice it as long as he showed competence, and the promise of success. Reagan, if memory serves, once took his cards out of his suit and began to read them at a welcoming ceremony, only to realize a minute or so in that they were last week's cards from last week's ceremony. He caught himself and made a joke of it. One was reminded of this the other day when Mr. Obama's speech got mixed up with the Irish prime minister's. Things happen. But the teleprompter trope has taken off: Why does he always have to depend on that thing?

There is a new Web site where the teleprompter shares its thoughts in a breathless White House diary. It's bummed that it has to work a news conference next week instead of watching "American Idol," it resents being dragged to L.A. in Air Force One's cargo hold "with the more common electronic equipment." It also Twitters: "We are in California! One of the interns gave my panels a quick scrub and I'm ready to prompt for the day." And: "Waiting for my boss's jokes to get loaded for Leno!"

More Peggy Noonan
Read Peggy Noonan's previous columns.

And click here to order her new book, Patriotic Grace.The fact is that Mr. Obama only has two jobs, but they're huge. The first is to pull us out of an economic death spiral—to save the banks, get them lending, fix the mortgage mess, address unemployment, forestall inflation. TARP, TALF, financial oversight and regulation of Wall Street—all of this is enormously complex, involving questions of scale, emphasis and direction. All else—windmills, green technology, remaking health care—is secondary. The economy is the domestic issue now, and for the next three years at least.

So one wonders why, say, the president does not step in and insist on staffing the top level of his Treasury Department, where besieged Secretary Tim Geithner struggles without deputies through his 15-hour days. Might AIG and the bonus scandals have been stopped or discovered sooner if Treasury had someone to answer the phones? Leadership is needed here. Not talkership, leadership.

Mr. Obama's second job is America's safety at home and in the world. Dick Cheney this week warned again of future terrorism and said Mr. Obama's actions have left us "less safe." White House press secretary Robert Gibbs reacted with disdain. Mr. Cheney is part of a "Republican cabal." "I guess Rush Limbaugh was busy." This was cheap.

A journalist, watching, said, "They are like two people fighting over a torn bag of flour." It may be hard cleaning it up.

Mr. Cheney's remarks, presented in a cable interview, looked political and were received as partisan. The fact is he was wrong and right, wrong in that a subject so grave demands a well documented and thoughtful address. It's hard to see how it helps to present crucial arguments in a cable interview and in a way that can be discounted as partisan. Nor does it help to appear to be laying the groundwork for a deadly argument: Bush kept us safe, Obama won't. It is fair— and necessary—to say what the new administration is doing wrong, and to attempt to correct it, through data and argument. The Bush administration made a great point of saying, when they were explaining what U.S. intelligence is up against, that the challenges are constant and we only have to be wrong once, fail once, for the consequences to be deeply painful. What the Bush administration was doing, in part, was admitting that they might be in charge when something happened. The key was to remain focused and vigilant. This is still true.

But Mr. Cheney was, is, right in the most important, and dreadful, way. We live in the age of weapons of mass destruction, and each day more people and groups come closer to getting and deploying them. "Man has never developed a weapon he didn't eventually use," said Reagan, without cards, worrying aloud in the Oval Office.

What can be used will be used. We are a target. Something bad is going to happen—don't we all know this? Are we having another failure of imagination?

A month ago FBI Director Robert Mueller, in a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations, warned of Mumbai-type terrorist activity, saying a similar attack could happen in a U.S. city. He spoke of the threat of homegrown terrorists who are "radicalized," "indoctrinated" and recruited for jihad. Mumbai should "reinvigorate" U.S. intelligence efforts. The threat is not only from al Qaeda but "less well known groups." This had the hard sound of truth.

Contrast it with the new secretary of homeland security, Janet Napolitano, who, in her first speech and testimony to Congress, the same week as Mr. Mueller's remarks, did not mention the word terrorism once. This week in an interview with Der Spiegel, she was pressed: "Does Islamist terrorism suddenly no longer pose a threat to your country?" Her reply: "I presume there is always a threat from terrorism." It's true she didn't use the word terrorism in her speech, but she did refer to "man-caused" disasters. "This is perhaps only a nuance, but it demonstrates that we want to move away from the politics of fear."

Ah. Well this is only a nuance, but her use of language is a man-caused disaster.

Our enemies are criminals, and criminals calculate. It is possible they are calculating thusly: America is in deep economic crisis and has a new, untested president. Why not move now?

Mr. Obama likes to say presidents can do more than one thing at a time, but in fact modern presidents are lucky to do one thing at a time, never mind two. Great forces are arrayed against them.

These are the two great issues, the economic crisis and our safety. In the face of them, what strikes one is the weightlessness of the Obama administration, the jumping from issue to issue and venue to venue from day to day. Isaiah Berlin famously suggested a leader is a fox or a hedgehog. The fox knows many things but the hedgehog knows one big thing. In political leadership the hedgehog has certain significant advantages, focus and clarity of vision among them. Most presidents are one or the other. So far Mr. Obama seems neither.

Title: Brit MP rips PM Brown a new one
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 25, 2009, 02:30:09 PM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94lW6Y4tBXs
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 25, 2009, 10:26:59 PM
Obama to redistribute Super Bowl trophies

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Updated: March 32, 2009

Steelers to loose Super Bowl Trophies

The Super Bowl XLIII Champion Pittsburgh Steelers, the only team to win six titles, will soon be loosing half of those trophies. After a meeting between NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell and President Barack Hussain Obama, Obama decided to redistribute half of their Steeler Super Bowl victories and trophies to less fortunate teams in the league.

"We live everyday in the country that invented the Super Bowl." said Obama "We are not about to lose this Great American tradition in the wake of these difficult times." Obama’s plan calls for the Steelers, who are a successful NFL team, to give half of their Super Bowl trophies to teams that are not successful or have not been as successful as the Steelers. "The Detroit Loins are just as much a part of the same fiber of the NFL as the Steelers and they should, no rather will, be entitled to a Super Bowl Trophy as well." Obama explains in his plan that he has imposed on Goodell and the NFL.

The Pittsburgh Steelers, who by virtue of hard work, excellent team play, stellar draft choices, responsible investing of free agents, careful hiring of coaches and excellent community service and commitment to their fans, has prospered greatly during the past 30 years and have won six Super Bowl Trophies. But President Barack Hussain Obama’s plan calls for the Pittsburgh Steelers to carry the larger burden of the NFL’s less successful teams. Obama went on to further proclaim, "In these difficult times we are all in this to work together. We must reclaim the NFL Championship Dream for every team, for every city and for every fan."

"My plan will not affect 31 of the 32 teams in the league." Obama assures. That’s over 95 percent of the teams in the NFL will not have to worry about loosing any Super Bowl Trophies. "The worst teams in the NFL and the teams that can’t seem to get a break and win a championship will no longer have to worry about going without a title." Obama promises. "We are a country and league of hope. We all need to make a change. It does not matter the color of the teams uniforms, the personal decisions that the teams make or their performance but rather if they are a member of this great American league."

The Super Bowl XLIII trophy will be redistributed to the 0-16 Detroit Lions. Through no fault of their own incompetence, the Lions could not manage a victory all season and this trophy will help ease the pain of their lack of performance and give them hope once again. The redistribution of Super Bowl XL trophy will go directly to the Steeler’s division rival the Cincinnati Bengals. The Bengals who also have fallen on hard times have never won a Super Bowl. This victory will bring a smile to hundreds of Bengal fans all over the world as they can now celebrate. Finally, one of the Steeler’s two Super Bowl victories over the Dallas Cowboys will go back to the Cowboys since the league needs to provide hope in the face of difficulty and provide hope in the face of uncertainty. This is a heavy burden for the Steelers but together we can all prosper.

All hope is not lost for Pittsburgh fans, Barack Hussain Obama has another plan in place. Obama has meet with MLB and commissioner Bud Selig on a similar plan. The New York Yankees will redistribute two of their world series trophies to the Pittsburgh Pirates as a supplement to their loosing 16 straight seasons and counting. This plan will help stimulate the Pirates and enable them to regain the American Dream. Barack Hussain Obama will be meeting with the NHL and Michael Phelps in the upcoming weeks as this issue is high on his agenda for "Hope and Change."
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: ccp on March 26, 2009, 03:45:29 PM
Emanual made hundrds of thousands for sitting on a board and doing little.  It is amusing how we hear over and over again how board members are asleep at the wheel. Well what the heck does anyone expect.  Some of these boards pay their "members" ridiculous sums for almost no work.  What do they do go and sit at a meeting once a month for hundreds of thousands a year.  If these are not payoffs than what is?

Folks they are all stealing at the top.  Some of these board members are essentially stealing.  Because they can.  It is like asking the foxes to guard the hen house.

I am not going to lose sleep over these guys/gals who are getting scrutiny. 

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/politics/obama/chi-rahm-emanuel-profit-26-mar26,0,5682373.story
Title: VDH
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 29, 2009, 09:52:10 PM
http://www.victorhanson.com/articles/hanson032809.html
 
March 28, 2009
The Ugly — Part Two
by Victor Davis Hanson
Pajamas Media

After outlining some “bad” trends — the conservative abandonment of budgetary restraint, the new liberal-Wall-Street nexus, the rise of therapeutic excuse-making for substandard behavior — I now offer three “ugly” trends. These are not merely bad, but sort of creepy as well. Don’t despair — I’ll end with some good developments on the next posting.

I) The Corruption of the Press. We have no media — at least as we once knew it. Somewhere in late 2007, it disappeared entirely, and became something akin to the old Pravda, or the livelier Baghdad Bob’s broadcasts, or the rants of Lord Haw-Haw. (We got everything from Judith Warner about the dreams of women having sex with Obama to “I felt this thrill going up my leg” Chris Matthews).

For the short-term thrill of ensuring the coronation of Barack Obama, it gave up all hard-won standards of journalistic objectivity — so much so that it is hard to adjudicate whether the rise of the Internet alone, or the clear bias of the print media, has nearly destroyed the newspaper industry.

Few any longer connect with a Newsweek editorial, a Time essay, a riff from NPR, or commentary on PBS. The front pages of the New York Times or Washington Post are op-eds in thin disguise. The faculty of the Columbia School of Journalism is not objective. We live in an age of affluent, rather inbred ironists who punch in at the Ministry of Truth, and the result is that about half of the population still wakes up every morning and sighs when they turn on the television, listen to the radio news, or read the newspaper, “He’s lying” or “She’s biased”. The utopian ends of social egalitarianism for the new media lords justified the tawdry means of distorting reality.

Now we have those in Congress talking about saving the newspapers by making them “non-profit,” tax-free entities that will drop political endorsements! That rather insane notion would have three deleterious effects:

1) The papers would become even harder one-sided and Left, once market forces were eliminated and the now soon to be unemployed could find federal media tenure doing, at best, what NPR does, and, at worst, having a sinecure at something public, but analogous to Air America. Oh yes, crede mihi, tax-free newspapers will be very biased.

2) A quasi-public print media will become even more incompetent. Think a very big DMV newsletter. Or perhaps a sort of tax-free sinecure for high-paid federal employees who make more at less stress than their private counterparts. Imagine a tax-exempt, quasi-public New York Times, running telethons, praising their public service investigatory work, begging for donations as they sell cups, plates, hats, etc., with scads of G-15 employees manning the phone banks on money-raising day, a Bill Moyers or senior journalist like Marvin Kalb extolling the courage of the new Times.

3) More fossilization of the economy. Not all the harness-fabricators morphed into tractor producers, but in our new wisdom all newspapers will become — what? I simply don’t know. We are trying to ossify American society at about 1965 in the age of LBJ, as Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid prove to be the most reactionary politicians in a half-century.

In the meantime, we are beginning to see that the media is about to add humiliation to its moral failure, as it grasps that once you worship a Messiah, you cannot leave the cult. Mr. Obama tolerates no dissent among the believers. The recent Obama press conference showed what happens to the shunned New York Times or Washington Post once you even consider climbing over the fence of the compound. What were these sycophants thinking as they watched Obama produce all sorts of bogus figures in assuring that tripling the deficit, then halving it will translate into lessening the present red-ink? Again, imagine a sequel to the Wizard of Oz, where everyone goes on thinking that the floating image on the screen with the smoke really is Oz, despite seeing the tiny man behind the curtain with his hands busy with the levers. The media knows what they’ve become, and already have seen the flip side of their one-eye Jack — and is now trapped in culthood.

II) Universities. Uglier still is what is going on in universities. Higher education in the humanities has devolved into a sort of indoctrination/reeducation camp, on the following apologia: the corporation, the family, the church, the military, the government are illiberal. So in our precious, rare chance to have the nation’s youth for a brief four years, we the professoriate have to offset, balance, offer an antithesis to these dominant conservative cultures. So, presto, we cannot be biased since we the anointed are the corrective to the bias.

Science and math hold out (it’s hard to suggest a postmodern Pythagorean theory would pass muster, or houses could rest on ideological constructs of phallocentric power machinations), and still ensure America’s universities are world-class as the partisan, ossified humanities departments piggy-bank on the reputation established by others.

We sadly assume that the higher one’s office in the university — full professor to dean to provost to president — the more likely one has mastered doublespeak. There are no longer real contentious issues, there is only one correct all-encompassing ideology — America’s history is largely race/class/gender exploitation; gay marriage and abortion on demand are civil rights issues of our times; diversity and affirmative action trump disinterested examination of merit; greedy capitalists have smoked the planet for their limos and private jets; improving student “profile,” not demonstration of character and competence, ensures promotion.

The odd thing is that those who excel at all this don’t even seem happy about it. They are empty suits, proverbial ‘hollow men’ without belief who have about as much self-respect for their habitual falsity as the Wall Street guy at AIG who assures his investors his company’s liability is manageable. After all, you cannot make $100,000 a year for 9 months work, with lifelong ensured employment, full benefits, and no daily audit — and seriously believe that you are perennially manning the barricades at the tip of the revolutionary spear.

What might yet restore the university? Transparency would be a small start. Release the test scores, grades, etc. of those who are admitted (we can do that without the individual names). Suggest, in this new age of AIG-accountability, that those institutions that take public funds release full budgetary figures, not percentages, but real detailed expenditures. Cut public funding off for students after four years. Replace tenure with five-year renewable contracts. Have exit exams for graduating seniors (half might well flunk basic benchmarks for math and fundamental English).

As it is now, most colleges expect alumni to give blindly — assuming that they are to remain unaware of the nature of the faculty profile, the content of the curriculum, or the activities of the universities — on the premise that any would-be donor, had he known what his alma mater was up to, would not like to subsidize classes like “The poetics of the low-rider,” or faculty like Ward Churchill (most colleges have a few), or $50,000 and up paid out for a 45-minute “I hate Bush” rant by Michael Moore at the student union, or 139-5 faculty senate votes (like Saddam’s plebiscites) on extraneous issues like gay marriage. Yes, there is humor in higher education. Nothing is weirder to see a provost head-nod among a wacked-out faculty meeting, then put on a suit and rush off to a five-star restaurant to reassure an aging capitalist that the university is a steward of American values. It reminds me of Petronius’s description of Croton.

III) Europeanization. I don’t know quite what the allure of Europe is for the American Left. But it seems to be that more of us will soon all be working for the government, habitually striking, hunting out that rare capitalist in hiding for a shake-down, and bitching over our weary 35 hr. work week.

Yet without hardship, challenge, and hope, the individual dies daily. Once the government ensures that all your needs will be taken care of, from your teeth and joints to job and retirement, ennui sets in, and with it the cargo we see in Europe — pacifism, cynicism, the loss of transcendence marked by atheism and childlessness, and worry about what others have rather than what you aspire to.

A Dutch friend once asked me why we Americans work 2-3 jobs. I replied to leave something better for our children than what we inherited. He answered, “But why? They will be taken care of by the state.” But if one does not have a vision of building something big, a thing that will last, endure, or at least appreciating such audacity in others, then we will be sentenced to live crummy, little lives of punching in at the government clock, perennially worried that someone else has something marginally better in our view than what we were allotted. It’s like running a race in which the goal is that all the runners cross the finish line at the same time, corner-eyes fixed on each other, scared to death that some trouble-maker might bolt out ahead.

So strange (or not so strange, after all?) that the liberal impulse in postwar Europe led to millions living in nearly identical houses and apartments, driving the same sort of cars, thinking about the same (their parties are like the feuds and squabbles among the Democratic Party here at home), and exuding the identical teen-age petulance when events belie the gospel.

We can see what Europeanization leads to: you worship at the altar of the goddess Pax, but hate the United States for still having a military that saves postmodern you from premodern others. You praise diversity, but are terrified of unassimilated Middle East Muslims thriving in your midst, who unlike you, really do believe in something and it’s not Western liberalism. You praise openness and tolerance, but demonize anyone who questions orthodoxy, whether it be global warming or the efficacy of state redistribution. You rant about class and privilege, but live private lives of secret values predicated on status, aristocratic pedigree, and rank.

Europeanization is so at odds with human nature that it bifurcates it — a false public face, a cynical private one. (I used to love living in Greece, going to the beach in the summer as a student and seeing all these socialist public power, phone, water, bank, etc., vans parked as their left-wing employees “got away” for some downtime around 2 PM — or being told I could hire a public worker after hours for cash for a phone installation rather than wait 9 months on “the list”.) Marxist at the day-job, conniving entrepreneur in the night hours.

It seems that in just 60 days we are heading that way — fast. These gargantuan deficits will require the most insidious taxes (on everything, as in the age of Augustus) we have yet witnessed, to make up the soon to be $20 trillion national debt. Universal health care, college for everyone, government jobs will mean a vast array of technocrati and less-skilled overseers and guardians. Less defense, higher taxes, more social spending, bigger government will expand the public sector to such a degree that to dismantle it will result in the sort of European mass protests and strikes we see daily in Greece or France when a poor fool like Sarkozy thinks it could be 1950 again, and wants to head-off pension insolvency, or bring back a 40 hour work week to the subway drivers.

The one positive? Have any of you met a disenchanted European who emigrated to the States, or lives a life of near isolation in Europe? They are almost hyper-American in their free market and democratic zeal. So full of anger at what their nation under the E.U. has become, they appear nearly fanatical in their allegiance to the free market, merit, free-thinking, liberty, and Western traditions. I have met dozens and they are the most remarkably competent individuals that I have come across in my lifetime — sort of the last few with unsnatched bodies dodging the zombies of Europe. I only wish we would offer instant citizenship status for these highly educated, highly trained, highly motivated but disconnected Europeans. We could lure 20 million in one fell swoop if we offered fast-track legal American citizenship — and reap the technological and entrepreneurial dividends for a half century to come.

Next posting. The good — and there are lots of good developments. So don’t despair.
Title: Recessions Rectify
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on March 30, 2009, 03:06:58 PM
Oh, What a Lovely Recession

Russ Smith
Left-wing redistributionists seize the moment.



Photo by aturkus

There’s presently a school of thought, mostly among the liberal intelligentsia, that the devastating recession has morphed from sheer panic to sour resignation throughout the nation. As a result, we’re now seeing the first wave of magazine and newspaper articles that assess the wreckage and grandly speculate upon the future of American society. This “first draft of history” is premature—in fact, the Las Vegas-tinged economy, where the rules are constantly changing, remains enveloped in gut-wrenching uncertainty—but I’m not an armchair sociologist with a sinecure at a prestigious university or think tank, or insulated by the downturn from inherited wealth or celebrity.

These pundits, left-leaning economists, and other designated “experts,” differ on the precise ramifications of the vanished “American Dream,” but the crux is similar: we’re entering a long, long era of reduced expectations and simpler way of life. Considering the sources—and academia is the epicenter—it’s not surprising that “Reaganism” is now a filthy word, Wall Street money-grubbers are and will be considered pariahs on the order of pornographers and ambulance-chasing lawyers, and high taxes are both necessary and desirable. An element of this commentary is the lingering resentment of the Bush years—the “stolen” election of 2000, Kerry’s loss in ’04, and the supposed philistinism of the former president—but the larger theme is, hey, we’re now in charge! Most of the writing expresses hostility to entrepreneurship and the commercial world, the belief that business, large and small, is somehow dirty, anti-intellectual, and brings out the worst in people. The underclass must be protected because it’s too fragile to be trusted to the greedy, corrupt upper class; a huge, benign government needs to steer such unfortunates in their private and professional lives.   

Typical of this paternalistic mindset is the cover story of April’s American Prospect, “Less is the New More: Why post-consumer America could be a better place,” written by Cornell University economist Robert H. Frank, an out-and-out exercise in wishful thinking that’s not uncommon among self-styled “progressives,” who, between the lines, believe that the current financial collapse will ultimately be recorded as a positive paradigm shift. In other words, to use the catchphrase from Martha Stewart, one of the discredited icons of the “greedy” culture that purportedly began with Reagan, the continuing economic crisis can be turned into “a good thing.”

A central tenet of Frank’s essay is the advocacy for a “steeply progressive tax on each family’s total annual consumption,” one in which, for example, a wealthy person would pay a 100 percent surcharge to the government if he or she adds a “$2 million wing to [their] mansion.” Frank writes that taxes in general will have to rise more than what President Obama has outlined in his exorbitant budget, although aside from the standard cry for bilking the richest Americans (the amount of revenue generated by this alone won’t begin to cover the administration’s wish-list of spending programs), he skirts around the specifics of tax rates for the less affluent. He also, curiously, calls tax hikes “the third rail of American politics,” even though Obama wasn’t shy about this issue during his campaign and still won the election convincingly. Besides, I thought tampering with Social Security reform was the “third rail,” as well as immigration reform and legalization of gay marriage; that sure makes a lot “third rails” in politics. But I digress.

Frank also has, in my view, a warped and condescending (not uncommon in his circles) sense of how Americans relate to each other when consumerism is considered. While he claims it’s not a matter of “keeping up with the Jones’,” he writes: “[traditional economic models] assume, preposterously, that an investment banker remains just as satisfied with his twin-engine Cessna even after learning that his Nantucket summer neighbor commutes to the island in a Gulfstream G200.” Talk about stereotyping. Frank’s “eat the rich” trope continues: “Even more striking gains would result from the [consumption] tax’s indirect effect on the expenditure cascades that have made life more difficult for middle-income families. If the rich spent less on housing, gifts, and other things, the near rich would spend less as well, and so on, all the way down.”

Translation: The United States is populated by envious sheep.

Kurt Andersen’s cover story in the current Time, “The End of Excess: Is This Crisis Good for America?” explores some of the same themes as Frank, absent the Father Knows Best hectoring. Andersen romps through life in America since the early 80s, the good and bad, opening his long article with the sentence, “Don’t pretend we didn’t see this coming for a long, long time.” That’s easy to say in retrospect, even if “The popular culture tried to warn us,” yet if you had polled a group of diverse Americans just one year ago, as the recession was starting to be felt, it’s very hard to believe that aside from a few stray Cassandras that many people, whether involved in finance, government, medicine, entertainment, media, charity work or education, would’ve have predicted the magnitude of this rotten economy.

In part, Andersen—successful novelist, journalist and talk-show host—is addressing his own crowd, especially with a paragraph like this one: “We don’t need to turn ourselves into tedious, zero-body-fat, zero-carbon-footprint ascetics, but even after the economy recovers, deciding to forgo that third car or fifth TV or imperial master bedroom or marginally cooler laptop will come more naturally.” On the whole, Andersen’s laundry-list article is by turns entertaining, astute and revisionist—although his donning of a hairshirt seems a bit false—but unlike the angry liberals who are gleefully projecting their own utopia of a strictly regulated, protectionist, Big Government, European-like (as if the U.K., Germany, France et al aren’t having their own problems) United States, Andersen is more reasonable.

Aside from the obvious (to all but the most left-wing) point that while storied institutions have failed or gone belly up in the past year, new entrepreneurs will take their place, to me, the key snippet in this piece is the key role that immigrants will play in America’s recovery. That is, if politicians allow this to happen. Andersen says, “The sooner we can agree on a coherent national policy to encourage as many as possible of the world’s smartest and most ambitious people to become Americans, the better our chances of forestalling national decline.”

Paul Krugman, on the cover of Newsweek now (in another cliché of more prosperous times, the Princeton professor, Nobel Prize winner, and New York Times op-ed columnist, is considered a “rock star” economist), isn’t as optimistic as Anderson. Then again, optimism isn’t in the man’s vocabulary. (I did enjoy the anecdote in Evan Thomas’ mostly puffy profile of Krugman, in which the Great Man says that he’s never met Obama and besides, at a press conference the President pronounced his name wrong.) Writing on March 27, Krugman longed for the days—even in the “go-go years” of 1960s bull market—back before Reagan when finance wasn’t glamorous but boring and small and “primitive,” when banks “attracted depositors by providing convenient branch locations and maybe a free toaster or two.”

Neat. Let’s return to the pre-ATM era, and, while we’re at it, that marvelous economy of the 1970s. The left doesn’t want to hear it, but once the recession does end, the country will need a fully-engaged, humming economy, and for that to happen it’s imperative that talented, business-oriented individuals lead the way. Government’s role is to be the umpire, not the shortstop, pitcher, and clean-up hitter all in one. It’s too early to tell whether Obama, at least if he wants to be re-elected, understands that the United States is a centrist country, and once the furor over AIG and TARP companies dies down, if he tacks to the left and embarks on a program of income redistribution, a Howard Jarvis-like populism will take hold and his “transformative” plans will be scuttled.

http://www.splicetoday.com/politics-and-media/oh-what-a-lovely-recession
Title: NPSM Moments
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on March 31, 2009, 09:21:08 AM
An obscenity laced rant about emerging political buffoonery as well as buffoonery past:

http://reason.com/news/show/130522.html
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 01, 2009, 04:01:59 AM
I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It's a depression. Everybody's out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel's work, banks are going bust, shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street and there's nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there's no end to it. We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TV's while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that's the way it's supposed to be. We know things are bad - worse than bad. They're crazy. It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, 'Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone.' Well, I'm not gonna leave you alone. I want you to get mad! I don't want you to protest. I don't want you to riot - I don't want you to write to your congressman because I wouldn't know what to tell you to write. I don't know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street. All I know is that first you've got to get mad. You've got to say, 'I'm a HUMAN BEING, Goddamnit! My life has VALUE!' So I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell,

 'I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!'

The character Howard Beale in the movie "Network"
Title: The Key to Understanding the Obama Administration
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on April 01, 2009, 03:34:12 PM
April 01, 2009, 4:00 a.m.

President Obama’s First 70 Days
It really does all make sense.

By Victor Davis Hanson

In just the first 70 days of the new administration, a number of Obama supporters have expressed some dismay at their new president. Some find his ethically challenged appointments at odds with his soaring moral rhetoric.

Others lament his apparent inability to stir up supporters in impromptu speeches, at least in the manner he did with set oratory on the campaign trail. And they worry about his occasionally insensitive remark.

Many cannot quite figure out why, after lambasting George W. Bush for running a $500-billion deficit, Obama has outlined eight years of budgetary red ink that would nearly match the debt run up by all previous U.S. presidents combined.

But such disappointments should be tempered. Not only is Obama simply drawing on his past 30 years of education, writing, work, and associations, but he is also properly reflecting the worldview of many of those working for him.

What, then, is the mindset behind America’s new approach to domestic policy and foreign affairs?

If you believed that average Americans are not well educated, do not think in sophisticated and rational ways, and cannot be trusted to make good decisions, whether for themselves or for their nation, then you would expand the power of better-educated and wiser government overseers. This would ensure that, instead of millions of private agendas that lead individuals improperly, and at times recklessly, to acquire and consume, we would have benevolent and far-sighted powers directing our lives in ways that benefit the environment, the economy — and themselves.

If you believed that highly educated and sometimes distracted liberals occasionally slip on rather mundane questions of taxes, lobbying, and conflict of interest — but not at all in the felonious, premeditated manner of the corporate hierarchy — then it would be necessary to overlook such minor lapses for the greater good of marshalling talented and well-disposed experts into progressive government.

If you believed that socially minded liberals are tolerant and extraordinarily empathetic, then their rather impolite speech is not at all offensive. Constant disparagement of the previous administration, and jokes about fellow Americans — ranging from the physically or mentally impaired, to Nancy Reagan and her séances, to the stereotyped religion and culture of a clinging middle America, to the purported prejudices of a “typical white person” — are not insensitive, let alone callous. No, the evocation of these occasional infelicities reflects the tally-sheet of nitpicking right-wing agitators, keen to bring down a hard-working progressive sacrificing for the people.

If you believed that compensation in this country was intrinsically unfair — that income is arbitrary and quite capriciously rewards some while unjustly shortchanging others — then you would wish to hike income and payroll taxes on high earners to reach confiscatory levels so that a fairer government could correct the errors of an unfair market for the benefit of the many. Higher taxes on some, then, are not just a means of raising revenue, but an important redistributive tool of government to spread the wealth around.

If you believed that government does too little for the average citizen — that at present, with its unnecessary wars and perks for the wealthy, it cannot ensure everyone lifelong entitlement — then you would wish to double, even triple present federal expenditures. The key would be to borrow enough now to provide relief to the people first, and only afterwards to worry how to pay off the resulting deficit of $1.7 trillion. Once people are accustomed to the services they deserve, they will ensure that their representatives find the right revenue mechanisms to guarantee that such necessary benefactions continue. If you build programs to help the people now, the necessary taxing and borrowing for a $3.6-trillion budget will come.

If you had little idea of how businesses are created, how they are run, and why they sometimes go broke, and if you thought that the truly talented and sophisticated never go into business but instead gravitate to the Ivy League to be trained as lawyers, professors, writers, and organizers, then you would assume that our present problems are largely the fault of the former, and can best be addressed by putting as many of the latter in your government as possible.

If you believed that Main Street and Wall Street have little, if anything, to do with why publishers can afford to extend million-dollar book advances, or why the Ivy League has millions in scholarships for students, or why foundations, universities, and governments can afford to hire so many advisors, consultants, administrators, lawyers, and professors, then you would never really connect the conditions that promote good business with those that allow intellectuals, technocrats, and bureaucrats to thrive.

If you believed that those with capital have had an unfortunate head start, or have done dubious things that others less fortunate would not, then you would seek ways to forgive loans, to allow the indebted to start over with a clean slate, to ensure new borrowing with record-low interest rates, to lower or eliminate taxes on most people, and to expand in turn the financial help from the government — and not worry that stocks are down, dividends are nearly nonexistent, interest on deposits is at a record low, equity in real property has often disappeared, and accumulated capital is itself often diminished or insecure.

If you believed that the story of the United States is more a narrative of gender, race, and class oppression than of brave souls promoting liberty and trying to reify the promise of the Constitution, then you would have empathy for fellow victims of such endemic Western oppression. The cries from the heart we are hearing from Bolivia and Cuba, from Iran, Syria, and the West Bank, are not anti-American, much less illiberal: they are efforts to articulate the oppression that the people in those places have suffered at the hands of others.

While in the short run the once-victimized may need to be deterred in their anger from harming the United States or themselves, in the long run their legitimate grievances must be addressed through a variety of concessions, apologies, or dialogues in order to promote the general peace. That a Hugo Chávez calls Americans “gringos,” or Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva blames “white, blue-eyed” bankers for the financial mess, or that state-run Palestinian papers refer to Jews as “pigs and apes,” or that the Iranian president serially claims the Holocaust is a concoction of Zionists, is all an unfortunate rhetoric of the oppressed (in the same way Reverend Wright once referred to Italians as “garlic noses”), brought on by colonization and exploitation, rather than proof that a large portion of the world beyond our shores is run by racist — and rather loony — people.

If you believed that the traditions and customs of the United States are largely a story of the oppressed overcoming the perniciousness of the privileged, rather than the collective efforts of the many to stop tyranny, then you would talk about past oppression, past victimization, and past unfairness far more than you would evoke Shiloh, the Meuse-Argonne, or Iwo Jima.

If you believed that the United States is hardly exceptional, but merely one nation not all that different from others, then you would have confidence in the aggregate wisdom of the United Nations, and the cultural and economic paradigms provided by the nations of the European Union. 

If you believed that wars, crises, and international tensions are brought about by miscommunications, misunderstandings, and Western insensitivity, rather than by despots trying to advance illiberal agendas whenever and wherever they sense an opening, then you would blame past administrations for our present ills, with all their bellicose and retrograde talk of preparedness, deterrence, and pre-emption. You would grandly proclaim a new age of harmonious relations, and count on your rhetorical abilities and charisma to persuade past rivals and mischaracterized enemies that, at this rare but opportune moment, there are no real differences between us — and thus no reasons for future disputes.

In other words, if you believed as President Obama and many of his advisors do, then you would do what Obama and his advisors are now doing.

— Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a recipient of the 2007 National Humanities Medal.
 

National Review Online - http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=YWI4ZDcwMzNiZmQ5MmQ4MzkwNjEyOGEyMGU3N2JmMjY=
Title: America the patsy
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 09, 2009, 07:40:02 AM
America The Patsy?
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Wednesday, April 08, 2009 4:20 PM PT

National Security: Russia tells the U.S. not to worry about a nuclear Iran and not to punish nuclear North Korea. Fidel Castro wants to help the president, Russia's "new comrade." Are we being set up?

Some of the most obvious threats to life and liberty in the historical record were, at the time they were happening, vehemently denied by those in positions of decision-making.

Isolationists and pacifists believed that Hitler's imperialism could be appeased by territorial gains. During the early Cold War, American Soviet spy Alger Hiss' integrity was vouched for by U.S. officials reaching a level as high as future Democratic presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson and Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter.

Those, such as Sen. Joseph McCarthy, suggesting that Hiss was only one of a massive group of Communist spies within the U.S. government were targeted (in McCarthy's case literally targeted for elimination by the CIA, as noted in Pulitzer-winning journalist Tim Weiner's book "Legacy of Ashes"), marginalized, even ruined.

M. Stanton Evans' 2007 book "Blacklisted by History" convincingly and meticulously exonerated McCarthy on most counts, but in other such episodes scholarly review has been unnecessary. Three decades of the ugly reality of Islamist revolution in Iran, for instance, have indelibly discredited the belief in 1979 by Andrew Young, the Carter administration's United Nations ambassador, that the Ayatollah Khomeini was "some kind of a saint."

Today, it takes willful blindness not to recognize Iran as the greatest threat to life and freedom in the world. Tehran is apparently now on the verge of announcing that it has mastered the final, most technically challenging stage of nuclear fuel production: the industrial-scale enrichment of uranium, which allows nuclear fuel to be generated in large quantities.

The Islamofascist regime in Iran has denied inspectors from the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency access to its Arak heavy water reactor, which could be geared to produce plutonium from spent uranium fuel rods.

Yet we heard soothing words this week from Russia's ambassador to the U.S., Sergei Kislyak.

"I don't see any threat to the United States coming from Iran anytime soon," he told the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace — ironically, the organization Hiss was president of when Whittaker Chambers testified in 1948 that he and Hiss committed espionage together.

In a similar vein, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said that "any threat of sanction" against North Korea in response to its Sunday launch of a multistage rocket over Japan, a violation of a U.N. Security Council resolution, "would be counterproductive."

More talk for a regime possessing as many as eight nuclear warheads after it sends up a missile reaching twice as far as anything it has launched previously?

Clearly, Russia wants to lull us into complacency regarding the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction among hostile regimes. Do Moscow and other adversaries of the free world sense an uncommon opportunity in the year 2009?

With an unprecedented financial crisis battering the West's economic system, and a man of the left in the White House, is Russian President Dmitry Medvedev's description of Barack Obama as "my new comrade" more than a clever sound bite?

Ailing Cuban dictator Castro, having granted an audience to members of the Congressional Black Caucus on Tuesday, seemed to share Medvedev's sentiment, asking, "How can we help President Obama?"

When longtime foes of the world's lone superpower behave in such fashion, it isn't because they've been converted to the cause of world peace; it is because they see a chance to change the dangerous global power game in their favor — and at our expense.

Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, always unguarded in expressing himself, claimed this week on a visit to Beijing that "the power of the U.S. empire has collapsed."

"Every day, the new poles of world power are becoming stronger: Beijing, Tokyo, Tehran," he said. "It's moving toward the East and toward the South."

Toward danger and away from security would be a more accurate description.

Title: VDH
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 27, 2009, 10:05:37 AM
Obama’s Foreign Policy Disasters

By Jamie Glazov
FrontPageMagazine.com | 4/27/2009

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Victor Davis Hanson, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.



FP: Victor Davis Hanson, welcome to Frontpage Interview.
What report card would you give the Obama administration in terms of foreign policy right now? Why?

Hanson: An Incomplete that at the present rate will turn into a D/F if he is not careful.

Obama has confused a number of issues: intractable problems like North Korea, Iran, Pakistan, Venezuela, Cuba, Russia, Islamic terrorism, etc. both pre- and post-dated George Bush; they present only bad and worse choices, and are predicated on different agendas of authoritarians that hinge on whether the United States can or cannot deter their regional megalomaniac dreams.

In the long-term, Obama's nontraditional heritage and charisma make little difference; on the other hand, serial apologies, "Bush did it", the "reset button" ad nauseam, trumpeting the "I was only (fill in the blank) when that happened" etc. have a brief shelf life, and achieve only a transitory buzz, similar to a Bono-celebrity tour.


He needs to cut out the messianic style, and realize that millions of brave souls, who invest at great danger in democracy, freedom, open markets, etc. around the world, count on an American President for moral support and guidance against a bullying Russia, Iranian-backed Hezbollah, Chavez's thugs, Castro jailers, et al.


When they see Obama's moral equivalence, they realize they are on their own and must cut their own deals to survive--understanding that multicultural trendiness is now a cynical cover for moral laxity and 'can't we all get along?' appeasement. So by all means smile and shake hands, but don't confuse that for tough diplomacy or protecting American global interests. Increasing the Bush billion-dollar deficit to $1.7, with another $9 trillion in additional aggregate debt will very soon curtail American options abroad, and our enemies are now waiting for opportune moments for exploitation.


FP: What danger does Putin’s regime pose to the West? What is your recommendation in terms of U.S. policy toward Putin? What mistakes has the new administration made so far in that department? For instance, in terms of the reset button fiasco, it means that the Obama team doesn’t even have a sound translator on hand. This is real grounds for worry, yes?


Hanson: We have three or four broad aims at this juncture: one, to ensure that former Soviet republics, which on their free accord sought integration with the West -- the Baltic Republics, Ukraine, Georgia, etc. -- are not forced back into a Russian Empire against their will; that Eastern European states remain autonomous and free to protect themselves from Iranian nuclear blackmail should they wish anti-ballistic missile protection; that Russia understands that there will be consequences if its technology ensures an Iranian bomb; and that Europe has assurances of support should Russia engage in energy blackmail—or worse.


Putin et al. know that their brinksmanship agendas were not predicated on Bush's smoke 'em out lingo; so to suggest Bush's tough talk, even if gratuitous in the first team, created crises where they otherwise did not exist, is absurd. Ms. Clinton—completely marginalized so far by Obama's obsessive need to bask in the pop-star limelight abroad—should know that. She has competent advisors; I cannot believe they really fall for the campaign mode nonsense that their sensitivity and diplomatic adroitness ipsis factis will translate into either friendship or better Russian behavior.

FP: The Obama administration apparently is set to give 900 million to Hamas. In other words, they want to give money to the Palestinian Nazi Party. What do you make of this? What must Obama do toward Hamas, the Iranian-backed Hezbollah, etc? Do you think he will do it and/or is he even capable or cognizant of what is actually going on and what is at stake?

Hanson: I am very worried. Israel I think is alone now. The failed Freeman appointment, the historically puerile al-Arabiya interview (cf. e.g., Obama's praise of the good ole days, some thirty years ago, when Sadat was murdered, Khomeini took over, Saddam was flexing his muscles, Americans were routinely murdered, etc.) the Samantha Power appointment, the 'outreach' to Syria, the video for Iran, the Gaza/Hamas rebuilding, the tough behind-the-scenes lectures to Israel—all this bodes ill.


Does Team Obama really believe that a murderous autocratic cabal like Hamas is merely different from a democratic constitutional republic like Israel? At best we have naiveté at the helm (Obama thinks he can mesmerize misunderstood killers), at worst, a genuine feeling that Israel is an aggressive, Western imperialist power exploiting indigenous people of color who simply wish to be free--in other words, the Rev. Wright-Bill Ayers-Rashid Khalidi view of the Middle East.


FP: What did you make of Obama’s Chavez meeting and his new disposition toward Latin America? Perhaps it is time to try something new?

Hanson: Not really. We stand for open markets, free trade, personal freedom, human rights, and consensual government. Others like Castro, Morales, Chavez, and Ortega simply don't. Why would anyone any more believe these thugs, who justify their lust for power by the age-old mantra of "we suffer for the people", as they try to engineer an equality of result--through any means necessary, with all power and prestige going to themselves?

They will say anything to blame a successful U.S., to rationalize the self-inflicted misery and failure of Latin America. Shaking Chavez's hand is a minor lapse if that; but in aggregate, the continuance of the glad-handing, trashing the US, showcasing his racial solidarity, listening to Ortega's rant, photo-oping with thugs--all that does two things abroad: first, it undercuts brave democrats in places like Columbia and elsewhere in Central America; two, it sends a message to fence-sitters in more important states like Peru, Brazil, Chile, etc. that authoritarian socialism, not free-market democracy, is now the wave of the future, and so they better get with the new neighborhood–or else!

FP: What do you think is the greatest threat right now facing the U.S. , Israel and the West?

Hanson: We have three: one, we have mortgaged our options to the Chinese and other debt holders. By going into $20 trillion in aggregate debt we will cut our military, pull back, dress it up with utopian rhetoric, and cede huge areas of the globe over to regional autocracies.


Second, some are already prepping for the Iranian catastrophe to come, by talking of "containing" Iran, as if we have given up on embargoing, blockading, and other more severe 11th hour measures to stop a Khomeinist nuke. Once that happens the Arab Sunni states will rush to get a bomb, Israel will be periodically blackmailed as Hamas, Hezbollah, etc will be given Iranian nuclear assurance (acting deranged with your finger on the trigger is smart in nuclear poker). Add in al Qaeda that thinks there are now new rules in Washington that can be tested--and you have a recipe for a dangerous world. We seem to think that not being attacked since 9/11 was some sort of natural occurrence, or perhaps yet another government ensured entitlement.

FP: Victor Hanson, thank you for joining us in these tough times.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jamie Glazov is Frontpage Magazine's editor. He holds a Ph.D. in History with a specialty in Russian, U.S. and Canadian foreign policy. He is the author of Canadian Policy Toward Khrushchev’s Soviet Union and is the co-editor (with David Horowitz) of The Hate America Left. He edited and wrote the introduction to David Horowitz’s Left Illusions. His new book is United in Hate: The Left's Romance with Tyranny and Terror. To see his previous symposiums, interviews and articles Click Here. Email him at jglazov@rogers.com.
Title: WSJ: The real culture war is over the free market
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 30, 2009, 09:17:38 AM
By ARTHUR C. BROOKS
There is a major cultural schism developing in America. But it's not over abortion, same-sex marriage or home schooling, as important as these issues are. The new divide centers on free enterprise -- the principle at the core of American culture.

Despite President Barack Obama's early personal popularity, we can see the beginnings of this schism in the "tea parties" that have sprung up around the country. In these grass-roots protests, hundreds of thousands of ordinary Americans have joined together to make public their opposition to government deficits, unaccountable bureaucratic power, and a sense that the government is too willing to prop up those who engaged in corporate malfeasance and mortgage fraud.

The data support the protesters' concerns. In a publication with the ironic title, "A New Era of Responsibility," the president's budget office reveals average deficits of 4.7% in the five years after this recession is over. The Congressional Budget Office predicts $9.3 trillion in new debt over the coming decade.

And what investments justify our leaving this gargantuan bill for our children and grandchildren to pay? Absurdities, in the view of many -- from bailing out General Motors and the United Auto Workers to building an environmentally friendly Frisbee golf course in Austin, Texas. On behalf of corporate welfare, political largess and powerful special interests, government spending will grow continuously in the coming years as a percentage of the economy -- as will tax collections.

Still, the tea parties are not based on the cold wonkery of budget data. They are based on an "ethical populism." The protesters are homeowners who didn't walk away from their mortgages, small business owners who don't want corporate welfare and bankers who kept their heads during the frenzy and don't need bailouts. They were the people who were doing the important things right -- and who are now watching elected politicians reward those who did the important things wrong.

Voices in the media, academia, and the government will dismiss this ethical populism as a fringe movement -- maybe even dangerous extremism. In truth, free markets, limited government, and entrepreneurship are still a majoritarian taste. In March 2009, the Pew Research Center asked people if we are better off "in a free market economy even though there may be severe ups and downs from time to time." Fully 70% agreed, versus 20% who disagreed.

Free enterprise is culturally mainstream, for the moment. Asked in a Rasmussen poll conducted this month to choose the better system between capitalism and socialism, 13% of respondents over 40 chose socialism. For those under 30, this percentage rose to 33%. (Republicans were 11 times more likely to prefer capitalism than socialism; Democrats were almost evenly split between the two systems.)

The government has been abetting this trend for years by exempting an increasing number of Americans from federal taxation. My colleague Adam Lerrick showed in these pages last year that the percentage of American adults who have no federal income-tax liability will rise to 49% from 40% under Mr. Obama's tax plan. Another 11% will pay less than 5% of their income in federal income taxes and less than $1,000 in total.

To put a modern twist on the old axiom, a man who is not a socialist at 20 has no heart; a man who is still a socialist at 40 either has no head, or pays no taxes. Social Democrats are working to create a society where the majority are net recipients of the "sharing economy." They are fighting a culture war of attrition with economic tools. Defenders of capitalism risk getting caught flat-footed with increasingly antiquated arguments that free enterprise is a Main Street pocketbook issue. Progressives are working relentlessly to see that it is not.

Advocates of free enterprise must learn from the growing grass-roots protests, and make the moral case for freedom and entrepreneurship. They have to declare that it is a moral issue to confiscate more income from the minority simply because the government can. It's also a moral issue to lower the rewards for entrepreneurial success, and to spend what we don't have without regard for our children's future.

Enterprise defenders also have to define "fairness" as protecting merit and freedom. This is more intuitively appealing to Americans than anything involving forced redistribution. Take public attitudes toward the estate tax, which only a few (who leave estates in the millions of dollars) will ever pay, but which two-thirds of Americans believe is "not fair at all," according to a 2009 Harris poll. Millions of ordinary citizens believe it is unfair for the government to be predatory -- even if the prey are wealthy.

Political strategy aside, intellectual organizations like my own have a constructive role in the coming cultural conflict. As policymakers offer a redistributionist future to a fearful nation and a new culture war simmers, we must respond with tangible, enterprise-oriented policy alternatives. For example, it is not enough to point out that nationalized health care will make going to the doctor about as much fun as a trip to the department of motor vehicles. We need to offer specific, market-based reform solutions.

This is an exhilarating time for proponents of freedom and individual opportunity. The last several years have brought malaise, in which the "conservative" politicians in power paid little more than lip service to free enterprise. Today, as in the late 1970s, we have an administration, Congress and media-academic complex openly working to change American culture in ways that most mainstream Americans will not like. Like the Carter era, this adversity offers the first opportunity in years for true cultural renewal.

Mr. Brooks is president of the American Enterprise Institute.
Title: culture war over free market enterprise
Post by: DougMacG on April 30, 2009, 10:13:26 AM
Crafty, I strongly agree.  I like this quote of Brooks, that there is a moral case against the politics of class envy and confiscation from the rich:

"Advocates of free enterprise must learn from the growing grass-roots protests, and make the moral case for freedom and entrepreneurship. They have to declare that it is a moral issue to confiscate more income from the minority simply because the government can."

Brian Wesbury explained the economics of the so-called tea party movement recently:http://www.ftportfolios.com/Commentary/EconomicResearch/2009/4/20/tea_party_economics  Unfortunately I'm not able to cut and paste out of the pdf.  He makes an example of education, but it couold be a local stadium or light rail.  The special interest gets its billion and they all reward each other and make political contributions and succeed politically, but the taxpayer is only hit for a few cents on every small purchase forever etc. until finally all these special interests become trillions and the taxpayer hits the boiling point. 

In the current climate, I think it isn't even the taxpayer who hurts because we aren't paying for the excess spending.  It's just the spending itself that at some point is morally offensive.  Each great idea like health care or home ownership for everyone is wonderful as an idea to discuss in a college classroom, but we can't do them all without collapsing our economy, oops.  But as the piece suggests, there is a moral case against compelling someone else, whether it is 'the rich' or future generations, to pay for all of our wild ideas.

Stealing a quote from JDN yesterday about healthcare, but could be said about any public issue: "something needs to be done, that is a given..."

Yes, but it is not a given that it is the government that needs to do it and it is not a given that doing something should be measured in public dollars spent.

Instinctively people really do know that private sector solutions are better and that our freedoms including free enterprise are what made us great.

I think liberals have even more confidence in the private sector than conservatives.  They are willing to tie its arms and break its kneecaps and still expect that it will perform about the same as before.
Title: Selective Literalism (continued as a Rant)
Post by: DougMacG on May 14, 2009, 01:42:26 PM
From Islam in Europe,  I agree with Huss exactly on choosing and encouraging positive immigration before the fact.  Mass deportations never seem to happen.

The JDN conversation with the Justice was interesting for him.  Bringing it here is what the Justice would call 'heresay' because the paraphrasing of cherrypicked answers to cherrypicked questions might not tell the whole story.

I suspect he wasn't asked the question about protesters rights in the checkout lane or dead-baby delivery room at an abortion clinic because they are banned to the sidewalk.  I doubt he was asked whether a gang with "straight power" signs could remove gay oriented products from stores shelves and I doubt he would say no problem on the record, or whether shingles protesters could disrupt a job site by moving the neatly stacked materials in carts and dropped in a pile at a different point on the property.  In that scenario, I think we would be discussing second amendment rights more than the first.

Even more ridiculous than saying the boycotted and removed goods might have been paid for by the hate-Israel people is to believe this justice would have allowed them a protest, with speeches and cameras, removing Israeli-made chairs from their arrangement in his courtroom, while in session, under his watch, without consequence, and even he did, that would be on public property, not in a privately owned store. 

But let's assume he does think I am obligated to host your free speech in my living room or business showroom and vice versa because it's 'free speech' and that you get Justices Breyer and Ginsburg along with Mother Theresa to agree with you, that does not change my view that their utter disrespect for the sanctity of private property is contemptible.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: JDN on May 15, 2009, 07:11:30 AM
Moderator: Perhaps Doug's post and this one belong in Islam in Europe?

Huss, I agree with your comments in theory, although they may not be practical and some would be difficult to implement.   

And Doug, no we didn't talk about abortion, or gays, or even roofing shingles for that matter; is that directly relevant to this particular video?
We did talk about the Dodgers, Manny, and my friend's new house.  But that's not relevant to this video either.

I did however show him and my friend the video; we were having drinks in the Club's library and there is a computer available there. 
No crime... 

And knowing the judge, I agree he would not have allowed them to protest, with speeches and cameras in his courtroom.
But then that is a crime...


Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 15, 2009, 10:16:31 PM
Perhaps your retired judge exemplifies that we have a legal system and not a justice system  :-)

Neither of my French speaking sources have responded to my requests to summarize the contents.

BTW, I am reminded of the time some union goons took me to the top floor (12th floor) of a building under construction when I was in the carpenter's union in Philadelphia oh so many years ago.   Word was that they had held the son of the president of the general contractor out over the edge by his feet.   Word was that they had dropped a can of spackling (the stuff for sealing seams of drywall-- weight about 50 pounds?) onto the hood of the Cadillac of the president of the electrical contractor (from 12 floors, it made one helluva dent , , ,).  So by the time they chatted with me, there was nary a threat as they persuaded me of the merits of their position , , ,
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: JDN on May 16, 2009, 06:45:30 AM
Perhaps your retired judge exemplifies that we have a legal system and not a justice system  :-)


Maybe that is why you quit practicing law?   :-)
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 16, 2009, 07:08:45 AM
I simply went from one form of aggression to another. 
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: DougMacG on May 16, 2009, 07:48:16 AM
"I simply went from one form of aggression to another."

I try to only get bent out of shape in 3 situations:  attacks on life, liberty and pursuit of happiness.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: G M on May 16, 2009, 07:55:01 AM

http://www.policeone.com/writers/columnists/Charles-Remsberg/articles/1242034-Handling-Protesters-Part-2/

Handling Protesters, Part 2

From the Calibre Press Street Survival Newsline

Do you have to be spit on by protesters--& other key questions
Part 2

In Part 1, we posed a dozen questions related to Legal Considerations in Managing Protests and Civil Disorder, derived from a panel on that topic sponsored by the International Assn. of Chiefs of Police (IACP).

See how well you scored, according to information presented by the IACP's panelists, Mary Claire McNaught, public safety attorney for the Winston-Salem (NC) PD and Daniel Schofield, chief of the legal unit at the FBI Academy in Quantico (VA).

The questions one more time:

1. While recognizing that Americans have more protection for free expression than probably any other nationality, what 4 general limitations can government (police) still place on public demonstrations?

2. What 3 criteria must be met by any restrictions placed on demonstrating?

3. Give examples of specific restrictions that might legally be imposed under these criteria.

4. Can you deny a group the right to protest based on a threat of violence associated with their demonstration?

5. What legal tactic can be used in advance to impose control over groups with bad reputations for causing problems with their demonstrations?


6. What key player should be a part of the planning before a demonstration takes place?
7. As a line officer, do you have to endure insults and spitting from demonstrators?

8. Name at least 3 liability risks you may face in conjunction with public protests.

9. Name 2 ways you can legally use videotape to your advantage?

10. Are demonstrations inside shopping malls legal?

11. Does the media have special rights at demonstration sites?

12. Can you charge protesters for the cost of protecting them?

Bonus Question: An American police officer is driving down the road and sees a lawyer walking on 1 side and Saddam Hussein walking on the other. Who does the officer hit first?

The answers:

IMPORTANT NOTE: As with any legal advice, be sure to check with your local advisors to be certain that the principles and precedents explained here currently apply in your jurisdiction.

1. Authorities can limit public speech, and the correlative right to protest and demonstrate, to a reasonable time, a reasonable place and a reasonable manner. You'll often see this 3-part terminology in court decisions dealing with 1st Amendment freedoms. These restrictions apply to speech (and protests) in public areas like roads, sidewalks, parks or other sites that are traditionally open for citizens to gather, talk and demonstrate.

Protest can also always be restricted because of its relationship to illegal conduct. Demonstrators do not have the right to trespass onto somebody's private property to protest or to engage in assault or disorderly conduct or any other behavior that violates the law. When free expression becomes illegal conduct, it can always be restricted.

2. Any limitation has to meet these criteria:

a) It must be content neutral, meaning that you don't restrict only those groups whose message you disagree with. In enforcing a quiet zone around a hospital, for example, you are not trying to control the message put forth by demonstrators, you're trying to control the noise that interferes with people getting well. Content neutrality is THE most important factor in keeping restrictions legal.

b) Any limitation must be narrowly tailored to serve an important interest. To continue the quiet zone analogy, the zone must not extend out farther than it has to to accomplish its purpose. It can't be clear across town where it has no reasonable relation to the hospital it supposedly protects. In other words, imposition of a restriction has to closely match the reason for it.

c) Limitations must ALLOW FOR ALTERNATIVES. If a person or group is restricted from protesting 1 place, they should have ample opportunity to demonstrate some other place in town.

3. If some group wants to protest across an interstate highway because they think that will have the biggest impact, you can easily deny that. In a recent federal case, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals supported a city in Alabama that completely banned tables set up on city sidewalks to distribute literature because they were considered too disruptive to pedestrians. You can deny the right to protest during RUSH HOUR. Many cities have statutes that prohibit demonstrations within a certain distance of a CHURCH during hours of service or shortly before or after because of anticipated traffic problems.

You can also sometimes limit the SIZE of a protest group. If a group of 500 wants to demonstrate in a park that can legitimately accommodate only 100 persons, you can stop that.

Court cases suggest that you CAN'T have a complete ban on protesting in a residential neighborhood. But you can prohibit a group from focusing on a particular resident (called "focused residential picketing"). And you can stop groups from marching through residential neighborhoods in the middle of the night when the noise would disrupt privacy.

In imposing restrictions, just remember the criteria itemized in #2. You must apply objective, content-neutral limitations based on some important consideration.

4. YES, but to do so you have to meet a VERY HIGH STANDARD.

Say you want to deny the Ku Klux Klan the right to march in your town because you're worried that you won't be able to protect against a real bloodbath. Courts have said that the police (or government in combination with the police) must prove that maintaining public safety and order is beyond the reasonable ability of your officers and administrators.

The courts will ask why you couldn't get help from neighboring jurisdictions or other sources. They will ask specific reasons why your doubt of maintaining public order is accurate. They will take a very close look because obviously a lot of jurisdictions would like to say, "Hey, we just can't be safe, so you can't come here."

It is very rare that a jurisdiction is able to place a complete ban on a group's ability to protest. You might be able to move the protest, or limit the size or delay it until you have time to recruit extra help, but a complete ban will very rarely be upheld.

5. If you are faced with a problem group, like the Ku Klux Klan or Operation Rescue, wanting to demonstrate in your community and you are concerned about your ability to maintain order because the group is known for not demonstrating peacefully and legally in other communities, you can probably obtain an INJUNCTION from a local judge that will allow you to impose specific, advance limitations on the group's right to protest/demonstrate. For example, an injunction might specify that protesters can't carry weapons, even if they have permits that ordinarily enable them to do so.

This legal tactic became a very useful arrow in law enforcement's quiver with the U.S. Supreme Court's sanction in the case of Madsen v. Women's Health Center [114 S.Ct. 2516 (1994).] In this important case, the Court upheld for the first time the use of injunctions in regards to demonstrations.

A local judge will likely be sympathetic with your position because he is not going to want his own community ripped apart by the group you're concerned about. Even if it turns out later that the judge shouldn't have issued the injunction, you and your department are fully protected from liability so long as you are acting pursuant to his order.

6. Your LOCAL PROSECUTOR. If the prosecutor doesn't agree with you on the arrests you make, he is going to abandon you when you get ready to go to trial. Be sure he participates in the planning and helps you evaluate the statutes that you may want to use as foundations for your arrests. Your department legal advisor or city attorney can guide you regarding civil liability issues, but a prosecutor's input is important where possible criminal charges against demonstrators or counter-demonstrators are concerned.

Particularly if you haven't had cause to use them for awhile, take a close and critical look at your statutes on disorderly conduct, public assembly and noise (noise can be an especially useful ground for arrest in protest situations, if the statute is specific enough). In some cases, these statutes are old, confusing and vague. The language would no longer pass court scrutiny. With sufficient notice, it may even be possible to get weak statutes updated before the protest goes down.

Once a prosecution strategy is agreed upon, officers must be informed as to what's permissible arrest-wise. When Winston-Salem PD anticipates an event with potentially troublesome protesters, officers are given a booklet clearly delineating elements of the non-routine offenses they might be called upon to arrest for. They are then trained on what they will need to show in order to get a conviction for each offense.

Take full advantage of what your laws will let you do. Your prosecutor should be oriented to telling you what you can do legally, not just hammering at what you can't do.

You also want to review physical control tactics that may be appropriate in handling demonstrators. In many departments, the command staff was trained in the '70s, while line officers were trained in the '90s. You don't want commanders encouraging an obsolete "stomp-and-drag" approach--and then later using inflammatory terminology like that in court--when more currently trained officers may know of more effective, lower profile options.

7. INSULTS, YES; SPITTING, NO.

Where exchanges between civilians are concerned, courts generally have ruled that when 1 person is right up in the face of another, close enough so that fighting could occur, and that person speaks directly to the other in an insulting, threatening, provoking manner, such speech can be considered "fighting words" and can be cause for arrest. [For an explanation of "fighting words", see Newsline No. 68.]

However, law enforcement officers, unlike ordinary citizens, are generally expected because of their professional training to restrain themselves in the face of insulting language. So if you're policing a demonstration and 1 of the protesters gives you obscene gestures and nasty talk, you're expected to have a thicker skin and not punch him in the mouth.

Spitting's a different matter. A protester even preparing to spit is committing assault and can be arrested. In 1 instance, a handcuffed subject was being walked to a police vehicle when he made a gurgling sound as if getting ready to spit. An officer immediately delivered when he later called "a straight-arm stun technique designed to redirect the head," injuring the subject but preventing officers from being spit on. A federal Court of Appeals dismissed a lawsuit against the officer, reasoning that no police officer should be left defenseless against someone preparing to spit on him and that objectively reasonable force to prevent the spitting does not violate any legal standard imposed by the constitution.

8. One of your highest liability risks--a very, very high risk--is FALSE IMPRISONMENT or FALSE ARREST, stemming from an arrest made without probable cause. This can happen easily in a confusing demonstration situation, where you have many people engaged in various types of behavior and quite likely struggling with you. Adequately documenting who in the crowd actually did what and that you had a specific reason for everyone you took in becomes difficult, especially in mass-arrest situations.

EXCESSIVE FORCE also remains a concern. While courts are becoming more and more cognizant of law enforcement realities, they still hold officers to a fairly high standard. If you're accused of excessive force, you will need to be able to articulate why you felt the level of force you used was required.

There may also be claims that you deprived would-be demonstrators of their CIVIL RIGHTS by imposing unreasonable limitations that made the protest ineffective. Your actions will then be tested against the criteria of objectivity itemized in #2. Courts will give great latitude for your regulation of free speech in public places but they do not look favorably on totally eliminating it just because it is inconvenient, unpopular or expensive, all of which it often is. If you effectively eliminate a person's chance for public expression, you need a very strong reason for doing so.

In some state courts, the accusation of FAILURE TO PROTECT is beginning to be raised. Here the court will look for evidence of a "special relationship" between you and the protesters that gives you an exceptional need to protect. Be careful not to make promises, such as: "Yes, you can demonstrate safely because we'll certainly have enough police officers there" or "We'll be fully equipped and fully prepared to protect you, you don't have to worry about a thing."

Another liability area for administrators that has started to emerge in some states is FAILURE TO PROTECT YOUR EMPLOYEE. An officer who gets injured wants to collect beyond workmen's compensation and argues, "You [the administrator] knew perfectly well you were expecting 2,000 Klansmen and you put me out there with 3 other officers and said, 'Here, guys, hold the line'--without adequate training, proper support, proper communications or proper equipment to handle the job, knowing full well that there was potential for harm to me."

9. Videotape can help you prepare tactically for managing a protest and help you defend yourself afterwards against charges of excessive force.

If you know a particular group is coming to town, contact other jurisdictions where these protesters have been previously and ask to borrow videotapes of their demonstration. Some groups try deliberately to provoke inappropriate responses from officers so they can sue or at least so they can get more publicity for their cause. Seeing some of their tactics ahead of time can help you plan your actions better. You may also be able to go on the Internet and find out what other agencies have learned when dealing with the group you're facing.

It's a good idea, incidentally, to practice and videotape crowd control tactics in role-playing exercises, just as you practice DT moves. Make and critique your mistakes with each other so you don't make them in public. Field-test your equipment beforehand, too.

If you use pain compliance or leverage techniques (like some we demonstrate in the Calibre Press Street Survival Seminar) to move people who are blocking an area, you are likely to get allegations of improper force afterwards. If the event has been taped, you can show in court that you used only an amount of force reasonably necessary to get the job done.

Departments and officers win almost all these force cases, unless the force used was clearly outrageous. More and more judges recognize that the way to evaluate an officer's use of force is to put themselves in that officer's shoes. They recognize the officer is in a tense, rapidly evolving, often dangerous situation and that he has to make split-second decisions. Even the Supreme Court has said that not every push or shove that an officer engages in that turns out to be unnecessary violates the law. There has to be room for understanding the dynamics of force confrontations...and videotape can help make the circumstances clearer.

Videotapes you make can be used for future training, too.

10. Generally, NO. Privately owned shopping malls are not considered to be public forum areas (like streets, sidewalks and public parks are) for purposes of 1st Amendment activity. People may have the right to protest outside the mall on public property, but you can keep demonstrators out of privately owned parking areas and the mall interior completely, if owners of the mall don't want people protesting there.

The same can be true regarding private universities. If it's private property it's not public-forum property. Even public buildings, like schools and police stations, are not normally open for demonstrations.

In July, 1997, a MN judge ruled that demonstrations must be permitted inside the Mall of America, the nation's largest, near Minneapolis. But that was because government funds were used in its construction. However, the judge said that the mall has the right to determine the time, place and manner of demonstrations and ruled that some animal-rights protesters must face trespassing charges because they failed to get permission from the mall before demonstrating inside last spring.

11. NO. From a legal standpoint, the media does not have any right of access to any area of public property or to your briefings or planning sessions that the public in general doesn't have. If you set up a no-person zone, with access barred by a police line, for example, the media has no legal right to say, "We're the media, we can come in there." You may decide to let them in, to give them extra access, but that's absolutely your choice.

Sometimes to cover big events, news helicopters will fly over areas where police don't want them for safety reasons. In LA this has been dealt with on occasion by a call to the FAA. The FAA, in turn, has declared the area in question a restricted zone, and news pilots who don't get out of there are subject to losing their licenses.

12. Not really. You can charge the group, but only for the cost their activities directly create. Say you have 50 Klanspeople who want to march down the middle of Main St., crossing 4 intersections. You can charge the Klan for traffic control officers at each intersection (including extra help you bring in from other jurisdictions), provided that you likewise charge other groups comparably for the same service. You can charge the cost of clean-up, but only for the clean-up activities you can actually tie to the activities of the protesting group, not those required because 2,000 onlookers trashed the area. That all has to be absorbed by your community as a cost of doing business in a democracy.

Likewise, you cannot charge protesters for the possible reaction of those observing their protest. In the case of 50 Klanspeople and 2,000 onlookers, if most of your extra resources are to keep the onlookers from bashing in the heads of the marchers, you can't charge for that protection.

Of course you can charge an administrative processing fee for a parade permit before a march-type demonstration is held, provided the fee is set and administered in a non-discriminatory, content-neutral manner. In other words, you must charge the Girl Scouts who want to stage a parade across town the same permit fee as you do the KKK. You don't favor 1 group over another because you like 1 group and don't like the other.

You can have a provision for indigent groups if you wish, but they must meet an objective test for indigence before the fee can be waived.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: JDN on May 16, 2009, 08:24:52 AM
GM; while I thought/hoped we were moving on...




10. Generally, NO. Privately owned shopping malls are not considered to be public forum areas (like streets, sidewalks and public parks are) for purposes of 1st Amendment activity. People may have the right to protest outside the mall on public property, but you can keep demonstrators out of privately owned parking areas and the mall interior completely, if owners of the mall don't want people protesting there.
[

ERGO -  IF the owners of the mall does not object, people cannot be kept out of the mall and demonstrations are allowed.

In this instance, the owner did not call the police nor did the owner seem to object, therefore again I repeat, NO CRIME...




Title: Swill
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on May 16, 2009, 08:45:24 AM
Tell us about the flat earth next, JDN. You're the only one who believes your swill.
Title: Stein on Pelosi
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on May 16, 2009, 08:45:54 AM
May 16, 2009, 7:00 a.m.

Fun with Dick and Nancy
Cheney has been entirely consistent on waterboarding. Pelosi has not.

By Mark Steyn

Uh-oh. Nancy Pelosi’s performance at her press conference re waterboarding has raised, according to the Washington Post, “troubling new questions about the Speaker’s credibility.” The dreaded T-word: “troubling.”

I doubt it will “trouble” the media for long, or at least not to the extent of bringing the Pelosi speakership to a sudden end — and needless to say I’m all in favor of Nancy remaining the face of congressional Democrats until November 2010. But her inconsistent statements do suggest a useful way of looking at America’s tortured “torture” debate:

Question: What does Dick Cheney think of waterboarding?

He’s in favor of it. He was in favor of it then, he’s in favor of it now. He doesn’t think it’s torture, and he supports having it on the books as a vital option. On his recent TV appearances, he sometimes gives the impression he would not be entirely averse to performing a demonstration on his interviewers, but generally he believes its use should be a tad more circumscribed. He is entirely consistent.

Question: What does Nancy Pelosi think of waterboarding?

No, I mean really. Away from the cameras, away from the Capitol, in the deepest recesses of her (if she’ll forgive my naivete) soul. Sitting on a mountaintop, contemplating the distant horizon, chewing thoughtfully on a cranberry-almond granola bar, what does she truly believe about waterboarding?

Does she support it? Well, according to the CIA, she did way back when, over six years ago.

Does she oppose it? According to Speaker Pelosi, yes. In her varying accounts, she’s (a) accused the CIA of consciously “misleading the Congress of the United States” as to what they were doing; (b) admitted to having been briefed that waterboarding was in the playbook but that “we were not — I repeat — were not told that waterboarding or any of these other enhanced interrogation methods were used”; (c) belatedly conceded that she’d known back in February 2003 that waterboarding was being used but had been apprised of the fact by “a member of my staff.” As she said on Thursday, instead of doing anything about it, she decided to focus on getting more Democrats elected to the House.

It’s worth noting that, by most if not all of her multiple accounts, Nancy Pelosi is as guilty of torture as anybody else. That’s not an airy rhetorical flourish but a statement of law. As National Review’s Andy McCarthy points out, under Section 2340A(c) of the relevant statute, a person who conspires to torture is subject to the same penalties as the actual torturer. Once Speaker Pelosi was informed that waterboarding was part of the plan and that it was actually being used, she was in on the conspiracy, and as up to her neck in it as whoever it was who was actually sticking it to poor old Abu Zubaydah and the other blameless lads.

That is, if you believe waterboarding is “torture.”

I don’t believe it’s torture. Nor does Dick Cheney. But Nancy Pelosi does. Or so she has said, latterly.

Alarmed by her erratic public performance, the speaker’s fellow San Francisco Democrat Dianne Feinstein attempted to put an end to Nancy’s self-torture session. “I don’t want to make an apology for anybody,” said Senator Feinstein, “but in 2002, it wasn’t 2006, ’07, ’08, or ’09. It was right after 9/11, and there were in fact discussions about a second wave of attacks.”

Indeed. In effect, the senator is saying waterboarding was acceptable in 2002, but not by 2009. The waterboarding didn’t change, but the country did. It was no longer America’s war but Bush’s war. And it was no longer a bipartisan interrogation technique that enjoyed the explicit approval of both parties’ leaderships, but a grubby Bush-Cheney-Rummy war crime.

Dianne Feinstein has provided the least worst explanation for her colleague’s behavior. The alternative — that Speaker Pelosi is a contemptible opportunist hack playing the cheapest but most destructive kind of politics with key elements of national security — is, of course, unthinkable. Senator Feinstein says airily that no reasonable person would hold dear Nancy to account for what she supported all those years ago. But it’s okay to hold Cheney or some no-name Justice Department backroom boy to account?


Well, sure. It’s the Miss USA standard of political integrity: Carrie Prejean and Barack Obama have the same publicly stated views on gay marriage. But the politically correct enforcers know that Barack doesn’t mean it, so that’s okay, whereas Carrie does, so that’s a hate crime. In the torture debate, Pelosi is Obama and Dick Cheney is Carrie Prejean. Dick means it, because to him this is an issue of national security. Nancy doesn’t, because to her it’s about the shifting breezes of political viability.

But it does make you wonder whether a superpower with this kind of leadership class should really be going to war at all. Over at the New York Times, the elderly schoolgirl Maureen Dowd riffed off Cheney’s defense of waterboarding and argued that, no matter when the next terrorist attack comes, the former vice president would be the one primarily responsible. He is, she said, “a force multiplier for Muslims who hate America.”

Really? Last week, while Speaker Pelosi was preoccupied with her what-did-I-know-and-when-did-I-know-that-I-knew-it routine, the Daily Telegraph in London reported what is believed to be the second mass poisoning of Afghan schoolgirls, this time at Ura Jalili High School for Girls in Charikar. Fifty students had to be hospitalized after a mysterious “poison gas” infected the classrooms. As you may recall, under the Taliban it was illegal for girls to attend school, and Afghan insurgents have made a sustained effort to make the price of female education too high. So, in an effort to identify the poison, blood samples have been taken to Bagram air base to be analyzed by the U.S. military, taking time off its hectic schedule of mass torture.

Does waterboarding so outrage the Muslim world that it drives millions of young men into the dark embrace of al-Qaeda? No. But the media fetishization of U.S. “torture” is certainly “a force multiplier” for Muslims who don’t so much “hate” as despise America, not least for its self-loathing.

One of the few U.S. commentators to pick up on the Afghan schoolgirls story was Phyllis Chesler, who wrote about it under the headline “The High Cost Of Western Idealism.” America and its few real allies fight under the most constrained and self-imposed rules of engagement ever devised, and against an enemy that rejects every basic element of the Geneva Conventions. Perhaps we are so rich, so smart, so advanced that we can fight with one arm and both legs tied behind our back and still win — eventually. Along the way many innocents will suffer. But better that than that a Gitmo detainee with a fear of insects should have a caterpillar put in his cell.

Watching the Democrats champing at the bit last week, I thought perhaps we could cut to the chase and handcuff Cheney and Pelosi to a radiator in the basement of a CIA safe house somewhere. But on reflection this would be an unacceptable level of torture. It would be ungallant to say for whom.


— Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is author of America Alone. © 2009 Mark Steyn
National Review Online - http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=YmQ5ZTA3NDE2NjE3YTEyNjY3ZjJlNzQ2YzE1OWZkNjU=
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: JDN on May 16, 2009, 10:43:36 AM
Tell us about the flat earth next, JDN. You're the only one who believes your swill.

 :roll:  :-D  :evil:

Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: HUSS on May 16, 2009, 11:39:25 AM
doesnt change the fact that the video would have been improved had an out of control cement truck had made an entrance.

GM; while I thought/hoped we were moving on...




10. Generally, NO. Privately owned shopping malls are not considered to be public forum areas (like streets, sidewalks and public parks are) for purposes of 1st Amendment activity. People may have the right to protest outside the mall on public property, but you can keep demonstrators out of privately owned parking areas and the mall interior completely, if owners of the mall don't want people protesting there.
[

ERGO -  IF the owners of the mall does not object, people cannot be kept out of the mall and demonstrations are allowed.

In this instance, the owner did not call the police nor did the owner seem to object, therefore again I repeat, NO CRIME...





Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: G M on May 16, 2009, 02:41:41 PM
GM; while I thought/hoped we were moving on...




10. Generally, NO. Privately owned shopping malls are not considered to be public forum areas (like streets, sidewalks and public parks are) for purposes of 1st Amendment activity. People may have the right to protest outside the mall on public property, but you can keep demonstrators out of privately owned parking areas and the mall interior completely, if owners of the mall don't want people protesting there.
[

ERGO -  IF the owners of the mall does not object, people cannot be kept out of the mall and demonstrations are allowed.

In this instance, the owner did not call the police nor did the owner seem to object, therefore again I repeat, NO CRIME...






**The Simon Wiesenthal Center would disagree, it seems.**

2009 News Releases

SIMON WIESENTHAL CENTRE - EUROPE
Tel. +33-147237637 - Fax: +33-147208401
e-mail: csweurope@gmail.com

Wiesenthal Centre-Backed French National Bureau Against Antisemitism Takes Legal Action against Anti-Israel Boycotters


Paris, 23 March 2009

The Simon Wiesenthal Centre-backed National Bureau Against Antisemitism (BNVCA), together with the French Association for Assistance to Israel (SFSI) and the Jewish Communities Council of Seine-Saint Denis (CCJ 93), on 20 March, took legal action against "persons instigating, promoting, or complicit, in the boycott of Israeli manufactured products."

Registering with the Public Prosecutor of the Bobigny district, their complaint noted:

- "Numerous calls from our members and the general public, regarding the invasion of Paris suburban supermarkets by anti-Israel boycotters."

- "The language of this campaign of incitement to hatred against Israel, in the short or mid-term, leads to anti-Jewish acts in the country.
Example: "The Israelis sell baby diapers [here], while they kill Palestinian children."

- "Videos available on EUROPALESTINE.COM, YOUTUBE.COM and DAILYMOTION.COM (see web links below) present these boycott operations in "Carrefour" supermarkets around Paris. We urge the management of these stores not to succumb to delinquent intimidation and to continue offering their clientele products, including from Israel, without discrimination."

- "This boycott campaign should be viewed as a discriminatory and punishable crime, inasmuch as many of the targeted products serve the kosher dietary needs of Jewish citizens [of France]."

- "All persons responsible for provocation to these crimes and delicts are charged under 'Article 23 of the Law of 29 July 1881, Appendix 47 of the Criminal Code', and for delicts against the Public Good under "Article 27 of the same law'."

Flyers, stickers and a list of products to be boycotted were also submitted to the Prosecutor.

"The threatening nature of the boycotters' occupation in each supermarket, and their manipulation of the public, is too reminiscent of the Nazi 'Kristallnacht' ('Night of Broken Glass') of 9 November 1938, under the slogan 'Kauft nicht bei Juden!' (Do Not buy Jewish products)," commented Dr Shimon Samuels, Director for International Relations of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre.

"We all know where 'Kristallnacht' ended: at Auschwitz and the destruction of Europe", concluded Samuels.

______________________

Web links of boycott actions:

http://www.europalestine.com/article.php3?id_article=3908
http://www.dailymotion.com/relevance/search/boycot+israel+/video/x8nocz_action-boycott-israel_news
(Aulnay-sous-Bois, 7 March 2009)

http://www.europalestine.com/article.php3?id_article=3814
http://www.dailymotion.com/relevance/search/boycot+israel+/video/x8jj7c_operation-de-boycot-2_news
(Genevilliers, 21 February 2009)

http://www.europalestine.com/article.php3?id_article=3846
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGKifWrNoOk
(Saint Denis, 14 February 2009)

______________________

For further information, please contact Shimon Samuels at +33.609.77.01.58.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: JDN on May 16, 2009, 06:26:18 PM
**The Simon Wiesenthal Center would disagree, it seems.**

With no offense meant, I think the Simon Wiesenthal Centre is a bit biased.  I suppose they
can take "legal action" and file a civil suit; but then anyone can sue anyone for anything.  Let's see if they win.....

As for criminal action (that is the issue here) all the flyers stickers and list of products were "submitted" to the
prosecutor and a complaint "registered" based upon a law written in 1881.  Want to bet that the prosecutor files that complaint in his circular file under his desk?
And do you really think a Judge in France will support that complaint?  And stop the boycott?  And arrest the "peaceful" protestors?
(as for the ones doing firebombing etc. they should be arrested, but the ones in this video were peaceful)

And remember, there is no complaint from the store owners?  Therefore, I doubt if anyone will be arrested and I doubt if the boycott will be stopped;
wrong or right, you know that too.  Sorry, no criminal crime.  I think you are letting your emotions overwhelm your logic.

Please post again when the protestors in this video have been arrested; in the interim, ... well I think we will all die of old age first.  :-)


Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: G M on May 16, 2009, 09:06:00 PM
**So, according to JDN, these women who don't call the police weren't victims of a crime. Yes?**

http://www.wjactv.com/news/19142996/detail.html

Sexual Assault Remains Most Unreported Crime
Posted: 8:01 pm EDT April 9, 2009
Updated: 8:36 pm EDT April 9, 2009

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- Sexual assault remains the most under-reported crime, so increasing the knowledge of how to protect against sexual assault is top priority, especially at Penn State University.
"The numbers indicate to us that there is between 800 and 1,000 incidents each year," said Susan DelPonte, Program Assistant with Center for Women Students.
DelPonte said her staff only sees about ten percent of those incidents walk through the door.
"Unfortunately I think there is still a societal stigma and women think it's their fault," she said.
The numbers are even lower for university police.
"If we see one, we're lucky," said Police Service Officer Ellen Aschenbrenner. "I understand why people don't report it, the stigma. The fear that they will be put on trial themselves and be victimized over again. I totally understand that, but I would like to see more justice for these people who are victimized."
DelPonte said, "Our job is really to give them resources that are available, so it's always their choice."
One of those resources is a series of rape aggression defense classes or RAD.
The program is made possible by Penn State University Police and Center for Women Students.
It's four classes totaling 12 hours of the latest self-defense techniques.
"The main goal of this defensive class is to get away and to survive the encounter,” said Aschenbrenner. "So, it doesn't matter what your fitness level is. It doesn't matter how big you are, strong you are, petite you are, these techniques are designed so that any woman can do them."
This semester’s RAD series begins next week for women students only, however, Aschenbrenner said she has trained community groups before and will do it again if there is an interest.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: HUSS on May 17, 2009, 05:10:16 AM
The crime being committed in your video is that most of the people in these videos shouldnt have been allowed into France in the first place.  Please do not portray these people as non violent mis understood youths.  Most of the time they are so violent and un appreciative of being given a chance to live in a civilized country that the police in France have been instructed to stay out of 751+ zones unless they are entering the area in a sizeable force.
If these are the people you want to throw your lot in with it speaks volumes to your character.  Something you freedom of speech at all cost types convieniently forget when foriegners use our own laws against us is that democracy has no defense mechanism to stop muslims from voting in people who will give us sharia and turn us against our allies.  These people deserve only one right, the right to be escorted to the border and set loose into the sea.

The 751 No-Go Zones of France
by Daniel Pipes
November 14, 2006
updated Sun, 16 Mar 2008

http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2006/11/the-751-no-go-zones-of-france.html

 Print  Send  Comment  RSS Share:       

They go by the euphemistic term Zones Urbaines Sensibles, or Sensitive Urban Zones, with the even more antiseptic acronym ZUS, and there are 751 of them as of last count. They are convienently listed on one long webpage, complete with street demarcations and map delineations.

What are they? Those places in France that the French state does not control. They range from two zones in the medieval town of Carcassone to twelve in the heavily Muslim town of Marseilles, with hardly a town in France lacking in its ZUS. The ZUS came into existence in late 1996 and according to a 2004 estimate, nearly 5 million people live in them.

Comment: A more precise name for these zones would be Dar al-Islam, the place where Muslims rule. (November 14, 2006)

Nov. 28, 2006 update: For an insight into how bad things are, the police in Lyons demonstrated on Nov. 9, denouncing "violence against the forces of order." Things have reached a pretty sad state when the police have to demonstrate in the streets against the criminals.

Jan. 5, 2008 update: In a remarkable statement, Michael Nazir-Ali, the Pakistani-born bishop of Rochester, writes in the Daily Telegraph about the situation in Great Britain:

there has been a worldwide resurgence of the ideology of Islamic extremism. One of the results of this has been to further alienate the young from the nation in which they were growing up and also to turn already separate communities into "no-go" areas where adherence to this ideology has become a mark of acceptability. Those of a different faith or race may find it difficult to live or work there because of hostility to them.

Jan. 16, 2008 update: Paul Belien of Brussels Journal provides an update on the ZUS, connecting them to organized crime in a way that helps explain police reluctance to intervene:

In May [2007], the French voters elected Mr. [Nicolas] Sarkozy as president because he had promised to restore the authority of the Republic over France's 751 no-go areas, the so-called zones urbaines sensibles (ZUS, sensitive urban areas), where 5 million people - 8 percent of the population - live. During his first months in office he has been too busy with other activities, such as selling nuclear plants to Libya and getting divorced. While the French media publish nude pictures of the future (third) Mrs. Sarkozy, the situation in the ZUS has remained as "sensitive" as before.

People get mugged, even murdered, in the ZUS, but the media prefer not to write about it. When large-scale rioting erupts and officers and firemen are attacked, the behavior of the thugs is condoned with references to their "poverty" and to the "racism" of the indigenous French. The French media never devote their attention to the bleak situation of intimidation and lawlessness in which 8 percent of the population, including many poor indigenous French, are forced to live. Muslim racism toward the "infidels" is never mentioned.

Xavier Raufer, a former French intelligence officer who heads the department on organized crime and terrorism at the Institute of Criminology of the University of Paris II, thinks that organized crime has a lot to do with the indifference of the French establishment.

The ZUS are centers of drug trafficking. According to a recent report of the French government's Interdepartmental Commission to Combat Drug Traffic and Addiction (MILDT) 550,000 people in France consume cannabis on a daily basis and 1.2 million on a regular basis. The annual cannabis consumption amounts to 208 tons for a market value of 832 million euros ($1.2 billion in U.S. dollars). MILDT estimates that there are between 6,000 and 13,000 small "entrepreneurs" and between 700 and 1,400 wholesalers who make a living out of dealing cannabis. The wholesalers earn up to 550,000 euros ($820,000) per year. Since they operate from within the ZUS the drug dealers are beyond the reach of the French authorities.

The ZUS exist not only because Muslims wish to live in their own areas according to their own culture and their own Shariah laws, but also because organized crime wants to operate without the judicial and fiscal interference of the French state. In France, Shariah law and mafia rule have become almost identical.

Mar. 8, 2008 update: Britain has "ethnic" no-go areas for military personnel in uniform, the Times (London) reports today at "Military uniforms in public ‘risk offending minorities'."

Certain areas in Britain will still have to remain off-limits for servicemen and women in military gear, despite the Government's desire for a nationwide uniform free-for-all, senior RAF sources acknowledged yesterday. … one senior air force source said that military commanders had to be aware of potential problems of personnel wearing combat and other military clothes in the street. "We're aware of the sensitivities, for example, in some ethnic minority communities which is why we need to have a dialogue with local authorities and police if we don't want to cause a problem."

Mar. 16, 2008 update: John Cornwell, a leading historian and commentator on religion, is generally skeptical of Nazir-Ali's no-go areas but finds that if anyplace fits the profile, it's Bury Park in Luton:

Luton, like other enclaves, has experienced a spate of incidents that look all too like attempts to make Bury Park a no-go area to non-Muslims. Between November of last year and last month there were 18 attacks – all registered by the police – on five non-Muslim homes in the area. One couple, Mr and Mrs Harrop, white residents in their eighties, have had bricks hurled through their windows. The home of Mrs Palmer, a widow of West Indian origin, aged 70, has been attacked four times; on one occasion a metal beer keg crashed through her bay window while she was watching TV.

Such attacks are not typical of the activities of the sort of radicals who preach a global Islamic state, or potential terrorists, who, according to one of my MI5 informants, merge into a background of "innocent normalcy" till the last minute. DCI Ian Middleton of Bedfordshire police says: "It's the perception of the victims that their Muslim neighbours are to blame, and we have to respect that. But we have our doubts." Middleton suspects, as does Margaret Moran, MP for Luton South, that the attacks could be the work of small groups of white or Muslim extremists, stirring up racial and inter-religious hatred for its own sake.

I was to come across comparable "no-go" incidents in other parts of Britain, such as threats against Muslim converts to Christianity, and attacks on visiting social workers and Salvation Army facilities.

July 28, 2008 update: For information on the German case, see Kristian Frigelj, "Unter Feinden," Die Welt. The teaser explains that "In many German urban areas, the police hardly dare enter because they are immediately assaulted." July 29, 2008 update: For a translation of this article, see "In Enemy Territory."

http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2006/11/the-751-no-go-zones-of-france.html


**The Simon Wiesenthal Center would disagree, it seems.**

With no offense meant, I think the Simon Wiesenthal Centre is a bit biased.  I suppose they
can take "legal action" and file a civil suit; but then anyone can sue anyone for anything.  Let's see if they win.....

As for criminal action (that is the issue here) all the flyers stickers and list of products were "submitted" to the
prosecutor and a complaint "registered" based upon a law written in 1881.  Want to bet that the prosecutor files that complaint in his circular file under his desk?
And do you really think a Judge in France will support that complaint?  And stop the boycott?  And arrest the "peaceful" protestors?
(as for the ones doing firebombing etc. they should be arrested, but the ones in this video were peaceful)

And remember, there is no complaint from the store owners?  Therefore, I doubt if anyone will be arrested and I doubt if the boycott will be stopped;
wrong or right, you know that too.  Sorry, no criminal crime.  I think you are letting your emotions overwhelm your logic.

Please post again when the protestors in this video have been arrested; in the interim, ... well I think we will all die of old age first.  :-)



Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: JDN on May 17, 2009, 07:43:37 AM
Huss....

I normally agree with most of your posts.  Perhaps my only criticism is that you have a tendency to generalize.
My fault perhaps is that I am myopic and I don't address the big picture.

And your comment "this thread is turning into a train wreck that you know you should pass over but just can't turn away"
seems apropos. 

However, since you did decide to get on this train, I take offense with your comment; rather
"these are NOT the people I want throw my lot in" and therefore it speaks nothing of my character.  Because I defend their
right to peacefully protest and boycott, it does not mean I approve of violence or criminal activity.

I also disagree with your comment, "when foreigners use our own laws against us is that democracy has no defense mechanism to stop
muslims from VOTING in people who will give us sharia and turn us against our allies."

Our country was founded on immigration.  My family is from Norway and Germany.  And I happen to have friends from many
different backgrounds and ethnic groups.  You mentioned that the "crime being committed in "this" video (it is not "my" video"; maybe Doug's video) is that
most of the people in these videos shouldn't have been allowed into France in the first place."  So why were they?
Could it be that France needed workers?  Like we imported Chinese labor?  Immigration policies can often be directly traced to the economy;
no one cares when times are good, there are plenty of jobs, but racism raises its ugly head when the economy turns and there is unemployment.
Or could it be guilt over Algeria?  Like America for many years allowed Vietnamese to easily immigrate here? 
Or could it be France just had a generous heart like America truly does?

In another post you commented,
"the answer is mass deportations and immigration reform.  A country accepting immigrants should look at applicants the same way a business interviews potential employees. Will they assimilate and fit into the culture?  Do they speak the language? do they offer a skill set that is in demand?  Will the country be a better place for having them?
If the answer is not yes to all of those questions they should be barred from entering."

I am against all illegal immigrants and agree that they should all (impossible) be escorted to the border (not sure if I agree they "should be set loose
into the sea").  But legal immigrants?  Many of whom have become citizens here and in France?  "Mass deportation? Why? Because they are of a different faith?
A different color?  They don't speak English well?  They have a brown eye?  No skill in demand; I mean God forbid if they are an auto factory worker.  I mean what is the litmus test? 
You said, "do they speak the language"?  Since when did that become a litmus test?
I doubt if many of our forefathers coming through Ellis Island could speak English.  You fall in love with a beautiful Italian girl while on vacation.  No English (you speak some Italian)
and she has no job skills.  So I guess marriage and bringing her home to America is out of the question?

Actually, it is not the easy to immigrate (legally) to the United States. And my point is, it's complicated.  Where do you draw the line.  Your Italian wife comes home with you.  Her kids from the previous marriage also come with her.  She misses her mom, so she comes too.  And her Dad.  Now they miss their sisters and brothers; they too want to visit and marry an American.  And truly adorable cousins.  Where do you say "No"?  And where is the line?  It is not easy...

But I object to your comment, when foreigners use our own laws against us is that democracy has no defense mechanism to stop
muslims from VOTING in people who will give us sharia and turn us against our allies."

The bedrock of our democracy is the power of the vote.  Are you truly proposing that we deny immigrants who have become citizens the right to vote if you don't agree with their politics? Or religion?  That they should be denied their citizenship for not following YOUR politics and religion?  On this basis Jews too could have been deported in our history.  Be careful what you ask for, it may one day come back to bite you.





Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 17, 2009, 09:23:27 AM
TANGENT:

GM:

Your basic point is sound, but I would also point out that many women's rights groups define rape in very Orwellian terms.  A few years back we had a thread here where it was reported that as they define it (working from memory here so the number could be off somewhat) some 80% of women who have been raped don't know they were raped.   :? :? :?

Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: HUSS on May 17, 2009, 12:28:32 PM

I also disagree with your comment, "when foreigners use our own laws against us is that democracy has no defense mechanism to stop
muslims from VOTING in people who will give us sharia and turn us against our allies."
It does not, and our "democracy is being used against us to curtail traditional norms that the North Americans founded their countries on



Quote
Our country was founded on immigration.  My family is from Norway and Germany.  And I happen to have friends from many
different backgrounds and ethnic groups.  You mentioned that the "crime being committed in "this" video (it is not "my" video"; maybe Doug's video) is that
most of the people in these videos shouldn't have been allowed into France in the first place."  So why were they?
Could it be that France needed workers?  Like we imported Chinese labor?  Immigration policies can often be directly traced to the economy;
no one cares when times are good, there are plenty of jobs, but racism raises its ugly head when the economy turns and there is unemployment.
Or could it be guilt over Algeria?  Like America for many years allowed Vietnamese to easily immigrate here? 
Or could it be France just had a generous heart like America truly does?
Generous?  Have you ever stopped to think that the reason the liberals coddle groups like CAIR and push for mass imigration is because they hate conservatives so much?????? the enemy of my enemy is my friend??? what makes me laugh is that the liberals who coddle groups like CAIR would be the first ones with their throats slit if ever sharia were instituted.  some how i just dont see mohammeed chumming around with anti gun types and gays.


Quote
In another post you commented,
"the answer is mass deportations and immigration reform.  A country accepting immigrants should look at applicants the same way a business interviews potential employees. Will they assimilate and fit into the culture?  Do they speak the language? do they offer a skill set that is in demand?  Will the country be a better place for having them?
If the answer is not yes to all of those questions they should be barred from entering."

I am against all illegal immigrants and agree that they should all (impossible) be escorted to the border (not sure if I agree they "should be set loose
into the sea").  But legal immigrants?  Many of whom have become citizens here and in France?  "Mass deportation? Why? Because they are of a different faith?
A different color?  They don't speak English well?  They have a brown eye?  No skill in demand; I mean God forbid if they are an auto factory worker.  I mean what is the litmus test? 
You said, "do they speak the language"?  Since when did that become a litmus test?
I doubt if many of our forefathers coming through Ellis Island could speak English.  You fall in love with a beautiful Italian girl while on vacation.  No English (you speak some Italian)
and she has no job skills.  So I guess marriage and bringing her home to America is out of the question?
The litmus test is, will the contribute to our take from society.  If they can not pay for themselves why should we let them in?  If you want to import an entire family from itally go ahead.  Just dont ask for tax payers to foot the bill.




Quote
Actually, it is not the easy to immigrate (legally) to the United States. And my point is, it's complicated.  Where do you draw the line.  Your Italian wife comes home with you.  Her kids from the previous marriage also come with her.  She misses her mom, so she comes too.  And her Dad.  Now they miss their sisters and brothers; they too want to visit and marry an American.  And truly adorable cousins.  Where do you say "No"?  And where is the line?  It is not easy...

But I object to your comment, when foreigners use our own laws against us is that democracy has no defense mechanism to stop
muslims from VOTING in people who will give us sharia and turn us against our allies."
Here is why i think you an apologist at best for muslims.  You can object all you want but the fact is it is happening.  When groups like the holy land foundation, CAIR, ISLAMVILLE etc.......... can be given tax payers money, court govt officials, be consulted on laws and operate openly what else can you say but immigrants are using our system against us.  CAIR which claims to be the voice of islam in america has no opposing group of muslims the way a child molester priet is run out of town by Christians. 
http://www.anti-cair-net.org/ - Have a look at this site, concrete proof that these people operate against us with our own laws and money.  After having almost ever foundign member tried and convicted in terror activities CAIR is still operating and recieving tax payer money.  France still has 751 zones that operate outisde of French law but still receive state benifits. so you can objest all you want, you can lobby for these people all they want but it doesnt change their goal.  End democracy and bring in sharia.



Quote
The bedrock of our democracy is the power of the vote.  Are you truly proposing that we deny immigrants who have become citizens the right to vote if you don't agree with their politics? Or religion?  That they should be denied their citizenship for not following YOUR politics and religion?  On this basis Jews too could have been deported in our history.  Be careful what you ask for, it may one day come back to bite you.


By the way, you do not live in a democracy.  You live in a republic.  The republic was founded in the hopes that people would be elected who were intelligent enough to keep the average joe from voting himself entitelements and the average mohammed from voting himself Keith Ellison's ( http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2006/10/015337.php ), men who will work to undermine the republic. I leave you with this...................


"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse (generous gifts) from the public treasury. From that moment on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy (which is) always followed by a dictatorship."
"The average age of the world's greatest civilization has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through this sequence. From bondage to spiritual faith; from spiritual faith to great courage; from courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance, from abundance to complacency; from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependence, from dependence back into bondage."
 

Alexander Tyler circa 1787 re the
fall of the Athenian Republic.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 17, 2009, 12:41:31 PM
Or as I put it when I ran for Congress for the Libertarian Party:  "They had a vote.  You're paying."
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: JDN on May 17, 2009, 01:33:52 PM
A democracy or a republic? 

You are right; we were founded as a republic;
In most states only white men who owned a certain amount of property could vote. So, on the whole, the first federal government that met in 1789 was a republic with only a fig-leaf of democratic representation.

But we have evolved; decade after decade, our republic became a democratic republic.

The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery. The Fourteenth Amendment effectively extended the vote to all adult male citizens, including ex-slaves, by penalizing states that did not allow for universal male suffrage. The Fifteenth Amendment explicitly gave the right to vote to former slaves. After the Supreme Court ruled that the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments did not extend suffrage to women, a vigorous campaign for the vote was launched by women, who received the vote through the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920.

But the main Amendment that tipped the scales from the national government of the United States being a mere republic to being a true representative democracy was the often-overlooked Seventeenth Amendment, which took effect in 1913. Since 1913 the U.S. Senate has been elected directly by the voters, rather than being appointed by the state legislatures. That makes the national government democratic in form, as well as being a republic.

And I think we are better off allowing former slaves to vote, allowing women to vote, and allowing all adult male citizens to vote.  But maybe you don't?


PS  Eloquent quote you left me with, but Alexander Tyler never wrote those words nor did he ever write a book or anything else regarding "The Fall of the Athenian Republic"
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: JDN on May 17, 2009, 01:36:59 PM
Or as I put it when I ran for Congress for the Libertarian Party:  "They had a vote.  You're paying."

You mean your eloquence at the Gatherings didn't extend to the political area?
 :-)
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: G M on May 17, 2009, 02:29:58 PM
TANGENT:

GM:

Your basic point is sound, but I would also point out that many women's rights groups define rape in very Orwellian terms.  A few years back we had a thread here where it was reported that as they define it (working from memory here so the number could be off somewhat) some 80% of women who have been raped don't know they were raped.   :? :? :?



Yeah, i've had those debates with feminists in academia. What they and JDN don't understand is the legal concept of the elements of a crime. For an individual to be charged with a crime, you must have every element of the offense or you won't get the arrest warrant signed, or even worse have a warrantless arrest thrown out, with all the potential civil and criminal liabilities. you as the arresting officer may face.

Without getting into a sexual assault statute of one state or another, the crime generally can be cover by these definitions:

Sexual Battery Law & Legal Definition

 
Sexual battery is an unwanted form of contact with an intimate part of the body that is made for purposes of sexual arousal, sexual gratification or sexual abuse. Sexual battery may occur whether the victim is clothed or not. It is a crime, which varies by state laws, so local laws should be consulted.
The following is an example of a state law defining sexual battery:
"Any person who touches an intimate part of another person while that person is unlawfully restrained by the accused or an accomplice, and if the touching is against the will of the person touched and is for the purpose of sexual arousal, sexual gratification, or sexual abuse, is guilty of sexual battery."

Aggravated Sexual Assault Law & Legal Definition

 
Aggravated sexual assault is a felony sexual offense governed by state laws, which vary by state. It is typically defined as a sexual assault that maims, wounds, or disfigures the victim, or involves a victim who is physically or mentally incapacitated. It may also be defined to include a sexual assault that is aided or abetted by another person, occurs during commission of another crime, or involves use of a deadly weapon. Local laws should be consulted for specific requirements and applicable penalties.
The following is an example of a state law dealing with aggravated sexual assault:
An actor is guilty of aggravated sexual assault if he commits an act of sexual penetration with another person under any one of the following circumstances:
The victim is less than 13 years old.
The victim is at least 13 but less than 16 years old; and a. The actor is related to the victim by blood or affinity to the third degree;or b. the actor has supervisory or disciplinary power over the victim; or c. the actor is a foster parent, a guardian, or stands in loco parentis within the household;
The act is committed during the commission, or attempted commission, whether alone or with one or more other persons, of robbery, kidnapping, homicide, aggravated assault on another, burglary, arson, or criminal escape;
The actor is armed with a weapon or any object fashioned in such a manner as to lead the victim to reasonably believe it to be a weapon and threatens by word or gesture to use the weapon or object;
The actor is aided or abetted by one or more other persons and the actor uses physical force or coercion;
The actor uses physical force or coercion and severe personal injury is sustained by the victim;
The victim is one whom the actor knew or should have known was physically helpless, mentally defective or mentally incapacitated.


You'll note that nowhere is there the requirement for law enforcement to be notified as an element of the offense. Nowhere is there a provision for "gender feminists" to assert that as we live in a patriarchy, no woman can give truly voluntary consent for sex. Of course, we'll see what effect Obama's judicial appointments have on this.  :roll:
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: HUSS on May 17, 2009, 02:30:11 PM
A democracy or a republic?  

You are right; we were founded as a republic;
In most states only white men who owned a certain amount of property could vote. So, on the whole, the first federal government that met in 1789 was a republic with only a fig-leaf of democratic representation.
You always play the victim card when confronted with facts.  



Quote
The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery. The Fourteenth Amendment effectively extended the vote to all adult male citizens, including ex-slaves, by penalizing states that did not allow for universal male suffrage. The Fifteenth Amendment explicitly gave the right to vote to former slaves. After the Supreme Court ruled that the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments did not extend suffrage to women, a vigorous campaign for the vote was launched by women, who received the vote through the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920.
What does this have to do with people voting themselves entitlements and sharia?  nice little bunny trail...............




Quote
And I think we are better off allowing former slaves to vote, allowing women to vote, and allowing all adult male citizens to vote.  But maybe you don't?
your so petty.  After my whole post filled with fact this is all you have????????? your a waste of key strokes.


Quote
PS  Eloquent quote you left me with, but Alexander Tyler never wrote those words nor did he ever write a book or anything else regarding "The Fall of the Athenian Republic"
Thanks, I'll make sure to remember that for the next time i use that quote.  Again, you ignore the point of my mis quoted quote.  Your concept of democracy is what has allowed your CIC to become the CEO of an auto maker, broker a deal on what cars FIAT can build in exchange for their 35% stake in Chrysler and what salaries bank CEO's can have regardless of whether they took tarp money or not........... all to the applause of a cheering populace....... Just wait until he names himself health care czar.  you guys are going broke faster then china can sell off their U.S $ holdings. Enjoy the ride, your one of the few who deserve whats coming, atleast you got to vote for it eh?????
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: JDN on May 17, 2009, 03:38:10 PM
GM said," What they and JDN don't understand is the legal concept of the elements of a crime. For an individual to be charged with a crime, you must have every element of the offense or you won't get the arrest warrant signed, or even worse have a warrantless arrest thrown out, with all the potential civil and criminal liabilities. you as the arresting officer may face."

I really do understand.  That has been my point all along that "you must have every element of the offense"...
I keep arguing this point to no avail.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: JDN on May 17, 2009, 03:53:16 PM
Huss
 :?
I conceded your point and acknowledged that you are right; we are a republic, not technically a democracy.
Then I "wasted keystrokes" and facts pointing out how we have evolved into a form of democracy
as well as being a republic.  And I commented that overall I think it is for the better.

As for Chrysler, as far as I'm concerned they could/should have gone broke.  On another post I am the guy who supported the bond holders; remember?
Frankly, I think a few banks should have gone broke and into bankruptcy too.  And if you bought a house you can't afford, well why is that my problem?
And I too am concerned about the spending spree.

As a side note, it doesn't matter, your opinions are welcome, but are you an American citizen?  I ask, because you said, you guys are going broke faster than China.....
Or if you are a citizen, maybe you mean WE are going broke .... 

But I don't like the bailouts either...
We might disagree with a particular French video, but please don't paint me "liberal" in all matters.   I agree, WE are going broke and something needs to be done.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: HUSS on May 17, 2009, 04:02:39 PM



Huss
 :?
I conceded your point and acknowledged that you are right; we are a republic, not technically a democracy.
Then I "wasted keystrokes" and facts pointing out how we have evolved into a form of democracy
as well as being a republic.  And I commented that overall I think it is for the better.
Slavery and woman voting aside, do you really think we are better off?  How can you say that?  Western society is on the brink of out right collapse.


Quote
As for Chrysler, as far as I'm concerned they could/should have gone broke.  On another post I am the guy who supported the bond holders; remember?
Frankly, I think a few banks should have gone broke and into bankruptcy too.  And if you bought a house you can't afford, well why is that my problem?
And I too am concerned about the spending spree.
I agree, i dont think there should have been any bail outs at all.  Although i think the govt has no business being in business at all.



Quote
As a side note, it doesn't matter, your opinions are welcome, but are you an American citizen?  I ask, because you said, you guys are going broke faster than China.....
Or if you are a citizen, maybe you mean WE are going broke .... 

I live in Canada.  I as a very pro American Canadian am very frustrated with the way your govt is running things.  Your CIC is going to force us into bed with the Chinese in order to have a buyer for our oil and water.  I never thought i would say this but at this point i no longer care, as long as things pick up.


Quote
But I don't like the bailouts either...
We might disagree with a particular French video, but please don't paint me "liberal" in all matters.   I agree, WE are going broke and something needs to be done.
you may not be a liberal.......... but i think you under estimate the threat of islam and "democracy's" ability to fight off a group who wishes to vote out democracy.
Title: Nonny Nonny Boo Boo, Ad Infinitum
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on May 17, 2009, 04:47:25 PM
JDN again equivocating:
Quote
I keep arguing this point to no avail.

No, the circular point you keep warbling on about is that as there were no arrest made hence there was no crime committed. Those of us able to embrace the obvious reply that merchandise was undoubtably damaged and very likely stolen, note further that crimes like torched cars are ubiquitous in France, note further that there are zones in France where the laws aren't enforced, and then there's the fact that the term "surrender monkey" arose to describe French behavior. Ergo we think the crime of criminal damage to property, shoplifting, and likely criminal trespass occurred, though the sundry French government organs opted not to do a damn thing about it. Make a wager with me that would make the research worth my time, and I will go and ferret out the evidence that merchandise was damaged and stolen, though then again the rank sophistry you consistently and arrogantly embrace makes is likely that no level of proof would satisfy you so instead I guess I'll leave you standing in the corner, covering your ears, and yelling "no crime was committed, nonny nony boo boo" yet again.

Let's recap: you've convinced no one, demonstrated damn-foolishness for all to see, and double down up your gross inanity at every opportunity. Keep up the good work as it makes our points for us.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: G M on May 17, 2009, 04:56:58 PM
GM said," What they and JDN don't understand is the legal concept of the elements of a crime. For an individual to be charged with a crime, you must have every element of the offense or you won't get the arrest warrant signed, or even worse have a warrantless arrest thrown out, with all the potential civil and criminal liabilities. you as the arresting officer may face."

I really do understand.  That has been my point all along that "you must have every element of the offense"...
I keep arguing this point to no avail.

You keep insisting that because the police were not called means no crime was committed. If the acts in the video were done in the US, I can assure you that multiple criminal charges could be filed. If you think those acts were legal, then as I said before, try doing that at your local supermarket. We'll see how that works out for you.

Step up and walk your talk.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: G M on May 17, 2009, 05:08:04 PM
Theft Law & Legal Definition

 
Generally, a person commits the crime of theft of property if he or she:
Knowingly obtains or exerts unauthorized control over the property of another, with intent to deprive the owner of his or her property;
Knowingly obtains by deception control over the property of another, with intent to deprive the owner of his or her property; or
Knowingly obtains or exerts control over property in the custody of a law enforcement agency which was explicitly represented to the person by an agent of the law enforcement agency as being stolen.
Without proof of intent to deprive, no criminal act has occurred. There must be an element of dishonesty which may be revealed from the words or actions of the perpetrator. In California, the Supreme Court has held that proof that a defendant intended to take property only temporarily, but for so extended a period of time as to deprive the owner of a major portion of its value or enjoyment, satisfies the intent element of a theft prosecution in California.
A person commits the crime of theft of services if:
He intentionally obtains services known by him to be available only for compensation by deception, threat, false token or other means to avoid payment for the services; or
Having control over the disposition of services of others to which he is not entitled, he knowingly diverts those services to his own benefit or to the benefit of another not entitled to such services.
To be convicted of theft by taking someone must unlawfully take, appropriate or carry away any property of another with intent of depriving him of the property. A person commits the offense of theft by receiving if he or she receives, retains, or disposes of stolen property of another person that he/she knew or should have known was stolen. Theft is often classified into degrees of misdemeanors or felonies carrying varied penalties according to the value of the item stolen. State laws vary, so local laws should be consulted for the specific requirements in your area.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: G M on May 17, 2009, 05:10:25 PM
Extortion Law & Legal Definition


 
A person commits the crime of extortion if he knowingly obtains by threat control over the property of another, with intent to deprive him of the property. The property extorted may be an item of personal property or a sum of money. A threat may include impersonating as government official, such as a police officer.
Extortion is a felony in all states, except that a direct threat to harm the victim is usually treated as the crime of robbery. Extortion may be classified under different categories of seriousness depending on the degree of wrongful intent. Blackmail is a form of extortion in which the threat is to expose embarrassing, damaging information to family, friends or the public.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: G M on May 17, 2009, 05:19:56 PM
Unlawful Assembly Law & Legal Definition

 
At common law, an unlawful assembly is a gathering of at least three persons whose conduct causes observers to reasonably fear that a breach of the peace will result. Although freedom of assembly is guaranteed by the First Amendment to the Constitution, law enforcement has the right to require disbursement of such an assembly as part of the "police powers" of the state. Determination of the potential dangers of riot or breach of peace are subjective and decided on the spot by police officers or other public officials.
Claims of "unlawful assembly" were often used to break up labor union picket lines until the late 1930s, against peaceful civil rights marches in the 1950s and 1960s, and by the police against anti-Vietnam War demonstrators in the late 1960s.
The following is an example of a local unlawful assembly statute:
"Wherever three or more persons assemble with intent or with means and preparations to do an unlawful act which would be riot if actually committed, but do not act toward the commission thereof, or whenever such persons assemble without authority of law, and in such a manner as is adapted to disturb the public peace, or excite public alarm, such assembly is an unlawful assembly."
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: G M on May 17, 2009, 05:24:09 PM
Vandalism Law & Legal Definition
Related to Vandalism


 
Vandalism is typically defined as when a person knowingly causes serious physical damage to a structure or its contents. Vandalism is governed by state statutes, which vary by state. Some states have separate statutes that deal specifically with vandalism to certain property, such as autos, cemeteries, or school property. Statutes typically provide for penalties based upon the value of the property damage. Local laws should be consulted for specific requirements in your area.
The following is an example of a state statute dealing with vandalism:
A) No person shall knowingly cause serious physical harm to an occupied structure or any of its contents.
(B) (1) No person shall knowingly cause physical harm to property that is owned or possessed by another, when either of the following applies:
(a) The property is used by its owner or possessor in the owner's or possessor's profession, business, trade, or occupation, and the value of the property or the amount of physical harm involved is five hundred dollars or more;
(b) Regardless of the value of the property or the amount of damage done, the property or its equivalent is necessary in order for its owner or possessor to engage in the owner's or possessor's profession, business, trade, or occupation.
(2) No person shall knowingly cause serious physical harm to property that is owned, leased, or controlled by a governmental entity. A governmental entity includes, but is not limited to, the state or a political subdivision of the state, a school district, the board of trustees of a public library or public university, or any other body corporate and politic responsible for governmental activities only in geographical areas smaller than that of the state.
(C) No person, without privilege to do so, shall knowingly cause serious physical harm to any tomb, monument, gravestone, or other similar structure that is used as a memorial for the dead; to any fence, railing, curb, or other property that is used to protect, enclose, or ornament any cemetery; or to a cemetery.
(D) No person, without privilege to do so, shall knowingly cause physical harm to a place of burial by breaking and entering into a tomb, crypt, casket, or other structure that is used as a memorial for the dead or as an enclosure for the dead.
(E) Whoever violates this section is guilty of vandalism. Except as otherwise provided in this division, vandalism is a felony of the fifth degree that is punishable by a fine of up to two thousand five hundred dollars in addition to the penalties specified for a felony of the fifth degree in sections 2929.11 to 2929.18 of the Revised Code. If the value of the property or the amount of physical harm involved is five thousand dollars or more but less than one hundred thousand dollars, vandalism is a felony of the fourth degree. If the value of the property or the amount of physical harm involved is one hundred thousand dollars or more, vandalism is a felony of the third degree.
(F) For purposes of this section:
(1) "Cemetery" means any place of burial and includes burial sites that contain American Indian burial objects placed with or containing American Indian human remains.
(2) "Serious physical harm" means physical harm to property that results in loss to the value of the property of five hundred dollars or more.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 17, 2009, 06:21:59 PM
Now you've done it JDN!  :lol:

First rule when you find yourself in a hole.  Stop digging  :lol: :lol: :lol:
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: JDN on May 17, 2009, 06:58:04 PM
 :-)  It's the weekend and I have time.  And if I dig deep enough won't I see light?  :-D
And GM is starting to grow on me...
Maybe it's the beer he suggested I drink instead of wine?

Interesting posts GM; let me give it a try...

"Vandalism is typically defined as when a person knowingly causes serious physical damage to a structure or its contents."
"Serious physical harm" means physical harm to property that results in loss to the value of the property of five hundred dollars or more."

I doubt if many food items cost more than $500.00 and without a complaint, well.......
No Vandalism.
______________
Unlawful Assembly Law & Legal Definition
"such persons assemble without authority of law,..."

But the owner allowed them in, treated them as customers and therefore they were assembled with authority of law.
No unlawful assembly...
______________
Extortion Law & Legal Definition
"A person commits the crime of extortion if he knowingly obtains by threat control over the property of another, with intent to deprive him of the property."

But they never threatened, never gained "control" over the property (it remained in the store) and there was no intent to deprive the store of any of their property.
No extortion...
______________
Theft Law & Legal Definition
"Knowingly obtains or exerts unauthorized control over the property of another, with intent to deprive the owner of his or her property"

They had permission to be in the store so it was not "unauthorized control over the property of another" and there was no intent to deprive the owner
of his or her property - they didn't take anything.
No  theft...

_______________
NO CRIME!!!       :evil:

And you know better than I know that if there is no complaint, there is no case and therefore all of the above will rarely if ever prosecuted.

As for "stepping up and walking my talk" what am I suppose to do?  Stage a boycott Pepsi rally at my nearby Ralphs? Sorry, I don't do protests or boycotts,
but that doesn't mean others shouldn't if they are passionate about the subject. 

Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: G M on May 17, 2009, 08:10:06 PM
:-)  It's the weekend and I have time.  And if I dig deep enough won't I see light?  :-D
And GM is starting to grow on me...
Maybe it's the beer he suggested I drink instead of wine?

Interesting posts GM; let me give it a try...

"Vandalism is typically defined as when a person knowingly causes serious physical damage to a structure or its contents."
"Serious physical harm" means physical harm to property that results in loss to the value of the property of five hundred dollars or more."

I doubt if many food items cost more than $500.00 and without a complaint, well.......
No Vandalism.

**It's total losses, not the cost per item.**
______________
Unlawful Assembly Law & Legal Definition
"such persons assemble without authority of law,..."

But the owner allowed them in, treated them as customers and therefore they were assembled with authority of law.
No unlawful assembly...

**If you entered Whole Foods and began disrupting business, as was done in the video, you soon would be contacted by the store management and law enforcement in short order. Again, your rights to assembly do not apply to private property of others. Again, try it if you think I'm wrong.**
______________
Extortion Law & Legal Definition
"A person commits the crime of extortion if he knowingly obtains by threat control over the property of another, with intent to deprive him of the property."

But they never threatened, never gained "control" over the property (it remained in the store) and there was no intent to deprive the store of any of their property.
No extortion...

**Wrong. Once the products were removed from the shelves, they were no longer available to legitimate customers. Perishable items were certainly damaged. According to additional media reports observant Jews in the area were deprived of kosher products due to the acts of this group. The video shows that at least one greenshirt exited the store with what appeared to be a shopping cart full of items.Again, try this at Whole Foods.**
______________
Theft Law & Legal Definition
"Knowingly obtains or exerts unauthorized control over the property of another, with intent to deprive the owner of his or her property"

They had permission to be in the store so it was not "unauthorized control over the property of another" and there was no intent to deprive the owner
of his or her property - they didn't take anything.
No  theft...

**See above. RICO statutes have been used against groups that target merchants using similar, if not identical acts to what was seen in the video.**

_______________
NO CRIME!!!       :evil:

And you know better than I know that if there is no complaint, there is no case and therefore all of the above will rarely if ever prosecuted.

As for "stepping up and walking my talk" what am I suppose to do?  Stage a boycott Pepsi rally at my nearby Ralphs? Sorry, I don't do protests or boycotts,
but that doesn't mean others shouldn't if they are passionate about the subject. 


Pick a subject. Try this as an experiment. You seem so sure that the conduct in the video is legal. Try it and show us you are correct.

**As far as a crime not being a crime if it's not reported.... If a woman is raped and she decides not to report, do you claim that a crime was not committed? Lots of crimes go unreported, doesn't mean the acts were not criminal. Lots of crimes go unprosecuted. It doesn't mean a crime wasn't committed. If I recall correctly, the Contra Costa DA's Office is no longer prosecuting most any misd. crimes due to budget cuts. This does not mean that there aren't misd. crimes in Co-Co county, just that they aren't prosecuted.**

**Lots of murders of civil rights workers in the south went unprosecuted, so I guess those weren't crimes, by your logic.**
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: JDN on May 17, 2009, 09:21:46 PM
I am going to read a book and maybe take Crafty's advice.

But....

No damage to items was reported by the store...
Store management had no objection to this assembly; therefore law enforcement has no valid reason to intercede on private property.
No complaint was filed by management regarding perishable goods; no complaint, no case.  And no report of stolen goods,
I guess they went shopping after they finished their protest?
They have RICO statutes in France?  I didn't know that?

Sorry, no chargeable crime, but I give you credit, "if you don't have the facts, dazzle them with your #$%^&*"
You know that if there was no complaint by management police would do nothing - zero.

But I am worn out so I will take Crafty's advice and move on.



Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: G M on May 17, 2009, 10:45:47 PM
I am going to read a book and maybe take Crafty's advice.

But....

No damage to items was reported by the store...

**Again, just because a victim chooses not to report a crime does not mean a crime was not committed.**


Store management had no objection to this assembly; therefore law enforcement has no valid reason to intercede on private property.

**Not true. Often crimes are reported to law enforcement by a witness that is not being directly impacted by the criminal act. It varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, but usually a law enforcement officer seeing a crime committed, need no complaintant to make an arrest.**

No complaint was filed by management regarding perishable goods; no complaint, no case. 

**Again, just because a victim chooses not to report a crime does not mean a crime was not committed.**

And no report of stolen goods,

**See above.**

I guess they went shopping after they finished their protest?

**Sure. That's why there are no shopping bags, just stacks of items swept off of shelves visible.**

They have RICO statutes in France?  I didn't know that?

**Again, we are using US legal standards as we don't speak French and can't plumb through French statutes or legal process.**

Sorry, no chargeable crime, but I give you credit, "if you don't have the facts, dazzle them with your #$%^&*"
You know that if there was no complaint by management police would do nothing - zero.

**Wrong. Depending on the statutes, it is possible for law enforcement to pursue a case without the cooperation of a victim.**

But I am worn out so I will take Crafty's advice and move on.





You don't have to be French to be a surrender monkey, but it helps.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: G M on May 18, 2009, 01:59:36 AM
Rallies at Southern California markets end in arrests
By: Associated Press | Thursday, February 19, 2004 10:17 PM PST ∞

LOS ANGELES -- More than 40 people were arrested Thursday during supermarket rallies in support of grocery clerks idled by a four-month strike and lockout.

The granddaughter of late farmworker union leader Cesar Chavez, state Assemblywoman Jackie Goldberg, D-Los Angeles, and an 86-year-old member of the Gray Panthers activist group were among those arrested during civil disobedience rallies involving clerks and about two dozen labor unions and community groups, organizers said.

Some protesters linked arms and blocked the entrances at Vons and Pavilions stores.

Twenty people were handcuffed and led away from the two stores in mid-city Los Angeles and the San Pedro area, organizers said. Ten people were taken into custody in Santa Monica and 17 in the Orange County town of Mission Viejo, authorities said.

They were cited for misdemeanors such as trespassing, obstructing an entrance or failure to disperse and were released to face court appearances, authorities said.


**Wow. And they didn't even touch the produce.**

Actress Jamie Lee Curtis attended one rally.

"I'm here as a mommy trying to explain to her little boy why we honk, why we put our thumbs up and why we don't go into those markets," she told KABC-TV. She was not among those arrested.

More civil disobedience rallies could occur as community groups from San Francisco to Washington, D.C. prepare to support the clerks, said Shannon Donato, one of the protest organizers.

"Today was the beginning of what you will continuously see across the nation," she said.

Meanwhile, federally mediated negotiations between the union and store chains continued for a ninth day without resolution.

The strike that began Oct. 11 put 70,000 clerks from San Diego to San Luis Obispo on picket lines in front of stores owned by Albertsons Inc., Kroger Co. and Safeway Inc.. Both sides have been deadlocked for months over the cost and scope of health benefits and a proposed two-tier wage system for future employees.

After clerks went on strike at Safeway-owned Vons and Pavilions stores, Albertsons and Ralphs, owned by Kroger Co., locked out their workers. The chains have lost tens of millions of dollars in sales since then but have been able to keep stores open with replacement workers.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: JDN on May 18, 2009, 07:47:23 AM
GM; I don't think you have a life...
How many posts in the last 24 hours on this subject?
Quantity versus quality; but you are known to do that.  You are wrong on the facts so you just keep adding irrelevant posts...

My wish for you is that I hope one day your Captain or Chief of Police is Islamic; that should make it interesting.

The store in France did not report a crime because they thought NO CRIME WAS COMMITTED.  You can speculate all you want about what "might" have happened, but it didn't
appear on the tape.  Based on the tape, i.e. based upon the facts, no crime was committed.

No trespass (never asked to leave and they were customers), no vandalism (no noted damage to any product; just speculation on your part) no unlawful assembly
(they were customers admitted by and approved by management) ergo no crime.  The boycotters are now home, drinking french wine, planning
their next peaceful boycott without a worry in the world.  Only you seem to worry. I assure you that your Captain would not worry about this particular boycott.  Nor the local DA.
They both have better things to do. And real crimes to solve.

In contrast to the above peaceful demonstration, you posted a 2004 (5 years ago is the best you can do?)rally in LA where the entrance was physically "blocked".
Misdemeanor charges were brought for "trespassing" (I guess the store complained huh?)
and "failing to disperse"; well I guess that doesn't apply in France either since management did not ask the boycotters to disperse?  Frankly,
the store in France didn't seem to mind at all.  Nor did the other customers in the video.  And so the police are going to enter the store and arrest the boycotters without a complaint?
It will NEVER happen here or in France. 

Do you really think the police in LA on their on volition arrested a CA State Assembly woman on private property without a complaint from the store?  You know better than that...

Lets just wait and see if there are going to be any arrests in France for this particular boycott.  I will take the time to follow up.  Heck, I will even follow up on the Simon Wiesenthal Center's
complaint.  I bet that too will die in the trash can.   :-D  But maybe the DA will call out the police and arrest these particular protestors.   :roll:
If not, I guess you are wrong - it's simple.  As to whether you believe the boycott itself is fair is irrelevant. 

Title: Ibid
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on May 18, 2009, 08:38:54 AM
JDN pouts:
Quote
No crime was committed, nonny nonny boo boo.


Hey JDN, you're not one of these folks who pays "aspiring actresseses" to smack you around, are you? If so, could GM and I get on that gravy train, as we're providing a similar service?
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: JDN on May 18, 2009, 08:48:56 AM
No, I'll pass on you and GM.   I just like the girls doing it.   :-D

But then maybe you and GM can smack each other around?
Now that you might like?   :evil:
Title: Endless Iterations
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on May 18, 2009, 09:05:36 AM
At least I'd expect there'd be some sport involved if GM and I went at it. Indeed, we have in the past with the results nowhere near as insipid.

Hey, I found a web site that said the Holocaust didn't occur. Like the URL so you can endlessly reiterate that "fact" too?
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: G M on May 18, 2009, 10:06:17 AM
I differentiate between a "Boycott Israel" i.e. people who oppose Israel's politics (valid or invalid depending upon your viewpoint)
versus a "Boycott Jews" which I would find repugnant. 

Here in America, I have heard/seen boycott this, that, and everything else it seems under the sun.  In and of itself, why can't a person/group
oppose another group's/country's products or politics?  Free speech?

And I am a little unclear as to the video (I don't speak French) but it seems that the group simply bought up all Israel products on the shelf.
Heck, if I was manager, I would be grateful, not apologetic.

**Get mad if you want, but it looks like you've learned a lot since you posted the above.**
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: JDN on May 18, 2009, 10:26:27 AM
I continue to learn on this forum.  I don't always agree, but I definitely learn.

Often, I find I learn more from a debate or disagreement than a love-in of
like minds always agreeing.  Give me the dissenting opinion anytime.

As for you, while we do not always agree, (I think we do more often than you appreciate)
I do admire the effort and passion.  And the honesty; you make no bones about your
opinions and beliefs, and are willing to follow them blindly  :-)  I mean that as a compliment,
don't take offense.


Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: HUSS on May 18, 2009, 10:34:06 AM


Often, I find I learn more from a debate or disagreement than a love-in of
like minds always agreeing.  Give me the dissenting opinion anytime.



+1 It also helps to have an atmosphere where the development of new ideas is welcome.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: G M on May 18, 2009, 08:16:07 PM
I continue to learn on this forum.  I don't always agree, but I definitely learn.

Often, I find I learn more from a debate or disagreement than a love-in of
like minds always agreeing.  Give me the dissenting opinion anytime.

As for you, while we do not always agree, (I think we do more often than you appreciate)
I do admire the effort and passion.  And the honesty; you make no bones about your
opinions and beliefs, and are willing to follow them blindly  :-)  I mean that as a compliment,
don't take offense.



I would say that I have a core set of values shaped by my life's experiences that I strive to adhere to.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: JDN on May 18, 2009, 10:13:35 PM
I don't know your life experiences, but I admire your core set of values.

Remember that while we may continue to disagree on some subjects
I will continue to learn.
 :-)
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 19, 2009, 09:38:04 AM
And on that gracious note, may I suggest we move on from this particular little discussion.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: DougMacG on May 19, 2009, 10:13:49 AM
"And on that gracious note, may I suggest we move on from this particular little discussion."

Like the best NHL hockey referees, they wait unitl the fighters are exhausted and then they break it up.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: HUSS on May 19, 2009, 10:30:43 AM
"And on that gracious note, may I suggest we move on from this particular little discussion."

Like the best NHL hockey referees, they wait unitl the fighters are exhausted and then they break it up.

Anyone else bothered by the prospect of Carolina winning another Cup this year?????????  Even worse, not one Canadian team is in the running.  They are all american teams using Canadian mercenaries.............. oh well, atleast i have the Olympics to look forward to.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 19, 2009, 10:34:34 AM
Doug:

That was very funny.

Marc
Title: Steyn: Live Free or Die, I
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on May 20, 2009, 10:31:15 AM
Hardly a rant:

April 2009
Mark Steyn

 
Live Free or Die
 
MARK STEYN'S column appears in several newspapers, including the Washington Times, Philadelphia's Evening Bulletin, and the Orange County Register. In addition, he writes for The New Criterion, Maclean's in Canada, the Jerusalem Post, The Australian, and Hawke's Bay Today in New Zealand. The author of National Review's Happy Warrior column, he also blogs on National Review Online. He is the author of several books, including the best-selling America Alone: The End of The World as We Know It. Mr. Steyn teaches a two-week course in journalism at Hillsdale College during each spring semester.

The following is adapted from a lecture delivered at Hillsdale College on March 9, 2009.

 

MY REMARKS are titled tonight after the words of General Stark, New Hampshire's great hero of the Revolutionary War: "Live free or die!" When I first moved to New Hampshire, where this appears on our license plates, I assumed General Stark had said it before some battle or other—a bit of red meat to rally the boys for the charge; a touch of the old Henry V-at-Agincourt routine. But I soon discovered that the general had made his famous statement decades after the war, in a letter regretting that he would be unable to attend a dinner. And in a curious way I found that even more impressive. In extreme circumstances, many people can rouse themselves to rediscover the primal impulses: The brave men on Flight 93 did. They took off on what they thought was a routine business trip, and, when they realized it wasn't, they went into General Stark mode and cried "Let's roll!" But it's harder to maintain the "Live free or die!" spirit when you're facing not an immediate crisis but just a slow, remorseless, incremental, unceasing ratchet effect. "Live free or die!" sounds like a battle cry: We'll win this thing or die trying, die an honorable death. But in fact it's something far less dramatic: It's a bald statement of the reality of our lives in the prosperous West. You can live as free men, but, if you choose not to, your society will die.

My book America Alone is often assumed to be about radical Islam, firebreathing imams, the excitable young men jumping up and down in the street doing the old "Death to the Great Satan" dance. It's not. It's about us. It's about a possibly terminal manifestation of an old civilizational temptation: Indolence, as Machiavelli understood, is the greatest enemy of a republic. When I ran into trouble with the so-called "human rights" commissions up in Canada, it seemed bizarre to find the progressive left making common cause with radical Islam. One half of the alliance profess to be pro-gay, pro-feminist secularists; the other half are homophobic, misogynist theocrats. Even as the cheap bus 'n' truck road-tour version of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, it made no sense. But in fact what they have in common overrides their superficially more obvious incompatibilities: Both the secular Big Government progressives and political Islam recoil from the concept of the citizen, of the free individual entrusted to operate within his own societal space, assume his responsibilities, and exploit his potential.

In most of the developed world, the state has gradually annexed all the responsibilities of adulthood—health care, child care, care of the elderly—to the point where it's effectively severed its citizens from humanity's primal instincts, not least the survival instinct. Hillary Rodham Clinton said it takes a village to raise a child. It's supposedly an African proverb—there is no record of anyone in Africa ever using this proverb, but let that pass. P.J. O'Rourke summed up that book superbly: It takes a village to raise a child. The government is the village, and you're the child. Oh, and by the way, even if it did take a village to raise a child, I wouldn't want it to be an African village. If you fly over West Africa at night, the lights form one giant coastal megalopolis: Not even Africans regard the African village as a useful societal model. But nor is the European village. Europe's addiction to big government, unaffordable entitlements, cradle-to-grave welfare, and a dependence on mass immigration needed to sustain it has become an existential threat to some of the oldest nation-states in the world.

And now the last holdout, the United States, is embarking on the same grim path: After the President unveiled his budget, I heard Americans complain, oh, it's another Jimmy Carter, or LBJ's Great Society, or the new New Deal. You should be so lucky. Those nickel-and-dime comparisons barely begin to encompass the wholesale Europeanization that's underway. The 44th president's multi-trillion-dollar budget, the first of many, adds more to the national debt than all the previous 43 presidents combined, from George Washington to George Dubya. The President wants Europeanized health care, Europeanized daycare, Europeanized education, and, as the Europeans have discovered, even with Europeanized tax rates you can't make that math add up. In Sweden, state spending accounts for 54% of GDP. In America, it was 34%—ten years ago. Today, it's about 40%. In four years' time, that number will be trending very Swede-like.

But forget the money, the deficit, the debt, the big numbers with the 12 zeroes on the end of them. So-called fiscal conservatives often miss the point. The problem isn't the cost. These programs would still be wrong even if Bill Gates wrote a check to cover them each month. They're wrong because they deform the relationship between the citizen and the state. Even if there were no financial consequences, the moral and even spiritual consequences would still be fatal. That's the stage where Europe is.

America is just beginning this process. I looked at the rankings in Freedom in the 50 States published by George Mason University last month. New Hampshire came in Number One, the Freest State in the Nation, which all but certainly makes it the freest jurisdiction in the Western world. Which kind of depressed me. Because the Granite State feels less free to me than it did when I moved there, and you always hope there's somewhere else out there just in case things go belly up and you have to hit the road. And way down at the bottom in the last five places were Maryland, California, Rhode Island, New Jersey, and the least free state in the Union by some distance, New York.

New York! How does the song go? "If you can make it there, you'll make it anywhere!" If you can make it there, you're some kind of genius. "This is the worst fiscal downturn since the Great Depression," announced Governor Paterson a few weeks ago. So what's he doing? He's bringing in the biggest tax hike in New York history. If you can make it there, he can take it there—via state tax, sales tax, municipal tax, a doubled beer tax, a tax on clothing, a tax on cab rides, an "iTunes tax," a tax on haircuts, 137 new tax hikes in all. Call 1-800-I-HEART-NEW-YORK today and order your new package of state tax forms, for just $199.99, plus the 12% tax on tax forms and the 4% tax form application fee partially refundable upon payment of the 7.5% tax filing tax. If you can make it there, you'll certainly have no difficulty making it in Tajikistan.

New York, California... These are the great iconic American states, the ones we foreigners have heard of. To a penniless immigrant called Arnold Schwarzenegger, California was a land of plenty. Now Arnold is an immigrant of plenty in a penniless land: That's not an improvement. One of his predecessors as governor of California, Ronald Reagan, famously said, "We are a nation that has a government, not the other way around." In California, it's now the other way around: California is increasingly a government that has a state. And it is still in the early stages of the process. California has thirtysomething million people. The Province of Quebec has seven million people. Yet California and Quebec have roughly the same number of government workers. "There is a great deal of ruin in a nation," said Adam Smith, and America still has a long way to go. But it's better to jump off the train as you're leaving the station and it's still picking up speed than when it's roaring down the track and you realize you've got a one-way ticket on the Oblivion Express.

"Indolence," in Machiavelli's word: There are stages to the enervation of free peoples. America, which held out against the trend, is now at Stage One: The benign paternalist state promises to make all those worries about mortgages, debt, and health care disappear. Every night of the week, you can switch on the TV and see one of these ersatz "town meetings" in which freeborn citizens of the republic (I use the term loosely) petition the Sovereign to make all the bad stuff go away. "I have an urgent need," a lady in Fort Myers beseeched the President. "We need a home, our own kitchen, our own bathroom." He took her name and ordered his staff to meet with her. Hopefully, he didn't insult her by dispatching some no-name deputy assistant associate secretary of whatever instead of flying in one of the bigtime tax-avoiding cabinet honchos to nationalize a Florida bank and convert one of its branches into a desirable family residence, with a swing set hanging where the drive-thru ATM used to be.

As all of you know, Hillsdale College takes no federal or state monies. That used to make it an anomaly in American education. It's in danger of becoming an anomaly in America, period. Maybe it's time for Hillsdale College to launch the Hillsdale Insurance Agency, the Hillsdale Motor Company and the First National Bank of Hillsdale. The executive supremo at Bank of America is now saying, oh, if only he'd known what he knows now, he wouldn't have taken the government money. Apparently it comes with strings attached. Who knew? Sure, Hillsdale College did, but nobody else.

If you're a business, when government gives you 2% of your income, it has a veto on 100% of what you do. If you're an individual, the impact is even starker. Once you have government health care, it can be used to justify almost any restraint on freedom: After all, if the state has to cure you, it surely has an interest in preventing you needing treatment in the first place. That's the argument behind, for example, mandatory motorcycle helmets, or the creepy teams of government nutritionists currently going door to door in Britain and conducting a "health audit" of the contents of your refrigerator. They're not yet confiscating your Twinkies; they just want to take a census of how many you have. So you do all this for the "free" health care—and in the end you may not get the "free" health care anyway. Under Britain's National Health Service, for example, smokers in Manchester have been denied treatment for heart disease, and the obese in Suffolk are refused hip and knee replacements. Patricia Hewitt, the British Health Secretary, says that it's appropriate to decline treatment on the basis of "lifestyle choices." Smokers and the obese may look at their gay neighbor having unprotected sex with multiple partners, and wonder why his "lifestyle choices" get a pass while theirs don't. But that's the point: Tyranny is always whimsical.

And if they can't get you on grounds of your personal health, they'll do it on grounds of planetary health. Not so long ago in Britain it was proposed that each citizen should have a government-approved travel allowance. If you take one flight a year, you'll pay just the standard amount of tax on the journey. But, if you travel more frequently, if you take a second or third flight, you'll be subject to additional levies—in the interest of saving the planet for Al Gore's polar bear documentaries and that carbon-offset palace he lives in in Tennessee.

Isn't this the very definition of totalitarianism-lite? The Soviets restricted the movement of people through the bureaucratic apparatus of "exit visas." The British are proposing to do it through the bureaucratic apparatus of exit taxes—indeed, the bluntest form of regressive taxation. As with the Communists, the nomenklatura—the Prince of Wales, Al Gore, Madonna—will still be able to jet about hither and yon. What's a 20% surcharge to them? Especially as those for whom vast amounts of air travel are deemed essential—government officials, heads of NGOs, environmental activists—will no doubt be exempted from having to pay the extra amount. But the ghastly masses will have to stay home.

"Freedom of movement" used to be regarded as a bedrock freedom. The movement is still free, but there's now a government processing fee of $389.95. And the interesting thing about this proposal was that it came not from the Labour Party but the Conservative Party.

Title: Steyn: Live Free or Die, II
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on May 20, 2009, 10:31:35 AM
That's Stage Two of societal enervation—when the state as guarantor of all your basic needs becomes increasingly comfortable with regulating your behavior. Free peoples who were once willing to give their lives for liberty can be persuaded very quickly to relinquish their liberties for a quiet life. When President Bush talked about promoting democracy in the Middle East, there was a phrase he liked to use: "Freedom is the desire of every human heart." Really? It's unclear whether that's really the case in Gaza and the Pakistani tribal lands. But it's absolutely certain that it's not the case in Berlin and Paris, Stockholm and London, New Orleans and Buffalo. The story of the Western world since 1945 is that, invited to choose between freedom and government "security," large numbers of people vote to dump freedom every time—the freedom to make your own decisions about health care, education, property rights, and a ton of other stuff. It's ridiculous for grown men and women to say: I want to be able to choose from hundreds of cereals at the supermarket, thousands of movies from Netflix, millions of songs to play on my iPod—but I want the government to choose for me when it comes to my health care. A nation that demands the government take care of all the grown-up stuff is a nation turning into the world's wrinkliest adolescent, free only to choose its record collection.

And don't be too sure you'll get to choose your record collection in the end. That's Stage Three: When the populace has agreed to become wards of the state, it's a mere difference of degree to start regulating their thoughts. When my anglophone friends in the Province of Quebec used to complain about the lack of English signs in Quebec hospitals, my response was that, if you allow the government to be the sole provider of health care, why be surprised that they're allowed to decide the language they'll give it in? But, as I've learned during my year in the hellhole of Canadian "human rights" law, that's true in a broader sense. In the interests of "cultural protection," the Canadian state keeps foreign newspaper owners, foreign TV operators, and foreign bookstore owners out of Canada. Why shouldn't it, in return, assume the right to police the ideas disseminated through those newspapers, bookstores and TV networks it graciously agrees to permit?

When Maclean's magazine and I were hauled up in 2007 for the crime of "flagrant Islamophobia," it quickly became very clear that, for members of a profession that brags about its "courage" incessantly (far more than, say, firemen do), an awful lot of journalists are quite content to be the eunuchs in the politically correct harem. A distressing number of Western journalists see no conflict between attending lunches for World Press Freedom Day every month and agreeing to be micro-regulated by the state. The big problem for those of us arguing for classical liberalism is that in modern Canada there's hardly anything left that isn't on the state dripfeed to one degree or another: Too many of the institutions healthy societies traditionally look to as outposts of independent thought—churches, private schools, literature, the arts, the media—either have an ambiguous relationship with government or are downright dependent on it. Up north, "intellectual freedom" means the relevant film-funding agency—Cinedole Canada or whatever it's called—gives you a check to enable you to continue making so-called "bold, brave, transgressive" films that discombobulate state power not a whit.

And then comes Stage Four, in which dissenting ideas and even words are labeled as "hatred." In effect, the language itself becomes a means of control. Despite the smiley-face banalities, the tyranny becomes more naked: In Britain, a land with rampant property crime, undercover constables nevertheless find time to dine at curry restaurants on Friday nights to monitor adjoining tables lest someone in private conversation should make a racist remark. An author interviewed on BBC Radio expressed, very mildly and politely, some concerns about gay adoption and was investigated by Scotland Yard's Community Safety Unit for Homophobic, Racist and Domestic Incidents. A Daily Telegraph columnist is arrested and detained in a jail cell over a joke in a speech. A Dutch legislator is invited to speak at the Palace of Westminster by a member of the House of Lords, but is banned by the government, arrested on arrival at Heathrow and deported.

America, Britain, and even Canada are not peripheral nations: They're the three anglophone members of the G7. They're three of a handful of countries that were on the right side of all the great conflicts of the last century. But individual liberty flickers dimmer in each of them. The massive expansion of government under the laughable euphemism of "stimulus" (Stage One) comes with a quid pro quo down the line (Stage Two): Once you accept you're a child in the government nursery, why shouldn't Nanny tell you what to do? And then—Stage Three—what to think? And—Stage Four—what you're forbidden to think . . . .

Which brings us to the final stage: As I said at the beginning, Big Government isn't about the money. It's more profound than that. A couple of years back Paul Krugman wrote a column in The New York Times asserting that, while parochial American conservatives drone on about "family values," the Europeans live it, enacting policies that are more "family friendly." On the Continent, claims the professor, "government regulations actually allow people to make a desirable tradeoff-to modestly lower income in return for more time with friends and family."

As befits a distinguished economist, Professor Krugman failed to notice that for a continent of "family friendly" policies, Europe is remarkably short of families. While America's fertility rate is more or less at replacement level—2.1—seventeen European nations are at what demographers call "lowest-low" fertility—1.3 or less—a rate from which no society in human history has ever recovered. Germans, Spaniards, Italians and Greeks have upside-down family trees: four grandparents have two children and one grandchild. How can an economist analyze "family friendly" policies without noticing that the upshot of these policies is that nobody has any families?

As for all that extra time, what happened? Europeans work fewer hours than Americans, they don't have to pay for their own health care, they're post-Christian so they don't go to church, they don't marry and they don't have kids to take to school and basketball and the 4-H stand at the county fair. So what do they do with all the time?

Forget for the moment Europe's lack of world-beating companies: They regard capitalism as an Anglo-American fetish, and they mostly despise it. But what about the things Europeans supposedly value? With so much free time, where is the great European art? Where are Europe's men of science? At American universities. Meanwhile, Continental governments pour fortunes into prestigious white elephants of Euro-identity, like the Airbus A380, capable of carrying 500, 800, a thousand passengers at a time, if only somebody somewhere would order the darn thing, which they might consider doing once all the airports have built new runways to handle it.

"Give people plenty and security, and they will fall into spiritual torpor," wrote Charles Murray in In Our Hands. "When life becomes an extended picnic, with nothing of importance to do, ideas of greatness become an irritant. Such is the nature of the Europe syndrome."

The key word here is "give." When the state "gives" you plenty—when it takes care of your health, takes cares of your kids, takes care of your elderly parents, takes care of every primary responsibility of adulthood—it's not surprising that the citizenry cease to function as adults: Life becomes a kind of extended adolescence—literally so for those Germans who've mastered the knack of staying in education till they're 34 and taking early retirement at 42. Hilaire Belloc, incidentally, foresaw this very clearly in his book The Servile State in 1912. He understood that the long-term cost of a welfare society is the infantilization of the population.

Genteel decline can be very agreeable—initially: You still have terrific restaurants, beautiful buildings, a great opera house. And once the pressure's off it's nice to linger at the sidewalk table, have a second café au lait and a pain au chocolat, and watch the world go by. At the Munich Security Conference in February, President Sarkozy demanded of his fellow Continentals, "Does Europe want peace, or do we want to be left in peace?" To pose the question is to answer it. Alas, it only works for a generation or two. And it's hard to come up with a wake-up call for a society as dedicated as latterday Europe to the belief that life is about sleeping in.

As Gerald Ford liked to say when trying to ingratiate himself with conservative audiences, "A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you have." And that's true. But there's an intermediate stage: A government big enough to give you everything you want isn't big enough to get you to give any of it back. That's the position European governments find themselves in. Their citizens have become hooked on unaffordable levels of social programs which in the end will put those countries out of business. Just to get the Social Security debate in perspective, projected public pension liabilities are expected to rise by 2040 to about 6.8% of GDP in the U.S. In Greece, the figure is 25%—i.e., total societal collapse. So what? shrug the voters. Not my problem. I want my benefits. The crisis isn't the lack of money, but the lack of citizens—in the meaningful sense of that word.

Every Democrat running for election tells you they want to do this or that "for the children." If America really wanted to do something "for the children," it could try not to make the same mistake as most of the rest of the Western world and avoid bequeathing the next generation a leviathan of bloated bureaucracy and unsustainable entitlements that turns the entire nation into a giant Ponzi scheme. That's the real "war on children" (to use another Democrat catchphrase)—and every time you bulk up the budget you make it less and less likely they'll win it.

Conservatives often talk about "small government," which, in a sense, is framing the issue in leftist terms: they're for big government. But small government gives you big freedoms—and big government leaves you with very little freedom. The bailout and the stimulus and the budget and the trillion-dollar deficits are not merely massive transfers from the most dynamic and productive sector to the least dynamic and productive. When governments annex a huge chunk of the economy, they also annex a huge chunk of individual liberty. You fundamentally change the relationship between the citizen and the state into something closer to that of junkie and pusher—and you make it very difficult ever to change back. Americans face a choice: They can rediscover the animating principles of the American idea—of limited government, a self-reliant citizenry, and the opportunities to exploit your talents to the fullest—or they can join most of the rest of the Western world in terminal decline. To rekindle the spark of liberty once it dies is very difficult. The inertia, the ennui, the fatalism is more pathetic than the demographic decline and fiscal profligacy of the social democratic state, because it's subtler and less tangible. But once in a while it swims into very sharp focus. Here is the writer Oscar van den Boogaard from an interview with the Belgian paper De Standaard. Mr. van den Boogaard, a Dutch gay "humanist" (which is pretty much the trifecta of Eurocool), was reflecting on the accelerating Islamification of the Continent and concluding that the jig was up for the Europe he loved. "I am not a warrior, but who is?" he shrugged. "I have never learned to fight for my freedom. I was only good at enjoying it." In the famous Kubler-Ross five stages of grief, Mr. van den Boogard is past denial, anger, bargaining and depression, and has arrived at a kind of acceptance.

"I have never learned to fight for my freedom. I was only good at enjoying it." Sorry, doesn't work—not for long. Back in New Hampshire, General Stark knew that. Mr. van den Boogard's words are an epitaph for Europe. Whereas New Hampshire's motto—"Live free or die!"—is still the greatest rallying cry for this state or any other. About a year ago, there was a picture in the papers of Iranian students demonstrating in Tehran and waving placards. And what they'd written on those placards was: "Live free or die!" They understand the power of those words; so should we.

http://www.hillsdale.edu/news/imprimis/archive/issue.asp?year=2009&month=04
Title: A Right Kind of Reorientation
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on May 21, 2009, 08:04:49 AM
May 21, 2009
How to Deprogram a Liberal in One Year Or Less

By Robin of Berkeley

So what do you do when you realize that everything you've ever thought and believed no longer worked for you?  Where do you go when the bubble of progressive politics bursts in your face and you're left in the leftist place on earth?  It seems that the choices are as follows:  either you cling to your beliefs even more zealously and attack anyone who dares to disagree.  Or, if you're like me, you embark on a journey of discovery and recovery.

I wrote another piece recently for American Thinker, a letter of amends to conservatives.  In it I described why I transformed from a Berkeley leftist to a talk radio loving conservative the last 1 1/2 years.   I realized the Democratic Party wasn't what I thought, that it had mutated into something mean and rough, and that I had probably been living in a fantasy world all along.  I very much appreciated the outpouring of support, wisdom, and forgiveness from American Thinker readers. 

Many said something to the effect of:  Robin, congrats, but what in the world took you so long?  So let me explain.  I wasn't just your garden variety liberal who voted Democrat and that was about it.   I was a true believer.  A zealot.  Like many leftists who had abandoned Judeo-Christian religion, I worshipped at the altar of liberalism.  For instance, I never missed watching the Democratic National Convention.  I watched every speech, with tissue box handy.   (What kind of a freak was I anyway?)  The Democratic Party symbolized hope, love, compassion, promise, everything that was good and holy in the world.   I gave money, my time, my heart, my soul.  I cried with joy when Democrats won; I was distraught when they lost.

I was programmed from birth to be a devout liberal.  My dad, a hard working first generation Russian Jew, would lecture me on a regular basis, "The Democrats are the party of the little people.  The Republicans are the party of the rich guy."  He would also get a little weepy when he watched the DNC (so that must be where I got it from).  One of our rare moments of bonding was reading the newspapers together on opposite ends of the couch, interrupting each other with stories about the bad Republicans and the heroic Democrats.

When I was in high school in the early 70's in New York, I wrote impassioned essays on civil rights and on feminism.  In college, in the days before universities became indoctrination factories, I searched for politically left classes, and took every one I could find.  I spent years in consciousness raising groups lambasting male oppression with other angry feminists, and yelled "Two Four Six Eight, Pornography is Woman Hate,"  at numerous marches.

When I was 26, I parked myself in the People's Republic of Berkeley, CA, the epicenter of the far left.  I came as a liberal but soon morphed into a leftist as most people here do.  In Berkeley, San Francisco, Oakland, and the outlying towns, there is no Republican Party.  Literally.  There are only Democrats running against other Democrats.  I recall years ago going to vote at a time when there were separate lines for Democrats and Republicans.  The Democrats' line was a mile long.  The Republican's was free and clear.  After we all stood there waiting for 45 minutes, a brave young man walked up to the Republican booth and quickly voted.  I still recall the cackles and giggles as we pointed and stared at this odd, exotic bird that had come to perch for a brief while.

So maybe you get now how hard it was, how disorienting and destabilizing and crazy making it was, when I realized about 1 1/2 years ago that I no longer believed in liberalism.  I walked around in a confused state for weeks.  Being a Democrat, a liberal, a far left radical from Berkeley was a big part of my identity.  So who the heck was I if I weren't a leftist?   And what in the world would I do, given that my husband, all my friends, and all my psychotherapist clients were liberal and I would be public enemy #1 if I told anyone?   Converting from Islam to Judaism, yet still hanging out in front of the old mosque in Kabul, probably would have been easier.

After weeks of shuffling around like a zombie, it was time to do something about it.  The first step, I decided, was deprogramming myself from decades of liberal propaganda.   Out went books by Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, Michael Parenti, and various 9/11 conspiracy books.  In came Mark Levin, Ben Stein, Ron Paul, and Ayn Rand.   I heard something vaguely about Talk Radio, so I scanned my AM dial, and found Michael Savage.  I was shocked and offended by his diatribes -- but also oddly intrigued.  I found many others:  Limbaugh, Hannity, Levin, Boortz, Medved, all of whom became my "sponsors" in recovery this last year.  I found wonderfully insightful websites like American Thinker.

To my disbelief, the more I listened and read, the more these folks made sense.  For instance, at first I couldn't understand why so many conservatives expressed concern about morality issues, like gay marriage.  Berkeley is Lesbian Central, and I know many good hearted gay people. But the more I learned, the more I started getting the larger picture; that conservatives were not necessarily impugning the character of gay people, but they were alarmed at the breakdown of traditional values.   If the basic structure of society goes, e.g., traditional marriage, religion, patriotism, common language, what remains?   If everything becomes fluid, what is there to hold onto?  Without any moral structure and traditions, a society descends into anarchy and mob rule, as it is clearly doing today. 

As I educated myself, I started thinking and rethinking.   I'd wake up in the middle of the night with the sudden realization that deeply held beliefs made no sense.  Take the anti war stance of the left.  Noble and sanctimonious and all that.  But how easy it is to sit back and preach peace when you have an army defending you; to rail against the U.S. when you are protected by free speech laws;  to demonize Israel, when you've never lived through the murderous pogroms of Tsarist Russia or the Holocaust.  How hypocritical to lambast Big Business while you are making money from their stocks in your mutual fund portfolio (that is, until Obama took over).  And how ludicrous to admire Chavez, Castro and all things socialist, when the closest experience you've had to standing on a bread line is queuing up for goat cheese/arugula pizza at Whole Foods.

And this love affair with Radical Islam -- what's up with that?   I had previously thought of Islam as a quaint, folksy religion.  But when I started actually reading about it, especially Dr. Phyllis Chesler's illuminating books and web site, I realized extremist Muslims were advocating some seriously scary stuff, like destroying Israel and the West.  I had been oblivious of the horrendous treatment of women: the honor killings, beheadings, genital mutilation.   It now seemed like the height of naivety, if not masochism, to embrace with open arms people who want to kill you.  While as a liberal I was socialized to believe everyone was good, all cultures were the same, and We Are The World, We Are The Children, I began to understand that evil exists.   The emergence of evil always offers warnings signs, and we ignore them at our peril. 

Though exhausted from lack of sleep, I also started waking up.  I realized, to my utter incredulity, that conservatives made sense, and that I was one of them.   I recalled Mark Twain's quip about his father: When Twain was a teenager, he thought his father was the stupidest man in the world; but when he became a young man in his 20's, his father had many intelligent things to say. Twain couldn't believe how much his father had learned in those years! Like Twain, I grew up and saw the world as it is.  Yes it would be nice to save the planet, to eliminate hunger, and to make everyone good and righteous.  But humans don't have the power to do that. To walk around, as I did, with utopian images that didn't match reality was to view life through the eyes of a child.  An adult understands that civility matters, people need to be held accountable for their behavior, and protecting yourself and your country are moral imperatives.

So it took about a year, but my deprogramming has been successful.  I'm comfortable in my own skin, feel more alive than I have in years, and am excited by all I'm learning and becoming.   Now when I listen to Sean Hannity's theme song, "Let Freedom Ring," I get a little misty eyed (some things never change).   I only hope and pray (yes I'm doing that more too) that the US survives when the Democrats are done "changing" it.  But if this lifelong left winger from Berkeley can wake up, hopefully others will also do so before it's too late.

Robin of Berkeley is a Recovering Liberal and a psychotherapist in private practice.

Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/05/how_to_deprogram_a_liberal_in.html at May 21, 2009 - 11:03:16 AM EDT
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: JDN on May 21, 2009, 11:29:08 AM
CNN) — So what did former President Bush think about President Obama and former Vice President Dick Cheney's dueling speeches on national security policies Thursday?
He didn't watch them.
A source close to Bush said the former president was traveling at the time, enroute to New Mexico where he is the keynote speaker Thursday night at a fund raising dinner for a scholarship program for students at Artesia High School."


Good for President Bush;  isn't that what former Presidents and Vice Presidents are suppose to do?
Title: Peanut Farmer Follies
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on May 21, 2009, 12:05:58 PM
Good for President Bush;  isn't that what former Presidents and Vice Presidents are suppose to do?

What, like Jimmy Carter?
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: JDN on May 21, 2009, 12:31:59 PM
After leaving office in 1982, he established The Carter Center in Atlanta, Georgia, to advance human rights and alleviate unnecessary human suffering. The non-profit, nongovernmental Center promotes democracy, mediates and prevents conflicts, and monitors the electoral process in support of free and fair elections. It also works to improve global health through the control and eradication of diseases such as Guinea worm disease, river blindness, malaria, trachoma, lymphatic filariasis, and schistosomiasis. It also works to diminish the stigma against mental illnesses and improve nutrition through increased crop production in Africa. A major accomplishment of The Carter Center has been the elimination of more than 99%of cases of Guinea worm disease, a debilitating parasite that has existed since ancient times, from an estimated 3.5 million cases in 1986 to fewer than 10,000 cases in 2007.[48] The Carter Center has monitored 70 elections in 28 countries since 1989.[49] It has worked to resolve conflicts in Haiti, Bosnia, Ethiopia, North Korea, Sudan and other countries. Carter and the Center actively support human rights defenders around the world and have intervened with heads of state on their behalf.

Nobel Peace Prize
In 2002, President Carter received the Nobel Peace Prize for his work "to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development" through The Carter Center.[50] He was the third US President, after Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, to be awarded the Prize.

I personally am not a big fan of Carter especially while he was in office.  But as it pertains to your question, if I recollect immediately after losing the election, he didn't spend his energy trying to be in the limelight criticizing the Republican Party or the new President.  I am sure there are exceptions, but in general it seems like a nice tradition to simply go home and avoid politics at least for a few years.  Build a library.  Write a book. Otherwise you sound like a bitter old man.
Title: Carter's Curator
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on May 21, 2009, 01:20:37 PM
You forgot the part about how the head of his library quit because Carter's books had so little relation to the truth is was embarrassing to curate them.

Beyond that is the larger point you missed, you congratulate Bush, and presumably are dishing on Cheney because he partook of the exact same behavior Carter and Clinton have. How do you reconcile that?
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: ccp on May 21, 2009, 01:51:41 PM
"if I recollect immediately after losing the election, he didn't spend his energy trying to be in the limelight criticizing the Republican Party or the new President."

oh really?

I don't recall previous Presidents along with their legislative hound dogs attacking mercilessly predecessor Presidents and VPs.
I don't other PRes. going around the world and mocking to the world our previous leaders.

I don't recall other Pres. allowing "criminal like invesigations" into policies they disagree with - even after they won the Presidency.

I say good for Cheney to speak up.  Why he should just fade away and let Bama and Pelosi and the rest destroy his integrity - over what?  For doing what was necessary to keep us safe?
 
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: G M on May 21, 2009, 02:08:56 PM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVMc4g3ybnI&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Ffrontpagemag%2Ecom%2F&feature=player_embedded

Jimmy Carter's war against the Jews.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: JDN on May 21, 2009, 02:56:47 PM
CCP
I think it is a time honored "tradition" to blame the last guy in the office if he's from the other party.

That being said, i too don't understand or approve of the legislative hounds.  Or the "criminal like investigations"; I am not
an attorney, but that too seems rather overzealous.  As for Pelosi, i don't understand her BS either; although
it seems Panetta (a democrat) seems to be doing a pretty good job of defending the CIA.  And rightfully
so in my opinion. 

BbyG
Didn't know about Carter's Librarian quitting; didn't care I guess.
And I don't remember Carter attacking the next administration immediately after leaving office.  There was a grace period.
Nor did Clinton; if I remember correctly he wrote a book, worked on his library, and he and President George H. Bush went on their world wide tour together arm in arm.  After his wife became political it is understandable that he re-entered the political arena.
Nor have most other Presidents and VP's.  Best to get on your horse and go off to your ranch.  And leave it for the next generation to pick up the attack.  The Republicans just need to find some new talent to take the lead in my opinion.  And then they will do fine.


Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: ccp on May 21, 2009, 05:58:03 PM
JDN,
Thanks for your response.
I agree that it seems classier and better for those who are no longer in office not to criticize those still in or those who replaced them.
But the continued visciousness of BO and the rest is unprecedented in my memory. 
Certainly Cheney would not be doing this if not for the unending, and nastiness of the attacks persisting long after BO and the Dems won.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on May 22, 2009, 08:24:55 AM
Quote
Didn't know about Carter's Librarian quitting; didn't care I guess.

Yes you do have a tendency to note things that support your position and ignore things that reveal its folly.

Quote
And I don't remember Carter attacking the next administration immediately after leaving office.  There was a grace period.

Pshaw. Carter has been on his sanctimonious high horse from the first day he was drummed out of office. He's been gumming up Mid-east negotiations from day one also.

Quote
Nor did Clinton; if I remember correctly he wrote a book, worked on his library, and he and President George H. Bush went on their world wide tour together arm in arm.  After his wife became political it is understandable that he re-entered the political arena.

After 8 years of George Bush being demonized in the harshest terms I can recall any President enduring--much of that demonization coming from former Clintonistas--I find this argument hollow. I don't have the energy to do the research, but expect I'd find Clinton doesn't keep his mouth zipped any better than his pants.

Quote
Nor have most other Presidents and VP's.  Best to get on your horse and go off to your ranch.  And leave it for the next generation to pick up the attack.  The Republicans just need to find some new talent to take the lead in my opinion.  And then they will do fine.

You know, if the press was something other than a lap dog for the current administration, I might have some sympathy for this argument. As it stands, however, BHO and his cronies are making statements that impact this nation's national security, statements that aren't meeting much in the way of a reality check. Along comes Cheney, about the only person out there who was in a position to know about matters at hand and is speaking about it, and we're not supposed to listen to this important counterpoint because it does not meet your definition of a stylish exit?

If I gotta choose between style and substance, put me down on the substance side. And if BHO is gonna keep releasing heavily redacted material that supports his position while failing to address the holes in his statements that folks who were there point out, then I hope everyone in the former administration comes out and calls BS on the rank politicalization of national security matters that the current administration appears to be embracing. Hells bells, is it really all that difficult to choose between a full understanding of critical issues or an elegant exit? And if that choice is difficult for you, what does it say about your priorities?
Title: BHO, Deconstructionist
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on May 22, 2009, 08:28:45 AM
Second post:

Barack Obama, Deconstructionist
PETER WEHNER - 05.22.2009 - 10:27 AM
I commented earlier on President Obama’s national security speech. In reading it over, though, I was struck by something else: the contradiction between what Obama says and what he does. Let’s start with the most obvious: he lectures us against “pointing fingers at one another” — and gives a speech that includes more than two dozen critical comments (direct or implied) against the Bush Administration. For a fellow who constantly speaks about wanting to move forward, Obama spends an awful lot of time looking back. But there is more. President Obama pretends to be providing a quantum break from his predecessor — but, as Charles Krauthammer points out in his column, “Obama has adopted with only minor modifications huge swaths of the entire, allegedly lawless Bush program.”

The president continually made reference to the importance of “transparency” in his speech — yet he will not release enhanced interrogation techniques memoranda showing what information we extracted by using these techniques. Compounding this hypocrisy is Obama feeling no reluctance to release previously classified memos that dealt with the methods of interrogation.

In his speech, Obama argued that President Bush’s anti-terrorism policies did not and, indeed, could not keep this country safe (because, Obama insists, they were at odds with our most fundamental values) — yet Bush’s policies, which in fact were not at odds with our most fundamental values, did exactly that. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, there was an overwhelming consensus that we would be hit again, and probably sooner rather than later. Al Qaeda certainly tried. Yet during the remaining seven-and-a-half years of the Bush presidency, our homeland was kept safe. Such things do not happen by accident.

President Obama spoke about his passionate concern for a “legitimate legal framework, with the kind of meaningful due process and rights for the accused that could stand up on appeal.” Yet in the same speech — just a few paragraphs later — Obama said, “even when this process is complete, there may be a number of people who cannot be prosecuted for past crimes, but who nonetheless pose a threat to the security of the United States.” So Obama endorsed the idea of indefinite detention without trial for some people he believes to pose a threat.

President Obama says that waterboarding “serve[d] as a recruitment tool for terrorists, and increase[d] the will of our enemies to fight us.” Yet key metrics of the last few years — from the increasing unpopularity of al Qaeda and bin Laden in the Muslim world, to rising sentiment against killing innocent civilians, to key clerics who were once allies of jihadists turning against them — show the appeal of Islamic militancy is waning. The reason, in large part, is because the surge has been succeeding in Iraq and Bush’s polices had terrorists on the run in many parts of the world. Iraq turned out to be the birthplace of the Muslim rise against militant Islam. The way to dampen enthusiasm for terrorists is to defeat them, to turn them into the “weak horse” rather than the “strong horse.” And if Obama had his way while serving in the Senate — he both opposed the surge and declared he would withdraw all American combat troops from Iraq by March 2008 — we would have lost the war. And that loss would have been the greatest jihadist recruitment tool imaginable.

By all accounts, Barack Obama’s personal life is admirable, meaning that in this respect he is completely different from Bill Clinton. But what is becoming increasingly clear is that Obama shares with Clinton the tendency to routinely, almost promiscuously, use straw-men to strengthen his case. He employs smooth and persuasive words which, upon close inspection, are at odds with reality. Deconstructionism might go over well when you’re a professor at an Ivy League school; as President, though, it can eventually get you in trouble.

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/wehner/67031
Title: Bush League Obama
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on May 22, 2009, 08:31:43 AM
Third post:

Obama in Bush Clothing
By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, May 22, 2009

"We were able to hold it off with George Bush. The idea that we might find ourselves fighting with the Obama administration over these powers is really stunning."

-- Unnamed and dismayed human rights advocate, on legalizing indefinite detention of alleged terrorists,

the New York Times, May 21

If hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue, then the flip-flops on previously denounced anti-terror measures are the homage that Barack Obama pays to George Bush. Within 125 days, Obama has adopted with only minor modifications huge swaths of the entire, allegedly lawless Bush program.

The latest flip-flop is the restoration of military tribunals. During the 2008 campaign, Obama denounced them repeatedly, calling them an "enormous failure." Obama suspended them upon his swearing-in. Now they're back.

Of course, Obama will never admit in word what he's doing in deed. As in his rhetorically brilliant national-security speech yesterday claiming to have undone Bush's moral travesties, the military commissions flip-flop is accompanied by the usual Obama three-step: (a) excoriate the Bush policy, (b) ostentatiously unveil cosmetic changes, (c) adopt the Bush policy.

Cosmetic changes such as Obama's declaration that "we will give detainees greater latitude in selecting their own counsel." Laughable. High-toned liberal law firms are climbing over each other for the frisson of representing these miscreants in court.

What about disallowing evidence received under coercive interrogation? Hardly new, notes former prosecutor Andrew McCarthy. Under the existing rules, military judges have that authority, and they exercised it under the Bush administration to dismiss charges against al-Qaeda operative Mohammed al-Qahtani on precisely those grounds.

On Guantanamo, it's Obama's fellow Democrats who have suddenly discovered the wisdom of Bush's choice. In open rebellion against Obama's pledge to shut it down, the Senate voted 90 to 6 to reject appropriating a single penny until the president explains where he intends to put the inmates. Sen. James Webb, the de facto Democratic authority on national defense, wants the closing to be put on hold. And on Tuesday, Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said, no Gitmo inmates on American soil -- not even in American jails.

That doesn't leave a lot of places. The home countries won't take them. Europe is recalcitrant. Saint Helena needs refurbishing. Elba didn't work out too well the first time. And Devil's Island is now a tourist destination. Gitmo is starting to look good again.

Observers of all political stripes are stunned by how much of the Bush national security agenda is being adopted by this new Democratic government. Victor Davis Hanson (National Review) offers a partial list: "The Patriot Act, wiretaps, e-mail intercepts, military tribunals, Predator drone attacks, Iraq (i.e., slowing the withdrawal), Afghanistan (i.e., the surge) -- and now Guantanamo."

Jack Goldsmith (The New Republic) adds: rendition -- turning over terrorists seized abroad to foreign countries; state secrets -- claiming them in court to quash legal proceedings on rendition and other erstwhile barbarisms; and the denial of habeas corpus -- to detainees in Afghanistan's Bagram prison, indistinguishable logically and morally from Guantanamo.

What does it all mean? Democratic hypocrisy and demagoguery? Sure, but in Washington, opportunism and cynicism are hardly news.

There is something much larger at play -- an undeniable, irresistible national interest that, in the end, beyond the cheap politics, asserts itself. The urgencies and necessities of the actual post-9/11 world, as opposed to the fanciful world of the opposition politician, present a rather narrow range of acceptable alternatives.

Among them: reviving the tradition of military tribunals, used historically by George Washington, Andrew Jackson, Winfield Scott, Abraham Lincoln, Arthur MacArthur and Franklin Roosevelt. And inventing Guantanamo -- accessible, secure, offshore and nicely symbolic (the tradition of island exile for those outside the pale of civilization is a venerable one) -- a quite brilliant choice for the placement of terrorists, some of whom, the Bush administration immediately understood, would have to be detained without trial in a war that could be endless.

The genius of democracy is that the rotation of power forces the opposition to come to its senses when it takes over. When the new guys, brought to power by popular will, then adopt the policies of the old guys, a national consensus is forged and a new legitimacy established.

That's happening before our eyes. The Bush policies in the war on terror won't have to await vindication by historians. Obama is doing it day by day. His denials mean nothing. Look at his deeds.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/21/AR2009052103680_pf.html
Title: Intellect v. Emotion
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on May 22, 2009, 09:12:43 AM
Fourth post. I think this analysis is spot on; Cheney's speech was a classical argumentation tour de force, while BHO embraced touchy feely appeals to emotion.

May 22, 2009
Obama vs. Cheney: Man vs. Manchild

Rick Moran

It was an extraordinary moment for our times. Two men with radically opposing viewpoints gave speeches on national security at roughly the same time and addressed most of the same subjects.

One, former Vice President Dick Cheney. The other, our current President Barack Obama. While it is difficult to be objective about the content of both speeches, a couple of general observations about the style and tone of the addresses can be made based on long standing principles of good speechmaking without resorting to (too much) partisanship.

I found the contrasting styles of the speeches fascinating. Cheney - elder statesman, experienced in government and politics - gave a speech that was a classic debaters' defense of Bush era policies as well as a straightforward tour d'horizon listing the threats we face an the nature of our enemies. Cheney's appeal was to the head, not the heart.

Obama, on the other hand, gave a speech he could have given a year ago during the campaign. High minded but defensive - almost as if he were responding to a campaign faux pas:

Quote
The third decision that I made was to order a review of all pending cases at Guantanamo. I knew when I ordered Guantanamo closed that it would be difficult and complex. There are 240 people there who have now spent years in legal limbo. In dealing with this situation, we don't have the luxury of starting from scratch. We're cleaning up something that is, quite simply, a mess -- a misguided experiment that has left in its wake a flood of legal challenges that my administration is forced to deal with on a constant, almost daily basis, and it consumes the time of government officials whose time should be spent on better protecting our country.

Note the appeal to sympathy and evasion of responsibility. Obama's speech is peppered with these little emotional appeals for understanding which is not only unseemly for a president but only serves to highlight his confusion and refusal to place national security above the plane of rhetoric and "values" and treat it like the hard headed, real world responsibility that it must be if we are to stay safe.

Cheney cooly dissected most of Obama's arguments, praising the president for some of his actions but pointing out in no uncertain terms that the president's starry eyed view of the threats we face as well as his plans with regard to Guantanamo do not make us safer:

Quote
On his second day in office, President Obama announced that he was closing the detention facility at Guantanamo. This step came with little deliberation and no plan. Their idea now, as stated by Attorney General Holder and others, is apparently to bring some of these hardened terrorists into the United States. On this one, I find myself in complete agreement with many in the President's own party. Unsure how to explain to their constituents why terrorists might soon be relocating into their states, these Democrats chose instead to strip funding for such a move out of the most recent war supplemental.

The administration has found that it's easy to receive applause in Europe for closing Guantanamo. But it's tricky to come up with an alternative that will serve the interests of justice and America's national security. Keep in mind that these are hardened terrorists picked up overseas since 9/11. The ones that were considered low-risk were released a long time ago. And among these, it turns out that many were treated too leniently, because they cut a straight path back to their prior line of work and have conducted murderous attacks in the Middle East. I think the President will find, upon reflection, that to bring the worst of the worst terrorists inside the United States would be cause for great danger and regret in the years to come.

In the category of euphemism, the prizewinning entry would be a recent editorial in a familiar newspaper that referred to terrorists we've captured as, quote, "abducted." Here we have ruthless enemies of this country, stopped in their tracks by brave operatives in the service of America, and a major editorial page makes them sound like they were kidnap victims, picked up at random on their way to the movies.

Note how Cheney cuts through the clutter and gets to the heart of the matter. He does it by appealing to logic and reason, not emotion. Even his frequent mentions of 9/11 during the speech were contextual and not designed to elicit an emotional reaction. It's what Obama failed to do in his speech. His context was "cleaning up the Bush mess," rather than fighting and winning the War on Terror.

There was nothing radically wrong with Obama's speech stylistically - if, as I said, he were still running for president. It flowed nicely. It laid out the liberal narrative on torture and Guantanamo smoothly. The frequent breaks for applause proved that his appeal to emotion worked quite well.

But the speech itself was appalling. It sounded whiny in places and extremely defensive. And this part sent chills down my spine:

Quote
National security requires a delicate balance. One the one hand, our democracy depends on transparency. On the other hand, some information must be protected from public disclosure for the sake of our security -- for instance, the movement of our troops, our intelligence-gathering, or the information we have about a terrorist organization and its affiliates. In these and other cases, lives are at stake.

Now, several weeks ago, as part of an ongoing court case, I released memos issued by the previous administration's Office of Legal Counsel. I did not do this because I disagreed with the enhanced interrogation techniques that those memos authorized, and I didn't release the documents because I rejected their legal rationales -- although I do on both counts. I released the memos because the existence of that approach to interrogation was already widely known, the Bush administration had acknowledged its existence, and I had already banned those methods. The argument that somehow by releasing those memos we are providing terrorists with information about how they will be interrogated makes no sense. We will not be interrogating terrorists using that approach. That approach is now prohibited.

In short, I released these memos because there was no overriding reason to protect them. And the ensuing debate has helped the American people better understand how these interrogation methods came to be authorized and used.

I don't think I've ever seen such a narrow, self serving definition of government secrecy nor a lamer excuse for violating it. The same argument was made for opposing the Terrorist Surveillance Program; terrorists already know we listen to them so what's the big deal?

Cheney, to say the least, is not impressed:

Quote
One person who by all accounts objected to the release of the interrogation memos was the Director of Central Intelligence, Leon Panetta. He was joined in that view by at least four of his predecessors. I assume they felt this way because they understand the importance of protecting intelligence sources, methods, and personnel. But now that this once top-secret information is out for all to see - including the enemy - let me draw your attention to some points that are routinely overlooked.

It is a fact that only detainees of the highest intelligence value were ever subjected to enhanced interrogation. You've heard endlessly about waterboarding. It happened to three terrorists. One of them was Khalid Sheikh Muhammed - the mastermind of 9/11, who has also boasted about beheading Daniel Pearl.

We had a lot of blind spots after the attacks on our country. We didn't know about al-Qaeda's plans, but Khalid Sheikh Muhammed and a few others did know. And with many thousands of innocent lives potentially in the balance, we didn't think it made sense to let the terrorists answer questions in their own good time, if they answered them at all.

Maybe you've heard that when we captured KSM, he said he would talk as soon as he got to New York City and saw his lawyer. But like many critics of interrogations, he clearly misunderstood the business at hand. American personnel were not there to commence an elaborate legal proceeding, but to extract information from him before al-Qaeda could strike again and kill more of our people.

Cheney knows full well it is stupidity and folly to "assume" your enemy "already knows" something so it is safe to release classified information. You never know what value the enemy will receive from such releases and besides, why take the chance that they can get anything that would help them?

For Obama, his "feel good" national security policy requires that it doesn't matter if the enemy gains an advantage, only that we adhere to his idea of "American values" - which wouldn't mean very much to dead Americans who were killed due to his frightening naivete and stupidity.

These were two speeches that featured competing world views, competing visions of America, and competing ideas on how to deal with the threats that face us. Cheney's statesmanlike address contrasted with Obama's campaign-style, defensive talk. One appealed to the head, the other the heart. One was delivered by a man, the other a man-child.

Dick Cheney is emerging as the elder statesman of the Republican party and the goto guy on critiquing Obama's national security policy. Let's hope he is accorded the opportunity to comment often.




Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2009/05/obama_vs_cheney_man_vs_manchil.html at May 22, 2009 - 12:07:14 PM EDT
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: ccp on May 22, 2009, 09:24:16 AM
I've come to the conclusion that BO is the most dishonest President in my adult lifetime.
Only rivaling him in this regard would of course be Clinton.

Once his poll ratings drop we might start to hear the MSM actually call him on the incredible incongruities of his speeches and waht is actually happening. 
 
Until then, he is adored and we continue to get screwed by him and his anti America socialist gang.
Title: Boortz
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 29, 2009, 01:02:43 PM
http://boortz.com:80/more/2009_commencement_speech.html
Title: WSJ: Schumpeter
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 31, 2009, 08:16:38 AM
By CARL SCHRAMM From today's Wall Street Journal Europe.
We continue to be in the middle of a frightening economic drama, one that is putting the core tenets of modern capitalism at the center of the global debate. That is an important debate to have, considering that the fundamental assumptions of modern economics -- that governments have appropriately designed counter-cyclical tools, that central banks are omnipotent, that the business cycle has been tamed and that our securities markets have finally rationalized risk -- have been shattered.

Is this the moment the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter had envisaged when he spoke of "creative destruction"? After all, it was Schumpeter who worried more than any other modern economist about what might be called the fragile condition of capitalism. He did so having lived through the economic horrors of Weimar, witnessed the terror of Soviet-style political economy, experienced the Depression -- and seen the chaos of World War II. Plenty of destruction, to be sure. His life's work concentrated on entrepreneurs renewing the economy through what he called "creative destruction."

If Schumpeter were alive today, he would surely ask, What caused this crisis? And, is this kind of scandal or drama endemic to the nature of capitalism itself? While a lot of attention has been given to the first question, I want to focus on the more ominous second one. Namely, how to save capitalism from a potentially fatal reaction to this crisis.

We need to remember that Schumpeter embraced capitalism not as a reaction or as the second-best solution to the unproductive reality of utopian economic planning. Rather, he saw capitalism as the foundation of two complementary forces. The first was economic expansion. The second was its role in protecting individual freedom.

For Schumpeter, to sacrifice one was to imperil the other. More starkly, he would remind us in no uncertain terms that, whatever our present doubts, the only way freedom is secure for any individual is within a growing economy. In other words, political freedom depends on economic expansion. In our own time, the Indian-born economist Amartya Sen has shown the importance of this tandem for the world's developing economies where economic expansion has become synonymous with freedom.

The connection between economic growth and democracy is, as political scientist Michael Mandelbaum says, a "tendency," not an "invariable law" of political economy. Economic growth usually brings higher rates of literacy and education, as well as a general shift from rural to urban living, elements shown to be correlated with democracy. Moreover, the overlap between free markets and democracy -- in private property, limited government, a thriving civil society, and established rule of law -- makes the causal connection even stronger.

As a general rule, only capitalism can create wealth and liberty at the same time. And, of course, capitalism can expand welfare faster than any other social or economic order has ever done.

However, given the pressures of the current crisis, a future where growth and freedom continue to jointly secure each other and anchor civil society is not assured. It seems that when economic contractions occur in their inevitable, yet unpredictable way, the critique of capitalism itself becomes more powerful and shrill.

From Schumpeter's vantage point, capitalism's very success allows rich societies to use government to relax the impersonal rules that govern markets, creating new rules that buffer citizens from the rigors of risk-taking and failure. In that sense, government invents for itself the task of mediating market outcomes. Schumpeter had seen the dangers of this play out in Bismarck's conception of Prussia's welfare state. In the face of the Marxist threat, the elite secured its position by causing government to dispense social benefits. Political entrenchment, not charity, had motivated Bismarck. When distorted in such a way, free-market capitalism is seen to suppress -- rather than to encourage -- social and economic mobility.

Since the New Deal, Americans have come to see government as somehow the ultimate protector of their financial welfare. In reality, though, the evidence of the U.S. government behaving in this way during the New Deal is thin to say the least. Although it is largely forgotten now, much of the government's action during the Depression actually had a marginal impact on individual lives. Monetary expansion and technological innovation boosted the economy, while the "second" depression of 1937-1938 is widely understood as having been induced by Roosevelt's attempt to manipulate credit markets.

So what about the ultimate Schumpeterian challenge: Can capitalism be saved? France's President Nicolas Sarkozy in October 2008 proposed a brilliant formulation. He said: "The financial crisis is not the crisis of capitalism. It is the crisis of a system that has distanced itself from the most fundamental values of capitalism, which betrayed the spirit of capitalism."

No doubt, in the face of the continuing financial crisis, entrepreneurial capitalism is threatened. All over the world, people are giving greater emphasis to personal security. Their taste for assuming personal risk may be chastened, at least for the moment. This is an altogether rational and expected response.

Where that becomes troublesome, however, is the moment when government comes to be seen as the sole source of security. What we, the public, need to understand is that the best guarantor of security is not government. It's economic growth. While we want to believe otherwise, the cold fact is that government can't guarantee economic permanency. Nobody, and nothing, can.

Pragmatically speaking, we must figure out how to increase people's sense of security without making government itself bigger or more powerful.

Joseph Schumpeter's answer to all this is that the most important citizen is not the politician, nor the big businessman, nor the bankers on Wall Street. They are important, but not central to the renewal of democratic capitalism. That role, that burden falls to our fellow citizens who, in the face of the challenges we see all around us, are ready to pursuit what entrepreneurs do: Create the new, create jobs and make the wealth that will be more necessary than ever to purchase a future worth living.

Whatever road we choose, entrepreneurial capitalism cannot be revived or flourish if new government security programs end up attenuating the individual's ultimate responsibility to attend to his or her own welfare.

Mr. Schramm is president and CEO of the Kauffman Foundation and co-author of "Good Capitalism, Bad Capitalism, and the Economics of Growth and Prosperity" (Yale Univ. Press, 2007).
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: ccp on May 31, 2009, 10:49:17 AM
France's President Nicolas Sarkozy in October 2008 proposed a brilliant formulation. He said: "The financial crisis is not the crisis of capitalism. It is the crisis of a system that has distanced itself from the most fundamental values of capitalism, which betrayed the spirit of capitalism."

Sarkozy said this?

Interesting a European is looking to the right.  And the President we are stuck with is and always has been looking the other way.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: JDN on June 08, 2009, 03:58:48 PM
This post is entitled "Political Rants" so my turn...  :-)

Recently, my small town (La Canada) where I own property proposed an assessment on all residential
property.  The money is to go towards schools.  A worthy cause I suppose, education, and good
schools do keep the property up.  A simple majority is needed for it to pass.

But anyone over 65 and underprivileged (not too many in town) may chose not to pay.  Now
I support the elderly, but it doesn't seem right to me that they can vote and be counted in
favor of the assessment, yet they do not have to pay.  It seems only fair to me that only
those who will pay should be entitled to vote; and let the votes fall as they may.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: G M on June 08, 2009, 04:00:29 PM
40% of the US population doesn't pay federal income tax. Should they be able to vote?
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: JDN on June 08, 2009, 04:10:42 PM
GM; I understand your point, (it is a good one) but this is a tax on property.  IF and only if
you own residential property will you be required to pay.  Yet, you can voluntarily opt
out of paying if you are over 65 regardless of your ability to pay.  And there are a lot of affluent
65+ people in town who are homeowners including my parents.  But perhaps you are right.

It was only a "Rant".....

Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: HUSS on June 08, 2009, 04:11:12 PM
40% of the US population doesn't pay federal income tax. Should they be able to vote?

"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse (generous gifts) from the public treasury. From that moment on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy (which is) always followed by a dictatorship."
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 08, 2009, 05:12:56 PM
Maybe the Founding Fathers knew what they were doing when money and property were part of the qualifications to vote!  :lol:

@JDN:  If you take the next step and realize that money is property too, a blazing glory of comprehension will be yours  :lol: :-D
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: JDN on June 09, 2009, 06:27:05 AM
Maybe the Founding Fathers knew what they were doing when money and property were part of the qualifications to vote!  :lol:

"What is true of every member of the society, individually, is true of them all collectively; since the rights of the whole can be no more than the sum of the rights of the individuals." --Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1789. ME 7:455, Papers 15:393
Title: Dick Morris
Post by: ccp on June 11, 2009, 01:25:05 PM
He has been pointing out that bo's policies are not all that popular which is not in sync with the fact that he is popular.
He predicts his poularity will fall as the public starts to equate him as part of the problem and not the solution.
That will occur when the visciousness of his changes start to be felt.

Will see if this plays out as he predicts.


"By Dick Morris 06.10.2009 Published on TheHill.com on June 9, 2009

At last, there is convincing evidence that Obama’s poll numbers may be descending to earth. While his approval remains high — and his personal favorability is even higher — the underlying numbers suggest that a decline may be in the offing. Even as he stands on his pedestal, the numbers under his feet are crumbling.

According to a Rasmussen poll, more voters now trust Republicans more than Democrats to handle the economy, by a margin of 45-39. Scott Rasmussen notes that “this is the first time in over two years of polling that the GOP has held the advantage on this issue.” Last month, he had the Democrats holding a one-point lead, but they lost it in June’s polling.


And the Democratic leads over Republicans on their core issues are also dropping. Particularly interesting is the Democratic decline over healthcare, from an 18-point lead in May to only 10 points now.

A Gallup poll also confirms that the president’s personal ratings are high, but the underlying data less so. While 67 percent of voters give Obama personal favorable ratings and 61 percent approve of his job performance (Rasmussen has his job approval lower, at 55 percent), they give him much lower ratings on specific issues.

Gallup shows Obama getting only 55 percent approval on his handling of the economy (down from 59 percent in February) and finds that only 45 percent approve of his handling of federal spending while 46 percent approve of his treatment of the budget deficit.

As it becomes clearer that the deficit caused by spending has landed us in a new economic crisis, entirely of Obama’s own making, his popularity and job performance are likely to drop as well.

The old recession — that the public says was caused by Bush — shows signs of winding down. But the new recession and/or inflation — triggered by Obama’s massive deficits — is just now coming upon us.

If Obama refuses to cut back on his spending/stimulus plans (despite convincing evidence that Americans are not spending the money), he has three options:

a) He can raise taxes, which will trigger a deeper recession;

b) He can print money, which will trigger huge inflation;

c) He can pay more interest to borrow money, which will send the economy diving down again.

The blame for these outcomes will fall squarely on Obama’s deficit and spending policies. The fact that Americans are aware of these issues, and already disapprove of Obama’s performance on them, indicates that they will be increasingly receptive to blaming him for the “new” recession.

Interestingly, Obama’s polling is now the exact opposite of President Clinton’s in the days after Monica Lewinsky. Back then, the president’s approval for handling specific issues was his forte, while his job approval remained high but his personal favorability lagged 20 points behind. Ultimately, it is a politician’s performance on specific issues that determines his electability. Personal favorability withers in the face of issue differences. Obama is about to find out that you cannot rely on image to bolster your presidency when the underlying issues are crumbling.

All this data suggests that Obama might run out of steam just as he gets to his healthcare agenda. As unemployment mounts, month after month, and Obama’s claims of job creation (or savings) ring hollow, it is possible that he will not have the heft to pass his radical restructuring of the healthcare system. The automaton Democratic majority may pass it anyway, but it will be a one-way ticket to oblivion if they do."

Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: ccp on June 12, 2009, 09:22:11 AM
Reagan and Lincoln vs BO

Reagan said what he meant and meant and did what he said.

BO

Does not say the true extent of what he means and does and means a lot more than what he is saying.
What would the founding fathers think about such deception?

Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: DougMacG on June 12, 2009, 10:26:35 AM
CCP: "[Obama] means a lot more than hje is saying"

Scott Johnson, Powerlineblog today:
In his Rhetoric, Aristotle teaches that a good speech necessarily draws on ethos (the speaker's power of evincing a personal character which will make his speech credible), pathos (the speaker's power of stirring the emotions of his audience) and logos (argument). Paul's analysis focuses on logos to the exclusion of ethos and pathos.

Obama's flattery of his Muslim audience with historical howlers cannot be understood apart from ethos and pathos. In part the flattery supports Obama's declaration of the uncomfortable historical truth of the Holocaust. As rhetoric, Obama's falsehoods give him the standing with his audience necessary to advance a painful truth.

One cannot understand a given passage without considering its effect upon the hearers. The topic sentences of the two paragraphs of the initial passage in issue read as follows:

    Around the world, the Jewish people were persecuted for centuries, and anti-Semitism in Europe culminated in an unprecedented Holocaust.

    On the other hand, it is also undeniable that the Palestinian people - Muslims and Christians - have suffered in pursuit of a homeland.

While Obama does not himself explicitly equate the sufferings of the Jewish people with those of "the Palestinian people," the structure of the passage does so for him. And this is of course how his intended audience would hear the words. Note as well how Obama includes Christians and excludes Jews from his definition of "the Palestinian people." It is an exclusion that conflicts with history but that serves his rhetorical purposes.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: ccp on June 12, 2009, 12:32:26 PM
Hi Doug,

Fascinating point about Aristotle here.  Let's apply the philosophy, or let me try:

BO has the ethos and pathos but not the best logos.

So he and the other Dems provide logos with falsehoods, lies and other deceptive manipulations that people will fall for in their wanting to believe that he is some sort of savior.

And he bribes large numbers with his class warfare rhetoric and to confiscate wealth and give it away to his favorite constituents and supporters.

They wrongly beleive he is helping them.  In the process he is selling America down the river.
This is where Dick Morris comes in.  He points out that BO's positions are not supported by a majority of Americans though her remains favorable.  When more and more Americans begin to feel the pain he is inflicting on this country then his personal numbers will fall.




Title: Prediction:When the eventual fall comes BO will blame his fellow Dems
Post by: ccp on June 13, 2009, 09:55:24 AM
Dick Morris predictions, I think, have been fairly acurrate.  Dick thinks the outcome of the gigantic spending of BO, and his associate Dems will be one or a combination of:

1)  massive inflation
2)  the policies will fail and the economy will continue tanking
3)  or taxes will sky rocket.

All the outcomes in his opinion will cause the ruin of BO - it is only a matter of time.

My guess he is right about the first three predictions.   But I have a prediction that he may be wrong about the ruin of BO:

BO (despite another one of his deceptions stating he doesn't look much at polls) is of course studying them with a fine tooth comb.

When he sees his poll numbers start to drop because more and more people will start worrying about the gigantic spending BO is not going to just sit there.

I predict he will start throwing his democrat colleagues in both houses to the wolves, with an all out triangulation attack blaming THEM for the massive spending. 

We will start seeing more and more subtle calls and claims from him and his subordinates that HE is working diligently to hold DOWN spending.  If it doesn't come down (and it won't because Democrats are clueless without being able to steal money and buy votes), and things go wrong as Morris predicts they MUST then watch for BO start publically  blaming his own party mates for the malfeasance.  He won't accept the responsibility.

Right now he continues and is getting away with blaming the "previous administration".  But when that no longer works he will blame his fellow Dems. 

Would he succeed in getting away with this?  I am not sure.  The adoring MSM will do their best to help him.
We shall see.
Title: Bonner: The third and final stage
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 19, 2009, 07:20:02 AM
Bill Bonner
Provided as a courtesy of Agora Publishing & The Daily Reckoning
Jun 18, 2009

 

<<The United States has entered the third and final stage in the life and death of a great country.

America's history can be divided into three broad stages. The first stage was industrialization. This is what took the United States from a marginal nation of settlers, explorers, farmers, entrepreneurs and religious refugees to become the world's richest and most powerful country. The source of its wealth and power was its factories... and its people. The factories were the best in the world. And the people how labored in them were accustomed to hard work, saving, and self-discipline. There were no free lunches in America during this period. The fastest growing cities of the time were manufacturing centers - Chicago, Gary, Detroit, Pittsburg, and Birmingham. Thanks to its smokestacks and assembly lines, the US could make things better, cheaper and faster than any other country, with the possible exception of Germany before WWI and Japan after WWII. That is how the US became the world's largest creditor - by selling US-made goods to foreigners. And it's how the United States won WWI and WWII too. American factories could turn out more tanks, more planes, more guns and more butter than any other nation. And the United States had an abundant source of fuel too; "Texas Tea" they called it.

After WWII America enjoyed its glory days. It was on top of the world... in practically every sense. The United States was #1.

Nothing fails like success. The New Deal had fundamentally changed Americans' relationship to the state. Federal meddlers began playing a larger and larger role in the economic life of the country. Soon, American attitudes evolved to fit the circumstances. With the world's reserve currency... a huge lead over its competitors... and a government that promised to take care of its wants and needs, the US workforce relaxed. Gradually, it shifted from making things to buying them... while industry turned its focus from production to sales... and then, financing. Then, the United States entered the second stage: financialization.

In this second stage, the center of gravity shifted from the wealth-producing factories to the financial centers - mainly Manhattan. Prices of real estate in New York soared. Wall Street came to be seen not merely as a place to invest the proceeds of honest toil... but a way to create wealth. The most ambitious college graduates turned from engineering and manufacturing first to sales and marketing and later to finance; because that's where the money was. At the peak, in the Bubble Epoch, 2003-2007, Wall Street was drawing in the world's leading scholars in mathematics and statistics... These people were creating the biggest debt bombs in history... exotic, complicated financial concoctions... that eventually blew up in their faces.

Detroit went into a decline as early as the late '60s. GM continued to make cars, but it looked to financing as a way of make money. GMAC became the major source of GM's profits. Still mills along the Monongahela River began to rust in the '70s. Ships began to come to the US laden with goods in the '80s and '90s... and to go back empty. The US Fed tried to stimulate the US economy on several occasions, but it had a strange effect. It put more credit in the hands of US consumers - who used the money to buy goods from overseas. In effect, the US Fed was stimulating manufacturing in China!

But in 2007-2008 the bubble in consumer debt blew up. GM went broke in May of '09. The financialization stage ended. In its place comes a new stage: politicization, the third and fatal phase of a great nation.

Where is the money now? It took the train from Grand Central Station in Manhattan down to Union Station in Washington, DC. Want money? Ask Washington. It's pledged an amount equal to three times what it spent in WWII to the fight against deflation.

Where is the power now? Just ask Chrysler bondholders; in the end it didn't matter what their contracts said... when the US government turned against them, their goose was cooked. The Obama Administration, owner of GM, now sets top salaries and determines what kind of cars the company will make. Washington also determines which businesses will be kept alive - AIG - and which will die - Lehman Bros. Now it's the politicians, not Wall Street, nor investors, who decide the allocation of big capital...

And when ambitious young people buy a ticket to begin their careers, are they going to Milwaukee... to Manhattan... or to the lobbyists' mecca in Northern Virginia?>>

Jun 18, 2009
Bill Bonner
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Boyo on June 25, 2009, 12:25:41 PM
Well it really does look like it is all over for the US :cry:

ARE Americans practicing Communism?
Read the 10 Planks of The Communist Manifesto to discover the truth and learn how to know your enemy...

Karl Marx describes in his communist manifesto, the ten steps necessary to destroy a free enterprise system and replace it with a system of omnipotent government power, so as to effect a communist socialist state. Those ten steps are known as the Ten Planks of The Communist Manifesto… The following brief presents the original ten planks within the Communist Manifesto written by Karl Marx in 1848, along with the American adopted counterpart for each of the planks. From comparison it's clear MOST Americans have by myths, fraud and deception under the color of law by their own politicians in both the Republican and Democratic and parties, been transformed into Communists.

Another thing to remember, Karl Marx in creating the Communist Manifesto designed these planks AS A TEST to determine whether a society has become communist or not. If they are all in effect and in force, then the people ARE practicing communists.

Communism, by any other name is still communism, and is VERY VERY destructive to the individual and to the society!!

The 10 PLANKS stated in the Communist Manifesto and some of their American counterparts are...

1. Abolition of private property and the application of all rents of land to public purposes.
Americans do these with actions such as the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution (1868), and various zoning, school & property taxes. Also the Bureau of Land Management (Zoning laws are the first step to government property ownership)

2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
Americans know this as misapplication of the 16th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, 1913, The Social Security Act of 1936.; Joint House Resolution 192 of 1933; and various State "income" taxes. We call it "paying your fair share".

3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance.
Americans call it Federal & State estate Tax (1916); or reformed Probate Laws, and limited inheritance via arbitrary inheritance tax statutes.

4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
Americans call it government seizures, tax liens, Public "law" 99-570 (1986); Executive order 11490, sections 1205, 2002 which gives private land to the Department of Urban Development; the imprisonment of "terrorists" and those who speak out or write against the "government" (1997 Crime/Terrorist Bill); or the IRS confiscation of property without due process. Asset forfeiture laws are used by DEA, IRS, ATF etc...).

5. Centralization of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.
Americans call it the Federal Reserve which is a privately-owned credit/debt system allowed by the Federal Reserve act of 1913. All local banks are members of the Fed system, and are regulated by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) another privately-owned corporation. The Federal Reserve Banks issue Fiat Paper Money and practice economically destructive fractional reserve banking.

6. Centralization of the means of communications and transportation in the hands of the State.
Americans call it the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and Department of Transportation (DOT) mandated through the ICC act of 1887, the Commissions Act of 1934, The Interstate Commerce Commission established in 1938, The Federal Aviation Administration, Federal Communications Commission, and Executive orders 11490, 10999, as well as State mandated driver's licenses and Department of Transportation regulations.

7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the state, the bringing into cultivation of waste lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
Americans call it corporate capacity, The Desert Entry Act and The Department of Agriculture… Thus read "controlled or subsidized" rather than "owned"… This is easily seen in these as well as the Department of Commerce and Labor, Department of Interior, the Environmental Protection Agency, Bureau of Land Management, Bureau of Reclamation, Bureau of Mines, National Park Service, and the IRS control of business through corporate regulations.

8. Equal liability of all to labor. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
Americans call it Minimum Wage and slave labor like dealing with our Most Favored Nation trade partner; i.e. Communist China. We see it in practice via the Social Security Administration and The Department of Labor. The National debt and inflation caused by the communal bank has caused the need for a two "income" family. Woman in the workplace since the 1920's, the 19th amendment of the U.S. Constitution, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, assorted Socialist Unions, affirmative action, the Federal Public Works Program and of course Executive order 11000.

9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries, gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more equitable distribution of population over the country.
Americans call it the Planning Reorganization act of 1949 , zoning (Title 17 1910-1990) and Super Corporate Farms, as well as Executive orders 11647, 11731 (ten regions) and Public "law" 89-136. These provide for forced relocations and forced sterilization programs, like in China.

10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children's factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production.
Americans are being taxed to support what we call 'public' schools, but are actually "government force-tax-funded schools " Even private schools are government regulated. The purpose is to train the young to work for the communal debt system. We also call it the Department of Education, the NEA and Outcome Based "Education" . These are used so that all children can be indoctrinated and inculcated with the government propaganda, like "majority rules", and "pay your fair share". WHERE are the words "fair share" in the Constitution, Bill of Rights or the Internal Revenue Code (Title 26)?? NO WHERE is "fair share" even suggested !! The philosophical concept of "fair share" comes from the Communist maxim, "From each according to their ability, to each according to their need! This concept is pure socialism. ... America was made the greatest society by its private initiative WORK ETHIC ... Teaching ourselves and others how to "fish" to be self sufficient and produce plenty of EXTRA commodities to if so desired could be shared with others who might be "needy"... Americans have always voluntarily been the MOST generous and charitable society on the planet.

Do changing words, change the end result? ... By using different words, is it all of a sudden OK to ignore or violate the provisions or intent of the Constitution of the united States of America?????

The people (politicians) who believe in the SOCIALISTIC and COMMUNISTIC concepts, especially those who pass more and more laws implementing these slavery ideas, are traitors to their oath of office and to the Constitution of the united States of America... KNOW YOUR ENEMY ...Remove the enemy from within and from among us.

Boyo
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Boyo on June 26, 2009, 10:44:45 AM
After I read this article myself the arugument is over about the obama

Obama, the African Colonial
By L.E. Ikenga
Had Americans been able to stop obsessing over the color of Barack Obama's skin and instead paid more attention to his cultural identity, maybe he would not be in the White House today. The key to understanding him lies with his identification with his father, and his adoption of a cultural and political mindset rooted in postcolonial Africa.


Like many educated intellectuals in postcolonial Africa, Barack Hussein Obama, Sr. was enraged at the transformation of his native land by its colonial conqueror. But instead of embracing the traditional values of his own tribal cultural past, he embraced an imported Western ideology, Marxism. I call such frustrated and angry modern Africans who embrace various foreign "isms", instead of looking homeward for repair of societies that are broken, African Colonials. They are Africans who serve foreign ideas.


The tropes of America's racial history as a way of understanding all things black are useless in understanding the man who got his dreams from his father, a Kenyan exemplar of the African Colonial.


Before I continue, I need to say this: I am a first generation born West African-American woman whose parents emigrated to the U.S. in the 1970's from the country now called Nigeria. I travel to Nigeria frequently. I see myself as both a proud American and as a proud Igbo (the tribe that we come from -- also sometimes spelled Ibo). Politically, I have always been conservative (though it took this past election for me to commit to this once and for all!); my conservative values come from my Igbo heritage and my place of birth. Of course, none of this qualifies me to say what I am about to -- but at the same time it does.


My friends, despite what CNN and the rest are telling you, Barack Obama is nothing more than an old school African Colonial who is on his way to turning this country into one of the developing nations that you learn about on the National Geographic Channel. Many conservative (East, West, South, North) African-Americans like myself -- those of us who know our history -- have seen this movie before. Here are two main reasons why many Americans allowed Obama to slip through the cracks despite all of his glaring inconsistencies:


First, Obama has been living on American soil for most of his adult life. Therefore, he has been able to masquerade as one who understands and believes in American democratic ideals. But he does not. Barack Obama is intrinsically undemocratic and as his presidency plays out, this will become more obvious. Second, and most importantly, too many Americans know very little about Africa. The one-size-fits-all understanding that many Americans (both black and white) continue to have of Africa might end up bringing dire consequences for this country.


Contrary to the way it continues to be portrayed in mainstream Western culture, Africa is not a continent that can be solely defined by AIDS, ethnic rivalries, poverty and safaris. Africa, like any other continent, has an immense history defined by much diversity and complexity. Africa's long-standing relationship with Europe speaks especially to some of these complexities -- particularly the relationship that has existed between the two continents over the past two centuries. Europe's complete colonization of Africa during the nineteenth century, also known as the Scramble for Africa, produced many unfortunate consequences, the African colonial being one of them.


The African colonial (AC) is a person who by means of their birth or lineage has a direct connection with Africa. However, unlike Africans like me, their worldviews have been largely shaped not by the indigenous beliefs of a specific African tribe but by the ideals of the European imperialism that overwhelmed and dominated Africa during the colonial period. AC's have no real regard for their specific African traditions or histories.  AC's use aspects of their African culture as one would use pieces of costume jewelry: things of little or no value that can be thoughtlessly discarded when they become a negative distraction, or used on a whim to decorate oneself in order to seem exotic. (Hint: Obama's Muslim heritage).


On the other hand, AC's strive to be the best at the culture that they inherited from Europe. Throughout the West, they are tops in their professions as lawyers, doctors, engineers, Ivy League professors and business moguls; this is all well and good. It's when they decide to engage us as politicians that things become messy and convoluted.


The African colonial politician (ACP) feigns repulsion towards the hegemonic paradigms of Western civilization. But at the same time, he is completely enamored of the trappings of its aristocracy or elite culture. The ACP blames and caricatures whitey to no end for all that has gone wrong in the world. He convinces the masses that various forms of African socialism are the best way for redressing the problems that European colonialism motivated in Africa. However, as opposed to really being a hard-core African Leftist who actually believes in something, the ACP uses socialist themes as a way to disguise his true ambitions: a complete power grab whereby the "will of the people" becomes completely irrelevant.


Barack Obama is all of the above. The only difference is that he is here playing (colonial) African politics as usual.   


In his 1995 memoir, Dreams From My Father -- an eloquent piece of political propaganda -- Obama styles himself as a misunderstood intellectual who is deeply affected by the sufferings of black people, especially in America and Africa. In the book, Obama clearly sees himself as an African, not as a black American. And to prove this, he goes on a quest to understand his Kenyan roots. He is extremely thoughtful of his deceased father's legacy; this provides the main clue for understanding Barack Obama.


Barack Obama Sr. was an African colonial to the core; in his case, the apple did not fall far from the tree. All of the telltale signs of Obama's African colonialist attitudes are on full display in the book -- from his feigned antipathy towards Europeans to his view of African tribal associations as distracting elements that get in the way of "progress".  (On p. 308 of Dreams From My Father, Obama says that African tribes should be viewed as an "ancient loyalties".)


Like imperialists of Old World Europe, the ACP sees their constituents not as free thinking individuals who best know how to go about achieving and creating their own means for success. Instead, the ACP sees his constituents as a flock of ignorant sheep that need to be led -- oftentimes to their own slaughter.


Like the European imperialist who spawned him, the ACP is a destroyer of all forms of democracy.


Here are a few examples of what the British did in order to create (in 1914) what is now called Nigeria and what Obama is doing to you: 


Convince the people that "clinging" to any aspect of their cultural (tribal) identity or history is bad and regresses the process of "unity". British Imperialists deeply feared people who were loyal to anything other than the state. "Tribalism" made the imperialists have to work harder to get people to just fall in line. Imperialists pitted tribes against each other in order to create chaos that they then blamed on ethnic rivalry. Today many "educated" Nigerians, having believed that their traditions were irrelevant, remain completely ignorant of their ancestry and the history of their own tribes.
Confiscate the wealth and resources of the area that you govern by any means necessary in order to redistribute wealth. The British used this tactic to present themselves as empathetic and benevolent leaders who wanted everyone to have a "fair shake". Imperialists are not interested in equality for all. They are interested in controlling all.   
Convince the masses that your upper-crust university education naturally puts you on an intellectual plane from which to understand everything even when you understand nothing. Imperialists were able to convince the people that their elite university educations allowed them to understand what Africa needed. Many of today's Nigerians-having followed that lead-hold all sorts of degrees and certificates-but what good are they if you can't find a job?   
Lie to the people and tell them that progress is being made even though things are clearly becoming worse.  One thing that the British forgot to mention to their Nigerian constituents was that one day, the resources that were being used to engineer "progress" (which the British had confiscated from the Africans to begin with!) would eventually run out. After WWII, Western Europe could no longer afford to hold on to their African colonies. So all of the counterfeit countries that the Europeans created were then left high-and-dry to fend for themselves. This was the main reason behind the African independence movements of the1950 and 60's. What will a post-Obama America look like?
Use every available media outlet to perpetuate the belief that you and your followers are the enlightened ones-and that those who refuse to support you are just barbaric, uncivilized, ignorant curmudgeons.  This speaks for itself.


America, don't be fooled. The Igbos were once made up of a confederacy of clans that ascribed to various forms of democratic government. They took their eyes off the ball and before they knew it, the British were upon them. Also, understand this: the African colonial who is given too much political power can only become one thing: a despot.


Boyo
Title: Someone has to Say It
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on July 02, 2009, 12:47:12 PM
Not a political rant, but I can hardly post this under "Rest in Peace."

Michael Jackson Was a Huge, Gaping A$$hole!
By Michael Musto in Featured, Michael JacksonWednesday, Jul. 1 2009 @ 11:00AM

No, wait, don't start throwing white gloves at me in anger! I didn't say it--I just thought it. It's Steppin' Out magazine's Chaunce Hayden who actually put that idea on paper, and I'm merely here to share his fuming words with y'all as a public (or perhaps pubic) service.

Check out Hayden's reasoning and see if you don't gag, spew, wince, and totally agree:

ASSHOLE OF THE WEEK: MICHAEL JACKSON
By Chaunce Hayden

It's time for the voice of reason. Michael Jackson was an asshole. There, I said it, and I'll say it again. Michael "creepy, boy-loving" Jackson was an asshole. Got a problem with that? Too bad. I refuse to jump on the "rest in peace, we love you, Michael" bandwagon and shed tears over someone who was so f-ing despicable. How quickly the world forgets or conveniently chooses not to remember.

Allow me to quickly recap the life of this troubled superstar: Michael Jackson was a pedophile. Michael Jackson was a drug addict. Michael Jackson
abused his own children both physically and emotionally. Michael Jackson was a deadbeat who owed millions in unpaid bills. Oh yeah, and Michael Jackson could sing and dance like a motherf--ker. And now, he's dead. Boo hoo. What surprises me is how long this frail child molester was able to physically walk the earth. Let's face it; Michael, for all intent and purpose, had left the human race years ago as he morphed into one of his Thriller video characters before our very eyes. But like the "Emperor's New Clothes," the world chose to ignore the true horror of this self-mutilated beast.

For 50 years, this soft-spoken mummy moonwalked his way through life leaving a trail of victims in his wake. God knows how many brainwashed boys were befriended by the ghoulish performer with the lure of cash, toys, exotic pets and an alcohol concoction Michael cleverly called "Jesus Juice" to loosen 'em up before a night of debauchery. Imagine your own child lying in bed next to Michael wondering why the room is spinning while a wig-wearing 5'10", 115-pound grown man in clown makeup gropes at his innocence. Yet, we cry for this animal as if Christ himself was crucified before our eyes. Please, spare me.

Someone should have put Michael out of his misery many years ago. A stake through the heart would have been more merciful than to allow this half-human/half plastic thing to slither through his backyard amusement park, hunting for his pubescent prey. In the end, I believe Michael himself knew what he had become and made the choice to put a stop to the madness. While the word "suicide" has yet to be brought up between all the blind tears, it's my hope that Michael, in an effort to stop himself from hurting any other child, put an end to his own miserable existence.

I will not mourn the death of Michael Jackson no more than I would mourn the death of any pedophile that hunts down children for deviant pleasure...Regardless of his musical abilities.

Tonight, as I write this column, my heart and tears go out to those children who grew up much too soon thanks to the "King of Pop."

http://blogs.villagevoice.com/dailymusto/archives/2009/07/michael_jackson_1.php
Title: Long Legged Mack Daddy and Riotin' White People
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 02, 2009, 04:26:07 PM


The unique Dr. Manning  :lol: :lol: :lol:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hFiab7fjak
Title: George Will: Tincture of Lawlessness
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 08, 2009, 12:46:52 PM
Tincture of Lawlessness
Obama's Overreaching Economic Policies

By George F. Will
Thursday, May 14, 2009



Anyone, said T.S. Eliot, could carve a goose, were it not for the bones. And anyone could govern as boldly as his whims decreed, were it not for the skeletal structure that keeps civil society civil -- the rule of law. The Obama administration is bold. It also is careless regarding constitutional values and is acquiring a tincture of lawlessness.

In February, California's Democratic-controlled Legislature, faced with a $42 billion budget deficit, trimmed $74 million (1.4 percent) from one of the state's fastest-growing programs, which provides care for low-income and incapacitated elderly people and which cost the state $5.42 billion last year. The Los Angeles Times reports that "loose oversight and bureaucratic inertia have allowed fraud to fester."

But the Service Employees International Union collects nearly $5 million a month from 223,000 caregivers who are members. And the Obama administration has told California that unless the $74 million in cuts are rescinded, it will deny the state $6.8 billion in stimulus money.

Such a federal ukase (the word derives from czarist Russia; how appropriate) to a state legislature is a sign of the administration's dependency agenda -- maximizing the number of people and institutions dependent on the federal government. For the first time, neither sales nor property nor income taxes are the largest source of money for state and local governments. The federal government is.

The SEIU says the cuts violate contracts negotiated with counties. California officials say the state required the contracts to contain clauses allowing pay to be reduced if state funding is.

Anyway, the Obama administration, judging by its cavalier disregard of contracts between Chrysler and some of the lenders it sought money from, thinks contracts are written on water. The administration proposes that Chrysler's secured creditors get 28 cents per dollar on the $7 billion owed to them but that the United Auto Workers union get 43 cents per dollar on its $11 billion in claims -- and 55 percent of the company. This, even though the secured creditors' contracts supposedly guaranteed them better standing than the union.

Among Chrysler's lenders, some servile banks that are now dependent on the administration for capital infusions tugged their forelocks and agreed. Some hedge funds among Chrysler's lenders that are not dependent were vilified by the president because they dared to resist his demand that they violate their fiduciary duties to their investors, who include individuals and institutional pension funds.

The Economist says the administration has "ridden roughshod over [creditors'] legitimate claims over the [automobile companies'] assets. . . . Bankruptcies involve dividing a shrunken pie. But not all claims are equal: some lenders provide cheaper funds to firms in return for a more secure claim over the assets should things go wrong. They rank above other stakeholders, including shareholders and employees. This principle is now being trashed." Tom Lauria, a lawyer representing hedge fund people trashed by the president as the cause of Chrysler's bankruptcy, asked that his clients' names not be published for fear of violence threatened in e-mails to them.

The Troubled Assets Relief Program, which has not yet been used for its supposed purpose (to purchase such assets from banks), has been the instrument of the administration's adventure in the automobile industry. TARP's $700 billion, like much of the supposed "stimulus" money, is a slush fund the executive branch can use as it pleases. This is as lawless as it would be for Congress to say to the IRS: We need $3.5 trillion to run the government next year, so raise it however you wish -- from whomever, at whatever rates you think suitable. Don't bother us with details.

This is not gross, unambiguous lawlessness of the Nixonian sort -- burglaries, abuse of the IRS and FBI, etc. -- but it is uncomfortably close to an abuse of power that perhaps gave Nixon ideas: When in 1962 the steel industry raised prices, President John F. Kennedy had a tantrum and his administration leaked rumors that the IRS would conduct audits of steel executives, and sent FBI agents on predawn visits to the homes of journalists who covered the steel industry, ostensibly to further a legitimate investigation.

The Obama administration's agenda of maximizing dependency involves political favoritism cloaked in the raiment of "economic planning" and "social justice" that somehow produce results superior to what markets produce when freedom allows merit to manifest itself, and incompetence to fail. The administration's central activity -- the political allocation of wealth and opportunity -- is not merely susceptible to corruption, it is corruption.

georgewill@washpost.com
Title: Non-Ideological Tyranny
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on July 09, 2009, 10:53:19 AM
Spread Freedom? Not So Much
The past four weeks show how ideological Obama’s un-ideological view really is.

By Jonah Goldberg

The Obama Doctrine is finally coming into focus.

It’s been hard to glean its form because for so long it seemed the president’s most obvious guiding principle was “not Bush,” particularly when it came to the Iraq War. Indeed, his anti-Bush stance has led him to stubbornly refuse to say the war has been won or to admit that he was wrong to oppose the surge. In the past, this unthinking reflex has caused Obama to take some truly repugnant positions. In July 2007, Obama said that he would order U.S. forces out of Iraq as quickly as possible, even if he knew it would lead to an Iraqi genocide. This makes Obama the first president in modern memory to have suggested that causing a genocide would be in America’s national interest.

Obama himself insists that he’s guided by nothing other than a cool-headed pragmatism. Indeed, Obama has a grating habit of describing any position not his own as “ideological,” as if his is the only sober, practical understanding of the problems we face. Just days before he was inaugurated, he gave a speech in Baltimore in which he proclaimed, “What is required is a new declaration of independence, not just in our nation, but in our own lives — from ideology and small thinking, prejudice and bigotry — an appeal not to our easy instincts but to our better angels.”

So ideologues — i.e. millions of Americans who disagree with his policies on principle — belong in a list along with bigots and dim bulbs. At home, this attitude has allowed him to dismiss opponents of socialized medicine and the government takeover of various industries as “ideologues,” and critics of trillions in debt-fueled spending as small-minded cranks.

Joshua Muravchik, a scholar at Johns Hopkins University and a leading advocate of democracy promotion around the globe, demonstrates in the current issue of Commentary that Obama has a similar attitude toward those who say America should advance the cause of liberty and democracy worldwide. Again and again, the administration has made it clear that spreading freedom is so much ideological foolishness. Before the inauguration, he told the Washington Post that he was concerned with “actually delivering a better life for people on the ground and less obsessed with form, more concerned with substance.” There’s merit to this view in principle, though Obama seems to be thinking about “economic justice” more than a free society. But in practice, when American presidents say they don’t care about democracy, tyrants rejoice.

In April, at a news conference following a meeting of the Organization of American States, Obama proclaimed, “What we showed here is that we can make progress when we’re willing to break free from some of the stale debates and old ideologies that have dominated and distorted the debate in this hemisphere for far too long.” Hillary Clinton was more pithy: “Let’s put ideology aside,” the secretary of state said. “That is so yesterday.” It’s worth recalling that those old ideological debates often involved America championing democracy against those who pushed for socialism. One wonders which ideological stance Obama thinks is stale.

Obama supporter and Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne writes that the Obama Doctrine involves restoring America’s alliances and working with the international community so we can all do great things together. That’s why Obama and Hillary Clinton have been so eager to apologize for America around the globe. One problem with such an approach is that it — so far at least — buys us nothing save the appearance of weakness. Another problem is that quite often, the international community is wrong.

Hence, according to the Obama administration, it’s foolishly ideological to resist the U.N.’s accommodation of tyrants and fanatics, while it is “pragmatic” to placate human-rights abusers. It is ideological to show disdain for Venezuela’s would-be dictator Hugo Chávez; it is “pragmatic” to stamp as “democratic” his effort to overthrow term limits. It is ideological to sustain sanctions against Burma and Sudan; it’s pragmatic to revisit them, even if it disheartens human-rights activists across the ideological spectrum. American exceptionalism is ideological, while seeing America as just another nation is realistic.

The past four weeks show how ideological Obama’s un-ideological view really is. In response to the revolutionary protests in Iran, Obama initially favored stability and preserving the fantasy of negotiations with the Iranian clerical junta. Not “meddling” was his top priority. Over time, the rhetoric improved, but the policy remained just as cynical.

Then, events in Honduras revealed that Obama really has no problem with meddling when a left-wing agenda is advanced. Manuel Zelaya, the president of Honduras and a Hugo Chávez wannabe, illegally defied the Honduran Congress, the Supreme Court, and the Constitution in an attempt to repeal term limits (which help sustain democracy in Central America by preventing presidents-for-life). The Supreme Court ordered the military to remove Zelaya from office and expel him from the country. A member of Zelaya’s own party replaced him, and elections were announced. But suddenly, Obama — taking much the same position as Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez — thought America should join the coalition of the meddlers demanding Zelaya’s return to power. In Iran, Obama was terrified to do anything that might lead to a coup to bring about democracy. In Honduras, Obama was unwilling to let stand a coup that preserved democracy.

It sure seems like Obama has an ideological problem with democracy.


National Review Online - http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NzIxN2VjYjhjZTMzMGM4OTdjNTI4ODM5ZmJlOWE1NmI=
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: ccp on July 09, 2009, 01:24:12 PM
"It sure seems like Obama has an ideological problem with democracy"

as does the msm and academia.
Title: Feds on Fed Ownership of GM
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on July 15, 2009, 08:32:50 AM
Current and retired government employees chime in on US ownership of GM:

Politics, Government Ownership of Auto Companies and Your Next Car Purchase

July 12, 2009
URL: http://www.fedsmith.com/article/2052/politics-government-ownership-auto-companies-your-next.html

Will the change in ownership of General Motors and Chrysler have an impact on the buying habits of our readers? Will significant government ownership will result in management decisions by these companies that reflect the administration's political agenda?

According to last week's survey, government ownership will have a substantial impact on the future buying decisions. In response to the initial question "Do you currently own a car manufactured by GM, Chrysler or Ford?", 66% of those responding indicated that they did own one of these cars.

Most of our readers work for the federal government or are retired from the federal government so they are often closer to the political process than most Americans.

Readers think that the future decisions made by the company will reflect the administration's political agenda. 69.4% say that future company decisions will reflect a political agenda; 16% say that decisions made by GM and Chrysler will not reflect a political agenda; and 14.7% are undecided.

Government Ownership and Purchasing Your Next Car

It is the response to the second question that may indicate problems for the American automobile industry. In response to the question: " General Motors and Chrysler will have significant government ownership in the near future. Will this change influence your selection when you buy your next new car?" 47.65% said they would not consider buying a GM or Chrysler car. 5.6% say they are more likely to buy a GM or Chrysler and 37.2% are undecided.

Here is an interesting statistic. 1388 readers (66%) said they currently own a Ford, Chrysler or GM. Out of these people, 49.6% said they would be less likely to buy a Chrysler or GM car in the future as a result of government ownership.
Out of all readers who took the survey, including those who currently own an "American" brand of automobile, 47.7% of readers said they would be less likely to buy a Chrysler or GM car in the future.

In other words, fewer people who currently own a GM, Chrysler or Ford car will consider buying a Chrysler or GM in the future compared to those who do not own one now. Based on the comments sent in, the most common reason is that many readers think the quality of the cars will be impaired with government ownership. Some readers are also displeased with a political agenda intermingling with business decisions of the company--which some see as harming the future quality of these cars.

Here are a few of the comments send in by readers in response to this question. As the largest percentage of readers indicated they would not buy a GM or Chrysler, most of the comments reflected that sentiment. Here are samples of the reasons given for this response:

I will buy no product that I know is owned or controlled by the federal government.
I will not/never buy from GM or Chrysler exactly because of govt AND union ownership...in fact, bought my first Japanese car 5 days ago...a Toyota, never even looked at GM or Chrysler.
I will however buy from Ford again as I did in Feb of this year. Neither company will get my business.
If I start looking for something new, Ford is the only American car manufacturer I will even consider.
GM still is too beholding (sic) to the UAW and can't or won't make necessary changes that are needed in today's competitive market. This is what caused their collapse in the first place.
The Govt should stay out of managing corporations. It should be looking to best manage the govt which it is not doing now.
I'll NEVER buy a car built by a US government owned company.
I've seen the Soviet built Ladas. I will be much more likely to purchase a foreign owned vehicle even if it is built in the U.S. (Nissan, Toyota, etc.)
Obama and UAW running a company? I wouldn't buy a water bucket from that bunch of Socialist thugs.
The government cannot run anything efficiently! Look at the post office, social security, medicare, and AmTrak!
I will not support socialism!
I'd buy a Yugo first.
I am definitely more inclined to buy a Ford if I decide to buy American.
Not supportive of Nationalizing Private Business...am also transferring banking to non-bailout Banking Institutions.
I feel Ford Mtr Co took a stand and refused bailout money. So I feel I should support the company with intergity first.
Have a VOLVO will keep a VOLVO. Toyota next choice. I will not support the Auto Workers Union, UAW, or an intrusive government.
But not all readers were so negative about their future car-buying experience from GM or Chrysler. While much fewer in number, here is a sample of these comments:

I will look for history of product quality, higher gas mileage and reasonable price (Value for the dollar) in making my next purchase.
I work for Uncle Same, no problem.
I have owned only American-made Chrysler or GM vehicles. If I should buy another vehicle it would very likely be GM or Chrysler. Government ownership in these companies has no effect on my choices.
A safe, stylish car would be attractive regardless of company ownership.
I'm going to buy what I need, when I need it, at the best price.
Quality will be the main criteria.
Personally I purchase vehicles based on my needs, customer service that is provided, and the identified dependability of a vehicle. I do not make decisions based upon the vehicle being American made, if I did I would not purchase a vehicle since most vehicles sold in America are made from non-American parts.
If there is no apparent change in quality, I'll still buy a GM product.
 Politics and Government Ownership of GM and Chrysler

The question of political and building cars generated a strong response from many readers. A large majority (69.4%)think that the administration's political agenda will be a factor in future decisions made by these companies. A few readers compared American to the Soviet Union and the quality of cars built by state-owned facilities there and in Eastern Europe during the Cold War.

Here is a small sample of the hundreds of comments sent in by readers on this issue.

I think Obama is pressuring all companies to build according to his agenda without regard as to it's feasability. Cost doesn't matter to him. Democrats think "we'll pass the laws and manufacturers will just build "em". Technology isn't there yet.
That has already happened. GM couldn't close an unprofitable warehouse in Norton, Massachusetts because it was in Barney Frank's district.
They are Obama motor's, and he has already set down the law. They have lost their owner ship, and as usual anything our government runs will fail. Thank God for FORD!!!!!!!
Obama ought to be ashamed ...
I've worked for the government long enough to know that whatever management (the primary owner) wants, management gets. How could the two be separated?
6 of 10 people on the GM board are Obama Administration officials, how would decisions NOT reflect Obama's political agenda?
Automobile company decisions have always been influenced by political agendas. The current administration is just more overt. For example: Expending valuable resources producing higher-mileage small cars that consumers don't want in order to meet a government mandated fleet MPG value.
The GOP will get things straightened out 4 years from now. We went through this government nonsense with the Carter administration.
Of course. The govt is micro-managing every other business to whom tax-payer dollars have been given (ie, banks and insurance companies). Why would this be different?
The unions will have an inordinate influence on these companies due to the current political climate and the ties they have with Mr. Obama.
Yes, for some reason politicians believe they more about running a corporation then a CEO does, they will drive these companies into the ground attempting to get them to purchase parts made in their districts for certain models as a way of ensuring their reelection campaign coffers are filled.
I foresee the demise of the car companies who will now have to build "government committee" designed cars. I also see the "BIG 3" going the way of Medicare, Medicade and Social Security.
Obama's idea of making cars people want is flawed. GMs best sellers were large trucks and SUVs not some death trap that will resemble a Smart car.
Does fascist state ring true here?
It will be impossible for the Gov't to keep its politics out of a company that it is a majority stock holder. That is too bad that our capitalist society is turning into a socialist society over a historically short period of time.
I think GM and Chrysler will have to follow what the administration's agenda is even if it does not make money. This is why the government then will have do force us to buy the cars that they make.
This is a bad situation where the government is taking over banks and want to control the nation. They are heading to outher countries like Russia who control the people. Everyone is saying the same also when you talk with them.
The Marxism has just begun.
Most surveys that we run result in several readers commenting that the way the comments are presented is unfavorable to the view held by those readers. To give a voice to all views, we searched through the 400 or more comments on this question and did find several that reflect the opinion of those that do not think the decisions made by GM and Chrysler will reflect a political agenda—or these readers are hopeful that the management decisions will reflect a political agenda. Here are those comments:

Primarily fuel economy improvements. But this should have happened years ago anyway as far as greater fuel economy.
And I hope that they do!
In olden times, yes. But today, as we see with the likes of Exon and countless other company agendas, bottom line management decisions are more and more about personal gain and greed.
Don't know - but I hope so
I hope so.
"American" car companies need to get with it and go Green!!!! and focus on Quality!!!
If the administration does have an influence, it should be to make the whole industry as "green" as it can as fast as it can!
I think so, if they focus at right point such as Quality, consumers in mind, one day auto industry will reach in pinnacle, which will take time, and nation will be proud for their tireless efforts.
I think the only goal is to keep the state of Michigan from imploding. The economy is the only agenda.
I feel that there will be fewer models to select from and that in itself will cut development cost.
I think ultimately the new trends in government reflect and shape the new trends in business.
Our thanks to the thousands of readers who took the time to participate in this survey and a special thanks to those who were willing to send in their written opinions on these questions.
Title: Contrarian:Bama.is Rebublicans best hope
Post by: ccp on July 17, 2009, 07:12:23 AM
Maybe Republicans should be grateful for BO.
I was speaking to someone who thinks BO's plan may be to spend the economy into a total trash then he could rebuild it from the ground up as a socialist state.

On the other hand Republicans like me may actually be grateful for him.  suppose precisely because of him that the trend towards socialism dies on the spot and reverses.

Wouldn't that be something.  The "pompous know-everything" who thinks he will mold America into his socialist vision actually causes a backlash so large the opposite happens.  That is what this Buchanan piece causes me to wonder:

Socialist America Sinking
by  Patrick J. Buchanan

07/17/2009

After half a century of fighting encroachments upon freedom in America, journalist Garet Garrett published "The People's Pottage." A year later, in 1954, he died. "The People's Pottage" opens thus:

"There are those who still think they are holding the pass against a revolution that may be coming up the road. But they are gazing in the wrong direction. The revolution is behind them. It went by in the Night of Depression, singing songs to freedom."

Garrett wrote of a revolution within the form. While outwardly America appeared the same, a revolution within had taken place that was now irreversible. One need only glance at where we were before the New Deal, where we are and where we are headed to see how far we are off the course the Founding Fathers set for our republic.

Taxes drove the American Revolution, for we were a taxaphobic, liberty-loving people. That government is best that governs least is an Americanism. When "Silent Cal" Coolidge went home in 1929, the U.S. government was spending 3 percent of gross domestic product.

And today? Obama's first budget will consume 28 percent of the entire GDP; state and local governments another 15 percent. While there is some overlap, in 2009, government will consume 40 percent of GDP, approaching the peak of World War II.

The deficit for 2009 is $1.8 trillion, 13 percent of the whole economy. Obama is pushing a cap-and-trade bill to cut carbon emissions that will impose huge costs on energy production, spike consumer prices and drive production offshore to China, which is opting out of Kyoto II. The Chinese are not fools.

Obama plans to repeal the Bush tax cuts and take the income tax rate to near 40 percent. Combined state and local income tax rates can run to 10 percent. For the self-employed, payroll taxes add up to 15.2 percent on the first $106,800 for all wages of all workers. Medicare takes 2.9 percent of all wages above that. Then there are the state sales taxes that can run to 8 percent, property taxes, gas taxes, excise taxes, and "sin taxes" on booze, cigarettes and, soon, hot dogs and soft drinks.

Comes now national health insurance from Nancy Pelosi's House. A surtax that runs to 5.4 percent of all earnings of the top 1 percent of Americans, who already pay 40 percent of all federal income taxes, has been sent to the Senate. Included also is an 8 percent tax on the entire payroll of small businesses that fail to provide health insurance for employees.

Other ideas on the table include taxing the health benefits that businesses provide their employees.

The D.C.-based Tax Foundation says New Yorkers could face a combined income tax rate of near 60 percent.

In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson called George III a tyrant for having "erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people and eat out their substance."

What did George III do with his Stamp Act, Townshend Acts or tea tax to compare with what is being done to this generation of Americans by their own government?

While the hardest working and most productive are bled, a third of all wage-earners pay no U.S. income tax, and Obama plans to free almost half of all wage-earners of all income taxes. Yet, tens of millions get Medicaid, rent supplements, free education, food stamps, welfare and an annual check from Uncle Sam called an Earned Income Tax Credit, though they never paid a nickel in income taxes.

Oh, yes. Obama also promises everybody a college education.

Coming to America to feast on this cornucopia of freebies is the world. One million to 2 million immigrants, legal and illegal, arrive every year. They come with fewer skills and less education than Americans, and consume more tax dollars than they contribute by three to one.

Wise Latina women have more babies north of the border than they do in Mexico and twice as many here as American women.

As almost all immigrants are now Third World people of color, they qualify for ethnic preferences in hiring and promotions and admissions to college over the children of Americans

All of this would have astounded and appalled the Founding Fathers, who after all, created America -- as they declared loud and clear in the Constitution -- "for ourselves and our posterity."

China saves, invests and grows at 8 percent. America, awash in debt, has a shrinking economy, a huge trade deficit, a gutted industrial base, an unemployment rate surging toward 10 percent and a money supply that's swollen to double its size in a year. The 20th century may have been the American Century. The 21st shows another pattern.

"The United States is declining as a nation and a world power with mostly sighs and shrugs to mark this seismic event," writes Les Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, in CFR's Foreign Affairs magazine. "Astonishingly, some people do not appear to realize that the situation is all that serious."

Even the establishment is starting to get the message.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mr. Buchanan is a nationally syndicated columnist and author of Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World, "The Death of the West,", "The Great Betrayal," "A Republic, Not an Empire" and "Where the Right Went Wrong."

Title: Abject Irony
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on July 17, 2009, 11:35:08 AM
I almost started an "Abject Irony" topic within which this piece would fit just fine.

July 17, 2009
Pirate this Film!

Rosslyn Smith
I have long had the belief that God can have a very pointed sense of humor. I think that His is not a thunderous belly laugh in reaction to grand human pratfalls but rather an irony laden little chuckle reserved for the self important and those who are often too clever for their own good.  This belief was reaffirmed this week when I read about the trials and tribulations of Academy Award winning director Steven Soderbergh in an article in  the Guardian. 

Most of the article was about Soderbergh's four and a half hour film Che, a Spanish language epic that was split in two for its mostly unnoticed release in America.  The movie earned less than half of its production costs at the world wide box office.  Both the journalist conducting the interview and the filmmaker seemed clueless as to why the film failed badly at the box office. 

First came self pity.

Quote
Eventually European investors were tapped for $58m (£35m) - a paltry figure considering the project's ambition. As a result Soderbergh was forced to shoot extremely quickly to stay on budget. The two parts were filmed over 76 days, four days fewer than for his glitzy Vegas action comedy Ocean's Eleven, an $85m capitalist fat-cat of a movie in comparison with Che.

"It's hard to watch it and not to wish we'd had more time," he says of Che.

Why investors seeking to make a profit should rush to invest in an overlong film about a murderer and a sworn enemy to their way of life in not explained.

The interview gets even better.  Why was Che such a complete box office failure when his image still adorns posters and tee shirts among self proclaimed radical revolutionaries in Western nations?  It turns out that  those who actually wanted to devote a large segment of their time to watching the film had followed Abbie Hoffman's classic reflexive title.   They pirated the film. 

Quote
"We got crushed in South America. We came out in Spain in September of last year and it was everywhere within a matter of days. It killed it."

The irony of fans of a sworn enemy of private enterprise and bourgeoisie property laws ripping off a filmmaker seems lost on both Soderbergh and the Guardian's Henry Barnes, who goes on to lament

Quote
Che seems, in retrospect, like a glorious, sad aberration: a niche-audience epic it would be impossible to commission in these straitened times. Today, the willingness of the studios to take such a punt has all but evaporated - a fact that Soderbergh is more alive to than most.

"I'm looking at the landscape and I'm thinking, 'Hmmm, I don't know. A few more years maybe,'" says Soderbergh. "And then the stuff that I'm interested in is only going to be of interest to me.

What end could be more fitting for one who lionized a monster in the name of art?

Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2009/07/pirate_this_film.html at July 17, 2009 - 02:32:37 PM EDT
Title: GS to buy Treasury
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 17, 2009, 08:50:40 PM


Goldman Sachs in Talks to Acquire Treasury Department
Sister Entities to Share Employees, Money

>


In what some on Wall Street are calling the biggest blockbuster deal in the history of the financial sector, Goldman Sachs confirmed today that it was in talks to acquire the U.S. Department of the Treasury.

According to Goldman spokesperson Jonathan Hestron, the merger between Goldman and the Treasury Department is “a good fit” because “they’re in the business of printing money and so are we.”

The Goldman spokesman said that the merger would create efficiencies for both entities: “We already have so many employees and so much money flowing back and forth, this would just streamline things.”

Mr. Hestron said the only challenge facing Goldman in completing the merger “is trying to figure out which parts of the Treasury Dept. we don’t already own.”

Goldman recently celebrated record earnings by roasting a suckling pig over a bonfire of hundred-dollar bills.

Elsewhere, conspiracy theorists celebrated the 40th anniversary of NASA faking the moon landing.

And in South Carolina, Gov. Mark Sanford gave his wife a new diamond ring, while his wife gave him an electronic ankle bracelet.


Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: ccp on July 18, 2009, 06:36:49 AM
Just for argument sake:
If W was still president and Goldman execs were giving themselves and their employees 12 billion in bonuses after all this would you think the msm would be almost completely silent about this?

I don't hear the left protesting us now that we have the Bama.
I don't hear the right speaking out about this since of course this is just an example capitilism.
Now that's said and out of the way it is obvious to me the rest of the country was robbed.
We were robbed EOM.
Title: Everything But Soylent Green
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on July 20, 2009, 06:29:31 PM
Wow, imagine if a Bush administration official had a record of statements this horrid.

Czar 54, Who Are You?
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Monday, July 20, 2009 4:20 PM PT
Leadership: Our new science czar, John Holdren, once backed compulsory sterilization and forced abortion as part of a government population-control program. The only thing missing was a Soylent Green recipe.

In April, President Obama declared that "the days of science taking a back seat to ideology are over." In everything from stem cell research to climate change and energy policy, reason and science would triumph. The problem is that what the Obama administration considers science, as exemplified by the choice of Holdren, is troubling.

In a recently rediscovered 1977 book, "Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment," co-authored with doomsters Paul and Anne Ehrlich, Holdren, who holds the post of presidential assistant for science technology, revealed his pessimistic and apocalyptic views on all three topics. They are disturbing.

He hates people and views them as the root of all planetary evils. Large families are a target of Holdren and the Ehrlichs, who write that they "contribute to general social deterioration by overproducing children" and "can be required by law to exercise reproductive responsibility."

On page 837, Holdren writes "it has been concluded that compulsory population-control laws, even including laws requiring compulsory abortion, could be sustained under the existing Constitution if the population crisis became sufficiently severe to endanger the society."

Overproducing children? On the next page, Holdren asserts that "neither the Declaration of Independence nor the Constitution mentions a right to reproduce." He missed that part about life being an inalienable right.

Existing Constitution? On page 943, Holdren proposes "a comprehensive Planetary Regime (that) could control the development, administration and distribution of all natural resources . . . not only in the atmosphere and the oceans, but in such freshwater bodies as rivers and lakes." We believe that was tried in Kyoto and will be tried again in Copenhagen.

As for that nasty people problem, Holdren says the "Planetary Regime might be given responsibility for determining the optimum population for the world and for each region and for arbitrating various countries' shares within their regional limits. . . . The Regime would have some power to enforce the agreed limits." This is China on steroids.

Among the methods of population control he discusses in the book is "sterilizing women after their second or third child" and "adding a sterilant to drinking water or staple foods." He cautions that whatever is added must be safe for pets and livestock.

Similar nonsense was express in Paul Ehrlich's "The Population Bomb" (1968), which warned: "In the 1970s, the world will undergo famine — hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked on now." He was wrong.

Such nightmare scenarios regarding overpopulation have made the rounds since Thomas Malthus predicted in 1798 that overpopulation would outstrip England's food supply and the British Empire would literally starve to death.

In 1980, Holdren and the Ehrlichs made a famous wager with economist Julian Simon: They bet $1,000 that five metals — chrome, copper, nickel, tin and tungsten — would be more expensive 10 years later. They were wrong on all five predictions, and had to pay up in 1990.
Holdren also calculated that famines due to climate change could leave a billion people dead by 2020, championed "population control measures," and believed 280 million Americans would likely be "too many."

Like Ehrlich, he forgot that with bodies come minds, minds that can innovate, invent and find substitutes for scarce resources and new ways to feed people. Things like fiber optic cables, wireless computers, and bioengineering come to mind. Obesity is a threat, not famine.

This administration, through its policies, programs and personnel choices, is pushing science fiction, not science, and seeking to control and limit people as a plague upon the earth. Science czar John Holdren's views, which to our knowledge have not been disavowed, paint a bleak future for the human race at the hands of government.
We prefer another piece of advice we were once given — be fruitful and multiply.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: G M on July 20, 2009, 06:38:46 PM
Where are all the O-bot, Bush haters? Step up and justify your Chicago-thug, marxist, empty-suit of a president. Hasn't quite turned out like you though, has it?
Title: Congress Doesn't Create Rights
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on July 24, 2009, 07:14:25 PM
The Folly of Obamacare
It’s a bait and switch.

By Jonah Goldberg

Let us for a moment adopt the proposition that health care is in fact a “right,” as pretty much every liberal politician has told us for at least a generation.

Now let us consider how President Obama’s proposed health-care bill would work. Under his plan, an official body — staffed with government doctors, actuaries, economists, and other experts — will determine which health-care treatments, procedures, and remedies are cost-effective and which are not. Then it will decide which ones will get paid for and which won’t. Would a 70-year-old woman be able to get a hip replacement, or would that not be considered a wise allocation of resources? Would a 50-year-old man not be permitted an expensive test his doctor wants if the rules say the cheaper, less-thorough one is sufficient? The Democrats call this “cost-controls.” But for the patient and the doctor, it’s plain old rationing.

Now, imagine if the government had a body of experts charged with figuring out what your free-speech rights are, or your right to assemble, or worship. Mr. Jones, you can say X and Y, but not Z. Ms. Smith, you can freely assemble with Aleutians, Freemasons, and carpenters, but you may not meet in public with anyone from Cleveland or of Albanian descent. Mrs. Wilson, you may pray to Vishnu and Crom, but never to Allah or Buddha, and when you do pray, you cannot do so for longer than 20 minutes at a time, unless it is one of several designated holidays. Please see Extended Prayer Form 10–22B.

Of course, all of this would be ludicrous beyond words.

Which is the whole point. Health care cannot be a right, because rights cannot come from government. At best, they can be protected by government. The founders understood this, which is why our Bill of Rights is really a list of restrictions on the government in Washington. “Congress shall make no law . . . ” is how the First Amendment begins.

Now, this isn’t to say the government can’t or shouldn’t provide health care to everyone. You have no right to a highway or sewer system, but there’s nothing wrong with government providing such things. Indeed, the Constitution says that government should promote the “general welfare.” And people of good will can argue whether or how much government-provided or -subsidized health care fits under that mandate.

Historically, the American people are keen on any proposal that expands freedom and are skeptical about anything that constricts it. Generally, this means that advocates for every new program or policy — from welfare to gay marriage — try their darnedest to frame their case in terms of extending choice and freedom.

The interesting thing is that it seems Americans have discovered that talk of health care as a “right” doesn’t mean expanding their own freedom. It means, at best, expanding the options of others at the expense of the middle class and, naturally, “the rich.”

Polling by the centrist think tank Third Way finds that the pivotal question for Americans is, “What’s in it for me?” And it seems President Obama hasn’t answered that to their satisfaction. Sixty percent of Americans think Obama’s health care plan will help someone other than them.

Many liberals frequently confuse widespread support for “reform” with support for massive new government involvement in health care. But when concrete proposals come down the pike, the issue changes from hypothetical support for fixing the problem to, again, “What’s in it for me?”

That’s why in his press conference Wednesday night, President Obama used very conservative, even free-market language to sell a program that is actually still premised on the left-wing nostrum that health care is a “right.” His plan will create “a marketplace that promotes choice and competition.” He’s in this to “control costs” and bring down the deficit.

Now, Obama has come nowhere near meeting the burden of proof that the still inchoate and murky proposals in a still half-baked health-care bill will do anything of the sort. Indeed, so far the more persuasive argument — backed up by the Congressional Budget Office and others — is that Obamacare will cost a lot of money. And the only way it can actually “save” money is by rationing care. But Obama understands that he cannot sell his health-care reform in the language of the Left.

So, it’s a bait and switch. If anything, the overriding idea behind Obama’s approach seems to be to rush his “public plan” into law and expand its generosity over time. This is the tribute a center-left president must pay to a center-right country.

He’s in such a hurry because he senses Americans understand a bait and switch when they see one. On Monday he even proclaimed, “The time for talking is through.”

In fact, it almost sounds like he actually does want to ration free speech, too.

— Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large of National Review Online and the author of Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning.


National Review Online - http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=Nzk1ZmQ0ZjhmYWZiNmViZWI0NzgyNWU1ZGU5Njg3OTQ=
Title: Trillion Here, Trillion There
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on July 25, 2009, 09:25:26 AM
Obama Lied --- The Economy Died ( IMHO a Must Read!)
RenewAmerica.com | July 25, 2009 | Joan Swirsky


"The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of the blessings. The inherent blessing of socialism is the equal sharing of misery." — Winston Churchill.

As President Clinton's campaign mouthpiece James Carville put it so succinctly in the 1990s, "It's the economy, stupid!" It was true then, it is true now. People may be temporarily seduced by intriguing figures and rosy promises but, bottom line, they still have to support their families and pay their bills. When the novelty of this or that politician has worn off and his or her pie-in-the-sky promises prove just so many hollow words, reality sets in.

I am no economy expert, except for seeing every day that Americans are both depressed and terrified about their rapidly devolving savings and the inflation that has already hit them at the supermarket. The other day, I was visiting my mother in the nursing home she has lived in for the past several years, where at least 75 percent of the employees are African-Americans who heartily voted for Obama. This was a conversation I heard in the elevator.

He: how are you doing?

She: Another day, another dollar.
He: Hey, for me it's another day, another fifty cents..
She: Me, too. I'm down to one meal a day!.

As I said, I'm not an expert-on-the-economy person, so I will cite those who are, with lots of bullets to emphasize the horror — and Buyer's Remorse — that Americans are now waking up to as they realize that the hope-and-change candidate they voted for in November is just another Socialist-cum-Marxist-cum-Communist whose regime (it's certainly not an administration) threatens to transform America into yet another failed and impoverished Banana Republic.

THOSE IN THE KNOW

Martin D. Weiss, Ph.D., an expert in domestic and international financial markets and the bestselling author of The Ultimate Safe Money Guide, has documented the following. We now have:

A new surge in unemployment that, even without counting those who are excluded from the official numbers, amounts to 14.7 million who are now jobless, the most since records dating back to 1948. Worse, for the first time since the Great Depression, every single job created after the prior recession has been wiped out.

Industrial production is falling at the same pace as it did in the early 1930s.

Global trade is falling at twice the pace of the early 1930s.

California — the nation's most populous state, with the largest GDP and the greatest impact on the entire U.S. economy — is collapsing.

Consumers are slashing their spending, small businesses are laying-off their workers, cities and states are forced to gut their budgets.

The most radical government countermeasures in a 100 years.

The biggest federal deficits in 200 years.

Weiss lists the bald-faced lies that Obama lackeys have foisted on the American public, including Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke lying to "60 Minutes" in March that he detected "green shoots" in the economy, Wall Street gurus lying about "the end of the bear market," labor officials lying about "a big turnaround in our nation's job market," California officials lying that they would never default but two days later defaulting on the state's short-term debt obligations to countless vendors and taxpayers and then unilaterally issuing millions of dollars in I.O.U.s that few financial institutions accepted.

Weiss also reports that the following government "help-America" programs have all FAILED!

TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program)

PPIP (Public-Private Investment Program)

TALF (Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility)

TLGP (Temporary Liquidity Guarantee Program)

CAP (Capital Assistance Program)

TIP (Targeted Investment Program)

HASP (Homeowners Affordability and Stability Plan)

CPFF (Commercial Paper Funding Facility)

AMLF (Asset-Backed Commercial Paper Money Market Fund Liquidity Facility)

MMIFF (Money Market Investor Funding Facility)

WHERE ARE WE NOW?

It's not a pretty picture.

Our national debt is $12,000,000,000,000 (as in trillion)

Social Security's unfunded liability if $11,000,000,000,000 (as in trillion).

Medicare's unfunded liability is $48,000,000,000,000 (as in trillion).

All of which adds up to $71,000,000,000,000 (as in trillion!). In short, the Obama regime has in six short months made the United States the most indebted country in the history of world civilization!

This is "change," economist Dick McDonald writes, that "only an imbecile could love." McDonald (www.riseupamerica.us) has his own laundry list:

Obama promised to save 3 or 4 million jobs, but we have lost 3.5 million jobs since January.

Obama has promised to hold unemployment to 8 percent — it's at 9.5 percent and skyrocketing.

He has brought the Government's tax receipts from corporations down by 55 percent.

He has brought the Government's tax receipts from individuals down 27 percent.

He has brought the number of unemployed to 20 percent and rising.

He has sent businesses reeling from being told they will bear more of the tax burden and have reduced staff.

He has favored wealth redistribution over job creation and economic growth.

He has funded a Gestapo-like mob of ACORN brown shirts who intimidate everyone.

He has given an equity interest in General Motors to an unsecured UAW debtor as a political payoff.

He has hired over 30 Czars to run the country without them being vetted by Congress.

He has militated against U.S. energy independence by refusing to increase domestic oil drilling in ANWR and offshore and build nuclear plants, but stood by his "addiction" to ethanol, which has caused corn shortages that precipitated starvation in the Third World.

He has used Democrat-controlled media and academia to silence his critics.

As everyone now knows, unemployment is still surging, with many states reporting up to 15 percent to 20 percent of people out of work; consumer confidence is plunging even further; and loan losses are exploding.

WHAT'S NEXT?

Obama's Cap & Tax Bill — which will cost every family $3000/year and force jobs to go to China and India — promises that every American will be TAXED every time they flush their toilets, turn on the lights in their homes, open their refrigerators, and drive their cars — that is the short list! In other words, every single activity of daily living will be monitored electronically for "usage" and then taxed to the hilt. Why? Because the way Socialism works is to tax people to such a Draconian extent that they can no longer afford to "make it" on their own and so must be "taken care of" by Big Government. Yes, the same government that has brought us the utterly FAILED Post Office, Medicare, Medicaid, and Motor Vehicle systems, to name but a few Big Brother debacles.

Then there is the centerpiece of Obama's Socialist dream, to "transform" our healthcare system, the better to "serve" the more-than 300-million people who live in America — including multi-millions of illegal aliens, felons, and other multi-millions who can afford health insurance but "choose" not to buy it.

In his prime-time news conference on July 22 — in between trashing the "stupid" Cambridge police department for doing their jobs — Obama admitted that he hadn't read the House version of the healthcare bill. Then he had the nerve to describe a three-card-Monte scheme to pay for it, all the while repeating the urgency of whacking the American people with another $1.5 trillion in debt.

As writer and author Larry Schweikart has chillingly documented, Obama's monstrous "healthcare" bill includes, among hundreds of other horrors:

Page 22: A mandate for the Government to audit the books of all employers that self insure.

Pg 30: A Government committee that will decide what treatments/benefits a person may receive.

Pg 42: The Health Choices Commissioner will choose your HC benefits for you. You will have no choice!

Pg 50: HC will be provided to ALL non-U.S. citizens, illegal or otherwise.

Pg 58: Government will have real-time access to an individual's finances and a National ID Healthcard will be issued!

Pg 59: Government will have direct access to your bank accounts.

Pg 65: Sec 164 is a payoff subsidized plan for retirees and their families in unions and community organizations like ACORN.

PG 85: The Government will ration your healthcare!

Pg 95: The Government will use groups — i.e., ACORN & Americorps — to sign up individuals for a Government HC plan.

Pg 85: Specifics of Benefit Levels for AARP members — your health care WILL be rationed.

Pg 124: No company can sue the Government on price fixing and there can be no "judicial review" against Government monopoly.

Pg 145: An employer MUST auto-enroll employees into a public option plan. NO CHOICE.

Pg 126: Employers MUST pay for healthcare for part-time employees AND their families.

Pg 149: ANY Employer with payroll $400k & above who does not provide a public option pays 8 percent tax on all payroll.

Pg 150: Businesses with payroll between $251k & $400k that don't provide a public option pay 2-6 percent tax on all payroll.

Pg 167 ANY individual who doesn't have acceptable HC according to the Government will be taxed 2.5 percent of income.

Pg 170: Any NONRESIDENT alien is exempt from individual taxes. (Americans will pay).

Pg 195: Officers & employees of the Healthcare Administration (the GOVERNMENT) will have access to ALL Americans' finances and personal records.

Pg 203: "The tax imposed under this section shall not be treated as tax." Yes, it says that.

Pg 239: Government will reduce physician services for Medicaid. Seniors, low income, and the poor will be affected.

Pg 241: Doctors — doesn't matter what specialty — will all be paid the same.

PG 253: Government sets value of doctor's time, professional judgment, etc. — literally, the value of humans.

PG 272: TREATMENT OF CERTAIN CANCER HOSPITALS — Cancer patients, welcome to rationing!

Pg 317-318: Government will mandate that hospitals cannot expand.

Pg 354: Government will RESTRICT enrollment of special needs people!

PG 425: Government will mandate Advance Care Planning Consultations for seniors... end-of-life prodding.

Pg 425: Government will instruct & consult regarding living wills, durable powers of attorney. Mandatory!

PG 425: Government will provide an approved list of end-of-life resources, guiding you in how to die.

PG 429: "Advanced care consultation" may include an ORDER for end of life plans. AN ORDER from the Government to end a life!

PG 430: The Government will decide what level of treatment you will have at end of life.

Pg 469: Community-Based Home Medical Services/Non-profit orgs. (ACORN Medical Services here?)

Pg 494-498: Government will cover Mental Health Services including defining, creating, and rationing those services.

Why rationing? Betsy McCaughey, former lieutenant governor of New York State, explains that the "$1 trillion to $1.6 trillion health bill, with new taxes and a $500 billion cut to Medicare, will come just as baby boomers turn 65 and increase Medicare enrollment by 30 percent. Less money and more patients will necessitate rationing." It's an "assault against seniors," she says.

After reading the 1,018-page Obama-Pelosi-Reid Bill, orthopedic surgeon Dr. Dave Janda wrote, "it should be clear that the same warning notice must be placed on The ObamaCare Plan as on a pack of cigarettes: Consuming this product will be hazardous to your health."

"If you are over 65." Dr. Janda continues, "or have been recently diagnosed as having an advanced form of cardiac disease or aggressive cancer.....dream on if you think you will get treated. Pick out your coffin. After each American turns 65 years of age, they have to go to a mandated counseling program that is designed to end life sooner."

THE DEFINITION OF INSANITY

As the Executive Director of Traditional Family Coalition, Andrea Lafferty said, "It took President Obama six months to pick a dog for the White House, but he wants Congress to pass a massive health care reform bill in two weeks! This is insane."

But why the escalating opposition to Obama's grand vision? Well, for one thing, Americans are a very smart people, notwithstanding an occasional lapse into a Jimmy Carter or Barack Obama. They "get" the scam of socialized medicine, they see people from Canada and France (in fact, from all over the world) flocking to our shores for treatments that they can't get in their "progressive" systems. And then there is the sticky reality of the non-partisan, putatively objective Congressional Budget Office, whose director Douglas Elmendorf said last week that the White House's health-care proposals would result in a "net increase in the federal budget deficit of $239 billion" over 10 years.

Forthwith, Obama "invited" Mr. Elmendorf to the White House, clearly not for tea and crumpets! Can you just imagine the tongue-lashing this watchdog received, or the threats? It remains to be seen how objective Mr. Elmendorf will be in the coming days and weeks.

Historian Victor Davis Hanson puts it this way:

There is a growing collective recognition that things simply do not work the way Obama thinks they do. They may in the hothouse at Harvard Law School or in the charade of Chicago politics, or among young, hip bloggers right out of Yale, but not necessarily in the larger American landscape or the real world abroad.

The American people sense this. They assume that what goes up must come down... Americans are waking up to the fact that their president says, promises, and does things that simply do not make sense...

And as an article in Reuters stated about Obama's stimulus package: "The economy is shaping up to be Barack Obama's Katrina. The difference [between Pres. Bush's Katrina and Obama's], of course, is that Katrina afflicted a city and a few states, while the recession afflicts the whole country."

ACCORDING TO PLAN

Vice President Joe Biden recently admitted that all the "experts" Americans entrusted with their money "misread how bad the economy was." Leftists like Biden have only a one-solution strategy for the problems they create: throw more money at it! Sure enough, Congressman Steny Hoyer, the second-ranking Democrat in the House, suggested that a second "Stimulus" package may be coming!

But the dirty little secret liberals take great pains to conceal is that their massive spending and taxing is all part of the Left's grand plan to bring big bad America to its knees, annihilate free-market capitalism, widely expand the role of government, and tax people into economic oblivion — all to fulfill their childlike, utopian goal (1) leveling the playing field to the lowest common denominator, and (2) exerting total control over the masses they consider so stupid.

In the last six months, they've seen the light of Socialism at the end of the democracy tunnel they've loathed for decades. But they're not there yet! Americans have now caught on to the scammers and their thug tactics and are pushing back hard.

Note to Obama & Company: We're mad as hell and we're not going to take it anymore!

http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/swirsky/090725
Title: Re: Political Rants, wage legislation
Post by: DougMacG on July 26, 2009, 10:04:23 AM
I must pile on to comments CCP made a couple of days ago in the health care thread:  "...Chuck Schumer made a statement that doctors should make no more than 80K a year...If that is his argument lawyers who require far less schooling should make no more than 40K per year..."

Over the years Republicans went along grudgingly in some cases with minimum wage legislation.  Then Kieth Ellison's predecessor proposed maximum wage legislation.  It was largely ignored but the premise was allowed to fester.  Entry level wage legislation is NOT about how much these people should make, it is about WHO should determine it.  The maximum wage proposal was that no one at the top should make more than 20-fold what to lowest wage worker gets paid by the same company.  Whether that sounds reasonable or should be some other factor is NOT the point.  We don't determine private compensation plans at the congressional level.  It is NOT part of their defined powers nor is it something they would be good at.

I don't know if Tiger Woods makes too much.  Nike and the PGA can figure out their pay and incentive plans and live with the consequences.  I'm busy with my own business. 

Unfortunately, we keep blurring the lines between public and private.  The more that we do that, the more that we have the government to micro-manage everything including the comp plan for Dr. CCP (and all these other workers in all these other industries) instead of leaving that in the hands of the patients he sees and the providers who want to hire him.

Look at the auto makers, banks, insurance companies, airlines, auto companies and on and on and on.  I always felt their executive pay is none of my business.  If they are inefficient in their business, they will fail.  That corrects the problem.  Now we have the mindset of don't let them fail.  So where is the correcting mechanism, a vote in congress for every paycheck for every profession in every industry?  And that is smarter than the market???  They exist only because of our subsidy, so now their intricacies are our responsibility. I can't even think of examples more facetious than reality.  Is McDonalds to big to fail?  Is a federal french fry commission next??

Only 2 of 10 members of the federal auto task force drive American cars, 2 don't own cars. 

I don't know what other people should make or what they should drive nor do they know the value of my labor or vehicle suits me best.  Chuck Schumer should re-read Article 1 and the rest of the constitution and focus on his own G*d D*mned business which should include spending the summer with his constituents, not trying to run every business in America.

For the parts of the constitution limiting federal powers that he doesn't like, he should focus in on the amendment process which should come before the enabling legislation.
Title: American Aristocrat Outed
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on July 27, 2009, 06:33:53 AM
July 27, 2009
Impersonating a Victim

By W. R. Wansley
This past March 29th, Professor Henry Louis Gates was being interviewed in front of a small group by Walter Isaacson on C-SPAN's Book TV.  Thirty-three minutes into the discussion about his new book on Lincoln, Professor Gates began a detailed account of his own genealogy.  He said that in doing so he had discovered he was about "50% white".  He said that this was quote, "To my astonishment and horror...".   

He continued by saying that he had subsequently sent his DNA off to be tested.  This time, upon finding out he was "57% white", he said again, "to my horror .... I was becoming more white by the minute".  To this Gates, Isaacson and everyone else there chuckled.

Something tells me that if Mr. Isaacson had said that he also had sent his DNA off and found that to his "astonishment and horror" he was 57% black, no one would chuckle, least of all the Professor of African American Studies at Harvard, Dr. Gates.

This diminutive man is the epitome of intellectual elitism.  He goes on book tours touting books he has written.  He lectures at symposiums on race.  He travels for pleasure.  He is vaunted and toasted where ever he goes.  He loves to talk about where he dines and drops a "Martha's Vineyard" or the like, in conversation here and there.  Except for his being slightly handicapped -- he walks with a cane -- he is living a charmed life.  He is embraced by his mostly lily-white fellow liberal elites.  He makes a good living -- inside work with no heavy lifting.

He is good friends with none other than the President of the United States and so much so that the President will lurch to his defense -- with prejudice.  He can publicly disrespect an officer  who was called to protect his property.  He even, it is now known, has a get out of jail free card.

The Gates arrest fiasco has put into sharp focus the difference between class and race in America.  It has also contrasted the pseudo victimhood of Gates with the legitimate victims of Jim Crow.   His defenders try playing the tattered race card but it doesn't work this time.  "Black men are arrested in greater proportion than whites", they squawk.  If Gates is indicative, now we know why.

We have now all heard the verbal abuse Gates hurled at the officer -- who was called to protect his property.   Gates theatrical reaction to the situation:  "This is what happens to a black man in America!"  What?  Returning to your posh residence from your trip to China and having a neighbor look out for you by reporting suspicious behavior in your upper-crusty neighborhood and having a white public servant come check on your place for you -- is that what "happens" to you in America, Dr. Gates?  Swing low sweet chariot.

Immune to embarrassment he continues undaunted.  When he is asked by the officer to step outside, Gates articulately replies, "I'll step outside with yo'-mama!"  The words of his repartee ring hollow -- even pathetic.  And funny too -- but alas I am laughing at him not with him.  What a joke.

Until now I have thought highly of Dr. Gates.  Regrettably he has been unmasked as another successful black man unable to come to terms with a country that has given him so much, but he is required to hate as part of the milk-the-guilt charade.  He now reminds me of Jeremiah Wright, a man who lives in a million dollar mansion in a gated community where he continually smolders with hatred for the country that has "persecuted" him so.

The President, Gates and Wright: three conspicuously successful black Americans irritably fixated on race.  Perhaps Wright is dealing with some of these same white genealogy issues as Gates and the President -- pray tell?   

Gates must believe using such colloquialisms as "yo' mama" gives him some sort of black victimhood authenticity.  What a fool.  In reality, he is a member of the American aristocratic class.  As a victim, he is an imposter.

Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/07/impersonating_a_victim.html at July 27, 2009 - 09:32:33 AM EDT
Title: backroom deals
Post by: ccp on July 27, 2009, 03:51:24 PM
We always hear about the back room deal making among our legislators.

Maybe there should be some transparancy about the stuff behind the scenes.

Why should not a congressman not be able to vote his beliefs or conscience and not have his arm twisted, his pocket lined, or threatened, or cojoled, or paid off in some way to vote the party line?

Or is that an oxymoron?
Title: Ratcheting Up the Nanny State
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on July 30, 2009, 06:04:02 AM
Hardly a rant, but rather a very prescient piece written in 1951 and applicable today.


How Now Shall We Behave?
Mises Daily by Garet Garrett | Posted on 7/30/2009 12:00:00 AM


"and they shall beat their swords into plowshares"
– Isaiah 2:4
[Faith & Freedom, March 1951]

With the advent of war, what means are available to those who wish to resist the progressive socialization of American society?

After every war, until the last one, the people took their liberty back. It was understood that they would; it was understood, in each case, that the government would surrender its extraordinary wartime powers and return to the form that was before. But during World War II, as we know, the planners at Washington were writing the enlarged design for a controlled world — enlarged, that is, from the New Deal design. They thought they had learned all they needed to know about controls, and they said, "You see that the economy has to be planned for war — prices, production, distribution and all. What is good for war is good also for peace. Unemployment can be planned away. Prosperity can be planned. The full life forever, with security and social justice — that can be planned."

And the people, remembering the unplanned depression, answered saying, "Why not?"

No Retreat
For the first time in our history, there was no intention on the part of government to return to the form that had been before, and from what followed we know that if a government is bent upon extending its power over the lives of the people, war is a wonderful occasion. During the war it can invoke the laws of necessity and appeal to the spirit of unity; and even while pretending to be tolerant of criticism, it can insist that criticism shall be constructive, not destructive, as if there could be any point in criticism that did not aim to destroy something. Then after the war it says, as it said the last time, that the problems of transition from war to peace are more than the people can solve for themselves; they need the aid and guidance of government much more than they need their liberty back.

These are not cynical reflections. They rest upon experience. One would have to be stupid, indeed, not to realize that with the political climate what it is, and has been for twenty years, you could almost as soon imagine putting the chicken back into the egg as to repack in a tight Constitutional box the powers of government that are released by total war.

A Question That May Fairly Tear You Apart
So it is war again, and the question comes, how now shall we behave?

We, of course, means those who have been fighting the rise of the Welfare State and, in its name, the progressive socialization of American society. Shall they go on with it? In war as in peace, shall they continue to say what they think of a government that tells the people socialism and liberty may dwell together amicably in the same house?

It is a question that may fairly tear you apart. Waiving the point as to whether they could if they would, some who are asking the question are not sure they would if they could. They know that the conditions of total war are so extreme and the perils so great that unity may be imperative. They know how easily going on with the fight could be construed as disaffection and how it might in fact implement disunity. Only in a war that calls for less than the utmost exertions of the whole people may disaffection be tolerated. In total war there arises almost at once a demand that disaffection shall be suppressed; and if it is too large to be suppressed, as for example in the case of powerful pressure groups like organized labor, it may have to be bribed, and public opinion will condone the bribing of it. This, of course, means nothing to those whose convictions might lead them to defy hostile public opinion and who could not at all be bribed. Nevertheless, under stress of common danger, herd compulsions are very strong. Divisive ideas may be forgotten. If the price of survival is solidarity, the feeling for solidarity will be almost irresistible.

To begin with, therefore, the degree of peril, according to each individual's estimate of it, must affect his decision about how to behave. He may say, "Of what avail are my private political principles if my country falls? Am I justified to insist upon them or to fight for them if thereby I tend to create disunity, which could be fatal?"

On the other hand lies the certainty that if the fight is broken off, the government, in default of opposition, will occupy new ground from which afterward perhaps it cannot be dislodged. So you have the terms of the dilemma.

An Ideological Truce
The decision would be easy to make if the government would say, "In all the fields of social controversy let there be truce for the duration of the war." It will not say that. On the contrary, it is already evident that totalitarian neo-liberalism is riding the war. Having promised that the government would practice extreme economy in nondefense spending, a staggering defense budget was brought on with, at the same time, further demands for the Welfare State; such as, increased unemployment compensation at a time when there are more jobs than men, greater subsidies to agriculture at a time when high farm prices are immunized by law from the effects of inflation, compulsory health insurance, federal aid to education, larger grants-in-aid to the states, and the distraction of a Fair Employment Practices Commission. A budget, said a responsible Senator, that was "the very height of fiscal irresponsibility."

The government, you see, cannot ever have thought to ask itself the question we discuss here; that is, whether for the duration of the war there should be a truce between, on the one hand, those who are resolved to extend much further the political regulation of our lives, and those, on the other hand, who very bitterly resist it.

The answer we seek must be found by each individual in himself alone. That also is freedom. A man must be free to surrender his freedom if he will, or to give it in hostage for any other value he may set above it — the survival of his country, for example. But for any whose minds may be in suspense it would certainly seem that the government's attitude should resolve the doubt.

Well then if you say, "Yes, the fight must go on," there is the next question: How?

Selective Targets
It is probably true that the fight cannot be continued in war as it was conducted in peace, if for no other reason than that the minds you want to reach are not the same. They will be inflamed by passion and slanted by propaganda, and above all they will be greatly distracted by many new cries of "Attention, people! Attention!"

The mind's capacity to give attention is very definitely limited, and as the demands upon it multiply in wartime it is bound in self-defense to become more selective and a little deaf. In this competition the normal disadvantage of the evangel for freedom is naturally worsened, since by its very nature it requires people to think attentively. Extremely few people like to do that. On first reflection this seems a discouraging fact, and yet it might turn out to be a gift if only it would cure the freedom-spokesmen of their principal weakness, which we may call the shotgun method. They sit in their towers writing many things in different ways, each on his own impulse, competing with one another for the people's attention — and they have no line. By contrast, look at the totalitarian neoliberals who are moving the Welfare State. They say the same things over and over, all as with one voice, and the cumulative effect of their reiterations is tremendous. They have a line. They got the idea from the Communists.

Is there not a lesson there?

To continue the fight successfully in wartime, it must be focused on relatively few points, such, for example, as to clarify the United Nations Covenant on Human Rights or the Genocide Convention, with intent to show the appalling danger of government by international treaty above the Constitution; or the fantastic nature of the federal budget; or the implications of any act of usurpation by the President, leading to government by executive discretion — and to do it in every case on level of ordinary understanding, in every man's language, even as the Daily Worker would do it.

An Ominous Sound
The scattered current literature of economic education, of free enterprise, of freedom's heritage, of Constitutional government, and so on, is in the aggregate enormous; but it is the work of many warriors discharging buckshot at many targets. If it could be organized and trained on a few selected targets — and targets in the news — its effect could be cannon-like. This would require collaboration, a liaison, a clearing intelligence somewhere, a board of strategy perhaps — but what of that? There now is a science of propaganda. The other side is using it. When will the conservatives learn it?

There will be something still for the individual to do. He cannot refuse to pay taxes, no matter how absurd the budget may be. He cannot attack the credit of the government — not in the wartime. He cannot conduct the war, nor can he refuse to risk his life for it if that is required of him. And though he may take to the soap box and lift his voice in the street, that will be only worse frustration.

But there are a few great voices left, and others not so great that are still telling the truth, and these the individual may amplify prodigiously. In his speech entitled, "Think It Over," and again in his startling speech calling for our own defense first, Mr. Hoover got several thousand letters and telegrams. Suppose he had got ten million, so that it had been in the news that the delivery of them blocked traffic in the neighborhood of Park Avenue and Forty-ninth Street. After a speech on the catastrophe to which the government's gaiety with billions is leading the country, Senator Byrd gets a few hundred letters, whereas if one-half of those who believe with him responded, the Senate Office Building would be swamped with them. Notable speeches by Senators and Representatives fighting against socialism are ill-reported in the news — often, in fact, omitted — yet it would be little enough for one who wished to do his part to find them in the Congressional Record and react in a manner to help boost their muzzle velocity. The running together of many voices, even yours and mine, makes a very ominous sound.


Garet Garrett (1878–1954) was an American journalist and author who was noted for his critiques of the New Deal and US involvement in the Second World War. See his books in the Mises Store. See his article archives. Comment on the blog.
This article was originally published in Faith & Freedom, March 1951.
See also, "Who Is Garet Garrett?"

http://mises.org/story/3589#
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Freki on July 31, 2009, 11:05:26 AM
I am one of those tea baggers.  I live in a small town, pop was 2000 when I was young it is now about 7000.  At the first Tea party protest we had about 1700.  As I looked around at the demographics of the crowd they were mostly the older patriarchs and matriarchs of the town!  People who had never protested anything in their lives.  At the fourth of July protest we topped 2000 people.  Our town has 7000.  The article that follows has comments from congress men who still dont seem to get this movement.  They seem to think they know best and are not listening to their constituents.  The backlash against bigger government is not a flash in the pan.  We have had enough.  Our reps need to listen or be put out.
=======================================================================================

Alex Isenstadt Alex Isenstadt – Fri Jul 31, 5:30 am ET
Screaming constituents, protesters dragged out by the cops, congressmen fearful for their safety — welcome to the new town-hall-style meeting, the once-staid forum that is rapidly turning into a house of horrors for members of Congress.

On the eve of the August recess, members are reporting meetings that have gone terribly awry, marked by angry, sign-carrying mobs and disruptive behavior. In at least one case, a congressman has stopped holding town hall events because the situation has spiraled so far out of control.

“I had felt they would be pointless,” Rep. Tim Bishop (D-N.Y.) told POLITICO, referring to his recent decision to temporarily suspend the events in his Long Island district. “There is no point in meeting with my constituents and [to] listen to them and have them listen to you if what is basically an unruly mob prevents you from having an intelligent conversation.”

In Bishop’s case, his decision came on the heels of a June 22 event he held in Setauket, N.Y., in which protesters dominated the meeting by shouting criticisms at the congressman for his positions on energy policy, health care and the bailout of the auto industry.

Within an hour of the disruption, police were called in to escort the 59-year-old Democrat — who has held more than 100 town hall meetings since he was elected in 2002 — to his car safely.

“I have no problem with someone disagreeing with positions I hold,” Bishop said, noting that, for the time being, he was using other platforms to communicate with his constituents. “But I also believe no one is served if you can’t talk through differences.”

Bishop isn’t the only one confronted by boiling anger and rising incivility. At a health care town hall event in Syracuse, N.Y., earlier this month, police were called in to restore order, and at least one heckler was taken away by local police. Close to 100 sign-carrying protesters greeted Rep. Allen Boyd (D-Fla.) at a late June community college small-business development forum in Panama City, Fla. Last week, Danville, Va., anti-tax tea party activists claimed they were “refused an opportunity” to ask Rep. Thomas Perriello (D-Va.) a question at a town hall event and instructed by a plainclothes police officer to leave the property after they attempted to hold up protest signs.

The targets in most cases are House Democrats, who over the past few months have tackled controversial legislation including a $787 billion economic stimulus package, a landmark energy proposal and an overhaul of the nation’s health care system.

Democrats, acknowledging the increasing unruliness of the town-hall-style events, say the hot-button issues they are taking on have a lot to do with it.

“I think it’s just the fact that we are dealing with some of the most important public policy issues in a generation,” said Rep. Bruce Braley (D-Iowa), who was confronted by a protester angry about his position on health care reform at a town hall event several weeks ago.

“I think in general what is going on is we are tackling issues that have been ignored for a long time, and I think that is disruptive to a lot of people,” said Bishop, a four-term congressman. “We are trying, one by one, to deal with a set of issues that can’t be ignored, and I think that’s unsettling to a lot of people.”

Freshman Rep. Dan Maffei (D-N.Y.), whose event at a Syracuse middle school was disrupted, said that he still planned to hold additional town halls but that he was also thinking about other options.

“I think you’ve got to communicate through a variety of different ways. You should do the telephone town hall meetings. You should do the town hall meetings. You should do the smaller group meetings,” said Maffei. “It’s important to do things in a variety of ways, so you don’t have one mode of communication.”

“You’re going to have people of varying views, and in this case, you’ve got the two extremes who were the most vocal,” Maffei said of the flare-up at his July 12 event.

On Tuesday, Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), who handles incumbent retention duties for House Democrats in addition to chairing the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, met with freshman members to discuss their plans for the monthlong August recess. While the specific issue of town hall protesters never came up, according to sources familiar with the meeting, he urged them not to back away from opponents.

“He said, ‘Go on offense. Stay on the offense. It’s really important that your constituents hear directly from you. You shouldn’t let a day go by [that] your constituents don’t hear from you,’” said one House Democratic leadership aide familiar with the meeting.

Some members profess to enjoy the give-and-take of the town halls, even if lately it’s become more take than give.

“Town halls are a favorite part of my job,” said Rep. Russ Carnahan (D-Mo.), a third-term congressman from St. Louis who noted that a “handful” of disruptions had taken place at his meetings. “It’s what I do. It’s what I will continue to do.”

“People have gotten fired up and all that, but I think that’s what makes town halls fun,” said Perriello, a freshman who is among the most vulnerable Democrats in 2010. “I think that most of the time when we get out there, it’s a good chance for people to vent and offer their thoughts. It’s been good.”

“I enjoy it, and people have a chance to speak their mind,” he said.

Both Carnahan and Perriello said they were plunging forward with plans to hold more town hall meetings.

Republicans, with an eye toward 2010, are keeping close track of the climate at Democratic events.

“We’ve seen Russ Carnahan, we’ve seen Tim Bishop, we’ve seen some other people face some very different crowds back home,” said National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman Pete Sessions (R-Texas). “The days of you having a town hall meeting where maybe 15 or 20 of your friends show up — they’re over. You’ve now got real people who are showing up — and that’s going to be a factor.”

Asked later how or whether the GOP would use the confrontations against Democrats, Sessions responded: “Wait till next year.”

But Democrats are quick to point out they’re not the only ones facing hostile audiences. They single out Rep. Mike Castle (R-Del.), who found himself in a confrontation earlier this month with a “birther” protester, and insist that Republicans face a backlash of their own if it appears the party is too closely aligned with tea party activists or other conservative-oriented protesters.

“It’s a risk that they align themselves with such a small minority in the party,” said Brian Smoot, who served as political director at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in the past election cycle. “They risk alienating moderates.”

Read More Stories from POLITICO
Title: The Following Words are Strung Consecutively
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on August 05, 2009, 10:06:31 AM
http://www.reason.com/blog/show/135230.html


Andrew Sullivan: Opposition to Cash-for-Clunkers Shows GOP Not Serious About Limited Government

Matt Welch | August 4, 2009, 10:55pm

Ideological shape-shifter and presidential benefit-of-the-doubt-giver Andrew Sullivan types the following words consecutively:

Quote
[C]ash-for-clunkers is one example of the government actually doing something right, helpful and popular. It's the kind of pragmatic experimentation that FDR tried repeatedly. So you have a practical, targeted measure that seems to have helped abate a deeper recession in the auto industry, and the right is obsessed with the ideological abstraction of "government."

What conservatives have to do, in my view, is not demonize government, but to champion limited government. If government can do tangible practical things that help everyone, while balancing its budget, it's doing what conservatives think it should. Smart, practical initiatives that address problems that the private sector has failed at: what else is government for? The rest is ideology - and it seems to be all the Republicans have left.

I'm nobody's conservative, but I'm pretty sure if I was telling conservatives how to think I wouldn't admonish them for failing to champion limited government within two sentences of praising FDR's pragmatism. It's like, I dunno, lecturing the Labour Party about demonstrating their pro-union bonafides while praising Margaret Thatcher's centrism. Sounds a bit off.

As for the factual claims, did cash-for-clunkers indeed "help everyone"? Well, no. Let's take my favorite example: me. The Welch household owns one car, a 1994 Acura Integra. While clunky, this 15-year-old car does not qualify for the program, because it gets too many miles per gallon–around 28, allegedly. So our tax dollars are being redistributed to people who have made less eco-friendly purchases than we have.

One could counter-argue that monocle-wearing magazine editors such as moi are not the intended audience for this bit of alleged FDRism, and while that actually doesn't make any sense (since no one's checking your pay stubs on the showroom floor), let's roll with it anyway. Here's the problem even then: We bought that pup (for the C-4-Cish price of $4,000, about six years ago), back when we were poor. Hell, I'd bet that the majority of households whose lone car is a 1994 anything ain't exactly swimming in the do-rey-mi. What this program does is take money from the stickshift-driving non-rich, and gives it to anyone with an SUV and/or old beater. Who (again, unlike us) is ready to shell out five figures for a shiny new car.

And wait! It gets worse, from that whole social-justice angle. What about the estimated 12 percent of Americans aged 15 years and above who don't drive, period? What about all the adults who live in the 8 percent of households that don't have a vehicle? What about half the residents of Manhattan, who took transit planners' decades-old dream to heart and "got out of their cars"? What about those who are too poor to drive? The answer: All of these people are subsidizing whoever turns in an SUV or crappy old $800 K-Car like the one I used to drive. Not only that, but what do you think happens to the $800 car market when the guvmint is handing out $4,500 checks to have the things destroyed? I'll go ahead and state the obvious: It shrinks, making it more expensive for the truly poor people, the ones who want to make that daring leap from the bus system to an awful old bucket of rust.

So no, not "everyone" was helped by cash-for-clunkers. Ah, but what about how it's better for the environment, and therefore "everyone"? Tell it to those smokestack apologists at, uh, The New York Times, The New Republic, and The Guardian.

Sullivan is dead right about one thing: Cash-for-clunkers is indeed very "popular." So is the home mortgage interest deduction, the prescription drug benefit, and any number of federal programs that siphon from the diffuse pool of tax revenue+debt and blast out concentrated benefits to the broad middle class. The standard for judging these things shouldn't be popularity–Richard Nixon's wage-and-price control spasm of 1971, to name one of many historical measures now widely and rightly considered asinine, was hugely popular at the time–but whether they make sense in both the short and long term.

Cash-for-clunkers amounts to a rounding error in Tim Geithner's nose-hair at this point, which is probably why at least some liberals seem so genuinely baffled by the disproportionate criticism it has drawn. But for some of us it's also a nearly perfect symbol of economic statism run amok. The federal government is taking from the many, giving it to the less-than-many, destroying functional cars, funneling money to an auto industry that it already largely owns (at a hefty taxpayer price tag), then taking multiple (and multiply premature) bows for rescuing the economy and the auto industry in the process.

I understand, and even appreciate, that not everyone interprets things this way. But what I don't understand, and ultimately don't respect, is the weird urge to react to yet another Obama administration brainfart by rounding up its opponents and putting them in a metaphorical holding pen marked "ideologically obsessed." Particularly after eight years in which the only detectable ideology was taxcut-and-spend, and otherwise do what parties in power always do: look for creative new ways to bribe the middle class.
Title: We are in the midst of a "soft" civil war
Post by: ccp on August 05, 2009, 03:52:45 PM
"Cash for clunkers is an example of government doing something right"?

first one billion than three.

A billion here, a billion there.
What's a billion dollars anymore anyway?

In an age of government wherein we speak of hundreds of billions and trillions the concept of  a billion has been relegated to pocket change.

I don't listen to Sullivan.  I have seen him on the talk circuit and I have never heard anything this guy has said that made any sense.
He always sounds bizarre and makes no sense.

I have said I was for compromise.  I thought the initial Tarp had saved a castrophe.  If there was no such thing as FIDC I am convinced we would have seen a rush on banks and a collapse like '29.

But, my idea of compromise was not to spend like crazy.

Jonah Goldberg was right when he said the Democracts are like Huns crashing the gates and going nuts looting and (my words) raping and pillaging, and stealing everything they can get their paws on and throwing it all around to their friends and cronies and allies.

We really are in a "soft" civil war.

Years ago the plundering would have been done with guns.  Now it is "legal" and legitimized because the plunderers have bribed enough of an electorate to get away with it.

And yet the Rebublicans have not yet found a savior of the United States of America if one exists.

I can only hope Dick Morris is right.

Title: Cash for Clunkers: Piecemeal Lobbied Justice vs. Equal Protectection for ALL
Post by: DougMacG on August 05, 2009, 04:27:09 PM
Yes it helped one failed industry hit better numbers at the end of one quarter but it violates all principles I thought we stood for.  As a manufacturer, if you are not on their preferred list, you miss out - AND you get to pay for the others' people's subsidy!  As a consumer maybe you get lucky (odds are that you don't!), but somebody else equally deserving comes in one day earlier, one day later, buys a slightly different vehicle, trades in a slightly different vehicle or does something else equally large and heroic to stimulate the economy and save the planet and THEY GET NOTHING... AND THEY PAY FOR YOUR SUBSIDY!!

Regarding the author, how do I say nicely... what kind of MORON thinks these are conservative OR AMERICAN principles???

In terms of common sense, it isn't drivers of clunkers who buy new cars.  There is a food chain.  More typically it is owners of 3-5 year old cars that buy new cars and it is the driver of the clunker who delays the need to expend the energy - roughly 65000 mega-joules or about 1.5 tons of crude oil - to manufacture a typical new vehicle.

The people who were ready to trade in the exact vehicle required in the bill and buy the exact new vehicle specified on the exact day that the taxpayer-taken, borrowed or printed money hit the street were most likely the cronies of the staffers and lobbyists who wrote the bill, it would seem to me.

Also I think the numbers will show that Honda and Toyota were the 'American' companies who benefited most...
Title: Thugocracy Strikes Again
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on August 10, 2009, 08:55:53 PM
Oh my goodness. Plenty wrong with this interview--we watch so much polished and produced news that this comes off quite raw--yet here we see a citizen confronting his representative and then informing us of the fallout:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETphJb9h6qM&feature=channel_page[/youtube]
Title: President Reagan
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 14, 2009, 09:44:43 AM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iShCXx_xZDQ
Title: If President Bush had , , ,
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 15, 2009, 09:13:57 AM
If George W. Bush had made a joke at the expense of the Special
Olympics, would you have approved?

If George W. Bush had given Gordon Brown a set of inexpensive and
incorrectly formatted DVDs, when Gordon Brown had given him a
thoughtful and historically significant gift, would you have approved?

If George W. Bush had given the Queen of England an iPod
containing videos of his speeches, would you have thought this
embarrassingly narcissistic and tacky?

If George W. Bush had bowed to the King of Saudi Arabia, would you have
approved?

If George W. Bush had visited Austria and made reference to the
nonexistent "Austrian language," would you have brushed it off as a
minor slip?

If George W. Bush had filled his cabinet and circle of advisers with people
who cannot seem to keep current on their income taxes, would you have
approved?


If George W. Bush had been so Spanish illiterate as to refer to "Cinco de
Cuatro" in front of the Mexican ambassador when it was the fourth of May
(Cuatro de Mayo), and continued to flub it when he tried again, would you
have winced in embarrassment?


If George W. Bush had misspelled the word advice would you have
hammered him for it for years like Dan Quayle and potatoe as "proof"
of what a dunce he is?


If George W. Bush had burned 9,000 gallons of jet fuel to go plant a single
tree on "Earth Day," would you have concluded he's a hypocrite?


If George W. Bush's administration had okayed Air Force One flying
low over millions of people followed by a jet fighter in downtown
Manhattan causing widespread panic, would you have wondered whether
they actually "get" what happened on 9-11?


If George W. Bush had been the first President to need a teleprompter
installed to be able to get through a press conference, would you have
laughed and said this is more proof of how he is inept he is on his own and
is really controlled by smarter men behind the scenes?


If George W. Bush had failed to send relief aid to flood victims throughout
the Midwest with more people killed or made homeless than in New Orleans,
would you want it made into a major ongoing political issue with claims of
racism and incompetence?

If George W. Bush had ordered the firing of the CEO of a major corporation,
even though he had no constitutional authority to do so, would you have
approved?

If George W. Bush had proposed to double the national debt, which
had taken more than two centuries to accumulate, in one year, would
you have approved?

If George W. Bush had then proposed to double the debt again within 10
years, would you have approved?


If George W. Bush had reduced your retirement plan's holdings of
GM stock by 90% and given the unions a majority stake in GM, would you
have approved?


If George W. Bush had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to
take Laura Bush to a play in NYC, would you have approved?

So, tell me again, what is it about Obama that makes him so brilliant and
impressive? Can't think of anything? Don't worry. He's done all this in 5
months -- so you'll have three years and seven months to come up with an
answer.
Title: Oleg Atbashian: Laughing
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 17, 2009, 10:18:53 PM
Laughing at the Contradictions of Socialism in America

Posted By Oleg Atbashian On March 5, 2009

There was a time in recent American history when certain Soviet jokes didn’t work in translation — not so much because of the language differences, but because of the lack of common sociopolitical context. But that is changing. As President Obama is preparing us for a great leap towards collectivism, I find myself recollecting forgotten political jokes I shared with comrades while living in the old country under Brezhnev, Andropov, and Gorbachev. (I was too young to remember the Khrushchev times, but I still remember the Khrushchev jokes.) I also noticed that the further America “advances” back to the Soviet model, the more translatable the old Soviet jokes become. Not all Soviet advancements have metastasized here yet, but we have four more glorious years to make it happen.

One of my favorite political jokes is this:

The six dialectical contradictions of socialism in the USSR:
There is full employment — yet no one is working.
No one is working — yet the factory quotas are fulfilled.
The factory quotas are fulfilled — yet the stores have nothing to sell.
The stores have nothing to sell — yet people got all the stuff at home.
People got all the stuff at home — yet everyone is complaining.
Everyone is complaining — yet the voting is always unanimous.

It reads like a poem — only instead of the rhythm of syllables and rhyming sounds, it’s the rhythm of logic and rhyming meanings. If I could replicate it, I might start a whole new genre of “contradictory six-liners.” It would be extremely difficult to keep it real and funny at the same time, but I’ll try anyway.

Dialectical contradictions are one of the pillars in Marxist philosophy, which states that contradictions eventually lead to a unity of opposites as the result of a struggle. This gave a convenient “scientific” excuse for the existence of contradictions in a socialist society, where opposites were nice and agreeable — unlike the wild and crazy opposites of capitalism that could never be reconciled. Hence the joke.

Then I moved to America, where wild and crazy opposites of capitalism were supposedly at their worst. Until recently, however, the only contradictions that struck me as irreconcilable were these:

Economic justice:
America is capitalist and greedy — yet half of the population is subsidized.
Half of the population is subsidized — yet they think they are victims.
They think they are victims — yet their representatives run the government.
Their representatives run the government — yet the poor keep getting poorer.
The poor keep getting poorer — yet they have things that people in other countries only dream about.
They have things that people in other countries only dream about — yet they want America to be more like those other countries.

Hollywood cliches:
Without capitalism there’d be no Hollywood — yet filmmakers hate capitalism.
Filmmakers hate capitalism — yet they sue for unauthorized copying of their movies.
They sue for unauthorized copying — yet on screen they teach us to share.
On screen they teach us to share — yet they keep their millions to themselves.
They keep their millions to themselves — yet they revel in stories of American misery and depravity.
They revel in stories of American misery and depravity — yet they blame the resulting anti-American sentiment on conservatism.
They blame the anti-American sentiment on conservatism — yet conservatism ensures the continuation of a system that makes Hollywood possible.

I never thought I would see socialist contradictions in America, let alone write about them. But somehow all attempts to organize life according to “progressive” principles always result in such contradictions. And in the areas where “progressives” have assumed positions of leadership — education, news media, or the entertainment industry — contradictions become “historically inevitable.”

If one were accidentally to open his eyes and compare the “progressive” narrative with facts on the ground, one might start asking questions. Why, for instance, if the war on terror breeds more terrorists, haven’t there been attacks on the U.S. soil since 2001? Why, if George W. Bush had removed our freedom of speech, was nobody ever arrested for saying anything? And if Obama has returned us our freedoms, why was a man harassed by police in Oklahoma for having an anti-Obama sign in his car? Why would anyone who supports free speech want to silence talk radio? And why is silencing the opposition called the “Fairness Doctrine”?

After the number of “caring,” bleeding-heart politicians in Washington reached a critical mass, it was only a matter of time before the government started ordering banks to help the poor by giving them risky home loans through community organizers. Which resulted in a bigger demand, which resulted in rising prices, which resulted in slimmer chances of repaying the loans, which resulted in more pressure on the banks, which resulted in repackaging of bad loans, which resulted in a collapse of the banks, which resulted in a recession, which resulted in many borrowers losing their jobs, which resulted in no further mortgage payments, which resulted in a financial disaster, which resulted in a worldwide crisis, with billions of poor people overseas — who had never seen a community organizer, nor applied for a bad loan — becoming even poorer than they had been before the “progressives” in the U.S. government decided to help the poor.

As if that were not enough, the same bleeding hearts are now trying to fix this by nationalizing the banks so that they can keep issuing risky loans through community organizers. In other words, to prevent the toast from landing buttered side down, they’re planning to butter the toast on both sides and hope that it will hover in mid-air. Which also seems like a sensible alternative energy initiative.

If that doesn’t fix the problem, there’s always the last resort of a liberal: blame capitalism. It’s always a win-win. Today government regulators may be blaming capitalism for the crisis caused by their dilettantish tampering with the economy, but who do you think they will credit after market forces resuscitate the economy?

Years ago, living in America made me feel as though I had traveled in a time machine from the past. But after the recent “revolutionary” changes have turned reality on its head — which is what “revolution” literally means — I’m getting an uneasy feeling I had come from your future.

As your comrade from the future, I also feel a social obligation to help my less advanced comrades in the American community, and prepare them for the transition to the glorious world of underground literature, half-whispered jokes, and the useful habit of looking over your shoulder. Don’t become a nation of cowards — but watch who might be listening.

Let’s start with these few.

People’s power:
Liberals believe they’re advancing people’s power — yet they don’t believe people can do anything right without their guidance.
People can’t do anything right — yet the government bureaucracy can do everything.
The government bureaucracy can do everything — yet liberals don’t like it when the government takes control of their lives.
Liberals don’t like it when the government takes control of their lives — yet they vote for programs that increase people’s dependency on the government.
They vote for programs that increase people’s dependency on the government — yet they believe they’re advancing people’s power.

Bush and the media:
The media said Bush was dumb — yet he won over two intelligent Democrats.
He won over two intelligent Democrats — yet the media said his ratings were hopeless.
The media said his ratings were hopeless — yet the 2004 electoral map was red.
The 2004 electoral map was red — yet the media said his policies failed.
The media said his policies failed — yet the economy grew and the war was won.
The economy grew and the war was won — yet the media said we needed “change.”

Public education:
Liberals have been in charge of education for 50 years — yet education is out of control.
Education is out of control — yet liberal teaching methods prevail.
Liberal teaching methods prevail — yet public schools are failing.
Public schools are failing — yet their funding keeps growing.
Their funding keeps growing — yet public schools are always underfunded.
Public schools are always underfunded — yet private schools yield better results for less [3].
Private schools yield better results for less — yet public education is the only way out of the crisis.

Foreign radicals:
Foreign radicals hate America — yet they’re all wearing American blue jeans.
They’re all wearing American blue jeans — yet they disdain American culture.
They disdain American culture — yet they play American music, movies, and video games.
They play American music, movies, and video games — yet they call Americans uncivilized.
They call Americans uncivilized — yet they expect Americans to defend their civilization.
They expect Americans to defend their civilization — yet they think American capitalism is outdated.
They think American capitalism is outdated — yet most of their countries require American handouts.
(* Some Democrat politicians have similar opinions about their redneck constituents — yet they won’t shut up about how proud they are to have their mandate.)

Liberals and taxes:
Liberals want to help the poor — yet they won’t give money to charities.
They won’t give money to charities — yet they’d like the government to become a gigantic charity.
They’d like the government to become a gigantic charity — yet the money has to be taken from people by force.
The money has to be taken from people by force — yet they call it welfare.
They call it welfare — yet higher taxes make everyone poorer.
Higher taxes make everyone poorer — yet liberals find ways not to pay taxes.
Liberals find ways not to pay taxes — yet they get to be chosen to run the government.

Liberals and the CIA:
The CIA is a reactionary institution — yet its agents always leak information that helps liberals politically.
CIA agents always leak information that helps liberals politically — yet liberals say the CIA is clueless.
Liberals say the CIA is clueless — yet in their movies the CIA is running the world.
In their movies the CIA is running the world — yet they tell us that better intelligence could have prevented the war.
Better intelligence could have prevented the war — yet “enhanced interrogations” of captured terrorists must not be allowed.

Love and marriage:
Sex differences are the result of social conditioning — yet homosexuality is biological.
Homosexuality is biological — yet everybody is encouraged to experiment with it.
Everybody is encouraged to experiment with it — yet venereal diseases are treated at the taxpayers’ expense.
Venereal diseases are treated at the taxpayers’ expense — yet taxpayers have no right to impose standards since there are no moral absolutes.
There are no moral absolutes — yet gay marriage is an absolute must.
Gay marriage is an absolute must — yet family is an antiquated tool of bourgeois oppression.
Title: The One
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 19, 2009, 07:12:51 AM
And it came to pass in the Age of Insanity that the people of the land called America , having lost their morals, their initiative, and their will to defend their liberties, chose as their Supreme Leader that person known as "The One".

He emerged from the vapors with a message that had no meaning; but He hypnotized the people telling them, "I am sent to save you. My lack of experience, my questionable ethics, my monstrous ego, and my association with evil doers are of no consequence. For I shall save you with Hope and Change. Go, therefore, and proclaim throughout the land that he who preceded me is evil, that he has defiled the nation, and that all he has built must be destroyed."
 
And the people rejoiced, for even though they knew not what "The One" would do, he had promised that it was good; and they believed. 
 
And "The One" said "We live in the greatest country in the world. Help me change everything about it!".
 
And the people said, "Hallelujah! Change is good!"
 
Then He said, "We are going to tax the rich fat-cats."
 
And the people said, "Sock it to them, and redistribute their wealth."
 
And the people said, "Show us the money!".

And then He said, "Redistribution of wealth is good for everybody."
 
And Joe, the plumber asked, "Are you kidding me? You're going to steal my money and give it to the deadbeats?"

And "The One" ridiculed and taunted him, and Joe's personal records were hacked and publicized.
 
One lone reporter asked, "Isn't that Marxist policy?"
 
And she was banished from the kingdom!
 
Then a citizen asked, "With no foreign relations experience, and having zero military experience or knowledge, how will you deal with radical terrorists?"
 
And "The One" said, "Simple. I shall sit with them and talk with them, and show them how nice we really are, and they will forget that they ever wanted to kill us all!"
 
And the people said, "Hallelujah! We are safe at last, and we can beat our weapons into free cars for the people!"
 
Then "The One" said, "I shall give 95% of you lower taxes."
 
And one, lone voice said, "But 40% of us don't pay ANY taxes."
 
So "The One" said, "Then I shall give you some of the taxes the fat-cats pay!"
 
And the people said, "Hallelujah! Show us the money!"
 
Then "The One" said, "I shall tax your Capital Gains when you sell your homes!"
 
And the people yawned, and the slumping housing market collapsed.

And He said, "I shall mandate employer- funded health care for EVERY worker and raise the minimum wage. And I shall give every person unlimited healthcare and medicine and transportation to the clinics."

And the people said, "Give me some of that!"
 
Then he said, "I shall penalize employers who ship jobs overseas."
 
And the people said, "Where's my rebate check?"
 
Then "The One" said, "I shall bankrupt the coal industry, and electricity rates will skyrocket!"
 
And the people said, "Coal is dirty, coal is evil, no more coal! But we don't care for that part about higher electric rates."
 
So "The One" said, "Not to worry. If your rebate isn't enough to cover your expenses, we shall bail you out. Just sign up with ACORN, and your troubles are over!"

Then He said, "Illegal immigrants feel scorned and slighted. Let's grant them amnesty, Social Security, free education, free lunches, free medical care, bi-lingual signs, and guaranteed housing."
 
And the people said, "Hallelujah!!" And they made him King!
 
And so it came to pass that employers, facing spiraling costs and ever-higher taxes, raised their prices and laid off workers. Others simply gave up and went out of business and the economy sank like a rock dropped from a cliff. The banking industry was destroyed.  Manufacturing slowed to a crawl. And more of the people were without means of support.
 
Then "The One" said, "I am the "The One" - The Messiah -and I'm here to save you! We shall just print more money so everyone will have enough!"

But our foreign trading partners said unto Him, "Wait a minute. Your dollar is not worth a pile of camel dung! You will have to pay more."
 
And the people said, "Wait a minute. That is unfair!"
 
And the world said, "Neither are these other idiotic programs you have embraced. Lo, you have become a Socialist state and a second-rate power. Now you shall play by our rules!"
 
And the people cried out, "Alas, alas!! What have we done?"


But yea verily, it was too late.  The people set upon "The One" and spat upon him and stoned him, and his name was dung.

And the once mighty nation was no more; and the once proud people were without sustenance or shelter or hope.
 
And the Change "The One" had given them was as like unto a poison that had destroyed them and like a whirlwind that consumed all that they had built.

And the people beat their chests in despair and cried out in anguish, "Give us back our nation and our pride and our hope!"

But it was too late, and their homeland was no more.
Title: Idiots Everywhere in America, I
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on August 19, 2009, 04:17:31 PM
This screed is reminiscent of one of my favorite cynics, H. L. Menken. I've not encountered this source before, can't find a succinct position statement anywhere on the site, and so fear it will turn out to be some LaRouchie or Moonie haven. Good invective is good invective so I post this anyway in all it's curmudgeonly glory. Please note, one table did not reproduce here; check the site to see it.

AMERICAN IDIOTS
by James Quinn
August 14, 2009

According to the CDC, 66% of adults over the age of 20 are overweight or obese. That is approximately 140 million adults. Somewhere between 15 and 20 million Americans can be classified as alcoholics. As many as 50% of those on welfare are alcoholics. There are 225 million people over 18 years old and 32 million of them do not have a high school degree. There are 32 million adults or 14% who are illiterate (23% in California, 22% in New York, 20% in Florida, 17% in New Jersey). The United States’ spending per pupil in public schools at $9,266 is in the top 5 in the world. New York and New Jersey spend $14,000 per pupil and one-fifth of their adults are illiterate.

Forrest Gump, when asked “Are you stupid or something”, responded “Stupid is as stupid does”. A person’s appearance does not prove they are stupid. It is their deeds and actions which prove whether they are stupid or not. The terms stupid and idiot are not politically correct in today’s America. Intellectually challenged, IQ disadvantaged, aptitude deficient, brain power wanting, and acumen poor might satisfy the PC police. Let’s take a look at their definitions according to Webster’s Dictionary and assess whether they might apply to anyone in the increasingly socialized United States of today.

Stupid - slow of mind; given to unintelligent decisions or acts; acting in an unintelligent or careless manner; lacking intelligence or reason; lacking in power to absorb ideas or impressions; implies a slow-witted or dazed state of mind that may be either congenital or temporary.

Idiot - a foolish or senseless person; a person of subnormal intelligence; a person lacking intelligence or common sense.

Besides describing George W. Bush, these definitions sadly describe millions of Americans. As a wise person I know likes to say, “It is a sad state of affairs”. Our citizens have failed to heed the wise words of our Founding Fathers:

“Reason obeys itself; and ignorance submits to whatever is dictated to it.”
Thomas Paine

“Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.”
James Madison

“Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.”
Edward Everett

The American people’s ignorance, stupidity, and disinterest in the governance of this nation have allowed an oligopoly of politicians, bankers, and powerful corporations to seize control of the country and loot its riches for their personal gain. By failing to educate themselves, millions of ignorant Americans have lost all of their power and are now dictated to by the few with knowledge. The elite who dictate the path of our country do not want the masses to become educated. Their power would be in jeopardy. The American public school system insures the retention of their power and wealth.

“Anyway, no drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we're looking for the source of our troubles, we shouldn't test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power.”
P.J. O’Rourke

The Ugly Numbers
Educational attainment is the single biggest determinant of lifetime income. As of 2008, 14% of Americans over 18 years old haven’t graduated high school, 31% have achieved a high school degree, 27% have earned a bachelor’s degree, and only 9% have earned an advanced degree. The median household income in the U.S. is $46,326. The median household income of Asian households is 24% higher at $57,518. The median household income of Black households is 35% lower at $30,134. Asian households have a fantastic educational achievement, with 49% of Asians achieving a bachelor’s degree or higher. Black households have a higher percentage with no high school degree (18%) than they do with a bachelor’s degree or higher (17%). Hispanic households have even more dreadful levels of educational attainment with only 12% achieving a bachelor’s degree or higher, while a full 37% of Hispanics have not graduated high school. Even though 69 million Americans have attained a high school degree, many are functionally illiterate as our public school system has just matriculated them through the system.

If you make the effort and earn a bachelor’s degree or master’s degree, the likelihood of making it into the top 10% to 20% of earners goes up dramatically. Drop out of high school and you guarantee that you will remain in the bottom 25% of earners, making less than $22,500 per year. There are approximately 111 million households in the United States. Only 5.6 million households earn more than $167,000. On the other end of the scale, there are 36.6 million households making less than $30,000. The middle is occupied by another 36.6 million households making less than $62,500. The bottom is occupied by high school graduates or dropouts. The top is occupied solely by college graduates. Those with knowledge and money are able to use their power to generate more money and consolidate that power by manipulating the ignorant poor masses. The U.S. public school system insures a continuous flow of ignorant masses.

Liberal Waste of Money

“In the first place, God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made school boards.”
Mark Twain

The United States takes in excess of $500 billion per year from its citizens through income taxes, real estate taxes, and school taxes to educate our young people in the public school system. The local and state bureaucrats along with the thousands of government officials responsible for the U.S. public education system believe that a half a trillion dollars is not nearly enough. There are 50 million students enrolled in 97,000 public schools in this country. The U.S. Department of Education spends $59 billion of your tax dollars and employs over 5,000 bureaucrats to guide our top notch world class educational system. There is no country on earth that spends close to the amount spent by the U.S. With this level of spending, we must have the smartest, best educated, most motivated students on the face of the earth.

(http://www.financialsense.com/editorials/quinn/2009/images/0814_clip_image002.gif)
Source: Perot Charts

Somehow, despite the billions “invested” in our children, millions graduate and can’t add or subtract. Cashiers in most retail stores would not know how to give you change from a dollar if the cash register didn’t tell them. Even then, it is often times a struggle. The Mathematics literacy of our 15 year olds is well below the world average and 10% to 15% below the leading Asian countries. We did beat Russia, Italy and Mexico. Any cost benefit analysis of what we spend versus what we get would conclude that our educational system is a complete disaster. It should be clear even to a high school dropout that our government bureaucrats haven’t spent our tax money efficiently or effectively. Our public schools are either not teaching the right things or not using the right techniques.
 
(http://www.financialsense.com/editorials/quinn/2009/images/0814_clip_image004.gif)
Source: Perot Charts

The liberals who are clamoring for more money and more government control of education have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that their methods have failed. According to the U.S. Dept. of Education the per pupil spending in 2005 was $9,266, up 128% since 1971. This means that from the time a child enters 1st grade until he/she graduates from high school (if they graduate), it costs taxpayers $111,000. You would think that with that investment, more than 33% of high school graduates would go to college. A study of public school students from 1991 to 2002 by the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research generated disturbing results:

The national high school graduation rate for all public school students remained flat over the last decade, going from 72% in 1991 to 71% in 2002.

Nationally, the percentage of all students who left high school with the skills and qualifications necessary to attend college was 34% in 2002.

The states with the lowest graduation rate in the nation were South Carolina (53%), followed by Georgia (56%), Tennessee (57%), and Alabama (58%).

In the class of 2002, about 78% of white students graduated from high school with a regular diploma, compared to 56% of African-American students and 52% of Hispanic students.

About 40% of white students, 23% of African-American students, and 20% of Hispanic students who started public high school graduated college-ready in 2002.

(http://www.financialsense.com/editorials/quinn/2009/images/0814_clip_image006.jpg)


The bureaucrats that allocate the billions in education spending have decided to concentrate on special education, education for the disadvantaged, and closing the “achievement gap” between white students and minority students. The results of these efforts have been dreadful. The facts are:

In 2007, the federal government spent $71.7 billion on elementary and secondary education pro­grams. These funds were spent by 13 federal departments and multi ple agencies. The Department of Education spent $39.2 billion on K–12 education. The largest programs in the Department of Education's elementary and sec ondary budget were "Education for the disadvantaged" ($14.8 billion) and "Special education" ($11.5 billion).

While spending per pupil has more than doubled, reading scores have remained relatively flat.

The achievement gap persists, with black and Hispanic children still lagging behind their white peers despite decades of federal aid targeted at equalizing opportunities for all students. Simi­larly, in 2005–2006, the national high school graduation rate for white students (80.6 percent) remained significantly higher than the graduation rates of black students (59.1 percent) and Hispanic students (61.4 percent).

In many cities, spending per stu dent exceeds $10,000 per year, yet graduation rates are below 50%. In Detroit, per-student spending is $11,100 per year, yet only 25% of Detroit's students are graduating from high school.

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, only 52% of public education expenditures are spent on instruction. This percentage has been slowly decreasing over recent decades.

(http://www.financialsense.com/editorials/quinn/2009/images/0814_clip_image008.jpg)

Instead of encouraging excellence in our most gifted children, government bureaucrats spend billions experimenting with the latest educational fads and trying to make sure all students are treated equal. This socialist teaching methodology has accomplished mass mediocrity. The devastating combination of mediocre teaching methods, weak curriculum, disinterested or non-existent parental involvement, lazy unmotivated pupils, and greedy self serving teachers’ unions has led to the poor excuse for a public education system.

More Perfect Union
“I don’t represent the children. I represent the teachers.”

 Al Shanker, former president of the American Federation of Teachers

One of the major reasons for poor academic result is non-caring tenured teachers, protected by powerful teachers’ unions. We could use teachers who cared as much as Mr. Hand. It has been 28 years since I was in high school. I had mostly mediocre teachers, but two teachers left a permanent impression on me. Charlie McLaughlin’s and Thomas McGrath’s enthusiasm for learning, knowledge of the subject matter, and concern for the students generated a passion for learning in me. Being inspired by a teacher is what every student needs to get to the next level.

The average salary of public school teachers is approximately $53,000. The average salary of public school teachers in California leads the nation at $65,000. This gives the term pay for performance a new meaning. A full 32% of all public school students in California don’t graduate high school. The California public school system doesn’t even prepare the average student well enough to read a newspaper or fill out an employment application at McDonalds. Based on information from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the following facts can be gleaned:

The average public school teacher was paid 36% more per hour than the average non-sales white-collar worker and 11% more than the average professional specialty and technical worker.

Full-time public school teachers work on average 36.5 hours per week during weeks that they are working. By comparison, white-collar workers (excluding sales) work 39.4 hours, and professional specialty and technical workers work 39.0 hours per week. Private school teachers work 38.3 hours per week.

Compared with public school teachers, editors and reporters earn 24% less; architects, 11% less; psychologists, 9% less; chemists, 5% less; mechanical engineers, 6% less; and economists, 1% less.

Public school teachers are paid 61% more per hour than private school teachers, on average nationwide.

The Detroit metropolitan area has the highest average public school teacher pay among metropolitan areas for which data are available, at $47.28 per hour, followed by the San Francisco metropolitan area at $46.70 per hour, and the New York metropolitan area at $45.79 per hour.

Title: Idiots Everywhere in America, II
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on August 19, 2009, 04:17:50 PM
With the highest average salary per teacher, Detroit must be turning out the best and brightest. Does a 75% high school dropout rate merit the highest salaries in the country? The district has 15,000 workers, an annual budget of $1.2 billion, and only graduates 25% of the 94,000 students it matriculates through its horrific system. Well done. I’m sure they will get big union negotiated raises this year. There is absolutely no evidence that average teacher pay is related to high school graduation rates. Due to their strong teachers’ unions, salaries, benefits and tenure are fought for, while the interests of the students are disregarded.

“A lot of people who have been hired as teachers are basically not competent.”

Al Shanker, former president of the American Federation of Teachers

Excellent motivated teachers produce excellent motivated students. Incompetent, unmotivated, burnt out, tenured teachers produce dropouts and functionally illiterate students. Tenure allows bad teachers to stay employed for decades. It is virtually impossible to get fired. In ten years, only about 47 out of 100,000 teachers were actually terminated from New Jersey’s schools. Newark’s school district successfully fired about one out of every 3,000 tenured teachers annually. Graduation statistics indicate that Newark’s graduation rate was a fabulous 30.6%. New York City’s Chancellor has revealed that in that city, only ten out of 55,000 tenured teachers were terminated in the 2006-2007 school year. According to the New York Daily News, at any given time in New York City an average of 700 teachers are being paid not to teach (they instead report to “rubber rooms”) while the district goes through the hoops (imposed by the union contract and by law) needed to pursue discipline or termination. A city teacher in New York that ends up being fired will have spent an average of 19 months in the disciplinary process. The Daily News reported that the New York City school district spends more than $65 million annually paying teachers accused of wrongdoing, in addition to the cost of hiring substitutes.

One highly destructive feature of the typical teachers’ union contract is a system that forces principals to hire teachers who transfer from other schools within the district. Since these teachers frequently are transferring because of poor performance in their original schools, the practice is called “the dance of the lemons” or “passing the trash.” One problem related to the destructive transfer system is a hiring process that takes too long and/or starts too late, thanks in part to union contracts. Would-be teachers typically cannot be hired until senior teachers have had their pick of the vacancies, and the transfer process makes principals reluctant to post vacancies at all for fear of having a bad teacher fill it instead of a promising new hire. Anywhere from 31% to almost 60% of applicants withdrew from the hiring process, often to accept jobs with districts that made offers earlier. Applicants who withdrew from the hiring process had significantly higher undergraduate GPAs, were 40% more likely to have a degree in their teaching field, and were significantly more likely to have completed educational coursework than the teachers who ended up staying around to finally receive job offers. Another common problem with the union contract is a “bumping” policy that fills schools which are more needy (but less desirable to teach in) with greater numbers of inexperienced teachers. In its report Teaching Inequality, the Education Trust wrote:

 “Children in the highest-poverty schools are assigned to novice teachers almost twice as often as children in low-poverty schools. Similarly, students in high-minority schools are assigned to novice teachers at twice the rate as students in schools without many minority students.”

The nonprofit Education Sector found in a 2007 report that nearly 19% of all public education spending in America goes towards things like seniority-based pay increases and outsized benefits -- things that don’t do much to improve teaching quality. If these provisions were done away with, the report found, $77 billion in education money would be freed up for initiatives that could actually improve learning, like paying high-performing teachers more money. Teachers unions push for contracts that effectively cripple school districts’ ability to monitor teachers for dangerous behavior. In one case, school administrators in Seattle received at least 30 warnings that a fifth grade teacher was a danger to his students. However, thanks to a union contract that forces schools to destroy most personnel records after each school year, he managed to evade punishment for nearly 20 years, until he was finally sent to prison in 2005 for having molested up to 13 girls. As an attorney for one of the victims put it, according to The Seattle Times:

“You could basically have a pedophile in your midst and not know it. How are you going to get rid of somebody if you don't know what they did in the past?”
Success Stories

"There is nothing which can better deserve our patronage than the promotion of science and literature. Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness." George Washington

Whenever I read about failure, my immediate reaction is to look for examples of success. Based on the studies I’ve found, Finland finishes at or near the top of every survey in Math and Science. They must be doing something right. With the pitiful results achieved by the U.S., we should humbly examine what we can learn from the Finnish school system.
 
(http://www.financialsense.com/editorials/quinn/2009/images/0814_clip_image010.gif)

Some facts about the Finnish school system are as follows:

Pre-school begins at age 6

Comprehensive school: age 7 to 16

Upper secondary school or vocational school: 16 to 19

Pupils in Finland, age 7 to 14, spend fewest hours in school

Higher education places for 65% young people

Second-highest public spending on higher education

They don’t divide students until they reach 16 years old. Education Minister Tuula Haatainen describes their philosophy:

“There is a philosophy of inclusion underlying this system. Widening participation in education is the most effective way of finding the most talented students. It's like ice hockey. We let all the girls and boys play, not only the best ones. With this fair play, we can give everyone the same chance to practice their skills - and this also gives us the way to find the best ones."

Their methods are based on common sense, personal responsibility, financial support and strong families:

An important ingredient in Finland's high achievement in reading and writing is a strong culture of reading in the home.

Parents nurture a love of reading among children and this is supported by a network of public libraries.

In the last international education league tables, produced by the OECD, Finland's 15 year olds were judged to have the highest standards of literacy in the world.

School meals are free to all pupils, there are no university fees and students can stay in the upper secondary stage (loosely equivalent to sixth forms) for up to four years.

Finland has made a conscious effort to have highly-qualified teachers throughout the school system.

Other ideas that have worked to improve academic results include private school choice, public school choice, and charter schools. Private school choice policies like vouchers, scholarships, or education tax credits help parents to enroll their children in a private school of choice. Public school choice allows parents more opportunity to choose the best public school for their children by offering open enrollment within the public education system. Charter schools are publicly funded schools that meet certain performance standards set by the government but are otherwise free from the traditional public school system. It is amazing what happens when free market competition is created by school choice. Government bureaucrats and Teachers’ Unions despise these ideas because failure and mediocrity are penalized while success is rewarded.

In 2001, Harvard University Economics Professor Dr. Caroline Hoxby studied the effect of school choice options on the performance of public schools. She found that public schools that faced a higher degree of competition from private schools improved their performance compared to public schools that faced less competition. Many surveys and focus groups have found that parents are more satisfied with their children's learning environment when they can choose their school. That helps to explain why limited voucher programs are usually over-subscribed, with many kids ending up on long waiting lists. In 1998, the non-profit Children's Scholarship Fund offered private school scholarships to 40,000 low-income students across the country. In all, more than 1.2 million kids applied. Not exactly a vote of confidence in the public school system.

Implications of Failure

“We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.”

Carl Sagan

After spending trillions on education in the last 40 years, we have absolutely nothing to show for it. SAT scores in Reading are lower and Math scores are flat with scores in 1972. The general populace is more ignorant, less informed, less curious, and easier to manipulate than they were in 1970.

(http://www.financialsense.com/editorials/quinn/2009/images/0814_clip_image012.jpg)

Our family has sacrificed financially to send our children to Catholic schools. Public schools spend anywhere from $8,000 to $14,000 per pupil and are able to send only 33% onto college. I pay $6,000 per year to send my oldest son to Catholic high school. Of the recent graduating class, 99% went on to college. The teachers are paid less, school spending is half as much per pupil and results are dramatically better. The combination of teachers who are competent and care, parents who are involved and care, and students who work hard and care, leads to success. The failure of public school education has vast negative implications for our society. Those with education and knowledge have pulled farther ahead of the uneducated and stupid. There are 225 million people over 18 years old and 146 million do not have a college degree. Only 20 million have a Master’s degree or better. Those who are educated make more money send their kids to private schools and continue the cycle. Ignorant teenagers who grow up to be ignorant adults, have kids who are brought up ignorant. It is extremely difficult to break this cycle.

This is a free country. No one is going to stop you from reading a book. My parents didn’t go to college, but their three kids did. All of our kids will go to college. It is expected and encouraged from the day they are born. The encouragement and involvement of two parents is more important than any other factor. The numbers speak for themselves. Asian children succeed the most because 85% of them are brought up in two parent households. White children are more successful in school because 76% of them are brought up in two parent households. Black children fail because only 38% are brought up in two parent households. The government can spend trillions more in urban public school systems and get no better results because black men have not taken personal responsibility for their children and families.

“Ignorance is the curse of God; knowledge is the wing wherewith we fly to heaven.”
William Shakespeare

The dumbing down of America has allowed the intelligentsia to retain power and increase their control over the country. Lack of educational achievement doesn’t automatically mean you are easily manipulated, but it sure increases the odds. If you weren’t motivated enough to do well in school, you are unlikely to take your civic duties of voting, understanding national issues, and getting involved in your community seriously. The saddest part is that an enormous quantity of even the college educated is so intellectually lazy that they choose to trust their leaders without question. With 100 million, ignorant, non-thinking, non-questioning, and intellectually lazy zombies occupying space in this country, continued domination by a few thousand highly educated elite remains quite easy. A highly educated citizenry would endanger their power. By socializing public education, encouraging mediocrity, and not rewarding excellence, government bureaucrats insure that the masses remain ignorant and pliable. Those in power know that by keeping the ignorant masses sedated with socialist goodies like welfare, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, public housing, and easy credit, they can stay in charge. For them it is fabulous, for the country it is a disaster. Winston Churchill summed it up succinctly:

“Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.”

There is no area of ignorance more distressing than in the area of economics and finance. Those with superior knowledge and power are able to mislead the ignorant masses regarding the state of our economic situation because most Americans have no clue about deficits, inflation, or the printing of money out of thin air. I’m reminded of Jeff Foxworthy’s “You Know You’re a Redneck” comedy routine.

You know you are ignorant if:

You think Pearl Harbor was attacked by the Germans (Bluto)

You think the Civil War is a Guns N Roses song.

You think Inflation is what you do to tires.

You think the Federal Reserve is a brand of scotch.

You think GDP stands for Got Da Payment from the welfare office.

You think you deserve a $300,000 house when your annual income is $22,500.

You don’t know the names of the guys on the penny, nickel, dime or quarter.

You think the National Debt is a monument in Washington DC

John Adams predicted the confusion and distress that has arisen in America.

“All the perplexities, confusion and distress in America arise, not from defects in their Constitution or Confederation, not from want of honor or virtue, so much as from the downright ignorance of the nature of coin, credit and circulation.”

The question is whether we can change our course, properly educate our populace, and take this country back from the entrenched elite. There is no more important issue facing our country today.


Bio: James Quinn is a senior director of strategic planning for a major university. These articles reflect the personal views of James Quinn. They do not necessarily represent the views of his employer and are not sponsored or endorsed by his employer. He can be reached at quinnadvisors@comcast.net.

http://www.financialsense.com/editorials/quinn/2009/0814.html
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: DougMacG on August 21, 2009, 07:23:16 AM
I wonder if it will it be 'cars for clunkers' that ultimately brings down Obamacare and the version of selective socialism so many people were sold by the leftist political machine currently in power in this country.

Yes people responded to the 'free' offer of 4500 bucks of transfer money, pretend money that everyone knows we don't have, to stimulate the economy through a selected consumer to a selected business for a limited time.

Just like the efficiency of Amtrack, DMV and the Post Office and the public-private partnership that brought us the bridge collapse, a couple of things went wrong with cars for clunkers: They underestimated the demand for free money, so they tripled the budget and put up a new deadline.  Not so different than the budget errors in the trillions  we saw for all of our current entitlement programs, all in projected bankruptcy.

Then the government computers went down so the select few didn't see the money anyway, just sitting on a government promise.  If they have to upgrade the computers, then they really underestimated the cost.  What about adding permanent staff for a 2 week program?  Who knows when they might want to do it again.

My biggest beef seriously is the mockery it makes of the concept of equal protection under the law.  What about a consumer of a different product?  What about a dealer of a different product?  What about a citizen-environmentalist who did something else for the earth not covered in the bill?  And what about the person who complies completely but doesn't get his application in until late Aug. or Sept. or Oct. as originally covered, passed and signed into U.S. Law?!  Sorry, nothing for you.

If you believe in cash for clunkers as a worthwhile endeavor, in spite of destroying the charities that relied that business - also based on the tax code, then our omniscient bureaucrats priced it wrong.  If we wanted to spend one billion until the end of October, the correct amount of the 'incentive' wasn't $4500.  Maybe it was $1000 or $2167 or some other number that only a market could figure out, not congressional aide in a cubicle or a lobbyist who is paid to get it done, not to get it right.

What have we learned?  The real clunker was the bureaucracy with their elitist leaders that don't know their own limits, and just like the next heart stint needed to save your life - offer expires Monday.
Title: BO will drive this country into the gutter.
Post by: ccp on August 21, 2009, 07:36:04 AM
Doug,
My arm chair opinion is that unless we all start sacrificing now this country is headed for a total collapse.
Even Buffett finally came out and said the obvious - all this spending will destroy us.
Entitlements will have to stop.
We should get the illegals to leave this country and stop allowing US employers to use them for beans on the dollar.

So some diners will close, gas stations, and consrtruction jobs.
Americans who are unemployed will have to take some of these jobs at lower rates and/or the owners will have to do the work themselves.

We need to stop giving life ling pensions to people who retire at 50 and then get other jobs.
Medicare and social security ages will have to increase to 70.

As a primary care doctor I have had to make due with less for years.
Nothing new to me.

I have had some skeptics decry that THIS IS the MO of BO.
Destroy the country so it has to be rebuilt from the bottom up - as a socialist state.
I am short of personally subscribing to this but I don't discount it altogether.

Yet the BO still has a 57% approval rating?

The only explanation for this is many still do not see any attractive alternative.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: G M on August 21, 2009, 07:37:44 AM
Actually Zogby has Barry polling at 45% approval rating.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 21, 2009, 07:41:39 AM
Lets continue this conversation on the Politics thread.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: ccp on August 21, 2009, 09:05:19 AM
He has lived a charmed life.  I have always felt Ted Kennedys, in particular believes the rules don't apply to him.


***What Ted Kennedy Wants
He's trying to change election rules—again.Article Comments (108) more in Opinion »Email Printer
Senator Ted Kennedy, who is gravely ill with brain cancer, has sent a letter to Massachusetts lawmakers requesting a change in the state law that determines how his Senate seat would be filled if it became vacant before his eighth full term ends in 2012. Current law mandates that a special election be held at least 145 days after the seat becomes available. Mr. Kennedy is concerned that such a delay could leave his fellow Democrats in the Senate one vote short of a filibuster-proof majority for months while a special election takes place.

"I therefore am writing to urge you to work together to amend the law through the normal legislative process to provide for a temporary gubernatorial appointment until the special election occurs," writes the Senator.

Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass.
What Mr. Kennedy doesn't volunteer is that he orchestrated the 2004 succession law revision that now requires a special election, and for similarly partisan reasons. John Kerry, the other Senator from the state, was running for President in 2004, and Mr. Kennedy wanted the law changed so the Republican Governor at the time, Mitt Romney, could not name Mr. Kerry's replacement. "Prodded by a personal appeal from Senator Edward M. Kennedy," reported the Boston Globe in 2004, "Democratic legislative leaders have agreed to take up a stalled bill creating a special election process to replace U.S. Senator John F. Kerry if he wins the presidency." Now that the state has a Democratic Governor, Mr. Kennedy wants to revert to gubernatorial appointments.

Beacon Hill has long sported heavy Democratic majorities, so the state legislature has the votes to grant Mr. Kennedy's wish. But does it have the chutzpah? An election is the more democratic option. After witnessing recent attempts by incompetent Governors in Illinois and New York to fill Senate vacancies, Massachusetts voters may have soured on such appointments. Especially when Mr. Kennedy's motivation for changing the law is so obviously born of partisan interest, not principle.***

Title: The Revolution Will Not Be Publicized
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on August 21, 2009, 03:30:20 PM
Back when I was a hippy who was gonna save the world I ran in Alinskyite circles where Gil Scott-Heron's poem The Revolution Will not be Televised was something of a street organizer's anthem. The gent posted below has updated that anthem a wee bit. I include Heron's original at the end so those who are unacquainted with it can get its flavor.


The Revolution Has Not Been Publicized (a poem)
Nathan Earle
(With apologies to Gil Scott-Heron)

You may as well stay home, brother.

You might as well just power down, order in, and shut it out.

You might as well just call up your kids, show off some pictures,

and attend church regularly on Sundays,

because the revolution has not been publicized.


The revolution has not been publicized.

The revolution was not waiting in your inbox

with a cute little subject line to catch your attention.

The revolution was not spelled out for you in three

easily-digestible sound-bites voiced over an apropos video

of the President getting off Air Force One.

The revolution has not been publicized.


The revolution was not immortalized in stories

of effete liberals sucking out your children's brains

bit by bit every time you sent them off to school.

The revolution did not suddenly announce itself

as it slithered through the flickering screen in your

darkened living room and crawled inside your head,

because the revolution was never publicized, brother.


There was no shouting in the streets that could be heard

above the almost silent drone of the machine as it snipped

away-the almost silent drone of the machine as it snipped

away-the rest of what was left of Madison's great idea.

The revolution has not been publicized.


There were no pictures of thirty million bureaucrats

snuffing out the fire of liberty one entrepreneurial spark at a time.

There were no pictures of forty million bureaucrats

marching out of the yawning pit to extract minutes and seconds

and years from what will be left of your life when you get done

standing at the window.

There were no pictures of fifty million bureaucrats

wagging their fingers in your face and showing you

the back of the line-the wrong line, as it turned out.

There were no videos on YouTube showing your kids'

noses pressed to the window waiting for you to come home.


ACORN, MoveOn, and the ACLU did not

particularly mind if you saw them coming.

In fact, they would have liked a little recognition now

and then for their role in bringing down the juggernaut

of Judeo-Christian constitutional republicanism.

But the revolution has not been publicized.


NBC, NPR, NYT, and the rest of the acronyms

did not openly self-congratulate on their sublime indifference

to difficult facts or for their daring,

prophylactic cultivation of ignorance, envy, and greed.

The revolution did not announce its consummation on the lips of Andrea Mitchell,

Chris Matthews, Larry King, or Keith Olbermann.

The revolution has not been publicized.


The revolution did not leave a sticky note on your wallet

warning you that at 12:05 p.m. on the twentieth day of January

it would take possession of the empty relic that was

left to you after your parents and your grandparents

and your great-grandparents tore it open and gorged on its contents.

The revolution did not stick in your throat on its way to your belly.

The revolution did not cause vomiting or obvious weight-gain.

The revolution is not reversible by liposuction.


The revolution has not been publicized, has not been publicized,

has not been publicized, has not been publicized.

The revolution will not be scaled back in the next election, brothers;

The revolution is complete.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BS3QOtbW4m0[/youtube]

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2009/08/the_revolution_has_not_been_pu.html
Title: Bill Whittle on the PC Narrative
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on August 25, 2009, 09:56:21 AM
An interesting rant by Bill Whittle, former writer of the Eject, Eject, Eject blog IIRC:

http://www.pjtv.com/video/Afterburner_with_Bill_Whittle/___MSNBC_%26_The_Great_Liberal_Narrative%3A_The_Truth_About_The_Tyranny_of_Political_Correctness/2343/;jsessionid=abcdgUcnYPEyFdBdxzsns
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Freki on August 25, 2009, 09:41:08 PM
WOW doesn't cover it!  Thanks BbG! :-o
Title: The Government can
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 01, 2009, 07:56:50 AM

http://theblogprof.blogspot.com/2009/08/video-tim-hawkins-government-can.html
Title: An Anti-Rant
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on September 02, 2009, 05:39:10 PM
I cringe every time I encounter something Pat Buchanan has written; even when I agree with his opinion he makes it in such a snarky, unctuous manner, often caricaturing those he oppose to such a degree it hurts to read his rants. In this Reason piece the author does a good job of reminding us just how often Buchanan's screeds evoke sympathy for Hitler and the Nazis.

http://www.reason.com/blog/show/135847.html


Buchanan: Everything You Know About Hitler's Foreign Policy is Wrong

Michael C. Moynihan | September 2, 2009, 6:19pm

Back in 1996, George Will wrote a column in Newsweek attacking Pat Buchanan's peculiar brand of conservatism; one that replaced the sunniness of Reaganism with a "snarl of resentment about people 'sitting on the corner playing bongo drums' in downtown Washington, about the economic onslaught from mighty Mexico, about the voicelessness of 'Euro-Americans' about the teaching of 'Godless evolution,' and other affronts to this 'Christian country.'" Will reminded readers of Pitchfork Pat's curious fixation on Nazi war criminals, and his revisionist view of how Jews were murdered at Treblinka:

In 1990 Buchanan, blithely misrepresenting "1,600 medical papers," ridiculed the "so-called 'Holocaust Survivor Syndrome'," which he said involves "fantasics" of martyrdom and heroics. He said that "reportedly" half the survivor testimonies on file at Yad Vashem memorial in Jerusalem are considered "unreliable." He did not say who reported that.

Regarding the use of diesel engine exhaust to asphyxiate Jews at the Treblinka concentration camp where 850,000 died, in 1990 Buchanan wrote: "Diesel engines do not emit enough carbon monoxide to kill anybody." How did he know? "In 1988, 97 kids trapped 400 feet underground in a Washington, D.C., tunnel while two locomotives spewed diesel exhaust into the car, emerged unharmed after 45 minutes." The source of that anecdote? "Somebody sent it to me." It had already appeared in a publication specializing in Holocaust denial.

Buchanan's eagerness to use such stuff that comes in, as it were, through his transom is telling. And as Jacob Weisberg wrote in The New Republic: "Carbon monoxide emitted by diesel engines is sufficient to asphyxiate people when they are crammed by the hundreds into thirteen-foot chambers. According to the 'Encyclopedia of the Holocaust,' suffocation at Treblinka took as much as half an hour: Buchanan's comparison only proves that the children he described had sufficient oxygen to survive whatever length of time they were trapped in the tunnel." Even though the tunnel was open at both ends, some children were made sick.


I covered much of the same territory responding to Buchanan's fact-free column on the John Demjanjuk case, in which he misunderstood the German penal code, compared a former concentration camp guard to Alfred Dreyfus, and generally made a hash of the facts surrounding the prosecution's case. And I took on Buchanan's view of the Holocaust—which he viewed as merely a consequence of a war started by Churchill—here.

And now Buchanan is back, with a column arguing that Hitler, the misunderstood Reichsfuehrer, didn't really want war, and could have been negotiated back from the brink. There is so much nonsense here that one barely knows where to begin, but here is a representative sample of Buchanan's argument:

The German-Polish war had come out of a quarrel over a town the size of Ocean City, Md., in summer. Danzig, 95 percent German, had been severed from Germany at Versailles in violation of Woodrow Wilson's principle of self-determination. Even British leaders thought Danzig should be returned. Why did Warsaw not negotiate with Berlin, which was hinting at an offer of compensatory territory in Slovakia? Because the Poles had a war guarantee from Britain that, should Germany attack, Britain and her empire would come to Poland's rescue.

Same was true of the Sudetenland, says Buchanan. These are, coincidentally, the very talking points one would find on the September 2, 1939 editorial page of the Völkischer Beobachter. And like much revisionism, such idiocy requires a significant refutation (which can be found in most any objective study of the war's origins). But let me just address a rhetorical question posed by Buchanan, and designed to convince readers that Hitler had no strategic designs on his neighbors:

But if Hitler was out to conquer the world — Britain, Africa, the Middle East, the United States, Canada, South America, India, Asia, Australia — why did he spend three years building that hugely expensive Siegfried Line to protect Germany from France?

This is pretty thin gruel, even by Buchanan's low standards of evidence. The Siegfried Line (or Westwall), a defensive structure built on Germany's western border, was by no means an indication of Germany's peaceful intentions. During the Sudeten crisis, which resulted in Czechoslovakia's incorporation into the Reich, "Hitler was hoping to prevent British intervention [by building the Westwall], and was certain the French would not act alone," writes historian Ian Kershaw. "A key deterrent, in his view, was the building of [the Westwall]...to provide a significant obstruction to any French invasion." There are piles of evidence to support this uncontroversial argument; simply, the German leadership constructed fortifications in the west in order to move on the east. As one book on the Westwall states flatly, the fortifications were "built not to protect against a French aggression per se but to deter France from attacking in support of her allies when Hitler sought to realize his territorial ambitions in the east."

And full credit to Adam Serwer at The American Prospect for his headline, "Pat Buchanan: Sotomayor? Racist. Hitler? Misunderstood."
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: DougMacG on September 03, 2009, 08:50:15 AM
Buchanan was very much against deposing Saddam IIRC, and departs from most Republicans on the issue of trade as well.  When he ran against sitting Pres. Bush (1) in 1992 he was very protectionist - we need to buy everything American etc. Then he drove his Mercedes to New Hampshire. 

Very charismatic guy who, along with Perot, succeeded in weakening Bush which led right into the Clinton presidency.  So Bush lost his 90% popularity for breaking his 'no new taxes' pledge, Buchanan was very tough on that, and then Bush lost his job to a guy committed to raising taxes much further on his first day in office.  Somewhere in there I hope are lessons learned.

Title: American Exceptionalism
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on September 04, 2009, 05:26:28 PM
Another fine Bill Whittle screed:

http://www.pjtv.com/video/Afterburner_with_Bill_Whittle/____Bill_Maher,_Barack_Obama_and_the_Truth_About_American_Exceptionalism/2378/
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Boyo on September 05, 2009, 04:19:49 PM
This is in reponse to those screwhead hollywood types and thier rediculous pledge to serve the obama.[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a61fPIgJfgs[/youtube]

enjoy Boyo
Title: Re: Political Rants: Klavan PJTV
Post by: Freki on September 06, 2009, 12:49:11 PM
I have been exploring PJTV and ran across Klavan.

Here are 2 of his vids I thought well worth watching.

 "Klavan on Culture: Shut Up"
http://www.pjtv.com/v/1612


 "Why Are Conservatives So Mean?"
http://www.pjtv.com/v/1949
Title: Jack Webb
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 07, 2009, 09:48:28 PM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4r6YCUtxfs&feature=popular
Title: PATRIOTS a poem
Post by: Freki on September 14, 2009, 04:03:50 PM
PATRIOTS


 

We glance about and see the signs, as memories buried deep

Begin to surface in our thoughts, and make it hard to sleep.

For once within our country there was freedom earned by blood

And full belief that freedom came from all our trust in God.

But now it is as though the story needs to be re-told.

What's that!  I hear the marching feet of patriots of old!

 

You can't usurp a country born by those whose hearts were free

Who structured laws and government to work for you and me;

Who threw into the king's own court his yoke of tyranny

And vowed to die before they ever gave up liberty!

Those men and women's honor was the type that can't be sold!

O yes!  I hear the marching feet of patriots of old!

 

Our country is the only one that fought for Freedom's Way.

To freely live religion and to give each man his sway;

To build and prosper honestly--not plunder nations' wealth.

And so we thrived as vigorous youth of joy and strength and health.

O! Liberty is in our veins, by God to us bestowed!

That's why I hear the marching feet of patriots of old!

 

Now tyranny has reared it head again within our land,

And cunning foes from many parts think vic'try is at hand.

For treason has been purchased by the best laid plans of men

From godless politicians who do not yet know their end.

O give me men of honesty, whose hearts are made of gold!

Alas!  I hear the marching feet of patriots new and old!

 

by  A. J. Forester

July 4, 2009

 

Permission to reprint this poem is freely given by the author. -- A. J. Forester
Title: "9/12 Quincy, Illinois: Dana Loesch Uncut - Snake Oil Salesmen & The New Revolut
Post by: Freki on September 15, 2009, 09:38:37 PM
This just made me smile.  She may not say much new but wow what pasion.  This is how to rant!!!!   :-o :wink: :-D

"9/12 Quincy, Illinois: Dana Loesch Uncut - Snake Oil Salesmen & The New Revolution"

http://www.pjtv.com/v/2440
Title: A Liberal Contemplates Food Fascism
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on September 23, 2009, 01:01:31 PM
Then They Came for the Fresca
The growing ambitions of the food police.
By William Saletan
Posted Tuesday, Sept. 22, 2009, at 11:23 AM ET
A nonalcoholic sequel to the Whiskey Rebellion seems to be brewing. And Slate may be joining it. I'll call it the Fresca Rebellion, in honor of our editor, David Plotz, a hard-core addict of the citrus-flavored soft drink.

For a long time, the only discernible libertarian around here was Jack Shafer, a man unable to wean himself from speech, guns, and other annoying constitutional amendments. But lately, other folks seem to be getting a bit Ayn Randy. On Saturday, Jacob Weisberg blew the whistle on New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg for trying to ban outdoor smoking in public parks ("First They Came for the Marlboros"). Yesterday, Daniel Engber went after the hypocrisy and overreaching of soda-tax advocates. And I've become such a knee-jerk defender of burgers and fries that I'm tempted to seek funding from the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

What's going on here? Most of us used to be good liberals. Are we getting conservative in our old age?

I'd say it's the opposite. We're what we were five or 10 years ago: skeptics and fact-mongers with a bias for personal freedom. It's the left that's turning conservative. Well, not conservative, but pushy. Weisberg put his finger on the underlying trend: "Because Democrats hold power at the moment, they face the greater peril of paternalistic overreaching." Today's morality cops are less interested in your bedroom than your refrigerator. They're more likely to berate you for outdoor smoking than for outdoor necking. It isn't God who hates fags. It's Michael Bloomberg.

In Engber's case, the provocation is scientific. To justify taxes on unhealthy food, the lifestyle regulators are stretching the evidence about obesity and addiction, two subjects on which Engber is burdened with contrary knowledge. Liberals like to talk about a Republican war on science, but it turns out that they're just as willing to bend facts. In wars of piety, science has no friends.

In my case, the provocation is partly scientific and partly libertarian. But mostly, it's a shift in the slippery slope. One of my basic rules is that slippery slopes run both ways. If you've never seen it, go watch that Monty Python sketch about Dennis Moore, the Robin Hood copycat who keeps stealing from the rich and giving to the poor until he realizes he's now stealing from the poor and giving to the rich. You have to notice when the balance of power and zeal has shifted from one party to the other.

Engber points out that 40 states have enacted special taxes on soda or junk food. And the soda taxers are becoming ever bolder. Their latest manifesto is an article in the New England Journal of Medicine, co-authored by the health commissioner of New York City, the surgeon general of Arkansas, and several others. It declares soda fair game for government intervention on the grounds that "market failures" in this area are causing "less-than-optimal production and consumption."

What exactly are these market failures? First, the authors argue,

because many persons do not fully appreciate the links between consumption of these beverages and health consequences, they make consumption decisions with imperfect information. These decisions are likely to be further distorted by the extensive marketing campaigns that advertise the benefits of consumption.

That's true. Some people don't realize how bad soda is for them. And I trust the soft-drink companies as far as I can throw them. So let's educate people about how much sugar they're drinking and what it's doing to them. But special taxes? To justify that, we'll need more. So let's move on to the authors' next rationale. They write that

consumers do not bear the full costs of their consumption decisions. Because of the contribution of the consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages to obesity, as well as the health consequences that are independent of weight, the consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages generates excess health care costs. Medical costs for overweight and obesity alone are estimated to be $147 billion—or 9.1% of U.S. health care expenditures—with half these costs paid for publicly through the Medicare and Medicaid programs. … Escalating health care costs and the rising burden of diseases related to poor diet create an urgent need for solutions, thus justifying government's right to recoup costs.

If you're trying to sink health care reform, this is a good way to do it: Show everyone how subsidized health insurance will entitle other people to regulate your eating habits. But it's worth noting that the authors base their argument on programs that already exist: Medicare and Medicaid.

I'll leave the socialism question to the rest of you. My real interest is in the authors' third basis for regulation: market failure that

results from time-inconsistent preferences (i.e., decisions that provide short-term gratification but long-term harm). This problem is exacerbated in the case of children and adolescents, who place a higher value on present satisfaction while more heavily discounting future consequences.

Wow. This isn't socialism. It's sheer paternalism. It applies even if you cover every cent of your medical expenses. You buy and drink soda because you want the "short-term gratification." Later, you regret this purchase because of its "long-term harm." This, according to the authors, is a market failure that justifies taxation to alter your behavior, totally apart from its impact on public health costs.

This is what worries me about the crackdown on death sticks and edible crap. There's no end to its ambitions. We'd better start applying some brakes.

If you think I'm overreacting, I call your attention to this paragraph in the NEJM article:

No adverse health effects of noncaloric sweeteners have been consistently demonstrated, but there are concerns that diet beverages may increase calorie consumption by justifying consumption of other caloric foods or by promoting a preference for sweet tastes. At present, we do not propose taxing beverages with noncaloric sweeteners, but we recommend close tracking of studies to determine whether taxing might be justified in the future.

I'm sitting here looking at a can of Fresca. The nutrition label says it has no calories. The ingredients label lists only aspartame as a sweetener. If studies show that drinks like this one indirectly increase calorie consumption "by promoting a preference for sweet tastes," the food police are explicitly prepared to tax them. And the crusade won't end with soda. Anything sweet is a target.

I warn you people now. You can ban the Marlboros, tax the Cokes, and zone the Whoppers. But you'll get Plotz's Fresca when you pry it from his cold, dead hands.

William Saletan is Slate's national correspondent and author of Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War.
Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2229194/
Title: Nightmare Scenarios
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on September 30, 2009, 12:46:47 PM
The Metamorphosis
In which our liberal author awakens one morning from uneasy dreams . . .

By David Kahane

I have a nightmare.

I have a nightmare that sometime before the 2010 elections, the scales will fall from your eyes and you will see us as we really are.

I have a nightmare that you will read C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters and realize that it is not fiction.

I have a nightmare that you will read Plunkitt of Tammany Hall and get firsthand instruction in how we steal elections.

I have a nightmare that you will read Machiavelli’s The Prince and realize that we got there way ahead of you.

I have a nightmare that you will read Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead and recognize us in the figure of Ellsworth Toohey — the “friend” who is in fact your mortal enemy.

I have a nightmare that you will read Dickens’s Bleak House and see us in the character of Mrs. Jellyby, the “telescopic philanthropist,” who lets her own family go to hell while she frets over the fate of an African tribe.

I have a nightmare that you will re-watch Saving Private Ryan and realize that Corporal Upham, the liberal stickler for process played by Jeremy Davies, saves the German prisoner’s life only to get most of his platoon killed, including Tom Hanks. And then commits the very war crime he tried to stop.

I have a nightmare that while you’re enjoying the scatological dialogue and ultra-violence of Pulp Fiction, you’ll realize that Vincent Vega, the unbeliever, dies unredeemed in Butch Coolidge’s bathroom, while Jules, who accepts the reality of miracles, grants absolution to Pumpkin and Honey Bunny and is thus saved.

I have a nightmare that you will go back and watch any B-movie made between 1933 and 1963, like Gun Crazy, and see an America that was not afraid of inanimate objects like firearms, and instead blamed the man for the crime.

I have a nightmare that some of you are old enough to recall a time when the law was an honorable profession, the Constitution was not so deconstructed that, essentially, all that is left of it is the Commerce Clause, and your doctor charged a fee for service and made house calls.

I have a nightmare that when you think of the late Ted Kennedy, resting peacefully at Arlington Cemetery, all you will be able to see is Mary Jo Kopechne, gasping for air in the Oldsmobile while the senator returned to his hotel room and went to sleep.

I have a nightmare that you will remember that Sirhan Sirhan was a Palestinian who hated Bobby Kennedy because of his support of Israel.

I have a nightmare that you’ll realize that, far from being a right-wing nut, Lee Harvey Oswald was a self-proclaimed Marxist who defected to the Soviet Union, came home with a Russian wife, agitated on behalf of Castro’s Cuba, tried to re-defect to Russia, returned to Dallas, brought his rifle to work, and killed JFK with a classic marksman’s shot group: miss, hit, kill.

I have a nightmare that you’ll remember that, in the week leading up to the murders of George Moscone and Harvey Milk, there was no right-wing “climate of hate” in San Francisco as Nancy Pelosi, aka Maerose Prizzi, would have you believe. Instead, the city was riveted by the murders of Congressman Leo Ryan and journalists Don Harris, Bob Brown, and Greg Robinson at the Port Kaituma airstrip on Nov. 18, 1978. This was followed by the “revolutionary suicides” of hundreds of Jim Jones’s radical-leftist Peoples Temple followers, most of them African American. One of the suicide notes read, “I, Marceline Jones, leave all bank accounts in my name to the Communist Party of the USSR.”

I have a nightmare that people will eventually realize that Dan White, who shot Moscone and Milk not over gay rights but over Moscone’s refusal to give him back his seat on the Board of Supervisors, was a Democrat.

I have a nightmare that one day Dianne Feinstein, a good and decent woman who not only was there but owes her entire national political career to the tragic events of Nov. 27, 1978, will straighten out Maerose Prizzi, as well as the rest of the country.

I have a nightmare that eventually you will recall that, just a few years after the events depicted in Milk, the newly liberated gay community in San Francisco was decimated by AIDS.

I have a nightmare that one day you will recognize the destructive philosophic effect on the American way of life of the “Institute for Social Research,” aka the Frankfurt School of radical neo-Marxists — Adorno, Horkheimer, Fromm, Habermas, Marcuse et al. — who, fleeing Hitler, arrived in America in 1934 and promptly affiliated with Columbia University, where they injected their notions of “critical theory” and “scientific Marxism” into the body of American academe.

I have a nightmare that one day, perhaps during another Great Awakening, the Supreme Court will overturn Murray v. Curlett, which outlawed school prayer in a lawsuit brought by Madalyn Murray O’Hair, the founder of American Atheists. In 1995, O’Hair was murdered along with her son and granddaughter by another American atheist, who chain-sawed their bodies into bits.

I have a nightmare that one day the Supreme Court will overturn Roe v. Wade, thus returning abortion to the states — although, alas, we will never get those 40 million dead souls to pay into the Social Security system.

I have a nightmare that I will still be alive when the Mother of All Ponzi Schemes finally beggars the nation, and the heroic, eco-friendly childless couples starve to death as they realize they forgot to manufacture their old-age meal tickets.

I have a nightmare that you will finally understand what the Manchurian Candidate, “mmm mmm mmm / Barack Hussein Obama,” meant by “fundamental change.”

I have a nightmare that one day Bill O’Reilly will wake up and realize that he’s letting a valuable television franchise descend into idiotic “culture warrior” and “body language” segments, and that he needs to stop hawking his books and Factor gear and remember to dance with what brung him — before the audience abandons him in favor of Glenn Beck.

I have a nightmare that we liberals won’t be able to stop Andrew Breitbart or any of the other maquis now shooting at us from every tree and from behind every rock, turning our own tactics against us, mocking us and rendering us frustrated and impotent.

I have a nightmare that W. will go on national television, rue his not naming a viable successor, castigate McCain for his disgraceful accommodationist campaign, and apologize for not fully executing the Bush Doctrine when he had the chance.

I have a nightmare that, one day soon, the New York Times will collapse into irrelevance, along with Time, Newsweek, and The New Yorker, and no one will be there to set the TV networks’ agendas, forcing you to once more think for yourself.

I have a nightmare that you will pick up a copy of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals and actually read it, boring and poorly written as it is.

I have a nightmare that you will organize and rally to take back your country from the frauds, poseurs, hollow men, gangsters, communists, atheists, perverts, Daley Machine hacks, ballerinas, and Jake Lingles who have parlayed a desire for Change, a touching but absurd reliance on Hope, and a huge dollop of racial guilt into something this country has never seen before.

I have a nightmare that you will come to understand the truth of Goya’s axiom that “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters.”

I have a nightmare that Sarah Palin will get the Republican nomination for president in 2012.

I have a nightmare that she will win, scattering us like so many scuttling Gregor Samsas.

I have nightmare that . . .

Nah. Never happen. You’re too stupid.

— Like Jack Valenti during the reign of LBJ, David Kahane sleeps each night a little better, a little more confidently because His Serene Highness, Barack Hussein Obama, is his president. Don’t even think about disagreeing with him, or with any of the sentiments expressed above, at kahanenro@gmail.com, or by becoming his friend on Facebook, or by reading his Rules for Radical Conservatives, out from Ballantine Books next summer.




National Review Online - http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NzYyNGNlNTBkNmFlMjJiNzU1MzA3NzllMGM2NzgzMzU=
Title: As the spin turns or churns
Post by: ccp on October 05, 2009, 08:39:02 AM
Well this is easy to respond to.  The Republicans are rooting for America.   We are responding to a President who travels around the world apologizing for this country.  Instead of being our advocate he has been agreeing with those who are our adversaries and enemies about how evil we are.

So naturally we are rooting for this President to fail.  Just like the liberals did when Bush was President.

"Moulitsas was more blunt. “So when did wingnuts start cheering against America? Their unbridled joy at losing out to Brazil is a bit unseemly, isn't it?” he asked, adding: "America, f—- yeah!" has become "F—- America, Yeah!"

Oh really??  Hasn't "F---America" been the mantra of the liberal left for decades now??

So now their radical left guy frontman is in office they are ardent patriots??  As usual if it wasn't so sad it would be funny.

My head spins with all the spin.

*****Dems: GOP rooting against America
         Glenn Thrush Glenn Thrush – Mon Oct 5, 5:48 am ET
During the Bush era, Republicans from Karl Rove to Joe Wilson questioned — in ways both veiled and overt — the patriotism of Democrats who challenged the administration’s Iraq policy, pre-war intelligence and surveillance programs.

But the joyous reaction in some GOP quarters to the International Olympics Committee's snub of Chicago — coupled with the party’s rapid-fire reaction to bad economic data – has some Democrats turning the tables and asking if Republicans are the ones cheering against America now.

Many Democrats saw the outbursts following the IOC decision – the merry Tweets, videos of cheering conservatives and chest-thumping by party leaders like Newt Gingrich — as part of larger pattern that includes the flirtation of right-wing Texans like Gov. Rick Perry with secession and the caustic tone of right-wing talk radio, embodied by Rush Limbaugh’s “I want him to fail” comment about Obama in January.

“Some of these people are starting to put politics first and country second,” said Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), the head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, taking particular issue with Limbaugh and Glenn Beck.

“The American people are starting to wonder if they are rooting against America,” he added.

Two influential progressive spokesmen, Talking Points Memo founder Josh Marshall and Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos, hit that theme hard last week, with Marshall musing, “I wonder if right-wingers would be less stoked if Chicago were part of America.”

Moulitsas was more blunt. “So when did wingnuts start cheering against America? Their unbridled joy at losing out to Brazil is a bit unseemly, isn't it?” he asked, adding: "America, f—- yeah!" has become "F—- America, Yeah!"

Republicans say this is all nonsense, and that liberals are exaggerating the importance of reactions by a handful of hard-liners to distract attention from legitimate criticism of big-government Democratic policies.

Michael Steel, spokesman for House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) — who criticized Obama’s trip to Copenhagen to lobby for the Olympics as a distraction and pounded the administration last week in the wake of a report that showed unemployment at 9.8 percent — said there are “no examples of House Republicans ‘rooting against America’ in any way, shape, or form."

Obama’s critics on the right openly ridiculed his lobbying trip to Copenhagen on behalf of his hometown as a major distraction from the country’s larger problems – and proof that he was losing “command focus.”

And the reaction to the city’s defeat was swift and, in some places, ecstatic.

A young organizer at the conservative “Defending the American Dream Summit” interrupted a panel discussion last Friday to reads the news from a BlackBerry.

A liberal tracker attending the event caught the crowd’s reaction in the Arlington, Va. hotel ballroom on video: The place erupted in hooting and wild applause, a scene perversely reminiscent of the exultation that followed the U.S. Olympic hockey team’s “Miracle on Ice” victory against the Soviets in 1980.

“[Chicago lost] on the very first vote! They did not have any chance…” the woman said to an ovation, recorded by Think Progress, an offshoot of the liberal Center for American Progress.

A blogger with the right-wing Weekly Standard reported: “Chicago loses! Chicago loses!... Cheers erupt at WEEKLY STANDARD world headquarters,” before hastily pulling down the post and replacing it with an item that omitted the newsroom reaction.

RedState's Erick Erickson ditched loftier prose and punched out the letters "Hahahahaha,” while former House Speaker Newt Gingrich combined the loss with Friday’s dreadful unemployment report to conclude "President Obama fails to get the Olympics while unemployment goes to 9.8% …America needs focused leadership," on his Twitter account.

Former Bush Press Secretary Dana Perino, who supported Chicago’s bid, shrugged off such reactions: “I… don’t know anyone who’s high-fiving,” Perino wrote in an e-mail. “Though I’d bet there are some doing that, I’m just as sure there are some who are finding a way to blame President Bush somehow. “

But other GOP insiders are worried the reaction may reinforce Democrats’ attacks, however unfair, that the party’s anti-Obama fervor is pushing them away from their self-professed patriotism.

Moments after the Chicago news broke, former Bush deputy press secretary Scott Stanzel Tweeted, "Note to GOP officials/consultants - resist temptation to pile on about Chicago losing just becuz Obama made the pitch."

Kevin Madden, who served as Mitt Romney’s spokesman in 2008, sent around Stanzel’s sentiments to friends and cautioned against a backlash.

“Republicans disagree with Obama on many policies, ranging from taxes and spending to national security,” Madden told POLITICO.

“He has a lot of really wrong ideas. But does that mean his effort to bring the Olympic games to Chicago and a chance to put America on the world’s stage should also automatically be subjected to scorn? I don’t believe it should. That’s just criticism for criticism’s sake. Reactionary criticism could even dilute any valid and legitimate criticism of his bad policies.”

Democrats are still smarting from years of GOP attacks on their own commitment to America’s safety and security, criticism that sometimes crossed the line into attacks on the party’s patriotism.

In late 2002, Rep. Joe Wilson shouted down Rep. Bob Filner, a California Democrat, who challenged Bush administration pre-war Iraq intelligence, bellowing, “This hatred of America by some people is just outrageous, and you need to get over it.”

Summing up his view of Democrats in 2005, President Bush’s top political advisor, Karl Rove, remarked that liberals are “concerned about what our enemies think of us, whether every government approves of our actions."

Rove echoed that sentiment in a March 2008 Wall Street Journal op-ed, writing, "Democrats appear to have an ideological investment in things going badly in Iraq. They seem upset and prickly when asked to comment on the progress America is making."

Boehner, talking to reporters in 2006, quipped, "I listen to my Democrat friends, and I wonder if they're more interested in protecting terrorists than in protecting the American people."

And Limbaugh, defending his “fail” comment at a conservative conference in February, asked the audience, "Did the Democrats want the war on Iraq to fail?” The crowd shouted “Yes!" and Limbaugh agreed.

The meme has carried into the Obama era, with Steve Doocy, the co-host of "Fox and Friends,” touting a video showing Obama without hand over heart during the playing of the national anthem.

“First he kicked his American flag pin to the curb,” Doocy said. “Now Barack Obama has a new round of patriotism problems.”

Democrats also point at the way the GOP has been pouncing on any scrap of economic data that shows the economy is still struggling.

Within the first 45 minutes after the Labor Department announced a worse-than-expected 263,000 jobs lost in September, POLITICO received no fewer than eight GOP press releases blasting away at Obama for failing to stem the tide of unemployment.

The office of Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.) literally hit the send button at 8:30 a.m. -- the moment of the announcement.

Former Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee Chairman Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), who helped Democrats win 14 seats in the last two cycles, said the GOP risks the perception rooting against recovery.

“They are playing to their base again, which I think is a big mistake.” he said.

“Criticizing the White House for spending nearly a trillion dollars of taxpayers’ money to produce a jobless recovery is the responsibility of public officials who believe there is a better way,” responded Steel.****
Title: The New Chum
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on October 10, 2009, 06:44:10 PM
Why I'm with Hamas and the Taliban

From: The Sunday Telegraph Sun Oct 11 00:00:00 EST 2009 Sun Oct 11 00:00:00 EST 2009

When it comes to awarding US President Barack Obama with the Nobel Peace Prize, I'm with the Taliban!

The terrorists think it stinks (Hamas does, too) and I believe he shouldn't have come within cooee of the purse.

The Nobel for Medicine is awarded on results, not to a recent medical graduate who  aspires to find a cancer cure.

Nor is the prize for Literature handed to someone who has written the first paragraph of what they think will be a masterpiece.

That's how it should be, but the Nobel Peace Prize Committee doesn't live in the real world. Look at previous winners such as Yasser Arafat in 1994.

The father of modern Middle Eastern terrorism was at least engaged in peace talks (he signed the Oslo Accords) though 15 years on nothing has really changed.

Or the 2001 award to former UN boss Kofi Annan, on whose watch possibly 800,000 Rwandans were slaughtered.



North Vietnam's Le Duc Tho had the grace to refuse to share the 1973 award with Henry Kissinger, becoming the only nominee to reject the glittering prize. His scruples were genuine _ the communist North were planning their major invasion.

Obama, on the other hand, is still dithering about whether to send more troops to Afghanistan (he should), but he took the prize without a blink.

In office for less than nine months, Obama could have just moved into the White House after his January 20 inauguration, mere days before the Nobel nominations closed last February 1. What has he done, then, to deserve anything?

The chairman of the prize committee, former Norwegian PM (coincidentally the only male on board) Thorbjorn Jagland said: ``We have on many occasions given it to try and enhance what personalities were trying to do.''

When asked whether it was premature, he said: ``It could be too late to respond three years from now. It is now that we have the opportunity to respond, all of us, I hope it will help him.''

Sounds like Norway runs on the basis of handing out elephant stamps for encouragement rather than marking people on their performance.

Even the AP White House Correspondent Jennifer Loven, not known for her critical views on the Obama presidency, noted that it has actually barely begun.

"He won! For what?'' she wrote. ``Work on the President's ambitious agenda, both at home and abroad, is barely under way, much less finished.

"He has no standout moment of victory that would seem to warrant a verdict as sweeping as that issued by the Nobel committee.''

As for peace, she noted that he is currently running two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and cannot get a climate change bill through his own Congress.

If he was being graded, his scorecard would read: "Incomplete.'' The award illustrates a number of serious problems that currently exist - not only in the Peace Prize process - but globally.

The principal flaw is the readiness to accept spin over substance.

Obama has promised the world but has not delivered anything significant.

His list of ``incomplete'' projects includes the pledge to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay, already slipping behind and unlikely to meet his own January, 2010 deadline.

Then there are his others: his failure to bring home US troops from Iraq; his failure to deal with the real threat of Iran developing nuclear weapons; his failure to even lay the groundwork for a new peace initiative between the Israelis and Palestinians. As for a nuclear-free world, see Iran.

Then there is climate change, which he sees as a ``priority'', unlike our own Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, who sees the issue of man-made carbon dioxide as the biggest moral issue facing the world.

It seems highly unlikely that Obama will have anything to present to his fans on this issue in Copenhagen come December.

He could always call former US vice-president Al Gore to deliver one of his emotion-rich but fact-lite speeches on the topic, bearing in mind the Nobel committee awarded him a Peace Prize in 2007(in conjunction with the dodgy IPCC) for his claptrap.

The Nobel committee seems to be sending a politically correct affirmative action love note to the Left in the US and elsewhere, applauding voters for electing a black man, albeit, one who has kindled divisions in his own country to such an extent that his opponents are starting to protest against his policies with a vehemence which may one day equal that of Obama's own more extremist supporters.

That Obama has marked his presidency by attempts to define down the power and global leadership clearly appealed to the Eurovision team, tired of America being the world's greatest nation and shamed by having to appeal to the might of the US to resolve conflicts that have been beyond the capacity of the UN, or the European Union or any other multilateral bodies to deal with.

But if an ``E'' for effort mark, or an "H'' for hope, is going to win what was once the world's most prestigious prize, it's time the Nobel Committee was told of Wilson Tuckey's efforts to broker peace in the Liberal Party, and Mick Gatto's mediation efforts in Melbourne's gangland.

We have plenty of Australians just as worthy of this award as the new chum in the White House.

http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/sunday-telegraph/why-im-with-hamas-and-the-taliban/story-e6frewt0-1225785361363
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Freki on October 15, 2009, 09:56:27 PM
Dated but still relivent today...WOW
---------------------------------------------------------
TRIBES
http://pajamasmedia.com/ejectejecteject/

You have to scroll down a bit but WOW
Title: Interconnected Economics and the Magic of Numbers in Politics, Thomas Sowell
Post by: DougMacG on October 16, 2009, 09:22:31 AM
http://www.tsowell.com/

Back in the days of the Soviet Union, two Russian economists who had never lived in a country with a free market economy understood something about market economies that many others who have lived in such economies all their lives have never understood. Nikolai Shmelev and Vladimir Popov said: "Everything is interconnected in the world of prices, so that the smallest change in one element is passed along the chain to millions of others."

What does that mean? It means that a huge increase in the demand for ice cream can mean higher prices for catchers' mitts, among other things.

When more cows are needed to produce more milk to make ice cream, then fewer cows will be slaughtered and that means less cowhide available to make baseball gloves. Supply and demand mean that catchers' mitts are going to cost more.

While this may be easy enough to understand, its implications are completely lost on many people in politics and in the media. If everything is connected to everything else in a market economy, then it makes no sense to have laws and policies that declare some given goal to be a "good thing," without regard to the repercussions, which spread out in all directions, like waves that spread across a pond when you drop a rock in the water.

Our current economic meltdown results from the federal government, under both Democrats and Republicans, declaring home ownership to be a "good thing" and treating the percentage of families who own their own home as if it was some sort of magic number that had to be kept growing — without regard to the repercussions on other things.

We are now living with those repercussions, which include the worst unemployment in decades. That is the price we are paying for increasing home ownership from 64 percent to 69 percent.

How did we get from home ownership to 15 million unemployed Americans? By ignoring the fact that there was a reason why only 64 percent of families owned their own home. More people would have liked to be home owners but did not qualify under mortgage lending standards that had been in place for decades.

Politicians to the rescue: Federal regulatory agencies leaned on banks to lend to people they were not lending to before — or else. The "or else" included not having their business decisions approved by the regulators, which could cost them more money than making risky loans.

Mortgage lending standards were lowered, in order to raise the magic number of home ownership. But, with lower lending standards, there were — surprise! — more mortgage payment delinquencies, defaults and foreclosures.

This was a problem not only for banks and other lenders but also for those in the business of buying mortgages from the original lenders. These included semi-government enterprises like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, as well as Wall Street firms that bought mortgages, bundled them together and issued securities based on the anticipated income from those mortgages.

In other words, all these economic transactions were "interconnected," as the Russian economists would say. And when the people who owed money on their mortgages stopped paying, the whole house of cards began to fall.

Politicians may not know much — or care much — about economics, but they know politics and they care a lot about keeping their jobs. So a great distracting hue and cry has gone up that all this was due to the market not being regulated enough by the government. In reality, it was precisely the government regulators who forced the banks to lower their lending standards.

The other big lie is that this was a failure of economists and others to foresee that the housing boom would turn to bust and set off financial repercussions across the economy.

In reality, everybody and his brother saw it coming and said so — including yours truly in the Wall Street Journal of May 26, 2005. As far away as London, The Economist magazine warned about the danger. So did many American publications and individuals. The problem was that politicians refused to listen. They were fixated on the magic number of home ownership and oblivious to the economic interconnections that Russian economists saw long ago and from far away.

It is understandable that many people do not pay nearly as much attention to political issues as they do to practical decisions that they have to make in their own lives. For one thing, they have only one vote among millions, so their influence on what policies the government will follow is in no way comparable to the weight of their decisions in their own personal affairs.

One consequence is that politicians can get away with half-baked arguments that people would never accept in their personal lives, where they apply a lot more scrutiny.

People who would never let some high-pressure salesman rush them into signing a contract to buy a car, before they have a chance to read the contract, may see nothing wrong with a President of the United States trying to rush Congress into passing a thousand-page bill before anybody has a chance to read it all.

Numbers, as well as words, get more scrutiny in private life than in political issues. Politicians love to cite magic numbers that are supposed to tell us whether some policy is a "good thing" or not. By sheer repetition, it is claimed that bigger numbers mean better results, whether the number is the percentage of families that own their own homes or the miles per gallon that automobiles get.

Administrations of both political parties, going back as far as the 1920s, have from time to time pushed the idea that a higher percentage of people owning their own homes is a "good thing," completely ignoring such repercussions as rising foreclosure rates in the wake of extending mortgage loans to people who are unlikely to be able to keep up the payments.

One of the other magic numbers that is popular in politics is the average miles per gallon of gas that cars are supposed to get, in order to meet standards set by the government. No matter how big this number gets, it can always get bigger, so there is no logical stopping place — which means a never-ending political crusade to increase that magic number.

The open-endedness of magic numbers is not their only problem. The more fundamental problem is that the costs entailed by a magic number are often either ignored or downplayed. More miles per gallon, for example, are usually achieved by having lighter cars — and lighter cars mean less protection from the consequences of automobile accidents. Bluntly, it means more severe injuries and death.

Many of the same people who protest against "trading blood for oil" when it comes to military interventions in the Middle East seem not to see that higher miles per gallon can also mean trading blood for oil.

The magic number du jour is the number of Americans without health insurance. Apparently getting more people insured is another "good thing" — which is to say, it is something whose costs are not to be weighed against the benefits, or whose costs are to be finessed aside with optimistic projections or a claim that these costs can be covered by eliminating "waste, fraud and abuse."

In real life, people weigh one thing against another. But in politics one declares one thing to be imperative, so the issue then becomes how we do it. In real life, all sorts of desirable things are not done, either because of other desirable things that would have to be sacrificed to do it or because of the dangers incurred in achieving the desired objective are worse than the problem we want to solve.

Almost never are the dangers of having uninsured people weighed against the dangers of having government bureaucrats over-ruling doctors and deciding whether money would be better spent saving the life of an elderly person or paying for an abortion for some teenager.

The crowning irony is that the problems caused by insurance companies refusing to pay for certain medications or treatment are to be solved by giving government bureaucrats that same power, along with the power to prevent patients from using their own money to pay for those same medications or treatments.

More than two centuries ago, Edmund Burke said, "Nothing is good but in proportion" — that is, when weighed as a trade-off. But a prudent weighing of trade-offs does not produce the political melodrama of pursuing a "good thing" measured by some magic number.
Title: Testing the Theories
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on October 16, 2009, 11:26:20 AM
Obama’s Theorems
The people don’t believe any more.

By Victor Davis Hanson

Part of the problem with the president’s agenda is that it is predicated on a number of radical ideas that are asserted, rather than proven. His experts and the elites assure us of a reality that most people in their own more mundane lives have not found to be true. In short, they may find Obama personally engaging, but they no longer believe what he says.

Take cap-and-trade legislation. We are asked to endanger an already-weak U.S. economy with a series of incentives and punishments to discourage the use of carbon-based fuels, with which — whether shale, natural gas, coal, or petroleum — America is rather well endowed.

A number of eminent scientists, along with environmental advocates such as Mr. Gore, lecture us that global warming as a manmade phenomenon is unimpeachable. But this month Americans are shivering through one of the coldest Octobers in memory, whether in Idaho, Colorado, or Michigan. They understand that over the last decade average global temperatures did not spike; in fact, they slightly decreased.

We are advised, of course, to look at larger trends to grasp the full extent of the looming disaster. But again, that is a more abstract proposition. And it is not one that is enhanced by elite condescension. In the here and now, the weather seems cooler, and it has for a decade. Voters, unless convinced otherwise, are not about to invest trillions on a theorem.

If borrowing money is the right way to get us out of the recession, the public wants to know why we do not call it “borrowing,” rather than “stimulus.” If well over a trillion dollars in new debt was supposedly essential to restarting the economy, why not three, four, or five trillion more to make recovery a sure thing? And if Americans know from first-hand experience that charging purchases on their credit cards is optional, quick, easy, and fun, but that paying them off is necessary, slow, difficult, and unpleasant, why would they think their government’s charges would be any different?

We are in a terrible energy crisis, we are told: Petroleum supplies have spiked, and we must immediately convert to mass transit, hybrids, biofuels, and electric cars. Such concern is wise, since oil is indeed a finite product. And while this recession has unexpectedly given us a reprieve from crippling oil prices, it is only a reprieve.

But be that as it may, the public sees no reason why it should not hedge its bets. Why not keep frantically searching for oil and gas, both to avoid going broke by buying expensive imported fuels, and to ensure America’s political autonomy from the likes of Chávez, Putin, and the Saudis?

The annual World Gas Association conference in Argentina just announced that new finds — many of them in North America — have pushed natural-gas reserves up to 1.2 trillion oil-equivalent barrels. Recent discoveries of huge fields in the Dakotas, the Gulf of Mexico, and the interior of California remind the public that there are still enormous domestic resources, which, if tapped, could tide us over until solar power, windmills, and biofuels become more economical. Developing all our energy resources, rather than using often-changing parameters to brand some sources environmentally incorrect (is nuclear power still taboo, sort of okay, or acceptable in terms of global warming?), seems far wiser to voters.

Health-care reform presents the same disconnect. The public is told the president’s radical overhaul of American medicine will save trillions of dollars. But the public wonders how that could be when more people are to be covered, with greater government intrusion.

They do not believe that the government — given vast unfunded liabilities from Medicare, Social Security, and the Postal Service — is particularly efficient. Or that all those who do not purchase private medical insurance are indigent or being “murdered” in a “holocaust,” rather than, in at least a few cases, simply gambling that they will stay healthy and preferring to spend their cash on other things.

If ridding Medicare of waste and fraud will help pay for nationalized health care, why have we waited this long to realize such economies? And if Medicare is admittedly rife with abuse, why would an even larger government-run program be singularly exempt from the same inherent dangers?

Abroad, there is the same commonsense intuition that something about the president’s talk does not quite seem right. One or two apologies might convey magnanimity; three or more reveal obsequiousness. Apologizing to a cranky neighbor for mowing on a Sunday morning is wise; apologizing to the entire block for an array of past sins does not just ensure ridicule, but could prove downright dangerous.

There is a reason why previous presidents were skeptical of Ahmadinejad, Assad, Castro, Chávez, Morales, and Putin, and it had nothing to do with Bush’s strut or twang. When Obama acts as if these rogues have been misunderstood, he might be right about one of them but not all of them — and it would not be because they were collectively and gratuitously alienated by the United States.

When told that Obama’s resonance abroad and forthright candor about what America has done wrong should be welcomed, since it makes us better liked, not all the public agrees. Some prefer not to be liked by some abroad; others wonder whether the president wants himself or the United States in general to be the more popular. If Obama can be quite detailed about all the things America has done wrong in the past, could he just once offer the same specificity about what we’ve done right — especially since America seems a far more prosperous and successful country today than, say, Egypt, Kenya, or India?

Something is also not quite right about Afghanistan. We are lectured ad nauseam that Bush took his eye off the good war to fight the optional and hopeless one in Iraq, while Obama for years has promised to reset priorities by finishing off the Taliban and bin Laden.

But that narrative troubles the public. If we neglected the war in Afghanistan, why were almost no Americans dying there between 2001 and 2006? In some years of war, fewer perished in twelve months in Afghanistan than in a single month in Iraq. Either both sides went into an agreed-on remission, or both sides simultaneously escalated elsewhere, turning to the hotter theater in Iraq. If we took our eye off the ball, did not radical Islam as well, when it called forth thousands to flock to Anbar Province?

If Bush was crazy to think that an oil-rich Sunni Arab kleptocracy on the Gulf — with a long history of genocide, sponsorship of terror, and war with the United States — needed a long-overdue reckoning after 19 Sunni Arab terrorists slaughtered 3,000 Americans, were his enemies even crazier to agree that Iraq was indeed now the central front in radical Islam’s war against the infidel?

Other questions arise. If Obama long ago wanted to finish off the Afghan war, why doesn't he do it now when Iraq is not the distraction that it was under Bush? Why, after a victory in Iraq, should we be discouraged, while radical Islam, coming off a defeat in Anbar Province, should be eager to escalate in Afghanistan? And if General Petraeus was right about the surge in Iraq, and candidate Obama, who wanted to clear the country of American combat forces by March 2008, was quite wrong (“the surge is not working”), then why would we assume that Petraeus is now wrong on Afghanistan and Obama right? After all, the former has been proven wise and consistent, and the latter wrong in the past and erratic in the present.

Americans want out of the recession and wish long-term problems of war, energy, and health care to be solved. They welcomed a young, charismatic president who seems eager to tackle these challenges head-on. The problem, however, is that they are not convinced that he understands the challenges, let alone that he offers the right solutions. In short, what Obama says seems pleasant to the ear, but an increasing number of Americans believe that his answers are not just unlikely, but perhaps not even possible.

— NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.
 

— Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a recipient of the 2007 National Humanities Medal.

National Review Online - http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MTkzNzY0ZWEyZGEyNTNmNjM2MTZkMTUwNWI5MmU1Yzc=
Title: Rant / Pat Buchanan - continued
Post by: DougMacG on October 21, 2009, 08:37:18 PM
CCP: "Yet I find him to be the only one who will state what others are literally afraid to state."

That is very true in some cases.  Digressing a little, there is a politician in Sweden charged with “hate speech” for writing an opinion piece in which he calls Islam the biggest threat to his country since World War II.  On the board we have seen videos and threats caused by the newcomers to western European countries.  In the US, it would be Buchanan to point out what everyone sees.  Buchanan opposes a lot of the legal immigration we currently have and all of the illegal immigration.  I might disagree with him on legal immigration but it should not be wrong or illegal to lament that there used to be a day when city notices didn't need to be printed in 13 languages and to comment that in those days the cities were stronger and the crime rate was lower, if that in fact was the case.

My point about protectionism was only that I disagree with him.  Same goes for Iraq.  The view he takes is certainly welcome on the board for discussion or debate IMO.  Opposing WWII intervention is consistent with anti-Iraq-war views - I don't agree with it but it's worthy of discussion.  I don't know the context of the Lincoln remark, but certainly by today's common rhetoric he led us into a bloody war.  Hard to explain but bloody war can be a good thing, like war to stop Hitler and showing our massive destructive capability and proving the willingness to use in order to stop the Pacific war of WWII.

Suspicion of the Israel lobby in America is valid and healthy.  Plenty of people think they have too much influence and it should be okay to say it aloud over the airwaves.  My objection is that when they say we only have a policy because of money from Israel, misplaced loyalties or Haliburton (or coal companies etc.),  but I favor the policy and I didn't receive any money, then I personally find that comment naive and condescending, still worthy of posting for discussion if for no other reason than that the view is widely held and deserves an opportunity to be answered and refuted.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 21, 2009, 08:43:07 PM
Indications of anti-Jewish tendencies by Buchanan go well beyond his thoughts on US-Israeli policy. 
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 22, 2009, 06:08:19 AM
"Twenty years ago this fall, the Iron Curtain was coming down in Europe. Across the Warsaw Pact, the jailers of the Communist prison states lost their nerve, and the cell walls crumbled. Matt Welch, the editor of Reason magazine, wonders why the anniversary is going all but unobserved: Why aren't we making more of the biggest mass liberation in history? Well, because to celebrate it would involve recognizing it as a victory over Communism. And, after the left's long march through the institutions of the west, most are not willing to do that. There's the bad totalitarianism (Nazism) and the good totalitarianism (Communism), whose apologists and, indeed, fetishists can still be found everywhere, even unto the White House." --columnist Mark Steyn
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: DougMacG on October 23, 2009, 08:34:12 AM
I hope we don't hold out the same harsh treatment for those who sympathize with or deny the existence of the holocaust of our time. 
Title: Pelosi pearls
Post by: ccp on October 30, 2009, 10:30:06 AM
I guess we could start a "fashion thread".
Nancy Pelosi has done wonders for the pearl necklace industry the way Imelda Marcos has for the shoe industry.
Has anyone noticed we never see her without her gigantic pears around her neck.
It must be some sort of phallic symbol, or symbol expressing POWER.
But there is something more than just fashion about this.

The number of Rx that just one of those pearls could pay for some poor broke elderly person...

http://www.nowpublic.com/world/speaker-nancy-pelosis-pearl-necklace-4-900-photo-01
Title: The Piece that Didn't Make It
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on October 30, 2009, 06:15:48 PM
My submission to the WaPo's pundit contest. Decided to get right in their face about one of my biggest annoyances with their paper; perhaps I overdid it:



Oh dear. The Supreme Court is going to hear a case, McDonald v. Chicago, that may leave the Second Amendment interpreted as the nation’s founders intended. In circles where unenumerated rights to privacy are found lurking amid penumbras and emanations while enumerated rights are declared passé, the panic is palpable: folks in flyover country may actually have a constitutional right to keep and bear arms.

Assuming words are declared to have meaning chaos could clearly ensue. Embrace of concrete standards based on clear intent might lead some to take the next step and wonder why murder rates are so different for jurisdictions along the Potomac River. DC, with its high murder rate has restrictive gun laws, Maryland with its somewhat less restrictive laws has a somewhat lower rate, while Virginia has the least restrictive gun laws and the lowest murder rate. Perhaps it’s the water. Maybe a reporter should investigate.

An investigation, though, could find things sundry Brahmins would prefer the hoi polloi to be ignorant of. Concealed carry legislation enacted in Virginia, for instance, was supposed to result in Wild West scenes being reenacted on area interstates. Alas an armed apocalypse has yet to occur on the road or anywhere else and, as noted, the violent crime rate tends to be lower in places where the wolves may find themselves confronting armed sheep. It appears the threat of being killed, wounded, or held at gunpoint until arrest impacts the benefit cost analysis of predators. Who’d of thunk it?

Time to get out the big guns and prevent a cascade. Perhaps the “assault weapon” boogieman can be dusted off as few noticed the term is essentially meaningless the last time around. Or “junk guns” can be re-vilified since poor folk have no need of affordable self-protection. Maybe the  “plastic gun” panic button could be pushed, or bullets that defy the laws of physics could be breathlessly re-postulated, or some new and improved Scary Thing could be earnestly bleated by our media friends.

But there’s the rub: America’s 75 million gun owners have an inkling the second amendment protects a right to bear arms, understand an armed populace reduces crime, and note media hyperventilation not only isn’t particularly congruent with firearm reality, but so shamelessly embraces anti-firearm biases that it throws credibility under the bus. Alienating that number of consumers in this competitive climate ought to leave editors thinking, “Oh dear.”
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: DougMacG on October 30, 2009, 08:58:51 PM
BBG,  Nice piece!  I would sell that one to their conservative competitors if they don't want it - Wash Times, DC Examiner, Townhall or even Real Clear Politics.

I don't think you would have liked having their editors cut through your work.  I wrote a counterpoint published by the Mpls paper alongside their endorsement of a young Bill Clinton in 1992.  They cut out one paragraph probably because they didn't understand the significance of it but it destroyed the meaning and originality of the entire piece from my point of view.  I had a couple of other run-ins with them and then started writing - no changes without permission - on my work.  They never published anything I wrote again.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on October 31, 2009, 07:27:36 AM
I've got two letters to the editor into the WaPo that they cut pretty good, each time excising my comments about the utter fatuity of their second amendment editorial stand. They really don't like it when you point out their lack of philosophical rigor, which I probably ought to have factored in when writing my submission.
Title: Déjà Vu Redux
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on November 01, 2009, 07:46:52 AM
Service.gov And Its Soviet Similarities
By SVETLANA KUNIN
Posted 10/30/2009 09:15 PM ET
USSR, 1959: I am a "young pioneer" in school. History classes remind us that there is a higher authority than their parents and teachers: the leaders of the Communist Party.

The story of young pioneer Pavlik Morozov is required reading. Pavlik reported his father to the secret police for disobeying government regulations. His life exemplified the duty of all good Soviet citizens to serve their government.

From the first year in school, all of us are made aware of our ethnicity (ethnic Russian, Jewish, Asian, etc.) and class (proletariat, intelligentsia), around which society is structured. This inherent divisiveness makes it easy for the government to stir ethnic and class tension and in this way distract from economic failure.

Newspapers and TV transmit government-approved news. Any critical voice is immediately suppressed and publicly denounced.

My parents, as all citizens of the USSR, work for state-run companies. All workers are unionized — another way the state controls the citizens. There is no private enterprise in USSR.

Whatever small private farms or shops that existed before 1930 have been taken over by the state. All medical care and schools are state entities. The government regulates what kind of technology, service and compensation are allowed.

From school age through adulthood, citizens are called to public service four to five times a year. Activities such as farming, cleaning places of work, and paper/metal scrap collections are mandatory.

Religious symbols are forbidden in schools or on state property. Most old religious buildings are transformed for secular use.

The Soviet government imposes the Iron Curtain. The state has strict control over our ability to travel abroad. This prevents us from realizing the discrepancy between the media's image of the great socialist country and the reality of our low standard of living.

USA, 2009: "Progressives" control the government. Children in some public schools sing songs about the president and study his directives.

Progressives view people not as unique individuals, but as groups. They play on class envy, or divide people by ethnicity (African-American, white, Hispanic, etc.). From early childhood they remind children of their ethnic identity. The idea of a color-blind society united under the American flag is not politically correct.

The mainstream media are aligned with the government. Those media outlets critical of government policy are publicly criticized by government officials and are in danger of suffering repercussions.

Government seizes a majority stake in two major auto companies and, through TARP money, has control over major banks. Congress discusses capping salaries in private businesses and is in the process of increasing its control over the health care industry.

Big labor union leadership is fully aligned with the progressives in government. There is strong pressure to eliminate the secret ballot in order to increase union membership.

Cap-and-trade, if passed, will drive a lot of small businesses into bankruptcy and create a fruitful soil for favoritism and government control over private entities.

Sept. 11 is declared a day of national service by the administration. It is no longer a day of remembrance for the horrific attack perpetrated by terrorists.

The American Constitution protects the separation between church and state. Atheist zealots pervert this ideal in order to force out religious symbols and traditions from public space. It is fashionable in progressive circles to ridicule religion and religious people. "Tolerance" is applied only to anti-religious values.

As a former citizen of the USSR, I heard and experienced all of this before. I listen to the speeches by the president asking people to sacrifice and serve. So what are we to sacrifice? For what? And to whom? I think I get it now.

Citizens of America, sacrifice your elders and forget your selfish aspirations of prosperity for yourself and your family! Sign onto Service.gov and serve your government!

• Kunin lived in the Soviet Union until 1980 and now lives in Connecticut. She wrote "The Perspective of a Russian Immigrant" that ran on the op-ed page Sept. 8-11. This column first appeared Oct. 22; we are repeating it because of its importance and for the benefit of our weekend-only subscribers.

http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=510876
Title: Judge Andrew Napolitano Natural rights Patriot Act
Post by: Freki on November 05, 2009, 11:29:58 AM
I am becoming a huge fan
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7n2m-X7OIuY[/youtube]
Title: Political Rants - From 4.6% to 10.2%! Unemployment, When is enough, enough?
Post by: DougMacG on November 06, 2009, 07:22:29 AM
At 10.2% unemployment as we still go full speed backwards into destruction I must say that I am sick and tired of this President and Congress blaming problems on predecessors.

The 'Age of Obama' began nationally with his speech to the Democratic Convention in 2004, after which he said privately to Harry Reid: "Harry, I have a gift".  I judge politicians by their policies, but if captivating crowds regardless of message is a gift, Adolf had it too.

Policies have consequences.

The power in Washington shifted in this week of 2006 when young Obama along with Hillary and Schumer and Barney Frank and Barbara Boxerand Pelosi and Reid were elevated to the majority.

After that time, Bush's lone effort and achievement was the surge in Iraq.  All other control of our government had shifted to congress awaiting a new liberal for the White House.

The unemployment rate when power shifted was 4.6%! while the record economic expansion finally petered out after 50 consecutive months of job growth.

(This growth was in spite of big government RINOs still holding back real private sector potential.)

Obama's team in congress has their fingerprints all over this collapse and Obama's team in campaign and transition was fully consulted and fully on board with ALL emergency measures taken between the collapse of Sept.2008 and his inauguration.

I suppose he is not really lying if he doesn't even know that it is his policies and stated agenda (screw wealth, screw the rich and dismantle free enterprise) that are causing economic under-performance and failure.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: ccp on November 06, 2009, 07:52:56 AM
"screw wealth, screw the rich and dismantle free enterprise"

I agree 100%.  I would also add screw the *taxpayer* (though it is camoflouged, sp?, not be this) and screw America as we know it, and perhaps even screw the concept of citizenship.
As long as most illegals vote Dem than screw the rest of us.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Boyo on November 06, 2009, 03:04:44 PM
Hey guys it really is sooo simple, here is a 9 min cartoon that explains what the czars in washington and any other progressive don't under stand.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVh75ylAUXY[/youtube]


watch and be astounded in 9 min.
boyo
Title: Barry's double standard
Post by: G M on November 06, 2009, 08:05:12 PM
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2009/11/obama_on_fort_hood_massacre_do.html

http://www.therightscoop.com/lt-col-ralph-peters-its-all-about-poor-major-hasan-and-i-am-ready-to-puke/

Only rush to judgement when it concerns cops.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Freki on November 06, 2009, 10:06:42 PM
Boyo I passed that on to my friends, nice find.

GM... Lt Col was spot on, thanks!
Title: Ready for the Next Act?
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on November 26, 2009, 09:34:02 AM
We Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet
If you think things have been rough so far, hang on.

By Victor Davis Hanson

When it comes to the problems facing this country, an old slogan comes to mind: “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet.”

High unemployment, the recession, and a terrorist resurgence in Afghanistan are bad enough. But there are a number of problems on the horizon that could dwarf President Obama’s first-year trials.

Why the pessimism? In short, we are doing nothing to prepare for the crises to come.

A global recession has led to low oil prices. Yet in this window of opportunity, America has not decreased its foreign-oil dependence. We are not encouraging domestic exploration. And we are still ambivalent on nuclear power.

But as the world economy recovers, oil will probably surge back over $100 a barrel, increasing our oil-import tab by 25 percent or more. The Obama administration, though, mostly is obsessed with subsidizing relatively small amounts of wind and solar power. It likely won’t be long before angry motorists at the pump are demanding to know why we have not pushed for more development at home of still-plentiful natural-gas and oil fields.

Meanwhile, other economic bad news may be just around the corner. Today, interest rates on short-term Treasury bills still are less than 1 percent. But they, too, will climb as business picks up and worries over American inflation spread.

If we have to pay foreign lenders 5 percent to 7 percent interest on our debt, as in the past, the increased costs will gobble up additional billions from our annual budget. Yet sadly again, we are missing this rare opportunity of low interest to pay off cheaply the trillions that we already owe. Instead, we are borrowing even more!

The War on Terror is also heating up again. Fairly or not, the Fort Hood massacre sent the message that the United States is more worried about appearing politically correct in matters of diversity than about hunting down radical Islamists on its home soil. Those who seek to copy what happened at Fort Hood will be encouraged. And those charged with stopping them will be discouraged and confused.

Such uncertainty was reinforced by the attorney general’s decision to try the architects of 9/11 in federal courts in New York City. At best, the confessed mass-murderer Khalid Sheikh Mohammed will lecture the United States. At worst, one sympathetic juror could find the monster only 99 percent guilty, and therefore the court might fail to convict him of planning the murders of 3,000 innocent people.

After announcing a new strategy of counterinsurgency in March, and appointing Gen. Stanley McChrystal the new supreme commander in Afghanistan, it looks like Obama only now will commit more troops to Afghanistan. That will be a wise decision — but one coming three months after the generals’ request.

We were given an unexpected reprieve through the defeat of al-Qaeda in Iraq. We can now build on that victory by routing the Taliban in the way the Iraq surge stabilized democracy there.

Finally, there is an array of taxes on the horizon — increased federal income-tax rates; promised hikes in health-care surcharge taxes; and even rumors of value-added federal sales taxes. These increases are said to be aimed at the proverbial wealthy. But that could change — given that the top 5 percent of households already provide 60 percent of the nation’s income-tax revenue. And many are already paying 50 percent to 60 percent of their incomes in combined local, state, federal, and payroll taxes.

Just consider. The price of gas will soon likely increase. The cost of servicing our profligate borrowing will, too. One more terrorist attack like at Fort Hood, or nightly sermons from a grandstanding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, or a new Taliban offensive, and the momentum could shift to radical Islam in its decades-long war against the United States. Next year’s tax hikes will be real and large — and no longer just this year’s idle talk.

As these storm clouds gather, Congress bickers on Saturday nights about borrowing even more money for health-care reform, yet another federal entitlement.

If you think things have been rough so far, hang on, ’cause you ain’t seen nothing yet.


— Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a recipient of the 2007 National Humanities Medal. © 2009 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

National Review Online - http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NTM2ZGFjNTFlMDc2YzRjOWUyOTJmMjNlMTY5YWI4ZGQ=
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 26, 2009, 02:15:36 PM
Boyo:

Just had a moment to watch that one-- nice find!
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: DougMacG on November 26, 2009, 07:20:22 PM
Thanks BBG regarding VDH post.  My thoughts exactly, just expressed far better.  How can anyone be very optimistic economically when everything we are doing and likely to do is the opposite of what needs to be done to grow back a healthy, vibrant economy.

Gas prices are reasonable right now, only because of global recession.  Every year gone by is another year we didn't allow expansion or domestic sources, increase refining capacity, convert transportation to CNG or get started on new (carbon-free) nuclear plants.  Any new economic growth will be choked out by the resulting energy cost escalation.  Instead of action or solution, we plan the opposite - highest in history new energy taxes and regulations.  All increases in energy purchases will result in equal problems of trade, payment and currency imbalances.

Interest rates are at zero out of the Fed.   If they need to lower them further, they can't.  But they will need to raise them, and the cost of anything burdened in debt (consumers, homeowners, federal governments, states, school districts, businesses, you name it) will go up drastically with no visible, offsetting benefit.

Taxes will go up and public spending will not go down as deficits continue no matter what the election gains are in 2010.  Regulations in general aren't going to be eased in any foreseeable timeframe.

We can't go this far or this fast down a road in the wrong direction and turn it around on a dime - especially when we don't have consensus that we are headed in the wrong direction.

If this Keynesian stimulus appears to work with a short term uptick, we will follow it with what? More of what appeared too work, more public spending with more trillions in debt and more government takeovers of industries, choices and liberties.

If we add a 2 1/2 trillion dollar federal healthcare control system and find out that cost level isn't enough to do the job, we will then do what? Scrap it?  No.  We will be trapped and guilted into increasing taxes, debt and funding just like we still do with the first thousand-plus federal social spending programs.

Hard to be optimistic with these leaders facing these problems.
Title: NBC Meet the Press today, outrage?
Post by: DougMacG on November 29, 2009, 09:48:49 AM
I was rebuked strongly (understatement) for comparing something horrific with something horrific in a post of mine in this thread in October.  

Dr. Rick Warren, author of "The Purpose Driven Life" hardly a fire-brand far right wing extremist, was a Thanksgiving weekend guest of David Gregory on NBC's 'Meet the Press' and shared his otherwise sensible views on many subjects but also used the h-word to describe the tragedy of 46 million killed since Roe v. Wade.  http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3032608/# , http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34079938/ns/meet_the_press/page/3/
Title: A Sad Time for Science
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on December 07, 2009, 06:24:07 AM
Donald Kennedy and the corruption of Science Magazine

By James Lewis
Science magazine has been stewing so long in the Global Warming bouillabaisse that its very brains are beginning to smoke. That may be because its august Editor-in-Chief Donald Kennedy (until last year) was a dedicated Warm-monger. Science is the flagship journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the political lobby for Big Science in Washington, D.C. The Editor-in-Chief of Science is like the Queen of England: It's the closest thing to God in the church hierarchy.  Everybody kisses your butt and all you have to do is wave your hand to the cheering peasantry from your golden coach.

Try a Google search for "Donald Kennedy AND Global Warming" and you get almost six million hits. Search for "global warming" in Science magazine itself, and you get 2,792 citations -- almost as many as you get for "increased science funding."

Here are some Science magazine headlines in the last several years, a period when we know that atmospheric temperatures were flat or declining. As MIT Professor of Meteorology Richard S. Lindzen just wrote in the Wall Street Journal: "Claims that climate change is accelerating are bizarre."    The unfortunate tendency of the atmosphere to stop warming is of course why Phil Jones and the CRUdocrats were trying to "fix" the data in their infamous email exchanges.

During this time Science magazine published thousands of references to Global Warming, including headlines like:

CLIMATE CHANGE: Taming the Angry Beast

Ken Caldeira

Science 17 October 2008 322: 376-377 (in Books) ....What Past Climate Changes Reveal About the Current Threat--and How... (human) activities have triggered the possibility of catastrophic climate change, how we have come to recognize the threat......


CLIMATE CHANGE: IPCC Report Lays Out Options for Taming Greenhouse Gases

John Bohannon

Science 11 May 2007 316: 812-814


CLIMATE CHANGE: Global Warming Is Changing the World

Richard A. Kerr

Science 13 April 2007 316: 188-190


How Much More Global Warming and Sea Level Rise?

Gerald A. Meehl, Warren M. Washington, William D. Collins, Julie M. Arblaster, Aixue Hu, Lawrence E. Buja, Warren G. Strand, and Haiyan Teng

Science 18 March 2005 307: 1769-1772


Global Warming and the Next Ice Age

Andrew J. Weaver and Claude Hillaire-Marcel

Science 16 April 2004 304: 400-402

Et cetaera ad nauseam. It's not a pretty sight.

Things get only worse when we look at the Eurekalert site, which is also run by the AAAS. Eurekalert presents an endless flow of press releases from universities that make billions from Federal grants. This is where our pop media  get their scientific  news.

Here are some search results:

Global Warming: 2,500 hits

Climate Change: 5,140 hits

CO2 Global Warming: 2,498 hits

Anthropogenic: 338 hits

Catastrophic: 1,213 hits

Apparently a lot of PR guys and gals were mining this little vein of gold. Remember Goebbels' slogan that "A Big Lie repeated often enough becomes the truth"? This is the Big Lie Repetition Machine. All your average journalist has to do is go to Eurekalert, search for "catastrophic" or "global warming" and copy the latest headline. Since the media are firing human ‘journalists' these days, they might as well get a computer program to do it.

It was Donald Kennedy who initiated the Science magazine State of the Planet issues, to drive home the Global Warming meme. In an editorial in the 6 January 2006 issue of Science he wrote, "The consequences of the past century's temperature increase are becoming dramatically apparent in the increased frequency of extreme weather events ..."

Only trouble: It wasn't true.

As skeptic Roger Pielke, Jr. wrote in a letter to Science that somehow passed the censors:

"Over recent decades, the IPCC found no long-term global trends in extratropical cyclones (i.e., winter storms), in "droughts or wet spells," or in"tornados, hail, and other severe weather"... A recent study by the International Ad Hoc Detection and Attribution Group concluded that it was unable to detect an anthropogenic signal in global precipitation." (Science, June 9, 2005, Letters)

But Mr. Kennedy's mind was made up, and mere facts could not change it. In his Editorial on The Breakthrough of the Year for 2005, Kennedy wrote:

"An especially significant runner-up (to the Breakthrough of the Year for 2005) was climate change. 650,000-year-old ice cores from Antarctica give a continuous record of correlations between atmospheric carbon dioxide and methane and the temperature changes imposed by glacial cycles. New information put to rest the idea, popular with those skeptical about global warming, that satellite measurements, in contrast to ground measurements, showed cooling. One by one, holes in the global warming case are being filled. Government actions should follow; of that, I'll say more in the first Science issue of the new year." (http://www.sciencemag.org/  SCIENCE VOL 310 23 DECEMBER 2005 )

So -- guess who was instrumental in getting Donald Kennedy appointed to that plum job at Science magazine? Yes, it was our old friend Paul Ehrlich, the author of The Population Bomb of 1968 --- the one that sputtered frighteningly for decades but never went off. It was Paul Ehrlich who wrote the major puff piece for Donald Kennedy, introducing him as Editor-in-Chief of Science mag, the most powerful job in American science. 562

22 JULY2005 VOL 309 SCIENCE http://www.sciencemag.org/ 


Are you beginning to suspect a set-up? Unh-huh...

I know a liberal who fell for Paul Ehrlich's book The Population Bomb three decades ago and still believes it today. Liberals never have to change their minds, especially about facts. Certainly Ehrlich never changed his mind, and when his predictions about Planetary Doom failed, he didn't come to the obvious conclusion that I must have been wrong. He just added more epicycles to his pleasingly complicated picture of the climate. That little sentence "I must be wrong" is the most important one in the entire vocabulary of honest scientists, of whom there are still a few lonely souls wandering over the blasted heath of Big Academia.

It seems that Ehrlich and Kennedy are good buds. Neither of them are scientists -- but they do play them on TV, in the media and at Stanford.

Donald Kennedy was Commissioner of the FDA for Jimmy Carter in the Seventies and hasn't stepped into a lab since that time, as far as I can tell from his publications -- none are based on empirical evidence. All he writes are editorials.  Instead, Professor Kennedy returned to being head of Biology at Stanford University.

If you look up Kennedy's bio on Wikipedia you'll see it's been airbrushed in Stalinist fashion -- it's only a few short paragraphs, with a big notice that Wikipedia does not allow disputed material to appear about living persons. That suggests that somebody wanted to cite some critical facts but Professor Kennedy objected. I wonder why?

One likely reason is the infamous Stanford University Overhead Scandal. "Overhead" is what universities charge the government over and above the cost of supporting research: In the evil corporate world it's called "profit margin." Of course universities would never think about making profits, which is why their tuitions and overhead charges to the Feds have been going up and up and up. Barred from making profits, all they do is raise their salaries and pensions and pad their expense accounts. They're in bed with a monopoly -- the Federal science bureaucracy -- so they charge monopoly prices.

Well, Donald Kennedy as President of Stanford was caught dipping a little too deeply into the honey pot. Some business about $7,000.000 bed sheets for the presidential residence and overbilling the Office of Naval Research 200 million dollars.  Small stuff. But the US Congress took notice, and called Donald Kennedy on the carpet. Mr. Kennedy defended every penny of his charges and resigned. That's when his good friends, like Mr. Ehrlich, got him his job at Science mag.

Everything about Science now smells fishy. The scientific blog world should be searching through journal websites to see how deeply they are quagmired in the honey pot of Global Warming: Nature, Scientific American, The Lancet, National Geographic, the lot. They all have websites with search engines. Public exposure may help them to clean out that pervasive stink of rotten fish.

Because the decay goes far beyond the CRUddites in Britain; it's all over the world among the machine politicians of science. All of them knew what was going on with the Biggest Science Scam in History, because it should be obvious to a child of six. Undergraduates in calculus classes learn that nonlinear dynamical systems are unanalyzable. Introductory physics classes learn there is no solution to the three-body problem, and the atmosphere is a lot more complicated than just three asteroids cycling around each other in space. Metereologist Edward Lorenz rose to fame in science by dramatizing the nature of chaotical systems, physical systems that cannot be predicted from their initial conditions. The weather is one of the best examples, but the earth sciences and biology are full of them.   So no sane scientist or mathematician could have believed the Global Warming scam. If any of them say they believe it today, they are either lying or incompetent.

Global Warming is like Political Correctness; everybody knows it's a lie, but nobody is allowed to say it in public.

This is a sad time for decent science.

But on the other hand, it's Springtime for Fraudocrats.

Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/12/donald_kennedy_and_the_corrupt.html at December 07, 2009 - 09:22:38 AM EST
Title: The New Cardinals
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on December 08, 2009, 11:26:37 AM
Climategate's bullyboy scientists

By Christopher Chantrill
The biggest thing that has taken a pounding in the last two weeks of Climategate is the fantasy PR image that scientists have maintained for so long.

Of course scientists fake results.  Of course they bully other scientists.  Of course they toady up to politicians.  Of course they try to get people fired when they don't agree with them.  Of course they threaten journalists with the "Big Cutoff."

What do you think they are?  Monks or something?  The only surprising thing is that the scientists kept people fooled for so long.  On second thoughts, it's not surprising.  Given what scientists dangle in front of us as they ask for money: a world without suffering, a world without physical labor, maybe even to know the inner secrets of the universe and the mind of God, why wouldn't we believe in them?

But there ain't no such thing as an impartial scientist.  Ain't no such thing as settled science.

In the first place, as Thomas Kuhn related in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, science is a social endeavor.  Here is one plausible explanation of the scientific process:

One reason science is social is that it is a difficult task to create a plausible and satisfying scientific culture, and therefore any science... is usually the product of many contributors.  For this reason sciences are most effectively sustained by dedicated specialists.  The second reason that sciences are social is that the universal problem of science is confidence -- the need to convince people that its teachings are true and that its practices are effective.

Actually that last paragraph was taken from a study of religion, For the Glory of God: How monotheism led to reformations, science, witch-hunts and the end of slavery by Rodney Stark.  For "science" substitute "religion" in the paragraph above.

In the second place, scientists are completely in bed with government.  It's a relationship that is useful to both scientists and politicians.  Scientists want to do important work, and politicians want the fruits of science when it gives them more power.

Just as religious leaders have often turned to politicians and kings when the going got rough, so scientists have turned to government for help.  After all, that's where the money is.

But just as an establishment of religion is a bad thing, so is an establishment of science.  Today, if Thomas Jefferson were alive, he'd probably be calling for a separation of science and state -- in The New York Times Science section.

Physics offered the politicians bombs of unimaginable power, and they offered the scientists budgets of unimaginable size.  It's a pity the bombs are so powerful they can't be used. And it's a pity that science-based war is now so expensive that the low-rent political actors have turned to terrorism, warfare on the cheap.

Macroeconomics offered the politicians the hope of manipulating the economy to reward their supporters without tears.  It offered economists a seat in the citadel of power.  Yet under the reign of the macroeconomic expertise the value of money has fallen faster than in the bad old days when kings and princes merely debased the coinage without the help of scientists.

There is nothing mysterious about this. The world is full of good ideas: scientific ideas, political ideas, business ideas.  But what about good ideas that actually work?  Not so many.

People with merely "good ideas" tend to sell them to the political world rather than the business world.

Conservative politicians have always been cautious about expertise.  Edmund Burke railed against economists, sophisters, and calculators.  Lord Salisbury, Conservative Prime Minister of Britain, wrote in a letter to a friend in 1877:

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.

If you believe the climate scientists, nothing is as warm as today.  So James Hansen, Michael "The Bruiser" Mann, and Phil Jones are nothing new.  What is new is the cruel way in which Climategate is humiliating the Manns and the Joneses.

In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn asserts that a scientific field truly becomes a "science" when its practitioners can "take the foundations of their field for granted" and report their results in articles addressed to and understandable only by other specialists.

When a man like Steve McIntyre can come in from another field and rock the foundations of hockey-stickology with his critique, then he is telling the Manns and the Joneses that they don't have a "science."  All they have is a religion.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Christopher Chantrill is a frequent contributor to American Thinker. See his roadtothemiddleclass.com and usgovernmentspending.com.  His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/12/climategates_bullyboy_scientis.html at December 08, 2009 - 02:25:19 PM EST
Title: Roger Scruton
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 14, 2009, 08:45:08 AM
"The USA has descended from its special position as the principled guardian of Western civilization and joined the club of sentimentalists who have until now depended on American power. In the administration of President Obama we see the very same totalitarian sentimentality that has been at work in Europe, and which has replaced civil society with the state, the family with the adoption agency, work with welfare, and patriotic duty with universal 'rights.' The lesson of postwar Europe is that it is easy to flaunt compassion, but harder to bear the cost of it. Far preferable to the hard life in which disciplined teaching, costly charity, and responsible attachment are the ruling principles is the life of sentimental display, in which others are encouraged to admire you for virtues you do not possess. This life of phony compassion is a life of transferred costs. Liberals who wax lyrical on the sufferings of the poor do not, on the whole, give their time and money to helping those less fortunate than themselves. On the contrary, they campaign for the state to assume the burden. The inevitable result of their sentimental approach to suffering is the expansion of the state and the increase in its power both to tax us and to control our lives. As the state takes charge of our needs, and relieves people of the burdens that should rightly be theirs -- the burdens that come from charity and neighborliness -- serious feeling retreats. In place of it comes an aggressive sentimentality that seeks to dominate the public square. I call this sentimentality 'totalitarian' since -- like totalitarian government -- it seeks out opposition and carefully extinguishes it, in all the places where opposition might form. Its goal is to 'solve' our social problems, by imposing burdens on responsible citizens, and lifting burdens from the 'victims,' who have a 'right' to state support. The result is to replace old social problems, which might have been relieved by private charity, with the new and intransigent problems fostered by the state...." --columnist Roger Scruton
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 14, 2009, 11:16:31 AM
Second post of the day

http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2009/10/11/
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: G M on December 14, 2009, 12:03:58 PM
http://hotair.com/archives/2009/12/13/quotes-of-the-day-224/comment-page-1/#comments

Lord Monckton rules!
Title: Controlling the World Through False Science
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on December 14, 2009, 12:20:45 PM
Yes, Monkton does. On a related note:

Global Warming: They Will Never Be Convinced
Townhall.com ^ | December 14, 2009 | Bruce Bialosky

The release of some 3,000 emails hacked from the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University illuminates the true intent of those in the forefront of one of the most complex scientific and political issues of our times: “Global Warming” (or, if you prefer, “Climate Change”). Never before have a small number of academic elites convinced the global political and media establishment to embrace such a large-scale alteration of our existence. Certainly nobody has ever been brazen enough to attempt this without the fundamental scientific pillars of transparency, informed debate, and consensus.

The fact that these emails became public was itself an anomaly. Releases of this kind always seem to be from the Left; it’s one of the tactics they employ to attack their political enemies. From the time of the Pentagon Papers, publications like the New York Times have reveled in releasing secret information that supposedly exposes the duplicity of the Right. During the Bush Administration, secret CIA documents repeatedly found their way to the front page of the Times, bringing justified concern to an Administration struggling with challenging defense and foreign-policy issues.

Speaker Pelosi’s reaction is to call it “E-mail-Theft-Gate.” The elitist media has refused to print a single word about the controversy as ABC, CBS and NBC have completely skipped the subject despite the suspension of the lead scientist at East Anglia. These are pristine examples of the utter hypocrisy of the Left. When their opponents are “exposed,” they scream about the issue; but when their political allies are exposed, they scream about the process. (You’ll notice the same reaction to the ACORN video clips.)

Yet as devastating as the emails are to the “cause” of global warming, equally troubling are the shameful personal attacks on individuals, mostly dissenting scientists. This has been behavioral norm for the Left. “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas” was the rule except when an icon of the Right – William Bennett – could be humiliated. Last-minute campaign attacks, like the one that harmed Bruce Herschensohn in 1992 and placed the leftist Barbara Boxer in the U.S. Senate for the past 18 years, have become standard behavior for the Left and its allies in the mainstream media.

Those of us who have lived our entire lives with this can relish the fact that the tables have been turned on the Left on an issue they consider not just a cause, but a religion. It is a moment where you just want to grab one of the True Believers of global warming and watch them squirm right before your eyes.

How come I feel so empty though? How come I feel that it is a waste of time? Is it because we’ve all seen this movie before? Having persistently tried to confront the True Believers with contradictory evidence and suffered only indignities, why would this time be different? Facts clearly do not matter to these people.

As we all know, this started with Al Gore and his obsession to suppress all opposition. From his days in the U.S. Senate, through his world tour with The Inconvenient Truth, he has always mocked anyone who could possibly contradict his statements. To his wide-eyed followers, the fact that he repeatedly refuses to debate anyone on the issue does not undermine his integrity one bit. It’s amusing that the conqueror of Ross Perot refuses to get on the same stage with the meager Professor Richard Lindzen from M.I.T.

A couple years back, Australian Dr. David Evans was the first notable individual to flip sides on the issue. Dr. Evans had been the Australian point man back in the late nineties for the Kyoto treaty. Ten years later, he wrote that his scientific research established that not only had the basic principles of global warming been brought into question, but that the earth was actually cooling.

I forwarded this article to some friends and family across the political spectrum, one of whom is a liberal Democrat. He informed me that he was sent articles like this regularly (despite not hobnobbing with Republican types), and that he totally disregarded them. This particular article, dense with scientific facts, was just blithely dismissed out of hand. The resulting (heated) exchanges nearly caused a world war in the family.

In the following days, I received a flurry of emails from him and his allies swearing allegiance to the cause of man-made global warming. Not one of them contested the facts substantiated by this serious scientist. Over and over, I attempted – without any success – to bring them back to the article and asked them to refute specifics. That a significant supporter of man-made global warming was now calling the entire issue into question did not matter. It’s ironic – and a little depressing – that intelligent people who argue that science is on their side refuse to accept the scientific method when the issues are in dispute.

With the release of the emails, which reveal that their scientific icons have been gaming the system and suppressing contradictory evidence, you would think that the True Believers would be calling for heads to roll. By any reasonable measure, they should be screaming about being used and manipulated.

The True Believers have yet to be publishing any comments calling for reconsideration. There is no outcry about the rampant abuse of science that has undermined the creditability of the entire global warming community. Incredibly, the only notable response has been President Obama stating he will fly to the Copenhagen and promise a 17% reduction in U.S. greenhouse gases.

It’s now pretty obvious that re-educating the global warming True Believers would be a fruitless exercise. They want us driving Mini Coopers (or riding bicycles), fueling our houses with $40,000 solar panels, and living in cities where we can walk to work. They want to control every aspect of our lives.

As the elite intelligentsia gather in Copenhagen sleeping in their $900 hotel rooms, driving around in their chauffeured driven limousines shipped in from Germany to accommodate the excessive demand and they wine and dine on OPM (other people’s money), their true essence is exposed in manners never seen. The proletariat has morphed into the bourgeois and now wishes to control the world through a false science that will accomplish their goal of stifling man’s advancement shrouded in a scientific cause.

Our only hope is to convince clear thinking, common sense Americans that these people need to be stopped before they destroy our way of life.

http://townhall.com/columnists/BruceBialosky/2009/12/14/global_warming_they_will_never_be_convinced
Title: UN Insurance Agency
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on December 14, 2009, 08:40:15 PM
2nd post.

Climategate: ‘Hello,’ the UN Secretary General Lied (Thomas Friedman, Too)
Posted By William M. Briggs On December 13, 2009 @ 12:00 am In . Column1 02, Science, Science & Technology, World News | 48 Comments

Using his best Chuck Schumer imitation, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon jumped in front of some cameras at Copenhagen and assured us that his cause was noble.

His demeanor was serious. Contemplative.

He searched his vocabulary for the precise phrase to convey his deepest conviction … and you could see his eyes sparkle when he hit upon the shim-sham-inducing word, accelerating, to describe what was happening to global warming.

Good Lord! I thought to myself. This is bad! If global warming is accelerating, if it is worse than we have predicted — happening three times [1] faster than any scientist ever feared in his worst nightmare — then, by golly, we sure ought to do something!

But as I was jumping up to write a check to the Sierra Club, I remembered. Hadn’t I heard Ban Ki-moon’s phrase somewhere else before?

I had. And often.

I turned to my trusty archives, and discovered something. At least since the late 1990s [2], and probably before, journalists, “activists,” and even politicians have been claiming: “It’s worse than we thought.”

Only two things can account for the constant use of these words:

(1) It really is, each and every time we turn around, getting hotter by amounts greater than we had predicted.

While this is logically possible, if this rhetoric were consistently true then by now the Earth’s fish would be swimming in water as hot as Tiger Woods is in.

(2) The politicians, etc., have forgotten the definition of accelerating.

This is plausible. It is, after all, a physical term, and most non-scientist global warming activists are demonstrably not well versed in their physics.

There is a third possibility, but knowing how earnest the Copenhagen crowd is, we can scarcely give it any weight.

It is — I hesitate when I write this — that the activists are exaggerating, even (gulp) fibbing.

For our own good, of course. To convince reluctant people to act. Let us hope this third scenario exists only in my fevered imagination.

All that is rotten is not in Denmark. Thomas Friedman, an opinionist at a local paper in New York, had a cuppa with Wolf Blitzer on CNN and assured him that he had looked into this whole global warming thing and discovered that, yes, the blanket of air surrounding the Earth was growing thicker with gas (we can resist the joke, can we not?) and that the only solution to prevent permanent heat stroke was to, so to speak, throw off the covers by buying insurance.

Of the kind underwritten by the ever-trustworthy and always-reliable United Nations.

Friedman’s idea is to take money from individuals who live in a few well-off countries and give it to some bureaucrats on First Avenue. They would then dole this money back out to persons unknown, such that these persons would be able to take the stuffing out of the blanket.

A fine idea, perhaps. Especially given that the UN’s historical stewardship of Other People’s Money has been such a raving success.

But, even if this isn’t so, Mr Friedman’s concern for humanity has gotten the better of him. Just as the activists had forgotten what to accelerate meant, Mr. Friedman has shown us he does not know what to insure means.

It works like this, Thomas. You fear an outcome that, if it happened, would cost X dollars. You don’t have, or wouldn’t like to pay, that much. So you seek an insurer, who estimates the probability X will occur. Using that estimate, the insurer asks you to pay Y dollars, where Y is much less than X. If you toddle along and the outcome never realizes, you are out Y dollars. But if the event happens, the insurer pays you X, and you are happy.

The outcome here is, of course, devastating global warming. The insurer is the United Nations. Problem is, we have been assured that “it’s worse than we thought” and that “the science is settled,” so the probability of the outcome is — by the insurer’s own estimate — certain. To write a policy in this case would be foolish.

That is, since the outcome already arrived, it would be more sensible to spend the money that would have gone for the policy to paying for the effects of the outcome, and thus remove the overhead costs that accompany any contract. And since those effects are local and varied, the money would be better left in the hands of local people and not given to an insurer.

All this changes, and insurance becomes financially viable, if the activists are willing to admit that our future is not assured, that the worst is only possible and not certain, or — how would they swallow this? — that they might be wrong.

Article printed from Pajamas Media: http://pajamasmedia.com

URL to article: http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/climategate-hello-the-un-secretary-general-lied-thomas-friedman-too/

URLs in this post:

[1] three times: http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/global-warming-is-three-times-faster-than-worst-predictions-451529.html
[2] the late 1990s: http://www.usatoday.com/weather/news/2000/wgblwrm.htm
Title: Governator
Post by: ccp on December 16, 2009, 09:54:44 AM
I remember an old college friend telling me in the 70's that Schwartenegger was his idol.  There is no question he was/is a great self promoter and very smart.  He was a great bodybuilder.  He did whatever it took.  He swindled Lou F. and obviously took steroids like the rest of them.  But he also worked hard and built the best body of his day.

He started in laughable movies and overcame that accent to become the biggest Movie draw of his day for a time.  That is remarkable when one thinks that he is not a very good actor.  He did it almost by sheer charisma.  I remember I used to look forward to him a guest on the "tonight " show.  I would wait till the end of the show when Johnny would have him come out and look forward to hearing him talk.  I was never a body builder but I like working out with weights so I had an interest.

I remember how he single handedly took the activity of body building from a looked down upon side show and made it more mainstream and appealable and accepted as  "sport."  Joe Weider could never do that.

Even Johnny Carson told him once on one of his many visits "you are very smart".
This after an idiotic Susan Pleshette questioned the Arnold, "can you tell me any exercises I can do while I am driving".
To which Arnold replied, "why do you want to exerciing while you are driving. When you are driving you should be concentrating on driving" to a laughing and nodding crowd and Johnny C.

I remember another person I met in the 80's who was trying to hit it big in show business tell me that Arnold's reputation in Hollywood was having been one of being considered the greatest self promoter anyone had ever seen.  That's saying a ton when one thinks of the BS artists, cons, and self marketeers in that town.

In my mind there is no question his gigantic narcissm coupled with a sharp, witty, and incredibly focused mind, workaholism, and iron will is together  a genius that got him to where he is.

That all said I don't know what to make of him now.  He looks like a failed governor in a liberal state full of Democrats on the dole, and who is desparately trying to stay relevant.

He states he is for the people and wants to do what is right but he has become increasingly more populist, and falling into the liberal line.  His latest push into the typical climatology-Hollywood-mantra looks phoney and cheap to me.

Perhaps it is the Kennedy influence on him.  I don't know.

I only know I just don't find him likable anymore.

Any thoughts from those in Kollyphornia?
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 16, 2009, 10:40:04 AM
IMHO he never lived up to some key campaign promises, but ever since he lost on his initiatives (e.g. redistricting, challenging state union power, were 2 REALLY good and important ones) he has been utterly pussywhipped by his wife's crowd and his disease to please them.  He IS a Democrat.    No respect left from me.
Title: Turncoatinater
Post by: ccp on December 21, 2009, 07:44:36 AM
And now today he is on Drudge giving Obama an *A*.

And telling him to hang in there, he'll get it all done, etc. 

The Kennedys are that hypnotic???

I don't get it.

He must want to stay relevant and want a job.

there is something pathetic when a once charismatic principled man who lead by example is suddenly completely different with his values.  It just goes to show you he is more about himself then his ideas.  If you can't beat them join them I guess.
Title: Gubernator - a house divided
Post by: DougMacG on December 21, 2009, 10:26:47 PM
"...he has been utterly pussywhipped by his wife's crowd and his disease to please them.  He IS a Democrat.    No respect left from me."

Let this be (another) case study on insecure, happily married men.   In politics they always parade the photogenic family for what it brings in for votes.  We had an R-Senator with Ahnold's problem.  Wife was liberal and he was a moderate R, now called RINO.  On the biggest issues, these selfless men put their family first... unfortunately I would not have voted for the wife.  Most Republican Californians would not have voted for Ted Kennedy's agenda.  Beware of this (for life) while choosing future leaders. 
Title: Political Rant - Strange Bedfellows
Post by: DougMacG on December 21, 2009, 11:04:47 PM
I now find myself more closely allied politically with Communist China, Russia, Dictatorship of Cuba and the ACLU than I am with the current power within the US government:

a) Communist China has more power than 40 Republican Senators to curb the growth in spending and the increase in government debt.  http://www.shanghaidaily.com/article/print.asp?id=423054  "The world does not have so much money to buy more US Treasuries."

b) Russia broke the Climategate story and also is whistlblowing on these pretend-science cleptocrats for tampering with the non-warming temperature data coming out of Russia.  If Russia isn't warming, Antarctica isn't warming and Minnesota isn't warming, then it makes you wonder if the other anecdotal stories are truly global. http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100020126/climategate-goes-serial-now-the-russians-confirm-that-uk-climate-scientists-manipulated-data-to-exaggerate-global-warming/  "now the Russians confirm that UK climate scientists manipulated data to exaggerate global warming"

c) Cuba says Obama lied in Copenhagen.  http://apnews.myway.com/article/20091221/D9CO04700.html  "Cuba and other poor nations have refused to recognize the agreement because they weren't permitted to participate in its development."  - an agreement not binding on them is not binding on us??

d) The ACLU has made a better case for privacy in Health Care records than any Republican or conservative: http://action.aclu.org/site/MessageViewer?dlv_id=57541&em_id=56521.0
The ACLU is Against Obama Health Care
Jul 21, 2009 ... If Obama digitizes health care records the ACLU could be all that stands between Pizza Palace and your privacy.
www.thorschrock.com/2009/07/21/aclu-against-obama-health-care/
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: ccp on December 22, 2009, 07:42:47 AM
 "In politics they always parade the photogenic family for what it brings in for votes"

True.  And in this case we all KNOW why he married Shriver.  It was obviously a designed step towards power from day one.

I wonder if we are finally rid of the Kennedys with the passing of the murderer who got away with it.

I wonder if Ahnold thinks he can be the next chosen one to carry on the Kennedy torch??
Perhaps that is why he is suddenly a gigantic liberal.  It is and always was all about him.  And only about the "people" for as long as that populist facade could garner him votes.

We know he won't go away.  He obviously needs the limelight.





Title: Prager: The accelerating decline
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 22, 2009, 08:34:07 AM
Democrats Ensure America Will No Longer Be the Last Best Hope of Earth
Dennis Prager
Tuesday, December 22, 2009

As the passage of the bill that will start the process of nationalizing health care in America becomes almost inevitable, so, too, the process of undoing America's standing as The Last Best Hope of Earth will have begun.

That description of America was not, as more than a few Americans on the left believe, made by some right-wing chauvinist. It was made by President Abraham Lincoln in an address to Congress on Dec. 1, 1862.

The bigger the American government becomes, the more like other countries America becomes. Even a Democrat has to acknowledge the simple logic: America cannot at the same time be the last best hope of earth and increasingly similar to more and more countries.

Either America is unique, in which case it at least has the possibility of uniquely embodying hopes for mankind -- or it is not unique, in which case it is by definition not capable of being the last best hope for humanity -- certainly no more so than, let us say, Sweden or the Netherlands.

Indeed, President Obama acknowledged this in April, when asked by a European reporter if he believes in American exceptionalism. The president's response: "I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism."

The president was honest. In his view, as in the view of today's Democratic party, America is special only in the same way we parents regard our children as "special." We all say it and we all believe it, but we know that it is meaningless except as an emotional expression of our love for our children. If every is child is equally special, none can be special, in fact. If every country is exceptional, then no country is exceptional, or at least no more so than any other.

With the largest expansion of the American government and state since the New Deal, the Democratic party -- alone -- is ending a key factor in America's uniqueness and greatness: individualism, which is made possible only when there is limited government.

The formula here is not rocket science: The more the government/state does, the less the individual does.

America's uniqueness and greatness has come from a number of sources, two of which are its moral and social value system, which is a unique combination of Enlightenment and Judeo-Christian values, and its emphasis on individual liberty and responsibility.

Just as the left has waged war on America's Judeo-Christian roots, it has waged war on individual liberty and responsibility.

Hillel, the most important rabbi of the Talmud (which, alongside the Hebrew Bible, is Judaism's most important book), summarized the human being's obligations in these famous words: "If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But if I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?"

What does this mean in the present context? It means that before anything else, the human being must first take care of himself. When people who are capable of taking care of themselves start relying on the state to do so, they can easily become morally inferior beings. When people who could take care of their family start relying on the state to do so, they can easily become morally inferior. And when people who could help take care of fellow citizens start relying on the state to do so, the morally coarsening process continues.

There has always been something profoundly ennobling about American individualism and self-reliance. Nothing in life is as rewarding as leading a responsible life in which one has not to depend on others for sustenance. Little, if anything, in life is as rewarding as successfully taking care of oneself, one's family and one's community. That is why America has always had more voluntary associations than any other country.

But as the state and government have gotten bigger, voluntary associations have been dying. Why help others if the state will do it? Indeed, as in Scandinavia, the attitude gradually becomes: why even help myself when the state will do it?

Barack Obama, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi are right about one thing -- they are indeed making history. But their legacy will not be what they think. They will be known as the people who led to the end of America as the last best hope of earth.

Lincoln weeps.

Copyright © 2009 Salem Web Network. All Rights Reserved.
Title: "Lincoln weeps"
Post by: ccp on December 22, 2009, 09:11:23 AM
"President Obama acknowledged this in April, when asked by a European reporter if he believes in American exceptionalism. The president's response: "I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism."
 
This is a longer more confusing way to simply say NO, I do not believe in American exceptionalism.

To think our own President would be able to say such a thing.  And get elected to power.  To stay in power.  To have a media that adores him.

It is all so incomprehensible to me.

Lincoln is not the only one weeping.  So do I and many Americans.  Is there enough of us left who care?

Who is the ONE that can save this country from a Manchurian candidate hell bent on destroying it?

The attempt to extend Medicare to those 55 and older, the closing of the "donut" hole is the most cynical disgusting way of trying to bribe back seniors who have been more and more as evidenced by polls dropping support of the ONE.

LIke I learned from my own personal ordeals there just is no one who cannot be bribed.  Even our own countrymen will be most happy to give away our future for a dole.

Not only do my personal travails make me weep, I have to watch the same thing happen to America.

And Obama is NOT honest.  Occasionally he lets slip out his true feelings.  The rest is just a gigantic con.

Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: ccp on December 24, 2009, 09:25:50 AM
Maybe this is why Schwarzenegger is sucking up to history's greatest human being:

Seeks Obama’s Help for Deficit Relief (Update3) Share Business ExchangeTwitterFacebook| Email | Print | A A A
By Michael B. Marois and William Selway

Dec. 24 (Bloomberg) -- California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, anticipating a $21 billion budget deficit, plans to ask President Barack Obama to ease mandates and minimums on social programs to save as much as $8 billion.

The Republican governor plans to seek the relief, according to a California official who asked not to be identified because details haven’t been resolved. Instead of seeking one-time stimulus money or a bailout, the most-populous state wants the U.S. to reduce mandates and waive rules stipulating expenditures on programs such as indigent health care, the official said.

California is among states most affected by the economic recession. It has the lowest credit rating and recorded the nation’s second-highest rate of home foreclosures, trailing only Nevada. Unemployment peaked at 12.5 percent in October amid the loss of 687,700 jobs from the year before, when the jobless figure was 8 percent. Wealth declined as the stock market lost 40 percent of its value in 2008.

The White House is aware of news reports about a request from California but didn’t have any details or comment, said Dan Pfeiffer, Obama’s communications director.

“The problem is that there are no easy solutions left,” said Jean Ross, executive director of the California Budget Project, a Sacramento-based research group concentrating on issues facing the poor. “Where do you go to cut that doesn’t permanently compromise the level of public services that this state needs to remain economically competitive and to have some semblances of a safety net left for vulnerable populations.”

Taxes and Cuts

Schwarzenegger and lawmakers worked to close a record $60 billion gap from February through July with $32 billion in spending cuts, $12.5 billion of temporary tax increases, $8 billion of federal stimulus money and more than $6 billion of other one-time fixes.

California’s deficits show how local governments are being forced to chose between raising taxes or cutting more funding for schools, health care and other programs, even as the economy is emerging from the recession that began in December 2007. The nascent recovery has yet to produce any job gains, a drag on states that rely on income and retail sales taxes.

Nationally, 35 states and Puerto Rico expect to have $56 billion less next year than they will need to pay for all of their programs, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. In Nevada, Arizona and New Jersey, the difference amounts to more than one-quarter of their budgets, the conference said. Funds from the $787 billion federal economic stimulus bill enacted in February run out at the end of next year.

Last Chance

Schwarzenegger, 62, will detail his request for help when he delivers his annual State of the State address on Jan. 6 and unveils his budget on Jan. 8, his last chance to reshape California’s fiscal policies before he leaves office in January 2011 after seven years.

This time, Schwarzenegger’s arsenal of one-time accounting maneuvers he and lawmakers have previously used to temporarily paper over parts of the gap -- such as accelerating income-tax collections -- has been mostly depleted, making efforts to erase the latest $21 billion deficit more difficult.

The state also has struggled to implement cost-cutting measures that were part of the $85 billion spending plan approved in July. Courts blocked part of the budget that cut funding for home care for the disabled and another part that borrowed $800 million from an account that sets aside money for local transportation agencies.

‘Low-Hanging Fruit’

An accounting error means the state has to spend almost $1 billion more on schools than budgeted. Officials also underestimated the cost of health care for the poor by $900 million, and lawmakers failed to pass legislation to realize $1 billion less in anticipated prison spending.

Combined, the state faces a $6.3 billion gap in the current year and another $14.4 billion in the next.

“We’ve already gone after the low-hanging fruit and the medium-hanging fruit and the higher-hanging fruit, so it’s going to get tougher and tougher now to balance the budget,” Schwarzenegger told reporters in November.

The governor has said he won’t increase taxes again to close the gap. That means more cuts, complicated by mandated expenditures for programs such as Medicaid health-care for low- income residents. With reductions already made to programs for the poor, additional trims jeopardize those federal funds.

Biggest Issuer

“In terms of programmatic reductions, we have to keep an eye on the fact that in some areas -- be it education or health and human services -- if you run afoul of federal maintenance of efforts requirements, you risk the loss of federal dollars,” said Schwarzenegger’s budget spokesman, H.D. Palmer. “As tough as 2009, these factors are going to make 2010 even more challenging.”

The state was the biggest bond issuer this year, selling $36 billion of debt. It may come to market with at least $5 billion more of public-works obligations in the fiscal year that begins July 1, state Treasurer Bill Lockyer said.

California’s general-obligation debt rating from Moody’s Investors Service is Baa1, the company’s eighth-highest investment grade, and A from Standard & Poor’s, the sixth- highest. By comparison, Greece, the poorest member of the 16- nation euro region, is rated two steps higher at A2 by Moody’s and two lower at BBB+ by S&P.

“California, which is more than three times bigger than Greece, is running out of money,” T.J. Marta, chief market strategist at Marta On The Markets LLC, a financial-research firm in Scotch Plains, New Jersey, told Bloomberg Radio today.

Higher Interest Rates

A Standard & Poor’s/Investortools index of California state and local debt has returned 13.1 percent this year through Dec. 23, about 1.5 percentage points less than the national average.

Investors have demanded higher interest rates from California, compared with other borrowers. The state’s 10-year bonds yielded 4.6 percent by the end of last week, 1.51 percentage points more than top-rated municipal borrowers, according to Bloomberg indexes. Three months ago, that difference was as little as 1.06 percentage points. Greek 10- year bonds yield 5.72 percent, Ireland’s 4.78 percent and Spain’s 3.93 percent.

In California, “it’s never a quick budget, it’s always prolonged and when it’s prolonged the headlines get worse and spreads widen,” said Peter Hayes, who oversees $115 billion in municipal bonds for New York-based BlackRock Inc., the world’s largest asset manager.

Opposition to Cuts

Democrats, who control both chambers of the Legislature, are expected to oppose wholesale cuts to health and welfare programs. Such resistance, along with Republican opposition to tax increases, will be exacerbated as election-year politics heightens the partisan divide. Half of the state’s 120 Assembly and Senate seats go before voters in November.

Budgets and tax increases in California must be approved by a two-thirds majority, and Democrats are two votes short in the Senate and six in the Assembly.

“When you are looking at a deficit in the size we have, everything needs to be on the table,” Assembly Speaker Elect John Perez, a Democrat from Los Angeles, told reporters on Dec. 11. “The reality is that the likelihood of passing taxes in this environment is slim, but everything has to be on the table. We have to come up with a resolution to this budget crisis that asks everyone to sacrifice, not just the people that are in the greatest need.”

To contact the reporters on this story: Michael B. Marois in Sacramento at mmarois@bloomberg.net; William Selway in San Francisco at wselway@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: December 24, 2009 11:49 EST
Title: GARY JOHNSON - 2012???
Post by: SkinnyDevil on December 27, 2009, 09:59:20 AM
I wasn't sure where to put this, so...

I liked Ron Paul & I supported Ron Paul. But I said at the time I thought Gary Johnson would be a better candidate (although they disagree on several issues). I just hope he's serious about a run in 2012:

http://ouramericainitiative.com/
Title: DINO
Post by: ccp on December 28, 2009, 09:34:21 AM
This is the first time I heard this.  DINO - RINO we have - next is LINO (Libertarian in name only) - AINO - (American in name only) - OREO (we already know this one).

 OPINION: DECLARATIONS DECEMBER 26, 2009 'He Just Does What He Thinks Is Right' By PEGGY NOONAN
 
Cannon to the left of him, cannon to the right of him, cannon in front of him volley and thunder. That's our president's position on the political battlefield now, taking it from all sides. And the odd thing, the unique thing in terms of modern political history, is that no one really defends him, no one holds high his flag. When was the last time you put on the radio or TV and heard someone say "Open line Friday—we're talking about what it is we like best about Barack Obama!" When did you last see a cable talking head say, "The greatness of this man is as obvious as it is unnoticed"?

Is the left out there on the Internet and the airwaves talking about him? Oh, yes. They're calling him a disappointment, a sellout, a DINO—Democratic in name only. He sold out on single-payer health insurance, and then the public option. He'll sell you out on your issue too.

The pundits and columnists, dreadful people that they are, call him cold, weak, aloof, arrogant, entitled.

So let's denounce him again.

Wait—it's Christmas. Let's not. There are people who deeply admire the president, who work with him and believe he's doing right. This week, this column is their forum. They speak not for attribution to avoid the charge of suckupism.

***
We start with a note from an accomplished young man who worked with Mr. Obama on the campaign and in the White House. He reminded me this week of a conversation we'd had shortly before the president's inauguration. "I remember you asked me back in January if I loved my guy. And in light of all that's happened in this first year, I still do. Even more so. And I also have a strong sense—based not just on polls but on a lot of folks I've talked to who don't always pay attention to politics—that he DOES have that base of people who still love him too.

"It's hard to detect, because the part of the 'base' that's represented on cable and on blogs is so vocal (and by vocal I mean shrill), but it's there. I also read it in the letters he gets. Some of them are amazingly poignant and appreciative of what he's done and what he's doing. Some of them are tough—very tough—but still respectful and hopeful that he's doing the right thing. Even if they're unsure right now, they want him to succeed. . ."

He sees them as a kind of quiet majority, or at least quiet-but-large-group-within-the-electorate.

"[T]hey're not going to run out and defend him on the blogs or start screaming back at his detractors, because they know its fruitless and they're sick of all that Washington nonsense anyway." They want him to cut through the mess and "get things done for them. And they're willing to give him that chance. Still."

The president, he suggested, tends toward the long view and the broad view. "Here's what I know about him. He still has this amazing ability to tune out the noise from Washington, read the letters from the people, listen to their concerns, listen to his advisors, hear both sides, absorb all the information, and make the decision that he honestly feels is right for the country."

He does this "without worrying too much about the polls, without worrying too much about being a one-term president. He just does what he thinks is right. And that consumes a lot of his time. Most of it, in fact."

He is aware that Obama is "perceived as alternately too weak and too Chicago, too left and too right, too willing to compromise and too beholden to his majority, too detached and too much meddling in too many things." The administration needs "to do better in resetting the story and telling it the way we want it told." But "the fractured, petty, biased-towards-the-sensational media today makes that more difficult than ever before."

He knows now, he said, "how the Bushes and the Clintons must have felt," and wonders "if that just happens to all White Houses. I don't know. But I do know that we have some very big, very unique problems right now. And we live in a very cynical . . . time where it's difficult to maintain the benefit of the doubt as you're navigating through the storm." They're giving it their best. "Lots of good people are trying. We won't fix it all, but I think we'll succeed (and think that in some cases, we already have!) at fixing a good deal."

***
Another staffer spoke warmly of President Obama's warmth. "He's interested in who you are, and it's not manufactured." He sometimes finds himself briefing the president before events. "I know he's just come out of a meeting on Afghanistan" and maybe the next meeting isn't as important, but he wants to know who they are and where they're from and has a gift for "making them feel important."

"He's a young president, young in terms of youthful." Sometimes people come in to meet him and find "they came for a photo and he gives them a game" of pick-up basketball on the White House court. "Those are the things from a human perspective that make him so accessible. Accessible is the right word. He's emotionally available."

He is appreciative of his staff's efforts. "When you're working hard for your country and you know [he cares] it is huge." How does he show his thanks? "It's a little like a basketball game—'Thanks for that, I know what you did.' It's not a note or a pat or a call, it's a guy-to-guy thank you, 'That's cool, that's good.' You think, 'My coach got that I worked my ass off.'"

"As a person he is just an incredible human being who you can't help but love."

A third Obama staffer spoke of last week's senior staff dinner, at which the president went around the table and told each one individually "what they meant to him, and thanked the spouses for putting up with what they have to put up with." He marks birthdays by marching in with cakes. He'll walk around the White House, pop into offices and tease people for putting their feet on the desk. "Sometimes he puts his feet on the desk." He's concerned about much, but largely unruffled. "He's not taken aback by the challenges he has. He seems more focused than he's ever been. He's like Michael Jordan in that at the big moments everything slows down for him." He's good in the crunch.
I end with a story told to me by an old Reagan hand who, with another former Reagan administration official, was being given a private tour of the White House by Michelle Obama. This was last summer. Mrs. Obama led the two through the halls, and then they stopped by the Lincoln bedroom. They stood in the doorway, and then took a step inside, but went no deeper. Everything looked the same, but something was different. "We don't allow guests to stay in this room anymore," Mrs. Obama explained. She spoke of it as a place of reverence. They keep it apart, it's not for overnights.

Unspoken, but clearly understood by the Reagan hands, was: This is where he signed the Emancipation Proclamation. A true copy of it is here, on the desk. He signed it: "Abraham Lincoln." The Reagan hands were impressed and moved. It is fitting and right that the Lincoln bedroom be held apart. It always should have been. Good, they thought. Good.

Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A11
Copyright 2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. Distribution and use of this material are governed by our Subscriber Agreement and by copyright law. For non-personal use or to order multiple copies, please contact Dow Jones Reprints at 1-800-843-0008 or visit
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 28, 2009, 09:56:45 AM
I used to think quite a lot of Peggy Noonan, but in the last few years she has become captured by Washington , , , or pre-mature senility.
Title: Recalibrating Abject Failure
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on December 28, 2009, 09:22:53 PM
Obama responds to the Fruit-of-the-Loom Bomber; White House now officially resembles Naked Gun
Published under Politics

“We will not rest until we find all who were involved and hold them accountable,” Mr. Obama told reporters during a break in his vacation.
He and Michelle then went to “grab a bite to eat.”

Thus, the Obama administration began to resemble a Zucker brothers, Jim Abrahams movie. Our glorious leader’s line was no different than the one used by Lieutenant Frank Drebbin and Captain Ed Hocken from Police Quad, who, in Naked Gun, just told Nordberg’s wife that not one person on the force would rest until Nordberg’s attackers were brought to justice.
Then they went to “grab a bite to eat.”

Even the New York Times (D)—the New York Times (D)—noticed this, and said, “Pictures of passengers enduring tougher security screening at the airport were juxtaposed against images of the president soaking in the sun and surf of this tropical getaway.” Good golly!

In his press conference, before stepping out for lunch, Mr Obama also said: “The American people should be assured that we are doing everything in our power to keep you and your family safe and secure during this busy holiday season.”

They are, in actual fact, doing “everything in their power.” And ain’t that a dirty shame?

Because Janet Napolitano was able to say immediately after the attack—that is, she was heard chanting: “The system worked…The system worked…The system worked.” She was engaged so intently, that the White House press secretary Robert Gibbs thought, at first, that this was to be the official line.

Or maybe Napolitano thought it was her duty to provide the the laugh line. Just like Lt. Drebbin did after a missile had crashed into a fireworks factory, with predicable results. “Nothing to see here. Go about your business. There is nothing to see here.”

Once Napolitano realized that reporters overheard her internal conversation, she was forced to announce, “The system did not work.”

Asked to ’splain herself, she said that what she meant, when she had been mumbling, “The system worked”, was that “Once the incident occurred, the system worked.”

Incidentally, the NY Times called this statement reversal—I am not kidding, folks—a recalibration of her original remarks. The apocalypse is surely nigh.

In recalibrating, Napolitano inadvertently leaked what must be the administration’s secret plan to thwart terrorism (this must have been what she meant when she said “once the incident occurred”): (1) install Dutch tourists on all flights (it was a Dutch man who smacked the terrorist down), and—you heard it here first!— (2) infiltrate terrorist camps and train them to be bumbling instead of efficient.

Because this “incident” was bumbling, Obama, and everybody else, has been calling this a “failed” terrorist attack.

My dear friends: it was not a failed attack. It was an attack, a successful one, just one with a low body count. It’s time to recalibrate the sentiment that “everything’s OK, all is well” simply because a lot of blood was not spilled (as it was in Ft. Hood).

If Abdulmutallab hadn’t peed on his PETN, the bodies, what would have been left of them, would have been stacked beside the runway still. (And Obama would have been forced to end his vacation early, and his golf game would have suffered.)

All is not well and the Obama administration’s system is inept. Abdulmutallab did everything he could to announce his evil intentions before the flight. He didn’t even have a passport! All Abdulmutallab needed to board the plane was his Al Qaeda membership card and a healthy dose of political correctness.

He even wore his “Terrorist” baseball cap—which security made him take off before he went through the metal detector. About the only thing Abdulmutallab didn’t do was to wear a vest of dynamite with an alarm clock attached.

After first crying, “It’s not my fault!” the administration sprang into action and instituted new, stricter rules on passenger behavior. Among these: disallowing extended toilet stays (no more Mile High club initiations for the foreseeable future), forced seating for the last hour of flights, plus no blankets or pillows in that same time.

Ah, the lovely scent of overreaction and misapplied focus. Yes, my dear readers, these actions are idiotic. Unless you believe, as the administration clearly does, that no terrorist would ever figure to set his bomb off before the last hour of a flight. Bin Laden must be fuming in his cave, “Curses! The Great Satan has taken away our ability to blow up its airplanes in the last hour of the flight! However can we restore our terroristic abilities!?”

They are still refusing to consider the one action that would greatly reduce the odds of letting a terrorist board. Because, of course, it might hurt some people’s feelings.

http://wmbriggs.com/blog/?p=1560
Title: The Roost
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on December 31, 2009, 12:43:42 PM
Our 2009 Chickens and Their 2010 Roost
A quiet year laid the groundwork for a troublesome one.

By Victor Davis Hanson

In the coming year, plenty of chickens will be coming home to roost.   

Take foreign relations. In 2009, the new administration assumed that George W. Bush was largely responsible for global tensions. As a remedy, we loudly reached out to our foes and those with whom we had uneasy relationships.

But so far these leaders — like Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, and Russia’s Vladimir Putin — have only interpreted Barack Obama’s serial goodwill gestures as weaknesses to be exploited. They play the part of the pushy class bully, we the whiny nerd.

In the waning days of 2009, Iran announced it has no intention of dismantling its nuclear facilities and ignored the latest Obama deadline to cease. There’s no reason not to expect the theocracy to make significant strides in its nuclear program in 2010, while continuing without rebuke to beat and murder democratic dissidents in its streets.

Russia has announced plans to develop a new generation of nuclear weapons — and scoffed at our polite suggestions that it should pressure Iran to stop its nuclear development.

Venezuela brags of its own similar program to come — which could threaten all the neighboring democracies in the region.

The administration courted China on a much-heralded Asian tour. President Obama even has said he would be our first “Pacific president.”

Unfortunately, China was not impressed. It declined to follow our advice about reducing its carbon footprint and instead reminded Americans that we owe the Chinese people nearly $1 trillion. Expect much more of that hectoring in 2010 as our debt to China grows.

Consider also the threat of Islamic terrorism. In 2009, some in the Obama administration decided “War on Terror” was too provocative a label for what might be better dubbed “overseas contingency operations.” Apparently, they were thinking a kinder, gentler image would discourage terrorists.

Accordingly, the confessed architect of 9/11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, was promised a civil trial in New York rather than the military tribunal normally accorded to out-of-uniform murderous terrorists. Expect a lot of soapbox speechmaking about America’s sins during his testimony in 2010.

As part of our efforts to break with the Bush antiterrorism past, President Obama also vowed he would close the facility at Guantanamo Bay by Jan. 22, 2010 — another deadline that won’t be met.

But as 2009 ended, we were reminded that radical Islamic terrorists still want to kill us for who we are, and what we represent, rather than any particular thing we do.

Maj. Nidal Hasan, nursed on radical-Islamic doctrine, murdered twelve fellow soldiers and one civilian at Ford Hood, Texas. Five would-be terrorists with U.S. citizenship were arrested in Pakistan on their way to link up with Islamist militant groups. And Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was stopped in flight from Amsterdam before he could blow up an American passenger jet.

Note that all these recent terrorists were not poor, lived in the hospitable West — and cared little that the Obama administration has been critical of the U.S.’s prior War on Terror policies.

So, while we assured the world in 2009 that we wouldn’t be overzealous in our various efforts to stop terrorists, the terrorists proved they most certainly would be in theirs to kill us.

Meanwhile, at home we operated on similar naïve assumptions. The Obama administration inherited a $500 billion deficit and expanded it threefold. Its planned mega-deficits may well grow the aggregate national debt to more than $20 trillion over the next decade

The administration’s 2009 calculations on how to service the growing red ink are based on continued cheap interest. Yet in 2010, it is likely we will see rising inflation, rising interest rates — and rising costs to the continual self-destructive borrowing.

We were given a break on energy prices in 2009. The worldwide recession sent oil down to about $50 a barrel. But America did little during the year’s reprieve to rush into production newly discovered domestic gas and oil fields, to tap existing finds in Alaska, or to license new nuclear plants.

By year’s end, oil was creeping back up to $80. If the economic upswing continues, in 2010 it may near its old high of nearly $150 a barrel. Soon we will wish we had done something concrete in 2009 rather than offering more stale rhetoric about wind and solar power.

In other words, 2009 may seem to have ended relatively quietly. But in our foreign relations, in the war against terror, in our massive borrowing, and in our energy policies, we created chickens that will come home to roost in 2010.

— Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a recipient of the 2007 National Humanities Medal.

National Review Online - http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=YzFlMGZkZjYxMTU2NDkwOWFhYWQxNGQ1Njk5MDk2YTA=
Title: Rove's Resolutions
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on January 01, 2010, 08:24:46 AM
New Year's Resolutions for Washington
Ambitious Republicans should resolve to run for office next year.
By KARL ROVE

President Obama not only left Washington, D.C., for the holidays, but the lower 48 as well. So I thought I'd offer a few New Year's resolutions for him and others to come back to in the coming year.

First, to Mr. Obama's staff: The Norwegian Nobel Committee didn't want to wake the president to tell him about his prize earlier this year, but there shouldn't be any reluctance to reassure the nation after a terrorist attack. Also, why not resolve to have a few less "historic" moments? How many can one president really have, anyway? A little more grace toward his predecessor would help him, as would less TV time. He is wearing out his welcome and his speechwriters—judging by the quality of their work lately.

In 2010, Mr. Obama should work on his habit of leaving a room of people with deeply divided opinions thinking he agrees with all of them. That leads to disagreements over essential issues, like the meaning of his pledge to begin withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2011 and the nature of the new military mission there.

Finally, Mr. Obama should work on meaning what he says. He didn't last year with all those health-care deadlines and tough talk supporting the public option. Now Mr. Obama will pivot to jobs and deficit reduction. As he tries to do that, voters will wonder if it's just a ruse to save Democrats.

Vice President Joe Biden should resolve to speak publicly less. Every time he opens his mouth, the West Wing staff uses him to make the president look good by comparison.

White House Social Secretary Desiree Rogers should take a lead from Santa Clause and make her list and check it twice . . . at the White House gates.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano should resolve to take a systems analysis course before she again declares that a system "worked."

The Democratic congressional leadership should resolve to come up with Plan B. After rejecting bipartisanship in 2009, they won't be able to pass bills in 2010 with only Democrats. Too many vulnerable Democrats will flake on big votes.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi—who has reportedly let it be known that she is comfortable with losing scores of House seats to pass ObamaCare—might resolve to treat her pet Blue Dogs a little better. As for the Blue Dogs, why not resolve to become Republicans?

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid should resolve to strive for a little less unity in his caucus and in the meantime enjoy this term in office. It's likely to be his last unless Nevada Republicans tear themselves apart next year for the privilege of running against him.

Republican congressional leaders should resolve not to sit on their laurels. They're winning the battle for public opinion on health care, cap and trade, and spending, but by next fall, it won't be enough to surf voter dissatisfaction with Mr. Obama and Democrats. Voters will want to know what Republican candidates would do.

A second Contract with America won't suffice. The GOP really won in 1994 by arming candidates with a basket of issues to pick from. Next year, candidates must be fluent in kitchen-table issues from jobs to health care to deficits to spending.

Ambitious Republicans should resolve to run next year. There will be a wave of voter support for GOP positions, but authenticity, passion and conviction matter. Voters can smell them, so bone up on the issues and say what you believe, not what someone tells you to say.

Democratic National Committee Chairman Tim Kaine should resolve not to blame himself for the coming political tsunami that'll hit his party next November. He should press Mr. Obama to raise lots of money to spend on close races in states where Democrats are in charge of redistricting. If not, he'll face a very ugly 2012 congressional election, too.

Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele had a great year in generating enthusiasm among small donors, but ends 2009 with less cash on hand than he had when he started the year. He should resolve to stop giving paid speeches and instead use his time repairing frayed relationships with major donors, whose support is critical to winning legislatures that will redraw congressional districts in 2011.

Tea Party members should resolve to resist being turned into another partisan political group. The movement's power stems from its ideas, not from any party it supports, and it has been very successful in educating Americans and arousing the country. It should let its members set their own personal course in primaries and fall elections.

As for me, I resolve to speak well of Mr. Obama more frequently, curry favor with liberals by being more critical of my fellow conservatives, and be guided by the words of Mark Twain, who said that the start of a New Year "is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual."

Mr. Rove, the former senior adviser and deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush, is the author of the forthcoming book "Courage and Consequence" (Threshold Editions).

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704152804574628161441708216.html
Title: Patriot Post
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 08, 2010, 09:44:09 AM
Digest · Friday, January 8, 2010

The Foundation
"Public affairs go on pretty much as usual: perpetual chicanery and rather more personal abuse than there used to be..." --John Adams

Government & Politics
If By 'Transparent' You Mean 'Secret'...


After much bribery and arm-twisting, the Senate managed just before Christmas to pass its version of ObamaCare by a 60-39 vote (amazingly, without a single GOP "aye"). Now, the bill heads for conference deliberation televised by C-SPAN, just as the cable channel offered and Barack Obama promised numerous times.

Or not.

Democrats let slip this week that there would be no typical conference committee on the competing House and Senate versions of the health bill, as "leaders" opted instead for private negotiations with "key" congressmen and senators, none of whom is Republican. Once an agreement is reached, each legislative chamber will vote again and send the unified bill to the president.

Without a conference committee, a rule requiring public access to the conference report for at least 48 hours before a vote would conveniently not apply. That means even more liberty-stealing treachery can be slipped into the bill with little notice. Funny how the "public option" doesn't mean that the public gets to know what's in the bill.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) nevertheless had the gall to declare, "There has never been a more open process for any legislation in anyone who's served here's experience." In response, Wall Street Journal columnist James Taranto mocked, "Has a more false or awkwardly worded statement ever come out of anyone who has served as speaker of the House's mouth?"

In spite of Democrats' best efforts at "transparency," there are many extra-special things that we actually do know about the bill. For example, on page 1,020, the Senate bill states: "It shall not be in order in the Senate or the House of Representatives to consider any bill, resolution, amendment or conference report that would repeal or otherwise change this subsection." In other words, the bill creates an eternal law by prohibiting future elected Congresses from making changes to this subsection.

What's in the subsection in question? The infamous "death panel" -- the Independent Medicare Advisory Board (IMAB), whose objective will be to "reduce the per capita rate of growth in Medicare spending" (read: to ration health care).

Meanwhile, the bill contains what amounts to a marriage penalty worth $2,000 or more in insurance premiums each year. The Wall Street Journal explains, "The disparity comes about in part because subsidies for purchasing health insurance under the plan from congressional Democrats are pegged to federal poverty guidelines. That has the effect of limiting subsidies for married couples with a combined income, compared to if the individuals are single."

Finally, Obama signaled this week that he's willing to break another campaign promise: The "no tax increases on the middle class" pledge. He threw his support behind the Senate's tax on higher end "Cadillac" insurance plans, something unions and House Democrats oppose.

The more the public learns about this continuing saga, the more vigorously opposed they become to "reform." No wonder Democrats want the process to remain secret.

The BIG Lies
"We will have a public, uh, process for forming this plan. It'll be televised on C-SPAN.... It will be transparent and accountable to the American people." --Barack Obama, November 2007

"That's what I will do in bringing all parties together, not negotiating behind closed doors, but bringing all parties together, and broadcasting those negotiations on C-SPAN so that the American people can see what the choices are, because part of what we have to do is enlist the American people in this process." --Barack Obama, January 2008

"[T]hese negotiations will be on C-SPAN..." --Barack Obama, January 2008

"We're gonna do all these negotiations on C-SPAN so the American people will be able to watch these negotiations." --Barack Obama, March 2008

"All this will be done on C-SPAN in front of the public." --Barack Obama, April 2008

"I want the negotiations to be taking place on C-SPAN." --Barack Obama, May 2008

"[W]e'll have the negotiations televised on C-SPAN, so that people can see who is making arguments on behalf of their constituents, and who is, who are making arguments on behalf of the drug companies or the insurance companies." --Barack Obama, August 2008

"We will work on this process publicly. It'll be on C-SPAN. It will be streaming over the Net." --Barack Obama, November 2008

Democrat 'Constitutional Scholars' at It Again
When questioned several weeks back about the constitutional authority for ObamaCare, Obama's publicist, Robert Gibbs, issued this disclaimer: "I don't believe there's a lot of -- I don't believe there's a lot of case law that would demonstrate the veracity" of questions about constitutional authority. Ah, yes, "case law." That's code for amending our Constitution by judicial diktat rather than via its prescribed method as stated in Article V.

This week, Gibbs reiterated, "I do not believe that anybody has legitimate constitutional concerns about the [health care] legislation."

Furthermore, when asked where the authority to mandate that Americans buy health insurance -- that they be forced under penalty of fine or imprisonment to engage in a particular commercial enterprise -- is located in the Constitution, Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-CA) answered, "Well, I would assume it would be in the Commerce clause of the Constitution. That's how Congress legislates all kinds of various programs."

Congress too often uses this clause to do whatever it wants to do (the legislative target might, just might, some day engage in interstate commerce, don't you know,) but this incorrect interpretation certainly doesn't make this legislation constitutional.

Quote of the Week
"America's founders intended the federal government to have limited powers and that the states have an independent sovereign place in our system of government. The Obama/Reid/Pelosi legislation to take control of the American health-care system is the most sweeping and intrusive federal program ever devised. If the federal government can do this, then it can do anything, and the limits on government power that our liberty requires will be more myth than reality." --Wall Street Journal op-ed by Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT), Liberty University School of Law professor Kenneth Blackwell and American Civil Rights Union senior legal analyst Kenneth Klukowski
Title: Nominee for best rant ever
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 08, 2010, 09:01:01 PM
http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=25400862
Title: AGW a a Cold War Metaphor
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on January 11, 2010, 08:41:57 PM
Cold wars

Brian Micklethwait (London)  Historical views • Media & Journalism • Science & Technology

The weather is cold and snowy in Britain just now - even, now, in central London - but people like Richard North are actually quite enjoying this:

It is global warming here again, and it is getting serious. It is not so much the depth, as the repeated falls. Each layer compacts and freezes which, with fresh global warming on top becomes lethally slippery.
Time was, what with the AGW crowd pretty much completely controlling the agenda, when this kind of elegant mockery would be dismissed as the ignorance of the uninitiated. But the fact is that the present wintry weather is extremely significant in this debate. True, the weather today is not the climate for the next century, but sooner or later weather does turn into climate, and the weather has, from the AGW point of view, been misbehaving for a decade. Their precious Hockey Stick said that the temperature of the globe would disappear off the top right hand corner of the page, right about now. Well it hasn't, has it?

As John Redwood recently asked Ed Miliband in the House of Commons, concerning the present very cold weather:

... which of the climate models had predicted this?
None, it quickly became clear from Mr Miliband's faltering reply, that Mr Miliband has been paying any attention to (although other sorts of models have predicted cold winters rather successfully).

But this is not just about looking out of the window and seeing if global warming is to be observed or not (as Richard North well understands). The other point here is the authority of the people upon whom people like Ed Miliband have been relying. Not only have none of Miliband's "experts" (sneer quotes entirely deliberate) been able to predict the recent succession of colder winters; it goes way beyond that. The point is: these experts assured the world, or allowed their more ignorant followers to assure the world, that these cold winters would not happen, and despite all their protestations now about how weather is not climate, well, shouldn't they have born this in mind when saying, only a few short years ago, and have been repeating ever since, that winter snow in places like Britain would be a thing of the past? Should they not have been more careful about seizing upon any bursts of warm weather, any bursts of weather of any kind, come to that, as evidence of the truth of global warming? Had they truly understood the point that they have been reduced to making now, they would have been a lot more modest in their recent, and in Britain economically disastrous, medium range predictions. See also, John Redwood's follow up posting. Redwood is now talking more sense about the world's climate than the British Met Office.

Forgive me for always banging on about that other Cold War whenever I write about Climategate, but I truly believe that these comparisons are relevant. Much the same people were locked in combat then as are now, and the same economically catastrophic policies are being argued for and against then as now, the big difference being that now it is the entire global economy that is being threatened with economic derangement, which means that the world won't now, as the deranging tendency well knows, be able to make the obvious and damning comparisons that it could make then.

Meanwhile, the AGW debate has arrived at the same position that the Cold War argument had arrived at in or around about 1970 to 1980. An informed minority of pro-economic-progress critics had won the academic argument against the pro-economic-derangement academics, and word of this victory was spreading. And a particular thing that happened then is starting to happen now, which is that even intelligent layman critics of the John Redwood (and Brian Micklethwait) variety are starting to understand the details of the argument better than even the very smartest of the pro-derangement scientists, of the sort who are still advising governments, or who are still receiving and still trying still to believe this advice. It's not that these "experts" were born stupid, nor that they are now ignorant. Nor is Ed Miliband stupid, even if, what with all the other things on his mind, I suspect him of still being fairly ignorant. The climate science "experts" still know far more mere facts about this debate than John Redwood does, or than I do. It is simply that these people have now said - and nailed their egos to - too many stupid things, too many non-facts, and there is now no sensible way out for them. It's what these "experts" still insist on saying they know, but that clearly ain't so, that is hanging them all out to dry. The science, they keep saying, still, is settled. In their dreams.

I remember when I and my fellow anti-Marxists began correcting self-declared Marxists, who suddenly found themselves as a result on the theoretical defensive, about what Karl Marx himself had actually said. Communism is fine in theory, they then said, retreating hurriedly, but it just didn't work quite so well in practice. No, said we, pressing forward some more, a theory that doesn't work "in practice" is called an untrue theory, a bad theory, and anyone who persists in following it is stupid, and by and by: evil. And so on. So it is now with AGW. Okay, I might not now be able to demolish the sinister and preposterous Michael Mann in a television studio, but give me another few months, weeks even, of reading the skeptic blogs and I surely could.

Then as now, the mainstream media were very reluctant to report what had become obvious then, and is gradually becoming obvious now. But despite there being no internet then, the obvious economic inferiority of communism was nevertheless reported and did get around, in the form of capitalist stuff galore and adverts galore for yet more capitalist stuff galore, and nothing but jokes and complaints about the communist stuff. Not even journalists could fail to observe in which direction the Berlin Wall was pointing, and which side built it. Now the word about the fraudulence of the AGW crowd is also getting out, in the form of misbehaving weather, and, despite the best efforts of most of the regular journalists, via the internet.

The next step is to destroy - or at least try to cut down to size - the various Evil Empires that have been erected upon the fraudulent foundations of the AGW argument, as Richard North also well understands.

http://www.samizdata.net/blog/archives/2010/01/cold_wars.html
Title: Patriot Post Brief
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 13, 2010, 05:49:00 AM
Brief · Monday, January 11, 2010

The Foundation
"Resolve to perform what you ought. Perform without fail what you resolve." --Benjamin Franklin

Culture
"The fact is that post-Umar Farouk, post-Richard Reid, and eight years post-9/11, this country is still flying blind when it comes to airline security. Another young male Islamic extremist tries to kill hundreds of innocent people, and the response is the same: Heightened airport security for travelers of all ages, nationalities, and religious backgrounds -- instead of increased focus on those who look, act, worship, and travel like terrorists. Even worse, this is the second major vulnerability revealed inside of a few weeks. Remember the embarrassment of the leaked 93-page TSA Standard Operating Procedures manual? Most reports focused on the fact that the document revealed how certain government or law enforcement credentials looked. Or that only 20 percent of checked bags are given a 'full open-bag search.' Or that disabled individuals' wheelchairs, casts, and orthopedic shoes are potentially exempt from explosives screening. But most frightening to me was that while the leaked document deemed that holders of passports from Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Libya, Syria, Sudan, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Somalia, Iraq, Yemen, and Algeria should be subjected to additional screening, no such special attention was given to holders of passports from Saudi Arabia -- the home of 15 of the 9/11 hijackers. And now it's worth noting that the list doesn't include Pakistan or Nigeria -- Umar Farouk's home -- either. At the time of the memo's leak, Michael Scheuer, the former head of the CIA unit tasked with tracking Osama bin Laden, told me that the federal government 'knows without question that al-Qaeda and its allies pore over the U.S. media for operationally applicable information.' There was 'no chance' that the misstep had gone unnoticed by our enemies, he said. Nor, I suspect, will the fact that in the wake of this latest attempted act of Islamic terrorism, the United States will keep refusing to apply the most invasive screening techniques to travelers with the most in common with the 9/11 attackers." --columnist Michael Smerconish

Re: The Left
"President Obama, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi -- all of whom have in recent years promised unprecedented levels of transparency in government -- are flouting their own words by meeting in secret to write the final version of Obamacare. They are doing this to avoid the public meetings of a bipartisan conference committee representing the Senate and House and the multiple, on-the-record roll call votes required in both chambers on a conference committee report. The most radical expansion of central government power in American history is happening right under journalists' noses, and yet they raise not a peep of protest when the doors close, effectively barring them from doing their jobs at a critical juncture. ... It's time for a sit-down protest by journalists whose first job is to uphold the public's right to know what its government is doing. Invite readers to come join them in demanding open meetings. The last thing Reid and Pelosi want is the spectacle of the Capitol Hill Police dragging protesting journalists away from the closed doors. It's time to show some cojones, people." --The Washington Examiner


Government
"President Obama is a great admirer of the Mayo Clinic. Time and again he has extolled it as an outstanding model of health-care excellence and efficiency. ... They 'offer the highest quality care at costs well below the national norm,' he wrote. 'We need to learn from their successes and replicate those best practices across our country.' On the White House web site, you can find more than a dozen other instances of Obama's esteem. So perhaps the president will give some thought to the Mayo Clinic's recent decision to stop accepting Medicare payments at its primary care facility in Glendale, Ariz. More than 3,000 patients will have to start paying cash if they wish to continue being seen by doctors at the clinic; those unable or unwilling to do so must look for new physicians. For now, Mayo is limiting the change in policy to its Glendale facility. But it may be just a matter of time before it drops Medicare at its other facilities in Arizona, Florida, and Minnesota as well. Why would an institution renowned for providing health care of 'the best quality and the lowest cost' choose to sever its ties with the government's flagship single-payer insurance program? Because the relationship is one it can't afford. Last year, the Mayo Clinic lost $840 million on its Medicare patients. At the Glendale clinic specifically, a spokesman told Bloomberg, Medicare reimbursements covered only 50 percent of the cost of treating elderly primary-care patients. Not even the leanest, most efficient medical organization can keep doing business with a program that compels it to eat half its costs. In breaking away from Medicare, the Mayo Clinic is hardly blazing a trail. Back in 2008, the independent Medicare Payment Advisory Commission reported that 29 percent of Medicare beneficiaries -- more than 1 in 4 -- have trouble finding a primary-care doctor to treat them. A survey by the Texas Medical Association that year found that only 38 percent of that state's primary-care physicians were accepting new Medicare patients. But if you think things are bad now, just wait until Congress enacts the president's health care overhaul." --columnist Jeff Jacoby

For the Record
"For those of you who may have been off the grid over the weekend the big news was an item in a new book by Mullpal Mark Halperin and John Heilemann titled 'Game Change' in which Majority Leader Harry Reid was quoted as using inappropriate language when describing then-Senator Barack Obama. According to the reporting: 'Reid said Obama could fare well nationally as an African-American candidate because he was "light-skinned" and didn't speak with a "Negro dialect unless he wanted to have one."' Ok. The whole double standard thing was duly marinated over the weekend -- if this had been an Republican would Al Sharpton have given him/her a pass as he did to Reid? And so on. ... President Obama issued a statement forgiving Harry Reid before the ink had even dried on the pages of the book. Yet it took him three days to figure out what to say about the guy who tried to blow up that plane on Christmas Day. Second, according to the reporting, Reid made those statements to 'a group of reporters.' Whoa! Check, please! To a group of reporters? None of whom thought this was newsworthy? For whom did those reporters write, 'My Weekly Reader'? If not evidence of a double standard, then it is certainly evidence of journalistic incompetence." --political analyst Rich Galen

Faith & Family
"The secular left -- and some self-described Christians -- criticize Brit Hume, the Fox News commentator, for suggesting that the solution to Tiger Woods' problems is a relationship with Jesus Christ. Hume made his remarks on 'Fox News Sunday.' Disclosure: I also appear on Fox News. Hume said, 'My message to Tiger would be: Tiger, turn to the Christian faith and you can make a total recovery and be a great example to the world.' That is a message shared for 2,000 years by those who follow Jesus of Nazareth. It apparently continues to escape the secular left that Christians feel compelled to share their faith out of gratitude for what Jesus has done for them (dying in their place on a cross and offering a new life to those who repent and receive Him as savior). In a day when some extremists employ violence to advance their religion, it is curious that many would save their criticism for a truly peace-bringing message such as the one broadcast by Brit Hume. Criticism of Hume has taken two forms. One is that it is hubris to presume the Christian faith is superior to other faiths. The other criticism is that Hume used Fox as a pulpit and if he wants to preach he should resign from the network and go door to door like a Jehovah's Witness. ... Christians like Hume are not trying to impose anything on anyone. They know the difference Jesus has made in their lives and they care enough about others to want to share His message in the hope that other lives will be similarly transformed." --columnist Cal Thomas

Opinion in Brief
"If there is any lesson in the history of ideas, it is that good intentions tell you nothing about the actual consequences. But intellectuals who generate ideas do not have to pay the consequences. Academic intellectuals are shielded by the principles of academic freedom and journalists in democratic societies are shielded by the principle of freedom of the press. Seldom do those who produce or peddle dangerous, or even fatal, ideas have to pay a price, even in a loss of credibility. ... Even political leaders have been judged by how noble their ideas sounded, rather than by how disastrous their consequences were. ... It may seem strange that so many people of great intellect have said and done so many things whose consequences ranged from counterproductive to catastrophic. Yet it is not so surprising when we consider whether anybody has ever had the range of knowledge required to make the sweeping kinds of decisions that so many intellectuals are prone to make, especially when they pay no price for being wrong. Intellectuals and their followers have often been overly impressed by the fact that intellectuals tend, on average, to have more knowledge than other individuals in their society. What they have overlooked is that intellectuals have far less knowledge than the total knowledge possessed by the millions of other people whom they disdain and whose decisions they seek to override. We have had to learn the consequences of elite preemption the hard way -- and many of us have yet to learn that lesson." --economist Thomas Sowell

The Gipper
"Since when do we in America believe that our society is made up of two diametrically opposed classes -- one rich, one poor -- both in a permanent state of conflict and neither able to get ahead except at the expense of the other? Since when do we in America accept this alien and discredited theory of social and class warfare? Since when do we in America endorse the politics of envy and division?" --Ronald Reagan

Political Futures
"A Wall Street Journal/NBC poll taken in mid-December showed that 55 percent of Americans believed the country was headed in the wrong direction. Just 47 percent approved of the job Obama was doing as president. Twenty-two percent approved of the job Congress was doing. And a whopping 35 percent have positive feelings toward the Democratic Party. And yet the public seems to like Republicans even less. Just 28 percent have positive feelings toward the GOP -- a rating lower than poll results just before the party's defeats in 2006 and 2008. You can't make as many mistakes as Republicans did and expect to be forgiven quickly. That could lead to a dilemma for voters next November. Many will be fully ready to vote Democrats out of office but will not be fully ready to vote in Republicans. Faced with an either/or choice, they will weigh whether they want to get rid of Democrats more than they want to stay away from Republicans. That dilemma could have been avoided. A slightly less disastrous end to the Republican reign might well have resulted in one or two additional GOP senators this year. And that, in turn, might have prevented some of the runaway Democratic excesses we've seen. Republicans think about that a lot these days, as Democrats overreach in ways that could burden the country for generations. All GOP lawmakers can do now is to oppose. But in their heart of hearts, they know they share some of the blame." --columnist Byron York

Insight
"Well, there's something known as American conservatism, though it does not even call itself that. It's been calling itself 'voting Republican' or 'not liking the New Deal.' But it is a very American approach to life, and it has to do with knowing that the government is not your master, that America is good, that freedom is good and must be defended, and communism is very, very bad." --National Review founder William F. Buckley Jr. (1925-2008)
Title: Stop Ruining my Life
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on January 24, 2010, 09:04:25 PM
Dear Conservative Movement: Stop Ruining My Life, by Michael Brendan Dougherty

Dear Conservative Movement,

That was crazy in Massachusetts! Right? I mean, it was like two months ago that liberals were all up in our faces. They said, “NY-23! We beat that Doug Hoffman, teabaggers!” Yeah. They beat a third-party candidate. And then Ted Kennedy’s still-warm seat was just handed to us. They can console themselves with a congressional district, while we strangle the most important liberal reform since the Johnson administration.

So, yeah. We’re supposed to be happy. I know we’re all talking about the glory days of 1994, or 1984. I’m sure there is some mid-level staffer at National Review, trying to conjure the tears of Barry Goldwater on behalf of Scott Brown. But in case you’ve forgotten, even by your own standards, you’re kind of in terrible shape.

First, you’re obsessed with yourself. You try everything in the culture—The Incredibles, Wal-Mart, Crocs—and you ask: Is it conservative? This makes us look like creep socialists from the 1930s, debating endlessly about whether something is sufficiently proletariat. Weren’t we supposed to defend truth, beauty, and goodness (like St. Thomas Aquinas?) You ask us to measure Bill Watterson, Bill Cosby and Bill Clinton by one measure: conservative/not conservative.

You go so far as to encourage people to fabricate their entire identity from the Republican platform. Look at S.E. Cupp. She used to be a person! Now, under your influence, she is one of the lamer Rush Limbaugh monologues from the Clinton era. She’s a copy of a copy of Xerox of a rejected P.J. O’Rourke riff. How can you live with yourself, conservative movement?

You may not know this. But all the smartest people on the Right are basically ashamed to be associated with you. Your “success” in building a set of near-permanent institutions, think-tanks, and magazines to promote your ideals in an uncontaminated environment leaves us with two choices:

1) Sell out to the movement. That is, we may occupy ourselves by explaining that whatever the GOP is promoting—whether it be torture, pre-emptive war, Mutually Assured Destruction, or supply-side economics—is an enduring Western value. If John Boehner is doing it, we're supposed to figure out why Edmund Burke would support it.

Or:

2) Sell out the movement. That is, pitch our articles to liberal audiences. Trash the movement (like I’m doing), and trade our actual conservative convictions for the ephemeral respect of our peers.

If one of us tries to walk a fine line between these two, we’ll be accused of either disloyalty by the hacks or of hackery by the principled and aloof. One way merits a secure gig in the movement's intellectual ghetto. The other may win a few of us a higher status but a more insecure job at a respected outlet.

This situation makes actual arguments difficult, since everyone assumes we are simply enacting long-term branding strategies, rather than stating our views honestly. You’ve made it impossible for us to have a conversation.

Because you’ve made yourself a prostitute for the GOP, a cynical and corrupt organization since Reconstruction, all of your young geniuses are tainted. People don’t respect their ideas, because they can’t assume they are genuinely held, rather than cynical ploys to keep Joe Palinsupporter in line.

And so, young conservatives hate themselves. They live in fear that if they do state their actual views, they’ll be forbidden from any meaningful work in the future outside the movement.

The reason Ross Douthat won’t share his views on gay marriage in detail is simple. He knows gay marriage opponents will be portrayed as the Bull Connors of the near-future. And he wants to keep writing film criticism and noodling theology for educated readers.

How many times did William F. Buckley have his tepid, once-moderate sounding defense of segregation quoted to him? A million times. By liberals, and paleo-conservative racists both. But Buckley was indestructible. Douthat and the rest of us aren’t. We know that for the foreseeable future, liberals have the whip-hand in forming the “prevailing structure of taboos.”

Which brings me to the last point. You’re a failure, and your ambitions are so limited, it makes me cold.

The prelapsarian conservatives of the 30s opposed foreign adventurism and naive Wilsonian internationalism. They wanted to shrink the size of the federal government. In over 70 years, despite massive public spasms of disgust with the federal government, conservatives have only made it larger and stupider.

Let's list how! Eisenhower’s Cold War mobilization, Nixon’s wage and price controls and the EPA, Reagan’s massive expansion of military spending, financed by tax cuts that were sold to the public as “revenue generating.” The process culminated in the hilariously fascist sounding, grant-writing chop shop known as the Department of Homeland Security. So: failure.

Don’t get me started on foreign policy. There we were always at odds. I was a kind of isolationist. Your two unwinnable wars did little to dissuade me on that point.

But then this free market stuff. Live within your means. Fend for yourself. Be responsible. I believed that. But the people you elected didn’t. Bankers, GE, Archers Daniels Midland, military contractors, really all sorts of speculators—they deserved wealth transfers, cheap credit, debt cancellation. These are your welfare queens, conservative movement. Do you know how bad this makes us look, after having attacked poor people and minorities as free-riders?

Anyway, perhaps most grandly, you’ve tried to preserve Christian civilization, in decline since the 60s, or the 20s, or the French Revolution, or since William of Ockham, if you ask Richard Weaver.

Though a minority of us still read and adhere to some hearty theology, Dutch Calvinism, Tractarianism or Latin-Mass Catholicism, you’ve abandoned your charges and America to Jesus-is-my-Boyfriend style mega-churches. If the choice is between listening to the wisdom of Kirk Cameron and singing Jars of Clay songs and pledging our virginity versus going to college, reading Kant and fornicating? I can tell you, categorically, we’ll be going at it like heathens and Democrats.

But perversely, you seem to thrive on this sort of failure. You’ve always accused liberals of creating social ills with government programs, immediately followed by proposing government programs for said social ills. The same is true of you. The more anxiety we have about family breakdown, the more we donate to the Heritage Foundation. Because the cure for deracinated social atomism is obviously a white paper.

The only thing you’re really good at is preserving the conservative movement. And that project bored me to tears.

I will admit it. There was something I found seductive about you. If someone wants to shout "Abortion is disgusting" (it is) or "Taxes suck" (they do) or "Let's defend America First!" (always), they can find a place to do it in the conservative movement. If they are presentable enough to date women, within two years or so, they'll be writing for conservative magazines, appearing on conservative podcasts, maybe even hanging out with elected officials.

It begins with one unshakable intellectual conviction in college, like "Entrepreneurs are awesome!" (a little Randian for me), or "modernity is chaos"—and suddenly someone is a part of a movement staffed with other bright, young, idealistic conservatives who think, drink and talk like they do. Privately, they even complain about you, like I do.

But it doesn’t take long for the nausea to set in. You start teaching us to embrace an inferiority complex, one that makes us feel like rebels, while making us more dependent your largesse.

You've tried to sweet-talk me—to convince me that a Kenyan socialist is sleeping in the same bedroom once occupied by Saint Ronnie, the divorced patron saint of union-busting.

But, we’re done. I tried to “improve you,” from my associate editor perch at a dissenting conservative magazine. Now? I wish you would go away. You’re an obstacle, taking every civic impulse of your audience and turning it into rotten populism. You turn every bit of goodwill and honest anxiety into a sleazy direct-mail fundraiser.

Some of us want to actually conserve what is good about this country. Some of us want to write fiction that has nothing to do with “conservatism,” as you call it. Some of us just can’t swallow our embarrassment anymore.

Regards,

Michael

P.S. Scott Brown is what you used to call a “squish.” So, you’re settling too.



Michael Brendan Dougherty is (still) a contributing editor to The American Conservative. As of this writing S.E. Cupp was one of his Facebook friends.

http://www.theawl.com/2010/01/dear-conservative-movement-stop-ruining-my-life-by-michael-brendan-dougherty
Title: Unsustainable is the new normal
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 08, 2010, 05:08:12 AM
Unsustainable the New Normal

By Mark Steyn

 

At the National Prayer Breakfast, Barack Obama singled out for praise Navy Corpsman Christian Bouchard. Or, as the president called him, "Corpseman Bouchard." Twice.



Hey, not a big deal. Throughout his life, the commander in chief has had little contact with the military, and less interest. And, when you give as many speeches as this guy does, there's no time to rehearse or read through: You just gotta fire up the prompter and wing it. But it's revealing that nobody around him in the so-called smartest administration of all time thought to spell it out phonetically for him when the speech got typed up and loaded into the machine. Which suggests that either his minders don't know that he doesn't know that kinda stuff, or they don't know it, either. To put it in Rumsfeldian terms, they don't know what they don't know.



Which is embarrassingly true. Hence, the awful flop speeches, from the Copenhagen Olympics to the Berlin Wall anniversary video to the Martha Coakley rally. The palpable whiff given off by the White House inner circle is that they're the last people on the planet still besotted by Barack Obama, and that they're having such a cool time starring in their own reality-show remake of "The West Wing" they can only conceive of the public – and, indeed, the world – as crowd-scene extras in "The Barack Obama Show." They expect you to cheer and wave flags when the floor manager tells you to, but the notion that, in return, he should be able to persuade you of the merits of his policies seems entirely to have eluded them.



But, since Obama's mispronunciation is a pithier summation of the State of the Union than any of the dreary 90-minute sludge he paid his speechwriters for, let us consider it: Is America a Corpseman walking?



Well, we're getting there. National Review's Jim Geraghty sums up Obama's America thus: "Unsustainable is the new normal." Indeed. The other day, Douglas Elmendorf, director of the Congressional Budget Office, described current deficits as "unsustainable." So let's make them even more so. The president tells us, with a straight face, that his grossly irresponsible profligate wastrel of a predecessor took the federal budget on an eight-year joyride, so the only way his sober, fiscally prudent successor can get things under control is to grab the throttle and crank it up to what Mel Brooks in "Spaceballs" (which seems the appropriate comparison) called "Ludicrous Speed."\



Obama's spending proposes to take the average Bush deficit for the years 2001-08, and double it, all the way to 2020. To get out of the Bush hole, we need to dig a hole twice as deep for one-and-a-half times as long. And that's according to the official projections of his Economics Czar, Ms. Rose Colored-Glasses. By 2015, the actual hole may be so deep that even if you toss every Obama speech down it on double-spaced paper you still won't be able to fill it up. In the spendthrift Bush days, federal spending as a proportion of GDP averaged 19.6 percent. Obama proposes to crank it up to 25 percent as a permanent feature of life.



But, if they're "unsustainable," what happens when they can no longer be sustained? A failure of bond auctions? A downgraded government debt rating? Reduced GDP growth? Total societal collapse? Mad Max on the New Jersey Turnpike?



Testifying to the House Budget Committee, Director Elmendorf attempted to pull back from the wilder shores of "unsustainable": "I think most observers expect that the government will act, that the unsustainability will be resolved through action, not through witnessing some collapse down the road," he said. "If literally nothing is done, then eventually something very, very bad happens. But I think the widespread view is that you and your colleagues will take action."



Dream on, you kinky fantasist. The one thing that can be guaranteed is that a political class led by Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank, a handful of reach-across-the-aisle Republican accomodationists and an economically illiterate narcissist in the Oval Office is never going to rein in unsustainable spending in any meaningful sense. That leaves Director Elmendorf's alternative scenario. What was it again? Oh, yeah:



"Some collapse down the road."



Speaking of roads, I see that, according to USA Today, when the economic downturn began the U.S. Department of Transportation had just one employee making over $170,000. A year and a half later, it has 1,690.



Happy days are here again!



Did you get your pay raise this year? What's that, you don't work for the government? Yes, you do, one way or another. Good luck relying on Obama, Pelosi, Frank and the other Emirs of Kleptocristan "taking action" to "resolve" that. In the past month, the cost of insuring Greece's sovereign debt against default has doubled. Spain and Portugal are headed the same way. When you binge-spend at the Greek level in a democratic state, there aren't many easy roads back. The government has introduced an austerity package to rein in spending. In response, Greek tax collectors have walked off the job.



Read that again slowly: To protest government cuts, striking tax collectors are refusing to collect taxes. In a sane world, this would be an hilarious TV comedy sketch. But most of the Western world is no longer sane. It's tough enough to persuade the town drunk to sober up, but when everyone's face down in the moonshine, maybe it's best just to head for the hills. But where to flee? America is choosing to embrace Greece's future when even the Greeks have figured out you can't make it add up. Consider the opening paragraph of Martin Crutsinger, "AP Economics Writer":



"WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama sent Congress a $3.83 trillion budget on Monday that would pour more money into the fight against high unemployment, boost taxes on the wealthy and freeze spending for a wide swath of government programs."



What language is that written in? How can a $3.83 trillion budget "freeze spending"? And where's the president getting all this money to "pour" into his "fight" against high unemployment? Would it perchance be from the same small businesses that might be hiring new workers if the president didn't need so much money to "pour" away? Heigh-ho. Maybe we can all be striking tax collectors. It seems a comfortable life. If unsustainable is the new normal, it should also be the new national anthem. Take it away, Natalie Cole:



"Unsustainable

That's what you are

Unsustainable

Though near or far[/

Like a ton of debt you've dropped on us

How the thought of you has flopped on us

Never before Has someone spent more … ."

It's not the "debt" or the "deficit," it's the spending. And the only way to reduce that is with fewer government agencies, fewer government programs, fewer government employees, lower government salaries.

Instead, all four are rocketing up: We are incentivizing unsustainability, and, when it comes to "some collapse down the road," you'll be surprised how short that road is.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: ccp on February 08, 2010, 07:43:31 AM
"The palpable whiff given off by the White House inner circle is that they're the last people on the planet still besotted by Barack Obama"

Maybe.  But he still gets loads of cover from the MSM.

As pointed out on I think by Hannity about this corpseman stuff, "can anyone imagine if W had made the same mispronounciation?

The endless heckles, the gaffaws, the late night jokes, the parodies parading out of Hollywood.

I didn't notice anyone other than Fox pick up on this.  In fact it it weren't for Fox I doubt anyone other than the few at the speech who would even know our genius professor, the new messiah could not pronounce the word.
Title: Coulter: BO's owned
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 11, 2010, 09:38:28 AM
Obama's Owned — You Can Bank on It
By Ann Coulter

Don't miss the best conservative columnists on The Patriot's opinion page -- the right opinion with NO advertising or annoying pop-ups.


Wall Street gambled, taxpayers foot the billThe New York Times and The Wall Street Journal are bristling with the news that Republicans have decided now is the time to suck up to Wall Street. As the saying goes, there is no truer friend than a Wall Street arbitrageur -- they are the salt-of-the-earth, the most loyal men who ever drew a breath!

What are Republicans thinking? While not every money-manipulator on Wall Street deserves to be treated like a heroin dealer, lots do. Could the Republicans be a little more discriminating in picking up the Democrats' old friends?

The Democrats are acting as if they want to punish everyone in the financial services industry, including the innocent, while the Republicans seem to want to protect everyone on Wall Street, including the guilty.

How about just punishing the guilty? The Democrats can't do that because the list of Wall Street's biggest offenders may turn out to be eerily similar to the list of Obama's biggest campaign contributors.

Employees from Goldman Sachs gave more to the Obama campaign than any other organization except the University of California -- with Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase quickly following in sixth and seventh place.

Whatever Obama has in mind for punishing the financial industry, I promise you, he won't punish his friends. After JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon took a $17 million bonus this week, and Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein got a $9 million bonus, Obama said he didn't begrudge them their bonuses, saying, "I know both those guys."

Obama seems to be hoping that his vague bluster about "obscene profits" will lure Republicans into embracing Wall Street welfare recipients -- thereby losing Americans forever.

Never bet against Republicans being outwitted.

Risk-taking and speculation are good. But the Democrats' crony capitalism is the worst of both worlds: risk-taking without any real risk for the risk-takers. It's like gambling with your rich daddy's money, except we're the rich daddy.

Obama, like the rest of his party, is an ideologue who doesn't understand or particularly like the free market. He fundamentally believes in the efficacy of the welfare state, whether the beneficiary is a layabout single mother or a rich Wall Street banker.

As Peter Schweizer describes in his magnificent book "Architects of Ruin," the Democrats have been bailing out investment houses from their bad bets since the Clinton administration. The bankers got all the profits when their risky bonds were paying -- and then gave massive donations to their Democratic benefactors. But once the bets went bad, it was the taxpayers' problem.

Heavily leveraged securities packages put together by Goldman Sachs and others were the HIV virus that killed the American economy. And the reason investment firms piled leverage on leverage on leverage was that they knew the government would bail them out if their house of cards collapsed.

On one hand, Goldman put together toxic securities packages for their clients, but on the other hand, Goldman knew the mortgage securities being sold on the market were crap, so they also took out lots of insurance with AIG on crappy products being traded on the market.

It would be as if, anticipating a major earthquake, Goldman bought massive insurance policies on every house on the San Andreas fault line.

There's nothing wrong with taking risks and making bets, provided that if you bet wrong or if you bankrupt your betting partner with wild gambles: You lose.

The problem was that Goldman and AIG, among many others, knew they wouldn't lose. Twenty years of Democratic bailouts have led them to understand that when their bets go bad, the taxpayer will save them.

Which is exactly what happened.

When the earthquake hit toxic securities, the insurer, AIG, couldn't pay up. Normally, that would result in the insurer going bankrupt, an orderly proceeding in bankruptcy court to distribute AIG's assets, and Goldman recovering only a portion of the insurance payout on the crappy products.

But instead of AIG going bankrupt and Goldman taking a hit, the U.S. taxpayer made good on AIG's securities insurance. In a deal arranged by former Goldman CEO and current Obama BFF, Hank Paulson, Goldman ended up being paid -- by you -- an astonishing 100 cents on the dollar.

So Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein's boast that his firm didn't want TARP money and has paid it all back is completely irrelevant. Goldman took billions of dollars -- that's millions with a "b" -- of the AIG bailout money. How about paying that back?

It took The New York Times a year and a half to figure out Goldman's jackpot winnings from the AIG bailout -- $12.9 billion, according to the Times -- so the first thing Republicans ought to do is hold hearings to determine who benefited from the Democrats' crony capitalism, and not take their bluster as fact.

The next step should be to get all the bailout money back.

When the government steps in to save the very financial institutions that poisoned the nation's financial system with contaminated securities and derivatives -- all while the bankers get to keep the fees and bonuses on their bad bets -- we are not talking about a free market.

We're talking about regular Americans being forced to foot the bill for the gambling habits of left-wing multimillionaires by buying the malefactors more chips every time they lose.

Republicans should defend any investment houses that never benefited from a government bailout. But anyone who took huge gambles, lost and got bailed out with taxpayer money should be tortured and then shot, miraculously brought back to life, tortured some more, then shot a few more times.

COPYRIGHT 2010 ANN COULTER
DISTRIBUTED BY UNIVERSAL UCLICK
Title: Hurtling Headlong to Hayek's Hades
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on February 11, 2010, 04:35:24 PM
http://reason.com/archives/2010/02/11/hurtling-down-the-road-to-serf
Reason Magazine


Hurtling Down the Road to Serfdom

Do we want a culture of takers or makers?

John Stossel | February 11, 2010

Government is taking us a long way down the Road to Serfdom. That doesn't just mean that more of us must work for the government. It means that we are changing from independent, self-responsible people into a submissive flock. The welfare state kills the creative spirit.

F.A. Hayek, an Austrian economist living in Britain, wrote The Road to Serfdom in 1944 as a warning that central economic planning would extinguish freedom. The book was a hit. Reader's Digest produced a condensed version that sold 5 million copies.

Hayek meant that governments can't plan economies without planning people's lives. After all, an economy is just individuals engaging in exchanges. The scientific-sounding language of President Obama's economic planning hides the fact that people must shelve their own plans in favor of government's single plan.

At the beginning of The Road to Serfdom, Hayek acknowledges that mere material wealth is not all that's at stake when the government controls our lives: "The most important change ... is a psychological change, an alteration in the character of the people."

This shouldn't be controversial. If government relieves us of the responsibility of living by bailing us out, character will atrophy. The welfare state, however good its intentions of creating material equality, can't help but make us dependent. That changes the psychology of society.

 I'll explore this tonight on my Fox Business show, 8 p.m. Eastern (rebroadcast Friday at 10 p.m.).

According to the Tax Foundation, 60 percent of the population now gets more in government benefits than it pays in taxes. What does it say about a society in which more than half the people live at the expense of the rest? Worse, the dependent class is growing. The 60 percent will soon be 70 percent.

Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin seems to understand the threat: He worries that "more people have a stake in the welfare state than in free enterprise. This is a road that Hayek perfectly described as 'the road to serfdom.'" (Tonight I will ask Ryan why, if he understands this, he voted for TARP and the auto bailouts.)

Kurt Vonnegut understood the threat of government-imposed equality. His short story "Harrison Bergeron" portrays a future in which no one is permitted to have any physical or intellectual advantage over anyone else. A government Handicapper General weighs down the strong and agile, masks the faces of the beautiful, and distracts the smart.

So far, the Handicapper General is just fantasy. But Vice President Joe Biden did shout at the Democratic National Convention: "Everyone is your equal, and everyone is equal to you." If he meant that we're all equal in rights and before the law, fine. If he meant government shouldn't put barriers in the way of opportunity, great. But statists like Biden usually have more in mind: They want government to make results more equal.

Two actual examples of the lunacy:

When colleges innovated by having students use Kindle e-book readers instead of expensive textbooks, the Justice Department sued them, complaining that the Kindle discriminates against blind students. The department also is suing the Massachusetts prison system because it makes prospective prison guards take a physical test. Since women don't do as well as men on that test, Justice claims the test discriminates against women.

Arthur Brooks, who heads the American Enterprise Institute, says statism is becoming the "central organizing power in our economy," and that the battle between free enterprise and statism will shape our futures. He remains optimistic because a recent poll showed that 70 percent of Americans want free enterprise. I'm less sanguine. In that same poll, 54 percent of Americans said government should exert more control over the economy. Brooks discounts that, claiming people forget their "core values" during crises.

But he asks the right question: Do we want a culture of takers or makers? Ryan and Brooks say most people want "the American idea": freedom and self-responsibility. I fear they want a Mommy State to take care of them. What do you think?

The choice is crucial. If we continue down the Road to Serfdom, our destination will be a poorer society, high unemployment, stagnation, and complacency.

John Stossel is host of Stossel on the Fox Business Network. He's the author of Give Me a Break and of Myth, Lies, and Downright Stupidity. To find out more about John Stossel, visit his site at johnstossel.com.
Title: Re: Hurtling Headlong to Hayek's Hades
Post by: Rarick on February 12, 2010, 05:22:10 AM
http://reason.com/archives/2010/02/11/hurtling-down-the-road-to-serf
Reason Magazine


Hurtling Down the Road to Serfdom

Do we want a culture of takers or makers?

John Stossel | February 11, 2010

Government is taking us a long way down the Road to Serfdom. That doesn't just mean that more of us must work for the government. It means that we are changing from independent, self-responsible people into a submissive flock. The welfare state kills the creative spirit.

F.A. Hayek, an Austrian economist living in Britain, wrote The Road to Serfdom in 1944 as a warning that central economic planning would extinguish freedom. The book was a hit. Reader's Digest produced a condensed version that sold 5 million copies.

Hayek meant that governments can't plan economies without planning people's lives. After all, an economy is just individuals engaging in exchanges. The scientific-sounding language of President Obama's economic planning hides the fact that people must shelve their own plans in favor of government's single plan.

At the beginning of The Road to Serfdom, Hayek acknowledges that mere material wealth is not all that's at stake when the government controls our lives: "The most important change ... is a psychological change, an alteration in the character of the people."

This shouldn't be controversial. If government relieves us of the responsibility of living by bailing us out, character will atrophy. The welfare state, however good its intentions of creating material equality, can't help but make us dependent. That changes the psychology of society.

 I'll explore this tonight on my Fox Business show, 8 p.m. Eastern (rebroadcast Friday at 10 p.m.).

According to the Tax Foundation, 60 percent of the population now gets more in government benefits than it pays in taxes. What does it say about a society in which more than half the people live at the expense of the rest? Worse, the dependent class is growing. The 60 percent will soon be 70 percent.

Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin seems to understand the threat: He worries that "more people have a stake in the welfare state than in free enterprise. This is a road that Hayek perfectly described as 'the road to serfdom.'" (Tonight I will ask Ryan why, if he understands this, he voted for TARP and the auto bailouts.)

Kurt Vonnegut understood the threat of government-imposed equality. His short story "Harrison Bergeron" portrays a future in which no one is permitted to have any physical or intellectual advantage over anyone else. A government Handicapper General weighs down the strong and agile, masks the faces of the beautiful, and distracts the smart.

So far, the Handicapper General is just fantasy. But Vice President Joe Biden did shout at the Democratic National Convention: "Everyone is your equal, and everyone is equal to you." If he meant that we're all equal in rights and before the law, fine. If he meant government shouldn't put barriers in the way of opportunity, great. But statists like Biden usually have more in mind: They want government to make results more equal.

You betcha, there will be a critical point where the producers "opt out" and instead of working, just show up for work like in soviet russia.  Then we will not be able to compete and it will take something like a "criminal revolutionary underground" to break things loose again. 
Title: Pulled the Plug on Entrepreneurship
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on February 12, 2010, 08:52:01 AM
Dear Mr. President: Why We Are Not Hiring

By C. Edmund Wright
Mr. President, did I really hear you say that businesses aren't hiring because they can't get bank loans? Are you kidding me?

Please indulge me for a moment, and we can get to the actual reasons.

But first, I must add that every time you step up to the microphone -- for example, your impromptu presser on Tuesday -- the painful decision to shut down my business of eighteen years is validated by your words. And I should thank you for that.

For the record, that decision was formalized on November 5, 2008. Check your calendar.

Some fifteen months later, I can say that it was the best business decision I have ever made. With your hands on the levers of the government and the economy, I wanted to have as little at risk as possible.

Don't get me wrong -- it was a torturous and gut-wrenching decision that went against every fiber of my being. I had to betray deeply rooted entrepreneurial instincts and set some more mundane material goals. And while it might seem extreme, I think my mindset speaks to the real reason businesses are not hiring now.

So what is that mindset?

It's not complicated. I am neither a swooning David Brooks enamored of your pant crease nor a silver-spoon trust-fund baby like Christopher Buckley. I've simply had some twenty-five entrepreneurial ventures -- with a good number of strikeouts to be honest -- and real-world experience told me exactly who you are and exactly what the business climate under your rule would be like.

And I was exactly right.

Consider: Eighteen years ago, I was statistically in poverty, but I had dreams and plans. At the time, Reaganomics still set the economic tone, and a fired-up Newt Gingrich was forcing conservatism on the Clinton White House. There were actually politicians who praised business-owners and profits.

Against that backdrop, I've beaten some long odds and had a pretty good run. It's been extremely hard, and the move up was not a straight line. There were times I wanted to quit. Without a doubt, though, I am better off than I was eighteen years ago, before I started under Bush 41 -- and ten years ago, when Bush 43 was elected -- and six years ago, when he was reelected. And so are all of the folks who have been on this ride with me.

Having said that, my business is not better off than it was just three years ago.

That's when decades of liberal energy policy came home to roost, and four-dollar gas took several hundred thousand from my bottom line faster than I could possibly react. That same gas price slammed my customers -- and my customers' customers -- forcing our company into a vice of rapidly rising costs and rapidly dropping revenues. Oh, and for fun, there were also slower payments from our customers. Thank you, environmental wackos!

We were not alone.

The fuel price domino nudged the subprime mortgage domino -- itself an outgrowth of liberal lending policies -- and we have all seen the unraveling of a financial system underpinned by real estate values. Those valuations were the basis for any number of derivatives and credit default swaps and so on. Putting the Wall Street talk aside, the net result to business of this massive wealth-destruction is that employees are more desperate for money, and customers are less willing to buy and slower to pay when they do.

This is the Main Street carnage of "unfettered government" on small business and families. It is the destructive fruit of environmental leftists, the Fannie-Freddie cronies in government, and other corrupt liberals and crony capitalists in positions of unmerited influence.

It crushes the bank account and the spirit of the entrepreneur -- and it is all caused by government incompetence from beltway bureaucrats with zero business experience...you know, like you and practically your entire administration.

And sadly, this is also the result of many Republicans giving in to the Democrat liberals all too often. One of the worst, ironically, is John McCain, who was always "reaching across the aisle" to vote against tax cuts and vote for energy restrictions and so on.

I'll admit that the prospect of running a small business under a McCain administration with Reid and Pelosi running Congress was not all that enticing, either. But it was your election that inspired me to pull the plug. After all, I saw how your Illinois buddies refused to let Republic Window even close down on their own terms, so I figured I better get out before your government and some union figured out a way to prevent me from quitting a business that I dreamed up, financed, created, and built from scratch.

You weren't lying when you told that Chicago public radio station in 2001 that the Constitution constrained your vision for government, were you?

Things were getting bad enough with Bush and other Republicans unable or unwilling to fight the encroaching liberal governmental infestation of our lives, but the thought of having a president who believes in that infection -- who would champion it and push it -- just scared the hell out of me. It beat the entrepreneurial spirit out of me, too.

So I decided to sit the risk-reward world of business ownership out for a while. Like many, we are no longer willing to take all of the financial and legal risks and aggravation of owning and running a business...not with even higher taxes, more regulation, more litigation, and more emboldened bureaucrats on the horizon. People who have a dream to build a better life by taking risks and starting a business instinctively know when those principles are under attack.

And with you, Sir, in the White House, these principles are indeed under attack. Why this surprises anyone is a mystery to me. Jeremiah Wright hates these principles. So did Saul Alinsky. So do Van Jones and Bill Ayers and Andy Stern. I don't know any "structural feminists," but I bet they hate them too. And so do you. This is part of the America that you promised to "fundamentally transform."

I knew what that meant. I could sense the bulls-eye on my back. This is who you are.

And since you clearly do not understand business at all, let me give you a short primer:

Any business idea, from the first day it is hatched, is nothing more than a series of cost-benefit analyses that the idea-holder either acts on or passes on. Sometimes the first decision is to forget the idea. Sometimes the first decision is to move ahead and invest some cash.

Perhaps a few million cost-benefit analyses later, you might have Microsoft or Home Depot or ESPN. Or you might have Bill's Plumbing or Johnson's Quality Homes or a café or an electrical wholesaler, and so on. And those businesses still operate on a constant stream of risk-reward decisions. In the business world, there is no neutral gear.

(There: Now you have more useful information than Jamie Gorelick or Franklin Raines got from Harvard.)

And when we have a president and ruling class who are clueless about and hostile towards business, the risk-reward equation shifts dramatically against further investment of time, talent, and capital. And that's where we are today.

I never really doubted my decision. Yet when I see you hold job summits featuring environmentalists and unions, lawyers, and poverty pimps, I am even more thrilled to be out of the game. When I hear you fantasize that the only reason businesses won't hire is that they can't get a loan, my decision is further validated. And when you say that small business is clamoring for you to pass health care, I know that you have taken total leave of your senses.

So again, thank you, Mr. President. Even without your teleprompter, you are convincing. You have convinced me I made the right decision and convinced others not to hire. I only hope and pray that the midterms of 2010 might reverse my decision. That is what every fiber of my being is hoping for.

Until then, don't blame George Bush and the banks. Feel free to blame me -- and all the other "Atlas Shrugged" entrepreneurs -- who are now on the sidelines, hoping Storm Obama will pass.

Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/02/dear_mr_president_why_we_are_n.html at February 12, 2010 - 10:50:51 AM CST
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 19, 2010, 08:38:28 AM
Woof Freki:

I apologize, but after reflection (and perhaps fired up a bit by watching Glenn Beck discuss this very point last night) I have decided to delete the post of the Austin plane killer.  But for what he did, no one would have bothered to finish reading what he wrote. 

Marc

PS: Left unmentioned is that, according to a TV report yesterday, that he set fire to his ex-wife's house with her and their child still inside it and that they were saved by the intervention of neighbors.

Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Rarick on February 19, 2010, 05:29:01 PM
I missed Glenn Beck?   I thought he expressed what I have heard a lot of people expressing, but they are not at "the wall" yet.
Title: Creating the Disease you Kill the Patient to Cure
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on February 21, 2010, 09:22:53 AM
The Fraud of Progressive Nobility

By Chuck Rogér
Barack Obama has admitted the need to break his most celebrated campaign promise. Suddenly he is "agnostic" on increasing taxes for people earning less than $250,000. Nine years ago, as an Illinois State Senator, Obama criticized the Supreme Court for not removing a roadblock that forbids Washington to redistribute income. That roadblock is the United States Constitution.

Washington routinely redistributes income within American society. When Joe Taxpayer receives government benefits that exceed what he pays in taxes, the effect is what the Heritage Foundation calls a "distributional deficit." Joe's higher-earning fellow taxpayers must fill that deficit. "Each year, government is involved in a large-scale transfer of resources between different social groups." The very idea that human nature or any natural law would be allowed to control humans or nature nauseates progressives. For example, allowing markets to be free and the weather to do its thing are immoral. So then, government must make people and science play fairly. Steeply graduated taxation for financing that government constitutes noble robbery.

George Mason University economics professor Don Boudreaux, who is also a Café Hayek blogger, explains his acid test for determining the genuineness of someone's nobility.

Desire to help others is noble. It's noble, though, not in and of itself. It's noble only if it's likely to lead to helping others who truly need help. A desire to help others that prompts well-meaning people to address nonexistent problems isn't so much noble as it is misguided and, possibly, dangerous.

Misguided nobility tends to focus people on intent, not results. Forty years of Great Society-inspired welfarism have brought a 70 percent illegitimate birthrate among Blacks-a 218 percent explosion since the LBJ years. The non-Hispanic white illegitimacy rate hovers below 12 percent. Amid a finger-pointing blame fest, "minority advocates" still supply the crutches on which minorities lean. For instance, affirmative action strengthens the haplessness in "protected classes" that motivated liberals to "protect" those classes in the first place.

Interestingly, Johns Hopkins and Syracuse Universities researchers found that immigrant black children attend college at a 25 percent higher rate, and upper echelon schools at a four times higher rate, than multigenerational African-American children. Princeton University and University of Pennsylvania sociologists determined that immigrants comprise 27 percent of Blacks at "selective" colleges and a whopping 41 percent at Ivy League institutions despite immigrants comprising only 13 percent of early college-aged Blacks in general. A black person had to be born into the victimhood peddled by the American progressive in order to fall for that victimhood.

In order to be progressive, one must keep up the appearance of helping the "less fortunate," pay no attention to the effects of said help, and soak up the feel-good one gets when the world praises the wonderfulness of one's intentions.

Professor Boudreaux points out the absurdity of a Macy's department store poster campaign which implies that 38 million Americans routinely go hungry.

...because feeding oneself and one's family is perhaps the most fundamental of all human impulses, if so many Americans were truly "at risk of hunger" on a regular basis, then it is nearly impossible to explain why poor Americans are so richly endowed with goods and services far less necessary to survival than food.

The Heritage Foundation's Ralph Rector observed that the "typical American categorized as ‘poor' by the government" owns a refrigerator, stove, washing machine, home air conditioning, microwave, color TV, VCR, stereo, at least one car, and 30 percent of the time, two cars.

Evidently then, self-anointed noble watchdogs want us to believe that starving poor people, in the throes of fighting off a survival impulse transmitted by their stomachs to their brains, leave air-conditioned homes and drive air-conditioned cars to appliance stores where they buy microwave ovens to reheat nonexistent food that they didn't buy because they couldn't afford it. Such rationale passes for clear thought among progressives who push taxpayer funding for feel-good programs based on flawed science and economics.

If allowed to remain off-leash, where will noble progressives take America?

The Tax Foundation found that President Obama's policies would massively increase income redistribution. Already, 60 percent of Americans are "net ‘receivers' of federal government benefits." Most families earning no more than $86,000 currently pay less federal tax than the dollar-value of government benefits that they collect. The new threshold will grow to $109,000 if Obama gets his way on healthcare, carbon "cap-and-trade," and new taxes on the wealthy. The President's plans would annually take almost $1 trillion from the top-earning 30 percent of families and hand it to the bottom 70 percent. Essentially, three of ten families will pay all federal bills for the remaining seven.

Even before considering Obama's hefty redistributionism, every federal tax dollar paid by America's lowest earners garners for those earners $10.44 in federal benefits. The President's 2012 reelection campaign slogan will be, "Open a progressive savings account. Hold out your hand and I'll double your 1,000 percent interest rate."

Another Tax Foundation study puts a frightening perspective on Obama's grotesque spending. Eliminating the federal deficit could require a 95.2 percent tax rate on the wealthiest Americans. Beatle George Harrison captured his government's arrogance back when he was enduring confiscatory taxation. Harrison wrote, "Should five percent appear too small, be thankful I don't take it all." One wonders who it is that the noble progressives think will create the jobs they keep promising when $952 of every $1,000 earned by small business owners is used to pay unemployment compensation for people who have no job and no intention of getting one as long as the noble progressives have their backs.

Reality-blind progressives like Barack Obama and the left ideologues who inhabit Capital Hill will spend and borrow and tax and spend even as prosperity evaporates. They will "spread the wealth" so thinly that only the super wealthy will have any wealth left to confiscate for spreading. Progressives' tax-the-rich agenda could have the insidious effect of encouraging the wealthy to work less in order to avoid being nobly robbed of more of their wealth. If Barack Obama somehow rams through his prosperity-killing agenda, then John Galt will emerge from the mountains of Colorado to pluck the achievers from society once again.

A physicist and former high tech executive, Chuck Rogér was a columnist for a Phoenix newspaper and now blogs at chuckroger.com. Email: swampcactus@chuckroger.com.

Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/02/the_fraud_of_progressive_nobil.html at February 21, 2010 - 11:21:29 AM CST
Title: Steyn: Why the west is going down the drain
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 22, 2010, 06:32:00 AM


Why the West is going down the drain

By Mark Steyn


News from around the world:

In Britain, it is traditional on Shrove Tuesday to hold pancake races, in which contestants run while flipping a pancake in a frying pan. The appeal of the event depends on the potential pitfalls in attempting simultaneous rapid forward propulsion and pancake tossing. But, in St. Albans, England, competitors were informed by Health & Safety officials that they were "banned from running due to fears they would slip over in the rain." Watching a man walk up the main street with a skillet is not the most riveting event, even in St. Albans. In the heat of the white-knuckle thrills, team captain David Emery momentarily forgot the new rules. "I have been disqualified from a running race for running," he explained afterwards.

In Canada, Karen Selick told readers of The Ottawa Citizen about her winter vacation in Arizona last month: "The resort suite I rented via the Internet promised a private patio with hot tub," she wrote. "Upon arrival, I found the door to my patio bolted shut. 'Entry prohibited by federal law,' read the sign. Hotel management explained that the drains in all the resort's hot tubs had recently been found not to comply with new safety regulations. Compliance costs would be astronomical. Dozens of hot tubs would instead be cemented over permanently." In the meantime, her suite had an attractive view of the federally-prohibited patio.

Anything else? Oh, yeah. In Iran, the self-declared nuclear regime announced that it was now enriching uranium to 20 percent. When President Barack Obama took office, the Islamic Republic had 400 centrifuges enriching up to 3.5 percent. A year later, it has 8,000 centrifuges enriching to 20 percent. The CIA director, Leon Panetta, now cautiously concedes that Iran's nuclear ambitions may have a military purpose. Which is odd, because the lavishly funded geniuses behind America's National Intelligence Estimate told us only two years ago that Tehran had ended its nuclear weapons program in 2003. Is that estimate no longer operative? And, if so, could we taxpayers get a refund?

This is a perfect snapshot of the West at twilight. On the one hand, governments of developed nations microregulate every aspect of your life in the interests of "keeping you safe." If you're minded to flip a pancake at speeds of more than 4 miles per hour, the state will step in and act decisively: It's for your own good. If you're a tourist from Moose Jaw, Washington will take pre-emptive action to shield you from the potential dangers of your patio in Arizona.

On the other hand, when it comes to "keeping you safe" from real threats, such as a millenarian theocracy that claims universal jurisdiction, America and its allies do nothing. There aren't going to be any sanctions, because China and Russia don't want them. That means military action, which would have to be done without U.N. backing – which, as Greg Sheridan of The Australian puts it, "would be foreign to every instinct of the Obama administration." Indeed. Nonetheless, Washington is (altogether now) "losing patience" with the mullahs. The New York Daily News reports the latest get-tough move:

"Secretary of State Clinton dared Iran on Monday to let her hold a town hall meeting in Tehran."

That's telling 'em. If the ayatollahs had a sense of humor, they'd call her bluff.

The average Canadian can survive an Arizona hot tub merely compliant with 2009 safety standards rather than 2010. The average Englishman can survive stumbling with his frying pan: You may get a nasty graze on his kneecap, but rub in some soothing pancake syrup, and you'll soon feel right as rain. Whether they – or at any rate their pampered complacent societies in which hot-tub regulation is the most pressing issue of the day – can survive a nuclear Iran is a more open question.

It is now certain that Tehran will get its nukes, and very soon. This is the biggest abdication of responsibility by the Western powers since the 1930s. It is far worse than Pakistan going nuclear, which, after all, was just another thing the CIA failed to see coming. In this case, the slow-motion nuclearization conducted in full view and through years of tortuous diplomatic charades and endlessly rescheduled looming deadlines is not just a victory for Iran but a decisive defeat for the United States. It confirms the Islamo-Sino-Russo-everybody else diagnosis of Washington as a hollow superpower that no longer has the will or sense of purpose to enforce the global order.

What does it mean? That a year or two down the line Iran will be nuking Israel? Not necessarily, although the destruction of not just the Zionist Entity but the broader West remains an explicit priority. Maybe they mean it. Maybe they don't. Maybe they'll do it directly. Maybe they'll just get one of their terrorist subcontractors to weaponize the St. Albans pancake batter. But, when you've authorized successful mob hits on Salman Rushdie's publishers and translators, when you've blown up Jewish community centers in Buenos Aires, when you've acted extra-territorially to the full extent of your abilities for 30 years, it seems prudent for the rest of us to assume that when your abilities go nuclear you'll be acting to an even fuller extent.

But, even without launching a single missile, Iran will at a stroke have transformed much of the map – and not just in the Middle East, where the Sunni dictatorships face a choice between an unsought nuclear arms race or a future as Iranian client states. In Eastern Europe, a nuclear Iran will vastly advance Russia's plans for a de facto reconstitution of its old empire: In an unstable world, Putin will offer himself as the protection racket you can rely on. And you'd be surprised how far west "Eastern" Europe extends: Moscow's strategic view is of a continent not only energy-dependent on Russia but also security-dependent. And, when every European city is within range of Tehran and other psycho states, there'll be plenty of takers for that when the alternative is an effete and feckless Washington.

It's a mistake to think that the infantilization of once-free peoples represented by the microregulatory Nanny State can be confined to pancakes and hot tubs. Consider, for example, the incisive analysis of Scott Gration, the U.S. special envoy to the mass murderers of Sudan: "We've got to think about giving out cookies," said Gration a few months back. "Kids, countries – they react to gold stars, smiley faces, handshakes, agreements, talk, engagement."

Actually, there's not a lot of evidence "smiley faces" have much impact on kids in the Bronx, never mind genocidal machete-wielders in Darfur. So much for the sophistication of "soft power," smiling through a hard-faced world.

So, Iran will go nuclear and formally inaugurate the post-American era. The Left and the isolationist Right reckon that's no big deal. They think of the planet as that Arizona patio and America as the hotel room. There may be an incendiary hot tub out there, but you can lock the door and hang a sign, and life will go on, albeit a little more cramped and constrained than before. I think not.

 
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: ccp on February 22, 2010, 07:34:25 AM
"The Left and the isolationist Right reckon that's no big deal"

Leading the isolationist Right is Pat Buchanan.  I have to say a recent column of his says it all (with regards to his true feelings about Jews).  According to him the problems we face in the Middle East are essentially the fault of the Jews.  He all but comes out and says it.  As a Jew, like Rachel it is hard not to be seriously offended. 
I've said before I really doubt if push comes to shove that most Americans will be willing to stick up for Israel.  I know some polls say otherwise but I don't believe them.

Of course Israel is trying to sell the concept that this is not just an Israeli problem it is a world problem.  I agree but of course I am biased.

Withou knowing the inside workings of the Bama administration superficially it really appears our fearless leader(s) has accepted a nuclear Iran. Tossed out on the cable talk shows the new strategy appears to be "containment", whatever that means.

All I can think of is John Bolten's warning to all who listened:

If anyone thinks Iran is a problem now just imagine what it will be like with nuclear weapons.
Title: We need this fellow here in the US!
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 24, 2010, 08:45:19 AM


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94lW6Y4tBXs
Title: Jim Bunning - a hero
Post by: ccp on March 02, 2010, 07:46:48 AM
At first my reaction to Jim Bunning was one of "what the heck is he thinking".

Now I think he is a hero and right on the money.

This country has to stop the sob stories, the false compassion and the feckless spending for everything under the sun.

We are BROKE.  When is it going to sink in?

We have to stop the dole and people will have to take jobs they don't want.

Today Medicare cuts to providers of 21% kick in.  The Congress passed a 30 day reprieve of this but the Senate has yet to roll this back.  Doctors/hospitals go through this bullying every year.  They gov holds this over our heads and then every time at the last minute act like they are doing us a favor by pushing it out another year.  This is their yearly bargaining chip.

OK, I'll take a pay cut.  But I ain't about to continue paying for everyone else to sit on their rears and collect pay checks while I work like a dog just to watch a large amount confiscated every tax quarter.

My health, auto, malpractice insurances keep going up every year for no reason yet I cannot raise my rates.

I am willing to work till I am 70 or longer, if I can.

I am not willing to pay for the pensions of all these people who retire at 50 and live for another 30 years.

I never agreed to all that.

Jim Bunning is the only one with enough guts to stand up against the madness.  Of course they reported he is retiring.

As Krauthammer said there is no hope otherwise any legislator will follow in his footsteps Rep or Dem.

This country is and should just go in the garbage.

And we have the richest man supporting the HC bill.  I agree we HAVE to do something but a gigantic overhaul with single payer all under the control of liberal academic elites is not the answer.  He is wrong to say that this bill is better than nothing.  Why should we make it worse?  WHy should most Americans suffer for the minority?

I doubt Buffet would agree to HMO medicine.  anymore than our fealess courageous legislators who all will continue to have access to the best care.

I have no prlbem with the President getting first rate care (including CT colonoscopy that was recently NOT approved for payment by Medicare for anyone else)  but Nancy Pelosi?  She is replaceable.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: prentice crawford on March 02, 2010, 09:02:13 AM
Woof,
 Senator Bunning and I have worked on a number of issues together over the years and I call him on a regular basis and was very sadden that he announced his retirement and that he would not be running for reelection. Jim is a very principled man and acts (not lip service; he walks the walk), as a man of integrity. He is calling attention to the juxtaposing dynamics of political promises/delusional policy making and reality. Yes, reality sucks, but it sucks even more when you're suddenly faced with it. Jim is showing Obama and the nation what's going to happen down the road with the healthcare reform package when all its mandates kick in; somebody is going to have to pay for it all and there are not enough rich people to tax, to pay for it.
                                            P.C.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: ccp on March 02, 2010, 11:04:01 AM
Do we know why he is retiring?

Frankly, he is the first and as far as I know the only one who is telling the truth here.  I wonder why he is retiring.  You worked with him?  Wow.

I don't see tax cut alone getting us out of this mess.
Printing funny money will only dig us into this deeper.

We have to wake up Americans and advise them that without sacrifice and hard work we will not get out of this.  We can't have everyone retire when they feel like it and then give less desirable jobs away to people marching into the country having babies, utilizing medicaid, our schools, taking money under the table, or those who come in legally bringing all their relatives inclucing ancietn parents over and putting them honestly or dishonestly on their busines's books for a few years and then qualifying for Medicare while the rest of us spent our whole lives putting into it - print worthless paper money - and expect that this coutnry will not fall apart. 

(Of course if we tax all the liberals in the entertainment/media/academia industries 95% that might help the rest of us.)

Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: prentice crawford on March 02, 2010, 12:48:24 PM
 He's leaving office mainly because of family but Jim is getting up there in age as well. He has his critics in the state, some even from inside the Republican Party that are more moderate have accused him of being obstinate in his positions. In others words he doesn't put Party first. :-P
 And Jim did the work on the issues I had concerns about and I informed him on those issues to help bring it to the attention of the Senate. Mainly, the effect of illegal immigration in Kentucky and gun control issues. Oh, and it's looking like Ron Paul's son, Rand Paul, is a front runner to take his seat. So much for the Party getting put first there. :-D
                                       P.C.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 03, 2010, 06:18:11 AM
PC:  I'll be asking you about Rand Paul on the Politics thread.
Title: The Schlitzing of America
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on March 08, 2010, 07:01:23 AM
Glenn Harlan Reynolds: Consent of the governed - and the lack thereof

By: Glenn Harlan Reynolds
Sunday Reflections Contributor
March 7, 2010

Our Declaration of Independence observes:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. -- That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, -- That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."

"Deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." This is boilerplate American history, and something that Americans -- and, in particular, America's political class -- have long taken for granted.

But now things are looking a bit dicey. According to a recent Rasmussen Poll , only 21 percent of American voters believe that the federal government enjoys the consent of the governed. On the other hand, Rasmussen notes, a full 63 percent of the "political class" believe that the government enjoys the consent of the governed.

It's tempting to stress the disconnect here, and that disconnect is certainly huge. Unsurprisingly, the political class -- which talks mostly to itself -- thinks that it is far more popular, and legitimate, in the eyes of the country than is in fact the case. In this, as in so many things, America's political class is out of touch with reality.

But forget the views of America -- where, it seems likely, more people believe in alien abductions than in the legitimacy of our rulers -- and look just at the more cheerful view of the political class.

Even among the rulers, only 63 percent -- triple the fraction of the general populace but still less than two-thirds of the political class -- regard the federal government as legitimate by the standards of America's founding document. The remainder, presumably, are comfortable being tyrants.

These numbers should raise deep worries about the future of our republic. A nation whose government does not rest on the consent of the governed is a nation whose government holds sway only by inertia, or by force.

It is a nation vulnerable to political shocks, usurpation, or perhaps even political collapse or civil war. It is a body politic suffering from a serious illness. Those who care about America should be very worried.

But we've had enough political drama in recent years, so I'll go for a more prosaic comparison: The once-heady brew of American freedom has become watery and unsatisfying.

In fact, when I think of the federal government's brand now, I think of Schlitz beer. Schlitz was once a top national brew. But, in search of short-term gains, it began gradually reducing its quality in tiny increments to save money, substituting cheaper malt, fewer hops and "accelerated" brewing for its traditional approach.

Each incremental decline was imperceptible to consumers, but after a few years, people suddenly noticed that the beer was no good anymore. Sales collapsed, and a "Taste My Schlitz" campaign designed to lure beer drinkers back failed when the "improved" brew turned out not to be any better. A brand image that had been accumulated over decades was lost in a few years, and it has never recovered.

The federal government, alas, finds itself in much the same position. The political class sold its legitimacy off in drips and drabs. As "smart politics" has come over the past decades to mean not persuasion but the practice of legerdemain, the use of political deals, cover from a friendly press apparat and taking advantage of voters' rational ignorance, the governing classes have managed to achieve things that would surely have failed had the people known what was going on.

But though each little trick may have slipped by the voters, the voters have nonetheless noticed that the ultimate product isn't what it used to be. The end result, as with Schlitz, is a tarnished brand. And rescuing tarnished brands is hard.

It gets worse. Not long ago, the federal government enjoyed a stellar reputation for honesty and competence. Now, according to a recent CNN poll, three-quarters of Americans think federal officials aren't honest . (There's no separate survey here on what the "political class" thinks, but I suspect that its numbers would be sunnier, but still appalling, as above). So what do we do with a federal government that many voters think is illegitimate and dishonest?

Well, the Declaration of Independence allows for the prospect of altering or abolishing the government we have in order to get a government that's closer to what we want. That needn't involve anything as violent as the American Revolution or the Civil War, but the need for change -- real, structural change as opposed to campaign-slogan "change" -- is becoming more obvious.

In the past, America has managed to reinvent itself without transformations as wrenching as the Civil War or the Revolution. As the legitimacy of our current arrangements becomes increasingly threadbare, it is perhaps worth thinking about how this might be accomplished again. Because when a great beer dies, it's sad. But when a great nation dies, it's tragic.


Examiner contributor Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a law professor at the University of Tennessee. He hosts "Instavision" at PJTV.com, and blogs at Instapundit.com.

 

 
 
Find this article at:
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columns/Sunday_Reflections/Consent-of-the-governed---and-the-lack-thereof-86628027.html
 
Title: Jon Stewart
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 19, 2010, 09:59:24 AM
Jon Stewart in fine form:

http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-march-17-2010/in-dodd-we-trust
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Rarick on March 20, 2010, 03:58:07 AM
I see a lot of people talking about change, but what should we be changing, and where are we going with it?  It seems NO One is willing to put thes two W'S out there.........

I would suggest 2 changes.  The first would be for both houses of congress.   A 2/3 vote to pass any legislation and a 3/4 vote to overrule veto.  Right now it is something less than that and they are going too fast with tooo many laws time to "derate" the engine.........

The second would be a tax reform.  If we are paying taxes, let us decide what programs we want to fund.  If I want x% of my taxes to fund the Highway system then that is where it goes.  If I choose to leave programs I don't like unfunded, then that is what happens, not a cent of my taxes would go to programs I do not want funded.  Okay my tax form got another 5 pages, but it give a check against a congress that likes throwing money around.   It would also force the various government departments to get efficient too, after all they suddenly are competing on the tax dollar market now aren't they?
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 20, 2010, 05:32:32 AM
May I suggest that a discussion of these would fit better on "The Way Forward for the American Creed" thread?
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Rarick on March 21, 2010, 07:42:28 PM
ok.
Title: next
Post by: ccp on March 22, 2010, 04:08:06 AM
Are we now going to see:
immigration amnesty (camouflagued (sp?) as reform).
college "entitlement" reform
and of course cap and trade?

Some say we won't see any of this this year.

I predict they are all on the table and ASAP.  In fact these items will be addressed immediately before there is a chance the Dems lose a house in Nov. in my opinion.

My prediction for the present health care policies.  They will only increase costs necessitating progressively more government "fixes" till eventually we are where the radicals want to be - a totally government controlled system with rationed care. 

It is obvious isn't it?


Title: VDH: Precedent Set
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on March 22, 2010, 06:29:22 AM
Victor Davis Hanson: We’ve Crossed the Rubicon
Pajamas Media ^ | March 21, 2010 | Victor Davis Hanson

President Obama has crossed the Rubicon with the health care vote. The bill was not really about medicine; after all, a moderately priced, relatively small federal program could offer the poorer not now insured, presently not on Medicare or state programs like Medicaid or Medical, a basic medical plan.

We have no interest in stopping trial lawyers from milking the system for billions. And we don’t want to address in any meaningful way the individual’s responsibility in some cases (drink, drugs, violence, dangerous sex, bad diet, sloth, etc.) for costly and chronic health procedures.

No, instead, the bill was about assuming a massive portion of the private sector, hiring tens of thousands of loyal, compliant new employees, staffing new departments with new technocrats, and feeling wonderful that we “are leveling the playing field” and have achieved another Civil Rights landmark law. (NB: do the math: add higher state income taxes in most states; the new Clinton-era federal income tax rates to come; the proposed lifting of limits on income exposed to FICA taxes; and now new health care charges — and I think you can reach in some cases a bite of 65%to 70% of one’s income.)

So we are in revolutionary times in which the government will grow to assume everything from energy use to student loans, while abroad we are a revolutionary sort of power, eager to mend fences with Syria and Iran, more eager still to distance ourselves from old Western allies like Israel and Britain.

There won’t be any more soaring rhetoric from Obama about purple-state America, “reaching across the aisle,” or healing our wounds. That was so 2008. Instead, we are in the most partisan age since Vietnam, ushered into it by the self-acclaimed “non-partisan.” But how could it be anything else?

Partisanship all the time, everywhere

No, Obama has thrown down the gauntlet, and is trying to reify the sloganeering of the 1960s. He apparently reasons along the following lines: that centrist talk was campaign fluff; the voters fell for it, and now it’s his turn to remake America with 51% of the House and 44% of the people. Think Sweden, or, better, Greece as our model at home, and something like America as Brazil in matters of foreign policy. Apparently, Obama figures that people now may not like the present partisanship, but they didn’t like FDR at the time either. Yet whom do they associate their Social Security checks with? Hoover? Coolidge? Harding?

I don’t see why the ram-it-through, health care formula won’t be followed by similar strategies for blanket amnesty, cap and trade, and expansions of the state takeover of cars, banks, student loans, and energy.

Remember, all these will be packaged as “comprehensive” reform — comprehensive health care, comprehensive immigration, comprehensive energy, comprehensive monitoring of even the banal decisions we make. So what does comprehensive really mean, other than all of us are going to get even more official looking letters in the mail, advising us to fill out a form, pay a fine, and be warned that a new regulation or tax is on the way — followed by the usual state/federal representative’s newsletter bragging about some new entitlement that he “won” for us with our borrowed money?

The Logic of Statism

I expect a lot of the following in the next three years.

1) Them!: More Obama soaring speeches about some “historic” crisis that needs “comprehensive” solutions (e.g., more of “this is our moment” banalities). Those introductions will be followed by alternate praise of some heroic individual who lost her health care, struggled to unionize, breathed some sooty air, was deported while cooking the evening meal, etc. These gripping narratives will be mixed in with ‘Them!’ demagoguery (e.g., the health care industry, the big corporations, the polluters, the nativists and racists — all of “Them” are standing in the way of hope and change, and, together, yes, we can! defeat them. Oh yes, there is going to being even more sermonizing, and shriller human interest portraits about “Them” smashing poor five-year-old Billy Jones from Topeka who flew up to DC to find Harry Reid for “help”; or “Them” denying Herlinda Lopez from Fresno her college dreams, who then wrote a letter pleading to Michelle for assistance; or “Them” absolutely crushing the mother of Bobby Smith for no other reason than sheer greed, who then took the Greyhound to Nancy Pelosi’s office!

2) The Fedopus has far more than eight tentacles: More letters in the mail from more state and federal bureaucracies (both broke, and searching for billions of dollars for millions of workers who need to be paid). The official looking stationary letters will be advising us that there is a new fee, surcharge, rule, regulation, etc. — mostly in the context that we have already in some way violated something. (Expect in such writs to see your name misspelled, your address garbled, one letter canceling out the one of the prior month, and semi-threatening language demanding compliance. [Don’t dare call the government number since the U.S. can’t hire more competent answerers from India]). This last month, to name a few, I got IRS friendly reminders, State Board of Equalization new rules, federal agricultural surveys, county assessment questionnaires, and the Census. All in all, about 12 official letters came, and I expect more this month. (My favorites are all the county, state, and federal agricultural questionnaires that usually have a warning like, “Do not write ‘no change from last year!’”—meaning that, even though your vineyard hasn’t gone anywhere in the last twelve months, you must go through a zillion questions, marking “No” to things like “Do you have a billboard on your property?” or “Do you raise gaming horses?”

3) More cynicism: The more Obama talks about the greedy and selfish in society who “take” from others, the more the public will understand that they are in fact the greedy in these crosshairs. Costly health problems that originate with obesity, smoking, alcoholism, unsafe sex, violence, law-breaking, etc. are really due to lack of scheduled office visits. One missed colonoscopy — not 50 extra pounds or 1000 Big Macs over the years — causes cancer. People always ache due to a dearth of medical advisors and outreach counselors — or the diet and prescription drugs pushed on the victim by the profit-mongering corporation. In other words, the old days of a kindly, but tiny government politely advising us about what not to do have now transmogrified into a brave new world in which there is no individual. Instead, there exists only collective responsibility — a creed that assumes those in rehab or on parole or fighting weight-induced diabetes were victims of a system in which those who did not engage in that sort of behavior were culpable in some way and should pony up. Best of all, the system assumes we are greedy, cruel, and selfish for writing things like the above.

4) Pelosism: In our brave new world, expect more of the lurid stories about the secretary of the Treasury not paying his FICA taxes. The multimillionaire Madame Speaker will spend more of the state’s millions on private jet travel as she lectures on carbon footprints and a culture of corruption. We will hear more about the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee hiding his income, or a member of the House Rules Committee bragging that, given the historic importance of health care, they are just making up the rules as they go along — and proud of it. Our guardian class has become the new French aristocracy at Versailles. They will rail about Citation jets for the CEO, and then fly federally-owned Gulfstreams; they will put us in Smart cars but limo in Yukons and Tahoes on “official business.” Our lifestyles will be as monitored as much as those who do the monitoring will not be at all.

5) Greedy and Not-So-Greedy Capitalists: And there are “bad” and “not so bad” capitalists too. The CEOs for GM are trying to help America out with green designs and fair wages — so unlike those at Ford and Toyota. Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are the model execs, quite unlike the yokels who run Caterpillar and whine about health care. George Soros is not really a money speculator that ruins banks, but a transferer of capital to progressive causes. In every statist society, large corporations either resist or join. For the latter, the machinery of government reinvents them as part of the solution rather than the problem — in the way that Al Gore really doesn’t really guzzle electricity, or John Edwards never really lived in a mansion. The transition to a Ministry of Industry requires a Ministry of Truth. With the Obama media we are already half there.

6) The Race/Class/Gender Cult: This federal caring creed trumps all religion. We will hear thousands of homophobic, racist, sexist anecdotes (but not those from a Ruth Ginsberg, or Harry Reid, or Joe Biden) that remind us why the government must enforce diversity set-asides and affirmative actions, and fund new sociological studies proving why group X hates group Y, and why government bureau Z is fighting X on behalf of Y for all our benefit. We are in perpetual war with perpetual ologies and –isms and we need far more Van Joneses to win them!

I understand the reasoning behind Obamism and am familiar with the feel-good, this-is-our-moment rhetoric of egalitarianism. But please at least spare us the fictions and simply be honest: Obama wants a state-run America, somewhere to the left of France or Denmark, a United States unexceptional and merely one of many nations at the UN. This vision follows an existing, decades-long encroachment of government. And it requires all sorts of highly credentialed overseers monitoring and at times justifiably attacking the upper middle class for its deplorable treatment of those below it.

This new America is ultimately predicated on the notion that we were born equal and must die absolutely equal as well. And this is entirely within our grasp, if we just understand that individual responsibility, talent, natural endowment, chance, merit, luck, tragedy, and a dozen other variables far too complex for government to imagine, much less solve, in fact, are not the real obstacles to ensuring equality.

Instead, it is simpler than that: greed, selfishness, racism, sexism, classism, and not niceness on the part of a few really are the culprits. Thank God that a few rare souls like Obama fathom that. And thank God, again, that it will take a singular humanitarian and genius like Obama to make us denser folks see it and do something about it.

That’s about where we are.

Subscript: Do Democrats realize that we really have crossed the Rubicon? In the future when the Republicans gain majorities (and they will), the liberal modus operandi will be the model—bare 51% majorities, reconciliation, the nuclear option, talk of deem and pass, not a single Democrat vote—all ends justifying the means in order to radically restructure vast swaths of American economic and social life. Is someone unhinged at the DNC? They just blew up any shred of bipartisan consensus when their President polls below 50%, the Democratically-controlled Congress below 20%, and health care reform less than 50%. Usually unpopular leaders and their unpopular ideas seek the shelter of minority rights and prerogatives. What will they do when they are in the minority—since they’ve entered the arena, boasted “let the games begin” and shouted “by any means necessary”?

http://pajamasmedia.com/victordavishanson/weve-crossed-the-rubicom/?singlepage=true
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: ccp on March 22, 2010, 07:19:23 AM
Couldn't have said it better.
Except Mr Hanson leaves out the coming immigration amnesty which will bring us 20 million new voters the vast majority are going to vote for, let me see, I couldn't imagine.

Could it be they will vote for the res of us to pay for their benefits -excuse me - entitlements?

I really do believe this is our last stand.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: ccp on March 22, 2010, 07:45:49 AM
"6) The Race/Class/Gender Cult: This federal caring creed trumps all religion. We will hear thousands of homophobic, racist, sexist anecdotes (but not those from a Ruth Ginsberg, or Harry Reid, or Joe Biden) that remind us why the government must enforce diversity set-asides and affirmative actions, and fund new sociological studies proving why group X hates group Y, and why government bureau Z is fighting X on behalf of Y for all our benefit. We are in perpetual war with perpetual ologies and –isms and we need far more Van Joneses to win them!"

Yes.  We all heard over the msm how one or two "Tea Party" people called some minorities a bad name.  The "N" word.  The "F" word.
And of course this is really what they want us to think it is about.  Those opposed are just a bunch of racists afterall.

There is no question if there were a thousand protesters the media would interview the ONE or TWO that used the N word (I am even afraid to use it in this context on this board lest my life be ruined) and that would make the news.

I've seen first hand how the MSM do this all the time.  Particularly when it fits a left wing agenda.
Title: Prager: Civil War
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 23, 2010, 10:51:54 PM

It's a Civil War: What We Do Now
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
ShareThis
A terrible thing happened to America on Sunday, March 21, 2010.

The country took its biggest step ever down a road diametrically opposed to its original intent of keeping the state small so that the individual can be free and great.

Therefore, in this unprecedented crisis of values, this is what needs to be done:

1. Know and teach America's core values.

We got to this point solely because over the past few generations, Americans have forgotten the values that have made America distinctive and great. Even the "Greatest Generation" failed to communicate them.

In a nutshell, they are what I call the American Trinity: "In God we trust," "Liberty" and "E Pluribus Unum." The left has successfully made war on all three -- substituting secularism for God and religion in as much of American life as possible; substituting equality (of result) for liberty; and multiculturalism is the opposite of "E Pluribus Unum."

People who do not understand American ideals -- especially small government -- now dominate our schools, our entertainment media and our news media.

(My own contribution here is a video titled, "The American Trinity" at prageru.com. Please view it and forward it.)

2. Recognize that we are fighting the left, not liberals.

Conservatives and centrists are no longer fighting liberals. We are fighting the left.

Liberalism believed in American exceptionalism; the left not only does not believe in it, the left opposes it. President Obama, when asked if he believes in American exceptionalism, replied, "I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism, and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism."

Liberalism believed in creating wealth; the left is interested in redistributing it.

Liberalism believed in a strong defense. The left believes in cutting defense and a strong United Nations.

3. Democrats should be referred to as Social Democrats. This is not meant to be cute, let alone as a slur. But calling Democrats Social Democrats is an effective way of reminding Americans that there is no longer any difference between what is now known as the Democratic Party and the Social Democratic parties of Europe. When the Democratic Party returns to its roots as a liberal, not a left-wing, party, we will happily resume calling the party by its original name. However, since no Democrat can cite a significant difference between the Democratic Party and the SD parties, there is no good reason not to use the more accurate nomenclature.

4. Work tirelessly to repeal the bill.

We must single-mindedly work to repeal the government health plan. We all know that it is difficult to repeal entitlements because they are like drugs and it is very difficult to wean people off drugs. But it is not impossible. We need to warn our fellow Americans that entitlements will do to America what drugs eventually do to addicts.

All Republicans must run for office on the "repeal" issue. Even when they lose, the difference between right and left, between Republicans and Social Democrats will have been made clear; and clarity is our best friend.

5. Our motto: "The bigger the government, the smaller the citizen."

I used this phrase in addressing the Republican members of Congress. It has become widely used, including by Rep. David Dreier, R-Calif., on the House floor during the Congressional debate on Sunday. It encapsulates this epic battle of American values versus leftist values. Every movement needs a motto. I nominate this.

6. Do not let other matters distract.

Neither Republicans nor conservatives are united on every issue facing America. Immigration is one example. But we are united on the big government vs. free individual issue, which, more than anything else, has defined America. If we allow any other domestic issue to divide us, we will lose.

And here's why: If Americans forget what America stands for, it won't help us if there is not one illegal immigrant here. And if we do remember what it means to be American, we can handle anything.

7. Acknowledge that we are in a non-violent civil war.

I write the words "civil war" with an ache in my heart. But we are in one.

Thank God this civil war is non-violent. But the fact is that the left and the rest of the country share almost no values. The American value system and the leftist value system are irreconcilable. If the left wins, America's values lose. If American values prevail, the left loses.

After Sunday's vote, for the first time in American history, one could no longer confidently believe that the American system will prevail. And if we don't fight for it, we don't deserve it.
Title: Constitutional Distortions & Corrupt Bargains
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on March 26, 2010, 07:51:33 AM
Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, Redux
In America, socialism used to be confined within certain boundaries; that was before last Sunday’s vote.
 
We are now beginning to enter the Kansas-Nebraska Act stage of our republic’s socialist crisis. At our constitutional founding, the evil of slavery was crudely evaded. In 1820, the Missouri Compromise, which prohibited the abomination north of 36°30' north latitude (about the middle of Missouri), was enacted.

But with the western push of the frontier, a new compromise was needed. So the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 decreed that the “popular sovereignty” of each territory should decide whether it would be a slave or a free state. Then, adherents of both the abomination and freedom migrated to Kansas to struggle — with their bodily presence — for their respective causes. First came politics. Then the political rhetoric turned violent. Then verbal violence turned to physical violence. Kansas became known as Bleeding Kansas. John Brown was the most famous person to apply unjustified, murderous violence to his righteous cause of ending slavery; he was hanged, but the Civil War ensued, because, as Lincoln sagely explained:

A House divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure; permanently half slave and half free.

I do not expect the Union to be dissolved — I do not expect the house to fall — but I do expect it will cease to be divided.

It will become all one thing or all the other.

Either the opponents of slavery, will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new — North as well as South.


Now we enter our history’s second stage in the struggle against the abomination of socialism. Just as slavery had been contained in the South, so entitlement socialism has, until this week, been more or less contained in service to only the poor and the elderly — and even those programs (for the elderly) operate on the principle of beneficiaries paying monthly premiums for the benefits they will later get (Medicare/Social Security). Only the poor, under Medicaid, received benefit without premium payment.

But now, just as the Kansas-Nebraska Act broke through the geographic limit to slave states, the Democratic party’s 2010 health-care law has broken the boundary that limited socialism. Now, the chains of socialism are to be clamped onto the able-bodied middle class — not merely retirees who have paid their insurance premiums and the presumed-helpless poor.

Even the New York Times — after the vote — admits what the bigger goal has been all along. In Wednesday’s edition (“In Health Care Bill, Obama Attacks Wealth Inequality” by David Leonhardt), they point out: “Beyond the health reform’s effect on the medical system, it is the centerpiece of his deliberate effort to end what historians have called the age of Reagan. . . . Speaking to an ebullient audience of Democratic legislators and White House aides at the bill-signing ceremony on Tuesday, Mr. Obama claimed that health reform would ‘mark a new season in America.’ . . . Above all, the central question that both the Reagan and Obama administrations have tried to answer — what is the proper balance between the market and the government? — remains unresolved. But the bill signed on Tuesday certainly shifts our place on that spectrum.”

I thank the New York Times for that honest statement of historic fact.

For example, the new law takes away from insurance companies the right to charge for insurance based on actuarial risk — which is the essence of insurance. Now they will charge what the politicians tell them to charge — and pay such benefits as the politicians order them to pay. They may, for a while, make money, but that will be at the sufferance of the politicians. One may call this mere regulation, but it is regulation to such a degree that it constitutes effective ownership of the insurance company. The former equity holders in such companies are now merely nominal owners. Also, the new law provides for taxes on investment income to pay for socialized health care, sucking out the lifeblood of our economy to the deathbeds of the destitute.

When these intrusions are combined with 1) the nationalization of GM and Chrysler, 2) the partial nationalization of the banks, 3) the establishment of trillion-dollar, taxpayer-funded slush funds (the stimulus package and TARP), and 4) the planned ten-year, $10 trillion expansion of government debt (which steals from our children and grandchildren dollars yet unmade by them to pay foreign debt holders), the center of gravity of our economy moves from the private sector to the public sector.

And just as the free states could not tolerate the spread of slavery into their midst, so, too, free middle-class America — if it still has its historic character — will not tolerate the yoke of socialism being put upon their necks.

First, the unambiguous will of the majority was defied by the vote of Congress last Sunday.

Come November, we shall see whether the system can still turn the popular will of the majority into legislative will. If it can, all will be well and the crisis will end. Rallying the vote between now and November is roughly equivalent to the early stage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act period — people started migrating to Kansas to support their convictions.

But come November, if the majority will — which opposes the socializing of health-care delivery and its associated government intrusions — is denied its expression by the corrupt bargains and constitutional distortions of Washington, then, for the second time in our history, we will enter that dangerous period when the House resolves its temporary division. Let us devoutly pray — and commit to ourselves — that this time freedom shall be reacquired . . . peaceably.

http://article.nationalreview.com/429385/kansas-nebraska-act-of-1854-redux/tony-blankley
Title: Progressivism: the real enemy - and it is us.
Post by: ccp on March 29, 2010, 09:44:25 AM
I thought this belongs in the Progressive thread but I cannot open that thread to post this as it is locked.

Progressives see us as the enemy and our enemies as noble not the other way around:
 
****Obama Slights Our Friends, Kowtows to Our Enemies
By Michael Barone (Archive) · Monday, March 29, 2010

Barack Obama's decision to postpone his trip to Indonesia and Australia -- to a democracy with the world's largest Muslim population and to the only nation that has fought alongside us in all the wars of the last century -- is of a piece with his foreign policy generally: attack America's friends and kowtow to our enemies.

Examples run from Britain to Israel. Early in his administration, Obama returned a bust of Churchill that the British government had loaned the White House after 9/11. Then Obama gave Prime Minister Gordon Brown a set of DVDs that don't work on British machines and that Brown, who has impaired vision, would have trouble watching anyway.

More recently, Obama summoned Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu to the White House, permitted no photographs, laid down non-negotiable demands and went off to dinner.

Some may attribute these slights to biases inherited from the men who supplied the titles of Obama's two books. Perhaps like Barack Obama Sr., he regards the British as evil colonialists. Or perhaps like his preacher for 20 years, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, he regards Israel as an evil oppressor.

But the list of American friends Obama has slighted is long. It includes Poland and the Czech Republic (anti-missile program cancelled), Honduras (backing the constitutionally ousted president), Georgia (no support against Russia), and Colombia and South Korea (no action on pending free trade agreements).

In the meantime, Obama sends yearly greetings to (as he puts it) the Islamic Republic of Iran, exchanges friendly greetings with Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, caves to Russian demands on arms control and sends a new ambassador to Syria.

What we're seeing, I think, is a president who shares a view, long held by some on the American left, that the real danger to America often comes from America's allies.

This attitude goes back to Gen. Joseph Stilwell's feud against China's Chiang Kai-shek in World War II. As Barbara Tuchman writes in her definitive biography, Stilwell thought Chiang was undercutting the U.S. by not fighting hard enough against the Japanese. He may have shared the view common among some "old China hands" -- diplomats and journalists like Edgar Snow -- that the Chinese communists were preferable.

After China fell to the communists, the old China hands got a fair share of the blame, and liberals who opposed military support of Chiang were vilified. This lesson was not forgotten.

In his first book on Vietnam, David Halberstam argued that the Diem brothers were not fighting hard enough against the communists. I remember him telling a group at the Harvard Crimson at the time how the U.S. needed to replace the Diems in order for liberals to avoid a political backlash like that against the old China hands.

The idea that allies can cause you trouble is not totally without merit. The Cold War caused us to embrace some unsavory folks. Democratic administrations supported military takeovers in Brazil in 1964 and Greece in 1967, just as a Republican administration supported one in Chile in 1973.

But liberals tend to forget the first two examples and remain fixated on the third. They see history as moving inevitably and beneficially to the left and bemoan American alliances with what they see as retrograde right-wing regimes.

They want us to look more favorably on those like Chavez and Fidel Castro, who claim they are helping the poor. Somehow it is seen as progressive to cuddle up to those who attack America and to scorn those who have shown their friendship and common values over many years.

And so Obama, the object of so much adulation in Western Europe, seems to have had only the coolest of relations with its leaders. The candidate who spoke in Berlin is now the president with no sympathy for the leaders of peoples freed when the wall fell. They are seen as impediments to his goal of propitiating Vladimir Putin's Russia, where Joseph Stalin is now an honored hero.

Obama's concessions to Russia have not prevented Russia from watering down sanctions against Iran. And Obama's display of scorning Netanyahu has not gotten the Palestinians to sit down face-to-face with the Israelis, as Netanyahu has promised to do.

Obama proclaims that through persistence he can make the leaders of Iran, North Korea, Russia, China and the Palestinians see things our way. The evidence so far is that they are making him do things their way -- and that our friends are wondering whether it pays to be on America's side.

COPYRIGHT 2010 THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER****
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 30, 2010, 06:07:19 AM
For "Prgressivism" post here:  http://dogbrothers.com/phpBB2/index.php?topic=1518.0
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: ccp on March 31, 2010, 02:20:36 PM
Palin's show about overcoming adversity?  This is particularly painful to me.  I see the first guy on her list is Toby Keith. 
People who have read my music posts for ten years know that I claim this guy is a total liar and a thief.  Virtually all of every single one of his hits are composed of lyrics that were stolen from my legally blind wife.  I couldn't stop it, I couldn't prevent it.  The people doing the stealing are professionals whose craft has been honed for decades.  They will bribe anyone close to us, surveillance us, hack into any device, bribe people at Copyright, police officers, a friend of mine going back almost 40 years, my wife's uncle, her mother and everyone else who would like to make a fast buck.  There is no clear service man we can have come in more than once before he appears to have been approached and willing to screw us over.  I remember having a lock smith do some work for us.  In the kitchen he blurts out of nowhere while he was tinkering with a lock and day dreaming, "I could sure use ten thousand dollars". 

Toby Keith is the biggest farce of all.  Not only does he sing songs that were stolen, he claims he wrote all of them and then sits there and makes up these phoney stories about how he comes up with the lyrics.  And of course there is no shortage of hangers-ons whose jobs or cash payouts will keep them happy while they act as witnesses happy to back up his storey.
Rich guys have lots of friends.  I guarantee you this guy could not write a song to save his life.  Watch him *make up* stories and try to sound like just a humble all around good guy.  The truth is he is like most in the music business: total liars, selfish, bullshit artists, back stabbers and often narcissistic.  I don't think for one second any of these people give a hoot about their "fans".  It is all sales folks.  Troops included.  So his old man was in the service.  So was mine.  That doesn't mean his going to Iraq ain't about selling records.

Matt Lauer in an interview with Sheryl Crow asked her why she refused to give credit for a song (she claimed) to a guy who claimed he wrote it - even after he committed suicide.  She sat there *stoned* faced and finally when pressed by Lauer she said, "well he really didn't do that much".
Afterwards he said these people are "not nice" people in this business.  They are not the kind of people everyone thinks.

Imagine.  The guy killed himself over one song.  Can you imagine a thousand?  Most of the cowards robbing us would also have killed themselves if they went through what we have/are. 

Katherine sits in our house trying to protect what has not yet been stolen.  Our lives in shambles.  People who moved in to a number of houses to keep an eye on us.  And this God forsaken piece of f..  garbage Toby Keith is going to get up there and give some sort of story about his talents and hard work and all the rest.  I hope there is a God.  I hope there is justice.

Because there isn't any here on Earth. 

As for Sarah Palin I wish her luck with her show otherwise.  But can't she find a real hero to interview instead of this true white trash.   



****Here's a chapter in the culture wars that no one saw coming: Sarah Palin and Fox News facing off against '80s rap star and actor LL Cool J.

Palin makes her hosting debut Thursday night on Fox, as captain of an interview special in Greta Von Susteren's 10 p.m. slot. The show is called "Real American Stories," and the New York Daily News explains that it chronicles "people who have overcome adversity and more."

Among the success stories Palin plans to highlight are those of country music star Toby Keith, former GE Chairman Jack Welch, and a recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor. LL Cool J (birth name James Todd Smith) was also included in the roster — which prompted some conservative commenters to gloat a bit.

Watch the promo for the show here:

 

Popular conservative blogger Allahpundit tweaked liberals who accuse Tea Party supporters of racist sympathies, saying they'll be "shocked to find the alleged Grand Dragon of the tea-party movement making chitchat with a hip-hop legend."

The problem is that no such chitchat was produced for the Palin show. LL Cool J, star of "NCIS: Los Angeles," tweeted Tuesday night: "Fox lifted an old interview I gave in 2008 to someone else & are misrepresenting to the public in order to promote Sarah Palins Show. WOW."

When contacted by Yahoo! News for comment, a Fox News spokesperson explained that LL Cool J had been informed in 2008 that the interview was planned as a segment for "Real American Stories"--though of course the network couldn't have known at the time that Palin would be hosting. The Fox spokesperson also provided us with a statement:

"Real American Stories features uplifting tales about overcoming adversity and we believe Mr. Smith's interview fit that criteria. However, as it appears that Mr. Smith does not want to be associated with a program that could serve as an inspiration to others, we are cutting his interview from the special and wish him the best with his fledgling acting career."

Attempts to reach LL Cool J for comment proved unsuccessful. Perhaps he intends a more recent Twitter entry to serve as his rejoinder to the Fox statement: "Nobody can bring you peace but yourself."****

Title: The real American story
Post by: ccp on April 01, 2010, 08:59:53 AM
Well now Toby Keith's pulbicist is claiming they have no idea about the Palin thing and Palin used all old clips of him.

The song "Courtesy of the Red White and Blue" was stolen right off our laptop when we lived in Florida.

Katherine had 30 songs she wanted me to type into the laptop.  I got most of them in.  I clearly remember saying the line with the image of the statue of liberty shaking her fist was a great line (this was afte 911) and we need to be careful because it would easliy be used.  After I typed most of the songs onto the laptop all of a sudden they disappeared.  Someone, probably either one of our neighbors or John Joseph Leeson networked into our laptop and took all the folders with the lyrics off the computer.  I immediately told Katherine and we made the mistake of turning off the computer as fast as possible.  I should have immediately gone somewhere else and retyped it write back in and make copies. 

They would never have done the song. Keith would have never bought it and claim he wrote it, and he would never have been where he is today.
WE didn't know at the time they will never do any songs if we have evidence.  They are very careful that way.  We wondered the opposite at the time.  Fewer copies were better because if they get one copy they will do it and use the song.  It is just the opposite.  We just didn't know how to protect ourselves.  They had some sort of networking device outside our house.  Probably some sort of relay device.  The gardner who did the lawns of 3 out of 4 of the lawns around us was seen by me going over to that side of the house multiple times for no other reason.  He had no business walking in between our house and the one neighbor who didn't use him.  Additinally that neighhbor one day had a guy and some girl doing some sort of work on their porch and fence and yard area one day. I drove home and saw this ver straight stick in the very center of my driveway pointing paralell to our property.  It was obvious it was placed there as some sorto fo marker.  I pull into the driveway and this guy is pretending to do something with the swing on my neighbors porch.  I knew right away some sort of scam was on but I didn't know what.  Nothing happened after I got into the house.  But I then went out back and up to an efficiency we had over the garage and could not see that side of the house.

I heard Katherine ringing an alarm after she heard the girl telling the guy to "get it, get it", "hurry up".  Within a minute I came out and saw them pretending to paint areas on our neighbors fence.  I believe they were getting data of some sort of networking device.  Katherine was reduced to doing computer work in our main bedroom closet because we didn't know how to stop them from knowing and thus networking into the computer.   Yes we turned off the internet and networking access.  It would always pop back on or there was always some way of hacking in with it off.  It became clear it is impossible to stop someone from hacking into a laptop and probably now any computer that has networking or wireless capacity which all of them made today have.  I can tell of probably a hundred more scams about how we keep getting ripped off.  Like we were warned by one guy who admitted, "I am the most honest guy you will ever meet in the music business" and "there are 50 ways to steal songs and if someone want them they WILL get them".

This is the power of money in the world today.  There is no doubt to this truth.

That said I am sure the hardrive has since been switched, destroyed or wiped so there would be virtually no chance we have any evidence on Keith.  The thieves who rob us know this.  That is why Keith and friends can mock us.  We yelled and screamed in our house and over the years callled him white trash and as one can imigane worse.  Of course just to mock and anger us and rub it in our faces he titles one of his albums white trash - as though he is proud of it.  This guy Keith is not doing the stealing.  His friends are.  That is why fans can laugh when someone calls these guys on it.  They say Keith is nowhere near you , doesn't need you and is rich (now) that it is the accuser not him who is making this up. It is like the mafia boss who has his goons kill off someone and then claims he was in Barbados at the time of the murder and laughs all the way to the bank.

To think Palin was going to use him as a great American story.  To think he can now get free publicity out of this fiasco.

The true American story is he is a thief, a slob, and a pig behind the facade and yet he is a star, filthy rich, connected, and loved by fans who believe in and love his music and thus couldn't care less about the real guy behind the image.

Unfortunately, this is the *real* America.

And since the media including dupes like Hannity make money off these celebrities they are all on board in a big way.
Title: Noonan
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 09, 2010, 06:46:42 AM
Noonan has disappointed not infrequently in the last few years.  Here she begins to recapture form:

==============

By PEGGY NOOONAN
Like all Americans, I continue to seek to understand exactly what moods, facts, assumptions, dynamics, agendas and structures underlay and made possible the crash and the great recession.

We do this so that we will be able to bring our gained wisdom into the future and keep another crash from happening, should we ever have another bubble to precede it. We also do it so that we know who to hate.

That's why this week's Financial Industry Inquiry Commission hearings were so exciting, such a public service. The testimony of Charles Prince, former CEO of Citigroup, a too-big-to-fail bank that received $45 billion in bailouts and $300 billion in taxpayer guarantees, was riveting. You've seen it on the news, but if you were watching it live on C-Span, the stark power of his brutal candor was breathtaking. This, as you know, is what he said:

"Let's be real. This is what happened the past 10 years. You, for political reasons, both Republicans and Democrats, finagled the mortgage system so that people who make, like, zero dollars a year were given mortgages for $600,000 houses. You got to run around and crow about how under your watch everyone became a homeowner. You shook down the taxpayer and hoped for the best.

."Democrats did it because they thought it would make everyone Democrats: 'Look what I give you!' Republicans did it because they thought it would make everyone Republicans: 'I'm a homeowner, I've got a stake, don't raise my property taxes, get off my lawn!' And Wall Street? We went to town, baby. We bundled the mortgages and sold them to fools, or we held them, called them assets, and made believe everyone would pay their mortgage. As if we cared. We invented financial instruments so complicated no one, even the people who sold them, understood what they were.

"You're finaglers and we're finaglers. I play for dollars, you play for votes. In our own ways we're all thieves. We would be called desperadoes if we weren't so boring, so utterly banal in our soft-jawed, full-jowled selfishness. If there were any justice, we'd be forced to duel, with the peasants of America holding our cloaks. Only we'd both make sure we missed, wouldn't we?"

OK, Charles Prince didn't say that. Just wanted to get your blood going. Mr. Prince would never say something so dramatic and intemperate. I made it up. It wasn't on the news because it didn't happen.

It would be kind of a breath of fresh air though, wouldn't it?

In fact, the hearings weren't dramatic but a tepid affair, gentle and genteel. The commission members—economists, lawyers, former officeholders—actually made me miss congressmen, who can at least be relied on to emote and act out the indignation of the citizenry as they understand the citizenry. As an investigative style this isn't pretty and usually isn't even sincere, but it can jar witnesses into revealing, either deliberately or by accident, who they really are and what they really think.

At this week's hearings, the questioners often spoke the impenetrable financial language of the witnesses. The leveraged capital arbitrage of the lowest CDOs were subject to the supersenior subprime exposure, as opposed to the triple-A seniors, right? The witnesses—former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan on Wednesday, Mr. Prince and former Treasury secretary and Citigroup chairman Robert Rubin on Thursday—were, in their testimony, obviously anxious not to be the evening's soundbite. Nobody wants to be the face of a bailout. This is where famous and important people being grilled hide now: in boringness, in an opacity of language so thick that following them is actually impossible. The testimony reminded me of an observation in Michael Lewis's "The Big Short," his study of what happened on Wall Street and why:

"Language served a different purpose inside the bond market than it did in the outside world. Bond market terminology was designed less to convey meaning than to bewilder outsiders. . . . The floors of subprime mortgage bonds were not called floors—or anything else that might lead the bond buyer to form any sort of concrete image in his mind—but tranches. The bottom tranche—the risky ground floor—was not called the ground floor but the mezzanine . . . which made it sound less like a dangerous investment and more like a highly prized seat in a domed stadium." In short, "The subprime mortgage market had a special talent for obscuring what needed to be clarified."

Which is what the hearings were like.

By Thursday afternoon I couldn't figure out why they'd been held. They couldn't have been aimed at informing the citizenry. Even the tone was strange, marked by a kind of weird delicacy, a daintiness of approach, a courtesy so elaborate I thought at some points commission members were spoofing each other. "Thank you so much for appearing," "I'm so grateful for that insight." Guys, there's a war on.

I want to pick out some memorable moments, but I can't really quote them because they resist quotation.

So I'll translate.

On Wednesday, Mr. Greenspan said it's easy to look back and see your mistakes, but what is to be gained by endless self-examination? It's tempting to be self-critical, but self-criticism can become self-indulgence. Systems are complex; human decision-making is shaped by the endless fact of human fallibility. I didn't do anything wrong, and neither did Ayn Rand by the way, but next time you might try more regulation.

On Thursday Chairman Phil Angelides to Messrs. Prince and Rubin: I like you, do you like me? But we don't like undersecuritized trilevel tranches, do we?

More Peggy Noonan
Read Peggy Noonan's previous columns

click here to order her new book, Patriotic Grace
.At one point commissioner Bill Thomas, a Republican former congressman from California, almost got an intelligent question out. It started as: How did you guys get to the top and run the show and not know what was going on below you? But Mr. Thomas got stuck in the muck of synthetic product securitized assets and then lost his thread, to the extent he had a thread. He began to ask Mr. Prince about his famous dancing quote: "As long as the music is playing, you've got to get up and dance," Mr. Prince had said in 2007. But Mr. Thomas asked his question so meekly—it was an "alleged quote" and maybe it was misunderstood by the press, which is always misunderstanding things. Then Mr. Thomas suddenly wasn't asking that, but asking if it would be nice if in the future bankers "have a structure," a stronger federal regulatory structure, though we probably shouldn't have one if we don't need it, but maybe we do, to sort of stop people like you, not that people like you should be stopped in any way.

Mr. Prince seized on this to say the dancing quote was taken out of context: He'd been talking about liquidity. Ah. Well, that takes the sting out of that one.

From a commission member: The American people have experienced a 30% fall in housing values. Do you know why?

Mr. Prince: Yes, we haven't had such a decline "since the Great Depression." The reason is before the crash there was "a bubble." There was too much "easy money." Then the bubble popped.

Thank you, Sherlock.

The takeaway, as they say, of the whole event, was more or less this:

Citigroup testifiers: We didn't do anything particularly wrong, and what happened is all so sad, isn't it? Sad, subprimed and tranched.

Commission: Yes, all so sad and tragic. Somebody's head should roll. I like your tie.

Can't we do better than this?
Title: Clinton, ever the BS artist.
Post by: ccp on April 17, 2010, 07:41:03 AM
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20100416/D9F4EPUO0.html

Does anyone remember the vehement anti-government rhetoric of the "flower" children of Clinton's generation of the 60's?

How about Bama's friend Ayers who planned to bomb the Pentagon?  Why doesn't Clinton mention this in the same sentence as he mentions Tim McVey and the Tea Party.

How about the shooting of student protestors at Kent State that became the Alamo of the left back then; the same left who rionically are *in control* of government.

Now these same people who were so opposed to government back then are suddenly telling us how good government is for us.

Strange how they change their tune once they are in charge.  No?

I don't fear the right paramilitaries.  I fear another Kent state where our own leftist government starts shooting us, robbing us, threatening us, and controlling every aspect of our lives.
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Boyo on April 19, 2010, 11:31:03 AM
This is a good overview of progressivism from Reason.com

Progressive History 101 (Minus All that Uncomfortable Racism, Sexism, and Support for Eugenics)
Damon W. Root | April 19, 2010

Shortly after Barack Obama was elected president, I wrote an article criticizing many of his left-leaning supporters for labeling themselves as progressives, arguing that “what the current vogue for the term progressive fails to acknowledge is that the original progressives embraced the worst abuses of state power in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.”

In response, I received a number of angry emails stating that today’s progressives had nothing to do with the sins of the first progressives, and that to conflate the two was intellectually dishonest and just plain mean. Perhaps some of my correspondents will now direct their outrage to the left-wing Center for American Progress, which just released a new monograph entitled “The Progressive Intellectual Tradition in America.” This paper argues that today’s progressives are the direct inheritors of an unbroken progressive tradition, one that brought glorious benefits to all Americans by doing away with the evils of limited government. Here’s a sample paragraph:

Progressives sought above all to give real meaning to the promise of the Preamble of the U.S. Constitution—“We the people” working together to build a more perfect union, promote the general welfare, and expand prosperity to all citizens. Drawing on the American nationalist tradition of Alexander Hamilton and Abraham Lincoln, progressives posited that stronger government action was necessary to advance the common good, regulate business interests, promote national economic growth, protect workers and families displaced by modern capitalism, and promote true economic and social opportunity for all people.

As far as history lessons go, this is laughably biased and incomplete. For starters, the original progressives most certainly did not “promote true economic and social opportunity for all people.” In the Jim Crow South, as historian David Southern has documented, disfranchisement, segregation, race baiting, and lynching all "went hand-in-hand with the most advanced forms of southern progressivism." Economist John R. Commons, a leading progressive academic and close adviser to high-profile progressive politicians—including “Fighting” Bob Lafollette, Theodore Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson—authored a 1907 book entitled Races and Immigrants in America, where he called African Americans “indolent and fickle” and endorsed protectionist labor laws since "competition has no respect for the superior races."

There’s also the matter of sexism. Exhibit A is future Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis’ famous “Brandeis Brief,” submitted to the Supreme Court in the case of Muller v. Oregon (1908). At issue was a state law limiting the working hours of female laundry employees. In his brief, Brandeis collected a parade of statistics, arguments, and journalistic accounts, all “proving” that women required special protection from the state. In fact, Brandeis argued, since women were responsible for bearing future generations, their bodies were in some sense collective property. "The overwork of future mothers," he wrote, "directly attacks the welfare of the nation." The Supreme Court agreed, declaring that, "As healthy mothers are essential to vigorous offspring, the physical well-being of woman becomes an object of public interest and care in order to preserve the strength and vigor of the race." Feminist legal scholars have long criticized Brandeis for introducing that bit of sexist paternalism into the law, though you wouldn’t learn anything about it by reading this monograph.

Finally, “The Progressive Intellectual Tradition in America” is totally silent about the progressives’ widespread support for the theory and practice of eugenics. As Princeton University economist Tim Leonard has chronicled, "eugenic thought deeply influenced the Progressive Era transformation of the state's relationship to the American economy." Despite the fact that this monograph favorably cites progressive hero Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes for his famous dissent in the economic liberty case Lochner v. New York (1905), the authors make no mention of Holmes’ notorious majority decision in Buck v. Bell, where Holmes and his colleagues (including Louis Brandeis) upheld the forced sterilization of those who “sap the strength of the State.”

In sum, the Center for American Progress has produced a fairy tale version of history, one that highlights what the authors see as the accomplishments of progressivism while totally ignoring anything that might detract from their lopsided narrative. Anyone interested in actually learning about the origins and history of the progressive movement should look elsewhere.

Boyo
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Boyo on April 19, 2010, 11:42:03 AM
Putting this here because it fits with my previous post :




[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHq2F_QA6cc[/youtube]
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: Boyo on April 22, 2010, 12:26:03 PM
Here is something I found. Wasn't sure where to put it.


[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zeMZGGQ0ERk[/youtube]
Title: Plunder or Enterprise
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 29, 2010, 06:33:17 PM
Plunder or Enterprise: The World's Choice
by Thomas E. Woods, Jr.
by Thomas E. Woods, Jr.

 
Although supporters of the market economy often have good reason for pessimism, it is important, especially in this age of globalization, not to lose sight of the genuine victories that the classical liberal tradition can boast. Half a century ago, Gunnar Myrdal could declare: "The special advisers to underdeveloped countries who have taken the time and trouble to acquaint themselves with the problem, no matter who they are …all recommend central planning as the first condition of progress." At that time, development economists who dissented from this consensus could have fit inside a phone booth. Today, economists who still favor central planning for the less-developed countries may as well hold their convention in a phone booth.

Public protests against globalization – protests that occur by and large in the prosperous West – denounce free trade and the mobility of capital as instruments of exploitation and oppression. The great development economist Peter Bauer used to say that if that were the case, then we should find the greatest prosperity among those less-developed countries that have the fewest economic connections to the West, and that those places that are altogether isolated – and therefore suffer from none of this alleged exploitation at all – should be paradise on earth. Needless to say, that is not even close to what we find, and most serious observers know it.

Today practically everyone agrees that some kind of market economy is essential if the less-developed countries are to progress to developed status. There are differences of opinion, to be sure, and the so-called "new development economics" of the past decade holds far more peril than promise. But that the terms of the debate have shifted there can be little doubt.

As globalization has proceeded, the subject of the market economy has attracted more and more attention, with friend and foe alike seeking to understand the implications of the creation of a truly global marketplace. One of the market's virtues, and the reason it enables so much peaceful interaction and cooperation among such a great variety of peoples, is that it demands of its participants only that they observe a relatively few basic principles, among them honesty, the sanctity of contracts, and respect for private property.

 
This is not to say that the philosophical principles the market embodies come naturally to every cultural milieu. Peter Bauer always insisted that a people's religious, philosophical, and cultural values could have important consequences for their economic success or failure. A people who believe in fatalism or collectivism, rather than in personal responsibility, will be less likely to undertake the risks associated with capitalist entrepreneurship, for example.

Or consider the example of tenth-century China. Rodney Stark points out that a substantial iron industry was beginning to flourish there at that time, producing an estimated thirty-five thousand tons of iron per year – a figure that ultimately grew to a hundred thousand. This abundance of iron translated into better agricultural tools, which in turn meant increased food production. Great wealth was being created, and China's economic prospects seemed excellent.

 
The imperial court, on the other hand, decided that all this accumulation of wealth by mere commoners amounted to an intolerable departure from pure Confucian principle, which imagined great wealth in the hands only of society's elite, and demanded that commoners be satisfied with their lot. The government simply seized the entire industry, and this wonderful example of innovation and wealth creation was crushed. Here is an example of cultural values that were incompatible with a market economy.[1]

But I want to go even further, and suggest that morality and the market are mutually reinforcing. It isn't merely that the market requires certain moral attributes in order to function properly. The market itself encourages moral behavior.

It takes little imagination to surmise how critics of the market would respond to such a claim. Doesn't the market encourage greed, rivalry, and discord? Does it not urge people to think only of themselves, accumulating wealth with no thought to any other concern?

The Communist Counter-Example

 
That human beings seek their own well-being and that of those close to them is not an especially provocative discovery. What is important is that this universal aspect of human nature persists no matter what economic system is in place; it merely expresses itself in different forms. For all their saccharine rhetoric, for example, communist apparatchiks were not known for their disinterested commitment to the common good. They, too, sought to improve their own well-being – except they lived in a system in which all such improvements came at the expense of their fellow human beings, rather than, as in a market economy, as a reward for serving them.

Communism brought out the worst in human nature, and crippled people's ability or ambition to participate in a market economy. "Traveling around the country," wrote American reporter Hedrick Smith in 1990, "I came to see the great mass of Soviets as protagonists in what I call the culture of envy. In this culture, corrosive animosity took root under the czars in the deep-seated collectivism in Russian life and then was cultivated by Leninist ideology. Now it has turned rancid under the misery of everyday living."[2]

The Soviet ruling class, with their cushy cars, clinics, and country homes, are a natural enough target for the wrath of the little people. But what is ominous for Gorbachev's reforms is that this free-floating anger, the jealousy of the rank and file, often lights on anyone who rises above the crowd – anyone who works harder, gets ahead, and becomes better off, even if his gains are honestly earned. This hostility is a serious danger to the new entrepreneurs whom Gorbachev is trying to nurture. It is a deterrent to even modest initiative among ordinary people in factories or on farms. It freezes the vast majority into the immobility of conforming to the group.

Under the system of tyranny and deprivation that the Russian people were forced to endure for seven decades, illicit "profiteering" – "think of the worker stealing wheelbarrows and multiply him by a million," one writer says – made it possible for countless Russians to acquire the goods they needed. We might therefore expect the profiteer to emerge as at least vaguely heroic, but the actual effect seems to have been to poison the idea of profit in the minds of many Russians, since they came to assume that anyone making a profit must be engaged in behavior that was somehow illicit or underhanded.

 
The countless stories in the Soviet press, as late in the socialist experiment as the 1980s, about vandalism and attacks on small shops by those who resented the success of their fellow man "bear witness to the powerful influence of decades of Leninist indoctrination," Hedrick Smith explained. "For great masses of Soviet people, capitalism is still a dirty word, and the fact that someone earns more, gets more, is a violation of the egalitarian ideal of socialism. Tens of millions of Soviets deeply mistrust the market, fearing they will be cheated and outsmarted. They see the profit motive as immoral."

The Supreme Soviet's Anatoly Sobchak once remarked, "Our people cannot endure seeing someone else earn more than they do…. They are so jealous of other people that they want others to be worse off, if need be, to keep things equal." Sobchak described this attitude as one of the chief obstacles to economic reform. Television personality Dmitri Zakharov put it this way: "In the West, if an American sees someone on TV with a shiny new car, he will think, 'Oh, maybe I can get that someday for myself.' But if a Russian sees that, he will think, 'This bastard with his car. I would like to kill him for living better than I do.'" That is what Marxism-Leninism did to these people.

Overlooked Perils of Interventionism

 
That system, the polar opposite of the free market, encouraged greed in the ruling class and apathy, envy, and alienation among everyone else. Scarcely anyone defends it any longer. At the same time, we are urged not to let the socialist debacle sour us on the state itself, which we are told is an indispensable instrument in the pursuit of "social justice." But the less predatory state that such critics have in mind carries its own moral and cultural perils, only a few of which we can consider here.

Economists speak of the disutility of labor. Albert Jay Nock referred to the human inclination to seek after wealth with the least possible exertion. In a formulation familiar to libertarians, Franz Oppenheimer described two ways of acquiring wealth: the economic means and the political means. The economic means involves the production of a good or service that is then sold to willing buyers seeking to improve their own well-being. Both parties benefit. The political means, on the other hand, involves the use of force to enrich one party or group at the expense of another – either to acquire someone else's wealth directly or to give oneself an unfair advantage over his competitors through the use or threat of coercion. That is a much easier way of enriching oneself; and since people tend to prefer an easier over a more difficult path to wealth, a society that hopes to foster both justice and prosperity needs to discourage wealth acquisition via the political means and encourage it through the economic means.

But the state, wrote Oppenheimer, was the organization of the political means of wealth acquisition. It was through this channel that people could find paths to their own economic well-being that involved the use of force – carried out on their behalf by the state – rather than their own honest work. For that reason, the baser aspects of human nature can find in the state an irresistible attraction. It is easier to become dependent on welfare than to work; it is easier to accept farm subsidies and thereby to increase food prices than it is to compete honorably and freely; and it is easier to file an antitrust complaint against a competitor than to outcompete him honestly in the marketplace. By making these and countless other predatory options possible, the state fosters unattractive moral attributes and appeals to the worst features of human nature.

 
In short order, society degenerates into a condition of low-intensity civil war, with each pressure group anxious to secure legislation aimed at enriching itself at the expense of the rest of society. The Hobbesian war of all against all that allegedly characterizes life under the pre-political state of nature creeps into political life itself, as even those who were initially reluctant to seek political favors pursue them with vigor, if only to break even (that is, vis-à-vis groups who are less scrupulous about using the state to secure their ends). All of this looting under cover of law is what Frédéric Bastiat memorably called "legal plunder."

The same phenomena are observable around the world, when misguided development aid programs have strengthened the interventionist state in less-developed nations. Ben Powell makes the important point, echoing Peter Bauer, that the fashionable proposals we hear about nowadays that seek to direct foreign aid to responsible, relatively non-predatory regimes miss the point: these aid programs are inherently bad, no matter how selectively the funds are allocated. Not only do they tend to enlarge the public sector of the recipient country, but competition for a share of the grant money also diverts private resources away from the satisfaction of genuine wants and into the wasteful, anti-social expenditure of time and resources for the purpose of winning government favors.

Some Virtues of the Market

If the state is the organization of the political means of wealth acquisition, then the market is the embodiment of the economic means. The market all but compels people to be other-regarding, but not by means of intimidation, threats, and propaganda, as in socialist and statist systems. It employs the perfectly normal, morally acceptable desire to improve one's material conditions and station in life, both of which can grow under capitalism only by directing one's efforts to the production of a good or service that improves the well-being of his fellow man. This is why the title of Frédéric Bastiat's book Economic Harmonies is such a beautiful encapsulation of the classical liberal message. (The American Anti-Imperialist League's George McNeill made essentially the same observation, if perhaps more vividly, in the late 1890s: "Wealth is not so rapidly gained by killing Filipinos as by making shoes.")

John Rawls famously argued in A Theory of Justice that we could judge a society on the basis of the material condition of the least well-off. The market wins according to that moral criterion as well. Capital University's Robert Lawson has shown that all around the world, the poor are consistently better off in the least interventionist, most market-oriented societies. America's poor are better off than much of the European middle class today, and better off than the American middle class of the 1950s.

This happy outcome follows from the very nature of capitalism. When businesses invest in capital equipment to render the production process more efficient, they make it possible to produce more goods at a lower unit cost. Competition then passes these cost cuts on to the consumer in the form of lower prices (a phenomenon not always so visible in an inflationary economy, but at work all the same). This greater abundance increases the purchasing power of all real incomes, and thereby redounds to the benefit of everyone.
Title: Plunder -2
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 29, 2010, 06:34:09 PM
The Enron Objection

 
Needless to say, the market possesses a great many virtues in addition to these. But what we might call the Enron objection will at this point be raised: doesn't that fiasco reflect a serious moral problem at the heart of capitalism? Enron, it is said, was the free market in action, and Ken Lay an apostle of laissez faire. In fact, neither claim is true. Time constraints limit me to recommending the Enron chapter in Tim Carney's important book The Big Ripoff: How Big Business and Big Government Steal Your Money (2006). To make a long story short, Enron was on the receiving end of countless waves of government subsidies. It also manipulated the bizarre regulatory thicket that was the California energy market in grotesquely anti-social ways that enriched Enron at the expense, quite literally, of everyone else. The Cato Institute's Jerry Taylor correctly described Enron on balance as "an enemy, not an ally of free markets. Enron was more interested in rigging the marketplace with rules and regulations to advantage itself at the expense of competitors and consumers than in making money the old-fashioned way – by earning it honestly from their customers through voluntary trade."

Enron was in fact punished by the market for its behavior, while the American government, awash in Ponzi schemes, accounting irregularities, and unfunded liabilities it can't possibly cover, goes about its business in peace. "Far from an example of a market failure," argues Jacksonville State University's Christopher Westley, "Enron's saga shows that firms which invest too much in politics can easily become complacent in the face of changing market conditions…. If there's a scandal to be found in the Enron debacle, it is this: Enron's faith that its political investments would eventually solve its problems caused it to avoid making necessary changes in its organization until it was too late. Anyone who checks Enron's stock price, now listed on one of the penny stock exchanges, knows that the market has penalized this strategy." Amazon.com and Kmart, on the other hand, were up front with their investors about their financial difficulties, and ended up doing much better – by and large, their investors, no doubt impressed by these firms' honesty and transparency, stuck by them.

The nature of the attacks on capitalism frequently changes: one day it's the corruption of businessmen, as with Enron, the next it's environmental degradation (which is typically the fault of poorly developed property rights and arbitrary regulatory regimes rather than of capitalism itself). Sometimes capitalism will be criticized for one alleged failing one day and exactly the opposite failing the next. Thus socialists once claimed that capitalism was less efficient than socialism, and could not produce in nearly the same abundance. Now that that argument has been silenced, we have begun to hear exactly the opposite claim: capitalism brings about too much wealth, and makes people materialistic and fat. As Joseph Schumpeter put it, "Capitalism stands its trial before judges who have the sentence of death in their pockets. They are going to pass it, whatever the defense they may hear; the only success a victorious defense can possibly produce is a change in the indictment." For a system that has brought about such astonishing and unprecedented advances in the well-being of the great mass of mankind, it is surprisingly vulnerable to attack.

 
Capitalism and Public Opinion

Murray Rothbard was fond of citing the arguments of Étienne de La Boétie (as well as those of such later figures as David Hume and Ludwig von Mises) to the effect that governments survive or perish on the basis of public opinion. Since those who rule are of necessity vastly outnumbered by those who are ruled, it is curious that any regime – much less the truly oppressive – should get away with it for so long. The only way they can do so, according to these men, is through the voluntary consent of the public. That consent need not take the form of wild enthusiasm, which is rarely forthcoming for any regime; passive resignation is quite enough.

If a critical mass of the population withdraws that consent, on the other hand, regimes collapse. The fall of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe was a textbook example of exactly what La Boétie meant: when next to no one obeys commands any longer, how can the ruling elite hold on to power?

 
It is not only political regimes but also economic systems that must pass a public opinion test if they are to endure. And here we encounter an essential cultural attribute for the maintenance of a free economy: a critical mass of the population must consider market exchange, and the institutional supports that make it possible, to be fundamentally just.

And yet from our major institutions here in the United States we hear something like the opposite. Schoolchildren are given the impression that the private sector is the source of all wickedness and oppression, from which public-spirited government officials, in their selfless commitment to justice, must rescue and protect us. The selection of subject matter itself exhibits a pro-state bias: students leave school knowing all about how a bill becomes a law, for example, but with no idea of how markets work.

All of this applies just as strongly to popular culture and the media, with of course a few noble exceptions like John Stossel. That is why I am surprised not by how much of the market economy has been suppressed in the United States, but by how much has managed to survive in the face of a hostile educational and cultural establishment. Europe's opinion molders, as Olaf Gersemann observes in his book Cowboy Capitalism, are utterly contemptuous of American capitalism, a phenomenon they do not understand, and it is not surprising that in such an intellectual milieu those countries find themselves burdened with even more statism than we do.

The Culture of Enterprise: Concluding Thoughts

We are being much too ambitious if we think even the best economic institutions can transform human beings from flawed creatures into saints. The correction of human failings is the business of families, churches, and voluntary organizations of all kinds. The twentieth century served, among other things, as an extended lesson in both the danger and the folly of state-led efforts to transform human nature. We can be more than satisfied if our economic system is content to take human beings as they are, direct their energies into productive rather than anti-social outlets, and reward them for satisfying the needs of their fellow men.

 
Thomas Jefferson once observed that the mass of mankind was not "born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them." That is what the free economy is all about: anyone is free to serve the public in the manner he thinks best, and no one, not even those who have been most successful in the past, can claim exemption from the daily referenda that take place whenever the public decides to buy or to abstain from buying what he has to sell.

To my ear, the term "culture of enterprise" suggests a society that possesses a conscious appreciation of the distinct virtues of the market economy, some of which I have described here, and why it is morally and materially superior to statist alternatives, as I have also described here. In other words, the points I have made in my remarks today are the kind of arguments that should resonate with and constitute important pillars for a culture of enterprise. Instead of being held up for condemnation and abuse, entrepreneurs in such a society would be respected and honored for the risks they assume with their own property in order to bring improvement to people's lives, from the latest technological innovation to the most mundane of necessities. For a true culture of enterprise to last, people must see in the unhampered market economy not merely the least intolerable system but a positive good, in which living standards consistently rise, human creativity is given free rein, and human interaction proceeds on the civilized basis of respect for others' person and property.

The decades following World War II taught anyone who was paying attention how not to encourage prosperity or escape from less-developed status: demonize producers and the successful, nationalize industry, harass foreign investors, make property insecure, institute "import substitution" policies, and suffocate entrepreneurship through regulation. Development aid programs, meanwhile, either expressly endorsed these policies (as in the case of import substitution) or enabled them to continue by masking the true effects of such disastrous measures or propping up the regimes that implemented them. If the less-developed countries are to enjoy the prosperity of such success stories as Hong Kong and South Korea, or enjoy the growth rates being observed today in Ireland and even China, they must abandon the destructive and wicked policies of the past, discard the culture of envy their leaders have fostered, and embrace the principles of freedom that have allowed more people than ever before in history to enjoy the material conditions of civilized life.

 
And at a time when our countrymen are being courted by all manner of interventionist politicians – with one noble exception, I hasten to add – peddling all kinds of grandiose schemes for human betterment, Americans themselves could stand to be reminded of the values that inform a culture of enterprise. There was something disturbing, and yet revealing, in the title of MSNBC's election coverage segment last year – Battleground: America. Every two years, but especially every four, the country becomes in effect a battleground between opposing forces, in which the winner acquires the power to take the country to war unilaterally, to impose a uniform social policy on 280 million Americans, and to implement all manner of policies on his own authority, by means of executive orders and signing statements. Americans typically take for granted that this is normal, and indeed how life must be.

But in fact we don't need Hillary Clinton or John Edwards, Rudy Giuliani or John McCain, to "run the country" (to use an infelicitous if unfortunately common phrase) or to make us prosperous. A free and responsible people can manage its affairs without the platitudes and paternal custodianship of a Great Leader, and exhibits no superstitious reverence toward the occupants of political office. Once a society begins to absorb this revolutionary discovery, it has already embraced the culture of enterprise.

Notes

[1] Rodney Stark, The Victory of Reason (New York: Random House, 2005), 71–72.

[2] This discussion of envy in Russia relies on Hedrick Smith, The New Russians (New York: Random House, 1990), 199–205.

Reprinted from Mises.org.

April 28, 2010

Thomas E. Woods, Jr. (visit his website; follow him on Facebook; send him mail), holds a bachelor’s degree in history from Harvard and his master’s, M.Phil., and Ph.D. from Columbia University. His nine books include the critically acclaimed study The Church Confronts Modernity (Columbia University Press, 2004) and two New York Times bestsellers: Meltdown and The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History. His new book, Nullification, will be released on June 29.
Title: Plunder or Enterprise is a great read!
Post by: Freki on April 30, 2010, 05:51:39 AM
Crafty that was a home run!  Thanks for posting it!
Title: The Power to tax and , , , to revolt
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 05, 2010, 04:41:07 AM
The Power to Tax ... and Revolt
"An unlimited power to tax involves, necessarily, a power to destroy; because there is a limit beyond which no institution and no property can bear taxation." --John Marshall
On December 16th, 1773, "radicals" from Boston, members of a secret organization of American Patriots called the Sons of Liberty, boarded three East India Company ships and threw into Boston Harbor 342 chests of tea.

This iconic event, in protest of oppressive British taxation and tyrannical rule, became known as the Boston Tea Party.

Resistance to the Crown had been mounting over enforcement of the 1764 Sugar Act, 1765 Stamp Act and 1767 Townshend Act, which led to the Boston Massacre and gave rise to the slogan, "No taxation without representation."

The 1773 Tea Act and resulting Tea Party protest galvanized the Colonial movement opposing British parliamentary acts, which violated the natural, charter and constitutional rights of the colonists.

In response to the rebellion, the British enacted additional punitive measures, labeled the "Intolerable Acts," in hopes of suppressing the burgeoning insurrection. Far from accomplishing their desired outcome, however, the Crown's countermeasures led colonists to convene the First Continental Congress on September 5th, 1774, in Philadelphia.

Near midnight on April 18th, 1775, Paul Revere departed Charlestown (near Boston) for Lexington and Concord in order to warn John Hancock, Samuel Adams and other Sons of Liberty that the British army was marching to arrest them and seize their weapons caches. While Revere was captured after reaching Lexington, his friend, Samuel Prescott, was able to evade the Red Coats and took word to the militiamen at Concord.

In the early dawn of that first Patriots' Day, April 19th, Captain John Parker, commander of the Lexington militia, ordered, "Don't fire unless fired upon, but if they want a war let it begin here." That it did -- American Minutemen fired the "shot heard round the world," as immortalized by poet Ralph Waldo Emerson, confronting British Regulars on Lexington Green and at Concord's Old North Bridge.

Thus, by the time the Second Continental Congress convened on May 10th, 1775, the young nation was in open war for liberty and independence, which would not be won until a full decade later. (Read more here.)

Today, the tax burden borne by most Americans, even those who pay no direct federal taxes but at the least pay a great hidden cost in federal regulation, is far greater than that which incited our Founders to revolution.

Thus, some 221 years after the ratification of our Constitution, Americans are once again at a crossroads with oppressive centralized government -- a point at which we must choose to turn up toward liberty or down toward tyranny and anarchy.

Those at the helm of the federal government, by way of generations of overreaching executive orders, legislative malfeasance and judicial diktat, have abandoned their sacred oaths to "support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic," and to "bear true faith and allegiance to the same."

Although our Constitution provides the People with an authentic means for amendment as prescribed in Article V, successive generations of leftists have, by way of legislation, regulation and activist courts, altered that august founding convention well beyond any semblance of its original intent.

Consequently, they have undermined constitutional Rule of Law, supplanting it with the rule of men.

They have done so in order to win the allegiance of special interest constituencies, which then ensure perpetual re-election of their sponsors in return for political and economic agendas structured on Marxist-Leninist-Maoist collectivism.

How have leftist politicians succeeded in this assault?

They accomplished this through direct taxation on an ever-smaller number of Americans for the benefit of an ever-larger number of Americans -- "progressive taxation" and "social justice" as the Left so self-righteously calls it.

So, shouldn't those who have more give to those who have less?

Well, yes, in my humble opinion, but individuals should rightly be left to decide how best to use their resources for the benefit of others. And in this respect, Americans are the most generous people on earth and from any time of human history.

However, Barack Hussein Obama, an ideological Marxist, believes that government should be the ultimate arbiter for the redistribution of wealth. Indeed, he said as much on the campaign trail in 2008.

Obama claims our economy is "out of balance," and our tax policies "badly skewed."

To resolve this, he says we need a "tax policy making sure that everybody benefits, fair distribution, a restoration of balance in our tax code, money allocated fairly..."

"Fair distribution"?

By this, of course, he means "redistribution."

It's not enough that 20 percent of Americans are already forced to fund 80 percent of the cost of bloated government largess; if Obama can saddle them with 100 percent of this cost, then he could anoint himself king.

Never mind that progressive taxation constitutes, in effect, a "Bill of Attainder" as outlawed by Article I, Section 9, of our Constitution. Who in Washington these days pays that venerable old parchment any mind?

As devoted socialist George Bernard Shaw acknowledged, "A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul," which is the template for a bloodless socialist revolution.

Further, Obama asserts that free enterprise is nothing more than "Social Darwinism, every man or woman for him or herself ... [a] tempting idea, because it doesn't require much thought or ingenuity."

Free enterprise "doesn't require much thought or ingenuity"?

Only in the distorted worldview of a "community organizer" and lifelong adherent of Marxist doctrine could such an absurd assertion originate.

The current debacle of progressive taxation is the result of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's class-warfare decree: "Here is my principle: Taxes shall be levied according to ability to pay. That is the only American principle."

We beg to differ. Roosevelt's "principle" was no more American than Obama's. Roosevelt was merely paraphrasing Karl Marx, whose maxim declared, "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs."

At the time Marx was formulating his collectivist manifesto, classical liberal Claude Frederic Bastiat, a prominent 19th-century political economist, wrote, "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else. ... Sometimes the law defends plunder and participates in it. Thus the beneficiaries are spared the shame and danger that their acts would otherwise involve. But how is this legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply. See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them and gives it to the other persons to whom it doesn't belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another... Then abolish that law without delay; No legal plunder; this is the principle of justice, peace, order, stability, harmony and logic."

Now, according to Heritage Foundation's Index of Dependence on Government, "Despite the famed 1996 Welfare Reform Act and the more recent welfare adjustments in 2006, 60.8 million Americans remain dependent on the government for their daily housing, food, and health care. Starting in 2016, Social Security will not collect enough in taxes to pay all of the promised benefits -- which is a problem for all workers, but especially for the roughly half of the American workforce that has no other retirement program. Add in spiraling academic grants, flat-out farm socialism, and the swelling ranks of Americans who believe themselves entitled to public-sector benefits for which they pay few or no taxes -- and Americans must ask themselves whether they are near a tipping point in the nature of their government." (Also see How the Tax Code is Expanding Government.)

Perversely, almost half of all American workers pay no income tax per the current tax code scheme, though under the Obama plot many now qualify for a tax refund.

Once a majority of Americans can be "protected" from a tax burden, they will ignore the constitutional, moral and civic implications of "progressive taxation."

The fact is that the only way to ensure fiscal accountability at the federal level is to directly spread the cost of government to a much broader number of taxpayers so all Americans "feel the pain." Of course, the Left understands that in order to escape any fiscal accountability, they need only ensure that the cost of government is borne by a targeted minority of income earners.

Obama is now poised to propose the implementation of a supplemental value-added tax, a national sales tax. Though this would seemingly spread the cost of government to all Americans (precisely what liberals want to avoid), Obama's VAT coupled with the myriad proposed exempt products and "rebates" to the "poor," would most assuredly be yet another avenue for the central government to use the tax code to bludgeon a minority of consumers in order to expand its authority and constituencies.

Vladimir Lenin asserted, "The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation."

And that is precisely Obama's political model.

But the problem with the socialist model is, as former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher aptly noted, "they always run out of other people's money."

If I could emphasize but one point, it would be this: The Left has bankrupted the nation and the bill for freeloading on others is coming due. It will most certainly be paid back in the currency of liberty.

The time is at hand when we must inquire with a unified voice: "If there is no constitutional authority for most laws and regulations enacted by Congress and enforced by the central government, then by what authority do those entities lay and collect taxes to fund such laws and regulations?" (See the Patriot Declaration.)
Title: Re: Political Rants
Post by: DougMacG on May 05, 2010, 10:35:14 AM
Pres. Bush paid a political price over Katrina because big government is lousy at delivering goods and services.  Obama may or may not pay a political price over the abysmal federal response in the gulf - failure to even execute its own emergency response plan.  In the mortgage crisis, the oversight committee actually made things worse instead of preventing or alleviating the crisis.  The SEC administrators it turns out were addicted to porn and happy to have free internet at work.  Most of what is wrong with healthcare originates from government's already heavy involvement in it.  Every government subsidy to make higher education affordable drives up the cost of higher education.  Government measures poverty by not counting any of the subsidies we already pay to alleviate poverty and measure homelessness by not counting the money we spend to house the homeless.

This week in the housing business I dug out a green area to replace it with pavement to comply with City of Minneapolis inspection orders that have the power to fine, assess and take my property if I don't comply while other departments of the City Government meet with their highly paid staffs in their prime real estate downtown offices to figure out where we can put in more green area in place of pavement.

Beware when politicians of any and all stripes tell you that we need to 'do something' or that 'we can do more'.  Maybe we should consider doing less.
Title: PM Margaret Thatcher
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 09, 2010, 03:16:13 PM


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okHGCz6xxiw&feature=related
Title: Doomsayers Beware
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 18, 2010, 06:06:55 AM
Doomsayers Beware, a Bright Future Beckons
By JOHN TIERNEY
Published: May 17, 2010
 
Long before “sustainable” became a buzzword, intellectuals wondered how long industrial society could survive. In “The Idea of Decline in Western History,” after surveying predictions from the mid-19th century until today, the historian Arthur Herman identifies two consistently dominant schools of thought.


The first school despairs because it foresees inevitable ruin. The second school is hopeful — but only because these intellectuals foresee ruin, too, and can hardly wait for the decadent modern world to be replaced by one more to their liking. Every now and then, someone comes along to note that society has failed to collapse and might go on prospering, but the notion is promptly dismissed in academia as happy talk from a simpleton. Predicting that the world will not end is also pretty good insurance against a prolonged stay on the best-seller list. Have you read Julian Simon’s “The State of Humanity”? Indur Goklany’s “The Improving State of the World”? Gregg Easterbrook’s “Sonic Boom”?

Good books all, and so is the newest addition to this slender canon, “The Rational Optimist,” by Matt Ridley. It does much more than debunk the doomsaying. Dr. Ridley provides a grand unified theory of history from the Stone Age to the better age awaiting us in 2100.

It’s an audacious task, but he has the intellectual breadth for it. A trained zoologist and former editor at The Economist, Dr. Ridley has established himself in previous books, like “The Origins of Virtue” and “Genome,” as the supreme synthesist of lessons from anthropology, psychology, molecular genetics, economics and game theory. This time he takes on all of human history, starting with our mysteriously successful debut. What made Homo sapiens so special? Dr. Ridley argues that it wasn’t our big brain, because Neanderthals had a big brain, too. Nor was it our willingness to help one another, because apes and other social animals also had an instinct for reciprocity.

“At some point,” Dr. Ridley writes, “after millions of years of indulging in reciprocal back-scratching of gradually increasing intensity, one species, and one alone, stumbled upon an entirely different trick. Adam gave Oz an object in exchange for a different object.”

The evidence for this trick is in perforated seashells from more than 80,000 years ago that ended up far from the nearest coast, an indication that inlanders were bartering to get ornamental seashells from coastal dwellers. Unlike the contemporary Neanderthals, who apparently relied just on local resources, those modern humans could shop for imports.

“The extraordinary promise of this event was that Adam potentially now had access to objects he did not know how to make or find; and so did Oz,” Dr. Ridley writes. People traded goods, services and, most important, knowledge, creating a collective intelligence: “Ten individuals could know between them ten things, while each understanding one.”

As they specialized and exchanged, humans learned how to domesticate crops and animals and sell food to passing merchants. Traders congregated in the first cities and built ships that spread goods and ideas around the world.

The Phoenician merchants who sailed the Mediterranean were denounced by Hebrew prophets like Isaiah and Greek intellectuals like Homer. But trading networks enabled the ancient Greeks to develop their alphabet, mathematics and science, and later fostered innovation in the trading hubs of the Roman Empire, India, China, Arabia, Renaissance Italy and other European capitals.

Rulers like to take credit for the advances during their reigns, and scientists like to see their theories as the source of technological progress. But Dr. Ridley argues that they’ve both got it backward: traders’ wealth builds empires, and entrepreneurial tinkerers are more likely to inspire scientists than vice versa. From Stone Age seashells to the steam engine to the personal computer, innovation has mostly been a bottom-up process.

“Forget wars, religions, famines and poems for the moment,” Dr. Ridley writes. “This is history’s greatest theme: the metastasis of exchange, specialization and the invention it has called forth, the ‘creation’ of time.”

You can appreciate the timesaving benefits through a measure devised by the economist William D. Nordhaus: how long it takes the average worker to pay for an hour of reading light. In ancient Babylon, it took more than 50 hours to pay for that light from a sesame-oil lamp. In 1800, it took more than six hours of work to pay for it from a tallow candle. Today, thanks to the countless specialists producing electricity and compact fluorescent bulbs, it takes less than a second. That technological progress, though, was sporadic. Innovation would flourish in one trading hub for a while but then stagnate, sometimes because of external predators — roving pirates, invading barbarians — but more often because of internal parasites, as Dr. Ridley writes:

“Empires bought stability at the price of creating a parasitic court; monotheistic religions bought social cohesion at the expense of a parasitic priestly class; nationalism bought power at the expense of a parasitic military; socialism bought equality at the price of a parasitic bureaucracy; capitalism bought efficiency at the price of parasitic financiers.”

Progress this century could be impeded by politics, wars, plagues or climate change, but Dr. Ridley argues that, as usual, the “apocaholics” are overstating the risks and underestimating innovative responses.

“The modern world is a history of ideas meeting, mixing, mating and mutating,” Dr. Ridley writes. “And the reason that economic growth has accelerated so in the past two centuries is down to the fact that ideas have been mixing more than ever before.”

Our progress is unsustainable, he argues, only if we stifle innovation and trade, the way China and other empires did in the past. Is that possible? Well, European countries are already banning technologies based on the precautionary principle requiring advance proof that they’re risk-free. Americans are turning more protectionist and advocating byzantine restrictions like carbon tariffs. Globalization is denounced by affluent Westerners preaching a return to self-sufficiency.

But with new hubs of innovation emerging elsewhere, and with ideas spreading faster than ever on the Internet, Dr. Ridley expects bottom-up innovators to prevail. His prediction for the rest of the century: “Prosperity spreads, technology progresses, poverty declines, disease retreats, fecundity falls, happiness increases, violence atrophies, freedom grows, knowledge flourishes, the environment improves and wilderness expands.”

If you’re not ready to trust an optimist, if you still fear a reckoning is at hand, you might consider the words of Thomas B. Macaulay, a British poet, historian and politician who criticized doomsayers of the mid-1800s.

“We cannot absolutely prove,” he wrote, “that those are in error who tell us that society has reached a turning point, that we have seen our best days. But so said all who came before us, and with just as much apparent reason.”
Title: Political Rant
Post by: DougMacG on May 18, 2010, 10:03:06 AM
Short rant regarding gays in the military, higher education, Kagan and the Supreme Court, the Solomon amendment, free speech, the autonomy of a private institution in this country and the ridiculous imbalance of makers vs. takers in this country:

Kagan was prevented from standing on her principles and opposing the way the American military discriminates because of the addiction of Harvard University to federal money.  Excuse me, but why in the hell is one of the world's richest, most expensive, elitist institutions receiving federal subsidy?  With a billion in the bank are they unable or unwilling to perform research for the public good at their own expense and give something back to society?  The result is that a plumber in flyover country who works all day with no college degree, who makes a good wage, gets 2 weeks a year off and supports a family of four must pay taxes that subsidize Harvard University, its elitist professors with all their tenure, time off, idealism and excesses.  Unbelievable.
Title: Tavis Smiley: Idiot leftist of the day
Post by: G M on May 28, 2010, 02:46:02 PM
http://townhall.com/blog/g/cb91fd92-7c8b-4ad7-8dd5-f5869a653f74

I know quite a bit about Columbine and the killers there. Christianity was most certainly not their motive.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on May 28, 2010, 04:21:17 PM
Goose stepping Baptist alert!!!!!!
Title: History returns to Europe
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 03, 2010, 08:15:49 AM
History Returns to Europe
 
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2526744/posts

VIENNA -- Walk the beautiful streets in Munich, Strasbourg and Vienna, and you can see why Europeans thought in the last decades that they had reached the end of history. There is not a soldier to be seen. Sidewalk cafes are jammed midweek with two-hour lunch-goers. Fashion, vacations and sex dominate the ads and billboards.

Bikers, electric commuter trains and tiny fuel-efficient cars zoom by in a green contrast to our gas-guzzling Tahoes and Yukons.

So naturally, there is a general sense of satisfied accomplishment among European social democrats. They believe that finally a quiet sameness across their continent has replaced two millennia of constant European warring and revolution. Now, everybody seems to get an apartment, small car, state job, good pension and peace -- and in exchange, all voice comfortable center-left consensus politics.

But beneath the genteel European Union veneer, few remembered that human nature remains constant and gives not even nice Europeans a pass from its harsh laws.

So suddenly the Greek financial meltdown, and the staggering debts that must be repaid, have alternately enraged and terrified northern European creditors. Even the most vocal Europhiles are quietly rethinking the entire premise of a European Union that offers lavish benefits but no sound method of paying for them.

After all, it is one thing to redistribute income by taking from richer Germans and Austrians to give to poorer Germans and Austrians. But it is something else for all Germans and Austrians to extend their socialist charity to siesta-taking Greeks, Italians and Spaniards. For all the lofty rhetoric of the collective European Union, age-old culture, language and nationalism still trump the ideal of continental unity.

But bickering over a trillion dollars in bad southern European debt is not the EU's only problem. Why, for example, do Europe's cradle-to-grave entitlements so often end up encouraging declining populations, atheism and lower worker productivity that is readily apparent to the casual visitor?

Perhaps if everybody ends up about the same, regardless of effort or achievement, then life must be enjoyed mostly in the here and now. Why sacrifice for children, or put something aside for heirs, or worry over a judgment in the afterlife? The more the European Union talks about its global caring, the less likely its own citizens are to have children.

It is also strange that the more Europeans flock to their ancient majestic cathedrals, splendid museums and grandiose villas and castles to satisfy an innate human desire to enjoy artistic, architectural and religious achievement, the more it is likely that they would never again build a now politically incorrect cathedral at Rouen, a Schönbrunn Palace or a castle on the Rhine.

Much is made of European multiculturalism, a willingness to allow Muslims from the Middle East, Pakistan and Turkey to live separate lives without assimilating fully into European society.

But such "tolerance" reflects in part a fear of radical Islam and terrorism. For all the European talk of progressive attitudes about free speech, feminism and gay rights, such principles fade quickly when radical Muslims demand Sharia law, demonize homosexuals or threaten European cartoonists and novelists. It is almost as if the more Europe takes pride in its own multiculturalism, the larger its ethnic ghettoes expand -- and the more its native populations grow bitter against the foreign-born.

Europe is a vocal member of the United Nations and other transnational organizations. But this utopian internationalism depends on the protection guaranteed by the United States and its huge military. Otherwise, there would either be costly European militaries -- or the occasional threat of attack. Europeans forgot that just because they are not looking for war, it doesn't mean that war might not look for them.

In short, as a reaction to the self-destruction of Europe in World War II and the twin monsters of fascism and communism, Europeans thought they could change human nature itself through the creation of an all-caring, all-wise European Union uber-citizen. Instead of dealing with human sins, European wise men of the last half-century would simply declare them passé.

But human-driven history is now roaring back with a fury in Europe -- from Mediterranean insolvency, to the threat of radical Islam, to demographic decline, to new international dangers on the horizon.

Only one question remains: At a time when Europe is discovering that its democratic socialism does not work, why in the world is the United States doing its best to copy it?
Title: The coming clusterfcuk explained
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 05, 2010, 07:41:33 AM


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyePCRkq620&feature=player_embedded
Title: Volcker
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 06, 2010, 12:09:58 PM
For those of you too young to remember Paul Volcker was appointed Chairman of the Fed in 1978.  It was he that brought the Nixon-Ford-Carter inflation under control (econ growth due to supply side tax rate cuts by Reagan was the other half of the equation).  More recently he was brought on board by the Obama team during the presidential campaign to bolster the impression that Obama was a responsible man.  Once in power, PV has complained that he has felt ignored.  Now that the excrement's approach to the fan is more imminent, BO re-courts PV. 

Here are PV's most recent thoughts:
=======================================

The New York Review of Books
 
The Time We Have Is Growing Short
by Paul Volcker
Some five years ago, at a conference of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, I lamented that “the growing imbalances, disequilibria, risks” were giving rise to “circumstances as dangerous and intractable” as any I could recall—intractable not just because of the combination of complicated issues, but because there seemed to be “so little willingness or capacity to do much about it.”

Part of the story is familiar. In the United States, savings practically disappeared as consumption rose far above past relationships to national production. That consumption was satisfied by rapidly growing imports from China and elsewhere in Asia at remarkably cheap prices, helping to keep inflation well subdued. The resulting seemingly inexorable increase in our current account deficit was easily financed by an equally large flow of short-term funds from abroad at exceptionally low interest rates. In fact, money was so easily available that it supported what became a bubble in housing, with rising home prices reinforcing a sense of prosperity and high consumption.

It was not so much that the imbalances were hidden or unknown. In particular, the Chinese surpluses and American deficits were widely thought to be unsustainable. But for the time being, the world economy was growing strongly. China in particular was mainly interested in developing its industry by encouraging exports, and the United States was not prepared to balance its national budget or to restrain the consumption and housing boom.

At the time, I suggested that the most likely result would not be well- thought-out and complementary policy actions. Rather, sooner or later, the necessary changes would be forced by a financial crisis.

I certainly did not anticipate the nature of the crisis that eventually ensued, its complexity, its force, or its impact right across the industrialized world. Subprime mortgages, credit default swaps, CDOs—squared, tranched, or otherwise—were not part of my world. Nor, I can add, had I ever imagined that the financial markets over those frightening weeks in the fall of 2008 would virtually freeze up. The sense of mutual trust upon which operating financial markets depend was lost.

Now we know that trillions of dollars of official funds came to the rescue of the broken system in the form of loans, capital, and guarantees. Flows of finance have been restored, albeit with large areas of continuing public support. The residential mortgage market in the United States—by far the largest sector of our capital market for the time being—remains almost wholly a ward of the government. Now, another range of uncertainty has arisen. Sovereign credits have come into question, most pointedly in the Eurozone but potentially of concern among some of our own states.

Any thoughts—any longings—that participants in the financial community might have had that conditions were returning to normal (implicitly promising the return of high compensation) should by now be shattered. We are left with some very large questions: questions of understanding what happened, questions of what to do about it, and ultimately, questions of political possibilities. The way those questions are answered will determine whether, in the end, the financial crisis has, in fact, forced the changes in thinking and in policies needed to restore a well-functioning financial system and better-balanced growing economies.

The Stanford Institute prize announcement sets out a simple proposition I suspect we all would support: “Economics is fundamentally about efficiently allocating resources so as to maximize the welfare of individuals.” I think it is fair to say that for some time the dominant approach of economic theorizing, increasingly reflected in public policy, has been that free and open financial markets, supported by advances in electronic technology and by sophisticated financial engineering, would most effectively support both market efficiency and stability. Without heavily intrusive regulation, investable funds would flow to the most profitable and productive uses. The inherent risks of making loans and extending credits would be diffused and reallocated among those best able and willing to bear them.

It is an attractive thesis, attractive not only in concept but for those participating in its seeming ability to generate enormous financial rewards. Our best business schools developed and taught ever more complicated models. A large share of the nation’s best young talent was attracted to finance. However, even when developments seemed most benign, there were warning signs.

Has the contribution of the modern world of finance to economic growth become so critical as to support remuneration to its participants beyond any earlier experience and expectations? Does the past profitability of and the value added by the financial industry really now justify profits amounting to as much as 35 to 40 percent of all profits by all US corporations? Can the truly enormous rise in the use of derivatives, complicated options, and highly structured financial instruments really have made a parallel contribution to economic efficiency? If so, does analysis of economic growth and productivity over the past decade or so indicate visible acceleration of growth or benefits flowing down to the average American worker who even before the crisis had enjoyed no increase in real income?

There was one great growth industry. Private debt relative to GDP nearly tripled in thirty years. Credit default swaps, invented little more than a decade ago, soared at their peak to a $60 trillion market, exceeding by a large multiple the amount of the underlying credits potentially hedged against default. Add to those specifics the opacity that accompanied the enormous complexity of such transactions.

The nature and depth of the financial crisis is forcing us to reconsider some of the basic tenets of financial theory. To my way of thinking, that is both necessary and promising in pointing toward useful reform.

One basic flaw running through much of the recent financial innovation is that thinking embedded in mathematics and physics could be directly adapted to markets. A search for repetitive patterns of behavior and computations of normal distribution curves are a big part of the physical sciences. However, financial markets are not driven by changes in natural forces but by human phenomena, with all their implications for herd behavior, for wide swings in emotion, and for political intervention and uncertainties.

Important questions about the governance of businesses and the relationships between principals and their agents are being reexamined. Most obviously and appropriately, the role of regulation and supervision, their necessity, their methods, and their difficulties are being reconsidered.

Virtually all developed economies have long had official institutions responsible for regulating their banking systems. To a lesser extent, there has been oversight of financial markets and nonbank financial institutions. In the United States, there has been a particularly complicated and intrusive institutional structure. But as a broad generalization, these existing structures, in all their variety, largely failed to prevent cascading financial failures, with severe economic damage.

One response has been a broad international effort to review capital requirements, leverage restraints, and liquidity practices, extending even beyond the traditional area of commercial banking. These are matters that by and large are within the existing competences of national regulatory authorities. Over the past two years, there has been much useful analysis and large areas of conceptual agreement. But even with that concentrated effort, it has been difficult to reach operational consensus.

The fact is that the exercise of effective regulatory and supervisory authority is always difficult on a national level, and those difficulties are multiplied when dozens of countries are involved. There are large political constraints and industry pressure. Consider the ten-year effort by the G10’s Basel Committee on Banking Supervision to coordinate capital requirements—completed just in time to be largely rendered moot by the financial crisis.

To me, the lesson is clear. There are deep-seated structural issues that must be dealt with by legislation. Moreover, there should be common elements among nations hosting significant international financial markets and institutions. As this is written, the US Senate has passed one fairly comprehensive legislative approach. There are some parts of that bill that I would prefer to see changed, redrafted, or eliminated in the negotiations to reconcile it with the House bill during the coming weeks. This is particularly true in clarifying the limits on proprietary activity of commercial banks, including trading in derivatives. However, I do think that taken as a whole the bill does incorporate basic approaches that can and should be part of our international consensus.

 

The central issue with which we have been grappling is the doctrine of “too big to fail.” Its corollary is so-called moral hazard: the sense that an institution—its creditors, its management, even its stockholders—will be inclined to tolerate highly aggressive risk in the expectation that it will be rescued from possible failure by official financial support.

That is not a new concern. Commercial banks in the ordinary course of their business have deposit insurance and access to Federal Reserve credit in times of stress. In practice, creditors of the largest banking institutions have been protected. The quid pro quo has been extensive regulation to limit risk. The underlying assumption has been, quite correctly in my view, that these banking institutions perform absolutely critical functions in our economy. They manage the payment systems, nationally and internationally. They provide safe and liquid facilities for depositing money. They are an indispensable source of credit to most businesses.

Now, the situation has been changed. A vast “shadow banking system” has emerged alongside, and is importantly dependent upon, traditional commercial banks. Investment banks have become financial trading machines. Hedge and private equity funds are active, operating in large part on borrowed funds. Financial affiliates of some industrial firms have expanded into the capital markets to the extent, in a few cases, that the risks have jeopardized the entire company. Derivatives, including credit default swaps hardly known a decade ago, have become speculative vehicles, exceeding their use as hedging instruments. Fragmented regulation and supervision, if present at all, have been weak.

To a substantial extent, it was those “nonbanks” that were at the epicenter of the crisis. Contrary to well-established central bank practices and with active government support, many of those same institutions received extensive assistance to remain viable.

Dealing with this great extension of moral hazard has become the largest challenge for financial reform. Central to that effort in thinking both in the United States and in Europe has been the creation of a new “resolution authority” that could supersede conventional bankruptcy procedures when the potential failure of a “systemically important” financial institution threatens to undermine the stability of the financial system.

Essentially, an official agency following established procedural safeguards (in theUS presumably the FDIC) could seize control of the failing institution, deal with its immediate obligations to maintain continuity in the market, but then promptly arrange for an orderly liquidation: stockholders and management would be gone, and creditors placed at risk, as in a normal bankruptcy. Ideally the path toward liquidation (including the sale of parts of the company) would be eased by setting out a “living will”—dissolution priorities prepared by large nonbank institutions and reviewed by their supervisors. Put simply, the concept is to prepare for a dignified burial—not intensive care with hopes for recovery.


The largest nonbank institutions would also be subject to supervision with respect to their capital, leverage, and liquidity—matters that, according to the Senate bill, would be overseen by the Federal Reserve. The intent is to permit the nonbanks to compete, to innovate, to actively trade, and to make profits free of highly detailed intrusive regulation. They should also be free to fail.

Put simply, there would continue to be a federal safety net implicitly subsidizing strongly regulated commercial banks, as has been the practice for decades, even for centuries—here and abroad. Other institutions, and their creditors, should not expect official protection. The clear possibility of failure without a “bailout” will be reflected in lower credit ratings, in higher financing costs, and in market-imposed restraints.

The logic of that approach is embedded in the Senate bill. Commercial banking would implicitly be supported in its wide range of relations with businesses and other customers. Proprietary trading, hedge funds, and other potentially profitable but risky activities not related to their essential responsibilities should clearly be prohibited for banks. The essential logic is that the taxpayers need not, and should not, be called upon to support essentially speculative activities within the protected, implicitly subsidized financial sector.

There are other key elements in the Senate bill. Importantly, there is a strong effort to force trading, clearance, and settlement of derivatives into organized exchanges and clearinghouses. New responsibilities for coherent oversight of the entire financial system are set out. Regulatory authorities are clarified. In all these areas, a high degree of international cooperation is necessary. My hope is that the legislative initiative underway will provide a solid foundation for strong American leadership in that effort.

None of these reforms will assure crisis-free financial markets in the years ahead. The point is to keep the inevitable excesses and points of strain manageable, to reduce their scale and frequency, and in the process more effectively contribute to the efficient allocation of our financial resources.

As we well know, the critical policy issues we face go way beyond the technicalities of law and regulation of financial markets. There is growing awareness of historically large and persistent fiscal deficits in a number of well-developed economies. The risks associated with the virtually unprecedented levels of public debts as we emerge from recessions are evident. In California, as in my own state of New York, it’s not a matter of intellectual awareness but of practical confrontation.

If we need any further illustration of the potential threats to our own economy from uncontrolled borrowing, we have only to look to the struggle to maintain the common European currency, to rebalance the European economy, and to sustain the political cohesion of Europe. Amounts approaching a trillion dollars have been marshaled from national and international resources to deal with those challenges. Financing can buy time, but not indefinite time. The underlying hard fiscal and economic adjustments are necessary.

As we look to that European experience, let’s consider our own situation. We are not a small country highly vulnerable to speculative attack. In an uncertain world, our currency and credit are well established. But there are serious questions, most immediately about the sustainability of our commitment to growing entitlement programs. Looking only a little further ahead, there are even larger questions of critical importance for those of less advanced age than I. The need to achieve a consensus for effective action against global warming, for energy independence, and for protecting the environment is not going to go away. Are we really prepared to meet those problems, and the related fiscal implications? If not, today’s concerns may soon become tomorrow’s existential crises.

I referred at the start of these remarks to my sense five years ago of intractable problems, resisting solutions. Little has happened to allay my concerns. But, of course, it is not true that our economic problems are intractable beyond our ability to react, to make the necessary adjustments to more fully realize the enormous potential for improving our well-being. Permit me a note of optimism.

A few days ago, I spent a little time in Ireland. It’s a small country, with few resources and, to put it mildly, a troubled history. In the last twenty years, it took a great leap forward, escaping from its economic lethargy and its internal conflicts. Responding to the potential of free and open markets and the stable European currency, standards of living have bounded higher, close to the general European level. Instead of emigration, there has been an influx of workers from abroad.

But now Ireland has been caught up in its own speculative excesses and financial deficits, culminating in a sharp economic decline. There is a lot of grumbling, about banks in particular. But I came away with another impression. The people I spoke to had an understanding that the boom had gotten out of hand. There seems to me a determination to do something about the situation, reflected not just in the words of the political leaders but in support for action among the public. And there is a sense of what is at stake, that the gains they made in recent years have been placed in jeopardy. The urgent need to get back on a sustainable budgetary and economic track is well understood.

I hope my quick impressions of Irish attitudes and policies will be borne out and that that small country will not be caught up by a European crisis beyond its control. In the United States, we don’t seem to me to share the same sense of urgency. We view ourselves as a huge and relatively self-sufficient country, in control of our own destiny. We have time to sort out our priorities, to decide what to do, and to do it. There are elements of truth in those propositions, but the time we have is growing short.

Restoring our fiscal position, dealing with Social Security and health care obligations in a responsible way, sorting out a reasonable approach toward limiting carbon omissions, and producing domestic energy without unacceptable environmental risks all take time. We’d better get started. That will require a greater sense of common purpose and political consensus than has been evident in Washington or the country at large.
Title: Dems: Schumer in 2016
Post by: ccp on June 07, 2010, 07:45:45 AM
This morning while watching him give a lecture on the greatness of gigantic government made me realize who the next in line Democratic Presidential candidate will be (probably as Crafty thinks - not 2012 but 2016).
Another NE liberal lawyer.  Chuck Schumer.  This is the guy the Republicans better start studying and getting their answers to.
He is IMHO FAR more formidable than Bamster who doesn't have a clue.

He is the guy who is going to bring the fight right back at us.  He is in line to be the Senate Dem leader after Reid falls this fall.
Next will be the Presidential bid.  I don't think he will want to be Bamster's second fiddle for 2012 though it is possible.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: DougMacG on June 07, 2010, 10:49:02 AM
CCP,  You are correct about Schumer.  There are others but he is the most senior and trusted among his peers for liberal strategy.  His skills and view of the constitution will be on display soon as the Senate Judiciary Committee ushers through uber-liberal Elena Kagan.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 07, 2010, 06:16:04 PM
These thoughts probably fit better on the Politics thread , , ,
Title: A great Prager rant
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 08, 2010, 10:39:11 PM


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNUc8nuo7HI
Title: The Collapse of the West
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 23, 2010, 08:14:09 AM
The collapse of the West, with Islam at the gate

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Internecine civil wars are underway almost everywhere within the West, and most
virulently in the United States of America. They are not yet kinetic wars, but wars
of grinding prepositioning, the kind which lead to foregone conclusions without a
shot being fired. They are wars of survival, nonetheless, because the basic
architecture for national strength is being altered incrementally or dramatically.
And in many cases consciously.

Almost all of the strategic restructuring of states is occurring in large part as a
result of an accumulation of wealth; an accumulation and value of which is seen as
permanent. This has resulted in the hubris — expressed by those who did not earn it
— of triumph in the Cold War. This is a Western phenomenon because the widespread
growth of wealth, the creation of freedoms classically associated with democracy,
resulted — as it must inevitably result — in complacencies which in turn led to a
"vote too far": the extension of the democratic franchise to those who do not help
in the creation of wealth.

Once the voting franchise of the West reached the point where those who sought
benefits outweighed those who created benefits, the tipping point was reached. The
situation of de facto "class warfare" thus emerges automatically under such
circumstances, and the envy of those who take against those who provide erupts into
"rights" and "entitlement". By deifying "democracy" above justice, the enfranchised
non-producers could always outvote the producers. We are at this point. The result
can only be collapse, or restructuring around a Cæsar or a Bonaparte until,
eventually, a productive hierarchy reappears, usually after considerable pain.

Virtually every conscious step of the Administration of President Barack Obama and
the overwhelming Democratic Party majority in Congress has been to increase the size
and role of government in the economy and society, and to decrease, limit, and
control the position of private enterprise and capital formation. Given that this
progressively contracts and ultimately eliminates production, and reduces the
inherent asset base of the country — its raw materials and productive intellect — to
a null value, the tradable value of the U.S. currency will inevitably decline. We
cannot be swayed by the enormous wealth of the North American continent. Almost all
areas have an inherent wealth of some kind, but assets left idle in the ground or
infertile in the brain define countries which fail, or are not victorious in their
quest for unbridled sovereignty.

Thus, a decline in currency value is exacerbated, or accelerated, by the increasing
supply of money, inextricably depreciating its value, particularly at a time of
decreasing productivity in vital perishable and nonperishable output.

The U.S. Obama Administration has focused entirely on an agenda of expanding
government — the seizure of the envied (and often ephemeral) "wealth" of the
producers — without addressing the process of facilitating the production of
essential commodities
and goods. Even the USSR and the People's Republic of China, during their communist
periods, focused — albeit badly — on the production of goods and services, when they
realized that the "wealth" to be "redistributed" existed only as the result of
production and innovation. The U.S., meanwhile, heavily as a result of policies of
the former Clinton Administration, has "outsourced" production, and the State — that
is, the Government — cannot easily, in the U.S., become the producer.

President Obama has addressed the U.S.' economic crisis by expanding government, and
government-related, employment in nonproductive sectors, while at the same time
blaming and punishing the private sector for all of the U.S. ills. Empowered by the
extended franchise, this was the politics of envy now becoming enabled. Moreover,
the populist, short-term response to the major oil-spill in the Gulf of Mexico was
clearly geared toward (a) transforming a crisis into an opportunity to pursue a
green energy agenda by highlighting the evils of the fossil fuels on which the U.S.
remains dependent; (b) ensuring that the President was not blamed for the poor
crisis response; and (c) ensuring that the Democratic Party did not suffer from the
crisis in the November 2010 mid-term Congressional elections.

The result of all the Obama initiatives has been to expand government and reduce or
absolutely control and tax the private sector, even though, without the private
sector, the U.S. has no viable export or self-sustaining capability. The net effect
has been to mirror — and overtake — the situation in which, for example, Germany
found itself a decade ago: without the ability to retain capital investment or
attract new capital investment. And in order to restrain capital flight from the
U.S., the Obama Administration seeks to further control worldwide earnings of U.S.
corporations and citizens. For other reasons, the U.S., believing that it still
dominates the technology arena, has imposed greater and greater restrictions on
international exports of technology through its ITAR (International Traffic in Arms
Regulations) and the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

All of this conspires to limit investment in U.S. manufacturing and restrict foreign
interest in U.S. exports because the regulations are being enforced merely for
political punitive reasons. The U.S. is making itself increasingly unappealing to
foreign investors and has, as this writer has noted, made the appeal of the U.S.
dollar as the global reserve currency evaporate, saved, for the moment, only by the
lack of a ready alternative. That situation will change within a very few years.

Thus, the U.S. has, in the space of a couple of years: (i) so dramatically inflated
money supply that the value of the dollar
is only shored up by the lack of international alternative currencies to act as
reserve trading currencies; (ii) so dramatically inflated public debt, without
stimulating economic growth, that U.S. economic performance will continue to decline
on a national and a per capita basis while competitive economies, such as the PRC
and Russia, will grow, reducing strategic differentials; (iii) severely punished the
private sector, thereby reducing the opportunities and incentives for strategic
capital formation, and in particular punishing the industrial production and energy
sectors, almost ensuring major dislocation to the delivery of U.S. basic needs in
the near-term; and (iv) so blatantly reduced its strategic capabilities through all
of these actions and in its diplomatic and military posture as to guarantee a
reduction in U.S. strategic credibility. Concurrent with all of this is an
increasingly punitive taxation framework.

The near-term impact will include rising domestic energy prices, possibly even
before the November 2010 mid-term Congressional elections, which could result in the
Democratic Party losing its substantial majority in both Houses. Even on this
matter, Democratic Party ideologues have attempted to suggest that this is exactly
what the country needs: expensive energy in order to facilitate change to "green"
solutions. This defies the historical reality that preeminent powers must always
have vast energy surpluses and use.

So much damage has been done to the U.S. strategic posture in just two years
(although building on a base of inefficiencies which have been growing since the end
of the Cold War), in many respects equal to the 1917 Russian Revolution (but without
the bloodshed), that it is difficult to forecast whether — because of a changing
global environment — the U.S. can, within a decade or two, recover its strategic
authority and leadership. Domestically, the massively statist and interventionist
approaches of the Obama Administration have polarized the country, and the response
will be reactive rather than innovative, inducing a period of isolation and
nationalism, but with grave difficulty in rebuilding confidence from the
international investment
community.

Europe

Artificial, wealth-induced complacency following the end of the Cold War led to fury
when economic collapse inevitably occurred in 2010, leading to draconian restraint
in public spending in many societies, but particularly Greece and Spain. It is said
that tourists are warned not to feed bears in Yellowstone National Park, in the
U.S., because the bears do not understand when the tourists have run out of food.
State-fed populations in Europe, the U.S., and Australia (see below) equally do not
understand when the free ride is over, and work must recommence.

Germany, France, and the United Kingdom have begun the arduous path back to
recovery, but the euro may, as a currency, have been irrevocably damaged, and the
European Union itself may have spent the term of its virility. Clearly, the
wealth-induced complacency, which had the compounding effect of allowing a decline
in a sense of national survival and national identity among the European Union (EU)
component states, has led now to a revived — but as yet unrealized — sense of
nationalism. This is beginning to lead to the recognition of the cohesive national
efficiency required for survival and competitiveness. It can be said that the EU
destroyed nationalism, without replacing it with any mechanism to create a new sense
of social cohesion, thus removing Europe's capability for economic competitiveness,
self defense, or ability to define a new culture (and identity) to replace the
national identities. Had the British Labour Party Government of outgoing Prime
Minister Gordon Brown persisted in office with his slavishly doctrinaire governance
— and demonstrably unworkable socialism, led by a privileged élite of Labour
mandarins wallowing at the trough — it is possible that an economic recovery
in the UK would have been problematic. It may still be problematic. And in this,
Brown was a prototype Obama, with his rank sense of entitlement. Even now, the
British political psyche is fractured along geographic lines, and, wealth-induced,
considers itself effectively "post-industrial", and therefore beyond the need for a
manufacturing (or even agricultural base). Thus, even though the UK is now far more
dependent on a maritime trade base than at any time in its history, it is incapable
of defending or projecting that maritime base; neither does it have the wherewithal
to trade.

Australia

The Australian Government of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has — like the Obama
Administration in the U.S. and the Brown Administration in the UK — demonstrated its
absolute lack of experience in management, economics, or real-life work skills. A
decision by Prime Minister Rudd to impose a new "super tax" of some 40 percent on
resource companies — miners, who produce most of Australia's export wealth —
suddenly highlighted the reality that the mining companies did not need to put their
investment into Australian projects.

It also highlighted the fact that foreign investors did not need to invest in
Australia, and that capital could move — as it always does — away from draconian tax
regimes. As Chilean Mines Minister Laurence Goldborne said in June 2010: "Just
because you have resources doesn't guarantee investment." This is something which
the governments of most African states know.

In Australia, the realization of the over-reaching greed — and envy-inspired
approach of of the proposed new tax laws — in turn led much of the ruling Australian
Labor Party (ALP) and the profoundly leftist Australian media to begin their drift
away from Rudd, leaving him with the prospect that he could either be abandoned as
party leader before the late-2010 general elections, or be faced with the prospect
of becoming Australia's first one-term Prime Minister. The question remains,
however, as to whether the markets will still be there when the ruin of trust in
Australian export and investment reliability is addressed by a future government.
The People's Republic of China (PRC), Australia's major export client state, and
Russia are now developing vast iron ore reserves on their mutual border, possibly —
in the near future — obviating the need for much of what Australia exports.

In the meantime, both Kevin Rudd and the opposition Liberal Party have essentially
embraced the move by Australia to see itself as a pseudo-post-industrial society,
gradually eroding the independent and innovative manufacturing sector which had been
a hallmark of Australian economic growth. A pseudo-post-industrial society is one
which believes that it can live solely on the intrinsic value of its currency,
without the necessity to sustain a balanced agricultural and industrial base to
preserve sovereign independence. A true post-industrial society — something thus far
a utopian dream — can produce all of its food and goods with a minute fraction of
its population, which would largely be left to address intellectual pursuits.

Australia, thus, faces a major challenge to its comfort, wealth, and security when
value perceptions, investment, and clients evaporate. We see, then, in the very
deliberate acts of envy and entitlement politics, the seeds of national collapse in
Australia, the U.S., and Western Europe.

Conclusions

Some of the Western powers have slumped before, and recovered. The United States has
yet to demonstrate this resilience. Other Western societies have slumped, and have
yet been protected by a strong regional system so that their societies could prosper
under foreign protection. The Netherlands, Spain, and Portugal, for example,
retained stable and individual prosperous societies and yet never recovered their
strategic leadership, relying, instead, on the power of their region for economic
and security protection. States which remain dependent on others for their
protection never fully regain their wealth and freedom.

States such as New Zealand depend on their greater neighbors for protection. But
wither New Zealand if Australia fails? Wither the Netherlands today if the European
Union fails? And wither the United States if its fortunes erode? Re-birth is, as
Britain has found through history, as did Rome, more arduous than that first, pure
flush of strategic victory.

The West is at its watershed, not because of a threat from a less-productive
society. The collapse of the West is not because Islam is at the gates. Islam is at
the gates because of the collapse of the West.

http://www.worldtribune.com/worldtri...0560_06_22.asp
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on June 23, 2010, 09:08:45 AM
Mort is clearly not thrilled with Joe-Bama's (my nick name) approach to Israel.  I would guess that has some cause for this piece from an otherwise liberal/Democrat Jewish writer

Part one:

 Mort Zuckerman: World Sees Obama as Incompetent and Amateur
The president is well-intentioned but can't walk the walk on the world stage
By Mortimer B. Zuckerman
Posted June 18, 2010
President Obama came into office as the heir to a great foreign policy legacy enjoyed by every recent U.S. president. Why? Because the United States stands on top of the power ladder, not necessarily as the dominant power, but certainly as the leading one. As such we are the sole nation capable of exercising global leadership on a whole range of international issues from security, trade, and climate to counterterrorism. We also benefit from the fact that most countries distrust the United States far less than they distrust one another, so we uniquely have the power to build coalitions. As a result, most of the world still looks to Washington for help in their region and protection against potential regional threats.

 
Yet, the Iraq war lingers; Afghanistan continues to be immersed in an endless cycle of tribalism, corruption, and Islamist resurgence; Guantánamo remains open; Iran sees how North Korea toys with Obama and continues its programs to develop nuclear weapons and missiles; Cuba spurns America's offers of a greater opening; and the Palestinians and Israelis find that it is U.S. policy positions that defer serious negotiations, the direct opposite of what the Obama administration hoped for.

The reviews of Obama's performance have been disappointing. He has seemed uncomfortable in the role of leading other nations, and often seems to suggest there is nothing special about America's role in the world. The global community was puzzled over the pictures of Obama bowing to some of the world's leaders and surprised by his gratuitous criticisms of and apologies for America's foreign policy under the previous administration of George W. Bush. One Middle East authority, Fouad Ajami, pointed out that Obama seems unaware that it is bad form and even a great moral lapse to speak ill of one's own tribe while in the lands of others.

Even in Britain, for decades our closest ally, the talk in the press—supported by polls—is about the end of the "special relationship" with America. French President Nicolas Sarkozy openly criticized Obama for months, including a direct attack on his policies at the United Nations. Sarkozy cited the need to recognize the real world, not the virtual world, a clear reference to Obama's speech on nuclear weapons. When the French president is seen as tougher than the American president, you have to know that something is awry. Vladimir Putin of Russia has publicly scorned a number of Obama's visions. Relations with the Chinese leadership got off to a bad start with the president's poorly-organized visit to China, where his hosts treated him disdainfully and prevented him from speaking to a national television audience of the Chinese people. The Chinese behavior was unprecedented when compared to visits by other U.S. presidents.

Obama's policy on Afghanistan—supporting a surge in troops, but setting a date next year when they will begin to withdraw—not only gave a mixed signal, but provided an incentive for the Taliban just to wait us out. The withdrawal part of the policy was meant to satisfy a domestic constituency, but succeeded in upsetting all of our allies in the region. Further anxiety was provoked by Obama's severe public criticism of Afghan President Hamid Karzai and his coterie of family and friends for their lackluster leadership, followed by a reversal of sorts regarding the same leaders.

Obama clearly wishes to do good and means well. But he is one of those people who believe that the world was born with the word and exists by means of persuasion, such that there is no person or country that you cannot, by means of logical and moral argument, bring around to your side. He speaks as a teacher, as someone imparting values and generalities appropriate for a Sunday morning sermon, not as a tough-minded leader. He urges that things "must be done" and "should be done" and that "it is time" to do them. As the former president of the Council on Foreign Relations, Les Gelb, put it, there is "the impression that Obama might confuse speeches with policy." Another journalist put it differently when he described Obama as an "NPR [National Public Radio] president who gives wonderful speeches." In other words, he talks the talk but doesn't know how to walk the walk. The Obama presidency has so far been characterized by a well-intentioned but excessive belief in the power of rhetoric with too little appreciation of reality and loyalty.

In his Cairo speech about America and the Muslim world, Obama managed to sway Arab public opinion but was unable to budge any Arab leader. Even the king of Saudi Arabia, a country that depends on America for its survival, reacted with disappointment and dismay. Obama's meeting with the king was widely described as a disaster. This is but one example of an absence of the personal chemistry that characterized the relationships that Presidents Clinton and Bush had with world leaders. This is a serious matter because foreign policy entails an understanding of the personal and political circumstances of the leaders as well as the cultural and historical factors of the countries we deal with.

1 2 3 Next Page >
Title: part one
Post by: ccp on June 23, 2010, 09:14:29 AM
 Mort Zuckerman: World Sees Obama as Incompetent and Amateur
The president is well-intentioned but can't walk the walk on the world stage
By Mortimer B. Zuckerman
Posted June 18, 2010
President Obama came into office as the heir to a great foreign policy legacy enjoyed by every recent U.S. president. Why? Because the United States stands on top of the power ladder, not necessarily as the dominant power, but certainly as the leading one. As such we are the sole nation capable of exercising global leadership on a whole range of international issues from security, trade, and climate to counterterrorism. We also benefit from the fact that most countries distrust the United States far less than they distrust one another, so we uniquely have the power to build coalitions. As a result, most of the world still looks to Washington for help in their region and protection against potential regional threats.

 
Yet, the Iraq war lingers; Afghanistan continues to be immersed in an endless cycle of tribalism, corruption, and Islamist resurgence; Guantánamo remains open; Iran sees how North Korea toys with Obama and continues its programs to develop nuclear weapons and missiles; Cuba spurns America's offers of a greater opening; and the Palestinians and Israelis find that it is U.S. policy positions that defer serious negotiations, the direct opposite of what the Obama administration hoped for.

The reviews of Obama's performance have been disappointing. He has seemed uncomfortable in the role of leading other nations, and often seems to suggest there is nothing special about America's role in the world. The global community was puzzled over the pictures of Obama bowing to some of the world's leaders and surprised by his gratuitous criticisms of and apologies for America's foreign policy under the previous administration of George W. Bush. One Middle East authority, Fouad Ajami, pointed out that Obama seems unaware that it is bad form and even a great moral lapse to speak ill of one's own tribe while in the lands of others.

Even in Britain, for decades our closest ally, the talk in the press—supported by polls—is about the end of the "special relationship" with America. French President Nicolas Sarkozy openly criticized Obama for months, including a direct attack on his policies at the United Nations. Sarkozy cited the need to recognize the real world, not the virtual world, a clear reference to Obama's speech on nuclear weapons. When the French president is seen as tougher than the American president, you have to know that something is awry. Vladimir Putin of Russia has publicly scorned a number of Obama's visions. Relations with the Chinese leadership got off to a bad start with the president's poorly-organized visit to China, where his hosts treated him disdainfully and prevented him from speaking to a national television audience of the Chinese people. The Chinese behavior was unprecedented when compared to visits by other U.S. presidents.

Obama's policy on Afghanistan—supporting a surge in troops, but setting a date next year when they will begin to withdraw—not only gave a mixed signal, but provided an incentive for the Taliban just to wait us out. The withdrawal part of the policy was meant to satisfy a domestic constituency, but succeeded in upsetting all of our allies in the region. Further anxiety was provoked by Obama's severe public criticism of Afghan President Hamid Karzai and his coterie of family and friends for their lackluster leadership, followed by a reversal of sorts regarding the same leaders.

Obama clearly wishes to do good and means well. But he is one of those people who believe that the world was born with the word and exists by means of persuasion, such that there is no person or country that you cannot, by means of logical and moral argument, bring around to your side. He speaks as a teacher, as someone imparting values and generalities appropriate for a Sunday morning sermon, not as a tough-minded leader. He urges that things "must be done" and "should be done" and that "it is time" to do them. As the former president of the Council on Foreign Relations, Les Gelb, put it, there is "the impression that Obama might confuse speeches with policy." Another journalist put it differently when he described Obama as an "NPR [National Public Radio] president who gives wonderful speeches." In other words, he talks the talk but doesn't know how to walk the walk. The Obama presidency has so far been characterized by a well-intentioned but excessive belief in the power of rhetoric with too little appreciation of reality and loyalty.

In his Cairo speech about America and the Muslim world, Obama managed to sway Arab public opinion but was unable to budge any Arab leader. Even the king of Saudi Arabia, a country that depends on America for its survival, reacted with disappointment and dismay. Obama's meeting with the king was widely described as a disaster. This is but one example of an absence of the personal chemistry that characterized the relationships that Presidents Clinton and Bush had with world leaders. This is a serious matter because foreign policy entails an understanding of the personal and political circumstances of the leaders as well as the cultural and historical factors of the countries we deal with.

1 2 3 Next Page >
Title: correction:above is part2 this is final part3
Post by: ccp on June 23, 2010, 09:19:06 AM

part 3:
Mort Zuckerman: World Sees Obama as Incompetent and Amateur
The president is well-intentioned but can't walk the walk on the world stage
By Mortimer B. Zuckerman
Posted June 18, 2010
 
The United States for 60 years has met its responsibilities as the leader and the defender of the democracies of the free world. We have policed the sea lanes, protected the air and space domains, countered terrorism, responded to genocide, and been the bulwark against rogue states engaging in aggression. The world now senses, in the context of the erosion of America's economic power and the pressures of our budget deficits, that we will compress our commitments. But the world needs the vision, idealism, and strong leadership that America brings to international affairs. This can be done and must be done. But we are the only ones who can do it.

< Previous Page 1 2 3
Title: American Psychosis
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 24, 2010, 11:03:26 AM
American Psychosis
What happens to a society that cannot distinguish between reality and illusion?

https://www.adbusters.org/magazine/90/hedges-american-psychosis.html

The United States, locked in the kind of twilight disconnect that grips dying empires, is a country entranced by illusions. It spends its emotional and intellectual energy on the trivial and the absurd. It is captivated by the hollow stagecraft of celebrity culture as the walls crumble. This celebrity culture giddily licenses a dark voyeurism into other people’s humiliation, pain, weakness and betrayal. Day after day, one lurid saga after another, whether it is Michael Jackson, Britney Spears or John Edwards, enthralls the country … despite bank collapses, wars, mounting poverty or the criminality of its financial class.

The virtues that sustain a nation-state and build community, from honesty to self-sacrifice to transparency to sharing, are ridiculed each night on television as rubes stupid enough to cling to this antiquated behavior are voted off reality shows. Fellow competitors for prize money and a chance for fleeting fame, cheered on by millions of viewers, elect to “disappear” the unwanted. In the final credits of the reality show America’s Next Top Model, a picture of the woman expelled during the episode vanishes from the group portrait on the screen. Those cast aside become, at least to the television audience, nonpersons. Celebrities that can no longer generate publicity, good or bad, vanish. Life, these shows persistently teach, is a brutal world of unadulterated competition and a constant quest for notoriety and attention.

Our culture of flagrant self-exaltation, hardwired in the American character, permits the humiliation of all those who oppose us. We believe, after all, that because we have the capacity to wage war we have a right to wage war. Those who lose deserve to be erased. Those who fail, those who are deemed ugly, ignorant or poor, should be belittled and mocked. Human beings are used and discarded like Styrofoam boxes that held junk food. And the numbers of superfluous human beings are swelling the unemployment offices, the prisons and the soup kitchens.

It is the cult of self that is killing the United States. This cult has within it the classic traits of psychopaths: superficial charm, grandiosity and self-importance; a need for constant stimulation; a penchant for lying, deception and manipulation; and the incapacity for remorse or guilt. Michael Jackson, from his phony marriages to the portraits of himself dressed as royalty to his insatiable hunger for new toys to his questionable relationships with young boys, had all these qualities. And this is also the ethic promoted by corporations. It is the ethic of unfettered capitalism. It is the misguided belief that personal style and personal advancement, mistaken for individualism, are the same as democratic equality. It is the nationwide celebration of image over substance, of illusion over truth. And it is why investment bankers blink in confusion when questioned about the morality of the billions in profits they made by selling worthless toxic assets to investors.

We have a right, in the cult of the self, to get whatever we desire. We can do anything, even belittle and destroy those around us, including our friends, to make money, to be happy and to become famous. Once fame and wealth are achieved, they become their own justification, their own morality. How one gets there is irrelevant. It is this perverted ethic that gave us investment houses like Goldman Sachs … that willfully trashed the global economy and stole money from tens of millions of small shareholders who had bought stock in these corporations for retirement or college. The heads of these corporations, like the winners on a reality television program who lied and manipulated others to succeed, walked away with hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses and compensation. The ethic of Wall Street is the ethic of celebrity. It is fused into one bizarre, perverted belief system and it has banished the possibility of the country returning to a reality-based world or avoiding internal collapse. A society that cannot distinguish reality from illusion dies.

The tantalizing illusions offered by our consumer culture, however, are vanishing for most citizens as we head toward collapse. The ability of the corporate state to pacify the country by extending credit and providing cheap manufactured goods to the masses is gone. The jobs we are shedding are not coming back, as the White House economist Lawrence Summers tacitly acknowledges when he talks of a “jobless recovery.” The belief that democracy lies in the choice between competing brands and the accumulation of vast sums of personal wealth at the expense of others is exposed as a fraud. Freedom can no longer be conflated with the free market. The travails of the poor are rapidly becoming the travails of the middle class, especially as unemployment insurance runs out. And class warfare, once buried under the happy illusion that we were all going to enter an age of prosperity with unfettered capitalism, is returning with a vengeance.

America is sinking under trillions in debt it can never repay and stays afloat by frantically selling about $2 billion in Treasury bonds a day to the Chinese. It saw 2.8 million people lose their homes in 2009 to foreclosure or bank repossessions – nearly 8,000 people a day – and stands idle as they are joined by another 2.4 million people this year. It refuses to prosecute the Bush administration for obvious war crimes, including the use of torture, and sees no reason to dismantle Bush’s secrecy laws or restore habeas corpus. Its infrastructure is crumbling. Deficits are pushing individual states to bankruptcy and forcing the closure of everything from schools to parks. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which have squandered trillions of dollars, appear endless. There are 50 million Americans in real poverty and tens of millions of Americans in a category called “near poverty.” One in eight Americans – and one in four children – depend on food stamps to eat. And yet, in the midst of it all, we continue to be a country consumed by happy talk and happy thoughts. We continue to embrace the illusion of inevitable progress, personal success and rising prosperity. Reality is not considered an impediment to desire.

When a culture lives within an illusion it perpetuates a state of permanent infantilism or childishness. As the gap widens between the illusion and reality, as we suddenly grasp that it is our home being foreclosed or our job that is not coming back, we react like children. We scream and yell for a savior, someone who promises us revenge, moral renewal and new glory. It is not a new story. A furious and sustained backlash by a betrayed and angry populace, one unprepared intellectually, emotionally and psychologically for collapse, will sweep aside the Democrats and most of the Republicans and will usher America into a new dark age. It was the economic collapse in Yugoslavia that gave us Slobodan Milosevic. It was the Weimar Republic that vomited up Adolf Hitler. And it was the breakdown in Tsarist Russia that opened the door for Lenin and the Bolsheviks. A cabal of proto-fascist misfits, from Christian demagogues to loudmouth talk show hosts, whom we naïvely dismiss as buffoons, will find a following with promises of revenge and moral renewal. And as in all totalitarian societies, those who do not pay fealty to the illusions imposed by the state become the outcasts, the persecuted.

The decline of American empire began long before the current economic meltdown or the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It began before the first Gulf War or Ronald Reagan. It began when we shifted, in the words of Harvard historian Charles Maier, from an “empire of production” to an “empire of consumption.” By the end of the Vietnam War, when the costs of the war ate away at Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and domestic oil production began its steady, inexorable decline, we saw our country transformed from one that primarily produced to one that primarily consumed. We started borrowing to maintain a level of consumption as well as an empire we could no longer afford. We began to use force, especially in the Middle East, to feed our insatiable thirst for cheap oil. We substituted the illusion of growth and prosperity for real growth and prosperity. The bill is now due. America’s most dangerous enemies are not Islamic radicals but those who sold us the perverted ideology of free-market capitalism and globalization. They have dynamited the very foundations of our society. In the 17th century these speculators would have been hung. Today they run the government and consume billions in taxpayer subsidies.

As the pressure mounts, as the despair and desperation reach into larger and larger segments of the populace, the mechanisms of corporate and government control are being bolstered to prevent civil unrest and instability. The emergence of the corporate state always means the emergence of the security state. This is why the Bush White House pushed through the Patriot Act (and its renewal), the suspension of habeas corpus, the practice of “extraordinary rendition,” warrantless wiretapping on American citizens and the refusal to ensure free and fair elections with verifiable ballot-counting. The motive behind these measures is not to fight terrorism or to bolster national security. It is to seize and maintain internal control. It is about controlling us.

And yet, even in the face of catastrophe, mass culture continues to assure us that if we close our eyes, if we visualize what we want, if we have faith in ourselves, if we tell God that we believe in miracles, if we tap into our inner strength, if we grasp that we are truly exceptional, if we focus on happiness, our lives will be harmonious and complete. This cultural retreat into illusion, whether peddled by positive psychologists, by Hollywood or by Christian preachers, is magical thinking. It turns worthless mortgages and debt into wealth. It turns the destruction of our manufacturing base into an opportunity for growth. It turns alienation and anxiety into a cheerful conformity. It turns a nation that wages illegal wars and administers offshore penal colonies where it openly practices torture into the greatest democracy on earth. And it keeps us from fighting back.

Resistance movements will have to look now at the long night of slavery, the decades of oppression in the Soviet Union and the curse of fascism for models. The goal will no longer be the possibility of reforming the system but of protecting truth, civility and culture from mass contamination. It will require the kind of schizophrenic lifestyle that characterizes all totalitarian societies. Our private and public demeanors will often have to stand in stark contrast. Acts of defiance will often be subtle and nuanced. They will be carried out not for short term gain but the assertion of our integrity. Rebellion will have an ultimate if not easily definable purpose. The more we retreat from the culture at large the more room we will have to carve out lives of meaning, the more we will be able to wall off the flood of illusions disseminated by mass culture and the more we will retain sanity in an insane world. The goal will become the ability to endure.

Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the New York Times, is the author of several books including the best sellers War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning and Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 25, 2010, 01:52:15 PM
Please post it on the Pathological Science thread on SCH forum, or on Legal Issues.  Thank you.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Freki on June 25, 2010, 06:41:41 PM
I was torn between path. science or rants, I chose rants for the nanny state aspect.  It is now in path. science.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 25, 2010, 11:58:56 PM
No worries; thank you.
Title: Day by Day
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 29, 2010, 11:18:33 AM


http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2010/06/27/
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Rarick on June 30, 2010, 03:10:14 AM
oooohhh! :evil:  That is a stinging rejoinder if I ever heard one.
Title: A Perfect Storm of Ignorance
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 04, 2010, 07:53:53 AM
A Perfect Storm of Ignorance

by Jeffrey Friedman

Jeffrey Friedman is the editor of Critical Review and of Causes of the
Financial Crisis, forthcoming from the University of Pennsylvania Press.

You are familiar by now with the role of the Federal Reserve in stimulating
the housing boom; the role of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in encouraging
low-equity mortgages; and the role of the Community Reinvestment Act in
mandating loans to "subprime" borrowers, meaning those who were poor credit
risks. So you may think that the government caused the financial crisis. But
you don't know the half of it. And neither does the government.

A full understanding of the crisis has to explain not just the housing and
subprime bubbles, but why, when they popped, it should have had such
disastrous worldwide effects on the financial system. The problem was that
commercial banks had made a huge overinvestment in mortgage-backed bonds
sold by investment banks such as Lehman Brothers.

Commercial banks are familiar to everyone with a checking or savings
account. They accept our deposits, against which they issue commercial loans
and mortgages. In 1933, the United States created the FDIC to insure
commercial banks' depositors. The aim was to discourage bank runs by
depositors who worried that if their bank had made too many risky loans,
their accounts, too, might be at risk.

The question of whether deposit insurance was necessary is worth asking, and
I will ask it later on. But for now, the key fact is that once deposit
insurance took effect, the FDIC feared that it had created what economists
call a "moral hazard": bankers, now insulated from bank runs, might be
encouraged to make riskier loans than before. The moral-hazard theory took
hold not only in the United States but in all of the countries in which
deposit insurance was instituted. And both here and abroad, the regulators'
solution to this (real or imagined) problem was to institute bank-capital
regulations. According to an array of scholars from around the world — Viral
Acharya, Juliusz Jablecki, Wladimir Kraus, Mateusz Machaj, and Matthew
Richardson — these regulations helped turn an American housing crisis into
the world's worst recession in 70 years.

WHAT REALLY WENT WRONG

The moral-hazard theory held that since the FDIC would now pick up the
pieces if anything went wrong, bankers left to their own devices would make
clearly risky loans and investments. The regulators' solution, across the
entire developed world, was to require banks to hold a minimum capital
cushion against a commercial bank's assets (loans and investments), but the
precise level of the capital reserve, and other details, varied from country
to country.

In 1988, financial regulators from the G-10 agreed on the Basel (I) Accords.
Basel I was an attempt to standardize the world's bank-capital regulations,
and it succeeded, spreading far beyond the G-10 countries. It differentiated
among the risks presented by different types of assets. For instance, a
commercial bank did not have to devote any capital to its holdings of
government bonds, cash, or gold — the safest assets, in the regulators'
judgment. But it had to allot 4 percent capital to each mortgage that it
issued, and 8 percent to commercial loans and corporate bonds.

Each country implemented Basel I on its own schedule and with its own
quirks. The United States implemented it in 1991, with several different
capital cushions; a 10 percent cushion was required for "well-capitalized"
commercial banks, a designation that carries privileges that most banks
want. Ten years later, however, came what proved in retrospect to be the
pivotal event. The FDIC, the Fed, the Comptroller of the Currency, and the
Office of Thrift Supervision issued an amendment to Basel I, the Recourse
Rule, that extended the accord's risk differentiations to asset-backed
securities (ABS): bonds backed by credit card debt, or car loans — or
mortgages — required a mere 2 percent capital cushion, as long as these
bonds were rated AA or AAA or were issued by a government-sponsored
enterprise (GSE), such as Fannie or Freddie. Thus, where a well-capitalized
commercial bank needed to devote $10 of capital to $100 worth of commercial
loans or corporate bonds, or $5 to $100 worth of mortgages, it needed to
spend only $2 of capital on a mortgage-backed security (MBS) worth $100. A
bank interested in reducing its capital cushion — also known as "leveraging
up" — would gain a 60 percent benefit from trading its mortgages for MBSs
and an 80 percent benefit for trading its commercial loans and corporate
securities for MBSs.

Astute readers will smell a connection between the Recourse Rule and the
financial crisis. By 2008 approximately 81 percent of all the rated MBSs
held by American commercial banks were rated AAA, and 93 percent of all the
MBSs that the banks held were either triple-A rated or were issued by a GSE,
thus complying with the Recourse Rule. (Figures for the proportion of
double-A bonds are not yet available.) According to the scholars I mentioned
earlier, the lesson is clear: the commercial banks loaded up on MBSs because
of the extremely favorable treatment that they received under the Recourse
Rule, as long as they were issued by a GSE or were rated AA or AAA.

When subprime mortgages began to default in the summer of 2007, however,
those high ratings were cast into doubt. A year later, the doubts turned
into a panic. Federally mandated mark-to-market accounting — the requirement
that assets be valued at the price for which they could be sold right now —
translated temporary market sentiment into actual numbers on a bank's
balance sheet, so when the market for MBSs dried up, Lehman Brothers went
bankrupt — on paper. Mark-to-market accounting applied to commercial banks
too. And it was the commercial banks' worry about their own and their
counterparties' solvency, due to their MBS holdings, that caused the lending
freeze and, thus, the Great Recession.

What about the rest of the world? The Recourse Rule did not apply to
countries other than the United States, but Basel I included provisions for
even more profitable forms of "capital arbitrage" through off-balance-sheet
entities such as structured investment vehicles, which were heavily used in
Europe. Then, in 2006, Basel II began to be implemented outside the United
States. It took the Recourse Rule's approach, encouraging foreign banks to
stock up on GSE-issued or highly rated MBSs.

THE PERFECT STORM?

Given the large number of contributory factors — the Fed's low interest
rates, the Community Reinvestment Act, Fannie and Freddie's actions, Basel
I, the Recourse Rule, and Basel II — it has been said that the financial
crisis was a perfect storm of regulatory error. But the factors I have just
named do not even begin to complete the list. First, Peter Wallison has
noted the prevalence of "no-recourse" laws in many states, which relieved
mortgagors of financial liability if they simply walked away from a house on
which they defaulted. This reassured people in financial straits that they
could take on a possibly unaffordable mortgage with virtually no risk.
Second, Richard Rahn has pointed out that the tax code discourages
partnerships in banking (and other industries). Partnerships encourage
prudence because each partner has a lot at stake if the firm goes under.
Rahn's point has wider implications, for scholars such as Amar Bhidé and
Jonathan Macey have underscored aspects of tax and securities law that
encourage publicly held corporations such as commercial banks — as opposed
to partnerships or other privately held companies — to encourage their
employees to generate the short-term profits adored by equities investors.
One way to generate short-term profits is to buy into an asset bubble.
Third, the Basel Accords treat monies set aside against unexpected loan
losses as part of banks' "Tier 2" capital, which is capped in relation to
"Tier 1" capital — equity capital raised by selling shares of stock. But
Bert Ely has shown in the Cato Journal that the tax code makes equity
capital unnecessarily expensive. Thus banks are doubly discouraged from
maintaining the capital cushion that the Basel Accords are trying to make
them maintain. This litany is not exhaustive. It is meant

only to convey the welter of regulations that have grown up across different
parts of the economy in such immense profusion that nobody can possibly
predict how they will interact with each other. We are, all of us, ignorant
of the vast bulk of what the government is doing for us, and what those
actions might be doing to us. That is the best explanation for how this
perfect regulatory storm happened, and for why it might well happen again.

By steering banks' leverage into mortgage-backed securities, Basel I, the
Recourse Rule, and Basel II encouraged banks to overinvest in housing at a
time when an unprecedented nationwide housing bubble was getting underway,
due in part to the Recourse Rule itself — which took effect on January 1,
2002: not coincidentally, just at the start of the housing boom. The Rule
created a huge artificial demand for mortgage-backed bonds, each of which
required thousands of mortgages as collateral. Commercial banks duly met
this demand by lowering their lending standards. When many of the same banks
traded their mortgages for mortgage-backed bonds to gain "capital relief,"
they thought they were offloading the riskiest mortgages by buying only
triple-A-rated slices of the resulting mortgage pools. The bankers appear to
have been ignorant of yet another obscure regulation: a 1975 amendment to
the SEC's Net Capital Rule, which turned the three existing rating
companies — S&P, Moody's, and Fitch — into a legally protected oligopoly.
The bankers' ignorance is suggested by e-mails unearthed during the recent
trial of Ralph Cioffi and Matthew Tannin, who ran the two Bear Stearns hedge
funds that invested heavily in highly rated subprime mortgage-backed bonds.
The e-mails show that Tannin was a true believer in the soundness of those
ratings; he and his partner were exonerated by the jury on the grounds that
the two men were as surprised by the catastrophe as everyone else was. Like
everyone else, they trusted S&P, Moody's, and Fitch. But as we would expect
of corporations shielded from market competition, these three "rating
agencies" had gotten sloppy. Moody's did not update its model of the
residential mortgage market after 2002, when the boom was barely underway.
And Moody's model, like those of its "competitors," determined how large
they could make the AA and AAA slices of mortgage-backed securities.

THE REGULATORS' IGNORANCE OF THE REGULATIONS

The regulators seem to have been as ignorant of the implications of the
relevant regulations as the bankers were. The SEC trusted the three rating
agencies to continue their reliable performance even after its own 1975
ruling protected them from the market competition that had made their
ratings reliable. Nearly everyone, from Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke on
down, seemed to be ignorant of the various regulations that were pumping up
house prices and pushing down lending standards. And the FDIC, the Fed, the
Comptroller of the Currency, and the Office of Thrift Supervision, in
promulgating one of those regulations, trusted the three rating companies
when they decided that these companies' AA and AAA ratings would be the
basis of the immense capital relief that the Recourse Rule conferred on
investment-bank-issued mortgage-backed securities. Did the four regulatory
bodies that issued the Recourse Rule know that the rating agencies on which
they were placing such heavy reliance were an SEC-created oligopoly, with
all that this implies? If you read the Recourse Rule, you will find that the
answer is no. Like the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), which later
studied whether to extend this American innovation to the rest of the world
in the form of Basel II (which it did, in 2006), the Recourse Rule wrongly
says that the rating agencies are subject to "market discipline."

Those who play the blame game can find plenty of targets here: the bankers
and the regulators were equally clueless. But should anyone be blamed for
not recognizing the implications of regulations that they don't even know
exist?

Omniscience cannot be expected of human beings. One really would have had to
be a god to master the millions of pages in the Federal Register — not to
mention the pages of the Register's state, local, and now international
counterparts — so one could pick out the specific group of regulations,
issued in different fields over the course of decades, that would end up
conspiring to create the greatest banking crisis since the Great Depression.
This storm may have been perfect, therefore, but it may not prove to be
rare. New regulations are bound to interact unexpectedly with old ones if
the regulators, being human, are ignorant of the old ones and of their
effects.

This is already happening. The SEC's response to the crisis has not been to
repeal its 1975 regulation, but to promise closer regulation of the rating
agencies. And instead of repealing Basel I or Basel II, the BIS is busily
working on Basel III, which will even more finely tune capital requirements
and, of course, increase capital cushions. Yet despite the barriers to
equity capital and loan-loss reserves created by the conjunction of the IRS
and the Basel Accords, the aggregate capital cushion of all American banks
at the start of 2008 stood at 13 percent — one-third higher than the
American minimum, which in turn was one-fifth higher than the Basel minimum.
Contrary to the regulators' assumption that bankers need regulators to
protect them from their own recklessness, the financial crisis was not
caused by too much bank leverage but by the form it took: mortgage-backed
securities. And that was the direct result of the fine tuning done by the
Recourse Rule and Basel II.

HOW DID WE GET INTO THIS MESS?

The financial crisis was a convulsion in the corpulent body of social
democracy. "Social democracy" is the modern mandate that government solve
social problems as they arise. Its body is the mass of laws that grow up
over time — seemingly in inverse proportion to the ability of its brain to
comprehend the causes of the underlying problems.

When voters demand "action," and when legislators and regulators provide it,
they are all naturally proceeding according to some theory of the cause of
the problem they are trying to solve. If their theories are mistaken, the
regulations may produce unintended consequences that, later on, in
principle, could be recognized as mistakes and rectified. In practice,
however, regulations are rarely repealed. Whatever made a mistaken
regulation seem sensible to begin with will probably blind people to its
unintended effects later on. Thus future regulators will tend to assume that
the problem with which they are grappling is a new "excess of capitalism,"
not an unintended consequence of an old mistake in the regulation of
capitalism.

Take bank-capital regulations. The theory was (and remains) that without
them, bankers protected by deposit insurance would make wild, speculative
investments. So deposit insurance begat bank-capital regulations. Initially
these were blunderbuss rules that required banks to spend the same levels of
capital on all their investments and loans, regardless of risk. In 1988 the
Basel Accords took a more discriminating approach, distinguishing among
different categories of asset according to their riskiness — riskiness as
perceived by the regulators. The American regulators decided in 2001 that
mortgage-backed bonds were among the least risky assets, so they required
much lower levels of capital for these securities than for every alternative
investment but Treasury's. And in 2006, Basel II applied that erroneous
judgment to the capital regulations governing most of the rest of the
world's banks. The whole sequence leading to the financial crisis began, in
1933, with deposit insurance. But was deposit insurance really necessary?

The theory behind deposit insurance was (and remains) that banking is
inherently prone to bank runs, which had been common in 19th-century America
and had swept the country at the start of the Depression.

But that theory is wrong, according to such economic historians as Kevin
Dowd, George Selgin, and Kurt Schuler, who argue that bank panics were
almost uniquely American events (there were none in Canada during the
Depression — and Canada didn't have deposit insurance until 1967). According
to these scholars, bank runs were caused by 19th-century regulations that
impeded branch banking and bank "clearinghouses." Thus, deposit insurance,
hence capital minima, hence the Basel rules, might all have been a mistake
founded on the New Deal legislators' and regulators' ignorance of the fact
that panics like the ones that had just gripped America were the unintended
effects of previous regulations.

What I am calling social democracy is, in its form, very different from
socialism. Under social democracy, laws and regulations are issued
piecemeal, as flexible responses to the side effects of progress — social
and economic problems — as they arise, one by one. (Thus the official name:
progressivism.) The case-by-case approach is supposed to be the height of
pragmatism. But in substance, there is a striking similarity between social
democracy and the most utopian socialism. Whether through piecemeal
regulation or central planning, both systems share the conceit that modern
societies are so legible that the causes of their problems yield easily to
inspection. Social democracy rests on the premise that when something goes
wrong, somebody — whether the voter, the legislator, or the specialist
regulator — will know what to do about it. This is less ambitious than the
premise that central planners will know what to do about everything all at
once, but it is no different in principle.

This premise would be questionable enough even if we started with a blank
legal slate. But we don't. And there is no conceivable way that we, the
people — or our agents in government — can know how to solve the problems of
modern societies when our efforts have, in fact, been preceded by
generations of previous efforts that have littered the ground with a tangle
of rules so thick that we can't possibly know what they all say, let alone
how they might interact to create another perfect storm.

This article originally appeared in the January/February 2010 edition of
Cato Policy Report.

http://www.cato.org/pubs/policy_report/v32n1/cpr32n1-1.html
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Rarick on July 04, 2010, 08:14:24 AM
Ohhh, wow.  This would be a wonderful something to put in editorials for why the "small government is better" crowd are not a bunch of kooks.  A bunch of agencies working to do their job created a nice mess. and congress guided by lobbiest "experts" also created inintended consequences?  Heck, this would make the bailout an even more heinous action in many eyes, rewarding banks for their short term greed in light of the regulatory environment, while still not helping out people that might otherwise of managed to "do the right thing" and stay in their house and pay of the mortgage.  I am sure there are a lot of people out there who might have needed a small amount of engouragement that way, but given the refusal of the banks to help figure things out due to the bail out terms.........

I suspect that the repeal of the old Savings and Loan regulations back in the late 80's contributed to this, at least in severity, too. 
Title: Silent Civil War
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on July 05, 2010, 02:18:02 PM
A dour piece. . . .

The New Civil Wars Within the West
      
Written by Gregory R. Copley     
Sunday, 04 July 2010 17:41

Internecine civil wars are underway almost everywhere within the West, and most virulently in the United States of America. They are not yet kinetic wars, but wars of grinding prepositioning, the kind which lead to foregone conclusions without a shot being fired. They are wars of survival, nonetheless, because the basic architecture for national strength is being altered incrementally or dramatically. And, in many cases, consciously.

Almost all of the strategic restructuring of states is occurring in large part as a result of an accumulation of wealth; an accumulation and value of which is seen as permanent. This has resulted in the hubris — expressed by those who did not earn it — of triumph in the Cold War. This is a Western phenomenon because the widespread growth of wealth, the creation of freedoms classically associated with democracy, resulted — as it must inevitably result — in complacencies which in turn led to a “vote too far”: the extension of the democratic franchise to those who do not help in the creation of wealth.

Once the voting franchise of the West reached the point where those who sought benefits outweighed those who created benefits, the tipping point was reached. The situation of de facto “class warfare” thus emerges automatically under such circumstances, and the envy of those who take against those who provide erupts into “rights” and “entitlement”.  By deifying “democracy” above justice, the enfranchised non-producers could always outvote the producers.  We are at this point.  The result can only be collapse, or restructuring around a Cæsar or a Bonaparte until, eventually, a productive hierarchy reappears, usually after considerable pain.

The United States of America

Virtually every conscious step of the Administration of Pres. Barack Obama and the overwhelming Democratic Party majority in Congress has been to increase the size and role of government in the economy and society, and to decrease, limit, and control the position of private enterprise and capital formation.  Given that this progressively contracts and ultimately eliminates production, and reduces the inherent asset base of the country — its raw materials and productive intellect — to a null value, the tradable value of the US currency will inevitably decline. We cannot be swayed by the enormous wealth of the North American continent.  Almost all areas have an inherent wealth of some kind, but assets left idle in the ground or infertile in the brain define countries which fail, or are not victorious in their quest for unbridled sovereignty.

Thus, a decline in currency value is exacerbated, or accelerated, by the increasing supply of money, inextricably depreciating its value, particularly at a time of decreasing productivity in vital perishable and non-perishable output.

The US Obama Administration has focused entirely on an agenda of expanding government — the seizure of the envied (and often ephemeral) “wealth” of the producers — without addressing the process of facilitating the production of essential commodities and goods.  Even the USSR and the People’s Republic of China, during their communist periods, focused — albeit badly — on the production of goods and services, when they realized that the “wealth” to be “redistributed” existed only as the result of production and innovation.  The US, meanwhile, heavily as a result of policies of the former Clinton Administration, has “outsourced” production, and the State — that is, the Government — cannot easily, in the US, become the producer.

Pres. Obama has addressed the US’ economic crisis by expanding government, and government-related, employment in non-productive sectors, while at the same time blaming and punishing the private sector for all of the US’ ills.  Empowered by the extended franchise, this was the politics of envy now becoming enabled.

Moreover, the populist, short-term response to the major oil-spill in the Gulf of Mexico was clearly geared toward (a) transforming a crisis into an opportunity to pursue a green energy agenda by highlighting the evils of the fossil fuels on which the US remains dependent; (b) ensuring that the President was not blamed for the poor crisis response; and (c) ensuring that the Democratic Party did not suffer from the crisis in the November 2010 mid-term Congressional elections.

The result of all the Obama initiatives has been to expand government and reduce or absolutely control and tax the private sector, even though, without the private sector, the US has no viable export or self-sustaining capability. The net effect has been to mirror — and overtake — the situation in which, for example, Germany found itself a decade ago: without the ability to retain capital investment or attract new capital investment.

And in order to restrain capital flight from the US, the Obama Administration seeks to further control worldwide earnings of US corporations and citizens. For other reasons, the US, believing that it still dominates the technology arena, has imposed greater and greater restrictions on international exports of technology through its ITAR (International Traffic in Arms Regulations) and the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

All of this conspires to limit investment in US manufacturing and restrict foreign interest in US exports because the regulations are being enforced merely for political punitive reasons. The US is making itself increasingly unappealing to foreign investors and has, as this writer has noted, made the appeal of the US dollar as the global reserve currency evaporate, saved, for the moment, only by the lack of a ready alternative. That situation will change within a very few years.

Thus, the US has, in the space of a couple of years: (i) so dramatically inflated money supply that the value of the dollar is only shored up by the lack of international alternative currencies to act as reserve trading currencies; (ii) so dramatically inflated public debt, without stimulating economic growth, that US economic performance will continue to decline on a national and a per capita basis while competitive economies, such as the PRC and Russia, will grow, reducing strategic differentials; (iii) severely punished the private sector, thereby reducing the opportunities and incentives for strategic capital formation, and in particular punishing the industrial production and energy sectors, almost ensuring major dislocation to the delivery of US basic needs in the near-term; and (iv) so blatantly reduced its strategic capabilities through all of these actions and in its diplomatic and military posture as to guarantee a reduction in US strategic credibility. Concurrent with all of this is an increasingly punitive taxation framework.

The near-term impact will include rising domestic energy prices, possibly even before the November 2010 mid-term Congressional elections, which could result in the Democratic Party losing its substantial majority in both Houses.  Even on this matter, Democratic Party ideologues have attempted to suggest that this is exactly what the country needs: expensive energy in order to facilitate change to “green” solutions. This defies the historical reality that pre-eminent powers must always have vast energy surpluses and use.

So much damage has been done to the US strategic posture in just two years (although building on a base of inefficiencies which have been growing since the end of the Cold War), in many respects equal to the 1917 Russian Revolution (but without the bloodshed), that it is difficult to forecast whether — because of a changing global environment — the US can, within a decade or two, recover its strategic authority and leadership.

Domestically, the massively statist and interventionist approaches of the Obama Administration have polarized the country, and the response will be reactive rather than innovative, inducing a period of isolation and nationalism, but with grave difficulty in rebuilding confidence from the international investment community.

Europe

Artificial, wealth-induced complacency following the end of the Cold War led to fury when economic collapse inevitably occurred in 2010, leading to draconian restraint in public spending in many societies, but particularly Greece and Spain. It is said that tourists are warned not to feed bears in Yellowstone National Park (in the US) because the bears do not understand when the tourists have run out of food. State-fed populations in Europe, the US, and Australia (see below) equally do not understand when the free ride is over, and work must recommence.

Germany, France, and the United Kingdom have begun the arduous path back to recovery, but the euro may, as a currency, have been irrevocably damaged, and the European Union itself may have spent the term of its virility. Clearly, the wealth-induced complacency, which had the compounding effect of allowing a decline in a sense of national survival and national identity among the European Union (EU) component states, has led now to a revived — but as yet unrealized — sense of nationalism.

This is beginning to lead to the recognition of the cohesive national efficiency required for survival and competitiveness. It can be said that the EU destroyed nationalism, without replacing it with any mechanism to create a new sense of social cohesion, thus removing Europe’s capability for economic competitiveness, self-defense, or ability to define a new culture (and identity) to replace the national identities.

Had the British Labour Party Government of outgoing Prime Minister Gordon Brown persisted in office with his slavishly doctrinaire governance — and demonstrably unworkable socialism, led by a privileged élite of Labour mandarins wallowing at the trough — it is possible that an economic recovery in the UK would have been problematic. It may still be problematic. And in this, Brown was a prototype Obama, with his rank sense of entitlement.

Even now, the British political psyche is fractured along geographic lines, and, wealth-induced, considers itself effectively “post-industrial”, and therefore beyond the need for a manufacturing (or even agricultural base). Thus, even though the UK is now far more dependent on a maritime trade base than at any time in its history, it is incapable of defending or projecting that maritime base; neither does it have the wherewithal to trade.

Australia

The Australian Government has — like the Obama Administration in the US and the Brown Administration in the UK — demonstrated its absolute lack of experience in management, economics, or real-life work skills. A decision by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd to impose a new “super tax” of some 40 percent on resource companies — miners, who produce most of Australia’s export wealth — suddenly highlighted the reality that the mining companies did not need to put their investment into Australian projects.

This “tax and spend” approach so damaged Prime Minister Rudd’s popularity in the run-up to a November 2010 election, that his deputy Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, an extreme left-wing feminist, mounted a rapid campaign within the ruling Labor Party to overthrow him.  But apart from some temporary back-peddling on the Resources Super Profits Tax until the next election is out of the way, don’t expect incoming Prime Minister Gillard — the first Australian female head-of-government and the most left-wing ever — to back off her punitive stance against the private sector.

The Australian Government’s punitive tax approach, initiated by Rudd but likely to continue for as long as Labor governs, also highlighted the fact that foreign investors did not need to invest in Australia, and that capital could move — as it always does — away from draconian tax regimes.  As Chilean Mines Minister Laurence Goldborne said in June 2010, “Just because you have resources doesn’t guarantee investment.” This is something which the governments of most African states know.

In Australia, the realization of the over-reaching greed — and envy-inspired approach of the proposed new tax laws — in turn led much of the ruling Australian Labor Party (ALP) and the profoundly leftist Australian media to begin their drift away from Rudd, leaving him with the prospect that he could either be abandoned as party leader before the late-2010 general elections, or be faced with the prospect of becoming Australia’s first one-term Prime Minister.

Gillard’s unbridled ambition also saw to that. The question remains as to whether she will be able to win the November 2010 general election. A more important question remains, however, as to whether the markets will still be there when the ruin of trust in Australian export and investment reliability is addressed by a future government. The People’s Republic of China (PRC), Australia’s major export client state, and Russia are now developing vast iron ore reserves on their mutual border, possibly — in the near future — obviating the need for much of what Australia exports.

In the meantime, both Kevin Rudd and the opposition Liberal Party have essentially embraced the move by Australia to see itself as a pseudo-post-industrial society, gradually eroding the independent and innovative manufacturing sector which had been a hallmark of Australian economic growth.  A pseudo-post-industrial society is one which believes that it can live solely on the intrinsic value of its currency, without the necessity to sustain a balanced agricultural and industrial base to preserve sovereign independence. A true post-industrial society — something thus far a utopian dream — can produce all of its food and goods with a minute fraction of its population, which would largely be left to address intellectual pursuits.

Australia, thus, faces a major challenge to its comfort, wealth, and security when value perceptions, investment, and clients evaporate. We see, then, in the very deliberate acts of envy and entitlement politics, the seeds of national collapse in Australia, the US, and Western Europe.

Conclusions

Some of the Western powers have slumped before, and recovered. The United States has yet to demonstrate this resilience.  Other Western societies have slumped, and have yet been protected by a strong regional system so that their societies could prosper under foreign protection.  The Netherlands, Spain, and Portugal, for example, retained stable and individual prosperous societies and yet never recovered their strategic leadership, relying, instead, on the power of their region for economic and security protection.  States which remain dependent on others for their protection never fully regain their wealth and freedom.

States such as New Zealand depend on their greater neighbors for protection.  But wither New Zealand if Australia fails?  Wither the Netherlands today if the European Union fails?  And wither the United States if its fortunes erode? Re-birth is, as Britain has found through history, as did Rome, more arduous than that first, pure flush of strategic victory.

The West is at its watershed, not because of a threat from a less-productive society. The collapse of the West is not because Islam is at the gates. Islam is at the gates because of the collapse of the West.

Analysis. By Gregory R. Copley, Editor, GIS/Defense & Foreign Affairs.

http://oilprice.com/Geo-Politics/International/The-New-Civil-Wars-Within-the-West.html
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: G M on July 05, 2010, 02:25:18 PM
Very well said.
Title: Civil war on multiple fronts.
Post by: ccp on July 09, 2010, 08:22:05 AM
1)  big vs little government
2)  class warfare (distribute wealth)
3)  race/cultural warfare (get even white Europeans)

But not only in the domestic context but Bamster has elevated it to a global context.

It is astonishing to see a DOJ so obviously reverse-racist and the MSM literally supporting them.

Title: Beware those Black Swans
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 13, 2010, 08:33:30 PM
http://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2010/07/debt-system-mother-black

 

Beware those Black Swans
Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Published 05 July 2010

The bestselling economist Nassim Nicholas Taleb argues that we can’t make the world financial system immune to shocks –– but we can make sure it’s much more robust by building randomness into our planning.



After completing my book The Black Swan, I spent some time meditating on the fragility of systems with the illusion of stability. This convinced me that the banking system was the mother of all accidents waiting to happen. I explained in the book that the best teachers of wisdom are the eldest, because they may have picked up invisible tricks that are absent from our epistemic routines and which help them survive in a world more complex than the one we think we understand. So being old implies a higher degree of resistance to "Black Swans" (events with the following three attributes: they lie outside the realm of regular expectations; they carry an extreme impact; and human nature makes us concoct explanations for their occurrence after the fact).

Take Mother Nature, which is clearly a complex system, with webs of interdependence, non-linearities and a robust ecology (otherwise it would have blown up a long time ago). It is a very old person with an impeccable memory. Mother Nature does not develop Alz­heimer's - and there is evidence that even humans would not easily lose brain functions with age if they took long walks, avoided sugar, bread, white rice and stock-market investments, and refrained from taking economics classes or reading the New York Times.

Let me summarise my ideas of how Mother Nature deals with the Black Swan. First, she likes redundancies. Look at the human body. We have two eyes, two lungs, two kidneys, even two brains (with the possible exception of company executives) - and each has more capacity than is needed ordinarily. So redundan­cy equals insurance, and the apparent inefficiencies are associated with the costs of maintain­ing these spare parts and the energy needed to keep them around in spite of their idleness.

The exact opposite of redundancy is naive optimisation. The reason I tell people to avoid attending an (orthodox) economics class and argue that economics will fail us is the following: economics is largely based on notions of naive optimisation, mathematised (poorly) by Paul Samuelson - and these mathematics have contributed massively to the construction of an error-prone society. An economist would find it inefficient to carry two lungs and two kidneys - consider the costs involved in transporting these heavy items across the savannah. Such optimisation would, eventually, kill you, after the first accident, the first "outlier". Also, consider that if we gave Mother Nature to economists, it would dispense with individual kidneys - since we do not need them all the time, it would be more "efficient" if we sold ours and used a central kidney on a time-share basis. You could also lend your eyes at night, since you do not need them to dream.

Almost every major idea in conventional economics fails under the modification of some assumption, or what is called "perturbation", where you change one parameter or take a parameter henceforth assumed to be fixed and stable by the theory, and make it random. Take the notion of comparative advantage, supposedly discovered by David Ricardo, and which has oiled the wheels of globalisation. The idea is that countries should focus on "what they do best". So one country should specialise in wine, another in clothes, even though one of them might be better at both. But consider what would happen to the country if the price of wine fluctuated. A simple perturbation around this assumption leads one to reach the opposite conclusion to Ricardo. Mother Nature does not like overspecialisation, as it limits evolution and weakens the animals.

This explains why I found the current ideas on globalisation (such as those promoted by the journalist Thomas Friedman) too naive, and too dangerous for society - unless one takes into account the side effects. Globalisation might give the appearance of efficiency, but the operating leverage and the degrees of interaction between parts will cause small cracks in one spot to percolate through the entire system.

The debt taboo
The same idea applies to debt: it makes you very fragile under perturbations. We currently learn in business schools to engage in borrowing, against all historical traditions (all Mediterranean cultures developed over time a dogma against debt). "Felix qui nihil debet", goes the Roman proverb: "Happy is he who owes nothing." Grandmothers who survived the Great Depression would have advised doing the exact opposite of getting into debt: have several years of income in cash before any personal risk-taking. Had the banks done the same, and kept high cash reserves while taking more aggressive risks with a smaller portion of their port­folios, there would have been no crisis.

Documents dating back to the Babylonians show the ills of debt, and Near Eastern religions banned it. This tells me that one of the purposes of religious traditions has been to enforce prohibitions to protect people against their own epistemic arrogance. Why? Debt implies a strong statement about the future, and a high degree of reliance on forecasts. If you borrow $100 and invest in a project, you still owe $100 even if you fail in the project (but you do a lot better in case you succeed). So debt is dangerous if you are overconfident about the future and are Black Swan-blind - which we all tend to be. And forecasting is harmful since people (especially governments) borrow in response to a forecast (or use the forecast as a cognitive excuse to borrow). My "Scandal of Prediction" (bogus predictions that seem to be there to satisfy psychological needs) is compounded by the "Scandal of Debt": borrowing makes you more vulnerable to forecast error.

Just as Mother Nature likes redundancies, so she abhors anything that is too big. The largest land animal is the elephant, and there is a reason for that. If I went on a rampage and shot an elephant, I might be put in jail and get yelled at by my mother, but I would hardly disturb the ecology of Mother Nature. On the other hand, my point about banks in my book - that if you shot a large bank, I would "shiver at the consequences" and that "if one falls, they all fall" - was subsequently illustrated by events: one bank failure, Lehman Brothers, in September 2008, brought down the entire edifice.

The crisis of 2008 provides an illustration of the need for robustness. Over the past 2,500 years of recorded ideas, only fools and Platonists have believed in engineered utopias. We shouldn't think that we can correct mistakes and eliminate randomness from social and economic life. The challenge, rather, is to ensure that human mistakes and miscalculations remain confined, and to avoid them spreading through the system - just the way Mother Nature does it. Reducing randomness increases exposure to Black Swans.

My dream is to have a true "epistemocracy"; that is, a society robust against expert errors, forecasting errors and hubris, one that can be resistant to the incompetence of politicians, regulators, economists, central bankers, bank­ers, policy wonks and epidemiologists.Here are ten principles for a Black Swan-robust society.

What is fragile should break early while it's still small: Nothing should ever become too big to fail. Evolution in economic life helps those with the maximum amount of hidden risks become the biggest.

No socialisation of losses and privatisation of gains: Whatever may need to be bailed out should be nationalised; whatever does not need a bailout should be free, small and risk-bearing. We got ourselves into the worst of capitalism and socialism. In France, in the 1980s, the Socialists took over the banks. In the US in the 2000s, the banks took over the government. This is surreal.

People who drove a school bus blindfolded (and crashed it) should never be given a new bus: The economics establishment lost its legitimacy with the failure of the system in 2008. Find the smart people whose hands are clean to get us out of this mess.

Don't let someone making an "incentive" bonus manage a nuclear plant - or your financial risks: Odds are he would cut every corner on safety to show "profits" from these savings while claiming to be "conservative". Bonuses don't accommodate the hidden risks of blow-ups. It is the asymmetry of the bonus system that got us here. No incentives without disincentives.

Time to definancialise
Compensate complexity with simplicity: Complexity from globalisation and highly networked economic life needs to be countered by simplicity in financial products. Complex systems survive thanks to slack and redundancy, not debt and optimisation.

Do not give children sticks of dynamite, even if they come with a warning label: Complex financial products need to be banned because nobody understands them, and few are rational enough to know it. We need to protect citizens from themselves, from bankers selling them "hedging" products, and from gullible regulators who listen to economic theorists.

Only Ponzi schemes should depend on confidence: Governments should never need to "restore confidence". Cascading rumours are a product of complex systems. Governments cannot stop the rumours. We just need to be able to shrug off rumours, to be robust to them. Do not give an addict more drugs if he has withdrawal pains: Using leverage to cure the problems of too much leverage is not homoeopathy, it's denial. The debt crisis is not a temporary problem, it's a structural one. We need rehab.

Citizens should not depend on financial assets as a repository of value and rely on fallible "expert" advice for their retirement: Economic life should be definancialised. We should learn not to use markets as warehouses of value.

Make an omelette with the broken eggs: The crisis of 2008 was not a problem to fix with makeshift repairs. We will have to remake the system before it does so itself. Let us move voluntarily into a robust economy by helping what needs to be broken break on its own, converting debt into equity, marginalising the economics and business school establishments, banning leveraged buyouts, putting bankers where they belong, clawing back the bonuses of those who got us here and teaching people to navigate a world with fewer certainties. Then we will see an economic life closer to our biological environment: smaller firms and no leverage - a world in which entrepreneurs, not bankers, take the risks, and in which companies are born and die every day without making the news.
Title: interesting thought piece: re. Black Swans
Post by: DougMacG on July 14, 2010, 08:50:04 AM
I agree strongly (in part) with the creative thought process in this piece.  Ever since studying human physiology in medical school (as an undergrad elective; NOT a med student) I have long believed that business and economic designers should study the intelligent design within human subsystems and found in nature's ecosystems for ideas inspiration to improve business and public services systems performance.  This author makes that point extremely well.

OTOH it seems he carries it too far with his presumption that we can design our economy out further with even greater central control (if I read him correctly) rather than erring on the side of economic freedoms allowing us to make personal choices and errors as individuals, businesses and nations.

For example he criticizes the concept of comparative advantage in globalization.  I agree with his point only to the point that public policies certain should not be made to exaggerate that phenomenon, but would warn that the loss of economic freedom required to prevent over-specialization would be worse than the problem or risk IMHO.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 14, 2010, 08:56:26 AM
I too find that there are several passages with which I disagree.  I posted it because of the influence his Black Swan book has had.

I don't even understand what he means with this one:

"Citizens should not depend on financial assets as a repository of value and rely on fallible "expert" advice for their retirement: Economic life should be definancialised. We should learn not to use markets as warehouses of value."

I'm confused, what form does he think savings should take?
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: DougMacG on July 14, 2010, 09:44:38 AM
Quoting: "Citizens should not depend on financial assets as a repository of value and rely on fallible "expert" advice for their retirement: Economic life should be definancialised. We should learn not to use markets as warehouses of value." -  Crafty: "I'm confused, what form does he think savings should take?"

In my case, and after the tech debacle, my retirement is entirely in real estate(hard assets/non-financial).  What could possibly go wrong with that?  :-(   :-o  :x  Besides the crash of values, I will need increasing amounts of financial assets just to pay the property taxes or lose (again) all I have saved and invested.

Still his piece is enlightening and I was not previously familiar with his work.  I would like to see someone take and run with the best aspects of it.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Freki on July 14, 2010, 10:04:24 AM
When you have to pay rent to the government (property taxes) to keep your property, Liberty is at stake!!!!

Freki
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Rarick on July 15, 2010, 03:26:13 AM
To get definancialized, I think you need to find some sort of "self- sustaining property", something like what used to be called the family farm.  There is a whole structure around owning enough land/ resources on that land that has been built up, and I think it favors corporate/lobbyist issues more than "the people".  Freki's one liner has a pretty sharp point, and a blunt weight to it when you think about it.  How many families have to give up their "solid base of resource" because taxes become too onerous, and they end up selling out to a larger business farm to pay the tax debt off and move to the city "to make a living".  A couple of generations later, you have what we have now.  5% of the population is still "out in the green" raising food for everyone else. 95% is suffering a certain "wage slavery" codependancy in the city with no real means of coping with a crisis without some sort of ready cash reserve.  That generally seems to be really hard to create too without some serious hard work (quality of life killing hard), and a lot of luck.

?????
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 15, 2010, 07:37:52 AM
Freki is dead on. 
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: DougMacG on July 15, 2010, 12:55:19 PM
Freki: "When you have to pay rent to the government (property taxes) to keep your property, Liberty is at stake!!!!"

Crafty: "Freki is dead on."
-----

Agree! If I don't pay the property taxes which are slightly more than 100% of my take home income, I lose the properties.  If I sell the properties I have to pay tax on a 20-30 year gain in one year boosting all other income into soak-the-rich rates.  There is no income averaging anymore.  I would have to pay federal tax on the inflation component of the gain - that might be all of it in some cases.  I would have to pay state tax at the highest rate because states tax capital gains including the inflation component gain (which is no gain at all) as ordinary income.  I can't sell this year because of depressed markets flooded with foreclosures.  Next year the tax rates go up.  Not exactly efficient or low impact taxation.

If your nest egg were all put in gold bullion all of your life, you would be in the similar situation of being taxed heavily on an inflationary gain.  And it's all inflationary gain because it is the exact same gold that you bought in the first place.

So much for hard, non-financial assets for prosperity, to remove risk and to simplify your life.
Title: The Homogeneity of the Ruling Class, 1
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on July 16, 2010, 03:24:13 PM
Not a big fan of the American Spectator as it often struck me as the right's version of the Daily Kos or Democratic Underground, and indeed this piece taken from it has its shrill moments, starts slowly, and is really freaking long. With that said, the thesis of this piece has a resonance that grew the more I read it:

The American Spectator

home

FEATURE

America's Ruling Class -- And the Perils of Revolution

By Angelo M. Codevilla from the July 2010 - August 2010 issue

As over-leveraged investment houses began to fail in September 2008, the leaders of the Republican and Democratic parties, of major corporations, and opinion leaders stretching from the National Review magazine (and the Wall Street Journal) on the right to the Nation magazine on the left, agreed that spending some $700 billion to buy the investors' "toxic assets" was the only alternative to the U.S. economy's "systemic collapse." In this, President George W. Bush and his would-be Republican successor John McCain agreed with the Democratic candidate, Barack Obama. Many, if not most, people around them also agreed upon the eventual commitment of some 10 trillion nonexistent dollars in ways unprecedented in America. They explained neither the difference between the assets' nominal and real values, nor precisely why letting the market find the latter would collapse America. The public objected immediately, by margins of three or four to one.

When this majority discovered that virtually no one in a position of power in either party or with a national voice would take their objections seriously, that decisions about their money were being made in bipartisan backroom deals with interested parties, and that the laws on these matters were being voted by people who had not read them, the term "political class" came into use. Then, after those in power changed their plans from buying toxic assets to buying up equity in banks and major industries but refused to explain why, when they reasserted their right to decide ad hoc on these and so many other matters, supposing them to be beyond the general public's understanding, the American people started referring to those in and around government as the "ruling class." And in fact Republican and Democratic office holders and their retinues show a similar presumption to dominate and fewer differences in tastes, habits, opinions, and sources of income among one another than between both and the rest of the country. They think, look, and act as a class.

Although after the election of 2008 most Republican office holders argued against the Troubled Asset Relief Program, against the subsequent bailouts of the auto industry, against the several "stimulus" bills and further summary expansions of government power to benefit clients of government at the expense of ordinary citizens, the American people had every reason to believe that many Republican politicians were doing so simply by the logic of partisan opposition. After all, Republicans had been happy enough to approve of similar things under Republican administrations. Differences between Bushes, Clintons, and Obamas are of degree, not kind. Moreover, 2009-10 establishment Republicans sought only to modify the government's agenda while showing eagerness to join the Democrats in new grand schemes, if only they were allowed to. Sen. Orrin Hatch continued dreaming of being Ted Kennedy, while Lindsey Graham set aside what is true or false about "global warming" for the sake of getting on the right side of history. No prominent Republican challenged the ruling class's continued claim of superior insight, nor its denigration of the American people as irritable children who must learn their place. The Republican Party did not disparage the ruling class, because most of its officials are or would like to be part of it.

Never has there been so little diversity within America's upper crust. Always, in America as elsewhere, some people have been wealthier and more powerful than others. But until our own time America's upper crust was a mixture of people who had gained prominence in a variety of ways, who drew their money and status from different sources and were not predictably of one mind on any given matter. The Boston Brahmins, the New York financiers, the land barons of California, Texas, and Florida, the industrialists of Pittsburgh, the Southern aristocracy, and the hardscrabble politicians who made it big in Chicago or Memphis had little contact with one another. Few had much contact with government, and "bureaucrat" was a dirty word for all. So was "social engineering." Nor had the schools and universities that formed yesterday's upper crust imposed a single orthodoxy about the origins of man, about American history, and about how America should be governed. All that has changed.

Today's ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits. These amount to a social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins (against minorities and the environment), and saints. Using the right words and avoiding the wrong ones when referring to such matters -- speaking the "in" language -- serves as a badge of identity. Regardless of what business or profession they are in, their road up included government channels and government money because, as government has grown, its boundary with the rest of American life has become indistinct. Many began their careers in government and leveraged their way into the private sector. Some, e.g., Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, never held a non-government job. Hence whether formally in government, out of it, or halfway, America's ruling class speaks the language and has the tastes, habits, and tools of bureaucrats. It rules uneasily over the majority of Americans not oriented to government.

The two classes have less in common culturally, dislike each other more, and embody ways of life more different from one another than did the 19th century's Northerners and Southerners -- nearly all of whom, as Lincoln reminded them, "prayed to the same God." By contrast, while most Americans pray to the God "who created and doth sustain us," our ruling class prays to itself as "saviors of the planet" and improvers of humanity. Our classes' clash is over "whose country" America is, over what way of life will prevail, over who is to defer to whom about what. The gravity of such divisions points us, as it did Lincoln, to Mark's Gospel: "if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand."

The Political Divide

Important as they are, our political divisions are the iceberg's tip. When pollsters ask the American people whether they are likely to vote Republican or Democrat in the next presidential election, Republicans win growing pluralities. But whenever pollsters add the preferences "undecided," "none of the above," or "tea party," these win handily, the Democrats come in second, and the Republicans trail far behind. That is because while most of the voters who call themselves Democrats say that Democratic officials represent them well, only a fourth of the voters who identify themselves as Republicans tell pollsters that Republican officeholders represent them well. Hence officeholders, Democrats and Republicans, gladden the hearts of some one-third of the electorate -- most Democratic voters, plus a few Republicans. This means that Democratic politicians are the ruling class's prime legitimate representatives and that because Republican politicians are supported by only a fourth of their voters while the rest vote for them reluctantly, most are aspirants for a junior role in the ruling class. In short, the ruling class has a party, the Democrats. But some two-thirds of Americans -- a few Democratic voters, most Republican voters, and all independents -- lack a vehicle in electoral politics.

Sooner or later, well or badly, that majority's demand for representation will be filled. Whereas in 1968 Governor George Wallace's taunt "there ain't a dime's worth of difference" between the Republican and Democratic parties resonated with only 13.5 percent of the American people, in 1992 Ross Perot became a serious contender for the presidency (at one point he was favored by 39 percent of Americans vs. 31 percent for G.H.W. Bush and 25 percent for Clinton) simply by speaking ill of the ruling class. Today, few speak well of the ruling class. Not only has it burgeoned in size and pretense, but it also has undertaken wars it has not won, presided over a declining economy and mushrooming debt, made life more expensive, raised taxes, and talked down to the American people. Americans' conviction that the ruling class is as hostile as it is incompetent has solidified. The polls tell us that only about a fifth of Americans trust the government to do the right thing. The rest expect that it will do more harm than good and are no longer afraid to say so.

While Europeans are accustomed to being ruled by presumed betters whom they distrust, the American people's realization of being ruled like Europeans shocked this country into well nigh revolutionary attitudes. But only the realization was new. The ruling class had sunk deep roots in America over decades before 2008. Machiavelli compares serious political diseases to the Aetolian fevers -- easy to treat early on while they are difficult to discern, but virtually untreatable by the time they become obvious.

Far from speculating how the political confrontation might develop between America's regime class -- relatively few people supported by no more than one-third of Americans -- and a country class comprising two-thirds of the country, our task here is to understand the divisions that underlie that confrontation's unpredictable future. More on politics below.

The Ruling Class

Who are these rulers, and by what right do they rule? How did America change from a place where people could expect to live without bowing to privileged classes to one in which, at best, they might have the chance to climb into them? What sets our ruling class apart from the rest of us?

The most widespread answers -- by such as the Times's Thomas Friedman and David Brooks -- are schlock sociology. Supposedly, modern society became so complex and productive, the technical skills to run it so rare, that it called forth a new class of highly educated officials and cooperators in an ever less private sector. Similarly fanciful is Edward Goldberg's notion that America is now ruled by a "newocracy": a "new aristocracy who are the true beneficiaries of globalization -- including the multinational manager, the technologist and the aspirational members of the meritocracy." In fact, our ruling class grew and set itself apart from the rest of us by its connection with ever bigger government, and above all by a certain attitude.

Other explanations are counterintuitive. Wealth? The heads of the class do live in our big cities' priciest enclaves and suburbs, from Montgomery County, Maryland, to Palo Alto, California, to Boston's Beacon Hill as well as in opulent university towns from Princeton to Boulder. But they are no wealthier than many Texas oilmen or California farmers, or than neighbors with whom they do not associate -- just as the social science and humanities class that rules universities seldom associates with physicians and physicists. Rather, regardless of where they live, their social-intellectual circle includes people in the lucrative "nonprofit" and "philanthropic" sectors and public policy. What really distinguishes these privileged people demographically is that, whether in government power directly or as officers in companies, their careers and fortunes depend on government. They vote Democrat more consistently than those who live on any of America's Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Streets. These socioeconomic opposites draw their money and orientation from the same sources as the millions of teachers, consultants, and government employees in the middle ranks who aspire to be the former and identify morally with what they suppose to be the latter's grievances.

Professional prominence or position will not secure a place in the class any more than mere money. In fact, it is possible to be an official of a major corporation or a member of the U.S. Supreme Court (just ask Justice Clarence Thomas), or even president (Ronald Reagan), and not be taken seriously by the ruling class. Like a fraternity, this class requires above all comity -- being in with the right people, giving the required signs that one is on the right side, and joining in despising the Outs. Once an official or professional shows that he shares the manners, the tastes, the interests of the class, gives lip service to its ideals and shibboleths, and is willing to accommodate the interests of its senior members, he can move profitably among our establishment's parts.

If, for example, you are Laurence Tribe in 1984, Harvard professor of law, leftist pillar of the establishment, you can "write" your magnum opus by using the products of your student assistant, Ron Klain. A decade later, after Klain admits to having written some parts of the book, and the other parts are found to be verbatim or paraphrases of a book published in 1974, you can claim (perhaps correctly) that your plagiarism was "inadvertent," and you can count on the Law School's dean, Elena Kagan, to appoint a committee including former and future Harvard president Derek Bok that issues a secret report that "closes" the incident. Incidentally, Kagan ends up a justice of the Supreme Court. Not one of these people did their jobs: the professor did not write the book himself, the assistant plagiarized instead of researching, the dean and the committee did not hold the professor accountable, and all ended up rewarded. By contrast, for example, learned papers and distinguished careers in climatology at MIT (Richard Lindzen) or UVA (S. Fred Singer) are not enough for their questions about "global warming" to be taken seriously. For our ruling class, identity always trumps.

Much less does membership in the ruling class depend on high academic achievement. To see something closer to an academic meritocracy consider France, where elected officials have little power, a vast bureaucracy explicitly controls details from how babies are raised to how to make cheese, and people get into and advance in that bureaucracy strictly by competitive exams. Hence for good or ill, France's ruling class are bright people -- certifiably. Not ours. But didn't ours go to Harvard and Princeton and Stanford? Didn't most of them get good grades? Yes. But while getting into the Ecole Nationale d'Administration or the Ecole Polytechnique or the dozens of other entry points to France's ruling class requires outperforming others in blindly graded exams, and graduating from such places requires passing exams that many fail, getting into America's "top schools" is less a matter of passing exams than of showing up with acceptable grades and an attractive social profile. American secondary schools are generous with their As. Since the 1970s, it has been virtually impossible to flunk out of American colleges. And it is an open secret that "the best" colleges require the least work and give out the highest grade point averages. No, our ruling class recruits and renews itself not through meritocracy but rather by taking into itself people whose most prominent feature is their commitment to fit in. The most successful neither write books and papers that stand up to criticism nor release their academic records. Thus does our ruling class stunt itself through negative selection. But the more it has dumbed itself down, the more it has defined itself by the presumption of intellectual superiority.

The Faith

Its attitude is key to understanding our bipartisan ruling class. Its first tenet is that "we" are the best and brightest while the rest of Americans are retrograde, racist, and dysfunctional unless properly constrained. How did this replace the Founding generation's paradigm that "all men are created equal"?

The notion of human equality was always a hard sell, because experience teaches us that we are so unequal in so many ways, and because making one's self superior is so tempting that Lincoln called it "the old serpent, you work I'll eat." But human equality made sense to our Founding generation because they believed that all men are made in the image and likeness of God, because they were yearning for equal treatment under British law, or because they had read John Locke.

It did not take long for their paradigm to be challenged by interest and by "science." By the 1820s, as J. C. Calhoun was reading in the best London journals that different breeds of animals and plants produce inferior or superior results, slave owners were citing the Negroes' deficiencies to argue that they should remain slaves indefinitely. Lots of others were reading Ludwig Feuerbach's rendition of Hegelian philosophy, according to which biblical injunctions reflect the fantasies of alienated human beings or, in the young Karl Marx's formulation, that ethical thought is "superstructural" to material reality. By 1853, when Sen. John Pettit of Ohio called "all men are created equal" "a self-evident lie," much of America's educated class had already absorbed the "scientific" notion (which Darwin only popularized) that man is the product of chance mutation and natural selection of the fittest. Accordingly, by nature, superior men subdue inferior ones as they subdue lower beings or try to improve them as they please. Hence while it pleased the abolitionists to believe in freeing Negroes and improving them, it also pleased them to believe that Southerners had to be punished and reconstructed by force. As the 19th century ended, the educated class's religious fervor turned to social reform: they were sure that because man is a mere part of evolutionary nature, man could be improved, and that they, the most highly evolved of all, were the improvers.

Thus began the Progressive Era. When Woodrow Wilson in 1914 was asked "can't you let anything alone?" he answered with, "I let everything alone that you can show me is not itself moving in the wrong direction, but I am not going to let those things alone that I see are going down-hill." Wilson spoke for the thousands of well-off Americans who patronized the spas at places like Chautauqua and Lake Mohonk. By such upper-middle-class waters, progressives who imagined themselves the world's examples and the world's reformers dreamt big dreams of establishing order, justice, and peace at home and abroad. Neither were they shy about their desire for power. Wilson was the first American statesman to argue that the Founders had done badly by depriving the U.S. government of the power to reshape American society. Nor was Wilson the last to invade a foreign country (Mexico) to "teach [them] to elect good men."
Title: The Homogeneity of the Ruling Class, 2
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on July 16, 2010, 03:25:29 PM
World War I and the chaos at home and abroad that followed it discredited the Progressives in the American people's eyes. Their international schemes had brought blood and promised more. Their domestic management had not improved Americans' lives, but given them a taste of arbitrary government, including Prohibition. The Progressives, for their part, found it fulfilling to attribute the failure of their schemes to the American people's backwardness, to something deeply wrong with America. The American people had failed them because democracy in its American form perpetuated the worst in humanity. Thus Progressives began to look down on the masses, to look on themselves as the vanguard, and to look abroad for examples to emulate.

The cultural divide between the "educated class" and the rest of the country opened in the interwar years. Some Progressives joined the "vanguard of the proletariat," the Communist Party. Many more were deeply sympathetic to Soviet Russia, as they were to Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Not just the Nation, but also the New York Times and National Geographic found much to be imitated in these regimes because they promised energetically to transcend their peoples' ways and to build "the new man." Above all, our educated class was bitter about America. In 1925 the American Civil Liberties Union sponsored a legal challenge to a Tennessee law that required teaching the biblical account of creation. The ensuing trial, radio broadcast nationally, as well as the subsequent hit movie Inherit the Wind, were the occasion for what one might have called the Chautauqua class to drive home the point that Americans who believed in the Bible were willful ignoramuses. As World War II approached, some American Progressives supported the Soviet Union (and its ally, Nazi Germany) and others Great Britain and France. But Progressives agreed on one thing: the approaching war should be blamed on the majority of Americans, because they had refused to lead the League of Nations. Darryl Zanuck produced the critically acclaimed movie [Woodrow] Wilson featuring Cedric Hardwicke as Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, who allegedly brought on the war by appealing to American narrow-mindedness against Wilson's benevolent genius.

Franklin Roosevelt brought the Chautauqua class into his administration and began the process that turned them into rulers. FDR described America's problems in technocratic terms. America's problems would be fixed by a "brain trust" (picked by him). His New Deal's solutions -- the alphabet-soup "independent" agencies that have run America ever since -- turned many Progressives into powerful bureaucrats and then into lobbyists. As the saying goes, they came to Washington to do good, and stayed to do well.

As their number and sense of importance grew, so did their distaste for common Americans. Believing itself "scientific," this Progressive class sought to explain its differences from its neighbors in "scientific" terms. The most elaborate of these attempts was Theodor Adorno's widely acclaimed The Authoritarian Personality (1948). It invented a set of criteria by which to define personality traits, ranked these traits and their intensity in any given person on what it called the "F scale" (F for fascist), interviewed hundreds of Americans, and concluded that most who were not liberal Democrats were latent fascists. This way of thinking about non-Progressives filtered down to college curricula. In 1963-64 for example, I was assigned Herbert McCloskey's Conservatism and Personality (1958) at Rutgers's Eagleton Institute of Politics as a paradigm of methodological correctness. The author had defined conservatism in terms of answers to certain questions, had defined a number of personality disorders in terms of other questions, and run a survey that proved "scientifically" that conservatives were maladjusted ne'er-do-well ignoramuses. (My class project, titled "Liberalism and Personality," following the same methodology, proved just as scientifically that liberals suffered from the very same social diseases, and even more amusing ones.)

The point is this: though not one in a thousand of today's bipartisan ruling class ever heard of Adorno or McCloskey, much less can explain the Feuerbachian-Marxist notion that human judgments are "epiphenomenal" products of spiritual or material alienation, the notion that the common people's words are, like grunts, mere signs of pain, pleasure, and frustration, is now axiomatic among our ruling class. They absorbed it osmotically, second -- or thirdhand, from their education and from companions. Truly, after Barack Obama described his opponents' clinging to "God and guns" as a characteristic of inferior Americans, he justified himself by pointing out he had said "what everybody knows is true." Confident "knowledge" that "some of us, the ones who matter," have grasped truths that the common herd cannot, truths that direct us, truths the grasping of which entitles us to discount what the ruled say and to presume what they mean, made our Progressives into a class long before they took power.
Title: The Homogeneity of the Ruling Class, 3
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on July 16, 2010, 03:26:11 PM
The Agenda: Power

Our ruling class's agenda is power for itself. While it stakes its claim through intellectual-moral pretense, it holds power by one of the oldest and most prosaic of means: patronage and promises thereof. Like left-wing parties always and everywhere, it is a "machine," that is, based on providing tangible rewards to its members. Such parties often provide rank-and-file activists with modest livelihoods and enhance mightily the upper levels' wealth. Because this is so, whatever else such parties might accomplish, they must feed the machine by transferring money or jobs or privileges -- civic as well as economic -- to the party's clients, directly or indirectly. This, incidentally, is close to Aristotle's view of democracy. Hence our ruling class's standard approach to any and all matters, its solution to any and all problems, is to increase the power of the government -- meaning of those who run it, meaning themselves, to profit those who pay with political support for privileged jobs, contracts, etc. Hence more power for the ruling class has been our ruling class's solution not just for economic downturns and social ills but also for hurricanes and tornadoes, global cooling and global warming. A priori, one might wonder whether enriching and empowering individuals of a certain kind can make Americans kinder and gentler, much less control the weather. But there can be no doubt that such power and money makes Americans ever more dependent on those who wield it. Let us now look at what this means in our time.

Dependence Economics

By taxing and parceling out more than a third of what Americans produce, through regulations that reach deep into American life, our ruling class is making itself the arbiter of wealth and poverty. While the economic value of anything depends on sellers and buyers agreeing on that value as civil equals in the absence of force, modern government is about nothing if not tampering with civil equality. By endowing some in society with power to force others to sell cheaper than they would, and forcing others yet to buy at higher prices -- even to buy in the first place -- modern government makes valuable some things that are not, and devalues others that are. Thus if you are not among the favored guests at the table where officials make detailed lists of who is to receive what at whose expense, you are on the menu. Eventually, pretending forcibly that valueless things have value dilutes the currency's value for all.

Laws and regulations nowadays are longer than ever because length is needed to specify how people will be treated unequally. For example, the health care bill of 2010 takes more than 2,700 pages to make sure not just that some states will be treated differently from others because their senators offered key political support, but more importantly to codify bargains between the government and various parts of the health care industry, state governments, and large employers about who would receive what benefits (e.g., public employee unions and auto workers) and who would pass what indirect taxes onto the general public. The financial regulation bill of 2010, far from setting univocal rules for the entire financial industry in few words, spends some 3,000 pages (at this writing) tilting the field exquisitely toward some and away from others. Even more significantly, these and other products of Democratic and Republican administrations and Congresses empower countless boards and commissions arbitrarily to protect some persons and companies, while ruining others. Thus in 2008 the Republican administration first bailed out Bear Stearns, then let Lehman Brothers sink in the ensuing panic, but then rescued Goldman Sachs by infusing cash into its principal debtor, AIG. Then, its Democratic successor used similarly naked discretionary power (and money appropriated for another purpose) to give major stakes in the auto industry to labor unions that support it. Nowadays, the members of our ruling class admit that they do not read the laws. They don't have to. Because modern laws are primarily grants of discretion, all anybody has to know about them is whom they empower.

By making economic rules dependent on discretion, our bipartisan ruling class teaches that prosperity is to be bought with the coin of political support. Thus in the 1990s and 2000s, as Democrats and Republicans forced banks to make loans for houses to people and at rates they would not otherwise have considered, builders and investors had every reason to make as much money as they could from the ensuing inflation of housing prices. When the bubble burst, only those connected with the ruling class at the bottom and at the top were bailed out. Similarly, by taxing the use of carbon fuels and subsidizing "alternative energy," our ruling class created arguably the world's biggest opportunity for making money out of things that few if any would buy absent its intervention. The ethanol industry and its ensuing diversions of wealth exist exclusively because of subsidies. The prospect of legislation that would put a price on carbon emissions and allot certain amounts to certain companies set off a feeding frenzy among large companies to show support for a "green agenda," because such allotments would be worth tens of billions of dollars. That is why companies hired some 2,500 lobbyists in 2009 to deepen their involvement in "climate change." At the very least, such involvement profits them by making them into privileged collectors of carbon taxes. Any "green jobs" thus created are by definition creatures of subsidies -- that is, of privilege. What effect creating such privileges may have on "global warming" is debatable. But it surely increases the number of people dependent on the ruling class, and teaches Americans that satisfying that class is a surer way of making a living than producing goods and services that people want to buy.

Beyond patronage, picking economic winners and losers redirects the American people's energies to tasks that the political class deems more worthy than what Americans choose for themselves. John Kenneth Galbraith's characterization of America as "private wealth amidst public squalor" (The Affluent Society, 1958) has ever encapsulated our best and brightest's complaint: left to themselves, Americans use land inefficiently in suburbs and exurbs, making it necessary to use energy to transport them to jobs and shopping. Americans drive big cars, eat lots of meat as well as other unhealthy things, and go to the doctor whenever they feel like it. Americans think it justice to spend the money they earn to satisfy their private desires even though the ruling class knows that justice lies in improving the community and the planet. The ruling class knows that Americans must learn to live more densely and close to work, that they must drive smaller cars and change their lives to use less energy, that their dietary habits must improve, that they must accept limits in how much medical care they get, that they must divert more of their money to support people, cultural enterprises, and plans for the planet that the ruling class deems worthier. So, ever-greater taxes and intrusive regulations are the main wrenches by which the American people can be improved (and, yes, by which the ruling class feeds and grows).

The 2010 medical law is a template for the ruling class's economic modus operandi: the government taxes citizens to pay for medical care and requires citizens to purchase health insurance. The money thus taken and directed is money that the citizens themselves might have used to pay for medical care. In exchange for the money, the government promises to provide care through its "system." But then all the boards, commissions, guidelines, procedures, and "best practices" that constitute "the system" become the arbiters of what any citizen ends up getting. The citizen might end up dissatisfied with what "the system" offers. But when he gave up his money, he gave up the power to choose, and became dependent on all the boards and commissions that his money also pays for and that raise the cost ofcare. Similarly, in 2008 the House Ways and Means Committee began considering a plan to force citizens who own Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs) to transfer those funds into government-run "guaranteed retirement accounts." If the government may force citizens to buy health insurance, by what logic can it not force them to trade private ownership and control of retirement money for a guarantee as sound as the government itself? Is it not clear that the government knows more about managing retirement income than individuals?

Who Depends on Whom?

In Congressional Government (1885) Woodrow Wilson left no doubt: the U.S. Constitution prevents the government from meeting the country's needs by enumerating rights that the government may not infringe. ("Congress shall make no law..." says the First Amendment, typically.) Our electoral system, based on single member districts, empowers individual voters at the expense of "responsible parties." Hence the ruling class's perpetual agenda has been to diminish the role of the citizenry's elected representatives, enhancing that of party leaders as well as of groups willing to partner in the government's plans, and to craft a "living" Constitution in which restrictions on government give way to "positive rights" -- meaning charters of government power.

Consider representation. Following Wilson, American Progressives have always wanted to turn the U.S. Congress from the role defined by James Madison's Federalist #10, "refine and enlarge the public's view," to something like the British Parliament, which ratifies government actions. Although Britain's electoral system -- like ours, single members elected in historic districts by plurality vote -- had made members of Parliament responsive to their constituents in ancient times, by Wilson's time the growing importance of parties made MPs beholden to party leaders. Hence whoever controls the majority party controls both Parliament and the government.

In America, the process by which party has become (almost) as important began with the Supreme Court's 1962 decision in Baker v. Carr which, by setting the single standard "one man, one vote" for congressional districts, ended up legalizing the practice of "gerrymandering," concentrating the opposition party's voters into as few districts as possible while placing one's own voters into as many as possible likely to yield victories. Republican and Democratic state legislatures have gerrymandered for a half century. That is why today's Congress consists more and more of persons who represent their respective party establishments -- not nearly as much as in Britain, but heading in that direction. Once districts are gerrymandered "safe" for one party or another, the voters therein count less because party leaders can count more on elected legislators to toe the party line.

To the extent party leaders do not have to worry about voters, they can choose privileged interlocutors, representing those in society whom they find most amenable. In America ever more since the 1930s -- elsewhere in the world this practice is ubiquitous and long-standing -- government has designated certain individuals, companies, and organizations within each of society's sectors as (junior) partners in elaborating laws and administrative rules for those sectors. The government empowers the persons it has chosen over those not chosen, deems them the sector's true representatives, and rewards them. They become part of the ruling class.

Thus in 2009-10 the American Medical Association (AMA) strongly supported the new medical care law, which the administration touted as having the support of "the doctors" even though the vast majority of America's 975,000 physicians opposed it. Those who run the AMA, however, have a government contract as exclusive providers of the codes by which physicians and hospitals bill the government for their services. The millions of dollars that flow thereby to the AMA's officers keep them in line, while the impracticality of doing without the billing codes tamps down rebellion in the doctor ranks. When the administration wanted to bolster its case that the state of Arizona's enforcement of federal immigration laws was offensive to Hispanics, the National Association of Chiefs of Police -- whose officials depend on the administration for their salaries -- issued a statement that the laws would endanger all Americans by raising Hispanics' animosity. This reflected conversations with the administration rather than a vote of the nation's police chiefs.

Similarly, modern labor unions are ever less bunches of workers banding together and ever more bundled under the aegis of an organization chosen jointly by employers and government. Prototypical is the Service Employees International Union, which grew spectacularly by persuading managers of government agencies as well as of publicly funded private entities that placing their employees in the SEIU would relieve them of responsibility. Not by being elected by workers' secret ballots did the SEIU conquer workplace after workplace, but rather by such deals, or by the union presenting what it claims are cards from workers approving of representation. The union gets 2 percent of the workers' pay, which it recycles as contributions to the Democratic Party, which it recycles in greater power over public employees. The union's leadership is part of the ruling class's beating heart.

The point is that a doctor, a building contractor, a janitor, or a schoolteacher counts in today's America insofar as he is part of the hierarchy of a sector organization affiliated with the ruling class. Less and less do such persons count as voters.

Ordinary people have also gone a long way toward losing equal treatment under law. The America described in civics books, in which no one could be convicted or fined except by a jury of his peers for having violated laws passed by elected representatives, started disappearing when the New Deal inaugurated today's administrative state -- in which bureaucrats make, enforce, and adjudicate nearly all the rules. Today's legal -- administrative texts are incomprehensibly detailed and freighted with provisions crafted exquisitely to affect equal individuals unequally. The bureaucrats do not enforce the rules themselves so much as whatever "agency policy" they choose to draw from them in any given case. If you protest any "agency policy" you will be informed that it was formulated with input from "the public." But not from the likes of you.

Disregard for the text of laws -- for the dictionary meaning of words and the intentions of those who wrote them -- in favor of the decider's discretion has permeated our ruling class from the Supreme Court to the lowest local agency. Ever since Oliver Wendell Holmes argued in 1920 (Missouri v. Holland) that presidents, Congresses, and judges could not be bound by the U.S. Constitution regarding matters that the people who wrote and ratified it could not have foreseen, it has become conventional wisdom among our ruling class that they may transcend the Constitution while pretending allegiance to it. They began by stretching such constitutional terms as "interstate commerce" and "due process," then transmuting others, e.g., "search and seizure," into "privacy." Thus in 1973 the Supreme Court endowed its invention of "privacy" with a "penumbra" that it deemed "broad enough to encompass a woman's decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy." The court gave no other constitutional reasoning, period. Perfunctory to the point of mockery, this constitutional talk was to reassure the American people that the ruling class was acting within the Constitution's limitations. By the 1990s federal courts were invalidating amendments to state constitutions passed by referenda to secure the "positive rights" they invent, because these expressions of popular will were inconsistent with the constitution they themselves were construing.

By 2010 some in the ruling class felt confident enough to dispense with the charade. Asked what in the Constitution allows Congress and the president to force every American to purchase health insurance, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi replied: "Are you kidding? Are you kidding?" No surprise then that lower court judges and bureaucrats take liberties with laws, regulations, and contracts. That is why legal words that say you are in the right avail you less in today's America than being on the right side of the persons who decide what they want those words to mean.

As the discretionary powers of officeholders and of their informal entourages have grown, the importance of policy and of law itself is declining, citizenship is becoming vestigial, and the American people become ever more dependent.
Title: The Homogeneity of the Ruling Class, 4
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on July 16, 2010, 03:26:53 PM
Disaggregating and Dispiriting

The ruling class is keener to reform the American people's family and spiritual lives than their economic and civic ones. In no other areas is the ruling class's self-definition so definite, its contempt for opposition so patent, its Kulturkampf so open. It believes that the Christian family (and the Orthodox Jewish one too) is rooted in and perpetuates the ignorance commonly called religion, divisive social prejudices, and repressive gender roles, that it is the greatest barrier to human progress because it looks to its very particular interest -- often defined as mere coherence against outsiders who most often know better. Thus the family prevents its members from playing their proper roles in social reform. Worst of all, it reproduces itself.

Since marriage is the family's fertile seed, government at all levels, along with "mainstream" academics and media, have waged war on it. They legislate, regulate, and exhort in support not of "the family" -- meaning married parents raising children -- but rather of "families," meaning mostly households based on something other than marriage. The institution of no-fault divorce diminished the distinction between cohabitation and marriage -- except that husbands are held financially responsible for the children they father, while out-of-wedlock fathers are not. The tax code penalizes marriage and forces those married couples who raise their own children to subsidize "child care" for those who do not. Top Republicans and Democrats have also led society away from the very notion of marital fidelity by precept as well as by parading their affairs. For example, in 1997 the Democratic administration's secretary of defense and the Republican Senate's majority leader (joined by the New York Times et al.) condemned the military's practice of punishing officers who had extramarital affairs. While the military had assumed that honoring marital vows is as fundamental to the integrity of its units as it is to that of society, consensus at the top declared that insistence on fidelity is "contrary to societal norms." Not surprisingly, rates of marriage in America have decreased as out-of-wedlock births have increased. The biggest demographic consequence has been that about one in five of all households are women alone or with children, in which case they have about a four in 10 chance of living in poverty. Since unmarried mothers often are or expect to be clients of government services, it is not surprising that they are among the Democratic Party's most faithful voters.

While our ruling class teaches that relationships among men, women, and children are contingent, it also insists that the relationship between each of them and the state is fundamental. That is why such as Hillary Clinton have written law review articles and books advocating a direct relationship between the government and children, effectively abolishing the presumption of parental authority. Hence whereas within living memory school nurses could not administer an aspirin to a child without the parents' consent, the people who run America's schools nowadays administer pregnancy tests and ship girls off to abortion clinics without the parents' knowledge. Parents are not allowed to object to what their children are taught. But the government may and often does object to how parents raise children. The ruling class's assumption is that what it mandates for children is correct ipso facto, while what parents do is potentially abusive. It only takes an anonymous accusation of abuse for parents to be taken away in handcuffs until they prove their innocence. Only sheer political weight (and in California, just barely) has preserved parents' right to homeschool their children against the ruling class's desire to accomplish what Woodrow Wilson so yearned: "to make young gentlemen as unlike their fathers as possible."

At stake are the most important questions: What is the right way for human beings to live? By what standard is anything true or good? Who gets to decide what? Implicit in Wilson's words and explicit in our ruling class's actions is the dismissal, as the ways of outdated "fathers," of the answers that most Americans would give to these questions. This dismissal of the American people's intellectual, spiritual, and moral substance is the very heart of what our ruling class is about. Its principal article of faith, its claim to the right to decide for others, is precisely that it knows things and operates by standards beyond others' comprehension.

While the unenlightened ones believe that man is created in the image and likeness of God and that we are subject to His and to His nature's laws, the enlightened ones know that we are products of evolution, driven by chance, the environment, and the will to primacy. While the un-enlightened are stuck with the antiquated notion that ordinary human minds can reach objective judgments about good and evil, better and worse through reason, the enlightened ones know that all such judgments are subjective and that ordinary people can no more be trusted with reason than they can with guns. Because ordinary people will pervert reason with ideology, religion, or interest, science is "science" only in the "right" hands. Consensus among the right people is the only standard of truth. Facts and logic matter only insofar as proper authority acknowledges them.

That is why the ruling class is united and adamant about nothing so much as its right to pronounce definitive, "scientific" judgment on whatever it chooses. When the government declares, and its associated press echoes that "scientists say" this or that, ordinary people -- or for that matter scientists who "don't say," or are not part of the ruling class -- lose any right to see the information that went into what "scientists say." Thus when Virginia's attorney general subpoenaed the data by which Professor Michael Mann had concluded, while paid by the state of Virginia, that the earth's temperatures are rising "like a hockey stick" from millennial stability -- a conclusion on which billions of dollars' worth of decisions were made -- to investigate the possibility of fraud, the University of Virginia's faculty senate condemned any inquiry into "scientific endeavor that has satisfied peer review standards" claiming that demands for data "send a chilling message to scientists...and indeed scholars in any discipline." The Washington Post editorialized that the attorney general's demands for data amounted to "an assault on reason." The fact that the "hockey stick" conclusion stands discredited and Mann and associates are on record manipulating peer review, the fact that science-by-secret-data is an oxymoron, the very distinction between truth and error, all matter far less to the ruling class than the distinction between itself and those they rule.

By identifying science and reason with themselves, our rulers delegitimize opposition. Though they cannot prevent Americans from worshiping God, they can make it as socially disabling as smoking -- to be done furtively and with a bad social conscience. Though they cannot make Americans wish they were Europeans, they continue to press upon this nation of refugees from the rest of the world the notion that Americans ought to live by "world standards." Each day, the ruling class produces new "studies" that show that one or another of Americans' habits is in need of reform, and that those Americans most resistant to reform are pitiably, perhaps criminally, wrong. Thus does it go about disaggregating and dispiriting the ruled.

Meddling and Apologies

America's best and brightest believe themselves qualified and duty bound to direct the lives not only of Americans but of foreigners as well. George W. Bush's 2005 inaugural statement that America cannot be free until the whole world is free and hence that America must push and prod mankind to freedom was but an extrapolation of the sentiments of America's Progressive class, first articulated by such as Princeton's Woodrow Wilson and Columbia's Nicholas Murray Butler. But while the early Progressives expected the rest of the world to follow peacefully, today's ruling class makes decisions about war and peace at least as much forcibly to tinker with the innards of foreign bodies politic as to protect America. Indeed, they conflate the two purposes in the face of the American people's insistence to draw a bright line between war against our enemies and peace with non-enemies in whose affairs we do not interfere. That is why, from Wilson to Kissinger, the ruling class has complained that the American people oscillate between bellicosity and "isolationism."

Because our ruling class deems unsophisticated the American people's perennial preference for decisive military action or none, its default solution to international threats has been to commit blood and treasure to long-term, twilight efforts to reform the world's Vietnams, Somalias, Iraqs, and Afghanistans, believing that changing hearts and minds is the prerequisite of peace and that it knows how to change them. The apparently endless series of wars in which our ruling class has embroiled America, wars that have achieved nothing worthwhile at great cost in lives and treasure, has contributed to defining it, and to discrediting it -- but not in its own eyes.

Rather, even as our ruling class has lectured, cajoled, and sometimes intruded violently to reform foreign countries in its own image, it has apologized to them for America not having matched that image -- their private image. Woodrow Wilson began this double game in 1919, when he assured Europe's peoples that America had mandated him to demand their agreement to Article X of the peace treaty (the League of Nations) and then swore to the American people that Article X was the Europeans' non-negotiable demand. The fact that the U.S. government had seized control of transatlantic cable communications helped hide (for a while) that the League scheme was merely the American Progressives' private dream. In our time, this double game is quotidian on the evening news. Notably, President Obama apologized to Europe because "the United States has fallen short of meeting its responsibilities" to reduce carbon emissions by taxation. But the American people never assumed such responsibility, and oppose doing so. Hence President Obama was not apologizing for anything that he or anyone he respected had done, but rather blaming his fellow Americans for not doing what he thinks they should do while glossing over the fact that the Europeans had done the taxing but not the reducing. Wilson redux.

Title: The Homogeneity of the Ruling Class, 5
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on July 16, 2010, 03:27:29 PM
Similarly, Obama "apologized" to Europeans because some Americans -- not him and his friends -- had shown "arrogance and been dismissive" toward them, and to the world because President Truman had used the atom bomb to end World War II. So President Clinton apologized to Africans because some Americans held African slaves until 1865 and others were mean to Negroes thereafter -- not himself and his friends, of course. So assistant secretary of state Michael Posner apologized to Chinese diplomats for Arizona's law that directs police to check immigration status. Republicans engage in that sort of thing as well: former Soviet dictator Mikhail Gorbachev tells us that in 1987 then vice president George H. W. Bush distanced himself from his own administration by telling him, "Reagan is a conservative, an extreme conservative. All the dummies and blockheads are with him..." This is all about a class of Americans distinguishing itself from its inferiors. It recalls the Pharisee in the Temple: "Lord, I thank thee that I am not like other men..."

In sum, our ruling class does not like the rest of America. Most of all does it dislike that so many Americans think America is substantially different from the rest of the world and like it that way. For our ruling class, however, America is a work in progress, just like the rest the world, and they are the engineers.

The Country Class

Describing America's country class is problematic because it is so heterogeneous. It has no privileged podiums, and speaks with many voices, often inharmonious. It shares above all the desire to be rid of rulers it regards inept and haughty. It defines itself practically in terms of reflexive reaction against the rulers' defining ideas and proclivities -- e.g., ever higher taxes and expanding government, subsidizing political favorites, social engineering, approval of abortion, etc. Many want to restore a way of life largely superseded. Demographically, the country class is the other side of the ruling class's coin: its most distinguishing characteristics are marriage, children, and religious practice. While the country class, like the ruling class, includes the professionally accomplished and the mediocre, geniuses and dolts, it is different because of its non-orientation to government and its members' yearning to rule themselves rather than be ruled by others.

Even when members of the country class happen to be government officials or officers of major corporations, their concerns are essentially private; in their view, government owes to its people equal treatment rather than action to correct what anyone perceives as imbalance or grievance. Hence they tend to oppose special treatment, whether for corporations or for social categories. Rather than gaming government regulations, they try to stay as far from them as possible. Thus the Supreme Court's 2005 decision in Kelo, which allows the private property of some to be taken by others with better connections to government, reminded the country class that government is not its friend.

Negative orientation to privilege distinguishes the corporate officer who tries to keep his company from joining the Business Council of large corporations who have close ties with government from the fellow in the next office. The first wants the company to grow by producing. The second wants it to grow by moving to the trough. It sets apart the schoolteacher who resents the union to which he is forced to belong for putting the union's interests above those of parents who want to choose their children's schools. In general, the country class includes all those in stations high and low who are aghast at how relatively little honest work yields, by comparison with what just a little connection with the right bureaucracy can get you. It includes those who take the side of outsiders against insiders, of small institutions against large ones, of local government against the state or federal. The country class is convinced that big business, big government, and big finance are linked as never before and that ordinary people are more unequal than ever.

Members of the country class who want to rise in their profession through sheer competence try at once to avoid the ruling class's rituals while guarding against infringing its prejudices. Averse to wheedling, they tend to think that exams should play a major role in getting or advancing in jobs, that records of performance -- including academic ones -- should be matters of public record, and that professional disputes should be settled by open argument. For such people, the Supreme Court's 2009 decision in Ricci, upholding the right of firefighters to be promoted according to the results of a professional exam, revived the hope that competence may sometimes still trump political connections.

Nothing has set the country class apart, defined it, made it conscious of itself, given it whatever coherence it has, so much as the ruling class's insistence that people other than themselves are intellectually and hence otherwise humanly inferior. Persons who were brought up to believe themselves as worthy as anyone, who manage their own lives to their own satisfaction, naturally resent politicians of both parties who say that the issues of modern life are too complex for any but themselves. Most are insulted by the ruling class's dismissal of opposition as mere "anger and frustration" -- an imputation of stupidity -- while others just scoff at the claim that the ruling class's bureaucratic language demonstrates superior intelligence. A few ask the fundamental question: Since when and by what right does intelligence trump human equality? Moreover, if the politicians are so smart, why have they made life worse?

The country class actually believes that America's ways are superior to the rest of the world's, and regards most of mankind as less free, less prosperous, and less virtuous. Thus while it delights in croissants and thinks Toyota's factory methods are worth imitating, it dislikes the idea of adhering to "world standards." This class also takes part in the U.S. armed forces body and soul: nearly all the enlisted, non-commissioned officers and officers under flag rank belong to this class in every measurable way. Few vote for the Democratic Party. You do not doubt that you are amidst the country class rather than with the ruling class when the American flag passes by or "God Bless America" is sung after seven innings of baseball, and most people show reverence. The same people wince at the National Football League's plaintive renditions of the "Star Spangled Banner."

Unlike the ruling class, the country class does not share a single intellectual orthodoxy, set of tastes, or ideal lifestyle. Its different sectors draw their notions of human equality from different sources: Christians and Jews believe it is God's law. Libertarians assert it from Hobbesian and Darwinist bases. Many consider equality the foundation of Americanism. Others just hate snobs. Some parts of the country class now follow the stars and the music out of Nashville, Tennessee, and Branson, Missouri -- entertainment complexes larger than Hollywood's -- because since the 1970s most of Hollywood's products have appealed more to the mores of the ruling class and its underclass clients than to those of large percentages of Americans. The same goes for "popular music" and television. For some in the country class Christian radio and TV are the lodestone of sociopolitical taste, while the very secular Fox News serves the same purpose for others. While symphonies and opera houses around the country, as well as the stations that broadcast them, are firmly in the ruling class's hands, a considerable part of the country class appreciates these things for their own sake. By that very token, the country class's characteristic cultural venture -- the homeschool movement -- stresses the classics across the board in science, literature, music, and history even as the ruling class abandons them.

Congruent Agendas?

Each of the country class's diverse parts has its own agenda, which flows from the peculiar ways in which the ruling class impacts its concerns. Independent businesspeople are naturally more sensitive to the growth of privileged relations between government and their competitors. Persons who would like to lead their community rue the advantages that Democratic and Republican party establishments are accruing. Parents of young children and young women anxious about marriage worry that cultural directives from on high are dispelling their dreams. The faithful to God sense persecution. All resent higher taxes and loss of freedom. More and more realize that their own agenda's advancement requires concerting resistance to the ruling class across the board.

Not being at the table when government makes the rules about how you must run your business, knowing that you will be required to pay more, work harder, and show deference for the privilege of making less money, is the independent businessman's nightmare. But what to do about it? In our time the interpenetration of government and business -- the network of subsidies, preferences, and regulations -- is so thick and deep, the people "at the table" receive and recycle into politics so much money, that independent businesspeople cannot hope to undo any given regulation or grant of privilege. Just as no manufacturer can hope to reduce the subsidies that raise his fuel costs, no set of doctors can shield themselves from the increased costs and bureaucracy resulting from government mandates. Hence independent business's agenda has been to resist the expansion of government in general, and of course to reduce taxes. Pursuit of this agenda with arguments about economic efficiency and job creation -- and through support of the Republican Party -- usually results in enough relief to discourage more vigorous remonstrance. Sometimes, however, the economic argument is framed in moral terms: "The sum of good government," said Thomas Jefferson, is not taking "from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned." For government to advantage some at others' expense, said he, "is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association." In our time, more and more independent businesspeople have come to think of their economic problems in moral terms. But few realize how revolutionary that is.

As bureaucrats and teachers' unions disempowered neighborhood school boards, while the governments of towns, counties, and states were becoming conduits for federal mandates, as the ruling class reduced the number and importance of things that American communities could decide for themselves, America's thirst for self-governance reawakened. The fact that public employees are almost always paid more and have more generous benefits than the private sector people whose taxes support them only sharpened the sense among many in the country class that they now work for public employees rather than the other way around. But how to reverse the roles? How can voters regain control of government? Restoring localities' traditional powers over schools, including standards, curriculum, and prayer, would take repudiating two generations of Supreme Court rulings. So would the restoration of traditional "police" powers over behavior in public places. Bringing public employee unions to heel is only incidentally a matter of cutting pay and benefits. As self-governance is crimped primarily by the powers of government personified in its employees, restoring it involves primarily deciding that any number of functions now performed and the professional specialties who perform them, e.g., social workers, are superfluous or worse. Explaining to one's self and neighbors why such functions and personnel do more harm than good, while the ruling class brings its powers to bear to discredit you, is a very revolutionary thing to do.

America's pro-family movement is a reaction to the ruling class's challenges: emptying marriage of legal sanction, promoting abortion, and progressively excluding parents from their children's education. Americans reacted to these challenges primarily by sorting themselves out. Close friendships and above all marriages became rarer between persons who think well of divorce, abortion, and government authority over children and those who do not. The homeschool movement, for which the Internet became the great facilitator, involves not only each family educating its own children, but also extensive and growing social, intellectual, and spiritual contact among like-minded persons. In short, the part of the country class that is most concerned with family matters has taken on something of a biological identity. Few in this part of the country class have any illusion, however, that simply retreating into private associations will long save their families from societal influences made to order to discredit their ways. But stopping the ruling class's intrusions would require discrediting its entire conception of man, of right and wrong, as well as of the role of courts in popular government. That revolutionary task would involve far more than legislation.

Title: The Homogeneity of the Ruling Class, 6
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on July 16, 2010, 03:28:01 PM
The ruling class's manifold efforts to discredit and drive worship of God out of public life -- not even the Soviet Union arrested students for wearing crosses or praying, or reading the Bible on school property, as some U.S. localities have done in response to Supreme Court rulings -- convinced many among the vast majority of Americans who believe and pray that today's regime is hostile to the most important things of all. Every December, they are reminded that the ruling class deems the very word "Christmas" to be offensive. Every time they try to manifest their religious identity in public affairs, they are deluged by accusations of being "American Taliban" trying to set up a "theocracy." Let members of the country class object to anything the ruling class says or does, and likely as not their objection will be characterized as "religious," that is to say irrational, that is to say not to be considered on a par with the "science" of which the ruling class is the sole legitimate interpreter. Because aggressive, intolerant secularism is the moral and intellectual basis of the ruling class's claim to rule, resistance to that rule, whether to the immorality of economic subsidies and privileges, or to the violation of the principle of equal treatment under equal law, or to its seizure of children's education, must deal with secularism's intellectual and moral core. This lies beyond the boundaries of politics as the term is commonly understood.

The Classes Clash

The ruling class's appetite for deference, power, and perks grows. The country class disrespects its rulers, wants to curtail their power and reduce their perks. The ruling class wears on its sleeve the view that the rest of Americans are racist, greedy, and above all stupid. The country class is ever more convinced that our rulers are corrupt, malevolent, and inept. The rulers want the ruled to shut up and obey. The ruled want self-governance. The clash between the two is about which side's vision of itself and of the other is right and which is wrong. Because each side -- especially the ruling class -- embodies its views on the issues, concessions by one side to another on any issue tend to discredit that side's view of itself. One side or the other will prevail. The clash is as sure and momentous as its outcome is unpredictable.

In this clash, the ruling class holds most of the cards: because it has established itself as the fount of authority, its primacy is based on habits of deference. Breaking them, establishing other founts of authority, other ways of doing things, would involve far more than electoral politics. Though the country class had long argued along with Edmund Burke against making revolutionary changes, it faces the uncomfortable question common to all who have had revolutionary changes imposed on them: are we now to accept what was done to us just because it was done? Sweeping away a half century's accretions of bad habits -- taking care to preserve the good among them -- is hard enough. Establishing, even reestablishing, a set of better institutions and habits is much harder, especially as the country class wholly lacks organization. By contrast, the ruling class holds strong defensive positions and is well represented by the Democratic Party. But a two to one numerical disadvantage augurs defeat, while victory would leave it in control of a people whose confidence it cannot regain.

Certainly the country class lacks its own political vehicle -- and perhaps the coherence to establish one. In the short term at least, the country class has no alternative but to channel its political efforts through the Republican Party, which is eager for its support. But the Republican Party does not live to represent the country class. For it to do so, it would have to become principles-based, as it has not been since the mid-1860s. The few who tried to make it so the party treated as rebels: Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. The party helped defeat Goldwater. When it failed to stop Reagan, it saddled his and subsequent Republican administrations with establishmentarians who, under the Bush family, repudiated Reagan's principles as much as they could. Barack Obama exaggerated in charging that Republicans had driven the country "into the ditch" all alone. But they had a hand in it. Few Republican voters, never mind the larger country class, have confidence that the party is on their side. Because, in the long run, the country class will not support a party as conflicted as today's Republicans, those Republican politicians who really want to represent it will either reform the party in an unmistakable manner, or start a new one as Whigs like Abraham Lincoln started the Republican Party in the 1850s.

The name of the party that will represent America's country class is far less important than what, precisely, it represents and how it goes about representing it because, for the foreseeable future, American politics will consist of confrontation between what we might call the Country Party and the ruling class. The Democratic Party having transformed itself into a unit with near-European discipline, challenging it would seem to require empowering a rival party at least as disciplined. What other antidote is there to government by one party but government by another party? Yet this logic, though all too familiar to most of the world, has always been foreign to America and naturally leads further in the direction toward which the ruling class has led. Any country party would have to be wise and skillful indeed not to become the Democrats' mirror image.

Yet to defend the country class, to break down the ruling class's presumptions, it has no choice but to imitate the Democrats, at least in some ways and for a while. Consider: The ruling class denies its opponents' legitimacy. Seldom does a Democratic official or member of the ruling class speak on public affairs without reiterating the litany of his class's claim to authority, contrasting it with opponents who are either uninformed, stupid, racist, shills for business, violent, fundamentalist, or all of the above. They do this in the hope that opponents, hearing no other characterizations of themselves and no authoritative voice discrediting the ruling class, will be dispirited. For the country class seriously to contend for self-governance, the political party that represents it will have to discredit not just such patent frauds as ethanol mandates, the pretense that taxes can control "climate change," and the outrage of banning God from public life. More important, such a serious party would have to attack the ruling class's fundamental claims to its superior intellect and morality in ways that dispirit the target and hearten one's own. The Democrats having set the rules of modern politics, opponents who want electoral success are obliged to follow them.

Suppose that the Country Party (whatever its name might be) were to capture Congress, the presidency, and most statehouses. What then would it do? Especially if its majority were slim, it would be tempted to follow the Democrats' plan of 2009-2010, namely to write its wish list of reforms into law regardless of the Constitution and enact them by partisan majorities supported by interest groups that gain from them, while continuing to vilify the other side. Whatever effect this might have, it surely would not be to make America safe for self-governance because by carrying out its own "revolution from above" to reverse the ruling class's previous "revolution from above," it would have made that ruinous practice standard in America. Moreover, a revolution designed at party headquarters would be antithetical to the country class's diversity as well as to the American Founders' legacy.

Achieving the country class's inherently revolutionary objectives in a manner consistent with the Constitution and with its own diversity would require the Country Party to use legislation primarily as a tool to remove obstacles, to instruct, to reintroduce into American life ways and habits that had been cast aside. Passing national legislation is easier than getting people to take up the responsibilities of citizens, fathers, and entrepreneurs.

Reducing the taxes that most Americans resent requires eliminating the network of subsidies to millions of other Americans that these taxes finance, and eliminating the jobs of government employees who administer them. Eliminating that network is practical, if at all, if done simultaneously, both because subsidies are morally wrong and economically counterproductive, and because the country cannot afford the practice in general. The electorate is likely to cut off millions of government clients, high and low, only if its choice is between no economic privilege for anyone and ratifying government's role as the arbiter of all our fortunes. The same goes for government grants to and contracts with so-called nonprofit institutions or non-governmental organizations. The case against all arrangements by which the government favors some groups of citizens is easier to make than that against any such arrangement. Without too much fuss, a few obviously burdensome bureaucracies, like the Department of Education, can be eliminated, while money can be cut off to partisan enterprises such as the National Endowments and public broadcasting. That sort of thing is as necessary to the American body politic as a weight reduction program is essential to restoring the health of any human body degraded by obesity and lack of exercise. Yet shedding fat is the easy part. Restoring atrophied muscles is harder. Reenabling the body to do elementary tasks takes yet more concentration.

The grandparents of today's Americans (132 million in 1940) had opportunities to serve on 117,000 school boards. To exercise responsibilities comparable to their grandparents', today's 310 million Americans would have radically to decentralize the mere 15,000 districts into which public school children are now concentrated. They would have to take responsibility for curriculum and administration away from credentialed experts, and they would have to explain why they know better. This would involve a level of political articulation of the body politic far beyond voting in elections every two years.

If self-governance means anything, it means that those who exercise government power must depend on elections. The shorter the electoral leash, the likelier an official to have his chain yanked by voters, the more truly republican the government is. Yet to subject the modern administrative state's agencies to electoral control would require ordinary citizens to take an interest in any number of technical matters. Law can require environmental regulators or insurance commissioners, or judges or auditors to be elected. But only citizens' discernment and vigilance could make these officials good. Only citizens' understanding of and commitment to law can possibly reverse the patent disregard for the Constitution and statutes that has permeated American life. Unfortunately, it is easier for anyone who dislikes a court's or an official's unlawful act to counter it with another unlawful one than to draw all parties back to the foundation of truth.

How, for example, to remind America of, and to drive home to the ruling class, Lincoln's lesson that trifling with the Constitution for the most heartfelt of motives destroys its protections for all? What if a country class majority in both houses of Congress were to co-sponsor a "Bill of Attainder to deprive Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, and other persons of liberty and property without further process of law for having violated the following ex post facto law..." and larded this constitutional monstrosity with an Article III Section 2 exemption from federal court review? When the affected members of the ruling class asked where Congress gets the authority to pass a bill every word of which is contrary to the Constitution, they would be confronted, publicly, with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's answer to a question on the Congress's constitutional authority to mandate individuals to purchase certain kinds of insurance: "Are you kidding? Are you kidding?" The point having been made, the Country Party could lead public discussions around the country on why even the noblest purposes (maybe even Title II of the Civil Rights Bill of 1964?) cannot be allowed to trump the Constitution.

How the county class and ruling class might clash on each item of their contrasting agendas is beyond my scope. Suffice it to say that the ruling class's greatest difficulty -- aside from being outnumbered -- will be to argue, against the grain of reality, that the revolution it continues to press upon America is sustainable. For its part, the country class's greatest difficulty will be to enable a revolution to take place without imposing it. America has been imposed on enough.

Angelo M. Codevilla is professor emeritus of international relations at Boston University.

http://spectator.org/archives/2010/07/16/americas-ruling-class-and-the/
Title: POTH's Maureen Dowd?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 18, 2010, 08:19:20 AM
On the whole I hold Dowd in utter contempt, but it seems to me that here she makes many telling points.

=============================

Rome Fiddles, We BurnBy MAUREEN DOWD
Published: July 16, 2010
         If the Vatican is trying to restore the impression that its moral sense is intact, issuing a document that equates pedophilia with the ordination of women doesn’t really do that. The Catholic Church continued to heap insult upon injury when it revealed its long-awaited new rules on clergy sex abuse, rules that the Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said signaled a commitment to grasp the nettle with “rigor and transparency.”

The church still believes in its own intrinsic holiness despite all evidence to the contrary. It thinks it’s making huge concessions on the unstoppable abuse scandal when it’s taking baby steps.

The casuistic document did not issue a zero-tolerance policy to defrock priests after they are found guilty of pedophilia; it did not order bishops to report every instance of abuse to the police; it did not set up sanctions on bishops who sweep abuse under the rectory rug; it did not eliminate the statute of limitations for abused children; it did not tell bishops to stop lobbying legislatures to prevent child-abuse laws from being toughened.

There is no moral awakening here. The cruelty and indecency of child abuse once more inspires tactical contrition. All the penitence of the church is grudging and reactive. Church leaders are merely as penitent as they need to be to protect the institution.

Can you imagine such a scene in the confessional?

“Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. I am as sorry as my job or school requires me to be.”

“But my daughter, that is not true penitence. That’s situational penitence.”

After the Belgian police bracingly conducted raids on the church hierarchy, inspired in part by the horrifying case of a boy molested for years by his uncle, the bishop of Bruges, a case that the church ignored and covered up for 25 years, the pope did not applaud the more aggressive tack. He condemned it.

In a remarkable Times story recently, Laurie Goodstein and David Halbfinger debunked the spin that Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger had been one of the more alert officials on the issue of sexual abuse:

“The future pope, it is now clear, was also part of a culture of nonresponsibility, denial, legalistic foot-dragging and outright obstruction. More than any top Vatican official other than John Paul, it was Cardinal Ratzinger who might have taken decisive action in the 1990s to prevent the scandal from metastasizing in country after country, growing to such proportions that it now threatens to consume his own papacy.”

If Roman Polanski were a priest, he’d still be working here.

Stupefyingly, the new Vatican document also links raping children with ordaining women as priests, deeming both “graviora delicta,” or grave offenses. Clerics who attempt to ordain women can now be defrocked.

On Beliefnet, Mark Silk, a professor of religion at Connecticut’s Trinity College, suggested that the stronger threat against women’s ordination is not “a maladroit add-on” but the medieval Vatican’s “main business.”

After the Vatican launched two inquisitions of American nuns, it didn’t seem possible that the archconservative Il Papa and his paternalistic redoubt could get more unenlightened, but they have somehow managed it.

Letting women be priests — which should be seen as a way to help cleanse the church and move it beyond its infantilized and defensive state — is now on the list of awful sins right next to pedophilia, heresy, apostasy and schism.

Archbishop Donald Wuerl of Washington, the chairman of the Committee on Doctrine of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, asserted, “The Catholic Church, through its long and constant teaching, holds that ordination has been, from the beginning, reserved to men, a fact which cannot be changed despite changing times.”

But if it was reserved to celibate men centuries ago simply as a way for the church to keep land, why can’t it be changed? If a society makes strides in not subordinating women, why can’t the church reflect that? If men prove that all-male hierarchies can get shamefully warped, why can’t they embrace the normality of equality? The Vatican’s insistence on male prerogative is misogynistic poppycock — enhancing American Catholics’ disenchantment with Rome.

In The New Republic, Garry Wills wrote about his struggle to come to terms with the sins of his church: Jesus “is the one who said, ‘Whatever you did to any of my brothers, even the lowliest, you did to me.’ That means that the priests abusing the vulnerable young were doing that to Jesus, raping Jesus. Any clerical functionary who shows more sympathy for the predator priests than for their victims instantly disqualified himself as a follower of Jesus. The cardinals said they must care for their own, going to jail if necessary to protect a priest. We say the same thing, but the ‘our own’ we care for are the victimized, the poor, the violated. They are Jesus.”
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: DougMacG on July 19, 2010, 11:44:32 AM
"On the whole I hold Dowd in utter contempt, but it seems to me that here she makes many telling points."

Crafty,  I see you did not necessarily endorse all of her points.

Dowd mixes in a point about letting women be priests, and Rachel here has poked fun on the board at 'the men at the Vatican' regarding women's so called 'reproductive rights',  but Dowd omits the key point that approximately 100% of the offending male priests are gay.  How can there can be serious analysis of what happened without addressing the elephant in the room,  gay men were the pedophiles perpetrating these crimes against children.

I would take more than one lesson here from the Boy Scouts who fought hard to keep out homosexual leaders.  Don't put gay men in a position of power over young boys, sorry - it doesn't work, and it is the right of these groups to chose their leaders.  It is the duty of the jurisdictions to prosecute the crimes, not to re-order the private group.  If the whole order of the Catholic Church was a scam to promote this crime, then they should and would be shut down, but it isn't.

The size and scope of this is unbelievable.  Those who committed the crimes should be hanged IMO, if that was the statutory punishment.  For those who KNEW and merely re-assigned the perps to continue their ways - same. 

Still that does not give outsiders standing to re-order principles within the church like gender inequity or sameness.  If it was, we could go further and requirer Bibles to be printed with the gender order in the Commandments reversed or random: Honor your mother and your father, your father and your mother, in some cases your mother and your mother, as we do not distinguish between the genders.  It doesn't work that way.  I would shy away from calling for change in religions other than stopping the abuse and punishing the guilty.

In the same vein as NCAA penalties on USC long after both the coach and player are gone, the costs of these lawsuits will be paid by the unknowing parishioners, not the perpetrators who abused the children and the broke the trust.
Title: Not that Kunstler: What is it?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 26, 2010, 10:44:53 AM

--------
What Is It?
By James Howard Kunstler
on July 26, 2010 9:26 AM

The New York Times ran a story of curious import this morning: "Mel Gibson Loses Support Abroad." Well, gosh, that's disappointing. And just when we needed him, too. Concern over this pressing matter probably reflects the general mood of the nation these dog days of summer - and these soggy days, indeed, are like living in a dog's mouth - so no wonder the USA has lost its mind, as evidenced by the fact that so many people who ought to know better, in the immortal words of Jim Cramer, don't know anything.

Case in point: I visited the Slate Political Gabfest podcast yesterday. These otherwise excellent, entertaining, highly educated folk (David Plotz, Emily Bazelon, and Daniel Gross, in for vacationing John Dickerson) were discussing the ramifications of the economic situation on the upcoming elections. They were quite clear about not being able to articulate the nature of this economic situation, "...this recession, or whatever you want to call it..." in Ms. Bazelon's words. What's the point of sending these people to Ivy League colleges if they can't make sense of their world.

Let's call this whatever-you-want-to-call-it a compressive deflationary contraction, because that's exactly what it is, an accelerating systemic collapse of activity due to over-investments in hyper-complexity (thank you John Tainter). A number of things are going on in our society that can be described with precision. We've generated too many future claims on wealth that does not exist and has poor prospects of ever being generated. That's what unpayable debt is. We have such a mighty mountain of it that the Federal Reserve can "create" new digital dollars until the cows come home (and learn how to play chamber music), but they will never create enough new money to outpace the disappearance of existing notional money in the form of welshed-on loans. Hence, money will continue to disappear out of the economic system indefinitely, citizens will grow poorer steadily, companies will go out of business, and governments at all levels will not have money to do what they have been organized to do.

This compressive deflationary collapse is not the kind of cyclical "downturn" that we are familiar with during the two-hundred-year-long adventure with industrial expansion - that is, the kind of cyclical downturn caused by the usual exhalations of markets attempting to adjust the flows of supply and demand. This is a structural implosion of markets that have been functionally destroyed by pervasive fraud and swindling in the absence of real productive activity.

The loss of productive activity preceded the fraud and swindling beginning in the 1960s when other nations recovered from the traumas of the world wars and started to out-compete the USA in the production of goods. Personally, I doubt this was the result of any kind of conspiracy, but rather a comprehensible historical narrative that worked to America's disadvantage. Tough noogies for us. The fatal trouble began when we attempted to compensate for this loss of value-creation by ramping up the financial sector to a credit orgy so that every individual and every enterprise and every government could enjoy ever-increasing levels of wealth in a system that no longer really produced wealth.

This was accomplished in the financial sector by "innovating" new tradable securities based on getting something for nothing. That is what the aggregate mischief on Wall Street and its vassal operations was all about. The essence of the fraud was the "securitization" of debt, because the collateral was either inadequate or altogether missing. That's how you get something for nothing. The swindling came in when these worthless certificates were pawned off on credulous "marks" such as pension funds and other assorted investors.

Tragically, everybody in a position to object to these shenanigans failed to issue any warnings or ring the alarm bells - and this includes the entire matrix of adult authority in banking, government (including the law), academia, and a hapless news media. Everyone pretended that the orgy of mortgage-backed securities, collateralized debt and loan obligations, structured investment vehicles, collateralized debt obligations, and other chimeras of capital amounted to things of real value.

Certainly the editors and pundits in the media simply didn't understand the rackets they undertook to report. You can bet that the players on Wall Street made every effort to mystify the media with arcane language, and they succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. (Making multiple billions of dollars by trading worthless certificates based on getting something for nothing must be the ultimate definition of succeeding beyond one's wildest dreams.) It's harder to account for the dimness of the news media. I doubt they were in on the caper. More likely there is a correlation between their low pay and their low capacity. But I wouldn't discount the fog of assumptions and expectations about the way the world is supposed to work that can disable even people of intelligence.

I'm as certain as the day is long that the folks on Wall Street, from the myrmidons in the trading pits to the demigods like John Thain, with his thousand-dollar trash basket, knew that they were trafficking in tainted paper. Many of them deserve to be locked up in the federal penitentiary for years on end, and they probably never will because president Barack Obama lacked the courage to set the dogs of justice after them and now it is too late.

The most confused of any putative authorities are the academic economists, lost in the wilderness of their models and equations and their quaint expectations of the way things ought to go if you can tweak numbers. These are the people who believe with the faith of little children that if you can measure anything you can control it. They will go down in history as the greatest convocation of clowns ever assembled, surpassing all the collected alchemists, priests, and vizeers employed in the 1500 years following the fall of Rome.

It's harder to tell whether the elected officials and their appointees in sensitive places like the Securities and Exchange Commission and the FBI had a clue as to the scale of misconduct in the financial sector, or if they were bought off plain and simple, or just too stupid to understand what was going on all around them. The term "regulatory capture" provides valuable insight. How could Christopher Cox at the SEC fail to notice the stupendous malfeasance in the mortgage-related securities rackets. Why isn't he working for fifty cents a day in the laundry of Allenwood Federal Correctional Facility? Why is the grifter of Countrywide mortgage favors, Christopher Dodd, still free to guzzle the fabled bean soup in the Senate lunch room? I could go on in this vein for two hundred pages, but you get the drift.

The collective failure of authority, whether of intention or oversight or mental deficiency boggles the mind. And it leaves us where we are: in a compressive deflationary contraction, a.k.a. the long emergency. This is not a cyclical recession. It's the end of one thing and the beginning of another thing, another phase of history in which people will have to learn to live differently or perish. I'm convinced that just about very elected official who can be swept out of office will be swept out of office - even if their replacements turn out to be a very unsavory gang of sadists and morons who will certainly make things worse.

But these dog days of summer nobody will be paying attention, even as the markets themselves roll over and puke, as I rather imagine they will between now and Halloween, if not next week.
P.S. I have not come to any conclusions about the fate of the Macondo blow-out and the claims of Matthew Simmons, though I have certainly got a lot of mail about it, some of it very intelligent. The BP oil spill has vanished from the news headlines again as the world waits for the final push at the relief wells. We do know that we are entering the heart of the hurricane season and that will make for some excitement.

http://kunstler.com/blog/2010/07/what-is-it.html
Title: Day by Day: Declaration of Independence
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 26, 2010, 04:20:14 PM
Second post of the day:

http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2010/06/27/
Title: Princess Chelsea
Post by: ccp on July 30, 2010, 10:10:36 AM
I don't care if the Clintons spend whatever they want for their only daughter's wedding.  It is just the hyporcracy of it all.  Chelsea who is some sort of assistant fund raiser for NYU has a building set aside for her that is the size of half a city block!  Marrying her hedge fund guy who is the son of a convicted crook.
NYU which is going global setting up the liberal child of their favorite liberal secretary of state.  The same liberal who feels that succesful people don't pay enough.  The hypocracy of limousine liberals is astounding.  Obviously grooming Chelsea for public office.  This folks, is big money/political power at its worst: 
 
****I'm constantly amazed at how much some money people blow on the Great White Wedding.

But Chelsea Clinton's forthcoming extravaganza takes the cake. The $11,000 cake, reportedly.

So in honor of this weekend's crazy Gilded Age circus, here are seven financial messages for would-be brides, grooms—and their parents.

1. Yes, the wedding-industrial complex marches on. The Age of Austerity? Ha. If you thought the recession was going to kill the GWW, think again. "We're in a recession-resistant industry," says Carley Roney, editor-in-chief of Knot Inc.'s TheKnot, the weddings website. The company's data suggest that the price of the median wedding, which dropped from $19,000 to $17,500 from 2008 to 2009, has now stabilized this year. Revenues rose 16% in the first quarter of 2010.

View Full Image

AFP/Getty Images
 
A sign outside a store in Rhinebeck, N.Y., where Chelsea Clinton and Marc Mezvinsky are to be married on Saturday.
2. Spending a fortune on a wedding is a choice, not a necessity. Chelsea's wedding is likely to cost $2 million to $3 million, says Ms. Roney. But first daughter Jenna Bush managed to hold a somewhat quieter affair for a lot less when she got married two years ago. She invited about 200 guests and held the wedding on her parents' ranch in Texas. It was hardly cheap, but at $100,000, the tab wasn't even in the same ballpark.

3. Spend what you can afford. Sure, the Clintons are spending a lot, but they are rich. Their net worth was estimated at $35 million not long ago. Chelsea is their only child. And Bill gets paid about $250,000 a speech. After taxes, that's about $160,000. So he could clear a $3 million tab for Chelsea's big day with 19 speeches. Even at one speech a day, that's three weeks' work. The average family maybe earns $3,000 in three weeks. Yet they spend about $17,500 on a wedding.

4. Look at the hourly costs. For Chelsea's event, if the ceremony starts at 6 p.m. and the guests party into the small hours, the whole affair may last maybe 11 hours. For $3 million, that's $270,000 an hour. How much fun can anyone have in an hour? Even if you're, say, doing the tango with Oprah Winfrey? Look at the numbers for a regular wedding. A $17,500 event that lasts 11 hours is costing you about $1,500 an hour. If it lasts only, say, six hours, you're spending nearly $3,000 an hour. Enjoy.

More
Rhinebeck Wedding Gridlock Rhinebeck Conspiracy Theory 5. The lifetime cost is off the map. People get angry when I point this out. But if your money earns, say, 4% a year above inflation, every dollar you save at age 20 will grow to about $6 by the time you retire. So that $17,500 will grow to about $100,000. If you're financially secure, maybe it doesn't matter so much. But most middle-class Americans are in a far more precarious situation than they realize. They have saved little, if anything, for their retirement, and they are deeply in debt. (Household debts are about twice what they were a decade ago.) And we've seen what can happen to jobs and wages in a slump. In these circumstances, saving money instead of spending it matters very much.

6. You might—possibly—be able to profit from others' extravagance. For those who still play the market, Knot Inc. may be of speculative interest. With its stock trading at $8, the company's entire market value is down to $270 million. It has about $130 million of cash and equivalents and no debt. Operating cash flow last year was $12 million. Results are due next week. One to watch.

7. How do you cut costs and still have a great wedding? Avoid Saturdays and peak seasons, says Ms. Roney. Avoid fancy venues and big cities. Make it more casual: A lot of the money goes toward those big formal dinners. And invite fewer guests. Five hundred people is going to cost you, even if they're not famous.

Bottom line? Think more like Jenna Bush, and less like Chelsea Clinton.

Write to Brett Arends at brett.arends@wsj.com

Copyright 2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved***
Title: Re: P.C.'s Rant
Post by: prentice crawford on August 01, 2010, 03:05:52 AM
            Yeah, It's A Rant, I Checked It Twice Just To Make Sure; I Haven't Been Feeling The Love Recently:

 After 9/11 I wrote President Bush concerning the security threats from having so many illegal immigrants coming into the country, as well as those that come in legally but then overstay their visas (I think one or two of the 9/11 hijackers, fell into this category), then too is the problem of catch and release, when those caught simply don't show up for their deportation hearing. I also pointed out that the number of Americans killed over the years by criminal acts committed by illegal aliens made the number of Americans killed on 9/11 (terrible as it was), look small in comparison.

 I was quite surprised when I checked my mail a week later and there was a letter from President Bush, that not only thanked me for my suggestions, but also detailed his plans to revamp the entire immigration bureaucracy. He of course did make changes but they had little effect, and with all the talk of amnesty, there was actually a marked increase in the number illegal aliens coming across our southern border. So much for trying to make things better.

 Nothing much has changed since the Obama administration took over on our side of the border, but things have certainly gotten more violent to the south of us. One of the things I mentioned in the letter to President Bush was that if we didn't control our borders, someone else would. Could America's enemies see this as an opportunity? What if one of these drug cartels or human smugging operations became a partner to the global operation of terrorism? I mean there already is a drug connection.
 
 Our politicians are playing Russian roulette with our lives everytime a drug shipment or band of illegal aliens are allowed to violate our border. However, the politicians are also taking a huge risk personally. I doubt that the American people will be so forgiving if another attack happens on our soil. I'm guessing that it's not something our politicians think about because if they did maybe they would show a little more caution and enforce our laws. Maybe we need to be a little more vocal. Let them know that if we are attacked again, because they chose for purely political reasons not to enforce our immigration laws and to secure our borders, then we the People will surely see to it that they pay a terrible price for their dereliction of duty.

 If another attack happens, the People should reach deep into the rotten, corrupt bowels of governmet and drag every bureaucrat and political brown nosing department head, that didn't do their up most to faithfully discharge their duties, out from under their desks, put them on trial, then make them dig the bodies of our fellow citizens out from under whatever disaster they let fall on us, then have them lay the bodies of the dead on the White House lawn and Capital steps. The blood will be on their hands! That's the message.

 As for these judges that interpret the Constitution as being a document designed to protect the government from its people, we need to stand them back on their feet. They've been standing on their heads for so long our Republic is upside down. Is that what you think the Founding Fathers had in mind? Come on! These jerks aren't judges, they are idealogical thieves stealing our freedoms, and putting us at the mercy of corrupt politicians and a enemy that has no mercy! God help us. I would say something corny at this point like, 'Wake up! America!", but that's not the problem. We have been wide awake and listening to sweet nothings in one ear and lies in the other. That's right, they have talked us right out of our tighty whitey's! And be warned, that won't be the worse analogy you'll see me write. :lol:

 Now I know that there will be people out there that say I'm a fear monger. And that's bad, how? A little fear in the heart of the right public servant, could save us another 9/11. I think fear in the hearts of our so called leaders is in short supply right now. They should be afraid, very afraid of failing the American people. At this point they only seem to be concerned with their political base and pushing through a radical agenda. If they were shaking in their boots, as they should be, maybe things wouldn't be in such a mess. We need to take that arrogant smirk off their faces, and humble them in light of the responsibility they have to the People.

 I'm telling you folks, the gun is pointed at our heads and these idiots are pulling the trigger! It's just a matter of time before the loaded chamber comes around. The border could be sealed tomorrow and effective enforcement could start today but they are choosing not to do it. Choosing!
 
 We the People need to get back in control of our government before it's too late and we need to make sure that every politician and government bureaucrat knows that they will be held accountable for what they do, and what they don't do. If not, one of these days the gun they have on us is going to go. Boom!

 They failed us miserably on 9/11 and we gave them a pass, we can't let it slide next time and it's up to you to let them know about it and that way, maybe there won't be a next time. We can't get our virginity back but we can hike up our undies and carry on. I warned you about the analogy. :-D

   By P.C. All Rights Reserved, copyright 2010

Title: We're All Kulaks, Comrade
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on August 10, 2010, 09:36:17 AM
American Kulaks
James Lileks · 12 hours ago

My friend the Crazy Uke is a mortgage guy; he’s getting me another refi. Years ago - oh, decades - we sat up all night in the back booth of a college restaurant and argued politics; now we sit around the kitchen table of the house he helped us buy, sign endless forms and documents, then pour a drink and agree about politics. I changed. He didn’t. As the son of Ukrainian DPs, he had anti-Soviet and anti-statist ideas poured into his marrow as he grew up, and his accounts of his parents’ lives during the famine and the war were not inconsiderable elements in my political education. It’s one thing to have a college bull session about the Cold War; it’s another to argue with a guy who was actually detained by the KGB and kicked out of the Eastern Bloc.

The Ukrainian famine is one of those episodes known more to anti-commies, I suspect; if I’m right about that, it says something about the people who regard such episodes as inconvenient anomalies and insist we talk about smallpox-infested blankets. But I remember hearing about how people were hauled away for harboring wheat - Kulaks! Wreckers! - and so I got a jolt when I read a NYT article last month about the Administration’s pivot on the health-care mandate question. Uh, well, yeah, it’s a tax, I guess, they said, and they cited some interesting Supreme Court law:

In their lawsuit, Florida and other states say: “Congress is attempting to regulate and penalize Americans for choosing not to engage in economic activity. If Congress can do this much, there will be virtually no sphere of private decision-making beyond the reach of federal power.”

In reply, the administration and its allies say that a person who goes without insurance is simply choosing to pay for health care out of pocket at a later date. In the aggregate, they say, these decisions have a substantial effect on the interstate market for health care and health insurance.

In its legal briefs, the Obama administration points to a famous New Deal case, Wickard v. Filburn, in which the Supreme Court upheld a penalty imposed on an Ohio farmer who had grown a small amount of wheat, in excess of his production quota, purely for his own use.

The wheat grown by Roscoe Filburn “may be trivial by itself,” the court said, but when combined with the output of other small farmers, it significantly affected interstate commerce and could therefore be regulated by the government as part of a broad scheme regulating interstate commerce.


If you’ve read Amity Shlaes’ “Forgotten Man,” this isn’t a total surprise, but to put in the modern web vernacular: Wow. Just - wow. So a guy grows wheat for himself, and bang! he’s a Kulak, too - not because he intended to sell the wheat, mind you, but he could have, and everyone did it, then prices would collapse and Walker Evans would have to go out and reshoot the Midwest to capture the new wave of human misery.

Something to keep in mind when someone says “if they can do this, they can do anything.” They’ve already done that. They already can do anything. I don’t know what’s worse: that it still exists as a decision the government could cite, or the fact that the administration thought it would be a good idea to bring it up to defend their tax.

By the way, the Crazy Uke’s parents are still alive, hale and sturdy. They lived long enough to see Ukraine declare its independence; they lived long enough to go home for a visit without Intourist minders.

Things change.

http://www.ricochet.com/conversations/American-Kulaks
Title: Alinsky Reexamined
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on August 11, 2010, 06:19:48 AM
Saul Alinsky: A Complicated Rebel
Nicholas von Hoffman’s new book complicates a right-wing caricature.
 
Radical: A Portrait of Saul Alinsky by Nicholas von Hoffman (Nation Books, 237 pp., $26.95)

Nicholas von Hoffman’s short, breezy, and informative sketch of Saul Alinsky — and of the decade he spent with him working as a community organizer — offers us a very different take on the legendary activist than the narrative we are accustomed to. This is especially the case for those conservatives who consider Alinsky close to the devil. Alinsky made the comparison himself, invoking Lucifer, along with Thomas Paine and Rabbi Hillel, in the epigraphs to his classic, bestselling 1971 guide, Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals. As Alinsky put it, clearly facetiously, Lucifer was “the very first radical . . . who rebelled against the establishment,” and who was so effective “that he . . . won his own kingdom.” But the reality of Alinsky and his work was significantly different from what this tongue-in-cheek self-presentation — and, a fortiori, today’s conservative attacks on Alinsky — would have us believe. He was not a radical believer in Big Government, and he probably would have had serious problems with Barack Obama’s agenda.

Alinsky became famous by organizing ethnic workers in the old Chicago stockyards from 1939 to the end of the 1950s, where he created the Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council as the vehicle to organize them. Because of his work, von Hoffman notes, “what had been an area of ramshackle, near-slum housing tilting this way and that had been rebuilt into a model working-class community of neat bungalow homes.”

Candidly, von Hoffman adds that Alinsky did not challenge the neighborhood’s pattern of segregation, which had “become an impregnable fortification of whites-only exclusionism.” Back in 1919, these same workers played a part in the famous 1919 Chicago-area race riots, in which 500 people, most of them black, were wounded and 38 killed. Alinsky did manage to obtain permission for blacks to have unmolested passage through the Back of the Yards as they were on their way to other places — which seems little by today’s standards, but, as von Hoffman notes, was a major accomplishment then.

As for the Neighborhood Council’s funding, it came not from government largesse, but from — of all things — the illegal-gambling activities of Alinsky’s partner, Joe Meegan. This spoke to Alinsky’s longstanding friendly relations with gangsters, thugs, and the organized-crime syndicates. That source of funding meant that any pressure from government to end racial exclusion would come to naught. Moreover, Alinsky’s belief that the people had to determine their own destiny meant, for him, that if the people wanted an all-white community, they should not be challenged on the matter. Although he wanted integration, and hoped that he could select and induce a few middle-class black families to buy homes in the Back of the Yards neighborhood and then convince whites to accept them, his partner Meegan nixed the idea. “Even public discussion of a Negro family,” von Hoffman writes, “would have the same effect as news that the bubonic plague was loose.” Even fair-minded whites in the area believed that blacks’ moving in meant “slumification, crime, bad schools, and punishing drops in real-estate values,” and hence the simple idea of an interracial neighborhood “would destroy the community and the council.” Alinsky’s code of loyalty to the Back of the Yards Council came before his personal opposition to segregation. (As von Hoffman rationalizes it, “the leaders behind the whites-only policy were his friends.”) The people pursued a policy he abhorred; and he had no choice but to stand with the people.

An even more surprising revelation is that Alinsky admired Sen. Barry Goldwater, whose libertarian objections to the proposed 1964 civil-rights act he shared. Countervailing power from organizations, not decisions made by courts, Alinsky thought, was the only way to achieve permanent change. Thus, von Hoffman tells us, “he was less than enthusiastic about much civil-rights legislation,” and during Goldwater’s run for the presidency, he had at least one secret meeting with the conservative senator, during which they discussed Lyndon Johnson’s civil-rights proposal. “Saul,” von Hoffman writes, “shared the conservative misgivings about the mischief such laws could cause if abused,” but would not publicly oppose the bill, since he had no better idea to propose in its place.

Alinsky also opposed Martin Luther King Jr.’s attempted march in Chicago in 1965, criticizing King for not building a “stable, disciplined, mass-based power organization.” He saw King as a man without local roots, who did not know the community, and who did not have any idea about how to organize it. Von Hoffman writes that King led “a little army stranded inside a vast and hostile terrain,” whose efforts “accomplished nothing except to reinforce the perception” that King “was an outsider.”

But what did Alinsky think about the other major liberal ideas of the time — for example, Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society program, or Robert F. Kennedy’s program for the poor? According to David Horowitz, the conservative activist and author — in his very influential pamphlet “Barack Obama’s Rules for Revolution: The Alinsky Model” — Alinsky’s radical organizers had a responsibility to work “within the system.” They did not follow the path advocated by the New Left, who preferred to utter meaningless calls for “revolution.” Thus, Horowitz writes, they “infiltrated the War on Poverty, made alliances with the Kennedys and the Democratic Party, and secured funds from the federal government. Like termites, they set about to eat away at the foundations of the building in expectation that one day they could cause it to collapse.” While the New Left created riots like that at the Chicago Democratic convention in 1968, “Alinsky’s organizers were insinuating themselves into Johnson’s War on Poverty program and directing federal funds into their own organizations and causes.”

According to von Hoffman, though, Alinsky had nothing but contempt for activists who gladly took money from the government, and hence his own group did not work within or for the government’s War on Poverty programs. Writes von Hoffman:

Although Alinsky is described as some kind of liberal left-winger[,] in actuality big government worried him. He had no use for President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society with its War on Poverty. He used to say that if Washington was going to spend that kind of dough the government might as well station people on the ghetto street corners and hand out hundred-dollar bills to the passing pedestrians. For him governmental action was the last resort, not the ideal one.

Moreover, according to von Hoffman, Alinsky also opposed putting community organizers on the government payroll, as Bobby Kennedy sought to do, since “it made an independent civil life next to impossible.” It also created the conditions by which any administration could use their work for “social and political control.” It would “stifle independent action,” and possibly turn paid organizers “into police spies.” As von Hoffman sees his mentor, Alinsky opposed not only big government, but also large corporations and big labor. What he wanted was not revolution — despite his radical rhetoric meant to appeal to the New Left — but “democratic organizations which could pose countervailing power against modern bureaucracies.” Thus, in von Hoffman’s view, Saul Alinsky was a radical, but a Tory radical or a radical conservative: a man with a libertarian sensibility who supported all the little men fighting against any large structure, whether it was the government, a corporation, or organized labor.

In today’s America, conservatives have paid a great deal of attention to what was — until its recent demise after a series of scandals — the largest and most successful community organization, ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now). Critics have accused the group of electoral fraud, of shakedowns of large banking and manufacturing firms, and of helping to create the housing bubble by fighting to have community banks grant loans to those who had no way to pay them back. Many of the critics claim that the organization, formed in 1970, was inspired by Alinsky’s methods and concepts — but Alinsky had nothing to do with its founding.

This is an important issue, because the great interest Alinsky has for commentators today stems largely from his reputed influence on Barack Obama. One often hears critics of President Obama’s policies proclaim that he is acting “straight out of the Alinsky playbook.” Because Obama was a community organizer for a brief time before going to law school, many people have assumed that, as a disciple of Saul Alinsky, he was committed thereafter to apply Alinsky’s principles as a guide for whatever position he held in life. Many therefore assume that he is now acting on them as president.

It is true that Obama’s mentors were trained by Alinsky’s organization. In re searching a piece for The New Republic in 2007, Ryan Lizza spoke to Gregory Galluzzo, one of the three men who instructed Obama when he became a community organizer. Galluzzo told Lizza that many organizers would start as idealists, and that he urged them to become realists and not be averse to Alinsky’s candid advocacy of gaining power, since “power is good” and “powerlessness is evil.” Galluzzo taught Obama that people have to be organized according to their self-interest, and not on the basis of what Obama himself has characterized as “pie-in-the-sky idealism.”

In 1992, Obama famously worked for a voter-registration group called Project Vote, which was an ACORN partner, and helped Carol Moseley Braun defeat an incumbent U.S. senator in the 1992 Democratic primary. A few years later, Lizza reported, Obama became ACORN’s attorney, and won a decision forcing Illinois to implement the Motor Voter Law, with what the Wall Street Journal’s John Fund called “loose voter-registration requirements that would later be exploited by ACORN employees in an effort to flood voter rolls with fake names.” Obama cited ACORN first on a list he composed in 1996 of key supporters for his campaign for the state senate.

So Obama’s association with ACORN was real, and close. This, combined with the fact that Obama taught Alinsky’s methods when he worked with community organizers, has led many to assume that Alinsky himself approved of ACORN. Von Hoffman, however, challenges this notion. He writes: “[ACORN’s] cheekiness, truculence, and imaginative tactical tropes have an Alinskyan touch but the organization’s handling of money, embezzlement, and nepotism would have drawn his scorn. Nor would he have been comfortable with the large amounts of government money flowing into the organization.” (Emphasis added.) This conclusion is essentially confirmed by the activist and writer John Atlas, whose new pro-ACORN book, Seeds of Change: The Story of ACORN, explains that the group broke with the Alinsky model in a number of ways — most importantly, by applying for and receiving government contracts.

According to von Hoffman, Alinsky had nothing but disdain for the New Left with which Obama was associated. He thought Bill Ayers was wedded to “petulant ego decision making,” as well as a “comic-book leftism whose principal feature was anger at a government which did not do as they bade it. Their foot-stamping anger and humiliation at their failures . . . made them believe they were justified in taking up violence.” He saw the Weather Underground as a group prone to tantrums and “Rumpelstiltskin politics.”

Alinsky’s own approach had some major successes. In Rochester, N.Y., he got Eastman Kodak to agree to hire more blacks. In 1965, he had been approached by ministers from Rochester after Martin Luther King Jr. had turned down an overture from them. This in itself provides an interesting contrast with some of the activism of later times: Alinsky took action after he was asked to intervene by community ministers. This was quite different from the kind of shakedown associated in more recent years with Rev. Jesse Jackson and Rev. Al Sharpton, the kind in which large corporations fill an organization’s coffers with money in exchange for a hands-off agreement.

Yet, even in the Rochester fight, Alinsky’s methods often appeared rather comical, and it is rather hard to believe that they were taken seriously. According to von Hoffman, what Alinsky proposed, and scared the city’s elite with, was a scheduled “fart-in” at the Kodak-sponsored Rochester Symphony. He planned to gather black activists — for whom concert tickets had been bought — for a pre-concert dinner made up exclusively of baked beans. This would be his substitute for sit-ins and picket lines. Alinsky called it a “flatulent blitzkrieg,” and the result of this threat (along with other tactics, including the use of proxies at stockholder meetings) evidently was a settlement in which the city fathers agreed to the demands. In Chicago, he threatened a “piss-in” at O’Hare Airport, which immediately led the city to the bargaining table. That such juvenile tactics worked perhaps says more about the fears of the politicians than the genius of Alinsky.

Alinsky had some impressive backers. Among them was the old giant of the mine workers’ union, John L. Lewis, who advised him and supported him. (Like Lewis, he used Communists as orga nizers on his staff. He disdained the Communist Party and its Marxist and pro-Soviet positions, and regarded its members as “servants of an antidemo cratic foreign power” — but because he valued the organizing skill of individual Communists, he hired them as staffers anyway.) He also bonded with key figures in the Catholic archdiocese of Chicago. The whites he sought to organize were mainly believing Catholics, and thus Alinsky became particularly close to Fr. John O’Grady, whom von Hoffman credits with doing away with clerically dominated local charities and replacing them with charities run by professionals from social-work schools in Catholic colleges and universities. Later, Alinsky became close to the Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain, with whom he regularly corresponded. He also befriended Cardinal Stritch and Fr. Jack Egan, who got the archdiocese to give him the money to launch organizing drives in the 1950s. This constituency is hardly what one thinks of as a force for social revolution in America.

So what were Alinsky’s goals in the end? Von Hoffman does not really answer this question, perhaps because Alinsky never did. Before people decide whether Saul Alinsky was a man with an actual revolutionary plan, they owe it to themselves to take into consideration von Hoffman’s contrary assessment of the father of community organizing.

— Ronald Radosh, an adjunct fellow at the Hudson Institute and a blogger for PajamasMedia.com, is the author of Commies: A Journey through the Old Left, the New Left and the Leftover Left.

http://article.nationalreview.com/439025/saul-alinsky-a-complicated-rebel/ronald-radosh
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 12, 2010, 11:30:59 PM
So, BBG, what do you make of this piece?
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Freki on August 13, 2010, 05:18:25 AM
Mohamed said war deception. Didn't Alinsky say view everything as black and white otherwise nothing gets done? I think he is much more radical than the piece makes out.  Reader beware!
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on August 13, 2010, 08:44:36 AM
This is just corruption plain and simple.  There is just nothing, or no one money can't buy.  Someone at the FHA should go to jail for this nonsense.  Has anyone tried to get a Federal employee fired?   Almost impossible.  Talk about an "club".

****Aug. 13 (Bloomberg) -- The Federal Housing Administration is providing a lifeline to new Manhattan luxury condominiums after sales stalled. Bloomberg's Monica Bertran reports. (Source: Bloomberg)

A one-bedroom apartment is pictured at the 99 John Deco Loft condo building in New York. Photographer: Ramin Talaie/Bloomberg
Whitney Gollinger, marketing chief for a Manhattan condo building with an outdoor movie theater and panoramic city views, is highlighting a different amenity to spur sales: the financial backing of the federal government.

The Federal Housing Administration agreed in March to insure mortgages for apartments at the 98-unit Gramercy Park development, known as Tempo. That enables buyers to make a down payment of as little as 3.5 percent in a building where apartments range from $820,000 to $3 million.

“It’s a government seal of approval,” said Gollinger, a director at the Developments Group of New York-based brokerage Prudential Douglas Elliman Real Estate. “We need as many sales tools as we can have these days, and it’s one more tool.”

The FHA, created in 1934 to make homeownership attainable for low- to moderate-income Americans, is providing a lifeline to new Manhattan luxury condominiums after sales stalled. Buildings featuring pet spas, concierges and rooftop lounges are applying for agency backing to unlock bank financing for purchasers. The FHA guarantees that if a homebuyer defaults on his mortgage, the agency will pay it.

At least nine Manhattan condo developments south of 96th Street have sought approval for FHA backing since the agency loosened its financing rules in December, according to a database of applications kept by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The change allows the FHA to insure loans in new projects where only 30 percent of units are in contract, down from at least 50 percent. About 1,900 apartments in New York’s most expensive neighborhoods would be covered by the applications.

Filling a Void

The agency also offers insurance to half of all mortgages in a single building after previously setting a limit at 30 percent, according to the new standards, which expire in December. The entire property must be approved for a buyer to get backing. Most of those that applied in Manhattan are buildings converted to condos or built since 2007.

The FHA is filling a void left after mortgage-finance agency Fannie Mae tightened its condo lending standards last year. The Washington-based company won’t back loans made in new buildings where fewer than 51 percent of the units are in contract, sometimes setting a requirement as high as 70 percent.

That in turn makes mortgage lenders hesitant to make loans at developments under those thresholds, said Orest Tomaselli, chief executive officer of White Plains, New York-based National Condo Advisors LLC, which advises condominiums on how to adhere to Fannie Mae and FHA standards.

‘Not an Accident’

“It’s not an accident that the FHA is offering this -- not private lenders,” said Christopher Mayer, senior vice dean at Columbia Business School’s Paul Milstein Center for Real Estate in New York. “An unfilled condominium complex is not the kind of thing that a bank looking to rebuild its balance sheet on real estate is looking to do.”

In New York City, the priciest urban U.S. housing market, the FHA insures loans of as much as $729,750, and permits buyers to borrow up to 96.5 percent of the price.

No buildings in Manhattan applied for FHA recognition between 1998 and 2008 -- though in those years the program didn’t require an entire property be approved and condo buyers could seek FHA-insured loans on their own, Tomaselli said.

New development in Manhattan represented 23 percent of the sales market in the second quarter, compared with 35 percent two years earlier, according to New York appraiser Miller Samuel Inc. About 8,700 new apartments in the borough were empty as of June, partly because of a lack of available financing for buyers, said Jonathan Miller, president of the firm.

‘Ironic’ Move

“Something has to happen for this product to be marketable,” Miller said. “I just find the whole thing ironic that FHA is providing financing for luxury housing.”

The FHA loosened the condo rules because of “market conditions,” according to Lemar Wooley, an agency spokesman.

“We are certainly cognizant of falling sales prices, limited availability of liquidity, etc., so we wanted to be flexible,” Wooley wrote in an e-mail. “The risk was considered before issuance of the temporary guidance.”

The new rules are a “game changer,” said Ryan Serhant, vice president at Nest Seekers International, a brokerage with offices in New York and Florida. He’s marketing 99 John Deco Lofts, a 442-unit conversion project in downtown Manhattan that features a “zen” flower garden and Brooklyn Bridge views.

The development, where sales began more than two years ago, had 10 units go into contract with FHA backing since approval in March. The FHA suspended its support for the building Aug. 3, according to the agency website. The property is working to have it reinstated, Serhant said.

Eager for Approval

Angela Ferrara, who markets the Sheffield condos on West 57th Street, checks every day whether the 597-unit property, which applied to the FHA in May, has won approval. Ferrara, vice president of sales for New York-based the Marketing Directors Inc., says she is eager to start touting the FHA backing to potential buyers. That’s a reversal from the past, when government loan programs weren’t necessary -- or advertised.

“People would get the wrong idea, and think it was a different type of government-subsidized product,” Ferrara said. “It was almost regarded as a negative, particularly in the luxury properties.”

Now, she said, “It’s actually became a widely accepted marketing tool.”

The Sheffield promotes amenities such as concierge service, a pet spa and massage rooms, according to the project’s website. A neighborhood guide on the site lists chef Thomas Keller’s four-star restaurant Per Se as a nearby attraction, along with Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall and Tiffany & Co.’s flagship Fifth Avenue store.

‘Great Solution’

The Sheffield’s owner, New York-based Fortress Investment Group LLC, took over the condo conversion project in foreclosure last August after the original developer, Kent Swig, defaulted on a loan. With 56 percent of the converted units sold or in contract, the building has about 230 units left to sell, Ferrara estimates.

FHA is “definitely is a great solution right now,” said Tomaselli of National Condo Advisors, which prepared the FHA applications for Tempo and Sheffield.

“The savvy developers did it first,” Tomaselli said. “But everybody else is catching up.”

In the borough of Brooklyn, FHA support accounted for half of the 29 units sold at the 111 Monroe condos in Clinton Hill and a quarter of apartments in Williamsburg’s NV building, which is sold out after two years on the market, said David Behin, executive vice president at the Developers Group, a New York brokerage for new buildings.

Limits to Success

The FHA’s effectiveness will be limited in Manhattan because apartment prices are higher than in Brooklyn and the insured loan is capped at $729,750, Behin said. The median price of a Manhattan apartment in a new development was $1.4 million in the second quarter, according to Miller Samuel and Prudential Douglas Elliman.

“With apartments over $1 million, FHA isn’t going to help you,” Behin said. “You’d have to put down 30 percent to get the loan of $729,000. And if you have 30 percent to put down, a bank will loan to you without FHA.”

Borrowers backed by FHA are essentially buying mortgage insurance, said Debra Shultz, managing director at Manhattan Mortgage Company Inc. in New York. Buyers pay an upfront premium of 2.25 percent of their loan value, and a monthly fee equal to about 0.5 percent of the loan amount for at least five years, she said.

Nationwide, the FHA insured 21 percent of all mortgages made in the second quarter, or $71.4 billion worth of loans, according to Geremy Bass, publisher of the Inside FHA Lending newsletter. That’s close to the $79.5 billion total value of all FHA-backed loans in 2007.

Rising Defaults

Nine percent of all FHA-insured loans were 90 days or more past due or in the process of foreclosure in the first quarter, compared with 7.4 percent a year earlier, data from the Washington-based Mortgage Bankers Association show.

The agency doesn’t require a minimum credit score for the mortgage insurance, though many lenders who fund the loans insist on a rating of at least 580, said Shultz.

The FHA is considering a minimum required score of 500, according to a notice the agency filed in the Federal Register on July 15. A person with a 500 rating is in the lowest one percentile of credit scores nationally and was likely delinquent on several accounts in the last year, said John Ulzheimer, president of consumer education for Credit.com, a consumer and credit education company based in San Francisco.

Taking on Risk

“The government is taking on more risk,” said Guy Cecala, publisher of Inside Mortgage Finance. “That’s the bottom line. They really can’t say no, because that’s their purpose. It’s to support the housing market when there’s no other funding.”

Until they heard about FHA, Asha Willis and her boyfriend, Cesar Rivera, didn’t think they would buy a place for at least five years -- enough time to save a 20 percent down payment, she said. The couple reasoned that they earned enough to make monthly mortgage payments, and began an apartment search in February, limiting their hunt to buildings with agency backing.

Willis, an attending physician at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn; and Rivera, a sales associate at Chelsea Piers in Manhattan, toured several glass and steel high rises and decided on a one-bedroom at Toll Brothers Inc.’s Two Northside Piers in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. It didn’t have FHA approval at the time, but developers promised it was on its way, Willis said.

Contract Contingency

“Our contract had a contingency that if they weren’t FHA approved we could get out of the contract,” said Willis, currently a renter at Manhattan’s Stuyvesant Town.

Prices at the building range from the “high $300,000s” to more than $2 million, according to Adam Gottlieb, project manager for Northside Piers. The property, which began sales in October 2008, received FHA approval in June.

Shultz, whose Manhattan Mortgage has sourced FHA loans for buyers in Brooklyn, the borough of Queens and on New York’s Long Island, said the last month brought a sudden surge of calls from would-be buyers seeking FHA insurance for Manhattan purchases.

“It’s definitely breaking through to the Manhattan market,” she said.

At Tempo, which is still under construction, developers are hoping that FHA approval will appeal to buyers of lower-priced units and inch the number of contracts signed to the 51 percent that conventional mortgage lenders require, Gollinger said. About 15 percent of the 98 units are under contract.

The developers plan to tout FHA support in e-mails and other promotions in a sales push next month as the building nears completion, Gollinger said.

“I never even dealt with this,” she said. “All of a sudden it became an absolute must.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Oshrat Carmiel in New York at ocarmiel1@bloomberg.net.****
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 13, 2010, 11:38:56 PM
May I suggest that this piece better belongs in the Housing thread?
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on August 14, 2010, 12:17:37 AM
Quote
So, BBG, what do you make of this piece?

Oh, I basically agree with it. I came up in Chicago under a bunch of Alinskyites back in the bad old days of Dick Nixon and the original Mayor Daley. Several of the folks I hung with had the special garbage truck come by for their trash (we always had an eye out for roadkill and other nasty stuff to garnish their garbage with) and there was all sorts of other wacky stuff going on in the wake of the '68 Democratic national convention. I always saw the organizing stuff as a response to heavy handed tactics, a response that didn't have the marxist overtones of college/Yippie/SDS types wandering around those days.
Title: Gilder interview
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 25, 2010, 05:48:44 AM
George Gilder on Austrian Finance, Internet Technology and the Virtues of Supply-Side Economics

George Gilder

The Daily Bell is pleased to present an exclusive interview with George Gilder (left).

Introduction: George Gilder is Chairman of George Gilder Fund Management, LLC and host of the Gilder Telecosm Forum. He is also a Senior Fellow at Discovery Institute where he directs Discovery's program on high technology and public policy, and the former Editor in Chief of the Gilder Technology Report (published by Forbes Inc., 1996-2007). Mr. Gilder pioneered the formulation of supply-side economics when he served as Chairman of the Lehrman Institute's Economic Roundtable, as Program Director for the Manhattan Institute, and as a frequent contributor to A.B. Laffer's economic reports and the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal. In the 1980s he also consulted leaders of America's high technology businesses. According to a study of presidential speeches, Mr. Gilder was President Reagan's most frequently quoted living author. In 1986, President Reagan gave George Gilder the White House Award for Entrepreneurial Excellence. Mr. Gilder hosts the web's premier technology investment discussion forum, the Gilder Telecosm Forum, and co-hosts (with Steve Forbes) the annual Gilder/Forbes Telecosm Conference.

Daily Bell: Can you give us some background on your life – where you grew up and what your interests were?

George Gilder: I grew up on a dairy farm in the Berkshires in Western Massachusetts, where my prime interests were cows, birds, sports, and girls.

Daily Bell: How did you become involved in free-market thinking?

George Gilder: I didn't. I got interested in human creativity and the conditions that foster it. It is enterprise that causes free markets, not free markets that summon enterprise. Adam Smith was wrong in his assertion that the extent of the division of labor is determined by the extent of the market. It is the other way around. The extent of the division of labor - the creativity of entrepreneurs - determines the extent of the market.

Daily Bell: Who were your big influences?

George Gilder: Jean Baptiste Say of Say's Law – supply creates its own demand – introduced to me by Thomas Sowell, who devoted his thesis to the subject. Supply-side economics is not a mere elaboration of free market theory. It is a new theory, founded by Say. It says markets are mere effects of enterprise.

Now from my studies of communications technology and Claude Shannon, I am intrigued with information theory and its concept of information entropy, which registers unexpected bits. Creativity always comes as a surprise to us. No information is transmitted unless it is unexpected. In this sense, Entropy is another word for "news."

I believe that information entropy also represents entrepreneurial "profit" (the unexpected component of returns; the expected component is the interest rate). Entrepreneurial economics is the economics of entropy. My former colleague Bret Swanson has an excellent website www.EntropyEconomics.com.

The key rule of information theory is that it takes a low entropy carrier (no surprises) to bear high entropy information. That is why information gravitates to the electromagnetic spectrum, with its predictable waves guaranteed by the speed of light. And that is why creative enterprise gravitates to countries with stable currencies attuned to gold and the rule of law (no surprises).

Daily Bell: Explain your views on feminism and affirmative action as a young man.

George Gilder: I always valued the differences between the sexes as crucial to life and love.

Daily Bell: Have your views evolved since then?

George Gilder: Just grown stronger as the evidence from biology has mounted.

Daily Bell: Do you see differences between the Austrians like FA Hayek and the Fresh Water school of Milton Friedman?

George Gilder: Yes. The Austrians stress entrepreneurial creativity over free markets. When I went to China in the 1990s with Milton Friedman, he urged the Chinese to "take control over their money supply" as if the communists needed any further recommendations for "controls." I urged them to "let a billion flowers bloom." As I have said, there can be no free markets without free entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs are not tools of the market, they are creators of new tools. The entrepreneur precedes the market. Without him, there is no market. The computerized markets of the quants careened to a predictable crash.

Daily Bell: Did you at the time you were writing Wealth and Poverty, a great book in our opinion.

George Gilder: Yes, I always preferred the Austrians for their stress on entrepreneurial creativity, but even the Austrians, beyond Von Mises, fell for the temptation of seeing entrepreneurs as products of "the free market" rather than its creator.

Daily Bell: Would you define yourself today - Republican, Conservative, Libertarian?

George Gilder: Yes.

Daily Bell: What do you think of the growing movement of Austrian economics?

George Gilder: Ever since Ludwig von Mises, the Austrians have been supreme in economics. But as far as I know no one has excelled the master.

Daily Bell: What do you think of Murray Rothbard?

George Gilder: Murray always struck me as a brilliant dogmatist, letting the ideal always trump the possible advance and allowing his hatred of bureaucracy to blur his ability to distinguish between totalitarianism and mere political muddle, between the Soviet Union and the United States, for relevant examples.

Daily Bell: What do you think of the Internet?

George Gilder: I have written several books on the Internet, beginning with Life After Television in 1990, which predicted "worldwide webs of glass and light." I think the Internet is now close to the end, because TCP-IP has become a cumbersome obstacle to communications in an age when video is the dominant form of traffic and thus the governing determinant of optimal technology. The new network will resemble a broadband synchronous version of the old telephone network, optimized for video. The current Internet, as Henry Gau has said, resembles an old telegraph system patched and upgraded for video.

Daily Bell: Is the Internet a force for freedom?

George Gilder: Yes. Communication is a form of freedom.

Daily Bell: How has your opinion of technology evolved over the years?

George Gilder: I have strengthened my view that government financed science and technology (such as global warming or "alternative" energy) are nearly always reactionary.

Daily Bell: Why did you stop writing about free-markets when you were such an eloquent proponent? Your voice has been missed.

George Gilder: I never stopped, but I wrote more about the fruits of enterprise and creativity than about the perfection of "free markets" themselves. Like "perfect competition," a cant of "free markets" has become an excuse for oppressive regulations and controls. As markets are never finally free or competition ever perfect, critics can always find reasons for new beadles and bureaucrats. Ostensible advocates of free markets, such as Paul Romer, end up denying the existence of real entrepreneurial invention (de novo) by depicting it as the mere materialist "reassembly of chemical elements."

Even Austrians depict the entrepreneur as a mere "scout of opportunities" or "arbitrageur" rather than as a creator of radical novelties based on imagination and original inspiration. They see the entrepreneur as a tool of markets rather than a creator of markets. Creation is a real thing in the world. Treating it as some kind of material process is arrant reductionism which leads to the notion that computer based financial markets are ideal. As we have seen in the recent financial crash, markets cannot function without human creativity and judgment.

Daily Bell: What do you think technology is capable of?

George Gilder: Empowerment of capitalists to defend themselves without retreat to Galt's Gulch.

Daily Bell: How is it going to change the future?

George Gilder: Enable global individualism and enterprise.

Daily Bell: Will it have a political impact? Is it?

George Gilder: Technological progress renders totalitarianism impotent. Only freedom can enable innovation and empower progress. Despots impoverish themselves.

Daily Bell: Where do you stand on fiat money versus a gold and silver standard?

George Gilder: Although I do not believe a restoration of the old gold standard is possible or desirable, I believe that gold is the monetary element and provides an extremely valuable gauge of the appropriate monetary policy. Ignoring the price of gold is perilous for any nation, such as the U.S. Gold will prevail over blind monetarism.

Daily Bell: What do you think of Congressman Ron Paul?

George Gilder: Like many movement libertarians, he always prefers the quixotic ideal (radical spending cuts) to the feasible improvement of lower tax rates. By opposing defense spending and American power he has become a shill for the enemies of capitalism and freedom.

Daily Bell: What do you think of the Tea Party movement?

George Gilder: A fully beneficial force as long as they stress tax cuts rather than spending cuts. Lower tax rates are good in themselves. Lower spending always ends up focusing on defense.

The chief damage of the new health care "reform" will come from the 16,500 new Internal Revenue Service Agents, each with $600K, assigned to enforce it. To focus on spending is wrong. It is coercive taxation that is the problem. It destroys capitalism.

Daily Bell: What do you think of the European Union and the move toward globalism generally. A good thing?

George Gilder: Global capitalism is good. Global socialism and bureaucracy is evil.

Daily Bell: Is America in good shape these days? Are you encouraged or discouraged?

George Gilder: America is in relatively bad shape. But it is showing strong signs of a revulsion against the ascendant socialism.

Daily Bell: What are some of the most influential books and web sites you can recommend to our readers?

George Gilder: Panic: the betrayal of capitalism by Andrew Redleaf and Richard Vigilante is the definitive account of the financial crash. Bret Swanson's EntropyEconomics website is excellent.

Daily Bell: Please recommend further reading from your own oeuvre as well.

George Gilder: My new book, The Israel Test, explains how anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism are chiefly forms of anti-capitalism.

Daily Bell: Thank you for your time and insights.




George Gilder is a provocative writer with a formidable intellect. The arc of his literary career is broad and glittering, and his arrival on the national scene was a literary event. He was an original thinker from the beginning, attracting attention for his plain-speaking about male/female relationships and then, before it was fashionable, the necessity for free-markets in a Western world that was trending toward socialism. Many read his 1981 bestseller Wealth and Poverty and were favorably influenced by his arguments for freedom and free-markets. The book was timely and erudite - a pleasure to read. (One can see even from the interview above that George Gilder is an artist with words.)

Anyway, the whole idea of supply-side economics, which George Gilder helped pioneer as Chairman of the Lehrman Institute's Economic Roundtable, was a sociopolitical revelation. It could be realistically implemented and supported ideologically by US conservatives of the day. It also worked. In fact, every time taxes have been cut (in the U.S.) an energetic economy has been the result. By cutting taxes, a government can actually gain revenue – because entrepreneurs work harder – which is something the Obama administration should remember as it begins to arm revenue officers with rifles to facilitate further collections.

But the major point of enlightenment as regards this interview – from our viewpoint – is the statement made about libertarian congressman Ron Paul (R-Tex). Now from our point of view, Ron Paul is a man with a cast of mind similar to George Gilder's. Gilder, however, doesn't see it that way. He seems somewhat skeptical of Ron Paul.

"Like many movement libertarians, he always prefers the quixotic ideal (radical spending cuts) to the feasible improvement of lower tax rates," Gilder states in the interview above. And then he adds of Ron Paul, that, "by opposing defense spending and American power he has become a shill for the enemies of capitalism and freedom."

He also states in answer to the next question about the impact of the US Tea Party movement, "[They are] a fully beneficial force as long as they stress tax cuts rather than spending cuts. Lower tax rates are good in themselves. Lower spending always ends up focusing on defense."

We can see from the above perspective that George Gilder believes in a robust defense posture and an expenditure (one assumes from his answers) roughly analogous to trillions being spent now by the Pentagon. Not only that, but he seems to imply that the Reagan era focus on CUTTING TAXES versus CUTTING SPENDING was a purposeful one at the highest levels – a way of presenting one's free-market bona fides without chopping expenditures. In fact, Reagan ended up increasing government, which was certainly not his stated intention.

Now leaving aside the issue of military spending – a contentious one to be sure (given America's serial, global wars) – what George Gilder is telling us is that supply-side economics allowed the Reagan era Republican party to promote free-markets without running the danger of encouraging military spending cuts. In other words, government could continue to grow at the federal level even though it was implementing free-market solutions.

This is an astonishing perspective and one that we had not fully contemplated. Perhaps we've simply not read the right articles or books, but we've believed all along that supply-side economics was proposed as a libertarian solution to the problem of OUT OF CONTROL government. In fact, we are informed herein, it was proposed as a libertarian-style alternative that allowed government to CONTINUE to grow – or so George Gilder seems to explain. (Maybe we have missed something in our analysis or misunderstood him, in which case we apologize.)

Armed with acute insights, George Gilder makes other provocative statements in this interview, and we won't presume on the reader's time to point them out. They are evident enough and are cast forth as sparks, in our view, from a brilliant mind. He is certainly not a man equipped to endorse common wisdom, though his track record shows us that he is fully capable of anticipating society's most profound transformations.

Finally, we will not pretend that this interview reveals an entirely candid George Gilder. He was obviously somewhat guarded and occasionally monosyllabic, or nearly so. But we were pleased, nonetheless, to elicit his fascinating responses on any terms and wish to state he was most gracious to give us even a little of his valuable time.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: G M on August 25, 2010, 06:11:41 AM
**My favorite part:

Daily Bell: What do you think of Congressman Ron Paul?

George Gilder: Like many movement libertarians, he always prefers the quixotic ideal (radical spending cuts) to the feasible improvement of lower tax rates. By opposing defense spending and American power he has become a shill for the enemies of capitalism and freedom.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on September 03, 2010, 07:42:10 AM
Some have said that the mosque on ground zero is akin to the Japanese building a religious shrine at Pearl Habor.

Looking at it from the opposite perspective:

Could any American dream or think it a good idea to build a memorial to Harry S. Truman on the site of Hiroshima?

It seems to me the fact I have never heard anyone even use this as an analogy suggests no American would be that obnoxious to even think of doing that to the Japanese.

There is simply no other explanation for building this mosque at the WTC site than it is meant to be a symbol of of victory.  The progressives who than turn around and agree with the argument that it is all about religious freedom - it is as Malken would say, "head exploding."  :x

   
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: DougMacG on September 03, 2010, 08:39:40 AM
Very well put CCP, the Truman center in Hiroshima.  We didn't build that and we can't put a church or synagogue anywhere in a Muslim land. This is a fascinating and emotionally charged upside-down issue.  True free market thinking says this site goes to the high bidder - strip club, pot shop, shooting range, what ever.  NY of course is a heavily zoned and regulated town, what gets built is what they want to get built.  Do developers survive without political contributions? I don't think so and why, because jobs don't get approved by just showing up with permit fees.

The whole issue is about bad taste.  A mosque is a monument to honor Islam and there are 100 of them operating freely in New York.  This isn't near ground zero; this is where blood stained plane parts landed. I think people forget the hundred in the planes died too, not just in the building. Blood of mass murder is sacred ground, if you believe in that sort of thing.  The city could 'take' the property for public purposes and under Kelo the city could 'take' the property for any private purposes that it sees fit. I didn't see Obama slamming that Supreme Court decision that gives local government complete control over what goes where.

The strangest part of it is to see no objection because it is not our place to say what can be built or cannot be built on sacred ground in New York City because of unbending principle and tolerance and meanwhile with a straight face tell Israel what religions of people can build in what areas of their land.  Go figure.
Title: freedom of speech?/how about a cultural theme park
Post by: ccp on September 03, 2010, 10:39:43 AM
"this site goes to the high bidder - strip club, pot shop, shooting range, what ever"

Good idea Doug.

Rush had suggested a gay bar open next door.  May I add a strip club titled "99 virgins" would be excellent for the other side of the mosque.

Across the street a Church with a statue of Jesus and Mother Mary.  Adjacent to that my favorite = a museum about Zionism.

A NOW center also would help complete a culturally diverse theme park around the mosque. 

OK you wise guys (there is certainly no nicer way to put it).  You want to speak of freedom of speech - lets give you the whole works! In your faces too.  :-D
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: G M on September 03, 2010, 11:40:49 AM
http://hotair.com/archives/2010/08/10/gutfeld-on-the-muslim-gay-bar-this-might-be-the-greatest-idea-ive-ever-had/

Gutfeld on the Muslim gay bar: “This might be the greatest idea I’ve ever had”
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Rarick on September 04, 2010, 04:28:08 AM
Ofend local sensibilities and you can expext to pay a price.  I like the concept of a new "PC Square" where the various fringe groups in this culture can build their monuments.  They can learn the concept of tolerance if they are intolerant, or gain some notice if they are quiet, but want to be discreetly visible. :wink: :evil:
Title: VDH: New Old World Order
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 04, 2010, 11:07:49 AM
NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE www.nationalreview.com PRINT

Victor Davis Hanson

September 2, 2010 12:00 A.M.

The New Old World Order
A global shift to past politics also signals a return to past solutions like free markets and strong borders.


The post–Cold War New World Order is rapidly breaking apart. Nations are returning to the ancient passions, rivalries, and differences of past centuries.

Take Europe. The decades-old vision of a united pan-continental Europe without borders is dissolving. The cradle-to-grave welfare dream proved too expensive for Europe’s shrinking and aging population.

Cultural, linguistic, and economic divides between Germany and Greece, or Holland and Bulgaria, remain too wide to be bridged by fumbling bureaucrats in Brussels. NATO has devolved into a euphemism for American expeditionary forces.

Nationalism is returning, based on stronger common ties of language, history, religion, and culture. We are even seeing the return of a two-century-old European “problem”: a powerful Germany that logically seeks greater political influence commensurate with its undeniable economic superiority.

The tired Israeli-Palestinian fight over the future of the West Bank is no longer the nexus of Middle East tensions. The Muslim Arab world is now more terrified by the re-emergence of a bloc of old familiar non-Arabic, Islamic fundamentalist rivals.

With nuclear weapons, theocratic Iran wants to offer strategic protection to radical allies such as Syria, Hezbollah, and Hamas, and at the same time restore Persian glory. While diverse, this rogue bunch shares contempt for the squabbling Sunni Arab world of rich but defenseless Gulf petro-sheikdoms and geriatric state authoritarians.

Turkey is flipping back to its pre-20th-century past. Its departure from NATO is not a question of if, but when. The European Union used to not want Turkey; now Turkey does not want the shaky EU.

Turkish revisionism now glorifies the old Ottoman sultanate. Turkey wants to recharge that reactionary model as the unifier and protector of Islam — not the modern, vastly reduced secular state of Kemal Ataturk. Weak neighbors Armenia, Cyprus, Greece, and Kurdistan have historical reasons to tremble.

Japan’s economy is still stalled. Its affluent population is shrinking and aging. Elsewhere in the region, the Japanese see an expanding China and a lunatic nuclear North Korea. Yet Japan is not sure whether the inward-looking United States is still credible in its old promise of protection against any and all enemies.

One of two rather bleak Asian futures seems likely. Either an ascendant China will dictate the foreign policies of Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, or lots of new freelancing nuclear powers will appear to deter China since it cannot count on an insolvent U.S. for protection.

Oil-rich Russia — deprived of its Communist-era empire — seems to find lost imperial prestige and influence by being for everything that the U.S. is against. That translates into selling nuclear expertise and material to Iran, providing weapons to provocative states such as Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela, and bullying neighbors over energy supplies.

Closer to home, Mexico has become a strange sort of friend. It devolves daily into a more corrupt and violent place than Iraq or Pakistan. The fossilized leadership in Mexico City shows no interest in reforming, either by opening its economy or liberalizing its political institutions.

Instead, Mexico’s very survival for now rests on cynically exporting annually a million of its impoverished and unhappy citizens to America. More interested in money than in its own people, the Mexican government counts on the more than $20 billion in remittances that return to the country each year.

But American citizens are tired of picking up the tab to subsidize nearly 15 million poor illegal aliens. The growing hostility between the two countries is reminiscent of 19th-century tensions across the Rio Grande.

How is America reacting to these back-to-the-future changes?

Politically divided, committed to two wars, in a deep recession, insolvent, and still stunned by the financial meltdown of 2008, our government seems paralyzed. As European socialism implodes, for some reason a new statist U.S. government wants to copy failure by taking over ever more of the economy and borrowing trillions more to provide additional entitlements.

As panicky old allies look for American protection, we talk of slashing our defense budget. In apologetic fashion, we spend more time appeasing confident enemies than buttressing worried friends.

Instead of finishing our border fence and closing the southern border, we are suing a state that is trying to enforce immigration laws that the federal government will not apply. And as sectarianism spreads abroad, we at home still pursue the failed salad bowl and caricature the once-successful American melting pot.

But just as old problems return, so do equally old solutions. Once-stodgy ideas like a free-market economy, strong defense, secure borders, and national unity are suddenly appearing fresh and wise.

— Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author, most recently, of The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern. © 2010 Tribune Media Services, Inc.
Title: Pat Cadell on GZM
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 08, 2010, 04:54:45 AM


http://www.jihadwatch.org/2010/06/pat-condell-on-ground-zero-mosque-is-it-possible-to-be-astonished-but-not-surprised.html
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on September 09, 2010, 12:01:56 PM
"But just as old problems return, so do equally old solutions. Once-stodgy ideas like a free-market economy, strong defense, secure borders, and national unity are suddenly appearing fresh and wise."

To many it does, including me and most on this board.

But "old solutions" are going to come with MUCH pain.  I don't hear many politicians being honest about that.

Bamster who has criticized the previous politicians for kicking the can down the road has done more to kick the can down the road then everyone before him.

The left is still hanging on hoping he is not the disaster that I/most of us think he is.
Title: Noonan: The Enraged vs. the Exhausted
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 24, 2010, 06:38:15 PM
DECLARATIONSSEPTEMBER 25, 2010
The Enraged vs. the Exhausted
If you thought the 1994 election was historic, just wait till this year.
By PEGGY NOONAN

All anyone in America who cares about politics was talking about this week was the
searing encounter that captured, in a way that hasn't been done before, the essence
of the political moment we're in. When 2010 is reviewed, it will be the clip
producers pick to illustrate the president's disastrous fall.

It is Monday, Sept. 20, the middle of the day, in Washington. CNBC is holding a town
hall for the president. A woman stands—handsome, dignified, black, a person with
presence. She looks as if she may be what she turns out to be, an Obama supporter
who in 2008 put up street signs, passed out literature and tried to win over
co-workers. As she later told the Washington Post, "I was thinking that the people
who were against him and didn't believe in his agenda were completely insane."

The president looked relieved when she stood. Perhaps he thought she might lob a
sympathetic question that would allow him to hit a reply out of the park. Instead,
and in the nicest possible way, Velma Hart lobbed a hand grenade.

"I'm a mother. I'm a wife. I'm an American veteran, and I'm one of your middle-class
Americans. And quite frankly I'm exhausted. I'm exhausted of defending you,
defending your administration, defending the mantle of change that I voted for, and
deeply disappointed with where we are." She said, "The financial recession has taken
an enormous toll on my family." She said, "My husband and I have joked for years
that we thought we were well beyond the hot-dogs-and-beans era of our lives. But,
quite frankly, it is starting to knock on our door and ring true that that might be
where we are headed."

View Full Image

Martin Kozlowski

What a testimony. And this is the president's base. He got that look public figures
adopt when they know they just took one right in the chops on national TV and cannot
show their dismay. He could have responded with an engagement and conviction equal
to the moment. But this was our president—calm, detached, even-keeled to the point
of insensate. He offered a recital of his administration's achievements: tuition
assistance, health care. It seemed so off point. Like his first two years.

But it was the word Mrs. Hart used that captured everything: "exhausted." From what
I see, that's how a lot of Democrats feel. They've turned silent, too, like people
who witnessed a car crash and can't talk anymore about the reasons for the accident
or how many were injured.

This election is more and more shaping up into a contest between the Exhausted and
the Enraged.

In a contest like that, who wins? That's like asking, "Who would win a sporting
event between the depressed and the anxious?" The anxious are wide awake. The wide
awake win.

But Rep. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee suggests I have the wrong word for the
Republican base. The word, she says, is not enraged but "livid."

The three-term Republican deputy whip has been campaigning in Alabama, Colorado,
Georgia, Mississippi, Missouri, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and South Carolina. We
spoke by phone about what she is seeing, and she sounded like the exact opposite of
exhausted.

There are two major developments, she says, that are new this year and
insufficiently noted, but they're going to shape election outcomes in 2010 and
beyond.

First, Washington is being revealed in a new way.

The American people now know, "with real sophistication," everything that happens in
the capital. "I find a much more knowledgeable electorate, and it is a real-time
response," Ms. Blackburn says. "We hear about it even as the vote is taking place."

Voters come to rallies carrying research—"things they pulled off the Internet,
forwarded emails," copies of bills, roll-call votes. The Internet isn't just a tool
for organization and fund-raising. It has given citizens access to information they
never had before. "The more they know," Ms. Blackburn observes, "the less they like
Washington."


Second is the rise of women as a force. They "are the drivers in this election
cycle," Ms. Blackburn says. "Something is going on." At tea party events the past 18
months, she started to notice "60% of the crowd is women."

She tells of a political rally that drew thousands in Nashville, at the State
Capitol plaza. She had brought her year-old grandson. When the mic was handed to
her, she was holding him. "I said, 'How many of you are grandmothers?' The hands!
That was the moment I realized that the majority of the people at the political
events now are women. I saw this in town halls in '09—it was women showing up at my
listening events, it was women talking about health care."

Why would more women be focusing more intently on politics this year than before?

Ms. Blackburn hypothesizes: "Women are always focusing on a generation or two down
the road. Women make the education and health-care decisions for their families, for
their kids, their spouse, their parents. And so they have become more politically
involved. They are worried about will people have enough money, how are they going
to pay the bills, the tuition, get the kids through school and college."

More Peggy Noonan

Read Peggy Noonan's previous columns

click here to order her new book, Patriotic Grace

Ms. Blackburn suggested, further in the conversation, that government's reach into
the personal lives of families, including new health-care rules and the prospect of
higher taxes, plus the rise in public information on how Washington works and what
it does, had prompted mothers to rebel.

The media called 1994 "the year of the angry white male." That was the year of the
Republican wave that yielded a GOP House for the first time in 40 years. "I look at
this year as the Rage of the Bill-Paying Moms," Ms. Blackburn says. "They are saying
'How dare you, in your arrogance, cap the opportunities my child will have? You'll
burden them with so much debt they won't be able to buy a house—all because you
can't balance the budget.'"

How does 2010 compare with 1994 in terms of historical significance? Ms. Blackburn
says there's an unnoted story there, too. Whereas 1994 was historic as a party
victory, a shift in political power, this year feels more organic, more
from-the-ground, and potentially deeper. She believes 2010 will mark "a
philosophical shift," the beginning of a change in national thinking regarding the
role of the individual and the government.

This "will be remembered as the year the American people said no" to the status quo.
The people "do not trust" those who make the decisions far away. They want to
restore balance.

What is the mainstream media getting wrong about this election, and what is it
getting right? The media, Ms. Blackburn says, do not fully appreciate "how livid
people are with Washington." They see the anger but don't understand its
implications. "They're getting right that people want change, but they're wrong
about what that change is going to be." The media, she said, "are going to be amazed
when Carly Fiorina and Sharron Angle win."

The mainstream media famously like the horse race—red is up, blue is down; Smith is
in, Jones is out. But if Ms. Blackburn is right, the election, and its meaning, will
be more interesting than the old, classic jockeying. And the outcomes won't be
controlled by the good ol' boys but by those she calls "the great new gals."
Title: Whose money is it anyway?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 26, 2010, 05:08:25 PM
Whose Money Is It Anyway?
"A just security to property is not afforded by that government under which unequal taxes oppress one species of property and reward another species." --James Madison

He may be the Joker, but the joke is on you.My children are big fans of Drew Carey's comedy show, "Whose Line Is It Anyway?" Carey selects scenarios for the cast, who then improvise characters, songs and scenes. At the end of each assignment, Carey then arbitrarily assigns "1,000 points" to the funniest performer adding the caveat, "But the points don't matter."

I mention this because there's another improvisational comedy show that the whole world has been watching for almost two years. Unfortunately, this one uses real scenarios, which have real consequences for millions of real people. The cast is far less creative than Carey and his comedy troupe, but, unfortunately, these real world points do matter.

I am, of course, talking about The BHO Show, and Obama's cadre of characters, who do his political bidding as they endeavor to accomplish "the fundamental transformation of the United States of America."

The underlying theme of The BHO Show is that bigger government is better government -- that the central government should be the ultimate arbiter of all enterprise through either taxation or regulation. To support this theme, Obama's cast is tasked with reinventing the truth in order to expand the Barackracy.

One of the most subtle but insidious means used by the BHO Players to subjugate the masses is manipulation of the common vernacular, the use of common words in a revised context to reframe the perceptions of the audience.

For example, government spending becomes "investment." Tax cuts "cost the government." Lower taxes are those that the government "can't afford." Redistributing your income to those who pay no taxes becomes "a rebate." Advocating for lower taxes is framed as "selfish."

BHO's cast even twists the most basic economic formulations. For example, they insist that lower taxes cause deficits, while anyone with a wisp of wit knows that spending causes deficits. They insist that pilfering trillions of dollars in tax obligations from future generations is justified by counting fictitious "jobs created or saved" now, but only an ideological Socialist believes the role of the central government is to "create or save jobs."

Of course, the show's host is the master of this deceptive dialect, especially effective when armed with Teleprompters.

In his most recent calls for tax increases, Obama claimed, "I can't give tax cuts to the top 2 percent of Americans ... and lower the deficit at the same time. ... It would cost us $700 billion to do it. ... We are not going to borrow hundreds of billions of dollars to give tax cuts to people who don't need them. ... On average millionaires would get a check of a hundred thousand dollars. ... We can't give away $700 billion to folks who don't need it. ... We can't afford the $700 billion price tag."

This nugget of ObamaSpeak translates, "Your money is actually my money, so I'll determine how much of it you can keep. If I let you keep more of your money, it will cause deficits, because I'm certainly not going to cut spending. Let me be clear, if I give a small business owner who wants to create a private sector job a tax break, it'll cost me a government job. I'm not going to fund private sector job growth when these business owners already have enough well-paid employees."

Given all this, I'd submit that the most fitting title for The BHO Show is, "Whose Money Is It Anyway?"

On this question, he certainly has the Leftmedia stumped.

Consider this "analysis" of tax cuts from CNN's Ali Velshi: "[L]et me put this into perspective. First, it's not free. Extending the tax breaks to the top 3 percent of earners would cost between $650 and $700 billion. Extending it for the rest of us is going to cost a lot more, possibly $3 trillion."

Notably, however, one lone Leftmedia talkinghead takes exception to BHO's wacky wordplay. MSNBC's Chris "The Thrill" Matthews nitpicks, "I have one small [SMALL?] tweak to make to what the president said today -- he should stop saying that giving people tax cuts is giving people money. It's their money! A tax cut is when the government doesn't take our money. It's an important distinction."

Of course, even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

In regard to the growing ranks of conservative Republicans who are steadfastly refusing to negotiate with Obama on his proposed tax increases, Obama says, "They are the Party of 'No.'"

But the fact is, those conservatives are restoring "the Party of Know," the Party of Ronald Reagan, whose timeless model for economic restoration is the only path to prosperity. They understand the consequences of tax increases and see through Obama's myths about tax cuts.

Will they succeed?

Thomas Jefferson declared, "Excessive taxation ... will carry reason and reflection to every man's door, and particularly in the hour of election." However, his was an era when taxation was levied, appropriately, on consumption -- in other words, when the burden of the cost of government was appropriately spread over enough people to ensure accountability.

Today, however, almost 90 percent of the cost of government is borne by 25 percent of income earners, and more than 50 percent of Americans now have no net income tax liability. Consequently, I have often quoted George Bernard Shaw: "A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul." (See how you rank as a taxpayer.)

The only hope for restoring the "reason and reflection" of which Jefferson wrote is to replace the current system of taxation with a national sales tax or a flat income tax. Unfortunately, the socialist fix is in: Few among that 50 percent of Americans with no net income tax liability will now vote themselves a share of the cost of government.

There is, however, another path to reason and reflection, which is a more enduring formula for success. The Tea Party movement has founded its grassroots platform on an appeal to restore Essential Liberty and Rule of Law as established by our Constitution, and that appeal is spreading the "brushfires of freedom."

To that end, I encourage every American Patriot reading these words to join one more Freedom Front, and help us distribute a small but highly effective instrument for educating Americans on First Principles, the Tea Party Primer. With tools like this pocket guide increasing the ranks of those steadfastly devoted to Liberty, in a few election cycles we will yank The BHO Show, and others like it, off the viewing schedule, and restore the integrity of our Constitution.

Semper Vigilo, Fortis, Paratus et Fidelis!

Mark Alexander
Publisher, The Patriot Post
Title: Geert Wilders in Berlin
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 03, 2010, 05:33:16 PM
Geert Wilders: Speech in Berlin yesterday
from Jihad Watch by Robert

Geert Wilders Speech in Berlin
October 2, 2010

Dear Friends,

I am very happy to be here in Berlin today. As you know, the invitation which my friend René Stadtkewitz extended to me, has cost him his membership of the CDU group in the Berlin Parliament. René, however, did not give in to the pressure. He did not betray his convictions. His dismissal prompted René to start a new political party. I wish him all the best. As you may have heard, the past weeks were extremely busy for me. Earlier this week we succeeded in forging a minority government of the Liberals and the Christian-Democrats which will be supported by my party. This is an historic event for the Netherlands. I am very proud of having helped to achieve this. At this very moment the Christian-Democrat Party conference is deciding whether or not to approves this coalition. If they do, we will be able to rebuild our country, preserve our national identity and offer our children a better future.

Despite my busy schedule at home, however, I insisted on coming to Berlin, because Germany, too, needs a political movement to defend German identity and to oppose the Islamization of Germany. Chancellor Angela Merkel says that the Islamization of Germany is inevitable. She conveys the message that citizens have to be prepared for more changes as a result of immigration. She wants the Germans to adapt to this situation. The Christian-Democrat leader said: "More than before mosques will be an integral part of our cities."

My friends, we should not accept the unacceptable as inevitable without trying to turn the tide. It is our duty as politicians to preserve our nations for our children. I hope that René's movement will be as successful as my own Partij voor de Vrijheid, as Oskar Freysinger's Schweizerische Volkspartei in Switzerland, as Pia Kjaersgaard's Dansk Folkeparti in Denmark, and similar movements elsewhere.

My good friend Pia recently spoke in Sweden at the invitation of the Sverigedemokraterna. She said: "I have not come to mingle in Swedish domestic politics because that is for the Swedish people to be concerned with. No, I have come because in spite of certain differences the Swedish debate in many ways reminds me of the Danish debate 10-15 years ago. And I have come to Sweden because it is also a concern to Denmark. We cannot sit with our hands in our lap and be silent witnesses to the political development in Sweden."

The same applies for me as a Dutchman with respect to Germany. I am here because Germany matters to the Netherlands and the rest of the world, and because we cannot establish an International Freedom Alliance without a strong German partner.

Dear friends, tomorrow is the Day of German Unity. Tomorrow exactly twenty years ago, your great nation was reunified after the collapse of the totalitarian Communist ideology. The Day of German Unity is an important day for the whole of Europe. Germany is the largest democracy in Europe. Germany is Europe's economic powerhouse. The wellbeing and prosperity of Germany is a benefit to all of us, because the wellbeing and prosperity of Germany is a prerequisite for the wellbeing and prosperity of Europe.

Today I am here, however, to warn you for looming disunity. Germany's national identity, its democracy and economic prosperity, is being threatened by the political ideology of Islam. In 1848, Karl Marx began his Communist Manifesto with the famous words: "A specter is haunting Europe - the specter of communism." Today, another specter is haunting Europe. It is the specter of Islam. This danger, too, is political. Islam is not merely a religion, as many people seem to think: Islam is mainly a political ideology.

This insight is not new.

I quote from the bestselling book and BBC television series The Triumph of the West which the renowned Oxford historian J.M. Roberts wrote in 1985: "Although we carelessly speak of Islam as a 'religion'; that word carries many overtones of the special history of western Europe. The Muslim is primarily a member of a community, the follower of a certain way, an adherent to a system of law, rather than someone holding particular theological views." The Flemish Professor Urbain Vermeulen, the former president of the European Union of Arabists and Islamicists, too, points out that "Islam is primarily a legal system, a law," rather than a religion.

The American political scientist Mark Alexander writes that "One of our greatest mistakes is to think of Islam as just another one of the world's great religions. We shouldn't. Islam is politics or it is nothing at all, but, of course, it is politics with a spiritual dimension, ... which will stop at nothing until the West is no more, until the West has ... been well and truly Islamized."

These are not just statements by opponents of Islam. Islamic scholars say the same thing. There cannot be any doubt about the nature of Islam to those who have read the Koran, the Sira and the Hadith. Abul Ala Maududi, the influential 20th century Pakistani Islamic thinker, wrote - I quote, emphasizing that these are not my words but those of a leading Islamic scholar - "Islam is not merely a religious creed [but] a revolutionary ideology and jihad refers to that revolutionary struggle ... to destroy all states and governments anywhere on the face of the earth, which are opposed to the ideology and program of Islam."

Ali Sina, an Iranian Islamic apostate who lives in Canada, points out that there is one golden rule that lies at the heart of every religion - that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. In Islam, this rule only applies to fellow believers, but not to Infidels. Ali Sina says "The reason I am against Islam is not because it is a religion, but because it is a political ideology of imperialism and domination in the guise of religion. Because Islam does not follow the Golden Rule, it attracts violent people."

A dispassionate study of the beginnings of Islamic history reveals clearly that Muhammad's objective was first to conquer his own people, the Arabs, and to unify them under his rule, and then to conquer and rule the world. That was the original cause; it was obviously political and was backed by military force. "I was ordered to fight all men until they say 'There is no god but Allah,'" Muhammad said in his final address. He did so in accordance with the Koranic command in sura 8:39: "Fight them until there is no more dissension and the religion is entirely Allah's."
According to the mythology, Muhammad founded Islam in Mecca after the Angel Gabriel visited him for the first time in the year 610. The first twelve years of Islam, when Islam was religious rather than political, were not a success. In 622, Muhammad emigrated to Yathrib, a predominantly Jewish oasis, with his small band of 150 followers. There he established the first mosque in history, took over political power, gave Yathrib the name of Medina, which means the "City of the Prophet," and began his career as a military and a political leader who conquered all of Arabia. Tellingly, the Islamic calendar starts with the hijra, the migration to Medina - the moment when Islam became a political movement.

After Muhammad's death, based upon his words and deeds, Islam developed Sharia, an elaborate legal system which justified the repressive governance of the world by divine right - including rules for jihad and for the absolute control of believers and non-believers. Sharia is the law of Saudi Arabia and Iran, among other Islamic states. It is also central to the Organization of the Islamic Conference, which in article 24 of its Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam, proclaims that "all rights and freedoms are subject to the Islamic Sharia." The OIC is not a religious institution; it is a political body. It constitutes the largest voting block in the United Nations and writes reports on so-called "Islamophobia" in Western Countries which accuse us of human rights violations. To speak in biblical terms: They look for a speck in our eye, but deny the beam in their own.

Under Sharia law people in the conquered territories have no legal rights, not even the right to life and to own property, unless they convert to Islam.

Before I continue, and in order to avoid any misunderstandings, I want to emphasize that I am talking about Islam, not about Muslims. I always make a clear distinction between the people and the ideology, between Muslims and Islam. There are many moderate Muslims, but the political ideology of Islam is not moderate and has global ambitions. It aims to impose Islamic law or Sharia upon the whole world. The way to achieve this is through jihad. The good news is that millions of Muslims around the world - including many in Germany and the Netherlands - do not follow the directives of Sharia, let alone engage in jihad. The bad news, however, is that those who do are prepared to use all available means to achieve their ideological, revolutionary goal.

In 1954, in his essay Communism and Islam, Professor Bernard Lewis spoke of "the totalitarianism, of the Islamic political tradition." Professor Lewis said that "The traditional Islamic division of the world into the House of Islam and the House of War, ... has obvious parallels in the Communist view of world affairs. ... The aggressive fanaticism of the believer is the same."

The American political scientist Mark Alexander states that the nature of Islam differs very little - and only in detail rather than style - from despicable and totalitarian political ideologies such as National-Socialism and Communism. He lists the following characteristics for these three ideologies.

* They use political purges to "cleanse" society of what they considere undesirable;

* They tolerate only a single political party. Where Islam allows more parties, it insists that all parties be Islamic ones;

* They coerce the people along the road that it must follow;

* They obliterate the liberal distinction between areas of private judgment and of public control;

* They turn the educational system into an apparatus for the purpose of universal indoctrination;

* They lay down rules for art, for literature, for science and for religion;

* They subdue people who are given second class status;

* They induce a frame of mind akin to fanaticism. Adjustment takes place by struggle and dominance;

* They are abusive to their opponents and regard any concession on their own part as a temporary expedient and on a rival's part as a sign of weakness;

* They regard politics as an expression of power;

* They are anti-Semitic.
Title: Wilders-2
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 03, 2010, 05:33:51 PM

There is one more striking parallel, but this is not a characteristic of the three political ideologies, but one of the West. It is the apparent inability of the West to see the danger. The prerequisite to understanding political danger, is a willingness to see the truth, even if it is unpleasant. Unfortunately, modern Western politicians seem to have lost this capacity. Our inability leads us to reject the logical and historical conclusions to be drawn from the facts, though we could, and should know better. What is wrong with modern Western man that we make the same mistake over and over again?

There is no better place to ponder this question than here in Berlin, the former capital of the evil empire of Nazi Germany and a city which was held captive by the so-called German "Democratic" Republic for over forty years.

When the citizens of Eastern Europe rejected Communism in 1989, they were inspired by dissidents such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Václav Havel, Vladimir Bukovsky, and others, who told them that people have a right, but also an obligation, to "live within the truth." Freedom requires eternal vigilance; so it is with truth. Solzhenitsyn added, however, that "truth is seldom sweet; it is almost invariably bitter." Let us face the bitter truth: We have lost our capacity to see the danger and understand the truth because we no longer value freedom.

Politicians from almost all establishment politicians today are facilitating Islamization. They are cheering for every new Islamic school, Islamic bank, Islamic court. They regard Islam as being equal to our own culture. Islam or freedom? It does not really matter to them. But it does matter to us. The entire establisment elite - universities, churches, trade unions, the media, politicians - are putting our hard-earned liberties at risk. They talk about equality, but amazingly fail to see how in Islam women have fewer rights than men and infidels have fewer rights than adherents of Islam.

Are we about to repeat the fatal mistake of the Weimar Republic? Are we succumbing to Islam because our commitment to freedom is already dead? No, it will not happen. We are not like Frau Merkel. We do not accept Islamization as inevitable. We have to keep freedom alive. And, to the extent that we have already lost it, we must reclaim it in our democratic elections. That is why we need political parties that defend freedom. To support such parties I have established the International Freedom Alliance.

As you know, I am standing trial in the Netherlands. On Monday, I have to go to court again and I will have to spend most of the coming month there. I have been brought to court because of my opinions on Islam and because I have voiced these opinions in speeches, articles and in my documentary film Fitna. I live under constant police protection because Islamic extremists want to assassinate me, and I am in court because the Dutch establishment - most of them non-Muslims - wants to silence me.

I have been dragged to court because in my country freedom can no longer be fully enjoyed. Unlike America, we do not have a First Amendment which guarantees people the freedom to express their opinions and foster public debate by doing so. Unlike America, in Europe the national state, and increasingly the European Union, prescribes how citizens - including democratically elected politicians such as myself - should think and what we are allowed to say.

One of the things we are no longer allowed to say is that our culture is superior to certain other cultures. This is seen as a discriminatory statement - a statement of hatred even. We are indoctrinated on a daily basis, in the schools and through the media, with the message that all cultures are equal and that, if one culture is worse than all the rest, it is our own. We are inundated with feelings of guilt and shame about our own identity and what we stand for. We are exhorted to respect everyone and everything, except ourselves. That is the message of the Left and the politically-correct ruling establishment. They want us to feel so ashamed about our own identity that we refuse to fight for it.

The detrimental obsession of our cultural and political elites with Western guilt reinforces the view which Islam has of us. The Koran says that non-Muslims are kuffar (the plural of kafir), which literally means "rejecters" or "ingrates." Hence, infidels are "guilty." Islam teaches that in our natural state we have all been born as believers. Islam teaches that if we are not believers today this is by our own or by our forefathers' fault. Subsequently, we are always kafir - guilty - because either we or our fathers are apostates. And, hence, according to some, we deserve subjugation.

Our contemporary leftist intellectuals are blind to the dangers of Islam.
Former Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky argues that after the fall of communism, the West failed to expose those who had collaborated with the Communists by advocating policies of détente, improved relations, relaxation of international tension, peaceful coexistence. He points out that the Cold War was "a war we never won. We never even fought it. ... Most of the time the West engaged in a policy of appeasement toward the Soviet bloc - and appeasers don't win wars."

Islam is the Communism of today. But, because of our failure to come clean with Communism, we are unable to deal with it, trapped as we are in the old Communist habit of deceit and double-speak that used to haunt the countries in the East and that now haunts all of us. Because of this failure, the same leftist people who turned a blind eye to Communism then, turn a blind eye to Islam today. They are using exactly the same arguments in favor of détente, improved relations, and appeasement as before. They argue that our enemy is as peace-loving as we are, that if we meet him half-way he will do the same, that he only asks respect and that if we respect him he will respect us. We even hear a repetition of the old moral equivalence mantra. They used to say that Western "imperialism" was as bad as Soviet imperialism; they are now saying that Western "imperialism" is as bad as Islamic terrorism.

In my speech near Ground Zero in New York on September 11, I emphasized that we must stop the "Blame the West, Blame America"-game which Islamic spokesmen are playing with us. And we must stop playing this game ourselves. I have the same message for you. It is an insult to tell us that we are guilty and deserve what is happening to us. We do not deserve becoming strangers in our own land. We should not accept such insults. First of all, Western civilization is the freest and most prosperous on earth, which is why so many immigrants are moving here, instead of Westerners moving there. And secondly, there is no such thing as collective guilt. Free individuals are free moral agents who are responsible for their own deeds only.

I am very happy to be here in Berlin today to give this message which is extremely important, especially in Germany. Whatever happened in your country in the past, the present generation is not responsible for it. Whatever happened in the past, it is no excuse for punishing the Germans today. But it is also no excuse for you to refuse to fight for your own identity. Your only responsibility is to avoid the mistakes of the past. It is your duty to stand with those threatened by the ideology of Islam, such as the State of Israel and your Jewish compatriots. The Weimar Republic refused to fight for freedom and was overrun by a totalitarian ideology, with catastrophic consequences for Germany, the rest of Europe and the world. Do not fail to fight for your freedom today.

I am happy to be in your midst today because it seems that twenty years after German reunification, a new generation no longer feels guilty for being German. The current and very intense debate about Thilo Sarrazin's recent book is an indication of the fact that Germany is coming to terms with itself.

I have not yet read Dr. Sarrazin's book myself, but I understand that while the ruling politically-correct establishment is almost unanimously critical of his thesis and he lost his job, a large majority of Germans acknowledges that Dr. Sarrazin is addressing important and pressing issues. "Germany is abolishing itself," warns Sarrazin, and he calls on the Germans to halt this process. The enormous impact of his book indicates that many Germans feel the same way. The people of Germany do not want Germany to be abolished, despite all the political indoctrination they have been subjected to. Germany is no longer ashamed to assert its national pride.

In these difficult times, where our national identity is under threat, we must stop feeling guilty about who we are. We are not "kafir," we are not guilty. Like other peoples, Germans have the right to remain who they are. Germans must not become French, nor Dutch, nor Americans, nor Turks. They should remain Germans. When the Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan visited your country in 2008, he told the Turks living here that they had to remain Turks. He literally said that "assimilation is a crime against humanity." Erdogan would have been right if he had been addressing the Turks in Turkey. However, Germany is the land of the Germans. Hence, the Germans have a right to demand that those who come to live in Germany assimilate; they have the right - no they have a duty to their children - to demand that newcomers respect the German identity of the German nation and Germany's right to preserve its identity.

We must realize that Islam expands in two ways. Since it is not a religion, conversion is only a marginal phenomenon. Historically, Islam expanded either by military conquest or by using the weapon of hijra, immigration. Muhammad conquered Medina through immigration. Hijra is also what we are experiencing today. The Islamization of Europe continues all the time. But the West has no strategy for dealing with the Islamic ideology, because our elites say that we must adapt to them rather than the other way round.

There is a lesson which we can learn in this regard from America, the freest nation on earth. Americans are proud of their nation, its achievements and its flag. We, too, should be proud of our nation. The United States has always been a nation of immigrants. U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt was very clear about the duty of immigrants. Here is what he said: "We should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else ... But this is predicated upon the man's becoming in very fact an American, and nothing but an American. ... There can be no divided allegiance here. ... We have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people."

It is not up to me to define what Germany's national identity consists of. That is entirely up to you. I do know, however, that German culture, like that of neighboring countries, such as my own, is rooted in judeo-christian and humanist values. Every responsible politician has a political obligation to preserve these values against ideologies which threaten them. A Germany full of mosques and veiled women is no longer the Germany of Goethe, Schiller and Heine, Bach and Mendelssohn. It will be a loss to us all. It is important that you cherish and preserve your roots as a nation. Otherwise you will not be able to safeguard your identity; you will be abolished as a people, and you will lose your freedom. And the rest of Europe will lose its freedom with you.

My friends, when Ronald Reagan came to a divided Berlin 23 years ago he uttered the historic words „Mister Gorbachev, tear down this wall." President Reagan was not an appeaser, but a man who spoke the truth because he loved freedom. Today, we, too, must tear down a wall. It is not a wall of concrete, but of denial and ignorance about the real nature of Islam. The International Freedom Alliance aims to coordinate and stimulate these efforts.

Because we speak the truth, voters have given my party, the Partij voor de Vrijheid, and other parties, such as the Dansk Folkeparti and the Schweizerische Volkspartei, the power to influence the political decision process, whether that be in opposition or in government or by supporting a minority government - as we want to do in the Netherlands. President Reagan showed that by speaking the truth one can change the course of history. He showed that there is no need to despair. Never! Just do your duty. Be not afraid. Speak the truth. Defend Freedom. Together we can preserve freedom, together we must preserve freedom, and together, my friends, we will be able to preserve freedom.

Thank you.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: G M on October 03, 2010, 05:51:21 PM
Wilders, like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, is a heroic figure. If the west is to survive, their warnings must be heeded.
Title: Alexander: Poverty Pimps
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 07, 2010, 08:44:04 AM
Alexander's Essay – October 7, 2010

Poverty Pimps
"The statesman who should attempt to direct private people in what manner they ought to employ their capitals, would ... assume an authority which could safely be trusted, not only to no single person, but to no council or senate whatever, and which would nowhere be so dangerous as in the hands of a man who had folly and presumption enough to fancy himself fit to exercise it." --Adam Smith

The lead poverty pimpAs a measure of community service, I round up my Boy Scout Troop periodically to meet with my friend, and Patriot Chaplain, Lurone Jennings, an inner-city community pastor.

We gather early on Saturday mornings to serve families who are struggling to make ends meet, most of them elderly and living in squalor. After cleaning around their shacks, providing meals and praying over those families, we always reconvene with Pastor Jennings for a time of fellowship.

Recently, I asked Lurone to explain what factors he thinks have contributed most to poverty in our city and nation. Without missing a beat, he said, "Poverty Pimps," referring to those who are elected to public office on the promise of a handout rather than a hand up -- this from a man who has devoted his life to serving those most irreconcilably ensnared by those pimps.

Handouts, of course, are a much easier sell than hand-ups, but the consequences in terms of human dignity and society are devastating.

Promising to give a man a fish rather than encouraging him to take up fishing to provide for himself is one of the clearest philosophical delineations between the worldviews of contemporary liberals and conservatives.

Lurone explained that, while New Deal and Great Society liberals may have had good intentions, the net result of their socialist endeavors has been the institutionalization of poverty, and the victimization and enslavement of what has become the Left's most reliable constituency of any stripe or association: black folks.

These days, a candidate for office can count on receiving 90-plus percent of the black vote in any election, so long as he has that all-important "D" next to his or her name.

Generations of Americans have become accustomed to being given, or at least promised, fish caught by someone else. Today, Barack Hussein Obama and his socialist bourgeoisie have banked their entire political fortunes on classist rhetoric, promoting disparity in order to foster dependence.

Once was the time that the Democrat Party was the embodiment of individual responsibility and states' rights. But the party was led astray by "useful idiots" on the Left, and by the end of Franklin Roosevelt's reign, the Party had been turned on end.

Indeed, the most famous of former Democrats, when asked why he left that once-proud party, replied, "I did not leave the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party left me." That, of course, was Ronald Reagan.

Now, the Democrat Party, with Obama and his Leftists cadres leading the charge, is determined to break the back of free enterprise and thereby ensure an impoverished voting majority. And they're well on the way to doing so.

The objective of Obama's "fundamental transformation of the United States of America" is to replace free enterprise with a "social democracy," which Merriam-Webster aptly defines as "1: a political movement advocating a gradual and peaceful transition from capitalism to socialism by democratic means; 2: a democratic welfare state that incorporates both capitalist and socialist practices."

Unfortunately, whether it's Marxist, Nationalist or Democratic Socialism, the terminus of statism is tyranny, for as Historian Lord John Acton noted, "Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely."

Eighteenth-century philosopher and political economist Adam Smith once wrote, "It is the highest impertinence and presumption, therefore, in kings and ministers, to pretend to watch over the economy of private people." In his 1776 masterpiece on man and economy, "An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations," Smith set forth that Liberty and free enterprise go hand in hand, and that should any potentate of state attempt to centralize the economy, that would most certainly be the end of Liberty.

Today, we Americans, in this last "Shining City on a Hill," stand at the precipice separating Liberty from tyranny.

In a few short weeks, we'll learn whether our nation is going to plant its feet firmly, shout "Enough!" and fight for the restoration of Essential Liberty, or be pushed yet another step closer to the abyss of totalitarianism.

With less than a month until the midterm referendum on the most menacing socialist agenda in U.S. history, I'm reminded of a pamphlet published in 1916 by an outspoken advocate for Liberty, William J. H. Boetcker. He entitled his tract "The Ten Cannots," and it fittingly contrasts the competing political and economic agendas of the right and left in this era: "You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift. You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. You cannot help the poor man by destroying the rich. You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred. You cannot build character and courage by taking away man's initiative and independence. You cannot help small men by tearing down big men. You cannot lift the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer. You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than your income. You cannot establish security on borrowed money. You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they will not do for themselves."

Indeed.

In the meantime, let us stand firm against the Poverty Pimps, and, noli nothis permittere te terere (Don't let the bastards get you down)!

Semper Vigilo, Fortis, Paratus et Fidelis!

Mark Alexander
Publisher, The Patriot Post
Title: Awful, awfuler, awfulest
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 09, 2010, 08:40:26 AM
Awful, Awfuler, Awfulest
By GAIL COLLINS
Published: October 8, 2010

 
I recently wrote a column on the pressing question of which state is having the most terrible election this year. Nevada won. Immediately, there were outcries from voters who believed their state had been unfairly overlooked on the dreadfulness meter.


“How could you leave out Connecticut?”

“Give credit where it is due for top honors to KENTUCKY.”

“Dang! Feeling a bit left out here in Massachusetts.”

“What about Maine?”

A reader from Missouri demanded consideration for his state, where Representative Roy Blunt, father of former Gov. Matt Blunt, is running against Secretary of State Robin Carnahan, sister of Representative Russ Carnahan, whose father was a governor and mother a senator. “There probably hasn’t been an election in Missouri in 30 years in which a Blunt or Carnahan wasn’t on the ballot,” he complained.

And you know what? That seems to be true. Thirteen Blunt candidacies and thirteen Carnahan ones since 1980. While extreme boredom is not nearly enough to get a state into the awful-election finals, Missouri, you do need to think about getting a little variety.

Several readers from Maine pointed out that their Republican candidate for governor, Paul LePage, has homes in both Maine and Florida, each of which got tax breaks as the family’s principal residence.

“If elected (he leads in polls) will he be governor of both states?” one correspondent demanded.

No, gentle reader. Florida has its own governor’s race, where the leading candidate is a wealthy businessman who made history when his company was fined $1.7 billion for fraudulent Medicare billing. It has enough on its hands. On the plus side, Florida might soon be able to bill itself as The Place Where Other States’ Officials Stash Their Loved Ones. West Virginia’s Republican candidate for the Senate, John Raese, has a house in Palm Beach where his wife lives with the kids, who attend local schools.

Raese is a very rich guy. (“I made money the old-fashioned way. I inherited it,” he told an interviewer.) His $2.9 million, 7,000-square-foot crash pad has made numerous appearances in Democratic campaign literature, which always notes that the driveway is paved in pink marble. Raese rejoined that it is “peach-colored tile” that he didn’t even pick himself, leading a West Virginia union leader to say that the coal miners felt “great sympathy and understanding for multimillionaires who were steered in a wrong direction by their interior designers.”

The presence of one outrageous candidate in a race is not nearly enough to make it the worst election in the country given all the competition we have this year. Here in New York, the Republican candidate for governor, Carl Paladino, seems incapable of discussing anything, including the state budget, without making a reference to his opponent Andrew Cuomo’s sex life.

Cuomo has barely said a word since the campaign began. We would be looking forward to the upcoming gubernatorial debate, except there will be so many minor candidates on the stage that it will be hard to pick him out. And when I tell you that one of the debaters is going to be a woman who claims to have supplied former Gov. Eliot Spitzer with prostitutes, you will understand that I am setting the bar for Worst Election winner very, very high.

Nevada won the contest because it has a high-profile race for the Senate in which voters seem to find both candidates so loathsome that neither incumbent Harry Reid nor his Republican opponent, Sharron Angle, wants to come out and campaign. The voters were tired of Reid, the powerful Senate majority leader, even before he attempted to run for re-election while his son was the Democratic gubernatorial nominee. Too many Reids! Really, Harry, if you wanted to pull something like this, you could have moved to Missouri.

Angle did make an appearance last week at a rally of Tea Party supporters in Mesquite, where she responded to a question about “Muslims wanting to take over the United States” by decrying the fact that Dearborn, Mich., and Frankford, Tex., were governed under Islamic law, called Sharia. Which, of course, they are not.

The Associated Press, which reported on this event, noted that while Dearborn does at least have “a thriving Muslim community,” it was not clear why Angle picked on Frankford, Tex., which did not seem to have many Muslims, and also went out of existence around 1975.

Nevada, you are the winner, and we appreciate the way you make the rest of us feel better about our own political woes.

“Wow! Texas did not make the list. Things are looking up,” wrote a grateful Texan.

“I can’t tell if this is a sign we’re improving or the rest of the country is going to hell,” wrote another.
Title: More PC MSM
Post by: ccp on October 11, 2010, 09:26:08 AM
I guess the political correct crowd has won.  When CNN anchors can label Palidino's comments as extreme then this is another example of us being turned upside down.  So gay marriage, adoption, parades is now mainstream and those who don't feel it is normal are now the "extreme" ones.  I think it still so most would agree with Palidino.
Republicans are on full retreat on this one.

***New York — Republican gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino told Orthodox Jewish leaders on Sunday that there's "nothing to be proud of in being a dysfunctional homosexual."

Paladino, who has received tea party support, made the comments at a synagogue in Brooklyn's Williamsburg section while trying to strike a contrast between himself and his Democratic rival, state Atty. Gen. Andrew Cuomo. Paladino said he chose not to march in this summer's gay pride parade but his opponent did.

"That's not how God created us," Paladino said of being gay, "and that's not the example that we should be showing our children."

He added that children who later in life choose to marry people of the opposite sex and raise families would be "much better off and much more successful."

"I don't want them to be brainwashed into thinking that homosexuality is an equally valid and successful option," he said.

Paladino, a multimillionaire developer from Buffalo, has stated that he is opposed to same-sex marriage. His most recent comments came as eight people were arraigned Sunday in an attack on a gay man and two gay teens in the Bronx on Oct. 3.

Asked whether his comments were appropriate given the attack, Paladino said he does not support violence against gays.

"Don't misquote me as wanting to hurt homosexual people in any way. That would be a dastardly lie," he said. "My approach is live and let live."

A Cuomo campaign spokesman, Josh Vlasto, said Paladino's comments demonstrated "a stunning homophobia and a glaring disregard for basic equality."
Copyright 2010 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.****

 
Title: Throw the Books at Him
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on October 11, 2010, 10:26:54 AM
Jimmy Carter: Can't Stop the Typing
In November 1980, the American people made a disastrous decision whose reverberations are still being felt today. Rather than biting the bullet and re-electing the glum, uncharismatic, hopeless Jimmy Carter to the White House—thereby ensuring that he would return to Plains, Ga., at the conclusion of his second term and keep his blabberpuss shut—they turfed him out into the street.

That made him mad. Really mad. By giving one of America's dopiest presidents the bum's rush, the American people ensured that Mr. Carter would spend the rest of his life trying to even the score, trying to persuade them that they had made a huge mistake when they cast their lot with Ronald Reagan, trying to convince them that they were a bunch of jerks.

The particular form of retribution Carter chose was as sinister and cruel as any known to man. He took his pen in hand and began to write books. Long books. Boring books. Dour books. Yes, long, boring, dour, numerous books. Books with sanctimonious names like "Keeping Faith" and "Living Faith" and "Leading a Worthy Life." Books with pompous names like "Turning Point," "Our Endangered Values" and "Always a Reckoning." Books with hokey names like "Christmas in Plains" and "Everything to Gain: Making the Most of the Rest of Your Life." And yes, even books with names like "The Little Baby Snoogle-Fleejer" that defy classification.

He has not set his pen down since.

With the recent release of the exquisitely pointless "White House Diary," his 25th entry in the literary sweepstakes, Mr. Carter has now written more books than James Joyce, Jane Austen, Gustave Flaubert, George Eliot, Virgil, Homer and Jonathan Franzen. He has also written more books than Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Lyndon Baines Johnson, Dwight Eisenhower, Woodrow Wilson, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington and a whole lot of other presidents who got more points on the scoreboard than he ever did. Most ex-presidents have the good grace to stop at a single publication after they leave office, though more than a few have obligingly opted for the public's favorite number in this lethal genre: zero.

Not Jimmy.

The Oval Office equivalent of the Edsel, Mr. Carter has spent three decades in the wilderness retrofitting his image as the best, the brightest, and the noblest ex-president of them all. This is like trying to get credit for touchdowns 30 years after the clock has run out, with the score reading Eureka College 50, Navy 0.

Being history's most admired ex-president is like being the most beloved former skipper of a torpedoed aircraft carrier. If the ship sank while you were at the helm, it doesn't really matter what a great job you did manning the inflatable lifeboat afterward. Mr. Carter inhabits some weird parallel universe with people like George Foreman, who were despised when they were at their peak and then manufactured a touchy-feely post-career aura that made some people forget how much they disliked them when they were famous. But George Foreman, unlike Jimmy Carter, is funny. And George Foreman could throw a punch.

Carter's extraneous exhumation of the musty old diary he kept during his four long, horrid years in office suggests that he is scraping the bottom of the barrel for material. Publishing a diary describing the four years in office that were so awful they got you booted out into the street is like George Pickett publishing "Gettysburg Diary" or Mike Brown publishing "Quiet Days in Katrina: A FEMA Diary." And if Carter's gone back to the dismal years 1977-80 to exhume diary material, what comes next? "Tuesdays with Bert Lance"?

This is a classic case of being careful what you wish for. The American people wanted Jimmy Carter out of office in the worst way, and to this day they are paying the price. If we had to do it all over again, I think a lot of people would vote to amend the Constitution and allow presidents to run for five, six—as many terms as they wanted. That wouldn't leave them much spare time to write books.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704631504575532314072376630.html
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on October 11, 2010, 10:38:35 AM
"George Foreman, who were despised when they were at their peak and then manufactured a touchy-feely post-career aura that made some people forget how much they disliked them"

Foreman despised?  By whom?

Actually I rooted for Foreman to wipe the smirk off Ali.  I appreciated GF when he proudly waved an American flag at the Olympics!
That was a refreshing turn form the Black power waving of fists from the Olympian runners and the celebrating of the draft dodging Ali.

Yet I did give Ali credit for beating the guy as he said he would.  The same guy who destroyed Frazier and Norton just earlier.



 
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 11, 2010, 03:24:29 PM
For me, and I think for most fight fans today, Foreman is about what he went through, what he did to change, and what he did to come back-- and take the heavyweight title again (I made money betting on him btw  8-) )
Title: Why Vilify those who Deliver Growth?
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on October 16, 2010, 06:44:17 PM
Time to shop Home Depot:

Stop Bashing Business, Mr. President
If we tried to start The Home Depot today, it's a stone cold certainty that it would never have gotten off the ground.
By KEN LANGONE

Although I was glad that you answered a question of mine at the Sept. 20 town-hall meeting you hosted in Washington, D.C., Mr. President, I must say that the event seemed more like a lecture than a dialogue. For more than two years the country has listened to your sharp rhetoric about how American businesses are short-changing workers, fleecing customers, cheating borrowers, and generally "driving the economy into a ditch," to borrow your oft-repeated phrase.

My question to you was why, during a time when investment and dynamism are so critical to our country, was it necessary to vilify the very people who deliver that growth? Instead of offering a straight answer, you informed me that I was part of a "reckless" group that had made "bad decisions" and now required your guidance, if only I'd stop "resisting" it.

I'm sure that kind of argument draws cheers from the partisan faithful. But to my ears it sounded patronizing. Of course, one of the chief conceits of centralized economic planning is that the planners know better than everybody else.

But there's a much deeper problem than whether I am personally irked or not. Your insistence that your policies are necessary and beneficial to business is utterly at odds with what you and your administration are saying elsewhere. You pick a fight with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, accusing it of using foreign money to influence congressional elections, something the chamber adamantly denies. Your U.S. attorney in New York, Preet Bahrara, compares investment firms to Mexican drug cartels and says he wants the power to wiretap Wall Street when he sees fit. And you drew guffaws of approving laughter with your car-wreck metaphor, recently telling a crowd that those who differ with your approach are "standing up on the road, sipping a Slurpee" while you are "shoving" and "sweating" to fix the broken-down jalopy of state.

View Full Image

Associated Press
President Barack Obama during a September 20th town hall.

That short-sighted wavering—between condescending encouragement one day and hostile disparagement the next—creates uncertainty that, as any investor could tell you, causes economic paralysis. That's because no one can tell what to expect next.

A little more than 30 years ago, Bernie Marcus, Arthur Blank, Pat Farrah and I got together and founded The Home Depot. Our dream was to create (memo to DNC activists: that's build, not take or coerce) a new kind of home-improvement center catering to do-it-yourselfers. The concept was to have a wide assortment, a high level of service, and the lowest pricing possible.

We opened the front door in 1979, also a time of severe economic slowdown. Yet today, Home Depot is staffed by more than 325,000 dedicated, well-trained, and highly motivated people offering outstanding service and knowledge to millions of consumers.

If we tried to start Home Depot today, under the kind of onerous regulatory controls that you have advocated, it's a stone cold certainty that our business would never get off the ground, much less thrive. Rules against providing stock options would have prevented us from incentivizing worthy employees in the start-up phase—never mind the incredibly high cost of regulatory compliance overall and mandatory health insurance. Still worse are the ever-rapacious trial lawyers.

Meantime, you seem obsessed with repealing tax cuts for "millionaires and billionaires." Contrary to what you might assume, I didn't start with any advantages and neither did most of the successful people I know. I am the grandson of immigrants who came to this country seeking basic economic and personal liberty. My parents worked tirelessly to build on that opportunity. My first job was as a day laborer on the construction of the Long Island Expressway more than 50 years ago. The wealth that was created by my investments wasn't put into a giant swimming pool as so many elected demagogues seem to imagine. Instead it benefitted our employees, their families and our community at large.

I stand behind no one in my enthusiasm and dedication to improving our society and especially our health care. It's worth adding that it makes little sense to send Treasury checks to high net-worth people in the form of Social Security. That includes you, me and scores of members of Congress. Why not cut through that red tape, Mr. President, and apply a basic means test to that program? Just make sure that money actually reduces federal spending and isn't simply shifted elsewhere. I guarantee you that many millionaires and billionaires will gladly forego it—as my wife and I already do when we forward those checks each month to charity.

It's not too late to include the voices of experienced business people in your efforts, small business owners in particular. Americans would be right to wonder why you haven't already.

Mr. Langone, a former director of the New York Stock Exchange and co-founder of Home Depot, is chairman of Invemed Associates.
Title: Excrement happens
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 19, 2010, 05:43:06 AM
In the beginning was the plan.

And then came the Assumptions.

And the Assumptions were without form.
And the Plan was without substance.

And darkness was upon the face of the Workers.

And they spoke among themselves, saying,
"It is a crock of shit, and it stinketh."
And the Workers went unto their Supervisors and said,
"It is a pail of dung, and none may abide the odor thereof."
And the Supervisors went unto their Managers, saying,
"It is a container of excrement, and it is very strong,
such that none may abide by it."
And the Managers went unto their Directors, saying,
"It is a vessel of fertilizer, and none may abide its strength."
And the Directors spoke amongst themselves, saying one to another,
"It contains that which aids plant growth, and it is very strong."
And the Directors then went unto the Vice-Presidents, saying unto them,
"It promotes growth, and it is very powerful."
And the Vice-Presidents went unto the President, saying unto him,
"This new plan will actively promote the growth and vigor
of the company, with powerful effects."
And the President Looked upon the Plan, and saw that it was good.
And the Plan became Policy.

This is how Shit Happens
Title: interesting thought pieces - The new, old world order - VDH
Post by: DougMacG on October 21, 2010, 09:37:20 PM
Posting this wide-ranging interview into a different category and looking for comment. Download and set aside 37 minutes. He calmly makes some startling predictions and observations across the globe.  Worth listening more than once IMO.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2010/10/027500.php
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: G M on October 22, 2010, 09:06:05 AM
Doug,

It doesn't seem to vary much from the threads found here.
Title: It's the Constitution, Stupid
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on October 26, 2010, 05:37:57 PM
Our Next Stop: Greece -- or Rome

by Roger Pilon

If there's one theme dominating our midterm elections this year, it's outrage over runaway government — government running our lives, and trampling morality in the process. CNBC financial reporter Rick Santelli, who gave the Tea Party its name, captured it perfectly last year in his "rant heard 'round the world" — "The government is promoting bad behavior." With the bailouts mounting, he touched a nerve when he asked how many people wanted to pay their neighbor's mortgage when they were struggling to pay their own.

The question hit home (literally) as more and more Americans were coming to see government's hand in the economic mess around them. Their neighbor was in trouble because Congress's irresponsible Community Reinvestment Act, the Fed's prolonged easy money policy, and the shenanigans of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had put people in homes they couldn't afford, leading to rising foreclosures, plummeting housing values, and job losses that have hit us all in countless ways.

It's not simply economics. It's government encouraging irresponsible behavior, and responsible people paying the price.

But are there any people in public life today behaving more irresponsibly than so many in Congress? They don't even read the bills they vote for? Look how Obamacare was passed. The "Louisiana Purchase." The "Cornhusker Kickback." Does anyone know what's in that law, even though it affects our very lives? We don't, and we won't know until the regulations get written. But here too, Congress delegated the power to write that law to unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats. Yet the Constitution's very first sentence states plainly that "[a]ll legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress."

]re there any people in public life today behaving more irresponsibly than so many in Congress?
And so we come to what really is agitating the voters this year, as seen on so many homemade Tea Party signs: The Constitution today is all but irrelevant. In their hearts, Americans know that it was written to limit government and protect our liberty — that's what the Revolution was about, after all. But time and again they see unlimited government running their lives — and irresponsibly at that.

Government is planning our retirement and health care, for example. Yet the three big "entitlement" programs — Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid — are going broke as Congress, rather than deal with that, creates an even larger and even more unfunded entitlement scheme, Obamacare. And states too have mortgaged themselves as far as the eye can see to give public sector employees health and retirement benefits that far exceed anything available to the private sector workers whose taxes have to pay for them.

Indeed, taxes and regulations today have so hammered the private sector that states like California appear to be in a demographic death spiral, with taxpayers fleeing while tax-takers flow in. Just look at the latest census estimates: for the first time in over a century, California will gain no new House seats.

Yet the Constitution gives only limited powers to the federal government, and it checks what states can do as well by recognizing the inherent right of individuals to plan and live their own lives, free from government interference — indeed, from government's planning our lives for us.

So how did we go from the Constitution's vision of liberty through limited government to the Leviathan we've got today? That's a long story, but at its core, it's really quite simple. The watershed was the Progressive Era, in the early decades of the 20th century, when the forebears of today's liberals rejected the founders' view of liberty. Their idea was to empower government bureaucrats, elites trained at the best schools, to plan everything from the economy to our living arrangements — even to our population, as in the infamous Supreme Court case of Buck v. Bell, which upheld a Virginia statute that authorized the sterilization of people thought to be of insufficient intelligence, all part of the eugenics movement aimed at improving the human race.

To some extent the court resisted the Progressives, citing the Constitution, but with the New Deal, especially after President Franklin Roosevelt's notorious court-packing threat in 1937, the court caved, and the Constitution was turned on its head. The floodgates were thus opened for the modern welfare state, the unsustainable foundations of which are now so obvious that they can no longer be ignored.

And so, having abandoned individual responsibility, succumbing instead to the siren song of government responsibility, we're now at another watershed. Either we grasp the nettle and restore our founding principles — gradually, as we must — or we go the way of Greece, or France, or, much earlier, Rome.

http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=12507
Title: Open Letter of an Ex-Democrat, I
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on October 28, 2010, 11:53:30 AM
Whoa, if this is indeed a common sentiment among (former) Democratic Party activists, then that party has some rough road ahead.

Dear Rush,

It’s my great hope that some of your listeners find a way to get this letter to you, or that it makes it to “Snerdley” and finds its way into your hands. I don’t think even you understand just how much damage Obama has done to the Democrat Party — to the point where formerly lifelong Democrats like myself, and everyone here at HillBuzz.org, are actively working to expose the party and literally burn it to the ground for the good of the country.

None of this is being reported in the media, but a Civil War in the Democrat ranks has been raging since May 31st, 2008…a date every Hillary Clinton supporter knows well, because that was the date of the Democrat Rules & Bylaws Committee Meeting where Howard Dean (then-DNC Chair), Donna Brazile, and scores of other Kool-Aid slurping Obama flunkies took off their masks and revealed the full extent of the Leftist coup that had taken over the party.  This was the day when the DNC took delegates Hillary Clinton won in Michigan away from her and handed them to Obama (despite the fact he wasn’t even on the primary ballot in that state, because he removed his name when his campaign realized he’d come in third in that race).

May 31st, 2008 was a day when Hillary “babes” (as you call us sometimes) like us flew to Washington in large numbers to stand outside the Marriott near the National Zoo, where this Rules & Bylaws Committee Meeting was held, to shout for the DNC to count all the votes and operate the nominating process fairly — but they refused.  The anger over that day has never abated. In fact, it’s grown considerably since then.

This was the determining factor in millions of us leaving the Democrat Party for good. This was the day when the P.U.M.A. movement began — in response to Donna Brazile’s calls for “party unity” following the Rules & Bylaws Committee Meeting, we “Hillary babes” said “Party Unity My A$$” (or People United Means Action, depending on how you want to phrase it).  Exit polls showed 8 million PUMA voted Republican for the first time in our lives in the fall of 2008…casting ballots for McCain/Palin (and in truth, mainly for Palin, whom we support, and not to a small degree because she receives many of the same attacks lobbed at Hillary Clinton all these years).

You seem to know most of all this, so I’ll end the history lesson by noting the people alienated by the Democrat Party during the primaries in 2008 — where it was clear the party and the media colluded at great lengths to push Obama while hammering Hillary Clinton into the ground — never came back to the Democrat Party.

This is also when most of us stopped using the term “Democratic Party”, since there’s nothing “democratic” about these people.  They are the “Democrat Party”, and even that is hard to acknowledge because they really and truly have proved themselves to be enemies of real democracy.

I’m still registered as a Democrat here in Chicago (because the Cocktail Party GOP establishment so disgusts me I can’t will myself to party-ID Republican, and there’s no Independent option here in Illinois) but I can’t imagine ever voting for another Democrat again, as long as I live.  To Hell with Democrats. This was solidified for me on Christmas Eve of last year, when Democrats rushed Obamacare through the Senate in the dead of night, through various secret channels, and every single Democrat voted for its passage (even supposed moderates like Evan Bayh in Indiana, who quickly realized his vote would cost him re-election…so the coward retired rather then face angry voters over what he did). I just don’t believe Democrats should be given elected office by voters because they cannot be trusted to even read bills before they vote on them, not even when said bills seek to permanently alter the entire American economy.  This is reckless and reprehensible to the point of treason.

I was a Democrat for 32 years before the heavy-handed push for Obama alienated me from the party…and I borrow what Hillary Clinton said about Republicans once, back when she was a Goldwater Girl, and will paraphrase by saying that I didn’t leave the Democrat Party, the Democrat Party left me.

After it beat me to a pulp, called me a racist, berated and insulted me, and used Alinsky Rules to hit me with everything it had.  Not just me, but all Hillary supporters.

This is the part I don’t think you understand because I don’t know if you and your listeners paid much attention to what the Obama campaign and DNC did to malign and assault Hillary Clinton’s supporters during the 2008 campaign.  None of this has been forgotten by any of us.

If you have not seen it already, Rush, you need to watch Gigi Gaston’s documentary “We Will Not Be Silenced 2008″.  I’m featured in a segment on the voter fraud that was committed in the Iowa Caucus back in January of 2008.  While I was always aware Democrats use unions and other means to cheat in elections, I never knew the Democrat Party was capable of the large-scale, aggressive, unapologetic fraud it committed on Obama’s behalf all through 2008.  In Iowa, I watched Obama’s ACORN and SEIU goons push and shove old people, bully them, and intimidate them when they wanted to vote for Hillary Clinton.  I saw scores of Illinois license plates fill the parking lots outside caucus locations, with Chicagoland Obama supporters illegally entering the Caucus sites to vote for Obama and game Iowa for him.  Having planned ahead, Obama supporters actually RAN those caucus sites, and held the doors open for all these fraudulent voters to walk right in, without being asked for IDs, where they then took control of the caucuses and bullied the Iowa residents into supporting Obama — lest they be called RAAACISTS! out in the open in front of their friends and neighbors in those open-air caucuses.

The media has never talked about this.  I don’t remember ever hearing you talk about it.  But one of the biggest reasons the Democrats are in the trouble they’re in right now is because of how frequently the Left and the media (one and the same, really) called anyone who opposed Obama a RAAACIST.  If you supported Hillary Clinton in the primaries instead of Obama, you were called a RAAACIST.  If you were someone like me who fundraised for Hillary, who hosted events for her, who put yourself out there and wrote columns advocating her or did media spots talking up her candidacy, you were aggressively targeted by the Obama campaign and his supporters…relentlessly attacked as a RAAACIST! and assaulted with the Alinksy Rules for Radicals in hopes of breaking your spirit, terrorizing you, and making you abandon Clinton for fear of having these people destroy your life, ruin your business, and make you an absolute pariah in your community.

This is what the Obama campaign, the media, and the DNC did to DEMOCRATS.

For almost a year, the Obama zealots and the Left waged all-out-war not just on Hillary Clinton, but on lifelong, loyal, dyed-in-the-wool Democrat voters like me.  This came straight from the top, from Obama himself.  Both he and his wife Michelle called the Clintons racists.  Obama’s surrogates like James Clyburne, Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, John Lewis, and others called Geraldine Ferraro, Madeline Albright, and others racists.  The Obamas toxified the South Carolina primary, in particular, with foul race-baiting and turned North Carolina and Indiana into racial powder kegs by ramping up accusations that anyone not supporting Obama was a vile racist that needed to be pounded into the ground.

Stephanie Tubbs Jones, my former Congresswoman back home in Cleveland, was a black Hillary Clinton supporter to the very end — and she was called a “race-traitor”, an “Aunt Jane”, and all manner of worse names as she was bullied, berated, and verbally assaulted by the Obama team…because she was black and dared to stand with her friend Hillary Clinton, the person Tubbs Jones knew would make a better president than “The One”.  To her dying day in August of 2008, Tubbs Jones was threatened by the Obama campaign and told she’d be primaried in 2010 and kicked to the curb for being a “race-traitor”. She died of a brain aneurysm while driving her car, and Obama supporters filled Daily Kos, DemocratUnderground, and other George Soros-supported sites with lies about her drunk driving, doing drugs, and other slurs because even after she died these people wouldn’t stop hating her for daring to be an outspoken black woman who would never abandon Hillary for Obama.

This is similar to the grief that I’ve received here in Chicago for being a gay Hillary former Democrat in Boystown who never drank any Kool-Aid, never stopped speaking out against Obama, and who recently fully came out as a conservative — in the face of the same kind of Alinsky-grade, identity-based, “traitor” hectoring that Tubbs Jones got for being a black woman who didn’t kneel before the Obama altar.

Well, Rush, let me just tell you, from personal experience, that the tens of millions of people relentlessly abused and hounded by Obama supporters (remember that back in 2008 he urged his followers to “get in their faces” and “confront their neighbors” if they weren’t drinking his unicorn-pumped sparkly Kool-Aid ) will NEVER EVER FORGET what the Obama campaign directed at them, in terms of all this Alinsky bullying.

To quote Jeremiah Wright, the man Obama spent twenty years eagerly listening to at Trinity United Church of Christ:  somebody’s chickens have now come back to roost.

During the campaign, Donna Brazile famously said that the Democrat Party no longer needed the people Obama once described as “bitter, religion-and-guns-clinging, Midwesterners”.  Brazile took this further and said, outright, that the Democrat party did not need blue-collar white voters, the Jacksonian voters, the Hillary voters, because the party was “Obamafied” and would win elections for generations with the Obama coalition of blacks, Leftist elites, Hispanics, low information gay voters, and self-hating Jews.

This is all the Democrats have left, Rush.

Speaking from personal experience, as someone who has worked in fundraising for over 10 years and who has been a part of every presidential campaign since 1992, the Democrats have permanently alienated tens of millions of people who normally turned out reliably every year not just to vote Democrat, but also to write checks and otherwise participate in campaigns.

No more.  Never again.

Here in Chicago, just about everyone who was part of Team Hillary efforts with me on the ground has completely divorced themselves from the Democrat Party.  Being called a racist repeatedly and hearing from Donna Brazile that we are not needed will do that to a person.

But in a bigger sense, Democrats, by being so shameless and aggressive with the voter fraud in 2008 have opened too many eyes for us to ever go back to pretending that fraud and corrupt practices aren’t the hallmark of the Democrat Party.

There was a show on ABC a few years ago called Alias starring Jennifer Garner in which she played a woman working for a company called Credit Dauphine…which she was told was a front for a CIA organization called SD6.  Garner’s character, Sidney Bristow, carried out her missions for SD6, overlooking different things the organization did that she might not have liked, because she thought she was doing what was best for the country.  And then, one day, Sidney learned SD6 was actually an enemy of America…that it’s real mission was to destroy the country…that everything Sidney was told about SD6 was a lie.  The mask came off SD6, and Sidney Bristow realized she had to work aggressively to take the whole enterprise down.

Rush (and his listeners), please hear me on this because you will not read this in the media — but just about every one of us from the Hillary 2008 campaign is a Sidney Bristow today.

Those of us who worked Democrat campaigns in the past put up with union associations and the other unsavory aspects of being a Democrat because we were told this was the only way Democrats could win…with union muscle.  But, in 2008 the Democrats revealed themselves to be an SD6 conglomeration of every force in this country that wants to bring America down, tank our economy, usurp our Constitution, and lay waste to the American way of life.

Democrats took off the mask.  The DNC reveled in being fully Leftist-controlled.  Crazy people unapologetic in their Communist admiration took over positions of great influence not just in the DNC, but in our state and federal governments as well.

I’m horrified by that.

Hillary supporters are horrified by that.

And we have not sat back quietly to allow this to happen without a fight.

Title: Open Letter of an Ex-Democrat, II
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on October 28, 2010, 11:53:53 AM
I know for a fact that people I worked with on the Hillary 2008 campaign have been actively working against every single Democrat who supported Obama’s nomination.  Everyone who backstabbed Hillary Clinton is being undermined and sabotaged by people who might still be registered as Democrats but have no more loyalty to the party.  Sometimes, conservative sites try to make this into a “sour grapes” sort of “Hillary’s revenge” meme — and there might be a taste of this in what’s going on — but the real driving force is that we former Democrats saw just how insane these people really are and we are now doing everything we can, behind the scenes, to use everything we know about the Democrat Party to collapse it from within.

If you think about it logically, there is not enough energy to sustain a years-long drive to remove Obama supporters from office just because people are still upset Hillary Clinton was not the 2008 nominee and is not president today.  Sometimes, I think even you believe this is what this is all about.  Your “Reverse Operation Chaos” initiative seems predicated on this, but that belief is apocryphal in that it misses a few big marks.

This is and it isn’t about Hillary.

What it’s really about is what the Democrat Party did to Hillary that alienated tens of millions of Jacksonian/Clintonian/middleclass Americans from the party permanently — and this includes what the party and Obama campaign did to Hillary’s supporters themselves (ie, calling them racists, telling them they weren’t wanted, calling them bitter clingers, etc.).

For the first time in our lives, so many of us former Democrats were given an Alinsky taste of what the Democrat Party really stand for…what it really believes…and how it really feels about America, our Constitution, our economy, and our way of life.

Howard Dean, Donna Brazile, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and Obama took the mask off the Democrat Party…and the Leftist gorgon that lurked beneath is something America-loving, middleclass, Jacksonian/Clintonian Democrats want nothing to do with.

As part of your “Reverse Operation Chaos”, you really need to emphasize something the media just won’t talk about — and that’s the simple fact that even if you called yourself a Democrat for 32 years, the way I did, because everyone you grew up with and everyone in your family was a Democrat, that in 2010 it’s time to ask yourselves what that really means.

Do you want to be in a party that calls people racists for stepping out of line and voicing opposition to the socialist lurch of the current administration?

Do you condone voter fraud and the shameless, undemocratic tactics employed by Democrats?

Do you wish to associate with the likes of ACORN, the SEIU, the Black Panthers, and all the other thugs, goons, and degenerates the Obama campaign and White House employ as the DNC’s muscle on the ground?

It is crystal clear that being a patriotic American who loves this country is intellectually incompatible with being a Democrat.  If you love America and want it to prosper, the Democrat Party is at absolute odds with everything we need for a thriving, successful economy.

Hillary supporters realize this.

We received a heaping helping of Alinsky assaults to wake us up to this reality.

The reason so many of us support Governor Palin is not just because we see the same Alinksy assaults being waged upon her…but the woman is pitch-perfect in outlining exactly why Obama and the Left are wrong, and why Democrats under Obama are dangerous to have in elected office.

I know you talk about a “Hillary 2012″ but Rush, as much as I love Hillary Clinton, and as much as I worked my heart out for her in 2008, there’s no way that even she can repair the damage Obama has done to the party.  Certainly not by 2012.  MAYBE the Clintons and their supporters can purge the Obama lunatics from the party by 2016…but I doubt even that will happen.  Just like with the Leftists Carter infected the Democrat Party with, Obama legacy hires will be in the DNC for a generation to come…and it might not be until the 2030s before the Democrats can remove the taint Obama and his Leftist agenda have put on the party.

Democrats have made themselves synonymous with anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-democracy.  Obama and his acolytes decidedly upped the ante when it came to their aggressive push towards socialism…and this Center-Right nation is resisting it in what I am certain will be an epic refudiation (to borrow the Governor’s term) next week.

On November 3rd, no one I know will be resting on any laurels.  November 3rd starts the 2012 campaign…and not just the presidential race (where we’ll back Governor Palin) but the drive to knock people like Claire McCaskill out of office, continuing our work to take down every last one of the Obama supporters who backstabbed Hillary Clinton and helped install this socialist into the White House back in 2008.  When you hear talk of a Hillary “enemies’ list”, or just “The List” as we call it in HRC supporter circles, this is very much real…and we are truly committed to making sure the Claire McCaskills out there get everything that is coming to them for all their service to Obama and his agenda.

Hear that, Ben Nelson…voters will be coming for you.

You and everyone like you.

Every last one of you.

If you voted for Obamacare, you are politically dead but may not know it…and it is your own fault.  Being intensely stupid is no defense.  If you were a YES vote on anything related to Obamacare you are going to be defeated…if not in 2010, then in the primaries in 2012.  If you survive those, you will be taken down in the 2012 general election.  Your political career is over…dummy.

Hope your time on the Obama Kool-Aid bandwagon was worth ruining your life over.

We will not forget those Obamacare votes.  We will not forgive being called a racist because we don’t support this terrible man and his awful agenda.  We will not be silenced.

We will not give up.

It’s going to be years, if ever, before the lamestream media ever catches up to any of this, and realizes that a large swath of people who used to be Democrat loyalists are now doing everything they can to destroy the party.  Some of them are out and open, like me and my friends here at HillBuzz, but many are doing their part quietly.  They just stop writing checks.  Or maybe now they write checks to Democrat opponents.  They might continue to attend events and fundraisers, but now they call up Republican sites and give them all the dirt on what they heard in those meetings.  The Democrat Party alienated so many people who are now working to bring it down that I could go on for pages and pages more on this topic.

It’s very Sidney Bristow, Rush.  And if you watched that show Alias, you’d know she not only won in the end, but looked damn good kicking ass while doing it.

THAT, El Rushbo, is what your “Hillary babes” are up to.

Here in Boystown, and in every town, because the Civil War Howard Dean, Donna Brazile, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and Obama started on May 31st, 2008 is raging without end until the Democrat Party is no more.

Tell your listeners to count on that.

Kevin DuJan

Editor-in-Chief, HillBuzz.org

http://hillbuzz.org/2010/10/27/an-open-letter-to-rush-limbaugh-and-his-listeners/
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 28, 2010, 02:49:14 PM
Fascinating piece, despite its utter lack of self-awareness of the Billary Hillbillies corruption, politics of personal destruction, and progressivism.
Title: Friedman
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 31, 2010, 08:13:48 AM
New Delhi
Thomas Friedman is often an intellectual legend in his own mind, and frequently in over his head, but as the saying goes about blind pigs , , ,

 
Josh Haner/The New York Times
Thomas L. Friedman

This week’s award for not knowing what world you’re living in surely goes to the French high school and college students who blockaded their campuses, and snarled rail traffic, in a nationwide strike against the French government’s decision to raise its pension retirement age from 60 to 62. If those students understood the hypercompetitive and economically integrated world they were living in today, they would have taken to the streets to demand smaller classes, better teaching, more opportunities for entrepreneurship and more foreign private investment in France — so they could have the sorts of good private sector jobs that would enable them to finance retirement at age 62. France already discovered that a 35-hour workweek was impossible in a world where Indian engineers were trying to work a 35-hour day — and so, too, are pension levels not sustained by a vibrant private sector.

What is most striking to me being in India this week, though, is how many Indians, young and old, expressed their concerns that America also seems at times to be running away from the world it invented and that India is adopting.

With President Obama scheduled to come here next week, at a time when more than a few U.S. politicians are loudly denouncing immigration reforms, free trade expansion and outsourcing, more than a few Indian business leaders want to ask the president: “What’s up with that?” Didn’t America export to the world all the technologies and free market dogmas that created this increasingly flat, global economic playing field — and now you’re turning against them?

“It is the Silicon Valley revolution which enabled the massive rise in tradable services and the U.S.-built telecommunication networks that allowed creation of the virtual office,” Nayan Chanda, the editor of YaleGlobal Online, wrote in the Indian magazine Businessworld this week. “But the U.S. seems sadly unprepared to take advantage of the revolution it has spawned. The country’s worn-out infrastructure, failing education system and lack of political consensus have prevented it from riding a new wave to prosperity.” Ouch.

Saurabh Srivastava, co-founder of the National Association of Software and Service Companies in India, explained that for the first 40 years of Indian independence, entrepreneurs here were looked down upon. India had lost confidence in its ability to compete, so it opted for protectionism. But when the ’90s rolled around, and India’s government was almost bankrupt, India’s technology industry was able to get the government to open up the economy, in part by citing the example of America and Silicon Valley. India has flourished ever since.

“America,” said Srivastava, “was the one who said to us: ‘You have to go for meritocracy. You don’t have to produce everything yourselves. Go for free trade and open markets.’ This has been the American national anthem, and we pushed our government to tune in to it. And just when they’re beginning to learn how to hum it, you’re changing the anthem. ... Our industry was the one pushing our government to open our markets for American imports, 100 percent foreign ownership of companies and tough copyright laws when it wasn’t fashionable.”

If America turns away from these values, he added, the socialist/protectionists among India’s bureaucrats will use it to slow down any further opening of the Indian markets to U.S. exporters.

It looks, said Srivastava, as if “what is happening in America is a loss of self-confidence. We don’t want America to lose self-confidence. Who else is there to take over America’s moral leadership? American’s leadership was never because you had more arms. It was because of ideas, imagination, and meritocracy.” If America turns away from its core values, he added, “there is nobody else to take that leadership. Do we want China as the world’s moral leader? No. We desperately want America to succeed.”

This isn’t just so American values triumph. With a rising China on one side and a crumbling Pakistan on the other, India’s newfound friendship with America has taken on strategic importance. “It is very worrying to live in a world that no longer has the balance of power we’ve had for 60 years,” said Shekhar Gupta, editor of The Indian Express newspaper. “That is why everyone is concerned about America.”

India and America are both democracies, a top Indian official explained to me, but emotionally they are now ships passing in the night. Because today the poorest Indian maid believes that if she can just save a few dollars to get her kid English lessons, that kid will have a better life than she does. So she is an optimist. “But the guy in Kansas,” he added, “who today is enjoying a better life than that maid, is worried that he can’t pass it on to his kids. So he’s a pessimist.”

Yes, when America lapses into a bad mood, everyone notices. After asking for an explanation of the Tea Party’s politics, Gupta remarked: “We have moved away from a politics of grievance to a politics of aspiration. Where is the American dream? Where is the optimism?”

Title: individualism
Post by: Freki on November 05, 2010, 07:59:46 AM
individualism

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BW-cUgZg178[/youtube]
Title: Peasants and Liberty
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on November 10, 2010, 05:53:02 PM
lies, half-truths, and omissions.

10
NOV

The BBC has an article up on the gun-smuggling from the US to Mexico.  In typically one-sided fashion, it mentions that guns seized from narcos in Mexico are often traced back to the United States, and that the ATF isn’t effectively fighting this problem.

For those without much knowledge on the subject, it gives the impression that there’s a flood of illegal guns being bought in the US across the counter legally, and then shipped into Mexico to fuel the gun crime there–blaming our “lax gun laws” for Mexico’s narco turf war violence.

First of all, let’s point out that Mexico has a narco problem because the US has a hard-on for drug prohibition, not because Americans can buy guns legally.  I’ve often read that canard about drug buyers financing drug crime with their purchases, but the simple twofold truth is that a.) people will always desire and buy mind-altering substances, no matter what the law says, and b.) the War on Drugs serves as a price control mechanism and profit guarantee for dealers and traffickers.

Second, let’s look at that article a little more closely.  The picture that accompanies it shows a bunch of 40mm grenade launchers along with ammunition.  Looking at that, your average BBC reader could be lead to believe that those things are legal to buy and own freely in the US, and that they originated at a US gun show or gun store.  Grenade launchers are, of course, illegal to own, purchase, or sell in the United States without a special registration and tax stamp.  Grenade launchers are tightly controlled “destructive devices”, as is their ammunition.  (Every single 40mm grenade is also classified as a DD, and subject to a $200 transfer tax per round.  Each grenade must be individually registered with the BATFE, which makes them super-expensive and very rare to find in civilian hands.)  Considering the difficulty and expense of obtaining a launcher and the ammo for it, never mind the fact that every single launcher and round is registered to an owner with the ATF, I guarantee that the 40mm launchers in that picture came not from the US, but from Mexican military armories.

Third, the language in the article isn’t quite misleading, but it omits a few facts.  We are told that “the majority of guns confiscated by Mexico and submitted to the ATF for tracing do originate in the US <emphasis mine>.”  What it doesn’t mention is that the majority of guns seized from Mexican narcos do not originate in the US.  The Mexican Federales do not submit most of their seized guns to the ATF for tracing because they know their provenance already.  Mexico uses a licensed version of the H&K G36 assault rifle, for example, and whenever one of those shows up, they know it didn’t walk out of a gun store in San Antonio.  (They also use the licensed version of the H&K 40mm grenade launcher, which happens to look exactly like the weapon in the center of the picture.)  So they only send the serial numbers of the non-domestic guns to the ATF, which is the minority of seized weapons.  Reading the article over a quick latte, one could however get the impression that most of the crime guns in Mexico are traced back to the US, because they omit that information.

Lastly, even those guns that were bought in the US and then smuggled into Mexico for use by narcos didn’t get sold to Mexican nationals legally.  Gun shops have to run federal background checks on every single gun purchase, and foreign nationals, with few exceptions, are not eligible to buy firearms in the United States.  If a rifle made it from a legal buyer into the hands of a Mexican criminal, the person buying the rifle and then handing it to said criminal broke federal law.  (Buying a gun for a non-eligible person is called a “straw sale”, and will get you ten years in Club Fed.)

Mexico has plenty of problems, but corruption (where and how do you think the narcos get Mexican military hardware?) and the economic incentives created by drug prohibition make up the lion’s share of those, not legal gun sales in the United States.  You want to curb the flow of guns and stop the violence in Mexico, you stop guaranteeing those dealers and traffickers a 10,000% profit margin on some powdered plant product.  Drug dealers don’t care about cocaine or “poisoning America’s children”, they care about profit.  If you held a voter referendum on keeping or tossing drug prohibition, all the drug dealers in the country would vote to keep them illegal.  Take away their price control system, and they’ll go the way of the booze runners of the Prohibition era.

But nobody’s going to do that, of course.  Between asset forfeiture, inability to learn from the Prohibition, the suitability of drug laws to curb inconvenient liberties, and the millions on the payroll of drug task forces and agencies nationwide, that wouldn’t be good business.  And civil liberties continue to take it in the pants.

Remember: a vote for drug prohibition is a vote for gun control.  Without illicit substance turf wars, we wouldn’t even have NFA ’34, GCA ’68, or the 1994 Crime Bill.  We wouldn’t have asset forfeiture, RICO, or any of the many other onerous laws that shackle our movements and make a mockery of the Bill of Rights.  But point that out to a self-righteous dope prohibitionist, and you get the old saw about the damage drugs can do, and do you want to see schoolchildren legally light up crack pipes in front of the CVS at eight in the morning?  It’s the same kind of arrogant paternalism that the gun banners display when they talk about how blood would flow in the streets if we removed all the restrictions on gun ownership and carry.  “Well, I know that I wouldn’t abuse them, but I’m damned sure those peasants all around me couldn’t handle the liberty…”

http://munchkinwrangler.wordpress.com/2010/11/10/lies-half-truths-and-omissions/
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: G M on November 10, 2010, 06:41:26 PM
RICO has been a very effective tool in breaking up organized crime cartels, and most of it's applicable statutes do not involve illegal drugs.

So why don't the Chinese people embrace the drug legalization that the British were kind enough to provide them with?
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on November 15, 2010, 08:47:11 AM
I haven't yet read the whole piece but the first thing I thought of when I saw the title, that the Presidency "is too big for one man" is Jimmy Carter.  That was the *exact* question that was being asked when he was President.  Indeed he even stated it when he was overwhelmed.  Now we have another big government man who is over his head thinking government should control everything and everyone and we have the same declaration.  The problem is not that the Presidency is too big for one man but we have one man trying to take control over everything.  He simply doesn't know what he is doing.

The government should protect us, enforce our laws, equal opportunity and that's about it "off the top off my head).

http://www.newsweek.com/2010/11/13/is-the-presidency-too-big-a-job.html
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: G M on November 15, 2010, 08:56:28 AM
The federal gov't should follow it's duties as outlined in the constitution and leave the states to worry about the rest.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on November 17, 2010, 10:26:21 AM
Just a thought.  Rangel recently complained that he was found guilty despite being allowed legal representation and the reason was to get this through with the present Congress.   My thinking is of course the Dems who are now in control want to get this whole affair dispensed with ASAP.  Additionally, we all know that with a Dem controlled committee Rangel will not recommmend expulsion.  I would think that would be a far more likely event if the Repubs were in control after they take power.

This whole thing is a song and dance for show.  Yeah they will fine him, maybe censor (whatever that means) but he will still be allowed to serve as a congressman.  This despite the fact he is taking bribes and stealing.  The joke is on Americans.  What a club it is in DC for these guys and gals!

***House ethics panel convicts Rep. Rangel on 11 of 13 counts of rule violations
By Susan Crabtree and Jordan Fabian - 11/16/10 11:55 AM ET
 
Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.), once one of the most powerful members of the House, was convicted Tuesday on 11 counts of violating ethics rules and now faces punishment.

Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), the chairwoman of the adjudicatory subcommittee and the full House ethics committee, announced the decision late Tuesday morning following an abbreviated public trial and nearly six hours of deliberations.



"We have tried to act with fairness, led only by the facts and the law," Lofgren said. "We believe we have accomplished that mission."

The full ethics panel will now convene a sanctions hearing to recommend a punishment, which ethics experts say will most likely be a reprimand or formal censure. The ethics committee had yet to announce by Tuesday afternoon when the hearing would occur.

Serious sanctions — including formal reprimand, censure or expulsion — require a vote on the House floor. Expulsion requires a two-thirds vote, while a reprimand, to which Rangel refused to agree in July, or a censure would need only a simple majority. The ethics panel could also impose a fine and deny some of Rangel’s House privileges.

But Rangel, 80, is certainly not expected to lose his job. The silver-haired 20-term veteran, known for his gravelly voice, sense of humor and sartorial splendor, is still beloved by many of his House colleagues. And in the lame-duck session, Democrats still hold the majority.

Either reprimand or formal censure carries no immediate, tangible consequence for Rangel, who easily won reelection this month, but the sweeping guilty verdict delivers a damaging blow to his reputation and 40-year political legacy.

Years of negative publicity and his drawn-out defense pushed the specter of the trial into the 2010 campaign season, angering House Democratic leaders and forcing some of Rangel's colleagues to return campaign contributions from him. Earlier this year, he was stripped of his powerful Ways and Means gavel after an initial investigation into a corporate-funded trip to the Caribbean concluded he should have known that his aides were trying to evade ethics rules.

Asked if he had any reaction to the panel's decision, Rangel initially told reporters, "Nope, none,” adding that he first saw the ruling on television.

Later, in an official statement, Rangel slammed the ethics subcommittee's "unprecedented" decision, saying his due-process rights were violated because the panel ruled without him having legal representation.

"How can anyone have confidence in the decision of the ethics subcommittee when I was deprived of due-process rights, right to counsel and was not even in the room?" Rangel said. "I can only hope that the full committee will treat me more fairly, and take into account my entire 40 years of service to the Congress before making any decisions on sanction."

Rangel also lamented the lack of a system to appeal the House ethics panel’s decision.

“While I am required to accept the findings of the ethics committee, I am compelled to state again the unfairness of its continuation without affording me the opportunity to obtain legal counsel as guaranteed under the U.S. Constitution," he said.

The decision comes one day after the panel rejected an emotional plea by Rangel to delay the trial because he lacked counsel. Rangel’s team of attorneys told him in mid-October that they could no longer represent him, and Rangel said he could not afford to hire a replacement right away after incurring nearly $2 million in legal fees over the past two years.

The adjudicatory panel, which operated as a jury of his peers, found that Rangel had used House stationery and staff to solicit money for a school of public policy in his name at the City College of New York. It also concluded that he solicited donors for the center with interests before the Ways and Means Committee. Members of Congress are allowed to solicit money for nonprofit entities — even those bearing their names — as long as they do not use congressional letterhead or office resources to do so.

The ethics panel split 4-4 on a charge that Rangel violated the gift ban because the plans for the center included an office and the archiving of his personal and professional papers.

The panel also found Rangel guilty of using an apartment in Harlem zoned for residential use as his campaign office, failing to report more than $600,000 on his financial disclosure report and failing to pay taxes on rental income from a villa he owns in the Dominican Republic.

Two counts charging him with improper use of the Congress’s free franked-mail privilege were combined into one.

Melanie Sloan, the executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, applauded the decision and called on Rangel to resign.

"All of Mr. Rangel's theatrics aside, the facts were clear: Mr. Rangel violated numerous House rules and federal laws," she said. "Whether these violations were deliberate or inadvertent, the American people deserve to be represented by members of Congress who adhere to the highest ethical standards. Mr. Rangel should resign."

Democracy 21’s Fred Wertheimer said the committee’s findings demonstrate the need for new ethics rules prohibiting members of Congress from soliciting money to finance institutes or centers in their name. He urged the House to promptly adopt new ethics rules barring the practice.

“There are inherent conflict-of-interest and appearance problems when members solicit money for entities named to honor the members,” he said. “Members of Congress should be prohibited from soliciting money to build monuments to themselves.”***

Title: correction
Post by: ccp on November 17, 2010, 10:28:49 AM
"Dem controlled committee Rangel will not recommmend expulsion"

I mean with a Dem controlled committee they will not expulse Rangel.  They will act like they are coming down hard.  A fine.  A "formal rebuke".
But we all know he is not going anywhere.  They will cover for him in the end.   
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 18, 2010, 08:13:47 AM
The Politics thread is more suitable for this and related subjects.
Title: Genuflect and Display Unquestioned Obedience
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on November 21, 2010, 09:08:59 AM
Lotsa links embedded in the original piece.

Gropers To Gropees: Shut Up And Take It, Or Hit The Road

Nov 12, 2010 By Ken. Politics & Current Events

I believe in American exceptionalism. That means I believe that our history and values and sacrifices and our learned-from wrongs combine to make something unique and wonderful and worth protecting and celebrating. That exceptionalism is not a function of geography or an accident of birth. It’s a result of fidelity — of adherence to shared values that make us mighty. I may disagree with others about what it means when it comes to policy and practice, but I believe firmly that it is true.

Americans can be murdered by terrorists, but shared values cannot be destroyed by guns and bombs and planes. Yet our adversaries in the “War on Terror” can most certainly win. They can win by frightening us into infidelity to our values, into betraying our best selves. Some would argue that they are already winning by that measure.

I can see what they mean. When we allow ourselves to be irrationally frightened into letting upjumped smirking thugs grope us, gape at our nads, and tell us we have to take it, we’re losing. We’re being unfaithful to what makes us great.

I’m talking, of course, about the Transportation Security Agency.

We’ve blogged a fair amount about the TSA here, and not in a flattering way. We’ve talked about how the TSA can’t distinguish between a thing and a picture of a thing, thinks that it has authority to investigate illicit cash (and believes that telling them it’s none of their business represents suspicious behavior), relies on junk science to “detect” danger, feels entitled to your unquestioning obedience (and tries to earn it not with competence but with, in effect, a also-ran muppet), and is vigilant against pressing dangers like Decepticons. Of course, if you recruit on pizza boxes, you’re not going to wind up with Elliot Ness. You’re going to get people who use the body scanners to make fun of people’s genitals, pretend to find cocaine in passengers’ luggage as a prank, steal from carry-ons, and generally act like badged choads. Oh, and sex offenders. Don’t forget the sex offenders. A security checkpoint is Walt Disney World for them.

As with so many other Security State measures added since 9/11, in the face of intrusive Security Theater the public has mostly confined its dissent to grumbling about inconvenience and delay. We don’t focus enough on those measures being revoltingly intrusive. That’s because we’re easy to scare and fundamentally innumerate. As Wil Wilkerson points out, we’re only cowed into being abused because we were told there would be no math:

I think this is one of those subjects that demands we step back, take a deep breath, and consider with a clear mind just how phenomenally idiotic the government’s policy of increasingly invasive degradation really is. Law-abiding travelers, who pose approximately zero risk of terrorism, and offer no ground for reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing, must run this gauntlet of abasement because airplanes were once made the instrument of mass death. The odds of being a victim of terrorism on a flight are approximately 1 in 10,408,947—rather less than the 1 in 500,000 odds of getting killed by lightning.

Would we submit to standing in line and having government workers rifle through our pockets and ask us annoying questions before being allowed to go outside on a stormy day, to reduce the chance of being hit by lightening? No. But we’ve submitted to far worse from the TSA because we’ve allowed the government to scare the bejeesus out of us about bin Laden being in every overhead bin, and convinced ourselves that it actually makes good sense to spend an hour of our trip standing in line and being probed by a guy in a polyester shirt, but no sense to spend five more minutes on our trip by driving the speed limit on the way to the airport, even though driving is many orders of magnitude more likely to kill us. We’ve allowed ourselves to be scared moronic and compliant. Like cows.

Now, however, the TSA might possibly have found a way to startle the herd into genuine anger and defiance. The TSA has rolled out its program requiring you to submit to either a body-revealing scan or a gropefest patdown. Between revealing full-body scanners and the alternative “enhanced pat-downs,” Americans are as close as they have been since 9/11 to calling bullshit on the ever-increasing Security Theater. Is the TSA managing that anger well? Of course not. Some of them smirk that we like it. Still others are clearly furious that the cows are no longer, well, cowed. There are increasing reports that the enhanced pat downs are being threatened, and used, in an angry and retaliatory fashion by government employees who are upset that we don’t want our practically naked bodies displayed on scanners. Consider this story from a groped rape survivor:

I said I didn’t want them to see me naked and the agent started yelling Opt out- we have an opt here. Another agent took me aside and said they would have to pat me down. He told me he was going to touch my genitals and asked if I wouldn’t rather just go through the scanner, that it would be less humiliating for me. I was in shock. I couldn’t believe this was happening. I kept saying I don’t want any of this to happen. I was whispering please don’t do this, please, please.”

Since Celeste didn’t agree to go through the scanner, the enhanced pat down began. “He started at one leg and then ran his hand up to my crotch. He cupped and patted my crotch with his palm. Other flyers were watching this happen to me. At that point I closed my eyes and started praying to the Goddess for strength. He also cupped and then squeezed my breasts. That wasn’t the worst part. He touched my face, he touched my hair, stroking me. That’s when I started crying. It was so intimate, so horrible. I feel like I was being raped. There’s no way I can fly again. I can’t do it.”

Think she’s alone at being treated like that? Think she’s being over-sensitive? Think again. Oh, think again.

Of course TSA agents are angry when you don’t herd obligingly through the scanner. They feel entitled to it, as a matter of right, based on what the modern Security State envisions that Americans should be. When the TSA expressed angst that “unquestioning compliance has diminished”, it was tipping its hand. The purpose of Security Theater is not only to prevent actual security threats. The purpose of Security Theater is to convince us that the government can do something and is doing something, and most importantly to make us accept “unquestioning compliance” with government as an American value. The purpose of Security Theater is to normalize submission. But “unquestioning compliance” is not an American value. Quite the contrary. In a nation in which we owe fidelity to shared values, accepting unquestioning compliance with government is like sneaking out on the wife and kids and nailing the smeared-lipstick cosmo-addled skank at the sleazy bar in the next town. And don’t come crying back to your wife Liberty and your kids Personal Responsibility and deal little Individuality when you pick up a nasty case of authoritarianism oozing from your — ok, I’m going to have to pull this literary device over and walk.

The proponents of the Security State — and the people who make their living from it — think just shut up and obey. Take the blogger Mom vs. the World, a former TSA agent. Even though she questions the value of the scanners, and even though she thinks the enhanced pat-downs are bullshit, she remains captured by the TSA mindset. Her view of the proper relationship between the state and the citizen is typified by her post Shut Up And Get In The Scanner. Aside from asserting, basically, that what should really embarrass us is not being scanned or groped, but the fact that we’re a pack of quarreling, vibrator-carrying, trash-dressing, child-abusing trailer trash, she offers this:

Flying is a privilege not a right. As such, it can be and is regulated. Requirements can and are set up to ensure that everyone who flies is safe. If you don’t like it, then don’t fly. You may not be as concerned as the next guy about the safety or you may be more concerned. Point is the job of TSA is to ensure the entire traveling public is safe not just you. TSA officers don’t care what you as an individual want, they can’t, it just isn’t possible. You may be ok with lax security but what about the next passenger who wants thorough security?

Your right to privacy isn’t being violated at all. You always have the option to drive a car, take a train, grab the bus or start rowing a boat. You do not have to fly, you just want to fly. The minute you decide you want to fly then you have to accept that security is involved and you are going to have consent and submit to it period the end.

. . . .

Now if you want to fly, suck it up and accept that you have to submit to the security procedures. Yes you think they are stupid or unnecessary but TSA officers and TSA don’t care what you think. They try to make it all warm and fuzzy but they can’t because it is security not a trip to Disney World. Shut up and get in the scanner or don’t fly.

Well, “Mom”, if flying is a “privilege, not a right,” it’s because over the last century we have gradually accepted the proposition that anything the government tells us it can regulate, it can regulate. Unlike “Mom”, Justice Stewart knows a right when he sees it: “The constitutional right to travel from one State to another . . . occupies a position fundamental to the concept of our Federal Union. It is a right that has been firmly established and repeatedly recognized.” Of course, rights are subject to limitations. Should the right to travel be limited by forced subservience to groping for purposes of Security Theater?

Now, I’m not saying that Mom is herself a perverted thug, like the people she’s saying we should just obey. I’m saying that she’s a sneering, entitled apologist for perverted thugs — and for the canine, un-American value of slobbery submission to the state. Even though she concedes that the groping is retaliatory bullshit, and even though she has no basis to assert that Security Theater actually increases real security, she’s deeply resentful that people are not putting up with it. Her righteous anger — like the anger of of the TSA thugs groping just a little bit harder to punish you for saying no to the body scanner — is the result we should expect from the small-time thugs whose identity is tied up in their petty authority.

Throughout my career — both as a prosecutor and as a defense attorney — I’ve observed a consistent inverse relationship: the more petty a government officer’s authority, the more that officer will feel a need to swagger and demand that you RESPECT HIS AUTHORITAH. Your average FBI agent might search your house based on a crappy perjured warrant, invade your attorney-client emails, and flush your life down the toilet by lying on the stand at your mail fraud trial. But he doesn’t feel a need to vogue and posture to prove anything in the process. He’s the FBI. But God above help you when you run into the guy with a badge from some obscure and puny government agency with a narrow fiefdom. He and his Napoleon syndrome have got something to prove. And he’s terrified that you’ll not take him very, very seriously. When I call FBI agents on behalf of my clients, they’re cool but professional and nonchalant. When I call a small agency — say, state Fish & Game, or one of the minor agency Inspector Generals — they’re hostile, belligerent, and so comically suspicious that you’d think I was asking for their permission to let my client smuggle heroin into the country in the anuses of handicapped Christian missionary orphans. They are infuriated, OUTRAGED, when a client asserts rights, when a client fails to genuflect and display unquestioning obedience. They are, in short, the TSA.

The media is trying out the story-of-the-week that the populace is revolting against the TSA, and against Security Theater. It might even be a little bit true.

It’s about godammed time.

http://www.popehat.com/2010/11/12/gropers-to-gropees-shut-up-and-take-it-or-hit-the-road/
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: G M on November 21, 2010, 09:40:22 AM
More wailing and ad hominem attacks on the TSA. Oh noes!

Shut down the TSA now. Let's just see what the loss of life looks like.

The smell of jet fuel and human flesh burning. It's the smell of freeeedom!
Title: The Day the Dollar died
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 25, 2010, 11:02:30 AM


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2N8gJSMoOJc&feature=player_embedded
Title: Nigel Farage
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 28, 2010, 04:48:29 PM
Euro Parliament rants

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dranqFntNgo&feature=related

And from last year

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFXSj5WofYA&feature=related
Title: Chris Christie!
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 03, 2010, 12:35:48 PM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pn4_0IV0JME&feature=player_embedded
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: G M on December 03, 2010, 07:30:56 PM
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]

Progress
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Boyo on December 04, 2010, 06:49:47 PM
This is really REALLY interesting!!

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xbp6umQT58A[/youtube]

Enjoy Boyo
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: The Tao on December 06, 2010, 12:20:48 PM
I've gotten to know and care for many of you here. I know that there are police amongst us and I respect you on a personal level and love training with you.

In the most respectful way that I can, I am wondering what people really believe in the way of felons reforming. I know that many go on to re offend, but in regard to those that don't and sincerely want to change their lives (especially when they offended as young adult and have remained trouble free for decades), I wonder a couple things:

How many decades must they remain trouble free in order to be free from discrimination on job applications?

If they have remained trouble free for multiple decades, why don't they have the right to own firearms so that they too may protect their families, and where does the right to protect the life of oneself and one's family come from?

I realize that the police do a dangerous job and obviously want to protect themselves against violent, well armed, well trained individuals, but it can be reasoned that any person with ill intent can obtain a firearm. Gun control laws don't work, nor will they ever.

I was taught that a man should be judged for his actions and I agree. I do wonder though, how long must his actions be good before he has redeemed himself? If a person with a less than sterling record has sincerely reformed, every religion, the Tao Te Ching, The Hagakure, and many other books that all of us here have read, express forgiveness and equal inclusion within one's society, given the the offending member has been obeying the laws and has sincerely changed. I am left wondering why we as a society don't adhere to that, but rather, look down on those that want to change and join the right side.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: G M on December 06, 2010, 12:59:05 PM
I think the biggest factor is the nature and number of the offense(s). Depending on the jurisdiction, expungement is possible in some cases.
Title: Wesbury: Greedy Innkeeper or Generous Capitalist?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 20, 2010, 02:28:17 PM
Greedy Innkeeper or Generous Capitalist? To view this article, Click Here
Brian S. Wesbury - Chief Economist
Robert Stein, CFA - Senior Economist
Date: 12/20/2010


The Bible story of the virgin birth is at the center of much of the holiday cheer at this time of the year. The book of Luke tells us Mary and Joseph traveled to Bethlehem because Caesar Augustus decreed a census should be taken. Mary gave birth after arriving in Bethlehem and placed baby Jesus in a manger because there was “no room for them in the inn.”

Over the centuries, people have come to believe that because Jesus was born in a stable, and not in a hotel room, Mary and Joseph must have been mistreated by a greedy innkeeper. This innkeeper only cared about profits and decided this young couple was not “worth” his best accommodations. This angle on the traditional story is repeated in just about every play, skit, or sermon on the subject.
 
These stories persist even though the Bible records no complaints at the time and there was apparently no charge for the use of the stable. It may be that the stable was the only place available. Bethlehem, like other small towns, was overflowing with people who were returning to their ancestral homes for the census, which was ordered by the Romans for the purpose of levying a tax.
 
If there was a problem, it was caused by the unintended consequences of government policy. However, a political spin has been added to the story and it blames capitalism and capitalists for being greedy and uncaring, even evil.
 
A different narrative could be easily generated. The innkeeper was generous to a fault – a hero even. He was over-booked, but he charitably offered his stable, a building that would not have existed if it weren’t for his foresight and industriousness. And don’t forget, the government officials who ordered the census slept in their own beds with little care for the wellbeing of those who had to travel regardless of their difficult life circumstances.
 
If you must find “evil” in either one of these narratives, remember that evil is ultimately perpetrated by individuals, not the institutions in which they operate.
 
And this is why it’s important to favor economic and political systems that limit the use and abuse of power over others. In the story of baby Jesus, a law that requires innkeepers to always have extra rooms, or to take in anyone who asks, would “fix” the problem of the evil innkeeper.
 
This regulation, which would be enforced by government, would have unintended consequences. Fewer people would become innkeepers because they would need to build larger structures (that could accommodate the crowd during a census). But because censuses are rare, the innkeeper would be forced to charge higher prices to cover costs. This, in turn, would cause many to complain that the innkeeper was greedy.
 
This does not mean that free markets are perfect or create utopia, they aren’t and they don’t. But, business can’t force you to buy a service or product. You have a choice – even if it’s not exactly what you want. And good business people try to make you happy in creative and industrious ways.
 
Government doesn’t always care. In fact, if you happen to live in North Korea or Cuba, and are not happy about the way things are going, you can’t leave. And just in case you try, armed guards will help you think things through.
This is why the framers of the US Constitution made sure there were “checks and balances” in the system. We’re now seeing that system operate. In reaction to the health care bill passed earlier this year, voters rejected many of the bill’s supporters and boosted the clout of its opponents. And the “new” majority favors lower taxes and less spending.
 
For many, this is not like having a savior. But it should give us all reason to hope for a better world in the years ahead.
Title: Spengler: Tea Party=Revolt of the Creditor and Saver class
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 20, 2010, 02:29:20 PM
Moved from the wrong thread to here:


 Longevity gives life to Tea Party
By Spengler

How could the Tea Party elect five senators and 40 members of the United States Congress last November, none with political experience and many with evident eccentricities? The answer is that a single issue united a slapdash agglomeration of amateurs, with sufficient power to override all the sources of weakness.

The Tea Party represents creditors of the government who do not want to be cheated out of their savings; that is, people close to retirement age who fear slow confiscation by inflation. Governments that run huge deficits normally reduce them by
debasing the currency, in order to repay their debts in inflated money.

In fact, the Tea Party is a triumph of economic rationality over lack of talent: its reason for being is so compelling and so clear that it has succeeded despite the silliness of some of its candidates. One top Republican pollster thinks that the "I am not a witch" message aired by losing Tea Party candidate Christine O'Donnell in Delware was the single worst piece of advertising in political history.

Elite commentators tend to dismiss the Tea Party as a mob of engaged boos. On the contrary, pollster Scott Rasmussen, reports, the Tea Partiers tend to be older than 45, married, wealthier and better educated than the general population, and concerned first of all with federal spending and deficits. The most important thing to know about such people is that there are more of them than ever before in American history.

Young families with small children borrow money from older people who have finished raising families. Most Americans begin adulthood heavily in debt and become lenders as they approach retirement. The changing proportions of young and old Americans has enormous bearing on political outcomes.

United States of America Dependency Ratios
YEAR TOTAL CHILD OLD AGE 
1975 55 39 16
1980 51 34 17
1985 50 32 18
1990 52 33 19
1995 53 34 19
2000 51 33 19
2005 50 31 19
2010 50 30 19
2015 52 30 22
2020 56 31 25
2025 60 31 29
2030 63 32 32

Two facts stand out in the table above showing the proportion of child vs elderly dependents in the United States. Elderly dependents have remained fairly static as a percentage of total population during the past 40 years. But the proportion will jump from 19% today to 32% in 2030. This seismic change in American demographics explains a great deal.

In 1975, when Jimmy Carter ran for president, 39 out 100 Americans were dependent children, but only 16 out of 100 Americans were dependent elderly. The baby boomers were in their twenties and starting families. Once elected president, Carter allowed the inflation rate to reach double-digits by 1981. A family that bought a house for $60,000 in January 1975 could have sold it for $110,000 in January 1981. In fact, home prices offered positive returns after inflation (stocks, bonds, and cash all showed negative real returns during the 1980s).

Elderly people on fixed pensions took part-time jobs or ate pet food as the value of money shrank; young people caught a free ride on the inflation wave. No one liked inflation, to be sure, but it was an ill wind that blew good to a great many people. The Carter administration, though, made an elementary blunder: as inflation drove up nominal income, it also pushed middle class taxpayers into higher tax brackets intended to soak the rich. With a top tax rate of 70%, the tax squeeze due to inflation became a crushing burden on the middle class, and the high rate of taxation on nominal capital gains was often confiscatory. If the Carter administration had indexed tax rates to inflation, it might have lasted a second term.

Now the tables are turned. By 2030, elderly dependents will comprise 32% of the American population, twice the level in 1975. For the first time in history, the number of elderly dependents will equal the number of child dependents. Americans now aged 45 will retire in 2030, and it is their concerns that give buoyancy to the Tea Party.

The Tea Party is an exercise in economic rationality. Measured inflation in the United States is less than 1% (according to the woefully inadequate Consumer Price Index), but the Tea Partiers anticipate higher inflation in the future should the federal government remain at 11% of gross domestic product.

This is not the first time that monetary issues have motivated the formation of an important third party. During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, a prolonged deflation under the gold standard drew Western farmers to the inflationist Free Silver movement. Permitting silver coinage would have increased the money supply, raised the price level and helped debtors. The movement was powerful enough to take over the Democratic Party in 1896, when its candidate William Jennings Bryan (an unknown 36-year-old congressman) excoriated Eastern creditor interests and their ''cross of gold'' imposed by Eastern creditor interests.

The proportion of prospective pensioners in the rest of the industrial world exceeds that in the United States, as shown in Table 2 below:

More developed regions of the world Dependency Ratios
YEAR TOTAL CHILD OLD AGE 
1975 54 37 17
1980 52 34 18
1985 49 32 17
1990 49 31 19
1995 50 29 20
2000 49 27 21
2005 48 25 23
2010 48 24 24
2015 51 25 26
2020 54 25 29
2025 57 25 33
2030 61 24 36
2035 63 24 39
2040 66 24 41
2045 68 25 43
2050 70 25 45

America's open political model makes it relatively easy for challengers to force their way onto the stage (although not to remain their for long), so the Tea Party as such is likely to remain a distinctly American phenomenon. But the shift towards an older population also will act as a brake on inflationist impulses elsewhere, for example, on the extent to which France and Germany will bail out Ireland, Portugal, Greece, or Spain.

In its first electoral outing, America's Tea Party helped shift the political balance. It would be incautious to view it as a passing expression of voter frustration. On the contrary: spontaneity and inexperience held the Tea Party back from harvesting the political support that should come to it. If the Tea Party does a better job of screening and prepping candidates - or the Republican party has the good sense to adopt its program - demographics and rational interest will make it an even stronger force as time passes, and an obstacle to a new inflation cycle.

Spengler is channeled by David P Goldman senior editor at First Things (www.firstthings.com).

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/LL07Aa01.html
Title: Bill Buckley and Huey Newton
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 29, 2010, 09:45:31 PM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4ypqCYPduI&feature=related
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: bigdog on January 02, 2011, 06:32:48 PM
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/jan/02/25-predictions-25-years

20 predictions for the next 25 years
From the web to wildlife, the economy to nanotechnology, politics to sport, the Observer's team of experts prophesy how the world will change – for good or bad – in the next quarter of a century

1 Geopolitics: 'Rivals will take greater risks against the US'

No balance of power lasts forever. Just a century ago, London was the centre of the world. Britain bestrode the world like a colossus and only those with strong nerves (or weak judgment) dared challenge the Pax Britannica.

That, of course, is all history, but the Pax Americana that has taken shape since 1989 is just as vulnerable to historical change. In the 1910s, the rising power and wealth of Germany and America splintered the Pax Britannica; in the 2010s, east Asia will do the same to the Pax Americana.

The 21st century will see technological change on an astonishing scale. It may even transform what it means to be human. But in the short term – the next 20 years – the world will still be dominated by the doings of nation-states and the central issue will be the rise of the east.

By 2030, the world will be more complicated, divided between a broad American sphere of influence in Europe, the Middle East and south Asia, and a Chinese sphere in east Asia and Africa. Even within its own sphere, the US will face new challenges from former peripheries. The large, educated populations of Poland, Turkey, Brazil and their neighbours will come into their own and Russia will continue its revival.

Nevertheless, America will probably remain the world's major power. The critics who wrote off the US during the depression of the 1930s and the stagflation of the 1970s lived to see it bounce back to defeat the Nazis in the 1940s and the Soviets in the 1980s. America's financial problems will surely deepen through the 2010s, but the 2020s could bring another Roosevelt or Reagan.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: G M on January 02, 2011, 07:01:02 PM
Roosevelt made the depression worse, set us up for the debt crisis we are facing now and said of Stalin "I think that if I give him everything I possibly can and ask for nothing from him in return, noblesse oblige, he won't try to annex anything and will work with me for a world of democracy and peace."

Thanks for the Iron Curtain, FDR.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: bigdog on January 03, 2011, 04:44:14 AM
I figured that was your take on FDR.  Could you please read the entire article, though?  Again, interesting ideas are introduced and discussed.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 03, 2011, 10:09:49 AM
Hard to take on 20 predictions across the span of human activity in one post BD  :-)

I will note that I disagree with #4's assumption of global warming (which is found in some of the other predictions as well) and thought that changes need to be made before prices of current energy models rise.  Quite the contrary, the market mechanism is by far the most efficient way both in terms of speed of change and efficacy in making wise decisions.  Adam Smith's "invisible hand" is but another way of stating the opening verse of the Tao Te Ching (The Tao which can be spoken of is not the Tao , , , The Tao does nothing but all is done." . . . or something like that).
Title: VDH: The New Sophists
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 06, 2011, 09:33:50 AM


In classical Athens, public life became dominated by clever and smart-sounding sophists. These mellifluous "really wise guys" made money and gained influence by their rhetorical boasts to "prove" the most amazing "thinkery" that belied common sense.

We are living in a new age of sophism -- but without a modern equivalent of Socrates to remind the public just how silly our highly credentialed and privileged new rhetoricians can often sound.

Take California, which is struggling with a near-record wet and snowy winter. Flooding spreads in the lowlands; snow piles up in the Sierras.

In February 2009, Nobel Laureate and Energy Secretary Steven Chu pontificated without evidence that California farms would dry up and blow away, inasmuch as 90 percent of the annual Sierra snowpack would disappear. Yet long-term studies of the central Sierra snowpack show average snow levels unchanged over the last 90 years. Many California farms are drying up -- but from government's, not nature's, irrigation cutoffs.

England is freezing and snowy. But that's odd, since global warming experts assured that the end of English snow was on the horizon. Australia is now flooding -- despite predictions that its impending new droughts meant it could not sustain its present population. The New York Times just published an op-ed assuring the public that the current record cold and snow are proof of global warming. In theory, they could be, but one wonders: what, then, would record winter heat and drought prove?

In response to these unexpected symptoms of blizzards and deluges, climate physicians offer changing diagnoses. "Global change" has superseded "global warming." After these radically cold winters, the next replacement appears to be "climate chaos." Yet if next December is neither too hot nor too cold, expect to hear about the doldrum dangers of "climate calm."

In 2009, brilliant economists in the Obama administration -- Peter Orszag, Larry Summers and Christina Romer -- assured us that record trillion-plus budget defects were critical to prevent stalled growth and 10 percent unemployment. For nearly two years we have experienced both, but now with an addition $3 trillion in national debt. All three have quietly either returned to academia or Wall Street.

There is also a new generation of young, sophistic bloggers who offer their wisdom from the New York-Washington corridor. They are usually graduates of America's elite colleges and navigate in an upscale urban landscape. One, the Washington Post's 26-year-old Ezra Klein, recently scoffed to his readers that a bothersome U.S. Constitution was "100 years old" and had "no binding power on anything."

One constant here is equating wisdom with a certificate of graduation from a prestigious school. If, in the fashion of the sophist Protagoras, one writes that record cold proves record heat, or that record borrowing and printing money will create jobs and sustained economic growth, or that a 223-year-old Constitution is 100 years old and largely irrelevant, then credibility can be claimed only in the title or the credentials -- but not the logic -- of the writer.

America is huge and diverse, but the world of our credentialed experts is quite small, warped and monotonous -- circumscribed largely by the prestigious university and an office in the incestuous Washington-New York corridor. There are plenty of prizes, honors and degrees among our policy setters and experts, but very little experience in running a business in Oklahoma, raising a large family in Kansas, or working on an assembly line in Michigan, a military base in Texas, a boat in Alaska or a ranch in Idaho.

In classical sophistic fashion, rhetoric is never far from personal profit. Multimillionaire Al Gore convinced the governments of the Western world that they were facing a global-warming Armageddon, then hired out his services to address the hysteria that he helped create.

How many climate Cassandras have well-funded research positions predicated on grants and subsidies that depend on convincing the pubic and government of impending disasters that they then can be hired to monitor and address? Are there no green antitrust laws? In contrast, how many of our climate theorists run irrigated farms and energy-intensive businesses at the mercy of new regulations that emanate from distant theorizing?

The public might have better believed the deficit nostrums of former budget director Peter Orzag had he not retired after less than two years on the job to position himself for a multimillion-dollar billet at Citigroup -- itself a recent recipient of some $25 billion in government bailout funds.

Are we to wonder why an angry, grassroots Tea Party spread -- or why it was instantly derided by our experts and technocrats as ill-informed or worse?
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: bigdog on January 10, 2011, 11:46:24 AM
This here because it is interesting:

Happy mathematical new year: 2011 is the sum of 11 consecutive prime numbers

http://republicofmath.wordpress.com/2011/01/01/happy-mathematical-new-year-2011-is-the-sum-of-11-consecutive-prime-numbers/
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on January 10, 2011, 12:15:40 PM
"Are we to wonder why an angry, grassroots Tea Party spread -- or why it was instantly derided by our experts and technocrats as ill-informed or worse?"

Yet according to the media we should all stop our angry rhetoric, we should all hold hands and calm discussions,  "conversations" (using the term from the shameless Spitzer), all the while we are getting screwed from here to kingdom-come from the left and their elites, they steal our money, bribe voters with it, talk our country down here and abroad, fail to protect our boarders, unilaterally decide to alter our culture, our norms, our way of life, give our hard earned achievements away, and on and on.

That is why I say on the other thread that the right will not be silenced and that the responsibility for murders rests with the guy who commited them and why our politicians many of whom are certainly corrupt are owed no more special privileges.  Talk radio, Sarah Palin, Fox, Beck, and even Olberman bare no responsibility for the crimes.  End of story.

And like I pointed out my opinion on the other thread how brave some politicians are in Mexico who really do risk their lives fighting crime and refuse bribes can you imagine our politicians doing the same here?  Why they take bribes without their lives at stake here.

Title: Robert Wright: First comes fear/Jon Stewart
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 12, 2011, 02:25:10 AM
I have read two of this writer's books on evolutionary psychology, "The Moral Animal" and "Non-Zero Sum" and think them outstanding.  The following I do NOT think outstanding, but I post it here to provoke conversation, then Jon Stewart, who comes quite a bit closer to Truth:

===================================

People on the left and right have been wrestling over the legacy of Jared Loughner, arguing about whether his shooting spree proves that the Sarah Palins and Glenn Becks of the world are fomenting violence. But it’s not as if this is the only data point we have. Here’s another one:

Six months ago, police in California pulled over a truck that turned out to contain a rifle, a handgun, a shotgun and body armor. Police learned from the driver — sometime after he opened fire on them — that he was heading for San Francisco, where he planned to kill people at the Tides Foundation. You’ve probably never heard of the Tides Foundation — unless you watch Glenn Beck, who had mentioned it more than two dozen times in the preceding six months, depicting it as part of a communist plot to “infiltrate” our society and seize control of big business.

Note the parallel with Loughner’s case. Loughner was convinced that a conspiracy was afoot — a conspiracy by the government to control our thoughts (via grammar, in his bizarre worldview). So he decided to kill one of the conspirators.

It’s not clear where Loughner got his conspiracy theory. The leading contender is a self-styled “king of Hawaii” who harbors, along with his beliefs about government mind control, a conviction that the world will end next year. But it doesn’t matter who Loughner got the idea from or whether you consider it left wing or right wing. The point is that Americans who wildly depict other Americans as dark conspirators, as the enemy, are in fact increasing the chances, however marginally, that those Americans will be attacked.

In that sense, the emphasis the left is placing on violent rhetoric and imagery is probably misplaced. Sure, calls to violence, explicit or implicit, can have effect. But the more incendiary theme in current discourse is the consignment of Americans to the category of alien, of insidious other. Once Glenn Beck had sufficiently demonized people at the Tides Foundation, actually advocating the violence wasn’t necessary.
By the same token, Palin’s much-discussed cross-hairs map probably isn’t as dangerous as her claim that “socialists” are trying to create “death panels.” If you convince enough people that an enemy of the American way is setting up a system that could kill them, the violent hatred will take care of itself.

When left and right contend over the meaning of incidents like this, the sanity of the perpetrator becomes a big issue. Back when Major Nidal Hasan killed 13 people at Fort Hood, the right emphasized how sane he was and the left how crazy he was. The idea was that if Hasan was sane, then he could be viewed as a coherent expression of the Jihadist ideology that some on the right say is rampant in America. In the case of Loughner, the right was quick to emphasize that he was not sane and therefore couldn’t be a coherent expression of right-wing ideology. Then, as his ideology started looking more like a left-right jumble, and his weirdness got better documented, a left-right consensus on his craziness emerged.

My own view is that if you decide to go kill a bunch of innocent people, it’s a pretty safe bet that you’re not a picture of mental health. But that doesn’t sever the link between you and the people who inspired you, or insulate them from responsibility. Glenn Beck knows that there are lots of unbalanced people out there, and that his message reaches some of them.

This doesn’t make him morally culpable for the way these people react to things he says that are true. It doesn’t even make him responsible for the things he says that are false but that he sincerely believes are true. But it does make him responsible for things he says that are false and concocted to mislead gullible people.

I guess it’s possible that Beck actually believes his hyper-theatrically delivered nonsense. (And I guess it’s possible that professional wrestling isn’t fake.) But in that case the responsibility just moves to Roger Ailes, head of Fox News, and Rupert Murdoch, its owner. Why are they giving a megaphone to someone who believes crazy stuff?

The magic formula of Palin and Beck — fear sells — knows no ideology. When Jon Stewart closed his Washington “rally to restore sanity” with a video montage of fear mongers, he commendably included some on the left — notably the sometimes over-the-top Keith Olbermann. The heads of MSNBC have just as much of an obligation to help keep America sane as the heads of Fox News have.

To be sure, at this political moment there is — by my left-wing lights, at least — more crazy fear-mongering and demonization on the right than on the left. But that asymmetry is transient.

What’s not transient, unfortunately, is the technological trend that drives much of this. It isn’t just that people can now build a cocoon of cable channels and Web sites that insulates them from inconvenient facts. It’s also that this cocoon insulates them from other Americans — including the groups of Americans who, inside the cocoon, are being depicted as evil aliens. It’s easy to buy into the demonization of people you never communicate with, and whose views you never see depicted by anyone other than their adversaries.

In this environment, any entrepreneurial fear monger can use technology to build a following. You don’t have to be the king of Hawaii to start calling yourself the king of Hawaii and convince a Jared Loughner that there’s a conspiracy afoot.

So I’m not sure how much good it would do if you could get a Glenn Beck to clean up his act. With such a vast ecosystem of fear mongers, his vacated niche might be filled before long. But I think Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch owe it to America to at least do the experiment.

Postscript: Encouragingly, Roger Ailes said in the wake of the Tucson shooting that “I told all of our guys, shut up, tone it down, make your argument intellectually.” So stay tuned. Also encouragingly, two journalists from liberal and conservative magazines — the American Prospect and National Review — had an extremely civil discussion about the Tucson shooting, about 24 hours after it happened, on my Web site Bloggingheads.tv.
============
http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon-january-10-2011/arizona-shootings-reaction

.
Title: Hate Speech from the Left?
Post by: G M on January 14, 2011, 09:07:39 AM
Where was Wright's concerns about the venom from the left during two terms of George W. Bush?

http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2010/0901/James-Lee-killed-in-Discovery-Channel-hostage-crisis-reminiscent-of-Unabomber

The man who entered the Discovery Channel headquarters in Silver Spring, Md., with a handgun and what appeared to be explosives Wednesday, taking several hostages, is being described in news reports as an “environmental activist.”


If so, his ideology is reminiscent of the infamous “Unabomber” – Theodore Kaczynski, now serving life in prison for a series of mail bombings that killed three people and injured 23 others.

The man in the Discovery Channel episode, identified by law enforcement officials as James J. Lee, apparently held beliefs similar to Kaczynski: that human population growth and modern industrial development imperil the planet.

Several hours after the episode began, Mr. Lee reportedly was shot and killed by sniper. Three hostages were released unharmed.

“The debate about the state of the planet is done,” Lee writes on his web site. “Global Warming is a reality. The massive extinction of animals is happening all over the world. Now let us begin the debate on how to save the planet. We can’t wait anymore, something must be done immediately! Let’s act on it right away; let this be a new chapter in the earth’s history. As human beings we must join together to save it.”
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=38923

Eco-Terror’s Inspiration
by Brian Sussman
09/10/2010



Eco-terrorist James Jay Lee last week executed a dangerous hostage plot inside the headquarters of the Discovery Channel. Armed with what appeared to be pipe bombs and a cheap pistol, Lee claimed to have been “awakened” by Al Gore’s film, "An Inconvenient Truth".

Lee regarded humans as the “most destructive, filthy, pollutive creatures around.” His desire was to force the Discovery Channel to fill its programming schedule with “solutions to save the planet.” Lee was shot and killed by police.

Sadly, Lee is not first eco-freak to go off. In 2005 the FBI declared domestic eco-terrorism to be America’s No. 1 threat.


Recent examples of enviro-violence include two large commercial radio towers toppled in Washington. The site was tagged with the letters “ELF.” Photos of the destruction were posted on the Earth Liberation Front website.

In April, ELF member Stephen Murphy was sentenced to five years after admitting he conspired to burn down a condominium development in Pasadena, Calif.

Daniel San Diego is wanted for his alleged involvement in the bombing of a biotech firm near San Francisco. According to the FBI, San Diego bears freaky tattoos resembling burning hillsides on his chest with the words “It only takes a spark” below, as well as burning buildings on his abdomen and a leafless tree rising from a road on his back.

The most notorious eco-terrorist is Ted Kaczynski—the Unabomber.  Over 17 years Kaczynski sent out mail bombs, killing three people and wounding 22. He also managed to sneak a bomb onto a 747 passenger jet flying between Chicago and Washington D.C. Fortunately the bomb didn’t discharge as planned.

Kaczynski’s reign ended in 1996, shortly after he made public his now infamous manifesto. In it he opined, “One of the effects of the intrusion of industrial society has been that over much of the world traditional controls on population have been thrown out of balance. Hence the population explosion, with all that it implies… No one knows what will happen as a result of ozone depletion, the greenhouse effect and other environmental problems that cannot yet be foreseen.”

And discovered by the FBI in the Unabomber’s Montana hovel? A well-worn copy of Al Gore’s 1990 screed, Earth In The Balance. Kaczynski apparently was quite taken by Gore’s missive. His copy of Earth In The Balance was dog-eared, underlined, marked and well worn.

The question is, why should anyone be surprised when environmental nut jobs mentally detonate? If one takes the warnings of Al Gore and his comrades as gospel, planet earth is a ticking time bomb and if nothing is done to stop it we’ll all perish. For some such fear mongering becomes a clarion call to aggressive action.

For example, in Earth In The Balance, Gore likens the fight against global warming with that of a deadly wartime enemy, stating, the “assault on the earth is breathtaking, and the horrific consequences are occurring so quickly as to defy our capacity to recognize them… Isolated pockets of resistance fighters who have experienced this juggernaut first hand have begun to fight back in inspiring but, in the final analysis, woefully inadequate ways.”

Speaking at the 2008 Clinton Global Initiative conference Gore proclaimed, “I believe we have reached the stage where it is time for civil disobedience to prevent the construction of new coal plants.”

Gore’s friend and consigliore, NASA director James Hansen, has gone so far as to refer to rail cars carrying coal as “death trains.” Hansen also claims, “We only have four years left to act on climate change” before we reach the point of no return. “I tell young people,” he said during a radio interview in San Francisco, “they had better start to act up because they are the ones who will suffer the most.”

Take the words of Gore and Hansen and add another of Al’s pals into the mix—Earth Day cofounder and author of The Population Bomb and The Population Explosion (the latter possessed a jacket endorsement by Al Gore)—Paul Ehrlich, and you have further fuel for fanaticism. Ehrlich actually equates overpopulation with a cancer that needs to be cut out. “The operation will demand many apparently brutal and heartless decisions,” he wrote in Population Bomb.

Fact is Gore, Hansen, and Ehrlich have been feeding the public a steady diet of fear and trembling for years. Words such as theirs too often have caused some to go over the brink.  

As I prove in my book Climategate, the environmental movement, fronted by Al Gore, is purposefully using a manufactured crisis to institute sweeping social and political change, and create an opportunity to score big bucks off green technologies and schemes like cap-and-trade.

Tragically there are too many useful idiots who believe the likes of Gore, and have decided to take matters into their own hands.

Brian Sussman is author of Climategate: a veteran meteorologist exposes the global warming scam, and hosts the morning show on radio station KSFO in San Francisco.
Title: Civility?
Post by: G M on January 17, 2011, 07:31:49 AM
Where was Wright on this?

http://pajamasmedia.com/tatler/2011/01/16/blast-from-the-green-past/
Title: Has Wright condemned this?
Post by: G M on January 20, 2011, 11:14:59 AM
http://www.cnn.com/video/?/video/bestoftv/2011/01/19/ac.cohen.dems.gop.nazis.cnn

The new civility.
Title: Re: Has Wright condemned this?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 20, 2011, 11:38:35 AM
I see GM has a new riff:  Instead of "Where's Waldo?" or "Where's Mohammed?" it is "Where's Wright?" :lol:
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: G M on January 20, 2011, 11:41:10 AM
Just waiting for the new civility to kick in.


 :roll:


Yup, any minute now......

Title: Iowahawk
Post by: G M on January 21, 2011, 02:52:13 PM
Dear Nazi

The correspondence of Congressman Steve Cohen (D-TN), America's most dynamic metaphorist

********************************

Mr. Hector Gutierrez
Gutierrez Bros. Landscaping
Arlington, VA

Dear Mr. Gutierrez:

Nothing could have prepared me for the shock that awaited as I exited the front door of my home early Wednesday morning, where I discovered that your lawn crew had cut a swath of environmental destruction across my yard so horrifying that it only can be compared to the Rape of Nanking. I can scarcely bring myself to describe the killing fields that are my North azalea beds and the brutal degradation and torture suffered by the bluegrass around the locust tree by the rear patio.

No longer will I sit idly while you and your doorknob hangers continue to repeat the Big Lie of "satisfaction guaranteed." I am writing to inform you that I have contacted the US Department of Interior to conduct a full independent investigation into Gutierrez Brothers' actions in this matter. Please be advised that you may be subpoenaed for records pertaining to mower height, pruning shear maintenance, and leaf blower emissions.

I would also advise your crewmen to heed the lessons of the Judgement At Nurenburg: although they may be spared the justice due their superiors, "I was only following orders" is not an excuse.

Sincerely,

Representative Steven Cohen
Washington, DC

********************************

Customer Relations Department
United Airlines
Elk Grove Village, IL

Dear Sir or Madam:

In the dark annals of human evil, history has recorded the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocides, and Stalin's mass starvation program. And now, United Airlines flight 671 from Reagan International to Memphis International on January 17th, 2011. I know, because I am a survivor of that dark exemplar of man's cruelty to man.

Perhaps I should have known what I was in, for when your brutal gate agent refused to issue me an upgrade despite being a Premier/1K member for over 10 years. Or when your flight crew Gestapo confiscated my carry on Roll Tote, even though I had nearly fit it into the overhead bin. But the true measure of the horror did not dawn on me until me and my fellow passengers were left taxiing on the tarmack for over twenty minutes in the Auschwitzian Airbus A320 cattlecar, in temperatures approaching 85 degrees, not knowing our fates or whether we would make it to our fundraising dinners.

Santayana once said, "those who forget history are doomed to repeat it." And I say to you and your fellow United criminals: "never again," unless you credit my account at least 2 flight segments for this travesty.

Sincerely,

Representative Steven Cohen
Washington, DC

cc: Human Rights Watch
cc: Amnesty International

********************************

Ms. He-Sook Park
AAA Georgetown Drycleaning
Washington, DC

Dear Ms. Park:

To paraphrase Pastor Martin Niemoeller, a witness to the Shoah:

First they frayed the hem on my wife's Valentino gown
My staff aide did not speak out
Because it was my wife's and it wasn't that noticeable

When they didn't honor the 5-for-$4.99 tie coupon
My staff aide did not speak out
Because the small print said "good Tuesday to Friday"

And when they overstarched my best Brooks Brothers shirts
there was no one left to speak out to
Because your counter attendant did not speak English

I will no longer stay silent in the face of your cruel and sickening campaign of chemical fabricide, Ms. Park. Mankind will soon learn of the horrors you are hiding behind the flimsy facade of 'One Hour Martinizing.' I expect full reparations for the suffering of my wardrobe, and may God have mercy on your soul.

Representative Steven Cohen
Washington, DC

P.S. -- Could you hem a pair of casual trousers before Saturday? I have a DNC retreat coming up.

********************************

Mr. and Mrs. Robert Epstein
3786 Arbor Cove
Fairfax, VA

Dear Mr. and Mrs. Epstein:

In her diaries, Anne Frank wrote, "After all that has happened, I still believe there is good in everyone." I am sad to say that after the obscene neighborhood parking situation Saturday, prompted by your son Jacob's Bar Mitzvah at Congregation Beth Shalom, I cannot reach the same optimistic conclusion.

As I witnessed one after another of your uniformed parking Gestapo invading my cul de sac with menacing SUVs, eventual blocking my driveway, I could not help but imagine the raw terror that must have gripped the doomed souls that inhabited the ghettos of Warsaw in 1939. Although the traffic jam eventually passed over when your and your adolescent shock troops blitzkreiged the Lazer FunZone, I am not sure I will ever fully recover from the trauma.

Never again, Mr. and Mrs. Epstein. Never again.

Sincerely,

Representative Steven Cohen
Washington, DC
Title: The Left's Tucson Strategy: Stage Two
Post by: G M on January 22, 2011, 08:30:27 PM
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2011/01/028190.php

The Left's Tucson Strategy: Stage Two
  Share13   Share Post   Print
January 22, 2011 Posted by John at 6:18 PM

The Left's attempt to link the Tucson shootings to angry rhetoric (not theirs, of course) was stage one of a broader strategy--what both military men and political strategists refer to as preparing the battlefield. The movement to feign nonpartisanship at the State of the Union address by seating Republicans and Democrats together is another aspect of this stage. At the same time, the Left is moving on to stage two--an effort to cash in on battlefield preparation by attacking specific figures on the right and trying to shut down speech that the Left finds inconvenient.

At the moment, the second most-read article at the New York Times site is this one: "Spotlight From Glenn Beck Brings a CUNY Professor Threats."

    On his daily radio and television shows, Glenn Beck has elevated once-obscure conservative thinkers onto best-seller lists. Recently, he has elevated a 78-year-old liberal academic to celebrity of a different sort, in a way that some say is endangering her life.

    Frances Fox Piven, a City University of New York professor, has been a primary character in Mr. Beck's warnings about a progressive take-down of America. Ms. Piven, Mr. Beck says, is responsible for a plan to "intentionally collapse our economic system."

Let's pause there for a moment. First of all, Ms. Piven is not a "liberal academic." By her own description, she is a radical, a leftist and a Marxist. Nor is she merely an academic; she has been a far-left activist for decades. The Times continues:

    Never mind that Ms. Piven's radical plan to help poor people was published 45 years ago, when Mr. Beck was a toddler. Anonymous visitors to his Web site have called for her death, and some, she said, have contacted her directly via e-mail.

    In response, a liberal nonprofit group, the Center for Constitutional Rights, wrote to the chairman of Fox News, Roger Ailes, on Thursday to ask him to put a stop to Mr. Beck's "false accusations" about Ms. Piven.

    "Mr. Beck is putting Professor Piven in actual physical danger of a violent response," the group wrote. ...

    Ms. Piven said in an interview that she had informed local law enforcement authorities of the anonymous electronic threats. ...

    The Nation, which has featured Ms. Piven's columns for decades, quoted some of the threats against her in an editorial this week that condemned the "concerted campaign" against her.

    One such threat, published as an anonymous comment on The Blaze, read, "Somebody tell Frances I have 5000 roundas ready and I'll give My life to take Our freedom back." (The spelling and capitalizing have not been changed.)

    That comment and others that were direct threats were later deleted, but other comments remain that charge her with treasonous behavior. ...

    The Center for Constitutional Rights said it took exception to the sheer quantity of negative attention to Ms. Piven.

    "We are vigorous defenders of the First Amendment," the center said in its letter to Fox. "However, there comes a point when constant intentional repetition of provocative, incendiary, emotional misinformation and falsehoods about a person can put that person in actual physical danger of a violent response." Mr. Beck is at that point, they said.

This is Orwellian on several levels. It is Ms. Piven, not Glenn Beck, who explicitly defends violence, and comes perilously close to advocating it:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELvINNajtCQ&feature=player_embedded#t=11s[/youtube]
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 22, 2011, 09:31:45 PM
Its me, wearing my Thread Police hat.  :-)  May I ask you to put this at
http://dogbrothers.com/phpBB2/index.php?topic=1285.msg11155#msg11155  

I just renamed the thread a bit to dial it in a bit better.
Title: Ain't that the Truth!
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 26, 2011, 09:00:29 AM
"Of the wealthiest zip codes in the U.S., 19 out of 20 vote Democratic. How much longer can the Dems continue the lie of representing the interests of the common man? What they represent is the interest of those who can take advantage of government in the most selfish manner." --columnist Bruce Bialosky

Title: day by day cartoon
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 08, 2011, 10:38:26 PM
http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2011/01/02/
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: prentice crawford on February 08, 2011, 11:17:25 PM
Woof,
 Wow! Now, that was both funny and true. :lol:
                      P.C.
Title: Will today's GOP embrace Reagan's real legacy?
Post by: bigdog on February 09, 2011, 03:26:34 AM
http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/forum/2011-02-08-column08_ST_N.htm
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 09, 2011, 05:14:20 AM
a) FWIW IMHO the problems in which we find ourselves are not due not enough compromise by Republicans-- quite the contrary.

b) Given the results of his support for amnesty for illegal aliens (which I supported at the time) if he were still with us, I suspect were he with us today regarding current efforts I suspect he would be saying something like "Fool me once, shame on you.  Fool me twice, shame on me."
=======
Patriot Post

"His integrity was most pure, his justice the most inflexible I have ever known, no motives of interest or consanguinity, of friendship or hatred, being able to bias his decision. He was indeed, in every sense of the words, a wise, a good, and a great man." --Thomas Jefferson on George Washington

The Gipper

Happy Birthday to the Gipper"I never thought of myself as a great man, just a man committed to great ideas. I've always believed that individuals should take priority over the state. History has taught me that this is what sets America apart -- not to remake the world in our image, but to inspire people everywhere with a sense of their own boundless possibilities. There's no question I am an idealist, which is another way of saying I am an American." --Ronald Reagan

Opinion in Brief
"It's been more than six years since our nation bid farewell to Ronald Reagan, born 100 years ago [yesterday]. Yet at times it seems as though he never left. ... It's worth reminding ourselves as we mark the centennial of Reagan's birth what he accomplished -- and how. It's important to do this in part because much of what passes for praise of Reagan is veiled criticism. Reagan is hailed, for example, as a great communicator. And with good reason; few politicians could match his rhetorical skill and his ability to articulate great themes that resonated with the American people. But that's where many on the Left stop. What they really seek to emulate is not his policies or his agenda. They hope that, by studying his methods, a little of his 'magic' will rub off on the liberal policies that have proven such a hard sell over the last two years. Dress the liberal agenda in 'Reaganesque' terms, and the electorate is yours, right? What condescending nonsense. It wasn't just Reagan's ability to communicate that endeared him to millions of Americans. It was the fact that he was articulating their most deeply cherished beliefs. It went well beyond the optimistic outlook -- which, although welcome, is something any president can attempt. It was because he spoke in direct terms that avoided the usual 'buzzword' approach we get from Washington. And he used that approach to say what many Americans thought: Taxes are too high -- let's cut them. Inflation is too high -- let's tame it. The Cold War can be won, not managed, and the world made safer for everybody -- let's do it. The fable of the Left (the hard Left, anyway -- many others are coming around) is that this was all smoke and mirrors. But the facts tell a different story." --Heritage Foundation president Ed Feulner

Political Futures
"The only good conservative is a dead conservative. That, in a nutshell, describes the age-old tradition of liberals suddenly discovering that once-reviled conservatives were OK after all. It's just we-the-living who are hateful ogres, troglodytes and moperers. Over the last decade or so, as the giants of the founding generation of modern American conservatism have died, each has been rehabilitated into a gentleman-statesman of a bygone era of conservative decency and open-mindedness. ... But it's Ronald Reagan who really stands out. As we celebrate the 100th anniversary of his birth, the Gipper is enjoying yet another status upgrade among liberals. Barack Obama took a Reagan biography with him on his vacation. A slew of liberals and mainstream journalists (but I repeat myself) complimented Obama's State of the Union address as 'Reaganesque.' Time magazine recently featured the cover story 'Why Obama (Hearts) Reagan.' ... Now, on one hand, there's something wonderful about the overflowing of love for Reagan. When presidents leave office or die, their partisan affiliation fades and, for the great ones, eventually withers away. Reagan was a truly great president, one of the greatest according to even liberal historians like the late John Patrick Diggins. As you can tell from the gnashing of teeth and rending of cloth from the far left, the lionization of Reagan is a great triumph for the right, and conservatives should welcome more of it. On the other hand, what is not welcome is an almost Soviet airbrushing of the past to serve liberalism's current agenda." --columnist Jonah Goldberg

Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on February 09, 2011, 12:14:20 PM
a) FWIW IMHO the problems in which we find ourselves are not due not enough compromise by Republicans-- quite the contrary.

b) Given the results of his support for amnesty for illegal aliens (which I supported at the time) if he were still with us, I suspect were he with us today regarding current efforts I suspect he would be saying something like "Fool me once, shame on you.  Fool me twice, shame on me."

Asw for 'A', I have come around to agreeing with you.  The problem with comprosing with liberals is in the end there is no compromise.  WE find ourselves every election cycle compromising and little by little they take more and more.  When they are in power they are as Jonas Goldberg stated Huns at the gates taxing and then raping and piliging the treasury spending like drunken fools.

Then when they don't have the cart blanch power (like now) suddenly the Republicans are held to task (by the Dems and their media cohorts) that if they do not "compromise" or act in an honorable "bipartisan" manner carrying on the task of "good" governance they are NO good. 

As for 'B', I would think Reagan would not have been happy about how illegals have abused our system.  He was being quite generous with his pardon of them. To think that his precedent can arguably have led to the situation being many several times worse now would not have changed his mind seems incredulous.

I had a Latino patient who translates for his wife who speaks not word of English.  He laughed when I tried a few Spanish words and said with a big grin that I could never run for any political office.  I need to learn Spanish now!

Yes CNN can pick and show adorable "nice" illegals who do back breaking work.  Yet they come here for whatever they can get.  And they mock us and take advantage of us and make fools of us.  And I don't mean just Latinos.  I mean any illegal.  Israelis included.

I tend to agree with Bob Grant.  It is probably already too late.  At least in places like California.
Title: Laffer
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 10, 2011, 10:23:15 AM
By ARTHUR B. LAFFER
For 16 years prior to Ronald Reagan's presidency, the U.S. economy was in a tailspin—a result of bipartisan ignorance that resulted in tax increases, dollar devaluations, wage and price controls, minimum-wage hikes, misguided spending, pandering to unions, protectionist measures and other policy mistakes.

In the late 1970s and early '80s, 10-year bond yields and inflation both were in the low double digits. The "misery index"—the sum of consumer price inflation plus the unemployment rate—peaked at well over 20%. The real value of the S&P 500 stock price index had declined at an average annual rate of 6% from early 1966 to August 1982.

For anyone old enough today, memories of the Arab oil embargo and price shocks—followed by price controls and rationing and long lines at gas stations—are traumatic. The U.S. share of world output was on a steady course downward.

Then Reagan entered center stage. His first tax bill was enacted in August 1981. It included a sweeping cut in marginal income tax rates, reducing the top rate to 50% from 70% and the lowest rate to 11% from 14%. The House vote was 238 to 195, with 48 Democrats on the winning side and only one Republican with the losers. The Senate vote was 89 to 11, with 37 Democrats voting aye and only one Republican voting nay. Reaganomics had officially begun.

President Reagan was not alone in changing America's domestic economic agenda. Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, first appointed by Jimmy Carter, deserves enormous credit for bringing inflation down to 3.2% in 1983 from 13.5% in 1981 with a tight-money policy. There were other heroes of the tax-cutting movement, such as Wisconsin Republican Rep. Bill Steiger and Wyoming Republican Sen. Clifford Hansen, the two main sponsors of an important capital gains tax cut in 1978.

View Full Image

Associated Press
 
Ronald Reagan after signing his first tax cut, Aug. 14, 1981.
.What the Reagan Revolution did was to move America toward lower, flatter tax rates, sound money, freer trade and less regulation. The key to Reaganomics was to change people's behavior with respect to working, investing and producing. To do this, personal income tax rates not only decreased significantly, but they were also indexed for inflation in 1985. The highest tax rate on "unearned" (i.e., non-wage) income dropped to 28% from 70%. The corporate tax rate also fell to 34% from 46%. And tax brackets were pushed out, so that taxpayers wouldn't cross the threshold until their incomes were far higher.

Changing tax rates changed behavior, and changed behavior affected tax revenues. Reagan understood that lowering tax rates led to static revenue losses. But he also understood that lowering tax rates also increased taxable income, whether by increasing output or by causing less use of tax shelters and less tax cheating.

Moreover, Reagan knew from personal experience in making movies that once he was in the highest tax bracket, he'd stop making movies for the rest of the year. In other words, a lower tax rate could increase revenues. And so it was with his tax cuts. The highest 1% of income earners paid more in taxes as a share of GDP in 1988 at lower tax rates than they had in 1980 at higher tax rates. To Reagan, what's been called the "Laffer Curve" (a concept that originated centuries ago and which I had been using without the name in my classes at the University of Chicago) was pure common sense.

There was also, in Reagan's first year, his response to an illegal strike by federal air traffic controllers. The president fired and replaced them with military personnel until permanent replacements could be found. Given union power in the economy, this was a dramatic act—especially considering the well-known fact that the air traffic controllers union, Patco, had backed Reagan in the 1980 presidential election.

On the regulatory front, the number of pages in the Federal Register dropped to less than 48,000 in 1986 from over 80,000 in 1980. With no increase in the minimum wage over his full eight years in office, the negative impact of this price floor on employment was lessened.

And, of course, there was the decontrol of oil markets. Price controls at gas stations were lifted in January 1981, as were well-head price controls for domestic oil producers. Domestic output increased and prices fell. President Carter's excess profits tax on oil companies was repealed in 1988.

The results of the Reagan era? From December 1982 to June 1990, Reaganomics created over 21 million jobs—more jobs than have been added since. Union membership and man-hours lost due to strikes tumbled. The stock market went through the roof. From July 1982 through August 2000, the S&P 500 stock price index grew at an average annual real rate of over 12%. The unfunded liabilities of the Social Security system declined as a share of GDP, and the "misery index" fell to under 10%.

Even Reagan's first Democratic successor, Bill Clinton, followed in his footsteps. The negotiations for what would become the North American Free Trade Agreement began in Reagan's second term, but it was President Clinton who pushed the agreement through Congress in 1993 over the objections of the unions and many in his own party.


President Clinton also signed into law the biggest capital gains tax cut in our nation's history in 1997. It effectively eliminated any capital gains tax on owner-occupied homes. Mr. Clinton reduced government spending as a share of GDP by 3.5 percentage points, more than the next four best presidents combined. Where Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton slipped up was on personal income tax rates—allowing the highest personal income tax rate to eventually rise to 39.6% from 28%.

The true lesson to be learned from the Reagan presidency is that good economics isn't Republican or Democrat, right-wing or left-wing, liberal or conservative. It's simply good economics. President Barack Obama should take heed and not limit his vision while seeking a workable solution to America's tragically high unemployment rate.

Mr. Laffer is the chairman of Laffer Associates and co-author of "Return to Prosperity: How America Can Regain Its Economic Superpower Status" (Threshold, 2010).

Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 14, 2011, 10:10:26 AM
Brief · February 14, 2011

The Foundation
"We must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt." --Thomas Jefferson

For the Record

Obama's $3.73 trillion budget is the biggest everThe White House released its 2012 budget proposal Monday morning and the damage is staggering: $3.73 trillion. The budget deficit will be $1.65 trillion for fiscal 2011, up from $1.29 trillion in fiscal 2010. The deficit will represent 10.9 percent of gross domestic product, a post-World War II record. "My budget makes investments that can help America win this competition and transform our economy, and it does so fully aware of the very difficult fiscal situation we face," Obama said. In other words, eat, drink and be merry because our children and grandchildren will pay the bill.

Political Futures
"At Philadelphia's 30th Street Station on Tuesday, lifelong government rail promoter Vice President Joe Biden unveiled a $53 billion high-speed train initiative and half-joked: 'I'm like the ombudsman for Amtrak.' As with most gaffetastic Biden-isms, the remark should prompt more heartburn than hilarity. Just who exactly is looking out for taxpayers when it comes to federal rail spending? Vigorous independent oversight of public infrastructure binges is especially critical given the nation's long history of mass transit slush funds, cost overruns and union-monopolized construction projects to nowhere. ... When Biden talks about 'seizing the future,' he's talking about seizing your wallets for his party's electoral security. ... [T]he Obama administration's political abuse of the Amtrak inspector general's office, still under congressional investigation, is a recipe for yet more porkulus-style waste." --columnist Michelle Malkin

Government
"House Republicans have promised major spending reforms, but GOP leaders are tongue-tied when they are asked which specific programs they want to cut. The GOP wants to cut domestic spending to 2008 levels, but that's just an accounting goal. The GOP needs a larger vision to guide their reforms. Republicans need to communicate to the public how a smaller government would benefit America and what federal agencies and activities are damaging and counterproductive. A key part of this strategy should be to revive a central theme of the 1981 and 1995 budget-cutting drives -- getting the federal government out of what are properly state and local activities. Constitutional federalism has taken a beating as federal aid to the states has doubled over the last decade to $646 billion this year. ... The federal-aid system does not deliver high-quality and cost-efficient services to citizens. It delivers bureaucracy, overspending, and regulatory micromanagement from Washington. In addition to helping balance the budget, Republicans can start a national debate about the proper role of the federal government by pushing to terminate the vast array of costly state aid programs." --Cato Institute's Chris Edwards

Reader Comments
"I was surprised to hear Mark Alexander call Sen. Bob Corker a friend. He has disappointed me, as a conservative, at most turns. I am not alone in this opinion. 'Bailout Bob' is on every Tea Party list I've seen as a one term senator. Perhaps you are simply golfing buddies and do not discuss the Fed or the importance of paring down this government while on the links." --Cathy

Editor's Reply: First, I do not play golf. Second, while Bob and I do not agree on everything, that does not mean we can't agree on anything. The "all or nothing" litmus test is a losing formula for any party, particularly the Tea Party. What I can tell you is that Bob is a self-made individual of very high character and faith, a very smart Patriot who is not a typical Beltway egomaniacal politico.
"Regarding Mark Alexander's essay, The Debt Bomb Showdown, it's too bad you litter an otherwise fine piece ... claiming to know something that you cannot know -- the truth of what goes on in Obama's mind and his motives. This used to be called lying and bearing false witness. Divining something by dint of your gigantic intellect or unparalleled mastery of grand strategic skullduggery does not qualify as knowing something in any actual sense. Again, it was a good piece otherwise." --Joe

Editor's Reply: I "divine" nothing when asserting Obama is an ideological Socialist who would, if unabated by wiser minds, reduce the USA to the USSA. I draw my conclusions from his words and deeds prior to being elected to the Senate, and since. I have read his books and studied the records of his associations with Leftist mentors such as Jeremiah Wright, Michael Pfleger, William Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, Khalid al-Mansour, Rashid Khalidi, Bob Creamer and others. He is a disciple of uber-Leftist Saul Alinsky, whose "Rules for Radicals" is the "bible" of "community organizers." His short record as part time Senator yielded the most radical Left voting record of any Senate member. His record as president has done much the same. Oh, but maybe Obama is now reformed? "Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclination, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence." --John Adams
"In Friday's 'Obama's Instruction Manual for Business' it illustrates how Obama is now trying to cozy up with the Chamber of Commerce and get business to jump 'back in the game.' Does he forget the first eight months of his term when he constantly harangued that the sky was falling and there was nothing but doom and gloom until the economy was in shambles? He painted such a nightmarish picture so he could ram thru his emergency measures. Then he expected the world to turn on a dime because HE said it was OK. The world, the economy and the public do not respond well to such bipolar behavior in the White House. The steady positive faithful outlook Ronald Wilson Reagan served us well during very trying times. Oh that we had such a man in public service today." --Greg

"It really bothers me that The Patriot Post used Mr. Rogers' photo as you did Friday. He is one of my heroes and IMHO to see Obama's head photoshopped in is in poor taste and insulting to the memory of a great man. This is the first time I have ever felt that you went over the line." --Joy

Editor's Reply: King Friday said he thought it was funny...

Liberty
"ack in 1942, the Supreme Court said that because the federal government has the right to regulate interstate commerce, the Department of Agriculture could tell a farmer how much wheat he could grow, even if the wheat never left his farm and was consumed there by his family and their farm animals. That case was a landmark, whose implications reached far beyond farming. ... ObamaCare is another piece of Congressional legislation for which there is no federal authority in the Constitution. But when someone asked Nancy Pelosi where in the Constitution there was any authority for passing such a law, her reply was 'Are you kidding?' Two federal courts have now said that they are not kidding. The ultimate question is whether the Supreme Court of the United States will back them up. That may depend on how soon the case reaches the Supreme court. If the issue wends its way slowly up through the Circuit Courts of Appeal, by the time it reaches the Supreme Court, Obama may have put more of his appointees there -- and, if so, they will probably rubberstamp anything he does. He would therefore have done a complete end-run around the Constitution and be well on his way to becoming the Hugo Chavez of North America." --economist Thomas Sowell

Opinion in Brief
"Here's a chunk of the problem with the proposed reconciliation of business and the Obama administration. 'We're trying,' the president said, in addressing the U.S. Chamber of Commerce [last] week, 'to run the government like you run your businesses -- with better technology and faster services.' ... What the president left out was imagination. And creativity. And a spirit of to-hell-with-it-let's-see-if-this-thing-works. ... The president used one word familiar to patrons of the marketplace -- 'invest.' That's what he wants business to do -- 'invest in America' for the sake of jobs, etc. He used the same word in the State of the Union message with a different spin. The idea there was Spend Taxpayer Money on Green Energy and the Like. The difference? Business ... pours money into a project with a clear, distinct idea of profits to come. A government 'investment'? You equate that kind of money transfer with bridges to nowhere and ethanol subsidies: things government does inasmuch as from those things government expects voter gratitude. The Chamber of Commerce and the president don't talk the same language. To them the same words mean different things." --columnist William Murchison

The Gipper
"We do have a rendezvous with destiny. Either we will preside over the great nightfall for all mankind, or we will accept the leadership that has been thrust upon us. I believe that is the obligation and responsibility of the Republican party today." --Ronald Reagan

 
Click Here 

 Willa's Chocolate Covered Shortbread
These buttery concoctions, dipped in dark chocolate, are incredibly delicious and passed our staff's taste test with flying colors! We can't get enough of them and know you'll enjoy these treats as much as we do. Packaged in a beautiful silver tin and excellent for gift-giving, each tin weighs 13 oz.
 

Faith & Family
"It is difficult to explain to a culture rapidly forgetting its foundation why that foundation matters. While churches and schools have left instruction in Western Civilization behind, the recipients of its strong underpinnings float aimlessly trying to redefine the definite and ignore the irrefutable. And here it is: Western Civilization in general and America in particular was built on Judeo-Christian values. Those values shaped every area of life from government to finance to family. They brought order to all three. Government was no longer top-down, but of the people. People were free to 'pursue happiness' in part by choosing their own work. Judeo-Christian teaching taught them to work hard, make and keep contracts, treat employees fairly, pay an honest day's wage, and keep their word. Prosperity followed from those foundational principles." --President of Culture Campaign Sandy Rios

Culture
"One of liberalism's many problems is that once an idea or program is proved wrong and unworkable, liberals rarely acknowledge their mistake and examine the root cause of their error so they don't repeat it. Take multiculturalism... In a speech to a security conference in Munich, British Prime Minister David Cameron declared state multiculturalism a failure. For good measure, Cameron said Britain also must get tougher on Islamic extremists. Predictably, this has angered Islamic extremists. A genuinely liberal country, he said, 'believes in certain values and actively promotes them. ... Freedom of speech. Freedom of worship. Democracy. The rule of law, equal rights, regardless of race, sex or sexuality.' ... It may be too late for Britain, as it may be too late for France and Germany. It isn't too late for the United States, though it is getting close. Too many American leaders suffer from the same weak-kneed syndrome that has gripped Britain. Who will tell immigrants to America that the days of multiculturalism are over and if they want to come to America, they must do so legally and expect to become Americans with no hyphens, no allegiance to another country, and no agenda other than the improvement of the United States?" --columnist Cal Thomas

 
Click Here 

 Taste of Tennessee
We have searched high and low to find a delightful sampling of delicious products made in The Patriot Shop's home state. Enjoy!
 

The Last Word
"A lot of people in America are elated by the sight of mobs gathering in the streets of Egypt. They view it as an oppressed people longing for liberty. They rejoice at the prospect of a dictator being dumped in favor of democracy. That is because a lot of people who are forever quoting Santayana's quip, 'Those who can not remember the past are condemned to repeat it,' have apparently remembered precious little themselves. It would seem that the extent of their historical knowledge begins and ends with the final score of the recent Super Bowl. The thing to keep in mind is that Cairo and Alexandria are not to be confused with Concord and Lexington, and nobody in the streets lobbing rocks and burning bottles is named Washington, Adams, Madison or Jefferson. Then there are those simpletons whose eyes begin to twinkle at the mere mention of the word 'revolution.' But comparing most revolutions to our own is sheer insanity. The French Revolution led to Robespierre and the Reign of Terror. The Russian Revolution led to Stalin and the gulags. China's Revolution brought us Mao and the slaughter of millions, Cuba's Revolution brought us Castro and the Iranian Revolution brought forth the Ayatollah Khomeini. ... Those good-hearted chumps who insist that democracy is the end-all and be-all are sadly misguided. Hitler won a popular election, as did Hamas in Gaza, as did Barack Obama, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, in America. Just because folks are allowed to vote is no guarantee that they can always be trusted to do the right thing." --columnist Burt Prelutsky

Title: WSJ: Kessler
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 17, 2011, 03:55:08 PM
By ANDY KESSLER
So where the heck are all the jobs? Eight-hundred billion in stimulus and $2 trillion in dollar-printing and all we got were a lousy 36,000 jobs last month. That's not even enough to absorb population growth.

You can't blame the fact that 26 million Americans are unemployed or underemployed on lost housing jobs or globalization—those excuses are played out. To understand what's going on, you have to look behind the headlines. That 36,000 is a net number. The Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that in December some 4,184,000 workers (seasonally adjusted) were hired, and 4,162,000 were "separated" (i.e., laid off or quit). This turnover tells the story of our economy—especially if you focus on jobs lost as a clue to future job growth.

With a heavy regulatory burden, payroll taxes and health-care costs, employing people is very expensive. In January, the Golden Gate Bridge announced that it will have zero toll takers next year: They've been replaced by wireless FastTrak payments and license-plate snapshots.

Technology is eating jobs—and not just toll takers.

Tellers, phone operators, stock brokers, stock traders: These jobs are nearly extinct. Since 2007, the New York Stock Exchange has eliminated 1,000 jobs. And when was the last time you spoke to a travel agent? Nearly all of them have been displaced by technology and the Web. Librarians can't find 36,000 results in 0.14 seconds, as Google can. And a snappily dressed postal worker can't instantly deliver a 140-character tweet from a plane at 36,000 feet.

So which jobs will be destroyed next? Figure that out and you'll solve the puzzle of where new jobs will appear.

View Full Image

Martin Kozlowski
 .Forget blue-collar and white- collar. There are two types of workers in our economy: creators and servers. Creators are the ones driving productivity—writing code, designing chips, creating drugs, running search engines. Servers, on the other hand, service these creators (and other servers) by building homes, providing food, offering legal advice, and working at the Department of Motor Vehicles. Many servers will be replaced by machines, by computers and by changes in how business operates. It's no coincidence that Google announced it plans to hire 6,000 workers in 2011.

But even the label "servers" is too vague. So I've broken down the service economy further, as a guide to figure out the next set of unproductive jobs that will disappear. (Don't blame me if your job is listed here; technology spares no one, not even writers.)

• Sloppers are those that move things—from one side of a store or factory to another. Amazon is displacing thousands of retail workers. DMV employees and so many other government workers move information from one side of a counter to another without adding any value. Such sloppers are easy to purge with clever code.

• Sponges are those who earned their jobs by passing a test meant to limit supply. According to this newspaper, 23% of U.S. workers now need a state license. The Series 7 exam is required for stock brokers. Cosmetologists, real estate brokers, doctors and lawyers all need government certification. All this does is legally bar others from doing the same job, so existing workers can charge more and sponge off the rest of us.

But eDiscovery is the hottest thing right now in corporate legal departments. The software scans documents and looks for important keywords and phrases, displacing lawyers and paralegals who charge hundreds of dollars per hour to read the often millions of litigation documents. Lawyers, understandably, hate eDiscovery.

Doctors are under fire as well, from computer imaging that looks inside of us and from Computer Aided Diagnosis, which looks for patterns in X-rays to identify breast cancer and other diseases more cheaply and effectively than radiologists do. Other than barbers, no sponges are safe.

• Supersloppers mark up prices based on some marketing or branding gimmick, not true economic value. That Rolex Oyster Perpetual Submariner Two-Tone Date for $9,200 doesn't tell time as well as the free clock on my iPhone, but supersloppers will convince you to buy it. Markups don't generate wealth, except for those marking up. These products and services provide a huge price umbrella for something better to sell under.

• Slimers are those that work in finance and on Wall Street. They provide the grease that lubricates the gears of the economy. Financial firms provide access to capital, shielding companies from the volatility of the stock and bond and derivative markets. For that, they charge hefty fees. But electronic trading has cut into their profits, and corporations are negotiating lower fees for mergers and financings. Wall Street will always exist, but with many fewer workers.

• Thieves have a government mandate to make good money and a franchise that could disappear with the stroke of a pen. You know many of them: phone companies, cable operators and cellular companies are the obvious ones. But there are more annoying ones—asbestos testing and removal, plus all the regulatory inspectors who don't add value beyond making sure everyone pays them. Technologies like Skype have picked off phone companies by lowering international rates. And consumers are cutting expensive cable TV services in favor of Web-streamed video.


Like it or not, we are at the beginning of a decades-long trend. Beyond the demise of toll takers and stock traders, watch enrollment dwindle in law schools and medical schools. Watch the divergence in stock performance between companies that actually create and those that are in transition—just look at Apple, Netflix and Google over the last five years as compared to retailers and media.

But be warned that this economy is incredibly dynamic, and there is no quick fix for job creation when so much technology-driven job destruction is taking place. Fortunately, history shows that labor-saving machines haven't decreased overall employment even when they have made certain jobs obsolete. Ultimately the economic growth created by new jobs always overwhelms the drag from jobs destroyed—if policy makers let it happen.

Mr. Kessler, a former hedge fund manager, is the author most recently of "Eat People And Other Unapologetic Rules for Game-Changing Entrepreneurs," just out from Portfolio.

Title: Retirement a privilege not a right
Post by: ccp on February 19, 2011, 11:34:47 AM
There was an article in one of the medical journals some years back that addressed the plight of the elderly in history.  Many elderly worked till they died.  Others, lived with family.  Others wound up at flop houses or begged.  Compare that to today's expectations.  (unfortunatley I cannot find the article now but it was extraordinarily illuminating from someone born in the 50s to see how hard it really was for many people who were lucky enough to live to old age.  After reading that I found it hard to feel sorry for the elderly of today.  No one wants to get old but.....

http://retirementblog.ncpa.org/the-right-to-retirement/

****Early Retirement, retirement

After last week's post, I started thinking about what our societal expectations are about retirement.  So I brushed the dust off of my pocket-sized copy of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.  After perusing them, I was reminded that these beloved documents spell out many God-given rights that government is obligated to protect while allowing humankind to pursue life, liberty and happiness.  (Note to the courts:  Constitutional law still exists).  But what is expectantly absent from the Bill of Rights is the right to an easy, stress-free life.

What does this have to do with retirement, one might ask?  There are no Constitutional rights to retirement, much less an easy retirement.  Retirement is made possible by the structure of entitlement programs, the effort of workers and savers, and the generosity (hopefully) of the next generation to care for their aging parents.  But the Constitution says nothing about retirement.  Specifically:

1)  There is no Constitutional right to early retirement.  The full retirement age when people receive their full Social Security benefits for most of today's workers is now 67.  While retiring at age 55 may be the plan for many, there are no guarantees.  So if your 401(k) account derailed your plans to retire early last year, this matter does not justify a goverment bailout.

2)  There is no Constitutional right to home equity for retirement income.  While the Constitution protects your property from unreasonable search and seizure, there is no right to property earning a 200 percent rate of return that will enable you to downsize and retire comfortably from the sale of your existing home.  The current mortgage mess has affirmed that this right does not exist.

3)  There is no Constitutional right to entitlement programs.  Sadly, the government has mislead people into thinking that Social Security alone can and will solve any retirement financial problems, and that there will always be money to fund entitlement programs.  But the $102 trillion future deficit held by Medicare and Social Security as it stands today means that the program will exist in its current form – only as far as the government is willing to borrow and people are willing to fork over payroll taxes.

4)  Finally, there is no Constitutional right to a "wealthy" standard of living at retirement.  I am reminded of the elite elderly couple Thurston and Lovey Howell from the 1960s TV show "Gilligan's Island."  While they were shipwrecked on an uninhabited island, we learn little about how these millionaires made their money, but it was obvious by their dress and demeanor that they had no financial worries in their later years.  Such is usually not the case for real-life retirees.  Some baby boomers may approach retirement with the resources to purchase a yacht or a month-long cruise, while many others may have to settle for a three-hour tour.

In other words, there are no guarantees in life, or in retirement outcomes, for that matter.   But careful thought and planning can minimize the risk of plans going awry.

Have a good weekend!***

Title: An Arab rant
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 19, 2011, 11:35:41 AM


http://v1.cache5.googlevideo.com/videoplayback?signature=21860F7497B3650E73AB92E1CF8EC3E916549B70.CBEE7BB927021E7995870DAE494DD017A466B309&sparams=id,itag,uaopt,ip,ipbits,expire&expire=1300718795&ipbits=0&ip=0.0.0.0&uaopt=no-save&itag=18&id=5c5a8f9f9e7facd4&key=yta1&el=videos&devkey=AX8iKz393pCCMUL6wqrPOZoO88HsQjpE1a8d1GxQnGDm&app=youtube_gdata&redirect_counter=2

Title: The Govt. can
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 06, 2011, 09:04:22 PM


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LO2eh6f5Go0&feature=player_embedded
Title: Al Jazeera: A listen and a read
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 07, 2011, 04:59:40 AM

http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/03/20113341535651130.html

http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/03/201134154351741689.html
Title: WSJ: The Demise of Third Worldism
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 22, 2011, 08:29:44 AM
y FABIO RAFAEL FIALLO
The globalization of the international economy and this winter's Arab revolts mark the demise, each in a different domain, of an ideological stance that flourished in the third quarter of the previous century. "Third Worldism," which rose out of decolonization and the triumph of Marxist revolutions in developing countries, is the belief or pretense that the economic and political interests of poor nations are in variance and contradiction to those of rich nations—specifically those with Western values and modes of living.

On the economic front, Third Worldism based its rationale on the theory of "unequal exchange," according to which trade between developed and developing nations are detrimental to the latter: Developing countries' exports—which 40 years ago consisted largely of raw materials and other primary commodities—were allegedly underpriced, and foreign investment was deemed a means of exploiting emerging markets' natural endowments and labor markets. Such commercial relationships, Third Worldism further posited, were the main cause of economic backwardness in developing countries. To overcome this state of affairs, Third Worldist "experts" in academic circles and international organizations advised developing countries to foster trade among themselves ("collective self-reliance" was the name given to that endeavor) and to pursue an inward-oriented industrialization through protectionist barriers against imported manufactured goods.

This kind of economic autarky found its counterpart on the political front in the principle of "self-determination." Developing countries, it was argued, were in fundamentally different cultural settings than the countries that had colonized them. They had the right and the need to look for political norms that suited their specific conditions and levels of development, instead of adopting the liberal, multiparty, democratic models that prevailed in the West.

In practice, self-determination soon became an expedient for newly established despots to strengthen and perpetuate their wrongdoings. The world's Maos, Castros, Gadhafis and Mugabes claimed to incarnate the interests of their nations. The citizens under their whips were relegated to the category of "masses," with the duty simply to implement their masters' orders. Whoever attempted to disagree was accused of being a "mercenary" paid by foreign powers. Dissent was tantamount to treason.

This fashionable brand of Third-World "self-determination" left First-World leaders with only one politically correct choice: Sit down, keep quiet and let the dictators—er, "nationalist liberators"—continue to smother free expression and hunt, imprison, torture and murder their opposition. The alternative—to be accused of interfering in the domestic affairs of sovereign developing nations—was just too unpalatable.

View Full Image

Associated Press
 
Nikita Khrushchev with Fidel Castro at the U.N. General Assembly, 1960.
.Before the turn of the millennium, trade globalization came to disprove the economic foundations of Third Worldism: One after the other, developing countries realized that protectionism had led them only to poverty, and that they had far more to gain from participating fully in international commerce. Many thus decided to overhaul their macroeconomic policies, privatize inefficient state enterprises and open their markets to foreign capital and to the technology that comes with it. Thanks to that change of paradigm, a large number of these countries have become formidable competitors in international markets for manufactured goods.

But the political pillar of Third Worldism remained. Tyrants' abuse of the principle of "self-determination" has been contested since the fall of the Berlin Wall. In international forums, proposals were put forward to institute the "right to interfere," which has since become the "responsibility to protect" populations from flagrant human-rights violations; in June 1990, in the city of La Baule, French President François Mitterrand promised that France would tailor her support for African regimes to their willingness to foster political freedom and economic efficiency. Former U.S. President George W. Bush later pushed his "freedom agenda," which emphasized democracy promotion as an essential ingredient of American foreign policy.

All these initiatives tried to combat the notion that "self-determination" should serve as a subterfuge for unaccountable autocrats to perpetuate their reigns. But Third World despots (and like-minded intellectuals) argued that such initiatives had no roots or legitimacy in developing nations' cultures. The Middle East was their prime example of a region where representative democracy had never prospered and had not even been sought.

Cue this winter's revolts, which have torn this sorry argument to pieces. In the streets of Tunis, Cairo, Tripoli and practically everywhere else in the region, men and women have risked their lives to show that they are not "masses," but individuals who want and have the right to choose and debate their governance. To my knowledge these protesters have not burned a single effigy of Uncle Sam or Israeli flag as their rulers have intermittently teleprompted them to do over the years. Instead their fury has been directed at those actually responsible for their decades-long suffering. Meanwhile Libyan rebels called on the outside world—and notably the West—for help in overthrowing Moammar Gadhafi. And this is not even the first time the people of North Africa or the Middle East have requested our support: In 2009, the streets of Iran rang with protesters' chorus of "Obama! Obama! Are you with them or are you with us?"

Whatever the outcome in Libya, Egypt or Tunisia—or Bahrain or Syria for that matter—don't expect the yearning for true self-determination to subside. These people have now glimpsed freedom, and they aren't likely to forget it and revert to their status quo ante. Fighting for liberty creates an unyielding addiction. Poland's Solidarity was smashed and forced underground in 1981, but eight years later the Berlin Wall fell and by 1990 Lech Walesa was president. North Africa and the Middle East are going through a period not unlike that in Eastern Europe in the 1980s: Sooner or later freedom will have the final say.

But what has been buried in the adventures and misadventures of today's revolts is that whatever legitimacy was left in the ideology of Third Worldism is now gone. Those statesmen and intellectuals who have fought this moment for years will pay dearly before history, but it has now arrived: By refusing to be governed any longer by despots, and showing that they have democratic aspirations similar to the rest of the world's, the Arab people have finally killed Third Worldism.

Mr. Fiallo is a Dominican-born economist, writer and retired U.N. official. His latest publication, "Ternes Eclats" or "Dimmed Lights," (L'Harmattan, 2009) presents a critique of international organizations.

Title: Prager: Chutzpah
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 22, 2011, 06:22:03 PM
Arab League Redefines Chutzpah
Tuesday, March 22, 2011
ShareThis
Many readers will recall one of the most famous headlines in modern American newspaper history -- the 1975 New York Daily News headline "Ford to City: Drop Dead."

Substitute "Arab League" for "Ford" and "America" for "City" and you've got the perfect headline: "Arab League to America: Drop Dead."

I always thought the best illustration of "chutzpah" was that of the boy who kills his parents and then pleads with the court for mercy, on the grounds that he is an orphan.

But given that that is only a hypothetical example, we now have a better illustration of chutzpah because this one is true.

Witnessing the Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi's large-scale killings of Libyan civilians, the Arab League begged us, the Europeans and the Security Council to militarily intervene on behalf of the Libyan people.

So, despite the fact that America is rather weary of fighting Muslim mass murderers, is militarily overstretched and has a devastating national debt, America said yes. We are the most decent country on Earth, and even a liberal-left Democrat in the White House feels the moral pull of America's legacy, values and unparalleled strength.

But no sooner have America and the Europeans intervened than the Arab League officially protests our intervention on the grounds that Libyan civilians -- 48 claimed, 0 confirmed at the time of the protest -- have been killed by the intervention requested by the Arab League.

What exactly did the Arab League, most of whose dictators have murdered thousands of their own people for political reasons, think would happen once the U.S. and the Europeans intervened militarily? Did they assume not one Libyan civilian would get killed? Has there been a military action in history in which no civilians died?

Amr Moussa, the outgoing secretary general of the Arab League, claimed in his statement that "What is happening in Libya differs from the aim of imposing a no-fly zone, and what we want is the protection of civilians and not the bombardment of more civilians."

Perhaps Moussa did not read the Security Council resolution. It does not limit anti-Gadhafi military activity to "imposing a no-fly zone." The resolution authorizes U.N. member states "to take all necessary measures to protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack in the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, including Benghazi (italics added)."

Perhaps President Obama should hold a press conference and make this announcement:

"Given the Arab League's protest, we are immediately ending our military involvement in Libya. Apparently, Mr. Moussa, the secretary general of the Arab League, assumed that military intervention is possible without the killing of a single civilian. He should have told us so. Under that condition, we would never have put our blood and treasure on the line. So now, we are out, and the blood of every Libyan killed and tortured by the Libyan dictator is now on the Arab League's hands. On behalf of the American people, I ask the Arab League, and especially Mr. Moussa, to never again appeal to us to save Arabs from their dictators. Shukran."

(The president likes using Arabic words when he addresses Arab audiences, so his using the Arabic word for "thank you," shukran, would add a nice flourish.)

What does this Arab League protest mean?

It clarifies once again that tribal values outweigh moral values in the Arab world, including among much of its educated elite such as Moussa. In many Arabs' eyes, it is better for an Arab tyrant to slaughter any number of Arabs, and to allow that tyrant to retain power, than for Westerners to kill a dozen Arabs in order save tens of thousands of them trying to topple that tyrant.

In much of the Arab world, saving Arab lives and spreading freedom pale in comparison to two other passions.

One of these is power -- especially despotic power -- as David Pryce-Jones shows in his brilliant book on the Arab world, "The Closed Circle." Strong and cruel Arab leaders -- from Gamal Abdul Nasser to Saddam Hussein to Hamas and Hezbollah -- have been adored by the famed "Arab street."

The other passion is hatred of Israel. That's the one thing that unites nearly all Arabs. They no more love Palestinians than they love Libyans or the tens of thousands of Syrian victims of the two Assad regimes in Damascus. They defend Palestinians because they are necessary for demonizing and ultimately delegitimizing Israel.

And Moussa is among the Israel haters. As The New York Times reported, "Hosni Mubarak removed him (Moussa) as foreign minister after a song called 'I Hate Israel and I Love Amr Moussa' became a pop hit in 2001." To hate Israel is to love Moussa.

It gets worse. Moussa is favored to win the Egyptian presidential election.

But look at the bright side -- thanks to Moussa and the Arab League, we now have a real-life illustration of chutzpah that outdoes the classic fictitious one.
Title: controlling the growth of the "state"
Post by: ccp on March 23, 2011, 10:53:45 AM
 A special report on the future of the state
Taming Leviathan
The state almost everywhere is big, inefficient and broke. It needn’t be, says John Micklethwait
Mar 17th 2011 | from the print edition
 THE argument sounds familiar. The disruptive reforms that have so changed the private sector should now be let loose on the public sector. The relationship between government and civil society has been that between master and servant; instead, it should be a partnership, with the state creating the right environment for companies and charities to do more of its work. The conclusion: “We are in a transition from a big state to a small state, and from a small society to a big society.”

A Republican presidential candidate in America? David Cameron rallying Britain’s Tories? Neither: the speaker is supposedly China’s most highly regarded bureaucrat. Last year Ma Hong won the country’s national award for government innovation—a great coup for her department, which is trying to get more non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to take over parts of welfare, health and education services in the city of Shenzhen, just across the border from Hong Kong.

The award partly reflects the whirl of activity that is Ms Ma. She has dismantled most of the controls on local NGOs: rather than be sponsored by some government department, all they have to do is register with her. She began in 2004 with industrial associations, but has extended the net to include independent charities. Almost 4,000 “social groups” are now registered—nearly double the number in 2002, when they were all tied to the state.

In this special report
The gods that have failed—so far
» Taming Leviathan «
 
California reelin'
Enemies of progress
Big society
Seize the moment
Go East, young bureaucrat
Favelous
A work in progress
Patient, heal thyself
Sources and acknowledgments
Offer to readers

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Related topics
Lawrence Summers
United Kingdom
United States
China
Over the past five years Ms Ma has paid out 400m yuan ($57m) to the NGOs for social work, mainly to do with the elderly. The groups are evaluated by third parties on things like their corporate governance: the higher their rating, the more money she trusts them with. She provides training in social work and tax advice. She would like donations to more NGOs to be tax-deductible, as in the West.

Ms Ma has studied what works elsewhere. In Hong Kong, where she trained in 2005, some 90% of social work is done by NGOs, paid for by the state. Like many Chinese bureaucrats, she also admires Singapore—especially its balance between easy registration for NGOs and stern punishment if they underperform. She wants her social groups to become the engines of Chinese society “just as private companies are in the economy”.

Even allowing for Ms Ma’s dynamism, there was, as so often in China, a message implied in her award. The country’s rulers are acutely aware that their government does not serve ordinary Chinese well. Back in 2007 the five-yearly Congress of the Communist Party embraced “scientific development” to create “a harmonious society”. Shenzhen is supposed to be the showcase for a new public sector, just as it showed the rest of the country how to embrace capitalism 30 years ago. The city has classified some 280 government functions as “social” ones, which means they can be contracted out to Ms Ma’s NGOs.

It is not hard to poke holes in China’s version of the Big Society, as we shall see later in this special report. But there is plainly a drive to make government work a little more like the private sector. “Just as a human has two legs, China has a very long economic one and a very short social one,” observes Ms Ma. “They should be of equal length.”

Many Western politicians feel the same way about their own bloated and inefficient governments. The immediate problem is the financial crisis: governments have had to spend furiously, both to prop up their banks and ward off a depression. With the average gross debt burden in OECD countries just over 100% of GDP and sovereign-debt markets fearful of another Greece or Ireland, every government, even America’s, is under pressure to produce a credible plan to shrink its deficit.

What is government for?

Costly though it has been, the financial crisis has merely brought forward a fiscal reckoning. In most of the rich world ageing populations have been driving up the cost of public health care and state pensions. Emerging countries that are becoming richer, such as China and India, are now wondering what sort of state they need to meet their citizens’ demands for better schools, health care and infrastructure.

Indeed, the fiery argument about capitalism prompted by the credit crunch has obscured a nascent, and much broader, debate about the nature of government. The future of the state is likely to dominate politics for the next decade at least. How can government be made more efficient? What should it do and not do? To whom should it answer? Ms Ma is one voice in this, but so are the anti-tax tea-party activists in America, French workers protesting against later retirement and British parents trying to set up independent schools with state money.

This special report’s central argument is that Leviathan can be made far more efficient. The state has woefully lagged behind the private sector. Catching up is not just a case of nuts-and-bolts productivity improvements but of liberal principle: too often an institution that, at least in a democracy, was supposed to be the people’s servant has become their master.

But nobody should expect that to be easy. The vested interests opposing change are huge: the state’s growth has been encouraged by the right as well as the left, by favour-seeking companies as well as public-sector unions, by voters as well as bureaucrats. Indeed, given the pressures for ever larger government, many reformers feel they will have to work hard just to keep it at its present size.

Government has always tended to expand (see table 1), and people have always fretted about it. In 1888 a French economist, Pierre Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, calculated that a share of 12-13% of GDP (just above the Western average then) was the sustainable limit for a modern state. By 1960 sprawling welfare states had pushed the average in the rich world to 28% (see chart 2), enough to convince Friedrich Hayek that “the deliberately organised forces of society [ie, government regulation]” might “destroy those spontaneous forces which have made advance possible.” Yet the next quarter-century saw another surge, pushed mainly by transfer payments and subsidies ostensibly aimed at the poor but often of most benefit to the middle classes.

This sparked a counterblast to halt Leviathan, led by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. By the 1990s many people thought that global capitalism would stop the state’s advance. This was the decade, after all, when Bill Clinton and other leaders declared the end of big government; when left-wingers claimed (inaccurately) that half the world’s biggest economies were multinational firms; when the emerging world was embracing the Washington consensus of deregulation: and when industrial policy mainly meant hanging on to golden shares in privatised companies. A special report in this newspaper, published in 1997, examined the then fashionable idea that the state was withering away. Its author, Clive Crook, now at the Financial Times, argued that it was not.

He has been proved right several times over. In continental Europe, where the state’s share of the economy was already pretty big, it has not risen that much. However, in America a Republican, George Bush, pushed up spending more than any president since Lyndon Johnson. In Britain New Labour became even less parsimonious: the state’s share of GDP rose from under 37% in 2000 to 44% in 2007; with the British economy struggling, it then jumped to 51% in 2010.

Share of GDP is not the only way to measure state power. “Big governance” can be just as costly to an economy as big government. Some 1,000 pages of federal regulations were added each year Mr Bush was in office. A quarter of a million Americans have jobs devising and implementing federal rules. The European Union has also produced a thicket of red tape. Some are prompted by the left (diversity, health and safety), others by the right (closed-circuit cameras, the war on drugs).

Or look at the state’s role in business. In the 1990s privatisation seemed to have settled that argument. Now state capitalism has returned, sometimes accidentally (several banks have become government-controlled) but often intentionally. Many of the new industrial champions of the emerging world are state-owned, and industrial policy is no longer a rude expression even in Anglo-Saxon countries.

There is a belief in boardrooms and among America’s tax-cutting right that a monstrous, ever-growing state is the creature of make-work bureaucrats and leftist politicians, and sometimes that is true. But often the beast is responding to popular demand. Globalisation, for instance, has increased many people’s reliance on the state: greater job insecurity among the middle classes has increased the calls for bigger safety nets, and the greater inequality that comes with bigger markets has made voters keener on redistribution. Or look at the threat of terrorism, to which the knee-jerk response on America’s right was to build up the government in Washington. As Stephen Walt, a professor at Harvard, puts it, “when September 11th happened, nobody rang Bill Gates or the Open Society Institute.”

The next battle

The recent advance of government is once again prompting a fightback. The Republicans’ victory in the 2010 mid-term elections was hailed as a return to small-government conservatism. Bruised rather than reinforced by his huge health-care reform, Mr Obama is limping back to the centre, suddenly promising businesspeople that he will rein in regulation. In Britain Mr Cameron’s government is pushing ahead with reforms that will slim some departments by a fifth. And even in big government’s continental European core, private-sector workers are reacting with fury to the perks their public-sector cousins enjoy at their expense. The German Language Society’s word of the year for 2010 was Wutbürger (irate citizen).

But will this fury stop Leviathan’s advance? Some scepticism is in order. None of the continental European government-slashers is really trying to change the structure of the state. Mr Cameron’s attempt offers a better chance of genuine radicalism, though even his savagery will take back the size of Britain’s state only to its level in 2008. The tea-party Republicans seem to be all milk and no caffeine: their first budget proposal did not touch defence or the three great entitlement programmes, Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. Like the apocryphal sign at a tea-party rally last year, warning government to keep its “hands off my Medicare”, they are refusing to confront reality.

Nor is it just spineless politicians who are at fault. A lot of economic theorists have predicted an ever larger state since Adolph Wagner linked its growth to industrialisation in the 19th century. The Baumol cost effect is often cited. In the 1960s William Baumol and William Bowen used the example of classical music to show that some activities are not susceptible to improvements in labour productivity. You still need the same number of musicians to play a Beethoven symphony as you did in the 19th century, even though real wages for musicians have risen since then. Larry Summers, Mr Obama’s main economic adviser till the end of 2010, argues that the goods governments buy, especially health care and education, have proved much more resistant to productivity enhancements than the rest of the economy. Since the 1970s real wages in America have risen tenfold if you measure them against the cost of televisions; set against the cost of health care, they have gone down.

Mr Summers expects that trend to continue. An ageing population will need ever more health services provided by the state. Better education means longer school years, smaller classes and more after-school activities, all of which cost more. Greater inequality will mean greater redistribution. In Italy and France cash social transfers alone take up 19% of GDP. The pressure to spend more is continuous, Mr Summers points out, whereas things that reduce the size of government tend to produce one-off savings: the end of the cold war, for instance, took a slice out of defence spending, but that was it.

Mr Summers has a lot of history on his side. This special report takes a more optimistic view. To start with, it is not inevitable that spending will keep on going up. Countries such as Canada and Sweden have reduced public spending when they had to. Moreover, some governments are massively more efficient than others, and there are huge gains to be achieved merely by bad governments copying what good governments do—such as planning ahead, backing winners and rewarding people for doing the right thing. With a smaller central core and much more competition for the provision of services, most governments could do the same for much less.

Most of this special report will focus on that overdue reorganisation. A second set of reforms, for which there is still less political appetite at the moment, would retarget government spending—especially adjusting social transfers (a category that in America’s national accounts rose from 8% of GDP in 1970 to 16% in 2009). Benefits that have become middle-class boondoggles should be redirected at the poor.

Not all of history is on the pessimists’ side. Fifty years ago companies seemed to be getting bigger and bigger. Business has since changed shape dramatically. The state can catch up by doing many of the same things business did to transform itself, not least bringing in competition and rethinking what it should do itself and what it should contract out to others. And the state, too, has changed shape in the past. In 19th century Britain, for instance, liberal reformers dismantled the patronage state of rotten boroughs and bought offices, building up a professional civil service. Government got leaner and much more efficient. It can surely do so again.

Second, even if Mr Summers is right that the state is unlikely to shrink, there is still a vast amount of work to be done to make it deliver more for the same money and become much more accountable. The ramifications are huge—for people, the economy and society.

Reasons to change

On a personal level, the state matters because it has a big impact on people’s lives. As Geoff Mulgan observes in his excellent book on the state, “Good and Bad Power”, the quality of the state you live in will do more to determine your well-being than natural resources, culture or religion. In the surveys that measure people’s happiness, decent government is as important as education, income and health (all of which are themselves dependent on government).

To business, government can make an enormous difference. Most obviously, if the state accounts for half the economy then improving any part of that will create better conditions for growth. Even if government were to cost the same but produce more (better-educated workers, decent health care, roads without holes, simpler regulation), the effect on private-sector productivity would be electric.

For society, the debate about the state matters because liberalism is on trial. “The challenge of Western democracy is always presented as one to do with transparency and accountability,” reflects Tony Blair, who served as Britain’s prime minister for ten years. “In fact it is really a challenge of efficacy. Our politicians on the whole are not corrupt. But they are not delivering the services people want. The emerging world is deciding what sort of government it wants. It looks at us and sees a system that costs a lot and does not deliver enough.” Another prominent Western politician goes further, seeing government as an increasing problem for the West too. “If it carries on as it is, eventually our own voters may also be more tempted by ‘something that makes the trains run on time’.”

A host of books have recently been singing the praises of China’s authoritarian approach. This special report will look at that model, but it will focus on the rich world, where most of the problems and solutions are to be found. No place better illustrates the troubles of the public sector than California, the American state that has become synonymous with private-sector ingenuity.

About The Economist online About The Economist Media directory Staff books Career opportunities Contact us Subscribe
Title: Shapiro: Wag the dog
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 24, 2011, 04:58:42 AM
http://townhall.com/columnists/benshapiro/2011/03/24/obama_wags_the_dog/page/full/

What is this really about?

As the price of oil skyrockets, as our debt levels rise to new highs and our housing market drops to new lows, President Obama decides that it is a fantastic time to start dropping bombs on Libya. Nobody, including Obama, seems to know what our objective is in Libya. First, it was deposing terroristic thug Muammar Qaddafi; then it was standing up for the United Nations; then it was protecting civilians; now it is some combination of all of them. This is the same man who once explained with regard to Middle East policy, "I can tell you this -- when I am president of the United States, the American people and the world will always know where I stand." Now, finding where Obama stands is tougher than finding a cane-less Waldo in a crowd of Christmas elves.

Meanwhile, the international community floats aimlessly through Obama's sea of foreign policy vagary. For a community organizer, Obama sure has trouble organizing the international community. Perhaps that's because even he doesn't know why we're in Libya.

One matter is crystal clear, however: we're certainly not in Libya for the reasons Obama has articulated.

Let's not deceive ourselves into believing that Obama has become an ardent advocate of Muslim freedom -- only a few short years ago, he was badmouthing President Bush's campaign in Iraq, ignoring Iranian pleas for freedom from the mullahs, and sending ambassadors to parlay with Hamas.

Let's not pretend, either, that America has serious interests at stake in Libya -- we don't. The rebels are backed by al-Qaida, the same people we're supposed to be fighting. Obama criticized the Iraq War for taking our eye off the ball with regard to al-Qaida; now, he's not merely taking our eye off the ball, but he's throwing the game to al-Qaida. Muammar Qaddafi deserves to lose his head, but America doesn't deserve a Libya run by an even worse foe. As for the U.N., we had more allies and more U.N. support for the war in Iraq, which Obama opposed.

As for Obama's contention that he wants to protect Libyan civilians, that also rings false. After all, the best way to protect Libyan civilians is to put highly trained allied troops on the ground in Libya -- as Obama himself has acknowledged. Back in 2007, Obama criticized President Bush's Afghanistan military policy for lack of boots, stating that the U.S. needed to "get the job done ... [which] requires us to have enough troops that we're not just air raiding villages and killing civilians."

So what's this really about? President Obama's war of choice in Libya is, very simply, a wag the dog scenario.

For months now, Obama has remained a non-entity on the Muslim uprisings rocking the Middle East. He has voted present, when in fact he isn't even present. Over the past few weeks, his non-action has begun to affect his public image. No longer is he considered cool -- now he's considered removed and distant. Obama has become Japan's last emperor, hiding behind his title and his advisers while performing ceremonial duties -- and the public has caught on. America knows, in short, that Obama is weak.

So Obama chose this moment to forge forth in a show of strength. Emphasis on the word "show."

Obama has explained that this intervention will take days, not weeks; he has backed down from his original aims; he has attempted to shirk leadership, handing it off to the Europeans (who want no part of it). All of this would seem to imply that he didn't want to be involved. But he chose to become involved in the first place, knowing full well that America could be supporting those who hope to murder us.

There's only one reason for that: he wants to distract the American public from the fact that the Great and Powerful Wizard of Oz is an insecure little man behind a media curtain. Obama is wagging the dog not to misdirect attention from a sex scandal, but in order to focus attention on his supposed brawn.

None of it is real. Once again, the military is being used by a Democrat as a political tool to curry favor with the hawkish American public. The American public is being manipulated by a Democrat, once again, because we support the men and women in harm's way. The war in Libya as Obama has organized it is a sham, a fraud and a disgrace.
Title: The US: The world's NANNY now?
Post by: ccp on March 24, 2011, 10:38:59 AM
I was for invading Iraq 1 and getting rid of Saddam (Iraq).

Bush senior started this whole deal with getting "international coalitions" and making sure we bribe enough countires to sound like they are on our side.

HE started that whole thing.  Bush junior went in to finish the job and started this freedom democracy thing in Iraq two.  I was for that too.

Prominent republicans were against at least Iraq 2 if not 1.

I look back and do not feel Iraq 2 it was worth the American investment in lives, money, time, attention.  Iraq 1 I believe was because we couldn't let Saddam control 25% of more of the World's oil supply.

I am completely against going into Egypt going into Lybia.  I don't know what has gotten into McCain.  Yet IF we are to do it we must win.  Not half hearted.

I do not want America to be the world's policeman (every hot spot) or the world's ambulance crew (every world disaster).

It is bad enough we have ever expanding NANNY domestic goverment, now we are going to have our military be the world's nanny??
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: DougMacG on March 24, 2011, 12:42:34 PM
CCP, Interesting thoughts.  Where you wrote "Prominent republicans were against at least Iraq 2 if not 1", I think you meant no prominent Republicans opposed? Pat Buchanan excluded.

Whether Iraq was worth it is a tough call, depends on whether a functional society is the result that is not an enemy of our interests.  I am still optimistic.  Saddam deserved deposing.  The Colin Powell we break we fix it doctrine is BS to me. We found it broken.  We could have deposed and left, but only if we were willing to repeat each time a new enemy states emerges. Same goes for Libya. 

The worst thing that happened in Iraq (beyond the fatalities) was that by the end the message became the opposite to the rest of the world, that we did not have the stomach to fight enemies with any consistent staying powers.  Now we hope Ghadafy steps down just as we say we are only staying a minute and won't put a single pair of boots on the ground.  What I read from that is the whole action is a head fake.  We will weaken his forces, scare him a little, then leave him in power and hope his dictatorship benevolence improves.

The point about coalitions is well put; they are a mixed blessing.  It gives legitimacy but limits the mission to failure, as in the case of leaving Saddam in power with the need to come back later costing far more in lives and dollars.  Who with a straight face believed he would honor his 1991 surrender agreement?

"Iraq 1 I believe was because we couldn't let Saddam control 25% of more of the World's oil supply."

I think it was about the sovereignty of Kuwait and Saudi - regarding oil.  I proposed at the time that if it is okay to invade neighbors for oil without consequence, instead of helping Kuwait we should have invaded Canada.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 24, 2011, 03:58:04 PM
I stand by Iraq 2.  After some very poor leadership by Bush-Rumbo, we finally got it together only to have the constant drumbeat of defeatism, cowardice, anti-Americanism, and occasional treason of the American Left (progressives, liberals, dems, socialists, Obama, Reid, Pelosi, Kerry, Gore, NY Times-LA Times-and-the-other-Pravdas et al) sabotage us from within and abroad.  I AM NOT saying that many good patriotic Americans were not opposed!  I AM saying that many others crossed the line many times and sometimes crossed it very far.

It we had lost our will after the Surge worked, the whole dynamic we are looking at now would have an entirely different hue.

Instead the accumulating clusterfcuk headed our way began with going limp in Iraq, then Baraq's performancin in Afpakia, and the accumulating momentum of @$%#%^#%& since then.
 
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on March 24, 2011, 05:23:05 PM
"It we had lost our will after the Surge worked, the whole dynamic we are looking at now would have an entirely different hue."

Agreed.

However I just don't know that Iraq 2 will benefit this country in the long run.  I guess no one can know at this time.

Iraq 1 did what it was supposed to, but I like George Will (who pointed out in one of his columns back than) still don't like Bush Sr.'s starting this having to seek the approval of the "international community".

Fast forward to the present.  Now we have the One placing our military under the command of other countries or in some way the UN.

To me it is all just an evolution of America's giving it all away.

At this rate OUR military will work for the UN.




Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: G M on March 24, 2011, 05:26:14 PM
"At this rate OUR military will work for the UN."

That's been the left's agenda forever.

Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 24, 2011, 06:57:41 PM
"However I just don't know that Iraq 2 will benefit this country in the long run.  I guess no one can know at this time."

1) My point is not that how it turned out was/is a good thing, but that it would have/could have been a good thing but for progressive perfidy; and

2) Thought exercise:  What would things look like now if we had NOT gone in?  What would SH be up to?  Would our troops still be in Saudi Arabia?  Where would Kadaffy be with his nuke program? etc etc etc



Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: DougMacG on March 24, 2011, 09:56:57 PM
Iraq 2 - 'What would things look like now if we had NOT gone in?'

a) Iraq Study Group: part of saying no imminent threat was that Saddam was 5-7 years away (like that is a long time) from nuclear weapons - in 2002 - meaning not until 2007-2009 - 2-4 years ago.  Time flies.  Without Iraq 2, the best info says he would easily be emboldened by now with nuclear weapons.

b) We didn't find WMD stockpiles, but we know he produced and used them previously. ISG said he hid or destroyed them but retained the ability and inclination to re-start.  Pretty likely he would have stockpiles of Chemical and biological WMD again by now, along with nuclear, if not for Iraq 2.

c) ISG said no "collaborative operational relationship" with al Qaida, a straw argument, no one said they were best friends or daily work partners.  Saddam's ties to terror were plenty, 25k checks to families of suicide bombers - that was true,  Harbored other terrorists cf. Abu Nidal, Iraqi passports used in WTC bombing the first time, shared a common enemies - Israel and USA, and Saddam's state newspaper named bin Laden's  targets of 9/11 two months prior - in flowery but prescient, unmistakable terms.  This was entered into the congressional record by Sen. Fritz Hollings D-SC one year after 9/11.  Iraq did not commit 9/11 but Saddam's ties to terror were plenty.

d)http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704050204576218513055705494.html  Iraq Unveils Ambitious Plan to Boost Oil Output‎ - Wall Street Journal - MARCH 23, 2011 - about the only good news in the world today.
Title: Magic Makes Mayhem
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on March 31, 2011, 09:53:20 AM
Though I have some qualms with it, an interesting paradigm is described in this book review:

Derek Leebaert’s Magic and Mayhem
from The Beacon by Robert Higgs
Derek Leebaert is an interesting and unusual man who combines active involvement in the world of business and government with an intellectual bent and a wide-ranging mind. He describes himself as a management consultant, currently a partner in the Swiss management consulting firm MAP AG. The holder of a D.Phil. degree from Oxford University, he spent seven years as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard’s Center for Science and International Affairs, where he became the founding editor of the journal International Security. Since 1996, he has taught foreign affairs at Georgetown University while continuing his consulting activities.

Of Leebaert’s books, several deal with information technology and several with foreign and defense policies and events. In 2002, his book The Fifty-Year Wound: How America’s Cold War Victory Shapes Our World (Boston: Little, Brown) was published. This 700-page tome is, if not the best comprehensive history of the Cold War, certainly one of the better ones. Packed with carefully documented information, it is critical of U.S. policies and actions in many respects, yet it remains well within the bounds of respectable scholarship in establishment circles, as does everything Leebaert writes. He is not a radical.

His most recent book, Magic and Mayhem: The Delusions of American Foreign Policy from Korea to Afghanistan (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010), is a less meaty, but even more critical book. By saying that it is less meaty, I do not intend to suggest that it lacks a great deal of factual evidence or careful documentation, but that it jumps about more, relying more on anecdotes and portraits of key actors, and less on a sustained analytical narrative. Nevertheless, it is a worthwhile book, especially for those who retain their faith that U.S. foreign and defense policymakers actually want to serve the general public interest better, if only they knew how to do so―a view I do not share.

Leebaert focuses on several dimensions of what he calls the foreign policy makers’ reliance on “magic”―a collection of assumptions and convictions about what the United States government can and should do in its dealings with the rest of the world. He calls it magic, he explains on page 1, because “shrewd, levelheaded people are so frequently bewitched into substituting passion, sloganeering, and haste for reflection, homework, and reasonable objectives.” As Leebaert illustrates with a great variety of cases, decision makers forgo careful study, detailed, factual evaluation, and judicious evaluation of alternatives (including the alternative of doing nothing) and instead opt for plunging almost blindly into efforts that almost any serious, informed thinker could have told them were doomed to fail. They are supremely self-confident, notwithstanding their all-too-frequent lack of any real basis for such confidence.

Such decision making almost always represents the work of what Leebaert calls “emergency men”―”the clever, energetic, self-assured, well-schooled people who take advantage of the opportunities intrinsic to the American political system to trifle with enormous risk” (p. 5). “Many people,” he notes, “are ready to play with dynamite” (p. 38). Emergency men may be found in the upper reaches of the government hierarchy―examples include such heavyweights as McGeorge Bundy, John F. Kennedy, Henry Kissinger, and Paul Wolfowitz―but they are also represented by a large number of political appointees at slightly lower levels and by many advisers and consultants, including putative experts on leave from academia or think tanks. All of these people may be distinguished from the officials who occupy permanent places in the bureaucracy in the State Department, the Defense Department, the armed forces, and the CIA. Such long-term functionaries receive relatively generous treatment in Leebaert’s assessment, being credited with greater knowledge of what they are doing and less eagerness to take the next big plunge.

Emergency men do not sit idly by, waiting for an emergency to arise. They look for one, and should they fail to find one, they may try to create one or the impression of one. Thus, Richard Nixon noted that Kissinger “would be ready to spark a crisis over Ecuador did Vietnam not exist” (p. 126). This search is scarcely a modest contribution to the promotion of national security. As Leebaert writes, “[T]he same policy expert who detects a ‘crisis’ will make darn sure that he or she is part of the effort to solve it.  … Emergency men identify a calamity … then sound the tocsin, offer quick verdicts, and jump forth with action-oriented remedies” (p. 126).

To make matters worse, “emergency men, so often synonymous with war hawks, tend to prevail in policy arguments.” They exploit the “‘action bias’ in decision making. Individuals feel compelled to ‘do something,’ anything, when confronting a challenge,” even though “leaving a ‘crisis’ alone can be a better means of handling a problem” (p. 159). All serious students of history are familiar with this pattern. It is the story, for example, of Theodore Roosevelt’s rise to power and of nearly everything Franklin D. Roosevelt and his lieutenants did during the early New Deal. Rare is the government official who goes down in history as a great man because he had the mature judgment and sage willingness to recognize that “doing something” would only make matters worse. Until recently, for example, hardly anyone had credited Warren G. Harding’s hands-off approach to the depression of 1920-21 for helping to bring about a quick, full recovery from this sharp contraction.

Emergency men tend to make a hash of matters for a variety of reasons, and Leebaert devotes the heart of his book to an elaboration of a half dozen chronic problems along these lines. He identifies these categories in the introduction:

A sensation of urgency and of “crisis” that accompanies the belief that most [sic] any resolute action is superior to restraint … joined by the emergency man’s eagerness to be his country’s revealer of dangers, real and imaginary.
The faith that American-style business management … can fix any global problem given enough time, resources, and appropriately “can-do,” businesslike zeal.
A distinctively American desire to fall in behind celebrities, stars, and peddlers of some newly distilled expertise who, in foreign affairs especially, seem to glow with wizardry.
An expectation of wondrous returns on investment, even when this is based on intellectual shortcuts.
Conjuring powerful, but simplified images from the depths of “history” to rationalize huge and amorphously expanding objectives.
The repeated belief that America can shape the destiny of other countries overnight and that the hearts and minds of distant people are throbbing to be transformed into something akin to the way we see ourselves. (pp. 7-8)
 Leebaert finds the origin of this syndrome in the U.S. response to the Korean crisis of the early 1950s, “the moment when magical thinking began regularly to insinuate itself with decisions of ‘national security’” (p. 28). As I have suggested, however, such modes of thought in policy making surely have earlier roots, although perhaps only from Korea onward were they so deeply embedded in defense and foreign policy making, as opposed to domestic policy making. Any activist U.S. government will probably tend toward this sort of “magical” syndrome because of its affinities with important strains in American politics and culture.

Leebaert’s book contains a number of finely etched cameos of emergency men such as Bundy, Robert McNamara, Kissinger, Douglas Feith, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle, and Paul Wolfowitz. For the latter five―prime examples of the neocon emergency men who played leading roles in bringing about the disastrous Iraq war and the subsequent ill-fated U.S. occupation―Leebaert has scarcely a kind word. He subjects to scathing criticism even Cheney and Rumsfeld, the two who at one time seemed to have had genuine talents and accomplishments. Given that Leebaert seems to be fairly evenhanded―indeed, almost uninterested―in regard to ideology and political party affiliation, his disdain for the neocons is especially striking. In his view, their chief shortcoming was not their ideology as such, but the fact that with their less-than-half-baked ideas about cakewalk victories, Iraqi oil paying for the war, and democratic dominoes falling across the Middle East, among other things, they were simply disconnected from reality.

In view of the stupidity that goes into so many U.S. defense and foreign policies, Leebaert considers why the smart, well-educated people in decision making circles who see through the stupidity do so little to object to or obstruct the disastrous policies as they are being formulated. Part of the answer has already been given: Emergency men who are eager to “do something” tend to carry the day by dismissing those who prefer to go slower as obstructionists, defeatists, and saboteurs. Being on the receiving end of such internecine attacks does not generally promote one’s career. Of course, political leaders tend to surround themselves with cowardly yes men in the first place, so keeping one’s negative views to oneself often seems the obvious thing for such flunkies to do. Moreover, people who take a longer view of their careers must take care not to become known as a troublemaker, a pessimist, or a foot-dragger.  One needs to remain a player.

To be a player entails consulting off and on for government, maybe getting confirmed by the Senate for a job or a sinecure on a presidential commission, participating on panels at the Council on Foreign Relations along with grandees from previous administrations, identifying yourself as an “owl” rather than as a hawk or a dove, and writing books that with any luck can get blurbed by Dr. Kissinger. This opulently carved door opens but narrowly, if at all; it can close completely on those who ask awkward questions or bring up troublesome facts.

In short, go along to get along, even if going along means keeping silent or voicing agreement when the emergency men are barking for precipitous, ill-considered, and potentially disastrous policies and actions.

Besides, if things do go wrong, one can always deflect the blame onto others. After the catastrophe of the U.S. war and subsequent occupation in Iraq, for example, all of the leading neocon warmongers have had the gall to publicly blame those who, they allege, poorly implemented the policies they formulated, while continuing to find nothing wrong with the policies themselves. Political actors rarely admit to having made mistakes in any event, but this blatantly twisted, self-serving interpretation leaves one aghast.

I wonder, however, whether Leebaert himself, notwithstanding all of his astute critical observations about policies and policy makers, also might have fallen victim to the temptation to express himself in a way that allows him to remain a player. As I noted at the beginning of this review, he is clearly a man of some consequence in the establishment. He has all of the right credentials, experience, and connections. His footnotes sometimes document a point as something a general, a diplomat, or another significant decision maker told him in person. Although he levels criticism at some people and some policies, he readily supports others, such as the first Gulf War and the U.S. war on Serbia, that in some eyes (including mine) seem to exemplify all of the foolishness he finds so obvious in other foreign engagements. Had his book ventured beyond the bounds of polite foreign-policy debate, it would not have received, as it has, dust-jacket endorsements by a former secretary of the U.S. Navy, a former vice chief of staff of the U.S. Army, and a former secretary of the U.S. Air Force and member of the Defense Science Board.

Leebaert’s approach to criticizing U.S. defense and foreign policies bears an interesting similarity to the criticisms Ludwig von Mises and F. A. Hayek leveled against socialism. These famous Austrian economists never criticized the socialists as bad people or as people who sought to act in a way that would harm the general public. They invariably gave their socialist ideological opponents the benefit of the doubt with regard to their good intentions. Although this approach has a certain theoretical justification in the development of economic theory, it flies in the face of historical reality. Many leading socialists, especially but by no means exclusively in the USSR, were little short of fiendish. It strains credulity to suppose that they were simply misguided men of good will.

Likewise, much of what seems merely foolish to Leebaert strikes me as the result, not of faulty thinking about policies and their likely consequences, but of the desire for political power and personal aggrandizement and of ideological and political motives that will not bear scrutiny. About such possibilities Leebaert has little―shockingly little, really―to say. In his view, it appears that the emergency men have been good men who allowed themselves to be seduced by “magical” thinking, when they should have gone about their business in a more rational, deliberate, and evidence-based manner. He therefore thinks that a book such as his might well serve to educate policy makers, leading them to abandon magic and to adopt a sounder approach to making their decisions. In this regard, I believe he has slipped into wishful thinking as much as did many of the foreign policy makers he so aptly criticizes.

Whenever we try to understand why policy makers act as they do, we must answer the question: Are they fools or charlatans? Leebaert concludes, in effect, that in the defense and foreign policy realm, they are often fools. I am inclined to the conclusion that they are both. Indeed, they are even worse: all too often, they are fools, bunglers, charlatans, liars, and murderers. Such persons’ playing with dynamite poses a grave danger to the rest of us. By now, we ought to have seen through them and their schemes a great deal more clearly than most of us have.

UPDATE: I have just discovered that my friend Jim Bovard also reviewed Leebaert’s book. His review appears in the March issue of The American Conservative. I recommend it highly. http://www.amconmag.com/blog/worst-and-brightest/ .

http://www.independent.org/blog/index.php?p=9564
Title: Immoral Ignorance
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on April 02, 2011, 08:02:50 AM
The Morality of Political Ignorance
Ilya Somin • April 2, 2011 3:08 am

Whenever we have an election, pundits and politicians wax eloquent about the supposed need to increase voter turnout. Much less attention is paid to the question of whether the people going to the polls actually understand the issues they’re voting on.

In conjunction with the upcoming Canadian election, political philosopher Jason Brennan, author of the excellent new book The Ethics of Voting, takes aim at this oversight:

Before Canadians head once again to the polls, they should do their homework. This election is an opportunity to make Canada even better, but it’s also a chance to make it worse. Bad decisions at the polls can lead to increased poverty, a stagnant economy, lost opportunities, worse pollution or unjust wars....

Casting an informed vote is hard. Knowing what the problems are is not enough, because the solutions to Canada’s problems are not obvious. Reading parties’ platforms is not enough. Knowing what policies the different political parties favour is not enough, because a voter needs to know which policies have any real shot of working. The Conservatives, Liberals, New Democrats, Greens and others each want Canada to be healthier, happier and stronger. They’re like doctors each offering different prescriptions to cure Canada’s illnesses. Some of these prescriptions will work, some will have no effect and some will make Canada sicker. Voters need to learn how to evaluate these prescriptions....

Voting is not like choosing food from a menu. If a citizen makes a bad choice about what to eat in a restaurant, she alone bears the costs of her decision. But if she makes a bad choice at the polls, she imposes the costs on everyone. Voters are not just choosing for themselves, but for all. If a restaurant offers bad food, diners can walk away or get their money back. This is not the case with public policy. Political decisions are imposed on all and enforced by law. Fellow citizens can’t just walk away from a menu full of bad policies.

Voters face some choices. They can form their beliefs about politics in a self-indulgent way. They can ignore evidence and form policy preferences based on what they find emotionally appealing. They can treat voting as a form of self-expression and ignore what damage they do. Or they can be good citizens. They can form their policy preferences by studying social scientific evidence about how institutions and policies work, and by using reliable methods of reasoning to study the issues. They can work to overcome their personal and ideological biases and choose in a smart, thoughtful way.


Unfortunately, extensive evidence shows that most voters both know very little about public policy and do a poor job of evaluating the political information they do know. Elsewhere, I have argued that such ignorance and bias is actually rational. There is only an infinitesmal chance that any one vote will be decisive. So individual voters have strong incentives to remain ignorant. But not every form of rational behavior is morally defensible. Sometimes, rational individual behavior leads to terrible collective outcomes. Consider the case of air pollution, where individuals might rationally choose not to limit their emission of dangerous pollutants because any one person’s behavior has only a tiny effect on overall air quality in the area. Widespread voter ignorance is a kind of pollution of the political system.

As Brennan notes, many people resist the idea that voters have a duty to become informed because they consider voting to be an individual right that the voter can use however he wants. But voting is not simply an individual choice. As John Stuart Mill emphasized 150 years ago, it is the the exercise of “power over others”:

The spirit of vote by ballot– the interpretation likely to be put on it in the mind of an elector– is that the suffrage is given to him for himself; for his particular use and benefit, and not as a trust for the public. . .

Now this one idea, taking root in the general mind, does a moral mischief outweighing all the good that the ballot could do, at the highest possible estimate of it. In whatever way we define or understand the idea of a right, no person can have a right (except in the purely legal sense) to power over others: every such power, which he is allowed to possess, is morally, in the fullest force of the term, a trust. But the exercise of any political function, either as an elector or as a representative, is power over others.

Like Brennan, I don’t believe that citizens have a duty to vote. Staying home on election day isn’t morally wrong. But if you do choose to go to the polls, you have a moral obligation to your fellow citizens to exercise the power of the ballot responsibility. And that means trying to become a better-informed voter and making a real effort to evaluate the information you learn in an unbiased way.

http://volokh.com/2011/04/02/the-morality-of-voting/
Title: Limbaugh, Prager
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 06, 2011, 11:38:00 AM
"The protests in Afghanistan about the burning of the Koran in Florida ... are [continuing]. Never mind that nobody even knew about the burning of the Koran -- it happened more than two weeks ago -- until these devout Muslims brought it up. And never mind that the Koran gets burned all the time when Muslims blow each other up in their mosques. And never mind that the U.S. burned Bibles in Afghanistan back in 2009. Do you remember that? ... The U.S. burned Bibles in Afghanistan in 2009 so as not to offend the locals." --radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh

"The pathetically weak responses from within mainstream, i.e., liberal, Christianity and Judaism have only added to the contempt for the Almighty and religion sown by beheadings and suicide bombings in Allah's name. The liberal Christian and Jewish responses have been to attack fellow Christians and Jews who have focused on Islamist terror. Instead of drawing attention to the damage radical Islam does to the name of the Almighty, liberal Christians and Jews focus their anger on co-religionists who do speak out on this issue and label them 'Islamophobes.' That the Almighty is not doing well in the Western world may trouble the Almighty. But it is we humans who should be most troubled. The moral, intellectual, artistic and demographic decline in Western Europe ... is only gaining momentum. And the consequences of that decline will be far more devastating than all the tsunamis and all the earthquakes that may come our way." --columnist Dennis Prager

Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on April 06, 2011, 12:07:15 PM
As pointed out by another radio host:

Burning the US flag in the US is freedom of speech.

Burning the Koran is moral outrage.

Just ask the MSM, soloDAD, and the rest of the crew.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: G M on April 06, 2011, 12:36:06 PM
What if a koran was wrapped in a US flag before being burned? Would it be free speech then?
Title: Fiscal Prudence Demonized
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on April 13, 2011, 10:30:17 AM
Who's the Extremist?
Why are liberals demonizing Paul Ryan's budget plan?

David Harsanyi | April 13, 2011

All of you yahoos who support Rep. Paul Ryan's budget plans aren't just misguided anymore; you're nihilists. After all, if $38 billion in illusionary cuts to the federal budget—1 percent, or less than the amount the national debt grew while everyone was gabbing about cutting 1 percent—is, as the esteemed Sen. Chuck Schumer explained, "extremism," we're going to have to ratchet up the hyperbole.

Rep. Ed Markey, member of the large political party that never resorts to boorish demonizing, recently explained at a progressive shindig that fiscal conservatives have a desire to "destroy the whole wide world." (Yikes!) And when you believe morality springs from the wisdom of technocrats and Washington spurs prosperity and taxpayers have an ethical obligation to pay for the abortions and highbrow radio networks of their more enlightened neighbors, it probably seems as if the whole wide world is crashing around you. The rest of us can only dream.

Markey went on to claim that Republicans wanted to "shut down the Internet" when they had voted to strip censors at the Federal Communications Commission of the power to regulate the Internet. Conservatives wanted to padlock the Web by keeping it open? As devious plots go, this one is as counterintuitive as it is dastardly. No, the Web has never been regulated, and it seems—to the untrained eye, at least—to function more efficiently and freely than any industry overseen by a three-letter acronym. But that's probably the problem.

The irascible Markey, author of the cap-and-trade regulatory scheme, also groused about Republicans (he must have forgotten to mention the Democrats) who are attempting to strip the Environmental Protection Agency of its power to regulate carbon dioxide—or, in other words, everything. Asserting that this is a tad too much authority for unelected bureaucrats to have is—and I'm loosely paraphrasing here—analogous to repeatedly shivving Mother Earth in the back, according to Markey. Democracy, you see, is vital in free society except when the issue is too vital for democracy.

And so it goes. The Democratic mayor of Washington, Vincent Gray, called on citizens to "fight back against oppression." What oppression, you ask? Riders to the 2011 federal budget would end taxpayer funding for abortions and allow a handful of poor kids in D.C. to once again escape public schools. (Talk about fighting oppression.) Choice, as you know, is tyranny. Sometimes.

When Ryan released his long-term budget plan, aimed to bring spending and revenue into equilibrium in a quarter-century, the thoughtful rhetoric continued. The always rational New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, who's already spent your great-grandkids' 401(k) accounts in his columns, called Ryan's plan "extreme," "unprofessional," "nonsensical" "crude nonsense," and accused the author of "haplessness" in one brief blog post.

Others claimed it was a "war on the poor" or, alternatively, a "war on the weak," because to the left, subsidizing the health care of the elderly and poor through the private delivery systems we use, rather than a plodding government system they want us to use, is the moral equivalent of rolling tanks into Grandma Edna's nursing home.

Forget cuts. We just need to tax more. It's patriotic, noted former Secretary of Labor, professor, political commentator but nonexpert on American history Robert Reich. And if you complain about taxes, interim Democratic National Chairwoman Donna Brazile will tell you it's driven by racism—which makes complete sense when you're plum out of rational arguments.

These are the allegedly reasonable, the self-styled moderates and the grown-ups. And that should make any "extremist" proud.

David Harsanyi is a columnist at The Blaze. Follow him on Twitter at davidharsanyi.

http://reason.com/archives/2011/04/13/whos-the-extremist
Title: American Patriot Defined
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 14, 2011, 09:51:05 AM
American Patriot Defined
This Patriots' Day, the 236th Anniversary of the Opening Salvo for American Liberty, The Spirit of Their Sacred Honor Endures
"Citizens by birth or choice of a common country, that country has a right to concentrate your affections. The name of American, which belongs to you, in your national capacity, must always exalt the just pride of patriotism, more than any appellation derived from local discriminations." --George Washington
A young reader in the Czech Republic contacted me recently with a question. (Yes, The Patriot Post's message of Liberty is global.)

She wrote, "We as a Czech family subscribe to The Patriot Post and read it with great interest. My homeland has been subject to the tyranny of Nationalist and Marxist Socialism. Could you please help me understand the difference between 'patriotism' and 'nationalism'? In Europe, anyone who puts his country first is called a nationalist and this pejorative term is equated with patriotism."

I responded, "Nationalism refers to a blind allegiance to the state, no matter what the nature of the state may be. American Patriotism refers to the steadfast devotion to the fundamental principles of our nation's Founding, individual Liberty as 'endowed by our Creator,' and the extension of that legacy to our posterity. American Patriotic devotion to Liberty will always be in contest with allegiance to the state or its sovereigns, especially when it manifests in some form of Socialism."

It is easy to understand how a Czech student might find it challenging to distinguish between patriotism and nationalism. Sadly most American students, heirs to the great legacy of Liberty bestowed upon them by generations of Patriots gone before, also can't articulate the difference.

In the early morning hours of the first Patriots' Day, April 19th, 1775, farmers and laborers, landowners and statesmen alike, pledged through action what Thomas Jefferson would later frame in words as "our Lives, our Fortunes, and our Sacred Honor." Thus began the great campaign to reject the predictable albeit tyrannical order of the state and to embrace the difficult toils of securing individual Liberty. It was this as-yet unwritten pledge by militiamen in the Battles of Lexington and Concord, which would delineate the distinction between Liberty and tyranny in Colonial America.

Why would the first generation of American Patriots forgo, in the inimitable words of Samuel Adams, "the tranquility of servitude" for "the animating contest of freedom"?

The answer to that question defined the spirit of American Patriotism at the dawn of the American Revolution, and to this day and for eternity, that spirit will serve as the first line of defense between Liberty and tyranny.

In the first months of the American Revolution, English author and lexicographer Samuel Johnson, a Tory loyalist, wrote that American Patriots' quest for liberty was nothing more than "the delirious dream of republican fanaticism" which would "put the axe to the roots of all government." Johnson concluded famously, "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel."

Unlike King George's partisans, however, American Patriots were unwaveringly loyal to something much larger than a mere man or geo-political institution. They pledged their sacred honor in support of Essential Liberty as "endowed by our Creator" and enshrined in our Declaration of Independence and its subordinate guidance, our Constitution.

It is this resolute devotion to the natural rights of man, the higher order of Liberty as endowed by God not government, which defines the spirit of American Patriots, and has obliged the animated contest of freedom from Lexington Green to this day.

In all the generations since the Revolution, and loudly again in the present era, the essence of Johnson's denigration of patriotism has been repeated by all statists, who augment their disdain for Patriots with words like "fascist, nationalist and jingoist."

These statists, Democratic Socialists in the current vernacular, would have you believe that they are the "true patriots," and only they deserve to be the arbiters of Liberty. But caveat emptor: As George Washington implored in his Farewell Address, "Guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism."

Liberty, as affirmed through natural law, is an abject affront to Socialists, who can claim dominion over others only if they supplant Rule of Law with their own rule. For such statists, the notion of serving a higher purpose than oneself is enigmatic; consequently, there is a raging ideological battle between Democratic Socialists and Patriots across our nation today.

Our steadfast support for Liberty and limited government is diametrically opposed to the Socialist manifesto of the Democrat Party, as reframed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1933, and renewed by every Democrat president since.

Regardless of how statists choose to promote Democratic Socialism, like Nationalist Socialism, it is nothing more than Marxist Socialism repackaged. Ultimately, it likewise seeks a centrally planned economy directed by a single-party state that controls economic production through regulation and income redistribution.

Mustering in response to the current threat of tyranny, the Tea Party movement is the latest incarnation in the lineage of American Patriots serving a cause much greater than our own self-interest. It is a direct ideological descendant of the Sons of Liberty who, in 1773, boarded three East India Company ships and threw 342 chests of tea into Boston Harbor, the first Tea Party.

According to the Democratic Socialists of Barack Obama's ilk, the Tea Party rank and file are an "angry mob" who are "waving their little tea bags" while they "bitterly cling to guns and religion." Indeed, the spirit of American Patriots is anathema to these statists.

In fact, today's Patriots are much like those of previous generations.

We are mothers, fathers and other family members nurturing the next generation of young Patriots. We are farmers, craftsmen, tradesmen and industrial producers. We are small business owners, service providers and professionals in medicine and law. We are employees and employers. We are in ministry at home and missionaries abroad. We are students and professors at colleges and universities, often standing alone for what is good and right.

We are Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Marines, Coast Guardsmen and public servants standing in harm's way at home and around the world, who are loyal, first and foremost, to our revered oath to "support and defend" our Constitution.

We are consumers and taxpayers. We are voters.

We are not defined by race, creed, ethnicity, religion, wealth, education or political affiliation, but by our devotion to our Creator, and the Liberty He entrusted to us, one and all.

We are Patriot sons and daughters from all walks of life, heirs to the blessings of Liberty bequeathed to us at great personal cost by our Patriot forebears, confirmed in the opinion that it is our duty to God and Country to extend that blessing to our posterity, and avowed upon our sacred honor to that end. We are vigilant, strong, prepared and faithful.

Title: What is he hiding?
Post by: ccp on April 15, 2011, 12:54:27 PM
Again.  No answer about where is the birth certificate.  No answer as to why he is suppressing it.  He is obviously covering up something.  Some think it specifies he was born a Muslim.  Personally if that is the issue then I don't see the big deal at this point.  Even Chris Matthews, "why not just show it"?

***Obama jokes about 'birther' controversy egged on by Trump and Palin

Arizona Legislature gives final approval to controversial 'birther bill'

While campaigning in Chicago yesterday President Obama startled audiences when he cracked wise about the ‘birther’ controversy, finally addressing the issue that is again sweeping across the media.

The President jabbed at claims made by celebrities and conservatives, making a joke of their challenges to where he was actually born.

‘Birthers,’ such as potential 2012 GOP candidates Sarah Palin and Donald Trump, have publicly questioned whether Obama was born in Hawaii or in Kenya.
 Hometown hero: Obama wore a Chicago Bulls cap at a fundraising kickoff event for the Democratic National Convention and his 2012 re-election campaign at Navy Pier in Chicago, Illinois
‘I wasn't born here,’ Mr Obama said, before the crowd of 2300 that quickly fell into a pregnant pause.

‘Just want to be clear, I was born in Hawaii.’
 More...Now it IS regime change: Cameron, Obama and Sarkozy promise to keep bombing Libya until Gaddafi is gone
In her father's footsteps: Gaddafi's daughter Aisha whips crowds into a frenzy as she calls on West to 'leave our skies'
Horror of the bakery queue: Women and children among 16 killed in rocket blitz by Gaddafi's troops

His joke came as the Arizona legislature approved a final proposal requiring presidential candidates to prove they are U.S. citizens before their names can appear on the state's ballot.

It would become the first state to require such proof if Governor Jan Brewer signs the measure into law.
  Chi-town: Obama talked up his old friend and colleague Rahm Emanuel at the Chicago event while the crowd went wild for their home town hero

Speaking with ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos yesterday, Obama surprised again by at last directly addressing the issue that he has brushed off in the past.

‘Most people feel pretty confident the President was born where he says he was, in Hawaii. He doesn’t have horns ... we’re not really worrying about conspiracy theories or birth certificates,’ he said.***
Title: Noonan: What the world sees in America
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 22, 2011, 05:59:35 AM


I want to talk a little more this holiday week about what I suppose is a growing theme in this column, and that is an increased skepticism toward U.S. military intervention, including nation building. Our republic is not now in a historical adventure period—that is not what is needed. We are or should be in a self-strengthening one. Our focus should not be on outward involvement but inner repair. Bad people are gunning for us, it is true. We should find them, dispatch them, and harden the target. (That would be, still and first, New York, though Washington too.) We should not occupy their lands, run their governments, or try to bribe them into bonhomie. We think in Afghanistan we're buying their love, but I have been there. We're not even renting it.

Our long wars have cost much in blood and treasure, and our military is overstretched. We're asking soldiers to be social workers, as Bing West notes in his book on Afghanistan, "The Wrong War."

I saw it last month, when we met with a tough American general. How is the war going? we asked. "Great," he said. "We just opened a new hospital!" This was perhaps different from what George Patton would have said. He was allowed to be a warrior in a warrior army. His answer would have been more like, "Great, we're putting more of them in the hospital!"

But there are other reasons for a new skepticism about America's just role and responsibilities in the world in 2011. One has to do with the burly, muscular, traditional but at this point not fully thought-through American assumption that our culture not only is superior to most, but is certainly better in all ways than the cultures of those we seek to conquer. We have always felt pride in our nation's ways, and pride isn't all bad. But conceit is, and it's possible we've grown as conceited as we've become culturally careless.

View Full Image

Getty Images
 
Ambassadress
.We are modern, they are not. We allow women freedom, they do not. We have the rule of law, they do not. We are technologically sophisticated, they are the Flintstones. We have religious tolerance. All these are sources of legitimate satisfaction and pride, especially the last. Our religious pluralism is, still, amazing.

I lately think of Charleston, S.C., that beautiful old-fashioned, new- fashioned city. On a walk there in October I went by one of the oldest Catholic churches in the South, St. Mary's, built in 1789. Across the street, equally distinguished and welcoming, was Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim, a Jewish congregation founded in 1749. They've been across from each other peacefully and happily for a long time. I walked down Meeting Street to see the Hibernian Society, founded in 1801. My people wanted their presence known. In a brochure I saw how the society dealt with Ireland's old Catholic-Protestant split. They picked a Protestant president one year, a Catholic the next, and so on. In Ireland they were killing each other. In America they were trading gavels. What a country! What a place. What a new world.

We have much to be proud of. And we know it. But take a look around us. Don't we have some reasons for pause, for self-questioning? Don't we have a lot of cultural repair that needs doing?

***
Imagine for a moment that you are a foreign visitor to America. You are a 40-year-old businessman from Afghanistan. You teach a class at Kabul University. You are relatively sophisticated. You're in pursuit of a business deal. It's your first time here. There is an America in your mind; it was formed in your childhood by old John Ford movies and involves cowboy hats and gangsters in fedoras. You know this no longer applies—you're not a fool—but you're not sure what does. You land at JFK, walking past a TSA installation where they're patting the genital areas of various travelers. Americans sure have a funny way of saying hello!

You get to town, settle into a modest room at the Hilton on Sixth Avenue. You're jet-lagged. You put on the TV, not only because you're tired but because some part of you knows TV is where America happens, where America is, and you want to see it. Headline news first. The world didn't blow up today. Then:

Click. A person named Snooki totters down a boardwalk. She lives with young people who grunt and dance. They seem loud, profane, without values, without modesty, without kindness or sympathy. They seem proud to see each other as sexual objects.

Click. "Real Housewives." Adult women are pulling each other's hair. They are glamorous in a hard way, a plastic way. They insult each other.

Click. Local news has a riot in a McDonalds. People kick and punch each other. Click. A cable news story on a child left alone for a week. Click. A 5-year-old brings a gun to school, injures three. Click. A show called "Skins"—is this child pornography? Click. A Viagra commercial. Click. A man tried to blow up a mall. Click. Another Viagra commercial. Click. This appears to be set in ancient Sparta. It appears to involve an orgy.

More Peggy Noonan
Read Peggy Noonan's previous columns

click here to order her book, Patriotic Grace
.You, the Kabul businessman, expected some raunch and strangeness but not this—this Victoria Falls of dirty water! You are not a philosopher of media, but you know that when a culture descends to the lowest common denominator, it does not reach the broad base at the bottom, it lowers the broad base at the bottom. This "Jersey Shore" doesn't reach the Jersey Shore, it creates the Jersey Shore. It makes America the Jersey Shore.

You surf on, hoping for a cleansing wave of old gangster movies. Or cowboys. Anything old! But you don't find TMC. You look at a local paper. Headline: New York has a 41% abortion rate. Forty-four percent of births are to unmarried women and girls.

You think: Something's wrong in this place, something has become disordered.

The next morning you take Amtrak for your first meeting, in Washington. You pass through the utilitarian ugliness, the abjuration of all elegance that is Penn Station. On the trip south, past Philadelphia, you see the physical deterioration that echoes what you saw on the TV—broken neighborhoods, abandoned factories with shattered windows, graffiti-covered abutments. It looks like old films of the Depression!

By the time you reach Washington—at least Union Station is august and beautiful—you are amazed to find yourself thinking: "Good thing America is coming to save us. But it's funny she doesn't want to save herself!"

***
My small point: Remember during the riots of the 1960s when they said "the whole world is watching"? Well, now the whole world really is. Everyone is traveling everywhere. We're all on the move. Cultures can't keep their secrets.

The whole world is in the Hilton, channel-surfing. The whole world is on the train, in the airport, judging what it sees, and likely, in some serious ways, finding us wanting.

And, being human, they may be judging us with a small, extra edge of harshness for judging them and looking down on them.

We have work to do at home, on our culture and in our country. A beautiful Easter to St. Mary's Church of Charleston, and happy Passover to Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim.

Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: JDN on April 22, 2011, 09:04:18 AM
"We have work to do at home, on our culture and in our country. A beautiful Easter to St. Mary's Church of Charleston, and happy Passover to Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim."

This whole article was a great summary of what I think a lot of Americans believe including myself.
Title: Christopher Hitchens: When the King saved God
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 24, 2011, 10:34:20 AM

CULTURE
When the King Saved God
An unbeliever argues that our language and culture are incomplete without a 400-year-old book—the King James translation of the Bible. Spurned by the Establishment, it really represents a triumph for rebellion and dissent. Accept no substitutes!
BY CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
MAY 2011
BIBLICAL PROPORTION The title page of the New Testament in the first edition of the King James Bible, published by Robert Barker (“Printer to the King’s most Excellent Maiestie”) in 1611.

After she was elected the first female governor of Texas, in 1924, and got herself promptly embroiled in an argument about whether Spanish should be used in Lone Star schools, it is possible that Miriam A. “Ma” Ferguson did not say, “If the King’s English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it’s good enough for the children of Texas.” I still rather hope that she did. But then, verification of quotations and sources is a tricky and sensitive thing. Abraham Lincoln lay dying in a room full of educated and literate men, in the age of the wireless telegraph, and not far from the offices of several newspapers, and we still do not know for sure, at the moment when his great pulse ceased to beat, whether his secretary of war, Edwin Stanton, said, “Now he belongs to the ages” or “Now he belongs to the angels.”

Such questions of authenticity become even more fraught when they involve the word itself becoming flesh; the fulfillment of prophecy; the witnessing of miracles; the detection of the finger of God. Guesswork and approximation will not do: the resurrection cannot be half true or questionably attested. For the first 1,500 years of the Christian epoch, this problem of “authority,” in both senses of that term, was solved by having the divine mandate wrapped up in languages that the majority of the congregation could not understand, and by having it presented to them by a special caste or class who alone possessed the mystery of celestial decoding.


Four hundred years ago, just as William Shakespeare was reaching the height of his powers and showing the new scope and variety of the English language, and just as “England” itself was becoming more of a nation-state and less an offshore dependency of Europe, an extraordinary committee of clergymen and scholars completed the task of rendering the Old and New Testaments into English, and claimed that the result was the “Authorized” or “King James” version. This was a fairly conservative attempt to stabilize the Crown and the kingdom, heal the breach between competing English and Scottish Christian sects, and bind the majesty of the King to his devout people. “The powers that be,” it had Saint Paul saying in his Epistle to the Romans, “are ordained of God.” This and other phrasings, not all of them so authoritarian and conformist, continue to echo in our language: “When I was a child, I spake as a child”; “Eat, drink, and be merry”; “From strength to strength”; “Grind the faces of the poor”; “salt of the earth”; “Our Father, which art in heaven.” It’s near impossible to imagine our idiom and vernacular, let alone our liturgy, without them. Not many committees in history have come up with such crystalline prose.

King James I, who brought the throne of Scotland along with him, was the son of Mary, Queen of Scots, and knew that his predecessor, Queen Elizabeth I, had been his mother’s executioner. In Scotland, he had had to contend with extreme Puritans who were suspicious of monarchy and hated all Catholics. In England, he was faced with worldly bishops who were hostile to Puritans and jealous of their own privileges. Optimism, prosperity, and culture struck one note—Henry Hudson was setting off to the Northwest Passage, and Shakespeare’s Globe Theater was drawing thoughtful crowds to see those dramas of power and legitimacy Othello, King Lear, and The Tempest—but terror and insecurity kept pace. Guy Fawkes and his fellow plotters, believed to be in league with the Pope, nearly succeeded in blowing up Parliament in 1605. Much of London was stricken with visitations of the bubonic plague, which, as Bishop Lancelot Andrewes (head of the committee of translators) noted with unease, appeared to strike the godly quite as often as it smote the sinner. The need was for a tempered version of God’s word that engendered compromise and a sense of protection.

Bishop Andrewes and his colleagues, a mixture of clergymen and classicists, were charged with revisiting the original Hebrew and Greek editions of the Old and New Testaments, along with the fragments of Aramaic that had found their way into the text. Understanding that their task was a patriotic and “nation-building” one (and impressed by the nascent idea of English Manifest Destiny, whereby the English people had replaced the Hebrews as God’s chosen), whenever they could translate any ancient word for “people” or “tribe” as “nation,” they elected to do so. The term appears 454 times in this confident form of “the King’s English.” Meeting in Oxford and Cambridge college libraries for the most part, they often kept their notes in Latin. Their conservative and consensual project was politically short-lived: in a few years the land was to be convulsed with civil war, and the Puritan and parliamentary forces under Oliver Cromwell would sweep the head of King Charles I from his shoulders. But the translators’ legacy remains, and it is paradoxically a revolutionary one, as well as a giant step in the maturing of English literature.

Imagining the most extreme form of totalitarianism in his Nineteen Eighty-Four dystopia, George Orwell depicted a secret class of occult power holders (the Inner Party clustered around Big Brother) that would cement its eternal authority by recasting the entire language. In the tongue of “Newspeak,” certain concepts of liberty and conscience would be literally impossible to formulate. And only within the most restricted circles of the regime would certain heretical texts, like Emmanuel Goldstein’s manifesto, still be legible and available. I believe that Orwell, a strong admirer of the Protestant Reformation and the poetry of its hero John Milton, was using as his original allegory the long struggle of English dissenters to have the Bible made available in a language that the people could read.

Until the early middle years of the 16th century, when King Henry VIII began to quarrel with Rome about the dialectics of divorce and decapitation, a short and swift route to torture and death was the attempt to print the Bible in English. It’s a long and stirring story, and its crux is the head-to-head battle between Sir Thomas More and William Tyndale (whose name in early life, I am proud to say, was William Hychyns). Their combat fully merits the term “fundamental.” Infuriating More, Tyndale whenever possible was loyal to the Protestant spirit by correctly translating the word ecclesia to mean “the congregation” as an autonomous body, rather than “the church” as a sacrosanct institution above human law. In English churches, state-selected priests would merely incant the liturgy. Upon hearing the words “Hoc” and “corpus” (in the “For this is my body” passage), newly literate and impatient artisans in the pews would mockingly whisper, “Hocus-pocus,” finding a tough slang term for the religious obfuscation at which they were beginning to chafe. The cold and righteous More, backed by his “Big Brother” the Pope and leading an inner party of spies and inquisitors, watched the Channel ports for smugglers risking everything to import sheets produced by Tyndale, who was forced to do his translating and printing from exile. The rack and the rope were not stinted with dissenters, and eventually Tyndale himself was tracked down, strangled, and publicly burned. (Hilary Mantel’s masterpiece historical novel, Wolf Hall, tells this exciting and gruesome story in such a way as to revise the shining image of “Saint” Thomas More, the “man for all seasons,” almost out of existence. High time, in my view. The martyrdoms he inflicted upon others were more cruel and irrational than the one he sought and found for himself.)


Other translations into other languages, by Martin Luther himself, among others, slowly entered circulation. One of them, the so-called Geneva Bible, was a more Calvinist and Puritan English version than the book that King James commissioned, and was the edition which the Pilgrim Fathers, fleeing the cultural and religious war altogether, took with them to Plymouth Rock. Thus Governor Ma Ferguson was right in one respect: America was the first and only Christian society that could take an English Bible for granted, and never had to struggle for a popular translation of “the good book.” The question, rather, became that of exactly which English version was to be accepted as the correct one. After many false starts and unsatisfactory printings, back in England, the Anglican conclave in 1611 adopted William Tyndale’s beautiful rendering almost wholesale, and out of their zeal for compromise and stability ironically made a posthumous hero out of one of the greatest literary dissidents and subversives who ever lived.

Writing about his own fascination with cadence and rhythm in Notes of a Native Son, James Baldwin said, “I hazard that the King James Bible, the rhetoric of the store-front church, something ironic and violent and perpetually understated in Negro speech … have something to do with me today; but I wouldn’t stake my life on it.” As a child of the black pulpit and chronicler of the Bible’s huge role in the American oral tradition, Baldwin probably was “understating” at that very moment. And, as he very well knew, there had been times when biblical verses did involve, quite literally, the staking of one’s life. This is why the nuances and details of translation were (and still are) of such huge moment. For example, in Isaiah 7:14 it is stated that, “behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.” This is the scriptural warrant and prophecy for the impregnation of the Virgin Mary by the Holy Ghost. But the original Hebrew wording refers only to the pregnancy of an almah, or young woman. If the Hebrew language wants to identify virginity, it has other terms in which to do so. The implications are not merely textual. To translate is also to interpret; or, indeed, to lay down the law. (Incidentally, the American “Revised Standard Version” of 1952 replaced the word “virgin” with “young woman.” It took the Fundamentalists until 1978 to restore the original misreading, in the now dominant “New International Version.”)

Take an even more momentous example, cited by Adam Nicolson in his very fine book on the process, God’s Secretaries. In the First Epistle to the Corinthians, Saint Paul reminds his readers of the fate that befell many backsliding pre-Christian Jews. He describes their dreadful punishments as having “happened unto them for ensamples,” which in 1611 was a plain way of conveying the word “example” or “illustrative instance,” or perhaps “lesson.” However, the original Greek term was typoi, which by contrast may be rendered as “types” or “archetypes” and suggests that Jews were to be eternally punished for their special traits. This had been Saint Augustine’s harsh reading, followed by successive Roman Catholic editions. At least one of King James’s translators wanted to impose that same collective punishment on the people of Moses, but was overruled. In the main existing text, the lenient word “ensamples” is given, with a marginal note in the original editions saying that “types” may also be meant. The English spirit of compromise at its best.

Then there are seemingly small but vital matters of emphasis, in which Tyndale did not win every round. Here is a famous verse which one might say was central to Christian teaching: “This is my Commandment, that you love one another, as I have loved you. / Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” That’s the King James version, which has echoed in the heads of many churchgoers until their last hour. Here is how the verse read when first translated by Tyndale: “This is my Commandment, that you love together as I have loved you. / Greater love than this hath no man, than that a man bestow his life for his friends.”

I do not find that the “King’s English” team improved much on the lovely simplicity of what they found. Tyndale has Jesus groping rather appealingly to make a general precept or principle out of a common bond, whereas the bishops and scholars are aiming to make an iron law out of love. In doing so they suggest strenuous martyrdom (“lay down,” as if Jesus had been a sacrifice to his immediate circle only). Far more human and attractive, surely, is Tyndale’s warm “bestow,” which suggests that a life devoted to friendship is a noble thing in itself.

Tyndale, incidentally, was generally good on the love question. Take that same Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians, a few chapters later. For years, I would listen to it in chapel and wonder how an insipid, neuter word like “charity” could have gained such moral prestige. The King James version enjoins us that “now abideth faith, hope and charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.” Tyndale had put “love” throughout, and even if your Greek is as poor as mine you will have to admit that it is a greatly superior capture of the meaning of that all-important original word agape. It was actually the frigid clerical bureaucrat Thomas More who had made this into one of the many disputations between himself and Tyndale, and in opting to accept his ruling it seems as if King James’s committee also hoped to damp down the risky, ardent spontaneity of unconditional love and replace it with an idea of stern duty. Does not the notion of compulsory love, in any form, have something grotesque and fanatical about it?

Most recent English translations have finally dropped More and the King and gone with Tyndale on this central question, but often at the cost of making “love” appear too husky and sentimental. Thus the “Good News Bible” for American churches, first published in 1966: “Love never gives up; and its faith, hope and patience never fail.” This doesn’t read at all like the outcome of a struggle to discern the essential meaning of what is perhaps our most numinous word. It more resembles a smiley-face Dale Carnegie reassurance. And, as with everything else that’s designed to be instant, modern, and “accessible,” it goes out of date (and out of time) faster than Wisconsin cheddar.

Though I am sometimes reluctant to admit it, there really is something “timeless” in the Tyndale/King James synthesis. For generations, it provided a common stock of references and allusions, rivaled only by Shakespeare in this respect. It resounded in the minds and memories of literate people, as well as of those who acquired it only by listening. From the stricken beach of Dunkirk in 1940, faced with a devil’s choice between annihilation and surrender, a British officer sent a cable back home. It contained the three words “but if not … ” All of those who received it were at once aware of what it signified. In the Book of Daniel, the Babylonian tyrant Nebuchadnezzar tells the three Jewish heretics Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego that if they refuse to bow to his sacred idol they will be flung into a “burning fiery furnace.” They made him an answer: “If it be so, our god whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, and he will deliver us out of thy hand, o King. / But if not, be it known unto thee, o king, that we will not serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image which thou hast set up.”

A culture that does not possess this common store of image and allegory will be a perilously thin one. To seek restlessly to update it or make it “relevant” is to miss the point, like yearning for a hip-hop Shakespeare. “Man is born unto trouble as the sparks fly upward,” says the Book of Job. Want to try to improve that for Twitter? And so bleak and spare and fatalistic—almost non-religious—are the closing verses of Ecclesiastes that they were read at the Church of England funeral service the unbeliever George Orwell had requested in his will: “Also when they shall be afraid of that which is high, and fears shall be in the way, and the almond tree shall flourish, and the grasshopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail: because man goeth to his long home. … Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern. / Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was.”

At my father’s funeral I chose to read a similarly non-sermonizing part of the New Testament, this time an injunction from Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians: “Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.”

As much philosophical as spiritual, with its conditional and speculative “ifs” and its closing advice—always italicized in my mind since first I heard it—to think and reflect on such matters: this passage was the labor of men who had wrought deeply with ideas and concepts. I now pluck down from my shelf the American Bible Society’s “Contemporary English Version,” which I picked up at an evangelical “Promise Keepers” rally on the Mall in Washington in 1997. Claiming to be faithful to the spirit of the King James translation, it keeps its promise in this way: “Finally, my friends, keep your minds on whatever is true, pure, right, holy, friendly and proper. Don’t ever stop thinking about what is truly worthwhile and worthy of praise.”

Pancake-flat: suited perhaps to a basement meeting of A.A., these words could not hope to penetrate the torpid, resistant fog in the mind of a 16-year-old boy, as their original had done for me. There’s perhaps a slightly ingratiating obeisance to gender neutrality in the substitution of “my friends” for “brethren,” but to suggest that Saint Paul, of all people, was gender-neutral is to re-write the history as well as to rinse out the prose. When the Church of England effectively dropped King James, in the 1960s, and issued what would become the “New English Bible,” T. S. Eliot commented that the result was astonishing “in its combination of the vulgar, the trivial and the pedantic.” (Not surprising from the author of For Lancelot Andrewes.) This has been true of every other stilted, patronizing, literal-minded attempt to shift the translation’s emphasis from plangent poetry to utilitarian prose.

T. S. Eliot left America (and his annoyingly colorless Unitarian family) to seek the traditionalist roots of liturgical and literary tradition in England. Coming in the opposite direction across the broad Atlantic, the King James Bible slowly overhauled and overtook the Geneva version, and, as the Pilgrim-type mini-theocracies of New England withered away, became one of the very few books from which almost any American could quote something. Paradoxically, this made it easy to counterfeit. When Joseph Smith began to fabricate his Book of Mormon, in the late 1820s, “translating” it from no known language, his copy of King James was never far from his side. He plagiarized 27,000 words more or less straight from the original, including several biblical stories lifted almost in their entirety, and the throat-clearing but vaguely impressive phrase “and it came to pass” is used at least 2,000 times. Such “borrowing” was a way of lending much-needed “tone” to the racket. Not long afterward, William Miller excited gigantic crowds with the news that the Second Coming of Jesus would occur in 1843. An associate followed up with an 1844 due date. These disappointed prophecies were worked out from marginal notes in Miller’s copy of the King James edition, which he quarried for apocalyptic evidence. (There had always been those, from the earliest days, when it was being decided which parts of the Bible were divinely inspired and which were not, who had striven to leave out the Book of Revelation. Martin Luther himself declined to believe that it was the work of the Holy Spirit. But there Christianity still is, well and truly stuck with it.) So, of the many Christian heresies which were born in the New World and not imported from Europe, at least three—the Mormons, or Latter-Day Saints; the Millerites, or Seventh-Day Adventists; and their schismatic product the Jehovah’s Witnesses—are indirectly mutated from a pious attempt to bring religious consensus to Jacobean England.

Not to over-prize consensus, it does possess certain advantages over randomness and chaos. Since the appearance of the so-called “Good News Bible,” there have been no fewer than 48 English translations published in the United States. And the rate shows no sign of slackening. Indeed, the trend today is toward what the trade calls “niche Bibles.” These include the “Couples Bible,” “One Year New Testament for Busy Moms,” “Extreme Teen Study Bible,” “Policeman’s Bible,” and—somehow unavoidably—the “Celebrate Recovery Bible.” (Give them credit for one thing: the biblical sales force knows how to “be fruitful and multiply.”) In this cut-price spiritual cafeteria, interest groups and even individuals can have their own customized version of God’s word. But there will no longer be a culture of the kind which instantly recognized what Lincoln meant when he spoke of “a house divided.” The gradual eclipse of a single structure has led, not to a new clarity, but to a new Babel.

Those who opposed the translation of the Bible into the vernacular—rather like those Catholics who wish the Mass were still recited in Latin, or those Muslims who regard it as profane to render the Koran out of Arabic—were afraid that the mystic potency of incantation and ritual would be lost, and that daylight would be let in upon magic. They also feared that if God’s word became too everyday and commonplace it would become less impressive, or less able to inspire awe. But the reverse turns out to have been the case, at least in this instance. The Tyndale/King James translation, even if all its copies were to be burned, would still live on in our language through its transmission by way of Shakespeare and Milton and Bunyan and Coleridge, and also by way of beloved popular idioms such as “fatted calf” and “pearls before swine.” It turned out to be rather more than the sum of its ancient predecessors, as well as a repository and edifice of language which towers above its successors. Its abandonment by the Church of England establishment, which hoped to refill its churches and ended up denuding them, is yet another demonstration that religion is man-made, with inky human fingerprints all over its supposedly inspired and unalterable texts. Ma Ferguson was right in her way. She just didn’t know how many Englishmen and how many Englishes, and how many Jesus stories and Jesuses, there were to choose from.
Title: Jon Stewart: Congress's final FU to 911 responders
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 27, 2011, 05:52:37 AM


http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/tue-april-26-2011/friends-without-benefits
Title: Re: Jon Stewart: Congress's final FU to 911 responders
Post by: G M on April 27, 2011, 06:23:25 AM


http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/tue-april-26-2011/friends-without-benefits

So, police, fire and EMS have to factor this in when responding to the next 911.

Oh, but Obama cut the police line of duty death benefit in half in 2009. I guess because he's so careful about spending and all.....
Title: VDH
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 12, 2011, 06:38:17 AM
Osama bin Laden is dead. The Middle East is in chaos. And radical Islam is floundering.

For a time after 9/11, bin Laden was riding high. Destroying 16 acres in Manhattan and hitting the Pentagon won al-Qaeda even more admiration from the Arab Street, hidden cash donations from sympathetic petrol-sheiks, and bribe and hush money from triangulating Middle East dictatorships.

But now bin Laden and most of his henchmen of a decade ago are dead, like the bloodthirsty Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, killed by American forces in Iraq. Or they were captured, like the 9/11 architect Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in Pakistan. Or they are in hiding, like Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, the increasingly irrelevant blowhard al-Qaeda information minister.

What caused al-Qaeda's steady decline? There are a lot of reasons.

Right after 9/11, the United States crafted a set of antiterrorism protocols as sweeping as they were controversial: the Patriot Act, Guantanamo Bay, renditions, tribunals, preventative detention, intercepts, wiretaps and enhanced interrogations. New security measures filtered down to every facet of American life, from radically intrusive and unpopular airport protocols that X-rayed baggage and passengers to beefed-up security on trains and at ports.

Civil libertarians mocked such vigilance, but the message went out that it was now much harder to come to America from the Middle East and in anonymity plan another 9/11. Subsequent terrorist attempts, aimed at targets such as the Brooklyn Bridge and Times Square, either failed or were thwarted before they began.

In wars abroad, thousands of radical Islamic jihadists heeded bin Laden's call to arms and flocked to the Hindu Kush and Anbar Province. The United States military and its allies were waiting, and then killed or wounded many thousands of terrorists and insurgents. That indisputable fact is as little remarked upon as it was critical to weakening and discrediting the martial prowess of radical Islam.

We also forget that the removal of Saddam Hussein, followed by his trial and execution by a democratically elected Iraq government, set off initial ripples of change in the Middle East between 2004 and 2006. The Syrian army was pushed out of Lebanon by popular protests. Muammar Gadhafi surrendered his nuclear weapons and publicly worried about his own future. Pakistan abruptly arrested for a time A.Q. Khan, who had franchised his nuclear weapons expertise.

These events did not lead directly to the current popular protests throughout the Middle East, but they may well have been precursors of a sort, once Iraq's elected government survived and the violence there abated.

But there is a final development that caused headaches for radical Islam -- the end of the American hysteria over the legality and morality of its own antiterrorism measures.

Although candidate Barack Obama was elected as the anti-Bush who promised to repeal the Bush protocols and end the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, President Obama did no such thing. He continued the Bush-Petraeus withdrawal plan in Iraq. He escalated in Afghanistan. He kept all the antiterrorism measures that he had once derided. And he expanded the Predator drone assassination missions fivefold, while sending commandos inside Pakistan to kill -- not capture and put on trial -- bin Laden. He ignored most recommendations from Attorney General Eric Holder and guessed rightly that his own left-wing base would keep largely quiet.

The effect was twofold. America kept up the pressure on terrorists and their supporters. And the liberal opposition to our antiterrorist policies simply evaporated once Obama became commander in chief.

Some who once protested the removal of Saddam lauded the efforts to do the same to Gadhafi. Those who once sued on behalf of detainees at Guantanamo joined the government to ensure the Predator drone targeted-killing program continued.

The chances in 2012 that the buffoonish Michael Moore -- who once praised the Iraqi insurgents -- will be again feted as a guest of honor at the Democratic National Convention, as he was in 2004, or that Cindy Sheehan will grab headlines once again, are zero.

Polls show that Obama's America is still just as unpopular among Middle Easterners as it was under George W. Bush. But now a much different media assumes that the problem is theirs, not America's. In this brave new world, the American liberal community is now invested in the continuance of the once-despised Bush antiterrorism program and the projection of force abroad -- and has little sympathy for foreign criticism of an American president.

Quite simply, bin Laden's world of 2001 no longer exists. That's mostly good for us, but quite bad for the dead terrorist's followers.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: G M on May 12, 2011, 09:10:09 AM
Radical (Or in truth mainstream) islam is not floundering, it's about to have Egypt as part of the new caliphate.
Title: Time to roll back America's borders , , ,
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 23, 2011, 05:25:09 AM
Mike Adams   Time for America to Roll Back Its Borders
Email Mike Adams | Columnist's Archive  Share   Buzz 0diggsdigg
Sign-Up  Dear President Obama:

I am writing today with a somewhat unusual request. Actually, it is a series of requests. First and foremost, I will be asking that you return America to its August 20th, 1959 borders so that Hawaii is no longer a state and you are no longer a citizen.
Title: Bad Guys & Bonehead Response
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on May 25, 2011, 10:11:03 AM
Almost posted this in both the cognitive dissonance of the right, and left's threads:

About the Authors
Donald Boudreaux is professor of economics at George Mason University, a former FEE president, and the author of Globalization. He is the winner of the 2009 Thomas Szasz Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Cause of Civil Liberties (general category). ... See All Posts by This Author


Thoughts on Freedom | Donald J. Boudreaux
Stop the Bad Guys
June 2011 • Volume: 61 • Issue: 5 •    Print This Post • 0 comments
It’s not too much of a simplification to say that modern American conservatives believe the national government to be ignorant, bumbling, and corrupt when it meddles in the U.S. economy, but sagacious, sure-footed, and righteous when it meddles in foreign-government affairs.

Nor are the boundaries of acceptable simplification breached by saying that modern American “liberals” believe the national government to be sagacious, sure-footed, and righteous when it meddles in the U.S. economy, but ignorant, bumbling, and corrupt when it meddles in foreign-government affairs.

This striking contradiction in political viewpoints has not, of course, gone unnoticed.

I was prompted to ponder this contradiction not long ago after I read an op-ed in the Washington Post by the neoconservative William Kristol calling on Uncle Sam to attempt to influence the outcomes of the recent popular uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East. My ponderings produced a hypothesis: Modern conservatives and “liberals” are obsessively fixated on bad guys (just different ones).

For both conservatives and “liberals” the world is full of problems caused by bad actors—greedy, heartless, power-hungry autocrats who deploy illegitimately acquired power to trample the rights and livelihoods of the masses. Ordinary men and women seek liberation from these tyrants, but—being ordinary and oppressed—the typical person cannot escape the overlords’ predation without help. Their liberation requires forceful intervention by well-meaning and courageous outsiders.

For “liberals” the oppressed masses consist of workers and the poor, and the oligarchs who do the oppressing are business people and private corporations. What encourages this oppression are free markets and their accompanying doctrine of nonintervention by government into the economy.

However, contrary to the “liberals,” nonintervention rests on at least three truths: First, the complexities of modern economies are so great, and hard to discern, that it is absurdly fanciful to suppose that government officials can intervene without causing more harm than good. Even the most well-meaning government is akin to a bull in a china shop: Out of its natural element, even government’s most careful actions will be so sweeping and awkward that the net result will be unintentionally destructive.

Second, even if economic intervention begins with the best of motives, it degenerates into a process of transferring wealth from the politically powerless to the politically powerful. The interventions continue to sport noble names (such as the “Great Society programs” and the “Fair Labor Standards Act”) and to be marketed as heroic efforts to defend the weak against the strong. But these, however, are nothing more than cynical and disingenuous political marketing efforts aimed at hiding from the general public the actual, unsavory consequences of these interventions.

Third, many situations that appear to well-meaning outsiders to be so undesirable that someone simply must intervene to correct them are understood by many of the people most closely affected by these situations to be superior to likely alternatives.

“Unequal income distribution” is perhaps the foremost such situation. While most “liberals” are obsessed with the “distribution” of income and believe that people of modest means must be especially disturbed by the fact that some other people earn more than they earn, in fact the typical American of modest means is far less bothered by “unequal” income “distribution” than are members of the “liberal” academy and punditry. This latter fact only further confirms to the “liberal” mind that ordinary Americans need third-party intervention to save them from their own naiveté; ordinary Americans just don’t know what glories they are denying themselves by acquiescing in the prevailing economic power structure.

Modern “liberals” dismiss these three objections to economic intervention as being fanciful excuses used by the economically powerful—and, even worse, also by the economically naive free-market faithful—to provide (flimsy) intellectual cover for predations by capitalist bad guys. The realistic assessments by modern “liberals” indicate to them that economic intervention is necessary and righteous.

A nearly identical debate plays out on the foreign-policy front, but with the sides switched.

For modern American conservatives the oppressed masses consist of foreign peoples yearning for American-style freedom and political franchise. But these unfortunate foreigners are oppressed by oligarchs who happen to control their governments. “Liberals” (and liberals) who adhere to a doctrine of U.S. government nonintervention in foreign affairs raise the same three objections that conservatives (and liberals) raise against government intervention in the economy.

First, the complexities of foreign governments’ relationships with their citizens are so great and hard to discern that it is absurdly fanciful to suppose that Uncle Sam can intervene without causing more harm than good. Even the most well-meaning intervention is akin to a bull in a china shop: Out of its natural element, even Uncle Sam’s most careful actions will be so sweeping and awkward that the net result will be unintentionally destructive.

Second, even if foreign intervention begins with the best of motives, it degenerates into a process of transferring wealth from the politically powerless to the politically powerful. The interventions continue to enjoy noble names (such as “Operation Iraqi Freedom”) and to be marketed as heroic efforts to defend the weak against the strong. But these, however, are nothing more than cynical and disingenuous political marketing efforts aimed at hiding from the general public the actual, unsavory consequences of these interventions in which corporations such as Halliburton and Blackwater rake in huge, undeserved profits at the expense of the American taxpayer and the foreign populations ostensibly being helped.

Third, many situations that appear to well-meaning outsiders to be so undesirable that someone simply must intervene are understood by many of the people most closely affected by these situations to be superior to likely alternatives. As oppressive as Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi regime genuinely was, it’s not at all clear that merely disposing of this particular bad guy has liberated Iraqis from oppression. Saddam’s rule was very much a result—and certainly not the principal cause—of Iraq’s anti-liberal culture and dysfunctional social institutions, not to mention earlier U.S. intervention.

Foreign countries’ political, economic, and social institutions are too complex and too deeply rooted in unique histories to be adequately grasped by American politicians and military leaders. Therefore American intervention—which is inevitably ham-fisted—adds to this mix only confusion and turmoil.

The two kinds of intervention situations aren’t analogous in all details; differences exist. But these differences are small when compared to the similarities. “Liberals’” confidence that domestic markets can be improved by battalions of bureaucrats charged with keeping bad guys in line is surprisingly similar to conservatives’ confidence that the welfare of foreigners can be improved by battalions of U.S. military troops charged with keeping bad guys in line.

http://www.thefreemanonline.org/columns/thoughts-on-freedom/stop-the-bad-guys/
Title: Patriot Post
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 13, 2011, 09:03:06 AM
Brief · June 13, 2011

The Foundation
"Wherever the real power in a Government lies, there is the danger of oppression." --James Madison

Government

Congress doesn't have many experts on the issues, but they did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night."In the course of any given year, Congress votes on taxes, medical care, military spending, foreign aid, agriculture, labor, international trade, airlines, housing, insurance, courts, natural resources, and much more. There are professionals who have spent their entire adult lives specializing in just one of these fields. The idea that Congress can be competent in all these areas simultaneously is staggering. Yet, far from pulling back -- as banks or other private enterprises must, if they don't want to be ruined financially by operating beyond the range of their competence -- Congress is constantly expanding further into more fields. Having spent years ruining the housing markets with their interference, leading to a housing meltdown that has taken the whole economy down with it, politicians have now moved on into micro-managing automobile companies and medical care. They are not going to stop unless they get stopped. And that is not going to happen until the voters recognize the fact that political rhetoric is no substitute for competence." --economist Thomas Sowell

Insight
"History suggests that capitalism is a necessary condition for political freedom. Clearly, it is not a sufficient condition." --American economist and author Milton Friedman (1912-2006)

U.S. Army Birthday and Flag Day 2011
Tomorrow is the 236th birthday of the United States Army, born of the desire to defend liberty and spread its flame. As the U.S. Army now leads the way in the Long War, let us not forget to pray for these brave Patriots standing in harm's way and their families awaiting their safe return.

Tomorrow is also Flag Day. Our flag is a beacon of liberty, a symbol of hope for all people who "hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed -- that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it...." On this Flag Day, we American Patriots display and pay homage to our national flag.

To purchase the highest quality American-made U.S. flags available, please visit The Patriot Shop.


 

The Gipper
"As we think back over the history of our nation's flag, we remember that the story of its early years was often one of hardship and trials, sometimes a fight for simple survival. ... As the American Republic grew and prospered and new stars were added to the flag, the ideal of freedom grew and prospered. From the rolling hills of Kentucky to the shores of California to the Sea of Tranquility on the Moon, our pioneers carried our flag before them, a symbol of the indomitable spirit of a free people. And let us never forget that in honoring our flag, we honor the American men and women who have courageously fought and died for it over the last 200 years, patriots who set an ideal above any consideration of self. Our flag flies free today because of their sacrifice. ... These anniversaries remind us that the great American experiment in freedom and democracy has really just begun. They remind us of the terrible hardships our forefathers willingly endured for their beliefs. And they challenge us to match that greatness of spirit in our own time, and I know we will. We are, after all, the land of the free and the home of the brave." --Ronald Reagan

Re: The Left
"No nation or culture in history has done more to advance the well-being of mankind than the United States and Western civilization. However to the Marxist mindset of the radical left, only they, utilizing the vehicle of a massive central government, could control mankind's nature and create a fair society. It is the ideal philosophy for those who, so enamored with themselves, can wallow in their self-importance and rule with a heavy hand the same masses they claim to protect. Under no circumstances, therefore, can these revolutionaries defend or profess admiration for their country; instead they must not only transform the United States into a villain, but destroy any vestiges of its accomplishments in order to permanently retain control over the populace and exact revenge for the alleged transgressions of the West. Barack Obama has spent his entire life, from birth to the present, marinated in this mindset. He is thus incapable of change or being receptive to any other viewpoint, as that would be an admission of failure." --columnist Steve McCann

Liberty
"For several years, the British media have been full of horror stories about failures in the National Health Service (NHS). ... The Telegraph now reports that the 'terminally ill' will be asked by their doctors how they would like to die and to write it down so the NHS will know. Will government then assist them to stop the care meter from running? Death panels, anyone? ... And then there is the disappearance of Britain's once proud work ethic, thanks to the expansion of the welfare state under the Labour Party. The Daily Mail reports that between 1997 and 2010, under Labour, 'the number of households in which no one has ever had a job almost doubled from 184,000 to 352,000.' ... A dysfunctional British immigration system has allowed 256,000 asylum-seekers over the past 20 years to be granted 'amnesty,' according to the Daily Mail. ... Add to these concerns the huge number of Muslim immigrants who display no desire to be assimilated into British life, the high abortion rate among the British, and the increasing secularization of culture and you have predictors of where America may be headed if it does not turn back on these attitudes and behavior patterns." --columnist Cal Thomas


 

Opinion in Brief
"They call it BCS, Bill Clinton Syndrome, and it has broken out anew in New York City and Washington, D.C., where it was first discovered. ... BCS strikes powerful figures, usually male, who experience lewd compulsions of an overpowering nature, generally in the presence of technology, often the telephone, occasionally a smart phone or even a computer, and usually when they are alone or behind closed doors with a woman of inferior rank. The first victim of the syndrome was, of course, President Bill Clinton, but it has struck a growing number of powerful individuals, most recently Congressman Chris Lee, International Monetary Fund chieftain Dominique Strauss-Kahn, and now Congressman Anthony Weiner... He apparently suffered at least the underpants version of BCS. He served as the moral scold to Republicans in Congress. ... What will become of these wretches I do not know, but for Weiner there is hope. The press has reported that his recent marriage to the Hillary Clinton aide was 'officiated' over by none other than Bill Clinton. I advise that Bill counsel Weiner and Hillary counsel the wife. Then let all four retire from public life. Along with them they can take any other public official suspected of suffering BCS. This nonsense has gone too far." --columnist R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr.

Political Futures
"If next year the American people pull the plug on the Obama presidency, mark down the past week as the beginning of the end.... Barack Obama's worst week was about more than bad data. The two great legislative monuments to the first Obama term, the remaking of the health-care industry and the Dodd-Frank financial reform, look like they've got serious structural cracks. A McKinsey report estimates that a third of employers will abandon their health-insurance plans come 2014. On Tuesday, The Wall Street Journal reported that the failure (or inability) of Dodd-Frank's regulatory arm to write new rules for the $583 trillion derivatives market has the financial sector in a panic over its legal exposure. ... We are heading toward an election fought over the economy. That's good because ultimately this means the subject is growth. The one consensus that exists across the political spectrum is that strong economic growth eases many problems -- from the entitlement burden to the tragedy of high youth unemployment. The battle will be fought over economic growth and how we get it -- Obama's way or something close to the opposite of Obama's way. ... Barack Obama will have better weeks than this. On the available evidence, however, the trend lines for politics and the economy are becoming clearer every day." --columnist Daniel Henninger

Culture
"It's been 67 years since the Supreme Court outlawed school segregation. In those 67 years, at every level of government, black Americans have been overwhelmingly staunch supporters of the Democrat party. What black Americans have gotten in return is an education system in which black children lag consistently behind their white counterparts, by an average of almost four years. Yet for 67 years, Democrats have promised black Americans that they're going to make things better for their communities, as long as they keep hitching their wagons to the Democrat party star. After two-thirds of a century, one might be inclined to think that more than a few black Americans might be inclined to ask the question, 'what have you done for me lately,' as in how come our children keep getting the short end of the educational stick after more than three generations of party loyalty? Yet in order to ask that question, one must know history and have learned to think for oneself. Knowledge of history and an ability to think independently require a decent education. Democrats around the nation are making sure that doesn't happen. In short, union campaign funds are more important than the education of black children, and anyone who thinks otherwise needs to explain how a status quo that ought be considered criminal could survive every challenge that's been thrown at it." --columnist Arnold Ahlert

Reader Comments
"Alexander, you are always willing to tread on the Left's 'sacred ground' where too many other conservatives dare not go. Thanks for your clarity on the homosexual issue, distinguishing between what constitutes personal choice versus their public policy agenda." --Semper Fi

"The left is so filled with hate and so quick to spin that they seldom look at the facts. Truth has little to do with their agenda and honest debate is not in their vocabulary. Alexander has taken a lightning rod issue and presented it in a fair, objective and honest context. His essay on this contentious topic was not only correct in every detail but it was a brave and heroic statement to make. Certainly doing so will subject him to viscous attacks from liberals, particularly the small but vitriolic homosexual crowd. Good work Alexander. Stand firm and remain steadfast." --Bill

Typical criticism of Alexander's column:

"Clearly you have never studied the topic of gays. You are apparently more interested in satisfying the cries of right wing evangelicals than in seeking the truth. The Defense of Marriage Act was pushed through Congress by Jerry Falwell/Dr. James Dobson (Focus on the Family)/the Mormon Church and the US Council of Catholic Bishops. ... Eventually, the Defense of Marriage Act will be declared unconstitutional, which it clearly is. ... It is time for the U.S. to catch up with the rest of the world on gay marriage. Public opinion in the U.S. supports gay marriage. ... Who are you to tell me what I can and can't do in the privacy of my bedroom?"

Editor's reply: First, the Defense of Marriage Act was signed into law September 21, 1996, by Bill Clinton, who said: "I remain opposed to same-sex marriage. I believe marriage is an institution for the union of a man and a woman. This has been my long-standing position, and it is not being reviewed or reconsidered." The legislation passed by overwhelming majorities of both Democrats and Republicans, 85-14 in the Senate and a vote of 342-67 in the House. The record reflects something quite more than a "Jerry Falwell/Dr. James Dobson, Mormon Church, US Council of Catholic Bishops" agenda and "satisfying the cries of right wing evangelicals" rather than seeking the truth.

Second, for the record, there is no constitutional basis to assert that gender identity is a civil right. You can push for an amendment if you want, or take the liberal route and amend it by judicial diktat, but this assertion has no basis under Rule of Law.

Third, my guide and test for Truth in this and all matters, starting with Liberty, is not predicated on public opinion polls or the actions of other nations.

Last, as I wrote, I support your liberty to practice your individual beliefs and behaviors right up unto the point at which you propose to impose your redefinition of nature upon others. The homosexual political agenda is something quite apart from the practice of your personal choices and behavior. I will continue to "out" the Left's agenda for what it is, including the errant argument that all of society should support the homosexual pathos, which offends "the laws of nature and nature's God."

Title: Steyn: Arab-lesbian blogger hoax
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 18, 2011, 07:40:56 PM




 <http://www.nationalreview.com/> NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE         

MARK STEYN


 

 

JUNE 18, 2011 7:00 A.M.

LibzGetReal

How could the Left not fall for the Arab-lesbian-blogger hoax?

 

Last week was a great week for lesbians coming out of the closet — coming
out, that is, as middle-aged heterosexual men.

On Sunday, Amina Arraf, the young vivacious Syrian lesbian activist whose
inspiring blog “A Gay Girl in Damascus” had captured hearts around the
world, was revealed to be, in humdrum reality, one Tom MacMaster, a
40-year-old college student from Georgia. The following day, Paula Brooks,
the lesbian activist and founder of the website LezGetReal, was revealed to
be one Bill Graber, a 58-year-old construction worker from Ohio. In their
capacity as leading lesbians in the Sapphic blogosphere, “Miss Brooks” and
“Miss Arraf” were colleagues. “Amina” had posted at LezGetReal before
starting “A Gay Girl In Damascus.” As one lesbian to another, they got along
swimmingly. The Washington Post reported:

Amina often flirted with Brooks, neither of the men realizing the other was
pretending to be a lesbian.

Who knows what romance might have blossomed had not “Amina” been arrested by
a squad of Baath Party goons dispatched by Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad.
Tom MacMaster then created “Rania,” a fake cousin for his fake lesbian, to
try to rouse the world to take up the plight of the nonexistent Amina’s
nonexistent detention. 

A “Free Amina!” Facebook page sprang up.

“The Obama Administration must speak about this,” declared Peter Beinart,
former editor of The New Republic. “This woman is a hero.”

On June 7th the State Department announced that it was looking into the
“kidnapping.”

Now consider it from Assad’s point of view. Unlike “Amina,” “Rania,” and the
“three armed men in their early 20s” who “hustled Amina into a red Dacia
Logan,” you have the disadvantage of actually existing. You’re the dictator
of Syria. You’ve killed more demonstrators than those losers Mubarak, Ben
Ali, and Gaddafi combined, and the Americans have barely uttered a peep.
Suddenly Hillary Clinton, who was hailing you as a “reformer” only 20
minutes ago, wants to give you a hard time over some lesbian blogger. Any
moment now Sarkozy or Cameron or some other Europoseur will demand
anti-homophobic NATO bombing missions over your presidential palace. On CNN
Wolf Blitzer and Anderson Cooper will be interviewing each other back and
forth all day long about the Gay Spring sweeping the Arab world. You’ll be
the first Middle East strongman brought down by lesbianism. You’ll be a
laughing stock at Arab League Where-Are-They-Now? nights.

Who needs it? “Release the lesbian bloggers!” commands Assad.

“Er, what lesbian bloggers?” says his vizier. “This is Damascus, remember?”

“Oh, yeah.” And he spends another sleepless night wondering if this is the
most devilish CIA dirty trick of all, or if one of their satellite drones
merely misinterpreted the grainy footage from the Colonel Gaddafi Lookalike
round of Syrian Idol.

The pretty young lesbian Muslim was exposed as a portly 40-year-old male
infidel at the University of Edinburgh with the help of “Paula Brooks,”
shortly before “Paula” was exposed as a 58-year-old male construction worker
from Ohio. “He would have got away with it if I hadn’t been such a stand-up
guy,” the second phony lesbian said of the first phony lesbian. As to why
stand-up guys are posing as sit-down lesbians, “Paula” told the Associated
Press that “he felt he would not be taken seriously as a straight man.”

“He got that one right,” sneered the Toronto gay magazine Xtra.

Indeed. A century ago, a British Army officer went to the Levant and
reinvented himself as Lawrence of Arabia. Now a middle-aged American male
college student goes to the Internet and reinvents himself as Florence of
Arabia. We have become familiar in recent years with the booming literary
genre of the fake memoir, to which Oprah’s late Book Club was distressingly
partial. Greg Mortensen’s now discredited Three Cups Of Tea took it to the
next level, not just near mandatory in the usual circles (grade schools and
sentimental punditry) but also compulsory in the Pentagon for commanders en
route to Afghanistan. After centuries of disdain for the preferred beverage
of imperialists, American officers in the Hindu Kush now drink more tea than
the Brits, and they don’t even like it. But a charlatan told them to do it,
so the tea allowance now consumes 23 percent of the Pentagon budget.

 

Yet Tom MacMaster topped even that. He took an actual, live, mass popular
uprising and made an entirely unrepresentative and, indeed, nonexistent
person its poster “girl.” From CNN to the Guardian to Bianca Jagger to
legions of Tweeters, Western liberalism fell for a ludicrous hoax. Why?

Because they wanted to. It would be nice if “Amina Arraf” existed. As niche
constituencies go, we could use more hijab-wearing Muslim lesbian militants
and fewer fortysomething male Western deadbeat college students. But the
latter is a real and pathetically numerous demographic, and the former is a
fiction — a fantasy for Western liberals, who think that in the
multicultural society the nice gay couple at 27 Rainbow Avenue can live next
door to the big bearded imam with four child brides at Number 29 and gambol
and frolic in admiration of each other’s diversity. They will proffer cheery
greetings over the picket fence, the one admiring the other’s attractive
buttock-hugging leather shorts for that day’s Gay Pride parade as he
prepares to take his daughter to the clitoridectomy clinic.

Yes, yes, I stereotype. But stereotypes become stereotypes because they’re
grounded in observable reality. “Amina Arraf” is grounded in nothing more
than a fetish fantasy as preposterous as those lipstick lesbians in porn
movies who can’t wait for some hot straight guy to jump in and make it a
threesome.

It would be statistically improbable for there to be no women attracted to
other women in Damascus. But “Amina Arraf” is nothing more than the
projection of parochial obsessions on to distant lands Western liberals are
too lazy to try to figure out. In 2007 in The Atlantic Monthly, Andrew
Sullivan, not yet mired up Sarah Palin’s birth canal without a paddle
peddling bizarre conspiracy theories about the maternity of her youngest
child, announced that, never mind his policies, Barack Obama’s visage alone
would be “the most effective potential rebranding of the United States since
Reagan.” As he explained:

It’s November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees
this man — Barack Hussein Obama — is the new face of America. In one simple
image, America’s soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a
logarithm. . . . If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against
the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama’s face gets
close.

For crying out loud. The assumption that “a young Pakistani Muslim” in
Lahore or Peshawar shares your peculiar preoccupations is the most feeble
kind of projection even by the standards of Western liberal navel-gazing. If
doting progressives stopped gazing longingly into “Obama’s face” for just a
moment, they might notice that in Benghazi “democracy activists” have been
rounding up Libyan blacks and immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa. In Bahrain
“democracy activists” have attacked hundreds of Bangladeshis and Pakistanis,
ripping the tongue out of one muezzin and leaving him brain damaged. What’s
so “multicultural” about the pampered middle-aged narcissists of the West’s
leisurely “activist” varsity pretending that the entire planet is just like
them?

You can learn a lot from the deceptions a society chooses to swallow. “Amina
Arraf” was a fiction who fit the liberal worldview. That’s because the
liberal worldview is a fiction.

—  <http://www.marksteyn.com/> Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is
author of  <http://www.nationalreview.com/redirect/amazon.p?j=1596985275>
America Alone. © 2011 Mark Steyn.
Title: Re: Steyn: Arab-lesbian blogger hoax
Post by: G M on June 18, 2011, 08:06:21 PM
Next thing you know, some enterprising fraudster will claim to be a dispossed "palestinian" refugee who was in reality a wealthy American citizen who lived in Cairo, yet still his academic fraud will be ignored by those that should know better.


Oh wait, it's already happened.



Nevermind.


Fake but true!
Title: Shapiro: Treating children as adults
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 29, 2011, 07:31:55 AM


This week, the Supreme Court, in a 7-2 decision, ruled that the state of California could not bar the sale of violent video games to minors. The majority opinion, written by quasi-originalist Justice Antonin Scalia, argued that the First Amendment requires that government not mandate that minors be controlled by their parents. Purer originalist Judge Clarence Thomas took the opposite view. "Although much has changed in this country since the Revolution," he wrote, "the notion that parents have authority over their children and that the law can support that authority persists today."

This is the debate that defines our time. The treatment of minors as tiny adults is a dangerous move that threatens the foundations of our society. Civilized societies have always recognized that parents must control their children until the kids reach maturity -- that's how we've historically passed along morals and information. If we left children to their own devices, there is little doubt that they would engage in every selfish pursuit they could -- kids aren't the naturally altruistic folks non-parents seem to think they are -- and hurt themselves in the process. They wouldn't go to school, they wouldn't go to church, and they certainly wouldn't embrace their parents' value systems.

But today's left, and many on the libertarian right, have embraced the concept of children making their own decisions. Paternalism has become a dirty word, even though parents are supposed to be paternal. New generations should not have to rediscover old truths -- reinventing the wheel takes time, effort and pain. They should be able to inherit the received wisdom of the past, glean from it, and then make their own decisions.

Historically, this has meant that parents control what their children see and hear. To a point, the more control parents have had, the better. There is a reason that unwed motherhood is the leading indicator of many of our most pressing social problems: Without a father in the home, children often run out of control and grow into irresponsible adults. Government should do its utmost to maintain enough respect for the family unit to allow adults to raise their children.

Now, however, we've moved into a brave new world in which children are thought to be adults who are far away. The left has pushed for lowered age of consent; they've pushed for children to be able to attain abortions without parental permission; they've pushed for heightened sex education, so children can make "informed" decisions without the input of their guardians.

This is not only scientifically inaccurate, but it's also morally incoherent. Children are children because they are not fully developed human beings. Science tells us that adolescents are biologically driven to embrace risky and stupid behavior. The part of the brain called the prefrontal cortex, which actually controls for risky behavior, isn't fully developed until children are fully grown. Leave children and adolescents to their own devices, and they will not make good decisions -- they will attack any boundaries and cross any lines.

What is government's role in all of this? Justice Scalia believes that government should not put more power in the hands of parents -- government should essentially be neutral between children and those who raise them. Justice Thomas believes that government should create a system wherein parents get the last word. In today's world, more than ever, it is important that children not be treated with libertarian casualness requiring parents to be all-knowing and all-seeing. Instead, government should place control firmly in the hands of parents, requiring children to go to their parents for advice and guidance.

Freedom and responsibility for actions go hand in hand; only adults can be held responsible for their actions and the actions of their children. Therefore, only adults should have the freedom to choose on behalf of their children. Any other moral system is a fundamental rejection of the superstructure of civilization in favor of a moral chimera.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: JDN on June 29, 2011, 08:06:22 AM
I had brought this issue up on the Legal Forum page a few days ago.  I agree with the decision.  First Amendment.... 

"The State wishes to create a wholly new category of content-based regulation that is permissible only for speech directed at children," Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in the majority opinion. "That is unprecedented and mistaken."

Restricting violent games could have easily led to restrictions on other mediums, First Amendment attorneys said.

Floyd Abrams, who represented the New York Times in the Pentagon Papers case, said a ruling for the California law would have been harmful "not just to video games but to great literature -- and mediocre literature."

"We're at least better off that we don't now have some sort of new rule allowing … a regime where courts and justices pass judgment upon whether the material has any value or not," Abrams said.


On a personal note, as i mentioned on the other forum, I find it odd that it is ok to restrict pornography, i.e. a minor cannot buy Playboy, but extreme violence is ok.  Frankly, I find
extreme violence more offensive than sexually oriented material.  However the ban remains at this time.

The 1968 Supreme Court case Ginsberg v. New York found that a retailer could be prosecuted for selling sexually oriented material to children, even if the material was not considered obscene for adults. (The case involved the owner of a mom-and- pop shop who sold two "girlie" magazines to a 16-year-old.)

However, Monday's ruling suggests the court may even be open to reconsidering past rulings on obscenity, said attorney Robert Corn-Revere, who successfully petitioned New York Gov. George E. Pataki to grant a posthumous pardon to Lenny Bruce for a 1964 obscenity conviction.


Crafty's said, "Historically, this has meant that parents control what their children see and hear."

"Freedom and responsibility for actions go hand in hand; only adults can be held responsible for their actions and the actions of their children. Therefore, only adults should have the freedom to choose on behalf of their children."


I agree; parents should control their children, choose for their children, but not the Government.  What I think is appropriate for my child may be different than your thoughts for your child. 
Let the parents decide, not the government.  Or the government will decide more and more for you....





Title: Children's freedom's
Post by: bigdog on June 29, 2011, 08:46:22 AM
This is an interesting thread at the moment.  I find the dichotomy in the recent USSC ruling to be fascinating.  Recently, the USSC has ruled that children at schools do not have the as many First Amendment and privacy rights as they used to.  Compare and contrast the famous Tinker v. Des Moines case with recent decisions about drug testing and the "Bong Hits for Jesus" case (in which the offending action took place outside of school!). 

From JDN: "I agree; parents should control their children, choose for their children, but not the Government.  What I think is appropriate for my child may be different than your thoughts for your child. 
Let the parents decide, not the government.  Or the government will decide more and more for you...."

I agree with the spirit of this.  There is a potential slippery slope here though.  What of a parent who decides that MAKING pornography is OK for kids?  What about drug/alcohol use?  Etc., etc.   

Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: JDN on June 29, 2011, 08:51:55 AM
Doug, I started to write a reply, then I noted your post was deleted.   :-)

I too agree, the parents should decide, but not the government.  Crafty seems to imply the government should decide....

As for Bigdog, I also agree. This is a slippery slope.  Perhaps the government will ban books for children
deemed offensive for children, but not adults....   Where do we stop.  I suggest it's the parent's responsibility,
not the government's job to intercede. 
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: DougMacG on June 29, 2011, 08:55:58 AM
JDN, (I hit post while still writing, starting over)Looks like my reaction to your question is covered in Crafty's post of Scalia's opinion (and points just made by Bigdog).  To me it is about parental control rights rather than children's rights.  Government isn't denying the kid the Playboy; it is requiring the parent to buy it or approve the purchase instead undermining that relationship.  The slippery slope would be the end of restricted movies too. Is that what we want?

There is a difference JDN between the wisdom of the details of any of these laws infringing on minors and empowering parents, x movies, violent games, cigarettes etc and having the court say those restrictions in your locality can't be done.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: JDN on June 29, 2011, 09:11:53 AM
Doug, I've done that too.   :-)

Actually, I think Scalia's opinion and Bigdog are agreeing with me, not Crafty.

However, I disagree with you, the government IS denying the kid the right to buy the Playboy; the government is not leaving it up to the parent
to simply tell their child "No".

I for example, would prefer that my child read Playboy at age 16 versus play/watch terribly violent games/movies.  You may disagree,
and advise your daughter differently.  Your choice as her parent in my opinion.

As for movies, the movie industry has invoked guidelines through the motion picture rating system.  That is much different
than government imposing legal action. 

As Bigdog points out, where and when will the government stop?

I think it should be up to the parent.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 29, 2011, 09:30:19 AM
As noted, the parent can buy for his/her child what he/she wishes to.  This completely meets the point raised by JDN.  Furthermore, the parent should be able to let a child go unattended into a store which sells magazines and not have to worry about the child (e.g. a 12 year old) buying "Big Dick Dwarves Anally Rape Anal Virgins and Shoot Jizz all over their Faces".
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: DougMacG on June 29, 2011, 10:30:01 AM
Like with legalization of drug issues, there are some inherent contentions between conservatism and libertarianism.  My view is that we can have lines drawn in law about morality and decency beyond just prosecuting theft and murder.  I fear slippery slopes too but I disagree with the idea that no limits can be placed on decadence without descending into a total police control state.  I'm not worried so much about keeping my daughter from porn, I'm opposed to it being universally available to all boys at all ages learning all the wrong messages at the wrong time in  the culture she lives in.  If their parents want that for their child, then they can provide it to the child, but I support reasonable restrictions on what merchants can provide to other people's children without parents express consent.

ps.  Crafty is quite knowledgeable on the titles for sale in that section of the store!  :-)
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 29, 2011, 10:33:35 AM
Back before I was married and getting more , , , selective in my social life, there was a time , , , Myself, I was happy with a magazine dedicated to "All "Natural' Women" (i.e. no silicon breasts).
Title: Imagine!
Post by: G M on June 29, 2011, 12:01:45 PM

http://www.torontosun.com/2011/06/28/lennon-was-a-closet-republican-assistant

John Lennon was a closet Republican, who felt a little embarrassed by his former radicalism, at the time of his death - according to the tragic Beatles star's last personal assistant.

Fred Seaman worked alongside the music legend from 1979 to Lennon's death at the end of 1980 and he reveals the star was a Ronald Reagan fan who enjoyed arguing with left-wing radicals who reminded him of his former self.

In new documentary Beatles Stories, Seaman tells filmmaker Seth Swirsky Lennon wasn't the peace-loving militant fans thought he was while he was his assistant.

He says, "John, basically, made it very clear that if he were an American he would vote for Reagan because he was really sour on (Democrat) Jimmy Carter.

"He'd met Reagan back, I think, in the 70s at some sporting event... Reagan was the guy who had ordered the National Guard, I believe, to go after the young (peace) demonstrators in Berkeley, so I think that John maybe forgot about that... He did express support for Reagan, which shocked me.

"I also saw John embark in some really brutal arguments with my uncle, who's an old-time communist... He enjoyed really provoking my uncle... Maybe he was being provocative... but it was pretty obvious to me he had moved away from his earlier radicalism.

"He was a very different person back in 1979 and 80 than he'd been when he wrote Imagine. By 1979 he looked back on that guy and was embarrassed by that guy's naivete."
Title: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Spartan Dog on July 03, 2011, 07:35:17 PM
On behalf of Crafty Dog


Video Clip

Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: JDN on July 03, 2011, 07:39:51 PM
sorry I can't open it.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 03, 2011, 09:50:59 PM
Works for me.

Thanks Kostas.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: JDN on July 03, 2011, 09:59:51 PM
It doesn't open on a Mac.
Title: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are to blame
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 12, 2011, 01:15:20 AM
By PETER WALLISON

When the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC) reported in January that the 2008 crisis was caused by lax regulation, greed on Wall Street and faulty risk management at banks and other financial firms, few were surprised.

That, after all, was the narrative propagated by government sources since 2008 and widely accepted in the media, in numerous books, and by many commentators. Writing in the New York Times on June 30, for example, Pro-Publica reporter Jesse Eisinger complained that bankers' concerns about excessive regulation under the Dodd-Frank Act did not take account of "the staggering costs of the crisis that the banks led us into."

The notion that the "banks led us into" the financial crisis echoes the narrative of the FCIC's Democratic majority, which placed the blame for the financial crisis on the private sector and dismissed the idea that government housing policy could have been responsible.

According to the FCIC majority report, the government's housing policies—led by the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—contributed only "marginally" to the crisis. Moreover, Fannie and Freddie "followed rather than led Wall Street and other lenders" into the subprime and other risky mortgage lending that ultimately caused the financial crisis.

View Full Image

Associated Press
James A. Johnson, former Fannie Mae Chairman

With the publication of "Reckless Endangerment," a new book about the causes of the crisis, this story is beginning to unravel. The authors, Gretchen Morgenson, a business reporter and commentator for the New York Times, and Josh Rosner, a financial analyst, make clear that it was Fannie Mae and the government housing policies it supported, pursued and exploited that brought the financial system to a halt in 2008.

After James A. Johnson, a Democratic political operative and former aide to Walter Mondale, became chairman of Fannie Mae in 1991, they note, it became a political powerhouse, intimidating and suborning Congress and tying itself closely to the Clinton administration's support for the low-income lending program called "affordable housing."

This program required subprime and other risky lending, but it solidified Fannie's support among Democrats and some Republicans in Congress, and enabled the agency to resist privatization or significant regulation until 2008. "Under Johnson," write Ms. Morgenson and Mr. Rosner, "Fannie Mae led the way in encouraging loose lending practices among banks whose loans the company bought. . . . Johnson led both the private and public sectors down a path that led directly to the financial crisis of 2008."

The authors are correct. Far from being a marginal player, Fannie Mae was the source of the decline in mortgage underwriting standards that eventually brought down the financial system. It led rather than followed Wall Street into risky lending.

This history does not appear in the FCIC majority report, and Mr. Johnson was not among the more than 700 witnesses the commission claims to have interviewed. Edward Pinto (a former chief credit officer of Fannie Mae, and now a colleague at the American Enterprise Institute) presented the evidence to the commission showing that by 2008 half of all mortgages in the U.S. (27 million loans) were subprime or otherwise risky, and that 12 million of these loans were on the books of the GSEs.

The research he gave the commission also showed that two-thirds of these subprime or risky loans were on the books of government agencies or firms subject to government control. But these facts were left out of the majority report. They did not fit with the narrative that the financial crisis was caused by the private sector, and they moved the blame uncomfortably close to the powerful figures in Congress who had supported the GSEs and the affordable housing goals over many years—and of course who appointed the majority of the commission.

If that were the end of the matter, we would be dealing solely with a report distorted by partisan considerations. The commission majority's false narrative, however, buttresses the notion that more regulation of banks and other private-sector financial institutions could have prevented the financial crisis—and might be necessary to prevent another one. This was the rationale for the Dodd-Frank Act.

But if government housing policy, and not Wall Street, caused the financial crisis, what was the basis for Dodd-Frank's extraordinary and growth-suppressing regulation on the financial system? This question is particularly trenchant as the country struggles through a seemingly interminable recession, brought on initially by a mortgage meltdown and a financial crisis but possibly extended by the uncertainties and credit restrictions flowing from the most comprehensive controls of the financial system since the New Deal.

The principal sponsors of that Dodd-Frank Act, former Sen. Chris Dodd and former House Financial Services Committee Chair Barney Frank, were also the principal supporters and political protectors of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and the government housing policies they implemented.

It is little wonder then that legislation named after them would place the blame for the financial crisis solely on the private sector and do nothing to reform a government-backed housing finance system that will increasingly be seen as the primary cause of the devastating events of 2008.

Mr. Wallison, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, was a member of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission and dissented from the majority report.
Title: Noonan: No times for games
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 15, 2011, 12:19:52 PM


Looked at one way, it shouldn't be hard. Both parties in Washington have every reason to want to prove they possess the baseline political competence to meet the government's central and pending crisis, which is the spending crisis. Both parties should be eager to reach a debt ceiling agreement, if only to prove the system isn't broken. Because really, they are the system. If it's broken, they're broken, and if they're broken, who needs them?

So you'd think the hangman's noose would have concentrated their minds. Instead, of course, it's a battle. As this is written, the president seems to have the edge. But if he wins—whatever winning looks like—he'll likely pay a price for his political victory. He usually does. He won on health care, which ruined his first two years in office and sharply accelerated the decline in his popularity.

***
The issues of spending and taxes should be decoupled. The spending crisis is what's going on and demands attention now; it's because of out-of-control spending that we are up against the debt ceiling. Taxes—whether to raise them on the wealthy, whether to reform the tax code and how—can't be satisfyingly dealt with in the next few weeks. It is gameful of the White House to obscure the central crisis by focusing on a secondary one. The American people have very interesting thoughts and views on taxes, and in no way is it certain that this issue will always favor the Republicans. There's an election in 2012, we can argue it through from now to then.

A central problem for Republicans is that they're trying to do everything—cut spending, fight off tax increases, win national support—from the House. The House is probably not enough to win a fight like this. In the words of a conservative strategist, Republicans have one bullet and the Democrats have three: the presidency, the Senate, and a mainstream media generally willing to accept the idea that the president is the moderate in the fight.

View Full Image

Chad Crowe
 .The president is in the better position, and he knows it. Majority Leader Eric Cantor reports Mr. Obama went into enough-is-enough mode during White House talks this week, warned Mr. Cantor not to call his bluff, and ended the meeting saying: "Can you imagine Ronald Reagan sitting here?" I'm glad Reagan is his model for how presidents should comport themselves, but he should know Reagan never tried to scare people into doing things his way. Instead he tried to encourage support, and with a light touch. When locked in battle with a Democratic Congress he didn't go on TV and make threats. He didn't say, "Congress needs to know we must rebuild our defense system, and if they don't, your children will die in a fiery hale of Soviet bullets."

That was—how to put it?—not his style. It's not any president's style. But it's what Mr. Obama was doing when he told CBS's Scott Pelley that he isn't sure there will be "money in the coffers" to send out Social Security checks. Soon he may be saying there won't be money in the coffers to let students return to college or to pay servicemen. The president is playing Targeted Catastrophe. He's attempting to agitate and frighten people into calling their congressmen and saying Don't Cut Anything, Raise Taxes on Millionaires.

Three weeks of Targeted Catastrophe could be pretty effective. But if the president wins this way, there will be residual costs. He will have scared America and shook it up, all for a political victory. That will not add to affection or regard for the president. Centrists and independents, however they react in terms of support, will not think more highly of him.

Which gets me, briefly, to the latest poll on whether Americans think we're on the right track or wrong track as a nation. The wrong-track number hit 63% this month, up from 60% last month, according to Reuters/Ipsos, which laid the increase to pessimism about the economy and "prolonged gridlock in Washington."

Fair enough. But there's more to be said about the nation the president seems to be busy agitating. It's always assumed the right track/wrong track numbers are about the economy, which makes sense because economic facts are always in the forefronts of everyone's minds. Will I get laid off, can I pay the bills, can my business survive?

More Peggy Noonan
Read Peggy Noonan's previous columns

Click here to order her book, Patriotic Grace
.But there are other reasons for American unease, and in a way some are deeper and more pervasive. Some are cultural. Here are only two. Pretty much everyone over 50 in America feels on some level like a refugee. That's because they were born in one place—the old America—and live now in another. We're like immigrants, whether we literally are or not. One of the reasons America has always celebrated immigrants is a natural, shared knowledge that they left behind everything they knew to enter a place that was different—different language, different ways and manners, different food and habits, different tempo. This took courage. They missed the old country. There's a line in a Bernard Shaw play, "Mrs. Warren's Profession": "I kept myself lonely for you!" That is the unspoken sentence of all immigrants toward their children—I made myself long for an old world so you could have a better one.

But everyone over 50 in America feels a certain cultural longing now. They hear the new culture out of the radio, the TV, the billboard, the movie, the talk show. It is so violent, so sexualized, so politicized, so rough. They miss the old America they were born into, 50 to 70 years ago. And they fear, deep down, that this new culture, the one their children live in, isn't going to make it. Because it is, in essence, an assaultive culture, from the pop music coming out of the rental car radio to the TSA agent with her hands on your kids' buttocks. We are increasingly strangers here, and we fear for the future. There are, by the way, 100 million Americans over 50. A third of the nation. That's a lot of displaced people. They are part of the wrong-track numbers.

So is this. In the Old America there were a lot of bad parents. There always are, because being a parent is hard, and not everyone has the ability or even the desire. But in the old America you knew it wasn't so bad, because the culture could bring the kids up. Inadequate parents could sort of say, "Go outside and play in the culture," and the culture—relatively innocent, and boring—could be more or less trusted to bring the kids up. Popular songs, the messages in movies—all of it was pretty hopeful, and, to use a corny old word, wholesome. Grown-ups now know you can't send the kids out to play in the culture, because the culture will leave them distorted and disturbed. And there isn't less bad parenting now than there used to be. There may be more.

There is so much unease and yearning and sadness in America. So much good, too, so much energy and genius. But it isn't a country anyone should be playing games with, and adding to the general sense of loss
Title: Prager: Top Ten Ways Progressives Harm Moral Character
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 19, 2011, 11:28:48 PM
Ten Ways Progressive Policies Harm Society's Moral Character
Tuesday, July 19, 2011
ShareThis
While liberals are certain about the moral superiority of liberal policies, the truth is that those policies actually diminish a society's moral character. Many individual liberals are fine people, but the policies they advocate tend to make a people worse. Here are 10 reasons:

1. The bigger the government, the less the citizens do for one another. If the state will take care of me and my neighbors, why should I? This is why Western Europeans, people who have lived in welfare states far longer than Americans have, give less to charity and volunteer less time to others than do Americans of the same socioeconomic status.

The greatest description of American civilization was written in the early 19th century by the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville. One of the differences distinguishing Americans from Europeans that he most marveled at was how much Americans -- through myriad associations -- took care of one another. Until President Franklin Roosevelt began the seemingly inexorable movement of America toward the European welfare state -- vastly expanded later by other Democratic presidents -- Americans took responsibility for one another and for themselves far more than they do today. Churches, Rotary Clubs, free-loan societies and other voluntary associations were ubiquitous. As the state grew, however, all these associations declined. In Western Europe, they have virtually all disappeared.

2. The welfare state, though often well intended, is nevertheless a Ponzi scheme. Conservatives have known this for generations. But now, any honest person must acknowledge it. The welfare state is predicated on collecting money from today's workers in order to pay for those who paid in before them. But today's workers don't have enough money to sustain the scheme, and there are too few of them to do so. As a result, virtually every welfare state in Europe, and many American states, like California, are going broke.

3. Citizens of liberal welfare states become increasingly narcissistic. The great preoccupations of vast numbers of Brits, Frenchmen, Germans and other Western Europeans are how much vacation time they will have and how early they can retire and be supported by the state.

4. The liberal welfare state makes people disdain work. Americans work considerably harder than Western Europeans, and contrary to liberal thought since Karl Marx, work builds character.

5. Nothing more guarantees the erosion of character than getting something for nothing. In the liberal welfare state, one develops an entitlement mentality -- another expression of narcissism. And the rhetoric of liberalism -- labeling each new entitlement a "right" -- reinforces this sense of entitlement.

6. The bigger the government, the more the corruption. As the famous truism goes, "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." Of course, big businesses are also often corrupt. But they are eventually caught or go out of business. The government cannot go out of business. And unlike corrupt governments, corrupt businesses cannot print money and thereby devalue a nation's currency, and they cannot arrest you.

7. The welfare state corrupts family life. Even many Democrats have acknowledged the destructive consequences of the welfare state on the underclass. It has rendered vast numbers of males unnecessary to females, who have looked to the state to support them and their children (and the more children, the more state support) rather than to husbands. In effect, these women took the state as their husband.

8. The welfare state inhibits the maturation of its young citizens into responsible adults. As regards men specifically, I was raised, as were all generations of American men before me, to aspire to work hard in order to marry and support a wife and children. No more. One of the reasons many single women lament the prevalence of boy-men -- men who have not grown up -- is that the liberal state has told men they don't have to support anybody. They are free to remain boys for as long as they want.

And here is an example regarding both sexes. The loudest and most sustained applause I ever heard was that of college students responding to a speech by President Barack Obama informing them that they would now be covered by their parents' health insurance policies until age 26.

9. As a result of the left's sympathetic views of pacifism and because almost no welfare state can afford a strong military, European countries rely on America to fight the world's evils and even to defend them.

10. The leftist (SET ITAL) weltanschauung (END ITAL) sees society's and the world's great battle as between rich and poor rather than between good and evil. Equality therefore trumps morality. This is what produces the morally confused liberal elites that can venerate a Cuban tyranny with its egalitarian society over a free and decent America that has greater inequality.

None of this matters to progressives. Against all this destructiveness, they will respond not with arguments to refute these consequences of the liberal welfare state, but by citing the terms "social justice" and "compassion," and by labeling their opponents "selfish" and worse.

If you want to feel good, liberalism is awesome. If you want to do good, it is largely awful.

Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: DougMacG on July 20, 2011, 10:52:49 AM
The Prager piece is a nice synopsis of the problem.  We have some more left leaning people on the board.  Would anyone argue that these things are not happening or that it really isn't that bad??

For a whole cross-section of America, government has become the provider, but government is only the vehicle.  We are mandating/coercing other people to be the provider including the next generation.  It is common for conservatives complain on behalf of the people carrying the extra burden, but it misses the central point here.  The programs, by and large, damage the recipients even worse.
Title: An offer that can't be refused
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 26, 2011, 09:08:02 PM


I'd like to make you a business offer. Seriously. This is a real offer. In fact, you
really can't turn me down, as you'll come to understand in a moment...

Here's the deal. You're going to start a business or expand the one you've got now.
It doesn't really matter what you do or what you're going to do. I'll partner with
you no matter what business you're in – as long as it's legal. But I can't give you
any capital – you have to come up with that on your own. I won't give you any labor
– that's definitely up to you. What I will do, however, is demand you follow all
sorts of rules about what products and services you can offer, how much (and how
often) you pay your employees, and where and when you're allowed to operate your
business. That's my role in the affair: to tell you what to do.

Now in return for my rules, I'm going to take roughly half of whatever you make in
the business, each year. Half seems fair, doesn't it? I think so. Of course, that's
half of your profits. You're also going to have to pay me about 12% of whatever you
decide to pay your employees because you've got to cover my expenses for
promulgating all of the rules about who you can employ, when, where, and how. Come
on, you're my partner. It's only "fair."

Now... after you've put your hard-earned savings at risk to start this business and
after you've worked hard at it for a few decades (paying me my 50% or a bit more
along the way each year), you might decide you'd like to cash out – to finally live
the good life.

Whether or not this is "fair" – some people never can afford to retire – is a
different argument. As your partner, I'm happy for you to sell whenever you'd
like... because our agreement says, if you sell, you have to pay me an additional
20% of whatever the capitalized value of the business is at that time.

I know... I know... you put up all the original capital. You took all the risks. You
put in all of the labor. That's all true. But I've done my part, too. I've collected
50% of the profits each year. And I've always come up with more rules for you to
follow each year. Therefore, I deserve another, final 20% slice of the business.
Oh... and one more thing...

Even after you've sold the business and paid all of my fees... I'd recommend buying
lots of life insurance. You see, even after you've been retired for years, when you
die, you'll have to pay me 50% of whatever your estate is worth. After all, I've got
lots of partners and not all of them are as successful as you and your family. We
don't think it's "fair" for your kids to have such a big advantage. But if you buy
enough life insurance, you can finance this expense for your children. All in all,
if you're a very successful entrepreneur... if you're one of the rare, lucky, and
hard-working people who can create a new company, employ lots of people, and satisfy
the public... you'll end up paying me more than 75% of your income over your life.
Thanks so much.

I'm sure you'll think my offer is reasonable and happily partner with me... but it
doesn't really matter how you feel about it because if you ever try to stiff me – or
cheat me on any of my fees or rules – I'll break down your door in the middle of the
night, threaten you and your family with heavy, automatic weapons, and throw you in
jail. That's how civil society is supposed to work, right? This is Amerika, isn't
it?

That's the offer Amerika gives its entrepreneurs. And the idiots in Washington
wonder why there are no new jobs...

Crux Note: Porter recently updated his popular "End of America" video with the very
latest developments. If you haven't seen it yet, be sure to click here.

 
Title: Re: Prager: Top Ten Ways Progressives Harm Moral Character
Post by: Cranewings on July 26, 2011, 09:35:21 PM
Ten Ways Progressive Policies Harm Society's Moral Character
Tuesday, July 19, 2011
ShareThis
While liberals are certain about the moral superiority of liberal policies, the truth is that those policies actually diminish a society's moral character. Many individual liberals are fine people, but the policies they advocate tend to make a people worse. Here are 10 reasons:

6. The bigger the government, the more the corruption. As the famous truism goes, "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." Of course, big businesses are also often corrupt. But they are eventually caught or go out of business. The government cannot go out of business. And unlike corrupt governments, corrupt businesses cannot print money and thereby devalue a nation's currency, and they cannot arrest you.

7. The welfare state corrupts family life. Even many Democrats have acknowledged the destructive consequences of the welfare state on the underclass. It has rendered vast numbers of males unnecessary to females, who have looked to the state to support them and their children (and the more children, the more state support) rather than to husbands. In effect, these women took the state as their husband.

8. The welfare state inhibits the maturation of its young citizens into responsible adults. As regards men specifically, I was raised, as were all generations of American men before me, to aspire to work hard in order to marry and support a wife and children. No more. One of the reasons many single women lament the prevalence of boy-men -- men who have not grown up -- is that the liberal state has told men they don't have to support anybody. They are free to remain boys for as long as they want.

I just wanted to address a few of these points. I don't entirely disagree with any of them, but I think some of them are too strong to really reflect what's happening.

For 6, I don't like how it dismisses the idea that big business can be corrupt. I think unfettered capitalism leads pretty strongly to monopolies and abused workers. Sure there is a balance that needs to be struck, but it was only rarely struck. We needed the unions and we need the government to control the unfair practices these people naturally turn to. A lot of the time the unions become too powerful in a company and grind it down with mounting government taxes and regulations, but there are other companies that become practical monopolies, drive small business out of towns, ruin communities and pay their workers far too little once they have a position in the community they destroyed where they can get away with it. Business and government are at odds, and I'd like to see more wisdom applied to taxes and regulation, but I wouldn't want to live in the slave state we would have if the DuPont's and Walmarts of the world had free reign.

7 - Most of these women are better off without the dirt bags they would have been stuck with. The divorce rate has risen directly in proportion with with womens' wages and to me, that's a good thing.

8 - I miss read eight. I guess that's true. I'd say it is blown out of proportion. As a medic, many of my friend's are national guard, army reserve, fire fighters, medics and EMTs, many are men and very young. I have a number of friends with kids, working 3 jobs, one of which is their dream job, and the other two they use to support children and build resumes, all while in their early 20's. I've been a medic for 6 years and an EMT before that, I'm 31, in school full time for engineering. I'm not very successful, but I've paid my way and work hard. Luckily my fiancee is very successful.

You are right about the idea of the boy-men, but I think the writer missed the cause. It doesn't have anything to do with the welfare state near as I can see, because I know a lot of dead beats and most of them aren't even on welfare. It is a combination of the successful marketing of the college life where you live on campus and survive on tens of thousands and loans / and the success of the video game companies. These people hire psychologists to figure out how best to trigger the work / reward centers in the brain. I know a lot of men that live a drug addict life style - staying inside all day getting weak and fat, with withering minds, and strange ideas about society, and it is directly because of the 30+ hours of video games they play a week that they could not quit if they wanted to. I don't think most of them know enough about politics to find the work center and ask for food stamps if they went hungry.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: DougMacG on July 27, 2011, 08:38:00 AM
Cranewings,  I enjoyed your take on this.  Without a doubt government program dependency is not the only negative force out there, it is just an amazingly large one.  I have see the video game addiction thing hit young people as well. 

The real dependents (children) live in a world where certain basics and luxuries are provided to them in exchange for varying levels of compliance with family rules or for nothing whatsoever depending on the family.  The difference typically is the expectation of an exit strategy and in the best situations pushed, rewarded, influenced toward real achievement.

In the example let's say of the mid-20s male, out of school, not working and unable/.uninterested in breaking away from a game addiction, someone is enabling.  Probably high achieving and very frustrated parents.  Unlike welfare however, he becomes less likely to reproduce and pass the dependency on to 5 more generations, as welfare unarguably already has.

Your point about divorces increasing as women become more productive being good is true in the cases of women being empowered to leave a bad situation, but I don't see how the whole gamut of deteriorating social statistics can be a good thing overall.  From what I see and read, there is no question that kids overall do best in a home that has a mother and a father in a loving marriage all under one roof.  (That is not always possible; I write as a single father.) 

We are doing many, many things in our public policies to undermine the health of our own society.
Title: 80 representatives multiplied networth 2002 to 2009
Post by: ccp on July 27, 2011, 09:04:00 AM
These people are immune from insider trading laws???

Where is the journolist on this?

We are being robbed by Wall Street, some banks, many politicians, some foreign recipients of "aid", fraud and abuse in all government programs, illegals, corporate crime (phone hacking which I can assure you is the very tiny tip of the iceberg based on my experience - I have been posting this for years), organized crime, and more.

Yet the Brock DOJ sees it fit to expand the civil rights division to protect gays, Muslims from being called bad names.

And anyone can wonder for my disgust at the world.  And we in this country pretend corruption is only rampant in other countries?
It is rampant here.

Instead of police officers retiring at 50 they should be retrained to go after white collar crime and paid better.

http://pronlinenews.com/?p=11018
Title: Ajami: Baraq the pessimist
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 31, 2011, 10:21:09 PM


By FOUAD AJAMI

In one of the illuminating, unscripted moments of the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama said—much to the dismay of his core constituency—that the Reagan presidency had been "transformational" in a way that Bill Clinton's hadn't. Needless to say, Mr. Obama aspired to a transformational presidency of his own.

He had risen against the background of a deep economic recession, amid unpopular wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; he could be forgiven the conviction that the country was ready for an economic and political overhaul. He gave it a mighty try. But the transformational dream was not to be. The country had limits. Mr. Obama couldn't convince enough Americans that the twin pillars of his political program—redistribution at home, retrenchment abroad—are worthy of this country's ambitions and vocation.

View Full Image

Associated Press
Temperament mattered. Ronald Reagan was the quintessential optimist, his faith in America boundless. He had been given his mandate amid economic distress—the great inflation of the 1970s, high unemployment and taxation—and a collapse of American authority abroad. Through two terms and a time of great challenges, he had pulled off one of the great deeds of political-economic restoration. He made tax cuts and economic growth the cornerstone of that recovery. Economic freedom at home had a corollary in foreign affairs—the pursuit of liberty, a course that secured a victorious end to the Cold War. The "captive nations" were never in doubt, American power was on the side of liberty.

By that Reagan standard, Mr. Obama has been a singular failure. The crippling truth of the Obama presidency is the pessimism of the man, the low expectations he has for this republic. He had not come forth to awaken this country to its stirring first principles, but to manage its decline at home and abroad. So odd an outcome, a man with an inspiring biography who provides no inspiration, a personal story of "The Audacity of Hope" yielding a leader who deep down believes that America's best days are behind it.

Amid the enthusiasm of his ascent to power, the choreography of a brilliant campaign, and a justifiable sense of pride that an African-American had risen to the summit of political power, it had been hard to tease out the pessimism at the core of Mr. Obama's vision. His economic program—the vaunted stimulus, the bailout of the automobile industry, the determination to overhaul the entire health-care system—gave away a bureaucratic vision: It was rule by emergency decree, as it were. No Reaganesque faith in the society for this leader.

In the nature of things, Mr. Obama could not take the American people into his confidence; he could not openly take up the thesis of America's decline. But there was an early signal, in April 2009 in Strasbourg, during a celebration of NATO's 60th anniversary, when he was confronted with the cherished principle of American "exceptionalism."

Asked whether he believed in the school of "American exceptionalism" that sees America as "uniquely qualified to lead the world," he gave a lawyerly answer: "I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism." We were not always going to be right, he added, "all have to compromise and that includes us."

Events would supply evidence of Mr. Obama's break with the history of America's faith in liberty in distant lands. The herald of change was at heart a man who doubted the ability of political freedom to skip borders, and to bring about the emancipation of peoples subjected to brutal tyrannies. The great upheaval in Iran in the first summer of his presidency exposed the flaws and contradictions of the Obama diplomacy.

A people had risen against their tyrannical rulers, but Mr. Obama was out to conciliate these rulers. America's support wouldn't have altered that cruel balance of force on the ground. But henceforth it would become part of the narrative of liberty that when Iran rose in rebellion, the pre-eminent liberal power sat out a seminal moment in Middle Eastern history.

In his encounters with the foreign world, Mr. Obama gave voice to a steady and unsettling expression of penance. We had made our own poor bed in distant lands, Mr. Obama believed. We had been aggressive and imperial in the wars we waged, and in our steady insistence that our way held out the promise for other nations. In that narrative of American guilt, the Islamic world was of central importance. It was in that vast, tormented world that Mr. Obama sought to make his mark, it was there he believed we had been particularly egregious.

But the truth of it, a truth that would erupt with fury in the upheaval of that Arab Spring now upon us, is that the peoples of that region needed our assistance and example. This was the Arabs' 1989, their supreme moment of historical agency, a time when younger people broke with their culture's history of evasion and scapegoating. For once the "Arab Street" was not gripped by anti-Zionism and anti-Americanism, for once it wasn't looking beyond its geography for alien demons. But we could not really aid these rebellions, for our touch, Mr. Obama insisted, would sully them. These rebellions, his administration lamely asserted, had to be thoroughly indigenous.

We had created—and were spooked by—phantoms of our own making. A visit last month to Syria's embattled city of Hama by U.S. Ambassador Robert Ford ought to have shattered, once and for all, the thesis of a rampant anti-Americanism in Arab lands. The American envoy was given a moving reception, he was met with flowers and olive branches by those struggling to end the tyranny of the Assad family. News of America's decline had not reached the streets of Hama. The regime may have denied them air and light and knowledge, but they knew that in our order of nations America remains unrivalled in the hope it holds out for thwarted populations.

Americans' confident belief in the uniqueness, yes the exceptionalism, of their country, rested on an essential faith in liberty, and individualism and anti-statism at home, and in the power of our example, and muscle now and then, in foreign lands. Mr. Obama is ill-at-ease with that worldview. Our country has had pessimism on offer and has invariably rejected it. At crucial points in its history, it has remained unshaken in the belief that tomorrow can be better.

In 2008, shaken by a severe economic recession and disillusioned by a difficult war in Iraq, Americans voted for charisma and biography. The electorate could not be certain of the bet it made, for Mr. Obama had been agile, by his own admission he had been a blank slate onto which his varied supporters could project their hopes and preferences. Next time around, it should be easier. The man at the helm has now played his hand.

Mr. Ajami is a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and co-chairman of Hoover's Working Group on Islamism and the International Order.
Title: Celebrities and the WH/politics in general
Post by: ccp on August 06, 2011, 07:13:46 AM
Well I dunno. Every time I see Brock STRUT up to the podium all I can think of is Basketball and hip hop with that walk of his.  Does this make me racist?

Having liberal celebrities to the WH is common and a symptom of one of the things wrong with our political system in my opinion which surely many will disagree.   I know first amendment and the rest.....   

Beyond the fact that many "hip-hoppers" steal material for the music (as well as practically everyone else in the music industry) via webs of organzied crime, that many got their start in more legitimate business by first making fortunes selling drugs as part of gangs, is the *annoying access celebrities in the entertainment industry have to politicians to begin with.  It is all about the money*.

We don't have to look overseas to find corruption.  Just look at DC.  Of course then again there is no more corrupt politics than local politics:

****Fox News' criticism of the Obama administration is becoming more than a Common problem.

The rapper Common, you may recall, drew heated commentary from the cable network for his invitation to take part in a White House poetry night. And Eric Bolling, a host on the Fox Business network, faced allegations of racism in May after referring to the White House as the "Hizzouse," "Hizzy" and "The Big Crib," and guests of the administration as "hoods" on the air.

On Thursday, a Fox News opinion website called Fox Nation aggregated a "Playbook" column by Politico's Mike Allen about President Barack Obama's 50th birthday bash, changing Allen's typically long headline with this:

'Obama's Hip-Hop BBQ Didn't Create Jobs'

The private party included dinner ("BBQ chicken, ribs, hamburgers, hot dogs, pasta, salad") in the Rose Garden was attended by Obama's staff and celebrities including Al Sharpton, Jay-Z,  Chris Rock, Charles Barkley, Steve Harvey, Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson. There were performances by Stevie Wonder, R&B singer Ledisi, jazz legend Herbie Hancock. A DJ "played Motown, hip-hop, and '70s and '80s R&B."

"The president asked everyone to dance -- and they did!"


The headline, not surprisingly, immediately sparked renewed charges of racism against the network. But Fox is standing by it.

Bill Shine, Fox executive vice president of programming in charge of the Fox Nation site, defended the decision in a statement to The Cutline: "We used the hip-hop reference per Politico's Playbook story this morning which stated 'Also present: Chicago pals, law-school friends, donors--and lots of kids of friends, who stole the show by doing dance routines to the hip-hop songs, in the center of the East Room.'"

The network has shut off further comments on the article, which were becoming incendiary.

"We found many of the comments to be offensive and inappropriate and they have been removed," Shine said.

Reached by The Cutline, Mike Allen declined comment on the Fox treatment of his piece.

But the incident is proving to be entertaining fodder in other Washington media circles. Talking Points Memo started a #HipHopBBQActs hashtag for Twitter users to come up with imaginary names for "grill-themed" rap performers, such as "KRS-A1" or "Too $hortribs."****

Title: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces - Thomas Sowell
Post by: DougMacG on August 09, 2011, 10:52:47 AM
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | Random thoughts on the passing scene:
By Thomas Sowell

The next time a member of the British royal family gets married, I hope they elope and spare us all another 24/7 media orgy.

Does the "not guilty" verdict in the Casey Anthony child murder trial mean that the jury succumbed to the confusion between "beyond a reasonable doubt" and "beyond any conceivable doubt"? The word "reasonable" is not put in there just for decoration.

We seem to be living in an age when nobody can be bothered to answer their telephone, but everybody has a recorded message telling us how important our phone call is to them.

President Obama often talks about wanting to raise taxes on "millionaires and billionaires" but — in his actual tax proposals — higher taxes usually begin with couples earning $250,000 between them. Apparently that makes you a millionaire or a billionaire.

It doesn't seem very scientific to have a good-looking nurse taking a man's blood pressure.

As the British have lost their empire and, more important, lost their respect for laws and standards, Britannia has gone from ruling the waves to waiving the rules.

The difference between mob rule and democracy was never more sharply demonstrated than by labor unions' attempts to prevent the Wisconsin voters' elected representatives from carrying out their official duties at the state Capitol. What would it matter what the voters want if any mob can stop it from happening?

My favorite birthday card this year said on the outside, "Ageing is Inevitable" — and, on the inside: "Maturity is optional."

Theodore Roosevelt said that his foreign policy was to speak softly and carry a big stick. Barack Obama's foreign policy in Libya has been to speak loudly and carry a little stick. Too often Obama's foreign policy around the world looks like children happily playing with fire.

Every weekday NewsAndOpinion.com publishes what many in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". HUNDREDS of columnists and cartoonists regularly appear. Sign up for the daily update. It's free. Just click here.

Class-warfare politics is bad enough when it is for real. But often it is as phony as a three-dollar bill, when the same politicians pass high tax rates on "the rich" to win votes — and then get financial support from "the rich" to create loopholes that enable them to avoid paying those high tax rates.

It is amazing how many people seem to think that, if you give them your phone number or e-mail address, this means that they are authorized to pass them on to others.

Three little words — "We the people," the opening words of the Constitution of the United States — are the biggest obstacle to achieving the political goals of the left. For that, they must move decisions away from "We the people" — from individuals to government; from elected officials to unelected judges; and from national institutions to international institutions like the United Nations — all safely remote and insulated from "We the people."

Some hotels have been called "historic." But to me that just means old. I don't like staying in old-fashioned hotels. There is usually a reason why those fashions went out of fashion.

Learned scholars still debate the reasons for the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. Learned scholars of the future, looking back on our decline and fall, may simply be baffled as to how we could have been so stupid.

Awkward and uncomfortable hospital gowns for patients just add a needless complication to the problems of people who are already sick. Surely someone could design something less bothersome.

I have never believed for a moment that Barack Obama has the best interests of the United States at heart.

Many liberals who consider themselves friends or allies of blacks are usually friends or allies of those particular blacks who are doing wrong things, often at the expense of other blacks.

At one time, it was well understood that adversity taught valuable lessons, which reduce the probability of repeating foolish decisions. But, today, the welfare state shields people from the consequences of their own mistakes, allowing irresponsibility to continue and to flourish among ever wider circles of people.

Amid all the concerns about the skyrocketing government debt, a front-page headline in the Wall Street Journal said: "Families Slice Debt to Lowest In 6 Years." It is remarkable how differently people behave when they are spending their own money compared to the way politicians behave when spending the government's money.
Title: Western society unrest
Post by: ccp on August 10, 2011, 12:12:22 PM
When I see this it kind of reminds me of the old historical film clips of Russians running through the squares during the Russian revolution - workers rights.  There is clearly a parallel.  Get the aristocrats, the rich.  We deserve more.  Socialism proves time and again what we get is not nearly as much trickle down wealth as much as trickle up poverty.  History repeats itself.  We need candidates who will make this clear.

****Economic Uncertainty Leading to Global Unrest
Published: Tuesday, 9 Aug 2011 | 3:35 PM ET Text Size By: Mark Koba
Senior Editor

London is reeling from three nights of rioting that's poured hundreds of people into the streets, leaving several local neighborhoods in shambles. One man is dead, dozens injured and arrested. 
Leon Neal | AFP | Getty Images
Two police cars and a large number of buildings were on Saturday set ablaze in north London following a protest over the fatal shooting of a 29-year-old man in an armed stand-off with officers. The patrol cars were torched as dozens gathered outside the police station on the High Road in Tottenham.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 

The protests have now spread to other cities, with violence reported in parts of Birmingham, Liverpool and Bristol.

Great Britain and other parts of the world are experiencing unrest at a time of global economic uncertainty and stock market volatility.

Here's a look at what's happening around the world and how economic downturns are bringing protestors into the streets.

Great Britain

Police in London say the violence began during a vigil for a man, Mark Duggan, who’d been killed by police. However, those on the streets say what's happening goes beyond one man's death.

In late June, half the public schools in Britain where closed by a massive protest over public pensions cuts, including three major teachers' unions, customs and immigration officers, and air traffic controllers. Some 750,000 people took part in the protest.

London's press has reported that discontent has been simmering among Britain's urban poor for years, in neighborhoods like Tottenham, where the riots started.

But as one man told NBC News about an economic protest two months ago, "There was not a word in the press about our protests. Last night (Saturday) a bit of rioting and looting and now look around you."

In response to the violence, Prime Minister David Cameron has said law and order will prevail in Great Britain and he's doubled the amount of police officers in the streets and instituted curfews for young adults.

Cameron's conservative government is under fire for spending cuts to social programs in order to help reduce the country's debt. Among those hit the hardest are large numbers of minority youths who have been at the forefront of the unrest.

Israel

Some 250,000 people took to the streets of Tel Aviv, Israel, on Saturday over the rising cost of living. Demonstrations actually began last month when a few people set up tents in an expensive part of Tel Aviv to protest rising property prices.

The protests have moved to other cities in Israel, where some 50,000 people rallied.

The demonstrations have turned into a major challenge for the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Polls released last week show his approval ratings have dropped while support for the protesters is high.

Netanyahu has announced a series of reforms including freeing up land for construction and offering tax breaks. But the reforms have only increased anger in the streets, according to reports.

Here are some of the demands from protestors, according to Reuters:

Increase personal tax brackets for top earners
Enshrine the right to housing in the law; introduce rent controls; boost mortgage relief
Stop further privatization of things such as health facilities
Provide free education for all from the age of three months
Raise the minimum wage to 50 percent of the average wage
Spain, Greece , Portugal

All three of these European Union nations have experienced protests and rioting in reaction to government austerity programs and bad economic conditions.

 
Aris Messinis | AFP | Getty Images
Demonstrators shout slogans against government's recent austerity economy measures during a protest in Athens.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 

In late June, riots broke out in Athens and other parts of Greece as the country's parliament voted to approve severe cutbacks in government spending.

Dozens were hurt and businesses destroyed as police battled rioters with tear gas and night sticks.

Greek lawmakers made the cuts in order to receive more bailout money from the International Monetary Fund and European Union—or run the risk of defaulting on their debts.

In Spain, thousands of people turned out in late May to protest the country's 21 percent unemployment rate.

They also demonstrated against government corruption and austerity measures to reign in the country's debt. Hundreds of people set up tents in a Madrid square and spent a week there in protest.

Portugal saw massive strikes and protests last March in response to government spending cuts. At least 200,000 people gathered in Lisbon.

The Philippines

Thousand of workers took to the streets throughout the country in May of this year to march for higher pay. They demanded better wages in light of rising inflation, including higher oil prices.

They called on the government of President Benigno Aquino III to do more to help protect jobs.

In reaction, the government held job fairs as hundreds of workers have been laid off as the economy slumps. Workers say that effort has fallen far short of what they want.

China

Nearly 1,000 cab drivers in eastern China blocked traffic and protested on Aug. 1 over rising fuel costs. It was the latest sign of discontent about the country's surging inflation.

Inflation is hitting China hard, with food prices recently increasing 12 percent. Many Chinese officials are reported concerned that inflation, along with rising property prices, could lead to even more unrest.

This past June, thousands of workers battled for three days with police in the capital city of the southern Chinese province of Guangdong. They were protesting declining living standards.

The recent protests can be traced back to February of this year, in what was an attempt to copy the Arab Spring uprising. That's when calls through Chinese social networks were sent out for an uprising in several local cities.

However, reports say the turnout was small in comparison to the enormous police presence and there were more clashes between journalists and officials than demonstrators.

Syria

In another legacy from the Arab Spring, protests and riots in Syria against the rule of President Bashar al-Assad have been going on for five months.

Reports say at least 1,600 people have been killed by government forces.

The demonstrations are a combination of calls for economic as well as political changes. Assad's government has promised a package of reforms including higher wages, letting political parties exist, easing restrictions on the media, and a new anti-corruption drive. But so far, none of the measures has been set in place.

Last week Assad sent troops and tanks to quell the mostly Sunni Muslim city of Hama in central Syria, and the army launched a similar assault on Sunday against Deir al-Zor.

Syria has cracked down with deadly force on protests in the past. In 1982 then-president Hafez al Assad—the father of Bashar al-Assad—sent troops into the Syrian town of Hama, killing between 10,000 and 40,000 people.

Syria's Arab neighbors as well as the United States have called for Assad to step down. He's ruled Syria for the past 11 years after succeeding his father. Assad says he has no intention of giving up his post as president.****

Title: Re: Western society unrest
Post by: G M on August 10, 2011, 12:20:55 PM
The capitalist system cannot feed the endless appetite of the welfare state. Europe is running out of "other people's money" and we are not far behind. A hard collision with reality is coming up.
Title: VDH on the UK and US riots
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 18, 2011, 07:22:50 AM


A once civil and orderly England was recently torn apart by rioting and looting -- at first by mostly minority youth, but eventually also by young Brits in general. This summer, a number of American cities witnessed so-called "flash mobs" -- mostly African-American youths who swarmed at prearranged times to loot stores or randomly attack those of other races and classes.

The mayhem has reignited an old debate in the West. Are such criminally minded young Americans and British turning to violence in protest over inequality, poverty and bleak opportunities? The Left, of course, often blames cutbacks in the tottering welfare state and high unemployment. The havoc and mayhem, in other words, are a supposed wake-up call in an age of insolvency not to cut entitlements, but to tax the affluent to redistribute more of their earnings to those unfairly deprived.

The Right counters that the problem is not too few state subsidies, but far too many. The growing -- and now unsustainable -- state dole of the last half-century eroded self-reliance and personal initiative. The logical result is a dependent underclass spanning generations that becomes ever more unhappy and unsatisfied the more it is given from others. Today's looters have plenty to eat. That is why they target sneaker and electronics stores -- to enjoy the perks of life they either cannot or will not work for.

We might at least agree on a few facts behind the violence. First, much of the furor is because poverty is now seen as a relative, not an absolute, condition. Per-capita GDP is $47,000 in the U.S. and $35,000 in Britain. In contrast, those rioting in impoverished Syria (where average GDP is about $5,000) or Egypt (about $6,000) worry about being hungry or being shot for their views, rather than not acquiring a new BlackBerry or a pair of Nikes. Inequality, not Tiny Tim-like poverty, is the new Western looter's complaint.

So when the president lectures about fat-cat "corporate jet owners," he doesn't mean that greed prevents the lower classes from flying on affordable commercial jets -- only that a chosen few in luxury aircraft, like himself, reach their destinations a little more quickly and easily. Not having what someone richer has is our generation's lament instead of lacking elemental shelter, food or electricity. The problem is not that the bathwater in Philadelphia is not as hot as in Martha's Vineyard, but that the conditions under which it is delivered in comparison are far more basic and ordinary.

Second, the wealthy have not set an example that hard work and self-discipline leads to well-deserved success and the good life. Recently, a drunken, affluent young prospect for the U.S. ski team urinated on a sleeping 11-year old during a transcontinental flight. And the more the psychodramas of drones like Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton, or some members of the royal family, become headline news, the more we see boredom and corruption among the pampered elite. The behavior of John Edwards, Eliot Spitzer, Dominique Strauss-Kahn or Arnold Schwarzenegger does not remind us that good habits of elite public figures follow from well-deserved riches and acclaim -- but only that with today's wealth and power comes inevitable license and decadence.

Third, communism may be dead, but Marxist-inspired materialism still measures the good life only by equal access to "things." We can argue whether those who loot a computer store are spoiled or oppressed. But even a person in faded jeans and a worn T-shirt can still find all sorts of spiritual enrichment at no cost in either a museum or a good book. Did we forget that in our affluent postmodern society, being poor is often an impoverishment of the mind, not necessarily the result of a cruel physical world?

Finally, there is far too much emphasis on government as the doting, problem-solving parent. What made Western civilization rich and liberal was not just free-market capitalism and well-funded constitutional government, but the role of the family, community and church in reminding the emancipated individual of an affluent society that he should not always do what he was legally permitted to. Destroy these bridles, ridicule the old shame culture of the past, and we end up with unchecked appetites -- as we now witness from a smoldering London to the flash mobbing in Wisconsin.

Our high-tech angry youth are deprived not just because their elders put at risk their future subsidies, but because they were not taught what real wealth is -- and where and how it is obtained and should be used.
Title: Huxley vs. Orwell
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 22, 2011, 09:28:33 AM
http://www.egodialogues.com/words-language/huxley-orwell.php
Title: Words fail , , ,
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 31, 2011, 08:22:33 AM
Tis a rare event, but I am speechless , , ,

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUj-m6Gq_2Y&feature=player_embedded
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on August 31, 2011, 08:49:18 AM
Crafty,

Wow!

If everyone thought like her we would be back to the stone age.

I am not sure what her alternative would be.  Someone has to build shelter and gather, grow, or hunt for food even without civilization.

She thinks people stopped working under communism?

And she might wonder why people might not want to hire her?

Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 31, 2011, 09:21:09 AM
39,000+ reads too, though some may be of folks like you and me , , ,
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: DougMacG on August 31, 2011, 10:59:54 AM
"Why do we have to pay f*ckin rent all our lives - all our lives?  Why?  Why?? Why can't we just pay f*ckin rent for like maybe 10 years, you know, you stay in a place, you know pay f*ckin rent like 10 years and after that you shouldn't have to pay rent again ever and I mean like ever for as long as you live."

Youtube offers a sneak inside peak into my world.  :-(  


Title: 21 minutes w George Gilder
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 02, 2011, 11:11:27 AM


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVjvkVNuM5A
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on September 02, 2011, 01:07:02 PM
"Why do we have to pay f*ckin rent all our lives - all our lives?  Why?  Why?? Why can't we just pay f*ckin rent for like maybe 10 years, you know, you stay in a place, you know pay f*ckin rent like 10 years and after that you shouldn't have to pay rent again ever and I mean like ever for as long as you live."

Well if she worked for me the answer would be simple:

Why can't I pay you a wage for ten years than you work for me forever for nothing.  I mean I shouldn't have to pay you a f* wage forever!  :-D
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: DougMacG on September 02, 2011, 09:11:20 PM
I enjoyed the Gilder interview very much.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: prentice crawford on September 03, 2011, 10:21:19 PM
 
 Obama Looking Like Job Killer In Chief
By Peter Schiff | Forbes – Fri, Sep 2, 2011tweet35Share7EmailPrintRelated Content
Obama Looking Like Job Killer In Chief
Friday morning, many on Wall Street were stunned by the big fat zero put up by the August jobs report, the worst showing in 11 months. The data convinced many previously optimistic economists that the United States will slip back into recession.

I believe that we have been in one giant recession all along that was only temporarily interrupted by trillions of useless and destructive deficit and stimulus spending.  Unfortunately, the August numbers will increase the talk of government efforts to stimulate the economy.

As President Obama prepares to unveil a new plan for the Federal Government to create jobs, evidence is rapidly piling up on how his administration is actively destroying jobs with stunning efficiency. Recent examples of this trend are enough to make anyone with even a casual respect for America’s former economic prowess hang their head in disgust.

The assault on private sector employment began in April when the democrat controlled National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) issued a complaint seeking to force Boeing aircraft to move Boeing’s newly opened non-union production facilities in South Carolina back to its union controlled plants in Washington State. Although Boeing simply says that it is looking to open a cost effective domestic manufacturing facility (an endangered species) to employ American workers, the NLRB alleges that the company was punishing union workers in Washington for past strikes.

Despite a lack of any direct evidence that Boeing was being punitive, and the fact that the company was not laying off any union workers, the NLRB has not backed down. Against little public support and nearly universal revulsion among business leaders, the NLRB is continuing its campaign to keep Boeing from exercising its freedoms and to employ people in a manner that makes sense for its business.

The Boeing move served notice that the Obama’s loyalties were firmly tied to the Union interests that were so critical to his election in 2008. This week, the anti-business tendencies of the administration came into even sharper focus.

In the telecommunications industry, service provider AT&T made the seemingly essential move in its attempt to acquire wireless specialist T-Mobile. But the Justice Department sued to block the $39 billion deal on antitrust grounds, saying that the merger between the second and fourth largest cell phone providers would unfairly restrict competition and raise prices.

In so doing, the DOJ seems to be operating under the assumption, without any direct evidence, that at least four companies are needed to provide healthy choice in the marketplace, and that three providers simply won’t cut it. More broadly, competition may increasingly come from outside the telecommunications sector (in particular from cable and satellite industries).

Plus, with the speed of technological change, who knows what types of competitors will arise in the years to come. The situation reminds me of the broken merger in 2004 and 2005 between Blockbuster Video and Hollywood Video. Based on antitrust concerns emanating from the Justice Department, Blockbuster backed off from the deal. Of course, just a few years later the whole sector was made obsolete by Netflix, and any advantage Blockbuster would have gained would have only been temporary.

In light of the current and future competition that is sure to change the way consumers talk with one another over great distances, AT&T and T-Mobile are much better positioned to survive as a combined entity. In any event if AT&T can’t buy T-Mobile, someone else will. The company’s parent, Deutsche Telecom, has stated its intention to divest itself of its American subsidiary.


So why not help American business survive in an increasingly competitive market? Most likely antitrust lawyers at the DOJ have been otherwise bored with the lack of merger deals to scrutinize (another downside to a weak economy), and this transaction just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. But the legal activism will certainly cost jobs. Even the unions recognize this and have supported the merger.

But the absurdity of the current environment reached a peak when the DOJ, and agents from, get this, the U.S. Fish and Wild Life Service, raided the Nashville factory of the legendary Gibson Guitar company. The raid resulted in agents carting off more than a half million dollars of supplies and essentially shutting the company down. The take down of one of America’s commercial icons apparently resulted from Gibson’s purchase of partially finished ebony and rosewood guitar fingerboards (these endangered trees are carefully managed) from an Indian supplier.

Now here’s the interesting part. The Indian government had issued no complaint about the transactions and there was no evidence that the company had violated U.S. law. The DOJ acted simply on suspicion that Gibson had violated Indian law. Since when do U.S. companies have to make sure that they comply with laws of every country in the world before they produce a product?

I had the good fortune on interviewing Henry Juszkiewicz, the CEO of Gibson on my radio show this Thursday.

After speaking to him, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry at the stunning economic incompetence of our government officials, who in the cause of arbitrary regulatory nitpicking, seem willing to sacrifice the reputation and prospects of one of the few remaining American manufacturers. God help us all.

On the other side of the coin, the government’s own efforts to create jobs in the private sector have met with little success. It was announced yesterday that Solyndra LLC of Fremont California, a manufacturer of solar panel has filed for bankruptcy protection and has laid off its remaining 1,100 workers. The development is notable because the company was a veritable poster child of the Obama Administration. The president himself visited their facilities in May of 2010 and touted the company as the template for America’s “green technology” future. As a result of its politically advantageous profile the company was able to secure $535 million in loans guaranteed by the government.

But apparently government blessing does not guarantee market success. Unfortunately, Solyndra could not sell its products profitably despite the government support and cheerleading. Instead $535 million in investment capital was diverted from potentially money making enterprises to a money losing enterprise. This is what happens when government calls the shots.

When it comes to the financial sector, the government can’t seem to decide whether it wants to preserve jobs or destroy them. After bailing out the banks three years ago (and making some of them too big to fail), it was reported today that the government is preparing to launch a multi-billion dollar lawsuit to recoup losses that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac suffered on mortgage backed bonds (loans that the government itself encouraged the banks to make). If the government were to prevail, job losses would surely emerge in the sector, and the government may need to bail out the banks once again!

So as we wait with eager anticipation as to what the President may reveal in his jobs speech next week, you can be sure that it’s not going to help America regain its competitive edge. The sooner we regard the government as a job killer rather than a job creator, the sooner we can all get back to work.

                                       P.C.
Title: Steyn: Lets Roll Over
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 10, 2011, 05:58:45 PM
'Let's Roll' Nation Mired In 'Let's Roll Over' Mush


By MARK STEYN
Posted 09/09/2011 05:46 PM ET


Though 343 of these firefighters' comrades died when the Twin Towers fell on 9/11, there won't be any firefighters at the official Ground Zero...

Waiting to be interviewed on the radio the other day, I found myself on hold listening to a public service message exhorting listeners to go to 911day.org and tell their fellow citizens how they would be observing the 10th anniversary of the, ah, "tragic events."

There followed a soundbite of a lady explaining that she would be paying tribute by going and cleaning up an area of the beach. Great! Who could object to that? Anything else?

Well, another lady pledged that she "will continue to discuss anti-bullying tactics with my grandson." Marvelous. Because studies show that many middle-school bullies graduate to hijacking passenger jets and flying them into tall buildings?

Whoa, ease up on the old judgmentalism there, pal. In New Jersey, many of whose residents were among the dead, middle-schoolers will mark the anniversary with a special 9/11 curriculum that will "analyze diversity and prejudice in U.S. history."

And, if the "9/11 Peace Story Quilt" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art teaches us anything, it's that the "tragic events" only underline the "importance of respect." And "understanding." As one of the quilt panels puts it:

"You should never feel left out

You are a piece of a puzzle

And without you

The whole picture can't be seen."

And if that message of "healing and unity" doesn't sum up what happened on Sept. 11, 2001, what does? A painting of a plane flying into a building? A sculpture of bodies falling from a skyscraper? Oh, don't be so drearily literal.

"It is still too soon," says Midori Yoshimoto, director of the New Jersey City University Visual Arts Gallery, whose exhibition "Afterward and Forward" is intended to "promote dialogue, deeper reflection, meditation and contextualization."

So, instead of planes and skyscrapers, it has Yoko Ono's "Wish Tree," on which you can hang little tags with your ideas for world peace.

What's missing from these commemorations? Firemen? Oh, please. There are some pieces of the puzzle we have to leave out.

As Mayor Bloomberg's office has patiently explained, there's "not enough room" at the official Ground Zero commemoration to accommodate any firemen. "Which is kind of weird," wrote the Canadian blogger Kathy Shaidle, "since 343 of them managed to fit into the exact same space 10 years ago."

On a day when all the fancypants money-no-object federal acronyms comprehensively failed — CIA, FBI, FAA, INS — the only bit of government that worked was the low-level unglamorous municipal government represented by the Fire Department of New York.

When they arrived at the World Trade Center the air was thick with falling bodies — ordinary men and women trapped on high floors above where the planes had hit who chose to spend their last seconds in one last gulp of open air rather than die in an inferno of jet fuel.

Far "too soon" for any of that at the New Jersey City University, but perhaps you could re-enact the moment by filling a peace tag for Yoko Ono's "Wish Tree" and then letting it flutter to the ground.

Upon arrival at the foot of the towers two firemen were hit by falling bodies. "There is no other way to put it," one of their colleagues explained. "They exploded." Any room for that on the Metropolitan Museum "Peace Quilt"? Sadly not. We're all out of squares.

What else is missing from these commemorations? "Let's Roll"? What's that — a quilting technique?

No, what's missing from these commemorations is more Muslims. I bumped into an old BBC pal the other day who's flying in for the anniversary to file a dispatch on why you see fewer women on the streets of New York wearing niqabs and burqas than you do on the streets of London. She thought this was a telling indictment of the post-9/11 climate of "Islamophobia."

I pointed out that, due to basic differences in immigration sources, there are far fewer Muslims in New York than in London. It would be like me flying into Stratford-on-Avon and reporting on the lack of Hispanics. But the suits had already approved the trip, so she was in no mood to call it off.

How are America's allies remembering the real victims of 9/11? "Muslim Canucks Deal With Stereotypes Ten Years After 9/11," reports CTV in Canada. And it's a short step from stereotyping to criminalizing. "How the Fear of Being Criminalized Has Forced Muslims Into Silence," reports The Guardian in Britain.

In Australia, a Muslim terrorism suspect was so fearful of being criminalized and stereotyped in the post-9/11 epidemic of paranoia that he pulled a Browning pistol out of his pants and hit Sgt. Adam Wolsey of the Sydney constabulary. Fortunately, Judge Leonie Flannery acquitted him of shooting with intent to harm on the grounds that "'anti-Muslim sentiment' made him fear for his safety," as Sydney's Daily Telegraph reported.

That's such a heartwarming story for this 9/11 anniversary they should add an extra panel to the peace quilt, perhaps showing a terror suspect opening fire on a judge as she's pronouncing him not guilty and then shrugging off the light shoulder wound as a useful exercise in healing and unity.

What of the 23rd Psalm? It was recited by Flight 93 passenger Todd Beamer and the telephone operator Lisa Jefferson in the final moments of his life before he cried "Let's roll!" and rushed the hijackers.

No, sorry. Aside from firemen, Mayor Bloomberg's official commemoration hasn't got any room for clergy, either, what with all Executive Deputy Assistant Directors of Healing and Outreach who'll be there.

One reason why there's so little room at Ground Zero is because it's still a building site. As I write in my new book, 9/11 was something America's enemies did to us; the 10-year hole is something we did to ourselves — and in its way the interminable bureaucratic sloth is surely as eloquent as anything Nanny Bloomberg will say in his remarks.

In Shanksville, Pa., the zoning and permitting processes are presumably less arthritic than in Lower Manhattan, but the Flight 93 memorial has still not been completed. There were objections to the proposed "Crescent of Embrace" on the grounds that it looked like an Islamic crescent pointing towards Mecca.

The defense of its designers was that, au contraire, it's just the usual touchy-feely huggy-weepy pansy-wimpy multiculti effete healing diversity mush.

It doesn't really matter which of these interpretations is correct, since neither of them has anything to do with what the passengers of Flight 93 actually did a decade ago. 9/11 was both Pearl Harbor and the Doolittle Raid rolled into one, and the fourth flight was the only good news of the day, when citizen volunteers formed themselves into an ad hoc militia and denied Osama bin Laden what might have been his most spectacular victory.

A few brave individuals figured out what was going on and pushed back within half-an-hour. But we can't memorialize their sacrifice within a decade. And when the architect gets the memorial brief, he naturally assumes there's been a typing error and that "Let's roll!" should really be "Let's roll over!"

And so we commemorate an act of war as a "tragic event," and we retreat to equivocation, cultural self-loathing and utterly fraudulent misrepresentation about the events of the day.

In the weeks after 9/11, Americans were enjoined to ask "Why do they hate us?" A better question is: "Why do they despise us?" And the quickest way to figure out the answer is to visit the Peace Quilt and the Wish Tree, the Crescent of Embrace and the Hole of Bureaucratic Inertia.

© Mark Steyn, 2011
Title: Who gives to charity?
Post by: G M on September 13, 2011, 12:53:41 PM
http://abcnews.go.com/2020/story?id=2682730&page=1

Who Gives and Who Doesn't?
 By JOHN STOSSEL and KRISTINA KENDALL

Nov. 28, 2006


There are a million ways to give to charity. Toy drives, food drives, school supply drives…telethons, walkathons, and dance-athons.
 
But just who is doing the giving? Three quarters of American families donate to charity, giving $1,800 each, on average. Of course, if three quarters give, that means that one quarter don't give at all. So what distinguishes those who give from those who don't? It turns out there are many myths about that.
 


Sioux Falls vs. San Francisco

We assume the rich give more than the middle class, the middle class more than the poor. I've heard liberals care more about the less fortunate, so we assume they give more than conservatives do. Are these assumptions truth, or myth?
 
To test what types of people give more, "20/20" went to two very different parts of the country, with contrasting populations: Sioux Falls, S.D. and San Francisco, Calif. The Salvation Army set up buckets at the busiest locations in each city -- Macy's in San Francisco and Wal-Mart in Sioux Falls. Which bucket collected more money?
 
Sioux Falls is rural and religious; half of the population goes to church every week. People in San Francisco make much more money, are predominantly liberal, and just 14 percent of people in San Francisco attend church every week. Liberals are said to care more about helping the poor; so did people in San Francisco give more?
 



It turns out that this idea that liberals give more…is a myth. Of the top 25 states where people give an above average percent of their income, 24 were red states in the last presidential election.
 
Arthur Brooks, the author of "Who Really Cares," says that "when you look at the data, it turns out the conservatives give about 30 percent more." He adds, "And incidentally, conservative-headed families make slightly less money."
 
And he says the differences in giving goes beyond money, pointing out that conservatives are 18 percent more likely to donate blood. He says this difference is not about politics, but about the different way conservatives and liberals view government.
 
"You find that people who believe it's the government's job to make incomes more equal, are far less likely to give their money away," Brooks says. In fact, people who disagree with the statement, "The government has a basic responsibility to take care of the people who can't take care of themselves," are 27 percent more likely to give to charity.
 
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 13, 2011, 03:12:21 PM
While I am quite sympathetic to the conclusion, I object to the methodology.

The Salvation Army is not a charity as likely to appeal to someone from SF as from South Falls.
Title: Who Gives More: Democrats or Republicans?
Post by: G M on September 13, 2011, 05:45:12 PM
http://philanthropy.com/article/Who-Gives-More-Democrats-or/49377/?otd=Y2xpY2t0aHJ1Ojo6c293aWRnZXQ6OjpjaGFubmVsOm5ld3MsYXJ0aWNsZTpjaGFyaXR5cy1wb2xpdGljYWwtZGl2aWRlOjo6Y2hhbm5lbDpsaXZlLWRpc2N1c3Npb25zLGFydGljbGU6d2hvLWdpdmVzLW1vcmUtZGVtb2NyYXRzLW9yLXJlcHVibGljYW5zLQ==

November 28, 2006

Who Gives More: Democrats or Republicans?


Tuesday, November 28, 2006, at 12 noon, U.S. Eastern time
 
In his new book, Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism, Arthur C. Brooks presents research showing that religious conservatives are more charitable than secular liberals. He says people who support the idea that government should redistribute income are among the least likely to dig into their own wallets to help others. Included in his book is an analysis of 15 sets of data that he says all came to the same conclusion.
 
What are the implications of his findings? Does it matter to charities whether they get more money from Democrats or Republicans? What can be done to counter these trends? What research data was used to reach these conclusions?
 
Related Article
 •Charity's Political Divide (11/23/2006)
 
The Guest
 
Arthur C. Brooks is professor of public administration at Syracuse University and a frequent contributor to The Wall Street Journal. His new book, Who Really Cares, was just published by Basic Books.
 
A transcript of the chat follows.
 
Stacy Palmer (Moderator):
    Good afternoon. I'm Stacy Palmer, editor of The Chronicle of Philanthropy and am pleased to welcome you to our discussion about a new book on charitable giving that is provoking much debate around the country. We'll be taking your questions throughout the hour, so please send them in -- just click on the link on this page that says "ask a question." Mr. Brooks, thank you for joining us and could you tell us what prompted you to write this book?
 
Arthur C. Brooks:
    Ten years ago in graduate school, I began studying the economics of nonprofits and charitable giving. Like most everybody else in the field, I looked at tax rates, deductions, exemptions, incentives. I also looked at the amount of money people gave away, and how much it could pay for in important services.
 
But it always seemed to me that something was missing from the scholarly discussions of charity in America. Charitable behavior is certainly affected by economic incentives, and it is an important source of money for nonprofits. But giving is, more importantly, a question of our values.
 
Giving is a uniquely common phenomenon in America: We give more time and money than the citizens of any other developed country. And I think this expresses some of our core values. To reduce the phenomenon of giving to money flows and tax incentives, it seemed to me, was to miss the main point of giving for so many people. When people talk about their giving, they talk about causes that really move them -- helping the poor, participating fully in their churches, or supporting a social cause their care deeply about. They talk about being their best selves, and they talk about the benefits they enjoy themselves.
 
Giving is a fundamental form of expression for most people, and one that transcends both consumer transactions and the ballot box. Yet I saw that as scholars and experts, we often treat it in a rather materialistic way, as just another instrument of funding or tool of public policy.
 
So a couple of years ago I set out to take a serious look at giving from a values perspective. Who Really Cares is the result. It lays out the best evidence -- as I see it -- about how currents in American culture today are pushing some people to give, other people not to give, and why it all matters.
 
That said, the book is not intended as the last word on giving values in America -- far from it. My hope is to start a conversation on the topic (like we're having here today), and with a little luck, to stimulate more research. I'd love it if, in 5 years we have a bigger knowledge about why people give and why they don't, and I can see which of the results in this book stand up to further scrutiny by scholars and practitioners.
 
My thanks to all of you who are making time to read the book, and to participate in this discussion.
 
Question from Jim Girvan, College Health Sciences Dean:
    I am intrigued by your findings and will definitely buy the book. My question is two-fold: first, as a member of family who gives a high percentage of our income to church and a rather large percentage to charity as well, my wife and I acknowledge much of our church offerings go to running the "business of the church." Do your statistics adjust for the "average 150-700 member congregation" where 70-75% of the offering monies are needed for church functions/personnel/maintenance?
 
Second -- My wife and I also view our taxes as one way we assist the community. By pooling monies, each of us enjoys services that few of us could afford by ourselves, and many of those services are available to those who can't pay. Is there a way your calculations could be adjusted to reflect the social welfare impact of tax monies on the populace as a whole? (remembering that I view them as donations even though I admit they are not voluntary)
 
Arthur C. Brooks:
    Thanks for your questions, Jim. I agree it's important to look at giving aside from sacramental contributions to get a fair picture of things. So one of the things I do in the book is to compare secular and religious folks only in terms of explicitly nonreligious giving and volunteering. There's still a huge difference:
 
Religiously-observant people are generally about 10 percentage points more likely than people with "no religion" (or who never practice) to give to nonreligious causes, and about 25 points less likely to volunteer.
 
Regarding taxes, I think it's true that some see them as a voluntary part of the social contract to help others. The problem with trying to make a measure that combines donations with taxes is that so many people don't pay their taxes with this intent, and voluntary charity is so different in terms of deciding where and how money is spent. Still, I discuss the fact that this point has conceptual validity in some places, especially Europe where social spending really is high.
 
Question from Arnold Hirshon, NELINET (non-profit library consortium):
    1. Is there any evidence that conservatives generally have more disposable income, and therefore are better able to give more -- both on a dollar basis and as a percentage of income?
 
2. Did the study show the extent to which conservatives vs. liberals actually lend their time to help others versus open their wallets?
 
3. Did the study show the value of a tax benefit for conservatives versus liberals?
 
Arthur C. Brooks:
    Great questions, Arnold. In general, there is little evidence that conservatives are richer than liberals. In the data I used in this book, conservatives earned slightly less than liberals, but donated more in each income class. Regarding volunteerism, the gap is statistically insignificant between liberals and conservatives, although adding in religion makes a gap open up (religious conservatives volunteer a lot more than secular liberals). It's not clear whether conservatives or liberals enjoy a disproportionate tax benefit from giving, although you might plausibly argue that liberals generally get a bigger benefit because they reside in greatest numbers in high-tax ("blue") states, and thus can deduct more. Still, the emerging research on tax shows that deducibility actually affects giving behavior relatively little for most folks.
 
Question from Kim S., consultant:
    I consider myself to be a "compassionate conservative" working in the nonprofit sector (having worked in the corporate sector for many years.) It is my impression that the nonprofit sector skews liberal/Democrat, at least at the general policy and advocacy levels. Do you agree, and if so, how can Republicans and conservatives become more of a presence, or have a stronger voice, in the nonprofit sector?
 
Arthur C. Brooks:
    Kim, I think it's probably true that nonprofit managers fall disproportionately on the liberal side -- like academics, journalists, and others. (One big exception is certainly Evangelical and traditional Catholic clergy.) If conservatives want to change the political makeup of nonprofit management, it probably means taking areas like social entrepreneurship more seriously. An example of such an effort is the Manhattan Institute's Center for Civic Innovation.
 
 
 
Question from Marilyn, small Midwestern college:
    Are these two possibilities: Republicans have more money and need the tax write-offs and are more often sought out by charities; some people who describe themselves liberals (like me) share money in ways that are not recognized as charity (such as helping friends put their children through college or helping a physically handicapped co-worker pay for appropriate housing)? My husband and I also served for two years in a Christian volunteer service project, which has, as we knew it would, affected our long-term earnings and hence our retirement income.
 
Arthur C. Brooks:
    Thanks, Marilyn. There's no evidence that conservatives look for (or receive) tax write-offs more than liberals do. But to your other point, it is always possible that folks like you tend to give in different ways from conservatives n ways that are not picked up in the data. The evidence is pretty incomplete on this point, although it suggests that conservatives actually give informally in some ways more than liberals (e.g. giving blood). But it is always possible that, in other ways, they give less. I am open to this possibility and believe it needs more study.
 
Stacy Palmer (Moderator):
    Mr. Brooks will continue to take your questions throughout the hour and we encourage you to join the conversation. To submit your question, click on the link that says "ask a question."
 
Question from Ben Brumfield, nonprofit software provider:
    While corroborating your main points from his own research, James Lindgren has criticised your analysis for glossing over moderates, who apparently donate less than conservatives or liberals. Your own paper "Faith, Secularism, and Charity" suggested that intensity of political feeling mattered more than political orientation. Would you discuss the role of political moderates in Who Really Cares?
 
For Lindgren's commentary, see his post here: http://volokh.com/posts/1164012942.shtml
 
Arthur C. Brooks:
    Thanks, Ben. My comparison between liberals and conservatives in the book was motivated by the common stereotype that conservatives are less compassionate than liberals, so I really wanted to compare these two groups specifically. If I had been trying to argue that politics per se affected giving, I would have spent lots of space in the book looking at "moderates," who often have low civic engagement levels just as often they have weak political views. But the point in the book was to show that charity differences are actually due to attitudes and behaviors (such as religiosity and attitudes about the government) that go deeper than political affiliations. In the book, I actually point out the fact that when we correct for the "deep attitudes," politics don't predict giving very well. In other words, politics are correlated with giving at the group level and contradict the stereotypes about charity -- and that's important to know. But if we want to know exactly why this is, we have to go into much deeper than politics. Perhaps not surprisingly, that second story isn't the "top-line" one that's showing up in the press a lot.
 
Question from Stephen L. Rozman, Tougaloo College:
    Do you make a distinction between giving to religious organizations (including churches) and giving to other types of groups?
 
Arthur C. Brooks:
    Stephen, Yes. But I should note that most of the data ask people to distinguish between religious and secular giving themselves, which injects some real precision into the distinction. My friend Alan Abramson has noted this in a couple of places. One of the reasons I used so many different data sources in the book is because I was worried about imprecision and bias from self-reported giving, and wanted to make sure lots of datasets told me more or less the same thing.
 
Question from Stacy Palmer:
    Professor Brooks, what difference will the Democratic takeover of Congress make in terms of charitable-giving policies?
 
Arthur C. Brooks:
    That's an important question for all of us in this discussion, I'm sure. One take on this question is provided in the last issue of Chronicle by Les Lenkowsky, and I recommend that editorial highly. I think it's fairly likely that we'll begin to see more support for increased regulation on private foundations. Also, the repeal of the estate tax is no longer remotely likely. Of course, the effect this latter policy has on giving is totally unknown, because people disagree whether the estate tax raises or lowers philanthropy.
 
Question from Harvey Blumberg, Montclair State University:
    Is income equality a factor? Also age?
 
Arthur C. Brooks:
    Harvey, Absolutely. Beliefs about income equality and income redistribution lie behind very definite giving differences. Chapter 3 talks a lot about the fact that proponents of income equality by means of government redistribution mechanisms are less likely to give voluntarily to charity than those who oppose redistribution. Lots has been written about age as a factor in giving. In general, folks give more as they get older.
 
Question from Michael Kearns:
    In the Center on Wealth and Philanthropy Charitable Giving Indices: Social Indicators of Philanthropy by State study, the top 10 states for CWP Measure 4 of Giving Relative to Income Ranked by State are: New York, District of Columbia, Utah, California, Connecticut, Maryland , New Jersey, Georgia,Massachusetts and Hawaii. 8 of those states would be classified as "blue states" whereas the bottom 10 states are: Maine, Mississippi, Indiana, Missouri, New Mexico, Iowa, South Dakota, Vermont, West Virginia and North Dakota are almost exclusively red.
 
So my questions are:
 
1) Does this study contradict your book?
 
2) If the premise that conservatives give more than liberals, does it matter which state the conservatives live (i.e. do conservatives living in blue states give more than those in red states). And if so, why?
 
Arthur C. Brooks:
    Thanks, Michael. There are various high-quality indices of giving by state and region, and they do indeed come to different conclusions. The simple one I use (comparing giving as a percentage of income with the electoral map) is supported to a large extent by the work at the Newtithing Group, and also by the giving data contained in the Indiana Center on Philanthropy's PSID data. That said, there are lots of ways to look at geography and giving, and the question is far from settled. But more importantly for this book, the main forces across individuals and states are not primarily political, but cultural. In answer to your second question, I think state matters less than things like religion. If the state counts per se, it will have to do with things like tax policies, which (in my view) are really not all that important.
 
Question from Walter Minot, U of South Alabama:
    Are there figures for conservative charitable giving apart from direct contributions to a person's parish church or local branch, which may be a form of self-serving convenience to keep the institution going?
 
Arthur C. Brooks:
    Walter, my answer above to Jim sums that up pretty well. I'd like to point out, however, that even if giving to churches is something like a "club membership" for some folks, we still need to look at it as voluntarily supporting a civic organization, so it is not entirely dissimilar to other kinds of charitable giving.
 
Question from Tom S., educator:
    I am a fairly conservative Evangelical who gives significantly to charities, both religious and otherwise. I was recently at a liberal-focused educators' gathering where a speaker presented the Evangelical viewpoint very fairly and accurately, though it was clearly not her viewpoint. She mentioned the fact that Evangelicals are extremely generous. I knew this to be true, but was amazed to see the crowd's amazement at this statement. I was also refreshed to hear the comment made. Do you think there is a trend toward recognizing this reality? What evidence have you seen for (or against) such a trend?
 
Arthur C. Brooks:
    Tom, There still exists the stereotype that conservatives n including conservative Christians n are inherently stingy people. This is strikingly common in much of academia, where it's possible not to even know an Evangelical person personally. I hope the truth becomes better known, because it will help religious and secular people work together with the facts in hand, and ultimately to increase American giving. If this happens, a big part of the reason will be because Evangelicals seek more to work with secularists and others in secular giving environments.
 
Question from Stacy Palmer:
    Based on your research, do you have any advice for how fund raisers can best appeal to potential donors?
 
Arthur C. Brooks:
    Well, my first response is that fundraisers should actually APPEAL to donors more. It's really shocking how many nonprofits don't take fundraising seriously, or do so in a way that doesn't honor the intent or wishes of givers. My research shows me very clearly (and I hope shows my readers as well) that giving is hugely beneficial to givers themselves, and so nonprofits do an immense service to individuals, communities, and our nation as a whole by fundraising per se. I know it's counterintuitive, but fundraisers need to understand that one of a nonprofit's highest functions can be to connect people who have a need for services with people who have a need to give (that is, all of us).
 
Question from Tom S., Educator:
    In the Chronicle of Philanthropy article, you are quoted as saying, "I'm tithing my royalties assiduously." Tithing (giving 10%) is a strong Judeo-Christian concept. Did you find any parallel concept or pattern in the non-religious community?
 
Arthur C. Brooks:
    Tom, First of all, I kind of regretted seeing that quote in the story, because I didn't intend that comment to be a boastful one, but rather a statement of fact. I think there are effective standards of giving in secular communities, particularly in elite philanthropy. Where we can use more attention is in "regular" secular charity. It would be very useful to try and establish more of a social code of an appropriate giving level. The devil is in the details of course, and I'm not sure yet how this could be accomplished without being morally heavy-handed.
 
Stacy Palmer (Moderator):
    I'm afraid that is all we have time for today. Thank you all for posing so many terrific questions and thanks to Professor Brooks for offering us a new perspective on charitable-giving patterns. If you have any additional questions about the Chronicle or suggestions for how we can serve you better, you can always write to us at editor@philanthropy.com
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: DougMacG on September 14, 2011, 08:00:09 AM
"While I am quite sympathetic to the conclusion, I object to the methodology. The Salvation Army is not a charity as likely to appeal to someone from SF as from South Falls."

That would be Sioux Falls, largest town in S.D.  :-)

I'll never forget when some years ago the daughter of Keith Ellison's predecessor, a prominent leftist in her own right, told us in a small social group (in my Republican friend's living room - drinking his wine and eating his food) that "the difference between Republicans and Democrats is that Democrats care more about others and Republicans care more about themselves". 

The study above may not be scientific but is about as stereotypical as you can get for a red state vs. blue state behavior comparison.  Salvation Army I think is about as well-known symbol as there is for helping the poor anonymously and out of your own pocket.  So they took the above hypothesis and tested it.  It failed.  More work is needed on that hypothesis.  :wink:
Title: Political Rant & thought piece: Oil prices and Greek debt
Post by: DougMacG on September 20, 2011, 11:02:45 AM
Linking a couple of current topics,  I offer this thought for comment:

Even though the U.S. is perhaps the number two producer of oil in the world with enormous reserves statutorily off limits to production and left in the ground, no increase in production, even a million barrels a day from just one of these untapped sources, would have any impact on oil prices, because oil prices are global and the globe is sooo big - we are told.  No change at the margin can make a difference.

Out of the other side of the mouth, the same people tell us the little bankrupt nation of Greece is bringing down the Euro and all of Europe, even a primary reason, just behind Bush's fault, as to why the Obama administration had no chance to turn around the American economy.

Good grief, people, which is it?  Factors and events at the margin matter or they don't?
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 20, 2011, 12:47:13 PM
Good point(s) but I think it would probably be better in the Energy thread.  BTW, I note that the risk of a hurricaine in the Gulf of Mexico seems to change the price of oil about $2 to $4 in one day , , ,
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on September 22, 2011, 12:33:35 PM
I don't know how accurate his predictions are but Dick Morris has been soothing the past couple of years to listen to because he makes bold Republican winning predictions.   "Have lunch with him" and listen how the repubs can win 60 in the Senate:

http://www.dickmorris.com/blog/closing-in-on-sixty-in-the-senate-dick-morris-tv-lunch-alert/
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 22, 2011, 12:39:47 PM
For future reference, that sort of piece would better belong in Politics, or The American Creed threads.
Title: Pithy quote.
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 30, 2011, 11:56:02 PM


"Fathom the hypocrisy of a government that requires every citizen prove they are insured ......... but not prove they are a citizen."
Title: Victor Davis Hanson: The Coming Post-Obama Renaissance
Post by: DougMacG on October 04, 2011, 08:30:38 AM
"That change of mood will lead the way to necessary reform in a way a less harmful McCain administration could not have achieved: greater revenue from tax simplification, tax reduction, and greater tax compliance, less regulations, entitlement reform, and budgetary discipline. Obama is doing to liberal politics what no right-wing activist could dream up."
...
"sadder but wiser Americans will soon be turned loose with a vigor unseen in decades"
----------------------

Hanson has a PhD from Stanford and teaches History at Stanford, authored more than 20 books http://www.bookfinder.com/author/victor-davis-hanson/ with some of the greatest insights I've ever read.  Don't be fooled, though, he is also a 'biased blogger'.  If you are unable to appreciate fact and analysis from one the greatest minds of our time because it comes from a biased blog, please do not read or comment.  For the rest, this is good material.  Please read and enjoy.  Brighter days are coming.

The Coming Post-Obama Renaissance
by Victor Davis Hanson
http://pajamasmedia.com/victordavishanson/the-post-obama-renaissance/?singlepage=true

The Parting of the Clouds

In every literary, historical or cinematic masterpiece, times must grow darkest before the sunrise and deliverance. Tolkien worked that classical theme to great effect. A sense of fatalism overtook a seemingly doomed Gondor — right before the overthrow of Barad-dûr and the dawn of a new age of men. The historian Herodotus, in literary fashion, also brilliantly juxtaposed the Greek collapse at Thermopylae (the Spartan King Leonidas’ head impaled on a stake), and the Persian firing of an abandoned Athens, with Themistocles’s sudden salvation of Western civilization at Salamis. In the classic Western film, hopelessness pervades until out of nowhere a Shane rides in.

What Was Hope and Change?

We are living in an age of such morality tales, though the depressing cycle reminds us that the gloom is hardly fiction or artistry. For those with a little capital there is only a sinking stock market. It seems to wipe out more of their 401(k)s each week, as if each month cancels out yet another year of prior thrift. Near zero interest means any money on deposit is only insurance, not any more a source of income. Millions are trapped in their unsold houses, either underwater or facing an end to any dreams of tapping equity by sale.

And for the greater number without savings? Stagnant GDP, 9.1 unemployment, another $5 trillion in debt, $1.6 trillion annual deficits, and sky-high fuel and food prices have combined to crush any notion of upward mobility. (If in 2004 5.7% unemployment was supposed to mark a “jobless recovery,” what exactly is 9.1% called? If Bush’s average $500 billion deficits over eight years were abhorrent, what must we say of Obama’s average $1.6 trillion over three? Really bad?)

In response, the Obama administration — let me be candid here — seems clueless, overpopulated as it is by policy nerds, academic overachievers, and tenured functionaries (cf. Larry Summers’ “there is no adult in charge”). They tend to flash Ivy League certificates, but otherwise have little record of achievement in the private sector. Officials seem to think that long ago test scores, a now Neolithic nod from an Ivy League professor, or a past prize translates into knowing what makes America run in places like Idaho and southern Michigan.

Yes, I know that Steven Chu is “brilliant” and a Nobel laureate. But that means no more than suggesting that laureate Paul Krugman was right about adding even more trillions to the debt. My neighbors know enough not to quip, as the know-it-all Chu did, that California farms (the most productive in the U.S.) will dry up and blow away, or gas prices should reach European levels, or Americans can’t be trusted to buy the right light bulbs, or a failed Solyndra just needed millions more of taxpayers’ money.

Solyndra and Van Jones are the metaphors of these times, reminding us of the corruption of the very notion of “green.” In the age of Al Gore, it has eroded from a once noble ideal of conservation to a tawdry profit- and job-scam for assorted hucksters and snake-oil salesmen. Without the lofty hype and shake-down, most otherwise would have had to find productive jobs. Tragically, “green” is the new refuge of scoundrels.

Costal del Sol Community Organizing?

I fear we have not seen such a divisive president since Richard Nixon. Suddenly there is a new fiscal Rubicon. Those crossing $200,000 in annual income now are to be suspect (“fat cat,” “corporate jet owner,” “millionaires and billionaires” [note how the two are sloppily associated — as if 1/1000 the wealth of one is still approximate to the other ]); those still on the other bank, are far more inherently noble (cf. Michelle Obama’s selfless legions, who, like the first couple, supposedly were to take her advice to turn down guaranteed riches in the abhorrent, but easy, corporate sector, to take on a life of noble service and relative poverty as hard-working community organizers and reps).

When did immigration law become embedded within the racial industry? If millions of Koreans were entering the U.S. illegally, would the National Council of La Raza insist on their amnesty, or be indifferent, or worry that such an influx might tax existing social services that provide for U.S. citizen poor? Did we ever have a president who issued a video (cf. 2010) appealing to constituents by their race, or suggested that border enforcement was equivalent to “moats” and “alligators,” or beseeched his Latino allies “to punish our enemies”? Is the president trying to turn enforcement of a federal statute into community organizing?

The Black Caucus has sadly become a caricature of itself, bewildered that Great Society II has further decimated the black community — now in racial solidarity with a failing president, now lashing out at the Tea Party. Yet the latter’s advocacy of fiscal discipline, greater deregulation, oil exploration, smaller government, and entitlement reform would unleash the private sector — and, to use the administration lingo, really create for the inner cities “millions of new jobs.”

So we are all confused by this new Morgan Freeman-esque (one of my favorite actors) racial illogicality: electing Obama was proof of racial harmony; but criticizing him proof of racialism; wanting to end his policies (that have impoverished black America most of all) borders on racism; expanding what will further harm blacks is proof of racial harmony? So one was supposed to vote for Obama to prove himself not racist, and then to stay quiet to ensure that he was still not racist? *

Readers will add here the end of an investigative media, ObamaCare, the new Solyndra and Fast and Furious scandals, “lead from behind” foreign policy, spread-the-wealth demonization of business, crony capitalism, punitive measures against everyone from guitar makers to plane manufacturers, distrust of oil and gas producers, Eric Holder’s politicized Justice Department, and so on.

OK—So Why the Optimism?

Why, then, do I see blue sky and a break in the present storms? For a variety of very good reasons.

Quite Exceptional, In Fact

The American Constitution remains singular and ensures a stable form of government of the sort absent in a Russia, China, the Islamic world, and even (or especially) the EU. Yes, I know Obama has mused that democracy is suddenly “messy” and he lamented to the La Razistas that he couldn’t quite enact legislation by fiat. And, yes, the governor of North Carolina, in revolutionary fashion, just wondered why we could not suspend congressional elections for a bit, while former budget director Peter Orszag (did he not get his trillions in “stimulus” from a Democratic Congress before he fled to Citicorp?) now dreams of a way of running around democratic “gridlock.” But for all that sudden liberal lamentation that the noble ends cannot be achieved by any means necessary, our system of government remains. And it will ensure us a stability abjectly absent elsewhere in the world.

Saudi America

Second, even Barack Obama cannot stop the oil and gas industries. Their brilliant new technologies and entrepreneurialism may well turn us into a fuel depot like Saudi Arabia, doubling our proven oil and gas reserves. Soon someone is going to see that our own natural gas can power millions of cars, freeing our foreign policy from Gulf authoritarians. We are poised for an oil boom not seen since the age of Texas and Oklahoma wildcatting. With a friendly new administration and more exploration out West, offshore, in the Gulf and in Alaska to augment the Dakotas oil renaissance, we will soon save hundreds of billions of dollars in imported fuel costs, stop subsidizing our enemies, perhaps help to lower energy prices worldwide, create “millions of new jobs,” and give a larger window of opportunity for solar, batteries, and alternative energies to become more efficient and cost competitive in the free market.

Pressure Is Building

Third, private enterprise is hoarding cash, uncertain over the costs of ObamaCare, in fear of more regulations and higher taxes, stung by “at some point you’ve made enough money” harassing bluster, and still convinced that equally cautious consumers are simply not buying. Yet, the country is still growing, still needs new homes, more food, and more energy. There are few strikes. Americans remain more self-reliant than our competitors. We are not a shrinking nation with the demographic crises of a Europe or Russia. Soon the mounting pressure will be released by a new change in government and we will see a recovery that should have occurred more than two years ago when the recession officially “ended” in June 2009 — only all the more enhanced due to its delay. When Obama leaves office, there will be a sense of psychological release in the business community that will lead to a far greater “stimulus” than printing more money.

Tempered by Fire

Fourth, that psychology of catharsis that accompanies the end of this administration will last for sometime. The next time Keynesians lecture us on more borrowing or greater spending (fill in the blanks), Americans will perhaps ask, “So we need to borrow at least $5 trillion within three years? Keep interest rates at near zero? Vastly inflate the money supply? Extend unemployment insurance to over 100 weeks? Exceed 50 million on food stamps?”

With an inept Carter, the left’s lament was “weak messenger.” With the triangulating Clinton, it was “weak message.” With Obama, despite the recent defections and liberal angst, there were both the messianic messenger and the true-blue message. What’s left? The American people turned on both in less than two years. That change of mood will lead the way to necessary reform in a way a less harmful McCain administration could not have achieved: greater revenue from tax simplification, tax reduction, and greater tax compliance, less regulations, entitlement reform, and budgetary discipline. Obama is doing to liberal politics what no right-wing activist could dream up.

Lead from the Front

Fifth, we tried UN multilateralism. We asked permission from the Arab League to intervene in Libya. We celebrated treating enemies and friends alike as neutrals. It did not quite work. Israel is still a democracy; its neighbors still are not. Europe’s leaders still accuse Obama as much as they did Bush. Hussein as a middle name means nothing to the Middle East. Putin is still Putin, and China still is China. Soon we will return to a quiet sense of American exceptionalism, but this time more so, given that the naysayers have had their naysay. Proper appreciation of U.S. global power and moral international citizenship likewise will restore confidence. I don’t think we will hear anymore that Bush turned off theocratic Iran, that Bush radicalized the Palestinians, that Bush destroyed relations with Turkey or Pakistan, or alienated Russia. In all these cases, things are about the same as in 2008 — or much worse.

Unmatched

Finally, the U.S. military has only improved in the last decade. It secured Iraq against all odds. Its Predator drones, in challenge and response fashion, have outpaced the new terrorism.

The domestic critique of the Bush-Cheney anti-terrorism protocols has been rendered mere partisanship by the Obama embrace or expansion of nearly every element that was once demonized between 2002-8. Obama’s unintended legacy is to legitimize Guantanamo, Iraq, renditions, tribunals, preventative detention, the Patriot Act, and so on. A Barack Obama who demagogued waterboarding won’t again — unless waterboarding three self-confessed mass-murdering terrorists is a “war crime” while blowing up over 2,000 suspected terrorists (and any in their vicinity, including U.S. citizens) with judge/jury/executioner missiles is not. (I think the current administration’s idea is simply that the more we vaporize in Waziristan, the less hassle we have with live suspects at Gitmo — again, on the rationale that a current senator, posing like Obama in 2007, can always have a field day with a captive live person in U.S. custody, but not so much with a dead one on foreign soil.)

Brighter Days

I, like many, am worried about the Republican field — as is the custom at this early stage. There is more to be endured in 2012. The Obama decline will spark venomous politics of the sort we haven’t seen in years. This time hope and change will be even more “Bush did it!/’You’re all racists!/“They” will take your Social Security.” The financial crisis is not over. We are not yet at the beginning of the end for statism, but the Churchillian end of its new beginning.

Still, let us cheer up a bit. The country always knew, but for just a bit forgot, that you cannot print money and borrow endlessly. It always knew that bureaucrats were less efficient than employers. It knew that Guantanamo was not a gulag and Iraq was not “lost.” But given the anguish over Iraq, the anger at Bush, the Obama postracial novelty and “centrist” façade, and the Freddie/Fannie/Wall Street collapse, it wanted to believe what it knew might not be true. Now three years of Obama have slapped voters out of their collective trance.

The spell has now passed; and we are stronger for its passing. There is going to be soon a sense of relief that we have not experienced in decades. In short, sadder but wiser Americans will soon be turned loose with a vigor unseen in decades.
Title: Mamet
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 12, 2011, 11:59:37 AM


By DAVID MAMET
There I was with a friend, and she was shopping for T-shirts for her daughter's Sweet Sixteen party.

We went to a store in Brooklyn, which did silk-screening. The owner had examples of his artwork on various articles of clothing in the window. These featured beautiful portraits of President Obama, and other compelling images.

My friend explained her needs, and the owner quoted her a price for the lot: shirts, artwork, silk-screening. "But," he said, "I could do better if you pay in cash."

Così fan tutti, which, as I understand it, means "So do they all."

But the man voted for higher taxes. Reminds me of the old joke that Oklahomans will vote their state dry as long as they can stagger to the polls.

What of taxes? Nobody likes 'em, everybody knows they are, in the main, waste, all try to avoid or defray the expenditure by means of varying legality, and yet 53% of the country voted to raise them.

Granted, many voted Democratic for reasons other than taxation, but one would think such votes may have been cast reluctantly, or as a choice of the lesser of evils, but no. Barack Obama was voted in, as far as one could see, in raptures.

But nobody likes taxes.

I was at a neighbor's house for dinner, and they'd ordered takeout Japanese food, and they had, at their table, a daughter recently returned from college. The father was deconstructing his California roll to eat it, retail, and the newly enlightened freshman explained to him that to do so was to disrespect the sushi chef who had labored to make the roll just so, and was his work worth nothing?

I commented that his work was, obviously, worth what one had paid for it—else one would not have paid—and that the price did not include "respect," and neither would the chef have requested it, for he was interested only in selling his work, after which the buyer was free to dispose of it however he would.

And I did not say, but wondered, what of respect for the poor father, who had, not incidentally, worked for the money to buy the California roll and, sorrowfully, for the money to send the young woman off to college to fill her head with trash?

How had the young Stalinist come to assume the mantle of Upholder of All Things Good; and how had the T-shirt maker come to vote against his own financial interests?

For, the more I think about it, the more the question of taxes is central to that of liberty in general. For the question is: Who is to run the country? Is it to be run by its citizens, free to exchange goods and services for mutual benefit, or by the government, increasing both its powers and its corruption by the ability to tax?

And who would be these Solons who would run our government, but the good-willed and otherwise unemployable, content to suck at the government tit, and spout trash for a living—e.g., that one may disrespect an absent sushi chef by an incorrect method of eating his California roll, or that a proportion of races in the workplace differing from the proportion of races in the populace at large is de facto evidence of discrimination?

Cut taxes and these intellectual wards of the state will have to find a method of support that actually fulfills a need. Cut taxes and the "special interests" will have no incentive to bribe or "support" a candidate to the tune of a fortune, for the candidate, if elected, will have no ability to repay the bribe.

Senators and presidents start poor and end up rich. Where did this money come from?

Whom did they have to please in order to reap the rewards, direct and indirect, upon which they retire?

Why did the T-shirt maker have to whisper when he made his offer of a legitimate exchange? And who did he think was going to pay the increased taxes he voted for? Certainly not himself, as he (like everyone else) was going to dodge as many as he could. Who but "the Rich," that magical invocation of a group in opposition to which we citizens have time and again impoverished ourselves?

The shirt maker voted for Obama, the purchaser of sushi voted for Obama. I did not vote for Obama.

Mr. Mamet is a playwright and screenwriter. His latest book, "The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture" (Sentinel), was published in June
Title: WSJ: Generational War
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 15, 2011, 11:18:39 AM


There is no law of nature or human action that a phenomenon like Occupy Wall Street must mean any single, consistent or coherent thing.

There is a law of the media that media attention begets media attention, that the presence of young people (especially female) makes for more eye-catching pictures. It also goes without saying that Occupy Wall Street, because it's taking place in the media capital New York City, benefits from critical mass effects that wouldn't apply to Occupy Boston or Occupy Atlanta. That Americans are gathering publicly to blame Wall Street and "corporate greed" for their troubles is, itself, decidedly not a novelty. On any given day, everyone from auto workers to airline pilots to AARP members can be found demonstrating to protect threatened benefits and livelihoods.

Now these groups have rushed to Manhattan's Zuccotti Park to partake of the media adoration that eluded their earlier efforts. The reason is not a mystery: The Sixties nostalgia occasioned by Occupy Wall Street isn't so easy to drum up when you're middle-class waddlers marching against health-care cuts in Madison, Wis., earlier in the year.

Yet these older folks—let's call them "giveback" nation—are more representative of our age's political pains, which will continue for the indefinite future. Try to reconcile their interests with those of college-age protesters—it's hard to do. The young protestors want jobs; they want someone else to pay high taxes; they likely don't want to pay a penny more for a new car or plane ticket than necessary in a competitive market.

Throw into the ménage a certain kind of Wall Street billionaire who craves to be heard saying he "understands" the grievances of the youngsters. Joe Kennedy was at least more honest about the existential dread of the truly rich when he told a friend he supported the New Deal because, as he put it, he would gladly give up half of everything he owned in order to be assured of keeping the other half.

All these things flow through Occupy Wall Street, but there may be reason to be thankful for it, indeed (in a fashion) thankful for the economic mess that occasions the protests.

The reason is found in a chart routinely produced by the Social Security Administration, showing the ratio of active workers to retirees falling by 33%, from roughly three-to-one today to two-to-one, over the next five presidential cycles. Given our closely fought elections, that trend is no friend to the young and would-be productive.

Related Video
 Dorothy Rabinowitz on the Occupy Wall Street protests.
..We've mentioned before Henning Bohn, an interesting University of California at Santa Barbara economist, who argues that, precisely because of these demographics, a median-age voter in successive future elections will rationally vote for higher taxes in order to secure his or her expected Social Security and Medicare benefits. Like many liberal economists, he also argues that extraordinarily low federal borrowing costs are key to making the numbers work. He even suggests that a rational taxpayer should prefer unfunded public pension programs because the return on any tax dollars injected into them would be less than the rate he pays on his mortgage and car loans.

In a recent paper, though, Mr. Bohn has a new worry: The explosion in federal deficits since the 2008 economic crisis, which he fears might "justify reasonable doubts about [U.S.] solvency and monetary stability and thus undermine a financing strategy built on the perception that U.S. debt is safe."

Professor Bohn probably won't share this view, but one response, then, might be: Hooray for the economic crisis. Hooray for the political stresses of the welfare state, of which Occupy Wall Street is an inchoate emblem.

Especially if you doubt whether higher taxes and relentless borrowing would really allow American society to finance the baby boom's retirement without undermining the economic growth ultimately needed to square the circle. Especially if you doubt that what works in, say, Denmark (a far-reaching welfare state combined with adequate growth) can be replicated here. Danes leave their babies in strollers on the street when they enter a restaurant. They don't lock their doors. What economists call a high degree of "social trust" discourages Danes from abusing the welfare state and thus makes their fellow Danes happier to finance it.

America is an altogether bigger, more diverse, more raucous, more federal society, in which congressional earmarks (though not significant money in themselves) are an apt symbol of the relentless individual and group self-seeking (and the hostility to other people's interests) that characterizes American politics. Come to think of it, the Occupy Wall Street cavalcade is an apt symbol too. That's why it may be a blessing in disguise that we're having our political crisis now, rather than 20 years from now, when demographics will have turned even more unfavorable to the productive economy.

Title: Steyn, Malkin, North
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 17, 2011, 05:05:58 PM
The Foundation
"Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition." --Thomas Jefferson
Opinion in Brief
 
"American Autumn" or Red October
"Take, for example, the complaints of the young Americans currently 'occupying' Wall Street. Many protesters have told sympathetic reporters that 'it's our Arab Spring.' Put aside the differences between brutal totalitarian dictatorships and a republic of biennial elections, and simply consider it in economic terms: At the 'Occupy' demonstrations, not-so-young college students are demanding that their tuition debt be forgiven. In Egypt, half the population lives in poverty; the country imports more wheat than any other nation on the planet, and the funds to do that will dry up in a couple months' time. They're worrying about starvation, not how to fund half a decade of Whatever Studies at Complacency U. One sympathizes. When college tuition is $50,000 a year, you can't 'work your way through college' -- because, after all, an 18-year-old who can earn 50-grand a year wouldn't need to go to college, would he? Nevertheless, his situation is not the same as some guy halfway up the Nile living on $2 a day: One is a crisis of the economy, the other is a crisis of decadence. And, generally, the former are far easier to solve. My colleague Rich Lowry correctly notes that many of the beleaguered families testifying on the 'We are the 99%' websites have real problems. However, the 'Occupy' movement has no real solutions, except more government, more spending, more regulation, more bureaucracy, more unsustainable lethargic pseudo-university with no return on investment, more more more of what got us into this hole. ... One of their demands is for a trillion dollars in 'environmental restoration.' Hey, why not? It's only a trillion. Beneath the allegedly young idealism are very cobwebbed assumptions about societal permanence. The agitators for 'American Autumn' think that such demands are reasonable for no other reason than that they happen to have been born in America, and expectations that no other society in human history has ever expected are just part of their birthright. But a society can live on the accumulated capital of a glorious inheritance only for so long." --columnist Mark Steyn

For the Record
"When fiscally conservative tea party activists held protests over the past two years, they filed for all the required permits and paid for their own power. Occupy Boston, by contrast, neither sought nor obtained any proper permits at any level, according to the Boston Globe. Instead, city and park officials have been cowed into providing them gratis electricity and camp space lest there be 'conflict.' Many of these occupiers are primarily occupied as paid rent-a-mobsters for unions, left-wing think tanks and the radical Working Families Party. While one collective hand soaks the taxpayers, the other hand is busy soliciting free stuff. Occupy Los Angeles activists took to Skype on their laptops to solicit donations of iPhones and iPads. Occupy Wall Street members on Twitter organized an ongoing '#needsoftheoccupiers' drive for everything from batteries and tarps to 'gently used' coats and sweaters, wool socks, sleeping bags and energy bars. Occupy Austin organizers publicized their wish list, including a free barbecue grill, portable toilets, extension cords, a Bobcat forestry cutter for clearing brush and network cameras for a livestream. These are not principled advocates of fiscal responsibility. They are professional freeloaders." --columnist Michelle Malkin

Faith & Family
"While the potentates of the press were paying homage to pot-smoking protesters demanding 'economic justice,' supporters of religious freedom were being massacred in Egypt. On Sunday, Oct. 9, more than 1,000 Coptic Christians held a vigil at the state television building in Cairo to pray for protection against radical Islamists burning their churches, homes, schools and businesses. According to Amnesty International, violent Islamist attacks against Egypt's Christian community -- which predates Islam by more than six centuries -- have increased exponentially since Hosni Mubarak was ousted in February. The peaceful gathering was attacked by armed Muslim militants and Egyptian army units. In the ensuing melee, at least 20 Copts were killed, and more than 75 were wounded. Eyewitnesses recorded victims being beaten, stabbed, shot, crushed by military vehicles and dragged through the streets of Cairo. Dr. Walid Phares of Fox News, one of the first to report the incident, rightly says, 'International news agencies, including AP, were late in reporting the real casualties.' So, too, was the White House in noting that the atrocity even happened. Apparently, Christians being brutalized in Egypt doesn't fit the O-Team's 'Arab spring' campaign theme song." --columnist Oliver North
Title: VDH: Reality
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 20, 2011, 05:29:45 AM


Last week, protests broke out again in Europe, from Rome to London. The monthlong Occupy Wall Street demonstrations in New York have spread. The current unrest follows this summer's riots in London and flash mob incidents in U.S. cities. In 2009 and 2010, Tea Parties turned out hundreds of thousands in protests against the Obama administration's policies and eventually gave him the largest midterm rebuke since 1938.

All of these protests, of course, are vastly different -- or are they really?

Ostensibly, the Wall Street protests rail against a small elite who makes a lot of money lending, investing and speculating -- although the protestors don't seem to worry much about the mega-salaries of actors, professional athletes or sympathetic multimillionaires like Al Gore, George Soros or John Kerry. American flash mobbers and London hoods thought it was OK to take things that were not theirs, since they have less than others. The Tea Partiers were simply tired of paying more taxes for big-government programs that they thought only made things worse.

In the current left and right anger -- somewhat analogous to the upheavals of 1848 or the 1930s -- the common denominator is frustration that Western upward mobility of some 60 years seems to be coming to an end. In response, millions want someone or something to be held accountable -- whether Wall Street insiders, or wasteful and corrupt governments, or the affluent who have more than others.

Unfortunately, political leaders -- unwilling to risk their careers by irking the people -- have offered few explanations for the root causes of all the various unrest. Instead, they assure us that Social Security is solvent, or that pensions and wages can remain sacrosanct, or that billionaires and millionaires are alone culpable. Sometimes they exploit race and class divisions in lieu of explaining 21st-century realities.

So here goes an explanation for the multifaceted unrest. For the last six decades, constant technological breakthroughs and growing government subsidies have given a billion and a half Westerners lifestyles undreamed of over the last 2,500 years. In 1930, no one imagined that a few pills could cure life-threatening strep throat. In 1960, no one planned on retiring at 55. In 1980, no one dreamed that millions could have instant access to civilization's collective knowledge in a few seconds through a free Google search.

Yet, the better life got in the West for ever more people, the more apprehensive they became, as their appetites for even more grew even faster. Remember, none of these worldwide protests are over the denial of food, shelter, clean water or basic medicine.

None of these protestors discuss the effects of 2 billion Chinese, Indian, Korean and Japanese workers entering and mastering the globalized capitalist system, and making things more cheaply and sometimes better than their Western counterparts.

None of these protestors ever stop to ponder the costs -- and ultimately the effect on their own lifestyles -- of skyrocketing energy costs. Since 1970 there has been a historic, multitrillion-dollar transfer of capital from the West to the Middle East, South America, Africa and Russia through the importation of high-cost oil and gas.

None seem to grasp the significance that, meanwhile, hundreds of millions of Westerners are living longer and better, retiring earlier, and demanding ever more expensive government pensions and health care.

Something had to give.

And now it has. Federal and state budgets are near bankrupt. Countries like Greece and Italy face insolvency. The U.S. government resorts to printing money to service or expand entitlements. Near-zero interest rates, declining home prices, and huge losses in mutual funds and retirement accounts have crippled the middle classes.

Bigger government, marvelous new inventions and creative new investment strategies are not going to restore the once-taken-for-granted good life. Until "green" means competitive renewable energy rather than a con for crony capitalists, we are going to have to create and save capital by producing more of our own gas and oil, and relying more on nuclear power and coal.

Westerners will have to work a bit longer and more efficiently, with a bit less redistributive government support. And they must confess that venture capitalists, hedge funds and big deficit-spending governments are no substitute for producing themselves the real stuff of life that millions now take for granted -- whether gas, food, cars or consumer goods.

Otherwise, a smaller, older and whinier West will just keep blaming others as their good life slips away. So it's past time to stop borrowing to import energy and most of the things we use but have given up producing -- and get back to competing in the real world.
Title: Noonan nails it
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 28, 2011, 07:03:42 AM
People are increasingly fearing the divisions within, even the potential coming apart of, our country. Rich/poor, black/white, young/old, red/blue: The things that divide us are not new, yet there's a sense now that the glue that held us together for more than two centuries has thinned and cracked with age. That it was allowed to thin and crack, that the modern era wore it out.

What was the glue? A love of country based on a shared knowledge of how and why it began; a broad feeling among our citizens that there was something providential in our beginnings; a gratitude that left us with a sense that we should comport ourselves in a way unlike the other nations of the world, that more was expected of us, and not unjustly—"To whom much is given much is expected"; a general understanding that we were something new in history, a nation founded on ideals and aspirations—liberty, equality—and not mere grunting tribal wants. We were from Europe but would not be European: No formal class structure here, no limits, from the time you touched ground all roads would lead forward. You would be treated not as your father was but as you deserved. That's from "The Killer Angels," a historical novel about the civil war fought to right a wrong the Founders didn't right. We did in time, and at great cost. What a country.

Enlarge Image

CloseMartin Kozlowski
 .But there is a broad fear out there that we are coming apart, or rather living through the moment we'll look back on as the beginning of the Great Coming Apart. Economic crisis, cultural stresses: "Half the country isn't speaking to the other half," a moderate Democrat said the other day. She was referring to liberals of her acquaintance who know little of the South and who don't wish to know of it, who write it off as apart from them, maybe beneath them.

To add to the unease, in New York at least, there's a lot of cognitive dissonance. If you are a New Yorker, chances are pretty high you hate what the great investment firms did the past 15 years or so to upend the economy. Yet you feel on some level like you have to be protective of them, because Wall Street pays the bills of the City of New York. Wall Street tax receipts and Wall Street business—restaurants, stores—keep the city afloat. So you want them up and operating and vital, you don't want them to leave—that would only make things worse for people in trouble, people just getting by, and young people starting out. You know you have to preserve them just when you'd most like to deck them.

***
Where is the president in all this? He doesn't seem to be as worried about his country's continuance as his own. He's out campaigning and talking of our problems, but he seems oddly oblivious to or detached from America's deeper fears. And so he feels free to exploit divisions. It's all the rich versus the rest, and there are a lot more of the latter.

Twenty twelve won't be "as sexy" as 2008, he said this week. It will be all brute force. Which will only add to the feeling of unease.

Occupy Wall Street makes an economic critique that echoes the president's, though more bluntly: the rich are bad, down with the elites. It's all ad hoc, more poetry slam than platform. Too bad it's not serious in its substance.

There's a lot to rebel against, to want to throw off. If they want to make a serious economic and political critique, they should make the one Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner make in "Reckless Endangerment": that real elites in Washington rigged the system for themselves and their friends, became rich and powerful, caused the great catering, and then "slipped quietly from the scene."

More Peggy Noonan
Read Peggy Noonan's previous columns

click here to order her book, Patriotic Grace
.It is a blow-by-blow recounting of how politicians—Democrats and Republicans—passed the laws that encouraged the banks to make the loans that would never be repaid, and that would result in your lost job. Specifically it is the story of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the mortgage insurers, and how their politically connected CEOs, especially Fannie's Franklin Raines and James Johnson, took actions that tanked the American economy and walked away rich. It began in the early 1990s, in the Clinton administration, and continued under the Bush administration, with the help of an entrenched Congress that wanted only two things: to receive campaign contributions and to be re-elected.

The story is a scandal, and the book should be the bible of Occupy Wall Street. But they seem as incapable of seeing government as part of the problem as Republicans seem of seeing business as part of the problem.

Which gets us to Rep. Paul Ryan. Mr. Ryan receives much praise, but I don't think his role in the current moment has been fully recognized. He is doing something unique in national politics. He thinks. He studies. He reads. Then he comes forward to speak, calmly and at some length, about what he believes to be true. He defines a problem and offers solutions, often providing the intellectual and philosophical rationale behind them. Conservatives naturally like him—they agree with him—but liberals and journalists inclined to disagree with him take him seriously and treat him with respect.

This week he spoke on "The American Idea" at the Heritage Foundation in Washington. He scored the president as too small for the moment, as "petty" in his arguments and avoidant of the decisions entailed in leadership. At times like this, he said, "the temptation to exploit fear and envy returns." Politicians divide in order to "evade responsibility for their failures" and to advance their interests.

The president, he said, has made a shift in his appeal to the electorate. "Instead of appealing to the hope and optimism that were hallmarks of his first campaign, he has launched his second campaign by preying on the emotions of fear, envy and resentment."

But Republicans, in their desire to defend free economic activity, shouldn't be snookered by unthinking fealty to big business. They should never defend—they should actively oppose—the kind of economic activity that has contributed so heavily to the crisis. Here Mr. Ryan slammed "corporate welfare and crony capitalism."

"Why have we extended an endless supply of taxpayer credit to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, instead of demanding that their government guarantee be wound down and their taxpayer subsidies ended?" Why are tax dollars being wasted on bankrupt, politically connected solar energy firms like Solyndra? "Why is Washington wasting your money on entrenched agribusiness?"

Rather than raise taxes on individuals, we should "lower the amount of government spending the wealthy now receive." The "true sources of inequity in this country," he continued, are "corporate welfare that enriches the powerful, and empty promises that betray the powerless." The real class warfare that threatens us is "a class of bureaucrats and connected crony capitalists trying to rise above the rest of us, call the shots, rig the rules, and preserve their place atop society."

If more Republicans thought—and spoke—like this, the party would flourish. People would be less fearful for the future. And Mr. Obama wouldn't be seeing his numbers go up.

Title: The Trilateral Commission; Rockefeller, Morgan, and War
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 02, 2011, 01:17:38 AM
There is quite a bit here I disagree with, indeed I wonder if at times it calls to anti-semitic memes.  Nonetheless, given the sophistication of this board, I think we can handle it.  There are things to ponder here.

http://mises.org/daily/5607/Rockefeller-Morgan-and-War
Title: Logical Conclusions Looming?
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on November 03, 2011, 06:31:56 AM
Read this piece out loud with a couple people in the room and perhaps you too can get your own right wing terrorist perp walk:

Gunwalker exposed: not a law enforcement operation, but something far worse

Whether or not the asshats at Fox News or the Drudge Report want to give credit where credit is due, we here in the gun community know that it was David Codrea at the Gun Rights Examiner and Mike Vanderboegh at Sipsey Street Irregulars that broke the damning news that Operation Fast and Furious was a gun-running operation that used taxpayer dollars to purchase firearms and deliver them directly to the Mexico drug cartels. I was fortunate enough to contribute in some small way by giving them some of the traffic they rightfully deserve and corroborating their exclusive after the fact.

The more I think about the hundreds of lives lost and the families destroyed with weapons provided  by our government, the more upset I become. Almost every law enforcement agency of the executive branch and scattered across four cabinet level agencies (Justice, State, Treasury, and Homeland Security) has a role in arming some of the most violent criminals on earth with the apparent goal of destabilizing an ally on the edge of a civil war and undermining the Constitution of our own nation.

In my opinion, what we are witnessing is a massive crime, and quite probably the legal definition of international terrorism as defined in U.S. Law. I don’t think we are in the range of hyperbole anymore when we wonder whether or not President Obama’s government is guilty of terrorism and acts of war against an ally. I do not think I am being hyperbolic when I say with great concern that it appears that the actions of our Executive branch walk right up to the line of what the Constitution considers treason, and perhaps crosses it.

Chairman Issa, Senator Grassley, and others have trod very deliberately and carefully since the very beginning of Operation Fast and Furious, always very measured with their words and careful in their allegations. Now that we know some of what they know, it is all too apparent why they have proceeded with such caution.

They have before them evidence that a substantial portion of one branch of federal government, led by high-ranking political appointees and elected officials, has apparently broken the most sacred trust, shattered their oaths, caused the deaths of hundreds and committed an act of war in an attempt to undermine our Constitution and Bill of Rights.

This is the largest scandal in American political history, which may eventually lead to the President and his closest advisors facing federal charges in two nations relating to terrorism, multiple murders, arms trafficking, and treason.

I lack the vocabulary to properly relate my astonishment and anger at the betrayal of this nation by the majority of “professional” media that would let the greatest crime in our nation’s history go unreported, or in the case of the Washington Post and New York Times, attempt to slander and libel those who would bring justice to a criminal regime.

We are rapidly approaching a juncture in history where we will either see justice served in a court of law, or tyranny run through the barrel of the gun. The Obama Administration has firmly indicated their favor for the latter.

Let us hope that the Courts and Congress can counteract that criminal tendency, so that we are not forced to water the tree of liberty ourselves.

http://guncounter.bob-owens.com/2011/09/gunwalker-exposed-not-a-law-enforcement-operation-but-something-far-worse/
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: G M on November 03, 2011, 06:34:51 AM
Read this piece out loud with a couple people in the room and perhaps you too can get your own right wing terrorist perp walk:

Not unless you then discuss committing crimes and then take actual steps to commit said crimes.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on November 03, 2011, 06:41:51 AM
Yes, I suppose "watering the tree of liberty" is too vague a reference.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: G M on November 03, 2011, 06:43:08 AM
Yes, I suppose "watering the tree of liberty" is too vague a reference.

Was the "geezer brigade" just quoting Jefferson, or were they actually plotting to murder people? Kind of a key point.
Title: Entering La La Land
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on November 03, 2011, 08:30:09 AM
So I usually don't have much use for conspiracy theories as most turn into tail chasing enterprises in which few verifiable facts can be found. And though I've been following Sipsey Street Irregulars through a lot of the Fast and Furious/Gunwalker horrific foolishness, I confess his strident tone gets on my nerves and think he'd serve his ends better by hyperventilating less. As that may be, now that our geriatric terrorists have been lead off in cuffs, we've got "authorities" claiming their antics were inspired by an online novel written by Sipsey Street blogger Mike Vanderboegh. 300 million plus people in the US many of whom must be talking to others about doing violence inspired by the federal foolishness, yet this administration manages to only roll out right wing kooks, in this instance ones said to be inspired by a major thorn in their side. Credulity is starting to be strained:

Alleged Plot to Attack U.S. Officials Was Inspired by Online Anti-Government Novel, Authorities Say
Published November 02, 2011 | FoxNews.com
 

An alleged plot to attack federal and state officials by suspected members of a fringe north Georgia militia group was inspired by an online anti-government novel, authorities said.

Court documents state that 73-year-old Frederick Thomas, a suspected member of the group, told others that he intended to model their actions on the online novel "Absolved," which involves small groups of citizens attacking U.S. officials.


The four suspected members, who federal authorities arrested Tuesday, were expected to appear in court Wednesday.

They were part of a group that also tried to obtain an unregistered explosive device and sought out the complex formula to produce Ricin, a biological toxin that can be lethal in small doses, according to a federal complaint.

Authorities said the group intended to use the plot of the novel "Absolved," written by Mike Vanderboegh, a blogger who has closely followed the botched federal investigation known as "Fast and Furious." He also runs a whistleblower website called Sipsey Street Irregulars.

During a phone interview with FoxNews.com on Wednesday, Vanderboegh claimed he was not responsible for the alleged plot.

"What kind of moron uses the phrase 'save the Constitution and then goes out to try and distribute Ricin?" Vanderboegh said. "This has got to be the Alzheimer's gang. What political point is made there? I don't understand what was going on in the minds of these Georgia idiots."

The four listed in the indictment are Thomas; Dan Roberts, 67; Ray Adams, 65; and Samuel Crump, 68. The men live in the north Georgia towns of Cleveland and Toccoa.

They had been talking about "covert" operations since at least March, according to court records, discussing murder, theft and using toxic agents and assassinations to undermine the state and federal government.

In one of the indictments obtained by FoxNews.com, authorities said Thomas is recorded saying, "Let's shoot the bastards that we discover are anti-American. And to me the best way to do that is to walk up behind them with a suppressed .22."

"I am of the, uh, old school, Mafia; one behind the ear with a .22 is all you need," Thomas allegedly said. "Of course a .40 Smith and Wesson or .45 ACP is just as good, even better, cause it makes the whole head explode."

Investigators also say Thomas openly discussed creating a "bucket list" of government employees, politicians, corporate leaders and members of the media he felt needed to be "taken out."

"I've been to war, and I've taken life before, and I can do it again," he told an undercover investigator, according to the records.

Thomas' wife, Charlotte, called the charges "baloney."

"He spent 30 years in the U.S. Navy. He would not do anything against his country," she said in a phone interview with The Associated Press.

Thomas and Roberts are accused of buying what they believed was a silencer and an unregistered explosive from an undercover informant in May and June. Prosecutors say he discussed using the weapons in attacks against federal buildings.

Prosecutors say Crump also discussed making 10 pounds of Ricin and dispersing it in Atlanta and various cities across the nation, suggesting it can be blown out of a car speeding down an interstate highway.

Adams, meanwhile, is accused of showing an informant the formula to make Ricin and identifying the ways to obtain the ingredients.

Thomas is accused of driving to Atlanta with a confidential informant on May 24 and scoping out an IRS building there and an ATF building "to plan and assess for possible attacks," the indictment states.

"We'd have to blow the whole building, like Timothy McVeigh," Thomas said during the trip to Atlanta, the indictment states.

Charlotte Thomas said her husband was arrested in a restaurant in Cornelia, Ga., and federal agents were at her home when she returned from the grocery store Tuesday afternoon. She said the agents wouldn't let her in her home.

"They tore up my house," Charlotte Thomas said.

She said her husband doesn't have an attorney yet.

Margaret Roberts of Toccoa said FBI agents showed up with a search warrant and went through her home, handcuffing her and taking a computer and other items. She said her husband is retired from the sign business and lives on pensions.

"He's never been in trouble with the law. He's not anti-government. He would never hurt anybody," she said.

Listed numbers for the other two suspects could not be found.

Attorneys for the men were not identified, and the federal defender's office had no immediate comment.

U.S. Attorney Sally Quillian Yates said the case is a reminder that "we must also remain vigilant in protecting our country from citizens within our own borders who threaten our safety and security."

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2011/11/01/4-suspected-us-militia-members-charged-in-plot/
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: G M on November 03, 2011, 08:40:12 AM
So, there is no way the "Geezers" were actually planning on murdering anyone?
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 03, 2011, 09:27:31 AM
May I suggest we put the Geezer Militia case on the watch list but withhold commentary while we await further developments?

Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on November 03, 2011, 09:31:11 AM
So, there is no way the "Geezers" were actually planning on murdering anyone?

Something of on non-sequtur there. Think my preface to the piece conveys my feelings. Is there some part of it I need to explain for you?
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: G M on November 03, 2011, 09:33:10 AM
So, there is no way the "Geezers" were actually planning on murdering anyone?

Something of on non-sequtur there. Think my preface to the piece conveys my feelings. Is there some part of it I need to explain for you?

Yeah, how you string together that a conspiracy case where the plotters were conspiring to murder people is some sort of gov't conspiracy related to "Gunwalker".
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on November 03, 2011, 10:08:22 AM
Uhm, 'cause as the article I posted states "authorities" are claiming the geriatric terrorists were inspired by an online novel written by the guy who has broken a lot of the "Gunwalker" story.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: G M on November 03, 2011, 10:13:33 AM
So the black helicopters swooped in and used Area 51 Mindcontrol technology to make the geezers conspire to murder people so they could then say they were inspired by an online book written by a blogger covering "Gunwalker"?
Title: 2.0
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 03, 2011, 10:38:15 AM
May I suggest we put the Geezer Militia case on the watch list but withhold commentary while we await further developments?

Title: Wesbury: Death of the Drachma and the Welfare State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 09, 2011, 07:27:57 PM


The Drachma is Dead: So Is the Welfare State
By Brian S. Wesbury
There is a simple rule in monetary economics, which many seem to have forgotten. A weak currency cannot replace a strong currency. In other words, the existence of the euro will force the countries of Europe to confront budgetary problems fiscally, not monetarily. No wonder governments are collapsing across the continent.
 
The Greek government, and some misguided economists, think the failure of the welfare state could be averted if Greece would only devalue its currency. This is a sad statement. A de-valuation is just a default by another name. It puts most of the burden on creditors, savers, and income earners, who face the pain and loss of reduced purchasing power.
 
Without the ability to devalue, the pain of restructuring falls on those who benefit from the largesse of government spending. Government jobs, pension payments, subsidies, and services will all need to be cut. The pain will fall inordinately on those who count on government for some form of support.
 
No wonder governments often choose devaluation instead of austerity. Devaluations can be blamed on the markets and Wall Street. But spending cuts hit constituents – those who voted for politicians who promised that government would never run out of money. This is why governments are collapsing, and will continue to collapse. Voters are completely disillusioned and they are facing a great deal of pain as they get a very expensive education in basic economics.
 
These countries cannot devalue their currency because they gave up the management of money to the European Central Bank. One benefit (or curse) of giving up sovereignty over money was that these countries were able to continue borrowing (in euros) well beyond what they could have borrowed in their local currency. Meanwhile, regulators let banks treat government debt as risk-free, creating artificial demand for this debt. (Just like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac created artificial demand for subprime debt in the US.)         
 
As a result, Greece and other nations are more deeply indebted than they would, or could, have been if they had kept their own currency in the first place. And this is key…the markets will never allow these old currencies to come back again. At least not in the foreseeable future. The drachma is dead.
 
The reason is simple. Consumers and creditors would not accept the drachma today because it would not be a viable store of value. It would be a useless currency that hardly anyone, outside of government, would choose to accept. Imagine if you were a Greek citizen and the government said, “please give us your euros in exchange for these drachma.” You would say “get out of here, go pick some olives.” No one in their right mind would trade a stronger currency, like the euro, for a weak currency that the authorities want to devalue.
 
Moreover, because Greek debt was issued in euros it cannot be repaid in drachma. Creditors would not want to accept it because it would be a weaker currency than their debt is already denominated in. In other words, devaluing into the drachma would lead to explicit debt defaults anyhow.
 
If for some reason property rights were violated and government used force, even guns, to implement a change to the drachma, Greek society would collapse. The underground economy would explode using other currencies and barter, creditors would not lend to Greece again for a very long time. The markets would stop working.
 
The simple rule of money – a weak currency cannot replace a strong currency – suggests that only the British pound, the dollar, gold, or possibly the German mark could replace the euro. This is true for Greece, or for any other non-German European nation. No other revived currency, except for the German mark, could compete against the euro.
 
As a result, Greek fiscal problems must be solved by a shift away from the welfare state. This is true for Italy, Spain, Portugal, and for every other nation in Europe which will eventually face the reality that the experiment with the welfare state has failed.
 
This is the real lesson of European budget problems. Government spending does not create wealth. It never has, it never will, and monetary shenanigans cannot change that fact. Free markets are the only way to create wealth.
Title: Re: Wesbury: Death of the Drachma and the Welfare State
Post by: G M on November 09, 2011, 07:59:21 PM
Well, that was very unWesbury-ish.

I thought happy days were here again.
Title: Andy Stern?!?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 01, 2011, 06:03:42 PM
By ANDY STERN
Andy Grove, the founder and chairman of Intel, provocatively wrote in Businessweek last year that, "Our fundamental economic beliefs, which we have elevated from a conviction based on observation to an unquestioned truism, is that the free market is the best of all economic systems—the freer the better. Our generation has seen the decisive victory of free-market principles over planned economies. So we stick with this belief largely oblivious to emerging evidence that while free markets beat planned economies, there may be room for a modification that is even better."

The past few weeks have proven Mr. Grove's point, as our relations with China, and that country's impact on America's future, came to the forefront of American politics. Our inert Senate, while preparing for the super committee to fail, crossed the normally insurmountable political divide to pass legislation to address China's currency manipulation. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, former Gov. Mitt Romney and President Barack Obama all weighed in with their views—ranging from warnings that China must "end unfair discrimination" (Mrs. Clinton) to complaints that the U.S. has "been played like a fiddle" (Mr. Romney) and that China needs to stop "gaming" the international system (Mr. Obama).

As this was happening, I was part of a U.S.-China dialogue—a trip organized by the China-United States Exchange Foundation and the Center for American Progress—with high-ranking Chinese government officials, both past and present. For me, the tension resulting from the chorus of American criticism paled in significance compared to reading the emerging outline of China's 12th five-year plan. The aims: a 7% annual economic growth rate; a $640 billion investment in renewable energy; construction of six million homes; and expanding next-generation IT, clean-energy vehicles, biotechnology, high-end manufacturing and environmental protection—all while promoting social equity and rural development.

Some Americans are drawing lessons from this. Last month, the China Daily quoted Orville Schell, who directs the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society, as saying: "I think we have come to realize the ability to plan is exactly what is missing in America." The article also noted that Robert Engle, who won a Nobel Prize in 2003 for economics, has said that while China is making five-year plans for the next generation, Americans are planning only for the next election.

The world has been made "flat" by the technological miracles of Andy Grove, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. This has forced all institutions to confront what is clearly the third economic revolution in world history. The Agricultural Revolution was a roughly 3,000-year transition, the Industrial Revolution lasted 300 years, and this technology-led Global Revolution will take only 30-odd years. No single generation has witnessed so much change in a single lifetime.

Enlarge Image

CloseDavid G. Klein
 .The current debates about China's currency, the trade imbalance, our debt and China's excessive use of pirated American intellectual property are evidence that the Global Revolution—coupled with Deng Xiaoping's government-led, growth-oriented reforms—has created the planet's second-largest economy. It's on a clear trajectory to knock America off its perch by 2025.

As Andy Grove so presciently articulated in the July 1, 2010, issue of Businessweek, the economies of China, Singapore, Germany, Brazil and India have demonstrated "that a plan for job creation must be the number-one objective of state economic policy; and that the government must play a strategic role in setting the priorities and arraying the forces of organization necessary to achieve this goal."

The conservative-preferred, free-market fundamentalist, shareholder-only model—so successful in the 20th century—is being thrown onto the trash heap of history in the 21st century. In an era when countries need to become economic teams, Team USA's results—a jobless decade, 30 years of flat median wages, a trade deficit, a shrinking middle class and phenomenal gains in wealth but only for the top 1%—are pathetic.

This should motivate leaders to rethink, rather than double down on an empirically failing free-market extremism. As painful and humbling as it may be, America needs to do what a once-dominant business or sports team would do when the tide turns: study the ingredients of its competitors' success.

While we debate, Team China rolls on. Our delegation witnessed China's people-oriented development in Chongqing, a city of 32 million in Western China, which is led by an aggressive and popular Communist Party leader—Bo Xilai. A skyline of cranes are building roughly 1.5 million square feet of usable floor space daily—including, our delegation was told, 700,000 units of public housing annually.

Meanwhile, the Chinese government can boast that it has established in Western China an economic zone for cloud computing and automotive and aerospace production resulting in 12.5% annual growth and 49% growth in annual tax revenue, with wages rising more than 10% a year.

For those of us who love this country and believe America has every asset it needs to remain the No. 1 economic engine of the world, it is troubling that we have no plan—and substitute a demonization of government and worship of the free market at a historical moment that requires a rethinking of both those beliefs.

America needs to embrace a plan for growth and innovation, with a streamlined government as a partner with the private sector. Economic revolutions require institutions to change and maybe make history, because if they stick to the status quo they soon become history. Our great country, which sparked and wants to lead this global revolution, needs a forward looking, long-term economic plan.

The imperative for change is simple. As Andy Grove pointed out: "If we want to remain a leading economy, we change on our own, or change will continue to be forced upon us."

Mr. Stern was president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and is now a senior fellow at Columbia University's Richman Center.
Title: Re: Andy Stern?!?
Post by: G M on December 02, 2011, 05:09:23 PM

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/print/284671

December 2, 2011 12:00 A.M.
The Problem with China Envy
What liberals want to copy is the authoritarianism.





In 2008, I wrote a book called “Liberal Fascism.” That title came from H. G. Wells, one of the most important socialist writers in the English language. He believed, as did his fellow Fabian socialists, that Western democratic capitalism had outlived its usefulness.
 
What was needed was a new, bold, forward-thinking system run by experts with access to the most modern techniques. For Wells, the label for such a system mattered less than the imperative that we implement a revolution-from-above. He admired how the Germans, Italians, and Russians were getting things done. In 1932, he proposed calling his revolutionary movement “enlightened Nazism” or “liberal fascism.”
 
Wells was hardly alone. Such arguments were being made in all the Western democracies, under a thousand different banners. Most progressives rejected terms like “fascist” or “Communist,” but they still touted foreign tyrannies as superior to the outmoded democratic capitalism of the 19th century.
 
Lincoln Steffens, the muckraking journalist, was a great fan of both Italian fascism and Soviet Communism. He returned from a trip to Russia to proclaim, “I have seen the future, and it works!”
 
Some things never change.
 
Andy Stern announced recently that he’s been to the future, and it works. In this case, the future resides in China, which he says has a superior economic system. “The conservative-preferred, free-market fundamentalist, shareholder-only model — so successful in the 20th century — is being thrown onto the trash heap of history in the 21st century.”
 
Who’s Andy Stern? He’s just the guy who, until last year, ran the Service Employees International Union, which under his leadership spent more than any organization to get Obama elected in 2008, some $28 million. Comparatively, Stern’s influence in the Democratic party eclipses that of, say, the allegedly sinister Koch brothers or anti-tax activist Grover Norquist among Republicans. Stern himself visited the White House more than any other person during Obama’s first year in office (53 times).
 
Stern sees the Chinese government’s allegedly keen ability to “plan” its way to prosperity as the new model for America. It is an argument of profound asininity. China had five-year plans before it started getting rich. Under the old five-year plans, China killed tens of millions of its own people and remained mired in poverty. What made China rich wasn’t planning, it was the decision to switch to markets (albeit corrupt ones). The planners were merely in charge of distributing the wealth that markets created.
 
Indeed, rapid economic growth always makes government planners look like geniuses when the reality is that the planners are more like self-proclaimed rainmakers who started dancing only after it started raining. When the rain stops, which it will, they’ll have much to answer for.
 
Oh, and what about labor? There’s one labor union in China, and it’s run by the government. (The Nazis had pretty much the same system.) Stern doesn’t seem to care.
 
More intriguingly, SEIU is a huge supporter of the Occupy Wall Street movement, which, taken at its word, is most concerned with income inequality and the back-room corruption that comes from “crony capitalism.” And Stern touts China as the model for how to fix things? China has 115 billionaires and at least 115 million people living on a dollar a day or less. Nearly all of those billionaires got rich gaming a corrupt political system.  

Obviously, the core problem with China envy is not economic but moral. To the extent that China’s economic planning “works,” it does so because China is an authoritarian country. (Japan has been planning its economy within democratic restraints and has been dying on the economic vine for nearly 20 years.) You can hit your building quota a lot more easily when you can shoot inconvenient people and trample property rights at will. The Three Gorges Dam displaced more than a million people who were given three choices: move, jail, death.
 
Stern joins a long list of liberals who’ve seen China embrace authoritarian capitalism and conclude that the secret to that success had to be the authoritarianism. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, my usual whipping boy in this department, has written thousands of words rhapsodizing about his “envy” of China. President Obama himself has said he’s envious of China’s president and has touted China’s infrastructure spending as something to emulate.
 
If you want to copy China because its authoritarian capitalism is better than our democratic capitalism, it seems pretty obvious that what you envy is the authoritarianism. H. G. Wells had a phrase for that.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 02, 2011, 07:41:28 PM
GM:

I have Jonah Goldberg's "Liberal Fascism" book and found it insightful.  (BTW Glenn Beck cites it as an influence).

In a very different way, I find the following piece from Stratfor to have a genuine insight.  In that economics is usually and area in which Stratfor depends on glib Keynesianism, this is a surprise to me  :lol:
============

STRATFOR
---------------------------
December 2, 2011


VIDEO: AGENDA: WITH GEORGE FRIEDMAN ON THE EUROPEAN DEBT CRISIS

As European leaders prepare for a crisis summit next week, STRATFOR CEO George
Friedman argues that German determination to dominate trade may be a principal cause
and that some of the smaller European countries may not be able to survive without
protection.

Editor’s Note: Transcripts are generated using speech-recognition technology.
Therefore, STRATFOR cannot guarantee their complete accuracy.

Colin: China's manufacturing sector contracted in November, for the first time in
three years. Russia is worried about investment plans and privatization, and even
prosperous Australia has cut public spending to match an income shortfall, all
blaming the slowdown in the deteriorating eurozone. The head of the EU's monetary
committee talks out the crisis. Poland chides Germany and tells it to show more
leadership. And a critical EU summit is coming up in eight days time.

Colin: Welcome to Agenda with George Friedman. George, it sounds like not much has
changed really.

George: Well, I think everybody's focused on the financial fallout, that's certainly
significant, I'm interested in a deeper issue that's inherent in Europe, which is
the idea of free trade. From my point of view, one of the problems that caused this
financial crisis was the fact that the European Union was built around the world's
second-largest exporter. Rather than having positive balance of trade, the
peripheral countries in Europe had negative balance of trade because Germany was
sending half its exports into these countries. Germany depends on these countries.
Unless these countries can become competitive with Germany, they are constantly be
overwhelmed by the trade flow which, in turn, is going to lead to both the
development of black markets off the books, protected industries in many ways, and
simultaneously, tax bases that are contracting. So everybody is spoken about how
absurd southern Europe's social spending was, the other way to look at it is the
size of the economy makes it impossible. Can Europe continue, in other words, with
pure free trade? Is it possible to solve the underlying financial crisis, the
imbalance between expenditures and the size of the economy, without some degree of
protection. We have to remember that the Germans developed in a protected
environment. So did the Japanese. The Chinese, today, operate in that. We don't live
in a free trade world, or at least we haven't lived in one, you know, for very long.
So, the real question in my mind, that's coming to the fore, is not the financial
problem, that's the expression of the underlying problem. And I really do wonder now
whether the Euro will survive or not, that's interesting in some ways, but whether
or not the European Union as conceived with open borders and absolutely free trade,
whether that is going to be able to survive.

Colin: Of course, there are quite a few groups, particularly trades unions, who are
advocating protection. But once you down that road, you get into what the free
traders call "beggar thy neighbor" policies.

George: Well, the argument would be that the current situation of Europe is "beggar
thy neighbor." I have a larger industrial plant, Germany says. Part of the reason I
have that industrial plant is was I was able to protect it in the 1950's, when it
was developing. I'm going to use that plant to sell products. I must sell products
because my industrial plant is way too big for domestic consumption. If I don't sell
products, I'm going to wind up with 15, 20 percent unemployment. So "beggar my
neighbor," I'm going to sell those products. I'm not going to allow them temporary
protection. I'm not going to allow them the sorts of things that they require to
grow. Well, we see that one of the outcomes of that has been this financial crisis.
It has other roots as well. I mean its not the only one, but it's certainly one of
them. So, the argument that you wind up in a trade war, may well be the case, but I
don't know that with the politics that is developing here, how the pro-Europeanist
elite survives. The situation in Europe is fairly disastrous. You have a political
elite that is dedicated Europeanist. By political elite, I mean not just the
politicians, I mean the bankers, I mean the journalists, and they have just
committed themselves to the idea that Europe must survive. And in many countries, a
middle and lower class that's being really pressed by this crisis, certainly it's
not only happening in Europe, it's happening in the  United States and other
countries, but in Europe, it's particularly intense and it's particularly sensitive
because you have very old animosities. You have countries that remember Germany in a
different way. Many of these wonder whether or not the Germans are doing this for
their own best interest or so on and so forth.

Colin: Yes, and you have the Polish foreign minister jumping in, yesterday,
suggesting that Germans were self centered, and, interesting for a Pole, telling
them "You Germans have got to start leading."

George: Well, the problem is what does leadership mean? And where are they going to
take Europe. Germany is leading, but the interests of the different countries are so
different, the Germans ultimately have their primary responsibility to themselves.
They're badly trying to keep the European Union in place, including allowing the
Greeks not to pay their loans and so on, because it's the Germans that must have
these markets. Remember, if the Germans can't export to these markets, they're going
to be experiencing a catastrophic recession, perhaps a depression. They must have
the European Union functional. And so, many of the things that the Germans are doing
is designed to keep that market alive. And you could even argue that German and
other countries' lending practices over the past three years, the loans that can't
be paid back, were primarily designed to maintain demand for their products, and
keep the process going. At this point, you are in a situation where that isn't
working any longer. So, calling for German leadership simply puts the Germans is in
a position where they have to answer the question, "Am I a German or a European?"
And the answer comes back, "I'm a European because it's in the best interest of
Germany."

Colin: The chairman of the EU monetary affairs committee says, "We're now in a very
critical period." We've heard that before, of course. But the crunch point does seem
to be coming up with the European summit on December the 9th.

George: I think that the crunch point is well past. I think that the framework
holding the European Union together really has dissolved to the point that you
really just have a collection of nations. It seems to me that these talks, that are
coming up, face a fundamental question. They're going to be about whether or not the
other countries of Europe are going to give a degree of sovereignty to the EU, and
particularly to the Germans and the French, who will be in a position to come to
their ministries and oversee  many of their operations, setting limits to what they
can. The Irish have already made it clear that they're not going to go along with
this. I don't know how many governments in Europe and Italy and Greece could
possibly survive, if they agreed to what the German recommendation is. And that's
the problem. There are solutions to this. The solutions either require these
peripheral countries to absorb a massive contraction of their standard of living
and/or give up sovereignty that many of them have fought for, maintaining formal
control. But if you can't control your internal fiscal life, you know, what do you
really have? If you don't have your budget, you have don't your government. I think
you're winding up in a situation where the price, that the Germans are asking to
keep it going, is too high. Paradoxically, the Germans are the ones who can't really
afford to let it go. So you have, you know, not a crunch. It is a reality that is
reared up, and everybody is trying to solve what I think is a fundamentally
insoluble problem.

Colin: Well, I suppose we should end an optimistic note. Central banks, led by the
Fed, have decided to make it easier for the Europeans and other to get hold of
dollars, which may stave off crisis for a few days or so.

George: But I think the most interesting part of this is, you know, we talked about
the Chinese bailing out at the Europeans for the Russians. The lender of last
resort, in the end, is still the United States. And that is one of the interesting
things when we look at the international balance of power for all the wretched
things that have happened in the United States, for all the miscalculations, for all
the incompetence, banality and everything else, when push comes to shove it was the
Americans that the Europeans turned to and the Americans that were able to provide
something of a solution. I think it is a temporary solution -- I don't think it
really solves any underlying problem, but it is a couple of aspirins to take on the
fever. It won't last for a while and I don't think the enthusiasm for it is
appropriate. I'm far more interested in the fact that, in the end, the United States
has retained his role, wisely or not, as the lender of last resort and, just as
money is fleeing to the United States for safety, so too the United States has the
ability to address this question. Whether it is wise or not is another issue that
happened to tell us about how this world works.

Colin: George Friedman there, ending Agenda for this week. Thanks for joining us,
and until the next time, goodbye.
More Videos - http://www.stratfor.com/theme/video_dispatch


Copyright 2011 STRATFOR.


Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: G M on December 02, 2011, 07:54:17 PM
Crafty,

It's all just a shuffling of the deck chairs on the Titanic. The EU/Euro and in the long term, europe is doomed. The future isn't going to be a nice place. Plan accordingly.
Title: Ditch the 17th Amendment!
Post by: prentice crawford on December 10, 2011, 07:14:24 PM
Section 3  Constitution of the United States of America
 
The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State, chosen by the Legislature thereof, for six Years; and each Senator shall have one Vote.
  
Each state has two senators, regardless of the size of its population.  Originally, senators were chosen by state legislatures.  In 1913 the 17th amendment provided that senators would be directly elected by the people.

Immediately after they shall be assembled in Consequence of the first Election, they shall be divided as equally as may be into three Classes. The Seats of the Senators of the first Class shall be vacated at the Expiration of the second Year, of the second Class at the Expiration of the fourth Year, and of the third Class at the Expiration of the sixth Year, so that one third may be chosen every second Year; and if Vacancies happen by Resignation, or otherwise, during the Recess of the Legislature of any State, the Executive thereof may make temporary Appointments until the next Meeting of the Legislature, which shall then fill such Vacancies

 My thought is that the 17th amendment should be repealed and the original Section 3 of the Constitution, should by default be reinstated. This would help curb the power of the Federal government over state governments, which was the intent of section 3 in the first place. Senators would be appointed by state governments ensuring their loyalty to the state they represent, not some special interest group or Party. The House of Representatives is the body of government that was intended to directly be voted into office by the people. It's because of the 17th amendment that the Federal government has been able to gain increasing power over States rights, and is a major reason for the political deadlock between Party's, constant campaigning, corruption and career politicans out of touch with their State's needs. I don't know what group of idiot's in 1913 thought they were smarter than the guy's that penned the final draft of the Constitution and the States that ratified it but they were idiot's and the cause of much of what ails us today. I could keep going but then my thought would undeniably be a rant then.

 Just a thought or a rant, whatever. :-)
                                       P.C.

 
Title: Kayfabe
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 13, 2011, 06:24:21 PM
2011 : WHAT SCIENTIFIC CONCEPT WOULD IMPROVE EVERYBODY'S COGNITIVE TOOLKIT?
In the News [18] | Contributors [159 ] | View All Responses [159 ]

Kayfabe 

Eric R. Weinstein

Mathematician and Economist; Principal, Natron Group
The sophisticated "scientific concept" with the greatest potential to enhance human understanding may be argued to come not from the halls of academe, but rather from the unlikely research environment of professional wrestling.
Evolutionary biologists Richard Alexander and Robert Trivers have recently emphasized that it is deception rather than information that often plays the decisive role in systems of selective pressures. Yet most of our thinking continues to treat deception as something of a perturbation on the exchange of pure information, leaving us unprepared to contemplate a world in which fakery may reliably crowd out the genuine. In particular, humanity's future selective pressures appear likely to remain tied to economic theory which currently uses as its central construct a market model based on assumptions of perfect information.
If we are to take selection more seriously within humans, we may fairly ask what rigorous system would be capable of tying together an altered reality of layered falsehoods in which absolutely nothing can be assumed to be as it appears. Such a system, in continuous development for more than a century, is known to exist and now supports an intricate multi-billion dollar business empire of pure hokum. It is known to wrestling's insiders as "Kayfabe".
Because professional wrestling is a simulated sport, all competitors who face each other in the ring are actually close collaborators who must form a closed system (called "a promotion") sealed against outsiders. With external competitors generally excluded, antagonists are chosen from within the promotion and their ritualized battles are largely negotiated, choreographed, and rehearsed at a significantly decreased risk of injury or death. With outcomes predetermined under Kayfabe, betrayal in wrestling comes not from engaging in unsportsmanlike conduct, but by the surprise appearance of actual sporting behavior. Such unwelcome sportsmanship which "breaks Kayfabe" is called "shooting" to distinguish it from the expected scripted deception called "working".
Were Kayfabe to become part of our toolkit for the twenty-first century, we would undoubtedly have an easier time understanding a world in which investigative journalism seems to have vanished and bitter corporate rivals cooperate on everything from joint ventures to lobbying efforts. Perhaps confusing battles between "freshwater" Chicago macro economists and Ivy league "Saltwater" theorists could be best understood as happening within a single "orthodox promotion" given that both groups suffered no injury from failing (equally) to predict the recent financial crisis. The decades old battle in theoretical physics over bragging rights between the "string" and "loop" camps would seem to be an even more significant example within the hard sciences of a collaborative intra-promotion rivalry given the apparent failure of both groups to produce a quantum theory of gravity.
What makes Kayfabe remarkable is that it gives us potentially the most complete example of the general process by which a wide class of important endeavors transition from failed reality to successful fakery. While most modern sports enthusiasts are aware of wrestling's status as a pseudo sport, what few alive today remember is that it evolved out of a failed real sport (known as "catch" wrestling) which held its last honest title match early in the 20th century. Typical matches could last hours with no satisfying action, or end suddenly with crippling injuries to a promising athlete in whom much had been invested. This highlighted the close relationship between two paradoxical risks which define the category of activity which wrestling shares with other human spheres:
• A) Occasional but Extreme Peril for the participants.
• B) General: Monotony for both audience and participants.
Kayfabrication (the process of transition from reality towards Kayfabe) arises out of attempts to deliver a dependably engaging product for a mass audience while removing the unpredictable upheavals that imperil participants. As such Kayfabrication is a dependable feature of many of our most important systems which share the above two characteristics such as war, finance, love, politics and science.
Importantly, Kayfabe also seems to have discovered the limits of how much disbelief the human mind is capable of successfully suspending before fantasy and reality become fully conflated. Wrestling's system of lies has recently become so intricate that wrestlers have occasionally found themselves engaging in real life adultery following exactly behind the introduction of a fictitious adulterous plot twist in a Kayfabe back-story. Eventually, even Kayfabe itself became a victim of its own success as it grew to a level of deceit that could not be maintained when the wrestling world collided with outside regulators exercising oversight over major sporting events.
At the point Kayfabe was forced to own up to the fact that professional wrestling contained no sport whatsoever, it did more than avoid being regulated and taxed into oblivion. Wrestling discovered the unthinkable: its audience did not seem to require even a thin veneer of realism. Professional wrestling had come full circle to its honest origins by at last moving the responsibility for deception off of the shoulders of the performers and into the willing minds of the audience.
Kayfabe, it appears, is a dish best served client-side

Title: Re: Keyfabe
Post by: DougMacG on December 14, 2011, 06:51:37 AM
Very interesting!  I never thought of the similarities between pro wrestling and perhaps climate science, or the pretend fights between the regulators and regulated in mortgage business.
Title: Never Trust Anyone Who Hasn’t Been Punched in the Face
Post by: bigdog on December 14, 2011, 12:19:39 PM

Conservatives like to talk about the causes of Western Civilization’s downfall: feminism, loose morality, drug abuse, Christianity’s decline, reality TV. Blaming civilization’s downfall on lardy hagfish such as Andrea Dworkin is like a doctor diagnosing senility by an old person’s wrinkles. The fact that anyone listened to such a numskull is a symptom, not the cause, of a culture in decline. The cause of civilizational decline is dirt-simple: lack of contact with objective reality. The great banker-journalist (and founder of the original National Review) Walter Bagehot said it well almost 150 years ago:


Please share this article by using the link below. When you cut and paste an article, Taki's Magazine misses out on traffic, and our writers don't get paid for their work. Email editors@takimag.com to buy additional rights. http://takimag.com/article/never_trust_anyone_who_hasnt_been_punched_in_the_face/print#ixzz1gXgMcchx
Title: Re: Never Trust Anyone Who Hasn’t Been Punched in the Face
Post by: G M on December 14, 2011, 01:14:16 PM

Conservatives like to talk about the causes of Western Civilization’s downfall: feminism, loose morality, drug abuse, Christianity’s decline, reality TV. Blaming civilization’s downfall on lardy hagfish such as Andrea Dworkin is like a doctor diagnosing senility by an old person’s wrinkles. The fact that anyone listened to such a numskull is a symptom, not the cause, of a culture in decline. The cause of civilizational decline is dirt-simple: lack of contact with objective reality. The great banker-journalist (and founder of the original National Review) Walter Bagehot said it well almost 150 years ago:


Please share this article by using the link below. When you cut and paste an article, Taki's Magazine misses out on traffic, and our writers don't get paid for their work. Email editors@takimag.com to buy additional rights. http://takimag.com/article/never_trust_anyone_who_hasnt_been_punched_in_the_face/print#ixzz1gXgMcchx

That was fcuking awesome!
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 14, 2011, 06:31:47 PM
Amen!
Title: Abandoning Iraq NYT OP ED
Post by: prentice crawford on December 18, 2011, 02:47:00 AM
NYTimes.com
 In Iraq, Abandoning Our Friends By KIRK W. JOHNSON
Published: December 15, 2011  
  U.S. Marks End to 9-Year War, Leaving an Uncertain Iraq (December 16, 2011)
Op-Ed Contributor: An Unstable, Divided Land (December 16, 2011)
Editorial: A Formal End (December 16, 2011)
  
  ON the morning of May 6, 1783, Guy Carleton, the British commander charged with winding down the occupation of America, boarded the Perseverance and sailed up the Hudson River to meet George Washington and discuss the British withdrawal. Washington was furious to learn that Carleton had sent ships to Canada filled with Americans, including freed slaves, who had sided with Britain during the revolution.

Britain knew these loyalists were seen as traitors and had no future in America. A Patriot using the pen name “Brutus” had warned in local papers: “Flee then while it is in your power” or face “the just vengeance of the collected citizens.” And so Britain honored its moral obligation to rescue them by sending hundreds of ships to the harbors of New York, Charleston and Savannah. As the historian Maya Jasanoff has recounted, approximately 30,000 were evacuated from New York to Canada within months.

Two hundred and twenty-eight years later, President Obama is wrapping up our own long and messy war, but we have no Guy Carleton in Iraq. Despite yesterday’s announcement that America’s military mission in Iraq is over, no one is acting to ensure that we protect and resettle those who stood with us.

Earlier this week, Mr. Obama spoke to troops at Fort Bragg, N.C., of the “extraordinary milestone of bringing the war in Iraq to an end.” Forgotten are his words from the campaign trail in 2007, that “interpreters, embassy workers and subcontractors are being targeted for assassination.” He added, “And yet our doors are shut. That is not how we treat our friends.”

Four years later, the Obama administration has admitted only a tiny fraction of our own loyalists, despite having eye scans, fingerprints, polygraphs and letters from soldiers and diplomats vouching for them. Instead we force them to navigate a byzantine process that now takes a year and a half or longer.

The chances for speedy resettlement of our Iraqi allies grew even worse in May after two Iraqi men were arrested in Kentucky and charged with conspiring to send weapons to jihadist groups in Iraq. These men had never worked for Americans, and they managed to enter the United States as a result of poor background checks. Nevertheless, their arrests removed any sense of urgency in the government agencies responsible for protecting our Iraqi allies.

The sorry truth is that we don’t need them anymore now that we’re leaving, and resettling refugees is not a winning campaign issue. For over a year, I have been calling on members of the Obama administration to make sure the final act of this war is not marred by betrayal. They have not listened, instead adopting a policy of wishful thinking, hoping that everything turns out for the best.

Meanwhile, the Iraqis who loyally served us are under threat. The extremist Shiite leader Moktada al-Sadr has declared the Iraqis who helped America “outcasts.” When Britain pulled out of Iraq a few years ago, there was a public execution of 17 such outcasts — their bodies dumped in the streets of Basra as a warning. Just a few weeks ago, an Iraqi interpreter for the United States Army got a knock on his door; an Iraqi policeman told him threateningly that he would soon be beheaded. Another employee, at the American base in Ramadi, is in hiding after receiving a death threat from Mr. Sadr’s militia.

It’s not the first time we’ve abandoned our allies. In 1975, President Gerald R. Ford and Henry A. Kissinger ignored the many Vietnamese who aided American troops until the final few weeks of the Vietnam War. By then, it was too late.

Although Mr. Kissinger had once claimed there was an “irreducible list” of 174,000 imperiled Vietnamese allies, the policy in the war’s frantic closing weeks was icily Darwinian: if you were strong enough to clear our embassy walls or squeeze through the gates and force your way onto a Huey, you could come along. The rest were left behind to face assassination or internment camps. The same sorry story occurred in Laos, where America abandoned tens of thousands of Hmong people who had aided them.

It wasn’t until months after the fall of Saigon, and much bloodshed, that America conducted a huge relief effort, airlifting more than 100,000 refugees to safety. Tens of thousands were processed at a military base on Guam, far away from the American mainland. President Bill Clinton used the same base to save the lives of nearly 7,000 Iraqi Kurds in 1996. But if you mention the Guam Option to anyone in Washington today, you either get a blank stare of historical amnesia or hear that “9/11 changed everything.”

And so our policy in the final weeks of this war is as simple as it is shameful: submit your paperwork and wait. If you can survive the next 18 months, maybe we’ll let you in. For the first time in five years, I’m telling Iraqis who write to me for help that they shouldn’t count on America anymore.

Moral timidity and a hapless bureaucracy have wedged our doors tightly shut and the Iraqis who remained loyal to us are weeks away from learning how little America’s word means.

Kirk W. Johnson, a former reconstruction coordinator in Iraq, founded the List Project to Resettle Iraqi Allies.

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on December 16, 2011, on page A43 of the New York edition with the headline: The Iraq We're Leaving Behind: Abandoning Our Friends.
                                                  
                                          P.C.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: bigdog on December 18, 2011, 03:30:59 AM
"Moral timidity and a hapless bureaucracy have wedged our doors tightly shut and the Iraqis who remained loyal to us are weeks away from learning how little America’s word means."

Thank you for posting this article, P.C.  It seems as though this has become a habitual pattern for our nation.  And this strikes as incredibly important.  As we engage China (and Iran and many others), like it or not we will need help and we will need to be trusted.  Do we mean what we say with Taiwan?  Japan?  The Philippines?  Others?  Even if the answer is yes on dealing with these particular countries, we will be seen by them (or China) as having a credible committment?  Or, is the fact that we do not honor our allies likely to lead to further doubt on the part of out natural and historic allies (and enemies)?     

Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: prentice crawford on December 18, 2011, 05:11:12 AM
Woof bigdog,
 Thank you for saying so; the whole thing has me in a very frustrated and angry mood. We know what's coming; it's like watching a train wreck. I hope there's a hell because I don't think karma is going to be able to handle all the people responsible for the carnage to come. It won't be instantaneous, it will happen over time but it will rival Pol Pot's killing fields before it's over.
                              P.C. 
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 18, 2011, 01:51:19 PM
Powerful piece making a powerful point.  Please post in it in the Iraq thread as well as here.  TIA.
Title: WSJ: The Financial Crisis on Trial
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 21, 2011, 06:22:04 AM

I post this here because I think it exceedingly important to put the blame for the crisis where it belongs-- and right at the center, along with Fed interest rate policy, government requirements that the unqualified be given home loans, etc are the FMs.
===========================


By PETER J. WALLISON
The Securities and Exchange Commission's lawsuits against six top executives of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, announced last week, are a seminal event.

For the first time in a government report, the complaint has made it clear that the two government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) played a major role in creating the demand for low-quality mortgages before the 2008 financial crisis. More importantly, the SEC is saying that Fannie and Freddie—the largest buyers and securitizers of subprime and other low-quality mortgages—hid the size of their purchases from the market. Through these alleged acts of securities fraud, they did not just mislead investors; they deprived analysts, risk managers, rating agencies and even financial regulators of vital data about market risks that could have prevented the crisis.

The lawsuit necessarily focuses on 2006 and 2007, the years that are still within the statute of limitations. But according to the SEC complaint, the behavior went on for many years: "Since the 1990s, Freddie Mac internally categorized loans as subprime or subprime-like as part of its loan acquisition program," while its senior officials continued to state publicly that it had little or no exposure to subprime loans.

The GSEs began acquiring large numbers of subprime and other low-quality loans in the mid-1990s, as they tried to comply with the government's affordable-housing requirements—quotas for mortgage purchases imposed by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) under legislation enacted by Congress in 1992.

These quotas initially required that, of all the loans bought by Fannie and Freddie in any year, 30% had to have been made to borrowers earning at or below the median income in their communities. The quotas, however, would increase—they rose to 40% in 1996, 50% in 2000, and 55% in 2007. HUD also added and raised quotas for "special affordable" loans that were to be made to borrowers with low or very low incomes (in some cases a mere 60% of the area median income).

It is certainly possible to find prime mortgages among borrowers whose incomes are below the median, but this becomes more difficult as the quota percentages increase. Indeed, by 2000 Fannie and Freddie were offering to buy zero-down payment loans and buying large numbers of subprime mortgages in order to meet the HUD quotas.

Enlarge Image

CloseCorbis
 .According to the SEC, for example, Fannie failed to disclose a low-quality loan known as an Expanded Approval (EA) mortgage—even though these loans had the highest rate of "serious delinquency" (90 days past due, and almost certainly going to foreclosure) in Fannie's book. Those EA loans—as then-Chairman Daniel Mudd told the House Financial Services Committee in April 2007—"helped us meet our HUD affordable housing requirements."

Meeting these quotas made Fannie and Freddie important factors in the financial crisis. Relying on the research of my colleague Edward Pinto at the American Enterprise Institute, I stated in my dissent from the majority report of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission that there were approximately 27 million subprime and other risky mortgages outstanding on June 30, 2008, and a lion's share was on Fannie and Freddie's books. That has now been largely confirmed by the SEC's data.

The SEC also charges that Fannie and Freddie's disclosures grossly understated the number of subprime and other risky loans they were holding or securitizing. For example, Freddie's Information Statement and Annual Report to Stockholders, in March 2006, reported that for 2005 and 2004 the company's exposure to subprime loans was "not significant." According to the SEC complaint, subprime mortgages at this point constituted 10% of Freddie's exposures.

Similarly, Fannie held over $94 billion in EA loans in 2007, according to the SEC—"11 times greater than the 0.3% ($8.3 billion)" in subprime loans Fannie disclosed for that year. (According to an SEC press release, both GSEs have agreed with the commission's "Statement of Facts" about their disclosure failures, without admitting or denying liability. They also agreed to cooperate with the commission's litigation against the former executives.)

Fannie and Freddie were the dominant players in the U.S. mortgage markets, by far the largest buyers of mortgages and mortgage-backed securities of all kinds. Statements by these two firms that their exposure to subprime mortgages was "not significant" or ".03 percent" would be read by analysts and other mortgage market participants as strong indications that relatively few subprime and other low-quality mortgages were outstanding.

My own research, as a member of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (and a dissenter from its majority report), did not turn up any analyst report or other public statement before the 2008 crisis that came close to estimating the actual number of subprime or other low-quality mortgages outstanding.

These failures to disclose subprime holdings meant that banks and other financial institutions, risk managers, analysts, rating agencies and even regulators may well have underestimated the risks of continuing to acquire, hold and distribute mortgages and mortgage-backed securities. Thus, when the bubble deflated in 2007, the financial system, and particularly the largest financial institutions, were primed for immense losses.

Mr. Wallison is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
Title: Bonjwa Voyage
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on December 22, 2011, 05:46:17 AM
First time I've encountered this source; his CV is certainly interesting. I'm no slouch when it comes to making a desktop computer do my bidding, but my kids multitask digitally in manners that amaze me: they keep a lot of different balls in the air while still working on a primary task, often gaming. This gent thinks they might have what it takes to be a next generation war fighter:

The Future of Drone Warfare

Over half of Air Force UPT (undergraduate pilot training) grads are now assigned to pilot drones rather than a real aircraft.*  The big question is why are drone pilots, guys that fly robots remotely from a computer terminal, going to a very expensive year of pilot training?  I can understand why the Air Force has chosen to send drone jockeys to pilot training: 

A shift to piloting drones rather than real aircraft is an assault on organizational culture of the Air Force.  In the Air Force, pilots do the fighting and as a result take most of the leadership positions. 

A transition to robotics upends that arrangement, and is why the USAF has strenuously resisted taking control of the drone mission until recently. 
In this light, sending these drone jockeys to a very expensive year of UPT is an attempt to ease the cultural transition. 
However, culture aside, is it the best training? 

Drone Pilots Today

I suspect it isn't.  Here's why.  The assumption that combat with drones is going to be the same as combat without them is flawed.  It's going to be VERY different.  So far, it's hard to see that.  Most engagements today involve:

a drone flying leisurely over a village in Pakistan controlled by a pilot at a terminal in Las Vegas/Nellis,
waiting for five or more armed men to assemble in a single house (which is a terrorist "signature" that green lights authorization to eliminate the threat), and
then pushing a button and holding a cursor over the house until it disappears. 

That's not going to last long. 

Drone Combat

How does the addition of drones change the nature of combat/conflict?  Why?  The tech is moving too fast.  Here are some of the characteristics we'll see in the near future:

Swarms.  The cost and size of drones will shrink.  Nearly everyone will have access to drone tech (autopilots already cost less than $30).  Further, the software to enable drones to employ swarm behavior will improve.  So, don't think in terms of a single drone. Think in terms of a single person controlling hundreds and thousands.

Intelligence.  Drones will be smarter than they are today.  The average commercial chip passed the level of insect intelligence a little less than a decade ago (which "magically" resulted in an explosion of drone/bot tech).  Chips will cross rat intelligence in 2018 or so.  Think in terms of each drone being smart enough to follow tactical instructions. 
Dynamism.  The combination of massive swarms with individual elements being highly intelligent puts combat on an entirely new level.  It requires a warrior that can provide tactical guidance and situational awareness in real time at a level that is beyond current training paradigms.

Training Drone Bonjwas

Based on the above requirements, the best training for drones (in the air and on land) isn't real world training, it's tactical games (not first person shooters).  Think in terms of the classic military scifi book, "Ender's Game" by Orson Scott Card. Of the games currently on the market, the best example of the type of expertise required is Blizzard's StarCraft, a scifi tactical management game that has amazing multiplayer tactical balance/dynamism.  The game is extremely popular worldwide, but in South Korea, it has reached cult status.  The best players, called Bonjwas, are treated like rock stars, and for good reason:

Training of hand/eye/mind.  Speeds of up to 400 keyboard mouse (macro/micro) tactical commands per minute have been attained.  Think about that for a second.  That's nearly 7 commands a second.

Fight multi-player combat simulations  for 10-12 hours a day.  They live the game for a decade and then burn out.   Mind vs. mind competition continously.

To become a bonjwa, you have to defeat millions of opponents to reach the tournament rank, and then dominate the tournament rank for many years.  The ranking system/ladder that farms new talent is global (Korea, China, SEA, North America, and Europe), huge (millions of players), and continuous (24x7x365).
Currently, the best Starcraft bonjwa in the world is Flash. Here's his ELO rating. 


Nearly all of the above would likely apply to cyber warfare too. 

http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2011/12/drone-bonjwas.html
Title: WSJ: Nietzsche
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 26, 2011, 12:38:03 PM

By THOMAS MEANEY
As a teenager, Friedrich Nietzsche was fascinated by America. "The American way of laughing does me good," he wrote after reading "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer," "especially this sort of sturdy seaman like Mark Twain." In the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson he discovered a "brother-soul" who kindled his lifelong passion for truth-seeking. Despite making his name as the greatest anti-democratic thinker of his age, Nietzsche believed that America was a land of free spirits, unburdened by the weight of the European past.

American readers, for their part, have repaid Nietzsche's attentions. More than any other European thinker, he is alive in our cultural bloodstream. But in a country that, from the start, elevated the values of efficiency and equality over the virtues of aristocratic excellence, Nietzsche's message was bound to mutate. We have blunted his challenge to "create yourself" into a commercial catchphrase; we prefer to "like" our fellow citizens rather than to love or hate them; we don't hesitate to declare any child who dabbles in crayons an "artist." As a culture, we have given Nietzsche a happy ending.

What does our use and abuse of Nietzsche's thinking say about us? This is the interesting question that Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen sets out to answer in "American Nietzsche," her elegant and revealing account of America's reckoning with the German thinker. She samples the gamut of responses to Nietzsche in an effort to explain how nearly every segment of American culture "discovered in Nietzsche a thinker to think with."

For American thinkers wrestling with the anxieties unleashed by living in a pluralist democracy, Nietzsche not only diagnosed the mentality more acutely than anyone else but for his careful readers—those with "a third ear"—also promised forms of higher fulfillment.

American Nietzsche
By Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen
Chicago, 452 pages, $30

.For Nietzsche, as for Emerson, the source of this fulfillment was to be found in a radically new conception of the individual. The self was not a stable entity for Nietzsche, nor was there any "true self" to be discovered. Rather the self is something that we are constantly becoming. "We shed our old bark, we shed our skins every spring," Nietzsche writes, "we keep becoming younger, fuller of future, taller, stronger." We construct ourselves by assembling our experiences, desires and actions in the way a novelist gives coherence to the incidental plot points of a novel. "Make your own Bible!" declares Emerson. For both Nietzsche and Emerson the point was to generate meaning through a continuous act of self-creation.

Nietzsche's first American popularizer was the journalist H.L. Mencken, who was drawn to Nietzsche's European exoticism. Nevertheless, Mencken understood clearly enough that the self-created individuals that Nietzsche described could never arise easily in a democracy, where the self-creation of one citizen inevitably treads on the self-creation of another. In his 1908 book, "The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche," Mencken excoriated the way that American mass society trampled on the possibility of unadjusted heroes. "It is only the under-dog . . . that believes in equality," he seethed, "it is only the mob that seeks to reduce all humanity to one dead level, for it is only the mob that would gain by such leveling."

Mencken reviled American culture for not producing more genuine artists to match their European counterparts. "The culture of the Renaissance raised itself on the shoulders of a group of a hundred men," Nietzsche wrote, and it was such a cultural avant-garde that Mencken aimed to cultivate.

Enlarge Image

CloseDoug Pike
 
A 1997 cartoon by Doug Pike.
.Mencken's columns put Nietzsche's name on the American cultural map, and the philosopher's ideas provoked murmurs of enthusiasm among a coterie of readers. But Nietzsche's reputation never got off the ground with the general public in the early decades of the 20th century. The first reason was the sensational trial, in 1924, of Leopold and Loeb, who kidnapped and murdered a 14-year-old boy, apparently under the influence of Nietzsche (or so claimed Clarence Darrow, Loeb's defense attorney). The second, more significant, reason was the rise of fascism in Europe.

It was one thing for American intellectuals and academics to invoke Nietzsche in their criticism of liberal democracy when its values seemed to be secure, but it was a considerably less welcome exercise in the 1930s, when those values were on the defensive. In the lead up to the war with Germany, Nietzsche's philosophy became hopelessly conflated with Nazism, though this association was the result of superficial reading. (Anti-Semitism, for instance, was one of Nietzsche's favorite examples of German stupidity.)

It was left to the German émigré and Princeton professor Walter Kaufmann to rehabilitate Nietzsche's reputation after World War II. In the best chapter of her book, Ms. Ratner-Rosenhagen explains how the Nietzsche we encounter in print today is largely Kaufmann's Nietzsche—mediated by his translations, collations and introductions. Kaufmann became not only Nietzsche's tireless promoter but also, to a degree, the sanitizer of his thought.

By arguing for Nietzsche's place in the Western canon alongside Kant and Hegel, Kaufmann made his subject respectable enough for the college classroom. He was also responsible for recasting Nietzsche as the forerunner of the various strains of existentialism that came into vogue in the 1960s. Nietzsche was suddenly a cultural touchstone with disciples ranging from Hugh Hefner to the Black Panther Huey Newton (the latter apparently misunderstood what Nietzsche meant by "slave morality" and thought it might be a good thing).

If there is a problem with "American Nietzsche," it is that Ms. Ratner-Rosenhagen is not quite up-front about the story she is telling. She claims at the outset that her study "is not even a book about Nietzsche"—and that, in the spirit of her subject, she will be merely presenting us with a series of interpretations in order to understand Nietzsche's "role in the ever-dynamic remaking of modern thought." But the last chapter of her book shows her to be partial to a very particular way of reading her subject. The chapter is devoted to three American Nietzscheans—Harold Bloom, Stanley Cavell and Richard Rorty—who all rediscovered American transcendentalism through Nietzsche and whose inclusion at the end of the book makes Nietzsche's thought seem like a long detour on the way back home to Emerson.

But Messrs. Cavell and Rorty have domesticated Nietzsche in peculiar ways, often sidestepping the main difficulties he presents. For Rorty, for instance, the challenge Nietzsche posed for a democratic culture could be solved by simply signing on to everything he says about the self but quarantining the rest of his unpalatable anti-democratic pronouncements. Nietzsche's two great contributions to American culture, according to Rorty, were that he provided us with an example of how we can all make an art of our private lives and that he showed us that the truth, far from having any absolute value, is simply whatever we find useful. When it comes to our democratic foundations, Rorty advises that we cheerfully embrace our lucky political inheritance, which we only risk squandering by interrogating too closely.

It would be nice if it were all that easy. But one of Nietzsche's major claims was, after all, that some of us will always rebel against the leveling effect of liberal democracy, while others—most of us—will join the herd. Likewise, Nietzsche thought that the truth was rarely ever useful. He thought errors, disasters and profound misunderstandings were much more precious.

Still, there is something to be said for the happy ending America has given Nietzsche. A country that can translate the striving of the Nietzschean superman into a guide for democracy's self-creating everyman may have discovered a rare kind of philosophical agility. The shift may not be quite fair to Nietzsche, but then he was always thrilled by America's powerful misreading of the European past.

—Mr. Meaney is a doctoral student in history at Columbia and a co-editor of the Utopian.
Title: Hitchens: A War Worth Fighting
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 27, 2011, 10:57:58 AM
http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2008/06/14/a-war-worth-fighting.html

A War Worth Fighting
Revisionists say that World War II was unnecessary. They're wrong.
by Christopher Hitchens  | June 14, 2008 11:36 AM EDT
Is there any one shared principle or assumption on which our political consensus rests, any value judgment on which we are all essentially agreed? Apart from abstractions such as a general belief in democracy, one would probably get the widest measure of agreement for the proposition that the second world war was a "good war" and one well worth fighting. And if we possess one indelible image of political immorality and cowardice, it is surely the dismal tap-tap-tap of Neville Chamberlain's umbrella as he turned from signing the Czechs away to Adolf Hitler at Munich. He hoped by this humiliation to avert war, but he was fated to bring his countrymen war on top of humiliation. To the conventional wisdom add the titanic figure of Winston Churchill as the emblem of oratorical defiance and the Horatius who, until American power could be mobilized and deployed, alone barred the bridge to the forces of unalloyed evil. When those forces lay finally defeated, their ghastly handiwork was uncovered to a world that mistakenly thought it had already "supped full of horrors." The stark evidence of the Final Solution has ever since been enough to dispel most doubts about, say, the wisdom or morality of carpet-bombing German cities.
Historical scholarship has nevertheless offered various sorts of revisionist interpretation of all this. Niall Ferguson, for one, has proposed looking at the two world wars as a single conflict, punctuated only by a long and ominous armistice. British conservative historians like Alan Clark and John Charmley have criticized Churchill for building his career on war, for ignoring openings to peace and for eventually allowing the British Empire to be squandered and broken up. But Pat Buchanan, twice a candidate for the Republican nomination and in 2000 the standard-bearer for the Reform Party who ignited a memorable "chad" row in Florida, has now condensed all the antiwar arguments into one. His case, made in his recently released "Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War," is as follows:
Buchanan does not need to close his book with an invocation of a dying West, as if to summarize this long recital of Spenglerian doomsaying. He's already opened with the statement, "All about us we can see clearly now that the West is passing away." The tropes are familiar—a loss of will and confidence, a collapse of the desire to reproduce with sufficient vigor, a preference for hedonism over the stern tasks of rulership and dominion and pre-eminence. It all sounds oddly … Churchillian. The old lion himself never tired of striking notes like these, and was quite unembarrassed by invocations of race and nation and blood. Yet he is the object of Buchanan's especial dislike and contempt, because he had a fondness for "wars of choice."
This term has enjoyed a recent vogue because of the opposition to the war in Iraq, an opposition in which Buchanan has played a vigorous role. Descending as he does from the tradition of Charles Lindbergh's America First movement, which looked for (and claimed to have found) a certain cosmopolitan lobby behind FDR's willingness to involve the United States in global war, Buchanan is the most trenchant critic of what he considers our fondest national illusion, and his book has the feel and stamp of a work that he has been readying all his life.
But he faces an insuperable difficulty, or rather difficulties. If you want to demonstrate that Germany was more the victim than the aggressor in 1914, then you must confine your account (as Buchanan does) to the very minor legal question of Belgian neutrality and of whether Britain absolutely had to go to war on the Belgian side. (For what it may be worth, I think that Britain wasn't obliged to do so and should not have done.) But the rest of the kaiser's policy, most of it completely omitted by Buchanan, shows that Germany was looking for a chance for war all over the globe, and was increasingly the prisoner of a militaristic ruling caste at home. The kaiser picked a fight with Britain by backing the white Dutch Afrikaner rebels in South Africa and by butchering the Ovambo people of what is now Namibia. He looked for trouble with the French by abruptly sending warships to Agadir in French Morocco, which nearly started the first world war in 1905, and with Russia by backing Austria-Hungary's insane ultimatum to the Serbs after the June 1914 assassinations in Sarajevo. Moreover, and never mentioned by Buchanan at all, the kaiser visited Damascus and paid for the rebuilding of the tomb of Saladin, announced himself a sympathizer of Islam and a friend of jihad, commissioned a Berlin-to-Baghdad railroad for the projection of German arms into the Middle East and Asia and generally ranged himself on the side of an aggressive Ottoman imperialism, which later declared a "holy war" against Britain. To suggest that he felt unjustly hemmed in by the Royal Navy's domination of the North Sea while he was conducting such statecraft is absurd.
And maybe a little worse than absurd, as when Buchanan writes: "From 1871 to 1914, the Germans under Bismarck and the Kaiser did not fight a single war. While Britain, Russia, Italy, Turkey, Japan, Spain, and the United States were all involved in wars, Germany and Austria had clean records." I am bound to say that I find this creepy. The start of the "clean record" has to be in 1871, because that's the year that Prussia humbled France in the hideous Franco-Prussian War that actually annexed two French provinces to Germany. In the intervening time until 1914, Germany was seizing colonies in Africa and the Pacific, cementing secret alliances with Austria and trying to build up a naval fleet that could take on the British one. No wonder the kaiser wanted a breathing space.
Now, this is not to say that Buchanan doesn't make some sound points about the secret diplomacy of Old Europe that was so much to offend Woodrow Wilson. And he is excellent on the calamitous Treaty of Versailles that succeeded only—as was noted by John Maynard Keynes at the time—in creating the conditions for another world war, or for part two of the first one. He wears his isolationism proudly: "The Senate never did a better day's work than when it rejected the Treaty of Versailles and refused to enter a League of Nations where American soldiers would be required to give their lives enforcing the terms of so dishonorable and disastrous a peace."
Actually, no soldier of any nation ever lost so much as a fingernail in the service of the League, which was in any case doomed by American abstention, and it's exactly that consideration which invalidates the second half of Buchanan's argument, which is that a conflict with Hitler's Germany both could and should have been averted. (There is a third Buchanan sub-argument, mostly made by implication, which is that the democratic West should have allied itself with Hitler, at least passively, until he had destroyed the Soviet Union.) Again, in order to believe his thesis one has to be prepared to argue that Hitler was a rational actor with intelligible and negotiable demands, whose declared, demented ambitions in "Mein Kampf" were presumably to be disregarded as mere propaganda. In case after case Buchanan shows the abysmal bungling of British and French diplomacy—making promises to Czechoslovakia that could never have been kept and then, adding injury to insult, breaking those promises at the first opportunity. Or offering a guarantee to Poland (a country that had gleefully taken part in the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia) that Hitler well knew was not backed by any credible military force.
Buchanan is at his best here, often causing one to whistle at the sheer cynicism and stupidity of the British Tories. In the Anglo-German Naval Agreement of June 1935, for example, they astounded the French and Italians and Russians by unilaterally agreeing to permit Hitler to build a fleet one third the size of the Royal Navy and a submarine fleet of the same size as the British! Not only was this handing the Third Reich the weapon it would soon press to Britain's throat, it was convincing all Britain's potential allies that they would be much better off making their own bilateral deals with Berlin. Which is essentially what happened.
But Buchanan keeps forgetting that this criminal foolishness is exactly the sort of policy that he elsewhere recommends. In his view, after all, Germany had been terribly wronged by Versailles and it would have been correct to redraw the frontiers in Germany's favor and soothe its hurt feelings (which is what the word "appeasement" originally meant). Meanwhile we should have encouraged Hitler's hostility to Bolshevism and discreetly rearmed in case he should also need to be contained. This might perhaps have worked if Germany had been governed by a right-wing nationalist party that had won a democratic vote. However, in point of fact Germany was governed by an ultra-rightist, homicidal, paranoid maniac who had begun by demolishing democracy in Germany itself, who believed that his fellow countrymen were a superior race and who attributed all the evils in the world to a Jewish conspiracy. It is possible to read whole chapters of Buchanan's book without having to bear these salient points in mind. (I should say that I intend this observation as a criticism.) As with his discussion of pre-1914 Germany, he commits important sins of omission that can only be the outcome of an ideological bias. Barely mentioned except in passing is the Spanish Civil War, for example, where for three whole years between 1936 and 1939 Germany and Italy lent troops and weapons in a Fascist invasion of a sovereign European nation that had never threatened or "encircled" them in any way. Buchanan's own political past includes overt sympathy with General Franco, which makes this skating-over even less forgivable than it might otherwise be.
On the one occasion where Spain does get a serious mention, it illustrates the opposite point to the one Buchanan thinks he's making. The British ambassador in Berlin, Sir Neville Henderson, is explaining why Hitler didn't believe that Britain and France would fight over Prague: "[Hitler] argued as follows: Would the German nation willingly go to war for General Franco in Spain, if France intervened on the side of the Republican government? The answer that he gave himself is that it would not, and he was consequently convinced that no democratic French government would be strong enough to lead the French nation to war for the Czechs."
In this instance, it must be admitted, Hitler was being a rational actor. And his admission—which Buchanan in his haste to indict Anglo-French policy completely fails to notice—is that if he himself had been resisted earlier and more determinedly, he would have been compelled to give ground. Thus the whole and complete lesson is not that the second world war was an avoidable "war of choice." It is that the Nazis could and should have been confronted before they had fully rearmed and had begun to steal the factories and oilfields and coal mines and workers of neighboring countries. As Gen. Douglas MacArthur once put it, all military defeats can be summarized in the two words: "Too late." The same goes for political disasters.
As the book develops, Buchanan begins to unmask his true colors more and more. It is one thing to make the case that Germany was ill-used, and German minorities harshly maltreated, as a consequence of the 1914 war of which Germany's grim emperor was one of the prime instigators. It's quite another thing to say that the Nazi decision to embark on a Holocaust of European Jewry was "not a cause of the war but an awful consequence of the war." Not only is Buchanan claiming that Hitler's fanatical racism did not hugely increase the likelihood of war, but he is also making the insinuation that those who wanted to resist him are the ones who are equally if not indeed mainly responsible for the murder of the Jews! This absolutely will not do. He adduces several quotations from Hitler and Goebbels, starting only in 1939 and ending in 1942, screaming that any outbreak of war to counter Nazi ambitions would lead to a terrible vengeance on the Jews. He forgets—at least I hope it's only forgetfulness—that such murderous incitement began long, long before Hitler had even been a lunatic-fringe candidate in the 1920s. This "timeline" is as spurious, and as sinister, as the earlier dates, so carefully selected by Buchanan, that tried to make Prussian imperialism look like a victim rather than a bully.
One closing example will demonstrate the corruption and prejudice of Buchanan's historical "method." He repeatedly argues that Churchill did not appreciate Hitler's deep-seated and respectful Anglophilia, and he continually blames the war on several missed opportunities to take the Führer's genially outstretched hand. Indeed, he approvingly quotes several academic sources who agree with him that Hitler invaded the Soviet Union only in order to change Britain's mind. Suppose that Buchanan is in fact correct about this. Could we have a better definition of derangement and megalomania than the case of a dictator who overrules his own generals and invades Russia in wintertime, mainly to impress the British House of Commons? (Incidentally, or rather not incidentally, it was precisely that hysterical aggression that curtain-raised the organized deportation and slaughter of the Jews. But it's fatuous to suppose that, without that occasion, the Nazis would not have found another one.)
It is of course true that millions of other people lost their lives in this conflict, often in unprecedentedly horrible ways, and that new tyrannies were imposed on the countries—Poland, Czechoslovakia and China most notably—that had been the pretexts for a war against fascism. But is this not to think in the short term? Unless or until Nazism had been vanquished, millions of people were most certainly going to be either massacred or enslaved in any case. Whereas today, all the way from Portugal to the Urals, the principle of human rights and popular sovereignty is at least the norm, and the ideas of racism and totalitarianism have been fairly conclusively and historically discredited. Would a frightened compromise with racist totalitarianism have produced a better result?
Winston Churchill may well have been on the wrong side about India, about the gold standard, about the rights of labor and many other things, and he may have had a lust for war, but we may also be grateful that there was one politician in the 1930s who found it intolerable even to breathe the same air, or share the same continent or planet, as the Nazis. (Buchanan of course makes plain that he rather sympathizes with Churchill about the colonies, and quarrels only with his "finest hour." This is grotesque.) As he closes his argument, Buchanan again refuses to disguise his allegiance. "Though derided as isolationists," he writes, "the America First patriots kept the United States out of the war until six months after Hitler had invaded Russia." If you know anything at all about what happened to the population of those territories in those six months, it is rather hard to be proud that America was neutral. But this is a price that Buchanan is quite willing to pay.
I myself have written several criticisms of the cult of Churchill, and of the uncritical way that it has been used to stifle or cudgel those with misgivings. ("Adlai," said John F. Kennedy of his outstanding U.N. ambassador during the Bay of Pigs crisis, "wanted a Munich.") Yet the more the record is scrutinized and re-examined, the more creditable it seems that at least two Western statesmen, for widely different reasons, regarded coexistence with Nazism as undesirable as well as impossible. History may judge whether the undesirability or the impossibility was the more salient objection, but any attempt to separate the two considerations is likely to result in a book that stinks, as this one unmistakably does.
Title: T. Friedman
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 04, 2012, 04:40:28 AM
Not often do I find TF to be worthy of posting here (understatement  :lol: ) but today is an exception.
=====================

So Much Fun. So Irrelevant.
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: January 3, 2012
       
Two things have struck me about the Republican presidential candidate debates leading up to the Iowa caucuses. One is how entertaining they were. The other is how disconnected they were from the biggest trends shaping the job market of the 21st century. What if the 2012 campaign were actually about the world in which we’re living and how we adapt to it? What would the candidates be talking about?

Surely at or near the top of that list would be the tightening merger between globalization and the latest information technology revolution. The I.T. revolution is giving individuals more and more cheap tools of innovation, collaboration and creativity — thanks to hand-held computers, social networks and “the cloud,” which stores powerful applications that anyone can download. And the globalization side of this revolution is integrating more and more of these empowered people into ecosystems, where they can innovate and manufacture more products and services that make people’s lives more healthy, educated, entertained, productive and comfortable.

The best of these ecosystems will be cities and towns that combine a university, an educated populace, a dynamic business community and the fastest broadband connections on earth. These will be the job factories of the future. The countries that thrive will be those that build more of these towns that make possible “high-performance knowledge exchange and generation,” explains Blair Levin, who runs the Aspen Institute’s Gig.U project, a consortium of 37 university communities working to promote private investment in next-generation ecosystems.

Historians have noted that economic clusters always required access to abundant strategic inputs for success, says Levin. In the 1800s, it was access to abundant flowing water and raw materials. In the 1900s, it was access to abundant electricity and transportation. In the 2000s, he said, “it will be access to abundant bandwidth and abundant human intellectual capital,” — places like Silicon Valley, Austin, Boulder, Cambridge and Ann Arbor.

But we need many more of these. As the world gets wired together through the Web and social networks, and as more and more sensors run machines that are talking to other machines across the Internet, we are witnessing the emergence of “Big Data.” These are the mountains of data coming out of all these digital interactions, which can then be collected, sifted, mined and analyzed — like raw materials of old — to provide the raw material for new inventions in health care, education, manufacturing and retailing.

“We’re all aware of the approximately two billion people now on the Internet — in every part of the planet, thanks to the explosion of mobile technology,” I.B.M.’s chairman, Samuel Palmisano, said in a speech last September. “But there are also upward of a trillion interconnected and intelligent objects and organisms — what some call the Internet of Things. All of this is generating vast stores of information. It is estimated that there will be 44 times as much data and content coming over the next decade ...reaching 35 zettabytes in 2020. A zettabyte is a 1 followed by 21 zeros. And thanks to advanced computation and analytics, we can now make sense of that data in something like real time.”

The more information and trends you are able to mine and analyze, and the more talented human capital, bandwidth and computing power you apply to that data, the more innovation you’ll get.

When eight doctors from around the world can look at the same M.R.I. in real time, said Levin, it enables the acceleration of small breakthroughs, which is where big breakthroughs eventually come from. Big bandwidth, he added, would enable these same doctors doing high-risk surgery to practice the life-saving procedures in advance over network-enabled simulators, leading to better results, new kinds of surgical innovations and new forms of medical education. Big bandwidth, combined with 3-D printers, would also allow for the rapid prototyping of all kinds of manufactured products that can then be made anywhere.

Right now, though, notes Levin, America is focused too much on getting “average” bandwidth to the last 5 percent of the country in rural areas, rather than getting “ultra-high-speed” bandwidth to the top 5 percent, in university towns, who will invent the future. By the end of 2012, he adds, South Korea intends to connect every home in the country to the Internet at one gigabit per second. “That would be a tenfold increase from the already blazing national standard, and more than 200 times as fast as the average household setup in the United States,” The Times reported last February.

Therefore, the critical questions for America today have to be how we deploy more ultra-high-speed networks and applications in university towns to invent more high-value-added services and manufactured goods and how we educate more workers to do these jobs — the only way we can maintain a middle class.

I just don’t remember any candidate being asked in those really entertaining G.O.P. debates: “How do you think smart cities can become the job engines of the future, and what is your plan to ensure that America has a strategic bandwidth advantage?”

Title: Charles Murray: The New Upper Class
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 08, 2012, 07:45:00 AM
Charles Murray writing in the New Criterion, January 2012:


The members of America's new upper class tend not to watch the same movies and television shows that the rest of America watches, don't go to kinds of restaurants the rest of America frequents, tend to buy different kinds of automobiles, and have passions for being green, maintaining the proper degree of body fat, and supporting gay marriage that most Americans don't share. Their child-raising practices are distinctive, and they typically take care to enroll their children in schools dominated by the offspring of the upper middle class—or, better yet, of the new upper class. They take their vacations in different kinds of places than other Americans go and are often indifferent to the professional sports that are so popular among other Americans. Few have served in the military, and few of their children either.

Worst of all, a growing proportion of the people who run the institutions of our country have never known any other culture. They are the children of upper-middle-class parents, have always lived in upper-middle-class neighborhoods and gone to upper-middle-class schools. Many have never worked at a job that caused a body part to hurt at the end of the day, never had a conversation with an evangelical Christian, never seen a factory floor, never had a friend who didn't have a college degree, never hunted or fished. They are likely to know that Garrison Keillor's monologue on Prairie Home Companion is the source of the phrase "all of the children are above average," but they have never walked on a prairie and never known someone well whose IQ actually was below average.

Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on January 08, 2012, 08:49:43 AM
"Therefore, the critical questions for America today have to be how we deploy more ultra-high-speed networks and applications in university towns to invent more high-value-added services and manufactured goods and how we educate more workers to do these jobs — the only way we can maintain a middle class.  I just don’t remember any candidate being asked in those really entertaining G.O.P. debates: “How do you think smart cities can become the job engines of the future, and what is your plan to ensure that America has a strategic bandwidth advantage?”

Is Friedman stating it should be a matter of government policy and administration to oversee the bandwidth revolution (if you will).  If you ask me America is in the forefront of this.

Should we have government policy overseeing this?  If so one can then imagine a new Gov. agency.  Or stated another way smaller government, at least in this area is not better. 

OTOH one could argue that the gov. should simply get out of the way.  But I am not clear it ever was.




Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 08, 2012, 11:40:43 AM
For bandwidth issues IIRC see some of the older posts in the SCH Internet technology thread.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on January 09, 2012, 06:08:19 AM
I don't see anything on the Romney webist about technology in general other than maybe extending visas to foreigners with advanced degrees.

OTOH it may not be a bad idea to wait with some plans and ideas lest Brockster use them for his trial balloons.  Clinton was a master (with a MSM allowing him to get away with it) of co-opting the ideas of the opposing party and act like it was all him.

"The era of big government is over".
Title: A ME college student on welfare
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 09, 2012, 08:47:41 AM

My Time at Walmart: Why We Need Serious Welfare Reform
December 13, 2011 By crousselle
During the 2010 and 2011 summers, I was a cashier at Wal-Mart #1788 in Scarborough, Maine. I spent hours upon hours toiling away at a register, scanning, bagging, and dealing with questionable clientele. These were all expected parts of the job, and I was okay with it. What I didn’t expect to be part of my job at Wal-Mart was to witness massive amounts of welfare fraud and abuse.
I understand that sometimes, people are destitute. They need help, and they accept help from the state in order to feed their families. This is fine. It happens. I’m not against temporary aid helping those who truly need it. What I saw at Wal-Mart, however, was not temporary aid. I witnessed generations of families all relying on the state to buy food and other items.  I literally witnessed small children asking their mothers if they could borrow their EBT cards. I once had a man show me his welfare card for an ID to buy alcohol. The man was from Massachusetts. Governor Michael Dukakis’ signature was on his welfare card. Dukakis’ last gubernatorial term ended in January of 1991. I was born in June of 1991. The man had been on welfare my entire life. That’s not how welfare was intended, but sadly, it is what it has become.
Other things witnessed while working as a cashier included:
a) People ignoring me on their iPhones while the state paid for their food. (For those of you keeping score at home, an iPhone is at least $200, and requires a data package of at least $25 a month. If a person can spend $25+ a month so they can watch YouTube 24/7, I don’t see why they can’t spend that money on food.)
b) People using TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) money to buy such necessities such as earrings, kitkat bars, beer, WWE figurines, and, my personal favorite, a slip n’ slide. TANF money does not have restrictions like food stamps on what can be bought with it.
c) Extravagant purchases made with food stamps; including, but not limited to: steaks, lobsters, and giant birthday cakes.
d) A man who ran a hotdog stand on the pier in Portland, Maine used to come through my line. He would always discuss his hotdog stand and encourage me to “come visit him for lunch some day.” What would he buy? Hotdogs, buns, mustard, ketchup, etc. How would he pay for it? Food stamps. Either that man really likes hotdogs, or the state is paying for his business. Not okay.
The thing that disturbed me more than simple cases of fraud/abuse was the entitled nature of many of my customers. One time, a package of bell peppers did not ring up as food in the computer. After the woman swiped her EBT card, it showed a balance that equaled the cost of the peppers. The woman asked what the charge was, and a quick glance at the register screen showed that the peppers did not ring up as food. (Food items had the letter ‘F’ next to their description.) The woman immediately began yelling at me, saying that, “It’s food! You eat it!”
This wasn’t the only time things like this happened: if a person’s EBT balance was less than they thought it would be, or if their cards were declined, it was somehow my fault. I understand the situation is stressful, but a person should be knowledgeable about how much money is in their account prior to going grocery shopping. EBT totals are printed on receipts, and every cell phone has a calculator function. There’s no excuse, and there’s no reason to yell at the cashier for it.
The worst thing I ever saw at Wal-Mart Scarborough was two women and their children. These women each had multiple carts full of items, and each began loading them at the same time (this should have been a tip-off to their intelligence levels). The first woman, henceforth known as Welfare Queen #1, paid for about $400 worth of food with food stamps. The majority of her food was void of any nutritional value. She then pulled out an entire month’s worth of WIC (Women, Infants, and Children program) checks. I do not mind people paying with WIC, but the woman had virtually none of the correct items. WIC gives each participating mother a book containing actual images of items for which a person can and cannot redeem the voucher. This woman literally failed at image comprehension.
After redeeming 10+ WIC checks, Welfare Queen #1 had me adjust the prices of several items she was buying (Wal-Mart’s policy is to adjust the price of the item without question if it’s within a dollar or two). She then pulled out a vacuum cleaner, and informed me that the cost of the vacuum was $3.48 because, “that’s what the label says.” The vacuum cleaner was next to a stack of crates that were $3.48. Somehow, every other customer was able to discern that the vacuum cleaner was not $3.48, but Welfare Queen #1 and her friend Welfare Queen #2 were fooled. Welfare Queen #2 informed me that she used to work for Wal-Mart, and that the “laws of Wal-Mart legally said” that I would have to sell her the vacuum for $3.48. After contacting my manager, who went off to find the proper vacuum price, Welfare Queen #1 remarked that it must be tough to stand on a mat all day and be a cashier. I looked at her, smiled, shrugged, and said, “Well, it’s a job.” She was speechless. After they finally admitted defeat, (not before Welfare Queen #2 realizing she didn’t have enough money to buy all of the food she had picked out, resulting in the waste of about $200 worth of products) the two women left about an hour and a half after they arrived at my register. The next man in line said that the two women reminded him of buying steel drums and cement. I said I was reminded why I vote Republican.
Maine has a problem with welfare spending. Maine has some of the highest rates in the nation for food stamp enrollment, Medicaid, and TANF. Nearly 30% of the state is on some form of welfare. Maine is the only state in the nation to rank in the top two for all three categories. This is peculiar, as Maine’s poverty rate isn’t even close to being the highest in the nation. The system in Maine is far easier to get into than in other states, and it encourages dependency. When a person makes over the limit for benefits, they lose all benefits completely. There is no time limit and no motivation to actually get back to work. Furthermore, spending on welfare has increased dramatically, but there has been no reduction of the poverty rate. Something is going terribly wrong, and the things I saw at work were indicators of a much larger problem. Something must change before the state runs out of money funding welfare programs.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces - Public Bandwidth
Post by: DougMacG on January 09, 2012, 10:46:06 AM
CCP: "Should we have government policy overseeing this?  If so one can then imagine a new Gov. agency.  Or stated another way smaller government, at least in this area is not better."

Yes, Friedman always seems fascinated by the way the trains run on time under totalitarian regimes.  He doesn't usually come out and say our government is who should do this but he frames his context by saying the people running for head of the federal government should be talking about it.

For me, no thank you to the central planners.  Sure a super high speed network linking Stanford Univ and all the engineers and labs in Silicon Valley would be nice if they don't already have one.  Then we will need to provide equal services to inner cities, suburbia and rural America, right?  We don't want anyone to be disadvantaged.

Information technology is important and dynamic, always changing and advancing.  You wouldn't put your government in charge of auto manufacturing, energy or health care would you?  Whoops! It's hard to find examples of things they wouldn't turn over to government control.   :-(

The only role I see for public sector is for local government to help with the right of ways for fiber optic lines, not the 60% tax they had home telephone service as they helped to kill it off.  Or the mortgage oversight committees where they asked themselves, now that we have all this power, what shall we do next with it?

If given the choice, choose the door with the smaller, equal-protection government behind it.  That will not leave us insurmountably lagging the Chinese and the Koreans IMHO.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces - Welfare in Maine
Post by: DougMacG on January 09, 2012, 10:56:23 AM
Yes, there is almost no real poverty left to fight in America.  Like climate change, there is a theory that living in hunger causes obesity.

Even if EBT can't go directly to liquor, junk foods or prepared foods, it frees up other monies to do that.  Dollars on food stamp cards sell on the street for 50 cents on the dollar.  Not a good tradeoff for the taxpayer, but with deficits where they are, the taxpayer isn't really paying either.   :-(

The 'average' person in poverty has several luxuries I live comfortably without:
http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2011/07/what-is-poverty

As scholar James Q. Wilson has stated, “The poorest Americans today live a better life than all but the richest persons a hundred years ago.”[3] In 2005, the typical household defined as poor by the government had a car and air conditioning. For entertainment, the household had two color televisions, cable or satellite TV, a DVD player, and a VCR... and a coffee maker.

Not to mention iPhone with the unlimited data package...
Title: Does this mean Hillary will make a good president?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 10, 2012, 04:38:59 PM

http://www.notechmagazine.com/2011/1...liticians.html


Castration Might Bring Us Better Politicians

"The major role of the eunuch in ancient societies was a political one. Eunuchs were the perfect guardians of harems and provided safe companions and secretaries for royal ladies. They could also be entrusted with the very highest offices of state with no fear that they would want to muscle in and start their own dynasties. Less susceptible than other men to corruption and persuasion by sexual means, they were the ideal politicians and civil servants. Their reputations could not be sullied by the accusations of rape, paternity suits and other scandals that so often blight the careers of public figures."

"The first civilization deliberately to select eunuchs as officers of state was the Assyrian Empire, which dominated the Near East during the early first millenium BC. The practice was continued by its successors, including the Persian Empire, founded by Cyrus the Great (559-529 BC) who, according to the Greek writer Xenophon, 'selected eunuchs for every post of personal service to him, from the doorkeepers up'. Eunuchs were becoming powerful in China during the same period. They were especially influential under the Han Dynasty (202 BC - 220 AD), when some held tremendous power simply because of their looks, and it was normal for emperors to have as many male favorites as the recommended magical number of wives. But most were of the professional variety, trained for a career in government."

"The Roman civil service also employed eunuchs, despite the bans on castration imposed by various emperors. And, although the custom was condemned by the Church, the zenith of 'eunuch power' in the Roman world actually came after it was Christianized, under the Eastern Roman (Byzantyne) Empire, which ruled from Constantinople (Istanbul) between AD 395 and 1453. Thousands of young men entered public service by being castrated, providing the empire with some of its most distinguished state secretaries, generals and even Church leaders."
Title: Great commentary from actor Richard Dreyfuss
Post by: bigdog on January 11, 2012, 08:57:04 AM
Excellent commentary by Richard Dreyfuss.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JodajZV0itM[/youtube]
Title: Political Rants - Cartoon
Post by: Spartan Dog on January 15, 2012, 11:13:10 AM
On behalf of Crafty Dog...

(http://www.dogbrothers.com/kostas/011212.jpg)
Title: Re: Political Rants - Cartoon
Post by: G M on January 15, 2012, 02:33:12 PM
On behalf of Crafty Dog...

(http://www.dogbrothers.com/kostas/011212.jpg)

Ouch!
Title: WSJ: The Coming Tech Led Boom
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 30, 2012, 05:54:46 AM
By MARK P. MILLS AND JULIO M. OTTINO
In January 1912, the United States emerged from a two-year recession. Nineteen more followed—along with a century of phenomenal economic growth. Americans in real terms are 700% wealthier today.

In hindsight it seems obvious that emerging technologies circa 1912—electrification, telephony, the dawn of the automobile age, the invention of stainless steel and the radio amplifier—would foster such growth. Yet even knowledgeable contemporary observers failed to grasp their transformational power.

In January 2012, we sit again on the cusp of three grand technological transformations with the potential to rival that of the past century. All find their epicenters in America: big data, smart manufacturing and the wireless revolution.

Information technology has entered a big-data era. Processing power and data storage are virtually free. A hand-held device, the iPhone, has computing power that shames the 1970s-era IBM mainframe. The Internet is evolving into the "cloud"—a network of thousands of data centers any one of which makes a 1990 supercomputer look antediluvian. From social media to medical revolutions anchored in metadata analyses, wherein astronomical feats of data crunching enable heretofore unimaginable services and businesses, we are on the cusp of unimaginable new markets.

Enlarge Image

CloseCorbis
 .The second transformation? Smart manufacturing. This is the first structural shift since Henry Ford launched the economic power of "mass production." While we see evidence already in automation and information systems applied to supply-chain management, we are just entering an era where the very fabrication of physical things is revolutionized by emerging materials science. Engineers will soon design and build from the molecular level, optimizing features and even creating new materials, radically improving quality and reducing waste.

Devices and products are already appearing based on computationally engineered materials that literally did not exist a few years ago: novel metal alloys, graphene instead of silicon transistors (graphene and carbon enable a radically new class of electronic and structural materials), and meta-materials that possess properties not possible in nature; e.g., rendering an object invisible—speculation about which received understandable recent publicity.

This era of new materials will be economically explosive when combined with 3-D printing, also known as direct-digital manufacturing—literally "printing" parts and devices using computational power, lasers and basic powdered metals and plastics. Already emerging are printed parts for high-value applications like patient-specific implants for hip joints or teeth, or lighter and stronger aircraft parts. Then one day, the Holy Grail: "desktop" printing of entire final products from wheels to even washing machines.

The era of near-perfect computational design and production will unleash as big a change in how we make things as the agricultural revolution did in how we grew things. And it will be defined by high talent not cheap labor.

Finally, there is the unfolding communications revolution where soon most humans on the planet will be connected wirelessly. Never before have a billion people—soon billions more—been able to communicate, socialize and trade in real time.

The implications of the radical collapse in the cost of wireless connectivity are as big as those following the dawn of telegraphy/telephony. Coupled with the cloud, the wireless world provides cheap connectivity, information and processing power to nearly everyone, everywhere. This introduces both rapid change—e.g., the Arab Spring—and great opportunity. Again, both the launch and epicenter of this technology reside in America.

Few deny that technology fuels economic growth as well as both social and lifestyle progress, the latter largely seen in health and environmental metrics. But consider three features that most define America, and that are essential for unleashing the promises of technological change: our youthful demographics, dynamic culture and diverse educational system.

First, demographics. By 2020, America will be younger than both China and the euro zone, if the latter still exists. Youth brings more than a base of workers and taxpayers; it brings the ineluctable energy that propels everything. Amplified and leavened by the experience of their elders, youth and economic scale (the U.S. is still the world's largest economy) are not to be underestimated, especially in the context of the other two great forces: our culture and educational system.

The American culture is particularly suited to times of tumult and challenge. Culture cannot be changed or copied overnight; it is a feature of a people that has, to use a physics term, high inertia. Ours is distinguished by incontrovertibly powerful features, namely open-mindedness, risk-taking, hard work, playfulness, and, critical for nascent new ideas, a healthy dose of anti-establishment thinking. Where else could an Apple or a Steve Jobs have emerged?

Then there's our educational system, often criticized as inadequate to global challenges. But American higher education eludes simple statistical measures since its most salient features are flexibility and diversity of educational philosophies, curricula and the professoriate. There is a dizzying range of approaches in American universities and colleges. Good. One size definitely does not fit all for students or the future.

We should also remember that more than half of the world's top 100 universities remain in America, a fact underscored by soaring foreign enrollments. Yes, other nations have fine universities, and many more will emerge over time. But again the epicenter remains here.

What should our politicians do to help usher in this new era of entrepreneurial growth? Liquid financial markets, sensible tax and immigration policy, and balanced regulations will allow the next boom to flourish. But the essential fuel is innovation. The promise resides in the tectonic technological shifts under way.

America's success isn't preordained. But the technological innovations circa 2012 are profound. They will engender sweeping changes to our society and our economy. All the forces are in place. It's just a matter of when.

Mr. Mills, a physicist and founder of the Digital Power Group, writes the Forbes Energy Intelligence column. Mr. Ottino is dean of the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Northwestern University.

Title: Econimist State capatilism ala China, Russia, Brazil
Post by: ccp on January 30, 2012, 07:59:06 AM
We see the nepotism corruption and control that government control over business can have here in the US.  There are some benefits as noted in multiple articles in the Economist's last issue.  Yet, eventually it is thought this style of governing will lose out.
Brockster is leading us towards the government control of everything which is bad in the long run. We will have much more stifling of innovation, and far more corruption in the long run.  Here is one article:

***The visible hand
The crisis of Western liberal capitalism has coincided with the rise of a powerful new form of state capitalism in emerging markets, says Adrian Wooldridge
Jan 21st 2012 | from the print edition

BEATRICE WEBB grew up as a fervent believer in free markets and limited government. Her father was a self-made railway tycoon and her mother an ardent free-trader. One of her family’s closest friends was Herbert Spencer, the leading philosopher of Victorian liberalism. Spencer took a shine to young Beatrice and treated her to lectures on the magic of the market, the survival of the fittest and the evils of the state. But as Beatrice grew up she began to have doubts. Why should the state not intervene in the market to order children out of chimneys and into schools, or to provide sustenance for the hungry and unemployed or to rescue failing industries? In due course Beatrice became one of the leading architects of the welfare state—and a leading apologist for Soviet communism.

The argument about the relative merits of the state and the market that preoccupied young Beatrice has been raging ever since. Between 1900 and 1970 the pro-statists had the wind in their sails. Governments started off by weaving social safety nets and ended up by nationalising huge chunks of the economy. Yet between 1970 and 2000 the free-marketeers made a comeback. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher started a fashion across the West for privatising state-run industries and pruning the welfare state. The Soviet Union and its outriggers collapsed in ruins.

In this special report
»The visible hand
Something old, something new
New masters of the universe
Theme and variations
Mixed bag
The world in their hands
And the winner is…
Sources & acknowledgements
Reprints

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Related topics
Economics
Globalisation
United States
Business
Emerging markets
The era of free-market triumphalism has come to a juddering halt, and the crisis that destroyed Lehman Brothers in 2008 is now engulfing much of the rich world. The weakest countries, such as Greece, have already been plunged into chaos. Even the mighty United States has seen the income of the average worker contract every year for the past three years. The Fraser Institute, a Canadian think-tank, which has been measuring the progress of economic freedom for the past four decades, saw its worldwide “freedom index” rise relentlessly from 5.5 (out of 10) in 1980 to 6.7 in 2007. But then it started to move backwards.

The crisis of liberal capitalism has been rendered more serious by the rise of a potent alternative: state capitalism, which tries to meld the powers of the state with the powers of capitalism. It depends on government to pick winners and promote economic growth. But it also uses capitalist tools such as listing state-owned companies on the stockmarket and embracing globalisation. Elements of state capitalism have been seen in the past, for example in the rise of Japan in the 1950s and even of Germany in the 1870s, but never before has it operated on such a scale and with such sophisticated tools.

State capitalism can claim the world’s most successful big economy for its camp. Over the past 30 years China’s GDP has grown at an average rate of 9.5% a year and its international trade by 18% in volume terms. Over the past ten years its GDP has more than trebled to $11 trillion. China has taken over from Japan as the world’s second-biggest economy, and from America as the world’s biggest market for many consumer goods. The Chinese state is the biggest shareholder in the country’s 150 biggest companies and guides and goads thousands more. It shapes the overall market by managing its currency, directing money to favoured industries and working closely with Chinese companies abroad.

State capitalism can also claim some of the world’s most powerful companies. The 13 biggest oil firms, which between them have a grip on more than three-quarters of the world’s oil reserves, are all state-backed. So is the world’s biggest natural-gas company, Russia’s Gazprom. But successful state firms can be found in almost any industry. China Mobile is a mobile-phone goliath with 600m customers. Saudi Basic Industries Corporation is one of the world’s most profitable chemical companies. Russia’s Sberbank is Europe’s third-largest bank by market capitalisation. Dubai Ports is the world’s third-largest ports operator. The airline Emirates is growing at 20% a year.


 
State capitalism is on the march, overflowing with cash and emboldened by the crisis in the West. State companies make up 80% of the value of the stockmarket in China, 62% in Russia and 38% in Brazil (see chart). They accounted for one-third of the emerging world’s foreign direct investment between 2003 and 2010 and an even higher proportion of its most spectacular acquisitions, as well as a growing proportion of the very largest firms: three Chinese state-owned companies rank among the world’s ten biggest companies by revenue, against only two European ones (see chart). Add the exploits of sovereign-wealth funds to the ledger, and it begins to look as if liberal capitalism is in wholesale retreat: New York’s Chrysler Building (or 90% of it anyway) has fallen to Abu Dhabi and Manchester City football club to Qatar. The Chinese have a phrase for it: “The state advances while the private sector retreats.” This is now happening on a global scale.


 .
This special report will focus on the new state capitalism of the emerging world rather than the old state capitalism in Europe, because it reflects the future rather than the past. The report will look mainly at China, Russia and Brazil. The recent protests in Russia against the rigging of parliamentary elections by Vladimir Putin, the prime minister, have raised questions about the country’s political stability and, by implication, the future of state capitalism there, but for the moment nothing much seems to have changed. India will not be considered in detail because, although it has some of the world’s biggest state-owned companies, they are more likely to be leftovers of the Licence Raj rather than thrusting new national champions.

Today’s state capitalism also represents a significant advance on its predecessors in several respects. First, it is developing on a much wider scale: China alone accounts for a fifth of the world’s population. Second, it is coming together much more quickly: China and Russia have developed their formula for state capitalism only in the past decade. And third, it has far more sophisticated tools at its disposal. The modern state is more powerful than anything that has gone before: for example, the Chinese Communist Party holds files on vast numbers of its citizens. It is also far better at using capitalist tools to achieve its desired ends. Instead of handing industries to bureaucrats or cronies, it turns them into companies run by professional managers.

The return of history

This special report will cast a sceptical eye on state capitalism. It will raise doubts about the system’s ability to capitalise on its successes when it wants to innovate rather than just catch up, and to correct itself if it takes a wrong turn. Managing the system’s contradictions when the economy is growing rapidly is one thing; doing so when it hits a rough patch quite another. And state capitalism is plagued by cronyism and corruption.

But the report will also argue that state capitalism is the most formidable foe that liberal capitalism has faced so far. State capitalists are wrong to claim that they combine the best of both worlds, but they have learned how to avoid some of the pitfalls of earlier state-sponsored growth. And they are flourishing in the dynamic markets of the emerging world, which have been growing at an average of 5.5% a year against the rich world’s 1.6% over the past few years and are likely to account for half the world’s GDP by 2020.

State capitalism increasingly looks like the coming trend. The Brazilian government has forced the departure of the boss of Vale, a mining giant, for being too independent-minded. The French government has set up a sovereign-wealth fund. The South African government is talking openly about nationalising companies and creating national champions. And young economists in the World Bank and other multilateral institutions have begun to discuss embracing a new industrial policy.

That raises some tricky questions about the global economic system. How can you ensure a fair trading system if some companies enjoy the support, overt or covert, of a national government? How can you prevent governments from using companies as instruments of military power? And how can you prevent legitimate worries about fairness from shading into xenophobia and protectionism? Some of the biggest trade rows in recent years—for example, over the China National Offshore Oil Corporation’s attempt to buy America’s Unocal in 2005, and over Dubai Ports’ purchase of several American ports—have involved state-owned enterprises. There are likely to be many more in the future.

The rise of state capitalism is also undoing many of the assumptions about the effects of globalisation. Kenichi Ohmae said the nation state was finished. Thomas Friedman argued that governments had to don the golden straitjacket of market discipline. Naomi Klein pointed out that the world’s biggest companies were bigger than many countries. And Francis Fukuyama asserted that history had ended with the triumph of democratic capitalism. Now across much of the world the state is trumping the market and autocracy is triumphing over democracy.

Ian Bremmer, the president of Eurasia Group, a political-risk consultancy, claims that this is “the end of the free market” in his excellent book of that title. He exaggerates. But he is right that a striking number of governments, particularly in the emerging world, are learning how to use the market to promote political ends. The invisible hand of the market is giving way to the visible, and often authoritarian, hand of state capitalism.

Special report at a glance 
The crisis of Western liberal capitalism has coincided with the rise of a powerful new form of state capitalism in emerging markets says Adrian Wooldridge Neil Webb 
A brief history of state capitalism and its variations Neil Webb
Related stories
The visible hand

Something old, something new
 How state enterprise is spreading to achieve global reachNeil Webb Related stories State capitalism's global reach: New masters of the universe

 It's not all the same, there are themes and variations within state capitalismNeil Webb Related stories A choice of models: Theme and variations

 Pros and cons: SOEs are good at infrastructure projects, not so good at innovationNeil Webb Related stories Pros and cons: Mixed bag

Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 30, 2012, 12:57:10 PM
Interesting read.  Thanks.
Title: Worship of the Mob
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 30, 2012, 02:08:39 PM
http://mises.org/daily/5879/Worship-of-the-Mob
Title: POTH's David Brooks missing much of the point, but getting some of it
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 31, 2012, 06:47:14 AM

The Great Divorce
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: January 30, 2012
Recommend
Twitter
Linkedin
 
comments (97)
Sign In to E-Mail
 
Print
 
       
Reprints
 
Share
CloseDiggRedditTumblrPermalink I’ll be shocked if there’s another book this year as important as Charles Murray’s “Coming Apart.” I’ll be shocked if there’s another book that so compellingly describes the most important trends in American society.

 
Josh Haner/The New York Times
David Brooks

Go to Columnist Page »David Brooks’s Blog
The intellectual, cultural and scientific findings that land on the columnist’s desk nearly every day.

Go to the Blog »The Conversation
David Brooks and Gail Collins talk between columns.

All Conversations »Readers’ Comments
Readers shared their thoughts on this article.
Read All Comments (97) »
Murray’s basic argument is not new, that America is dividing into a two-caste society. What’s impressive is the incredible data he produces to illustrate that trend and deepen our understanding of it.

His story starts in 1963. There was a gap between rich and poor then, but it wasn’t that big. A house in an upper-crust suburb cost only twice as much as the average new American home. The tippy-top luxury car, the Cadillac Eldorado Biarritz, cost about $47,000 in 2010 dollars. That’s pricy, but nowhere near the price of the top luxury cars today.

More important, the income gaps did not lead to big behavior gaps. Roughly 98 percent of men between the ages of 30 and 49 were in the labor force, upper class and lower class alike. Only about 3 percent of white kids were born outside of marriage. The rates were similar, upper class and lower class.

Since then, America has polarized. The word “class” doesn’t even capture the divide Murray describes. You might say the country has bifurcated into different social tribes, with a tenuous common culture linking them.

The upper tribe is now segregated from the lower tribe. In 1963, rich people who lived on the Upper East Side of Manhattan lived close to members of the middle class. Most adult Manhattanites who lived south of 96th Street back then hadn’t even completed high school. Today, almost all of Manhattan south of 96th Street is an upper-tribe enclave.

Today, Murray demonstrates, there is an archipelago of affluent enclaves clustered around the coastal cities, Chicago, Dallas and so on. If you’re born into one of them, you will probably go to college with people from one of the enclaves; you’ll marry someone from one of the enclaves; you’ll go off and live in one of the enclaves.

Worse, there are vast behavioral gaps between the educated upper tribe (20 percent of the country) and the lower tribe (30 percent of the country). This is where Murray is at his best, and he’s mostly using data on white Americans, so the effects of race and other complicating factors don’t come into play.

Roughly 7 percent of the white kids in the upper tribe are born out of wedlock, compared with roughly 45 percent of the kids in the lower tribe. In the upper tribe, nearly every man aged 30 to 49 is in the labor force. In the lower tribe, men in their prime working ages have been steadily dropping out of the labor force, in good times and bad.

People in the lower tribe are much less likely to get married, less likely to go to church, less likely to be active in their communities, more likely to watch TV excessively, more likely to be obese.

Murray’s story contradicts the ideologies of both parties. Republicans claim that America is threatened by a decadent cultural elite that corrupts regular Americans, who love God, country and traditional values. That story is false. The cultural elites live more conservative, traditionalist lives than the cultural masses.

Democrats claim America is threatened by the financial elite, who hog society’s resources. But that’s a distraction. The real social gap is between the top 20 percent and the lower 30 percent. The liberal members of the upper tribe latch onto this top 1 percent narrative because it excuses them from the central role they themselves are playing in driving inequality and unfairness.

It’s wrong to describe an America in which the salt of the earth common people are preyed upon by this or that nefarious elite. It’s wrong to tell the familiar underdog morality tale in which the problems of the masses are caused by the elites.

The truth is, members of the upper tribe have made themselves phenomenally productive. They may mimic bohemian manners, but they have returned to 1950s traditionalist values and practices. They have low divorce rates, arduous work ethics and strict codes to regulate their kids.

Members of the lower tribe work hard and dream big, but are more removed from traditional bourgeois norms. They live in disorganized, postmodern neighborhoods in which it is much harder to be self-disciplined and productive.

I doubt Murray would agree, but we need a National Service Program. We need a program that would force members of the upper tribe and the lower tribe to live together, if only for a few years. We need a program in which people from both tribes work together to spread out the values, practices and institutions that lead to achievement.

If we could jam the tribes together, we’d have a better elite and a better mass.

Title: Patriot Post: Alexander
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 02, 2012, 11:34:09 AM
Barack Hussein Obama centered his recent State of Disunion campaign speech on the worn socialist refrain of "fairness."
"We can go in two directions," Obama said. "One is towards less opportunity and less fairness. Or we can fight for ... building an economy that works for everyone, not just a wealthy few."
His subsequent 2012 stump speeches include a variation of these words at his most recent whistle stop in Michigan: "I want this to be a big, bold, generous country where everybody gets a fair shot, everybody is doing their fair share, everybody is playing by the same set of rules."
Let's briefly review our nation's history in regard to Liberty, taxation and "fairness."
The first American Revolution was galvanized by a Tea Party protest against a small three pence tax surcharge on imported tea.
Our Founders were uniformly concerned about government power to lay and collect taxes and, accordingly, enumerated specific limitations on taxing and spending.
James Madison addressed the issue of unlimited spending, and his words are applicable today: "It has been [said], that the power 'to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defence and general welfare of the United States,' amounts to an unlimited commission to exercise every power which may be alleged to be necessary for the common defence or general welfare." Rejecting that "misconstruction" of our Constitution, Madison went on to write, "If Congress can do whatever in their discretion can be done by money, and will promote the General Welfare, the Government is no longer a limited one, possessing enumerated powers, but an indefinite one."
To ensure that federal taxation would be limited to these constraints, Article I, Section 8, Clause 1 of our Constitution (the "Taxing and Spending Clause"), as duly ratified in 1789, defined the "Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises," but Section 8 required that such, "Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States." This, in effect, limited the power of Congress to impose direct taxes on individuals, as further outlined in Section 9: "No Capitation, or other direct, Tax shall be laid, unless in Proportion to the Census or enumeration herein before directed to be taken."
That Constitutional limitation survived until 1861, when the first income tax was imposed to defray costs of the War Between the States. That three-percent tax on incomes over $800 was sold as an emergency war measure. In 1894, congressional Democrats tested the Constitution, passing a peacetime tax of two percent on income above $4,000. A year later, that tariff was overturned by the Supreme Court as not complying with the limitations set forth in Article 1.
However, the greatest historical injury to economic Liberty was dealt in the presidential campaign of 1912, when the father of Democratic Socialism, Woodrow Wilson, was elected on his mastery of class warfare rhetoric, as outlined in Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto in the mid-19th century. He used Marx's populist redistribution theme, "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs," to gain passage of the Sixteenth Amendment, which stated, "The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration."
The top tax rate levied under the new Amendment was just seven percent on incomes above $500,000 (about $12 million in 2012 dollars).
But the ability to impose direct taxes gave rise to a century of class warfare political rhetoric that would be anathema to our Founders and the Liberty they fought so hard to secure for their posterity.
Two decades later, Franklin Roosevelt gained acceptance of his New Deal programs via his refined classist rhetoric -- and American socialist propaganda has been the bookmarked page in the political playbook of all Democrat presidents since.
Though the contrast between, and debate about, Leftist Tyranny versus Essential Liberty was boldly reinvigorated by Ronald Reagan during his two terms of office, never before the election of Barack Hussein Obama in 2008 have so many Americans fully recognized the cumulative manifestation of collectivist socialism.
A second Tea Party protest has been brewing since Obama took office, demanding tax reform -- but no such reformation will succeed unless accompanied by tax conformation, ensuring that taxes collected are only for expenditures authorized by our Constitution.
Post Your Opinion: Tell us how you will act to oppose Obama's re-election.
Laying the groundwork for his 2012 re-election bid, Obama's SOTU was devoid of any free-market economic remedies, and every "solution" was predicated upon government engineering via intervention, regulation or redistribution -- consistent with his perfected version of Wilson's and Roosevelt's Democratic Socialist platform.
Additionally, Obama has dumbed-down his classist "fairness" rhetoric to comport with the latest populist appeals of the "occupy movement."
Anticipating that his opponent in the general election will be Mitt Romney, an easy-to-target "rich Republican," Obama has rallied his own stable of uber-wealthy Leftists in support of his "Wall Street v Main Street" disinformation campaign.
In his SOTU, Obama declared, "You can call this class warfare all you want. But asking a billionaire to pay at least as much as his secretary in taxes? Most Americans would call that common sense."
To further advance his classist "divide and conquer" strategy, he trotted out Debbie Bosanek, the secretary of billionaire Obamaphile Warren Buffett, as a prop for invoking the Buffet Rule -- "If you make more than $1 million a year, you should not pay less than 30 percent in taxes."
"Right now, Warren Buffett pays a lower tax rate than his secretary. Do we want to keep these tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans?" asked Obama. Predictably, our Class-Warrior-in-Chief has refused to tell the American people how much Ms. Bosanek is paid in order to be taxed at a higher rate than her boss. Forbes Magazine, however, uses current IRS tax tables to estimate that she makes "well above $200,000 annually." Clearly, Ms. Bosanek isn't just any old secretary.
"Facts," as John Adams noted, "are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence."
The fact is that Warren Buffet, like Mitt Romney and other "wealthy Americans," pays much more than the much-maligned "15 percent" on capital gains. Before being taxed on his profits, the corporations producing them are already taxed at 35 percent -- the highest corporate tax rate in the world. So, in effect, these vilified wealthy Americans are already paying more than 50 percent in taxes, far above the 30 percent rate of Obama's beloved "Buffett Rule," and far, far above his "15 percent" claim.
 
Here in our humble editorial shop, we call Obama's deceptive prevarication, The Big Lie.
Now, Obama might make a pitch for fairness if the top 25 percent of income earners were paying a lower percentage of the nation's tax bill than the percentage of national income they earn. But the top 25 percent are currently paying 87 percent of that bill while earning 65 percent of that income.
However, populist rhetoric trumps facts, where there is not enough "common sense" to prevail. As George Bernard Shaw said, "A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul."
Moreover, the real tragedy is that Obama's senseless sycophants don't comprehend the great error of his "fairness" rhetoric. The capital Obama proposed to remove from the economy in the form of even more disproportionate taxes (for expenditures not authorized by our Constitution) will decrease the available pool of capital for economic expansion, job creation and higher standards of living for ALL working Americans.
Post Your Opinion: How can the next Republican presidential candidate best defend free enterprise?
Obama's "fairness" farce to raise taxes and shrink capital is the last component of his macroeconomic agenda to break the back of free enterprise, in order to achieve his objective of "fundamentally transforming the United States of America" from a nation guided by Rule of Law as supported by economic Liberty, to one subdued by the rule of men under the oppression of Democratic Socialism.
In 1819, Chief Justice John Marshall famously observed, "An unlimited power to tax involves, necessarily, a power to destroy; because there is a limit beyond which no institution and no property can bear taxation."
Should Obama gain a second term, he is virtually assured "an unlimited power to tax" beyond the limits free enterprise can bear. The outcome of the next election will be either a sunrise or sunset on Liberty.
While Leftists may have the constitutional authority to levy direct taxes on income, they do not have the authority to levy such taxes for expenditures not expressly authorized by our Constitution -- though they have done so with impunity for generations.
In 1794, as recorded in the Annals of Congress, James Madison declared, "I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents..."
To this day, no constitutional articulation of such spending power exists, and challenging that authority exposes the Achilles' heel of the generations of socialist programs espoused by Obama and his Leftist cadres.
So, can an "establishment Republican" defeat Obama with a "tax reform" platform?
No -- unless he centers the debate on the fact that our Constitution provides no authority for the expenditures Obama proposes, charges him with violating his "sacred oath" to "support and defend," and vigorously makes the case that Obama has offended American Liberty in the process.
It is just such a breach of trust that gave rise to the first American Revolution. Focusing on Obama's Breach of Oath will ensure that Liberty can be sustained with ballots rather than bullets.
The next Republican presidential candidate must not only defeat Obama's rhetoric with Rule of Law defining the role of government, but if he succeeds, he must devote his administration, first and foremost, to real tax reform and implementation of either a flat tax or national sales tax.
As far as the "Buffett Rule" is concerned, Buffett and his secretary, and all American taxpayers, are being overtaxed for illegal expenditures.
Semper Vigilo, Fortis, Paratus et Fidelis!
Libertas aut Mortis!
 
Mark Alexander
Publisher, The Patriot Post
Title: Douglas Murray: Israel and Nuclear Iran
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 10, 2012, 08:38:00 AM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=3dBzslDdQ_g
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on February 10, 2012, 03:16:43 PM
I forgot about the fact that no planes bringing arms to Israel were allowed to land in Europe during the '73 war.

I wonder if the diffference now is Saudi will step up and provide extra oil to Europe.  Not holding my breath.

The Saudis have to know Iran is the threat and the Jews are not. 

Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 10, 2012, 05:49:33 PM
I too had forgotten about the Eruo no-landing-rights policy.

The Saudis DO know from whence the real threat comes.  IIRC it was posted here that the Saudis had given green light to Israel to use Saudi air space to and from points east of SA.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: G M on February 10, 2012, 06:11:44 PM
The perfumed Saudi princes know which side of the naan gets hummus. They can hate Israel all they want, but a nuclear Iran is a dire existential threat to the house of Saud and the sunni gulf states.
Title: Sayeeda Warsi: Don't Marginalize Christianity
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 16, 2012, 10:41:54 PM



Don’t marginalise Christianity, says UK’s Muslim minister
Sayeeda Warsi | 16 February 2012
http://www.mercatornet.com/Newsletterv0810/view_txt/dont_marginalise_christianity_says_uks_muslim_minister



Baroness Sayeeda Warsi is the co-chairman of the British Conservative Party and the first female Muslim to serve as a minister in a UK cabinet. This week she gave a controversial speech about the role of faith in public life at a conference organised by the Vatican.

Today I want to make one simple argument. That in order to ensure faith has a proper space in the public sphere, in order to encourage social harmony, people need to feel stronger in their religious identities, more confident in their beliefs. In practice this means individuals not diluting their faith and nations not denying their religious heritage.

If you take this thought to its conclusion then the idea you’re left with is this: Europe needs to become more confident in its Christianity. Let us be honest. Too often there is a suspicion of faith in our continent: where signs of religion cannot be displayed or worn in government buildings; where states won’t fund faith schools; and where faith is sidelined, marginalised and downgraded.

It all hinges on a basic misconception: that somehow to create equality and space for minority faiths and cultures we need to erase our majority religious heritage. But it is my belief that the societies we are, the cultures we’ve created, the values we hold and the things we fight for stem from something we’ve argued over, dissented from, discussed and built up: centuries of Christianity.

The Christian roots of Europe

It’s what the Holy Father called the “unrenounceable Christian roots of [our] culture and civilisation” which shine through our politics, our public life, our culture, our economics, our language and our architecture. You cannot and should not erase these Christian foundations from the evolution of our nations any more than you can or should erase the spires from our landscapes.

Let me get one thing very clear: I am not saying that everything done in the name of faith has been a blessing for our continent. Too much blood has been shed in the name of religion. But trying to erase this history or blind ourselves to the role of religion on our continent is wrong. We need to realise what drives us, what binds us and what inspires us is a history we are in danger of denying.

I know, in a globalised world, it is easy to think that to relate to others you must water down your identity. But my point today is that being sure of who you are is the only way in which you will be more accommodating of others.

And there is a second strand to this argument. That true confidence has the power to guarantee openness. Because only when you’re content in your own identity only when you realise that the ‘Other’ does not jeopardise who you are can you truly accept and not merely tolerate the presence of difference. Just as the bully bullies because he or she is insecure, so too the state suppresses, marginalises, dictates and dismisses when it feels its identity is at stake.

In the United Kingdom, we have guarded against such fear by recognising the importance of the Established Church and our Christian heritage – our majority faith. And that is what has created religious freedom and a home for people like me, of minority faiths. Majority faiths and minority faiths – as a Muslim who was born and raised in – and now serves – a Christian country, I have experience of both.

What truly enabled me to learn about my faith and to practice it was that my country – the bed over which the river of my faith flowed – had a strong Christian identity. This defined, shaped and gave me confidence in my own faith which, combined with the confidence of my country’s principles and values have since been evident in the decisions I’ve taken as an adult.

Good works come from conviction

A strong sense of Christianity didn’t threaten our Muslim identity – it actually reinforced it. It enabled me to make the case for further interfaith debate, discussion and work. It motivated me to stand up and speak out against anti-Muslim hatred, the persecution of Christians and anti-Semitism. And it inspired me to challenge the growing marginalisation of faith in my country and in Europe.

As I look around the world today, my resolve is strengthened. Where we see faith inspiring, driving and motivating good works is where certainty of conviction is at its strongest. As the Bible teaches us: “For even as the body without the spirit is dead: so also faith without works is dead.”

The Qur’an teaches us something similar – that: “those who believe and do good works are the best of created beings”. We see the proof every day – globally, locally and individually. From the Catholic Church being instrumental in toppling communism to its key role in securing peace in Northern Ireland. From the Catholic Schools in the UK, many of which are outperforming other institutions to the domestic response to the earthquake in Haiti, the floods in Pakistan and the drought in East Africa. And where day by day, faith sustains people through their darkest, most desperate periods. There is no denying the link between these positive actions and faith.

Don’t dumb down religion

As a UK cabinet minister of the Muslim faith, representing a country with an Anglican Established Church, visiting our friends in the spiritual home of Catholicism you will find no greater champion of understanding between faiths than me.

But I believe that where interfaith dialogue does not work is where faiths are dumbed down in order to find common ground. Just as the European language of Esperanto, which attempted to build a new tongue, neutralises our component languages, a common language between faiths risks watering down the diversity and intensity of our respective religions.

The point is that in so many ways, being sure of your faith adds a layer of strength to society. Confidence in our own beliefs enables us to defend attacks on others. Faith asks you to stand up for your neighbour. As the fourth Muslim caliph Ali ibn Abu Talib said: “Every man is your brother.either your brother in faith or your brother in humanity.”

This is the spirit which inspired Muslims to protect Jews during the Holocaust, which motivated Christians to support Muslims fleeing persecution in Darfur and which led Chief Rabbi Sacks to call for action against persecution in Bosnia. It’s something I’ve been arguing for a long time. That persecution somewhere is persecution everywhere. That if you oppress my neighbour you are oppressing me. That an attack on a gudwara is an attack on a mosque, a church, a temple, a synagogue.

Marginalisation of faith

But the confident affirmation of religion which I have spoken of is under threat. It is what the Holy Father called ‘the increasing marginalisation of religion’ during his speech in Westminster Hall.

I see it in United Kingdom and I see it in Europe: spirituality suppressed; divinity downgraded. Where, in the words of the Archbishop of Canterbury, faith is looked down on as the hobby of ‘oddities, foreigners and minorities’. Where religion is dismissed as an eccentricity because it’s infused with tradition. Where we undermine people who attribute good works to their belief and require them to deny it as their motivation. And where faith is overlooked in the public sphere with not even a word about Christianity in the preface of the “European Constitution”.

When I pledged that the new government in the United Kingdom would ‘do God’, in some quarters there was uproar. More telling were the countless comments I received of quiet support a relief that finally someone had said what they had been thinking. This fact alone shows the extent to which religion has been sidelined by some.

Because in parts of Europe there have been misguided beliefs that in order to accommodate people from other backgrounds, we must somehow become less religious or less Christian, that somehow society must level itself out so that faith becomes something that is marginalised and limited to the private confines of one’s home or even one’s mind.

But those calls are not coming from other faith communities. They are coming from two types of people. First, the well-intentioned liberal elite who, conversely, are trying to create equality by marginalising faith in society, who think that the route to religious pluralism is by creating a path of faith-neutrality, who downgrade religion to a mere subcategory in public life.

But look at their supposed level playing field. Its terrain is all but impassable to anyone of belief. One of the arguments of the liberal elite is that faith and reason are incompatible. But they don’t realise, as the Holy Father has argued for many years, that faith and reason go hand in hand. As he said to us in Westminster Hall, “the world of secular rationality and the world of religious belief need one another and should not be afraid to enter into a profound and ongoing dialogue, for the good of our civilisation.” In other words, just as reason should not be excluded from debates about faith so too spirituality should not be excluded when we look at worldly matters.

Second, there are the anti-religionists, the faith deniers, the people who dine out on free-flowing media and sustain a vocabulary of secularist intolerance, attempting to remove all trace of religion from culture, history and public discourse, while ignoring the fact that people of faith give more to charity and that the number of people going to a place of worship is globally on the up.

The deep intolerance of militant secularisation

For me, one of the most worrying aspects about this militant secularisation is that at its core and in its instincts it is deeply intolerant. It demonstrates similar traits to totalitarian regimes – denying people the right to a religious identity and failing to understand the relationship between religious loyalty and loyalty to the state.

That’s why in the 20th Century, one of the first acts of totalitarian regimes was the targeting of organised religion. Why? Because, to them, a religious identity struck at the heart of their totalitarian ideology. In a free market of ideas, they knew their ideology was weak. And with the strength of religions, established over many years, followed by many billions, their totalitarian regimes would be jeopardised.

Our response to militant secularisation today has to be simple: holding firm in our faiths; holding back intolerance, reaffirming the religious foundations on which our societies are built. And reasserting the fact that, for centuries, Christianity in Europe has been inspiring, motivating, strengthening and improving our societies. In public life – driving people to do great things, like setting up schools, creating public services, leading the way in charitable acts. In politics – inspiring parties on both the left and the right. In economics – providing many of the foundations for our market economy and capitalism. In culture – influencing our monuments, our music, our paintings, and our engravings.

Faith must inform public debate

Politicians need to give faith a seat at the table in public life. Not the privileged position of a theocracy, but that of an equal informer of our public debate. So we are not afraid to acknowledge when the debate derives from a religious basis. And not afraid to take onboard – and take on – the solutions offered up by religion. Politicians must also not be afraid to speak out when we think people who speak in the name of faith have got it wrong.

I am not saying that faith leaders should have a monopoly on morality. Because, of course, as our Prime Minister David Cameron said, there are Christians who don’t live by a moral code and there are atheists and agnostics who do. But for people who do have a faith, their faith can be a helpful prod in the right direction.

Therefore, I’m arguing that religion needs a role when we look at the problems today. So that even the most committed atheist can find that those who are committed to religion have something to offer and that faith can be good for society, good for communities and good for those who choose to follow a faith. When religion has a role in public life, it enables us to look at our economy and refer to the Christian principles on which our markets were founded. It means we can take solace from teachings such a Rerum Novarum and Caritas in Veritate, which offer up answers for creating moral markets.

It means we can look at our social problems and be inspired by Catholic Social Teaching [by] looking at our welfare system and thinking, how does this impact on human dignity; [by] looking at social breakdown and thinking, are we reinforcing responsibility between citizens; [by] looking at governance and thinking, are we relying on large organisations to do what smaller units could achieve -- all the while thinking and remembering that many of our values -- loving our neighbours, acting as the Good Samaritan, supporting and championing the family unit, doing to others as you would be done by -- are Biblical, spiritual and religious in their origin.

People need to realise that, in our continent and beyond, Christianity’s teachings and values are as permanent as Westminster Abbey as indelible as Da Vinci’s Last Supper and as solid as Christ the Redeemer and that Christianity is as vital to our future as it is to our past. Our two states have lots to learn and much to teach and I have hope, and yes faith, that others will continue with us on this path. 

This speech has been edited for length. For the full speech, visit Sayeeda Warsi’s website.

Title: Prager: If you are ever murdered , , ,
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 28, 2012, 07:44:33 AM
If You're Ever Murdered, Here's an Idea
Tuesday, February 21, 2012
ShareThis
I'd like to offer a simple proposal that, if enacted, could generate a great deal of a most precious resource: moral clarity.

It concerns the death penalty.

Opponents of capital punishment for murderers argue that the state has no right to take a murderer's life. Apparently, one fact that abolitionists forget or overlook is that the state is acting on behalf of the murdered person and the murdered person's family, not only on behalf of society.

In order to make this as clear as possible, here is my proposal: Americans should be able to declare what they want the state to do on their behalf if they are murdered. Those who wish the state to keep their murderer alive for all of his natural years should wear, let us say, a green bracelet and/or place a green dot on their driver's license or license plate. And those who want their convicted murderer put to death can wear a red bracelet and/or have a red dot on their license.

Just as I have a pink "donor" circle on my driver's license signifying that in case I die, I wish to provide my organs to help keep some person alive, I wish to make it known that if I am murdered, I do not want my murderer kept alive a day longer than legally necessary.

There are a number of reasons for recommending such a policy.

First, as noted, it is clarifying for the individual. It is easier to take a position in the abstract than when it hits home. It is one thing to oppose the death penalty when others are killed, but if you have to decide what happens if it is you who is murdered, the mind focuses with greater clarity.

Before deciding which color to choose, let a woman imagine herself raped and then stabbed to death. And let her further imagine that if this happened to her, she now has some say in determining what happens to the person who did this to her. She is no longer a silent corpse. Her voice will be heard, perhaps even be determinative of her killer's fate.

Likewise, the woman who truly opposes death for any murderer, no matter how heinous and sadistic his actions, will also now have the ability to speak from the grave. No matter how much her family may seek the death penalty, family members will have no say. Any woman -- or man -- who passionately opposes the death penalty under every conceivable circumstance can now help to ensure that at least in his or her case, a murderer's life that might have been taken might now be preserved. There is no more direct way to give death-penalty abolitionists the right to have a say over the fate of a murderer.

Second, such a choice gives great power to the individual. Abolitionists who live in pro-death-penalty Texas, for example, can now have a say on a matter of enormous moral magnitude. And pro-death penalty citizens living in states that have either legally or de facto abolished the death penalty regain a sense of power over their life (or death, to be precise).

The whole American experiment has been predicated on giving individuals as much control over their own lives as possible. But this has been undermined in the last 50 years, as the state has gotten ever more powerful. Giving murder victims say over their murderer's fate would be a small but symbolically significant step in Americans reasserting the importance of the individual. It's hard to imagine a more appropriate arena than in determining what happens to the person who murdered you.

As dark as thoughts of one's own murder may be, we all think about it. And I don't think I speak only for myself in saying that I would rest just a tiny bit better knowing that if I were murdered, my murderer might not be allowed to watch TV; read books; exercise; develop relationships with people inside and outside of prison; surf the Internet; sing; listen to music; have his health care needs addressed; and be visited by loved ones while I lay in my grave.

And for those opposed to the death penalty, they, too, will be able to rest a bit easier. They will be assured that even men who came to their home, raped all the females in their family, and then set the house on fire with the family inside -- as happened in Connecticut a few years ago -- would never be killed by the state.

Third, it would be interesting to see if these color-coded bracelets and licenses had any effect on who gets murdered. Clearly, when the murder is a crime of passion, it is hard to imagine that a would-be murderer would stop himself from killing someone upon noticing a red bracelet or a red dot on a license plate. But crimes of passion are generally not, in any event, punished by death. On the other hand, in murders that could be capital crimes, it is possible (not necessarily likely, but possible) that a murderer (or even more likely, his accomplice, if there were one) might just re-think murdering the victim.

Fourth, choosing which color bracelet or dot on one's license not only forces people to confront their own consciences, but it will undoubtedly engender deep discussions with others. To cite but one example, it can surely help singles who are dating. If you're against the death penalty, and your date drives up with a red bracelet and/or dot on his license plate, you'll have either a far deeper discussion than you would have otherwise have had at dinner, or you'll spare yourself the time and expense of a date that will probably go nowhere.

These are some of the arguments for the plan. I can't think of one good argument against it -- unless you're an abolitionist who is fearful of seeing red.

Title: People Aren't Smart Enough for Democracy
Post by: bigdog on March 01, 2012, 07:03:12 AM
So says this article:

http://www.livescience.com/18706-people-smart-democracy.html?fb_comment_id=fbc_10150565482731373_20634352_10150568265926373#fff6c3e6c6c2ad
Title: Escaping the cult of the average
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 04, 2012, 01:01:39 PM

http://www.smartercreativity.com/blog/2012/2/3/escaping-the-cult-of-the-average-the-happy-secret-to-better.html
Title: Re: Escaping the cult of the average
Post by: G M on March 04, 2012, 04:04:42 PM

http://www.smartercreativity.com/blog/2012/2/3/escaping-the-cult-of-the-average-the-happy-secret-to-better.html

That was worth watching twice!
Title: Religion for everyone
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 05, 2012, 05:13:03 AM
http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB10001424052970204883304577221603720817864-lMyQjAxMTAyMDAwNDEwNDQyWj.html?mod=wsj_share_email_bot

 One key thing lacking in much of modern society is the sense of community provided by churches and other religious institutions. In a discussion about his new book, "Religion for Atheists," Alain de Botton talks with WSJ's Gary Rosen about how our sense of kinship and belonging might be reattained in a more-secular age.
.One of the losses that modern society feels most keenly is the loss of a sense of community. We tend to imagine that there once existed a degree of neighborliness that has been replaced by ruthless anonymity, by the pursuit of contact with one another primarily for individualistic ends: for financial gain, social advancement or romantic love.

In attempting to understand what has eroded our sense of community, historians have assigned an important role to the privatization of religious belief that occurred in Europe and the U.S. in the 19th century. They have suggested that we began to disregard our neighbors at around the same time that we ceased to honor our gods as a community.

Journal Community
..This raises two questions: How did religion once enhance the spirit of community? More practically, can secular society ever recover that spirit without returning to the theological principles that were entwined with it? I, for one, believe that it is possible to reclaim our sense of community—and that we can do so, moreover, without having to build upon a religious foundation.

Insofar as modern society ever promises us access to a community, it is one centered on the worship of professional success. We sense that we are brushing up against its gates when the first question we are asked at a party is "What do you do?," our answer to which will determine whether we are warmly welcomed or conclusively abandoned.

In these competitive, pseudo-communal gatherings, only a few sides of us count as currency with which to buy the goodwill of strangers. What matters above all is what is on our business cards. Those who have opted to spend their lives looking after children, writing poetry or nurturing orchards will be left in no doubt that they have run contrary to the dominant mores of the powerful, who will marginalize them accordingly.

Religion in Secular Life: A Proposal
View Slideshow

Thomas Greenall & Jordan Hodgso
 
A university alive to its true responsibilities would teach students about things like the tensions of married life, with books like 'Anna Karenina' and 'Madame Bovary' on the syllabus.
..Given this level of discrimination, it is no surprise that many of us choose to throw ourselves with a vengeance into our careers. Focusing on work to the exclusion of almost everything else is a plausible strategy in a world that accepts workplace achievements as the main tokens for securing not just the financial means to survive physically but also the attention that we require to thrive psychologically.

Religions seem to know a great deal about our loneliness. Even if we believe very little of what they tell us about the afterlife or the supernatural origins of their doctrines, we can nevertheless admire their understanding of what separates us from strangers and their attempts to melt away one or two of the prejudices that normally prevent us from building connections with others.

Consider Catholicism, which starts to create a sense of community with a setting. It marks off a piece of the earth, puts walls up around it and declares that within their confines there will reign values utterly unlike the ones that hold sway in the world beyond. A church gives us rare permission to lean over and say hello to a stranger without any danger of being thought predatory or insane.

The composition of the congregation also feels significant. Those in attendance tend not to be uniformly of the same age, race, profession or educational or income level; they are a random sampling of souls united only by their shared commitment to certain values. We are urged to overcome our provincialism and our tendency to be judgmental—and to make a sign of peace to whomever chance has placed on either side of us. The Church asks us to leave behind all references to earthly status. Here no one asks what anyone else "does." It no longer matters who is the bond dealer and who the cleaner.

 
Zackary Canepari/Panos;
 
We all stand to learn something from the ways in which religion promotes morality, inspires travel, trains minds and encourages gratitude at the beauty of life.
.The Church does more, however, than merely declare that worldly success doesn't matter. In a variety of ways, it enables us to imagine that we could be happy without it. Appreciating the reasons why we try to acquire status in the first place, it establishes conditions under which we can willingly surrender our attachment to it.

It is the genius of the Mass to confront these fears. The building in which it is performed is almost always sumptuous. Though it is technically devoted to celebrating the equality of man, it often surpasses palaces in its beauty. The company is also enticing. As the congregants start to sing "Gloria in Excelsis," we are likely to feel that the crowd is nothing like the one that we encounter at the shopping mall or the bus stop. We gaze up at the vaulted, star-studded ceiling and rehearse in unison the words "Lord, come, live in your people and strengthen them by your grace." We leave thinking that humanity may not be such a wretched thing after all.

As a result, we may start to feel that we could work a little less feverishly, because we see that the respect and security we hope to gain through our careers is already available to us in a warm and impressive community that imposes no worldly requirements on us for its welcome.

If the Mass has done its job and we are awake to its lessons, it should succeed by its close in shifting us at least fractionally off our accustomed egocentric axes. It should also have given us a few ideas for mending some of the more dispiriting aspects of our fractured modern world.

One of these ideas relates to the benefits of taking people into a distinct space where they can be isolated from the usual ideology of the mercantile world. The venue itself ought to be attractive enough to evoke enthusiasm for the notion of a group. It should inspire visitors to suspend their customary frightened egoism in favor of a joyful immersion in a collective spirit—an unlikely scenario in the majority of modern so-called "community centers," insultingly designed structures whose appearance paradoxically serves to confirm the inadvisability of joining anything communal.

The Mass also contains a lesson about the importance of rules for directing people in their interactions with one another. The liturgical complexity of a Missal—the way in which this book of instructions for celebrating a Mass compels the congregants to look up, stand, kneel, sing, pray, drink and eat at given points—speaks to an essential aspect of human nature. To foster a sense of communal intimacy and to ensure that profound and dignified personal bonds can be forged, a tightly choreographed agenda of activities may be more effective than simply leaving a group to mingle aimlessly on its own.

A final lesson from the Mass is closely connected with its history. Before it was a service, before the congregants sat in seats facing an altar behind which a priest held up a wafer and a cup of wine, the Mass was a meal. What we now know as the Eucharist began as an occasion when early Christians put aside their work and domestic obligations and gathered around a table (usually laden with wine, lamb and loaves of unleavened bread) in order to commemorate the Last Supper. They talked, prayed and renewed their commitments to Christ and to one another. Like Jews at the Sabbath meal, Christians understood that it is when we satiate our bodily hunger that we are often readiest to direct our minds to the needs of others.

Enlarge Image

CloseKyoko Hamada/Gallery Stock
 
The contemporary world is not lacking in places where we can dine well in company, but what's significant is that there are almost no venues that can help us to transform strangers into friends.
.In honor of the most important Christian virtue, these gatherings became known as agape (love, in Greek) feasts and were regularly held by Christian communities in the period between Jesus's death and the Council of Laodicea in A.D. 364. Complaints about the excessive exuberance of some of these meals eventually led the early Church to the regrettable decision to ban agape feasts and to suggest that the faithful eat at home with their families instead—and only afterward gather for the spiritual banquet that we now know as the Eucharist.

But the Mass is hardly alone as an instructive example, and community is certainly not our only unmet need in the modern world. My premise is that even those who aren't religious can find religion sporadically useful, interesting and consoling and should consider how we might import certain religious ideas and practices into the secular realm.

Everyone stands to learn something from the ways in which religion delivers sermons, promotes morality, engenders a spirit of community, inspires travel, trains minds and encourages gratitude at the beauty of life. In a world beset by fundamentalists of both the believing and the secular variety, it must be possible to balance a rejection of religious faith with a selective reverence for religious rituals and concepts.

Religion serves two central needs that secular society has not been able to meet with any particular skill: first, the need to live together in harmonious communities, despite our deeply-rooted selfish and violent impulses; second, the need to cope with the pain that arises from professional failure, troubled relationships, the death of loved ones and our own decay and demise.

Religions are a repository of occasionally ingenious concepts for trying to assuage some of the most persistent and unattended ills of secular life. They merit our attention for their sheer conceptual ambition and for changing the world in a way that few secular institutions ever have. They have managed to combine theories about ethics and metaphysics with practical involvement in education, fashion, politics, travel, hostelry, initiation ceremonies, publishing, art and architecture—a range of interests whose scope puts to shame the achievements of even the greatest secular movements and innovators.

Enlarge Image

CloseMasterfile
 
Cathedral La Seu in evening light, Palma de Majorca, Spain
.It feels especially relevant to talk of meals, because our modern lack of a proper sense of community is importantly reflected in the way we eat. The contemporary world is not, of course, lacking in places where we can dine well in company—cities typically pride themselves on the sheer number and quality of their restaurants—but what's significant is that there are almost no venues that can help us to transform strangers into friends.

The large number of people who patronize restaurants suggests that they are refuges from anonymity and coldness, but in fact they have no systematic mechanism for introducing patrons to one another, to dispel their mutual suspicions, to break up the clans into which they segregate themselves or to get them to open up their hearts and share their vulnerabilities with others. At a modern restaurant, the focus is on the food and the décor, never on opportunities for extending and deepening affections.

Patrons tend to leave restaurants much as they entered them, the experience having merely reaffirmed existing tribal divisions. Like so many institutions in the modern city (libraries, nightclubs, coffee shops), restaurants know full well how to bring people into the same space, but they lack any means of encouraging them to make meaningful contact with one another once they are there.

With the benefits of the Mass and the drawbacks of contemporary dining in mind, we can imagine an ideal restaurant of the future, an Agape Restaurant. Such a restaurant would have an open door, a modest entrance fee and an attractively designed interior. In its seating arrangement, the groups and ethnicities into which we commonly segregate ourselves would be broken up; family members and couples would be spaced apart. Everyone would be safe to approach and address, without fear of rebuff or reproach. By simple virtue of being in the space, guests would be signaling—as in a church—their allegiance to a spirit of community and friendship.

Though there wouldn't be religious imagery on the walls, some kind of art that displayed examples of human vulnerability, whether in relation to physical suffering, poverty, anxiety or romantic discord, would bring more of who we actually are into the public realm, lending to our connections with others a new and candid tenor.

Religions are aware that the moments around the ingestion of food are propitious to moral education. It is as if the imminent prospect of something to eat seduces our normally resistant selves into showing some of the same generosity to others as the table has shown to us. Religions also know enough about our sensory, nonintellectual dimensions to be aware that we cannot be kept on a virtuous track simply through the medium of words. They know that their captive audience is likely to accept a trade-off between ideas and nourishment—and so they turn meals into disguised ethical lessons.

Enlarge Image

CloseThomas Greenall & Jordan Hodgson
 
Temple to perspective: This structure would represent the age of the Earth, with each centimeter of height equating to 1 million years. A tiny band of gold a mere millimeter thick at the bottom of the roughly 150- foot structure would stand for mankind's time on Earth.
.Before our first sip of wine, religious communities offer us a thought that can be swallowed with the liquid like a tablet. They make us listen to a homily in the gratified interval between two courses. And they use specific types of food and drink to represent abstract concepts, telling Christians, for example, that bread stands for the sacred body of Christ, informing Jews that the Passover dish of crushed apples and nuts is the mortar that was used by their enslaved ancestors to build the warehouses of Egypt and teaching Zen Buddhists that their cups of slowly brewing tea are tokens of the transitory nature of happiness in a floating world.

Taking their seats at an Agape Restaurant, guests would find in front of them guidebooks reminiscent of the Haggadah (the text followed at a Passover Seder) or the Missal, laying out the rules for how to behave at the meal. No one would be left alone to find their way to an interesting conversation with another, any more than it would be expected of participants at a Passover meal or in the Eucharist that they might manage independently to alight on the salient aspects of the history of the tribes of Israel or achieve a sense of communion with God.

The Book of Agape would direct diners to speak to one another for prescribed lengths of time on predefined topics. Like the famous questions that the youngest child at the table is assigned by the Haggadah to ask during the Passover ceremony ("Why is this night different from all other nights?" "Why do we eat unleavened bread and bitter herbs?" and so on), these talking points would be carefully crafted for a specific purpose, to coax guests away from customary expressions of pride ("What do you do?" "Where do your children go to school?") and toward a more sincere revelation of themselves ("What do you regret?" "Whom can you not forgive?" "What do you fear?").

The liturgy would inspire charity in the deepest sense, a capacity to respond with complexity and compassion to the existence of our fellow creatures. One would be privy to accounts of fear, guilt, rage, melancholy, unrequited love and infidelity that would generate an impression of our collective insanity and endearing fragility.

Thanks to the Agape Restaurant, our fear of strangers would recede. The poor would eat with the rich, the black with the white, the orthodox with the secular, workers with managers, scientists with artists. The claustrophobic pressure to derive all of our satisfactions from our existing relationships would ease, as would our desire to climb ever higher in social status.

The notion that we could mend some of the tatters in the modern social fabric through an initiative as modest as a communal meal may seem offensive to those who trust in the power of legislative and political solutions to cure society's ills. But these restaurants would not be an alternative to traditional political methods. They would be a prior step, taken to humanize one another in our imaginations.

Christianity, Judaism and Buddhism have made significant contributions to political life, but their relevance to the problems of community are arguably never greater than when they depart from the modern political script and remind us that there is also value to be had in standing in a big hall singing a hymn or in ceremoniously washing a stranger's feet or in sitting at a table with neighbors and partaking of lamb stew and conversation. These rituals, as much as the deliberations inside parliaments and law courts, are what help to hold our fractious and fragile societies together.

—From "Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believers Guide to the Uses of Religion" by Alain de Botton, to be published March 6 by Pantheon. Copyright by Alain de Botton.
 
A version of this article appeared Feb. 18, 2012, on page C1 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Religion for Everyone.

Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: G M on March 05, 2012, 05:22:00 AM
It's nice that atheists recognize the emptiness of atheism, but a pseudochurch will provide them no comfort.
Title: Finley in WSJ: Coffee is an essential benefit too
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 12, 2012, 01:39:15 AM


By ALLYSIA FINLEY
Dear President Obama,

Can you believe the nerve of employers? Many of them still seem to think that they should be allowed to determine the benefits they offer. I guess they haven't read your 2,000-page health law. It's the government's job now.

That's a good thing, too. Employers for too long have been able to restrict our access to essential health services like contraception by making us pay some of the bill. Really, it's amazing that we aren't all dead. Now, thanks to you, we'll enjoy free and universal access to preventative care just like workers do in Cuba. Even so, there are still many essential benefits that the government must mandate to make the U.S. the freest country in the world.

• Fitness club memberships. Most doctors agree that exercising is one of the best ways to prevent disease. However, gym memberships can run between $240 and $1,800 per year. Such high prices force us to choose between exercising and buying groceries. While we could walk or jog outside, many of us prefer not to. Therefore, employers should be required to pay for workers' gym memberships. Doing so might even reduce employers' health costs, which is why many companies already subsidize memberships. Those that don't are limiting our freedom to exercise.

Enlarge Image

CloseGetty Images
 .• Massages. Stress raises the risk of heart disease, obesity, depression and a host of other maladies. About one half of Americans say they're stressed, and studies show that health costs for stressed-out workers are nearly 50% higher than those for their chilled-out counterparts. According to the Mayo Clinic, a great way to reduce stress is to get a massage. However, since few of us can afford massages, it is imperative that employers be required to cover weekly massage treatments or hire in-office masseuses. Think of the millions of new jobs this mandate will create in the therapeutic field, too.

• Yoga classes. Like exercise and massage, yoga reduces stress and can relieve back pain, osteoarthritis and even menopausal symptoms. Yoga is also one of the best exercises for pregnant women since stress raises the risk of birth defects, which in turn increase health costs. While we could practice yoga with the aid of a DVD or Web video, classes offer social benefits that enhance our psychological well-being.

• Coffee. Studies show that coffee can ward off depression, Alzheimer's disease, type 2 diabetes and sleepiness—which makes it one of the most powerful preventive treatments. Workers who drink java are also more productive and pleasant. While many offices have coffee makers, some employers—most notably those affiliated with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—continue to deny workers this essential benefit. All employers should have to provide workers with freshly brewed coffee. Oh, and workers must also be able to choose the kind of coffee regardless of the price.

Republicans might argue that requiring Mormon charities to serve coffee is a violation of "religious liberty" since the Mormon church's doctrine proscribes coffee, but this argument is a red herring. Leading medical experts recommend drinking coffee. Moreover, 99% of adults have drunk coffee at one point in their lives (including most Mormons).

• Salad bar. Studies also show that eating a lot of salad helps people maintain a healthy weight, which is key to preventing diabetes, heart disease and hypertension. Admittedly, mandating that employers include a free salad bar in their cafeterias would primarily benefit healthy eaters (women like myself) and raise prices for workers who subsist on junk (most men). However, such a mandate is necessary to expand our access to healthy food. Nanny-state conservatives who oppose this mandate merely want to ban salad and control what we eat.

Republicans may complain that these suggested mandates represent an unconstitutional expansion of federal government power. However, I'm sure Attorney General Eric Holder, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and your political adviser David Axelrod could produce a legal memorandum explaining why they are necessary and proper to promote our general welfare (and of course, your re-election).

Besides, if you can justify a mandate on individuals to buy health insurance, this should be a piece of cake.

Ms. Finley is assistant editor of OpinionJournal.com.

Title: Some good data for a campaign speech
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 12, 2012, 08:36:58 AM


http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=xOAgT8L_BqQ&feature=player_embedded
Title: Political Rants - re. Coffee is an essential benefit too, and gender wars
Post by: DougMacG on March 12, 2012, 08:42:07 AM
How can we not at least grant congress the power to mandate employers at a minimum make peas and carrots available to workers during the work day?  What kind of a country have we become?  Maybe the article is written in jest but just where does nanny state, cradle-to-grave government begin and end, no one knows.

Going the other direction with it, Dem female lawmakers are avenging proposed limits on the slaughtering of our young with viagra legislation.

Bill introduced to regulate men's reproductive health
Part of a trend, she likens the bill to men legislating ‘a woman’s womb.’

By Jackie Borchardt, Columbus Bureau Updated 11:53 PM Saturday, March 10, 2012

COLUMBUS – Before getting a prescription for Viagra or other erectile dysfunction drugs, men would have to see a sex therapist, receive a cardiac stress test and get a notarized affidavit signed by a sexual partner affirming impotency, if state Sen. Nina Turner has her way.

The Cleveland Democrat introduced Senate Bill 307 this week.

A critic of efforts to restrict abortion and contraception for women, Turner says she is concerned about men’s reproductive health. Turner’s bill joins a trend of female lawmakers submitting bills regulating men’s health. Turner said if state policymakers want to legislate women’s health choices through measures such as House Bill 125, known as the “Heartbeat bill,” they should also be able to legislate men’s reproductive health...

Read more at the link: http://www.daytondailynews.com/news/dayton-news/bill-introduced-to-regulate-mens-reproductive-health-1341547.html  and click on the ads.

I would note in the false declaration of gender wars that I think it is women who are the most energetic of the pro-life movement (anti-women's rights?) and my guess that it is older women who might like to enjoy their aging husbands' erection one more time.
Title: A different Pelosi on Maher
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 18, 2012, 09:45:29 AM


http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=J_9J5cJwkLU
Title: Bill Maher
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 22, 2012, 11:25:28 AM
THIS week, Robert De Niro made a joke about first ladies, and Newt Gingrich said it was “inexcusable and the president should apologize for him.” Of course, if something is “inexcusable,” an apology doesn’t make any difference, but then again, neither does Newt Gingrich.

Mr. De Niro was speaking at a fund-raiser with the first lady, Michelle Obama. Here’s the joke: “Callista Gingrich. Karen Santorum. Ann Romney. Now do you really think our country is ready for a white first lady?”

The first lady’s press secretary declared the joke “inappropriate,” and Mr. De Niro said his remarks were “not meant to offend.” So, as these things go, even if the terrible damage can never be undone, at least the healing can begin. And we can move on to the next time we choose sides and pretend to be outraged about nothing.

When did we get it in our heads that we have the right to never hear anything we don’t like? In the last year, we’ve been shocked and appalled by the unbelievable insensitivity of Nike shoes, the Fighting Sioux, Hank Williams Jr., Cee Lo Green, Ashton Kutcher, Tracy Morgan, Don Imus, Kirk Cameron, Gilbert Gottfried, the Super Bowl halftime show and the ESPN guys who used the wrong cliché for Jeremy Lin after everyone else used all the others. Who can keep up?

This week, President Obama’s chief political strategist, David Axelrod, described Mitt Romney’s constant advertising barrage in Illinois as a “Mittzkrieg,” and instantly the Republican Jewish Coalition was outraged and called out Mr. Axelrod’s “Holocaust and Nazi imagery” as “disturbing.” Because the message of “Mittzkrieg” was clear: Kill all the Jews. Then the coalition demanded not only that Mr. Axelrod apologize immediately but also that Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz “publicly rebuke” him. For a pun! For punning against humanity!

The right side of America is mad at President Obama because he hugged the late Derrick Bell, a law professor who believed we live in a racist country, 22 years ago; the left side of America is mad at Rush Limbaugh for seemingly proving him right.

If it weren’t for throwing conniption fits, we wouldn’t get any exercise at all.

I have a better idea. Let’s have an amnesty — from the left and the right — on every made-up, fake, totally insincere, playacted hurt, insult, slight and affront. Let’s make this Sunday the National Day of No Outrage. One day a year when you will not find some tiny thing someone did or said and pretend you can barely continue functioning until they apologize.

If that doesn’t work, what about this: If you see or hear something you don’t like in the media, just go on with your life. Turn the page or flip the dial or pick up your roll of quarters and leave the booth.

The answer to whenever another human being annoys you is not “make them go away forever.” We need to learn to coexist, and it’s actually pretty easy to do. For example, I find Rush Limbaugh obnoxious, but I’ve been able to coexist comfortably with him for 20 years by using this simple method: I never listen to his program. The only time I hear him is when I’m at a stoplight next to a pickup truck.

When the lady at Costco gives you a free sample of its new ham pudding and you don’t like it, you spit it into a napkin and keep shopping. You don’t declare a holy war on ham.

I don’t want to live in a country where no one ever says anything that offends anyone. That’s why we have Canada. That’s not us. If we sand down our rough edges and drain all the color, emotion and spontaneity out of our discourse, we’ll end up with political candidates who never say anything but the safest, blandest, emptiest, most unctuous focus-grouped platitudes and cant. In other words, we’ll get Mitt Romney.

Bill Maher is host of “Real Time With Bill Maher” on HBO.

Title: Re: Bill Maher
Post by: G M on March 22, 2012, 08:53:01 PM
http://legalinsurrection.com/2012/03/bill-maher-reaping-what-media-matters-has-sown/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+LegalInsurrection+%28Le%C2%B7gal+In%C2%B7sur%C2%B7rec%C2%B7tion%29

Bill Maher reaping what Media Matters has sown


Posted by William A. Jacobson   Thursday, March 22, 2012 at 9:18am



We live in a world where groups like Media Matters and Think Progress monitor and record every word uttered by any conservative of prominence in the media, hoping to find something “insensitive” with which to mount a campaign to silence the speaker through intimidation of advertisers.
 
So what goes around come around, and Bill Maher is feeling the heat.  And Maher doesn’t like it:
 

Let’s have an amnesty — from the left and the right — on every made-up, fake, totally insincere, playacted hurt, insult, slight and affront. Let’s make this Sunday the National Day of No Outrage. One day a year when you will not find some tiny thing someone did or said and pretend you can barely continue functioning until they apologize.
 
If that doesn’t work, what about this: If you see or hear something you don’t like in the media, just go on with your life. Turn the page or flip the dial or pick up your roll of quarters and leave the booth.
 
The answer to whenever another human being annoys you is not “make them go away forever.” We need to learn to coexist, and it’s actually pretty easy to do. For example, I find Rush Limbaugh obnoxious, but I’ve been able to coexist comfortably with him for 20 years by using this simple method: I never listen to his program. The only time I hear him is when I’m at a stoplight next to a pickup truck.
 
Maher is right.  But an amnesty is not possible so long as groups like Media Matters and Think Progress exist, because what Maher decries is their very reason for existence.
Title: Woman who lived under Nazis and Russian Communism warns of danger to us
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 24, 2012, 11:02:26 AM


http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=e8rT76vNmxc
Title: WSJ: Obama's Europa Complex
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 27, 2012, 04:59:31 PM

By MARK HELPRIN
Both in his re-election campaign and as the core principle of his presidency, Barack Obama asks America to cast off reliance on the free market—because, in his characterization, the free market "doesn't work"—in favor of the European model of ever-tightening, ever-regulating, ever-expanding governance. This he does, astonishingly, at the very moment of the European model's long-predictable crisis, collapse, bankruptcy, and devolution.

With his trademark certainty he proposes—indeed, at times commands—that we follow him over the Niagara to which his back is turned. The writer Henry James cautioned that, "It's a complex fate, being an American, & one of the responsibilities it entails is fighting against a superstitious valuation of Europe." Promiscuous endorsement of things European, inveterate in the president's academic coterie, has long been characteristic of American snobs. As Harvard once dispatched missionaries to better the savages, it now sends students abroad so they might better us. To be wrong on both counts requires congenital blindness to the facts, which suggest that despite our own grievous failings Europe is hardly worthy of imitation.

As a museum of culture, it has few competitors. Europeans make better movies; their cuisine is better (except in Eastern Europe, Central Europe, Scandinavia, England, Ireland, the Low Countries, Germany and Switzerland); and they do a better job of suppressing modern architecture, for which they are to be commended.

But in suppressing and over-engineering their economies they court national bankruptcies. Just as reckless are their efforts to ameliorate economic stagnation via the all-guzzling welfare state. Shall we create more jobs by aping Europe, which since 1990 has averaged 9.16% unemployment while ours was 5.95%?

European structural unemployment is supposedly tolerable in the context of less income inequality and greater social analgesia, but although income equality may be the socialist ideal, isn't the more civilized object to provide as abundantly as possible rather than to annihilate the potential for envy? Incomes are perfectly level in the Gulag, whereas in Boston and Singapore they are not.

More to the point, giant social welfare systems cannot but strangle economies the progressive failure of which they are intended to relieve. Differences within Europe itself illustrate the route out of its troubles that it may yet take just as American progressives jump into the hole it is trying to exit. France now has in proportion to its working population 44% more public employees than Germany, and devotes 52.3% rather than Germany's 43.7% of gross domestic product to public expenditure. Do the French, not to mention the Greeks, wonder by what magic Germany achieves its solvency?

Remarkably like the leaders of the bankrupt states of Europe, President Obama believes that the key to prosperity is to regulate, engineer, and direct the economy; to raise taxes; to augment the powers of government; to substitute collective largess for family cohesion; to spend money that does not exist; and, to paraphrase Macbeth, to borrow, to borrow, and to borrow.

Enlarge Image

CloseChad Crowe
 .In supposedly enlightened Europe, political polarization still finds expression in fascism and communism, as illustrated by the French elections of 2002, when, before the economic crisis, parties of the extreme right and left took nearly one vote in five. Should we emulate this, or the devolution of the United Kingdom, Spain and Belgium? The wars in Northern Ireland and the Balkans? The burning cities of France and Greece? Lacking the balance of our federal system, the European Union brutally overrides local preferences, and should Europe unite it will be so dirigiste and brittle a concoction it will disintegrate as surely as any empire. Shall we emulate that?

If our elites think European low birth rates, family disruption, and nihilism are hip, fine, and dandy, they should read Thomas Mann's "Disorder and Early Sorrow" and contemplate the Weimar Republic. Having abandoned the Constitution, American universities now decide representation by race and sex, and embrace speech codes as in much of Europe, where, for example, Holocaust denial is a crime. Though it is a crime against the truth, it should not be a crime against the law, which could as easily prohibit predication of the Holocaust as it prohibits denial. Should this be our model?


Even with indispensable American aid, Europe took seven months to topple a lunatic at not quite the head of a small, corrupt, inexperienced Libyan army equipped with outdated weapons. Britain now has no fixed-wing aircraft carriers, only 25 principal surface warships (half those of South Korea), and fewer than 200 tanks and 200 combat aircraft with which barely to defend itself. That it once morally despaired of self-defense was understandable in light of the pointless carnage of the Great War. But now in light of what? Fluctuating supplies of ganja? Occasional ebbs of upper-class self-flagellation?

Save those of Russia, Germany has the most powerful land forces in Europe, but only one-sixth the tanks and artillery of Iran. No European air force except Russia's is superior to Saudi Arabia's. Such weakness, almost unimaginable only a short time ago, should not be our aspiration, although it has become so. Europe's disarmament renders it virtually unable to contribute to stability abroad (once, the power of Britain alone kept the lid on the Middle East), or to deter war even on its own soil, such as in the Balkans in the 1990s. Europe is now more vulnerable than during the Cold War, and its vulnerability will only increase, stimulating the appetites of a Russia that wants above all to rebound.

If this seems far-fetched, so at one time did the world-shuddering awakenings of the Wehrmacht, the Red Army, and the forces of Imperial Japan. By abdicating its role in a stable military equilibrium, Europe is not for the first time in its long and bloody history careless of tragedy and fate, and in our own imitative disarmament we are following suit.

In short, the president and his progressives are chasing after a specter. Because the president is apparently repelled by the principles of the American Founding and lacks an alternative other than the European model, nothing else is in his quiver as he is driven by the dread of a future absent his omnipresent intervention.

For if he were no longer able to direct an endlessly augmented list of actions, to suffocate fortune and chance in the infinitely growing pillow of regulation and thus settle everything into silence, to sand down every bump, straighten every drawer, comfort every cry, iron every shirt, and protect every frog, what would America come to? We would be even less like Europe, and as anyone can see, in Europe they do everything right.

Mr. Helprin, a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, is the author of, among other works, the novels "Winter's Tale" (Harcourt) and "A Soldier of the Great War" (Harcourt).
Title: Reese: 545 vs. 300,000,000
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 06, 2012, 05:48:53 PM
Not sure when this was written.
================================================

545 vs. 300,000,000 People
By Charlie Reese

Politicians are the only people in the world who create problems and then campaign against them.

Have you ever wondered, if both the Democrats and the Republicans are against deficits, WHY do we have deficits?

Have you ever wondered, if all the politicians are against inflation and high taxes, WHY do we have inflation and high taxes?

You and I don't propose a federal budget. The President does.

You and I don't have the Constitutional authority to vote on appropriations. The House of Representatives does.

You and I don't write the tax code, Congress does.

You and I don't set fiscal policy, Congress does.

You and I don't control monetary policy, the Federal Reserve Bank does.

One hundred senators, 435 congressmen, one President, and nine Supreme Court justices equates to 545 human beings out of the 300 million are directly, legally, morally, and individually responsible for the domestic problems that plague this country.

I excluded the members of the Federal Reserve Board because that problem was created by the Congress. In 1913, Congress delegated its Constitutional duty to provide a sound currency to a federally chartered, but private, central bank.

I excluded all the special interests and lobbyists for a sound reason. They have no legal authority. They have no ability to coerce a senator, a congressman, or a President to do one cotton-picking thing. I don't care if they offer a politician $1 million dollars in cash. The politician has the power to accept or reject it. No matter what the lobbyist promises, it is the legislator's responsibility to determine how he votes.

Those 545 human beings spend much of their energy convincing you that what they did is not their fault. They cooperate in this common con regardless of party.

What separates a politician from a normal human being is an excessive amount of gall. No normal human being would have the gall of a Speaker, who stood up and criticized the President for creating deficits. The President can only propose a budget. He cannot force the Congress to accept it.

The Constitution, which is the supreme law of the land, gives sole responsibility to the House of Representatives for originating and approving appropriations and taxes. Who is the speaker of the House? He is the leader of the majority party. He and fellow House members, not the President, can approve any budget they want. If the President vetoes it, they can pass it over his veto if they agree to.

It seems inconceivable to me that a nation of 300 million cannot replace 545 people who stand convicted -- by present facts -- of incompetence and irresponsibility. I can't think of a single domestic problem that is not traceable directly to those 545 people. When you fully grasp the plain truth that 545 people exercise the power of the federal government, then it must follow that what exists is what they want to exist.

If the tax code is unfair, it's because they want it unfair.

If the budget is in the red, it's because they want it in the red.

If the Army & Marines are in a foreign country it's because they want them in a foreign country ...

If they do not receive social security but are on an elite retirement plan not available to the people, it's because they want it that way.

There are no insoluble government problems.

Do not let these 545 people shift the blame to bureaucrats, whom they hire and whose jobs they can abolish; to lobbyists, whose gifts and advice they can reject; to regulators, to whom they give the power to regulate and from whom they can take this power. Above all, do not let them con you into the belief that there exists disembodied mystical forces like "the economy," "inflation," or "politics" that prevent them from doing what they take an oath to do.

Those 545 people, and they alone, are responsible.

They, and they alone, have the power.

They, and they alone, should be held accountable by the people who are their bosses.

Provided the voters have the gumption to manage their own employees...

We should vote all of them out of office and clean up their mess!


Title: Pat Kennedy says the obvious
Post by: ccp on April 17, 2012, 11:04:06 AM
This is a remarkable admission by an ex congressman.  Perhaps it is just perception or the media but it does seem like this President is the most corrupt in my memory:

****Former Dem. Congressman Kennedy Alleges 'Quid Pro Quo' for Access to White House
8:42 AM, Apr 15, 2012 • By DANIEL HALPERS

    Access to the Obama White House is in direct correlation to the amount of money donated to the president's reelection effort and the Democratic party, the New York Times reports today.

The Times reports: "those who donated the most to Mr. Obama and the Democratic Party since he started running for president were far more likely to visit the White House than others. Among donors who gave $30,000 or less, about 20 percent visited the White House, according to a New York Times analysis that matched names in the visitor logs with donor records. But among those who donated $100,000 or more, the figure rises to about 75 percent. Approximately two-thirds of the president’s top fund-raisers in the 2008 campaign visited the White House at least once, some of them numerous times."

But the most explosive allegation in the news story comes from former Democratic congressman Patrick Kennedy, son of the late Ted Kenney, who calls what the Obama White House is doing "quid pro quo."

Patrick J. Kennedy, the former representative from Rhode Island, who donated $35,800 to an Obama re-election fund last fall while seeking administration support for a nonprofit venture, said contributions were simply a part of “how this business works.”

“If you want to call it ‘quid pro quo,’ fine,” he said. “At the end of the day, I want to make sure I do my part.”
Related Stories
Obama Fundraises After Debut of 17-Minute Ad
Obama Tries to Rally the Base
W.H. Announces Federal Taxpayer Receipt, Complains ...
Unemployment Gap Remains
Votes per $1,000 Spent in Florida
More by Daniel Halper
Dem. Senator: 'Aim of this Bill Is Not to Lower the ...
'Excuses, Excuses'
DNC Chief Called on to Release Tax Returns
Largest Obama Super PAC Donor: 'Ann Romney Has Never ...
More on James Q. Wilson
Mr. Kennedy visited the White House several times to win support for One Mind for Research, his initiative to help develop new treatments for brain disorders. While his family name and connections are clearly influential, he said, he knows White House officials are busy. And as a former chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, he said he was keenly aware of the political realities they face.

And Kennedy admits that folks in the White House are checking out the donor records:

“I know that they look at the reports,” he said, referring to records of campaign donations. “They’re my friends anyway, but it won’t hurt when I ask them for a favor if they don’t see me as a slouch.”

Translated, "quid pro quo" means "this for that." As in, if you want this from the Obama White House, then give that (e.g., cash).****
Title: Re: Pat Kennedy says the obvious
Post by: G M on April 17, 2012, 11:08:14 AM
It's almost like we have some sort of Chicago Corruption on a national scale now. Who could have seen that coming?  :roll:



This is a remarkable admission by an ex congressman.  Perhaps it is just perception or the media but it does seem like this President is the most corrupt in my memory:

****Former Dem. Congressman Kennedy Alleges 'Quid Pro Quo' for Access to White House
8:42 AM, Apr 15, 2012 • By DANIEL HALPERS

    Access to the Obama White House is in direct correlation to the amount of money donated to the president's reelection effort and the Democratic party, the New York Times reports today.

The Times reports: "those who donated the most to Mr. Obama and the Democratic Party since he started running for president were far more likely to visit the White House than others. Among donors who gave $30,000 or less, about 20 percent visited the White House, according to a New York Times analysis that matched names in the visitor logs with donor records. But among those who donated $100,000 or more, the figure rises to about 75 percent. Approximately two-thirds of the president’s top fund-raisers in the 2008 campaign visited the White House at least once, some of them numerous times."

But the most explosive allegation in the news story comes from former Democratic congressman Patrick Kennedy, son of the late Ted Kenney, who calls what the Obama White House is doing "quid pro quo."

Patrick J. Kennedy, the former representative from Rhode Island, who donated $35,800 to an Obama re-election fund last fall while seeking administration support for a nonprofit venture, said contributions were simply a part of “how this business works.”

“If you want to call it ‘quid pro quo,’ fine,” he said. “At the end of the day, I want to make sure I do my part.”
Related Stories
Obama Fundraises After Debut of 17-Minute Ad
Obama Tries to Rally the Base
W.H. Announces Federal Taxpayer Receipt, Complains ...
Unemployment Gap Remains
Votes per $1,000 Spent in Florida
More by Daniel Halper
Dem. Senator: 'Aim of this Bill Is Not to Lower the ...
'Excuses, Excuses'
DNC Chief Called on to Release Tax Returns
Largest Obama Super PAC Donor: 'Ann Romney Has Never ...
More on James Q. Wilson
Mr. Kennedy visited the White House several times to win support for One Mind for Research, his initiative to help develop new treatments for brain disorders. While his family name and connections are clearly influential, he said, he knows White House officials are busy. And as a former chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, he said he was keenly aware of the political realities they face.

And Kennedy admits that folks in the White House are checking out the donor records:

“I know that they look at the reports,” he said, referring to records of campaign donations. “They’re my friends anyway, but it won’t hurt when I ask them for a favor if they don’t see me as a slouch.”

Translated, "quid pro quo" means "this for that." As in, if you want this from the Obama White House, then give that (e.g., cash).****

Title: Fake Orgasms and the Tea Party: Just Another Political Science Convention
Post by: bigdog on April 17, 2012, 03:25:46 PM
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/04/fake-orgasms-and-the-tea-party-just-another-political-science-convention/255909/#.T42jCE6oZc0.facebook

You can't find a Food Network stew any richer than when political scientists gather: vector autoregression analysis, word of growing cheating on political surveys, talk of faked orgasms, and microscopic parsing of President Obama's speeches meld with revisionist takes on the Tea Party.

It happened again when the Midwest Political Science Association drew 5,000 attendees from around the globe to an annual Chicago gathering. The high-brow feast concluded Sunday but not before hundreds of panel discussions and the surfacing of 4,239 academic papers.

Yes, 4,239, and with lots of footnotes, graphs and vector autoregression analyses. Closing my eyes and randomly picking just four papers in the event's 574-page, phonebook-like program, I give you the following:

 "The Effects of Teachers' Race on Adolescent Risky Sexual Behaviors," "The Impact of State Politics and Policy on Fossil Fuel Plant Construction," "Out of Africa: Electoral Failure and the Future of Political Islam in West Africa," and "Political Knowledge of Local Courts: Are Rural Voters More Informed than Urban Voters?"
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 17, 2012, 04:45:54 PM
Thanks for sharing a bit of the view from your sector in the trenches BD :-)
Title: DOJ 'peacemakers' helped Sanford stay cool amid rising tensions
Post by: bigdog on April 18, 2012, 12:11:25 PM
http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2012-04-15/news/os-trayvon-martin-george-zimmerman-justice-departm-20120415_1_federal-workers-racial-tensions-peacekeepers

When racial tensions flared in Sanford, a league of secretive peacemakers reached out to the city's spiritual and civic leaders to help cool heated emotions after 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was shot and killed in February.

When civil-rights organizers wanted to demonstrate, these federal workers taught them how to peacefully manage crowds.

They even arranged a police escort for college students to ensure safe passage for their 40-mile march from Daytona Beach to Sanford to demand justice.

Title: The absent beard in politics
Post by: bigdog on April 18, 2012, 10:58:06 PM
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2012/04/beards_in_politics_there_hasn_t_been_a_bearded_major_party_presidential_nominee_in_almost_100_years_why_.html



Though the gentlemen who vied for the Republican presidential nomination disagreed on many things, from tax policy to contraception to the feasibility of establishing a colony on the moon, there's one critical issue on which they were firmly in accord: facial hair. This was true of the eventual nominees in the last election, and the one before that, and in every other presidential contest going back to 1916. One hundred years ago, two of the four men running for president were proudly hirsute, as were two of the four vice-presidential candidates. Today, the sitting president can't grow whiskers and his challengers wouldn't dare try. When did the beard lose its political prestige?


 
In his delightful 1930 monograph Concerning Beards, Edwin Valentine Mitchell notes that "the fortunes of the beard have always fluctuated through the ages. It flourishes for a time in full splendor, then diminishes in size, and finally disappears altogether, only to burst forth once more in all its former glory." In much of the premodern era, a healthy beard connoted influence and high status; Mitchell says that "one ancient king actually made a terrible scene because the reigning head of another state sent a beardless youth upon a political errand to his court." The opposite is true, too: Men pressed into servitude were often shorn of their beards as a sign of subjugation.
Title: First family travel
Post by: ccp on April 26, 2012, 11:57:04 AM
What do others think?  I really don't want to get into how much a first lady spends.  On one hand she is representing the US overseas.   I don't want or expect she travel coach.   I want the first family safe.   OTOH is she travelling the world sightseeing?  Hillary did the exact same thing.  I am not sure about other first ladies.   Certainly the Obamas will be financially secure enough to travel wherever they want after the Presidency is over.   

http://dailycaller.com/2012/04/26/group-michelle-obamas-spain-trip-cost-taxpayers-467k/
Title: Z-man on Trayvon v. Zimmerman
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 01, 2012, 06:42:06 AM


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpUAFGqwiJY&feature=player_embedded
Title: We didn't have this green thing back then
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 11, 2012, 11:55:26 AM
"We didn't have this green thing back then"

Checking out at the store, the young cashier suggested to the older
woman, that she should bring her own grocery bags because plastic bags
weren't good for the environment.

The woman apologized and explained, "We didn't have this green thing
back in my earlier days."

The clerk responded, "That's our problem today. Your generation did not
care enough to save our environment for future generations."

She was right -- our generation didn't have the green thing in its day.

Back then, we returned milk bottles, soda bottles and beer bottles to
the store. The store sent them back to the plant to be washed
andsterilized and refilled, so it could use the same bottles over and
over. So they really were recycled. But we didn't have the green thing
back in our day.

Grocery stores bagged our groceries in brown paper bags, that we reused
for numerous things, most memorable besides household garbage bags, was
the use of brown paper bags as book covers for our school books. This
was to ensure that public property, (the books provided for our use by
the school) was not defaced by our scribbling. Then we were able
to personalize our books. But too bad we didn't do the green thing back
then.

We walked up stairs, because we didn't have an escalator in every store
and office building. We walked to the grocery store and didn't climb
into a 300-horsepower machine every time we had to go two blocks. But
she was right. We didn't have the green thing in our day.

Back then, we washed the baby's diapers because we didn't have the
throw-away kind. We dried clothes on a line, not in an energy gobbling
machine burning up 220 volts -- wind and solar power really did dry our
clothes back in our early days. Kids got hand-me-down clothes from
their brothers or sisters, not always brand-new clothing. But that
young lady is right; we didn't have the green thing back in our day.

Back then, we had one TV, or radio, in the house -- not a TV in every
room. And the TV had a small screen the size of a handkerchief, not a
screen the size of the state of Montana . In the kitchen, we blended
and stirred by hand because we didn't have electric machines to do
everything for us. When we packaged a fragile item to send in the mail,
we used wadded up old newspapers to cushion it, not Styrofoam or
plastic bubble wrap. Back then, we didn't fire up an engine and burn
gasoline just to cut the lawn. We used a push mower that ran on human
power. We exercised by working so we didn't need to go to a health club
to run on treadmills that operate on electricity. But she's right; we
didn't have the green thing back then.

We drank from a fountain when we were thirsty instead of using a cup or
a plastic bottle every time we had a drink of water. We refilled
writing pens with ink instead of buying a new pen, and we replaced the
razor blades in a razor instead of throwing away the whole razor just
because the blade got dull. But we didn't have the green thing back
then.

Back then, people took the streetcar or a bus and kids rode their bikes
to school or walked instead of turning their moms into a 24-hour taxi
service. We had one electrical outlet in a room, not an entire bank of
sockets to power a dozen appliances. And we didn't need
a computerized gadget to receive a signal beamed from satellites 2,000
miles out in space in order to find the nearest burger joint.

But isn't it sad… the current generation laments how wasteful we old
folks were just because we didn't have the green thing back then?

Please forward this on to another selfish old person who needs a lesson
in conservation from smartass young people.

We don't like being old in the first place, so it doesn't take much
to tick us off.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on May 11, 2012, 12:32:38 PM
Interesting post.

Life is seems much more complicated today.

There absolutely is far more competition.

There absolutely is information overload.

Despite all the "advances" are human beings better off?

I don't know.  We could probably debate this for a long time and get thousands of different answers and opinions.

Title: Rush:
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 14, 2012, 09:39:23 AM
"This is what I know. Mitt Romney was not at Chappaquiddick. Mitt Romney has not been accused of rape. Mitt Romney did not have an affair with a mob babe. He didn't have an affair with an actress who committed suicide later on. Mitt Romney did not father a child out of wedlock. Mitt Romney did not support the tapping of Martin Luther King's phone. Mitt Romney was never a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Mitt Romney did not lie about his law school grades. Chappaquiddick is Ted Kennedy. Accused of rape is Bill Clinton. Affair with the mob babe and an actress, John Kennedy. Didn't father a child out of wedlock, that's John Edwards and Democrats too numerous to mention. Didn't support the tapping of Martin Luther King's phone, that's Robert Kennedy. Never a member of the Ku Klux Klan, that's Robert Byrd. Didn't lie about his law school grades, that's Joe Biden. All Democrats, and all of those Democrats did those things well after high school. And Obama even wrote in his book 'Dreams from My Father' how he bullied a young girl. And he hasn't even apologized." --radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: bigdog on May 14, 2012, 12:42:38 PM
Rush conveniently ignores the sins of Republicans.  While I take his point, it is not as if the GOP doesn't have its share of pretty scummy pols.

In researching a side project, I discovered this: http://www.funeralwise.com/customs/society/gangs

Interesting to me that such a page exists. 
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 14, 2012, 02:05:34 PM
Forgive the tedium of the question BD, but I understand Rush's point to be the differing consequences with the pravdas for the various transgressions in question.

Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: bigdog on May 14, 2012, 02:50:30 PM
As do I.  However, I think that he (and often liberals are guilty of the same) makes the claim, and implicitly wants to forget/forgive/cast aside the transgressions of his party and/or ideological sympathizers. 

Forgive the tedium of the question BD, but I understand Rush's point to be the differing consequences with the pravdas for the various transgressions in question.


Title: The Night Watchman
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 16, 2012, 06:15:22 AM
                                                             THE NIGHT WATCHMAN

Once upon a time the government had a vast scrap yard in the middle of a
desert.

Congress said, "Someone may steal from it at night." So they created a
night watchman position and hired a person for the job. Then Congress
said, "How does the watchman do his job without instruction? " So they
created a planning department and hired two people, one person to write
the instructions, and one person to do time studies. Then Congress said,
"How will we know the night watchman is doing the tasks correctly?" So
they created a Quality Control department and hired two people. One was
to do the studies and one was to write the reports. Then Congress said,
"How are these people going to get paid?" So they created two positions:
A time keeper and a payroll officer then hired two people. Then Congress
said, "Who will be accountable for all of these people?" So they created
an administrative section and hired three people, an Administrative
Officer, Assistant Administrative Officer, and a Legal Secretary.

Then Congress said, "We have had this command in operation for one year
and we are $918,000 over budget, we must cut back." So they laid-off the
night watchman.

NOW slowly, let it sink in.

Quietly, we go like sheep to slaughter... Does anybody remember the
reason given for the establishment of the DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY during
the Carter administration?

Anybody?

Anything?

No?

Didn't think so!

Bottom line is, we've spent several hundred billion dollars in support
of an agency....the reason for which not one person who reads this can
remember!

Ready?

It was very simple... and at the time, everybody thought it very
appropriate.

The Department of Energy was instituted on 8/04/1977... ......... ......

To LESSEN OUR DEPENDENCE ON FOREIGN OIL.

Hey, pretty efficient, huh?

AND NOW IT'S 2012 -- 35 YEARS LATER -- AND THE BUDGET FOR THIS
"NECESSARY" DEPARTMENT IS AT $24.2 BILLION A YEAR. IT HAS 16,000 FEDERAL
EMPLOYEES AND APPROXIMATELY 100,000 CONTRACT EMPLOYEES; AND LOOK AT THE
JOB IT HAS DONE!

(THIS IS WHERE YOU SLAP YOUR FOREHEAD AND SAY, "WHAT WERE THEY THINKING?")

34 years ago 30% of our oil consumption was foreign imports.

Today 70% of our oil consumption is foreign imports.

Ah, yes -- good old Federal bureaucracy.

NOW, WE HAVE TURNED OVER THE BANKING SYSTEM, HEALTH CARE,

AND THE AUTO INDUSTRY TO THE SAME GOVERNMENT?

Hello!

Anybody Home?

Signed,

The Night Watchman
Title: Prager: Leftism is a religion
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 22, 2012, 08:58:47 AM
Rational People Fear Big Government, Not Big Business
Tuesday, May 22, 2012
ShareThis
You cannot understand the left if you do not understand that Leftism is a religion. It is not God-based (some Left-wing Christians' and Jews' claims notwithstanding), but otherwise it has every characteristic of a religion. The most blatant of those characteristics is dogma. People who believe in Leftism have as many dogmas as the most fundamentalist Christian.

One of them is material equality as the preeminent moral goal. Another is the villainy of corporations. The bigger the corporation, the greater the villainy. Thus, instead of the devil, the left has Big Pharma, Big Tobacco, Big Oil, the "military-industrial complex," and the like. Meanwhile, Big Labor, Big Trial Lawyers, and, of course, Big Government are leftwing angels. And why is that? Why, to be specific, does the left fear big corporations but not big government? The answer is dogma -- a belief system that transcends reason. No rational person can deny that big governments have caused almost all the great evils of the last century, arguably the bloodiest in history. Who killed the 20-30 million Soviet citizens in the Gulag Archipelago -- big government or big business? Hint: There were no private businesses in the Soviet Union. Who deliberately caused 75 million Chinese to starve to death -- big government or big business? Hint: See previous hint. Did Coca Cola kill five million Ukrainians? Did Big Oil slaughter a quarter of the Cambodian population? Would there have been a Holocaust without the huge Nazi state?

Whatever bad big corporations have done is dwarfed by the monstrous crimes -- the mass enslavement of people, the deprivation of the most basic human rights, not to mention the mass murder and torture and genocide -- committed by big governments.

How can anyone who thinks rationally believe that big corporations rather than big governments pose the greatest threat to humanity? The answer is that it takes a mind distorted by leftist dogma. If there is another explanation, I do not know what it is.

Religious Christians and Jews also have some irrational beliefs, but their irrationality is overwhelmingly confined to theological matters; and these theological irrationalities have no deleterious impact on religious Jews' and Christians' ability to see the world rationally and morally. Few religious Jews or Christians believe that big corporations are in any way analogous to big government in terms of evil done. And the few who do are leftists.

That the Left demonizes "Big Pharma," for instance, is an example of leftwing thinking. America's pharmaceutical companies have saved millions of lives, including millions of leftists' lives. And I do not doubt that in order to increase profits, they have not always played by the rules. But to demonize big pharmaceutical companies while lionizing big government, big labor unions and big trial law firms, is to stand morality on its head.

There is yet another reason to fear big government far more than big corporations. ExxonMobil has no police force, no IRS, no ability to arrest you, no ability to shut you up, and certainly no ability to kill you. ExxonMobil can't knock on your door in the middle of the night and legally take you away. Apple Computer cannot take your money away without your consent, and it runs no prisons. The government does all of these things.

Of course, the left will respond that government also does good and that corporations and capitalists are, by their very nature, "greedy."

To which the rational response is that, of course, government also does good. But so do the vast majority of corporations, private citizens, church groups, and myriad voluntary associations. On the other hand, only big government can do anything approaching the monstrous evils of the last century.

As for greed: Between hunger for money and hunger for power, the latter is incomparably more frightening. It is noteworthy that none of the twentieth century's monsters -- Lenin, Hitler, Stalin, Mao -- were preoccupied with material gain. They loved power much more than money.

And that is why the left is much more frightening than the right. It craves power.

Title: Political Rant interesting thought piece- Bill Whittle, Why the Euro has Failed
Post by: DougMacG on May 28, 2012, 10:59:26 AM
Entitled "Why the Euro Failed", this is way too wide ranging to put in the Euro category.  The first half is about why Flight 447 failed and he continues the analogy through the Civil War, Greece, Germany, the Euro and Wisconsin. 6 minutes of your time well spent IMO.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2012/05/27/whittle_why_the_euro_has_failed.html
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 28, 2012, 12:30:14 PM
Is there a URL for that?
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: DougMacG on May 28, 2012, 01:18:48 PM
"Is there a URL for that?"

Oooops.  Here, and added back to original post.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2012/05/27/whittle_why_the_euro_has_failed.html
Title: VDH: It's the culture, stupid!
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 31, 2012, 07:47:21 AM


Culture still matters
 
By Victor Davis Hanson
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | RUDESHEIM, Germany -- This week I am leading a military history tour on the Rhine River from Basel, Switzerland, to Amsterdam. You can learn a lot about Europe's current economic crises by just ignoring the sophisticated barrage of news analysis and instead watching, listening, and talking to people as you go down river.
 
Switzerland, by modern standards, should be poor. Like Bolivia, it is landlocked. Like Italy, it has no real gas or oil wealth. Like Afghanistan, its northern climate and mountainous terrain limit agricultural productivity to upland plains. And like Turkey, it is not a part of the European Union.
 
Unlike Americans, the Swiss are among the most homogeneous people in the world, without much diversity, and make it nearly impossible to immigrate there.
 
So Switzerland supposedly has everything going against it, and yet it is one of the wealthiest nations in the world. Why and how?
 
To answer that is also to learn why roughly 82 million Germans produce almost as much national wealth as do 130 million Greeks, Portuguese, Italians, and Spaniards. Yet the climate of Germany is somewhat harsh; it too has no oil or gas. By 1945, German cities lay in ruins, while Detroit and Cleveland were booming. The Roman historian Tacitus remarked that pre-civilized Germany was a bleak land of cold weather, with little natural wealth and inhabited by tribal savages.
 
Race does not explain present-day national wealth. From 500 B.C. To A.D. 1300, Switzerland and Germany were considered brutal and backward in comparison to classical Greece and Rome, and later Renaissance Venice and Florence.
 
Instead, culture explains far more -- a seemingly taboo topic when economists nonchalantly suggest that contemporary export-minded Germans simply need to spend and relax like laid-back Southern Mediterraneans, and that the latter borrowers save and produce like workaholic Germans to even out the playing field of the European Union.
 
But government-driven efforts to change national behavior often ignore stubborn cultural differences that reflect centuries of complex history as well as ancient habits and adaptations to geography and climate. Greeks can no more easily give up siestas than the Swiss can mandate two-hour afternoon naps. If tax cheating is a national pastime in Palermo, in comparison it is difficult along the Rhine.
 
I lived in Greece for over two years and often travel to northern and Mediterranean Europe and North Africa. While I prefer the Peloponnese to the Rhineland, over the years I have developed an unscientific and haphazard -- but often accurate -- politically incorrect method of guessing whether a nation is likely to be perennially insolvent and wracked by corruption.
 
Do average passersby throw down or pick up litter? After a minor fender-bender, do drivers politely exchange information, or scream and yell with wild gesticulations? Is honking constant or sporadic? Are crosswalks sacrosanct? Do restaurant dinners usually start or wind down at 9 p.m.? Can you drink tap water, or should you avoid it? Do you mostly pay what the price tag says, or are you expected to pay in untaxed cash and then haggle over the unstated cost? Are construction sites clearly marked and fenced to protect pedestrians, or do you risk walking into an open pit or getting stabbed by exposed rebar?
 
To put these crude stereotypes more abstractly, is civil society mostly moderate, predicated on the rule of law, and meritocratic -- or is it better characterized by self-indulgence, cynicism and tribalism?
 
The answers to these questions do not hinge on race, money or natural wealth, but they do involve culture and the way average people predictably live minute by minute. Again, these national habits and traditions accrued over centuries, and as much as politics or economics, they explain in part why Bonn is not Athens, and Zurich is not Naples, or for that matter why Cairo is unlike Tel Aviv or why Mexico City differs from Toronto.
 
There is one final funny thing about contemporary culture. What people say and do about it are two different things. We in the postmodern, politically correct West publicly pontificate that all cultures are just different and to assume otherwise is pop generalization, but privately assume that you would prefer your bank account to be in Frankfurt rather than Athens, or the tumor in your brain to be removed in London rather than Lisbon.
 
A warm sunset with an ouzo on a Greek island beach may be more relaxing than schnapps on the foggy Rhine shore, but to learn why Greeks will probably not pay back what they owe Germany -- and do not believe that they should have to -- take a walk through central Athens and then do the same in Munich.
Title: Neal Boortz
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 31, 2012, 10:17:09 AM
Second post of the day:


 
Neal Boortz is a Texan, a lawyer, a Texas Aggie (Texas A&M) graduate, and now a nationally syndicated talk show host from Atlanta. His commencement address to the graduates of a recent Texas A&M class is far different from what either the students or the faculty expected. Whether you agree or disagree, his views are certainly thought provoking.

"I am honored by the invitation to address you on this august occasion. It's about time. Be warned, however, that I am not here to impress you; you'll have enough smoke blown up your bloomers today. And you can bet your tassels I'm not here to impress the faculty and administration. You may not like much of what I have to say, and that's fine. You will remember it though. Especially after about 10 years out there in the real world. This, it goes without saying, does not apply to those of you who will seek your careers and your fortunes as government employees.

This gowned gaggle behind me is your faculty. You've heard the old saying that those who can - do. Those who can't - teach. That sounds deliciously insensitive. But there is often raw truth in insensitivity, just as you often find feel-good falsehoods and lies in compassion. Say good-bye to your faculty because now you are getting ready to go out there and do. These folks behind me are going to stay right here and teach.

By the way, just because you are leaving this place with a diploma doesn't mean the learning is over. When an FAA flight examiner handed me my private pilot's license many years ago, he said, “Here, this is your ticket to learn.” The same can be said for your diploma. Believe me, the learning has just begun.

Now, I realize that most of you consider yourselves Liberals. In fact, you are probably very proud of your liberal views. You care so much. You feel so much. You want to help so much. After all, you're a compassionate and caring person, aren't you now? Well, isn't that just so extraordinarily special. Now, at this age, is as good a time as any to be a liberal; as good a time as any to know absolutely everything. You have plenty of time, starting tomorrow, for the truth to set in.

Over the next few years, as you begin to feel the cold breath of reality down your neck, things are going to start changing pretty fast... Including your own assessment of just how much you really know.

So here are the first assignments for your initial class in reality: Pay attention to the news, read newspapers, and listen to the words and phrases that proud Liberals use to promote their causes. Then, compare the words of the left to the words and phrases you hear from those evil, heartless, greedy conservatives. From the Left you will hear "I feel." From the Right you will hear "I think." From the Liberals you will hear references to groups -- The Blacks, the Poor, the Rich, the Disadvantaged, the Less Fortunate. From the Right you will hear references to individuals. On the Left you hear talk of group rights; on the Right, individual rights.

That about sums it up, really: Liberals feel. Liberals care. They are pack animals whose identity is tied up in group dynamics. Conservatives think -- and, setting aside the theocracy crowd, their identity is centered on the individual.

Liberals feel that their favored groups have enforceable rights to the property and services of productive individuals. Conservatives, I among them I might add, think that individuals have the right to protect their lives and their property from the plunder of the masses.

In college you developed a group mentality, but if you look closely at your diplomas you will see that they have your individual names on them. Not the name of your school mascot, or of your fraternity or sorority, but your name. Your group identity is going away. Your recognition and appreciation of your individual identity starts now.

If, by the time you reach the age of 30, you do not consider yourself to be a conservative, rush right back here as quickly as you can and apply for a faculty position. These people will welcome you with open arms. They will welcome you, that is, so long as you haven't developed an individual identity. Once again you will have to be willing to sign on to the group mentality you embraced during the past four years.

Something is going to happen soon that is going to really open your eyes. You're going to actually get a full time job!

You're also going to get a lifelong work partner. This partner isn't going to help you do your job. This partner is just going to sit back and wait for payday. This partner doesn't want to share in your effort, but in your earnings.

Your new lifelong partner is actually an agent; an agent representing a strange and diverse group of people; an agent for every teenager with an illegitimate child; an agent for a research scientist who wanted to make some cash answering the age-old question of why monkeys grind their teeth. An agent for some poor demented hippie who considers herself to be a meaningful and talented artist, but who just can't manage to sell any of her artwork on the open market.

Your new partner is an agent for every person with limited, if any, job skills, but who wanted a job at City Hall. An agent for tin-horn dictators in fancy military uniforms grasping for American foreign aid. An agent for multi-million dollar companies who want someone else to pay for their overseas advertising. An agent for everybody who wants to use the unimaginable power of this agent's for their personal enrichment and benefit.
That agent is our wonderful, caring, compassionate, oppressive government. Believe me, you will be awed by the unimaginable power this agent has. Power that you do not have. A power that no individual has, or will have. This agent has the legal power to use force, deadly force to accomplish its goals.

You have no choice here. Your new friend is just going to walk up to you, introduce itself rather gruffly, hand you a few forms to fill out, and move right on in. Say hello to your own personal one ton gorilla. It will sleep anywhere it wants to.

Now, let me tell you, this agent is not cheap. As you become successful it will seize about 40% of everything you earn. And no, I'm sorry, there just isn't any way you can fire this agent of plunder, and you can't decrease its share of your income. That power rests with him, not you.

So, here I am saying negative things to you about government. Well, be clear on this: It is not wrong to distrust government. It is not wrong to fear government. In certain cases it is not even wrong to despise government for government is inherently evil. Yes, a necessary evil, but dangerous nonetheless, somewhat like a drug. Just as a drug that in the proper dosage can save your life, an overdose of government can be fatal.

Now let's address a few things that have been crammed into your minds at this university. There are some ideas you need to expunge as soon as possible. These ideas may work well in academic environment, but they fail miserably out there in the real world.
First is that favorite buzz word of the media and academia: Diversity! You have been taught that the real value of any group of people - be it a social group, an employee group, a management group, whatever - is based on diversity. This is a favored liberal ideal because diversity is based not on an individuals abilities or character, but on a person's identity and status as a member of a group. Yes, it's that liberal group identity thing again.

Within the great diversity movement group identification - be it racial, gender based, or some other minority status - means more than the individuals integrity, character or other qualifications.

Brace yourself. You are about to move from this academic atmosphere where diversity rules, to a workplace and a culture where individual achievement and excellence actually count. No matter what your professors have taught you over the last four years, you are about to learn that diversity is absolutely no replacement for excellence, ability, and individual hard work. From this day on every single time you hear the word "diversity" you can rest assured that there is someone close by who is determined to rob you of every vestige of individuality you possess.

We also need to address this thing you seem to have about "rights." We have witnessed an obscene explosion of so-called "rights" in the last few decades, usually emanating from college campuses.

You know the mantra: You have the right to a job. The right to a place to live. The right to a living wage. The right to health care. The right to an education. You probably even have your own pet right - the right to a Beemer for instance, or the right to have someone else provide for that child you plan on downloading in a year or so.

Forget it. Forget those rights! I'll tell you what your rights are. You have a right to live free, and to the results of 60% -75% of your labor. I'll also tell you have no right to any portion of the life or labor of another.

You may, for instance, think that you have a right to health care. After all, President Obama said so, didn't he? But you cannot receive health-care unless some doctor or health practitioner surrenders some of his time - his life - to you. He may be willing to do this for compensation, but that's his choice. You have no "right" to his time or property. You have no right to his or any other person's life or to any portion thereof.

You may also think you have some "right" to a job; a job with a living wage, whatever that is. Do you mean to tell me that you have a right to force your services on another person, and then the right to demand that this person compensate you with their money? Sorry, forget it. I am sure you would scream if some urban outdoors men (that would be "homeless person" for those of you who don't want to give these less fortunate people a romantic and adventurous title) came to you and demanded his job and your money.

The people who have been telling you about all the rights you have are simply exercising one of theirs - the right to be imbeciles. Their being imbeciles didn't cost anyone else either property or time. It's their right, and they exercise it brilliantly.

By the way, did you catch my use of the phrase "less fortunate" a bit ago when I was talking about the urban outdoors men? That phrase is a favorite of the Left. Think about it, and you'll understand why.

To imply that one person is homeless, destitute, dirty, drunk, spaced out on drugs, unemployable, and generally miserable because he is "less fortunate" is to imply that a successful person - one with a job, a home and a future - is in that position because he or she was "fortunate." The dictionary says that fortunate means "having derived good from an unexpected place." There is nothing unexpected about deriving good from hard work. There is also nothing unexpected about deriving misery from choosing drugs, alcohol, and the street.

If the Liberal Left can create the common perception that success and failure are simple matters of "fortune" or "luck," then it is easy to promote and justify their various income redistribution schemes. After all, we are just evening out the odds a little bit. This "success equals luck" idea the liberals like to push is seen everywhere. Former Democratic presidential candidate Richard Gephardt refers to high-achievers as "people who have won life's lottery." He wants you to believe they are making the big bucks because they are lucky. It's not luck, my friends. It's choice. One of the greatest lessons I ever learned was in a book by Og Mandino, entitled, "The Greatest Secret in the World." The lesson? Very simple: "Use wisely your power of choice."

That bum sitting on a heating grate, smelling like a wharf rat? He's there by choice. He is there because of the sum total of the choices he has made in his life. This truism is absolutely the hardest thing for some people to accept, especially those who consider themselves to be victims of something or other - victims of discrimination, bad luck, the system, capitalism, whatever. After all, nobody really wants to accept the blame for his or her position in life. Not when it is so much easier to point and say, "Look! He did this to me!" than it is to look into a mirror and say, "You S. O. B.! You did this to me!"

The key to accepting responsibility for your life is to accept the fact that your choices, every one of them, are leading you inexorably to either success or failure, however you define those terms.

Some of the choices are obvious: Whether or not to stay in school. Whether or not to get pregnant. Whether or not to hit the bottle. Whether or not to keep this job you hate until you get another better-paying job. Whether or not to save some of your money, or saddle yourself with huge payments for that new car.

Some of the choices are seemingly insignificant: Whom to go to the movies with. Whose car to ride home in. Whether to watch the tube tonight, or read a book on investing. But, and you can be sure of this, each choice counts. Each choice is a building block - some large, some small. But each one is a part of the structure of your life. If you make the right choices, or if you make more right choices than wrong ones, something absolutely terrible may happen to you. Something unthinkable. You, my friend, could become one of the hated, the evil, the ugly, the feared, the filthy, the successful, the rich.

The rich basically serve two purposes in this country. First, they provide the investments, the investment capital, and the brains for the formation of new businesses. Businesses that hire people. Businesses that send millions of paychecks home each week to the un-rich.

Second, the rich are a wonderful object of ridicule, distrust, and hatred. Few things are more valuable to a politician than the envy most Americans feel for the evil rich.

Envy is a powerful emotion. Even more powerful than the emotional minefield that surrounded Bill Clinton when he reviewed his last batch of White House interns. Politicians use envy to get votes and power. And they keep that power by promising the envious that the envied will be punished: "The rich will pay their fair share of taxes if I have anything to do with it." The truth is that the top 10% of income earners in this country pays almost 50% of all income taxes collected. I shudder to think what these job producers would be paying if our tax system were any more "fair."

You have heard, no doubt, that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Interestingly enough, our government's own numbers show that many of the poor actually get richer, and that quite a few of the rich actually get poorer. But for the rich who do actually get richer, and the poor who remain poor .. there's an explanation -- a reason. The rich, you see, keep doing the things that make them rich; while the poor keep doing the things that make them poor.

Speaking of the poor, during your adult life you are going to hear an endless string of politicians bemoaning the plight of the poor. So, you need to know that under our government's definition of "poor" you can have a $5 million net worth, a $300,000 home and a new $90,000 Mercedes, all completely paid for. You can also have a maid, cook, and valet, and a million in your checking account, and you can still be officially defined by our government as "living in poverty." Now there's something you haven't seen on the evening news.

How does the government pull this one off? Very simple, really. To determine whether or not some poor soul is "living in poverty," the government measures one thing -- just one thing. Income.

It doesn't matter one bit how much you have, how much you own, how many cars you drive or how big they are, whether or not your pool is heated, whether you winter in Aspen and spend the summers in the Bahamas, or how much is in your savings account. It only matters how much income you claim in that particular year. This means that if you take a one-year leave of absence from your high-paying job and decide to live off the money in your savings and checking accounts while you write the next great American novel, the government says you are living in poverty."

This isn't exactly what you had in mind when you heard these gloomy statistics, is it? Do you need more convincing? Try this. The government's own statistics show that people who are said to be "living in poverty" spend more than $1.50 for each dollar of income they claim. Something is a bit fishy here. Just remember all this the next time Charles Gibson tells you about some hideous new poverty statistics.

Why has the government concocted this phony poverty scam? Because the government needs an excuse to grow and to expand its social welfare programs, which translates into an expansion of its power. If the government can convince you, in all your compassion, that the number of "poor" is increasing, it will have all the excuse it needs to sway an electorate suffering from the advanced stages of Obsessive-Compulsive Compassion Disorder.

I'm about to be stoned by the faculty here. They've already changed their minds about that honorary degree I was going to get. That's OK, though. I still have my PhD. in Insensitivity from the Neal Boortz Institute for Insensitivity Training. I learned that, in short, sensitivity sucks. It's a trap. Think about it - the truth knows no sensitivity. Life can be insensitive. Wallow too much in sensitivity and you'll be unable to deal with life, or the truth, so get over it.

Now, before the dean has me shackled and hauled off, I have a few random thoughts.

* You need to register to vote, unless you are on welfare. If you are living off the efforts of others, please do us the favor of sitting down and shutting up until you are on your own again.

* When you do vote, your votes for the House and the Senate are more important than your vote for President. The House controls the purse strings, so concentrate your awareness there.

* Liars cannot be trusted, even when the liar is the President of the country. If someone can't deal honestly with you, send them packing.

* Don't bow to the temptation to use the government as an instrument of plunder. If it is wrong for you to take money from someone else who earned it -- to take their money by force for your own needs -- then it is certainly just as wrong for you to demand that the government step forward and do this dirty work for you.

* Don't look in other people's pockets. You have no business there. What they earn is theirs. What you earn is yours. Keep it that way. Nobody owes you anything, except to respect your privacy and your rights, and leave you the hell alone.

* Speaking of earning, the revered 40-hour workweek is for losers. Forty hours should be considered the minimum, not the maximum. You don't see highly successful people clocking out of the office every afternoon at five. The losers are the ones caught up in that afternoon rush hour. The winners drive home in the dark.

* Free speech is meant to protect unpopular speech. Popular speech, by definition, needs no protection.

* Finally (and aren't you glad to hear that word), as Og Mandino wrote,
1. Proclaim your rarity. Each of you is a rare and unique human being.
2. Use wisely your power of choice.
3. Go the extra mile, drive home in the dark.

Oh, and put off buying a television set as long as you can. Now, if you have any idea at all what's good for you, you will get out of here and get started. Class dismissed.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 31, 2012, 01:23:25 PM
The Truth
http://www.truthorfiction.com/rumors/b/boortz.htm
The speech is from the pen of Neil Boortz and is posted on his website at www.boortz.com.

Boortz tells TruthOrFiction.com, however, that so far, it's never actually been delivered at a commencement.

He says he wrote the speech about 1997 in protest of never having been invited to give a commencement address.
It became the springboard for his first book, "The Commencement Speech You Need To Hear."
Later he produced an audio CD of the speech complete with crowd noise and applause, which has been aired on his radio program.

Boortz says that although Texas A & M is his alma mater, it is not true that he gave the speech there.
Title: Steyn: Twilight of the West
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 04, 2012, 03:40:39 PM


Twilight of the West



By Mark Steyn
June 2, 2012 4:00 A.M.



The Eurovision Song Contest doesn’t get a lot of attention in the United States, but on the Continent it’s long been seen as the perfect Euro-metaphor. Years before the euro came along, it was the prototype pan-European institution, and predicated on the same assumptions. Eurovision took the national cultures that produced Mozart, Vivaldi, and Debussy, and in return gave us “Boom-Bang-a-Bang” (winner, 1969), “Ding-Ding-a-Dong” (winner, 1975), and “Diggi-Loo-Diggi-Ley” (winner, 1984). The euro took the mark, the lira, and the franc, and merged them to create the “Boom-Bang-a-Bang” of currencies.

How will it all end? One recalls the 1990 Eurovision finals in Zagreb: “Yugoslavia is very much like an orchestra,” cooed the hostess, Helga Vlahovic. “The string section and the wood section all sit together.” Shortly thereafter, the wood section began ethnically cleansing the dressing rooms, while the string section rampaged through the brass section pillaging their instruments and severing their genitals. Indeed, the charming Miss Vlahovic herself was forced into a sudden career shift and spent the next few years as Croatian TV’s head of “war information” programming.

Fortunately, no one remembers Yugoslavia. So today Europe itself is very much like an orchestra. The Greek fiddlers and the Italian wind players all sit together, playing cards in the dressing room, waiting for the German guy to show up with their checks. Just before last week’s Eurovision finale in Azerbaijan, the Daily Mail in London reported that the Spanish entrant, Pastora Soler, had been told to throw the competition “because the cash-strapped country can’t afford to host the lavish event next year,” as the winning nation is obliged to do. In a land where the youth unemployment rate is over 50 percent, and two-thirds of the country’s airports are under threat of closure, and whose neighbors (Britain) are drawing up plans for military intervention to evacuate their nationals in the event of total civic collapse, the pressing need to avoid winning the Eurovision Song Contest is still a poignant symbol of how total is Spain’s implosion. Ask not for whom “Ding-Ding-a-Dong” dings, it dings for thee.

One of the bizarre aspects of media coverage since 2008 is the complacent assumption that what’s happening is “cyclical” — a downturn that will eventually correct itself — rather than profoundly structural. Christine Lagarde, head of the IMF, found herself skewered like souvlaki on a Thessaloniki grill for suggesting the other day that the Greeks are a race of tax evaders. She’s right. Compared to Germans, your average Athenian has a noticeable aversion to declaring income. But that’s easy for her to say: Mme. Lagarde’s half-million-dollar remuneration from the IMF is tax-free, just a routine perk of the new transnational governing class. And, in the end, whether your broke European state has reasonably efficient tax collectors like the French or incompetent ones like the Greeks is relatively peripheral.

Likewise, on this side of the Atlantic: Quebec university students, who pay the lowest tuition rates in North America, are currently striking over a proposed increase of $1,625. Spread out over seven years. Or about 232 bucks per annum. Or about the cost of one fair-trade macchiato a week. Which has, since the strike, been reduced further, to a couple of sips: If you’re wondering how guys who don’t do any work can withdraw their labor, well, “strike” is a euphemism for riot. The other week, Vanessa L’Écuyer, a sexology student at the Université du Québec à Montréal, was among those arrested for smoke-bombing the subway system and bringing the city’s morning commute to a halt. But, as in Europe, in the end, whether you fund your half-decade bachelor’s in sexology through a six-figure personal debt or whether you do it through the largesse of the state is relatively peripheral.

In the twilight of the West, America and Europe are still different but only to this extent: They’ve wound up taking separate paths to the same destination. Whether you get there via an artificial common currency for an invented pseudo-jurisdiction or through quantitative easing and the global decline of the dollar, whether you spend your final years in the care of Medicare or the National Health Service death panels, whether higher education is just another stage of cradle-to-grave welfare or you have a trillion dollars’ worth of personal college debt, in 2012 the advanced Western social-democratic citizen looks pretty similar, whether viewed from Greece or Germany, California or Quebec.

That’s to say, the unsustainable “bubble” is not student debt or subprime mortgages or anything else. The bubble is us, and the assumptions of entitlement. Too many citizens of advanced Western democracies live a life they have not earned, and are not willing to earn. Indeed, much of our present fiscal woe derives from two phases of human existence that are entirely the invention of the modern world. Once upon a time, you were a kid till you were 13 or so; then you worked; then you died. That bit between childhood and death has been chewed away at both ends. We invented something called “adolescence” that now extends not merely through the teenage years but through a desultory half decade of Whatever Studies at Complacency U up till you’re 26 and no longer eligible for coverage on your parents’ health-insurance policy. At the other end of the spectrum, we introduced something called “retirement” that, in the space of two generations, has led to the presumption that able-bodied citizens are entitled to spend the last couple of decades, or one-third of their adult lives, as a long holiday weekend.

The bit in between adolescence and retirement is your working life, and it’s been getting shorter and shorter. Which is unfortunate, as it has to pay for everything else. This structural deformity in the life cycle of Western man is at the root of most of our problems. Staying ever longer in “school” (I use the term loosely) leads to ever later workplace entry, and ever later (if at all) family formation. Which means that our generation is running up debt that will have to be repaid by our shrunken progeny. One hundred Greek grandparents have 42 Greek grandchildren. Is it likely that 42 Greeks can repay the debts run up by 100 Greeks? No wonder they’d rather stick it to the Germans. But the thriftier Germans have the same deathbed demographics. If 100 Germans resent having to pick up the check for an entire continent, is it likely 42 Germans will be able to do it?

Look around you. The late-20th-century Western lifestyle isn’t going to be around much longer. In a few years’ time, our children will look at old TV commercials showing retirees dancing, golfing, cruising away their sixties and seventies, and wonder what alternative universe that came from. In turn, their children will be amazed to discover that in the early 21st century the Western world thought it entirely normal that vast swathes of the citizenry should while away their youth enjoying what, a mere hundred years earlier, would have been the leisurely varsity of the younger son of a Mitteleuropean Grand Duke.

I was sad to learn that Helga Vlahovic died a few weeks ago, but her central metaphor all those years ago wasn’t wrong. Any functioning society is like an orchestra. When the parts don’t fit together, it’s always the other fellow who’s out of tune. So the Greeks will blame the Germans, and vice versa. But the developed world is all playing the same recessional. In the world after Western prosperity, we will work till we’re older and we will start younger — and we will despise those who thought they could defy not just the rules of economic gravity but the basic human life cycle.

— Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is the author of After America: Get Ready for Armageddon. © 2012 Mark Steyn
Title: Nigel Farrar was right
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 16, 2012, 12:19:26 PM
Now this is a rant!

Subject: The coming collapse of the Euro

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ez-88_hIrLY&feature=youtu.be
Title: Re: Political Rants Nigel Farage and the Euro collapse
Post by: DougMacG on June 16, 2012, 03:24:51 PM
Now this is a rant! 
Subject: The coming collapse of the Euro
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ez-88_hIrLY&feature=youtu.be

Wow. Thanks for that post!  Does anyone feel like they were warned?

The problem (IMO) isn't the Euro, but the failure of the countries within the Euro to pursue responsible economic policies. 

I wonder if any of our 'members of Parliament' used their time on the floor here with that kind of passion and that level of clarity warning us about Fannie Mae, CRAp or ACA before they collapse(d) us.
Title: Spencer: Is Bloomberg secretly a Muslim?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 18, 2012, 10:03:14 AM
http://pjmedia.com/blog/is-michael-bloomberg-secretly-a-muslim/?singlepage=true

Sure, people ask it all the time about Barack Obama, but what about New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg? His latest intrusion into the lives of individual New Yorkers — the banning of large sugary drinks, as well as popcorn and milkshakes – resembles in its spirit nothing more than the recent whipping of smokers in the new Islamic state that has just been established in northern Mali.

Bloomberg, in fact, may be more Muslim than the Malians. Mali’s Movement for Unity and Jihad in West Africa hasn’t yet banned large soft drinks, but Big Gulps are not all that common in Timbuktu, anyway. And he is way ahead of their smoking ban, having already banned smoking indoors everywhere in New York City, and in large portions of the outdoors as well, including Central Park. Bloomberg doesn’t have defiant nicotine addicts whipped as of yet, but you never know; he might decide it’s a good idea to give his anti-smoking laws some teeth.

Of course, Bloomberg isn’t turning New York City into the world’s largest day-care center and nursery school because smoking and drinking a big soda while standing in Central Park is “un-Islamic,” but because he contends that such practices endanger the public health. But that is essentially the same thing; the Movement for Unity and Jihad in West Africa believes that it is better for the public health for the public to follow Islamic law, and ensures the truth of this claim by whipping or otherwise brutalizing those who dare to step out of line. Both Bloomberg and the Islamic supremacists believe that individuals are generally too stupid to be trusted to make decisions for themselves, and think that they have to be forced into doing the right thing as they see it.

AdvertisementThis is the quintessential totalitarian impulse: to exalt the collective over the individual, and to control every aspect, every detail, of the individual’s life, from birth to death, from waking in the morning to going to sleep at night. The struggle against Sharia is a struggle for individual rights, and hence for freedom par excellence. Islamic law mandates denial of basic rights to women and non-Muslims, severe restrictions on the freedom of speech, death for apostates, warfare against unbelievers, stonings for adultery, amputations for theft, female genital mutilation, and polygamy.

Above all, however, it grants to the religious authority a measure of control over the individual that Americans in earlier, more robust ages would have found abhorrent. After so many decades of the welfare system, however, a politician like Michael Bloomberg has become possible; and with his every new and more absurd nanny state measure, he continues to erode our ability to stand up for ourselves and for the individual against state control.

The real question, then, is not so much whether Bloomberg is secretly a Muslim — of course he isn’t — but whether Islamic law is inherently totalitarian and inimical to the spirit of respect for individual rights upon which this nation was founded. And despite all the increasingly frantic mainstream media attempts to obscure Sharia’s true contents and nature from the American people, it is increasingly clear that it is. Sharia legislates for every aspect of human life, such that the pious Muslim faces no ethical difficulties, no moral dilemmas, no hard choices, no tough judgment calls: everything is set out for him to the last detail, and all he need do is obey. This results in a stunting of the moral character that leads not only to the atrophy of the individual’s abilities of ethical discernment, but also to a diminishment of both the value of the individual and the power of the individual in society. Human beings are not individual moral actors, but only subjects of the authoritarian power, who directs them in every detail of how to behave. The human will is cheapened, and human life itself is cheapened.

This is a key reason why anti-Sharia laws in the U.S. are so urgently needed. The United States at its founding accorded an extraordinary and largely unprecedented respect for the individual; the struggle against Sharia is yet another episode in the never-ending war of the bullying authority against the individual will. What played out in National Socialist Germany, as well as in the Soviet Union and other Communist states, will play out again in America as we decide in the coming months and years how much Islamic law we’re going to accommodate, and when (if ever) we’re going to resist the imposition of more: the struggle between the individual and the collective.

Bloomberg and other foolish Western collectivists and soft authoritarians only weaken our ability to resist Sharia, for they accustom us to the coercive impulses it manifests so ruthlessly. But ultimately, the battle has already been won: the human spirit simply does not and will not bear slavery indefinitely. In an indelible image, Alexander Solzhenitsyn likened the survival of the individual will against the all-powerful collective to blades of grass poking through the concrete; our job in the present age, as Islamic supremacist groups do everything they can to halt anti-Sharia initiatives all over the country, is to see that those concrete slabs never get laid down in the first place.



Title: Re: University Campaign Promotes White Guilt...
Post by: objectivist1 on June 21, 2012, 11:28:34 AM
These videos really need to be seen to be believed - along with the accompanying text - so I'm simply posting the link here:

www.theblaze.com/stories/not-fair-to-be-white-see-the-unbelievable-new-campaign-sponsored-by-the-university-of-minnesota-duluth/
Title: America's Last Prisoner of War
Post by: bigdog on June 29, 2012, 12:44:47 PM
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/americas-last-prisoner-of-war-20120607

Here because I don't have a better place for it:


The mother and father sit at the kitchen table in their Idaho farmhouse, watching their son on YouTube plead for his life. The Taliban captured 26-year-old Bowe Bergdahl almost three years ago, on June 30th, 2009, and since that day, his parents, Jani and Bob, have had no contact with him. Like the rest of the world, their lone glimpses of Bowe – the only American prisoner of war left in either Iraq or Afghanistan – have come through a series of propaganda videos, filmed while he's been in captivity.

In the video they're watching now, Bowe doesn't look good. He's emaciated, maybe 30 pounds underweight, his face sunken, his eye sockets like caves. He's wearing a scraggly beard and he's talking funny, with some kind of foreign accent. Jani presses her left hand across her forehead, as if shielding herself from the images onscreen, her eyes filling with tears. Bob, unable to look away, hits play on the MacBook Pro for perhaps the 30th time. Over and over again, he watches as his only son, dressed in a ragged uniform, begs for someone to rescue him.

"Release me, please!" Bowe screams at the camera. "I'm begging you – bring me home!"

Title: Mark Levin makes another point regarding yesterday's SCOTUS decision.
Post by: objectivist1 on June 29, 2012, 02:05:22 PM
OBAMACARE, THE COMMERCE CLAUSE, AND SUPREME COURT DECISION

by Mark Levin on Friday, June 29, 2012 at 11:15am

This may seem a little technical, but it is necessary.  So follow along with me.  A number of politicians and commentators are claiming that the Supreme Court in the Obamacare case "limited" the reach of the commerce clause, i.e., five justices held that individuals cannot be mandated to buy insurance under the commerce clause.  Actually, the five justices did not limit anything.  They simply did not accept the Obama administration's ridiculous argument that inactivity is commerce.  The status quo stands.  However, the bigger point is this.
 
When a court issues an opinion, it is said to be the "Opinion of the Court."  The Opinion of the Court is the controlling precedent.  Chief Justice Roberts wrote the Opinion of the Court for Parts I (background on the Obamacare law), II (the Anti-Injunction Act is not a bar to the lawsuit proceeding and being decided) and III-C (Obamacare is valid under the tax power).
 
But respecting Parts III- A, the commerce clause and necessary and proper section,  Roberts is writing for himself, not for a majority.
 
Furthermore, the Dissent is labeled as: “Justice Scalia, Justice Kennedy, Justice Thomas, and Justice Alito, dissenting.” It is Not labeled as “dissenting in the judgment, concurring in part” or some permutation.
 
You can’t say it was the “opinion of the court” that the mandate violated the commerce clause. You have to cobble together sections where Roberts is writing for himself and the dissent (which isn’t formally joined Robert’s writing), is writing for itself.
Justice Thomas, in his separate dissenting opinion, wrote:
 “The joint dissent and THE CHIEF JUSTICE cor­rectly apply our precedents to conclude that the Individual Mandate is beyond the power granted to Congress under the Commerce Clause and the Necessary and Proper Clause.”
 
Notably, this does not explicitly state that the dissenters joined with the Chief’s opinion respecting the commerce clause (or necessary and proper clause).
If five justices had intended for their view of the commerce clause (and necessary and proper clause) to be controlling as the majority view, they would have said so by joining or concurring in each others' parts.  They didn't.  So, while we can cobble them together, as a formal legal matter, it is a troubling issue.  While the status quo stands re the commerce clause (and necessary and proper clause), there was no formal majority on those issues.
 
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 29, 2012, 02:56:50 PM
Obj:  Good Levin.  (BTW I listened to the whole show per your recommendation)  The best thread for it would be http://dogbrothers.com/phpBB2/index.php?topic=1850.800
Title: Obama Enables America's Enemies.
Post by: objectivist1 on July 04, 2012, 05:28:52 PM
The Egyptian Disaster

By Robert Spencer - posted July 2, 2012

No sooner was Muslim Brotherhood candidate Mohamed Morsi elected president of Egypt than he announced his determination to work for the freedom of an enemy of the United States: blind sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, who is serving a life term for his role in planning the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Not since Jimmy Carter helped usher in the Iranian Revolution has an American president done so much to aid those who are determined to destroy the United States.

In fact, the parallels are numerous. Carter betrayed the shah of Iran, a longtime U.S. ally who had a dismal human rights record but was generally loyal, and paved the way for the ascent to power of the Ayatollah Khomeini and the Iranian mullahcracy that quickly showed its gratitude to Carter by taking U.S. Embassy personnel hostage, and has maintained a war footing against the United States ever since.

Obama, for his part, betrayed Hosni Mubarak, another longtime U.S. ally with a record of repressive rule, paving the way for the Muslim Brotherhood’s rise to power. And now President Morsi has shown his gratitude to Obama by announcing his determination to free from prison a man who plotted to murder hundreds of thousands of Americans.

It is said that history repeats itself, but it doesn’t do so by means of some automatic, inexorable, deterministic process. History repeats itself because people refuse to study and learn its lessons, and to face the unpleasant facts it presents. Thus, they make the same mistakes their predecessors did. The Obama administration didn’t have to be Carter’s second term, but both Carter and Obama are the products of a political culture that consistently discounts the importance of religious motivations. Informed sources have noted that at the time of the Iranian Revolution, only one book by the Ayatollah Khomeini could be found in the State Department, and no one had read it: no one thought the rantings of an obscure fanatic exiled to far-off France were important. That was the manifestation of a willful blindness to rival that of James Clapper, Obama’s director of national intelligence, who famously labeled the Muslim Brotherhood “largely secular.” In fact, it is the same willful blindness, and it has characterized the Washington establishment’s views on Islam and jihad from Carter’s day until now.

So secular is the Brotherhood that Morsi recently repeated its guiding motto to an enthusiastic crowd: “The Koran is our constitution, the Prophet is our leader, jihad is our path and death in the name of Allah is our goal.” Last week, Yasser Borhamy, a Salafi leader, declared that the Muslim Brotherhood was planning to implement Sharia as the main source for Egyptian law. Noting opposition to Sharia in Egypt, Borhamy said: “What is disturbing in the Islamic Sharia law, is Sharia bothering anyone? We do not say ‘our views on Sharia,’ but we say that we want the Sharia law revealed by God. Would anyone be afraid of the Sharia that establishes justice, [public] interest and wisdom? This is very strange. How is it said that people are afraid of Sharia?”

By “Sharia law revealed by God,” Borhamy meant the Sharia that stones adulterers, amputates thieves’ hands, mandates death for apostates from Islam, and institutionalizes subjugation of women and non-Muslims. If the Brotherhood does succeed in implementing this in Egypt, it will have Barack Obama to thank: his applause for the “Arab Spring” uprisings, coupled with the universal misrepresentation of them in the Western media as outpourings of a longing for democracy and pluralism, has brought us to the inception of an Egyptian regime that is almost certain to go to war with Israel and pursue a path of unrelenting hostility toward its erstwhile patrons in Washington.

Yet even the likelihood that Egypt, long a recipient of American largesse, will become an enemy of America is unlikely to shake those entrenched core assumptions in Washington that got us into this fix. The Obama administration rejects, as a matter of repeatedly stated policy, the idea that Islam has anything to do with terrorism, or warfare against unbelievers, or the legal subjugation of non-Muslims. An Obama official who opined that a Muslim Brotherhood regime in Egypt would likely be an enemy of the United States because of Islam’s core doctrines regarding the evil of the society of unbelievers would be reprimanded or fired outright for “Islamophobia.”

And so what was old is new again: a man who owes his seat of power to the United States demonstrates his hostility to the ones who put him in place. Then it was Khomeini, now it is Morsi, but in both cases it is the same. One wonders how many times Washington will have the luxury of making this same mistake before the consequences become too terrible to bear.

Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and author of the New York Times bestsellers The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and The Truth About Muhammad. His latest book, Did Muhammad Exist?, is now available.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: JDN on July 04, 2012, 07:03:23 PM
"The Egyptian Disaster"
What caught my attention in this post was:

"...the shah of Iran, a longtime U.S. ally who had a dismal human rights record..."
and
"...Hosni Mubarak, another longtime U.S. ally with a record of repressive rule..."

Objectivist1, I understand your post.  All is not roses.  But on this 4th of July, OUR Independence Day, didn't we too fight against "repressive rule"?  Isn't this freedom, isn't this the core
for what America Stands For?  If we can't support freedom, the choice of the people, whether we like their choices or not, who are we?  What are we?
If we support murderous despicable despots, albeit they are our "ally" what do we stand for?
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 04, 2012, 07:21:50 PM
What is so profoundly distressing, frustrating, and indeed enraging to me is how when President Bush nad the neoconservatives sought to get ahead of the curve in this regard, the the Progressives and most of the Dems VICIOUSLY fought him every step of the way with some of them crossing the line IMO to treason (e.g. Pravda on the Hudson and Pravda on the Beach divulging secret military and intelligence operations in time of war.

Although Bush-Rumbo led the Iraq War rather poorly, eventually with the Surge things were turned around-- only to be thrown away by President Baraq.

Where has the support been for the forces of freedom within Iran?

Where has the support been for the Ukraine, Georgia, Poland and other countries of eastern Europe being squeezed anew by the Russians?

One gets the impression that only when is it a friend of the US, that Baraq believes in the opposition, never mind that said opposition only believes in one man one vote one time.

Title: Didn’t send your kids to war? You ‘owe’ money to those who went, 3 fundraising c
Post by: bigdog on July 05, 2012, 05:15:54 AM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/didnt-send-your-kids-to-war-you-owe-money-to-those-who-went-fundraising-sponsors-say/2012/07/04/gJQA9496MW_story.html

If you have military-age children who have not served in this decade’s wars, then you owe a debt — meaning money — to those who did. That’s the premise of a new fundraising effort by three wealthy American families who want to help U.S. veterans of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Every non-military family should give something, they said. The affluent should give large sums. No one should think of it as charity, but rather a moral obligation, an alternative way to serve, perhaps the price of being spared the anxiety that comes with having a loved one in a war zone.
Title: Enabling our enemies...
Post by: objectivist1 on July 05, 2012, 08:28:00 AM
Marc is correct, and I share both his outrage and his opinion that treason was committed by the political opposition during this period.  For the full, disgusting story of the Democrat Party's transgressions in the lead-up to the Iraq War, read David Horowitz's excellent book "Party of Defeat."  It chronicles the entire sordid affair, and will enrage anyone who loves this nation and its founding principles.  Unfortunately, and as usual, neither the press nor the impotent Republican "leadership" will bring these facts up and remind the American people (as they ought to be - and OFTEN) of these despicable actions.  Another example of just why we need more individuals like Allen West in Congress.  If the public were reminded of these damning facts, Obama would lose lose in a landslide, and Mitt Romney would not be the Republican nominee.  I strongly encourage freedom-loving people to read Horowitz's book - (or review it again if you've read it.)  It will remind you of just what we are up against - the enemy within.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 05, 2012, 08:33:11 AM
Obj:

If you have the time, would you provide a summary/review of it in the Iraq thread for us?

TY,
Marc
Title: Alexander: The Imperial Executive
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 06, 2012, 08:04:37 AM
Alexander's Essay – July 5, 2012
The Imperial Executive

"Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it." --Declaration of Independence (1776)
 
This being the week designated to celebrate American Liberty, I paused to read the Declaration of Independence, as I do every anniversary of its signing. In that venerable old parchment, our Founders reduced to words the eternal source of Liberty as "endowed by our Creator," and then outlined their grievances against an imperial executive who willfully violated that endowment "which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitled them."

The Unanimous Declaration was, in the words of Thomas Jefferson, its principal author, "the declaratory charter of our rights, and the rights of man."

It opens by defining those rights, framing the relationship between the Creator and His people, the people and the government, and then listing how the executive had violated their God-given rights, "all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States."

Among those "injuries and usurpations" committed by the executive, they noted:

"He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good. ... He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them. ... He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers. ... He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance. ... He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation."

The comparison between the imperial powers which gave rise to the American Revolution and the imperial presidency which now threatens the Essential Liberty our Founders fought for, and generations of American Patriots have since defended, is unavoidable.

Barack Hussein Obama recently lamented, "It turns out our Founders designed a system that makes it more difficult to bring about change than I would like sometimes." However, he added, "One of the things about being President is you get better as time goes on." Indeed, he has become quite better at forging ahead with his agenda to supplant Rule of Law with rule of men, in flagrant disregard of his Oath of Office.

The evidence of Obama's self-anointed imperial status is mounting.

He created swarms of "czars" unaccountable to Congress. He circumvented Congress by using the Environmental Protection Agency to implement his cap-and-trade scheme. He used the National Labor Relations Board to circumvent the Employee Free Choice Act. He used the Federal Communications Commission to circumvent the judiciary's proscription on regulating the Internet. He used the Department of Education to force national education standards.

In other cases, Obama has simply ignored the law completely.

He ordered the Department of Justice to cease enforcement of the Defense of Marriage Act. He ordered the Department of Health and Human Services to force private religious institutions to fund abortions and other measures contrary to their Biblical moral code. He ordered the Department of Homeland Security's immigration service to use "prosecutorial discretion" in order to stop the mandated deportation of illegal immigrants.

Regarding the latter, even former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales responded, "To halt through the deportation of some undocumented immigrants looks like a political calculation to win Hispanic votes, and subjects him to criticism that he is violating his oath of office by selectively failing to enforce the law."

Most recently, Obama claimed "executive privilege" to avoid further investigation into "Fast and Furious," a scheme designed to promote the administration's efforts to undermine "the palladium of all rights," our Second Amendment.

Of course, Obama's imperial ascension is fully in keeping with his narcissistic pathology, and he's made plain that he doesn't intend to be constrained by the law.

Soon after his election, his former Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel, proclaimed that Obama would use "executive orders and directives to get the job done across a front of issues." And Obama himself boldly decreed earlier this year, "Whenever Congress refuses to act, Joe [Biden] and I, we're going to act. In the months to come, wherever we have an opportunity, we're going to take steps on our own [to implement my agenda]."

In the Declaration of Independence, our Founders' long list of objections to government assault on Liberty closes by condemning the executive "for altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments" and "exciting domestic insurrections amongst us," and notes, "A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people."

Today, Obama's pledge of "fundamentally transforming the United States of America" is brought about by attacking the free enterprise system, by altering our form of government in favor of Democratic Socialism, by pitting one group of Americans against another, and by justifying a domestic insurrection called "Occupy Wall Street."

The Declaration concludes, "And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor."

Fellow Patriots, whether by ballot or bullet box, we must pledge no less to preserve Liberty.

Pro Deo et Constitutione -- Libertas aut Mors
Semper Vigilo, Fortis, Paratus et Fidelis
Mark Alexander
Publisher, PatriotPost.US
Title: Some actual scholarship from a professor on the taxation issue re: Obamacare.
Post by: objectivist1 on July 07, 2012, 11:52:21 AM
A Short History of Congress's Power to Tax

The Supreme Court has long distinguished the regulatory from the taxing power.

By PAUL MORENO - July 6, 2012 - Wall Street Journal

In 1935, Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins was fretting about finding a constitutional basis for the Social Security Act. Supreme Court Justice Harlan Fiske Stone advised her, "The taxing power, my dear, the taxing power. You can do anything under the taxing power."

Last week, in his ObamaCare opinion, NFIB v. Sebelius, Chief Justice John Roberts gave Congress the same advice—just enact regulatory legislation and tack on a financial penalty, as in failure to comply with the individual insurance mandate. So how did the power to tax under the Constitution become unbounded?

The first enumerated power that the Constitution grants to Congress is the "power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts, and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States." The text indicates that the taxing power is not plenary, but can be used only for defined ends and objects—since a comma, not a semicolon, separated the clauses on means (taxes) and ends (debts, defense, welfare).


Editorial board member Joe Rago on how Chief Justice John Roberts's rewrite of ObamaCare weakens the Constitution's federalist structure. Photo: Associated Press

This punctuation was no small matter. In 1798, Pennsylvania Rep. Albert Gallatin said that fellow Pennsylvania Rep. Gouverneur Morris, chairman of the Committee on Style at the Constitutional Convention, had smuggled in the semicolon in order to make Congress's taxing power limitless, but that the alert Roger Sherman had the comma restored. The altered punctuation, Gallatin said, would have turned "words [that] had originally been inserted in the Constitution as a limitation to the power of levying taxes" into "a distinct power." Thirty years later, Virginia Rep. Mark Alexander accused Secretary of State John Quincy Adams of doing the same thing after Congress instructed the administration to print copies of the Constitution.

The punctuation debate simply reinforced James Madison's point in Federalist No. 41 that Congress could tax and spend only for those objects enumerated, primarily in Article I, Section 8.

Congress enacted very few taxes up to the end of the Civil War, and none that was a pretext for regulating things that the Constitution gave it no power to regulate. True, the purpose of tariffs was to protect domestic industry from foreign competition, not raise revenue. But the Constitution grants Congress a plenary power to regulate commerce with other nations.

Congress also enacted a tax to destroy state bank notes in 1866, but this could be seen as a "necessary and proper" means to stop the states from usurping Congress's monetary or currency power. It was upheld in Veazie Bank v. Fenno (1869).

The first unabashed use of the taxing power for regulatory purposes came when Congress enacted a tax on "oleomargarine" in 1886. Dairy farmers tried to drive this cheaper butter substitute from the market but could only get Congress to adopt a mild tax, based on the claim that margarine was often artificially colored and fraudulently sold as butter. President Grover Cleveland reluctantly signed the bill, saying that if he were convinced the revenue aspect was simply a pretext "to destroy . . . one industry of our people for the protection and benefit of another," he would have vetoed it.

Congress imposed another tax on margarine in 1902, which the Supreme Court upheld (U.S. v. McCray, 1904). Three justices dissented, but without writing an opinion.

Then, in 1914, Congress imposed taxes on druggists' sales of opiates as a way to regulate their use. Five years later, in U.S. v. Doremus , the Supreme Court upheld the levy under Congress's express power to impose excise taxes.

Then, in 1922, the court rejected Congress's attempt to prohibit child labor by imposing a tax on companies that employed children. An earlier attempt to accomplish this, by prohibiting the interstate shipment of goods made by child labor, was struck down as unconstitutional—since it was understood since the earliest days of the republic that Congress had the power to regulate commerce but not manufacturing. "A Court must be blind not to see that the so-called tax is imposed to stop the employment of children within the age limits prescribed," Chief Justice William Howard Taft wrote in Bailey v. Drexel Furniture Co. "Its prohibitory and regulatory effect and purpose are palpable." Even liberal justices Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis D. Brandeis concurred in Taft's opinion.

Things came to a head in the New Deal, when Congress imposed a tax on food and fiber processors and used those tax dollars to provide benefits to farmers. Though in U.S. v. Butler (1936) the court adopted a more expansive view of the taxing power—allowing Congress to tax and spend for the "general welfare" beyond the powers specifically enumerated in the Constitution—it still held the ends had to be "general" and not transfer payments from one group to another. After President Franklin D. Roosevelt threatened to "pack" the Supreme Court in 1937, it accepted such transfer payments in Mulford v. Smith (1939), so long as the taxes were paid into the general treasury and not earmarked for farmers.

And now, in 2012, Justice Roberts has confirmed that there are no limits to regulatory taxation as long as the revenue is deposited in the U.S. Treasury.

Are there any other limits? Article I, Section 2 says that "direct taxes shall be apportioned among the states" according to population. This is repeated in Article I, Section 9, which says that "no capitation, or other direct tax, shall be laid," unless apportioned.

The Supreme Court struck down income taxes in 1895 (Pollock v. Farmers' Loan & Trust Co.), on the ground that they were "direct" taxes but not apportioned by population. Apportioning an income tax would defeat the purpose of the relatively poorer Southern and Western states, who wanted the relatively richer states of the Northeast to pay the bulk of the tax. The 16th Amendment gave Congress the power to tax incomes without apportionment.

Other direct taxes should presumably have to be apportioned according to the Constitution. Justice Roberts quickly dismissed the notion that the individual mandate penalty-tax is not a direct tax "under this Court's precedents." To any sentient adult, it looks like a "capitation" or head tax, imposed upon individuals directly. Unfortunately, having plenty of other reasons to object to ObamaCare, the four dissenting justices in NFIB v. Sebelius did not explore this point.

Some conservatives have cheered that part of Justice Roberts's decision that limits Congress's Commerce Clause power. But an unlimited taxing power is equally dangerous to constitutional government.

Mr. Moreno is a professor of history at Hillsdale College and the author of "The American State from the Civil War to the New Deal," forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.
Title: Battling the Amoeba
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 13, 2012, 04:01:53 PM
http://pjmedia.com/rogerkimball/2012/07/12/battling-the-amoeba/?singlepage=true
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on July 14, 2012, 11:17:13 AM
"Some conservatives have cheered that part of Justice Roberts's decision that limits Congress's Commerce Clause power. But an unlimited taxing power is equally dangerous to constitutional government."

Absolutely.  Mark Levin is correct in saying Roberts has done grave nearly irreversible damage to our republic.  The democrat party, liberal lawyer, union, minority interest cabal is subverting justice in our system to maintain power for themselves.

Our system is in trouble as long as we have half the population voting money for themselves out of the treasury and doing so with complicit polticians.

Rush Limbaugh has finally come and highlighted as a message to Romney.   It ain't about jobs.   It ain't about the middle class.  Both of these are relevent but are only subtle pretetexts to the real issue.

It is the gigantic entitlement state that keeps expanding while those who pay for it are being squeezed.

This is the "issue" of the age for the US.
That is the issue

Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 14, 2012, 12:09:24 PM
That and governmental control of economic acitivity a.k.a. fascism.
Title: Alexander: Translating Obamaspeak
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 19, 2012, 09:51:11 AM


Alexander's Essay – July 19, 2012
Socialism v Free Enterprise: Translating ObamaSpeak
What He Said v What He Meant
"Here comes the orator! With his flood of words, and his drop of reason." --Benjamin Franklin (Poor Richards Almanack, 1735)
 
Trust me, I never operated a lemonade stand, but I'm the president!

Barack Hussein Obama never so much as operated a corner lemonade stand, but his perspective on free enterprise is certainly getting some traction.

Invoking the two pillars of his re-election campaign, tax "fairness" and class warfare, Obama first focused on the tax piece, asserting, "I'm not going to see us gut the investments that grow our economy."

In ObamaSpeak, "gut the investments" translates as "cut taxes," and "grow the economy" translates as "grow the government." This remark was a smokescreen in regard to Democrat efforts to let the across-the-board Bush tax rates expire, which, in effect, will raise taxes on all Americans who earn a living rather than live on the dole.

To that end, Obama's Senate lap dog, Patty Murray (D-WA), served up this ultimatum: "If we can't get a good deal -- a balanced deal that calls on the wealthy to pay their fair share -- then I will absolutely continue this debate into 2013 rather than lock in a long-term deal this year that throws middle-class families under the bus."

Of course, EVERY aspect of her classist rhetoric requires a secret decoder ring.

"Good deal" means "raising taxes" and "balanced deal" means "more spending." If the Demo-gogues were serious about balancing anything, they'd do precisely what "middle-class families" do during tough times: cut expenses.

"The wealthy" means "tax payers rather than tax consumers." As for paying their "fair share," the producers and job creators who earn $250,000-and-above (which is the target for Obama's looming tax increase) while constituting just two percent of the population already pay 43.6 percent of all federal income taxes. Obama is also keenly aware that the top 25 percent of income earners already pay more than 84 percent of income tax revenues and the top 50 percent of earners now pay almost 98 percent of all income tax revenue collected -- which means he's all but created a voting majority who pay little or no federal income tax.

Clearly, Democrats don't represent the "99 percent." Instead, they pander to the 50 percent who are the beneficiaries of confiscated and redistributed wealth from the other 50 percent. I invoke again the timeless words of George Bernard Shaw: "A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul."

Continuing with the translation exercise, Murray says Senate Demos won't "lock in a long-term deal," meaning "extend tax relief for tax payers," and "throwing middle-class families under the bus" is what Obama and his Socialist Democrats do best.
Every dollar paid into the bloated federal coffers is one less dollar to be spent or invested in the private sector -- where all those "middle-class families" Obama and his cadres use for cannon fodder -- are barely making ends meet.

After pitching his plug for tax increases, Obama then got way off his teleprompted script with the most pointed classist and collectivist rhetoric he has yet to regurgitate: "If you've been successful, you didn't get there on your own. ... If you've got a business -- you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen."

Of course, in the context of his socialist agenda, "somebody else" is his collectivist euphemism for "government," a.k.a. Hillary Clinton's "village."

Finally, he asserted that collectivism is responsible for the existence of the middle class: "So we say to ourselves, ever since the founding of this country, you know what, there are some things we do better together. That's how we created the middle class." (As a half-truth, he may be partially correct. More middle-class folks could be wealthy if socialist government taxes and regulation weren't holding them back.)

According to Obama, then, we owe all that we are and all that we own to government.
Notably, after having presided over four years of a flat-lined economy, despite spending trillions of dollars with nothing to show but trillions of dollars in debt, Obama's chronic Narcissistic Personality Disorder enables him to completely ignore reality.
Every time he diverts from his ObamaPrompter, as he did with his assessment of free enterprise, he exposes his ultra-Leftist agenda. Some memorable examples include his recent assertion that, "The private sector is doing fine," but we need more government jobs. Then there was his infamous comment to Joe the Plumber that we need to "spread the wealth around." My personal favorite, however, was when an open mike caught his whispered assurance to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev: "After my election I'll have more flexibility."

Contemplate those words again: "After my election I'll have more flexibility."

As if he hasn't yet done enough damage to our economy, culture and world standing in his first term? One wonders just what other damage he'd do with "more flexibility" in a second term.

Obama leads his lemmings to believe that business owners are millionaires driven by greed who don't care about the jobs they create and the families those jobs support. In fact, the vast majority of small businesses -- those which make up the foundation of our economy -- are owned by men and women who put in long hours for not much more money than their managers and supervisors. But that's during a healthy economy.

In a failing economy, like the current one under the Obama regime, small business owners who are personally liable for the debt required to operate their businesses, are taking out second home mortgages, maxing their credit cards, and borrowing from relatives and retirement savings in order to keep their businesses solvent.
 
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney wasted no time returning fire in defense of free enterprise.

"The idea to say that Steve Jobs didn't build Apple, that Henry Ford didn't build Ford Motor, that Papa John didn't build Papa John Pizza, that Ray Kroc didn't build McDonald's, that Bill Gates didn't build Microsoft -- you go on down the list ... to say something like that is not just foolishness, it is insulting to every entrepreneur, every innovator in America and it's wrong," Romney said.

He continued, "[Obama's] logic doesn't just extend to the entrepreneurs that start a barber shop or a taxi operation ... it also extends to everybody in America that wants to lift themself up a little further ... [Obama] would say, 'Well, you didn't do that ... you are not responsible for that success.' Obama exposed what he really thinks about free people and the American vision, and government, what he really thinks about America itself. I find it extraordinary that a philosophy of that nature would be spoken by a president of the United States. We have seen what Obama's political philosophy brings and we don't want any more of it!"

Romney closed by asking, "Do we believe in an America that is great because of government, or do we believe in an America that's great because of free people allowed to pursue their dream? Obama attacks success and therefore under Obama we have less success. And I will change that."

National Review's Rich Lowry summed up Obama's theory of economics: "Behind every successful businessman, there is a successful government. Everyone is helpless without the state, the great protector, builder, and innovator. Everything is ultimately a collective enterprise. Individual initiative is only an ingredient in the more important work when 'we do things together.'"

Ronald Reagan observed, "Entrepreneurs and their small enterprises are responsible for almost all the economic growth in the United States."

We still are, and Obama and his Leftists despise nothing more than self-sufficiency, which is the antithesis of the government dependency they promote.

Pro Deo et Constitutione — Libertas aut Mors
Semper Vigilo, Fortis, Paratus et Fidelis
 
Mark Alexander
Publisher, The Patriot Post
Title: Rep. Mike Kelly
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 28, 2012, 10:38:50 AM

http://www.ijreview.com/2012/07/11663-absolute-must-watch-anti-red-tape-speech-in-house-receives-standing-ovation/
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: DougMacG on July 28, 2012, 11:41:59 AM
Yes. Great speech!  Anyone who has had their business swallowed up or nearly so by the regulatory red tape can feel that passion.

For me, taxes cost more than food, shelter, clothing, transportation and healthcare combined, but regulations are worse.

A great line in there:

Take the heavy boot off the throat of America's job creators and LET THEM BREATHE!

We spend $1.75 trillion on red tape.  There is your deficit and then some.
Title: Herbert: The right and wrong of compulsion by the State, 1894
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 30, 2012, 08:21:25 AM
Auberon Herbert in "The Right and Wrong of Compulsion by the State" (1894):


We are fast getting rid of emperors and kings and dominant churches, as far as the mere outward form is concerned, but the soul of these men and these institutions is still living and breathing within us. We still want to exercise power, we still want to drive men our own way, and to possess the mind and body of our brothers as well as of our own selves. The only difference is that we do it in the name of a majority instead of in the name of divine right. . . .

In this case the possession of power would necessarily confer upon those who gained it such enormous privileges—if we are to speak of the miserable task of compulsion as privileges—the privileges of establishing and enforcing their own views in all matters, of treading out and suppressing the views to which they are opposed, of arranging and distributing all property, of regulating all occupations, that all those who still retained sufficient courage and energy to have views of their own would be condemned to live organized for ceaseless and bitter strife with each other.

In presence of unlimited power lodged in the hands of those who govern, in the absence of any universal acknowledgment of individual rights, the stakes for which men played would be so terribly great that they would shrink from no means to keep power out of the hands of their opponents. Not only would the scrupulous man become unscrupulous, and the pitiful man cruel, but the parties into which society divided itself would begin to perceive that to destroy or be destroyed was the one choice lying in front of them.

Title: The gun is civilization
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 08, 2012, 06:50:06 AM
"The Gun Is Civilization" by Maj. L. Caudill USMC (Ret)

Human beings only have two ways to deal with one another: reason and force. If you want me to do something for you, you have a choice of either convincing me via argument, or force me to do your bidding under threat of force. Every  human interaction falls into one of those two categories, without exception. Reason or force, that's it.

In a truly moral and civilized society, people exclusively interact through persuasion. Force has no place as a valid method of social interaction and the only thing that removes force from the menu is the personal firearm, as paradoxical as it may sound to some.

When I carry a gun, you cannot deal with me by force. You have to use reason and try to persuade me, because I have a way to negate your threat or employment of force.

The gun is the only personal weapon that puts a 100-pound woman on equal footing with a 220-pound mugger, a 75-year old retiree on equal footing with a 19-year old gang banger, and a single guy on equal footing with a carload of drunken guys with baseball bats.

The gun removes the disparity in physical strength, size, or numbers between a potential attacker and a defender.
There are  plenty of people who consider the gun as the source of bad force equations. These are the people who think that we'd be more civilized if all guns were removed from society, because a firearm makes it easier for a [armed] mugger to do his job. That, of course, is only true if the mugger's potential victims are mostly disarmed either by choice or by legislative fiat--it has no validity when most of a mugger's potential marks are armed.

People who argue for the banning of arms ask for automatic rule by the young, the strong, and the many, and that's the exact opposite of a civilized society. A mugger, even an armed one, can only make a successful living in a society where the state has granted him a force monopoly.

Then there's the argument that the gun makes confrontations lethal that otherwise would only result in injury. This argument is fallacious in several ways. Without guns involved, confrontations are won by the physically superior party inflicting overwhelming injury on the loser.

People who think that fists, bats, sticks, or stones don't constitute lethal force, watch too much TV, where people take beatings and come out of it with a bloody lip at worst. The fact that the gun makes lethal force easier works solely in favor of the weaker defender, not the stronger attacker.  If both are armed, the field is level.

The gun is the only weapon that's as lethal in the hands of an octogenarian as it is in the hands of a weight lifter. It simply wouldn't work as well as a force equalizer if it wasn't both lethal and easily employable.

When I carry a gun, I don't do so because I am looking for a fight, but because I'm looking to be left alone. The gun at my side means that I cannot be forced, only persuaded. I don't carry it because I'm afraid, but because it enables me to be unafraid. It doesn't limit the actions of those who would interact with me through reason, only the actions of those who would do so by force.  It removes force from the equation... and that's why carrying a gun is a civilized act.

Maj. L. Caudill USMC (Ret.)

So, the greatest civilization is one where all citizens are equally armed and can only be persuaded, never forced.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: bigdog on August 08, 2012, 07:30:11 AM
A great article. Since this is a forum dedicated to searching for truth, I sould say that there is some question as to the author. Here is the same article, attributed to Marko Kloos. (This does not change in any way my appreciation for the article.)


http://munchkinwrangler.wordpress.com/2007/03/23/why-the-gun-is-civilization/
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 08, 2012, 09:27:16 AM
You may well be right.  The piece came to me from someone less than rigorous about his sourcing.  In this case I thought it not to matter, but once again it looks like I've gotten nipped in the butt by this individual.
Title: The Occupy Movement Unmasked...
Post by: objectivist1 on August 09, 2012, 06:47:30 AM
Occupy Unmasked

Posted By Ben Shapiro On August 9, 2012

This week, Mark Cuban and Todd Wagner’s Magnet Releasing revealed that they had purchased the rights to Occupy Unmasked, a Citizens United production, also produced by Andrew Breitbart, and created by Stephen K. Bannon. About a month ago, I had the opportunity to pre-screen the film along with the attendees of the Right Online conference.

Full disclosure: I’m editor-at-large of Breitbart News; I was a close friend of Andrew’s; I’m a Shillman Journalism Fellow with the Freedom Center. Leaving all that aside, Occupy Unmasked is a thought-provoking and powerful piece of work that will make you worry for your country.

The film itself explores the deep, dark crevices of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Where did it come from? What are its ideological and philosophical roots? And what was the goal of the movement?

Occupy Unmasked uncovers the answers through exclusive footage of the Occupy movement – footage that will leave your skin crawling and your stomach writhing. This was not a peaceful, hippie movement of the 1960s, with thousands of grassroots turning out for drug-induced love-ins. This was a top-down, insidiously planned movement with a set of very real goals: chaos, political pressure, undermining the existing constitutional order. Occupy was dangerous, and it was purposefully designed to be dangerous.

Through all of this, Andrew Breitbart acts as guide. Andrew was a larger-than-life figure – a passionate advocate for what he believed, and a deep believer in the great hope that is America. And you can see the fire in his eyes when he describes the shameful dreams and tactics of Occupy. The rapes, the assaults, the property damage; the smear campaigns; the media complicity. It’s all there.

When we get to the ideological roots of the movement, David Horowitz takes the fore. As a former leftist radical, Horowitz understands the motives of the thwarted ‘60s radicals standing behind the Occupy movement. He understands the underpinnings of an astroturfed operation, and he details how Occupy stole the Marxist philosophy of the 1930s radicals, combined them with the sit-in politics of the 1960s radicals, and then added a patina of legitimacy provided by a compliant mainstream media. There is a history to Occupy. It did not spring from the mind of Zeus, full-blown. It sprang from a hundred-year history of class and race discontent; it was fruit of the poisonous tree. Horowitz explains all that, and he also explains how so many Americans were duped into believing that Occupy was simply an innocent movement frustrated with the workings of the political machinery.

The film isn’t just commentary. It features undercover work by video journalists including Brandon Darby, Lee Stranahan, Pam Keys, and Mandy Nagy. It allows viewers to enter deep into the heart of a movement that wasn’t a joke, no matter how much it may seem so in retrospect.

And today, that is the true danger of Occupy: that we will take it too lightly, pretend that it meant nothing. In truth, it meant everything to the left. That’s why the Obama administration defended it. This week, Judicial Watch announced that it had obtained access to Obama administration Department of Homeland Security documents showing that the General Services Administration told law enforcement to “stand down” and allow Occupy Portland protesters to violate the law. As Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch said, “These documents clearly show that federal agencies colluded with the Obama White House to allow the Occupy Wall Street protestors to violate the law with impunity. These documents tell us that the GSA and DHS can’t be relied upon to protect federal workers or property.”

Occupy may not be the first radical movement to seize the imaginations of millions of Americans. And it won’t be the last. But it may have been the first fully produced mass movement in American history – a movement created in back rooms, to specific ends. Occupy Unmasked documents the evolution of the Occupy movement in all its horrific detail.

And you can guarantee that we haven’t seen the last of Occupy. Not yet.

Watch the trailer of Occupy Unmasked here: www.occupyunmasked.com



Title: U.S. military officers are told to plan to fight Americans
Post by: bigdog on August 12, 2012, 02:58:23 PM
http://m.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/aug/7/the-civil-war-of-2016/
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on August 14, 2012, 12:15:28 PM
Well, we sill see if peaceful elections are the antedote to the dangling of taxpayer monies to bribe ever increasing numbers and groups of voters, expanding their power, to the ong term detriment of this country as we have always known it.


Many are questioning if this is unstoppable peacefully.

We will know in November.

I am optimistic.
 
Title: Southern Poverty Law Center has ZERO credibility...
Post by: objectivist1 on August 21, 2012, 09:10:12 AM
Hatred's Strange Bedfellows

Washington Times | Aug 20, 2012
By Frank Gaffney, Jr.

Last week’s near-massacre at the Family Research Council (FRC) put into sharp relief a curious fact:  The people most aggressively denouncing others for their “hatemongering” sure are engaging in a lot of it themselves – with dangerous, and potentially lethal, repercussions.

Take, for example, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).  Back in the heyday of the civil rights movement, the SPLC helped counter the Ku Klux Klan and other racists and anti-Semites.  At the moment, though, the SPLC is hanging out with today’s counterpart to the KKK and the preeminent threat to civil rights – especially those of women – in America: Islamists bent on insinuating here their anti-constitutional, misogynistic and supremacist doctrine known as shariah.

A case in point occurred last Wednesday night, just hours after a gunman named Floyd Lee Corkins entered the headquarters of the FRC. Corkins apparently was bent on killing as many of the Center’s employees as possible, perhaps because of the social conservative group’s listing (along with this columnist and a number of others) earlier this year by the SPLC as among the worst hate groups and bigots in America. 

It turns out that, as with the Family Research Council, what seems to qualify one for smearing by the Southern Poverty Law Center is disagreement with its political agenda.  If you lawfully object to, say, the erosion of traditional marriage or open borders, you stand to be condemned by the SPLC as a hater.  It seems that if you are militantly in favor of the radical homosexual agenda or racist groups like La Raza, however, you get a pass from that organization.

Particularly striking in this regard is the utter blindness of the SPLC to the hatemongering in which Muslim Brotherhood and Islamist organizations in this country regularly engage.  If you warn, on the basis of abundant evidence – including such Islamist groups’ own statements – that they are seeking to subvert our freedoms and form of government by insinuating shariah into this country then, boom, the self-appointed arbiters of hate will brand you a monger of it.  But those whose Islamic creed promotes hatred of other religions, man-made laws and people who embrace them are never mentioned as a problem.

On Wednesday, August 15th, the director of the SPLC’s “intelligence project,” Heidi Beirich, participated in an open conference call organized by one such Islamist group, the Muslim Public Affairs Council.  She used the occasion to inveigh against anti-Muslim hate groups and to declare that her group was “very, very concerned” about their proliferation.

What makes this performance absolutely bizarre is the fact that MPAC is not simply a Muslim Brotherhood-associated organization that, by definition, is in the business of promoting shariah’s virulently intolerant code.  The organization also has a documented history of anti-Semitism, including such hatemongering as: the contention on 9/11 by its executive director, Salam Al- Marayati, that the Jews should be viewed as possible perpetrators of the attacks of that day; repeated claims that Zionists and Jews “own” the Congress, its staff and the American media; and vitriolic support for the designated terrorist organization, Hamas, whose explicit goal is destroying Israel.

So egregious is Muslim Public Affairs Council’s record of hatemongering that an ecumenical group of seven leaders of national faith-based and civil rights organizations wrote the leadership of the Southern Poverty Law Center last week urging the SPLC not to associate with those Islamists.  An attachment noted that  an MPAC-sponsored event in December 2000 featured an exhortation from Imam Mohammed Al-Asi, a supporter of the quintessential Islamist hate group, Hezbollah, and director of the Islamic Education Center in Potomac.  He declared on that occasion:

“Now, all our khatibs (speakers), our imams, our public speakers, should be concentrating on militarizing the Muslim public.…Rhetoric is not going to liberate Al-Quds [Jerusalem] and Al-Aqsa [the mosque on the Temple Mount]. Only carrying arms will do this task. And it’s not going to be someone else who is going to carry arms for you and for me.  It is you and me who are going to have to carry these arms.”

It is deeply regrettable that the Southern Poverty Law Center has been reduced to a propaganda arm of enemies of freedom.  It should be embarrassed about its evident refusal to hold accountable any of the myriad Islamist entities that are authentic promoters of hatred – apart from Louis Farakhan’s Nation of Islam, a group so racist, so anti-Semitic, so hateful that even the SPLC evidently could not overlook its record.  And the SPLC should abandon its odious practice of listing as hate groups those – like the Family Research Council – with whom it simply disagrees politically, and seeks to silence.

The Southern Poverty Law Center is quick to allege ties between people it calls haters and people who use violence against the object of the purported hatred.  If the SPLC is genuinely interested in preventing such behavior, then the organization and its leaders should stop what amounts to encouragement of it.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 22, 2012, 06:46:48 AM
Good to see some pressure generating against the SPLC.  The post would be better in the Liberal Fascism or the Politically (In)correct threads.
Title: VDH: Graffiti on Trees
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 27, 2012, 10:14:57 AM
Graffiti on Trees, High-Speed Rail to Nowhere — the Wages of Liberalism
August 27, 2012 - 12:01 am - by Victor Davis Hanson


Last week, while reading about an insolvent California’s insistence on going ahead with the first leg of a proposed high-speed rail line (total cost of the system: an estimated $100-$300 billion), I heard the following story on a local ABC news affiliate about a nearby low-Sierra lake:
 

Vandalism forces closure of Pine Flat campground

 
Advertisement
 


Monday, August 20, 2012
 
Amanda Perez
 
FRESNO, Calif. (KFSN) — Acts of vandalism have forced officials to shut down a popular campsite in Fresno County. The Pine Flat Campground located below the Pine Flat Dam on Trimmer Springs Road is closed indefinitely. Nearby Winton Park remains open but things aren’t looking much better there. Vandals tagged rocks, barbeques, and even trees with graffiti. “It was horrible. It didn’t look like nature. It looked like a nightmare,” said visitor Jose Zarate of Fresno.
 
Unfair to the Vandals
 
You can read the rest of story at KFSN’s Website; additional news items detailed similar stories at other local lakes — a veritable Vandal assault on the vestiges of civilization (actually, that allusion is unfair to the Vandals): copper wire stripped out of power conduits, toilets and sinks ripped out of bathrooms, and, yes, more gang graffiti painted on trees.
 
I think the latter horror is what earned the local media attention. Destroying public property, assaulting other campers, closing down recreation sites are one thing — but graffiti on trees? That’s an insult that no liberal can stomach. In the grand struggle of environmental correctness versus multiculturalism, green wins every time. (Why do a few liberals oppose illegal immigration? Because of worries about environmental damage along the border.)
 
The Tipping Point
 
I have a hard time timing car trips to Los Angeles because a large section of the 99 state “freeway,” north of Kingsburg, is still (after a half-century) two lanes, potholed, and crammed with traffic. But the rub is that the traffic is of a strange sort, one characterized by an inordinate number of drivers with loose brush, tools, appliances — almost anything — not secured in flat-bed pickups or piled too high in pickups and trailers. The debris commonly flies out on the road, causes an accident, and shuts down California’s main interior north-south lateral for several hours.
 
What is the common theme here?
 
When the liberal mind cannot cope with the concrete ramifications of its own ideology, it seeks a sort of tokenism. Unable to ensure that trees are not defaced? An ancient highway is not upgraded? Presto, zoom ahead to space-age high-speed rail, as if the conditions that created sprayed trees and mattresses lying among the pot-holes will not easily migrate to high-speed rail. That is, within 10 years I have no doubt that the Fresno-Corcoran (“rail to nowhere”) link will be periodically closed due to stripped copper wire conduit, mattresses thrown over the fence onto the tracks, and the general inability of the state to service the system due to the sort of daily vandalism seen at our local campgrounds.
 
If one third of the nation’s welfare population resides in California, and if seven million of the last ten million Californians added to the state population are now on Medicaid, and if Californians, as it is estimated, send approximately $10 billion a year in remittances to Mexico and Latin America, then something has to give. And the remedy for that something that gives is either teaching youth not to spray paint pine trees, or hiring unemployed ex-gang-bangers to pressure wash the graffiti off pine trees — or moving to a kinder, gentler Santa Cruz or Newport, feeling good on the beach, watching the sunset each evening, and cursing those evil conservatives who want to poison the 3-inch delta smelt and keep foie gras legal in California.
 
The Role of the Scapegoat
 
When society cannot fathom that 16 youths were shot and another six killed last weekend in Chicago, it seeks symbolic relief. As I followed stories of the mayhem in the inner city of Chicago, I noted periodic news about the case of Trayvon Martin and the national outrage at George Zimmerman, who in a world of liberal jurisprudence has nonetheless mostly been tried and convicted in the court of public opinion. But because the Congressional Black Caucus cannot fathom what to do about the epidemic of black-on-black murder and even Rahm Emanuel was not successful after calling in Louis Farrakhan to keep the peace  (and neither wishes to make even a rough connection between the violence and Great Society paternalism, the destruction of the black family, and a generation of youths raised without fathers on state assistance), they must seek a token — or rather, in anthropological terms, a scapegoat, some symbolic target to beat when crops fail and pestilence arrives. What is the alternative — lectures about flash-mobbing and sermons about the waste of buying $300 Lebron James signature sneakers?
 
The angrier we can become about Trayvon Martin, and the more our furor at George Zimmerman, the more we can square the circle of dealing with the Chicago killings (one murder occurred this week just three blocks from the Obama Chicago mansion. [I doubt Barack Obama will be returning to his home after his tenure ends in Washington]). If California has no clue what to do about its schools being reduced to near last in math and English test scores, its epidemic of uninsured drivers, its nearly 40% drop-out rates of Hispanic males in Central Valley high schools, and its 50%-plus rates of remediation of incoming freshmen in the state college system, then its needs a token solution. So it deals with the very real long-term consequences of illegal immigration by pushing for the Dream Act.
 
But tokenism is not the only reaction when postmodern liberal dreaming ends up in concrete premodern catastrophe. Escapism is a related response. I don’t think Dream Act supporters in Santa Monica or Atherton wish to live in, or visit much, Parlier or Orange Cove. When CSU presidents retire from Central Valley campuses, they usually frown and head to Palm Springs or Monterey. Doctrinaire liberalism is predicated on the notion of escapism, that one has the means and know-how to ensure that children do not go to the schools whose curriculum and policies follow your own utopian thinking. Or that you make sure your “wind and solar and millions of green jobs” windmills are obstructing someone else’s view. Or that the first high-speed rail link connects Fresno with Charles Manson’s prison in Corcoran rather than cutting a wide swath through Bay Area suburbs.
 
Medieval exemption is yet another response to liberalism. As I wrote in 2008, I watched with curiosity as tony Palo Alto neighborhoods sprouted bigger Obama campaign signs on their lawns, even though the owners were by definition one-percenter segregationists (East Palo Alto and Redwood City are a mile — and a solar system — away). The mansions of an Al Gore, John Kerry, and John Edwards are expiated by their owners’ always louder liberal outrage. No one really wishes to live in a world governed by the laws of contemporary liberalism. So the architects escape it and justify their flight by finding a suitable token, a convenient scapegoat, a secular priest like Obama to offer them penance for their sins of enjoying elite privilege.
 
When we talk of tokenism, escapism, or penance, we are still in world of symptoms, not the etiology of the malady. All can understand the very human desire to support a liberal crusader like Barack Obama among those who pay no income tax, belong to the near 50% who receive some sort of government aid, or are part of the one-sixth of the population on food stamps. Self-interest is an understandable motivation. It explains why the public employee and teacher naturally worry more about pay increases than the tax wherewithal to pay for them.
 
But for the more elite and influential progressive, affluence has allowed liberal orthodoxy to evolve to its theoretical limitations. There is a reason why 90% of professors — life-long tenure, summers off, guaranteed pay raises — are liberal and 70% of small-business people are conservative. The more removed one becomes from the elemental struggle to eat one more day — and never in the history of civilization have so many been so exempt from such existential worries — the more one enjoys the luxury of pondering more cosmic issues such as extending Social Security disability payments to youths suffering from attention deficit disorder or mandating gay history in state public schools or saving the smelt.
 
The problem, however, with modern redistributive liberalism is that it is predicated on a number of people not predicating their existences on just such modern liberal principles. When the natural gas fracker, the dairy owner, the cement contractor, and the software engineer either quit or move, then the Pine Flat campgrounds become, as they are now, the norm rather than the aberration.
 
A rich inheritance, a big law settlement, tenure, a movie deal, a state sinecure — these enablers of elite liberal thought are all predicated on the less-liberal productive classes creating wealth to shear. Behind every liberal philanthropist fortune is a huge capitalist score. Bill Gates and Warren Buffett can afford now to be liberal — an expensive indulgence — because in their early incarnations they were no-holds-barred capitalists who made lots of enemies conducting business without mercy and in search of pure profit. (In the 1980s and early 1990s Bill Gates’ Microsoft was cast as a Darth Vader enemy that had crushed the underdog, hip, and nearly insolvent Apple through piratical means.)
 
Put Sean Penn or George Clooney in a socialist Hollywood (one in fact, not in mere name), where the state ran the industry and the profits were divided evenly among actors, crews, and janitors (who is to say that Clooney “built” a film any more than the guy who swept the set after he got in his Mercedes and headed home?), and soon you would have a suddenly conservative Penn or Clooney, netting about $70,000 a year before taxes and without the wherewithal to jet to Caracas or hold a fund-raiser in Geneva — and furious that they were making the same as the guy who swept the set (as in most can sweep sets, but not all can be Sean Penns).
 
Affluence and poverty are the twins of liberalism. The former allows one to both dream and to escape that dream. The latter provides the fodder for liberal artillery.
Title: David Koch
Post by: JDN on September 01, 2012, 09:23:44 AM
He sounds rather reasonable.

"David Koch breaks from GOP on gay marriage, taxes, defense cuts"

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0812/80483.html
Title: VDH: A world we don't question
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 05, 2012, 10:42:11 AM
World We Don’t Question
 
I’ve witnessed two of the most radical developments in my lifetime the last four years — changes far greater than those brought on by the massive new increases in the national debt, the soaring gas costs, the radical decrease in average family income, the insolvent Medicare and Social Security trajectories, or the flat housing market.
 
One is the fact of less than 1% interest rates on most savings (well below the rate of inflation), and the other is an epidemic of 20-something unemployment. All that is the new normal.

Why Save?
 
The hallmark advice of retirement planning was always to scrimp, save, and put away enough money to make up for retirement’s lost salary, increasing medical bills, and the supposed good life of the “golden years.” If a couple had saved, say, $300,000 over a lifetime (again, say, putting $500 away each month for 30 years at modest compounded interest), then they might expect a so-so annual return at 5% of about $15,000 a year on their stash, or about $1,250 per month.
 
In other words, perhaps Mr. and Mrs. Retiree could find enough with Social Security to live okay and pass on the principal to their kids. But well aside from the fact that many Americans have been laid off, taken pay cuts, lost home equity, had their 401(k)s pruned, or had to take care of out-of-work relatives, there is no 5% any more on anything, not even 2% or  in most cases 1%.  Saving money means nothing really in terms of return, only the realization that inflation eats away the principal each year.
 
To earn a decent return, the retiree has had to wade into bonds, stocks, and real estate buying and selling, with all their attendant risks that loom larger after 65. The old American idea of receiving a fair so-so interest on a little money in the savings account vanished. And no one seems to care.
 
The Federal Reserve perhaps had its reasons to keep interest rates low, given the massive spending, 2008 collapse, and the anemic “recovery,” but whatever the purported aims, the policy is not working. Yet cheap money proves to be no stimulus, even at rock-bottom interest rates. Firms don’t seem to think that near-zero interest (and the banks now have a rather scandalous margin between what they charge for ordinary loans and what they pay in interest) balances out the new anxiety over tax hikes, more regulations, and spiking energy costs. (Did Obama believe that employers simply existed to pay ever more taxes for his growing technocracy to redistribute?)
 
In classical Roman Republican terms, near-zero interest (and calls for “cancellation of debt and redistribution of property”) represented a vast transfer of wealth from those who saved to those who owe. Imagine a contemporary version of Catiline yelling, “If elected, I promise we won’t pay those SOB one-percenters any more than a third of a percent on their not-pay-their-fair-share stashes.” At least that way we might have known what we were dealing with.
 
The Really Lost Generation
 
Few seem to note that those who receive nothing on their retirement savings don’t retire so easily. And when they don’t retire, jobs don’t open up — which brings us to my next observation: the lost generation of those between 21 and 30, who at various ages and periods came into the workplace the last four years. Many have 8% plus student loans. I doubt half of those will ever be paid off, given the epidemic of unemployment in this cohort.
 
Unemployment rates of those 16-24 are now officially over 50%. Even the cohort between 16 and 29 suffers from 45% unemployment. In short, in four years we have become Europeanized: young people with no jobs who are living at home and putting off marriage and child raising — a “lost” generation in “limbo,” etc. etc. They may have a car, borrow their parents’ nicer car for special occasions, watch their parents’ big screen TV, and have pocket change for a cell phone and laptop by enjoying free rent, food, and laundry, but beneath that thinning technological veneer there is really little hope that they will ever be able to maintain that lifestyle on their own in this present day and age. Meanwhile, just like some Middle East tribal society, “contacts,” “networking,” and “pull” are the new gospel, as parents rely on quid pro quos to offer their indebted, unemployed (and aging) children some sort of inside one-upmanship in the cutthroat job market.
 
Note that as a poor substitute for a job, we institutionalized something called the “internship.” The best I can tell (I get weekly barrages of inquiries from young people wanting to “intern”), you would enjoy the work of free workers who in exchange for their uncompensated labor gather skills and influence that translate at some nebulous date into real work. How odd that the government that fines an employer who does not duly pay proper overtime wages is not interested in the tens of millions of youth who are working largely as Spartan helots.
 
These new realities fall heavily on the young male. Traditionally, he was in charge of taking charge — working two jobs to acquire enough to seed a marriage and family or buy a house, striving to be the protector of the household, and accruing experience in his late twenties that would translate into needed promotions in his thirties that would later on pay for braces, kids’ camp, and college tuitions.
 
No more. We have become emasculated Italians, our economy ossified and socialized to such an extent that few are taking risks to open new businesses in Illinois, build a pipeline across Nebraska, plant a 600-acre irrigated field, or open a timber mill or mine in California. Only so many of the unemployed can land a government job monitoring delta smelt populations or suing to shut down another power plant. In other words, I don’t think Barack Obama at the convention this week is going to be bragging too much about “millions of new green jobs,” more subsidies to Solyndra clones, another stimulus, keeping the deficit at $1 trillion plus, another federal takeover, more juicy details about Obamacare, higher taxes on the greedy, another gas lease denied, or yet more pipelines tabled. He may wish to continue all that, but he surely won’t wish to tell us so.
 
The new model for the next generation is to cobble part-time work together, intern, occasionally draw on unemployment, send out resumes hourly, and hope for something to turn up (preferably in government, state or federal). We all witness the reality behind these statistics firsthand. When we travel we see more and more older people at work, often well into their 70s. I know 50 or so young offspring of friends, relatives, and associates who are desperately trying to find work.
 
Some other symptoms: There is a new backlash at colleges, which habitually lie to students about the value of their degrees and care more that their offices of diversity are staffed well and their vice provosts for external relations are hitting all the necessary conferences — at least far more than they worry that their tuition increases have yearly soared well beyond the rates of inflation. The federal government, of course, has masked such excess with subsidized loan-sharking. I asked some young people recently what their various (and all had confusing loan “packages”) “subsidized” student loan interest rates were. Most said between 6 and 9% (as their parents get .25% of their own savings).
 
I don’t know where this all leads. The aging baby boomers are not going to have the retirements that they envisioned, and their children are not going to have the good jobs their baby-boomer parents enjoyed. The more I talk to those my age (58), the more I hear that they are madly trying to save money, buy an extra house, get a good used car — all for their children who may not otherwise ever have a savings account, a home, or reliable transportation. The ancient wisdom was always “don’t spoil your kids,” “no one helped me after 18,” and “keep it up and they will never fend for themselves.” All true.
 
But these days, the game has changed somewhat — or rather been downscaled: the PhD is not being hired for anything other than part-time teaching; the JD is reduced to the law library gofer; the freshly minted MD is the equivalent of a salaried, high-paid nurse; the credentialed high-school teacher is subbing; the engineer is a draftsman; the carpenter is cobbling together home repair mini-jobs. The new plum job? Landing one of those federal or state regulatorships, inspectorships, or clerkships, which are paid for with borrowed money,  produce little, and grow as those they audit and fine shrink.
 
In other words, we are seeing the proverbial chickens coming home to roost in an economy that has run up $16 trillion in debt, regulated its way into paralysis, hounded the private sector, and demonized profit-making. The strange thing about the 2008 disaster was not just that hand-in-glove with Wall Street banks Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae created a huge real estate bubble and then watched it pop (one inflated through private speculation and government-backed sub-prime loans), but that the blame went not to the intrusive, incompetent federal government or even to a Goldman-Sachs-like bundler (a firm from whom Obama got more campaign money than did any other prior presidential candidate), but to the vague “private sector” — as if the well-driller or timber man had somehow collapsed the economy. The result was that Obama’s medicine from 2009 onward was worse than the original disease.
 
Oh, one other thing. We don’t see any more of those funny, though obnoxious, bumper stickers  with the words “We are spending our children’s inheritance” on huge Winnebagos as they zoom by. Perhaps that’s because there are not so many inheritances any more or the children (now in their late 20s) are inside the Winnebago on vacation with their parents. Or maybe the parents sold the Winnebago and are working at Starbucks.
 
Finally, where does all this lead? To a great deal of pressure and expectations upon a Mitt Romney, whom a growing number of people seem willing to entrust with the remedy to Obama’s Hellenic malady. The more Obama tsk-tsks saving the Utah Winter Olympics or creating a Bain Capital, the more the strapped public may say “bring it on.”
Title: Steyn on Fluke
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 08, 2012, 03:08:14 PM
http://www.ocregister.com/opinion/america-370703-fluke-one.html
Title: Mayor Rahm Emanuel AND Ryan finally agree!
Post by: JDN on September 11, 2012, 08:07:58 AM
Hopefully, the Mayor will not waiver against the unions.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-chicago-teachers-strike-20120911,0,1301512.story
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 11, 2012, 08:16:04 AM
JDN: 

Thread Nazi here.  :lol:  The most specific thread for that would be "Unions".   Thank you.
Title: One sentence
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 11, 2012, 09:58:37 PM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdnY8r7_fLw&feature=player_embedded
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 12, 2012, 11:02:47 AM


By Roger L Simon
The Democratic Party and a Second Holocaust

September 12, 2012 - 12:01 am - by Roger L Simon

I admit the title of this article is incendiary, but these are incendiary times — not just because the U.S. consulate in Benghazi has been torched and the embassy in Cairo attacked by Islamic fanatics protesting a movie no one ever heard of, let alone saw, but because, in the midst of this, the president of the United States declined to meet with the prime minister of Israel when Benjamin Netanyahu is in the U.S. next week for the convening of the General Assembly.
 
Not surprisingly, the White House has branded this a false report and — mirabile dictu in this election season — Obama did speak with the Israeli prime minister for an hour Tuesday evening.
 
Was this a hurried arrangement to avoid a public relations debacle for the president?

 
Advertisement
 


Most likely. The result was a fairly bland announcement by the White House. And we all know Obama despises Netanyahu. He said as much to Sarkozy on an open mike. Our president prefers the likes of the charming Russian leadership (also available on open mike) and the quasi-Islamist prime minister of Turkey who massacres Kurdish civilians and opposes the equality of the sexes.
 
But Netanyahu, like him or not, has a weight on his shoulders far greater than has the president of the United States. For the prime minister of Israel, it’s not the economy, stupid. It’s the preservation of his people. In other words, it’s genocide, stupid.
 
At the same time as Obama is refusing or not refusing to talk with Netanyahu, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is arriving in New York for his annual pilgrimage to the UN, once more undoubtedly to spew his propaganda before the world as the centrifuges continue to whirl back in Iran, bringing the Islamic Republic closer and closer to a nuclear weapon.
 
As we all know, the bien pensants at the New York Times and elsewhere think that this is natural evolution, that the Third World (okay, the developing world) will all be getting the bomb soon — that we should just learn to live with it and ignore statements of racial and national extermination made on a daily basis by the mullahs. They have to be kidding, right? It’s just a pose. No one would actually do that.
 
Of course, people did — and they were “civilized” Europeans — not so very long ago. And for Benjamin Netanyahu to ignore that would be criminal madness. No wonder, at this point, practically every Israeli, right or left, has lined up behind him on the issue. It would be insane to do otherwise.
 
Barack Obama, as we also know, has not. He has refused Netanyahu’s request for a nuclear “red line” beyond which Iran cannot cross, even though, without such a line, sanctions are meaningless. (Iran clearly treats them that way.) And, at least according the Jerusalem Post, Obama has continued this refusal in his latest conversation with Netanyahu, no matter how that was arranged. The resulting statement has no reference to it.
 
(BTW, isn’t it odd that Obama would suddenly be having a conversation with Netanyahu in the evening in D.C.? That would make it roughly one or two AM in Jerusalem, depending on when they started.)
 
In any case, this refusal is not in the slightest bit surprising. Obama, after all, is the man who had no discernible feeling for the brave democracy demonstrators in Tehran, abjuring them in favor of self-serving (and ultimately useless) dialogue with Ahmadinejad. The way Obama ignored the Iranian Green Movement is the most morally and emotionally disconnected act by an American president in my lifetime. Why should Netanyahu trust a man like that?
 
Which leads me to the incendiary part of this article.
 
I address it to my fellow Jews who are currently in the Democratic Party or supporting it.
 
How do you sleep?
 
I’m talking to you David Axelrod, Charles Schumer, and even you, Alan Dershowitz, who made such a big (and welcome) noise when Jerusalem, Hamas, and the “law of return” were left out of the Democratic Party platform for the first time in years and then went suddenly silent when only the first of the three was reinstated.
 
How about you, Rahm Emanuel, son of the Irgun and one-time volunteer with the IDF? How would you feel if a dirty nuke, slipped by the Revolutionary Guard into the hands of their buddies in Hezbollah, detonated on Dizengoff Street?
 
And then there’s Jack Lew, Orthodox and the president’s very own chief of staff, sometimes referred to as “The Gate Keeper” or “The Co-President.”
 
I could go on. There are so many more. But you get the point. (I deliberately omitted Deborah Wasserman Schultz in order to not be accused of attacking the cognitively challenged.)
 
Nasty words exist in the Jewish tradition for those who collaborated with the enemy during World War II. These people are not nearly as bad as that. Most of them are well-meaning though hidebound by a tradition dating from the time of FDR and earlier, making them emotionally unable to acknowledge the corruption of the Democratic Party, corruption that was made painfully apparent by the shouts of “boos” from the floor of last week’s convention.
 
But imagine those “boos” in another time and place… on the floor of the Reichstag in the 1930s or the floor of the Majlis last week… and you may not be so emotionally blocked, may not find it so easy to sleep, as I said.
 
So to my Jewish brethren: difficult times ahead. Time to make some tough decisions that call a lot of old assumptions into question. I know it’s not easy. But it’s necessary.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on September 12, 2012, 12:19:27 PM
My sentiments exactly ditto the above post.

Once again as noted years ago.  Brock Obama would never have become President without the help of liberal Jews.

They need to rethink their political alignment.

I know they are Democrat party hacks for multiple reasons:

Religious doctrine to be for the underdog
Democrat party which has historically  been for immigrants (votes) and most Jews and their descendants came here 100 years ago as immigrants.

Historical bigotry against Jews from Republican wasps and Christains (you can't come to our universities or country clubs).

Guilt, but far more for *narcissm* or the belief that if one pretends they are for the poor or downtrodden somehow this makes them wiser, smarter, better, superior to other people.   Perhaps part of the "chosen ones" theme (I am not sure).

Trust me, on the last point.  No one in this fucking world *has ever* thanked Jews for this narcissistic pursuit.  If so we would not have for ages and into the present and for the forseable future been so resented, so disliked and held as the scapegoats.

Unfortunately I don't think the Axelrods, Emanuals etc have the capacity to ever admit they are wrong.  Additionally they all have too much influence and power (while getting rich) doing what they do for their democrat party.

Dershowitz, despite being pompous and also a bit narcisstic has far more humanity and I suspect kindness in his heart.  He seems more rational. 

EOM
Title: PAtriot Post on BO, Libya,and Egypt
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 14, 2012, 09:51:03 AM
Repeating History With Barack Carter

"Let us recollect that peace or war will not always be left to our option; that however moderate or unambitious we may be, we cannot count upon the moderation, or hope to extinguish the ambition of others." --Alexander Hamilton
 
We warned last week about the U.S. throwing good money down the rat hole that is the Middle East. Events this week have confirmed just how prescient we were. In what appeared to be a coordinated effort, adherents of the Religion of Peace™ rioted first in Egypt and then in Libya, murdering four Americans in the latter nation, including our ambassador and two former Navy SEALs. Another embassy assault in Yemen followed. It shouldn't be lost on anyone that this occurred on the day that America solemnly observed the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

In the face of it all, the Obama administration continues its failed policy of abandoning friends, bowing to enemies and apologizing for America at every turn. It's uncannily reminiscent of the Carter era. Apparently, all the "hope and change" fomented during the Arab Spring has resulted in quite a spectacular Arab Fall.

In Egypt on Tuesday, protesters allegedly became angry over a film that they claimed insulted the murderous pedophile Mohammed. Reminiscent of their sieges of Christian cities in the 7th and 8th centuries, they scaled the walls of the U.S. Embassy in Cairo, hauled down and desecrated its American flags and replaced them with black flags containing Islamic emblems and the words, "There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his messenger." The riot prompted U.S. security guards to fire off a volley of warning shots as a large crowd of more than 2,000 angry Muslims (is there any other kind?) gathered outside the embassy. Egypt, of course, is the country for whom the Obama regime just announced it will forgive $1 billion worth of debt to the American taxpayer. And this is the thanks we get.

Of course, BO isn't sure if Egypt is an ally, so the confusion is hardly surprising.

The official response to the initial violence (before the walls were breached) from the U.S. Embassy in Cairo was offensive, at best. The embassy issued a statement condemning "the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims." So Muslim riots and attacks on our embassy -- on 9/11 -- are the fault of some amateurs with a video camera?

Mitt Romney weighed in immediately after the embassy's apology, saying, "It's disgraceful that the Obama administration's first response was not to condemn attacks on our diplomatic missions, but to sympathize with those who waged the attacks." Naturally, the Leftmedia went apoplectic and changed the focus to Romney's "timing" and his "politicization" of the matter instead of Obama's Carter-esque foreign policy failings.

Obama quickly responded and threw his embassy personnel under the bus, saying the embassy's statement "didn't come from me, [and] it didn't come from Secretary [of State Hillary] Clinton." Always passing the buck. He then helpfully added, "[T]he United States rejects efforts to denigrate the religious beliefs of others." This was just a week after members of his own Democrat party at their convention loudly rejected the most central tenet of Liberty, that it is "endowed by our Creator" and not the gift of benevolent political masters. And just months after the administration trampled religious liberty with its ObamaCare contraception mandate.

Later Tuesday, events turned deadly in Libya. During a night attack on the U.S. consulate and a safe house in Benghazi, Islamists killed U.S. ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens, and three American security personnel. U.S. officials said the Benghazi attack may have been planned around the distraction of the protests, and it seems that members of the Islamist group Ansar al-Sharia, an offshoot of al-Qa'ida, perpetrated it. Libyan officials say they've already made arrests. "It bears the hallmarks of an organized attack," one U.S. official said. Yet other squishy U.S. officials cautioned against assuming that the attacks were even terrorist attacks, much less deliberately organized to coincide with the 9/11 anniversary. Right, just an unfortunate coincidence that Muslims attack U.S. embassies on the anniversary of the deadliest Muslim attack on America.
Ambassador Stevens was on the side of the "freedom fighters" when the recent Libyan revolution was at its most vulnerable, in danger of being crushed by Moammar Gadhafi's troops when they were moving on Benghazi. During the early days of the revolution, Stevens boarded a Greek cargo ship and sailed right into Benghazi, working with the rebels and offering his support throughout the revolution. For his courage and steadfastness, he received a murderous show of gratitude.

Worse still, reports indicate that the U.S. had advance warning of the attacks and yet did nothing to place embassies on high alert. The White House, of course, denies this -- which would be plausible only because Obama skips so many intelligence briefings.

As has been the case for roughly 5,000 years, the situation in the Middle East remains tense and dangerous. Obama isn't helping, as on Tuesday the White House declined Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's request to meet the president during a UN conference at the end of the month. Of course, the White House denies the snub, but to turn John Kerry's comments at last week's DNC back on Democrats, we'll take the word of Netanyahu over Obama any day. Adding insult to injury, Obama announced the same day as the snub that he'll appear with David Letterman next week, and his campaign spent the week raffling chances to attend a fundraiser with various celebrities. It's always good to know where our president's priorities are.

As Mark Alexander said yesterday, Ronald Reagan warned us about the consequences of inept leadership. Did we learn anything? If the American people do not resoundingly defeat Obama on November 6, it will most certainly affirm this observation from 19th-century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: "The only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history."

Quote of the Week

"Mr. Obama ... came to office saying, and apparently believing, that a more deferential America would be better respected around the world. He will finish his term having disproved his own argument. The real lesson of the last four years -- a lesson as much for Republican isolationists as for Democrats who want to lead from behind -- is the ancient one that weakness is provocative." --The Wall Street Journal

This Week's 'Alpha Jackass' Award

"Governor Romney seems to have a tendency to shoot first and aim later. [emphasis added] And as president, one of the things I've learned is you can't do that. ... t's important for you to make sure that the statements that you make are backed up by the facts and that you've thought through the ramifications before you make them." --Barack Obama on Romney's statement re: the Cairo embassy

"In their fantasy world, all the complex global changes of the world since World War II have never happened. In their fantasy America, all problems have simple solutions -- simple and wrong. It's a make-believe world, a world of good guys and bad guys where some politicians shoot first and ask questions later." [emphasis added] --Jimmy Carter in 1980 -- probably the last politician Obama should be quoting right now
Title: VDH: Pret Modern ME and and Post Modern West
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 17, 2012, 11:33:18 AM
The Premodern Middle East and Postmodern West Don’t Mix, Mr. President
 
Globalization certainly did not bring the premodern world of the Middle East closer together with the postmodern West — despite Barack Obama’s 2007 narcissistic vows that his own intellect and background could bridge such a gap. If anything, the more we know about each other, the more we sense we are back to Lepanto and the siege of Vienna. Since the 9/11 anniversary attacks, the Obama administration has seemed bewildered, petulant, and more or less shocked in Casablanca-style fashion about the hatred shown the United States — whether overt among the Arab Street, or implicit among Arab governments’ wink-and-nod inability to protect U.S. embassies. It apparently forgot some basic rules about how to deal with radical Islam, and instead regressed back to the old familiar appeasement that led to 9/11/2001.
 
I. Pretexts

Mr. President, do not obsess over the pretext of the day. Terry Jones is only as crude as Andres Serrano and his Piss Christ, which I don’t recall warranted a personal call from the chairman of the Joint Chiefs to the artist to cool it, much less a federal effort to detain a Coptic filmmaker. Sometimes Muslims will rage at a Rushdie novel, sometimes at a papal reference to a Byzantine letter, and at other times at a supposedly flushed or torched Koran. Or maybe a grainy amateurish video will be set them off to kill a nun, blow up a priest, burn down an embassy, or assassinate a Western ambassador.  There are three-hundred-million-plus free-thinking Americans, and thus at least that many possible “slights” — if you choose to go down that road of blaming free expression rather than the primeval mind that objects to it.
 
The opportunities for Muslims in the Middle East to be outraged at the West in general and the U.S. in particular are legion. You, Mr. Obama, the most powerful of all Americans, must remember that these totems are mere tools of an al-Qaeda, a Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamic Jihad — or whatever the particular aggrieved party calls itself this week. They are no more than crude pretexts to direct fury among their ignorant and impoverished masses at opportune times against the United States, and thereby gain power.
 
In that regard, each time we castigate a Rushdie, a Danish cartoonist, a U.S. soldier, or a nut like Terry Jones, we simply play into the hands of the Islamists. The latter are thrilled when American grandees look weak, desperate, and only too eager to fall over themselves in undermining their own singular Constitution and distancing themselves from their own values. Far better it would be to say, one time — and only one time: “We cherish and protect freedom of expression and abhor censorship and violence; if that bothers you, it bothers you.” End of story.
 
2. The Sources of Islamic Anger
 
Remember the source of premodern Islamic anger. Why did the Zawahiri brothers, or the late bin Laden, or the Islamist of the week hate the West, and in particular the United States?
 
It surely is not, as their apologists plead, because of our “foreign policy.” We are enlightened compared to what Putin did in Chechnya or how Chinese treated their Muslim minorities. You, readers, know the American record better than do I: we graciously accepted Muslim refugees, even ingrates like Mohamed Morsi or the 9/11 mass murderers. We fed Somalis; helped to remove Gaddafi; freed Kuwaitis; liberated Afghans (twice); birthed Iraqi democracy; bombed Christians to save Muslim Kosovars and Bosnians; fund Jordanians, Egyptians, and Palestinians; and so on.
 
Instead, the wrath of the Muslim Street is elemental and existential (read The Al Qaeda Reader to fathom all the twenty or so excuses given by bin Laden for his hatred of the U.S.). It can be explained in terms something like this: Islamists have convinced the Arab masses that their present mess (so easily fathomed in a globalized world in second-by-second, instantaneous comparisons with other cultures — via cell phones, the Internet, DVDs, and cable television) is not their own fault.
 
Discussions of the pernicious effects of endemic tribalism, misogyny, statism, anti-Semitism, fundamentalism, religious intolerance, xenophobia, and anti-modernism are taboo. So there is never serious reflection about self-induced pathologies that keep fostering a Saddam Hussein, Muslim Brotherhood, and Ba’ath Party, or the preconditions that throughout much of the 20th century made the Arab world so susceptible to Hitlerism, then Soviet communism, then Baathism, then Western authoritarianism, then authoritarianism, and, then, or rather always back to, Islamic radicalism. The Middle East is not fascist, communist, Baathist, pan-Arabist, or Islamist, so much as it is screwed-up-ist and blame-them-ist.
 
If all these -isms did not exist, we would have to invent them and others as well to find scapegoats for self-induced misery. The Islamist explains to the illiterate masses that they are poor and angry because, despite their renewed zealotry and supposed ancient majesty, the evil Westerners have, quite unfairly, all the power, wealth, and influence — and yet don’t deserve it, given their godlessness, decadence, and corruption. Westerners obtained their preeminence through “crimes” like Zionism, colonialism, imperialism, etc., at a stage of Islamic vulnerability, when Muslim sellouts betrayed the Prophet and joined the enemy. And thus true believers, by sheer force of religious fervor, can slap down these Westerners, as was true in the ancient past. Presto — go torch an embassy and empower me as you leader!
 
That exegesis for millions in Cairo is far more comforting advice than something a bit more mundane like “treat women equally” or “look at the world empirically” or “take apart your cell phone and see how it works.”
 
3. Blaming Us, Not Them
 
The worst response to radical Islam has unfortunately become the present administration’s postmodern, so-cool policy. The Cairo fable, the al Arabiya “Bush did it” interview, the euphemisms (e.g., “man-caused disasters”), the insanity that Maj. Hasan’s murdering threatens our diversity programs, trying KSM in New York, reading Mutallab his Miranda rights, serial trashing of Guantanamo, James Clapper’s laughable assurance that the Muslim Brotherhood is “secular,” NASA’s all-important Muslim outreach, etc., at best remind the Islamists that Westerners would hardly be so self-abasing if there were not something to be ashamed about.
 
Our hesitancy confirms their accusations and, at worst, suggests that we are also weak and without a sense of self — and so will do very little if a true believer were to kill a diplomat, storm an embassy, or shoot Marines. And when you add in fiscal insolvency, looming defense cuts, and presidential boasting about killing bin Laden and Predator assassinating, this administration had done just enough high-fiving and spiking the ball to incite the anger of an Islamist, but not nearly enough concrete action to remind him of the dangerous consequences of such primitive anger.
 
Worse, in some ways, are Obama’s feeble attempts to separate himself from the history and values of the United States — almost as if to say, “They did it, don’t blame me!” Remember, Obama objected that he was but a near-infant and so blameless when Daniel Ortega to his face enumerated all his fabricated hurts against America. (If the president of the United States will not defend America in front of a communist dictator, who will?)
 
The entire subtext of Obama’s outreach narratives (made explicitly in his al Arabiya interview) is that his own unique pedigree and worldview have exempted him from American pathologies and thus culpability for them. In the alternate brain chemistry of the Obamites, there is no contradiction between worldwide Islamist vows to kill our diplomats or burn embassies and Obama’s much-vaunted boasts of restoring American popularity abroad. The derangement goes like this: those who hate America are mistakenly still mad at the old Bush America and have not yet evolved to duly appreciate the new Obama America. In other words, the vestiges of right-wing extremism still confuses those abroad, who have not yet caught on that America is on their side.
 
In the present case, bewildered press secretary Tim Carney essentially said just that: that when protestors burn flags, kill Americans, and destroy icons of American power, they aren’t really mad at us, Obama, the White House, or American foreign policy. Instead, they are just confused over disgusting Terry Jones and a reprehensible handful of Copts:
 

We also need to understand that this is a fairly volatile situation and it is in response not to United States policy, and not to, obviously, the administration, or the American people, but it is in response to a video, a film that we have judged to be reprehensible and disgusting. That in no way justifies any violent reaction to it, but this is not a case of protests directed at the United States writ large or at U.S. policy, this is in response to a video that is offensive to Muslims.
 
“Not…directed at the United States” — perhaps tell that to Ambassador Stevens as he suffocated to death.
 
4. What Must Muslims Do?
 

It is not brain surgery to enter the modern world. Follow some South Koreans or Chileans around for a week with a video camera. Grow up and stop blaming those on whom you depend for everything from drilling bits to laptops. Adopt the now seemingly impossible: consensual government, a bill of rights, secular tolerance for religious diversity, gender equality, meritocracy, respect for science and empiricism, a free market, and a free press. In other words, join the 21st century.
 
Otherwise, Westerners must make themselves as immune from Middle East passions as is possible. In that context, not tapping vast new domestic finds of gas and oil on public lands is suicidal, given that such potential income and independence would soon make the Gulf irrelevant to our survival.  Let the Kuwaitis or the Iranians deal with the Chinese. Of course, elites warn us not to “overreact.” But overreacting, compared to the present radical appeasement, is the moderate, rational course.
 
A good start, then, would be very quietly to start trimming aid at about $100 million every month, and quite coolly rejecting visas from the Middle East (putting thousands of future Mr. Morsis on hold). We can put travel restrictions on the Middle East, and ask the Egyptian ambassador to go home for a month or so to think things over and see whether he really wishes to protect our embassy. Elites shriek, “Oh, but you’ll only isolate Morsi and alienate the moderates.” Perhaps, but we might also remind them that American friendship is based on reciprocity and must be earned rather than assumed. How odd that the only good thing that either Mr. Obama or Mrs. Clinton has said throughout this depressing spectacle was Obama’s flub that he didn’t quite know whether Egypt, the recipient of over $1 billion in annual U.S. cash, was an ally or enemy. So only by accident does he make the Muslim Brotherhood government a tiny bit unsure of exactly how we feel or what we might do.
 
5. Whom to Fear?
 
Finally we must examine the ubiquitous Westernized Middle Easterner who appears as pundit, talking head, and the authentic voice of the Arab Street. Quite dangerous are the Mohamed Morsis of the world — men like a Sayyid Qutb or Mohammed Atta, who had spent time in the West, fled here for its protection, enjoyed its affluence, indulged in its sins, and blossomed amid its hot-house universities. These men can often be quite dangerous.
 
Most are intelligent and understand the self-loathing that is endemic among their postmodern Western hosts. For the Westernized anti-Americanist, being educated, working, and living in California or New York reminds him of the contrast with his own Egypt or the West Bank. That disconnect evokes all sorts of contradictory emotions: why am I so blessed in the land of the infidels and so wretched at home? Or how much penance must I undertake for satisfying over here what would be seen as illicit appetites at home? Or how can these affluent atheists have so much more than my pious brothers in the Middle East?
 
The Westernized Middle Easterner, energized by Western self-loathing, steeped in post-colonial theory, nursed on deconstruction, and attuned to multicultural victimology, learns quickly. Whether a Khomeini returning from a generous France, a Mohammed Atta leaving Germany, or a Mohamed Morsi arriving in Cairo, they soon hate their prior Western benefactors for reminding them how their own self-induced pathologies have led to the miasma of the Middle East — but now with no longer a nodding professor to egg them on, but rather only a mute embassy, a flag, and a diplomat to incite their passions. Poor Hillary Clinton wonders out loud how can it be that the Libyans are unappreciative of our efforts, as if such ingratitude is new and surprising, rather than old and predictable.
 
A Footnote
 
With the implosion of the Middle East comes the end of the mythic foreign policy of Barack Obama. Just as Russia was not reset and our enemies did not become friends, so, too, the fantasy that Barack Obama’s name, race, and lineage, when coupled with leftist politics, would win over our Middle East never arrived. All that failed — failed not just for America, but for the Nobel laureate himself. In that regard, Obama’s entire four-year project has failed: $5 trillion of borrowed stimulus did not jump-start the economy; only more federal debt and bankruptcy followed “solar and wind and millions of green jobs,” as vast new finds of oil and gas on public lands were ignored, while gas hit $4 a gallon. The problem for supporters of Obamacare is not to implement, but how to junk, this boondoggle without loss of face. Government Motors and the Volt went nowhere, and appointees like Eric Holder, Kathleen Sebelius, Timothy Geithner, and Janet Napolitano proved embarrassments. Now we are left with the Federal Reserve desperately printing money before the election.
 
There was human frenzy in 2008 that entranced millions, and now we will be paying for the wages of that madness for quite some time.
Title: WSJ: Muslims, Mormons, and Liberals
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 18, 2012, 11:28:36 AM
Stephens: Muslims, Mormons and Liberals Why is it OK to mock one religion but not another?
By BRET STEPHENS
 
'Hasa Diga Eebowai" is the hit number in Broadway's hit musical "The Book of Mormon," which won nine Tony awards last year. What does the phrase mean? I can't tell you, because it's unprintable in a family newspaper.

On the other hand, if you can afford to shell out several hundred bucks for a seat, then you can watch a Mormon missionary get his holy book stuffed—well, I can't tell you about that, either. Let's just say it has New York City audiences roaring with laughter.

The "Book of Mormon"—a performance of which Hillary Clinton attended last year, without registering a complaint—comes to mind as the administration falls over itself denouncing "Innocence of Muslims." This is a film that may or may not exist; whose makers are likely not who they say they are; whose actors claim to have known neither the plot nor purpose of the film; and which has never been seen by any member of the public except as a video clip on the Internet.

No matter. The film, the administration says, is "hateful and offensive" (Susan Rice), "reprehensible and disgusting" (Jay Carney) and, in a twist, "disgusting and reprehensible" (Hillary Clinton). Mr. Carney, the White House spokesman, also lays sole blame on the film for inciting the riots that have swept the Muslim world and claimed the lives of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three of his staff in Libya.

So let's get this straight: In the consensus view of modern American liberalism, it is hilarious to mock Mormons and Mormonism but outrageous to mock Muslims and Islam. Why? Maybe it's because nobody has ever been harmed, much less killed, making fun of Mormons.

Here's what else we learned this week about the emerging liberal consensus: That it's okay to denounce a movie you haven't seen, which is like trashing a book you haven't read. That it's okay to give perp-walk treatment to the alleged—and no doubt terrified—maker of the film on legally flimsy and politically motivated grounds of parole violation. That it's okay for the federal government publicly to call on Google to pull the video clip from YouTube in an attempt to mollify rampaging Islamists. That it's okay to concede the fundamentalist premise that religious belief ought to be entitled to the highest possible degree of social deference—except when Mormons and sundry Christian rubes are concerned.

And, finally, this: That the most "progressive" administration in recent U.S. history will make no principled defense of free speech to a Muslim world that could stand hearing such a defense. After the debut of "The Book of Mormon" musical, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints responded with this statement: "The production may attempt to entertain audiences for an evening but the Book of Mormon as a volume of scripture will change people's lives forever by bringing them closer to Christ."

That was it. The People's Front for the Liberation of Provo will not be gunning for a theater near you. Is it asking too much of religious and political leaders in Muslim communities to adopt a similar attitude?

It needn't be. A principled defense of free speech could start by quoting the Quran: "And it has already come down to you in the Book that when you hear the verses of Allah [recited], they are denied [by them] and ridiculed; so do not sit with them until they enter into another conversation." In this light, the true test of religious conviction is indifference, not susceptibility, to mockery.

The defense could add that a great religion surely cannot be goaded into frenetic mob violence on the slimmest provocation. Yet to watch the images coming out of Benghazi, Cairo, Tunis and Sana'a is to witness some significant portion of a civilization being transformed into Travis Bickle, the character Robert De Niro made unforgettable in Taxi Driver. "You talkin' to me?"

A defense would also point out that an Islamic world that insists on a measure of religious respect needs also to offer that respect in turn. When Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi—the closest thing Sunni Islam has to a pope—praises Hitler for exacting "divine punishment" on the Jews, that respect isn't exactly apparent. Nor has it been especially apparent in the waves of Islamist-instigated pogroms that have swept Egypt's Coptic community in recent years.

Finally, it need be said that the whole purpose of free speech is to protect unpopular, heretical, vulgar and stupid views. So far, the Obama administration's approach to free speech is that it's fine so long as it's cheap and exacts no political price. This is free speech as pizza.

President Obama came to office promising that he would start a new conversation with the Muslim world, one that lectured less and listened more. After nearly four years of listening, we can now hear more clearly where the U.S. stands in the estimation of that world: equally despised but considerably less feared. Just imagine what four more years of instinctive deference will do.

On the bright side, dear liberals, you'll still be able to mock Mormons. They tend not to punch back, which is part of what makes so many of them so successful in life.

Write to bstephens@wsj.com
Title: Obama Nation Plantation
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 20, 2012, 12:41:21 PM

Alexander's Column – September 20, 2012
The ObamaNation Plantation
Calling Out Obama's Socialist Political Agenda

"Repeal that [welfare] law, and you will soon see a change in their manners. ndustry will increase, and with it plenty among the lower people; their circumstances will mend, and more will be done for their happiness by inuring them to provide for themselves, than could be done by dividing all your estates among them." --Benjamin Franklin (1753)
 
Barack Hussein Obama's Leftmedia sycophants declared the Romney-Ryan presidential ticket DOA this week. The talkingheads have convicted Mitt Romney for what they insist is a very offensive "political gaffe" uttered at a private campaign event back in May.

The colossal blunder in question? Romney identified the underbelly of Obama's socialist political agenda -- the fact that an ever-increasing number of "useful idiots" have been lured into subservience by generations of Socialist Democrat policies, are now dependent on a laundry list of government subsidies, and, consequently, they are very likely to vote for the candidate who will continue redistributing wealth to fund those subsidies.

The video was surreptitiously recorded by an anonymous party, then leaked by an opposition researcher named James Carter IV -- yes, he's the grandson of that Jimmy Carter -- to a hard-left magazine, which timed its release of the video as part of Obama's dezinformatsia campaign.

In the video, Romney said, "There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president, no matter what ... who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That's an entitlement, and the government should give it to them. And they will vote for [Obama] no matter what. ... These are people who pay no income tax."
While Romney's citation of the percentage of Americans who pay no taxes was correct, and it happens to coincide with Obama's current poll numbers, clearly his reference was to the fact that 30-35 percent of Obama's most fervent constituent support is composed of those who are now culturally, if not irrevocably, dependent upon a plethora of government subsidies. These "takers" pay no income tax, and they thus have no direct liability in the economics of wealth redistribution and no stake in curtailing our calamitous $16,000,000,000,000 national debt.

Indeed, they are "dependent upon government," and "believe that they are victims, believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, [and] believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it."

Now, there's nothing new about Romney's contention regarding the relationship between populist socialism and popular elections. Avowed socialist George Bernard Shaw, co-founder of the London School of Economics, smugly declared at the turn of the 20th century, "A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul."
 

Observations about the inherent threat to Liberty posed by that electoral equation predates Shaw by at least two millennia. Greek Historian Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus wrote, "The real destroyer of the liberties of the people is he who spreads among them bounties, donations and benefits."
Six centuries earlier, Chinese philosopher Lao-Tzu wrote, "The people suffer from famine because of the multitude of taxes consumed by their superiors. It is through this that they suffer famine."

And every generation of historians since has likewise noted that long and sordid history of destruction.

In 1766, that founding sage Ben Franklin observed, "I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. In my youth I travelled much, and I observed in different countries, that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer."

In 1776, the year the ideological ancestors of today's American Patriots were codifying our natural right to Liberty, Historian Edward Gibbon published his six-volume treatise, "The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," detailing how opulence and entitlement led to the loss of civic virtue and the fall of the world's first great republic.

Another enlightened philosopher of the era, François-Marie Arouet (Voltaire), observed, "The art of government consists of taking as much money as possible from one party of citizens to give to the other."

In his 1781 "Notes on the State of Virginia," Thomas Jefferson wrote, "Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition."

These 18th-century observations about taxation and entitlement served as seminal reference points for the "Fatal Cycle of Democracy" published a century later.
 
That cycle follows this sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith; From spiritual faith to great courage; From courage to Liberty (Rule of Law); From Liberty to abundance; From abundance to complacency; From complacency to apathy; From apathy to dependence; From dependence back into bondage (rule of men).

Thus, not only is the substance of Romney's assertion about Obama's "base," tragically and completely accurate, it has been substantiated throughout history. And, according to The Heritage Foundation's 2012 Index of Dependence on Government, Obama's earnest endeavor of "fundamentally transforming the United States of America" is well underway, with historic numbers of Americans now dependent upon the state.  While it would be patently wrong to assert that everyone who receives a government subsidy and pays no taxes is an Obama supporter, the growing number of Americans who depend on government support under Obama's Great Recession is staggering.  According to the Tax Policy Center, more than 46 percent of households pay no income tax. That is because over the last four decades, Congress has "engineered" the tax code to exempt income from targeted voter blocks.
 
The Census Bureau reports that almost 50 percent of Americans in the most recent quarter of record resided in a household where a family member received direct government assistance, at a cost of almost 70 percent of the federal budget. During the Reagan years, only 30 percent of households received government support, and the percentage has increased almost 10 percent since Obama took office.

About 16 percent of American households (one in seven) depend on food stamps -- the rolls of which have swelled from 31.9 million when Obama took office, to a record 46.5 million people today. And when Obama gutted Welfare reform, that shuffled millions of voters into his camp.  Of course, most Americans who receive Medicare and Social Security have been forced to pay into those non-existent "trust funds" for their whole careers. Thus, to call that support an "entitlement" would be entirely wrong.

Responding to Romney's exposure of the relationship between Obama's socialist agenda and his electoral support, Barack endeavored to distance himself from his "redistributive justice" platform and instead enlisted his minions to kill the messenger.

House Democrat Whip Steny Hoyer claimed, "I don't know that any Democrat believes redistribution of wealth is the end of government -- it is not."

Apparently Hoyer does not recall candidate Obama's own words on the subject: "There has been a systematic, uh, uh, I don't think it is too strong to call it a propaganda campaign, uh, against the possibility of government action and its efficacy. ... As we try to resuscitate this notion that we are all in this together ... the trick is figuring out how do we structure government systems that actually pool resources and hence facilitate redistribution, because I actually believe in redistribution."
 
Meanwhile, Joe Biden, in a recent speech to the ultra-Leftist Center for American Progress Action Fund, said that Romney and Ryan "are gonna put y'all back in chains!" But what Obama's state-dependent lemmings don't understand is that they've already voluntarily slapped on the chattel slavery chains of the ObamaNation Plantation.
In 1982, as the last Evil Empire was disintegrating from within, Ronald Reagan observed, "In an ironic sense, Karl Marx was right. We are witnessing today a great revolutionary crisis, a crisis where the demands of the economic order are conflicting directly with those of the political order. But the crisis is happening not in the West, but in the home of Marxism-Leninism, the Soviet Union."

It is an even greater irony that today, the birthplace of Liberty is slovenly slipping into the Fatal Cycle of Democracy and is on the precipice of an irrevocable plunge into the abyss of tyranny. The good news is that if Obama's re-election serves as the tipping point for that plunge, there is always the option of restoring Liberty by bullets when ballots fail.

The notion that the ballot box is not the only path to restoring Liberty may make some in our Patriot ranks uncomfortable. But that must be all the more motivation for every one of us to contribute the utmost of our time, talent and treasure toward ensuring an electoral outcome that restores our heritage of God-given Essential Liberty.

To that end, I recall the words of Thomas Paine: "If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace."

Pro Deo et Constitutione — Libertas aut Mors
Semper Vigilo, Fortis, Paratus et Fidelis
 
Mark Alexander
Publisher, The Patriot Post
Title: Rep: Allen West
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 28, 2012, 10:03:05 AM

"My statement to the United Nations would have been, 'The future does not belong to those who attack our Embassies and Consulates and kill our Ambassadors. The Angel of Death in the form of an American Bald Eagle will visit you and wreak havoc and destruction upon your existence.'" --Rep. Allen West (R-FL)

BTW folks, the progressives have targetted Rep. West.  I have donated to his campaign two times.
Title: Serious talk by Democrat pollster Pat Caddell
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 30, 2012, 03:48:36 PM
Much of this would fit just fine in the Media thread, but I think this talk goes deeper than that and deserves the greater thoughtfulness that tends to be given pieces in this thread.

http://hotair.com/greenroom/archives/2012/09/29/pat-caddell-media-have-become-an-enemy-of-the-american-people/
Title: VDH: Left wants multiculturalism to trump free speech
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 04, 2012, 08:11:42 AM
Left Wants Multiculturalism to Trump Free Speech
Victor Davis Hanson
Oct 04, 2012
 
The American Left used to champion free expression. We were lectured -- correctly -- that the price of being repulsed by occasional crude talk and art was worth paying. Only that way could Americans ensure our daily right to criticize those with greater power and influence whom we found wrong and objectionable.

When 1950s comedian Lenny Bruce titillated his audiences with the F-word and crude sex talk, liberals came to his defense. They reminded us that vulgar speech is not a crime: The First Amendment was not just designed to protect uplifting expression, but also rarer blasphemous and indecent speech.
 
For liberals, the burning of a flag on campus and the full frontal nudity of Penthouse magazine were also First Amendment issues.
 
When artist Andres Serrano photographed a crucifix in a jar with his own urine ("Piss Christ"), the avant-garde Left not only protected Serrano's constitutional right to offend millions, but also saw no problem in the U.S. government subsidizing the talentless Serrano's sophomoric obnoxiousness.
 
But the worldview of the Left is self-contradictory. One of its pet doctrines is multiculturalism -- or the idea that non-Western cultures cannot be judged critically by our own inherently biased Western standards.
 
Female circumcision or honor killings in the Muslim world don't merit our attention in the way that a woman's right to free abortion pills from her Catholic employer does in the West. When it comes to the Middle East, we neither criticize strongly enough the region's sexism, homophobia or racism, nor do we defend without qualification our own notions of free expression as inherently superior to the habitual censorship abroad.
 
Fear plays a role, too. Championing the right of Andres Serrano to show his degrading pictures of Christ wins liberal laurels. Protecting novelist Salman Rushdie's caricatures of Islam might earn death.
 
The Obama administration went to great lengths to blast -- and even arrest -- an Egyptian-American Coptic Christian for posting on the Internet a juvenile movie trailer ridiculing Islam and offending Muslims. After riots across the Middle East and the murder of the U.S. ambassador in Libya, American officials did not wish to concede that radical Islam hates the United States -- even when Barack Obama is president. And they did not want to admit that their own lax security standards, not a film trailer, led to the horrific murders in Libya, or that in an election year their Middle East reset policy is in shambles.
 
No obnoxious American in the last half-century -- not Larry Flynt, not Daniel Ellsberg, not even Julian Assange -- has warranted so much condemnation for his antics from the president of the United States, the secretary of state and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff as have one crackpot preacher in Florida and an inept Coptic film producer.
 
Outraged Arab-Americans in Dearborn, Mich., demonstrated in favor of anti-blasphemy laws last week. They demanded an end to any expression that they find religiously offensive -- and thereby prove to be embarrassingly clueless as to why many in their communities left their own homelands to come to America in the first place.
 
The new Egyptian president, Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood, recently lectured the U.S. on its decadence and wants a global ban on the caricaturing of Islam. He, too, forgot why he once fled to the United States to be educated, employed and to freely say things that would have gotten him killed in his native Egypt.
 
Another Egyptian immigrant, frequent CNN and MSNBC guest pundit Mona Eltahawy, recently spray-painted over a public anti-jihadist poster that she disliked. In her world, defacing public property is OK if by her own standards she judges it offensive. Eltahawy, like the Dearborn protestors, is oblivious to the fact that her self-appointed censorship would soon turn her adopted country into just the sort of intolerant society from which she, too, fled.
 
It is past time for U.S. officials to insist that our traditions and laws apply equally across the board, regardless of where we come from, or what we look like, or the anger and danger we incur from abroad.
 
Schools could do better by cutting back on their multicultural classes and reintroducing study of the U.S. Constitution. All immigrants need to pass a basic test on the Bill of Rights as part of winning citizenship.
 
"Speaking truth to power" is not Sandra Fluke grandstanding to ovations at the Democratic convention on behalf of government-supplied free contraception. It is instead our elected officials reminding rampaging Middle Eastern terrorists and bigots that they will not alter our Constitution -- and better not try.
 
Title: The meaning of one billion
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 07, 2012, 05:15:11 PM



This is too true to be funny.

 The next time you hear a politician use the
 Word 'billion' in a casual manner, think about
 whether you want the 'politicians' spending

 YOUR tax money.

 A billion is a difficult number to comprehend,
 But one advertising agency did a good job of
 Putting that figure into some perspective in
 
One of its releases.

 A.
 A billion seconds ago it was 1959.

 B.
 A billion minutes ago Jesus was alive.

 C.
 A billion hours ago our ancestors were
 living in the Stone Age.

 D.
 A billion days ago no-one walked on the earth on two feet.

 E.
 A billion dollars ago was only
 8 hours and 20 minutes,
 at the rate our government
 is spending it.

 While this thought is still fresh in our brain...
 let's take a look at New Orleans ...
 It's amazing what you can learn with some simple division.

 Louisiana Senator,
 Mary Landrieu (D)
 was asking Congress for
 250 BILLION DOLLARS
 To rebuild New Orleans. Interesting number...
 What does it mean?

 A.
 Well .. If you are one of the 484,674 residents of New Orleans
(every man, woman and child)
 You each get $516,528

 B.
 Or... If you have one of the 188,251 homes in
 New Orleans, your home gets
 $1,329,787
 C.

 Or... If you are a family of four...
 Your family gets
 $2,066,012

 Washington, D.C.
 ..HELLO!
 Are all the calculators broken??

 Building Permit Tax
 CDL License Tax
 Cigarette Tax
 Corporate Income Tax
 Dog License Tax
 Federal Income Tax (Fed)
 Federal Unemployment Tax (FU TA)
 Fishing License Tax
 Food License Tax
 Fuel Permit Tax
 Gasoline Tax
 Hunting License Tax
 Inheritance Tax
 Inventory Tax
 IRS Interest Charges (tax on top of tax)
 IRS Penalties (tax on top of tax)
 Liquor Tax
 Luxury Tax
 Marriage License Tax
 Medicare Tax
 Property Tax
 Real Estate Tax
 Service charge Taxes
 Social Security Tax
 Road Usage Tax (Truckers)
 Sales Taxes
 Recreational Vehicle Tax
 School Tax
State Income Tax
State Unemployment Tax (SUTA)
 Telephone Federal Excise Tax
 Telephone Federal Universal Service Fee Tax
 Telephone Federal, State and Local Surcharge Tax
 Telephone Minimum Usage Surcharge Tax
 Telephone Recurring and Non-recurring Charges Tax
Telephone State and Local Tax
 Telephone Usage ChargeTax
 Utility Tax
 Vehicle License Registration Tax
 Vehicle Sales Tax
 Watercraft Registration Tax
 Well Permit Tax
 Workers Compensation Tax
 (And to think, we left British Rule to avoid so many taxes)

 STILL THINK THIS IS FUNNY?

 Not one of these taxes existed 100 years ago...
 And our nation was the most prosperous in the world.

 We had absolutely no national debt...
 We had the largest middle class in the world...
 And Mom stayed home to raise the kids.

 What happened?
 Can you spell
 'politicians'!

 And I still have to
 Press '1'
 For English.

 I hope this goes around the
 USA
 At least 100 times.

 What the hell has happened to our country?????
Title: Schumpeter in 1942
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 29, 2012, 05:10:59 AM
 
Joseph Schumpeter writing in "Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy," 1942:


The man who has gone through a college or university easily becomes psychically unemployable in manual occupations without necessarily acquiring employability in, say, professional work. His failure to do so may be due either to lack of natural ability—perfectly compatible with passing academic tests—or to inadequate teaching; and both cases will . . . occur more frequently as ever larger numbers are drafted into higher education and as the required amount of teaching increases irrespective of how many teachers and scholars nature chooses to turn out.

The results of neglecting this and of acting on the theory that schools, colleges and universities are just a matter of money, are too obvious to insist upon. Cases in which among a dozen applicants for a job, all formally qualified, there is not one who can fill it satisfactorily, are known to everyone who has anything to do with appointments . . .

All those who are unemployed or unsatisfactorily employed or unemployable drift into the vocations in which standards are least definite or in which aptitudes and acquirements of a different order count. They swell the host of intellectuals in the strict sense of the term whose numbers hence increase disproportionately. They enter it in a thoroughly discontented frame of mind. Discontent breeds resentment. And it often rationalizes itself into that social criticism which as we have seen before is in any case the intellectual spectator's typical attitude toward men, classes and institutions especially in a rationalist and utilitarian civilization.

Well, here we have numbers; a well-defined group situation of proletarian hue; and a group interest shaping a group attitude that will much more realistically account for hostility to the capitalist order than could the theory—itself a rationalization in the psychological sense—according to which the intellectual's righteous indignation about the wrongs of capitalism simply represents the logical inference from outrageous facts. . . . Moreover our theory also accounts for the fact that this hostility increases, instead of diminishing, with every achievement of capitalist evolution.
Title: Bono goes free market
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 30, 2012, 10:10:01 AM


Staff writer Parmy Olson writing at forbes.com, Oct. 22:


Bono has learned much about music over more than three decades with U2. But alongside that has been a lifelong lesson in campaigning—the activist for poverty reduction in Africa spoke frankly on Friday about how his views about philanthropy had now stretched to include an appreciation for capitalism.

The Irish singer and co-founder of ONE, a campaigning group that fights poverty and disease in Africa, said it had been "a humbling thing for me" to realize the importance of capitalism and entrepreneurialism in philanthropy, particularly as someone who "got into this as a righteous anger activist with all the cliches."

"Job creators and innovators are just the key, and aid is just a bridge," he told an audience of 200 leading technology entrepreneurs and investors at the F.ounders tech conference in Dublin. "We see it as startup money, investment in new countries. A humbling thing was to learn the role of commerce."
Title: WSJ: Noonan: The "I's" have it
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 16, 2012, 08:57:46 AM


We are becoming a conceited nitwit society, pushy and self-aggrandizing. No one is ashamed to brag now. and show off. They think it heightens them. They think it's good for business.

It used to be that if you were big, you'd never tell people how big you were because that would be kind of classless, and small. In fact it would be a proof of smallness. So don't be showy. The big are modest.

Ha.

There is the issue—small but indicative of something larger—of how members of the U.S. military present themselves, and the awe they consciously encourage in the public and among the political class. The other day on his Daily Beast blog, Andrew Sullivan posted a letter from a reader noting the way officers are now given and relentlessly wear on their dress uniforms ribbons, markers and awards for pretty much everything they do—what used to be called fruit salad. Mr. Sullivan posted two pictures we echo here, one of Gen. David Petraeus and one of Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower. This is the Eisenhower of D-Day, of the long slog through Europe in World War II. He didn't seem to see the need to dress himself up and tell you what he'd done. Maybe he thought you knew. He didn't wear all the honors to which he was entitled, though he could have used them to dazzle the masses if that had been what he was interested in.

Top brass sure is brassier than it used to be. And you have to wonder what that's about. Where did the old culture of modesty go? Ulysses S. Grant wore four stars on his shoulder and nothing else on his uniform. And that was a fellow who'd earned a few medals.

Jump now to the woman who is the main focus in the Petraeus scandal, Paula Broadwell. She was a person of impressive achievement right from the start—high school valedictorian, West Point grad, master's degrees, Army officer. But even that wasn't enough ribbons. In YouTube videos she brags about her security clearance, her inside knowledge—"That's still being vetted"—and the Ph.D. she's working on. She calls herself a biographer, but biographers actually do something arduous—they write biographies. Ms. Broadwell contracted with a professional, reporter Vernon Loeb, to organize, synthesize, think and write. On Twitter, Ms. Broadwell describes herself as "Author . . . National Security Analyst; Army Vet; Women's Rights Activist; Runner/Skier/Surfer; Wife; Mom!" On her website she noted that in her free time she is an Ironman triathelete "and a model and demonstrator for KRISS, a manufacturer of .45-caliber machine guns." "When Paula is not on the frontlines, online, or writing lines," she and her husband run, ski and surf together.

My goodness. All hail. This isn't describing yourself in the best possible light, this is bragging about yourself to a degree and in a way that is actually half mad.

But it's kind of the way people talk about themselves now. And I have to say, this is new. Not new in history but new as a fully developed and enveloping national style. You know why they loved us in Europe in World War II? I mean aside from because we won? Because they thought we were kind of strong and silent—modest, actually—like Gary Cooper in "Sergeant York." Now we still do ratta-tat-tat, but it's on Facebook FB +5.89%and it's about how great we are.

We used to worry that kids would be victims of the self-esteem movement, that constant praise would keep them from an honestly earned, and therefore stable, self-respect, and steer them toward mere conceit. Now parents have it.

The other young woman in the story, Ms. Broadwell's apparent nemesis, felt harassed when her role became known. Jill Kelley called 911 and quickly informed the operator of her status. "You know, I don't know if by any chance, because I'm an honorary consul general, so I have inviolability." She suggested "diplomatic protection" might be in order. But she isn't a diplomat, she's a lady who gives parties and knows a lot of people. She even knows an FBI agent who opened an investigation for her because she felt harassed by anonymous emails. This really was a confusing part of the story. Just about everyone, certainly every woman, in the public eye in America receives aggressive, insulting, menacing emails. We didn't know we could get FBI investigations opened for that! Maybe our mistake is not being honorary consuls with inviolability.

***
These are just the players in the scandal of the week. Have we noticed a certain lack of modesty in our political figures? Thank goodness, therefore, for Mitt Romney, who in a conference call with donors said he got beat and beat bad, that his campaign was lacking, that his gut on the big issues was probably off, that he shouldn't have allowed his campaign to become (in the grandiose, faux-macho lingo of campaign consultants who wish they wore fruit salad) an air war and not a ground war, and that they were smoked in get-out-the-vote. He added, with an eye to concerns larger than his own, that he wanted to help the party analyze and define what didn't work in 2012 so it would be stronger in 2016.

Sorry. Kidding! He didn't say that.

He said the administration gave "gifts" to interest groups, and the groups appreciated the gifts, and, people being the little automatons they are, said yes, sire, and voted for him.

In a way it was as bad as the old "47%" tape. Because it was so limited.

***
Which gets us to the president. He's looking very stern. You don't have a problem with Susan Rice, you have a problem with me, he says, with a scowl. He talks about the fiscal cliff but not in a way that shows a real eagerness for compromise. He does not define areas of potential give, potential progress. He won, after all. He doesn't have to.

What is needed is bigness, magnanimity. It's not all about him, his party, it's not all about self. It is not even all about one's deepest political intentions. There are other ways and schedules for moving forward there.

Get the Republicans leaders on the Hill together. Suggest in subtle ways you'll let them save face. Quietly acknowledge you weren't the best negotiator in the world the first time 'round, and neither were they. Maybe no one was quite their best. But the nation faces a real challenge and there will be economic repercussions in mishandling it. "Let's make a deal and let's make it quickly. We all have to play games but not too much and not too long."

And mean it. And deal.

This would be good for the president, good for his legacy, good for the country. This is a man who could show that in a time of crisis he and Speaker John Boehner could re-enact Ronald Reagan and Tip O'Neill. Which is something the country would be relieved to see. "Look—it still works!"

It might take some of the bitterness, some of the long, grinding, partisan poison out of the system.

Might we see that?

Or just instead the stern face, the old soft, nebulous aggression, in the age of the outsized ego?
Title: WSJ: NH Taleb: Learning to love volatility
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 17, 2012, 04:24:01 PM

Learning to Love Volatility
In a world that constantly throws big, unexpected events our way, we must learn to benefit from disorder, writes Nassim Nicholas Taleb..
By NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB
 
Several years before the financial crisis descended on us, I put forward the concept of "black swans": large events that are both unexpected and highly consequential. We never see black swans coming, but when they do arrive, they profoundly shape our world: Think of World War I, 9/11, the Internet, the rise of Google GOOG -0.01%.

In economic life and history more generally, just about everything of consequence comes from black swans; ordinary events have paltry effects in the long term. Still, through some mental bias, people think in hindsight that they "sort of" considered the possibility of such events; this gives them confidence in continuing to formulate predictions. But our tools for forecasting and risk measurement cannot begin to capture black swans. Indeed, our faith in these tools make it more likely that we will continue to take dangerous, uninformed risks.

Some made the mistake of thinking that I hoped to see us develop better methods for predicting black swans. Others asked if we should just give up and throw our hands in the air: If we could not measure the risks of potential blowups, what were we to do? The answer is simple: We should try to create institutions that won't fall apart when we encounter black swans—or that might even gain from these unexpected events.

Fragility is the quality of things that are vulnerable to volatility. Take the coffee cup on your desk: It wants peace and quiet because it incurs more harm than benefit from random events. The opposite of fragile, therefore, isn't robust or sturdy or resilient—things with these qualities are simply difficult to break.


To deal with black swans, we instead need things that gain from volatility, variability, stress and disorder. My (admittedly inelegant) term for this crucial quality is "antifragile." The only existing expression remotely close to the concept of antifragility is what we derivatives traders call "long gamma," to describe financial packages that benefit from market volatility. Crucially, both fragility and antifragility are measurable.

As a practical matter, emphasizing antifragility means that our private and public sectors should be able to thrive and improve in the face of disorder. By grasping the mechanisms of antifragility, we can make better decisions without the illusion of being able to predict the next big thing. We can navigate situations in which the unknown predominates and our understanding is limited.

Herewith are five policy rules that can help us to establish antifragility as a principle of our socioeconomic life.


Rule 1: Think of the economy as being more like a cat than a washing machine.

We are victims of the post-Enlightenment view that the world functions like a sophisticated machine, to be understood like a textbook engineering problem and run by wonks. In other words, like a home appliance, not like the human body. If this were so, our institutions would have no self-healing properties and would need someone to run and micromanage them, to protect their safety, because they cannot survive on their own.

By contrast, natural or organic systems are antifragile: They need some dose of disorder in order to develop. Deprive your bones of stress and they become brittle. This denial of the antifragility of living or complex systems is the costliest mistake that we have made in modern times. Stifling natural fluctuations masks real problems, causing the explosions to be both delayed and more intense when they do take place. As with the flammable material accumulating on the forest floor in the absence of forest fires, problems hide in the absence of stressors, and the resulting cumulative harm can take on tragic proportions.

And yet our economic policy makers have often aimed for maximum stability, even for eradicating the business cycle. "No more boom and bust," as voiced by the U.K. Labor leader Gordon Brown, was the policy pursued by Alan Greenspan in order to "smooth" things out, thus micromanaging us into the current chaos. Mr. Greenspan kept trying to iron out economic fluctuations by injecting cheap money into the system, which eventually led to monstrous hidden leverage and real-estate bubbles. On this front there is now at least a glimmer of hope, in the U.K. rather than the U.S., alas: Mervyn King, governor of the Bank of England, has advocated the idea that central banks should intervene only when an economy is truly sick and should otherwise defer action.

Promoting antifragility doesn't mean that government institutions should avoid intervention altogether. In fact, a key problem with overzealous intervention is that, by depleting resources, it often results in a failure to intervene in more urgent situations, like natural disasters. So in complex systems, we should limit government (and other) interventions to important matters: The state should be there for emergency-room surgery, not nanny-style maintenance and overmedication of the patient—and it should get better at the former.

In social policy, when we provide a safety net, it should be designed to help people take more entrepreneurial risks, not to turn them into dependents. This doesn't mean that we should be callous to the underprivileged. In the long run, bailing out people is less harmful to the system than bailing out firms; we should have policies now that minimize the possibility of being forced to bail out firms in the future, with the moral hazard this entails.



Rule 2: Favor businesses that benefit from their own mistakes, not those whose mistakes percolate into the system.

Some businesses and political systems respond to stress better than others. The airline industry is set up in such a way as to make travel safer after every plane crash. A tragedy leads to the thorough examination and elimination of the cause of the problem. The same thing happens in the restaurant industry, where the quality of your next meal depends on the failure rate in the business—what kills some makes others stronger. Without the high failure rate in the restaurant business, you would be eating Soviet-style cafeteria food for your next meal out.

These industries are antifragile: The collective enterprise benefits from the fragility of the individual components, so nothing fails in vain. These businesses have properties similar to evolution in the natural world, with a well-functioning mechanism to benefit from evolutionary pressures, one error at a time.

By contrast, every bank failure weakens the financial system, which in its current form is irremediably fragile: Errors end up becoming large and threatening. A reformed financial system would eliminate this domino effect, allowing no systemic risk from individual failures. A good starting point would be reducing the amount of debt and leverage in the economy and turning to equity financing. A firm with highly leveraged debt has no room for error; it has to be extremely good at predicting future revenues (and black swans). And when one leveraged firm fails to meet its obligations, other borrowers who need to renew their loans suffer as the chastened lenders lose their appetite to extend credit. So debt tends to make failures spread through the system.

A firm with equity financing can survive drops in income, however. Consider the abrupt deflation of the technology bubble during 2000. Because technology firms were relying on equity rather than debt, their failures didn't ripple out into the wider economy. Indeed, their failures helped to strengthen the technology sector.



Rule 3: Small is beautiful, but it is also efficient.

Experts in business and government are always talking about economies of scale. They say that increasing the size of projects and institutions brings costs savings. But the "efficient," when too large, isn't so efficient. Size produces visible benefits but also hidden risks; it increases exposure to the probability of large losses. Projects of $100 million seem rational, but they tend to have much higher percentage overruns than projects of, say, $10 million. Great size in itself, when it exceeds a certain threshold, produces fragility and can eradicate all the gains from economies of scale. To see how large things can be fragile, consider the difference between an elephant and a mouse: The former breaks a leg at the slightest fall, while the latter is unharmed by a drop several multiples of its height. This explains why we have so many more mice than elephants.

So we need to distribute decisions and projects across as many units as possible, which reinforces the system by spreading errors across a wider range of sources. In fact, I have argued that government decentralization would help to lower public deficits. A large part of these deficits comes from underestimating the costs of projects, and such underestimates are more severe in large, top-down governments. Compare the success of the bottom-up mechanism of canton-based decision making in Switzerland to the failures of authoritarian regimes in Soviet Russia and Baathist Iraq and Syria.



Rule 4: Trial and error beats academic knowledge.

Things that are antifragile love randomness and uncertainty, which also means—crucially—that they can learn from errors. Tinkering by trial and error has traditionally played a larger role than directed science in Western invention and innovation. Indeed, advances in theoretical science have most often emerged from technological development, which is closely tied to entrepreneurship. Just think of the number of famous college dropouts in the computer industry.

But I don't mean just any version of trial and error. There is a crucial requirement to achieve antifragility: The potential cost of errors needs to remain small; the potential gain should be large. It is the asymmetry between upside and downside that allows antifragile tinkering to benefit from disorder and uncertainty.

Perhaps because of the success of the Manhattan Project and the space program, we greatly overestimate the influence and importance of researchers and academics in technological advancement. These people write books and papers; tinkerers and engineers don't, and are thus less visible. Consider Britain, whose historic rise during the Industrial Revolution came from tinkerers who gave us innovations like iron making, the steam engine and textile manufacturing. The great names of the golden years of English science were hobbyists, not academics: Charles Darwin, Henry Cavendish, William Parsons, the Rev. Thomas Bayes. Britain saw its decline when it switched to the model of bureaucracy-driven science.

America has emulated this earlier model, in the invention of everything from cybernetics to the pricing formulas for derivatives. They were developed by practitioners in trial-and-error mode, drawing continuous feedback from reality. To promote antifragility, we must recognize that there is an inverse relationship between the amount of formal education that a culture supports and its volume of trial-and-error by tinkering. Innovation doesn't require theoretical instruction, what I like to compare to "lecturing birds on how to fly."



Rule 5: Decision makers must have skin in the game.

At no time in the history of humankind have more positions of power been assigned to people who don't take personal risks. But the idea of incentive in capitalism demands some comparable form of disincentive. In the business world, the solution is simple: Bonuses that go to managers whose firms subsequently fail should be clawed back, and there should be additional financial penalties for those who hide risks under the rug. This has an excellent precedent in the practices of the ancients. The Romans forced engineers to sleep under a bridge once it was completed.

 
The opposite of trial and error is regimented, Soviet-style production. Here, workers at a Soviet bagel-making plant

Because our current system is so complex, it lacks elementary clarity: No regulator will know more about the hidden risks of an enterprise than the engineer who can hide exposures to rare events and be unharmed by their consequences. This rule would have saved us from the banking crisis, when bankers who loaded their balance sheets with exposures to small probability events collected bonuses during the quiet years and then transferred the harm to the taxpayer, keeping their own compensation.

In these five rules, I have sketched out only a few of the more obvious policy conclusions that we might draw from a proper appreciation of antifragility. But the significance of antifragility runs deeper. It is not just a useful heuristic for socioeconomic matters but a crucial property of life in general. Things that are antifragile only grow and improve under adversity. This dynamic can be seen not just in economic life but in the evolution of all things, from cuisine, urbanization and legal systems to our own existence as a species on this planet.

We all know that the stressors of exercise are necessary for good health, but people don't translate this insight into other domains of physical and mental well-being. We also benefit, it turns out, from occasional and intermittent hunger, short-term protein deprivation, physical discomfort and exposure to extreme cold or heat. Newspapers discuss post-traumatic stress disorder, but nobody seems to account for post-traumatic growth. Walking on smooth surfaces with "comfortable" shoes injures our feet and back musculature: We need variations in terrain.

Modernity has been obsessed with comfort and cosmetic stability, but by making ourselves too comfortable and eliminating all volatility from our lives, we do to our bodies and souls what Mr. Greenspan did to the U.S. economy: We make them fragile. We must instead learn to gain from disorder.

—Mr. Taleb, a former derivatives trader, is distinguished professor of risk engineering at New York University's Polytechnic Institute. He is the author of "Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder" (Random House), from which this is adapted.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: G M on November 17, 2012, 04:59:46 PM
That was the best thing I've read in the last year!!
Title: Steyn hosting on Rush
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 27, 2012, 09:04:44 AM
Forwarded by a friend:

===================
Brilliant discussion of how liberalism is the "default position" in American culture today.  This is from the second hour of Rush Limbaugh's radio show on Monday, which Steyn guest-hosted (he is my favorite guest host.) Steyn's commentary in the clip linked below in essence elucidates Ayn Rand's statement that "The men who are not interested in philosophy need it most urgently…they absorb it from the culture around them."
He echoes the point made several days ago by Rush that conservatives will continue to lose elections until we start focusing on the "long game."  We MUST promote and EFFECTIVELY explain the virtue of our ideas in the culture at large - and NOT simply think that voting for conservative-minded politicians in elections every so often is enough.

Seriously - this concept is extremely well-illustrated by Steyn in this segment, and is well worth your time:

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/12997808/02%20Mon%2C%20November%2026th%2C%202012%20Hour%202.mp3
Title: Bill Whittle
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 02, 2012, 03:06:28 PM

http://blip.tv/davidhorowitztv/bill-whittle-6444929
Title: Frank Fleming: Attitudes towards guns a hologram of attitude toward freedom
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 06, 2012, 06:34:57 AM
"I've come to realize what a good test one's attitude towards guns is about whether someone's mind is liberty oriented. If one is okay with police having guns -- whoever is designated as having authority -- but panicked at the thought of their fellow man or themselves having guns, then that is someone who does not think like a free person. He places a magical aura around whoever is in charge and only thinks they can wield power. This will come up again in other areas, such as letting government make economic decisions but fearing individual people making those decisions themselves." --columnist Frank J. Fleming
Title: Dowd
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 09, 2012, 11:33:10 AM


MY college roommates and I used to grocery shop and cook together. The only food we seemed to agree on was corn, so we ate a lot of corn.

My mom would periodically call to warn me in a dire tone, “Do you know why the Incas are extinct?”

Her maize hazing left me with a deeply ingrained fear of being part of a civilization that was obliviously engaging in behavior that would lead to its extinction.

Too bad the Republican Party didn’t have my mom to keep it on its toes. Then it might not have gone all Apocalypto on us — becoming the first civilization in modern history to spiral the way of the Incas, Aztecs and Mayans.

The Mayans were right, as it turns out, when they predicted the world would end in 2012. It was just a select world: the G.O.P. universe of arrogant, uptight, entitled, bossy, retrogressive white guys.

Just another vanishing tribe that fought the cultural and demographic tides of history.

Someday, it will be the subject of a National Geographic special, or a Mel Gibson movie, where archaeologists piece together who the lost tribe was, where it came from, and what happened to it. The experts will sift through the ruins of the Reagan Presidential Library, Dick Cheney’s shotgun casings, Orca poll monitoring hieroglyphics, remnants of triumphal rants by Dick Morris on Fox News, faded photos of Clint Eastwood and an empty chair, and scraps of ancient tape in which a tall, stiff man, his name long forgotten, gnashes his teeth about the 47 percent of moochers and the “gifts” they got.

Instead of smallpox, plagues, drought and Conquistadors, the Republican decline will be traced to a stubborn refusal to adapt to a world where poor people and sick people and black people and brown people and female people and gay people count.

As the historian Will Durant observed, “A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.”

President Obama’s victory margin is expanding, as more votes are counted. He didn’t just beat Romney; he’s still beating him. But another sign of the old guard’s denial came on Friday, a month after the election, when the Romney campaign ebulliently announced that it raised $85.9 million in the final weeks of the campaign, making its fund-raising effort “the most successful in Republican Party history.”

Why is the Romney campaign still boasting? You can’t celebrate at a funeral. Go away and learn how to crunch data on the Internet.

Outside the Republican walled kingdom of denial and delusion, everyone else could see that the once clever and ruthless party was behaving in an obtuse and outmoded way that spelled doom.

The G.O.P. put up a candidate that no one liked or understood and ran a campaign that no one liked or understood — a campaign animated by the idea that indolent, grasping serfs must be kept down, even if it meant creating barriers to letting them vote.

Although Stuart Stevens, the Romney strategist, now claims that Mitt “captured the imagination of millions” and ran “with a natural grace,” there was very little chance that the awkward gazillionaire was ever going to be president. Yet strangely, Republicans are still gobsmacked by their loss, grasping at straws like Sandy as an excuse.

Some G.O.P. House members continue to try to wrestle the president over the fiscal cliff. Romney wanders in a daze, his hair not perfectly gelled. And his campaign advisers continue to express astonishment that a disastrous campaign, convention and candidate, as well as a lack of familiarity with what Stevens dismissively calls “whiz-bang turnout technologies,” could possibly lead to defeat.

Who would ever have thought blacks would get out and support the first black president? Who would ever have thought women would shy away from the party of transvaginal probes? Who would ever have thought gays would work against a party that treated them as immoral and subhuman? Who would have ever thought young people would desert a party that ignored science and hectored on social issues? Who would ever have thought Latinos would scorn a party that expected them to finish up their chores and self-deport?

Republicans know they’re in trouble when W. emerges as the moral voice of the party. The former president lectured the G.O.P. on Tuesday about being more “benevolent” toward immigrants.

As Eva Longoria supersedes Karl Rove as a power player, Republicans act as shellshocked as the Southern gentry overrun by Yankee carpetbaggers in “Gone with the Wind.” As the movie eulogized: “Here was the last ever to be seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and of Slave. Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered, a Civilization gone with the wind.”

Gun sales have burgeoned since the president’s re-election, with Black Friday weapons purchases setting records as the dead-enders rush to arm themselves.

But history will no doubt record that withering Republicans were finally wiped from the earth in 2016 when the relentless (and rested) Conquistadora Hillary marched in, General Bill on a horse behind her, and finished them off.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on December 09, 2012, 12:33:10 PM
Dowd continued,

and ushers in the age of government tryanny.

As for blacks supporting the first black president it is not about that as much as supporting a Democrat and big transfer of wealth government.

As for women it mostly single young mothers who also want to have wealth transferred to them.

As for Latinos it is not about self deporting - it is the same - transfer of wealth to them.

As for gays a large part of it is financial benefits. 

As for the Gone With the Wind reference with regards to the Republican party being racist - well it is better used to describe America as an idea, a concept, a way of life with limited government and real freedom from tyranny.  You can confiscate only so much, print money out of thin air, borrow from other countries so much.

Gone with the wind is America as Dowd and her ilk move to one world government, void of religion, void of personal freedom, constant management and oversight,
endless nit picking all the same time government grows it's control and power.  Government that is still run by human beings who are just as corrupt as any in the private sector.


Title: Re: Political Rants - Dowd
Post by: DougMacG on December 09, 2012, 01:50:56 PM
Yes that we quite a smug, gloating piece, witty and entertaining for her market - rich liberals with their lattes enjoying their Sunday NY Times.  Celebrating the troubles of their opposition could be taken all in good fun, but it is rooted in the fact that they hate the limited government crowd more than the hate terrorists, even in NYC.

"history will no doubt record that withering Republicans were finally wiped from the earth in 2016 when the relentless (and rested) Conquistadora Hillary marched in, General Bill on a horse behind her, and finished them off"

Good grief.  This was a divided election.  Romney won a close one on the issues, lost on turnout, likability, popularity, dependency.  Dems beat all expectations in the Senate but nowhere close to just a few years ago when they passed Obamacare at 60.  They lost the House big time even with the historic turnout operation.  That doesn't bode well for them in 2014.

They don't know how to lead, compromise, govern or how to fix any of our problems.

Last time they won this big was 1976, when the Republican Party was FAR weaker.  They got so smug that Ted Kennedy almost beat a sitting incumbent to turn us even further left.  That election turned late and ended in a Reagan landslide.  Dems only swept once since then, when Clinton got 43% of the vote the cycle before Newt and the Republicans took congress.

Smug in the context of all these cycles and shifts and in the face of these economic problems shows a scary level of ignorance.  There aren't 3 people in America who love Hillary as much as Maureen Dowd does.  I have more fear of Michelle Obama running next.  She has all the depth and experience of her husband. (
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: DougMacG on December 09, 2012, 01:57:00 PM
"As for gays a large part of it is financial benefits"

Good point by CCP.  I always think it is about acceptance or respect, but notice that the recognition has to in law exactly in the name of marriage, as identified in all contract law, employee benefits etc.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on December 11, 2012, 03:47:05 PM
John D Rockefeller wealth was estimated at 1.4 billion when he died in 1937.  The US GDP was est. at 92 billion.

According to the recent cable series on the "men who built America" he was worth an estimated 600 billion in today's dollars.  Ten times more then todays richest people.

Now that is real money.
Title: VDH: Let the real fat cats pay their fair share
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 13, 2012, 01:14:18 PM


http://townhall.com/columnists/victordavishanson/2012/12/13/let-the-real-fat-cats-pay-their-fair-share-n1465210/page/full/
Title: Some of us aren't going to like this one , , ,
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 13, 2012, 06:24:30 PM
Conservative Survival in a Progressive Age
Big government and the social revolution are here to stay. The conservative role is to shape both for the better..
By PETER BERKOWITZ

Political moderation is a maligned virtue. Yet it has been central to American constitutionalism and modern conservatism. Such moderation is essential today to the renewal of a conservatism devoted to the principles of liberty inscribed in the Constitution—and around which both social conservatives and libertarians can rally.

"It is a misfortune, inseparable from human affairs, that public measures are rarely investigated with that spirit of moderation which is essential to a just estimate of their real tendency to advance or obstruct the public good," observed James Madison in Federalist No. 37. The challenge, Madison went on to explain, is more sobering still because the spirit of moderation "is more apt to be diminished than promoted by those occasions which require an unusual exercise of it."

In a similar spirit, and in the years that Americans were declaring independence and launching a remarkable experiment in self-government, Edmund Burke sought to conserve in Great Britain the conditions under which liberty flourished. To this end, Burke exposed the error of depending on abstract theory for guidance in practical affairs. He taught the supremacy in political life of prudence, or the judgment born of experience, bound up with circumstances and bred in action. He maintained that good policy and laws must be fitted to the people's morals, sentiments and opinions. He demonstrated that in politics the imperfections of human nature must be taken into account even as virtue and the institutions of civil society that sustain it must be cultivated. And he showed that political moderation frequently counsels rejecting the path of least resistance and is sometimes exercised in defending principle against majority opinion.

Madison's words and example and Burke's words and example are as pertinent in our time as they were in their own. Conservatives should heed them as they come to grips with two entrenched realities that pose genuine challenges to liberty, and whose prudent management is critical to the nation's well-being.

The first entrenched reality is that big government is here to stay. This is particularly important for libertarians to absorb. Over the last two hundred years, society and the economy in advanced industrial nations have undergone dramatic transformations. And for three-quarters of a century, the New Deal settlement has been reshaping Americans' expectations about the nation-state's reach and role.

Enlarge Image


Close
Images.com/Corbis
 .Consequently, the U.S. federal government will continue to provide a social safety net, regulate the economy, and shoulder a substantial share of responsibility for safeguarding the social and economic bases of political equality. All signs are that a large majority of Americans will want it to continue to do so.

In these circumstances, conservatives must redouble their efforts to reform sloppy and incompetent government and resist government's inherent expansionist tendencies and progressivism's reflexive leveling proclivities. But to undertake to dismantle or even substantially roll back the welfare and regulatory state reflects a distinctly unconservative refusal to ground political goals in political realities.

Conservatives can and should focus on restraining spending, reducing regulation, reforming the tax code, and generally reining in our sprawling federal government. But conservatives should retire misleading talk of small government. Instead, they should think and speak in terms of limited government.

The second entrenched reality, this one testing social conservatives, is the sexual revolution, perhaps the greatest social revolution in human history. The invention, and popularization in the mid-1960s, of the birth control pill—a cheap, convenient and effective way to prevent pregnancy—meant that for the first time in human history, women could have sex and reliably control reproduction. This greatly enhanced their ability to enter the workforce and pursue careers. It also transformed romance, reshaped the family and refashioned marriage.

Brides may still wed in virginal white, bride and groom may still promise to love and cherish for better or for worse and until death do them part, and one or more children may still lie in the future for many married couples. Nevertheless, 90% of Americans engage in premarital sex, cohabitation before marriage is common, and out-of-wedlock births are substantial.

Divorce, while emotionally searing, is no longer unusual, legally difficult or socially stigmatizing. Children, once the core reason for getting married, have become optional. Civil unions for gays and lesbians have acquired majority support and same-sex marriage is not far behind.

These profoundly transformed circumstances do not oblige social conservatives to alter their fundamental convictions. They should continue to make the case for the traditional understanding of marriage with children at the center, both for its intrinsic human rewards and for the benefits a married father and mother bring to rearing children. They should back family-friendly public policy and seek, within the democratic process, to persuade fellow citizens to adopt socially conservative views and vote for candidates devoted to them.

Yet given the enormous changes over the last 50 years in the U.S. concerning the ways individuals conduct their romantic lives, view marriage, and think about the family—and with a view to the enduring imperatives of limited government—social conservatives should refrain from attempting to use the federal government to enforce the traditional understanding of sex, marriage and the family. They can remain true to their principles even as they adjust their expectations of what can be achieved through democratic politics, and renew their appreciation of the limits that American constitutional government imposes on regulating citizens' private lives.

Some conservatives worry that giving any ground—in regard to the welfare and regulatory state, the sexual revolution, or both—is tantamount to sanctifying a progressive status quo. That is to mistake a danger for a destiny. Seeing circumstances as they are is a precondition for preserving one's principles and effectively translating them into viable reforms.

Even under the shadow of big government and in the wake of the sexual revolution, both libertarians and social conservatives, consistent with their most deeply held beliefs, can and should affirm the dignity of the person and the inseparability of human dignity from individual freedom and self-government. They can and should affirm the dependence of individual freedom and self-government on a thriving civil society, and the paramount importance the Constitution places on maintaining a political framework that secures liberty by limiting government.

So counsels constitutional conservatism well understood.

Mr. Berkowitz, a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, is the author of "Constitutional Conservatism: Liberty, Self-Government and Political Moderation," forthcoming from the Hoover Institution Press in February. This op-ed is adapted from the book's conclusion.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: G M on December 13, 2012, 07:13:20 PM
The coming crash will end big government, the question is what rises from the ashes.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: DougMacG on December 14, 2012, 10:10:27 AM
Crafty wrote on Media Issues: "Well, I was reading in the WSJ today that 70%  shocked shocked shocked is financed by the Fed buying the debt with the printing press.  I suspect that even Wilson and his Fed did not do that , , ,"
-----------------------
So a huge part of our spending is not paid for with taxation and the majority of that part is not covered by borrowing.

George Gilder posed as I recall a thought provoking question - what if we didn't tax at all?

Gilder's view (big risk of remembering or stating this wrong) is that spending is the tax.  Public spending is where you take the resources out of the private, productive economy, for better or for worse.  Our horribly inefficient tax code is an additional tax, taking even more resources away from productive use in compliance and avoidance.

In a bizarre twist of politics, the Gilder view from the far right supply side offered at least half in jest is now the governing philosophy of our leftist President and the world's most powerful banker.

We spend with no limit, far beyond what we even pretend to tax or borrow.  Then we watch and see what happens as our economy deteriorates and our currency erodes. 

Whatever does happen will likely be worse than if we had spent responsibly, only on legitimate governing functions, and not levied taxes at all.
Title: Patriot Post/Mark Alexander: NeoComs
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 14, 2012, 02:31:49 PM
Alexander's Column – December 13, 2012
The 'NeoComs'
The Neo-Communist Economic Agenda
"We must make our election between economy and Liberty, or profusion and servitude." --Thomas Jefferson (1816)
 
"The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings. The inherent virtue of Socialism is the equal sharing of miseries. ... Socialism is the philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance and the gospel of envy." --Winston Churchill

Today, I have a new entry for the political lexicon to categorize the latest ideological iteration of Marxists in America: "Neo-Communists" or the abbreviated version, "NeoComs."
You're no doubt familiar with the label "Neo-Conservatives," and its shortened version, "NeoCons," to describe conservatives who have adapted to more interventionist foreign policies promoting democracy, and who support open trade policies. "Neo" differentiates these conservatives from the isolationist and non-interventionist conservatism of the 1930s -- until the attack on Pearl Harbor drew us into war with Japan and Germany.

At the other end of the political spectrum from the Ronald Reagan NeoCons are the NeoComs -- modern-day socialists who have risen, in the last decade, to dominate the Democrat Party. They have modified old Marxist doctrines and adapted them to current political platforms and policies using leftist propaganda more compatible with contemporary culture. Chief among these is the Democrat Party's tried and true "divide and conquer" disparity rhetoric, which foments discontent and division based on income, race, ethnicity, gender, education, occupation, etc.

However, bull pucky by any other name is still bull pucky. Democratic Socialism, like Nationalist Socialism, is nothing more than Marxist Socialism repackaged.
The objective of today's NeoComs is, as you by now know, "fundamentally transforming the United States of America," in order to "peacefully transition" from our constitutional republic and its free-enterprise economy to a socialist republic with a state-organized and regulated economy.

Ideological adherents of the American Communist Party made few political gains under that banner in the last century because the label "communist" was and remains "distasteful" to most Americans. Thus, NeoComs have infested the once-noble Democrat Party and are using it as cover for socialist policy implementation.
The political genes of the current cadres of NeoComs establish them as the direct descendants of the statist policies of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the programs he implemented under cover of the Great Depression.

Roosevelt, like most of today's wealthy liberal protagonists, was an "inheritance-welfare liberal" -- raised in a dysfunctional home and dependent on his financial inheritance rather than that essential spirit of self-reliance, which forms the core of American Liberty. Consequently, the "dependence ethos" irrevocably shaped by FDR's privileged upbringing is virtually indistinguishable from the dependence ethos of those who have been raised or inculcated with belief that they are reliant upon welfare handouts from the state.

Though markedly dissimilar in terms of their political power, the underlying difference between inheritance liberals and welfare liberals is, the former depend on investment and trust distributions while the latter depend on government redistributions. But they both support socialist political and economic agendas based on Marxist collectivism.

Endeavoring to transform our Republic into a socialist state, FDR set about to replace our authentic Constitution with the so-called "living constitution" by way of judicial diktat, thereby subordinating the Rule of Law to the will of his administration. Anticipating Supreme Court rulings against many of his patently unconstitutional policies, which he later arrogantly outlined in his "New Bill of Rights," FDR attempted to expand the number of justices on the High Court, thereby allowing him to flood the bench with his nominees in order to win majority rulings.

Despite his failed attempt to pack the High Court, over the course of FDR's three full terms, he infested American politics with socialist programs and policies, and brought the nation perilously close to being ruled by an avowed Marxist, his vice president, Henry Wallace.

Prior to 2008, the closest the U.S. had gotten to an openly socialist president was after FDR's then-vice president, John Garner, broke with Roosevelt over FDR's effort to pack the court. In 1940, Roosevelt tapped his secretary of agriculture, Henry Wallace, to replace Garner as his new running mate. Wallace's allegiance to Marxist doctrine was well established. However, near the end of World War II, Roosevelt feared that he could not get re-elected to a fourth term with an open Communist on the ticket, so he tapped the more moderate Harry Truman and demoted Wallace to Secretary of Commerce -- where he could further his Marxist agenda.

FDR, of course, died in office just a month into his fourth term. But had he retained Wallace instead of opting for Truman, America would have had its first communist president by succession.

Shortly after becoming president, Truman fired Wallace because of his affinity for the USSR. Wallace would later unsuccessfully challenge Truman in 1948 under the thinly veiled socialist Progressive Party front, with the endorsement of the American Communist Party.

The end of World War II largely capped FDR's "New Deal" socialist expansion of the state until Lyndon Johnson's progressive "Great Society" platform heralded a plethora of new statist programs and policies. Ironically, another war, Vietnam, capped Johnson's socialist expansionism, but not the enormous price tag of the welfare and entitlement programs established by FDR and Johnson.

 
It was not until the sharp economic downturn of the Great Recession in September 2008 that the next socialist surge of statist intervention would be implemented. That severe recession, the result of Democrat-sponsored statist intervention policies which led to the collapse of real estate values, and cascaded into the near collapse of the U.S. banking system, also led to the election of Barack Hussein Obama, much as the Great Depression had led to the election of FDR.

In fact, Obama's progressive re-election mantra, "Forward," was inspired either by the concluding words of FDR's "Bill of Rights": "[W]e must be prepared to move forward, in the implementation of these rights....", or by Mao Zedong's collectivist "Great Leap Forward." Either case would constitute a political distinction without a difference.

Like Roosevelt, Obama was raised in a dysfunctional family, but unlike FDR, Obama inherited a socialist political legacy rather than wealth. However, neither Roosevelt nor Obama "let a serious crisis go to waste."

Obama, the NeoCom-in-Chief and our first openly socialist president, was elected and re-elected on his progressive "fair share" rhetoric, which he often frames as "spreading the wealth around." That, of course, is merely a new riff on an old FDR proclamation: "Here is my principle: Taxes shall be levied according to ability to pay. That is the only American principle." However, that "American principle" is merely a paraphrase of Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto, in which he declared, "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs."

Obama's political storm troopers are led by the largest subgroup of congressional Democrats, the 76 declared members of his Congressional Progressive Caucus, who have made "progressive taxation" the top priority of their "redistributive justice" agenda.

Rep. Paul Ryan properly summed up Obama's progressive agenda as "a dull journey from one entitlement to the next, a government-planned life, a country where everything is free but us."
 
Obama and his American Communist Party-endorsed NeoComs are crafting their progressive economic policies using the subtle Cloward-Piven model, a socialist strategy that outlines how to overload the national entitlement delivery system, what we call the ObamaNation Plantation, in order to generate a severe economic crisis and ultimately break the back of free enterprise. Obama is using so-called "stimulus and bailout" plans (including his most recent "Fiscal Bluff"), ObamaCare, cap-n-trade, international climate change treaties, and the like, to take our country to the edge of that precipice.

Sometimes, however, the NeoCom agenda is not so subtle, as was the case this week when Jeffrey Immelt, an ardent Obama supporter who also chairs Obama's Economic Recovery Advisory Board, said of Red China's economy, "The one thing that actually works, state-run communism, may not be your cup of tea, but their government works."
NeoComs outside the U.S. are even less subtle.

In a recent newspaper column in "Pravda," the old Soviet propaganda rag ("The Truth") now published by post-Soviet era conscripts of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, a popular writer, Xavier Lerma, had this observation on our most recent presidential election: "The Communists have won in America with Obama. ... Obama has been re-elected for a 2nd term by an illiterate society."

Lerma criticized his fellow Russians for electing Vladimir Putin who, Lerma laments, "sounded like Ronald Reagan" in a recent speech Putin gave on the Russian economy.
Putin said: "We are reducing taxes on production. We are optimizing state expenses. We must avoid excessive interference into the economic life of the country and the absolute faith into the all-mightiness of the state. Unreasonable expansion of the budget deficit and accumulation of the national debt are as destructive as an adventurous stock market game. During the time of the Soviet Union the role of the state in economy was made absolute, which eventually lead to the total non-competitiveness of the economy. That lesson cost us very dearly. I am sure no one would want history to repeat itself. We must seek support in the moral values that have ensured the progress of our civilization. Honesty and hard work, responsibility and faith in our strength are bound to bring us success."

Lerma concluded, "Who could ever [have] imagined anyone so willing to destroy [capitalism] like Obama, much less seeing millions vote for someone like Obama. They read history in America don't they? Alas, the schools in the U.S. were conquered by the Communists long ago and history was revised thus paving the way for their Communist president."

Indeed, who could have imagined?

Pro Deo et Constitutione — Libertas aut Mors
Semper Vigilo, Fortis, Paratus et Fidelis
 
Mark Alexander
Publisher, The Patriot Post
Title: Yes!Right On! Perfect!Couldn't have said it better...
Post by: ccp on December 14, 2012, 05:29:24 PM
though I have tried.

The above piece is brilliantly written.

*NeoCom* - perfect!  We need to start this phrase with proper attribution around a better structured conservative version of the "journo-list".

I love the quote of Winston Churchill - an earlier version of the twisting of phrases "trickle down wealth" vs. "trickle up poverty".

Interesting history on FDR.  A true limo-inheritance liberal, if you will.

As for the Brocksters and his communist storm troopers using the word "forward" I am not sure it is either from FDR or Mao.  This word goes much further back in history to European socialist movements.  Nonetheless, the astonishing use of the word, as he points out, could not be more overt as to Obama's real political loyalties and beliefs.

Rahm Emanuel made clear his description of the "opportunity" the near depression of late 2008/early 09 gave the NeoCOms just like the depression gave FDR his opportunity.

Gotta love the Pravda author's pointing out the absurdity of Putin running on Reagna themes while here we have the opposite (the pravda piece I believe was noted on the Forum previously).

And yes as Rep. Ryan pointed out we are on a journey of a dull life all planned out for us by our "beloved" intellectuals at places like Harvard and Yale to the extent that none of us are free.

I add to this that our new slave masters are the liberal elites of our universities who have come up with Obamacare, cap and trade, indoctrination (as GM has smartly expressed as going on for decades) of our children.

Title: better than "slave masters"
Post by: ccp on December 14, 2012, 05:32:39 PM
the liberal elites are the new Politburo.

Title: NEWTOWN
Post by: prentice crawford on December 17, 2012, 02:12:11 AM
 The tragedy at Newtown was a terrible, violent act and my heart goes out to all those effected. Our lack of mental healthcare in this country, a irresponsible News Media and corrupt politians is a deadly match. It will probably come to light that this was the act of a mentally and emotionally disturbed individual that wanted to take his angst out on society. People will be looking for answers as to why this person chose to do this, and how he planned this out. The News Media should take credit for creating this monster and giving him the incentive and ideas to vent his suicidal rage on this small commuity. This is another instance where a copycat psycho has been educated by the activist News Media, because of the exploitation of similar shootings in the past. The Media uses these events to push political agendas like gun control and hype their ratings, going over all the gory details, plus giving a world stage for these nut jobs to get fame, notoriety, and inflict maximum damage on our society. This sick individual at Newtown, could have just killed himself or worn a suit & tie and ran over people with his car right there at his house. It could have been that simple but he didn't do that. No, he dressed up in camoflage and black, put on a bullet proof vest, loaded up with guns and ammo then went to a grade school. The guns and ammo wasn't just any old kind, nope they were the kind that gun control advocates and political activist want banned. He made sure they met the standard of hype the Media gives such weapons too, he shot his victims mutiple times to make sure they were not just wounded. He knew he had to get a high body count or else he wouldn't make the cut to get on the Media's stage. Here's an idea News Media, do your job in an ethical manner, report the story then shut the hell up.

                                              P.C.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: DougMacG on December 18, 2012, 08:59:41 AM
I share the sentiments of P.C. expressed in the previous post of this thread.  Very well put!

There is copycat element to these shootings.  The media coverage plays some role in that.  I don't want an unconstitutional crackdown on our free press, but I do wish for them to be aware of that problem, report responsibly and move on.
Title: Why the left hates guns
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 21, 2012, 08:39:48 AM
KUHNER: Why the left hates guns

Armed citizens a bulwark against state power
 
By Jeffrey T. Kuhner
The Washington Times
Thursday, December 20, 2012

Liberals have declared war on gun rights. Following the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., gun-control zealots have seized on the murder of 20 children and 6 adults to push their longtime goal of rolling back the Second Amendment. The bodies of the victims were not even cold before the progressive blogosphere was blaming the National Rifle Association for the atrocity.
 
President Obama is calling for sweeping new gun restrictions, including restoring the assault-weapons ban and limiting ammunition in magazines. MSNBC host Ed Schultz seeks the outright “confiscation of guns.” CNN’s Piers Morgan wants America to adopt Great Britain’s rigid gun laws. Ultimately, the left’s argument boils down to one seminal belief: The primary cause for our epidemic of mass shootings lies in technology — the wide availability of firearms. Restrict access to guns, liberals claim, and violence will be curbed significantly.
 
This is not only false, but blatant propaganda. The Sandy Hook shooter, Adam Lanza, was severely mentally ill. His mother, Nancy Lanza, who also was butchered by her son, proved unable to find appropriate treatment. Instead, according to press accounts, she kept him isolated in a windowless basement for long hours each day, where he played violent video games. No one is willing to confront this painful truth: Our culture’s obsession with video games, especially those that glorify mass killing, senseless brutality and bloodlust, is desensitizing our youth.
 
Adam Lanza was a deranged individual who spent countless hours in a virtual reality slaughtering imaginary human beings. He also lacked necessary medical treatment — including medication. His life was a combustible mix, ready to blow at any moment. The results were predictable and ominous: Someone was going to get hurt. The only question was who — and how many.
 
The massacres at Columbine High School in Colorado; Virginia Tech; Tucson, Ariz.; Aurora, Colo.; and Sandy Hook all had one thing in common: The perpetrators suffered from serious mental illness. The recent rash of mass shootings has nothing to do with guns. Rather, it is our society’s refusal to involuntarily institutionalize the violently mentally ill. Since the 1970s, liberals — in the name of “civil rights” — have succeeded in opening up the doors of psychiatric hospitals and releasing psychologically disturbed patients. This has allowed mentally unstable individuals to roam our streets. The consequences have been disastrous — soaring homelessness, rampant poverty, rising crime and an explosion in random murderous atrocities.
 
The schools, malls and movie theaters where these crimes took place had something else in common: They were gun-free zones. If banning firearms was the solution, those places should have been safe havens. They weren’t. The reason is obvious. Gun-free zones prevent law-abiding citizens from being able to protect themselves, leaving them defenseless against ruthless gunmen. The principal and teachers at Sandy Hook stood helpless as Lanza shot them in cold blood. They were like sheep led to the slaughter.
 
Norway has some of the strictest gun laws in the world. That did not stop a madman in 2011 from massacring nearly 80 people — many of them children — at a summer camp outside Oslo. To think gun control can prevent mass violence is a leftist utopian fantasy. Timothy McVeigh killed 168 people in Oklahoma City in 1995 using a fertilizer-based truck bomb. The worst school atrocity occurred in Michigan in 1927 when 38 children, ages 7 to 11, along with seven adults were murdered. The weapons that were used: three primitive homemade explosives. Evil is a fundamental reality of life. It cannot be legislated away. It must be faced down and defeated.
 
This is why the only policy answer to the wave of mass shootings is not fewer guns, but more guns. In particular, gun-free zones should be dismantled at schools. It’s time that education budgets incorporate the hiring of security personnel — say, two guards per school — who would be armed and trained to use deadly force against any future potential shooter. Ideally, they would be ex-military, who possess experience in dealing with surprise attacks and volatile situations. Just the fact that schools would be known to have armed agents protecting students and staff would significantly deter gun violence.
 
Yet the Democratic left is determined to repeal the Second Amendment. Why? The answer is simple: An armed citizenry is pivotal to a self-governing republic. Our founders enshrined gun rights not because they were bloodthirsty hicks who celebrated a culture of dueling, revenge and honor. Instead, they understood that pervasive gun ownership is a bulwark against excessive state coercive power. A self-reliant people — as opposed to one subservient to rulers — must be capable of defending themselves and their families from dangerous predators. Gun rights are essential to our system of limited government and individual liberty.
 
For liberals, this is precisely the problem with the Second Amendment. Their aim is to erect a Scandinavian-style social democracy — a North American Sweden. The structure standing in their way is the Constitution. This is why the progressive left has been relentlessly assaulting our Judeo-Christian heritage and constitutional republic. It must vilify — and discredit — our founding principles in order to pave the way for its collectivist revolution. Nothing is more quintessentially American than our gun culture. Secular leftists hate guns because they loathe America. And they will stop at nothing — including exploiting the bodies of dead children — to achieve their radical, anti-American and anti-gun agenda.
 
Jeffrey T. Kuhner is a columnist and editorial writer at The Washington Times. He is also the host of “The Kuhner Report” on AM-680 WRKO (www.wrko.com) from 6-9 a.m. and 11 a.m.-noon EST in Boston.


Read more: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/dec/20/why-the-left-hates-guns/#ixzz2Fhmw3h4I
 Follow us: @washtimes on Twitter
Title: Media and Copycat Killers
Post by: prentice crawford on December 22, 2012, 03:31:26 AM

ZEYNEP TUFEKCI    - Zeynep Tufekci is a fellow at the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University, an assistant professor at the School of Information and Department of Sociology at the University of North Carolina, and a faculty associate at the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet and Society. She writes regularly at her personal site, Technosociology.

The Media Needs to Stop Inspiring Copycat Murders. Here's How.

7 DEC 19 2012, 10:07 AM ET 43

After a wave of teen suicides in the 1980s, news outlets began reporting on these deaths more cautiously. Similar guidelines could help prevent more shooting sprees.

After the Newtown shootings, newspapers printed detailed information about the killer and his methods. (McClatchy Papers)

You might not have noticed, but the mass media rarely reports on suicides, particularly teen suicides. When it does, the coverage is careful, understated, and dampened. This is no accident: Following guidelines endorsed by the Centers for Disease Control and National Institutes of Mental Health, the media carefully and voluntarily avoids sensationalizing such deaths especially among teenagers. They almost never make the news unless the person is a public figure; methods of suicide are rarely mentioned; suicide pacts are not reported upon.

This is for good reason: Suicide, especially among teens, is contagious. It's a morbidly attractive idea that offers an established path of action for a troubled youngster. And we know from research in many fields that establishing a path of action -- a complete narrative in which you can visualize your steps and their effects -- is important in enabling follow-through.

This, for example, is exactly why political campaigns ask people about where and how they plan to vote -- imagined events are more likely to be carried out in real life. If you have a full story in your head, you are more likely to enact it, step by step. We also know such "contagion" effects are especially strong in adolescence and young adulthood -- an especially turbulent time for mental health.

In the Middle Ages, psychosis may have involved visions of the devil. Today, it can involve dressing in pseudo-combat gear and walking through a public place in a blaze of violence.
As a sociologist, I am increasingly concerned that the tornado of media coverage that swirls around each such mass killing, and the acute interest in the identity and characteristics of the shooter -- as well as the detailed and sensationalist reporting of the killer's steps just before and during the shootings -- may be creating a vicious cycle of copycat effects similar to those found in teen and other suicides.

Indeed, the rate of mass public shootings in the United States has been accelerating. In 2012 alone, there were at least a dozen of them. Seven dead at an Oakland college in April. Five killed at a Seattle coffee shop in May. Twelve killed in an Aurora, Colorado, movie theater in July. Six murdered at a Wisconsin Sikh temple in August, and six more killed in Minneapolis in September. Three dead in the Milwaukee spa shootings in October. And most recently, and unimaginably, 20 children as young as six, along with six adults, murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School. The trend is disturbingly clear.

As many have pointed out, these mass public rampages are inextricably linked with the availability of high-capacity guns and ammunition, as well as with lack of strong mental health infrastructure -- especially for those in late adolescence and early adulthood, the typical onset period for major psychotic disorder.

But it's also important to recognize that while mental illness plagues every society, the ways people express it are heavily influenced by the norms, heroes, anti-heroes, and spectacles of their own places and times. In the Middle Ages, psychosis may have involved visions of the devil, snakes, or witches. In the 21st century, it can involve dressing in pseudo-combat gear, donning numerous high-powered rifles, and walking through a public place in a blaze of violence. The shock value is part of the goal -- and the higher the shock value, predictably, the higher the ensuing media coverage, which fuels interest in the shooter and creates a whirlwind of attention and spectacle.

My aim here is not to blame the media: such events have undeniable news value, and there is intense public interest in uncovering their details. But it's important to recognize that such incidents are not mono-causal, and sensational news coverage is, increasingly, part of the mix of events that contributes to these rampages.

We need to figure out how to balance the public interest in learning about a mass shooting with the public interest in reducing copycat crime. The guidelines on reporting on teen suicides were established after a spate of teenage suicides in the United States, some through suicide pacts, in the 1980s. Those who created the guidelines looked at examples from other countries -- for example, the subway suicides in Vienna in the 1980s, which decreased after the media changed its coverage -- and provided specific recommendations: Don't refer to the word suicide in the headline. Don't report the method of the suicide. Don't present it as an inexplicable act of an otherwise healthy person.

With that as a model, here are some initial recommendations.

1. Law enforcement should not release details of the methods and manner of the killings, and those who learn those details should not share them. In other words, there should be no immediate stories about which guns exactly were used or how much robo-cop gear was utilized. There should be no extensive timelines -- no details about which room was entered first or which victim was killed second. In particular, there should be no reporting of the killer's words, or actions before or during the shooting.

Yes, I am a scholar of social media and I understand that these things will leak. But there is a big difference between information that can only be found if you really look for it and news stories that are blasted by every television station and paper in the country. At a minimum, we can and should greatly delay the release of these details by weeks, if not months.

2. If and when social media accounts of the killers are located, law enforcement should work with the platforms to immediately pull them. Yes, there will be screenshots, and again, I am not proposing that such information can be entirely shut out. But by making it harder to find, we can dampen the impact of the spectacle.

3- The name of the killer should not be revealed immediately. If possible, law enforcement and media sources should agree to withhold it for weeks. The identity can be released later during trial (if there is one) or during the release of the investigative report. Once again, merely delaying the release of information may greatly reduce the spectacle effect. The name may "leak," but that is very different from the full blast of attention that currently surrounds the perpetrators immediately after each incident.

Similarly, the killer should not be profiled extensively, at least not at first. There should not be an intense search for clues or reasoning beyond "troubled person commits unspeakable act; wish he had gotten help earlier," in as flat a reporting style as possible. We know that the killers tend to be young men, and they tend to have mental health issues. We do not need to know which exact video games they played, what they wore, or what their favorite bands were.

4. The intense push to interview survivors and loved ones in their most vulnerable moments should be stopped. This, too, may help reduce the sense of spectacle and trauma.

I don't claim that these are the only and best ways to deal with this issue. but I offer them as fodder for a conversation that I hoped will be taken up by media and mental health experts. And we shouldn't be concerned that such guidelines will be impossible to follow. Just yesterday, news outlets revealed that Richard Engel of NBC had been kidnapped in Syria -- and released. The information about his capture, though obviously newsworthy, was held back in order to aid the negotiations and rescue efforts.

There are many such cases of media voluntarily acting to dampen coverage of certain events, especially when it involves one of their own. Let's entreat them to do it for the sake of potential shooting victims as well.

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/12/the-media-needs-to-stop-inspiring-copycat-murders-heres-how/266439/ 

                                    P.C.
Title: Re: Media and Copycat Killers
Post by: G M on December 22, 2012, 01:54:11 PM
Very good ideas there. Especially the part where our professional journalists stop shoving their cameras into the faces of traumatized children and ask them about the horrors they just survived.
Title: Active Shooter
Post by: prentice crawford on December 23, 2012, 08:34:45 AM
   10-43: All Units...
with Doug Wyllie, PoliceOne Editor in Chief

Active shooters in schools: The enemy is denial
Preventing juvenile mass murder in American schools is the job of police officers, school teachers, and concerned parents

 

Editor's Note: Visit the Newtown Shooting special coverage page for more perspectives on active shooters in schools, including my article "Active shooters in schools: Should teachers be trained by police firearms instructors?" Have a perspective on this issue? Leave it in the comments below.
“How many kids have been killed by school fire in all of North America in the past 50 years? Kids killed... school fire... North America... 50 years...  How many?  Zero. That’s right.  Not one single kid has been killed by school fire anywhere in North America in the past half a century.  Now, how many kids have been killed by school violence?”

So began an extraordinary daylong seminar presented by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, a Pulitzer Prize nominated author, West Point psychology professor, and without a doubt the world’s foremost expert on human aggression and violence. The event, hosted by the California Peace Officers Association, was held in the auditorium of a very large community church about 30 miles from San Francisco, and was attended by more than 250 police officers from around the region.

Grossman’s talk spanned myriad topics of vital importance to law enforcement, such as the use of autogenic breathing, surviving gunshot wounds, dealing with survivor guilt following a gun battle, and others. But violence among and against children was how the day began, and so I'll focus on that issue here.



Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, pictured with PoliceOne Senior Editor Doug Wyllie, spoke before a crowd of more than 250 police officers in an event hosted by the California Peace Officers Association. (PoliceOne image)
Related Articles:
Arming campus cops is elementary
A decade after Columbine we're still learning, teaching

Related Resources:
Book Excerpt: On Sheep, Wolves, and Sheepdogs
Visit the Killology Research Group website

Related Feature:
   Helping schools prepare for an active-shooter showdown
Sheriff Fred Wegener says that preparing schools for an active shooter is community policing at its best.
“In 1999,” Grossman said, “school violence claimed what at the time was an all time record number of kids’ lives. In that year there were 35 dead and a quarter of a million serious injuries due to violence in the school. How many killed by fire that year? Zero. But we hear people say, ‘That’s the year Columbine happened, that’s an anomaly.’ Well, in 2004 we had a new all time record — 48 dead in the schools from violence. How many killed by fire that year? Zero. Let’s assign some grades. Put your teacher hat on and give out some grades. What kind of grade do you give the firefighter for keeping kids safe? An ‘A,’ right? Reluctantly, reluctantly, the cops give the firefighters an ‘A,’ right? Danged firefighters, they sleep ‘till they’re hungry and eat ‘till they’re tired. What grade do we get for keeping the kids safe from violence? Come on, what’s our grade? Needs improvement, right?”

Johnny Firefighter, A+ Student
“Why can’t we be like little Johnny Firefighter?” Grossman asked as he prowled the stage. “He’s our A+ student!”

He paused, briefly, and answered with a voice that blew through the hall like thunder, “Denial, denial, denial!”

Grossman commanded, “Look up at the ceiling! See all those sprinklers up there? They’re hard to spot — they’re painted black — but they’re there. While you’re looking, look at the material the ceiling is made of. You know that that stuff was selected because it’s fire-retardant. Hooah? Now look over there above the door — you see that fire exit sign? That’s not just any fire exit sign — that’s a ‘battery-backup-when-the-world-ends-it-will-still-be-lit’ fire exit sign. Hooah?”

Walking from the stage toward a nearby fire exit and exterior wall, Grossman slammed the palm of his hand against the wall and exclaimed, “Look at these wall boards! They were chosen because they’re what?! Fireproof or fire retardant, hooah? There is not one stinking thing in this room that will burn!”

Pointing around the room as he spoke, Grossman continued, “But you’ve still got those fire sprinklers, those fire exit signs, fire hydrants outside, and fire trucks nearby! Are these fire guys crazy? Are these fire guys paranoid? No! This fire guy is our A+ student! Because this fire guy has redundant, overlapping layers of protection, not a single kid has been killed by school fire in the last 50 years!

“But you try to prepare for violence — the thing much more likely to kill our kids in schools, the thing hundreds of times  more likely to kill our kids in schools — and people think you’re paranoid. They think you’re crazy. ...They’re in denial.”

Teaching the Teachers
The challenge for law enforcement agencies and officers, then, is to overcome not only the attacks taking place in schools, but to first overcome the denial in the minds of mayors, city councils, school administrators, and parents. Grossman said that agencies and officers, although facing an uphill slog against the denial of the general public, must diligently work toward increasing understanding among the sheep that the wolves are coming for their children. Police officers must train and drill with teachers, not only so responding officers are intimately familiar with the facilities, but so that teachers know what they can do in the event of an attack.

“Come with me to the library at Columbine High School,” Grossman said. “The teacher in the library at Columbine High School spent her professional lifetime preparing for a fire, and we can all agree if there had been a fire in that library, that teacher would have instinctively, reflexively known what to do.

"But the thing most likely to kill her kids — the thing hundreds of times more likely to kill her kids, the teacher didn’t have a clue what to do. She should have put those kids in the librarian’s office but she didn’t know that. So she did the worst thing possible — she tried to secure her kids in an un-securable location. She told the kids to hide in the library — a library that has plate glass windows for walls. It’s an aquarium, it’s a fish bowl. She told the kids to hide in a fishbowl. What did those killers see? They saw targets. They saw fish in a fish bowl.”

Grossman said that if the school administrators at Columbine had spent a fraction of the money they’d spent preparing for fire doing lockdown drills and talking with local law enforcers about the violent dangers they face, the outcome that day may have been different.

Rhetorically he asked the assembled cops, “If somebody had spent five minutes  telling that teacher what to do, do you think lives would have been saved at Columbine?”

Arming Campus Cops is Elementary
Nearly two years ago, I wrote an article called Arming campus cops is elementary. Not surprisingly, Grossman agrees with that hypothesis.

“Never call an unarmed man ‘security’,” Grossman said.

“Call him ‘run-like-hell-when-the-man-with-the-gun-shows-up’ but never call an unarmed man security.

"Imagine if someone said, ‘I want a trained fire professional on site. I want a fire hat, I want a fire uniform, I want a fire badge. But! No fire extinguishers in this building. No fire hoses. The hat, the badge, the uniform — that will keep us safe — but we have no need for fire extinguishers.’ Well, that would be insane. It is equally insane, delusional, legally liable, to say, ‘I want a trained security professional on site. I want a security hat, I want a security uniform, and I want a security badge, but I don’t want a gun.’ It’s not the hat, the uniform, or the badge. It’s the tools in the hands of a trained professional that keeps us safe.

“Our problem is not money,” said Grossman.  “It is denial.”

Grossman said (and most cops agree) that many of the most important things we can do to protect our kids would cost us nothing or next-to-nothing.

Grossman’s Five D’s
Let’s contemplate the following outline and summary of Dave Grossman’s “Five D’s.” While you do, I encourage you to add in the comments area below your suggestions to address, and expand upon, these ideas.

1. Denial — Denial is the enemy and it has no survival value, said Grossman.

2. Deter — Put police officers in schools, because with just one officer assigned to a school, the probability of a mass murder in that school drops to almost zero

3. Detect — We’re talking about plain old fashioned police work here. The ultimate achievement for law enforcement is the crime that didn’t happen, so giving teachers and administrators regular access to cops is paramount.

4. Delay — Various simple mechanisms can be used by teachers and cops to put time and distance between the killers and the kids.

a. Ensure that the school/classroom have just a single point of entry. Simply locking the back door helps create a hard target.
b. Conduct your active shooter drills within (and in partnership with) the schools in your city so teachers know how to respond, and know what it looks like when you do your response.

5. Destroy — Police officers and agencies should consider the following:

a. Carry off duty. No one would tell a firefighter who has a fire extinguisher in his trunk that he’s crazy or paranoid.
b. Equip every cop in America with a patrol rifle. One chief of police, upon getting rifles for all his officers once said, “If an active killer strikes in my town, the response time will be measured in feet per second.”
c. Put smoke grenades in the trunk of every cop car in America. Any infantryman who needs to attack across open terrain or perform a rescue under fire deploys a smoke grenade. A fire extinguisher will do a decent job in some cases, but a smoke grenade is designed to perform the function.
d. Have a “go-to-war bag” filled with lots of loaded magazines and supplies for tactical combat casualty care.
e. Use helicopters. Somewhere in your county you probably have one or more of the following: medevac, media, private, national guard, coast guard rotors.
f. Employ the crew-served, continuous-feed, weapon you already have available to you (a firehouse) by integrating the fire service into your active shooter training. It is virtually impossible for a killer to put well-placed shots on target while also being blasted with water at 300 pounds per square inch.
g. Armed citizens can help.  Think United 93. Whatever your personal take on gun control, it is all but certain that a killer set on killing is more likely to attack a target where the citizens are unarmed, rather than one where they are likely to encounter an armed citizen response.

Coming Soon: External Threats
Today we must not only prepare for juvenile mass murder, something that had never happened in human history until only recently, but we also must prepare for the external threat. Islamist fanatics have slaughtered children in their own religion — they have killed wantonly, mercilessly, and without regard for repercussion or regret of any kind. What do you think they’d think of killing our kids?

“Eight years ago they came and killed 3,000 of our citizens. Do we know what they’re going to do next? No! But one thing they’ve done in every country they’ve messed with is killing kids in schools,” Grossman said.

The latest al Qaeda charter states that “children are noble targets” and Osama bin Laden himself has said that “Russia is a preview for what we will do to America.”

What happened in Russia that we need to be concerned with in this context? In the town of Beslan on September 1, 2004 — the very day on which children across that country merrily make their return to school after the long summer break — radical Islamist terrorists from Chechnya took more than 1,000 teachers, mothers, and children hostage. When the three-day siege was over, more than 300 hostages had been killed, more than half of whom were children.

“If I could tackle every American and make them read one book to help them understand the terrorist’s plan, it would be Terror at Beslan  by John Giduck. Beslan was just a dress rehearsal for what they’re planning to do to the United States,” he said.

Consider this: There are almost a half a million school buses in America. It would require almost every enlisted person and every officer in the entire United States Army to put just one armed guard on every school bus in the country.

As a country and as a culture, the level of protection Americans afford our kids against violence is nothing near what we do to protect them from fire. Grossman is correct: Denial is the enemy. We must prepare for violence like the firefighter prepares for fire. And we must do that today.

Hooah, Colonel!


About the author
Doug Wyllie is Editor in Chief of PoliceOne, responsible for setting the editorial direction of the website and managing the planned editorial features by our roster of expert writers. In addition to his editorial and managerial responsibilities, Doug has authored more than 600 feature articles and tactical tips on a wide range of topics and trends that affect the law enforcement community. Doug is a member of International Law Enforcement Educators and Trainers Association (ILEETA), and an Associate Member of the California Peace Officers' Association. He is also a member of the Public Safety Writers Association, and is a two-time (2011 and 2012) Western Publishing Association "Maggie Award" Finalist in the category of Best Regularly Featured Digital Edition Column. Even in his "spare" time, he is active in his support for the law enforcement community, contributing his time and talents toward police-related charitable events as well as participating in force-on-force training, search-and-rescue training, and other scenario-based training designed to prepare cops for the fight they face every day on the street.

                                       P.C.
Title: Douthat: How to read in 2013
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 30, 2012, 12:06:54 PM
How to Read in 2013
 
By ROSS DOUTHAT
 
Published: December 29, 2012 341 Comments
 


COME what may in the next 12 months, 2013 has this much going for it: It’s a year without a midterm election, and a year that’s as far removed as possible from the next presidential race. This means that for a blessed 365 days you can be a well-informed and responsible American citizen without reading every single article on Politico, without hitting refresh every 30 seconds on your polling-average site of choice, without channel-hopping between Chris Matthews’s hyperventilating and Dick Morris’s promises of an inevitable Republican landslide.



So use the year wisely, faithful reader. For a little while, at least, let gridlock take care of itself, shake yourself free of the toils of partisanship, and let your mind rove more widely and freely than the onslaught of 2014 and 2016 coverage will allow.

Here are three steps that might make such roving particularly fruitful. First, consider taking out a subscription to a magazine whose politics you don’t share. I’m using the word “subscription” advisedly: it may sound fusty in the age of blogs and tweets and online hopscotching, but reading the entirety of a magazine, whether in print or on your tablet, is a better way to reckon with the ideas that its contributors espouse than just reading the most-read or most-e-mailed articles on its Web site, or the occasional inflammatory column that all your ideological compatriots happen to be attacking.

So if you love National Review’s political coverage, add The New Republic or The Nation to your regular rotation as well. If you think that The New Yorker’s long-form journalism is the last word on current affairs, take out a Weekly Standard subscription and supplement Jeffrey Toobin with Andy Ferguson, Adam Gopnik with Christopher Caldwell. If you’re a policy obsessive who looks forward every quarter to the liberal-tilting journal Democracy, consider a subscription to the similarly excellent, right-of-center National Affairs. And whenever you’re tempted to hurl away an article in disgust, that’s exactly when you should turn the page or swipe the screen and keep on reading, to see what else the other side might have to say.

Second, expand your reading geographically as well as ideologically. Even in our supposedly globalized world, place still shapes perspective, and the fact that most American political writers live in just two metropolitan areas tends to cramp our ability to see the world entire.

So the would-be cosmopolitan who currently gets a dose of British-accented sophistication from The Economist — a magazine whose editorial line varies only a little from the Manhattan-and-D.C. conventional wisdom — might do well to read the London Review of Books and The Spectator instead. (The multilingual, of course, can roam even more widely.) The conservative who turns to Manhattan-based publications for defenses of the “Real America” should cast a bigger net — embracing the Californian academics who preside over the Claremont Review of Books, the heartland sans-culottes at RedState, the far-flung traditionalists who write for Front Porch Republic. And the discerning reader should always have an eye out for talented writers — like the Montanan Walter Kirn, the deserving winner of one of my colleague David Brooks’s Sidney Awards — who cover American politics from outside D.C. and N.Y.C.

Finally, make a special effort to read outside existing partisan categories entirely. Crucially, this doesn’t just mean reading reasonable-seeming types who split the left-right difference. It means seeking out more marginal and idiosyncratic voices, whose views are often worth pondering precisely because they have no real purchase on our political debates.

Start on the non-Republican right, maybe, with the libertarians at Reason magazine, the social conservatives at First Things and Public Discourse, the eclectic dissidents who staff The American Conservative. Then head for the neo-Marxist reaches of the Internet, where publications like Jacobin and The New Inquiry offer a constant reminder of how much room there is to the left of the current Democratic Party.

And don’t be afraid to lend an ear to voices that seem monomaniacal or self-marginalizing, offensive or extreme. There are plenty of writers on the Internet who are too naïve or radical or bigoted to entrust with any kind of power, but who nonetheless might offer an insight that you wouldn’t find in the more respectable quarters of the press.

If these exercises work, they’ll make 2013 a year that unsettles your mind a little — subjecting the views you take for granted to real scrutiny, changing the filters through which you view the battles between Team R and Team D, reminding you that more things are possible in heaven and earth than are dreamed of by John Boehner and Harry Reid.

Then, and only then, will you be ready to start counting the days till the 2016 Iowa caucuses arrive.


I invite you to follow me on Twitter at twitter.com/DouthatNYT.
Title: George Will: Our Decadent Democracy
Post by: DougMacG on January 04, 2013, 09:03:24 AM
George Will sums it up well our current, destructive course:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/george-will-our-decadent-democracy/2013/01/02/90dac36c-5477-11e2-bf3e-76c0a789346f_story.html

Our decadent democracy

By George F. Will, Published: January 2

Connoisseurs of democratic decadence can savor a variety of contemporary dystopias. Because familiarity breeds banality, Greece has become a boring horror. Japan, however, in its second generation of stagnation is fascinating. Once, Japan bestrode the world, jauntily buying Rockefeller Center and Pebble Beach. Now Japanese buy more adult diapers than those for infants.

George Will

Deficit spending once was largely for investments — building infrastructure, winning wars — which benefited future generations, so government borrowing appropriately shared the burden with those generations. Now, however, continuous borrowing burdens future generations in order to finance current consumption. Today’s policy, says DeMuth, erases “the distinction between investing for the future and borrowing from the future.”

It is now as clear as it is unsurprising that most Americans will be spared the educational experience of “fiscal cliff”-related tax increases and spending cuts, which would have been a small but instructive taste of the real costs of the entitlement state.

Still, December’s maneuverings taught three lessons.

First, there will be no significant spending restraint. Democrats — you know: the people respectful of evidence and science — even rejected a more accurate measurement of the cost of living that would slightly slow increases in myriad government benefits. Accuracy will be sacrificed to liberalism’s agenda of government growth.

Second, Barack Obama has (as Winston Churchill said of an adversary) “the gift of compressing the largest amount of words into the smallest amount of thought.” His incessant talking swaddles one wee idea — raising taxes on “millionaires and billionaires,” including people earning less than half a million. He has nothing pertinent to say about the steadily worsening fiscal imbalance that will make sluggish growth — less than 3 percent — normal.

Third, one December winner was George W. Bush because a large majority of Democrats favored making permanent a large majority of his tax cuts. December’s rancor disguised bipartisan agreement: Both parties flinch from cliff-related tax increases and spending decreases. But neither the increases nor decreases would have tamed the current $1 trillion-plus budget deficit nor made a discernible dent in the 87-times-larger unfunded liabilities of the entitlement state.

This state cannot be funded by taxing “the rich.” Or even by higher income taxes on the middle class. Income taxes cannot fund the government liberals want, and they dare not seek the consumption and energy taxes their entitlement architecture requires. Hence, although Republicans are complicit, Democrats are ardent in embracing decadent democracy. This consists not just of infantilism — refusing to will the means for the ends one has willed — but also of willing an immoral means: conscripting the wealth of future generations.

As economists Glenn Hubbard and Tim Kane explain in National Affairs quarterly, the U.S. political system “cannot govern the entitlement state” that “exists largely to provide material benefits to individuals.” Piling up unsustainable entitlement promises — particularly, enactment of Medicare in 1965 and the enrichment of Social Security benefits in 1972 — has been improvident for the nation but rational for the political class. The promised expenditures, far in excess of revenue, would come due “beyond the horizon of political consequences.”

“Our politicians,” say Hubbard and Kane, “are acting rationally” but “politically rational behavior is now fiscally perverse.” Both parties are responding to powerful electoral incentives to neither raise taxes nor cut spending. Hence, “the clash over raising the debt limit that gripped Washington during the summer of 2011 was just the beginning, not the end, of our fiscal woes.”

But the perils of the entitlement state are no longer (in Hubbard’s and Kane’s words) “safely beyond the politicians’ career horizons.” Furthermore, a critical mass of Republicans reject the careerists’ understanding of “politically rational” behavior. These Republicans have a different rationale for being in politics.

The media, which often are the last to know things because their wishes father their thoughts, say the tea party impulse is exhausted. Scores of House Republicans and seven first-term Republican senators (Rand Paul, Mike Lee, Pat Toomey, Ted Cruz, Ron Johnson, Marco Rubio and Tim Scott) will soon — hello, debt ceiling — prove otherwise.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: bigdog on January 07, 2013, 06:29:05 PM
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/01/04/why_2013_looks_a_lot_like_1913

"The leading power of the age is in relative decline, beset by political crisis at home and by steadily eroding economic prowess. Rising powers are jostling for position in the four corners of the world, some seeking a new place for themselves within the current global order, others questioning its very legitimacy. Democracy and despotism are locked in uneasy competition. A world economy is interconnected as never before by flows of money, trade, and people, and by the unprecedented spread of new, distance-destroying technologies. A global society, perhaps even a global moral consciousness, is emerging as a result. Small-town America rails at the excessive power of Wall Street. Asia is rising once again. And, yes, there's trouble in the Middle East.
 
Sound familiar?

In many ways, the world of 1913, the last year before the Great War, seems not so much the world of 100 years ago as the world of today, curiously refracted through time.
..."
Title: Prager: Richard Cohen explains conservatives
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 08, 2013, 01:32:58 PM
http://www.dennisprager.com/columns.aspx?g=d0cd155d-b447-4425-985a-f65cfbfb9980&url=richard-cohen-explains-conservatives-n1483114
Title: Nassim Taleb (Black Swan guy)
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 22, 2013, 08:34:38 AM
http://reason.com/reasontv/2013/01/20/interview-with-nassim-nicholas-taleb
Title: Prager: Fiscal conservatism needs social conservatism
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 22, 2013, 09:28:38 AM
second post of the morning:


'Fiscal' Conservatism Needs 'Social' Conservatism
Tuesday, January 22, 2013
Dennis Prager

For some years now, we have been told about a major division within American conservatism: fiscal conservatives vs. social conservatives.  This division is hurting conservatism and hurting America -- because the survival of American values depends on both fiscal and social conservatism. Furthermore, the division is logically and morally untenable. A conservative conserves all American values, not just economic ones.

By "social conservatism," I am referring to the second and third components of what I call the American Trinity -- liberty, "In God We Trust" and "E Pluribus Unum."

It is worth noting that a similar bifurcation does not exist on the left. One never hears the term "fiscal liberals." Why not? Because those who consider themselves liberals are liberal across the board -- fiscally and socially.  The left understands that values are a package. Apparently, many conservatives -- libertarians, for example -- do not. They think that we can sustain liberty while ignoring God and religion and ignoring American nationalism and exceptionalism.

It is true that small government and liberty are at the heart of the American experiment. But they are dependent on two other values: a God-based religious vigor in the society and the melting pot ideal.  Or, to put it another way, small government and fiscal conservatism will not survive the victory of social leftism.

The Founding Fathers made clear that liberty is dependent upon not only small government but also society's affirming God-based values. Not having imbibed the Enlightenment foolishness that people are basically good, the founders understood that in order for a society to prosper without big government, its citizens have to hold themselves accountable to something other than -- higher than -- the brute force of the state. That something is God and the Judeo-Christian religions that are its vehicle.

Those who believe in a small state -- fiscal conservatives -- need to know that a small state is dependent on a big God and, therefore, on a God-centered population. Look at Europe for confirmation. As secularism expands, so does the state. And that is what is happening in America.  Fiscal conservatives, such as libertarians, don't make this connection. They view small government as an achievable end in and of itself, divorced from the social/religious values the American people hold.

Western and Chinese apologists for the Communist Chinese regime argue the same thing -- that economic freedom is divisible from other values.

I am in no way morally equating American libertarians and other fiscal conservatives to Chinese Communists. Libertarians hate communism. I am only pointing out that they agree on the separation of economic and social values, on the dispensability of God and religion, on the idea that America should not interfere in other nations -- no matter how great the evil -- and more.

Fiscal conservatives who consider themselves conservative need to imagine what type of America they will bequeath to future generations if the only conservative value that survives is fiscal conservatism.

Do you really want to live in an America that is godless, where liberty derives from the state and where moral values derive from each individual's heart? In an America that ignores genocides abroad? In an America that so radically redefines marriage -- the union of anyone who loves anyone -- that it no longer has a moral justification to prohibit polygamy or incest? In an America that has no moral opinion on abortion, even if performed solely, let us say, for reasons of the fetus's gender? In an America that embraces multiculturalism rather than the melting pot ideal?

My goal here is not to expel from the conservative movement those who are conservative only with regard to fiscal matters. May God bless them (even those who do not believe in him), and may they long vote Republican. My goal is to bring them to social conservatism.

Because a conservative conserves. And not just money.
Title: VDH: Europe's wishes came true
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 24, 2013, 05:03:27 AM
Europe's Wishes Came True
Victor Davis Hanson
Jan 24, 2013
 
Almost a decade ago, Europeans and many progressive Americans were lamenting how the United States was going to miss out on the 21st-century paradigm symbolized by the robust European Union. Neanderthal Americans were importing ever more oil while waging a costly "war on terror" and fighting two conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Our budget deficit in 2003 hit $374 billion.

The EU avoided foreign conflicts and embraced soft power. Its declining military budgets and centralized transnational government ensured that it could address global warming and fund ever-expanding entitlements. Even the poorer Mediterranean nations reached new heights of prosperity. The Greek economy soared. Spain's real estate market was to become the hottest in the world. Italy seemed to resemble Germany more than Portugal.

President George W. Bush was not just hated in Europe, but caricatured as the symbol of backward free-market capitalism, rank American consumerism and U.S. imperialism abroad. Only with the election of the progressive Barack Obama would Europe finally find a like-minded, sophisticated American president.

Yet European Union prosperity has now proved a phantom -- one conjured up by accounting gimmickry, borrowed German money and corrupt EU apparatchiks. Neither the EU at large nor most individual European nations can sustain their present rate of redistributionist entitlements. To end cash transfers across borders spells the breakup of the union. To embrace austerity at home ensures near anarchy in the streets of individual nations.

The worry is not that Greece will implode, but whether France can remain financially solvent. More realistic countries such as Germany, Latvia and Sweden are quietly drifting away from the socialist model, preferring balanced budgets, lower taxes and fewer regulations.

The EU may be worried that Obama's United States is becoming more like the EU at the very time many in Europe are starting to take a second, kinder look at the old free-market model of the United States. An America of low taxes, low unemployment and robust growth once meant a huge market for European goods, as the United States drove a prosperous world economy and had enough cash to protect the Western world.

All that has changed after four years of unprecedented $1 trillion-plus U.S. budget deficits. National debt has hit a historic $16 trillion, with no reversal in sight. Unemployment has been at 7.8 percent or above for 48 consecutive months. GDP growth is calcified at an anemic 2 percent. Record numbers of Americans draw on unemployment, disability and food stamps.

There is even greater irony in foreign policy. Europe blasted Bush for his cooked-up war on radical Islam and his needless interventions abroad. But with the ascendency of Barack Obama, Europe finally got a mirror image of itself. Both Iraq and Afghanistan will have ended according to strict timetables of withdrawal, not with any lasting security on the ground.

France and Great Britain went into Libya, while America "led from behind." Muammar Gadhafi's dictatorship was replaced with chaos that has birthed a terrorist haven that threatens to become the new Afghanistan. The odious anti-Semite and Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohamed Morsi now runs a near-bankrupt Egypt that looks a lot like Haiti. After the messes in Libya and Egypt, the West watched impotently as Syria became something like Mogadishu.

France is forced to unilaterally intervene in its old colony, Mali, to stop an Islamist takeover of the entire country. America watches from the sidelines, as undermanned French forces are offered meager logistical support from EU allies. In Algeria, radical Islamists brazenly executed dozens of Western hostages.

Yet Obama has found widespread public support for his new isolationism. ((VDH needs to recognize the role of Bush's poor leadership in both Afpakia and Iraq.  It is not illogical for we the people to doubt our government's ability to accomplish what it sets out to do.  This is a subject I've been meaning to address for some time.))  Apparently, liberals prefer to borrow money at home for more entitlements rather than spend money on interventions abroad. Many conservatives enjoy the schadenfreude of watching as Europe plays (poorly) the old thankless unilateral role of the United States.

Obama has loudly promised a pivot in the U.S. security profile toward the Pacific region. That change represents the unspoken reality that socialist redistribution has reduced Europe to near-irrelevancy. Supposedly, free-market Asian economies are the new nexus of wealth and power. Oil and gas finds in America are providing unexpected energy independence from the Persian Gulf. Or perhaps the new strategic emphasis reflects the demographic realities of the Obama coalition of various minority groups -- and fewer European-American voters.

The Hawaiian-born and Indonesia-raised president certainly seems more interested in Asia than he does in the old colonial Mediterranean world of aging and shrinking European nations, Arab quagmires, oil intrigue, Islamic terrorists and the Israeli-Palestinian open sore.

In short, Europe got the European Union of its hopes and a changed America of its fantasies -- but both are rapidly becoming its worst nightmares.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on January 24, 2013, 07:18:10 AM
Nice VDH piece,

"That change represents the unspoken reality that socialist redistribution has reduced Europe to near-irrelevancy. Supposedly, free-market Asian economies are the new nexus of wealth and power. Oil and gas finds in America are providing unexpected energy independence from the Persian Gulf. Or perhaps the new strategic emphasis reflects the demographic realities of the Obama coalition of various minority groups -- and fewer European-American voters.

With regard to the first sentence I agree the US is going the same way.  With regards to the third sentence could be a boom if Obama would get out of the way - he won't.  He will allow it to proceed but lonely under extraordinary more than necessary regulation so HE and his kingdom is in control of it all - not the private sector.  And at the same time he will tax the sector so high it's growth will still be muffled and we will still have to pay up for our energy.

AS for the last statement certainly the strategy is to find and maintain a coalition of groups over 51 % to ram through and subjugate those who "cling on to their guns and religion".

VDH, who I agree with Doug is one of our best thinkers and writers.   Has anyone seen if he has written any pieces on strategy.  On how to turn the ship around *before* it sinks?  Personally I am convinced it is too late.

I have lost all faith in Republican leaders.   They botched the Hillary interview.  It was embarrassing to watch her go on offense against them and they respond not with outrage, indignation, making it damn clear  that she should be responsible and guilty for the deaths they let her turn it around and make them look like fools.    As noted by one cable talk hawlk , she came prepared.   She had her team of lawyers prepare her for all questions, all comers, prepare even a crying charade (why is ok for supposedly tough women in important positions to cry - if it was a man he would be ridiculed) and our guys were all fragmented, unable to stay focused, directed, like a good tough prosecutor who is PREPARED.     Woo is us.    EVen this simple task with which they had months - they can't even get this right.

This convinces me more than ever the Republicans will not be able to rise to the occasion.   And Karl Rove is back in the thick of the strategizing.
Title: Steyn: What difference, at this point, does it make?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 26, 2013, 08:36:28 AM


If I'm following this correctly, according to one spokesperson for the Marine Corps Band, at Monday's Inauguration Beyoncé lip-synced to the national anthem but the band accompanied her live. However, according to a second spokesperson, it was the band who were pretending to play to a tape while Beyoncé sang along live. So one or the other of them was faking it. Or maybe both were. Or neither. I'd ask Chuck Schumer, the master of ceremonies, who was standing right behind her, but he spent the entire performance staring at her butt. If it was her butt, that is. It might just have been the bulge of the Radio Shack cassette player she was miming to. In an America with an ever more tenuous grip on reality, there's so little to be sure of.

Whether Beyoncé was lip-syncing to the band or the band were lip-syncing to Beyoncé is like one of those red pill / blue pill choices from "The Matrix." Was President Obama lip-syncing to the Founders, rooting his inaugural address in the earliest expressions of American identity? ("The patriots of 1776 ... gave to us a Republic, a government of, and by, and for the people, entrusting each generation to keep safe our founding creed.") Or maybe the Founders were lip-syncing to him as he appropriated the vision of the first generation of Americans and yoked it ("preserving our individual freedoms ultimately requires collective action") to a statist pitch they would have found utterly repugnant.

The whole event had the air of a simulacrum: It looked like a presidential inauguration, but the sound was tinny and not quite in sync. Obama mouthed along to a canned vocal track: "We reject the belief that America must choose between caring for the generation that built this country and investing in the generation that will build its future." That's great! It's always reassuring to know the head of state is going to take issue will all those people wedded to the "belief" that America needs either to shove every granny off the cliff or stake its newborns out on the tundra for the wolves to finish off. When it comes to facing the music, Obama is peerless at making a song and dance about tunes nobody's whistling without ever once warbling the real big numbers (16 trillion). But, like Beyoncé, he's totally cool and has a cute butt.

A couple of days later, it fell to the 45th president-in-waiting to encapsulate the ethos of the age in one deft sound bite: What difference does it make? Hillary Clinton's instantly famous riposte at the Benghazi hearings is such a perfect distillation that it surely deserves to be the national motto of the United States. They should put it on Paul Krugman's trillion-dollar coin, and in the presidential oath:

"Do you solemnly swear to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States?"

"Sure. What difference, at this point, does it make?"

Well, it's the difference between cool and reality – and, as Hillary's confident reply appeared to suggest, and the delirious media reception of it confirmed, reality comes a poor second in the Obama era. The presumption of conservatives has always been that, one day, cold, dull reality would pierce the klieg-light sheen of Obama's glamour. Indeed, that was the premise of Mitt Romney's reductive presidential campaign. But, just as Beyoncé will always be way cooler than some no-name operatic soprano or a male voice choir, so Obama will always be cooler than a bunch of squaresville yawneroos boring on about jobs and debt and entitlement reform. Hillary's cocksure sneer to Sen. Johnson of Wisconsin made it explicit. At a basic level, the "difference" is the difference between truth and falsity, but the subtext took it a stage further: no matter what actually happened that night in Benghazi, you poor sad loser Republicans will never succeed in imposing that reality and its consequences on this administration.

And so a congressional hearing – one of the famous "checks and balances" of the American system – is reduced to just another piece of Beltway theater. "The form was still the same, but the animating health and vigor were fled," as Gibbon wrote in "The Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire." But he's totally uncool, too. So Hillary lip-synced far more than Beyoncé, and was adored for it. "As I have said many times, I take responsibility," she said. In Washington, the bold declarative oft-stated acceptance of responsibility is the classic substitute for responsibility: rhetorically "taking responsibility," preferably "many times," absolves one from the need to take actual responsibility even once.

In the very same self-serving testimony, the Secretary of State denied that she'd ever seen the late Ambassador Stevens' cables about the deteriorating security situation in Libya on the grounds that "1.43 million cables come to my office" – and she can't be expected to see all of them, or any. She is as out of it as President Jefferson, who complained to his Secretary of State James Madison, "We have not heard from our ambassador in Spain for two years. If we have not heard from him this year, let us write him a letter." Today, things are even worse. Hillary has apparently not heard from any of our 1.43 million ambassadors for four years. When a foreign head of state receives the credentials of the senior emissary of the United States, he might carelessly assume that the chap surely has a line of communication back to the government he represents. For six centuries or so, this has been the minimal requirement for functioning interstate relations. But Secretary Clinton has just testified that, in the government of the most powerful nation on Earth, there is no reliable means by which a serving ambassador can report to the Cabinet minister responsible for foreign policy. And nobody cares: What difference does it make?

Nor was the late Christopher Stevens any old ambassador but, rather, Secretary Clinton's close personal friend "Chris." It was all "Chris" this, "Chris" that, when Secretary Clinton and President Obama delivered their maudlin eulogies over the flag-draped coffin of their "friend." Gosh, you'd think if they were on such intimate terms, "Chris" might have had Hillary's email address, but apparently not. He was just one of 1.43 million close personal friends cabling the State Department every hour of the day.

Four Americans are dead, but not a single person involved in the attack and the murders has been held to account. Hey, what difference does it make? Lip-syncing the national anthem beats singing it. Peddling a fictitious narrative over the coffin of your "friend" is more real than being an incompetent boss to your most vulnerable employees. And mouthing warmed-over clichés about vowing to "bring to justice" those responsible is way easier than actually bringing anyone to justice.

And so it goes:

Another six trillion in debt? What difference does it make?

An economic stimulus bill that stimulates nothing remotely connected with the economy? What difference does it make?

The Arab Spring? Aw, whose heart isn't stirred by those exhilarating scenes of joyful students celebrating in Tahrir Square? And who cares, after the cameras depart, that Egypt's in the hands of a Jew-hating 9/11 truther whose goons burn churches and sexually assault uncovered women?

Obama is the ultimate reality show, and real reality can't compete. Stalin famously scoffed, "How many divisions has the Pope?" Secretary Clinton was more audacious: How many divisions has reality? Not enough.

©MARK STEYN
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: DougMacG on January 26, 2013, 10:07:10 AM
Mark Steyn nails it in so many ways.  What difference does it make?]  "At a basic level, the "difference" is the difference between truth and falsity"

Clinton is saying: we went with falsity, we won and you can't do anything about it.

The exact quote I think was: "With all due respect, the fact is we had four dead Americans,  Was it because of a protest or is it because of guys out for a walk one night and they decide they go kill some Americans? What difference, at this point, does it make?"

With continuing disregard for the truth, neither of those scenarios is what happened either.  Wasn't it a planned terror attack or do we still not know.   Guys out for a walk??  One night??  It was the anniversary of 9/11!!!  Does she still not get it??

'What difference does it make' is not an answer to a congressional inquiry.  My first reading of this was that her reaction was scripted and rehearsed, answer a question with a question etc.  More accurate and very funny is CCP's reaction, good thing she didn't have a lamp within reach.  She was pissed.  You have to know your Clinton history to get that one.


Title: David Mamet and the Fools of Chelm
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 27, 2013, 05:03:52 PM


Gun Laws and the Fools of Chelm†
Jan 29, 2013 12:00 AM EST
NEWSWEEK
By David Mamet
The individual is not only best qualified to provide his own personal defense, he is the only one qualified to do so. .
 
Karl Marx summed up Communism as “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” This is a good, pithy saying, which, in practice, has succeeded in bringing, upon those under its sway, misery, poverty, rape, torture, slavery, and death.

For the saying implies but does not name the effective agency of its supposed utopia. The agency is called “The State,” and the motto, fleshed out, for the benefit of the easily confused must read “The State will take from each according to his ability: the State will give to each according to his needs.” “Needs and abilities” are, of course, subjective. So the operative statement may be reduced to “the State shall take, the State shall give.”

All of us have had dealings with the State, and have found, to our chagrin, or, indeed, terror, that we were not dealing with well-meaning public servants or even with ideologues but with overworked, harried bureaucrats. These, as all bureaucrats, obtain and hold their jobs by complying with directions and suppressing the desire to employ initiative, compassion, or indeed, common sense. They are paid to follow orders.

Rule by bureaucrats and functionaries is an example of the first part of the Marxist equation: that the Government shall determine the individual’s abilities.

As rules by the Government are one-size-fits-all, any governmental determination of an individual’s abilities must be based on a bureaucratic assessment of the lowest possible denominator. The government, for example, has determined that black people (somehow) have fewer abilities than white people, and, so, must be given certain preferences. Anyone acquainted with both black and white people knows this assessment is not only absurd but monstrous. And yet it is the law.

President Obama, in his reelection campaign, referred frequently to the “needs” of himself and his opponent, alleging that each has more money than he “needs.”

But where in the Constitution is it written that the Government is in charge of determining “needs”? And note that the president did not say “I have more money than I need,” but “You and I have more than we need.” Who elected him to speak for another citizen?

It is not the constitutional prerogative of the Government to determine needs. One person may need (or want) more leisure, another more work; one more adventure, another more security, and so on. It is this diversity that makes a country, indeed a state, a city, a church, or a family, healthy. “One-size-fits-all,” and that size determined by the State has a name, and that name is “slavery.”

The Founding Fathers, far from being ideologues, were not even politicians. They were an assortment of businessmen, writers, teachers, planters; men, in short, who knew something of the world, which is to say, of Human Nature. Their struggle to draft a set of rules acceptable to each other was based on the assumption that we human beings, in the mass, are no damned good—that we are biddable, easily confused, and that we may easily be motivated by a Politician, which is to say, a huckster, mounting a soapbox and inflaming our passions.

The Constitution’s drafters did not require a wag to teach them that power corrupts: they had experienced it in the person of King George. The American secession was announced by reference to his abuses of power: “He has obstructed the administration of Justice … he has made Judges dependant on his will alone … He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our Constitution, and unacknowledged by our Laws … He has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass out people and to eat out their substance … imposed taxes upon us without our consent… [He has] fundamentally altered the forms of our government.”
 
Who threatens American society most: law-abiding citizens or criminals? (Matt Rourke/AP)

This is a chillingly familiar set of grievances; and its recrudescence was foreseen by the Founders. They realized that King George was not an individual case, but the inevitable outcome of unfettered power; that any person or group with the power to tax, to form laws, and to enforce them by arms will default to dictatorship, absent the constant unflagging scrutiny of the governed, and their severe untempered insistence upon compliance with law.

The Founders recognized that Government is quite literally a necessary evil, that there must be opposition, between its various branches, and between political parties, for these are the only ways to temper the individual’s greed for power and the electorates’ desires for peace by submission to coercion or blandishment.

Healthy government, as that based upon our Constitution, is strife. It awakens anxiety, passion, fervor, and, indeed, hatred and chicanery, both in pursuit of private gain and of public good. Those who promise to relieve us of the burden through their personal or ideological excellence, those who claim to hold the Magic Beans, are simply confidence men. Their emergence is inevitable, and our individual opposition to and rejection of them, as they emerge, must be blunt and sure; if they are arrogant, willful, duplicitous, or simply wrong, they must be replaced, else they will consolidate power, and use the treasury to buy votes, and deprive us of our liberties. It was to guard us against this inevitable decay of government that the Constitution was written. Its purpose was and is not to enthrone a Government superior to an imperfect and confused electorate, but to protect us from such a government.

Many are opposed to private ownership of firearms, and their opposition comes under several heads. Their specific objections are answerable retail, but a wholesale response is that the Second Amendment guarantees the right of the citizens to keep and bear arms. On a lower level of abstraction, there are more than 2 million instances a year of the armed citizen deterring or stopping armed criminals; a number four times that of all crimes involving firearms.

The Left loves a phantom statistic that a firearm in the hands of a citizen is X times more likely to cause accidental damage than to be used in the prevention of crime, but what is there about criminals that ensures that their gun use is accident-free? If, indeed, a firearm were more dangerous to its possessors than to potential aggressors, would it not make sense for the government to arm all criminals, and let them accidentally shoot themselves? Is this absurd? Yes, and yet the government, of course, is arming criminals.

Violence by firearms is most prevalent in big cities with the strictest gun laws. In Chicago and Washington, D.C., for example, it is only the criminals who have guns, the law-abiding populace having been disarmed, and so crime runs riot.

Cities of similar size in Texas, Florida, Arizona, and elsewhere, which leave the citizen the right to keep and bear arms, guaranteed in the Constitution, typically are much safer. More legal guns equal less crime. What criminal would be foolish enough to rob a gun store? But the government alleges that the citizen does not need this or that gun, number of guns, or amount of ammunition.But President Obama, it seems, does.

He has just passed a bill that extends to him and his family protection, around the clock and for life, by the Secret Service. He, evidently, feels that he is best qualified to determine his needs, and, of course, he is. As I am best qualified to determine mine.

For it is, again, only the Marxists who assert that the government, which is to say the busy, corrupted, and hypocritical fools most elected officials are (have you ever had lunch with one?) should regulate gun ownership based on its assessment of needs.

Q. Who “needs” an assault rifle?

A. No one outside the military and the police. I concur.

An assault weapon is that which used to be called a “submachine gun.” That is, a handheld long gun that will fire continuously as long as the trigger is held down.
These have been illegal in private hands (barring those collectors who have passed the stringent scrutiny of the Federal Government) since 1934. Outside these few legal possessors, there are none in private hands. They may be found in the hands of criminals. But criminals, let us reflect, by definition, are those who will not abide by the laws. What purpose will passing more laws serve?

My grandmother came from Russian Poland, near the Polish city of Chelm. Chelm was celebrated, by the Ashkenazi Jews, as the place where the fools dwelt. And my grandmother loved to tell the traditional stories of Chelm.

Its residents, for example, once decided that there was no point in having the sun shine during the day, when it was light out—it would be better should it shine at night, when it was dark. Similarly, we modern Solons delight in passing gun laws that, in their entirety, amount to “making crime illegal.”
 
What possible purpose in declaring schools “gun-free zones”? Who bringing a gun, with evil intent, into a school would be deterred by the sign?
Ah, but perhaps one, legally carrying a gun, might bring it into the school.
 
If President Obama determines a need to defend his family, why can’t we defend our own? (Jonathan Ernst, Reuters/Landov)

Good.

We need more armed citizens in the schools.

Walk down Madison Avenue in New York. Many posh stores have, on view, or behind a two-way mirror, an armed guard. Walk into most any pawnshop, jewelry story, currency exchange, gold store in the country, and there will be an armed guard nearby. Why? As currency, jewelry, gold are precious. Who complains about the presence of these armed guards? And is this wealth more precious than our children?

Apparently it is: for the Left adduces arguments against armed presence in the school but not in the wristwatch stores. Q. How many accidental shootings occurred last year in jewelry stores, or on any premises with armed security guards?

Why not then, for the love of God, have an armed presence in the schools? It could be done at the cost of a pistol (several hundred dollars), and a few hours of training (that’s all the security guards get). Why not offer teachers, administrators, custodians, a small extra stipend for completing a firearms-safety course and carrying a concealed weapon to school? The arguments to the contrary escape me.

Why do I specify concealed carry? As if the weapons are concealed, any potential malefactor must assume that anyone on the premises he means to disrupt may be armed—a deterrent of even attempted violence.

Yes, but we should check all applicants for firearms for a criminal record?

Anyone applying to purchase a handgun has, since 1968, filled out a form certifying he is not a fugitive from justice, a convicted criminal, or mentally deficient. These forms, tens and tens of millions of them, rest, conceivably, somewhere in the vast repository. How are they checked? Are they checked? By what agency, with what monies? The country is broke. Do we actually want another agency staffed by bureaucrats for whom there is no funding?

The police do not exist to protect the individual. They exist to cordon off the crime scene and attempt to apprehend the criminal. We individuals are guaranteed by the Constitution the right to self-defense. This right is not the Government’s to “award” us. They have never been granted it.

The so-called assault weapons ban is a hoax. It is a political appeal to the ignorant. The guns it supposedly banned have been illegal (as above) for 78 years. Did the ban make them “more” illegal? The ban addresses only the appearance of weapons, not their operation.

Will increased cosmetic measures make anyone safer? They, like all efforts at disarmament, will put the citizenry more at risk. Disarmament rests on the assumption that all people are good, and, basically, want the same things.

But if all people were basically good, why would we, increasingly, pass more and more elaborate laws?

The individual is not only best qualified to provide his own personal defense, he is the only one qualified to do so: and his right to do so is guaranteed by the Constitution.
President Obama seems to understand the Constitution as a “set of suggestions.” I cannot endorse his performance in office, but he wins my respect for taking those steps he deems necessary to ensure the safety of his family. Why would he want to prohibit me from doing the same?
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on January 27, 2013, 07:43:24 PM
"This is a chillingly familiar set of grievances; and its recrudescence was foreseen by the Founders. They realized that King George was not an individual case, but the inevitable outcome of unfettered power; that any person or group with the power to tax, to form laws, and to enforce them by arms will default to dictatorship, absent the constant unflagging scrutiny of the governed, and their severe untempered insistence upon compliance with law."

Yes.  I think the Republicans, or at least the Conservative ones are evolving their message that I hope will resonate with more people than those of us already in the choir.  (I am a convert! :-D)

While the left tries to point to the private sector rich and powerful (unless one is a liberal Democrat - they get a "pass"; like Hollywood; like Buffett) we can point to Washington DC.   Rush pointed this out the other day as I posted.  Hannity who I admittedly shied away from for being too "unobjective" if you will, did a great show this weekend on Fox.  The richest county in the US is DC.  Seven of the top richest counties in the entire country are surrounding DC.   Multiple members of the Houses have family members getting rich as lobbyists.   

IF anyone has driven around DC knows there are a lot of slums.  So the fact that it is still the richest county in the US says a lot.  (Actually is DC really a county?)

Maybe the Repubs can have some success at turning the !% argument against the left with the corruption of the ruling government elite
Title: Fleming: Freedom!
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 30, 2013, 08:44:26 AM


"[W]e spend so much time on these individual issues like guns and health care, but what we need to take on as a country is the topic of freedom overall. What are rights? What is the purpose of the government? All our arguments are because we disagree on those questions, but that's not usually where the discussion is. If we want to change things, we need people thinking on these fundamental questions." --columnist Frank J. Fleming
Title: The Crisis of American Conservatism
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 09, 2013, 07:11:09 AM


http://www.fpri.org/articles/2012/12/crisis-american-conservatism-inherent-contradictions-and-end-road
Title: Interesting thought pieces: The man who shot bin Laden
Post by: DougMacG on February 12, 2013, 11:25:41 AM
Long piece on Esquire, March 2013.  Because of secrecy and security, this guy comes back and starts over keeping his claim to fame hushed.
http://www.esquire.com/features/man-who-shot-osama-bin-laden-0313?src=rss

February 11, 2013, 6:00 AM
The Man Who Killed Osama bin Laden... Is Screwed  By Phil Bronstein,  former editor of the San Francisco Chronicle


For the first time, the Navy SEAL who killed Osama bin Laden tells his story — speaking not just about the raid and the three shots that changed history, but abou3t the personal aftermath for himself and his family. And the startling failure of the United States government to help its most experienced an skilled warriors carry on with their lives.
http://www.esquire.com/features/man-who-shot-osama-bin-laden-0313?src=rss
Title: Dan Bongino: It's about people control.
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 13, 2013, 09:14:48 PM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8WLXhahw_A
Title: VDH: Why do propserous societies give up?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 14, 2013, 08:24:59 AM
Why do once-successful societies ossify and decline?

Hundreds of reasons have been adduced for the fall of Rome and the end of the Old Regime in 18th-century France. Reasons run from inflation and excessive spending to resource depletion and enemy invasion, as historians attempt to understand the sudden collapse of the Mycenaeans, the Aztecs and, apparently, the modern Greeks. In literature from Catullus to Edward Gibbon, wealth and leisure -- and who gets the most of both -- more often than poverty and exhaustion implode civilization.

One recurring theme seems consistent in Athenian literature on the eve of the city's takeover by Macedon: social squabbling over slicing up a shrinking pie. Athenian speeches from that era make frequent reference to lawsuits over property and inheritance, evading taxes, and fudging eligibility for the dole. After the end of the Roman Republic, reactionary Latin literature -- from the likes of Juvenal, Petronius, Suetonius, Tacitus -- pointed to "bread and circuses," as well as excessive wealth, corruption and top-heavy government.

For Gibbon and later French scholars, "Byzantine" became a pejorative description of a top-heavy Greek bureaucracy that could not tax enough vanishing producers to sustain a growing number of bureaucrats. In antiquity, inflating the currency by turning out cheap bronze coins was often the favored way to pay off public debts, while the law became fluid to address popular demands rather than to protect time-honored justice.

After the end of World War II, most of today's powerhouses were either in ruins or still preindustrial -- China, France, Germany, Japan, South Korea, Russia and Taiwan. Only the United States and Great Britain had sophisticated economies that survived the destruction of the war. Both were poised to resupply a devastated world with new ships, cars, machinery and communications.

In comparison to Frankfurt, the factories of 1945 Liverpool had survived mostly intact. Yet Britain missed out on the postwar German economic miracles, in part because after the deprivations of the war, the war-weary British turned to class warfare and nationalized their main industries, which soon became uncompetitive.

The gradual decline of a society is often a self-induced process of trying to meet ever-expanding appetites, rather than a physical inability to produce past levels of food and fuel, or to maintain adequate defense. Americans have never had safer workplaces or more sophisticated medical care -- and never have so many been on disability.

King Xerxes' huge Persian force of 250,000 sailors and soldiers could not defeat a rather poor Greece in 480-479 B.C. Yet a century and a half later, a much smaller invading force from the north under Philip II of Macedon overwhelmed the far more prosperous Greek descendants of the victors of Salamis.

For hundreds of years, the outmanned legions of the tiny and poor Roman Republic survived foreign invasions. Yet centuries later, tribal Goths, Visigoths, Vandals and Huns overran the huge Mediterranean-wide Roman Empire.

Given our unsustainable national debt -- nearly $17 trillion and climbing -- America is said to be in decline, although we face no devastating plague, nuclear holocaust, or shortage of oil or food.

Americans have never led such affluent material lives -- at least as measured by access to cell phones, big-screen TVs, cheap jet travel and fast food. Obesity rather than malnutrition is the greater threat to national health. Flash mobs go after electronics stores, not food markets. Americans spend more money on Botox, face lifts and tummy tucks than on the age-old scourges of polio, small pox and malaria.

If Martians looked at the small box houses, one-car families and primitive consumer goods of the 1950s, they would have thought the postwar United States, despite a balanced budget in 1956, was impoverished. In comparison, an indebted contemporary America would seem to aliens flush with cash, as consumers jostle for each new update to their iPhones.

By any historical marker, the future of Americans has never been brighter. The United States has it all: undreamed new finds of natural gas and oil, the world's pre-eminent food production, continual technological wizardly, strong demographic growth, a superb military and constitutional stability.

Yet we don't talk confidently about capitalizing and expanding on our natural and inherited wealth. Instead, Americans bicker over entitlement spoils as the nation continues to pile up trillion-dollar-plus deficits. Enforced equality rather than liberty is the new national creed. The medicine of cutting back on government goodies seems far worse than the disease of borrowing trillions from the unborn to pay for them.

In August 1945, Hiroshima was in shambles, while Detroit was among the most innovative and wealthiest cities in the world. Contemporary Hiroshima now resembles a prosperous Detroit of 1945; parts of Detroit look like they were bombed decades ago.

History has shown that a government's redistribution of shrinking wealth, in preference to a private sector's creation of new sources of it, can prove more destructive than even the most deadly enemy.
Title: VDH: DB forum is wrong
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 19, 2013, 02:13:03 PM


America's Bright Future

by Victor Davis Hanson (Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow)

 In three key sectors of the economy, the country is experiencing a rejuvenating renaissance.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Talk of American decline is in the air. And why not when the aggregate U.S. debt nears $17 trillion? Unemployment has not dipped below 7.8 percent in 48 months. GDP growth over the last four years has averaged an anemic 2 percent. The economy contracted in the last quarter of 2012. Record numbers of Americans are on food stamps, unemployment, and disability insurance.
 
“Lead from behind” has become a catchphrase for a new American retrenchment abroad. Exhausted from a decade of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and with huge defense cuts on the horizon, the United States has ceded leadership in the out-of-vogue “war on terror” to France to stave off an Islamist takeover of Mali. The Arab world certainly seems more unstable than ever. A Muslim Brotherhood government presides over an unstable Egypt. The death toll in Syria now exceeds 60,000. Islamist terrorists slaughtered Westerner hostages in Algeria, months after the murder of an American ambassador and three others in Benghazi. Mediterranean Libya is starting to resemble Somalia.

     
  Illustration by Barbara Kelley

There are reasons for pessimism about the world in general and America in particular, which is more divided politically than at any period since the turbulent 1960s—torn apart by fresh arguments over the Second Amendment, the debt, the federalization of health care, and proposed amnesty for illegal aliens. Still, the general despair does not mean that there are not reasons for optimism, especially when we compare our lot with that of other countries. The United States still enjoys the most robust demography of the major Western industrial nations. Its Constitution ensures a political stability not found elsewhere. There is no danger of political dissolution of the sort that the European Union faces. We have been spared the riots and turbulence of Greece.
 
An American Farming Renaissance

More importantly, recent revolutionary trends in the United States have either gone unnoticed or been taken largely for granted. Yet these underappreciated developments offer hope for an American renaissance unlike any in our recent memory—mostly despite, rather than because of, the federal government that currently borrows nearly $.40 for each dollar it spends.
 
Take agriculture. Just a decade ago, there was talk of the United States becoming a net food importer. Commodity prices were largely flat. Farming seemed to be losing its competitive edge plagued as it was by high-energy costs, flat food demand, and prognostications of crippling droughts brought on by man-made climate change. But a perfect storm of events has suddenly redefined the American farm in a way analogous to the mechanized revolution of the 1920s.
 
China and India have reached a proverbial tipping-point, where millions of newly upscale consumers have broadened their tastes for everything from almonds and raisins to processed foods that require substantial bulk purchases of grains, rice, meats, and corn syrup. If only 20 percent of the Indian and Chinese population have the capital to afford new choices in imported food, such percentages still represent about 400 million new Westernized consumers, a class larger than most other nations.
 
An unnecessary biofuels program has diverted valuable acreage to ethanol production, creating commodity shortages while boosting prices and adding to the new sense of demand for American produce. Meanwhile, new fertilizers and chemicals, genetic engineering, and computerized mechanization have done the nearly impossible—they have transformed an efficient agriculture of the late twentieth century into an even more productive new enterprise. In 2011, the United States set a new record of over $140 billion in export agricultural earnings, after ensuring 315 million Americans the most diverse, safest, and cheapest food in the world.
 
In my own environs of Central California, the sudden changes are mind-boggling. California exported a record $21 billion worth of produce from some 400 crops last year. Almond acreage has soared to 760,000 acres, while prices remain higher in real dollars than when the industry was at just a quarter of its present plantings—a situation quite unlike the past cycles of overplanting and crashing prices. New rootstocks, improved cultivars, second-generation drip irrigation technologies, and computerized fertilization regimens have made once sandy and marginal soils as productive for fruits and nuts as deep loams.
 
Along with increased efficiency and vast new markets, America’s farm competitors are also facing new challenges. The huge European Union subsidy program is proving unsustainable, especially its once vast cash transfers to Mediterranean farmers. Energy and labor prices are far higher in Europe and regulations more Byzantine.  Elsewhere, most of the world’s agriculture does not operate according to free-market principles and remains hampered by state interference.
 
The Future of Fuel

Along with food, fuel is another one of modern life’s essential resources—and in that domain, too, America could soon be preeminent. The traditional notion of “peak oil” and the once gloomy prognostications of a future of ever increasing bills for imported natural gas have almost instantly disappeared. Thanks to the new technologies of fracking and horizontal drilling, America not only has the largest combined gas, oil, and coal resources in the world, but may also become the largest producer of all three by 2020.
 
Four years ago, vast new finds of gas in the Midwest and East, along with extensive discoveries in California and Alaska, suggested that we might in the distant future need only to rely on North American produced oil and gas. Today, the once widely mocked Nixon-era slogan of self-sufficiency in oil and gas could become a reality. If the current development of oil and gas on private lands were expanded by new federal leases on public lands, self-sufficiency could come even more rapidly—especially if trucks and heavy equipment change over to natural gas fuels. California alone may have 35 billion barrels of oil reserves in its newly appreciated Monterey Shale formation, a natural treasure that could dwarf the riches of Napa Valley wine industry or Hollywood.
 
The gradual displacement of coal by natural gas for electrical production will not only help clean the American atmosphere in a way federally-subsidized wind and solar power have not, but also create an industry of coal exportation to energy hungry, resource poor China and India. As a result of plentiful supplies of domestic natural gas, American consumers will save over $100 billion in reduced household bills over the next decade.
 
With the new production, even at falling prices, gas and oil revenues provided a half-trillion dollar boost to the economy in 2011 alone. Given the new competitive pricing of domestic American fuels, long departed energy-dependent industries in petrochemicals, fertilizers, and steel and aluminum production may once again return to American shores. The 1970s nightmare of oil embargoes, the 1990s scenario of fighting in the Middle East to help keep open the sea-lanes to the Persian Gulf, and the astronomical oil and gas importation costs of the 2000s may all be ended by thousands of new American gas and oil wells, requiring millions of new American workers.
 
Silicon Valley Rejuvenated
 
During much of the 1980s, there was wide scale apprehension that the new computer age belonged to Asia. Apple’s miracle was nearly defunct. Steve Jobs remained exiled from the company for a decade, as he struggled with a number of start-up companies. Experimental high definition television was forecast soon to become a veritable Japanese monopoly. Sony bought Rockefeller Center and Pebble Beach was sold to Japanese investors—all supposed proof of a superior Asian economic model of government and private industry partnership. The dot-com crash at the end of the 1990s was a reminder that the best days of Silicon Valley had come and gone.
 
Yet just two decades later, the genius of Silicon Valley and its second-generation affiliates across the country, from Washington to Texas, have redefined modern living in a truly global sense. Each morning, billions worldwide wake up to multitask on their iPhones, check in with their Facebook accounts, run Google searches on their laptops and iPads, tap into Microsoft word programs, and buy things on Amazon. While much of the labor to produce these items is outsourced abroad, and while cheaper knock-off models and versions have captured a large share of the commodity purchases, so far, the United States continues to produce the majority of first-generation ideas and innovations that fuel the information and communication revolutions. A once nearly insolvent Apple of the 1980s is currently the world’s second largest publicly traded company, with a market capitalization value of some $626 billion.
 
Despite high labor costs, overregulation, and increasing taxation, American tech companies profit from an informal and meritocratic culture that rewards talent more than it relies on hierarchies of birth, class, and tribe so common abroad. While American public school education is in crisis, and although the humanities have been politicized on our college campuses, American math, science, engineering, and professional schools in business and medicine still remain preeminent. That explains why in a recent Times Higher Education ranking of world universities, eight of the top ten institutions were American. California alone had more universities—Berkeley, Cal Tech, Stanford, and UCLA—among the top fifteen ranked campuses than any single nation except the United States as a whole.
 
Bouts of collective pessimism are common in America, and the current episode of collective depression is understandable given our mounting debt and unsustainable entitlements. But we should remember one thing. In the past, when we feared seemingly great rising powers—from the dynamic Germany of the 1930s, to the Soviet juggernaut of the 1950s that put a man into space, to the supposedly unstoppable Japan, Inc. paradigm of the 1980s, to the much admired post-national European Union collective of the 1990s— all such rivals eventually imploded or sputtered. America, meanwhile,  recouped and regained its preeminence in peace and war.
 
Why such resilience? Largely because of our far greater reliance on free markets, transparent meritocracy, rewards for individual initiative and success, comparatively smaller government, and constitutionally-protected liberties. Despite the present despondency—over two-thirds of Americans in most polls believe their country is on the wrong track—these uniquely American attributes are propelling revolutions in fuels, agriculture, and informational sciences in a manner unlike anywhere abroad. That American breakthroughs in fracking, horizontal drilling, improved agricultural protocols and technologies, mobile communications, social networking, and online commerce have developed without fanfare and largely without government aid should remind us that the sources of our continual renaissance lie more outside than inside Washington.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: G M on February 19, 2013, 02:35:44 PM
I hope he is correct.
Title: My use of the noun Politburo
Post by: ccp on February 20, 2013, 09:23:06 PM
for big government that is controlled by party members in the dem party, and our liberal universities and have unilaterally decided religion, guns, soda, endless taxation, bigger government oversight and intrusion into our lives is a good thing all  the while progressing towards the end goal of total single government domination of all of humanity has been hijacked by
Bob Woodward and misapplied to Karl Rove group.

The only think keeping the liberal politburo in power is the continuously refined calculations on how to bribe just enough coalitions of voters to stay in power.
Title: Orphan Voters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 23, 2013, 03:34:56 PM
Haven't had a chance to read this yet but it comes recommended:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2013/02/20/as-country-club-republicans-link-up-with-the-democratic-ruling-class-millions-of-voters-are-orphaned/
Title: Re: Orphan Voters
Post by: G M on February 23, 2013, 03:37:29 PM
Haven't had a chance to read this yet but it comes recommended:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2013/02/20/as-country-club-republicans-link-up-with-the-democratic-ruling-class-millions-of-voters-are-orphaned/

Making the republican party even more "democrat-lite"-ish isn't the path to victory, or good for our already diminished future.
Title: What if One Day We Get a Bad President?
Post by: G M on February 23, 2013, 03:42:54 PM
http://pjmedia.com/blog/what-if-one-day-we-get-a-bad-president/?singlepage=true

What if One Day We Get a Bad President?

The consequences of being saddled with a non-progressive, dumb chief executive are too horrible to imagine.





by
Frank J. Fleming

Bio





February 20, 2013 - 12:12 am


I believe I have noticed a problem with President Obama’s declaring that he can blow up Americans with drone strikes without due process.
 
Stick with me here; this is a bit of an esoteric argument. Now, like most people, I celebrate every time Obama obtains more power. Now he can do whatever he feels needs to be done for the country and not be burdened with getting the approval of his lessers first. So the more powerful the presidency, the better for us all. But I had a terrible thought: What if one day we get a bad president?

 


For instance, take this power to kill Americans with drones. No one worries that Obama will abuse such a power — I mean, we’re talking about a man who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize just for existing. It’s not like he’s ever going to use that power to blow us up (though, according to his lawyers, he legally could… and if he did, we’d just have to assume he had really, really good reasons). But just imagine if that power wound up in the hands of a president like George W. Bush. He’d probably blow up people with the drone all day, thinking he was playing a video game (“I’m gettin’ me a high score!”). Or worse yet, think of handing Dick Cheney that power. He’d most likely declare a unilateral war on kittens and puppies, blowing them up from the sky and then collecting the tears of children for some evil Halliburton project.
 
And the power to incinerate people isn’t the only power I fear could fall into the wrong hands. Like, what about the new authority the government has under President Obama to force people to buy things? That’s great for Obama to have, because he can force people to buy things they really do need to buy, like health care (and maybe in the future other things we all should really have, like hybrids or his memoirs). But think of what could happen if a president not as enlightened as Obama wielded such a power, backed by a Congress full of Republican troglodytes? They could make us all buy AR-15s or Big Gulps or Bibles or other dangerous, awful things.
 
Furthermore, there is Obama’s position on compromise. Now, we all agree that it’s absolutely ridiculous that Obama has to yield at all to those mindless Republican thugs who somehow hold a majority in Congress. Obama is a brilliant man, so why should he compromise to the ideals of those so far beneath him? That’s why he doesn’t ever yield and agree to spending cuts and just asks for more taxes on the rich. And if somehow taxing the rich more and more doesn’t make the math add up, then we’ll ignore the stupid math. I mean, that’s why we haven’t had a federal budget for years: Why in the world should what Obama can do be limited by some arbitrary squiggles called “numbers”? So Obama will absolutely not compromise with crazed right-wingers or math.
 
But think of what would happen if a bad president took such an attitude? He’d spend all his time making speeches, listing out promises that would never be fulfilled, while Congress would be locked in constant gridlock. What a pointless, worthless presidency that would be.
 
Also, the latitude we give Obama might become a problem if bad presidents come to expect it. Normally, if the unemployment rate hovered around 8% for a president’s entire term (and was only that low because millions of people had given up even looking for work) while at the same time we were burdened with high gas prices and economic growth ground to a halt, we would say that president was a complete and utter failure. Basically the worst president imaginable. We’d not only want that worthless wretch kicked out of office before he could do any more damage to our economy, we’d want him forced to wander the streets while citizens pelted him with rotten fruit and shouted obscenities at him.
 
With Obama, though, we’re very understanding of what’s happened to the economy because of the mess he inherited from Bush. Obviously, someone as smart as him, with all his economic experience from community organizing and voting in legislatures, is doing the absolute best anyone could expect, and four years later he’s almost got unemployment going in the right direction. But what if a Republican becomes president and has a similar record and expects the same leeway? He could be a total disaster on the economy — America could have results almost as bad as during the last four years — and then finish his first term and expect a pat on the head and a cookie like we gave Obama.
 
So we are setting a lot of precedents during Obama’s presidency that will give us something to fear if we elect a bad president someday. Still, I know what many of you are thinking: “We’ll just never elect a bad president again.” It does seem like we’ve fixed the system so we won’t ever elect a bad president, as Mitt Romney, who despises 47% of Americans, lost quite handily to Obama (who despises a much smaller percentage of Americans — only rich people and business owners). Romney wanted to outlaw vaginas and tie poor people to the top of his car, and there was something about binders that was very bad though hard to coherently explain why, and the people rejected him. But it wasn’t that long ago that George W. Bush was elected and reelected. And what if in 2016 people aren’t enamored with Hillary Clinton’s charm or wowed by literally one of the sharpest intellects we’ve ever seen, Joe Biden? What if instead they fall for that psychopath Marco Rubio, despite his affinity for drinking water?
 
The obvious solution is to have Obama be president forever, but that’s not practical. Eventually Obama will get bored and want to be president of a country he likes better than this one. Another idea would be to pass a law that if the president is an enlightened progressive, he shall have dictator-like powers and not have anything he does questioned by Congress or the Supreme Court, but if he’s a right-winger, he’ll need a supermajority in Congress to do anything. The only problem is that the Republicans in Congress love to block all commonsense legislation like that.
 
So the only option left is to consider curtailing a bit of the power we’re allowing Obama, because someday we might have a president who is completely detached from average Americans, doesn’t care about our problems, and ruins everything he touches — someone completely unlike Obama. I mean, just imagine all that power Obama has in the hands of someone who completely sucks at being president. The economy would be ruined, we’d have disastrous situations abroad, and our liberties would be threatened. It would be a lot like now, but instead of it being Bush’s fault, it would be the fault of the current president. So to keep that from happening, we’ll have to do the hard thing and put more limitations on Obama’s power. I’m sure he’ll understand and not drone-strike us.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 24, 2013, 05:47:26 PM
http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2013/02/24/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+daybydaycartoon%2FkUnt+%28Day+by+Day+Cartoon+by+Chris+Muir%29#006855
Title: Geraghty on Gaffes
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 26, 2013, 08:34:00 AM

Morning Jolt – February 26, 2013
By Jim Geraghty
John Kerry Was For 'Kyrzakhstan' Before He Was Against It

This is kind of an easy lay-up for mockery . . .

John Kerry has suffered his first gaffe as the new US secretary of state, inventing the nation of 'Kyrzakhstan'
In an embarrassing slip of the tongue, Mr Kerry last week praised US diplomats working to secure "democratic institutions" in the Central Asian country, which does not exist.

The newly minted diplomat was referring to Kyrgyzstan, a poor, landlocked nation of 5.5 million, which he appeared to confuse with its resource-rich neighbour to the north, Kazakhstan.

The State Department kindly omitted the error in the official transcript of Wednesday's speech, which Mr Kerry delivered on the eve of his first foreign trip as secretary of state.

(All of that wacky capitalization reflects that we're reading the Telegraph of London.)

A little while back, I pointed out that we need a better, more specific term for the statements our current political journalism calls "gaffes" because the media was applying the term to all kinds of statements:

Verbal misstatements and grammatical errors: "57 states," Joe Biden calling his running mate "Barack America," etc.

Brain freezes: Rick Perry in the debate. Of course this looks bad during a moment in the spotlight, but anyone who has never had this happen to them, raise your hand. Uh-huh. Didn't think so.

Honest statements that are admissions against self-interest: President Obama declaring during a meeting of his Jobs Council, "Shovel-ready was not as . . . uh . . . shovel-ready as we expected."

Unusual ideas: Newt Gingrich's pay-kids-to-be-janitors idea.

Genuinely harmful erroneous statements: Joe Biden saying, "I wouldn't go anywhere in confined places now," in an appearance designed to reassure the public about swine flu, or Michele Bachmann repeating a mother's claim that Gardasil causes retardation.

Controversial or unpopular points: See Romney's Olympics and Palestinian statements above.

So John Kerry said 'Kyrzakhstan' when he meant 'Kyrgyzstan,' a small but strategically important Central Asian nation that has suffered from a vowel drought for many decades. Big deal? Small deal? I'd argue that our assessment of Kerry's intelligence or verbal acuity ought to be based on factors bigger than this.

So why are some gaffes turned into big deals and others not? Narrative, right? If you're Sarah Palin, Dan Quayle, Mitt Romney, or certain other Republican figures, you've been accused of being a bumbling imbecile, and thus every time you slip up words in a public appearance it's further evidence of your imbecility. But when Barack Obama mentions "57 states," it's just a reflection that he's tired.

By the way, a few Democrats do get the "dumb guy" treatment. Here's Representative Sheila Jackson Lee, speaking on the floor of the House, July 2010: "Today, we have two Vietnams, side by side, North and South, exchanging and working. We may not agree with all that North Vietnam is doing, but they are living in peace. I would look for a better human rights record for North Vietnam, but they are living side by side."

Yes, this is the same woman who in 1997 asked a NASA scientist if the Mars Pathfinder had photographed the flag that Neil Armstrong had planted . . . You know, the one on the moon.

There are genuinely stupid people in our political world, people who are probably too stupid to stay in the offices they hold. But it's not their misstatements that worry me; it's their silly or stupid ideas.  I think the "reset button with Russia" represented ludicrously wishful thinking, pretending that tensions between the U.S. and Moscow had to do with some sort of "cowboy attitude" from President Bush instead of the two nations having fundamentally different and conflicting interests and goals in the world, coupled with the unnervingly intense paranoia and ruthlessness of Vladimir Putin. Someday Russia may have a leader who's a nicer guy than Putin, but the Russian government's worldview is probably still going to see the world as a zero-sum game, where if we're winning, they're losing.

Toss in the widespread, bipartisan support for negotiating with the Taliban. Obviously, David Petraeus and John McCain aren't stupid. But they, along with most of our foreign-policy thinkers, believed that at some point, the Taliban would wear down and be ready for good faith negotiations, where we would be able to trust them to live up to their side of the argument. Surprise! Turns out the efforts at talks went nowhere, and the Taliban made unrealistic demands for prisoner swaps. You have a better chance of hashing out the paperwork with a rabid dog.

Over at the American Thinker, Shoshana Bryen looks at the non-gaffe parts of the speech that ought to concern us:

Secretary Kerry equated foreign aid with promoting moderation. "The investments that we make support our efforts to counter terrorism and violent extremism wherever it flourishes. And we will continue to help countries provide their own security, use diplomacy where possible, and support those allies who take the fight to terrorists."
Consider Pakistan. Between 2001 and 2012, the United States spent almost $18 billion in Pakistan. From 2009-2011, under the Kerry-Lugar-Berman bill, the U.S. provided $2.8 billion in civilian aid, including $1 billion in emergency humanitarian aid. About $855 million of that was in the FY2011. And yet, our bilateral relationship is defined mainly by arguments over drone strikes and collateral damage. Regarding Pakistani willingness to "take the fight to the terrorists," Pakistan-based Taliban groups remain committed to attacks on targets in both Pakistan and Afghanistan and more than 300 civilians, mainly Shiites in a predominantly Sunni country, were killed in sectarian assaults in 2012. More than 80 people were killed last week when a bomb went off in a largely Shiite marketplace.

Is more American money going to change and moderate Pakistan? Or those who support the United States in opposition to a nuclear Iran?

See, this is stupidity (or perhaps better described as bad judgment) with policy consequences.

Okay, one easy lay-up, from Jim Treacher: "You probably haven't heard of Kyrzakhstan, but it's one of the most dangerous places on Earth. It's so perilous that you can't find it on any map. It's just that scary. . . . I notice Kerry didn't mention Libya in his list of dangerous places. Apparently, everything's been going just fine there. But then . . . what difference does it make?

By the way, is the Marco Rubio water-drink thing over? Anybody else still think that the water drink was a potential career-ender, as the CNN chyron suggested?

Title: Walter Russell Mead: The World and its Leaders
Post by: DougMacG on March 04, 2013, 08:51:00 AM
Walter Russell Mead writing on Friday, March 1, online for the American Interest:

Financial markets around the world reeled when the Italians rejected the European status quo and their own political establishment in the last election. This should not have come as such a surprise; few political establishments anywhere in the democratic world are as spectacularly rotten as Italy's, and the European status quo is the biggest man-made policy disaster since the fall of the Iron Curtain.

Italian voters don't have a lot of use for their leaders, and it's hard to say they are wrong. The left wants to preserve the unsustainable, the right doesn't have what it takes, and the center is dominated by short term, self centered careerists whizzing through the well oiled revolving doors that connect business with government. But how different are politics elsewhere? Voters ultimately weary of repeat policy failure by the well connected and well educated, and whether you look at Europe, the United States or Japan, the failures of national leadership keep piling up.

Americans often like to believe that our problems are as exceptional as our strengths, but our stale and ineffective political establishment looks a lot like its peers around the world. The American elite is not alone in its inconsequential futility and its lack of strategic vision; world leaders everywhere are falling down on the job.

The assumption that the people guiding the destinies of the world's major powers know what they are doing is a comforting one, but there's not a lot of evidence to support it. The "pass it to find out what's in it" health care 'reform' in the United States, the vast stinking policy corpse that is European monetary union, the failure of establishments everywhere to figure out the simple arithmetical problems that our welfare states are encountering because of the demographic transition, the metastasizing tumor of corruption also known as the Chinese Communist Party: none of these suggest that the world is being governed with unusual wisdom.
Title: VDH: Medieval CA
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 07, 2013, 02:33:20 PM

Gates Close at Dusk
 
At about dusk, I close two large metal gates to my driveways. The security lights come on, and I enjoy intramural life. I am not protecting my dogs from coyotes, although there are many in the vineyard, but rather the farmhouse from the odd array of visitors, the lost, and criminals that can make up the now normal nighttime world of central California. If you doubt me, just peruse the Fresno Bee for the sort of things that occur nightly.

 


From the past year I offer the following catalogue of those who have visited the farm from dusk to dawn outside the walls: A half-dozen noble caballeros riding down the road on magnificent steeds, outfitted in satin and silver with majestic sombreros, who unfortunately timed their ride a bit late and found themselves in the dark, and in need of stables (my lawn had to do). Some female text-messagers sitting in the car presumably giving directions to thieves — perhaps those who on three occasions last year stole copper wire from pumps. A decent enough soul, presumably from Mexico, broke and out of gas, who spoke neither English nor Spanish; a would-be “scavenger” who had all sorts of stolen items in his new truck, seeking cash customers for his wares; and dozens more. A sort of California Canterbury Tales of nocturnal pilgrims, interesting in retrospect, a bit scarifying at 11 p.m. honking or yelling at the closed gate. Sorry, folks, the compound gates close at 9 p.m.
 
The surrounding landscape was once a checkerboard of small 60-200 acre family farms. The house I live in never had a lock for its seven outside doors. Weeknights were spent in local get-togethers — the Walnut Improvement Club, Eastern Star, the Odd Fellows, the Masons, the Grange, Farm Bureau — exotic names long gone with the breezes. In most cases, the children of the neighboring dead yeomen have long left, and the parcels conglomerated by larger corporations or purchased by absentee owners, or leased. The old farmhouses are mostly rented out to immigrants. Agriculture is booming; but farming is long dead. The land grows food as never before, but no longer families.
 
The Feudal Pyramid
 
A medieval society can be defined in a variety of ways. In terms of class, there is more a pyramidal culture. A vast peasantry sits below an elite of clergy and lords above — but with little or no independent middle class in-between.
 
I think California is getting there quickly — with the U.S. soon to follow.
 
For our version of the clergy, think public employees, whose salary and benefits are anywhere from 30-40% higher than their counterparts in the private sector. In California, the security guard in the symphony parking lot makes minimum wage and has no pension, even as he faces as much danger as his counterpart in the state police. And like medieval churchmen, our public-employee clergy positions are often nepotic. Families focus on getting the next generation a coveted spot at the DMV, the county assessor’s office, or the local high school. Like the vast tax-free estate of the clergy that both nearly broke feudalism and yet was beyond reproach, so too California’s half-trillion-dollar unfunded pensions and bond liabilities are considered sacrosanct. To question the pay or the performance of a California teacher or prison guard is to win the same scorn that was once earned from ridiculing the local friar. If suggesting that the man of god who was too rotund as a result of living freely on his tax-exempt church land was worthy of stoning, then so too suggesting that our teachers or highway-patrol officers are paid incommensurately with the quality of students in our schools or the safety on our roads is likewise politically incorrect right-wing heresy.
 
The aristocracy is, of course, our coastal elite, the five or six million high earners who live near the Pacific Ocean from the Bay Area to San Diego. They are more likely to administer both our inherited and natural wealth, symbolized by everything from top universities, Hollywood, and state government to Silicon Valley, Napa Valley, and California finance and natural resources. Their children, if industrious and motivated, are prepped at Stanford and Berkeley, interned at proper law firms and government bureaus, and usually inherit enough of their patrimony and early enough to afford the $1,000 per square foot price that a Newport or Atherton keep costs — along with its flocks of attendant nannies, gardeners, neighborhood security guards, and maintenance people.
 
The middle is still shrinking. They are mostly the over three million who have left California for no-tax Nevada or Texas, or crime-free Idaho, or sane Wyoming and Utah. High-paying jobs in manufacturing, construction, and energy are disappearing. The aristocracy, whose religion is the green government, believes that to extend the conditions of its own privilege to millions of less well-educated and less correct-thinking others (e.g., build new affordable condos alongside interstate 280, open up the Malibu hills to low-income development, start drilling for oil and gas in the Monterey Shale formation, build some more dams to ensure irrigation water, widen the 99 and 101 to three lanes from northern to southern California) is to destroy the hallowed lord-serf system altogether.
 
The aristocracy sails in the summer, not powerboats. In winter, it tends to ski, not use snowmobiles. Its SUVs are Volvo and Mercedes, not second-hand Tahoes and Yukons. Ideally, its kids go to UC, Stanford, or USC, not to CSU campuses in Turlock, Fresno, or Bakersfield. The aristocracy believes in noblesse oblige, but it is a funny sort of one: shutting down a quarter-million acres of farmland is good for all of us, especially for a three-inch bait fish, and even for the farmworkers and managers who must lose their jobs for a just cause. Keeping derricks out of the coastal panorama is wonderful for rich and poor — and really, who would want a smelly job anyway out on a nauseous oil platform? To paraphrase Steven Chu, European-priced gas is the goal: $10 a gallon would thin out the traffic, keep the right people on the roads, clean up the air, and make high-speed rail economical.
 
The disappearing middle-class worker in California, who is not connected to the aristocracy or part of the clergy, gets up to work in places like insolvent Stockton, Modesto, or San Bernardino. He drives on substandard roads to a job that does not quite pay for his once overpriced but now underwater house, or the most expensive and highly taxed gas in the nation. Yet he shrugs that he cannot so easily leave a state, with a house without equity, and yet cannot quite stay either — when the nation’s highest sales and income taxes lead to the nation’s nearly worst schools and infrastructure.
 
If he whines, he is told that he is lucky to live in California with its climate, weather, and culture — and so must pay a premium in taxes, regulations, and high costs, despite receiving very little in return in the form of state services. So without a vibrant middle class, the medieval world thrives.
 
In medieval California, the elderly and retired sometimes head to the foothills, a poorer man’s coast, where there is less crime and less worry over what California has become. I never quite fathomed fully why a classical Greece of city-states on the plains became an Ottoman Greece of villages perched on mountain slopes. I knew, of course, in the abstract that Greeks fled Turks to escape the taxman, conversion to Islam, and the Janissaries, but I can now appreciate that maybe such a sense of impending dread is real in interior California, as valley towns become darker at night from lights that no longer work, and streets that are no longer safe and assumptions that are no longer familiar. Even the most liberal retired professor seems to head for the hills once his thirty years at CSU are up.
 
The peasantry — one third of the nation’s welfare recipients, in a state in which almost a quarter of the population is officially “poor” — lives mostly in the central interior, or in the vast Los Angeles basin, or in small-service enclaves along the coasts — a Redwood City or Seaside, where they tend to the aristocracy’s daily needs. The aristocracy makes enough not to mind high taxes, and takes care of the tax-freed peasantry by offering the nation’s highest public benefits, including generous EBD and WIC cards, Section 8 housing, daycare help, education supplements, legal assistance, and cash grants.
 
Those in Old Pasadena, Pacific Palisades, Montecito, Pacific Grove, Menlo Park, Hillsborough, Piedmont, and Pacific Heights mostly avoid the peasantry in Merced and Tulare. That many of their tax dollars end up there and that billions of their state’s earnings go out of state as remittances to Latin America mean little. There is so much good weather, high life, and money in coastal California that the expense to keep the peasantry content is simply a small cost of being an aristocrat in paradise. Indeed they romanticize the peasantry in a way that they most surely do not the embattled middle class.
 
The Medieval Mind
 
But feudal California is more than a sense of bifurcated classes and locations. It adopts a closed medieval state of mind too. The Renaissance marked a lessening of the intolerance and censorship of the medieval clergy. Art, literature, science, and philosophy were freed from shibboleths of Aristotle, Church doctrine, and formalistic conventions. But California has of yet had no such renaissance. In our closed, anti-scientific, and deductive way of thinking, Solyndra was a success. Drilling for cheap natural gas in the Monterey Shale formation would be seen as failure. When our governor told Rick Perry that Californians did not need to cool off in 110 degree heat through “fossil fuel”-fed air conditioning, he did not mean that solar panels were energizing green air conditioners in Barstow, but rather that our elites on the coast have natural air conditioning; it’s called the Pacific Ocean. And although wind and solar provide miniscule amounts of California energy, it matters little, given that coastal elites enjoy 70 degree weather year-round and keep their power bills low. PG&E’s and Southern California Edison’s astronomical energy costs are for “little people,” the middle classes in the hot and cold interior and mountains. The aristocracy sets the regulations that make power soar, and the interior pays far more of the costs.
 
In medieval California, certain thinking is off-limits, just as during the tenth century in France or in the eighth century in Constantinople. I once wrote, on these pages, that one could not any more determine exactly the racial and ethnic heritage of millions of intermarried and integrated Californians, much less could universities easily determine why particular California ancestries qualified for affirmative action and others did not (e.g., was it due to ongoing racism, skin color, historical claims against the majority culture, purposes of “diversity”? etc.). The next thing I knew the Stanford Daily was calling for me to be disciplined by the Hoover Institution. Indeed, these monthly reflections on California earn on occasion an angry op-ed in a California paper, dozens of hate emails — and even now and then a phone call from an irate state official.
 
You see, in medieval California the orthodoxy of the clergy and aristocracy must remain unquestioned. Wind and solar are superior energy sources to natural gas or other fossil fuels. The blue-state model of high taxes and big government has been redeemed by the public-approved tax hikes of 2012.
 
Acres of huge windmills or vast solar-panel farms do not cause as many environmental or aesthetic problems as does a confined natural gas-fed power plant. The degree to which we are not entirely green is due not to science, but to the greed of private enterprise. The problem with illegal immigration is not that it is illegal, much less that the state is overwhelmed in its idealistic mission to provide near instant parity to millions who arrived without legality, capital, education, or English from the abject poverty of central Mexico, but that a largely white, aging, and disappearing nativist class is obstructing multicultural solutions. Our public employees are the most successful and competent in the nation and that is why they make more than others elsewhere, but still not enough to provide a lifestyle commensurate with their talents and industry.
 
The present baby-boom generation and its offspring are brilliant and are Renaissance figures; they gave us, after all, everything from Facebook to Apple and Google. They are superior moral beings too, and so do not outsource, avoid taxes, bundle campaign donations, seek insider subsidized federal loans, or in general say un-nice things. In contrast, our ancestors were pedestrian and reactionary. After all, they did silly, almost inexplicable things like build Hetch Hetchy, the Big Creek hydroelectric project, the L.A. freeway system, and the California Water Project. We will use these quirky inheritances a bit longer, but would never replicate them.
 
California’s public education curriculum is medieval. There are certain religious tenets that are sacrosanct and indoctrinate the young. A grasping white male Christian culture gave us a burdensome legacy of racism, sexism, homophobia, and nativism. Courageous Latino, black, gay, and female heroes fought on the barricades to ensure us the present utopia. We name new schools after 19th Century Mexican bandits who were hung for murder, not any longer after Father Serra or Luther Burbank.
 
To the degree there is a Stanford University, or Southern California Edison, or a California oil or farming industry, it was due not to those who designed or invented such institutions, but to the unsung heroes who did the actual manual labor of laying cement and hammering nails. Fossil fuels and nuclear power are largely a curse; wind, solar, and biofuel are our future. Only heretics and reactionary witches doubt the sanctity of gay marriage, or pine for anti-abortion legislation and capital punishment — leftover prejudices from our pre-green government past. When we say “celebrate diversity” at our universities, we do not mean celebrate all sorts of thinking, from radical left to reactionary right, from the atheist mind to the Church of Christ zealot, from the capitalist to the socialist, but rather we define diversity as superficial appearance, and the degree to which different races and genders march in lockstep to a uniform ideological drummer. In medieval California there is no empiricism: the public schools are successful, the CSU system is reaching new academic heights, and high-speed rail is shortly to replace our crowded freeways.
 
Extra Moenia
 
Finally, the medieval world was less secure than that of the Renaissance and Enlightenment that followed. It was feudal in the sense of walled cities and castles, and a lack of easy, safe, and cheap transportation that had once been assured in Roman times. When I drive down to Malibu or over to Palo Alto, it can be a feudal experience, even though contemporary cars are safer and more dependable. But the problem is not the machine, but the increasingly medieval mind that pilots it.
 
Huge trucks stay in the middle lane of the rare three-lane freeway, and often hog the fast lane when there are only two. I count dozens of Highway Patrol officers lasering cars. They seem less interested in the flatbed trucks that have no tarps over their green cuttings, lumber, mattresses, and scrap iron. Every tenth car is weaving, due not to drink but texting.
 
Some stretches — the 99 south of Visalia, the 101 south of Gilroy, the 152 a mile after Casa de Fruta, the convergence of the 405 and 101 — are truly scary driving experiences. At night on the way home I make it a point not to get gas on the west side of the 99 as it bisects Fresno. I don’t stop in an Inglewood or even Delano at dark. Driving Manning Avenue or Nees Avenue out to I-5 is a sort of Russian Roulette: at which intersection will the cross-traffic driver run the stop sign? I avoid 4-6 p.m., when too many have too many alcoholic beverages on their way home. In feudal California we may liken a drive to Napa or Newport to a sort of medieval pilgrimage to the Middle East, a trip sometimes fraught with danger, in need of careful planning and enormous patience. Some days 180 miles is less than three hours and we are in Renaissance times; at others it is six hours and we are back to the byways of medieval Italy.
 
Of course, there is an excitement in the medieval World: the clash of a postmodern Palo Alto with premodern Parlier three hours away, or consider the notion of the Stanford legacy student on the I-5 passing the van of the meth lab operator. I never know quite what I’ll see when I go into Selma, only that it will be unexpected, sometimes bizarre, and require all my sensatory talents to make sense of or avoid it. My grandparents talked of their grandparents coming out west to California in the 1870s. I may one day tell my grandkids that I made it to Los Angeles safely and back!
Title: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces: Jack Kemp - The Wagon
Post by: DougMacG on March 08, 2013, 10:28:03 AM
Jack Kemp in 1979:  "You need both groups, both parties. The Democrats are the party of redistribution. The Republicans must be the part of growth."

In 1979, all of Washington was run by Democrats.

Correcting and sourcing a great analogy that I botched in recent posts.
------------

"Think about a wagon. It is a simple but forceful way of visualizing an important aspect of government. The wagon is loaded here. It's unloaded over there. The folks who are loading it are Republicans. The folks who are unloading it are Democrats. You need both groups, both parties. The Democrats are the party of redistribution. The Republicans must be the part of growth. It is useless to argue, as some libertarians do, that we do not need redistribution at all. The people, as a people, rightly insist that the whole look after the weakest of its members."

Jack Kemp's 1979 book, “An American Renaissance.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/post/jack-kemp-and-the-contemporary-gop/2011/03/29/AF3EQyQE_blog.html

----------
I told this story at a gathering in a friend's living room after listening to a young woman, daughter of Kieth Ellison's predecessor and a Lt. Governor candidate in her own right, tell us that the difference between the parties was that Democrats care about others while Republicans care only about themselves.  She heard that we need both parties and gasped, "I've never heard that before!"
Title: Tyranny of the ZIP Code
Post by: bigdog on March 10, 2013, 08:47:08 AM
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112558/zip-code-history-how-they-define-us

Title: WaTimes/Doran: America's New Religion
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 13, 2013, 08:35:32 AM
DORAN: America’s new ‘religion’
The culture is ugly and coarse but it’s all relative
There are many explanations for President Obama’s popularity: his personal charisma, demographics, Republican bungling and dependency on government. Yet rarely is culture invoked as the reason why so many Americans have embraced his agenda.
To many, talk about culture evokes classical art and music, and often prompts blank stares, but if we define culture as the predominant beliefs and behavior of a society, what can be said about 21st century American culture?
Few believe that culture really matters in a society where millions of voices are competing for attention and notoriety, but America has embraced a predominant culture: relativism, the belief that I decide what is right or wrong, true or false, that there is nothing that is objectively right or wrong, true or false.
Relativism has become America’s national “religion.” In recent decades, Americans have adopted this attitude because it allows them to indulge their passions and ambitions guilt-free, or because they have been brainwashed into believing that adopting this attitude is a mark of sophistication. While many Democrats have embraced the ideal of a welfare state, many libertarian Republicans have embraced the competing ideal of the autonomous man. Neither acknowledges an authority higher than the state or the individual in matters of right and wrong, truth and falsehood.
It is unlikely that many Americans would consciously choose a culture of coarseness, so why is American culture — TV, radio, films, books and advertising — so immersed in violence, indiscriminate sex, superficiality, pornography and ugliness?
There is much talk about our freedom to choose, but we rarely hear that we can’t choose the consequences of our choices. When relativism is adopted by a society, it does not produce beauty, but coarseness, if not as the desired outcome, then as an unintended consequence. One can see this occurring in America, in a descent to the lowest common denominator when it comes to art, music, literature, public discourse and entertainment.
When no one can judge with anything like authority, then the ugliest TV show is on par with a program that depicts heroic virtue. There is nothing “bad” about someone who makes exploitative films, nor is there anything “good” about someone who strives to produce something beautiful. Relativism fosters self-indulgence over self-governance, hedonism over self-giving.
Examine cultures that have embraced relativism, and you find moribund societies with few children, “green religions” that value the planet over human life, the glorification of physical stimulation and “self-fulfillment,” and nihilism that proceeds from life having nothing to offer apart from what can be extracted from it in a few short years.
Without reliably honorable norms of human behavior, constant stimulation often becomes the paradigm for happiness, frequently resulting in enslavement to drugs, alcohol, sex, pornography, violence or the passive malaise of video games and the Internet.
Relativism diminishes our intellectual capacity. How many today are capable of constructing a rigorously logical argument to support their position? When there is no right or wrong, when nothing is true or false, then the need for rigorous reasoning and meticulous research diminishes. Debating positions becomes a matter of appealing to an audience’s passions, of attacking the person making the opposing argument or of demonstrating how the consequences of a particular position will either favor or harm the audience.
This zeitgeist has been ably captured by Mr. Obama and his allies, with references to “fairness,” “tolerance” and “cultural sensitivity” replacing “anachronistic” concepts like right and wrong, truth and falsehood.
Despite what is peddled in our universities, by Hollywood and on Madison Avenue, we are not equipped to decide what is right and wrong solely by ourselves. Attempting to do so makes us less human, not more human. Relativism produces self-absorbed men and women who can’t think, but who believe themselves to be knowledgeable, sophisticated and liberated. It is a dead-end existence masquerading as freedom.
Thomas M. Doran, a writer and educator, is the author most recently of “Terrapin” (Ignatius Press, 2012).


Title: Virginity Pledges
Post by: bigdog on March 19, 2013, 10:54:26 AM
http://www.whiteoliphaunt.com/duckofminerva/2013/03/human-rights-treaties-are-like-virginity-pledges.html

From the article:

In the category of “pop-culture-not-talked-about-by-normal-Ducks,” People magazine’s cover story last week was on ABC’s The Bachelor, Sean Lowe, and his pledge to remain a virgin re-virgin until his wedding night.  As someone who graduated high school in town of less than 1500 in Kansas, I think this type of pledge is pretty typical: many teens and young adults make a pledge, usually in front of an audience, to avoid sexual conduct until marriage.  And, not surprisingly, most teens do not keep their pledge.[1]  In fact, there are some studies that indicate that these virginity pledges are associated with riskier sexual behavior.
Title: Steyn: Geopolitical ADHD
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 26, 2013, 08:25:04 AM


Ten years ago, along with three-quarters of the American people, including the men just appointed as President Obama’s secretaries of state and defense, I supported the invasion of Iraq. A decade on, unlike most of the American people, including John Kerry and Chuck Hagel, I’ll stand by that original judgment.
 
None of us can say what would have happened had Saddam Hussein remained in power. He might now be engaged in a nuclear-arms race with Iran. One or other of his even more psychotic sons, the late Uday or Qusay, could be in power. The Arab Spring might have come to Iraq, and surely even more bloodily than in Syria.
 
But these are speculations best left to the authors of “alternative histories.” In the real world, how did things turn out?
 
Three weeks after Operation Shock and Awe began, the early-bird naysayers were already warning of massive humanitarian devastation and civil war. Neither happened. Overcompensating somewhat for all the doom-mongering, I wrote in Britain’s Daily Telegraph that “a year from now Basra will have a lower crime rate than most London boroughs.” Close enough. Major General Andy Salmon, the British commander in southern Iraq, eventually declared of Basra that “on a per capita basis, if you look at the violence statistics, it is less dangerous than Manchester.”
 
Ten years ago, expert opinion was that Iraq was a phony-baloney entity imposed on the map by distant colonial powers. Joe Biden, you’ll recall, advocated dividing the country into three separate states, which for the Democrats held out the enticing prospect of having three separate quagmires to blame on Bush, but for the Iraqis had little appeal. “As long as you respect its inherently confederal nature,” I argued, “it’ll work fine.” As for the supposedly secessionist Kurds, “they’ll settle for being Scotland or Quebec.” And so it turned out. The Times of London, last week: “Ten Years after Saddam, Iraqi Kurds Have Never Had It So Good.” In Kurdistan as in Quebec, there is a pervasive unsavory tribal cronyism, but on the other hand, unlike Quebec City, Erbil is booming.
 
What of the rest of the country? Iraq, I suggested, would wind up “at a bare minimum, the least badly governed state in the Arab world, and, at best, pleasant, civilized and thriving.” I’ll stand by my worst-case scenario there. Unlike the emerging “reforms” in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, and Syria, politics in Iraq has remained flawed but, by the standards of the grimly Islamist Arab Spring, broadly secular.
 
So I like the way a lot of the trees fell. But I missed the forest.
 
On the previous Western liberation of Mesopotamia, when General Maude took Baghdad from the Turks in 1917, British troops found a very different city from the Saddamite squat of 2003: In a lively, jostling, cosmopolitan metropolis, 40 percent of the population was Jewish. I wasn’t so deluded as to think the Jews would be back, but I hoped something of Baghdad’s lost vigor might return. Granted that most of the Arab world, from Tangiers to Alexandria, is considerably less “multicultural” than it was in mid century, the remorseless extinction of Iraq’s Christian community this last decade is appalling — and, given that it happened on America’s watch, utterly shameful. Like the bland acknowledgement deep in a State Department “International Religious Freedom Report” that the last church in Afghanistan was burned to the ground in 2010, it testifies to the superpower’s impotence, not “internationally” but in client states entirely bankrolled by us.
 
Foreigners see this more clearly than Americans. As Goh Chok Tong, the prime minister of Singapore, said on a visit to Washington in 2004, “The key issue is no longer WMD or even the role of the U.N. The central issue is America’s credibility and will to prevail.” Just so. If you live in Tikrit or Fallujah, the Iraq War was about Iraq. If you live anywhere else on the planet, the Iraq War was about America, and the unceasing drumbeat of “quagmire” and “exit strategy” communicated to the world an emptiness at the heart of American power — like the toppled statue of Saddam that proved to be hollow. On the eleventh anniversary of 9/11, mobs trashed U.S. embassies across the region with impunity. A rather more motivated crowd showed up in Benghazi, killed four Americans, including the ambassador, and correctly calculated they would face no retribution. Like the Taliban in Afghanistan, these guys have reached their own judgment about American “credibility” and “will” — as have more potent forces yet biding their time, from Moscow to Beijing.
==============
A few weeks after the fall of Saddam, on little more than a whim, I rented a beat-up Nissan at Amman Airport and, without telling the car-hire bloke, drove east across the Iraqi border and into the Sunni Triangle. I could not easily make the same journey today: Western journalists now require the permission of the central government to enter Anbar Province. But for a brief period in the spring of 2003 we were the “strong horse” and even a dainty little media gelding such as myself was accorded a measure of respect by the natives. At a rest area on the highway between Rutba and Ramadi, I fell into conversation with one of the locals. Having had to veer onto the median every few miles to dodge bomb craters, I asked him whether he bore any resentments toward his liberators. “Americans only in the sky,” he told me, grinning a big toothless grin as, bang on cue, a U.S. chopper rumbled up from over the horizon and passed high above our heads. “No problem.”
 



Advertisement
 





“Americans only in the sky” is an even better slogan in the Obama era of drone-alone warfare. In Iraq, there were a lot of boots on the ground, but when it came to non-military leverage (cultural, economic) Americans were content to remain “only in the sky.” And down on the ground other players filled the vacuum, some reasonably benign (the Chinese in the oil fields), others less so (the Iranians in everything else).
 
And so a genuinely reformed Middle East remains, like the speculative scenarios outlined at the top, in the realm of “alternative history.” Nevertheless, in the grim two-thirds-of-a-century roll call of America’s un-won wars, Iraq today is less un-won than Korea, Vietnam, or Afghanistan, and that is not nothing. The war dead of America and its few real allies died in an honorable cause. But armies don’t wage wars, nations do. And, back on the home front, a vast percentage of fair-weather hawks who decided that it was all too complicated, or a bit of a downer, or Bush lied, or where’s the remote, revealed America as profoundly unserious. A senator who votes for war and then decides he’d rather it had never started is also engaging in “alternative history” — albeit of the kind in which Pam Ewing steps into the shower at Southfork and writes off the previous season of Dallas as a bad dream. In non-alternative history, in the only reality there is, once you’ve started a war, you have two choices: to win it or to lose it. Withdrawing one’s “support” for a war you’re already in advertises nothing more than a kind of geopolitical ADHD.
 
Shortly after Gulf War One, when the world’s superpower assembled a mighty coalition to fight half-a-war to an inconclusive halt at the gates of Baghdad, Washington declined to get mixed up in the disintegrating Balkans. Colin Powell offered the following rationale: “We do deserts. We don’t do mountains.” Across a decade in Iraq, America told the world we don’t really do deserts, either.
 
— Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is the author of After America: Get Ready for Armageddon. © 2013 Mark Steyn
Title: Prager: The Bible vs. The Heart
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 04, 2013, 03:02:42 PM

The Bible vs. Heart
Tuesday, April 02, 2013


 I offer the single most politically incorrect statement a modern American -- indeed a modern Westerner, period -- can make: I first look to the Bible for moral guidance and for wisdom.

I say this even though I am not a Christian (I am a Jew, and a non-Orthodox one at that). And I say this even though I attended an Ivy League graduate school (Columbia), where I learned nothing about the Bible there except that it was irrelevant, outdated and frequently immoral.

I say this because there is nothing -- not any religious or secular body of work -- that comes close to the Bible in forming the moral bases of Western civilization and therefore of nearly all moral progress in the world.

It was this book that guided every one of the Founding Fathers of the United States, including those described as "deists." It is the book that formed the foundational values of every major American university. It is the book from which every morally great American from George Washington to Abraham Lincoln to the Rev. (yes, "the Reverend," almost always omitted today in favor of his secular credential, "Dr.") Martin Luther King, Jr., got his values.

It is this book that gave humanity the Ten Commandments, the greatest moral code ever devised. It not only codified the essential moral rules for society, it announced that the Creator of the universe stands behind them, demands them and judges humans' compliance with them.

It gave humanity the great moral rule, "Love your neighbor as yourself."

It taught humanity the unprecedented and unparalleled concept that all human beings are created equal because all human beings -- of every race, ethnicity, nationality and both male and female -- are created in God's image.

It taught people not to trust the human heart, but to be guided by moral law even when the heart pulled in a different direction.

This is the book that taught humanity that human sacrifice is an abomination.

This is the book that de-sexualized God -- a first in human history.

This is the book that alone launched humanity on the long road to abolishing slavery. It was not only Bible-believers (what we would today call "religious fundamentalists") who led the only crusade in the world against slavery, it was the Bible itself, thousands of years before, that taught that God abhors slavery. it legislated that one cannot return a slave to his owner and banned kidnapping for slaves in the Ten Commandments. Stealing people, kidnapping, was the most widespread source of slavery, and "Thou shall not steal" was first a ban on stealing humans and then on stealing property.

It was this book that taught people the wisdom of Job and of Ecclesiastes, unparalleled masterpieces of world wisdom literature.

Without this book, there would not have been Western civilization, or Western science, or Western human rights, or the abolitionist movement, or the United States of America, the freest, most prosperous, most opportunity-giving society ever formed.

For well over a generation, we have been living on "cut-flower ethics." We have removed ethics from the Bible-based soil that gave them life and think they can survive removed from that soil. Fools and those possessing an arrogance bordering on self-deification think we will long survive as a decent society without teaching the Bible and without consulting it for moral guidance and wisdom.

If not from the Bible, from where should people get their values and morals? The university? The New York Times editorial page? They have been wrong on virtually every great issue of good and evil in our generation. They mocked Ronald Reagan for calling the Soviet Union an "evil empire." More than any other group in the world, Western intellectuals supported Stalin, Mao and other Communist monsters. They are utterly morally confused concerning one of the most morally clear conflicts of our time -- the Israeli-Palestinian/Arab conflict. The universities and their media supporters have taught a generation of Americans the idiocy that men and women are basically the same. And they are the institutions that teach that America's founders were essentially moral reprobates -- sexist and racist rich white men.

When the current executive editor of the New York Times, Jill Abramson, was appointed to that position she announced that "In my house growing up, The Times substituted for religion." The quote spoke volumes about the substitution of elite media for religion and the Bible in shaping contemporary America.

The other modern substitute for the Bible is the heart. We live in the Age of Feelings, and an entire generation of Americans has been raised to consult their heart to determine right and wrong.

If you trust the human heart, you should be delighted with this development. But those of us raised with biblical wisdom do not trust the heart. So when we are told by almost every university, by almost every news source, by almost every entertainment medium that the heart demands what is probably the most radical social transformation since Western civilization began -- redefining marriage, society's most basic institution, in terms of gender -- it may be wiser to trust the biblical understanding of marriage rather than the heart's.

My heart, too, supports same-sex marriage. But relying on the heart alone is a terribly flawed guide to social policy. And it is the Bible that has produced all of the world's most compassionate societies.

This, then, is the great modern battle: the Bible and the heart vs. the heart alone.
Title: Noonan: A statesman's friendly advice
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 05, 2013, 08:37:26 AM
Noonan: A Statesman's Friendly Advice Singapore's Lee Kwan Yew on what makes America great—and what threatens its greatness.
By PEGGY NOONAN
 
I found myself engrossed this week by the calm, incisive wisdom of one of the few living statesmen in the world who can actually be called visionary.

The wisdom is in a book, "Lee Kuan Yew: The Grand Master's Insights on China, the United States and the World," a gathering of Mr. Lee's interviews, speeches and writings.

Mr. Lee, of course, is the founder and inventor of modern Singapore. He made it a dynamo. He pushed it beyond its ethnic divisions and placed a bet that, though it is the smallest nation in southeast Asia has few natural resources, its people, if organized and unleashed within a system of economic incentive, would come to constitute the only resource that mattered. He was right. When he took office as prime minister, in 1959, per capita income was about $400 a year. Last year it was more than $50,000.

He is now 89, a great friend of America, and his comments on the U.S. are pertinent to many of the debates in which we're enmeshed.

He is bullish about our immediate prospects but concerned about our longterm trajectory. He believes what made us great is the ancestral nature of our people—creative, inventive, original, inclusive.

Enlarge Image


Close
Reuters
 
Former Singapore Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew
.
His advice on immigration: keep it up but keep your culture.

What threatens America? A political culture stuck in the shallows, and a mass-entertainment edifice that is destabilizing, destructive and injurious to the national character.

Is the United States in systemic decline?

"Absolutely not." It is the most militarily powerful and economically dynamic nation in the world. America faces debt, deficit and "tremendously difficult economic times" but "for the next two to three decades" it "will remain the sole superpower."

America has shown over its history "a great capacity for renewal and revival." It doesn't get stuck in "grooved thinking" but is able to think pragmatically and imaginatively. Its language "is the equivalent of an open system that is clearly the lingua franca" of all the economic and political leaders and strivers in the world. In the coming decades "it is the U.S. that will be pre-eminent in setting the rules of the game. No major issue of world peace and stability can be resolved without U.S. leadership."

A major factor in America's rise and economic dominance: All the brightest people in the world know "Americans will let you work for them in America and in their multinational corporations abroad." But America will lose its technological edge unless it is able to continue attracting talent.

The American advantage in coming economic and technological contests? A "can-do" approach to life. Americans always believe a problem can be solved. An "entrepreneurial culture" that sees both risk and failure "as natural and necessary for success." The U.S. is still "a frontier society." "The American culture . . . is that we start from scratch and beat you." They would settle an empty area, call it a town, and say, "You be the sheriff, I am the judge, you are the policeman, and you are the banker, let us start." Not long ago the U.S. was losing to Japan and Germany in manufacturing. "But [Americans] came up with the Internet, Microsoft MSFT -0.87%and Bill Gates, and Dell. . . . What kind of mindset do you need for that? It is part of their history."

America is great not only because of its power and wealth. After World War II its "magnanimity and generosity" helped it "rebuild a more prosperous world." "Only the elevating power of her idealism" can explain this. "The United States is the most benign of all the great powers."

What worries him about America? Our elections have become "a never-ending process of auctions" in which politicians outbid each other with promises. America's leaders seem captive to popular sentiment. They must break out of this and do what is necessary for America, "even if they lose their re-election."

Our consumer society and mass communications "have made for a different kind of person getting elected as leader." Politicians hesitate to speak needed truths: "A certain coyness or diffidence seems to have descended on American politicians."

Mr. Lee is "amazed" that "media professionals can give a candidate a new image and transform him . . . into a different personality. . . . A spin doctor is a high-income professional, one in great demand. From such a process, I doubt if a Churchill, a Roosevelt, or a de Gaulle can emerge!"

What worries him about the prevailing U.S. culture? a lot: "guns, drugs, violent crime, vagrancy, unbecoming behavior in public—in sum, the breakdown of civil society."

"The ideas of individual supremacy . . . when carried to excess, have not worked," and the world has taken note: "Those who want a wholesome society where young girls and old ladies can walk in the streets at night, where the young are not preyed upon by drug peddlers, will not follow the American model. . .  The top 3 to 5% of a society can handle this free-for-all, this clash [but] if you do this with the whole mass, you will have a mess. . . . To have, day to day, images of violence and raw sex on the picture tube, the whole society exposed to it, it will ruin a whole community."

Asians visiting the U.S. are often "puzzled and disturbed by conditions there." including "poverty in the midst of great wealth."

Peggy Noonan's Blog
Daily declarations from the Wall Street Journal columnist.
.
In spite of this, America often now exhibits to the world a sense of its own "cultural supremacy." When the American media praise a country such as the Philippines for becoming democratic, "it is praise with condescension, compliments from a superior culture patting an inferior one on the head." America criticizes Singapore as too authoritarian. "Why? Because we have not complied with their ideas of how we should govern ourselves. But we can ill afford to let others experiment with our lives. Their ideas are theories, theories not proven."

What can destroy America is "multiculturalism," which he speaks of as not an appreciation of all cultures but a gradual surrendering of the essential culture that has sustained America since its beginning. That culture—its creativity and hardiness, its political and economic traditions—is great, and it would be "sad for America to be changed even partially." Will waves of immigrants from the south assimilate, or will America become "more Latin American?" America must continue to invite in all the most gifted and hard-working people in the world, but it must not lose its culture, which is the secret of its success.

And America goes the way of modern Europe at its peril: "If you follow the ideological direction of Europe, you are done for." There are always people who require help, but "addressing their needs must be done in a way that does not kill incentive."

"Americans and European governments believed that they could always afford to support the poor and the needy: widows, orphans, the old and homeless, disadvantaged minorities, unwed mothers. Their sociologists expounded the theory that hardship and failure were due . . . to flaws in the economic system. So charity became 'entitlement,' and the stigma of living on charity disappeared." Welfare costs grew faster than the government's willingness to raise taxes. They "took the easy way out by borrowing to give higher benefits to the current generation of voters." The result: deficits and dangerously high public debt.
Title: Prager: Lessons for Holocaust Day
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 09, 2013, 08:18:50 AM
Lessons for Holocaust Day
Tuesday, April 09, 2013

Yesterday, Jews around the world observed Holocaust Day. This day ought to be universally observed because the lessons of the Holocaust are universal. Here are some of them:

1. People are not basically good

At any time in history, the belief that people are basically good was irrational and naive. To believe it after the Holocaust -- and after the Communist genocides in China, Korea, Cambodia, and the Soviet Union, the Turkish slaughter of the Armenians, and the mass murders in Rwanda, the Congo, Tibet and elsewhere -- is beyond irrational and naive. It is stupid and dangerous, and therefore inexcusable.

2. The Jews are the world's canary in the mine

When Jews are murdered, it is a warning to decent non-Jews that they are next. Because Western nations dismissed Nazi anti-Semitism as the Jews' problem, 50 million non-Jews ended up dying. If the world dismisses Ahmadinejad's Iran as primarily the Jewish state's problem, non-Jews will suffer again. Jew-haters (or, if you will, Jewish state-haters) begin with Jews but never end with them.

3. Great good is no more common than great evil

That is why the most important task for any society is to devise ways to make people good. By "good," I do not mean people who do not murder or steal. People who don't murder or steal aren't good people; they are simply not criminals.

It is therefore worth pondering: With the collapse of America's Judeo-Christian moral foundations, how exactly will American society make good individuals? Those who equate goodness with support for a welfare state do not ask this question. But the rest of us are very worried.

4. Lies and victimhood make evil possible

Most evil is not committed by sadists. Most evil is committed by people who hold evil ideologies. And in modern times those ideologies have emanated from two primary sources: lies and victimhood.

Lies about Jews built Auschwitz (just as, for example, lies about blacks enabled the transatlantic slave trade). And along with lies about Jews, it was Germans' sense of victimhood that built Auschwitz. Perceiving oneself or one's group as a victim allows many people to rationalize doing evil.

5. Nazism, not Christianity, built Auschwitz

The symbol of Nazism was the swastika, not the cross. Had Nazism been a Christian movement, its symbol would have been, or at least included, the Christian cross. The claim that the Holocaust was a product of Christianity is a charge perpetuated by people and ideologies bitter over the nearly 2,000 years of Christian anti-Semitism in Europe. That bitterness is warranted. Blame for the Holocaust is not. Too many Christians supported the Nazis, but Nazism was anti-Christian.

The complex truth is this:

a) Nearly 2,000 years of European Christian anti-Semitism -- including Martin Luther -- rendered the Jew an outcast and thereby laid much of the groundwork for the acceptance of Nazi demonization of the Jews.

b) But no Christian institution or theology ever called for the extermination of the Jews. It took the secular shattering of the Christian conscience to accomplish that. This was prophesied 100 years before Hitler's rise, in 1834, by the great German poet, Heinrich Heine, a secular Jew:

"Christianity -- and that is its greatest merit -- has somewhat mitigated that brutal German love of war, but it could not destroy it. Should that subduing talisman, the cross, be shattered, the frenzied madness of the ancient warriors, that insane Berserk rage of which Nordic bards have spoken and sung so often, will once more burst into flame. This talisman [the cross] is fragile, and the day will come when it will collapse miserably. Then ... a play will be performed in Germany which will make the French Revolution look like an innocent idyll."

European Christianity has much to atone for (and it has). But the collapse of Christianity should frighten every decent person. In Europe, it was first succeeded by fascism, communism and Nazism, and then by a soulless and morally confused secularism. What will succeed it in America?

6. Secular education has proved morally worthless

Professor Peter Merkl of the University of California at Santa Barbara studied 581 Nazis and found that Germans with a high school education "or even university study" were more likely to be antisemitic than those with less education ("Political Violence under the Swastika," Princeton University Press).

A study of the makeup of 24 leaders of Einsatzgruppen, the mobile killing units that killed nearly two million Jews prior to the use of gas chambers, showed that the great majority were highly educated: "One of the most striking things about the Einsatzgruppen leadership makeup is the prevalence of educated people, professionals, especially lawyers, Ph.D.'s. ..." (Irving Greenberg, in "Auschwitz: Beginning of a New Era?" Ktav Press).

6. Pacifists in moral societies are morally worthless

No Nazi death camp was liberated by pacifists or peace activists. Every camp was liberated by a soldier who either killed or helped others kill.

7. Had there been an Israel in the 1930s and '40s, six million Jews would not have been murdered

There would have been one place on earth that would have taken in Jews prior to the Holocaust, when Hitler was willing to let many leave. And during the Holocaust, one country would have fought for them -- by bombing Auschwitz, for example.

8. The Chinese need their Holocaust Day

When the Chinese have their own Holocaust Day -- a day that commemorates Mao's and the Communist Party's killing of 60 million Chinese between 1958 and 1961 -- China will be a much more decent place. Until then, it is run by people who venerate a monster.

9. God is indispensable -- but not a celestial butler

If we deny God, we will produce a morally lost society.  But if we rely only on God -- and do not fight -- evil will win.
Title: Give monogamy a chance
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 09, 2013, 09:14:33 PM
Though I find the piece's analysis incomplete in that it does not recognize the fundamental tension comes from the extended interregnum between puberty and breeding, it does make some points that need making.

Give Monogamy a Chance
Students, who in class recognize the ethical imperative not to use other people as means to an end, do so every night in their dorms..
By EMILY ESFAHANI SMITH

The hit HBO series "Girls," which is wildly popular with 20-something audiences, is also notorious for its frank portrayals of the dark side of the casual-sex culture reigning among America's young adults. In the first season of the show, the main character, Hannah (played by Lena Dunham), finds herself in a dysfunctional relationship with an actor, Adam, whom she regularly sleeps with but isn't dating in the traditional sense. She really likes him, though, so she asks him one day, during intercourse, "You want me to call you?" His response is to push her head down into a pillow.

For decades now, young women have been taught by popular culture that casual sex is supposed to be liberating. Shows like "Sex and the City" sent the message that promiscuity was at worst no big deal and at best empowering. But stories like those on "Girls," and those in Donna Freitas's illuminating new book, "The End of Sex," suggest that for many young women it proves instead to be dehumanizing. Using extensive survey research and dozens of interviews with young men and women on college campuses across the country, Ms. Freitas explodes the myth of the "harmless hookup."

The hookup, as Ms. Freitas defines it, is meant to be "an efficient form of sexual interaction." To qualify, a sexual encounter must be brief—lasting "as short as a few minutes to as long as several hours over a single night"—and it must be "purely physical in nature." One freshman at a Catholic college sums it up this way for the author: "There are no strings. You just do it, you're done, and you can forget about it." Among its practitioners, first base is tonsil-hockey and home plate is learning each other's names, as Tom Wolfe put it over a decade ago. The point is simply to have sex (often very bad sex) with no emotional bond formed with one's partner. The basic human desire to love and be loved is a sign of weakness here, and traditional courtship—exchanging high-fives over a game of beer-pong doesn't count—has no role.

A professor of religious studies at Boston University, Ms. Freitas draws a portrait of life on campus in which sex is almost completely decoupled from eroticism. One college woman describes juggling three men at once; a male student admits that a hookup is just a "trial run" for a date; a third student explains that oral sex is "almost expected" in a hookup: "People have these urges and they are trying to satisfy them." Sex on campus, writes the author, has been reduced to a solitary and selfish act—basically, onanism "with another person present."

The End of Sex
By Donna Freitas
(Basic, 221 pages, $25.99)

In other words, many college students, who in philosophy class would surely recognize the ethical imperative not to use other people as means to an end, do so every night in their dorms. This selfishness is why, as Ms. Freitas argues, the hookup culture is intimately related to sexual assault. In both, one person uses another to satisfy a sexual or social desire without any regard for what that other person wants, needs or feels. Once alcohol is added to the mix, and there is plenty of it in the hookup culture, consent becomes a murky issue.

According to various academic studies, 65% to 75% of undergraduates report having participated in the hookup culture. But many are troubled by it. In a survey that Ms. Freitas gave to 1,010 students from Catholic and secular institutions, around 50% had reservations about whether casual sex is acceptable. Three quarters of the respondents objected to the notion, central to the hookup culture, that "sex is primarily the taking of pleasure from another person." And contrary to depictions in popular culture, men are just as troubled by casual sex as women are.

So why do they do it? Social pressure plays a large role. But there is something else. College students may not be lusting after sex so much as they are chasing after relationships. In our wider culture, where more and more interactions are occurring via text messages, Facebook, FB -0.96%Twitter and email rather than face-to-face or at the very least on the phone, students are yearning for meaningful connections. Hooking up offers an immediate substitute for the relationships and romance that young people admit they want, but without the constraints and sacrifices that authentic relationships require.

Ms. Freitas's book is a timely and alarming wake-up call to students, college administrators and parents, and she presents a compelling argument against the hookup culture. Less convincing are her ideas for fixing it. The author, whose own thinking is firmly rooted in the feminist left, thinks administrators on campus could do more, for instance, to educate students about healthy sexuality—even though, given the politically correct bureaucrats that administer most campuses, there are already plenty of consciousness-raising events pushing messages that overlap with and complement hookup norms, such as replacing Valentine's Day with "Vagina Week."

In the book's conclusion, Ms. Freitas says that she wants young adults to have "good sex," a category that can include, she suggests, hooking up—as long as students recognize that casual sex is "just one option among many." Yet this jars with the nearly 200 preceding pages on the corrosive effects of casual sex. She also wants students to "feel empowered" by their sexual decisions and to recognize that "it is their right to define what they want out of sex"—even though feminists who champion the hookup culture rely on the same rhetoric. Their ideas about liberation and empowerment, like the hookup culture itself, treat human sexuality as a social and political battlefield. In the end, though, sex isn't a political act, nor is it about empowerment. It is one part of a complete relationship between two people. Meaningful sex is grounded in love and commitment, not power—an insight students seem to intuitively grasp, even if they don't act on it.

Ms. Esfahani Smith is an associate editor of the New Criterion and editor of the pop-culture blog Acculturated.
Title: VDH: Counter-Revolutionary
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 10, 2013, 03:36:00 PM
second post of the day:

“Counter-revolutionary” is an apt term for these days: President Obama has promised to make a fundamental transformation, a veritable revolution in American society and culture. Those who oppose such an ongoing agenda are suspected of all sorts of racism, nativism, misogyny, homophobia, and general counter-revolutionary activity.
 
So — here are some thoughtcrimes:

 


Global warming
 
The latest news on “climate change” was not good for global-warming, cap-and-trade zealots. The planet did not heat up in the last decade and a half, despite substantial increases in carbon emissions. The much ballyhooed “Marcott paper” (supposedly millennia of conclusive climate data!) has been largely discredited, and shares the company of the East Anglia email trove (e.g., “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. … Our observing system is inadequate”).
 
Why the counter-revolutionary suspicion of global warming? I know that the forces of market capitalism are potent, but they certainly lack the powers of the sun and solar system to alter the earth. I have also spent too much time in academia and met too many professors not to know that politicization has infected campus teaching and research — especially the doctrine that the noble ends always justify the occasionally suspect means.
 
Global warming is a cult belief of the elite: the latter conveniently opposed fracking and horizontal drilling, while subsidizing costly wind and solar that hurt the poor (the lines of cars of poor Latinos at the rural filling station near my house — which offers gas at 10 cents a gallon cheaper than in town — forms about 6:00 a.m.). Such facts — like the cost of air conditioning in Fresno on an August 105 Fahrenheit afternoon — are of no interest to the Palo Alto or Berkeley utopian.
 
It is the penance that instead counts — an Al Gore lecturing upscale students on polar bear populations so he can use his carbon-offsetted private jet to save them. There is the matter of “cool” too: Worrying about global warming is like drinking Starbucks as you enter Whole Foods; in contrast, worrying about cheap natural gas to help the poor have warm homes is like drinking a McDonald’s latte as you are greeted at the door of Walmart.
 
Cool — for upscale, would-be revolutionaries – is everything.
 
Guns
 
I have met very few academics, politicians, or journalists who knew much about guns. Few of them hunt. Most do not live in bad neighborhoods or drive long distances, sometimes through or into rough areas. I suspect few work alone at night. Few are plagued by woodpeckers destroying an eve on the barn, varmints digging under the shed pavement, or a rabid coyote too close to the doghouse.
 
So when I hear a liberal expert propose yet another round of Second Amendment infringement, I expect confusion about magazines, clips, calibers, rifles, shotguns, pistols, “automatic” and “semi-automatic,” and “assault weapons.” (Four hours, black spray paint, a sheet of aluminum, cardboard, tin snips, solder, and super glue, and you perhaps could make my ancient semi-automatic .22 resemble a scary “assault rifle.”)
 
So far I have heard of no proposed legislation that would have stopped Sandy Hook or Columbine, tragically so. To have prevented another unhinged loser from shooting children and teens would have required a police state to have confiscated millions of previously sold legal weapons and ammunition, or to have had armed guards in the schools. There is no legal support for the former or political support for the latter.
 
The Sandy Hook shooter’s sick fascination with violent video games and his aberrant psychological state (or was it an autistic-like impairment?) were the stronger catalysts of his mayhem. Yet I know that the Obama administration has no desire to go after Hollywood moguls regarding gratuitous gun violence on the big screen, much less take on the ACLU and the psychiatry industry about either psychotropic drugs or the ability of the clearly unhinged to avoid incarceration.
 
There is a predictability in the liberal mindset: it prefers the iconic to the substantial in matters of controversy. Address the misdemeanor, ignore the felony.
 
To stop most gun-related deaths in general in the U.S., we would have to focus on inner-city youths (cf. both the success and controversy of stop-and-frisk in New York). We would have to target young minority males in advertising to make the illicit use of the gun comparable to the social unattractiveness of … well, smoking.
 
I cannot see any of that happening. So we go after the demonic gun that causes less than 1% of annual gun-related deaths, feel good about doing something “for the children,” and derive an added psychic uplift that such a superfluous something also enrages the lower-middle class — especially the slightly rural, mostly white male Sarah Palin constituent. The First Amendment is sacrosanct and must be expanded; the Second is suspect and must be deflated.
 
Gay Marriage
 
Sometime about a year ago, the long-held position of Barack Obama and the Clintons on gay marriage — No! — became, in Emmanuel Goldstein fashion, abhorrent. Indeed, they’ve become harsh critics of those who still believe as they recently did.
 
Most Americans are fine with civil unions and, in live-and-let-live fashion, don’t worry all that much about gay marriage. Nonetheless, why the sudden dramatic change, if not for brilliant messaging and well-funded liberal gay donors whose pledges were made contingent on fluidity on the issue?
 
Key to the transformation in popular culture was the radical change in the perception of male homosexuality. In the 1980s and 1990s — read the work of the late gay investigative journalist Randy Shilts, or the old videos of San Francisco parades or arguments over bath houses — there was the general impression that male homosexuality was both more promiscuous than either heterosexual or lesbian practice, and that passive sexual intercourse was a catalyst for the spread of the AIDS virus and hepatitis (suddenly a venereal disease in a way it had not been in the past) in a manner that “normative” heterosexual intercourse was not.
 
Mention of male homosexuality in the news was usually linked with sexual practice, and the result was not favorable to the majority of the public. The age-old word “sodomy” was not then the taboo term that it is now. That perception — reality, whatever one calls it — has now vanished. “Gay” is a non-sexual sobriquet that involves vaguely defined expressions of affection. To suggest that anal intercourse is statistically more likely to be unhygienic or, if practiced with frequency, to run the risk of either hepatitis or AIDS is now proof of homophobia. Indeed, so is the use of “homosexual” for “gay.”
 
Most of us do not think too much about it, other than to ensure that we treat people — in my case whether in evaluating students, grant applicants, or scholars — equally, with no interest at all in their sexual lives.
 
That said, the transformation in gay-advocacy strategy has been nothing short of remarkable, its signature achievement being that there is absolutely nothing much different between gay male and straight male sexual congress — and that those who believe there is are themselves bigots.
 
If so, we should soon expect the liberal popular culture — from the movies of Quentin Tarantino to the recent Spartacus series — to stop presenting anal penetration as an especially unwelcome sort of act, or a particular nasty sort of sexual coercion.
 
In the logic of gay marriage, liberal culture — art, cinema, movies, journalism, politics — will soon represent gay male sexual practice as an act as natural as any other, without value judgments of any sort attached to it. Also, I would expect in the years ahead that the law, as it does now, will not add enhanced charges like “anal penetration” or “sodomy” to sexual criminal complaints. I am confused in this progressive era why I still read that a particular sex offender suspect is to be considered especially odious, by adding details to his charges like “sodomy” or “anal penetration.” Why qualify, much less legally enhance, the particular details of rape?
 
Incidentally, in matters of sexual consistency, there should be no longer suspicions of adult males being Brownie or Girl Scout Masters, given that the gay rights movement has made the Boy Scouts themselves suspect for unfairly discouraging gay Scout Masters. Is a forty-year old heterosexual male any more likely to look upon young girls in untoward fashion than a forty-year old gay male would young boys? Gay marriage is not the end of a long struggle, but the very beginning of a brave new world whose contours we can only imagine.
 
Illegal Immigration
 
In good 1984-style, the Associated Press just outlawed “illegal immigrant.” Apparently “illegal alien” was so odious that its banishment was automatic and not worthy of citation. Yet what does “undocumented” mean, given one usually never applied for documents to be un-anything?
 
As Orwell saw, imprecision, or rather deliberate distortion, in language is always the first characteristic of the totalitarian.
 
Here are the public’s problems with illegal immigration, from 1-5:
 
1. The law: Once one group feels that it is exempt from federal law, others might as well, too. If I choose to break a federal statute of my own choosing with impunity, why would I fear doing the same with others? Who needs to file a 1040 or worry about car registration, a building permit, a fishing license, or rabies pet vaccination?
 
We forget that the illegal immigrant serially violates the law in obtaining all sorts of fraudulent documents (how can one with a false Social Security number be “undocumented”?), any one violation of which would harm the job or education prospects of a U.S. citizen.
 
2. The tribe: Illegal immigration, largely from Latin America, is too often implicitly predicated on ethnic chauvinism. Were it a matter of Southeast Asians or Poles coming illegally and en masse, La Raza activism would be nonexistent — or championing law enforcement.
 
The Democratic Party in general supports massive influxes, followed by periodic amnesties, followed by expanded entitlements, followed by political loyalty for 3-4 generations. La Raza activists see numbers as key to incomplete assimilation that in turn leads to salad-bowl like political constituencies. Without massive immigration, the Democratic Party’s base — greens, gays, single women, metrosexual young yuppie couples, African-Americans, third-generation Asians and Latinos — does not guarantee the much-promised new demography. As a rough observation, red-state, church-going nuclear families seem to be having more kids than blue-state sorts.
 
Once the impoverished Oaxacan immigrant crosses the border, he becomes statistical proof that Latinos have not achieved parity with the majority culture, due to all sorts of –isms and –ologies that can only be addressed by more government programs staffed by activists. The fact of why and how he was impoverished and whom was to blame before he crossed the border is too illiberal to be addressed.
 
The most frightening statistic I know in regards to illegal immigration is the disappointing performance of second-generation California Latinos in standardized tests and graduating from high school.
 
Compare this quote from an April 2012 Wall Street Journal article written by George P. Shultz and Eric A. Hanushek:
 

But the averages mask the truly sad story in the Latino population, soon to become California’s dominant demographic group. Hispanics attending school in California perform no better than the average student in Mexico, a level comparable to the typical student in Kazakhstan. An alarming 43% of Hispanic students in California did not complete high school between 2005 and 2009, and only 10% attained a college degree.
 
Where did all that massive money spent in remedial help and education go, if Mexico does as good a job as the U.S?
 
A word like raza really does mean race, as in the superior race. Because it compounds the assumptions of an exceptional language and ethnic heritage and racial identity, it is pernicious in the way unquestioned use of volk in 19th-century Germany logically grew into something quite scary 100 years later.
 
3. Helot labor is helot labor: Something is quite sick when a country of chronic 7.6% unemployment (in fact, much higher when we count those who gave up looking for work) wants to import a million menial laborers.
 
Either entitlements are too generous, or no longer tied to work participation, or we have lost the respect for a shared experience of entry-level physical drudgery, the traditional perquisite to character. I grew up with the bracero program, and remember the old Harvest of Shame-like documentaries, the Woody Guthrie “Deportee” activist songs, and the seasonal liberal op-eds deploring the exploitation. The premise that America can institutionalize the idea that you are good enough to work for us but not good enough to be one of us just won’t work.
 
Mark my words: the guest-worker program is an invitation to exploitation, endless social activism, serial amnesties, and more ethnic tensions.
 
4. Numbers impair assimilation: Bring in 100,000 immigrants and we are a melting pot of assimilation as Latinos follow the paradigm of the Italians; but bring in nearly 1,000,000 a year, and illegally so, and we are a salad-bowl, Balkanized society of competing factions.
 
Legality, English, and a diploma guarantee successful assimilation, which used to be desirable; the antithesis to all that ensures difficult assimilation, which to too many elites is now more desirable. How did assimilation, integration, and intermarriage become counter-revolutionary?
 
5. Legal immigration is mostly ignored, other than in platitudes about meritocratic criteria (e.g., education, skill sets, capital, etc.). Democrats sing of legal immigration as if they were the party working to get the brilliant Nigerian electrical engineer his green card at Google. Maybe, maybe not. But does Joe Biden or Chuck Schumer ever say the following?
 

We need to predicate immigration on legality and on precisely those skills needed by American society — and therefore we must close the borders to those who would come illegally, without a high-school diploma, and knowledge of English, given they are far more likely to draw on rather than contribute to the finances of the U.S.
 
The classically liberal position on immigration (e.g., treat everyone on a racially blind and ethnically blind basis; ensure that those who took the trouble to follow the law are privileged over those who did not and cut in line; apply meritocratic criteria not subject to racial or ethnic bias; and for applicants of roughly similar qualifications, ensure a rough “diversity” that results in Asians, Latin Americans, Africans, and Europeans entering in about equal numbers) is now counter-revolutionary.
 
The Economy
 
Here is what you do if you are a revolutionary who wishes to transform the American economy:
 

a) Have the government absorb health care, one-sixth of the economy.
 
b) Ensure that a correct Federal Reserve establishes near-zero interest rates.
 
c) Vastly expand the numbers on food stamps, unemployment, and disability insurance.
 
d) Raise taxes on the upper incomes, so that in many states the suspect pay 55% of their incomes in federal income, payroll, Medicare, Obamacare, and state income taxes.
 
e) Exempt half the U.S. households from federal income tax, so that for many April 15 is a day of credit reimbursement.
 
f) In matters of bankruptcy, seek to elevate pension holders over creditors and contractors.
 
g) Promote programs that seek to offer redress payouts to supposedly discriminated constituents and seek to excuse mortgage and credit card debt.
 
h) Vastly grow the number of federal employees.
 
i) Run chronic budget deficits to ensure redistributive growth.
 
j) Plan to double the national debt in eight years.
 
l) Cut the defense budget.
 
m) Keep entitlement payouts sacrosanct.
 
n) Conduct psychological warfare against the job-hiring classes (pay your fair share, you didn’t build that, no time to profit, fat cat, etc.).
 
o) Establish crony capitalism so that particular capitalists (e.g., Solyndra, GE, Chrysler, etc.) understand that anti-capitalist mandates do not apply to politically correct policies.
 
p) Discourage new gas and oil production that might undercut green energy and prevent gas from going “to European levels” or electricity to “skyrocket.”
 
Here is what you might do should you wish a natural recovery, decentralization, and more people working:
 

a) Simply do the opposite from all of the above.
 
How do you know if you are a counter-revolutionary? You sense that you – not just your opposition to “fundamental transformation” — must be destroyed.
 
It’s that simple.
Title: Prescience in 1975
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 16, 2013, 05:17:37 AM
David Fromkin writing in Foreign Affairs, July 1975:


The grim events at the Athens airport on August 5, 1973, were in a sense symbolic. . . . When the hand grenades were hurled into the departure lounge and the machine gunners simultaneously mowed down the passengers waiting to embark for New York City, it seemed incomprehensible that so harmless a group should be attacked. The merest glance at their hand-luggage, filled with snorkels and cameras, would have shown that they had spent their time in such peaceful pursuits as swimming, sunbathing, and snapping photos of the Parthenon.

The raid had been undertaken on behalf of an Arab Palestine. Yet the airport passengers had done the Arabs no harm. . . .

True, other ages have suffered from crime and outrage, but what we are experiencing today goes beyond such things. Too small to impose their will by military force, terrorist bands nonetheless are capable nowadays of causing enough damage to intimidate and blackmail the governments of the world. Only modern technology makes this possible—the bazooka, the plastic bomb, the submachine gun, and perhaps, over the horizon, the nuclear mini-bomb. The transformation has enabled terrorism to enter the political arena on a new scale, and to express ideological goals of an organized sort rather than mere crime, madness, or emotional derangement as in the past.
Title: Prager: Lessons from Boston and Chechnya
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 23, 2013, 08:36:01 AM
Lessons from Boston and Chechnya
Tuesday, April 23, 2013

We cannot bring back the stolen lives. We cannot bring back the lost limbs or the lost hearing. And we cannot mitigate the infinite grief of the victims' loved ones.

But there is something we can and must do: We must learn all the lessons we can.

Here are some:

1. The gulf between the decent and the indecent

Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the older brother, once told an interviewer before a Golden Gloves boxing competition: "I don't have a single American friend. I don't understand them."

The reason Tsarnaev didn't understand Americans was not primarily cultural. Tsarnaev came to America when he was 14 or 15, an age when the vast majority of immigrants to America have assimilated quite successfully

Rather, the reason was that the indecent don't understand the decent, just as the decent don't understand the indecent.

One of the greatest insights I learned as a young man came from reading Viktor Frankl's seminal work, "Man's Search for Meaning." Frankl was a Jewish psychoanalyst who survived Auschwitz, where nearly every member of his family, including his wife, was murdered. His conclusion: "There are two races of men in this world but only these two. The race of the decent man and the race of the indecent man."

Those "races" do not understand one another. But more important than understanding the indecent is overpowering and, when necessary, destroying the indecent.

2. Any religion or ideology that is above good and evil produces enormous evil.

For tens of millions of Muslims today, Islam is beyond good and evil: The infidel may be decent, but that is of no importance to the radical Islamist. For example, to become a "more religious" Muslim, Tamerlan Tsarnaev gave up boxing, marijuana, tobacco and even not wearing a shirt in the presence of females. Tsarnaev believed Islam forbade those things -- none of which is an evil. But when it came to the greatest evil -- murder (of non-Muslims) -- his religion was not only silent, it was enthusiastically supportive.

Likewise, communists in the Soviet Union, China and elsewhere -- and their many supporters in the West -- raised the creation of egalitarian society and industrialization above good and evil. And Nazism elevated race above good and evil. The environmentalists who oppose vitamin A-injected rice in the Third World place their agenda above good and evil.

Unfortunately, most religious and secular ideologues find preoccupation with human decency boring. The greatest moral idea in history, ethical monotheism, doesn't excite most people.

3. A victimhood identity produces cruelty.

The Tsarnaev brothers' primary self-perception was that of being Chechen victims, and that plus their religious convictions allowed them to blow up men, women and children with a perfectly clear conscience. Even when victimhood status is objectively true -- which it was not for these brothers, who were among the spectacularly fortunate few to be able to live in freedom and with unlimited opportunities -- nothing provides people with as good a reason to commit atrocities as does a victim mentality.

4. Happiness is a moral issue.

Happiness is not an emotional state so much as it is a moral imperative. In general, those who act happy make the world better and those who act unhappy make it worse. This is equally true in the micro and macro realms. It is not surprising, therefore, that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was described by a cousin, Zaur Tsarnaev, in this way: "He was never happy, never cheering, never smiling."

5. Boys will be bad men if they had no good men.

It is apparent that the younger brother Dzhokhar was deeply influenced by his brother, Tamerlan, who was seven years older. All of us who have an older brother, especially with a large age gap, know that he has a god-like status in the eyes of a young boy.

If good men do not inspire boys, bad men will. Without good older men in boys' lives, those boys are likely to grow up and do bad things. See our inner cities for further confirmation.

6. Universities and the left generally continue to deny any link between Muslim terrorists and their Muslim beliefs.

Just as in previous acts of Islamist terror, the left in general, and university professors in particular, continue to argue that it is wrong -- actually bigoted -- to associate these terrorists' religious beliefs with their terrorism.

Michael Eric Dyson, Georgetown professor of sociology: "So you take one part of the element, that he's Muslim. But he also might have listened to classical music. He might have had some Lil Wayne."

MSNBC host Melissa Harris- Perry: "I keep wondering is it possible that there would ever be a discussion like, 'This is because of Ben Affleck and the connection between Boston and movies about violence?' And of course, the answer is no. ... Our very sense of connection to them is this framed-up notion of, like, Islam making them something that is non-normal."

Zaheer Ali -- Harvard graduate, recipient of Columbia University's Merit Scholars Graduate Fellowship, recipient of the Social Science Research Council's Mellon Mays Pre-Doctoral Research Grant -- on MSNBC: "It isn't Muslim that is a common thing here, it's people who are alienated."

Professor Brian Levin -- director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino (formerly associate director of the Southern Poverty Law Center) -- to Bill Maher:

"Look, it's not like people who are Muslim who do wacky things have a monopoly on it. We have hypocrites across faiths, Jewish, Christian who say they're out for God and end up doing not so nice things."

Bill Maher's response: "That's liberal bullshit."

And that's what our children are routinely taught.
Title: Your second amendment cop buddy will take your guns
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 23, 2013, 04:37:13 PM


http://lewrockwell.com/orig13/hathaway3.1.1.html

I will note that in my opinion Lew Rockwell more than one has crossed the line into racism and anti-semitism.  Nonetheless this piece posted on his site packs a punch on the subject of gun confiscation.

Title: Re: Your second amendment cop buddy will take your guns
Post by: G M on April 23, 2013, 10:35:57 PM


http://lewrockwell.com/orig13/hathaway3.1.1.html

I will note that in my opinion Lew Rockwell more than one has crossed the line into racism and anti-semitism.  Nonetheless this piece posted on his site packs a punch on the subject of gun confiscation.
 


 :roll:
Title: Ayn Rand: Money
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 28, 2013, 04:09:13 PM
“So you think that money is the root of all evil?” said Francisco d’Anconia. “Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can’t exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil?
 
“When you accept money in payment for your effort, you do so only on the conviction that you will exchange it for the product of the effort of others. It is not the moochers or the looters who give value to money. Not an ocean of tears not all the guns in the world can transform those pieces of paper in your wallet into the bread you will need to survive tomorrow. Those pieces of paper, which should have been gold, are a token of honor–your claim upon the energy of the men who produce. Your wallet is your statement of hope that somewhere in the world around you there are men who will not default on that moral principle which is the root of money, Is this what you consider evil?
 
“Have you ever looked for the root of production? Take a look at an electric generator and dare tell yourself that it was created by the muscular effort of unthinking brutes. Try to grow a seed of wheat without the knowledge left to you by men who had to discover it for the first time. Try to obtain your food by means of nothing but physical motions–and you’ll learn that man’s mind is the root of all the goods produced and of all the wealth that has ever existed on earth.
 
“But you say that money is made by the strong at the expense of the weak? What strength do you mean? It is not the strength of guns or muscles. Wealth is the product of man’s capacity to think. Then is money made by the man who invents a motor at the expense of those who did not invent it? Is money made by the intelligent at the expense of the fools? By the able at the expense of the incompetent? By the ambitious at the expense of the lazy? Money is made–before it can be looted or mooched–made by the effort of every honest man, each to the extent of his ability. An honest man is one who knows that he can’t consume more than he has produced.’
 
“To trade by means of money is the code of the men of good will. Money rests on the axiom that every man is the owner of his mind and his effort. Money allows no power to prescribe the value of your effort except the voluntary choice of the man who is willing to trade you his effort in return. Money permits you to obtain for your goods and your labor that which they are worth to the men who buy them, but no more. Money permits no deals except those to mutual benefit by the unforced judgment of the traders. Money demands of you the recognition that men must work for their own benefit, not for their own injury, for their gain, not their loss–the recognition that they are not beasts of burden, born to carry the weight of your misery–that you must offer them values, not wounds–that the common bond among men is not the exchange of suffering, but the exchange of goods. Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men’s stupidity, but your talent to their reason; it demands that you buy, not the shoddiest they offer, but the best that your money can find. And when men live by trade–with reason, not force, as their final arbiter–it is the best product that wins, the best performance, the man of best judgment and highest ability–and the degree of a man’s productiveness is the degree of his reward. This is the code of existence whose tool and symbol is money. Is this what you consider evil?
 
“But money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver. It will give you the means for the satisfaction of your desires, but it will not provide you with desires. Money is the scourge of the men who attempt to reverse the law of causality–the men who seek to replace the mind by seizing the products of the mind.
 
“Money will not purchase happiness for the man who has no concept of what he wants: money will not give him a code of values, if he’s evaded the knowledge of what to value, and it will not provide him with a purpose, if he’s evaded the choice of what to seek. Money will not buy intelligence for the fool, or admiration for the coward, or respect for the incompetent. The man who attempts to purchase the brains of his superiors to serve him, with his money replacing his judgment, ends up by becoming the victim of his inferiors. The men of intelligence desert him, but the cheats and the frauds come flocking to him, drawn by a law which he has not discovered: that no man may be smaller than his money. Is this the reason why you call it evil?
 
“Only the man who does not need it, is fit to inherit wealth–the man who would make his own fortune no matter where he started. If an heir is equal to his money, it serves him; if not, it destroys him. But you look on and you cry that money corrupted him. Did it? Or did he corrupt his money? Do not envy a worthless heir; his wealth is not yours and you would have done no better with it. Do not think that it should have been distributed among you; loading the world with fifty parasites instead of one, would not bring back the dead virtue which was the fortune. Money is a living power that dies without its root. Money will not serve the mind that cannot match it. Is this the reason why you call it evil?
 
“Money is your means of survival. The verdict you pronounce upon the source of your livelihood is the verdict you pronounce upon your life. If the source is corrupt, you have damned your own existence. Did you get your money by fraud? By pandering to men’s vices or men’s stupidity? By catering to fools, in the hope of getting more than your ability deserves? By lowering your standards? By doing work you despise for purchasers you scorn? If so, then your money will not give you a moment’s or a penny’s worth of joy. Then all the things you buy will become, not a tribute to you, but a reproach; not an achievement, but a reminder of shame. Then you’ll scream that money is evil. Evil, because it would not pinch-hit for your self-respect? Evil, because it would not let you enjoy your depravity? Is this the root of your hatred of money?
 
“Money will always remain an effect and refuse to replace you as the cause. Money is the product of virtue, but it will not give you virtue and it will not redeem your vices. Money will not give you the unearned, neither in matter nor in spirit. Is this the root of your hatred of money?
 
“Or did you say it’s the love of money that’s the root of all evil? To love a thing is to know and love its nature. To love money is to know and love the fact that money is the creation of the best power within you, and your passkey to trade your effort for the effort of the best among men. It’s the person who would sell his soul for a nickel, who is loudest in proclaiming his hatred of money–and he has good reason to hate it. The lovers of money are willing to work for it. They know they are able to deserve it.
 
“Let me give you a tip on a clue to men’s characters: the man who damns money has obtained it dishonorably; the man who respects it has earned it.
 
“Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper’s bell of an approaching looter. So long as men live together on earth and need means to deal with one another–their only substitute, if they abandon money, is the muzzle of a gun.
 
“But money demands of you the highest virtues, if you wish to make it or to keep it. Men who have no courage, pride or self-esteem, men who have no moral sense of their right to their money and are not willing to defend it as they defend their life, men who apologize for being rich–will not remain rich for long. They are the natural bait for the swarms of looters that stay under rocks for centuries, but come crawling out at the first smell of a man who begs to be forgiven for the guilt of owning wealth. They will hasten to relieve him of the guilt–and of his life, as he deserves.
 
“Then you will see the rise of the men of the double standard–the men who live by force, yet count on those who live by trade to create the value of their looted money–the men who are the hitchhikers of virtue. In a moral society, these are the criminals, and the statutes are written to protect you against them. But when a society establishes criminals-by-right and looters-by-law–men who use force to seize the wealth of disarmed victims–then money becomes its creators’ avenger. Such looters believe it safe to rob defenseless men, once they’ve passed a law to disarm them. But their loot becomes the magnet for other looters, who get it from them as they got it. Then the race goes, not to the ablest at production, but to those most ruthless at brutality. When force is the standard, the murderer wins over the pickpocket. And then that society vanishes, in a spread of ruins and slaughter.
 
“Do you wish to know whether that day is coming? Watch money. Money is the barometer of a society’s virtue. When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion–when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing–when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors–when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you–when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice–you may know that your society is doomed. Money is so noble a medium that is does not compete with guns and it does not make terms with brutality. It will not permit a country to survive as half-property, half-loot.
 
“Whenever destroyers appear among men, they start by destroying money, for money is men’s protection and the base of a moral existence. Destroyers seize gold and leave to its owners a counterfeit pile of paper. This kills all objective standards and delivers men into the arbitrary power of an arbitrary setter of values. Gold was an objective value, an equivalent of wealth produced. Paper is a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it. Paper is a check drawn by legal looters upon an account which is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims. Watch for the day when it bounces, marked, ‘Account overdrawn.’
 
“When you have made evil the means of survival, do not expect men to remain good. Do not expect them to stay moral and lose their lives for the purpose of becoming the fodder of the immoral. Do not expect them to produce, when production is punished and looting rewarded. Do not ask, ‘Who is destroying the world? You are.
 
“You stand in the midst of the greatest achievements of the greatest productive civilization and you wonder why it’s crumbling around you, while you’re damning its life-blood–money. You look upon money as the savages did before you, and you wonder why the jungle is creeping back to the edge of your cities. Throughout men’s history, money was always seized by looters of one brand or another, whose names changed, but whose method remained the same: to seize wealth by force and to keep the producers bound, demeaned, defamed, deprived of honor. That phrase about the evil of money, which you mouth with such righteous recklessness, comes from a time when wealth was produced by the labor of slaves–slaves who repeated the motions once discovered by somebody’s mind and left unimproved for centuries. So long as production was ruled by force, and wealth was obtained by conquest, there was little to conquer, Yet through all the centuries of stagnation and starvation, men exalted the looters, as aristocrats of the sword, as aristocrats of birth, as aristocrats of the bureau, and despised the producers, as slaves, as traders, as shopkeepers–as industrialists.
 
“To the glory of mankind, there was, for the first and only time in history, a country of money–and I have no higher, more reverent tribute to pay to America, for this means: a country of reason, justice, freedom, production, achievement. For the first time, man’s mind and money were set free, and there were no fortunes-by-conquest, but only fortunes-by-work, and instead of swordsmen and slaves, there appeared the real maker of wealth, the greatest worker, the highest type of human being–the self-made man–the American industrialist.
 
“If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans, I would choose–because it contains all the others–the fact that they were the people who created the phrase ‘to make money.’ No other language or nation had ever used these words before; men had always thought of wealth as a static quantity–to be seized, begged, inherited, shared, looted or obtained as a favor. Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created. The words ‘to make money’ hold the essence of human morality.
 
“Yet these were the words for which Americans were denounced by the rotted cultures of the looters’ continents. Now the looters’ credo has brought you to regard your proudest achievements as a hallmark of shame, your prosperity as guilt, your greatest men, the industrialists, as blackguards, and your magnificent factories as the product and property of muscular labor, the labor of whip-driven slaves, like the pyramids of Egypt. The rotter who simpers that he sees no difference between the power of the dollar and the power of the whip, ought to learn the difference on his own hide– as, I think, he will.
 
“Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to be the tool by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of men. Blood, whips and guns–or dollars. Take your choice–there is no other–and your time is running out.”

Ayn Rand
 The Angel Clark Show
Title: A Spanish Leftist Speaks Out
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 06, 2013, 08:35:04 AM
An interesting rant by a Leftist Spanish journalist, refusing to toe the party's line.  First published about 3 years ago.
---------


http://www.aish.com/jw/me/85943662.html


A Leftist Speaks Out
by Pilar Rahola

As a non-Jew I have the historical responsibility to fight against hatred of Jews.

Why don't we see demonstrations against Islamic dictatorships in London, Paris, Barcelona?

Or demonstrations against the Burmese dictatorship?

Why aren't there demonstrations against the enslavement of millions of women who live without any legal protection?

Why aren't there demonstrations against the use of children as human bombs where there is conflict with Islam?

Why has there been no leadership in support of the victims of Islamic dictatorship in Sudan?

Why is there never any outrage against the acts of terrorism committed against Israel?

Why is there no outcry by the European left against Islamic fanaticism?

Why don't they defend Israel's right to exist?

Why confuse support of the Palestinian cause with the defense of Palestinian terrorism?

An finally, the million dollar question: Why is the left in Europe and around the world obsessed with the two most solid democracies, the United States and Israel, and not with the worst dictatorships on the planet? The two most solid democracies, who have suffered the bloodiest attacks of terrorism, and the left doesn't care.

And then, to the concept of freedom. In every pro Palestinian European forum I hear the left yelling with fervor: "We want freedom for the people!"

Not true. They are never concerned with freedom for the people of Syria or Yemen or Iran or Sudan, or other such nations. And they are never preoccupied when Hamas destroys freedom for the Palestinians. They are only concerned with using the concept of Palestinian freedom as a weapon against Israeli freedom. The resulting consequence of these ideological pathologies is the manipulation of the press.

The international press does major damage when reporting on the question of the Israeli-Palestinian issue. On this topic they don't inform, they propagandize.

When reporting about Israel the majority of journalists forget the reporter code of ethics. And so any Israeli act of self-defense becomes a massacre, and any confrontation, genocide. So many stupid things have been written about Israel that there aren't any accusations left to level against her.

At the same time, this press never discusses Syrian and Iranian interference in propagating violence against Israel; the indoctrination of children and the corruption of the Palestinians. And when reporting about victims, every Palestinian casualty is reported as tragedy and every Israeli victim is camouflaged, hidden or reported about with disdain.

And let me add on the topic of the Spanish left. Many are the examples that illustrate the anti-Americanism and anti-Israeli sentiments that define the Spanish left. For example, one of the leftist parties in Spain has just expelled one of its members for creating a pro-Israel website. I quote from the expulsion document: "Our friends are the people of Iran, Libya and Venezuela, oppressed by imperialism, and not a Nazi state like Israel."

In another example, the socialist mayor of Campozuelos changed Shoah Day, commemorating the victims of the Holocaust, with Palestinian Nakba Day, which mourns the establishment of the State of Israel, thus showing contempt for the six million European Jews murdered in the Holocaust.

Or in my native city of Barcelona, the city council decided to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the creation of the State of Israel, by having a week of solidarity with the Palestinian people. Thus, they invited Leila Khaled, a noted terrorist from the 70's and current leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a terrorist organization so described by the European Union, which promotes the use of bombs against Israel.

This politically correct way of thinking has even polluted the speeches of President Zapatero. His foreign policy falls within the extreme left, and on issues of the Middle East he is unequivocally pro Arab. I can assure you that in private, Zapatero places on Israel the blame for the conflict in the Middle East, and the policies of foreign minister Moratinos reflect this. The fact that Zapatero chose to wear a kafiah in the midst of the Lebanon conflict is no coincidence; it's a symbol.

Spain has suffered the worst terrorist attack in Europe and it is in the crosshairs of every Islamic terrorist organization. As I wrote before, they kill us with cell phone hooked to satellites connected to the Middle Ages. And yet the Spanish left is the most anti Israel in the world.

And then it says it is anti Israeli because of solidarity. This is the madness I want to denounce in this conference.

In conclusion, I am not Jewish. Ideologically I am left and by profession a journalist. Why am I not against Israel like my colleagues? Because as a non-Jew I have the historical responsibility to fight against Jewish hatred and currently against the hatred for their historic homeland, Israel. To fight against anti-Semitism is not the duty of the Jews; it is the duty of the non-Jews.

As a journalist it is my duty to search for the truth beyond prejudice, lies and manipulations. The truth about Israel is not told. As a person from the left who loves progress, I am obligated t defend liberty, culture, civic education for children, coexistence and the laws that the Tablets of the Covenant made into universal principles.

Principles that Islamic fundamentalism systematically destroys. That is to say that as a non-Jew, journalist and leftist I have a triple moral duty with Israel, because if Israel is destroyed, liberty, modernity and culture will be destroyed too.

The struggle of Israel, even if the world doesn't want to accept it, is the struggle of the world.
________________________________________
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on May 14, 2013, 06:12:25 PM
I wonder if any of these scandals will be proven to be connected to Obama.

Surely he knew about a lot of this.  Surely he gave the "nod".   That doesn't mean there is anything in writing or any email evidence to speak to this likely truth.

So we would have to hope someone will turn on him.  Perhaps we will need special prosecutor(s) to force the truth out of those who will surely be thrown under the bus with
the proverbial buck stuffed in their pockets.

We will now have to suffer through the inevitable democratic counter attack being formulated as we speak.

I wonder if any of the journolisters are on the AP list.  Lets see if they are STILL more infatuated with their beloved party or with themselves and their fellow media types.

Will there come a point where they will en masse throw the ONE under the bus?  Paving the way for Clinton?  Or Cuomo?  Will Boomer Bloomberg jump into the ring?


Title: Newt: The Four Scandals
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 15, 2013, 12:25:48 PM
Four Scandals

When I started writing this it was called "three scandals".

There was the Benghazi Scandal, the IRS Scandal, and the little covered but equally alarming Secretary Sebelius scandal.

Then as I was writing we learned that the Justice Department had secretly obtained two months worth of phone call records for more than 100 Associated Press reporters. This is the largest violation of the First Amendment in modern times and so we now have four scandals in the Obama Administration.

The White House wants Americans to believe the four scandals are all, in one way or another, the rogue acts of insignificant subordinates.

They want us to believe that a few misguided but well-meaning IRS agents in regional offices took the initiative to persecute and harass conservatives in an election year.
They want us to believe that repeated requests for more security at the Benghazi compound were ignored by fourth-tier bureaucrats at the State Department, never making it to the Department’s leadership. That the talking points were altered by unknown analysts at the CIA, rather than senior administration officials as evidence suggests. That the explosive allegations of a senior diplomat are really just the ramblings of a disgruntled employee.

They want us to believe that the White House was completely unaware that the Department of Justice secretly grabbed two months of phone records from Associated Press reporters who cover the administration, in an effort to identify their sources.

And no doubt we will soon discover that Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius’s shakedown of insurance companies for money which Congress refused to appropriate was really the initiative of some unfortunate functionary deep in the bowels of the Department.

But in truth, these scandals are not the random acts of a few bureaucrats who got out of hand.

These scandals are in fact the natural manifestations of Obamaism.

Unaccountable power, untethered from law or the Constitution, and employed for political gain is standard operating procedure in an administration which seeks to make government bigger and bigger. It is the Chicago machine transplanted to the federal government.

And they continue without shame, lying about what they’ve done, then lying about lying, and finally lying about the people who are telling the truth until everyone forgets what they lied about in the first place.

When the President blamed the terrorist attacks in Benghazi on a protest that never happened, anyone who dared challenge the official story was smeared as a crazy extremist or a bitter partisan.

When the Secretary of State vowed to prosecute the creator of an obscure anti-Islam Internet video, those who doubted the explanation were intolerant.

When the U.N. ambassador said on five Sunday talk shows that the violence arose from a spontaneous demonstration against the video, people who questioned the claim were politicizing a tragedy.

It is now obvious to everyone that the Obama Administration was deliberately dishonest. And so the White House tells Americans to forget about it, “Benghazi happened a long time ago.”

The subordinates have been punished. The whistleblowers have been demoted. Move along, nothing to see here.

The administration took the same approach to the IRS scandal. Apparently beginning in 2010, the IRS singled out groups with “tea party” or “patriot" in their name (presumably assuming that groups on the Left don’t describe themselves as “patriotic”), as well as organizations “involved in limiting/expanding Government, educating on the Constitution and Bill of Rights, social economic reform movement,” or making statements which “criticize how the country is being run.”

The IRS asked many of these groups to provide lists of their donors, the amount of each donation, and lots of details about the organizations’ activities. Here is an example of one appalling letter from the IRS to a Tea Party group which was targeted.

When the IRS confessed to some of this on Friday in advance of an investigation made public yesterday, it tried to blame low level IRS employees in a Cincinnati office. But it is already being widely reported that senior IRS officials in Washington knew for almost two years that the agency was targeting conservative organizations, even though they testified before Congress more than a year ago and claimed the IRS was doing no such thing.

So they lied to Congress, then lied to the press when caught, and now once again they’re lying about lying. This is the agency which is integral to implementing Obamacare.

How would you like the IRS bureaucrats deciding your health treatments?

Chilling isn't it?

Meanwhile, the White House maintains it had no idea the IRS was abusing power to target the administration’s political enemies, although the Presidential spokesman, Jay Carney, has admitted some people in the White House knew something at a recent press briefing.

Carney's comment begins to move toward Senator Howard Baker's famous Watergate question, "What did you know and when did you know it?"

Speaking of abuses of power, the White House also says it was unaware the Department of Justice secretly obtained two months worth of phone records for more than 100 Associated Press reporters, many of whom cover the Obama administration.

The DOJ is trying to discover the source of unauthorized and damaging national security leaks which informed an AP story on al Qaeda last year.

That is in contrast with the damaging national security leaks which supported the President’s reelection last year: they have not shown much interest in discovering who told the New York Times about President Obama’s “kill list” or his administration’s work on the Stuxnet virus that set back Iran’s nuclear program, or who granted Hollywood filmmakers unprecedented access to officials who divulged details of the bin Laden raid.

Of course, two months worth of phone records are likely to reveal communications with AP sources on hundreds of other stories about the administration in that period of time. But the White House says it is not involved.

Finally, we learned this week that Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius has been shaking down the health care companies for donations to fund implementation of Obamacare. When Congress refused to appropriate more money to set up the health insurance exchanges, Secretary Sebelius began asking these companies to contribute to Enroll America, a nonprofit organization created to promote Obamacare. It is headed by a former White House official.

As Senator Lamar Alexander said, “Such private fundraising circumvents the constitutional requirement that only Congress may appropriate funds. If the secretary or others in her department are closely coordinating the activities of Enroll America...then those actions may be in violation of the Anti-Deficiency Act.”

Senator Alexander points out the Secretary’s activities are functionally no different from those which led to the Iran-Contra scandal, in which the executive branch attempted to continue supporting a program Congress had not authorized using private donations. Fourteen officials were indicted in Iran-Contra.

Among all these lies and abuses of power from senior administration officials, how can the White House credibly continue to blame low level subordinates? And if he’s not responsible for the State Department, the Department of Justice, the IRS, or the Department of Health and Human Services (all of which were carrying on activities transparently to his political advantage) is President Obama responsible for anything at all in the executive branch?

Your Friend,
Newt
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on May 15, 2013, 02:45:45 PM
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-05-15/whats-in-the-irs-inspector-generals-report

I tried to look up who oversees the Office of Inspector General and it seems according to Wikipedia there are MANY offices of the "Inspector General".

If I read right the particular OIG who comes out with the above mentioned report more or less exonerating Lerner at the IRS is the one under HHS - that is overseen by, you got it Sec. Sebelius.

All of a sudden a report is released sounding as though it is non partisan and objective, coming from a department run by one Brockster appointee  that "exonerates" the IRS which is controlled by a another Brockster appointee.

It is all legal mumbo jumbo that has ZERO credibility.   Actually can anyone EVER remember one Fed agency uncovering illegal activity of another Federal agency?

Yet MSLSD will be advising us tonight that the career civil servants who never have a political axe to grind at an OIG investigated and found no wrong doing and that is the end of the story.

It was those jerks the  Clintons who dumbed us all down with this kind of crap.


Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: G M on May 15, 2013, 02:52:38 PM
Are your political opinions ObamaCare compliant?

Learn more at IRS.gov
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on May 15, 2013, 04:53:53 PM
OK lets put to rest the concept that "career" civil servants are nonpartisan.   That is like saying school teachers are all nonpartisan.   Or all doctors are nonpartisan.  "it is all about patient care".  Although how many doctors are Dems and how many are, like me, Republican I am really not sure.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/348417/irs-employees-disproportionately-donate-obama
Title: Congressman leaves IRS commish walking bow-legged.
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 17, 2013, 02:04:01 PM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOpcqteueqg
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on May 20, 2013, 05:59:55 AM
On the news is Obama's rant that "blacks have to work twice as hard"

Is this really true?  In the highly competitive field of medicine I am in, the people who get ahead are ALL the ones who work twice as hard.  Be they white black oriental middle eastern indian female male......

Title: WSJ: A Crisis of authority
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 20, 2013, 06:30:49 PM
By JAMES TARANTO

Democracy is in peril: That is an emerging theme of the liberal left's response to the Obama scandals. The argument misses the point, no doubt deliberately. What we are witnessing now is not a crisis of democracy but a crisis of authority. The administrative state, in thrall to a decadent cultural elite, has lost the consent of the governed.

"After a week of scandal obsession during which the nation's capital and the media virtually ignored the problems most voters care about--jobs, incomes, growth, opportunity, education--it's worth asking if there is something especially flawed about our democracy," declares the Washington Post's E.J. Dionne.

He goes through a partisan litany of complaints--"a radicalization of conservative politics, over-the-top mistrust of President Obama on the right, high-tech gerrymandering in the House and a Senate snarled by non-constitutional super-majority requirements"--but makes no mention of the abuses of power by the Internal Revenue Service and the Justice Department. He does hint at Benghazi, in his concluding paragraph, but only to pooh-pooh it:

    Since World War II, bouts of economic growth have allowed democracies to buy their way out of trouble. One can hope this will happen again--and soon. In the meantime, politicians might contemplate their obligations to stewardship of the democratic ideal. They could begin by pondering what an unemployed 28-year-old makes of a ruling elite that expends so much energy feuding over how bureaucrats rewrote a set of talking points.

But if the purpose of that rewriting was, as it appears to have been, to deceive voters and bolster the president's re-election prospects, then it was a subversion of democracy.

And the IRS scandal was a subversion of democracy on a massive scale. The most fearsome and coercive arm of the administrative state embarked on a systematic effort to suppress citizen dissent against the party in power. Thomas Friedman is famous for musing that he wishes America could be China for a day. It turns out we've been China for a while.

In a CNN.com column Donna Brazile strikes the same theme with a sinister twist:

    A government of, by, and for the people requires that people talk to people, that we can agree to disagree but do so in civility. If we let the politicians and those who report dictate our discourse, then our course will be dictated.

    Why am I alarmed? Because two "scandals"--the IRS tax-exempt inquiries and the Department of Justice's tapping of reporters' phones--have become lynch parties. And the congressional investigation of Benghazi may become a scandal in itself.

In one breath Brazile urges everyone to be civil and respectful. In the next she labels her opponents with one of the most racially incendiary metaphors in the American lexicon. And note that she is casting government officials who abused their power as lynching victims.

Brazile is on to something, however, in her skepticism about "those who report." The current crisis of authority very much includes the news media, which in significant measure have abdicated their guiding principles of impartiality, objectivity and sometimes even accuracy.

Liberal media bias is an old complaint, but the Obama presidency has given it a new and dangerous form. Never has the prevailing bias of the media been so closely aligned with the ideological aims and political interests of the party in power. The American media remain free and independent, or you would not be reading this column. But to a large extent they have functioned for the past few years as if they were under state control.

The problem of media bias runs deep, and it often does not take the form of open partisanship. Here's an example, from a Washington Post story on the IRS scandal:

    Nonprofit groups that do not have to pay taxes are supposed to ensure that political activity is not their primary purpose, so evidence that some of the new organizations seeking tax-exempt status were fronts for campaign organizations drew bipartisan interest. Good-government groups started pressuring the IRS to more closely scrutinize applicants. One such group, Democracy 21, wrote a series of letters to the IRS arguing that many of the groups should not receive favored tax status.

    "In all of these cases, the groups were claiming (c)(4) status basically for the purpose of hiding their donors," said Democracy 21 President Fred Wertheimer.

There's a whole world of bias in that phrase "good-government groups." According to the Inspector General's report, one of the red flags the IRS used to identify dissident organizations for targeting was "education of the public via advocacy/lobbying to 'make America a better place to live.' " Tea Party organizations conceive of themselves as good-government groups, just as Democracy 21 does. The Post accepts the latter characterization, but not the former, unquestioningly.


Fred Wertheimer: Nonprofit status for me, but not for thee.

The description of Democracy 21 as a "good-government group" is especially inapt in this particular story. Wertheimer's organization wrote letters lobbying the IRS to take action against political groups of whose activities it disapproved. The IRS did Wertheimer's bidding, and in so doing massively abused its power. The IRS, not Wertheimer, is culpable for the abuse of power. But it is preposterous to label Democracy 21 "a good-government group" in the course of telling how its activities encouraged an abuse of governmental power.

"Good-government group" is a misleading designation for another reason. As we noted last week, Democracy 21 is itself a tax-exempt 501(c)(4) corporation. In lobbying the IRS to investigate nonprofits for engaging in political activity, Democracy 21, a nonprofit, was engaging in political activity.

That's not "good government," it's rent-seeking. A large, established corporation was seeking to use the regulatory power of the state to set up barriers to entry by smaller competitors. It is an exact parallel to the McCain-Feingold media's insistence that corporate free speech is an outrage against democracy. In making that claim, the New York Times and others almost never mention that "media corporations" were exempt from McCain-Feingold's unconstitutional censorship.

There's been a lot of talk about Watergate lately, most of it unintentional apophasis (or "Bimbo," to use the technical term). A very funny example is the lead paragraph of a column by the Chicago Tribune's Eric Zorn:

    If it makes me a media lackey or a tail-wagging lap dog for President Barack Obama to hold out for, you know, actual evidence that he had anything to do with the various and glaring misbehavior, blundering and butt-covering in the governmental ranks before I begin invoking Watergate and floating the possibility of impeachment, then so be it.

Do go on, Eric. What was that you were saying about Watergate and impeachment?

As we wrote Friday, this will be a scandal like Watergate if it turns out that the IRS was acting under orders from Barack Obama or Valerie Jarrett. If the White House's conduct turns out to be unimpeachable, then it is something far worse: a sign that the government itself has become a threat to the Constitution.

But it's worth pondering how Watergate helped bring about the current crisis of authority. It oversimplifies matters only slightly to say the liberal left owes its cultural authority to three events in the 1960s and 1970s. The culmination of the civil-rights movement in 1964-65 established its moral authority. The antiwar movement's success at securing defeat in Vietnam established its political authority. Watergate discredited the Republican Party. (It also made heroes of journalists and provided impetus for restricting the political speech of those who are not media professionals.)

The political result of all this was more polarization. The ascendant left became dominant in the Democratic Party, driving conservatives into the Republican camp, which in turn encouraged liberal Republicans to become Democrats. The cultural result--the effect on journalistic, educational, charitable and scientific institutions--was both polarization and left-wing domination.

The left, certain of its moral authority, felt entitled to rule. The grandiose Barack Obama was the personification of that attitude, if not a caricature of it. The Portland Press Herald notes a lovely example from the newly released memoir of Maine's recently retired Sen. Olympia Snowe:

    In an earlier phone call, Obama had told the Republican that she could be "a modern-day Joan of Arc" by supporting his health care bill, now known as "Obamacare." When Snowe pointed out Joan of Arc had been burned at the stake, Obama reportedly replied: "Don't worry, I'll be there with a fire hose!" She still voted against the bill on the Senate floor.

Try to imagine Lyndon Johnson or Bill Clinton making that pitch.

Moral authority entails a moral hazard: the temptation to abuse political and cultural power. Today's liberal left conceives of itself as being on the side of all that is good, right and reasonable. It caricatures the right as racist, extremist, greedy, dishonest, fanatically religious, prone to violence--and dangerous because, through the Republican Party, it has maintained parity in the political arena. Of the 10 presidential elections since Watergate, each party won 5; and voters haven't entrusted the Democrats with full control of government for more than two years since the Carter era.

If ordinary politics are a battle between good and evil, then winning becomes an overriding moral imperative. The end justifies the means: Journalists shade or conceal the truth in the service of a "larger truth." Government restricts political speech in the name of promoting democracy. Administrative agencies perpetrate injustice in the name of "social justice." That's how IRS agents could think it was their patriotic duty to help fix an election for the party in power.

These wrongful actions subvert the institutions with whose stewardship the perpetrators have been entrusted. They also undermine the moral authority of those institutions' leaders. National Journal's Ron Fournier offers five suggestions for how "Obama can restore the public's trust and rescue his presidency." None of the ideas are likely to achieve those goals, but three of them seem worthy: Bring in some adult supervision at the White House, appoint a special prosecutor for the IRS, and adopt a more media-friendly policy on leak investigations. One of them--"appoint a bipartisan oversight board to oversee the implementation of Obamacare"--won't fly. Even Republicans are savvy enough not to share responsibility for that fiasco.

But the final proposal is downright ludicrous: "Reset the narrative and public expectations with a major speech on trust." It's not just that Fournier continues to imagine, against all evidence, that Obama is a dazzling orator. He fails to see that whether or not the president is personally culpable in the scandals, they all flow from his basic political character. Fournier's fantasy that Obama could "reset the narrative" with a speech suggests that he has not yet abandoned the fantasy that Obama is some sort of savior.

If Obama is no savior, neither is he the devil. He is but a man who, through a combination of ambition, talent, character and luck, became the central figure in the left's crisis of authority. That crisis had been building for decades, seems to be reaching a culmination now, and will be resolved we know not how, except that we expect the process to be convulsive.

What if we're wrong? What if the country collectively shrugs, loses interest in politics, and goes on with life? Then we really will be like China--or worse. In his Saturday column, the New York Times's Charles Blow, who at 42 is just under a decade younger than Obama, shows us where the corruption of moral authority leads.

He begins by asserting that the Obama scandals are failing to "resonate" with the public. That claim is based on a single opinion poll, so it may prove evanescent even if true. But Blow's explanation of this purported fact is chilling:

    As for Tea Party groups that received extra scrutiny from the I.R.S., an Associated Press-GfK poll released last month found that fewer than a fourth of Americans say they support the group. The Tea Party may well be passé. . . .

    So an unpopular movement applied for tax-exempt status under conditions made possible by an unpopular court decision, in order to influence politics with unfathomable amounts money from unnamed donors? Good luck gaining sympathy for that.

This passage exemplifies the moral and intellectual decadence of the 21st-century left. A comparison to one of Blow's Times predecessors will illustrate why. Anthony Lewis, who retired in 2001 and died this March two days shy of his 86th birthday, was insufferably smug too. But it is impossible to imagine him crowing over the persecution of an out-group because it is unpopular.

One common argument against such persecution is a slippery-slope appeal to self-interest: You may be next. That's the gist of the famous Martin Niemöller poem:

    When the Nazis came for the communists,
    I remained silent,
    I was not a communist.

    When they locked up the social democrats,
    I remained silent,
    I was not a social democrat.

    When they came for the trade unionists,
    I did not speak up,
    because I was not a trade unionist.

    When they came for me,
    there was no one
    left to speak out.

The analogy isn't precise. When the U.S. government came for the Tea Party, Blow's colleagues on the Times editorial board did speak out--in support of its IRS effort. But what happens when they come for the mainstream media? Then, the editorial board speaks out. But Blow remains blasé:

    It is clear that the Justice Department overreached on the Associated Press scandal and that its strong-arm tactics are likely to have a chilling effect. But Americans are not big fans of mass media. A November Gallup poll found that only a fourth of Americans rate the honesty and ethical standards of journalists highly. Even bankers ranked higher.

Not only is Blow untroubled by abuses of power at the expense of an out-group he loathes, but he's only mildly bothered by what he considers an abuse of power against his own kind, mainstream journalists. The next step after the corruption of authority, it would seem, is uncritical submission to it.

Let's again quote Barack Obama, from his May 5 commencement address at the Ohio State University:

    Unfortunately, you've grown up hearing voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity that's at the root of all our problems; some of these same voices also doing their best to gum up the works. They'll warn that tyranny is always lurking just around the corner. You should reject these voices. Because what they suggest is that our brave and creative and unique experiment in self-rule is somehow just a sham with which we can't be trusted.

His words were soothing, reassuring, like a lullaby. The scandals are a wake-up call.

Is democracy in peril? Is it really true that "we can't be trusted" with America's "brave and creative and unique experiment in self-rule"? That all depends on what the president meant by "we."
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on May 23, 2013, 07:05:08 AM
Hearing one of the purported excuses of the IRS apologists whether they be media liberals or IRS employees pointing out they deal with thousands of items every day.  Suggesting they are too overwhelmed with data they couldn't possibly have done anything wrong by purposeful design strikes a painful cord with me. 

It is exactly one of the same excuses from the US Copyright office to explain why so many copyright documents disappear.   Oh we have 6000 that come through here a day we couldn't possibly be doing anything with specific ones but we admit we do make *mistakes" amongst the avalanche of papers.   So they easily find take hold what was sent it, then wait for their accomplices to steal it out of our house and then suddenly we hear nothing from the CRO.  When we call, send in writing requests for what we sent them they deny they ever received them.   *we* must be mistaken because they never received anything from us.

Then in the occasional case we do find written evidence we sent them something such as a postal receipt, low and behold, it is miraculously found.  If we don't respond their accomplices in the music business know they are home free with stolen material and we start to hear the dirtballs singing it on the music stations and the yahoo et al announcements of all these new albums.

So when I hear the IRS trying to claim they had no idea or where not purposely looking at conservative groups because of the sea of data,  I in fact know in my heart, they are lying.
Title: Fay Voshell: Dear IRS: Concerning the Content of my Prayers
Post by: DougMacG on May 30, 2013, 01:47:28 PM
Fay was one of our contributors on a previous forum.   Link and contact info at the end.

May 26, 2013
Dear IRS: Concerning the Content of my Prayers
By Fay Voshell

Dear IRS,

I understand your people have been deeply interested in the content of my prayers.

I never thought I'd see the day.

I have always assumed prayer in any form goes against the current notion many of you in the IRS share -- the notion that absolute separation of Church and State involves suppression of any religious expression in public.

We religious types are used to being called out for praying at football games, graduations, and the like. But I hadn't thought you would be interested in the private prayers offered by me and my like-minded fellow citizens -- people who collectively wish to put their concerns before the Almighty.

Was I ever wrong!

I'm shocked you are inquiring about private thoughts before God. I assume you may also want to talk to our pastors, insisting they break their vows to keep confessions confidential?

I suppose I should not be surprised at your behavior, since a great Prophet warned there would always be people who desired to pry into all the secrets of the human heart. "Be on your guard," he said. "There is nothing concealed that will not be disclosed, or hidden that will not be made known. What you have said in the dark will be heard in the daylight, and what you have whispered in the ear in the inner rooms will be proclaimed from the roofs."

Let me be clear: My prayers are none of your business. I like to keep my thoughts between me and my God. But since you asked, I will let you know what I'm praying. I pray for my family.

I ask they will be blessed, particularly the littlest members. I ask they grow up to be pure, true, noble and brave. I ask they be preserved from predators who wish to devour their minds, bodies and souls. I ask God to place guardian angels around them to keep them from harm. I pray that when and if God calls them home to live with Him, they are escorted by angels. I pray the death of innocents and innocence will cease.

I pray for the Church.

I ask she will be free to preach the blessed gospel of Christ in all its permutations. I ask she is salt to preserve an increasingly corrupt culture. I pray for bravery for her as she faces persecution here and around the globe. I pray her priests and pastors will be emboldened to stand up for the truth.

But I am guessing you don't care much about my prayers for my family and my church. I am guessing you want to know what I am praying about the government, the nation and the world. You want to know where I stand politically, and think my prayers will give you some clues.

Very well.

Here is some of what I pray:

I pray God will recall the good deeds of America and have mercy on a nation which stood up and battled at great cost the evils of fascism and communism, taking down the Nazi scourge and felling the Iron Curtain. I ask God to remember the great good our nation has done, to take note of her generosity to nations less fortunate, to remember how many of the poor and oppressed she has absorbed into her borders. I ask him to recall her great deeds of generosity, for her attempts to ameliorate the grim conditions of those living in poverty, afflicted by disease, destroyed by famine, and ground down by oppression.

Then, knowing what evils presently afflict her, I ask God to recall her to Him. I ask she repents and is forgiven. I pray for an end to the massacre of the unborn, an end to the rise of infanticide and mercy killing. I pray for the true education of our children, and for rich opportunities for them to rise to their God-given potential. I ask for the reform of our once great academic institutions and for the triumph of thinking over ideology. I pray for our military, that it not be corrupted but that it remains honorable, strong and committed to our defense and the defense of freedom everywhere.

And, yes, I pray for our government. I ask that whatever evil is hidden within be exposed; whatever nefarious machinations are being carried out be brought to the light and expunged. I ask perpetrators of evil be punished according to the law. I ask true reform sweep throughout our national, state and city governments. I pray for just and righteous servants to be raised up as leaders. I pray for congress, our courts and our executives to be models of integrity, justice and righteousness.

I ask for honesty and impartiality to reign in our civic institutions, including the IRS.

You read that correctly. I pray for the IRS, too.

I ask that it and its employees be returned to the impartiality demanded of our civil servants. I ask that if it fails that test and continues in the paths of oppression and corruption, it collapses and is replaced with a more just system.

I ask for discernment and courage for my fellow citizens. I pray we are always on the alert. I pray we all will render to Caesar what is justly his. I ask we respect and honor in as far as possible our government and our fellow citizens. I ask we have the bravery to refuse obedience when our leaders demand we go against our God-given consciences.

Last, I pray we will not give to Caesar what he has no right to know, much less demand or control; namely, our consciences, our thoughts, our hopes and our dreams -- and our prayers.

Fay Voshell holds a M.Div. from Princeton Theological Seminary, which awarded her the Charles Hodge prize for excellence in systematic theology. She was selected as one of the Delaware GOP's "Winning Women," class of 2008. Her writing has been published in American Thinker and National Review. She may be reached at fvoshell@yahoo.com

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/05/dear_irs_concerning_the_content_of_my_prayers.html#ixzz2UoKvEUFr

Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 30, 2013, 03:34:05 PM
Thanks Doug.  If you happen to be in contact with Fay please give her my warm greetings.
Title: VDH: Margin of Error
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 18, 2013, 08:31:35 AM
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/350920/americas-vast-margin-error-victor-davis-hanson
Title: Alexander: It is the profiling stupid!
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 18, 2013, 09:18:31 AM
second post of the day

It's the Profiling, Stupid!
Obama, Trust and the NSA
By Mark Alexander • June 13, 2013         
"All men having power ought to be distrusted..." --James Madison (1787)
 

Last week, Barack Hussein Obama deflected new concerns about the National Security Administration's intrusive domestic data-mining operations, saying, "If people can't trust ... the executive branch ... to make sure we're abiding by the Constitution, due process, and rule of law, then we're going to have some problems here."
Barack, we have some problems here.
Of course, trusting the Executive Branch is not the issue. The problem is Obama's life-long record of deceit and deception, and his utter contempt for Rule of Law.
Amidst recent revelations that Obama's black-bag cutouts inspired his "low-level" union cadres at the IRS to target his Patriot and Tea Party political enemies list, and scripted a cover-up of the Benghazi murders in order that it not derail his 2012 re-election campaign momentum, is it conceivable that his "low-level" union cadres at the NSA might collect intelligence data on U.S. citizens to profile those whom oppose Obama?
As with the other scandals, Obama's political handlers and their Leftmedia talkingheads are obfuscating the facts regarding NSA data collection. They ignore legitimate civil liberty concerns, and focus instead on the question of whether such data is essential to our national security.
Allow me to reframe a quote from James "Ragin' Cajun" Carville's political playbook about focusing on the big issue, and adapt it for the big data debate: "It's the profiling, stupid!"
The question is not whether intelligence data collection is critical to our nation's ability to defend itself -- good intelligence is, and has always been a critical component of national defense and security.
The overarching questions are, what is the scope of domestic NSA intelligence gathering, and what is the potential for an administration to use that information to profile and target political opponents?
Post Your Opinion
Here is a very brief background pertaining to the genesis of the NSA data-mining programs that have violated First and Fourth Amendment proscriptions against government infringement of the rights of American citizens.
After World War I, a civilian code-breaking group called Black Chamber seized daily telegrams from major telegraph companies, in violation of the 1912 Radio Communications Act. This operation was exposed and shut down, but after World War II, President Harry Truman rightly deemed the threat of nuclear weapons to be so significant that, by way of executive order, he formed the National Security Agency.
The NSA was tasked with collecting as much signal and communication intelligence as the limits of technology would allow, and its budget soon dwarfed that of the Central Intelligence Agency as it expanded those limits. The NSA exponentially accelerated the old Black Chamber ops far beyond any commercial capabilities, and disseminated its findings to the FBI, CIA, Secret Service, Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (DEA predecessor) and the Department of Defense.
NSA operated without court orders and warrants, and its domestic data mining operations flourished unabated until two of its collection programs, "SHAMROCK" and "MINARET," were discovered by congressional investigators after the Vietnam War.
In 1975, Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Frank Church (D-ID) noted that these programs "certainly appear to violate section 605 of the Communications Act of 1934 as well as the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution." He described the NSA operations as "the largest government interception programs affecting Americans ever undertaken." But those operations were a drop in the ocean compared to NSA programs today.
From 1980 to 2000, NSA intelligence gathering capabilities advanced well beyond what academicians considered the theoretical limits, due primarily to Internet communication and transactions. However, congressional intelligence oversight committees maintained strict limits on domestic intelligence gathering.
Fast forward to the rise of "Jihadistan" and the 9/11 al-Qa'ida attack on American soil.
Under the authority of post 9/11 Patriot Act provisions, the NSA greatly expanded its gathering operations to include mountains of metadata -- essentially macro data tags about micro data -- on virtually every electronic transmission and transaction, including the tagging of individual financial, telecommunication and internet traffic. That is on top of all the data the government already maintains on individuals, and when ObamaCare is fully implemented, the government will then have complete access to medical histories and conditions.
The NSA has the added benefit of tapping into massive commercial data mining operations at Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Facebook, PalTalk, YouTube, Skype, AOL and Apple, and collected chat videos, stored data, file transfers, social networking, videos and photos, and especially encrypted communications, which can be virtually deciphered and read in real time. (For the record, the massive commercial data mining also poses significant threats to privacy, and should be subject to disclosure limitations and regulation requiring consumers to approve or disapprove the collection of such data.)
 

The legitimate purpose for gathering massive amounts of metadata, and probably many "deeper layers of data," is that such data can be sifted by algorithms in search of patterns, trends and associations that may be linked with national security threat profiles.
When there were profile hits in the data, investigators are required by law, subject to the 2008 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), to obtain a court order to conduct a deeper review of the stored data.
Now, if the executive branch is to be trusted, and congressional oversight is sufficient, then there is no problem with the collection of metadata, and the transactions or transmissions associated with that data. But our Founders wisely established that no such trust should ever be afforded those in power, so the question of trust should be a mute point.
So, who is to be trusted?
Post Your Opinion
Certainly not Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who was asked in a March congressional hearing, "Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?" Clapper responded, "No, sir. There are cases where they could inadvertently perhaps collect [intelligence on Americans], but not wittingly."
Clapper, who apparently does not grasp the concept that when you find yourself in a hole, stop digging, attempted to parse his response, saying this week, "I responded in what I thought was the most truthful or least most untruthful manner, by saying, 'No.' And again, going back to my metaphor, what I was thinking of is looking at the Dewey Decimal numbers of those books in the metaphorical library. To me collection of U.S. persons data would mean taking the books off the shelf, opening it up and reading it."
OK, in the intelligence trade craft, "gathering intelligence" refers to the accumulation of data. "Collection" refers to the analysis of data, but Clapper obviously knew that the distinction between gathering and collecting intelligence would not be apparent to any elected official during the hearings.
But according to White House paid professional liar Jay Carney, Obama "certainly believes that Director Clapper has been straight and direct in the answers he's given," and added that he thinks Clapper has been "aggressive in providing as much information as possible to the American people, to the press."
So, what about "trusting the executive branch" with collection programs like PRISM, which co-opt data from domestic telecommunication and Internet service providers?
In 2005, then Senator Obama declared, "If someone wants to know why their own government has decided to go on a fishing expedition through every personal record or private document, through library books they've read and phone calls they've made -- this legislation gives people no rights to appeal the need for such a search in a court of law. ... This is just plain wrong."
In 2008, an indignant candidate Obama promised, "I will provide our intelligence and law enforcement agencies with the tools they need to track and take out the terrorists without undermining the Constitution and our freedom. That means no more illegal wiretapping ... [spying] on citizens ... tracking citizens who do nothing but protest... No more ignoring the law when it is inconvenient. ... The law is not subject to the whims of stubborn rulers ... justice is not arbitrary. [Bush] acts like violating civil liberties is the way to enhance our security... The first thing I will do, when I am president, is call in my attorney general and ... review every executive order issued by George Bush to determine which of those have undermined civil liberties, which are unconstitutional, and I will reverse them with a stroke of a pen."
Now, Obama says, "Nobody is listening to your telephone calls. That is not what this program is about. What the intelligence community is looking at is phone numbers and duration of calls. They're not looking at names and not looking at content." He added that when he became president, "My assessment was [that NSA intelligence] helps us prevent terrorist attacks. The modest encroachments" on privacy, he said, "was worth us doing." (Watch Obama then and now.)
In fact, under the Obama administration, the NSA activities have massively expanded.
Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI), one of the key architects of the Patriot Act, said this week that the scope of the NSA data mining operation is "beyond what the Patriot Act intended." Sensenbrenner, who chairs the House Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, Homeland Security, and Investigations, added, "I know because I helped draft Section 215 and it was designed to prevent the NSA from [domestic] data mining and that is exactly what they're doing. ... Apparently what the president seems to think is that universal background checks for guns are okay, so universal seizure of people's telephone records is okay."
According to The New York Times' editorial on NSA operations and Obama's response, "He has now lost all credibility."
The Times later amended that post to read, "lost all credibility on this issue," but they had it right the first time.
Ironically, amid the NSA controversy, Obama announced last week, "We're going to take a new step to make sure that virtually every child in America's classrooms has access to the fastest Internet. I am directing the Federal Communications Commission, which is the FCC, to begin a process that will connect 99 percent of America's students to high-speed broadband Internet within five years."
 

Recall, if you will, just a few weeks back when Obama preached his "ignore tyranny sermon" to Ohio State graduates: "You've grown up hearing voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity that's at the root of all our problems; some of these same voices also doing their best to gum up the works. They'll warn that tyranny is always lurking just around the corner. You should reject these voices."
Well, in Ronald Reagan's inimitable words, "Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem." And indeed, "tyranny is always lurking just around the corner," and our Founders expected us to be ever vigilant against despotism, regardless of Obama's demand we "reject these voices."
Note that Obama's IRS profiling of Patriot and Tea Party political opponents was not the first time this administration's foot soldiers set their sights on his political adversaries. There are many other examples of government agencies targeting his enemy list.
For example, the Department of Homeland Security wasted no time after Obama took office targeting conservatives in a 2009 DHS document "Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment." That terrorist profile included a footnote that defines "rightwing extremism in the United States" as any groups that question federal authority and support states' rights. It also notes that DHS "will be working with its state and local partners over the next several months" to collect information on these radicals, with "a particular emphasis" on sources of "rightwing extremist radicalization." DHS czar Janet Napolitano expressed her concerns about "trends of violent radicalization in the United States," but insists, "We are on the lookout for criminal and terrorist activity but we do not -- nor will we ever -- monitor ideology or political beliefs."
Right, you can trust her -- she's from the government.
And consider the 2010 security exercise at Ft. Knox, in which an Obama supporter wrote into the scenario that "Tea Party terrorists" were the adversaries.
The bottom line is that most Americans in the military, intelligence and law enforcement communities are Patriots -- and there are even some in the IRS and other civilian government agencies. But when Obama's wayward NeoCom cadres use the power of their government office to profile and target his political adversaries, that does not require a directive from Obama. The profilers were already predisposed with a political bias, and Obama has fueled that predisposition in every government agency.
Where there is a corrupt executive, there will be corruption in the ranks. Obama is not to be afforded any measure of trust. As Thomas Jefferson wrote, "The time to guard against corruption and tyranny, is before they shall have gotten hold on us. It is better to keep the wolf out of the fold, than to trust to drawing his teeth and talons after he shall have entered."
Footnote: Amid all the debate about NSA profiling of terrorists, I thought the Left universally argued that "profiling" was a bad word. Fact is I fully support tactical profiling measures, like behavioral profiling at airport security checkpoints, rather than subjecting grandmothers and babies to full body searches. (Read "Anyone for Terrorist Profiling?")
Pro Deo et Constitutione — Libertas aut Mors
Semper Vigilo, Fortis, Paratus et Fidelis
 
Mark Alexander
Publisher, The Patriot Post
Title: The Regulated States of America
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 19, 2013, 07:21:51 AM
By NIALL FERGUSON

In "Democracy in America," published in 1833, Alexis de Tocqueville marveled at the way Americans preferred voluntary association to government regulation. "The inhabitant of the United States," he wrote, "has only a defiant and restive regard for social authority and he appeals to it . . . only when he cannot do without it."

Unlike Frenchmen, he continued, who instinctively looked to the state to provide economic and social order, Americans relied on their own efforts. "In the United States, they associate for the goals of public security, of commerce and industry, of morality and religion. There is nothing the human will despairs of attaining by the free action of the collective power of individuals."

What especially amazed Tocqueville was the sheer range of nongovernmental organizations Americans formed: "Not only do they have commercial and industrial associations . . . but they also have a thousand other kinds: religious, moral, grave, futile, very general and very particular, immense and very small; Americans use associations to give fetes, to found seminaries, to build inns, to raise churches, to distribute books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner they create hospitals, prisons, schools."

Tocqueville would not recognize America today. Indeed, so completely has associational life collapsed, and so enormously has the state grown, that he would be forced to conclude that, at some point between 1833 and 2013, France must have conquered the United States.

Enlarge Image
image
image
Barbara Kelley

The decline of American associational life was memorably documented in Robert Puttnam's seminal 1995 essay "Bowling Alone," which documented the exodus of Americans from bowling leagues, Rotary clubs and the like. Since then, the downward trend in "social capital" has only continued. According to the 2006 World Values Survey, active membership even of religious associations has declined from just over half the population to little more than a third (37%). The proportion of Americans who are active members of cultural associations is down to 14% from 24%; for professional associations the figure is now just 12%, compared with more than a fifth in 1995. And, no, Facebook FB +0.21% is not a substitute.

Instead of joining together to get things done, Americans have increasingly become dependent on Washington. On foreign policy, it may still be true that Americans are from Mars and Europeans from Venus. But when it comes to domestic policy, we all now come from the same place: Planet Government.

As the Competitive Enterprise Institute's Clyde Wayne Crews shows in his invaluable annual survey of the federal regulatory state, we have become the regulation nation almost imperceptibly. Excluding blank pages, the 2012 Federal Register—the official directory of regulation—today runs to 78,961 pages. Back in 1986 it was 44,812 pages. In 1936 it was just 2,620.

True, our economy today is much larger than it was in 1936—around 12 times larger, allowing for inflation. But the Federal Register has grown by a factor of 30 in the same period.

The last time regulation was cut was under Ronald Reagan, when the number of pages in the Federal Register fell by 31%. Surprise: Real GDP grew by 30% in that same period. But Leviathan's diet lasted just eight years. Since 1993, 81,883 new rules have been issued. In the past 10 years, the "final rules" issued by our 63 federal departments, agencies and commissions have outnumbered laws passed by Congress 223 to 1.

Right now there are 4,062 new regulations at various stages of implementation, of which 224 are deemed "economically significant," i.e., their economic impact will exceed $100 million.

The cost of all this, Mr. Crews estimates, is $1.8 trillion annually—that's on top of the federal government's $3.5 trillion in outlays, so it is equivalent to an invisible 65% surcharge on your federal taxes, or nearly 12% of GDP. Especially invidious is the fact that the costs of regulation for small businesses (those with fewer than 20 employees) are 36% higher per employee than they are for bigger firms.

Next year's big treat will be the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, something every small business in the country must be looking forward to with eager anticipation. Then, as Sen. Rob Portman (R., Ohio) warned readers on this page 10 months ago, there's also the Labor Department's new fiduciary rule, which will increase the cost of retirement planning for middle-class workers; the EPA's new Ozone Rule, which will impose up to $90 billion in yearly costs on American manufacturers; and the Department of Transportation's Rear-View Camera Rule. That's so you never have to turn your head around when backing up.

President Obama occasionally pays lip service to the idea of tax reform. But nothing actually gets done and the Internal Revenue Service code (plus associated regulations) just keeps growing—it passed the nine-million-word mark back in 2005, according to the Tax Foundation, meaning nearly 19% more verbiage than 10 years before. While some taxes may have been cut in the intervening years, the tax code just kept growing.

I wonder if all this could have anything to do with the fact that we still have nearly 12 million people out of work, plus eight million working part-time jobs, five long years after the financial crisis began.

Genius that he was, Tocqueville saw this transformation of America coming. Toward the end of "Democracy in America" he warned against the government becoming "an immense tutelary power . . . absolute, detailed, regular . . . cover[ing] [society's] surface with a network of small, complicated, painstaking, uniform rules through which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot clear a way."

Tocqueville also foresaw exactly how this regulatory state would suffocate the spirit of free enterprise: "It rarely forces one to act, but it constantly opposes itself to one's acting; it does not destroy, it prevents things from being born; it does not tyrannize, it hinders, compromises, enervates, extinguishes, dazes, and finally reduces [the] nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd."

If that makes you bleat with frustration, there's still hope.

Mr. Ferguson's new book "The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die" has just been published by Penguin Press.
Title: Re: VDH: Margin of Error
Post by: DougMacG on June 19, 2013, 11:00:41 AM
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/350920/americas-vast-margin-error-victor-davis-hanson

Hanson makes an important observation here, one that Wesbury built his workhorse economy theory on, and the premise for all Liberalnomics.  The American culture and the American economy is so strong that it can absorb certain inefficiencies and keep right on ticking, like nothing is wrong.  We can handle a 1% tax rate.  We can handle a 10% tax rate, maybe 20%.  But maybe we can't handle lost economic activity that real rates of taxation now approaching 65% will cause.  We can handle one page of regulations and we can handle a thousand pages of regulations, even excessive ones.  But maybe we can't handle the 80,000 pages of business strangulation now in place.  We can handle the government meddling in 40% of health care.  50% maybe, but not 100% with no private sector remaining.  We can handle $3 gas, but maybe not $10, $20.  Maybe we can afford to put 50 million people on food stamps, but not 51 million.  At some point there will be too many people riding and not enough pulling the wagon to keep it going.  We could probably handle $16 trillion in debt if we removed other chains that are holding us back.  At some point we will have absorbed all of our margin of error and cannot place one more ounce of weight on the load we are carrying without collapsing.  Like the piece about China banking built on a house of cards, we have already had our own brushes with economic meltdown.  Our current failure to address anything that is wrong in our policies will eventually come back to bite us - sooner and worse than all but a few (GM, Peter Shiff, etc.) can imagine.
Title: VDH: Lies Subvert Democracy
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 23, 2013, 08:04:51 AM


Truth is the lifeblood of democracy. Without honesty, the foundations of consensual government crumble.

If the Internal Revenue Service acts unlawfully, our system of citizens’ computing their own taxes implodes.

Yet Lois Lerner, one of the IRS’s top officials, would not answer simple questions about her agency’s conduct during congressional testimony, instead pleading the Fifth Amendment. Any taxpayer who tried that with an IRS auditor would end up fined, if not in jail.

Advertisement
Almost everything that IRS officials have reported about the agency’s unlawful targeting of conservative groups has proven false. IRS malfeasance was not limited only to the Cincinnati office, as alleged, but followed directives sent from higher-ups in Washington. Lois Lerner confessed to the scandal only through a rigged public query by a planted questioner, designed to preempt an upcoming critical inspector general’s report. There is legitimate dispute over both the number and the purpose of former IRS commissioner Douglas Shulman’s visits to the White House and nearby executive office buildings, but he did his credibility no good by snidely remarking to Congress that at least one of those visits was to take his kids to the White House Easter Egg Roll.

Attorney General Eric Holder — who had already been held in contempt by the House of Representatives for declining to turn over internal Justice Department documents in the earlier Fast and Furious scandal — swore to Congress that he had no knowledge of any effort to go after individual reporters. But according to an official Justice Department statement, Holder had in fact signed off on the search warrant to monitor the communications of Fox News reporter James Rosen. In other words, the attorney general of the United States under oath misled — or lied to — Congress.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper was recently asked by Senator Ron Wyden (D., Ore.) whether the National Security Agency collected the phone and e-mail records of millions of ordinary Americans. Clapper said that it did not. That, too, was an untruth. Clapper’s supporters argued that Wyden should not have asked in public a sensitive question that threatened the needed secrecy of the program. But Clapper did not demur or request a closed session. He instead found it easier to deceive, later dubbing his response the “least untruthful” answer possible.

Washington reporters and spin doctors argue whether newly appointed national-security adviser Susan Rice knowingly lied when she wove a yarn about a single video maker’s being responsible for spontaneous violence that led to the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi. Yet no one disputes that her televised accounts — as well as those of both President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton — were untrue, and demonstrably so at the time. Yet Rice was promoted, not censured, following her performance.

Last November, White House press secretary Jay Carney was asked point-blank whether the administration had altered CIA-produced intelligence memos to fit its narrative of a spontaneous riot in Benghazi. Carney answered unequivocally that the administration had made only one stylistic change. That, too, was not accurate. In fact, there were at least twelve different drafts that reflected substantial ongoing changes by the administration of the original CIA talking points.

Former EPA director Lisa Jackson created a fake e-mail identity — “Richard Windsor” — to conduct official business off the record. But Jackson did not stop with that ruse. She turned Richard Windsor into an entire mythical persona, who supposedly took online tests and was given awards by the EPA — a veritable Jackson doppelgänger who was certified as “a scholar of ethical behavior” by no less than the agency that the unethical Jackson oversaw.

Deception is now institutionalized in the Obama administration. It infects almost every corner of the executive branch, eroding the trust necessary for the IRS, the Department of Justice, our security agencies, and the president’s official spokesman — sabotaging the public trust required for democracy itself.

What went wrong with the Obama administration?

For one thing, there is no longer a traditional adversarial media in Washington. Spouses and siblings of executives at the major television networks are embedded within the administration. Unlike with Watergate, the media now hold back, believing that any hard-hitting reporting of ongoing scandals would only weaken Obama, whose vision of America the vast majority of reporters share. But that understood exemption only encourages greater lack of candor.

There is also utopian arrogance in Washington that justifies any means necessary to achieve exalted ends of supposed fairness and egalitarianism. If one has to tell a lie to stop the Tea Party or Fox News, then it is not seen by this administration as a lie.

Barack Obama swept up an entire nation in 2008 with his hope-and-change promises of a new honesty and transparency. That dream is now in shambles, destroyed by the most untruthful cast since Richard Nixon, H. R. Haldeman, Ron Ziegler, and John Dean left Washington in disgrace almost 40 years ago — after likewise subverting the very government they had pledged to serve.

— Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. His new book, The Savior Generals, is just out from Bloomsbury Press. You can reach him by e-mailing author@victorhanson.com. © 2013 Tribune Media Services, Inc.
Title: The Age of American Impotence
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 25, 2013, 02:18:05 PM
Stephens: The Age of American Impotence
As the Edward Snowden saga illustrates, the Obama administration is running out of foreign influence.

    By BRET STEPHENS


At this writing, Edward J. Snowden, the fugitive National Security Agency contractor indicted on espionage charges, is in Moscow, where Vladimir Putin's spokesman insists his government is powerless to detain him. "We have nothing to do with this story," says Dmitri Peskov. "I don't approve or disapprove plane tickets."

Funny how Mr. Putin always seems to discover his inner civil libertarian when it's an opportunity to humiliate the United States. When the Russian government wants someone off Russian soil, it either removes him from it or puts him under it. Just ask investor Bill Browder, who was declared persona non grata when he tried to land in Moscow in November 2005. Or think of Mr. Browder's lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, murdered by Russian prison officials four years later.

Mr. Snowden arrived in Moscow from Hong Kong, where local officials refused a U.S. arrest request, supposedly on grounds it "did not fully comply with the legal requirements under Hong Kong law." That's funny, too, since Mr. Snowden had been staying in a Chinese government safe house before Beijing gave the order to ignore the U.S. request and let him go.

"The Hong Kong government didn't have much of a role," Albert Ho, a Hong Kong legislator, told Reuters. "Its role was to receive instructions to not stop him at the airport."

Now Mr. Snowden may be on his way to Havana, or Caracas, or Quito. It's been said often enough that this so-called transparency crusader remains free thanks to the cheek and indulgence of dictatorships and strongmen. It's also been said that his case illustrates how little has been achieved by President Obama's "reset" with Moscow, or with his California schmoozing of China's Xi Jinping earlier this month.

Enlarge Image
image
image
AFP/Getty Images

A show of support in Hong Kong for a fugitive visitor, June 18.

But however the Snowden episode turns out (and don't be surprised if the Russians wind up handing him over in exchange for an unspecified American favor), what it mainly illustrates is that we are living in an age of American impotence. The Obama administration has decided it wants out from nettlesome foreign entanglements, and now finds itself surprised that it's running out of foreign influence.

That is the larger significance of last week's Afghan diplomatic debacle, in which the Taliban opened an office in Doha for the "Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan"—the name Mullah Omar grandiloquently gave his regime in Kabul before its 2001 downfall. Afghan President Hamid Karzai responded by shutting down negotiations with the U.S. over post-2014 security cooperation.

Now the U.S. finds itself in an amazing position. Merely to get the Taliban to the table for a bogus peace process, the administration agreed at Pakistan's urging to let Mullah Omar come to the table on his owns terms: no acceptance of the Afghan Constitution, no cease-fire with international forces, not even a formal pledge to never again allow Afghanistan to become a haven for international terrorism. The U.S. also agreed, according to Pakistani sources, to allow the terrorist Haqqani network—whose exploits include the 2011 siege of the U.S. Embassy in Kabul—a seat at the table.

Yet having legitimized Haqqani and given the Taliban everything it wanted in exchange for nothing, the U.S. finds itself being dumped by its own client government in Kabul, which can always turn to Iran as a substitute patron. Incredible: no peace, no peace process, no ally, no leverage and no moral standing, all in a single stroke. John Kerry is off to quite a start.

What's happening in Afghanistan is of a piece with the larger pattern of U.S. diplomacy. Iraq? The administration made the complete withdrawal of our troops a cornerstone of its first-term foreign policy, and now finds itself surprised that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki won't lift a finger to prevent Iranian cargo planes from overflying his airspace en route to resupplying Bashar Assad's military. Syria? President Obama spent two years giving the country's civil war the widest berth, creating the power vacuum in which Iran, Hezbollah and Russia may soon achieve their strategic goals.

And Iran: In 2003, Tehran briefly halted its secret nuclear-weapons work and agreed to suspend its enrichment activities, at least for a few months. Yet since then, every U.S. effort to persuade Iran to alter its nuclear course has failed. Is it because the Obama administration was insufficiently solicitous, patient, or eager for a deal? Or is it that Tehran believes that treating this administration with contempt carries little cost?

"America can't do a damn thing against us" was a maxim of the Iranian revolution in its early days when America meant Jimmy Carter. Under President Obama, the new maxim could well be "America won't do a damn thing."

Which brings us back to the Snowden file. Speaking from India, Mr. Kerry offered a view on what it would mean for Russia to allow him to flee. "Disappointing," said our 68th secretary of state. He added "there would be without any question some effect and impact on the relationship and consequences."

Moscow must be trembling.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: G M on June 25, 2013, 03:22:18 PM
I guess this is the smart power we were promised...
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: DDF on June 25, 2013, 09:57:03 PM
I have to wonder where the United States would be if it weren't busy doing warrantless wiretapping (under Bush, even with wide leniency by the FISA court in terms of obtaining warrants after the fact - they still didn't bother), spying on it's own citizens, or actually staying out of countries where they obviously aren't welcome, ceasing the role of world super cop. I wonder what that would look like.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: G M on June 25, 2013, 09:59:55 PM
No power vacuum is left unfilled.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: DDF on June 25, 2013, 10:07:22 PM
No disagreement there at all.
I like a lot of the things I'm learning here, like how criminals should be treated. What I don't understand is why we don't treat politicians that are criminals in the same manner (they do in some other countries), leaving the power vacuum to be filled by those that actually have integrity.
I'm dead sure many on this site know what discipline and accountability are. Not quite certain why there is a complete absence of it on Capitol Hill. No longer my business I suppose, but enjoy staying somewhat in contact. Good to read your stuff GM. I enjoy it. Thank you.
Title: Mark Steyn: Simulacrum Self Government
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 29, 2013, 09:05:04 AM
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/352350/simulacrum-self-government-mark-steyn

Wednesday, June 26, 2013 — just another day in a constitutional republic of limited government by citizen representatives:

First thing in the morning, Gregory Roseman, Deputy Director of Acquisitions (whatever that means), became the second IRS official to take the Fifth Amendment, after he was questioned about awarding the largest contract in IRS history, totaling some half a billion dollars, to his close friend Braulio Castillo, who qualified under a federal “set aside” program favoring disadvantaged groups — in this case, disabled veterans. For the purposes of federal contracting, Mr. Castillo is a “disabled veteran” because he twisted his ankle during a football game at the U.S. Military Academy prep school 27 years ago. How he overcame this crippling disability to win a half-billion-dollar IRS contract is the heartwarming stuff of an inspiring Lifetime TV movie.

Advertisement
Later in the day, Senator John Hoeven, Republican of North Dakota and alleged author of the Corker-Hoeven amendment to the immigration bill, went on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show and, in a remarkable interview, revealed to the world that he had absolutely no idea what was in the legislation he “wrote.” Rachel Jeantel, the endearingly disastrous star witness at the George Zimmerman trial, excused her inability to comprehend the letter she’d supposedly written to Trayvon Martin’s parents on the grounds that “I don’t read cursive.” Senator Hoeven doesn’t read legislative. For example, Section 5(b)(1):

    Not later than 180 days after the date of the enactment of this Act, the Secretary shall establish a strategy, to be known as the ‘Southern Border Fencing Strategy’ . . .

On the other hand, Section 5(b)(5):

    Notwithstanding paragraph (1), nothing in this subsection shall require the Secretary to install fencing . . .

Asked to reconcile these two paragraphs, Senator Hoeven explained that, “when I read through that with my lawyer,” the guy said relax, don’t worry about it. (I paraphrase, but barely.) So Senator Hoeven and 67 other senators went ahead the following day and approved the usual bazillion-page we-have-to-pass-it-to-find-out-what’s-in-it omnibus bill, cooked up in the backrooms, released late on a Friday afternoon and passed in nothing flat after Harry Reid decreed there’s no need for further debate — not that anything recognizable to any genuine legislature as “debate” ever occurs in “the world’s greatest deliberative body.”

Say what you like about George III, but the Tea Act was about tea. The so-called comprehensive immigration reform is so comprehensive it includes special deals for Nevada casinos and the recategorization of the Alaskan fish-processing industry as a “cultural exchange” program, because the more leaping salmon we have the harder it is for Mexicans to get across the Bering Strait. While we’re bringing millions of Undocumented-Americans “out of the shadows,” why don’t we try bringing Washington’s decadent and diseased law-making out of the shadows?

Just when you thought the day couldn’t get any more momentous, the Supreme Court weighed in on same-sex marriage. When less advanced societies wish to introduce gay marriage, the people’s elected representatives assemble in parliament and pass a law. That’s how they did it in the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Norway, Sweden, Portugal, etc. But one shudders to contemplate what would result were the legislative class to attempt “comprehensive marriage reform,” complete with tax breaks for Maine lobstermen’s au pairs and the hiring of 20,000 new IRS agents to verify business expenses for page boys from disparate-impact groups. So instead it fell to five out of nine judges, which means it fell to Anthony Kennedy, because he’s the guy who swings both ways. Thus, Supreme Intergalactic Emperor Anthony gets to decide the issue for 300 million people.

As Spider-Man’s Uncle Ben so famously says in every remake, with great power comes great responsibility. Having assumed the power to redefine a societal institution that predates the United States by thousands of years, Emperor Tony the All-Wise had the responsibility at least to work up the semblance of a legal argument. Instead, he struck down the Defense of Marriage Act on the grounds that those responsible for it were motivated by an “improper animus” against a “politically unpopular group” they wished to “disparage,” “demean,” and “humiliate” as “unworthy.” What stump-toothed knuckle-dragging inbred swamp-dwellers from which hellish Bible Belt redoubt would do such a thing? Well, fortunately, we have their names on the record: The DOMA legislators who were driven by their need to “harm” gay people include notorious homophobe Democrats Chuck Schumer, Pat Leahy, Harry Reid, Joe Biden, and the virulent anti-gay hater who signed it into law, Bill Clinton.
====================

It’s good to have President Clinton’s animus against gays finally exposed by Anthony Kennedy. There’s a famous photograph of him taken round the time he signed DOMA, at a big fundraiser wearing that black-tie-and-wing-collar combo that always made him look like the maître d’ at a 19th-century bordello. He’s receiving greetings from celebrity couple Ellen DeGeneres and Anne Heche, who’d come out as gay the week before and, in the first flush of romance, can’t keep their hands off each other even with President Happy Pants trying to get a piece of the action. For a man motivated only by a hateful need to harm gays, he’s doing a grand job of covering it up, looking like the guy who decided to splash out for the two-girl special on the last night of the sales convention. Nevertheless, reacting to the Supreme Court’s decision, President Clinton professed himself delighted to have been struck down as a homophobe.

Advertisement
In his dissent, Justice Scalia wrote that “to defend traditional marriage is not to condemn, demean, or humiliate those who would prefer other arrangements, any more than to defend the Constitution of the United States is to condemn, demean, or humiliate other constitutions.” Indeed. With this judgment, America’s constitutional court demeans and humiliates only its own. Of all the local variations through which same-sex marriage has been legalized in the last decade, mostly legislative (France, Iceland) but occasionally judicial (Canada, South Africa), the United States is unique in its inability to jump on the Western world’s bandwagon du jour without first declaring its current vice president, president pro tem of the Senate, majority leader, chairman of the Senate Rules Committee, and prospective first First Gentleman raging gay-bashers. As the Paula Deens of orientation, maybe they should all be canceled.

There is something deeply weird, not to say grubby and dishonest, about this. In its imputation of motive to those who disagree with it, this opinion is more disreputable than Roe v. Wade — and with potentially unbounded application. To return to the immigration bill, and all its assurances that those amnestied will “go to the end of the line” and have to wait longer for full-blown green cards and longer still for citizenship, do you seriously think any of that hooey will survive its first encounter with a federal judge? In much of the Southwest, you’d have jurisdictions with a majority of Hispanic residents living under an elderly, disproportionately white voting roll. You can cut-and-paste Kennedy’s guff about “improper animus” toward “a group of people” straight into the first immigration appeal, and a thousand more. And that’s supposing the administrative agencies pay any attention to the “safeguards” in the first place.

As I say, just another day in the life of the republic: a corrupt bureaucracy dispensing federal gravy to favored clients; a pseudo-legislature passing bills unread by the people’s representatives and uncomprehended by the men who claim to have written them; and a co-regency of jurists torturing an 18th-century document in order to justify what other countries are at least honest enough to recognize as an unprecedented novelty. Whether or not, per Scalia, we should “condemn” the United States Constitution, it might be time to put the poor wee thing out of its misery.

— Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is the author of After America: Get Ready for Armageddon. © 2013 Mark Steyn
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 30, 2013, 09:48:27 PM
http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2013/06/30/
Title: Catching Pigs
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 05, 2013, 07:58:49 AM
CATCHING PIGS....
 

 
There was a chemistry professor in a large college that had some exchange students in the class. One day while the class was in the lab,
the professor noticed one young man, an exchange student, who kept rubbing his back and stretching as if his back hurt. The professor asked
the young man what was the matter. The student told him he had a bullet lodged in his back. He had been shot while fighting communists in his
native country who were trying to overthrow his country's government and install a new communist regime.
 
In the midst of his story, he looked at the professor and asked a strange question. He asked: "Do you know how to catch wild pigs?"
 
The professor thought it was a joke and asked for the punch line.
 
The young man said that it was no joke. "You catch wild pigs by finding a suitable place in the woods and putting corn on the ground.
The pigs find it and begin to come every day to eat the free corn.  "When they are used to coming every day, you put a fence down one side
of the place where they are used to coming. When they get used to the fence, they begin to eat the corn again and you put up another side of
the fence. "They get used to that and start to eat again. You continue until you have all four sides of the fence up with a gate in the last side.
 
"The pigs, which are used to the free corn, start to come through the gate to eat that free corn again. You then slam the gate on them and
catch the whole herd. Suddenly the wild pigs have lost their freedom. They run around and around inside the fence, but they are caught.
Soon they go back to eating the free corn. They are so used to it that they have forgotten how to forage in the woods for themselves,
so they accept their captivity."
 
The young man then told the professor that is exactly what he sees happening in America. The government keeps pushing us toward Communism/Socialism and keeps spreading the free corn out in the form of programs such as supplemental income, tax credit for unearned income,tax exemptions, tobacco subsidies, dairy subsidies, payments not to plant crops (CRP), welfare, medicine, drugs, etc. while we continually lose our freedoms, just a little at a time.
 
One should always remember two truths: There is no such thing as a free lunch, and you can never hire someone to provide a service for you cheaper than you can do it yourself.  If you see that all of this wonderful government "help" is a problem confronting the future of democracy in America, you might want to send this on to your friends.

But, God help us all when the gate slams shut!
 
Quote for today:
 
"The problems we face today are there because the people who work for a living are now outnumbered by those who vote for a living." 
Title: VDH: Liberal Apartheid
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 07, 2013, 09:32:42 AM
One of the strangest things about the modern progression in liberal thought is its increasing comfort with elitism and high style. Over the last 30 years, the enjoyment of refined tastes, both material and psychological, has become a hallmark of liberalism — hand in glove with the art of professional altruism, so necessary to the guilt-free enjoyment of the good life. Take most any contemporary issue, and the theme of elite progressivism predominates.

Higher education? A visitor from Mars would note that the current system of universities and colleges is designed to promote the interests of an elite at the expense of the middle and lower-middle classes. UCLA, Yale, and even CSU Stanislaus run on premises far more reactionary and class-based than does Wal-Mart. The teaching loads and course responsibilities of tenured full professors have declined over the last half-century, while the percentage of units taught by graduate students and part-time faculty, with few benefits and low pay, has soared.

The number of administrators has likewise climbed — even as student indebtedness has skyrocketed, along with the unemployment rate among recent college graduates. A typical scenario embodying these bizarre trends would run something like the following: The UC assistant provost for diversity affairs, or the full professor of Italian literature, focusing on gender and the self, depend on lots of graduate and undergraduate students in the social sciences and humanities piling up debt without any guarantee of jobs, while part-time faculty subsidize the formers’ lifestyles by teaching, without grading assistants, the large introductory undergraduate courses, getting paid a third to half what those with tenure receive.

Advertisement
The conference and the academic book, with little if any readership, promote the career interest and income of the trendy administrator and the full professor, and are subsidized by either the taxpayers or the students or both. All of the above assumes that a nine-month teaching schedule, with tenure, grants, sabbaticals, and release time, are above reproach and justify yearly tuition hikes exceeding the rate of inflation. The beneficiaries of the system win exemption from criticism through loud support of the current progressive agenda, as if they were officers with swagger sticks in the culture wars who must have their own perks if they are to properly lead the less-well-informed troops out of the trenches.

Take illegal immigration. On the facts, it is elitist to the core. Big business, flush with cash, nevertheless wants continued access to cheap labor, and so favors amnesties for millions who arrived without English, education, or legality. On the other end of the scale, Jorge Hernandez, making $9 an hour mowing lawns, is not enthusiastic about an open border, which undercuts his meager bargaining power with his employer.

The state, not the employer, picks up the cost of subsidies to ensure that impoverished illegal-immigrant workers from Oaxaca have some semblance of parity with American citizens in health care, education, legal representation, and housing. The employers’ own privilege exempts them from worrying whether they would ever need to enroll their kids in the Arvin school system, or whether an illegal-alien driver will hit their daughter’s car on a rural road and leave the scene of the accident. In other words, no one in Atherton is in a trailer house cooking meth; the plastic harnesses of missing copper wire from streetlights are not strewn over the sidewalks in Palo Alto; and the Menlo schools do not have a Bulldog-gang problem.

Meanwhile, ethnic elites privately understand that the melting pot ensures eventual parity with the majority and thereby destroys the benefits of hyphenation. So it becomes essential that there remain always hundreds of thousands of poor, uneducated, and less-privileged immigrants entering the U.S. from Latin America. Only that way is the third-generation Latino professor, journalist, or politician seen as a leader of group rather than as an individual. Take away illegal immigration, and the Latino caucus and Chicano graduation ceremony disappear, and the beneficiaries become just ordinary politicians and academics, distinguished or ignored on the basis of their own individual performance.

Mexico? Beneath the thin veneer of Mexican elites suing Americans in U.S. courts is one of the most repressive political systems in the world. Mexican elites make the following cynical assumptions: Indigenous peoples are better off leaving Mexico and then scrimping to send billions of dollars home in remittances; that way, they do not agitate for missing social services back home; and once across the border, they act as an expatriate community to leverage concessions from the United States.

Nannies, gardeners, cooks, and personal attendants are increasingly recent arrivals from Latin America — even as the unemployment rates of Latino, African-American, and working-class white citizens remain high, with compensation relatively low. No wonder that loud protestations about “xenophobes, racists, and nativists” oil the entire machinery of elite privilege. Does the liberal congressman or the Washington public advocate mow his own lawn, clean his toilet, or help feed his 90-year-old mother? At what cost would he cease to pay others to do these things — $20, $25 an hour? And whom would he hire if there were no illegal immigrants? The unemployed African-American teenager in D.C.? The unemployed Appalachian in nearby West Virginia? I think not.
Title: Prager: Egypt's coup and ours
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 09, 2013, 10:36:44 AM

Egypt's Coup ... and Ours
Tuesday, July 09, 2013
ShareThis

Here is what Shadi Hamid of the Brookings Institution had to say about Egypt's coup in a New York Times op-ed:

"Now supporters of the Brotherhood will ask, with good reason, whether democracy still has anything to offer them."

As much as I loathe the Muslim Brotherhood and the whole Islamist enterprise, it is difficult to imagine any other response among Islamists than this: Our votes don't count.

They were voted into office; many Egyptians and the army didn't like the results, so the vote was overthrown.

With some important differences -- and not all of them to the credit of the United States -- the Supreme Court of the United States, colluding judges and the Democratic Party of California did the same thing to the voters of California.

First, in March 2000, the voters of California, by the lopsided percentile margin of 61-38, voted to enact a statute that restricted marriage to one man and one woman. Eight years later, in May 2008, the California Supreme Court struck it down on the grounds that it violated the state constitution.

Having had their vote overturned by the California Supreme Court because Proposition 22 allegedly violated the California Constitution, the citizens of California later that year voted to amend the California Constitution. It would include these 14 words:

"Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California."

Known as Proposition 8, it, too, passed in liberal California -- by a margin of 52-47.

Immediately challenged by pro-same-sex marriage groups, the California Supreme Court actually upheld the vote. Even a California Supreme Court had no choice but to vote that way since, in effect, it was being asked to vote on whether the California Constitution was constitutional in California.

But the left in America knows that all it needs to do in order to overturn a vote it opposes is to find a left-wing judge or court.

So, the left went to a federal court and found the perfect judge, a gay leftist, former U.S. District Chief Judge Vaughn Walker. On August 4, 2010, Walker overturned Proposition 8, asserting, among other personal opinions, that the amendment to the California Constitution "violated the Equal Protection Clause [of the U.S. Constitution] because there is no rational basis for limiting the designation of 'marriage' to opposite-sex couples." (Italics added.)

All of Western civilization for all its history had been irrational in defining marriage as a man-woman institution. So believed one man, and he used that view to overturn -- for a second time in eight years -- the vote of a substantial majority of Californians.

Walker's ruling was, of course, upheld by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, the most left-wing circuit court in the country. Like Walker and most other leftwing justices, the Ninth Circuit rules according their ideology, not according to the law and certainly not according to the will of voters.

The left uses left-wing judges and courts to achieve its ends. They uphold votes that support the left, and overturn those that don't.

But it gets worse.

The left-wing governor and attorney general of California chose not to defend Proposition 8 before the Supreme Court, though it was their legal duty to do so. "Social justice" is the supreme left-wing value; honor and integrity are redefined to mean that which promotes social justice, as the left defines the term.

Consequently, there was no one with legal standing to defend the vote of a substantial majority of Californians before the Supreme Court. And so, the Supreme Court ruled that since no one but the State of California had the legal standing to defend the voters of California, neither the Supreme Court nor the Ninth District Court of Appeals could rule on Judge Walker's decision. And so one leftist judge's ruling was allowed to remain in force.

As a result, another vote was overturned and the most important social institution was radically redefined. It was all done by a left-wing judge, a left-wing governor of California and four left-wing justices plus one swing vote on the U.S. Supreme Court.

In America we don't need the army to overthrow elections. We have left-wing judges to do that.
Title: Wrong Side of the Street
Post by: G M on July 09, 2013, 04:55:28 PM
http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/2013/07/wrong-side-of-street.html

Tuesday, July 09, 2013
 

Wrong Side of the Street

Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog 19 Comments


The Zimmerman case is about many things, but it isn't about George Zimmerman, an Hispanic Obama supporter who campaigned against police brutality only to find himself plucked up by the hand of Big Brother to play the villainous white racist in the latest episode of liberal political reality television.
 
Zimmerman is the latest Bernie Goetz; another wholly unlikely cult figure who currently campaigns for vegetarian lunches in public schools and squirrel rescue. It's not that the two men had anything particularly in common. Unlike Goetz, it is very unlikely that Zimmerman jumped the gun, so to speak, but they both fill a similar niche. They represent the embattled lower half of the middle class.
 
To understand the Zimmerman case, you have to live in a neighborhood that has just enough property values to keep you paying the mortgage and just enough proximity to dangerous territories to make you feel like you're living on the frontier.
 
The chain of events doesn't make much sense to the elites, which is one reason why they assume that the explanation must be racism There weren't a lot of New Yorker readers cheering as Charles Bronson's Paul Kersey stalked the subways and parks of the city blowing away hoods. The perfect target audience for the Death Wish movies or for Goetz saying "You don't look too bad, here's another" was that bottom half of the middle class that didn't have enough money to leave the city and didn't have enough liberalism to accept the violence as their just due.
 
But the case isn't about race either. It's about a struggling middle class in a precarious economy trying to hang on to what it has. And it's about a culture of dropouts from the economy who celebrate thuggery and then pretend to be the victims. It's doubtful that anyone in Zimmerman's neighborhood who weathered multiple break-ins has much sympathy for the Martin family. And that's one reason that the prosecution hasn't found any useful witnesses.
 
If Trayvon Martin had been the clean cut innocent kid that the media tried to pretend he is, the reaction might have been different. But he wasn't. The gap between Martin and Zimmerman wasn't race, in other circumstances most liberals would have called both men members of minority groups, it was aspiration.

George Zimmerman wanted to to be a cop. Trayvon Martin wanted to be a hood. It's quite possible that Martin got no closer to his ambition than Zimmerman got to his. Both men were just going through the motions on the edge of a game of cops-and-robbers that suddenly turned deadly real. And even in a country where the thug tops the entertainment heap, the vulnerable parts of the middle class have more sympathy for aspiring cops than for aspiring thugs.
 
What are cops and thugs? Cops are the protectors of the middle class and thugs prey on the middle class. Not just any part of the middle class, but the vulnerable parts, the men and women without enough money and mobility to get out when neighborhoods turn bad. And then it all comes down to territory and who can intimidate whom. Either the cops intimidate the thugs or the thugs intimidate the cops.
 
Everyone is the hero in their own story, but George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin were living out different stories. George Zimmerman was looking out for his neighbors while Trayvon Martin was looking to live the thug life. Martin's story ended with him realizing that sometimes attitude isn't enough and Zimmerman's story ended with him realizing that sometimes even when you try to be the hero, you're going to be drawn as a villain.
 
But the Zimmerman and Martin story is an American story. That's why it has become so big. Back in the 70s, when Paul Kersey was skulking around on the silver screen, it was mainly an urban story. Now it's an everywhere story. It's a story about homesteaders and savages, about a shaky middle class built on piles of debt trying to protect what's left of its way of life while across the street, there's the glamor of not working and scoring money any way you can.
 
It's a culture clash of a primal kind. Settlers and nomads. Cops and robbers. Builders and destroyers. And it was never going to end well. The elites want the settlers to make way for the nomads, the cops to acknowledge their role in alienating the robbers and the builders to admit that their construction is really the destruction of the way of life of the destroyers. They don't understand the struggling lower middle class and they don't care to. They have a great deal of empathy for the Trayvon Martins swaggering around another neighborhood that decays at their touch, but none for the George Zimmermans, sweating, mopping their brows, worrying how they're going to hold everything together.
 


Neighborhood watches don't have to turn violent, but they exist because of the potential for violence in a society with plenty of law, but little order. The struggling middle class looks to the cops only to realize that the cops have their own job and it isn't to protect them, it's to protect each other. And so they become cops. It's vigilantism of a sort and it's a symptom of social collapse. But it's also the attitude that helped make the United States happen.
 
That's the real story behind the headlines, the agitprop and the circus of a public trial. It's the reality that doesn't get talked about much because it's much less interesting than the straightforward story being fed into the presses. The one about an innocent young boy killed for no reason at all. It's a story about what happens when people are backed into a corner and then told to stay there. It's about a frightened middle class trying to survive. And it's about territory.
 
Settlers make homes. Nomads walk in and out of them. Builders thrive on making things and destroyers on trashing them. Zimmerman picked his side of the coin and Martin picked his.
Title: Nork Propaganda
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 17, 2013, 03:32:59 PM
http://superchief.tv/leaked-north-korean-documentary-exposes-western-propaganda-and-its-scary-how-true-it-is/
Title: The Goldberg File: Trolling
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 19, 2013, 11:06:09 AM


The Goldberg File
By Jonah Goldberg
July 19, 2013

Dear Reader (unless you are in Detroit, and are busy fighting off Humungous, the C.H.U.D.s, Morlocks, Mole Men, Minions, Skrulls, and those folks from the government who are here to help),

Welcome to the United States of Trolling

In case you didn't know, trolling is one of those Internet words the kids today use. The Urban Dictionary has a series of entirely serviceable definitions of the term. But the gist of it boils down to pretending to be serious while saying something outrageous in an effort to really piss people off for the sake of pissing people off.

I will be the first to confess that we at the Goldberg File are not strangers to the practice because, well, it's fun. As my favorite Russian proverb goes, "If you see a Bulgarian in the street, beat him. He will know why."

More relevant, journalism is a lot like Sara Lee's Home Style Troll Pie ("Now with at least 10 percent real troll!"), the troll is simply baked in. That's because trolling is often in the eye of the beholder. One man's trollery is another man's speaking truth to power. Writers are supposed to be provocative. Good writing often involves stating truths boldly and clearly. (For instance: Harry Reid smells vaguely like stale corn chips, failure, and cat urine; on this there can be no debate.) A dedicated Communist or Nazi who reads Orwell probably won't think Orwell is a profound witness to evil, he'll think Orwell should live under a bridge. The moment we try to cut through the white noise of life and synthesize a simple truth, we invariably generalize. And any generalization will seem unfair to the exceptions who prove the rule. (This is one reason why writing about issues like race and gender are so perilous. No matter how true the generalization, the exceptions must be treated like the rule. More on that in a bit.)

Trolling Stone

Anyway, I suppose I should get to the point. As I've written before, all poisons depend on the dosage. A little salt makes food tasty, a lot of salt is lethal. My concern is that the sodium content of American society is approaching fatal proportions.

Consider the entirely intended controversy over Rolling Stone's new cover of that murderous loser Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

Now Rolling Stone has been a really lame magazine for a very long time. I'm talking about the non-music-industry coverage, since I've never had much interest in reading how Hair Bands find their muse.

On the few occasions I've picked up Rolling Stone in the last 15 years, it's always seemed to me to be the print version of the judges' table on Animal Planet's Pet Star -- a roving agglomeration of has-beens and sell-outs eager for a check in return for the cachet of their faded glory supported by a bunch of people just happy for a little attention. In the print version at least, the political orientation of the magazine has long been driven by a bundle of hoary clichés about the inherent radicalism of young people, particularly the notion that capitalism is antithetical to the interests and aesthetics of the young. This sort of thinking is what fueled both the Occupy Wall Street movement and the coverage of it. The false premise underlying it helps explain why OWS fizzled out like a wet match rather than igniting a populist prairie fire. From what I can tell, the average young person is far more interested in getting a good job or starting a career than living on a kibbutz or bringing down The Man, but that is too inconvenient a fact for the Jann Wenners of the world. You have to wonder what serious Marxists think of such spectacle. The magazine eagerly turns itself into a cog for the mass-marketing operations of huge conglomerates promoting centimillionaire populists like Bruce Springsteen and allegedly radical rappers who're more interested in bragging about how much money they make than tearing down The System.

Oh, and let's not give in to the seductions of nostalgia and think the rock-and-roll industry was ever just "about the music." The essence of marketing to young people -- in politics and everything else -- is necessarily condescension. For instance, take a look at this ad from 1968. It shows a bunch of long-haired protesters in one of The Man's cages. The headline: "But the Man Can't Bust Our Music."

Pssst! Kids, The Man thinks you're stupid.

Anyway, I agree with everything Jim Geraghty says about Rolling Stone. He's right: Running a print magazine is hard enough, never mind aiming one at the one demographic most solidly hostile to reading on paper (or even reading at all). The Tsarnaev cover is nothing more than an attempt to troll the country in the hope that the ensuing controversy will fool a bunch of idiot kids into confusing the controversy for edgy rebellion. I can only assume we'll look back on this lame "Hail Mary" as a symptom of the magazine's interminable death rattle.

The View at The View

In other "news," Jenny McCarthy is joining The View. Look, opinions vary on Jenny McCarthy. My friend Ronald Bailey makes a very strong case that she's harmed countless children by peddling her antivaccine nonsense. Our own talented Betsy Woodruff has a very entertaining and enlightening piece showing that her antivaccine views are part of a seamless tapestry of McCarthy's overall vapidity. An excerpt:

McCarthy wrote a book about her Papist upbringing called Bad Habits (wordplay! If you missed it, she's dressed as a nun on the cover), which she plugged on The View in 2012, dispensing such logical and coherent spiritual insights as "Worship an elephant, if it puts you in a state of grace." Then again, I guess it would be too much to ask for her to know what a complicated term like "state of grace" means, given that McCarthy -- who says she once wanted to be a nun -- seemed to think the Immaculate Conception refers to the conception of Jesus, not Mary.

But look, there's one thing all informed and fair-minded people across the ideological spectrum can agree on: Jenny McCarthy looks really good naked. I say this without fear of contradiction, for I have done some reporting on this. Not as much as I would like, I will concede. But enough to be confident this statement will make it past this "news"letter's diligent fact-checkers.

Alas, McCarthy will not be naked on The View (unless the producers act on my numerous e-mails and voice messages). This is particularly ironic given the title of the show. Instead she will speak her mind, which is not her strong suit. As a result, you can be sure she will say really stupid things that lots of people will get up in arms about.
And that's the point. The show is one long exercise in trolling people. Whoopi Goldberg (no relation) plays the exact same role. (Note: I cannot confirm this, but sources tell me that Ms. Goldberg does not look good naked.) When she said that what Roman Polanski did wasn't really "rape rape," she was playing her part. The show may have started with the intent of having crones stand around the village well gossiping, and no doubt that's still part of its function, but the only way that show is ever in the "news" is when one of the biddies says something remarkably dumb. And you can be sure the producers are ecstatic when people remark upon it.

Trollier Than Thou

And that's my real gripe here. Because of the insatiable desire to "go viral," the entire media landscape is being sucked into the black hole of YouTwitFacetaGram. You know, there's a certain irony to the fact that Barbara Walters is the host of The View. She is endlessly celebrated as a pioneer who proved that women could do "hard news," but she's spent the vast bulk of her career working to make news as soft as possible. Journalistically speaking, she is the opposite of Viagra (coincidentally, that's actually how one of my sources described Whoopi Goldberg). She spent a couple years anchoring a nightly news broadcast, but has spent decades asking celebrities what kind of tree they'd most like to be. And now she's finishing her career sitting at the head of the mean-girls table at the electronic high-school cafeteria. While she's not solely responsible for the long decline of her profession, it's hard to say she didn't contribute to the problem.

Watch The Today Show some morning. At the opening when they announce the big stories they'll be covering, there's invariably a tease for a YouTube video of a dog playing a xylophone (badly) or some baby walking around with a bucket on its head. I always wonder what the victims of a forest fire or the families rounded up into a camp in some godforsaken corner of the globe would think if they knew that their plight gets equal or lesser billing to a Siberian Husky that says, "I love you!"
I think it's fair to say that I'm no purist on such things. I take a back seat to no man in my fondness for dogs saying "I love you." But I don't claim it's "news." Indeed, that's why here at the G-File, we put "news" in quotation marks.

The Bell Trolls for Thee

Today's column is on Al Sharpton. I don't mention George Zimmerman or Trayvon Martin once, in part because the Zimmerman controversy will eventually go away, but Sharpton, like herpes, is forever. I also didn't mention the Trayvon Martin controversy because I resent the contrivance of it all. I have sincere sympathy for the Martin family. I also have sympathy for Zimmerman. I think he made a terrible mistake that night, but he doesn't deserve to have his life threatened or spend the remainder of his days having millions of Americans thinking he's a monster.

My resentment stems from the fact that this is all so manufactured. For instance, there have been literally thousands of articles talking about Stand Your Ground laws in the last three months (I checked Nexis). But the Stand Your Ground law had nothing to do with what happened in Florida. Why not use this tragedy to launch a national debate about the Kellogg-Briand Pact or the infield-fly rule?

The very idea this tragedy is the result of racism mistakes a premise for a conclusion. Actually, there's an impressive consistency here. Liberalism's whole approach to racial issues is to reverse engineer from results to causes. Whatever the issue -- from the number of Ph.D.s to the number of business loans -- liberalism looks first to inequality of results and then postulates that the cause must be racism or sexism or some other institutionalized bigotry. If you note that there is no actual evidence for their conclusion, they keep pointing at the result as if that's all the evidence needed. It's a bit like when my dog looks at his empty food bowl. I can say, "But you just ate like five seconds ago, don't you remember?" Or, "You have historically unprecedented explosive diarrhea so I cannot feed you at this juncture." It just doesn't matter. All the proof Cosmo needs that something is horribly wrong is the fact that his food bowl is empty. Causes, reasons, explanations are like the "blah, blah, blahs" in a Far Side cartoon and nothing more. This is in fact the essence of "disparate impact" -- the result is the proof of racism regardless of the cause. The same goes here. Trayvon Martin is dead. Zimmerman isn't. "What more proof do you need?" liberals ask.

None. None at all. And that's the problem.

Of Kings and Crowds

Both the literal and the merely figurative mobs clamoring for justice against Zimmerman are in important respects asking for the same thing. Sure, the lynch mobs want Zimmerman dead, while those pushing for a federal case just want him locked up -- an important distinction to be sure. But they both want to reject the findings of a court of law and a duly appointed jury because they do not like the result. In this, both are manifestations of arbitrary power, the bane of conservatives since Edmund Burke. Arbitrary power is the exercise of force for grievances found neither in law nor reason. It is the marshaling of violence to remedy resentment and justify caprice.
Because we are drenched in the language of democracy, we tend to think that the will of the crowd has legitimacy simply by virtue of numbers. But numbers alone do not a reasonable argument make. As I wrote back in 2006:

Politics has a math of its own. Whereas a scientifically minded person might see things this way: One person who says 2+2=5 is an idiot; two people who think 2+2=5 are two idiots; and a million people who think 2+2=5 are a whole lot of idiots -- political math works differently. Let's work backwards: if a million people think 2+2=5, then they are not a million idiots, but a "constituency." If they are growing in number, they are also a "movement." And, if you were not only the first person to proclaim 2+2=5, but you were the first to persuade others, then you, my friend, are not an idiot, but a visionary.

Arbitrary power is the same whether it comes from a monarch or a mob. Indeed, they are very often the same thing. In modern times, all leaders derive their legitimacy from the masses. In democracies, we formalize the process and temper it with the rule of law. But even so, while presidents and prime ministers derive their formal power from elections, they derive their practical power from popularity. If president Obama had an 80 percent approval rating (shudder) he could do far more with the same office than he can with a 45 percent approval rating.

The same often holds true for kings. In The Treason of the IntellectualsJulien Benda noted that the rising tide of populism meant that kings were now subject to the whims of the masses. In the past, a monarch could act on the national interests of the state without fear of correction from below. But by the 20th century, "The modern citizen claims to feel for himself what is demanded by the national honor, and he is ready to rise up against his leaders if they have a different conception of it." That may sound like an improvement. Indeed, it may well be one. But absent the rule of law and constitutional guarantees of individual liberty, it's all just different manifestations of arbitrary power. It reminds me of one of my favorite lines from William Jennings Bryan: "The people of Nebraska are for free silver and I am for free silver. I will look up the arguments later."

Most mobs have someone out front egging them on, telling them where to find the victims, and where best to string them up. Whether that person is a king, a president, or just a random human carbuncle like Al Sharpton is of little difference. Legitimacy has already left the building.
Title: From FB
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 19, 2013, 07:11:13 PM
Which of these encounters is Racist?

1. Black man Kills a White Man
2. Black man Kills a Hispanic Man
3. Black man Kills a Asian Man
4. Black man Kills another Black Man

5. White Man Kills another White Man
6. White Man Kills a Hispanic Man
7. White Man Kills an Asian
8. White (who is actually Hispanic) Man Kills a Black Man

Congratulations; if you selected #8 you are not a Racist and you correctly identified the only encounter that could remotely be considered racist in the current frenzy of vigilantism.

Let's suppose a Black Man (who happened to be President) left 4 White Americans to fend for themselves in Benghazi to ultimately die a horrible death far away from family and friends. Would that fall into any sort of Racial Profiling as trumpeted in the Zimmerman case, or would that simply be a matter of needing to get to your next Political Campaign stop along with another round of Golf?

Let's suppose a Black Man (who happened to be the US Attorney General) allowed literally tons of military-style weapon systems to be shipped directly to known cartels in Mexico (and blaming said weapons transfers on Law-Abiding Americans) and as a direct result many, many Hispanics as well as White US Border Patrol Agent died of gunshot wounds. Would that be considered to fall on any part of the Racial Profiling spectrum or would that simply be a minor oversight on his part of which he had no direct knowledge?

You see, I don't care one bit what your skin color happens to be. I don't really care what happened to your ancestors. Mine were slaughtered at the hands of the Russians and Germans. I've gotten over it. What I actually care about is an individual's personal behavior as judged by an objective standard.

This "Racism" fire-hose of nonsense needs to be turned off and the word itself needs to be properly used, defined and reserved for actual racists who are an abomination to all humankind.
Title: When the parasite outgrows the host
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 24, 2013, 09:35:12 AM
"Like Detroit, America has unfunded liabilities, to the tune of $220 trillion, according to the economist Laurence Kotlikoff. Like Detroit, it's cosseting the government class and expanding the dependency class, to the point where its bipartisan 'immigration reform' actively recruits 50-60 million low-skilled chain migrants. Like Detroit, America's governing institutions are increasingly the corrupt enforcers of a one-party state -- the IRS and Eric Holder's amusingly misnamed Department of Justice being only the most obvious examples. Like Detroit, America is bifurcating into the class of 'community organizers' and the unfortunate denizens of the communities so organized. The one good thing that could come out of bankruptcy is if those public-sector pensions are cut and government workers forced to learn what happens when, as National Review's Kevin Williamson puts it, a parasite outgrows its host." --columnist Mark Steyn
Title: Henry Rollins letter to Ann Coulter
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 25, 2013, 08:29:33 PM
“Dear Ann:

You used to be fun; at least funny.  At least gently and amusingly insane, but girlfriend, you’ve changed!  The thousand-yard stare you’ve acquired in the last couple of years says lonely nights, too much wine and insecurity about the future of your career.  Where to now, my sweet fascist?  Another one of your silly books?  More hilarious appearances on Hannity & Colmes?  Bill Maher has to be tired of you by now.

You’re anything but stupid and by now , you must see the writing on the wall.  You’ll never have a real place with the Beltway in crowd, as they see you as a northeastern, hickoid, pro wrestler, Nascar type with a degree from Cornell.  I mean, really, Ann; where can it go from here?  Ann, I think I have the answer, in fact, I know I do.

I want to hire you, Ann.  I want you to come and work for me.  I want you to be my “Ann Friday,” my housekeeper, beekeeper, floor, chimney and minesweeper, my window-washing, grocery-buying, dinner-cooking, obsequious, submissive concubine-domestic.

You will laugh at my jokes, celebrate my victories and lament my failures.  You will praise my friends and vow great harm upon all who oppose me.  You will treat me like a god, a guru, a mentor – and the best night in the sack you’ve ever had.  You will carry my bags, wash my cars, walk my dogs and turn your savings over to me.  You  will massage Susan Sarandon’s aching shoulders, whip up vegan delights for Hanoi Jane Fonda, and loofah Barbra Streisand’s stretch marks.

But most of all, Ann, you will just shut the fuck up.

I can offer you a life of obedient servitude on my compound; in your time with me, you will learn much.  You will learn that America is made up of people from all races, walks of life and sexual orientation and that it’s all OK.  You will learn to be patient and kind.  You will learn the meaning of the word “respect” and memorize every line of Caddyshack.  You will  listen to The Ramones, Black Sabbath and the Brides of Funkenstein.  You’re a figure of fun and I plan on having fun with that figure.  You will learn who your daddy is, that’s for sure.

But mostly, Ann, you will just shut the fuck up.

Come on, Anne, ya fuckin’ psycho; let’s do this!

Henry”
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on July 28, 2013, 08:19:41 PM
The kiss of death for Weiner was having Huma stand by him.  Dems are fleeing in droves.  Can't have this guy drag their 2016 investment into the picture by way of Huma.  Besides it is for NYC mayor only.  And they got their Alternative.   So for the first time I can recall feminists are finally abandoning a Democrat:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/28/opinion/sunday/dowd-time-to-hard-delete-carlos-danger.html?ref=maureendowd&_r=0
Title: I am Spartacus
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 15, 2013, 07:19:38 PM
http://accordingtohoyt.com/2013/08/15/i-am-spartacus/
Title: Biggest Embarrassment
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 26, 2013, 05:40:13 AM

http://youngcons.com/conservative-professor-writes-epic-letter-after-hes-called-the-biggest-embarrassment-to-higher-education-in-america/

Conservative professor writes epic letter after he’s called “the biggest embarrassment to higher education in America”




I want to take the time to thank you for writing and telling me that I should be fired from my position as a tenured professor because I am “the biggest embarrassment to higher education in America.” I also want to thank you for responding when I asked you exactly how you arrived at that conclusion. Your response, “because you insist that marriage requires one man and one woman,” was both helpful and concise.

While I respect your right to conclude that I am the biggest embarrassment to higher education in America, I think you’re wrong. In fact, I don’t even think I’m the biggest embarrassment to higher education in the state of North Carolina. But since you’re a liberal and you support “choice” – provided we’re talking about dismembering children and not school vouchers for those who weren’t dismembered – I want to give you some options. In fact, I’m going to describe the antics of ten professors, official campus groups, and invited campus speakers in North Carolina and let you decide which constitutes the biggest embarrassment to higher education.

1. In the early spring semester of 2013, a women’s studies professor and a psychology professor at Western Carolina University co-sponsored a panel on bondage and S&M. The purpose of the panel was to teach college students how to inflict pain on themselves and others for sexual pleasure. When you called me the biggest embarrassment in higher education, you must not have known about their bondage panel. Maybe you were tied up that evening and couldn’t make it.

2. At UNC Chapel Hill, there is a feminist professor who believes that women can lead happy lives without men. That’s nothing new. But what’s different is that she thinks women can form lifelong domestic partnerships with dogs and that those relationships will actually be fulfilling enough to replace marital relationships with men. I can’t make this stuff up, Ed. I don’t drop acid. Well, at least not since the late 1980s. But I promise this story is real and not an LSD flashback.

3. At Duke University, feminists hired a “sex worker” (read: prostitute) to speak as part of an event called the Sex Workers Art Show. After his speech, the male prostitute pulled down his pants, got down on his knees, and inserted a burning sparkler into his rectum. While it burned, he sang a verse of “the Star Spangled Banner.” I believe that stripping incident was almost as embarrassing as the other one involving the Duke Lacrosse team.

4. A porn star was once paid to give a speech at UNCG. The topic was “safe sodomy.” After her speech, the feminist pornographer sold autographed butt plugs to students in attendance. I’m not sure whether the ink could contribute to rectal cancer. I’m no health expert. But I do know it was pretty darned embarrassing when the media picked up on the story.

5. A few years ago at UNC-Chapel Hill, a feminist group built a large vibrator museum in the middle of the campus quad as a part of their “orgasm awareness week.” I think that was probably the climax of the semester, academically speaking. But they certainly weren’t too embarrassed to display a vibrator that was made out of wood back in the 1920s. Keep your batteries charged, Ed. We’re about halfway done.

6. A feminist administrator at UNC-Wilmington sponsored a pro-abortion event. During the event they sold tee shirts saying “I had an abortion” to students who … well, had abortions. That’s right, Ed. The students were encouraged to boast about the fact that they had killed their own children. That’s how the UNC system is preserving the future of our great Tar Heel state.

7. The following semester, that same UNCW administrator sponsored a workshop teaching students how to appreciate their orgasms. I learned art appreciation in college. Today, college kids are taught orgasm appreciation. I will let you decide whether that’s an embarrassment to higher ed., Ed.

8 A few years ago, a UNCW English professor posted nude pictures of under-aged girls as a part of an “art exhibit” in the university library. The Provost then ordered the nude pictures to be moved away from the library and into the university union. This decision was made after several pedophiles had previous been caught downloading child pornography in the university library just a few yards away from the location of the display. The English professor was incensed so she asked the Faculty Senate to censure the provost for violating her “academic freedom.” The faculty senate sided with the feminist professor. The provost was later pressured to leave the university.

9. A different feminist professor at UNCW accused a male professor of putting tear gas in her office. She was later caught putting her mail in a microwave oven. She did this because she thought people were trying to poison her with anthrax and that the oven would neutralize the toxins. She was not placed on leave for psychiatric reasons. Instead, she was designated as the university’s official “counter terrorism” expert.

10 And then there is Mike Adams. He thinks marriage is between a man and a woman.

So those are the choices, Ed. You can simply write back and tell me which of these professors, groups, or guest speakers has caused “the biggest embarrassment to higher education” – either in North Carolina or in America altogether. Or you can just concede that our system of hire education is the real embarrassment because it has been hijacked by radical feminism. And please pardon any puns – especially those that take the form of ms-spelled words.
Title: Peggy Noonan: Work and the American Character
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 30, 2013, 04:23:29 AM
Noonan: Work and the American Character
We need political leaders who can speak to the current national unease.

 By PEGGY NOONAN
 
Two small points on an end-of-summer weekend. One is connected to Labor Day and the meaning of work. It grows out of an observation Mike Huckabee made on his Fox show a few weeks ago. He said that we see joblessness as an economic fact, we talk about the financial implications of widespread high unemployment, and that isn't wrong but it misses the central point. Joblessness is a personal crisis because work is a spiritual event.

A job isn't only a means to a paycheck, it's more. "To work is the pray," the old priests used to say. God made us as many things, including as workers. When you work you serve and take part. To work is to be integrated into the daily life of the nation. There is pride and satisfaction in doing work well, in working with others and learning a discipline or a craft or an art. To work is to grow and to find out who you are.

In return for performing your duties, whatever they are, you receive money that you can use freely and in accordance with your highest desire. A job allows you the satisfaction of supporting yourself or your family, or starting a family. Work allows you to renew your life, which is part of the renewing of civilization.

Work gives us purpose, stability, integration, shared mission. And so to be unable to work—unable to find or hold a job—is a kind of catastrophe for a human being.

There are an estimated 11.5 million unemployed people in America now, and those who do not have sufficient work or who've left the workforce altogether inflate that number further.

This is the real reason jobs and employment are the No. 1 issue in America's domestic life. And what I have been thinking in the weeks leading up to this weekend is very simple: "Thank you, God, that I have a job." May more of us be able to say those words on Labor Day 2014.
Related Video

Wall Street Journal Declarations columnist Peggy Noonan on the state of employment and economic opportunity in the United States on Labor Day. Photos: Getty Images

And may more political leaders come up who can help jobs happen, who can advance and support the kind of national policies that can encourage American genius. One of the things missing in the current political scene is zest—a feeling that can radiate from the political sphere that everything is possible, the market is wide open. In the midst of the economic malaise of the 1970s the TV anchormen spoke in sonorous tones about the dreadful economic indicators—inflation, high interest rates, "the misery index." But Steve Jobs, in his parents' garage, was quietly working on circuit boards. And strange young Bill Gates was creating a company called Microsoft. All that work burst forth under the favorable economic conditions and policies in the 1980s and '90s.

What is needed now is a political leader on fire about all the possibilities, not one who tries to sound optimistic because polls show optimism is popular but someone with real passion about the idea of new businesses, new inventions, growth, productivity, breakthroughs and jobs, jobs, jobs. Someone in love with the romance of the marketplace. We've lost that feeling among our political leaders, who mostly walk around looking like they have headaches. But American genius is still there, in our garages. It's been there since before Ben Franklin and the key and the kite and the bolt of lightning.
***

The second point is about a kind of cultural unease in the country that is having an impact on the national mood. I think it's one of the reasons the right track/wrong track polls are bad.

To make the point, we go back in political time.

Really good politicians don't try to read the public, they are the public. They don't try to be like the people, they actually are like them. Ronald Reagan never thought of himself as a gifted reader of the public mind, but as a person who had a sense of what Americans were thinking because he was thinking it too. That's a gift, and a happy one to have—the gift of unity with the public you lead. The lack of that quality can be seen in many current political figures, who often, when they speak, seem to be withholding their true thoughts. As if the people wouldn't like it, or couldn't handle it.

Reagan was a good man, and part of his leadership was that he thought Americans were good too. He had high respect for what he saw as the American character. He liked to talk about the pioneers because he was moved by their courage, their ability to endure and forge through hostile conditions. He thought that was a big part of the American character. He was similarly moved by the Founders. He talked about the men who founded Hollywood , too, because those old buccaneers were great entrepreneurs who invented an industry. He admired their daring and willingness to gamble. They were wealth creators—that's who Americans are. He liked to talk about inventors who create markets—that's us, he thought. He liked to talk about barn raisings—the practice out West of local settlers coming together to build some neighbor's barn, so pretty soon they'd have a clearing and then a town.

By celebrating these things he felt he was celebrating not the America that was, but the America that is. That America, he felt, was under threat of being squashed and worn down by the commands and demands of liberalism. He would fight that and, he thought, win, because Americans saw it pretty much as he did.

So Reagan didn't just have something, the ability to lead. He was given something—the America he grew up in, knew and could justly laud.

To today: I've been thinking about the big bad stories of the summer, the cultural ones that disturb people. The sick New York politician who, without apparent qualms, foists his sickness into the public sphere again. The kids who kill the World War II vet because they're bored. The kids who kill the young man visiting from Australia because they too are bored, and unhappy, and unwell. The teacher who has the affair with the 14-year-old student, and gets a slap on the wrist from the judge. The state legislator who's a sexual predator, the thieving city councilor and sure, the young pop star who is so lewd, so mindlessly vulgar and ugly on the awards show.

We're shocked. But we're not shocked. And that itself is disturbing. We're used to all this, now, this crassness and lowness of public behavior. The cumulative effect of these stories, I suspect, is that we're starting to fear: Maybe that's us. Maybe that's who we are now. As if these aren't separate and discrete crimes and scandals but a daily bubbling up of the national character.

It would be good if we had some political leaders who could speak of this deflated and anxious feeling about who we are. Conservatives have been concerned about our culture for at least a quarter-century. Helpful now would be honest liberal voices that speak to our concerns about who we fear we're becoming. They might find they're thinking the way the American people are thinking, which is step one in true leadership.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: DougMacG on August 30, 2013, 08:36:19 AM
"What is needed now is a political leader on fire about all the possibilities... someone with real passion about the idea of new businesses, new inventions, growth, productivity, breakthroughs and jobs, jobs, jobs. Someone in love with the romance of the marketplace."

Peggy Noonan is right.  Big, centrally planned and controlled governments don't create prosperity, economic freedom does.  We talked about finding the next Reagan until it was cliche.  It isn't the next Reagan we need, we need the next real leader. 

Republican governance of 2001-2006 had no discipline, no clarity and no purpose.  People changed the direction in Nov 2006 and loved the idea of hope and change in 2008 with no idea that a left turn was a backwards turn.   The tea party surge of 2010 was a start.  It was grass roots, but it was leaderless and not policy specific.  2012 was a year of confusion.  The failure of the Obama Presidency was not clear enough to enough people and Romney was not quite right. 

Now young people feel that their country is failing when it is their leaders and their policies that are failing them.  A real leader could change hearts and minds.  The table is set.  Maybe we always say this but true now without a doubt - never before has there been a greater opportunity.
Title: Baraq Queeg Obama
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 02, 2013, 02:04:40 PM

In Herman Wouk’s classic World War II novel, The Caine Mutiny, there is a moment when a group of the ship’s officers are getting away from the increasingly eccentric Captain Queeq by relaxing ashore.
 
Suddenly the malcontent Lieutenant Keefer asks the others: “Does it occur to you that Captain Queeg may be insane?"
 
In fact Queeg is not insane, at least not at that time. He is simply grappling, more and more disastrously, with a job too big for him. Come the crisis of a typhoon, he becomes paralyzed and nearly sinks the ship by failing to give the obvious orders. At the subsequent court-martial he appears quite normal until he breaks down under the pressure of cross-examination. Before this, the officers have searched the regulations for guidance, but the regulations refer only to a captain who is clearly and unmistakably insane, not one who is merely guilty of eccentricity and bad judgment. At a lower level of responsibility, Queeg might have performed adequately, but with Keefer’s question, the remaining respect for Queeg’s office has gone.
 
Obama’s second inauguration speech may be his Queeg moment - an undeniable demonstration that, in an emergency, he is incapable of grappling with reality. For all his unceasing invocation of the word “change,” the outstanding thing about Obama has been his apparent inability to react, even to an imminent crisis. Like Queeg, he stands frozen on the bridge as the waves grow higher, or obsesses over issues like homosexuals and women in the military as the typhoon rises.
 
Faced with the worst looming fiscal cliff-fall in world history Obama, like Queeg in the typhoon, has done nothing at all, but has, increasingly, resorted to meaningless words. His pseudo-Keynesian fiscal notions and a mantra-like repetition of old and failed ideas, suggest a serious lack on mental versatility.
 
Economics is not an exact science, but some of its rules are now well-known, and one is that a government cannot spend its way out of a recession.
 
Yet Obama does not project any sense of urgency, merely a smug, radiating sense of his own greatness. The one fiscal measure to which he seems committed - taxing the rich - is infantile stuff, like Queeg’s obsession with who ate the wardroom strawberries. Any first-year politics or economics student knows that there are not enough rich, even in as wealthy a country as the United States, to have raising their taxes make any appreciable difference.
 
President Reagan’s application of the Laffer Curve proved emphatically, and only a short while ago, that the way to both stimulate the economy and to increase government revenues is to lower taxes.  And it is not hard to pick some areas as least where towering taxes would make no appreciable difference to public infrastructure.
 
Like Queeg, Obama shows an inability to change course when such a change is desperately needed. Giving 20 F-16 fighters and hundreds of tanks to Egypt was never, in my opinion, a clever idea. Even when Egypt was an unequivocal friend its security required things like armored cars to put down street violence, not these hi-tech weapons whose only conceivable use would be against Israel. Indeed, Obama seems to show no awareness that Egypt and other major Islamic countries have changed from being friends to something like enemies in a few months.
 
For a President of the United States there is a difference between making a bad policy choice and clinging to that policy when it is plainly completely wrong, like the Caine steaming in a circle and cutting its own tow-line. Mistakes that cannot be ignored are always someone else’s fault (refer George Bush).
 
The dancing is still there, the golf, the celebs, the multi-million dollar holidays, but behind them it is possible to detect a desperate emptiness, an interconnected mosaic of failure.
 
The one much-boasted triumph, the killing of Osama Bin Laden, was the work of other men. One of those most responsible, Dr. Shakil Afridi, rots in the hellhole of a Pakistani jail, abandoned.
 
Obama’s oath to bring the Benghazi murderers to justice seems to have been forgotten as soon as it was made, something - I am not sure if there is a word for it - actually below the level of a campaign promise.
 
Allies have been lost or slighted in almost every part of the world, the Afghan war has brought the U.S. and NATO humiliation and Russia and China lead in Space. The defenses of the U.S.’s major allies, such as Britain, are in an even more dire situation.
 
This does not even consider the exploding levels of domestic poverty. Restoring flexibility to the wage system, so as to give American industry a reasonable degree of competitiveness, seems out of the question.
 
The Western position in Mali seems to have suddenly collapsed without warning, or without preventative action being taken, and meanwhile, we have had the North Korean threat. I somehow doubt we would have had that if Reagan had been at the helm.
 
What, exactly have things come to when a cockroach of a country, apparently run by real, certifiable lunatics, can threaten the United States with nuclear weapons?  The typhoon waves are starting to break over the bridge.
 
Hal G.P. Colebatch
 
Hal G.P. Colebatch, a lawyer and author, has lectured in International Law and International Relations at Notre Dame University and Edith Cowan University in Western Australia and worked on the staff of two Australian Federal Ministers.
Title: Jean Bethke Elshtain
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 06, 2013, 08:34:06 AM
 From the late Jean Bethke Elshtain's 2003 book "Just War Against Terror: The Burden of American Power in a ¬Violent World" (Robert George writes about Elshtain nearby.):

In Albert Camus's novel, The Plague, an allegory on the coming of totalitarian terror, one of the protagonists comments acerbically on the naive reactions in a time of crisis of those he calls the "humanists," people who see themselves as living in a reasonable world in which everything is up for negotiation. They believe there is a utilitarian calculus by which to gauge all human purposes and actions. Walking down the streets of Oran (the city in which the novel is set), "humanists" may smash underfoot a rat carrying the plague bacillus but claim, "There are no rats in Oran." Why? Because there cannot be. That sort of thing does not happen anymore. In modernity, it simply must be the case that all human purposes and the means deployed to achieve them are open to adjudication and argument. Just get the aggrieved parties to really talk to one another, because that is the way reasonable people do things. The thinking of the "reasonable," Camus's narrator suggests, is dominated by their own internal preferences rather than the concrete realities of the situation.

Camus's "humanists" are unwilling or unable to peer into the heart of darkness. They have banished the word evil from their vocabularies. Evil refers to something so unreasonable, after all! Therefore, it cannot really exist. Confronted by people who mean to kill them and to destroy their society, these well-meaning persons deny the enormity of what is going on.
Title: Freud on WW-1 (echoes of Lorenz)
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 07, 2013, 12:19:53 PM
Then the war in which we had refused to believe broke out, and it brought - disillusionment. Not only is it more bloody and more destructive than any war of other days, because of the enormously increased perfection of weapons of attack and defence; it is at least as cruel, as embittered, as implacable as any that has preceded it. It disregards all the restrictions known as International Law, which in peace-time the states had bound themselves to observe; it ignores the prerogatives of the wounded and the medical service, the distinction between civil and military sections of the population, the claims of private property. It tramples in blind fury on all that comes in its way as though there were to be no future and no peace among men after it is over. It cuts all the common bonds between the contending peoples, and threatens to leave a legacy of embitterment that will make any renewal of those bonds impossible for a long time to come.

Moreover, it has brought to light an almost incredible phenomenon: the civilized nations know and understand one another so little that one can turn against the other with hate and loathing. Indeed, one of the great civilized nations is so universally unpopular that the attempt can actually be made to exclude it from the civilized community as 'barbaric', although it has long proved its fitness by the magnificent contributions to that community which it has made. We live in hopes that the pages of an impartial history will prove that that nation, in whose language we write and for whose victory our dear ones are fighting, has been precisely the one which has least transgressed the laws of civilization. But at such a time who dares to set himself up as judge in his own cause?

People are more or less represented by the states which they form, and these states by the governments which rule them. The individual citizen can with horror convince himself in this war of what would occasionally cross his mind in peace-time - that the state has forbidden to the individual the practice of wrong-doing, not because it desires to abolish it, but because it wants to monopolize it, like salt and tobacco. A belligerent state permits itself every such misdeed, every such act of violence, as would disgrace the individual. It makes use against the enemy not only of the accepted stratagems of war, but of deliberate lying and deception as well - and to a degree which seems to exceed the usage of former wars. The state exacts the utmost degree of obedience and sacrifice from its citizens, but at the same time it treats them like children by maintaining an excess of secrecy and a censorship upon news and expressions of opinion which leaves the spirits of those whose intellects it thus suppresses defenceless against every unfavourable turn of events and every sinister rumour. It absolves itself from the guarantees and treaties by which it was bound to other states, and makes unabashed confession of its own rapacity and lust for power, which the private individual has then to sanction in the name of patriotism.

It should not be objected that the state cannot refrain from wrong-doing, since that would place it at a disadvantage. It is no less disadvantageous, as a general rule, for the individual to conform to the standards of morality and refrain from brutal and arbitrary conduct; and the state seldom proves able to indemnify him for the sacrifices it exacts. Nor should it be a matter for surprise that this relaxation of all the moral ties between the collective beings of mankind should have had repercussions on the morality of individuals; for our conscience is not the inflexible judge that ethical teachers declare it, but in its origin is dread of the community and nothing else. When the community no longer raises objections, there is an end, too, to the suppression of evil passions, and people perpetrate deeds of cruelty, fraud, treachery and barbarity so incompatible with their level of civilization that one would have thought them impossible.

Well may the citizen of the civilized world of whom I have spoken stand helpless in a world that has grown strange to him - his great fatherland disintegrated, its common estates laid waste, his fellow-citizens divided and debased!

There is something to be said, however, in criticism of his disappointment. Strictly speaking it is not justified, for it consists in the destruction of an illusion. We welcome illusions because they spare us emotional distress, and enable us instead to indulge in gratification. We must not complain, then, if now and again they come into collision with some portion of reality and are shattered against it.

The whole essay can be found here:
http://www.panarchy.org/freud/war.1915.html
Title: Judge Jeanine: Barq guilty of dithering incompetence
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 08, 2013, 04:06:17 PM


http://video.foxnews.com/v/2657047627001/judge-jeanine-another-false-narrative-from-the-white-house/
Title: Obama lifted his speech from Bush
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 11, 2013, 08:57:03 PM
Obama lifted his Syria speech from Bush
By Marc A. Thiessen, Updated: Wednesday, September 11, 6:08 AM

President Obama never misses a chance to “blame it on Bush,” and last night’s address to the nation on Syria was no exception.

The reason Obama has failed to win support military action in Syria, the president declared last night, is not because he has failed to lay out a coherent strategy — it’s because of “the terrible toll of Iraq and Afghanistan.” Obama further slammed former president George W. Bush for presiding over “a decade that put more and more war-making power in the hands of the president and more and more burdens on the shoulders of our troops, while sidelining the people’s representatives from the critical decisions about when we use force.”

Put aside the fact that Congress explicitly authorized the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, while Obama did not seek congressional authorization before launching his war in Libya — or that dozens of nations joined us in Iraq and Afghanistan, while in Syria we have . . . France.

If Bush was so bad, then why did Obama lift so much of his speech making the case for military action in Syria from Bush’s speech making the case for military action in Iraq?

In his address Tuesday night arguing that the United States must hold a Baathist dictator who used chemical weapons against his own people to account, Obama said: “I know Americans want all of us in Washington — especially me — to concentrate on the task of building our nation here at home. . . . It’s no wonder then that you’re asking hard questions. So let me answer some of the most important questions that I’ve heard from members of Congress and that I’ve read in letters that you’ve sent to me.”

He then went on to pose a number of questions raised by critics about the need for military action, and answer them: “First, many of you have asked, won’t this put us on a slippery slope to another war? . . . Others have asked whether it’s worth acting if we don’t take out [Syrian President Bashar al-]Assad. . . . Other questions involve the dangers of retaliation.. . . Many of you have asked a broader question: Why should we get involved at all in a place that’s so complicated and where, as one person wrote to me, those who come after Assad may be enemies of human rights? . . . Finally, many of you have asked, why not leave this to other countries or seek solutions short of force?”

Hmm, that sounded familiar. In his October 7, 2002, speech in Cincinnati, making the case that the United States must hold a Baathist dictator who used chemical weapons on his people to account, Bush declared: “Many Americans have raised legitimate questions: about the nature of the threat; about the urgency of action. . . . These are all issues we’ve discussed broadly and fully within my administration. And tonight, I want to share those discussions with you.”

Bush then went on to pose a number of questions raised by critics and answer them: “First, some ask why Iraq is different from other countries or regimes that also have terrible weapons. . . . Some ask how urgent this danger is to America and the world. . . . Some have argued that confronting the threat from Iraq could detract from the war against terror. . . . Many people have asked how close Saddam Hussein is to developing a nuclear weapon. . . . Some citizens wonder, after 11 years of living with this problem, why do we need to confront it now? . . . Some believe we can address this danger by simply resuming the old approach to inspections, and applying diplomatic and economic pressure.”

In other words, Obama essentially copied Bush’s speech making the case for military action in Iraq to make his case for military action in Syria.

The similarities don’t end there. Obama also mimicked Bush in laying out the consequences of inaction, Obama said: “A failure to stand against the use of chemical weapons would weaken prohibitions against other weapons of mass destruction and embolden Assad’s ally, Iran, which must decide whether to ignore international law by building a nuclear weapon or to take a more peaceful path. This is not a world we should accept.”

In 2002, Bush declared: “Failure to act would embolden other tyrants, allow terrorists access to new weapons and new resources, and make blackmail a permanent feature of world events. . . . And through its inaction, the United States would resign itself to a future of fear. That is not the America I know.”

While imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, it takes a special kind of chutzpah to plagiarize your predecessor while attacking him at the same time.

Of course, the imitation only went so far. After making the case for military action, Bush issued an ultimatum to the Iraqi regime. After making the case for military action, Obama announced he was deploying . . . Secretary of State John F. Kerry to meet with his Russian counterparts. Presumably Kerry will explain that if Assad fails to comply with Obama’s just demands, the Syrian dictator will face the consequences — a military strike that is “unbelievably small.”

Now that wasn’t lifted from George W. Bush.

Read more from Marc Thiessen’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.
Title: American Exceptionalism
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 13, 2013, 09:27:43 AM
Radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh: "It is because of this liberty and freedom that our country exists, because the Founders recognized it comes from God. It's part of the natural yearning of the human spirit. It is not granted by a government. It's not granted by Putin. It's not granted by Obama or any other human being. We are created with the natural yearning to be free, and it is other men and leaders throughout human history who have suppressed that and imprisoned people for seeking it. The U.S. is the first time in the history of the world where a government was organized with a Constitution laying out the rules, that the individual was supreme and dominant, and that is what led to the U.S. becoming the greatest country ever because it unleashed people to be the best they could be. Nothing like it had ever happened. That's American exceptionalism. Putin doesn't know what it is, Obama doesn't know what it is, and it just got trashed in the New York Times. It's just unacceptable."
Title: Re: American Exceptionalism
Post by: DougMacG on September 16, 2013, 09:44:49 AM
Radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh: "It is because of this liberty and freedom that our country exists, because the Founders recognized it comes from God. It's part of the natural yearning of the human spirit. It is not granted by a government. It's not granted by Putin. It's not granted by Obama or any other human being. We are created with the natural yearning to be free, and it is other men and leaders throughout human history who have suppressed that and imprisoned people for seeking it. The U.S. is the first time in the history of the world where a government was organized with a Constitution laying out the rules, that the individual was supreme and dominant, and that is what led to the U.S. becoming the greatest country ever because it unleashed people to be the best they could be. Nothing like it had ever happened. That's American exceptionalism. Putin doesn't know what it is, Obama doesn't know what it is, and it just got trashed in the New York Times. It's just unacceptable."


Rush at least nailed the fact that Obama and Putin are two people who don't understand what made America great / "exceptional".

In the longer rant on the radio, he played the clip of Obama asked if he believed in American Exceptionalism.  The President said yes and then went on to express that he hoped the Greeks believed in Greek Exceptionalism as well.  Good grief.  If he had any clue as to what made America great, he wouldn't be trying to dismantle it.
---------------------

Here is Matthew Spalding writing at Heritage, 2010:

In 1776, when America announced its independence as a nation, it was composed of thirteen colonies surrounded by hostile powers.

Today, the United States is a country of fifty states covering a vast continent. Its military forces are the most powerful in the world. Its economy produces almost a quarter of the world's wealth. The American people are among the most hard-working, church-going, affluent, and generous in the world.

Is America exceptional?

Every nation derives meaning and purpose from some unifying quality—an ethnic character, a common religion, a shared history. The United States is different. America was founded at a particular time, by a particular people, on the basis of particular principles about man, liberty, and constitutional government.

The American Revolution drew on old ideas. The United States is the product of Western civilization, shaped by Judeo-Christian culture and the political liberties inherited from Great Britain.

Yet the founding of the United States was also revolutionary. Not in the sense of replacing one set of rulers with another, or overthrowing the institutions of society, but in placing political authority in the hands of the people.

As the English writer G. K. Chesterton famously observed, "America is the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed." That creed is set forth most clearly in the Declaration of Independence, by which the American colonies announced their separation from Great Britain. The Declaration is a timeless statement of inherent rights, the proper purposes of government, and the limits on political authority.

The American Founders appealed to self-evident truths, stemming from "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God," to justify their liberty. This is a universal and permanent standard. These truths are not unique to America but apply to all men and women everywhere. They are as true today as they were in 1776.

Working from the principle of equality, the American Founders asserted that men could govern themselves according to common beliefs and the rule of law. Throughout history, political power was—and still is—often held by the strongest. But if all are equal and have the same rights, then no one is fit by nature to rule or to be ruled.

As Thomas Jefferson put it, "[T]he mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God." The only source of the legitimate powers of government is the consent of the governed. This is the cornerstone principle of American government, society, and independence.

America's principles establish religious liberty as a fundamental right. It is in our nature to pursue our convictions of faith. Government must not establish an official religion, just as it must guarantee the free exercise of religion. Indeed, popular government requires a flourishing of religious faith. If a free people are to govern themselves politically, they must first govern themselves morally.

    "Being an American is more than a matter of where you or your parents came from. It is a belief that all men are created free and equal." – Harry S. Truman
    October 26, 1948

These principles also mean that everyone has the right to the fruits of their own labor. This fundamental right to acquire, possess, and sell property is the backbone of opportunity and the most practical means to pursue human happiness. This right, along with the free enterprise system that stems from it, is the source of prosperity and the foundation of economic liberty.

Because people have rights, government has only the powers that the sovereign people have delegated to it. These powers are specified by a fundamental law called a constitution. Under the rule of law, all are protected by generally agreed-upon laws that apply, equally, to everyone.

The United States Constitution defines the institutions of American government: three distinct branches of government that make the law, enforce the law, and judge the law in particular cases. This framework gives the American government the powers it needs to secure our fundamental rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

The ultimate purpose of securing these rights and of limiting government is to protect human freedom. That freedom allows the institutions of civil society—family, school, church, and private associations—to thrive, forming the habits and virtues required for liberty.

The same principles that define America also shape its understanding of the world. The Declaration of Independence proclaimed that the thirteen colonies were a separate and sovereign nation, like any other nation. But America is not simply another nation.

The United States is a nation founded on universal principles. It appeals to a higher standard that all governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. All nations are answerable to this principle, and it is this principle that makes the United States a truly legitimate nation.

Liberty does not belong only to the United States. The Declaration of Independence holds that all men everywhere are endowed with a right to liberty. That liberty is a permanent aspect of human nature everywhere is central to understanding America's first principles.

Nevertheless, the primary responsibility of the United States is to defend the freedom and well-being of the American people. To do this, the United States must apply America's universal principles to the challenges this nation faces in the world.

    "Our founding documents proclaim to the world that freedom is not the sole prerogative of a chosen few. It is the universal right of all God's children." – Ronald Reagan
    July 15, 1991

This is not easy. America has not always been successful. But because of the principles to which it is dedicated, the United States always strives to uphold its highest ideals. More than any other nation, it has a special responsibility to defend the cause of liberty at home and abroad.

As George Washington put it in his First Inaugural Address: "The preservation of the sacred fire of liberty and the destiny of the republican model of government are justly considered as deeply, perhaps as finally, staked on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people." America's role in the world is to preserve and to spread, by example and by action, the "sacred fire of liberty."

America is an exceptional nation, but not because of what it has achieved or accomplished. America is exceptional because, unlike any other nation, it is dedicated to the principles of human liberty, grounded on the truths that all men are created equal and endowed with equal rights. These permanent truths are "applicable to all men and all times," as Abraham Lincoln once said.

America's principles have created a prosperous and just nation unlike any other nation in history. They explain why Americans strongly defend their country, look fondly to their nation's origins, vigilantly assert their political rights and civic responsibilities, and remain convinced of the special meaning of their country and its role of the world. It is because of its principles, not despite them, that America has achieved greatness.

To this day, so many years after the American Revolution, these principles—proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence and promulgated by the United States Constitution—still define America as a nation and a people. Which is why friends of freedom the world over look to the United States not only as an ally against tyrants and despots but also as a powerful beacon to all those who strive to be free.


Title: A hint of Munich
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 18, 2013, 09:06:09 AM
The Syria Deal Has a Hint of Munich
I fear that soon we will hear Assad, an enemy of humanity, praised for his cooperation and spirit of responsibility.
By

•   BERNARD-HENRI LÉVY
It would be nice to believe that Saturday's Russian-American agreement on Syria's chemical weapons constitutes the "advance" that everyone seems to be so eager to call it.

And one hopes that France's firmness—the declared will of President François Hollande to strike Syria militarily, followed by his effort, unsuccessful, alas, to push a tough resolution through the United Nations Security Council—will eventually pay off and bring the international community into line.

But meanwhile, what a situation!

I am not talking about the letter of the agreement, which the experts immediately observed was: (1) Unimplementable. How, in a country at war, does one gather up and then destroy 1,000 tons of chemical weapons scattered across the entire territory? (2) Unverifiable. According to the best estimates, the task would require 20 times more inspectors than the United Nations mustered in Syria last summer, and who, for the most part, remained shut up in their hotels or were trotted around by the regime. (3) Unaffordable. The United States has invested $8 billion to $10 billion to destroy its own chemical weapons and, 20 years later, the task is not yet finished. (4) Tied to a timetable ("mid-2014") that, apart from being technically meaningless, sounds like a bad joke in a country where, for two and a half years now, hundreds of civilians have been killed each day by conventional arms. (5) The equivalent of a terrible trick, the principal effect of which will be, by placing the onus on the chemical-weapons inspectors, to externalize the tragedy, so to speak, and return the world to sleeping the sleep of the Unjust.

What I am talking about is Bashar Assad, who has been transformed, as if by magic, from a war criminal and enemy of humanity (in the words of U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon) into an unavoidable, nay, legitimate, negotiating partner—whose spirit of cooperation and responsibility I fear we will soon hear being widely praised.
I'm talking about Vladimir Putin, who brought off the tour de force of posing as a peacemaker—getting everyone to forget, in the process, his own crimes in Georgia, Chechnya and Russia—with the same aplomb that he has showed when playing the superman athlete who brings down whales, tigers and giant pike.

I'm talking about the hesitant, timorous America that we have seen—through the incredible sequence in which Secretary of State John Kerry's wise, forceful speech was juxtaposed against Barack Obama's strangely indecisive remarks—taking seriatim and almost simultaneously every conceivable geopolitical position. I'm talking about an America willing itself into weakness. A quiescent America that Mr. Putin, with his astounding lecture on democratic morals published in the New York Times, has allowed himself the luxury of humiliating on her home field.

I'm talking about North Korea and Iran, which will have good reason to believe, from here on out, that the West's word, its warnings, the promises it makes to its allies, aren't worth a thing. Can you blame them for thinking that? And will those who presently are granting Assad his license to kill finally rouse themselves to anger when they see the ayatollahs crossing the nuclear threshold? Maybe. But the fact that one even has to wonder—the fact that this or that Islamist fanatic or crazy dictator might be encouraged to think that he could, in future, act with impunity, Damascus-style—constitutes a source of misunderstanding and confusion in international relations. The result is an instability far greater than anything that might have accompanied the warning shot planned, then abandoned, by the U.S. and France.

And, finally, I'm thinking about the civilians in Syria not yet killed by shelling or made to flee, and who now more than ever find themselves trapped. They are caught in a vise between the regime's army—supported by Russian advisers, Hezbollah auxiliaries and Revolutionary Guards from Tehran—and the jihadists who draw strength from the West's abdication and who increasingly are able to present themselves, despite poisonous future results not difficult to imagine, as the last hope of a people pushed to the brink.

There is, in the cowardly relief so widely expressed at the idea of seeing the prospect of military strikes dispelled, regardless of the consequences, a tone that cannot but recall detestable memories of the late 1930s.

Because history has more imagination than do human beings, let us suppose that Assad, heady from his unexpected reprieve, commits another massacre that the world deems excessive. Or let us suppose that the Syrian tragedy meter passes a certain point (150,000 dead? 200,000?) and that public opinion, which is now the arbiter of war and peace, suddenly finds this intolerable. Or let us suppose that the chemical-weapons inspections take a dramatic turn, requiring a response and military strikes. When one of the above happens, we will remember Winston Churchill's famous and fateful phrase, adapted to the present context: "You were given the choice between strikes and dishonor. You chose dishonor and you will have strikes."

Mr. Lévy's books include "Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against the New Barbarism" (Random House, 2008). This article was translated from the French by Stephen B. Kennedy.

Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 19, 2013, 02:54:14 PM
I thinking delete here on put on the MMA thread , , ,
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on October 02, 2013, 07:19:04 AM
Don't the Federal employees ALWAYS get their back pay?

And don't they essentially get the time off with pay in a shutdown?

So they should be happy.

I wish I could get some days off with pay.
Title: Turner: Creed
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 03, 2013, 05:58:39 AM
Creed
by Steve Turner

We believe in MarxFreudandDarwin
We believe everything is OK
as long as you don’t hurt anyone,
to the best of your definition of hurt,
and to the best of your knowledge.

We believe in sex before, during, and
After marriage.
We believe in the therapy of sin.
We believe that adultery is fun.
We believe that sodomy’s OK.
We believe that taboos are taboo.

We believe that everything’s getting better
despite evidence to the contrary.
The evidence must be investigated
and you can prove anything with evidence.

We believe there’s something in horoscopes,
UFOs and bent spoons;
Jesus was a good man, just like Buddha,
Mohammed, and ourselves.
He was a good moral teacher although we think
his good morals were bad.

We believe all religions are basically the same—
At least the one that we read was.
They all believe in love and goodness.
They only differ on matters of creation,
Sin, heaven, hell, God, and salvation.

We believe that after death comes the Nothing
Because when you ask the dead what happens
They say nothing.
If death is not the end, if the dead have lied, then it’s
compulsory heaven for all
excepting perhaps
Hitler, Stalin, and Genghis Khan.

We believe in Masters and Johnson.
What’s selected is average.
What’s average is normal.
What’s normal is good.

We believe in total disarmament.
We believe there are direct links between warfare and bloodshed.
Americans should beat their guns into tractors
and the Russians would be sure to follow.

We believe man is essentially good.
It’s only his behavior that lets him down.
This is the fault of society.
Society is the fault of conditions.
Conditions are the fault of society.

We believe that each man must find the truth that is right for him.
Reality will adapt accordingly.
The universe will readjust.
History will alter.
We believe that there is no absolute Truth
Excepting the truth
That there is no absolute truth.

We believe in the rejection of creeds,
and the flowering of individual thought.

PS: Chance:

If chance be
the Father of all flesh,
disaster is his rainbow in the sky,
and when you hear

State of Emergency!
Sniper Kills Ten!
Troops on Rampage!
Whites go Looting!
Bomb Blasts School!

It is but the sound of man
worshipping his makers.
Title: Friends of Obama
Post by: ccp on October 03, 2013, 08:22:21 AM
To prevent starvation, isolation, and despair one synagogue has discovered a new way to be charitable:

http://news.yahoo.com/video/washington-dc-synagogue-helps-furloughed-103243176.html
Title: VDH: Medieval Liberals
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 09, 2013, 06:56:35 AM


http://www.nationalreview.com/article/360583/medieval-liberals-victor-davis-hanson
Title: poster boy for cronism
Post by: ccp on October 11, 2013, 05:55:44 AM
There could be no other person who uses his government influence to make a lot of money.
Whenever associated with any wrongdoing just donate to charity, take a big tax deduction, deny any wrong doing and shift the attention to another subject.   Works every time:

*****McAuliffe among investors in Rhode Island insurance scam that preyed on dying people

  By Fredrick Kunkle,   Published: October 10 E-mail the writer
 
 Virginia gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe was one of dozens of investors with a Rhode Island estate planner charged with defrauding insurers by using the stolen identities of terminally ill people, according to court documents filed Wednesday by federal prosecutors in Providence.

McAuliffe’s name appeared on a lengthy list of investors with Joseph A. Caramadre, an attorney and accountant who obtained the identities of dying people to set up annuities that ultimately cost insurance companies millions of dollars, the documents say.
 
McAuliffe claims Cuccinelli tax plan could cost $8B

Ben Pershing 8:02 AM ET

Democrat ignores rival’s pledge to cut income tax only if he can recoup funds through closing tax loopholes.

Cuccinelli and McAuliffe trade blows at Richmond forum

Laura Vozzella OCT 10

The rivals for governor made claims about an investment scheme and abortion.

McAuliffe tells a good story — though facts may be missing

Laura Vozzella OCT 10

Democratic candidate for governor in Va. is known for enthusiastic embellishment.


The list also included the law firm of a former Rhode Island Supreme Court justice, a Roman Catholic monsignor, a former Cranston, R.I. police chief, and a bookmaker, according to The Providence Journal, which first reported McAuliffe’s investment Wednesday.

Federal court documents do not accuse McAuliffe of wrongdoing, and it wasn’t clear whether he had made money or lost money on the investments. His campaign spokesman said McAuliffe was a “passive investor” who was deceived like many others. Spokesman Josh Schwerin also said that the campaign and McAuliffe donated sums to the American Cancer Society totaling $74,000 — approximately the amount McAuliffe earned as a return on the investment and received in a campaign donation from Caramadre.

“Terry was one of hundreds of passive investors several years ago and had no idea about the allegations against the defendant — who, at the time, was widely respected by business leaders and elected officials,” Schwerin said. “The allegations are horrible and he never would have invested if he knew he was being deceived.”

Caramadre and his former employee Raymour Radhakrishnan were charged in November 2011 in a 66-count indictment accusing them of wire fraud, money laundering and witness-tampering. Both men pleaded guilty last November, the FBI said in a press release.

Federal authorities say Caramadre, through his firm Estate Planning Resources, began developing products in the 1990s that used the identities of terminally ill people to purchase variable annuities from insurance companies. The annuities offered death benefits when those annuitants died. The investments — which Caramadre allegedly made on behalf of himself, friends, family and others — included returns of all the money invested and sometimes a guaranteed profit, federal authorities said.

In 2006, Caramadre also began investing in “death-put bonds” that relied on obtaining the identities of terminally ill people, according to prosecutors. These investments allowed the owner to redeem the bonds years or decades earlier than the maturity date when the bond’s co-owner died.

The FBI, in a November 2012 press release announcing mid-trial guilty pleas by Caramadre and Radhakrishnan, said Caramadre located terminally ill people by visiting AIDS patients at a hospice, locating relatives of terminally ill people, and placing an ad in a local Catholic newspaper offering $2,000 cash to people with a terminal illness.

In 2009, Caramadre gave McAuliffe’s campaign an $26,599 contribution, including an in-kind event donation of $1,599, according to records kept by the Virginia Public Access Project.

Researcher Alice Crites contributed to this story.*****


Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 11, 2013, 06:28:31 AM
Why is this here?  Wouldn't go better in the corruption thread?
Title: Steyn: Park SErvice Paramilitaries
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 12, 2013, 06:26:54 PM
http://www.nationalreview.com/node/361057/print
Title: The End of the Nation-State?
Post by: bigdog on October 13, 2013, 05:10:53 AM
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/13/opinion/sunday/the-end-of-the-nation-state.html?ref=opinion

From the article:

One scenario, “Nonstate World,” imagined a planet in which urbanization, technology and capital accumulation had brought about a landscape where governments had given up on real reforms and had subcontracted many responsibilities to outside parties, which then set up enclaves operating under their own laws.

The imagined date for the report’s scenarios is 2030, but at least for “Nonstate World,” it might as well be 2010: though most of us might not realize it, “nonstate world” describes much of how global society already operates. This isn’t to say that states have disappeared, or will. But they are becoming just one form of governance among many.
Title: John Wayne
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 18, 2013, 10:24:21 AM


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btvSE6tVHzQ#t=96
Title: Funding Jihadis while denying military benefits
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 20, 2013, 09:16:15 AM


http://nationalreview.com/article/361051/funding-jihadists-while-denying-military-benefits-andrew-c-mccarthy

While I disagree with the opening swipes on the War on Islamic Fascism, many worthy points are made here:

=================

Here is where we’re at: The Republican establishment — the guys who told us that for a trillion dollars and several thousand American casualties, we could build “Islamic democracies” that would be reliable U.S. allies in the War on Terror — say it is Ted Cruz who is “delusional” and the effort to stave off Obamacare that is “unattainable.”

These self-appointed sages are, of course, the same guys who told us the way to “stabilize” and “democratize” Libya was to help jihadists topple and kill the resident dictator — who, at the time, was a U.S. ally, providing intelligence about the jihadists using his eastern badlands as a springboard for the anti-American terror insurgency in Iraq. That’s probably worth remembering this week, during which some of our new “allies” abducted Libya’s president while others car-bombed Sweden’s consulate in Benghazi — site of the still unavenged terrorist massacre of American ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other U.S. officials 13 months ago.
Advertisement

Not to worry, though. So successful do they figure the Libyan escapade was, GOP leaders are backing a reprise in Syria. It is there, we learn from a Human Rights Watch report issued this week, that our new “allies,” the al-Qaeda-rife “rebels,” executed a savage atrocity just two months ago. Sweeping into the coastal village of Latakia, the jihadists slaughtered 190 minority Alawites. As the New York Times details, “at least 67 of the dead appeared to have been shot or stabbed while unarmed or fleeing, including 48 women and 11 children.” More than 200 other civilians were captured and are still being held hostage.

So that’s going well.

And, you’ll be pleased to know, supporting the Syrian “rebels” is a high enough priority that it’s not part of the 17 percent of the federal government affected by the “shutdown.” America’s enemies are still receiving taxpayer-funded weapons, so that they can fight America’s other enemies, the Assad regime, to what Washington hopes will be a resounding victory. Er . . . check that — to what the administration hopes will be . . . a tie. The administration also let slip this week that it is arming our preferred jihadists so they can grind to a stalemate with Russia’s preferred jihadists — after all, we wouldn’t want to upset Iran’s ruling jihadists after they’ve just finally deigned to take, yes, a phone call from our pleading president after blowing him off in New York.

So support for the Syrian jihad remains unaffected by the shutdown, just like the Capitol Hill gym and Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move!” website. Obama did manage, however, to cut off death benefits for the families of American troops killed fighting for our country. Or at least our conniving Alinsky-in-chief thought he’d succeeded in cutting off the military death benefits — along with forcible closures of war-hero cemeteries, national monuments, private homes, and the ocean.

It turned out he’d miscalculated.

President I Will Not Negotiate ended up negotiating, and then quietly paying bereaved military families, because he discovered, to his astonishment, that the public would hold him, not Republicans, responsible for this unspeakable breach of faith. He’d thought he had that covered. After all, as the Republican establishment repeatedly tells us, Obama’s media always blame the GOP — thus making it “delusional” for the GOP to stand up and fight about anything.

The president was caught by the strategy devised by the delusional rubes who want to exercise Congress’s prerogative not to fund Obamacare — a purportedly unattainable goal, notwithstanding that the prerogative is rooted in the Constitution, in marked contrast to Obama’s own selective waivers of Obamacare, which are apparently rooted in . . . Obama.

See, in order to demonstrate beyond cavil that they were being reasonable, notwithstanding huge objections to the current unsustainable $3.6 trillion trough of federal spending, conservatives volunteered to fund everything the government does except Obamacare. The administration and its scribes shrieked, of course, but there is nothing illegal or unusual about withholding appropriations for federal programs. The government does it every year. Obama himself does it, not just in refusing to enforce the federal immigration laws (to take just one example) but in refusing to execute aspects of Obamacare that harm preferred corporations, union cronies, and Congress.

As expected, our petulant president refused the deal, directing his minions to forge ahead full-speed on his signature socialization of health care — never mind its unpopularity, unconstitutionality, and unreadiness for implementation. Meantime, he schemed to make the shutdown he was forcing as painful as possible. The mainstream-media division of the White House press operation would then, he figured, dutifully blame Republicans for the inevitable public outcry, and the GOP would instantly unfurl its ever-ready white flag.

But instead of waving the flag, House conservatives decided to wave a series of appropriations bills: bite-size portions of the mega-funding the president had already refused — a page out of the Left’s book, offering heartstring-tugging dollars for Head Start, disadvantaged women and children, cancer patients, emergency responders, national-parks operation, city services for Washington residents, etc. Obama thumbed his nose at these House overtures, banked on the press’s refusal to cover them, and went merrily about the business of scalding Republicans over a government shutdown that he was actually causing.

Except Obama let one bill get by: the House’s Pay Our Military Act (POMA). Why? Because Obama needs to hold Senate Democrats in lockstep “no” mode, but even they would not sign on to refusing to pay our troops in wartime. So the bill was passed — proving that, as the delusional Ted Cruz maintains, Democrats can be moved if unified Republicans make the pressure intense enough.
==========================================

Obama signed POMA even though it cut sharply against his Maximum Pain strategy, but that was because he had his usual Plan B: ignore federal law. As Heritage’s Hans von Spakovsky explained on the Corner, administration lawyers issued tortuous guidance, twisting a statute that directs the payment of death benefits into a prohibition against the payment of death benefits. The idea was to add POMA to the community organizer’s propaganda campaign: to show that the Republicans would betray even our fallen heroes if that’s what it took to deny health care to millions of Americans.

But the president who slept through the Benghazi massacre once again forgot that our military is not just an agitprop. Our soldiers really do put their lives on the line, and lose them — as did the one marine and four soldiers who were killed in Afghanistan last weekend. That made it all too real. When bereaved families were suddenly denied death benefits by our government, there was no hiding the fact that the commander-in-chief had, yet again, abandoned those who’d made the ultimate patriotic sacrifice. What’s more, this dereliction was nothing more than crass political calculation — or, as it turned out, miscalculation.
Advertisement

Public anger erupted and even the Associated Press courtiers were reduced to reporting a sharp drop in the president’s approval rating. Congressional Democrats scrambled and a superfluous, face-saving death-benefits law was enacted so the White House could try to pretend the president now had payment authority he’d previously lacked. Administration lawyers continue to mumble about how, though Obama felt really terrible about it, the perfectly clear POMA had been “too vague” to help military families in their time of need.

You know, there’s also a 1996 law on the federal books that makes it a felony to provide material support to terrorists. It’s not vague. In fact, it’s clear as a bell, according to the many federal courts that have applied it in sentencing scores of jihadist-abettors to hundreds of years in prison.

Don’t you find it strange, don’t you think the public at large would find it strange, that in a shutdown Obama has instigated in order to enforce the Obamacare law Americans don’t want, he so skews the rest of our law that his administration says we can fund al-Qaeda but we can’t fund the families of our war dead?

What a great argument that would be for Republicans . . . if only they were on the right side of it. But they’re not. So let’s roll over on Obamacare, get behind the Syrian jihadists, and make sure everyone knows Ted Cruz is the delusional one around here.

— Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute. He is the author, most recently, of Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy
Title: Dear Liberal- here is why I am so hostile
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 24, 2013, 11:17:59 AM

http://sufficient-reason.tumblr.com/post/26781491317/dear-liberal-heres-why-im-so-hostile
Title: A Pair of Great Rants from Zo
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 26, 2013, 06:01:40 PM


http://gopthedailydose.com/2013/10/26/zo-responds-wave-rainbow-flag-confederate-flag/
Title: powerful pictures
Post by: bigdog on October 30, 2013, 12:07:10 PM
Not a thought piece so much as thoughtful:

http://nedhardy.com/2013/06/14/powerful-pictures-18-pics/
Title: Prager: Conservative Parents, Left-Wing Children
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 05, 2013, 09:04:21 AM


Conservative Parents, Left-Wing Children
Tuesday, Nov 5, 2013

There is a phenomenon that is rarely commented on but which is as common as it is significant.

For at least two generations, countless conservative parents have seen their adult children reject their core values.

I have met these parents throughout America. I have spoken with them in person and on my radio show. Many have confided to me — usually with a resigned sadness — that one or more of their children has adopted left-wing social, moral and political beliefs.

A particularly dramatic recent example was a pastor who told me that he has three sons, all of whom have earned doctorates — from Stanford, Oxford and Fordham. What parent wouldn’t be proud of such achievements by his or her children?

But the tone of his voice suggested more irony than pride. They are all leftists, he added wistfully.

“How do you get along?” I asked.

“We still talk,” he responded.

Needless to say, I was glad to hear that. But as the father of two sons, I readily admit that if they became leftists, while I would, of course, always love them, I would be deeply saddened. Parents, on the left or the right, religious or secular, want to pass on their core values to their children.

As a father, my purpose is not to pass on my seed, but to pass on my values. Just about anyone can biologically produce a child. That ability we share with the animals. What renders us distinct from animals is that we can pass on values. As the Latin puts it, animals only have “genitors;” humans have “paters.” Or as the Hebrew has it, parent (horeh) comes from the same root as teacher (moreh). That is why Judaism puts teachers (of religious/moral values) on the same plane as parents.

So it is sad when a parent who believes, for example, in the American trinity of liberty, “In God We Trust” and “E Pluribus Unum” has a child who believes that equality trumps liberty, that a secular America is preferable to a God-centered one, and that multiculturalism should replace the unifying American identity.

It is sad when a pastor, or any other parent, who believes that the only gender-based definition of marriage that has ever existed — husband and wife — has a child who regards the parent as a bigot for holding on to that definition.

It is sad when a parent who believes that America has always been, in Lincoln’s famous words, “the last best hope of earth,” has a child who believes that America has always been little more than an imperialist, racist and xenophobic nation.

That this happens so often raises the obvious question: Why?

There are two reasons.

One is that most parents with traditional American and Judeo-Christian values have not thought it necessary to articulate these values to their children on a regular basis. They assumed that there was no need to because that was true for much of American history, when the society at large held those values. Villages do indeed raise children. And when the village shares parents’ values, the parents don’t have to do the difficult work of inculcating these values.

But the village — i.e., American society — has radically changed.

Which brings us to the second reason.

Virtually every institution outside the home has been captured by people with left-wing values: specifically the media (television and movies) and the schools (first the universities and now high schools).

In the 1960s and 1970s, American parents were blindsided. Their children came home from college with values that thoroughly opposed those of their parents.

And the parents had no idea how to counteract this. Moreover, even if they did, after just one year at the left-wing seminaries we still call universities, it was often too late. As one of the founders of progressivism in America, Woodrow Wilson, president of Princeton University before becoming president of the United States, said in a speech in 1914, “I have often said that the use of a university is to make young gentlemen as unlike their fathers as possible.” Eighty-eight years later, the president of Dartmouth College, James O. Freedman, echoed Wilson: “The purpose of a college education is to question your father’s values,” he told the graduating seniors of Dartmouth College.

Even now, too few conservative parents realize how radical — and effective — the university agenda is. They are proud that their child has been accepted to whatever college he or she attends, not realizing that, values-wise, they are actually playing Russian roulette — except that only one chamber in the gun is (SET ITAL) not (END ITAL) loaded with a bullet.

And then they come home, often after only year at college, a different person, values-wise, from the one the naive parent so proudly said goodbye.

What to do? I will answer that in a future column. But the first thing to do is to realize what is happening.

There are too many sad conservative parents.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on November 05, 2013, 05:44:18 PM
"Conservative Parents, Left-Wing Children"

Doesn't that describe Hillary' parents and her?
Title: What Obama learned at Columbia
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 12, 2013, 09:53:08 AM
http://www.theblaze.com/contributions/what-obama-and-i-learned-at-columbia-how-to-destroy-america-from-within/
Title: Prager: The Midas Touch and the Leftist Touch
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 19, 2013, 08:50:22 AM
The Midas Touch and the Leftist Touch
Tuesday, Nov 19, 2013


The Midas touch is named for the mythological Greek King Midas who is said to have been able to turn everything he touched into gold.

The left has the opposite ability: to turn virtually everything it touches into rubble. Sometimes it happens quickly; sometimes it takes generations. But it is inevitable.

Almost the only time this is not true is when the left takes a position that is shared by non-leftists. But whatever the left transforms in its direction is damaged, and often destroyed.

Name the institution or the value transformed by the left and that institution or value is ruined.

Here is a partial list:

–Education

Since the left came to dominate universities, schools of education and, increasingly, high schools, each has becomes inferior to what it was prior to left-wing influence.

Universities have become to the left what seminaries are to religions — a place to indoctrinate students. Truth is derided as a false construct and is no longer the goal of most university professors (outside of math and the natural sciences). Schools of education teach left-wing doctrines and brand-new notions of teaching that are almost always inferior to what existed earlier.

–Art and Music

The left-wing influence on art and music has been almost entirely destructive. Notions of greatness in art have been deconstructed, if not ridiculed. There is no pursuit of excellence or of spiritual or moral elevation, and no aim to inspire. Indeed, the opposite is more often the rule. The ugly, the deliberately offensive, the moronic and the scatological are celebrated: The 24-foot sculpture of a dog lifting its leg and peeing in front of the Orange County Museum of Art; Piss Christ, the crucifix in the artist’s urine shown at galleries around America; and exhibits composed of menstrual blood are but a few examples.

–Environmental Laws

While all rational people want to protect the environment, environmentalism has become a destructive leftist religion. Millions of Africans have died of malaria because of the environmentalist-induced bans on DDT. Environmentalist opposition to modifying rice to include Vitamin A led to the deaths of about 8 million Third World children. In 2012 alone, wind turbines have created killing fields for birds and bats. The American prairies are being destroyed by the environmentalists’ push for ethanol.

–The Culture

The cultural left has created and celebrated an unbelievable coarsening of the culture, especially injurious to the young. Examples of Hollywood’s degradation of culture in film and on television are too numerous to mention. We will suffice with mentioning only MTV, one of the most damaging cultural forces in the lives of American young people; and the sex-drenched universities from an f-saw exhibition to the ubiquitous “sex week.”

–The Military

For decades, the left has sought to weaken the American military, the most potent force for peace and liberty on planet earth — by, among other things, obtaining huge cuts in military spending (not only through sequestration) and social engineering experiments such as placing women in combat units.

–California

Thanks to the left’s total dominance of California political life, the left, in the words of the most respected observer of California life, Chapman University’s Joel Kotkin, “has turned the California Dream into a nightmare.”

–Black America

Left-wing policies have done incalculable damage to black America. Left-wing mayors of nearly every major American city have supervised the economic ruin of many of those cities. Decades of rhetoric reinforcing black victimhood have served only to stymie black progress and increase anger. And left-wing welfare policies have been the primary contributor to the 70 percent rate for children born out-of-wedlock and the concomitant decline of black fatherhood.

–The Economy

The left-engineered welfare state with its monumental national debts is crushing the economies of virtually every European country that has adopted them, and it will do the same to the American economy. Even the proudest achievements of the left — Medicare and Medicaid — will soon be unsustainable, as will Social security if the retirement age is not raised by at least a few years.

–Men and Women

Thanks to left-wing attitudes inculcated in women from high school on, more and more women consider marriage and family second in importance to career success. This will lead, as it already has, to unhappiness among vast numbers of women who eventually realize that career isn’t nearly as meaningful to them as it is to most men. Meanwhile, the anti-boy policies in elementary schools and high schools — books assigned that appeal far more to girls, the end of games at recess that boys enjoy and need — have directly led to boys falling more and more behind girls in academic and professional achievement.

Meanwhile, left-wing denigration of marriage (except same-sex marriage) has led to the lowest rates of marriage in Western history, and the left-wing-induced secularization of society has massively contributed to historically low birth rates in America and Europe.

–God and Religion

For over half a century, the left has made war on Judeo-Christian religions in the popular culture and through legislation, beginning with the Supreme Court’s 1962 decision banning this voluntary and non-denominational prayer in New York State schools: “Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon Thee, and we beg Thy blessings upon us, our parents, our teachers and our country.” The consequences of this enforced secularization of American life in terms of human happiness and ethical behavior are — and will increasingly be — disastrous.

It turns out that there is little difference between the Midas touch and the leftist touch. Both end up destroying everything.
Title: VDH: The War on Human Nature
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 01, 2013, 12:33:06 PM
http://nationalreview.com/article/364828/war-human-nature-victor-davis-hanson

Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on December 08, 2013, 06:46:58 PM
I am posting this not because of Netanyahu but this that Mandela wrote in an autobiography:

"In my experience I have found Jews to be more broadminded than most whites on issues of race and politics, perhaps because they themselves have historically been victims of prejudice," Mandela wrote in his 1994 autobiography.

He is thus the first and only prominent Black to acknowledge any appreciation for Jewish support of Black civil rights.


*****Netanyahu missing Mandela memorial for cost reasons
     
Jerusalem (AFP) - Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has decided not to attend a memorial service for Nelson Mandela this week because it is too expensive to travel to South Africa, Israeli media reported Sunday.

Netanyahu had notified the South African authorities that he would fly in but cancelled his plans at the last minute due to the costs involved -- around 7.0 million shekels ($2 million) for his transport and security alone, pubic radio and the Haaretz daily reported.

"The decision was made in light of the high transportation costs resulting from the short notice of the trip and the security required for the prime minister in Johannesburg," Haaretz reported.

The Israeli leader has been in the spotlight recently with revelations that taxpayers dished out almost $1 million last year to maintain his three residences.

The media highlighted a bill of 17,000 euros ($23,000) for water to fill a swimming pool at his villa in Caesarea in the country's north.

More than 50 heads of state and government have confirmed their intentions to travel to South Africa to pay their respects to the anti-apartheid hero who died last Thursday, South Africa's foreign ministry has said.

US President Barack Obama and his wife Michelle will be among 80,000 people attending a vast memorial service Tuesday in the Soweto sports stadium that hosted the 2010 World Cup final.

The commemorations will culminate with Mandela's burial on December 15 in Qunu -- the rural village where he spent his early childhood.

Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas has announced that he will attend Tuesday's memorial service.

Israeli leaders have paid warm homage to the former South African president who died after a long illness at the aged of 95.

Netanyahu paid tribute to Mandela as "a man of vision and a freedom fighter who disavowed violence".

But some commentators have noted that Israel maintained close relations with the apartheid-era regime until the United States said the ties could threaten Washington's generous annual military aid to the Jewish state.

After his release from 27 years incarceration in 1990, Mandela, who first visited Israel and the Palestinian territories in 1999, was an ardent supporter of the Palestinian cause but also a firm believer that Israelis would ultimately take the path of peace.

"In my experience I have found Jews to be more broadminded than most whites on issues of race and politics, perhaps because they themselves have historically been victims of prejudice," Mandela wrote in his 1994 autobiography.

South African Jews played a prominent role in the struggle against apartheid, among them late communist leader Joe Slovo, who headed the ANC's military wing.*****
Title: VDH: The Art of Presidential Lying
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 11, 2013, 08:44:31 AM
http://victorhanson.com/wordpress/?p=6824
Title: Gilder: Knowledge and Power
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 23, 2013, 10:50:53 AM

Hoover fellow Robinson, left, and George Gilder, right

This week on Uncommon Knowledge, author George Gilder discusses his conception of knowledge, power, and the economy, as described in his latest book, Knowledge and Power: The Information Theory of Capitalism and How it is Revolutionizing our World. He argues that a low entropy, or predictable and stable, carrier is required for the emergence of knowledge – whether it be a fiber optic cable and communication, or a social system governed by the rule of law and economic innovation. Such a social system is not spontaneous, but rather developed through sacrifice and a religious order. (41:32)


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uj3YA-JDv-k

Title: Goldberg: Duck Dynasty, Paine vs. Burke
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 26, 2013, 08:01:29 AM
http://townhall.com/columnists/jonahgoldberg/2013/12/25/duck-dynasty-and-a-free-society-n1768166/page/full
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on December 29, 2013, 08:17:41 AM
I don't agree with all of this but she makes some good points.   Since no political party adequately addresses this (or in the case of Republicans even admit to the existence of thi) I personally feel that NO party in this country represents me. 

****INCOME INEQUALITY CREATES HUGE GAPS IN OPPORTUNITY

Cynthia Tucker
By Cynthia Tucker December 28, 2013 12:00 AM
     
By now, you've surely heard of the Texas drunken driving case that has sparked national outrage -- angering victims, upsetting psychologists and sending Twitter into overdrive. A 16-year-old who killed four people while legally intoxicated was sentenced to 10 years' probation and treatment in a tony rehab facility.

As unusual as that example of mercy may be, it was the rationale offered by a defense expert that drove observers into a frenzy. A psychologist hired by defense attorneys told the court that the young man's tragically irresponsible actions were the fault of his rich parents, who didn't rear him with sufficient discipline. As a consequence, G. Dick Miller said, the teenager suffered from "affluenza" and didn't know right from wrong. (Many other psychologists have disagreed vociferously, saying there is no such diagnosis.)

It's hard to stomach that notion, especially since Judge Jean Boyd of the Fort Worth Juvenile Court seems to have swallowed it whole. I can't imagine how bitter and resentful -- not to mention mystified -- the victims' families must be.

But Boyd might have unintentionally done us a favor by opening the door to a dank, dark room that we have worked too hard to keep closed. She has let out the putrid aromas of economic inequality, which we have long ignored. Wealthy people, the judge's sentence reminds us, have huge advantages over ordinary folk, despite an American mythology about equal opportunity. And the opportunity gap is growing as inequality cleaves the country into haves and have-nots.

The very terms "wage gap" and "disappearing middle class" have become cliches in Washington, often muttered by pandering politicians and comfortable journalists who have little real understanding of the effect that income inequality has had on the lives of ordinary Americans. But the fallout is real enough.

Since the 1970s, the wages of working-class Americans -- those without college degrees -- have stagnated and fallen further and further behind. Meanwhile, the wealthy have only become more prosperous.

Despite what you may believe to be true, the individual's work ethic has little to do with those results. No matter how hardworking you are, a job at Wal-Mart won't give you much in the way of financial security. And if you are born to parents who can give you a trust fund, it doesn't matter how little you work; you'll still have plenty of security.

The trends that have eaten away at the great American middle -- including globalization and technological gains -- have been evident for decades, but the Great Recession accelerated the consequences. Even as economic data show huge gains in productivity, the jobless rate remains high, stuck at around 7 percent. (Translation: Companies have found ways to get more and more work done with technology, whether it's through eliminating bank tellers and installing more ATMs, or using more robots in factories.)

This is a complex problem with no easy answers, but we could make a start toward solutions by looking squarely at the issue and refusing to call it by other names. Here are a few things it's not: indolence, racism, the failure of the welfare state.

Mitt Romney became appropriately infamous for his condescending dismissal of the "47 percent" who he claimed doesn't want to work, but that wrong-headed idea doesn't stop with Romney. U.S. Rep. Jack Kingston, R-Ga., running for the GOP nomination for the U.S. Senate, has proposed that poor children sweep school cafeteria floors in exchange for free or reduced lunches, a deal that would get the "myth out of their head that there is such a thing as a free lunch," he said.

But liberals often get it wrong, too -- confusing rampant income inequality with racism. The legacy of racism has certainly contributed to the wealth gap between black and white Americans, but class is now a bigger factor in a child's future than race. President Obama's children are virtually assured a bright future, while millions of their cohort among the working classes are not.

The class divide is one of the biggest problems now facing the country, and it's time we started to confront it. Judge Boyd's unjust sentence is just the provocation to force us to take it on.

(Cynthia Tucker, winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for commentary, is a visiting professor at the University of Georgia. She can be reached at cynthia@cynthiatucker.com.)****
Title: Camille Paglia: A Feminist Defense of Masculine Virtues
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 30, 2013, 01:59:25 PM
Camille Paglia: A Feminist Defense of Masculine Virtues
The cultural critic on why ignoring the biological differences between men and women risks undermining Western civilization.
By Bari Weiss
Updated Dec. 28, 2013 10:46 p.m. ET

Philadelphia 'What you're seeing is how a civilization commits suicide," says Camille Paglia. This self-described "notorious Amazon feminist" isn't telling anyone to Lean In or asking Why Women Still Can't Have It All. No, her indictment may be as surprising as it is wide-ranging: The military is out of fashion, Americans undervalue manual labor, schools neuter male students, opinion makers deny the biological differences between men and women, and sexiness is dead. And that's just 20 minutes of our three-hour conversation.

When Ms. Paglia, now 66, burst onto the national stage in 1990 with the publishing of "Sexual Personae," she immediately established herself as a feminist who was the scourge of the movement's establishment, a heretic to its orthodoxy. Pick up the 700-page tome, subtitled "Art and Decadence From Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, " and it's easy to see why. "If civilization had been left in female hands," she wrote, "we would still be living in grass huts."

The fact that the acclaimed book—the first of six; her latest, "Glittering Images," is a survey of Western art—was rejected by seven publishers and five agents before being printed by Yale University Press only added to Ms. Paglia's sense of herself as a provocateur in a class with Rush Limbaugh and Howard Stern. But unlike those radio jocks, Ms. Paglia has scholarly chops: Her dissertation adviser at Yale was Harold Bloom, and she is as likely to discuss Freud, Oscar Wilde or early Native American art as to talk about Miley Cyrus.

Ms. Paglia relishes her outsider persona, having previously described herself as an egomaniac and "abrasive, strident and obnoxious." Talking to her is like a mental CrossFit workout. One moment she's praising pop star Rihanna ("a true artist"), then blasting ObamaCare ("a monstrosity," though she voted for the president), global warming ("a religious dogma"), and the idea that all gay people are born gay ("the biggest canard," yet she herself is a lesbian).

Neil Davies

But no subject gets her going more than when I ask if she really sees a connection between society's attempts to paper over the biological distinction between men and women and the collapse of Western civilization.

She starts by pointing to the diminished status of military service. "The entire elite class now, in finance, in politics and so on, none of them have military service—hardly anyone, there are a few. But there is no prestige attached to it anymore. That is a recipe for disaster," she says. "These people don't think in military ways, so there's this illusion out there that people are basically nice, people are basically kind, if we're just nice and benevolent to everyone they'll be nice too. They literally don't have any sense of evil or criminality."

The results, she says, can be seen in everything from the dysfunction in Washington (where politicians "lack practical skills of analysis and construction") to what women wear. "So many women don't realize how vulnerable they are by what they're doing on the street," she says, referring to women who wear sexy clothes.

When she has made this point in the past, Ms. Paglia—who dresses in androgynous jackets and slacks—has been told that she believes "women are at fault for their own victimization." Nonsense, she says. "I believe that every person, male and female, needs to be in a protective mode at all times of alertness to potential danger. The world is full of potential attacks, potential disasters." She calls it "street-smart feminism."

Ms. Paglia argues that the softening of modern American society begins as early as kindergarten. "Primary-school education is a crock, basically. It's oppressive to anyone with physical energy, especially guys," she says, pointing to the most obvious example: the way many schools have cut recess. "They're making a toxic environment for boys. Primary education does everything in its power to turn boys into neuters."

She is not the first to make this argument, as Ms. Paglia readily notes. Fellow feminist Christina Hoff Sommers has written about the "war against boys" for more than a decade. The notion was once met with derision, but now data back it up: Almost one in five high-school-age boys has been diagnosed with ADHD, boys get worse grades than girls and are less likely to go to college.

Ms. Paglia observes this phenomenon up close with her 11-year-old son, Lucien, whom she is raising with her ex-partner, Alison Maddex, an artist and public-school teacher who lives 2 miles away. She sees the tacit elevation of "female values"—such as sensitivity, socialization and cooperation—as the main aim of teachers, rather than fostering creative energy and teaching hard geographical and historical facts.

By her lights, things only get worse in higher education. "This PC gender politics thing—the way gender is being taught in the universities—in a very anti-male way, it's all about neutralization of maleness." The result: Upper-middle-class men who are "intimidated" and "can't say anything. . . . They understand the agenda." In other words: They avoid goring certain sacred cows by "never telling the truth to women" about sex, and by keeping "raunchy" thoughts and sexual fantasies to themselves and their laptops.

Politically correct, inadequate education, along with the decline of America's brawny industrial base, leaves many men with "no models of manhood," she says. "Masculinity is just becoming something that is imitated from the movies. There's nothing left. There's no room for anything manly right now." The only place you can hear what men really feel these days, she claims, is on sports radio. No surprise, she is an avid listener. The energy and enthusiasm "inspires me as a writer," she says, adding: "If we had to go to war," the callers "are the men that would save the nation."

And men aren't the only ones suffering from the decline of men. Women, particularly elite upper-middle-class women, have become "clones" condemned to "Pilates for the next 30 years," Ms. Paglia says. "Our culture doesn't allow women to know how to be womanly," adding that online pornography is increasingly the only place where men and women in our sexless culture tap into "primal energy" in a way they can't in real life.

A key part of the remedy, she believes, is a "revalorization" of traditional male trades—the ones that allow women's studies professors to drive to work (roads), take the elevator to their office (construction), read in the library (electricity), and go to gender-neutral restrooms (plumbing).

" Michelle Obama's going on: 'Everybody must have college.' Why? Why? What is the reason why everyone has to go to college? Especially when college is so utterly meaningless right now, it has no core curriculum" and "people end up saddled with huge debts," says Ms. Paglia. What's driving the push toward universal college is "social snobbery on the part of a lot of upper-middle-class families who want the sticker in the window."

Ms. Paglia, who has been a professor of humanities and media studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia since 1984, sees her own students as examples. "I have woodworking students who, even while they're in class, are already earning money making furniture and so on," she says. "My career has been in art schools cause I don't get along with normal academics."

To hear her tell it, getting along has never been Ms. Paglia's strong suit. As a child, she felt stifled by the expectations of girlhood in the 1950s. She fantasized about being a knight, not a princess. Discovering pioneering female figures as a teenager, most notably Amelia Earhart, transformed Ms. Paglia's understanding of what her future might hold.

These iconoclastic women of the 1930s, like Earhart and Katharine Hepburn, remain her ideal feminist role models: independent, brave, enterprising, capable of competing with men without bashing them. But since at least the late 1960s, she says, fellow feminists in the academy stopped sharing her vision of "equal-opportunity feminism" that demands a level playing field without demanding special quotas or protections for women.

She proudly recounts her battle, while a graduate student at Yale in the late 1960s and early '70s, with the New Haven Women's Liberation Rock Band over the Rolling Stones: Ms. Paglia loved "Under My Thumb," a song the others regarded as chauvinist. Then there was the time she "barely got through the dinner" with a group of women's studies professors at Bennington College, where she had her first teaching job, who insisted that there is no hormonal difference between men and women. "I left before dessert."

In her view, these ideological excesses bear much of the blame for the current cultural decline. She calls out activists like Gloria Steinem, Naomi Wolf and Susan Faludi for pushing a version of feminism that says gender is nothing more than a social construct, and groups like the National Organization for Women for making abortion the singular women's issue.

By denying the role of nature in women's lives, she argues, leading feminists created a "denatured, antiseptic" movement that "protected their bourgeois lifestyle" and falsely promised that women could "have it all." And by impugning women who chose to forgo careers to stay at home with children, feminists turned off many who might have happily joined their ranks.

But Ms. Paglia's criticism shouldn't be mistaken for nostalgia for the socially prescribed roles for men and women before the 1960s. Quite the contrary. "I personally have disobeyed every single item of the gender code," says Ms. Paglia. But men, and especially women, need to be honest about the role biology plays and clear-eyed about the choices they are making.

Sex education, she says, simply focuses on mechanics without conveying the real "facts of life," especially for girls: "I want every 14-year-old girl . . . to be told: You better start thinking what do you want in life. If you just want a career and no children you don't have much to worry about. If, however, you are thinking you'd like to have children some day you should start thinking about when do you want to have them. Early or late? To have them early means you are going to make a career sacrifice, but you're going to have more energy and less risks. Both the pros and the cons should be presented."

For all of Ms. Paglia's barbs about the women's movement, it seems clear that feminism—at least of the equal-opportunity variety—has triumphed in its basic goals. There is surely a lack of women in the C-Suite and Congress, but you'd be hard-pressed to find a man who would admit that he believes women are less capable. To save feminism as a political movement from irrelevance, Ms. Paglia says, the women's movement should return to its roots. That means abandoning the "nanny state" mentality that led to politically correct speech codes and college disciplinary committees that have come to replace courts. The movement can win converts, she says, but it needs to become a big tent, one "open to stay-at-home moms" and "not just the career woman."

More important, Ms. Paglia says, if the women's movement wants to be taken seriously again, it should tackle serious matters, like rape in India and honor killings in the Muslim world, that are "more of an outrage than some woman going on a date on the Brown University campus."

Ms. Weiss is an associate editorial features editor at the Journal.
Title: Poth/Nocera: Will Digital Networks ruin us?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 07, 2014, 08:37:38 AM
Will Digital Networks Ruin Us?
By JOE NOCERA
Published: January 6, 2014 189 Comments


The most important book I read in 2013 was Jaron Lanier’s “Who Owns the Future?” Though it was published in May, I came to it late in the year. But this turned out to be fortuitous timing. With unemployment seemingly stalled out at around 7 percent in the aftermath of the Great Recession, with the leak of thousands of National Security Agency documents making news almost daily, with the continuing stories about the erosion of privacy in the digital economy, “Who Owns the Future?” puts forth a kind of universal theory that ties all these things together. It also puts forth some provocative, unconventional ideas for ensuring that the inevitable dominance of software in every corner of society will be healthy instead of harmful.

    "How much is Google's use of my personal information in ad targeting worth to me? It can't be worth more than advertisers pay to use it, which is a few pennies."



Lanier has an unusual authority to criticize the digital economy: He was there, more or less, at the creation. Among (many) other things, he founded the first company to sell virtual reality products. Another of his start-ups was sold to Google. As a consultant, he has had assignments with “Wal-Mart, Fannie Mae, major banks and hedge funds,” as he notes in “Who Owns the Future?” But unlike most of his fellow technologists, he eventually came to feel that the rise of digital networks was no panacea.

On the contrary: “What I came away with from having access to these varied worlds was a realization that they were all remarkably similar,” he writes. “The big players often gained benefits from digital networks to an amazing degree, but they were also constrained, even imprisoned, by the same dynamics.”

Over time, the same network efficiencies that had given them their great advantages would become the instrument of their failures. In the financial services industry, it led to the financial crisis. In the case of Wal-Mart, its adoption of technology to manage its supply chain at first reaped great benefits, but over time it cost competitors and suppliers hundreds of thousands of jobs, thus “gradually impoverishing its own customer base,” as Lanier put it to me.

The N.S.A.? It developed computer technology that could monitor the entire world — and, in the process, lost control of the contractors it employed. As for Facebook, Google, Twitter, Amazon et al., well, in Lanier’s view, it’s only a matter of time before their advantages, too, disintegrate.

There are two additional components to Lanier’s thesis. The first is that the digital economy has done as much as any single thing to hollow out the middle class. (When I asked him about the effect of globalization, he said that globalization was “just one form of network efficiency.” See what I mean about a universal theory?) His great example here is Kodak and Instagram. At its height, writes Lanier “Kodak employed more than 140,000 people.” Yes, Kodak made plenty of mistakes, but look at what is replacing it: “When Instagram was sold to Facebook for a billion dollars in 2012, it employed only 13 people.”

Which leads nicely to Lanier’s final big point: that the value of these new companies comes from us. “Instagram isn’t worth a billion dollars just because those 13 employees are extraordinary,” he writes. “Instead, its value comes from the millions of users who contribute to the network without being paid for it.” He adds, “Networks need a great number of people to participate in them to generate significant value. But when they have them, only a small number of people get paid. This has the net effect of centralizing wealth and limiting overall economic growth.” Thus, in Lanier’s view, is income inequality also partly a consequence of the digital economy.

It is Lanier’s radical idea that people should get paid whenever their information is used. He envisions a different kind of digital economy, in which creators of content — whether a blog post or a Facebook photograph — would receive micropayments whenever that content was used. A digital economy that appears to give things away for free — in return for being able to invade the privacy of its customers for commercial gain — isn’t free at all, he argues.

Lanier’s ideas raise as many questions as they answer, and he makes no pretense to having it all figured out. “I know some of this will turn out to be wrong,” he told me. “But I just don’t know which part.”

Still his ideas about reformulating the economy — creating what he calls a “humanistic economy” — offer much food for thought. Lanier wants to create a dynamic where digital networks expand the pie rather than shrink it, and rebuild the middle class instead of destroying it.

“If Google and Facebook were smart,” he said, “they would want to enrich their own customers.” So far, he adds, Silicon Valley has made “the stupid choice” — to grow their businesses at the expense of their own customers.

Lanier’s message is that it can’t last. And it won’t.
A version of this op-ed appears in print on January 7, 2014, on page A23 of the New York edition with the headline: Will Digital Networks Ruin Us?.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on January 07, 2014, 07:36:08 PM
excellent and refreshing take on digital networks.

Title: Ad for Superbowl banned
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 12, 2014, 10:33:41 AM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvzAt9Yx7s8#t=10
Title: VDH: (In)Equality
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 14, 2014, 08:38:59 AM
http://nationalreview.com/article/368353/idol-equality-victor-davis-hanson
Title: Re: VDH: (In)Equality
Post by: DougMacG on January 14, 2014, 09:18:58 AM
http://nationalreview.com/article/368353/idol-equality-victor-davis-hanson

Great post!

Hanson:  "The problem with destroying liberty in service to mandated sameness is obvious, driven by Hesiod’s  second, destructive envy: It has never worked, because it is contrary to human nature — both man’s acquisitive habits and the fact that we are not all born into the world equal in every respect. Instead, forced equality erodes personal initiative, undermines the rule of law, ruins the honesty of language, and requires a degree of coercion antithetical to a free society."


If people don't choked up on emotion when they hear about liberty and freedom, then look at the efficiency side of it, getting everyone to do and be their best.  Inequality is the step-ladder.  If all incomes are the same, then they are low and there is no step up.  Wouldn't everyone like to think that a year from now they will be more skilled, more experienced and more valuable as a worker, wage earner or business owner than they are right now - and get paid more for it.   You in your prime and at your peak is the upside of you at the beginning with no experience or skills.  Do we really want no upside or to keep placing more limits on it?  The question should be how to get all people to realize their potential, not how to diminish those who did.


Hanson:  "The irony is that free people usually create far more wealth than the coerced, which makes the lower echelons better off, a fact that reminds “equality” is usually about empowering progressive elites rather than materially helping the poor."

Wasn't that exact point made recently here by our own G M ?!  )

Title: WSJ: Where left and right agree on inequality
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 15, 2014, 12:27:04 AM
Where Right and Left Agree on Inequality
Both say that 'a fair chance in the race of life' does not come through the market alone.
By
William A. Galston
Jan. 14, 2014 7:16 p.m. ET

Mitt Romney's contemptuous dismissal of the "47%" has turned out to be the most consequential utterance of the 2012 presidential campaign. The line about those who are dependent on government and unlikely to vote for him was recognized by thoughtful conservatives for what it was: an economic and moral mistake as well as a political blunder. Even before President Obama's speech last month on inequality, conservative leaders had begun to speak out, and the pace has intensified in recent weeks.

Speaking at the Brookings Institution on Monday, Rep. Paul Ryan laid out his understanding of the America idea: a society in which "the condition of your birth does not determine the outcome of your life." He was echoing the founder of the Republican Party, who declared in 1861 that the principal objective of American government was "to afford to all an unfettered start and a fair chance in the race of life."

As always, President Lincoln chose his words with precision. An unfettered start—without legal impediments—is necessary but not sufficient. A fair chance takes more, which is why the man who freed the slaves also established our system of land-grant colleges.

Today, we know that a fair chance means reaching kindergarten ready to read, graduating from high school and pursuing post-secondary education or training while developing the traits of character that enable young people to persevere in the face of inevitable difficulties. A fair chance also means a job market where people are hired and rewarded on the basis of talent and drive, not race, gender or family connections.

Many conservatives understand that what Lincoln termed a fair chance—what we now call equality of opportunity—does not come about through the market and civil society alone. Writing in the most recent issue of National Affairs, Michael Gerson and Peter Wehner declare that conservatives believe in equality of opportunity, not equality of results, but also that "government holds some responsibility for creating the ground for that equality of opportunity, which is not a natural condition."

Leading conservatives acknowledge, moreover, that the United States is not yet an equal-opportunity society. In a speech in November, Sen. Mike Lee said: "Today, a boy born in the bottom 20% of our income scale has a 42% chance of staying there as an adult." According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, he added, "the United States is third from the bottom of advanced countries in terms of upward economic mobility." Speaking last month, Sen. Marco Rubio said that "70% of children born into poverty will never make it to the middle class," noting that there is more social mobility in Canada than in the U.S. The senators are both right. We are still far from Paul Ryan's ideal.

This is what makes the present moment so unusual. Most liberals agree with most conservatives that the objective is equal opportunity. Liberals agree that equal opportunity is a social creation, not a natural condition. And they cite the same facts to argue that the U.S. has not yet succeeded in creating an equal-opportunity society.

The question is what to do about it.

We know, for example, that many children reach kindergarten far behind their more fortunate peers and that they never catch up. Poverty is part of the explanation, as liberals insist. But so are parenting and family structure, as conservatives believe.

We have a choice. We can continue a useless debate between two half-truths, or we can agree that we should work together on both parts of a complex and stubborn problem. We can do more to ensure that children do not grow up in poverty and that they receive effective preparation for formal schooling. And we can do more to encourage a culture of work and marriage while acknowledging that for the foreseeable future, a large percentage of children will grow up in single-parent households whose mothers and fathers will need help to become more effective parents.

Here's another useless debate. Every serious analysis concludes that poverty in the U.S. would be far worse without the programs launched during the Great Society. So conservatives should stop repeating Ronald Reagan's canard that we fought a war on poverty and poverty won. It is more accurate to say that we fought poverty to a draw in circumstances that became increasingly unfavorable for lower-wage workers and their families.

But Lyndon Johnson launched the war on poverty to "open the gates" of opportunity and create a society in which everyone has a chance "to advance his welfare to the limit of his capacities." Cash transfers and in-kind supports may help the poor. But unless that assistance builds opportunity, it will never be enough.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on January 15, 2014, 06:08:28 AM
About the author who hails from the political left; Mondale, Gore, Clinton.

The left loves to opine, "what about the poor".   I also ask what about the middle class?   70% live from paycheck to paycheck.  That is more than just the poor.

And what about the remarkable advantages the wealthy have that are not available to others? 

Some on the right speak we should not even focus on class.   America is not about classes.  We are not to be divided into such groups. 

I like Galston's attempt at trying to find some common ground.  But he still seems bent on what can the State do about it?   For example.  Today we know that a fair chance to succeed includes reaching Kindergarten with the ability to read.  Is this true?  I don' t remember anyone reading before school.   I learned to read in school.   Also I read that the pre Kindergarten programs as advocated by the One and his crew simply don't work.  Obviously it does come from the home.  So how are more social programs going to help those noncompetitive parents?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Galston
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: DougMacG on January 15, 2014, 08:29:39 AM
About the author who hails from the political left; Mondale, Gore, Clinton.
The left loves to opine, "what about the poor".   I also ask what about the middle class?   70% live from paycheck to paycheck.  That is more than just the poor.
And what about the remarkable advantages the wealthy have that are not available to others? 
Some on the right speak we should not even focus on class.   America is not about classes.  We are not to be divided into such groups. 
I like Galston's attempt at trying to find some common ground.  But he still seems bent on what can the State do about it?   For example.  Today we know that a fair chance to succeed includes reaching Kindergarten with the ability to read.  Is this true?  ...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Galston

Galston: Where Right and Left Agree on Inequality

I should be happy with half agreement but what he says about poverty is bunk.  We don't have widespread real poverty in America.  We don't have real have-nots.  What we have are earn-nots.  Generations of people in many areas grow up in an environment where no one had to go out and earn everything that they have, no matter how much, no matter how little.  The nature of the dependency society is that we cannot end it.  I know we need a true safety net for people in real need.  But we can't even talk about the damage these programs do to millions and millions of recipients.  Look at debate over the extension of unemployment benefits to eternity in the new-normal, non-emergency economy.   An entrepreneur response is what a trained, skilled, resilient worker who has a family to feed does when he or she can't find someone else to hire them for a conventional job.  When we pay you not to do that, you will not do that, for the most part.  But politically, today, we can't even discuss it much less fix it.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 15, 2014, 08:44:57 AM
I agree strong questions can be put to this piece, as the two of you have.  I also like that you get there is something of merit to the piece as well.
Title: Apocraphyl (sp?) Story
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 16, 2014, 08:05:01 AM
http://www.ijreview.com/2014/01/107990-story-prof-fails-entire-class-illustrate-obamas-socialism-left-furious/
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on January 16, 2014, 07:20:24 PM
That is the best lesson on socialism I have ever heard.

Title: Barnett: NSA bulk data is like gun registration
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 21, 2014, 08:11:45 PM

Knowledge is Power: How the NSA bulk data seizure program is like gun registration

    By Randy Barnett   
    January 21 at 5:07 pm

We are repeatedly told by defenders of the NSA bulk data seizure program that there has not been a single example of any abuse by the NSA of this database. Set aside the information that the NSA regularly violated its own rules. Set aside the fact that the so-called FISA “court” lacks the independent information needed to oversee such abuses.  Set aside the information we have that some NSA employees used their access to this data to cyberstalk their love interests, giving rise to the internal nickname “LoveINT.”  Set aside the fact that Edward Snowden managed to get his hands on “literally everything” without authorization. Set aside that this was likely made possible due to the absence of internal monitoring of data collection at the NSA, so it cannot be effectively audited and held accountable.  And, above all, set aside the fact that this is a top secret program, the operational details of which we have no direct knowledge. Query whether government officials such as the Attorney General, or even the President himself, are privy to how the program actually works. After all, the concept of “deniability” was invented to shield them from such information so they can deny any such knowledge.

Set all this aside and assume instead that the claim of “not a single abuse” is true. Does that justify the existence of such a program of data collection on every person in the United States? I do not think so. Knowledge is power, and the power to access this information in secret is a very dangerous one. Consider why gun rights advocates, like myself, oppose firearm registration. We are told by proponents of such registration that it is “reasonable” because it does not deprive anyone of his or her right to keep or bear arms. Yet the very existence of the data trove makes present and future violations more feasible and, therefore, more likely.  For example, the New York Police Department reportedly sent notices to registered gun owners to surrender their guns having a capacity of more than 5 rounds, as such weapons now violate state law. Formerly perfectly legal and entirely conventional guns are now susceptible to confiscation due to registration.

The brute fact that the government does not know where the guns are makes it much more difficult to confiscate them in the future. Not only does this illustrate the practical danger to constitutional liberties posed by the government simply possessing vast information about our activities and associations for later search. The trove of phone and email metadata to which the NSA now has access would make gun registration unnecessary as the government would already possess enough information to identify most gun owners.

In the “good old days” of Smith v. Maryland, the principal authority cited on behalf of the constitutionality of this bulk data seizure program, there needed to be a pen register installed on any particular person’s phone whose activities were being tracked. Not only did law enforcement have good reason to be suspicious of Michael Lee Smith, authorities had to present its track and trace order to a third-party – the phone company – which provided an external constraint on such tracking.  Now we have a policy of “pen registers for everyone,” the information from which is automatically seized and kept entirely in house, subject only to internal “controls.”

This vast searchable database creates three grave threats to the personal liberties of the citizenry.

    First, is the use of such information – like the use of the IRS to suppress political opposition – illicitly and improperly to target people for political purposes.
    Second, and equally dangerous, is a future legally authorized “mission creep,” as this data is used for more and more purposes. We are already hearing, for example, that NSA is sharing data with other agencies, such as the Drug Enforcement Administration, who then obscure the source of their tips with other evidence.  After all, “if it would have saved just one life….”
    Third, if this use of so-called “metadata” in the hands of third-parties is allowed, then bulk seizure and storage of other third-party records, such as our credit card statements, is equally permissible.  Once this bulk collection of “metadata” is permitted, there is no judicially-administrable limiting principle confining it to our phone records, or email “headers.”

The power to search all our communications – or all our third-party records – is a power too great to repose in the government’s hands. Unlike private business like Verizon or Google, those in government have a strong incentive and desire to suppress dissent – along with their political rivals – and need only the means to do so. Unlike private companies, they have the power to incarcerate anyone on their enemies targeting list should their searches turn up anything incriminating. Yahoo and Sprint have neither the motive nor the means to restrict our liberties.

Cato’s Jim Harper and I have contended that all these bulk data seizure programs are both illegal under Section 215 of the Patriot Act and unconstitutional under the Fourth Amendment.  But set aside such arguments.  Whether legal or illegal, constitutional or unconstitutional, knowledge is power.  And this is too much power to give any agency of government.

Randy Barnett

Randy Barnett is the Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Legal Theory, Georgetown University Law Center, and Director of the Georgetown Center for the Constitution. His books include: Restoring the Lost Constitution: The Presumption of Liberty (Princeton, rev. ed. 2014); and The Structure of Liberty: Justice and the Rule of Law (Oxford, rev. ed. forthcoming 2014). A former criminal prosecutor in Chicago, in 2004, he argued medical marijuana case of Gonzales v. Raich in the U.S. Supreme Court. In 2009, he was named a Guggenheim Fellow in Constitutional Studies. Follow him on Twitter @RandyEBarnett
Title: How would we know?
Post by: ccp on January 22, 2014, 07:51:13 AM
"We are repeatedly told by defenders of the NSA bulk data seizure program that there has not been a single example of any abuse by the NSA of this database. Set aside the information that the NSA regularly violated its own rules. Set aside the fact that the so-called FISA “court” lacks the independent information needed to oversee such abuses.  Set aside the information we have that some NSA employees used their access to this data to cyberstalk their love interests, giving rise to the internal nickname “LoveINT.”  Set aside the fact that Edward Snowden managed to get his hands on “literally everything” without authorization. Set aside that this was likely made possible due to the absence of internal monitoring of data collection at the NSA, so it cannot be effectively audited and held accountable.  And, above all, set aside the fact that this is a top secret program, the operational details of which we have no direct knowledge. Query whether government officials such as the Attorney General, or even the President himself, are privy to how the program actually works. After all, the concept of “deniability” was invented to shield them from such information so they can deny any such knowledge."

That was exactly my point when I heard Congressman King on Geraldo ranting about "show us one shred of evidence of abuse".

Sorry folks.  I will never ever support this guy for anything.  Anyone who talks like that is either naïve, stupid, or a liar.

How the heck are we the people supposed to come up with evidence against the NSA?  You  tell us KIng you stupid bastard.   HOw can we even know?  
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on January 22, 2014, 09:11:25 AM
Why in the world would they accept gifts like this?  The gifts were to family members which under Virginia is legal though they maybe avoided reporting them which is not.
The investigation seems to have sprung unexpectedly from some items stolen from a kitchen by a chef who was obviously given some plea deal in exchange for dirt on the bigger fish. 

Yet I wonder why Federal investigations seem to be successful against Republicans but seem to go no where with Democrats.   And to think McDonnell's gifts of 160K were such a big deal when Virginia just elected a far bigger crook McAullife as governor?  That guy has become a multimillionaire with his insider deals.   Some people are just wiser at skirting the laws when they take bribes I guess. 

****Ex-Governor of Virginia Is Indicted on Charges Over Loans and Gifts


By TRIP GABRIELJAN. 21, 2014
Former Gov. Bob McDonnell and his wife, Maureen, could face decades in prison if convicted. Steve Helber/Associated Press

Former Gov. Bob McDonnell of Virginia and his wife, Maureen, were indicted Tuesday by a federal grand jury on charges of accepting more than $140,000 in loans and gifts in exchange for promoting the business of a political patron who was seeking special favors from the state government.

The 14-count indictment filed by the United States attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia included charges of fraud and soliciting loans and gifts from Jonnie R. Williams Sr., the chief executive of Star Scientific, a maker of dietary supplements, who hoped to use the governor to promote his products.

The indictment accuses the McDonnells of accepting some $135,000 in cash from Mr. Williams, thousands of dollars in golf outings, designer clothing and a Rolex watch engraved “71st Governor of Virginia” on the back. It accuses the former first couple of lying about the gifts on loan statements and to government investigators.

Once a rising Republican star, mentioned as a possible running mate for Mitt Romney in 2012 and as an aspirant for his party’s 2016 presidential nomination, Mr. McDonnell has taken a spectacular fall since details of his relationship with Mr. Williams surfaced last spring. Under Virginia law, he was limited to one four-year term, but details of his relationship with Mr. Williams and the threat of his indictment colored the race to succeed him.

“Today’s charges represent the Justice Department’s continued commitment to rooting out public corruption at all levels of government,” the acting assistant attorney general, Mythili Raman, said in a statement. “Ensuring that elected officials uphold the public’s trust is one of our most critical responsibilities.”

At a news conference in Richmond on Tuesday night, Mr. McDonnell said he had been “falsely and wrongly accused” and that prosecutors had “stretched the law to its breaking point” to bring charges. He said he did no special favors for Mr. Williams. He appeared with his wife and took no questions.


Earlier, a lawyer for Ms. McDonnell, William Burck, said she was innocent.

Mr. McDonnell, who last summer announced that he was returning the gifts and loans, has long maintained that he never did anything for Mr. Williams or his company that he would not have done for any other Virginia business.

He apologized in his last address to the General Assembly on Jan. 8 for the scandal, which cast a shadow over the campaign of the Republican candidate who sought to succeed him, Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II. Mr. Cuccinelli lost in November to the current governor, Terry McAuliffe.

A lawyer for Mr. Williams, Jerry W. Kilgore, declined to comment. Mr. Williams stepped down as chief executive of Star Scientific last month and the company changed its name.

If convicted, the McDonnells could face decades in prison.

As detailed in the 43-page indictment, Mr. Williams ingratiated himself with the McDonells by giving them lavish gifts and loans, many of which it said Ms. McDonnell solicited with the promise that she and the governor could help his company.

Mr. Williams, an entrepreneur whose publicly traded company developed dietary supplements and cosmetics derived from a tobacco extract, sought to use the McDonnells to impress investors, as well as to enlist the governor’s support in winning state-funded research on his product.

In April 2011, the government charges, Ms. McDonnell asked Mr. Williams to buy her an Oscar de la Renta gown in New York for a political event at the Union League Club. She promised to seat him next to the governor.

Later that year, the indictment charges, Ms. McDonnell told Mr. Williams that she and her husband were having severe financial difficulties because of real estate investments in Virginia Beach. She asked for a $50,000 loan. Mr. Williams agreed to lend the money, telling the governor that “loan paperwork was not necessary,” according to the charges.

ELSEWHERE ON NYTIMES.COM
 

Watch Now: Inside China's Internet addiction bootcamps


Watch: Urban grit in Philly's Fishtown
Watch: How to make oatmeal sandwich cookies

nytimes.comVideo




Shortly after, Mr. Williams paid $15,000 to cater the wedding of the McDonnells’ middle daughter, and Ms. McDonnell agreed to fly to Florida on Mr. Williams’s private jet to promote a dietary supplement called Anatabloc, made by Star Scientific.

“Thanks so much for all your help with my family,” the governor wrote to Mr. Williams, in an email included in the indictment. “Your very generous gift to [CM] was most appreciated as well as the golf round tomorrow for the boys,” he added, with “CM” apparently a reference to the governor’s middle daughter.

“Maureen is excited about the trip to fla to learn more about the products,” he added.

At the governor’s request, according to the indictment, the Virginia secretary of health asked policy advisers to meet with Mr. Williams, who was interested in having Virginia’s public universities conduct scientific studies of the health benefits of the active ingredient in Anatabloc, which he would be able to point to for investors.

In a meeting with the health policy adviser, Mr. Williams said he had discussed with the governor having the studies paid for by the State Tobacco Commission.

Later, when the governor met with a top state official about ways to reduce health care costs, Mr. McDonnell pulled out some Anatabloc from his pocket, said he took it personally and asked the official to “reach out to the ‘Anatabloc people’ and meet with them,” according to the indictment.

In the summer of 2011, when Mr. Williams offered a mountain lake home he owned to the McDonnells for a getaway, Ms. McDonnell asked if Mr. Williams’s Ferrari would be available for their use. Mr. Williams had an employee drive the car to the lake house for the McDonnells’ enjoyment, according to the indictment.

The government charges that after Ms. McDonnell met with investigators in February 2013, she wrote a note to Mr. Williams trying to cover her tracks by making it appear that she had agreed to return the designer luxury goods to him rather than keep them.

The governor was charged with routing Mr. Williams’s loans and other largess through family members and “corporate entities” to avoid revealing them on annual gift disclosure filings. When details of some of the gifts emerged publicly last year, Mr. McDonnell said they had been made to family members, not himself, and therefore he was not required to disclose them.

Speaking to radio listeners last spring, Mr. McDonnell said, “I think it’s important that the people of Virginia know that nothing has been done with regard to my relationship with Mr. Williams or his company Star Scientific to give any kind of special benefits to him or his company.”

Although Mr. McDonnell said he had returned all the gifts, the indictment includes a list of property that he and his wife would be required to forfeit if they are convicted. The list includes Mr. McDonnell’s silver Rolex, two gold Oscar de la Renta dresses, an Armani jacket and matching dresses, two pairs of Foot Joy golf shoes, a baby blue striped Peter Millar golf shirt, a Ping Kinloch golf bag, two sets of golf clubs, two iPhones and 30 boxes of Anatabloc.****
Title: Malken: Chamber of Comm. = cronyism
Post by: ccp on January 25, 2014, 07:20:39 PM
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce vs. America

By Michelle Malkin  •  January 24, 2014 09:03 AM


The U.S. Chamber of Commerce vs. America
 by Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2014

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is a politically entrenched synod of special interests. These fat cats do not represent the best interests of American entrepreneurs, American workers, American parents and students, or Americans of any race, class or age who believe in low taxes and limited government. The chamber’s business is the big business of the Beltway, not the business of mainstream America.

If you are a business owner who believes your country should strictly and consistently enforce its borders and deport illegal immigrants who violate the terms of their visas, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce doesn’t represent you.

If you are a worker who believes the feds should punish illegal aliens who use fake documents to obtain jobs instead of rewarding them with “legal status,” the U.S. Chamber of Commerce doesn’t champion you.

If you are a parent or educator who opposes top-down federal education schemes such as Common Core that undermine local control, dumb down rigorous curricula and threaten family privacy while enriching big business and lobbying groups, the U.S. Chamber od Commerce doesn’t speak for you.

If you are a taxpayer who has had enough of crony capitalism and publicly funded bailouts of failing corporations, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce doesn’t work for you.

Last year, the chamber poured more than $52 million into K Street lobbying efforts on behalf of illegal alien amnesty, Fed Ed Common Core programs and increased federal spending. This year, chamber bigwigs are paving the perilous pathway to GOP capitulation. The left hardly needs to lift a finger against tea party candidates and activists who are bravely challenging the big government status quo. The chamber has already volunteered to spend $50 million subsidizing the Republican incumbency protection racket and attacking anti-establishment conservatives.

Allow me to say, “I told you so.” In 2010, when President Barack Obama hypocritically attacked the chamber for accepting “foreign donations” just before the midterm elections, many on the right rushed to the group’s side. But as I warned then, the purported enemy of my enemy is … sometimes my worst enemy. Barely three months after their Kabuki campaign fight, Obama and the chamber had already kissed and made up.

The chamber joined hands with the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations on a joint campaign to support Obama’s increased government infrastructure and spending proposals, stuffed with Big Labor payoffs.

The chamber is one of the staunchest promoters of mass illegal immigration, and joined with the AFL-CIO and American Civil Liberties Union to oppose immigration enforcement measures.

The chamber opposed E-verify and sued Arizona over its employer sanctions law.

The chamber supported a pro-Obamacare, pro-TARP, pro-stimulus, pro-amnesty Democrat in Arizona over his free-market GOP challenger.

The chamber supported the George W. Bush/Obama TARP, the Bush/Obama auto bailout and the billion-dollar, pork-stuffed stimulus.

This isn’t about letting the best ideas and businesses thrive. It’s about picking winners and losers. It’s about “managing” competition and engineering political outcomes under the guise of stimulating the economy and supporting “commerce.” What’s in it for the statist businesses that go along for the ride with Obama and his team of corruptocrats? Like they say in the Windy City: It’s all about the boodle — publicly subsidized payoffs meted out to the corruptocrats’ friends and special interests.

In the case of Common Core, the chamber has made common cause with the left-wing, corporate-bashing Center for American Progress in a new Baptists and Bootleggers coalition. They are seemingly strange bedfellows who both profit from increased federal government intervention. For giant corporate publishers, such as Pearson and other big-business ventures backed by the chamber, it’s all about cashing in on the public schools’ Common Core captive guinea pigs in testing, teaching, data collection and data analysis.

For big government advocacy groups, such as CAP, it’s all about diminishing state, local and parental control over local education and curricular decisions; expanding Washington’s regulatory reach into the classroom; and ensuring the perpetuation of the Fed Ed bureaucracy.

When businesses get in the government handout line, it’s not a “public-private partnership.” It’s corporate welfare. Venture socialism. Whatever you call it, it stinks as much under Democrat administrations as it does under Republican ones.

Always beware of Washington business-boosters wearing false free-market facades.
Title: What drives success?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 26, 2014, 08:53:59 AM


http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/26/opinion/sunday/what-drives-success.html?ref=todayspaper&_r=1
Title: Eric Prince goes to work for China
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 26, 2014, 09:04:03 AM
I found this interesting on several levels:

Second post of morning
Erik Prince: Out of Blackwater and Into China
The former CIA asset on his latest venture: After being 'blowtorched' by U.S. politics, he says, this time he's working for Beijing.
by David Feith

Jan. 24, 2014 6:28 p.m. ET

Hong Kong

Erik Prince —ex-Navy SEAL, ex-CIA spy, ex-CEO of private-security firm Blackwater —calls himself an "accidental tourist" whose modest business boomed after 9/11, expanded into Iraq and Afghanistan, and then was "blowtorched by politics." To critics and conspiracy theorists, he is a mercenary war-profiteer. To admirers, he's a patriot who has repeatedly answered America's call with bravery and creativity.

Now, sitting in a boardroom above Hong Kong's Victoria Harbour, he explains his newest title, acquired this month: chairman of Frontier Services Group, an Africa-focused security and logistics company with intimate ties to China's largest state-owned conglomerate, Citic Group. Beijing has titanic ambitions to tap Africa's resources—including $1 trillion in planned spending on roads, railways and airports by 2025—and Mr. Prince wants in.

With a public listing in Hong Kong, and with Citic as its second-largest shareholder (a 15% stake) and Citic executives sitting on its board, Frontier Services Group is a long way from Blackwater's CIA ties and $2 billion in U.S. government contracts. For that, Mr. Prince is relieved.

"I would rather deal with the vagaries of investing in Africa than in figuring out what the hell else Washington is going to do to the entrepreneur next," says the crew-cut 44-year-old.

Having launched Blackwater in 1997 as a rural North Carolina training facility for U.S. soldiers and police, Mr. Prince says he "kept saying 'yes' as the demand curve called—Columbine, the USS Cole and then 9/11." In 100,000 missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, he says, Blackwater contractors never lost a U.S. official under their protection. But the company gained a trigger-happy reputation, especially after a September 2007 shootout that left 17 civilians dead in Baghdad's Nisour Square.

At that point, charges Mr. Prince, Blackwater was "completely thrown under the bus by a fickle customer"—the U.S. government, and especially the State Department. He says Washington opted to "churn up the entire federal bureaucracy" and sic it on Blackwater "like a bunch of rabid dogs." According to Mr. Prince, IRS auditors told his colleagues that they had "never been under so much pressure to get someone as to get Erik Prince," and congressional staffers promised, "We're going to ride you till you're out of business."

Amid several federal prosecutions involving Blackwater employees, most of which fizzled, Mr. Prince resigned as CEO in 2009 and now feels "absolutely total regret in every way, shape and form for ever saying 'yes' " to a State Department contract.

Which brings him to Hong Kong and his new firm. "This is not a patriotic endeavor of ours—we're here to build a great business and make some money doing it," he says. Asia, and especially China, "has the appetite to take frontier risk, that expeditionary risk of going to those less-certain, less-normal markets and figuring out how to make it happen." Mr. Prince says "critics can throw stones all they want" but he is quick to point out that he has "a lot of experience in dealing in uncertainties in difficult places," and says "this is a very rational decision—made, I guess, emotionless."

Mr. Prince aims to provide "end-to-end" services to companies in the "big extractive, big infrastructure and big energy" industries. Initially focused on building a Pan-African fleet of aircraft, his firm will expand into barging, trucking and shipping, along with "remote-area construction" as needed for reliable transport. A company—Chinese, Russian, American or otherwise—may have "an extremely rich hydrocarbon or mining asset," he explains, "but it's worth nothing unless you can get it to where someone will pay you for it." His investor prospectus notes that with today's transportation infrastructure, "it costs more to ship a ton of wheat from Mombasa, Kenya to Kampala, Uganda than from Chicago to Mombasa."


Such high costs also reflect the dangers of piracy and civil conflict, but Mr. Prince plays down his firm's plans in the security realm. "We are not there to provide military training. We are not there to provide security per se. Most of that security"—say, if an oil pipeline or mining camp needs protection—"would be done by whatever local services are there," including police and private firms. "We don't envision setting up a whole bunch of local guard services around the continent."

So the former Blackwater chief won't employ guys with guns? Well, he says, "that would be the exception, certainly not the rule."

He says his attention is on "expeditionary logistics" and "asset management." If a company needs to build a dam, he muses by way of example, "how do you deliver an extremely high-dollar turbine into a very remote part of the world? . . . Do you sling it with a helicopter? There's all sorts of interesting challenges like that that we'll be endeavoring to face."

Mr. Prince won't share any revenue projections, but his prospectus notes that "China is Africa's largest trading partner," with annual flows of $125 billion. Most estimates put that figure closer to $200 billion, a meteoric increase from $10 billion in 2000 and $1 billion in 1980. The U.S., which was Africa's top trade partner until 2009, registered $100 billion in annual African exchange at last count. China-Africa trade could reach $385 billion by 2015, according to Standard Chartered Bank.

"The U.S. has been fixated on terrorism the last 10 or 15 years," says Mr. Prince, "and American companies by and large haven't had the appetite for Africa." In 2010 the African Development Bank found that Chinese firms signed 20 contracts in Africa for every one signed by an American firm. But does post-9/11 distraction really explain this discrepancy?

A better explanation would begin with China's state-directed investment strategy, which funds opaque state-owned firms to operate across Africa with little regard for trifles such as financial transparency, environmental degradation or human rights. When a tyrant like Sudan's Omar al- Bashir can't get Western financing for a mega-dam across the Nile River, China arrives with an easy loan, some state-owned firms to build the dam and some others to claim oil or mineral concessions elsewhere in the country. Beijing's approach has helped boost African economic growth—projected at 6% this year by the International Monetary Fund—but it has also helped entrench some of the world's most oppressive governments.

Mr. Prince prefers to look on the bright side. "Developing good investments in Africa is by and large the best for the people of Africa that have a job, that have electricity, that might have clean water, that might have those things that we in the West take horribly for granted."

It's Capitalism 101, he argues. "When someone needs copper, or wood or an ag product, and they invest capital somewhere to make that happen, and people get jobs from that, and that good gets introduced to the world stage and it gets traded and moved, the whole world benefits."

As for Chinese patronage of presidents-for-life like Sudan's Bashir, Mr. Prince's CEO, Gregg Smith —a former U.S. Marine and Deloitte executive—offers this observation: "There's thousands of tribal conflicts in Africa every decade that have nothing to do with anyone from the outside. It has everything to do with tribal conflicts that have been going on for centuries, and the fact that the economies cause folks not to have jobs," says Mr. Smith. "It's not about who backs Omar al-Bashir."

Nor, adds Mr. Prince, does China's expanding commercial empire come at the expense of American interests. "The United States and China are among each other's largest trading partners," he notes, "and I think countries that trade goods together tend not to trade lead," meaning to shoot at each other.

This historically questionable reassurance notwithstanding, Mr. Prince certainly isn't complacent about America's global standing. U.S. policy in Africa, he says, "is just nonexistent. It's about as coherent as U.S. Middle East policy—incoherent."

Americans, he says, "are at a competitive disadvantage because of their government. . . . It's amazing how many countries run their embassies as commercial outposts to promote businessmen from their country. I think the U.S. has forgotten about that one."

At this point in the interview, Mr. Prince begins speaking more sharply, even bitterly, not simply as a critic of Washington policy but as a man betrayed. Which he was, in 2009, when he was outed publicly as a CIA asset.

For years while running Blackwater, it turns out, Mr. Prince was also using his personal wealth and expertise to recruit and deploy a world-wide network of spies tracking al Qaeda operatives in "hard target" locations where even the CIA couldn't reliably operate. This work remained secret until June 2009, when then-CIA Director Leon Panetta mentioned it in classified testimony to Congress. Within weeks, leaks hit the front pages.

"The one job I loved more than any other was ripped away from me thanks to gross acts of professional negligence at the CIA," Mr. Prince wrote in his memoir, "Civilian Warriors," published in November.

This background comes to mind as Mr. Prince makes the surprising claim that "there's very little advantage to being an American citizen anymore. They tax you anywhere in the world you are, they regulate you, and they certainly don't help you, at all."

His advice for Washington: "Stop committing suicide." Lawmakers should "get out of their heads this idea that they can recklessly spend money that they don't have," he says. "The United States government is too big in all areas. . . . It's time to make the entire thing a lot smaller." That would include doing everything from allowing Americans to buy incandescent light bulbs to reining in domestic surveillance by the National Security Agency.

At no point does Mr. Prince address the irony of making these arguments days after going into business with a state-owned firm founded as part of Communist China's Ministry of State Security.

"Look," he says, grasping to end our talk on an optimistic note, "America can pull its head out at any time. That happens at the ballot box. Ballot boxes have consequences still in America." He continues: "But the American electorate has to actually pay attention, has to turn off the Xbox long enough to pay attention. Otherwise they're going to continue to elect the government they deserve."

Mr. Feith is an editorial-page writer at The Wall Street Journal Asia.
Title: VDH: Eating our Young
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 27, 2014, 10:12:26 AM
http://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/eating-our-young/?singlepage=true
Title: When only 1% are Employed
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 05, 2014, 10:08:11 PM

http://www.homefreeamerica.us/1-employed/
When only 1% are Employed

When I wrote Brave New War back in 2006, I made this aggressive projection on how rapid technological change would change warfare:

    The threshold necessary for small groups to conduct global warfare has finally been breached, and we are only starting to feel its effects.  Over time, in as little as perhaps twenty years and as the leverage of technology increases, this threshold will finally reach its culmination — with the ability of one man to declare war on the world and win.

It seems that we are on track with my projection.  Recently, we saw individuals leveraging the power of computers and networks launch (open source) protests that toppled governments.   It didn’t end there.  Edward Snowden (love him or hate him) proved it is possible to wage a one-man information war against the biggest, most powerful national security establishment in the world.   The US government.  A country that spends more than all other countries in the world combined on national defense.

He was able to:

    steal the crown jewels of the US security system by himself,
    initiate an information war against the entire US national security bureaucracy while eluding capture, and
    initiate economic disruptions that have done billions of dollars in damage to US corporations (from Boeing to RSA).

However, his successes don’t end there, he’s winning the war.

This support from the editors of the New York Times indicates that he’s already achieved most of what it takes to achieve a “moral victory” against the US government.

Of course, this type of revolutionary change due to technology isn’t isolated to the world of conflict, terrorism, and war.  It’s also going on in our economy.

Technological change is rapidly killing entire industries and job categories without replacing them.   Across the board, incremental productivity improvements are making it possible for employers to get by without hiring new people (even the head of the biggest employer in the World has plans to replace most of his workers with robots).  However, that won’t be where we see the greatest losses.   Those losses will occur in the industries that are completely gutted from the arrival of products and services that make them obsolete.   

As this trend strengthens, we may see results similar to what we saw with the agrarian economy.   If that occurs, the extreme endpoint of this decline may be a world where most of the commercial activity in goods and services we see today — from education to health care to manufacturing to transportation to retail to legal services — is accomplished by less than 1% of the people it used to require. 

That means only 1 of the hundred jobs being done currently will be left.  More strikingly, it’s very likely this won’t take the 200 years it took agriculture to go from 95% of the population to less than 1%.  It’s going to be much, much faster this time due to the speed at which improvements can be distributed (software/data).  Given this catalyst, we may find ourselves more than half of the way there within twenty years.

Another catalyst will be economic crisis.  With each successive crisis, there will an increased competition for the remaining economic scraps.  This competition will force companies to use technology more aggressively as a replacement for workers.  Economic crisis will also force bankrupt governments to radically reduce their expenditures.   This shortfall will drive a willingness to bend regulations to adopt alternatives that provide significant benefit for a fraction of the cost, despite vocal opposition from existing interests.

This process is both inevitable and irreversible. Our world is being upended. Get ready.

JR
Title: The Left's Unending Anger...
Post by: objectivist1 on February 06, 2014, 08:26:51 AM
The Angry Left

Posted By Daniel Greenfield On February 6, 2014 @ frontpagemag.com

The American left has never had it this good with two terms of an uncompromising leftist in the White House dedicated to its agenda, making and unmaking laws at a whim, siccing the IRS and federal prosecutors on his political enemies and transforming the country at a breathtaking pace.

Obama is what generations of the left have worked toward. This is the flicker of hope they kept alive throughout the Nixon years, Carter’s collapse and the long stretch of Reaganomics. This is what Bill Clinton robbed them of by gauging his actions against the polls instead of blasting full steam ahead regardless of what the public wanted.

So why is the left so angry?

Watch MSNBC or browse any left-wing site and you see a level of anger that would make you think that Al Gore had just conceded or Nixon had just won reelection. There’s more anger in the privileged circles of the left than in the political rearguard of the Tea Party.

That anger trickles from the top down. Obama’s interview with Bill O’Reilly was yet another opportunity for the most powerful man in the country to blame a vast right-wing conspiracy. A day doesn’t pass without another email from Obama, his wife, Sandra Fluke or Joe Biden warning that without another five or ten dollar contribution, the “right” will take over America.

The left has unchallenged control over the government, academia and the entertainment industry and yet it talks as if the country is 5 seconds away from Sarah Palin marching into Washington, D.C. at the head of an army of Duck Dynasty fans to outlaw abortion.

The apocalyptic political paranoia and the uncontrolled outbursts of rage haven’t changed much since 2003. Ten years later, the ideologues in power still act as if George W. Bush is serving out his fourth term. Every day on MSNBC, a stew of conspiracy theories about oil companies, Israel, the Koch Brothers, Wal-Mart and Karl Rove leaves a slimy trail across the television screen.

On the Internet, manufactured outrage has become the only progressive stock in trade. Did Jerry Seinfeld say that he values humor over racial quotas? He’s a racist. Did an ESPN magazine out a compulsive liar who also happened to be pretending to be a woman? Lock him up. Did Mike Huckabee say something that could be misinterpreted with enough ellipses and out of context “Twitterized” quotes? Before you know it, he’s a sexist pig.

It says something deeply disturbing about a progressive readership that eats up hate and doesn’t react to anything positive. The rash of fake hate crimes feeds into that same perverse need for an enemy to hate and fight. The left used to pretend that it wanted to do something positive, but now that it has the power, it can’t stop searching for someone to hate instead.

The left is more comfortable being angry than being anything else; it finds it easier to rally the troops against something than for something so that even its triumphs only lead to more anger. The MSNBC tweet about an interracial Cheerios commercial was revealing of a deeper problem within the left. It was assumed that the MSNBC audience wouldn’t care about an interracial ad unless it could somehow pretend to “spite” the right by watching it.

Obama’s awkward stumble from cause to cause, letting the old Bush policies run on Autoplay unless a crusade kicks in, as it eventually did on gay marriage and illegal immigration, is indicative of the problem with the left’s governing style. It cares less about gay marriage or legalizing illegal aliens than it does about stirring up conflict.

That is another reason why the left began neglecting some of its bread and butter issues after Obama won. Aside from the need to protect its own man, it wasn’t really all that interested in closing Gitmo, gay marriage or opposing the War in Iraq. The things it wants to do are never as important to it as its obsessive need to feel that it is fighting against the right.

For all the Obama Worship, the left is more united by hatred for Sarah Palin or Ted Cruz than by its support for its own leaders. It derives its identity more from the things that it is against — the middle class, the country, the businessman, the white male — than from the things that it is for.

The left’s sense of self is strongest when it is attacking, not when it is inspiring, when it is destroying, not when it is building.

Deprived of an external enemy, its ideologues carve out narrow orthodoxies and denounce each other for violating them. When the right and the center have been purged, the purges of the left begin and don’t end until there is nothing left except one tyrant-guru and his terrified minions.

The small scale bloodsport documented in the outward reaches of feminism by The Nation in its article “Feminism’s Toxic Twitter Wars” as transgender rights activists denounce Eve Ensler for excluding them by using the word “Vagina” and black feminists denounce white feminists for ignoring their concerns is typical.

When all enemies to the right have been eliminated, the left doesn’t find peace. Its ideology is a weapon, its gurus are egomaniacs and its followers joined to fight. When it wins in an arena, whether it’s academia or entertainment, the winners begins warring against each other proving that even in an ideological vacuum its ideology remains a destructive force whose followers would rather denounce and destroy, than educate and enlighten.

As a victorious parasite writes its own obituary, a successful left is a threat to its own existence and the only thing saving the left from a violent disintegration is the right.

Hating the right is the only thing that keeps the left together. When it doesn’t have Nixon to kick around anymore, it dissolves into a wet puddle of goo. If it didn’t have Sarah Palin, Ted Cruz, Mitt Romney and every other figure who took his turn starring in their grim theater of the Two Minutes Hate, it would revert back to the petty infighting of a thousand minor eccentric causes.

The left needs to believe in a vast right-wing conspiracy. It needs the Koch Brothers, Karl Rove, Evangelical Christians, AIPAC, oil companies, defense contractors and every other element of its conspiracy theories to keep its followers focused on the “real” threat instead of purging each other for tone policing, insufficient privilege checking and any other outrage of the week.

Like the Salafists shooting and shelling each other in Syria, the ranks of the left are filled with dogmatic and intolerant fanatics whose only goal in life is the absolute victory of their point of view. Their mutual fanaticism and aggrieved sense of victimhood gives them more in common with each other and that very commonality is the source of their mutual hatred. Only they can understand each other well enough to truly want to kill each other.

It isn’t hope that animates the left’s leaders and thinkers, but the darker side of human nature. That dark side is why the left’s victories end in tragedies, why the red flags are painted with blood and why when its followers have run out of enemies to kill, they turn on each other and destroy their own movements with firing squads, gulags and guillotines.

Hate is the force that gives the left meaning.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on February 06, 2014, 09:38:11 AM
"When I wrote Brave New War back in 2006, I made this aggressive projection on how rapid technological change would change warfare:

    The threshold necessary for small groups to conduct global warfare has finally been breached, and we are only starting to feel its effects.  Over time, in as little as perhaps twenty years and as the leverage of technology increases, this threshold will finally reach its culmination — with the ability of one man to declare war on the world and win."

This is only true because the US military and/or the politicians have decided that conducting war in the modern era is a police action.  We could easily wipe out Irans nuclear facilities.  We choose not to.  We could easily put away that guy in N Korea - we choose not to.

As for Iraq and Syria etc.  They are not really enemies of the US but if they were we make them into parking lots.

We are too kind.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on February 06, 2014, 09:46:36 AM
As for the angry left article the author seems to miss the point.  We have to look at the ultimate left's end game.  That is the only way to understand them.

They are not finished till there is ONE world government controlled by policy wonks who can control and dictate every aspect of the lives of every human being.

Concepts of country and religions are "mideavil".

THAT is the end game.  THAT is why they are never satisfied.  And we know the policy wonks all want perfect equality of opportunity and outcomes.  

The fact that they too are power and money hungry like almost all of humanity is not important.  

And now they can vocalize in public their dissatisfaction more now that Brock is safely elected for the second term.  No problem voicing any dissatisfaction with him now while cloaking as "the right" is simply in "his" way.  Their next champion is on deck.  
Title: VDH: An Orwellian Nation of Obamathink
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 13, 2014, 07:14:19 PM
An Orwellian Nation of Obamathink
By Victor Davis Hanson · Feb. 13, 2014
13 Comments
Print Email Bigger Smaller

The nightmare societies portrayed in the George Orwell novels “1984” and “Animal Farm” gave us the word “Orwellian.” That adjective reflects a vast government's efforts not just to deceive and control the people, but also to do so by reinventing the meaning of ordinary words while rewriting the past itself.

America, of all places, is becoming Orwellian. The president repeatedly reminds the American people that under his leadership, the U.S. has produced a record level of new oil and natural gas. But didn't Obama radically curtail leases for just such new energy production on federal lands? Have the edicts on the barn wall of “Animal Farm” been changed again, with the production of new oil and gas going from bad to suddenly good?

Does anyone remember that the Affordable Care Act was sold on the premise that it would guarantee retention of existing health plans and doctors, create 4 million new jobs and save families $2,500 a year in premiums, all while extending expanded coverage to more people at a lower cost?

Only in Orwell's world of doublespeak could raising taxes, while the costs of millions of health plans soars, be called “affordable.” Is losing your existing plan and doctor a way of retaining them?

The Congressional Budget Office recently warned that Obamacare would “keep hours worked and potential output during the next 10 years lower than they would be otherwise.” That nonpartisan verdict should be bad news for workers.

Not in our brave new world. The Obama administration says it is pleased that workers will now be freed from “job lock.” What is job lock – a made-up Newspeak word right out “1984”? Work fewer hours, make less money and create fewer outputs – and be happy.

About every January since 2009, the president has promised to close Guantanamo Bay. Is the detention facility now sort of virtually closed – in the manner that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his chemical weapons are now virtually gone, as Obama decreed years ago, and in the manner that we are still hunting down the murderers in Benghazi who were supposedly outraged over a video? Is there an Orwellian “memory hole” where these embarrassing proclamations are disposed?

In 2004, many in the media reported that George W. Bush, the demonized Emmanuel Goldstein of our era, had overseen a “jobless recovery.” Unemployment at election time in 2004 was 5.4 percent.

Yet since January 2009, only two months have seen joblessness dip slightly below 7 percent. A record 90 million able-bodied Americans are not participating in the workforce. Yet the president, in Orwellian doublespeak fashion, recently claimed that the job picture is good. If 5.4 percent unemployment was once called a jobless recovery, are we now in a jobless recovery from a jobless recovery?

In 2013, the IRS confessed that it had targeted particular political groups based on their names or political themes – a Big Brother intrusion into private lives that was revealed at about the same time the Associated Press and National Security Agency eavesdropping scandals came to light. During the initial media frenzy, President Obama blasted the politicization of the IRS as “outrageous.”

After the IRS was confirmed to be delaying the tax-exempt requests of conservative groups at a far greater rate than their liberal counterparts, the agency's director, Douglas Shulman, stepped down at the end of his term. His replacement, acting commissioner Steven Miller, subsequently resigned from the agency. And the IRS official in charge of tax-exempt decisions, Lois Lerner, invoked her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination before Congress. She and Joseph H. Grant, commissioner of the Tax Exempt and Government Entities Division, both abruptly retired from the IRS.

Congressional committees and the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration found that groups loosely associated with the Tea Party were more likely to have their tax-exempt requests put on hold than other nonprofits. Yet recently, President Obama concluded of this entire mess that it did not entail “even a smidgen of corruption.”

It takes Orwell's doublethink to explain how a scandal might have rated an “outrageous” before the people in charge quit, retired or invoked the Fifth Amendment, and then, after their embarrassing departures, was reinvented as an episode without a smidgen of corruption.

In politics, of course, left and right, conservative and liberal, make up stuff. But Orwell, who also blasted the rise of European fascism, focused more on the mind games of the statist Left.

Why? He apparently feared that the Left suffered an additional wage of hypocrisy in more openly proclaiming the noble interests of “the people.” Because of those supposedly exalted ends of equality and fairness, statists were more likely to get a pass from the media and public for the scary means they employed to achieve them.

Right now in America, the words and deeds of both past and present become reality only when the leaders put them in the correct service of the people.

© 2014 TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.
Title: Man bites dog: Harvard prof gets in right in POTH
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 16, 2014, 02:35:41 PM
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/16/business/yes-the-wealthy-can-be-deserving.html?_r=0
Title: VDH: The Value of Putin
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 16, 2014, 09:04:24 PM


http://www.nationalreview.com/article/370782/value-putin-victor-davis-hanson
Title: Sayett: Hating What's Right
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 17, 2014, 07:13:51 AM
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/12997808/Evan_Sayet-HatingWhatsRight.mp3

Hat tip to our Objectivist.
Title: Obama's strengths?
Post by: G M on February 22, 2014, 06:57:55 AM
Is it economic policy, foreign policy or website design?

Discuss.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 22, 2014, 07:19:23 AM
Obfuscation and misdirection.
Title: VDH: Outrage quiver is empty
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 27, 2014, 04:15:11 AM
http://townhall.com/columnists/victordavishanson/2014/02/27/americas-quiver-of-outrage-is-empty-n1800898/page/full
Title: Kasparov
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 27, 2014, 04:29:05 AM
http://www.ijreview.com/2014/02/117710-chess-champion-obliterates-obama-foreign-policy-blunders/
Title: Re: Kasparov
Post by: G M on February 27, 2014, 04:33:46 AM
http://www.ijreview.com/2014/02/117710-chess-champion-obliterates-obama-foreign-policy-blunders/

Exactly.
Title: Brilliant piece by Jonah Goldberg
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 28, 2014, 04:00:05 PM
A Return to Hidden Law
                   
Longtime readers of the G-File might think about taking a speed-reading course. They
also may remember that, about 14 years ago, I used to write about “hidden law” a
lot. I returned to it in today’s column on the Arizona brouhaha.
                   
Hidden law was a term coined by Jonathan Rauch, who basically updated a lot of ideas
familiar to readers of Burke, Hayek, Oakeshott, and Albert Jay Nock. Calling himself
a “soft communitarian,” Rauch put it very well so it’s worth quoting him at length:

                   
                     
A soft communitarian is a person who maintains a deep respect for what I call
"hidden law": the norms, conventions, implicit bargains, and folk wisdoms that
organize social expectations, regulate everyday behavior, and manage interpersonal
conflicts. Until recently, for example, hidden law regulated assisted suicide, and
it did so with an almost miraculous finesse. Doctors helped people to die, and they
often did so without the express consent of anybody. The decision
was made by patients and doctors and families in an irregular fashion, and,
crucially, everyone pretended that no decision had ever been made. No one had been
murdered; no one had committed suicide; and so no one faced prosecution or
perdition.
                     
Hidden law is exceptionally resilient, until it is dragged into politics and
pummeled by legalistic reformers, at which point it can give way all at once. The
showboating narcissist Jack Kevorkian dragged assisted suicide into the open and
insisted that it be legalized (and televised). At that point, the deal was off. No
one could pretend assisted suicide wasn’t happening. Activists framed state
right-to-die initiatives, senators sponsored bills banning assisted
suicide, and courts began issuing an unending series of deeply confused rulings.
Soon decisions about assisted suicide will be made by buzzing mobs of lawyers and
courts and ethics committees, with prosecutors helpfully hovering nearby, rather
than by patients and doctors and families. And the final indignity will be that the
lawyers and courts and committee people will congratulate themselves on having at
last created a rational process where before there were no rules at all, only chaos
and
darkness and barbarism. And then, having replaced an effective and intuitive and
flexible social mechanism with a maladroit and mystifying and brittle one, they will
march on like Sherman’s army to demolish such other institutions of hidden law as
they encounter.
                     
The enemy of hidden law is not government, as such. It is lawyers. Three years in
law school teach, if they teach nothing else, that as a practical matter hidden law
does not exist, or that if it does exist it is contemptibly inadequate to cope with
modern conflicts. The American law school is probably the most ruthlessly
anti-communitarian institution that any liberal society has ever produced.
                   
                   
I’ve long believed there’s a strongly held view in Hollywood and D.C. that says that
without the government in Washington American society would descend into anarchy
almost instantaneously. People are walking around downtown Peoria. They are
perfectly calm and rational. Mr. Jones says “good morning” to Mrs. Smith. “Nice
weather, huh?”
                   
Then, as if Landru had replaced the noontime chime with the code phrase “the federal
government is gone,” someone shouts, “The federal government is gone!” and anarchy
immediately ensues, with rape and rapine fast on its heels. Upon hearing the news
that Washington stands idle, Mr. Jones attempts to ravish Mrs. Smith. His dastardly
plan is only foiled because Slim Pickens ordered the ol’ number six.
                   
And I’m not talking about panic over a nuclear strike or the news that Cthulhu has
started his horrible feast on Capital Hill. I mean that I think there’s a notion —
more like an unarticulated assumption — that it’s the government in Washington that
holds society together. This is somewhat implied in the way Obama talks about
government as the word for the things we all do together and his efforts to sow
bowel-stewing panic over the government shutdown. It’s
implicit in all the talk — from Republicans and Democrats alike — that the president
needs a “vision” for the whole country and that he “creates” jobs.
                   
The simple fact is that if the federal government disappeared tomorrow — and the
media didn’t report it — it would take days or even weeks for many people to even
learn about it. And the news would not come from marauding barbarians on motorcycles
laying waste to communities. It would mostly spread with the news that there’s
something wrong with the Post Office. And if somehow you could keep the Post Office
going — and with it the checks from the treasury —
people could go months without murdering, raping, or even running with scissors.
                   
A liberal might respond, “Aha! You concede the point that people need those checks
from government!” Well, yes. But the government also needs those people to need
those checks. My point isn’t about wealth-transfers, it’s that normal people don’t
look to the federal government for much direction or meaning in their lives.
                   
90 Percent of Life
                   
Assuming you’re not a congressman, a mattress-tag cop, or a mutant telepath held
captive in an underground research facility in New Mexico, your interactions with
government are extremely limited. This is so despite the ever-metastasizing role of
government — all government — in our lives. Indeed, the main role the state has in
our lives doesn’t involve interventions we can see, but restrictions we can’t. The
state limits the range of choices available to us
until, very quickly, we forget we ever had the choice in the first place.
                   
Still, most of your daily actions are governed by hidden law, not statutory law. How
often do your arguments — with the dry cleaner or chiropodist — lead to a cop
showing up? If you go to a fancy restaurant and ask for toasted cheese sandwiches
but the waiter talks you into a plate full of snails, you work it out on your own;
you don’t call a lawyer.
                   
And if you’ve ever talked to beat cops you’d know a vast amount of their time is
spent avoiding enforcing the law. They tell street-cart vendors and angry customers
to “work it out.” They come up with solutions based on hidden law, not statutory
law, in order to avoid the paperwork (this is one of the few instances I can think
of where government red tape is a good thing).
                   
And that’s arguments. The truth is most of our life isn’t spent having arguments,
it’s spent having conversations. Indeed all of human civilization is a kind of
conversation. Michael Oakeshott:
                   
                     
As civilized human beings, we are the inheritors, neither of an inquiry about
ourselves and the world, nor of an accumulating body of information, but of a
conversation, begun in the primeval forests and extended and made more articulate in
the course of centuries. It is a conversation which goes on both in public and
within each of ourselves.
                   
                   
If you’ve ever been to a good party, what makes it great is enough shrimp cocktail
and single-malt scotch. But also lots of different conversations, each with its own
flavor. One of the most deadly things you can do at a party is ask everyone to quiet
down and have one big conversation. Suddenly, what was a fun party feels like a
therapy session or an intervention, sort of like when Janice ruined her mom’s
funeral in The Sopranos.
                   
The reason I am always harping on the glories of federalism is that America is like
a giant party with a million quirky, fun, intense, rewarding conversations going on
all at once. When you leave people to talk things out, they tend to do it without
the help of the government. And the last thing we need is the state coming in,
trying to pick winners and losers in those conversations — or simply telling people
to shut up.
                   
In a sense, Left and Right are on the wrong side of this stuff. At least by
stereotype, conservatives prefer order and conformity while liberals like
rebelliousness. And yet conservatives — those evil voluptuaries of states’ rights
and localism — are the ones making the case for diversity. For instance, I have
nothing but sympathy for the folks who want to, say, “Keep Austin Weird.” But I have
nothing but contempt for the people who have that bumpersticker on
their Prius but say the exact opposite with their voting. Maybe they support
policies close to home that they think will help keep Austin weird, but when they
vote for Democratic governors and senators and congressmen, never mind presidents,
they vote for the crowd that wants to unleash evermore armies of humorless reformers
on the land. Worse, while they’re for keeping Austin weird, they support policies
that would deny, say, Arizona from being its own kind of weird.
                   
But let’s be fair. Conservatives are often doing the same thing now. I have more
sympathy for them because A) I’m conservative and I share many of their goals and B)
the Left started it and conservatives are simply fighting back. Once it was
established that we are to be ruled by legalistic reformers, it was inevitable that
the Right would find its own to fight fire with fire.
                   
And that’s what’s so terribly depressing about all of this. We live in a country
where more and more people are terrified to work things out themselves in a
conversation with someone they disagree with. That’s why I didn’t like S.B. 1062 —
because people on the right found it necessary and because people on the left made
it necessary.
                   
It’s a simple point, but the difference between conversations and arguments is this:
Both sides win in a conversation. Arguments are zero sum.
Title: The War on Winners
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 11, 2014, 05:27:07 PM
I like the pithy insight at the heart of this piece and will be looking to use it in my own efforts at communicating.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/373053/progressivisms-war-winners-mary-eberstadt

excerpt

"If today’s progressives really care so much about the poor, why not cease and desist in their enthusiastic efforts to obstruct such manifestly good works?

"The answer is simple: Today’s progressivism is a wholly owned subsidiary of the ideological desire to put sexual expression first, and to further that expression via every means available, including state power.

"Progressives believe that today’s sexual suffragettes are the civil-rights pioneers of our time; and in a conflict between expressionism and anything else, expressionism will trump. If that means that girls in public schools will feel uncomfortable because they have to share their lockers and bathrooms with biological boys, so be it. If it means that the Little Sisters of the Poor and a hundred other charitable organizations might be fined out of existence, so be that, too. It’s the sexual revolution, not the poor, to whom progressivism will give the thumbs-up."
Title: Spengler: The Rise of Secular Religion
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 19, 2014, 08:52:05 AM


http://www.the-american-interest.com/articles/2014/03/17/the-rise-of-secular-religion/
Title: WSJ: The Case for Nationalism
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 22, 2014, 05:41:33 AM
The Case for Nationalism
By JOHN O'SULLIVAN
March 21, 2014 6:59 p.m. ET

Trying to abolish or replace the nation-state is almost certain to produce more evils than it deters. Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
Incessant "antifascist" propaganda from Moscow, baseless claims of attacks against Russians in Ukraine, incitement of Russian-speakers in eastern Ukraine, Russian troops without insignia seizing official buildings in Crimea, a stage-managed illegal plebiscite there and then its annexation by Russia, assurances from President Vladimir Putin that he has no further territorial designs in Europe (though, alas, he may be forced to intervene elsewhere to protect ethnic Russians)—yes, it all has the disturbing ring of the 1930s.

Isn't this where nationalism leads—to fascism and war?

That is a common interpretation of Europe's recent crises. It is also, coincidentally, Mr. Putin's interpretation of events in Ukraine, which he blames on neo-fascist followers of the nationalist leader Stepan Bandera, who was murdered by the KGB in 1959. But this view is really too simple by half.

Nationalists are certainly implicated in the Ukraine crisis, but more as victims than perpetrators. The crisis began as an attempt by Moscow to rescue its stillborn concept of a Eurasian Economic Union by forcing Ukraine to join it and to reject associate membership in the European Union.

Mr. Putin, who isn't a nationalist (see below) but the ruler of a shaky multinational empire hostile to nationalism, sparked off the crisis by closing Russia's borders to Ukraine's agricultural exports. He did so to compel a reluctant President Viktor Yanukovych to abandon the more popular EU option.

The Ukrainian government, encouraged by Mr. Putin, unified the assorted democrats, nationalists and activists of the left and the right who protested this move by firing indiscriminately on them. Mr. Yanukovych's power crumbled almost visibly; he fled; and a new Ukrainian government that includes nationalists took over.

Nationalism was thus one impulse in this general movement. Others were love of freedom, desire for a more democratic system, economic hopes for greater prosperity through ties to Western Europe and simple human decency. The Ukrainians inspired by these aims have just sustained an (inevitable) defeat in Crimea, but they still govern most of Ukraine, which is now escaping from Moscow's post-Soviet institutions. While that remains the case, Mr. Putin has suffered a reverse overall.

If Ukrainian nationalists have been reactive, even victimized, in this crisis, what about Mr. Putin himself? His actions have certainly been objectionable—ruthless, aggressive, deceitful, illegal, repressive, subversive. But to describe them as "nationalist" is to reduce the concept of nationalism to a politics of aggressive self-assertion. There is no reason to suppose that nations and nation-states are more prone to indulge in such folly than are federations, empires or states founded on nonnational principles.

Mr. Putin has indeed acted ruthlessly of late, but he has done so in the service of what he sees as clear state or even personal interests, not from a commitment to Russian peoplehood.

The history of the 1930s is instructive for making the necessary distinctions here. World War II began as the result of a conspiracy by Hitler and Stalin—the Nazi-Soviet Pact—to invade Poland and divide Eastern Europe and the Baltic states between them. Nazi Germany was a state built upon the ideology of racial nationalism (which places race above nationhood), the Soviet Union upon the ideology of proletarian internationalism (which rejects nationalism entirely). Both acted far more brutally and unrestrainedly than any conventional nation-state of the period.

Besides, today's Russian Federation is itself not a nation-state but an empire. Mr. Putin's conduct of the crisis, in addition to being aggressive, might best be described as imperialist or neo-imperialist, not nationalist. We should not illegitimately associate the nation-state with crimes that aren't uniquely nationalist and may even be less likely to be committed by stable nation-states.

This matters because nationalism is an increasingly necessary word that is too often misused as a term of abuse. Nationalisms and nationalist movements are popping up all over Europe. These can take very different forms: left, right and ambivalent. Some are straightforward secessionist movements, like the nationalist parties in Scotland and Catalonia, striving to establish new states rooted in historic nations. Others are movements resisting further integration of their existing nation-states into the European Community, such as the True Finns party in Finland and the U.K. Independence Party in Britain.

Still others want to protect the nation and its distinctive political spirit (the National Front in France), or the welfare state (the Danish People's Party in Denmark) or "liberal values" (the Party of Freedom led by Geert Wilders in Holland) that each feels is threatened by mass immigration. Even the mercifully cautious Germans have the Alternative for Germany party, which, though not avowedly nationalist, emits a distinctively postwar German anti-Euro economic nationalism—and should probably be renamed the Alliance of Patriotic Bankers.

The Saturday Essay
The Future of Brain Implants (3/14/14)
Sheryl Sandberg and Anna Maria Chávez on 'Bossy,' the Other B-word (3/8/14)
The Job After Steve Jobs: Tim Cook and Apple (2/28/14)
Dave Barry's Manliness Manifesto (2/21/14)
What Would Lincoln Do? (2/14/14)
A Word of Advice ... on Advice (2/7/14)
Why Women Are Living in the Discomfort Zone (1/31/14)
50 Years After War on Poverty Declared: Two Views Rep. Paul Ryan | Sen. Cory Booker (1/24/14)
Most of these parties, which didn't exist 20 years ago, are now represented in Europe's parliaments. They are expected to do well in May's elections. They probably won't win power or enter government, but they force mainstream parties to deal with such issues as the loss of national sovereignty.

In the eyes of Europe's various political and cultural establishments—what the British call the Great and the Good—none of this should be happening. It is akin to water running uphill. For several decades now, we have heard from these precincts that the nation-state is on its way out, losing power upward to supranational institutions and downward to organized minority groups. Behind their hands, the critics of resurgent nationalism murmur that it is nothing but xenophobia, authoritarianism or even fascism, in folkloric drag. They see Europe's rising nationalist parties as the preserve of bitter losers or those in the grip of nostalgia.

Herman Van Rompuy, the president of the European Council, expressed this view perfectly in 2010 when he announced for the umpteenth time that the nation-state was dead, adding: "The biggest enemy of Europe today is fear; fear leads to egoism, egoism leads to nationalism, and nationalism leads to war."

This pronouncement didn't foresee Mr. Putin's recent actions. But it illustrates nicely how Europe's political elites see events like the Ukraine crisis in the distorting mirror of anti-nationalism. This view persuades them to consider nationalism a threat, but a dying one. And it is, quite simply, wrong on both counts.

A practical refutation of this view lies in the fact that there are more nation-states in the world today than ever before. They have multiplied since 1945 in two great leaps forward: the decolonization period of the 1950s and 1960s, and the years following the dissolution of communism in 1989 and 1991. Some of these nations gained their independence, alas, by war and revolution—Zimbabwe, Croatia, Bosnia, Kosovo. Others did so by peaceful negotiation. Most former British colonies and Soviet republics took this route, but the most significant example of it is the "velvet divorce" that produced successful Czech and Slovak states.

This upsurge of nationhood might be dismissed as a detour on the high road to global governance if the establishment view of nationalism weren't so absurdly crude. It elides vital distinctions and treats all forms of national loyalty as if they were the most aggressive and exclusivist type. In reality, the full spectrum of nationalist loyalties runs roughly as follows: from Nazism, which is totalitarian racial nationalism; to fascism, which is authoritarian and aggressive nationalism; to ethnic nationalism, which is exclusivist, treating ethnic minorities as second-class citizens (if that); to civic nationalism, which opens full citizenship to all born in the national territory in return for their loyalty to the nation and its institutions; and finally, to patriotism, which is that same national loyalty plus simple love of country—its scenery, its sights and sounds, its characteristic architecture, its songs and poems, its people, its wonderful familiarity.

Here, for instance, is George Orwell, perhaps the most famous critic of nationalism, upon returning to southern England from Spain: "Down here it was still the England I had known in my childhood: the railway-cuttings smothered in wildflowers, the deep meadows where the great shining horses browse and meditate, the slow-moving streams bordered by willows, the green bosoms of the elms, the larkspurs in the cottage gardens; and then the huge peaceful wilderness of outer London, the barges on the miry river, the familiar streets, the posters telling of cricket matches and Royal weddings, the men in bowler hats, the pigeons in Trafalgar Square, the red buses, the blue policemen—all sleeping the deep, deep sleep of England."

England has changed since then, of course; men no longer wear bowler hats. But it would be as absurd to condemn such a tender patriotism as likely to lead to fascism as it would be to abstain from all interest in sex on the grounds that it might lead to promiscuity. Ordinary people, attached to reality as they must be to survive, feel exactly that sense of absurdity when they hear statements like Mr. Van Rompuy's.

But that hasn't hitherto affected their political behavior. Why have they suddenly begun thinking and voting in line with such sentiments?

One obvious reason is that all the ideological rivals to patriotism have been largely discredited. Orwell pointed out that those who abandoned patriotism generally adopted a more virulent ideological substitute. In our day, the most obvious rival ideologies are Europeanism in Europe and multiculturalism in the U.S., both of which seek to weaken national patriotism to change the political character of their societies.

Scots who hope to break away from the U.K. rally in Edinburgh in September 2013, a year before a scheduled referendum on independence for Scotland. Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
But neither of these creeds has yet become more than a niche loyalty, even though they enjoy lavish official support and the sympathy of those government officials, international bureaucrats, NGO executives, "denationalized" corporate managers and academics ambitious to be the vanguard of the new or transformed nation. Old-fashioned patriotism survives, perhaps weakened by such defections, but not seriously challenged. It remains in the shadows until tempted into the open by a 9/11, or an anniversary of D-Day or the funeral of a Margaret Thatcher. It is then suddenly recognized as the sentiment of most of the nation.

Until recently, those voters for whom patriotism and the national interest were determining issues found comfortable homes in parties of both the left and the right. But that has gradually ceased to be true.

As parties of the left swapped their working-class identity for that of middle-class liberalism, they began to think patriotism vulgar, cheap and xenophobic. At the same time, mainstream parties of the right drifted unthinkingly into a posture that treated nationalist and socially conservative voters as somewhat embarrassing elderly relatives whose views could be safely ignored. Party leaders reasoned that their atavistic voters had nowhere else to go.

The result can be seen most dramatically in Britain, where the U.K. Independence Party, having secured its base among traditional middle-class Tories, is now harvesting new votes from patriotic blue-collar Laborites. But one can see similar outcomes throughout Europe.

Another factor in this resurgence is a change of intellectual fashion toward bigness. Fewer people in all classes are still confident that the future belongs to the big battalions. They have noticed that smaller states are likely to be richer, easier to manage and closer to the people than larger states. As the Economist magazine pointed out a few years ago: "Of the 10 countries with populations of over 100 [million], only the U.S. and Japan are prosperous."

These economic facts remove an important obstacle to secession. And if there ever was a link between prosperity and bigness, it has been dissolved by free trade and globalization, which ensure that the size of a nation need no longer coincide with the size of the market open to it. At the same time, a government can shrink to the size that its citizens find most convenient to control.

The U.S. is the exception to these rules—it is both large and prosperous—because its federalism distributes power to states and localities, where it can be better controlled. Switzerland is another example. Europe might imitate America's success if it were to model itself on Switzerland and distribute power downward. But the opposite is happening—in both Europe and America.

A final brief argument is perhaps the strongest: Nation-states are an almost necessary basis for democracy. A common language and culture, a common allegiance to national institutions, a common sense of destiny, all within a defined territory, with equal rights for all citizens—these seem to be the conditions that enable people with different opinions and interests to accept political defeat and the passage of laws to which they strongly object. There are a few exceptions to this rule—India, Switzerland—but many more confirmations of it.

None of these many considerations justify supporting nationalism as a universal principle of statehood. There is no such principle. States rooted in ideas as different as popular consent and the dynastic principle have been handed down to us by history. Wholesale reconstruction of them is utopian and nearly always fails. The best we can hope for is to improve them by piecemeal reform along the grain of their history.

But trying to abolish or replace the nation-state is almost certain to produce more evils than it deters. The lesson of recent history is that nationalism is here to stay—and that secure, stable and satisfied nation-states are likely to want friendship with neighboring countries rather than their conquest. Wise political leaders anxious for peace will concentrate on shaping their people's nationalism into an amiable patriotism rather than on submerging it in a new sovereignty and driving it toward its darker manifestations.

Mr. O'Sullivan is director of the Danube Institute in Budapest and a senior fellow of the National Review Institute in New York.
Title: Combating bad science
Post by: ccp on March 26, 2014, 05:41:34 AM
THis maybe deserves new thread.  Remember I noted that most medical research publications are not much more than worthless.  So is research in many fields.   This address that.  Yet research is taking off.  Everything is data.  Everything is being measured for tiny small percentage of percentage gains.  There is no end to this.  Problem is "science" is used by whomever for whatever.  Sorting out the invalid from the truly informative or new discovery is not always easy:

Combating bad science

Metaphysicians

Sloppy researchers beware. A new institute has you in its sights
 Mar 15th 2014  | From the print edition

“WHY most published research findings are false” is not, as the title of an academic paper, likely to win friends in the ivory tower. But it has certainly influenced people (including journalists at The Economist). The paper it introduced was published in 2005 by John Ioannidis, an epidemiologist who was then at the University of Ioannina, in Greece, and is now at Stanford. It exposed the ways, most notably the overinterpreting of statistical significance in studies with small sample sizes, that scientific findings can end up being irreproducible—or, as a layman might put it, wrong.

Dr Ioannidis has been waging war on sloppy science ever since, helping to develop a discipline called meta-research (ie, research about research). Later this month that battle will be institutionalised, with the launch of the Meta-Research Innovation Centre at Stanford.


METRICS, as the new laboratory is to be known for short, will connect enthusiasts of the nascent field in such corners of academia as medicine, statistics and epidemiology, with the aim of solidifying the young discipline. Dr Ioannidis and the lab’s co-founder, Steven Goodman, will (for this is, after all, science) organise conferences at which acolytes can meet in the world of atoms, rather than just online. They will create a “journal watch” to monitor scientific publishers’ work and to shame laggards into better behaviour. And they will spread the message to policymakers, governments and other interested parties, in an effort to stop them making decisions on the basis of flaky studies. All this in the name of the centre’s nerdishly valiant mission statement: “Identifying and minimising persistent threats to medical-research quality.”

The METRICS system

Irreproducibility is one such threat—so much so that there is an (admittedly tongue-in-cheek) publication called the Journal of Irreproducible Results. Some fields are making progress, though. In psychology, the Many Labs Replication Project, supported by the Centre for Open Science, an institute of the University of Virginia, has re-run 13 experiments about widely accepted theories. Only ten were validated. The centre has also launched what it calls the Cancer Biology Reproducibility Project, to look at 50 recent oncology studies.

Until now, however, according to Dr Ioannidis, no one has tried to find out whether such attempts at revalidation have actually had any impact on the credibility of research. METRICS will try to do this, and will make recommendations about how future work might be improved and better co-ordinated—for the study of reproducibility should, like any branch of science, be based on evidence of what works and what does not.

Wasted effort is another scourge of science that the lab will look into. A recent series of articles in the Lancet noted that, in 2010, about $200 billion (an astonishing 85% of the world’s spending on medical research) was squandered on studies that were flawed in their design, redundant, never published or poorly reported. METRICS will support efforts to tackle this extraordinary inefficiency, and will itself update research about the extent to which randomised-controlled trials acknowledge the existence of previous investigations of the same subject. If the situation has not improved, METRICS and its collaborators will try to design new publishing practices that discourage bad behaviour among scientists.

There is also Dr Ioannidis’s pet offender: publication bias. Not all studies that are conducted get published, and the ones which do tend to be those that have significant results. That leaves a skewed impression of the evidence.

Researchers have been studying publication bias for years, using various statistical tests. Again, though, there has been little reflection on these methods and their comparative effectiveness. They may, according to Dr Ioannidis, be giving both false negatives and false positives about whether or not publication bias exists in a particular body of studies.

Dr Ioannidis plans to run tests on the methods of meta-research itself, to make sure he and his colleagues do not fall foul of the very criticisms they make of others. “I don’t want”, he says, “to take for granted any type of meta-research is ideal and efficient and nice. I don’t want to promise that we can change the world, although this is probably what everybody has to promise to get funded nowadays.”

From the print edition: Science and technology
Title: WSJ: Koch bro speaks
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 03, 2014, 03:49:28 PM

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303978304579475860515021286?mod=hp_opinion&mg=reno64-wsj&url=http%3A%2F%2Fonline.wsj.com%2Farticle%2FSB10001424052702303978304579475860515021286.html%3Fmod%3Dhp_opinion



Charles Koch: I'm Fighting to Restore a Free Society

Instead of welcoming free debate, collectivists engage in character assassination.
  

by Charles G. Koch  
 

Updated April 2, 2014 7:47 p.m. ET


I have devoted most of my life to understanding the principles that enable people to improve their lives. It is those principles—the principles of a free society—that have shaped my life, my family, our company and America itself.

Unfortunately, the fundamental concepts of dignity, respect, equality before the law and personal freedom are under attack by the nation's own government. That's why, if we want to restore a free society and create greater well-being and opportunity for all Americans, we have no choice but to fight for those principles. I have been doing so for more than 50 years, primarily through educational efforts. It was only in the past decade that I realized the need to also engage in the political process.


A truly free society is based on a vision of respect for people and what they value. In a truly free society, any business that disrespects its customers will fail, and deserves to do so. The same should be true of any government that disrespects its citizens. The central belief and fatal conceit of the current administration is that you are incapable of running your own life, but those in power are capable of running it for you. This is the essence of big government and collectivism.

More than 200 years ago, Thomas Jefferson warned that this could happen. "The natural progress of things," Jefferson wrote, "is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground." He knew that no government could possibly run citizens' lives for the better. The more government tries to control, the greater the disaster, as shown by the current health-care debacle. Collectivists (those who stand for government control of the means of production and how people live their lives) promise heaven but deliver hell. For them, the promised end justifies the means.

Instead of encouraging free and open debate, collectivists strive to discredit and intimidate opponents. They engage in character assassination. (I should know, as the almost daily target of their attacks.) This is the approach that Arthur Schopenhauer described in the 19th century, that Saul Alinsky famously advocated in the 20th, and that so many despots have infamously practiced. Such tactics are the antithesis of what is required for a free society—and a telltale sign that the collectivists do not have good answers.

Rather than try to understand my vision for a free society or accurately report the facts about Koch Industries, our critics would have you believe we're "un-American" and trying to "rig the system," that we're against "environmental protection" or eager to "end workplace safety standards." These falsehoods remind me of the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan's observation, "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts." Here are some facts about my philosophy and our company:

Koch companies employ 60,000 Americans, who make many thousands of products that Americans want and need. According to government figures, our employees and the 143,000 additional American jobs they support generate nearly $11.7 billion in compensation and benefits. About one-third of our U.S.-based employees are union members.

Koch employees have earned well over 700 awards for environmental, health and safety excellence since 2009, many of them from the Environmental Protection Agency and Occupational Safety and Health Administration. EPA officials have commended us for our "commitment to a cleaner environment" and called us "a model for other companies."

Our refineries have consistently ranked among the best in the nation for low per-barrel emissions. In 2012, our Total Case Incident Rate (an important safety measure) was 67% better than a Bureau of Labor Statistics average for peer industries. Even so, we have never rested on our laurels. We believe there is always room for innovation and improvement.

Far from trying to rig the system, I have spent decades opposing cronyism and all political favors, including mandates, subsidies and protective tariffs—even when we benefit from them. I believe that cronyism is nothing more than welfare for the rich and powerful, and should be abolished.

Koch Industries was the only major producer in the ethanol industry to argue for the demise of the ethanol tax credit in 2011. That government handout (which cost taxpayers billions) needlessly drove up food and fuel prices as well as other costs for consumers—many of whom were poor or otherwise disadvantaged. Now the mandate needs to go, so that consumers and the marketplace are the ones who decide the future of ethanol.

Instead of fostering a system that enables people to help themselves, America is now saddled with a system that destroys value, raises costs, hinders innovation and relegates millions of citizens to a life of poverty, dependency and hopelessness. This is what happens when elected officials believe that people's lives are better run by politicians and regulators than by the people themselves. Those in power fail to see that more government means less liberty, and liberty is the essence of what it means to be American. Love of liberty is the American ideal.

If more businesses (and elected officials) were to embrace a vision of creating real value for people in a principled way, our nation would be far better off—not just today, but for generations to come. I'm dedicated to fighting for that vision. I'm convinced most Americans believe it's worth fighting for, too.

Mr. Koch is chairman and CEO of Koch Industries.
Title: governements kill
Post by: ccp on April 10, 2014, 02:40:38 AM
http://townhall.com/columnists/walterewilliams/2014/04/09/how-to-assist-evil-n1819754

The 20th century turned out to be mankind's most barbaric. Roughly 50 million to 60 million people died in international and civil wars. As tragic as that number is, it pales in comparison with the number of people who were killed at the hands of their own government. Recently deceased Rudolph J. Rummel, professor of political science at the University of Hawaii and author of "Death by Government," estimated that since the beginning of the 20th century, governments have killed 170 million of their own citizens. Top government killers were the Soviet Union, which, between 1917 and 1987, killed 62 million of its own citizens, and the People's Republic of China, which, between 1949 and 1987, was responsible for the deaths of 35 million to 40 million of its citizens. In a distant third place were the Nazis, who murdered about 16 million Jews, Slavs, Serbs, Czechs, Poles, Ukrainians and others deemed misfits, such as homosexuals and the mentally ill
[/color]
Title: A good reply on History of Democrats, Republicans, and Racism off of Yahoo board
Post by: ccp on April 15, 2014, 01:02:12 AM
David H 44 minutes ago

A Short History of Democrats, Republicans, and Racism

 The following are a few basic historical facts that every American should know.

 Fact: The Republican Party was founded primarily to oppose slavery, and Republicans eventually abolished slavery. The Democratic Party fought them and tried to maintain and expand slavery.

 Why is this indisputable fact so rarely mentioned? PBS documentaries about slavery and the Civil War barely mention it, for example. One can certainly argue that the parties have changed dramatically in 150 years, but that does not change the historical fact that it was the Democrats who supported slavery and the Republicans who opposed it. And that indisputable fact should not be airbrushed out for fear that it will tarnish the modern Democratic Party.

 Had the positions of the parties been the opposite, and the Democrats had fought the Republicans to end slavery, the historical party roles would no doubt be repeated incessantly in these documentaries. Funny how that works.

 Fact: During the Civil War era, the "Radical Republicans" were given that name because they wanted to not only end slavery but also to endow the freed slaves with full citizenship, equality, and rights.

 Yes, that was indeed a radical idea at the time!

 Fact: Lincoln's Vice President, Andrew Johnson, was a strongly pro-Union (but also pro-slavery) Democrat who had been chosen as a compromise running mate to attract Democrats. After Lincoln was assassinated, Johnson thwarted Republican efforts in Congress to recognize the civil rights of the freed slaves, and Southern Democrats continued to thwart any such efforts for nearly a century.

 Fact: The Ku Klux Klan was originally and primarily an arm of the Southern Democratic Party, and its mission was to terrorize freed slaves and Republicans who sympathized with them.

 Why is this fact conveniently omitted in so many popular histories and depictions of the KKK, including PBS documentaries? Had the KKK been founded by Republicans, that fact would no doubt be repeated constantly on those shows.

 Fact: In the 1950s, President Eisenhower, a Republican, integrated the US military and promoted civil rights for minorities. Eisenhower pushed through the Civil Rights Act of 1957. One of Eisenhower's primary political opponents on civil rights prior to 1957 was none other than Lyndon Johnson, then the Democratic Senate Majority Leader. LBJ had voted the straight segregationist line until he changed his position and supported the 1957 Act.

 Fact: The historic Civil Rights Act of 1964 was supported by a higher percentage of Republicans than Democrats in both houses of Congress. In the House, 80 percent of the Republicans and 63 percent of the Democrats voted in favor. In the Senate, 82 percent of the Republicans and 69 percent of the Democrats voted for it.

 Fact: Contrary to popular misconception, the parties never "switched" on racism.

 Following the epic civil rights struggles of the 1960s, the South began a major demographic shift from Democratic to Republican dominance. Many believe that this shift was motivated mainly by racism. While it is certainly true that many Southern racists abandoned the Democratic Party over its new support for racial equality and integration, the notion that they would flock to the Republican Party -- which was a century ahead of the Democrats on those issues -- makes no sense whatsoever.

 Yet virtually every liberal, when pressed on the matter, will inevitably claim that the parties "switched," and most racist Democrats became Republicans! In their minds, this historical ju jitsu maneuver apparently transfers all the past sins of the Democrats (slavery, the KKK, Jim Crow laws, etc.) onto the Republicans and all the past virtues of the Republicans (e.g., ending slavery) onto the Democrats! That's quite a feat!

 It is true that Barry Goldwater's opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 probably attracted some racist Democrats to the Republican Party. However, Goldwater was not a racist -- at least not an overt racist like so many Southern Democrats of the time, such as George Wallace and Bull Connor. He publicly professed racial equality, and his opposition to the 1964 Act was based on principled grounds of states rights. In any case, his libertarian views were out of step with the mainstream of the Republican Party, and he lost the 1964 Presidential election to LBJ in a landslide.

 But Goldwater's opposition to the 1964 Civil Rights Act provided liberals an opening to tar the Republican Party as racist, and they have tenaciously repeated that label so often over the years that it is now the conventional wisdom among liberals. But it is really nothing more than an unsubstantiated myth -- a convenient political lie. If the Republican Party was any more racist than the Democratic Party even in 1964, why did a higher percentage of Republicans than Democrats in both houses of Congress vote for the 1964 Civil Rights Act? The idea that Goldwater's vote on the 1964 Civil Rights Act trumps a century of history of the Republican Party is ridiculous, to say the least.

 Every political party has its racists, but the notion that Republicans are more racist than Democrats or any other party is based on nothing more than a constant drumbeat of unsubstantiated innuendo and assertions by Leftists, constantly echoed by the liberal media. It is a classic example of a Big Lie that becomes "true" simply by virtue of being repeated so many times.

 A more likely explanation for the long-term shift from Democratic to Republican dominance in the South was the perception, fair or not, that the Democratic Party had rejected traditional Christian religious values and embraced radical secularism. That includes its hardline support for abortion, its rejection of prayer in public schools, its promotion of the gay agenda, and many other issues.

 In the 1960s the Democratic Party essentially changed its strategy for dealing with African Americans. Thanks largely to earlier Republican initiatives on civil rights, blatant racial oppression was no longer a viable political option. Whereas before that time Southern Democrats had overtly and proudly segregated and terrorized blacks, the national Democratic Party decided instead to be more subtle and get them as dependent on government as possible. As LBJ so elegantly put it (in a famous moment of candor that was recorded for posterity), "I'll have those niggers voting Democratic for the next 200 years." At the same time, the Democrats started a persistent campaign of lies and innuendo, falsely equating any opposition to their welfare state with racism.

 From a purely cynical political perspective, the Democratic strategy of black dependence has been extremely effective. LBJ knew exactly what he was doing. African Americans routinely vote well over 90 percent Democratic for fear that Republicans will cut their government benefits and welfare programs. And what is the result? Before LBJ's Great Society welfare programs, the black illegitimacy rate was as low as 23 percent, but now it has more than tripled to 72 percent.

 Most major American city governments have been run by liberal Democrats for decades, and most of those cities have large black sections that are essentially dysfunctional anarchies. Cities like Detroit are overrun by gangs and drug dealers, with burned out homes on every block in some areas. The land values are so low due to crime, blight, and lack of economic opportunity that condemned homes are not even worth rebuilding. Who wants to build a home in an urban war zone? Yet they keep electing liberal Democrats -- and blaming "racist" Republicans for their problems!

 Washington DC is another city that has been dominated by liberal Democrats for decades. It spends more per capita on students than almost any other city in the world, yet it has some of the worst academic achievement anywhere and is a drug-infested hellhole. Barack Obama would not dream of sending his own precious daughters to the DC public schools, of course -- but he assures us that those schools are good enough for everyone else. In fact, Obama was instrumental in killing a popular and effective school voucher program in DC, effectively killing hopes for many poor black families trapped in those dysfunctional public schools. His allegiance to the teachers unions apparently trumps his concern for poor black families.

 A strong argument could also be made that Democratic support for perpetual affirmative action is racist. It is, after all, the antithesis of Martin Luther King's vision of a color-blind society. Not only is it "reverse racism," but it is based on the premise that African Americans are incapable of competing in the free market on a level playing field. In other words, it is based on the notion of white supremacy, albeit "benevolent" white supremacy rather than the openly hostile white supremacy of the pre-1960s Democratic Party.

 The next time someone claims that Republicans are racist and Democrats are not, don't fall for it.
Title: Kroger Manager Fired After He Slams Knife-Wielding Shoplifter to Ground...
Post by: objectivist1 on April 19, 2014, 04:22:47 PM
From the 'no good deed goes unpunished' department.  Hey, it's company policy.
 

Kroger manager fired after he slams a knife-wielding shoplifter to the ground
By Will Lerner5 hours agoOdd News
 
 

If you’re an employee of a chain store and you see a shoplifter, don’t confront them. It’s been proven again and againand again and again that no matter how noble your intentions are, you can be fired from your job. As KDFW FOX 4 Newsreports, this is exactly what happened to one Kroger grocery store manager in Arlington, Texas.

 
View gallery
.
<image001.png>
The manager is seen here, after having slammed the suspected shoplifter to the ground. (KDFW)
A customer in the parking lot of the Kroger recorded the incident on their cellphone. In the video, you can see the unnamed manager approach the shoplifting suspect. The suspect appears to have a knife in his hand. The manager shoves him into a parked car and gets the knife out the suspect’s hand before eventually slamming him down to the ground.

 
View gallery
.
<image002.png>
Claude Medlock (KDFW)
The alleged shoplifter is 51-year-old Claude Medlock. According to KDFW, Arlington Police say that Mr. Medlock has a, “lengthy criminal history that includes theft and robbery convictions.” They didn’t consider the manager’s actions a crime, but that didn’t matter to Kroger. Kroger sent a statement to KDFW, which read in part:

“The incident…is not a reflection of our company’s fraud prevention protocol, procedures or training…He is no longer employed by our company.”
The manager told the station that he had worked in loss prevention for 13 years, and “believed he handled the situation properly.”
Title: Jon Voight
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 20, 2014, 09:57:41 AM


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-YtYL6br_8
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on April 21, 2014, 05:05:19 AM
Well this is something Americans can be proud of.  The immigrants are coming here and working past a lot of our own and what do we do?  Get stoned.

I can only hope that the lure of marijuana will wear itself out and people will realize they are wasting the lives smoking this shit:

http://news.yahoo.com/colorado-pot-holiday-tries-mainstream-074215765.html

But think of the good the tax income will do???   Using GMs phrase:  bahaha.
Title: Prager: From Greatness to Whiteness
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 22, 2014, 09:44:52 AM


http://www.dennisprager.com/greatness-whiteness/
Title: White Privilege
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 02, 2014, 09:31:47 AM


http://www.ijreview.com/2014/04/134388-freshman-shames-ivy-league-college-personal-story-white-privilege/
Title: Re: White Privilege
Post by: G M on May 02, 2014, 09:52:05 AM


http://www.ijreview.com/2014/04/134388-freshman-shames-ivy-league-college-personal-story-white-privilege/

Awesome!

http://www.theonion.com/articles/white-male-privilege-squandered-on-job-at-best-buy,35835/
Title: Black Skin Privilege...
Post by: objectivist1 on May 02, 2014, 10:56:37 AM
Here is David Horowitz's and John Perazzo's brilliant pamphlet detailing the corollary argument to the indeed "awesome" article Crafty posted by the young white male student:

www.amazon.com/Black-Skin-Privilege-American-Dream-ebook/dp/B00BXPIHLA/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1399053246&sr=1-1&keywords=black+skin+privilege
Title: Coercion dolled up as civil rights
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 06, 2014, 03:33:47 PM
Ultimately I think this reduces to "One is free to do it.  Others are free to make of it what they will."

======================================
http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/same_sex_marriage_coercion_dolled_up_as_civil_rights

Same-sex marriage: coercion dolled up as civil rights
Stop treating Brendan Eich as a one-off – gay marriage is inherently illiberal.
Brendan O'Neill | 5 May 2014
comment 13 | print |

It's six weeks since Javascript inventor Brendan Eich was hounded out of his job at Mozilla by a virtual mob of intolerant tweeters and campaigners. His crime? Failing to genuflect at the altar of gay marriage, which is now the closest thing our otherwise godless, belief-lite, morally vacuous societies have to a sacred value. For refusing to bow down before this new sainted institution, and for having the temerity to donate money to a campaign group opposed to it, Eich was found guilty by the mob of sacrilege and was hounded out of public life as a modern-day heretic.

And in those six weeks, some gay-marriage backers, feeling more than a little red-faced, have called for the zealots in their camp to get a grip. The treatment of Eich was an example of what happens when bad-apple activists turn crazily self-righteous, they say. British-American writer Andrew Sullivan says the witch-hunting of Eich speaks to the ‘fanaticism’ of certain campaigners, which apparently runs counter to the gay-marriage movement’s desire to create a more ‘tolerant and diverse society’. Recently, prominent American liberals and libertarians published an open letter headlined ‘Freedom to Marry, Freedom to Dissent: Why We Must Have Both’, which says the Eich episode showed the ‘eagerness [of] some supporters of same-sex marriage to punish rather than to criticise or to persuade those who disagree’. ‘Enforcing orthodoxy hurts everyone’, the letter says, and gay-marriage campaigners must lobby for the ‘freedom to marry’ in a less hysterical fashion.

It is always refreshing to see people stand up for the freedom to dissent, especially on an issue like gay marriage, on which there’s an astounding amount of nodding-dog conformity. But there is nonetheless something off, something problematic, something wrong about the past month’s burgeoning critical response to the Eich affair. And it’s this: it treats the illiberalism and intolerance hurled Eich’s way as a one-off, an extreme case, an instance of ‘some activists’ going too far, when in truth what happened to Eich is entirely in keeping with the coercive culture of the politics of gay marriage more broadly. To view the hounding of Eich as an aberration, as a veering off the alleged path of diversity mapped out by the gay-marriage campaign, is utterly to miss the point – Eich’s treatment is better seen as the logical conclusion to what has been a strikingly illiberal movement from the get-go.

This is the thing no one in the gay-marriage lobby, or in political and media circles more broadly, seems to want to talk about - the fact that in every jurisdiction in which it has been introduced, gay marriage has been heavily attended by authoritarianism and coercion.

Sometimes the coercion is soft, taking the form of what John Stuart Mill called ‘the tyranny of custom’, where those who refuse to embrace gay marriage - the most speedily formed custom of modern times - will be branded phobic and hateful and perhaps boycotted by agitators, pressured to choose between their moral opposition to same-sex marriage and their place in polite society; you absolutely cannot have both. And sometimes the coercion is hard, involving, in the case of France most obviously, actual state violence against opponents of gay marriage. But whatever form it has taken, coercion has been the order of the day in every campaign to legalise gay marriage, meaning Eich’s fate wasn’t some abnormality - it was part of a pretty scary ‘new normal’, of a sweeping culture of intolerance that has been fostered by the political set pushing gay marriage.

It is odd that people should be so shocked by what was done to Eich this month considering that, over the past year and more, we’ve already had the hounding of individuals and businesses that refuse to go wild for gay marriage. Indeed, pre-Eich the US National Review published an article appositely headlined ‘Support gay marriage - or else’, which discussed the growing number of cases in which private businesses that refuse to cater to or work at gay weddings - that is, which exercise their freedom of association - are being threatened with punishment under hate-crime legislation. As the National Review said, ‘refusal [to celebrate gay marriage] is now considered tantamount to a crime’. Eich’s treatment only made more explicit this creeping criminalisation of opponents of gay marriage. In Britain, too, one of the first things secularist supporters of gay marriage did when it became clear that their new institution was going to come into being was to agitate against Catholic schools for failing to promote it. They accused Catholic schools of ‘politically indoctrinating’ their students by teaching them only about traditional marriage, and said such ‘encouragement to bigotry’ shouldn’t be allowed. It was another attempted assault on freedom of association, another indicator of an emerging censorious hostility to anyone who doesn’t embrace gay marriage. The mob punishment of Eich - and the stern warning it sent to other traditionalist-minded or religious folk in public life who might foolishly have been thinking of expressing their views on gay marriage - was just an extension of earlier moral assaults on any person or group that didn’t fully buy into the gospel of gay marriage.

Critics of gay marriage have for months faced ‘ostracism from public life’, as the columnist Damon Linker put it - in an article published pre-Eich. As Linker said, there is a morally coercive streak to the gay-marriage movement, which seems to desire not just tolerance of its ideas, but ‘psychological acceptance and positive affirmation’ of them by everyone. To this end, businesses run by individuals who are less than keen on gay marriage have found themselves boycotted against, protested against, demonised by Twittermobs. Individuals who have voted in favour of traditional marriage in referendums have been denounced as ‘hateful’, ‘brainwashed’, ‘knuckle-draggers’. American states that have failed to introduce gay marriage have had their tourism websites hacked and smothered in abusive commentary. The impact of all these shrill assaults on opponents of gay marriage, of this often media-led branding of critics of gay marriage as ‘phobic’ and irrational, has been to chill debate, to encourage one side in the discussion to shut the hell up or risk ‘ostracism from public life’. It was only a matter of time before this striking unwillingness to tolerate the existence of anyone who isn’t thrilled by gay marriage translated into the physical hounding-out of public life of an individual like Eich. The signs were there.

In some places, the mob pressure to silence one’s moral opposition to gay marriage has been backed by the armed wing of the state. In France, mass protests against the introduction of gay marriage have been met with the violence of the truncheon and even the copious deployment of tear gas. Parisians who have gathered in public while wearing pro-traditional marriage t-shirts – which feature a man, woman and child – have been cautioned by police for organising ‘unauthorised protests’. In the words of the Paris-based writer John Laughland, opponents of gay marriage are being treated as ‘ideological enemies’ by the French state, where ‘every effort [is made] to delegitimise those who protest [against] same-sex marriage’. The moral assault on Eich can hardly be considered special, or especially shocking, when it springs from a movement that has already physically assaulted its critics.

Elsewhere, there has been a strong strain of Orwellianism in the advance of gay marriage. States have been busy rewriting official documents to reflect their elevation of a new form of marriage to replace the old one. In France, Canada and elsewhere, words like husband and wife, even mother and father, are being replaced with what officials call more ‘gender-neutral’ - translation: utterly soulless - terms such as ‘partner’ or ‘parent’. Some campaigners claim this is merely a practical step to reflect a new reality, but as Orwell knew only too well, language itself can be used to shape reality. In gay marriage’s great rewriting and renaming of various communal identities that have been a core part of our societies for generations - from mother to wife to child - we can see the implicit diminishing of the value of a certain, more traditional way of life, with the old-style family unit itself being robbed of moral meaning and reduced to a business-like collection of partners and ‘Parent 1’ and ‘Parent 2’. Here, too, there’s a coercive component, an attempted top-down refashioning of identities that emerged from within communities over a great period of time.

Anyone who over the past few years has paid attention to the moral delegitimation of critics of gay marriage, to the state attacks on anti-gay marriage protesters, to the social ostracism of those who favour traditional marriage, to the attempt to force religious schools to teach about gay marriage, and to the Orwellian airbrushing from history of the words and identities cleaved to by the already married, cannot have been surprised by what happened to Eich. His fate wasn’t the product of a handful of zealous campaigners going too far on Twitter - it was the end result of an intolerant culture, sometimes mob-like, sometimes state-enforced, that has been gaining ground for years, and which showed long before the elbowing aside of Eich that it was more than happy to ostracise, punish, criminalise and censor anyone who dared raise a peep of opposition to gay marriage. Coercion is built into gay marriage. They used to say love and marriage went together - in the gay-marriage movement, it’s authoritarianism and marriage that are bedfellows.

The question is: why? Why has the gay-marriage issue been such a shrill and intolerant affair? It isn’t because some campaigners are overly keen and a bit hotheaded; it’s because gay marriage is not actually a campaign to expand equality, far less freedom, but is better seen as the main mechanism through which modern society now challenges traditional cultural norms, through which society expresses its dislocation from, and its growing disdain for, the old-world values of family life, family sovereignty, long-term commitment, loyalty, and so on.

Gay marriage has emerged as the perfect means through which our post-traditional, relativistic elites can both subtly denigrate older values and also impose a set of whole new values, related to viewing traditional married life and family integrity as problematic, and therefore more individuated, changeable forms of human relationships as good. And because this is fundamentally about eradicating old moral values and enforcing new ones, it constantly verges on being coercive, expressing a hostility towards its opponents that tends to treat them, not simply as wrong or pesky, but as actual blocks, as ‘ideological enemies’, to the elite’s attempted enforcement of a new moral outlook.

One of the most striking developments in Western societies in recent years has been the sacralisation of homosexuality, the transformation of sexuality from a simple matter of who you have sex with into a set of values and behaviours. In a very short period of time, historically speaking, homosexuality has gone from being a crime to being possibly the most celebrated way of life in modern Western nations. Indeed, such has been the sacralisation of homosexuality, everywhere from popular culture to the political sphere, that the criminals are now those who criticise gay sex, not those who have it - as witnessed in such acts of authoritarianism as the imposing of a one-month prison sentence on a Swedish pastor who preached against homosexuality, the arrest of a preacher in Dundee for saying homosexuality was a sin, the banning of an advert in London that offended gays, the sending of American experts to Africa to preach about the virtues of homosexuality (in a similar way that Christian colonialists used to preach to Africans about the virtues of the Bible, including, er, anti-homosexual views), and so on. Gay-friendliness has become probably the key barometer of decency in the modern West; and those who fail the test can expect censorship or some other form of punishment.

There are various reasons for this move from decriminalising homosexuality, which was a very good thing, to the sanctification of homosexuality, which is just weird. But the main one is that over the past two decades, the gay issue has evolved as the perfect way for the new elites to distance themselves from values that have fallen out of their favour. We have seen the weaponisation of homosexuality, the transformation of it by sections of the political and media classes into the focal point for the expression of hostility to the straight world – which means not just people who are sexually straight, but also so-called straight culture and straight values, straightlacedness itself, ways of life that are based on commitment, privacy, familial sovereignty, things that tend to be viewed by the modern cultural clerisy as outdated or, worse, dangerous and destructive. The sacralisation of homosexuality corresponds precisely with the growing denigration by the state and others of the sphere of the family and the ideals of lifelong commitment, because celebrating gayness has become the main and most PC means through which traditional values might be dented and traditional identities called into question, even thrown open to heightened official scrutiny.

This is what explains both the peculiarly speedy and strikingly authoritarian way in which gay marriage has been adopted by governments across the West who otherwise care little for freedom and choice - because officials recognise in it the opportunity to push further their instinctive hostility towards traditional communal and familial ideals that to a large extent exist outside of the purview of the state. Understanding the impulse behind Western officialdom’s feverish adoption of gay marriage is key to understanding what makes this new institution so illiberal and intolerant. Its great driving force is not any commitment to civil rights but rather an urge to coerce, a desire to reshape the views and ideals and habits of the public, to enforce a new morality that elevates individuation over family life, risk-awareness over commitment, and an openness to being guided through life by experts over loyalty to one’s family unit or community.

So when you criticise gay marriage, you’re not just criticising gay marriage, you’re challenging a new moral framework carved out by those who apparently know better than us what our private lives and relationships should and shouldn’t look like. You’re not just an opponent of gay marriage - you’re a moral heretic whose very thoughts and behaviour are seen as deviant, as running counter to a new, apparently better kind of morality. And that, as Eich’s treatment and everything else that preceded it has shown us, simply will not be tolerated.

Brendan O’Neill is editor of spiked, an on-line magazine in the UK. This article has been republished with permission
- See more at: http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/same_sex_marriage_coercion_dolled_up_as_civil_rights#sthash.SlsKPAHf.dpuf
Title: Bill Maher actually gets it right on privacy
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 12, 2014, 08:11:33 AM
begins at 02:18

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUhTqFGa4iA

Title: Monica Lewinski Wasn't a Victim - America Was...
Post by: objectivist1 on May 12, 2014, 09:14:21 AM
Monica Lewinsky Wasn’t a Victim —- America Was

Posted By Daniel Greenfield On May 12, 2014 @ frontpagemag.com

Monica Lewinsky wasn’t brought back from a cul-de-sac of the ‘90s celebrity scandal universe, where Kato Kaelin still sleeps on a couch, Amy Fisher stalks quiet Long Island streets and Tonya Harding skates around in circles, in order to hurt Bill and Hillary.

Vanity Fair brought Monica in to help them.

That’s why it’s Monica’s essay in Vanity Fair and not the essays of any of the women whom Bill Clinton sexually harassed and whom Hillary Clinton tried to silence.

Hillary’s political career was built on Monica Lewinsky and cancer. Rudy Giuliani’s cancer. Without Monica and cancer, instead of running for president she would be delivering a commencement address at Bennington College and the dean would be introducing her as Hillary Rodham.

Monica made Bill and Hillary into the victims of their own misbehavior. Vanity Fair is hoping that Democrats forget the political dysfunction, sellouts and blatant corruption of the Clinton years. Its editorial staff is hoping that they’ll get angry about Ken Starr and “privacy violations” all over again.

But Bill and Hillary aren’t victims. They’re two dysfunctional people with a knack for making their personal problems into the country’s problem. They’ve done it before and they’re doing it again. They deal with their personal problems, just as they dealt with Monica Lewinsky, through abuses of power.

Monica was disposable. If it hadn’t been her, it would have been someone else. Bill and Hillary treated her the way they treated any woman who became an obstacle to their political ambitions. That’s a step up from how the Kennedy clan treated inconvenient women by drowning them, drugging them or lobotomizing them.

Feminists are debating whether Hillary was right to call Monica a “narcissistic loony toon” instead of discussing the private War on Women she waged against any woman complaining about her husband’s behavior. It’s a cheap distraction from what really matters. The outrage over the War on Women, ‘90s edition, featuring stops at the Tailhook Symposium and Anita Hill’s Department of Education digs, did not extend to abuses by powerful liberal men. There was one set of feminist rules for a drunken Navy lieutenant in Vegas and another for the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of the United States.

As long as he was a liberal.

Monica isn’t a victim either. Liberal feminists were hypocritical in their treatment of her, but they were far more hypocritical in their treatment of the women Bill Clinton sexually harassed. Talking about how unfair they were to Monica lets them off the hook for how unfair they were to women who did not want a sexual relationship with Bill Clinton and who demonstrated more authentic feminist creds by speaking out about it than the professional liberal feminists who smeared and demeaned them to protect Bill.

There was a power imbalance between Bill and Monica. And Bill Clinton is a compulsive manipulator, but Monica wasn’t a child. She chose to have an affair with another woman’s husband and was humiliated because that man was the President of the United States. The outcome was inevitable.

Hillary Clinton was right to call her a “narcissistic loony toon”, but Hillary, running for president on a platform of her own Monica-manufactured celebrity, is an even more narcissistic loony toon than Monica could ever aspire to be. And Bill Clinton, who chases cameras as avidly as he chases women, is the king of all narcissistic loony toons.

The real victim wasn’t any of these three repulsive characters. It was the United States of America.

The American people wanted good government and instead got a demented duo whose uncontrolled appetite for power, admiration and everything else, including White House furniture, knew no limit.

And they’re still the victims today.

There are two types of victims. There are those Americans who consented to have a political relationship with Bill and Hillary. Twice. And there are those who didn’t.

There are the Monica Lewinskys and the Juanita Broaddricks.

There are Americans who were raped by the Clinton Administration. And there are Americans who chose to be abused by it and would still be willing to be abused by it all over again.

Obama and Clinton voters have much in common with Monica Lewinsky. They caused their own problems and yet, like Monica, they whine about being unable to find work. They blame Republicans for humiliating them by revealing their disgusting relationship with a politician who is a serial liar.

And they act as if the whole thing is someone else’s fault.

They whine that if it hadn’t been for the Republicans no one would know just how disgusting their affair with the man who wrecked the country’s national defense, sold pardons like hotcakes and used his own adultery to position his wife’s presidential bid was.

They complain that if Republicans would just shut up about Benghazi, the national debt, the return of Al Qaeda, the imperial presidency and the constant lies leaking out of the White House, no one would judge them for that faded Obama-Biden sticker on the back bumper of their taxpayer subsidized Prius.

They’re not the victims. Victims don’t choose to be victims.

It’s the women who didn’t accede to Bill Clinton’s sexual demands and were smeared by Hillary Clinton for daring to complain about it… who are the victims. It’s the Americans who didn’t play Monica Lewinsky at the ballot box, surrendering to Bill Clinton’s charms while ignoring a funny little man in a cave who was threatening to attack America after bombing its embassies, who are the victims.

Monica Lewinsky is the Clinton and Obama voter, narcissistic to a fault and incapable of acknowledging fault, feeling victimized but unable to point to the real perpetrator, blaming Republicans for exposing her sordid behavior and that of the man who was taking advantage of her, and then complaining that she can’t find work.

Who needs a special essay from Monica Lewinsky when any Obama voter will tell you the same story?

The real victims of Bill, Barack and Hillary are the hardworking Americans who do the best they can for their families and their country, who don’t make excuses for their misbehavior or the misbehavior of their politicians, who work hard at their jobs and work harder to raise their children.

They are the victims of bad governments and bad politicians they didn’t vote for. They are harassed and assaulted by a corrupt political machine, a power-mad bureaucracy and a degenerate Washington establishment. They did not consent to be abused by Bill, Barack, Hillary, the EPA, the DOJ, the BLM, the FEC, the IRS and every other alphabet soup agency out of D.C.

And they are smeared and demonized when they complain about it.

They are the real victims of the abusers, exploiters and manipulators in Washington D.C. whose lust for power knows no limits. And they are also the victims of the Monica Lewinsky voters who whine and make faces, but refuse to end their political affair with the abusers of their country.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 12, 2014, 09:51:17 AM
Please post on Clinton thread too.
Title: ALexander: What is the real "Climate Change" Agenda?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 14, 2014, 01:48:23 PM
What's the Real 'Climate Change' Agenda?
A Perfect Storm for an End Run on Liberty
By Mark Alexander • May 14, 2014    
"Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect every one who approaches that jewel." --Patrick Henry (1778)
 

We're nearing the hot season in the Northern Hemisphere and, predictably, that means the Left's alarmist "global warming" rhetoric is heating up. Never mind that most weather forecasts beyond 72 hours are largely speculative; these purveyors of hot gas believe we should accept their inviolable 100-year forecast.

Ahead of this year's midterm elections, amid the plethora of its domestic and foreign policy failures, the Democrat Party has chosen to make their "climate change" fear and fright campaign an electoral centerpiece. Their strategy is to rally the most liberal cadres of Al Gore's cult of Gorons, whose religious zeal toward "global warming" is fanatical. Unfortunately, for the rest of America, most who occupy this Leftist constituency are no longer capable of distinguishing fact from fiction.

Though the climate alarmists of the 1970s were driven by rhetoric over the coming ice age, the current climate calamity is one of global warming. But the question about climate isn't if the weather is varying but why it is varying.

And the answer to that question is far less complicated than the "climate change" agenda, which is not about the weather, but about a political strategy to subjugate free enterprise under statist regulation -- de facto socialism, under the aegis of "saving us from ourselves."

The climate is always changing relative to complex short- and long-term climate cycles, so "climate change" is a superbly safe political "cause célèbre" -- sort of like "heads we win, tails you lose." So, declarations like Barack Obama's 2014 State of the Union warning -- "The debate is settled. Climate change is a fact" -- fall into the "keen sense of the obvious" category.

In April, the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change released a synopsis of thousands of climate studies, which contradict the conventional "global warming assumptions." According to the Cato Institute's Roger Pilon, "We are now at 17 years and eight months of no global warming."

Not to be outdone by the NIPCC, however, the Obama administration released its own 800-page apocalyptic National Climate Assessment last week, with such erudite conclusions as, "[W]e know with increasing certainty that climate change is happening now."

I "know" with more than "increasing certainty" that every time I walk outside, I can detect climate change, and this ever-changing condition is better known as "weather."
Despite the hot hype, Jason Furman, chairman of Obama's Council of Economic Advisers, the week before Obama trotted out his climate assessment, had this to say about sluggish first quarter economic growth: "The first quarter of 2014 was marked by unusually severe winter weather."

Global cooling? That's right, economic stagnation is not the result of failed "economic recovery" policies but "unusually severe winter weather."

 

Obama's minister of propaganda, Jay Carney, followed with this explanation: "We had historically severe winter weather which temporarily lowered growth in the first quarter ... in other words, a reduction of 1 to 1.5% in GDP as a result of what was historically severe weather, one of the coldest winters on record, the greatest number of snowstorms on record."

After the White House climate assessment was released, Carney was challenged about the disparity between "historically severe winter weather" and global warming, and responded, "The impacts of climate change on weather are severe in both directions."

Well there you go -- climate change is the default explanation for hot and cold weather.

It was no small irony that last week, Obama chose to promote his administration's "green agenda" with Walmart as a backdrop -- ironic given that most of Walmart's products are produced in China and other third-world nations, the biggest land, water and atmospheric polluters on the planet.

To that end, columnist Charles Krauthammer notes, "We have reduced our carbon dioxide emission since 1996 more than any other country in the world, and, yet, world emissions have risen. Why? We don't control the other 96% of humanity. We can pass all the laws we want. We can stop all economic activity and take cold showers for the next 100 years, it will not change anything if India and China are opening a new coal plant every week."

I would suggest to Charles that it's called "global climate" because it is not "local climate," even if China and India reduced their CO2 emissions it would not stop "climate change."

Further, the administration's report claims that "climate disruption" has resulted in a global temperature rise of 1.3 to 1.9 degrees since 1895 -- and it is no coincidence that the report cherry-picked that starting date because 1890 is recognized as the end of the 300-year "Little Ice Age" global cooling period.

For the record, estimates of the minuscule temperature fluctuation over the last century, if correct, would explain why White House science adviser John Holdren has abandoned the term "global warming," opting instead for the more ambiguous and all-encompassing phrase "global climate disruption."

Fact is, we "disrupt" the global climate every time we exhale.

Such linguistic obfuscations would make the old Soviet Dezinformatsia Bureau proud! Of course, the Obama administration has mastered the art of the "BIG Lie" from the top down. (Think about it: Would you buy a used car from any of them?)

However, even the Left's cherished United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded that there "is limited evidence of changes in [weather] extremes associated with other climate variables since the mid-20th century."

And, regarding the objectivity of all those erudite "climate change" scientists, columnist George Will observed, "There is a sociology of science. Scientists are not saints in white laboratory smocks. They have got interests like everybody else. If you want a tenure-track position in academia, don't question the reigning orthodoxy on climate change. If you want money from the biggest source of direct research in this country, the federal government, don't question its orthodoxy. If you want to get along with your peers, conform to peer pressure. This is what's happening."

Krauthammer added, "All physicists were once convinced that space and time were fixed until Einstein, working in a patent office, wrote a paper in which he showed that they are not. I'm not impressed by numbers. I'm not impressed by consensus."
 

As for those of us who can distinguish between fact, fiction and political endgames, and are most decidedly not among Obama's legions of pantywaist bed-wetters, he unilaterally suspends the revered scientific method and accuses us of "wasting everybody's time on a settled debate -- climate change is a fact. ... Climate change is not some far-off problem in the future. It's happening now. It's causing hardship now."

This week, you can expect to hear the Leftmedia trumpet some Antarctic ice melt, but you haven't heard much about the record ice pack in the Arctic, which is threatening Al Gore's once-marooned polar bear population, because the ice is too thick for the bears to reach their primary food source, seals.

Let me repeat myself: The climate hype is not about the weather, but about a political strategy to subjugate free enterprise under statist regulation -- de facto socialism, under the aegis of "saving us from ourselves."

Indeed, Obama's economic policies and regulations have already moved our nation rapidly toward the brink of statist totalitarianism.

And there was more evidence this week of Obama's reckless strategy to subjugate our economy and by extension, our national security, to his "climate change" agenda.
Adding to his "War on Coal," Obama has ratcheted up his War on Energy Independence, not only refusing to complete the Keystone XL pipeline but now going after alternative oil exploration methods by implementing new fracking disclosure rules. On top of that, he is undermining alternate transportation options for oil in the absence of Keystone XL with new regulations for trains transporting oil, and specifications for rail cars. Oh, did I mention Obama's regulatory obstacles to constructing new refineries despite the fact that our current refinement capacity is approaching its limit?

How does this all add up?

According to columnist Terence Jeffrey, "Ultimately, it will not matter if people in government cynically promote the theory that human activity is destroying the global climate as a means of taking control of your life, or if they take control of your life because they sincerely believe human activity is destroying the global climate. Either way, government will control of your life. ... In a nation where government can de-develop the economy, stop population growth and redistribute wealth both inside and outside its borders, there will still be droughts, floods and hot summer nights. But there will be no freedom." 
In his 1735 edition of Poor Richard's Almanack, Benjamin Franklin observed, "Some are weatherwise, some are otherwise." While the Left promotes its agenda as "weatherwise" and its detractors as "deniers," fact is, they are otherwise.

Oh, wait, my bad. "The debate is settled."

Title: UTA Commencement 2014, 10 Life Lessons From Seal Training
Post by: DougMacG on May 22, 2014, 08:49:09 AM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxBQLFLei70
http://www.utexas.edu/news/2014/05/16/admiral-mcraven-commencement-speech/

A worthwhile watch or read.
Title: The Point of an Honest Discussion of Race...
Post by: objectivist1 on May 23, 2014, 06:07:51 AM
‘The Point’ of an Honest Discussion of Race

Posted By Jack Kerwick On May 23, 2014 @ frontpagemag.com

In reply to a recent article in which I disclosed some neglected facts concerning race and slavery, a reader inquired as to the point in unveiling them.  Before answering, let’s review some of the tidbits that I shared in the interest of that “honest discussion” of race that the Eric Holders of the world continually charge the rest of us with deferring:

(1) For centuries, millions of white European Christians were enslaved by Asian and African Muslims;

(2) The first slaves in Colonial America were white;

(3) Blacks were in America prior to slavery;

(4) A significant portion of African blacks who eventually became slaves in America were already Christian;

(5) These black slaves had been converted by the African blacks who sold them into bondage;

(6) During the antebellum period, there existed several thousand slave owners who were black;

(7) The first slave master in America was a black man, Anthony Johnson, an Angolan who had originally been sold into slavery by his fellow Africans to Arabs and who owned black and white servants.

There is still other historical “trivia” that defy the conventional narrative on race and slavery.

The civilized world, justly, expresses outrage over the abduction and enslavement of hundreds of young Nigerian schoolgirls at the hands of the African Islamic terrorist organization, Boko Haram.  But the stone-cold truth of the matter is that this sort of thing has been transpiring in Africa from time immemorial.  For millennia upon millennia, black Africans have seized upon and enslaved other black Africans.  And, as notes famed Islamic scholar, Bernard Lewis, among others, from the dawn of Islam, Muslims have abducted and enslaved non-Muslims—both black and white.

It is estimated that well over 100 million black Africans died over the span of 14 centuries as they were marched across the scalding hot sands of the Sahara Desert by those Arab raiders and traders intent upon reducing them to a life of bondage in foreign lands.

In spite of the tremendous number of blacks transported to the Middle East, the latter consists of relatively few blacks today. Why?  For one, African boys were frequently forced to undergo castration, a practice so barbaric that but a tiny percentage survived it.  Those who did, however, fetched a purchasing price several times that of their peers who were not made into eunuchs.

Another consideration accounting for the miniscule black population in the contemporary Middle East is that African girls were sold as concubines and into sex slavery to Arab masters.  This reflected the Islamic belief—most recently articulated by the leader of Boko Haram but first stated in the Koran and practiced by Muhammad—that girls can and should become wives once they are nine years of age.  Upon begetting their masters’ offspring, many eventually became assimilated into their families.

But, thirdly, the tragic fact is that many slaves were simply worked to death.

What follows are some other fascinating truths that are a “must” for any truly honest discussion of race and slavery:

While whites were by no means unique in practicing slavery, they were indeed unique insofar as they were the first people in all of history to have developed a moral revulsion against this age-old institution.  No one liked being abducted and enslaved by others.  But many of these same unfortunates wouldn’t have hesitated to do the same to others if the opportunity had arisen.  Whites, more specifically, English white Christians, personified and led by the conservative William Wilberforce, succeeded in prevailing upon the British Empire—the most economically and militarily powerful presence on the planet at that time—to abolish slavery, not just in England or even within the Empire, but in every area of the globe over which Britain could hope to exercise any of its influence.

More scandalously, the British met with much resistance from Arabs, Asians, and Africans.  Bernard Lewis relays an exchange between a British Consul General in Morocco and the Sultan of that land that typifies precisely the challenges to its campaign against slavery that the English had to surmount.  When the Sultan was asked what he had done to relegate to the dustbin of history the trade in human flesh, he “replied, in a letter expressing evident astonishment, that ‘the traffic in slaves is a matter on which all sects and nations have agreed from the time of the sons of Adam…up to this day.’”  The Sultan added that he was oblivious to slavery’s “manifest to both high and low and requires no more demonstration than the light of day.”

Incidentally, England’s success was a long time coming, for in some parts of the non-European world, places like India and Saudi Arabia, slavery didn’t become illegal until the 1940s and 1960s, respectively.

My reader who inquired as to the “point” in raising these facts at no time denies any of them.  Thus, he confirms what some of us have long suspected: in their tireless promotion of the conventional orthodoxy on race and slavery in America, neither he nor his ilk has ever been in the least bit interested in history for its own sake.  Rather, there has always been a “point” to their campaign, the advancement of a political agenda involving fictions concerning perpetual black suffering, white oppression, and white guilt.

The facts to which I allude here frustrate that agenda.

And this, by the way, is “the point” of mentioning them.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 23, 2014, 07:26:35 AM
Please post on the Race thread on the SCH forum as well.
Title: playing cash games with the liitle people
Post by: ccp on June 01, 2014, 07:27:01 AM
There is something about this that is reminiscent of Nero throwing coins off the balcony to the 'little' people:

http://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2014/05/31/hidden-cash-man-buries-cash-in-angry-bird-eggs-at-la-beaches/
Title: Presdient: Obama has done the most damage
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 14, 2014, 10:06:20 PM
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/362419/president-who-has-done-most-damage-dennis-prager
Title: Bush Derangement Syndrome
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 18, 2014, 06:00:51 PM


http://patriotpost.us/alexander/26746
Title: Stratfor: The Power of Crowds
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 19, 2014, 09:09:17 AM
 The Power of Crowds
Global Affairs
Wednesday, June 11, 2014 - 03:00 Print Text Size
Global Affairs with Robert D. Kaplan
Stratfor

By Robert D. Kaplan

When the history of the current Ukraine crisis is written, scholars will note that it began with demonstrations. The demonstrators were in significant measure young urbanites from the capital of Kiev, in search of a more Western orientation for their country. The European Union might be battered with a half-decadelong financial crisis. But the demonstrators, nevertheless, in large part saw the European Union in symbolic terms as a moral savior, promising a future of states governed by impersonal laws that treat everyone equally -- unlike the future promised by Russia's authoritarian leader, Vladimir Putin, and his local cohorts: that of nations, saddled with historical grudges, that seek glory for ethnic groups rather than rights for individuals. Cynics believed the demonstrations would peter out in the freezing cold Ukrainian winter, with insufficient public support. They were wrong. The demonstrators kept returning to Independence Square, also known as Maidan, toppling the pro-Moscow regime and changing European geopolitics.

Demonstrators obviously don't always get what they desire. The '60s youth rebellion in the United States split the Democratic Party of the era and alienated many middle-of-the-road American voters -- sometimes referred to as the silent majority -- and thereby helped enable the presidential election of the conservative Republican Richard Nixon. Many of the Iranian students who demonstrated in massive numbers against the repression of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in 1978 thought that they were enabling the future of a more democratic and accountable government. Instead, they got the suffocating autocracy, laced with terrorism, of the Shiite ayatollahs. The young Egyptian idealists, influenced by the values of cosmopolitan global culture, thought that their demonstrations in Cairo's Tahrir Square in early 2011 would break the back of military tyranny. Instead, their protests led to an immoderate Islamic regime that, in turn, was toppled by another military tyranny.

There are two major lessons here. Demonstrators, as numerous as they appear on the television screen -- and in the eyes of the media in general -- represent only a minute portion of the society, which may be with them or against them. And even if the society is with them, it does not mean that the same society has the social, economic and institutional traction for organizing itself into a version of the new political order for which the demonstrators yearn. Demonstrators often represent an educational elite, and an elite, well, by its very nature is not representative of the population at large, which, in the cases of Iran and Egypt, is composed of vast peasantries and proletariats prone to deep religiosity. The other lesson follows from the first: Just because demonstrators may be capable of undermining an existing order -- whether the administration of Lyndon Johnson or the rule of the Shah or of Hosni Mubarak or of Viktor Yanukovich -- does not mean that they have the capability of directing, or much less influencing, the emergence of a replacement order. For example, in recent times we have seen how social media can help depose regimes in the Arab world but is unable to foster the bureaucratic and institutional wherewithal to build better alternative ones.

The autocracies of Tunisia, Libya, Yemen and Syria were all initially overthrown or at least weakened in 2011 by liberal-trending demonstrators. But with the exception of Tunisia, the result was either anarchy or partial anarchy, not a more liberal order. The fact that demonstrators are change agents does not mean that they know how to direct change. To wit, Ukraine may eventually turn out very different from what the original demonstrations in Kiev suggested.

Of course, massive demonstrations across Central and Eastern Europe in 1989 led to the end of communist tyranny and its replacement by mostly liberal democracies of varying degrees of stability and competence. The difference between Europe and the Arab world is that Europe, as socially pulverized as it was by decades of communism, nevertheless had the semblance of institutions and the historical memory of a middle class, as well as high literacy rates, that enabled it to survive the political rigors of freedom -- something that the Arab world, with the possible exception of Tunisia, lacked. And Tunisia, remember, is the most European of Arab countries -- geographically close to Europe, with a long history as a state and no significant ethnic or sectarian divides. In other words, demonstrators may all look similar on the television screen and shout similar things, but the societies in which they are enmeshed are all somewhat different. And it is that difference that determines what happens after the demonstrators remove an existing order.

Recently, some of the most sustained demonstrations we have seen have been in Brazil and Thailand. Both upheavals fall under the broad theme elucidated by the late Harvard Professor Samuel Huntington in his 1968 book, Political Order in Changing Societies, in which he posits that the more developed and complex a society turns out to be, rather than become more satisfied, the emerging middle class of that society becomes less satisfied and therefore demands more efficiency and accountability from the government. The more complex a society becomes, in other words, the more it requires more nimble and responsive institutions. This means that social and political upheaval is a constant. Brazilians are dissatisfied that the country's newfound wealth is not being more equally distributed, even as their government is not becoming more efficient. Thailand's political divisions are based in part on the wealth disparity between the capital of Bangkok and the far poorer, rural countryside. These are the problems of relative success, but they can nonetheless lead to fierce and prolonged disturbances. And in the case of Thailand, they can lead even to a military coup.

All these demonstrators, from Ukraine to Tunisia to Thailand, have had an ally: postmodern communications technology. Not only does social media facilitate crowd organization, but so does satellite television, which requires only enough bodies to fill a screen in order to provide a crowd with global significance. And with global significance -- the knowledge that you are not alone against a hated regime but have virtual supporters worldwide -- comes a lift in morale that, in turn, brings along with it courage and the sense of empowerment for those in the street.

The crowd can thus be small in size but vast in meaning. Among the many themes in the late Nobel Laureate Elias Canetti's 1960 book, Crowds and Power, is his concept that crowds provide an escape from loneliness. Inside a crowd you are protected, for your passions are those of the person next to you, and the next, all flowing together. If a hated regime represents one type of crowd formation, the demonstrators in the square represent another. And from that comes their strength.

The virtual crowd is now everywhere, whether as a horde of Facebook followers tracking an entertainment star or as a throng of people in sync on Twitter supporting or opposing some person or idea. Postmodern civilization encourages loneliness and anxiety, for which joining a crowd constitutes an escape.

Thus, we should expect crowd formations to be a permanent feature of global politics. And the nightmare of leaders, particularly authoritarian ones, is that of being overthrown by a crowd as in Ukraine. Chinese leaders live with this fear, especially as their country's rate of economic growth is expected to continue its decline. The clerical regime in Iran fears ending up like the Shah's -- toppled by a crowd. That is why the ayatollahs are so keen to see a relaxation of economic sanctions against their country.

Perhaps the most famous crowd formations in early modern and modern history were those of the 1848 revolutions in Europe, when crowds of bourgeois intellectuals and working class radicals rose from France to the Balkans demanding the end of authoritarian imperial orders. But with the exception of the Orleans monarchy in France, those regimes all ultimately survived because divisive ethnic interests undermined the universalist longings of the demonstrators. It was all a close-run affair, though, that took many months to play out. Had the 1848 rebellions succeeded, the history of Europe thereafter would have been dramatically different, with different power arrangements that could very well have precluded the world wars of the 20th century.

Always keep 1848 in mind. For with technology now providing a tipping point in a world of vast urban concentrations, and with more and more human beings living in dense, claustrophobic settings, crowds will be at the very center of history in the 21st century -- and, therefore, at the center of geopolitics.

Read more: The Power of Crowds | Stratfor
Title: Liberalism poison is everywhere.
Post by: ccp on June 23, 2014, 07:18:05 PM
So I am reading this article supposedly about Robert E Lee when the  author suddenly makes a left turn comparing the "fire-eaters" who were "incendiary" Southern politicians who wanted to bring back the African slave trade to expand slavery and cotton to, get this the Tea party politicians of today:

"The fire-eaters were a minority then, as the Tea Partiers (their spiritual descendants) are today, but like today’s Tea Party they promoted extremist agendas and pounded down on wedge issues that sundered the nation and very nearly destroyed it."

What in the heck does the Tea Party have to do with advocates of slavery?  Answer:  they are the Union soldiers fighting for freedom.

****How I Learned to Hate Robert E. Lee

By Christopher Dickey June 21, 2014 10:18 PM The Daily Beast
 
All the time I was growing up in Atlanta, the face of Robert E. Lee was taking shape on the side of an enormous granite mountain just outside town. He loomed like a god above us, as much a presence as any deity, and God knows he was accepted as such. It was only much later that I began to question his sanctity, and then to hate what he stood for.

When I was in elementary school, the face of Lee on Stone Mountain was a rough-cut thing, weathering and wasting as the generation that began it in 1912—a generation that still included veterans of the Civil War 50 years before—gave way to generations with other wars to focus their attention.

Then the carving began again in 1964 in a centennial haze of romantic memories about the Old South and frenzy of fear and defiance provoked by the civil-rights movement. As Martin Luther King Jr. was marching on Washington, Confederate battle flags floated above state houses and sculptors using torches began again to carve the granite features of Lee, along with Stonewall Jackson and Jefferson Davis, taking up three vertical acres on the mountain’s face.

It is this sort of image—the bas-relief nobility of memorial sculpture—that Michael Korda chisels through in his massive and highly readable new one-volume biography: Clouds of Glory: The Life and Legend of Robert E. Lee. But, as Korda clearly recognizes, Lee himself could be almost as impenetrable as stone.

He was not cold. He was very loving with his wife and many children. He enjoyed flirting (harmlessly, it seems) with young women. He had the self-assurance of a Virginia aristocrat, albeit an impecunious one, and the bearing of a man born not only to be a soldier, but to command. He was tall for his time—at least 5’10”—and as a young man he was strikingly handsome, broad-shouldered, and Byronic.

But perhaps Lee’s most memorable feature, even in the worst of times, was his phenomenal self-control, whether in the face of triumphs or disasters. His belief in God’s will lent “a certain opaque quality” to Lee’s character, as Korda writes. Perhaps the general did not cultivate his fame as “The Marble Man,” but he earned it.

Lee was so much the model of a Virginia gentleman that he came to seem a hero not only of the Lost Cause in the South, but of a restored peace for the Union in the aftermath of the war. He believed in reason, good manners, and moderation in all things except battle, when his skill in defense and audacity in offense managed to keep the Confederacy’s hopes for independence alive years longer than would have—or should have—been the case.

And that is part of the problem. While the dream of the Confederacy was kept alive, the men on the battlefield on both sides perished by the tens of thousands. In his desperate effort to triumph at Gettysburg in 1863, deep in northern territory, he waged a battle that cost more than 50,000 soldiers their lives over the course of three days—more than died in combat in the entire Vietnam War.

Lee put the blame for Gettysburg on himself, which was a rare and noble thing to do, then retreated, and kept on fighting. Almost a year later at Spotsylvania Court House, where 32,000 soldiers died, a Union officer described a scene in which the Confederate dead “were piled upon each other in some places four layers deep, exhibiting every ghastly phase of mutilation. Below the mass of fast-decaying corpses, the convulsive twitching of limbs and the writhing of bodies showed that there were wounded men still alive and struggling to extricate themselves from the horrid entombment.”

It may be unfair to criticize a general for wanting to fight on against all odds. That is what we assume generals will try to do, and Lee often put himself in as much personal danger and daily discomfort as his faithful soldiers. But it’s a plain fact that by prolonging a conflict he could not win, Lee’s brilliance and the loyalty he inspired helped destroy what was left of the South.

Korda writes that by late 1864 the Union commander Ulysses S. Grant (the subject of another Korda biography) and Lee had “created dreadful, static sieges that would postpone the end of the war by 10 painful months,” during which time Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman “would march through Georgia, taking Atlanta, marching from there ‘to the sea,’ and destroying everything along his way: towns, railway lines, telegraph lines, homes, farms, crops, and livestock.”

What cannot and should not be forgiven about Lee, despite his many virtues, is the cause that he defended.

Korda argues convincingly that Lee was ambivalent about slavery. His wife’s family owned more than 100 Negroes, but when her father died, Lee took pains to see that the old man’s will emancipating them after five years was executed. (That this finally took effect in 1862 does not diminish the fact that he had set the wheels in motion to free these servants and laborers years before.) Lee and his wife set up a school for the slaves, which was actually illegal in Virginia at the time. And he proposed, toward the end of the war, when the white South was bled dry, that slaves should be enlisted as soldiers and granted their freedom in the process. But that bold suggestion went nowhere with the politicians, who stalled until the idea, along with the Confederacy, was dead.

Korda is especially good at explaining why Lee, who had performed heroically in the Mexican War and served as the superintendent of West Point, turned down the command of the Union armies offered to him by the Lincoln administration in the first days of the conflict. He saw himself as a Virginian, deeply rooted in the state’s genteel culture. And while he did not support secession and thought it dangerous and revolutionary (thus anathema to his aristocratic values), he could not bring himself to lead an army that would force Virginia or any other state to remain in the Union. Once Virginia reluctantly seceded, so, also reluctantly, did Lee.

But after that decision was made, Lee’s nobility and charisma, and the carnage that he commanded, gave cover to all those incendiary Southern politicians who did not, in fact, feel ambivalent about slavery. These “fire-eaters,” as they were called, not only wanted to perpetuate their peculiar institution, they wanted to reopen the slave trade with Africa, which was recognized even at the time as a terrible holocaust banned for half a century, but rationalized by them because African slaves were just so cheap and profitable and could be so useful to those Southerners who wanted to spread their voracious cotton economy to the west and south.

The fire-eaters were a minority then, as the Tea Partiers (their spiritual descendants) are today, but like today’s Tea Party they promoted extremist agendas and pounded down on wedge issues that sundered the nation and very nearly destroyed it.

Lee had no time for these men, and he opposed their ideas, but he fought for them year after year, battle after battle, slaughter after slaughter. Maybe that makes him in his way a fascinating and tragic leader, but readers of Korda’s balanced and detailed book will have to decide for themselves if he was a heroic one. For my part, I think not.
Title: Re: Liberalism poison is everywhere.
Post by: DougMacG on June 24, 2014, 05:55:36 AM
So I am reading this article supposedly about Robert E Lee when the  author suddenly makes a left turn comparing the "fire-eaters" who were "incendiary" Southern politicians who wanted to bring back the African slave trade to expand slavery and cotton to, get this the Tea party politicians of today:

"The fire-eaters were a minority then, as the Tea Partiers (their spiritual descendants) are today, but like today’s Tea Party they promoted extremist agendas and pounded down on wedge issues that sundered the nation and very nearly destroyed it."

What in the heck does the Tea Party have to do with advocates of slavery?  Answer:  they are the Union soldiers fighting for freedom.
...


Nice catch.  Quite obnoxious and obsessive that they can't put their hatred aside long enough to tell an unrelated story.
Title: Bill Whittle
Post by: MikeT on July 17, 2014, 11:34:36 AM
Asked to post this here...  Political satire from Bill Whittle is always entertaining and generally 'spot-on':

https://www.billwhittle.com/


Also, if you can still find them on Youtube, the Whiteboard voice-overs he did (I think for PJ Media) are great, i.e. the one on the Palestinian conflict.  I wish he would do more of these.  It's quite evidently his voice.  These were actually how I 'discovered' him.  I recall there being at least a half dozen ofthem on various subjects but I'm not in posession of a single repository site.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZY8m0cm1oY
Title: WW1
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 26, 2014, 12:53:00 PM


The War That Broke a Century
A king, a kaiser, a czar—all were undone as they realized what they had unleashed with World War I.
By Peggy Noonan
WSJ
Updated July 25, 2014 6:52 p.m. ET

Next week marks the 100th anniversary of the start of World War I. It was the great disaster of the 20th century, the one that summoned or forced the disasters that would follow, from Lenin and Hitler to World War II and the Cold War. It is still, a century later, almost impossible to believe that one event, even a war, could cause such destruction, such an ending of worlds.

History still isn't sure and can never be certain of the exact number of casualties. Christopher Clark, in "The Sleepwalkers" (2013), puts it at 20 million military and civilian deaths and 21 million wounded. The war unleashed Bolshevism, which brought communism, which in time would kill tens of millions more throughout the world. (In 1997, "The Black Book of Communism," written by European academics, put the total number at a staggering 94 million.)

Thrones were toppled, empires undone. Western Europe lost a generation of its most educated and patriotic, its future leaders from all classes—aristocrats and tradesmen, teachers, carpenters and poets. No nation can lose a generation of such men without effect. Their loss left Europe, among other things, dumber.

Reading World War I histories, I have been startled to realize the extent to which the leaders or putative leaders of the belligerent nations personally suffered. A number of them fell apart, staggering under the pressure, as if at some point in the day-to-day they realized the true size and implications of the endeavor in which they were immersed. They seemed to come to understand, after the early hurrahs, that they were involved in the central catastrophe of the 20th century, and it was too big, too consequential, too history-making to be borne. Some would spend the years after the war insisting, sometimes at odd moments, that it wasn't their fault.
Enlarge Image

Illustration of King George V visiting a soldier's grave on the Western Front during World War 1. Getty Images

As Miranda Carter shows in " George, Nicholas and Wilhelm " (2010), the king of England, the czar of Russia and the kaiser of Germany were all in different ways wrecked by the war.

Kaiser Wilhelm, whose bombast, peculiarities of personality and lack of wisdom did so much to bring the conflict, folded almost from the start. Two years in, he was described by those around him as a "broken man"—depressed, lethargic, ill. An aide wrote of him as "violent and unpredictable."

Barbara Tuchman, in the classic "The Guns of August" (1962), notes how in the early days of the war Wilhelm's margin notes on telegrams became "more agitated." ("Rot!" "He lies!" "False dog!") In time, top brass shunted him aside and viewed him as irrelevant. The kaiser rarely referred to the sufferings of his people. Ms. Carter writes: "Wilhelm had always had difficulty in empathizing with others' difficulties." When his country collapsed, he fled to Holland, where in conversation he referred to his countrymen as "pigs" and insisted that the war was the fault of others. He died at age 81 in 1941, two years into World War II.

King George V did have empathy, and it almost killed him. Touring the Western Front, he suffered at the sights—once-rich fields now charred craters, villages blasted away, piles of dead bodies. He aged overnight, his beard turning almost white. Ms. Carter writes that he now surveyed the world with a "dogged, melancholic, unsmiling stare." A year into the war, a horse he was riding on a visit to the front got frightened, reared, and fell on him. The king never fully recovered from the injuries. Years later, he was haunted by what he called "that horrible and unnecessary war." In 1935, war clouds gathering once again, he met up with his wartime prime minister. The king, wrote Lloyd George, "broke out vehemently, 'And I will not have another war, I will not.' " He also said that the Great War had not been his fault. He died the following year.

Czar Nicholas II of Russia, of course, would lose everything—his throne and his life, as his family would lose theirs. But from the early days of the war he too was buckling. His former chief minister, Vladimir Kokovtsov, called Nicholas's faded eyes "lifeless." In the middle of conversations, the czar lost the thread, and a simple question would reduce him to "a perfectly incomprehensible state of helplessness."

Two years in, Kokovtsov thought Nicholas on the verge of nervous breakdown. So did the French ambassador, who wrote in the summer of 1916: "Despondency, apathy and resignation can be seen in his actions, appearance, attitudes and all the manifestations of the inner man." The czar wore a constant, vacant smile, but glanced about nervously. Friendly warnings that the war was not being won and revolution could follow were ignored. For him, in Ms. Carter's words, "Contradiction now constituted betrayal." At the end, those close to Nicholas wondered if he failed to move to save his throne because he preferred a crisis that might force his abdication—and the lifting of burdens he now crushingly understood he could not sustain.

Then there is Woodrow Wilson at his second Versailles peace conference, in the spring of 1919. Negotiations were draining, occasionally volatile. The victors postured, schemed and turned on each other for gain. They had literally argued about whether windows should be opened, and about what language should be the official one of the talks. (They settled on three.) President Wilson developed insomnia and a twitch on the left side of his face. He was constantly tired, occasionally paranoid. After a trying meeting with France's finance minister, Louis Klotz, Wilson joked with a friend of his weariness: "I have Klotz on the brain."

He may have. Weeks earlier, weak and feverish, he had physically collapsed. It was a flu, a cold, possibly encephalitis. He rallied and returned to work but sometimes appeared impatient, euphoric or energized to the point of manic.

On the afternoon of May 1 at the peace conference, Wilson suddenly announced in his office, to his wife and his doctor, Adm. Cary Grayson, "I don't like the way the colors of this furniture fight each other." As biographer A. Scott Berg notes in "Wilson," published last year, the president continued, saying: "The greens and the reds are all mixed up here and there is no harmony. Here is a big purpose, high-backed covered chair, which is like the Purple Cow, strayed off to itself, and it is placed where the light shines on it too brightly. If you will give me a lift, we will move this next to the wall where the light from the window will give it a subdued effect. And here are two chairs, one green and the other red. This will never do. Let's put the greens all together and the reds together."

Mr. Berg : "Wilson's bizarre comments did not end there. He described the Council of Four meetings, how each delegation walked like schoolchildren each day to its respective corners. Now, with the furniture regrouped, he said each country would sit according to color"—the reds in the American corner, the greens in the British.

Grayson didn't know what to think. Perhaps it was nervous exhaustion, perhaps a sign of something more serious. After returning to the U.S., Wilson launched a grueling campaign for America to join the League of Nations. That fall, in the White House, he would suffer the stroke or strokes that would leave him disabled the rest of his life.

So what are we saying? Nothing beyond what I suppose has long been a theme, which may be a nice word for preoccupation, in this space: History is human.

And sometimes it turns bigger than humans can bear.

(Correction: Czar Nicholas II was married to a granddaughter of Queen Victoria. He was not himself Victoria's grandchild, as an earlier version of this column stated.)
Title: A few minutes that might change some minds
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 26, 2014, 01:01:35 PM
second post

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hMUZ3wOXXc
Title: Love People, Not Pleasure
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 28, 2014, 06:45:58 PM
Sunday Review | CONTRIBUTING OP-ED WRITER
18 July 2014

Love People, Not Pleasure
Arthur C. Brooks

ABD AL-RAHMAN III was an emir and caliph of Córdoba in 10th-century Spain. He was an absolute ruler who lived in complete luxury. Here’s how he assessed his life:

“I have now reigned above 50 years in victory or peace; beloved by my subjects, dreaded by my enemies, and respected by my allies. Riches and honors, power and pleasure, have waited on my call, nor does any earthly blessing appear to have been wanting to my felicity.”

Fame, riches and pleasure beyond imagination. Sound great? He went on to write:

“I have diligently numbered the days of pure and genuine happiness which have fallen to my lot: They amount to 14.”

Abd al-Rahman’s problem wasn’t happiness, as he believed — it was unhappiness. If that sounds like a distinction without a difference, you probably have the same problem as the great emir. But with a little knowledge, you can avoid the misery that befell him.

What is unhappiness? Your intuition might be that it is simply the opposite of happiness, just as darkness is the absence of light. That is not correct. Happiness and unhappiness are certainly related, but they are not actually opposites. Images of the brain show that parts of the left cerebral cortex are more active than the right when we are experiencing happiness, while the right side becomes more active when we are unhappy.

As strange as it seems, being happier than average does not mean that one can’t also be unhappier than average. One test for both happiness and unhappiness is the Positive Affectivity and Negative Affectivity Schedule test. I took the test myself. I found that, for happiness, I am at the top for people my age, sex, occupation and education group. But I get a pretty high score for unhappiness as well. I am a cheerful melancholic.

So when people say, “I am an unhappy person,” they are really doing sums, whether they realize it or not. They are saying, “My unhappiness is x, my happiness is y, and x > y.” The real questions are why, and what you can do to make y > x.

If you ask an unhappy person why he is unhappy, he’ll almost always blame circumstance. In many cases, of course, this is justified. Some people are oppressed or poor or have physical ailments that make life a chore. Research unsurprisingly suggests that racism causes unhappiness in children, and many academic studies trace a clear link between unhappiness and poverty. Another common source of unhappiness is loneliness, from which about 20 percent of Americans suffer enough to make it a major source of unhappiness in their lives.

THERE are also smaller circumstantial sources of unhappiness. The Princeton psychologist Daniel Kahneman and his colleagues measured the “negative affect” (bad moods) that ordinary daily activities and interactions kick up. They found that the No. 1 unhappiness-provoking event in a typical day is spending time with one’s boss (which, as a boss, made me unhappy to learn).

Circumstances are certainly important. No doubt Abd al-Rahman could point to a few in his life. But paradoxically, a better explanation for his unhappiness may have been his own search for well-being. And the same might go for you.

Have you ever known an alcoholic? They generally drink to relieve craving or anxiety — in other words, to attenuate a source of unhappiness. Yet it is the drink that ultimately prolongs their suffering. The same principle was at work for Abd al-Rahman in his pursuit of fame, wealth and pleasure.

Consider fame. In 2009, researchers from the University of Rochester conducted a study tracking the success of 147 recent graduates in reaching their stated goals after graduation. Some had “intrinsic” goals, such as deep, enduring relationships. Others had “extrinsic” goals, such as achieving reputation or fame. The scholars found that intrinsic goals were associated with happier lives. But the people who pursued extrinsic goals experienced more negative emotions, such as shame and fear. They even suffered more physical maladies.

This is one of the cruelest ironies in life. I work in Washington, right in the middle of intensely public political battles. Bar none, the unhappiest people I have ever met are those most dedicated to their own self-aggrandizement — the pundits, the TV loudmouths, the media know-it-alls. They build themselves up and promote their images, but feel awful most of the time.

That’s the paradox of fame. Just like drugs and alcohol, once you become addicted, you can’t live without it. But you can’t live with it, either. Celebrities have described fame like being “an animal in a cage; a toy in a shop window; a Barbie doll; a public facade; a clay figure; or, that guy on TV,” according to research by the psychologist Donna Rockwell. Yet they can’t give it up.

That impulse to fame by everyday people has generated some astonishing innovations. One is the advent of reality television, in which ordinary people become actors in their day-to-day lives for others to watch. Why? “To be noticed, to be wanted, to be loved, to walk into a place and have others care about what you’re doing, even what you had for lunch that day: that’s what people want, in my opinion,” said one 26-year-old participant in an early hit reality show called “Big Brother.”

And then there’s social media. Today, each of us can build a personal little fan base, thanks to Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and the like. We can broadcast the details of our lives to friends and strangers in an astonishingly efficient way. That’s good for staying in touch with friends, but it also puts a minor form of fame-seeking within each person’s reach. And several studies show that it can make us unhappy.

It makes sense. What do you post to Facebook? Pictures of yourself yelling at your kids, or having a hard time at work? No, you post smiling photos of a hiking trip with friends. You build a fake life — or at least an incomplete one — and share it. Furthermore, you consume almost exclusively the fake lives of your social media “friends.” Unless you are extraordinarily self-aware, how could it not make you feel worse to spend part of your time pretending to be happier than you are, and the other part of your time seeing how much happier others seem to be than you?

Some look for relief from unhappiness in money and material things. This scenario is a little more complicated than fame. The evidence does suggest that money relieves suffering in cases of true material need. (This is a strong argument, in my view, for many safety-net policies for the indigent.) But when money becomes an end in itself, it can bring misery, too.

For decades, psychologists have been compiling a vast literature on the relationships between different aspirations and well-being. Whether they examine young adults or people of all ages, the bulk of the studies point toward the same important conclusion: People who rate materialistic goals like wealth as top personal priorities are significantly likelier to be more anxious, more depressed and more frequent drug users, and even to have more physical ailments than those who set their sights on more intrinsic values.

No one sums up the moral snares of materialism more famously than St. Paul in his First Letter to Timothy: “For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.” Or as the Dalai Lama pithily suggests, it is better to want what you have than to have what you want.

SO fame and money are out. How about pleasures of the flesh? Take the canonical hedonistic pleasure: lust. From Hollywood to college campuses, many assume that sex is always great, and sexual variety is even better.

This assumption actually has a name: the “Coolidge Effect,” named after the 30th president of the United States. The story (probably apocryphal) begins with Silent Cal and Mrs. Coolidge touring a poultry farm. The first lady noticed that there were very few roosters, and asked how so many eggs could be fertilized. The farmer told her that the virile roosters did their jobs over and over again each day. “Perhaps you could point that out to Mr. Coolidge,” she told him. The president, hearing the remark, asked whether the rooster serviced the same hen each time. No, the farmer told him — there were many hens for each rooster. “Perhaps you could point that out to Mrs. Coolidge,” said the president.

The president obviously figured these must be happy roosters. And notwithstanding the moral implications, the same principle should work for us. Right?

Wrong. In 2004, two economists looked into whether more sexual variety led to greater well-being. They looked at data from about 16,000 adult Americans who were asked confidentially how many sex partners they had had in the preceding year, and about their happiness. Across men and women alike, the data show that the optimal number of partners is one.

This might seem totally counterintuitive. After all, we are unambiguously driven to accumulate material goods, to seek fame, to look for pleasure. How can it be that these very things can give us unhappiness instead of happiness? There are two explanations, one biological and the other philosophical.

From an evolutionary perspective, it makes sense that we are wired to seek fame, wealth and sexual variety. These things make us more likely to pass on our DNA. Had your cave-man ancestors not acquired some version of these things (a fine reputation for being a great rock sharpener; multiple animal skins), they might not have found enough mating partners to create your lineage.

But here’s where the evolutionary cables have crossed: We assume that things we are attracted to will relieve our suffering and raise our happiness. My brain says, “Get famous.” It also says, “Unhappiness is lousy.” I conflate the two, getting, “Get famous and you’ll be less unhappy.”

But that is Mother Nature’s cruel hoax. She doesn’t really care either way whether you are unhappy — she just wants you to want to pass on your genetic material. If you conflate intergenerational survival with well-being, that’s your problem, not nature’s. And matters are hardly helped by nature’s useful idiots in society, who propagate a popular piece of life-ruining advice: “If it feels good, do it.” Unless you share the same existential goals as protozoa, this is often flat-out wrong.

More philosophically, the problem stems from dissatisfaction — the sense that nothing has full flavor, and we want more. We can’t quite pin down what it is that we seek. Without a great deal of reflection and spiritual hard work, the likely candidates seem to be material things, physical pleasures or favor among friends and strangers.

We look for these things to fill an inner emptiness. They may bring a brief satisfaction, but it never lasts, and it is never enough. And so we crave more. This paradox has a word in Sanskrit: upadana, which refers to the cycle of craving and grasping. As the Dhammapada (the Buddha’s path of wisdom) puts it: “The craving of one given to heedless living grows like a creeper. Like the monkey seeking fruits in the forest, he leaps from life to life... Whoever is overcome by this wretched and sticky craving, his sorrows grow like grass after the rains.”

This search for fame, the lust for material things and the objectification of others — that is, the cycle of grasping and craving — follows a formula that is elegant, simple and deadly:

Love things, use people.

This was Abd al-Rahman’s formula as he sleepwalked through life. It is the worldly snake oil peddled by the culture makers from Hollywood to Madison Avenue. But you know in your heart that it is morally disordered and a likely road to misery. You want to be free of the sticky cravings of unhappiness and find a formula for happiness instead. How? Simply invert the deadly formula and render it virtuous:

Love people, use things.

Easier said than done, I realize. It requires the courage to repudiate pride and the strength to love others — family, friends, colleagues, acquaintances, God and even strangers and enemies. Only deny love to things that actually are objects. The practice that achieves this is charity. Few things are as liberating as giving away to others that which we hold dear.

This also requires a condemnation of materialism. This is manifestly not an argument for any specific economic system. Anyone who has spent time in a socialist country must concede that materialism and selfishness are as bad under collectivism, or worse, as when markets are free. No political ideology is immune to materialism.

Finally, it requires a deep skepticism of our own basic desires. Of course you are driven to seek admiration, splendor and physical license. But giving in to these impulses will bring unhappiness. You have a responsibility to yourself to stay in the battle. The day you declare a truce is the day you become unhappier. Declaring war on these destructive impulses is not about asceticism or Puritanism. It is about being a prudent person who seeks to avoid unnecessary suffering.

Abd al-Rahman never got his happiness sums right. He never knew the right formula. Fortunately, we do.

A contributing opinion writer and the president of the American Enterprise Institute.
Title: Krauthammer: Kerry a moral disgrace
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 02, 2014, 04:01:50 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/charles-krauthammer-clueless-in-gaza/2014/07/31/d781a286-18e8-11e4-9e3b-7f2f110c6265_story.html
Title: Hypocrisy over Gaza
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 06, 2014, 12:26:08 AM


http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=1b9_1407258785#sthash.MjyqVuvD.gbpl
Title: Sen. Corey Booker goes after Hamas
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 06, 2014, 05:40:36 PM


https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=10152340146258717&fref=nf
Title: Prager: Lessons of the Holocaust
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 08, 2014, 09:04:11 AM


http://www.jewishjournal.com/dennis_prager/item/lessons_of_the_holocaust
Title: As usual, Steyn is correct
Post by: G M on August 13, 2014, 04:09:37 AM
http://www.steynonline.com/6506/you-want-nazis
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on August 13, 2014, 06:04:47 AM
Thanks for posting.  I haven't read Steyn in a while but he is really good.

And his final question:   where are the Republicans?

In hiding.   To think after what Obama and his mafia army has done to this country the Republicans should be ready to roll into power.  Instead people from  both the moderate to far right and the entire left even hate them more.

Just because Obama's ratings are as low as possible (he would NEVER go lower than 40% due to the entitlement die hard progressive crowd)  doesn't mean most of these people will automatically vote Republican who are disliked even more.

Can Cruz or anyone step up.  All we need is a likable, smart person with a great mouthpiece.  That does not include Romney, Jeb or Rand (IMO).
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on August 17, 2014, 08:32:13 AM
As I posted before I disagree.  While Obama's approval rating (still over 50%) with Jews may be dropping those Jews will not become Republican.   Indeed his approval rating makes no difference now since he is not running again.  The liberal Jews will be out in force voting for Dems in '16.

http://nypost.com/2014/08/17/obama-is-driving-jews-from-democratic-party/
Title: The Hell That Is the Obama White House...
Post by: objectivist1 on August 20, 2014, 05:28:44 AM
The Hell That Is the Obama White House

Posted By David Horowitz On August 19, 2014

Originally published by RedState.com.

Let me begin by acknowledging that this inspirational title is lifted from a tweet by screen actor James Woods. And now I will explicate his tweet.

Every sentient human being whose brain isn’t stuffed with ideological fairy dust can see that Obama is behind every major scandal of his administration from Benghazi to the I.R.S. disgrace. How can one know this? Because the culprits haven’t been fired. Moreover, if they are serial liars like Susan Rice, they’ve actually been promoted to posts where their loyalty to the criminal-in-chief can do America and its citizens even more damage, if that is possible.

A president faced with a scandal created by underlings behind his back would be naturally furious at their misbehavior, and want heads to roll. This didn’t happen in any of these scandals because their point of origin was the White House itself. Promoting the culprits is a way of keeping them quiet.

And what exactly is the I.R.S. scandal about — to take just one case? It’s a plan unprecedented in modern American politics to push the political system towards a one-party state by using the taxing authority of the government to cripple and destroy the political opposition. The administration’s campaign to promote voter fraud by opposing measures to stop it (and defaming them as “racist” is guided by the same intentions and desire.

And why shouldn’t Obama want to destroy the two-party system since he is also in utter contempt of the Constitutional framework, making law illegally, and defying an impotent Congress to stop him? Of course every radical, like Obama, hates the Constitutional framework because, as Madison explained in Federalist #10, it is designed to thwart “the wicked projects” of the left to redistribute income and destroy the free market.

The same desire to overwhelm and permanently suppress the opposition drives the war that Obama and the Democrats have conducted against America’s borders and therefore American sovereignty. Their plan is too flood the country with illegals of whatever stripe who will be grateful enough for the favor to win them elections and create a permanent majority in their favor. The immediate result of these efforts is that we have no secure southern border, and therefore no border; and therefore we have effectively invited criminals and terrorists to come across and do Americans harm.

Which brings us to the deepest level of Obama’s hell, which is his anti-American foreign policy. When Obama was re-elected in 2012, the very first thought I had was this: A lot of people are going to be dead because of this election. How disastrously right I was. Since their assault on George Bush and their sabotage of the war in Iraq, Obama and the Democrats have forged a power vacuum in Europe and even more dramatically in the Middle East, which nasty characters have predictably entered with ominous implications for the future security of all Americans.

Take one aspect of this epic default: Obama’s lack of response to the slaughter of Christians in Palestine, Egypt and Iraq. Hundreds of thousands of Christians have been slaughtered and driven from their homes in Iraq – over half a million by some counts. This is the oldest Christian community in the world dating back to the time of Christ. What was Obama’s response to this atrocity until a group of Yazvidi along with the Christians were trapped on a mountain side, and politics dictated he had to make some gesture? His response was to do and say nothing. Silence. Even his statement announcing minimal action to save the Yazvidi and the Christians mentioned the Christians once in passing while devoting a paragraph to the obscure Yazvidi.

What this unfeeling and cold response to the slaughter of Christians tells us is that Obama is a pretend Christian just the way he is a pretend American. What he is instead is a world class liar. That is because his real agendas are anti-American, anti-Christian, and anti-Jewish, and obviously and consistently pro America’s third world adversaries to whom he is always apologizing and whom he is always appeasing. Obama lies about his intentions and policies because he couldn’t survive politically if he told the truth.

The socialist plot against individual freedom called Obamacare was sold as a charitable attempt to cover the uninsured (which it doesn’t), to lower health insurance costs (which it doesn’t) and to allow patients to keep their doctor and their plan (which it doesn’t). What it actually does is to take away a major piece of the freedom that Americans once enjoyed – the freedom to choose their plan and their doctor, and not to have the government control their health care or have easy access to all their financial information.

This devious, deceitful, power hungry administration is just as James Woods described it. But it is also a mounting danger for all Americans. Thanks to his global retreat, the terrorists Obama falsely claims are “on the run” are in fact gathering their strength and their weapons of mass destruction until a day will come when they will cross our porous borders and show us what the years of perfidy not only by Obama but by the whole Democratic Party have wrought.
Title: top political donors
Post by: ccp on August 23, 2014, 01:01:34 PM
http://www.opensecrets.org/overview/topcontribs.php
Title: Our thorougly modern enemies
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 24, 2014, 10:38:23 AM
Please post that in the Politics thread.  TIA

========================

Our Thoroughly Modern Enemies
ISIS in the 21st Century
POTH
AUG. 23, 2014
Ross Douthat

IN his remarks on the murder of James Foley, the American journalist decapitated by the terrorists of ISIS, President Obama condemned Foley’s killers, appropriately, as a “cancer” on the Middle East and the world. But he also found room for the most Obama-ish of condemnations: “One thing we can all agree on,” he insisted, is that the would-be caliphate’s murderous vision has “no place in the 21st century.”

The idea that America’s foes and rivals are not merely morally but chronologically deficient, confused time travelers who need to turn their DeLorean around, has long been a staple of this administration’s rhetoric. Vladimir Putin, Bashar al-Assad and tyrants in general have been condemned, in varying contexts, for being on the dreaded “wrong side of history.” Earlier this year, John Kerry dismissed Putin’s Crimea adventure in the same language Obama used last week: “19th-century behavior in the 21st century,” foredoomed by its own anachronism.


These tropes contain a lot of foolishness. Where ISIS is concerned, though, they also include a small but crucial grain of truth.

The foolishness starts with the fact that the history of liberal democracy is actually inseparable, as Abram Shulsky writes in The American Interest, from “the constant appearance of counter-ideologies that have arisen in reaction against it.” Whether reactionary or utopian, secular or religious, these counter-ideologies are as modern, in their way, as the Emancipation Proclamation or the United Nations Charter. Both illiberal nationalism and Islamic fundamentalism are younger than the United States. They aren’t just throwbacks or relics; they’re counterforces that liberal modernity seems to inevitably conjure up.

So writing off the West’s challengers as purely atavistic is a good way to misunderstand them — and to miss the persistent features of human nature that they exploit, appeal to and reward.

These features include not only the lust for violence and the will to power, but also a yearning for a transcendent cause that liberal societies can have trouble satisfying.

As The Week’s Michael Brendan Dougherty argues, discussing the Europeans who have joined up with ISIS, liberalism’s “all-too-human order” — which privileges the sober, industrious and slightly boring — is simply “not for everyone.” Nor, most likely, will it ever be: in this century, the 22nd, or beyond.

Which is why liberalism’s current dominance is contingent rather than necessary, and why its past victories have often been rather near-run things. The arc of history, another favored Obama phrase, has at times bent toward pogroms and chattel slavery, totalitarianism and genocide, nuclear annihilation. (For the Middle East’s persecuted Christians and Yazidis, it bends toward annihilation even now.) The ideals of democracy and human rights are ascendant in our age, but their advance still depends on agency, strategy and self-sacrifice, no matter what date the calendar displays.
Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story

And yet: Despite perpetuating various comforting fallacies, the White House’s talk of history’s favorites does hint at an important point about the key weakness of the enemies we face right now.


That’s because even if history doesn’t actually take sides, many people the world over share President Obama’s impulses: They want to feel that it sides with them. So the most successful counter-ideologies, the most threatening of liberalism’s rivals, have always managed to give the impression that their ideas are on the winning side of history, and that it is the poor milquetoast liberal democrats who are antique and out of date.

This was obviously true of Marxist-Leninism, but it was true of fascism as well. The fascists were reactionaries, to a point, in their appeals to mythic Roman and Teutonic pasts. But they offered far more than nostalgia: What the late Christopher Hitchens called “the mobilizing energy of fascism” was inseparable from a vision of efficiency, technology and development, one that helped persuade many Europeans (and some Americans) that Mussolini and then even Hitler stood at history’s vanguard, that the future was being forged in Rome and Berlin.

Fortunately for us, that kind of energy is mostly absent from today’s counter-ideologies, and particularly from the self-styled caliphate whose brutality was on display last week. The term “Islamofascist,” popularized after 9/11, was imprecise because it gave groups like Al Qaeda and ISIS too much credit: They may know how to use the Internet to propagandize, but they otherwise lack even a hint of the reactionary futurism, the marriage of romanticism to industrial efficiency, that made the original fascism appealing to so many.

That doesn’t mean their ideas are destined to disappear. Their place in our century, our era, is secure. We may crush them militarily, kill and scatter their adherents, but variations on Al Qaeda and ISIS will probably persist as long as liberalism does.

But to contend for mastery, to threaten us the way Nazis and Communists once did, they would need to do more than demonstrate, by their continued depredations, that history doesn’t have necessary destinations. They would need to somehow persuade the world that history’s arc might actually be about to bend toward them.
Title: Continuous partial attention
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 27, 2014, 04:40:58 PM
Farnam Street: The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We’ve Lost in a World of Constant Connection

<https://ci5.googleusercontent.com/proxy/WitcZkBT49Nt1fd-bS0DAC51Y7zqveAR99K0NtzERzvUgHWWa4QM_5dXPtJnh8UvUCSmz-KYaZu958XuNt9h1xfwo9hTUnAfWbCvZXbDnUMnz2Ya=s0-d-e1-ft#http://farnamstreetblog.com/images/FarnamStreet_Icon_10093.png>
________________________________

The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We’ve Lost in a World of Constant Connection

Posted: 26 Aug 2014 05:00 AM PDT

Technology is neither good nor bad, nor is it neutral. — Melvin Kranzberg

It won’t be long before people fail to remember a world without the internet. Michael Harris explores what that means in his new book The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We’ve Lost in a World of Constant Connection.

For those billions who come next, of course, it won’t mean anything very obvious. Our online technologies, taken as a whole, will have become a kind of foundational myth —a story people are barely conscious of, something natural and, therefore, unnoticed. Just as previous generations were charmed by televisions until their sets were left always on, murmuring as consolingly as the radios before them, future generations will be so immersed in the Internet that questions about its basic purpose or meaning will have faded from notice. Something tremendous will be missing from their lives— a mind-set that their ancestors took entirely for granted— but they will hardly be able to notice its disappearance. Nor can we blame them.

However, we have in this brief historical moment, this moment in between two modes of being, a very rare opportunity. For those of us who have lived both with and without the vast, crowded connectivity the Internet provides, these are the few days when we can still notice the difference between Before and After.

This is the moment. Our awareness of this singular position pops up every now and again. We catch ourselves idly reaching for our phones at the bus stop. Or we notice how, midconversation, a fumbling friend dives into the perfect recall of Google.



I think that within the mess of changes we’re experiencing, there’s a single difference that we feel most keenly; and it’s also the difference that future generations will find hardest to grasp. That is the end of absence— the loss of lack. The daydreaming silences in our lives are filled; the burning solitudes are extinguished.

Before all memory of those absences is shuttered, though, there is this brief time when we might record what came before. We might do something with those small, barely noticeable instances when we’re reminded of our love for absence. They flash at us amid the rush of our experience and seem to signal: Wait, wasn’t there something . . . ?

***

In 1998, the writer Linda Stone coined the phrase that perfectly describes the state of most people: “continuous partial attention.” More than welcoming this impoverished state, most of us run toward it.

We are constantly distracted. Pings. Texts. Emails. We’re becoming slaves to devices and perpetual connectivity.

Dr. Gary Small, a researcher at UCLA, writes that “once people get used to this state, they tend to thrive on the perpetual connectivity. It feeds their egos and sense of self-worth, and it becomes irresistible.” We feel needed. We’re weaving our self-identity with our devices. We think that if they are not constantly buzzing we’re not “needed, necessary, crucial.” This “atmosphere of manic disruption makes (our) adrenal glands pump up production of cortisol and adrenaline.”

Dr. Small points out:

In the short run, these stress hormones boost energy levels and augment memory, but over time they actually impair cognition, lead to depression, and alter the neural circuitry in the hippocampus, amygdala, and prefrontal cortex— the brain regions that control mood and thought. Chronic and prolonged techno-brain burnout can even reshape the underlying brain structure.

***

Harris argues that there was a moment weirdly similar to this one: the year 1450. That’s the year when Johannes Gutenberg managed to invent a printing press.

Like the Internet, Gutenberg’s machine made certain jobs either ridiculous or redundant (so long, scriptoria). But much more was dismantled by Gutenberg’s invention than the employment of a few recalcitrant scribes. As the fidelity and speed of copying was ratcheted way up, there was a boom in what we’d now call data transfer: A great sermon delivered in Paris might be perfectly replicated in Lyon. (Branding improved, too: for the first time subjects knew what their king looked like.) Such uniformity laid the groundwork for massive leaps in knowledge and scientific understanding as a scholastic world that was initially scattered began to cohere into a consistent international conversation, one where academics and authorities could build on one another’s work rather than repeat it. As its influence unfurled across Europe, the press would flatten entire monopolies of knowledge, even enabling Martin Luther to shake the foundations of the Catholic Church; next it jump -started the Enlightenment. And the printing press had its victims; its cheap and plentiful product undid whole swaths of life, from the recitation of epic poetry to the authority of those few who could afford handmade manuscripts.

[...]

For any single human to live through such a change is extraordinary. After all, the original Gutenberg shift in 1450 was not a moment that one person could have witnessed, but a slow-blooming era that took centuries before it was fully unpacked. Literacy in England was not common until the nineteenth century, so most folk until then had little direct contact with the printed book. And the printing machine itself was not fundamentally improved upon for the first 350 years of its existence.

But today is different.

How quickly, how irrevocably, this kills that. Since ours is truly a single moment and not an era, scholars who specialize in fifteenth-century history may be able to make only partial comparisons with the landscape we’re trekking through. While writing this book, I found it necessary to consult also with neuroscientists, psychiatrists, psychologists, technology gurus, literature professors, librarians, computer scientists, and more than a few random acquaintances who were willing to share their war stories. And all these folk, moving down their various roads, at last crossed paths— in that place called Absence. It was an idea of absence that seemed to come up time and again. Every expert, every scientist, and every friend I spoke with had a device in his or her pocket that could funnel a planet’s worth of unabridged, incomprehensible clamor. Yet it was absence that unified the elegies I heard.

***

The change with Gutenberg was so total that it became a lens through which we view the world. “The gains the press yielded,” Harris writes, “are mammoth and essential to our lives.” Yet each new technology — from the written word to Twitter — is both an opportunity for something new and an opportunity to give something up.

In Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan wrote that: “a new medium is never an addition to an old one, nor does it leave the old one in peace.”

New mediums that become successful subjugate the older ones. It “never ceases to oppress the older media until it finds new shapes and positions for them.”

Harris challenges us: “As we embrace a technology’s gifts, we usually fail to consider what they ask from us in return—the subtle, hardly noticeable payments we make in exchange for their marvellous service.”

We don’t notice, for example , that the gaps in our schedules have disappeared because we’re too busy delighting in the amusements that fill them. We forget the games that childhood boredom forged because boredom itself has been outlawed. Why would we bother to register the end of solitude, of ignorance, of lack? Why would we care that an absence has disappeared?

The more I thought about this seismic shift in our lives— our rapid movement toward online experience and away from rarer, concrete things— the more I wanted to understand the nature of the experience itself. How does it feel to live through our own Gutenberg moment? How does it feel to be the only people in history to know life with and without the Internet?

After a month long break from the Internet, Harris emerges without an epiphany. “But it’s the break itself that’s the thing. It’s the break—that is, the questioning—that snaps us out of the spell, that can convince us that it was a spell in the first place,” he writes. While he doesn’t propose taking a month off, he does propose the occasional break: “I think what you get is a richer interior light and the ability to see yourself in a critical light, living online. Because if you’re in the middle of something you can never see it properly.”

The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We’ve Lost in a World of Constant Connection urges us to remain aware of what came before and “to again take pleasure in absence.”


Brought to you by: CURIOSITY: A curiously unconventional ad agency that helps you stand out in today’s crowded world.
Title: Internet fixation...
Post by: objectivist1 on August 27, 2014, 08:57:27 PM
I do think that there are some very deleterious effects on kids that have been born within the last 15 years that can be observed and traced back to the Internet, video games, and social media.  While I agree that these things are not necessarily bad in and of themselves, moderation in everything is the key, IMHO.  Most people, for example - even of my generation (I'm 52) - find the idea of being alone with only their thoughts for more than about 5 minutes very unpleasant.  Based upon my observation, this has become much more widespread since the advent of the Internet, as the author describes.

Those people (myself included) who actually enjoy solitude for moderate amounts of time (anywhere from 4 hours to a couple of days) have always been in the minority in my experience.  I'd estimate those folks comprise less than 5% of the American population.  Since I haven't travelled much outside the U.S., I can't say if this is true world-wide.  I've found that most people have a need for constant stimulation/entertainment of some sort. I can only say that for my own mental equilibrium, regular periods of solitude and contemplation are important.

I'm interested in what other members of this forum think...
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 27, 2014, 09:16:27 PM
Amongst Carl Jung's various theories was one which said the people have four basic functions of which one is dominant:  Thinking (about 10% of the population IIRC) feeling (about 60%?) sensation, and intuition and are either introverted or extroverted.  This makes for 8 basic personality types, and as the theory is fleshed out it becomes 16 or 32.  (The Briggs-Meyer personality test and various others are based upon this work)

From the sound of your description, you are an introvert.

(Tangent:  In our hands, usually there are three major lines.  Do the bottom and middle line come together or not?)



Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: G M on August 27, 2014, 09:43:16 PM
Amongst Carl Jung's various theories was one which said the people have four basic functions of which one is dominant:  Thinking (about 10% of the population IIRC) feeling (about 60%?) sensation, and intuition and are either introverted or extroverted.  This makes for 8 basic personality types, and as the theory is fleshed out it becomes 16 or 32.  (The Briggs-Meyer personality test and various others are based upon this work)

From the sound of your description, you are an introvert.

(Tangent:  In our hands, usually there are three major lines.  Do the bottom and middle line come together or not?)


INTJ and palm reading is silly.

Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: G M on August 27, 2014, 10:58:20 PM
http://www.nationalreview.com/campaign-spot/386305/key-demographic-americas-wrong-information-voters-jim-geraghty

I'm less concerned about the impact of technology and far more concerned by the rise of stupidity in this country. We are becoming Idiocracy more and more every day.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: objectivist1 on August 28, 2014, 05:22:47 AM
GM:

I agree wholeheartedly with you.  I was simply indulging Crafty in the interesting, if somewhat non-pragmatic discussion he started with his last post here  :-D
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on August 28, 2014, 08:25:46 AM
Objectivist:

"Those people (myself included) who actually enjoy solitude for moderate amounts of time (anywhere from 4 hours to a couple of days) have always been in the minority in my experience."

Just reminds me of watching part of the cable biography on Einstein the other day (again) and how he would sit or days, weeks, months in solitude working out his theoretical problems.

I've read Newton was the same way.   Barely eat or bathe.  Just shut themselves in a room and with brute force of indomitable will come up with theories that could explain the physical world and consequently humanity forever.

Now people like that probably use computers to boost their efficiencies to do the same thing.    The rest of us just cruise around on social or other entertainment type media allowing it to direct our thoughts to some extent.   Free association from our own imaginations is influenced by what we see on the screen.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 28, 2014, 08:33:12 AM
1)  There are two methods "palmistry" and "hand reading".  The two are quite distinct.  I learned a fair amount of the latter from Top Dog.  It was, and presumably still is, wonderful for picking up girls. 

2) It also presents itself as an empirical method, hence my as of yet unanswered question to Obj.

3) I'd say we are plenty serious around here and that a moment of levity is a good thing.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on August 28, 2014, 08:38:19 AM
"It was, and presumably still is, wonderful for picking up girls."

Once on the Atlantic City boardwalk a date and I stopped into a palm readers salon.   We each went in separately.  I cannot even remember what I was told.  Yet my date came out all anxious and silent.  I asked her what happened. She refused to tell me.   She was horrified.   I never learned what that gypsy dressed witch said to her.

Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: objectivist1 on August 28, 2014, 08:53:48 AM
Crafty:

Agreed - levity is welcome.  The bottom and middle lines DO NOT come together on my palms.  Therefore...?
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 28, 2014, 10:15:17 AM
Therefore the theory, or my diagnosis of you as an introvert, is wrong in your case.  In introverts the lines are supposed to come together.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 28, 2014, 10:16:26 AM
Again, gypsy palmistry and hand reading (note, NOT palm reading) are NOT the same thing at all.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: G M on August 29, 2014, 07:02:16 AM
1)  There are two methods "palmistry" and "hand reading".  The two are quite distinct.  I learned a fair amount of the latter from Top Dog.  It was, and presumably still is, wonderful for picking up girls. 





You could always ask them their sign and show them your mood ring.  :-D
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 29, 2014, 07:13:00 AM
Hand reading was an AWESOME way of meeting women for me.  You hold their hand and talk about their favorite subject--themselves.  When I would do this at a bar sometimes I had a number of others competing to be next to be read.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: G M on August 29, 2014, 07:42:57 AM
I don't doubt it. I do doubt the validity of it as a method for personality analysis.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 29, 2014, 08:07:17 AM
Actually Top Dog could do some AMAZING reads (first time he met my then girlfriend he turned and looked at me and said "She must drive your crazy interrupting you when you are reading".  There was NO way he could have known that!

I too had many a read where the woman was surprised at how I could have known that.  If you break down the analytical framework, the variables assessed followed a lot of Jungian pyschology (thinking, feeling, sensation, intuition, introverted, extroverted, etc) and a lot of it simply made sense; a hard thick stubby muscular hand would tend to correlate to a personality that was more impulsive than a hand that was long, slender, and delicate.

 
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: G M on August 29, 2014, 08:23:50 AM
http://www.secrets-explained.com/derren-brown/cold-reading

How would it differ from cold reading?
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 29, 2014, 09:34:22 AM
My secrets revealed!   :lol:
Title: Mark Steyn: The Reformation of Manners
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 30, 2014, 02:15:49 PM


http://www.steynonline.com/6543/the-reformation-of-manners
Title: Dad of KIA SEAL writes to Obama
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 02, 2014, 06:02:24 PM
No doubt this will get the same level as Cindy Sheehan's utterances to Bush-2:

=============================

"After finally choosing to view the barbaric, on-camera beheading by ISIS of freelance war correspondent James Foley, I have been left with a level of rage known only to those of us who have sacrificed unspeakable offerings on the altar of world peace.

My offering was my only son — Aaron Carson Vaughn. Aaron was a member of SEAL Team VI. He was killed in action when a CH47D Chinook, carrying thirty Americans and eight Afghans was shot down in the Tangi River Valley of Afghanistan on Aug. 6, 2011.

Many times over the past three years, I have been asked what drove my son to choose his particular career. What made him want to be a Navy SEAL? My answer is simple.

Aaron Vaughn was a man who possessed the courage to acknowledge evil. And evil, once truly acknowledged, demands response. Perhaps this is why so few are willing to look it in the eye. It is much simpler — much safer — to look the other way.

That is, unless you are the leader of the Free World.

As Commander-in-Chief, your actions — or lack thereof — Mr. President, cost lives. As you bumble about in your golf cart, slapping on a happy face and fist-pounding your buddies, your cowardly lack of leadership has left a gaping hole — not only in America’s security — but the security of the entire globe. Your message has come across loud and clear, sir: You are not up to this job. You know it. We know it. The world knows it.

Please vacate the people’s house and allow a man or woman of courage and substance to seize the reigns of this out-of-control thug-fest and regain the balance we, America, have provided throughout our great history.

Thanks to your “leadership” from whatever multi-million dollar vacation you happen to be on at any given moment, the world is in chaos. What’s been gained, you’ve lost. What’s been lost, you’ve decimated. You’ve demolished our ability to hold the trust of allies. You’ve made a mockery of the title “President.” And you’ve betrayed the nation for which my son and over 1.3 million others have sacrificed their very lives.

But this should come as no surprise, since your wife uttered a vile statement on Feb. 18, 2008, during the primary campaign — one that speaks volumes of your true convictions. “For the first time in my adult life, I am really proud of my country,” she said.

I am sure my deceased son thanks you for that, Mrs. Obama. Oh, and you’re welcome.

Never in my lifetime have I witnessed such despair and such growing fear that the world’s last best hope, America, has finally been dismantled. Perhaps the better word is transformed — fundamentally transformed. Come to think of it, it’s become difficult — if not impossible — to believe things haven’t gone exactly as you planned, Mr. President.

Amazingly, in five short years, your administration has lurched from one disaster to another. You spearheaded the ambitious rush to end the wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan — with no plan on how to do so effectively. Also, the release of “the Taliban five” in exchange for one American — without consulting Congress — is also on your shoulders.

You have been at the helm during unprecedented national security leaks — including, but not limited to the outing of SEAL Team VI on the Bin laden raid, the outing of the Pakistani doctor who provided the intelligence for that raid, the outing of Afghanistan’s CIA station chief, and the outing of your personal “kill list” to make you look tough. In addition, 75 percent of American deaths in Afghanistan and 83 percent of Americans-wounded-in-action have occurred on your watch, according to icasualties.org.

And now, we have this recent, heinous event: the beheading of an American citizen by a barbaric organization you foolishly referred to as “the JV team” in your statements to the New Yorker magazine in January.

You, sir, are the JV team. It’s time for you to step down and allow a true leader to restore our honor and protect our sons and daughters.

America has always been exceptional. And she will be again. You, Mr. President, are a bump in our road."

Reprinted with family's permission



Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...sident-Obama-s-resignation.html#ixzz3CCH02irl
Title: Police "militarization" - is it really a problem?
Post by: objectivist1 on September 03, 2014, 07:31:07 AM
I think this is an excellent analysis of the question.  I've been mulling this over myself for some time, as I've heard cries from both libertarians and those in our camp regarding their alarm over "police militarization."  My question has always been - as long as the citizens have access to the same weaponry - what's the issue?

The ‘Militarization’ of the Police?

Posted By Jack Kerwick On September 3, 2014

Making the rounds through libertarian (and other) circles in the wake of the police shooting death of Michael Brown is the notion that the “militarization” of local police forces is a huge problem besetting the country.

Though I self-identify as a conservative, I have a considerable affection for libertarianism. In fact, it is precisely because of this fondness that I am compelled to put out to pasture all of this “militarization” talk.

(1)The mere possession of weaponry of a kind on the part of police is no more objectionable—no more a justification for the charge of “militarization”—than is the mere existence of guns or SUV’s objectionable.

For starters, it is unclear as to what libertarians even mean in claiming that the police are “militarized.” From what I can gather—sorry, but no self-avowed libertarian writer who I have yet encountered is clear on this—it is the fact that today’s police forces are equipped with weaponry of a technologically sophisticated sort, the sort with which our soldiers are armed when confronting enemies overseas, that warrants the charge of “militarization.”

How the mere possession of things is a cause of alarm for, of all people, the libertarian, is beyond me. In personifying inanimate objects he comes perilously close to sounding like just those enemies of liberty against whom he’s tirelessly railing, those who would personify guns, wealth, and, say, SUV’s.

Moreover, libertarians are the first to champion the (law-abiding, adult) citizen’s constitutional, even “inalienable,” right to bear virtually whatever arms he prefers. How, we must ask, does it turn out to be permissible—not “militarized”—for the janitor next door to possess a machine gun, but somehow impermissible—“militarized”—for the police to do the same?

(2) The distribution of arms among the police, on the one hand, and the citizenry, on the other, utterly fails to establish that the police, or anyone, haven’t a right to arm themselves like Rambo—i.e. it fails to supply a single warrant for the charge of “militarization.”

If the libertarian insists that it isn’t the possession by police of weaponry as such to which he objects, but the fact that, as things currently stand, the police have access to these weapons to which other citizens are denied, then it is the distribution of this access, and not the access itself, that has him upset.

But if this is the case, then the proper complaint is not, “The police are ‘militarized’!” The proper complaint is that, “We should be allowed to be ‘militarized’ too,” or something like this.

In other words, the charge of “militarization” makes no sense here.

(3) The concept of “militarization” encompasses the concepts of collective purpose and coercion.

Government, by definition, has a monopoly on force. Yet, theoretically, the libertarian, unlike the anarchist, has no objections to this: the libertarian recognizes the authority of government to both enact and enforce laws. Since police officers are government agents, the libertarian affirms their authority to deploy the power at their disposal to coerce citizens into abiding by the laws that police are committed to safeguarding.

So, the sheer fact that police are endowed with the power to coerce prospective and actual violators of the law can’t be something with which the libertarian has a problem, for he has no problem with government per se.

In other words, that police are using force to maintain law and order—precisely what police have always done and what they’ve always been meant to do—can’t be the spring of the libertarian’s howls of “militarization.”

Only if government agents—whether police or otherwise—are coercing citizens in the service of fulfilling some grand collective purpose will the charge of “militarization” apply. Coercion, in and of itself, is insufficient to constitute “militarization.”

But this, in turn, means that the actual weaponry with which the police (or any other agent of the government) are endowed is irrelevant to determining whether the police, or any other agent of government, are “militarized.” If police were armed only with clubs, but used these clubs in order to insure that citizens were exercising three days a week for the purpose of producing “The Physically Fit Society,” say, then this would indeed show that the police had a “militarized” set of mind. Conversely, if the police are armed to the teeth with the stuff of soldiers but used their arms only to insure that the rule of law was preserved, to protect the life, limb, and property of citizens from those—like the rioters in Ferguson—who are intent upon undermining civilization, this would fail to establish that they are “militarized.”

(4) Police brutality, dereliction of duty, abuse of power and the like are issues that should count for much for all decent people, especially the libertarian. But none of these things are necessarily a function of “militarization,” much less equivalent to it.

That there are police officers that abuse their authority and power is not only an empirically verified fact; it is a no-brainer to the lover of liberty who knows, along with Lord Acton, that while “absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely,” even a limited degree of “power tends to corrupt.”

But when police do violate their oath to serve and protect, then we can and should call out their violations for what they are. Conflating or obscuring issues with bumper-sticker friendly misnomers like “militarization” is counterproductive.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 15, 2014, 09:33:08 AM


The Rectification of the Names!

As the guy with the shovel despairingly said from the bottom of a deep pit in the woods, "How did I get started on this?"

Oh right. I meant to say earlier, I am crawling like Andy Dufresne on his exodus from Shawshank toward an idea for a new book. It's just an idea. As Marcus Aurelius (the Richard Harris version) might say, it's a dream. I can only whisper it. Anything more than a whisper and it might vanish.

In the course of my developing this whisper-of-an-idea for a book, my AEI colleague Michael Auslin pointed me to a Confucian concept called "the rectification of names." Maybe you know all about it because you're a smarty-pants Confucian scholar, which would be an interesting twist on who I imagine you, my "Dear Reader," to be. But it was new to me and it's really an exciting idea because it connects a lot of different exciting ideas into a potentially fully functional Death Star, I mean book, idea.

Anyway, the gist is that society goes ass-over-teakettle (to borrow a phrase from the academic literature) when names no longer describe the things they are assigned to.

Take it away Confucius:

"A superior man, in regard to what he does not know, shows a cautious reserve. If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success. When affairs cannot be carried on to success, proprieties and music do not flourish. When proprieties and music do not flourish, punishments will not be properly awarded. When punishments are not properly awarded, the people do not know how to move hand or foot. Therefore a superior man considers it necessary that the names he uses may be spoken appropriately, and also that what he speaks may be carried out appropriately. What the superior man requires is just that in his words there may be nothing incorrect."

Now, I'm just starting my reading on all of this and, so far, I don't much care for the way the concept was used to justify castes and classes in feudal China or any of that jazz. And, yes, I am aware that a similar concern was in fact a central point of my last book (Now out in paperback, noodle-salad-eaters). It's central to Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" — never mind to 1984 — and Ludwig Wittgenstein had much to say on the subject as well. And anyone who ate funny brownies in college has grooved on the relationship between words and reality (and the puzzle of the Skipper & Gilligan's limited wardrobe).

But I very much like the idea that societies get themselves into trouble when language becomes a tool not for describing reality but concealing it.

This is one of the many reasons I loathe the self-described pragmatists who insist they want to solve problems by getting "beyond labels." You cannot solve problems if you cannot describe the problem — and the solution — accurately. Try fixing a flat tire with a wet hamster. Now, call the hamster a "tire iron." Has it gotten any easier? Shakespeare tells us that a rose by another name will smell just as sweet, but if you can't tell sh*t from shinola, your shoes are going to smell awful.

When Facts Are Treason

The disconnect between names and the named becomes most pronounced in totalitarian societies where words become weapons of the State. When language ceases to be a tool for labeling reality and higher truths and becomes one for upholding the agenda of a regime, the society rots and invites revolt. Try as they might, tyrants rarely have much success at persuading miserable people they are happy or hungry people they are full. As a result, regimes feel required to tighten their grip on society even more. Use of the wrong word — or the right word the wrong way — becomes ever more damning evidence of disloyalty or treason. And you know what? The tyrants are right: It is disloyalty and treason to an evil regime to accurately tell the truth.

I think there's something very profound about the Chinese idea that revolutions are primarily an effort to bring about the rectification of names; that the demand for justice is first and foremost a demand that words and reality come back into alignment. Nothing is more infuriating than to be told not to believe your lying eyes — or your empty stomach. Take a moment to ponder various revolutions around the globe over history and ask yourself if there isn't something to that.

One last point before I fulfill my obligation to put some news-related content in this "news"letter: Free societies are not immune to this problem, it's just that we have better antibodies. We have more opportunities and mechanisms to get words and things lined up properly. In a society where children won't be beaten or executed for pointing out that the emperor has no clothes, the nakedness of the emperor will be a much more frequent topic of conversation.

But that just means it takes longer — and more work — for names to get messed up. Who can dispute that political correctness is, to a large extent, an organized effort to keep truth from being applied to the problems of reality? Who can deny that our politics is shot through with words that don't line up properly with what they are supposed to describe?

They're Not Islamic, They're Not Even I-Curious

For instance, my column today is on the president's contention that the Islamic State is not Islamic. The assertion fits perfectly with the extended philosophical throat-clearing you just waded through. I mean talk about letting names and things wander off from each other!

Imagine, just for the sake of argument that, say, the State Department's Jen Psaki sat down to interview an Islamic State fighter over coffee.

Psaki: "Hi. What's your name?"

Mohammad: "Mohammed."

Psaki: "Were you named after your father?"

Mohammed: "No. I am named after the One True Prophet Mohammed."

Psaki: "Interesting. So what's the name of your organization?"

Mohammed: "The Islamic State."

Psaki: "Oh, that's exotic. What does that do?"

Mohammed: "We have sworn to Allah that we will bring about a global caliphate as he commands us through Mohammed and the Koran. Inshallah, we will kill the pagans, Jews, and infidels and convert the Christians to the one true faith.

Psaki: "Oh my, that sounds like quite a project. So, let me ask you, what religion should I put down here, Mohammed."

Mohammed: "I am Muslim. I will give my life for Islam. It's right there in the name: Islamic State."

Psaki: "Well, I can see that this will just remain one of those mysteries. I'll just put down agnostic."

Large-Scale Counterterrorism Operations Are Hell

Sadly, only after I wrote my column did I learn that not only does the administration insist that the Islamic State isn't even a smidgen Islamic — as the president might say — but we aren't at war with it either. "If somebody wants to think about it as being a war with [the Islamic State], they can do so, but the fact is that it's a major counterterrorism operation that will have many different moving parts," Secretary of State John Kerry explained yesterday.

"We're engaged in a major counterterrorism operation," he told CBS, "and it's going to be a long-term counterterrorism operation. I think war is the wrong terminology and analogy but the fact is that we are engaged in a very significant global effort to curb terrorist activity."

Okay, wait a second. I can understand — no matter how ridiculous I think the claim may be — the argument that we are not at war with the Islamic State. I can certainly understand the argument — again, even though I reject it — that we don't want to pay the terrorist group the "compliment" of saying we're at war with it.

But hold the phone. John Kerry is saying that "war" is the wrong analogy? Really? It is okay to analogize the fights against poverty, cancer, climate change etc., to war, but we can't analogize sustained bombing campaigns with coordinated ground offensives to it? Oh my stars and garters.  It's like the effort to get rid of the Islamic State is the Moral Equivalent of Pension Reform.

It gets worse. Olivier Knox of Yahoo News asked White House press secretary Josh Earnest, "What does victory [in the fight against the Islamic State] look like here?"
Earnest earnestly replied, "I didn't bring my Webster's dictionary with me up here." Meanwhile, the disconnect between names and things has gotten to the point where a senior administration official thinks Saudi Arabia is "galvanized" against the Islamic State because it has an "extensive border with Syria." Except for the fact that it doesn't, this is a very powerful point. So much for Mark Twain's observation that "God created war so that Americans would learn geography."

Of course, the administration is simply following the president's lead. Given how rabid Kerry, Hagel, and others were just a few weeks ago, it's pretty obvious that Obama has told his team "opstay ayingsay arway." In his heart the president just doesn't like words like "war" or "win." That's why he "ended" the Iraq War. That's why when asked to explain what "destroy" means he said it meant to reduce to a manageable problem. That's why the administration keeps talking about mitigation. That's why they long ago replaced the "War on Terror" with "overseas contingency operations" and rogue states with "states of concern." Hey, maybe we should just start calling it "the Islamic State of Concern"?

This of course reminds me of Winston Churchill's famous line, "We shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall mitigate on the beaches, we shall degrade them on the landing grounds, we shall reduce them to manageable problems in the fields and in the streets. . ."

Really, anyone can play. Release the dogs of overseas contingency operations! Haven't you read Sun Tzu's "The Art of Mitigation"?

Look, as I suggest in my column, there's room in a war for bending the truth if it helps win the war. The problem here is that when you're bending the truth that you're even at war, what truths are worth telling? As I wrote last week , I still think Obama's greatest concern isn't how to conquer — or even "manage" — the Islamic State or terrorism in general but how to find the right words that will rescue him from political hassles, responsibility, and blame. Rather than say he misjudged the Islamic State, he told Chuck Todd he never even called them the "Jayvee" team, which was a lie.

If Obama's theory of the world is right, this may all work out for him. If jihadism is a minor nuisance that we can manage without much distraction or effort, then his word games might even make sense. But if we are really facing a more substantial and long-term threat, then his word games are not just stupid, they are dangerous because they put further distance between names and reality, between problems and solutions.

I am not a fan of the philosopher Carl Schmitt, but I always liked his line, "Tell me who your enemy is, and I will tell you who you are." I don't think it captures anything like the whole truth, but it does capture an important truth: To stand for something requires standing against something. If you stand for democracy, you must stand against tyranny. If you stand for truth, you must stand against lies. It is a tactical and strategic question whether we need to go to literal war against the Islamic State. But if we are not figuratively or spiritually at war with what the Islamic State stands for, then, my God, what do we stand for?
Title: What is response to this?
Post by: ccp on September 17, 2014, 07:38:10 AM
http://theweek.com/article/index/268182/this-is-what-happens-when-republicans-actually-enact-their-radical-agenda 

Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 17, 2014, 01:39:22 PM
Please post on "The Way Forward" thread.
Title: The Left's "Manufactured Intelligence"...
Post by: objectivist1 on September 24, 2014, 08:00:35 AM
iSocialism, Science and Stupidity

Posted By Daniel Greenfield On September 24, 2014 @ frontpagemag.com

Every ideology needs to believe in its inevitability. Religions get their inevitability from prophecies; secular ideologies get theirs from the modernist fallacy.

The modernist fallacy says that history is moving on an inevitable track toward their ideology. Resistance is futile, you will be liberalized. Marxism predicted the inevitable breakdown of capitalism. Obama keeps talking about being “on the right side of history” as if history, like a university history curriculum, has a right side and a wrong side. All everyone has to do is grab a sign and march “Forward!” to the future.

The bad economics and sociology around which the left builds its Socialist sand castles assume that technological progress will mean improved control. Capitalism with its mass production convinced budding Socialists that the entire world could be run like a giant factory under technocrats who would use industrial techniques to control the economic production of mankind in line with their ideals.

The USSR and moribund European economies broke that theory into a million little pieces.

The dot com revolution with its databases and subtle tools for manipulating individuals on a collective basis led to a Facebook Socialism that crowdsources its culture wars and “nudges” everyone into better habits, lower body masses and conveniently available death panels.

The iSocialist, like his industrial predecessor, assumes that technology gives superintelligent leftists better tools for controlling everything. The planned economy failed in the twentieth because the tools of propaganda posters, quotas and gulags were too crude. This time he is certain that it will work.

Intelligence is to leftists what divine right was to the crowned kings of Europe. They frantically brand themselves as smart because in a technocracy, superiority comes from intelligence. Their vision is the right one because they are the smart ones. Their shiny future is backed by what they call “science.”

Science, the magic of the secular age, is their church. But science isn’t anyone’s church. Science is much better at disproving things than at proving them. It’s a useful tool for skeptics, but a dangerous tool for rulers. Like art, science is inherently subversive and like art, when it’s restricted and controlled, it stops being interesting.

Neil deGrasse Tyson’s defenders reacted to his basic errors by asserting that even if he had made a mistake, science, collectively, was right. Science is of course neither right nor wrong; its methodology can be used to determine whether something is right or wrong.

In Tyson’s case, science determined long ago that at least one of his claims was wrong. Neil deGrasse Tyson doesn’t embody science. No individual does. What Tyson embodies is manufactured intelligence. Manufactured intelligence is how we knew that Obama was smart. But manufactured intelligence has the same relationship to intelligence as a painting of the ocean does to the real thing.

The real ocean is complicated and messy. So is real intelligence. Manufactured intelligence is the fashion model playing a genius in a movie. Real intelligence is an awkward man obsessing over a handful of ideas, some of them ridiculously wrong, but one of which will change the world.

Real intelligence isn’t marketable because it doesn’t make an elite feel good about its power.

Biblical fake prophets were often preferred to real prophets because they made rulers feel comfortable about the future. The modern technoprophet assures a secular elite that it can effectively control people and that it even has the obligation to do so. It tells them that “science” is on their side.

The easy way to tell real religion from fake religion is that real religion doesn’t make you feel good. It doesn’t assure you that everything you’re doing is right and that you ought to keep on doing it.

The same holds true for science. Real science doesn’t make you feel smart. Fake science does.

No matter how smart you think you are, real science will make you feel stupid far more often than it will make you feel smart. Real science not only tells us how much more we don’t know than we know, a state of affairs that will continue for all of human history, but it tells us how fragile the knowledge that we have gained is, how prone we are to making childish mistakes and allowing our biases to think for us.

Science is a rigorous way of making fewer mistakes. It’s not very useful to people who already know everything. Science is for stupid people who know how much they don’t know.

A look back at the march of science doesn’t show an even line of progress led by smooth-talking popularizers who are never wrong. Instead the cabinets of science are full of oddballs, unqualified, jealous, obsessed and eccentric, whose pivotal discoveries sometimes came about by accident. Science, like so much of human accomplishment, often depended on lucky accidents to provide a result that could then be isolated and systematized into a useful understanding of the process.

Modernism is a style that offers a seamless vision of perfection that doesn’t exist. The accomplishments of our age haven’t changed human nature and they have not made us infallible.

Real science tells us that we are basically stupid. A close study of history proves it. And that’s a good thing. Stupid people can learn from their mistakes. Self-assured elites convinced of their own superior intelligence can’t. Everyone makes mistakes. The future belongs to those who recognize them.

The inability of Neil deGrasse Tyson and his defenders to acknowledge that he is wrong is a revealing look at the rotten core of the liberal elite which is incapable of admitting its errors, but sneers and smears its way out of a moral reckoning every time. Its ideology with its assumption of central control over lives and economies is too dependent on its own illusion of genius not to lie about its failures.

It is too big to fail and that makes its failure inevitable.

Tysonism is why ObamaCare suffered a disastrous launch, why the VA reorganization didn’t work and why we’re back in Iraq. Technocrats don’t make mistakes. They can’t. They’re only at the top because they’re smart. If they ever admitted to being stupid, they would lose their right to rule.

Like Lysenkoism, Tysonism uses ideology to determine the outcomes of science. That’s how we keep ending up with Global Warming as settled science no matter how often the actual science contradicts it.

Tysonism appropriates science without understanding it. Its science consists of factoids, some right and some wrong, which simplify and clarify everything. Its manufactured intelligence makes people feel smart without actually giving them the critical tools to question the false assumptions of a Tyson.

What the left calls science is really a hypothesis accepted as a fact without the skepticism. Its intelligence is a conclusion without bothering to determine whether it’s true. Science and intelligence are perpetual processes that are never truly settled. But in law and government, as in all other fields, the left discards the process and asserts an inevitable outcome by virtue of its superiority.

Intelligence as ideology is at the heart of the left. Its Orwellian twist discards the need for using intelligence to question its ideology by asserting that the issue is settled. To be smart is to be left and to be left is to be smart. And only stupid people would question that.

There is no need to think about anything because the smart people have already done all the thinking. You can show you are smart by accepting their conclusions or show your stupidity by questioning them.

Science and skepticism are the tools of stupid people. As Socrates put it, I know that I know nothing. We have the most to fear from the smart people who don’t know and will never admit how little they know.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 24, 2014, 11:49:57 AM
Islamic Jihad -- Target America
Should You Be Concerned?
By Mark Alexander • September 24, 2014
"The establishment of civil and religious liberty was the Motive which induced me to the Field." --George Washington (1783)


Despite assurances to the contrary from our nation's commander in chief, it turns out that global Jihad is thriving. And it constitutes a greater threat to our nation's security today than at any time in history.

Should you be concerned?

Of course, the answer is "yes," but with qualification.

The most imminent domestic threat to your life and property, statistically, emanates from the sociopathic drug/gang culture, which continues to metastasize on urban poverty plantations and is now spilling into suburban and rural communities. That threat has been cultivated for the last five decades by ruinous political and social policies that were, ostensibly, enacted to eradicate the poverty those policies institutionalized.

That notwithstanding, the elevated threat to your life from Islamic extremists should be a concern -- not because the probability of being an individual victim of an Islamist assault will soon be higher than the drug/gang culture threat, but because the probability of being among the cumulative victims of a catastrophic attack on our homeland -- be it conventional, nuclear or biological -- is escalating largely unabated.

The 9/11 attack on our country was perpetrated by 19 al-Qa'ida operatives. Its immediate effects -- the loss of lives and the longer-term economic impact -- were devastating. It would only take five to 10 al-Qa'ida operatives to create destruction on a 100-fold scale, with a little help from Iran or other terror-sponsoring states.

How real is that threat?

Islamic terrorist groups are surging worldwide, including Jabhat al-Nusra, Boko Haram, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Taliban, Jamaat-e-Islami, Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Khorasan Group and now, front and center, ISIL, a.k.a. the Islamic State -- all of which together constitute Jihadistan, that borderless nation of Islamic extremists aligned under the Qur'anic umbrella.

Currently there are many American Islamists actively fighting among the ranks of ISIL in the Middle East -- and they have significant networks of support in the United States. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper concludes that the direct links between ISIL and those domestic networks has created "the most diverse array of threats and challenges as I've seen in my 50-plus years in the [intelligence] business."

How did this surge get underway?

In 2012, amid the cascading failure of his domestic economic and social policies, Barack Obama centered his re-election campaign on his faux foreign policy successes, which were built upon the following two boasts: "Four years ago, I promised to end the war in Iraq. I did." And "al-Qa'ida is on the run."

The reality, however, is that Obama's "hope and change" retreat from Iraq left a vacuum for the resurgence of a far more dangerous incarnation of Muslim terrorism under the ISIL label, which has displaced al-Qa'ida as the dominant asymmetric Islamic terrorist threat to the West.

Clearly, it is Obama's foreign policy malfeasance that poses the greatest threat to U.S. national and homeland security.

So, is the Islamic State actually, well, Islamic?

Not according to Obama. While he subscribes to the hate-driven rhetoric of Afro-centric theology, six formative years of his early life were spent attending Islamic schools in Indonesia.

In his address to the nation last week, he claimed, "Let’s make two things clear: ISIL is not Islamic. ... And ISIL is certainly not a state.”

Reasonable people may disagree on whether the Islamic State now occupying much of Syria and Iraq is, at least by the Western definition, a state, but it certainly is a state in the Jihadistan context given the Islamic World of the Qur'an recognizes no political borders.

But for Obama to suggest "ISIL is not Islamic" is flatly absurd. Why else are American taxpayers providing Islamist prisoners at Gitmo copies of the Qur'an and payer rugs?
It is equally asinine, of course, for Secretary of State John Kerry to perpetuate the lie that "Islam is the Religion of Peace™" by claiming, "We must continue to repudiate the gross distortion of Islam that ISIL is spreading."

Their errant assertions prompted this rebuke from Islamic State spokesman Abu Muhammad al-Adnani: "[Obama and Kerry] turned into Islamic jurists, muftis, sheikhs and preachers, standing up for Islam and the Muslims, so it appears that they no longer have confidence in the ability or sincerity of their sorcerers..."

So, is Islamic Jihad really "Islamic"?

There are many excellent resources for understanding Islamic extremism and the rise of Islamic terrorism. But allow me to offer a brief overview of Islam and the schism that gave rise to global Islamic Jihad.

In 570 AD, Abū al-Qāsim Muhammad was born in Mecca (in modern-day Saudi Arabia). In the year 610, Muhammad went into the hills and claims to have received instruction from an angel to spend the next 22 years as the exclusive transcriber of Allah's message, the Qur'an, which means "recitation." Its 114 Surahs, or chapters, outline the religious, military, civil, social, commercial and legal systems of Islam. Most Muslims believe that Islam originated with the prophet Adam, and that Noah, Abraham, Moses and Jesus were Islamic prophets.

After Muhammad's death in 632, Islam split into two factions, Sunni and Shi’ite -- a split originating from a dispute about whether the religion should be led by strict adherence to the Qur'an, or led by Ali, the son-in-law of Muhammad. The Sunnis (from "Ahl al-Sunna," meaning ”people of the tradition”) bonded through Muslim orthodoxy. The Shias (from “Shiat Ali,” meaning ”party of Ali”) were a political alliance formed around Muhammad's descendant.

Despite the split, Islam thrived, and by the 17th century, a vast Muslim empire was controlled by a powerful military and was the cultural cradle of mathematics, architecture, art, law and science. But the rise of Western military power would divide and conquer the Muslim empire by the end of the 18th century, followed by European occupations of much of that former empire over the next century.

By the end of World War I, Islam's Ottoman Empire was lost. Many Muslims adapted to Western culture, while some held to old Islamic traditions. But the re-constitution of the State of Israel in 1948 seeded a resurgence of Islamic fervor, a fervor that would unleash itself 30 years later under the watch of Jimmy Carter's administration.
In 1979, the powerful and strategic state of Iran fell to the Islamic Revolution, and Shia cleric Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned to power. Student revolutionaries seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran, taking 52 Americans hostage, and that act galvanized both Shia and Sunni Islamist activists throughout the Middle East.

Today, Shia Muslims represent majorities only in Iran, Iraq and Bahrain.

But Islamic Jihad, including al-Qa'ida and subsequent terrorist groups, is rooted in Sunni orthodoxy. Sunnis represent about 85% of Muslims worldwide, including countries in Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

So again, is Islamic Jihad "Islamic"? Indeed, it is.

The Suras of the Qur'an and the Hadith (Muhammad's teachings) require jihad, or "holy war," against all "the enemies of God." For the record, orthodox Sunnis understand that these "infidels" include all Muslim or non-Muslim people who refute any teachings of Muhammad -- which is why ISIL Sunnis are slaughtering Iraqi Shias.

Rebutting Obama's assertion that Islamic Jihad is disconnected from Islam, Hoover Institution Fellow Dennis Prager writes: "Killing 'unbelievers' has been part of -- of course not all of -- Islam since its inception. Within 10 years of Muhammad’s death Muslims had conquered and violently converted whole peoples from Iran to Egypt and from Yemen to Syria. Muslims have offered conquered people death or conversion since that time. ... More than 600 years after Muhammad, Ibn Khaldun, the greatest Muslim writer who ever lived, explained why Islam is the superior religion in the most highly regarded Muslim work ever written, 'Muqaddimah,' or 'Introduction to History': 'In the Muslim community, the holy war is religious duty, because of the universalism of the Muslim mission and (the obligation to) convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force.'"

Thus, if you're among those who resist or refute Muhammad's teachings, you're a de facto enemy of Islam.

According to Muhammad in the Qur'anic verses, Allah commands, "I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore strike off their heads and strike off every fingertip of them."

Do you refute any teachings of Muhammad?

Based on the Sunni Islamist history of violence, it is clear that Islam is not "the Religion of Peace," though there are obviously many Muslims worldwide and in the U.S. who do not subscribe to Islamist Jihad theology. But the number of Sunni Muslims who do support that totalitarian theology is staggering.

According to the Pew Research Center, there are 2.75 million Muslims in the U.S. today. Notably, about 90% of American Muslims are Sunni. The Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Nation of Islam have now established more than 2,200 mosques, some of which have become hotbeds of support for Sunni Islamist extremists. The ethnic group with the fastest growing conversion rate to Islam is Latino -- 12 million of whom are now in the U.S. illegally, and who continue to pour across our southern border.

Do any of those grim statistics concern you?

At the conclusion of the American Revolutionary War, George Washington wrote that our nation has its roots in "the establishment of civil and religious liberty."
Islam, on the other hand, is founded on the abolition of civil and religious liberty -- which is to say it is diametrically opposed to the notion that Liberty is "endowed by our Creator."

Pro Deo et Constitutione -- Libertas aut Mors
Semper Fortis Vigilate Paratus et Fidelis
Title: Obama Brings Ferguson Lynch Mob to U.N....
Post by: objectivist1 on September 25, 2014, 06:01:36 AM
Obama Brings the Ferguson Lynch Mob to the U.N.

Posted By Matthew Vadum On September 25, 2014

President Obama used an opportunity on the world stage this week to encourage America’s enemies to continue promoting the tired old left-wing narrative that the U.S. is an irretrievably racist hotbed of injustice.

Instead of just focusing on the topic of the day, namely, what the U.S. government is planning to do to undermine the extraordinarily brutal Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS), Obama suggested that his own country’s race relations problems are on par with leading world crises. And Islam is perfectly innocent. Only bad people who aren’t real Muslims are causing trouble in the world.

It’s bread and circuses, with America’s own Caesar running the show.

According to Obama, the killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown, a black man, by a white police officer in Ferguson, Mo., in itself is proof that race relations are poisonous in the United States. As the Left sees it, Brown was the latest in a long line of helpless black victims mowed down by racist cops who are part of America’s corrupt criminal justice system. It’s just more left-wing sloganeering, staples of which are knee-jerk cop hatred and making excuses for black criminals.

Anti-American fanatics, such as the Iranians, have used the events in Ferguson as propaganda to defame the United States. Obama is telegraphing to the Islamist totalitarians that they are on the right track and have entirely legitimate criticisms.

“I realize that America’s critics will be quick to point out that at times we too have failed to live up to our ideals; that America has plenty of problems within its own borders,” Obama told the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday in a speech that focused on foreign policy and national security issues.

“This is true,” he told the gathering of delegates from nations that enslave people, chop off their hands and heads, mutilate their genitals, and sanction the gang rape of infidels, women, and youngsters. He continued:

In a summer marked by instability in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, I know the world also took notice of the small American city of Ferguson, Missouri — where a young man was killed, and a community was divided. So, yes, we have our own racial and ethnic tensions.

Apart from the vile moral equivalency, that is, the implied comparison of the Brown shooting with Islamist atrocities, Obama never bothered to point out that there is still not even a scintilla of evidence that what transpired last month in Ferguson was in any way racially motivated. Investigators keep digging and coming up empty-handed.

Nor did he point out that his administration is leading the way, trying to inflame racial and ethnic tensions. Egged on by violent left-wing mobs and race-obsessed profiteers like Obama allies Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson Sr., the U.S. Department of Justice is conducting a race-baiting witch hunt aimed at the entire police force in Ferguson.

It is nothing more than a taxpayer-funded Democratic Party voter registration drive disguised as a civil rights investigation. Such hoaxes are the stock in trade of the radical community organizers who run the Obama White House.

But it’s a costly hoax. At least 40 federal agents have reportedly been on the ground in the St. Louis area desperately searching for proof of racial animus on the part of Darren Wilson, the decorated Ferguson police officer who shot Brown Aug. 9 after the suspected gang member beat him and tried to take his handgun.

That figure of two-score agents is apparently more than the Obama administration has assigned to all the other major scandals embroiling the administration combined. Those other scandals include Hillary Clinton’s Benghazi bungling, IRS persecution of conservative groups, New Black Panther Party voter intimidation charges, the Fast and Furious gun-running episode, and the NSA’s domestic spying.

The rest of Obama’s UN speech consisted of bromides and inane mantras about the Islamic world he holds so dear.

Although Islam has been generating terrorists and Islamic supremacists for over a millennium, Islam’s been done wrong by those who have hijacked it, Obama argued.

A “more lethal and ideological brand of terrorists“ have “perverted one of the world’s great religions,” he said. These terrorists are “employing the most brutal methods to intimidate people within their communities,” he said, without mentioning that his allies in SEIU and Saul Alinsky-inspired activist groups do much the same to American communities.

Obama glossed over the centuries of Islamic irredentism and religious violence to claim that, notwithstanding the often-graphic verses of the Holy Koran, that “Islam teaches peace.” In his view, “Muslims the world over aspire to live with dignity and a sense of justice,” he said without mentioning that to many Mohammedans the world over justice consists of Jews’ and Christians’ severed heads on public display.

Obama even said that “we reject any suggestion of a clash of civilizations,” even though a clash of civilizations is precisely what is taking place.

Now that Obama’s approval ratings on national security and terrorism have taken a beating, the president feels he needs to sound like an actual president who cares about the good of the nation and is willing to use the nation’s military might in a just cause.

What ISIS is doing is outrageous, Obama complains. But his hatred of ISIS is conditional, based on polling. As long as voters are concerned about ISIS, he’ll pretend to be concerned about ISIS.

“No God condones this terror,” he said. “No grievance justifies these actions. There can be no reasoning — no negotiation — with this brand of evil. The only language understood by killers like this is the language of force. So the United States of America will work with a broad coalition to dismantle this network of death.“

This is likely the same pep talk Obama gave to former IRS enforcer Lois Lerner as she geared up to harass and intimidate Tea Party nonprofits.

In Obama’s eyes, only American conservatives, not medieval Islamic savages, are permanent foes worthy of eternal enmity.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: G M on September 25, 2014, 11:30:16 AM
Churning up racial hatred is the only card Obama has left in the wake of his failed presidency.
Title: Bill Maher surprises-2
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 27, 2014, 06:17:47 PM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDFrNQAjDYA
Title: Neal Stephenson: Innovation Starvation
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 02, 2014, 04:23:51 PM

INNOVATION STARVATION
Neal Stephenson

MY LIFE SPAN ENCOMPASSES the era when the United States of America was capable of launching human beings into space. Some of my earliest memories are of sitting on a braided rug before a hulking black-and-white television, watching the early Gemini missions. In the summer of 2011, at the age of fifty-one—not even old—I watched on a flatscreen as the last space shuttle lifted off the pad. I have followed the dwindling of the space program with sadness, even bitterness. Where’s my donut-shaped space station? Where’s my ticket to Mars? Until recently, though, I have kept my feelings to myself. Space exploration has always had its detractors. To complain about its demise is to expose oneself to attack from those who have no sympathy that an affluent, middle-aged white American has not lived to see his boyhood fantasies fulfilled.
Still, I worry that our inability to match the achievements of the 1960s space program might be symptomatic of a general failure of our society to get big things done. My parents and grandparents witnessed the creation of the automobile, the airplane, nuclear energy, and the computer, to name only a few. Scientists and engineers who came of age during the first half of the twentieth century could look forward to building things that would solve age-old problems, transform the landscape, build the economy, and provide jobs for the burgeoning middle class that was the basis for our stable democracy.

The Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010 crystallized my feeling that we have lost our ability to get important things done. The OPEC oil shock was in 1973—almost forty years earlier. It was obvious then that it was crazy for the United States to let itself be held economic hostage to the kinds of countries where oil was being produced. It led to Jimmy Carter’s proposal for the development of an enormous synthetic fuels industry on American soil. Whatever one might think of the merits of the Carter presidency or of this particular proposal, it was, at least, a serious effort to come to grips with the problem.

Little has been heard in that vein since. We've been talking about wind farms, tidal power, and solar power for decades. Some progress has been made in those areas, but energy is still all about oil. In my city, Seattle, a thirty-five-year-old plan to run a light rail line across Lake Washington is now being blocked by a citizen initiative. Thwarted or endlessly delayed in its efforts to build things, the city plods ahead with a project to paint bicycle lanes on the pavement of thoroughfares.

In early 2011, I participated in a conference called Future Tense, where I lamented the decline of the manned space program, then pivoted to energy, indicating that the real issue isn’t about rockets. It’s our far broader inability as a society to execute on the big stuff. I had, through some kind of blind luck, struck a nerve. The audience at Future Tense was more confident than I that science fiction (SF) had relevance—even utility—in addressing the problem. I heard two theories as to why:

1. The Inspiration Theory. SF inspires people to choose science and engineering as careers. This much is undoubtedly true, and somewhat obvious.

2. The Hieroglyph Theory. Good SF supplies a plausible, fully thought-out picture of an alternate reality in which some sort of compelling innovation has taken place. A good SF universe has a coherence and internal logic that makes sense to scientists and engineers. Examples include Isaac Asimov’s robots, Robert Heinlein’s rocket ships, and William Gibson’s cyberspace. As Jim Karkanias of Microsoft Research puts it, such icons serve as hieroglyphs—simple, recognizable symbols on whose significance everyone agrees.

Researchers and engineers have found themselves concentrating on more and more narrowly focused topics as science and technology have become more complex. A large technology company or lab might employ hundreds or thousands of persons, each of whom can address only a thin slice of the overall problem. Communication among them can become a mare’s nest of e-mail threads and PowerPoints. The fondness that many such people have for SF reflects, in part, the usefulness of an overarching narrative that supplies them and their colleagues with a shared vision. Coordinating their efforts through a command-and-control management system is a little like trying to run a modern economy out of a politburo. Letting them work toward an agreed-on goal is something more like a free and largely self-coordinated market of ideas.

SPANNING THE AGES

SF has changed over the span of time I am talking about—from the 1950s (the era of the development of nuclear power, jet airplanes, the space race, and the computer) to now. Speaking broadly, the techno-optimism of the Golden Age of SF has given way to fiction written in a generally darker, more skeptical, and ambiguous tone. I myself have tended to write a lot about hackers—trickster archetypes who exploit the arcane capabilities of complex systems devised by faceless others.

Believing we have all the technology we’ll ever need, we seek to draw attention to its destructive side effects. This seems foolish now that we find ourselves saddled with technologies like Japan’s ramshackle 1960s-vintage reactors at Fukushima when we have the possibility of clean nuclear fusion on the horizon. The imperative to develop new technologies and implement them on a heroic scale no longer seems like the childish preoccupation of a few nerds with slide rules. It’s the only way for the human race to escape from its current predicaments. Too bad we’ve forgotten how to do it.

“You’re the ones who’ve been slacking off!” proclaims Michael Crow, president of Arizona State University (and one of the other speakers at Future Tense). He refers, of course, to SF writers. The scientists and engineers, he seems to be saying, are ready and looking for things to do. Time for the SF writers to start pulling their weight and supplying big visions that make sense. Hence the Hieroglyph project, an effort to produce an anthology of new SF that will be in some ways a conscious throwback to the practical techno-optimism of the Golden Age.

SPACEBORNE CIVILIZATIONS

China is frequently cited as a country now executing the big stuff, and there’s no doubt they are constructing dams, high-speed rail systems, and rockets at an extraordinary clip. But those are not fundamentally innovative. Their space program, like all other countries’ (including our own), is just parroting work that was done fifty years ago by the Soviets and the Americans. A truly innovative program would involve taking risks (and accepting failures) to pioneer some of the alternative space launch technologies that have been advanced by researchers all over the world during the decades dominated by rockets.

Imagine a factory mass-producing small vehicles, about as big and complicated as refrigerators, which roll off the end of an assembly line, are loaded with space-bound cargo and topped off with nonpolluting liquid hydrogen fuel, then are exposed to intense concentrated heat from an array of ground-based lasers or microwave antennas. Heated to temperatures beyond what can be achieved through a chemical reaction, the hydrogen erupts from a nozzle on the base of the device and sends it rocketing into the air. Tracked through its flight by the lasers or microwaves, the vehicle soars into orbit, carrying a larger payload for its size than a chemical rocket could ever manage, but the complexity, expense, and jobs remain grounded. For decades, this has been the vision of such researchers as physicists Jordin Kare and Kevin Parkin. A similar idea, using a pulsed ground-based laser to blast propellant from the backside of a space vehicle, was being talked about by Arthur Kantrowitz, Freeman Dyson, and other eminent physicists in the early 1960s.

If that sounds too complicated, then consider the 2003 proposal of Geoff Landis and Vincent Denis to construct a twenty-kilometer-high tower using simple steel trusses. Conventional rockets launched from its top would be able to carry twice as much payload as comparable ones launched from ground level. There is even abundant research, dating all the way back to Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the father of astronautics beginning in the late nineteenth century, to show that a simple tether—a long rope, tumbling end over end while orbiting Earth—could be used to scoop payloads out of the upper atmosphere and haul them up into orbit without the need for engines of any kind. Energy would be pumped into the system using an electrodynamic process with no moving parts.

All are promising ideas—just the sort that used to get an earlier generation of scientists and engineers fired up about actually building something.

But to grasp just how far our current mind-set is from being able to attempt innovation on such a scale, consider the fate of the space shuttle’s external tanks (ETs). Dwarfing the vehicle itself, the ET was the largest and most prominent feature of the space shuttle as it stood on the pad. It remained attached to the shuttle—or perhaps it makes as much sense to say that the shuttle remained attached to it—long after the two strap-on boosters had fallen away. The ET and the shuttle remained connected all the way out of the atmosphere and into space. Only after the system had attained orbital velocity was the tank jettisoned and allowed to fall into the atmosphere, where it was destroyed on reentry.

At a modest marginal cost, the ETs could have been kept in orbit indefinitely. The mass of the ET at separation, including residual propellants, was about twice that of the largest possible shuttle payload. Not destroying them would have roughly tripled the total mass launched into orbit by the shuttle. ETs could have been connected to build units that would have humbled today’s International Space Station. The residual oxygen and hydrogen sloshing around in them could have been combined to generate electricity and produce tons of water, a commodity that is vastly expensive and desirable in space. But in spite of hard work and passionate advocacy by space experts who wished to see the tanks put to use, NASA—for reasons both technical and political—sent each of them to fiery destruction in the atmosphere. Viewed as a parable, it has much to tell us about the difficulties of innovating in other spheres.

EXECUTING THE BIG STUFF

Innovation can’t happen without accepting the risk that it might fail. The vast and radical innovations of the mid-twentieth century took place in a world that, in retrospect, looks insanely dangerous and unstable. Possible outcomes that the modern mind identifies as serious risks might not have been taken seriously—supposing they were noticed at all—by people habituated to the Depression, the World Wars, and the Cold War, in times when seat belts, antibiotics, and many vaccines did not exist. Competition between the Western democracies and the communist powers obliged the former to push their scientists and engineers to the limits of what they could imagine and supplied a sort of safety net in the event that their initial efforts did not pay off. A grizzled NASA veteran once told me that the Apollo moon landings were communism’s greatest achievement.

In his book Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure, Tim Harford outlines Charles Darwin’s discovery of a vast array of distinct species in the Galapagos Islands—a state of affairs that contrasts with the picture seen on large continents, where evolutionary experiments tend to get pulled back toward a sort of ecological consensus by interbreeding. “Galapagan isolation” versus the “nervous corporate hierarchy” is the contrast staked out by Harford in assessing the ability of an organization to innovate.
Most people who work in corporations or academia have witnessed something like the following: A number of engineers are sitting together in a room, bouncing ideas off one another. Out of the discussion emerges a new concept that seems promising. Then some laptop-wielding person in the corner, having performed a quick Google search, announces that this “new” idea is, in fact, an old one—or at least vaguely similar—and has already been tried. Either it failed, or it succeeded. If it failed, then no manager who wants to keep his or her job will approve spending money trying to revive it. If it succeeded, then it’s patented and entry to the market is presumed to be unattainable, since the first people who thought of it will have “first-mover advantage” and will have created “barriers to entry.” The number of seemingly promising ideas that have been crushed in this way must be in the millions.

What if that person in the corner hadn’t been able to do a Google search? It might have required weeks of library research to uncover evidence that the idea wasn’t entirely new—and after a long and toilsome slog through many books, tracking down many references, some relevant, some not. When the precedent was finally unearthed, it might not have seemed like such a direct precedent after all. There might be reasons why it would be worth taking a second crack at the idea, perhaps hybridizing it with innovations from other fields. Hence the virtues of Galapagan isolation.

The counterpart to Galapagan isolation is the struggle for survival on a large continent, where firmly established ecosystems tend to blur and swamp new adaptations. Jaron Lanier, a computer scientist, composer, visual artist, and author of the book You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, has some insights about the unintended consequences of the Internet—the informational equivalent of a large continent—on our ability to take risks. In the pre-Net era, managers were forced to make decisions based on what they knew to be limited information. Today, by contrast, data flows to managers in real time from countless sources that could not even be imagined a couple of generations ago, and powerful computers process, organize, and display the data in ways that are as far beyond the hand-drawn graph-paper plots of my youth as modern video games are to tic-tac-toe. In a world where decision makers are so close to being omniscient, it’s easy to see risk as a quaint artifact of a primitive and dangerous past.

The illusion of eliminating uncertainty from corporate decision making is not merely a question of management style or personal preference. In the legal environment that has developed around publicly traded corporations, managers are strongly discouraged from shouldering any risks that they know about—or, in the opinion of some future jury, should have known about—even if they have a hunch that the gamble might pay off in the long run. There is no such thing as “long run” in industries driven by the next quarterly report. The possibility of some innovation making money is just that—a mere possibility that will not have time to materialize before the subpoenas from minority shareholder lawsuits begin to roll in.

Today’s belief in ineluctable certainty is the true innovation killer of our age. In this environment, the best an audacious manager can do is to develop small improvements to existing systems—climbing the hill, as it were, toward a local maximum, trimming fat, eking out the occasional tiny innovation—like city planners painting bicycle lanes on the streets as a gesture toward solving our energy problems. Any strategy that involves crossing a valley—accepting short-term losses to reach a higher hill in the distance—will soon be brought to a halt by the demands of a system that celebrates short-term gains and tolerates stagnation, but condemns anything else as failure. In short, a world where big stuff can never get done.
Title: Noonan: The New Bureaucratic Brazeness
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 03, 2014, 09:25:48 AM
The New Bureaucratic Brazenness
Official arrogance is the source of public cynicism.
By Peggy Noonan
Oct. 2, 2014 6:22 p.m. ET

We're all used to a certain amount of doublespeak and bureaucratese in government hearings. That's as old as forever. But in the past year of listening to testimony from government officials, there is something different about the boredom and indifference with which government testifiers skirt, dodge and withhold the truth. They don't seem furtive or defensive; they are not in the least afraid. They speak always with a certain carefulness—they are lawyered up—but they have no evident fear of looking evasive. They really don't care what you think of them. They're running the show and if you don't like it, too bad.

And all this is a new bureaucratic style on the national level. During Watergate those hauled in and grilled by Congress were nervous. In Iran-Contra, Olllie North was in turn stoic, defiant and unafraid to make an appeal to the public. But commissioners and department heads now—they really think they're in charge. They don't bother to fake anxiety about public opinion. They care only about personal legal exposure. They do not fear public wrath.

All this became apparent in the past year's IRS hearings, and was pronounced in Tuesday's Secret Service hearings.

Julia Pierson, the director, did not seem at all preoccupied with what you thought of her. She was impassive, generally unresponsive and unforthcoming. She didn't bother to show spirit or fiery commitment. She was the lifeless expression of consultant-guided anti-truth.

No question was answered straight and simple. Everything was convoluted and involved extraneous data, so that listeners couldn't follow the answer and by the end couldn't remember the question. I am certain government witnesses do this deliberately—the rounded words, long sentences that collapse, the bureaucratic drone—so reporters will fall asleep and fail to file. An hour in Tuesday I expected the TV camera to slowly slide toward the ceiling, with the screen covered in a cameraman's drool. "Mistakes were made." "Our security plan was not property executed." Yes, you could say that of a story in which a nut with a knife burst into the White House and ran around the ceremonial rooms. Ms. Pierson neglected to mention in her testimony the story that would break shortly after she finished: Secret Service agents in Atlanta a few weeks before had allowed on to an elevator carrying the president a private security man, who reportedly jumped around taking pictures and was later found to be carrying a gun.

Ms. Pierson resigned after bad reviews of her performance. That's a tragedy in the sense it's tragic she wasn't fired.

But does anybody in the government feel it is necessary to be truthful about anything anymore? Does anyone in the federal government ever think about concepts like "taxpayers" and "citizens" and their "right to know"?

Everything sounds like propaganda. That will happen when government becomes too huge, too present and all-encompassing. Everything almost every level of government says now has the terrible, insincere, lying sound of The Official Line, which no one on the inside, or outside, believes. The other day, during the big Centers for Disease Control news conference on the Dallas Ebola case, a man from one of the health agencies insisted in burly (and somehow self-satisfied) tones that the nation's health is his group's No. 1 priority. And I thought, just like a normal person, "No, your No. 1 priority is to forestall a sense of panic. To do that you'll say what you need to say. Your second priority, connected to the first, is to assert the excellence and competence of the agency with which you are associated. Your third priority is to keep the public safe."

Everyone who spoke was very smooth. "I think 'handful' is the right characterization," said the CDC director to a Wall Street Journal reporter who asked if the sick man had contact with others before he was hospitalized. (That became "up to 100" the next day.) The officials were relentlessly modern-bureaucratic in their language. They have involved all "stakeholders."

Was the sick man an American or a foreign national? "The individual was here to visit family." Oh. The speaker's tone implied he'll tell us more down the road if he decides we can handle it.

What about those who traveled on the same plane as the man, and which flight was it? "Ebola is a virus. It's easy to kill if you wash your hands," said CDC chief Thomas Frieden . You are only infectious once you are sick, not before.

Ebola will not, all agreed, produce a full-fledged American epidemic. "We are stopping it in its tracks in this country," Dr. Frieden said.

That may be true. But nobody thinks it because government doctors and professionals said it. Americans do not have confidence in what The Officials tell them anymore.

This is not only because we live in a cynical age. In this case it's because people know the truth always contains uncomfortable elements, and in the CDC news conference very few uncomfortable elements were allowed.

They say the only thing you have to fear is personal contact, but they shy away from clearly defining personal contact. They suggest it has to do with bodily fluids, so you immediately think of the man sneezing next to you on the train. They do not want to discuss the man sneezing next to you on the train.

They did not want to discuss who the sick man was, his nationality, exactly what flight he came in on. They are good to their global masters! Sorry, just reacting like a normal person. There was a persistent sense the professionals had agreed to be chary with information that might alarm America's peasants and make them violent.

We are locked in some loop where the public figure knows what he must pronounce to achieve his agenda, and the public knows what he must pronounce to achieve his agenda, and we all accept what is being said while at the same time everyone sees right through it. The public figure literally says, "Prepare my talking points," and the public says, "He's just reading talking points." It leaves everyone feeling compromised. Public officials gripe they can't break through the cynicism. They cause the cynicism.

The only people who seem to tell the truth now are the people inside the agencies who become whistleblowers. They call a news organization, get on the phone with a congressman's staff. That's basically how the Veterans Affairs and Secret Service scandals broke: Desperate people who couldn't take the corruption dropped a dime. What does it say about a great nation when its most reliable truth tellers are desperate people?

Sometimes it looks as if everyone in public life is in showbiz, only showbiz with impermeable employee protections. Lois Lerner of IRS fame planted the question, told the lie, took the Fifth, lost the emails and stonewalled. Her punishment for all this was a $100,000-a-year pension for the rest of her life. Imagine how frightened she was. I wonder what the Secret Service head's pension will be?

A nation can't continue to be vibrant and healthy when the government controls more and more, and yet no one trusts a thing the government says. It's hard to keep going that way.
Title: Camille Paglia
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 05, 2014, 01:07:56 PM


http://time.com/3444749/camille-paglia-the-modern-campus-cannot-comprehend-evil/
Title: Re: Political Rants & conjecture
Post by: MikeT on October 13, 2014, 10:38:29 AM
Pentagon preps for 'war' on global warming....


http://www.latimes.com/world/mexico-americas/la-fg-hagel-climate-change-20141013-story.html

Ok, why I am posting this here: because this is complete hyperbole and conjecture on my part...  

A couple of months ago, I read about a war game developed by the army for a potential 'zombie apocalypse.'

My first thought was of course, 'hoax'.  But I looked it up and its real. The report itself basically says 'hey, this is just for a lark' in the introduction.  I recall that it was (from memory)  somebody's war college thesis or something.  But, in essence it was a plan for the implementation of martial law in the event of a widespread biological outbreak.  At the time I remember thinkoing:  it doesn't take a rocket scientist to either ask the question:  does the US Army war college really ever do ANYTHING 'on a lark'?, and b) to conclude that it's a pretty easy thing to mentally 'find and and replace' the farcical 'zombie apocalypse' with 'Ebola apocalypse', 'EMP apocalypse', 'economic apocalypse' and etc.  That's the impression I was left with anyway. 

Accordingly, what with everything that's going on in the world right now, when I saw this report today and was like 'really?!!!', I was suddenly struck by the admittedly quite paranoid possibility of asking huh,'what if global warming' (in the context of military preparedness) was just one big straw man?

Seems to me it would draw a lot less attention to say that 'the Pentagon is preparing for this [unlikely] event that most people think won't even happen' than 'the Pentagon is preparing for worldwide destabilization resulting from threat X that people see as being much more likely'.

That, or the idiots really are driving the bus. Presented with this alleged fact (the Pentagon's preparedness for GW), I don't really see other alternatives...?
Title: Ingraham: Obama done
Post by: ccp on October 21, 2014, 04:29:03 PM
Oh really?  (This woman is definitely from Venus.)  Think again.  He will do grave damage to this country for 26 more months.  Then we have Hillary to contend with.  And the rest of the left machine.
We didn't even win midterms yet.  And even if we do we can't stop what he is about to do to us.  Yup.  He screwed this country over good.

***seen on Fox and Friends

President Obama told Al Sharpton's radio show that Democrats who are avoiding him before the midterm elections actually do support his agenda.

“The bottom line though is, these are all folks who vote with me, they have supported my agenda in Congress. ... This isn’t about my feelings being hurt, these are folks who are strong allies and supporters of me,” said Obama, citing agreements with these candidates on issues like the minimum wage, fair pay, infrastructure spending and early childhood education.

"I tell them, I said you know what, you do what you need to win. I will be responsible for making sure that our voters turn out."

The comments come after the president said that his policies are on the ballot on Election Day.

Laura Ingraham rejected Obama's comment about his feelings, arguing "it is all about his feelings being hurt."

She said the president can't get over the fact that he's "finished" and that his policies have failed.
Title: By law no one can stop him it appears
Post by: ccp on October 21, 2014, 04:45:34 PM
Again what planet is Ingraham from?  Obama done?  Why, he is just starting.  Who is going to stop him?  A coup of Treasury agents?   The MSM?   Hollywood?  Silicon Valley?  Wall Street?  The hapless and truly helpless Republicans? 

****Obama to Unilaterally Admit 100,000 Haitians Without Congress

By: Daniel Horowitz

October 20th, 2014

While Republicans are playing defense on immigration – curled up in the fetal position waiting for the transformational executive amnesty – Obama is already issuing “smaller” unilateral immigration edicts to the detriment of the country. 

As noted before, Obama has already issued several executive orders expanding immigration or implementing incremental amnesty since Congress left town to hit the campaign trail.  This time, he plans to admit 100,000 more impoverished immigrants from Haiti without input from Congress.

At a time when hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants from Central America - which has demonstrated public health concerns - that will place additional burden on our already overextended welfare system are being dispersed throughout our country, Obama’s Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson announced on Friday that they will extend the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Honduras and Nicaragua.  On the same day, DHS announced that it would expand chain migration from Haiti with the Haitian Family Reunification Parole (HFRP), allowing as many as 100,000 more Haitians into the country beginning next year.




Obama is exploiting the generosity of our nation’s citizens and taking it to suicidal levels – all for his personal agenda of remaking America.


This is yet another example of Obama putting the priorities of Americans last by opening our doors to the third-world at a time when we have record legal and illegal immigration from some of these countries.  Obama is exploiting the generosity of our nation’s citizens and taking it to suicidal levels – all for his personal agenda of remaking America. 

Long before the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, we opened our doors to this very poor and uneducated country.  According to the 2013 American Community Survey of the Census Bureau, we have almost 600,000 immigrants from Haiti.  We’ve given out roughly 169,000 green cards to Haitian nationals since 2007, based on a quick glance of the most recent DHS yearbook on immigration.  Remember this is a tiny country with a population just under 10 million. 

Americans have been extremely generous to impoverished countries, particularly those from Latin America.  Americans have always pitched in with charity and adoptions more than any other country in the world.   And yes, we have opened our immigration system to these countries over the past few decades like never before.  Now, Obama is taking that generosity and categorically expanding it across the board so that the remaining relatives of those recipients of our generosity can come here – without any regard for their qualifications.   

Section 212(a)(4) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) clearly states that barring temporary, catastrophic situations, immigrants must be assessed on a case-by-case basis to ensure that they do not become a public charge.


(B) Factors to be taken into account.- (i) In determining whether an alien is excludable under this paragraph, the consular officer or the Attorney General shall at a minimum consider the alien’s-


As we all know, Haiti is one of the poorest countries in the world. More than 50% of the population is illiterate. According to the Center for Immigration Studies, Haiti and Honduras are among the countries from which the immigrant population has the lowest rate of entrepreneurship.

They [Republicans] must use all their leverage, including the budget process, during the lame duck session to execute their first duty: protecting Americans first.
Temporary Protective Status and parole were only designed for a case-by-case basis for urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit.  Categorically importing the third-world, especially given our current situation, certainly does not constitute a significant public benefit and it definitely is not being done on a case-by-case basis.  Something this consequential must certainly not be done without the input from the American people through their elected representatives.

Contrast the current leadership under Obama and situation with the past. During a speech before a group of newly-arrived immigrants in 1924, President Calvin Coolidge asserted a basic premise supported by both political parties: “As a nation, our first duty must be those who are already our inhabitants, whether native or immigrants.”

Between Obama’s continued unilateral acts breaking our immigration system, his backward policy with the threat of infectious diseases, and his incoherent policy dealing with the threat from Islamic terror, it’s time for House Republicans to reconvene in an emergency session of Congress. They must use all their leverage, including the budget process, during the lame duck session to execute their first duty: protecting Americans first.

Title: Questions surround Lewinsky's Return
Post by: ccp on October 23, 2014, 08:44:50 AM
It really is remarkable how as far as I can tell there is no mention of self responsibility or blame of Clinton or Hillary.  Just bash the Drudgereport.  And then turn it around to a politically correct agenda about online bullying...... :x;  Just remarkable.  And the left wingers scoop it right up.

*****Questions surround Lewinsky's return
    
 By Kevin Cirilli - 10/23/14 06:00 AM EDT

Monica Lewinsky is back — and this time she has a cause.

The woman who became a punch line for sexual encounters with Bill Clinton is returning to the spotlight after more than a decade, hoping to become an advocate for ending bullying online.



ADVERTISEMENT

While her speech on the topic in Philadelphia drew a standing ovation, it remains to be seen whether Lewinsky can escape her past — and the politics of being “that woman” — to help end what she calls a “culture of humiliation.”

Vanity Fair, which hired Lewinsky as a contributor, said the response to her first foray into public advocacy has been “very positive.”

"Even [liberal comedian] Bill Maher said, 'I was very moved by it,'" said Vanity Fair spokeswoman Beth Kseniak.

Lewinsky, who declined comment through a representative, said one of the “principal reasons” she decided to break her silence was the 2010 death of Tyler Clementi, a Rutgers University student who committed suicide after intimate pictures of him were posted online to humiliate him and "expose" him as being gay.

"While it touched us both, my mother was unusually upset by the story and I wondered why," Lewinsky said in her speech. "Eventually it dawned on me: she was back in 1998, back to a time when I was periodically suicidal; when she might very easily have lost me; when I, too, might have been humiliated to death."

Lewinsky specifically mentioned The Tyler Clementi Foundation in her speech, providing a boom of publicity for the organization that his parents started.

"We're very appreciative she'd mention our foundation and our work," Clementi's mother Jane said in an interview with The Hill.

Jane Clementi said a "mutual friend" introduced her to Lewinsky after her first Vanity Fair column, and the two discussed her son.

"She shared with us how Tyler's story impacted her and her mom," Clementi said.

Some advocates say they do not want Lewinsky to become the face of the anti-bullying movement.

StopCyberbullying founder Parry Aftab said Lewinsky's involvement would "set back" their efforts.

"I find it a bit insulting to the people who have been cyber bullied to have Monica Lewinsky step out and say she's the poster-child for cyber bullying," said Aftab, whose nonprofit is organized in 76 countries and began in 1995.

Aftab said that Lewinsky's baggage would take attention away from the main issue.

"Look at her interviews — it's all about Monica," Aftab said. "She's setting us back years. She doesn't know what she's talking about."

Aftab argued that Lewinsky wasn't cyber bullied after her affair with Clinton was exposed by the Drudge Report, a conservative website, because she became "a public figure and it was newsworthy."

While StopCyberbullying has sought to appeal to young people by working with MTV, the Spiderman comic book series and celebrities such as Nick Lachey and Victoria Justice, Aftab said the group has no interest in working with Lewinsky.

"One of the housewives from 'Real Housewives of Orange County' came to us the other week — I don't even remember her name," Aftab said. "We said, 'No.' These people just want the publicity."

Forbes editor Randall Lane, who helped organize the Philadelphia event and book Lewinsky’s appearance, disagreed, arguing that Lewinsky has the “ultimate point of view” on cyber bullying from having experienced it “first hand.”

"There's not a single person in this age group — the first generation to grow up with the Internet — that hasn't either been cyber bullied or know someone who has," Lane said. "They innately get what she's talking about."

"Also, she made a mistake in her 20s that will haunt her for the rest of her life — that resonates, too."

The Clementi Foundation says Lewinsky’s advocacy is helping them reinvigorate the national debate on cyber bullying and share Tyler's story.

"Unfortunately, most people only think about Tyler's final hours," Clementi's mother Jane said. "That's sad because that's so not Tyler. He was a sweet, kind, caring, giving and thoughtful person.”

"In a moment of despair, he didn't find the right answer," she said. "This is all outside of my world — it's not what I'm used to, but there's an importance in sharing someone's story and starting a conversation."

But can Lewinsky help?

"I believe that she can," Clementi said. "If Tyler could see the impact he's had — I think it'd be overwhelming and amazing for him."

— This report was updated at 8:37 a.m.
Title: Newt: Who saw this coming?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 29, 2014, 08:32:59 PM
Things You Wouldn’t Have Believed About President Obama and the 2014 Election

Think back six years to the day President Obama was elected. Tens of thousands gathered in Grant Park in Chicago. There was cheering in the streets across the country. Commentators were breathless and tearful. The president-elect gave an excellent speech. Most Americans exulted at Hope and Change.

Imagine if someone had told you that night that within six years, the man just elected president would have:

Pivoted from a campaign theme of unity to a habit of insinuating Americans who opposed his policies were racists, sexists, classists, or bigots.

Run one of the most divisive reelection campaigns in recent memory on a theme of class warfare.

Lost the Massachusetts Senate seat formerly held by Ted Kennedy to a Republican with health care as the issue.

Driven approval of the Democratic Party to its lowest point in 30 years, with Republicans on the verge of their largest majority in the House in more than half a century.

Allowed western Iraq, then a story of hard-earned recovery, to fall into the hands of a terrorist organization more extreme than Al Qaeda that would declare it had reestablished the caliphate.

Allowed Vladimir Putin to invade and annex a large territory of a major European country.

Done nothing when Russian militants shot down a civilian airliner flying over Europe.

Declared as a "red line" the use of chemical weapons in Syria and then done nothing when it was crossed.

Abandoned several longstanding U.S. allies in the Middle East in favor of Islamist agitators--allowing Egypt, a tourist destination in 2009, to fall into the hands of the Muslim Brotherhood and Libya to fall into the hands of terrorists.

Entered negotiations with Iran that did not require Iran to halt its nuclear weapons program.

Caused a humanitarian crisis with a flood of immigrant children on our border, who came here because the President promised not to send them home and declared his intention to grant amnesty by executive order.

Told the American people a Soviet-style lie about this crisis, saying the children on the border suddenly came to the U.S. because of violence which had been going on in Central America for years (a lie which the media accepted with barely a comment).

Signed a law reorganizing the country's health care system despite the fact that neither he nor a single person who voted for it had read it.

Passed his health care law supposedly to achieve universal coverage, only to have roughly as many people uninsured 5 years later.

Caused millions of Americans to have their health insurance plans canceled, after promising repeatedly they could keep them.

Caused premiums to increase by 100% in Delaware, 90% in New Hampshire, 54% in Indiana, 53% in California -- the list goes on.
Spent $2 billion on a health care website that became a national embarrassment.

Assured Americans Ebola would not spread to the United States, weeks before it did.

Insisted all employers provide free contraception to their employees, even over their religious objections.

Won the Nobel Peace Prize while waging two wars and killing hundreds of civilians a year with drones.

Allowed the U.S. to spend four years (and counting) without the capability to send its astronauts into space, forcing us to rely on Putin’s Russia for access to space.
Characterized supporting a traditional definition of marriage (as he did when he was elected) as divisive and discriminatory.

Spent weeks misleadingly characterizing a premeditated terrorist attack that killed the U.S. ambassador to Libya as a spontaneous protest, apparently for political reasons.

Brushed off extensive evidence that senior IRS officials targeted his political opponents, calling it the work of "two dilberts in Cincinnati" which involved "not a smidgen of corruption."

Overseen an IRS that mysteriously lost the hard drives and backups of up to 20 IRS employees at the center of the targeting scandal.

Tolerated damaging national security leaks that cast him in a favorable light.

Placed a respected Fox News reporter under criminal investigation for his story about North Korean nuclear tests.

Employed for years an Attorney General who was held in contempt of Congress for refusing turn over evidence about his knowledge of a program that resulted in the death of a
border patrol agent, and who lied under oath about the DOJ snooping on phone records of AP reporters.

If someone had looked into a crystal ball and made any one of these predictions in isolation, you probably would not have believed it. If you had been read the entire list, you would have concluded that President Obama turned out to be the exact opposite of what Candidate Obama promised--and you would have understood why Democrats would be in such a precarious position heading into election day 2014.

Your Friend,
Newt
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: DougMacG on October 30, 2014, 08:11:23 AM
That is quite a post by Newt from Crafty.  Really it's sad that it's so easy to find fault with this President.  I failed to comprehend then or now what voters saw in him.  I think we nailed it here on the forum, that he was (intentionally) a blank slate where the voter could imagine him as their own wish list.  He was against gay marriage but those with that interest knew that he was not against it, just needed to say that to get elected.  He was for getting past racial divisions but he would still exploit them enough to win and advance an agenda.  He was against war but presumed to be smart enough to not let the world go to hell.  Whoops.  He opposed and dismantled all the precepts of growth economics but people believed the economy would magically grow anyway.  It didn't.

What should come out of this is that we learn from and focus on the failure of these policies rather than of the failures of this one man who is leaving office anyway.

We could learn (again) that peace comes through strength and deterrence, not through wishful thinking.  Economic growth comes from a foundation of economic policies that support growth, not from one that attacks vital components of the economy like energy and investment.  We get past racial divisions by adopting racial blindness, where we look past color into character *Who said that?), not from expecting people to vote for you because of color.  We get the best healthcare when we have a say in our own choices and decisions, not decries from far away bureaucracies.  
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on October 30, 2014, 08:30:48 AM
"What needs to come out of this is that we learn more from the failure of the policies than the failures of this man"

Well said and in my opinion the key challenge confronting those of us on the right.  The left will NEVER admit to failure of policy.  They will only make excuses and blame the messenger or his political adversaries as being this diabolical evil entity that fights back their glorious agenda.  That is their self identity.  Their narcissism.  They believe in  a perfect fair and equitable world.  Just believing this and voting for party the deceptively pretends to champion this they think they are better, smarter, more righteous than the rest of us.  It absolves them of all sins.  They are GOOD.  We are EVIL.  They are the Democrats.  The Schultz's  (from my other post).

Like liberal aunt asks me when I explain why I am a Conservative, "what about the poor".   My response is why cannot the poor take care of themselves.  Who is stopping them?
She looked at me with an aghast look as though I am heartless.  I said your answer to everything is more government more tax.  Why is it my job to support those who make it a lifetime of being poor despite many programs already in place to help them?

No answer.  Just left with the her thoughts that she is for the poor and I am heartless.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: DougMacG on October 30, 2014, 08:54:13 AM
Like liberal aunt asks me when I explain why I am a Conservative, "what about the poor".   My response is why cannot the poor take care of themselves.  Who is stopping them?
She looked at me with an aghast look as though I am heartless.  I said your answer to everything is more government more tax.  Why is it my job to support those who make it a lifetime of being poor despite many programs already in place to help them?

No answer.  Just left with the her thoughts that she is for the poor and I am heartless.

She asks a great and serious question.  We need to answer it better. 
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on October 30, 2014, 09:40:17 AM
Doug,

You and I both know that overall trickle down will work better than trickle up.  Yet the widened gap between rich and poor does give the enemy ammo that enriching bankers while everyone in the middle stagnates and those at the bottom do worse as a counterargument.

I still think the right has to do better with the concept of leveling the playing field.

As one who is a big victim of those without scruples and with access to influence and money I know full well how hard work and talent can be thwarted and robbed.

That said one idea the concept of leveling taxes to a falt rate.  I prefer one rate for everyone without deductions including all economic rungs.  Since the left will seize upon this to say this hurts the poor the most I would be willing to compromise for two rates.  Not a zero one but a lower and a higher one.

Republicans can do more to reach out to minorities and promoting them to positions of political power within our party (as obviously they are doing).

Would a minority rather be a member that promotes the welfare state or a member that promotes everyone has chances and opportunity to share in the American Dream.

Of course these are only a sampling of ideas (surely not new).

It would be highly ironic if the first Black President germinated the first real minority movement away from the Democrat party.  That is from within the urban areas and not just religious minorities.

In '08 Obama stated the way we were was not working.  Instead many are (finally) waking up to the fact this his way is the old way and already proven wrong.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: DougMacG on October 30, 2014, 11:49:59 AM
"Doug, You and I both know that overall trickle down will work better than trickle up. "

   -  ccp, Trickle down was a misnomer.  We didn't give money to the rich hoping they would spread it around and some might get to the poor and middle class, as alleged.  We sometimes allowed people (including the rich) to keep part of what the earned, because it is the right thing to do.  Yes, producers tend to invest, grow businesses, build factories, hire people etc. and that is good too.

"Yet the widened gap between rich and poor does give the enemy ammo that enriching bankers while everyone in the middle stagnates and those at the bottom do worse as a counterargument."

    - Income inequality got worse under liberal-progressive policies.  We need to promise to do what is right and articulate it MUCH better.

"I still think the right has to do better with the concept of leveling the playing field."

    - Agree.  Social spending should be aimed at helping those who can lift themselves up and out of the need for assistance.  Not mentioned in your response to your liberal aunt, we DO support a good safety net for those truly in need.  It should be part government, part charity and it will be much better funded in the long run if we have a healthy, prosperous economy than it is in a sinking ship.

"As one who is a big victim of those without scruples and with access to influence and money I know full well how hard work and talent can be thwarted and robbed."

    - These crimes and so many others are already against the law.   Setting up a system where less influence is peddled is a start and enforcing laws already on the books is a must.  Rand Paul sends the opposite message when he says, let people out who committed only non-violent crimes.  Maybe some financial crimes could be paid back with something like three-fold damages instead of time served, but as you suggest, the perception of tolerance for white collar BS is part of our political problem, even while it seems to be Dems committing most of it.

"That said one idea the concept of leveling taxes to a flat rate.  I prefer one rate for everyone without deductions including all economic rungs.  Since the left will seize upon this to say this hurts the poor the most I would be willing to compromise for two rates.  Not a zero one but a lower and a higher one."

    - Agree!  There should be a minimum and a maximum tax rate based on efficiency and moral principles, and the only deductions should be the expenses incurred generating the income.  Tax capital gain same as ordinary income, but allow a subtraction for the inflationary component of the income at the same CPI adjustment rate that we use for social security.  Move corporate tax rates down from highest in the world to within the lower one-third of OECD countries, our economic competitors, and let companies operate where they want around the world.

"Republicans can do more to reach out to minorities and promoting them to positions of political power within our party (as obviously they are doing)."

    - Yes!  Reach out by treating them like people, not interest groups.
...
"It would be highly ironic if the first Black President germinated the first real minority movement away from the Democrat party.  That is from within the urban areas and not just religious minorities. "

    - That would be the logical reaction to what we learned from the effects of these policies.  They might also be tired of the pandering, pressuring, guilting, etc. in exchange for nothing but being stuck in bad place.

"In '08 Obama stated the way we were was not working.  Instead many are (finally) waking up to the fact this his way is the old way and already proven wrong."
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: G M on October 30, 2014, 02:38:13 PM
"What needs to come out of this is that we learn more from the failure of the policies than the failures of this man"

Well said and in my opinion the key challenge confronting those of us on the right.  The left will NEVER admit to failure of policy.  They will only make excuses and blame the messenger or his political adversaries as being this diabolical evil entity that fights back their glorious agenda.  That is their self identity.  Their narcissism.  They believe in  a perfect fair and equitable world.  Just believing this and voting for party the deceptively pretends to champion this they think they are better, smarter, more righteous than the rest of us.  It absolves them of all sins.  They are GOOD.  We are EVIL.  They are the Democrats.  The Schultz's  (from my other post).

Like liberal aunt asks me when I explain why I am a Conservative, "what about the poor".   My response is why cannot the poor take care of themselves.  Who is stopping them?
She looked at me with an aghast look as though I am heartless.  I said your answer to everything is more government more tax.  Why is it my job to support those who make it a lifetime of being poor despite many programs already in place to help them?

No answer.  Just left with the her thoughts that she is for the poor and I am heartless.

Capitalism is the greatest mechanism ever invented to raise people out of poverty.
Title: Pointman: Live and Let Live, but in Fear
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 30, 2014, 07:19:19 PM
 
Live and let live, but in fear.
by Pointman

This article is about terrorism, more specifically terrorism and its impact on the people and democracies of the developed world. It's time for some direct talking, not to the terrorists because they're beyond reason, but to the ordinary person who is their target.

I've heard on more than one occasion that the reason a few hundred thousand Britons could rule over the huge population of India in the heyday of the British Empire, was that they never interfered with the local culture or religion, and indeed even went native themselves in subtle ways.

That's a fundamentally erroneous idea springing from a basic ignorance of historical fact and reinforced by the residual feel-good attitudes of that failed experiment we called multiculturalism. If they found a local practice repugnant according to their own moral code, they outlawed it and simply hung or imprisoned anyone who persisted in doing it.
For example, the practice of Suttee involved the voluntary or sometimes involuntary burning of widows atop their husband's funeral pyre. They outlawed it. Another example would be them annihilating the Thuggee sect, who believed the people they strangled were sacrifices to placate the death goddess Kali. Anybody who aided or abetted those activities risked the hangman's noose, and that's why both the practise of Suttee and the cult of the Thuggees died out in India.

So, if you're the boss of the country and some small section of people in it are indulging in a practise you find deeply offensive, you have the right to forbid them from doing it and punish them if they persist. Stating that in an unvarnished way, it's your country and they do as you tell them or they suffer or get out of it. That's always been the rule, despite what some deluded people might have come to think in recent decades.

There are some stark realities in the coming years that various parties are going to have to face up to whether they like it or not, because as always, times change and you have to respond realistically to those new circumstances or accept being at the mercy of them.

The first one is we have to concede that the western attitude of live and let live without interfering in the lives of minorities is no longer viable when a terrorism threat is originating from that area and killing ordinary people. If ruling liberal elites continue to act as if there's no problem and consequently hamstring efforts by the police and security services to go after it and root it out, then after enough deaths they'll be forced to take the more draconian action demanded by their frightened electorates.

There is somehow an implicit assumption that terrorism only poses a threat to America, it's their problem and everyone else can relax. Don't kid yourself, whatever country you live in, no matter how enlightened you feel it is, you're under threat too; it's just a matter of time. After 9/11 in New York, 7/7 in London, the Madrid bombings and most recently the tragic murders in Canada, attitudes had to change. On every one of those occasions, people were genuinely shocked that it could be happening in their country, and was even being done by born and bred nationals of those countries.

What compounded the shock was that the then fashionable idea of multiculturalism had engendered the idea that being part of a minority made one good and above criticism. If you dared to disapprove of any aspect of their culture, you were automatically howled down as a bigot or even worse, a racist. Knowing they could operate under this cloak of virtual invulnerability, extremist sections within these communities relied on it to radicalise, recruit and train followers to carry out acts of terrorism. They did exactly that and we're now looking at the results of it; an enemy within.

Even the criminal element within those communities used this get out of jail free card to their advantage. For instance, the recent conviction of a large gang of Asian men in the UK who'd been sex trafficking white girls and boys for over a decade, did so with the police and social services turning a blind eye because they feared the race card would be played if they intervened. There was a different law being applied or not, dependent on nothing more than a person's colour or ethnicity. It was the children who suffered.
To quote Angela Merkel, multiculturalism failed "utterly" but the effects of that failure live on. The Chairman of the UK Commission for Racial Equality, said that the end result of multiculturalism was ghettoisation. I'd agree with that assessment though perhaps by a different line of reasoning outlined in a previous article. The attitude of live and let live combined with the natural opacity of what's going on in a ghetto, allowed the threat to grow unseen until it was far too late.

Even when the murderous threat materialised, certain sections of the liberal intelligentsia and media, after a suitable silence of a week or two, had the temerity to voice the opinion that in reality it was somehow all our fault for being oppressors of some or other minority. That's coming at you Canada. It's not just that they're divorced from reality of common opinion, but that they just cannot let go of that idea that being any sort of minority automatically makes you better than one of the local natives, whom to be frank they despise anyway.

That sort of attitude, while of course permissible in a democracy, plays into the hands of terrorists because terrorism does work on occasion, despite what we like to think. For instance, Spain in the immediate aftermath of the Madrid bombings withdrew what few troops it had deployed in the gulf. The intimidation worked and Spain by giving in to it, has put their citizens even further into harm's way. If some gang of terrorists wants to change Spanish government policy, just explode a few more bombs there. That's why we should never give in to terrorism, because in essence it's a transfer of power from an elected government to a few murderous thugs.

Terrorism combined with the residual delusions of multiculturalism even works to inhibit or suppress pointed comment in various forums. One of the strongest weapons we have against totalitarianism and extremism is to point out its inconsistencies using humour, and yet I've never heard a stand up comedian having a go at radical Islam. They're happy to constantly denigrate Christianity or Judaism because they're safe targets, but stay well away from the Muslims or they might suffer the death threats of that cartoonist in Denmark. There is an urban legend of an Aussie comedian who has a go but if so, he seems to be unique. If you feel too scared to laugh at them, then that's a big win for the terrorists.

There are equally pressing issues thrown up by terrorism for people who are members of minority communities who rightly or wrongly are being associated with their atrocities.
The major one is that the religion of Islam has been hijacked by the terrorists who use an obscene interpretation of it as justification for their outrages. For better or worse, people now talk about Muslim terrorists not extreme Muslim terrorists. Living in an environment of distrust and fear of any minority generates a simple view of the world, uncomplicated by such nice distinctions. Perception trumps fact every time and the only way of changing that perception is to demonstrate what a marginal influence extremists have in your communities.

A measured denunciation by some obscure imam in the wake of the latest mass atrocity just isn't making the grade. It merely reinforces the paranoid idea that the terrorists are just some deniable military arm advancing some hidden agenda of your community. That's neither fair nor true but that's the perception. You have to start actively preaching out against these people, rooting them out of positions of influence and yes, rendering to the police and security services all the help they need to combat such elements who injure us all. A bomb on a crowded bus or railway carriage doesn't stop to consider the religious persuasion of the passengers, whether Muslim or not.

Terrorism has changed the world for you too. Instead of the majority needing to be ultra sensitive to your cultural needs, the position has been reversed and you now have to be sensitive to their needs, because their attitudes and tolerance towards minorities have worn pretty thin. Things like lobbying hard to get a mosque built right next to the Twin Towers site was the worst sort of insult to the memory of two thousand slaughtered innocents, no matter what religious sophistry was being used to justify it.

To the terrorists, I'd say you've had all your cheap hits. Things are tougher for you now. The assumption that the apparently lax attitudes of democracies meant we were weak and a pushover will yet again prove to be baseless. We're not only on guard against you but we've got good men actively hunting you. You'd be surprised at how ruthless we can be to defend our freedoms, so you better be prepared to be dragged out of some hole for nothing better than a bullet between your eyes. If that means we're prepared to trade down an element of our personal freedom, so be it.

We all lost something in the fire.

On the day the planes hit the twin towers, a younger brother of mine was a lecturer in socialist economics. He stood and watched in the campus of a university in central London rich fee-paying Arabic students of his dancing around in joy of what was happening. That not only showed him how much he didn't really know what was their mindset but killed forever the unconditional live and let live ethos of his liberal politics which had always divided us.

On the day the planes hit the twin towers, I was managing a team at Canary Wharf, the financial centre of London. There was a rumour that a London bound plane nobody could get in touch with was heading in our direction. The top management were patently doing nothing more than denial and displacement activity with their thumb up their arse and in the meantime everyone should stand by their desk and await further orders, so I told my crew to go home. That's the duty of care. Nobody moved so for the first time ever I ordered them to just get the fuck out of there in a loud enough voice for other people to hear. They moved. What the rest did, I don't know.

When I was sure they'd all gone, I retired to a local bar and watched helplessly the tragedy unfold on television. I was joined by a friend who'd also told his team to go home but who also couldn't leave the vicinity because helping hands might just be needed if it all came down. He asked me what I was thinking and in an unguarded moment of anger I spoke what was on my mind. Three things. I told him it was a massive intelligence failure, a brilliant operation from their perspective and we'd kill their arse for doing it. All three were true.

Take a look at the picture heading up this piece. Take a really hard look. There's five men carrying another injured one in a chair because there's nothing like a stretcher available. They're getting him to safety. In the ordinary way of things, it should only take two or three at most to carry that weight but they're working in an atmosphere of choking cement dust which makes breathing almost impossible. None of them are looking to each other for support because each one of them is fighting their own individual battle against their own clogged lungs to get that injured man out of there.

I don't know whether the man they were carrying made it or not, and I do hope he did, but what I'm damn sure of is that every one of those men who got him to safety turned around and went straight back into that hell to save anyone else who'd survived the attack.

They're exactly why I know we're going to beat the terrorists.
©Pointman

Related articles by Pointman:
Why Multiculturalism failed.
The times they are a changing and a righteous kill.
Click for a list of other articles.
Title: Prager: The Tactics of the Left
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 04, 2014, 08:40:08 AM
http://www.dennisprager.com/lefts-tactics-personal-example/
Title: The Democrat Civil War Has Begun...
Post by: objectivist1 on November 06, 2014, 04:01:37 AM
The Democratic Party’s Civil War Is Here

Posted By Daniel Greenfield On November 6, 2014 @ frontpagemag.com

There are really two Democratic parties.

One is the old corrupt party of thieves and crooks. Its politicians, black and white, are the products of political machines. They believe in absolutely nothing. They can go from being Dixiecrats to crying racism, from running on family values to pushing gay marriage and the War on Women.

They will say absolutely anything to get elected.

Cunning, but not bright, they are able campaigners. Reformers underestimate them at their own peril because they are determined to win at all costs.

The other Democratic Party is progressive. Its members are radical leftists working within the system. They are natural technocrats and their agendas are full of big projects. They function as community organizers, radicalizing and transforming neighborhoods, cities, states and even the country.

They want to win, but it’s a subset of their bigger agenda. Their goal is to transform the country. If they can do that by winning elections, they’ll win them. But if they can’t, they’ll still follow their agenda.

Sometimes the two Democratic parties blend together really well. Bill Clinton combined the good ol’ boy corruption and radical leftist politics of both parties into one package. The secret to his success was that he understood that most Democrats, voters or politicians, didn’t care about his politics, they wanted more practical things. He made sure that his leftist radicalism played second fiddle to their corruption.

Bill Clinton convinced old Dems that he was their man first. Obama stopped pretending to be anything but a hard core progressive.

The 2014 election was a collision course between the two Democratic parties. The aides and staffers spilling dirt into the pages of the New York Times, the Washington Post and Politico reveal that the crackup had been coming for some time now. Now the two Democratic parties are coming apart.

Reid is blaming Obama. The White House is blaming Reid. This isn’t just a showdown between two arrogant men. It’s a battle between two ideas of what the Democratic Party should be.

Senate Dems chose to back away from Obama to appeal to Middle America. Obama wanted to double down on his 2012 strategy of energizing the base at the expense of moderate voters. Reid and his gang are complaining that Obama didn’t back away far enough from them. Instead he reminded voters in the final stretch that the senators were there to pass his agenda. Obama’s people are dismissing them as cowards for not taking him to battleground states and running on positions even further to the left.

Reid’s people think that Obama deliberately tied them to him and that’s probably true. It’s not just about Obama’s ego. His campaigns and his time in office were meant to showcase the progressive position that the only way to win was from the left. Obama and his people would rather radicalize the Democratic Party and lose, than moderate their positions and stand a chance of winning.

The left isn’t interested in being a political flirtation. It nukes any attempt at centrism to send the message that its allies will not be allowed any other alternative except to live or die by its agenda.

Obama deliberately sabotaged Reid’s campaign plans, as Reid’s chief of staff discussed, because that strategy involved disavowing Obama and his legacy. In the time honored tradition of the radical left, Obama would rather have a Republican senate than a Democratic senate won by going to the center.

Republicans benefited from a Democratic civil war. They were running a traditional campaign against a more traditional part of the Democratic Party. They didn’t really beat the left. They beat the old Dems.

The old Dems were crippled by the progressive agenda. They were pretending to be moderates while ObamaCare, illegal alien amnesty and gay marriage were looking over their shoulders. They married Obama and it was too late for them to get a divorce. And it doesn’t look any better down the road.

The Clintons became the public face of the Democrats, but instead of turning things around, they presided over a series of defeats. Bill Clinton couldn’t even save Mark Pryor in Arkansas. Not only that, he had to watch Republicans take every congressional seat in Arkansas and the governor’s mansion.

Bill had wanted Hillary to play Sarah Palin, turning her into a kingmaker and building on a narrative of female empowerment by having her back female senators. Instead Kay Hagan, Michelle Nunn, Alison Lundergan Grimes and Amanda Curtis lost. Not only did Hillary Clinton fail to deliver, but the War on Women narrative was turned inside out by the rise of Joni Ernst.

Ernst’s emergence as the definitive new senator of the election killed any chance that Democrats had of spinning the election results as sexist; even if Harkin’s Taylor Swift crack hadn’t done that on its own.

The Dems had gambled that the War on Women could offset Obama’s unpopularity, but voters were more concerned about the economy than the culture war. Not only novelty candidates like Wendy Davis, but incumbents like Mark Udall, tried for what they thought was a winning strategy. But the War on Women wasn’t a strategy, it was a fake talking point that their own consultants had forgotten to tell them was disinformation that they had created to seed the media and spread fear among Republicans.

Romney had won white women in every age group. Increased turnout by minority women had skewed the numbers, but those numbers reflected racial solidarity, not a gender gap. Progressives had not bothered to tell their old Dem cousins what they were doing. The Senate Dems marched into political oblivion by adopting the Wendy Davis platform to the bafflement and ridicule of female voters.

The War on Women meme was greeted with laughter in New York and Colorado. Senator Udall was dubbed Mark Uterus by his own supporters and performed worse with female voters than in 2008. Meanwhile in Iowa, Joni Ernst had split the female vote which Harkin had won by 64 percent in 2008.

Not only did Hillary Clinton do more damage to her brand by failing to deliver white and women voters, but the Democratic Party is stunned, confused and divided. And the damage is self-inflicted.

The Clintons thought that they could reunite a splintering Democratic Party by taking on a Republican midterm election wave. Obama sabotaged Reid to keep the Democratic Party leaning to the left. Reid is now attacking Obama openly in a way that would have been inconceivable a year ago. Obama’s people are returning the favor by going after Reid and Schumer. The war of the two parties has begun.

The old Dems have no ideas and no agenda. The progressives want to get as much of their agenda done even if it’s by executive order and even if it makes them even more unpopular than they are now. The old Dems have realized that they are the ones who will pay a political price for progressive radicalism.

And waiting in the wings is the 2016 election.

Obama has made it clear that he is willing to nuke his own party to get amnesty done. But for the first time his party seems less than eager to sacrifice its short term greed for the agendas of the left. And the only man who could tie the two wings together has emerged weakened from the Battle of Arkansas.

Amnesty promises radical demographic change, but red state Dems want to protect their positions today. They aren’t doing it for the ideology. They want to stay in office. The mutual backstabbing ended in disaster for the Democrats and there’s no reason to think that the backstabbing is going to stop.

Obama won’t just have to fight Republicans for the next two years. He’ll also have to fight Democrats.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on November 06, 2014, 06:05:22 AM
"Obama won’t just have to fight Republicans for the next two years. He’ll also have to fight Democrats."

The right's analogy to this could be the Tea Party vs the  Republican McConnell/Bush crowd.

Maybe like a Marc Levin vs a Jeb Bush or a Boehner.

Title: Bill Whittle on a rampage
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 10, 2014, 09:00:38 AM


https://www.billwhittle.com/speaking/david-horowitz-freedom-center-palm-beach-fl
Title: Not the Sort of Trials the Founders Foresaw
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on November 13, 2014, 12:28:31 PM
Why Innocent People Plead Guilty
Jed S. Rakoff
NOVEMBER 20, 2014 ISSUE

The criminal justice system in the United States today bears little relationship to what the Founding Fathers contemplated, what the movies and television portray, or what the average American believes.

To the Founding Fathers, the critical element in the system was the jury trial, which served not only as a truth-seeking mechanism and a means of achieving fairness, but also as a shield against tyranny. As Thomas Jefferson famously said, “I consider [trial by jury] as the only anchor ever yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution.”

The Sixth Amendment guarantees that “in all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury.” The Constitution further guarantees that at the trial, the accused will have the assistance of counsel, who can confront and cross-examine his accusers and present evidence on the accused’s behalf. He may be convicted only if an impartial jury of his peers is unanimously of the view that he is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt and so states, publicly, in its verdict.

The drama inherent in these guarantees is regularly portrayed in movies and television programs as an open battle played out in public before a judge and jury. But this is all a mirage. In actuality, our criminal justice system is almost exclusively a system of plea bargaining, negotiated behind closed doors and with no judicial oversight. The outcome is very largely determined by the prosecutor alone.

In 2013, while 8 percent of all federal criminal charges were dismissed (either because of a mistake in fact or law or because the defendant had decided to cooperate), more than 97 percent of the remainder were resolved through plea bargains, and fewer than 3 percent went to trial. The plea bargains largely determined the sentences imposed.

While corresponding statistics for the fifty states combined are not available, it is a rare state where plea bargains do not similarly account for the resolution of at least 95 percent of the felony cases that are not dismissed; and again, the plea bargains usually determine the sentences, sometimes as a matter of law and otherwise as a matter of practice. Furthermore, in both the state and federal systems, the power to determine the terms of the plea bargain is, as a practical matter, lodged largely in the prosecutor, with the defense counsel having little say and the judge even less.

It was not always so. Until roughly the end of the Civil War, plea bargains were exceedingly rare. A criminal defendant would either go to trial or confess and plead guilty. If the defendant was convicted, the judge would have wide discretion to impose sentence; and that decision, made with little input from the parties, was subject only to the most modest appellate review.

After the Civil War, this began to change, chiefly because, as a result of the disruptions and dislocations that followed the war, as well as greatly increased immigration, crime rates rose considerably, and a way had to be found to dispose of cases without imposing an impossible burden on the criminal justice system. Plea bargains offered a way out: by pleading guilty to lesser charges in return for dismissal of the more serious charges, defendants could reduce their prison time, while the prosecution could resolve the case without burdening the system with more trials.

The practice of plea bargaining never really took hold in most other countries, where it was viewed as a kind of “devil’s pact” that allowed guilty defendants to avoid the full force of the law. But in the United States it became commonplace. And while the Supreme Court initially expressed reservations about the system of plea bargaining, eventually the Court came to approve of it, as an exercise in contractual negotiation between independent agents (the prosecutor and the defense counsel) that was helpful in making the system work. Similarly, academics, though somewhat bothered by the reduced role of judges, came to approve of plea bargaining as a system somewhat akin to a regulatory regime.

Thus, plea bargains came to account, in the years immediately following World War II, for the resolution of over 80 percent of all criminal cases. But even then, perhaps, there were enough cases still going to trial, and enough power remaining with defense counsel and with judges, to “keep the system honest.” By this I mean that a genuinely innocent defendant could still choose to go to trial without fearing that she might thereby subject herself to an extremely long prison term effectively dictated by the prosecutor.

All this changed in the 1970s and 1980s, and once again it was in reaction to rising crime rates. While the 1950s were a period of relatively low crime rates in the US, rates began to rise substantially in the 1960s, and by 1980 or so, serious crime in the US, much of it drug-related, was occurring at a frequency not seen for many decades. As a result, state and federal legislatures hugely increased the penalties for criminal violations. In New York, for example, the so-called “Rockefeller Laws,” enacted in 1973, dictated a mandatory minimum sentence of fifteen years’ imprisonment for selling just two ounces (or possessing four ounces) of heroin, cocaine, or marijuana. In addition, in response to what was perceived as a tendency of too many judges to impose too lenient sentences, the new, enhanced sentences were frequently made mandatory and, in those thirty-seven states where judges were elected, many “soft” judges were defeated and “tough on crime” judges elected in their place.

At the federal level, Congress imposed mandatory minimum sentences for narcotics offenses, gun offenses, child pornography offenses, and much else besides. Sometimes, moreover, these mandatory sentences were required to be imposed consecutively. For example, federal law prescribes a mandatory minimum of ten years’ imprisonment, and a maximum of life imprisonment, for participating in a conspiracy that distributes five kilograms or more of cocaine. But if the use of a weapon is involved in the conspiracy, the defendant, even if she had a low-level role in the conspiracy, must be sentenced to a mandatory minimum of fifteen years’ imprisonment, i.e., ten years on the drug count and five years on the weapons count. And if two weapons are involved, the mandatory minimum rises to forty years, i.e., ten years on the drug count, five years on the first weapons count, and twenty-five years on the second weapons count—all of these sentences being mandatory, with the judge having no power to reduce them.

In addition to mandatory minimums, Congress in 1984 introduced—with bipartisan support—a regime of mandatory sentencing guidelines designed to avoid “irrational” sentencing disparities. Since these guidelines were not as draconian as the mandatory minimum sentences, and since they left judges with some limited discretion, it was not perceived at first how, perhaps even more than mandatory minimums, such a guidelines regime (which was enacted in many states as well) transferred power over sentencing away from judges and into the hands of prosecutors.

One thing that did become quickly apparent, however, was that these guidelines, along with mandatory minimums, were causing the virtual extinction of jury trials in federal criminal cases. Thus, whereas in 1980, 19 percent of all federal defendants went to trial, by 2000 the number had decreased to less than 6 percent and by 2010 to less than 3 percent, where it has remained ever since.

The reason for this is that the guidelines, like the mandatory minimums, provide prosecutors with weapons to bludgeon defendants into effectively coerced plea bargains. In the majority of criminal cases, a defense lawyer only meets her client when or shortly after the client is arrested, so that, at the outset, she is at a considerable informational disadvantage to the prosecutor. If, as is very often the case (despite the constitutional prohibition of “excessive bail”), bail is set so high that the client is detained, the defense lawyer has only modest opportunities, within the limited visiting hours and other arduous restrictions imposed by most jails, to interview her client and find out his version of the facts.

The prosecutor, by contrast, will typically have a full police report, complete with witness interviews and other evidence, shortly followed by grand jury testimony, forensic test reports, and follow-up investigations. While much of this may be one-sided and inaccurate—the National Academy of Science’s recently released report on the unreliability of eyewitness identification well illustrates the danger—it not only gives the prosecutor a huge advantage over the defense counsel but also makes the prosecutor confident, maybe overconfident, of the strength of his case.

Against this background, the information-deprived defense lawyer, typically within a few days after the arrest, meets with the overconfident prosecutor, who makes clear that, unless the case can be promptly resolved by a plea bargain, he intends to charge the defendant with the most severe offenses he can prove. Indeed, until late last year, federal prosecutors were under orders from a series of attorney generals to charge the defendant with the most serious charges that could be proved—unless, of course, the defendant was willing to enter into a plea bargain. If, however, the defendant wants to plead guilty, the prosecutor will offer him a considerably reduced charge—but only if the plea is agreed to promptly (thus saving the prosecutor valuable resources). Otherwise, he will charge the maximum, and, while he will not close the door to any later plea bargain, it will be to a higher-level offense than the one offered at the outset of the case.

In this typical situation, the prosecutor has all the advantages. He knows a lot about the case (and, as noted, probably feels more confident about it than he should, since he has only heard from one side), whereas the defense lawyer knows very little. Furthermore, the prosecutor controls the decision to charge the defendant with a crime. Indeed, the law of every US jurisdiction leaves this to the prosecutor’s unfettered discretion; and both the prosecutor and the defense lawyer know that the grand jury, which typically will hear from one side only, is highly likely to approve any charge the prosecutor recommends.

But what really puts the prosecutor in the driver’s seat is the fact that he—because of mandatory minimums, sentencing guidelines (which, though no longer mandatory in the federal system, are still widely followed by most judges), and simply his ability to shape whatever charges are brought—can effectively dictate the sentence by how he publicly describes the offense. For example, the prosecutor can agree with the defense counsel in a federal narcotics case that, if there is a plea bargain, the defendant will only have to plead guilty to the personal sale of a few ounces of heroin, which carries no mandatory minimum and a guidelines range of less than two years; but if the defendant does not plead guilty, he will be charged with the drug conspiracy of which his sale was a small part, a conspiracy involving many kilograms of heroin, which could mean a ten-year mandatory minimum and a guidelines range of twenty years or more. Put another way, it is the prosecutor, not the judge, who effectively exercises the sentencing power, albeit cloaked as a charging decision.

rakoff_2-112014.jpg
Brittany Murray/Long Beach Press-Telegram/AP Images
Brian Banks and his lawyer from the Innocence Project at the dismissal of his wrongful conviction on rape and kidnapping charges, Long Beach, California, May 2012. Banks, who had been a high school football star with a scholarship to USC at the time of his arrest, served five years in prison for a crime he never committed after accepting a plea bargain under the advisement of his original lawyer.
The defense lawyer understands this fully, and so she recognizes that the best outcome for her client is likely to be an early plea bargain, while the prosecutor is still willing to accept a plea to a relatively low-level offense. Indeed, in 2012, the average sentence for federal narcotics defendants who entered into any kind of plea bargain was five years and four months, while the average sentence for defendants who went to trial was sixteen years.

Although under pressure to agree to the first plea bargain offered, prudent defense counsel will try to convince the prosecutor to give her some time to explore legal and factual defenses; but the prosecutor, often overworked and understaffed, may not agree. Defense counsel, moreover, is in no position to abruptly refuse the prosecutor’s proposal, since, under recent Supreme Court decisions, she will face a claim of “ineffective assistance of counsel” if, without consulting her client, she summarily rejects a plea bargain simply as a negotiating ploy.

Defense counsel also recognizes that, even if she thinks the plea bargain being offered is unfair compared to those offered by other, similarly situated prosecutors, she has little or no recourse. An appeal to the prosecutor’s superior will rarely succeed, since the superiors feel the need to support their troops and since, once again, the prosecutor can shape the facts so as to make his superior find his proposed plea acceptable. And there is no way defense counsel can appeal to a neutral third party, the judge, since in all but a few jurisdictions, the judiciary is precluded from participating in plea bargain negotiations. In a word, she and her client are stuck.

Though there are many variations on this theme, they all prove the same basic point: the prosecutor has all the power. The Supreme Court’s suggestion that a plea bargain is a fair and voluntary contractual arrangement between two relatively equal parties is a total myth: it is much more like a “contract of adhesion” in which one party can effectively force its will on the other party.

As for the suggestion from some academics that this is the equivalent of a regulatory process, that too is a myth: for, quite aside from the imbalance of power, there are no written regulations controlling the prosecutor’s exercise of his charging power and no established or meaningful process for appealing his exercise of that power. The result is that, of the 2.2 million Americans now in prison—an appalling number in its own right—well over two million are there as a result of plea bargains dictated by the government’s prosecutors, who effectively dictate the sentences as well.

A cynic might ask: What’s wrong with that? After all, crime rates have declined over the past twenty years to levels not seen since the early 1960s, and it is difficult to escape the conclusion that our criminal justice system, by giving prosecutors the power to force criminals to accept significant jail terms, has played a major part in this reduction. Most Americans feel a lot safer today than they did just a few decades ago, and that feeling has contributed substantially to their enjoyment of life. Why should we cavil at the empowering of prosecutors that has brought us this result?

The answer may be found in Jefferson’s perception that a criminal justice system that is secret and government-dictated ultimately invites abuse and even tyranny. Specifically, I would suggest that the current system of prosecutor-determined plea bargaining invites the following objections.

First, it is one-sided. Our criminal justice system is premised on the notion that, before we deprive a person of his liberty, he will have his “day in court,” i.e., he will be able to put the government to its proof and present his own facts and arguments, following which a jury of his peers will determine whether or not he is guilty of a crime and a neutral judge will, if he is found guilty, determine his sentence. As noted, numerous guarantees of this fair-minded approach are embodied in our Constitution, and were put there because of the Founding Fathers’ experience with the rigged British system of colonial justice. Is not the plea bargain system we have now substituted for our constitutional ideal similarly rigged?

Second, and closely related, the system of plea bargains dictated by prosecutors is the product of largely secret negotiations behind closed doors in the prosecutor’s office, and is subject to almost no review, either internally or by the courts. Such a secretive system inevitably invites arbitrary results. Indeed, there is a great irony in the fact that legislative measures that were designed to rectify the perceived evils of disparity and arbitrariness in sentencing have empowered prosecutors to preside over a plea-bargaining system that is so secretive and without rules that we do not even know whether or not it operates in an arbitrary manner.

Third, and possibly the gravest objection of all, the prosecutor-dictated plea bargain system, by creating such inordinate pressures to enter into plea bargains, appears to have led a significant number of defendants to plead guilty to crimes they never actually committed. For example, of the approximately three hundred people that the Innocence Project and its affiliated lawyers have proven were wrongfully convicted of crimes of rape or murder that they did not in fact commit, at least thirty, or about 10 percent, pleaded guilty to those crimes. Presumably they did so because, even though they were innocent, they faced the likelihood of being convicted of capital offenses and sought to avoid the death penalty, even at the price of life imprisonment. But other publicized cases, arising with disturbing frequency, suggest that this self-protective psychology operates in noncapital cases as well, and recent studies suggest that this is a widespread problem. For example, the National Registry of Exonerations (a joint project of Michigan Law School and Northwestern Law School) records that of 1,428 legally acknowledged exonerations that have occurred since 1989 involving the full range of felony charges, 151 (or, again, about 10 percent) involved false guilty pleas.

It is not difficult to perceive why this should be so. After all, the typical person accused of a crime combines a troubled past with limited resources: he thus recognizes that, even if he is innocent, his chances of mounting an effective defense at trial may be modest at best. If his lawyer can obtain a plea bargain that will reduce his likely time in prison, he may find it “rational” to take the plea.

Every criminal defense lawyer (and I was both a federal prosecutor and a criminal defense lawyer before going on the bench) has had the experience of a client who first tells his lawyer he is innocent and then, when confronted with a preview of the government’s proof, says he is guilty. Usually, he is in fact guilty and was previously lying to his lawyer (despite the protections of the attorney–client privilege, which many defendants, suspicious even of their court-appointed lawyers, do not appreciate). But sometimes the situation is reversed, and the client now lies to his lawyer by saying he is guilty when in fact he is not, because he has decided to “take the fall.”

In theory, this charade should be exposed at the time the defendant enters his plea, since the judge is supposed to question the defendant about the facts underlying his confession of guilt. But in practice, most judges, happy for their own reasons to avoid a time-consuming trial, will barely question the defendant beyond the bare bones of his assertion of guilt, relying instead on the prosecutor’s statement (untested by any cross-examination) of what the underlying facts are. Indeed, in situations in which the prosecutor and defense counsel themselves recognize that the guilty plea is somewhat artificial, they will have jointly arrived at a written statement of guilt for the defendant to read that cleverly covers all the bases without providing much detail. The Supreme Court, for its part, has gone so far (with the Alford plea of 1970) as to allow a defendant to enter a guilty plea while factually maintaining his innocence.

While, moreover, a defendant’s decision to plead guilty to a crime he did not commit may represent a “rational,” if cynical, cost-benefit analysis of his situation, in fact there is some evidence that the pressure of the situation may cause an innocent defendant to make a less-than-rational appraisal of his chances for acquittal and thus decide to plead guilty when he not only is actually innocent but also could be proven so. Research indicates that young, unintelligent, or risk-averse defendants will often provide false confessions just because they cannot “take the heat” of an interrogation. Although research into false guilty pleas is far less developed, it may be hypothesized that similar pressures, less immediate but more prolonged, may be in effect when a defendant is told, often by his own lawyer, that there is a strong case against him, that his likelihood of acquittal is low, and that he faces a mandatory minimum of five or ten years in prison if convicted and a guidelines range of considerably more—but that, if he acts swiftly, he can get a plea bargain to a lesser offense that will reduce his prison time by many years.

How prevalent is the phenomenon of innocent people pleading guilty? The few criminologists who have thus far investigated the phenomenon estimate that the overall rate for convicted felons as a whole is between 2 percent and 8 percent. The size of that range suggests the imperfection of the data; but let us suppose that it is even lower, say, no more than 1 percent. When you recall that, of the 2.2 million Americans in prison, over 2 million are there because of plea bargains, we are then talking about an estimated 20,000 persons, or more, who are in prison for crimes to which they pleaded guilty but did not in fact commit.

What can we do about it? If there were the political will to do so, we could eliminate mandatory minimums, eliminate sentencing guidelines, and dramatically reduce the severity of our sentencing regimes in general. But even during the second Obama administration, the very modest steps taken by Attorney General Eric Holder to moderate sentences have been met by stiff opposition, some from within his own department. For example, the attorney general’s public support for a bipartisan bill that would reduce mandatory minimums for certain narcotics offenses prompted the National Association of Assistant US Attorneys to send an “open letter” of opposition, while a similar letter denouncing the bill was signed by two former attorney generals, three former chiefs of the Drug Enforcement Administration, and eighteen former US attorneys.

Reflecting, perhaps, the religious origins of our country, Americans are notoriously prone to making moral judgments. Often this serves salutary purposes; but a by-product of this moralizing tendency is a punitiveness that I think is not likely to change in the near future. Indeed, on those occasions when Americans read that someone accused of a very serious crime has been permitted to plea bargain to a considerably reduced offense, their typical reaction is one of suspicion or outrage, and sometimes not without reason. Rarely, however, do they contemplate the possibility that the defendant may be totally innocent of any charge but is being coerced into pleading to a lesser offense because the consequences of going to trial and losing are too severe to take the risk.

I am driven, in the end, to advocate what a few jurisdictions, notably Connecticut and Florida, have begun experimenting with: involving judges in the plea-bargaining process. At present, this is forbidden in the federal courts, and with good reason: for a judge to involve herself runs the risk of compromising her objectivity if no bargain is reached. For similar reasons, many federal judges (including this one) refuse to involve themselves in settlement negotiations in civil cases, even though, unlike the criminal plea bargain situation, there is no legal impediment to doing so. But the problem is solved in civil cases by referring the settlement negotiations to magistrates or special masters who do not report the results to the judges who handle the subsequent proceedings. If the federal rule were changed, the same could be done in the criminal plea bargain situation.

As I envision it, shortly after an indictment is returned (or perhaps even earlier if an arrest has occurred and the defendant is jailed), a magistrate would meet separately with the prosecutor and the defense counsel, in proceedings that would be recorded but placed under seal, and all present would be provided with the particulars regarding the evidence and issues in the case. In certain circumstances, the magistrate might interview witnesses or examine other evidence, again under seal so as not to compromise any party’s strategy. He might even interview the defendant, under an arrangement where it would not constitute a waiver of the defendant’s Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination.

The prosecutor would, in the meantime, be precluded from making any plea bargain offer (or threat) while the magistrate was studying the case. Once the magistrate was ready, he would then meet separately with both sides and, if appropriate, make a recommendation, such as to dismiss the case (if he thought the proof was weak), to proceed to trial (if he thought there was no reasonable plea bargain available), or to enter into a plea bargain along lines the magistrate might suggest. No party would be required to follow the magistrate’s suggestions. Their force, if any, would come from the fact that they were being suggested by a neutral third party, who, moreover, was a judicial officer that the prosecutors and the defense lawyers would have to appear before in many other cases.

Would a plan structured along these lines wholly eliminate false guilty pleas? Probably not, but it likely would reduce their number. Would it present new, unforeseeable problems of its own? Undoubtedly, which is why I would recommend that it first be tried as a pilot program. Even given the current federal rules prohibiting judges from involving themselves in the plea-bargaining process, I think something like this could be undertaken, since most such rules can be waived and the relevant parties could here agree to waive them for the limited purposes of a pilot program.

I am under no illusions that this suggested involvement of judges in the plea-bargaining process is a panacea. But would not any program that helps to reduce the shame of sending innocent people to prison be worth trying?

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/nov/20/why-innocent-people-plead-guilty/
Title: WSJ: Strassel: The Next Prez and the Obama Way
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 24, 2014, 02:03:08 PM
The Next Prez and the Obama Way
Prosecutorial discretion? OK, how about not enforcing the 73,954 pages of tax code?
By Kimberley A. Strassel
Nov. 20, 2014 7:00 p.m. ET
Getty Images
Date: Jan. 21, 2017
To: POTUS
From: Your loyal and determined GOP advisers
Re: Your First 100 Days.

Hey Boss!

Congrats again (and fab party last night). Eight long years, and a Republican is finally back behind the Resolute desk. Pity about the Senate; Harry Reid is already vowing to shut the place down again. We put your chances of getting your agenda through that chamber in the range of slim to snowball.

But we’ve been thinking. Yes, the Constitution matters—Article I, Article II, blah, blah—though let’s be honest: What really counts in this town is precedent. And the ace news is that your predecessor blew up about 230 years of it. We’ve attached an 87-page list (check your spam box) of President Obama ’s unilateral actions: altering the ObamaCare statute; refusing to enforce federal drug laws; granting waivers to education reforms; using Justice Department suits to impose new industry rules; drafting agency regulations to go around Congress. Don’t forget 2014, when he rewrote federal immigration law. Like, all of it. By himself.

And here’s where it gets sweet. We’ve been analyzing the Obama team’s justifications. Some are p-r-e-t-t-y creative, but they boil down to this: Whenever a law is “unworkable,” or inadequately “funded”—and Congress won’t do anything—the president gets to act! How is that for new precedent? Think about it. This city has yet to produce a single statute or reg that is “workable” or that has, according to Democrats, enough money. Not a one. Remember that old Imagine Dragons tune, “I’m On Top of the World”? That’s you, boss. That’s you.

So here’s our plan for getting your entire agenda done—all of it!—by May:

Prosecutorial discretion: Love this. Your top item? Cutting taxes. We have two words and one number for you: Tax Code, 73,954 pages. Is there a more unworkable law? ROFL! We’ve got an executive order ready instructing IRS agents not to enforce the code on any person or company who refuses to pay more than our new rates. Goodbye Alternative Minimum Tax, death tax, capital gains, restrictions on nonprofits. Hello, flat tax on a postcard.

Speaking of taxes, do remember to thank Chief Justice John Roberts for declaring the ObamaCare individual mandate a tax. Not enforcing that one, either! That’s O-Care repealed. Check. You ran on reducing the regulatory burden. We’re sending a list of rules under major laws that you can instruct agencies and the Justice Department to no longer uphold. You know, the damaging stuff buried in the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, the National Labor Relations Act, Dodd-Frank, McCain-Feingold. All unworkable!

We’re also readying a memo for the Justice Department, listing areas in which it should forgo suits for federal violations: Title IX, voting rights, affirmative action, wages and overtime. It’s not like anyone can “make” us do anything. Ask all those marijuana smokers in Alaska.

Waivers: You ran on fixing the debt, by fixing entitlements. Done. You know all those states getting waivers to experiment with Medicaid or welfare? Smart, but small. We’re thinking that with an elastic enough reading of laws, we can waive our way out of an entitlement system altogether. Medicaid vouchers? Child’s play. Did you know the Social Security Act allows sweeping waivers to its programs in the case of a national emergency? We so feel a national emergency coming on. A big one. Long—four years, maybe eight. Don’t laugh. Mr. Obama made anything conceivable.

Agencies: Justice now has time on its hands, so we’re setting up a task force to bring criminal charges against slippery characters (folks who, bonus, Americans love to hate): trial firms, union shops. Obama showed with his banking and BP BP.LN -0.22% suits that if we go big and ugly, we won’t even have to test legal theories; the targets will roll, and agree to new restrictions. That’s tort and labor reform done. And we’re already directing your agencies to start authorizing moves that Congress won’t: drilling off the East Coast and in ANWR; health insurance across state lines; school vouchers. Sky’s the limit! What the last guy showed is that the federal architecture is now so complex that you can always find a loophole. Look at his climate program. (BTW, we are shutting that down. Today.)

Is any of this constitutional? Meh. (Shred this memo.) We suppose you could ask legal advice, but Obama was certainly never that dumb. Here was his epiphany: Nobody can really stop a president. Congress can only complain. The judiciary moves too slowly to make a difference (look at Obama’s illegal recess appointments). Turns out the only thing that ever really restrained the chief executive was that oath he took. Our side has always taken that seriously. Hmmm.

We know you ran on restoring the Constitution, and the other side is counting on your base holding you to that. What they don’t understand is plenty of our people would be equally happy to see you stick it to them. We could do the right thing; arguably should.

Then again, who will they be to complain if we don’t?

Respectfully, Your Team.

Write to kim@wsj.com.
Title: Rant: Ferguson and the Liberal false logic string I call "And Another Thing..."
Post by: DougMacG on November 26, 2014, 07:51:24 AM
Ferguson offers a good opportunity to point out a very commonly used, liberal (false) logic string that I call "And another thing..."

So often the first thing a liberal says, the premise or foundation of their larger argument, is false.  Then, instead of backing up the first (false) point, they continue on with second and third points and so on, as if each additional point further demonstrates the validity of the first (false) point

Here it is out of Ferguson.  The (false) logic behind the big uproar goes something like this:  Not only did Blacks fail to get justice in this case, but did you know all these other things about racism in America?

The starting point is false - as usual.  Justice was done in this case.  A big, stupid man attacked a cop with a gun and ended up dead.  The cop used justifiable force to protect his own life.  Race had nothing to do with the attack, the struggle or the shooting.  Race had nothing to do with the legal proceedings that followed.  The Grand Jury included a mixture of races; they looked at everything and judged fairly.  If anything they bent over backwards because of the potential race implications of the result.

The starting point in the current "no Justice, no peace" arson and disruption campaign is that Brown and his family failed to get justice because he is black.  In addition to that (and another thing...), this is what always happens in America.  Life is really unfair to blacks everywhere, all the time.  The liberals and agitators making this point and organizing these protests have no qualms about the fact that their launching point for such an important campaign is abjectly false.

Even if one of the supporting points has truth in it, it is a new or separate point, not support for the original, false starting point, as presented.

Similar examples of this are found in most liberal arguments on issues, such as income inequality, minimum wage, war in Iraq, taxes on the rich, education funding, you name it.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on November 26, 2014, 08:17:01 AM
Agree with you Doug.

One problem I see is the right is not unified in its' response to the left's propaganda along with the obvious disadvantage of being up against a biased MSM and academia and big government "complex".

The arguments coming out of Ferguson defy logic to such an extant I don't know what we are even arguing about anymore.    Listening to Rachel Maddow's rants last PM about how "weird" the presentation from the prosecutor was etc in itself was just disgusting.  Like Levin asks is she so screwed up with her leftist idealogy she just ignore reason, truth, and logic?

The answer is YES.

They just continue arguing when there is NO real argument.  They just won't stop. 


Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 26, 2014, 08:21:07 AM
The Race thread on SCH would be a good place for continuing this discussion.
Title: Brother to Brother
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 28, 2014, 02:24:50 PM


https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=10152314396513715&set=vb.673253714&type=2&theater
Title: The Sixth Commandment: "You Shall Not MURDER"...
Post by: objectivist1 on December 02, 2014, 06:04:05 AM
You Can Kill, But Not Murder

Posted By Dennis Prager On December 2, 2014

That is the King James translation of the sixth commandment. It is a magnificent translation. But this one has led to much moral confusion.

Yesterday, PragerUniversity.com, which has had more than 20 million views this year, released 11 courses (each five-minutes long) — the Ten Commandments and an introduction.

The reason we made these video courses is that I believe that everything we need to make a good world and rid ourselves of evil is contained in the Ten Commandments.

For the next few weeks, my column will be selected transcripts of the courses, all of which I present.

Whatever your faith, or if you have no faith, I invite you to watch the videos at www.prageru.com — from the introduction through the tenth, or any of the Ten. They are cleverly animated with text and graphics.

Here is the text of commandment six — explaining why the King James translation is wrong:

You would think that of all the Ten Commandments the one that needs the least explaining is the sixth, because it seems so clear. It is the one that the King James Bible, the most widely used English translation of the Bible, translates as, “Thou shall not kill.”

Yet, the truth is the quite the opposite. This is probably the least well understood of the Ten Commandments. The reason is that the Hebrew original does not say, “Do not kill.” It says, “Do not murder.” Both Hebrew and English have two words for taking a life — one is “kill” (harag, in Hebrew) and the other is “murder” (ratzach in Hebrew).

The difference between the two is enormous. Kill means:

1) Taking any life — whether of a human being or an animal.

2) Taking a human life deliberately or by accident.

3) Taking a human life legally or illegally, morally or immorally.

On the other hand, murder can only mean one thing: The illegal or immoral taking of a human life. That’s why we say, “I killed a mosquito,” not, “I murdered a mosquito.” And that’s why we would say that “the worker was accidentally killed,” not that “the worker was accidentally murdered.”

So why did the King James translation of the Bible use the word “kill” rather than “murder”? Because 400 years ago, when the translation was made, “kill” was synonymous with “murder.” As a result, some people don’t realize that English has changed since 1610 and therefore think that the Ten Commandments prohibits all killing.

But, of course, it doesn’t. If the Ten Commandments forbade killing, we would all have to be vegetarians, as killing animals would be prohibited. And we would all have to be pacifists — since we could not kill even in self-defense.

However, you don’t have to know how the English language has evolved to understand that the Ten Commandments could not have prohibited all killing.

The very same part of the Bible that contains the Ten Commandments — the Five Books of Moses, the Torah as it is known by Jews — commands the death penalty for murder, allows killing in war, prescribes animal sacrifice and allows eating meat.

A correct understanding of the commandment against murder is crucial because, while virtually every modern translation correctly translates the commandment as “Do not murder,” many people cite the King James translation to justify two positions that have no biblical basis: opposition to capital punishment and pacifism.

Regarding capital punishment and the Bible, as I note in my Prager University course on capital punishment, the only law that appears in each one of the Five Books of Moses is that murderers be put to death. Opponents of the death penalty are free to hold the view that all murderers should be allowed to live. But they are not free to cite the Bible to support their view.

Yet, many do. And they always cite the Commandment, “Do not kill.” But that, as should now be abundantly clear, is not what the commandment says, and it is therefore an invalid argument.

As regards pacifism, the belief that it is always wrong to kill a human being, again, anyone is free to hold this position, as immoral as it may be. And what other word than “immoral” can one use to describe forbidding the killing of someone who is in the process of murdering innocent men, women and children, in, let’s say, a movie theater or a school?

But it is dishonest to cite the commandment against murder to justify pacifism.

There is moral killing — most obviously when done in self-defense against an aggressor — and there is immoral killing. And the word for that is “murder.”

The Ten Commandments are portrayed on two tablets. The five commandments on the second tablet all concern our treatment of fellow human beings.

The first one on that list is “Do not murder.” Why? Because murder is the worst act a person can commit. The other four commandments — prohibiting stealing, adultery, giving false testimony and coveting, are all serious offenses.

But murder leads the list because deliberately taking the life of an innocent person is the most terrible thing we can do. That is why it is so important to understand that the commandment prohibits murder, not all killing. When people liken killing in self-defense to murder — such as when they equate killing the terrorist who is murdering people with the murders that the terrorist is committing — all they are doing is reducing the evil that murder is. And when they use the Ten Commandments to justify that position, all they are doing is making the Ten Commandments, the moral foundation of Western Civilization, morally irrelevant.

The next time you hear someone cite, “Do not kill” when quoting the sixth commandment, gently but firmly explain that it actually says, “Do not murder.”
Title: Black police chief speaks his mind
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 02, 2014, 07:49:15 PM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VaS5eJaJYpE&feature=player_detailpage
Title: Obamaspeak
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 23, 2014, 10:24:32 AM
Fantasyland, U.S.A.
December 22nd, 2014 - 4:53 pm


One way of reinventing reality is to warp the meaning of words. No president in memory has waged such a war on the English language as has Barack Obama — changing the meaning of vocabulary to hide what he fears might otherwise be unpopular.

Take executive orders. He brags that he does not issue them as commonly as his predecessors, but that is only true because Obama has now renamed some of his executive orders presidential “memoranda.” Add up both categories, and no president in the last half-century has so frequently bypassed Congress to unilaterally make new or ignore existing laws.

If Obama suddenly does not get his legislative way after losing the Congress, and boasts in defiance about his plans to act unilaterally (“I’ve got a pen and I’ve got a phone”), then why the need to hide that brag with linguistic gymnastics?

When Obama faced reelections, he pointed to increased deportations. But that claim hinged on changing the meaning of deportee. All of a sudden, illegal aliens who were stopped and turned away right at the border count as deportees. By changing the meaning of words, Obama believed that he could reinvent the reality of open borders into tough border enforcement.

But then again, when he found it useful to brag of open borders, suddenly he pointed to lower deportations, as the vocabulary once again readjusted its meaning.

On another front, Obama simply makes up names that imply the opposite of reality. The Affordable Care Act was hardly affordable. Obama knew that he could not save the American family the promised $2,500 in premiums, or reduce deductibles, or lower the deficit through health care reform. Instead, insurance policy premiums have gone up, plans and doctors have been dropped, and deductibles have soared. According to Jonathan Gruber, these known downsides of Obamacare had to be disguised from the supposedly “stupid” American people.

In the world of the Obama administration, Bowe Bergdahl, the deserter who was exchanged for four terrorists held at Guantanamo, did not, as National Security Advisor Susan Rice insisted, serve “with honor and distinction.” Instead, he abandoned his fellow soldiers at the front, and walked over to find the enemy Taliban. Traitor, like the word jihadist, has been excised from the Obama vocabulary.

There seems to be no global Islamic terrorist culpability behind the murdering of innocents worldwide. If the Islamic fundamentalist Taliban blow up school children in Pakistan, if the Tsarnaev brothers claim an Islamic inspiration to kill and maim Americans during the Boston Marathon, if Major Nidal Hasan screams “Allahu Akbar“ as he shoots American soldiers, the Obama administration will either ignore the role of radical Islam or construct a circumlocution to mask the fact of Islamic terrorism.

In the latest Sony Corporation debacle, Obama warns us about the dangers of letting foreign nationals like the North Korean hackers censor free expression on American soil. Yet he did not invoke such ethical concern when he blasted — and later had jailed — Nakoula Nakoula. The latter was a U.S. resident filmmaker who caricatured Islam in a video and then was falsely blamed by the Obama administration as the culprit for the attack on the American consulate in Benghazi.

Indeed, Obama in that case played the role of North Korea by ensuring that Nakoula’s videos ceased, that radical Islamists were satiated, and that Obama could win multicultural reelection points against supposed illiberal film makers.

We also live in an age of little collective memory that prevents us from identifying reality. Guantanamo was promised to be closed, and so it is — sort of. Obama reiterates before critical elections that he has no powers to grant blanket amnesties; to do so without congressional action would be the work of a dictator or emperor, he warns his supporters. But then he does just that when there are no more elections, and suddenly he is neither a dictator nor emperor. Our only guide to his mendacity is the occasional emphatic, like “no kidding,” “in truth,” “make no mistake about,” “let me be perfectly clear,” which serves as an unconscious verbal tic of the untruth to follow.

We are supposed to believe that Obama’s opposition to fracking, horizontal drilling, and the Keystone pipeline has somehow led to lower gas prices. Do we forget that he is on record that he favored higher electricity rates, while his former energy secretary dreamed of European-style gas prices? How strange is the Obama principle: “I will brag about the results of how my failed efforts did not stop something I opposed.” Or perhaps, “All fracking and horizontal drilling are bad, except when they revive my moribund economy.”

The list of Obama-era fantasies is endless. Turkey is a special partner that offers a democratic Islamic alternative to the usual Middle East mess. Sanctions should be considered against Israel, but withdrawn from Cuba and Iran. Reset with Russia tamed Putin, who worked with us to corral the Assad government in Syria. ISIS is a jayvee organization. Iran is seriously discussing quitting the nuclear acquisition business. China is now a fellow advocate of reducing global warming. Young black men are in mortal danger from the police, as opposed to other young black men. There is not a smidgeon of corruption at the IRS. We live in a world in which Obamacare is an affordable act and terrorist murder on a military base is workplace violence. If rape does not take place at the University of Virginia fraternity, it could have; and if Michael Brown was not shot with his hands up, screaming, “don’t shoot,” in theory he certainly might have been.

The use of language to distort reality, the fables, and the contorted logic all result from a central fact: the way in which Obama and his cohort wish to fundamentally transform America is not where the majority of Americans wish to end up. Given that fact, Obama must find fantasies to mask reality — and do so by any means necessary.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: G M on December 23, 2014, 01:50:15 PM
An entire presidency built on lies.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 25, 2014, 02:40:00 PM
BTW Gents, I just noticed that this is our first thread to hit 300,000 reads!


Title: Remember the Persecuted
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 25, 2014, 02:40:51 PM
Second post:

A number of noteworthy points made in this piece:

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/dont-forget-the-persecuted/article/2557808 
Title: Esman: Europe's Year of the Jihadist
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 29, 2014, 11:38:01 AM
Guest Column: Europe's Year of the Jihadist
by Abigail R. Esman
Special to IPT News
December 29, 2014
http://www.investigativeproject.org/4713/guest-column-europe-year-of-the-jihadist
 
Among the trends of 2014 – "Gone, Girl," Lena Dunham, and $55,000 potato salad – was another the list-makers seem to have missed: it was also a very good year for Islamic jihad. And while this was true on the battlefields of Syria and the cities and villages of Pakistan, it was true, too, in more subtle ways throughout the West – and especially in Europe. It was, for instance, the year of Mehdi Nemmouche's slaughter of four Jews at the Jewish Museum in Brussels.

It was the year that Belgium itself was named a "terrorist recruiting hub" by the Wall Street Journal. And in Germany, France, England, and the Netherlands, pro-Islamic State demonstrations laid bare the growing support of terrorism and Islamic jihad among Europe's expanding Muslim population – all while politicians either stood back or even contributed to the praise.

Throughout 2014, Europeans faced pro-IS, anti-Jew demonstrations in Paris, Hamburg, Amsterdam, London and The Hague, and the establishment of "sharia zones" in London, Wupperthal, and elsewhere. True, such zones do not necessarily delineate areas in which sharia law, rather than state law, applies. But the term helps them define those largely-Muslim neighborhoods whose residents tend to be radical and who often support jihadist movements both at home and abroad.

Combined, these events signal the increasing success of Islamists who are working to change Europe from within – sometimes through violence, but more often through strategies known as "stealth jihad" – a way of applying social and political pressures to transform the current culture.

Take, for instance, the response of Josias van Aartsen, mayor of The Hague, to radical Muslims who called for the death of Dutch non-Muslims and Jews during pro-IS rallies in August: then on holiday, Van Aartsen declined to return home, ignoring even the throwing of stones at non-Muslims and the police. Only when a counter demonstration against IS was planned in the same, Muslim-majority neighborhood did Van Aartsen take action: he forbade it. "Too provocative," he said.

Or there are the recently-leaked intelligence briefs in France, as reported by the Gatestone Institute, that "Muslim students are effectively establishing an Islamic parallel society completely cut off from non-Muslim students," while "more than 1000 French supermarkets, including major chains such as Carrefour, have been selling Islamic books that openly call for jihad and the killing of non-Muslims."

In England, an "Operation Trojan Horse" outlined plans to Islamize schools in Muslim neighborhoods. According to the Guardian, a government investigation of the program last summer found a "'sustained, coordinated agenda to impose segregationist attitudes and practices of a hardline, politicised strain of Sunni Islam' on children in a number of Birmingham schools." Among those responsible for the "Operation" were the Association of Muslim Schools – UK and the Muslim Council of Britain – the same organization that, in 2011, declared that women who do not veil their faces "could be guilty of rejecting Islam."

Ironically, it seems to have been England's own culture that allowed the rise of Islamist teachings in its schools to begin with. Even Britain's education secretary Nicky Morgan admitted to the New York Times that much of the operation's success could be attributed to public "fear of being accused of racism and anti-Islamic views." Not for nothing did former Obama advisor Lawrence Krauss declare the British "too polite" and "scared of offending 'vocal and aggressive Muslims.'"

The government's discovery of "Operation Trojan Horse" and immediate efforts to dismantle it are commendable, but it is difficult to assess the damage already done to Muslim children in the British schools. By some accounts, as many as 2,000 Britons have joined the (Sunni-led) jihad in Syria and Iraq. That includes the man known as "Jihadi John," who beheaded U.S. journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff. And, experts warn, the number of so-called "junior jihadis" – children under 10 who have become radicalized – is on the rise.

Not that such warnings are likely to do much good: The UK has, until recently, spent tremendous resources on programs aimed at preventing Muslim youth from joining militant groups, which have for the most part failed. "Having undertaken the 'most significant domestic program by any Western country to foster a moderate version of Islam and prevent radicalization, the UK has effectively given up trying to stop jihadists from being created," James Brandon, the former research director at one such program, told Reuters.

Despite such developments, European lawmakers have had a hard time figuring out how to deal with Muslim radicals, especially with returnees from Syria and Iraq. England is hardly the only place where politicians fear "offending" the sensibilities of Muslim groups. Although an estimated 450 Germans have joined the jihad in Syria, German Green Party domestic policy expert Irene Mihalic told the magazine Der Spiegel in September that tougher counterterrorism laws were unnecessary because "there are already 'sufficient levers available to impose bans and limitations' on terrorists and their supporters." Majority parties apparently disagreed. Later that month, Germany became the first country to fully outlaw IS, along with all expressions of support for the terrorist group, from banners and graffiti to public demonstrations and endorsements by local mosques.

Such has hardly been the case in Denmark, though, where unwillingness to "offend" or "provoke" the country's Muslim community has translated into a program that seeks to rehabilitate returning jihadists, rather than imprison them. In the country that boasts the second-largest number (per capita) of Muslims to join jihadist groups, returnees receive generous handouts in the form of government assistance in finding homes and jobs, or tuition aid in order to continue their education. In addition, the rehab program "does not try to change the fundamentalist beliefs of the returning fighters – as long as they don't advocate violence," CNN reports.

Evidently pampering jihadists isn't working very well: Danish intelligence recently warned that returnees from IS and Al Nusra camps now pose a "significant" threat to the country. One jihadist profiled by CNN said that he plans to return to Syria to rejoin the caliphate once he completes his Danish government-funded education.

Other European governments have been reluctant to prosecute those recruiting for ISIS and other terrorist groups – groups that are in effect encouraging people to commit murder. In December, Dutch courts declared a 20-year-old woman "not guilty" of recruiting women to join the jihad in Syria on the grounds that women in IS are not permitted to fight – and hence cannot be considered terrorists. In another case, 23-year-old "Imad al-O" was found guilty of helping a 16-year-old girl travel to Syria via Egypt. His sentence? Three months prison time and 240 hours of community service.

Through it all, "lone wolf" radicals continue their attacks in European cities, such as the Dec. 21 attack in Dijon by a man who drove a car into a crowd of pedestrians, claiming he was "acting for the children of Palestine."

The attack "for the children of Palestine" occurred just as French officials determined to join Sweden in recognizing a Palestinian state – a kind of international version, you might say, of England's decision to stop trying to keep Muslim youth from radicalizing and becoming warriors for Islam. Unlike Kickstarter potato salads, it's a trend we can well leave behind as we move into the new year.

Abigail R. Esman, the author, most recently, of Radical State: How Jihad Is Winning Over Democracy in the West (Praeger, 2010), is a freelance writer based in New York and the Netherlands.
Title: T. Roosevelt: Citizenship in a Republic
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 31, 2014, 02:26:04 PM
Full speech Citizenship In A Republic:

Strange and impressive associations rise in the mind of a man from the New World who speaks before this august body in this ancient institution of learning. Before his eyes pass the shadows of mighty kings and war-like nobles, of great masters of law and theology; through the shining dust of the dead centuries he sees crowded figures that tell of the power and learning and splendor of times gone by; and he sees also the innumerable host of humble students to whom clerkship meant emancipation, to whom it was well-nigh the only outlet from the dark thraldom of the Middle Ages.


This was the most famous university of mediaeval Europe at a time when no one dreamed that there was a New World to discover. Its services to the cause of human knowledge already stretched far back into the remote past at a time when my forefathers, three centuries ago, were among the sparse bands of traders, ploughmen, wood-choppers, and fisherfolk who, in hard struggle with the iron unfriendliness of the Indian-haunted land, were laying the foundations of what has now become the giant republic of the West. To conquer a continent, to tame the shaggy roughness of wild nature, means grim warfare; and the generations engaged in it cannot keep, still less add to, the stores of garnered wisdom which where once theirs, and which are still in the hands of their brethren who dwell in the old land. To conquer the wilderness means to wrest victory from the same hostile forces with which mankind struggled on the immemorial infancy of our race. The primaeval conditions must be met by the primaeval qualities which are incompatible with the retention of much that has been painfully acquired by humanity as through the ages it has striven upward toward civilization. In conditions so primitive there can be but a primitive culture. At first only the rudest school can be established, for no others would meet the needs of the hard-driven, sinewy folk who thrust forward the frontier in the teeth of savage men and savage nature; and many years elapse before any of these schools can develop into seats of higher learning and broader culture.


The pioneer days pass; the stump-dotted clearings expand into vast stretches of fertile farm land; the stockaded clusters of log cabins change into towns; the hunters of game, the fellers of trees, the rude frontier traders and tillers of the soil, the men who wander all their lives long through the wilderness as the heralds and harbingers of an oncoming civilization, themselves vanish before the civilization for which they have prepared the way. The children of their successors and supplanters, and then their children and their children and children's children, change and develop with extraordinary rapidity. The conditions accentuate vices and virtues, energy and ruthlessness, all the good qualities and all the defects of an intense individualism, self-reliant, self-centered, far more conscious of its rights than of its duties, and blind to its own shortcomings. To the hard materialism of the frontier days succeeds the hard materialism of an industrialism even more intense and absorbing than that of the older nations; although these themselves have likewise already entered on the age of a complex and predominantly industrial civilization.


As the country grows, its people, who have won success in so many lines, turn back to try to recover the possessions of the mind and the spirit, which perforce their fathers threw aside in order better to wage the first rough battles for the continent their children inherit. The leaders of thought and of action grope their way forward to a new life, realizing, sometimes dimly, sometimes clear-sightedly, that the life of material gain, whether for a nation or an individual, is of value only as a foundation, only as there is added to it the uplift that comes from devotion to loftier ideals. The new life thus sought can in part be developed afresh from what is roundabout in the New World; but it can developed in full only by freely drawing upon the treasure-houses of the Old World, upon the treasures stored in the ancient abodes of wisdom and learning, such as this is where I speak to-day. It is a mistake for any nation to merely copy another; but it is even a greater mistake, it is a proof of weakness in any nation, not to be anxious to learn from one another and willing and able to adapt that learning to the new national conditions and make it fruitful and productive therein. It is for us of the New World to sit at the feet of Gamaliel of the Old; then, if we have the right stuff in us, we can show that Paul in his turn can become a teacher as well as a scholar.


Today I shall speak to you on the subject of individual citizenship, the one subject of vital importance to you, my hearers, and to me and my countrymen, because you and we a great citizens of great democratic republics. A democratic republic such as ours - an effort to realize its full sense government by, of, and for the people - represents the most gigantic of all possible social experiments, the one fraught with great responsibilities alike for good and evil. The success or republics like yours and like ours means the glory, and our failure of despair, of mankind; and for you and for us the question of the quality of the individual citizen is supreme. Under other forms of government, under the rule of one man or very few men, the quality of the leaders is all-important. If, under such governments, the quality of the rulers is high enough, then the nations for generations lead a brilliant career, and add substantially to the sum of world achievement, no matter how low the quality of average citizen; because the average citizen is an almost negligible quantity in working out the final results of that type of national greatness. But with you and us the case is different. With you here, and with us in my own home, in the long run, success or failure will be conditioned upon the way in which the average man, the average women, does his or her duty, first in the ordinary, every-day affairs of life, and next in those great occasional cries which call for heroic virtues. The average citizen must be a good citizen if our republics are to succeed. The stream will not permanently rise higher than the main source; and the main source of national power and national greatness is found in the average citizenship of the nation. Therefore it behooves us to do our best to see that the standard of the average citizen is kept high; and the average cannot be kept high unless the standard of the leaders is very much higher.


It is well if a large proportion of the leaders in any republic, in any democracy, are, as a matter of course, drawn from the classes represented in this audience to-day; but only provided that those classes possess the gifts of sympathy with plain people and of devotion to great ideals. You and those like you have received special advantages; you have all of you had the opportunity for mental training; many of you have had leisure; most of you have had a chance for enjoyment of life far greater than comes to the majority of your fellows. To you and your kind much has been given, and from you much should be expected. Yet there are certain failings against which it is especially incumbent that both men of trained and cultivated intellect, and men of inherited wealth and position should especially guard themselves, because to these failings they are especially liable; and if yielded to, their- your- chances of useful service are at an end. Let the man of learning, the man of lettered leisure, beware of that queer and cheap temptation to pose to himself and to others as a cynic, as the man who has outgrown emotions and beliefs, the man to whom good and evil are as one. The poorest way to face life is to face it with a sneer. There are many men who feel a kind of twister pride in cynicism; there are many who confine themselves to criticism of the way others do what they themselves dare not even attempt. There is no more unhealthy being, no man less worthy of respect, than he who either really holds, or feigns to hold, an attitude of sneering disbelief toward all that is great and lofty, whether in achievement or in that noble effort which, even if it fails, comes to second achievement. A cynical habit of thought and speech, a readiness to criticise work which the critic himself never tries to perform, an intellectual aloofness which will not accept contact with life's realities - all these are marks, not as the possessor would fain to think, of superiority but of weakness. They mark the men unfit to bear their part painfully in the stern strife of living, who seek, in the affection of contempt for the achievements of others, to hide from others and from themselves in their own weakness. The rôle is easy; there is none easier, save only the rôle of the man who sneers alike at both criticism and performance.


It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat. Shame on the man of cultivated taste who permits refinement to develop into fastidiousness that unfits him for doing the rough work of a workaday world. Among the free peoples who govern themselves there is but a small field of usefulness open for the men of cloistered life who shrink from contact with their fellows. Still less room is there for those who deride of slight what is done by those who actually bear the brunt of the day; nor yet for those others who always profess that they would like to take action, if only the conditions of life were not exactly what they actually are. The man who does nothing cuts the same sordid figure in the pages of history, whether he be a cynic, or fop, or voluptuary. There is little use for the being whose tepid soul knows nothing of great and generous emotion, of the high pride, the stern belief, the lofty enthusiasm, of the men who quell the storm and ride the thunder. Well for these men if they succeed; well also, though not so well, if they fail, given only that they have nobly ventured, and have put forth all their heart and strength. It is war-worn Hotspur, spent with hard fighting, he of the many errors and valiant end, over whose memory we love to linger, not over the memory of the young lord who "but for the vile guns would have been a valiant soldier."


France has taught many lessons to other nations: surely one of the most important lesson is the lesson her whole history teaches, that a high artistic and literary development is compatible with notable leadership im arms and statecraft. The brilliant gallantry of the French soldier has for many centuries been proverbial; and during these same centuries at every court in Europe the "freemasons of fashion: have treated the French tongue as their common speech; while every artist and man of letters, and every man of science able to appreciate that marvelous instrument of precision, French prose, had turned toward France for aid and inspiration. How long the leadership in arms and letters has lasted is curiously illustrated by the fact that the earliest masterpiece in a modern tongue is the splendid French epic which tells of Roland's doom and the vengeance of Charlemange when the lords of the Frankish hosts where stricken at Roncesvalles. Let those who have, keep, let those who have not, strive to attain, a high standard of cultivation and scholarship. Yet let us remember that these stand second to certain other things. There is need of a sound body, and even more of a sound mind. But above mind and above body stands character - the sum of those qualities which we mean when we speak of a man's force and courage, of his good faith and sense of honor. I believe in exercise for the body, always provided that we keep in mind that physical development is a means and not an end. I believe, of course, in giving to all the people a good education. But the education must contain much besides book-learning in order to be really good. We must ever remember that no keenness and subtleness of intellect, no polish, no cleverness, in any way make up for the lack of the great solid qualities. Self restraint, self mastery, common sense, the power of accepting individual responsibility and yet of acting in conjunction with others, courage and resolution - these are the qualities which mark a masterful people. Without them no people can control itself, or save itself from being controlled from the outside. I speak to brilliant assemblage; I speak in a great university which represents the flower of the highest intellectual development; I pay all homage to intellect and to elaborate and specialized training of the intellect; and yet I know I shall have the assent of all of you present when I add that more important still are the commonplace, every-day qualities and virtues.


Such ordinary, every-day qualities include the will and the power to work, to fight at need, and to have plenty of healthy children. The need that the average man shall work is so obvious as hardly to warrant insistence. There are a few people in every country so born that they can lead lives of leisure. These fill a useful function if they make it evident that leisure does not mean idleness; for some of the most valuable work needed by civilization is essentially non-remunerative in its character, and of course the people who do this work should in large part be drawn from those to whom remuneration is an object of indifference. But the average man must earn his own livelihood. He should be trained to do so, and he should be trained to feel that he occupies a contemptible position if he does not do so; that he is not an object of envy if he is idle, at whichever end of the social scale he stands, but an object of contempt, an object of derision. In the next place, the good man should be both a strong and a brave man; that is, he should be able to fight, he should be able to serve his country as a soldier, if the need arises. There are well-meaning philosophers who declaim against the unrighteousness of war. They are right only if they lay all their emphasis upon the unrighteousness. War is a dreadful thing, and unjust war is a crime against humanity. But it is such a crime because it is unjust, not because it is a war. The choice must ever be in favor of righteousness, and this is whether the alternative be peace or whether the alternative be war. The question must not be merely, Is there to be peace or war? The question must be, Is it right to prevail? Are the great laws of righteousness once more to be fulfilled? And the answer from a strong and virile people must be "Yes," whatever the cost. Every honorable effort should always be made to avoid war, just as every honorable effort should always be made by the individual in private life to keep out of a brawl, to keep out of trouble; but no self-respecting individual, no self-respecting nation, can or ought to submit to wrong.


Finally, even more important than ability to work, even more important than ability to fight at need, is it to remember that chief of blessings for any nations is that it shall leave its seed to inherit the land. It was the crown of blessings in Biblical times and it is the crown of blessings now. The greatest of all curses in is the curse of sterility, and the severest of all condemnations should be that visited upon willful sterility. The first essential in any civilization is that the man and women shall be father and mother of healthy children, so that the race shall increase and not decrease. If that is not so, if through no fault of the society there is failure to increase, it is a great misfortune. If the failure is due to the deliberate and wilful fault, then it is not merely a misfortune, it is one of those crimes of ease and self-indulgence, of shrinking from pain and effort and risk, which in the long run Nature punishes more heavily than any other. If we of the great republics, if we, the free people who claim to have emancipated ourselves form the thraldom of wrong and error, bring down on our heads the curse that comes upon the willfully barren, then it will be an idle waste of breath to prattle of our achievements, to boast of all that we have done. No refinement of life, no delicacy of taste, no material progress, no sordid heaping up riches, no sensuous development of art and literature, can in any way compensate for the loss of the great fundamental virtues; and of these great fundamental virtues the greatest is the race's power to perpetuate the race. Character must show itself in the man's performance both of the duty he owes himself and of the duty he owes the state. The man's foremast duty is owed to himself and his family; and he can do this duty only by earning money, by providing what is essential to material well-being; it is only after this has been done that he can hope to build a higher superstructure on the solid material foundation; it is only after this has been done that he can help in his movements for the general well-being. He must pull his own weight first, and only after this can his surplus strength be of use to the general public. It is not good to excite that bitter laughter which expresses contempt; and contempt is what we feel for the being whose enthusiasm to benefit mankind is such that he is a burden to those nearest him; who wishes to do great things for humanity in the abstract, but who cannot keep his wife in comfort or educate his children.


Nevertheless, while laying all stress on this point, while not merely acknowledging but insisting upon the fact that there must be a basis of material well-being for the individual as for the nation, let us with equal emphasis insist that this material well-being represents nothing but the foundation, and that the foundation, though indispensable, is worthless unless upon it is raised the superstructure of a higher life. That is why I decline to recognize the mere multimillionaire, the man of mere wealth, as an asset of value to any country; and especially as not an asset to my own country. If he has earned or uses his wealth in a way that makes him a real benefit, of real use- and such is often the case- why, then he does become an asset of real worth. But it is the way in which it has been earned or used, and not the mere fact of wealth, that entitles him to the credit. There is need in business, as in most other forms of human activity, of the great guiding intelligences. Their places cannot be supplied by any number of lesser intelligences. It is a good thing that they should have ample recognition, ample reward. But we must not transfer our admiration to the reward instead of to the deed rewarded; and if what should be the reward exists without the service having been rendered, then admiration will only come from those who are mean of soul. The truth is that, after a certain measure of tangible material success or reward has been achieved, the question of increasing it becomes of constantly less importance compared to the other things that can be done in life. It is a bad thing for a nation to raise and to admire a false standard of success; and their can be no falser standard than that set by the deification of material well-being in and for itself. But the man who, having far surpassed the limits of providing for the wants; both of the body and mind, of himself and of those depending upon him, then piles up a great fortune, for the acquisition or retention of which he returns no corresponding benefit to the nation as a whole, should himself be made to feel that, so far from being desirable, he is an unworthy, citizen of the community: that he is to be neither admired nor envied; that his right-thinking fellow countrymen put him low in the scale of citizenship, and leave him to be consoled by the admiration of those whose level of purpose is even lower than his own.


My position as regards the moneyed interests can be put in a few words. In every civilized society property rights must be carefully safeguarded; ordinarily, and in the great majority of cases, human rights and property rights are fundamentally and in the long run identical; but when it clearly appears that there is a real conflict between them, human rights must have the upper hand, for property belongs to man and not man to property. In fact, it is essential to good citizenship clearly to understand that there are certain qualities which we in a democracy are prone to admire in and of themselves, which ought by rights to be judged admirable or the reverse solely from the standpoint of the use made of them. Foremost among these I should include two very distinct gifts - the gift of money-making and the gift of oratory. Money-making, the money touch I have spoken of above. It is a quality which in a moderate degree is essential. It may be useful when developed to a very great degree, but only if accompanied and controlled by other qualities; and without such control the possessor tends to develop into one of the least attractive types produced by a modern industrial democracy. So it is with the orator. It is highly desirable that a leader of opinion in democracy should be able to state his views clearly and convincingly. But all that the oratory can do of value to the community is enable the man thus to explain himself; if it enables the orator to put false values on things, it merely makes him power for mischief. Some excellent public servants have not that gift at all, and must merely rely on their deeds to speak for them; and unless oratory does represent genuine conviction based on good common sense and able to be translated into efficient performance, then the better the oratory the greater the damage to the public it deceives. Indeed, it is a sign of marked political weakness in any commonwealth if the people tend to be carried away by mere oratory, if they tend to value words in and for themselves, as divorced from the deeds for which they are supposed to stand. The phrase-maker, the phrase-monger, the ready talker, however great his power, whose speech does not make for courage, sobriety, and right understanding, is simply a noxious element in the body politic, and it speaks ill for the public if he has influence over them. To admire the gift of oratory without regard to the moral quality behind the gift is to do wrong to the republic.


Of course all that I say of the orator applies with even greater force to the orator's latter-day and more influential brother, the journalist. The power of the journalist is great, but he is entitled neither to respect nor admiration because of that power unless it is used aright. He cna do, and often does, great good. He can do, and he often does, infinite mischief. All journalists, all writers, for the very reason that they appreciate the vast possibilities of their profession, should bear testimony against those who deeply discredit it. Offenses against taste and morals, which are bad enough in a private citizen, are infinitely worse if made into instruments for debauching the community through a newspaper. Mendacity, slander, sensationalism, inanity, vapid triviality, all are potent factors for the debauchery of the public mind and conscience. The excuse advanced for vicious writing, that the public demands it and that demand must be supplied, can no more be admitted than if it were advanced by purveyors of food who sell poisonous adulterations. In short, the good citizen in a republic must realize that the ought to possess two sets of qualities, and that neither avails without the other. He must have those qualities which make for efficiency; and that he also must have those qualities which direct the efficiency into channels for the public good. He is useless if he is inefficient. There is nothing to be done with that type of citizen of whom all that can be said is that he is harmless. Virtue which is dependant upon a sluggish circulation is not impressive. There is little place in active life for the timid good man. The man who is saved by weakness from robust wickedness is likewise rendered immune from robuster virtues. The good citizen in a republic must first of all be able to hold his own. He is no good citizen unless he has the ability which will make him work hard and which at need will make him fight hard. The good citizen is not a good citizen unless he is an efficient citizen.


But if a man's efficiency is not guided and regulated by a moral sense, then the more efficient he is the worse he is, the more dangerous to the body politic. Courage, intellect, all the masterful qualities, serve but to make a man more evil if they are merely used for that man's own advancement, with brutal indifference to the rights of others. It speaks ill for the community if the community worships these qualities and treats their possessors as heroes regardless of whether the qualities are used rightly or wrongly. It makes no difference as to the precise way in which this sinister efficiency is shown. It makes no difference whether such a man's force and ability betray themselves in a career of money-maker or politician, soldier or orator, journalist or popular leader. If the man works for evil, then the more successful he is the more he should be despised and condemned by all upright and far-seeing men. To judge a man merely by success is an abhorrent wrong; and if the people at large habitually so judge men, if they grow to condone wickedness because the wicked man triumphs, they show their inability to understand that in the last analysis free institutions rest upon the character of citizenship, and that by such admiration of evil they prove themselves unfit for liberty. The homely virtues of the household, the ordinary workaday virtues which make the woman a good housewife and housemother, which make the man a hard worker, a good husband and father, a good soldier at need, stand at the bottom of character. But of course many other must be added thereto if a state is to be not only free but great. Good citizenship is not good citizenship if only exhibited in the home. There remains the duties of the individual in relation to the State, and these duties are none too easy under the conditions which exist where the effort is made to carry on the free government in a complex industrial civilization. Perhaps the most important thing the ordinary citizen, and, above all, the leader of ordinary citizens, has to remember in political life is that he must not be a sheer doctrinaire. The closest philosopher, the refined and cultured individual who from his library tells how men ought to be governed under ideal conditions, is of no use in actual governmental work; and the one-sided fanatic, and still more the mob-leader, and the insincere man who to achieve power promises what by no possibility can be performed, are not merely useless but noxious.


The citizen must have high ideals, and yet he must be able to achieve them in practical fashion. No permanent good comes from aspirations so lofty that they have grown fantastic and have become impossible and indeed undesirable to realize. The impractical visionary is far less often the guide and precursor than he is the embittered foe of the real reformer, of the man who, with stumblings and shortcoming, yet does in some shape, in practical fashion, give effect to the hopes and desires of those who strive for better things. Woe to the empty phrase-maker, to the empty idealist, who, instead of making ready the ground for the man of action, turns against him when he appears and hampers him when he does work! Moreover, the preacher of ideals must remember how sorry and contemptible is the figure which he will cut, how great the damage that he will do, if he does not himself, in his own life, strive measurably to realize the ideals that he preaches for others. Let him remember also that the worth of the ideal must be largely determined by the success with which it can in practice be realized. We should abhor the so-called "practical" men whose practicality assumes the shape of that peculiar baseness which finds its expression in disbelief in morality and decency, in disregard of high standards of living and conduct. Such a creature is the worst enemy of the body of politic. But only less desirable as a citizen is his nominal opponent and real ally, the man of fantastic vision who makes the impossible better forever the enemy of the possible good.


We can just as little afford to follow the doctrinaires of an extreme individualism as the doctrinaires of an extreme socialism. Individual initiative, so far from being discouraged, should be stimulated; and yet we should remember that, as society develops and grows more complex, we continually find that things which once it was desirable to leave to individual initiative can, under changed conditions, be performed with better results by common effort. It is quite impossible, and equally undesirable, to draw in theory a hard-and-fast line which shall always divide the two sets of cases. This every one who is not cursed with the pride of the closest philosopher will see, if he will only take the trouble to think about some of our closet phenomena. For instance, when people live on isolated farms or in little hamlets, each house can be left to attend to its own drainage and water-supply; but the mere multiplication of families in a given area produces new problems which, because they differ in size, are found to differ not only in degree, but in kind from the old; and the questions of drainage and water-supply have to be considered from the common standpoint. It is not a matter for abstract dogmatizing to decide when this point is reached; it is a matter to be tested by practical experiment. Much of the discussion about socialism and individualism is entirely pointless, because of the failure to agree on terminology. It is not good to be a slave of names. I am a strong individualist by personal habit, inheritance, and conviction; but it is a mere matter of common sense to recognize that the State, the community, the citizens acting together, can do a number of things better than if they were left to individual action. The individualism which finds its expression in the abuse of physical force is checked very early in the growth of civilization, and we of to-day should in our turn strive to shackle or destroy that individualism which triumphs by greed and cunning, which exploits the weak by craft instead of ruling them by brutality. We ought to go with any man in the effort to bring about justice and the equality of opportunity, to turn the tool-user more and more into the tool-owner, to shift burdens so that they can be more equitably borne. The deadening effect on any race of the adoption of a logical and extreme socialistic system could not be overstated; it would spell sheer destruction; it would produce grosser wrong and outrage, fouler immortality, than any existing system. But this does not mean that we may not with great advantage adopt certain of the principles professed by some given set of men who happen to call themselves Socialists; to be afraid to do so would be to make a mark of weakness on our part.


But we should not take part in acting a lie any more than in telling a lie. We should not say that men are equal where they are not equal, nor proceed upon the assumption that there is an equality where it does not exist; but we should strive to bring about a measurable equality, at least to the extent of preventing the inequality which is due to force or fraud. Abraham Lincoln, a man of the plain people, blood of their blood, and bone of their bone, who all his life toiled and wrought and suffered for them, at the end died for them, who always strove to represent them, who would never tell an untruth to or for them, spoke of the doctrine of equality with his usual mixture of idealism and sound common sense. He said (I omit what was of merely local significance):


"I think the authors of the Declaration of Independence intended to include all men, but they did not mean to declare all men equal in all respects. They did not mean to say all men were equal in color, size, intellect, moral development or social capacity. They defined with tolerable distinctness in what they did consider all men created equal-equal in certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. This they said, and this they meant. They did not mean to assert the obvious untruth that all were actually enjoying that equality, or yet that they were about to confer it immediately upon them. They meant to set up a standard maxim for free society which should be familiar to all - constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and, even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people, everywhere."



We are bound in honor to refuse to listen to those men who would make us desist from the effort to do away with the inequality which means injustice; the inequality of right, opportunity, of privilege. We are bound in honor to strive to bring ever nearer the day when, as far is humanly possible, we shall be able to realize the ideal that each man shall have an equal opportunity to show the stuff that is in him by the way in which he renders service. There should, so far as possible, be equal of opportunity to render service; but just so long as there is inequality of service there should and must be inequality of reward. We may be sorry for the general, the painter, the artists, the worker in any profession or of any kind, whose misfortune rather than whose fault it is that he does his work ill. But the reward must go to the man who does his work well; for any other course is to create a new kind of privilege, the privilege of folly and weakness; and special privilege is injustice, whatever form it takes.


To say that the thriftless, the lazy, the vicious, the incapable, ought to have reward given to those who are far-sighted, capable, and upright, is to say what is not true and cannot be true. Let us try to level up, but let us beware of the evil of leveling down. If a man stumbles, it is a good thing to help him to his feet. Every one of us needs a helping hand now and then. But if a man lies down, it is a waste of time to try and carry him; and it is a very bad thing for every one if we make men feel that the same reward will come to those who shirk their work and those who do it. Let us, then, take into account the actual facts of life, and not be misled into following any proposal for achieving the millennium, for recreating the golden age, until we have subjected it to hardheaded examination. On the other hand, it is foolish to reject a proposal merely because it is advanced by visionaries. If a given scheme is proposed, look at it on its merits, and, in considering it, disregard formulas. It does not matter in the least who proposes it, or why. If it seems good, try it. If it proves good, accept it; otherwise reject it. There are plenty of good men calling themselves Socialists with whom, up to a certain point, it is quite possible to work. If the next step is one which both we and they wish to take, why of course take it, without any regard to the fact that our views as to the tenth step may differ. But, on the other hand, keep clearly in mind that, though it has been worth while to take one step, this does not in the least mean that it may not be highly disadvantageous to take the next. It is just as foolish to refuse all progress because people demanding it desire at some points to go to absurd extremes, as it would be to go to these absurd extremes simply because some of the measures advocated by the extremists were wise.


The good citizen will demand liberty for himself, and as a matter of pride he will see to it that others receive liberty which he thus claims as his own. Probably the best test of true love of liberty in any country in the way in which minorities are treated in that country. Not only should there be complete liberty in matters of religion and opinion, but complete liberty for each man to lead his life as he desires, provided only that in so he does not wrong his neighbor. Persecution is bad because it is persecution, and without reference to which side happens at the most to be the persecutor and which the persecuted. Class hatred is bad in just the same way, and without regard to the individual who, at a given time, substitutes loyalty to a class for loyalty to a nation, of substitutes hatred of men because they happen to come in a certain social category, for judgement awarded them according to their conduct. Remember always that the same measure of condemnation should be extended to the arrogance which would look down upon or crush any man because he is poor and to envy and hatred which would destroy a man because he is wealthy. The overbearing brutality of the man of wealth or power, and the envious and hateful malice directed against wealth or power, are really at root merely different manifestations of the same quality, merely two sides of the same shield. The man who, if born to wealth and power, exploits and ruins his less fortunate brethren is at heart the same as the greedy and violent demagogue who excites those who have not property to plunder those who have. The gravest wrong upon his country is inflicted by that man, whatever his station, who seeks to make his countrymen divide primarily in the line that separates class from class, occupation from occupation, men of more wealth from men of less wealth, instead of remembering that the only safe standard is that which judges each man on his worth as a man, whether he be rich or whether he be poor, without regard to his profession or to his station in life. Such is the only true democratic test, the only test that can with propriety be applied in a republic. There have been many republics in the past, both in what we call antiquity and in what we call the Middle Ages. They fell, and the prime factor in their fall was the fact that the parties tended to divide along the wealth that separates wealth from poverty. It made no difference which side was successful; it made no difference whether the republic fell under the rule of and oligarchy or the rule of a mob. In either case, when once loyalty to a class had been substituted for loyalty to the republic, the end of the republic was at hand. There is no greater need to-day than the need to keep ever in mind the fact that the cleavage between right and wrong, between good citizenship and bad citizenship, runs at right angles to, and not parallel with, the lines of cleavage between class and class, between occupation and occupation. Ruin looks us in the face if we judge a man by his position instead of judging him by his conduct in that position.


In a republic, to be successful we must learn to combine intensity of conviction with a broad tolerance of difference of conviction. Wide differences of opinion in matters of religious, political, and social belief must exist if conscience and intellect alike are not be stunted, if there is to be room for healthy growth. Bitter internecine hatreds, based on such differences, are signs, not of earnestness of belief, but of that fanaticism which, whether religious or antireligious, democratic or antidemocratic, it itself but a manifestation of the gloomy bigotry which has been the chief factor in the downfall of so many, many nations.


Of one man in especial, beyond any one else, the citizens of a republic should beware, and that is of the man who appeals to them to support him on the ground that he is hostile to other citizens of the republic, that he will secure for those who elect him, in one shape or another, profit at the expense of other citizens of the republic. It makes no difference whether he appeals to class hatred or class interest, to religious or antireligious prejudice. The man who makes such an appeal should always be presumed to make it for the sake of furthering his own interest. The very last thing an intelligent and self-respecting member of a democratic community should do is to reward any public man because that public man says that he will get the private citizen something to which this private citizen is not entitled, or will gratify some emotion or animosity which this private citizen ought not to possess. Let me illustrate this by one anecdote from my own experience. A number of years ago I was engaged in cattle-ranching on the great plains of the western Unite States. There were no fences. The cattle wandered free, the ownership of each one was determined by the brand; the calves were branded with the brand of the cows they followed. If on a round-up and animal was passed by, the following year it would appear as an unbranded yearling, and was then called a maverick. By the custom of the country these mavericks were branded with the brand of the man on whose range they were found. One day I was riding the range with a newly hired cowboy, and we came upon a maverick. We roped and threw it; then we built a fire, took out a cinch-ring, heated it in the fire; and then the cowboy started to put on the brand. I said to him, "It So-and-so's brand," naming the man on whose range we happened to be. He answered: "That's all right, boss; I know my business." In another moment I said to him: "Hold on, you are putting on my brand!" To which he answered: "That's all right; I always put on the boss's brand." I answered: "Oh, very well. Now you go straight back to the ranch and get whatever is owing to you; I don't need you any longer." He jumped up and said: "Why, what's the matter? I was putting on your brand." And I answered: "Yes, my friend, and if you will steal for me then you will steal from me."


Now, the same principle which applies in private life applies also in public life. If a public man tries to get your vote by saying that he will do something wrong in your interest, you can be absolutely certain that if ever it becomes worth his while he will do something wrong against your interest. So much for the citizenship to the individual in his relations to his family, to his neighbor, to the State. There remain duties of citizenship which the State, the aggregation of all the individuals, owes in connection with other States, with other nations. Let me say at once that I am no advocate of a foolish cosmopolitanism. I believe that a man must be a good patriot before he can be, and as the only possible way of being, a good citizen of the world. Experience teaches us that the average man who protests that his international feeling swamps his national feeling, that he does not care for his country because he cares so much for mankind, in actual practice proves himself the foe of mankind; that the man who says that he does not care to be a citizen of any one country, because he is the citizen of the world, is in fact usually and exceedingly undesirable citizen of whatever corner of the world he happens at the moment to be in. In the dim future all moral needs and moral standards may change; but at present, if a man can view his own country and all others countries from the same level with tepid indifference, it is wise to distrust him, just as it is wise to distrust the man who can take the same dispassionate view of his wife and mother. However broad and deep a man's sympathies, however intense his activities, he need have no fear that they will be cramped by love of his native land.


Now, this does not mean in the least that a man should not wish to good outside of his native land. On the contrary, just as I think that the man who loves his family is more apt to be a good neighbor than the man who does not, so I think that the most useful member of the family of nations is normally a strongly patriotic nation. So far from patriotism being inconsistent with a proper regard for the rights of other nations, I hold that the true patriot, who is as jealous of the national honor as a gentleman of his own honor, will be careful to see that the nations neither inflicts nor suffers wrong, just as a gentleman scorns equally to wrong others or to suffer others to wrong him. I do not for one moment admit that a man should act deceitfully as a public servant in his dealing with other nations, any more than he should act deceitfully in his dealings as a private citizen with other private citizens. I do not for one moment admit that a nation should treat other nations in a different spirit from that in which an honorable man would treat other men.


In practically applying this principle to the two sets of cases there is, of course, a great practical difference to be taken into account. We speak of international law; but international law is something wholly different from private of municipal law, and the capital difference is that there is a sanction for the one and no sanction for the other; that there is an outside force which compels individuals to obey the one, while there is no such outside force to compel obedience as regards to the other. International law will, I believe, as the generations pass, grow stronger and stronger until in some way or other there develops the power to make it respected. But as yet it is only in the first formative period. As yet, as a rule, each nation is of necessity to judge for itself in matters of vital importance between it and its neighbors, and actions must be of necessity, where this is the case, be different from what they are where, as among private citizens, there is an outside force whose action is all-powerful and must be invoked in any crisis of importance. It is the duty of wise statesman, gifted with the power of looking ahead, to try to encourage and build up every movement which will substitute or tend to substitute some other agency for force in the settlement of international disputes. It is the duty of every honest statesman to try to guide the nation so that it shall not wrong any other nation. But as yet the great civilized peoples, if they are to be true to themselves and to the cause of humanity and civilization, must keep in mind that in the last resort they must possess both the will and the power to resent wrong-doings from others. The men who sanely believe in a lofty morality preach righteousness; but they do not preach weakness, whether among private citizens or among nations. We believe that our ideals should be so high, but not so high as to make it impossible measurably to realize them. We sincerely and earnestly believe in peace; but if peace and justice conflict, we scorn the man who would not stand for justice though the whole world came in arms against him.


And now, my hosts, a word in parting. You and I belong to the only two republics among the great powers of the world. The ancient friendship between France and the United States has been, on the whole, a sincere and disinterested friendship. A calamity to you would be a sorrow to us. But it would be more than that. In the seething turmoil of the history of humanity certain nations stand out as possessing a peculiar power or charm, some special gift of beauty or wisdom of strength, which puts them among the immortals, which makes them rank forever with the leaders of mankind. France is one of these nations. For her to sink would be a loss to all the world. There are certain lessons of brilliance and of generous gallantry that she can teach better than any of her sister nations. When the French peasantry sang of Malbrook, it was to tell how the soul of this warrior-foe took flight upward through the laurels he had won. Nearly seven centuries ago, Froisart, writing of the time of dire disaster, said that the realm of France was never so stricken that there were not left men who would valiantly fight for it. You have had a great past. I believe you will have a great future. Long may you carry yourselves proudly as citizens of a nation which bears a leading part in the teaching and uplifting of mankind.
Title: Mona Charen: Gruber, Freakonomics, and Roe v. Wade
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 02, 2015, 10:08:16 AM
Mona Charen: "Recall that the 2005 best-seller 'Freakonomics' made a huge splash with the claim that Roe v. Wade was responsible for the drop in crime America experienced starting in the 1990s. The theory, simplified for space, was that fewer unwanted babies began to be born after 1973. These aborted babies did not turn 18 in 1991 and, accordingly, did not commit crimes, leading to the dramatic drop in crime. It turns out that the study on which the 'Freakonomics' authors based their chapter on abortion and crime was authored by none other than Jonathan Gruber (and others). ... Considering that 30 percent of abortions are obtained by African-American women, though they constitute just 13 percent of the female population, Gruber was in effect arguing that reducing the number of poor black children was, not to put too fine a point on it, a positive good. One cannot begin to imagine the outcry if a conservative academic (that rare specimen) had published similar conclusions with such sang-froid. ... [W]hat’s more revealing is the casual readiness to calculate lost lives as so many numbers on a balance sheet. If it makes you uncomfortable that such a person helped design Obamacare, you’re not alone."
Title: Patriot Post: Civic Virtue in Decline
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 05, 2015, 09:57:41 AM
Civic Virtue in Decline
 

As we enter 2015, it's worth looking back on some key cultural indicators from 2014. Here is one bad omen: According to a 2014 Associated Press-GfK poll, Americans' sense of civic virtue is in serious decline. "I don't see any recovery," said Rutgers University Professor Cliff Zukin. "The people who were 40 two decades ago aren't as engaged as the people who were 60 two decades ago. This generational slippage tends to continue."

The poll was a reprise of questions asked in 1984, and it focused on six civic-oriented activities: voting, volunteering, jury service, reporting crimes, knowing English and keeping on top of news and public issues. Only voting and volunteering were embraced as enthusiastically as they were 30 years ago, yet even those numbers are not particularly encouraging. Only 28% of Americans consider volunteering a "very important obligation." And while 75% characterize voting a central obligation of citizenship, talk is cheap: Voter turnout in the last presidential election dipped to 57.5% of eligible citizens compared to 62.3% in 2008.

Voter turnout in 2014? The 36.4% of eligible citizens who bothered to vote represented the lowest turnout in any election cycle since World War II.

Most Americans do feel some sense of duty to the nation, with 90% characterizing the reporting of a crime one has witnessed, voting in elections, knowing English and serving on a jury when called as "somewhat important" obligations of citizenship. And a majority of Americans consider them "very important" obligations. Yet with an exception for voting, those majorities have declined by an average of approximately 13 percentage points over the last three decades.

Leading the pack are adults under 30 years of age. In every category except volunteering, they were less likely than elder generations to see any obligation, and also felt less obligated than young people of the past. Even more ominously, nearly one in four feel no obligation to keep informed, volunteer or speak English.

Scott Keeter, director of survey research at the Pew Research Center, suggests one possibility for the decline. "There are a lot of arguments about how our society has shifted toward a rights focus instead of an obligation focus," he explains -- even as he remains relatively unconcerned, adding, "It's a little early to pull the alarm bells about the demise of our civic culture."

No, it's not. And while a rights focus versus an obligation focus may account for some of the decline, the 800-pound gorilla is far more obvious: The American Left has virtually removed the concept of American exceptionalism from the classroom, and cheapened the concept of citizenship itself.

With regard to exceptionalism, the New York Post explains that the teaching of civics has been "largely abandoned" in today's public schools, and according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which bills itself as "the largest nationally representative and continuing assessment of what America's students know and can do in various subject areas," those students are less proficient in American history than in any other subject.

Furthermore, what little history they do learn has been twisted to conform to the leftist agenda. As we reported in July, the College Board, the company responsible for the SAT exams and a number of Advanced Placement (AP) exams, has radically redesigned American history curricula to dispense with such things as learning about our nation's Founders. Mark Alexander noted, "The College Board, which sets the curriculum-testing bar, makes only two references to George Washington, one to Thomas Jefferson, and nowhere to be found are Benjamin Franklin and James Madison, among others." In their place, students will learn about class, race and gender wrongs.
One such example is that set by the cities of Seattle and Minneapolis, where Columbus Day has been kicked to the curb in favor of "Indigenous People's Day" -- in all its grievance-mongering glory.

Thus the obvious question arises: Why would one be expected to feel a sense of civic virtue toward a nation one either knows little about, or has been taught to view with contempt?

As for cheapening citizenship, what could be more obvious than the Left's obsession with granting many of its privileges to illegal aliens? Once again California leads the way, as illegal aliens can now get driver's licenses in that state beginning this year. Not to be outdone, the New York City Council is considering a bill to allow non-citizens to vote in municipal elections. That follows Mayor Bill de Blasio's signing of a bill last July providing municipal ID cards to city "residents," regardless of immigration status, beginning this year. De Blasio also signed a bill in November barring the city from alerting federal authorities to illegals in city custody and subject to deportation proceedings, except in rare cases.

And last, but certainly not least, Barack Obama unilaterally decided he will not enforce immigration law against five million illegal aliens -- illegals who have and will compete with American citizens for jobs, and many of whom already receive government services, including welfare and Medicaid.

And legal immigrants who were once expected to assimilate into America's "melting pot" society have been told to "celebrate their differences," which goes a long way toward explaining the reluctance to learn English.

The concerted effort to tarnish the civic pride that American exceptionalism engenders, coupled with the effort to denigrate citizenship itself -- which is exactly what creating politically motivated exemptions for lawbreakers represents -- are all the explanation necessary as to why civic virtue is in decline.

In the same 1961 speech in which Democrat President (and leftist icon) John Kennedy uttered the words "ask not what your country can do for you -- ask what you can do for your country," he also told the nation that "[w]e dare not forget today that we are the heirs of that first [American] revolution." Six years later, Ronald Reagan made it clearer in his inaugural address as California governor: "Freedom is a fragile thing and is never more than one generation away from extinction." Civic virtue and the obligations of citizenship cannot be separated from the preservation of freedom. We allow their continued deterioration at our own peril.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: DougMacG on January 05, 2015, 11:07:14 AM
"Voter turnout in 2014? The 36.4% of eligible citizens who bothered to vote represented the lowest turnout in any election cycle since World War II."

   - Voters and voter demographic groups lost faith in leftism as represented by the President and supporting cast of Pelosi-Reid, etc., without being converted over to the other side (yet).  Meanwhile, conservatives have lost faith in their leadership and their party's ability or desire to truly turn things around.

President Kennedy: "ask not what your country can do for you -- ask what you can do for your country".

   - That feeling has been gone for quite a while.  Had Obama taken that approach, he could have inspired millions of people to do better for themselves!

Ronald Reagan: "Freedom is a fragile thing and is never more than one generation away from extinction."

  - Unfortunately, proven true.

I would add two quotes.

Mark Steyn:  "You Can't Have a Conservative Government with a Liberal Culture"
http://www.steynonline.com/6598/conservative-government-in-a-liberal-culture

Soviet Premier Nikita Krushchev said to our grandparents:
"I can prophesize that your grandchildren in America will live under socialism,"
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/nikita-khrushchev-and-face-the-nations-biggest-scoop/
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

We are one leader away from changing direction at this historic, political inflection point, before no one ever again remembers what made this country great.
Title: Say it ain't so Charles....well, he was a Democrat in the past
Post by: ccp on January 11, 2015, 09:23:26 AM
The average Joe taxpayer finally gets a bit of a break (at the pump) and now we have even (faux) conservative calling for this to immediately be taken away by assessing a huge tax increase on gas.    Charles we don't all make a million a year like you.   Charles is now moved to my phoney list.

**********Raise the gas tax. A lot.

By Charles Krauthammer Opinion writer January 8  

For 32 years I’ve been advocating a major tax on petroleum. I’ve got as much chance this time around as did Don Quixote with windmills. But I shall tilt my lance once more.

The only time you can even think of proposing a gas tax increase is when oil prices are at rock bottom. When I last suggested the idea six years ago, oil was selling at $40 a barrel. It eventually rose back to $110. It’s now around $48. Correspondingly, the price at the pump has fallen in the last three months by more than a dollar to about $2.20 per gallon.

As a result, some in Congress are talking about a 10- or 20-cent hike in the federal tax to use for infrastructure spending. Right idea, wrong policy. The hike should not be 10 cents but $1. And the proceeds should not be spent by, or even entrusted to, the government. They should be immediately and entirely returned to the consumer by means of a cut in the Social Security tax.

The average American buys about 12 gallons of gas a week. Washington would be soaking him for $12 in extra taxes. Washington should therefore simultaneously reduce everyone’s FICA tax by $12 a week. Thus the average driver is left harmless. He receives a $12-per-week FICA bonus that he can spend on gasoline if he wants — or anything else. If he chooses to drive less, it puts money in his pocket. (The unemployed would have the $12 added to their unemployment insurance; the elderly, to their Social Security check.)

The point of the $1 gas tax increase is not to feed the maw of a government raking in $3 trillion a year. The point is exclusively to alter incentives — to reduce the disincentive for work (the Social Security tax) and to increase the disincentive to consume gasoline.

It’s win-win. Employment taxes are a drag on job creation. Reducing them not only promotes growth but advances fairness, FICA being a regressive tax that hits the middle and working classes far more than the rich.

As for oil, we remain the world champion consumer. We burn more than 20 percent of global output, almost twice as much as the next nearest gas guzzler, China.

A $1 gas tax increase would constrain oil consumption in two ways. In the short run, by curbing driving. In the long run, by altering car-buying habits. A return to gas-guzzling land yachts occurs every time gasoline prices plunge. A high gas tax encourages demand for more fuel-efficient vehicles. Constrained U.S. consumption — combined with already huge increases in U.S. production — would continue to apply enormous downward pressure on oil prices.

A tax is the best way to improve fuel efficiency. Today we do it through rigid regulations, the so-called CAFE standards imposed on carmakers. They are forced to manufacture acres of unsellable cars in order to meet an arbitrary, bureaucratic “fleet” gas-consumption average.

This is nuts. If you simply set a higher price point for gasoline, buyers will do the sorting on their own, choosing fuel efficiency just as they do when the world price is high. The beauty of the tax — as a substitute for a high world price — is that the incentive for fuel efficiency remains, but the extra money collected at the pump goes right back into the U.S. economy (and to the citizenry through the revenue-neutral FICA rebate) instead of being shipped overseas to Russia, Venezuela, Iran and other unsavories.

Which is a geopolitical coup. Cheap oil is the most effective and efficient instrument known to man for weakening these oil-dependent miscreants.

And finally, lower consumption reduces pollution and greenhouse gases. The reduction of traditional pollutants, though relatively minor, is an undeniable gain. And even for global warming skeptics, there’s no reason not to welcome a benign measure that induces prudential reductions in CO2 emissions.

Gasoline hasn't been this cheap since 2009. But why now, and how long will prices stay low? Here's what you need to know, in two minutes. (Gillian Brockell/The Washington Post)

The unexpected and unpredicted collapse of oil prices gives us a unique opportunity to maintain our good luck through a simple, revenue-neutral measure to help prevent the perennial price spikes that follow the fool’s paradise of ultra-cheap oil.

We’ve blown this chance at least three times since the 1980s. As former French foreign minister Jean François-Poncet said a quarter-century ago, “It’s hard to take seriously that a nation has deep problems if they can be fixed with a 50-cent-a-gallon” — 90 cents in today’s money — “gasoline tax.” Let’s not blow it again.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 11, 2015, 10:43:26 AM
Well, although the idea is not well thought out IMHO, in fairness we must note that he seeks to offset the tax with tax cuts elsewhere.

Title: SourKrauthammer
Post by: ccp on January 11, 2015, 06:47:25 PM
"Well, although the idea is not well thought out IMHO, in fairness we must note that he seeks to offset the tax with tax cuts elsewhere"

Why is it to a liberal (not you Crafty I mean in general) government spending of more tax receipts a great "stimulator" of the economy, but a tax cut is no more than a gift to the rich. 

Now we have a gas price drop and even some Repubs are calling to negate most of this with a tax increase?   When did sourKraut decide we need to increase tax on gas to because we must decrease gas usage.  Is this his nod to Climate Change?

Does he pretend the money will go for "infrastructure"?   We all know what that means :  pork, favoritism, nepotism, more lobbyist government contracts, maybe organized crime in the construction business.

Rationalizing a tax decrease on wages will not incentivize work.   Most people who need a tax break just to want a job?  Is that why people don't work?  What is he thinking?

Most of these people will not work because they can't get wages that are worth the 40 hours of sweat more then they can get collecting unemployment or disability or a pension.

Not because of their taxes.

It would help people to work just as much if they can afford to get to work.

More Rhino social engineering every bit as absurd as the lefts'.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 11, 2015, 06:58:21 PM
Again, I disagree with CK' idea, I am just pointing out that it is not a net increase, but a purportedly revenue neutral shift from taxing one thing to taxing a different thing with the goal of increasing economic efficiency.  That's all.
Title: VDH: Multi-Culti Suicide
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 17, 2015, 07:21:34 PM
http://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/multicultural-suicide/?singlepage=true
Title: Union of concerned scientists
Post by: ccp on January 18, 2015, 10:31:26 AM
Of course because they are "scientists" they have no axes to grind or agendas or political or financial conflicts of interests.  It is all in the name of their religion:  science.
Does this author really think the average person has any knowledge or information on the thousands of regulations we get yearly?   Who elected these people?


*****How Congress is Cutting Science Out of Science Policy (Op-Ed)LiveScience.com By Celia Wexler, Union of Concerned Scientists
January 16, 2015 1:51 PM
 ˠ➕✓✕Content preferences Done Celia Wexler is a senior Washington Representative for the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), where she focuses on food and drug safety, protections for scientist whistle-blowers and government transparency and accountability. She is the author of "Out of the News: Former Journalists Discuss a Profession in Crisis" (McFarland, 2012). She contributed this article to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

You can say one thing about the U.S. House of Representatives leadership. They're good about recycling — holding repeated votes on the same bills they've already passed. So I guess no one should be surprised that one of the first bills the new House will vote on this week is a retread, and a nasty one at that. The bill, the Regulatory Accountability Act (RAA), sounds pretty harmless and wonky. It is wonky, buried in thousands of words that mask its true intention, which is not harmless at all. The bill would take a sledge hammer to science-informed policymaking at federal agencies. [Why I'll Talk Politics With Climate Change Deniers — But Not Science ]

Why should the nation care? Because instead of science informing the decisions our government makes about protecting our environment, public health and safety, those decisions would be driven by the wants of regulated industries, putting average Americans in jeopardy.

The bill's impact dramatically affects the fundamental regulatory process, so that nearly every type of protective regulation is vulnerable. As a result, the RAA is opposed by groups who advocate on a variety of issues, ranging from consumer safety and financial reform to food safety and worker rights.

Slowing the pace of government to a crawl

Currently, when agencies want to issue a regulation, they already must follow a process dictated by at least six existing laws. They have to give the public and those interests affected by the regulation a chance to comment on it. They must explain why the regulation is needed and routinely attempt to estimate its costs and benefits. Regulations can also be challenged in court. This ensures that agencies take procedural requirements seriously when they develop a rule, because the failure to do so can lead to the rule being rejected by the court, sending the agency back to the beginning of the process to start all over again.

Years pass between the time a rule is proposed and its implementation. Even when a regulated industry does not oppose a rule, such as a rule that imposes stronger safety requirements on the operation of construction cranes and derricks, it can take more than six years for a final rule to be issued.

But the RAA would add dozens of new procedures for agencies to follow, and likely would add several more years to the current process.

For example, this bill would require agencies to estimate not only the direct costs and benefits of a proposed regulation but also "indirect" costs, including impacts on jobs and wages — yet the bill doesn't define what an indirect cost is. It requires agencies to examine every alternative to the rule being proposed and the indirect and direct costs of each. It requires the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to produce mandatory guidelines stipulating how agencies should do these estimates. If agencies fail to do exactly as OMB requires, this alone can be a reason for a judge to throw out the regulation altogether. And, the bill would require agencies to conduct a formal "hearing" for any rule that has a $1 billion or greater cost (though anyone who objects to smaller rules — those that cost $100 million or more — can petition the agency to conduct a formal hearing, as well).

Such hearings would give regulated industries the right to cross-examine agency officials, and to re-examine, in a trial setting, the agency's justification of costs and benefits and alternatives to the rule. When the administrative law and regulatory experts at the American Bar Associationlooked at an earlier version of the RAA, they found this hearing requirement particularly troubling, noting that "trial-type methods are usually unsuitable in generalized rulemaking proceedings," and that "not one scholarly article" written over the past 30 years supported this type of formal rulemaking.

The rise of the zombie bills

You might want to call this the first in what we expect to be a long list of "zombie bills" — retreads of bills which failed to become law in previous years, but have been resurrected one more time. These legislative proposals harm science-informed policy, jeopardizing public health, safety and the environment.

The House leadership isn't crazy. They suspect that the shift in power in the U.S. Senate means that these terrible bills may have a chance at life this Congress. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), the powerful chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, and conservative Democratic co-sponsor Collin Peterson (D-Minn.) claim that the bill would "modernize" the regulatory process. That is absolutely not what the bill would do, nor what it was designed to do.

This is much more about delaying and blocking regulations and preventing agencies from carrying out their statutory missions. Goodlatte has been an ardent criticof the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) rules on a variety of issues. And Peterson has been waging war against the Administration's efforts to address climate change.

The bill has never drawn substantial bipartisan support. When the RAA passed the House late last year, it received the votes of 28 Democrats, but that was largely because it was part of a package that include a positive proposal, a bill that would help veterans get jobs. House members, particularly in vulnerable districts, were wary of voting against that provision right before the election. Roughly half of the Democrats who supported the bill either retired or were defeated last November.

But the bill has had the consistent and vigorous support of big business groups. Indeed, the Chamber of Commercehas listed passage of the RAA as one of its major goals this year.

Deciphering the details

This bill is deliberately complicated. You would have to be a regulatory lawyer to perceive all the traps, and even then you might miss some. Essentially what the RAA would do is hamstring federal agencies with additional procedural burdens when they try to carry out their mandates using the best available science. [How Much Say Should Congress Have in Science Funding? ]

When James Goodwin of the Center for Progressive Reform looked at the bill, he found it would add a whopping 74 additional procedural requirements agencies would have to undertake to propose and implement regulations, including those that protect the environment, public health and safety.

Even assessing risk, which should be in the hands of scientists, would be second-guessed by White House officials. Goodlatte's proposal requires that the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) develop guidelines for assessing risk, and that agencies must conform to whatever OIRA imposes — despite the fact that OIRA's small staff, which includes only a handful of scientists, lacks the scientific and technical expertise that federal agency scientists possess. OIRA bean counters should not be in the business of determining what constitutes a scientifically valid risk assessment.

In passing bipartisan laws such as the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act, Congress told the EPA that preserving the environment and protecting public health was its core mission, and directed that it should not nickel-and-dime regulations that have ensured that future generations have access to unpolluted lakes and rivers and breathable air.

The RAA would jeopardize that mandate. The EPA would be much more vulnerable to legal challenges of its rules based on their costs, even if those rules were crucial to protecting air and water and safeguarding public health — indeed, even if those rules have enormous long-term economic benefits or savings.

That's because costs are specific and supplied by regulated industries. But benefits, particularly long-term ones, are far more difficult for an agency to quantify. How do you figure out the value of your children not getting asthma from smoggy air and being able to play outside? The RAA emphasizes the costs to businesses, not the long-term benefits to the public.

The worst part of the bill is the blatant cynicism it demonstrates. This bill harms science, but it also harms democracy. In rushing this complicated legislative proposal during the first weeks of Congress, House leaders are subverting the democratic process. If Congress wants an open and public debate on the value of bipartisan public protections built over the past century, then it should do so directly.

But Goodlatte, Peterson and others may suspect that they'd lose in a fair fight over the value of clean air and water and public health and safety. Last year, when respected pollster Celinda Lake Recent did national polling and convened focus groups to measure public attitudes towards regulation and regulatory enforcement, she was surprised to find strong support for federal agencies that crosses party and ideological lines. Even the EPA, often the target of congressional critiques, received the support of more than half of those polled, well above popular support for Congress, which hovers around 10 percent. The average voter understands and respects the work of agencies and knows the value of regulations that protect public health, safety and the environment. Those polled want regulations to be enforced, and enforced fairly. They don't like the idea of big companies rigging the system. And the RAA not only ups the game, but gives priority seats to select players — regulated industries.

So instead of having a fair debate over the merits of science-informed public policies, Goodlatte and Peterson and House leaders want to sneak this bill through. Their efforts suggest that they know full well that most House members, particularly the 73 House freshmen who can barely find their offices, won't understand the bill, or its full implications.

I will give the House leadership points for one thing: This blatant attempt to subvert public protections has brought together science, consumer, public health, financial reform and environmental activists. Americans continue to believe that democracy means that our elected officials ought to make policies that benefit their constituents, not their big donors. Let's hope the nation can drive a stake through the heart of this and future "zombie" bills.

Follow all of the Expert Voices issues and debates — and become part of the discussion — on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher. This version of the article was originally published on Live Science.

Title: Obama's ilk
Post by: ccp on January 20, 2015, 06:15:35 AM
It's all about the world now.   I didn't see any mention of "coutry".  Just the temporary nod to reality by using the term "governments" as liberals like this Columbia University Professor push for one world government:
 
Jeffrey D. Sachs   

DEC 9, 2014 7
The Year of Sustainable Development

NEW YORK – The year 2015 will be our generation’s greatest opportunity to move the world toward sustainable development. Three high-level negotiations between July and December can reshape the global development agenda, and give an important push to vital changes in the workings of the global economy. With United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s call to action in his report “The Road to Dignity,” the Year of Sustainable Development has begun.

In July 2015, world leaders will meet in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to chart reforms of the global financial system. In September 2015, they will meet again to approve Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to guide national and global policies to 2030. And in December 2015, leaders will assemble in Paris to adopt a global agreement to head off the growing dangers of human-induced climate change.

The fundamental goal of these summits is to put the world on a course toward sustainable development, or inclusive and sustainable growth. This means growth that raises average living standards; benefits society across the income distribution, rather than just the rich; and protects, rather than wrecks, the natural environment.

The world economy is reasonably good at achieving economic growth, but it fails to ensure that prosperity is equitably shared and environmentally sustainable. The reason is simple: The world’s largest companies relentlessly – and rather successfully – pursue their own profits, all too often at the expense of economic fairness and the environment.

Profit maximization does not guarantee a reasonable distribution of income or a safe planet. On the contrary, the global economy is leaving vast numbers of people behind, including in the richest countries, while planet Earth itself is under unprecedented threat, owing to human-caused climate change, pollution, water depletion, and the extinction of countless species.

The SDGs are premised on the need for rapid far-reaching change. As John F. Kennedy put it a half-century ago: “By defining our goal more clearly, by making it seem more manageable and less remote, we can help all people to see it, to draw hope from it, and to move irresistibly toward it.” This is, in essence, Ban’s message to the UN member states: Let us define the SDGs clearly, and thereby inspire citizens, businesses, governments, scientists, and civil society around the world to move toward them.

The main objectives of the SDGs have already been agreed. A committee of the UN General Assembly identified 17 target areas, including the eradication of extreme poverty, ensuring education and health for all, and fighting human-induced climate change. The General Assembly as a whole has spoken in favor of these priorities. The key remaining step is to turn them into a workable set of goals. When the SDGs were first proposed in 2012, the UN’s member said that they “should be action-oriented,” “easy to communicate,” and “limited in number,” with many governments favoring a total of perhaps 10-12 goals encompassing the 17 priority areas.

Achieving the SDGs will require deep reform of the global financial system, the key purpose of July’s Conference on Financing for Development. Resources need to be channeled away from armed conflict, tax loopholes for the rich, and wasteful outlays on new oil, gas, and coal development toward priorities such as health, education, and low-carbon energy, as well as stronger efforts to combat corruption and capital flight.

The July summit will seek to elicit from the world’s governments a commitment to allocate more funds to social needs. It will also identify better ways to ensure that development aid reaches the poor, taking lessons from successful programs such as the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria. One such innovation should be a new Global Fund for Education, to ensure that children everywhere can afford to attend school at least through the secondary level. We also need better ways to channel private money toward sustainable infrastructure, such as wind and solar power.

These goals are within reach. Indeed, they are the only way for us to stop wasting trillions of dollars on financial bubbles, useless wars, and environmentally destructive forms of energy.

Success in July and September will give momentum to the decisive climate-change negotiations in Paris next December. Debate over human-induced global warming has been seemingly endless. In the 22 years since the world signed the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change at the Rio Earth Summit, there has been far too little progress toward real action. As a result, 2014 is now likely to be the warmest year in recorded history, a year that has also brought devastating droughts, floods, high-impact storms, and heat waves.

Back in 2009 and 2010, the world’s governments agreed to keep the rise in global temperature to below 2° Celsius relative to the pre-industrial era. Yet warming is currently on course to reach 4-6 degrees by the end of the century – high enough to devastate global food production and dramatically increase the frequency of extreme weather events.

To stay below the two-degree limit, the world’s governments must embrace a core concept: “deep decarbonization” of the world’s energy system. That means a decisive shift from carbon-emitting energy sources like coal, oil, and gas, toward wind, solar, nuclear, and hydroelectric power, as well as the adoption of carbon capture and storage technologies when fossil fuels continue to be used. Dirty high-carbon energy must give way to clean low- and zero-carbon energy, and all energy must be used much more efficiently.

A successful climate agreement next December should reaffirm the two-degree cap on warming; include national “decarbonization” commitments up to 2030 and deep-decarbonization “pathways” (or plans) up to 2050; launch a massive global effort by both governments and businesses to improve the operating performance of low-carbon energy technologies; and provide large-scale and reliable financial help to poorer countries as they face climate challenges. The United States, China, the European Union’s members, and other countries are already signaling their intention to move in the right direction.

The SDGs can create a path toward economic development that is technologically advanced, socially fair, and environmentally sustainable. Agreements at next year’s three summits will not guarantee the success of sustainable development, but they can certainly orient the global economy in the right direction. The chance will not come along again in our generation.

Post Comment Read Comments (7)
PreviousImmigration and the New Class Divide                   

Read more at http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/sustainable-development-2015-by-jeffrey-d-sachs-2014-12#CGgVk1wyquc8QbuD.99
Title: Kasparov
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 21, 2015, 11:18:31 AM

By
Garry Kasparov
Jan. 20, 2015 7:42 p.m. ET
194 COMMENTS

The recent terror attacks in Paris at the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, and at a kosher supermarket, leaving 17 people dead, represented the latest offensive in a struggle that most people, even many of its casualties, are unaware is even taking place.

Globalization has effectively compressed the world in size, increasing the mobility of goods, capital and labor. Simultaneously this has led to globalization across time, as the 21st century collides with cultures and regimes intent on existing as in centuries past. It is less the famous clash of civilizations than an attempt by these “time travelers” to hold on to their waning authority by stopping the advance of the ideas essential to an open society.

Radical Islamists, from the Taliban and al Qaeda to Boko Haram and Islamic State, set the time machine to the Dark Ages and encourage the murder of all who oppose them, often supported by fatwas and funds from terror sponsors like Iran. The religious monarchies in the Middle East are guilty by association, creating favorable conditions for extremism by clamping down on any stirring of freedom.

Vladimir Putin wants Russia to exist in the Great Power era of czars and monarchs, dominating its neighbors by force and undisturbed by elections and rights complaints. The post-Communist autocracies, led by Mr. Putin’s closest dictator allies in Belarus and Kazakhstan, exploit ideology only as a means of hanging on to power at any cost.

In the East, Kim Jong Un ’s North Korea attempts to freeze time in a Stalinist prison-camp bubble. In the West, Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela and the Castros in Cuba use anachronistic socialist propaganda to resist increasing pressure for human rights.

What unites the time travelers is their rejection of modernity—or what we should instead call modern values, to replace the obsolete and condescending term “Western values.” With violence and with violent rhetoric, the time travelers’ natural target is often the traditional champion of the rights that threaten them: the United States. The guaranteed freedoms represented by the First Amendment frighten the radical mullahs and dictators more than any drone strike or economic sanction.
Title: Heroes
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 23, 2015, 09:11:07 AM
http://www.theatlasphere.com/columns/100118-browne-heroes.php
Title: The Troubnle with Limited Government
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 23, 2015, 12:53:48 PM
Second post

The Trouble With Limited Government

Why even Reagan couldn't stop spending from skyrocketing--and what to do about it.

BY WILLIAM VOEGELI

Wednesday, November 7, 2007 12:01 a.m. EST A quarter century ago president Ronald Reagan declared in his first inaugural address: "In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem. . . . It is my intention to curb the size and influence of the federal establishment and to demand recognition of the distinction between the powers granted to the federal government and those reserved to the states or to the people." In 1981, the year of that speech, the federal government spent $678 billion; in 2006, it spent $2,655 billion. Adjust that 292% increase for inflation, and the federal government is still spending 84% more than it did when Reagan became president--in a country whose population has grown by only 30%.

To put the point another way, if per capita spending after 1980 had grown at the rate of inflation, federal outlays would have been $1,883 billion in 2006 instead of $2,655 billion. The 41% increase from 1981 to 2006 is considerably lower than the 94% increase in real per capita spending in the previous 25 years, from 1956 to 1981. In the past two decades, the federal establishment grew steadily, rather than dramatically. Nonetheless, Reagan's pledge to curb the government's size and influence has hardly been fulfilled. Inflation-adjusted federal spending increased in every year but two over the past 26 years.

Military spending is a minor factor in the overall growth of government. It was 23.2% of federal spending and 5.2% of gross domestic product in 1981.
Those percentages peaked in 1987 at 28.1% and 6.1%, respectively. Defense spending fell steadily thereafter, and was just over 16% of the federal budget and 3% of GDP from 1999 through 2001. Since September 11, defense spending has climbed to 20% of the federal budget and 4% of GDP. Despite the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, both figures are lower than they were at any point during Jimmy Carter's presidency.

The engine driving the growth of government has been "human resources"--the Office of Management and Budget's category that includes Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, along with other programs for health, education, veterans and income security. Spending on human resources in 1981 was $362 billion, slightly more than half (53.4%) of all federal outlays. That proportion declined to slightly less than half (49.7%) by the time Reagan left office in 1989. But it turns out there was a peace dividend after the fall of the Berlin Wall: National defense spending dropped from 26.5% of federal outlays in 1989 to 16.1% in 1999. That savings--a tenth of the budget--migrated to human resources, where spending climbed to 60% of outlays by 1995. The category has stayed above that level ever since, reaching almost two-thirds of federal spending (65.6%) and 13.1% of GDP in 2003.

The numbers confirm what every despondent conservative already knows. Since Reagan's stunning victory in 1980, conservative journals have annihilated forests to print articles about excessive government spending. Conservative think tanks have produced sweeping plans for reducing the welfare state.  Republicans occupied the White House for 18 of the 26 years after 1980, and held a Senate majority for 16 1/2 years and a House majority for 12 years.  Yet the result is a federal establishment bigger and more influential today than in 1980.

Reagan was elected president 25 years after the first issue of National Review declared its intention to "stand athwart history, yelling Stop." This was an amazing ascent for a political movement that started out, in the words of NR's first editorial, "superfluous" and "out of place." In the 25 years since Reagan's election, however, conservatives determined to scale back the welfare state might as well have been standing a respectful distance behind history, whispering "Please slow down."





If conservatism has a future, those who want to fashion it need to acknowledge and understand this stunning defeat. In National Review last year Ramesh Ponnuru said the "real crisis" is that, while a conservatism whose "central mission" does not emphasize the fight against Big Government is inconceivable, a "political coalition in America capable of sustaining a majority" for that mission is unimaginable. Conservatism, in other words, can have a purpose or it can have a prospect. It cannot, apparently, have both.

This political problem will only become more acute as the challenges of governance become more severe. One yardstick may help conservatives feel a little better about themselves. In 1981 federal spending was 22.2% of GDP; last year it was 20.3%. This measure hovered in a very narrow band for the whole era, never exceeding 23.5% or falling below 18.4%. Adding expenditures by states and localities confirms the picture of a rugby match between liberals and conservatives that is one interminable scrum in the middle of the field. Spending by all levels of government in America amounted to 31.6% of GDP in 1981, and 31.8% in 2006.

Conservatives, though, can't take much solace from fighting Big Government to a draw. Looking back, the dynamic growth of the American economy after 1982--real per capita GDP was two-thirds higher in 2006 than in 1981--offered a great opportunity to reduce the relative size of the public sector. This economic vigor meant that more people had more money to spend on their own health, education and welfare, presumably enabling the government to spend less for such purposes. It also meant that government spending could have grown robustly and still expanded more slowly than the economy, leaving the public sector to absorb a significantly smaller portion of GDP in 2006 than it did in 1981. Even this modest achievement eluded conservatives.

Republicans abandoned their promises to abolish the departments of Energy and Education. Efforts to zero out smaller and supposedly vulnerable agencies like the National Endowment for the Arts accomplished nothing. The only important victory here was the 1996 law abolishing Aid to Families with Dependent Children, a victory that may turn out to be hollow. The New Republic celebrated rather than lamented the 10th anniversary of AFDC's demise, arguing that because of the law, "welfare-bashing has lost its political resonance . . . [and] welfare reform has expanded the constituency for activist government. Democrats now have more political room to fight Republican austerity--and to propose, in its place, a stronger safety net."

Looking forward, government spending as a percentage of GDP is about to rise dramatically. The oldest baby boomers, born in 1946, will be eligible for Social Security's early retirement benefits in 2008 when they turn 62, and become Medicare beneficiaries when they turn 65 in 2011. These two programs, along with Medicaid, accounted for 41% of federal spending in 2006, even before the baby boom cohort had started collecting benefits. All three will increase relentlessly due to the longevity and sheer numbers of Americans born between 1946 and 1964. The columnist Bruce Bartlett estimates that the magnitude of this growth will be "on the order of 10% of the gross domestic product over the next generation even if no new government programs are enacted or current ones expanded." This is the Swedenization of America on autopilot.





Many conservative commentators, in their assessments of these ominous prospects and past opportunities lost, have resorted to finger-pointing. The title of Mr. Bartlett's book, "Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy" (2006), hints at the villain he identifies. "Leviathan on the Right" (2007), by Michael D. Tanner of the Cato Institute, makes "big-government conservatives" and their ideas the culprit.

Though these books were published in the past two years, the blame game has been going on since Reagan was elected. Newt Gingrich famously derided Bob Dole as the "tax collector for the welfare state." Dick Armey said that what "killed us" during the 1995 government shutdown was that Mr. Gingrich and his House deputies were "full of themselves," boasting about the shutdown in advance. President George H.W. Bush was savaged by conservatives for his 1990 tax increase.

In "Dead Right," published in 1994, David Frum carried the assignment of blame to its logical conclusion. He argued that capitulating to the welfare state is not a betrayal of the Reagan legacy; it is the Reagan legacy:


  There was no arithmetic reason that the Reagan program could not have succeeded. Reagan's budgets were wrecked by the inability and unwillingness of the most conservative administration since Coolidge's to resist the rise of social welfare spending. . . . The doctrine was that the welfare state should be allowed to hurtle forward whenever the political cost of halting it was likely to be inconvenient in the shortest of short runs.

There would be many more harsh judgments about how this or that faction betrayed the conservative campaign against Big Government. All such explanations, however, agree on one dubious premise: But for the weakness or hubris of some key player, the conservative project could have succeeded.

That premise disregards the central fact--cutting back the welfare state is very, very difficult. Paul Pierson, a political scientist at Berkeley, showed in "Dismantling the Welfare State?" (1994) that Margaret Thatcher had no more success in curtailing Britain's social programs than our conservatives had in undoing ours. As prime minister for 11 years, Mrs. Thatcher had more leverage to change policy than President Reagan or Speaker Gingrich ever possessed. Mr. Pierson concludes, however, that her government "had only modest success" in cutting back individual welfare state programs, while her record in modifying the context of future struggles over the welfare state "was if anything less impressive."

Lacking an appreciation of the challenges they would face, conservatives never developed a political strategy adequate to the task. There was no systematic effort to pare back the welfare state, no disciplined preparation for the inevitable and aggressive counterattacks by interest groups and liberal journalists. Instead, conservatives time and again were shocked to discover that the people who built the welfare state were so unhelpful about dismantling it. Right-wingers fell into long periods of sullen, stupefied resentment, punctuated by frontal assaults that were brief, furious and futile. Think of David Stockman's crusade to cut spending in 1981; or the
1995 government shutdown, the Pickett's Charge of the Gingrich rebels.

Early on, in the wilderness years, conservatives had a surer sense of what they were up against. The first issue of National Review described conservatism as "a position . . . unattenuated by a thousand vulgar promises to a thousand different pressure groups." Unattenuated in theory, conservatism in practice has been hemmed in constantly by the fact that the people insist that promises made to them, vulgar or not, must be kept.

Robert Samuelson recently wrote, "Most Americans . . . think that they automatically deserve whatever they've been promised simply because the promises were made."





As a result, it is much harder for conservatives to dismantle the welfare state than for liberals to build it. The main impediment to the New Deal was the "legitimacy barrier," the prelapsarian conviction held by many jurists and citizens that government had no rightful business undertaking a whole range of social improvements, no matter how gratifying the beneficiaries might find them. The New Deal overcame--demolished, really--that barrier, and with it the constitutional and political impediments to building the welfare state. That victory, according to James Q. Wilson, guaranteed not only the permanent existence but the permanent growth of Big Government:

  New programs need not await the advent of a crisis or an extraordinary majority, because no program is any longer "new"--it is seen, rather, as an extension, a modification, or an enlargement of something the government is already doing. . . . Since there is virtually nothing the government has not tried to do, there is little it cannot be asked to do.

After the legitimacy barrier is overwhelmed, the political calculus of how benefits and burdens are apportioned and, crucially, perceived strengthens liberals "seeking to extend benefits to large numbers of people" against conservatives "seeking to take those benefits away," according to Mr. Pierson. Liberals must worry only about a "diffuse concern about tax rates," a problem they can usually finesse "through reliance on indirect taxes and social insurance 'contributions.' " The conservative project, on the other hand, requires "the imposition of concrete losses on a concentrated group of voters in return for diffuse and uncertain gains." Every cutback necessitates "a delicate effort to transform programmatic change into an electorally attractive proposition," an effort that is in constant danger of being negated by "a substantial public outcry," such as the one against President Bush's Social Security proposals in 2005.

Conservatives have always had to negotiate the trade-offs, inherent in Mr. Ponnuru's dilemma, between adhering to the mission and assembling a majority. It hardly suffices to say that Barry Goldwater, the first National Review-era conservative hero, favored the mission. "I do not undertake to promote welfare," he announced in "The Conscience of a Conservative" (1960), "for I propose to extend freedom. My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them. It is not to inaugurate new programs, but to cancel old ones that do violence to the Constitution, or that have failed in their purpose, or that impose on the people an unwarranted financial burden." Rather than compromise his mission to gain political victory, Goldwater in 1964 went out of his way to tell voters what they didn't want to hear.

At the other end of the spectrum, House Republicans kept their majority for eight years after Newt Gingrich resigned in 1998, but the revolutionaries who came to Washington in 1994 to do big things wound up staying around just to be big shots. After the 1995 government shutdown, the mission of the congressional Republican Party shrank steadily, and finally amounted to nothing more than clinging to its majority. In the end, the meagerness of that aspiration negated it. Voters connected the unprincipled personal behavior of thieves and frauds like Duke Cunningham and Mark Foley with the unprincipled political behavior of a congressional majority that spent millions on a bridge to nowhere and billions on a Medicare drug plan to the moon. After the House majority leader, Tom DeLay, declared in 2005 that there was really nothing left to cut in the federal budget, voters concluded, plausibly, that if we're going to have Big Government we might as well entrust it to politicians who don't pretend they oppose it.

Supply-side economics was, in political terms, an effort to break out of Mr. Ponnuru's dilemma, to secure a majority without sacrificing the mission. In 1963, Sen. Goldwater had voted against the Kennedy tax cuts, saying the dangers of inflation and deficits required "firm, principled decisions" about spending prior to any tax reductions. The "Reagan gambit," as Mr. Frum called supply-side economics, was an attempt to reverse the political equation. Liberalism had flourished by making government spending the independent variable and taxes the dependent one: Give the people a cluster of attractive and successful social welfare programs, the logic went, and voters will gladly pay the taxes required to support them. Supply-side conservatives tried to make taxes the independent variable and spending the dependent one: Give the people a cluster of appealing tax cuts and count on their attachment to them to set spending at the level defined by the resulting revenue stream. To the extent that lower taxes, along with smarter regulatory and monetary policies, strengthened the economy, they would also increase government revenues and make the attainment of revenue-defined spending levels that much easier.

The experience of a quarter century shows that tax cuts have served important purposes, but the cause of scaling back Big Government is not one of them. Fiscal policy-making is an ongoing political science experiment, testing the relative strength of the aversion to taxes, the appetite for government programs, and the feasibility of large-scale borrowing. The results are in, and they're not ambiguous: Under every set of circumstances, the levels of taxing and borrowing increase to accommodate government spending, to a far greater extent than government spending decreases in order to avoid excessive taxation or deficits.

In David Stockman's bitter but compelling memoir about his embattled years as President Reagan's OMB director, he describes his own reckoning with Mr.
Ponnuru's dilemma: "The politics of American democracy made a shambles of my anti-welfare state theory . . . [which] rested on the illusion that the will of the people was at drastic variance with the actions of the politicians."

In reality, "congressmen and senators ultimately deliver what their constituencies demand. The notion that Washington . . . [is] divorced from the genuine desires of the voters . . . constitutes more myth than truth."
Title: The Pity Party: The Folly of Liberal "Compassion"...
Post by: objectivist1 on January 27, 2015, 04:39:46 AM
The Pity Party

Posted By Daniel Greenfield On January 27, 2015

Progressives will always claim that no matter how badly their plans go wrong, at least their terrible policies were well-intentioned.

The regimes that shot orphans, starved entire cities into submission and committed genocide were “caring” in comparison to the heartless Dickensian capitalists who did nothing for the poor except create cheap products and jobs. They might have killed millions, but their red hearts were in the right place.

They didn’t just spend all their time gobbling caviar and diving into swimming pools full of all money like the millionaires of the West. Instead they gave speeches about Marxism-Leninism, killed anyone who wasn’t up on their dialectical materialism and then gobbled working class caviar and dove into proletarian swimming pools full of money.

The path to everything from death panels to gulags was paved by outrage over the oppressed and compassion for the less fortunate… even if the real less fortunate turned out to be those on whom the tender-hearted compassion of progressives was practiced on.

That compassion is the theme of William Voegeli’s “The Pity Party: A Mean-Spirited Diatribe Against Liberal Compassion.” Going from Bill Clinton’s “I Feel Your Pain” to Barack Obama’s “Yes, We Can,” Voegeli challenges the conspicuous compassion and self-centered emotional displays on which the contemporary progressive argument is built.

Rather than dealing with the issues, the left deals in narratives. Its pornography of misery bypasses facts, particularly those which demonstrate that it is the left’s policies that create misery, thereby showing the dangers of placing compassion above any other value; including truth. And that is one of the subjects explored in Voegeli’s book whose themes occupy the moral realm as much as the sphere of government policy.

“So many Americans,” Voegeli writes, take for granted, “that moral growth requires little else than feeling, acting and being more compassionate.”

The conspicuous compassion of progressivism results in the appearance of goodness, without its substance. It is easy to mandate social welfare. Especially at someone else’s expense. What is difficult is grappling with human limitations and aspirations. That’s why the War on Poverty failed.

FDR explicitly laid out the moral double standard for the right and the left. The Pity Party quotes him as saying, “Divine justice weighs the sins of the cold-blooded and the sins of the warm-hearted in different scales. Better the occasional faults of a government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.”

There lies the high-minded formula for dismissing the crimes of the left as the “occasional faults” of warm-blooded leftists over the neglect of a conservative government. FDR was saying that it was better to do something, even if it was the wrong thing, than to do nothing. It was a left-wing indictment of nothing less than the United States Constitution. The argument is echoed today in defense of amnesty and any other disastrous Obama policy by asserting that doing something is better than nothing.

The good leftist may destroy lives, but at least he doesn’t neglect his warm-hearted duty to meddle. Better a caring killer, than a constitutionalist who doesn’t care enough to death panel the sick.

In The Pity Party, Voegeli explores the failure of progressive ideas and the immunity of those failures to reform. Looking at the global and national consequences of progressive policymaking he shows that the politics of conspicuous compassion are self-contradictory and lead to bad results and advises conservatives on how to counter the caring spin cycle of the left.

In the age of Tumblr and Twitter when the Social Justice Warrior deploys limitless outrage, bile and spleen in empathy’s name, progressive pathos has become a revolutionary hysteria that trips easily into riots and violent threats. The primacy of compassion as the only significant virtue makes it impossible to distinguish between empathy and self-serving rhetoric, between caring and egotistical hysteria.

At the big government and big media level, every argument is triangulated as being between caring progressives and uncaring conservatives. Their human shields; children, the elderly, designated minority victim classes and gentle giants, are infinite. Their personal stories, even if they happen to be those of Democratic activists covertly posing as ordinary people at a State of the Union address, negate the facts.

Every dispute, no matter how technical, eventually culminates with the left trotting out its human shields to take the debate out of the realm of facts and into the realm of personal anecdote. Since creative types can figure out how to personalize every debate, every debate becomes an empathy test. The issue stops being whether a policy will work, but whether a politician represents our values of caring. And this is where Democrats routinely trounce Republicans in polling questions.

The longstanding tactic of the left is to turn every debate into a question of which side consists of good people and which side consists of bad people. It is a tactic that Republicans have done a very poor job of fighting because they do not believe of the left what it believes about them.

A secularized empathy provides religion without deity or scripture. The new temple becomes the government building and its new bible is a million pages of ObamaCare regulations that no one reads. Its messiahs are community organizers. Its clergy hold “die-ins” and seek absolute power to regulate every detail of human life. Thus the tyranny of compassion transforms America into a Socialist theocracy.

The compassion of the left exists in a space formerly occupied by religion and is therefore immune to analysis and factual critique. It serves as the supporting ideology for leftist policy and cloaks it in the same self-serving air of a spiritual compassion that should not be examined to see how many people ended up in the gulags or death panels.

Voegeli’s critique serves as a warning that a policy based on the theatrics of compassion without moral substance or factual analysis is doomed to destroy its own unexamined founding virtues. In the name of compassion, the left hurts the very people it claims to want to help while serving its own interests.

Every crime, from Green Energy corruption to totalitarian health care regulations, is justified by an appeal to compassion. But the truly compassionate attribute is not the arrogant paternalism of leftist policymakers, but the empowerment of our fellow man through political and economic freedom.
Title: Mind the Gap
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 28, 2015, 09:08:37 AM
Mind the Gap
Global Affairs
January 28, 2015 | 09:00 GMT Print Text Size
 
By Jay Ogilvy
The Charlie Hebdo attack and its aftermath in the streets and in the press tempt one to dust off Samuel Huntington's 1996 book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. Despite the criticisms he provoked with that book and his earlier 1993 article in Foreign Affairs, recent events would seem to be proving him prescient.

Or was he?

While I am not about to deny the importance of religion and culture as drivers of geopolitical dynamics, I will argue that, more important than the clashes among the great civilizations, there is a clash within each of the great civilizations. This is the clash between those who have "made it" (in a sense yet to be defined) and those who have been "left behind" — a phrase that is rich with ironic resonance.

Before I make my argument, I warn that the point I'm trying to make is fairly subtle. So, in the interest of clarity, let me lay out what I'm not saying before I make that point. I am not saying that Islam as a whole is somehow retrograde. I am not agreeing with author Sam Harris' October 2014 remark on "Real Time with Bill Maher" that "Islam is the mother lode of bad ideas." Nor am I saying that all religions are somehow equal, or that culture is unimportant. The essays in the book Culture Matters, which Huntington helped edit, argue that different cultures have different comparative advantages when it comes to economic competitiveness. These essays build on the foundation laid down by Max Weber's 1905 work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. It is only the "sulfuric odor of race," as Harvard historian David Landes writes on the first page of the first essay in Culture Matters, that has kept scholars from exploring the under-researched linkages between culture and economic performance.

Making It in the Modern World

The issue of the comparative advantages or disadvantages of different cultures is complicated and getting more so because with modernity and globalization, our lives are getting more complicated. We are all in each other's faces today in a way that was simply not the case in earlier centuries. Whether through travel or telecommunications or increasingly ubiquitous and inexpensive media, each and every one of us is more aware of the cultural other than in times past. This is obvious. What is not so obvious are the social and psychological consequences of the inevitable comparisons this awareness invites us to make: How are we measuring up, as individuals and as civilizations?
In the modern world, the development of the individual human, which is tied in part to culture, has become more and more important. If you think of a single human life as a kind of footrace — as if the developmental path from infancy to maturity were spanning a certain distance — then progress over the last several millennia has moved out the goal posts of maturity. It simply takes longer to learn the skills it takes to "make it" as an adult. Surely there were skills our Stone Age ancestors had to acquire that we moderns lack, but they did not have to file income taxes or shop for insurance. Postmodern thinkers have critiqued the idea of progress and perhaps we do need a concept that is forgivingly pluralistic. Still, there have been indisputable improvements in many basic measures of human progress. This is borne out by improved demographic statistics such as birth weight, height and longevity, as well as declining poverty and illiteracy. To put it very simply, we humans have come a long way.
But these historic achievements have come at a price. It is not simple for individuals to master this elaborate structure we call modern civilization with its buildings and institutions and culture and history and science and law. A child can't do it. Babies born into this world are biologically very similar to babies born 10,000 years ago; biological evolution is simply too slow and cannot equip us to manage this structure. And childhood has gotten ever longer. "Neoteny" is the technical term for the prolongation of the period during which an offspring remains dependent on its parent. In some species, such as fish or spiders, newborns can fend for themselves immediately. In other species — ducks, deer, dogs and cats — the young remain dependent on their mothers for a period of weeks. In humans, the period of dependency extends for years. And as the generations and centuries pass, especially recently, that period of dependency keeps getting longer.

As French historian Philippe Aries informed us in Centuries of Childhood, "in medieval society, the idea of childhood did not exist." Prior to modernity, young people were adults in miniature, trying to fit in wherever they could. But then childhood got invented. Child labor laws kept children out of the factories and truancy laws kept them in public schools. For a recent example of the statutory extension of childhood known as neoteny, consider U.S. President Barack Obama's announcement that he intends to make community college available for free to any high school graduate, thus extending studenthood by two years.

The care and feeding and training of your average human cub have become far greater than the single season that bear cubs require. And it seems to be getting ever longer as more 20-somethings and even 30-somethings find it cheaper to live with mom and dad, whether or not they are enrolled in school or college. The curriculum required to flourish as an adult seems to be getting ever longer, the goal posts of meaningful maturity ever further away from the "starting line," which has not moved. Our biology has not changed at anywhere near the rate of our history. And this growing gap between infancy and modern maturity is true for every civilization, not just Islamic civilization.
 
The picture gets complicated, though, because the vexed history of the relationships among the world's great civilizations leaves little doubt about different levels of development along any number of different scales of achievement. Christian democracies have outperformed the economies and cultures of the rest of the world. Is this an accident? Or is there something in the cultural software of the West that renders it better able to serve the needs of its people than does the cultural software called Islam?

Those Left Behind

Clearly there is a feeling among many in the Islamic world that they, as a civilization, have been "left behind" by history. Consider this passage from Snow, the novel by Nobel Prize-winning Turkish author Orhan Pamuk:

"We're poor and insignificant," said Fazul, with a strange fury in his voice. "Our wretched lives have no place in human history. One day all of us living now in Kars will be dead and gone. No one will remember us; no one will care what happened to us. We'll spend the rest of our days arguing about what sort of scarf women should wrap around their heads, and no one will care in the slightest because we're eaten up by our own petty, idiotic quarrels. When I see so many people around me leading such stupid lives and then vanishing without a trace, an anger runs through me…"

Earlier I mentioned the ironic resonance of this phrase, "left behind." I think of two other recent uses: first, the education reform legislation in the United States known as the No Child Left Behind Act; the second, the best-selling series of 13 novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins in which true believers are taken up by the Rapture while the sinners are "left behind." In both of these uses, it is clearly a bad thing to be left behind.

This growing divide between those who have made it and those who are being left behind is happening globally, in each of the great civilizations, not just Islam. To quote my fellow Stratfor columnist, Ian Morris, from just last week:

Culture is something we can change in response to circumstances rather than waiting, as other animals must, for our genes to evolve under the pressures of natural selection. As a result, though we are still basically the same animals that we were when we invented agriculture at the end of the ice age, our societies have evolved faster and faster and will continue to do so at an ever-increasing rate in the 21st century.

And because the fundamental dynamics of this divide are rooted in the mismatch between the pace of change of biological evolution on the one hand (very slow) and historical or technological change on the other (ever faster), it is hard to see how this gap can be closed. We don't want to stop progress, and yet the more progress we make, the further out the goal posts of modern maturity recede and the more significant culture becomes.

There is a link between the "left behind" phenomenon and the rise of the ultra-right in Europe. As the number of unemployed, disaffected, hopeless youth grows, so also does the appeal of extremist rhetoric — to both sides. On the Muslim side, more talk from the Islamic State about slaying the infidels. On the ultra-right, more talk about Islamic extremists. Like a crowded restaurant, the louder the voices get, the louder the voices get.

I use this expression, those who have "made it," because the gap in question is not simply between the rich and the poor. Accomplished intellectuals such as Pamuk feel it as well. The writer Pankaj Mishra, born in Uttar Pradesh, India, in 1969, is another rising star from the East who writes about the dilemma of Asian intellectuals, the Hobson's choice they face between recoiling into the embrace of their ancient cultures or adopting Western ways precisely to gain the strength to resist the West. This is their paradox: Either accept the Trojan horse of Western culture to master its "secrets" — technology, organization, bureaucracy and the power that accrues to a nation-state — or accept the role of underpaid extras in a movie, a very partial "universal" history, that stars the West. In my next column, I'll explore more of Mishra's insights from several of his books.
Title: Piers Morgan on American Sniper
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 29, 2015, 10:07:20 PM
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...-hero-not-coward-did-job-job-kill-people.html
Title: Re: Piers Morgan on American Sniper
Post by: G M on January 30, 2015, 06:13:23 AM
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...-hero-not-coward-did-job-job-kill-people.html

Morgan isn't a complete idiot.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on February 07, 2015, 07:46:09 PM
A lot of outrage over Brain Williams over his lies to embellish himself.

My question:

Why is there not even more outrage over the repeat and serial lying from our politicians?   Why are not they held to a high standard?

The answer ought not to be, "they all do it".

This is not or should not be acceptable.  Yet it seems to be just fine for many.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on February 15, 2015, 10:06:44 AM
Well if your going to listen to a speech from someone who will proceed to insult some of the Supreme Court Justices, most of Congress, or/and half the population of the United States you may as well get drunk and pass out.  OTOH she probably agrees with him 90% of the time.

http://news.yahoo.com/ginsburg-wasnt-100-percent-sober-state-union-192728335--politics.html
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 15, 2015, 02:39:23 PM
My strong dislike for RBG is a matter of record around here, but I file this under "little old lady had a bit too much wine at dinner; BFD."
Title: A first; someone else gets it!!!
Post by: ccp on February 15, 2015, 04:38:12 PM
Hurrah!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Finally someone besides me who hits the nail on the head.  From Walter Williams.  I keep saying we need efforts at real fairness.   We don't need class envy or victimhood but we do need a full scale up and down evaluation of the playing field.   Government has only added to the unfairness in our country.  Not reduced it.   

http://townhall.com/columnists/walterewilliams/2015/02/11/fairness-and-justice-n1954848
Title: REcasting the East-West Dialogue
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 18, 2015, 05:39:23 AM

Share
Recasting the East-West Dialogue
Global Affairs
February 18, 2015 | 09:01 GMT
Print
Text Size

By Jay Ogilvy

At a crucial turning point in his book, An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World, Pankaj Mishra includes a long speech by one of his friends, Vinod. Mishra asks his friend about a picture of Vinod's sister, Sujata, whose in-laws, disappointed with her dowry, drenched her in kerosene and burned her alive. Vinod's impassioned reply takes up fully eight pages of Mishra's book. One paragraph of that long speech:

    It is people like Gautama Buddha and Gandhi who have misled us. They have taught us to be passive and resigned. They have told us of the virtuous life; they have told us to deny ourselves in order to be content. But they haven't told us how to live in the real world — the world that grows bigger and bigger and more complex all the time. This is why Vivekananda is important. He could see why the old habits of fatalism and resignation — the habits of village people — wouldn't work any more. He saw that they had made us the slaves of the Muslims and then the British, why these people coming from outside could rule over India for so long. He was totally unsentimental, and he was brutally frank. He told us that we were sunk in tamas, darkness. There was no point in trumpeting our spiritual success, our philosophical wisdom. All that was in the past. It was meant for primitive people. This was now the age of big nations. India was one such nation but it was way behind Europe and America. The West had technology, it had mastered nature, it had exploded nuclear bombs, it had sent people to the moon. When someone asked Gandhi what he thought of western civilization, he made a joke. He said that western civilization would be a good idea. But Vivekananda knew that the West had much to teach us. The first lesson was that we have to be materialists first. We have to learn to love wealth and comfort; we have to grow strong, know how to take pleasure in things, and recognize that there is no virtue in poverty and weakness. We have to know real manhood first. Spirituality comes later, or not at all. Perhaps we don't need it.

I quote Mishra, quoting Vinod, at such length because I think this speech, coming from this source, is the best response I can make to a very thoughtful response to my last column, Mind the Gap. In that column, I described the growing divergence — in Islam and in each of the great civilizations — between those who have "made it" and those who have been left behind. I used the expression "made it" precisely to avoid a callow economism that would value only financial success. But one reader responded:

    One of the reasons certain peoples and cultures might be outperformed or "left behind" is they simply do not define or strive for the same type of "progress." The view of "progress" has become ethnocentric and the western interpretation is clearly the dominant one. 
Whereas in Western society we are taught to strive for economic progress, in the east progress can take non monetary forms such as familial harmony or spiritual ascendancy as these are valued at least as much as economic prosperity.

Yes, there's a danger of wielding an ethnocentric measuring rod of progress, which is why I used the willfully ambiguous expression "making it" rather than a more precise one, such as "high GDP per capita." But the charge of ethnocentrism does not stick because, from people including Vinod and Mishra, we are hearing some arguments very similar to mine, made from a very different ethnic center: modern India.

I find it fascinating that Mishra, a relatively young Indian scholar, is able to speak with a tongue that is so profoundly forked between East and West in his fast-growing body of work. The East-West discussion is no longer a comparison of cultures and traditions to find common ground for some universal belief system, as was the work of philosophers such as F.S.C. Northrop and religious historians such as Huston Smith. Nor is it a matter of fleeing one set of customs for another, forsaking the fallen gods of one's elders and seeking elsewhere in a kind of grass-is-greener syndrome. I reference the procession of journeyers to the East, from Lawrence of Arabia to the Beatles.

Now we're beyond all that. Figures such as Mishra represent a new generation of writers who are integrating East and West in ways that take the dialectic of sameness and otherness through new and different cycles of shock and recognition.
From the Ruins of Empire

Modernization, colonialism, industrialization, globalization, Westernization — these are huge forces and dynamics that have shaken Asian cultures to their ancient foundations. As Mishra puts it in From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia:

    The much-heralded shift of economic power from the West to the East may or may not happen, but new perspectives have certainly opened up on world history. For most people in Europe and America, the history of the twentieth century is still largely defined by the two world wars and the long nuclear stand-off with Soviet Communism. But it is now clearer that the central event of the last century for the majority of the world's population was the intellectual and political awakening of Asia and its emergence from the ruins of both Asian and European empires. To acknowledge this is to understand the world not only as it exists today but also how it is continuing to be remade not so much in the image of the West as in accordance with the aspirations and longings of former subject peoples.

The shift in perspectives from that of the rulers to that of the ruled reveals a history — past, present and future — quite different from those written by Western scholars. But the perspective of Asian intellectuals is riven with contradiction: According to Mishra, they want to hold on to their religious and cultural traditions, and yet they cannot stand up to the West without adopting its ways in place of their own.

From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia follows the careers of several Asian intellectuals who wrestled with the choice of whether to Westernize or not. Some of the names are familiar: Gandhi, Ataturk, Tagore. But some, such as Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, are new to me. According to Mishra, "It is impossible to imagine, for instance, that the recent protests and revolutions in the Arab world would have been possible without the intellectual and political foundation laid by al-Afghani's assimilation of Western ideas and his rethinking of Muslim traditions." If that judgment is anywhere near correct, al-Afghani merits more consideration.

So what are some of the intellectual and political foundations laid by al-Afghani? And how do they put a new spin on the East-West dialogue of old? "He advocated both nationalism and pan-Islamism; he lamented the intolerance of Islam; he evoked its great glories in the past; he called for Muslim unity; he also asked Muslims to work with Hindus, Christians and Jews, and did so himself." The dilemmas facing al-Afghani were so deep there seemed no way of resolving them short of working both sides of several streets as each new country and each new situation demanded.

Al-Afghani got around. He spent almost two years in Istanbul before being expelled in 1871. Why? "Indian Muslims harassed by the British, and Muslim Tatars ill-treated by the Russians, were beginning to call for the Ottoman sultan to assume leadership of the Muslim world and declare jihad (holy war) on infidels." But pan-Islamism was in its infancy and al-Afghani's efforts in Istanbul were unsuccessful. In the late 1870s, al-Afghani's career as an outside agitator took him to Egypt where he gave speeches in Cairo and Alexandria in 1878 before being expelled back to India in 1879.

How does al-Afghani's legacy, as opportunistic and inconsistent as it may be, put a new spin on the East-West dialogue? For one thing, al-Afghani is not a Gandhi. He did not preach non-violence. For another, he was not a Tagore, not a vividly spiritual man, not a sage. As such, he upsets the stereotype that would oppose the spiritual East to the materialistic West — the very stereotype invoked by that thoughtful and welcome respondent to my last column, the very stereotype so passionately rejected by Mishra's friend, Vinod. With al-Afghani's enthusiasm for an Islamic Reformation, and a corresponding separation of church from state, he holds out some hope for a politically moderate Islam. But don't get your hopes up too fast: The wounds and humiliations of empire struck so deep in al-Afghani's soul that his deepest and most abiding commitment was to anti-imperialism. It is a sentiment alive and well in the Arab Spring and in other recent conflicts across the East. Perhaps the contradictions lived by al-Afghani and expressed by Mishra will lead us to a deeper understanding of modern conflicts in the Muslim world and of the East-West dialogue at the heart of it all.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on February 22, 2015, 06:51:58 AM
Well, I can say I don't recall anyone who headed the DNC who garnered my appreciation or admiration.   It is interesting when we occasionally hear stories of unethical behavior from Democrats when one of more of them are pissed off by another one of their kindred.   

The phony anti-Semitic and anti-woman card:

**********In 2013, Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz “sensed” President Barack Obama might try to replace her as chair — and it led her to set in motion an ethically questionable plan to prevent her ouster, according to a new Politico report.

She “began to line up supporters to suggest the move was both anti-woman and anti-Semitic,” the report states, citing anonymous sources.

Schultz did indeed keep her position as DNC chair and sources who have reportedly spoken with the Democratic congresswoman said she believes no one will remove her before her term ends in 2017.

The Politico report also outlined Schultz’s isolation within the Democratic Party and indicates she has barely even talked to Obama since 2011:

Throughout her time as chair, Wasserman Schultz has turned off colleagues, other top Democrats and current and former staff for a management style that strikes many as self-centered — even for a politician — and often at the expense of the DNC or individual candidates or campaigns. Many top Democrats, including some she counts as supporters and friends, privately complain about her trying to use the DNC as a vehicle for her own personal promotion, and letting her own ambition get in the way of larger goals.******
Title: Re: Wasserman-Schultz...
Post by: objectivist1 on February 22, 2015, 06:55:58 AM
Well, she is right about one thing: Obama is anti-Semitic. 

She is also beneath contempt, and clearly cares only for her own self-promotion.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on February 23, 2015, 06:53:15 PM
"Well, she is right about one thing: Obama is anti-Semitic"

I agree but,

1)   That wouldn't have been why she would have been ousted.   She is incompetent.

2)   She is not really Jewish.   She is a Democrat.
Title: VDH: The Liberal Circus
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 02, 2015, 10:15:51 PM

The Liberal Circus
March 2, 2015 7:30 am / 9 Comments / victorhanson

by Victor Davis Hanson // PJ Media
This Nov. 28, 2012 file photo shows then-Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton listening as President Barack Obama speaks in the Cabinet Room at the White House in Washington. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, File)


This Nov. 28, 2012 file photo shows then-Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton listening as President Barack Obama speaks in the Cabinet Room at the White House in Washington. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, File)

Lately liberalism has gone from psychodrama to farce.

Take Barack Obama. He has gone from mild displeasure with Israel to downright antipathy. Suddenly we are in a surreal world where off-the-record slurs from the administration against Benjamin Netanyahu as a coward and chickensh-t have gone to full-fledged attacks from John Kerry and Susan Rice, to efforts of former Obama political operatives to defeat the Israeli prime minister at the polls, to concessions to Iran and to indifference about the attacks on Jews in Paris. Who would have believed that Iranian leaders who just ordered bombing runs on a mock U.S. carrier could be treated with more deference than the prime minister of Israel? What started out six years as pressure on Israel to dismantle so-called settlements has ended up with a full-fledged vendetta [1] against a foreign head of state.

Hillary Clinton likewise has gone from a rather run-of-the-mill liberal grandee to a political grafter [2]. She apparently solicited donations from foreign government officials and wealthy foreign nationals to contribute to the Clinton Foundation — and this was while she was secretary of State conducting the foreign policy of the United States. If those charges are proven accurate, how could she ever be trusted to become commander in chief? Unfortunately, in the last year almost every cause that Hillary Clinton has taken up has been belied by her own actions.

Inequality and fairness? At time when students struggle under a collective $1 trillion-plus student debt, much of it because of universities hiking fees and tuitions above the inflation rate, Hillary has serially charged universities well over $200,000 [3] for 30-minute boilerplate speeches.

Women’s issues? We learn that women on Senator Clinton’s staff once made considerably less than their male counterparts [4]. Had Bill Clinton worked at a university, corporation or government bureau, his sexual peccadillos long ago would have had him thrown off the premises. The latest disclosures about his junkets with convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein [5] are so bizarre that no one quite knows what to make of them — the would-be first female and feminist president married to a man who serially cavorted with a convicted sexual pervert?

Transparency? Consider the recent disclosures that Hillary knew almost immediately that the Benghazi killings were the preplanned work of terrorists and not due to spontaneous rioters angry over a video — and yet continued to deceive the public that just the opposite was true. The problem with Hillary’s scandals are not just that they reveal a lack of character, but that they are illiberal to the core on hallmark progressive issues of concern for equality, transparency and feminism.

We no longer live in an age of debate over global warming. It has now transmogrified well beyond Al Gore’s hysterics, periodic disclosures about warmists’ use of faked data, embarrassing email vendettas, vindictive lawsuits, crony green capitalism, and flawed computer models. Now Congressman Raul Grijalva (D-AZ), the ranking Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee, has taken the psychodrama to the level of farce in a two-bit McCarthyesque effort [6] to demand from universities information about scientists who do not embrace his notions of manmade global warming. Where are the ACLU and fellow Democratic congressional supporters of free speech and academic freedom to censure such an Orwellian move? Finally, even the American Meteorological Society had to condemn the unhinged Grijalva for his bizarre efforts.

Attorney General Eric Holder came into office alleging racism and calling the American people cowards, and six years later is exiting, still blaming racism for his own self-inflicted failures. In between, Holder became the first attorney general to be cited for contempt by Congress. He stonewalled the Fast and Furious investigations. His plans to try terrorists in federal civilian courts were tabled almost immediately. He ordered electronic taps and surveillance on the communications of Associated Press and Fox reporters for supposed leaks.  He ignored wrongdoing in the IRS mess, a scandal that continues to grow. He got caught using his government jet [7] to take his daughters and their boyfriends to the Belmont Stakes.

But Holder will be remembered largely for his racialist tenure. He dropped a strong case of voting intimidation by armed Black Panthers at the polls. In congressional testimony, he referred to blacks as “my people”; anyone else — except Joe Biden — who had said the same would have been asked to resign. He promised federal action on Ferguson and the Trayvon Martin shootings — and then quietly backed off when the evidence for civil rights violations did not meet his own rhetorical excesses. The problem, he pleaded, was not that his targets were not guilty under the law, but that the law itself had to be changed to make them guilty.  Holder claimed repeatedly that opposition to Obama was race-based, and he leaves office as a caricature of incompetence and racial divisiveness.

The IRS scandal likewise went from melodrama to farce. The president said there was not a “smidgeon” of corruption in the selective targeting of conservatives. Lois Lerner, the focus of investigations, pled the Fifth Amendment after having received over $100,000 in merit bonuses. When congressional investigators wanted to subpoena her computer records, IRS officials claimed both that her hard drive  had crashed and that its data was unrecoverable. The latter proved untrue; but then so far so has everything the IRS has said. The only lesson is that any private citizen who replied to IRS inquiries in the manner that the IRS responded to public subpoenas would be jailed.

Debt? Barack Obama stated out in 2008 calling George W. Bush unpatriotic for piling up nearly $5 trillion in eight years; he may be on target to double that amount — and trump the combined red ink of all prior presidents. Obama raised taxes, slashed defense, and still ended up with over a $500 billion annual deficit, as he declared the age of austerity over.

So it has become with most liberal issues. The debate over illegal immigration has gone from arguments over closing the border to Social Security cash rebates to illegals and presidential threats to punish Border Patrol officers who enforce existing law. State Department deputy spokeswoman Marie Harf assures us that poverty and unemployment are catalysts to terrorism [8], just as so-called Jihadi John, the psychotic ISIS beheader, is revealed to be a preppie British subject[9] from the upper middle class. The president brags that gas prices have gone down because frackers ignored his efforts to stop them — and then vetoes the Keystone Pipeline.

The Trayvon Martin controversy descends from the purportedly preteen of released photos who was shot down in cold blood by a white vigilante into doctored NBC tapes, airbrushed photos, the New York Times’ invented rubric “white Hispanic,” the president weighing in on Trayvon’s shared racial appearance, girlfriend Rachel Jeantel’s explanation of Trayvon’s violence as a sort of homophobic act of “whoop ass” — only to be echoed by MSNBC talking head Melissa Harris-Perry’s ugly sanction of violence on Martin Luther King Day with the amplification of Jeantel’s term “whoop”:  “I hope [Martin] whooped the sh-it out of George Zimmerman [10].” It would be hard for a satirist to make all that up.

Michael Brown goes from the icon of a “gentle giant” in vain calling out “hands up, don’t shoot” only to be gunned down by a white racist cop — to a thug who strong-armed a store clerk, walked out into the middle of the road under the influence and then attacked a police officer. Conspiracists once warned us that the government was buying up ammo to prevent private gun owners from purchasing it; now we learn that Obama by executive order may ban [11] the most popular type of sporting ammunition. Is there one element of Obamacare that has not been modified, delayed, or ignored — from the employer mandate to the fine for noncompliance?

Why this descent into travesty?

The liberal left got what it wanted in 2009 with a supermajority in the Senate and large majority in the House, a subservient mainstream media, the good will of the American people, and the most liberal president in American history. It only took that the liberal hierarchy six years to erode the Democratic Party to levels that we have not seen since the 1920s. Almost every policy initiative we have seen — whether climate change, foreign policy, health care, or race relations — has imploded.

The answer to these failures has not been introspection, humility, or reevaluation why the liberal agenda proved unpopular and unworkable, but in paranoid fashion to double-down on it, convinced that its exalted aims must allow any means necessary — however farcical —  to achieve them.

The logical result is the present circus.
Title: The Environmental Religion
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 16, 2015, 08:27:41 AM
Too bad the piece does not address the reality of serious environmental problems, but not without insight nonetheless.

Notable & Quotable: Environmental Religion
Environmentalism is a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths.
March 15, 2015 5:55 p.m. ET
23 COMMENTS

From a speech by the late novelist Michael Crichton to the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco, 2003:

Today, one of the most powerful religions in the Western World is environmentalism. Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists. Why do I say it’s a religion? Well, just look at the beliefs. If you look carefully, you see that environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths.

There’s an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there’s a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. Sustainability is salvation in the church of the environment. Just as organic food is its communion, that pesticide-free wafer that the right people with the right beliefs, imbibe. . . .

There is no Eden. There never was. What was that Eden of the wonderful mythic past? Is it the time when infant mortality was 80%, when four children in five died of disease before the age of five? When one woman in six died in childbirth? When the average lifespan was 40, as it was in America a century ago. When plagues swept across the planet, killing millions in a stroke. Was it when millions starved to death? Is that when it was Eden?
Popular on WSJ


Title: This one leaves me speechless
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 23, 2015, 01:08:48 PM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krXUZwclNbY&spfreload=10
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: DougMacG on March 23, 2015, 03:06:28 PM
Wow! There are big problems in the black community; most of the visible and statistical ones come from black males.  This is what a pack of black females can look like.  I argue strongly that this kind of dysfunctionality comes from a learned culture, and is not race-based.  This is proven to me by how easily a black can opt out and how easily a white or anyone else can opt in.

The observer making comments and opinions happens to be black.  Assuming we all believe in free speech, anyone should be able to make those same comments.  Good luck with that.

Nothing will turn a culture like that around instantly.  The Dems say more money to job training, health care, etc. is the answer.  Maybe a shovel-ready project on the site, lol.  If you are a job trainer, do you want one of these people to be required to attend your class, at taxpayer expense, against their will?  Who would benefit?  No one.  Who would lose out?  Those who really wanted job training.

Paraphrasing the premise of George Gilder's bestselling book "Wealth and Poverty" (1981), you cannot study poverty.  Poverty is by definition the lack of something.  You can't study something that isn't there.  Instead, study wealth (success).  Then when you see poverty, you can look to see what elements of wealth and success are missing.

These people may or may not fit the definition of poverty.  If they are largely part of an inner-city demographic common in other cities, they have all the basics of life paid for, free food, shelter, clothing, schooling, etc.  If they are among the so-called poor in America, then statistically they also have air conditioning, cable tv, smart phones, 2 cars and surround sound video theater.  But to the extent that their main source of income is not earned, they most likely lack other important things, such as self discipline, individual responsibility and a schedule full of priorities and commitments. 

When those things are gone, other things fill the void, like time on their hands with little or no sense of being invested in the community.  This video is what the result of that can look like.
Title: Patriot Post: The Sum of all Lies
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 01, 2015, 12:09:54 PM
The Sum of All Lies
Terror Does Not Tolerate a Vacuum
By Mark Alexander • April 1, 2015     
“There is a rank due to the United States, among nations, which will be withheld, if not absolutely lost, by the reputation of weakness. If we desire to avoid insult, we must be able to repel it; if we desire to secure peace, one of the most powerful instruments of our rising prosperity, it must be known that we are at all times ready for war.” --George Washington (1793)
 

The "Sum of All Fears" was one of many well-written novels by the late Tom Clancy, whose fictional military, intelligence and terrorism plots were woven with fact-based tradecraft.

The title was inspired by a quote from Winston Churchill: "You may take the most gallant sailor, the most intrepid airman or the most audacious soldier, put them at a table together -- what do you get? The sum of their fears."

Clancy's plot focused on an Islamist terror group's endeavor to detonate a nuclear weapon in the U.S. A Syrian cell with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine reconstituted the nuke after discovering the necessary fissile material at an Israeli aircraft crash site.

True to Hollywood form, however, filmmakers grossly altered Clancy's original plot, resulting in a much less plausible but more politically correct version. In the movie, the terrorists are not Islamists, but "right-wing" neo-Nazis conspiring to detonate a nuclear bomb in Baltimore harbor -- and to start a war between the U.S. and Russia as a catalyst for cementing fascist alliances in the rest of Europe. Leave it to Tinseltown's Left-coast libs to cast these murderous villains as right-wing white supremacists rather than expose the real Islam!

Despite Hollywood's revisionism, Clancy's original plot was close to reality back in 1992, and it's much closer to the stark reality of today, given that Islamists may soon have fissile material from Iran to wage surrogate Jihad against the U.S.

The probability of al-Qa'ida and/or Islamic State actors gaining access to a nuclear weapon and then detonating it in the U.S. (most likely in an East Coast urban center) is increasing by the day.

That escalating threat is due solely to the "sum of all lies" being propagated by Barack Hussein Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry, whose record of treasonous treachery dates back to his collaboration with our enemy during the Vietnam War.
 

There is another "Iran Hostage Crisis" unfolding here, but, unlike the one resolved minutes after Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, this time all Americans are being held hostage, and the current president is a collaborator.

The Middle East is devolving into an expanding theater of warfare between Iranian Shiites and Arab Sunnis, who could very well combine forces against Israel. Obama, with the help of Kerry and his predecessor, Hillary Clinton, have presided over the political disintegration of North Africa and the Middle East -- that dissolution being the direct result of a series of deceptions promulgated to suit Obama's domestic political agenda.

The first and foremost of those deceptions was rooted in Obama's 2012 bid for re-election. Amid the cascading failure of his domestic economic and social policies, BO centered his campaign upon faux foreign policy "successes" built around two fraudulent pretexts. First: "Four years ago, I promised to end the war in Iraq. I did." Second: "Al-Qa'ida is on the run."

In fact, Obama's calamitous retreat from Iraq in order to create a campaign slogan bumper sticker left a regional vacuum for the resurgence of a far more dangerous manifestation of Islamic terrorism under the ISIL label, which, in conjunction with a thriving al-Qa'ida terrorist network, poses a dire asymmetric terrorist threat to the West.
In a strategic region where former President George W. Bush's doctrine of preemption resulted in costly but significant strides toward regional stability and the protection of our critical national interests, Obama has managed to undo the hard-won success of Operation Iraqi Freedom and is doing his best to undermine Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan.

And just six months ago, Obama declared that his counterterrorism policies "have [been] successfully pursued in Yemen and Somalia for years."
 
Well, take a gander at the state of Obama's poster-nations today.

How bad has it become?

Earlier this week, Obama’s former ambassador to Iraq, James Jeffrey, stated bluntly, “We’re in a g-ddamn free fall here."

Stop for a moment and ponder that assessment fully.
 

Of course, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and former Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn have already affirmed Jeffrey's appraisal.

Recall in his Senate testimony, Clapper stated that the direct links between ISIL and domestic terror networks have created “the most diverse array of threats and challenges I’ve seen in my 50-plus years in the [intelligence] business." He added, "When the final accounting is done, 2014 will have been the most lethal year for global terrorism in the 45 years such data has been compiled. ... I don’t know of a time that has been more beset by challenges and crises around the world. I worry a lot about the safety and security of this country. ... The homegrown violent extremists continue to pose the most likely threat to our homeland.”

And Flynn is firmly on record regarding Obama's failure to confront the Islamic threat: “You cannot defeat an enemy you do not admit exists. ... I think there is confusion about what it is that we are facing. It’s not just what has been defined as 40,000 fighters in the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, it’s also a large [radicalized segment of Muslims] who are threatening our very way of life."

As for the Obama/Kerry negotiations with Iran, Flynn notes, "Iran is [not only] a state sponsor of terrorism. Iran has killed more Americans than al-Qa'ida has through state sponsors, through their terrorist network Hezbollah. ... My sense of where the policy is -- it's almost a policy of willful ignorance. ... Here we are talking to Iran about a nuclear deal with this almost complete breakdown of order in the Middle East."

In February, former Acting Director of the CIA Mike Morell said that negotiating over the number of nuclear-enriching centrifuges is futile. “If you are going to have a nuclear weapons program, 5,000 is pretty much the number you need,” Morell said. “If you have a power program, you need a lot more. By limiting them to a small number of centrifuges, we are limiting them to the number you need for a weapon.”

Just last week, current CIA Director John Brennan declared that Iran "is still a state-sponsor of terrorism," but the CIA's current Worldwide Threat Assessment no longer lists Iran and Hezbollah as terrorist threats.

Who's in charge of this debacle?

As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu noted during his recent address to Congress, Obama's nuclear negotiations have "two major concessions: one, leaving Iran with a vast nuclear program and, two, lifting the restrictions on that program in about a decade. That's why this deal is so bad. It doesn’t block Iran’s path to the bomb; it paves Iran’s path to the bomb." Netanyahu further warned, "Iran’s neighbors know that Iran will become even more aggressive and sponsor even more terrorism when its economy is unshackled and it’s been given a clear path to the bomb."

"Free fall." "The most diverse array of threats." "Willful ignorance." "The number you need for a weapon." "[The deal] paves Iran’s path to the bomb."

And now, after claiming al-Qa'ida's demise, victory in Iraq and success in Somalia and Yemen, Obama and Kerry are trying to sell us on their nuclear weapons "deal" with Iran under the pretense that it will render the Middle East and our homeland safe from nuclear terrorism?

Negotiations with Iran were slated to conclude last night, March 31st, but it's "April Fools' Day," and, accordingly, Obama and Kerry have announced yet another extension of negotiations with Iran. Apparently three is not the charm.

Make no mistake, this "deal" is not designed to prevent nuclear terrorism, and at best may just delay it. Of course, no deal is better than a bad deal.

Thomas Sowell notes that Obama's motivation for this charade with Iran, despite robust objections from Senate and now 367 House Republicans and Democrats, is that "such an agreement will serve as a fig leaf to cover his failure to do anything that has any serious chance of stopping Iran from going nuclear. Such an agreement will protect Obama politically, despite however much it exposes the American people to unprecedented dangers."

In the end, the central issue is not whether Iran can be trusted, but that Obama can't be trusted. Clearly, Obama's foreign policy malfeasance and his blinding Islamophilia pose the greatest threat to U.S. national and homeland security.
 

Pro Deo et Constitutione -- Libertas aut Mors
Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis
Title: Mookie on women in combat and more
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 02, 2015, 02:08:29 AM


https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=465891170233781
Title: The War on the Private Mind
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 02, 2015, 08:14:37 AM

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/416307/war-private-mind-kevin-d-williamson

In a related vein:

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/416318/religious-liberty-and-lefts-end-game-andrew-walker

Title: The Alinsky Way of governing
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 13, 2015, 06:52:39 PM
The Alinsky Way of Governing
What happens when those in power adopt ‘rules for radicals’ to attack their less powerful opponents.
By Pete Peterson
April 9, 2015 6:50 p.m. ET
WSJ:

Arizona Rep. Raul Grijalva, the ranking Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee, recently caused a stir by sending letters to seven university presidents seeking background information on scientists and professors who had given congressional testimony that failed to endorse what is the conventional wisdom in some quarters regarding climate change. One of the targets was Steven Hayward, a colleague of mine at Pepperdine’s School of Public Policy.

Though the congressman lacked legal authority to demand information, his aggressive plan, which came to light in late February, should not be a surprise at a time when power holders from the White House on down are employing similar means against perceived enemies.

Mr. Grijalva left a clue about how he operates in 2013 when the magazine In These Times asked about his legislative strategy. “I’m a Saul Alinsky guy,” he said, referring to the community organizer and activist who died in 1972, “that’s where I learned this stuff.”

What sort of stuff? Mr. Grijalva sent his letters not to the professors but to university presidents, without (at least in the case of Mr. Hayward) the professors’ knowledge. Mr. Hayward was not even employed by Pepperdine at the time of his congressional testimony in 2011.

But targeting institutions and their leaders is pure Alinsky; so are the scare tactics. Mr. Grijalva’s staff sent letters asking for information about the professors, with a March 16 due date—asking, for instance, if they had accepted funding from oil companies—using official congressional letterhead, and followed up with calls from Mr. Grijalva’s congressional office. This is a page from Alinsky’s book, in both senses of the word: “Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have,” reads one tip in his 1971 “Rules for Radicals.”

Yet adopting Alinsky’s tactics may not in this case fit with Alinsky’s philosophy. This is Alinsky with a twist. Despite myriad philosophical inconsistencies, “Rules for Radicals” is meant to empower the weaker against the stronger. Alinsky writes: “The Prince was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power. Rules for Radicals is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away.”

In a similar vein, the political philosopher Jean Bethke Elshtain supported Alinsky’s work in getting disengaged communities—typically in lower socio-economic strata—to assume the difficult responsibilities of citizenship. As a way of challenging “big government,” even conservatives such as former House Majority Leader Dick Armey have recommended Alinsky’s tactics (minus his professed hatred of capitalism, etc.).

But what happens when Machiavelli’s Prince reads and employs “Rules for Radicals”? In 2009 President Obama’s friend and adviser Valerie Jarrett was asked on CNN about media bias, particularly at Fox News, and she responded: “What the administration has said very clearly is that we’re going to speak truth to power.” I remember thinking: “Wait a minute, you’re the White House. You are the power.”

In that sense President Obama’s election was both the climax of Alinsky’s vision and an existential crisis for that vision. Alinsky promoted the few tactics available to the downtrodden: irreverence, ridicule and deception. “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it,” he wrote. So the rise to power of the world’s most famous community organizer raises a question: Should Alinskyite tactics be employed by those in power, or should they be reserved for those without?

Mr. Grijalva’s campaign against seven academics serves as a cautionary tale of what can happen when power adopts these strategies to suppress opposition. The congressman’s office arranged additional pressure by notifying national and local media that these professors were under “investigation.” On the day the letters went out, the Washington Post blared: “House Dems: Did Big Oil seek to sway scientists in climate debate?”

After receiving a call from a Grijalva staffer, our local Malibu Times obliged with the front-page headline, “Pepperdine Professor Investigated by Congressman.” The online Delaware News Journal, the hometown newspaper for David Legates at the University of Delaware, wrote: “UD’s David Legates caught in climate change controversy.” Alabama’s Huntsville Times had a piece under the headline: “Arizona congressman asking questions about outside funding for UAH climate expert John Christy.”

To their credit, several editorial boards came to the defense of the professors. The Arizona Republic, the home-state newspaper of Mr. Grijalva and targeted Arizona State University professor Robert Balling, wrote that Mr. Grijalva’s campaign “fits the classic definition of a witch hunt.” Rep. Grijalva on March 2 acknowledged to National Journal that some of the information he demanded from the universities was “overreach” but defended his demand for information about funding sources.

How did it come to this? The inability of politicians to confront another’s argument, much less to attempt to persuade the other side, has become standard operating procedure. Now this toxic approach is extending to the broader world of policy—including scientific research. Instead of evaluating the quality of the research, opponents make heavy-handed insinuations about who funds it—as though that matters if the science is sound. And now just about every climate scientist employed by an American university knows that Washington is watching.

More broadly, what has happened is that a generation of American politicians who came of age during Saul Alinsky’s lifetime has moved into positions of institutional power that he so often derided as “the enemy.” They are showing an inability to leave behind Alinsky’s tactics that were intended for the weak against the strong. Civil discourse and academic freedom suffer while the “Prince” becomes more powerful.

Mr. Peterson is the executive director of the Davenport Institute for Public Engagement at Pepperdine’s School of Public Policy.
Popular on WSJ

 
Title: Reagan at Bergen Belsen
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 04, 2015, 09:58:10 AM
http://www.wsj.com/video/reagan-masterpiece-1985-bergen-belsen-speech/2E64EDA1-1704-4A1E-AFDF-419587348A68.html
Title: A good indictment of progressivism - from a socialist!
Post by: ccp on May 15, 2015, 07:06:26 AM
A patient of mine who is a socialist gave me a copy of Z magazine, a far left rag.

So I read the article on the "Triumph of Conservatism". 

It is actually an indictment of the lefts big governement's progressivise expansion.  It claims that progressivism has actually helped Wall Street and itself.

Isn't this fascism?

Obviously Obama and Clinton are prime examples of this.  While I would beg to differ about some of the conclusions it is quite interesting how this comes from an open socialist.  That an avowed socialist would criticize the progressive movement is amazing.  Reminds me of Lenin totally disillusioned with Communism while witnessing the growing power of Stalin prior to his death from multiple strokes.

 http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/11/us/gabriel-kolko-left-leaning-historian-of-us-policy-dies-at-81.html?_r=0
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: G M on May 15, 2015, 10:54:30 AM
It isn't about ideology, it is all about power.
Title: Sheriff David Clarke
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 15, 2015, 11:53:44 PM
https://www.facebook.com/NationalRifleAssociation/videos/10153441495446833/
Title: Jonah Goldberg on "Social Justice"
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 25, 2015, 06:25:34 PM
https://www.facebook.com/prageru/videos/884322274943963/
Title: Dennis Prager: Left vs. Right: Part One...
Post by: objectivist1 on May 27, 2015, 04:38:36 AM
The Differences Between Left and Right: Part I

Posted By Dennis Prager On May 27, 2015

Most Americans hold either liberal or conservative positions on most matters. In many instances, however, they would be hard pressed to explain their position or the position they oppose.

But if you can’t explain both sides, how do you know you’re right?

At the very least, you need to understand both the liberal and conservative positions in order to effectively understand your own.

I grew up in a liberal world — New York, Jewish and Ivy League graduate school. I was an 8-year-old when President Dwight Eisenhower ran for re-election against the Democratic nominee, Adlai Stevenson. I knew nothing about politics and had little interest in the subject. But I well recall knowing — knowing, not merely believing — that Democrats were “for the little guy” and Republicans were “for the rich guys.”

I voted Democrat through Jimmy Carter’s election in 1976. He was the last Democrat for which I voted.

Obviously, I underwent an intellectual change. And it wasn’t easy. Becoming a Republican was emotionally and psychologically like converting to another religion.

In fact, when I first voted Republican I felt as if I had abandoned the Jewish people. To be a Jew meant being a Democrat. It was that simple. It was — and remains — that fundamental to many American Jews’ identity.

Therefore, it took a lot of thought to undergo this conversion. I had to understand both liberalism and conservatism. Indeed, I have spent a lifetime in a quest to do so.

The fruit of that quest will appear in a series of columns explaining the differences between left and right.

I hope it will benefit conservatives in better understanding why they are conservative, and enable liberals to understand why someone who deeply cares about the “little guy” holds conservative — or what today are labeled as conservative — views.

Difference No. 1: Is Man Basically Good?

Left-of-center doctrines hold that people are basically good. On the other side, conservative doctrines hold that man is born morally flawed — not necessarily born evil, but surely not born good. Yes, we are born innocent — babies don’t commit crimes, after all — but we are not born good. Whether it is the Christian belief in Original Sin or the Jewish belief that we are all born with a yetzer tov (good inclination) and a yetzer ra (bad inclination) that are in constant conflict, the root value systems of the West never held that we are naturally good.

To those who argue that we all have goodness within us, two responses:

First, no religion or ideology denies that we have goodness within us; the problem is with denying that we have badness within us.

Second, it is often very challenging to express that goodness. Human goodness is like gold. It needs to be mined — and like gold mining, mining for our goodness can be very difficult.

This so important to understanding the left-right divide because so many fundamental left-right differences emanate from this divide.

Perhaps the most obvious one is that conservatives blame those who engage in violent criminal activity for their behavior more than liberals do. Liberals argue that poverty, despair, and hopelessness cause poor people, especially poor blacks — in which case racism is added to the list — to riot and commit violent crimes.

Here is President Barack Obama on May 18, 2015:

“In some communities, that sense of unfairness and powerlessness has contributed to dysfunction in those communities. … Where people don’t feel a sense of hope and opportunity, then a lot of times that can fuel crime and that can fuel unrest. We’ve seen it in places like Baltimore and Ferguson and New York. And it has many causes — from a basic lack of opportunity to some groups feeling unfairly targeted by their police forces.”

So, poor blacks who riot and commit other acts of violence do so largely because they feel neglected and suffer from deprivations.

Since people are basically good, their acts of evil must be explained by factors beyond their control. Their behavior is not really their fault; and when conservatives blame blacks for rioting and other criminal behavior, liberals accuse them of “blaming the victim.”

In the conservative view, people who do evil are to be blamed because they made bad choices — and they did so because they either have little self-control or a dysfunctional conscience. In either case, they are to blame. That’s why the vast majority of equally poor people — black or white — do not riot or commit violent crimes.

Likewise, many liberals believe that most of the Muslims who engage in terror do so because of the poverty and especially because of the high unemployment rate for young men in the Arab world. Yet, it turns out that most terrorists come from middle class homes. All the 9/11 terrorists came from middle- and upper-class homes. And of course Osama bin Laden was a billionaire.

Material poverty doesn’t cause murder, rape or terror. Moral poverty does. That’s one of the great divides between left and right. And it largely emanates from their differing views about whether human nature is innately good.
Title: Coulter is Incorrect
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 28, 2015, 07:27:33 AM
Ramos Can Stay, But Matt Lauer Has to Go
Posted By Ann Coulter On May 28, 2015
 
 [1]I finally found a Mexican willing to do a job no American will do! I have an explosive book on the No. 1 issue in the country coming out next week, I’ve already written 10 New York Times best-sellers — I’d be on a postage stamp if I were a liberal — but can’t get an interview on ABC, NBC or CBS.

Only Mexican-born Jorge Ramos would interview me on his Fusion network. Yay, Jorge!

After a spellbinding interview, Ramos ended by asking this excellent question — which I had suggested myself for all authors, most of whom write very boring books, harming the marketability of my own books: “Is there anything in your book that isn’t already generally known?”

My soon-to-be-released book, “Adios, America! The Left’s Plan to Turn Our Country into a Third World Hellhole,” is jam-packed with facts you didn’t already know. Don’t even think of using it as a coaster, like those other books.

These are just a few:

— Teddy Kennedy’s 1965 Immigration Act was expressly designed to change the demographics of our country to be poorer and more inclined to vote Democratic.
— It worked! Post-1970 immigrants vote 8-2 for the Democrats.
— Citing this dramatic shift in the Democratic Party’s fortunes, Democratic consultant Patrick Reddy called the 1965 Immigration Act “the Kennedy family’s greatest gift to the Democratic Party.”
— Immigrants admitted before 1970 made more money, bought more houses and were more educated than Americans. The post-Kennedy immigrants are astronomically less-educated, poorer and more likely to be on welfare than the native population.
— With no welfare state to support them, about a third of pre-1965 Act immigrants returned to the places they came from. British and Jewish immigrants were the least likely to go home — less than 10 percent did.
— Although America is admitting more immigrants, they are coming from fewer countries than they did before 1970. On liberals’ own terms, the country is becoming less “diverse,” but a lot poorer and a lot more Latin.
— America has already taken in one-fourth of Mexico’s entire population.
— In 1970, there were almost no Nigerian immigrants in the United States. Our country is now home to more Nigerians than any country in the world except Nigeria.
— America takes more immigrants from Nigeria than from England.
— The government refuses to tell us how many prisoners in the United States are immigrants. That information is not available anywhere. But the ancillary facts suggest that the number is astronomical.
— There are more foreign inmates in New York state prisons from Mexico than from the entire continent of Europe.
— Hispanics are less likely to be in the military than either whites or blacks, and a majority of Hispanic troops are women. On the other hand, Hispanics are overrepresented in U.S. Prisons.
— In Denmark, actual Danes come in tenth in criminals’ nationality, after Moroccans, Lebanese, Yugoslavians, Somalis, Iranians, Pakistanis, Turks, Iraqis and Vietnamese.
— At least 15 percent of all births in Peru and Argentina are to girls between the ages of 10 and 15. In the U.S., only 2 percent of births are to girls that young, and those are mostly Hispanics, who are seven times more likely to give birth at that age than white girls are.
— Sex with girls as young as 12 years old is legal in 31 of the 32 states of Mexico.
— In all of Western Europe, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Israel combined, there have been eight reported births to girls aged 10 or younger. Seven of the eight were impregnated by immigrants.
— In some areas of America, law enforcement authorities have given up on prosecuting statutory rape cases against Mexican men in their 30s who impregnate 12- and 13-year-old girls, after repeatedly encountering parents who view their little girls’ pregnancies as a “blessing.”
— The same North Carolina newspapers that gave flood-the-zone coverage to a rape that never happened at a Duke lacrosse party completely ignore real rapes happening right under their noses, being committed against children by immigrants providing cheap labor to the state’s farming and meat-packing industries.
— Since 2004, Mexicans have beheaded at least a half-dozen people in the United States.
— Mexican drug cartels — not ISIS — pioneered the practice of posting videotaped beheadings online.
— An alleged “ISIS” beheading video making the rounds in 2014 was actually a Mexican beheading video from 2010.
— Post-1970 immigrants have re-introduced slavery to America. Indian immigrant Lakireddy Bali Reddy, for example, used the H1-B visa program, allegedly for “high-tech workers,” to bring in 12-year-old girls he had bought from their parents for sex.
— The above story was missed by the San Francisco Chronicle. It was broken by a high school journalism class.
— The ACLU took Reddy’s side.
— We’re still letting in Hmong immigrants as a reward for their help with the ill-fated Vietnam War, which ended 40 years ago.
— Between 2000 and 2005, nearly 100 Hmong men were charged with rape or forced prostitution of girls in Minneapolis-St Paul, according to the Minneapolis Star Tribune. The vast majority of the victims were 15 years old or younger. A quarter of the victims were not Hmong.
— Proponents of the 1965 immigration bill swore up and down that it would not alter this country’s demographic mix. In fact, Kennedy’s immigration policy has brought about the greatest demographic shift of any nation in world history.
— In 1980, Reagan won the biggest electoral landslide in history against an incumbent president, Jimmy Carter. Without the last 40 years of immigration, in 2012, Mitt Romney would have won a bigger landslide than Reagan did. He got more of the “Reagan coalition” than Reagan did.
— If Romney had won 71 percent of the Hispanic vote, he still would have lost. If he’d gotten just 4 percent more of the white vote, he would have won.

Adios, America! In bookstores next Monday, June 1.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on May 28, 2015, 10:39:59 AM
Heading:  "Coulter is incorrect"

Do you mean politically incorrect?
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 28, 2015, 01:10:19 PM
Yes  :-D
Title: Of Hills and Dales
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 05, 2015, 07:23:20 AM
https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/of-hills-and-dales-2015-commencement-address/?utm_source=housefile&utm_medium=email&utm_content=jun2015&utm_campaign=imprimis&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-8VIj-zYT0s464otFMVlPfQvN7AMA0lzkM9xb6D_H6JCPk9iTTeDsJ54YVAE6GY7g-AQfp_Cp2M3cKDoM_lS7NC4pP6eA&_hsmi=18130432
Title: Beck: It is about Islam
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 16, 2015, 02:59:50 PM
http://www.glennbeck.com/2015/06/16/the-most-controversial-book-glenn-has-ever-written-it-is-about-islam/
Title: Zo: Why the Dems are the party of racism
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 24, 2015, 10:44:13 PM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kry_VfFSh4
Title: How to Escape the Age of Mass Delusion
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 25, 2015, 12:20:35 PM
http://thefederalist.com/2015/06/08/how-to-escape-the-age-of-mass-delusion/
Title: Re: How to Escape the Age of Mass Delusion
Post by: G M on June 25, 2015, 08:44:15 PM
http://thefederalist.com/2015/06/08/how-to-escape-the-age-of-mass-delusion/

That is a very good, very important article.
Title: Jonah Goldberg
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 26, 2015, 10:56:22 PM
Dear Reader (unless you have a Matchbox car of the General Lee from the Dukes of Hazard, in which case you must be sent to reeducation camp),

In my column today I note that we now live in a world where Bobby Jindal is a fake Indian, but it’s racist to say Elizabeth Warren isn’t a real Indian. It’s okay for the press to mock Ted Cruz for boasting Cuban heritage, but it’s outrageous that Jindal and Nikki Haley aren’t boasting about their heritage enough.  But, as the surprisingly communicative prison bully said to his new cellmate, “Hold on, it gets worse.”

Big corporations — the very same corporations we are constantly told are “Right-wing” — have been falling over themselves to erase any hint of Confederate flags from their inventories. Walmart proclaimed, 'We never want to offend anyone with the products that we offer.” eBay said they don’t want to sell anything that promotes “divisiveness.” Amazon quickly followed suit with similar pabulum.

As a business proposition, it’s hard for me to fault them. With the mobs desperate to sack any citadel that even hints at being a holdout, best to defenestrate the Confederate flags and fly the white ones.

But this standard of no “divisive” products isn’t actually a standard. It is a political fiction, a marketing myth, an invocation one must offer as one shovels the cursed wares of the day down the memory hole, like so many kilos of heroin with cops at the door.

Goodbye to All That

“Memory hole” is a term from Orwell’s 1984. It was literally a series of pipes one could throw documents down, so as to whisk them to the furnace as quickly as possible. (Fortunately for Hillary Clinton, that can be done digitally these days.)

Taken seriously, this new standard of anti-divisiveness would require cramming so many things down the memory hole it would be the functional equivalent of shoving a whole Thanksgiving turkey, uncooked, into the garbage disposal. Everywhere one looks, there are divisive things. The gay pride rainbow flag? Shvvvuuumph! Down the memory hole! Nazi memorabilia (still widely available at Amazon and Ebay)? Thwwwwwwwwwooosshh! Down the memory hole! Communist flags? Muslim Crescents? Christian Crucifixes? Stars of David (never mind Israeli flags)? Get ready for a long, grinding, thwarararammmmmfitang as the disciples of blackwhite thinking — and those who fear them — squeeze the polarizing bric-a-brac into the wheezing pneumatic tubery.

These of course are just the symbols. Then there are the books that must be hurled into the maw of forgetting. For the last few years, Huckleberry Finn’s place in American life has been shrinking, thanks to the stark terror it inflicts in an educrat class that insists on denouncing America’s racist past, but is too scared to actually engage it maturely for fear of triggering someone.

Gone With the Asininity

Already, a film critic at the New York Post (!) wants to dustbin Gone With The Wind (though he at least concedes it could be interred at a museum). I’m no partisan of the Confederacy, but I’m also no partisan of Communism. I understand why so many glower when they see the Confederate flag fly, I am hard pressed to understand why so few glare when they see the Hammer and Sickle grace dorm room walls or the midriffs of bearded, burly hipsters who apparently got a memo it’s okay to wear transgressive T-shirts so long as they’re so tight people get a glimpse of your belly hairs.

I’d say it’s almost as if they don’t know that the Communists were the greatest revivers of the institution of slavery in the 20th century, except I am fairly certain they don’t know that (as we speak — so to speak — ISIS is giving away sex-slaves to the winners of Koran-memorization contests, but this arouses far less passion in Americans than the thought that someone somewhere might want to buy a civil war chess set from Walmart).

I said above that if this standard were taken seriously so much would have to go down the memory hole. But that’s the rub. This isn’t a standard that is being taken seriously. It isn’t a standard at all. It’s a cudgel. A rhetorical nightstick used in service to the politics of revenge and forgetting.

When I was growing up (“How’s that going? Seems like you’ve got a ways to go…” — The Couch), it seemed like lots of people talked about post-modernism, critical-race theory and all that junk. Today, it seems like no one talks about it, but everyone lives it — or is being forced to live with it.

I’ll always remember that line from Wendy Doniger when McCain picked Sarah Palin for veep: “Her greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman.”

Whatever criticisms you might have for Palin, there was a time when the one thing everyone could agree on is that she’s, you know, a woman. But now we live in an age where we must say Bruce Jenner is a woman, but only Right-wing cranks like me bother to complain that a professor at the University of Chicago could write that Sarah Palin isn’t one.

The Center Will Not Hold

My real fear isn’t that the left will win. I still have some faith that the American people, including large portions of the Democratic base, don’t actually buy all of this nonsense, or at the very least it’s reasonable to assume they won’t continue to buy it for long. Why? Because it’s exhausting. What’s the correct word today? What are we allowed to think? How long must we discuss a world that doesn’t bear much resemblance to the one we actually live in?  Most people don’t want to be politically engaged constantly. We won’t all be assimilated by the Borg. (Though it is kind of amazing that the Swedish Chef on The Muppet Show had been warning us about this for so long and we never listened; “borg-a-borg-borg-borg!”)

No my real fear is that the center will not hold. I’ve discussed this a bit when it comes to the debate over Islam. I don’t like the practice of insulting Muslims — or anybody — just to prove a point. But what I like even less is the suggestion that Muslim fanatics have the assassin’s veto over what we can say or do. So I am forced to choose sides, and when forced, I will stand with the insulters over the beheaders. But that is not an ideal scenario. That is the Leninist thinking of “the worse, the better.”
So what I fear is something similar in our own society; that the left gets what it’s been asking for: Total Identity Politics Armageddon. Everyone to your tribe, literal or figurative.

Spending as much time as I do on the internet, it’s easy to think this world has already arrived. It’s basically how political twitter operates. But what I fear is that it spills over into real life, like when characters from The Matrix walk among us.

The Left’s identity-politics game is a bit like the welfare states of Europe, which exist solely by living off borrowed capital and unrequited generosity. Europeans can only have their lavish entitlements because they benefit from our military might and our technological innovation. Left to their own devices, they’d have to live quite differently.
Similarly, identity politics is fueled by generous subsidies from higher education, foundations, and other institutions designed to transfer resources to the Griping Industry. But if you spend enough time teaching people to think that way, guess what? They’ll think that way.

Cruz v. Clinton Ragnarok

The other night I was on Special Report with Senator Ted Cruz as our guest in the “Center Seat.” On the broadcast show I got to ask a total of one question — Cruz is a brilliant filibusterer.

Anyway, after he left the online show (where we chatted more), I remarked that his professed general election strategy — should he get the nomination — is to run on uniting conservatives and to get the conservatives who allegedly didn’t show up for McCain and Romney to show up for him.  He almost explicitly says he wants to run a Goldwateresque campaign: all-choice, no echo. Galvanize the base, forget about everyone else.

Now, I’m not sure I really believe this would actually be his game plan if he were to win the nomination, but I understand why he’s saying it now. He wants to be the One True Conservative in the race and that’s what his constituency wants to hear. Fair enough.

But it occurs to me that Cruz’s bet that a full-throated conservative can beat a full-throated liberal in a general election is very much the mirror image of Hillary Clinton’s strategy (though Hillary’s approach seems vastly more shameless and transparent, perhaps because, unlike Cruz, she’s an awful politician).

Her plan is to rally the Obama Coalition and forget about the middle. Cruz’s plan is to rally what he calls the Reagan coalition and forget about everyone else. As a matter of pure electoral mechanics and mathematics, I’m pretty dubious about that. But it would move the country further down the course I’m worried about.  Obviously, for me, the choice between Ted Cruz and Hillary Clinton is no choice at all. I’d vote for Cruz in a heartbeat.  My only point here is that when one side plays the identity politics game so aggressively, it forces others to play it as well. Those of us who want politics to mean less in life are forced to choose a side.
Title: Stratfor: The Rise of Warlord Entrepeneurs
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 27, 2015, 04:36:51 PM
 The Rise of Warlord Entrepreneurs
Global Affairs
June 24, 2015 | 08:00 GMT
Print
Text Size

By Jay Ogilvy

As the Islamic State digs in after its conquest of Ramadi, U.S. President Barack Obama has been candid about his lack of a strategy to deal with the group, in part because he is waiting for commitments from the Iraqi government, but in part because the Islamic State is poorly understood. We know it is "nimble," "aggressive" and "opportunistic." But there is much about it we don't know.

If you Google "books on the Islamic State," you might be surprised at how many have jumped off the press in the past year, a phenomenon all the more remarkable given how little we actually know about the group. One book you will not see among your search results, since it does not have "Islamic State" in its title, is the recently published Warlords, Inc.: Black Markets, Broken States, and the Rise of the Warlord Entrepreneur, edited by Noah Raford and Andrew Trabulsi. It is an anthology and therefore unlikely to be widely noticed, but I would like to draw on the insights of a few of its authors.

Together with Philip Bobbitt's analysis of the nation-state's decline and the market state's rise, Warlords, Inc. provides geopolitical context for understanding the rise of the Islamic State. Though their prescriptions differ, Bobbitt and several Warlords, Inc. authors define the edges of a white space that the Islamic State is trying to fill by referring to the group's geopolitical context. By looking at what's outside the outline rather than what's inside it, they may be giving us a more accurate picture of the Islamic State than those who claim to be peering directly into the group's dark and secretive interior.
The Market-State Warlord

Like Bobbitt, the authors of Warlords, Inc. believe we are undergoing a major historical transition in which many governments, and even the very idea of the nation-state itself, are under threat. The anthology's central thesis is that a netherworld of drugs, kidnapping and the smuggling of people and other contraband is bound to open up wherever the state fails to deliver public goods like health, education and security.

A shrieking feedback loop kicks in when failing states spawn illicit economies that in turn prey on the failing states from whence they came. "Once the social fabric is torn, the warlord entrepreneur is like the clotting blood, the scab forming over the wound." A vivid image, but how is this any different from earlier warlord threats?

The distinctive property of the new warlordism is the degree to which it follows an economic logic as opposed to the political logic of prior insurgencies. There's less talk of colonial oppression and class, and more talk of marketing, money laundering and finance.

In an essay titled, "Innovation, Deviation, and Development," authors Nils Gilman, Jesse Goldhammer and Steven Weber argue:

    Talk about "animal spirits" (Adam Smith) or "disruptive innovation" (Clayton Christensen) or "creative destruction" (Joseph Schumpeter) — it is all here. Just because these markets feature goods and services that may disgust us, does not mean we can't learn a great deal from deviant globalization's "success stories" and "best practices."

    Behind the backs of — and often despite — all those corporations and development NGOs, as well as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, the poor are renting their bodies, selling their organs, stealing energy, stripping their natural environments of critical minerals and chemicals, manufacturing drugs, and accepting toxic waste — not because they are evil, but in order to make a living. Thus, deviant globalization is a form of economic development.

India's Naxal Insurgencies

Nowhere is the shift from ideology to economics clearer than in the case of India's Naxals. As we learn in a chapter by energy security consultant Shlok Vaidya that is entirely devoted to their story, the Naxals began in March 1967 as a group of idealistic, college-educated Maoists who wanted to help the peasants out of penury. From their origin in Naxalbari (hence the name), committing isolated acts of banditry, they grew within a few months to form massive mobs of people armed with little more than farm tools; at one point, they had even managed to gain control of 300 square miles of territory. Still, given their weak organization and even weaker weaponry, they were eventually overwhelmed by state police. Thousands of attempts to resurrect the insurrection over the following months and years led only to the imprisonment of 40,000 insurgents by 1972. Apparently defeated, the Naxals went largely dormant for decades.

But since 2005, the Naxals have been making a significant and terrifying comeback. In 2012, they perpetrated over 1,500 violent acts, including attacks on police and the demolition of cellphone towers. The new Naxals trace their heritage directly to the original Naxalbaris, but they are different: less ideological, more focused on money, and because of that money, better armed. They still embrace some Maoist tactics, including focusing overwhelming force on one target at a time. But this raises a question: If they can indeed focus overwhelming force on a target that kills two birds with one stone, such as a cellphone tower that is surrounded by a rural police station, why don't they do so as often as they can?

    The answer is to be found in what is the clearest demarcation between Naxalbari's revolutionaries and the insurgency of today. This generation has embraced the very activity the Maoist ideology so vehemently opposes: profit. India's illicit economy is estimated to be between 40 and 71 percent of the size of the legitimate economy — somewhere between $500 billion and $1 trillion. The Naxals underpin a huge segment of this growing market.

Naxals need cellphones, too. They maintain a going concern that employs foot soldiers at $60 per month. Many of those foot soldiers go forth with price cards to collect what has become known as "the revolutionary tax" on a monthly basis: $2 for daycare workers, $4 for elementary school teachers, $10 for high school teachers, $4 for bank employees, $14 for bank managers and $100 for businessmen.

Whereas the revolutionary objectives of the original Naxalbaris were formed from a Robin Hood-cum-Mao mix of ideological egalitarianism and targeted violence, the principal goals of the new Naxals are quite different: to preserve India's natural resources from predation by the rest of the globe.

    Over the past twenty years, India has signed thousands of contracts that parcel out its reserves of bauxite, thorium, and coal, respectively 10 percent, 12 percent, and 7 percent of the world's reserves. India stands to do deals worth more than $80 billion, should the Naxals allow it. Unfortunately 80 percent of these natural resources are found in four Naxal-afflicted states that lack governance and opportunity.

But will the Naxals aim to kill the beast on which they so successfully prey?

    There are an estimated sixty thousand illegal mines operating today... These mines are operated by criminal organizations that also pay into the Naxal revenue pool... 20 and 30 percent for each truckload of coal.

Similarly, isn't there quite a bit of oil in the provinces the Islamic State is overrunning? And weren't Islamic State fighters quick to loot the banks in Mosul?
Lessons for Understanding the Islamic State

Most characterizations of the Islamic State feature it as a group chiefly driven by the religious fanaticism of Islamic extremism. But if Bobbitt and the Warlords, Inc. authors are correct, there may be more to it than that; we could be looking at an enemy driven by both God and Mammon.

With the rise of the market state, the parasite has taken on some of the features of the prey. The Naxalite insurgency (and quite possibly, the Islamic State) has adopted some of the market state's characteristics, transcending the old confines of state borders to achieve a transnational reach and becoming media- and social networking-savvy, well financed and well armed.

    Modern Naxals have corrected the flaws in their revolutionary predecessors' model. Instead of relying on ideology to amass huge numbers with a shared purpose, this generation emphasizes execution: building tactical training capacity, capturing popular support and stockpiling equipment. Instead of bows and arrows, the new generation is armed with state-of-the-art weaponry.

Comparisons between the Naxals, old and new, naturally invite comparisons between the Islamic State and its predecessor, al Qaeda. The brutality of beheadings and the extremism of religious rhetoric could be obscuring a more important difference between the two jihadist groups: financial acumen.

If that is the case, then the recent assassination of top Islamic State moneyman, Abu Sayyaf, along with the capture of his wife and a trove of records may prove especially valuable. If we can "follow the money," as Watergate informant Deep Throat so succinctly put it, we may yet learn enough about the Islamic State to be able to frame a credible strategy for its defeat.
Title: overtime populism
Post by: ccp on June 30, 2015, 06:48:49 AM
I never understood the concept that overtime pay should be 1.5 times the usual rate.  With regards to this I don't understand how one can open the floodgates to illegals stifling wages than turn around and expect this.  All politics of course.   OTOH companies certainly do abuse employees frequently but this is not the answer IMO:

More overtime on the way? Obama proposes broader coverage
More overtime on the way? Obama prepares to make more workers eligible for time-and-a-half pay
Associated Press By Christopher s. Rugaber, AP Economics Writer
1 hour ago

 More overtime on the way? Obama proposes broader coverage

In this June 26, 2015, photo, President Barack Obama speaks in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington. The Obama administration will propose requiring overtime pay for workers who earn nearly $1,000 per week, three individuals familiar with the plan said Monday, June 29. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

WASHINGTON (AP) -- They're called managers, and they sometimes work grueling schedules at fast food chains and retail stores. But with no overtime eligibility, their pay may be lower per hour than many workers they supervise.

With those employees in mind, the Obama administration is proposing making up to 5 million more people eligible for overtime — its latest effort to boost pay for lower-income workers. These workers would benefit from rules requiring businesses to pay eligible employees 1½ times their regular pay for any work beyond 40 hours a week.

"We've got to keep making sure hard work is rewarded," President Barack Obama wrote in an op-ed published Monday in The Huffington Post. "That's how America should do business. In this country, a hard day's work deserves a fair day's pay."

Employers can now often get around the rules: Any salaried employee who's paid more than $455 a week — or $23,660 a year — can be called a "manager," given limited supervisory duties and made ineligible for overtime.

Yet that would put a family of four in poverty territory. Obama says that the level is too low and undercuts the intent of the overtime law. The threshold was last updated in 2004 and has been eroded by inflation.

The long-awaited overtime rule from the Labor Department would more than double the threshold at which employers can avoid paying overtime, to $970 a week by next year. That would mean salaried employees earning less than $50,440 a year would be assured overtime if they work more than 40 hours per week.

To keep up with future inflation and wage growth, the proposal will peg the salary threshold at the 40th percentile of income. The White House said 56 percent of those who would benefit in the first year are women, and 53 percent have a college degree.

With the higher threshold, many more Americans — from fast food and retail supervisors to bank branch managers and insurance claims adjusters — would become eligible for overtime. Other changes the administration may propose could lead more white-collar workers to claim overtime.

A threshold of $984 a week would cover 15 million people, according to the liberal Economic Policy Institute. In 1975, overtime rules covered 65 percent of salaried workers. Today, it's just 12 percent.

The beneficiaries would be people like Brittany Swa, 30, a former manager of a Chipotle restaurant in Denver. As a management trainee, she started as an entry-level crew member in March 2010. After several months she began working as an "apprentice," which required a minimum 50-hour work week.

Yet her duties changed little. She had a key to the shop and could make bank deposits, but otherwise spent nearly all her time preparing orders and working the cash register. She frequently worked 60 hours a week but didn't get overtime because she earned $36,000.

The grueling hours continued after she was promoted to store manager in October 2010. She left two years later, and now processes workers' compensation claims at Travelers. She makes $60,000 a year, "which is surprising, since I only work 40 hours a week," she says.

Swa has joined a class-action lawsuit against Chipotle, which charges that apprentices shouldn't be classified as managers exempt from overtime. A spokesman for Chipotle declined to comment on the case.

Dawn Hughey, a former store manager for Dollar General in Flint, Michigan, would have also benefited from a higher overtime threshold. Hughey worked 60 to 80 hours a week for about two years before being fired in 2011. She was paid $34,700.

"I missed a lot of family functions working like that," Hughey said. "It was just expected if you were a store manager."

She made about $45,000 a year as an hourly worker in a previous job at a Rite Aid in California, where she typically worked 48 hours a week and received overtime.

The White House's proposed changes, which will be open for public comment and could take months to finalize, can be enacted through regulation without approval by the Republican-led Congress. They set up a populist economic argument that Democrats have already been embracing in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election. Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who is challenging Hillary Rodham Clinton for the Democratic nomination, said the proposal means businesses would no longer be able to shirk their responsibility to pay fair wages.

"This long overdue change in overtime rules is a step in the right direction and good news for workers," Sanders said.

Yet the proposals won't necessarily produce a big raise for people like Swa and Hughey. The National Retail Federation, a business group, says its members would probably respond by converting many salaried workers to hourly status, which could cost them benefits such as paid vacation. Other salaried workers would have their hours cut and wouldn't receive higher pay.

Businesses might hire additional workers to avoid paying overtime or extend the hours they give part-timers. Yet supporters of extending overtime coverage say they would welcome those changes.

"It's a job creation measure," said Daniel Hamermesh, an economist at the University of Texas, Austin. "Employers will substitute workers for hours, when the hours get more expensive."

The administration's proposal may make other changes. Right now, employees who earn more than the salary threshold can still receive overtime — unless they have managerial duties or are professionals with some discretion over their work and hours.

That exemption, however, is granted mainly at an employer's discretion. If a company says an employee's primary duty is, for example, supervising others, the employer can disqualify that person from overtime.

__

Associated Press writers Josh Lederman and Jim Kuhnhenn contributed to this report.
Title: Brooks: The Next Culture War
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 30, 2015, 08:46:10 AM
Christianity is in decline in the United States. The share of Americans who describe themselves as Christians and attend church is dropping. Evangelical voters make up a smaller share of the electorate. Members of the millennial generation are detaching themselves from religious institutions in droves.

Christianity’s gravest setbacks are in the realm of values. American culture is shifting away from orthodox Christian positions on homosexuality, premarital sex, contraception, out-of-wedlock childbearing, divorce and a range of other social issues. More and more Christians feel estranged from mainstream culture. They fear they will soon be treated as social pariahs, the moral equivalent of segregationists because of their adherence to scriptural teaching on gay marriage. They fear their colleges will be decertified, their religious institutions will lose their tax-exempt status, their religious liberty will come under greater assault.


The Supreme Court’s gay marriage decision landed like some sort of culminating body blow onto this beleaguered climate. Rod Dreher, author of the truly outstanding book “How Dante Can Save Your Life,” wrote an essay in Time in which he argued that it was time for Christians to strategically retreat into their own communities, where they could keep “the light of faith burning through the surrounding cultural darkness.”

He continued: “We have to accept that we really are living in a culturally post-Christian nation. The fundamental norms Christians have long been able to depend on no longer exist.”

Most Christian commentary has opted for another strategy: fight on. Several contributors to a symposium in the journal First Things about the court’s Obergefell decision last week called the ruling the Roe v. Wade of marriage. It must be resisted and resisted again. Robert P. George, probably the most brilliant social conservative theorist in the country, argued that just as Lincoln persistently rejected the Dred Scott decision, so “we must reject and resist an egregious act of judicial usurpation.”

These conservatives are enmeshed in a decades-long culture war that has been fought over issues arising from the sexual revolution. Most of the conservative commentators I’ve read over the past few days are resolved to keep fighting that war.

I am to the left of the people I have been describing on almost all of these social issues. But I hope they regard me as a friend and admirer. And from that vantage point, I would just ask them to consider a change in course.

Consider putting aside, in the current climate, the culture war oriented around the sexual revolution.

Put aside a culture war that has alienated large parts of three generations from any consideration of religion or belief. Put aside an effort that has been a communications disaster, reducing a rich, complex and beautiful faith into a public obsession with sex. Put aside a culture war that, at least over the near term, you are destined to lose.

Consider a different culture war, one just as central to your faith and far more powerful in its persuasive witness.


We live in a society plagued by formlessness and radical flux, in which bonds, social structures and commitments are strained and frayed. Millions of kids live in stressed and fluid living arrangements. Many communities have suffered a loss of social capital. Many young people grow up in a sexual and social environment rendered barbaric because there are no common norms. Many adults hunger for meaning and goodness, but lack a spiritual vocabulary to think things through.

Social conservatives could be the people who help reweave the sinews of society. They already subscribe to a faith built on selfless love. They can serve as examples of commitment. They are equipped with a vocabulary to distinguish right from wrong, what dignifies and what demeans. They already, but in private, tithe to the poor and nurture the lonely.

The defining face of social conservatism could be this: Those are the people who go into underprivileged areas and form organizations to help nurture stable families. Those are the people who build community institutions in places where they are sparse. Those are the people who can help us think about how economic joblessness and spiritual poverty reinforce each other. Those are the people who converse with us about the transcendent in everyday life.

This culture war is more Albert Schweitzer and Dorothy Day than Jerry Falwell and Franklin Graham; more Salvation Army than Moral Majority. It’s doing purposefully in public what social conservatives already do in private.

I don’t expect social conservatives to change their positions on sex, and of course fights about the definition of marriage are meant as efforts to reweave society. But the sexual revolution will not be undone anytime soon. The more practical struggle is to repair a society rendered atomized, unforgiving and inhospitable. Social conservatives are well equipped to repair this fabric, and to serve as messengers of love, dignity, commitment, communion and grace.
Title: Williams: Lincoln Wrong About Right of Secession...
Post by: objectivist1 on July 14, 2015, 12:01:57 PM
This is a point I have long agreed with and argued with professors of history and others who have a penchant for deifying Lincoln.  The anger I engendered while I was living in CT arguing this point was considerable.  Here in the South it's not quite so vitriolic:



Historical Ignorance

Walter E. Williams - July 14, 2015
               
 
The victors of war write its history in order to cast themselves in the most favorable light. That explains the considerable historical ignorance about our war of 1861 and panic over the Confederate flag. To create better understanding, we have to start a bit before the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia.

The 1783 Treaty of Paris ended the war between the colonies and Great Britain. Its first article declared the 13 colonies "to be free, sovereign and independent states." These 13 sovereign nations came together in 1787 as principals and created the federal government as their agent. Principals have always held the right to fire agents. In other words, states held a right to withdraw from the pact — secede.

During the 1787 Constitutional Convention, a proposal was made that would allow the federal government to suppress a seceding state. James Madison rejected it, saying, "A union of the states containing such an ingredient seemed to provide for its own destruction. The use of force against a state would look more like a declaration of war than an infliction of punishment and would probably be considered by the party attacked as a dissolution of all previous compacts by which it might be bound."

In fact, the ratification documents of Virginia, New York and Rhode Island explicitly said they held the right to resume powers delegated should the federal government become abusive of those powers. The Constitution never would have been ratified if states thought they could not regain their sovereignty — in a word, secede.

On March 2, 1861, after seven states seceded and two days before Abraham Lincoln's inauguration, Sen. James R. Doolittle of Wisconsin proposed a constitutional amendment that read, "No state or any part thereof, heretofore admitted or hereafter admitted into the union, shall have the power to withdraw from the jurisdiction of the United States."

Several months earlier, Reps. Daniel E. Sickles of New York, Thomas B. Florence of Pennsylvania and Otis S.
Ferry of Connecticut proposed a constitutional amendment to prohibit secession. Here's a question for the reader: Would there have been any point to offering these amendments if secession were already unconstitutional?

On the eve of the War of 1861, even unionist politicians saw secession as a right of states. Rep. Jacob M. Kunkel of Maryland said, "Any attempt to preserve the union between the states of this Confederacy by force would be impractical, and destructive of republican liberty."

Both Northern Democratic and Republican Parties favored allowing the South to secede in peace. Just about every major Northern newspaper editorialized in favor of the South's right to secede. New York Tribune (Feb. 5, 1860): "If tyranny and despotism justified the Revolution of 1776, then we do not see why it would not justify the secession of Five Millions of Southrons from the Federal Union in 1861." Detroit Free Press (Feb. 19, 1861): "An attempt to subjugate the seceded states, even if successful, could produce nothing but evil — evil unmitigated in character and appalling in content." The New York Times (March 21, 1861): "There is growing sentiment throughout the North in favor of letting the Gulf States go."

The War of 1861 settled the issue of secession through brute force that cost 600,000 American lives. We Americans celebrate Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, but H.L. Mencken correctly evaluated the speech: "It is poetry, not logic; beauty, not sense." Lincoln said the soldiers sacrificed their lives "to the cause of self-determination — that government of the people, by the people, for the people should not perish from the earth." Mencken says: "It is difficult to imagine anything more untrue. The Union soldiers in the battle actually fought against self-determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of people to govern themselves."

The War of 1861 brutally established that states could not secede. We are still living with its effects. Because states cannot secede, the federal government can run roughshod over the U.S. Constitution's limitations of the Ninth and Tenth Amendments. States have little or no response.

Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University. To find out more about Walter E. Williams and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.
COPYRIGHT 2015 CREATORS.COM
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: G M on July 14, 2015, 12:31:45 PM
Lincoln was correct in crushing the south. Leaving the US to preserve slavery wasn't a noble cause.
Title: Re: Lincoln...
Post by: objectivist1 on July 14, 2015, 01:26:28 PM
I'm not arguing that abolishing slavery was a bad thing, and neither is Dr. Williams (who by the way, is black.)  What both of us are saying is that the rationale used by Lincoln was intellectually dishonest and simply not correct.  The individual members of a confederation have the inherent right to nullify the agreement if they feel they are being abused by the federation.  The issue of the morality of slavery is separate and distinct.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 15, 2015, 12:25:57 PM
Excellent posts-- but would someone please post them on the American history thread or the Constitutional law thread?
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: G M on July 15, 2015, 05:41:01 PM
I like Walter Williams and am aware he is black. The reasons and motivations behind the civil war are complex, however the institution of slavery was unacceptable and ending it at gunpoint was the correct thing to do.
Title: Rothstein: Why did Europe conquer the world?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 19, 2015, 09:22:39 AM

Why Did Europe Conquer the World?

By Philip T. Hoffman
Princeton, 272 pages, $29.95

Such abstract formulations—mainly relegated to footnotes and appendices—make an appearance because Mr. Hoffman, who teaches at the California Institute of Technology, uses economic theory to scrutinize the supremacy of the West. He notes that scholars have ascribed Europe’s success to a variety of features: geographical and ecological advantages (Jared Diamond in “Guns, Germs, and Steel,” 1997); competitive markets and military rivalries ( Paul Kennedy in “The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers,” 1987); a culture that stresses adaptability and a fierce defense of democracy ( Victor Davis Hanson in “Carnage and Culture,” 2001); a style of detached investigation and scientific inquiry ( David Landes in “The Wealth and Poverty of Nations,” 1998); and principles like private property and the rule of law ( Niall Ferguson in “Civilization: The West and the Rest,” 2011). Mr. Hoffman, finding many of their answers unsatisfactory, suggests something different: the West’s mastery of gunpowder.

This claim may seem strange. Gunpowder was discovered in China and was in wide use in the Ottoman Empire. Yet well before the Industrial Revolution, Mr. Hoffman argues, the West surpassed the war-making capacity of other societies by improving the accuracy, range and speed of its weaponry. Why? First, Mr. Hoffman says, because of political priorities. Today we expect leaders to deliver prosperity, security and peace, but in early modern Europe the belief was, as Machiavelli put it, that rulers “ought to have no object, thought, or profession but war.”

War was the main reason why taxes were levied. In the two centuries before 1750, between 40% and 80% of European government budgets went to the military. European tax rates were also significantly higher than those in other regions. In 1776, England’s per capita taxes (measured in grams of silver) were equivalent to about 180 grams, France’s to 61 grams and China’s to just 7 grams.
Advertisement

European nations also gained proficiency through experience, not least when fighting among themselves. Between 1550 and 1600, Mr. Hoffman says, the principal European powers were at war 71% of the time; from 1600 to 1650, 66% of the time. And because nearly all European battles used gunpowder technology—unlike, say, those in China, where nomadic tribes were routinely fought without such weaponry—the result was innovation and mastery: “learning by doing,” as Mr. Hoffman puts it.

If money and practice gave the West an edge, other factors played a role as well. Mr. Hoffman uses a “tournament model” of economic competition to examine the variables affecting military success and suggests that, for several centuries, European nations, fighting among themselves, steadily gained the mastery to overwhelm others. In this model, two powers vie for a prize (financial gain, land, glory). To attain it they must first raise taxes and build armies and an infrastructure. The real variations come when war breaks out. Rulers must mobilize fighters and prepare for battle; there might be different amounts of money spent but also different political costs to mobilization—say, in the political deals made or the taxes raised for war or the reactions of the populace. According to the model, the odds of winning are assumed to be proportional to the resources being mobilized: Spend more and you have a better chance of winning. The odds increase if your political costs are low—e.g., if there is little popular opposition. Both high resource use and low political costs were generally true in the West in centuries of internecine wars, which gave them distinctive advantages in world conquest.

The model is illuminating: A nation might refuse to fight, for example, if it were facing a powerful opponent, thus ceding the prize. Mr. Hoffman calls the result “peace”—but it is created by intimidation, accommodation or appeasement. War is more likely when nations are roughly equivalent than when one of them is immensely superior (the Pax Romana). The model can be made more sophisticated by incorporating the effects of innovation, which may lower costs and also increase fighting efficiency.

Through such analysis, Mr. Hoffman finds four conditions in early modern Europe that he finds nowhere else: (1) frequent wars between countries that have roughly the same size and financial power; (2) huge sums lavished on warfare along with low political costs; (3) the heavy use of gunpowder technology; and (4) few obstacles blocking innovation. Mr. Hoffman observes that European governments uniquely allowed their war technologies to be used for private expeditions. Entrepreneurial explorers as well as corporations like the Dutch East India Co. engaged in colonization, conquest and trade.

With all of this nurturing, gunpowder technology advanced rapidly. One rough measure: The relative price of pistols in England, between the mid-16th century and the early 18th, fell by a factor of six. Other countries couldn’t match the efficiency. In the 17th century, the prices of Chinese weapons were much higher than their equivalents in England. The “model makes clear,” Mr. Hoffman writes, “once and for all, the political and military conditions that distinguished Europe from the rest of the world.” And that gave them the ability to readily conquer foreign armies, none of which were remotely as deadly as the European forces.

Mr. Hoffman’s argument is both brilliant and eccentric: brilliant in the way it contributes to historical speculation, eccentric in its formalist reduction of a culture’s complexities. But look what kind of European order it conjures up: Here are a group of fierce, Spartan-like states warring with one another, battling over colonial holdings, trying to expand their terrain, perfecting their weaponry. Such a portrait actually resembles the familiar caricature of the West, in which the West is considered a military culture that achieved dominance through ruthless combat and acquisitiveness, resulting in centuries of imperialism, slavery and exploitation. And indeed, Mr. Hoffman concludes that the triumph of the West imposed overwhelmingly heavy costs on the populations of Europe and that outside of Europe “the damage done was immeasurably greater.”

The widespread acceptance of this general belief can now be seen in the West’s self-denigrating view of itself—in the confessions of guilt, gestures to make recompense, and shamefaced withdrawal from the exercise of power and self-interest. Such a perspective, though, is deeply flawed. Imperial desires, slavery and exploitation have been hallmarks of every powerful culture and are hardly unique to the West (more unique, in fact, is the West’s abolition of slavery). The presence of villainy (another universal) also explains nothing. Mr. Hoffman helps explain a certain kind of success but not a certain kind of civilization. And it’s not clear that the two can be so easily separated.

In fact, gunpowder advances may be not the cause of Western power but a reflection of it—the power of its ideas and modes of understanding. Innovation depends on a certain kind of ambition and a particular way of thinking; it doesn’t happen simply because there are few obstacles and many resources, as Mr. Hoffman’s theory suggests. Thus for millennia most nomadic tribes didn’t go beyond bow-and-arrow technologies. Building a better gun requires a grasp of physical principles and a certain flexibility of mind—being able to apply those principles in new ways. Innovation is thus in part a scientific enterprise and a product of the same impulses that shaped the Western Renaissance.

Similarly, the far-flung explorations that characterized early modern Europe were not undertaken just to attain power and riches; they reflected a desire to illuminate the unknown, to comprehend the universe and map its qualities, to discover not just novelties but fundamental principles. They involved a kind of nervy geographic universalism. This is one reason why the West might be the only culture in human history to undertake the systematic study and analysis of other cultures, discerning differences and commonalities. These impulses and their moral implications are more rare than the mastery of gunpowder—and more powerful.

—Mr. Rothstein is the Journal’s critic
Title: A data base world - perfect for the left!
Post by: ccp on July 19, 2015, 12:25:33 PM
Some thoughts from the top of my head:

Gathering data and mining it with statistics and formulas and conclusions and then formulating policy from that is a perfect storm against the right.

In medicine the new coding formula with tens of thousands of codes trying to categorize every health ailment into a code that can be translated into a set of ones and zeros is making our heads spin in medicine. 

Now we see on Drudge bamster and his liberal policy makers from the Ivy's along with his fascist friends in tech doing the same with "racial" profiling.

The legal system is also a target.

This explosion of data is perfect for liberals to use in ways that they will insist is for social justice and equality.  They are the new Kings, the new Emporers, the new Queens, the new despots.

Freedom is defined as that which is permissable by THEM.

Not by our Constitution.

Data is easy to interpret in many different ways and the opportunity for nefarious misuse much greater but subtle and under the radar  that makes this very dangerous.

Title: Steyn on Trump and McCain
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 24, 2015, 05:12:59 AM
http://www.steynonline.com/7059/the-superbowl-of-superholes
Title: Re: Steyn on McCain & Trump...
Post by: objectivist1 on July 24, 2015, 08:12:09 AM
I LOVE Mark Steyn.  He tells it like it is - John McCain IS an A-hole - ask anyone who's ever worked with him...
Title: VDH: Trump and the Fed-up Crowd
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 28, 2015, 08:59:59 AM
Donald Trump and the Fed-Up Crowd
July 27, 2015 8:11 am / 40 Comments / victorhanson
Watching Trump’s rise, America’s middle class “fed-up crowd” is enjoying the comeuppance of an elite that never pays for the ramifications of its own ideology.

by Victor Davis Hanson // PJ Media
Yeah, I kind of love this guy —->@unsavoryagents [1] Ha ha #LosAngeles [2] violent crime up 26% wake up! #SanctuaryCity [3] pic.twitter.com/4TtvwVWY5C [4] — RockPrincess (@Rockprincess818) July 10, 2015 [5]

Yeah, I kind of love this guy —->@unsavoryagents [1] Ha ha #LosAngeles [2] violent crime up 26% wake up! #SanctuaryCity [3] pic.twitter.com/4TtvwVWY5C [4]
— RockPrincess (@Rockprincess818) July 10, 2015 [5]
Donald Trump — a former liberal and benefactor of Democrats — is still surging. But his loud New York lingo, popular put-downs of obnoxious reporters and trashing of the D.C. establishment are symptoms, not the catalyst, of the growing popular outrage of lots of angry Americans who are fed up.The fed-up crowd likes the payback of watching blood sport in an arena where niceties just don’t apply anymore. At least for a while longer, they enjoy the smug getting their comeuppance, as an uncouth, bullheaded Trump charges about, snorting and spearing liberal pieties and more sober and judicious Republicans at random.

Perhaps they don’t see the abjectly crude Trump as any more crude that Barack Obama calmly in academic tones assuring Americans that they all could keep their doctors and health plans when he knew that was simply untrue or announcing to the nation that his own grandmother was a “typical white person” or advising supporters to “get in their face.”  They see Trump as no more vindictive that Harry Reid lying about Mitt Romney’s tax returns (and then bragging that such a lie helped defeat him), or a Sen. Barbara Boxer publicly attac­­king the single, non-parental status of then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. And they certainly don’t see Trump as uncouth as an Al Sharpton — former presidential candidate, chief advisor on matters of race to Barack Obama, and current TV news show host. Trump’s crass bombast is enjoyed by the fed-up crowd as the proper antidote to the even greater bombast of the Left, who created Trump’s latest manifestations.

The conservative base is tired of illegal immigration. Their furor peaked with the horrific killing of Kate Steinle by a seven-time convicted felon and five-time deported illegal alien.  They are baffled that one apparently exempt and privileged ethnic group can arbitrarily decide to ignore federal law. They are irate that they are lectured about their supposed racism from an open-borders movement predicated on La Raza-like ethnic chauvinism. They do not want to hear about nativism from a lobby that so often at rallies waves the flag of the country that none of the protestors seems to wish to return to, a country whose authoritarianism is romanticized as much as their host country is faulted for its magnanimity. Call this what you will, but emotion over neglecting federal law is much less worrisome than cool calculation over violating it.

The fed-up crowd expects statistics to be massaged to counter reality; in the real world nearly a million illegal aliens have committed crimes, with almost 700,000 charged with felonies and serious misdemeanors. In fantasyland, they are said to be more lawful than U.S. citizens. Most Americans would be guilty of felonies for creating false identities, or using fraudulent Social Security numbers; in matters of illegal immigration, these common crimes are not even considered crimes.

The furor over the death of Ms. Steinle reflected the mounting outrage — especially at the hypocrisy of the elites who crafted sanctuary-city legislation. Would they be so nonchalant about the law if a daughter of one of the architects of the legislation were to be gunned down by an illegal alien? Would San Franciscans object if Tulsa nullified federal gun legislation or declared open season on federally protected species? Only liberalism can take a reactionary Old Confederacy idea of federal nullification and turn it into a progressive fad.

The recent disclosures about Planned Parenthood likewise infuriated the fed-up base. Again, they were not incensed just at the callous and sick way supposed humanitarians at Planned Parenthood talked of slicing up fetal tissue and selling organs, but at the hypocrisy of it all. At a time liberals are Trotskyzing our past to damn to memory any ancient historical figure who owned slaves or practiced racism, how does Planned Parenthood’s godhead Margaret Sanger, the racist eugenicist and promoter of abortion to curb minority populations [6], get a pass?

Liberals lecture about “settled science” and adherence to logic instead of myth and folklore. But they also insist on talking of fetuses as non-human organisms, even as they concede both that fetuses in the womb possess viable — and marketable — human tissues and that developing babies at 22 weeks are now viable outside the womb.

For those who bandy about words like troglodyte, it is quite Neanderthal, in the scientific sense, to believe that a baby is not a living, viable organism until it emerges from the birth canal. For a movement that talks of caring and compassion, it is hard to write a script more cruel and callous than that of the Planned Parenthood talking heads referencing a Lamborghini or a “less crunchy” abortion technique or the macabre house of horrors of the abortionist and convicted murderer Dr. Gosnell. As for the supposed questionable ethics of catching Planned Parenthood with ruse and stealthy tape, no one seemed to object over secretly taping at a private gathering Mitt Romney’s unfortunate quip about the “47 percent,” much less did liberals object to four decades of 60 Minutes ambush-style, secret-video reporting.

The fed-up crowd is tired of racial hypocrisy. In the Trayvon Martin case, the president weighed in on the ongoing case in blatantly racist fashion by announcing the deceased might have looked like his own son, as the New York Times invented “white Hispanic” to lessen George’s Zimmerman’s ethnic fides (e.g., is Barack Obama, of similar half-minority lineage, a “white African-American”?) and as the media photo-shopped Zimmerman’s head wounds and selectively edited his taped 911 call.

Fantasy was thematic ad nauseam from the Duke lacrosse fiasco to the Michael Brown mythologies, the font of the “hands up, don’t shoot” lie that became a national slogan. But again, the hypocrisy is what irritates more — a Barack Obama siccing his administration after supposedly elite segregated neighborhoods as he sends his kids to Sidwell Friends.

The fed-up crowd expects that Paula Deen, the Duck Dynasty crowd, and Donald Sterling can become public enemies with a racist or insensitive word. But this is not so when a Harry Reid, Joe Biden, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Chris Rock, Jamie Foxx, Spike Lee, Al Sharpton, or Jesse Jackson mouths unequivocal racism. They assume that Jefferson can be rendered no more than a slave owner, but not liberal icon Woodrow Wilson who practiced 20th-century not 18th-century-style racism.

The fed-up crowd senses that if America continues its present regressive trajectory it will end up as a Greece, Detroit, or Chicago, without anywhere in America to flee to. It no doubt wants Trump to continue for a bit longer, as he struts about and shouts over why Hillary has a career when Gen. David Petraeus’s was ruined for roughly the same offenses, or cuts short an agenda-driven and biased Telemundo reporter as biased and agenda-driven. At some point the fed-ups will have vented and become fed up themselves with the circus-master Trump, who equates his own money-making with both virtue and wisdom. But we are not there yet quite yet.

To explain the inexplicable rise of Donald Trump is to calibrate the anger of a fed-up crowd that is enjoying the comeuppance of an elite that never pays for the ramifications of its own ideology. The elite media, whose trademark is fad and cant, writes off the fed-up crowd as naïve and susceptible to demagoguery as the contradictory and hypocritical Trump manipulates their anger. In fact, they probably got it backwards. Trump is a transitory vehicle of the fed-up crowd, a current expression of their distaste for both Democratic and Republican politics, but not an end in and of himself. The fed-up crowd is tired of being demagogued to death by progressives, who brag of “working across the aisle” and “bipartisanship” as they ram through agendas with executive orders, court decisions, and public ridicule. So the fed-ups want other conservative candidates to emulate Trump’s verve, energy, eagerness to speak the unspeakable, and no-holds barred Lee Atwater style — without otherwise being Trump.
Title: VDH "is the man"
Post by: ccp on July 28, 2015, 09:54:43 AM
" So the fed-ups want other conservative candidates to emulate Trump’s verve, energy, eagerness to speak the unspeakable, and no-holds barred Lee Atwater style — without otherwise being Trump."

VDH ***gets it***!!!

Yet CNN, Republicans and Fox troglodites are scratching their collective heads, "gee wiz I don't understand why Trump is so popular".

As I've said before no one party represents ME.

Trump speaks like he does represent me.

So he is refreshing.

I will not vote for Bush or Kasich, period.

Why bother?




Title: Shut up Bigot! The Intolerance of Tolerance
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 20, 2015, 10:19:38 AM
http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/shut-up-bigot-the-intolerance-of-tolerance/16701
Title: Quote Worth Noting
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on August 27, 2015, 04:57:40 PM
It's a bad idea, even posthumously, to give suicide murderers exactly what they want:

Quote
A suicide-homicide is an act of ultimate rage. People who do these kinds of things feel like they’re the victims. Their acts of suicide and homicide are a way to make a point. Although they don’t live to see the results, they would probably like what they see: Millions of people not only being momentarily horrified, but agreeing with the murderer’s classification of him- or herself as a victim. Whatever the President and the Pope have to say about this, rest assured that the killer — if he were alive to hear — would be happily applauding.

Michael Hurd.

Title: Debunking the Myth of Socialist Success in Scandanavia
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 28, 2015, 01:33:22 PM
http://www.thenewamerican.com/world-news/europe/item/21463-debunking-the-myth-of-socialist-success-in-scandinavia
Title: Generational Changes are bigger than any presidential candidate
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 01, 2015, 08:01:44 AM
Generational Economic Changes Are Bigger than Any Presidential Candidate

These are the sort of thoughts that come to mind when a bunch of conservative bloggers get together and start arguing about Donald Trump . . .

Americans came to think of the economic conditions of the postwar boom -- low unemployment, easy entry into the workplace, job stability, considerable purchasing power and lots of consumer goods, high exports, good pensions, etc. as “normal.” What no one wanted to really acknowledge was how rare our advantage of that era was: We were an intact first-world economy on a planet where almost every other country was rebuilding from being blasted to hell during World War II.

Decade by decade, the rest of the world caught up and offered economic competition, primarily in the form of cheaper labor. The debate between trade and protectionism was largely one among elites. Non-wonk Americans lamented the decline of manufacturing jobs while buying Japanese (and then Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese) electronics, German and Japanese cars, etc. Free trade is terrific for consumers but not so great when somebody overseas can do your job for less money. From where I sit, it’s on the whole advantageous but horrible if it’s your job being “outsourced” overseas.

The public’s interest would briefly stir for NAFTA or Most Favored Nation status for China, but by and large, Americans either applauded globalization, loved its benefits but lamented its costs without ever connecting the two, or just ignored it.

For a while, Americans were told that the graduate-high-school-and-go-to-the-widget-factory-assembly-line life model was disappearing, but was being replaced with a better one: graduate-from-college-and-go-to-the-white-collar-job. In fact, it was so much better, it was worth taking on tens of thousands or even $150,000 in debt, because you would make more money over the course of your lifetime.

And then, sometime around the Great Recession, that deal changed, too. Companies realized they didn’t need that many entry-level positions (or they could shift it to unpaid labor in the form of internships). Undoubtedly, some colleges let their standards slide, and too many young people focused on basket-weaving, gender studies, or humanities majors and found themselves with a degree that didn’t translate well to the needs of the job market. A dramatic expansion of unskilled labor in the form of illegal immigration put the squeeze on another corner of the workforce; automation did even more. For many, that path to the good life seems steeper, rockier, and less clear than their parents ever faced.

Some folks at the top of the economic pyramid were or are quite comfortable with the new arrangement, offering perspectives like, “If the transformation of the world economy lifts four people in China and India out of poverty and into the middle class, and meanwhile means one American drops out of the middle class, that’s not such a bad trade,” and, “We demand a higher paycheck than the rest of the world. So if you’re going to demand 10 times the paycheck, you need to deliver 10 times the value. It sounds harsh, but maybe people in the middle class need to decide to take a pay cut.” An American company may not self-identify as all that American anymore, and certainly doesn’t feel much obligation to put a national interest ahead of the bottom line.

These are giant, sweeping problems that are best measured on generational time-frames and go well beyond one law or one president or lawmaker. This change is tied to our nation’s long, slow, painful slide from a system of public schools where kids were likely to get at least a “good enough” education to prepare them for the workforce to one where public schools range from excellent to abysmal. It’s tied to the U.S. going from a nation of 14 million immigrants in 1980 (both legal and illegal, 6.2 percent of the population) to 40 million immigrants in 2010 (12.9 percent). It’s tied to changing from a world with one primary, stable, relatively predictable antagonist (the Soviet Union) to an asymmetric, multinational, amorphous, adaptive slate of demonic foes like ISIS and al Qaeda. And it’s tied up in going from a relative monoculture influenced by Judeo-Christian values and identities to a cultural Balkanization where the counterculture became the dominant culture, then shattered itself.

Ultimately, electing a better president is one step on the road -- an important one, but only one. A lot of this comes down to what Americans expect of themselves. Do we want to compete in the global economy, and if not, are we willing to live with the consequences of closing ourselves off from the rest of the world? Are we willing to study hard to be qualified for good jobs and work hard once we get them? Are our companies willing to see themselves as national institutions instead of global ones? Are employers willing to show greater loyalty to their employees, and are their employees willing to reciprocate?

It would be spectacular if we could shake the country out of its fascination with caudillo-like figures. You would hope people would have learned from the experience of electing Barack Obama the Lightworker, the Munificent Sun God, the first man to step down into the presidency. But no, for far too many people, the lesson is not that we shouldn’t look to a president to be our savior, it’s that we chose the wrong one -- but Hillary, or Donald Trump, or Bernie Sanders will be the right savior.
Title: The Rise of Middle Class Serfdom
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 01, 2015, 08:32:17 AM
second post

http://www.artofmanliness.com/2015/08/31/shadow-work-and-the-rise-of-middle-class-serfdom/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheArtOfManliness+%28The+Art+of+Manliness%29
Title: The work that made America great
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 09, 2015, 11:38:58 AM
http://www.onbeing.org/blog/work-we-value-intelligence-we-ignore-work-made-america-great-valued-any-longer/2590
Title: Admiral takes on Sec. Kerry to his face
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 09, 2015, 12:53:22 PM
second post:

https://www.facebook.com/adrian.ionescu.376/videos/10153070412010913/
Title: Stratfor: The Crisis of the Middle Class and American Power
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 12, 2015, 08:07:55 AM
An interesting discussion, albeit flawed IMHO:

Summary

Editor's Note: To mark Labor Day, we are republishing Stratfor founder George Friedman's essay on how the American middle class — one of the country's core values — is steadily losing ground. This analysis was originally published in January 2013, when unemployment in the United States was hovering around 8 percent and recovery from the 2008-2009 financial crisis was still tenuous.
Analysis

By George Friedman

When I wrote about the crisis of unemployment in Europe, I received a great deal of feedback. Europeans agreed that this is the core problem while Americans argued that the United States has the same problem, asserting that U.S. unemployment is twice as high as the government's official unemployment rate. My counterargument is that unemployment in the United States is not a problem in the same sense that it is in Europe because it does not pose a geopolitical threat. The United States does not face political disintegration from unemployment, whatever the number is. Europe might.

At the same time, I would agree that the United States faces a potentially significant but longer-term geopolitical problem deriving from economic trends. The threat to the United States is the persistent decline in the middle class' standard of living, a problem that is reshaping the social order that has been in place since World War II and that, if it continues, poses a threat to American power.
The Crisis of the American Middle Class

The median household income of Americans in 2011 was $49,103. Adjusted for inflation, the median income is just below what it was in 1989 and is $4,000 less than it was in 2000. Take-home income is a bit less than $40,000 when Social Security and state and federal taxes are included. That means a monthly income, per household, of about $3,300. It is urgent to bear in mind that half of all American households earn less than this. It is also vital to consider not the difference between 1990 and 2011, but the difference between the 1950s and 1960s and the 21st century. This is where the difference in the meaning of middle class becomes most apparent.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the median income allowed you to live with a single earner — normally the husband, with the wife typically working as homemaker — and roughly three children. It permitted the purchase of modest tract housing, one late model car and an older one. It allowed a driving vacation somewhere and, with care, some savings as well. I know this because my family was lower-middle class, and this is how we lived, and I know many others in my generation who had the same background. It was not an easy life and many luxuries were denied us, but it wasn't a bad life at all.

Someone earning the median income today might just pull this off, but it wouldn't be easy. Assuming that he did not have college loans to pay off but did have two car loans to pay totaling $700 a month, and that he could buy food, clothing and cover his utilities for $1,200 a month, he would have $1,400 a month for mortgage, real estate taxes and insurance, plus some funds for fixing the air conditioner and dishwasher. At a 5 percent mortgage rate, that would allow him to buy a house in the $200,000 range. He would get a refund back on his taxes from deductions but that would go to pay credit card bills he had from Christmas presents and emergencies. It could be done, but not easily and with great difficulty in major metropolitan areas. And if his employer didn't cover health insurance, that $4,000-5,000 for three or four people would severely limit his expenses. And of course, he would have to have $20,000-40,000 for a down payment and closing costs on his home. There would be little else left over for a week at the seashore with the kids.

And this is for the median. Those below him — half of all households — would be shut out of what is considered middle-class life, with the house, the car and the other associated amenities. Those amenities shift upward on the scale for people with at least $70,000 in income. The basics might be available at the median level, given favorable individual circumstance, but below that life becomes surprisingly meager, even in the range of the middle class and certainly what used to be called the lower-middle class.

The Expectation of Upward Mobility

I should pause and mention that this was one of the fundamental causes of the 2007-2008 subprime lending crisis. People below the median took out loans with deferred interest with the expectation that their incomes would continue the rise that was traditional since World War II. The caricature of the borrower as irresponsible misses the point. The expectation of rising real incomes was built into the American culture, and many assumed based on that that the rise would resume in five years. When it didn't they were trapped, but given history, they were not making an irresponsible assumption.

American history was always filled with the assumption that upward mobility was possible. The Midwest and West opened land that could be exploited, and the massive industrialization in the late 19th and early 20th centuries opened opportunities. There was a systemic expectation of upward mobility built into American culture and reality.

The Great Depression was a shock to the system, and it wasn't solved by the New Deal, nor even by World War II alone. The next drive for upward mobility came from post-war programs for veterans, of whom there were more than 10 million. These programs were instrumental in creating post-industrial America, by creating a class of suburban professionals. There were three programs that were critical:

    The GI Bill, which allowed veterans to go to college after the war, becoming professionals frequently several notches above their parents.
    The part of the GI Bill that provided federally guaranteed mortgages to veterans, allowing low and no down payment mortgages and low interest rates to graduates of publicly funded universities.
    The federally funded Interstate Highway System, which made access to land close to but outside of cities easier, enabling both the dispersal of populations on inexpensive land (which made single-family houses possible) and, later, the dispersal of business to the suburbs.

There were undoubtedly many other things that contributed to this, but these three not only reshaped America but also created a new dimension to the upward mobility that was built into American life from the beginning. Moreover, these programs were all directed toward veterans, to whom it was acknowledged a debt was due, or were created for military reasons (the Interstate Highway System was funded to enable the rapid movement of troops from coast to coast, which during World War II was found to be impossible). As a result, there was consensus around the moral propriety of the programs.

The subprime fiasco was rooted in the failure to understand that the foundations of middle class life were not under temporary pressure but something more fundamental. Where a single earner could support a middle class family in the generation after World War II, it now took at least two earners. That meant that the rise of the double-income family corresponded with the decline of the middle class. The lower you go on the income scale, the more likely you are to be a single mother. That shift away from social pressure for two parent homes was certainly part of the problem.

Re-engineering the Corporation

But there was, I think, the crisis of the modern corporation. Corporations provided long-term employment to the middle class. It was not unusual to spend your entire life working for one. Working for a corporation, you received yearly pay increases, either as a union or non-union worker. The middle class had both job security and rising income, along with retirement and other benefits. Over the course of time, the culture of the corporation diverged from the realities, as corporate productivity lagged behind costs and the corporations became more and more dysfunctional and ultimately unsupportable. In addition, the corporations ceased focusing on doing one thing well and instead became conglomerates, with a management frequently unable to keep up with the complexity of multiple lines of business.

For these and many other reasons, the corporation became increasingly inefficient, and in the terms of the 1980s, they had to be re-engineered — which meant taken apart, pared down, refined and refocused. And the re-engineering of the corporation, designed to make them agile, meant that there was a permanent revolution in business. Everything was being reinvented. Huge amounts of money, managed by people whose specialty was re-engineering companies, were deployed. The choice was between total failure and radical change. From the point of view of the individual worker, this frequently meant the same thing: unemployment. From the view of the economy, it meant the creation of value whether through breaking up companies, closing some of them or sending jobs overseas. It was designed to increase the total efficiency, and it worked for the most part.

This is where the disjuncture occurred. From the point of view of the investor, they had saved the corporation from total meltdown by redesigning it. From the point of view of the workers, some retained the jobs that they would have lost, while others lost the jobs they would have lost anyway. But the important thing is not the subjective bitterness of those who lost their jobs, but something more complex.

As the permanent corporate jobs declined, more people were starting over. Some of them were starting over every few years as the agile corporation grew more efficient and needed fewer employees. That meant that if they got new jobs it would not be at the munificent corporate pay rate but at near entry-level rates in the small companies that were now the growth engine. As these companies failed, were bought or shifted direction, they would lose their jobs and start over again. Wages didn't rise for them and for long periods they might be unemployed, never to get a job again in their now obsolete fields, and certainly not working at a company for the next 20 years.

The restructuring of inefficient companies did create substantial value, but that value did not flow to the now laid-off workers. Some might flow to the remaining workers, but much of it went to the engineers who restructured the companies and the investors they represented. Statistics reveal that, since 1947 (when the data was first compiled), corporate profits as a percentage of gross domestic product are now at their highest level, while wages as a percentage of GDP are now at their lowest level. It was not a question of making the economy more efficient — it did do that — it was a question of where the value accumulated. The upper segment of the wage curve and the investors continued to make money. The middle class divided into a segment that entered the upper-middle class, while another faction sank into the lower-middle class.

American society on the whole was never egalitarian. It always accepted that there would be substantial differences in wages and wealth. Indeed, progress was in some ways driven by a desire to emulate the wealthy. There was also the expectation that while others received far more, the entire wealth structure would rise in tandem. It was also understood that, because of skill or luck, others would lose.

What we are facing now is a structural shift, in which the middle class' center, not because of laziness or stupidity, is shifting downward in terms of standard of living. It is a structural shift that is rooted in social change (the breakdown of the conventional family) and economic change (the decline of traditional corporations and the creation of corporate agility that places individual workers at a massive disadvantage).

The inherent crisis rests in an increasingly efficient economy and a population that can't consume what is produced because it can't afford the products. This has happened numerous times in history, but the United States, excepting the Great Depression, was the counterexample.

Obviously, this is a massive political debate, save that political debates identify problems without clarifying them. In political debates, someone must be blamed. In reality, these processes are beyond even the government's ability to control. On one hand, the traditional corporation was beneficial to the workers until it collapsed under the burden of its costs. On the other hand, the efficiencies created threaten to undermine consumption by weakening the effective demand among half of society.
The Long-Term Threat

The greatest danger is one that will not be faced for decades but that is lurking out there. The United States was built on the assumption that a rising tide lifts all ships. That has not been the case for the past generation, and there is no indication that this socio-economic reality will change any time soon. That means that a core assumption is at risk. The problem is that social stability has been built around this assumption — not on the assumption that everyone is owed a living, but the assumption that on the whole, all benefit from growing productivity and efficiency.

If we move to a system where half of the country is either stagnant or losing ground while the other half is surging, the social fabric of the United States is at risk, and with it the massive global power the United States has accumulated. Other superpowers such as Britain or Rome did not have the idea of a perpetually improving condition of the middle class as a core value. The United States does. If it loses that, it loses one of the pillars of its geopolitical power.

The left would argue that the solution is for laws to transfer wealth from the rich to the middle class. That would increase consumption but, depending on the scope, would threaten the amount of capital available to investment by the transfer itself and by eliminating incentives to invest. You can't invest what you don't have, and you won't accept the risk of investment if the payoff is transferred away from you.

The agility of the American corporation is critical. The right will argue that allowing the free market to function will fix the problem. The free market doesn't guarantee social outcomes, merely economic ones. In other words, it may give more efficiency on the whole and grow the economy as a whole, but by itself it doesn't guarantee how wealth is distributed. The left cannot be indifferent to the historical consequences of extreme redistribution of wealth. The right cannot be indifferent to the political consequences of a middle-class life undermined, nor can it be indifferent to half the population's inability to buy the products and services that businesses sell.

The most significant actions made by governments tend to be unintentional. The GI Bill was designed to limit unemployment among returning serviceman; it inadvertently created a professional class of college graduates. The VA loan was designed to stimulate the construction industry; it created the basis for suburban home ownership. The Interstate Highway System was meant to move troops rapidly in the event of war; it created a new pattern of land use that was suburbia.

It is unclear how the private sector can deal with the problem of pressure on the middle class. Government programs frequently fail to fulfill even minimal intentions while squandering scarce resources. The United States has been a fortunate country, with solutions frequently emerging in unexpected ways.

It would seem to me that unless the United States gets lucky again, its global dominance is in jeopardy. Considering its history, the United States can expect to get lucky again, but it usually gets lucky when it is frightened. And at this point it isn't frightened but angry, believing that if only its own solutions were employed, this problem and all others would go away. I am arguing that the conventional solutions offered by all sides do not yet grasp the magnitude of the problem — that the foundation of American society is at risk — and therefore all sides are content to repeat what has been said before.

People who are smarter and luckier than I am will have to craft the solution. I am simply pointing out the potential consequences of the problem and the inadequacy of all the ideas I have seen so far.
Title: Things that make you go hmmm , , ,
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 22, 2015, 08:08:10 PM
https://www.facebook.com/supporttonyabbott/photos/a.543213439116244.1073741829.539741976130057/757523487685237/?type=3
Title: Re: Things that make you go hmmm , , ,
Post by: G M on September 23, 2015, 08:00:49 AM
https://www.facebook.com/supporttonyabbott/photos/a.543213439116244.1073741829.539741976130057/757523487685237/?type=3

What is the difference between the vast majority of peaceful muslims and bigfoot?

There are people who claim to have seen bigfoot.
Title: Wesbury: TARP created Trump
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 24, 2015, 06:52:59 PM
Back in 2008, rather than fix mark-to-market accounting, Treasury Secretary Hank Paulsen, Federal Reserve Board Chair Ben Bernanke, and other members of the financial market crisis team, chose to use a government-funded bazooka. A $700 billion bank bailout named The Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP.

President Bush, who authorized this approach, later explained it by saying he “abandoned free market principles to save the free market.” That statement makes no sense. Either you believe in free markets, or you don’t. Violating a free market means it’s not free. More truthfully, the Bush team abandoned free markets because it was the politically expedient thing to do.

But, by doing this, Republican leadership undermined a sacrosanct belief of conservatism – markets are self-healing and government intervention creates unintended consequences. Abandoning this philosophy left voters literally adrift. Politics is just politics. The GOP ship has no anchor or rudder. Why vote for a philosophy if those who claim to support it do so only when it is convenient? The result: Donald Trump.

The subprime bubble was government failure, not free market failure. We knew back then, and we have the data now to prove that government had created the housing bubble. The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) forced Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to buy subprime loans. To fulfill government mandates, Fannie and Freddie “pushed” banks to make loans to low and moderate income families. This required accepting lower credit scores and smaller down-payments. And that’s exactly what the private sector did; fill government orders.

Then, when these loans inevitably started to go bad, mark-to-market accounting forced banks to write down assets that were still viable, to illiquid, virtually non-existent market prices. On paper, this destroyed private bank capital, forcing them into the arms of the government. Hank Paulsen knew this, but refused to change the rule. Instead, he used massive government intervention and justified it by saying the market would fail without it. He didn’t believe in free markets.

What no one talks about is the fact that the S&P 500 fell an additional 40% after TARP was passed. The $700 billion didn’t save the banks or the economy. In fact, the $700 billion was sucked up by mark-to-market losses, which would have continued indefinitely without a change in rules. Thank the Lord that this happened in March 2009 when Congress forced the Accounting Board to fix it. That’s when the market and the economy bottomed, not when government flooded the system with money.
Nonetheless, the philosophical damage was done. Government grew, TARP was used to justify passage of Dodd-Frank financial regulation. But most importantly, it created a narrative that the private sector, and fat cat bankers, needed a government bailout. This was a huge political mistake that the GOP has yet to recover from.

The GOP created a “mosh pit” of beliefs that elevates personal desires, inconsistent thinking, an interventionist government, a mistrust of private institutions, fear of our own neighbors, and celebrity above consistent philosophy and trust in our fellow man. And they have governed like that ever since, refusing to use the power of the purse to stop Obamacare (even though they said that the healthcare law would destroy America) and refusing to use scandal at the VA to show how bad government run healthcare really is. Ending one-half the Sequester, and claiming it was conservative to do so, was also nonsense. Don’t misunderstand, no one is going into the voting booth with TARP, itself, on their mind. What they know is that the GOP is just another political party who abandons philosophy for expediency.

And this has far reaching effects. If the GOP doesn’t trust banks, why is President Obama wrong when he says we shouldn’t trust private health insurers or power plants?
If the GOP can’t stand up and defend free markets and its supposed core principles, how can it ever stand up to political arguments from the left?

Unfortunately, this argument will fall on deaf ears to many because it seems so out of sync with the narrative that politicians of both sides want you to believe. The GOP will not admit it made a mistake with TARP, neither will those who supported it, like The Wall Street Journal Editorial Page. And the Democrats believe in big government and evil corporations, so they love this, just like they loved the Great Depression – Happy Days Are Here Again!

In the meantime, the establishment GOP, when it had complete control of government, grew the government. And, now, that it controls the Senate and the House, but does not have a super majority, it says, well, we need to play along so we can get a GOP president in the White House. Then they will cut the size of government. In other words, they have no real principles except a desire for power.

What they do have is lots of lung power for blasting Donald Trump. But isn’t it interesting that they say he isn’t a real conservative? Neither are they. I’m old enough to know a real conservative when I see one, and the current leadership is not conservative.

They are right that Donald Trump has no true guiding philosophical principles, at least none that are visible. “Making good deals” is not a principle, and it’s not even a strategy, it’s a tactic. On the Democrat side, Bernie Sanders is a socialist who doesn’t trust the private sector. Senator Sanders is attracting crowds because of his principles, winning political points when he claims the GOP only cares about bailing out fat cats. He has a point. Donald Trump is attracting crowds with tough talk even if it’s incoherent from a philosophical point of view, because the GOP and the President aren’t tough.

Neither candidate can “fix” the economy, not with their current proposals. But, voters don’t have a clear vision of what the US economy needs to be fixed, because the GOP pulled up the philosophical anchor. So, the next time the GOP claims Donald Trump isn’t reflective of conservative values, they ought to look in the mirror. They created him. The only way out is for Paul Ryan, George Bush, The Wall Street Journal Editorial Page, Hank Paulson and every other GOP member that supported TARP to admit it was a mistake.

The way to beat Donald Trump is to attack the Establishment GOP, not cozy up to it. Even John Kasich seems to understand this. Trump is the result of a vacuum in principled leadership. A rudderless ship, or a ship with no anchor in a storm, creates fear. True leadership has an anchor, a rudder. It’s time to elect a real conservative as president. Someone who can lead the American people back to a consistency of thought that supports free markets and fights against government growth. A true conservative GOP candidate will run against the establishment, pointing out its failure to hold any real philosophical ground. That will be the winning strategy come November 2016.

Brian S. Wesbury, Chief Economist
Click here for PDF version

Title: Well this Ought to Make . . .
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on September 30, 2015, 07:09:35 PM
. . . feminist heads explode:

http://captaincapitalism.blogspot.com/2015/09/blame-women-disproportionately-for.html
Title: Mark Levin Strikes Again
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 04, 2015, 07:31:07 PM
Mark Levin Strikes Again
By DICK MORRIS
Published on DickMorris.com on October 4, 2015
Mark Levin's new book, Plunder and Deceit, takes aim at the familiar catalog of destructive Obama Administration policies but with a new twist: He focuses, specifically, on how they harm children and the next generation.

It's quite a catalog beginning with how Common Core compromises educational integrity and quality and proceeds to show how the student loan industry keeps professors overpaid and underworked while it jails our young in a modern debtor's prison of obligations.  He explains how ObamaCare requires the young to pay higher insurance premiums that they should and how Social Security represents a massive robbery of our children to support us in our old age.  Levin chronicles how a host of public services are now being run to fund salaries and pensions of the workers who provide them, not to meet the needs of their intended recipients.  Nowhere is this pattern more blatant than in education where he teachers unions have come to epitomize the famous saying of their founder Albert Shanker who said "when school children start paying union dues, that's when I'll start representing the interests of children."
 
Ultimately, ObamaCare will squeeze state and local budgets as they struggle to pay for the vast expansion of Medicaid.  By 2020, when the federal subsidies dial back and end, the burden of paying the local share of Medicaid will absorb all state revenues that might have been earmarked for education.  Forget about any teacher pay raises in the future.  The money all went to Medicaid.  We are paying for the health costs of America's poor (but not old) off the backs of our children's education.

But most interesting is the basic question Levin asks: Why are we so protective of our children as parents and so reckless in endangering them as citizens, voters, and taxpayers?  On the one hand, we overprotect our young and on the other, our fiscal policies are the equivalent of telling them to go play in the middle of traffic.

His question is capitalism on its head.  In our economy, we use personal selfish desires to power an economy that benefits us all.  But in this case, we use selfish public policies to screw our own children.

Leave it to Mark Levin to ask why.
Title: Some Cultures ARE Superior to Others...
Post by: objectivist1 on October 06, 2015, 11:53:08 AM
CHARLATANS AND SHEEP: PART III

The profound impact of culture.

October 6, 2015  Thomas Sowell   

The prevailing social dogma of our time — that economic and other disparities among groups are strange, if not sinister — has set off bitter disputes between those who blame genetic differences and those who blame discrimination.

Both sides ignore the possibility that groups themselves may differ in their orientations, their priorities and in what they are prepared to sacrifice for the sake of other things.

Back in the early 19th century, an official of the Russian Empire reported that even the poorest Jews saw to it that their daughters could read, and their homes had at least ten books. This was at a time when the vast majority of the population of the Russian Empire were illiterate.

During that same era, Thomas Jefferson complained that there was not a single bookstore where he lived. In Frederick Law Olmsted's travels through the antebellum South, he noted that even plantation owners seldom had many books.

But in mid-18th century Scotland, even people of modest means had books, and those too poor to buy them could rent books from lending libraries, which were common throughout Scottish towns.

There is no economic determinism. People choose what to spend their money on, and what to spend their time on. Cultures differ.

On a personal note, as a child nearly nine years old, I was one of the many blacks who migrated from the South to Harlem in the 1930s.

Although New York had public libraries, elite public high schools and free colleges of high quality, I had no idea what a public library was, or what an elite high school was, and the thought of going to college never crossed my mind.

Jewish immigrants who arrived in New York, generations before me, seized upon the opportunities provided by public libraries and later their children flooded into the elite public high schools and free city colleges. This was consistent with the values of their centuries-old culture.

For most of the black kids of my generation, those things might as well not have existed, because nothing in their culture would have pointed them toward such things.

There was no reason to believe that I would have been any different from the rest, except for the fact that members of my family, who had very little education themselves, wanted me to get the education that they never had a chance to get.

They had no more idea of the role of public libraries and elite quality high schools and colleges than I did.

But they knew a boy a little older than I was, who came from a better educated family, and they decided that he was somebody I should meet and who could serve as a guide to me on things they knew nothing about.

His name was Eddie Mapp, and I can still recall how he took me to a public library, and how patiently he tried to explain to me what a public library was, and why I should get a library card. He opened a door for me into a wider world. But most other black kids in Harlem at that time had no one to do that for them.

Nor did kids from various other ethnic groups in New York have someone to open doors to a wider world for them. It didn't matter how smart they were or whether opportunities were available for them, if they knew nothing about them.

An internationally renowned scholar of Irish American ancestry once said in a social gathering that, when he was a young man of college age, he had no plans to go to college, until someone else who recognized his ability urged him to do so. There was no reason to expect all groups to follow in the footsteps of the Jews.

In my later years, two middle-class couples I knew took it upon themselves to each take a young relative from the ghetto into their home and, at considerable cost in time and money, try to provide them with a good education.

One of these youngsters had an IQ two standard deviations above the mean. But both of them eventually returned to the ghetto life from which they came. It wasn't genetics and it wasn't discrimination.

The youngster with an IQ two standard deviations above the mean will probably never achieve what a Jewish or Asian youngster with an IQ only one standard deviation above the mean achieves.

Those who are celebrating the ghetto culture might consider what the cost is to those being raised in that culture. And they might reconsider what they are hearing from charlatans parading statistical disparities.



Title: What Police Patrol Patterns Tell You
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on October 08, 2015, 09:43:59 AM
Don't see much empiric data in this piece, but it does reflect some of my observations, particularly when I have to contend with trips to DC or Baltimore. Note how the War on Drugs is the gift that keep on giving:

http://www.singledudetravel.com/2015/10/the-single-dudes-guide-to-survival-volume-3/
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ppulatie on October 08, 2015, 10:18:12 AM
BBG, interesting article.

Some observations from my own city....and also a comment on DC.

My nephew is in a high position with Metro DC police. They have a problem where in the really black and poor areas, crime is extensive. When murders occur, the people in the area will not cooperate with the police to solve the crime. It reached such a point that the cops told the residents that when major crimes occurred, they would come in and do a basic investigation but the people were otherwise on their own. They also told them that the crimes must stay in that area and if the perps committed crimes in other parts of the city, then the cops would come in and all hell would break out.

Today, DC has a huge problem with the Top Cops. They have created such an adversarial relationship with the beat cops and that they have "restricted" real enforcement standards to such a degree, crime has worsened even more. It is so bad that cops are leaving with just a handful of years left to retirement.

Now, to my city.......with the housing downturn, we suffered greatly. Cops leaving the force were not replaced, so for a city of 100k, we were down to 85 sworn officers, when 120 plus were authorized. Now, my comments about this in blue....

Police Patrol Style (from best to worse)

Beat cops on foot, evidence of commitment of the department to send immediate backup and of community support.
There are not enough cops to put them on foot. Plus in the dangerous areas, beat cops are unable to respond quickly.

Beat cops parked, evidence of community support, but lack of faith in backup.
This is an absurd conclusion. Beat cops parked are likely doing paperwork, or taking a short break. Often they are parked in staging areas waiting for additional cops so as to respond together to an incident. Smart cops do not respond alone.

Single officer patrolling in a cruiser, indication that policing patterns revolve around intelligence gathering, suggestive of ongoing crime.
 Absurd again. They patrol in cars for quick response to incidents.

Single officers patrolling with flashers lit up, which is an attempt to seem more committed than they are in the face of spiraling crime.
Patrol with flashers lit? I haven't seen that.

Paired officers patrolling in the same cruiser for defensive purposes, which mean it has gotten so bad that the cops could care less about you, and have been briefed to protect themselves first and foremost.
 Another absurd comment. Yes, there is concern for themselves, but this is not about not caring for the people they protect. This is about responding to incidents with enough "force" to ensure both safety and ability to solve the problem, especially domestic incident.

No visible police coverage, indicating that the police are busy elsewhere, and that this is known by opportunistic criminals, which would be 100% of the criminal population. An alternative, and even more ominous reading of this, is that the police are afraid to enter this area!
Agree with the first part. Cops are busy elsewhere.  Second argument........b.s.

In my city, crime was rampant caused by one part of the city. 3% of the population lived in one area (almost projects type) and caused over 65% of the crime. When major incidents occurred, due to lack of staffing, all units in the city would respond. Then, the next city over would cover other priority 2 and 3 calls. Priority 1 calls were put off until units couls respond, often taking a couple of hours or more. This continued for several years.

In 2014, the cops changed their practice with new hires coming on. The bad area now found cops patrolling all the time, no matter what other incidents were occurring. They would pull over anything suspicious and engaged in very aggressive profiling. Since then, crime and murders are down considerably because the bad elements were taken off the streets due to increased manpower.

Everything is situational....
Title: Not bad!
Post by: ccp on October 09, 2015, 12:20:43 PM
She is quite attractive:    :-D

https://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images;_ylt=A0LEVy5iEhhWDfMAKsNXNyoA;_ylu=X3oDMTByMjB0aG5zBGNvbG8DYmYxBHBvcwMxBHZ0aWQDBHNlYwNzYw--?p=Renee+Ellmers&fr=yfp-t-901

True or not how dare any Dem use this as fodder after what they did to this country with Clinton.  

A Wikipedia insert  from a DHS IP address is a big deal however.
Likewise,  Secret Service agents looking up Chafitz file.  They must all be fired. All of them except the reported few who had legitimate reasons to at his file.
These people work for us not the other way around.

Somebody has to clean up our government.   What a darn mess.  The crook at the Copyright Office (now head of a department there - as Mark Levin says, "that's right I said it!") seems like the tip of the iceberg so to speak. 
Title: Re: Not bad!
Post by: G M on October 09, 2015, 09:16:17 PM
She is quite attractive:    :-D

https://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images;_ylt=A0LEVy5iEhhWDfMAKsNXNyoA;_ylu=X3oDMTByMjB0aG5zBGNvbG8DYmYxBHBvcwMxBHZ0aWQDBHNlYwNzYw--?p=Renee+Ellmers&fr=yfp-t-901

True or not how dare any Dem use this as fodder after what they did to this country with Clinton.  

A Wikipedia insert  from a DHS IP address is a big deal however.
Likewise,  Secret Service agents looking up Chafitz file.  They must all be fired. All of them except the reported few who had legitimate reasons to at his file.
These people work for us not the other way around.

Somebody has to clean up our government.   What a darn mess.  The crook at the Copyright Office (now head of a department there - as Mark Levin says, "that's right I said it!") seems like the tip of the iceberg so to speak. 

The federal government politicized and corrupt like Chicago. Who could had seen this coming?
Title: Firing Federal empolyees
Post by: ccp on October 10, 2015, 07:18:43 AM
I was trying to find information on this.  IN 2009 over 6,000+ were fired.  In 2013 9000+ mostly from the VA despite the rise of the Federal work force during the Obama years.

Why were so many fired in '09?   Any information on this.  I wonder if this was to pack the workforce with leftist political people:

****Firing Federal Employees Isn’t Easy, But It Can Be Done
By Kellie Lunney
May 29, 2014

Members of Congress are working overtime these days churning out, or clambering onto, legislation that would make it easier for the Veterans Affairs Department to fire senior executives. The House on May 21 passed such a bill, and there’s more to come on that subject from both sides of the Capitol and both parties. The mismanagement at VA facilities regarding patient care and the alleged cover-up in Phoenix of medical appointment scheduling delays to help top managers secure bonuses and meet performance goals for the department has consumed Washington during the last month.

Among the many questions the controversy has raised, one seems to be at the heart of the debate: Why isn’t it easier to fire career civil servants?

As is the case with most processes in the federal government, firing a career employee is not simple. There is a good reason why it isn’t so easy, or as commonplace, as it is in the private sector: There are laws protecting career civil servants from being dismissed without cause or for politically-motivated reasons. Certainly there’s a case to be made that the federal firing process (which does exist) could, and probably should, be improved. But making it too easy seriously threatens the due process long afforded to federal workers, significantly increases the risk of politically-motivated sackings, and could have adverse effects on the recruitment and retention of talented federal employees.

The federal workforce is made up of about 2.1 million employees. In fiscal 2013, only 9,559 employees were terminated or removed for discipline or performance, according to Office of Personnel Management statistics. That’s less than 1 percent of the total workforce. So, which Cabinet-level department fired the most employees (2,247) in fiscal 2013 for discipline or performance? The Veterans Affairs Department. VA is one of the largest federal agencies, but it’s not the biggest.

In our July 2012 magazine, we looked at the federal firing process for most career employees to see how it works, and why it’s underused, in Wielding the Ax. The process for senior executives is a little bit different, but they too are afforded due process under the system.

Title: Gowdy on the floor of the House
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 10, 2015, 09:01:01 AM
https://www.facebook.com/OCEANSIDEGANGBUSTER/videos/570895389687387/
Title: Prager: The selfishness of socialism
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 15, 2015, 06:50:54 AM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cx_GDMsg54
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ppulatie on October 16, 2015, 12:19:04 PM
I am sitting on the epub of Bill O'Reilly's book "Killing Reagan". I have not started yet, but here is an interesting article about the book.Apparently the book is thinly sources and full of factual errors. Four authors who have written extensively about Reagan combine to rip the book in this article. One author is Stephen Hayward.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/10/16/what-bill-oreillys-new-book-on-ronald-reagan-gets-wrong-about-ronald-reagan/ (https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/10/16/what-bill-oreillys-new-book-on-ronald-reagan-gets-wrong-about-ronald-reagan/)

After reading BOR other "Killing" books, it does not surprise me that this book would be filled with errors as well...
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: G M on October 16, 2015, 12:26:48 PM
I am sitting on the epub of Bill O'Reilly's book "Killing Reagan". I have not started yet, but here is an interesting article about the book.Apparently the book is thinly sources and full of factual errors. Four authors who have written extensively about Reagan combine to rip the book in this article. One author is Stephen Hayward.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/10/16/what-bill-oreillys-new-book-on-ronald-reagan-gets-wrong-about-ronald-reagan/ (https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/10/16/what-bill-oreillys-new-book-on-ronald-reagan-gets-wrong-about-ronald-reagan/)

After reading BOR other "Killing" books, it does not surprise me that this book would be filled with errors as well...

I liked him better when he was on the Mary Tyler Moore show.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: DougMacG on October 16, 2015, 01:54:36 PM
I am sitting on the epub of Bill O'Reilly's book "Killing Reagan". I have not started yet, but here is an interesting article about the book.Apparently the book is thinly sources and full of factual errors. Four authors who have written extensively about Reagan combine to rip the book in this article. One author is Stephen Hayward.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/10/16/what-bill-oreillys-new-book-on-ronald-reagan-gets-wrong-about-ronald-reagan/ (https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/10/16/what-bill-oreillys-new-book-on-ronald-reagan-gets-wrong-about-ronald-reagan/)

After reading BOR other "Killing" books, it does not surprise me that this book would be filled with errors as well...

May I suggest the candidates and the electorate read Steve Hayward's books on Reagan instead of O'Reilly's fantasies.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Age-Reagan-Conservative-Counterrevolution/dp/1400053587
http://www.amazon.com/Steven-F.-Hayward/e/B000APZKLO
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ppulatie on October 17, 2015, 07:56:46 AM
What? No Peggy Noonan book?   :evil:
Title: Unintelligence Agencies
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on October 18, 2015, 08:30:27 AM
This piece argues that, despite all its myriad civil intrusions, American intelligence agencies are unwieldy behemoths that rarely produce actionable intelligence. Last two paras follow:

My own suspicion: you could get rid of most of the 17 agencies and outfits in the U.S. Intelligence Community and dump just about all the secret and classified information that is the heart and soul of the national security state. Then you could let a small group of independently minded analysts and critics loose on open-source material, and you would be far more likely to get intelligent, actionable, inventive analyses of our global situation, our wars, and our beleaguered path into the future.

The evidence, after all, is largely in. In these years, for what now must be approaching three-quarters of a trillion dollars, the national security state and the military seem to have created an un-intelligence system. Welcome to the fog of everything.


http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-fog-of-intelligence/
Title: The Art of Not Giving a Fornication
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 28, 2015, 11:52:38 AM
Warning:  F-bombs abound

http://markmanson.net/not-giving-a-fuck
Title: Re: The Art of Not Giving a Fornication
Post by: G M on October 28, 2015, 11:59:04 AM
Warning:  F-bombs abound

http://markmanson.net/not-giving-a-fuck

I like it!
Title: How Collectivism Gains Ground...
Post by: objectivist1 on November 07, 2015, 08:24:54 AM
The Tools Collectivists Use To Gain Power

Wednesday, 04 November 2015    Brandon Smith


While many divisions within our society are arbitrary or engineered, there is one division that represents perhaps the most pervasive and important conflict of our time; the division between collectivists and individualists.

Now, people who do not understand the nature of collectivism will often argue that individualism and collectivism are not mutually exclusive because individuals require groups in order to survive and thrive. However, a “group” is not necessarily a collective.

For some reason the core fundamental of collectivism – the use of psychological coercion or physical force to compel participation – goes right over the heads of many skeptics. A group does not have to be collectivist. Any group can and should be voluntary. Collectivism is NOT voluntary. Therefore, collectivism and individualism are indeed mutually exclusive. Collectivists and individualists cannot exist in the same space at the same time without eventually coming into conflict. There is simply no way around it.

From the position of the liberty minded (or the average Libertarian), collectivism is by far the inferior of the two philosophies. Collectivists often boast of the social and economic “harmonization” collectivism creates, as well as the mobilization of labor to “streamline progress.” The reality is that artificially rigged harmony is no harmony at all. If people are forced to homogenize and get along through fear, then peace has not truly been accomplished.

Human beings must come to their own conclusions on cooperation and tolerance in their own time. They cannot be manipulated and shoehorned into a “utopian” framework. Problems will result, like genocide, which tends to erupt during almost every attempt at collectivist utopianism.

Economic harmonization is even less practical, with government force inevitably used to confiscate resources from one group to give to another group, essentially punishing success or frugality. This creates an environment in which achievement becomes less desirable. When people do not have individual incentive to pursue achievement, they see personal effort as wasted. Innovation and entrepreneurship fall by the wayside, and society as a whole begins to diminish in prosperity. Without individual accomplishments and ingenuity, the group is nothing but a hollow mindless ant hill.

Another argument which usually arises is that individualism leads to “selfishness” and the dominance of wealth devouring machines like corporations. I would remind collectivists that corporations exist only through the legal framework and protections of corporate personhood created by governments, and without government protections and favor, corporations could not exist. It is by collectivism, not individualism, that corporatocracy thrives.

At the same time, collectivists consistently blame individualist "free markets" for the numerous ailments of nations.  Yet another misrepresentation considering America has not had true free markets in well over a century, and most other nations have never had true free markets in their history.  Feudalism and its child Socialism have always been present to plague mankind.

There are no merits to collectivism that are not accomplished with greater success by individualism and voluntary community. In fact, collectivism only serves to enrich and empower a select few elites while destroying the future potential of all other individuals.

Given the disturbing nature of collectivism, one would think that attempts at collectivist societies would be a rarity, shunned by most people as akin to inviting cancer into the body. Unfortunately, cultures based on individualism are the minority in history.

The average collectivist is not usually much of a beneficiary of collectivism. We call these people “useful idiots” or “sheeple” who unknowingly serve the darker machinations of elitists while under the delusion that they are changing society for the better. The reason useful idiots participate in collectivism are many, but I have found that across the spectrum these people tend to be weak willed, weak minded, and by extension, possess a rabid desire for control over others.

It is perhaps no coincidence that “intellectuals” (self proclaimed) tend to end up at the forefront of modern efforts for collectivism. While the poor and destitute are often exploited by collectivism as a mob to be wielded like a battering ram, it is the soft noodle-bodied and fearful academia that acts as middle management in the collectivist franchise. It is they that desire the power to impose their “superior” ideologies on others, and since they are too weak to accomplish anything on their own, they require the cover and momentum of collectivist movements to give them the totalitarian fix they so crave. In other words, they believe in humanitarianism by totalitarianism.

Individualism is under constant and imminent threat as the collectivist obsession with control grows. The ultimate end game of collectivists is to derive submission from individuals, to corner people into handing over their individualism willingly.  It is not enough for them to merely apply force, the greatest power is in the power of consent.  Here are the most common tools used by collectivists to obtain power and manufacture consent from the masses.

The Illusion Of Consensus

Collectivists rely greatly on the force of a well-aimed mob to convince the general public they have the consensus position; that they are in the majority. Appearing to be in the majority is the single most important goal of a collectivist movement, even if they are in reality a small minority. The anonymity of web activism gives the force of the mob a new potency. No more than a dozen collectivists working in tandem can wreak havoc in multiple web forums or harass numerous individualist publications while giving casual readers the impression that their ideology is “everywhere.”

The key here is that collectivists understand that the average person does not want to be seen as too contrary to the majority. They understand that the majority view matters to the public, even if the majority view is utterly wrong. If collectivists can convince enough people that their ideology is the majority view, they know that many people will blindly adopt that ideology as their own in order to fit in. The lie of consensus then becomes a self perpetuating prophecy. This problem will remain forever a danger as long as people continue to care at all about the majority view.

The Destruction Of Core Institutions

Those institutions people consider “core institutions” are sometimes vital, and sometimes not. That said, it is the openly admitted objective of collectivists through socialist-style movements to destroy core institutions so that there is no competition to their new system. A collectivist society cannot allow citizens to have any loyalties beyond their loyalty to the group or the state.

So, individual liberties must be degraded or removed, as per the constant reinterpretation of the Constitution as a “living document.”  Religious institutions must be painted as shameful affairs for stupid barbaric cave-people. And, the family unit must be broken apart. This is done through economic depravity so pronounced that families never see each other, through state influence over children through public schooling, and through identity politics and propaganda which create sexual and racial conflicts out of thin air.

Dominating Discussion

This coincides with the idea of artificial consensus, but it goes beyond the use of the mob. In our daily lives we are now bombarded with collectivist messages — in mainstream news, in television shows, in movies, through web media and print media. The money behind these outlets belongs to a very small and select group of people, but through them the collectivist worldview is injected into every corner of our society. I would call this propaganda by attrition; an indirect but steady insertion of collectivism creating an atmosphere in which the ideology becomes commonplace even though it is being promoted by a limited number of people.

Exploiting The Youth

When we are young, most of us spend a great deal of time and energy working to be taken seriously. The question is, should we be taken seriously?

In my view and the view of the liberty minded, it really depends on the person’s actions, experience, efforts and accomplishments. Most younger people have little to no experience in life and haven’t had the time to accomplish much. They are still learning how to function in the world, and what kind of goals they want to pursue (if they ever pursue any goals). Because of this, it is hard for those of us who have gone through considerable struggles in life and reached a certain level of achievement to take them seriously when they decide to stroll into a room and pontificate on their moral and philosophical superiority. It makes me want to ask; what the hell have you ever accomplished?

This is not to say that there are not ingenious young people out there, or ignorant and lazy older folks. There are. But collectivist movements seek to exploit younger generations exactly because of their general lack of experience and naivety, as well as their feelings of entitlement when it comes to respect.

Collectivism almost always utilizes a theory called “futurism” in order to appeal to the young. The theory, which was a leading philosophy behind the rise of fascism, proclaims that all new ideas are superior in their social usefulness and all old ideas and beliefs should be abandoned like so much dead skin. According to futurism, those who cling to old ideas and principles are an obstacle to the progress of society as a whole.

The funny thing is, the ideas usually expounded by collectivists are as old as time — elitism, feudalism, totalitarianism, etc. None of these methodologies are “new” by any stretch of the imagination, but collectivists repackage them as if they are some grand new secret to Shangri-La. Younger adherents of collectivism latch onto futurism almost immediately. For, if all new ideas are superior, and all old ideas are barbaric, and younger people are the purveyors and consumers of everything new, then this means that it is the youngest generations that are the wisest, and the village elders that are naïve. By default, the young become the village elders without them ever having to struggle, make sacrifices, learn hard lessons, suffer loss, rise to challenges, or accomplish anything.

The enticing nature of this sudden groundswell of cultural respect is simply far too much for the average person college age or younger to ignore. Collectivism gives the young what they think they want, then uses them as tools for greater conquests.

Forcing Society To Accept The Lowest Common Denominator

Collectivism requires the homogenization of society, to the point that individualism is frowned upon and success is treated as negligible. Whether it is public schools lowering standards to the point that students with little or no reading comprehension graduate, or businesses being forced to lower standards in the name of “diversity” while rejecting employees with superior skill sets because they do not belong to a designated victim group, or government institutions like the military lowering physical standards to accommodate far weaker candidates in the name of “gender parity” while putting every soldier’s life at risk in the process, we are constantly being asked to accommodate the lowest common denominator instead of reaching for the highest level of excellence.

This makes the concept of success a bit of a joke. For “success” within such a system is easy as long as one follows the rules; excelling as an individual is not a factor. And by success I mean being allowed to survive, because that is the best you are going to get in a collectivist structure. The only way to fail is to not follow the rules, rules which may be arbitrary or idiotic at their core. Individualists are immediately punished for thinking or acting outside the box, when this is exactly the kind of behavior that should be encouraged. A society built on the lowest common denominator is a society destined for collapse. Individuals are systematically weeded out in the name of homogenization and all of their potential achievements and innovations disappear with them.

The nightmare of collectivism is the defining battle of our age. It is in this era that we will decide whether or not individual liberty and freedom of thought are more important than the illusory security and “harmony” of the collective.

I, for one, long to see a future in which individual enterprise is allowed to thrive and voluntary participation is the root principle on which our culture functions; a future in which state power is reduced to zero, or near zero, and government force is no longer an acceptable means by which one group can seek to control another group. I may not see this world in my lifetime, but the liberty-minded can make it possible for newer generations by avidly defending ourselves against collectivism today. As pointed out in the beginning, collectivism and individualism cannot coexist; confrontation is inevitable. Recognizing this, and preparing for it, is our duty as free human beings.
Title: Dershowitz: Selective outrage
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 13, 2015, 12:29:25 AM
http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/6870/selective-outrage-on-campus
Title: Fighting Back Against Tyranny...
Post by: objectivist1 on November 13, 2015, 05:39:13 AM
Methods For Fighting Back Against Collectivist Tyranny

Wednesday, 11 November 2015   Brandon Smith


In any examination of historical precedence, it is easy to see that the sheer number of collectivist and tyrannical systems have far outweighed any experiments in individual liberty. I have explored the reasons for this in numerous articles, including recent pieces such as “How To Stamp Out Cultural Marxism In A Single Generation” and “The Tools Collectivists Use To Gain Power.” To summarize, there is a driving desire among weaker-minded people to seek control over other people in the name of arbitrary standards of safety as well as arbitrary standards of “civil” conformity. While such people proclaim publicly that they do what they do for the “greater good,” in reality they seek only to satiate a private lust for power.

In the darkest corners of their souls, many people have personal aspirations to attain godhood in their own little worlds. And if they cannot achieve such godhood outright on their own, then they will join a mob with similar aspirations so that they can at least feel omnipotent through vicarious tyranny.

This is why collectivism and individualism are mutually exclusive. A collectivist uses force or manipulation to compel the masses to accept a society that follows his personal ideology. An individualist adheres only to the tenets of natural law and the non-aggression principle. He believes force is justified only when the personal liberties of an individual are threatened by others. And he demands that if he participates in any society, it be voluntary. Collectivism is society through coercion. Individualism promotes society through voluntary cooperation. The two philosophies cannot coexist.

I'll say it again because there are some people out there with severe reading comprehension issues; the definition of collectivism requires the prioritization of the group over the rights of the individual.  Collectivism by its very nature denies or destroys individualism and individual choice in this prioritization.  Collectivism therefore requires the engineered organization of individuals predicated by COERCION, or force.  Period.  If a group organizes voluntarily, then it is NOT collectivist.  If a group is organized through force and manipulation, then it IS collectivist. Period.  Bananas are yellow.  Oranges are orange.  The sky is blue.  Two plus two equals four.  And, collectivism compels participation by force, while voluntary community does not.

There is no rational debate to be made against this clear dichotomy.  It is truly amazing how some folks cannot seem to grasp the very obvious difference between collectivism and voluntary community; the same people that will likely still attempt to argue that collectivism and individualism are "not mutually exclusive" after reading this very article.

I certainly would never make the claim that most collectivists are intelligent...

The collectivist threat is not merely due to environmental factors alone. As the psychologist Carl Jung outlined in his collected papers titled “The Undiscovered Self,” at any given point in history at least 10% of the human population has inherent (but often latent) psychopathic tendencies. Less than 1% of these people will actually act out their full psychopathy under stable social conditions. However, in times of great distress or political and economic upheaval, the psychopathic 10% are given a kind of playground in which to let the devil out; Jung called this the “collective shadow.”

As I have explained in the past, these are the “useful idiots” within any society. They are the reason why there will never be a time now or in the future in which collectivist oppression will not be a potential threat, and why individualists will have to remain forever on guard. That said, they are only a part of the bigger problem. In almost every instance of mass tragedy or despotic government, an elitist minority pulls the strings of the useful idiots, aiming them like a shotgun at individualists in order to clear a path for total centralization. The elites are another horror altogether.

These are the men and women who EMBRACE their psychopathy. It is not latent or subconscious; it is a fully integrated and accepted part of their psychological life. They have found that psychopathy can be an effective tool for gaining power and influence when average people around them are less vigilant or less confrontational due to fear or apathy. And contrary to popular belief, psychopaths CONSTANTLY organize into effective working groups, some of them vast and global in scope, as long as there is the promise of mutual benefit involved.

This is not to say that they organize around “gain” alone. Elitists have their own pervasive ideology and their own rationalizations for seeking control of others.

They see themselves as “philosopher kings” as described in Plato’s 'Republic,' exemplary and “special” people who are born with the inherent genetic capacity to rule over the masses with the utmost clarity. They believe they know what is best not only for you, but for the human experiment in total. Their goal is to construct a sociopolitical apparatus that will allow them to have complete overreaching influence over every aspect of every individual life, up to and including the erasure of that life if they think it serves their ends.

"...You would be forcibly fed, clothed, lodged, taught, and employed whether you like it or not. If it were discovered that you had not character and industry enough to be worth all this trouble, you might possibly be executed in a kindly manner…” — George Bernard Shaw, Fabian socialist, from 'The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism'

"My conclusion is that a scientific society can be stable given certain conditions. The first of these is a single government of the whole world, possessing a monopoly of armed force and therefore able to enforce peace. The second condition is a general diffusion of prosperity, so that there is no occasion for envy of one part of the world by another. The third condition (which supposes the second fulfilled) is a low birth rate everywhere, so that the population of the world becomes stationary, or nearly so. The fourth condition is the provision for individual initiative both in work and in play, and the greatest diffusion of power compatible with maintaining the necessary political and economic framework.” — Bertrand Russell, member of the Fabian Society, from 'The Impact Of Science On Society'(Note: Russell believed that individuals should be given at least the illusion of choice within minor aspects of society in order to maintain their willing participation.)

"The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. … t remains a fact that in almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons… It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind, who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world.” — Edward Bernays, father of modern propaganda, from 'Propaganda'

Elitists are rarely as open about their true intentions as the men quoted above. They often entice the public with fantastical promises if collectivist systems are supported, including: equality of wealth and prosperity; reduction of labor and increases in leisure time; incredible technological advances; universal education; universal healthcare; the end of nationalism, resulting in the end of war, resulting in infinite global peace; etc.

When they are not able to sell the public on a particular aspect of collectivism, they will create artificial divisions and artificial crises in order to engineer chaos. As per the Hegelian dialectic, when we are thoroughly tenderized by fear and disaster, the elites return to the scene with a “solution” to their original crime, a solution that usually involves more collectivism.

So how do individualists fight back against collectivism, elitists and the useful idiots they exploit? Here are some practical strategies that anyone can employ in his daily life.

Stop Participating In False Paradigms

Yes, in the everyday world there are leftists and right wingers, liberals and conservatives, Republicans and Democrats. People subscribe to particular ideologies and philosophies backed by fundamental differences in belief. These divisions between regular people are indeed real. However, it is important to realize that at the gatekeeper level in these systems, the leadership in both parties subscribe to the same goals. They are not divided. They are part of the elitist structure. And while their rhetoric differs cosmetically, in policy and in action they will always work to destroy individual liberty and promote collectivism, whether they claim to be on the right or the left.

This reality also applies to supposed conflicts between nations. If two nations appear to be at odds with each other, yet the leadership of each nation remains in league with the same international elitists (bankers, Fabians, globalists, etc.), then their conflict is a sham designed as theater for the masses.

Refuse to participate in false paradigms. Point out the inconsistencies of BOTH parties or sides and identify how each works against individualism and toward collectivism. Do not affiliate with any group or institution that has a demonstrated history of antagonism towards individual freedom or that partners with known collectivist (globalist) organizations and frontmen. If you are going to fight for any side, make sure it truly represents liberty through its actions and associations.  Rhetoric is meaningless.

Decouple From Dependency On Corrupt Systems

As our economic situation becomes more and more dire, people are much more apt to become dependent on the system for survival, and this is an intentional result. I would not expect, for example, that the 94 million people in the U.S. who have been unemployed for so long they are no longer counted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics should refrain from government aid or cut themselves off from welfare measures and become immediately self-reliant. They should, however, consider working toward that goal over time; and so should everyone else.

This is not quite as impossible as it seems. Can you produce or repair items that act as survival necessities? Can you teach a necessary skill? If so, then you are already well on your way to independence. Once you have a necessary skill, trade is possible outside the controlled economic framework. The more individuals involved in an alternative economy, the more diversity of skill sets will be available and the more prosperous that voluntary community will become.

The ultimate achievement in my view would be similar in aspects to the American agrarian models of the past with the integration of helpful technology: completely voluntary communities in which free trade is the foundation; the existence of grid water and grid power is unnecessary; food production is local and ample rather than reliant on national or international freight systems and the artificial scarcity of corporate farming models; and security is provided by each individual for himself, as well as for the community, through voluntary neighborhood watches or militias.

All of this starts with each individual taking action to become a producer, rather than a wage slave or welfare slave.

Organize Locally With People Of Like Mind

Again, organizing voluntarily is counter to collectivism.  Collectivist systems cannot be defeated unless you are willing to establish a competing model that works better while maintaining freedom. This is not hard to do, considering collectivist models are failure-driven machines that devour people and use them as fuel to move society as a whole towards a “greater good” which is neither great nor good.

As outlined above, independent localism is the answer. It is a voluntary structure that encourages self-reliance and preparedness, while making production and innovation the mainstays of a healthy society. It rewards personal success and achievement, rather than punishing it. And, it helps a larger percentage of wealth to keep cycling locally, rather than being siphoned out of communities by governments or government-chartered and protected corporations.

Localism always starts small, with families, friends and neighbors. But as your organization continues to make life better for those involved, it will inevitably attract more participants.  The redundancy of localized economies would also protect people from economic collapse.  In fact, without the forced interdependency of centralized collectivist economic models, large scale financial crises would probably become a thing of the past.

Educate Children Privately

I’ve been saying it a lot lately, and I’ll say it again: Public schooling as it stands today is an apparatus for brainwashing, nothing more. With the dismal world ranking of U.S. students in math, science and reading, I hardly see what service public education is actually performing in America. The only service public schools do seem to excel at is indoctrination, with children now being immersed in collectivist lessons through Common Core and being conditioned into pacifism and fear through insane zero-tolerance policies.

The only working solutions available for parents today are to decouple from the federally dominated public school system and place their children in a well-vetted private school or to home-school. Any sacrifice, financial or otherwise, is worth it to save American children from a vicious system of propaganda and conditioning that could conceivably suppress their individualism and warp them into collectivist monsters.

Arm And Train For Self-Defense

I think it should be pretty obvious that there is a simple reason behind the collectivist habit of attempting to disarm common people: Armed people are harder to manage or control.  If an armed population was not a threat to collectivists then they would not keep trying to disarm everyone. Therefore, if you are not armed and trained in self-defense, then you are not a threat to collectivists.

You can be the most brilliant of thinkers with pristine logic and truth on your side; but without the means and ability to destroy an attacker or tyrant, you are nothing in the grand scheme. Intellectual warriors are not really warriors. And as a writer, I will say in all honesty that the threat of the pen is not mightier than the threat of the sword.

Keep in mind, though, that it is not enough to merely purchase a firearm or shoot at the range. Team tactics and training are essential for free people, which is why they are so admonished by collectivist elements in our society. Train with friends and family or with your Community Preparedness Team, as I do through Oath Keepers; but learn tactical methodologies and how to fight with others. Present a viable danger to collectivists, or be subsumed by them.

Remove The Elitist Hierarchy

Eventually, the fight between individualism and collectivism will become physical rather than informational. There is no way around it. The more individuals begin to decouple from the corrupt system and construct their own alternative framework, the more violent collectivists will turn in response. The virtue of self-defense requires that tyrants be cut off from their means to project violence onto others.

While it is impossible to stop the inherent nature of psychopathy other than to participate in communities where psychopaths are not welcome or encouraged, there is the matter of organized elitism to deal with.

Any fight for freedom from collectivists will require the removal of command and control. This is the only way that humanity can be given breathing room to rebuild without remaining under constant preplanned threat. There are, in fact, many organizations that openly work toward collectivist oligarchy, from central banks (this means central bankers in ALL nations, not just in the West), to the Council On Foreign Relations, to Tavistock, to the Rand Corporation, to the International Monetary Fund or the Bank for International Settlements, to Bilderberg, to the Fabian Society, etc. These institutions need to be dismantled by any means necessary and the participants removed from positions of control. Make no mistake; it will take a war before such people give up the reins of power. This is the inevitable cost of individualism and the inevitable cost of freedom.



Title: Jonah goldberg in fine form
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 13, 2015, 02:25:08 PM
http://link.nationalreview.com/view/547fd5293b35d0210c8df7b93akdg.3par/315caa54
Title: Greg Gutfield
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 15, 2015, 09:11:32 PM
https://www.facebook.com/GregGutfeldShow/videos/1645010782434666/
Title: Baraq's cynical refugee ploy
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 18, 2015, 09:51:05 AM
http://www.the-american-interest.com/2015/11/17/president-obamas-cynical-refugee-ploy/
Title: Profli-gate: The Modern American Way of War
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 21, 2015, 05:09:17 PM

 
The American Way of War in the Twenty-First Century
Roads to Nowhere, Ghost Soldiers, and a $43 Million Gas Station in Afghanistan
by Tom Engelhardt, November 13, 2015
Print This | Share This
Originally posted at TomDispatch.
It’s a $cam!: The American Way of War in the Twenty-First Century
By Tom Engelhardt

Let’s begin with the $12 billion in shrink-wrapped $100 bills, Iraqi oil money held in the U.S. The Bush administration began flying it into Baghdad on C-130s soon after U.S. troops entered that city in April 2003. Essentially dumped into the void that had once been the Iraqi state, at least $1.2 to $1.6 billion of it was stolen and ended up years later in a mysterious bunker in Lebanon. And that’s just what happened as the starting gun went off.

It’s never ended. In 2011, the final report of the congressionally mandated Commission on Wartime Contracting estimated that somewhere between $31 billion and $60 billion taxpayer dollars had been lost to fraud and waste in the American “reconstruction” of Iraq and Afghanistan. In Iraq, for instance, there was that $75 million police academy, initially hailed “as crucial to U.S. efforts to prepare Iraqis to take control of the country’s security.” It was, however, so poorly constructed that it proved a health hazard. In 2006, “feces and urine rained from the ceilings in [its] student barracks” and that was only the beginning of its problems.

When the bad press started, Parsons Corporation, the private contractor that built it, agreed to fix it for nothing more than the princely sum already paid. A year later, aNew York Times reporter visited and found that “the ceilings are still stained with excrement, parts of the structures are crumbling, and sections of the buildings are unusable because the toilets are filthy and nonfunctioning.” This seems to have beenpar for the course. Typically enough, the Khan Bani Saad Correctional Facility, a $40 million prison Parsons also contracted to build, was never even finished.

And these were hardly isolated cases or problems specific to Iraq. Consider, for instance, those police stations in Afghanistan believed to be crucial to “standing up” a new security force in that country. Despite the money poured into them and endless cost overruns, many were either never completed or never built, leaving new Afghan police recruits camping out. And the police were hardly alone. Take the $3.4 millionunfinished teacher-training center in Sheberghan, Afghanistan, that an Iraqi company was contracted to build (using, of course, American dollars) and from which it walked away, money in hand.

And why stick to buildings, when there were those Iraqi roads to nowhere paid for by American dollars? At least one of them did at least prove useful to insurgent groups moving their guerrillas around (like the $37 million bridge the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built between Afghanistan and Tajikistan that helped facilitate the region’s booming drug trade in opium and heroin). In Afghanistan, Highway 1 between the capital Kabul and the southern city of Kandahar, unofficially dubbed the “highway to nowhere,” was so poorly constructed that it began crumbling in its first Afghan winter.

And don’t think that this was an aberration. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) hired an American nonprofit, International Relief and Development (IRD), to oversee an ambitious road-building program meant to gain the support of rural villagers. Almost $300 million later, it could point to “less than 100 miles of gravel road completed.” Each mile of road had, by then, cost U.S. taxpayers $2.8 million, instead of the expected $290,000, while a quarter of the road-building funds reportedly went directly to IRD for administrative and staff costs. Needless to say, as the road program failed, USAID hired IRD to oversee other non-transportation projects.

In these years, the cost of reconstruction never stopped growing. In 2011, McClatchy News reported that “U.S. government funding for at least 15 large-scale programs and projects grew from just over $1 billion to nearly $3 billion despite the government’s questions about their effectiveness or cost.”

The Gas Station to Nowhere

So much construction and reconstruction – and so many failures. There was thechicken-processing plant built in Iraq for $2.58 million that, except in a few Potemkin-Village-like moments, never plucked a chicken and sent it to market. There was the sparkling new, 64,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art, $25 million headquarters for the U.S. military in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, that doubled in cost as it was being built and that three generals tried to stop. They were overruled because Congress had already allotted the money for it, so why not spend it, even though it would never be used? And don’t forget the $20 million that went into constructing roads and utilities for the base that was to hold it, or the $8.4 billion that went into Afghan opium-poppy-suppression and anti-drug programs and resulted in… bumper poppy cropsand record opium yields, or the aid funds that somehow made their way directly into the hands of the Taliban (reputedly its second-largest funding source after those poppies).

There were the billions of dollars in aid that no one could account for, and a significant percentage of the 465,000 small arms (rifles, machine guns, grenade launchers, and the like) that the U.S. shipped to Afghanistan and simply lost track of. Most recently, there was the Task Force for Business Stability Operations, an $800-million Pentagon project to help jump-start the Afghan economy. It was shut down only six months ago and yet, in response to requests from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, the Pentagon swears that there are “no Defense Department personnel who can answer questions about” what the task force did with its money. AsProPublica’s Megan McCloskey writes, “The Pentagon’s claims are particularly surprising since Joseph Catalino, the former acting director of the task force who was with the program for two years, is still employed by the Pentagon as Senior Advisor for Special Operations and Combating Terrorism.”

Still, from that pile of unaccountable taxpayer dollars, one nearly $43 million chunk did prove traceable to a single project: the building of a compressed natural gas station. (The cost of constructing a similar gas station in neighboring Pakistan: $300,000.) Located in an area that seems to have had no infrastructure for delivering natural gas and no cars converted for the use of such fuel, it represented the only example on record in those years of a gas station to nowhere.

All of this just scratches the surface when it comes to the piles of money that were poured into an increasingly privatized version of the American way of war and, in the form of overcharges and abuses of every sort, often simply disappeared into the pockets of the warrior corporations that entered America’s war zones. In a sense, a surprising amount of the money that the Pentagon and U.S. civilian agencies “invested” in Iraq and Afghanistan never left the United States, since it went directly into the coffers of those companies.

Clearly, Washington had gone to war like a drunk on a bender, while the domestic infrastructure began to fray. At $109 billion by 2014, the American reconstruction program in Afghanistan was already, in today’s dollars, larger than the Marshall Plan (which helped put all of devastated Western Europe back on its feet after World War II) and still the country was a shambles. In Iraq, a mere $60 billion was squandered on the failed rebuilding of the country. Keep in mind that none of this takes into account the staggering billions spent by the Pentagon in both countries to build strings of bases, ranging in size from American towns (with all the amenities of home) to tiny outposts. There would be 505 of them in Iraq and at least 550 in Afghanistan. Most were, in the end, abandoned, dismantled, or sometimes simply looted. And don’t forget the vast quantities of fuel imported into Afghanistan to run the U.S. military machine in those years, some of which was siphoned off by American soldiers, to the tune of at least $15 million, and sold to local Afghans on the sly.

In other words, in the post-9/11 years, “reconstruction” and “war” have really been euphemisms for what, in other countries, we would recognize as a massive system of corruption.

And let’s not forget another kind of “reconstruction” then underway. In both countries, the U.S. was creating enormous militaries and police forces essentially from scratch to the tune of at least $25 billion in Iraq and $65 billion in Afghanistan. What’s striking about both of these security forces, once constructed, is how similar they turned out to be to those police academies, the unfinished schools, and that natural gas station. It can’t be purely coincidental that both of the forces Americans proudly “stood up” have turned out to be the definition of corrupt: that is, they were filled not just with genuine recruits but with serried ranks of “ghost personnel.”

In June 2014, after whole divisions of the Iraqi army collapsed and fled before modest numbers of Islamic State militants, abandoning much of their weaponry and equipment, it became clear that they had been significantly smaller in reality than on paper. And no wonder, as that army had enlisted 50,000 “ghost soldiers” (who existed only on paper and whose salaries were lining the pockets of commanders and others). In Afghanistan, the U.S. is still evidently helping to pay for similarly stunning numbersof phantom personnel, though no specific figures are available. (In 2009, an estimated more than 25% of the police force consisted of such ghosts.) As John Sopko, the U.S. inspector general for Afghanistan, warned last June: “We are paying a lot of money for ghosts in Afghanistan… whether they are ghost teachers, ghost doctors or ghost policeman or ghost soldiers.”

And lest you imagine that the U.S. military has learned its lesson, rest assured that it’s still quite capable of producing nonexistent proxy forces. Take the Pentagon-CIA program to train thousands of carefully vetted “moderate” Syrian rebels, equip them, arm them, and put them in the field to fight the Islamic State. Congress ponied up $500 million for it, $384 million of which was spent before that project was shut downas an abject failure. By then, less than 200 American-backed rebels had been trained and even less put into the field in Syria – and they were almost instantly kidnapped orkilled, or they simply handed over their equipment to the al-Qaeda-linked al-Nusra Front. At one point, according to the congressional testimony of the top American commander in the Middle East, only four or five American-produced rebels were left “in the field.” The cost-per-rebel sent into Syria, by the way, is now estimated at approximately $2 million.

A final footnote: the general who oversaw this program is, according to the New York Times, still a “rising star” in the Pentagon and in line for a promotion.

Profli-gate

You’ve just revisited the privatized, twenty-first-century version of the American way of war, which proved to be a smorgasbord of scandal, mismanagement, and corruption as far as the eye could see. In the tradition of Watergate, perhaps the whole system could be dubbed Profli-gate, since American war making across the Greater Middle East has represented perhaps the most profligate and least effective use of funds in the history of modern warfare. In fact, here’s a word not usually associated with the U.S. military: the war system of this era seems to function remarkably like a monumental scam, a swindle, a fraud.

The evidence is in: the U.S. military can win battles, but not a war, not even against minimally armed minority insurgencies; it can “stand up” foreign militaries, but only if they are filled with phantom feet and if the forces themselves are as hollow as tombs; it can pour funds into the reconstruction of countries, a process guaranteed to leave them more prostrate than before; it can bomb, missile, and drone-kill significant numbers of terrorists and other enemies, even as their terror outfits and insurgent movements continue to grow stronger under the shadow of American air power. Fourteen years and five failed states later in the Greater Middle East, all of that seems irrefutable.

And here’s something else irrefutable: amid the defeats, corruption, and disappointments, there lurks a kind of success. After all, every disaster in which the U.S. military takes part only brings more bounty to the Pentagon. Domestically, every failure results in calls for yet more military interventions around the world. As a result, the military is so much bigger and better funded than it was on September 10, 2001. The commanders who led our forces into such failures have repeatedly been rewarded and much of the top brass, civilian and military, though they should have retired in shame, have taken ever more golden parachutes into the lucrative worlds of defense contractors, lobbyists, and consultancies.

All of this couldn’t be more obvious, though it’s seldom said. In short, there turns out to be much good fortune in the disaster business, a fact which gives the whole process the look of a classic swindle in which the patsies lose their shirts but the scam artists make out like bandits.

Add in one more thing: these days, the only part of the state held in great esteem by conservatives and the present batch of Republican presidential candidates is the U.S. military. All of them, with the exception of Rand Paul, swear that on entering the Oval Office they will let that military loose, sending in more troops, or special ops forces, or air power, and funding the various services even more lavishly; all of this despite overwhelming evidence that the U.S. military is incapable of spending a dollar responsibly or effectively monitoring what it’s done with the taxpayer funds in its possession. (If you don’t believe me, forget everything in this piece and just check out the finances of the most expensive weapons system in history, the F-35 Lightning II, which should really be redubbed the F-35 Overrun for its madly spiraling costs.)

But no matter. If a system works (particularly for those in it), why change it? And by the way, in case you’re looking for a genuine steal, I have a fabulous gas station in Afghanistan to sell you…

Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author ofThe United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. He is a fellow of the Nation Institute and runs TomDispatch.com. His latest book is Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.
 
 
Title: The goverment/military/health care complex
Post by: ccp on November 21, 2015, 05:36:23 PM
It's like the health care stocks.   When taxpayer money is involved they skyrocket:

http://www.google.com/finance?q=INDEXDJX%3ADWCARD&sq=defense%20stocks&sp=1&ei=QBtRVoGFKMfCe6yVrZgB

I don't get it.  How come I don't do better like all the big pharma and insurance companies?  I am a part time government employee?   :wink:

Yeah A half bill for a single plane does sound NUTS.
Title: Former Muslim woman goes off
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 07, 2015, 09:01:23 AM
http://www.westernjournalism.com/watch-woman-who-was-raised-muslim-just-dropped-truth-bomb-about-islam-every-lib-must-see/?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=PostTopSharingButtons&utm_content=2015-12-07&utm_campaign=websitesharingbuttons
Title: Col Peters goes off on Baraq
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 07, 2015, 10:36:42 AM
second post

Actually calls him a pussy on national TV: https://www.facebook.com/FreeBeacon/videos/922267914488899/
Title: More Ralph Peters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 08, 2015, 09:18:39 PM
https://www.facebook.com/FreeBeacon/videos/922623131120044/
Title: Dubious Value of College To Many Workers...
Post by: objectivist1 on December 09, 2015, 11:39:28 AM
SQUANDERED RESOURCES ON COLLEGE EDUCATION

The dubious benefit of college degrees to workers over the next decade.

December 9, 2015  Walter Williams

Most college students do not belong in college. I am not by myself in this assessment. Washington Post columnist Robert Samuelson said, "It's time to drop the college-for-all crusade," adding that "the college-for-all crusade has outlived its usefulness." Richard Vedder, professor emeritus of economics at Ohio University, reports that "the U.S. Labor Department says the majority of new American jobs over the next decade do not need a college degree. We have a six-digit number of college-educated janitors in the U.S." Vedder adds that there are "one-third of a million waiters and waitresses with college degrees." More than one-third of currently working college graduates are in jobs that do not require a degree, such as flight attendants, taxi drivers and salesmen. College was not a wise use of these students', their parents' and taxpayer resources.

What goes on at many colleges adds to the argument that college for many is a waste of resources. Some Framingham State University students were upset by an image of a Confederate flag sticker on another student's laptop. They were offered counseling services by the university's chief diversity and inclusion officer.

Campus Reform reports that because of controversial newspaper op-eds, five Brown University students are claiming that freedom of speech does not confer the right to express opinions they find distasteful.

A Harvard University student organization representing women's interests now routinely advises students that they should not feel pressured to attend or participate in class sessions that focus on the law of sexual violence and that might therefore be traumatic. Such students will be useless to rape victims and don't belong in law school.

And some college professors are not fit for college, as suggested by the courses they teach. Here's a short list, and you decide: "Interrogating Gender: Centuries of Dramatic Cross-Dressing," Swarthmore College; "GaGa for Gaga: Sex, Gender, and Identity," University of Virginia; "Oh, Look, a Chicken!" Belmont University; "Getting Dressed," Princeton University; "Philosophy and Star Trek," Georgetown University; "What if Harry Potter Is Real?" Appalachian State University; and "God, Sex, Chocolate: Desire and the Spiritual Path," University of California, San Diego.

The fact that such courses are part of the curricula also says something about administrators who allow such nonsense.

Then there is professorial "wisdom." Professor Mary Margaret Penrose, of the Texas A&M University School of Law, asked, during a panel discussion on gun control, "Why do we keep such an allegiance to a Constitution that was driven by 18th-century concerns?"

Perhaps the newest "intellectual" fad is white privilege. Portland State University professor Rachel Sanders' "White Privilege" course says "whiteness" must be dismantled if racial justice is ever to be achieved. Campus Reform reports on other whiteness issues (http://tinyurl.com/oof9wu3). Harvard's classes on critical race theory combine "progressive political struggles for racial justice with critiques of the conventional legal and scholarly norms which are themselves viewed as part of the illegitimate hierarchies that need to be changed."

Back to those college administrators. Dartmouth College's vice provost for student affairs, Inge-Lise Ameer, said, "There's a whole conservative world out there that's not being very nice." She did, however, issue "an unequivocal apology" for stoking tensions with such a disparaging comment about conservatives to Black Lives Matter protesters.

After a standoff with other Black Lives Matter protesters, Princeton University President Christopher L. Eisgruber acceded to demands that former Princeton President Woodrow Wilson's name be removed from the campus because of his behavior as U.S. president. President Wilson was a progressive and an avowed racist who racially segregated the civil service and delighted in showing D.W. Griffith's racist "The Birth of a Nation" to his White House guests. Professor Thomas DiLorenzo's recent column suggests that a worthier target for Black Lives Matter protesters would be Abraham Lincoln, who he says was "the most publicly outspoken racist and white supremacist of all American presidents" (http://tinyurl.com/jza7ntf).

The bottom line is that George Orwell was absolutely right when he said, "There are notions so foolish that only an intellectual will believe them."
Title: The Myth of Christian Pacifism...
Post by: objectivist1 on December 10, 2015, 09:08:56 AM
This is an excellent book explaining the Biblical rationale for self-defense, and putting to rest the idea that Christians should be pacifists.  Extensive scriptural references are provided.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0982215150?keywords=a%20time%20to%20kill%20book&qid=1449767016&ref_=sr_1_3&sr=8-3

Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 10, 2015, 10:02:42 AM
Looks interesting.  I just ordered it.
Title: Dana Loesch
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 15, 2015, 10:36:48 AM
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/12/15/the-nra-strikes-back-at-ny-daily-news-linking-the-godless-left-and-the-wars-on-christmas-christianity-and-the-2nd-amendment/?postshare=481450195207595&tid=ss_fb-bottom
Title: Rush: There is no Republican Party
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 20, 2015, 07:33:33 PM
http://www.dailywire.com/news/1995/limbaugh-kill-gop-hank-berrien?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_content=121815-news&utm_campaign=dwbrand
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on December 20, 2015, 08:17:45 PM
Rush is so brilliant at expressing his thoughts.  He definitely does have a talent from God.  He verbalizes the thoughts and feelings of millions.

Yet the left has somewhat succeeded in marginalizing him.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces, 2015, worst year ever
Post by: DougMacG on December 24, 2015, 07:26:06 AM
Dave Barry, Miami Herald, Pulitzer Prize winner, argues that 2015 was worse than 1347 when the Bubonic Plague killed much of humanity and backs it up with facts mixed with humor including a month by month recap starting with January when the biggest story on earth was the below regulation air pressure of a Tom Brady football.

http://www.miamiherald.com/living/liv-columns-blogs/dave-barry/article51119880.html
Title: The Riot Racket
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on December 27, 2015, 12:53:36 PM
Old racial shill payouts beget current urban landscape, san the improvements promised.

http://www.city-journal.org/2015/25_4_riots.html
Title: About the NSA spying on Congress
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 07, 2016, 03:31:41 PM
Elected officials and leaders of the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) must maintain the integrity of America’s vast intelligence enterprise as a lawful, neutral, independent and fair arbiter of facts. Recent news that the Obama White House obtained intelligence containing private conversations of members of Congress and American Jewish organizations from the National Security Agency (NSA) suggests the integrity of our intelligence agencies have been undermined.


The heads of the 17 organizations in the IC oversee a massive foreign data collection network that produces sensitive information on adversaries and allies.


It is an awesome capability for good, but it poses a threat to free society if exploited for political purposes.


The prospect of the White House – or any political element – using one of these agencies to mine information on members of Congress and U.S. citizens is frightening and criminal. So it is of grave concern to learn that the administration allegedly permitted the National Security Agency (NSA) to monitor American communications between the Israeli prime minister and U.S. Congressmen and members of Jewish organizations during the sensitive domestic political debate on the Iran nuclear agreement.


Lawmakers must respond quickly. This is about the NSA potentially violating constitutionally protected civil liberties.
The rules are clear. When the electronic communications of U.S. citizens are inadvertently swept up, which happens frequently, the NSA is required to immediately minimize them.


First, it needs to identify the phone number associated with the person and cease monitoring it. Second, any reference to the individual in collected data must be eliminated.


And there are special NSA rules if information about the discussions or communications of members of Congress is collected. Under NSA rules, this information is supposed to be destroyed unless the NSA Director issues a waiver to collect and disseminate this information because of a compelling foreign intelligence reason.


The administration likely failed on all of these counts. It apparently looked the other way and didn’t implement long established safeguards. That is why this issue is so serious.


The government can only retain content on Americans when it contains national security implications and must obtain a court warrant if it wants to maintain surveillance on an American person. Israel’s prime minister has no protections.
More to the point, this alleged surveillance was never about national security. The White House wanted to learn the strategies that opponents of the Iran nuclear agreement would use to attack the president’s political agenda.


Congress should demand a full accounting, which should not take long. The NSA has all of the information lawmakers need at its fingertips.


Here are seven questions that the administration needs to answer about the continued monitoring of U.S. persons by the NSA.

1.   Exactly how many and specifically which Americans were monitored?
2.   On which members of Congress did the NSA spy?
3.   How many conversations were collected and what did they disclose?
4.   Who within the IC knew about the ongoing and intentional collection of American communications with the Israeli prime minister? Did NSA Director Mike Rogers know? Who approved it?
5.   Who within the White House knew of this collection and who knew of its content? Did they attempt to stop this collection once they became aware that it was possibly illegal?
6.   How did the NSA justify and rationalize providing the White House with intelligence on the private conversations by members of Congress and American Jewish organizayions? At what security level was the information transferred to the White House?
7.   Did this surveillance practice extend to any other intelligence agencies?
8.   
There needs to be a full public accounting.


This is not an isolated instance of IC negligence. CENTCOM is under investigation for cooking the intelligence on the threat from ISIS.


Both are serious violations of the public trust, but the NSA case is potentially so egregious that it threatens the very credibility of the IC. Whether conservative, progressive, Republican, Democrat or Libertarian, all Americans fear the immense capability of government to target them. A proportional reaction is required because it extends to the very heart of constitutionally guaranteed protections.


I strongly disagreed with Edward Snowden’s actions and the substance of his allegations, but the NSA might have fulfilled his predictions that the government would unleash the IC capabilities for unlawful domestic purposes.


Speaker
Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI)
Title: Progressives crowd funding jihadis
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 07, 2016, 05:36:16 PM
second post

http://www.thediplomad.com/2016/01/progressivism-crowd-funding-terrorism.html#pq=iIhzF9
Title: Piss on People Skills
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on January 08, 2016, 10:38:04 AM
My life's story is congruent with this piece:

http://captaincapitalism.blogspot.com/2016/01/hr-and-people-skills.html
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on January 10, 2016, 08:09:05 PM
Some of the "top" choices for a woman for the $10 dollar bill:

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/cafe/women-10-dollar-bill-candidates

Every one is basically not so much a champion for America as a champion for liberal causes.

Maybe we could have bills for liberals and bills for the rest of us.

Well what else would one expect from the most leftist President and his socialist appointees?




Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: G M on January 10, 2016, 08:42:44 PM
We need separate countries.


Some of the "top" choices for a woman for the $10 dollar bill:

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/cafe/women-10-dollar-bill-candidates

Every one is basically not so much a champion for America as a champion for liberal causes.

Maybe we could have bills for liberals and bills for the rest of us.

Well what else would one expect from the most leftist President and his socialist appointees?





Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on January 15, 2016, 06:49:05 AM
I saw most of the debate last night. 

My biggest concern was when some candidates were asked about how they would solve the national debt and social security debts everyone but one sidestepped the issues.

I don't recall Christy commenting on the debt but he does have a plan to save social security one trillion. 

To me this is the largest threat to the US.   The progressive debt problems.   And no one (except for the one exception) even answered the questions and both moderators who were otherwise, I felt did a good job, pressed for answers.   

Indeed every candidate on that stage should have been forced to deal with those 2 issues.

 
Title: Which Side of the Spectrum is the Most Simpleminded?
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on January 15, 2016, 04:43:52 PM
Those of a liberal persuasion were snickering a couple years back over psychological surveys that claimed to demonstrate conservatives are more simpleminded than liberals. Someone has taken a deeper look at the survey techniques and resulting data:

http://reason.com/archives/2016/01/15/liberals-are-simple-minded
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: G M on January 15, 2016, 09:35:45 PM
http://www.nationalreview.com/campaign-spot/386305/key-demographic-americas-wrong-information-voters-jim-geraghty

I'm less concerned about the impact of technology and far more concerned by the rise of stupidity in this country. We are becoming Idiocracy more and more every day.

https://www.yahoo.com/music/powerball-reimbursement-fund-page-created-235504618.html?soc_src=social-sh&soc_trk=fb

http://www.ifc.com/shows/comedy-bang-bang/blog/2015/03/10-things-idiocracy-got-right-about-the-future
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: DDF on January 18, 2016, 08:06:37 AM
http://www.nationalreview.com/campaign-spot/386305/key-demographic-americas-wrong-information-voters-jim-geraghty

I'm less concerned about the impact of technology and far more concerned by the rise of stupidity in this country. We are becoming Idiocracy more and more every day.

https://www.yahoo.com/music/powerball-reimbursement-fund-page-created-235504618.html?soc_src=social-sh&soc_trk=fb

http://www.ifc.com/shows/comedy-bang-bang/blog/2015/03/10-things-idiocracy-got-right-about-the-future

When I was a boy, my father threw a head of cabbage at my head so hard it exploded, because I had failed to feed the animals. Right or wrong, I never forgot to feed the animals again.

Now.... we have Americans who, waste their money and start pages like this... all because we quit exploding heads of cabbage....

Is it any wonder? Goes hand in hand with Common Core schooling.

God help us.
Title: Nation That Gave Us The Magna Carta Is Dead...
Post by: objectivist1 on January 20, 2016, 05:30:38 AM
Geller: The Nation That Gave the World the Magna Carta Is Dead

by PAMELA GELLER January 18, 2016

The British Parliament on Monday debated whether or not to ban Donald Trump from the country for the crime of saying that in light of jihad terrorist attacks, there should be a temporary moratorium on Muslim immigration into the U.S.

I did not expect for one moment that the Brits would ban the U.S. presidential candidate who may very well be the next President of the United States. A nation whose national self-esteem (or what’s left of it) is rooted deeply in its place in history would be infamous for having banned the leader of its closest ally, the one that saved her from the Nazi onslaught.

On the other hand, maybe they will ban Trump. After all, the British government banned me from entering the country for standing up against jihad terror. To ban Trump for calling for a temporary moratorium on Muslim immigration would just be more of the same. The British government, egged on by the left, seems determined to silence any and every voice against jihad terror and Islamization. The consequences for Britain will be catastrophic.

According to documents released in our lawsuit against the British government under the Duty of Candor, my support for Israel was also cited as grounds for the ban. An official in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office wrote that the dossier that the government had assembled as the case for banning me was “particularly citing pro-Israeli views.” If supporting Israel can get you banned from Britain, opposing the unrestricted entry of Muslims (including jihad terrorists) into the U.S. certainly can.

In not allowing me into the country solely because of our true and accurate statements about Islam and support of Israel, the British government was behaving like a de facto Islamic state.

By the time my ban was officially announced, however, the Home Office had scrubbed the material about it being because I was pro-Israel. The British government explicitly stated that I was banned because my presence was “not conducive to the public good” and that I represented a “threat to security of our society.” What were the criteria? CNN “journalist” Mona Eltahawy was soon afterward scheduled to speak in the UK at a women’s conference sponsored by two sharia-compliant media orgs, Reuters and the New York Times. Yet Mona Eltahawy was arrested after attacking a complete stranger in the New York subway and defacing our American Freedom Defense Initiative pro-Israel ad. Is that acceptable behavior and conducive to the public good? The British government apparently thinks so. They also let a notorious Muslim Brotherhood leader take refuge in London, and readily admit preachers of jihad terror.

The Home Office also cited security concerns – that is, if I were admitted, Muslims might riot, and rather than keep the Muslims rioting, they banned me. As Laura Rosen Cohen says, “security concerns” are the new “shut up.” My real crime was my principled dedication to freedom. I am a human rights activist dedicated to freedom of speech, freedom of conscience and individual rights for all before the law. I fiercely oppose violence and the persecution and oppression of minorities under supremacist law. I deplore violence and work for the preservation of freedom of speech to avoid violent conflict. I have never been convicted of any crime. I have never been arrested. I became a writer and activist in the wake of 9/11. For this, I am banned from Britain. I shed no tears. I am banned from Mecca, too.

Things have not improved in the two and a half years since I was banned. Monday’s Parliamentary “debate” was more like a clown contest, with Islamic apologists competing to see which one could out-bootlick Britain’s Islamic supremacists.

Why did this once great country agree to hold such a debate in the first place? Now in the birthplace of the principle of the freedom of speech, holding opinions that are unpopular with the elites can get you banned from the country. Apparently over 500,000 people signed a petition demanding that Trump be banned. Mind you, another petition calling for a halt to the massive Muslim migration into the United Kingdom gained a similar number of signers, but there was no Parliamentary debate, or any significant political discussion, of that one.

Where also is the Parliamentary debate about the hundreds of thousands, possibly as many as a million, young British girls who were brutalized by Muslim rape gangs? These girls were sacrificed on the altar of Islamic supremacism. For years these little British girls went to the authorities about these Muslim child sex trafficking gangs and the authorities did nothing for fear of appearing “Islamophobic” or racist. But they sprang into action and banned me when they heard I would be laying a wreath at the site of the Lee Rigby beheading on Armed Services Day.

What’s bitterly ironic is that Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron, a lapdog of Islamic supremacists, has just called on immigrants to learn English within two-and-a-half years of arriving in Britain, or face deportation. If Trump had said that, the British left would be working up another petition denouncing him. Will Cameron be banned from the country?

The nation that gave the world the Magna Carta is dead.

Title: Reality bitch slaps Thomas Friedman
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 20, 2016, 11:40:04 AM
ZURICH — Just get me talking about the world today and I can pretty well ruin any dinner party. I don’t mean to, but I find it hard not to look around and wonder whether the recent turmoil in international markets isn’t just the product of tremors but rather of seismic shifts in the foundational pillars of the global system, with highly unpredictable consequences.

What if a bunch of eras are ending all at once?

What if we’re at the end of the 30-plus-year era of high growth in China, and therefore China’s ability to fuel global growth through its imports, exports and purchases of commodities will be much less frothy and reliable in the future?
Thomas L. Friedman


“Now that this debt bubble is unwinding, growth in China is going offline,” Michael Pento, president of Pento Portfolio Strategies, wrote on CNBC.com last week. “The renminbi’s falling value, cascading Shanghai equity prices (down 40 percent since June 2014) and plummeting rail freight volumes (down 10.5 percent year over year) all clearly illustrate that China is not growing at the promulgated 7 percent, but rather isn’t growing at all. The problem is that China accounted for 34 percent of global growth, and the nation’s multiplier effect on emerging markets takes that number to over 50 percent.”

What if the $100-a-barrel oil price era is over and all these countries whose economies were directly or indirectly propped up by those prices will have to learn to grow the old-fashioned way — by making goods and services others want to buy? Thanks to steady technological advances in America for fracking, horizontal drilling and using big data to identify deposits, OPEC’s pricing power has disappeared. Countries that have set their budgets based on $80- to $100-a-barrel oil will find themselves vastly underfunded just when their populations — in places like Iran, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Indonesia and Venezuela — have surged.

What if average is over for countries? During the Cold War you could be an average, newly independent state with artificial borders drawn by colonial powers. There were two superpowers ready to throw foreign aid at you, educate your kids in America or Moscow, build up your armed forces and security services and buy your crummy manufactured exports or commodities.

But what if the rise of robots, software and automation mean that these countries can’t rely on manufacturing to create mass labor anymore, that the products they can make and sell can’t compete with Chinese goods, that climate change is pressuring their ecosystems and that neither Russia nor America wants to have anything to do with them because all either wins is a bill?

Many of these frail, artificial states don’t correspond to any ethnic, cultural, linguistic or demographic realities. They are caravan homes in a trailer park — built on slabs of concrete without real foundations or basements — and what you’re seeing today with the acceleration of technology, climate change stresses and globalization is the equivalent of a tornado going through a trailer park. Some of these states are just falling apart, and many of their people are now trying to cross the Mediterranean — to escape their world of disorder and get into the world of order, particularly the European Union.

Advertisement
Continue reading the main story

Advertisement
Continue reading the main story

But what if the E.U. era is over? Reuters reported this week that Germany is telling other E.U. countries that if they don’t prevent the influx of more refugees into Europe from the Mediterranean and “relieve Berlin of the lonely task of housing refugees, Germany could shut its doors.” Some Germans even want a border fence. One senior conservative was quoted as saying, “If you build a fence, it’s the end of Europe as we know it.”

What if the era of Iranian isolation is over, just as the Arab system is collapsing and the two-state solution between Israelis and Palestinians is history? How will all those molecules interact?
Continue reading the main story
Recent Comments
Susan Anderson Just now

Bernie Sanders is not "far left". His solutions are pragmatic and overdue.He's not much different from Hillary, just comes from a more...
Richard 5 minutes ago

We can't blame Trump for advocating far-right policies. So far, he hasn't articulated any policies at all. He just says he's going to...
Percy 5 minutes ago

I think Mr. Friedman is sending out the subliminal message that he wants to be the Republican (or independent) candidate for president.

    See All Comments Write a comment

And what if all this is happening when the two-party system in America seems to be getting most of its energy from the far left and the far right? Bernie Sanders’s platform is that we can solve our most onerous economic problems if we just tax “The Man” more. Donald Trump and Ted Cruz are running on the theme that they are “The Man” — the strongman — who can magically fix everything.

What if our 2016 election ends up being between a socialist and a borderline fascist — ideas that died in 1989 and 1945 respectively?
Continue reading the main story
Sign Up for the Opinion Today Newsletter

Every weekday, get thought-provoking commentary from Op-Ed columnists, The Times editorial board and contributing writers from around the world.

And what if all of this is happening at a time when our government’s ability to stimulate the economy through either monetary or fiscal policy is constrained? Unless we go to negative interest rates, the best the Fed can do now is rescind the tiny rate hike made in December. Meanwhile, after all the vital government spending to stimulate demand after the 2008 crisis, there is no consensus in the country for another big round.

These what-ifs constitute the real policy landscape that will confront the next president. But here’s the worst “what if”: What if we’re having a presidential election but no one is even asking these questions, let alone “what if” all of these tectonic plates move at once? How will we generate growth, jobs, security and resilience?

There’s still an opportunity for someone to lead by asking, and answering, all of these “what ifs,” but that time is quickly coming to an end, just like the last dinner party I ruined.
Title: Ever wonder how so many young people could
Post by: ccp on January 20, 2016, 01:53:56 PM
vote for an avowed communist like the Bern, just read this:

http://www.fox5ny.com/news/77757485-story

They will learn soon enough what the cost of freedom means.
Title: Re: Ever wonder how so many young people could
Post by: DDF on January 20, 2016, 02:04:06 PM
vote for an avowed communist like the Bern, just read this:

http://www.fox5ny.com/news/77757485-story

They will learn soon enough what the cost of freedom means.

I read that earlier today. It isn't surprising. Kids and others don't know jack squat. People congratulating the DPRK because they got nukes.... people more concerned about pharmaceutical marijuana.... the list goes on and on....

It justifies rule through power and not law....otherwise, you have a bunch of people like these, voting for a bunch of Obamas and Clintons, when they couldn't name a sitting or former supreme court justice to save their lives.... and in the end, the stupid are so many, that you get their interpretation of the law.

Just round them up, put them in their own pasture of a country within the US, where they can't hurt anyone other than themselves, let them get high, pat each other on the ass and tell each other how great their Birkenstocks look, and discuss worthless degrees in Liberal Arts... and basically do themselves in.... just build a moat around it first, filled with saltwater crocs.

Works for me.

Rant over.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on January 21, 2016, 09:08:18 AM
Of course the (C)rats are out in force making this into a national political issue against the Republican governor.  I have not heard that while 8,000 plus were "exposed" only 45 or so have tested positive elevated lead levels.   I don't hear Hillary saying that Brock refused to declare a state of emergency as requested by the Governor.  While this warrants and immediate reaction, cause for concern, and study, this is not the disaster the Dems want to make this out to.  Here we go with the class actions.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2016/01/19/michigan-flint-water-contamination/78996052/
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: G M on January 21, 2016, 09:10:34 AM
Of course the (C)rats are out in force making this into a national political issue against the Republican governor.  I have not heard that while 8,000 plus were "exposed" only 45 or so have tested positive elevated lead levels.   I don't hear Hillary saying that Brock refused to declare a state of emergency as requested by the Governor.  While this warrants and immediate reaction, cause for concern, study this is not the disaster the Dems want to make this out to.  Here we go with the class actions.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2016/01/19/michigan-flint-water-contamination/78996052/

http://hotair.com/archives/2016/01/19/epa-chief-we-did-our-job-in-the-flint-water-disaster/

The same level of service you've come to expect!
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 21, 2016, 11:44:15 AM
Wrong thread for this gents.  Perhaps Political Economics or Bureaucracy in Action or , , , but not this thread.
Title: The Constitution Shouldn't be Celebrated
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on January 24, 2016, 03:14:32 PM
A heterodox examination of the history of the American constitution from a libertarian perspective:


MARC:  Moved to the American Creed/Constitution thread.
Title: liberty score - the case for it as a tool
Post by: ccp on January 25, 2016, 08:20:17 AM
https://www.conservativereview.com/commentary/2016/01/how-to-interview-a-candidate
Title: Cultural Marxism explained in 7 Minutes
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 29, 2016, 02:17:56 PM
https://www.mises.org/blog/cultural-marxism-explained-7-minutes
Title: Norway better than America
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 29, 2016, 09:59:16 PM
http://www.thenation.com/article/after-i-lived-in-norway-america-felt-backward-heres-why/
Title: Islamophobia
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 08, 2016, 07:23:22 AM


https://www.facebook.com/Rahav.Rani/videos/992239060822502/
Title: Frankie McRae
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 09, 2016, 10:29:00 AM
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=984286798306872&set=gm.1551948995120121&type=3&theater
Title: Noonan: The Court, like the country, needs balance
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 19, 2016, 10:22:44 AM
The Court, Like the Country, Needs Balance
It would be wise for the president to change his mind on a nomination to replace Justice Scalia.
By Peggy Noonan
Feb. 18, 2016 7:14 p.m. ET
910 COMMENTS

The president has every right to nominate a successor to Justice Antonin Scalia. He shouldn’t, but he has the right by law and precedent.

The reasons he shouldn’t spring from facts particular to the moment and having to do with what Justice Scalia symbolized.

In a 50/50 country, one that suffers deep ideological divisions and is constantly at its own throat, Justice Scalia stood, for that half of the country that is more or less conservative, for wisdom, permanence, enduring structures and understandings. That he was brilliant, witty and penetrating in his thought goes without saying. He was also brave, with that exhausting kind of courage that has to do with swimming each day against the tide. Here is Justice Scalia as prophet, dissenting in 1992’s sweeping abortion decision, Planned Parenthood v Casey: “Its length, and what might be called its epic tone, suggest that its authors believe they are bringing to an end a troublesome era in the history of our Nation and of our Court. . . . [But] by foreclosing all democratic outlet for the deep passions this issue arouses, by banishing the issue from the political forum that gives all participants, even the losers, the satisfaction of a fair hearing and an honest fight, by continuing the imposition of a rigid national rule instead of allowing for regional differences, the Court merely prolongs and intensifies the anguish.”

It did; it has.

Here is the end of his dissent in Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 decision on same-sex marriage: “Hubris is sometimes defined as o’erweening pride; and pride, we know, goeth before a fall. . . . With each decision of ours that takes from the People a question properly left to them—with each decision that is unabashedly based not on law, but on the ‘reasoned judgment’ of a bare majority of this Court—we move one step closer to being reminded of our impotence.”

By “we” he meant the people, not the court.

Conservatives—again, half the country, maybe more—took succor from his bracing 30-year presence on the bench. The country, and the court too, benefited: With his fierce dissents Scalia helped people accept decisions with which they disagreed. At least our view was spoken. At least it’s respected by someone!

Our divided country has been stumbling along for decades with a split court. We have grown used to the phrase, “In a 5-4 decision.” Half the country probably thinks high-court decisions are by definition 5-4.

The court in our time has both expanded its role and loosened its intellectual standards. It pronounces now on every facet of life in America—on our religious life, on abortion and marriage, on guns and immigration. At the same time members of the court have grown used to approaching issues based on their personal vision of what is desirable public policy. Scalia famously didn’t think his preferences were the issue; what the law says is the issue.

Justice is supposed to be blind, impartial. It is not supposed to be about politics and brute power. But we all know that is what it is now about. As Hugh Hewitt wrote this week in the Washington Examiner, the court “has assumed power never intended it by the Framers, but it is what it is and there is no going back.”

Which is why the issue of Scalia’s replacement is so consequential.

When the court is roughly balanced, 5-4, the public is allowed to assume some rough approximation of justice will occur—that something that looks like justice will be handed down. There will be chafing and disappointments. ObamaCare will be upheld. Yay! Boo! Gay marriage will be instituted across the land. Yay! Boo!

The closeness of the vote suggests both sides got heard. The closeness contributes to an air of credibility. That credibility helps people accept the court’s rulings.

When the balance of the court tips too much one way, it invites people to see injustice and bully politics. It invites unease and protest.

That in turn will produce another crack in the system—and in public respect for the system. This divided nation does not need more cracks and strains.

What to do? The closest you can come to public peace in resolving the question of Scalia’s replacement is to take a step wholly unusual, even unprecedented, and let the American people make the decision themselves, this year, with their 2016 presidential vote.

Maybe that election will produce a progressive Democratic president. That president will choose as progressive a nominee as the Senate will accept.

Maybe that election will produce a conservative Republican president. That president will choose as conservative a nominee as the Senate will accept.

Either way half the country will be half happy, half unhappy, but the country will have chosen. That they made the decision will allow people to accept the outcome more easily—either a real change in the ideological makeup of the court, or a court whose rough and not always predictable balance has been preserved.

We take a swerve or stay where we are. But it will be the people who swerved or stayed.

For President Obama to leave the Scalia replacement to the next president would be an act of prudence and democratic courtesy. He of course says he will put a nominee forward. What a thing it would be if he changed his mind.

The Republican Senate has every right by law and precedent to block his nominee. They moved quickly after Scalia’s death, and with startling unanimity, to announce they would do so. This had the virtue of clarity and the defect of aggression. Still, their ultimate stand is right.

It should be noted there’s no reason to believe leaving it to the people will guarantee conservative outcomes.

I close with a thought about an aspect of modern leftism that is part of the context here.

There is something increasingly unappeasable in the left. This is something conservatives and others have come to fear, that progressives now accept no limits. We can’t just have court-ordered legalized abortion across the land, we have to have it up to the point of birth, and taxpayers have to pay for it. It’s not enough to win same-sex marriage, you’ve got to personally approve of it and if you publicly resist you’ll be ruined. It’s not enough that we have publicly funded contraceptives, the nuns have to provide them.

This unappeasable spirit always turns to the courts to have its way.

If progressives were wise they would step back, accept their victories, take a breath and turn to the idea of solidifying gains, of heroic patience, of being peaceable.

Don’t make them bake the cake. Don’t make them accept the progressive replacement for Scalia. Leave the nuns alone.

Progressives have no idea how fragile it all is. That’s why they feel free to be unappeasable. They don’t know what they’re grinding down.

They think America has endless give. But America is composed of humans, and they do not have endless give.

Isn’t that what we’re seeing this year in the political realm? That they don’t have endless give? And we’ll be seeing more of it.
Title: WSJ Why the Sanders Trump voters?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 19, 2016, 07:33:31 PM

By Daniel J. Arbess
Feb. 19, 2016 6:31 p.m. ET
86 COMMENTS

B ernie Sanders, the 74-year-old self-described democratic socialist, is surprising even himself with his primary-season success against Hillary Clinton, fueled by a staggering 83% majority of the under-30 vote in New Hampshire and 84% in the Iowa caucuses.

As this newspaper reported on Tuesday, voters in the millennial bracket, 18- to 34-year-olds, will for the first time equal the baby-boomer share of the electorate, at 31%. These young voters appear to be falling headlong for the Vermont senator’s plaintive narrative of economic “unfairness.” His throwaway prescriptions for redistributing income and wealth are being echoed by an increasingly nervous Mrs. Clinton—despite such policies’ having been jettisoned during her husband’s administration in the 1990s.

Then again, Republican front-runner Donald Trump’s vague promises that he will “make America great again” aren’t much more comforting—except to the masses of Americans responding to his populist diatribes against free trade and immigrants. He too scored well with the young in New Hampshire, though, winning 38% of the 18-29 support, more than double his closest competitor for that group, Ted Cruz, at 17%.

These young voters seem not to realize that the economic policies they find so resonant are the least likely to promote the growth and the social mobility they desire. They deserve to be lead from the discredited backwater of equalizing outcomes, forward with policies that instead help eliminate barriers frustrating their access to opportunities.

The millennials can’t be faulted for being anxious about their economic prospects. They are coming of age in the weakest economy in generations. The underemployment rate (measuring those working a job for which they’re overqualified and underpaid) for young adults below age 30 is 60%. The overall employment-to-population ratio of 77.4% for those in the prime-of-working-life 25-54 age bracket translates into 1.5 million jobs below the 20-year average.

The college graduate living in his parents’ basement and working a marginal job to service a student loan is by now an archetype of the Obama era. And while the headline unemployment numbers are down, and the administration congratulates itself on a tepid “recovery” that was almost exclusively dependent on Fed-engineered financial-asset inflation, there is every reason to be skeptical about the health of the labor market. The labor-participation rate languishes at its lowest level in 40 years, and credit creation, government and private investment aren’t faring much better.

Both Democrats and some Republicans keep blaming it all on “Wall Street” (Bernie Sanders’s all-purpose boogeyman) for “getting away with murder” (Donald Trump on hedge funds). Don’t they realize that the financial markets are the lubricant of the entire economy—that Wall Street’s capacity to provide liquidity and to broker capital is the lifeblood of American companies? History will probably judge the misguided post-crisis regulations like Dodd-Frank and retribution against Wall Street to have sown the seeds of the next financial crisis. For now, the vilification of Wall Street in the presidential campaign is irresponsible.

The sluggish growth of jobs and the economy has a lot more to do with the transitioning from American manufacturing and services to information technology than with the 2008 financial crisis and its supposed perpetrators. And the Fed alone can’t do much more to promote its employment-and-inflation mandates.

Why? Because the economy is facing complex structural headwinds for both: Artificial intelligence and self-learning algorithms are efficiency-creating and cost-reducing, and soon they will be displacing service professionals and Ph.Ds just as they have factory workers. The Bank of England projects that 45% of jobs done by people in the U.K. will eventually be performed by robots. ArkInvest expects the U.S. to shed 75 million jobs in the next two decades.

And yes, the new tech-economy wealth is increasingly concentrating in the hands of relatively few innovators and financiers, leaving the middle class and its consumer demand lagging behind. What is the appropriate role of government in redressing this?

Why wouldn’t young voters want “free stuff” paid for by the rich, as the Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton narrative promises? Because the no-free-lunch axiom is still true: Mr. Sanders’s socialized education, health care and other policies would cost up to $20 trillion, according to analysts, requiring tax collections to increase up to 47%. And have we not at least learned from the collapse and dismantling of socialism over the past quarter century that governments lack the incentives and resources to effectively allocate and manage capital in the microeconomy? The eldest of the millennials were in elementary school when the Soviet Union collapsed, so they might be forgiven for their unfamiliarity with the failure of socialist economics. But Bernie Sanders was the mayor of Burlington, Vt., and Hillary Clinton the first lady of Arkansas—what’s their excuse for revanchist economics?

The economic culture of the U.S. is different than that of any country in the world. Americans have always admired each other’s economic success and striven for the chance to achieve it for themselves—by building, not taking the wealth from their neighbors’ pockets. Donald Trump is unabashedly proud of his success—no wonder he’s so popular. As a political leader, though, he needs to up his economic game quickly from “There’s going to be a bubble popping” and “Nobody can solve it like me.”

Real solutions demand real leadership, not polarizing Twitter -length rhetoric. An America-appropriate policy response to the inequality challenge needs to be focused on equalizing opportunities, not outcomes. At the very least, removing barriers to social mobility will require tax, regulatory and educational reforms to give people the qualifications and liberty to improve their lives in the new economy.

At this point in the presidential campaign, all the ideas for stimulating growth are coming from the Republican side: Marco Rubio has discussed the transformational challenges of the tech economy, and he has proposed alternatives to traditional campus-based higher education (online college and flexible vocational training); innovative student-loan programs; and corporate tax and regulatory reforms. Jeb Bush and John Kasich are also reform-minded, including promoting initiatives to ease the burden on small businesses that power job growth.

Yet millennials, who would most benefit from a real economic recovery, replacing the false one of the past several years, so far seem intent on voting against their interests. There is still hope. We’re moving past the peak of the “authenticity” phase of the campaign cycle, when voters unfamiliar with the field of candidates are initially drawn simply to candidates who seem willing to bluntly speak their minds. John Kasich’s strong performance in New Hampshire might herald the transition to a more constructive phase, when voters—including millennials—are readier to listen to a more nuanced, realistic economic message. If not, today’s young voters may not like the world they inherit, and members of the aging generation risk eventually finding themselves short of the Social Security benefits they thought they had coming.

Mr. Arbess, the founder of Xerion Investments, is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and co-founder of No Labels, promoting political bipartisanship.
Title: VDH: Weimar America
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 25, 2016, 12:18:18 PM
http://victorhanson.com/wordpress/?p=9072
Title: Re: VDH: Weimar America
Post by: G M on February 25, 2016, 02:32:39 PM
http://victorhanson.com/wordpress/?p=9072

As usual, VDH is exactly right.
Title: Noonan: The Rise of the Unprotected
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 26, 2016, 09:06:14 AM
 By Peggy Noonan
Feb. 25, 2016 8:02 p.m. ET
895 COMMENTS

We’re in a funny moment. Those who do politics for a living, some of them quite brilliant, are struggling to comprehend the central fact of the Republican primary race, while regular people have already absorbed what has happened and is happening. Journalists and politicos have been sharing schemes for how Marco parlays a victory out of winning nowhere, or Ted roars back, or Kasich has to finish second in Ohio. But in my experience any nonpolitical person on the street, when asked who will win, not only knows but gets a look as if you’re teasing him. Trump, they say.

I had such a conversation again Tuesday with a friend who repairs shoes in a shop on Lexington Avenue. Jimmy asked me, conversationally, what was going to happen. I deflected and asked who he thinks is going to win. “Troomp!” He’s a very nice man, an elderly, old-school Italian-American, but I saw impatience flick across his face: Aren’t you supposed to know these things?

In America now only normal people are capable of seeing the obvious.

But actually that’s been true for a while, and is how we got in the position we’re in.

Last October I wrote of the five stages of Trump, based on the Kübler-Ross stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Most of the professionals I know are stuck somewhere between four and five.

But I keep thinking of how Donald Trump got to be the very likely Republican nominee. There are many answers and reasons, but my thoughts keep revolving around the idea of protection. It is a theme that has been something of a preoccupation in this space over the years, but I think I am seeing it now grow into an overall political dynamic throughout the West.

There are the protected and the unprotected. The protected make public policy. The unprotected live in it. The unprotected are starting to push back, powerfully.

The protected are the accomplished, the secure, the successful—those who have power or access to it. They are protected from much of the roughness of the world. More to the point, they are protected from the world they have created. Again, they make public policy and have for some time.

I want to call them the elite to load the rhetorical dice, but let’s stick with the protected.

They are figures in government, politics and media. They live in nice neighborhoods, safe ones. Their families function, their kids go to good schools, they’ve got some money. All of these things tend to isolate them, or provide buffers. Some of them—in Washington it is important officials in the executive branch or on the Hill; in Brussels, significant figures in the European Union—literally have their own security details.

Because they are protected they feel they can do pretty much anything, impose any reality. They’re insulated from many of the effects of their own decisions.

One issue obviously roiling the U.S. and western Europe is immigration. It is THE issue of the moment, a real and concrete one but also a symbolic one: It stands for all the distance between governments and their citizens.

It is of course the issue that made Donald Trump.

Britain will probably leave the European Union over it. In truth immigration is one front in that battle, but it is the most salient because of the European refugee crisis and the failure of the protected class to address it realistically and in a way that offers safety to the unprotected.

If you are an unprotected American—one with limited resources and negligible access to power—you have absorbed some lessons from the past 20 years’ experience of illegal immigration. You know the Democrats won’t protect you and the Republicans won’t help you. Both parties refused to control the border. The Republicans were afraid of being called illiberal, racist, of losing a demographic for a generation. The Democrats wanted to keep the issue alive to use it as a wedge against the Republicans and to establish themselves as owners of the Hispanic vote.

Many Americans suffered from illegal immigration—its impact on labor markets, financial costs, crime, the sense that the rule of law was collapsing. But the protected did fine—more workers at lower wages. No effect of illegal immigration was likely to hurt them personally.

It was good for the protected. But the unprotected watched and saw. They realized the protected were not looking out for them, and they inferred that they were not looking out for the country, either.

The unprotected came to think they owed the establishment—another word for the protected—nothing, no particular loyalty, no old allegiance.

Mr. Trump came from that.

Similarly in Europe, citizens on the ground in member nations came to see the EU apparatus as a racket—an elite that operated in splendid isolation, looking after its own while looking down on the people.

In Germany the incident that tipped public opinion against the Chancellor Angela Merkel’s liberal refugee policy happened on New Year’s Eve in the public square of Cologne. Packs of men said to be recent migrants groped and molested groups of young women. It was called a clash of cultures, and it was that, but it was also wholly predictable if any policy maker had cared to think about it. And it was not the protected who were the victims—not a daughter of EU officials or members of the Bundestag. It was middle- and working-class girls—the unprotected, who didn’t even immediately protest what had happened to them. They must have understood that in the general scheme of things they’re nobodies.

What marks this political moment, in Europe and the U.S., is the rise of the unprotected. It is the rise of people who don’t have all that much against those who’ve been given many blessings and seem to believe they have them not because they’re fortunate but because they’re better.

You see the dynamic in many spheres. In Hollywood, as we still call it, where they make our rough culture, they are careful to protect their own children from its ill effects. In places with failing schools, they choose not to help them through the school liberation movement—charter schools, choice, etc.—because they fear to go up against the most reactionary professional group in America, the teachers unions. They let the public schools flounder. But their children go to the best private schools.

This is a terrible feature of our age—that we are governed by protected people who don’t seem to care that much about their unprotected fellow citizens.

And a country really can’t continue this way.

In wise governments the top is attentive to the realities of the lives of normal people, and careful about their anxieties. That’s more or less how America used to be. There didn’t seem to be so much distance between the top and the bottom.

Now is seems the attitude of the top half is: You’re on your own. Get with the program, little racist.

Social philosophers are always saying the underclass must re-moralize. Maybe it is the overclass that must re-moralize.

I don’t know if the protected see how serious this moment is, or their role in it.
Title: Pacs sound like scams and cons
Post by: ccp on March 04, 2016, 09:59:44 AM
OK new pac now wants to recruit Paul Ryan now for President.  A lot of people taking big salaries from these PACs..  They are opportunists for sure.  And a bunch of suckers jumping right in:

http://www.rollcall.com/news/super_pac_outside_spending_chiefs_make_big_bucks-230166-1.html
Title: Re: Pacs sound like scams and cons
Post by: DougMacG on March 04, 2016, 11:39:49 AM
"new pac now wants to recruit Paul Ryan now for President." 

Paul Ryan isn't going to be the President but his policy proposals might be what becomes policy IF we could win the Senate AND the Presidency with a mandate.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on March 04, 2016, 01:10:39 PM
"Paul Ryan isn't going to be the President"

That is right.  So why is there a pac trying to rally him to run?

These last minute desperation moves by establishment types is not helping ( and I don't want to hear these very same people suggest there is no "establishment" - they know who and what we mean)

I can only conclude that the people behind these pacs are con artists taking money from people who have money.

None of this helps the right.

Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 04, 2016, 01:18:06 PM
Gents:

Wrong thread for the last three posts.  They belong in the 2016 thread.
Title: Is social science politically biased?
Post by: ccp on March 06, 2016, 04:16:33 PM
Duh  :roll:  :

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-social-science-politically-biased/

Title: more on PACS
Post by: ccp on March 08, 2016, 11:05:02 AM
Maybe they have hurt Republicans, not helped:
http://www.newsweek.com/dark-money-boomerang-republican-party-434499?rx=us
Title: Re: more on PACS
Post by: DougMacG on March 08, 2016, 01:43:27 PM
Maybe they have hurt Republicans, not helped:
http://www.newsweek.com/dark-money-boomerang-republican-party-434499?rx=us

Yes the PACs have been all negative on Republicans, doing the work for Democrats.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 08, 2016, 07:20:46 PM
IIRC Newsweek was bought for exactly ONE DOLLAR by Dick Harman of Harman Electronics and husband of my Dem congressional opponent in 1992 Jane Harman.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: G M on March 09, 2016, 05:31:57 AM
IIRC Newsweek was bought for exactly ONE DOLLAR by Dick Harman of Harman Electronics and husband of my Dem congressional opponent in 1992 Jane Harman.


Overpaid.
Title: Repurposing Europe
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 09, 2016, 09:13:51 AM


http://www.firstthings.com/article/2016/04/repurposing-europe
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: DDF on March 16, 2016, 07:21:37 PM
So....

Facebook blocks me today....

I admit that I'm not the most social person.

My crime? Posting that I support having a military dictatorship as my preferred form of government..... almost verbatim...

They then take the added step of asking my significant other if she "really knows me?"

Facebook police.... I have to laugh. They should come to my house uninvited in the middle of the night, break in, and check.

Why am I saying this here?

You can do whatever you want as long as it is in line with what the "progressives" agree with, and granted, Zuckerberg can run his business as he sees fit.... unlike a liberal college youth.... I actually know a little about my line of thinking....and am not a hypocrite that hasn't thought this out.

Their reaction however, did nothing to change my mind. It only reinforced what I was already thinking.

Trump is a narcissist.... no doubt about it.... but if we're just going to shut up the Klan (I detest them personally) in Fullerton, shut down Trump rallies in Chicago.... and now don't dare say you prefer something that doesn't have a murderous lawyerly hag from Chicago posted firmly at the head of it.....

Then let's just shut things up all the way....

Thank my Christian God that I didn't ask the Facebook "investigator" to make me a wedding cake.

Rant over.

Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: G M on March 16, 2016, 07:26:22 PM
Social media is a bad idea, especially if you are in law enforcement.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: DDF on March 16, 2016, 07:37:30 PM
Social media is a bad idea, especially if you are in law enforcement.

You're absolutely correct of course, and I know it.... just hard to resist sometimes.... liberals.... (with the noteable exception of those in the Tribe)..... I'll never understand them.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on March 25, 2016, 08:44:32 AM
It just strikes me as such a sad commentary about the distrust we have of our politicians that the timing of announcing that 2 Americans died just hours after Bamster gets back to tht US from his exotic vacation was *politically* timed, even if just a coincidence:

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/03/25/state-department-reveals-american-deaths-in-brussels-hours-before-obama-returns-to-united-states/
Title: Duh. Why is minimum wage so low?
Post by: ccp on March 28, 2016, 05:38:36 AM
Anybody see a connection between the two newspaper articles.   I agree.  We should allow everyone in the world to move in AND we should guarantee them a minimum wage twice as high:

http://www.nj.com/opinion/index.ssf/2016/03/njs_expensive_so_why_is_the_minimum_wage_so_low_ed.html

http://www.nj.com/opinion/index.ssf/2016/03/njs_expensive_so_why_is_the_minimum_wage_so_low_ed.html

My only question as always remains unanswered.  What about the people who either came here legally or were born here?

Should we just continue to move out of the state?  Once Christie is out of office we are doomed.
Title: VDH: Europe at the Edge of the Abyss
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 30, 2016, 06:14:59 PM


http://www.nationalreview.com/article/433364/europe-edge-abyss
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on April 06, 2016, 01:56:21 PM
Interesting exchange.  Yelling at Rick Scott because she can't get Obamacare while she is a "stay at home" mom and sitting at Starbucks with her laptop presumably drinking $5 coffee.

This is classic of what we are all up against in this country. 


http://www.miamiherald.com/news/state/florida/article70240692.html
Title: So what
Post by: ccp on April 09, 2016, 10:58:09 AM
If you are a war hero your arrested and face is all over the news.  Fact is he wasn't driving.   He was sleeping in his car.   If you are Democrat Presidential candidate with an organized mob behind you  and you repeatedly  thumb your nose over national security for years it is a "right wing conspiracy" or much to do about nothing, etc.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/ex-navy-seal-says-killed-bin-laden-charged-171750737.
Title: Re: So what
Post by: G M on April 09, 2016, 02:28:20 PM
If you are a war hero your arrested and face is all over the news.  Fact is he wasn't driving.   He was sleeping in his car.   If you are Democrat Presidential candidate with an organized mob behind you  and you repeatedly  thumb your nose over national security for years it is a "right wing conspiracy" or much to do about nothing, etc.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/ex-navy-seal-says-killed-bin-laden-charged-171750737.


Many states, mine included consider an intoxicated person in possession of their keys in the car to be DUI. Personally, I think that's a bogus arrest.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on April 09, 2016, 02:42:44 PM
"Many states, mine included consider an intoxicated person in possession of their keys in the car to be DUI."

Well in that case I understand it.

Thanks for clarification.

Just trouble shooting.  If one comes out of a bar and goes in the back seat to sleep it off till next morning then that person too is DUI?

What if they have a van and go in the back to sleep?  

Basically one cannot sleep in their car if under the influence even if she/he does not drive?

Well he was in parking lot on someone's else's property...........but if the owner of the property does not complain........ :|
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: G M on April 09, 2016, 03:17:03 PM
"Many states, mine included consider an intoxicated person in possession of their keys in the car to be DUI."

Well in that case I understand it.

Thanks for clarification.

Just trouble shooting.  If one comes out of a bar and goes in the back seat to sleep it off till next morning then that person too is DUI?

What if they have a van and go in the back to sleep?  

Basically one cannot sleep in their car if under the influence even if she/he does not drive?

Well he was in parking lot on someone's else's property...........but if the owner of the property does not complain........ :|


The best course of action in that scenario is to lock your keys in your trunk or another locked container before going to sleep.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: DougMacG on April 10, 2016, 10:04:36 AM
"Many states, mine included consider an intoxicated person in possession of their keys in the car to be DUI."
Well in that case I understand it.
Thanks for clarification.
Just trouble shooting.  If one comes out of a bar and goes in the back seat to sleep it off till next morning then that person too is DUI?
What if they have a van and go in the back to sleep?  
Basically one cannot sleep in their car if under the influence even if she/he does not drive?
Well he was in parking lot on someone's else's property...........but if the owner of the property does not complain........ :|

The best course of action in that scenario is to lock your keys in your trunk or another locked container before going to sleep.

My uncle was a D.A. here for 36 years.  He wouldn't prosecute a DUI where the intent and action of the person arrested was to be NOT driving the car.  Like ccp says, realize you shouldn't be driving, get off the road, sleep it off.  Unfortunately that isn't the law (here).  Do what GM says.  I was going to say throw the keys as far as you can away from the car where they won't be found and hope you have an extra set, or get away from the car which is also not the safest thing to do on a cold MN winter night away from home.  These days, it's Uber.  Load the app and register before the situation arises and have your username and password all known in your phone so it will come up easily when you need it.  (I should take my own advice; I signed up and don't know my password...)  You still need to get away from the car if you are even possibly over .08.  Cheaper than the alternative.
Title: Corrupting the English Language
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 19, 2016, 09:13:01 AM
http://thefederalist.com/2016/04/19/how-democrats-win-debates-by-corrupting-the-english-language/
Title: Why the Left loathes Western Civilization
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 27, 2016, 07:05:54 PM
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/434549/left-western-civilization-case-hatred
Title: Arabs strive for honor, not peace
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 27, 2016, 08:25:20 PM
second post

http://www.meforum.org/5966/arabs-strive-for-honor-not-peace
Title: Stephen W. Browne: The Dialog we are not having
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 03, 2016, 10:39:30 AM
http://www.stephenwbrowne.com/2016/04/3136/
Title: Hello Darkness My Old Friend
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 03, 2016, 05:36:43 PM
second post

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1RieIRFqN0&feature=youtu.be
Title: America has never been so ripe for tyranny
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 04, 2016, 06:50:32 AM
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/04/america-tyranny-donald-trump.html
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on May 04, 2016, 01:43:30 PM
Elizabeth pocohantas Warren:

The Massachusetts senator and liberal firebrand went on a lengthy Twitter tirade, calling Trump’s candidacy one built on “racism, sexism, and xenophobia” and supported by Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Ku Klux Klan.

So what should be the response to this?
AS for the KKK I don't think even a dozen people show up to their rallies so what .
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: G M on May 04, 2016, 02:34:33 PM
First of all, ask Fauxcohauntus if she feels bad for taking the place of an actual American Indian in academia?

Elizabeth pocohantas Warren:

The Massachusetts senator and liberal firebrand went on a lengthy Twitter tirade, calling Trump’s candidacy one built on “racism, sexism, and xenophobia” and supported by Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Ku Klux Klan.

So what should be the response to this?
AS for the KKK I don't think even a dozen people show up to their rallies so what .
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: DougMacG on May 05, 2016, 05:07:33 AM
Massachusetts senator and liberal firebrand went on a lengthy Twitter tirade, calling Trump’s candidacy one built on “racism, sexism, and xenophobia” and supported by Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Ku Klux Klan.

So what should be the response ...

 She was going to make that charge no matter who the nominee was. Our job was to  choose someone who would make those charge false.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: G M on May 05, 2016, 05:53:33 AM
Massachusetts senator and liberal firebrand went on a lengthy Twitter tirade, calling Trump’s candidacy one built on “racism, sexism, and xenophobia” and supported by Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Ku Klux Klan.

So what should be the response ...

 She was going to make that charge no matter who the nominee was. Our job was to  choose someone who would make those charge false.

The appropriate response to the left is always "fcuk you". Anything else is a waste of time.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on May 05, 2016, 07:26:02 AM
"The appropriate response to the left is always "fcuk you". Anything else is a waste of time."

You mean like Obama says by his actions and deeds to conservative America every day.  Choooooommmmmm.......
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: G M on May 05, 2016, 07:51:33 AM
"The appropriate response to the left is always "fcuk you". Anything else is a waste of time."

You mean like Obama says by his actions and deeds to conservative America every day.  Choooooommmmmm.......

Yup
Title: A Confessison of Liberal Intolerance
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 08, 2016, 09:28:14 AM
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/08/opinion/sunday/a-confession-of-liberal-intolerance.html?ref=opinion&_r=1
Title: Re: A Confessison of Liberal Intolerance
Post by: G M on May 08, 2016, 09:35:31 AM
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/08/opinion/sunday/a-confession-of-liberal-intolerance.html?ref=opinion&_r=1

They aren't liberals, they are leftists.
Title: The real goal of the left listening to Jeff Sachs around 2007 (Kerry Globalist)
Post by: ccp on May 08, 2016, 09:39:20 AM
(Surprising the article in Crafty's post above made it into the NYT.)



I don't really need to post a Drudge headline since I am sure every one has seen it , but this says it all.  Kerry calling for an end to borders and thus nations and countries.  I think this need to be a part of Trumps campaign.  Do the people of this nation black white christian and not male and female want to live the way the elites have decided for us with one world not under God or do we want to keep the US of A .  Because if the left has it's way there will be no USA.  I would like to see how happy Black lives matter would be once they realize what dupes they are:

What does Kerry care?  he married into millions:
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/kerry-slams-trumps-wall-tells-grads-to-prepare-for-borderless-world/article/2590596
Title: 1/6 of young men out of work or in jail
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 11, 2016, 03:12:56 PM
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/435228/masculinity-cbo-study-young-men-jobless-incarcerated
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on May 12, 2016, 08:39:15 PM
Jeff Sessions read my post here on this thread of May 8 which included:    :-D

"Kerry calling for an end to borders and thus nations and countries.  I think this need to be a part of Trumps campaign.  Do the people of this nation black white christian and not male and female want to live the way the elites have decided for us with one world not under God or do we want to keep the US of A .  Because if the left has it's way there will be no USA.  I would like to see how happy Black lives matter would be once they realize what dupes they are"

Session on Drudge today sums it up:

"For the first time in a long time, this November will give Americans a clear choice on perhaps the most important issue facing our country and our civilization: whether we remain a nation-state that serves its own people, or whether we slide irrevocably toward a soulless globalism that treats humans as interchangeable widgets in the world market."

We give up our nation to the world or we stay a country.  Some are surely happy with the former.  Obama, Kerry, and Zuckerberg whose only interest is expanding FAcebook (which could be renamed Zucker book) around the world.  Of course with him at the top.   I am not sure what most new immigrants think but I would think most later generation Americans would like to stay American.  Either way lets put this up front and center in this election. 
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 12, 2016, 11:23:57 PM
YES.
Title: "Should" vs. "Is"
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 13, 2016, 07:13:34 AM
Don’t Get “Should” Mixed Up with “Is”
Posted: 28 Apr 2016 04:00 AM PDT

The hardest truth to swallow is that the world isn’t really fair, and it isn’t a world you’d necessarily draw up from scratch. It’s not usually what you suppose it should be. None of what’s around us came about by grand design: From a spark many billion years ago, things evolved in a fairly undirected manner (as far as we can tell).

When the world doesn’t quite agree with our ideas, we often begin distorting our own cognition. We confuse should with is, and then complain or rationalize when reality shows we’ve gotten the wrong answer.

The history of Marxist political ideology is a pretty good example. It’s not unreasonable to think that the world should, in some cosmic sense, be a bit more egalitarian. We’re all born and we all die just the same — why should some among us enjoy the spoils while some among us wallow? Capitalism encourages that outcome to an extent, and it sometimes accidentally rewards behavior that is anti-social or simply not adding anything to the world. (A thousand derivatives traders and casino operators just cringed.)

The problem is that reality is way more complex than a simple fairness test would hope to show.

A really large-scale egalitarian society has never worked for a few interrelated reasons, chief among them that: groups don’t have power, people have power (raising the question, who specifically decides how to allocate society’s resources?); utopia doesn’t scale; market forces provide very effective carrots, sticks, and signals that directed egalitarianism lacks, among other reasons. Reaching for extreme levelness in outcomes has always been deeply problematic and always will be, because that’s how reality is constructed.

Inevitably when certain people who get into power run the experiment again, and it does not work as intended, its deepest acolytes return to first principles instead of acknowledging a flawed premise. Well, that wasn’t real Marxism. Yes the proposed system of economic distribution didn’t work, but that’s not our fault. It still should be this way. Things should be fairer. We just did it wrong. Let’s run it again!

Results like that show the brain performing some real acrobatics to keep its desired and cherished idea intact. The Greek statesman Demosthenes, living about 350 years before the birth of Christ, put it best by saying “What a man wishes, he also believes.” In other words, because we want it to be true, we make it so in our minds, evidence be damned.

We’re all subject to this bias from time to time.

In the financial world, many an investor has seen his investment go south only to complain about how unfair the damn world is, how things shouldn’t have gone that way — the CEO should have been more attentive, the creditors should have been more fair, competitors should have been more rational. It’s not supposed to go like this! Far from the investor’s mind is the thought that he simply misdiagnosed a complex situation with a range of outcomes, including bad ones. But reality is irreducibly complicated — it doesn’t ignore things just because you do. It isn’t supposed to be anything. It’s just hard.
This isn’t to be harsh. It’s just the way things are. It’s not about you. Nature just doesn’t care too much about your should.

This happens in relationships all the time. It’s almost an iron rule of life that marrying someone with the intent of changing them is not going to work. Who wants to be chiseled, molded, and nagged by their spouse? Who’s really been successful at that? Most of us seek acceptance, and when we don’t get it, we fight for our independence. That’s just human nature.

And yet how many divorces happen due to traits that were plainly present before the marriage began? Is a continuation of long-held traits the fault of the non-compliant spouse, or was there a willful misunderstanding from Day 1?

That’s not to say that a good spouse shouldn’t work to improve themselves. Of course they should. It is a recognition of the base rate that major improvements are not very common.

Think of the last major personality flaw you had that you actually shed for good. I’ll wait…

And so our lack of understanding human nature and of the complex reality leads us to bad results, frequently because we wish the world was another way. We think it ought to be another way, and we keep that conclusion even after the world shows us we’re wrong, leading to one mistake after another as we rationalize repeated errors with ought style thinking.

Start resolving to test yourself with the basic question: Do I believe this because I wish it was so, or because it actually is so? Have I acted in some way because I wish that action caused success, or because it actually does? If you can’t tell the difference, it’s likely to be wishful. And if you simply don’t know, then leave it at that: You don’t know. Resolve to find out the truth as best you can.

Instead of beating our heads against the wall, we should spend more time trying to understand the world as it is, and live accordingly. Or, in the brilliant words of Joseph Tussman:

“What the pupil must learn, if he learns anything at all, is that the world will do most of the work for you, provided you cooperate with it by identifying how it really works and aligning with those realities. If we do not let the world teach us, it teaches us a lesson.”
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces, Sessions
Post by: DougMacG on May 13, 2016, 08:09:53 AM
"soulless globalism that treats humans as interchangeable widgets in the world market"

"We give up our nation to the world or we stay a country."
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Sessions is a great guy, one of the best, but there is a difference between judging the lousy products that come out of free enterprise / free trade and protecting our sovereignty. 

Trump constantly conflates sovereignty with trade protectionism.  The lowering of tariffs in Nafta wasn't the problem, the infringement on sovereignty was.  Same with WTO, TPP, etc.  Trump threatens NATO which has been successful and gives the sham called the UN a pass. 

My view: No global taxes.  No global laws.  Just voluntary agreements among countries.  Regimes who systematically rape, torture and poison their own, support terror and invade other countires might find themselves deposed by force, with or without a UN resolution.  For Trump, all those violations plus the shooting at American planes didn't justify use of force against Saddam in Iraq.

Note that Jeff Sessions and Trump were diametrically opposed on Iraq:
http://www.sessions.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/floor-statements?ID=a3a309fe-7e9c-9af9-7220-6bb130ef43cd 


Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on May 13, 2016, 08:37:16 AM
"My view: No global taxes.  No global laws.  Just voluntary agreements among countries. "

I agree with # 1.  And # 3.  I am not sure about #2.  Some global laws are helpful in resolving peaceful disputes between nations.  Lest the powerful take advantage of the small.  But I confess I know essentially nothing about this.

"Trump constantly conflates sovereignty with trade protectionism. "

Doug knows more about this than me.  But Reagan utilized some protectionism.  At least when it came to national security.  Was Reagan wrong with this?

I am serious not being sarcastic.
Title: VDH on smart ass/wise guy milineals Pajama Boys
Post by: ccp on May 17, 2016, 11:31:37 AM
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/435448/obamas-pajama-boy-menagerie
Title: Dinesh D'Souza
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 21, 2016, 03:12:11 PM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWXZ-whusxY&feature=youtu.be
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on May 21, 2016, 06:36:35 PM
I watched the video showing Dinesh turn the college student's logic into a hypocrite self justification that it is.  I wonder who the older lady sitting in front and to the right of the student is.  She is egging him on clapping for the student.  I assume she is one of the college professors.  She is obviously anti - Dinesh.  Typical of the leftist professor class.
Title: Greetings, Slaves
Post by: G M on May 22, 2016, 02:47:58 PM
https://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/2016/05/21/greetings-slaves/?singlepage=true

Greetings, Slaves
 BY RICHARD FERNANDEZ MAY 21, 2016

Thomas Lifson argues that Bernie Sanders presents "a mortal danger to not only the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton, but the continued viability of the party’s strategy of mouthing populist rhetoric while practicing crony capitalism. Too late, they now realize he actually means what he says."

In an age where truth is the worst policy, socialism -- like Santa Claus -- is something no adult should believe in. That Sanders might actually have illusions lies at the heart of his appeal. To a cynical public a politician who doesn't calculate in explicit monetary terms is the nearest thing to secular sainthood. Hans Gruber, the villain in Die Hard, disappointed the industrialist he kidnapped by confessing: "Mr Takagi, ... I am far more interested in the 100 million dollars in negotiable bearer bonds hidden in your vault."

Takagi: You want money? What kind of terrorist are you?


 
We expect revolutionaries to be indifferent to money. Yet in reality the Left thinks about nothing but money as the Venezuelan socialists who have stolen $350 billion from the treasury, according to the Basel Institute on Governance, should have proved to the world. If it's any consolation to the Democratic Party, Bernie Sanders is not as indifferent to lucre as he seems. Sanders' filings show he's received money from Super PACs and donors with links to Wall Street -- so he may be normal after all.

Perhaps the first major 20th century writer to realize that the ambition of all true Communists should be to become billionaire revolutionaries was Hilaire Belloc. In his 1912 book, The Servile State, Belloc argued the then-burgeoning Communist movement would find more success ditching Leninism in favor of an alliance with Crony Capitalists to reinstate Slavery. "Slavery, or a Servile State in which those who do not own the means of production shall be legally compelled to work for those who do, and shall receive in exchange a security of livelihood."

This modern form of slavery would address not only the concerns of the revolutionaries by fixing job insecurity and guaranteeing retirement on a plantation basis, but also assuage the monopolists, who stay up nights worrying about preserving market share in the face of competition. An alliance between socialists and crony capitalists would solve both problems at once. The only price to pay for this convenience is the loss of public freedom and that is readily paid.

As for the rest, it would be sustainable. The crony capitalists would underwrite the projects of the collectivists. The ant-heaps of each would be so similar to the other that only a few changes in signage would be needed to turn regulated capitalism into the workers' paradise. It was a tremendous insight. Belloc realized Bolshevism was was too obviously destructive to last and anticipated the rise of what we would now call the Blue Model. F.A. Hayek paid tribute: "Hilaire Belloc ... explained that the effects of Socialist doctrine on Capitalist society is to produce a third thing different from either of its two begetters - to wit, the Servile State." Regarding the Servile State, George Orwell realized whatever name it gave itself, such an unholy alliance would be much the same quantity.


Many earlier writers have foreseen the emergence of a new kind of society, neither capitalist nor Socialist, and probably based upon slavery ... A good example is Hilaire Belloc's book, The Servile State ...  Jack London, in The Iron Heel ... Wells's The Sleeper Awakes (1900) ... Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1930), all described imaginary worlds in which the special problems of capitalism had been solved without bringing liberty, equality, or true happiness any nearer. More recently, writers like Peter Drucker and F.A. Voigt have argued that Fascism and Communism are substantially the same thing. And indeed, it has always been obvious that a planned and centralized society is liable to develop into an oligarchy or a dictatorship.
The crucial point would be that this proposed Third Way would be more secure than the traditional Leninsim which rested upon the unholy Troika of Party, Army and Cheka. Paychecks would actually be met, courtesy of the crony capitalists. It's not surprising that after the collapse of the Soviets, the next collectivist social project was the much more "responsible" EU. But Larry Elliott, arguing in the Guardian for a British exit from Brussels, realized that distinction was more a matter of degree than substance. He characterized the EU not as "the US without the electric chair; it is the USSR without the gulag."  The correspondence with Belloc's 1912 prediction is eerie.

Belloc argued that the only two exits from the evils of crony capitalism were an expansion of property holdings to the great majority of the people (the classic conservative program) or collectivism. Of the two alternatives, the elites would find collectivism far the easier path. He wrote, "if you are suffering because property is restricted to a few, you can alter that factor in the problem either by putting property in the hands of many or the hands of none ... a trust or monopoly is welcomed because it 'furnishes a mode of transition from private to public ownership.'" Crony capitalism furnishes collectivism so well that the Servile State becomes indistinguishable from the Workers' Paradise and its leaders equally interchangeable. Thus we have billionaires who become men of the people and men of the people who become billionaires. Who could have foreseen this in 1912?



 
The so-called Socialist ... has not fallen into the Servile State by a miscalculation ... he welcomes its birth, he foresees his power over its future ... it is orderly in the extreme ... and the prospect of a vast bureaucracy wherein the whole of life shall be scheduled and appointed to certain simple schemes deriving from the co-ordinate work of public clerks and marshaled by powerful heads of departments gives his small stomach a final satisfaction.
Best of all, the socialist agitator was free under the arrangement to engage in his favorite project of remaking mankind to free him from "the ravages of drink: more fatal still the dreadful habit of mankind of forming families and breeding children." Belloc's Servile State anticipated the carnival at Davos with its weird hodgepodge of moralism, pseudo-scientific causes and economic diktat precisely because it understood what the power coalition of the future would look like.

Where both Belloc and Orwell may have erred was in assuming the Servile State could fix the sustainability problems that doomed Leninism. The hope of finding a lasting formula for collectivism lies at the heart of the USSR's reboot and the EU and Hillary's socialism in words but crony capitalism in deeds strategy, in contrast to Bernie Sanders' hair-on-fire socialism. Nobody argues with the collectivist goals, just about how to pay for them.  Both the EU and its American imitations are attempts at finding a socialism which can pay the bills. Unfortunately the present political crisis raises the  possibility that the Servile State itself is inherently unsustainable.

The issue which dogs Hillary and which no cosmetic distancing from Sanders will solve is that the middle class is losing faith in the platform. The political turmoil threatening to break apart the EU and the American Blue Model is rooted in the fact that both are broke and have no prospect of meeting obligations as manifested in the stagnation of wages in the West and also in the collapse of the "security" safety nets for which the present-day slaves have traded away their freedom. The progressive campaign is essentially predicated on the assumption that a sufficiently resolute government can defy the laws of financial gravity. There is now some doubt on that point.

Collectivism cannot even pay its pensions. "The present value of unfunded obligations under Social Security as of August 2010 was approximately $5.4 trillion. In other words, this amount would have to be set aside today such that the principal and interest would cover the program's shortfall between tax revenues and payouts over the next 75 years."  One of the culprits, ironically, is that the socialists have succeeded all too well in changing mankind's dreadful habit of forming families and breeding children.

It's not just the Government that's broke but also its political partners. Recently the Teamsters' Central States Pension Fund announced that it was bust. Unless it gets an infusion of taxpayer money, pension benefits for about 407,000 people could be reduced to "virtually nothing." Orwell famously said that "if you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever." What he and Belloc failed to anticipate was that the boot might rot to pieces and fail to fulfill its function to oppress.

What Belloc left out of his model, very oddly for him especially, was God. (Those who object to the word can substitute one of their choosing: reality, consequences or arithmetic, it makes no difference.) God can't be fixed and shows up at the most inconvenient moments. Teamsters who are able to intimidate everything find they are finally helpless against addition and subtraction. At the end of it all they, like everyone else who has mismanaged their pensions, can pay their retirees "virtually nothing."

In the face of this failure perhaps it is time to revisit Belloc's alternatives. If the only remaining path is to encourage a return to the popular ownership of property and making markets freer as opposed to cutting deals with monopolists -- then so be it. Technology may be working in favor of the path not taken. As intellectual property becomes the dominant means of production, every human is automatically born with a certain amount of capital, provided Planned Parenthood doesn't get to him first.

Lincoln Steffens thought he saw a future that worked but it was cruel fraud. Why not try property this time instead of slavery? We've tried being slaves. Let's try being free. Belloc points out this idea is so revolutionary that anyone who espouses it will almost certainly be suspected of mental incapacity.

You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one

I hope someday you'll join us

Then we can really have some fun.
Title: Interesting thought piece
Post by: DougMacG on May 23, 2016, 12:24:34 PM
From a Chinese fortune cookie:

Good writing is clear thinking made visible.
Title: Rove supports Debbie the Schultz
Post by: ccp on May 25, 2016, 04:07:25 PM
At first I was shocked but on second thought this makes sense:

http://www.salon.com/2016/05/25/strange_bedfellows_karl_rove_tea_party_express_endorse_debbie_wasserman_schultz_in_democratic_primary_fight/
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 25, 2016, 09:44:03 PM
That would be better in the "politics" thread.
Title: 2016, this is where we are
Post by: G M on May 28, 2016, 03:52:37 PM
https://reason.com/blog/2016/05/24/80-percent-of-americans-want-to-label-fo

Caution: DNA present
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on May 29, 2016, 11:27:14 AM
 :-D

I guess we could live on protein fat and carbohydrate drinks and vitamins and mineral water.

This reminds me of the knowledge demonstrated by people Jesse Waters interviews on Fox. 
Title: So irrational it is sad
Post by: ccp on May 30, 2016, 06:21:26 AM
Not unexpected from a guy who co hosts a Sharpton show and already has a book on how Trump would govern. 

The visceral hatred some Blacks have for whites and anyone associated with the Republican Party is beyond logic:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/earl-ofari-hutchinson/true-danger-signs-in-clinton-email_b_10197998.html?utm_hp_ref=politics
Title: More left wing coverup
Post by: ccp on May 30, 2016, 06:36:05 AM
for the Clinton crime organization. 
Just keep denying the patently obvious:

http://www.breitbart.com/2016-presidential-race/2016/05/29/huffington-post-removes/
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 30, 2016, 07:03:18 AM
Gents:

The last few posts would have been better in other threads e.g. Politics, 2016 Election, etc. 
Title: Noonan: A Party Divided, and none too soon
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 03, 2016, 08:10:20 AM
A Party Divided, and None Too Soon
Beltway Republicans will have to come to terms with how they lost Middle America.
Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Sacramento, Calif. June 1, 2016. ENLARGE
Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Sacramento, Calif. June 1, 2016. Photo: Reuters
By Peggy Noonan
June 2, 2016 6:48 p.m. ET
492 COMMENTS

This first month of summer I see movement and no-movement.

No movement: Donald Trump. He’s like someone caught in the first act who lurches into a second act—a solid, prepared speech, a subdued interview—then scrambles back to first-act antics. It’s easy to guess he’s surrounded by friends and supporters who know more is needed than popping off about “Crooked Hillary” but are afraid to mess with his swing. They fear taking the tang out of his secret sauce. Another guess: He’s not sure he can pull off a change of style—he’s afraid he’ll be boring if he’s serious, afraid he’ll bore himself if he knows what he’s going to say next. So he continues to rant, not to reassure fence sitters. Hillary Clinton hasn’t entered a second act either, but it’s partly situational: She’s trapped in a primary battle. When it comes to Mr. Trump she tries various attack lines—“divisive,” “dangerous,” “dangerously incoherent”—to see what resonates, as they say. She is plodding, unimaginative, stolid. She wishes she had secret sauce.

Closer to home I see movement. Friends who’d been for John Kasich or Marco Rubio now sunnily and without a headache declare themselves for Mr. Trump. An intellectual friend, previously disapproving, confided she’s for him too. But two friends who had been early, enthusiastic Trump backers now seem to be having doubts: They’ve lost their oomph, talk about him less. Nothing’s set in concrete this year, not that anything was.

A central predicament of 2016 continues. GOP elites and intellectual cadres may be clueless about America right now, but they have an informed and appropriately elevated sense of the demands of the presidency. They fear Mr. Trump’s temperament and depth do not meet its requirements. Trump supporters have a more grounded sense of America and its problems but too low a sense of what the presidency can demand in regard to personal virtues. If this problem is to be resolved, it is Mr. Trump who will resolve it. He shows little interest. This space said in February that his political fortunes would hinge on whether America came to think of him as a good man and a fully stable one. It is still true.

The Beltway intelligentsia of the conservative movement continues to be upset about Mr. Trump’s coming nomination and claim they’d support him but they have to be able to sleep at night. They slept well enough through two unwon wars, the great recession, and the refusal of Republican and Democratic administrations to stop illegal immigration. In a typically evenhanded piece in National Review, Ramesh Ponnuru writes of conservative infighting. Most back Mr. Trump, but others, “especially among conservative writers, activists, and think-tankers,” vow they’ll never vote for him. “This debate splits people who have heretofore been friends with similar views on almost all issues, and who on each side have reasonable arguments to hand. It is therefore being conducted in a spirit of mutual rage, bitterness, and contempt.”

That’s witty and true—I’ve seen it—but the division is also promising. Too much has long been “agreed on.” At some point conservative intellectuals are going to take their energy and start thinking about how we got here. How did a party that stood for regular people become a party that stood for platitudes regular people no longer found even vaguely pertinent? During the Bush administration, did the party intelligentsia muscle critics and silence needed dissent, making the party narrower, more rigid and embittered? What is the new conservatism for this era? How did the party of Main Street become the party of Donors’ Policy Preferences?

An anecdote. Two years ago at a birthday party for a mutual friend, I bumped into a hedge-fund billionaire who turned to me angrily and lashed out over something I’d written that seemed to him insufficiently conservative. I listened, merely blinking with surprise I’m sorry to say, and removed myself from his flight path. Afterward I thought about how he must have come to view himself. He is, as I said, vastly wealthy, but also generous, giving time and money to think tanks, groups, candidates. He must view all this, I thought, as a targeted investment. Maybe he sees himself as having . . . a controlling investment. Maybe he thinks he bought conservatism. I felt in a sharp new way that my criticisms of the donor class had been right. Inevitably they see to their own enthusiasms and policy priorities. This was how the GOP became the party of We Don’t Care What Americans Think About Illegal Immigration. Who do those Americans think they are—they think they own the place?

A great party needs give. It needs a kind of capaciousness and broadness. On that, the best example of movement I’ve seen in some time is what I discovered this week: a sophisticated, rather brilliant and anonymous website that is using this Trumpian moment to break out of the enforced conservative orthodoxy of the past 15 years.

It is called the Journal of American Greatness. Its contributors ask questions that need asking and makes critiques that sting.

They describe themselves as “aghast at the stupidity and corruption of American politics, particularly in the Republican Party, and above all in what passes for the ‘conservative’ intellectual movement.” Who are they? “None of your damned business.” Why? “Because the times are so corrupt that simply stating certain truths is enough to make one unemployable for life.”

Where they stand: “We support Trumpism, defined as secure borders, economic nationalism, interests-based foreign policy, and above all judging every government action through a single lens: does this help or harm Americans? For now, the principal vehicle of Trumpism is Trump.”

They explore essential questions. “When—and why—did free trade become a sacred ritual of the Republican right?” They give neoconservatism its intellectual due but explore the “unwisdom” of the “Middle East democracy agenda.” Neoconservatives seem “incapable of learning from their mistakes or changing their minds.” The contributors hilariously score NeverTrumpers who claim to be standing at great cost on principle while others are “in the tank” for Mr. Trump: “Of all the opinions that require little courage to express, opposition to Trump is the lead one.” In the past two decades, they observe, “a new conservative intellectual superstructure,” including magazines, journals and think tanks, was built on the new base of the Republican Party. It “routinized the production of its self-justification.” But “the base no longer wants the superstructure.” Voters have their own ideas of what conservatism is.

I contacted JAG by social media and asked about their work. “If we had to characterize ourselves, we would like to think that our writing is informed by a mix of pragmatic experience and theory. What brings us together is our dismay at the stultification of political ideas in the United States. We see ourselves as challenging the intellectual rigidity that has come to characterize, in our view, so much of what passes for self-described ‘serious thinking’ today.”

Their reach and the reactions they’ve received “have thus far significantly exceeded our expectations.”

It’s encouraging they’re doing what they’re doing, and that there is a market for it.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on June 03, 2016, 01:53:13 PM
Noonan has seemed to pick up on and understand the Trump phenomenon much sooner than most Republicans or conservatives.

Some of them are only now jumping on board.  Some appear to be doing so to save their own skins if you ask me - McConnell for example.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 03, 2016, 04:17:11 PM
Peggy has had my respect for many years now.
Title: What say ye?
Post by: ccp on June 09, 2016, 07:57:14 AM
I don't know.  A lot of people making big bucks off these so called PACs.  Is this anything other than a business scam or is this guy for real?  too much money involved to take this shit seriously.

I would be very careful donating one cent to any of these probably mostly bullshit scams:

https://www.yahoo.com/news/why-republican-created-pac-help-100005165.html?nhp=1
Title: A liberal?
Post by: ccp on June 10, 2016, 01:28:49 PM
Apparently he is now involved with globalist or one world government group as well:

http://www.breitbart.com/2nd-amendment/2016/06/10/general-david-petraeus-forming-gun-control-group-with-mark-kelly/
Title: Re: A liberal?
Post by: G M on June 10, 2016, 01:59:34 PM
Apparently he is now involved with globalist or one world government group as well:

http://www.breitbart.com/2nd-amendment/2016/06/10/general-david-petraeus-forming-gun-control-group-with-mark-kelly/

I guess when they raised their right hands and swore to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, they really didn't mean it.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on June 13, 2016, 04:57:04 AM
Hardly a mention if at all that guy going to LA found with explosives etc was for Bernie Sanders.  If he were for Trump it would be headlines on every leftist and main stream (also leftist) media outlet:

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_GAY_PRIDE_EXPLOSIVES_ARREST_THE_LATEST?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2016-06-12-17-58-57

Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 14, 2016, 07:13:03 AM
That would be for the Homeland thread, yes?  No relation to this thread-- and what is the source for saying he is a Sanders supporter?

Sorry to be abrupt-- headed out.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on June 14, 2016, 07:24:19 AM
http://www.newsday.com/news/nation/james-wesley-howell-arrested-at-calif-gay-pride-parade-was-on-probation-in-ind-1.11907256


"The page's most recent public post, from June 3, shows a photo comparing an Adolf Hitler quote to one from Hillary Clinton. An anti-Clinton, pro-Bernie Sanders photo was posted in February."



Title: DC statehood
Post by: ccp on July 03, 2016, 07:12:32 PM
Of course, with seal of approval from Obama and Clinton to add 2 more Democratic Senators and a few more Congressmen from what 80% democratic residents?:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/dc-politics/what-to-call-the-51st-state-district-leaders-settle-on-new-columbia/2016/06/29/b47d1b6a-3e04-11e6-80bc-d06711fd2125_story.html
Title: The Rant to end all Rants
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 05, 2016, 08:53:30 PM
https://www.facebook.com/nevereveragainever/videos/vb.313210635511804/632368516929346/?type=2&theater
Title: Re: The Rant to end all Rants
Post by: DDF on July 05, 2016, 09:30:48 PM
https://www.facebook.com/nevereveragainever/videos/vb.313210635511804/632368516929346/?type=2&theater

They just deleted it, but I saw it first. I wonder if they're already getting death threats from the religion of peace.

Here's another link to the same video.

https://www.facebook.com/1710744702493021/videos/1811126315788192/
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 06, 2016, 08:49:41 AM
Awesome!

Can someone here save if before FB deletes it again?
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 06, 2016, 09:17:41 AM
Nevermind , , , http://www.snopes.com/arab-guy-renouncing-faith-television/
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on July 07, 2016, 01:26:45 PM
The 20 Repubs who confirmed Lynch.  OTOH did it really make a difference?  It wasn't like Obama was not going to nominate someone who is not leftist and under his control:

https://www.conservativereview.com/commentary/2016/07/20-republicans-are-responsible-for-loretta-lynch
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 07, 2016, 02:05:26 PM
Wrong thread.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on July 11, 2016, 10:47:39 AM
My response to the NY Jewish liberal Chait is to claim Obama's rise to power mirrors Lenin and Stalin.  Oh to be sure , Obama is not a genocidal Stalin but the parallels are very striking.    :-P
 
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/07/donald-trump-and-hitlers-rise-to-power.html
Title: Fuk Beyonce
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 12, 2016, 11:53:37 AM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oahkGuG09SE&feature=youtu.be
Title: Don't resist arrest and you won't be shot
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 14, 2016, 07:49:48 AM
http://thefederalist.com/2016/07/11/if-you-dont-want-police-to-shoot-you-dont-resist-arrest/
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on July 14, 2016, 03:03:44 PM
What is going on?  I posted I though Netanyahu's $1400 haircut was a bit much and then this:

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/article89533592.html

Ben got a good deal.  Why can't the find a Mexican to cut their hair for $20?
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 14, 2016, 04:49:41 PM
Was that a rant or interesting thought piece?   :lol:
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on July 14, 2016, 05:02:01 PM
"Was that a rant or interesting thought piece? "

Both. 

Or it could go under "humor or WTF"
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 20, 2016, 09:06:20 AM
From the post which opens this thread:

"I open this thread for all WELL-WRITTEN and REASONED political rants and interesting thought pieces." 

Title: Woodward, Bernstein, NYT
Post by: ccp on July 26, 2016, 04:31:06 AM
and Putin.  Should Vlad get the pulitzer (with small P) prize ?   :-)

http://www.wnd.com/2016/07/will-putin-get-a-pulitzer/
Title: Coulter: The Wrath of Khan
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 07, 2016, 06:33:05 AM
As usual Ann throws in some specious bullsh*t (the confederate flag argument) but the main point is dead on.

THE WRATH OF KHAN
August 3, 2016 - Ann Coulter

Khizr Khan, the Muslim "Gold Star Father" who harangued Americans at the Democratic National Convention, with a mute, hijab-wearing wife at his side, is just another in a long string of human shields liberals send out to defend their heinous policies. The "Jersey Girls" were the classic example, first described in that magnificent book Godless: The Church of Liberalism .


In order to shut down a debate they're losing, Democrats find victims to make their arguments for them, pre-empting counter-argument by droning on about the suffering of their victim-spokesperson. Alternative opinions must be preceded by proof that the speaker has "sacrificed" more than someone who lost a child, a husband, or whatever.


Khan's argument, delivered angrily and in a thick Pakistani accent at the DNC, is that "our" Constitution requires us to continue the nonstop importation of Muslims.


If the U.S. Constitution required us to admit more than 100,000 Muslims a year -- as we do -- we'd already be living in Pakistan, and Khan wouldn't have had to move to get that nice feeling of home. So the "argument" part of Khan's point is gibberish.


Luckily, Khan had Part Two: His son died in Iraq, whereas Donald Trump does not have a son who died in Iraq, so he can't say anything.


Yes, a candidate for president of the United States is supposed to be prohibited from discussing a dangerous immigration program because Khan's son was one of fourteen (14!) Muslim servicemen killed by other Muslims in our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. That's why we're obligated to import yet more Muslims – including, undoubtedly, some just like the ones who killed his son. Q.E.D.!



If you think that doesn't make any sense, keep your yap shut, unless you lost a child in Iraq, too.


There were virtually no Muslims in America before Teddy Kennedy's 1965 immigration act. Today, we admit more immigrants from Muslim countries than from Great Britain.


Are Americans allowed to have an opinion on whether that's a good idea?


So far, it's worked out great!


In addition to the sudden appearance of honor killings, clitorectomies, hijabs and massive government frauds, Muslim immigrants have given us: The most devastating terrorist attack in world history, followed by terrorist attacks at Fort Hood, the Boston Marathon, a military recruiting center in Chattanooga, Times Square, Vaughan Foods in Oklahoma, San Bernardino and an Orlando nightclub, among other places.


We've admitted 2 million Muslims just since 9/11 – that’s more than had been admitted before 9/11. If we don't make it 3 million, we're monsters? May we ask how many Muslims Khan's mystery Constitution requires -- or is that out of bounds unless we had a child who died in Iraq?


Apparently, sending out a victim to make their argument was the only option left for the "Make America Muslim!" crowd.


After Trump  somehow got the crazy idea that a presidential candidate was allowed to discuss government policies and proposed a temporary ban on Muslim immigration -- which, by the way, is perfectly constitutional -- the entire media and political class erupted in a sputtering rage.


Conscience of a Nation, Speaker Paul Ryan proclaimed: "That's not who we are." Jeb! Bush made the subtle and clever argument that Trump was "unhinged." Marco Rubio called any pause in Muslim immigration "offensive." ABC News' Jonathan Karl called Trump's plan "outrageous" -- which was way better than MSNBC, where Trump was compared to white supremacists and Nazis.


White House spokesman Josh Earnest said Trump had "disqualifie(d)" himself from "serving as president" for suggesting any slowdown in Muslim immigration. Vice President Joe Biden -- tribune of blue-collar Americans everywhere! -- said that if Trump were the nominee, Hillary would "win in a walk."


Then it turned out Trump's Muslim ban was a huge hit with actual voters. Hillary, who promises to quadruple the number of Syrian "refugees" we bring in, is quite far from winning "in a walk."


So the media and political class had no choice: They had to produce a victim to make their argument, in order to block any response. For their next trick, Democrats plan to produce a little girl whose parents were recently murdered to present their tax plan. (Better make sure they weren't killed by an illegal alien!)


Does anyone know what Khan thinks of gays? How about miniskirts? Alcohol? Because I gather we're going to have to turn all our policies over to him, too. What have you sacrificed, Barney Frank??


Muslim troops accounted for 0.2 percent of all U.S. troop deaths in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Southerners accounted for 38 percent of those killed in Iraq and 47 percent in Afghanistan.


What has South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley "sacrificed" compared to the families of these men? How about Nikki put their flag back up?


The Confederate flag won't lead to thousands of dead and maimed Americans, as Muslim immigration does. The only danger posed by the Confederate flag is that media elites will hold the South in even greater contempt than they already do, assuming that's possible.


But as long as they brought it up, if only people who lost children in our wars may discuss public policy, then only they should vote, not only on how many more Muslim immigrants this country needs, but on all government policies. What has Chuck Todd sacrificed? Have any current members of The New York Times editorial board ever lost a son in war? (Fighting on the American side.)


The inevitable conclusion to the hysteria over Khan is that only those who have worn the uniform and heard shots fired in anger can vote in our elections. Hello, media? Hey -- where'd everybody go?


COPYRIGHT 2016 ANN COULTER
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on August 17, 2016, 01:23:42 PM
The doctor who is all over the news sites - huffington compost then to yahoo news questions Trump's doctors letter.

I question her to some extent.   She is board certified in obgyn AND pain medicine ( or one spot states physical rehab) .  I can tell you that in my experience that 100 % of doctors go into pain medicine for the lucrative money they can make.  It is far more likely she went into that from OB gyn than the other way around though maybe not. 

she lists herself as "sexpert".   I never heard of the field of "sexpert" so that comes off as a self promotional label.  And "Canadian Spice" sounds totally San Fransisco where she appears to be based.

Bottom line she is full of it with an agenda:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jennifer-gunter/im-a-doctor-heres-concerning-trumps-medical-letter_b_11565838.html?
Title: Globalist Control Post-Collapse...
Post by: objectivist1 on August 20, 2016, 06:25:37 AM
How The Globalists Will Attempt To Control Populations Post-Collapse

Wednesday, 17 August 2016   Brandon Smith


There is an interesting disconnect with some people when discussing the concept of global centralization. Naturally, the mind reels in horror at the very idea, because many of us know, deep down at our core, that centralization is the root of tyranny.  We know that when absolute power is granted into the hands of an elite few over the lives of the masses, very bad things happen.  No small group of people has ever shown itself trustworthy, rational, empathic or wise enough to handle such a responsibility.  They ALWAYS screw it up, or, they deliberately take advantage of their extreme position of influence to force a particular ideology on everyone else.

This leads to resistance, resistance leads to sociopolitical crackdown and then great numbers of people are imprisoned, enslaved or even murdered.  This leads to even more resistance until one of two possible outcomes emerges — chaos and revolution or complete totalitarianism and micro-managed collectivism.

There is no way around this eventual conflict.  As long as the centralists continue to pursue total power, men and women will gather to fight them and the situation will escalate.  The only conceivable way that this fight could be defused is if the elites stop doing what they do.  If they suddenly become enlightened and realize the error of their ways, then perhaps we could escape the troubles unscathed.  Or, if those same elites all happen to meet an abrupt end and their influence is neutralized, then the world might have a chance to adjust and adapt in a more organic fashion.

Unfortunately, there are people who refuse to believe that a fight is unavoidable.  They desperately want to believe there is another way, and they will engage in an amazing display of mental gymnastics in order to justify this belief.

First, I think it is important to note that I have always argued that the globalists will eventually fail in their pursuit.  I find that some folks out there misinterpret my position when I outline the strategies of globalists and they assume I am presenting global centralization as a “sine qua non.”  I do not argue that the elites will win the fight, I only argue that there is no way to avoid the fight.

Those that want to know my views on why globalist defeat is a certainty can read my article The Reasons Why The Globalists Are Destined To Lose.

The rhetorical question always arises:  “How could the globalists ever hope to secure dominance over the entire world; isn’t that an impossible task?”

I believe according to my knowledge of history and human psychology that it IS an impossible task, but that is NOT going to stop the globalists from trying.

This is what the cynics just don’t seem to grasp; we are dealing with a group of narcissistic psychopaths organized around a cult ideology and with nearly unlimited resources at their fingertips.  These people think they are rising man-gods, like the Egyptian pharaohs of old.  They cannot be persuaded through superior logic or emotional appeal.  They will not be deterred by mass activism or peaceful redress.  They only understand one thing — the force of arms and the usefulness of lies.

Such people are notorious for taking entire civilizations down with them rather than ceding their thrones.  It is foolish to plan a response to them on the assumption that a fight can be avoided.  When I say that the globalists are “destined to lose,” this is predicated on my understanding that a certain percentage of human beings will always have an inherent capacity for resistance to tyranny.  The globalists will be defeated because there is no way to quantify every single threat to their utopian framework.  As long as people continue to fight them, physically and with information, regardless of the personal cost, their weaknesses will be found and they will fall.

This will not be accomplished, however, without considerable sacrifice.

When I talk about "collapse", I am talking about a process.  Collapse is not an singular event, it is an ongoing series of events.  The U.S. has, for example, been in the middle of a collapse since 2008.  The end of this collapse will come when the final economic bubble propping up our system has burst and the process of rebuilding begins.  The most important questions is, WHO will do the rebuilding?  The globalists with their power agenda, or common people seeking freedom and prosperity?

I have outlined in numerous articles the reality that an ongoing destabilization of large portions of the global economic framework will be used by the elites as leverage to convince the public that greater centralization is necessary, including global economic management through the IMF and BIS, a global currency using the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights as a bridge and global governance through the United Nations or a similar body not yet developed.  This plan is becoming more and more openly discussed by globalists within the mainstream media.  It’s hardly a secret anymore.

Many people will undoubtedly support this centralization out of fear of instability.  That said, many people will also refuse to support it.

Here is how I believe, according to historical precedence and the globalist’s own writings, that they will attempt to assert global centralization post-collapse and enforce compliance.

Resource Management And Distribution

As I point out in many of my articles on the necessity for localism, without ample food, water and shelter self-maintained by groups of like minded citizens, no resistance can be mounted against a centralizing force.  If you cannot supply your own logistics, then you must resort to stealing them from the enemy.  Obviously, it is less risky to supply yourself if possible.

Post-collapse, when rule of law in many places has broken down and resources can no longer be transferred safely from region to region, the name of the game will be control of necessities and the producers of necessities.  This is also used by totalitarians when the danger of unrest is present.  A prime example of this method in action was the Stalinist consolidation of the Soviet Union.

The fact is, successful rebellions in occupied nations tend to grow in rural surroundings.  Cities are often strongholds for totalitarians because they offer more means of surveillance, a more passive population and, once taken over, they are easier to secure and defend.  I call this the “green zone doctrine;” the use of locked down cities as pivot points to launch attacks on rural people.

Stalin used this very model, sending troops from controlled cities to plunder resources from outlying farming communities.  He then stored these supplies for “redistribution;” the people deemed most useful to the regime were fed, the people deemed not useful or potential threats were not fed.  In the end, Stalin killed off many potential rebels simply by denying them food production or food access.

The elites do not need to own every inch of ground in order to launch an effective campaign of martial law.  All they need to do is own key cities through surveillance technology and troop presence, then use these cities as staging grounds to confiscate resources in surrounding areas from people they do not like.  If you think the government would not pursue that kind of tactic in the U.S., I highly suggest you look into Executive Order 13603, signed by Barack Obama in 2012.  This order gives the president authority during a “national emergency” to take any private property or resources if it is deemed “necessary to national defense.”

It should be noted that starvation as a weapon has been extremely useful for the elites in the past.

The Malaysian Model Of Control

If the elites are anything, they are rather predictable.  This is because they have a habit of consistently using strategies that have worked for them before.  In my article When The Elites Wage War On America, This Is How They Will Do It, I examine the writings of Council On Foreign Relations member Max Boot on methods for quelling insurgencies.  In the U.S., insurgency is a given post-collapse.  The only question is whether it will be a large insurgency or a small one.

I do not hold out much hope for most of the rest of the world in terms of generating a useful rebellion.  Most citizens in Europe and Asia are unarmed and untrained.  Any resistance in these regions will be very small and cell structured if it is going to survive.

The methods Max Boot describes tend toward larger threats to the establishment.  Boot mentions specifically the great success by the British in Malaysia from 1948-1960 against highly effective communist guerillas and terrorists.  This success can be attributed to several factors:

1) The British used large-scale concentration camps to separate production centers from rebel influence.  These were massive camps surrounded by barbed wire fences and guard towers, primarily used to house farmers and other workers and their families.  This stopped the guerillas from hiding among the working class and recruiting from them.  This follows the “green zone doctrine” I described above.

2) The British implemented a sophisticated identification system for all Malaysian citizens including fingerprinting.  They then set up numerous checkpoints across the country at which citizens had to produce their paperwork.  Anyone who did not have their papers was held on suspicion of being an insurgent.  The rebels in Malaysia attempted to counter this by forcefully taking over busy buildings and buses, then burning everyone’s IDs.  This would not be a very effective tactic in a digitized world where identification is accomplished through advanced biometrics.

3) Instead of fielding massive lumbering military brigades in a useless effort to cover large stretches of ground, the British used spies and informants to locate rebel strongholds, then sent special forces units in to neutralize them.  Again, they did not need to control every inch of ground; they used military assets wherever the rebels were, then left.  Their goal was not to control a lot of ground, but to kill rebels.  The British used considerable brutality in their efforts, including a mobile gallows that traveled the country, and the public display of rotting corpses to strike fear in the insurgency.

4) The political elites in Britain fought the psychological war by offering promises of peace and prosperity to the Malaysian commoners if they supported the effort against the insurgency.  They did not necessarily need to follow through on these promises, all they needed to do was create a few examples of reward for cooperation, and sell this to the public in a convincing manner.  Once enough of the population was in the hands of the British, the insurgency lost supply resources and also had to worry about informants.

Technology Grid For Tyranny

Malaysia was an example of a competent strategy to uproot insurgents, but there were also many failures and pitfalls.  The elites are trying to mitigate any future unknown quantities when fighting against rebellions through the use of new technologies.

The green zone doctrine could only be successful today with the use of biometric surveillance.  Restriction of movement could be accomplished, but only in cities with extensive surveillance grids.  The insurgents of a post-collapse future would be hard pressed to infiltrate or exfiltrate from a green zone with currently available facial recognition, gait and walk recognition, retina and thumbprint scanning, etc.  Facial recognition has even gone into the realm of thermal imaging; cameras can use the unique heat signature from blood vessels within the human face to identify a person from a relative distance.  Make-up and prosthetics would not counter this.  Thermal masking would be the only solution.

Beyond that, an insurgency would have to be technologically savvy. Cyber warfare would have to be integral to their methodology.  This is not something any other rebellion in history has had to deal with.

An Uneducated And Bumbling Insurgency

The globalist’s strategy to trigger economic and social chaos, then lock down certain regions and offer centralization as a solution to the population, is far easier to accomplish when the opposition they face lacks insight, patience, planning and initiative.

The British were partially successful in Malaysia because the guerillas were ignorant of public perception. While they were effective and ruthless fighters, their viciousness resulted in lack of public support.  Though wide public support is not needed for victory, it certainly helps.

Multiple revolutions against Stalin’s power, some of them very large, were put down because of poor planning.  Rebels massed sizable forces in tight areas, such as a single mountain or mountain ranges.  Stalin simply dropped poisonous gasses on insurgents that had put all their eggs in one basket and forgot to stockpile gas masks.  It is vital to recognize that in a post-collapse world governments and elites may no longer be subject to public scrutiny, and are thus free to act as maliciously as they want.  All contingencies have to be considered.

Rebels in the Soviet Union also had a bad habit of ignoring logistics.  Many were armed with mismatched rifles and a rainbow selection of ammunition instead of arming all their men with the same rifle and the same ammo for redundancy.  Rebellions have been lost in the past merely because the fighters armed with too wide an array of weapons ran out of enough ammo to feed any of them.

Insurgents have also historically suffered from an inability to strike the leadership centers of the empires they fought.  Primarily because they did not know who the real leadership was.  Only in our modern era do we have the information available to identify the elites and their organizations.  Globalists are often very vocal today in media about who they are and what they want.  This is why the elites seek to make the next insurgency the LAST insurgency.  Never before have they been so vulnerable.

I believe the globalists will use their standard strategy of disinformation and division first to acquire centralization, but eventually they will turn to a Stalin/Malaysian model for control on the ground.  I will have to save the specific counter-strategies to these tactics for another article.  Some of them I probably cannot legally discuss at all.  The most important thing to remember, though, is that the globalists’ job is harder than our job.  They have to control people, property, resources, and mass psychology.  They have thousands of variables to take into account, and thousands of situations that could go wrong.

All we have to worry about is our own local organization, our own moral compass, our own survival and removing the top globalists from the picture.

 
Title: Extinction Level Event
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 23, 2016, 05:59:43 PM
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2016/08/a_clinton_presidency_would_be_the_political_equivalent_of_an_extinction_level_event_.html?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=facebook
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on August 23, 2016, 08:13:19 PM
"Still, there are always doubts. But while I may not be 100% sure of what Trump will do, I’m sure as hell sure of Clinton. You don’t have to be Joe Friday to figure out her MO."

Echoing this was Donald Rumsfeld who while stating he is voting for Trump stated the reason was simple, "he is a known unknown while Clinton is a known known".

Title: VDH: Lies
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 31, 2016, 07:42:36 AM
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/439505/hillary-clinton-lies-progressives-look-other-way?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Daily%20Trending%20Email%20Reoccurring-%20Monday%20to%20Thursday%202016-08-30&utm_term=NR5PM%20Actives
Title: re.VDH: Lies 2016, Wm Safire: congenital liar 1996. She had good reasons to lie.
Post by: DougMacG on August 31, 2016, 09:10:43 AM
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/439505/hillary-clinton-lies-progressives-look-other-way?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Daily%20Trending%20Email%20Reoccurring-%20Monday%20to%20Thursday%202016-08-30&utm_term=NR5PM%20Actives

Great article.  All the Hillary supporters I know seem to know there is something wrong with her but the depth and breadth of it is astounding.

Her words are a contrary indicator of truth.  It all brings back memories.  Bill Safire, NY Times nailed it when she was 'First Lady' in Bill Clinton's first term:

http://www.nytimes.com/1996/01/08/opinion/essay-blizzard-of-lies.html

Blizzard of Lies
By WILLIAM SAFIRE
Published: January 8, 1996

Americans of all political persuasions are coming to the sad realization that our First Lady -- a woman of undoubted talents who was a role model for many in her generation -- is a congenital liar.

Drip by drip, like Whitewater torture, the case is being made that she is compelled to mislead, and to ensnare her subordinates and friends in a web of deceit.

1. Remember the story she told about studying The Wall Street Journal to explain her 10,000 percent profit in 1979 commodity trading? We now know that was a lie told to turn aside accusations that as the Governor's wife she profited corruptly, her account being run by a lawyer for state poultry interests through a disreputable broker.

She lied for good reason: To admit otherwise would be to confess taking, and paying taxes on, what some think amounted to a $100,000 bribe.

2. The abuse of Presidential power known as Travelgate elicited another series of lies. She induced a White House lawyer to assert flatly to investigators that Mrs. Clinton did not order the firing of White House travel aides, who were then harassed by the F.B.I. and Justice Department to justify patronage replacement by Mrs. Clinton's cronies.

Now we know, from a memo long concealed from investigators, that there would be "hell to pay" if the furious First Lady's desires were scorned. The career of the lawyer who transmitted Hillary's lie to authorities is now in jeopardy. Again, she lied with good reason: to avoid being identified as a vindictive political power player who used the F.B.I. to ruin the lives of people standing in the way of juicy patronage.

3. In the aftermath of the apparent suicide of her former partner and closest confidant, White House Deputy Counsel Vincent Foster, she ordered the overturn of an agreement to allow the Justice Department to examine the files in the dead man's office. Her closest friends and aides, under oath, have been blatantly disremembering this likely obstruction of justice, and may have to pay for supporting Hillary's lie with jail terms.

Again, the lying was not irrational. Investigators believe that damning records from the Rose Law Firm, wrongfully kept in Vincent Foster's White House office, were spirited out in the dead of night and hidden from the law for two years -- in Hillary's closet, in Web Hubbell's basement before his felony conviction, in the President's secretary's personal files -- before some were forced out last week.

Why the White House concealment? For good reason: The records show Hillary Clinton was lying when she denied actively representing a criminal enterprise known as the Madison S.& L., and indicate she may have conspired with Web Hubbell's father-in-law to make a sham land deal that cost taxpayers $3 million.

Why the belated release of some of the incriminating evidence? Not because it mysteriously turned up in offices previously searched. Certainly not because Hillary Clinton and her new hang-tough White House counsel want to respond fully to lawful subpoenas.

One reason for the Friday-night dribble of evidence from the White House is the discovery by the F.B.I. of copies of some of those records elsewhere. When Clinton witnesses are asked about specific items in "lost" records -- which investigators have -- the White House "finds" its copy and releases it. By concealing the Madison billing records two days beyond the statute of limitations, Hillary evaded a civil suit by bamboozled bank regulators.

Another reason for recent revelations is the imminent turning of former aides and partners of Hillary against her; they were willing to cover her lying when it advanced their careers, but are inclined to listen to their own lawyers when faced with perjury indictments.

Therefore, ask not "Why didn't she just come clean at the beginning?" She had good reasons to lie; she is in the longtime habit of lying; and she has never been called to account for lying herself or in suborning lying in her aides and friends.

No wonder the President is fearful of holding a prime-time press conference. Having been separately deposed by the independent counsel at least twice, the President and First Lady would be well advised to retain separate defense counsel.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on August 31, 2016, 09:58:31 AM
On a cable network this am it was pointed out that 70% think she is dishonest. 
My response is the other 30% know she is too but just don't care.  Or they are just THAT ill informed, but most likely just going to refuse to admit the truth out of spite.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 31, 2016, 10:30:27 AM
The Safire article is great and timely but this is not the thread for it.  Please post in the Clinton thread.
Title: VDH: The More Things Change
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 01, 2016, 11:37:43 PM
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/439568/1966-technology-history-culture-change?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Daily%20Trending%20Email%20Reoccurring-%20Monday%20to%20Thursday%202016-09-01&utm_term=NR5PM%20Actives
Title: Levin site admitting Conservatism has last the battle and probably the war
Post by: ccp on September 03, 2016, 11:59:05 AM
https://www.conservativereview.com/commentary/2016/09/listen-conservative-conscience-ep54-sept2
Title: HuffPo: Smug White Liberals
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 03, 2016, 10:50:48 PM
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nikki-johnsonhuston-esq/the-culture-of-the-smug-w_b_11537306.html
Title: New label that is sticking: "alt-right"
Post by: ccp on September 05, 2016, 11:52:06 AM
As usual we allow the LEFT to establish the label and what it stands for  and  it is not pretty, by design:

"The alt-right has no official ideology, with the Associated Press stating that there is "no one way to define its ideology."[16][17] It has been said to include elements of white nationalism,[1][2][6] white supremacism,[3][5][8] antisemitism,[1][2][9] right-wing populism,[6] nativism,[10] and the neoreactionary movement."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alt-right

Trumps attempts at outreach are good but way to feeble and far between to counter this .   The right loses the propaganda war AGAIN.
Title: The Flight 93 Election
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 05, 2016, 05:22:37 PM
http://www.claremont.org/crb/basicpage/the-flight-93-election/#.V81-TGBriL4.facebook
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on September 06, 2016, 05:56:31 AM
Great piece above CD.

I agree with it 100% except for part of this statement:

"On trade, globalization, and war, Trump is to the left (conventionally understood) not only of his own party, but of his Democratic opponent."

I am not clear why globalization if 'right'.  Perhaps in terms of free markets but definitely not in political terms unless he refers to exporting "democracy" over seas which is a total joke . 

I do like his description of the "never Trump Right" and agree with the conclusion below:

"The election of 2016 is a test—in my view, the final test—of whether there is any virtù left in what used to be the core of the American nation. If they cannot rouse themselves simply to vote for the first candidate in a generation who pledges to advance their interests, and to vote against the one who openly boasts that she will do the opposite (a million more Syrians, anyone?), then they are doomed. They may not deserve the fate that will befall them, but they will suffer it regardless."



Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on September 06, 2016, 08:15:30 AM
Did Hillary put out a "hit" on Putin?   :evil:

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/1735372/putins-official-presidential-car-involved-in-head-on-horror-crash-in-moscow-killing-russian-presidents-favourite-chauffeur/

Notice how this story dropped off the face of the Earth:

http://www.newsweek.com/seth-rich-murder-dnc-hack-julian-assange-hillary-clinton-donald-trump-492084
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 06, 2016, 08:24:10 AM
Gents:

This is not some sort of catch all thread; I've seen a bit of a trend towards this.   For example the previous post belongs in Hillbillary Clintons.  (Fascinating about Putin's driver btw)
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 07, 2016, 12:52:20 PM
Again, this is NOT a catch all thread.

Let's put this superb post in the Corruption thread or the Cognitive Dissonance of the Left thread-- or better yet, in both!
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: DDF on September 07, 2016, 02:00:00 PM
Done deal Guru. My apologies.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 07, 2016, 04:08:53 PM
Excellent posts DDF, I'm just wanting to nip in the bud a tendency to use this as a catch all thread  :-D  You just happened to walk into a pre-existing situation.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: DDF on September 07, 2016, 10:35:35 PM
Excellent posts DDF, I'm just wanting to nip in the bud a tendency to use this as a catch all thread  :-D  You just happened to walk into a pre-existing situation.


Sir. Thank you.
Title: Deep political analysis
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 08, 2016, 10:28:42 PM
https://www.facebook.com/chinofheroes/videos/1765631590325403/?pnref=story
Title: The Way It Is - Lessons Learned by Living in the Third World
Post by: DDF on September 12, 2016, 08:58:45 AM
To anyone that wants to cry about living in the United States:

You know the problem with people like you? The fact that you live in the richest country in the world, and still complain. You have no mass graves, you don't have bodies hanging from bridges, you have hot water heaters, and you think you have it bad living in what you describe as a "racist country" that "oppresses" you, that YOU choose to live in.

The fact that you can complain publicly, without being killed over it, shows you just how good you have it. You get to cry about how life is unfair.... you have running water and you ate today. You have access to the best healthcare in the world, but you're pissed off because someone you think owes you something, didn't let you sit on your ass and hand it to you.

And to the immigrants, you chose to go there, to get away from whatever it was that you didn't like about wherever it is you came from. Be grateful. Others died, attempting to get what you have received. No one owes you anything, they never will. Something else, the country you just went to doesn't have the same laws that you use in your country of origin, where they would maybe beat, if not kill you, for being there illegally, or saying something political, and these are YOUR laws, but you get upset when someone treats you more leniently? You need to learn some gratitude.

My wife and I, have not had a hot water bath, in more than a year, with water that we didn't heat manually, over a fire, because we don't have a water heater, and we're fortunate, because at least we have a way to get hot water. Others are not so fortunate and do not even have running water. They bathe out of a barrel in front of their adobe home, and if they ate, it was tortillas and beans, so miss me with your "we're oppressed" garbage that flows constantly from your mouths, because for whatever reason, you think something should be given to you. You're on welfare and get cellphones and a place to live, where even your poverty, still places you in the top ten percent of wealth in the world.

Your problem is that you don't know or have forgotten what really bad is. You're spoiled. Straight up.
Title: Country is not right of center; it is left of center and getting worse
Post by: ccp on September 22, 2016, 04:51:28 AM
https://www.conservativereview.com/commentary/2016/09/memo-to-gop-never-trumpers
Title: Prager: Left Wing Hysteria
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 12, 2016, 08:04:42 AM
http://www.dennisprager.com/trumps-comments-the-latest-left-wing-hysteria/
Title: Hillary wants ACA to collapse
Post by: ccp on October 18, 2016, 07:50:00 AM
Nothing surprising here.  Most astute people know the ACA was nothing more than a stepping stone for the Left to get to totally socialized single payer health care.  Here we have the confirmation once again that every cynical thought about her is founded in truth.   She is hoping to have the Republicans step in to make it worse and she will jump into the "breech" and save the day with "expanding" Medicare:

http://www.lifezette.com/polizette/wikileaks-hillary-wants-obamacare-unravel/
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 18, 2016, 09:56:52 AM
Wrong thread for that.  It is neither a rant nor an interesting thought piece.

Health Care perhaps?

Title: VDH: Our Neurtron Bomb Election
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 18, 2016, 10:30:34 AM
THIS is what a rant and/or interesting thought piece looks like:

Outstanding rant from VDH!


Our Neutron Bomb Election

The shells of our institutions maybe survive the 2016 campaign, but they will be mere husks.
By Victor Davis Hanson — October 18, 2016

The infamous neutron bomb was designed to melt human flesh without damaging infrastructure. Something like it has blown up lots of people in the 2016 election and left behind empty institutions.

After the current campaign — the maverick Trump candidacy, the Access Hollywood Trump tape, the FBI scandal, the Freedom of Information Act revelations, the WikiLeaks insider scoops on the Clinton campaign, the hacked e-mails, the fraudulent pay-for-play culture of the Clinton Foundation — the nuked political infrastructure may look the same. But almost everyone involved in the election has been neutroned.

In theory, there are nominally still such things as a D.C. establishment, the Republican party, still abstractions known as “fact-checking,” still something in theory called “debate moderators,” still ex-presidents’ “foundations.” But, in fact, after this campaign, these are now mere radiated shells.

Who are the big losers of 2016, besides the two candidates themselves?

The D.C. ‘establishment’ and its ‘elites’

Collate the Podesta e-mails. Read Colin Powell’s hacked communications. Review Hillary’s Wall Street speeches and the electronic exchanges between the media, the administration, and the Clinton campaign. The conclusion is an incestuous world of hypocrisy, tsk-tsking condescension, sanitized shake-downs, inside profiteering, snobby high entertainment — and often crimes that would put anyone else in jail.
The players are also quite boring and predictable.

They live in a confined coastal cocoon. They went largely to the same schools, intermarried, traveled back and forth between big government, big banks, big military, big Wall Street, and big media — and sound quite clever without being especially bright, attuned to social justice but without character. Their religion is not so much progressivism, as appearing cool and hip and “right” on the issues. In this private world, off the record, Latinos are laughed off as “needy”; Catholics are derided as near medieval and in need of progressive tutoring on gay issues. Hillary is deemed a grifter — but only for greedily draining the cash pools of the elite speaker circuit to the detriment of her emulators. Money — Podesta’s Putin oil stocks, Russian autocrats’ huge donations in exchange for deference from the Department of State, Gulf-oil-state-supplied free jet travel, Hillary’s speaking fees — is the lubricant that makes the joints of these rusted people move. A good Ph.D. thesis could chart the number of Washington, D.C., insider flunkies who ended up working for Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac or Goldman Sachs — the dumping grounds of the well-connected and mediocre.

In this world, there are Bill and Hillary, the Podesta brothers, Huma Abedin and Anthony Weiner, Christiane Amanpour and Jamie Rubin, Samantha Power and Cass Sunstein, Andrea Mitchell and Alan Greenspan, and on and on. Jorge Ramos goes after Trump; his daughter works for Hillary; and his boss at Univision badgers the Clinton campaign to stay lax on open borders — the lifeblood that nourishes his non-English-speaking money machine.
George Stephanopoulos, who helped run the Clinton campaign and White House, and who as a debate moderator obsessed over Mitt Romney’s answers to abortion hypotheticals, is the disinterested ABC News chief anchor.

CNN vice president Virginia Moseley is married to Hillary Clinton’s former deputy secretary at the State Department Tom Nides (now of Morgan Stanley) — suggesting “The Clinton News Network” is not really a right-wing joke.

Former ABC News executive producer Ian Cameron is married to Susan Rice, a — pre-Benghazi — regular on the Sunday talk shows.

CBS president David Rhodes is the sibling of aspiring novelist Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national security adviser for “strategic communications and Speechwriting,” whatever that fictive title means.

ABC News correspondent Claire Shipman married former White House press secretary Jay Carney (now senior vice president for “worldwide corporate affairs” at Amazon: not just “corporate affairs” or “worldwide affairs” but “worldwide corporate affairs”). And on and on.

These nice people report on each other. They praise each other, award each other, make money together, and bristle with each other when they are collectively and pejoratively dubbed the “elites.” They write and sound off about the buffoon Trump and preen in sanctimonious moral outrage, as the rest of the country sees this supposedly lavishly robed imperial class as embarrassingly naked. If our version of El Escorial continues, something like the prognathic Habsburg jaw may begin to appear as an elite D.C. marker.

As administration officials go in and out of lucrative banking, foundations, academia, and Wall Street posts, the idea of a permanent New York or Washington “power couple” or “power family” becomes more banal.

Is there a rule somewhere that requires a media kingpin to be married to a political operative or government official or like kind? Can an opinion journalist not be actively involved, whether overtly or stealthily, in an ongoing campaign or married to a consultant who is? Is there a retiring high official who just goes home and calls it quits after his public service? Is Nebraska, Carson City, or Mississippi such an awful place after Chevy Chase, Georgetown, or Dupont Circle?

The Republican Party

What exactly is the Republican party? Has it any coherence or unity or shared ideas?

Is it for legally enforced borders or “let the market adjudicate” free passage of inexpensive labor between countries? Fair or free trade? Assimilation and integration, or identity-politics lite? Cashing in on government service or against emeriti lobbying?

Does it embrace traditional values or a slight slowing of the descent of popular culture? Does it want to reverse big government or ratchet it down somewhat? Is it against $1 trillion deficits, but okay with $500 million ones? Does it believe losing the presidential election nobly is preferable to winning it ugly? Does Obamacare need a tweak or two?

Is it for a Jacksonian, don’t tread-on-me foreign policy, or isolationism, or neocon nation building — all, some, or none?

Are Trump’s private boorishness and crudity worse for Republicans than Clinton’s now quite public corruption and dishonesty?

Atheist free-market conservatives seem to despise Trump’s vulgarity more than do Christian Evangelicals — not necessarily on the grounds that they are less likely to say such Trumpian things in their own private lives than are fundamentalists, but because they find him so very gauche.

No one quite knows what the party will become after Donald Trump sprinted away with the Republican nomination and then discovered that most of the Republican establishment, implicitly and explicitly, would rather lose to Hillary Clinton than win with him.

Many said they quit the Republican party when Trump was nominated, as many perhaps will quietly quit when it returns to normalcy.

After the election, don’t expect a rapid reconciliation. The Trump base, often in nihilistic fashion, does not wish to be part of Paul Ryan’s pragmatic world; and those who identify with the culture of the Wall Street Journaland the Chamber of Commerce have no desire to be seen with the NASCAR and tea-party crowd. For fleeting moments in the primaries a Marco Rubio or Scott Walker posed as a Reaganesque uniter, only to implode under national scrutiny and candidate infighting.

The Presidential ‘Foundation’

The presidential foundation is now a parody of itself.

The Clinton Foundation Syndicate served largely as a sinecure for Clinton hangers-on between elections who were apparently otherwise unemployable. It offered free jet travel for the Clinton family. It oiled pay-for-play donations that would spin off into private speaking and consulting gigs for the insatiable Bill and Hillary. Oil profits — from Russia, the Persian Gulf, and the autocracies of the former Soviet Union — fueled the Clinton cash nexus. (How odd to oppose domestic fracking but to welcome carbon cash from medieval foreign petro-nations.)

Many Republicans damn conservatives who would hold their nose and vote Trump in hopes of saving the Supreme Court or stopping the socialization of the federal government. They should spend a quarter of their time writing about the Clinton Foundation. In the past 50 years, have we ever seen anything quite like the listing of VIP foundation donors by name so they could cash in on Haitian relief contracts to pick over the carcass of a ravaged, impoverished nation — or blatant requests to medieval sheikdoms to send million-dollar presents or free jet service to the ex-president, the message routed by way of his secretary of state spouse? Dick Nixon would not have found a way to enrich himself on the backs of the Haitian refugees or think out loud about assassinating a troublesome political opponent.

There are three models for ex-presidents and their foundations. One is Jimmy Carter’s sanctimonious progressivism — of setting up a quite legitimate “center,” staying active in politics, and assuming a (sometimes tiring) role as senior citizen of the world who globetrots and editorializes on how humanity has disappointed him.

A second is more or less genuine retirement in the fashion of George H. W. and George W. Bush; their respective foundations and libraries are largely apolitical. Neither comments much on contemporary politics, nor do they trash their successors. Painting or sky-diving is preferable to returning to the campaign trail or slicing Obama.

The third is the Bill/Hillary Clinton paradigm of non-stop electioneering, tawdry enrichment, and massaging the office of president emeritus and a presidential foundation to feather one’s nest.

Barack Obama will choose one of these three models, but it is likely that the most lucrative Clinton paradigm is now utterly discredited.

‘Fact-checking’

Few any longer believe in fact-checking, largely because it was exposed as an arm of progressive campaigns.

The embarrassing recent statements of Dean Baquet, executive editor of the New York Times, were a frightening synopsis of rank bias defined up as disinterested audit. So were the obsequious check-ins by toady journalists with the Clinton campaign to remind Podesta, Inc. of their own lack of ethics.
Fact-checkers inordinately go after conservatives. Or they make up rules about what constitute “facts” as they go along, providing context and supposed noble intent to water down progressive inaccuracies. Or they use adverbs like “mostly” to suggest that false liberal assertions are “mostly” true and other accurate statements of non-liberals are “mostly” false. Fact-checking is postmodern truth that depends on who says something and for what purpose.
When Hillary Clinton in the second debate directed the audience to her own website to “fact-check” Trump, we came full circle from naiveté to farce.
Fact-checking might have been a neutral concept, not inherently better or worse than the original “facts” themselves — given that it is entirely predicated on the character and ability of those who fact-check (who, as we see from WikiLeaks, can be just as sanctimonious and deceitful as the politicians they audit). Fact-checking in the age of the Internet arena will go the way of America Online or Myspace.

Debate Moderators

There are no such persons any longer as “debate moderators.” The enterprise has devolved into artifice, in which the moderator is supposed to argue with the conservative candidate, “fact-check” him or her in mediis rebus, while being deferential to the like-minded progressive candidate.

Debate moderators follow assumed premises: an Anderson Cooper, Candy Crawley, Lester Holt, or Martha Raddatz envision themselves as crusaders hammering away at selfish and dangerous conservatives, in behalf of an ignorant audience that needs their enlightened help to avoid being duped. In a few of the worst cases, a scheduled debate question is leaked to the liberal candidate to ensure she is not embarrassed.

If a conservative candidate seems to have tied his opponent, the liberal moderator — witness a Matt Lauer — is considered a sell-out, soon to be shunned by the right people. Most are thus deterred from moderating “incorrectly.”

After 2016, we should either let the candidates go at it, or, better yet, let robot time keepers run things.

The 2016 campaign is not quite over, and there are a few neutron bombs left to go off — but for many of our accustomed fixtures it is too late. They are nuked, and nothing remains but their shells.


— Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author, most recently, of The Savior Generals.
Title: Millenials vs. Mutant Capitalism
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 20, 2016, 02:26:02 PM
This is an example of a thought piece:

Millennials vs. Mutant Capitalism
This generation is skeptical of America’s economic system. No wonder.
By Christopher Koopman
Oct. 18, 2016 7:03 p.m. ET


About 70 million millennials will be eligible to vote in this year’s presidential election, according to Pew Research Center. How my generation votes matters more than ever—which makes the results of an April Harvard Institute of Politics survey seem very troubling. About a third of Americans ages 18-29 support socialism, while not even half back capitalism. College graduates view capitalism more favorably, but these still don’t appear to be encouraging numbers.

Analyzing similar data in February, pollster Frank Luntz wrote that “the hostility of young Americans to the underpinnings of the American economy and the American government ought to frighten every business and political leader.” There’s only one problem with this pessimism about millennials: As a generation, we don’t really know what we believe.

Clear majorities of millennials—whether they’re Bernie Bros, Trumpians or die-hard libertarians—point to the economy as their top issue. This shouldn’t be surprising. Most of us entered adulthood during the Great Recession and tried to find work in its aftermath. This harrowing experience left millions preoccupied with economic issues and convinced that the system is rigged against them.

Does this mean millennials have come to disdain capitalism? Not exactly. We might call it “capitalism” in opinion surveys, but in reality young people are rejecting a system that they have only been led to believe is capitalism.

For many, capitalism isn’t about free enterprise, nor is it about the startups and innovation. When they hear the term, millennials think about Wall Street bailouts, corporate greed, political scandals and tax codes riddled with loopholes for the wealthy and connected. Yet this has little to do with what equal-opportunity capitalism actually is: A system providing all Americans with a chance to use their unique skills to create a business with free access to different markets and customers.

Strip away the titles of “capitalism” and “socialism,” and the responses become drastically different. A 2015 Reason-Rupe poll found that college-aged respondents are far more supportive of a “free-market system” (72%) than they are of a “government-managed economy” (49%). In reality, millennials—regardless of party or ideology—have arrived at a surprising consensus: We support free markets, are very much unhappy with the current state of affairs, and are still looking for change.

This is good news, but it should also serve as a warning. Perhaps at no time in history has it been more important to differentiate genuine capitalism from the mutant system that has dominated economic policy over the last decade. Yet Mr. Luntz’s analysis is still absolutely right: Millennials are hostile to the underpinnings of the American economy. We simply shouldn’t confuse that economy with capitalism.

Mr. Koopman is a fellow with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.
Title: Mark Steyn: Live Free or Die
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 22, 2016, 06:09:06 AM
April 2009
Mark Steyn

 
Live Free or Die
 
MARK STEYN'S column appears in several newspapers, including the Washington Times, Philadelphia's Evening Bulletin, and the Orange County Register. In addition, he writes for The New Criterion, Maclean's in Canada, the Jerusalem Post, The Australian, and Hawke's Bay Today in New Zealand. The author of National Review's Happy Warrior column, he also blogs on National Review Online. He is the author of several books, including the best-selling America Alone: The End of The World as We Know It. Mr. Steyn teaches a two-week course in journalism at Hillsdale College during each spring semester.

The following is adapted from a lecture delivered at Hillsdale College on March 9, 2009.

 

MY REMARKS are titled tonight after the words of General Stark, New Hampshire's great hero of the Revolutionary War: "Live free or die!" When I first moved to New Hampshire, where this appears on our license plates, I assumed General Stark had said it before some battle or other—a bit of red meat to rally the boys for the charge; a touch of the old Henry V-at-Agincourt routine. But I soon discovered that the general had made his famous statement decades after the war, in a letter regretting that he would be unable to attend a dinner. And in a curious way I found that even more impressive. In extreme circumstances, many people can rouse themselves to rediscover the primal impulses: The brave men on Flight 93 did. They took off on what they thought was a routine business trip, and, when they realized it wasn't, they went into General Stark mode and cried "Let's roll!" But it's harder to maintain the "Live free or die!" spirit when you're facing not an immediate crisis but just a slow, remorseless, incremental, unceasing ratchet effect. "Live free or die!" sounds like a battle cry: We'll win this thing or die trying, die an honorable death. But in fact it's something far less dramatic: It's a bald statement of the reality of our lives in the prosperous West. You can live as free men, but, if you choose not to, your society will die.

My book America Alone is often assumed to be about radical Islam, firebreathing imams, the excitable young men jumping up and down in the street doing the old "Death to the Great Satan" dance. It's not. It's about us. It's about a possibly terminal manifestation of an old civilizational temptation: Indolence, as Machiavelli understood, is the greatest enemy of a republic. When I ran into trouble with the so-called "human rights" commissions up in Canada, it seemed bizarre to find the progressive left making common cause with radical Islam. One half of the alliance profess to be pro-gay, pro-feminist secularists; the other half are homophobic, misogynist theocrats. Even as the cheap bus 'n' truck road-tour version of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, it made no sense. But in fact what they have in common overrides their superficially more obvious incompatibilities: Both the secular Big Government progressives and political Islam recoil from the concept of the citizen, of the free individual entrusted to operate within his own societal space, assume his responsibilities, and exploit his potential.

In most of the developed world, the state has gradually annexed all the responsibilities of adulthood—health care, child care, care of the elderly—to the point where it's effectively severed its citizens from humanity's primal instincts, not least the survival instinct. Hillary Rodham Clinton said it takes a village to raise a child. It's supposedly an African proverb—there is no record of anyone in Africa ever using this proverb, but let that pass. P.J. O'Rourke summed up that book superbly: It takes a village to raise a child. The government is the village, and you're the child. Oh, and by the way, even if it did take a village to raise a child, I wouldn't want it to be an African village. If you fly over West Africa at night, the lights form one giant coastal megalopolis: Not even Africans regard the African village as a useful societal model. But nor is the European village. Europe's addiction to big government, unaffordable entitlements, cradle-to-grave welfare, and a dependence on mass immigration needed to sustain it has become an existential threat to some of the oldest nation-states in the world.

And now the last holdout, the United States, is embarking on the same grim path: After the President unveiled his budget, I heard Americans complain, oh, it's another Jimmy Carter, or LBJ's Great Society, or the new New Deal. You should be so lucky. Those nickel-and-dime comparisons barely begin to encompass the wholesale Europeanization that's underway. The 44th president's multi-trillion-dollar budget, the first of many, adds more to the national debt than all the previous 43 presidents combined, from George Washington to George Dubya. The President wants Europeanized health care, Europeanized daycare, Europeanized education, and, as the Europeans have discovered, even with Europeanized tax rates you can't make that math add up. In Sweden, state spending accounts for 54% of GDP. In America, it was 34%—ten years ago. Today, it's about 40%. In four years' time, that number will be trending very Swede-like.

But forget the money, the deficit, the debt, the big numbers with the 12 zeroes on the end of them. So-called fiscal conservatives often miss the point. The problem isn't the cost. These programs would still be wrong even if Bill Gates wrote a check to cover them each month. They're wrong because they deform the relationship between the citizen and the state. Even if there were no financial consequences, the moral and even spiritual consequences would still be fatal. That's the stage where Europe is.

America is just beginning this process. I looked at the rankings in Freedom in the 50 States published by George Mason University last month. New Hampshire came in Number One, the Freest State in the Nation, which all but certainly makes it the freest jurisdiction in the Western world. Which kind of depressed me. Because the Granite State feels less free to me than it did when I moved there, and you always hope there's somewhere else out there just in case things go belly up and you have to hit the road. And way down at the bottom in the last five places were Maryland, California, Rhode Island, New Jersey, and the least free state in the Union by some distance, New York.

New York! How does the song go? "If you can make it there, you'll make it anywhere!" If you can make it there, you're some kind of genius. "This is the worst fiscal downturn since the Great Depression," announced Governor Paterson a few weeks ago. So what's he doing? He's bringing in the biggest tax hike in New York history. If you can make it there, he can take it there—via state tax, sales tax, municipal tax, a doubled beer tax, a tax on clothing, a tax on cab rides, an "iTunes tax," a tax on haircuts, 137 new tax hikes in all. Call 1-800-I-HEART-NEW-YORK today and order your new package of state tax forms, for just $199.99, plus the 12% tax on tax forms and the 4% tax form application fee partially refundable upon payment of the 7.5% tax filing tax. If you can make it there, you'll certainly have no difficulty making it in Tajikistan.

New York, California... These are the great iconic American states, the ones we foreigners have heard of. To a penniless immigrant called Arnold Schwarzenegger, California was a land of plenty. Now Arnold is an immigrant of plenty in a penniless land: That's not an improvement. One of his predecessors as governor of California, Ronald Reagan, famously said, "We are a nation that has a government, not the other way around." In California, it's now the other way around: California is increasingly a government that has a state. And it is still in the early stages of the process. California has thirtysomething million people. The Province of Quebec has seven million people. Yet California and Quebec have roughly the same number of government workers. "There is a great deal of ruin in a nation," said Adam Smith, and America still has a long way to go. But it's better to jump off the train as you're leaving the station and it's still picking up speed than when it's roaring down the track and you realize you've got a one-way ticket on the Oblivion Express.

"Indolence," in Machiavelli's word: There are stages to the enervation of free peoples. America, which held out against the trend, is now at Stage One: The benign paternalist state promises to make all those worries about mortgages, debt, and health care disappear. Every night of the week, you can switch on the TV and see one of these ersatz "town meetings" in which freeborn citizens of the republic (I use the term loosely) petition the Sovereign to make all the bad stuff go away. "I have an urgent need," a lady in Fort Myers beseeched the President. "We need a home, our own kitchen, our own bathroom." He took her name and ordered his staff to meet with her. Hopefully, he didn't insult her by dispatching some no-name deputy assistant associate secretary of whatever instead of flying in one of the bigtime tax-avoiding cabinet honchos to nationalize a Florida bank and convert one of its branches into a desirable family residence, with a swing set hanging where the drive-thru ATM used to be.

As all of you know, Hillsdale College takes no federal or state monies. That used to make it an anomaly in American education. It's in danger of becoming an anomaly in America, period. Maybe it's time for Hillsdale College to launch the Hillsdale Insurance Agency, the Hillsdale Motor Company and the First National Bank of Hillsdale. The executive supremo at Bank of America is now saying, oh, if only he'd known what he knows now, he wouldn't have taken the government money. Apparently it comes with strings attached. Who knew? Sure, Hillsdale College did, but nobody else.

If you're a business, when government gives you 2% of your income, it has a veto on 100% of what you do. If you're an individual, the impact is even starker. Once you have government health care, it can be used to justify almost any restraint on freedom: After all, if the state has to cure you, it surely has an interest in preventing you needing treatment in the first place. That's the argument behind, for example, mandatory motorcycle helmets, or the creepy teams of government nutritionists currently going door to door in Britain and conducting a "health audit" of the contents of your refrigerator. They're not yet confiscating your Twinkies; they just want to take a census of how many you have. So you do all this for the "free" health care—and in the end you may not get the "free" health care anyway. Under Britain's National Health Service, for example, smokers in Manchester have been denied treatment for heart disease, and the obese in Suffolk are refused hip and knee replacements. Patricia Hewitt, the British Health Secretary, says that it's appropriate to decline treatment on the basis of "lifestyle choices." Smokers and the obese may look at their gay neighbor having unprotected sex with multiple partners, and wonder why his "lifestyle choices" get a pass while theirs don't. But that's the point: Tyranny is always whimsical.

And if they can't get you on grounds of your personal health, they'll do it on grounds of planetary health. Not so long ago in Britain it was proposed that each citizen should have a government-approved travel allowance. If you take one flight a year, you'll pay just the standard amount of tax on the journey. But, if you travel more frequently, if you take a second or third flight, you'll be subject to additional levies—in the interest of saving the planet for Al Gore's polar bear documentaries and that carbon-offset palace he lives in in Tennessee.

Isn't this the very definition of totalitarianism-lite? The Soviets restricted the movement of people through the bureaucratic apparatus of "exit visas." The British are proposing to do it through the bureaucratic apparatus of exit taxes—indeed, the bluntest form of regressive taxation. As with the Communists, the nomenklatura—the Prince of Wales, Al Gore, Madonna—will still be able to jet about hither and yon. What's a 20% surcharge to them? Especially as those for whom vast amounts of air travel are deemed essential—government officials, heads of NGOs, environmental activists—will no doubt be exempted from having to pay the extra amount. But the ghastly masses will have to stay home.

"Freedom of movement" used to be regarded as a bedrock freedom. The movement is still free, but there's now a government processing fee of $389.95. And the interesting thing about this proposal was that it came not from the Labour Party but the Conservative Party.

====================

That's Stage Two of societal enervation—when the state as guarantor of all your basic needs becomes increasingly comfortable with regulating your behavior. Free peoples who were once willing to give their lives for liberty can be persuaded very quickly to relinquish their liberties for a quiet life. When President Bush talked about promoting democracy in the Middle East, there was a phrase he liked to use: "Freedom is the desire of every human heart." Really? It's unclear whether that's really the case in Gaza and the Pakistani tribal lands. But it's absolutely certain that it's not the case in Berlin and Paris, Stockholm and London, New Orleans and Buffalo. The story of the Western world since 1945 is that, invited to choose between freedom and government "security," large numbers of people vote to dump freedom every time—the freedom to make your own decisions about health care, education, property rights, and a ton of other stuff. It's ridiculous for grown men and women to say: I want to be able to choose from hundreds of cereals at the supermarket, thousands of movies from Netflix, millions of songs to play on my iPod—but I want the government to choose for me when it comes to my health care. A nation that demands the government take care of all the grown-up stuff is a nation turning into the world's wrinkliest adolescent, free only to choose its record collection.

And don't be too sure you'll get to choose your record collection in the end. That's Stage Three: When the populace has agreed to become wards of the state, it's a mere difference of degree to start regulating their thoughts. When my anglophone friends in the Province of Quebec used to complain about the lack of English signs in Quebec hospitals, my response was that, if you allow the government to be the sole provider of health care, why be surprised that they're allowed to decide the language they'll give it in? But, as I've learned during my year in the hellhole of Canadian "human rights" law, that's true in a broader sense. In the interests of "cultural protection," the Canadian state keeps foreign newspaper owners, foreign TV operators, and foreign bookstore owners out of Canada. Why shouldn't it, in return, assume the right to police the ideas disseminated through those newspapers, bookstores and TV networks it graciously agrees to permit?

When Maclean's magazine and I were hauled up in 2007 for the crime of "flagrant Islamophobia," it quickly became very clear that, for members of a profession that brags about its "courage" incessantly (far more than, say, firemen do), an awful lot of journalists are quite content to be the eunuchs in the politically correct harem. A distressing number of Western journalists see no conflict between attending lunches for World Press Freedom Day every month and agreeing to be micro-regulated by the state. The big problem for those of us arguing for classical liberalism is that in modern Canada there's hardly anything left that isn't on the state dripfeed to one degree or another: Too many of the institutions healthy societies traditionally look to as outposts of independent thought—churches, private schools, literature, the arts, the media—either have an ambiguous relationship with government or are downright dependent on it. Up north, "intellectual freedom" means the relevant film-funding agency—Cinedole Canada or whatever it's called—gives you a check to enable you to continue making so-called "bold, brave, transgressive" films that discombobulate state power not a whit.

And then comes Stage Four, in which dissenting ideas and even words are labeled as "hatred." In effect, the language itself becomes a means of control. Despite the smiley-face banalities, the tyranny becomes more naked: In Britain, a land with rampant property crime, undercover constables nevertheless find time to dine at curry restaurants on Friday nights to monitor adjoining tables lest someone in private conversation should make a racist remark. An author interviewed on BBC Radio expressed, very mildly and politely, some concerns about gay adoption and was investigated by Scotland Yard's Community Safety Unit for Homophobic, Racist and Domestic Incidents. A Daily Telegraph columnist is arrested and detained in a jail cell over a joke in a speech. A Dutch legislator is invited to speak at the Palace of Westminster by a member of the House of Lords, but is banned by the government, arrested on arrival at Heathrow and deported.

America, Britain, and even Canada are not peripheral nations: They're the three anglophone members of the G7. They're three of a handful of countries that were on the right side of all the great conflicts of the last century. But individual liberty flickers dimmer in each of them. The massive expansion of government under the laughable euphemism of "stimulus" (Stage One) comes with a quid pro quo down the line (Stage Two): Once you accept you're a child in the government nursery, why shouldn't Nanny tell you what to do? And then—Stage Three—what to think? And—Stage Four—what you're forbidden to think . . . .

Which brings us to the final stage: As I said at the beginning, Big Government isn't about the money. It's more profound than that. A couple of years back Paul Krugman wrote a column in The New York Times asserting that, while parochial American conservatives drone on about "family values," the Europeans live it, enacting policies that are more "family friendly." On the Continent, claims the professor, "government regulations actually allow people to make a desirable tradeoff-to modestly lower income in return for more time with friends and family."

As befits a distinguished economist, Professor Krugman failed to notice that for a continent of "family friendly" policies, Europe is remarkably short of families. While America's fertility rate is more or less at replacement level—2.1—seventeen European nations are at what demographers call "lowest-low" fertility—1.3 or less—a rate from which no society in human history has ever recovered. Germans, Spaniards, Italians and Greeks have upside-down family trees: four grandparents have two children and one grandchild. How can an economist analyze "family friendly" policies without noticing that the upshot of these policies is that nobody has any families?

As for all that extra time, what happened? Europeans work fewer hours than Americans, they don't have to pay for their own health care, they're post-Christian so they don't go to church, they don't marry and they don't have kids to take to school and basketball and the 4-H stand at the county fair. So what do they do with all the time?

Forget for the moment Europe's lack of world-beating companies: They regard capitalism as an Anglo-American fetish, and they mostly despise it. But what about the things Europeans supposedly value? With so much free time, where is the great European art? Where are Europe's men of science? At American universities. Meanwhile, Continental governments pour fortunes into prestigious white elephants of Euro-identity, like the Airbus A380, capable of carrying 500, 800, a thousand passengers at a time, if only somebody somewhere would order the darn thing, which they might consider doing once all the airports have built new runways to handle it.

"Give people plenty and security, and they will fall into spiritual torpor," wrote Charles Murray in In Our Hands. "When life becomes an extended picnic, with nothing of importance to do, ideas of greatness become an irritant. Such is the nature of the Europe syndrome."

The key word here is "give." When the state "gives" you plenty—when it takes care of your health, takes cares of your kids, takes care of your elderly parents, takes care of every primary responsibility of adulthood—it's not surprising that the citizenry cease to function as adults: Life becomes a kind of extended adolescence—literally so for those Germans who've mastered the knack of staying in education till they're 34 and taking early retirement at 42. Hilaire Belloc, incidentally, foresaw this very clearly in his book The Servile State in 1912. He understood that the long-term cost of a welfare society is the infantilization of the population.

Genteel decline can be very agreeable—initially: You still have terrific restaurants, beautiful buildings, a great opera house. And once the pressure's off it's nice to linger at the sidewalk table, have a second café au lait and a pain au chocolat, and watch the world go by. At the Munich Security Conference in February, President Sarkozy demanded of his fellow Continentals, "Does Europe want peace, or do we want to be left in peace?" To pose the question is to answer it. Alas, it only works for a generation or two. And it's hard to come up with a wake-up call for a society as dedicated as latterday Europe to the belief that life is about sleeping in.

As Gerald Ford liked to say when trying to ingratiate himself with conservative audiences, "A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you have." And that's true. But there's an intermediate stage: A government big enough to give you everything you want isn't big enough to get you to give any of it back. That's the position European governments find themselves in. Their citizens have become hooked on unaffordable levels of social programs which in the end will put those countries out of business. Just to get the Social Security debate in perspective, projected public pension liabilities are expected to rise by 2040 to about 6.8% of GDP in the U.S. In Greece, the figure is 25%—i.e., total societal collapse. So what? shrug the voters. Not my problem. I want my benefits. The crisis isn't the lack of money, but the lack of citizens—in the meaningful sense of that word.

Every Democrat running for election tells you they want to do this or that "for the children." If America really wanted to do something "for the children," it could try not to make the same mistake as most of the rest of the Western world and avoid bequeathing the next generation a leviathan of bloated bureaucracy and unsustainable entitlements that turns the entire nation into a giant Ponzi scheme. That's the real "war on children" (to use another Democrat catchphrase)—and every time you bulk up the budget you make it less and less likely they'll win it.

Conservatives often talk about "small government," which, in a sense, is framing the issue in leftist terms: they're for big government. But small government gives you big freedoms—and big government leaves you with very little freedom. The bailout and the stimulus and the budget and the trillion-dollar deficits are not merely massive transfers from the most dynamic and productive sector to the least dynamic and productive. When governments annex a huge chunk of the economy, they also annex a huge chunk of individual liberty. You fundamentally change the relationship between the citizen and the state into something closer to that of junkie and pusher—and you make it very difficult ever to change back. Americans face a choice: They can rediscover the animating principles of the American idea—of limited government, a self-reliant citizenry, and the opportunities to exploit your talents to the fullest—or they can join most of the rest of the Western world in terminal decline. To rekindle the spark of liberty once it dies is very difficult. The inertia, the ennui, the fatalism is more pathetic than the demographic decline and fiscal profligacy of the social democratic state, because it's subtler and less tangible. But once in a while it swims into very sharp focus. Here is the writer Oscar van den Boogaard from an interview with the Belgian paper De Standaard. Mr. van den Boogaard, a Dutch gay "humanist" (which is pretty much the trifecta of Eurocool), was reflecting on the accelerating Islamification of the Continent and concluding that the jig was up for the Europe he loved. "I am not a warrior, but who is?" he shrugged. "I have never learned to fight for my freedom. I was only good at enjoying it." In the famous Kubler-Ross five stages of grief, Mr. van den Boogard is past denial, anger, bargaining and depression, and has arrived at a kind of acceptance.

"I have never learned to fight for my freedom. I was only good at enjoying it." Sorry, doesn't work—not for long. Back in New Hampshire, General Stark knew that. Mr. van den Boogard's words are an epitaph for Europe. Whereas New Hampshire's motto—"Live free or die!"—is still the greatest rallying cry for this state or any other. About a year ago, there was a picture in the papers of Iranian students demonstrating in Tehran and waving placards. And what they'd written on those placards was: "Live free or die!" They understand the power of those words; so should we.
Title: Right vs Left
Post by: DDF on November 12, 2016, 12:54:02 PM

The problem in the world today, isn't liberal or conservative.

It isn't even White, Black or Latino, due to the fact that even in primarily mono ethnic countries, these problems still persist.

It is the fact that doctors, lawyers, and politicians make more than farmers, construction workers, machinists, police and soldiers, and are respected more than the latter.

If anything, the latter should make more. Try living without them.

Most people want the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, and there's nothing wrong with that, their political views being nothing other than their personal belief on how to achieve that for themselves or others.

Given the hard, manual labor involved with farming, machining, or construction, the financial reward should be larger than having a warm office and manicures, in order to attract people to the industries that are necessary for survival.

People have grown soft, and want the world, for having studied, but never having worked on a farm.

That is the truth of it.
Title: Re: Right vs Left
Post by: G M on November 12, 2016, 01:16:15 PM
AI is already cutting into legal work. In 20 years, human lawyers will be for courtrooms only.

http://www.cnbc.com/2016/05/12/the-future-of-the-legal-system-artificial-intelligence.html



The problem in the world today, isn't liberal or conservative.

It isn't even White, Black or Latino, due to the fact that even in primarily mono ethnic countries, these problems still persist.

It is the fact that doctors, lawyers, and politicians make more than farmers, construction workers, machinists, police and soldiers, and are respected more than the latter.

If anything, the latter should make more. Try living without them.

Most people want the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, and there's nothing wrong with that, their political views being nothing other than their personal belief on how to achieve that for themselves or others.

Given the hard, manual labor involved with farming, machining, or construction, the financial reward should be larger than having a warm office and manicures, in order to attract people to the industries that are necessary for survival.

People have grown soft, and want the world, for having studied, but never having worked on a farm.

That is the truth of it.
Title: Embrace the Suck
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 18, 2016, 08:46:04 AM
http://www.inc.com/chris-dessi/how-to-get-comfortable-with-being-uncomfortable-according-to-a-green-beret.html
Title: You are still crying wolf
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 20, 2016, 12:00:24 AM
http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/16/you-are-still-crying-wolf/
Title: Message from American Infantryman
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 20, 2016, 12:01:05 AM
second post

https://www.gruntworks11b.com/war-room/a-message-to-the-angry-leftists-from-an-american-infantryman/
Title: From 2003: Feminism AWOL on Islam
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 20, 2016, 11:03:35 PM
Why Feminism Is AWOL on Islam
Kay S. Hymowitz
 

U.S. feminists should be protesting the brutal oppression of Middle Eastern women. But doing so would reveal how little they have to complain about at home.

Argue all you want with many feminist policies, but few quarrel with feminism?s core moral insight, which changed the lives (and minds) of women forever: that women are due the same rights and dignity as men. So, as news of the appalling miseries of women in the Islamic world has piled up, where are the feminists? Where?s the outrage? For a brief moment after September 11, when pictures of those blue alien-creaturely shapes in Afghanistan filled the papers, it seemed as if feminists were going to have their moment. And in fact the Feminist Majority, to its credit, had been publicizing since the mid-90s how Afghan girls were barred from school, how women were stoned for adultery or beaten for showing an ankle or wearing high-heeled shoes, how they were prohibited from leaving the house unless accompanied by a male relative, how they were denied medical help because the only doctors around were male.

But the rest is feminist silence. You haven?t heard a peep from feminists as it has grown clear that the Taliban were exceptional not in their extreme views about women but in their success at embodying those views in law and practice. In the United Arab Emirates, husbands have the right to beat their wives in order to discipline them??provided that the beating is not so severe as to damage her bones or deform her body,? in the words of the Gulf News. In Saudi Arabia, women cannot vote, drive, or show their faces or talk with male non-relatives in public. (Evidently they can?t talk to men over the airwaves either; when Prince Abdullah went to President Bush?s ranch in Crawford last April, he insisted that no female air-traffic controllers handle his flight.) Yes, Saudi girls can go to school, and many even attend the university; but at the university, women must sit in segregated rooms and watch their professors on closed-circuit televisions. If they have a question, they push a button on their desk, which turns on a light at the professor?s lectern, from which he can answer the female without being in her dangerous presence. And in Saudi Arabia, education can be harmful to female health. Last spring in Mecca, members of the mutaween, the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue, pushed fleeing students back into their burning school because they were not properly covered in abaya. Fifteen girls died.

You didn?t hear much from feminists when in the northern Nigerian province of Katsina a Muslim court sentenced a woman to death by stoning for having a child outside of marriage. The case might not have earned much attention?stonings are common in parts of the Muslim world?except that the young woman, who had been married off at 14 to a husband who ultimately divorced her when she lost her virginal allure, was still nursing a baby at the time of sentencing. During her trial she had no lawyer, although the court did see fit to delay her execution until she weans her infant.

You didn?t hear much from feminists as it emerged that honor killings by relatives, often either ignored or only lightly punished by authorities, are also commonplace in the Muslim world. In September, Reuters reported the story of an Iranian man, ?defending my honor, family, and dignity,? who cut off his seven-year-old daughter?s head after suspecting she had been raped by her uncle. The postmortem showed the girl to be a virgin. In another family mix-up, a Yemeni man shot his daughter to death on her wedding night when her husband claimed she was not a virgin. After a medical exam revealed that the husband was mistaken, officials concluded he was simply trying to protect himself from embarrassment about his own impotence. According to the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, every day two women are slain by male relatives seeking to avenge the family honor.

The savagery of some of these murders is worth a moment?s pause. In 2000, two Punjabi sisters, 20 and 21 years old, had their throats slit by their brother and cousin because the girls were seen talking to two boys to whom they were not related. In one especially notorious case, an Egyptian woman named Nora Marzouk Ahmed fell in love and eloped. When she went to make amends with her father, he cut off her head and paraded it down the street. Several years back, according to the Washington Post, the husband of Zahida Perveen, a 32-year-old pregnant Pakistani, gouged out her eyes and sliced off her earlobe and nose because he suspected her of having an affair.

In a related example widely covered last summer, a teenage girl in the Punjab was sentenced by a tribal council to rape by a gang that included one of the councilmen. After the hour-and-a-half ordeal, the girl was forced to walk home naked in front of scores of onlookers. She had been punished because her 11-year-old brother had compromised another girl by being been seen alone with her. But that charge turned out to be a ruse: it seems that three men of a neighboring tribe had sodomized the boy and accused him of illicit relations?an accusation leading to his sister?s barbaric punishment?as a way of covering up their crime.

Nor is such brutality limited to backward, out-of-the-way villages. Muddassir Rizvi, a Pakistani journalist, says that, though always common in rural areas, in recent years honor killings have become more prevalent in cities ?among educated and liberal families.? In relatively modern Jordan, honor killings were all but exempt from punishment until the penal code was modified last year; unfortunately, a young Palestinian living in Jordan, who had recently stabbed his 19-year-old sister 40 times ?to cleanse the family honor,? and another man from near Amman, who ran over his 23-year-old sister with his truck because of her ?immoral behavior,? had not yet changed their ways. British psychiatrist Anthony Daniels reports that British Muslim men frequently spirit their young daughters back to their native Pakistan and force the girls to marry. Such fathers have been known to kill daughters who resist. In Sweden, in one highly publicized case, Fadima Sahindal, an assimilated 26-year-old of Kurdish origin, was murdered by her father after she began living with her Swedish boyfriend. ?The whore is dead,? the family announced.

As you look at this inventory of brutality, the question bears repeating: Where are the demonstrations, the articles, the petitions, the resolutions, the vindications of the rights of Islamic women by American feminists? The weird fact is that, even after the excesses of the Taliban did more to forge an American consensus about women?s rights than 30 years of speeches by Gloria Steinem, feminists refused to touch this subject. They have averted their eyes from the harsh, blatant oppression of millions of women, even while they have continued to stare into the Western patriarchal abyss, indignant over female executives who cannot join an exclusive golf club and college women who do not have their own lacrosse teams.

But look more deeply into the matter, and you realize that the sound of feminist silence about the savage fundamentalist Muslim oppression of women has its own perverse logic. The silence is a direct outgrowth of the way feminist theory has developed in recent years. Now mired in self-righteous sentimentalism, multicultural nonjudgmentalism, and internationalist utopianism, feminism has lost the language to make the universalist moral claims of equal dignity and individual freedom that once rendered it so compelling. No wonder that most Americans, trying to deal with the realities of a post-9/11 world, are paying feminists no mind.

To understand the current sisterly silence about the sort of tyranny that the women?s movement came into existence to attack, it is helpful to think of feminisms plural rather than singular. Though not entirely discrete philosophies, each of three different feminisms has its own distinct reasons for causing activists to ?lose their voice? in the face of women?s oppression.

The first variety?radical feminism (or gender feminism, in Christina Hoff Sommers?s term)?starts with the insight that men are, not to put too fine a point upon it, brutes. Radical feminists do not simply subscribe to the reasonable-enough notion that men are naturally more prone to aggression than women. They believe that maleness is a kind of original sin. Masculinity explains child abuse, marital strife, high defense spending, every war from Troy to Afghanistan, as well as Hitler, Franco, and Pinochet. As Gloria Steinem informed the audience at a Florida fundraiser last March: ?The cult of masculinity is the basis for every violent, fascist regime.?

Gender feminists are little interested in fine distinctions between radical Muslim men who slam commercial airliners into office buildings and soldiers who want to stop radical Muslim men from slamming commercial airliners into office buildings. They are both examples of generic male violence?and specifically, male violence against women. ?Terrorism is on a continuum that starts with violence within the family, battery against women, violence against women in the society, all the way up to organized militaries that are supported by taxpayer money,? according to Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, who teaches ?The Sexuality of Terrorism? at California State University in Hayward. Violence is so intertwined with male sexuality that, she tells us, military pilots watch porn movies before they go out on sorties. The war in Afghanistan could not possibly offer a chance to liberate women from their oppressors, since it would simply expose women to yet another set of oppressors, in the gender feminists? view. As Sharon Lerner asserted bizarrely in the Village Voice, feminists? ?discomfort? with the Afghanistan bombing was ?deepened by the knowledge that more women than men die as a result of most wars.?

If guys are brutes, girls are their opposite: peace-loving, tolerant, conciliatory, and reasonable??Antiwar and Pro-Feminist,? as the popular peace-rally sign goes. Feminists long ago banished tough-as-nails women like Margaret Thatcher and Jeanne Kirkpatrick (and these days, one would guess, even the fetching Condoleezza Rice) to the ranks of the imperfectly female. Real women, they believe, would never justify war. ?Most women, Western and Muslim, are opposed to war regardless of its reasons and objectives,? wrote the Jordanian feminist Fadia Faqir on OpenDemocracy.net. ?They are concerned with emancipation, freedom (personal and civic), human rights, power sharing, integrity, dignity, equality, autonomy, power-sharing [sic], liberation, and pluralism.?

Sara Ruddick, author of Maternal Thinking, is perhaps one of the most influential spokeswomen for the position that women are instinctually peaceful. According to Ruddick (who clearly didn?t have Joan Crawford in mind), that?s because a good deal of mothering is naturally governed by the Gandhian principles of nonviolence such as ?renunciation,? ?resistance to injustice,? and ?reconciliation.? The novelist Barbara Kingsolver was one of the first to demonstrate the subtleties of such universal maternal thinking after the United States invaded Afghanistan. ?I feel like I?m standing on a playground where the little boys are all screaming ?He started it!? and throwing rocks,? she wrote in the Los Angeles Times. ?I keep looking for somebody?s mother to come on the scene saying, ?Boys! Boys!? ?

Gender feminism?s tendency to reduce foreign affairs to a Lifetime Channel movie may make it seem too silly to bear mentioning, but its kitschy naivet? hasn?t stopped it from being widespread among elites. You see it in widely read writers like Kingsolver, Maureen Dowd, and Alice Walker. It turns up in our most elite institutions. Swanee Hunt, head of the Women in Public Policy Program at Harvard?s Kennedy School of Government wrote, with Cristina Posa in Foreign Policy: ?The key reason behind women?s marginalization may be that everyone recognizes just how good women are at forging peace.? Even female elected officials are on board. ?The women of all these countries should go on strike, they should all sit down and refuse to do anything until their men agree to talk peace,? urged Ohio representative Marcy Kaptur to the Arab News last spring, echoing an idea that Aristophanes, a dead white male, proposed as a joke 2,400 years ago. And President Clinton is an advocate of maternal thinking, too. ?If we?d had women at Camp David,? he said in July 2000, ?we?d have an agreement.?

Major foundations too seem to take gender feminism seriously enough to promote it as an answer to world problems. Last December, the Ford Foundation and the Soros Open Society Foundation helped fund the Afghan Women?s Summit in Brussels to develop ideas for a new government in Afghanistan. As Vagina Monologues author Eve Ensler described it on her website, the summit was made up of ?meetings and meals, canvassing, workshops, tears, and dancing.? ?Defense was mentioned nowhere in the document,? Ensler wrote proudly of the summit?s concluding proclamation?despite the continuing threat in Afghanistan of warlords, bandits, and lingering al-Qaida operatives. ?uilding weapons or instruments of retaliation was not called for in any category,? Ensler cooed. ?Instead [the women] wanted education, health care, and the protection of refugees, culture, and human rights.?

Too busy celebrating their own virtue and contemplating their own victimhood, gender feminists cannot address the suffering of their Muslim sisters realistically, as light years worse than their own petulant grievances. They are too intent on hating war to ask if unleashing its horrors might be worth it to overturn a brutal tyranny that, among its manifold inhumanities, treats women like animals. After all, hating war and machismo is evidence of the moral superiority that comes with being born female.

Yet the gender feminist idea of superior feminine virtue is becoming an increasingly tough sell for anyone actually keeping up with world events. Kipling once wrote of the fierceness of Afghan women: ?When you?re wounded and left on the Afghan plains/And the women come out to cut up your remains/Just roll to your rifle and blow out your brains.? Now it?s clearer than ever that the dream of worldwide sisterhood is no more realistic than worldwide brotherhood; culture trumps gender any day. Mothers all over the Muslim world are naming their babies Usama or praising Allah for their sons? efforts to kill crusading infidels. Last February, 28-year-old Wafa Idris became the first female Palestinian suicide bomber to strike in Israel, killing an elderly man and wounding scores of women and children. And in April, Israeli soldiers discovered under the maternity clothes of 26-year-old Shifa Adnan Kodsi a bomb rather than a baby. Maternal thinking, indeed.

The second variety of feminism, seemingly more sophisticated and especially prevalent on college campuses, is multiculturalism and its twin, postcolonialism. The postcolonial feminist has even more reason to shy away from the predicament of women under radical Islam than her maternally thinking sister. She believes that the Western world is so sullied by its legacy of imperialism that no Westerner, man or woman, can utter a word of judgment against former colonial peoples. Worse, she is not so sure that radical Islam isn?t an authentic, indigenous?and therefore appropriate?expression of Arab and Middle Eastern identity.

The postmodern philosopher Michel Foucault, one of the intellectual godfathers of multiculturalism and postcolonialism, first set the tone in 1978 when an Italian newspaper sent him to Teheran to cover the Iranian revolution. As his biographer James Miller tells it, Foucault looked in the face of Islamic fundamentalism and saw . . . an awe-inspiring revolt against ?global hegemony.? He was mesmerized by this new form of ?political spirituality? that, in a phrase whose dark prescience he could not have grasped, portended the ?transfiguration of the world.? Even after the Ayatollah Khomeini came to power and reintroduced polygamy and divorce on the husband?s demand with automatic custody to fathers, reduced the official female age of marriage from 18 to 13, fired all female judges, and ordered compulsory veiling, whose transgression was to be punished by public flogging, Foucault saw no reason to temper his enthusiasm. What was a small matter like women?s basic rights, when a struggle against ?the planetary system? was at hand?

Postcolonialists, then, have their own binary system, somewhat at odds with gender feminism?not to mention with women?s rights. It is not men who are the sinners; it is the West. It is not women who are victimized innocents; it is the people who suffered under Western colonialism, or the descendants of those people, to be more exact. Caught between the rock of patriarchy and the hard place of imperialism, the postcolonial feminist scholar gingerly tiptoes her way around the subject of Islamic fundamentalism and does the only thing she can do: she focuses her ire on Western men.

To this end, the postcolonialist eagerly dips into the inkwell of gender feminism. She ties colonialist exploitation and domination to maleness; she might refer to Israel?s ?masculinist military culture??Israel being white and Western?though she would never dream of pointing out the ?masculinist military culture? of the jihadi. And she expends a good deal of energy condemning Western men for wanting to improve the lives of Eastern women. At the turn of the twentieth century Lord Cromer, the British vice consul of Egypt and a pet target of postcolonial feminists, argued that the ?degradation? of women under Islam had a harmful effect on society. Rubbish, according to the postcolonialist feminist. His words are simply part of ?the Western narrative of the quintessential otherness and inferiority of Islam,? as Harvard professor Leila Ahmed puts it in Women and Gender in Islam. The same goes for American concern about Afghan women; it is merely a ?device for ranking the ?other? men as inferior or as ?uncivilized,? ? according to Nira Yuval-Davis, professor of gender and ethnic studies at the University of Greenwich, England. These are all examples of what renowned Columbia professor Gayatri Spivak called ?white men saving brown women from brown men.?

Spivak?s phrase, a great favorite on campus, points to the postcolonial notion that brown men, having been victimized by the West, can never be oppressors in their own right. If they give the appearance of treating women badly, the oppression they have suffered at the hands of Western colonial masters is to blame. In fact, the worse they treat women, the more they are expressing their own justifiable outrage. ?When men are traumatized [by colonial rule], they tend to traumatize their own women,? Miriam Cooke, a Duke professor and head of the Association for Middle East Women?s Studies, told me. And today, Cooke asserts, brown men are subjected to a new form of imperialism. ?Now there is a return of colonialism that we saw in the nineteenth century in the context of globalization,? she says. ?What is driving Islamist men is globalization.?

It would be difficult to exaggerate the through-the-looking-glass quality of postcolonialist theory when it comes to the subject of women. Female suicide bombers are a good thing, because they are strong women demonstrating ?agency? against colonial powers. Polygamy too must be shown due consideration. ?Polygamy can be liberating and empowering,? Cooke answered sunnily when I asked her about it. ?Our norm is the Western, heterosexual, single couple. If we can imagine different forms that would allow us to be something other than a heterosexual couple, we might imagine polygamy working,? she explained murkily. Some women, she continued, are relieved when their husbands take a new wife: they won?t have to service him so often. Or they might find they now have the freedom to take a lover. But, I ask, wouldn?t that be dangerous in places where adulteresses can be stoned to death? At any rate, how common is that? ?I don?t know,? Cooke answers, ?I?m interested in discourse.? The irony couldn?t be darker: the very people protesting the imperialist exploitation of the ?Other? endorse that Other?s repressive customs as a means of promoting their own uniquely Western agenda?subverting the heterosexual patriarchy.

The final category in the feminist taxonomy, which might be called the world-government utopian strain, is in many respects closest to classical liberal feminism. Dedicated to full female dignity and equality, it generally eschews both the biological determinism of the gender feminist and the cultural relativism of the multiculti postcolonialist. Stanford political science professor Susan Moller Okin, an influential, subtle, and intelligent spokeswoman for this approach, created a stir among feminists in 1997 when she forthrightly attacked multiculturalists for valuing ?group rights for minority cultures? over the well-being of individual women. Okin admirably minced no words attacking arranged marriage, female circumcision, and polygamy, which she believed women experienced as a ?barely tolerable institution.? Some women, she went so far as to declare, ?might be better off if the culture into which they were born were either to become extinct . . . or preferably, to be encouraged to alter itself so as to reinforce the equality of women.?

But though Okin is less shy than other feminists about discussing the plight of women under Islamic fundamentalism, the typical U.N. utopian has her own reasons for keeping quiet as that plight fills Western headlines. For one thing, the utopian is also a bean-counting absolutist, seeking a pure, numerical equality between men and women in all departments of life. She greets Western, and particularly American, claims to have achieved freedom for women with skepticism. The motto of the 2002 International Women?s Day??Afghanistan Is Everywhere??was in part a reproach to the West about its superior airs. Women in Afghanistan might have to wear burqas, but don?t women in the West parade around in bikinis? ?It?s equally disrespectful and abusive to have women prancing around a stage in bathing suits for cash or walking the streets shrouded in burqas in order to survive,? columnist Jill Nelson wrote on the MSNBC website about the murderously fanatical riots that attended the Miss World pageant in Nigeria.

As Nelson?s statement hints, the utopian is less interested in freeing women to make their own choices than in engineering and imposing her own elite vision of a perfect society. Indeed, she is under no illusions that, left to their own democratic devices, women would freely choose the utopia she has in mind. She would not be surprised by recent Pakistani elections, where a number of the women who won parliamentary seats were Islamist. But it doesn?t really matter what women want. The universalist has a comprehensive vision of ?women?s human rights,? meaning not simply women?s civil and political rights but ?economic rights? and ?socioeconomic justice.? Cynical about free markets and globalization, the U.N. utopian is also unimpressed by the liberal democratic nation-state ?as an emancipatory institution,? in the dismissive words of J. Ann Tickner, director for international studies at the University of Southern California. Such nation-states are ?unresponsive to the needs of [their] most vulnerable members? and seeped in ?nationalist ideologies? as well as in patriarchal assumptions about autonomy. In fact, like the (usually) unacknowledged socialist that she is, the U.N. utopian eagerly awaits the withering of the nation-state, a political arrangement that she sees as tied to imperialism, war, and masculinity. During war, in particular, nations ?depend on ideas about masculinized dignity and feminized sacrifice to sustain the sense of autonomous nationhood,? writes Cynthia Enloe, professor of government at Clark University.

Having rejected the patriarchal liberal nation-state, with all the democratic machinery of self-government that goes along with it, the utopian concludes that there is only one way to achieve her goals: to impose them through international government. Utopian feminists fill the halls of the United Nations, where they examine everything through the lens of the ?gender perspective? in study after unreadable study. (My personal favorites: ?Gender Perspectives on Landmines? and ?Gender Perspectives on Weapons of Mass Destruction,? whose conclusion is that landmines and WMDs are bad for women.)

The 1979 U.N. Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), perhaps the first and most important document of feminist utopianism, gives the best sense of the sweeping nature of the movement?s ambitions. CEDAW demands many measures that anyone committed to democratic liberal values would applaud, including women?s right to vote and protection against honor killings and forced marriage. Would that the document stopped there. Instead it sets out to impose a utopian order that would erase all distinctions between men and women, a kind of revolution of the sexes from above, requiring nations to ?take all appropriate measures to modify the social and cultural patterns of conduct of men and women? and to eliminate ?stereotyped roles? to accomplish this legislative abolition of biology. The document calls for paid maternity leave, nonsexist school curricula, and government-supported child care. The treaty?s 23-member enforcement committee hectors nations that do not adequately grasp that, as Enloe puts it, ?the personal is international.? The committee has cited Belarus for celebrating Mother?s Day, China for failing to legalize prostitution, and Libya for not interpreting the Qur?an in accordance with ?committee guidelines.?

Confusing ?women?s participation? with self-determination, and numerical equivalence with equality, CEDAW utopians try to orchestrate their perfect society through quotas and affirmative-action plans. Their bean-counting mentality cares about whether women participate equally, without asking what it is that they are participating in or whether their participation is anything more than ceremonial. Thus at the recent Women?s Summit in Jordan, Rima Khalaf suggested that governments be required to use quotas in elections ?to leapfrog women to power.? Khalaf, like so many illiberal feminist utopians, has no hesitation in forcing society to be free. As is often the case when elites decide they have discovered the route to human perfection, the utopian urge is not simply antidemocratic but verges on the totalitarian.

That this combination of sentimental victimhood, postcolonial relativism, and utopian overreaching has caused feminism to suffer so profound a loss of moral and political imagination that it cannot speak against the brutalization of Islamic women is an incalculable loss to women and to men. The great contribution of Western feminism was to expand the definition of human dignity and freedom. It insisted that all human beings were worthy of liberty. Feminists now have the opportunity to make that claim on behalf of women who in their oppression have not so much as imagined that its promise could include them, too. At its best, feminism has stood for a rich idea of personal choice in shaping a meaningful life, one that respects not only the woman who wants to crash through glass ceilings but also the one who wants to stay home with her children and bake cookies or to wear a veil and fast on Ramadan. Why shouldn?t feminists want to shout out their own profound discovery for the world to hear?

Perhaps, finally, because to do so would be to acknowledge the freedom they themselves enjoy, thanks to Western ideals and institutions. Not only would such an admission force them to give up their own simmering resentments; it would be bad for business.
The truth is that the free institutions?an independent judiciary, a free press, open elections?that protect the rights of women are the same ones that protect the rights of men. The separation of church and state that would allow women to escape the burqa would also free men from having their hands amputated for theft. The education system that would teach girls to read would also empower millions of illiterate boys. The capitalist economies that bring clean water, cheap clothes, and washing machines that change the lives of women are the same ones that lead to healthier, freer men. In other words, to address the problems of Muslim women honestly, feminists would have to recognize that free men and women need the same things?and that those are things that they themselves already have. And recognizing that would mean an end to feminism as we know it.

There are signs that, outside the academy, middlebrow literary circles, and the United Nations, feminism has indeed met its Waterloo. Most Americans seem to realize that September 11 turned self-indulgent sentimental illusions, including those about the sexes, into an unaffordable luxury. Consider, for instance, women?s attitudes toward war, a topic on which politicians have learned to take for granted a gender gap. But according to the Pew Research Center, in January 2002, 57 percent of women versus 46 percent of men cited national security as the country?s top priority. There has been a ?seismic gender shift on matters of war,? according to pollster Kellyanne Conway. In 1991, 45 percent of U.S. women supported the use of ground troops in the Gulf War, a substantially smaller number than the 67 percent of men. But as of November, a CNN survey found women were more likely than men to support the use of ground troops against Iraq, 58 percent to 56 percent. The numbers for younger women were especially dramatic. Sixty-five percent of women between 18 and 49 support ground troops, as opposed to 48 percent of women 50 and over. Women are also changing their attitudes toward military spending: before September 11, only 24 percent of women supported increased funds; after the attacks, that number climbed to 47 percent. An evolutionary psychologist might speculate that, if females tend to be less aggressively territorial than males, there?s little to compare to the ferocity of the lioness when she believes her young are threatened.

Even among some who consider themselves feminists, there is some grudging recognition that Western, and specifically American, men are sometimes a force for the good. The Feminist Majority is sending around urgent messages asking for President Bush to increase American security forces in Afghanistan. The influential left-wing British columnist Polly Toynbee, who just 18 months ago coined the phrase ?America the Horrible,? went to Afghanistan to figure out whether the war ?was worth it.? Her answer was not what she might have expected. Though she found nine out of ten women still wearing burqas, partly out of fear of lingering fundamentalist hostility, she was convinced their lives had greatly improved. Women say they can go out alone now.

As we sink more deeply into what is likely to be a protracted struggle with radical Islam, American feminists have a moral responsibility to give up their resentments and speak up for women who actually need their support. Feminists have the moral authority to say that their call for the rights of women is a universal demand?that the rights of women are the Rights of Man.

Feminism Behind the Veil

Feminists in the West may fiddle while Muslim women are burning, but in the Muslim world itself there is a burgeoning movement to address the miserable predicament of the second sex?without simply adopting a philosophy whose higher cultural products include Sex and the City, Rosie O?Donnell, and the power-suited female executive.

The most impressive signs of an indigenous female revolt against the fundamentalist order are in Iran. Over the past ten years or so, Iran has seen the publication of a slew of serious journals dedicated to the social and political predicament of Islamic women, the most well known being the Teheran-based Zonan and Zan, published by Faezah Hashemi, a well-known member of parliament and the daughter of former president Rafsanjani. Believing that Western feminism has promoted hostility between the sexes, confused sex roles, and the sexual objectification of women, a number of writers have proposed an Islamic-style feminism that would stress ?gender complementarity? rather than equality and that would pay full respect to housewifery and motherhood while also giving women access to education and jobs.

Attacking from the religious front, a number of ?Islamic feminists? are challenging the reigning fundamentalist reading of the Qur?an. These scholars insist that the founding principles of Islam, which they believe were long ago corrupted by pre-Islamic Arab, Persian, and North African customs, are if anything more egalitarian than those of Western religions; the Qur?an explicitly describes women as the moral and spiritual equals of men and allows them to inherit and pass down property. The power of misogynistic mullahs has grown in recent decades, feminists continue, because Muslim men have felt threatened by modernity?s challenge to traditional arrangements between the sexes.

What makes Islamic feminism really worth watching is that it has the potential to play a profoundly important role in the future of the Islamic world?and not just because it could improve the lot of women. By insisting that it is true to Islam?in fact, truer than the creed espoused by the entrenched religious elite?Islamic feminism can affirm the dignity of Islam while at the same time bringing it more in line with modernity. In doing this, feminists can help lay the philosophical groundwork for democracy. In the West, feminism lagged behind religious reformation and political democratization by centuries; in the East, feminism could help lead the charge.

At the same time, though, the issue of women?s rights highlights two reasons for caution about the Islamic future. For one thing, no matter how much feminists might wish otherwise, polygamy and male domination of the family are not merely a fact of local traditions; they are written into the Qur?an itself. This in and of itself would not prove to be such an impediment?the Old Testament is filled with laws antithetical to women?s equality?except for the second problem: more than other religions, Islam is unfriendly to the notion of the separation of church and state. If history is any guide, there?s the rub. The ultimate guarantor of the rights of all citizens, whether Islamic or not, can only be a fully secular state.
Title: Idiocracy
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 27, 2016, 10:49:09 AM
http://www.newslogue.com/debate/138
Title: Substituting "Black People" for "Men" in feminist article
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 27, 2016, 11:04:51 AM
second post

http://www.factsoverfeelings.org/blog/i-changed-men-to-black-people-in-an-everyday-feminism-post-and-heres-what-happened
Title: Re: Substituting "Black People" for "Men" in feminist article
Post by: G M on November 27, 2016, 11:15:41 AM
second post

http://www.factsoverfeelings.org/blog/i-changed-men-to-black-people-in-an-everyday-feminism-post-and-heres-what-happened

Heh!
Title: How times have changed since my first Presidential election
Post by: ccp on November 29, 2016, 05:48:04 PM
The entire South voted Dem (for southern Carter) and California , NJ, Washington , Oregon , Illinois  voted for Republican Ford!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Carter#/media/File:ElectoralCollege1976.svg
Title: Interesting thought pieces: Ambitious millenials leaving America?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 02, 2016, 03:13:43 PM
https://pjmedia.com/trending/2016/12/02/millennials-are-leaving-the-country-but-not-for-the-reason-you-think/
Title: VDH: Unexpected Consequences
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 03, 2016, 10:08:40 PM
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/442606/donald-trump-victory-resulted-barack-obama-polarizing-presidency?utm_source=nr&utm_medium=satemail&utm_content=hanson&utm_campaign=consequences&utm_term=VDHM
Title: Where the right went wrong
Post by: bigdog on December 19, 2016, 01:08:39 PM
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/15/opinion/sunday/charlie-sykes-on-where-the-right-went-wrong.html

"Now that the election is over, don’t expect any profiles in courage from the Republican Party pushing back against those trends; the gravitational pull of our binary politics is too strong."
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on December 19, 2016, 05:34:31 PM
"We destroyed our own immunity to fake news, while empowering the worst and most reckless voices on the right.

This was not mere naïveté. It was also a moral failure, one that now lies at the heart of the conservative movement even in its moment of apparent electoral triumph. Now that the election is over, don’t expect any profiles in courage from the Republican Party pushing back against those trends; the gravitational pull of our binary politics is too strong."

This guy still doesn't get it does he?   Yes many of us , myself included were repulsed by Trump's vulgarity.  Yet he was he was the only one willing to fight except for probably Cruz and Jindal too  though they lacked the star power.

Like today I watched some sort of forum hosted by the ex Repulican governor of NJ Christine Todd Whitman who is just as much an elitist as the rest and who  thinks she is above it all by voting for Hillary .  I could only stomach about 10- or 15 minutes of listening to her panel speak of compromise and both sides working across the aisle to govern and get things done.

We are in a civil war . wake up.  We are not one country anymore.

They still don't get why Trump blew all the other Republicans out of the running.  They are grasping and crying just like the Democrats .



Title: 2nd post from me
Post by: ccp on December 19, 2016, 05:45:38 PM
 While is  Whitman talking about compromise and working across the aisle?   

Did she hear what the Clintons are saying?  What the DNC is saying?

What Obama is up to?

This guy , Pat Cadell,  a Democrat gets it:

http://www.breitbart.com/radio/2016/12/19/caddell-grace-missing-obamas-leave-white-house/
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: G M on December 19, 2016, 05:45:58 PM
Anyone ever heard of Charlie Sykes before this coverage in the New Duranty Times? I have not. Oh look, he's writing a book! What a coincidence!

Over time, we’d the media succeeded in delegitimizing the media altogether — all the normal guideposts were down, the referees discredited. **Fixed it for him
Title: Right, Left, and Wrong
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 19, 2016, 08:37:54 PM
"For years, we ignored the birthers, the racists, the truthers and other conspiracy theorists"

NOT ON THIS FORUM.

We tangled with the Truthers who tried surfing in to here.

Racism has been rejected clearly and strongly.

When the data was , , ,sparse we entertained birtherism, but when it was settled, we moved on.

Can't say I've never been fooled (Fool me twice, shame on me) but as for conspiracy theorists?  Infowars, DEBKA and others of that ilk are a non-grata.

I'd say we do our best around here to Search For Truth.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: bigdog on December 20, 2016, 04:15:09 AM
Anyone ever heard of Charlie Sykes before this coverage in the New Duranty Times? I have not. Oh look, he's writing a book! What a coincidence!

Over time, we’d the media succeeded in delegitimizing the media altogether — all the normal guideposts were down, the referees discredited. **Fixed it for him

http://www.hoover.org/profiles/charles-j-sykes
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: DougMacG on December 20, 2016, 06:33:57 AM
Charlie Sykes made perfect sense in the Wisconsin Primary fight where Cruz beat Trump. But after Trump was nominated, the never-Trump leaders ended up with almost no followers on the right.

Sykes had it exactly right with this at the beginning of the piece:

"What they did buy into was the argument that this was a “binary choice.” No matter how bad Mr. Trump was, my listeners argued, he could not possibly be as bad as Mrs. Clinton.".  Enough said.

They didn't just buy into it, from a conservative point of view that was the truth.  The conservative voter had the risk Trump would be a lousy conservative vs the certainty of Hillary.

Ted Cruz is a more pure conservative, and would have lost this race. The voters knew something that Charlie Sykes didn't.

Lamenting Hillary's loss makes no sense to me from a conservative point of view.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: G M on December 20, 2016, 06:47:29 AM
I'm glad the left is more principled and decent and punishes anti-semetic racebaiters like Al Shapton by giving him a tv show on MSNBC, having him speak at DNC conventions and only allowed to visit the white house less than one hundred times in the last eight years. Haters!

(http://media.npr.org/assets/img/2014/04/10/obama-and-sharpton-nan-2011_custom-4ecf73a85156da3ff3734bdc9853407842485c12-s900-c85.jpg)

(http://www.theblaze.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/obamasharpton.jpg)
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: G M on December 20, 2016, 07:00:49 AM
 the racists, the truthers and other conspiracy theorists...

(https://encrypted-tbn3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRrIj48ipDwZ6d6llNk5uIt_ZfN4OynGpM1Be3FTchBo_uHg1cW5Q)
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 20, 2016, 10:58:35 AM
In fairness, the point that Trump has overturned certain conventional and long standing Rep positions remains and is worthy of examination.  At the moment I am mentally composing a post about this.
Title: Hacking the rules is not good government
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 02, 2017, 10:21:34 AM
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-01-01/hacking-democratic-rules-isn-t-good-government
Title: political "trolling"
Post by: ccp on January 04, 2017, 05:11:28 AM
The end of real discourse?  I agree the Left started this.   But now what?


http://www.nationalreview.com/article/443503/trump-and-right-love-trolling-and-tweeting-what-happened-truth
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on January 11, 2017, 01:10:46 PM
I dunno.  Anyone who has had to sit on an airplane for 5 hrs from a delay may be understanding of this:

https://www.yahoo.com/news/former-york-senator-al-damato-211300984.html
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on January 12, 2017, 02:05:24 PM
All VERY strange:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/reliable-source/wp/2017/01/12/jeff-bezos-is-the-anonymous-buyer-of-the-biggest-house-in-washington/?utm_term=.4cad0fb414f0

Lets hope that rising tides lift all boats and there is real trickle down effects.

Because the rich are about to get fantastically richer. 
Drain the swamp?  I dunno.
Title: The full fury of the globalist elites is still pending
Post by: ccp on January 13, 2017, 03:21:42 AM
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/01/12/virgil-trumps-nationalist-vision-vs-gospel-globalism/


Note Fay Voshell is cited in the article
Title: Re: The full fury of the globalist elites is still pending
Post by: DougMacG on January 13, 2017, 08:23:54 AM
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/01/12/virgil-trumps-nationalist-vision-vs-gospel-globalism/

Note Fay Voshell is cited in the article

Good article and excellent wisdom from Fay about globalism becoming a religion.

The article's author wrote’:. Trump's pro-worker, pro-taxpayer activism is also proving to be pro-business."

Yes, and that ends the moment we start a trade war.  Not mentioned was the American consumer.

"Back in 1846, the leading British free trader Richard Cobden declared, flat-out, that free trade would save the world:

I see in the Free-trade principle that which shall act on the moral world as the principle of gravitation in the universe—drawing men together, thrusting aside the antagonism of race, and creed, and language, and uniting us in the bonds of eternal peace.

Cobden was a capitalist, and capitalists are often cold-eyed, but, as we can see, there’s a dreamy, even giddy, utopianism in Cobden’s thinking.  And amazingly, it won the battle of public opinion in 19th-century Britain.

Interestingly, one contemporary of Cobden’s—who was much colder-eyed and decidedly not a capitalist—nevertheless endorsed the same idea.  That would be Karl Marx, ..."

We can fight open borders, the UN disaster and our loss of sovereignty without losing our standard of living and our freedom to trade.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on January 14, 2017, 08:03:38 AM
Of course . Cowards never take responsibility.  Instead for any remorse of fixing the primaries for Clinton and against Sanders she blames Comey.  No surprise she is a known back stabber.


Yet , of course she is still in Congress fighting every day to redeem her relavence and shove herself on the country:

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017/01/13/wasserman-schultz-grills-fbi-chief-over-russian-hacking-issue-in-closed-door-meeting.html
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 15, 2017, 11:24:41 PM
This is the Rants and Interesting Thought Pieces thread.  The Politics thread would be better for that.
Title: VDH: Putin, Obama, and Trump
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 18, 2017, 04:40:04 PM
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/443903/obama-misread-putin-trump-might-not-new-era-big-sticks-common-enemies-mutual-benefit
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on January 18, 2017, 06:17:40 PM
I am more interested in the before and after Presidency photos.  We always hear about how much they have aged from the stress of the job.  Truthfully I think that is BS and if you took photos of a lot of people over 8 yrs at those times in their lives one would see a big difference:

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/01/18/before-and-after-obama-10-signs-of-a-diminished-america/

He was what 47 in '08 and he is 55 now.  So sure he looks older.
Title: The Hollywood take on Trump
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 18, 2017, 08:31:12 PM
http://variety.com/2017/biz/news/rob-long-donald-trump-hollywood-1201961237/
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: G M on January 18, 2017, 09:47:31 PM
I am more interested in the before and after Presidency photos.  We always hear about how much they have aged from the stress of the job.  Truthfully I think that is BS and if you took photos of a lot of people over 8 yrs at those times in their lives one would see a big difference:

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/01/18/before-and-after-obama-10-signs-of-a-diminished-america/

He was what 47 in '08 and he is 55 now.  So sure he looks older.

I know that America looks seriously damaged by the last 8 years. Faces of meth level damaged.
Title: Movie about the facts that led up to Kelo decision
Post by: bigdog on January 19, 2017, 01:46:40 PM
http://www.vimooz.com/2017/01/18/courtney-moorehead-balaker-little-pink-house-athena-film-festival/

"Based on a true story, two-time Oscar® nominee Catherine Keener plays a small-town nurse Susette Kelo, who emerges as the reluctant leader of her working-class neighbors in their struggle to save their homes from political and corporate interests bent on seizing the land and handing it over to Pfizer Corporation. Susette’s battle goes all the way to the US Supreme Court and the controversial 5-4 decision in Kelo vs. City of New London gave government officials the power to bulldoze a neighborhood for the benefit of a multibillion-dollar corporation. The decision outraged Americans across the political spectrum, and that passion fueled reforms that helped curb eminent domain abuse."
Title: wealthy running for top political jobs
Post by: ccp on January 20, 2017, 06:30:50 AM
Mark Cuban , who I like is clearly jealous of Trump.  Many of these fabulously wealthy type A personality types must be looking at Trump, a business man and be thinking why not me?

Zuckerberg will run too eventually.  Think about it.   The owner and controller of social media.   And all the funding (times 1000) that he could need to run .   And he would win IMHO.  Effectively he would be a Democrat but I would guess he would play independent.  Independents though are essentially Democrats.

Now I see this:

https://www.yahoo.com/gma/shark-tank-star-kevin-oleary-enters-politics-people-151807375--abc-news-topstories.html

Trump seems to have widened the whole thinking about who could run.  Does not have to be career politician.  And can run right for the top job.  Why waste time in a state job or congressional job?  Why bother with the Michael Bloomberg thing and be a lowly mayor.  

Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 20, 2017, 11:40:27 AM
Not the thread for this-- this is not a catch all thread for "items of interest".   

"Politics" is a better catch all thread for items of interest.
Title: Re: Movie about the facts that led up to Kelo decision
Post by: DougMacG on January 20, 2017, 12:44:16 PM
http://www.vimooz.com/2017/01/18/courtney-moorehead-balaker-little-pink-house-athena-film-festival/

"Based on a true story, two-time Oscar® nominee Catherine Keener plays a small-town nurse Susette Kelo, who emerges as the reluctant leader of her working-class neighbors in their struggle to save their homes from political and corporate interests bent on seizing the land and handing it over to Pfizer Corporation. Susette’s battle goes all the way to the US Supreme Court and the controversial 5-4 decision in Kelo vs. City of New London gave government officials the power to bulldoze a neighborhood for the benefit of a multibillion-dollar corporation. The decision outraged Americans across the political spectrum, and that passion fueled reforms that helped curb eminent domain abuse."

Thank you Bigdog.  I hope they did a good job telling this story.  From my perspective, it is shameful that ANY Justices voted for this much less 5 of them including Anthony Kennedy, Reagan's third choice for that seat.

This is one issue that kept me from supporting Donald Trump until there was no one left (but HRC) as an alternative. 

As he description states, this is an issue that united the right and the left. I don't want special powers to anyone and the left doesn't want it for big corporate interests over the people.

Freedom of contract for consenting adults?  Your home is your castle?  Right of privacy?  Takings require public use?  Right of title, what third world countries often lack.  Whatever happened to buying property on the market, consensual buyers buying consensual property from consensual sellers at a consensual price?
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 20, 2017, 04:06:45 PM
This decision was discussed on the Constitutional Law thread on the SC&H forum.  IIRC some wag with a local NH position made a move to subject Justice Souter's home to eminent domain.
Title: Spengler on Trump
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 21, 2017, 08:28:44 AM
https://pjmedia.com/spengler/2017/01/20/donald-trump-american-hero/
Title: With Smugness Towards None
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 24, 2017, 10:15:06 AM
http://www.aei.org/publication/with-smugness-toward-none/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=smaricksmuggnesstowardnone
Title: The Dems rise is far from inevitable
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 24, 2017, 07:52:58 PM
second post

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-01-24/the-democrats-rise-is-far-from-inevitable
Title: The US is now an Open Loop system
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 25, 2017, 07:34:04 AM
Second post

Open Loop Nation
Posted: 24 Jan 2017 10:50 AM PST
The US, as a socio-economic system, is now running open loop. 

Not only that, it's running open loop in an extremely chaotic environment and that's bad news.  While open loop systems are extremely stable under controlled conditions, they can be just the opposite in complex, rapidly changing or uncertain environments.  In those environments they fail quickly or worse:  they run amok.   

What is open loop?  Open loop is a concept from control theory, but anybody who has ever worked with machines is already familiar with it. 

In a nutshell, an open loop system doesn't use a feedback loop to modify its performance, it simply runs at the level you set them at until you turn it off or it runs out of fuel.  A closed loop system is just the opposite.  It modifies its performance based on changing conditions.

For example, its the difference between a fire in your fireplace that burns until it's out of wood and a home heating system that turns on and off based on the temperature you set. 

So how does this apply to something as big and complex as the US? 

The US is a socioeconomic system.  We built it.  For the last hundred years it's been a closed system.  That means it:

   has levers and mechanisms for adjusting its performance.

   can measure its effectiveness relative to achieved results. 

   can mitigate any damage or exploit opportunity when the environment or situation changes. 

However, those levers and mechanisms have frayed over the last couple of decades:

   The levers and mechanisms of control the US has available to manager our socio-economic system are too weak to do so anymore.  From the Fed ZIRP to a chaotic media to porous borders to companies that avoid paying any taxes (Google, Apple, etc.).

   There is no consensus over what constitutes success.  Who should benefit and how should they benefit?  Should we let the market dictate everything or allocate success based on identity or should we build a prosperous middle class? 

   We've blundered into failures with security (9/11 to Iraq to ISIS), domestic development (rustbelt and Katrina response) to economic progress (the non-response to the financial crisis that we still haven't recovered from nearly a decade later).   

Now, there are forces at work in the US, driven by ubiquitous globalization and a rapid expansion in Internet social connectivity.  More importantly, from Trump's disruptive governance to a women's protest that was 3x bigger than any protest in US history, these new forces have exceed the ability of the US institutions to respond. 

What does this mean? 

The US doesn't have a control system anymore.  It's open loop. 

Sincerely,
John Robb
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on January 25, 2017, 07:47:23 AM
"Perhaps Bush was able to handle his reelection loss with such equanimity and show such generosity to the man who turned him out of office precisely because he had such a modest view of himself, because he trusted the many over the mighty, because he understood that voters might have seen something that he couldn’t, and because he had such faith in our institutions, even when those institutions produced outcomes not to his liking"

compare this humility to the conceit , arrogance, narcissism , braggadocio, smugness, know it all, first marxist Prez we just endured and who will surely not go away gracefully and will surely be there to annoy the Right for years to come.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: G M on January 25, 2017, 10:05:56 AM
"Perhaps Bush was able to handle his reelection loss with such equanimity and show such generosity to the man who turned him out of office precisely because he had such a modest view of himself, because he trusted the many over the mighty, because he understood that voters might have seen something that he couldn’t, and because he had such faith in our institutions, even when those institutions produced outcomes not to his liking"

compare this humility to the conceit , arrogance, narcissism , braggadocio, smugness, know it all, first marxist Prez we just endured and who will surely not go away gracefully and will surely be there to annoy the Right for years to come.

It's ok, he will continue to act as a GOTV mechanism for Trump's reelection.
Title: No Shades of Grey
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 28, 2017, 02:07:57 PM
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-allen-liberals-are-the-new-manicheans-20170127-story.html
Title: A German journalist's perspective
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 01, 2017, 08:02:04 AM
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/letter-from-washington-how-america-lost-its-identity-a-1131294.html?utm_source=Today%27s+Headlines&utm_campaign=f598d81244-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2016_12_12&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_b04355194f-f598d81244-80108809#spRedirectedFrom=www&referrrer=https://t.co/Yrd0zjVGue
Title: Trump's use of social networking changes governance
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 02, 2017, 11:30:16 PM
How Trump's Use of Social Networking Changes Governance
Posted: 02 Feb 2017 04:22 PM PST

The Trump presidency operates very differently (obviously) than those of his post-WW2 predecessors.  First off, its goals are completely different:  it's dismantling the neoliberal system.  A system that earlier administrations built up over decades.  Second, and equally as interestingly, it operates more like a network than a bureaucracy.  Specifically, the Trump administration is:

   More autocratic than bureaucratic.  Single decision maker (softly autocratic) rather than decision through a consensus of bureaucratic elites.  This is faster, particularly within a network setting, but more prone to error.

   More socially networked than hierarchically networked. Its external social network is on the same level as the governmental bureaucracy.  The social network is now a means of governance on par with the bureaucracy.   

   National governance isn't just in Washington anymore, it's be conducted everywhere at once.  Everyone, from the government bureaucrat to the corporate executive to the owner of a Twitter account is now an active participant.  It is now much more participatory than it has EVER been.

Reactivity

What makes Trump's networked autocracy (potentially) effective is in how it stays reactive to the rapidly evolving needs of its supporters.  It does this through:

   Big Data Analysis:  Both Bannon's Cambridge Analytica and Kushner's San Antonio Moneyball operation dig deeply into social networks to profile voters.

   Online chatter:  Direct online feedback on Twitter or Facebook, as well as chatter in groups like the_Donald, the 358,000 member pro-Trump social network on Reddit.

   Intuition:  A salesman's gut.  All Trump.  Trump has an intuitive feel for what the target audience wants and needs.  A gut that's greatly enhanced by feedback from social networks.

Reactive Networked Autocracy

Based on these differences and the evidence of the first few weeks, we can expect this administration's style of governance to operate very differently than the legacy cold war bureaucracy that ran our country since WW2.   Here are some of the major changes:

   Incremental change vs. Rapid change.  Bureaucrats make changes slowly and incrementally.  Autocrats can make wholesale changes.   Social networking makes it possible to route around bureaucratic roadblocks to create de facto change before the bureaucracy can catch up.   

   Adherence to Ideology vs. Adherence to Common Sense.  US bureaucratic governance is based on neoliberal ideology and the sciences of social complexity (economics, etc.).   Social networking has made people increasingly aware to the gap between results/common sense and ideology/models (a similar gap toppled the USSR).  Trump exploits that gap.

   Serial vs. Parallel focus.  Bureaucratic governance mass media coverage focuses on one problem at a time (serially), or as closely to that as possible.  In contrast, networked governance can focus on many in parallel.  This makes it very difficult for gatekeepers to exercise control.

Sincerely,
John Robb
 
Title: Milo
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 06, 2017, 10:43:24 PM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3K1pGN-O8I
Title: Re: Milo
Post by: DougMacG on February 07, 2017, 10:00:50 AM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3K1pGN-O8I

A must see!
Title: Ben Shapiro
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 13, 2017, 10:05:33 PM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqzN0nqiJyQ
Title: What we are fighting for
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 14, 2017, 07:01:57 PM
I like this one:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/10/opinion/sunday/what-were-fighting-for.html?emc=edit_th_20170210&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=49641193&_r=3


What We’re Fighting For

Our acts of moral courage defend America as surely as any act of violence.

By PHIL KLAY
FEB. 10, 2017


When his convoy was ambushed during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, First Lt. Brian Chontosh ordered his Humvee driver to head straight into the oncoming machine gun fire. They punched through, landing in a trench full of heavily armed Iraqi soldiers. Lieutenant Chontosh and his Marines leapt out and he ran down the trench firing away, dropping one enemy soldier after another. First his rifle jammed, then he ran out of ammunition, so he switched to his pistol. He shot it dry, reloaded, and shot it dry again. So he picked up an AK-47 from a dead Iraqi, fired that dry, picked up another AK, fired that dry, picked up a rocket-propelled grenade, fired it, and led the group back to the Humvee, their attack having almost completely cleared the trench. Almost.

One Iraqi was playing dead, fiddling with the pin of a grenade. Lieutenant Chontosh had no ammo, but on the ground were a couple of M-16 rounds from when his rifle had jammed. He grabbed one, loaded, and before the Iraqi could pull the pin, Lieutenant Chontosh locked eyes with him and shot him dead. All told, according to the journalist Phil Zabriskie’s account of the ambush in “The Kill Switch,” Lieutenant Chontosh had killed about two dozen people that day.

When I was a new Marine, just entering the Corps, this story from the Iraq invasion defined heroism for me. It’s a perfect image of war for inspiring new officer candidates, right in line with youthful notions of what war is and what kind of courage it takes — physical courage, full stop. We thought it was a shame more Americans didn’t know the story.

But after spending 13 months in Iraq, after seeing violence go down not because we managed to increase our lethality but because we improved our ability to work with Iraqis, I became convinced that there were other stories of war equally important for Americans to understand. And as we look at a president who claims that he wants to “fight fire with fire” in the battle against jihadism, I think back to the stories that defined, for me, what it meant to be an American at war, and the reasons I was proud to wear the uniform.
 

I was sent to Iraq in January 2007 with a logistics unit, the sort unlikely to engage in Chontosh-style heroics. We managed the key parts of an army people often forget about: truck drivers, engineers, explosive disposal specialists, postal workers — and, crucially, doctors.

Midway through my deployment a Marine arrived on base with severe wounds. He’d been shot by an enemy sniper, and the medical staff swarmed around his body, working frantically, skillfully, but it wasn’t enough. He died on the table.

Normally, there’d be a moment of silence, of prayer, but the team got word that the man who killed this young Marine, the insurgent sniper, would be arriving a few minutes later. That dead Marine’s squadmates had engaged the sniper in a firefight, shot him a couple of times, patched him up, bandaged him and called for a casualty evacuation to save the life of the man who’d killed their friend.

So he arrived at our base. And the medical staff members, still absorbing the blow of losing a Marine, got to work. They stabilized their enemy and pumped him full of American blood, donated from the “walking blood bank” of nearby Marines. The sniper lived. And then they put him on a helicopter to go to a hospital for follow-up care, and one of the Navy nurses was assigned to be his flight nurse. He told me later of the strangeness of sitting in the back of a helicopter, watching over his enemy lying peacefully unconscious, doped up on painkillers, while he kept checking the sniper’s vitals, his blood pressure, his heartbeat, a heartbeat that was steady and strong thanks to the gift of blood from the Americans this insurgent would have liked to kill.

This wasn’t just a couple of Marines and sailors making the right decision. These weren’t acts of exceptional moral courage in the way Lieutenant Chontosh’s acts were acts of exceptional physical courage. This was standard policy, part of tradition stretching back to the Revolutionary War, when George Washington ordered every soldier in the Continental Army to sign a copy of rules intended to limit harm to civilians and ensure that their conduct respected what he called “the rights of humanity,” so that their restraint “justly secured to us the attachment of all good men.”


From our founding we have made these kinds of moral demands of our soldiers. It starts with the oath they swear to support and defend the Constitution, an oath made not to a flag, or to a piece of ground, or to an ethnically distinct people, but to a set of principles established in our founding documents. An oath that demands a commitment to democracy, to liberty, to the rule of law and to the self-evident equality of all men. The Marines I knew fought, and some of them died, for these principles.

That’s why those Marines were trained to care for their enemy. That’s why another Marine gave his own blood to an insurgent. Because America is an idea as much as a country, and so those acts defend America as surely as any act of violence, because they embody that idea. That nurse, in the quiet, alone with that insurgent, with no one looking as he cared for his patient. That was an act of war.

After I left the Marine Corps, I met a veteran named Eric Fair. He was quiet. He wrote strange and affecting stories about guilt and alienation, and at first he didn’t tell me much about his past. Only over time did I learn that he’d been an Army Arabic linguist before Sept. 11, and then had signed up as a contractor and gone to Abu Ghraib prison in January 2004, all things he would later write about in his memoir “Consequence.”

Back then Abu Ghraib was a mess, he told me. Thousands of Iraqis, some of them insurgents, plenty of them innocent civilians caught up in the post-invasion chaos, and far too few qualified interrogators to sort it out. And the information they were seeking — it was literally life or death.

So Eric began crossing lines. Not legal lines — he followed the rules. But moral lines, personal lines, lines where it was clear that he wasn’t treating the people in his interrogation booth like human beings.

One time, it was with a boy captured with car batteries and electronic devices. The boy said his father used the batteries for fishing, an explanation that Eric found absurd. So, he used the approved techniques. Light slaps, stress positions. The boy eventually broke and, weeping, told Eric about a shop where his father delivered the electronics.

When a unit was sent to raid the shop, it found half a dozen partly assembled car bombs. “It was an enormous adrenaline rush,” he told me. He’d used techniques he now considers torture and, he thought, saved lives.

So, naturally, he kept using them. There were a large number of detainees caught with car batteries, all of them with the same story about fishing. With them, Eric would go right to the techniques designed to humiliate, to degrade, to make people suffer until they tell you what you want to hear. But Eric didn’t get any more results. No more car bomb factories. Just a lot of broken, weeping detainees.

Eventually, he told a fellow contractor the ridiculous fishing story, and how he wasn’t falling for it, and the contractor told him: “Of course they fish with car batteries. I used to do it in Georgia.” The electric charge stuns the fish, a simple method for an easy meal.

Eric isn’t sure how many innocent Iraqis he hurt. All he knows is how easy it was for him to cross the line. Just as with that wounded insurgent there was a codified set of procedures set in place to help guide Marines and Navy medical personnel to make moral choices, choices they could tell their children and grandchildren about without shame, for Eric, there was a codified set of procedures beckoning him to take actions that he now feels condemn him.

He doesn’t even have the consolation of feeling that he saved lives. Sure, they found a car bomb factory, but Abu Ghraib was a turning point. In 2003, thousands of Iraqi soldiers had begun surrendering to the United States, confident they’d be treated well. That’s thousands of soldiers we didn’t have to fight to the death because of the moral reputation of our country.

Abu Ghraib changed things. Insurgent attacks increased, support for the sectarian leader Moktada al-Sadr surged, and 92 percent of Iraqis claimed they saw coalition forces as occupiers rather than liberators or peacekeepers. WikiLeaks later released a United States assessment that detainee mistreatment at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo was “the single most important motivating factor” convincing foreign jihadists to wage war, and Gen. Stanley McChrystal said, “In my experience, we found that nearly every first-time jihadist claimed Abu Ghraib had first jolted him to action.” Our moral reputation had started killing American soldiers.

So, yeah, they found a car bomb factory. Once.

Eric has a relationship to his war that’s much different from mine. Yet we were in the same war. And Eric did what our nation asked of him, used techniques that were vetted and approved and passed down to intelligence operatives and contractors like himself. Lawyers at the highest levels of government had been consulted, asked to bring us to the furthest edge of what the law might allow. To do what it takes, regardless of whether such actions will secure the “attachment of all good men,” or live up to that oath we swear to support and defend the Constitution.

What to make of that oath, anyway? The Constitution seems to mean different things at different times and places — whether in my unit’s dusty little combat hospital, or in Eric’s interrogation booth, or in a stadium where a crowd cheers a presidential candidate vowing to torture his nation’s enemies. We live in a democracy, so that document can be bent and twisted and re-formed to mean whatever we want it to.

If we choose to believe in a morally diminished America, an America that pursues its narrow selfish interests and no more, we can take that course and see how far it gets us. But if we choose to believe that America is not just a set of borders, but a set of principles, we need to act accordingly. That is the only way we ensure that our founding document, and the principles embedded within, are alive enough, and honorable enough, to be worth fighting for.

Which brings me back to Brian Chontosh, that man with such incredible skill at killing for his country. Years after I left the Corps I was surprised to learn that he didn’t really put much stock in his exceptional kill count. He told Mr. Zabriskie this about killing: “It’s ugly, it’s violent, it’s disgusting. I wish it wasn’t part of what we had to do.”

When people ask him if he’s proud of what he did, he answers: “I’m not proud of killing a whole lot of people. That doesn’t make sense to me. I’m proud of who I am today because I think I’ve done well. I think I’ve been honorable. I’ve been successful for my men, for the cause, for what’s right.”

Brian Chontosh doesn’t dwell on the dead, but he does wonder whether there were times when, perhaps, he need not have killed. One of these is that last soldier in the trench. He’ll remember him, trying to pretend he’s dead but wiggling a bit. “It’s not a haunting image,” he told Mr. Zabriskie. “It’s just — man. I wonder. I wonder if I would have just freaking grabbed the dude. Grabbed his hand, thrown the grenade away or something. I could have got him some medical treatment.”

If he had, then that enemy soldier would have ended up with a unit like mine, surrounded by doctors and nurses and Navy corpsmen who would have cared for him in accordance with the rules of law. They would have treated him well, because they’re American soldiers, because they swore an oath, because they have principles, because they have honor. And because without that, there’s nothing worth fighting for.

Phil Klay is the author of the short-story collection “Redeployment.”

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTOpinion), and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.
Title: Commentary: Our miserable 21st century
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 18, 2017, 08:12:31 PM
https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/our-miserable-21st-century/
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on February 19, 2017, 07:32:11 AM


From post above :

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/our-miserable-21st-century/

An eye opener. 

Agree with a lot of it.  However there are other factors that contributed to Trump no mentioned.

Such as the threat of giving away  of US sovereignty and the progressive's embrace America bashing and fueling of racism for examples.
It isn't *all* about "jobs"
Title: Novak: Democracy, Capitalism
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 19, 2017, 08:39:03 AM

By Michael Novak
Feb. 17, 2017 6:46 p.m. ET
44 COMMENTS

(This article appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Dec. 27, 1994. Michael Novak died Friday at 83.)

Democracy, Winston Churchill once said, is a bad system of government, except when compared to all the others. Much the same might be said of capitalism. It is not a system much celebrated by the poets, the philosophers or the priests. From time to time, it has seemed romantic to the young; but not very often. Capitalism is a system that commends itself best to the middle aged, after they have gained some experience of the way history treats the plans of men.

My own field of inquiry is theology and philosophy. From the perspective of these fields, I would not want it to be thought that any system is the Kingdom of God on Earth. Capitalism isn’t. Democracy isn’t. The two combined are not. The best that can be said for them (and it is quite enough) is that, in combination, capitalism, democracy, and pluralism are more protective of the rights, opportunities, and conscience of ordinary citizens (all citizens) than any known alternative.

Better than the Third World economies, and better than the socialist economies, capitalism makes it possible for the vast majority of the poor to break out of the prison of poverty; to find opportunity; to discover full scope for their own personal economic initiative; and to rise into the middle class and higher.

Sound evidence for this proposition is found in the migration patterns of the poor of the world. From which countries do they emigrate, and to which countries do they go? Overwhelmingly they flee from socialist and Third World countries, and they line up at the doors of the capitalist countries.

A second way of bringing sound evidence to light is to ask virtually any audience, in almost any capitalist country, how many generations back in family history they have to go before they reach poverty. For the vast majority of us in the U.S. we need go back no farther than the generation of our parents or grandparents. In 1900, a very large plurality of Americans lived in poverty, barely above the level of subsistence. Most of our families today are described as affluent. Capitalist systems have raised up the poor in family memory.

The second great argument on behalf of capitalism is that it is a necessary condition for the success of democracy—a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition. The instances of Greece, Portugal, Spain, Chile (after Pinochet), South Korea and others allow us to predict that once a capitalist system has generated a sufficiently large and successful middle class, the pressures for turning toward democracy become very strong. This is because successful entrepreneurs speedily recognize that they are smarter and more able than the generals and the commissars. They begin demanding self-government.

As has been recognized since ancient times, the middle class is the seedbed of the republican spirit. Capitalism tends toward democracy as the free economy tends toward the free polity. In both cases, the rule of law is crucial. In both, limited government is crucial. In both, the protection of the rights of individuals and minorities is crucial. While capitalism and democracy do not necessarily go together, particularly in the world of theory, in the actual world of concrete historical events, both their moving dynamism and their instincts for survival lead them toward a mutual embrace.

On this basis, one can predict that as the entrepreneurial spirit grows in China, particularly in its southern provinces, we can expect to see an ever stronger tide in favor of democratic institutions begin to make itself felt. The free economy will unleash forces that propel China toward the free polity.

True, some dictators have chosen to permit capitalist systems even though such systems severely limit their own power over the economy. But there is an inherent defect in one-man rule that makes capitalism in such nations vulnerable. That defect is human mortality and the problem of succession. One of the great advantages of democracy is that it solves that problem of succession in a routine, regular and peaceful way. For the long-run health of capitalism, then, I venture the hypothesis that democracy, with its methods of peaceful succession, is also a necessary condition.

Another service to capitalism that democracy performs better than dictatorship draws upon its representational function. A free economy has a great many parts, and a parliament or representative congress tends to represent all these parts. Thus in a democracy every part of the economy has at least some active voice. This may make it more difficult for clear and simple decisions to be made. But the active representation of all economic parties does make less likely the harsh, unilateral decisions to which dictators are prone. Pinochet and other dictators have caused great harm to their economies by unconsidered, unilateral decisions, which a parliament might have prevented them from making.

People do not love democracy if it does not bring improvement in their economic conditions. They will not be satisfied with democracy if all it means is the opportunity to vote every two years. Typically, they do not ask for utopia but would like to see the possibility of solid economic progress for their families over the next three to four years. This is the psychological mechanism which makes capitalism, or at least a dynamic economy, indispensable to the success of democracy. Capitalism delivers the goods that democracy holds out as one of its promises.

Another service provided by capitalism to democracy is less well understood. The founders of the U.S. understood it very clearly, however, as one can see by a careful study of Federalist No. 10 and No. 53. Benjamin Franklin in London and Thomas Jefferson in Paris searched libraries to find out why previous republics had failed. Envy, it turns out, is the most destructive social passion—more so than hatred, which is at least visible and universally recognized as evil. Envy seldom operates under its own name; it chooses a lovelier name to hide behind, and it works like a deadly invisible gas. In previous republics, it has set class against class, sections of cities against other sections, leading family against leading family. For this reason, the early Americans stood against division (“divided we fall”) and sought ways to neutralize envy.

To accomplish this task, the Founders determined that a republic cannot be built upon the clerical (priestly) class; nor upon the aristocracy and military (whose interests in “honor” caused so many rivalries and contestations); but upon a far humbler and typically more despised class, those engaging in commerce. They opted for what they called “a commercial republic.” Why did they choose as their social foundation a class, and an activity, universally regarded by philosophers, religious leaders, and poets as lowly and ignoble?

They chose commerce for two reasons. First, when all the people in the republic, especially the able-bodied poor, see that their material conditions are actually improving from year to year, they are led to compare where they are today with where they would like to be tomorrow. They stop comparing themselves with their neighbors, because their personal goals are not the same as those of their neighbors. They seek their own goals, at their own pace, to their own satisfaction.

Indeed, in America, as de Tocqueville and others noted, there was a remarkable freedom from envy. On the whole, people rejoiced in the success of others, as signs of the coming prosperity of their village, city, and nation. Across America today, in public schools and colleges and universities, one still sees many portraits of public benefactors who were successful in commerce and industry. Democracy depends on a growing economy for its upward tide—for social mobility, opportunity, and the pursuit of personal accomplishment.

The other reason the Framers chose commerce and industry as the economic foundation for this nation is to defeat the second great threat to republican institutions, the tyranny of a majority. James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, in particular, understood the ravages of original sin in human affairs. They, therefore, strongly supported Montesquieu’s (and Aquinas’) notion of separated powers, plus the “principle of division” throughout every branch of society.

It is in the nature of commerce and industry that they focus the interests of citizens in many different directions: Some in finance, some in production, some in supply, some in wholesale, some in retail, some in transport, some in lumber, others in tobacco, or cotton, or vegetables, or whatever. In their structure and goals, industry differs from industry, firm from firm. In such ways, commerce and industry render highly unlikely any single, universal majority.

In summary, commerce and industry are a necessary condition for the success of republican government (”government of the people, by the people, and for the people”) because they (1) defeat envy, through open economic opportunity and economic growth; and (2) defeat the tyranny of a majority, through splitting up economic interests into many different foci.
Title: EVerything is fuct
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 24, 2017, 07:18:41 PM
https://markmanson.net/everything-is-fucked
Title: Re: EVerything is fuct
Post by: G M on February 24, 2017, 07:46:28 PM
https://markmanson.net/everything-is-fucked

Gosh, it's the internet and not lie after lie from the MSM and the dominant political structures that many of us are well aware of.
Title: The Rise of the Useless Class
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 07, 2017, 05:18:33 AM
http://ideas.ted.com/the-rise-of-the-useless-class/
Title: Feminism AWOL on Islam
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 08, 2017, 03:16:47 PM
January 2003

Why Feminism Is AWOL on Islam
Kay S. Hymowitz
 

U.S. feminists should be protesting the brutal oppression of Middle Eastern women. But doing so would reveal how little they have to complain about at home.

Argue all you want with many feminist policies, but few quarrel with feminism?s core moral insight, which changed the lives (and minds) of women forever: that women are due the same rights and dignity as men. So, as news of the appalling miseries of women in the Islamic world has piled up, where are the feminists? Where?s the outrage? For a brief moment after September 11, when pictures of those blue alien-creaturely shapes in Afghanistan filled the papers, it seemed as if feminists were going to have their moment. And in fact the Feminist Majority, to its credit, had been publicizing since the mid-90s how Afghan girls were barred from school, how women were stoned for adultery or beaten for showing an ankle or wearing high-heeled shoes, how they were prohibited from leaving the house unless accompanied by a male relative, how they were denied medical help because the only doctors around were male.

But the rest is feminist silence. You haven?t heard a peep from feminists as it has grown clear that the Taliban were exceptional not in their extreme views about women but in their success at embodying those views in law and practice. In the United Arab Emirates, husbands have the right to beat their wives in order to discipline them??provided that the beating is not so severe as to damage her bones or deform her body,? in the words of the Gulf News. In Saudi Arabia, women cannot vote, drive, or show their faces or talk with male non-relatives in public. (Evidently they can?t talk to men over the airwaves either; when Prince Abdullah went to President Bush?s ranch in Crawford last April, he insisted that no female air-traffic controllers handle his flight.) Yes, Saudi girls can go to school, and many even attend the university; but at the university, women must sit in segregated rooms and watch their professors on closed-circuit televisions. If they have a question, they push a button on their desk, which turns on a light at the professor?s lectern, from which he can answer the female without being in her dangerous presence. And in Saudi Arabia, education can be harmful to female health. Last spring in Mecca, members of the mutaween, the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue, pushed fleeing students back into their burning school because they were not properly covered in abaya. Fifteen girls died.

You didn?t hear much from feminists when in the northern Nigerian province of Katsina a Muslim court sentenced a woman to death by stoning for having a child outside of marriage. The case might not have earned much attention?stonings are common in parts of the Muslim world?except that the young woman, who had been married off at 14 to a husband who ultimately divorced her when she lost her virginal allure, was still nursing a baby at the time of sentencing. During her trial she had no lawyer, although the court did see fit to delay her execution until she weans her infant.

You didn?t hear much from feminists as it emerged that honor killings by relatives, often either ignored or only lightly punished by authorities, are also commonplace in the Muslim world. In September, Reuters reported the story of an Iranian man, ?defending my honor, family, and dignity,? who cut off his seven-year-old daughter?s head after suspecting she had been raped by her uncle. The postmortem showed the girl to be a virgin. In another family mix-up, a Yemeni man shot his daughter to death on her wedding night when her husband claimed she was not a virgin. After a medical exam revealed that the husband was mistaken, officials concluded he was simply trying to protect himself from embarrassment about his own impotence. According to the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, every day two women are slain by male relatives seeking to avenge the family honor.

The savagery of some of these murders is worth a moment?s pause. In 2000, two Punjabi sisters, 20 and 21 years old, had their throats slit by their brother and cousin because the girls were seen talking to two boys to whom they were not related. In one especially notorious case, an Egyptian woman named Nora Marzouk Ahmed fell in love and eloped. When she went to make amends with her father, he cut off her head and paraded it down the street. Several years back, according to the Washington Post, the husband of Zahida Perveen, a 32-year-old pregnant Pakistani, gouged out her eyes and sliced off her earlobe and nose because he suspected her of having an affair.

In a related example widely covered last summer, a teenage girl in the Punjab was sentenced by a tribal council to rape by a gang that included one of the councilmen. After the hour-and-a-half ordeal, the girl was forced to walk home naked in front of scores of onlookers. She had been punished because her 11-year-old brother had compromised another girl by being been seen alone with her. But that charge turned out to be a ruse: it seems that three men of a neighboring tribe had sodomized the boy and accused him of illicit relations?an accusation leading to his sister?s barbaric punishment?as a way of covering up their crime.

Nor is such brutality limited to backward, out-of-the-way villages. Muddassir Rizvi, a Pakistani journalist, says that, though always common in rural areas, in recent years honor killings have become more prevalent in cities ?among educated and liberal families.? In relatively modern Jordan, honor killings were all but exempt from punishment until the penal code was modified last year; unfortunately, a young Palestinian living in Jordan, who had recently stabbed his 19-year-old sister 40 times ?to cleanse the family honor,? and another man from near Amman, who ran over his 23-year-old sister with his truck because of her ?immoral behavior,? had not yet changed their ways. British psychiatrist Anthony Daniels reports that British Muslim men frequently spirit their young daughters back to their native Pakistan and force the girls to marry. Such fathers have been known to kill daughters who resist. In Sweden, in one highly publicized case, Fadima Sahindal, an assimilated 26-year-old of Kurdish origin, was murdered by her father after she began living with her Swedish boyfriend. ?The whore is dead,? the family announced.

As you look at this inventory of brutality, the question bears repeating: Where are the demonstrations, the articles, the petitions, the resolutions, the vindications of the rights of Islamic women by American feminists? The weird fact is that, even after the excesses of the Taliban did more to forge an American consensus about women?s rights than 30 years of speeches by Gloria Steinem, feminists refused to touch this subject. They have averted their eyes from the harsh, blatant oppression of millions of women, even while they have continued to stare into the Western patriarchal abyss, indignant over female executives who cannot join an exclusive golf club and college women who do not have their own lacrosse teams.

But look more deeply into the matter, and you realize that the sound of feminist silence about the savage fundamentalist Muslim oppression of women has its own perverse logic. The silence is a direct outgrowth of the way feminist theory has developed in recent years. Now mired in self-righteous sentimentalism, multicultural nonjudgmentalism, and internationalist utopianism, feminism has lost the language to make the universalist moral claims of equal dignity and individual freedom that once rendered it so compelling. No wonder that most Americans, trying to deal with the realities of a post-9/11 world, are paying feminists no mind.

To understand the current sisterly silence about the sort of tyranny that the women?s movement came into existence to attack, it is helpful to think of feminisms plural rather than singular. Though not entirely discrete philosophies, each of three different feminisms has its own distinct reasons for causing activists to ?lose their voice? in the face of women?s oppression.

The first variety?radical feminism (or gender feminism, in Christina Hoff Sommers?s term)?starts with the insight that men are, not to put too fine a point upon it, brutes. Radical feminists do not simply subscribe to the reasonable-enough notion that men are naturally more prone to aggression than women. They believe that maleness is a kind of original sin. Masculinity explains child abuse, marital strife, high defense spending, every war from Troy to Afghanistan, as well as Hitler, Franco, and Pinochet. As Gloria Steinem informed the audience at a Florida fundraiser last March: ?The cult of masculinity is the basis for every violent, fascist regime.?

Gender feminists are little interested in fine distinctions between radical Muslim men who slam commercial airliners into office buildings and soldiers who want to stop radical Muslim men from slamming commercial airliners into office buildings. They are both examples of generic male violence?and specifically, male violence against women. ?Terrorism is on a continuum that starts with violence within the family, battery against women, violence against women in the society, all the way up to organized militaries that are supported by taxpayer money,? according to Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, who teaches ?The Sexuality of Terrorism? at California State University in Hayward. Violence is so intertwined with male sexuality that, she tells us, military pilots watch porn movies before they go out on sorties. The war in Afghanistan could not possibly offer a chance to liberate women from their oppressors, since it would simply expose women to yet another set of oppressors, in the gender feminists? view. As Sharon Lerner asserted bizarrely in the Village Voice, feminists? ?discomfort? with the Afghanistan bombing was ?deepened by the knowledge that more women than men die as a result of most wars.?

If guys are brutes, girls are their opposite: peace-loving, tolerant, conciliatory, and reasonable??Antiwar and Pro-Feminist,? as the popular peace-rally sign goes. Feminists long ago banished tough-as-nails women like Margaret Thatcher and Jeanne Kirkpatrick (and these days, one would guess, even the fetching Condoleezza Rice) to the ranks of the imperfectly female. Real women, they believe, would never justify war. ?Most women, Western and Muslim, are opposed to war regardless of its reasons and objectives,? wrote the Jordanian feminist Fadia Faqir on OpenDemocracy.net. ?They are concerned with emancipation, freedom (personal and civic), human rights, power sharing, integrity, dignity, equality, autonomy, power-sharing [sic], liberation, and pluralism.?

Sara Ruddick, author of Maternal Thinking, is perhaps one of the most influential spokeswomen for the position that women are instinctually peaceful. According to Ruddick (who clearly didn?t have Joan Crawford in mind), that?s because a good deal of mothering is naturally governed by the Gandhian principles of nonviolence such as ?renunciation,? ?resistance to injustice,? and ?reconciliation.? The novelist Barbara Kingsolver was one of the first to demonstrate the subtleties of such universal maternal thinking after the United States invaded Afghanistan. ?I feel like I?m standing on a playground where the little boys are all screaming ?He started it!? and throwing rocks,? she wrote in the Los Angeles Times. ?I keep looking for somebody?s mother to come on the scene saying, ?Boys! Boys!? ?

Gender feminism?s tendency to reduce foreign affairs to a Lifetime Channel movie may make it seem too silly to bear mentioning, but its kitschy naivet? hasn?t stopped it from being widespread among elites. You see it in widely read writers like Kingsolver, Maureen Dowd, and Alice Walker. It turns up in our most elite institutions. Swanee Hunt, head of the Women in Public Policy Program at Harvard?s Kennedy School of Government wrote, with Cristina Posa in Foreign Policy: ?The key reason behind women?s marginalization may be that everyone recognizes just how good women are at forging peace.? Even female elected officials are on board. ?The women of all these countries should go on strike, they should all sit down and refuse to do anything until their men agree to talk peace,? urged Ohio representative Marcy Kaptur to the Arab News last spring, echoing an idea that Aristophanes, a dead white male, proposed as a joke 2,400 years ago. And President Clinton is an advocate of maternal thinking, too. ?If we?d had women at Camp David,? he said in July 2000, ?we?d have an agreement.?

Major foundations too seem to take gender feminism seriously enough to promote it as an answer to world problems. Last December, the Ford Foundation and the Soros Open Society Foundation helped fund the Afghan Women?s Summit in Brussels to develop ideas for a new government in Afghanistan. As Vagina Monologues author Eve Ensler described it on her website, the summit was made up of ?meetings and meals, canvassing, workshops, tears, and dancing.? ?Defense was mentioned nowhere in the document,? Ensler wrote proudly of the summit?s concluding proclamation?despite the continuing threat in Afghanistan of warlords, bandits, and lingering al-Qaida operatives. ?uilding weapons or instruments of retaliation was not called for in any category,? Ensler cooed. ?Instead [the women] wanted education, health care, and the protection of refugees, culture, and human rights.?

Too busy celebrating their own virtue and contemplating their own victimhood, gender feminists cannot address the suffering of their Muslim sisters realistically, as light years worse than their own petulant grievances. They are too intent on hating war to ask if unleashing its horrors might be worth it to overturn a brutal tyranny that, among its manifold inhumanities, treats women like animals. After all, hating war and machismo is evidence of the moral superiority that comes with being born female.

Yet the gender feminist idea of superior feminine virtue is becoming an increasingly tough sell for anyone actually keeping up with world events. Kipling once wrote of the fierceness of Afghan women: ?When you?re wounded and left on the Afghan plains/And the women come out to cut up your remains/Just roll to your rifle and blow out your brains.? Now it?s clearer than ever that the dream of worldwide sisterhood is no more realistic than worldwide brotherhood; culture trumps gender any day. Mothers all over the Muslim world are naming their babies Usama or praising Allah for their sons? efforts to kill crusading infidels. Last February, 28-year-old Wafa Idris became the first female Palestinian suicide bomber to strike in Israel, killing an elderly man and wounding scores of women and children. And in April, Israeli soldiers discovered under the maternity clothes of 26-year-old Shifa Adnan Kodsi a bomb rather than a baby. Maternal thinking, indeed.

The second variety of feminism, seemingly more sophisticated and especially prevalent on college campuses, is multiculturalism and its twin, postcolonialism. The postcolonial feminist has even more reason to shy away from the predicament of women under radical Islam than her maternally thinking sister. She believes that the Western world is so sullied by its legacy of imperialism that no Westerner, man or woman, can utter a word of judgment against former colonial peoples. Worse, she is not so sure that radical Islam isn?t an authentic, indigenous?and therefore appropriate?expression of Arab and Middle Eastern identity.

The postmodern philosopher Michel Foucault, one of the intellectual godfathers of multiculturalism and postcolonialism, first set the tone in 1978 when an Italian newspaper sent him to Teheran to cover the Iranian revolution. As his biographer James Miller tells it, Foucault looked in the face of Islamic fundamentalism and saw . . . an awe-inspiring revolt against ?global hegemony.? He was mesmerized by this new form of ?political spirituality? that, in a phrase whose dark prescience he could not have grasped, portended the ?transfiguration of the world.? Even after the Ayatollah Khomeini came to power and reintroduced polygamy and divorce on the husband?s demand with automatic custody to fathers, reduced the official female age of marriage from 18 to 13, fired all female judges, and ordered compulsory veiling, whose transgression was to be punished by public flogging, Foucault saw no reason to temper his enthusiasm. What was a small matter like women?s basic rights, when a struggle against ?the planetary system? was at hand?

Postcolonialists, then, have their own binary system, somewhat at odds with gender feminism?not to mention with women?s rights. It is not men who are the sinners; it is the West. It is not women who are victimized innocents; it is the people who suffered under Western colonialism, or the descendants of those people, to be more exact. Caught between the rock of patriarchy and the hard place of imperialism, the postcolonial feminist scholar gingerly tiptoes her way around the subject of Islamic fundamentalism and does the only thing she can do: she focuses her ire on Western men.

To this end, the postcolonialist eagerly dips into the inkwell of gender feminism. She ties colonialist exploitation and domination to maleness; she might refer to Israel?s ?masculinist military culture??Israel being white and Western?though she would never dream of pointing out the ?masculinist military culture? of the jihadi. And she expends a good deal of energy condemning Western men for wanting to improve the lives of Eastern women. At the turn of the twentieth century Lord Cromer, the British vice consul of Egypt and a pet target of postcolonial feminists, argued that the ?degradation? of women under Islam had a harmful effect on society. Rubbish, according to the postcolonialist feminist. His words are simply part of ?the Western narrative of the quintessential otherness and inferiority of Islam,? as Harvard professor Leila Ahmed puts it in Women and Gender in Islam. The same goes for American concern about Afghan women; it is merely a ?device for ranking the ?other? men as inferior or as ?uncivilized,? ? according to Nira Yuval-Davis, professor of gender and ethnic studies at the University of Greenwich, England. These are all examples of what renowned Columbia professor Gayatri Spivak called ?white men saving brown women from brown men.?

Spivak?s phrase, a great favorite on campus, points to the postcolonial notion that brown men, having been victimized by the West, can never be oppressors in their own right. If they give the appearance of treating women badly, the oppression they have suffered at the hands of Western colonial masters is to blame. In fact, the worse they treat women, the more they are expressing their own justifiable outrage. ?When men are traumatized [by colonial rule], they tend to traumatize their own women,? Miriam Cooke, a Duke professor and head of the Association for Middle East Women?s Studies, told me. And today, Cooke asserts, brown men are subjected to a new form of imperialism. ?Now there is a return of colonialism that we saw in the nineteenth century in the context of globalization,? she says. ?What is driving Islamist men is globalization.?

It would be difficult to exaggerate the through-the-looking-glass quality of postcolonialist theory when it comes to the subject of women. Female suicide bombers are a good thing, because they are strong women demonstrating ?agency? against colonial powers. Polygamy too must be shown due consideration. ?Polygamy can be liberating and empowering,? Cooke answered sunnily when I asked her about it. ?Our norm is the Western, heterosexual, single couple. If we can imagine different forms that would allow us to be something other than a heterosexual couple, we might imagine polygamy working,? she explained murkily. Some women, she continued, are relieved when their husbands take a new wife: they won?t have to service him so often. Or they might find they now have the freedom to take a lover. But, I ask, wouldn?t that be dangerous in places where adulteresses can be stoned to death? At any rate, how common is that? ?I don?t know,? Cooke answers, ?I?m interested in discourse.? The irony couldn?t be darker: the very people protesting the imperialist exploitation of the ?Other? endorse that Other?s repressive customs as a means of promoting their own uniquely Western agenda?subverting the heterosexual patriarchy.

The final category in the feminist taxonomy, which might be called the world-government utopian strain, is in many respects closest to classical liberal feminism. Dedicated to full female dignity and equality, it generally eschews both the biological determinism of the gender feminist and the cultural relativism of the multiculti postcolonialist. Stanford political science professor Susan Moller Okin, an influential, subtle, and intelligent spokeswoman for this approach, created a stir among feminists in 1997 when she forthrightly attacked multiculturalists for valuing ?group rights for minority cultures? over the well-being of individual women. Okin admirably minced no words attacking arranged marriage, female circumcision, and polygamy, which she believed women experienced as a ?barely tolerable institution.? Some women, she went so far as to declare, ?might be better off if the culture into which they were born were either to become extinct . . . or preferably, to be encouraged to alter itself so as to reinforce the equality of women.?

But though Okin is less shy than other feminists about discussing the plight of women under Islamic fundamentalism, the typical U.N. utopian has her own reasons for keeping quiet as that plight fills Western headlines. For one thing, the utopian is also a bean-counting absolutist, seeking a pure, numerical equality between men and women in all departments of life. She greets Western, and particularly American, claims to have achieved freedom for women with skepticism. The motto of the 2002 International Women?s Day??Afghanistan Is Everywhere??was in part a reproach to the West about its superior airs. Women in Afghanistan might have to wear burqas, but don?t women in the West parade around in bikinis? ?It?s equally disrespectful and abusive to have women prancing around a stage in bathing suits for cash or walking the streets shrouded in burqas in order to survive,? columnist Jill Nelson wrote on the MSNBC website about the murderously fanatical riots that attended the Miss World pageant in Nigeria.

As Nelson?s statement hints, the utopian is less interested in freeing women to make their own choices than in engineering and imposing her own elite vision of a perfect society. Indeed, she is under no illusions that, left to their own democratic devices, women would freely choose the utopia she has in mind. She would not be surprised by recent Pakistani elections, where a number of the women who won parliamentary seats were Islamist. But it doesn?t really matter what women want. The universalist has a comprehensive vision of ?women?s human rights,? meaning not simply women?s civil and political rights but ?economic rights? and ?socioeconomic justice.? Cynical about free markets and globalization, the U.N. utopian is also unimpressed by the liberal democratic nation-state ?as an emancipatory institution,? in the dismissive words of J. Ann Tickner, director for international studies at the University of Southern California. Such nation-states are ?unresponsive to the needs of [their] most vulnerable members? and seeped in ?nationalist ideologies? as well as in patriarchal assumptions about autonomy. In fact, like the (usually) unacknowledged socialist that she is, the U.N. utopian eagerly awaits the withering of the nation-state, a political arrangement that she sees as tied to imperialism, war, and masculinity. During war, in particular, nations ?depend on ideas about masculinized dignity and feminized sacrifice to sustain the sense of autonomous nationhood,? writes Cynthia Enloe, professor of government at Clark University.

Having rejected the patriarchal liberal nation-state, with all the democratic machinery of self-government that goes along with it, the utopian concludes that there is only one way to achieve her goals: to impose them through international government. Utopian feminists fill the halls of the United Nations, where they examine everything through the lens of the ?gender perspective? in study after unreadable study. (My personal favorites: ?Gender Perspectives on Landmines? and ?Gender Perspectives on Weapons of Mass Destruction,? whose conclusion is that landmines and WMDs are bad for women.)

The 1979 U.N. Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), perhaps the first and most important document of feminist utopianism, gives the best sense of the sweeping nature of the movement?s ambitions. CEDAW demands many measures that anyone committed to democratic liberal values would applaud, including women?s right to vote and protection against honor killings and forced marriage. Would that the document stopped there. Instead it sets out to impose a utopian order that would erase all distinctions between men and women, a kind of revolution of the sexes from above, requiring nations to ?take all appropriate measures to modify the social and cultural patterns of conduct of men and women? and to eliminate ?stereotyped roles? to accomplish this legislative abolition of biology. The document calls for paid maternity leave, nonsexist school curricula, and government-supported child care. The treaty?s 23-member enforcement committee hectors nations that do not adequately grasp that, as Enloe puts it, ?the personal is international.? The committee has cited Belarus for celebrating Mother?s Day, China for failing to legalize prostitution, and Libya for not interpreting the Qur?an in accordance with ?committee guidelines.?

Confusing ?women?s participation? with self-determination, and numerical equivalence with equality, CEDAW utopians try to orchestrate their perfect society through quotas and affirmative-action plans. Their bean-counting mentality cares about whether women participate equally, without asking what it is that they are participating in or whether their participation is anything more than ceremonial. Thus at the recent Women?s Summit in Jordan, Rima Khalaf suggested that governments be required to use quotas in elections ?to leapfrog women to power.? Khalaf, like so many illiberal feminist utopians, has no hesitation in forcing society to be free. As is often the case when elites decide they have discovered the route to human perfection, the utopian urge is not simply antidemocratic but verges on the totalitarian.

That this combination of sentimental victimhood, postcolonial relativism, and utopian overreaching has caused feminism to suffer so profound a loss of moral and political imagination that it cannot speak against the brutalization of Islamic women is an incalculable loss to women and to men. The great contribution of Western feminism was to expand the definition of human dignity and freedom. It insisted that all human beings were worthy of liberty. Feminists now have the opportunity to make that claim on behalf of women who in their oppression have not so much as imagined that its promise could include them, too. At its best, feminism has stood for a rich idea of personal choice in shaping a meaningful life, one that respects not only the woman who wants to crash through glass ceilings but also the one who wants to stay home with her children and bake cookies or to wear a veil and fast on Ramadan. Why shouldn?t feminists want to shout out their own profound discovery for the world to hear?

Perhaps, finally, because to do so would be to acknowledge the freedom they themselves enjoy, thanks to Western ideals and institutions. Not only would such an admission force them to give up their own simmering resentments; it would be bad for business.
The truth is that the free institutions?an independent judiciary, a free press, open elections?that protect the rights of women are the same ones that protect the rights of men. The separation of church and state that would allow women to escape the burqa would also free men from having their hands amputated for theft. The education system that would teach girls to read would also empower millions of illiterate boys. The capitalist economies that bring clean water, cheap clothes, and washing machines that change the lives of women are the same ones that lead to healthier, freer men. In other words, to address the problems of Muslim women honestly, feminists would have to recognize that free men and women need the same things?and that those are things that they themselves already have. And recognizing that would mean an end to feminism as we know it.

There are signs that, outside the academy, middlebrow literary circles, and the United Nations, feminism has indeed met its Waterloo. Most Americans seem to realize that September 11 turned self-indulgent sentimental illusions, including those about the sexes, into an unaffordable luxury. Consider, for instance, women?s attitudes toward war, a topic on which politicians have learned to take for granted a gender gap. But according to the Pew Research Center, in January 2002, 57 percent of women versus 46 percent of men cited national security as the country?s top priority. There has been a ?seismic gender shift on matters of war,? according to pollster Kellyanne Conway. In 1991, 45 percent of U.S. women supported the use of ground troops in the Gulf War, a substantially smaller number than the 67 percent of men. But as of November, a CNN survey found women were more likely than men to support the use of ground troops against Iraq, 58 percent to 56 percent. The numbers for younger women were especially dramatic. Sixty-five percent of women between 18 and 49 support ground troops, as opposed to 48 percent of women 50 and over. Women are also changing their attitudes toward military spending: before September 11, only 24 percent of women supported increased funds; after the attacks, that number climbed to 47 percent. An evolutionary psychologist might speculate that, if females tend to be less aggressively territorial than males, there?s little to compare to the ferocity of the lioness when she believes her young are threatened.

Even among some who consider themselves feminists, there is some grudging recognition that Western, and specifically American, men are sometimes a force for the good. The Feminist Majority is sending around urgent messages asking for President Bush to increase American security forces in Afghanistan. The influential left-wing British columnist Polly Toynbee, who just 18 months ago coined the phrase ?America the Horrible,? went to Afghanistan to figure out whether the war ?was worth it.? Her answer was not what she might have expected. Though she found nine out of ten women still wearing burqas, partly out of fear of lingering fundamentalist hostility, she was convinced their lives had greatly improved. Women say they can go out alone now.

As we sink more deeply into what is likely to be a protracted struggle with radical Islam, American feminists have a moral responsibility to give up their resentments and speak up for women who actually need their support. Feminists have the moral authority to say that their call for the rights of women is a universal demand?that the rights of women are the Rights of Man.

Feminism Behind the Veil

Feminists in the West may fiddle while Muslim women are burning, but in the Muslim world itself there is a burgeoning movement to address the miserable predicament of the second sex?without simply adopting a philosophy whose higher cultural products include Sex and the City, Rosie O?Donnell, and the power-suited female executive.

The most impressive signs of an indigenous female revolt against the fundamentalist order are in Iran. Over the past ten years or so, Iran has seen the publication of a slew of serious journals dedicated to the social and political predicament of Islamic women, the most well known being the Teheran-based Zonan and Zan, published by Faezah Hashemi, a well-known member of parliament and the daughter of former president Rafsanjani. Believing that Western feminism has promoted hostility between the sexes, confused sex roles, and the sexual objectification of women, a number of writers have proposed an Islamic-style feminism that would stress ?gender complementarity? rather than equality and that would pay full respect to housewifery and motherhood while also giving women access to education and jobs.

Attacking from the religious front, a number of ?Islamic feminists? are challenging the reigning fundamentalist reading of the Qur?an. These scholars insist that the founding principles of Islam, which they believe were long ago corrupted by pre-Islamic Arab, Persian, and North African customs, are if anything more egalitarian than those of Western religions; the Qur?an explicitly describes women as the moral and spiritual equals of men and allows them to inherit and pass down property. The power of misogynistic mullahs has grown in recent decades, feminists continue, because Muslim men have felt threatened by modernity?s challenge to traditional arrangements between the sexes.

What makes Islamic feminism really worth watching is that it has the potential to play a profoundly important role in the future of the Islamic world?and not just because it could improve the lot of women. By insisting that it is true to Islam?in fact, truer than the creed espoused by the entrenched religious elite?Islamic feminism can affirm the dignity of Islam while at the same time bringing it more in line with modernity. In doing this, feminists can help lay the philosophical groundwork for democracy. In the West, feminism lagged behind religious reformation and political democratization by centuries; in the East, feminism could help lead the charge.

At the same time, though, the issue of women?s rights highlights two reasons for caution about the Islamic future. For one thing, no matter how much feminists might wish otherwise, polygamy and male domination of the family are not merely a fact of local traditions; they are written into the Qur?an itself. This in and of itself would not prove to be such an impediment?the Old Testament is filled with laws antithetical to women?s equality?except for the second problem: more than other religions, Islam is unfriendly to the notion of the separation of church and state. If history is any guide, there?s the rub. The ultimate guarantor of the rights of all citizens, whether Islamic or not, can only be a fully secular state.
Title: Vanity Fair: The Terrifying Truth
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 09, 2017, 08:39:38 PM

http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/03/the-terrifying-truth-behind-the-trump-russia-mess
Title: minor point
Post by: ccp on March 10, 2017, 07:37:23 AM
"But I submit that Trump hatred has become a serious danger of its own. Trump inspires in his foes a revulsion so severe that even people who normally know better, and behave better, seem to feel the ends justify the means in getting rid of him."

switch the name Trump with Clinton, or Pelosi, or Reid, or Schumer, or may of the Hollywood liberals and we have the same conclusion.
Title: Stratfor: Connectivity, not Primacy
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 15, 2017, 01:15:18 AM

Connectivity, Not Primacy, Is the Way of the World
Global Affairs
March 8, 2017 | 08:56 GMT Print
Text Size
As emerging markets form more connections in all directions, they're becoming less reliant on the developed world. (EKAPHON MANEECHOT/Shutterstock)

Editor's Note: The Global Affairs column is curated by Stratfor's board of contributors, a diverse group of thinkers whose expertise inspires rigorous and innovative thought. Their opinions are their own and serve to complement and even challenge our beliefs. We welcome that challenge, and we hope our readers do too.

By Parag Khanna

As surprising as it may seem, speaking of "deglobalization" as an unstoppable trend became fashionable long before Donald Trump was elected the United States' 45th president. Citing the persistent after-effects of the 2008 financial crisis, such as lower cross-border interbank lending, rising tension in Asia and pressure to bring manufacturing back within America's borders, the arguments for "peak globalization" held a certain appeal before Trump's "economic nationalism" agenda of tearing up trade agreements took center stage this year.

But as in every previous episode, the rumors of globalization's demise have been drastically overstated. Today's reality — and the megatrend of the 21st century — remains a massive expansion in the volume of cross-border connectivity within and across the regions of the world, and in the scale of movements of people and transactions of goods, services, capital and data. Globalization is alive and well. The question that really matters for American strategists is whether the United States is being left out of the loop as the rest of the world's regions deepen their connections with one another.
Get on Board or Get Left Behind

Trump's worldview rests on the belief that America's economic might gives it almost unlimited leverage — and that the rest of the world will need to play ball if it wants access to American customers and finance. That may have been true once. But a closer look at just how global trade has been realigning suggests that it's likely to keep growing with or without the United States.

An example already in the public eye is former U.S. President Barack Obama's signature international economic effort, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). After the previous administration proved unable to push it through Congress and Trump ditched it in one of his first executive orders, most of the TPP's other signatories are moving ahead anyway with a "TPP minus one" format. In fact, though America will be absent when the new TPP constellation of negotiating countries comes together in Chile in March, China will be present for the first time. This is quite a reversal of fortune for a trade agreement that was initially pitched to Congress as a way to contain China's rise.

Even more important, more than a dozen Asian countries have rekindled their efforts to advance an alternative megadeal — the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) — centered not on the United States but on China. If the RCEP moves forward, it will integrate Asian markets in a way that will make them even harder for American firms to penetrate. Indigenous Asian firms will quickly move up the value chain and start occupying spots that U.S. companies are used to having for themselves. This is why America's biggest corporations aren't so keen on Trump's efforts to erect barriers that would keep manufacturing, pharmaceuticals and other sectors at home. Not only would "border adjustment taxes" raise the cost of their imports, but without the TPP's push to open markets, multinational companies' declining profits abroad will mean less capital to invest in competing for the high-growth markets where the majority of their revenues come from.

What is Global Affairs?

As Americans, it's easy to assume that global trade still depends on the United States as the consumer of last resort. But that's no longer true. In fact, the bulk of trade in emerging-market nations is with one another, not with the United States. In 1990, emerging economies sent 65 percent of their exports to developed peers like the United States and Europe, and only 35 percent to other developing countries. Today, that figure is nearly reversed. This rising emerging-market trade is a multidecade trend that many Western economists neglect. China's annual trade with Africa is nearing $400 billion per year — more than U.S.-Africa trade — and its trade with Latin America is almost $200 billion, about the same as trade between Latin America and Europe. Emerging markets won't decouple from advanced economies, but as they connect more in all directions, they're becoming less reliant on the developed world.

This is only natural given their geographic proximity to one another. Consider that most of the world's oil now flows between the Middle East and Far East, across the Indian Ocean and through the Straits of Malacca to China, Japan and South Korea. A full 80 percent of China's oil and natural gas imports traverse this route, along with roughly 66 percent of China's imported and exported goods. Even if China diverts some of these flows to Arctic routes, for example, this is a shift in trade geography, not a decline in trade overall.

It's become trendy among globalization skeptics to point out that global trade growth is decelerating relative to global gross domestic product growth. But given how fast Asian economies are expanding in consumption and services, this isn't surprising. By most estimates, consumption in China now represents two-thirds of China's output and contributes 75 percent of its growth. Yet China has also continued its investment binge in infrastructure and real estate, which are keeping commodities imports steady. And remember that as they grow, wealthier societies tend to import more, borrow more, spend more and travel more — which means Asia's rising middle class will likely be a driver of international trade even as its companies reduce their dependence on the West.

Which brings us to the largest coordinated investment program in history: the construction of "One Belt, One Road," a China-driven infrastructure project meant to weave many new and sturdy Silk Roads across the Eurasian landmass. For the past quarter-century since the Soviet Union's collapse, Europe has been steadily rehabilitating its former Warsaw Pact and Soviet republic neighbors with modern infrastructure, while China has begun to do the same with the dozen countries on its western periphery, turning most Central Asian states into supply chain colonies and passageways to the Near East and Europe. In the next quarter-century, they will meet in the middle, fusing the Eurasian supercontinent into an integrated commercial zone encompassing over two-thirds of the world's population.

But we don't need to wait until then to see the potential: Europe's trade with Asia — including China, Japan, India, Australia and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations — already exceeds trans-Atlantic trade at more than $1 trillion per year, and that's even before most of these high-speed railways, pipelines and other corridors are built. No wonder European governments (and their construction companies) were tripping over themselves to join the Chinese-sponsored Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, despite America's objections. Germany's record trade surpluses aren't going to be absorbed in the sluggish eurozone, or by a protectionist America. Thus, for all of today's uncertainty, this undercurrent is clear: Europe and Asia are brushing aside America's unpredictability and getting on with the business of building a new world order. As I wrote in Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization, "Connectivity across Eurasia now competes with culture across the Atlantic."
An Opportunity of Global Proportions

This is not "balancing behavior" to counteract the economic hegemony of the United States; the world is not aligning against America. It still uses the American financial system where necessary and American technology when convenient. But there is a law of history far more powerful than the United States' geopolitical primacy: supply and demand. American officials talk about accommodating China's rise as if the global system has an entrenched preference for American leadership. But the logic of history has no such sentimentality. The system wants only one thing: more connectivity. It doesn't care which power is the most connected, but the most connected power will have the most leverage. It will supply the security, infrastructure and other public goods that the world desires. China has become a welcome and popular power in Africa and Latin America because it has sold them (and often built for them) the foundations of better connectivity. They have demand for infrastructure and China supplies it. Ethereal concepts such as "soft power" are a pale substitute for the power of connectivity.

The new trade and financial links across the regions of the world signal the birth of a more distributed global economy with many major regional anchors including the United States. All sizable economies have benefited massively from exploiting comparative advantages with one another, and even the limited regionalization of supply chains won't undo this positive interdependence.

This more distributed globalization is also a significant opportunity for moribund Western economies. America is a debtor nation, but Japan and Germany (along with China) are the world's largest creditor nations, generating profits from reviving global lending and trade finance. Emerging markets' faster growth rates and weaker currencies have inspired some of the world's largest pension funds, from Canada to Norway, to expand their portfolio allocation to Asia, Latin America and Africa. The Norwegian pension fund recently announced a big switch in its focus from bonds to equity, meaning it is investing more in multinational corporations with exposure to emerging markets. The long money is still betting on globalization. Rather than try to stop it, America should get on the right side of history.

Indeed, the United States remains not only the most powerful state in the international system but also one of the most connected. America is the world's largest oil producer, and it increasingly exports oil to China and liquefied natural gas to Europe. The American dollar provides liquidity to the global financial system; American foreign investment drives capital formation in emerging markets; America's network of military alliances provides security guarantees; and of course, American software exports and digital services are craved universally.

American competitiveness therefore isn't enhanced by isolating itself. U.S. companies rightly favored the TPP and other trade agreements because they've long since outgrown even their own giant domestic market. Without substantial margins abroad, they cannot invest at home. Trump's punitive measures are self-defeating because they hinder America from competing in a world of growing opportunity. Not only should America redouble its efforts to open markets for American goods, services and investment, but it also must be equally aggressive in reforming its own tax, infrastructure, technology, immigration and education policies so that investing at home becomes more attractive.

If this is what Steve Bannon meant by "economic nationalism," that would be fine. But Trump's brand of "America First" ignores the simple fact that tens of millions of American jobs are linked to exports, and protectionism invites reciprocity in the form of countervailing measures that will surely destroy jobs, raise prices and slow the economy. There is still time to course-correct and ensure that globalization follows a win-win path. Most of the rest of the world sees it that way, and perhaps America should too.
Title: Re: Stratfor: Connectivity, not Primacy
Post by: DDF on March 15, 2017, 08:31:50 AM

Connectivity, Not Primacy, Is the Way of the World
Global Affairs
March 8, 2017 | 08:56 GMT Print
Text Size
As emerging markets form more connections in all directions, they're becoming less reliant on the developed world. (EKAPHON MANEECHOT/Shutterstock)

Editor's Note: The Global Affairs column is curated by Stratfor's board of contributors, a diverse group of thinkers whose expertise inspires rigorous and innovative thought. Their opinions are their own and serve to complement and even challenge our beliefs. We welcome that challenge, and we hope our readers do too.

By Parag Khanna



He is a CNN Global Contributor and Senior Research Fellow in the Centre on Asia and Globalisation at the Lee Kuan Yew School. Edit -Lee Kuan Yew is a portion of the  National University of Singapore - added for clarity.

Just to better undertsand his formation and school of thought.

"Khanna was born in Kanpur, India. His childhood was spent between India and the United Arab Emirates before his family moved to New York City. For his final year at Horace Greeley High School in Chappaqua, New York, Khanna moved to Flensburg, Germany, as an exchanged student and attended the Altes Gymnasium, where he completed the requirements for an Abitur degree."

As an American, I don't necessarily like non-americans, or Americans that are first generation, telling me what my country should be doing.

That should, IMO, be left to Americans to decide.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 15, 2017, 08:57:02 AM
Stratfor printed this as an "op-ed" piece.

The arguments it makes are ones we should be familiar with and have thought about. 

This is a powerful book:

https://www.amazon.com/Nonzero-Logic-Destiny-Robert-Wright/dp/0679758941%3FSubscriptionId%3DAKIAILSHYYTFIVPWUY6Q%26tag%3Dduckduckgo-ffsb-20%26linkCode%3Dxm2%26camp%3D2025%26creative%3D165953%26creativeASIN%3D0679758941
Title: Camille Paglia
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 15, 2017, 11:05:38 AM
https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/camille-paglia-discusses-her-war-on-elitist-garbage-and-contemporary-feminism
Title: VDH: The End of Identity Politics
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 19, 2017, 09:31:17 PM
http://www.hoover.org/research/end-identity-politics

Title: battle of the boom boxes
Post by: ccp on March 21, 2017, 05:37:24 AM
and a battle of cultures by VDH as only VDH can do:

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/445934/political-culture-backlash-americans-retreat-when-theres-no-escaping-politics
Title: Maureen Dowd
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 27, 2017, 10:30:05 AM
http://www.voices4hillary.com/even-if-you-dont-read-maureen-dowd-read-this-donald-this-i-will-tell-y-2331030492.html?xrs=RebelMouse_fb&ts=1490576743
Title: POTH goes looking for interesting thought pieces on the right
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 29, 2017, 08:59:11 AM
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/28/us/politics/right-and-left-partisan-writing-you-shouldnt-miss.html?emc=edit_ta_20170328&nl=top-stories&nlid=49641193&ref=cta&_r=1
Title: Peggy Noonan on Steve Bannon
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 17, 2017, 04:21:10 AM
 By Peggy Noonan
April 13, 2017 7:36 p.m. ET
495 COMMENTS

My late friend Bill Safire, the tough and joyous New York Times columnist, once gave me good advice. I was not then a newspaper columnist, but he’d apparently decided I would be. This is what he said: Never join a pile-on, always hit ’em when they’re up. Don’t criticize the person who’s already being attacked. What’s the fun in that, where’s the valor? Hit them when they’re flying high and it takes some guts.

So, in the matter of Steve Bannon :

I think we can agree he brings a certain amount of disorder. They say he’s rough and tough, and there’s no reason to doubt it. They say he leaks like a sieve and disparages his rivals, and this can be assumed to be correct: They all do that in this White House. He is accused of saying incendiary things and that is true. A week into the administration he told Michael Grynbaum of the Times the media should “keep its mouth shut and just listen for a while.” “I love a gunfight,” he reportedly said in the middle of his latest difficulties. When he tried to muscle members of the Freedom Caucus to vote for the ObamaCare replacement bill, a congressman blandly replied, “You know, the last time someone ordered me to do something I was 18 years old, and it was my daddy, and I didn’t listen to him, either.” When I said a while back that some of the president’s aides are outlandish, and confuse strength with aggression, he was in mind.
Opinion Journal: "The White House is a pressure cooker."
Former White House Speechwriter Bill McGurn on his experience of White House political battles. Photo: Associated Press

But there’s something low, unseemly and ugly in the efforts to take him out so publicly and humiliatingly, to turn him into a human oil spot on the tarmac—this not only from his putative colleagues but now even the president. “I like Steve, but you have to remember he was not involved in my campaign until very late,” Mr. Trump purred to the New York Post’s Michael Goodwin.

    Trump and the Rise of the Unprotected

    Peggy Noonan writes about Donald Trump and the rise of the protected, made up of figures in government, politics and media who are struggling to make sense of the world they created.

    Click to Read Story

    Trump Was a Spark, Not the Fire

    Peggy Noonan: The establishments, both media and conservative, failed to anticipate how they’d be consumed.

    Click to Read Story

    The Republican Party Is Shattering

    Peggy Noonan: The Republican party is shattering and whether Republicans stop Donald Trump or unite behind him, nothing will ever be the same.

    Click to Read Story

    Advertisement

    A Wounded Boy’s Silence, and the Candidates’

    Peggy Noonan: “I hate war,” FDR declared 80 years ago. Why can’t today’s politicians say so?

    Click to Read Story

    Shining a Light on ‘Back Row’ America

    Peggy Noonan writes about Chris Arnade, a photographer whose travels and pictures reveal an America that is battered but standing, a society that is atomized but holding on.

    Click to Read Story

    No More Business as Usual, Mr. Trump

    Peggy Noonan writes Donald Trump has to abandon his company in order to deal on the country’s behalf.

    Click to Read Story

    Advertisement

    Imagine a Sane Donald Trump

    You know he’s a nut. What if he weren’t?

    Click to Read Story

    The Year of the Reticent Voter

    Peggy Noonan: People seem to feel that if they express a preference, they’re inviting others to inspect their souls.

    Click to Read Story

    Remembering a Hero, 15 Years After 9/11

    Peggy Noonan: “With this bandanna,” Welles Crowther said, “I’m gonna change the world.” And he did.

    Click to Read Story

    Advertisement

    That Moment When 2016 Hits You

    Peggy Noonan: ‘I felt a wave of sadness,’ said one friend. This year’s politics have that effect on a lot of Americans.

    Click to Read Story

Peggy Noonan: Pulitzer Prize Winner for Commentary 2017

So let’s take a look at something impressive Mr. Bannon has done. I’ve been meaning to write of it for a while. In 2014 he did a live Skype interview for a conference on poverty at the Vatican. BuzzFeed ran it during the campaign under the headline “This Is How Steve Bannon Sees the Entire World.”

It shows an interesting mind at work.

The West is currently facing a “crisis of capitalism,” he said. The world was able to recover after the world wars in part thanks to “an enlightened form of capitalism” that generated “tremendous wealth” broadly distributed among all classes. This capitalism was shaped by “the underlying spiritual and moral foundations . . . of Judeo-Christian belief.” Successful capitalists were often either “active participants in the Jewish faith” or “active participants in the Christian faith.” They operated on a kind of moral patrimony, part tradition, part religious teaching. But now the West has become more secular. Capitalism as a result has grown “unmoored” and is going “partly off track.”

He speaks of two “disturbing” strands. “One is state-sponsored capitalism,” as in China and Russia. We also, to a degree, see it in America. This is “a brutal form of capitalism” in which wealth and value are distributed to “a very small subset of people.” It is connected to crony capitalism. He criticizes the Republican Party as “really a collection of crony capitalists that feel they have a different set of rules of how they’re going to comport themselves.”

The other disturbing strand is “libertarian capitalism,” which “really looks to make people commodities, and to objectify people, and to use them almost.” He saw this strand up close when he was on Wall Street, at Goldman Sachs . There he saw “the securitization of everything” and an attitude in which “people are looked at as commodities.”
Opinion: The FBI, Billy Bush and the Upset of 2016
Peggy Noonan breaks down the components that ultimately undid Hillary Clinton.

Capitalists, he said, now must ask: “What is the purpose of whatever I’m doing with this wealth? What is the purpose of what I’m doing with the ability that God has given us . . . to actually be a creator of jobs and a creator of wealth?”

With both these strands, he says, the middle class loses ground. This has contributed to the “global revolt” of populism and nationalism. That revolt was fueled, too, by the financial crisis of 2008. None of those responsible on Wall Street were called to account: “No bonuses and none of their equity was taken.” The taxes of the middle class were used to bail them out.

There’s more in the conversation, which lasted 50 minutes and included the problem of racist and anti-Semitic overtones in populist movements. But it’s a thoughtful, serious talk, and its themes would reverberate in the 2016 election.

You can see Mr. Bannon’s basic or developing political and economic philosophy as half-baked, fully baked, or likely to explode in the oven. And it is fair to note his views haven’t seemed to gel or produce very much in the first dozen weeks of the Trump era.

But what Mr. Bannon offered in the interview was a point of view that was publicly declared and could be debated.

What will take its place if he leaves the White House or recedes as a figure? What worldview will prevail, to the extent Mr. Trump does worldviews? Policy changes accompanying Mr. Bannon’s diminishment this week included the president’s speaking approvingly of the Export-Import Bank and NATO, declaring that China isn’t a currency manipulator after all, suggesting the dollar may be too strong, and hitting Syria and Afghanistan.

None of that sounds like Candidate Trump.

It is possible what we are seeing is simply the rise of a more moderate or conciliatory or establishment Trump White House. But it also looks like the rise of the Wall Street Mr. Bannon painted as tending to see people as commodities. Gary Cohn, director of the National Economic Council, is said to be Mr. Bannon’s most effective internal foe. He is the new rising figure. There are many Wall Street folk—some from Messrs. Bannon and Cohn’s old stomping ground, Goldman Sachs—in influential administration posts. They don’t come across as the kind of people who exhaust themselves pondering the meaning of the historical moment or tracing societal stresses and potential responses.

Will all these changes, in policy and perhaps personnel, hurt Mr. Trump? Probably a little. But nothing dramatic right now, because his supporters knew they were making an unusual choice in making him president, and they will give him time.

But if the Trump White House is itself changing dramatically, we’ll look back on this week as the moment the change became apparent.

I end with Safire, who’s been gone eight years. I still miss him, and I thought of him this week when I received good news. He’d received the same news 39 years before. I think he’d be happy, clap me on the back, call me kid. And I’m telling you the first chance he got to take a deserved shot, he’d take it. And if instead I’d endured some personal or professional loss, he’d be first one on the phone.

He had style. Style is good.

Beautiful Easter and Passover to my readers, who wrote in this week and reminded me how beautiful they are. I know that’s corny, but sometimes life is corny.
Title: Re: Peggy Noonan on Steve Bannon
Post by: DougMacG on April 17, 2017, 07:00:42 AM
Full text of the Bannon talk on poverty and capitalism here:

https://www.buzzfeed.com/lesterfeder/this-is-how-steve-bannon-sees-the-entire-world?utm_term=.fyL3Ypgya#.eto3JBpOP
Title: media manipulate Bannon's image?
Post by: ccp on April 17, 2017, 02:46:04 PM
Rush pointed out how more attention was paid to Bannon then possibly any other WH advisor in history:

http://www.breitbart.com/big-journalism/2017/04/17/nyt-media-manipulated-steve-bannons-image-drive-wedge-trump/
Title: Ten Reasons I am no longer a Leftist
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 20, 2017, 09:08:53 PM
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2014/07/ten_reasons_i_am_no_longer_a_leftist.html
Title: Left economics is no match for alt right resentment
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 20, 2017, 09:37:28 PM
Plenty here I do not agree with, but some genuine insights as well:

https://fee.org/articles/left-wing-economics-is-no-match-for-alt-right-resentment/
Title: The West has done BAD THINGS!
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 27, 2017, 10:16:30 PM
http://www.intellectualtakeout.org/blog/west-has-done-bad-things-so-has-every-other-culture


The West Has Done Bad Things… But So Has Every Other Culture
10

Daniel Lattier | April 25, 2017

It has become common for many Americans and Europeans to denounce the West because of its past sins. As David Brooks recently pointed out in his New York Times column, students in history courses are often taught that “Western civilization is a history of oppression.” 

This argument against the West usually takes the following form:

1) Western people in the past have committed violent atrocities based on a perceived religious or cultural superiority.

2) Therefore, Western civilization is not worth preserving. 

But from a logical perspective this argument is missing a premise, namely, that every civilization or people that has committed violent atrocities based on a perceived religious or cultural superiority is not worth preserving.

According to philosopher and social critic Jacques Ellul, if one believes that this (usually unstated) premise is true, then not one civilization or people that has ever existed would make the cut.   

In The Betrayal of the West, Ellul agrees that Westerners need to acknowledge the sins of their past. There has been blood, and it does no good for the future of the West to deny it.

But Ellul does not believe it follows from this acknowledgement that one must therefore scorn the West:

    “Am I therefore to become a masochist and reject everything western, deny all the values of our world? No! I take a middle ground; I admit the accusations in their full extent, but I do not accept the rejection of the West in its entirety. I accept responsibility for the evil that has been done, but I deny that only evil has been done. I know our civilization is built on bloodshed and robbery, but I also know that every civilization is built on bloodshed and robbery. In the face of the pseudo-revolutionary speeches, the sensational news of people joining the guerrillas, the contempt for ‘white culture,’ and the inflamed desire to destroy everything that made us great, I reaffirm the value of the West we have known.”

Ellul goes on to provide pages of historical reminders that other cultures cannot exactly cast stones at the West. Among the reminders is this paragraph:

    “Let me begin by recalling some facts. We have been colonialists and we are now imperialists. Granted. But we did not invent colonialism and imperialism, nor are we the sole actors in these dramas. When the Arabs invaded the whole northern section of black Africa, what was that but colonialism, and indeed something worse than colonialism? And what of the Turkish invasions that created the Ottoman empire? and the Khmer invasions that created the Khmer empire? and the Tonkinese invasion that created the Tonkin empire? and the terrible conquests of Genghis Khan, which were doubtless the most terrible conquests of all, since Genghis Khan probably slaughtered some sixty million people in the course of his reign, or more people than Hitler or even Stalin? and the Bantu invasions that created new invader kingdoms in two-thirds of the black continent? What of the Chinese invasions of a third of Asia? and the Aztec invasions of their neighbors that led to what we are told was the wonderful Aztec kingdom that the fearsome conquerors destroyed, but which was itself in fact nothing but a frightful dictatorship exercised over crushed and conquered peoples?” 

And regarding the West’s unique role in human history, Ellul has this to say:

    “[T]he essential, central, undeniable fact is that the West was the first civilization in history to focus attention on the individual and on freedom. Nothing can rob us of the praise due us for that. We have been guilty of denials and betrayals… we have committed crimes, but we have also caused the whole of mankind to take a gigantic step forward and to leave its childhood behind.”

Perhaps it’s also time for Westerners today to leave behind a childish loathing of their past that remains blind to its very real and important achievements. The conclusion to Brooks' aforementioned column is also fitting here: “All I can say is, if you think [Western Civilization] was reactionary and oppressive, wait until you get a load of the world that comes after it.” 

Dan is the Vice President of Intellectual Takeout. He received his B.A. in Philosophy and Catholic Studies from the University of St. Thomas (MN), and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Systematic Theology from Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. You can find his academic work at Academia.edu.

E-mail Dan
Title: American Interest: The Deconstruction of the West
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 27, 2017, 10:17:50 PM
second post

https://www.the-american-interest.com/2017/04/12/the-deconstruction-of-the-west/
Title: Poor Americans today better off than Billionaires past
Post by: ccp on May 08, 2017, 02:28:38 PM
Well Rockefeller did live to 99.  I am sure he lived better in 1916 then most live today.

But for all the advances made who do we have to thank - white men:   :wink:

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/447386/health-care-living-conditions-poor-americans-beat-those-billionaires-past
Title: Leaving the SJW cult
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 15, 2017, 10:13:36 AM
https://medium.com/@KeriSmith/on-leaving-the-sjw-cult-and-finding-myself-1a6769b2f1ff
Title: VDH: Regime Change by any other name
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 24, 2017, 02:26:15 PM
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/447864/trump-critics-left-right-want-him-removed
Title: VDH: The Dems go full Jimmy Swaggart
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 07, 2017, 09:59:31 PM
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/448320/hypocrite-democrats-lecture-country-exempt-themselves-resemble-jimmy-swaggart
Title: The Cold Civil War
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 14, 2017, 11:43:10 PM
http://www.claremont.org/crb/article/the-cold-civil-war/
Title: Gates of Vienna: Are we approaching the end game?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 20, 2017, 11:48:33 AM
http://gatesofvienna.net/2017/06/are-we-approaching-the-end-game/
Title: Re: Gates of Vienna: Are we approaching the end game?
Post by: G M on June 20, 2017, 01:54:09 PM
http://gatesofvienna.net/2017/06/are-we-approaching-the-end-game/

Yes. Next question?
Title: Jordan Peterson
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 21, 2017, 09:15:34 AM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8Q4EWVPNOE&feature=share
Title: How Europe lost its Way
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 22, 2017, 01:32:41 PM


http://www.nationalreview.com/article/448800/douglas-murray-book-excerpt-roots-european-crisis-post-war-immigration
Title: Gramscian damage
Post by: G M on July 04, 2017, 12:22:09 PM
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=260

Gramscian damage
Posted on 2006-02-11 by Eric Raymond

Americans have never really understood ideological warfare. Our gut-level assumption is that everybody in the world really wants the same comfortable material success we have. We use “extremist” as a negative epithet. Even the few fanatics and revolutionary idealists we have, whatever their political flavor, expect everybody else to behave like a bourgeois.

We don’t expect ideas to matter — or, when they do, we expect them to matter only because people have been flipped into a vulnerable mode by repression or poverty. Thus all our divagation about the “root causes” of Islamic terrorism, as if the terrorists’ very clear and very ideological account of their own theory and motivations is somehow not to be believed.

By contrast, ideological and memetic warfare has been a favored tactic for all of America’s three great adversaries of the last hundred years — Nazis, Communists, and Islamists. All three put substantial effort into cultivating American proxies to influence U.S. domestic policy and foreign policy in favorable directions. Yes, the Nazis did this, through organizations like the “German-American Bund” that was outlawed when World War II went hot. Today, the Islamists are having some success at manipulating our politics through fairly transparent front organizations like the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

But it was the Soviet Union, in its day, that was the master of this game. They made dezinformatsiya (disinformation) a central weapon of their war against “the main adversary”, the U.S. They conducted memetic subversion against the U.S. on many levels at a scale that is only now becoming clear as historians burrow through their archives and ex-KGB officers sell their memoirs.


The Soviets had an entire “active measures” department devoted to churning out anti-American dezinformatsiya. A classic example is the rumor that AIDS was the result of research aimed at building a ‘race bomb’ that would selectively kill black people.

On a different level, in the 1930s members of CPUSA (the Communist Party of the USA) got instructions from Moscow to promote non-representational art so that the US’s public spaces would become arid and ugly.

Americans hearing that last one tend to laugh. But the Soviets, following the lead of Marxist theoreticians like Antonio Gramsci, took very seriously the idea that by blighting the U.S.’s intellectual and esthetic life, they could sap Americans’ will to resist Communist ideology and an eventual Communist takeover. The explicit goal was to erode the confidence of America’s ruling class and create an ideological vacuum to be filled by Marxism-Leninism.

Accordingly, the Soviet espionage apparat actually ran two different kinds of network: one of spies, and one of agents of influence. The agents of influence had the minor function of recruiting spies (as, for example, when Kim Philby was brought in by one of his tutors at Cambridge), but their major function was to spread dezinformatsiya, to launch memetic weapons that would damage and weaken the West.

In a previous post on Suicidalism, I identified some of the most important of the Soviet Union’s memetic weapons. Here is that list again:

There is no truth, only competing agendas.
All Western (and especially American) claims to moral superiority over Communism/Fascism/Islam are vitiated by the West’s history of racism and colonialism.
There are no objective standards by which we may judge one culture to be better than another. Anyone who claims that there are such standards is an evil oppressor.
The prosperity of the West is built on ruthless exploitation of the Third World; therefore Westerners actually deserve to be impoverished and miserable.
Crime is the fault of society, not the individual criminal. Poor criminals are entitled to what they take. Submitting to criminal predation is more virtuous than resisting it.
The poor are victims. Criminals are victims. And only victims are virtuous. Therefore only the poor and criminals are virtuous. (Rich people can borrow some virtue by identifying with poor people and criminals.)
For a virtuous person, violence and war are never justified. It is always better to be a victim than to fight, or even to defend oneself. But ‘oppressed’ people are allowed to use violence anyway; they are merely reflecting the evil of their oppressors.
When confronted with terror, the only moral course for a Westerner is to apologize for past sins, understand the terrorist’s point of view, and make concessions.
As I previously observed, if you trace any of these back far enough, you’ll find a Stalinist intellectual at the bottom. (The last two items on the list, for example, came to us courtesy of Frantz Fanon. The fourth item is the Baran-Wallerstein “world system” thesis.) Most were staples of Soviet propaganda at the same time they were being promoted by “progressives” (read: Marxists and the dupes of Marxists) within the Western intelligentsia.

The Soviets consciously followed the Gramscian prescription; they pursued a war of position, subverting the “leading elements” of society through their agents of influence. (See, for example, Stephen Koch’s Double Lives: Stalin, Willi Munzenberg and the Seduction of the Intellectuals; summary by Koch here) This worked exactly as expected; their memes seeped into Western popular culture and are repeated endlessly in (for example) the products of Hollywood.

Indeed, the index of Soviet success is that most of us no longer think of these memes as Communist propaganda. It takes a significant amount of digging and rethinking and remembering, even for a lifelong anti-Communist like myself, to realize that there was a time (within the lifetime of my parents) when all of these ideas would have seemed alien, absurd, and repulsive to most people — at best, the beliefs of a nutty left-wing fringe, and at worst instruments of deliberate subversion intended to destroy the American way of life.

Koch shows us that the worst-case scenario was, as it turns out now, the correct one; these ideas, like the “race bomb” rumor, really were instruments deliberately designed to destroy the American way of life. Another index of their success is that most members of the bicoastal elite can no longer speak of “the American way of life” without deprecation, irony, or an automatic and half-conscious genuflection towards the altar of political correctness. In this and other ways, the corrosive effects of Stalin’s meme war have come to utterly pervade our culture.

The most paranoid and xenophobic conservatives of the Cold War were, painful though this is to admit, the closest to the truth in estimating the magnitude and subtlety of Soviet subversion. Liberal anticommunists (like myself in the 1970s) thought we were being judicious and fair-minded when we dismissed half of the Right’s complaint as crude blather. We were wrong; the Rosenbergs and Alger Hiss really were guilty, the Hollywood Ten really were Stalinist tools, and all of Joseph McCarthy’s rants about “Communists in the State Department” were essentially true. The Venona transcripts and other new material leave no room for reasonable doubt on this score.

While the espionage apparatus of the Soviet Union didn’t outlast it, their memetic weapons did. These memes are now coming near to crippling our culture’s response to Islamic terrorism.

In this context, Jeff Goldstein has written eloquently about perhaps the most long-term dangerous of these memes — the idea that rights inhere not in sovereign individuals but identity groups, and that every identity group (except the “ruling class”) has the right to suppress criticism of itself through political means up to and including violence.

Mark Brittingham (aka WildMonk) has written an excellent essay on the roots of this doctrine in Rousseau and the post-Enlightenment Romantics. It has elsewhere been analyzed and labeled as transnational progressivism. The Soviets didn’t invent it, but they promoted it heavily in a deliberate — and appallingly successful — attempt to weaken the Lockean, individualist tradition that underlies classical liberalism and the U.S. Constitution. The reduction of Western politics to a bitter war for government favor between ascriptive identity groups is exactly the outcome the Soviets wanted and worked hard to arrange.

Call it what you will — various other commentators have favored ‘volk-Marxism’ or ‘postmodern leftism’. I’ve called it suicidalism. It was designed to paralyze the West against one enemy, but it’s now being used against us by another. It is no accident that Osama bin Laden so often sounds like he’s reading from back issues of Z magazine, and no accident that both constantly echo the hoariest old cliches of Soviet propaganda in the 1930s and ’40s.

Another consequence of Stalin’s meme war is that today’s left-wing antiwar demonstrators wear kaffiyehs without any sense of how grotesque it is for ostensible Marxists to cuddle up to religious absolutists who want to restore the power relations of the 7th century CE. In Stalin’s hands, even Marxism itself was hollowed out to serve as a memetic weapon — it became increasingly nihilist, hatred-focused and destructive. The postmodern left is now defined not by what it’s for but by what it’s against: classical-liberal individualism, free markets, dead white males, America, and the idea of objective reality itself.

The first step to recovery is understanding the problem. Knowing that suicidalist memes were launched at us as war weapons by the espionage apparatus of the most evil despotism in human history is in itself liberating. Liberating, too, it is to realize that the Noam Chomskys and Michael Moores and Robert Fisks of the world (and their thousands of lesser imitators in faculty lounges everywhere) are not brave transgressive forward-thinkers but pathetic memebots running the program of a dead tyrant.

Brittingham and other have worried that postmodern leftism may yet win. If so, the victory would be short-lived. One of the clearest lessons of recent times (exemplified not just by kaffiyeh-wearing western leftists but by Hamas’s recent clobbering of al-Fatah in the first Palestinian elections) is that po-mo leftism is weaker than liberal individualism in one important respect; it has only the weakest defenses against absolutist fervor. Brittingham tellingly notes po-mo philosopher Richard Rorty’s realization that when the babble of conflicting tribal narratives collapses in exhaustion, the only thing left is the will to power.

Again, this is by design. Lenin and Stalin wanted classical-liberal individualism replaced with something less able to resist totalitarianism, not more. Volk-Marxist fantasy and postmodern nihilism served their purposes; the emergence of an adhesive counter-ideology would not have. Thus, the Chomskys and Moores and Fisks are running a program carefully designed to dead-end at nothing.

Religions are good at filling that kind of nothing. Accordingly, if transnational progressivism actually succeeds in smothering liberal individualism, its reward will be to be put to the sword by some flavor of jihadi. Whether the eventual winners are Muslims or Mormons, the future is not going to look like the fuzzy multicultural ecotopia of modern left fantasy. The death of that dream is being written in European banlieus by angry Muslim youths under the light of burning cars.

In the banlieus and elsewhere, Islamist pressure makes it certain that sooner or later the West is going to vomit Stalin’s memes out of its body politic. The worst way would be through a reflex development of Western absolutism — Christian chauvinism, nativism and militarism melding into something like Francoite fascism. The self-panicking leftists who think they see that in today’s Republicans are comically wrong (as witnessed by the fact that they aren’t being systematically jailed and executed), but it is quite a plausible future for the demographically-collapsing nations of Europe.

The U.S., fortunately, is still on a demographic expansion wave and will be till at least 2050. But if the Islamists achieve their dream of nuking “crusader” cities, they’ll make crusaders out of the U.S., too. And this time, a West with a chauvinized America at its head would smite the Saracen with weapons that would destroy entire populations and fuse Mecca into glass. The horror of our victory would echo for a thousand years.

I remain more optimistic than this. I think there is still an excellent chance that the West can recover from suicidalism without going through a fevered fascist episode and waging a genocidal war. But to do so, we have to do more than recognize Stalin’s memes; we have to reject them. We have to eject postmodern leftism from our universities, transnational progressivism from our politics, and volk-Marxism from our media.

The process won’t be pretty. But I fear that if the rest of us don’t hound the po-mo Left and its useful idiots out of public life with attack and ridicule and shunning, the hard Right will sooner or later get the power to do it by means that include a lot of killing. I don’t want to live in that future, and I don’t think any of my readers do, either. If we want to save a liberal, tolerant civilization for our children, we’d better get to work.

UPDATE: My original link to Protein Wisdom went stale. I’m not certain the new one is the same essay, but it is on many of the same ideas.
Title: Of course this "just discovered"
Post by: ccp on July 04, 2017, 01:35:24 PM
in news today on our day of Independence and the anniversary of TJs death:

https://www.yahoo.com/news/quarters-jefferson-apos-slave-bore-081036373.html

Like in previous GM post anything good about our founding has to be countered with evil white people etc........
Title: NRO: Trump's Defense of Western Civilization
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 08, 2017, 10:19:15 AM
http://www.nationalreview.com/g-file/449313/trump-western-civilization-defense-left-response?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=170707_G-File&utm_term=GFile
Title: Re: NRO: Trump's Defense of Western Civilization
Post by: G M on July 08, 2017, 10:29:56 AM
http://www.nationalreview.com/g-file/449313/trump-western-civilization-defense-left-response?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=170707_G-File&utm_term=GFile

The left hates us, they really, really hate us.

Plan accordingly.
Title: The left hates western civilization
Post by: G M on July 08, 2017, 10:57:51 PM
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2017/07/its-true-liberals-hate-western-civilization.php

POSTED ON JULY 8, 2017 BY JOHN HINDERAKER IN LEFTISM, LIBERALS
IT’S TRUE: LIBERALS HATE WESTERN CIVILIZATION


President Trump’s superb speech in Poland has been praised by most observers, including Paul. On the Left, however, Trump’s speech has been criticized for its principal virtue, the president’s spirited defense of Western civilization. Here are some of the many such instances.

Amanda Marcotte writes at Salon: “Trump’s alt-right Poland speech: Time to call his white nationalist rhetoric what it is.”

Trump argued that Western (read: white) nations are “the fastest and the greatest community” and the “world has never known anything like our community of nations.” He crowed about how Westerners (read: white people) “write symphonies,” “pursue innovation” and “always seek to explore and discover brand-new frontiers,” as if these were unique qualities to white-dominated nations, instead of universal truths of the human race across all cultures.

Why, exactly, should we “read white people”? Trump said not a word about race in his speech. While the peoples that developed Western culture were of course predominantly white, Western civilization is not limited to one race. Just ask, say, Thomas Sowell or Yo-Yo Ma. The obsession with race is the Left’s, not Trump’s.

He also portrayed this Western civilization as under assault from forces “from the South or the East” that “threaten over time to undermine these values and to erase the bonds of culture, faith and tradition that make us who we are.”
***
And yet, even though Trump was fairly begging to be labeled a fascist with his speech painting the purity of white civilization as under threat from racialized foreigners….

But wait! Doesn’t the threat from the East come from Russia? And aren’t Russians white? On the Left, facts are always secondary, at best, to the Narrative. Finally, this howler:

Breitbart gushed about how Trump was calling for “protecting our borders” and “preserving Western civilization,” and bizarrely compared the speech to Ronald Reagan’s “tear down this wall” speech, even though the Berlin Wall is the gold standard in the kind of border security and cultural “preservation” that Trump has made his political career calling for.

Great point, Amanda! Just like Trump’s wall on the southern border, the East Germans built the Berlin Wall to keep out the throngs of West Berliners that were trying to get in illegally.

Next, Sarah Wildman at Vox: “Trump’s speech in Poland sounded like an alt-right manifesto.”

In his address, Trump cast the West, including the United States and Europe, on the side of “civilization.” With an undercurrent of bellicosity, he spoke of protecting borders, casting himself as a defender not just of territory but of Western “values.” And, using the phrase he had avoided on his trip to Saudi Arabia, he insisted that in the fight against “radical Islamic terrorism,” the West “will prevail.”

Is this what is meant by “alt-right”? I am so old, I can remember when 95% of Americans would have thought that such propositions verged on the self-evident.

Common Dreams (“Breaking News & Views For the Progressive Community”): “‘Disturbing’ Undertones Detected in Trump’s Bizarre Poland Speech.”

Honing in on Trump’s repeated emphasis on “the will” and his declaration that “our civilization will triumph,” many made connections between the speech and an infamous 1935 Nazi propaganda film titled “Triumph of the Will,” which was directed by Leni Riefenstahl and based on the 1934 Nuremberg Rally.

You can’t make this stuff up.

Peter Beinart in The Atlantic:

In his speech in Poland on Thursday, Donald Trump referred 10 times to “the West” and five times to “our civilization.” His white nationalist supporters will understand exactly what he means. It’s important that other Americans do, too.
***
The West is a racial and religious term. To be considered Western, a country must be largely Christian (preferably Protestant or Catholic) and largely white.

But Israel is pretty universally regarded as Western, and Western values derive largely from Jewish history and culture.

The most shocking sentence in Trump’s speech—perhaps the most shocking sentence in any presidential speech delivered on foreign soil in my lifetime—was his claim that “The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive.” … Trump’s sentence only makes sense as a statement of racial and religious paranoia. … A direct line connects Trump’s assault on Barack Obama’s citizenship to his speech in Poland. In Trump and Bannon’s view, America is at its core Western: meaning white and Christian (or at least Judeo-Christian). The implication is that anyone in the United States who is not white and Christian may not truly be American but rather than an imposter and a threat.

Like Trump’s daughter and son-in-law? Beinart’s rant verges on the insane.

Jonathan Capehart in the Washington Post: “Trump’s white-nationalist dog whistles in Warsaw.”

This is the same crowd that brays about the superiority of “Western civilization” and its contributions in the history of the world conveniently ignores (or perhaps is just plain ignorant about) what we’ve adopted from Muslims and the Middle East. Those symphonies Trump says “We write” (ahem) would be real lame without the influence of the Middle East and Muslims. According to Salim al-Hassani, chairman of the Foundation for Science, Technology and Civilization and editor of “1001 Inventions,” which chronicles “the enduring legacy of Muslim civilization,” told CNN years ago that the lute, musical scales and the ancestor of the violin are all part of that legacy.

Carlyn Reichel, former speechwriter for Joe Biden, in Foreign Policy: “Trump Has Reshaped Presidential Rhetoric Into an Unrecognizable Grotesque.”

Like staring into a fun-house mirror, the trappings of an American president delivering a landmark speech abroad were there — certainly there were deliberate echoes of President John F. Kennedy’s historic speech in Berlin — but it was all reshaped into an unrecognizable grotesque.

With each paragraph, strong statements about defending freedom and standing against the forces of oppression were replaced by a narrow vision of the world rooted in an even narrower ideology. For Trump, the boundaries of “civilization” only extend to those who share his definition of “God” and “family” — that is, a Judeo-Christian worldview and power structures that continue to be dominated by white men.

So you can’t celebrate or defend Western civilization without being denounced by liberals as a white nationalist, a fascist, and so on. It is good to know where they stand.

Title: VDH: History's complexity should discourage liberal cheap retroactive morality
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 10, 2017, 09:59:40 PM
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/422104/historys-complexity-should-discourage-liberals-cheap-retroactive-morality-victor
Title: Shoving Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals Right Back in the Left’s Ugly Face
Post by: G M on July 12, 2017, 06:11:53 PM
https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2017/02/13/shoving-alinskys-rules-for-radicals-right-back-in-the-lefts-ugly-face-n2284892

Shoving Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals Right Back in the Left’s Ugly Face
Kurt Schlichter |Posted: Feb 13, 2017 12:01 AM 
 


The Left is getting massively out-Alinskyed, and the hilarious thing is that this band of withered hippies, unemployable millennial safe-space cases, and unlovable + unshaven libfeminists don’t even know it. Oh, their masters sure know it. Soros is bitterly having to ramp up his infusions of blood money to keep his community-organized “grassroots” movements afloat. The less dumb ones among the lying dinosaur media are panicking as their influence fades, and Chuck Schumer is enduring such a non-stop parade of serial humiliations that if the Senate were a penitentiary, he’d be McConnell’s prison Mitch.

The Leftist mafia godmaleidentifyingparents pulling the strings of the Marxist Muppets know the score – they are losing. And it’s awesome. Because, finally, the Right has taken Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals and shoved it up where #TheResistance don’t shine.

Thank you, Andrew Breitbart. You yelled “Follow me!” and led a movement that had previously been dominated by doofy wonks and bow-tied geeks over the top in a glorious bayonet charge against the paper tiger liberal elite. The Left hadn’t taken a good, solid gut punch since Ronald Reagan turned the Oval Office keys over to the wimpcons who found fighting Democrats uncouth because conflict made for awkward luncheons down at the club. Bizarrely, the guy who picked up the standard and carried it forward when our beloved commander was felled by fate was a New York billionaire with no identifiable ideological foundation who instinctively understood the one thing that could make up for his other failings: He knows how to fight liberals and win. For Donald Trump and the revitalized conservative movement, Alinsky's book isn’t some dusty old commie tome - it’s a lifestyle.

Alinsky’s Rules are relatively simple, and they make sense when you are fighting a conventional opponent with an interest in maintaining the status quo. The Rules are terrific for dealing with an old-school conservative guy who drives a Buick, enjoys gardening, and doesn’t want any trouble. They aren’t so effective against conservative brawlers who like to punch, and who aren’t too fussy about whether it’s with tweets or with fists.

The Rules are not some magic incantation; they are simply some tactical principles that work in certain kinds of fights against certain kinds of opponents – particularly ones willing to unilaterally disarm in the face of an unprincipled enemy. But once the secret is out, it’s relatively easy to turn them around on an enemy that is so stupid it thinks it’s going to gain widespread acceptance among normal Americans by dressing up as genitalia. That’s why the thirteen classic Alinsky Rules are playing out right now in a way the Left did not expect.

Rule 1: “Power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have.” Actually, we now have a lot of power. No, we don’t have direct power over liberal bastions like Hollywood, the media and academia, but by threatening to use governmental levers of power to impact their tax breaks, copyright laws, and subsidies, we can pound them into submission. And Trump is clearly willing to use all his powers to beat the living liberalism out of our enemy.


Wait, this is where the Fredocons loosen their bow ties and stutter, “Why…we can’t…Professor Wellington Wimpenheimer IV would not approve…it’s so mean…oh, well I never!”

Wake up. Man up. If you ever want to win (and maybe someday even kiss a girl) you need to get real. They hate us, and we either win or we spend the rest of our miserable lives as Boxer the Horse, slaving away to fund the welfare state under the lash of the Left until it decides it’s time to pack us off to the glue factory.

Rule 2: “Never go outside the expertise of your people” and Rule 3: “Whenever possible, go outside the expertise of the enemy.” Stupid GOP wonkcons want to fight to where the liberals are strong, like on entitlements. Trump is smart enough to fight where liberals are weak, like on the economy. And he’s going to throw down some serious jujitsu by doing a liberal thing – infrastructure spending – in a conservative way. He's a developer – he knows how to build stuff, and he will freak the Left out by delivering concrete results (not the least of them, a wall) where liberals (for whom “infrastructure” means giving our money to their deadbeat constituents) never actually build stuff anymore. As a conservative, I’m not thrilled about “infrastructure” spending. But as a conservative insurgent who wants to see the Left on its collective collectivist back, twitching like a dying roach, I’m thrilled.


Rule 4: “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.” This is not so much about pointing out the lies and hypocrisy that constitute Leftist orthodoxy – the vicious racism they deny is racism because it’s anti-white, the racism against non-whites who refuse to serve a liberal master, the sexism against women who think babies should be actually be born, and so on. It’s about not letting them tie us into knots by using our morals and values as bear traps to immobilize and neutralize us. Fortunately, most of us have discovered how losing our superficial “political values” helps us regain our freedom. We have embraced the power of not #caring. And liberals have no idea what to do when they shout “Trump is a meanie,” and we shrug, smile, and bust out with an impromptu interpretive dance to celebrate Neil Gorsuch.


Rule 5: “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.” Actually, the AR15 a more potent weapon, but ridicule will do as long as the Left doesn't try to make good on its countless threats of violence and tyranny. Regardless, we finally we have a conservative corps that is willing to mock the members of that motley collection of pompous, inept, lying jerks we call the Democrat Party and its media catamite corps. When they turn around and try to mock us back, well, we aren’t watching their late night hack comics anymore, and frankly they can make all the jokes they want. The punchline is still going to be “And then the Republicans repealed Obamacare.”

Rule 6: “A good tactic is one your people enjoy.” I’m having fun watching the liberals lose. How about you?

Rule 7: “A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.” I don’t know – I doubt I am ever going to be tired of so much #winning.

Rule 8: “Keep the pressure on. Never let up.” Remember the Trump outrage du jour a couple days ago when we were supposed to be on the verge of war with Australia? Well, Down Under’s kangaroos and giant scary spiders still wander freely, and we’ve long since moved on. President Trump has been busy owning the news cycle with appointments, executive orders, and the occasional squirrel-sighting tweet that sends the media chasing off on a rodent-seeking tangent. Oh no, Kellyanne Conway said to buy Ivanka’s stuff – if I ever cared (and I never did), I’ve already moved on to giggling about the progressive freak out over ICE being allowed to do its job again.

Rule 9: “The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.” No, Alinsky was wrong. The thing itself is much, much worse – as Democrats will find out when President Trump signs the law mandating national concealed carry reciprocity.

Rule 10: “The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.” Democrats are trying to do the massive resistance thing again, and it’s going about as well as when they tried the massive resistance thing against integration. It may arouse libs in blue cities and on soon-to-be-defunded college campuses, but normals are getting tired of the nonstop Leftist nonsense. See Rule 7. Conversely, Trump’s nonstop series of orders, appointments, and policies seems to be helping him – mostly because they are popular.

Rule 11: “If you push a negative hard enough, it will push through and become a positive.” Unhinged Leftist obstruction, including violence, is driving people right. However, leftist harping on Trump’s rough edges seems to be backfiring – instead of “Oh my, what a brute!” people seem to be saying “Good. He fights.”

Rule 12: “The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.” Trump has a program and it’s popular. What’s the Democrats’ program? “Give us more of your money so we can buy votes from welfare cheats, and then we’ll lecture you on your privilege?”

The Democrats have no meaningful policies because their entire focus is on them regaining and keeping power – that’s their desired end state, not a country made great again, and that’s why they get no traction anywhere on the map outside of the dysfunctional blue spots. Watch for then to eventually seriously propose secession by the liberal states – after the last few months, I’ve been tempted to move my novel People’s Republic, about California ignoring the admonition to never go full Venezuela, over to the nonfiction section.

Rule 13: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” Well, they try to. They try to make Trump a demonic chimera composed of bits and pieces of Hitler, Mussolini, and more Hitler, and he just doesn’t care. We don’t care, because we know what they are really saying is that we normals are the monsters, that it’s not Trump governing that is illegitimate but that it is we normals having a voice in governing ourselves that is illegitimate.

And now we are woke, as the ridiculous Left would put it, to the Left’s tired Alinsky antics. We see it’s all a lie. It’s all a scam. And we aren’t playing the game by their rules anymore.
Title: Andrew McCarthy on the political philosophy of Mark Levin
Post by: ccp on July 15, 2017, 08:43:11 AM
I am pleased to read piece by McCarthy on the great one's .

Sadly the conclusion is not unexpected:

"But he has rightly come to the conclusion that the cause is lost absent the renewal of first principles. As Rediscovering Americanism illustrates, the need is acute and the hour is late."


by ANDREW C. MCCARTHY   July 15, 2017 4:00 AM @ANDREWCMCCARTHY

The Constitution safeguards the liberties that the Declaration of Independence represents but did not create. Is there an enduring American character? For those who view our nation as at a tipping point, the question is urgent. Others scoff, “Why?” After all, if the American character is truly enduring, it will endure — the ship eventually will right itself to the extent it is off course. And if not, history will inevitably evolve it into something better, right?

My friend Mark Levin would counter that this is the wrong way to look at it. The foundation of Americanism, he posits, is natural law. That does not just spontaneously appear, nor passively persevere. Understanding our natural-law roots, reaffirming our attachment to them in the teeth of the progressive project to supersede them — this is hard work. Necessary work, though. Discovering natural law is a prerequisite to rediscovering Americanism, an aim that, not coincidentally, is announced in the title of Mark’s ambitious new book, Rediscovering Americanism: And the Tyranny of Progressivism. It is ambitious not merely because it endeavors to outline what it takes to grasp natural law, never an easy proposition and made all the harder by two centuries of contrarian political philosophy — with modern opinion elites poised to drive the last nail in the coffin.

Levin further undertakes to acquaint the lay reader with the political philosophers and theorists in the competing camps, in their own words. Locke himself would have cautioned that this is an uphill climb. Not one he shied away from, of course. As philosophy students who have plowed their way through his much-debated oeuvre will recall, Locke divided his readers into the “hunters” and those “content to live lazily on scraps of begged opinions.”

Levin, with his wide reach as a popular talk-radio host, bestselling author (yet again), and constitutional litigator, is not just looking for hunters. He’s trying to create them. Or at least enough of them to stem the tide of change — change being the radical antithesis of reformation, the restorative enterprise Levin channels Burke in championing. As Levin reads Locke, “the fact that every person has the ability to reason and discover natural law . . . does not mean that all people will do so.” A critical mass of them must try, though. We are a deeply divided nation, and the prospect of that’s easing any time soon is dim.

The solution, as Levin sees it, is for lovers of America not merely to feel patriotic fervor but to become knowledgeable of and conversant with the ideals on which it is founded. That means going to the sources. It all goes back to natural law because of the Declaration of Independence, which is not the foundation but the reflection of the American character, already formed. So says none other than Jefferson, the Declaration’s principal author. Reflecting on his handiwork nearly a half-century later, Jefferson explained (in a letter to Henry Lee) that the founders were striving “not to find out new principles,” nor to say things never said or thought before, but to set down “an expression of the American mind.” Levin’s point is that there was — and is — an America that pre-existed and gave essential content to the American nation. Levin’s point, the same one made in Paul Johnson’s magisterial A History of the American People, is that there was — and is — an America that pre-existed and gave essential content to the American nation.

It is an interesting observation given the heavy emphasis on the primacy of the Constitution in much of Levin’s work. But the march is straightforward: The Constitution promotes the principles and safeguards the liberties of the Americanism that the Declaration represents but did not create. The Declaration is impelled by “the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God,” the force that drove the American people “to assume among the powers of the earth, [their] separate and equal station.” Why the laws of nature? Why not simply nature itself? Because nature has fitted us out with needs and drives that can lead to destructive as well as to beneficial behavior. It is natural law that points us to human flourishing: the application of human reason to the forces of nature. Yet, not the autopilot kind of reason that Locke described as our “faculty of understanding which forms the trains of thought and deduces proofs.” That is, not the everyday kind, innately exercised by everyone. The lamp of natural law, Locke elaborated, is right reason, “certain definite principles of action from which spring all virtues and whatever is necessary for the proper molding of morals.”

Here, Levin finds the 18th century’s echoes of Cicero: “True law is right reason in agreement with nature; it is of universal application, unchanging and everlasting.” It is reason that learning has cultivated for the pursuit of happiness. It is not a sensor distinguishing pleasure from pain. It is reason that assimilates what is in the highest interests of beings of our immutable nature. Right reason is what Aristotle saw as “this divine element of human nature,” thanks to which there is a “natural justice and injustice common to all, even to those who have no association or covenant with each other.” Natural law thus leads to the discovery of what the founders memorialized as our “unalienable rights.” It also requires the restraint of the state so that these rights to live freely and happily may be pursued by every person. This calls for a civil society that respects the rights and equal dignity of all, within the framework of traditions and customs derived from our nation’s accumulated experience.

Natural law is the basis for our conceit that no one may rule over another without his consent. It forms what Lincoln called “the great principles on which the temple of liberty was built” — the principles of the Declaration that inexorably demanded the end of slavery. In the absence of natural law, we would be left to the tyranny of will — arbitrary morality and rights, dictated by those who had muscled their way to dominance.

For Levin, rationalizing such a muscular state is the 20th-century progressive project spearheaded by Herbert Croly, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, John Dewey, and their progeny. They built on the utopian foundation of the “philosopher-kings”: Rousseau’s radical egalitarianism, Hegel’s historicism, Marx’s economic determinism and class struggle, and so on. After a century’s ascendancy, this project has transformed the governing system, the federalist balance of power, and our core assumptions about government: its role, form, competence, and relationship to the citizen. The rights of self-determination, self-governance, and private property — the blessings of liberty that are the heritage of natural law — are in peril, if not of extinction, at least of irreversible atrophy. Mark Levin has not been content to inveigh against statism. In the last few years, he has offered concrete plans to roll it back, including a campaign for a convention of the states under Article V of the Constitution, aimed at stripping down Washington from without, since it will never reform itself from within. He is clearly frustrated by the lack of progress against “progress.” But he has rightly come to the conclusion that the cause is lost absent the renewal of first principles. As Rediscovering Americanism illustrates, the need is acute and the hour is late.

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/449531/mark-levin-rediscovering-america-tyranny-progressivism-natural-law-declaration-independence
Title: another winner from VDH
Post by: ccp on July 18, 2017, 05:57:26 AM
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/449594/fifth-american-war-blue-state-vs-red-elites-vs-populists-egalitarianism-vs-liberty

Trump is the one of the only champions for us , another Ted Cruz ,  but both have flaws and do not have the support of the majority of Repubs

It looks grim at this point

Proof we are done for :

https://www.conservativereview.com/articles/huh-43-percent-of-conservatives-say-handouts-trump-tax-cuts

check mate

because of stolen election in Minn.  by that creepy Senator the LEFT has won.


Title: Bezos, Washington Post, and US Postal Service
Post by: ccp on July 23, 2017, 07:06:00 AM
Bezos bought Wash Post to leverage Washington.  Makes sense.   Interesting that the US Postal Service in actuality is subsidizing Amazon!!!!!   :-o

https://pjmedia.com/michaelwalsh/2017/07/22/the-amazon-washington-post-and-why-it-needs-to-be-destroyed/
Title: Re: Bezos, Washington Post, and US Postal Service
Post by: G M on July 23, 2017, 11:07:13 AM
Bezos bought Wash Post to leverage Washington.  Makes sense.   Interesting that the US Postal Service in actuality is subsidizing Amazon!!!!!   :-o

https://pjmedia.com/michaelwalsh/2017/07/22/the-amazon-washington-post-and-why-it-needs-to-be-destroyed/

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/postal-service-broke-federal-law-and-showed-institutional-bias-by-letting-workers-help-clinton-campaign-watchdog/article/2629083
Title: How To Know You’re In a Mass Hysteria Bubble
Post by: G M on August 17, 2017, 01:26:57 PM
http://blog.dilbert.com/post/164297628606/how-to-know-youre-in-a-mass-hysteria-bubble

How To Know You’re In a Mass Hysteria Bubble
Posted August 17th, 2017 @ 12:36pm

History is full of examples of Mass Hysterias. They happen fairly often. The cool thing about mass hysterias is that you don’t know when you are in one. But sometimes the people who are not experiencing the mass hysteria can recognize when others are experiencing one, if they know what to look for.

I’ll teach you what to look for.

image
A mass hysteria happens when the public gets a wrong idea about something that has strong emotional content and it triggers cognitive dissonance that is often supported by confirmation bias. In other words, people spontaneously hallucinate a whole new (and usually crazy-sounding) reality and believe they see plenty of evidence for it. The Salem Witch Trials are the best-known example of mass hysteria. The McMartin Pre-School case and the Tulip Bulb hysteria are others. The dotcom bubble probably qualifies. We might soon learn that the Russian Collusion story was mass hysteria in hindsight. The curious lack of solid evidence for Russian collusion is a red flag. But we’ll see how that plays out.

The most visible Mass Hysteria of the moment involves the idea that the United States intentionally elected a racist President. If that statement just triggered you, it might mean you are in the Mass Hysteria bubble. The cool part is that you can’t fact-check my claim you are hallucinating if you are actually hallucinating. But you can read my description of the signs of mass hysteria and see if you check off the boxes.

If you’re in the mass hysteria, recognizing you have all the symptoms of hysteria won’t help you be aware you are in it. That’s not how hallucinations work. Instead, your hallucination will automatically rewrite itself to expel any new data that conflicts with its illusions.

But if you are not experiencing mass hysteria, you might be totally confused by the actions of the people who are. They appear to be irrational, but in ways that are hard to define. You can’t tell if they are stupid, unscrupulous, ignorant, mentally ill, emotionally unstable or what. It just looks frickin’ crazy.

The reason you can’t easily identify what-the-hell is going on in the country right now is that a powerful mass hysteria is in play. If you see the signs after I point them out, you’re probably not in the hysteria bubble. If you read this and do NOT see the signs, it probably means you’re trapped inside the mass hysteria bubble.

Here are some signs of mass hysteria. This is my own take on it, but I welcome you to fact-check it with experts on mass hysteria.

1. The trigger event for cognitive dissonance

On November 8th of 2016, half the country learned that everything they believed to be both true and obvious turned out to be wrong. The people who thought Trump had no chance of winning were under the impression they were smart people who understood their country, and politics, and how things work in general. When Trump won, they learned they were wrong. They were so very wrong that they reflexively (because this is how all brains work) rewrote the scripts they were seeing in their minds until it all made sense again. The wrong-about-everything crowd decided that the only way their world made sense, with their egos intact, is that either the Russians helped Trump win or there are far more racists in the country than they imagined, and he is their king. Those were the seeds of the two mass hysterias we witness today.

Trump supporters experienced no trigger event for cognitive dissonance when Trump won. Their worldview was confirmed by observed events.

2. The Ridiculousness of it

One sign of a good mass hysteria is that it sounds bonkers to anyone who is not experiencing it. Imagine your neighbor telling you he thinks the other neighbor is a witch. Or imagine someone saying the local daycare provider is a satanic temple in disguise. Or imagine someone telling you tulip bulbs are more valuable than gold. Crazy stuff.

Compare that to the idea that our president is a Russian puppet. Or that the country accidentally elected a racist who thinks the KKK and Nazis and “fine people.” Crazy stuff.

If you think those examples don’t sound crazy – regardless of the reality – you are probably inside the mass hysteria bubble.

3. The Confirmation Bias

If you are inside the mass hysteria bubble, you probably interpreted President Trump’s initial statement on Charlottesville – which was politically imperfect to say the least – as proof-positive he is a damned racist.

If you are outside the mass hysteria bubble you might have noticed that President Trump never campaigned to be our moral leader. He presented himself as – in his own words “no angel” – with a set of skills he offered to use in the public’s interest. He was big on law and order, and equal justice under the law. But he never offered moral leadership. Voters elected him with that knowledge. Evidently, Republicans don’t depend on politicians for moral leadership. That’s probably a good call.

When the horror in Charlottesville shocked the country, citizens instinctively looked to their president for moral leadership. The president instead provided a generic law and order statement. Under pressure, he later named specific groups and disavowed the racists. He was clearly uncomfortable being our moral lighthouse. That’s probably why he never described his moral leadership as an asset when running for office. We observe that he has never been shy about any other skill he brings to the job, so it probably isn’t an accident when he avoids mentioning any ambitions for moral leadership. If he wanted us to know he would provide that service, I think he would have mentioned it by now.

If you already believed President Trump is a racist, his weak statement about Charlottesville seems like confirmation. But if you believe he never offered moral leadership, only equal treatment under the law, that’s what you saw instead. And you made up your own mind about the morality.

The tricky part here is that any interpretation of what happened could be confirmation bias. But ask yourself which one of these versions sounds less crazy:

1. A sitting president, who is a branding expert, thought it would be a good idea to go easy on murderous Nazis as a way to improve his popularity.

or…

2. The country elected a racist leader who is winking to the KKK and White Supremacists that they have a free pass to start a race war now.

or…

3. A mentally unstable racist clown with conman skills (mostly just lying) eviscerated the Republican primary field and won the presidency. He keeps doing crazy, impulsive racist stuff. But for some reason, the economy is going well, jobs are looking good, North Korea blinked, ISIS is on the ropes, and the Supreme Court got a qualified judge. It was mostly luck.

or…

4. The guy who didn’t offer to be your moral leader didn’t offer any moral leadership, just law and order, applied equally. His critics cleverly and predictably framed it as being soft on Nazis.

One of those narratives is less crazy-sounding than the other. That doesn’t mean the less-crazy one has to be true. But normal stuff happens far more often than crazy stuff. And critics will frame normal stuff as crazy whenever they get a chance.

4. The Oversized Reaction

It would be hard to overreact to a Nazi murder, or to racists marching in the streets with torches. That stuff demands a strong reaction. But if a Republican agrees with you that Nazis are the worst, and you threaten to punch that Republican for not agreeing with you exactly the right way, that might be an oversized reaction.

5. The Insult without supporting argument

When people have actual reasons for disagreeing with you, they offer those reasons without hesitation. Strangers on social media will cheerfully check your facts, your logic, and your assumptions. But when you start seeing ad hominem attacks that offer no reasons at all, that might be a sign that people in the mass hysteria bubble don’t understand what is wrong with your point of view except that it sounds more sensible than their own.

For the past two days I have been disavowing Nazis on Twitter. The most common response from the people who agree with me is that my comic strip sucks and I am ugly.

The mass hysteria signals I described here are not settled science, or anything like it. This is only my take on the topic, based on personal observation and years of experience with hypnosis and other forms of persuasion. I present this filter on the situation as the first step in dissolving the mass hysteria. It isn’t enough, but more persuasion is coming. If you are outside the mass hysteria bubble, you might see what I am doing in this blog as a valuable public service. If you are inside the mass hysteria bubble, I look like a Nazi collaborator.

How do I look to you?



I wrote a book about how to persuade yourself to success. Based on reader comments, it is working.

My upcoming book, Win Bigly, tells you how to persuade others. (For good.) That comes out October 31st.
Title: Confederate Statues Honor Timeless Virtues — Let Them Stay
Post by: G M on August 19, 2017, 03:13:48 PM
Confederate Statues Honor Timeless Virtues — Let Them Stay

by ARTHUR HERMAN   August 19, 2017 4:00 AM @ARTHURLHERMAN

Don’t let extremists on both sides destroy honor and valor, even as they seek to destroy everything else. There are times when I wonder if we’re coming to the harsh, bitter end of the American experiment. The weekend of August 12 was one of them. My wife and I have lived in Charlottesville for the past 14 years, and on Saturday we got to see the sick political culture that’s infected this country for the past couple of decades sweep over our fair city, leaving three dead and many more seriously injured. Beth and I like to run in the mornings, and that Saturday morning we headed over to the big four-story parking garage at John Paul Jones Arena, which we sometimes use as our running track when it’s raining or it’s very hot and sunny. Usually the garage is completely empty; that Saturday every bay was filled with a Virginia State Police car, with dozens of other police cars and vans parked along the side. Seeing them gave us both an eerie feeling filled with foreboding; I’d felt the same eeriness that Friday night, when white supremacists held their torchlight vigil at the University of Virginia, in a scene reminiscent of Nazi-party rallies in the 1930s.

Yet even with all these policemen in riot gear, no one could control the violence when extremists from the left and extremists from the right battled each other in the streets in Charlottesville — or the national political firestorm it set off. And all this happened because our city council decided in June it could score some liberal points by having the statue of Robert E. Lee removed from a park downtown, and by changing the name from Lee Park to Emancipation Park. UP NEXT UP NEXT UP NEXT UP NEXT UP NEXT CBS News figure Misrepresents Facts on Terror 00:57 01:00 Powered by They’re not alone, of course; they’re part of a trend that’s sweeping — or, I prefer to say infecting — the country right now, and not just in the South. I’ve heard many arguments as to why statues commemorating Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and other Confederate war heroes should come down in Charlottesville; and not many why they should stay, except from white supremacists who have no honest or rational views on the matter. So maybe it’s time for someone who is a scholar, a historian — a Pulitzer Prize finalist historian, and the New York Times–bestselling author of nine books — and a lifelong Civil War buff to rehearse the reasons why they should remain, and why, if they come down now under violent pressure from the Left, we may be losing a lot more than statues of dead Confederate heroes. these are not ‘Confederate monuments.’ They are monuments to the dead, soldiers who fought and often died for the Confederate cause. First of all, these are not “Confederate monuments.” They are monuments to the dead, soldiers who fought and often died for the Confederate cause. They were erected years after the Civil War.

For example, the bronze Lee statue in Lee Park dates to 1924. It was begun by a French sculptor, completed by an Italian-immigrant artist, and then cast by a company in the Bronx. These monuments were dedicated to memorialize the courage and sacrifice that these Southern men and, in some cases, women (one of the sculptures in Baltimore pulled down earlier this week was dedicated “to the Confederate women of Maryland”) brought to a cause that they believed at the time deserved the same “last full measure of devotion” that their Northern counterparts brought to theirs. Of course, some of those who paid for and erected these statues also believed that cause had been right, not wrong. (I’ll say more about that in a minute.) But in the final analysis, they are monuments to timeless virtues, not to individuals. Nor are they monuments to “traitors.” Abraham Lincoln set that issue aside as soon as the war ended, by making it clear that there would be no trials or punishments for the rebels who had fought for the Confederacy and that the national agenda would be reconciliation, not retribution, in order that Americans might come together again as one nation, indivisible. And that has been the lasting legacy of the Civil War, ever since. It is in fact the true face of American exceptionalism, that we Americans could fight a savage and bloody civil war, in which more than 600,000 died and thousands more were maimed and wounded, and still be able to honor the heroes of both sides.

That never happened with other civil wars. It didn’t happen in Ireland or Spain or Russia, and it won’t happen in Iraq. This is a personal issue for me. My great-great-grandfather fought for the Union in that war and was severely wounded at the Battle of Stone’s River. (I still have the rebel Minié ball the medics pulled out of his knee.) But I know that neither he nor the men he served with in his Wisconsin regiment would want, 150 years later, to change those parks’ names — any more than would Ulysses S. Grant or Lincoln, who after the war famously spoke of the need for “charity to all and malice towards none.” Lincoln sought “to bind the nation’s wounds” in the aftermath of America’s bloodiest conflict. It was a process of reconciliation and healing, which the Left is now determined to tear up and destroy. This is why making Lee the target of these attacks is both ironic and tragic. Just before the surrender at Appomattox Courthouse, one of his officers proposed instead that they draw off into the hills to continue the fight against the Federals in a guerilla war. Lee firmly said no. The South had fought its war and lost; after the surrender, he wanted his men to return to their homes and return to being Americans. As any reader of Jay Winik’s book April 1865 also knows, after the war Lee also worked for reconciliation between black and white, in hopes that together they could build a new South now that the slaveholding version was gone forever. It’s true that Lee failed. His dream of a new South descended into Jim Crow after he died. This is in fact the best argument that those who want these statues gone can make: that the “reconciliation” between North and South was done on the backs of blacks, and that the end of Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow were the price America paid to have peace in the aftermath of civil war. From a historical point of view, it’s almost convincing, even though what American blacks suffered under segregation was nothing compared to what liberalism has inflicted on them since the 1950s, as it destroyed their families, their schools, and their young men and women’s lives through drugs and guns and the gangster-rap culture “lifestyle,” which is really a death style. It’s a deceptively specious proposition. We must remove these statues, is how the argument goes, as a form of symbolic reparation to African Americans who suffered not only slavery but its Jim Crow aftermath. The monuments may be to the right people — men who served with honor, dedication, and valor — but they were too often erected for the wrong reasons, not to close the books on a bitter war but to open a new chapter in a segregationist South. They are monuments to Southern heroes, symbols of Southern courage and heroism.

The subtext was: When the South rises again, it will produce heroes like these again. But again, this argument runs up against the monuments themselves. They’re not to leaders of the Ku Klux Klan or the architects of segregation or to George Wallace or Lester Maddox. They are monuments to Southern heroes whom the segregationists could cling to as unexceptionable symbols of Southern courage and heroism. The subtext was: When the South rises again, it will produce heroes like these again. Instead it got Theodore Bilbo and George Wallace and Robert Byrd; but that was not Lee or Jackson’s fault, any more than an American flag displayed at a KKK rally is a reason to ban the Stars and Stripes. In that sense, one could say that these statues and monuments were vice’s tribute to virtue, and Jim Crow’s tribute to dead heroes, because even Jim Crow knew they represented human qualities — duty, honor, valor, sacrifice — that transcend race, color, and political ideology. *** That is, of course, what those who want the statues torn down deny. Black Lives Matter, Antifa, and sundry activists who gathered to do battle in Charlottesville that day believe that there are no intrinsic human virtues, only politics and power. They are our totalitarian Left: Their ideological roots run much deeper than Ferguson. Reared on Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky, they see America as the Evil Empire and the Confederacy as a face of that evil. The people who led the destruction of the statues in Durham, for example, were members of the World Workers Party, a Communist faction that supported the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 and of Czechoslovakia in 1968. The party’s latest cause happens to be defending North Korea. Tearing down statues of dead Confederates is just one more means to their Marxist end. Those who convince themselves that removing these monuments will calm political passions and make the issue go away know not with whom they are dealing. The totalitarian Left is just getting warmed up. To them this is not a campaign about racism or slavery; it’s one more step in transforming America by effacing and defacing every aspect of its history, going back to the founding. Once Lee and Jackson are gone, attention will turn to Thomas Jefferson. (It already has here in Charlottesville, where he made his home at Monticello, and at the University of Virginia, which he founded). Jefferson was a slaveholder, after all, who actually knew it was wrong; why are so many statues and highways named after him, and likewise after his fellow slaveholders James Madison and George Washington? Clearly we need to start correcting that. And what about Lincoln himself? How would he pass the latest litmus test on what constitutes racism? Or how would many or even most of the men who wore blue and fought for the Union, including my great-great grandfather? They may be heroes for now, but when Governor Andrew Cuomo says he has ordered removing the names of Lee and Jackson from street signs because New York “stands against racism,” where does that leave most Americans born before the Second World War?

The truth is that, while Cuomo, Black Lives Matter, and the Workers World Party claim to hate racism, what they really hate is America. America is a country where the process of conflict and reconciliation, combined with the passage of time, brings out and embeds the qualities that make the United States one people and one community. That process includes the Civil War. This is not my insight, it was Abraham Lincoln’s. He believed that the Southerners who had left the Union in 1861 and had fought a war with every ounce of savagery and bitterness could be welcomed back in 1865 and that the nation could made whole again, because the virtues (not the vices) the South displayed in that conflict — honor, valor, sacrifice — were in fact American virtues. Now 150 years later, extremists on both sides have brought the anger and bitterness back, deliberately. When I think about the riots in Charlottesville, I hear these lines from Dover Beach: “We are here as on a darkling plain / Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight / Where ignorant armies clash by night” — and while statues of dead heroes watch impassively overhead. So when should those statues come down? I’d say when honor, valor, and sacrifice no longer count for anything in this country. Until then, let them stay. Don’t let extremists on both sides destroy the virtues they stand for, even as they seek to destroy everything else. — Arthur L. Herman is Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute and the author of the forthcoming 1917: Lenin, Wilson, and the Birth of the New World Disorder and Freedom’s Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II.

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/450622/virginia-confederate-statues-robert-e-lee-stonewall-jackson-virtues-honor-sacrifice-valor?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Saturday%202017-08-19&utm_term=NR5PM%20Actives
Title: On Charlottesville, Trump, and Anti-Americanism
Post by: G M on August 20, 2017, 06:16:42 PM
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/450626/charlottesville-donald-trump-alt-right-blame-both-sides-wrong?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Saturday%202017-08-19&utm_term=NR5PM%20Actives

On Charlottesville, Trump, and Anti-Americanism

 by ANDREW C. MCCARTHY   August 19, 2017 4:00 AM @ANDREWCMCCARTHY


The president made some idiotic remarks, but he knows something the elites overlook. Susan Rosenberg was a terrorist in the early 1980s. Like her Weathermen comrades, she would have killed many people had she been a more competent terrorist. She was a fugitive plotting more bombings when she and a co-conspirator were captured in New Jersey, armed to the gills and toting over 700 pounds of dynamite. At her sentencing, she proclaimed, “Long live the armed struggle” against “U.S. imperialism.” Her only regret was that she hadn’t shot it out with the police who arrested her. A federal judge sentenced her to 58 years’ imprisonment. I know her story well because, when she claimed she was being denied parole unlawfully, I spent over a year as the prosecutor arguing that the court should keep her in the slammer. Finally, the court ruled against her. So . . . Bill Clinton sprang her. Her commutation may have outraged most Americans, but it was celebrated by the nation’s “progressive” opinion elites, the same ones who were cool with President Clinton’s release of the FALN terrorists. Granted, Rosenberg didn’t get the hero’s welcome at New York City’s Puerto Rican Day parade received by Oscar Lopez Rivera — the FALN terrorist released by President Obama. The teaching gig the Left arranged for her wasn’t quite as prestigious and long-lived as the ones her fellow Weathermen — and Obama pals — Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn fell into. She’ll never be a t-shirt icon, like Che Guevara or Tupac Shakur. The campaign to pretend she was innocent won’t rival the Alger Hiss fairy tale. There will probably be no statue of her, much less a performing-arts center like the one in Princeton named for Paul Robeson. In Political Skirmishes, Where are the Police? 00:06 00:54 Powered by But she hates America, so she’ll be remembered fondly in the places where the cultural tune is called. Her books — such as An American Radical: A Political Prisoner in My Own Country — will continue to be taken oh so seriously. Her Wikipedia entry does not describe her as a terrorist; it says Susan Rosenberg is a “radical political activist, author and advocate for social justice.”

That’s why you got Trump. It has nothing to do with statues of the dead. It is about the status of the living. You’re upset over President Trump’s idiotic remarks this week? Oh, right, I need to specify. Not the crackpot bit about General Pershing mass-murdering Muslim prisoners in the Philippines (well explained by David French, here). I mean the one about the “very fine people” in Charlottesville — the supposed “many” who joined neo-Nazis, KKK die-hards, and other white supremacists in a demonstration that could not have been more overtly racist and despicable. Yeah, I’m upset about that, too. That doesn’t mean I didn’t notice the anti-fa thugs were out there. It doesn’t mean I don’t see the hard Left’s seditionist shock troops, at war with the country, much like the Weathermen, the Panthers, and the Black Liberation Army back in the day. As we’ve seen many times now (and will, alas, see many times more), the radical Left doesn’t need tiki-torch twits to spur them to arson and mayhem.

This time, though, in Charlottesville, the white supremacists were the instigators. They caused it. They orchestrated this disgusting event, they came ready for the violence they knew they were provoking, and one of them committed a murder. If the roles were reversed, we wouldn’t want to hear a bunch of imbecilic “there’s blame on both sides” moral equivalence. We’d want the most culpable bunch called out and condemned, by name — and without any irrational hedging about phantom “very fine people” who confederate with sociopaths on the latter’s terms. Making that distinction does not mean you can’t or shouldn’t call out anti-fa, too. But a young woman died here. And she didn’t die because, fully aware she was courting danger, she got herself into a scrap. She was standing where she had a right to be standing, expressing what she had a right to express, when she was murdered by a depraved racist who plowed a car into her and other human beings. Anyone commenting on this ghastly event ought to be able to prioritize his righteous rage. Especially if that anyone happens to be the president of the United States. Anyone commenting on this ghastly event ought to be able to prioritize his righteous rage. Especially if that anyone happens to be the president of the United States. You have good reason to be upset that this president couldn’t meet that modest standard.

If you’re on the political right, moreover, you may be even more upset by a poll that says two-thirds of Republicans actually approve of Trump’s response. They believe he ascribed blame accurately. Well, he didn’t. Does that make the poll result irrational? I don’t think so. It is not that two-thirds of the Right really think “very fine people” make common cause with the KKK. And it’s not that they really see two sides equally at fault. It is that, regardless of comparative fault, they know there were two sides out there. And they know the media has tried to obscure that fact. The poll is less indicative of settled belief than of gut reaction. People are fed up. If you dare notice the radical Left, you are not an observer of objective fact, you are a neo-Nazi sympathizer. If you dare notice that many of the “peaceful protesters” were swinging batons and spraying chemicals, you need a re-education course in “unconscious racism.” News about a radical leftist’s attempted mass murder of Republican House members that left Representative Steve Scalise on the brink of death faded quickly away — just a few days’ Kumbaya coverage along the lines of “Shaken Democrats joined Republicans in expressing outrage, etc., etc.”

But on Thursday in Barcelona, when Muslim terrorists reverted to the car jihad they have been using quite notoriously for years, the media speculated that the terrorist killing of 13 people by careening a van along a crowded street might just be a Charlottesville “copycat” attack. You get it: Islamic terrorists are just like the Klan, are just like bourgeois Americans in the Age of Trump. Or, as they say in Virginia, “Allahu akbar, y’all.” Don’t be sidetracked by the trendy debate over statues. Statuary is complicated. It is erected as much to signal the sentiments of the commissioners as to honor noteworthy lives. And it is built to last, so it stands even when sentiments change. A great deal of Confederate iconography was not commissioned in remembrance of soldierly valor or mawkish depiction of genteel Dixie. It was crafted in defiant 20th-century resistance to the extension of equal rights, dignity, and opportunity to black people. Trump’s ill-informed meanderings about “culture” aside, many people taking offense at the statues have every reason to feel offended because, taken all in all, the reasons why they stand are at least as offensive as the images they convey. Maybe if we grasp that, instead of getting hysterical over it, we can see why the loss of Robert E. Lee shouldn’t threaten Thomas Jefferson.

The disappearance of an honorable soldier in a dishonorable cause is not a slippery-slope rationale for casting out the founder who grafted onto America’s soul the conceit that we are all created equal — a solemn declaration of far more enduring consequence than its author’s flaws. Pegging it at 4,500 probably exaggerates the number of Saxon pagans beheaded by Charles the Great at Verden, but to call the episode an atrocity is no exaggeration. Nor, however, has Charlemagne’s ruthlessness in battle been adjudged reason to remove his famous statue from the cathedral entrance at Notre Dame de Paris. Without him, there might have been no Europe, no Western culture as we know it, no development of the university, no magnificent cathedrals still standing. It is a matter of perspective, of understanding changing times and our flawed nature. We can demand that our history not be erased and still realize that some of it is better recounted in book form than in stone or alloy. It should be left to the people most affected by evocative statuary to make that call. What bothers many ordinary Americans is that there is far more uproar over a statue of Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville than over one of Vladimir Lenin in Seattle. What bothers us is that elite opinion’s determination to conceal the presence of anti-fa at last weekend’s bloody debacle — the better to smear the American Right with the alt-right — is just phase one. Inevitably, phases two and three will follow: The presence of leftist radicals is grudgingly admitted but rationalized as a necessary defense against monstrous evil; then, in time, their presence is venerated as exemplary courage against a monstrously evil society.

Donald Trump’s buffoonery is self-defeating, but there is shrewdness beneath it. He grasps, in a way the people who cover him don’t seem to, that much of the country is sick of being told the country sucks. There are racists and they should be condemned without equivocation. But their existence in ever smaller numbers does not mean we are living in AmeriKKKa, or that there is high virtue in anti-Americanism. — Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at National Review Institute and a contributing editor of National Review.

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/450626/charlottesville-donald-trump-alt-right-blame-both-sides-wrong?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Saturday%202017-08-19&utm_term=NR5PM%20Actives
Title: VDH on the war on memory
Post by: G M on August 22, 2017, 09:35:18 AM
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/450689/erasing-history-censoring-confederate-past-rewriting-memory-mob-vengeance

Our War against Memory

Monuments to Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee are removed from Wyman Park in Baltimore, August 16, 2017.

by VICTOR DAVIS HANSON   August 22, 2017 4:00 AM @VDHANSON

The new abolitio memoriae   Back to the Future Romans emperors were often a bad lot — but usually confirmed as such only in retrospect. Monsters such as Nero, of the first-century A.D. Julio-Claudian dynasty, or the later psychopaths Commodus and Caracalla, were flattered by toadies when alive — only to be despised the moment they dropped. After unhinged emperors were finally killed off, the sycophantic Senate often proclaimed a damnatio memoriae (a “damnation of memory”). Prior commemoration was wiped away, thereby robbing the posthumous ogre of any legacy and hence any existence for eternity.

 In more practical matters, there followed a concurrent abolitio memoriae (an “erasing of memory”). Specifically, moralists either destroyed or rounded up and put away all statuary and inscriptions concerning the bad, dead emperor. In the case of particularly striking or expensive artistic pieces, they erased the emperor’s name (abolitio nominis) or his face and some physical characteristics from the artwork. Impressive marble torsos were sometimes recut to accommodate a more acceptable (or powerful) successor. (Think of something like the heads only of the generals on Stone Mountain blasted off and replaced by new carved profiles of John Brown and Nat Turner). A Scary History Without Leon Trotsky’s organizational and tactical genius, Vladimir Lenin might never have consolidated power among squabbling anti-czarist factions. Yet after the triumph of Stalin, “de-Trotskyization” demanded that every word, every photo, and every memory of an ostracized Trotsky was to be obliterated. That nightmarish process fueled allegorical themes in George Orwell’s fictional Animal Farm and 1984. How many times has St. Petersburg changed its name, reflecting each generation’s love or hate or indifference to czarist Russia or neighboring Germany? Is the city always to remain St. Petersburg, or will it once again be anti-German Petrograd as it was after the horrific First World War? Or perhaps it will again be Communist Leningrad during the giddy age of the new man — as dictated by the morality and the politics of each new generation resenting its past? Is a society that damns its past every 50 years one to be emulated? Abolition of memory is easy when the revisionists enjoy the high moral ground and the damned are evil incarnate. But more often, killing the dead is not an easy a matter of dragon slaying, as with Hitler or Stalin. Confederate General Joe Johnston was not General Stonewall Jackson and after the war General John Mosby was not General Wade Hampton, just as Ludwig Beck was not Joachim Peiper.

 What about the morally ambiguous persecution of sinners such as the current effort in California to damn the memory of Father Junipero Serra and erase his eponymous boulevards, to punish his supposedly illiberal treatment of Native Americans in the early missions some 250 years ago? California Bay Area zealots are careful to target Serra but not Leland Stanford, who left a more detailed record of his own 19th-century anti-non-white prejudices, but whose university brand no progressive student of Stanford would dare to erase, because doing so would endanger his own studied trajectory to the good life. We forget that there are other catalysts than moral outrage that calibrate the targets of abolitio memoriae. Again, in the case of the current abolition of Confederate icons — reenergized by the Black Lives Matter movement and the general repulsion over the vile murders by cowardly racist Dylan Roof — are all Confederate statues equally deserving of damnation? Does the statue of Confederate General James Longstreet deserve defacing? He was a conflicted officer of the Confederacy, a critic of Robert E. Lee’s, later a Unionist friend of Ulysses S. Grant, an enemy of the Lost Causers, and a leader of African-American militias in enforcing reconstruction edicts against white nationalists. Is Longstreet the moral equivalent of General Nathan Bedford Forrest (“get there firstest with the mostest”), who was the psychopathic villain of Fort Pillow, a near illiterate ante-bellum slave-trading millionaire, and the first head of the original Ku Klux Klan? Were the 60–70 percent of the Confederate population in most secessionist states who did not own slaves complicit in the economics of slavery? Did they have good options to leave their ancestral homes when the war started to escape the stain of perpetuating slavery? Do such questions even matter to the new arbiters of ethics, who recently defiled the so-called peace monument in an Atlanta park — a depiction of a fallen Confederate everyman, his trigger hand stilled by an angel? How did those obsessed with the past know so little of history?

Key to General William Tecumseh Sherman’s devastating strategy of marching through Georgia and the Carolinas was his decision to deliberately target the plantations and the homes of the wealthy, along with Confederate public buildings. Apparently Sherman believed that the plantation owners of the South were far more culpable than the poor non-slave-holding majority in most secessionist states. Sherman generally spared the property of non-slave owners, though they collectively suffered nonetheless through the general impoverishment left in Sherman’s wake. In our race to rectify the past in the present, could Ken Burns in 2017 still make his stellar Civil War documentary, with a folksy and drawly Shelby Foote animating the tragedies of the Confederacy’s gifted soldiers sacrificing their all for a bad cause? Should progressives ask Burns to reissue an updated Civil War version in which Foote and southern “contextualizers” are left on the cutting room floor? How about progressive icon Joan Baez? Should the Sixties folksinger seek forgiveness from us for reviving her career in the early 1970s with the big money-making hit “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”— her version of The Band’s sympathetic ode to the tragedy of a defeated Confederacy, written over a century after the Civil War. (“Back with my wife in Tennessee / When one day she called to me / Said, “Virgil, quick, come see / There goes the Robert E. Lee!”) If a monument is to be wiped away, then surely a popular song must go, too. Are there gradations of moral ambiguity? Or do Middlebury and Berkeley students or antifa rioters in their infinite wisdom have a monopoly on calibrating virtue and defining it as 100 percent bad or good? Who of the present gets to decide whom of the past we must erase — and where does the cleansing of memory stop? Defacing Mt. Rushmore of its slave owners? Who of the present gets to decide whom of the past we must erase — and where does the cleansing of memory stop? Defacing Mt. Rushmore of its slave owners? Renaming the double-whammy Washington and Lee University? Are we to erase mention of the heavens for their August 21 eclipse that unfairly bypassed most of the nation’s black population — as the recent issue of Atlantic magazine is now lamenting? Revolutions are not always sober and judicious.

We might agree that the public sphere is no place for honorific commemoration of Roger B. Taney, the author of the Dred Scott decision. But statue removal will not be limited to the likes of Roger B. Taneys when empowered activists can cite chapter and verse the racist things once uttered by Abraham Lincoln, whose bust was just disfigured in Chicago — and when the statue-destroyers feel that they gain power daily because they are morally superior. Correct and Incorrect Racists? The logical trajectory of tearing down the statue of a Confederate soldier will soon lead to the renaming of Yale, the erasing of Washington and Jefferson from our currency, and the de-Trotskyization of every mention of Planned Parenthood’s iconic Margaret Singer, the eugenicist whose racist views on abortion anticipated those of current liberal Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. (Ginsburg said, “Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.”) At what point will those who went ballistic over President Trump’s clumsy “on the one hand, on the other hand” criticism of both the abhorrent racists who marched in Charlottesville (parading around in the very Nazi garb that their grandparents had fought to vanquish) and the unhinged anarchists who sought to violently stop them demand that Princeton University erase all mention of their beloved Woodrow Wilson, the unapologetic racist? Wilson, as an emblematic and typical early progressive, thought human nature could “progress” by scientific devotion to eugenics, and he believed that blacks were innately inferior. Wilson, also remember, was in a position of power — and, owing to his obdurate racism, he ensured that integration of the U.S. Army would needlessly have to wait three decades.

Do any of the protestors realize that a chief tenet of early progressivism was eugenics, the politically correct, liberal orthodoxy of its time? Just as in Roman times, chipping away the face of Nero or Commodus did not ensure a new emperor’s good behavior, so tearing down a statue of a Confederate soldier is not going to restore vitality to the inner city, whose tragedies are not due to inanimate bronze. When Minnesota Black Lives Matter marchers chanted of police, “Pigs in a blanket, fry ’em like bacon,” was that a call for violence that was not long after realized by a spate of racist murders of policemen in Dallas? Are such advocates of torching police officers morally equipped to adjudicate which Confederate statue must come down? And did President Obama swiftly condemn the forces that led the shooter to select his victims for execution? After Major Nidal Malik Hasan murdered 13 fellow soldiers in cold blood, screaming out “Allah Akbar” as he shot, did “both sides” Obama really have to warn America that “we don’t know all the answers yet, and I would caution against jumping to conclusions until we have all the facts”? And did it take him six years before he discovered the catalysts when finally calling the murders a terrorist attack? Did Obama have to dismiss the Islamist anti-Semitic terrorist slaughter of targeted Jews in a kosher market in Paris with the callous and flippant quip that the murderers had killed “a bunch of folks in a deli in Paris”? Were there demonstrations over that moral equivalence? And was it inevitable that the anti-Semite, homophobe, and provocateur with past blood on his hands for inciting riot and arson, the Reverend Al Sharpton, would advocate yanking public sponsorship of the Jefferson memorial? He who is with sin now casts the first stone? We are in an age of melodrama, not tragedy, in which we who are living in a leisured and affluent age (in part due to the accumulated learning and moral wisdom gained and handed down by former generations of the poor and less aware) pass judgement on prior ages because they lacked our own enlightened and sophisticated views of humanity — as if we lucky few were born fully ethically developed from the head of Zeus. In my own town, there used to be a small classical fountain dedicated by the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. It was long ago torn down. (Who wishes to recall the forces that led to Prohibition?) In its place now sits an honorific statue to the clawed, half-human Aztec deity Coatlicue, the hungry earth-mother goddess. Coatlicue was quite a bloodthirsty creation, to whom thousands of living captives were sacrificed. The goddess was often portrayed wrapped in a cloak of skin and wearing a neckless of human hearts, hands, and skulls. Our town’s new epigraph atop Coatlicue is Viva la Raza — “Long live the Race.” Should there be demonstrations to yank down such a racialist and Franco-ist hurrah? Or are the supposed victims of white privilege themselves exempt from the very chauvinism that they sometimes allege in others? Is there a progressive rationale that exempts Coatlicue and its racist plaque, whose sloganeering channels the raza/razza mantras of Fascist Spain and Mussolini’s Italy? Are we to have a perpetual war of the statues?

The Arc of History More Often Bends Backward There is a need for an abolition of memory in the case of Hitler or Stalin, or here in America perhaps even of a Nathan Bedford Forrest. But when we wipe away history at a whim (why in 2017 and not, say, in 2015 or 2008?), we’d better make sure that our targets are uniquely and melodramatically evil rather than tragically misguided. And before we get out our ropes and sandblasters, we should be certain that we are clearly the moral superiors of those we condemn to oblivion. Before we get out our ropes and sandblasters, we should be certain that we are clearly the moral superiors of those we condemn to oblivion. Be careful, 21st-century man. Far more hypercritical generations to come may find our own present moral certitude — late-term and genetically driven abortion, the rise of artificial intelligence in place of human decision-making, the harvesting and selling of aborted fetal organs, ethnic and tribal chauvinism, euthanasia, racially segregated dorms and “safe spaces” — as immoral as we find the sins of our own predecessors. For the last decade, we were lectured that the arc of history always bends toward our own perceptions of moral justice. More likely, human advancement tends to be circular and should not to be confused with technological progress. Just as often, history is ethically circular. No Roman province produced anyone quite like a modern Hitler; Attila’s body count could not match Stalin’s. In the classical Athens of 420 B.C., a far greater percentage of the population could read than in Ottoman Athens of A.D. 1600. The average undergraduate of 1950 probably left college knowing a lot more than his 2017 counterpart does. The monopolies of Google, Facebook, and Amazon are far more insidious than that of Standard Oil, even if our masters of the universe seem more hip in their black turtlenecks than John D. Rockefeller did in his starched collars. Moneywise, Bernie Madoff outdid James Fisk and Jay Gould. The strangest paradox in the current epidemic of abolitio memoriae is that our moral censors believe in ethical absolutism and claim enough superior virtue to apply it clumsily across the ages — without a clue that they fall short of their own moral pretensions, and that one day their own icons are as likely be stoned as the icons of others are now apt to be torn down by black-mask-wearing avengers. A final paradox about killing the dead: Two millennia after Roman autocrats’ destruction of statues, and armed with the creepy 20th-century model of Fascists and Communists destroying the past, we, of a supposedly enlightened democracy, cannot even rewrite history by democratic means — local, state, and federal commission recommendations, referenda, or majority votes of elected representatives. More often, as moral cowards, we either rely on the mob or some sort of executive order enforced only in the dead of night.

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/450689/erasing-history-censoring-confederate-past-rewriting-memory-mob-vengeance
Title: VDH: The Double Standard in the Progressive War against the Dead
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 26, 2017, 11:36:33 AM


http://victorhanson.com/wordpress/the-double-standard-in-the-progressive-war-against-the-dead/#more-10514


The Double Standard in the Progressive War against the Dead
Title: Glick: Netanyahu's empathy for Trump
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 26, 2017, 12:18:04 PM
second post

http://carolineglick.com/netanyahus-empathy-for-trump/
Title: Jonah Goldberg: The Revenge of El Jabato
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 27, 2017, 10:44:43 AM
 http://www.nationalreview.com/g-file/450847/columbus-confederate-monument-iconoclasm-el-jabato-revenge

Title: NRO: Antifa and America's political culture
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 29, 2017, 06:38:28 AM
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/450893/antifa-berkeley-violence-harms-political-culture?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Monday%20through%20Friday%202017-08-28&utm_term=NR5PM%20Actives
Title: Ben Shapiro: When disaster strikes
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 30, 2017, 11:30:24 PM
http://www.dailywire.com/news/20426/shapiro-national-review-when-disaster-strikes-men-ben-shapiro?utm_source=shapironewsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=083017-news-title&utm_campaign=two
Title: VDH: Linguistic McCarthyism
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 01, 2017, 09:03:49 AM
http://victorhanson.com/wordpress/linguistic-mccarthyism/
Title: Glick: When Great Institutions Lie
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 09, 2017, 10:21:48 AM
http://www.jpost.com/printarticle.aspx?id=504551
Title: Re: Glick: When Great Institutions Lie
Post by: G M on September 09, 2017, 10:50:54 AM
http://www.jpost.com/printarticle.aspx?id=504551


David Burge‏
@iowahawkblog

1. Identify a respected institution.
2. kill it.
3. gut it.
4. wear its carcass as a skin suit, while demanding respect.
#lefties
Title: WSJ: Decliining mobility
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 21, 2017, 05:47:55 PM
https://www.wsj.com/articles/struggling-americans-once-sought-greener-pasturesnow-theyre-stuck-1501686801?mod=e2fb
Title: Bret Stephens: The Dying Art of Disagreement
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 26, 2017, 10:42:16 AM
Op-Ed Columnist
The Dying Art of Disagreement
Plato and Aristotle in discussion, by Luca della Robbia (1437)


This is the text of a lecture delivered at the Lowy Institute Media Award dinner in Sydney, Australia, on Saturday, Sept. 23. The award recognizes excellence in Australian foreign affairs journalism.

Let me begin with thanks to the Lowy Institute for bringing me all the way to Sydney and doing me the honor of hosting me here this evening.

I’m aware of the controversy that has gone with my selection as your speaker. I respect the wishes of the Colvin family and join in honoring Mark Colvin’s memory as a courageous foreign correspondent and an extraordinary writer and broadcaster. And I’d particularly like to thank Michael Fullilove for not rescinding the invitation.

This has become the depressing trend on American university campuses, where the roster of disinvited speakers and forced cancellations includes former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and Condoleezza Rice, former Harvard University President Larry Summers, actor Alec Baldwin, human-rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, DNA co-discoverer James Watson, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, filmmaker Michael Moore, conservative Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist George Will and liberal Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Anna Quindlen, to name just a few.

So illustrious is the list that, on second thought, I’m beginning to regret that you didn’t disinvite me after all.

The title of my talk tonight is “The Dying Art of Disagreement.” This is a subject that is dear to me — literally dear — since disagreement is the way in which I have always earned a living. Disagreement is dear to me, too, because it is the most vital ingredient of any decent society.

To say the words, “I agree” — whether it’s agreeing to join an organization, or submit to a political authority, or subscribe to a religious faith — may be the basis of every community.

But to say, I disagree; I refuse; you’re wrong; etiam si omnes — ego non — these are the words that define our individuality, give us our freedom, enjoin our tolerance, enlarge our perspectives, seize our attention, energize our progress, make our democracies real, and give hope and courage to oppressed people everywhere. Galileo and Darwin; Mandela, Havel, and Liu Xiaobo; Rosa Parks and Natan Sharansky — such are the ranks of those who disagree.

And the problem, as I see it, is that we’re failing at the task.

This is a puzzle. At least as far as far as the United States is concerned, Americans have rarely disagreed more in recent decades.

We disagree about racial issues, bathroom policies, health care laws, and, of course, the 45th president. We express our disagreements in radio and cable TV rants in ways that are increasingly virulent; street and campus protests that are increasingly violent; and personal conversations that are increasingly embittering.

This is yet another age in which we judge one another morally depending on where we stand politically.

Nor is this just an impression of the moment. Extensive survey data show that Republicans are much more right-leaning than they were twenty years ago, Democrats much more left-leaning, and both sides much more likely to see the other as a mortal threat to the nation’s welfare.

The polarization is geographic, as more people live in states and communities where their neighbors are much likelier to share their politics.

The polarization is personal: Fully 50 percent of Republicans would not want their child to marry a Democrat, and nearly a third of Democrats return the sentiment. Interparty marriage has taken the place of interracial marriage as a family taboo.

Finally the polarization is electronic and digital, as Americans increasingly inhabit the filter bubbles of news and social media that correspond to their ideological affinities. We no longer just have our own opinions. We also have our separate “facts,” often the result of what different media outlets consider newsworthy. In the last election, fully 40 percent of Trump voters named Fox News as their chief source of news.

Thanks a bunch for that one, Australia.

It’s usually the case that the more we do something, the better we are at it. Instead, we’re like Casanovas in reverse: the more we do it, the worse we’re at it. Our disagreements may frequently hoarsen our voices, but they rarely sharpen our thinking, much less change our minds.

It behooves us to wonder why.

* * *

Thirty years ago, in 1987, a philosophy professor at the University of Chicago named Allan Bloom — at the time best known for his graceful translations of Plato’s “Republic” and Rousseau’s “Emile” — published a learned polemic about the state of higher education in the United States. It was called “The Closing of the American Mind.”

The book appeared when I was in high school, and I struggled to make my way through a text thick with references to Plato, Weber, Heidegger and Strauss. But I got the gist — and the gist was that I’d better enroll in the University of Chicago and read the great books. That is what I did.

What was it that one learned through a great books curriculum? Certainly not “conservatism” in any contemporary American sense of the term. We were not taught to become American patriots, or religious pietists, or to worship what Rudyard Kipling called “the Gods of the Market Place.” We were not instructed in the evils of Marxism, or the glories of capitalism, or even the superiority of Western civilization.

As I think about it, I’m not sure we were taught anything at all. What we did was read books that raised serious questions about the human condition, and which invited us to attempt to ask serious questions of our own. Education, in this sense, wasn’t a “teaching” with any fixed lesson. It was an exercise in interrogation.

To listen and understand; to question and disagree; to treat no proposition as sacred and no objection as impious; to be willing to entertain unpopular ideas and cultivate the habits of an open mind — this is what I was encouraged to do by my teachers at the University of Chicago.

It’s what used to be called a liberal education.

The University of Chicago showed us something else: that every great idea is really just a spectacular disagreement with some other great idea.

Socrates quarrels with Homer. Aristotle quarrels with Plato. Locke quarrels with Hobbes and Rousseau quarrels with them both. Nietzsche quarrels with everyone. Wittgenstein quarrels with himself.

These quarrels are never personal. Nor are they particularly political, at least in the ordinary sense of politics. Sometimes they take place over the distance of decades, even centuries.

Most importantly, they are never based on a misunderstanding. On the contrary, the disagreements arise from perfect comprehension; from having chewed over the ideas of your intellectual opponent so thoroughly that you can properly spit them out.

In other words, to disagree well you must first understand well. You have to read deeply, listen carefully, watch closely. You need to grant your adversary moral respect; give him the intellectual benefit of doubt; have sympathy for his motives and participate empathically with his line of reasoning. And you need to allow for the possibility that you might yet be persuaded of what he has to say.

“The Closing of the American Mind” took its place in the tradition of these quarrels. Since the 1960s it had been the vogue in American universities to treat the so-called “Dead White European Males” of the Western canon as agents of social and political oppression. Allan Bloom insisted that, to the contrary, they were the best possible instruments of spiritual liberation.

He also insisted that to sustain liberal democracy you needed liberally educated people. This, at least, should not have been controversial. For free societies to function, the idea of open-mindedness can’t simply be a catchphrase or a dogma. It needs to be a personal habit, most of all when it comes to preserving an open mind toward those with whom we disagree.

* * *

That habit was no longer being exercised much 30 years ago. And if you’ve followed the news from American campuses in recent years, things have become a lot worse.

According to a new survey from the Brookings Institution, a plurality of college students today — fully 44 percent — do not believe the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects so-called “hate speech,” when of course it absolutely does. More shockingly, a narrow majority of students — 51 percent — think it is “acceptable” for a student group to shout down a speaker with whom they disagree. An astonishing 20 percent also agree that it’s acceptable to use violence to prevent a speaker from speaking.

These attitudes are being made plain nearly every week on one college campus or another.

There are speakers being shouted down by organized claques of hecklers — such was the experience of Israeli ambassador Michael Oren at the University of California, Irvine. Or speakers who require hundreds of thousands of dollars of security measures in order to appear on campus — such was the experience of conservative pundit Ben Shapiro earlier this month at Berkeley. Or speakers who are physically barred from reaching the auditorium — that’s what happened to Heather MacDonald at Claremont McKenna College in April. Or teachers who are humiliated by their students and hounded from their positions for allegedly hurting students’ feelings — that’s what happened to Erika and Nicholas Christakis of Yale.

And there is violence. Listen to a description from Middlebury College professor Allison Stanger of what happened when she invited the libertarian scholar Charles Murray to her school to give a talk in March:

    The protesters succeeded in shutting down the lecture. We were forced to move to another site and broadcast our discussion via live stream, while activists who had figured out where we were banged on the windows and set off fire alarms. Afterward, as Dr. Murray and I left the building . . . a mob charged us.

    Most of the hatred was focused on Dr. Murray, but when I took his right arm to shield him and to make sure we stayed together, the crowd turned on me. Someone pulled my hair, while others were shoving me. I feared for my life. Once we got into the car, protesters climbed on it, hitting the windows and rocking the vehicle whenever we stopped to avoid harming them. I am still wearing a neck brace, and spent a week in a dark room to recover from a concussion caused by the whiplash.

Middlebury is one of the most prestigious liberal-arts colleges in the United States, with an acceptance rate of just 16 percent and tuition fees of nearly $50,000 a year. How does an elite institution become a factory for junior totalitarians, so full of their own certitudes that they could indulge their taste for bullying and violence?

There’s no one answer. What’s clear is that the mis-education begins early. I was raised on the old-fashioned view that sticks and stones could break my bones but words would never hurt me. But today there’s a belief that since words can cause stress, and stress can have physiological effects, stressful words are tantamount to a form of violence. This is the age of protected feelings purchased at the cost of permanent infantilization.

The mis-education continues in grade school. As the Brookings findings indicate, younger Americans seem to have no grasp of what our First Amendment says, much less of the kind of speech it protects. This is a testimony to the collapse of civics education in the United States, creating the conditions that make young people uniquely susceptible to demagogy of the left- or right-wing varieties.

Then we get to college, where the dominant mode of politics is identity politics, and in which the primary test of an argument isn’t the quality of the thinking but the cultural, racial, or sexual standing of the person making it. As a woman of color I think X. As a gay man I think Y. As a person of privilege I apologize for Z. This is the baroque way Americans often speak these days. It is a way of replacing individual thought — with all the effort that actual thinking requires — with social identification — with all the attitude that attitudinizing requires.

In recent years, identity politics have become the moated castles from which we safeguard our feelings from hurt and our opinions from challenge. It is our “safe space.” But it is a safe space of a uniquely pernicious kind — a safe space from thought, rather than a safe space for thought, to borrow a line I recently heard from Salman Rushdie.

Another consequence of identity politics is that it has made the distance between making an argument and causing offense terrifyingly short. Any argument that can be cast as insensitive or offensive to a given group of people isn’t treated as being merely wrong. Instead it is seen as immoral, and therefore unworthy of discussion or rebuttal.

The result is that the disagreements we need to have — and to have vigorously — are banished from the public square before they’re settled. People who might otherwise join a conversation to see where it might lead them choose instead to shrink from it, lest they say the “wrong” thing and be accused of some kind of political -ism or -phobia. For fear of causing offense, they forego the opportunity to be persuaded.

Take the arguments over same-sex marriage, which you are now debating in Australia. My own views in favor of same-sex marriage are well known, and I hope the Yes’s wins by a convincing margin.

But if I had to guess, I suspect the No’s will exceed whatever they are currently polling. That’s because the case for same-sex marriage is too often advanced not by reason, but merely by branding every opponent of it as a “bigot” — just because they are sticking to an opinion that was shared across the entire political spectrum only a few years ago. Few people like outing themselves as someone’s idea of a bigot, so they keep their opinions to themselves even when speaking to pollsters. That’s just what happened last year in the Brexit vote and the U.S. presidential election, and look where we are now.

If you want to make a winning argument for same-sex marriage, particularly against conservative opponents, make it on a conservative foundation: As a matter of individual freedom, and as an avenue toward moral responsibility and social respectability. The No’s will have a hard time arguing with that. But if you call them morons and Neanderthals, all you’ll get in return is their middle finger or their clenched fist.

One final point about identity politics: It’s a game at which two can play. In the United States, the so-called “alt-right” justifies its white-identity politics in terms that are coyly borrowed from the progressive left. One of the more dismaying features of last year’s election was the extent to which “white working class” became a catchall identity for people whose travails we were supposed to pity but whose habits or beliefs we were not supposed to criticize. The result was to give the Trump base a moral pass it did little to earn.

* * *

So here’s where we stand: Intelligent disagreement is the lifeblood of any thriving society. Yet we in the United States are raising a younger generation who have never been taught either the how or the why of disagreement, and who seem to think that free speech is a one-way right: Namely, their right to disinvite, shout down or abuse anyone they dislike, lest they run the risk of listening to that person — or even allowing someone else to listen. The results are evident in the parlous state of our universities, and the frayed edges of our democracies.

Can we do better?

This is supposed to be a lecture on the media, and I’d like to conclude this talk with a word about the role that editors and especially publishers can play in ways that might improve the state of public discussion rather than just reflect and accelerate its decline.

I began this talk by noting that Americans have rarely disagreed so vehemently about so much. On second thought, this isn’t the whole truth.

Yes, we disagree constantly. But what makes our disagreements so toxic is that we refuse to make eye contact with our opponents, or try to see things as they might, or find some middle ground.

Instead, we fight each other from the safe distance of our separate islands of ideology and identity and listen intently to echoes of ourselves. We take exaggerated and histrionic offense to whatever is said about us. We banish entire lines of thought and attempt to excommunicate all manner of people — your humble speaker included — without giving them so much as a cursory hearing.

The crucial prerequisite of intelligent disagreement — namely: shut up; listen up; pause and reconsider; and only then speak — is absent.

Perhaps the reason for this is that we have few obvious models for disagreeing well, and those we do have — such as the Intelligence Squared debates in New York and London or Fareed Zakaria’s show on CNN — cater to a sliver of elite tastes, like classical music.

Fox News and other partisan networks have demonstrated that the quickest route to huge profitability is to serve up a steady diet of high-carb, low-protein populist pap. Reasoned disagreement of the kind that could serve democracy well fails the market test. Those of us who otherwise believe in the virtues of unfettered capitalism should bear that fact in mind.

I do not believe the answer, at least in the U.S., lies in heavier investment in publicly sponsored television along the lines of the BBC. It too, suffers, from its own form of ideological conformism and journalistic groupthink, immunized from criticism due to its indifference to competition.

Nor do I believe the answer lies in a return to what in America used to be called the “Fairness Doctrine,” mandating equal time for different points of view. Free speech must ultimately be free, whether or not it’s fair.

But I do think there’s such a thing as private ownership in the public interest, and of fiduciary duties not only to shareholders but also to citizens. Journalism is not just any other business, like trucking or food services. Nations can have lousy food and exemplary government, as Great Britain demonstrated for most of the last century. They can also have great food and lousy government, as France has always demonstrated.

But no country can have good government, or a healthy public square, without high-quality journalism — journalism that can distinguish a fact from a belief and again from an opinion; that understands that the purpose of opinion isn’t to depart from facts but to use them as a bridge to a larger idea called “truth”; and that appreciates that truth is a large enough destination that, like Manhattan, it can be reached by many bridges of radically different designs. In other words, journalism that is grounded in facts while abounding in disagreements.

I believe it is still possible — and all the more necessary — for journalism to perform these functions, especially as the other institutions that were meant to do so have fallen short. But that requires proprietors and publishers who understand that their role ought not to be to push a party line, or be a slave to Google hits and Facebook ads, or provide a titillating kind of news entertainment, or help out a president or prime minister who they favor or who’s in trouble.

Their role is to clarify the terms of debate by championing aggressive and objective news reporting, and improve the quality of debate with commentary that opens minds and challenges assumptions rather than merely confirming them.

This is journalism in defense of liberalism, not liberal in the left-wing American or right-wing Australian sense, but liberal in its belief that the individual is more than just an identity, and that free men and women do not need to be protected from discomfiting ideas and unpopular arguments. More than ever, they need to be exposed to them, so that we may revive the arts of disagreement that are the best foundation of intelligent democratic life.

The honor the Lowy Institute does tonight’s nominees is an important step in that direction. What they have uncovered, for the rest of you to debate, is the only way by which our democracies can remain rational, reasonable, and free.
Title: Jonah Goldberg: The Right to be Wrong
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 28, 2017, 03:32:11 AM


http://www.aei.org/publication/does-america-still-believe-in-the-right-to-be-wrong/?mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiTnpWak1XTXhaRFF4TlRrMyIsInQiOiJhMXBFM3ZONkZiZ29jb3MxSzlXaTN0UHEzbkRLYXN3VFBoWVAxSmlzdW0yOHVaSXVjYWpIaDNYOTlRYXlKb29hbFwvbXA1K0hkZnZDTEx2QWpIcmRxcmlJRFpiWUJQeGczc2lNUmhEdVJOZkdtWmViUE5VelZkUGhmYzlQZTVwODEifQ%3D%3D
Title: Noonan: The Culture of Death and Disdain
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 07, 2017, 05:15:50 AM
The Culture of Death—and of Disdain
Why do Americans own so many guns? Because they don’t trust the protected elites to protect them.
Photo: Chad Crowe
By Peggy Noonan
Oct. 5, 2017 6:56 p.m. ET
703 COMMENTS

When news broke at Christmastime five years ago of what had happened at Newtown a friend, a news anchor, called and said with a broken voice: “What is the word for what we feel?” I thought for a moment. “Shattered,” I said. “We are shattered, all of us.” When people in ensuing days spoke of what had been done to the little children in the classrooms, I’d put up my hands and say no, we can’t keep putting those words in the air, we can’t afford it. When terrible images enter our heads and settle in, they become too real, and what is real is soon, by the unstable, imitated, repeated.

When Columbine happened in the spring of 1999, it hit me like a wave of sickness. I wrote a piece about the culture of death that produced the teenage shooters: “Think of it this way. Your child is an intelligent little fish. He swims in deep water. Waves of sound and sight, of thought and fact, come invisibly through that water, like radar. . . . The sound from the television is a wave, and the sound from the radio; the headlines on the newsstand, on the magazines, on the ad on the bus as it whizzes by—all are waves. The fish—your child—is bombarded and barely knows it. But the waves contain words like this, which I’ll limit to only one source, the news:

“. . . was found strangled and is believed to have been sexually molested . . . had her breast implants removed . . . took the stand to say the killer was smiling the day the show aired . . . said the procedure is, in fact, legal infanticide . . . is thought to be connected to earlier sexual activity among teens . . . court battle over who owns the frozen sperm . . . contains songs that call for dominating and even imprisoning women . . . died of lethal injection . . . had threatened to kill her children . . . had asked Kevorkian for help in killing himself . . . protested the game, which they said has gone beyond violence to sadism . . . showed no remorse . . . which is about a wager over whether he could sleep with another student . . .

“This is the ocean in which our children swim. This is the sound of our culture. It comes from all parts of our culture and reaches all parts of our culture, and all the people in it, which is everybody.”

We were bringing up our children in an unwell atmosphere. It would enter and distort them. Could we turn this around?

And here is the horror for me of Las Vegas: I was not shattered. That shatters me.

It was just another terrible story. It is not the new normal it is the new abnormal and deep down we know it’s not going to stop. There is too much instability in our country, too much rage and lovelessness, too many weapons.

On television, the terrible sameness. We all know the postmassacre drill now. The shocked witness knows exactly what the anchor needs and speaks in rounded, 20-second bursts. Activists have their bullet-point arguments ready because they used them last time and then saved them in a file called “Aurora,” “Virginia Tech” or “Giffords, Gabby.”

We are stuck, the debate frozen. The right honestly doesn’t understand why the left keeps insisting on reforms that won’t help. The left honestly doesn’t understand how much yearning there is among so many conservatives to do something, try something, make it better. They don’t want their kids growing up in a world where madmen have guns that shoot nine rounds a second. Many this week at least agreed bump stocks can be banned. It probably won’t help much. But if it helps just a little, for God’s sake, do it.

But: Why do so many Americans have guns? I don’t mean those who like to hunt and shoot or live far out and need protection. I don’t mean those who’ve been handed down the guns of their grandfather or father. Why do a significant number of Americans have so many guns?

Wouldn’t it help if we thought about that?

I think a lot of Americans have guns because they’re fearful—and for damn good reason. They fear a coming chaos, and know that when it happens it will be coming to a nation that no longer coheres. They think it’s all collapsing—our society, our culture, the baseline competence of our leadership class. They see the cultural infrastructure giving way—illegitimacy, abused children, neglect, racial tensions, kids on opioids staring at screens—and, unlike their cultural superiors, they understand the implications.

Nuts with nukes, terrorists bent on a mission. The grid will go down. One of our foes will hit us, suddenly and hard. In the end it could be hand to hand, door to door. I said some of this six years ago to a famously liberal journalist, who blinked in surprise. If that’s true, he said, they won’t have a chance! But they are Americans, I said. They won’t go down without a fight.

Americans have so many guns because drug gangs roam the streets, because they have less trust in their neighbors, because they read Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road.” Because all of their personal and financial information got hacked in the latest breach, because our country’s real overlords are in Silicon Valley and appear to be moral Martians who operate on some weird new postmodern ethical wavelength. And they’ll be the ones programming the robots that’ll soon take all the jobs! Maybe the robots will all look like Mark Zuckerberg, like those eyeless busts of Roman Emperors. Our leaders don’t even think about this technological revolution. They’re too busy with transgender rights.

Americans have so many guns because they know the water their children swim in hasn’t gotten cleaner since Columbine, but more polluted and lethal.

The establishments and elites that create our political and entertainment culture have no idea how fragile it all is—how fragile it seems to people living normal, less privileged lives. That is because nothing is fragile for them. They’re barricaded behind the things the influential have, from good neighborhoods to security alarms, doormen and gates. They’re not dark in their imagining of the future because history has never been dark for them; it’s been sunshine, which they expect to continue. They sail on, oblivious to the legitimate anxieties of their countrymen who live near the edge.

Those who create our culture feel free to lecture normal Americans—on news shows, on late night comedy shows. Why do they have such a propensity for violence? What is their love for guns? Why do they join the National Rifle Association? The influential grind away with their disdain for their fellow Americans, whom they seem less to want to help than to dominate: Give up your gun, bake my cake, free speech isn’t free if what you’re saying triggers us.

Would it help if we tried less censure and more cultural affiliation? Might it help if we started working on problems that are real? Sure. But why lower the temperature when there’s such easy pleasure to be had in ridiculing your mindless and benighted countrymen?
Title: Hannah Arendt: The Power of Secularized Man
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 08, 2017, 10:51:46 AM
http://www.barofsolitude.com/…/the-power-of-secularized-man/
22 September 2017 by Yoshiro Blackburn

The Power of Secularized Man


“The films which the Allies circulated in Germany and elsewhere after the war showed clearly that this atmosphere of insanity and unreality is not dispelled by pure reportage. To the unprejudiced observer these pictures are just about as convincing as snapshots of mysterious substances taken at spiritual séances. Common sense reacted to the horrors of Buchenwald and Auschwitz with the plausible argument: ‘What crimes must these people have committed that such things were done to them!’; or, in Germany and Austria, in the midst of starvation, overpopulation, and general hatred: ‘Too bad that they’ve stopped gassing the Jews’; and everywhere with the skeptical shrug that greets ineffectual propaganda.

“If the propaganda of truth fails to convince the average person because it is too monstrous, it is positively dangerous to those who know from their own imaginings what they themselves are capable of doing and who are therefore perfectly willing to believe in the reality of what they have seen. Suddenly it becomes evident that things which for thousands of years the human imagination had banished to a realm beyond human competence can be manufactured right here on earth, that Hell and Purgatory, and even a shadow of their perpetual duration, can be established by the most modern methods of destruction and therapy. To these people (and they are more numerous in any large city than we like to admit) the totalitarian hell proves only that the power of man is greater than they ever dared to think, and that man can realize hellish fantasies without making the sky fall or the earth open.

“These analogies, repeated in many reports from the world of the dying, seem to express more than a desperate attempt at saying what is outside the realm of human speech. Nothing perhaps distinguishes modern masses as radically from those of previous centuries as the loss of faith in a Last Judgment: the worst have lost their fear and the best have lost their hope. Unable as yet to live without fear and hope, these masses are attracted by every effort which seems to promise a man-made fabrication of the Paradise they had longed for and of the Hell they had feared. Just as the popularized features of Marx’s classless society have a queer resemblance to the Messianic, so the reality of the concentration camps resembles nothing so much as medieval pictures of Hell.

“The one thing that cannot be reproduced is what made the traditional conceptions of Hell tolerable to man: the Last Judgment, the idea of an absolute standard of justice combined with the infinite possibility of grace. For in the human estimation there is no crime and no sin commensurable with the everlasting torments of Hell. Hence the discomfiture of common sense, which asks: What crime must these people have committed in order to suffer so inhumanly? Hence also the absolute innocence of the victims: no man ever deserved this. Hence finally the grotesque haphazardness with which concentration-camp victims were chosen in the perfected terror state: such ‘punishment’ can, with equal justice and injustice, be inflicted on anyone.”
 — Hannah Arendt, from The Origins of Totalitarianism (1966)
Title: George Friedman: Manners and Political Life
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 11, 2017, 01:14:40 PM
By George Friedman


Manners and Political Life


Restraint in public life is not a foundation of civilization. It is civilization.


I married a woman born in Australia, of that class that emulated English culture. Loving her as I did, I did not understand the British obsession with table manners. For her, eating a bowl of soup was a work of art, a complex of motions difficult for me to master, and to me incomprehensible in purpose. From the beginning of our love, dinner became for me an exercise of obscure rules governing the movement of food to my mouth. It was a time when conversation was carefully hedged by taboos and obligations. Some things were not discussed at dinner.

Meredith, my wife, grew up elegant and restrained. The enormous body of rules she called good manners rigidly shaped and controlled her passions, which were many. She followed the rules she learned as a child partly out of a desire for others to think well of her, partly because she regarded these manners as the laws of nature. Restraint and propriety were the outward sign of a decent life. The dinner table was where children learned that there were rules to a civilized life. For many, the powers of good manners crushed their souls, leaving them with little but the arrogance of having mastered the rules. For the best, manners provided the frame for a life of free will and self-confidence. Good manners allowed her to be both free and civilized, in the English manner. Her obsession with manners imposed a civility that shaped the way in which people disagreed.

I grew up in the Bronx, a place of fragmented cultures, of immigrants under severe and deforming pressure. There were many cultures – few any longer authentic, all in some way at odds with each other. Meredith’s table was a place of restraint. Mine was a place of combat. The hidden message about food was to eat as much as you can as quickly as you can, because who could really know when you would eat again? The table was a place of intellectual and emotional combat, where grievances were revealed, ideas were challenged and the new world we were in was analyzed for its strangeness. The grammar of debate took precedence over digestion.

She and I appear to many to be mismatched. She has never lost her belief that one must show restraint to appear to fit in. I have never lost my belief that the world is a dangerous place that must be confronted vigorously. Yet underneath these differences we formed a bond, based on a will to live as we will, but distinguishing carefully between who we were in private and who we were in public. This distinction is the root of both sanity and civility. I learned from her that there was a time and place for everything. I learned that without manners, however arbitrary they might be, life was chaos. I learned that combat, in speech and deed, might sometimes be necessary, but that it must be bound by the rituals of civility, or everything is destroyed. I am not sure she learned much from me.

Public Life

Manners make it possible to disagree within a framework of ritual that the disagreement does not lead to unhealable breaches. They allow you to live much of your life in unthinking patterns, freeing you to devote your thoughts to matters more pressing than how to greet someone, or whether to put on a tie. A tie is an example of this. It is a pointless piece of cloth. Yet, in putting it on, the act of dressing becomes complex and focuses you on the task ahead. You are putting on a tie because what you will now do has some importance – at least for me.

I grew up in the 1960s, when manners were held to be a form of hypocrisy, the sign of a false and inauthentic time. When Mickey Mantle hit a home run, he trotted around the bases as if his excellence was incidental and required no celebration. His undoubted elation was contained within ritual. Today, success in sports has fewer limits, and success and contempt for the other side frequently merge. When I was very young, courtship and marriage rituals were ringed with things you did not do. Of course, all these things were done, but they were hidden from the gaze of others. Part of it was shame, but part of it was also respect for manners, even in their breach. It had the added and urgent dimension that the most precious parts of growing up were private things.

The argument was that honesty was the highest virtue. Manners restrained honest expression and therefore denied us our authenticity. What came of this was an assault on the distinction between what we are in private and what we are in public. The great icon of this was Woodstock, where the music was less important than the fact that things that had been ruthlessly private had become utterly public. The shame that is attached to bad manners was seen as dishonesty, and unrestrained actions as honesty. The restraint of manners became mortally wounded.

Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower had come to despise each other by the time of Eisenhower’s inauguration. They hid this in public. The press, undoubtedly aware of the tension, chose not to focus on it. The ritual that was at the heart of the republic – the peaceful transfer of power ¬– was the focus, and the personal feelings of each were hidden from view. They were dishonest in their public behavior, and in retrospect, the self-restraint with which they hid their honest feelings was their moral obligation. These were two dishonest men, honoring their nation in their dishonesty.

The press was in on the act. The press is an institution specifically mentioned in our Constitution. Implicitly it is charged with telling the truth. The press minimized the fact that Franklin D. Roosevelt was disabled. The New York Times refrained from publishing that the Soviets had deployed missiles in Cuba. Reporters did not make public the rumors that Eisenhower might have been having an affair in England. All of these might have been true, but the press saw its role as that of an adversary to the state, but not an enemy.

Members of the press saw themselves as carrying out three roles: They were journalists, they were citizens, and they were well-mannered. As journalists, they published “all the news that’s fit to print.” As citizens, they wanted the U.S. to win World War II and would do nothing to hinder it. As ladies and gentlemen, they knew there were things that were true but did not warrant telling. There were always exceptions, but the prestige press, as they were then called, did not see these roles as incompatible.
It is important not to overstate the comity that existed, or neglect the exceptions, but the idea that good manners required certain behavior did matter. It is not clear to me that the republic suffered from the restraint of good manners and the ability of politicians and journalists to feel shame.

Authenticity

Today, we are surrounded by politicians who have decided that honesty requires that they show how deeply they detest each other, and a public that feels free to display its contempt for any with whom it disagrees. Our opponents have become our enemies, and our enemies have become monsters. This has become true for all political factions, and all political factions believe it is true only for their opponents. The idea that it is proper to hide and suppress our malice because not doing so is bad manners has been lost on all levels. With this has been lost the idea that it is possible to disagree on important matters, yet respect and even honor your opponent. Or, put another way, what has been lost is the obligation to appear to feel this way. Manners, after all, do not ask you to lie to yourself, but merely to the rest of the world.

The obsession with honesty over manners hides something important. Depending on who you are, depending on what you say, and depending on why you say it, honesty can be devastating. The idea that manners create inauthentic lives, lives in which true feelings are suppressed, is absolutely true. But it forgets the point that many of the things we feel ought to be suppressed, and many of the truths we know ought not to even be whispered. Indeed, the whisperer, when revealed, should feel shame. Without the ability to feel shame, humans are barbarians. It is manners, however false, that create the matrix in which shame can be felt. When we consider public life today, the inflicting of shame has changed from the subtle force of manners, to the ability to intimidate those you disagree with. As Francois de La Rochefoucauld said, “Hypocrisy is a tribute vice pays to virtue.” Today, vice feels little need to apologize.

I am not here speaking of issues. The issues must be debated. I am speaking of the aesthetics of debate, of restraint and respect. I am speaking of the ability to believe something deeply, yet hold open the possibility that you have much to learn from those who disagree – or at least pretend to, which is almost as good.

What I have written here would seem to have little to do with geopolitics. It has everything to do with it. A nation has as its foundation the love of one’s own. That isn’t a saccharine concept. It is the idea that we are born in or come to a country and do not merely share core values with each other, but honor each other for being our fellow citizens, that our mutual bond is the fellowship of the nation. Underneath there may be much malice, but good manners require it be hidden. The collapse of manners undermines the love of one’s own and weakens the foundation of the nation. And since nations rise and fall, this is very much a geopolitical question.

In the end, being well-mannered in the highest sense is a personal obligation. It rests on the desire to be well-thought-of as a human being, and on caring what others think of you. Many of us lack that virtue. We lack the ability to be ashamed, or we have convinced ourselves that feeling shame is a weakness. We appear on television saying things to each other that decent human beings would not reveal they feel, and our viewers applaud. There is no federal program to resurrect pride in our bearing. It flows from each of us doing it. But that requires a common code of behavior, not fully rational but fully respected, and that has been eaten away. This is the place where I should mention social media, but what more is there to say on that, so consider it said. We all know that there is a terrible problem. But most of us think it is the person we dislike who is the problem, not us.

There is a concept worth ending on, which is the principle of intellectual rectitude, the idea that one must be cautious in thought and in speech. That we should know what we know, and know what we feel, and draw a sharp line between the two. There is a place for feelings, but passion can lead to recklessness, and societies crumble over the massive assault of passion. One of the things I try to do – frequently failing – is to exercise intellectual rectitude in my writing. Restraint in public life – that life that you live with others – is not a foundation of civilization. It is civilization.

There is a time to tell the truth, and a time to withhold it. In the Bible, two books are thought to be written by Solomon. One, Ecclesiastes, is about the fact that there is a time and place for everything. It is a book of manners and of despair. Manners and despair are linked, but if you don’t know there is a time and place for everything, then you are not human. Solomon also wrote the Song of Songs. It is a poem about love and the erotic. It allows us to see that while there is a time and place for everything, and eros in the public space is unacceptable, a life without the erotic is not worth living. The Song of Songs is our solace for the rigors of Ecclesiastes.

The loss of time and place is the loss of propriety and proportion. It is the destruction of both the public and the private, of the life of duty and the life of pleasure. Pleasure cannot live without duty nor duty without pleasure. Neither can exist without good manners. And this applies to the relationship of lovers, of citizens and of nations. And the beginning of the path to it is intellectual rectitude.
Title: Re: George Friedman: Manners and Political Life
Post by: G M on October 11, 2017, 01:21:38 PM
Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other. John Adams

Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/j/johnadams391045.html

http://dailycaller.com/2017/10/09/california-to-have-harsher-penalty-for-pronoun-violations-than-for-knowingly-spreading-hiv/



By George Friedman


Manners and Political Life


Restraint in public life is not a foundation of civilization. It is civilization.


I married a woman born in Australia, of that class that emulated English culture. Loving her as I did, I did not understand the British obsession with table manners. For her, eating a bowl of soup was a work of art, a complex of motions difficult for me to master, and to me incomprehensible in purpose. From the beginning of our love, dinner became for me an exercise of obscure rules governing the movement of food to my mouth. It was a time when conversation was carefully hedged by taboos and obligations. Some things were not discussed at dinner.

Meredith, my wife, grew up elegant and restrained. The enormous body of rules she called good manners rigidly shaped and controlled her passions, which were many. She followed the rules she learned as a child partly out of a desire for others to think well of her, partly because she regarded these manners as the laws of nature. Restraint and propriety were the outward sign of a decent life. The dinner table was where children learned that there were rules to a civilized life. For many, the powers of good manners crushed their souls, leaving them with little but the arrogance of having mastered the rules. For the best, manners provided the frame for a life of free will and self-confidence. Good manners allowed her to be both free and civilized, in the English manner. Her obsession with manners imposed a civility that shaped the way in which people disagreed.

I grew up in the Bronx, a place of fragmented cultures, of immigrants under severe and deforming pressure. There were many cultures – few any longer authentic, all in some way at odds with each other. Meredith’s table was a place of restraint. Mine was a place of combat. The hidden message about food was to eat as much as you can as quickly as you can, because who could really know when you would eat again? The table was a place of intellectual and emotional combat, where grievances were revealed, ideas were challenged and the new world we were in was analyzed for its strangeness. The grammar of debate took precedence over digestion.

She and I appear to many to be mismatched. She has never lost her belief that one must show restraint to appear to fit in. I have never lost my belief that the world is a dangerous place that must be confronted vigorously. Yet underneath these differences we formed a bond, based on a will to live as we will, but distinguishing carefully between who we were in private and who we were in public. This distinction is the root of both sanity and civility. I learned from her that there was a time and place for everything. I learned that without manners, however arbitrary they might be, life was chaos. I learned that combat, in speech and deed, might sometimes be necessary, but that it must be bound by the rituals of civility, or everything is destroyed. I am not sure she learned much from me.

Public Life

Manners make it possible to disagree within a framework of ritual that the disagreement does not lead to unhealable breaches. They allow you to live much of your life in unthinking patterns, freeing you to devote your thoughts to matters more pressing than how to greet someone, or whether to put on a tie. A tie is an example of this. It is a pointless piece of cloth. Yet, in putting it on, the act of dressing becomes complex and focuses you on the task ahead. You are putting on a tie because what you will now do has some importance – at least for me.

I grew up in the 1960s, when manners were held to be a form of hypocrisy, the sign of a false and inauthentic time. When Mickey Mantle hit a home run, he trotted around the bases as if his excellence was incidental and required no celebration. His undoubted elation was contained within ritual. Today, success in sports has fewer limits, and success and contempt for the other side frequently merge. When I was very young, courtship and marriage rituals were ringed with things you did not do. Of course, all these things were done, but they were hidden from the gaze of others. Part of it was shame, but part of it was also respect for manners, even in their breach. It had the added and urgent dimension that the most precious parts of growing up were private things.

The argument was that honesty was the highest virtue. Manners restrained honest expression and therefore denied us our authenticity. What came of this was an assault on the distinction between what we are in private and what we are in public. The great icon of this was Woodstock, where the music was less important than the fact that things that had been ruthlessly private had become utterly public. The shame that is attached to bad manners was seen as dishonesty, and unrestrained actions as honesty. The restraint of manners became mortally wounded.

Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower had come to despise each other by the time of Eisenhower’s inauguration. They hid this in public. The press, undoubtedly aware of the tension, chose not to focus on it. The ritual that was at the heart of the republic – the peaceful transfer of power ¬– was the focus, and the personal feelings of each were hidden from view. They were dishonest in their public behavior, and in retrospect, the self-restraint with which they hid their honest feelings was their moral obligation. These were two dishonest men, honoring their nation in their dishonesty.

The press was in on the act. The press is an institution specifically mentioned in our Constitution. Implicitly it is charged with telling the truth. The press minimized the fact that Franklin D. Roosevelt was disabled. The New York Times refrained from publishing that the Soviets had deployed missiles in Cuba. Reporters did not make public the rumors that Eisenhower might have been having an affair in England. All of these might have been true, but the press saw its role as that of an adversary to the state, but not an enemy.

Members of the press saw themselves as carrying out three roles: They were journalists, they were citizens, and they were well-mannered. As journalists, they published “all the news that’s fit to print.” As citizens, they wanted the U.S. to win World War II and would do nothing to hinder it. As ladies and gentlemen, they knew there were things that were true but did not warrant telling. There were always exceptions, but the prestige press, as they were then called, did not see these roles as incompatible.
It is important not to overstate the comity that existed, or neglect the exceptions, but the idea that good manners required certain behavior did matter. It is not clear to me that the republic suffered from the restraint of good manners and the ability of politicians and journalists to feel shame.

Authenticity

Today, we are surrounded by politicians who have decided that honesty requires that they show how deeply they detest each other, and a public that feels free to display its contempt for any with whom it disagrees. Our opponents have become our enemies, and our enemies have become monsters. This has become true for all political factions, and all political factions believe it is true only for their opponents. The idea that it is proper to hide and suppress our malice because not doing so is bad manners has been lost on all levels. With this has been lost the idea that it is possible to disagree on important matters, yet respect and even honor your opponent. Or, put another way, what has been lost is the obligation to appear to feel this way. Manners, after all, do not ask you to lie to yourself, but merely to the rest of the world.

The obsession with honesty over manners hides something important. Depending on who you are, depending on what you say, and depending on why you say it, honesty can be devastating. The idea that manners create inauthentic lives, lives in which true feelings are suppressed, is absolutely true. But it forgets the point that many of the things we feel ought to be suppressed, and many of the truths we know ought not to even be whispered. Indeed, the whisperer, when revealed, should feel shame. Without the ability to feel shame, humans are barbarians. It is manners, however false, that create the matrix in which shame can be felt. When we consider public life today, the inflicting of shame has changed from the subtle force of manners, to the ability to intimidate those you disagree with. As Francois de La Rochefoucauld said, “Hypocrisy is a tribute vice pays to virtue.” Today, vice feels little need to apologize.

I am not here speaking of issues. The issues must be debated. I am speaking of the aesthetics of debate, of restraint and respect. I am speaking of the ability to believe something deeply, yet hold open the possibility that you have much to learn from those who disagree – or at least pretend to, which is almost as good.

What I have written here would seem to have little to do with geopolitics. It has everything to do with it. A nation has as its foundation the love of one’s own. That isn’t a saccharine concept. It is the idea that we are born in or come to a country and do not merely share core values with each other, but honor each other for being our fellow citizens, that our mutual bond is the fellowship of the nation. Underneath there may be much malice, but good manners require it be hidden. The collapse of manners undermines the love of one’s own and weakens the foundation of the nation. And since nations rise and fall, this is very much a geopolitical question.

In the end, being well-mannered in the highest sense is a personal obligation. It rests on the desire to be well-thought-of as a human being, and on caring what others think of you. Many of us lack that virtue. We lack the ability to be ashamed, or we have convinced ourselves that feeling shame is a weakness. We appear on television saying things to each other that decent human beings would not reveal they feel, and our viewers applaud. There is no federal program to resurrect pride in our bearing. It flows from each of us doing it. But that requires a common code of behavior, not fully rational but fully respected, and that has been eaten away. This is the place where I should mention social media, but what more is there to say on that, so consider it said. We all know that there is a terrible problem. But most of us think it is the person we dislike who is the problem, not us.

There is a concept worth ending on, which is the principle of intellectual rectitude, the idea that one must be cautious in thought and in speech. That we should know what we know, and know what we feel, and draw a sharp line between the two. There is a place for feelings, but passion can lead to recklessness, and societies crumble over the massive assault of passion. One of the things I try to do – frequently failing – is to exercise intellectual rectitude in my writing. Restraint in public life – that life that you live with others – is not a foundation of civilization. It is civilization.

There is a time to tell the truth, and a time to withhold it. In the Bible, two books are thought to be written by Solomon. One, Ecclesiastes, is about the fact that there is a time and place for everything. It is a book of manners and of despair. Manners and despair are linked, but if you don’t know there is a time and place for everything, then you are not human. Solomon also wrote the Song of Songs. It is a poem about love and the erotic. It allows us to see that while there is a time and place for everything, and eros in the public space is unacceptable, a life without the erotic is not worth living. The Song of Songs is our solace for the rigors of Ecclesiastes.

The loss of time and place is the loss of propriety and proportion. It is the destruction of both the public and the private, of the life of duty and the life of pleasure. Pleasure cannot live without duty nor duty without pleasure. Neither can exist without good manners. And this applies to the relationship of lovers, of citizens and of nations. And the beginning of the path to it is intellectual rectitude.

Title: Cognitive Dissonance
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 01, 2017, 11:11:58 AM
http://www.dailywire.com/news/23003/why-dont-media-treat-islamist-terror-attacks-white-ben-shapiro?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_content=062316-news&utm_campaign=benshapiro
Title: Re: Cognitive Dissonance
Post by: G M on November 01, 2017, 07:44:28 PM
http://www.dailywire.com/news/23003/why-dont-media-treat-islamist-terror-attacks-white-ben-shapiro?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_content=062316-news&utm_campaign=benshapiro

"The tree of liberty diversity must be refreshed from time to time constantly with the blood of patriots and tyrants innocents."

Title: Roy Moore and Creepy Christianity
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 14, 2017, 04:08:36 PM
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/453729/roy-moore-christianity-built-on-fear?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Monday%20through%20Friday%202017-11-14&utm_term=NR5PM%20Actives
Title: God writes straight with crooked lines
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 20, 2017, 03:24:50 AM
From Australia

https://www.mercatornet.com/above/view/god-writes-straight-with-crooked-lines/20733?utm_source=MercatorNet&utm_campaign=bf3af63726-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_11_20&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_e581d204e2-bf3af63726-124674163
Title: Milo
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 23, 2017, 09:41:24 AM
The one and only Milo i.e. thoroughly vulgar, witty, and insightful:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idE_jqBn-pw
Title: Bigotry is the Ultimate Sin
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 28, 2017, 09:53:36 AM
Hat tip to GM

http://thedeclination.com/bigotry-the-ultimate-sin/

Bigotry: The Ultimate Sin
by Thales | Nov 28, 2017 | Marxism, SJWs, Weaponized Empathy |

Bigotry is the ultimate sin in modern American Leftism. Racism and sexism are the most commonly cited varieties, of course, but other permutations exist. Homophobia, Islamophobia, fatphobia, ageism, and presumably a whole host of other possible violations.

Being the ultimate sin provides the Leftist with a moral club with which to browbeat his opponents. If one accepts the proposition that these are the worst sins of humanity, and one also accepts the proposition that all humans are biased (which is true – humans categorically cannot be fully objective), then everyone is guilty of the ultimate sin. Weaponized empathy is then applied. You are guilty, look at all the horrible things that happened in the world, which are now your fault because you’re guilty of the ultimate sin.

Redemption is only possible through the application of Progressive policies. Give up your wealth, give up your possessions. Surrender your country, vote the way the Progressive technocracy wants. And even then, the intercession through political submission is only temporary. Tomorrow you will still be a racist, and more will be required of you.

Take this Leftist example on Twitter. Admittedly, he is not exactly the brightest bulb even in the ordinarily dim Progressive world. But does a nice job of illustrating this view of the Ultimate Sin ™.
thales2

Read it very carefully. “Someone who is not racist is a better person than someone who is.” And then our intrepid Leftist attempts to escape by taking issue with my application of “a tad.” The application, of course, was very deliberate, as was my example. We’ve already had plenty of real life examples of highly intelligent, useful, inventive people being tarred and feathered because they were deemed guilty of the Ultimate Sin ™. Remember the case of Brendan Eich? Remember Tim Hunt? So a man can do something, accomplish something great, but everything is rendered null and void with even a minor violation of the Progressive narrative. You could cure cancer, but if you made a joke about “chinks” you’re now accounted as lower than every person Progressives see as not-racist.
Let me rephrase that a bit. The person Progressives deem as not-bigoted (and this is a temporary license which can be revoked at any time) is automatically a better person than some of the brightest, most accomplished people in history.

Worse, bigotry is seen as a binary state with them. You are either bigoted, or you are not. Gradations are meaningless. The man who makes a politically incorrect joke about “wetbacks” is as evil as Hitler, because both are “bigots.” This is one of the convenient tools of Antifas who see Nazis in their breakfast cereal, all Ultimate Sinners are bigots, all bigots are Fascists, all Fascists are Nazi, all Nazis are Literally Hitler. They misunderstand why Hitler was evil. He wasn’t evil because he didn’t like Jews, he was evil because he killed them by the millions. It is the physical action not the thought which rendered him evil.

Progressives lump both into the same category and call it all bigotry, but one of these is not like the other. If you have a bad thought you must feel guilty for the thought. If the badthink turns into speech, you are a Nazi, because speech is synonymous with physical action (except when they are talking, in which case it isn’t). They are like Neo in The Matrix, dodging sense and consistent definition like the protagonist dodged bullets.

Everybody has inappropriate thoughts of some kind or another. The sensible person dismisses them and does not allow them to unduly affect his life. He need not feel guilty about them. He merely needs to not act on them. Do not allow weaponized empathy to hijack your brain and make you feel guilty for bad thoughts (some of which aren’t even bad in any objective sense – they are just un-PC). Do not fall into the trap of bigotry as the Ultimate Sin ™. And certainly there is no need to submit to Progressives so that they may conduct intercession for you or grant you a temporary, revocable license as a non-bigot.

Consider the extreme endpoint of the Progressive train of thought. An equal-opportunity murderer is better than the man who cures cancer but makes a politically incorrect racial joke. The Marxist roots of this line of thinking should be evident by now. It’s the same strain of ideological madness that led to Communist regimes prioritizing political criminals over violent ones. Fidel Castro released many murderers and employed them as guards and executioners for political prisoners. After all, the murderer is better than the political opposition.

Progressives think this is getting to the root of the problem; that by attacking the thought, the bias, they are somehow curbing the action. Except that this doesn’t work. Controlling thought at this level is impossible short of deliberate brainwashing; short of making everyone functionally identical drones. The proper way of heading off bad behavior is to not act on something inappropriate. When a man gets mad at someone over something small, he may think about beating the stuffing out of that person. But should he act on the thought, or dismiss it and calm himself down?

This is part of simple human maturity. The Progressive must treat humans as children, incapable of walling off thought and action; that each thought must turn into corresponding action, so one must be constantly on the lookout for biases, wrongthink, or otherwise. Some of the smarter ones attempt to escape this trap by (truthfully) admitting that this isn’t actually possible. But then they turn around and say we must now compensate for these implicit biases; for these thoughts. They believe that the thoughts must somehow be turning into unconscious actions that are small and immeasurable as single units, but still causing a collective effect. Since clearly [insert demographic group here] are worse off than another, the Progressive might say,  we must compensate for the difference, because the cause of the difference must be collective wrongthink; collective bias against [demographic group].

There is an unfounded assumption baked into that: namely, that such small, unconscious actions are the primary cause of such inequity. Many other explanations exist. With the famous “77 cents on the dollar” comparison with women, different personal career and life choices probably play a role. With regards to black people, Thomas Sowell points to the welfare state as the primary cause. He has explained that by subsidizing the destruction of the black family, the black middle class has been wiped out, and this, accordingly to him, has resulted in the inequity. Some suggest nutrition and dietary choices play a role; that people who eat like crap don’t develop as well. Others suggest general biological differences as another possibility (and not merely racial – but also sexual). Progressive brains explode into rage at the mere hint of this notion. It is considered beyond the pale to discuss. Cultural differences are also often cited, with the famous Asian stereotype being a common example (“you study to be doctor NOW!”).

Point is, whatever the reason(s), the Progressive assumption is that it must be the fault of wrongthinking bigots, and we must transfer their ill-gotten, bigoted gains to the poor, oppressed people of… whatever. Naturally, as intercessors on your behalf (and they get their cut, accordingly), you must submit to their will, or your non-bigot license will be revoked and you will be considered worse than literal murderers.

Because bigotry, you see, is the Ultimate Sin ™.
Title: Re: Bigotry is the Ultimate Sin
Post by: G M on November 28, 2017, 10:12:59 AM
Anything the left does, it's ultimately all about gaining power and control over you.


Hat tip to GM

http://thedeclination.com/bigotry-the-ultimate-sin/

Bigotry: The Ultimate Sin
by Thales | Nov 28, 2017 | Marxism, SJWs, Weaponized Empathy |

Bigotry is the ultimate sin in modern American Leftism. Racism and sexism are the most commonly cited varieties, of course, but other permutations exist. Homophobia, Islamophobia, fatphobia, ageism, and presumably a whole host of other possible violations.

Being the ultimate sin provides the Leftist with a moral club with which to browbeat his opponents. If one accepts the proposition that these are the worst sins of humanity, and one also accepts the proposition that all humans are biased (which is true – humans categorically cannot be fully objective), then everyone is guilty of the ultimate sin. Weaponized empathy is then applied. You are guilty, look at all the horrible things that happened in the world, which are now your fault because you’re guilty of the ultimate sin.

Redemption is only possible through the application of Progressive policies. Give up your wealth, give up your possessions. Surrender your country, vote the way the Progressive technocracy wants. And even then, the intercession through political submission is only temporary. Tomorrow you will still be a racist, and more will be required of you.

Take this Leftist example on Twitter. Admittedly, he is not exactly the brightest bulb even in the ordinarily dim Progressive world. But does a nice job of illustrating this view of the Ultimate Sin ™.
thales2

Read it very carefully. “Someone who is not racist is a better person than someone who is.” And then our intrepid Leftist attempts to escape by taking issue with my application of “a tad.” The application, of course, was very deliberate, as was my example. We’ve already had plenty of real life examples of highly intelligent, useful, inventive people being tarred and feathered because they were deemed guilty of the Ultimate Sin ™. Remember the case of Brendan Eich? Remember Tim Hunt? So a man can do something, accomplish something great, but everything is rendered null and void with even a minor violation of the Progressive narrative. You could cure cancer, but if you made a joke about “chinks” you’re now accounted as lower than every person Progressives see as not-racist.
Let me rephrase that a bit. The person Progressives deem as not-bigoted (and this is a temporary license which can be revoked at any time) is automatically a better person than some of the brightest, most accomplished people in history.

Worse, bigotry is seen as a binary state with them. You are either bigoted, or you are not. Gradations are meaningless. The man who makes a politically incorrect joke about “wetbacks” is as evil as Hitler, because both are “bigots.” This is one of the convenient tools of Antifas who see Nazis in their breakfast cereal, all Ultimate Sinners are bigots, all bigots are Fascists, all Fascists are Nazi, all Nazis are Literally Hitler. They misunderstand why Hitler was evil. He wasn’t evil because he didn’t like Jews, he was evil because he killed them by the millions. It is the physical action not the thought which rendered him evil.

Progressives lump both into the same category and call it all bigotry, but one of these is not like the other. If you have a bad thought you must feel guilty for the thought. If the badthink turns into speech, you are a Nazi, because speech is synonymous with physical action (except when they are talking, in which case it isn’t). They are like Neo in The Matrix, dodging sense and consistent definition like the protagonist dodged bullets.

Everybody has inappropriate thoughts of some kind or another. The sensible person dismisses them and does not allow them to unduly affect his life. He need not feel guilty about them. He merely needs to not act on them. Do not allow weaponized empathy to hijack your brain and make you feel guilty for bad thoughts (some of which aren’t even bad in any objective sense – they are just un-PC). Do not fall into the trap of bigotry as the Ultimate Sin ™. And certainly there is no need to submit to Progressives so that they may conduct intercession for you or grant you a temporary, revocable license as a non-bigot.

Consider the extreme endpoint of the Progressive train of thought. An equal-opportunity murderer is better than the man who cures cancer but makes a politically incorrect racial joke. The Marxist roots of this line of thinking should be evident by now. It’s the same strain of ideological madness that led to Communist regimes prioritizing political criminals over violent ones. Fidel Castro released many murderers and employed them as guards and executioners for political prisoners. After all, the murderer is better than the political opposition.

Progressives think this is getting to the root of the problem; that by attacking the thought, the bias, they are somehow curbing the action. Except that this doesn’t work. Controlling thought at this level is impossible short of deliberate brainwashing; short of making everyone functionally identical drones. The proper way of heading off bad behavior is to not act on something inappropriate. When a man gets mad at someone over something small, he may think about beating the stuffing out of that person. But should he act on the thought, or dismiss it and calm himself down?

This is part of simple human maturity. The Progressive must treat humans as children, incapable of walling off thought and action; that each thought must turn into corresponding action, so one must be constantly on the lookout for biases, wrongthink, or otherwise. Some of the smarter ones attempt to escape this trap by (truthfully) admitting that this isn’t actually possible. But then they turn around and say we must now compensate for these implicit biases; for these thoughts. They believe that the thoughts must somehow be turning into unconscious actions that are small and immeasurable as single units, but still causing a collective effect. Since clearly [insert demographic group here] are worse off than another, the Progressive might say,  we must compensate for the difference, because the cause of the difference must be collective wrongthink; collective bias against [demographic group].

There is an unfounded assumption baked into that: namely, that such small, unconscious actions are the primary cause of such inequity. Many other explanations exist. With the famous “77 cents on the dollar” comparison with women, different personal career and life choices probably play a role. With regards to black people, Thomas Sowell points to the welfare state as the primary cause. He has explained that by subsidizing the destruction of the black family, the black middle class has been wiped out, and this, accordingly to him, has resulted in the inequity. Some suggest nutrition and dietary choices play a role; that people who eat like crap don’t develop as well. Others suggest general biological differences as another possibility (and not merely racial – but also sexual). Progressive brains explode into rage at the mere hint of this notion. It is considered beyond the pale to discuss. Cultural differences are also often cited, with the famous Asian stereotype being a common example (“you study to be doctor NOW!”).

Point is, whatever the reason(s), the Progressive assumption is that it must be the fault of wrongthinking bigots, and we must transfer their ill-gotten, bigoted gains to the poor, oppressed people of… whatever. Naturally, as intercessors on your behalf (and they get their cut, accordingly), you must submit to their will, or your non-bigot license will be revoked and you will be considered worse than literal murderers.

Because bigotry, you see, is the Ultimate Sin ™.
Title: David Goldman: The West Must Restore a Sense of the Sacred
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 03, 2017, 01:01:17 PM


http://www.standpointmag.co.uk/node/7031/full

Title: Re: David Goldman: The West Must Restore a Sense of the Sacred
Post by: G M on December 03, 2017, 03:50:29 PM


http://www.standpointmag.co.uk/node/7031/full



The real Americans still have a sense of the sacred.
Title: Mauldin: Automatic Job Storm Coming
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 10, 2017, 05:11:36 AM
By John Mauldin | Dec 09, 2017
Automatic Job Storm Coming


Almost every weekday, some arm of the US government issues some sort of economic statistic. News media and financial analysts review and report it. Then 99.9% of the adult population, and probably 90% of the financial industry, forget all about it. And they’re probably right to do so.

The monthly jobs report isn’t like that. Yes, any single month doesn’t tell us much. Yes, the Labor Department’s methodology has some flaws, both major and minor. But imperfect as it is, the jobs report is our best look at the economy’s pulse. Jobs matter in a visceral way to almost all of us, as you know well if you’ve ever lost one. Almost any survey that asked questions around employment would reveal the angst that many Americans feel about the possibility of losing their jobs.
 
Right now, automation tops the list of things that might threaten our jobs. Artificial intelligence and robotics technology are rapidly learning to do what human workers do, but better, faster, and cheaper.

I’ve use the following chart before, but it’s a compelling illustration of how technology is reducing employment. It shows the rising rig count in the oil patch since mid-2016 – and yet the number of workers on those rigs is actually still falling. This is the impact of a new robot called an iron roughneck: Tasks that used to require 20 people now need only five. And the iron roughneck is not even that widely deployed in the oil and gas industry – the trend will hit hard in the coming decade. Roughneck jobs are relatively high-paying; it takes a great deal of training and skill to be able to do them.
 
Today I’ll give you some quick thoughts on the just-issued November jobs report, then take a deeper look at the automation problem/opportunity. I use both words because automation truly can be either. And then we look at the failure of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) to take into account the major technological changes that are going to come our way over the next 10 to 12 years (if a host of studies are correct). I think that failure is likely to lead the FOMC to make the mother of all policy errors. And right now, a major monetary policy error is the most dangerous weapon of mass wealth destruction facing the US and the world.


A Decelerating Job Picture

The jobs report for November was solid, with job growth above the recent average. But earnings were a disappointment, as we will see. Philippa Dunne’s summed up the report in a recent commentary:

Employers added 228,000 jobs in November, 221,000 of them in the private sector. Both are nicely above their averages over the last six months, 164,000 headline and 162,000 private. Almost all the major sectors and subsectors were positive. Mining and logging was up 7,000 (slightly above the average for the last year); construction, 24,000 (well above average, with specialty trades strong and civil/heavy down); manufacturing 31,000 (well above average, with almost all of it from durables); wholesale trade, 3,000 (slightly below average); retail, 19,000 (vs. an average loss of 2,000); transportation and warehousing, 11,000 (well above average); finance, 8,000 (weaker than average); professional and business services, 46,000 (right on its average, with temp firms particularly strong); education and health, 54,000 (well above average, with education, health care, and social assistance all participating); and leisure and hospitality, 14,000 (well below average). The only major down sector was information, off 4,000, slightly less negative than average. Government added 7,000, well above average, with local leading the way.

What’s not to like about this? The answer is that we really need to review the report in terms of the trend. And the trend in employment is deceleration. As Peter Boockvar explains,

Also, we must smooth out all the post storm disruptions. This give us a 3-month average monthly job gain of 170k, a 6-month average of 178k, and a year-to-date average of 174k. These numbers compare with average job growth of 187k in 2016, 226k in 2015, and 250k in 2014. Again, the slowdown in job creation is a natural outgrowth of the stage of the economic cycle we are in where it gets more and more difficult finding the right supply of labor.

The growth in wages is also decelerating. I was talking with Lacy Hunt this morning about the jobs report. He noted that real wage growth for the year ending November 2015 was 2.8%, while for the year ending November 2016 it was just 1%. The savings rate is now the lowest in 10 years. The velocity of money is still slowing, which means that businesses have to do everything they can to hold down costs, and one of those things is to rein in wages.

And yet the Federal Reserve has a fetish for this thing called the Phillips curve, a theory that was thoroughly debunked by Milton Friedman early on and later by numerous other economists as having no empirical link to reality. But since the Fed has no other model, they cling desperately to it, like a drowning man to a bit of driftwood. Basically, the theory says that when employment is close to being as full, as it is right now, wage inflation is right around the corner. According to the Phillips curve, then, the FOMC needs to be tightening monetary policy.  Later we’ll see how the FOMC’s faulty tool is likely to lead to a major monetary policy error.

Basically, the Federal Reserve looks at history and tries to conjure models of future economic performance based on it – even as everyone in the financial industry goes on intoning that past performance is not indicative of future results. But all the Fed has is history, and they cling to it. My contention is that the near future is not going to look like the near or the distant past, and so we had better throw out our historical analogies and start thinking outside the box. Now let’s look at some real problems that will impact the future of employment.

Robotic Wipeout

Last month I shared in Outside the Box a new McKinsey report on job automation. Actually, I shared an Axios article summarizing that report, which is 160 pages long. You can read it here if you have time. McKinsey does a good job pulling together data and forecasting its consequences.

Every year, reports like this reflect a process that’s occurred many times in human history. People discover or invent something useful: fire, the wheel, iron, gunpowder, coal, oil, the steam engine, electricity, the automobile, the airplane, the computer, etc. Life changes as the new knowledge spreads. People either adapt or they don’t. Those who don’t adapt fade into the background. In the last few decades of their working lives, they end up taking the very lowliest of jobs in order to get some food, clothing, and shelter; but it’s not a comfortable life. There was no government safety net for most of our history. But most people tried hard to adapt their skills to the new changes. And as we adapted to radically disruptive inventions like the steam engine, automobile, and computer, hardly anyone had the necessary skills, and so everyone had to learn.

Today, things are different. Fifteen percent of men between the ages of 25 and 54 – who should be in their most productive years of contributing to their families and society – don’t even want a job. That’s up from 5% in the mid-’60s, and the number has been steadily rising. Fifty-six percent of these people receive federal disability payments, averaging about $13,000, which is roughly equivalent to the pay for a minimum-wage job, after taxes – except that disability comes with free Medicare. Unless these people find ways to develop needed skills, there is not much financial incentive for them to look for jobs.

The rest of the people who don’t want jobs are mostly early retirees, homemakers, caregivers, or students. And roughly 1/3 of the 10 million+ men who have dropped out of the workforce have criminal records, which is often a barrier to work. Only about 3–4% are actually discouraged workers who might take a job if a job is available. That picture should be worrying. It is one reason why GDP has not increased all that much. Remember that GDP is proportional to the number of workers available times their productivity. Taking 10 million workers out of the workforce reduces GDP.

The problem for most of us now is that we don’t want to simply fade into the background like so many people have done with each major shift in technology; yet new knowledge spreads around the globe now in seconds instead of centuries. It’s easy to feel that the walls are closing in, because for many of us they are. The McKinsey report makes that crystal clear. They project that technology will replace as many as 800 million workers worldwide by 2030. Displacement is not just a US or developed-world phenomenon; it will show up in the emerging and developing markets as well.

McKinsey draws a distinction that we should all remember. The problem is less about jobs disappearing than about the automation of particular tasks that are part of our jobs. In most cases, employers can’t simply fire a human, plug in a robot, and accomplish all the same things at the same or better performance level but lower cost. You have to zoom in closer and look at the tasks that each job entails, and ask which of them can be automated. The roughneck jobs in the oilfield are a good example: The Iron Roughneck doesn’t replace all workers on the rig, just some of them.

So when McKinsey says that 23% of US “current work activity hours” will be automated by 2030, that’s not the same as saying 23% of jobs. The shift will affect almost all jobs to some degree. That 23% figure is their “midpoint” scenario, too. In the “rapid” scenario it’s 44% of US current work activity hours that will be handed over to machines.

In other words, whatever your job is, some part of it will likely get automated in the next decade or so. That might be good news if the machines can take on the repetitive drudgery that you don’t enjoy. Automation could free you to do things that are more interesting to you and more valuable to your employer. But outcomes are going to vary widely. Here’s a chart on sector and occupation employment shifts from McKinsey. (This one is for the US; their report has sections for other countries as well.)
 
The circles on the right are the translation of those task-hours into numbers of workers. As you can see, in their rapid automation scenario, by 2030 – just 12 years from now – 73 million people out of a workforce of 166 million will have been displaced, with 48–54 million of them needing to change occupations completely.

In other words, a full third of the workforce may have to change career fields. That’s going to be a problem. Yes, Americans change jobs more frequently now than they used to, but the changes tend to be evolutionary: We gain new skills, find a better place to apply them, acquire new contacts, seek out new opportunities, and so on. The personal transformation happens slowly enough to be manageable. That’s going to change.

My friend Danielle DiMartino highlights another of the amazing charts in the McKinsey study, one that analyzes US job-market susceptibility to automation scale:
 
This chart demonstrates that it’s not just the low-skilled workers who are at risk. It’s also mid-level and even some high-level people. There is more job risk than many of us imagine. That is why I break the world up into the Unprotected, the Protected, and the Vulnerable Protected classes. The latter group doesn’t even realize their vulnerability.

Superhuman Level

Worse, I think the shift to automation may come even faster than McKinsey’s rapid scenario suggests. Recently I ran across an artificial intelligence story that’s almost terrifying. You might have heard about AlphaGo, the AI system created by Google subsidiary DeepMind. It plays the very complex board game called Go.
In 2015, DeepMind became the first computer to beat a human professional Go player. It learned how to do this by analyzing many thousands of games played by humans. Impressive, but only the beginning.

This year, DeepMind introduced AlphaGo Zero, a new system that quickly acquired the same skills with no human help at all. The programmers simply gave it a blank board and the rules of the game. It then played millions of games against itself. Here’s the chilling quote from DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis:
The most striking thing is that we don’t need any human data anymore.

It gets more unnerving. On December 5 (yes, last week), DeepMind published a scientific paper that sounds straight out of science fiction. I added the bold print.
The AlphaGo Zero program recently achieved superhuman performance in the game of Go, by tabula rasa reinforcement learning from games of self-play. In this paper, we generalise this approach into a single AlphaZero algorithm that can achieve, tabula rasa, superhuman performance in many challenging domains.

Starting from random play, and given no domain knowledge except the game rules, AlphaZero achieved within 24 hours a superhuman level of play in the games of chess and shogi (Japanese chess) as well as Go, and convincingly defeated a world-champion program in each case.

That’s startling, so let me repeat it slowly. In one day, starting from nothing at all (“tabula rasa”), AlphaGo Zero learned to play chess, shogi, and Go at a superhuman level, beating the same systems that had beaten the best humans in the world.

That’s how fast the technology is evolving. I suspect some of the rapid acceleration came from faster processor chips – Moore’s law says they should double in power every two years. But this was far more than a doubling; this was exponential.

Systems like that are coming for your job. So if you think you’re safe because you aren’t an assembly-line worker or a retail cashier and don’t work at the level of rote repetition, you could be wrong. These systems will only get better and take on ever more complex jobs.

Could DeepMind build a system that reads my archives, monitors my email, and then writes Thoughts from the Frontline at a level where you couldn’t tell the difference between it and me?

How do you know it hasn’t?

Perfect Storm

Those who control the tech are intent on bringing the era of superautomation forward as fast as possible. I talk a lot about incentives and the way people and businesses respond to them. Identifying incentives is a key tool in analyzing trends and forecasting what different players will do next. Well, between dicey Federal Reserve policies and possible tax reforms, businesses are getting new incentives to automate sooner rather than later.

 First, the Fed. I’ve made the case before that I think they waited too long to end quantitative easing and begin normalizing interest rates. Their delay created our present weird situation where we have little or no inflation according to the indexes, but the cost of living for people at the median income level and below is outpacing wage growth and leaving the average household struggling to stay even.

Real wages, that is wages after CPI growth, have advanced only 0.2% a year since 1973. And as I noted above, real wage growth is now decelerating.
 
Diminished earning power has, in turn, robbed businesses of pricing power and forced them to cut costs ruthlessly. One way you slash costs is by automating. In this week’s Outside the Box I shared a story about how Amazon is now hiring robots faster than it is human employees. Amazon is in the lead, but other companies aren’t far behind. This trend limits wage gains even more, and the situation is getting worse as the technology gets better and cheaper. (The fact that San Francisco has limited the number of robots per company and limited the speed of robotic delivery simply ensures that San Francisco will be behind the rest of the country in terms of growth and productivity within a few years.)

Of course, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with making your business more efficient. You have to survive against the competition. But in this case the competition is not happening naturally or according to market forces. The Fed has kept market forces from working and has created an environment that would never have occurred otherwise. You can argue whether a laissez faire market would have worked better or worse, but it’s pretty clear we haven’t had one.

Now add in tax policy. I explained early this year in my open letters to the new US president that we would all be better off with a consumption tax like a VAT rather than we are currently with the income tax. Alas, I did not get my wish. Congress is right now “improving” the tax code in ways that may actually accelerate the automation trend.

(Incidentally, I’m getting many emails with questions about the new Republican tax plan. I’ll have more detailed thoughts after we see what, if anything, gets through the conference committee and becomes law. At this point it’s still a guessing game, and I would rather comment on what is actually extruded from the sausage grinder. Let me just say that there’s something in the bill for everybody to hate.)

For instance, one proposal is to allow equipment purchases to be expensed immediately instead of amortized over time. That’s not a bad idea on its own. However, it effectively subsidizes companies to upgrade their equipment and technology to the latest state of the art. And, as we saw above, the state of the art is automated devices that need little human help.

The accelerated shift to automation may help explain a Business Roundtable survey that showed some odd results. As reported by the Wall Street Journal last week, CEOs say their plans for capital investment have risen to the highest level since the second quarter of 2011. That’s good news: Businesses see growth opportunities and want to add production capacity to meet them. But the same survey shows CEO hiring expectations going in the opposite direction. Hiring is not plummeting by any means, and many do plan to increase hiring over the next six months; but the majority say they will keep their headcount where it is or lower it. General Electric will cut 12,000 jobs from its power business, roughly 18% of that division’s total employment, in order to cut costs and reduce overcapacity.

How do we explain a situation in which capital spending rises but employment stay the same or falls? Automation is one answer. It lets you increase capacity without increasing headcount and expenses – you may even reduce them.

Not coincidentally, the new tax bill may remove the Obamacare individual mandate, but the employer mandate is staying in place – and healthcare costs are still rising. That too incentivizes businesses to use machines instead of people wherever possible.

So where do all these factors leave human workers? The McKinsey forecasts fall more or less at the midpoint of those in other reports I am reading. We’re facing a perfect storm: Technological, monetary, and political entities are joining forces to stir up a maelstrom of change that is going to bombard all of us. I’m not an exception, and neither are you.

We can’t control these giant forces, but we can control our responses. Whatever your job is now, you need to think about how vulnerable it may be and what else you might do. If you need to acquire new skills, start doing it now. If you have young adult or teen children, help them with their education and career choices. That art history degree may not be much in demand in 2030. Or even in 2020.

Monetary Policy Error

Looking ahead brings us full circle, right back to considering the potential for a major monetary policy error. We may, in fact, see a little wage inflation in the near future, and I think that would be a good thing, considering how little there has been for years; but right now the Personal Consumption Expenditures Index (PCE) is hovering around annual growth of 1.5%, still well below the Fed’s target of 2%. What would be the danger of letting it rise to 2.5%? Seriously.

This FOMC gives every indication that they are not only going to continue to raise rates but are also going to reduce the Fed’s balance sheet by some $450 billion next year. The Fed thinks QE helped to bring about the rising asset prices (stocks, bonds, and housing – assets of all types). Yet somehow they believe that quantitative tightening (QT) won’t have any effect on the markets. Of course, there is no empirical evidence for that conclusion, unless you want to count the taper tantrum that was unleashed when interest rate increases and quantitative tightening were first mentioned.

The Fed, with their slavish fetish for the Phillips Curve, see wage inflation just around the corner, and they want to head it off at the pass. But if they are as data-dependent as they say they are, they should look at their data and see that there is no wage inflation. There is a reason why there isn’t: The vast bulk of workers do not have pricing power. The labor market has changed dramatically in the last 20 years, and every study I have read as I have researched the future of work suggests that employment is going to change even more drastically in the next 20 years.

If we have 20 million workers who presumably want to have jobs but suddenly find themselves without job opportunities because of automation and other forces, that is not an environment in which we are going to see wage inflation. That is a situation in which workers will take whatever wages they can get. Think Greece.

Monetary growth is decelerating, too. The velocity of money continues to fall. Total consumer debt as a percentage of disposable income is the highest it has ever been – over 26%. The savings rate has fallen to a 10-year low. Consumers are stretched, and there is just not the buying power – no matter how low interest rates are – to create the inflation that the Fed is so afraid of.

I could go on and on about the fragility of this economy, even though on the surface it seems to be the strongest it has been since the Great Recession. Looking ahead, 2018 should be another year for growth. So I look around and ask, what could endanger that? I think the biggest risk is a central bank policy error.
We are going into unknown territory. Beyond this point, there be dragons.

I should add that I am generally optimistic about 2018. My forecast issues this year will probably be more optimistic than they have been for a long time. Not necessarily in terms of stock market prices, but regarding the economy in general. I actually have this hope – which I recognize is not a strategy – that the Federal Reserve will back off sooner rather than later and we can avoid a downturn in the economy for another few years. I think nothing could make me happier than if we actually established the record for the longest recovery.
Title: WSJ: So, where's the Fascism?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 02, 2018, 11:40:50 AM
https://www.wsj.com/articles/about-that-trump-autocracy-1514839233

About That Trump ‘Autocracy’
Remember all those progressive predictions of looming fascism?
 
President Donald Trump PHOTO: SAUL LOEB/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
By
The Editorial Board
Jan. 1, 2018 3:40 p.m. ET
627 COMMENTS

As Donald Trump heads into his second year as President, we’re pleased to report that there hasn’t been a fascist coup in Washington. This must be terribly disappointing to the progressive elites who a year ago predicted an authoritarian America because Mr. Trump posed a unique threat to democratic norms. But it looks like the U.S. will have to settle for James Madison’s boring checks and balances.

“How to stop an autocracy,” said a Feb. 7, 2017 headline on Vox, ruminating on a zillion-word essay in The Atlantic on how Donald Trump might impose authoritarian rule. Academics and pundits mined analogies to Mussolini, Hitler and Vladimir Putin.

Four political scientists even formed something called Bright Line Watch—with the help of foundation money—to “monitor the status of democratic practices and highlight potential threats to American democracy.” Readers won’t be surprised to learn that the only graver threat than Mr. Trump is the Republican Congress that refuses to impeach him.

One of the Bright Line Watch founders, University of Rochester professor Gretchen Helmke, wrote in the Washington Post on April 25, “Could Trump set off a constitutional crisis? Here’s what we can learn from Latin America.”

A year later, where are we on the road to Venezuela?

***
Far from rolling over Washington institutions like a tank, Mr. Trump seems as frustrated as other Presidents with the limits of his power. He achieved one major legislative goal in tax reform but failed on health care. His border wall isn’t built and he may have to legalize the “Dreamer” immigrants if he wants Congress to approve money for it.
Mr. Trump’s political appointees still aren’t close to fully staffing the executive branch. He’s making more headway on judges, but that’s partly due to former Democratic leader Harry Reid’s decision in 2013 to eliminate the Senate filibuster for judicial nominees. The press cheered on that partisan, mid-session change of Senate rules to pack the courts.

Mr. Trump’s rhetorical attacks on the media are excessive. But for all of his bluster, we haven’t seen a single case of Trump prosecutors seeking warrants to eavesdrop on journalists to discover their sources. Barack Obama’s Justice Department surreptitiously did that to the Associated Press and James Rosen of Fox News in violation of Justice guidelines.

As for legal checks and balances, progressive judges in the lower courts have overturned three versions of Mr. Trump’s travel ban. Their legal analysis is dubious given the Constitution’s grant of authority to the political branches on immigration and national security, and our guess is that the Supreme Court will eventually overrule the lower courts. But the point is that judges are hardly deferring to the Trump Administration. Oh, and since when do tyrants deregulate to take power away from the administrative state?

Mr. Trump is also facing a special counsel investigation with essentially unchecked power to investigate him and his family. Robert Mueller is ostensibly charged with looking into ties between Russians and the 2016 Trump campaign, but Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appears to have given Mr. Mueller carte blanche.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself from the Russia probe and seems unable to exert any discipline over the FBI. The Justice Department ultimately reports to Mr. Trump. Yet he can’t even get his nominees at the FBI and Justice to tell Congress what they used as evidence to get a FISA warrant against Trump campaign officials in 2016. Who is the unaccountable authority here?

The real story of the past year is that, despite the daily Trumpian melodrama, the U.S. political system is working more or less as usual. Mr. Trump has sometimes broken with familiar presidential decorum, especially in his public statements and attacks on individuals. But he is paying a considerable political price for that excess with an approval rating below 40% less than a year into his term.

Voters rejected his preferred Senate candidates in Alabama twice. Republicans were routed in Virginia’s elections as Democrats came out in droves, and on present trend the GOP will lose its House majority in November. In other words, we are watching the typical back and forth of American democracy.

Democratic institutional norms are worth defending, which is why we called out the Obama IRS for bias against the tea party. We’ll do the same if Mr. Trump exceeds his constitutional power. But the lesson of the past year is that progressives should have more faith in the American system—whether they’re in power or not. Losing an election isn’t the same as losing a democracy.
Title: Nullification
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 07, 2018, 12:27:04 PM
https://www.dailynews.com/2018/01/05/626633/
Title: Courageous rant by Arab TV host
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 15, 2018, 11:18:15 AM
https://www.israelvideonetwork.com/arab-tv-host-just-body-slammed-every-innocent-muslim-lie-ever-told/?omhide=true
Title: The Peace Corps in Africa taught me Trump is right
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 17, 2018, 04:48:46 PM


http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/01/what_i_learned_in_peace_corps_in_africa_trump_is_right.html
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on January 18, 2018, 05:52:41 AM
Of course many countries are poor and conditions like we here have no clue and are relatively spoiled

none of this means it is a good idea to call black countries shit holes especially knowing how the left will drum this into " he is a nazi , a clansman, a bigot , white racist , insensitive rich prick theme to drum the anger and voting desires of the Blacks , the Browns, the Yellows, and the Latinos.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 18, 2018, 11:02:52 AM
It's not like this was a public statement-- it was a moment of backdoor shorthand candor used with bad faith intent by Tricky Dicky Durbin et al.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: DougMacG on January 18, 2018, 11:11:47 AM
ccp:  "... none of this means it is a good idea to call black countries shit holes especially knowing how the left will drum this into " he is a nazi , a clansman, a bigot , white racist , insensitive rich prick theme to drum the anger and voting desires of the Blacks , the Browns, the Yellows, and the Latinos.

I agree with you.  I'm sick of making excuses for him.
OTOH:
 - As Crafty wrote, it was a private statement (and likely misquoted)
 - Documented is that some of these places are literally fecalized.
 - Barack Obama said exact same thing, see media post this am.
 - Cry wolf, cry wolf, then see a real wolf?  The Left said the same of Mitt Romney.
 - Trump's support is going up within some of these groups.
 - Black unemployment at a is 14 year low?
 - Unknown to all political analysts, Trump already had a relationship with black and Hispanic
 - Americans:  "The Apprentice drew a mass audience that pulled in an especially high proportion of
black and Hispanic viewers..."  https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-07-06/the-remaking-of-donald-trump
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: G M on January 18, 2018, 11:17:23 AM
ccp:  "... none of this means it is a good idea to call black countries shit holes especially knowing how the left will drum this into " he is a nazi , a clansman, a bigot , white racist , insensitive rich prick theme to drum the anger and voting desires of the Blacks , the Browns, the Yellows, and the Latinos.

I agree with you.  I'm sick of making excuses for him.
OTOH:
 - As Crafty wrote, it was a private statement (and likely misquoted)
 - Documented is that some of these places are literally fecalized.
 - Barack Obama said exact same thing, see media post this am.
 - Cry wolf, cry wolf, then see a real wolf?  The Left said the same of Mitt Romney.
 - Trump's support is going up within some of these groups.
 - Black unemployment at a is 14 year low?
 - Unknown to all political analysts, Trump already had a relationship with black and Hispanic
 - Americans:  "The Apprentice drew a mass audience that pulled in an especially high proportion of
black and Hispanic viewers..."  https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-07-06/the-remaking-of-donald-trump

I am tired of having to pretend that what everyone knows is true isn't because it hurts feelings.
Title: The Shutdown Victory
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 22, 2018, 11:44:45 AM
Obviously this could go into more particularized threads, but there are deeper themes here which make it deserving of placement in this thread

https://amgreatness.com/2018/01/22/the-shutdown-victory/
Title: Tucker Carlson
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 24, 2018, 07:11:32 PM


http://insider.foxnews.com/2018/01/24/fisa-memo-feinstein-and-schiff-compare-release-supporters-russian-agents-tucker-says
Title: POTH: Our Hackable Political Future
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 05, 2018, 07:15:50 AM
Our Hackable Political Future
By HENRY J. FARRELL and RICK PERLSTEINFEB. 4, 2018

Imagine it is the spring of 2019. A bottom-feeding website, perhaps tied to Russia, “surfaces” video of a sex scene starring an 18-year-old Kirsten Gillibrand. It is soon debunked as a fake, the product of a user-friendly video application that employs generative adversarial network technology to convincingly swap out one face for another.

It is the summer of 2019, and the story, predictably, has stuck around — part talk-show joke, part right-wing talking point. “It’s news,” political journalists say in their own defense. “People are talking about it. How can we not?”

Then it is fall. The junior senator from New York State announces her campaign for the presidency. At a diner in New Hampshire, one “low information” voter asks another: “Kirsten What’s-her-name? She’s running for president? Didn’t she have something to do with pornography?”

Welcome to the shape of things to come. In 2016 Gareth Edwards, the director of the Star Wars film “Rogue One,” was able to create a scene featuring a young Princess Leia by manipulating images of Carrie Fisher as she looked in 1977. Mr. Edwards had the best hardware and software a $200 million Hollywood budget could buy. Less than two years later, images of similar quality can be created with software available for free download on Reddit. That was how a faked video supposedly of the actress Emma Watson in a shower with another woman ended up on the website Celeb Jihad.

Programs like these have many legitimate applications. They can help computer-security experts probe for weaknesses in their defenses and help self-driving cars learn how to navigate unusual weather conditions. But as the novelist William Gibson once said, “The street finds its own uses for things.” So do rogue political actors. The implications for democracy are eye-opening.
  

The conservative political activist James O’Keefe has created a cottage industry manipulating political perceptions by editing footage in misleading ways. In 2018, low-tech editing like Mr. O’Keefe’s is already an anachronism: Imagine what even less scrupulous activists could do with the power to create “video” framing real people for things they’ve never actually done. One harrowing potential eventuality: Fake video and audio may become so convincing that it can’t be distinguished from real recordings, rendering audio and video evidence inadmissible in court.

A program called Face2Face, developed at Stanford, films one person speaking, then manipulates that person’s image to resemble someone else’s. Throw in voice manipulation technology, and you can literally make anyone say anything — or at least seem to.

The technology isn’t quite there; Princess Leia was a little wooden, if you looked carefully. But it’s closer than you might think. And even when fake video isn’t perfect, it can convince people who want to be convinced, especially when it reinforces offensive gender or racial stereotypes.

Another harrowing potential is the ability to trick the algorithms behind self-driving cars to not recognize traffic signs. Computer scientists have shown that nearly invisible changes to a stop sign can fool algorithms into thinking it says yield instead. Imagine if one of these cars contained a dissident challenging a dictator.

In 2007, Barack Obama’s political opponents insisted that footage existed of Michelle Obama ranting against “whitey.” In the future, they may not have to worry about whether it actually existed. If someone called their bluff, they may simply be able to invent it, using data from stock photos and pre-existing footage.

The next step would be one we are already familiar with: the exploitation of the algorithms used by social media sites like Twitter and Facebook to spread stories virally to those most inclined to show interest in them, even if those stories are fake.

It might be impossible to stop the advance of this kind of technology. But the relevant algorithms here aren’t only the ones that run on computer hardware. They are also the ones that undergird our too easily hacked media system, where garbage acquires the perfumed scent of legitimacy with all too much ease. Editors, journalists and news producers can play a role here — for good or for bad.

Outlets like Fox News spread stories about the murder of Democratic staff members and F.B.I. conspiracies to frame the president. Traditional news organizations, fearing that they might be left behind in the new attention economy, struggle to maximize “engagement with content.”

This gives them a built-in incentive to spread informational viruses that enfeeble the very democratic institutions that allow a free media to thrive. Cable news shows consider it their professional duty to provide “balance” by giving partisan talking heads free rein to spout nonsense — or amplify the nonsense of our current president.

It already feels as though we are living in an alternative science-fiction universe where no one agrees on what it true. Just think how much worse it will be when fake news becomes fake video. Democracy assumes that its citizens share the same reality. We’re about to find out whether democracy can be preserved when this assumption no longer holds.
Title: Stephen Pinker: The Enlightenment is Working
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 10, 2018, 11:40:26 AM
The Enlightenment Is Working
Don’t listen to the gloom-sayers. The world has improved by every measure of human flourishing over the past two centuries, and the progress continues, writes Steven Pinker.
The Enlightenment Is Working
Illustration: Robert Neubecker
By Steven Pinker
Feb. 9, 2018 10:49 a.m. ET
222 COMMENTS

For all their disagreements, the left and the right concur on one thing: The world is getting worse. Whether the decline is visible in inequality, racism and pollution, or in terrorism, crime and moral decay, both sides see profound failings in modernity and a deepening crisis in the West. They look back to various golden ages when America was great, blue-collar workers thrived in unionized jobs, and people found meaning in religion, family, community and nature.

Such gloominess is decidedly un-American. The U.S. was founded on the Enlightenment ideal that human ingenuity and benevolence could be channeled by institutions and result in progress. This concept may feel naive as we confront our biggest predicaments, but we can only understand where we are if we know how far we’ve come.

You can always fool yourself into seeing a decline if you compare rose-tinted images of the past with bleeding headlines of the present. What do the trajectories of the nation and world look like when we measure human well-being over time with a constant yardstick? Let’s look at the numbers (most of which can be found on websites such as OurWorldinData, HumanProgress and Gapminder).

Consider the U.S. just three decades ago. Our annual homicide rate was 8.5 per 100,000. Eleven percent of us fell below the poverty line (as measured by consumption). And we spewed 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide and 34.5 million tons of particulate matter into the atmosphere.

Fast forward to the most recent numbers available today. The homicide rate is 5.3 (a blip up from 4.4 in 2014). Three percent of us fall below the consumption poverty line. And we emit four million tons of sulfur dioxide and 20.6 million tons of particulates, despite generating more wealth and driving more miles.

Greater LiteracyThe proportion of people who can read andwrite has nearly swapped places with the proportion who could not 200 years ago.  Percentage of literate world populationSource: Calculated based on figures fromourworldindata.org
%1800’501900’5020000204060801002014x85.3%

Globally, the 30-year scorecard also favors the present. In 1988, 23 wars raged, killing people at a rate of 3.4 per 100,000; today it’s 12 wars killing 1.2 per 100,000. The number of nuclear weapons has fallen from 60,780 to 10,325. In 1988, the world had just 45 democracies, embracing two billion people; today it has 103, embracing 4.1 billion. That year saw 46 oil spills; 2016, just five. And 37% of the population lived in extreme poverty, barely able to feed themselves, compared with 9.6% today. True, 2016 was a bad year for terrorism in Western Europe, with 238 deaths. But 1988 was even worse, with 440.

The headway made around the turn of the millennium is not a fluke. It’s a continuation of a process set in motion by the Enlightenment in the late 18th century that has brought improvements in every measure of human flourishing.

Start with the most precious resource, life. Through most of human history, continuing into the 19th century, a newborn was expected to live around 30 years. In the two centuries since, life expectancy across the world has risen to 71, and in the developed world to 81.

When the Enlightenment began, a third of the children born in the richest parts of the world died before their fifth birthday; today, that fate befalls 6% of the children in the poorest parts. In those countries, infectious diseases are in steady decline, and many will soon follow smallpox into extinction.

The poor may not always be with us. The world is about a hundred times wealthier today than it was two centuries ago, and the prosperity is becoming more evenly distributed across countries and people. Within the lifetimes of most readers, the rate of extreme poverty could approach zero. Catastrophic famine, never far away in the past, has vanished from all but the most remote and war-ravaged regions, and undernourishment is in steady decline.

    ‘Our ancestors replaced dogma, tradition and authority with reason, debate and institutions of truth-seeking.’

Within developed countries, inequality is rising, but real poverty is not. A century ago, the richest countries devoted 1% of their wealth to children, the poor, the sick and the aged; today they spend almost a quarter of it. Most of their poor today are fed, clothed and sheltered and have luxuries like smartphones and air conditioning that used to be unavailable to anyone, rich or poor. Poverty among racial minorities has fallen, and poverty among the elderly has plunged.

The world is giving peace a chance. During most of the history of nations and empires, war was the natural state of affairs, and peace a mere interlude between wars. Today war between countries is obsolescent, and war within countries is absent from five-sixths of the world. The proportion of people killed annually in wars is about a quarter of what it was in the mid-1980s, a sixth of what it was in the early 1970s, and a 16th of what it was in the early 1950s.

In most times and places, homicides kill far more people than wars. But homicide rates have been falling as well and not just in the U.S. People in the rest of the world are now seven-tenths as likely to be murdered as they were two dozen years ago. Deaths from terrorism, terrifying as they may be, amount to a rounding error.

Life has been getting safer in every other way. Over the past century, Americans have become 96% less likely to be killed in an auto accident, 88% less likely to be mowed down on the sidewalk, 99% less likely to die in a plane crash, 59% less likely to fall to their deaths, 92% less likely to die by fire, 90% less likely to drown, 92% less likely to be asphyxiated, and 95% less likely to be killed on the job. Life in other rich countries is even safer, and life in poorer countries will get safer as they get richer.

More Wealth, Less PovertyIn the long term, prosperity has become moreevenly distributed across countries andpeople.Percentage of world population livingoutside extreme povertySource: Calculated based on figures fromourworldindata.orgNote: The definition of extreme poverty wasmeasured by the number of people living on less than$1 a day until 2002 when the benchmark was raisedto $1.90
%18501900’502000050100

Despite backsliding in countries like Russia, Turkey and Venezuela, the long-term trend in governance is toward democracy and human rights. Two centuries ago a handful of countries, embracing 1% of the world’s people, were democratic; today, more than half of the world’s countries, embracing 55% of its people, are.

Not long ago half the world’s countries had laws that discriminated against racial minorities; today more countries have policies that favor their minorities than policies that discriminate against them. At the turn of the 20th century, women could vote in just one country; today they can vote in every country where men can vote save one (Vatican City). Laws that criminalize homosexuality continue to be stricken down, and attitudes toward minorities, women and gay people are becoming steadily more tolerant, particularly among the young, a portent of the world’s future. Violence against women, children and minorities is in long-term decline, as is the exploitation of children for their labor.

As people are getting healthier, richer, safer and freer, they are also becoming more knowledgeable and smarter. Two centuries ago, 12% of the world could read and write; today 85% can. Literacy and education will soon be universal, for girls as well as for boys. The schooling, together with health and wealth, is literally making us smarter—by 30 IQ points, or two standard deviations above our ancestors.


People are putting their longer, healthier, safer, freer, richer and wiser lives to good use. Americans work 22 fewer hours a week than they did in the late 19th century and lose 43 fewer hours to housework. They have more opportunities to use their leisure to travel, spend time with children, connect with loved ones and sample the world’s cuisine, knowledge and culture.

Thanks to these gifts, people in a majority of countries have become happier. Even Americans, who take their good fortune for granted and have stagnated in happiness, call themselves “pretty happy” or happier. And despite the panic about “kids today” (heard in every era), younger generations are less unhappy, lonely, drug-addicted and suicidal than their Boomer parents.

As societies become wealthier and better educated, they raise their sights to the entire planet. Since the dawn of the environmental movement in the 1970s, the world has emitted fewer pollutants, cleared fewer forests, spilled less oil, set aside more preserves, extinguished fewer species, saved the ozone layer and may have peaked in its consumption of oil, farmland, timber, cars and perhaps even coal.

* * *

To what do we owe this progress? Does the universe contain a historical dialectic or arc bending toward justice? The answer is less mysterious: The Enlightenment is working. Our ancestors replaced dogma, tradition and authority with reason, debate and institutions of truth-seeking. They replaced superstition and magic with science. And they shifted their values from the glory of the tribe, nation, race, class or faith toward universal human flourishing.

Longer LivesFalling child mortality has helped the averagelife expectancy at birth to more than double.Life ExpectancySource: ourworldindata.org
.years1800’501900’50200020304050607080

These developments have been gradual and uneven, with many backtracks and zigzags. But the happy developments of the last two centuries are the cumulative gifts of the brainchildren they spawned.

● Disease was decimated by vaccines, sanitation, antibiotics and other advances in medicine and public health, driven by the germ theory of disease and our understanding of evolution, physiology and genetics.

● Famine was stanched by crop rotation, synthetic fertilizer, the replacement of muscle by machinery and the selective breeding of vigorous hybrids.

● Poverty was slashed by education, markets, global trade and cheaper food and clothing, together with social programs that support the young, old, sick and unlucky.

● Violent crime was tamed by a replacement of the code of vendetta by the rule of law, by fairer judicial systems and, most recently, by data-driven policing.

● Everyday hazards were blunted by safety regulations and engineering, driven by an increasing valuation of human life. A similar combination of regulation and technology is ramping down pollution.

● Oppression and discrimination may persist in some places by brute force, but they start to corrode when educated, mobile and connected people exchange ideas and are forced to justify their practices.

● War is being marginalized by the spread of democracy (which inhibits leaders from turning their youth into cannon fodder), global commerce (which makes trade more profitable than plunder), peacekeeping forces (which separate belligerents and extinguish flare-ups) and competent governments (which outcompete insurgents for the allegiance of their citizens). Also driving war down are norms against conquest, enforced by the international community with shaming, sanctions and occasionally armed intervention.

* * *

The evidence for progress raises many questions.

Isn’t it good to be pessimistic, many activists ask—to rake the muck, afflict the comfortable, speak truth to power? The answer is no: It’s good to be accurate. We must be aware of suffering and injustice where they occur, but we must also be aware of how they can be reduced. Indiscriminate pessimism can lead to fatalism: to wondering why we should throw time and money at a hopeless cause. And it can lead to radicalism: to calls to smash the machine, drain the swamp or empower a charismatic tyrant.

Wider Democracy Only one in a hundred people lived under some form of democracy two centuries ago; now, most do. Percentage of world population living in a democracy Source: Calculated based on figures from our world in data.org
%18501900’502000020406080

Is progress inevitable? Of course not! Solutions create new problems, which must be solved in their turn. We can always be blindsided by nasty surprises, such as the two World Wars, the 1960s crime boom and the AIDS and opioid epidemics.

And the greatest global challenges remain unsolved. This does not mean they are unsolvable. In 2015 the world’s nations came to a historic agreement on climate change in Paris, and pathways to decarbonization, including carbon pricing and zero-emission technologies, have been laid out. Since the closing days of World War II, nuclear weapons have not been used in almost 73 years of saber-rattling (including standoffs with the half-mad despots Stalin and Mao), and the New Start treaty between the U.S. and Russia, capping nuclear arsenals, went into full effect just this week.

On these matters, the policies of President Donald Trump —denial of climate change, planned withdrawal from the Paris accord, provocation of North Korea, nuclear arms expansion—are alarming. But continued progress is in the interests of the rest of the world, and numerous states, countries, corporations, political actors and sectors of the military are pushing back against the intemperate plans of the administration.


How should we think about future progress? We must not sit back and wait for problems to solve themselves, nor pace the streets with a sandwich board proclaiming that the end of the world is nigh. The advances of the past are no guarantee that progress will continue; they are a reminder of what we have to lose. Progress is a gift of the ideals of the Enlightenment and will continue to the extent that we rededicate ourselves to those ideals.

Are the ideals of the Enlightenment too tepid to engage our animal spirits? Is the conquest of disease, famine, poverty, violence and ignorance … boring? Do people need to believe in magic, a father in the sky, a strong chief to protect the tribe, myths of heroic ancestors?

I don’t think so. Secular liberal democracies are the happiest and healthiest places on earth, and the favorite destinations of people who vote with their feet. And once you appreciate that the Enlightenment project of applying knowledge and sympathy to enhance human flourishing can succeed, it’s hard to imagine anything more heroic and glorious.

Mr. Pinker is Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. This essay is adapted from his new book, “Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress,” which will be published by Viking on Feb. 13.
Title: Helluva Rant by Kate Millet's Sister!
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 10, 2018, 12:05:12 PM
second post

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/269251/my-sister-kate-destructive-feminist-legacy-kate-mark-tapson#.WnwqlDraWNI.twitter
Title: Jonah Goldberg: The People We Deserve
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 17, 2018, 07:36:30 AM

http://www.nationalreview.com/g-file/456513/virtue-democracy-people-we-deserve?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=180216_G-File&utm_term=GFile
Title: Now, THAT'S A RANT!
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 20, 2018, 05:33:27 AM
https://www.liveleak.com/view?i=e06_1519057581

Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on February 20, 2018, 07:17:14 AM
bottom line :

don't even dare to "dis" Ytube

a real professional service might  respond with editors note disputing the claims but would not censor it IMO.
Title: The Age of Outrage
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 21, 2018, 10:36:18 PM
https://www.city-journal.org/html/age-outrage-15608.html
Title: VDH: Russia spreads chaos, fooling media, exposing FBI
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 27, 2018, 08:39:31 AM


https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/02/russia-spreading-chaos-fooling-media-exposing-fbi/
Title: Mencken: In defense of women
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 01, 2018, 07:15:54 AM

“The woman who is not pursued sets up the doctrine that pursuit is offensive to her sex, and wants to make it a felony. No genuinely attractive woman has any such desire. She likes masculine admiration, however violently expressed, and is quite able to take care of herself. More, she is well aware that very few men are bold enough to offer it without a plain invitation, and this awareness makes her extremely cynical of all women who complain of being harassed, beset, storied, and seduced. All the more intelligent women that I know, indeed, are unanimously of the opinion that no girl in her right senses has ever been actually seduced since the world began;”
― H.L. Mencken, In Defense Of Women
Title: McCarthy - more right than wrong
Post by: ccp on March 07, 2018, 07:41:31 AM
https://pjmedia.com/trending/media-joe-mccarthy/
Title: How Can You Separate Freedom of Conscience from Freedom of Religion?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 10, 2018, 05:46:59 AM


https://www.mercatornet.com/features/view/how-can-you-separate-freedom-of-conscience-from-freedom-of-religion/21089?utm_source=MercatorNet&utm_campaign=0de7e49b62-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_03_02&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_e581d204e2-0de7e49b62-124674163

How can you separate freedom of conscience from freedom of religion?
Australia's review of religious freedom will determine whether civil tolerance can prevail over coerced conformity
David van Gend | Mar 2 2018 | comment 22




In the wake of the legalisation of same-sex marriage, the Australian government set up an expert panel to see whether amendments are needed to protect freedom of religion. The president of the Australian Marriage Forum, Dr David van Gend, made a lengthy submission. Here is an excerpt. 

*******

This Review has been triggered by concern over threats to religious freedom from the redefinition of marriage. I doubt it is possible to enjoy authentic religious freedom under a regime of “marriage equality”.

A law for homosexual “marriage” will intimidate religious leaders (and their insurers) with the relentless threat of anti-discrimination lawsuits; individuals who speak out against LGBT dogma will be harassed by the “Human Rights” censors; marriage doctrine and moral teaching will become something to be whispered in private.

There can be no peaceful coexistence between state-enforced homosexual orthodoxy and Christian moral orthodoxy. It will require a robust Conscientious and Religious Freedom Act to protect people of faith in an increasingly hostile culture, but I doubt there is the political will.

Freedom of “thought, conscience and religion” should not be divided

The Review fails to link conscientious freedom with religious freedom.

These two freedoms describe the exercise of the same moral faculty and should not be artificially divided. Any such division might create an “us and them” attitude where a Review like this is perceived as only for religious types and of no interest to the rest of us.

In fact, religious freedom is a subset of conscientious freedom, and conscientious freedom is crucial for all of us, whether our deepest convictions lead us to a religious worldview or not. I will link “conscientious and religious freedom” in this submission and I hope the Review will consider doing so.

The essence of our humanity is our reason and conscience, the faculties by which we strive to distinguish right from wrong, truth from error.

Top priority in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is given to reason and conscience, as being central to human dignity. The opening Article states:

    All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

Article 18 reinforces the fact that reason and conscience and religion are linked, since the search for meaning and questions of right and wrong are central to a rational being:

    Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion.

This triple freedom – of thought, conscience and religion – is at the centre of the structure of human rights, because it is at the centre of human life. These are the freedoms that, throughout history, men and women would die for.

A Review of Religious Freedom should not imply that the conscientious freedom of a non-religious person is in any way inferior, or even different, to religious freedom. Both exercise the same moral faculty with the same objective of understanding what is right and just. This Review should not be on behalf of “religious types” but on behalf of us all.

Freedom of “thought, conscience and religion” is not an “exemption” to be granted by the state

That which government did not give, government has no authority to take away.

Conscientious and religious freedom must not be seen as an “exemption” granted graciously by the state; it is a prior liberty that predates all politics and pulls rank on novel laws that would compel our conscience – laws for same-sex marriage or abortion-on-demand, for example.

These inalienable rights are ours by virtue of being rational creatures, not by fiat of any political power. One of the drafters of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the head of UNESCO, Charles Malik, stressed that these rights were recognized as inherent to human nature, not subject to the spirit of the age:

    It is not an accident that the very first substantive word in the text is the word “recognition”: “Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights, etc.” Now you can “recognise” only what must have been already there, and what is already there cannot, in the present context, be anything but what nature has placed there ... Dignity and rights are natural to our being and are not the generous grant of some external power.

Freedom of religion is not limited to what happens in church

Religious freedom should not be limited to what goes on within the walls of the church or synagogue or mosque. A religious philosophy of life, like any philosophy of life, is made to be lived out – or it is lifeless. Limiting “religious freedom” to what may be said or done in church while shackling its activities in the rest of our lives (how religious individuals raise their children and conduct their private businesses, or how religious institutions run their schools, their adoption agencies, their charities, their hospitals) is to treat this core liberty with contempt – and it violates the full provision of Article 18 of the UDHR:

    Article 18: Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.

Unless a religious worldview can be manifested outside the place of worship, it is not free.

US Supreme Court Chief Justice, John Roberts, and three of his fellow judges were scathing about the prospects for authentic religious liberty after “marriage equality” was imposed on the entire USA by their five fellow judges in March 2015.

Roberts was astonished at the majority’s trivial notion of religious liberty, as if it were merely the freedom to hold private beliefs and did not extend to living out one’s life in accordance with those beliefs:

    “The majority graciously suggests that religious believers may continue to “advocate” and “teach” their views of marriage.”

But as Roberts points out, the First Amendment in the US Constitution is not just about ideas but actions; it “guarantees ... the freedom to ‘exercise’ religion. Ominously, that is not a word the majority uses.”

His colleague, Justice Thomas, expanded on this critique of religious liberty-lite:

    Religious liberty is about more than just the protection for “religious organizations and persons ... as they seek to teach the principles that are so fulfilling and so central to their lives and faiths.” Religious liberty is about freedom of action in matters of religion generally, and the scope of that liberty is directly correlated to the civil restraints placed upon religious practice.

Chief Justice Roberts noted the barely disguised hostility to religious believers in the Supreme Court’s majority ruling:

    Unfortunately, people of faith can take no comfort in the treatment they receive from the majority today ... The most discouraging aspect of today’s decision is the extent to which the majority feels compelled to sully those on the other side of the debate ... These apparent assaults on the character of fair-minded people will have an effect, in society and in court. Moreover, they are entirely gratuitous ... It is one thing for the majority to conclude that the Constitution protects a right to same-sex marriage; it is something else to portray everyone who does not share the majority’s “better informed understanding” as bigoted.

Fellow dissenter, Justice Alito, pointed out that the majority’s contemptuous opinion put opponents of homosexual “marriage” on a moral par with the racists of an earlier era:

    It will be used to vilify Americans who are unwilling to assent to the new orthodoxy. In the course of its opinion, the majority compares traditional marriage laws to laws that denied equal treatment for African-Americans and women. The implications of this analogy will be exploited by those who are determined to stamp out every vestige of dissent ... I assume that those who cling to old beliefs will be able to whisper their thoughts in the recesses of their homes, but if they repeat those views in public, they will risk being labelled as bigots and treated as such by governments, employers, and schools.

The abolition of the natural truth of marriage and parenting, of father, mother and child, is a frontal assault on religious culture and the victors will take no prisoners.

Canadian Queen’s Counsel, Barbara Findlay, declared years ago: “The legal struggle for queer rights will one day be a showdown between freedom of religion versus sexual orientation.” Law professor and “activist for LGBT rights”, Chai Feldblum, was asked about such a showdown. Her views carried weight because she was an Obama-appointee to the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. She answered, “In almost all cases sexual liberty should win, because that’s the only way that the dignity of gay people can be affirmed in any realistic manner.” The editorial of America’s leading journal on religion and public life, First Things, responded to Feldblum’s comment, “It’s a frank statement that clarifies how few restraints progressives feel once they are convinced that they are fighting for ‘the great civil-rights issue of our times’.”

Laws normalising gay “marriage” will be the big stick needed for “queer rights” to beat religious freedom into legal submission. And any who pretend otherwise are deluding themselves. It will take a sturdy Conscientious and Religious Freedom Act to keep the peace in a divided culture.

David van Gend is a Queensland doctor and president of the Australian Marriage Forum
Title: The man who knew too little
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 10, 2018, 02:42:35 PM
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/10/style/the-man-who-knew-too-little.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news
Title: Jonah Goldberg: The Wisdom of Youth
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 11, 2018, 11:17:33 AM
https://www.nationalreview.com/blog/g-file/the-wisdom-of-youth/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=180209_G-File&utm_term=GFile


Title: Why is Modern Debates on Morality so Shrill?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 13, 2018, 03:03:57 PM
https://www.artofmanliness.com/2018/03/12/modern-morality-shrill/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheArtOfManliness+%28The+Art+of+Manliness%29&mc_cid=dabc51b6b2&mc_eid=d095873e37


It’s hard not to notice that in interactions both online and off, people seem increasingly polarized when it comes to political, social justice, and moral and ethical issues of all kinds. Rather than engaging in a civil discussion, debates turn into emotionally-charged flame wars, marked by blame, shame, and the exchange of insults. Such interactions are acrimonious, seemingly interminable, and markedly shrill.

What accounts for the tenor of these melees on morality?

Some astute observers have posited that our political and social positions have become more fervent as society has become more secular. People seem to have an ingrained penchant for the “religious” — a proclivity to draw lines between us and them, the pure and the polluted, doctrine and heresy, the unconverted and the woke — and in the absence of traditional faith-based outlets for these energies, have channeled these “religious” impulses towards partisan politics.

There’s surely something to this theory. But the shrillness of our modern debates on morality has an even deeper underlying cause.
The 3 Elements of a Rational, Functional Moral Culture

In After Virtue, philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre argues that Aristotelian virtue ethics offers the best model of a healthy and well-functioning moral system; its strength, he asserts, is the presence of three elements — all of which must be in place for any moral system to thrive:
1. Man-as-he-happens-to-be.

This is a human being in his raw, morally untutored state. This is man left to his own devices and allowed to follow his default impulses. Man on the path of least resistance.
2. A view of man-as-he-could-be-if-he-realized-his-telos.

Telos is the Greek word for man’s ultimate aim. It represents his ultimate purpose and function — an essential nature that can only be realized by throwing off the inertia of default desires and actively striving after it.

For the ancient Greeks, a man’s telos was reaching a state of eudaimonia; a word that is hard to translate but means something akin to happiness, excellence — full human flourishing. For Aristotle specifically, eudaimonia meant not only possessing good character, but achieving excellence in action. Virtue was both the goal and the practice — the end man should strive for, and the active means of attaining that end.

For Aristotle, a “good man” was as functional and objective a concept as a “good watch” or a “good musician.” A good watch accurately tells time; a good musician plays his instrument well; and a good man fulfills his purpose as a man. Each statement, the philosopher would say, is equally objective and factual.
3. An ethical code that allows a man to move from state #1 to state #2.

Man-as-he-happens-to-be and man-if-he-realized-his-telos are antagonistic states — one slides into the lowest and easiest, while the other aims for the noblest and highest.

To transition from the former to the latter — to access one’s full potential — you need to adopt certain behaviors and habits of action. What behaviors and actions to take are prescribed by a set of ethics that are specifically designed to move you from state #1 to state #2. The code lays out which virtues will take you towards your telos, and conversely, which vices will stymie your progress in reaching it. As MacIntyre explains:

    “The precepts which enjoin the various virtues and prohibit the vices which are their counterparts instruct us how to move from potentiality to act, how to realize our true nature and to reach our true end. To defy them will be to be frustrated and incomplete, to fail to achieve that good of rational happiness which it is peculiarly ours as a species to pursue.”

Although we can describe this set of moral precepts as an ethical code, it should not be thought of, at least in the context of Aristotelianism, as primarily a set of rules. As MacIntyre observes, “the most obvious and astonishing absence from Aristotle’s thought for any modern reader” is that “there is relatively little mention of rules anywhere in the Ethics.” In the absence of strict, rote, universal rules, Aristotle instead argued for the cultivation of a kind of master virtue which would aid a man in acquiring all the rest: phronesis, or practical wisdom. As a virtue in one context can be a vice in another (e.g., being frugal vs. being cheap), a man needed phronesis to guide him in doing the right thing, at the right time, for the right reason.

Each of the three elements above “requires reference to the other two if its status and function are to be intelligible.” The combination of the three produces a moral culture that is not only functional, but rational.

Such a moral code is rational in the sense that there is a logical relationship between is and ought. That is, if your telos is X, we can objectively say that you ought to do Y, and you ought not to do Z, in order to reach it. To achieve this end, you must adopt these means.

While this threefold scheme can form the basis of a personal moral code, Aristotle specifically imagined his system of virtue ethics in the context of community (in his case, the Greek city-state). Individuals aim to fulfill their telos as men, while pointing that effort towards what MacIntyre calls a “shared project of achieving a common good” (for Aristotle, for example, reaching one’s telos was closely tied to being a good citizen and contributing to Athenian democracy). Within a community with a common telos, rules are erected that prohibit negative behaviors that would be destructive to the efforts and relationships necessary to achieving its shared project, while virtues — positive traits of character that move the community closer to that common good — are celebrated and encouraged. The rules cannot be understood apart from the virtues at which they aim; the former are not arbitrary, but designed to facilitate the greater flourishing of the latter.

The same 3-part moral framework also exists within the Abrahamic religions, only, as MacIntyre explains, shaded a bit differently:

    “The precepts of ethics now have to be understood not only as teleological injunctions, but also as expressions of a divinely ordained law. The table of virtues and vices has to be amended and added to and a concept of sin is added to the Aristotelian concept of error. The law of God requires a new kind of respect and awe. The true end of man can no longer be completely achieved in this world, but only in another. Yet the threefold structure of untutored human-nature-as-it-happens-to-be, human-nature-as-it-could-be-if-it-realized-its-telos and the precepts of rational ethics as the means for the transition from one to the other remains central.”

For the religious adherent, one’s telos wasn’t eudaimonia (at least as Aristotle understood it), but salvation — being transformed into a creature divinely made perfect.
The Fate of a Moral Culture Without a Shared Telos

Over several centuries, and for complex reasons, a teleologically-based moral system eroded in the West.

As MacIntyre succinctly summarizes, “the joint effect of the secular rejection of both Protestant and Catholic theology and the scientific and philosophical rejection of Aristotelianism was to eliminate any notion of man-as-he-could-be-if-he-realized-his-telos.”

The idea of having an ultimate aim survives on a personal level (though scarcely few people seem to think of themselves as having a telos, or know what theirs is). But on a broad, cultural level, Western societies no longer share a telos in common. The kind of moral system outlined above can really only function in a fairly homogeneous community of limited size; as a society grows increasingly large and diverse, people no longer share the same telos (or have a concept of telos at all), nor a project of common good that the telos supports. Thus in our own culture, many competing teloi exist, or are absent altogether.

Yet, we still retain the other two pieces of classical morality: man-as-he-happens-to-be and a set of ethics. Witness the effect this creates:

The moral code which was specifically created to move man-as-he-happens-to-be towards his telos, now hangs in space, detached from a larger purpose.

There is only man in his raw state, and a code of behavior he is to follow. But, in the absence of a telos, this code consists not in virtues, alongside attendant rules that help a man achieve them, but in the rules alone. As McIntyre observes, when a moral culture lacks a teleological element, “Rules become the primary concept of the moral life.”

In a moral system which lacks a telos, there exist only negative proscriptions for appropriate behavior — rules which are not designed to move man to fulfill his essential purpose, but simply to allow the basic functions of society to continue.

No. No. No. Don’t. Don’t. Don’t.

And so today we have an abundance of voices pointing out what a good man isn’t, but very few describing what a good man is. We lack a positive ideal. In this we’ve become a nation of something worse than school marms — for at least the disciplinarian teacher reprimanded her students with some end in mind.

At the same time that rules become more central to such a moral culture, they become less motivating. Still today we know that man in his untutored state is prone to bad behavior, and so establish rules in an attempt to educate that behavior. But in the absence of an accompanying telos, such rules lack a compelling why — a rationale for why a man should choose to undergo this education, and offer his compliance, rather than following the less challenging path of least resistance.

This is quite problematic, for as pointed out above, man-as-he-happens-to-be and man-if-he-realized-his-telos are antagonistic states. The latter is not how we act if left to our druthers. Achieving one’s telos involves mastering lower impulses to reach for the higher variety. It requires self-mastery, self-control, delayed gratification. It’s not a “natural” state, and as such, its pursuit requires strong motivation — motivation that can only be furnished by pointing to an overarching aim.

Given the lack of motivation inherent to a telos-free moral code, vice inevitably waxes and virtue wanes. This ethical lassitude is still a cause of consternation to a culture, that, even if it’s lost hope in producing citizens of sterling character, still needs them to act with a minimum of propriety and trust in interpersonal relationships in order to keep day-to-day life safe and copacetic. It is rightly felt that people can no longer be left to rely on their phronesis to make moral judgements (for without a telos, what would this judgement be based on?), and so more and more granular and restrictive rules are created as to what constitutes appropriate behavior — external, universal, one-size-fits-all guidelines that of course work much less well in some circumstances than others.

Naturally, there is much disagreement on just how far all these rules should extend beyond the enforcement of the bare minimum of propriety. Just how granular the rules should get is a matter of one’s perspective of what is “just” and “right” and these positions are based on conflicting telos, or on no defined telos at all.

Indeed, the disappearance of a shared telos from a culture’s moral code ultimately has a deteriorating effect on that culture’s moral discourse. When a culture loses its shared telos, is and ought are divorced. Without this connection, moral precepts lose any objectivity — a rational basis for why we should choose one position over another. Though we still voice our positions as if they had this kind of rational authority, our moral arguments in fact become “mere instrument of individual desire and will.” We assert our opinions as if they are objectively true, when they are in fact the arbitrary product of emotion and personal preference. One notices that there is very little philosophical discussion surrounding our moral debates at all; very little appeal to reason is issued beyond “This is the way it should be! . . . Because!” Moral debate becomes a series of reciprocal shouts. Flaming, blaming, shaming.

Or as MacIntyre puts it, “without a teleological framework the whole project of morality becomes unintelligible.”

As he observes, each person has become an autonomous moral agent, who “now [speaks] unconstrained by the externalities of divine law, natural teleology or hierarchical authority; but why should anyone else now listen to him?”
Living a Eudaimonic Life In an Irrational, Dysfunctional Moral Culture

MacIntyre truly offers an incisive explanation for why our moral debates are so shrill. Moral precepts — encouragements of virtue and prohibitions of vice — are rationally based when they lead to a clear telos. If your telos is this, you ought to do that. When a culture lacks a shared telos, and everyone is following their own ultimate aim (or lack such an aim at all), people with competing teloi simply talk past each other, while those without any teloi make moral arguments that sound objective but are really the irrational products of personal preference and emotion.

While MacIntyre’s insights are descriptive, and it’s enormously helpful to understand why things are the way they are, they’re less prescriptive; what should we do with this information? Three takeaways suggest themselves:

The importance of having a personal telos. Even though modern society no longer shares a common telos, you still should be clear on your own. What’s your ultimate aim? What’s your essential purpose and function? Throwing off your default desires is never easy. Knowing the end you’re aiming for will make you far more motivated in embracing the means — the habits of action attendant to living a strenuous life of virtue and excellence — that are necessary to get there.

The pointlessness of debate (with those who don’t share your telos). The West still celebrates the debate of political, social, and moral issues, and we do so because of the tradition we inherited from the ancient Greeks. But the framework that allowed their rigorous exchanges to function — the context of a defined city-state with a shared telos — no longer exists in our large, heterogeneous modern countries. We’re still trying to engage in an old model of rhetoric, despite inhabiting a very different cultural landscape. The result is our empty, interminable, emotion-driven shouting matches.

Now I’m not saying we should never debate important ideas. Such debates can be healthy and robust when in engaged in between people who share the same telos. And those who do not share the same telos can debate issues in a strictly pragmatic way — arguing for which solutions will be most effective or expedient. But when debates concern issues of “right” and “wrong,” if the parties do not share a common telos, the result will only be pointless, irrational pontificating.

The importance of belonging to a community. While it is impossible to share a telos with millions of other people, it is still quite possible, and desirable, to do so with a smaller community of like-minded folks. For Aristotle, achieving a life of eudaimonia could never be a solo affair; it required working on a shared project of common good with others. Comrades in a common purpose sharpen each other, and can create and achieve things they couldn’t by themselves.

Just as importantly, communities of virtue act as repositories of moral excellence, emitting an influence and fragrance that strengthen and leaven the larger culture, and preserving virtues that might otherwise disappear. As MacIntyre ended After Virtue over three decades ago:

    “It is always dangerous to draw too precise parallels between one historical period and another; and among the most misleading of such parallels are those which have been drawn between our own age in Europe and North America and the epoch in which the Roman empire declined into the Dark Ages. Nonetheless certain parallels there are. A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium. What they set themselves to achieve instead—often not recognizing fully what they were doing—was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness. If my account of our moral condition is correct, we ought also to conclude that for some time now we too have reached that turning point. What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope. This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time.”
Title: Wesbury: The Invisible Hand
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 02, 2018, 10:57:27 AM
Monday Morning Outlook
________________________________________
Ignoring the Invisible Hand To view this article, Click Here
Brian S. Wesbury, Chief Economist
Robert Stein, Deputy Chief Economist
Date: 4/2/2018

One of the most important questions we have about our country's future is whether prosperity itself will make the American people lose sight of where that prosperity comes from; whether we'll forget to cultivate the attitudes about freedom, property rights, and hard work that have made not only us great but also all the other places that have followed the same path.

To be clear, this has nothing directly to do with who is president or which party controls Congress. It has nothing to do with the tax cut passed late last year, or recent tariffs, or increases in federal spending, or red tape being cut or added. Instead, it runs much deeper than that and will affect all of these issues over the very long term, multiple generations into the future.

The issue comes to mind for personal reasons, as a couple of us travel around the country with our high school juniors looking at colleges, hither and yon.

We're not here to shame any particular school, so we're not going to name any. But here's what we notice on our visits: at some point, the college admissions officers in charge of the meeting will talk about great accomplishments by students or recently-graduated alumni. Invariably, the accomplishments are volunteer efforts of various sorts that help people in some far off land or, sometimes, here in the US.

Don't get us wrong, stories like this deserve to be told. They're important and worthy of honor. But, not once, in all our collective college tours have we ever heard a school bring up someone who, say, grew up in tough circumstances, was maybe the first in their family to go to college, and has since gone on to become a very successful entrepreneur, investor, or key officer at a large company, like a CEO or CFO,...someone who has gone on to create wealth for their own family and others as well.

Not once.

Which is odd because we know these colleges must have tons of these stories to tell. You can tell when you're taking the tour after the admissions sessions when you walk through the campuses and see the dorms, classrooms, and athletic centers many of which are named after alumni who've cut enormous checks.

Maybe stories of business-oriented success are just not on the radar of the kinds of people who run admissions offices. Or, worse, maybe they think it's embarrassing or that there should be some sort of shame associated with striving to generate wealth.

Either way, they seem out of touch with why so many of their students want to go to college in the first place. "Making the world a better place" is not just about volunteer work; it's about personal ambition and desire mixing with the invisible hand to raise the standard of living for everyone.

Capitalism isn't a dirty word and the long-term success of our civilization means making sure our children know it.
Title: The mommy-state
Post by: G M on April 03, 2018, 06:07:38 PM
http://thedeclination.com/the-government-is-your-mother-and-mother-knows-best/

Well worth reading.
Title: Why Liberals are unhappy
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 07, 2018, 06:18:05 AM
https://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/liberals-likely-unhappy-people-yoga-edition/
Title: Herbert Marcuse in 1965: Repressive Tolerance
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 07, 2018, 06:26:09 AM
second post of morning

This is a subtle and dangerous read.

http://www.marcuse.org/herbert/pubs/60spubs/65repressivetolerance.htm
Title: Prager: Fear of the Left
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 03, 2018, 05:50:43 AM
http://www.dennisprager.com/fear-of-the-left-the-most-powerful-force-in-america-today/
Title: The Suicide of Europe
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 16, 2018, 10:52:53 AM
https://www.prageru.com/videos/suicide-europe
Title: Brigitte Gabrielle
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 21, 2018, 12:37:58 PM


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngfIvyHQmJE
Title: The interesting implications of the new Hungarian model
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 25, 2018, 10:28:45 AM
https://www.dailysignal.com/2018/05/23/hungarys-experiment-could-rebuild-a-sense-of-nation-in-europe/?utm_source=TDS_Email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=MorningBell&mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiTlRjeU1qZGpNREprT0RkaSIsInQiOiJmWW5UM1llTE0rRTdmVHJLVW5Sd2g5cjFhTG5NM0Z6UkNjaVdXdkFLSkczMit6QW1mbVV3aDl1YjQxdENsRTYzUDFiakRidWU1R1JvSnpOOE1rQlJjR2lpYlNLSTV4NjFwS2VjQ2JZYWNcL3ZVNDcxZmdGckVLMkpsWDZPNWloNncifQ%3D%3D
Title: Prager: Google-- don't fight evil
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 05, 2018, 08:45:49 AM
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/google-defense-department-pullout-dont-fight-evil/
Title: VDH: The Fate of the West, Trump, and the Resistance
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 24, 2018, 09:46:18 PM


http://thefederalist.com/2018/06/22/victor-davis-hanson-on-the-fate-of-the-west-trump-and-the-resistance/#.Wy5G-XNULys.twitter
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on June 25, 2018, 04:47:51 AM
"So progressive thinkers and institutional administrators within the university got their way. And now we’re sort of at the end of that experiment, and the question we have to ask is what did they give us? Well, they gave us $1 trillion in student debt. They created a very bizarre system in which the federal government — subsidized through student loans, constantly increasing tuition beyond the rate of inflation — the result of which is that we’ve had about a 200 percent growth in administrative costs, and administrators and non-teaching staff within the university. We’ve politicized the education."

In the 70s when I went to a small PA college we had one history professor, so it was whispered was a communist.  I took his class on Civil War and Reconstruction and there was not hint of progressive themes during the class.  Being a communist was not a compliment in those days.

Now it is.

I just received yet another Rutgers alumni magazine where I graduated from med school in '86.
I would say maybe 60 % were liberal themes.  Women on the cover with "we too" headline.  Articles about them, a painter who only paints black men.
A page on Hillary Clinton's speech at Rutgers where she was still paid an outrageous  25 K .

The whole journal is politicized .  If they think this is going to inspire me to donate ..........  Here are examples of some of the lib themes in just this past ONE journal:

https://magazine.rutgers.edu/features/wetoo
https://magazine.rutgers.edu/features/visible-men
https://magazine.rutgers.edu/features/learning-to-live-togetherhttps://magazine.rutgers.edu/on-the-banks/speakers-in-the-house  - Anita Hill?  What was her claim to fame other then her claim Thomas spoke few crude lines to her?  "Queen" Latifah has a particular jab at me since some of her lines (but of course she is "singer"songwriter a title that had its rebirth in the early 2000s when hundreds of song lyrics were robbed and sold around the music circuit is now an icon . 

https://magazine.rutgers.edu/insights/a-call-to-action
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on June 25, 2018, 05:17:18 AM
VDH:  " I live in the same house that my great-great-grandmother lived."

wow.  that is great.

I would have to go somewhere to parts unknown to Russia Ukraine or Lithuania or where Prussia used to be to do that.  God only knows......
Title: WSJ: George Shultz
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 28, 2018, 07:46:47 AM
I have great respect for George Shultz

America Can Ride the 21st Century’s Waves of Change
Fasten your seat belt. From work to warfare to welfare, technology is transforming the world.
By George P. Shultz
June 27, 2018 6:51 p.m. ET
27 COMMENTS

The world is experiencing change of unprecedented velocity and scope. Governments everywhere must develop strategies to deal with this emerging new world. They should start by studying the forces of technology and demography that are creating it.

Change is the raw material of history. What gnaws at me now is the speed of change. In the last century, machines performed as instructed. Today, they can be designed to learn from experience, by trial and error. This will improve productivity—but it will also accelerate workplace disruption.

Societies usually had time to adjust to economic revolutions. In the early 20th century, American farmworkers fell from half the population to less than 5% as agriculture was mechanized. We were able to establish a public school system to retrain those workers’ children for jobs in the cities. But today, the rapid destruction of old jobs and simultaneous creation of new ones means that the workers themselves must adapt.

There are now 6.7 million “unfilled jobs” in America. Filling them with both new and newly displaced workers will test both education (particularly K-12, where the U.S. continues to fall behind) and the flexibility of workers to pursue new occupations. Community colleges and similar institutions can help, on a time scale more attuned to new technology’s rapidity. They deserve strong support.

Another force of change that needs to be understood more fully is the information and communications revolution, which is making governance more difficult. Information is everywhere—some of it accurate, some of it deliberately inaccurate. We have ceaseless and instantaneous communication to everybody, anybody, at any time. People can easily find out what is going on, organize around it, and take collective action—and they do.

Autocrats respond by using the same technology for surveillance and repression as they try to govern this new form of diversity by suppressing it. Democracies have too often become trapped in short-term reactions to the vocal interests that most effectively capture governance infrastructures. Both responses have produced sharp declines in trust toward institutions. In the long run, neither will work.

Fundamental changes in the technological means of production will furthermore allow goods to be produced on demand, near where they will be used, in ways that can unsettle international order. Sophisticated use of robotics alongside human colleagues, plus 3-D printing and unexpected changes in the distribution of energy supplies, have implications for our security and economy.

Similar manufacturing advances also diffuse military power—through ubiquitous sensors, inexpensive and autonomous drones, high-powered nanoexplosives, and less costly access to space through microsatellites. These developments empower smaller states and even individuals, eroding incumbent powers like the U.S. of their current advantage. We will increasingly need to be vigilant that our words and deeds aren’t revealed to be backed by empty threats.

Against this, the world’s population is undergoing its own dramatic reordering just as emerging technologies hint at a potential new deglobalization.

In developed countries, fertility is decreasing as life expectancy is increasing. This reduces the working-age population and increases the cost of pensions and care for the elderly—requiring government budgets that increasingly crowd out other productive investments. The populations of many of today’s major powers—Japan, Germany, Russia, even China—are set to shrink. Notably this isn’t the case for the U.S., Canada, and Australia, all countries with a long history of immigration. Will these trends continue?

In developing South Asia and in Africa, however—where most of the growth in world population comes from—persistently high fertility rates aren’t sufficiently matched by economic growth. These same regions also feel a disproportionate impact from natural disasters, human and agricultural diseases, and resource scarcities. That disparity underlies the global movement of peoples, setting off a populist turn in world politics.

So what should we do about all of this? We should think local and global.

Technology and demography can’t be halted; they will always go forward. The U.S. will need to find ways to adapt domestically, but if these trends are handled well the prospects for America to benefit are remarkably bright. I think in particular of how the Founders addressed the problem of governance through their own time of change by leaning more on the diversity of individual states and localities—governments whose ears were closer to the ground, so that they were more nimble.

Meanwhile, America’s allies and adversaries are likely to struggle with many of these changes, more than the U.S. will. America’s own global leadership will face growing demands. The more we can understand other countries’ situations, the stronger our foundation for constructive national and international engagement will be.

The 21st century’s waves of change are being driven by technology, not by the humanities. But, to move beyond these disruptions, we have to think through this change in human terms.

Mr. Shultz, a former director of the Office of Management and Budget, and secretary of the Treasury, of labor and of state, is a distinguished fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He is a co-editor of “Beyond Disruption: Technology’s Challenge to Governance” (June 2018, Hoover Institution Press).
Title: POTP: Dems have demonized too
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 08, 2018, 05:32:18 PM
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/democrats-have-demonized-our-fellows-americans-too/2018/08/07/59d33fa4-9a5b-11e8-b60b-1c897f17e185_story.html?utm_term=.6d7c0aabbc6e
Title: Economist: Western Civilization is an idea worth defending and reapplying
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 14, 2018, 08:07:53 AM
https://www.economist.com/open-future/2018/08/03/western-civilisation-is-an-idea-worth-defending-and-reapplying
Title: VDH: The police were not policed
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 14, 2018, 08:09:23 AM
second post

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/08/hard-to-trust-doj-fbi-cia-without-accountability/
Title: WSJ: Taranto: What went wrong with human rights
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 18, 2018, 10:06:03 AM
U.S. Edition
August 18, 2018

What Went Wrong With Human Rights
The conflation of ‘natural law’ with ‘positive law’ handed communism a philosophical victory after the end of the Cold War.
What Went Wrong With Human Rights
Illustration: Ken Fallin
92 Comments
By James Taranto
Aug. 17, 2018 6:29 p.m. ET

Washington

When the U.S. withdrew in June from the United Nations Human Rights Council, Ambassador Nikki Haley described the council as “a protector of human-rights abusers, and a cesspool of political bias.” Aaron Rhodes agrees but thinks Ms. Haley was too gentle.

“The Human Rights Council has become a cover for dictatorships,” he says. “They assume the high moral ground of standing for ‘dialogue’ and ‘cooperation,’ a tactic for smothering the truth about denying freedom. Raising human-rights concerns is dismissed as divisive and confrontational, and a threat to ‘stability.’ Most of the debate there is technocratic blah-blah about global social policy—not about human rights at all.”

To U.N. watchers it’s a familiar critique, but Mr. Rhodes, 69, applies it far more broadly. In his recent book, “The Debasement of Human Rights: How Politics Sabotage the Ideal of Freedom,” he argues that virtually the entire human-rights enterprise has been corrupted by a philosophical error enshrined in the U.N.’s 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights—and that this explains the travesty of the Human Rights Council.

That error is the conflation of “natural law” with “positive law.” Mr. Rhodes explains the difference: “Natural law is a kind of constraint on positive law.” Think of America’s Bill of Rights, whose opening clause is “Congress shall make no law.” The idea is “that laws have to answer to a higher law,” he says. “This is a vision of law that is very deeply embedded in Western civilization,” finding premodern expression in the ideas of the Greek Stoics and the Roman statesman Cicero, as well as in biblical canon law. Natural law is universal—or at least claims to be.

“Positive law,” Mr. Rhodes continues, “is the law of states and governments.” A statute like the Social Security Act of 1935 creates “positive rights”—government-conferred benefits to which citizens have a legal entitlement. Positive law is particular to a nation or other polity: “I live in Germany,” says Mr. Rhodes, a native of upstate New York whom I met during his U.S. book tour. “I enjoy a lot of economic and social rights there, but they reflect the political values of that community.” The Germans are “keen on being a moral society, where the state helps people. They’re statist. This is their mentality, but I don’t think it’s the same mentality here.”

Not everyone, however, accepts the idea of natural law. Adherents to the doctrine of legal positivism assert, in Mr. Rhodes’s words, “that all law is positive law, and the rest of it is just an illusion.” In this view, there is no difference in kind between, say, the right to free speech and the right to collect a Social Security check. Neither right is intrinsic to human nature, and both are bestowed by government.

Even in the U.S., the boundary between natural and positive law began to blur decades before the U.N.’s founding. Early-20th-century progressives, including Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, “were arguing vociferously against natural rights,” Mr. Rhodes says. “Their thing was that the constitutional rights were something archaic and an obstacle.” Franklin D. Roosevelt enumerated his “Four Freedoms” in January 1941, including two natural rights (freedom of speech and of “worship”) and one positive one (“freedom from want”). The fourth, “freedom from fear,” Mr. Rhodes calls “meaningless,” observing that fear is a “basic instinct.”

In 1944 FDR exhorted Congress to enact a “Second Bill of Rights,” all positive—including the rights to “a useful and remunerative job,” “a decent home,” “adequate medical care” and “a good education.” Four years later his widow, Eleanor, chaired the committee that drafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which reads like a mashup of America’s real Bill of Rights and FDR’s aspirational second one. “They tried to have it both ways,” Mr. Rhodes says, by acknowledging that positive rights are “not the same as civil and political rights” while also insisting “they’re human rights.”

Mr. Rhodes is careful to add that he doesn’t intend his argument “as an attack on welfare states, or even on socialism.” Those arrangements are fine by him as long as they are chosen freely and democratically. What, then, is wrong with an expansive concept of human rights? For one thing, it leads to a kind of inflation that devalues natural rights. “The European Union, and its Charter of Fundamental Rights, says that the right to have free employment counseling is a human right,” he notes. That “equates something as banal as employment counseling with something like the right to be free from torture, or the right to be free from slavery.”

The corollary is that abolishing torture and slavery—or protecting the freedoms enumerated in America’s Bill of Rights—is no more important than employment counseling. Which brings us back to the U.N. Human Rights Council. Mr. Rhodes describes it as “controlled” by “Islamic theocracies” and “heavily under the influence of China.” Those unfree countries “are forming a human-rights vision of their own,” he says. “It’s human rights without freedom. It’s human rights based on economic and social rights, where freedoms are restricted in the interest of ‘peace’ and ‘stability’ and power—their power.”

That in turn has “instilled a kind of passivity among people” living in unfree countries, Mr. Rhodes says: “They expect that they can fix their society through human rights. But the human-rights system is impotent; it doesn’t have any teeth. There’s an illusion of ‘the U.N. is going to force my government to protect me.’ No, it doesn’t do this. So civil society puts all of its energies into this structure, which can’t do anything.”

The problem has worsened since the end of the Cold War, which provided the clarity of “an ideological battle about human rights,” as Mr. Rhodes puts it. The communists, like today’s repressive regimes, embraced “this fraud of economic and social rights, which provided this derisory standard of living” but was actually “a cover for their power.” Some Western diplomats argued in favor of natural law. And the Soviet Union and its satellites abstained from the U.N. General Assembly’s vote on the 1948 Universal Declaration—because, Mrs. Roosevelt believed, they couldn’t abide Article 13’s provision that “everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own.”

Natural rights enjoyed something of a renaissance beginning with the 1975 Helsinki Accords, in which the Soviet bloc joined the West in pledging to “respect human rights and fundamental freedoms, including the freedom of thought, conscience, religion or belief.” Helsinki included positive rights too, “but nobody paid attention to them especially,” Mr. Rhodes says.

“The importance of the Helsinki Accords was to stimulate civil society behind the Iron Curtain,” he says. That took the form of national “Helsinki committees,” whose members would go to international conferences for the purpose of “talking about human rights and embarrassing these dictatorial states.” In 1982, at the suggestion of Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov, the committees formed an umbrella nongovernmental organization, the Vienna-based International Helsinki Federation. The Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, and Mr. Rhodes became the IHF’s executive director in 1993. He held that position until 2007, when the federation dissolved.

His work in postcommunist states could be dispiriting. “Some of the new governments—they didn’t want NGOs around. They’d say, we are human rights; we don’t need civil society to tell us what to do,” Mr. Rhodes recalls. “But of course they needed criticism, especially with regard to minorities, and civil liberties as well. They needed to be observed and constrained in their policies.” Among citizens of the newly liberated lands, Mr. Rhodes observed what he calls “the notorious mentality problems”: “As a result of living under these communist systems, people are very subdued. There’s a lack of—their panache has been removed from them.”

The end of the Cold War felt like a victory for the free world, but in Mr. Rhodes’s view it proved a “disaster” for the concept of human rights. The U.N. held its World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna in 1993, the same year he began his work at the Helsinki Federation. It was “a period of chaos,” he says: “You have all of these ridiculous theories, like the ‘end of history’ and ‘new world order’—and meanwhile, wars in Tajikistan and Yugoslavia and Georgia.”

To which the U.N. answered, in Mr. Rhodes’s paraphrase: “Let’s call everything a human-rights problem.” The Vienna Declaration concerned itself not only with natural rights and the familiar positive ones, but also with policing private conduct and attitudes, including crimes like domestic assault, civil offenses like sexual harassment, and “socially determined barriers,” even “psychological” ones, that exclude the disabled from “full participation in society.”

“The irony of it is, with the end of these communist regimes, their theory of human rights was victorious,” Mr. Rhodes says. “The Soviet idea of human rights found legitimacy in the international system.”

Can anything be done? “I wish that the Trump administration would talk about human rights once in a while,” Mr. Rhodes says. “They should talk about freedom.” He adds: “I think the only administration that really promoted natural rights was Reagan.”

Mr. Taranto is the Journal’s editorial features editor.
Title: Krauthammer from beyond the grave
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 12, 2018, 03:38:28 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A37224-2004Aug26.html?noredirect=on
Title: VDH: Descent into Madness
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 18, 2018, 10:21:37 AM
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/09/progressive-madness-cory-booker-maxine-waters-john-kerry/
Title: The Myuth of Freedom
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 19, 2018, 11:04:25 PM
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/sep/14/yuval-noah-harari-the-new-threat-to-liberal-democracy?CMP=fb_gu
Title: Ben Shapiro: Stop apologizing for the history of the West
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 13, 2018, 11:29:07 AM


https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/10/stop-apologizing-for-history-the-west-churchill-critics/
Title: America's Permanent Mobs
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 27, 2018, 09:36:20 AM
https://www.the-american-interest.com/2018/10/22/americas-permanent-mobs/?fbclid=IwAR2V6jfCRROICNEHJc_-4kGP4_1f2prA6SpAoRrzZcfq6VeOjsFrA8qTWAs
Title: The Madness Returns
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 28, 2018, 10:42:13 AM


https://www.weeklystandard.com/barton-swaim/the-madness-returns
Title: Our Revolution's logic
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 01, 2018, 07:44:05 AM
https://americanmind.org/essays/our-revolutions-logic/?fbclid=IwAR35ZcPvExtxBxJLbxsrVzptcQLaSME7xJrx8AFkQQKMq38IqFc1vC89L8g
Title: Tucker Carlson and Ben Shapiro
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 05, 2018, 08:47:19 PM


https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=24&v=Bh8vqof9hAk
Title: WSJ: Where are America's corporate patriots?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 29, 2018, 12:18:14 PM
Where Are the Corporate Patriots?
Regarding China, U.S. companies should step up and do their part to protect national security.
85 Comments
By Samantha F. Ravich
Nov. 28, 2018 6:23 p.m. ET
U.S. soldiers during the invasion of Normandy, France, June 6, 1944.
U.S. soldiers during the invasion of Normandy, France, June 6, 1944. Photo: Getty Images

The U.S. military needed a small vessel that could transport troops and equipment from large oceangoing ships onto the beach. It was the late 1930s and Andrew Jackson Higgins, a small-boat builder in New Orleans, thought an adapted design of one of his oil-prospecting boats would do the trick. He won the contract, patented his design, and expanded his Higgins Industries workforce from 75 in 1938 to more than 20,000 in 1943. The “Higgins boat” allowed Allied forces to reach the beaches of Normandy on D-Day. Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower called Higgins the “man who won the war for us.”

Higgins’s story was one of American ingenuity. But it was also a story about the importance of the American patent system and the security of U.S. intellectual property. What would have happened if the Japanese had stolen Higgins’s boat designs before he could get his product into the hands of the U.S. military? What would have happened if, when he applied for his patent, Japanese government-affiliated entities beat him to the punch by filing for a patent using stolen designs?

Or, what if, during an earlier period of relative peace in Europe, Higgins had decided to sell into the European market but was forced to form a joint venture with German firms, thereby transferring critical technology to a government the U.S. would soon face as a foe?

Eight decades later, intellectual-property theft is happening at a pace that threatens American security and prosperity. State actors, and the companies they own, control or influence, have launched a campaign to siphon critical and emerging American technology. The People’s Republic of China annually steals between $225 billion and $600 billion of U.S. intellectual property.

In 2017 Chinese citizen Kevin Dong Liuwas arrested for attempting to steal trade secrets and computer information from Massachusetts-based Medrobotics. The company’s robotics technology, which hadn’t been patented at the time of the theft, may one day become critical for battlefield medicine.

In 2012 an investigation by the House Intelligence Committee found that the Chinese company Huawei “exhibits a pattern of disregard for the intellectual property rights” of other companies. Among other illegal actions, Huawei was stealing the patented computer code created by California-based Cisco, electronically copying it, and inserting it into its own products. Cisco is a major contractor to the Defense Department.

In October the Commerce Department accused Chinese state-owned Fujian Jinhua Integrated Circuit Co. of stealing trade secrets from Micron, a semiconductor manufacturer based in Boise, Idaho. Micron produces as much as a quarter of the world’s dynamic random-access memory integrated circuits, which are used in personal computers, workstations and servers and have important military applications. Last month Commerce barred the sale of any U.S.-origin technology to Jinhua.

The American Chamber of Commerce in China and others have warned that Chinese government authorities often demand disclosure of confidential technological information as a requirement of selling into the Chinese market. More than 20% of American companies operating in China have been asked to transfer technology to Chinese partners in the past three years.

The Trump administration should be commended for making cyber-enabled economic warfare a priority in the U.S. National Security Strategy. The president also deserves plaudits for exposing Beijing’s hidden hand in stealing U.S. technology and intellectual property. But protecting America’s critical technology isn’t a job for government alone. America’s private sector needs to work more closely with government to keep sensitive technology out of the hands of a potentially hostile foreign government.

Too many American companies have been too quick to sell out in exchange for access to the Chinese market. Many have been slow to disclose when they’ve been targeted by Chinese hackers in hope of preventing their stock prices from taking a hit. But these are more than business decisions; they are matters of national security.

Andrew Jackson Higgins’s reward for his hard work and ingenuity was more than financial—he earned the entire nation’s gratitude. Eisenhower paid him tribute in his 1944 Thanksgiving Day address: “Let us thank God for Higgins Industries, management, and labor which has given us the landing boats with which to conduct our campaign.” If America wants to retain its prosperity and freedom, it will need more patriotic businessmen like Higgins.

Ms. Ravich is chairman of the Transformative Cyber Innovation Lab at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and vice chairman of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board.
Title: Krauthammer from beyond the grave 2.0
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 25, 2018, 04:24:08 PM
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/12/charles-krauthammer-uncommon-greatness/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Monday%20through%20Friday%202018-12-25&utm_term=NRDaily-Smart
Title: Our Exhausted American Mediocracy
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 31, 2018, 09:53:08 AM
https://amgreatness.com/2018/12/30/our-exhausted-american-mediocracy/
Title: Walter Williams: Disparities Galore
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 31, 2018, 03:22:57 PM
second post


Disparities Galore


ByWALTER E. WILLIAMS
December 29, 2018
 
Much is made about observed differences between sexes and among races. The nation's academic and legal elite try to sell us on the notion that men and women and people of all races should be proportionally represented in socio-economic characteristics. They make statements such as "Though African Americans and Hispanics make up approximately 32 percent of the US population, they (constituted) 56 percent of all incarcerated people in 2015" and "20 percent of Congress is women. Only 5 percent of CEOs are."

These differences are frequently referred to as disparities. Legal professionals, judges, politicians, academics and others often operate under the assumption that we are all equal. Therefore, inequalities and disparities are seen as probative of injustice. Thus, government must intervene, find the cause and engineer a policy or law to eliminate the injustice. Such a vision borders on lunacy. There's no evidence anywhere or at any time in human history that shows that but for some kind of social injustice, people would be proportionally represented across a range of socio-economic attributes by race and sex.

Indeed, if there is a dominant feature of mankind, it's that we differ significantly over a host of socio-economic characteristics by race, sex, ethnicity and nationality. The differences have little or nothing to do with any sort of social injustice or unfair treatment. Let's examine some racial, ethnic and sex disparities with an eye toward identifying the injustice involved. We might also ponder what kind of policy recommendation is necessary to correct the disparity.

Jews constitute no more than 3 percent of the U.S. population but are 35 percent of American Nobel Prize winners. As of 2017, Nobel Prizes had been awarded to 902 individuals worldwide. Though Jews are less than 2 percent of the world's population, 203, or 22.5 percent, of the Nobel Prizes were awarded to Jews. Proportionality would have created 18 Jewish Nobel laureates instead of an "unfair" 203. What should Congress and the United Nations do to "correct" such a disparity? Should the Nobel committees be charged with racism?

Jews are not the only people taking more than their "fair share" of things. Blacks are 13 percent of the U.S. population but, in some seasons, have been as high as 84 percent of NBA players. Compounding that "injustice," blacks are the highest-paid basketball players and win nearly all of the MVP prizes. Blacks are also guilty of taking 67 percent, an "unfair" share, of professional football jobs. Blacks are in the top salary category in every offensive and defensive position except quarterback. But let's not lull ourselves into complacency. How often do you see a black NFL kicker or punter?

Laotian, Samoan and Vietnamese women have the highest cervical cancer rates in the United States. The Pima Indians of Arizona have the highest reported prevalence of diabetes of any population in the world. Tay-Sachs disease favors Ashkenazi Jews. Cystic fibrosis haunts white people. Blacks of West African ethnic origin have the highest incidence of sickle cell anemia. The prevalence of prostate cancer is lower in men of South Asian ethnicity than in the general population. Black American men have the highest prostate cancer rates of any racial or ethnic group in the United States. Black males are also 30 percent likelier to die from heart disease than white men.

There are loads of other disparities based upon physical characteristics, but it would take a fool to believe that we are all equal and any difference between us is a result of some kind of social injustice that begs for a societal remedy. The only kind of equality consistent with liberty is equality before the law — which doesn't require that people be in fact equal.

Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University. To find out more about Walter E. Williams and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.
Title: Too much psilocybin?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 02, 2019, 11:00:22 PM
but weirdly interesting nonetheless:

https://medium.com/deep-code/situational-assessment-2018-the-calm-before-the-storm-5a0bd014ec84

Title: Re: Too much psilocybin?
Post by: G M on January 02, 2019, 11:37:27 PM
but weirdly interesting nonetheless:

https://medium.com/deep-code/situational-assessment-2018-the-calm-before-the-storm-5a0bd014ec84



That was worth the deep dive into the text.
Title: Digital like thought ?
Post by: ccp on January 03, 2019, 05:03:22 AM
It is amazing how  computers, digital devices, video fantasy games , have changed how these millennials and gen Y think.

The Tolkien like "Blue Church" and the "Insurgency"

Collective thinking like two opposing collections of Borg vying to control the whole ..

Something Orwellian maybe ?  I don't remember Orwell's books well since i read them while trying to stay awake decades ago.




Title: George Friedman: What has happened to us?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 05, 2019, 11:31:59 PM
By George Friedman

What Has Happened to Us

The global system that many fear is dying is already dead. The new one has yet to emerge.

Last week, we published our annual forecast, which goes on for 40 pages. The length is necessary, but it risks obscuring the fundamental question: What has happened to us? From Shanghai to Moscow to Brussels to Washington, there is a sense that something has gone wrong with the world, with our nations, with our friends and even with ourselves.

The feeling has permeated our societies. We have gone from a belief in the end of history, in a final reconciliation of all our major contradictions, to a sense of failure, foreboding and betrayal. The sense is everywhere, and it came upon us with startling speed. A decade is a second in the history of humanity. The new year is the future, and the global sense of increasing failure will grow. But our future is embedded in the past, and the past must be grasped.

A Decade of Fear

Humans cycle between complacency and fear. When the time for fear comes, we magnify the threat. It’s a natural response; after all, when things go wrong, we humans need all the energy we can muster to face it, and terror is the most powerful of feelings. In the late summer and early fall of 2008, we faced the sum of our fears. On Sept. 15, 2008, Lehman Brothers collapsed. All its debts went unpaid. Those who were unpaid could not pay others, and that failure forced the economic system to face the abyss. It’s a familiar story by now, but its telling always omits something that happened just a month before, on Aug. 8. That day, war broke out between Russia and Georgia, and Russian tanks – a nightmare to the West a scant generation earlier – were on the move once more.

At the end of a war, the winning coalition dreams of a world in which its will continues to govern, where the differences among its members are settled with quiet goodwill, and where only good things will happen. Yet the end of the Cold War had not created a stable platform for eternal prosperity, nor had it made war obsolete. It hadn’t even settled the Russian question. The idea that any conflict could be the war to end all wars is the first product of victory and the most heartbreaking illusion. We made the same realization in 2008 in the space of seven weeks. The interests of the world were the same as ever, and the heartbreaking illusion returned. And since we are human, we knew that someone betrayed us. The idea that this is the human condition and that hostility and disorder are our natural state is too painful to contemplate. If the eternal peace that Immanuel Kant promised and that the fall of the Berlin Wall delivered dissolved, then it must have been the work of dark and vile forces.

In the wake of World War II came Maoist mass murder, the imprisonment of Soviet war heroes in the Gulag, Joseph McCarthy’s crusade against latent communism in the U.S., and all that these phenomena spawned. War is fought out of fear. The hubris of victory hides but does not abolish that fear. We should not be surprised at where we are now. The greater the victory, the greater the disappointment. Much went well after World War II, but the expectations exceeded the possibility.

The Revolution of Rising Expectation

During decolonialization in the 1950s and 1960s, a phrase became commonplace: the revolution of rising expectation. It meant that with the end of colonialism, the expectations of the developing world grew beyond what was reasonable. The disparity between expectation and reality then engendered disappointment and anger, which gave rise to instability. The same concept applies to the world after 1992: We expected a world without conflict, of common interests and values, and of increasing prosperity. It was a hope as inevitable as it was far-fetched. What came out of 2008 was a world plunged into fear and a rising sense of betrayal. That has matured now into a world in which fear, distrust and mutual contempt define political life in all spheres.

The events of 2008 brought to maturity the processes that had been underway in the past. Today the household income of someone in the fourth quintile – where the lower middle class is located – is about $35,000 a year. Accounting for taxes, and ignoring the cost of health insurance, we can generously estimate that lower middle-class families bring home $2,500 a month. When I was a child, my family was firmly in the lower middle class. We had a small house, a car and enough money to take modest vacations. These are luxuries the lower middle class cannot afford today on $2,500 a month.

Inequality was never the issue in the United States. The issue was attaining the American dream: homeownership and the promise of upward mobility for the next generation. That’s gone now. Though it had been dying for decades at the hands of a variety of forces, 2008 convinced the lower middle class that it wasn’t coming back. Even at the median income level of above $50,000 a year, the pain has subsided but not evaporated.

The current anger and drug addiction in the United States is a uniquely American problem. But the same sense that the world has turned against its poorer citizens and that the elites couldn’t care less has also spread to Europe and could be found in China and Russia as well. It became a global reality, and the immigration issue jelled it. Unable to understand the bitterness their countrymen felt at suffering national indifference while foreigners received care and attention, the elite sought to paint the lower middle class as xenophobic.

Leaders around the world have seized on this feeling. Xi Jinping became dictator of Chinabecause he arrested members of the elite. Vladimir Putin has stayed in power for nearly 20 years with promises to make Russia great again. The European right grasped the degree to which the Continent’s elite had once again become indifferent to the plight of their compatriots. And in the United States, the Democratic Party framed itself as the party of the working poor but focused on everything else, while an outsider took control of the Republican Party – historically the party of corporations – by mobilizing the underclasses. In each of these countries – including Russia, now that oil prices are in the $40 range – the disappointment of what used to be the working classes is in full bloom, confronting an elite that is relieved just to have a functioning banking system and believes, by extension, that all is well.

The distrust is not new. But the inevitable failure of the fantasies of the post-Cold War world has given it tremendous power.

Tensions Beget Tensions

Along with the tensions within nations are the tensions between them. In 2008, Russia announced it would not go gentle into that good night. Its brief war with Georgia was a subdued overture to what has since arisen. The tensions between countries have mounted, in part because nations are afraid of other nations and seek to protect themselves by being more fearsome. In our time, however, the problem is more complex. Between 1992 and 2008 the global economy surged as emerging countries built their economies on exports. The recession after 2008 hurt these countries badly, whether they exported manufactured goods or energy. Perhaps more important, what importers had tolerated and even benefited from they could no longer abide.

Cheaper exports were not a universal boon. On the whole, they benefited important countries, but people do not live “on the whole.” When vast segments of the population are victims of imports, or see themselves as such, the political system will destabilize regardless of whether the state is benefiting in a general sense. Indeed, the fact that the benefits accrue to certain classes while others lose their jobs increases the anger. Those who gain from the arrangement don’t understand what the fuss is about, and their incomprehension inevitably inhibits their response. The debate turns to the question of who is responsible. Whatever the reality, those who benefit will wind up with the blame, and the task of stabilizing the system falls to politicians.

The growing distrust within nations drives the growing distrust among nations. In many countries, the political order is in the midst of a transformation. Individuals and parties that one could not have imagined holding office a decade ago are now in power or close to it. International conflicts that appeared well-contained within the framework of the Cold War coalition are bursting at the seams. The Cold War coalition is increasingly at odds with itself, as new and unfathomable coalitions emerge, and dangers we thought we had buried in 1992 are coming back to life. Among those who saw themselves as managing the coalition, a sense of horror is inevitable. But that coalition, like the Congress of Vienna, the League of Nations or the United Nations, could survive for perhaps a generation at most. What had bound these groups’ members together was the enemy. A defeated enemy is simply not a strong enough glue to do the job.

New World, New Rules

The world has abandoned the rules of the Cold War coalition. This was inevitable. The 2008 crisis was going to happen in one form or another, and it would speak with authority. A new world would grow out of it. You can see our vision of how this plays out in our 40-year forecast or from my books, but that is unimportant right now. What matters is understanding that the world forged in 1945, the world that defeated the Soviet Union, is gone now. It left behind profound social tensions that the elite will ignore, until they no longer can, and a new international system. The new system, though born of the old one, is very different.

We are not going back. The vast social and political animosity tearing at the fabric of the world will resolve itself, perhaps with blood but likely without it. It will leave behind a changed world. That’s our point about 2019. It is a year in which an old world has already died, but many still think it can be resurrected. It is a year where the new world has not yet emerged. There are those who will welcome it. There are those who will loathe it. It will be what it must be – a new world with new rules. History is profoundly indifferent to our preferences. We live. We die. We love. We hate. We do so all under the pressure of reality. And the world is on the edge.
Title: "middle class "is going to be focus of Warren and likely most of the other Dems
Post by: ccp on January 06, 2019, 05:27:59 AM
From Freidman's piece above :

"The current anger and drug addiction in the United States is a uniquely American problem. But the same sense that the world has turned against its poorer citizens and that the elites couldn’t care less has also spread to Europe and could be found in China and Russia as well. It became a global reality, and the immigration issue jelled it. Unable to understand the bitterness their countrymen felt at suffering national indifference while foreigners received care and attention, the elite sought to paint the lower middle class as xenophobic."

This IS going to be a key them of the Dems :

I heard yesterday  Warren's theme in her election bid will be to focus on rejuvenating the middle class (in an effort to win back the middle class group that voted for Trump not the girl who should be locked up).

It will be health care and other themes  (of course from stealing from the "rich" to give to others).  Maybe "free" college, retraining and God only knows what else.

The Cans better be ready for this.   

They need a good common message.  Not a dick like Mitt talking about character.
Trump is the best (and also sometimes the worst mouthpiece when he lets his lack of control cause him to say counterproductive things)
Lindsey Graham has a great mouthpiece when he doesn't go off the beaten path.........

Newt usually does.

But the same problem always arises - the LEFT controls 93% of the medica ........

Title: Re: "middle class "is going to be focus of Warren and likely most of the other Dems
Post by: DougMacG on January 06, 2019, 10:26:07 AM
ccp:  Warren's theme in her election bid will be to focus on rejuvenating the middle class (in an effort to win back the middle class group that voted for Trump not the girl who should be locked up).

It will be health care and other themes  (of course from stealing from the "rich" to give to others).  Maybe "free" college, retraining and God only knows what else.

The Cans better be ready for this.

[with the media message 93% Leftist]


We need to defeat the free shit [someone else will pay for it] argument with the poor and we really need to defeat that argument with the middle class.  The Socialist Democrats 83% tax rates aren't going to pay for it, nor would 100% tax rates get you there.  The outgoing House Republicans made no attempt to counter this.  Now it is only Trump.  He has the bully pulpit and the policies and results to counter this - if he could only stay focused. 
-------------------
George Friedman:
"Inequality was never the issue in the United States. The issue was attaining the American dream: homeownership and the promise of upward mobility for the next generation. That’s gone now. Though it had been dying for decades at the hands of a variety of forces, 2008 convinced the lower middle class that it wasn’t coming back."

    - Sorry I don't buy this.  Incomes are going up.  Plenty of kids out of college make phenomenal money.  Younger people are choosing to not marry, not start families, not buy houses.  House prices are driven up by badly designed government policies, not the cost of lumber and building supplies.  Everything that government declared essential has skyrocketed and everything left in mostly in the free market has became more affordable.  If people can't live off of 2500 /mo or 50k/yr it is because their government of choice drove up the cost.  Stagnation is a public policy choice and the return of the Nancy Pelosi House indicates that is what we prefer to prosperity.

Too bad people here don't know that "free" health care in socialist places like Venezuela after the capitalists are driven out doesn't include food and water.
Title: Stephen Browne: Cvilization
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 17, 2019, 04:37:22 AM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWGcq3R9vb8&feature=youtu.be&fbclid=IwAR17x52YotgxRA33wibXH-nqwro3TwaCfGlukasFwLWmzoAJiq2edQkIIy4
Title: The Manifest Destiny of the Ruling Class
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 06, 2019, 04:05:28 PM


https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/02/politics-of-manifest-destiny-ruling-class-opposing-tribe/
Title: Are we on the road to civilization collapse?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 21, 2019, 11:12:17 AM
Haven't had a chance to read this yet, posting it here so it does not fall between the cracks for me:

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20190218-are-we-on-the-road-to-civilisation-collapse?ocid=fbfut&fbclid=IwAR2q1DZ3hAHdB0YuRKTDHVE_Ol9zZ-TD0Ron8uVhaOUEEBCbASFzkfrsKmA
Title: Re: Are we on the road to civilization collapse?
Post by: G M on February 21, 2019, 11:21:52 AM
Haven't had a chance to read this yet, posting it here so it does not fall between the cracks for me:

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20190218-are-we-on-the-road-to-civilisation-collapse?ocid=fbfut&fbclid=IwAR2q1DZ3hAHdB0YuRKTDHVE_Ol9zZ-TD0Ron8uVhaOUEEBCbASFzkfrsKmA

We are descending into collapse presently.
Title: Not really complicated
Post by: ccp on February 24, 2019, 07:08:04 AM
Tough lawyers and those who make a living talking their heads off make it so.

https://pjmedia.com/claudiarosett/timeline-of-the-isis-bride/

We could let her back in and like the movie "Inglorious Bastards"  cut 'ISIS' into her forehead in memory of all those who were murdered
lost loved ones or everything they owned.

That throw her in prison for life.
Title: Gary Cohen now cashing in on experience with Trump
Post by: ccp on February 27, 2019, 06:07:09 AM
amazing how may people are making money off having known Trump.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/27/gary-cohn-writing-memoir-of-career-including-trump-white-house-tenure.html

How about an insider book on what Obama knew , when he knew it , and cover/clear  ups .
I guess no money in it.
Title: VDH: What progressives should know about Trump voters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 21, 2019, 10:39:39 AM


https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/19/opinions/what-progressives-should-know-about-trump-voters-hanson/index.html?fbclid=IwAR0gyHJ6w6lqAbALJI1Ib1PZib3wRAHPdntuXQa-F6aO8Bnrsfwknevu-bM
Title: Re: VDH: What progressives should know about Trump voters
Post by: DougMacG on March 21, 2019, 11:56:19 AM
https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/19/opinions/what-progressives-should-know-about-trump-voters-hanson/index.html?fbclid=IwAR0gyHJ6w6lqAbALJI1Ib1PZib3wRAHPdntuXQa-F6aO8Bnrsfwknevu-bM

Excuse me, did you just say VDH published at CNN?

Winning.

Great article.  I would like to see an honest liberal attempt to refute any of his points.
Title: VDH on cnn site
Post by: ccp on March 21, 2019, 03:46:16 PM
cnn's tip to the candidates more likely then any recommendation to its validity

should also be what liberal media people should know ! especially CNN that insults me daily

Title: NRO: Why Go West?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 30, 2019, 04:17:21 PM


https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/04/immigration-western-civilization-leftist-complaints/?fbclid=IwAR3duD0ZzCfW4vkZlLiDaZLOiEEnn3rwCPlOV6y02aT9ft8Q06XQotgHByE
Title: kevin Williamson on Dems getting voting for criminals
Post by: ccp on May 01, 2019, 05:11:47 AM
This is good to see.  Kevin going after the fraud and corruption of the Left's quest for power instead of reminding us on how much he hates Trump.

Agree with focusing your ire where it belongs => on the Let:

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/05/felon-voting-rights-cynical-democratic-party-politics/
Title: Daniel Greenfield: Brainwashing a Nation
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 23, 2019, 11:11:23 AM
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273635/brainwashing-nation-daniel-greenfield?fbclid=IwAR1717Pbw4p891AdnPopLsB-DAhqdLHtmz1qwnBnrh7w1nY3mvYEyoidIcQ
Title: VDH: Dem debate cowardice, hypocrisy, and nuttiness
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 08, 2019, 01:22:01 PM


https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/08/democratic-party-debate-cowardice-hypocrisy-nuttiness/?fbclid=IwAR0XfZLSBWlZDJQTEn4myvkt2A98caqX9H5NC7_cNljIbuaCTZeNI5fZP4o
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on August 08, 2019, 03:07:46 PM
Glad to see VDH showing up on Fox frequently
He is always admirable and insightful.

Too bad CNN does not have the balls or integrity to have him on so the libs can hear someone insightful and logical.
Title: Rabbi Fisher: Everyone is smart except Donald Trump
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 11, 2019, 10:13:23 AM
https://ronaldyatesbooks.com/2018/10/everyone-is-smart-except-donald-trump-rabbi-dov-fischer/?fbclid=IwAR03nkTnd9my3ucHa9_Fmn_1NcNK6RXV762GhrSeb4G6IMhG_aRoLjK2Cjc
Title: An intriguing idea
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 11, 2019, 11:46:32 PM
https://www.intellectualtakeout.org/article/why-its-time-treat-hammer-and-sickle-swastika?fbclid=IwAR02EwbNqj-dOw2PJJTKXizbxigc9T8Nl1nHfHqb_5BPFQcKUE5NzDbw42c
Title: VDH: The Death of American Citizenship
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 01, 2019, 05:19:19 PM


https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/09/the-death-of-american-citizenship/?fbclid=IwAR1ELo4MUIrxHYUpdXwTcSDm4lJO2ehYyWBQcQMVY5MECHJAWSYn2BV3fvw
Title: POTH: Ross Douhat: The Corruption Before Trump
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 02, 2019, 01:02:08 AM
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/01/opinion/corruption-democracy-trump.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

The American republic, more idealistic and less brutal than its Roman antecedent, doesn’t send former cabinet officials and senators off to practice extractive taxation everywhere that we have military bases. Instead, we’ve developed a more complicated interplay between public service and private enrichment, a labyrinthine system of consultancies and adviserships and directorates and boards in which the dedicated public servant can make enough money to keep up with the cost of tuition at Sidwell or Exeter without ever taking anything so embarrassing as a bribe.

The ideological grease in this system is the belief that the American businessman, the American soldier and the American diplomat are all fundamentally doing the same work, expanding the Pax Americana one newly opened market, one toppled strongman and one baby democracy at a time. So why shouldn’t our public servants move back and forth between these realms — selling arms to our allies one day, serving on a do-gooding foundation funded by allies and defense contractors the next, helping those allies lobby our government the day after that? After all, all these projects serve the same goal: A world of capitalist democracies at peace with one another, free to get rich under the umbrella of the American military.
Sign Up for Debatable

Agree to disagree, or disagree better? We'll help you understand the sharpest arguments on the most pressing issues of the week, from new and familiar voices.

[The big debates, distilled. This guide will put in context what people are saying about the pressing issues of the week. Sign up for our new newsletter, Debatable.]

This kind of thinking has animated and justified elite self-enrichment throughout my lifetime. Think of Dick Cheney’s smooth move from supervising the Defense Department to running a defense contractor to supervising the Defense Department once again, or the extraordinary post-presidential buckraking of the Clinton family and their foundation’s global funding stream.

But the pattern isn’t just personal, it’s also structural, with specific opportunities for moneymaking embedded in big-picture, bipartisan projects: the Clinton-era attempt to transform post-Soviet Russia into a functioning capitalist democracy; the Bush-era attempt to remake the Middle East; the multi-administration push to unite American and Chinese markets, creating a free and prosperous “Chimerica” on which the sun would never set.

We are where we are in American politics, in part, because all these big-picture projects succeeded in enriching private interests … but failed to achieve their stated public goals. The “shock therapy” delivered to Russia midwifed Putinism instead of a prosperous American ally. The war in Iraq ushered in a regional conflict that’s still burning to this day. Chimerica worked out better for the Chinese than for many working-class Americans, and far better for the Chinese Politburo than for the cause of liberty. And the self-justifying doctrine of the present elite — that you can serve the common good while in office and do well for yourself afterward — became far more implausible when the elite’s projects kept failing even as the officeholders kept on cashing in.

Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 25, 2019, 11:26:24 AM


https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2019/10/closing-conservative-mind-politics-and-art-war




Money quote: 

"For centrists rattled by the rise of populism it is a flattering tale. No responsibility for the condition of politics is ascribed to them. Reason has been tossed aside because the masses – encouraged by amoral rabble-rousers – have been allowed to vent their ignorant passions. It is not hard to detect the reek of class hatred in this ruling liberal narrative. But there is something more powerful here than mere snobbery: the belief that politics can be governed by formulas derived from some large theory. In the past, such theories were derived from Marxism and positivism, utilitarianism and Fabianism, among other ideologies. Today they emanate from the prevailing variety of rights-based liberalism promoted by philosophers such as John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin. The key feature of this liberalism is that it transfers decision-making from political to judicial institutions. Liberals are turning to law to entrench values and policies for which they cannot secure democratic assent."
Title: George Friedman: Wrath and Political Polarization
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 25, 2019, 11:54:46 AM
second post

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=U4ma-g0dils
Title: Pat Buchanan
Post by: ccp on October 29, 2019, 10:07:20 AM
Will history repeat?

https://townhall.com/columnists/patbuchanan/2019/10/29/is-trump-facing-a-1960s-style-revolt-n2555479
Title: VDH: The Military Intelligence Complex
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 04, 2019, 10:29:00 AM


https://amgreatness.com/2019/11/03/the-military-intelligence-complex/
Title: In Public service to the people
Post by: ccp on November 11, 2019, 06:57:18 AM
books and more books
Bolton too with headlines of 2 mill. advance
Soro would gladly pay that if there is anything at all that will make orange man look bad:

https://pjmedia.com/trending/nikki-haley-says-tillerson-and-kelly-tried-to-get-her-to-undermine-trump/

Perhaps this is why Trump fired Tillerson persona non grata ..........
Title: China reverses crypto currency band, now wants to dominate it.
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 11, 2019, 11:25:55 AM
https://www.theepochtimes.com/china-reverses-cryptocurrency-ban-and-now-wants-to-dominate-it_3140036.html?utm_source=Epoch+Times+Newsletters&utm_campaign=88480e0f28-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_11_11_01_09&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_4fba358ecf-88480e0f28-239065853
Title: Re: China reverses crypto currency band, now wants to dominate it.
Post by: DougMacG on November 11, 2019, 04:27:40 PM
https://www.theepochtimes.com/china-reverses-cryptocurrency-ban-and-now-wants-to-dominate-it_3140036.html?utm_source=Epoch+Times+Newsletters&utm_campaign=88480e0f28-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_11_11_01_09&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_4fba358ecf-88480e0f28-239065853

Maybe 'blockchain technology will be the regime's undoing.
Title: Finally , at least some at NR get IT!
Post by: ccp on November 13, 2019, 03:12:05 PM
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-not-so-persuasive-sales-pitch-for-impeachment/
Title: Kuntsler: Are Americans Ready for Tyranny?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 08, 2019, 10:20:03 AM
https://fabiusmaximus.com/2019/12/01/are-americans-ready-for-tyranny/

Also see

https://fabiusmaximus.com/2019/11/29/podcast-with-james-howard-kunstler/

https://fabiusmaximus.com/2019/11/30/about-americas-leaders/

https://fabiusmaximus.com/2019/12/01/are-americans-ready-for-tyranny/

https://fabiusmaximus.com/2019/12/02/kunstler-asks-what-is-our-future/



Title: Kunstler
Post by: ccp on December 08, 2019, 11:07:54 AM
"I’ve said often that I remain a registered Democrat despite the fact that I’m at odds with the current disposition of the party. But the political Left has always been kind of a vehicle for the thinking classes in America and yet the thinking classes appear to have lost their minds – and done so worse than any other group in America."

Very interesting to read

As probably most I only know Kunstler as a liberal defense lawyer
so his thought discussions are quit surprising to me .
Unfortunately he remains a Democrat despite agreeing the party is totally nuts .
I didn't read all of the posts but I would ask him , why not Republican - he noted the Republican Party is so hollow a clown like Trump could take it over .  Ok, so what would give the Republican Party some beef so to speak that would attract him to it?
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 08, 2019, 02:27:06 PM
If I am not mistaken, that was a different Kuntstler.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: DougMacG on December 08, 2019, 07:39:13 PM
Different Kuntstler.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Kunstler

I saw Wm. Kuntsler speak one time about the Wounded Knee trial.
Title: James much more savvy then William
Post by: ccp on December 09, 2019, 05:04:51 AM
*different* Kunstler

Thanks for clarifying that .  I made the mistake of assuming.

The other Kunstler (William), the one I remember , has got to be die heart Democrat to the death.
He is more the SPLC type.


Title: Nick Freitas
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 09, 2019, 11:09:10 AM


https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1643812189020623
Title: Propaganda
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 09, 2019, 02:25:38 PM


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6wx50ZK3jk&feature=share&fbclid=IwAR1iqUCnle85IWRfwjE8ndBSco6zHjTS0_7szFNHJqN2FlImPEj19B2Y6lM
Title: Comey's War on America
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 12, 2019, 03:35:34 PM
https://amgreatness.com/2019/12/11/james-comeys-war-on-america/
Title: Re: Comey's War on America
Post by: G M on December 12, 2019, 04:43:51 PM
https://amgreatness.com/2019/12/11/james-comeys-war-on-america/

We live in very dark times now.
Title: The Cost of Social Justice Ideology
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 17, 2019, 11:39:26 AM


https://www.city-journal.org/social-justice-ideology
Title: Noonan: The Post Heroic Presidency
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 27, 2019, 12:47:10 PM
There's quite a bit that Peggy does not get about Trump IMHO, but there is substance here as well.

The Century of the Postheroic Presidency
Bill Clinton started the trend. By 2016 voters had given up on high standards in the White House.

By Peggy Noonan
Dec. 26, 2019 6:56 pm ET


When we think about current history we tend to be expecting or predicting something as opposed to experiencing something. But what we need to understand now is that the 21st century isn’t new. It still feels new, but it isn’t. We are entering its third decade. We have been waiting for the century to take its shape and fully become itself, but it’s already doing that.

The 20th century was shaped by the events of 1914-19, the Great War and Versailles. The past two decades have been shaping the 21st.

If we limit ourselves to domestic politics it’s been a time of big change with big implications.

Both parties have been overthrowing the elites and establishments that reigned for at least half a century. In doing so, both parties are changing their essential natures. In both cases the rebellion is driven largely by a bottom-line bitterness: You didn’t care about us, and now you will be gone.

Among Democrats it is the rising left, the progressives, kicking away from the old Clintonian moderates, from old party ways and identifications. They hate Clintonism almost more than they hate conservatism. And they are hated back. In a recent conversation with a politician who was a high official in the Clinton administration, I asked: When you go talk to progressives about your differences, how does that conversation go? “I don’t speak to them,” he shot back. The new New Left—we have to find a better name—is closer to socialism or proudly socialistic. What they feel for the old party establishment: “Thanks for standing up for the little guy while your trade deals made you and your friends rich.” “Thanks for creating a tax system in which you guys become billionaires while everyone else sank.”

The left-wing millennials will rise because the young always do. It’s tempting to compare the rise of the left in the party now with the 1970s and the rise of the old New Left. Boomer leftists then were mad at America over the war, and some of them had read Marx for the first time. But they loved America, and they went on to show that love as the workhorses they were—the first to put the lights on in the office or the institution in the morning, the last to put them off at night.

The rising millennial left seems to love high abstractions—economic justice, global movements for change. But they weren’t raised in a patriotic age, they weren’t taught what in America is admirable, even noble. Do they love America? Do they love this thing we have and are part of in the same, moist-eyed way Americans have in the past? It’s unclear. But if they don’t, when they triumph we’re in trouble.

On the Republican side the rise of Donald Trump revealed the new party to itself. It is a big-government, antiwar, populist party that is conservative-leaning in its social policy. Any card-carrying Trump supporter will immediately say, after lauding the economy, that he has delivered on the courts and has aligned his administration, for all his personal New Yorkiness and indifference to social issues, with those who think conservatively.

Republicans in 2016 were to the right of party leaders, elders and professionals on essential issues—immigration, political correctness, the LGBTQ regime and the arguments it spurred in the town council about bathroom policies, and in schools over such questions as, “Are we still allowed in sports to have a girls team composed of biological girls and a boy’s team composed of biological boys? Will we be sued?”

They knew that on these questions and others the party’s establishments didn’t really care about their views or share them.

When Republicans rebel against the status quo, it’s a powerful thing. They produced in their 2016 rebellion something new: They changed the nature of the presidency itself. The pushing back against elites entailed a pushing against standards. It’s always possible a coming presidential election will look like a snap-back to the old days, a senator versus a governor, one experienced political professional against another. But we will never really go back to the old days. Anyone can become president now, anyone big and colorful and in line with prevailing public sentiment.

We have entered the age of the postheroic presidency. Certain low ways are forgiven, certain rough ways now established. Americans once asked a lot of their presidents. They had to be people not only of high competence and solid, sober backgrounds, but high character. In modern presidencies you can trace a line from, say, Harry S. Truman, who had it in abundance, to Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan, who also did.

But the heroic conception of the presidency is over. Bill Clinton and his embarrassments damaged it. Two unwon wars and the great recession killed it. “If you like your doctor you can keep your doctor” buried it. When you deliberately lie like that, you are declaring you have no respect for the people. And the people noticed.

They would like to have someone admirable in the job, someone whose virtues move them, but they’ve decided it’s not necessary. They think: Just keep the economy growing, don’t start any new wars, and push back against the social-issues maximalists if you can.

In the last cycle we spoke of shy Trump voters—those who didn’t want to get in an argument over supporting him. I suspect this cycle we’ll call them closeted Trump voters—those who don’t want to be associated with the postheroic moment, who disapprove of it, but see no realistic alternative.

In time we’ll see you lose something when you go postheroic. Colorful characters will make things more divided, not less. They’ll entertain but not ennoble. And the world will think less of us—America has become a clownish, unserious country with clownish, unserious leaders—which will have an impact on our ability to influence events.

I close with another entity of American life that should be worried about seeming like it doesn’t care about its own country. It is what used to be called big business.

America has always been in love with the idea of success. It’s rewarded the creation of wealth, made household saints of the richest men in the world. We were proud they lived here.

But big business, especially big tech executives and bankers, should be thinking: In this century they’re coming at you left and right.

The left used to say, “You didn’t build that,” while the right said, “You did.” But now there’s a convergence, with both sides starting to think: This country made you. It made the roads you traveled; it made the expensive peace in which your imagination flourished; it created the whole world of arrangements that let you become rich.

You owe us something for that. You owe us your loyalty. And if you allow us to discern—and in this century you have been busy allowing us!—that you do not really care about America, that your first loyalty isn’t to us but to “the world” or “global markets,” then we will come down on you hard.

It isn’t only parties that can be broken up in this century, the one that isn’t coming but is here.
Title: Re: Noonan: The Post Heroic Presidency
Post by: G M on December 27, 2019, 05:32:09 PM
The America we were born in is dead.

Now it's just a matter of salvaging what we can from what is left.



There's quite a bit that Peggy does not get about Trump IMHO, but there is substance here as well.

The Century of the Postheroic Presidency
Bill Clinton started the trend. By 2016 voters had given up on high standards in the White House.

By Peggy Noonan
Dec. 26, 2019 6:56 pm ET


When we think about current history we tend to be expecting or predicting something as opposed to experiencing something. But what we need to understand now is that the 21st century isn’t new. It still feels new, but it isn’t. We are entering its third decade. We have been waiting for the century to take its shape and fully become itself, but it’s already doing that.

The 20th century was shaped by the events of 1914-19, the Great War and Versailles. The past two decades have been shaping the 21st.

If we limit ourselves to domestic politics it’s been a time of big change with big implications.

Both parties have been overthrowing the elites and establishments that reigned for at least half a century. In doing so, both parties are changing their essential natures. In both cases the rebellion is driven largely by a bottom-line bitterness: You didn’t care about us, and now you will be gone.

Among Democrats it is the rising left, the progressives, kicking away from the old Clintonian moderates, from old party ways and identifications. They hate Clintonism almost more than they hate conservatism. And they are hated back. In a recent conversation with a politician who was a high official in the Clinton administration, I asked: When you go talk to progressives about your differences, how does that conversation go? “I don’t speak to them,” he shot back. The new New Left—we have to find a better name—is closer to socialism or proudly socialistic. What they feel for the old party establishment: “Thanks for standing up for the little guy while your trade deals made you and your friends rich.” “Thanks for creating a tax system in which you guys become billionaires while everyone else sank.”

The left-wing millennials will rise because the young always do. It’s tempting to compare the rise of the left in the party now with the 1970s and the rise of the old New Left. Boomer leftists then were mad at America over the war, and some of them had read Marx for the first time. But they loved America, and they went on to show that love as the workhorses they were—the first to put the lights on in the office or the institution in the morning, the last to put them off at night.

The rising millennial left seems to love high abstractions—economic justice, global movements for change. But they weren’t raised in a patriotic age, they weren’t taught what in America is admirable, even noble. Do they love America? Do they love this thing we have and are part of in the same, moist-eyed way Americans have in the past? It’s unclear. But if they don’t, when they triumph we’re in trouble.

On the Republican side the rise of Donald Trump revealed the new party to itself. It is a big-government, antiwar, populist party that is conservative-leaning in its social policy. Any card-carrying Trump supporter will immediately say, after lauding the economy, that he has delivered on the courts and has aligned his administration, for all his personal New Yorkiness and indifference to social issues, with those who think conservatively.

Republicans in 2016 were to the right of party leaders, elders and professionals on essential issues—immigration, political correctness, the LGBTQ regime and the arguments it spurred in the town council about bathroom policies, and in schools over such questions as, “Are we still allowed in sports to have a girls team composed of biological girls and a boy’s team composed of biological boys? Will we be sued?”

They knew that on these questions and others the party’s establishments didn’t really care about their views or share them.

When Republicans rebel against the status quo, it’s a powerful thing. They produced in their 2016 rebellion something new: They changed the nature of the presidency itself. The pushing back against elites entailed a pushing against standards. It’s always possible a coming presidential election will look like a snap-back to the old days, a senator versus a governor, one experienced political professional against another. But we will never really go back to the old days. Anyone can become president now, anyone big and colorful and in line with prevailing public sentiment.

We have entered the age of the postheroic presidency. Certain low ways are forgiven, certain rough ways now established. Americans once asked a lot of their presidents. They had to be people not only of high competence and solid, sober backgrounds, but high character. In modern presidencies you can trace a line from, say, Harry S. Truman, who had it in abundance, to Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan, who also did.

But the heroic conception of the presidency is over. Bill Clinton and his embarrassments damaged it. Two unwon wars and the great recession killed it. “If you like your doctor you can keep your doctor” buried it. When you deliberately lie like that, you are declaring you have no respect for the people. And the people noticed.

They would like to have someone admirable in the job, someone whose virtues move them, but they’ve decided it’s not necessary. They think: Just keep the economy growing, don’t start any new wars, and push back against the social-issues maximalists if you can.

In the last cycle we spoke of shy Trump voters—those who didn’t want to get in an argument over supporting him. I suspect this cycle we’ll call them closeted Trump voters—those who don’t want to be associated with the postheroic moment, who disapprove of it, but see no realistic alternative.

In time we’ll see you lose something when you go postheroic. Colorful characters will make things more divided, not less. They’ll entertain but not ennoble. And the world will think less of us—America has become a clownish, unserious country with clownish, unserious leaders—which will have an impact on our ability to influence events.

I close with another entity of American life that should be worried about seeming like it doesn’t care about its own country. It is what used to be called big business.

America has always been in love with the idea of success. It’s rewarded the creation of wealth, made household saints of the richest men in the world. We were proud they lived here.

But big business, especially big tech executives and bankers, should be thinking: In this century they’re coming at you left and right.

The left used to say, “You didn’t build that,” while the right said, “You did.” But now there’s a convergence, with both sides starting to think: This country made you. It made the roads you traveled; it made the expensive peace in which your imagination flourished; it created the whole world of arrangements that let you become rich.

You owe us something for that. You owe us your loyalty. And if you allow us to discern—and in this century you have been busy allowing us!—that you do not really care about America, that your first loyalty isn’t to us but to “the world” or “global markets,” then we will come down on you hard.

It isn’t only parties that can be broken up in this century, the one that isn’t coming but is here.
Title: NRO: Toward a conservative institutionalism
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 29, 2020, 02:10:02 PM


https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2020/02/10/toward-a-conservative-institutionalism/
Title: Bolton and the consequences of executive privilege
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 29, 2020, 02:10:52 PM
second post





https://www.amgreatness.com/2020/01/28/bolton-and-the-consequences-of-the-destruction-of-executive-privilege/
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on January 29, 2020, 02:25:02 PM
Funny how NSA holds up release
of book but NYSlimes seems to get an inside scoop that of course is negative to Trump and just in time to shove it is the nation's face at this time

Amazing how the NYT can seem to get information on just about anything they need in order to advance the Dem Party cause.
Title: Ross Douhat: The Age of Decadence
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 09, 2020, 12:23:33 PM


The Age of Decadence
Cut the drama. The real story of the West in the 21st century is one of stalemate and stagnation.
By Ross Douthat
An Opinion columnist and the author of the forthcoming book “The Decadent Society,” from which this essay is adapted.

Feb. 7, 2020

1225
Everyone knows that we live in a time of constant acceleration, of vertiginous change, of transformation or looming disaster everywhere you look. Partisans are girding for civil war, robots are coming for our jobs, and the news feels like a multicar pileup every time you fire up Twitter. Our pessimists see crises everywhere; our optimists insist that we’re just anxious because the world is changing faster than our primitive ape-brains can process.

But what if the feeling of acceleration is an illusion, conjured by our expectations of perpetual progress and exaggerated by the distorting filter of the internet? What if we — or at least we in the developed world, in America and Europe and the Pacific Rim — really inhabit an era in which repetition is more the norm than invention; in which stalemate rather than revolution stamps our politics; in which sclerosis afflicts public institutions and private life alike; in which new developments in science, new exploratory projects, consistently underdeliver? What if the meltdown at the Iowa caucuses, an antique system undone by pseudo-innovation and incompetence, was much more emblematic of our age than any great catastrophe or breakthrough?

The truth of the first decades of the 21st century, a truth that helped give us the Trump presidency but will still be an important truth when he is gone, is that we probably aren’t entering a 1930-style crisis for Western liberalism or hurtling forward toward transhumanism or extinction. Instead, we are aging, comfortable and stuck, cut off from the past and no longer optimistic about the future, spurning both memory and ambition while we await some saving innovation or revelation, growing old unhappily together in the light of tiny screens.

The farther you get from that iPhone glow, the clearer it becomes: Our civilization has entered into decadence.

The word “decadence” is used promiscuously but rarely precisely. In political debates, it’s associated with a lack of resolution in the face of threats — with Neville Chamberlain and W.B. Yeats’s line about the best lacking all conviction. In the popular imagination, it’s associated with sex and gluttony, with pornographic romances and chocolate strawberries. Aesthetically and intellectually it hints at exhaustion, finality — “the feeling, at once oppressive and exalting, of being the last in a series,” in the words of the Russian poet Vyacheslav Ivanov.

But it’s possible to distill a useful definition from all these associations. Following in the footsteps of the great cultural critic Jacques Barzun, we can say that decadence refers to economic stagnation, institutional decay and cultural and intellectual exhaustion at a high level of material prosperity and technological development. Under decadence, Barzun wrote, “The forms of art as of life seem exhausted, the stages of development have been run through. Institutions function painfully. Repetition and frustration are the intolerable result.” He added, “When people accept futility and the absurd as normal, the culture is decadent.” And crucially, the stagnation is often a consequence of previous development: The decadent society is, by definition, a victim of its own success.

Note that this definition does not imply a definitive moral or aesthetic judgment. (“The term is not a slur,” Barzun wrote. “It is a technical label.”) A society that generates a lot of bad movies need not be decadent; a society that makes the same movies over and over again might be. A society run by the cruel and arrogant might not be decadent; a society where even the wise and good can’t legislate might be. A crime-ridden society isn’t necessarily decadent; a peaceable, aging, childless society beset by flares of nihilistic violence looks closer to our definition.

Nor does this definition imply that decadence is necessarily an overture to a catastrophe, in which Visigoths torch Manhattan or the coronavirus has dominion over all. History isn’t always a morality play, and decadence is a comfortable disease: The Chinese and Ottoman empires persisted for centuries under decadent conditions, and it was more than 400 years from Caligula to the actual fall of Rome.

“What fascinates and terrifies us about the Roman Empire is not that it finally went smash,” wrote W.H. Auden of that endless autumn, but rather that “it managed to last for four centuries without creativity, warmth, or hope.”

Whether we are waiting for Christians or barbarians, a renaissance or the Singularity, the dilemma that Auden described is now not Rome’s but ours.


II.
“Do people on your coast think all this is real?”

The tech executive sounded curious, proud, a little insecure. We were talking in the San Francisco office of a venture capital firm, a vaulted space washed in Californian sun. He was referring to the whole gilded world around the Bay, the entire internet economy.

That was in 2015. Here are three stories from the five years since.

A young man comes to New York City. He’s a striver, a hustler, working the borderlands between entrepreneurship and con artistry. His first effort, a credit card for affluent millennials, yanks him into the celebrity economy, where he meets an ambitious rapper-businessman. Together they plan a kind of internet brokerage where celebrities can sell their mere presence to the highest bidder. As a brand-enhancing advertisement for the company, they decide to host a major music festival — an exclusive affair on a Caribbean island for influencers, festival obsessives and the youthful rich.

The festival’s online rollout is a great success. There is a viral video of supermodels and Instagram celebrities frolicking on a deserted beach, a sleek website for customers and the curious, and in the end, more than 5,000 people buy tickets, at an average cost of $2,500 to $4,000 — the superfluity of a rich society, yours for the right sales pitch.

But the festival as pitched does not exist. Instead, our entrepreneur’s plans collapse one by one. The private island’s owners back out of the deal. The local government doesn’t cooperate. Even after all the ticket sales, the money isn’t there, and he has to keep selling new amenities to ticket buyers to pay for the ones they’ve already purchased. He does have a team working around the clock to ready … something for the paying customers, but what they offer in the end is a sea of FEMA tents vaguely near a beach, a catering concern that supplies slimy sandwiches, and a lot of cheap tequila.

Amazingly, the people actually come — bright young things whose Instagram streams become a hilarious chronicle of dashed expectations, while the failed entrepreneur tries to keep order with a bullhorn before absconding to New York, where he finds disgrace, arrest and the inevitable Netflix documentary.

That’s the story of Billy McFarland and the Fyre Festival. It’s a small-time story; the next one is bigger.

A girl grows up in Texas, she gets accepted to Stanford, she wants to be Steve Jobs. She has an idea that will change an industry that hasn’t changed in years: the boring but essential world of blood testing. She envisions a machine, dubbed the Edison, that will test for diseases using just a single drop of blood. And like Jobs she quits college to figure out how to build it.

Ten years later, she is the internet era’s leading female billionaire, with a stream of venture capital, a sprawling campus, a $10 billion valuation for her company, and a lucrative deal with Walgreens to use her machines in every store. Her story is a counterpoint to every criticism you hear about Silicon Valley — that it’s a callow boys’ club, that its virtual realities don’t make the world of flesh and blood a better place, that it solves problems of convenience but doesn’t cure the sick. And she is the toast of an elite, in tech and politics alike, that wants to believe the Edisonian spirit lives on.

But the Edison box — despite endless effort and the best tech team that all that venture capital can buy — doesn’t work. And over time, as the company keeps expanding, it ceases even trying to innovate and becomes instead a fraud, using all its money and big-time backers to discredit whistle-blowers. Which succeeds until it doesn’t, at which point the company and all its billions evaporate — leaving behind a fraud prosecution, a best-selling exposé and the inevitable podcast and HBO documentary to sustain its founder’s fame.

That’s the story of Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos. It’s a big story. But our third story is bigger still, and it isn’t finished yet.

An internet company decides to revolutionize an industry — the taxi and limousine market — that defines old-school business-government cooperation, with all the attendant bureaucracy and unsatisfying service. It promises investors that it can buy its way to market dominance and use cutting-edge tech to find unglimpsed efficiencies. On the basis of that promise, it raises billions of dollars across its 10-year rise, during which time it becomes a byword for internet-era success, the model for how to disrupt an industry. By the time it goes public in 2019, it has over $11 billion in annual revenue — real money, exchanged for real services, nothing fraudulent about it.

Yet this amazing success story isn’t actually making any profit, even at such scale; instead, it’s losing billions, including $5 billion in one particularly costly quarter. After 10 years of growth, it has smashed the old business model of its industry, weakened legacy competitors and created value for consumers — but it has done all this using the awesome power of free money, building a company that would collapse into bankruptcy if that money were withdrawn. And it has solved none of the problems keeping it from profitability: The technology it uses isn’t proprietary or complex; its rival in disruption controls 30 percent of the market; the legacy players are still very much alive; and all of its paths to reduce its losses — charging higher prices, paying its workers less — would destroy the advantages that it has built.

So it sits there, a unicorn unlike any other, with a plan to become profitable that involves vague promises to somehow monetize all its user data and a specific promise that its investment in a different new technology — the self-driving car, much ballyhooed but as yet not exactly real — will make the math add up.

That’s the story of Uber — so far. It isn’t an Instagram fantasy or a naked fraud; it managed to go public and maintain its outsize valuation, unlike its fellow unicorn WeWork, whose recent attempt at an I.P.O. hurled it into crisis. But it is, for now, an example of a major 21st-century company invented entirely out of surplus, and floated by the hope that with enough money and market share, you can will a profitable company into existence. Which makes it another case study in what happens when an extraordinarily rich society can’t find enough new ideas that justify investing all its stockpiled wealth. We inflate bubbles and then pop them, invest in Theranos and then repent, and the supposed cutting edge of capitalism is increasingly defined by technologies that have almost arrived, business models that are on their way to profitability, by runways that go on and on without the plane achieving takeoff.

Do people on your coast think all this is real? When the tech executive asked me that, I told him that we did — that the promise of Silicon Valley was as much an article of faith for those of us watching from the outside as for its insiders; that we both envied the world of digital and believed in it, as the one place where American innovation was clearly still alive. And I would probably say the same thing now because, despite the stories I’ve just told, the internet economy is still as real as 21st-century growth and innovation gets.

But what this tells us, unfortunately, is that 21st-century growth and innovation are not at all that we were promised they would be.

III.
The decadent economy is not an impoverished one. The United States is an extraordinarily wealthy country, its middle class prosperous beyond the dreams of centuries past, its welfare state effective at easing the pain of recessions, and the last decade of growth has (slowly) raised our living standard to a new high after the losses from the Great Recession.

But slowly compounding growth is not the same as dynamism. American entrepreneurship has been declining since the 1970s: Early in the Jimmy Carter presidency, 17 percent of all United States businesses had been founded in the previous year; by the start of Barack Obama’s second term, that rate was about 10 percent. In the late 1980s, almost half of United States companies were “young,” meaning less than five years old; by the Great Recession, that share was down to only 39 percent, and the share of “old” firms (founded more than 15 years ago) rose from 22 percent to 34 percent over a similar period. And those companies increasingly sit on cash or pass it back to shareholders rather than investing in new enterprises. From World War II through the 1980s, according to a recent report from Senator Marco Rubio’s office, private domestic investment often approached 10 percent of G.D.P.; in 2019, despite a corporate tax cut intended to get money off the sidelines, the investment-to-G.D.P. ratio was less than half of that.


This suggests that the people with the most experience starting businesses look around at their investment opportunities and see many more start-ups that resemble Theranos than resemble Amazon, let alone the behemoths of the old economy. And the dearth of corporate investment also means that the steady climb of the stock market has boosted the wealth of a rentier class — basically, already-rich investors getting richer off dividends — rather than reflecting surging prosperity in general.

Behind this deceleration lurks the specter of technological stagnation. Andrew Yang’s presidential campaign notwithstanding, leaping advances in robotics aren’t about to throw everybody out of work. Productivity growth, the best measure of technology’s effect on the economy, has been weak in the United States and weaker in Europe ever since the first dot-com bust.

In 2017 a group of economists published a paper asking, “Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?” The answer was a clear yes: “We present a wide range of evidence from various industries, products, and firms showing that research effort is rising substantially while research productivity is declining sharply.” In his 2011 book “The Great Stagnation,” Tyler Cowen cited an analysis from the Pentagon physicist Jonathan Huebner, who modeled an innovations-to-population ratio for the last 600 years: It shows a slowly ascending arc through the late 19th century, when major inventions were rather easy to conceive and adopt, and a steepening decline ever since, as rich countries spend more and more on research to diminishing returns.

These trends don’t mean progress has ceased. Fewer blockbuster drugs are being approved, but last month still brought news of a steady generational fall in cancer deaths, and a possible breakthrough in cystic fibrosis treatment. Scientific research has a replication crisis, but it’s still easy to discern areas of clear advancement — from the frontiers of Crispr to the study of ancient DNA.

But the trends reveal a slowdown, a mounting difficulty in achieving breakthroughs — a bottleneck if you’re optimistic, a ceiling if you aren’t. And the relative exception, the internet and all its wonders, highlights the general pattern.


The Northwestern University economist Robert Gordon, one of the most persuasive theorists of stagnation, points out that the period from 1840 to 1970 featured dramatic growth and innovation across multiple arenas — energy and transportation and medicine and agriculture and communication and the built environment. Whereas in the last two generations, progress has become increasingly monodimensional — all tech and nothing else. Even within the Silicon Valley landscape, the clear success stories are often the purest computer-and-internet enterprises — social media companies, device manufacturers, software companies — while the frauds and failures and possible catastrophes involve efforts to use tech to transform some other industry, from music festivals to office-space rentals to blood tests.

The Silicon Valley tycoon Peter Thiel, another prominent stagnationist, likes to snark that “we wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” And even the people who will explain to you, in high seriousness, that nobody would really want a flying car can’t get around the basic points that Thiel, Gordon, and others have been making. Take a single one of the great breakthroughs of the industrial age — planes and trains and automobiles, antibiotics and indoor plumbing — and it still looms larger in our everyday existence than all of the contributions of the tech revolution combined.

We used to travel faster, build bigger, live longer; now we communicate faster, chatter more, snap more selfies. We used to go to the moon; now we make movies about space — amazing movies with completely convincing special effects that make it seem as if we’ve left earth behind. And we hype the revolutionary character of our communications devices in order to convince ourselves that our earlier expectations were just fantasies, “Jetsons stuff” — that this progress is the only progress we could reasonably expect.

IV.
With this stagnation comes social torpor. America is a more peaceable country than it was in 1970 or 1990, with lower crime rates and safer streets and better-behaved kids. But it’s also a country where that supposedly most American of qualities, wanderlust, has markedly declined: Americans no longer “go west” (or east or north or south) in search of opportunity the way they did 50 years ago; the rate at which people move between states has fallen from 3.5 percent in the early 1970s to 1.4 percent in 2010. Nor do Americans change jobs as often as they once did. For all the boosterish talk about retraining and self-employment, all the fears of a precarious job market, Americans are less likely to switch employers than they were a generation ago.

Meanwhile, those well-behaved young people are more depressed than prior cohorts, less likely to drive drunk or get pregnant but more tempted toward self-harm. They are also the most medicated generation in history, from the drugs prescribed for A.D.H.D. to the antidepressants offered to anxious teens, and most of the medications are designed to be calming, offering a smoothed-out experience rather than a spiky high. For adults, the increasingly legal drug of choice is marijuana, whose prototypical user is a relaxed and harmless figure — comfortably numb, experiencing stagnation as a chill good time.

And then there is the opioid epidemic, whose spread across the unhappiest parts of white America passed almost unnoticed in elite circles for a while because the drug itself quiets rather than inflames, supplying a gentle euphoria that lets its users simply slip away, day by day and bit by bit, without causing anyone any trouble. The best book on the epidemic, by the journalist Sam Quinones, is called “Dreamland” for a reason.

In the land of the lotus eaters, people are also less likely to invest in the future in the most literal of ways. The United States birthrate was once an outlier among developed countries, but since the Great Recession, it has descended rapidly, converging with the wealthy world’s general below-replacement norm. This demographic decline worsens economic stagnation; economists reckoning with its impact keep finding stark effects. A 2016 analysis found that a 10 percent increase in the fraction of the population over 60 decreased the growth rate of states’ per capita G.D.P. by 5.5 percent. A 2018 paper found that companies in younger labor markets are more innovative; another found that the aging of society helped explain the growth of monopolies and the declining rate of start-ups.

This feedback loop — in which sterility feeds stagnation, which further discourages childbearing, which sinks society ever-deeper into old age — makes demographic decline a clear example of how decadence overtakes a civilization. For much of Western history, declining birthrates reflected straightforward gains to human welfare: victories over infant mortality, over backbreaking agrarian economies, over confining expectations for young women. But once we crossed over into permanent below-replacement territory, the birth dearth began undercutting the very forces (youth, risk -taking, dynamism) necessary for continued growth, meaning that any further gains to individual welfare are coming at the future’s expense.

V.
Now the reader will probably have an obvious objection to this portrait of senescence and stagnation: What about politics? Would a decadent society really reproduce the 1969 Days of Rage on social media, with online mobs swarming and the old extremes back in action? Would it produce a populist surge and a socialist revival, a domestic civil war so polarizing that Americans could mistake the work of Russian hackers for the sincere convictions of their fellow citizens? Would it elect Donald Trump as president?

Strangely, the answer might be “yes.” Both populism and socialism, Trump and Bernie Sanders, represent expressions of discontent with decadence, rebellions against the technocratic management of stagnation that defined the Obama era. “Make America Great Again” is the slogan of a reactionary futurism, a howl against a future that wasn’t what was promised, and the Sanders Revolution promises that what the left lost somewhere in the Reagan era can be regained, and the climb to utopia begun anew.

But the desire for a different future only goes so far, and in practical terms the populist era has mostly delivered a new and deeper stalemate. From Trump’s Washington to the capitals of Europe, Western politics is now polarized between anti-establishment forces that are unprepared to competently govern and an establishment that’s too disliked to effectively rule.


The structures of the Western system, the United States Constitution and administrative state, the half-built federalism of the European Union, are everywhere creaking and everywhere critiqued. But our stalemates make them impervious to substantial reform, let alone to revolution. The most strident European nationalists don’t even want to leave the European Union, and Trump’s first term has actually been much like Obama’s second, with failed legislation and contested executive orders, and policy made mostly by negotiation between the bureaucracy and the courts.

There is a virtual Trump presidency whose depredations terrify liberals, one that airs on Fox in which Trump goes from strength to strength. But the real thing is closer to the genre the president knows best, reality television, than to the actual return of history. (Trump’s recent State of the Union, with its theatrics and premature declaration of victory over decadence, was a particularly striking case in point.)

Likewise in the wider political culture. The madness of online crowds, the way the internet has allowed the return of certain forms of political extremism and the proliferation of conspiracy theories — yes, if our decadence is to end in the return of grand ideological combat and street-brawl politics, this might be how that ending starts.

But our battles mostly still reflect what Barzun called “the deadlocks of our time” — the Kavanaugh Affair replaying the Clarence Thomas hearings, the debates over political correctness cycling us backward to fights that were fresh and new in the 1970s and ’80s. The hysteria with which we’re experiencing them may represent nothing more than the way that a decadent society manages its political passions, by encouraging people to playact extremism, to re-enact the 1930s or 1968 on social media, to approach radical politics as a sport, a hobby, a kick to the body chemistry, that doesn’t put anything in their relatively comfortable late-modern lives at risk.

Close Twitter, log off Facebook, turn off cable television, and what do you see in the Trump-era United States? Campuses in tumult? No: The small wave of campus protests, most of them focused around parochial controversies, crested before Trump’s election and have diminished since. Urban riots? No: The post-Ferguson flare of urban protest has died down. A wave of political violence? A small spike, maybe, but one that’s more analogous to school shootings than to the political clashes of the 1930s or ’60s, in the sense that it involves disturbed people appointing themselves knights-errant and going forth to slaughter, rather than organized movements with any kind of concrete goal.

Internet-era political derangement is partially responsible for white supremacists goading one another into shooting sprees, or the Sanders supporter who tried to massacre Republicans at a congressional baseball game in 2017. But these episodes are terrible and also exceptional; they have not yet established a pattern that looks anything like the early 1970s, when there were more than 2,500 bombings across the continental United States in one 18-month period.

Maybe today’s outliers are the forerunners of something worse. But our terrorists don’t feel like prophets or precursors; they often feel more like marks.

Title: Seven Sins of Statistical Misinterpretation
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 03, 2020, 06:25:00 AM
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-seven-deadly-sins-of-statistical-misinterpretation-and-how-to-avoid-them?utm_source=pocket-newtabThe
Title: The age of chaos
Post by: G M on March 07, 2020, 11:30:14 PM
https://straightlinelogic.com/2020/03/06/irrelevant-details-by-robert-gore/
Title: Big news
Post by: ccp on March 08, 2020, 02:58:05 PM
Katherine just got me a MAGA coffee mug.  :-D

but it came with a tiny chip in it.   :-o
Title: VDH: America in a New, Upside Down World
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 16, 2020, 12:09:34 PM
https://amgreatness.com/2020/03/15/america-in-a-new-upside-down-world/
Title: The Commie China Virus and the Rural Urban Divide
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 25, 2020, 03:03:07 PM
March 25, 2020   View On Website
The Coronavirus and the Rural-Urban Divide
By: Antonia Colibasanu

The coronavirus crisis is a source of common concern across the globe and a shared invisible enemy. But as it develops, the crisis will push toward a global reset. The distribution of power around the world had become more diffuse before the coronavirus outbreak, with countries like China and Russia increasing their role at the global level and nationalism growing at the expense of the authority of multilateral institutions. But with the coronavirus pandemic, the deepening differences between classes and between rural and urban societies are not only becoming more visible worldwide – they are restructuring societies and thus reshaping national strategies.

In the last chapter of my book "Redrawing the World Map: Contemporary Geopolitics and Geoeconomics" (to come out later this year in Romanian and then in English), I write about how the social changes brought on by digitization, while they differ from place to place, will eventually restructure all nation-states and the global system. Social changes also reshape how we see the world, geopolitically. My argument referred to the way that resources – including human resources – change and evolve over time depending on the ecosystem they are part of, and depending on that system’s geography and social patterns.

I argue that globalization and access to digitization made it possible for people living in very different locations to consider themselves peers. In the process, people working from laptops in their offices, or independently from home or some coffee shop, have been uniting the urban zones of the world. I also argue that while “urban” areas begin to share common characteristics all over the world, rural areas will not only remain distinct from one country to the next, but as a whole will grow increasingly different from urban centers within each nation. The social geography of rural areas, depending on the specific structure of each nation-state, will have a great impact on nation-states’ strategies. The characteristics of a state’s rural reality – and its interconnections, similarities and tensions with rural counterparts elsewhere – will determine to what extent that state cooperates with or opposes other states. The urban setting is where they come to talk; it is a setting for mutual understanding.
 
(click to enlarge)

What this means is that society, and the settings in which it acts, will become more important to the state’s strategic imperatives – not less, no matter the promises of technology. Demographics matter because they are the very core of society and because they are ever-changing, at distinct paces, within each society. Communities, through their levels of education and specialization as well as their living environments, determine the country’s economic development and, with that, its imperatives. I wrote the introduction of my book too early to consider the effects of the novel coronavirus on demographics and society overall – even if I acknowledged its potential to drive significant changes.

Now I am beginning to see what may come. As of this writing, the coronavirus has already brought Europe to a close. Extraordinary things are happening. Italy is in complete lockdown; Paris is quiet for the first time in history. Borders have been resurrected: The checkpoints are back in use. Goods are allowed to move through them, while only citizens returning to their home countries may pass. Nation-states have banned exports of essential medical equipment to fight the virus. In this crisis, EU member states are visibly national first and foremost. They seek solutions in the nationalization of businesses, and the national military is called in to help.

There are several dimensions to discuss when talking about EU resilience to the coronavirus crisis. First, coordination among member states is what makes the EU relevant – the states administer borders and essential trade traffic. Second, they coordinate on a bilateral level, sending in timely resources and medical aid. Health is a prerogative of the nation-state. However, the way each country reacts to the needs of the other will determine intra-EU relations. Third, how EU institutions coordinate national actions following the crisis will determine the future of the EU. The public perceives the EU through what Brussels does to help. So, we will know how the EU evolves based on how it acts in front of its public.

Ultimately, the future of the EU, and that of the world, depends on how society is shaped by the coronavirus pandemic. We are all subject to “social distancing” policies imposed by nation-states in fighting contagion. Much has been said and written about how social distancing will affect supply chains and the economy – because people may choose to work or not to work, because they may revolt against the policy considering the need to support themselves. The financial costs are high. Much has also been said and written about how labor will change – telecommuting, for those who can work remotely, will potentially set new standards. The opportunities may also be high. All writings I have read also point to inevitable yet uncertain changes approaching, including the potential for a depression.

However, social distancing, in practice, doesn’t affect only working habits. It relates to personal feelings, of which the most important is fear. You fear the virus, therefore you keep your distance. You don’t do that because someone told you to; you do it because you feel you should, for your own sake. It is personal, even if it is imposed. Fear of getting sick with something that is not necessarily deadly depends on the trust you have in the health system. Fear of getting sick along with many others depends on the trust in your country’s ability to cope with a situation where a lot of people get sick and many others are economically inactive. The two are very distinct matters, distinct fears.

Anthropologists teach us how humans and humanity have evolved and have been shaped by their fears. It is fears and the actions taken to deal with fears that create social changes. The geography people live in sets them to fear differently and therefore respond differently to challenges. Geopolitics takes into consideration the behavior of the mountain people, which is different from that of other people, because they fear different things. Similarly, in the coronavirus pandemic, the urban population, while more connected through digitization, in a much more enclosed environment, behaves differently from those living in villages.

The people living in urban environments have better access to medical services than those living in villages. It matters greatly for urban areas whether the health care system is under pressure; for most rural areas, the health care system is meager or nonexistent. True, differences exist between countries – the rural setting in Germany is different from that of France, with people having more access to medical facilities in Germany than in France. But overall, medical care for the urban population is a lot more accessible than it is for the rural population. Similarly, the role of the state and its economic power are perceived differently in rural versus urban areas, which are not created equal.

In the coronavirus crisis, considering the potential for the medical system to be overloaded and the closeness imposed by urban settings, the fear of living in an apartment is intense. Acknowledging that you don’t have access to services you used to have access to means acknowledging some of your needs will not be met. And when social distancing includes state-mandated isolation (as is the case in Italy, Spain and France right now), having to stay indoors for longer than a few days and fill out forms to show the local police authority just to walk your dog certainly has some effects on your lifestyle and psychological state. Fighting the negative effects of the quarantine may include singing on the balcony, as we saw in Italy, but this means only that there are negative effects to fight.

In the process of social distancing, we are testing the links between social groups. The well-off will behave differently from the poor, the young differently from the old. In a town, all groups have access to the same services – in an unequal manner. Observing the food bought in the rush hours for the quarantine is a lesson in how different in both lifestyle and ultimately in income urban people are. Their tolerance, their acceptance for the other doesn’t relate to their willingness to help. For all the physical closeness there is between urban people, there is just as much distance. Living in an apartment doesn’t mean you talk to your neighbors outside of saying “hello.” Not talking disengages – you are too busy, but also you need not know. If you don’t know that a neighbor needs help, then you have no responsibility to help. The urban social network is that of class, and once in a class, in a group, relations with the other groups are minimal.

For the rural, things are different. There are groups in the villages, as there are influencers. But the network rules are different. It is family ties that matter, before economic classes. Links between people are well established, and the same from one generation to another. When you are living in the countryside, you are generally more aware of geography and closeness than you would be in the city. You know a lot about your neighbors because you need to deal with them on a more or less daily basis. The plots of land around the villagers’ houses don’t impose human distance, as good neighborliness includes helping out one another. The state is largely not present – but God is. Religion and family are key concepts for what forms the basis for trust in rural areas.

During the pandemic, fear in rural areas is dependent on their connection and their dependency on the cities. In this sense, the more distant they are, the less affected they get. However, considering contagion rules, once someone gets infected, the rural setting facilitates infection. Imposing social distancing in such communities is difficult – considering their poor access to public health services, rural people consider themselves doomed from the very beginning. They live not in fear, but in the hope that God will help them again. Because no one else really helped before. They need not learn that medical services are available, because it is in distant hospitals that they can get access to such services – in theory. Digitization, when available, is only for communication with and learning about the rest of the world. They rely mostly on religious services and their own.

The coronavirus crisis creates different fears for different geographies. While digitization gives all people access to information, fears of the unknown – which include not only the virus but also the way that it is and could be dealt with at all levels – deepen differences between the urban and the rural. While it's unclear how the EU will come out of this new crisis, and while it's urgent that nation-states act and show they can fight the coronavirus, it is clear that the outbreak will also affect the distance between the urban and the rural and that between the social classes. In effect, the crisis is accelerating a process that was already happening, as fears create social changes affecting the structure of society, everywhere around the globe. Urban reactions are similar, their problems too. They may bring the world together. But rural reactions are not similar – and we don’t know them yet.   




Title: George Friedman: Thinking about this moment
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 02, 2020, 08:57:16 AM
April 2, 2020 View On Website
Open as PDF

George Friedman's Thoughts: Thinking About This Moment
By: George Friedman
Geopolitical Futures

My job is to write, and my goal in writing is to put things in perspective. The world has been to me an endlessly shifting kaleidoscope of nations, all moving in different directions that can be predicted by understanding the forces that shape their actions. I take pleasure in seeing the order behind the chaos. Sometimes I succeed, sometimes I fail, but I have lived in a world of many colors, shapes and tempos.

For the past month, a vast fog has made that world difficult to see. The coronavirus pandemic has rendered normal global events irrelevant. Something deadly is stalking the world, and it respects neither power nor money. Governments are obsessed with protecting us, or at least with appearing to protect us, but there is no protection except for what we provide ourselves. An infection cannot be destroyed yet. It will run whatever course it runs. Our bodies may or may not rally to overcome it. Our will has nothing to do with what happens.

Therefore, the only action we can take is to not allow the virus to enter our bodies, and the way it can enter our bodies is not through the air, or through food, or even through dirt. The disease invades our bodies from the bodies of other human beings. So we avoid contact with others. Governments have adopted a policy of building barriers between nations and sometimes barriers within their nations. The choice of families is to build barriers between themselves and their neighbors. Our politics and our lives are focused on this at the moment, and the distance we put between ourselves and the rest of the world.

The other consequences of doing social distancing are not at the moment of prime importance. There is something unseen out there that will sicken us and even kill us, and we cling to whatever safety there is by being alone. But we are social animals. We do not live alone. Love of one’s own is not simply love of those in our household but of those with whom we share language, faith and history. If we see our neighbors, our countrymen and the world as being potentially infected with a hidden pestilence, if the barriers of borders and doors supplant all of these other things, then how do we remain human?

I have been at home for nearly a month, my wife making heroic forays to pick up pre-ordered food at the supermarket, commanding me not to share her risks for I must not get ill so I can think and write and earn money. I am the man, and I am supposed to risk my life at the supermarket, yet she insists I must not get ill. The oddity of all of this is not only that this reduces my sense of manhood, but that a trip to the supermarket has become an act of quiet heroism.

What is most frightening in all of this madness is that it is not madness. It is all we can do, and we are for the most part doing it. We are not doing it because of threats from the government; we are doing it because it is all we can do. I used to think about the Russia-Turkey confrontation in Libya, about Brexit, and about the development of hypersonic missiles. All that is still there, but for now none of it matters. There are slight glimpses of U.S.-China tensions or a Belarusian leader saying that the cure to all this is vodka. In some ways he makes more sense. Doctors tell us to wait. The president of Belarus tells us to get drunk. That won’t save us, but at least we won’t be afraid.

This is an extraordinary moment in human history. Our world has contracted. And this is true not in one country but in virtually all countries. In some countries, of course, life goes on unchanged along with all too common disease and death. In most countries, those violating the new laws and customs are seen as social deviants. But even in wartime, perhaps especially in wartime, I have not seen social responsibility being defined as refusing to enter into social life.

I am a fan of science fiction, and I love post-apocalypse novels. This is not playing out as it’s supposed to. We have our disease, but it will not wipe out everyone but a lone woman, as happened in “Extinction Point.” In novels like these, the virus would be delivered by aliens even now colonizing the planet, and the woman making contact with a crippled man in Alaska plans survival and resistance. Reality is even more stunning. We do not face the annihilation of the species – or so it seems – but we do, almost seamlessly, face the danger and transform our lives. We face combat not with aliens but at most with our own boredom.

What is perhaps most different in our apocalypse novel is that we have not seen a surge of banditry roving over the landscape. For me, one of the most remarkable things – and from what I can see, this is true globally – is that our retreat into our homes and ourselves has been remarkably orderly. But that I suppose is because heroes are still at work in our warehouses and trucks and stores, and food is still ample. That may continue indefinitely, but in a world we can’t recognize, nothing is certain.
That this cannot become the new model of human existence is obviously true. It can be done only if we accept a level of poverty and loneliness until the day medicine finds a solution. And since the experts speak in terms of years, maintaining our current stance will be difficult. Our position now is that preventing deaths from the virus takes precedence over all other things. Whether this posture can be maintained in the face of massive social and economic failure, where the trip to the supermarket is pointless, is unknown. But for the moment that is not the question. For the near future this will go on, and my world will contract, and my kaleidoscope will see grey, not the vivid colors I have lived with. And I do take walks, seeing occasionally other neighbors out walking, and we pass on opposite sides of the street each wondering whether the other is in the grip of the invisible plague.

We can do this. For a while longer.
Title: PJ Media: Managing Knowledge Too Dangerous to Exist
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 21, 2020, 08:35:30 AM


https://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/managing-knowledge-too-dangerous-to-exist/
Title: The Pandemic is not a Black Swan, but a portent of a more fragile global system
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 23, 2020, 11:39:31 AM
https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-pandemic-isnt-a-black-swan-but-a-portent-of-a-more-fragile-global-system?utm_source=nl&utm_brand=tny&utm_mailing=TNY_Daily_042220&utm_campaign=aud-dev&utm_medium=email&bxid=5be9d3fa3f92a40469e2d85c&cndid=50142053&hasha=52f016547a40edbdd6de69b8a7728bbf&hashb=e02b3c0e6e0f3888e0288d6e52a57eccde1bfd75&hashc=9aab918d394ee25f13d70b69b378385abe4212016409c8a7a709eca50e71c1bc&esrc=bounceX&utm_term=TNY_Daily


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IsHNb-4IxDY&feature=youtu.be
Title: America is imploding
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 13, 2020, 01:46:31 PM


https://eand.co/the-american-economy-is-imploding-and-america-is-too-e998d3cfb1d9
Title: VDH: The Left is what it once loathed
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 19, 2020, 10:15:01 AM


https://amgreatness.com/2020/05/17/the-left-is-what-it-once-loathed/
Title: A time to hate
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 19, 2020, 11:50:26 AM
second post

https://spectator.org/a-time-to-hate/
Title: Moving Goal Posts
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 20, 2020, 10:11:04 PM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5oaWEIqIjYk&feature=youtu.be
Title: Dan Crenshaw: Why Does Reopening Polarize Us?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 20, 2020, 10:13:40 PM
Why Does Reopening Polarize Us?
The divide over lockdowns reflects deeper differences in attitudes about risk, liberty and morality.
By Dan Crenshaw
May 18, 2020 7:03 pm ET

The debate over reopening the economy has a peculiar characteristic: It breaks down almost entirely along political lines. Liberals emphasize the dangers of an open society, shaming those who want to go back to work. Conservatives argue the opposite. Red states are steadily reopening, while most blue states lag. House Democrats believe it isn’t safe for lawmakers to go back to work, while the Republican-controlled Senate is back in session.

It isn’t obvious that such a debate should be partisan, yet it is. Why? One popular explanation is that all roads lead to President Trump. Whatever he says, the left will say the opposite.

Geographic distribution has also been proposed as a factor. Liberals tend to pack into crowded cities, where the virus spreads more easily, while conservatives populate the more rural, safer regions. This explanation is neat but fails to explain the divide within cities, where Republicans support reopening more than their Democratic neighbors.

Another factor is that the economic fallout has harmed working-class, high-school-educated Americans far worse than the liberal-leaning college-educated. It is easy to “prioritize public health” when you work comfortably from home.

Finally, the far left is treating the lockdowns and the consequent economic devastation as an opportunity to “restructure” America into a socialist utopia. So they’re in no rush.

These factors contribute to the partisan divide, but I believe a complete account would take us deeper, into the realm of psychology and morality. Liberal and conservative brain function has been shown to differ considerably during exercises in risk-taking. These differences led researchers to conclude that socially conservative views are driven, at least in part, by people’s need to feel safe and secure. While liberals present themselves as more open to experience and change, conservatives seem more likely to protect that which we know. This divide appears to apply to multiculturalism, traditional institutions and financial risk, but not all unknown risks.

Today conservatives are the ones ready to confront risk head-on. That’s consistent with my experience in the military, where the overwhelming majority of special operators identify as conservatives. Recent data confirm my experiences, indicating that high-risk civilian occupations tend to be filled by those who lean right. If conservatives show more brain activity when processing fear, they also seem better at overcoming it.

Liberals are also more comfortable with a government that regulates more behavior and provides more services. They often say, “You can’t be free if you don’t have service X, Y and Z.” Such statements sound nonsensical to conservative ears. The conservative emphasis on personal responsibility leaves less room for the government micromanagement we’re witnessing now.

Conservatives understand basic morality differently, too. Research shows that among the five moral foundations—care, fairness, authority and tradition, in-group loyalty, and purity—liberals prioritize care and fairness, while conservatives engage all five about equally. The liberal weighting means that far more emphasis is placed on a single consideration—“If it saves even one life . . .”— to the exclusion of others, such as the costs to society. Liberals equate those costs with simple monetary hardship, easily replaced by a government check. Conservatives realize economic devastation may affect lives for years, altering their entire trajectories.

The liberal approach betrays a lack of imagination. Just because you dislike Mr. Trump doesn’t mean he must be wrong here. Just because you can work remotely doesn’t mean others can, too. Just because you don’t want to confront risk doesn’t mean others should be prevented from doing so. Just because you have a single-dimensional view of “caring” doesn’t mean we can afford to ignore the consequences of economic devastation.

It is time to reopen America in a smart and deliberate fashion and stop calling people murderers because they want to get back to work. The American people are responsible enough to live free and confront risk. Let them do so.

Mr. Crenshaw, a Republican, represents Texas’ Second Congressional District.
Title: substitute "socialism" for "man"
Post by: ccp on May 27, 2020, 06:10:55 AM
And assume he is speaking to the liberal youths of today:

https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/e21913f5-370f-4a28-95c9-edd6f54d00d5
Title: There are no good narratives on Race
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 09, 2020, 06:58:35 PM
There Are No Good Narratives on Race
By AARON SIBARIUM
About Aaron Sibarium
Follow Aaron Sibarium On Twitter
June 9, 2020 8:54 AM


Protesters hold placards as they rally against the death in Minneapolis police custody of George Floyd, in Manhattan, New York City, June 2, 2020. (Jeenah Moon/Reuters)

The Left’s is overstated and divisive, but the alternatives aren’t much better.

Whenever police brutality sparks riots and resentments, from Rodney King to Freddie Gray to George Floyd, there is a current of contrarian opinion that wants to blame “The Narrative.” The Narrative holds that police killings are common; that they are motivated mostly by race; and that race is the defining line in American society, the source of all its problems and divisions.

Each claim, the naysayers note, is either exaggerated or fabricated. No, police killings are not common; law-abiding citizens are more likely to be struck by lightning than shot by the police. No, they’re not racially-motivated; once you control for crime rates, police kill whites just as often as they do blacks. And while racism is certainly a part of American society, to say that it’s the whole thing is ridiculously reductionist, a potted, politicized tall tale that excuses, maybe even encourages violence.

And they’re right: The Narrative does trade on hyperbole, ignore inconvenient facts, and deepen the divisions it purports to redress.

But if its shortcomings suggest the naivety of a certain sort of protestor, its persistence despite those shortcomings suggests the naivety of much of the pushback. In particular, it suggests that the three main counter-narratives on offer today — creedalism, nationalism, and localism — simply ring hollow, and provide very little in the way of unity or hope.

Start with creedalism. For many centrists-cum-civic nationalists, racism and rioting alike are rooted in a betrayal of America’s founding identity, its classically liberal character. What unites us all as Americans, on this view, is (or should be) reverence for the Constitution, respect for the rule of law, and belief in the fundamental equality of man: in other words, a series of abstract principles.


It’s an admirable vision, and no doubt it would be less divisive than The Narrative. But “less divisive” is a far cry from unifying. It’s easy to agree on abstract principles in the abstract; it’s hard to interpret and apply them when their whole point is to transcend concrete conflicts and experiences. And even if we could agree on what the principles mean, it’s not clear that they would satisfy our need for kinship and identity — indeed, it’s not clear “principles” are an identity at all.

The other problem with creedalism is that it tends to imagine Americans as individuals first, and members of groups second. But — and The Narrative is right about this — individual and group identity aren’t always so separable. People have parents, parents have pasts, and pasts contain pains, not all of which time can anesthetize. George Floyd’s murder may have been an outlier, in other words, but it took place in a country where racial violence was the norm for centuries, where blacks are nearly ten times poorer than whites, and where, if police killings are unbiased, policing itself is not, as any serious scholar will attest. And of course, race does not exhaust the list of divisions that “free markets, free people” seems unable to bridge.

Partly in response to these problems, some conservatives have pivoted toward a more particularist understanding of American identity — based on shared values, yes, but also shared history, shared culture. This was the understanding that dominated last summer’s National Conservatism Conference in Washington, D.C., with more than one panelist invoking “the mystic chords of memory” posited by Abraham Lincoln in his First Inaugural. At first glance, it can seem like a healthy corrective to creedal abstraction, and perhaps, in some small sense, it is.

But as a blueprint for racial union, it’s got some pretty big design flaws. Leave aside for a moment the question of whether we’ve ever had a common culture, or the fact that we don’t have one now; it’s not even clear we have a common history. Yes, our ancestors fought the same wars . . . but not always on the same side. Yes, blacks have lived here for over three centuries . . . first as slaves, then as second-class citizens to whites. Even if you think racism is mostly a thing of the past (and it’s debatable whether you should), American history does contain quite a lot of it, enough to make those “mystic chords” rather hard to harmonize. Arranging them may be possible in principle; in practice, no one has written a score.

And in a country of 330 million people — black, white, and every shade in between — that lack of harmony is a huge problem. It would be one thing if our diversity broke down neatly along state lines, so that each demographic were largely self-governing under our federal system. But that is not the America we have, and, more to the point, it’s not the one we should want — meaning that localism, the last-ditch solution to which Americans often turn, doesn’t solve much at all. If anything, it has become another vector for polarization, cynically deployed by whichever side is out of power, from the grassroots gutting of Obamacare to the California crusade against ICE — and on the specific issue of police reform, it is poised to polarize us further still: consider how a local vote to disband the police became national news, and part of national debate, literally overnight.

94
So it’s not enough to reject the racial gnosticism of The Narrative. You need a positive replacement, a story that’s sufficiently broad to include everyone but sufficiently narrow to make inclusion seem worth it. The academic defenders of the riots, the reporters determined to downplay them, the pious protesters lamenting their privilege, clearly don’t know what that looks like.

But nor, I think it’s safe to say, do you.
Title: apple admits they are racist
Post by: ccp on June 12, 2020, 01:27:46 PM
or how else does one explain this:


https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2020/06/12/apple-ceo-tim-cook-announces-100-million-racial-justice-initiative/


https://www.apple.com/leadership/


Al Gore is on the BOD - I guess for his prowess running corporations?

yup no , no colored people , woops excuse me,  people of color. 

but lots of women.
cook is gay I think

Any Republicans?   :wink:
Title: Caldwell: The Age of Entitlement
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 13, 2020, 07:12:05 AM
I seek to grasp the implications of the following from "The Age of Entitlement" by Christopher Caldwell:
=========================================

"Less well understood was that the internet approach to data, and to reality, undermined ALL types of thinking aimed at understanding systems from the outside-- not just religion, but also science, political ideology, and deductive reasoning. Big Data worked by correlation, not by logic. As the Oxford technology expert Viktor Mayer-Schonberger put it, "Society will need to shed some of its obsession with causality in exchange for simple correlations: not knowing 'why' but only 'what.'" Big Data was a reassertion by powerful corporations of a right that had been stripped from other Americans: the right to stereotype.
, , ,
"The information-gathering capacities of the new internet firms brought them into both collusion and competition with government.
, , ,
"GOOGLE and SWIFT were private companies-- yet their regulatory and public information roles made them look like governments in embryo.
, , ,
"The problem was not the expansion of government until it crowded out the private sector-- it was the expansion of the private sector until it became a kind of government."
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on June 13, 2020, 09:40:42 AM
".As the Oxford technology expert Viktor Mayer-Schonberger put it, "Society will need to shed some of its obsession with causality in exchange for simple correlations: not knowing 'why' but only 'what.'"

very good point.

as AI bighots like Google Microsoft and FB work feverishly to replace myself as a primary care doctor
I will keep this in mind.
Title: 2nd post RELIGION OF WOKE 2020 AND COMPARISON TO CHRISTIANITY AND ROME
Post by: ccp on June 13, 2020, 11:02:53 AM
The religion of WOKE
and almost identical comparison to how Christianity in the Roman Empire


https://wabcradio.com/podcast/the-john-batchelor-show/

the comparison is uncanny.

BUT I do not think the "new found virtuosity " explains our civil war 2020.

To me the religion of WOKE is just a front, a ruse , to use as a club that those who are woke are more virtuous , more good and on the "right side " of history (we keep hearing Don the Lemon tell us every night)

It is a front for the real issue - power and control over the money -

The woke are no more virtuous than the rest of us .  They just use the concept as a cover .
It is useful to shame , to play on guilt (white guilt as Shelby Steele points on on LEvin)
to pressure and even further to extort from and destroy all opposition to forced redistribution of wealth so fully embraced by the DNC .

The celebrity rich newscaster academic and soros bezos zucker zuckerberg libs think they are safe because they are converts.

Maybe - enemies of the Muslims were granted freedom or spared from death if they convert.  But by doing so they relinquish all control to the Isllamists.
Title: Anonymous Berkeley prof devastates BLM narrative
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 17, 2020, 08:28:43 PM
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/anonymous-berkeley-professor-shreds-blm-injustice-narrative-damning-stats-and-logic
Title: George Friedman: History and Decency
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 18, 2020, 07:56:24 AM
   History and Decency
Thoughts In and Around Geopolitics
By: George Friedman

When I was a child, I learned that history moves forward, sometimes gently and sometimes brutally, but that I had no control over what happened. I heard the stories of the Holocaust and the communists, and I learned that they happened not because Hitler and Stalin were monsters but because history unfolds as it does, sometimes monstrously. I saw the lives of my parents and myself as trapped in the tides with millions of people, each confined in their lives, each acting as they must, and the sum total leading to whatever came. I wondered why my father did not take arms and fight the evils that history imposed on his life, and his answer was this, if not in his words: courage is a self-indulgence. It allows you the illusion that you can control history. All that was possible for him was to try to live or make a small decision about how he died. No one would know, no one would care. His only guide was fear, and his only goal was the vague possibility that he could somehow shape the fate of the few that he loved.

I learned to watch history unfold not because I thought I could change it but because I thought that if I knew the direction it would take, I could in some small way shape my own life to evade its wrath. I learned to observe the broad tidal waves of history, largely ignoring those who presided over it. Leaders and rulers come and go, governing millions for short periods of time. We imbue them with power they don’t have because the things we learned at the kitchen table were terrifying. We want to think someone must be in control, someone must be responsible, someone must be held accountable. The idea that we are simply the audience and victims of impersonal forces that create leaders who speak their lines and then move off the stage is intolerable. As a child, I shared the affection of many for Dwight Eisenhower. My father once asked me if I knew how many people he had killed. And then he said that if Ike had not, someone else would have. It had to be done.

We are each shaped by our childhood, and this was mine. When I went to college, the question I wanted to know was why this was so. I read Hegel and Marx and Thucydides and the rest but could not figure out what would happen next. Of course, to do that I had to understand first why this was so. I found that answer in Machiavelli, who explained what a prince must do if he is to remain a prince. The teaching of Machiavelli is simple. If you want to be a shoemaker, you must make a shoe a certain way. If you want to be a prince, you must rule a certain way. Shoemakers and princes are trapped in the same matrix of reality. You can choose to do it differently, but then your customers will leave you, and your citizens will loathe you.
What I learned during that period is that history consists of people doing what they must do under certain circumstances. They do not make history. History makes them. A prince must do what is necessary or he will quickly cease being the prince, discarded and forgotten, while another, less fastidious, does what must be done. I turned from trying to make history to forecasting it. It was the best and most I could do.

As I grow older, I want there to be more. For some, the tale I tell is reasonable, adding to it the idea of a merciful God, who guides each of our lives and allows them to form into history. I believe deeply that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of by philosophy. But for me the mystery is the horror of the 20th century. I know it had to be. I don’t understand why.

But my need for it to be more goes deeper. I know myself and the things I did that shouldn’t have been done, and the things I didn’t do that should have been done. I cannot hold history responsible for these sins of commission and omission. They are mine. I did things I told myself would do good but knew in my heart would not. I can refer to “The Prince,” but I was no prince. I can refer to necessity, but I knew even then my sins weren’t necessary. I suspect that as we grow old and look back on our lives, there is much each of us would do differently. When we’re young, we are confident that all we do will be different. It’s human.
I am good at seeing what horror might come, and take satisfaction only in being right. I forgive myself by saying there is nothing to be done. But the fact that there is nothing to be done does not relieve us of the obligation to be appalled by even the most necessary thing. At this point I would point to morality, justice and all the transcendental concepts that are so hard to fathom that we dispense with them, and accept that we are sinners and apologize.

But there is a more mysterious concept that we cannot evade: decency. If we accept everything about the impersonal power and predictability of history, we are still left with the question of how we should live our lives. Indeed, the prince, doing what he is compelled to do in order to rule, has this question as well. Otherwise, everything I think of history permits us to do anything we wish. And if we are free to do that, then we are free to think that political ambitions justify the most horrible crimes of a Hitler and a Stalin. Each praised ruthlessness and rejected decency. Perhaps ruthlessness is imperative. It can still be softened by decency.

Decency is a mysterious concept. As an ambition, it seems to affirm our weakness. It is not a concept on which philosophers will discourse. We have no guide to it, but we know it when we see it. I think, hesitantly, that its core is modesty. Modesty is the ability of humans to laugh at themselves gently as they go about their great schemes. It affirms that they are prisoners of events but that they will, with humor, try to shape them anyway.

Decency is also kindness, even (or especially) to those who are incapable of modesty. The immodest suffer the most from their fear of being ordinary. Decency is an awareness of our limits, and a refusal to condemn others for the limits they have.

Ultimately, I think of decency as a sense of how noble humanity can be and how funny it is. Decency is not weakness. The decent know when they must act, but they also are aware of their own maliciousness and refuse to celebrate their own virtues.

I do know that history is a terrible and relentless engine. At best we can understand what a dictator will do or what a virus is. But in the end, the cold watching of it unfold and enjoying your prescience has to be leavened, lest you become a monster.

Living a decent life is not part of history, but then we are more than history. We are ourselves. We live in a time when self-righteousness abounds and decency is rare. But then it was always so. Self-righteousness justifies ruthlessness and self-celebration. It justifies contempt for others.

The Declaration of Independence spoke of a decent respect to the opinions of mankind. I think Thomas Jefferson chose the words carefully. Decency sounds weak. He knew it wasn’t.
Title: Why We Must Teach Western Civilization
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 24, 2020, 11:19:58 PM
https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2020/05/18/why-we-must-teach-western-civilization/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=top-bar-latest&utm_term=third
Title: Friedman: Beethoven
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 25, 2020, 07:18:33 AM
    Beethoven and Now
Thoughts In and Around Geopolitics
By: George Friedman

I know nothing about music. I can’t play an instrument, nor can I read music. My singing appalls even me. Yet music has defined my life. When I hear a song it conjures in me, as it does in others, a particular place on a particular night with a particular person. Or it conjures a phase of my life. Cyndi Lauper’s songs remind me of the time when I said to hell with duty. “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” is gender neutral. Edith Piaf’s “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien” – “No, I Do Not Regret Anything” – reminds me of a thing that had to be done but ought not to have been done. When I hear the Christian hymn “Let There Be Peace on Earth,” I think of my wife and the choices we’ve had to make.

Music is the sound that happens to be permanently linked to a memory, and the memory fixed to an emotion that I felt then.

The emotions can be exuberant or thoughtful, but they are always tinged with sadness. They all speak of the past that I cannot forget but cannot relive.

I discovered the music that will always remind me of this time: Beethoven’s “Pathetique.” It is a somber piece but not sad. It tells me that time is not of the essence, and it invites me to think deeply, or as deeply as I can. And then it breaks into a tempo, with a sound that admits that time is of course of the essence. And then it breaks into a strange celebration of life, not of its finitude but of the passions that should be embedded there.

Today, time has slowed, and our mood is somber. Thanks to quarantine measures imposed because of the COVID-19 pandemic, we live the same day over and over again until we cannot remember what day it is. We search for an exit, but there is none. We look for something different only to discover that mere difference doesn’t redeem the day. The sense of rebellion we feel subsides, and we accept that time isn’t of the essence any longer. But, of course, it is. It is not simply that life is short, but that it has so much to offer. And then you learn to celebrate the things you cannot have now, but in that celebration, as Beethoven teaches, there arises a sense of being that is distinct from doing. You are drawn into yourself, and find the music that Beethoven tried to teach us. “Pathetique” is far from the pathetic. It is an invitation to see that the somber is the preface to the joyous, but that the work and discipline to achieve that is more difficult than contemplating the status of the Chinese navy. The latter has rules. Beethoven demands that you make your own rules.

That seems to me to be the nature of our moment. We do not know whether it will be long or short. It is in this moment that we live, and the music of the beginning is not that of the end. This is a difficult and even terrible time. Arguing that it is not as bad as this or that moment is pointless. The moment in which we are living is what matters. The worst part of it is that we didn’t choose it; it chose us, and that is outrageous. The issue facing us we know how to resist: by not going outside and living with the consequences. But even then we are helpless. Courage won’t save us, and fear really doesn’t protect us.

Beethoven has the virtue of being accessible to those without learning or even taste in music, such as myself. The opening to "Symphony No. 5" fills me with a dreadful anticipation. "Symphony No. 9" and its "Ode to Joy" remind of the moments of delirious happiness before revolutions turn into monstrosities. “Moonlight Sonata” draws out the rare moments that make a love affair a moment of redemption. And "Pathetique" reassures us that ennui and sorrow are a preface to triumph – and that is for me the music of this moment.

The virtue of feelings is that no one can tell us that we are wrong. What we feel is what we feel. The virtue of Beethoven, for me, is that he evokes feeling, where there is much music that I can’t understand. I take meaning from The Doors because they remind me of a night I treasure. But these are merely reactions. I rarely have time to consider these things. But now there is time, and that has transformed living.

One of the singular characteristics of the moment is that there is time, time in excess of what we might be able to bear. For some, this time is a period of reprieve from a life of endless urgency and activity. For them, this time may be a gift, a time to be free from the constraints of the urgent, to the consideration of the urgent. It is also a dangerous time. With endless empty days, we have a chance to confront who we are and what we have been and what, because of the choices we made, we will never do. We may also confront, with our significant others, what we have been together, the answer to which may be the discovery of mutual loathing or the rebirth of the joy we once felt.

As humanity suffers from a host of maladies, this may sound like narcissism, but it is merely the inevitable outcome of the cessation of happening that these past few months have brought us, and which will likely continue for a long time. Our civilization has been built around doing, and doing is seen as a sign of our success. Those who had failed in life were thought not to be busy. Those who were busy were in demand, and the demand for our time was affirmation of our worth.

Many of us remain busy today, but even the busiest among us have had the pattern of our lives changed. Most of us thrive in social life, be it tennis, dinner parties or getting drunk together. Those moments now carry with them the possibility of disease and death, so we avoid them. And so even for those who eagerly await a teleconference, time has changed its shape. More precisely, time has emerged, demanding that we fill it. Importantly, this emergence of time is greater for the older than the younger among us, especially for the younger who have children who never cease to devour every moment. But for those who never had children or whose children now need little from their parents, their lives have vast gaps in them.

Beethoven is making a vital point. Life is difficult and tedious, and for many of us it will always be that. We all long to be free of constraints, to shape our lives, but that is an illusion. The most brilliant investor makes his money by aligning his actions with the market. Generals align their orders with the reality of the enemy they are facing. Doctors align with the reality of nature. The brilliant can see what must be done before others, but in the end they are no more free for that. They are held in the constraints of the beginning of the “Pathetique” like anyone else. They live life by its own rules.

When I play the songs I remember, and think of the things I was doing at the time, I realize what I didn’t know then: When I broke free of all responsibility, the constraints of life dictated the exit and the return. When I heard Edith Piaf regretting nothing, regrets were too late. And when I heard the alien sounds of Protestant hymns and wondered whether I could live with them, the decision had already been made and there could be no other answer.

This is not a sense of helplessness. As the last movement of the “Pathetique” makes clear, the logical necessity of the music takes us to the logical necessity of our lives and times. What we feel does not matter to a virus. But it matters to us. This for now is our life, and Beethoven is inviting us to listen to Cyndi Lauper. We may not be able to do what she says, but we can think, and that thought can be enough.   

Title: George Friedman: The Redemption of Prediction
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 25, 2020, 12:41:53 PM
The Redemption of Prediction
Friedman’s Thoughts In and Around Geopolitics
By: George Friedman

Foreseeing what will happen is not difficult. It requires only that we face the fact that life always repeats itself if not perfectly, then roughly. As Mark Twain famously put it, “History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” We are born of a woman, are nurtured and grow, live our lives as best we can, and die, and within a generation or three, our names and lives will be forgotten, along with what little we have done. There are variations within the rhyming tune, but on the whole this is what we are. We cannot predict everything about life, but we can grasp the pattern that grips us and within which we struggle to live.

It is conceited to claim that the pattern that grips the individual does not also grip humanity and all of its parts. It is more difficult to grasp the song that is being sung than to grasp its rhyme. An individual is born to his life. Where he was born and to whom tells an observer a great deal about what his life will be. The place you were born and the people to whom you were born is both a comforting cradle and a painful prison. If place, people and time will tell us what is possible and impossible in our life, then the possible and impossible is held in common by all those whose origins we share, and with subtlety and gentleness, we can tell the story of cities and nations before they occur. It demands only that we see the obvious and be honest with ourselves as to what we have seen.

There are those who wish that they would be different. There are others who wish that their city or nation would be different. And there are those who wish people would be different. As we learn playing poker, it is important never to lie to yourself about the cards you were dealt, or comfort yourself by imagining that the other player’s cards were different. If you accept that your own life is an inevitable cycle, and you accept the cards that you have been dealt, then altering the pattern ever so slightly is possible. If you demand that it be vastly different, life will crush you, as history crushes nations that try to escape what they are.

It is not difficult to predict, to some degree, what path your children will take, and the path that nations will take. But as with children and your own nation, it is impossible not to lie and wish for them what is not in their nature. Both are loved, but both are ultimately untamed, subject to their own nature and moving predictably toward an end you will not see.

I am living through my second transition. I know what these transitions look like, but even knowing what is to come, I forget how painful it is. I saw Harlem burn after Martin Luther King was murdered. I thought that in the second and last cycle of my life, it would be different. More precisely, I didn’t think. I separated my knowledge of the cycles and sanitized them into an abstraction. I lied to myself in not remembering that the cycle comes with rage over past and present injustices, with lives shattered unexpectedly by poverty, and the fundamental truths of who we are, dismissed in favor of strange and alien beliefs.

The 2020s, a decade of change, have opened as I expected, but the sense of being a stranger in a strange land was not what I expected. Or more precisely, I welcomed the first cycle with my youth; the second is made unwelcome by my age.

This is how my country grows. It explodes in rage, and mutual loathing and self-righteousness become universal. We grow this way because we have little time. Americans live their lives with urgency, knowing that as individuals they are born and die, knowing that they will be forgotten as all others are, yet they are unwilling to believe their cards. The American phrase is the epicurean “Dum vivimus, vivamus,” meaning, “While we live, let us live,” with a joyous assertiveness in the last phrase. And implicit in that phrase is a will to be remembered through the ages, like Benjamin Franklin, who enjoyed the finest wines and women to be found in Paris. That is not the card we were dealt, but it is the hunger we have. And the problem is that the urge to play a busted flush leads if not to disaster, then to discomfort and disappointment.

Americans are a lucky people, partly because the country was invented to deal us, to continue the card analogy, full houses, and also because when we lose, the country will stake us to another hand. And so I know that, as in the past, the pain of the 2020s will pass. Who imagined electricity or microchips? We are a nation built to reinvent itself.

COVID-19 was mindless nothingness as viruses are. But the events of the past few weeks, the demonstrations and riots and preposterous claims that each will assume belong to the other side, raise Shakespeare’s vision: “Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Implicit in my work is that there is something uniquely nobler about my country. I know this was forgotten when Detroit burned, when children starved and froze in the Great Depression of 1929, when the dead were buried after the Civil War and a vile corruption seized the nation.

I know that the nation redeemed itself after each of these events. I know that few thought at the time that it could, and that they passed into the light confident of their redemption. I know that this will likely happen again. But in a decade whose beginning has been announced with authority, sending the country into wrenching pain, I am caught up with the thought that predicting these things is a chump’s game, and that this time we won’t pull the “case ace.” But I know we will because Mark Twain taught me the secret. It all rhymes. I know this is necessary, but I wish the nation would not put itself through this again, and perhaps be less ambitious. But that is not our nature, and in our lives we live the struggle to be more than we might be, and as a people to be a “light unto the nations.”

It is ugly, painful work at times, and we are in those times
Title: Joe Rogan and Bret Weinstein
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 01, 2020, 08:29:46 AM
Haven't listened yet but comes well recommended

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRCzZp1J0v0&feature=youtu.be
Title: The Police, Patriarchy, and Feminism
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 09, 2020, 11:22:08 AM
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/07/the_police_patriarchy_and_feminism.html
Title: Mike Savage
Post by: ccp on July 11, 2020, 09:21:46 PM
the bailout corruption , devaluation of the dollar, and the myth of white privilege:

https://michaelsavage.com/podcast-the-myth-of-white-privilege-interview-with-dr-marilyn-singleton/
Title: Twenty Years a Fool
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 20, 2020, 06:58:29 AM
https://c2cjournal.ca/2015/03/twenty-years-a-fool-my-long-journey-home-from-the-left/?_post_id=4952
Title: Arsonists in the Attic
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 20, 2020, 09:29:11 AM
second

https://thecritic.co.uk/arsonists-in-the-attic/
Title: VDH: Will 2021 be 1984
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 20, 2020, 09:29:54 AM
third

https://amgreatness.com/2020/07/19/will-2021-be-1984/
Title: 2021=1984
Post by: G M on July 20, 2020, 11:04:30 AM
https://amgreatness.com/2020/07/19/will-2021-be-1984/
Will 2021 Be 1984?
It’s all about the power, not the equality.

By Victor Davis Hanson • July 19, 2020

Cultural revolutions are insidious and not just because they seek to change the way people think, write, speak, and act. They are also dangerous because they are fueled by self-righteous sanctimoniousness, expressed in seemingly innocuous terms such as “social activism,” “equality,” and “fairness.”

The ultimate aim of the Jacobin, Bolshevik, or Maoist is raw power—force of the sort sought by Hugo Chavez or the Castro dynasty to get rich, inflict payback on their perceived enemies, reward friends, and pose as saviors.

Cubans and Venezuelans got poor and killed; woke Chavezes and Castros got rich and murderous.

Leftist agendas are harder to thwart than those of right-wing dictators such as Spain’s Francisco Franco because they mask their ruthlessness with talk of sacrifice for the “poor” and concern about the “weak.”

Strong-man Baathists, Iranian Khomeinists, and the German National Socialists claimed they hated capitalism. So beware when the Marxist racialists who run Black Lives Matter, the wannabe Maoists of Antifa, the George Soros-paid activists, “the Squad” and hundreds of state and local officials like them in cities such as Portland, Seattle, and Minneapolis, and Big Tech billionaires take power. These are “caring” people who couldn’t care less about the working classes or the hundreds of African-Americans murdered in America’s inner cities.

Vice President as President
If Joe Biden is elected, the effort to remove him by those now supporting him will begin the day after the election and it will not be as crude as rounding up a Yale psychiatrist to testify to his dementia in Congress or shaming the White House physician to give him the Montreal Cognitive Assessment Test in the manner that the Left went after Donald Trump.

It will be far more insidious and successful: leaked stories to the New York Times and Washington Post from empathetic White House insiders will speak of how “heroically” Biden is fighting his inevitable decline—and how gamely he tries to marshal his progressive forces even as his faculties desert him. We would read about why Biden is a national treasure by sacrificing his health to get elected and then nobly bowing out as he realized the cost of his sacrifice on his person and family.

In the past until now, there was zero chance that the hard Left would ever win an American election. No socialist has ever come close. Even Bernie Sanders accepted that the Democratic establishment for six years broke rules, leveraged candidates to drop out, and warped the media to ensure that he would remain a septuagenarian blowhard railing at the wind from one of his three houses. George McGovern was buried by a landslide. Most Democrats, after Kennedy and until Obama, never won the popular vote unless possessed of a Southern-accented hinting at centrism.

Only the Great Depression and World War II ensured four terms of FDR, who still knew enough not to let his house socialists ruin the wartime U.S. economy.

But in perfect storm and black swan fashion, the coronavirus, the lockdown, the riots, anarchy and looting, all combined with Trump Derangement Syndrome to be weaponized by the Left—and the media far more successfully than with their failed pro forma, legalistic efforts with Robert Mueller and impeachment to destroy the Trump presidency—have pushed socialism along.

Yet even that chaos and anarchy by itself would not have been able to bring the radical Left into power. Only a “candidate” like Joe Biden could do that.

“Good ‘ole Joe from Scranton” could offer the trifecta formula for a socialist ascension: a reassuring pseudo-centrism, decades’ old establishment familiarity, and his current cognitive decline. In a rare time of virtual campaigning, virtual conventions, and perhaps even virtual debates, Biden alone could successfully massage the virus/quarantine/rioting and panic to win the election, and then nobly exit.

This is not the analysis of a conspiracy theorist but the operating principle behind the Democrats’ and Biden’s basement strategy. It is for that reason that his vice presidential selection is shaping up like none other in memory. In short, Joe Biden of all people is now the face of a cultural revolution, although even he may not fully realize it.

Fundamentally Transforming Everything
What should we expect then if Biden wins and either steps down or more or less is left as a diminished figurehead controlled by the hard Left?

First, there is one theme that unites “the Squad,” Black Lives Matter, the globalist technocracy, and the international Left: unapologetic anti-Semitism. We will see overt anti-Semitism in a way this country has not seen since the early 20th century, all couched in ideological and politically correct attacks on “Zionists” and “the rich” and “Wall Street”—and why Israel has no business being a “Jewish state.”

It has already begun with an NFL player voicing Hitlerian tropes and praising Louis Farrakhan, and then being seconded by an array of rappers, woke Black Lives Matter activists and “Free Palestine” demonstrations. To smear “the Jews” no longer is grounds for an immediate and expected apology, but more “So what are you going to do about it?” Anti-Semitism is deeply embedded within the DNA of the BLM movement—and professional sports as well, as we saw recently from the warnings of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Charles Barkley.

“Eat the rich” sloganeering and plans for a wealth tax, and jacking up capital gains and income tax rates, all seem like they are aimed at the super-rich. But don’t think weaponizing the tax code, the government bureaucracies, and the culture itself will do much to the immense wealth of Jeff Bezos, the heirs to Steve Jobs, the Google zillionaires, George Soros, the Walmart fortunes, the lesser tech billionaires, the Facebook clan, or Michael Bloomberg, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffet. None of them will be touched.

Why would any socialist go after the sympathetic mega-funders of the Washington Post, the Atlantic, Google or Apple News, Twitter, or Vox?

Left-wing billionaires are not so strange as we might think. After all, they can afford to be socialists. They like the idea that fewer may follow in their footsteps. They think social activism offers them penance for their hard-driving acquisitiveness. Most of all, they feel their knack for making money is proof that they have the wisdom, the right, and the need to redirect the lives of less successful others—and for the good of all.

Otherwise, the plutocratic class will spend hundreds of millions—a proverbial drop in the bucket in their fortunes—to consult with lawmakers about how to avoid their own progressive legislation and policies. It will hire phalanxes of tax lawyers, trust evaders, and philanthropy scammers that will make the architects of the Clinton Foundation seem a poor joke.

The real enemy in 2021 would be the upper-middle-class as it always is, the kulaks—and not really the professionals such as the lawyers, media grandees, and professors—although many should expect to become collateral damage.

The special targets will be the self-employed successful business class. The enemies of the people will be mostly those striving to be millionaires who run local insurance agencies, the store owners, salespeople, the successful medical practices, car dealerships, large family farms, the millions who keep the country competitive, innovative, and prosperous.

All of them lack the romance of the poor and the cultural tastes of the rich, but for the most part, they are just too damn informed and stubborn to be tolerated. They need to be marginalized by taxes, regulations, and a second-wave cultural assault that renders the prior “you didn’t build that,” “spread the wealth,” “no time to profit,” and “at some point you’ve made enough money” mere sandbox chatter.

The Coming Segregation
Race? We already see the new contours of the always changing commandments of the anointed posted on the Animal Farmbarnyard wall. A new segregation and apartheid will be sold as needed justice and enlightenment. Admission quotas and hiring on the basis of race will no longer be subtle but overt and triumphant. Separate facilities predicated on race will be common on campuses. What will happen if someone of the wrong race drinks from a fountain in a racially-segregated safe space?

Equality or superiority of result for the favored will be “justice.” Reparations will follow. The sort of creepy anti-white propaganda we saw at the Smithsonian Museum of African-American History and Culture will become orthodoxy. Some of the U.S. GDP won’t be devoted to production but rather toward ferreting out “racism” as they reconstruct society in order endlessly to punish “racists.”

Merit will soon become a dirty, counterrevolutionary word.

Discrimination and the one-drop racial rules of the Old Confederacy will be rebranded as woke, hip, and progressive. Expect more Rachel Dolezals and Ward Churchills. In Seattle, the city conducted whites-only, segregated reeducation sessions, teaching the naïve how to undo their “whiteness.” It was overseen by an office of “civil rights” and sought to ensure that white employees give up their “comfort,” and even their supposed “guaranteed physical safety.” They were to curb any “expectations or presumptions of emotional safety,” or “control over other people and over the land,” and probably end “relationships with some other white people.”

All that was missing were the Maoist dunce caps.

In 2020 we call racism and segregation “civil rights.” I doubt very many graduates of Seattle’s reeducation efforts decided to dismantle their home security system, will vote to defund the police, will declare their mortgaged home community property, or plan to shun their suburban neighbors if they appear too white looking. But that’s not the point. Instead, the state is joining the racists by institutionalizing venomous tribalism. An Oregon County tried to demand masks for all its residents except African-Americans—the sort of apartheid policy no one in his right mind four months ago would have imagined could be tried in the United States.

Borders? The wall will stop dead in its tracks, and what has been built likely dismantled. Citizenship and residency will be further blurred, with the rights of citizens insidiously transferred to resident aliens. Perhaps the word “citizen” will disappear as discriminatory. Illegal immigration will be favored over legal immigration, in that the latter is too diverse, too meritocratic, and too politically unpredictable.

Farewell to Institutions, Hello to “Progress”
The military? A progressive’s dream. It will transcend its current race and gender edicts in a way no elected slow-coach legislature could imagine. Virtue signaling and quotas will be the quickest route to flag-officer rank, and with it a nice retirement as a woke lobbyist, a wise-man member on an enlightened defense contractor board, a Wall Street “security analyst,” or a cable TV paid woke pundit. How a colonel handled “diversity,” not whether he understands tanks, planes, choppers, or guns will determine his chances at generalship. The Pentagon budget will be rebranded, as “national security” is no longer defined in anachronistic terms like hardware, missiles, ships, and planes, but by diversity and ending implicit bias—a sort of vast ongoing city of Seattle training session.

Finance? The country is broke. Yet the Left wants to borrow trillions for the New Green Deal, reparations, and massive new and expanded old social projects.

It can do that only through one of three ways. It can institutionalize zero or negative interest for a decade or so until the debt crushes the United States. Or it can inflate the economy, eroding accumulated wealth and paying off debt in funny money.

Or it can follow the Chrysler creditor model of the Obama Administration, and begin selectively renouncing debt obligations or reordering the priorities of various creditors. At first, the effort will appear noble and popular by canceling all student debt. But soon the Left will extend such exemptions to minority mortgages and credit card obligations. Debt cancellation and “starting over,” based on race, will be a cornerstone of the “transformation” as it has been since the age of Catiline.

High tech? Like the media, it will formally fuse into the progressive party, as elites go back and forth between jobs in Washington and those at Apple, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft. Everything from the order of internet searches to censoring ads and videos for their political content will be greenlighted. Silicon Valley will be seen as the most important asset of the Left, both for its political utility in blocking conservative expression, and its enormous wealth that fuels leftist campaigns.

Finally, if the Senate and House go progressive along with the presidency, the filibuster will end. And we will see fundamental constitutional changes never quite envisioned. Expect legislation to make the Electoral College inert without the use of a clumsy constitutional amendment process.

The Supreme Court will be enlarged and packed on a majority congressional vote to neuter existing conservatives until reinforcements of progressive new justices arrive.

Some will wish to make senators popularly elected on the basis of demography or the Senate expanded into the hundreds—anything to do away with the paleo-idea of two senators from Montana or Wyoming standing in the way of the bending arc of history.

Such are the wages of a global pandemic, national quarantine, sudden recession, cultural revolution in the streets—and an impaired Joe Biden.

Add it all up, and 2020 may be the first, best, and last chance for “1984”—and the Left knows it.
Title: The power of Ones
Post by: G M on July 22, 2020, 08:48:54 PM
https://straightlinelogic.com/2020/07/21/the-power-of-ones-by-robert-gore/
Title: George Friedman: Dignity
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 23, 2020, 10:14:14 AM
July 23, 2020   View On Website
Open as PDF



    Dignity in Our Time
Thoughts in and around geopolitics.
By: George Friedman

I went once to the funeral of a friend, a soldier. He had died an ordinary death, a car crash that left his parents in agony. I remember his father standing stock-still with an expressionless face. I thought for a moment that he was indifferent, but upon further consideration I realized he chose to be dignified, and his stolid figure meant that he would not share that moment of agony with the rest of the world. It was his final salute to his son, and the only solace he had the right to call on.

Dignity is not the absence of feeling. It is the presence of feeling so profound that sharing it with the rest of the world would degrade it. It commends a person to privacy, to feel without indulging self-demonstration. It means that the most extreme moments of feeling, particularly of pain, should be experienced in the quiet of your own soul. Self-control is a gift we owe ourselves and a duty we have to each other. You can weep, but your tears are too precious to share.

It strikes me that our time is singularly lacking in dignity. I will not bore you with examples of the lack of dignity in modern politics. From the lowest citizen to the highest official, of all parties and of all ideologies, the desire to be dignified is gone. In America, no feeling is so squalid as to be hidden, no appetite too low not to be shown, and no ambition too embarrassing to reveal. We all have squalid feelings and appetites. Dignity is not an absence of these things; it’s the will to keep them private.
Some simply cannot believe that reasonable people might disagree. Instead, disagreement is the result of the other’s corrupt soul. This is nothing short of a form of rage. Dignified opponents will not reveal their rage, not because they are not angry, or because they like their opponents, but because self-control is something they owe themselves. The most powerful argument against a lout is to listen to their argument then leave, agreeing to disagree. It will usually enrage him. His raging against you, and the fact that he cannot draw you into a reciprocal rage, the fact that you appear untouched by his insults, leaves your opponent in agony. He will keep thinking of what he should have said for a week. Most important, in retaining your dignity, you have shown yourself the pleasure of being strong. Dignity is the highest manifestation of strength.

I think of the dignity of Martin Luther King Jr. who would not defile himself by raging at his enemies. He was able to assert his views and himself without engaging in public rage. What he felt privately, was private. But in public he sought reconciliation with those he opposed, and offered a hand of reconciliation. He wrote the Letter From Birmingham Jail, an act of profound dignity in an unjust world. He understood that how he waged his battle was as important as what the battle was about. He opposed but did not demean opponents. The way in which he carried himself may have hidden rage, but dignity is the art of hiding what should be hidden, and controlling passion. He is remembered not only for his eloquence and courage but also for his presentation of what a public person ought to be, especially when under attack. Dignity allows for dissent and confrontation, while allowing the world to see how such battles ought to be fought.

I remember when I was young that the highest imperative was to be true to yourself. That was interpreted as burdening everyone you met with your beliefs. It was a time when repression was a dirty word and did not apply to regimes. It applied to your feelings. Repressing your feelings would betray your belief and damage your liver. It was a time of what I call pseudo-Freudianism. Freud was believed to regard repressing feelings as self-destructive. He didn’t but that didn't stop some from proclaiming that he did.

When we look at the howls of outrage in the world surrounding us, we see the sense that beliefs should be shouted at the top of your lungs, with your enemies disparaged and crushed if possible. The crisis of dignity today is the abandonment of the idea that there is a time and place for everything, and the refusal to believe that your own beliefs might be wrong. The indignity of self-certainty and celebration has been elevated above the dignity of public modesty and, with it, the profound and unbending love of one’s own belief.

Dignity is a form of art. It is built on deep and complex passions that are controlled in spite of their power, and the will to craft a persona that has a place for passion and a place for courtesy. The ugliness of our time is those who have only passions, to be displayed at any time.

In the end, dignity is always reborn. People who love their own views and passions above all else are weak. Their self-absorption leads them to forget that this is a dangerous world. However much they proclaim it, they don’t really believe it. Their self-righteousness leaves them little room to watch their backs. But dignified life allows you time to observe the world, and strike before you are struck. Yet there’s always is a time and place for everything, even for enemies to share a drink and a moment to reflect. Understand that enemies may need to be destroyed, but not despised, for your own sake.

We have lost our dignity and must regain it. We need a society that regards a lack of dignity as a sign of weakness.   



Title: Tucker Carlson: The Big Power Grab
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 31, 2020, 10:38:26 AM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQu4ZHXItr0
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: DougMacG on August 01, 2020, 04:17:47 PM
Where is our 'ray of hope' thread?

"HOCKEY: There’s no kneeling in the NHL: No less than 6 teams link arms, stand together during national anthem to show unity."
https://www.theblaze.com/news/theres-no-kneeling-in-the-nhl-no-less-than-4-teams-link-arms-stand-together-during-national-anthem-to-show-unity
Hat tip Glenn Reynolds.

A real sport.

Or this.  The P.A. system fails and an Edmonton arena full of Canadian hockey fans sing the American national anthem, April 2017:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qf2jb51HzTs

Real sports fans.
Title: The Elites fiddle while America burns
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 04, 2020, 11:10:10 AM
The Elites Fiddle While America Burns
The Great 2020 Meltdown has exposed the rottenness of our political and corporate establishments.

By Gerard Baker
Aug. 3, 2020 11:53 am ET


The most intolerable irony of the past few miserable months has been listening to our self-appointed moral leaders lecture us on the nation’s irredeemable sinfulness from the comfort of their own secure, well-upholstered positions, while we endure daily the urban nightmare of a world created by their political allies.

As our cultural, media and corporate chiefs deliver their social and political wisdom from their redoubts in New York’s Hamptons, Palm Beach, Fla., and the greener pastures of the San Francisco Bay Area, America’s cities have been ravaged by successive predations of lockdown, disorder and violence.

Urban living is a fragile trade-off at the best of times between convenience and discomfort, excitement and peril, opportunity and expense. If you take away the convenience, excitement and opportunity, the residue isn’t an appealing one.

For cities like New York, Chicago, Minneapolis, Seattle and Portland, Ore., the damage done by this indulgent summer of insanity may never be repaired. For decades these cities have been controlled by monolithic Democratic establishments—though Republican mayors proved they could govern New York. They have milked the more dynamic parts of their populations to feed their own ideological agenda while doing nothing to lift the least advantaged out of misery.

The Great Meltdown of 2020 has exposed how rotten these urban establishments have become.

The lockdown, that soul-crushing exercise in economic suicide, imposed and enforced largely by the people it least affects, has permanently demolished vast elements of the economic base of these cities: businesses that will never return, employees who have moved away or will work from home rather than tolerate the increasingly perilous lottery of commuting and working in a deteriorating urban environment.

Adding to the injury were weeks of unrestrained, anarchic unrest, with whole parts of cities burned and blighted, with the willing connivance, even encouragement, of authority.

Then, as Democratic mayors actively encouraged an all-out assault on city police forces, a terrifying wave of violence and crime swept the cities. In Chicago last month murder rose 139% over a year earlier. New York had more shootings in the first seven months of 2020 than in all of 2019. The victims of these crimes are almost never the vocal elites, safe in their well-protected homes and offices. They are the poorest and least secure of our neighbors.

Meanwhile, political leaders—backed with money and words from their business allies—have responded with an elaborate performative exercise that has nothing to offer the daily reality but is designed to redraw the boundaries of our free thought. So, for example, those of us who stayed in New York this summer weren’t permitted to worship in church, but we were allowed—we were more or less instructed—to worship at the feet of those who preach hatred of the police, racial strife and white self-loathing. Friends weren’t permitted to attend parents’ funerals, but the right people were free to travel across state lines to attend multiple funerals for political and public show.

If you think irony is dead you had only to observe Bill de Blasio, New York’s mayor, posing for pictures as he painted “Black Lives Matter” on America’s most famous shopping street, while a few miles away his city resonated to the sound of gunfire and the anguished cries of families of children murdered in broad daylight.

This is what modern leadership looks like: a morality play that treats us all like recalcitrant children, even as the cities we helped build implode around us.

Whatever the political consequences of this unprecedented summer, there will be hefty costs, and they won’t be borne by those responsible. As cities are further hollowed out by crime and decay, taxes will rise, further stifling investment and growth, further harming the most disadvantaged, and accelerating a vicious circle of decline.

It’s a needless tragedy engineered by ideologues that is sending into sharp reverse the gains made in large American cities in the early years of the 21st century.

Already between 2015 and 2019, migration away from America’ largest cities had accelerated. That was largely an economic phenomenon, as rising taxes and the possibilities of technology drove people away. City leaders are now re-creating the social conditions that ruined these cities in the 1960s and ’70s: violent crime; urban blight, crumbling infrastructure. And they’ve added to that list schools run by unions dedicated to radical ideology and the mob in control of the streets in furtherance of an intolerant political agenda.

Worst of all, now we have a corporate elite, safely sequestered from the consequences of all this ruin, loudly helping it along by signaling their own virtue and denouncing our supposed vice.

Title: Walter Russell Mead: The Pandemic is a Dress Rehearsal
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 04, 2020, 11:38:31 AM
second

The Pandemic Is a Dress Rehearsal
The world is entering a transformative era. Prepare for more chaos and instability.

By Walter Russell Mead
Aug. 3, 2020 6:52 pm ET

Eight months after the novel coronavirus burst out of Wuhan, China, it has created unprecedented economic and social disruption, with economies cratering across the globe and more destruction to come. Tens of millions have lost their jobs, and millions more have seen their life savings disappear as governments forced restaurants, bars and other small businesses to shut their doors.

Wealthy societies are able, for now, to print and pump money in hope of limiting the social and economic damage, but such measures cannot be extended forever. For the first time since the 1940s, political authorities around the world face a flood of economic and political challenges that could overwhelm the safeguards built into the system.

In poorer countries, the situation is worse. The pandemic rages unchecked through countries like South Africa and Brazil, where low commodity prices, falling remittances and falling demand for industrial products are intersecting with capital flight to create an unprecedented economic shock. Countries like Lebanon and Ethiopia, facing grave crises before the pandemic, struggle to maintain basic order.

Science will, we must hope, come to the rescue with a vaccine or a cure before our resources are exhausted. But as the world wrings its hands and waits for a deus ex machina, we must recognize that the end of the pandemic does not mean a return to the relatively stable world of the post-Cold War era.

Governments and other institutions have always had to deal with difficult challenges that they couldn’t predict. Disease, famine and barbarian invasions fell unexpectedly on societies that often struggled merely to survive. The Industrial Revolution brought new perils like financial panics, the business cycle and social upheavals. Millions left the land and learned to depend on the modern economy for sustenance. Revolutionary political movements that challenged the old order could be as destructive and mysterious as the plagues and famines of earlier times.

After World War II, as the threat of nuclear war glowered in the background, the assumption that humanity could deal with most natural disasters, health problems and the business cycle took hold. It wasn’t utopia, but life seemed more predictable than in the past. With the fall of the Soviet Union, the threat of nuclear war receded into the background and Western self-confidence reached new heights. Over the past 30 years, the world has developed an intricately organized, massively complex, extraordinarily effective and extremely dynamic global civilization.

The pandemic, which is mild as the great plagues of history go, demonstrates that the complexity of this global civilization has become a source of new vulnerabilities. And with the legitimacy of many institutions resting on their ability to solve problems quickly and effectively, Covid-19 challenges political leaders and institutions in ways that they cannot easily manage.

The world needs to get used to that feeling. The pandemic’s legacy will be crisis and chaos—and the trajectory of human civilization has shifted in ways that will test political leaders and economic policy makers more severely than anything since World War II. This is partly because the return of great-power competition introduces new risks and complications into the international system. More fundamentally, it is because the information revolution is beginning to disrupt the world as profoundly and traumatically as the Industrial Revolution disrupted the 19th-century world.

The transformation of the workplace by information technology has been a bright spot in the pandemic, allowing many businesses and important institutions to continue functioning even as key employees stay home. But the same transformation is also driving many of the forces destabilizing society: declines in stable manufacturing jobs, whole regions hollowed out by economic change, the collapse of professional journalism and the rise of social media, the implosion of traditional retail, and looming job threats as self-driving cars and other new technological innovations move into the marketplace.

A host of 21st-century problems threaten to overwhelm the institutions of both national and global governance: the emergence of China as a new kind of economic and geopolitical challenger, the escalating arms races in cyber and biological weapons, the global surge of populism and nationalism, and the growing risks from poorly understood vulnerabilities and relationships in volatile and rapidly changing financial markets. Any one of these could push the world into a cycle of crisis and conflict resembling the first half of the 20th century.

Covid-19 is less a transient, random disturbance after which the world will return to stability than it is a dress rehearsal for challenges to come. History is accelerating, and the leaders, values, institutions and ideas that guide society are going to be tested severely by the struggles ahead.
Title: Why the Woken Dead won't debate you
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 04, 2020, 11:46:30 AM
Third: 

https://newdiscourses.com/2020/07/woke-wont-debate-you-heres-why/
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 24, 2020, 03:35:02 PM
From an interaction I had with a German FMA friend on FB:
===================

Much I could say in response to the specifics of your argumentation, yet somehow we are in agreement on your fundamental point that America is very badly divided.

The responsibility for this is not equal in my opinion. Obviously there is a danger of hubris in such a conclusion, but sometimes in Life things are not even.

The Progs et al, in their own words, seek to "fundamentally transform" America.

NO.

The Progs et al abused the power of the intel and national police apparatus in an attempted soft coup of our elected President and punish their political opponents with lawfare that subverts the Rule of Law itself.

NO.

The Progs et al seek to impose a racial caste system, wherein people are not defined by the content of their character but instead by the color of their skin.

NO.

The Progs et al with open borders and amnesty to illegal aliens seek to dilute the American citizenry with voters more to their liking.

NO.

The Progs et al now seek to create electoral chaos with millions of ballots sent out with no signature verification process and no verified chain of custody (a.k.a. ballot harvesting)

I would say "NO", but there is a very real chance they will succeed in this and the lawlessness that they have unleashed on our streets may well turn out to be only the appetizer for a much heavier meal.

The Progs et al promise to come very our guns.

HELL NO!!!
Title: The 2020 Revolution
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 28, 2020, 06:14:50 AM


https://americanmind.org/essays/revolution-2020/
Title: George Friedman: Clever and smart
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 01, 2020, 07:05:59 AM
   
    On Presidential Debates
Thoughts in and around geopolitics.
By: George Friedman

As I write this, my wife is watching the presidential debate in another room. I am sitting alone and sipping a port because I loathe presidential debates. This has nothing to do with the candidates – they are a separate matter. I hate presidential debates because they are designed to bring out the worst in every candidate, making it impossible to determine whether any of them is worthy of the office. Had Thomas Jefferson debated John Adams the way debates have been staged since Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy, I would have hated them too.

To understand what I am saying, we need to distinguish between being clever and being smart. There are several differences between the two, but for the current topic, the useful distinction is between thinking fast and thinking deep. Thinking fast allows you to see an opportunity, conjure a sharp statement and focus for an hour. Thinking deep means recognizing that the issues are all complex and therefore being unable to give simplistic responses to questions that are unanswerable in the time allowed. No issue to be faced by a president could responsibly be addressed in an hour. A candidate might have thought deeply on race, but precisely because he had thought deeply he would be aware of the difficulty and danger of trying to express what he has thought in two sentences.

Clever has the power to take your breath away with a witty and apt jab. Smart is boring. The deeper you see, the harder it is to talk about it. A smart person who takes on a clever person in front of an audience with limited time and interest will always lose. The first modern debate was between Kennedy and Nixon. Nixon had far more experience on the issues. Kennedy won the night by claiming that President Dwight Eisenhower had allowed a missile gap to develop. The statement was untrue, and Kennedy knew it was untrue, but it didn’t matter. A clever falsehood can sweep the table in a sentence. The explanation of why the statement is untrue requires a great deal of time.

The smart frequently suffer from the social defect of the inability to be glib. The paradox is that a person appears to be less than bright, when standing next to a truly clever candidate. It is not impossible to be smart and clever. Franklin Roosevelt was brilliant in many ways, but he was also able to say what he was thinking in a way that the audience could understand and be persuaded by. The fireside chats were clever. But FDR did not have to stand next to a simply clever man. He had the freedom that comes from owning the moment and using it to sum up the complexity of your knowledge. FDR had the opportunity to reveal his depth without simultaneously fending off a clever man. He might have won a debate, but showing that you are more clever than the other guy is hardly a qualification for president.

A competent president must think deeply on a dizzying range of issues, yet a president need not be a master improviser.

Rather, a president should have thought deeply about what to do when the moment to act comes. Former Secretary of State Dean Acheson told Kennedy that his first task as president was to go off alone and think about whether he would be prepared to use nuclear weapons and, if so, identify the circumstances under which he would. Acheson told him not to tell anyone what he had decided. A president manages a crisis by going away and thinking about it even before it happens.

The hunger for the clever leads the American people into some absurdities. Eisenhower had been a soldier and was not always clear when speaking. The media therefore raised the question of whether he was suited for the presidency. Here was the supreme commander of Operation Overlord, the first commander of NATO and the man who negotiated an end to the Korean War, being ridiculed at times because of his convoluted public speaking. Some claimed he was senile. He wasn’t, but the media expected the president to be clever, and Eisenhower was deep and complex. He likely defeated Adlai Stevenson only because both were, in their own way, smart. In those days, clever might not have been as honored as it is today. Since the debate became a critical part of a presidential campaign, we have been plagued by clever presidents.

This makes the task of a citizen far more difficult. The citizen must have the discipline not to draw rapid judgments and to listen carefully to what someone wishing to govern has to say. Looking back in history, we see few instances in which elections weren’t raucous occasions. What saved the day was the expectations the public placed on candidates. Candidates were expected to comport themselves appropriately. The public can rant, but smart candidates let others do the ranting for them.

Unfortunately, sometimes debates are the only opportunity for a citizen to judge the candidate. A citizen’s fundamental job is to figure out who is smart and who is merely clever – and, of course, who is neither, which shows rather quickly. This is a tricky business; voters often can’t know whether there is actually a missile gap. When President Harry S. Truman placed a plaque on his desk saying “the buck stops here,” the public had to decide if he was clever or smart or both in publicizing that plaque.

Democracy generally places a premium on the clever because the clever can move the public in a way that the smart usually can’t. The smart will drone on subjects such as health care or nuclear war. The smart know that the subjects are so important that they need to be dealt with soberly, and so complex that they need to be dissected in excruciating detail. There is no need for one liners that dazzle, but an absolute need for sobriety and meticulous thought.

So my bottle of Taylor Fladgate 20 and I are refusing to watch the debate. I brood over what is the fundamental distinction within human reason, of which the presidential debates are merely specimens. Democracy frightened the founders, and the debates remind me, after the third glass, that there has to be a better way. There isn’t unless we demand it, but we love the clever sally and loathe the boring truth.   



Title: Harpers: The Revolt of the Elites
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 02, 2020, 03:20:34 PM
https://archive.harpers.org/1994/11/pdf/HarpersMagazine-1994-11-0001862.pdf?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAJXATU3VRJAAA66RA&Expires=1423434213&Signature=8O60NjTWyBb4ji1nsZZPTZM62rk%3D
Title: Oikophobia
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 06, 2020, 08:53:51 AM
https://quillette.com/2019/10/07/oikophobia-our-western-self-hatred/
Title: George Friedman: The Tedium of Passion
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 08, 2020, 07:29:40 AM
Entirely too sanguine IMHO, but FWIW here it is:



October 8, 2020   Open as PDF

The Tedium of Passion
By: George Friedman

I normally try to forget the books I write, at least for a while. They can be a trap, enclosing you forever. But I can’t escape the last book I wrote, “The Storm Before the Calm,” about the anger that would encompass American life for at least the first part of this decade. I drew my conclusions from moments like the Great Depression and Andrew Jackson’s assault on the eastern banks. But to a great extent I got my bearings from the 1960s and 1970s for the obvious reason that I lived through them.
It was a time of intense outrage at anyone who disagreed with you, a time of utter certainty of one’s own view. Lyndon Johnson was regarded as a baby killer, and the war in Vietnam as a tool to enrich defense companies. Opponents of the war were viewed by their critics as tools of the communists and haters of America. Entwined in this was a culture war. On one side was what was called the counterculture, which saw America as fundamentally corrupt, combining the dehumanization of the suburbs with insoluble racism. On the other side was what was called middle America, viewing the counterculture as degenerates who were destroying the fabric of America by rejecting everything that was decent and honorable.

I recall members of the American Legion and members of construction unions confronting hordes of anti-war demonstrators dressed bizarrely, I suspect because they wanted to show contempt for the middle class and a sense that they had transcended the World War II veterans into a higher truth. I was young and dressed like a slob, still my preferred sartorial statement, and went into a 7-Eleven in Boone, North Carolina, during a best forgotten road trip. The person behind the counter called me a “hippie degenerate punk” and threatened vague mayhem if I didn’t leave. I was in similar clothing when I denied that the Viet Cong were the heirs of the American Revolution to a young lady I thought I was getting somewhere with. She grew enraged and refused to talk to me when I called them Stalinist thugs, the latter a far greater loss than a storekeeper in Boone.

I found myself in trouble. Socially I belonged to the baby boomers, who, like the millennials today, thought of themselves as having the mission to perfect humanity. But I was born in Hungary and lived with a family that remembered its recent past. For me, the perfection of humanity was not the goal. The goal was avoiding the power of tyranny. I saw tyranny through my parents’ eyes. That era was a moment of great passion, with evil masquerading as the good, and people expressing it by hating anyone who disagreed with them. I love the United States because it was better than where I had come from. It did not demand perfection. To the radicals of the 1960s, America had to be reconstructed through revolution. To middle America, the nation had been penetrated by monsters trying to destroy it.

It all became very personal. Someone who opposed the Vietnam War did not socialize with someone who supported the war. The basic assumption that normally controls the United States – that reasonable people can disagree without loathing each other – was suspended, replaced with a passionate belief that anyone who differed from oneself was deeply flawed and likely despicable. Things changed only after Richard Nixon was driven from office, the anti-war activists started looking for jobs and the pro-war movement realized the war was a waste.

Passion is an overrated virtue because it has no sense of proportion. Passion makes everything look more significant than it is and sees disagreement as sacrilege. Passion makes it seem that this is the worst of times. Because of my parents I knew the tales of European passion, but unlike my parents I wasn’t frightened by it. I was bored by it. The core certainty of each side was not merely that it was right but that the other side was wicked. Passion and self-righteousness blended with a rage at those who disagreed.

The passion of Hitler or Lenin, of course, was not boring. It was evil, but there was never a boring minute around either side. The idea that I have mentioned in the past – that civilization is the ability to believe something, yet be open to the possibility that your belief is in error – is boring. Constantly drawing in your horns when your passions demand that you gore your opponent is tiring, and the inability to hate because your opponent might be right takes a glittering moment and turns it into duller shades. Being moderate is the foundation of civilized life, yet it’s one that always repels those who are certain that they are self-evidently right.

We are of course in a moment where respect for the views of those you disagree with has withered. This happens in America with some regularity. But the time we live in is not as exciting, tense and fraught with danger as the media might suggest. It is simply tedious. As Shakespeare put it, “It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” As we have seen in the past, the United States is far too robust, and far too resilient, for the passions of the moment to destroy it. If it weren’t, it would have been destroyed long ago. Robert E. Lee couldn’t break the union, and he had a powerful military behind him. Joe McCarthy and the anti-war movement couldn’t do it. The current cast of characters certainly can’t do it. The founders knew that the best solution for political passions is boredom. Eventually the actors take a break, and the audience needs to get home, pay the babysitter and get some sleep.

For those who have never lived through this, they have never seen passion like this. For those who have lived through it before, it’s more of the same.   



Title: The Socialist States of America
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 13, 2020, 06:01:45 AM
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16624/socialist-states-of-america
Title: United States of the Democatic Republic of America
Post by: ccp on October 13, 2020, 06:37:02 AM
of course

all the swamp anti Trump Republicans will blame Trump for this

even though it is their inactions that have led to this since Watergate

they think they are immune  because they  are part of  the DC swamp crowd



Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 13, 2020, 05:14:18 PM
Amen.
Title: VDH: America in the balance
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 13, 2020, 07:02:34 PM
Another great piece from VDH that nicely summarizes quite a bit-- America hangs in the balance people!!!
https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/10/the-fragments-of-a-civilization/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Monday%20through%20Friday%202020-10-13&utm_term=NRDaily-Smart

Government crimes and coverups, a corrupt media, a candidate hiding and lying to the public, and plans to undo the foundations of the republic


Piece by piece, our civilization is beginning to disassemble. And the agents of fragmentation are as obvious as the efforts to conceal them are frantic.

St. Hillary the Colluder

In nonchalant fashion, we learned last week from newly released government documents that Hillary Clinton’s campaign team cooked up the Trump-Russia collusion hoax as a way of diverting attention from her own ongoing embarrassing email scandals.
Clinton, through three firewalls, paid foreign ex-spy Christopher Steele to create a bogus smear-Trump dossier. Steele, who had no data on, or information about any such collusion, apparently drew largely on fabrications dreamed up by a former Russian spy working at the liberal Brookings Institution. The convoluted conspiracy baffled even the sneaky Russians, who were confused when they got wind of it — possibly through the direct participation of one of their own assets.

Did we then spend millions of dollars on Robert Mueller’s nearly two-year investigation, a wild goose chase consuming millions of collective media hours hyping fantasies, and paralyzing an administration for three years — all for Hillary Clinton’s machinations, the apparent true and only Russian colluder?

John Brennan’s CIA intercepted Russian concerns over such a ruse. He even briefed President Obama on the Clinton caper. Yet the U.S. investigatory and judicial branches did not stop Clinton’s efforts to subvert a rival’s campaign. Indeed, many of the highest officials of the Obama administration shortly joined her efforts to seed the fraudulent Steele dossier throughout the Obama government and thus into the media as well — their efforts peaking in timely fashion right before the November 2016 election.

Translate all that, and the evidence grows that Hillary Clinton, in felonious fashion, paid for the Steele dossier to subvert an election and, after the election, to destroy a presidential transition and indeed a presidency itself — government efforts that historians one day will assess as the most intense effort on record to destroy a U.S. president.

These crimes were committed with the apparent cooperation of at least some in the Obama DOJ, FBI, and CIA, along with their epigones who were deeply embedded in the administrative state when Trump won the election. The tactics of such a strategy included altering federal documents, lying to a FISA court, leaking classified information, illegally surveilling American citizens, conspiring to frame top administration officials such as General Michael Flynn, unmasking names in confidential intercepts and leaking them to the media — and lying under oath about the above and more.

Hillary’s efforts constitute the most egregious scandal in American election history. And yet, shameless to the end, she continues to foam about “Trump collusion,” in the manner of a beached whale, gasping for air and twitching about on the sand.

Hackery

In nonchalant fashion, we also just learned that CrowdStrike — a company in which the Pelosis made an initial $1 million investment and that is now run by billionaire Shawn Henry, a former high official of Robert Mueller’s FBI — was given the sole proprietorship of the hacked DNC computers. Has the FBI ever allowed the victims of a felonious federal crime to conduct their own forensic investigations? The FBI outsourced the analysis even though the computer hard drives were the key evidence at the crime scene of a supposed conspiracy, allegedly cooked up by the Russians.

The scandal was not just that the FBI did not object to a private company taking over its own responsibility for the investigation. Worse still, for two years Washington insiders have known that CrowdStrike’s president had testified before Congress that he had no evidence that any Russians had hacked the DNC computers.

His secret testimony — apparently also known to Mueller’s investigators — came at a time when the nation was convulsed by the media-driven Russian hoax, much of the frenzy generated by MSNBC, where Henry himself had been an occasional “security” analyst.

We may never know how, why, or by whom the computers were hacked, only that the DNC and the Clinton campaign most certainly did not want any government agency investigating those mysteries.

If Biden wins in 2021, as surely as the sun rises, all the current investigations into the illegal weaponization of the DOJ, the FBI, and the CIA will abruptly cease within days.

De-debating

In nonchalant fashion, we also belatedly learned that the moderator of the vice-presidential debate, Susan Page, a USA Today Washington News Bureau Chief, is currently writing a biography of arch-Trump antagonist Nancy Pelosi. (Would the Biden campaign have objected if a debate moderator was now writing a likely favorable biography of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell?)

At about the same time, it was belatedly disclosed that the designated moderator of the now cancelled second presidential debate, Steven Scully, once worked as an intern for debate participant Joe Biden. (Would the Biden campaign have objected had the moderator once interned for the Trump organization?)


The Strangest Campaign in History?

Apparently, Scully also had mistakenly sent a message over the public Twitter airways — rather than through intended private direct messaging — seeking the advice of now prominent Trump hater and fired former Trump press secretary Anthony Scaramucci. Scully asked the “Mooch” whether to respond to Trump’s charges that he was biased — though Scaramucci is the most publicly biased of all self-described media experts. (Would the Biden campaign have objected if it learned that the debate moderator had been communicating with Kellyanne Conway for advice on how to reply to criticism from Biden?)
Is America so short of informed beltway creatures that it cannot find, if only for the purpose of appearances, a single moderator who has not either interned for Joe Biden or Donald Trump, or who is not currently writing a bio of a Trump-hating or Biden-hating public figure?


Worse still, Scully deleted his tweet, froze his account from public access, and claimed that his computer was “hacked.” “Hacked” is now the operative defense when caught in embarrassing electronic communications. To avoid responsibility for their own embarrassing actions, Joy Reid, Anderson Cooper, and Anthony Wiener also claimed, probably falsely, that their phone or social-media accounts had been hacked.

Had the debate taken place, one wonders whether Scully, much like Fox’s Chris Wallace and USA Today’s Susan Page, would have zeroed in on Trump, in similar gottcha, moralistic fashion to explain why we should not presume him to be untruthful or racist.

The morning after we saw the recent, live vice-presidential debate carried out successfully with proper social distancing and testing precautions, the Commission on Presidential Debates abruptly insisted that the second presidential debate, to be moderated by Scully, would be virtual for the first time in American history.

The commission — an ostensibly bipartisan group that nonetheless consists exclusively of Democrats and Never Trumpers —  knows that Trump thrives on “reality” television while Biden has crafted a unique campaign based almost entirely on remote communications through Skype and Zoom, often with the assistance of poorly concealed teleprompters and scripted talking points. Moreover, when a candidate leads, as the mainstream polling suggests Biden now does, debates are considered unnecessary hazards, even as underdogs see them as critical chances to reboot campaign momentum.

The commission’s decision came even though the president’s doctors reported that by October 15, Trump would be medically fit to participate and virtually immune for months from reinfection. In addition, as with most asymptomatic and recovered patients with viral antibodies, Trump would be unable to pass on the virus for months, if ever.

In other words, Biden — and anyone else present — would have had far less chance of being infected by Trump in the now cancelled second debate than during the first debate.

Issues Are Bad

In nonchalant fashion, Joe Biden just announced that he will rule neither in nor out the Democratic plan to “pack” the Supreme Court to either 13 or 15 justices, should he win and the Senate flip Democratic.

As Biden put it to his questioner:

I know it’s a great question, and you all, I don’t blame you for asking, but you know the moment I answer that question, that headline in every one of your papers will be about that, other than, other than focusing on what’s happening now.

Biden was only clarifying what he had said earlier in the first debate when he stonewalled with, “Whatever position I take on that, that’ll become the issue.”

That incoherence was a further clarification of an earlier admission that the inquiry was “a legitimate question” but one that Biden was “not going to answer.”

And most recently Biden quadrupled down and insisted that voters do not “deserve” an honest answer on whether their Supreme Court will be packed — as he reverted to his bizarre earlier campaign mode of “lying, dog-faced pony soldier,” “You’re a damn liar, man” and “Look, fat, look. Here’s the deal.”

If we follow all the contorted Biden logic, he seems to now believe that the public has a reasonable interest in what he would do about enlarging the Court to nullify Trump’s conservative picks — but that the public nonetheless doesn’t deserve to know.
And Biden will not meet that “legitimate” but undeserved public interest, because, by answering, his very response would become the “issue.” That is, Biden would take a position on an issue, and therefore either delight or offend many voters. And he must avoid that at all costs.

Biden’s answer may be the most surreal response of any presidential candidate in memory.

But it is emblematic of his entire stealth campaign, in collusion with a cheerleading media — a virtual candidate who has no answers to questions that are now rarely asked.

Any reporter, debate moderator, or journalist who asked a question that Biden could not answer or that would in any way embarrass Biden would now earn lifetime ostracism and career beltway ruin for aiding and abetting the Prince of Darkness and the enemies of progressivism.

The current Democratic Party, hostage to the hard-core Left, has asserted that in victory it may seek to pack the Supreme Court and thereby end a 150-year law governing that nine-member body. It has also said it might end the 170-year-old Senate filibuster, on cue from Barack Obama, who as a senator nonetheless found the filibuster useful when he was in the minority. It claims it might do away with the 233-year-old Electoral College, a foundation of the U.S. Constitution that sought to ensure a republic rather than a democracy ruled by the 51 percent and urban centers.

Biden will no longer repeat his earlier no-fracking pandering, but his party (“I am the Democratic Party right now”) has often said it will end fracking. Fracking, remember, has helped to lower world oil prices, to the detriment of Russia and the Middle East. Fracking has helped to keep American troops out of Middle East interventions (remember the now calcified slogan “no blood for oil”?), aided middle-class commuters, created millions of well-paying jobs, and made electricity cheaper, and the air far cleaner.

On all these questions, Biden will offer no answers to voters who do not “deserve” to know. Yet he could very well seek to change the core rules by which America is governed — as part of a larger project to ensure systemic progressive dominance.
He has no answers because to answer honestly would either reveal himself to be a leftist pawn now and thus an anathema to the suburban swing voter; or, contrarily, he’d be exposed as an oath-breaker in the eyes of the AOC–Bernie Sanders socialist near majority of his own party.

So in Orwellian fashion, “issues” can no longer be issues, even if they could alter the United States in a way not seen since its founding.

Sleepwalking to the Revolution

To paraphrase Sophocles, 2020 saw many strange things and nothing stranger than peak Trump derangement syndrome, COVID-19, a self-induced recession, our first national quarantine, and riots, looting, and arson, all mostly unpunished and uncontrolled, in our major cities.

So we are in revolutionary times, even as we snooze about a recent systematic effort, hidden with great effort by our own government, to destroy a prior presidential campaign and transition, and now a presidency.

We are asked to vote for a candidate who will not reveal his position on any major issue of our age, because he feels to do so would enlighten the undeserving electorate and thereby cost him the election. So we continue to sleepwalk toward a revolution whose architects warped our institutions in 2016–2020, and they now plan to alter many of them beyond recognition in 2021.

Translated, that means that they don’t regret what they did in 2016–2019, only that they belatedly got caught for a brief time.
And so by changing the rules after 2020, they are vowing never ever to get caught again.
Title: Re: VDH: America in the balance
Post by: G M on October 13, 2020, 07:27:20 PM

"Translated, that means that they don’t regret what they did in 2016–2019, only that they belatedly got caught for a brief time.
And so by changing the rules after 2020, they are vowing never ever to get caught again."

That is their plan. They will plunge us into war if they need to.



Another great piece from VDH that nicely summarizes quite a bit-- America hangs in the balance people!!!
https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/10/the-fragments-of-a-civilization/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Monday%20through%20Friday%202020-10-13&utm_term=NRDaily-Smart

Government crimes and coverups, a corrupt media, a candidate hiding and lying to the public, and plans to undo the foundations of the republic


Piece by piece, our civilization is beginning to disassemble. And the agents of fragmentation are as obvious as the efforts to conceal them are frantic.

St. Hillary the Colluder

In nonchalant fashion, we learned last week from newly released government documents that Hillary Clinton’s campaign team cooked up the Trump-Russia collusion hoax as a way of diverting attention from her own ongoing embarrassing email scandals.
Clinton, through three firewalls, paid foreign ex-spy Christopher Steele to create a bogus smear-Trump dossier. Steele, who had no data on, or information about any such collusion, apparently drew largely on fabrications dreamed up by a former Russian spy working at the liberal Brookings Institution. The convoluted conspiracy baffled even the sneaky Russians, who were confused when they got wind of it — possibly through the direct participation of one of their own assets.

Did we then spend millions of dollars on Robert Mueller’s nearly two-year investigation, a wild goose chase consuming millions of collective media hours hyping fantasies, and paralyzing an administration for three years — all for Hillary Clinton’s machinations, the apparent true and only Russian colluder?

John Brennan’s CIA intercepted Russian concerns over such a ruse. He even briefed President Obama on the Clinton caper. Yet the U.S. investigatory and judicial branches did not stop Clinton’s efforts to subvert a rival’s campaign. Indeed, many of the highest officials of the Obama administration shortly joined her efforts to seed the fraudulent Steele dossier throughout the Obama government and thus into the media as well — their efforts peaking in timely fashion right before the November 2016 election.

Translate all that, and the evidence grows that Hillary Clinton, in felonious fashion, paid for the Steele dossier to subvert an election and, after the election, to destroy a presidential transition and indeed a presidency itself — government efforts that historians one day will assess as the most intense effort on record to destroy a U.S. president.

These crimes were committed with the apparent cooperation of at least some in the Obama DOJ, FBI, and CIA, along with their epigones who were deeply embedded in the administrative state when Trump won the election. The tactics of such a strategy included altering federal documents, lying to a FISA court, leaking classified information, illegally surveilling American citizens, conspiring to frame top administration officials such as General Michael Flynn, unmasking names in confidential intercepts and leaking them to the media — and lying under oath about the above and more.

Hillary’s efforts constitute the most egregious scandal in American election history. And yet, shameless to the end, she continues to foam about “Trump collusion,” in the manner of a beached whale, gasping for air and twitching about on the sand.

Hackery

In nonchalant fashion, we also just learned that CrowdStrike — a company in which the Pelosis made an initial $1 million investment and that is now run by billionaire Shawn Henry, a former high official of Robert Mueller’s FBI — was given the sole proprietorship of the hacked DNC computers. Has the FBI ever allowed the victims of a felonious federal crime to conduct their own forensic investigations? The FBI outsourced the analysis even though the computer hard drives were the key evidence at the crime scene of a supposed conspiracy, allegedly cooked up by the Russians.

The scandal was not just that the FBI did not object to a private company taking over its own responsibility for the investigation. Worse still, for two years Washington insiders have known that CrowdStrike’s president had testified before Congress that he had no evidence that any Russians had hacked the DNC computers.

His secret testimony — apparently also known to Mueller’s investigators — came at a time when the nation was convulsed by the media-driven Russian hoax, much of the frenzy generated by MSNBC, where Henry himself had been an occasional “security” analyst.

We may never know how, why, or by whom the computers were hacked, only that the DNC and the Clinton campaign most certainly did not want any government agency investigating those mysteries.

If Biden wins in 2021, as surely as the sun rises, all the current investigations into the illegal weaponization of the DOJ, the FBI, and the CIA will abruptly cease within days.

De-debating

In nonchalant fashion, we also belatedly learned that the moderator of the vice-presidential debate, Susan Page, a USA Today Washington News Bureau Chief, is currently writing a biography of arch-Trump antagonist Nancy Pelosi. (Would the Biden campaign have objected if a debate moderator was now writing a likely favorable biography of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell?)

At about the same time, it was belatedly disclosed that the designated moderator of the now cancelled second presidential debate, Steven Scully, once worked as an intern for debate participant Joe Biden. (Would the Biden campaign have objected had the moderator once interned for the Trump organization?)


The Strangest Campaign in History?

Apparently, Scully also had mistakenly sent a message over the public Twitter airways — rather than through intended private direct messaging — seeking the advice of now prominent Trump hater and fired former Trump press secretary Anthony Scaramucci. Scully asked the “Mooch” whether to respond to Trump’s charges that he was biased — though Scaramucci is the most publicly biased of all self-described media experts. (Would the Biden campaign have objected if it learned that the debate moderator had been communicating with Kellyanne Conway for advice on how to reply to criticism from Biden?)
Is America so short of informed beltway creatures that it cannot find, if only for the purpose of appearances, a single moderator who has not either interned for Joe Biden or Donald Trump, or who is not currently writing a bio of a Trump-hating or Biden-hating public figure?


Worse still, Scully deleted his tweet, froze his account from public access, and claimed that his computer was “hacked.” “Hacked” is now the operative defense when caught in embarrassing electronic communications. To avoid responsibility for their own embarrassing actions, Joy Reid, Anderson Cooper, and Anthony Wiener also claimed, probably falsely, that their phone or social-media accounts had been hacked.

Had the debate taken place, one wonders whether Scully, much like Fox’s Chris Wallace and USA Today’s Susan Page, would have zeroed in on Trump, in similar gottcha, moralistic fashion to explain why we should not presume him to be untruthful or racist.

The morning after we saw the recent, live vice-presidential debate carried out successfully with proper social distancing and testing precautions, the Commission on Presidential Debates abruptly insisted that the second presidential debate, to be moderated by Scully, would be virtual for the first time in American history.

The commission — an ostensibly bipartisan group that nonetheless consists exclusively of Democrats and Never Trumpers —  knows that Trump thrives on “reality” television while Biden has crafted a unique campaign based almost entirely on remote communications through Skype and Zoom, often with the assistance of poorly concealed teleprompters and scripted talking points. Moreover, when a candidate leads, as the mainstream polling suggests Biden now does, debates are considered unnecessary hazards, even as underdogs see them as critical chances to reboot campaign momentum.

The commission’s decision came even though the president’s doctors reported that by October 15, Trump would be medically fit to participate and virtually immune for months from reinfection. In addition, as with most asymptomatic and recovered patients with viral antibodies, Trump would be unable to pass on the virus for months, if ever.

In other words, Biden — and anyone else present — would have had far less chance of being infected by Trump in the now cancelled second debate than during the first debate.

Issues Are Bad

In nonchalant fashion, Joe Biden just announced that he will rule neither in nor out the Democratic plan to “pack” the Supreme Court to either 13 or 15 justices, should he win and the Senate flip Democratic.

As Biden put it to his questioner:

I know it’s a great question, and you all, I don’t blame you for asking, but you know the moment I answer that question, that headline in every one of your papers will be about that, other than, other than focusing on what’s happening now.

Biden was only clarifying what he had said earlier in the first debate when he stonewalled with, “Whatever position I take on that, that’ll become the issue.”

That incoherence was a further clarification of an earlier admission that the inquiry was “a legitimate question” but one that Biden was “not going to answer.”

And most recently Biden quadrupled down and insisted that voters do not “deserve” an honest answer on whether their Supreme Court will be packed — as he reverted to his bizarre earlier campaign mode of “lying, dog-faced pony soldier,” “You’re a damn liar, man” and “Look, fat, look. Here’s the deal.”

If we follow all the contorted Biden logic, he seems to now believe that the public has a reasonable interest in what he would do about enlarging the Court to nullify Trump’s conservative picks — but that the public nonetheless doesn’t deserve to know.
And Biden will not meet that “legitimate” but undeserved public interest, because, by answering, his very response would become the “issue.” That is, Biden would take a position on an issue, and therefore either delight or offend many voters. And he must avoid that at all costs.

Biden’s answer may be the most surreal response of any presidential candidate in memory.

But it is emblematic of his entire stealth campaign, in collusion with a cheerleading media — a virtual candidate who has no answers to questions that are now rarely asked.

Any reporter, debate moderator, or journalist who asked a question that Biden could not answer or that would in any way embarrass Biden would now earn lifetime ostracism and career beltway ruin for aiding and abetting the Prince of Darkness and the enemies of progressivism.

The current Democratic Party, hostage to the hard-core Left, has asserted that in victory it may seek to pack the Supreme Court and thereby end a 150-year law governing that nine-member body. It has also said it might end the 170-year-old Senate filibuster, on cue from Barack Obama, who as a senator nonetheless found the filibuster useful when he was in the minority. It claims it might do away with the 233-year-old Electoral College, a foundation of the U.S. Constitution that sought to ensure a republic rather than a democracy ruled by the 51 percent and urban centers.

Biden will no longer repeat his earlier no-fracking pandering, but his party (“I am the Democratic Party right now”) has often said it will end fracking. Fracking, remember, has helped to lower world oil prices, to the detriment of Russia and the Middle East. Fracking has helped to keep American troops out of Middle East interventions (remember the now calcified slogan “no blood for oil”?), aided middle-class commuters, created millions of well-paying jobs, and made electricity cheaper, and the air far cleaner.

On all these questions, Biden will offer no answers to voters who do not “deserve” to know. Yet he could very well seek to change the core rules by which America is governed — as part of a larger project to ensure systemic progressive dominance.
He has no answers because to answer honestly would either reveal himself to be a leftist pawn now and thus an anathema to the suburban swing voter; or, contrarily, he’d be exposed as an oath-breaker in the eyes of the AOC–Bernie Sanders socialist near majority of his own party.

So in Orwellian fashion, “issues” can no longer be issues, even if they could alter the United States in a way not seen since its founding.

Sleepwalking to the Revolution

To paraphrase Sophocles, 2020 saw many strange things and nothing stranger than peak Trump derangement syndrome, COVID-19, a self-induced recession, our first national quarantine, and riots, looting, and arson, all mostly unpunished and uncontrolled, in our major cities.

So we are in revolutionary times, even as we snooze about a recent systematic effort, hidden with great effort by our own government, to destroy a prior presidential campaign and transition, and now a presidency.

We are asked to vote for a candidate who will not reveal his position on any major issue of our age, because he feels to do so would enlighten the undeserving electorate and thereby cost him the election. So we continue to sleepwalk toward a revolution whose architects warped our institutions in 2016–2020, and they now plan to alter many of them beyond recognition in 2021.

Translated, that means that they don’t regret what they did in 2016–2019, only that they belatedly got caught for a brief time.
And so by changing the rules after 2020, they are vowing never ever to get caught again.
Title: Re VDH
Post by: DougMacG on October 14, 2020, 07:26:23 AM
Great piece. Also this:
https://ricochet.com/podcast/ricochet-podcast/house-of-deplorables-victor-davis-hanson-makes-his-final-case-for-trump/
Title: Bob Dole on debates
Post by: ccp on October 15, 2020, 02:38:27 PM
https://thepostmillennial.com/bob-dole-suggests-commission-on-presidential-debates-is-unfair-biased-against-trump

The questions are always based in worded in ways in cinque with anti Trump talking points

But they are always anti Republican

I think Chris Wallace did ask Hillary a tough question in '16 and chased her some
other than that I can never recall ever seeing a Democrat put on the Defensive with the questions like the Repubs
in general and Trump in particular are.
Title: VDH: Fragments of a Civilization
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 23, 2020, 09:48:16 PM
https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/10/the-fragments-of-a-civilization/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Monday%20through%20Friday%202020-10-13&utm_term=NRDaily-Smart
Title: Re: VDH: Fragments of a Civilization
Post by: G M on October 23, 2020, 09:59:46 PM
"Translated, that means that they don’t regret what they did in 2016–2019, only that they belatedly got caught for a brief time.

And so by changing the rules after 2020, they are vowing never ever to get caught again."

They would rather burn it all down, rather than let Trump be president for another term.



https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/10/the-fragments-of-a-civilization/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Monday%20through%20Friday%202020-10-13&utm_term=NRDaily-Smart
Title: Archbishop lets loose
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 31, 2020, 07:27:14 PM
https://taylormarshall.com/reset?fbclid=IwAR2dfxhCpFICbcXqonYNNx3IuVm91-TlnD-5ppChMF-GC4WDP_WJ3qwusgI
Title: Re: Archbishop lets loose
Post by: G M on October 31, 2020, 08:28:08 PM
https://taylormarshall.com/reset?fbclid=IwAR2dfxhCpFICbcXqonYNNx3IuVm91-TlnD-5ppChMF-GC4WDP_WJ3qwusgI

I am so old, I remember when "Is the Pope Catholic" wasn't a serious question to be debated.
Title: joe scarborough
Post by: ccp on November 02, 2020, 09:41:08 AM
https://pjmedia.com/election/stephen-kruiser/2020/11/02/turncoat-idiot-joe-scarborough-thinks-the-constitution-is-voter-suppression-n1113744

supposed tough guy

former republican who marries die hard Democrat woman then becomes girly

like Arnold
Title: The Great Reset
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 03, 2020, 12:11:22 PM


https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/great-reset-dummies?utm_campaign=&utm_content=Zerohedge%3A+The+Durden+Dispatch&utm_medium=email&utm_source=zh_newsletter
Title: The Riot Party
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 03, 2020, 12:30:11 PM
second post

https://americanmind.org/essays/the-riot-party/?fbclid=IwAR2JZ6exHlpaOsEHoHN5yGrKGbRacsgPEhpJHb40H12dqk4jW1AkKQLb7d4
Title: Tucker
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 07, 2020, 04:29:53 AM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uKwoojS9XU&feature=emb_rel_pause
Title: Van Jones
Post by: ccp on November 08, 2020, 08:12:29 AM
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/bronsonstocking/2020/11/07/van-jones-sobs-like-a-baby-while-race-huckstering-over-trumps-defeat-n2579671

This guy does have conservative values

and compared to many of the libs on CNN he is a bit more objective
I noticed

not frequently but he does give repubs once in a while

how can we get someone like him on our side ?

is it possible?
Title: The Plight of the Heartland
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 13, 2020, 03:19:50 PM
N GEOPOLITICS
How the Plight of a Heartland Could Upset America's Balance
Rebecca Keller
Rebecca Keller
Senior Science and Technology Analyst, Stratfor
12 MINS READ
Nov 13, 2020 | 10:00 GMT
(Samuel Corum/Getty Images)
A supporter of current U.S. President Donald Trump (left) and a supporter of U.S. President-elect Joe Biden point to each other's hats in Washington D.C. on Nov. 8, 2020, as people gathered in the streets to celebrate Biden’s projected victory.

(Samuel Corum/Getty Images)
HIGHLIGHTS
The unprecedented threats of violence and unrest surrounding the 2020 U.S. presidential election have shown just how deeply divided the American electorate has become. As the United States prepares for what’s likely to be a highly contentious power transition, we invite readers to revisit this 2019 column on how the polarization of U.S. politics goes hand-in-hand with the U.S. economic core’s continued shift away from the Mississippi River Basin to the coasts....

Editor's Note: The unprecedented threats of violence and unrest surrounding the 2020 U.S. presidential election have shown just how deeply divided the American electorate has become. As the United States prepares for what’s likely to be a highly contentious power transition, we invite readers to revisit this 2019 column on how the polarization of U.S. politics goes hand-in-hand with the U.S. economic core’s continued shift away from the Mississippi River Basin to the coasts.

The death of the American middle class and, with it, large swaths of the American interior, is no secret. Globalization, technological change and other factors have decimated the heartland of the country at the same time as demographic, economic and other trends are beginning to concentrate the country's economic wealth and political influence along the coasts. With the traditional core of the United States no longer carrying the weight it once did, the country as a whole has lost a largely unified center in geographic, economic and social terms. Today, many of the country's growing economic hubs share a similar type of geographical location — a coast — yet they remain geographically, culturally and economically diverse. In this most basic sense, diversity breeds drivers that divide rather than unify, meaning that the continued shift in the U.S. economic core away from its geographic center, alongside other technological and demographic factors, will inflame the nation's social, political and generational divides for some time to come.

The Big Picture
Stratfor's geopolitical methodology rests on seven pillars that drive the actions of all nations: geography, economics, politics, history, technology, society and security. In examining these aspects of a nation's life, it is critical to identify a country's core — the focus of the country's population, economic might and natural resources. What happens, however, when technological shifts propel a shift in a country's core? How does that change the constraints and compulsions of a nation?

Defining the U.S. Core
Many often attribute the United States' modern success to its prize for winning the geographic lottery: the Mississippi River Basin. Stretching from the Rocky Mountains in the west to the Appalachian chain in the east, this vast region offers ample fertile land, navigable rivers, access to raw materials and, in more modern times, transport links to manufacturing centers. It's no surprise, then, that this heartland provided the United States with the economic prosperity that laid the foundation for the country to inevitably become an empire.

For all its historical strength, the Mississippi River Basin is no longer the economic core, or "ecumene," of the United States. After all, technology has evolved and the U.S. economy has shifted; the basin's steel belt has become the rust belt, while containerized shipping, globalization and automation have increased the economic importance of the coastal urban centers. Agriculture, which remains concentrated in the Mississippi basin, still carries outsized political weight compared to its meager contribution of less than 1 percent of gross domestic product, yet even that is beginning to wane in the face of demographic shifts and advancing technology. Naturally, any such transition produces winners and losers; in the U.S. case, it has exacerbated a political divide that has only grown in intensity since the 2016 presidential elections.

A Ditch, a Dream and the Rising Mississippi
The Mississippi basin did not become the undisputed core of the United States until the second half of the 19th century. The U.S. government had been well aware of the land's promise in terms of resources when President Thomas Jefferson acquired much of the basin in 1803 through the Louisiana Purchase, yet the area remained a sparsely populated wilderness for lack of transport links between the Atlantic coast and the interior. (At the dawn of the 19th century, in fact, many in the young republic even regarded western New York, which was part of the original colonial core, as wilderness.) With the Mississippi not yet navigable in the north and the sea route from New Orleans to the economic centers of the mid-Atlantic and northeastern colonies still arduous, transporting goods, particularly bulky ones, over land was more trouble than it was worth. Ultimately, it was technological innovation that increased the ease and reliability of water-based navigation that ultimately transformed the Mississippi basin into the new country's core.


At the dawn of the 19th century, New York City, Baltimore, Philadelphia and Charleston, South Carolina, were all competing for economic superiority in the fledgling nation. In 1825, however, New York gained a clear advantage over its rivals thanks to the Erie Canal, a waterway that transported grains, flour, salt, heavier ores, minerals and manufactured goods from the Great Lakes to the metropolis via the canal and the Hudson River. More than that, the canal was the single greatest factor in the emergence of the cities of Buffalo, Rochester and Syracuse, New York, as well as the industries that would support them for the better part of a century. Thanks to the upstate canal, New York City's population and economy boomed, leading to a fourfold rise in exports in just the first five years of the canal's operation. But the economic might that emerged along the canal's route did not create a permanent core. Rail, technological improvements and a series of other canals and locks increasingly connecting the various tributaries of the Mississippi basin, while improving navigability eroded the advantages of the Erie Canal. And when the St. Lawrence Seaway opened in 1959, it put the final nail in the coffin of the New York waterway, as the Great Lake states opted for the quicker northern route to the Atlantic.

It wasn't until after the American Civil War ended in 1865 that the Mississippi basin reached its full potential as its agricultural and industrial might helped foster the nation's recovery. In 1879, the federal government assumed responsibility for the river's navigation, facilitating coordination and improving efficiency. The steamboat era, followed by the advent of the river barge and extensive engineering projects during the second half of the 1800s, ultimately laid the foundation for New Orleans to become a booming, diversified export/import hub in the following century. From 1940 to 1984, waterborne trade in the Mississippi basin increased over 13 times, rising from 27 million metric tons (30 million short tons) of goods to roughly 363 million. But just as technological advancements effectively consigned the Erie Canal to history, technological changes in shipping and manufacturing and improvements to the road and rail network have had a similarly deleterious effect on the Mississippi basin.

Without a unifying culture, economy and geography knitting the core together, the new center — fiscally robust as it may be — will not help an already fraying populace mend itself.

The Winners and Losers of Efficiency
As technological advancement and globalization made trade more efficient, the great manufacturing hubs in the American Midwest have begun to close their doors. The economic decline has been well-documented: States that were once powerhouses in coal or steel are now losing population as their inhabitants are forced to seek employment elsewhere. Globalization hit all of America's middle class hard, but especially in the heavy industrial areas in the basin's steel belt, making the American dream — the vision that an individual can become prosperous simply through hard, blue-collar work — so much more difficult to achieve.

And even if U.S. agriculture avoided the same downturn that manufacturing suffered, it has lost its political and economic heft of yesteryear. Demographic trends, evolving technologies, the effects of the U.S.-Chinese trade war and proposed cuts in agricultural subsidies all suggest that the sector's influence will continue to wane in the halls of power. Ultimately, contemporary agriculture requires ever-fewer farmers, yet the local industrial jobs that previously attracted surplus labor are growing equally rarer — political pledges to return to a bygone era notwithstanding. Today, the rural heartland faces difficult times ahead as people migrate to pursue economic opportunities in coastal states and other urban areas.


Of course, the United States is not solely a heartland power; it has long operated a strong navy on both coasts, allowing it to project power around the world. Likewise, coastal urban centers like New York, Boston and San Francisco did not become economic hubs simply at the expense of the interior. Now, however, internal migration trends indicate that once-powerful states like Illinois, Ohio and Pennsylvania are losing people as western (Oregon and Washington) and southeastern states (Florida, North Carolina and South Carolina) gain them. It's a similar case in terms of economic growth, as western and southeastern regions witnessed growth above the national average while the Great Plains, New England and the Great Lakes regions all posted economic growth figures below the national average in 2016-2017.

But population movement and positive economic growth only tell part of the story. The new U.S. ecumene — which forms a rough "U" shape that traces down the Pacific coast, takes in some Rocky Mountain states, proceeds through Texas and much of the Gulf of Mexico before turning slightly north in the southeastern coastal states — possesses a diverse set of economic interests. No one or two economic factors drive this disparate ecumene; instead, there are tech hubs on the West Coast, energy resources in Texas and real estate and industrial concerns in the Southeast, along with a variety of other economic interests. The lack of a unified economic heartland, coupled with increasing urbanization and generational shifts, sheds light on the roots of an important trend that could deeply affect the near-term future of the United States: the disappearance of the political moderate.


Hollowing Out the Political Middle
Societal, economic or cultural change is not always immediately reflected in the halls of Washington, D.C. Some of the change at the political level can be delayed due to the fundamentals of the U.S. political system. Changes in population due to the rise and fall of local state economies will only result in changes in representation every decade and even then, they will be gradual. After each census, the House of Representatives recalculates the number of seats allocated to each state proportionally, meaning that the population declines in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Illinois, West Virginia and Michigan that have occurred over the past decade will have a delayed effect on overall political power within the House. In the meantime, traditionally powerful states that see waning power and influence ahead will seek to hold onto influence in other ways and in other branches of the government. See the 2016 presidential elections, when many states that have been facing long-term economic decline gravitated to the candidate who promised a return to former glory. However, the growth of urban areas as economic hubs could slowly change the social and political profiles of the states that host them. Ultimately, the lag between demographic and economic changes and its formal reflection at the level of political representation leaves the U.S. political system in a state of limbo.


Against this backdrop, the United States is witnessing the growth of ideological divides stemming from generational shifts, urbanization, internal migration and economic inequalities. Without a unifying culture, economy and geography knitting the core together, the new ecumene — fiscally robust as it may be — will not help an already fraying populace mend itself. After all, many of the cultural concerns and economic priorities of Los Angeles still have little in common with those in Raleigh. Instead, we are more likely to witness states push more heavily for their own regional, rather than national, interests as a result of the lag of national representation behind economic realities. In fact, this is a trend that is already in evidence on hot-button issues such as climate change and net neutrality. States will continue to exert local power to drive policy toward their own regional interests. But for emerging technologies like automated vehicles, this drive threatens hopes of standardizing the industry, which could eventually temper advances. Alternatively, big states will have an opportunity to exert an outsized political power if they act early to enshrine regulations on emerging technologies, forcing others to follow. Even still, the United States is staring at an uncertain road ahead in terms of policy direction and political volatility as the off-kilter equilibrium, set adrift by a shifting core, will take years to recalibrate.

The disenfranchisement of the blue-collar middle class that helped propel Donald Trump to the presidency in 2016 is not the only thing pushing the partisan divide wide. Numerous other issues are fomenting greater political division — all of which is a manifestation of the country itself metaphorically hollowing out its core. Though the Mississippi basin will remain an agricultural resource base, the effective core, where economic might, population centers and connections with the rest of the world are consolidated, will be centered on the U.S. coasts in the decades to come. With the country's modern-day ecumene located on both sides of the country and the former center seeking to cling to its previous influence, the next several election cycles have the potential to swing widely between poles as the political divide continues to grow. And just as China rises as a global competitor (even amid its own internal geographic divisions), the United States will be forced to grapple with the reality of an urban, coastal core and a potentially restive rural interior that will chafe — potentially to the point of social or civil unrest — at its limited economic opportunities.

Title: The Amorality of the Left's Equality Extremism
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 01, 2020, 08:17:58 PM
https://amgreatness.com/2020/11/30/the-amorality-of-the-lefts-equality-extremism/?fbclid=IwAR19prVblqSf1DKsDcjPfpk4bYXyHzAy7b6Fq9JADVcEFAJek7WGVPWqels
Title: Tucker: 12/14/20
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 15, 2020, 03:50:25 AM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVPKw4H-h90&fbclid=IwAR3D9DXA7uiyrzThRzRsqtTFqNmXSvNCl-inUsZFHNpLvtrOMTRWF40wCLc
Title: Newt: Why I will not give up
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 19, 2020, 10:21:04 AM
https://www.gingrich360.com/2020/12/why-i-will-not-give-up/
Title: Newt , why I will not give up
Post by: ccp on December 19, 2020, 10:45:02 AM
Newt at his best!

https://emojiguide.org/thumbs-up
Title: The great debate between Burke and Paine
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 20, 2020, 04:40:05 PM
https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2014/07/great-debate-edmund-burke-thomas-paine-yuval-levin-shaun-rieley.html?fbclid=IwAR3nV1wr9c6vhhjgb3ez_lL35v-NObAwUPDpZ6pQZTGYZFZFUEpPpAFrE-Y
Title: we get $2 a day Hollywood gets this
Post by: ccp on December 22, 2020, 04:42:49 AM
https://news.yahoo.com/somehow-congress-lackuster-covid-19-013900426.html

Pelosi and Maxine get to cameo in Marvel movie #79

Maxine could go down in history as first black Wonder Woman.
And the first one over 100 y old
Title: Tucker
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 05, 2021, 03:19:07 AM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4cgLgJ52MQ

Title: TV show Dragnet 1969 "public affairs"
Post by: ccp on January 07, 2021, 04:30:56 AM
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x5uwsjk

the 60 's hippies and radicals were arguing the same stuff as today

difference  is they are in charge now.

I never liked the show growing up or now but this is exactly same Democrat talking points   as today

Notice one character reminds me of Saul Alinsky.
Title: Re: Political Rants, Mark Steyn
Post by: DougMacG on January 07, 2021, 07:38:47 AM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXjFLUGMuSE
Title: George Friedman: First thoughts on a national tragedy
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 07, 2021, 02:46:13 PM
   
First Thoughts on a National Tragedy
By: George Friedman
A physician is taught to avoid emotional involvement with patients. If he suffers with them, the pain will break him and his judgement will be impaired. He must be clinical and disinterested in order to understand what he is seeing. Avoiding emotions is necessary, but it exacts an extraordinary toll of either pain or an insensitivity to pain. Striving to understand demands distance, but that distance inevitably breaks.

The task I have set myself is to try to understand the way the world works, and to do that, to some extent, I must not allow myself to participate in it. The world is filled with opinions about what ought to be, and the cacophony of self-certainty is a luxury from which I must imperfectly try to remove myself. As Wednesday unfolded, the opinions were overwhelming. I am a citizen of the United States, and it is at times impossible to keep my distance, much as it would be for a physician to treat his own child.

My job is to say something, but what can you say about the unthinkable? How can you speak when you are grieving? The capital of our country was invaded by a mob, some carrying weapons, who had been encouraged to do so by the president. Nothing that was said for or against Donald Trump was sufficient for the moment, and all those who claimed to have foreseen this or claimed that what we saw did not happen are merely continuing the routine chatter of political discourse. I am supposed to be able to explain what has happened, but the ordinary criticism or defense of Trump doesn’t comprehend the moment, and in any case it misses the point. It is not Trump but we ourselves who are to blame, and what we have become toward each other that has somehow been corrupted. None of this could have happened without the rancor tacitly or deliberately embraced.

I am not able to think analytically about this, nor can I pretend that my writing predicted this. I must approach this as what I am: a citizen of a nation that gave me sanctuary, to which I owe my life and which I tried to serve as best I could. I have traveled the world and seen many acts of political rage and cruelty. I have seen coups. This may have been a blundering one, but it was a coup nonetheless, carried out with the intent to change the outcome of an election. It happened in my country, and in its capital city, and in its Capitol building. That moment made us simply another country, and not the city on a hill, shedding light on the world.

I was forced into silence by grief. When something enchanting dies, it calls for a moment of silence over what was lost. Every word uttered demeans the moment. And so I was silent. Now I speak, but what is there to say? The light of the shining city on a hill must be relit, and to relight it we must begin by willing ourselves to friendship and to refuse to despise each other regardless of disagreement. That is the start. I don’t know if we have the will or the strength to do it.

This is all opinion, not carefully thought-out analysis. And much of it is cliche. But cliches carry some truth. I have tried to understand, but now I am reduced to grief. Others will say they told me so, but then they have said so much that they must at times be right.

We did not lose our country yesterday, but we received a warning that our country is in danger. And it is most in danger, I think, from the spirit of self-righteousness that has gripped our nation. Each of us seems to hold our views as unassailable. Each of us regards other views as monstrous. From this cauldron only poison will be brewed.

I have spoken for myself here, not for my method. For the moment I don’t care for the method, or for the understanding. I long for a lost world in which reasonable people could disagree over politics and still be friends. Donald Trump did not rip friendships apart. We did that to ourselves.

There is no wisdom or genius in what I have said. For now, it is what it is. I will seek to return to ironic distance soon. But my country is in danger, and now is not the time for distance nor the endless chatter of opinions passionately repeated.

I love this country. It is time for its citizens to get a grip.
Title: Re: George Friedman: First thoughts on a national tragedy
Post by: G M on January 07, 2021, 03:15:41 PM
"We did not lose our country yesterday, but we received a warning that our country is in danger."

BULLSHIT


   
First Thoughts on a National Tragedy
By: George Friedman
A physician is taught to avoid emotional involvement with patients. If he suffers with them, the pain will break him and his judgement will be impaired. He must be clinical and disinterested in order to understand what he is seeing. Avoiding emotions is necessary, but it exacts an extraordinary toll of either pain or an insensitivity to pain. Striving to understand demands distance, but that distance inevitably breaks.

The task I have set myself is to try to understand the way the world works, and to do that, to some extent, I must not allow myself to participate in it. The world is filled with opinions about what ought to be, and the cacophony of self-certainty is a luxury from which I must imperfectly try to remove myself. As Wednesday unfolded, the opinions were overwhelming. I am a citizen of the United States, and it is at times impossible to keep my distance, much as it would be for a physician to treat his own child.

My job is to say something, but what can you say about the unthinkable? How can you speak when you are grieving? The capital of our country was invaded by a mob, some carrying weapons, who had been encouraged to do so by the president. Nothing that was said for or against Donald Trump was sufficient for the moment, and all those who claimed to have foreseen this or claimed that what we saw did not happen are merely continuing the routine chatter of political discourse. I am supposed to be able to explain what has happened, but the ordinary criticism or defense of Trump doesn’t comprehend the moment, and in any case it misses the point. It is not Trump but we ourselves who are to blame, and what we have become toward each other that has somehow been corrupted. None of this could have happened without the rancor tacitly or deliberately embraced.

I am not able to think analytically about this, nor can I pretend that my writing predicted this. I must approach this as what I am: a citizen of a nation that gave me sanctuary, to which I owe my life and which I tried to serve as best I could. I have traveled the world and seen many acts of political rage and cruelty. I have seen coups. This may have been a blundering one, but it was a coup nonetheless, carried out with the intent to change the outcome of an election. It happened in my country, and in its capital city, and in its Capitol building. That moment made us simply another country, and not the city on a hill, shedding light on the world.

I was forced into silence by grief. When something enchanting dies, it calls for a moment of silence over what was lost. Every word uttered demeans the moment. And so I was silent. Now I speak, but what is there to say? The light of the shining city on a hill must be relit, and to relight it we must begin by willing ourselves to friendship and to refuse to despise each other regardless of disagreement. That is the start. I don’t know if we have the will or the strength to do it.

This is all opinion, not carefully thought-out analysis. And much of it is cliche. But cliches carry some truth. I have tried to understand, but now I am reduced to grief. Others will say they told me so, but then they have said so much that they must at times be right.

We did not lose our country yesterday, but we received a warning that our country is in danger. And it is most in danger, I think, from the spirit of self-righteousness that has gripped our nation. Each of us seems to hold our views as unassailable. Each of us regards other views as monstrous. From this cauldron only poison will be brewed.

I have spoken for myself here, not for my method. For the moment I don’t care for the method, or for the understanding. I long for a lost world in which reasonable people could disagree over politics and still be friends. Donald Trump did not rip friendships apart. We did that to ourselves.

There is no wisdom or genius in what I have said. For now, it is what it is. I will seek to return to ironic distance soon. But my country is in danger, and now is not the time for distance nor the endless chatter of opinions passionately repeated.

I love this country. It is time for its citizens to get a grip.
Title: George
Post by: ccp on January 07, 2021, 04:10:14 PM
"I love this country. It is time for its citizens to get a grip."

I thought I posted reply to this but I guess I didn't

my response is this

similar to GM

Ok George go ahead and get a grip,

while the Left continues to wipe out conservatives and everything we stand for

Ha ha what a joke:

This is who we really are:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=982quaGZLCM


Title: Re: George
Post by: G M on January 07, 2021, 04:18:04 PM
MUST! VOTE! HARDER!




"I love this country. It is time for its citizens to get a grip."

I thought I posted reply to this but I guess I didn't

my response is this

similar to GM

Ok George go ahead and get a grip,

while the Left continues to wipe out conservatives and everything we stand for

Ha ha what a joke:

This is who we really are:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=982quaGZLCM
Title: Noonan: Bring the Insurrectionists to Justice
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 09, 2021, 10:47:38 AM
Bring the Insurrectionists to Justice
The politicians who egged them on should also be made to pay a heavy price.

By Peggy Noonan
Jan. 7, 2021 7:19 pm ET

A rioter carries a House podium at the U.S. Capitol, Jan. 6.
PHOTO: WIN MCNAMEE/GETTY IMAGES



How do we deal with all that has happened?

We remember who we are. We are a great nation and a strong one; we have, since our beginning, been a miracle in the political history of man. We have brought much good. We are also in trouble, no point not admitting it.

We regain our confidence. We’ve got through trouble before. We love this place and will keep it. We have a Constitution that’s gotten us this far and will get us further.

We lower the boom. No civilized country can accept or allow what we saw Wednesday with the violent assault on the U.S. Capitol. This was an attack on democracy itself. That is not just a phrase. Rule by the people relies on adherence to law and process. The assault and siege was an attempt to stop the work of democracy by halting the peaceful transfer of presidential power, our crowning glory for more than two centuries.

This was a sin against history.

When something like this happens it tends to be repeated. It is our job to make sure it is not.

And so we should come down like a hammer on all those responsible, moving with brute dispatch against members of the mob and their instigators.

On the rioters: Find them, drag them out of their basements, and bring them to justice. Use all resources, whatever it takes, with focus and speed. We have pictures of half of them; they like to pose. They larked about taking selfies and smiling unashamed smiles as one strolled out with a House podium. They were so arrogant they were quoted by name in news reports. It is our good luck they are idiots. Capitalize on that luck.

Throw the book at them. Make it a book of commentaries on the Constitution. Throw it hard.

They have shamed and embarrassed their country in the eyes of the world, which is not only a painful fact but a dangerous one. The world, and the young—all of us—need to see them pay the price.

Now to the devil and his apprentices.

As for the chief instigator, the president of the United States, he should be removed from office by the 25th Amendment or impeachment, whichever is faster. This, with only a week and a half to go, would be a most extraordinary action, but this has been an extraordinary time. Mike Pence is a normal American political figure; he will not have to mount a new government; he appears to be sane; he will in this brief, strange interlude do fine.

The president should be removed for reasons of justice—he urged a crowd to march on Congress, and, when it turned violent, had to be dragged into telling them, equivocally, to go home—and prudence. Mitt Romney had it exactly right: “What happened here . . . was an insurrection, incited by the president of the United States.” As for prudence, Mr. Trump is a sick, bad man and therefore, as president, a dangerous one. He has grown casually bloody-minded, nattering on about force and denouncing even his own vice president as a coward for not supporting unconstitutional measures. No one seems to be certain how Mr. Trump spends his days. He doesn’t bother to do his job. The White House is in meltdown. The only thing that captures his interest is the fact that he lost, which fills him with thoughts of vengeance.

Removing him would go some distance to restoring our reputation, reinforcing our standards, and clarifying constitutional boundaries for future presidents who might need it.


READ MORE DECLARATIONS
In 2021, All the World’s a Stage December 31, 2020
A Look Back at the Pandemic Year December 24, 2020
The Monday When America Came Back December 17, 2020
Mrs. Smith’s Tips for New Lawmakers December 10, 2020
Who’ll Be 2020’s Margaret Chase Smith? December 3, 2020
As for his appointees and staff, the garbage they talk to rationalize their staying is no longer acceptable to anyone. “But my career.” Your career, in the great scheme of things, is nothing. “But my future in politics.” Your future, even if your wildest schemes are fulfilled, is a footnote to a footnote. There are ways to be a footnote honorably. “But my kids.” When they are 20 they will read the history. You want them proud of your role, not petitioning the court for a name change.

It was honorable to arrive with high hopes and idealistic commitments. It is not honorable to stay.

As for the other instigators, a side note.

True conservatives tend to have a particular understanding of the fragility of things. They understand that every human institution is, in its way, built on sand. It’s all so frail. They see how thin the veil is between civilization and chaos, and understand that we have to go through every day, each in our way, trying to make the veil thicker. And so we value the things in the phrase that others use to disparage us, “law and order.” Yes, always, the rule of law, and order so that the people of a great nation can move freely on the streets and do their work and pursue their lives.


To the devil’s apprentices, Sens. Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz. They are clever men, highly educated, well-credentialed, endlessly articulate. They see themselves as leading conservative lights, but in this drama they have proved themselves punks practicing punk politics. They are like people who know the value of nothing, who see no frailty around them, who inherited a great deal—an estate built by the work and wealth of others—and feel no responsibility for maintaining the foundation because pop gave them a strong house, right? They are careless inheritors of a nation, an institution, a party that previous generations built at some cost.

They backed a lie and held out the chimera of some possible Trump victory that couldn’t happen, and hid behind the pretense that they were just trying to be fair to all parties and investigate any suspicions of vote fraud, when what they were really doing was playing—coolly, with lawyerly sophistication—not to the base but to the sickness within the base. They should have stood up and told the truth, that democracy moves forward, that the election was imperfect as all elections are, and more so because of the pandemic rules, which need to be changed, but the fact is the voters of America chose Biden-Harris, not Trump-Pence.

Here’s to you, boys. Did you see the broken glass, the crowd roaming the halls like vandals in late Rome, the staff cowering in locked closets and barricading offices? Look on your mighty works and despair.

The price they will pay is up to their states. But the reputational cost should be harsh and high.

Again, on the president: There have been leaders before who, facing imminent downfall, decide to tear everything down with them. They want to go out surrounded by flames. Hitler, at the end, wanted to blow up Germany, its buildings and bridges. His people had let him down. Now he hated them. They must suffer.

I have resisted Nazi comparisons for five years, for the most part easily. But that is like what is happening here, the same kind of spirit, as the president departs, as he angrily channel-surfs in his bunker.

He is a bad man and not a stable one and he is dangerous. America is not safe in his hands.

It is not too late. Removal of the president would be the prudent move, not the wild one. Get rid of him. Now.
Title: Re: Noonan: Bring the Insurrectionists to Justice
Post by: G M on January 09, 2021, 10:59:19 AM
If only they felt such rage regarding a stolen election...




Bring the Insurrectionists to Justice
The politicians who egged them on should also be made to pay a heavy price.

By Peggy Noonan
Jan. 7, 2021 7:19 pm ET

A rioter carries a House podium at the U.S. Capitol, Jan. 6.
PHOTO: WIN MCNAMEE/GETTY IMAGES



How do we deal with all that has happened?

We remember who we are. We are a great nation and a strong one; we have, since our beginning, been a miracle in the political history of man. We have brought much good. We are also in trouble, no point not admitting it.

We regain our confidence. We’ve got through trouble before. We love this place and will keep it. We have a Constitution that’s gotten us this far and will get us further.

We lower the boom. No civilized country can accept or allow what we saw Wednesday with the violent assault on the U.S. Capitol. This was an attack on democracy itself. That is not just a phrase. Rule by the people relies on adherence to law and process. The assault and siege was an attempt to stop the work of democracy by halting the peaceful transfer of presidential power, our crowning glory for more than two centuries.

This was a sin against history.

When something like this happens it tends to be repeated. It is our job to make sure it is not.

And so we should come down like a hammer on all those responsible, moving with brute dispatch against members of the mob and their instigators.

On the rioters: Find them, drag them out of their basements, and bring them to justice. Use all resources, whatever it takes, with focus and speed. We have pictures of half of them; they like to pose. They larked about taking selfies and smiling unashamed smiles as one strolled out with a House podium. They were so arrogant they were quoted by name in news reports. It is our good luck they are idiots. Capitalize on that luck.

Throw the book at them. Make it a book of commentaries on the Constitution. Throw it hard.

They have shamed and embarrassed their country in the eyes of the world, which is not only a painful fact but a dangerous one. The world, and the young—all of us—need to see them pay the price.

Now to the devil and his apprentices.

As for the chief instigator, the president of the United States, he should be removed from office by the 25th Amendment or impeachment, whichever is faster. This, with only a week and a half to go, would be a most extraordinary action, but this has been an extraordinary time. Mike Pence is a normal American political figure; he will not have to mount a new government; he appears to be sane; he will in this brief, strange interlude do fine.

The president should be removed for reasons of justice—he urged a crowd to march on Congress, and, when it turned violent, had to be dragged into telling them, equivocally, to go home—and prudence. Mitt Romney had it exactly right: “What happened here . . . was an insurrection, incited by the president of the United States.” As for prudence, Mr. Trump is a sick, bad man and therefore, as president, a dangerous one. He has grown casually bloody-minded, nattering on about force and denouncing even his own vice president as a coward for not supporting unconstitutional measures. No one seems to be certain how Mr. Trump spends his days. He doesn’t bother to do his job. The White House is in meltdown. The only thing that captures his interest is the fact that he lost, which fills him with thoughts of vengeance.

Removing him would go some distance to restoring our reputation, reinforcing our standards, and clarifying constitutional boundaries for future presidents who might need it.


READ MORE DECLARATIONS
In 2021, All the World’s a Stage December 31, 2020
A Look Back at the Pandemic Year December 24, 2020
The Monday When America Came Back December 17, 2020
Mrs. Smith’s Tips for New Lawmakers December 10, 2020
Who’ll Be 2020’s Margaret Chase Smith? December 3, 2020
As for his appointees and staff, the garbage they talk to rationalize their staying is no longer acceptable to anyone. “But my career.” Your career, in the great scheme of things, is nothing. “But my future in politics.” Your future, even if your wildest schemes are fulfilled, is a footnote to a footnote. There are ways to be a footnote honorably. “But my kids.” When they are 20 they will read the history. You want them proud of your role, not petitioning the court for a name change.

It was honorable to arrive with high hopes and idealistic commitments. It is not honorable to stay.

As for the other instigators, a side note.

True conservatives tend to have a particular understanding of the fragility of things. They understand that every human institution is, in its way, built on sand. It’s all so frail. They see how thin the veil is between civilization and chaos, and understand that we have to go through every day, each in our way, trying to make the veil thicker. And so we value the things in the phrase that others use to disparage us, “law and order.” Yes, always, the rule of law, and order so that the people of a great nation can move freely on the streets and do their work and pursue their lives.


To the devil’s apprentices, Sens. Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz. They are clever men, highly educated, well-credentialed, endlessly articulate. They see themselves as leading conservative lights, but in this drama they have proved themselves punks practicing punk politics. They are like people who know the value of nothing, who see no frailty around them, who inherited a great deal—an estate built by the work and wealth of others—and feel no responsibility for maintaining the foundation because pop gave them a strong house, right? They are careless inheritors of a nation, an institution, a party that previous generations built at some cost.

They backed a lie and held out the chimera of some possible Trump victory that couldn’t happen, and hid behind the pretense that they were just trying to be fair to all parties and investigate any suspicions of vote fraud, when what they were really doing was playing—coolly, with lawyerly sophistication—not to the base but to the sickness within the base. They should have stood up and told the truth, that democracy moves forward, that the election was imperfect as all elections are, and more so because of the pandemic rules, which need to be changed, but the fact is the voters of America chose Biden-Harris, not Trump-Pence.

Here’s to you, boys. Did you see the broken glass, the crowd roaming the halls like vandals in late Rome, the staff cowering in locked closets and barricading offices? Look on your mighty works and despair.

The price they will pay is up to their states. But the reputational cost should be harsh and high.

Again, on the president: There have been leaders before who, facing imminent downfall, decide to tear everything down with them. They want to go out surrounded by flames. Hitler, at the end, wanted to blow up Germany, its buildings and bridges. His people had let him down. Now he hated them. They must suffer.

I have resisted Nazi comparisons for five years, for the most part easily. But that is like what is happening here, the same kind of spirit, as the president departs, as he angrily channel-surfs in his bunker.

He is a bad man and not a stable one and he is dangerous. America is not safe in his hands.

It is not too late. Removal of the president would be the prudent move, not the wild one. Get rid of him. Now.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on January 09, 2021, 11:19:26 AM
".If only they felt such rage regarding a stolen election."

Exactly

We know the truth but is will never be proven enough

And now with the Dems in power the evidence for it will be erased

I know what that feels like personally
Title: Her name was...
Post by: G M on January 09, 2021, 12:55:42 PM
https://tomluongo.me/2021/01/07/tiananmen-avoided-d-c-as-trump-era-ends/
Title: Re: Noonan: Bring the Insurrectionists to Justice
Post by: DougMacG on January 09, 2021, 03:17:20 PM
The protest was mostly peaceful and we don't know much yet about who instigated violence.

Noonan: "The president should be removed for reasons of justice—he urged a crowd to march on Congress, and, when it turned violent, had to be dragged into telling them, equivocally, to go home—and prudence. "

Umm, removed for high crimes and misdemeanors, not justice.  Didn't MLK urge a crowd to March on Washington?

She's entitled to her opinion, but to me she is a contrary indicator on all topics Trump.  She goes all negative, misses the good, and lost her objectivity somewhere along the way.  Frankly that's lousy journalism IMHO, though she was once great. No excuse for calling for impeachment without an impeachable offense.  That is reckless and disqualifying.  Most of it is blah, blah...  This was a sin against history. Right out of the Obama vocabulary. What part of history lacked sin? 
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 09, 2021, 04:02:02 PM
GM's "Her Name Was" post has eloquence, but climbing through the busted window of a barricaded door against LEOs with guns out defending those whom they are sworn to protect fits under the heading of "Stupid games winning stupid prizes."

Our side needs to get that a lot of rational Americans have looked at the Trump-Giuliani-Wood-Sydney Powel clown show going 0-60 in court (including Trump appointed judges) and look at Trump's proven track record (e.g. his performance in the first debate) think he lost,  he's a crybaby and a bully (see e.g. attempted treatment of Pence) who is now a sore loser in denial thrashing about.

The other side has more "to get"--: the rationality of our perception of the Hillary investigation being thrown, the foulness of the attempted coup via the Russia Collusion, the Impeachment Farce, the oppression by the Tech Oligarchs, and much more-- such as realizing our actions now are a response to  their hubris and lack of American integrity.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: G M on January 09, 2021, 04:28:24 PM
If only she had been a convicted felon who had jammed a gun into the belly of a pregnant woman during a home invasion robbery and then died of a drug overdose while in handcuffs...

GM's "Her Name Was" post has eloquence, but climbing through the busted window of a barricaded door against LEOs with guns out defending those whom they are sworn to protect fits under the heading of "Stupid games winning stupid prizes."

Our side needs to get that a lot of rational Americans have looked at the Trump-Giuliani-Wood-Sydney Powel clown show going 0-60 in court (including Trump appointed judges) and look at Trump's proven track record (e.g. his performance in the first debate) think he lost,  he's a crybaby and a bully (see e.g. attempted treatment of Pence) who is now a sore loser in denial thrashing about.

The other side has more "to get"--: the rationality of our perception of the Hillary investigation being thrown, the foulness of the attempted coup via the Russia Collusion, the Impeachment Farce, the oppression by the Tech Oligarchs, and much more-- such as realizing our actions now are a response to  their hubris and lack of American integrity.
Title: Strassel: Trump Erases His Legacy
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 09, 2021, 05:58:48 PM
Trump Erases His Legacy
He also destroyed any chance of a political future, all on a single Wednesday afternoon.
By Kimberley A. Strassel
Jan. 7, 2021 6:22 pm ET


WSJ Opinion: Trump Erases His Legacy

Potomac Watch: A politician has to work hard to destroy a legacy and a future in a single day. President Donald J. Trump managed it. Image: John Minchillo/Associated Press




A politician has to work hard to destroy a legacy and a future in a single day. President Donald J. Trump managed it.


By this Wednesday afternoon, media outlets had called both Georgia Senate runoffs for the Democratic candidates, handing Sen. Chuck Schumer the keys to that chamber. We now have a Democrat-controlled Washington. The Georgia news came as a mob of Trump supporters—egged on by the president himself—occupied the U.S. Capitol building. Now four people are dead, while aides and officials run for the exits.



It didn’t have to be this way. The president had every right—even an obligation, given the ad hoc changes to voting rules—to challenge state election results in court. But when those challenges failed (which every one did, completely), he had the opportunity to embrace his legacy, cement his accomplishments, and continue to play a powerful role in GOP politics.


Mr. Trump could have reveled in the mantle of the one-term disrupter—the man the electorate sent to Washington to deliver the message that it was tired of business as usual. He could have pointed out just how successful he was in that mission by stacking his cabinet with reformers, busting convention, and overseeing policy changes that astounded (and delighted) even many warrior conservatives.



The withdrawal from the Paris climate accord and the Iranian deal. The greatest tax simplification and reduction since Reagan. The largest deregulatory effort since—well, ever. Three Supreme Court justices and 54 appellate court judges. Drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve. The Jerusalem embassy. Criminal-justice reform. Opportunity zones. He could have noted that the greatest proof of just how much Democrats and the establishment feared his mission were the five years of investigations, hysterical allegations and “deep state” sabotage—which he survived.

Mostly, he could have explained that all this was at considerably heightened risk if Democrats win the Senate—and invested himself fully in Georgia. Every day needed to be about fundraising, rallying the troops, making clear to his supporters that the only way to preserve this legacy was to keep the Senate in GOP hands.


That isn’t what happened. Obviously. Following court losses, Mr. Trump, in his own words, devoted “125% of my energy” to his own grievances. He declared the Georgia Senate races “illegal and invalid,” discouraging voting. He actively undercut Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler with late-game demands for $2,000 stimulus checks and with his veto of a defense authorization bill that provided pay raises and support for Georgia’s military bases. His denial of the presidential results energized Democrats and depressed Republicans. Turnout in Trump counties lagged, while turnout in some Democratic areas nearly reached that of the November election.


Mr. Trump is leaving, and thanks to his final denial of reality, Mr. Schumer will now methodically erase his policy history. Democrats need only 51 votes to eliminate the Trump tax reform, 51 to use the Congressional Review Act to undo his final deregulations; 51 to wave through liberal judges to counter Mr. Trump’s picks. And this is before Mr. Biden gets busy reversing Trump policy by executive fiat, and assuming Democrats forbear from abolishing the legislative filibuster.



So that’s his legacy, largely gone. As for his future, Mr. Trump’s role in inflaming the Capitol mob has likely put paid to that, as well. Dedicated members of his administration are resigning. Longtime supporters in Congress are turning. Millions of Americans who for years were willing to tolerate, often even celebrate, Mr. Trump’s brash behavior in the pursuit of reform or good policy, are less amused by the wreckage he has visited on party and policy. And they’ll be unwilling to go there again in 2024.


Trump loyalists may well condemn anyone who speaks honestly of all this as RINOs or spineless Beltwayers who care nothing of “election fraud.” But to quote the incoming president, “C’mon, man.” It’s one thing to scorn a Mitt Romney. But many of the senators throwing up their hands are the ones who fearlessly rooted out the false Russia collusion accusations, who defended Mr. Trump through baseless impeachment proceedings, and who understand the need for voting reform. Many of the officials resigning are bold conservatives, attracted to an administration they knew would let them break china. They too are stunned, and demoralized, by the president’s decision to tank their work.


“We signed up for making America great again. We signed up for lower taxes and less regulation. The president has a long list of successes that we can be proud of. But all of that went away yesterday.” That was Mick Mulvaney talking to CNBC Thursday. Mr. Mulvaney, the tea-party supporter, founding member of the House Freedom caucus, and the onetime Trump chief of staff. Hardly an establishment weenie.


The pity is that Mr. Trump’s conflagration will mostly burn the Americans he went to Washington to help. They will bear the higher taxes, the higher costs of regulation, the higher unemployment, the loss of freedoms. America became less great this week. And that’s fully on the guy at the top.

Title: Re: Strassel: Trump Erases His Legacy
Post by: G M on January 09, 2021, 06:22:14 PM
Trump's true legacy is showing how utterly corrupt our institutions have become.


Trump Erases His Legacy
He also destroyed any chance of a political future, all on a single Wednesday afternoon.
By Kimberley A. Strassel
Jan. 7, 2021 6:22 pm ET


WSJ Opinion: Trump Erases His Legacy

Potomac Watch: A politician has to work hard to destroy a legacy and a future in a single day. President Donald J. Trump managed it. Image: John Minchillo/Associated Press




A politician has to work hard to destroy a legacy and a future in a single day. President Donald J. Trump managed it.


By this Wednesday afternoon, media outlets had called both Georgia Senate runoffs for the Democratic candidates, handing Sen. Chuck Schumer the keys to that chamber. We now have a Democrat-controlled Washington. The Georgia news came as a mob of Trump supporters—egged on by the president himself—occupied the U.S. Capitol building. Now four people are dead, while aides and officials run for the exits.



It didn’t have to be this way. The president had every right—even an obligation, given the ad hoc changes to voting rules—to challenge state election results in court. But when those challenges failed (which every one did, completely), he had the opportunity to embrace his legacy, cement his accomplishments, and continue to play a powerful role in GOP politics.


Mr. Trump could have reveled in the mantle of the one-term disrupter—the man the electorate sent to Washington to deliver the message that it was tired of business as usual. He could have pointed out just how successful he was in that mission by stacking his cabinet with reformers, busting convention, and overseeing policy changes that astounded (and delighted) even many warrior conservatives.



The withdrawal from the Paris climate accord and the Iranian deal. The greatest tax simplification and reduction since Reagan. The largest deregulatory effort since—well, ever. Three Supreme Court justices and 54 appellate court judges. Drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve. The Jerusalem embassy. Criminal-justice reform. Opportunity zones. He could have noted that the greatest proof of just how much Democrats and the establishment feared his mission were the five years of investigations, hysterical allegations and “deep state” sabotage—which he survived.

Mostly, he could have explained that all this was at considerably heightened risk if Democrats win the Senate—and invested himself fully in Georgia. Every day needed to be about fundraising, rallying the troops, making clear to his supporters that the only way to preserve this legacy was to keep the Senate in GOP hands.


That isn’t what happened. Obviously. Following court losses, Mr. Trump, in his own words, devoted “125% of my energy” to his own grievances. He declared the Georgia Senate races “illegal and invalid,” discouraging voting. He actively undercut Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler with late-game demands for $2,000 stimulus checks and with his veto of a defense authorization bill that provided pay raises and support for Georgia’s military bases. His denial of the presidential results energized Democrats and depressed Republicans. Turnout in Trump counties lagged, while turnout in some Democratic areas nearly reached that of the November election.


Mr. Trump is leaving, and thanks to his final denial of reality, Mr. Schumer will now methodically erase his policy history. Democrats need only 51 votes to eliminate the Trump tax reform, 51 to use the Congressional Review Act to undo his final deregulations; 51 to wave through liberal judges to counter Mr. Trump’s picks. And this is before Mr. Biden gets busy reversing Trump policy by executive fiat, and assuming Democrats forbear from abolishing the legislative filibuster.



So that’s his legacy, largely gone. As for his future, Mr. Trump’s role in inflaming the Capitol mob has likely put paid to that, as well. Dedicated members of his administration are resigning. Longtime supporters in Congress are turning. Millions of Americans who for years were willing to tolerate, often even celebrate, Mr. Trump’s brash behavior in the pursuit of reform or good policy, are less amused by the wreckage he has visited on party and policy. And they’ll be unwilling to go there again in 2024.


Trump loyalists may well condemn anyone who speaks honestly of all this as RINOs or spineless Beltwayers who care nothing of “election fraud.” But to quote the incoming president, “C’mon, man.” It’s one thing to scorn a Mitt Romney. But many of the senators throwing up their hands are the ones who fearlessly rooted out the false Russia collusion accusations, who defended Mr. Trump through baseless impeachment proceedings, and who understand the need for voting reform. Many of the officials resigning are bold conservatives, attracted to an administration they knew would let them break china. They too are stunned, and demoralized, by the president’s decision to tank their work.


“We signed up for making America great again. We signed up for lower taxes and less regulation. The president has a long list of successes that we can be proud of. But all of that went away yesterday.” That was Mick Mulvaney talking to CNBC Thursday. Mr. Mulvaney, the tea-party supporter, founding member of the House Freedom caucus, and the onetime Trump chief of staff. Hardly an establishment weenie.


The pity is that Mr. Trump’s conflagration will mostly burn the Americans he went to Washington to help. They will bear the higher taxes, the higher costs of regulation, the higher unemployment, the loss of freedoms. America became less great this week. And that’s fully on the guy at the top.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 09, 2021, 06:43:36 PM
True that, and true that he would seem to have thrown away a goodly percentage of all the deep good he did.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: G M on January 09, 2021, 07:10:21 PM
True that, and true that he would seem to have thrown away a goodly percentage of all the deep good he did.

Why? Because the the people who hate him and us, still hate him and us?

Title: If would pray we get someone else , not Trump 2024
Post by: ccp on January 09, 2021, 09:29:28 PM
".Longtime supporters in Congress are turning. Millions of Americans who for years were willing to tolerate, often even celebrate, Mr. Trump’s brash behavior in the pursuit of reform or good policy, are less amused by the wreckage he has visited on party and policy. And they’ll be unwilling to go there again in 2024."

Quite frankly I am one who is not amused by losing the Senate possibly to miscalculations in the last 2 months by Trump .  He singlehandedly divided his own party with calling out Republicans in Georgia ,  slapping his most ardent supporter in the face (VP Pence ) at the end in desperation

he has burned endless bridges - who would want to work with him in '24?

and turning off many independents and out of no where calling for the $600 payday be raised to 2,000 dollars without thinking it through or listening to people in the party with the result was delayed longer etc.

Unless there is absolutely no one else Trump is done
for me.

By then partly thanks to him as Doug points out his legacy
is we have both houses and WH controlled by political enemies
who will surely make much of the country suffer.

And corona not withstanding what happened unexpectedly at WH
is the last memory of him as President and we all know the last memory if usually the one that stands out the most .


Title: Re: If would pray we get someone else , not Trump 2024
Post by: G M on January 09, 2021, 09:34:47 PM
Are you going to outvote the dem fraud machines and the millions of illegal aliens who will be given citizenship?


".Longtime supporters in Congress are turning. Millions of Americans who for years were willing to tolerate, often even celebrate, Mr. Trump’s brash behavior in the pursuit of reform or good policy, are less amused by the wreckage he has visited on party and policy. And they’ll be unwilling to go there again in 2024."

Quite frankly I am one who is not amused by losing the Senate possibly to miscalculations in the last 2 months by Trump .  He singlehandedly divided his own party with calling out Republicans in Georgia ,  slapping his most ardent supporter in the face (VP Pence ) at the end in desperation

he has burned endless bridges - who would want to work with him in '24?

and turning off many independents and out of no where calling for the $600 payday be raised to 2,000 dollars without thinking it through or listening to people in the party with the result was delayed longer etc.

Unless there is absolutely no one else Trump is done
for me.

By then partly thanks to him as Doug points out his legacy
is we have both houses and WH controlled by political enemies
who will surely make much of the country suffer.

And corona not withstanding what happened unexpectedly at WH
is the last memory of him as President and we all know the last memory if usually the one that stands out the most .
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on January 09, 2021, 10:43:19 PM
". Are you going to outvote the dem fraud machines and the millions of illegal aliens who will be given citizenship?"

it is a no brainer to me the election  was stolen
I am just saying banging your head harder against the wall dumb ass tweets and nauseating bombast and narcissism
is not the way to fight what we are up against .
we need to win over independents and having a spokesperson who is what Trump is pissed the off
He was great only when he stood by the policies like when he kept his big trap shut at the RNC with regards to yelling screaming calling everyone in sight he doesn't like names, because they don't like or agree with him

We expect strong leaders but not ass holes.

Just my view
If I had the answers on how to fight the tsunami of Leftist onslaught I could also probably figure out the unified field theory

That said the previous head up their assess Bushies are out with the long knives  going after Josh Hawley:

https://www.kansascity.com/news/politics-government/article248346830.html

BTW
it will be interesting what Mark Levin has to say as I think he was pushing the elector thing too.
 
Andrew McCarthy has been mostly right all along even if I wish his conclusions were different . He often winds up explaining how we don't have the legal weapons to fight with .
OTOH we are up against such an onslaught it is hard just getting whipped and having to take it.

What should we do?

I can tell you now I don't see how bringing out weapons and start shooting is going to help
No chance that would not be put down .

 
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: G M on January 09, 2021, 11:29:15 PM
"I can tell you now I don't see how bringing out weapons and start shooting is going to help
No chance that would not be put down ."

I'm not advocating anything, but I do expect that many dems are going to find out how rule .308 works.


https://monsterhunternation.com/2018/11/19/the-2nd-amendment-is-obsolete-says-congressman-who-wants-to-nuke-omaha/



Title: Dan Crenshaw: Understanding the Left's thinking.
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 17, 2021, 03:06:34 PM
https://www.dailywire.com/news/crenshaw-to-understand-illogical-lockdowns-we-must-understand-the-lefts-thinking
Title: Liberal with integrity
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 20, 2021, 02:38:39 PM
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-new-domestic-war-on-terror-is
Title: Small Wars Journal
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 21, 2021, 07:35:05 AM
Not wild about the last paragraph but some perceptive passages in here

https://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/revolution-behind-attempted-revolution?fbclid=IwAR2FF-a-z3MpGvP27-ZcqC7ciVyXyPlapg_GejqPXrxfYdlD74K1C8fbixs
Title: Adversary Culture in 2020
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 21, 2021, 07:52:44 AM
second post

https://www.firstthings.com/article/2021/02/adversary-culture-in-2020?fbclid=IwAR3-L2hpE4DOJnynlytxwShCGSvwbzH-a805my4BluCzo7n5MOOgTsSC7yc
Title: " I like Martha McCallum"
Post by: ccp on January 21, 2021, 08:29:11 AM
me too:

https://www.google.com/search?source=univ&tbm=isch&q=martha+maccallum&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi4uIPnuK3uAhXHhOAKHbZYCnYQiR56BAhEEAI&biw=1440&bih=789#imgrc=4Hgd_leUshUZBM

 :wink:
Title: China is at war with us
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 26, 2021, 07:14:22 PM
https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2021/01/23/world-doesnt-realize-already-at-war-china/?fbclid=IwAR1SyWUlRB4n4TfNp2l9pJdMx3HBsrCtvivPOI1ubOCWsebCTCzmeqFODxk
Title: David Gergen. speaking fee
Post by: ccp on February 08, 2021, 02:10:25 PM
https://www.wsb.com/speakers/david-gergen/

I don't get it
we see him all the time on liberal stations mostly CNN
for many yrs
I have yet to hear him say anything worth one cent
Nothing insightful
nothing really imaginative
nothing we already don't know

yet he keeps getting thrown on to diss Republicans and lately of course anything Maga
as though his word means more then just anther asshole with a biased opinion.
Title: George Friedman: The Crisis of the Medical Establishment
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 14, 2021, 08:43:34 PM
February 11, 2021
View On Website
Open as PDF

    
The Crisis of the Medical Establishment
Thoughts in and around geopolitics.
By: George Friedman

It has been about a year since the world entered a medical crisis for which there had been no cure. For much of the pandemic, the best solution was to contain the spread of COVID-19 while scientists developed a vaccine. It required a radical restructuring in how we lived our lives. More, the nature of the virus was such that any of us could be infectious without being sick. Anyone could be carrying the disease, so it was best to stay away from everyone, or so the thinking went.

Humans are by nature social animals – not just in the pleasure we take in being with others but in the way we produce the things we need to live and the things we need to live well. I went on vacation last week and felt as if I were venturing into a strange and dangerous world unlike any I had lived in before. We took a walk down a street for the pleasure of passing by strangers – a real but hitherto unknown need. The street was crowded with others who shared the need. Walking down a street is dynamic. It isn’t fighter planes holding inviolable positions relative to each other. People change course, they stumble, they stop to look in store windows or at other people. Keeping six feet of separation is impossible. Unpleasant but not impossible was wearing a mask on a sweetly warm subtropical day, inhaling and exhaling my own damp heat.

There is a constant sense of danger, a constant feeling that the pleasure of a walk, and the infusion of a Goombay Smash (if you haven’t tried a double, do), is a reckless act that not only endangers your life but threatens our social structure. Humans cannot live their lives like Phil Connors did in “Groundhog Day,” a movie that depicts a man awakening every day only to relive the previous. It is a funny and horrifying movie. Life is finite; it can’t be put on constant replay, not knowing when the song will move on. This was, in effect, the consequence of the medical solution.

This was the first vacation I took in over a year, and I took it with a sense of reckless youth. It was a good feeling, one clearly shared by many. The use of masks was random, distances weren’t kept, bars were filled. These were not the know-nothing rednecks that are imagined to be the primary source of such behavior. They were the denizens of luxury hotels. The sense of joyous rebellion was clear. It occurred to me then that the world’s ministries of health would not declare the end of social distancing and masking but rather a new way to measure risk, and I think it is taking place now.

The virus is dangerous, albeit less so than, say, smallpox, diphtheria, cholera or Ebola, and the prevailing wisdom is that those younger than 65 years old who have no comorbidities are far less likely to die. The total number of dead is horrific in spite of this. During the polio epidemic of the 20th century, which primarily afflicted children, often killing or maiming them, doctors did not decree that all of society abort their normal lives. They accepted random disease as a possibility inherent in being human. We went on, and some wept. They knew doctors were working on a vaccine, but that work had been underway for years, and no one knew when or if there would be one. In the meantime, they lived their lives. Doctors didn’t demand that we suspend our lives for an unknown period. How long can you go without seeing your children and grandchildren, without going to a relative’s funeral or wedding, without constant awareness of the risks of living?

In the end, a polio vaccine was developed and the disease went away, but we were not expected to halt our lives in the meantime. When it was developed – I was about five years old – everyone was quickly and joyously given the vaccine. It is very important to see the different views not only of the disease but of the vaccine. Everyone embraced the polio vaccine. But vast numbers of people all over the world have declared to pollsters at least that they will not take the COVID-19 vaccine. Some are afraid that microchips to control us will be inserted. Others that the whole disease was invented to enrich Big Pharma. There are those who have rejected vaccines for a long time. But there are also now those who simply do not trust the medical community. Some fear the breakneck speed at which the vaccine was developed. Others believe that the medical establishment’s pretense to scientific rectitude is an illusion. In short, they believe doctors don’t know what they're doing. And this is compounded by the belief that the risk of the disease is less than the risk of the vaccine.

I am not sure where this distrust started. For me it was with eggs, a trivial matter. When I was young, I was given eggs to eat constantly. Then I learned later that eggs were dangerous for one’s cholesterol levels. More recently, I learned that on the contrary, they were good. For most of us, our contact with science is the media declaring the latest food to promise eternal life or catastrophe all announced with utter confidence. It seems to many as if they have no idea what they are doing but are at all times certain. My perception may be wrong, but it is a social force nonetheless.

I am certainly taking the vaccine. I also understand the dynamic of scientific research, and that at each point they were doing the best they could do. But the fact is that the only solutions they had at the beginning were unsustainable in the long run and failed to take into account the price those solutions imposed. In other cases, life went on and the individual could determine action. In this case, the world changed its shape to deal with the disease. And that imposed a disease of the sort medicine is not meant to deal with, changing the fabric of the lives we have built for ourselves. I saw while on vacation on the street the eagerness, even with risk, to get on with life. I also sense the distrust that, fairly or not, has grown between scientist and civilian. The unwillingness to take the vaccine is a signal of the problem.
Title: Boomers' dismal legacy
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 21, 2021, 12:53:52 PM
https://amgreatness.com/2021/02/07/the-baby-boomers-dismal-legacy/
Title: On being a Dissident in 21st Century, post-Republic FUSA
Post by: G M on February 22, 2021, 03:11:55 PM
https://www.brenthamachek.com/post/understanding-and-embracing-the-role-of-the-21st-century-american-dissident
Title: Lib Clooney going after Jim Jordan
Post by: ccp on February 23, 2021, 08:25:43 AM
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/jim-jordan-george-clooney-ohio-state-sex-abuse_n_603490d9c5b67c32962018c5

I don't understand

if all these people supposedly knew what was going on
they could easily have fired the doctor and hired a new one

I have seen doctors losing their licenses for a huge amount less than this

of course I don't believe 20,000 + allegations either though
sounds like a gold rush to me.

Title: MSM go to the Leftist lawyers, Tribe et al
Post by: ccp on February 23, 2021, 09:55:07 AM
for immediate phony "fact check" of Justice Thomas the print their email/phone call etc responses :

https://www.yahoo.com/news/dissent-justice-thomas-election-case-223407739.html

Title: Justice Thomas on the Dissent, Vote Fraud Case
Post by: DougMacG on February 23, 2021, 04:13:32 PM
for immediate phony "fact check" of Justice Thomas the print their email/phone call etc responses :

https://www.yahoo.com/news/dissent-justice-thomas-election-case-223407739.html

Justice Thomas:

“Few things are worse for public confidence in elections than having the rules changed in the middle of the game (or after it). An epidemic of late-in-the-day changes to the rules was particularly corrosive in 2020. Courts are ill-equipped to referee those changes when partisan tempers are running hot. The Supreme Court just threw away its last opportunity to remedy that problem before the next election cycle. . . . This issue will not go away, and it may return next time surrounded by the same sorts of popular rage that led to the Capitol riot. This was the time for cooler heads to say what the law is.”

“An election free from strong evidence of systemic fraud is not alone sufficient for election confidence. Also important is the assurance that fraud will not go undetected.”

(https://twitter.com/JackPosobiec/status/1363903188475273217/photo/1?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1363903188475273217%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fthetruereporter.com%2Fvideo-justice-clarence-thomas-blasts-supreme-court-on-rigged-elections%2F)

“That decision to rewrite the rules seems to have affected too few ballots to change the outcome of any federal election. But that may not be the case in the future,” Thomas wrote. “These cases provide us with an ideal opportunity to address just what authority nonlegislative officials have to set election rules, and to do so well before the next election cycle. The refusal to do so is inexplicable.”

Justice Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch dissented, too.

“If state officials have the authority they have claimed, we need to make it clear. If not, we need to put an end to this practice now before the consequences become catastrophic,” Thomas added.

“We are fortunate that many of the cases we have seen alleged only improper rule changes, not fraud,” Thomas went on to say. “But that observation provides only small comfort. An election free from strong evidence of systemic fraud is not alone sufficient for election confidence. Also important is the assurance that fraud will not go undetected.”

https://thetruereporter.com/video-justice-clarence-thomas-blasts-supreme-court-on-rigged-elections/
Title: Left going after conservative justice's families now ; Dick Morris is right
Post by: ccp on February 23, 2021, 05:47:19 PM
https://www.newsweek.com/clarence-thomas-gop-election-challenge-dissent-sparks-calls-investigate-his-wife-1571179
Title: The Narrative, the Coup, and the Bourgeoisie
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 27, 2021, 04:42:20 AM
https://amgreatness.com/2021/02/27/the-narrative-the-coup-and-the-bourgeoisie/
Title: Re: The Narrative, the Coup, and the Bourgeoisie
Post by: G M on February 27, 2021, 04:57:05 PM

This IS a MUST READ!


https://amgreatness.com/2021/02/27/the-narrative-the-coup-and-the-bourgeoisie/
Title: Some thoughts on the must read
Post by: ccp on February 27, 2021, 10:13:29 PM
not totally analogous to Bolshevik Russia

as I think the proletariat that Lenin was opposed
would now be defined in modern US as who we call the elites and academics
and other privileged types

and from what I remember Lenin did not give a hoot about the poor or serfs
or the victims per se
he was champion of the workers
which is opposite of today wherein the workers , or in my mind , working tax payers are the enemies
of the state
not the other way around

Workers unite ! is more  phrase that Trump would use. (proletariat)

and the bourgeoisie I would think would not be the enemies of the state but the elitists and government  employees and academics who support the state

I agree with this statement:

"The answer of course was that the bourgeoisie nomenclature was inherently vague, by design, and the gulag did not differentiate between its political prisoners of one social class or another. If you were there, you were an enemy of the state."

I remember in Russian history classes and political science class ( I took of the former and one of the latter) no matter how hard I tried to figure out what was meant by the term " bourgeoisie" I could not grasp it.




 
Title: Re: Some thoughts on the must read
Post by: G M on February 28, 2021, 09:46:41 AM
No matter what they claim, Marxism is always about the "elites" crushing the rest of the population.


not totally analogous to Bolshevik Russia

as I think the proletariat that Lenin was opposed
would now be defined in modern US as who we call the elites and academics
and other privileged types

and from what I remember Lenin did not give a hoot about the poor or serfs
or the victims per se
he was champion of the workers
which is opposite of today wherein the workers , or in my mind , working tax payers are the enemies
of the state
not the other way around

Workers unite ! is more  phrase that Trump would use. (proletariat)

and the bourgeoisie I would think would not be the enemies of the state but the elitists and government  employees and academics who support the state

I agree with this statement:

"The answer of course was that the bourgeoisie nomenclature was inherently vague, by design, and the gulag did not differentiate between its political prisoners of one social class or another. If you were there, you were an enemy of the state."

I remember in Russian history classes and political science class ( I took of the former and one of the latter) no matter how hard I tried to figure out what was meant by the term " bourgeoisie" I could not grasp it.
Title: Translating Social Justice Newspeak
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 04, 2021, 10:34:52 AM
https://dc.claremont.org/translating-social-justice-newspeak/?fbclid=IwAR09oFmBm-nzkh_aC_hTKd02PegCvK5dUdF-7Yq46b4_L9FiORh8cGmwSfU
Title: Not voting our way out of this...
Post by: G M on March 06, 2021, 06:54:24 PM
https://straightlinelogic.com/2021/03/06/the-inversion-by-robert-gore-2/
Title: CS Lewis
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 28, 2021, 08:32:18 AM
http://www.samizdat.qc.ca/arts/lit/Toast_CSL.pdf
Title: Bombthrower: The Age of Over Abundant Elites
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 19, 2021, 05:18:42 PM
https://bombthrower.com/articles/the-age-of-over-abundant-elites/#
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on April 19, 2021, 05:38:07 PM
people are reading the forum .

I just posted how the swamp creatures are intermarried interbreeded go to the same elite castles estates neighborhoods yachts etc

So from the above "The Age of Over-Abundant Elites" is this



"Then the media makes useful idiots of us all, reframing as existential battles between good and evil what are really just internecine conflicts between elites who regard everybody else as serfs (in much the same way that I have always privately thought that World War 1 was, at it’s core, a family squabble among a pan-European dynasty that ruled by divine right).


Via Brookings Institute: The Family Relationships that couldn’t stop World War 1"
Title: Patriot Post: Mark Alexander: Systemic Racism Not Guilty
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 21, 2021, 02:16:41 PM
https://patriotpost.us/alexander/79332-floyd-verdict-systemic-racism-not-guilty-2021-04-21?mailing_id=5791&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.5791&utm_campaign=alexander&utm_content=header.default
Title: Why everything is liberal/prog
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 24, 2021, 09:31:21 AM
https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/why-is-everything-liberal?fbclid=IwAR2qT1TazUOm7lhD8qNdJu4hSyGY7Wj0fsx1tKLR-rmYX78I7KyKuXg3M80
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on April 24, 2021, 11:18:54 AM
"Why everything is liberal/prog"

very depressing

Title: The Narcissism and grandiosity of celebrities
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 24, 2021, 08:48:28 PM
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/homo-consumericus/200906/the-narcissism-and-grandiosity-celebrities?fbclid=IwAR0g0O0aEYpFBu9YlWbrpQy9Od95mJmRUOHa5pSSlhVXBAaIOY6wgMqYouk
Title: Paul Harvey, 1965: If I were the Devil
Post by: DougMacG on April 28, 2021, 08:33:04 AM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKk_5XH1AEM
Title: poll of virtually all dems and some independents
Post by: ccp on April 29, 2021, 01:16:23 PM
https://thenationalpulse.com/analysis/cbs-biden-speech-approval-poll-fraud/

surprise the all love the Jo

free shit on the way !!!!!!

listen to the science
  the data

 :wink:
Title: The Woke Are Waiting for Alaric
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 01, 2021, 01:04:48 AM
https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/01/the-woke-are-waiting-for-alaric/
Title: Iran claims US paid billions for 4 hostages
Post by: ccp on May 03, 2021, 08:18:02 AM
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2021/05/02/state-department-denies-iran-tv-report-of-paying-7-billion-for-four-u-s-hostages-n1444151

reason I put this here is because
it highlights
how I don't know who to believe :

Iran OR Biden administration

Is it not sad I can't trust my own government over Iran?

Title: Borrowed Benefits Syndrome
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 06, 2021, 08:18:45 AM
America’s Welfare State Is on Borrowed Time
Biden has fully embraced the mad goal of giving 98% of the population lavish benefits at no cost.
By Christopher DeMuth
Updated May 5, 2021 5:46 pm ET
SAVE
PRINT
TEXT
207

ILLUSTRATION: CHAD CROWE



Has anyone noticed that the president has proposed increasing federal spending by nearly $1 trillion a year, while promising that 98% of Americans will pay nothing for it? The very idea would have seemed mad to every previous generation of Americans. Today it is considered conventional.

President Biden’s plans have been rightly criticized for the incontinence of the spending and the perversity of the taxes. Much of the spending is designed to exploit the pandemic crisis by transforming emergency income support into permanent middle-class entitlements for toddler care, higher education, medical services and much else. Other spending is called “infrastructure” but includes a list of progressive wants having nothing to do with capital investment. The tax increases—supposedly confined to the 2% with household incomes of $400,000 or more, but heavily weighted against capital investment—would seriously damage the economy and raise radically less revenue than claimed.

OPINION: POTOMAC WATCH
The Tab for Biden's Plans Hits $6 Trillion


SUBSCRIBE
But set aside these problems and take the Biden plans as advertised, as a tremendous expansion of government paid for by a select few taxpayers plus lots of new borrowing. This is the apotheosis of a political transformation that began insensibly in the 1970s and has triumphed with barely a quiver of recognition, much less debate. It may be called the borrowed-benefits syndrome.

From the founding through 1969, the federal government followed a balanced-budget policy, not perfectly but with impressive consistency. Regular operations were covered by current taxes and tariffs. Borrowing was reserved for wars, economic depressions and other emergencies, investments in territory and transportation projects. The debts were paid down through subsequent budget surpluses and economic growth.

NEWSLETTER SIGN-UP
Opinion: Morning Editorial Report
All the day's Opinion headlines.

PREVIEW
SUBSCRIBED
From 1970 onward, the country shifted to a budget-deficit policy—spending more than current revenue as a matter of routine, at first a little and then going big, through years of peace and prosperity as well as of war and crisis. Deficits had averaged 3% of spending in 1950-69, a period that included two wars, a pandemic and two serious recessions.

Deficits then grew to 10% of spending in the 1970s and 18% in the 1980s. The U.S. borrowed for 22% of spending in 2019, a growth year that would have called for a budget surplus under the old regime. The deficit ballooned to nearly half of spending during the 2020 pandemic, setting the stage for another ratcheting up of regular annual deficits under the Biden plans.

Many explanations have been adduced for the shift, such as the triumph of Keynesian economics and its techniques for fine-tuning aggregate demand. But the growth of deficit spending has hardly been fine-tuning, and has been practiced energetically by non-Keynesians such as Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump.


The best explanation is populist rather than academic: the shift in federal expenditures toward mass consumption. In 1970, about 36% of federal spending, net of interest payments, was benefits to individuals—Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid (new programs at the time), unemployment compensation, means-tested welfare benefits. Benefits spending then grew mightily, roughly in tandem with deficit spending, and is now about 76% of spending, heading briskly toward 80%. Most of this spending has been placed on autopilot and is exempt from occasional spending-reduction initiatives and government closures.

The shriveling share of spending on traditional government—defense, courts and law enforcement, parks and infrastructure, basic research—has remained subject to congressional appropriations. The Biden plans, while lacking in many details, would continue this profound change, with well over half the spending devoted to individual benefits.

Politicians and citizens have gradually discovered a powerful new principle of political economy: The government provides large numbers of voters with immediate personal benefits that greatly exceed what it charges in taxes, billing the difference to future generations. This principle is the driving force of the Biden plans, which would be financed mainly by new borrowing, not taxes.

The principle is less salient in other advanced democracies because they raise healthy revenue from broad-based and often regressive levies on consumption, such as value-added taxes. The U.S., by contrast, has long depended on a highly progressive income tax that is complex and wasteful and produces relatively little revenue. The American tax system is increasingly an adjunct of borrowed-benefits policy—a means of distributing benefits rather than a means of paying for them. The conversion of the IRS to a social welfare agency would continue apace under the Biden plans with their profusion of targeted tax credits for families and green energy.

The borrowed-benefits policy deserves to be called a syndrome for two reasons. First, personal benefits, however much needed or described as “investments” by proponents, will not generate the future economic growth needed to pay down the debts incurred to finance them. Budgeting consumption spending according to imagined futures of trouble-free prosperity, rather than current revenues, is the real political legacy of Keynesianism. This technique is on display in the Biden administration’s rosy long-term economic projections for its spending plans.


Second, whatever the future may hold, the provision of borrowed benefits is deeply corrupting of democracy. It absolves citizens of recognizing their dependence on one another and politicians of accountability for managing the conflicts and constraints of today’s society. Instead, it encourages the fantasy that there are Croesuses in our midst whose “fair share” will pay for the benefits government wants to give us. This, too, is a central element of the Biden plans.

I have no solution for borrowed-benefits syndrome, which has dissolved the consensus that the welfare state is something citizens should be willing to pay for. I can, however, objurgate the politicians who have built their careers on propagating the syndrome far and wide, now with unprecedented aggressiveness in the Biden administration and Congress.

Mr. DeMuth is a distinguished fellow at the Hudson Institute. This article draws on his essay “The Rise and Rise of Deficit Government,” published this week at Law & Liberty.
Title: George Friedman on Bach and God
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 14, 2021, 05:32:25 AM
May 14, 2021
View On Website
Open as PDF

    
An Evening With Bach
Thoughts in and around geopolitics.
By: George Friedman

A friend of ours, Shem Guibbory, who is a violinist with the MET Orchestra in New York, came to our house last week for dinner. He agreed to play Bach’s Chaconne for an audience of us and a few other friends. I do not have an ear for music, but I kept thinking that this is how God sounded during the creation of the world. The music had a perfect order that could be seen only by gazing deeply into what appeared at first to be disorder. It struck me as extraordinary that a human being was able to capture God’s spirit on a piece of wood.

My business is the relation of order to disorder. Nations appear to be disorderly things, but for me there is deep order inherent to them. When one nation encounters another, the sound it makes is the cacophony of conflict. Yet in it is an order of necessity, which is the truth underlying the noise. Necessity, the constraints that compel a nation forward, seems chaotic, but from the chaos we can comprehend and even predict the direction of nations.

That I would claim any right to a piece of Bach’s transcendent music or my friend's superb delivery is of course the hubris you all put up with. But my goal here is not to discuss the divine tedium of being human but to consider how that tedium and Bach’s brilliance must give us a sense of God.

God is not a subject ever lightly taken, especially in our time, where suspicion of speaking of God is rampant. The Enlightenment was a celebration of nature, man and science. There was room for God as a courtesy. As the Enlightenment turned into modern science, the idea of an infinite God, the cause of all things, ceased to be the common cultural belief, overwhelmed as it was by the idea that all things human and universal were the product of matter. Science never denied the orderliness of nature but could not concede that what some call intelligent creation and others think of as God’s handiwork might be the origin of the order of the universe, of the political world or of human life. Science based on causation and the mere existence of order does not make the case for a force responsible for that order. For science, but not necessarily the scientist, the origin of the order cannot be known.

But when I listened to Bach, I encountered an order surreal in its complexity, seductive if I stopped trying to dissect it and simply capitulated to it. At that point I found beauty. Beauty is a concept that is difficult to grasp. It is said to be a matter of taste and therefore the creature of taste and nothing more. But when I listened to Bach and watched the violinist draw the sounds through his bow, I realized both that this is beauty, and that if the beholder does not recognize this, then he is in some sense crippled. Beauty is not in the eye of the beholder but in the eye of the universe.

And when speaking of beauty, it is necessary to discuss a subject that is not appropriate to speak of in polite company: death. There are those who believe that physical death does not end life. There are those who argue that death annihilates life and consciousness. The former believe this to be a matter of faith, the latter a matter of science. For me, faith is something anyone can claim and build on it any edifice he desires. Who knows what’s true? But it is the materialistic definition of the world, and of death, that I find most troubling, and the trouble is embedded in Bach. How could a human being conceive of such sounds and construct the music? How can I pretend to understand the working of nations? How can the mind of any human being be filled with the extraordinary things it is filled with? Each of us in an hour encounters in his mind things he has seen, will see, or cannot see because nothing else like it exists. Each of us in that hour feels love, anger, lust and depression. Our minds are filled with the prosaic and the uncanny, and we live within that space expecting it to be so.

The brain is said to be the origin of thought, and all thought originates therefore in our bodies. But I know that I, George Friedman, can choose to think of things at will. Some might say that the brain generated the thought. It might contain that thought in its folds and crannies, but the brain cannot generate the complexity of thoughts that I think, because I feel myself choosing to think them, and because I experience them. The brain might be the retainer of thought, but there is an "I" here, and I know that I have chosen this word to write and that word originated from me. I may be delusional, but I think not. I might be an automaton, but Bach could not simply have been a channel for brain tissue to express the chemicals it generates.

If there is an "I" independent of the brain, then I can understand how Bach could have willed his music into existence. He chose to do so out of love for the beautiful. If that is so, then Bach was greater than his body, and when the container of Bach’s genius is broken, is Bach destroyed or is he free? Obviously, I am playing with the idea that there are more things on heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophies. I don’t pretend to understand the universe, and I find even myself puzzling. But the idea that the rich complexity of thought and emotion is a product of the brain strikes me as simplistic. A more elegant explanation is that there is a soul, good or evil as it chooses, that cannot be contained in the Enlightenment.

This strange wandering into metaphysics does not depart from politics. The soul of one might be chaotic. The souls of many have in them a certain logic, not because they are the mechanistic production of appetites and manufactured thoughts, but because, like the universe, there is an order beneath the chaos, and in looking for constraints, I need to look more deeply. Yes, there are constraints, but they constrain more than the body. They constrain the wildness of our minds, a wildness we share with each other. The freedom of the soul struggles against the limits of the body in everyone in orderly ways. There is order to a nation, and it seems to be that wild currents are only at the surface.

I may be completely wrong about the world, and maybe there is nothing more than my appetite driving me. But just as scientists insist on causation, I must explain Bach. How could he compose a song that elevates us into places that I thought did not exist. How can this exist in the world – and it does – as a matter of material causality rather than as a man choosing to see the uncanny?

I can’t get there from the Enlightenment, and I fear claiming I know more than I do. I am already far away from my yard. Yet listening to Bach forces me to rethink what I do, and the universe itself. I think Bach intended that to be the case.
Title: Snowflakes
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 07, 2021, 10:16:02 AM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCMwlorNEZk&t=186s
Title: Unspeakable Truths about Racial Inequality
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 08, 2021, 05:41:53 AM
https://quillette.com/2021/02/10/unspeakable-truths-about-racial-inequality-in-america/?fbclid=IwAR3PPhI8Ria2slJYoLajGT0RyhYAm87C_GDPPdRndZErLItX5hrax_6_WKo
Title: some sort of personality disorder
Post by: ccp on June 15, 2021, 09:18:59 AM
the complete lack of shame

the total self serving nature of her making something that is not into some sort women's "issue":

https://www.mediaite.com/tv/cnns-brianna-keilar-practically-begs-katie-hill-to-return-to-congress-at-end-of-flattering-interview/

I guess it is not possible to have normal people in politics

These people simply cannot go away.

Of course Brianna who clearly has her own problems has come right on and push the leftist political agenda

Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 15, 2021, 10:42:29 AM
Wrong thread for that.
Title: We need to explain "fascism" as the left misuses the word
Post by: ccp on June 17, 2021, 04:58:02 AM
The Left -  more government control over our lives , more centralization , control by a few , in bed with leftist corporate America, stifling opposition speech, propaganda at schools , media , many corporations , reducing our freedoms, socialistic programs, equal outcomes high taxation

The Right - individualism, personal responsibility, free speech, less government, less control ,
  capitalism , equal opportunity, etc.

Yet the Yale philosophy professor calls the Right fascistic !   Time to defund Universities. 
Especially Yale and Harvard with billions in endowment
   
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2021/06/16/yale-professor-compares-gop-critical-race-theory-opposition-to-german-neo-nazi-aim-to-end-holocaust-education/
Title: Fake Woke
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 22, 2021, 02:08:03 AM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2l6JUNFAJ9o&t=18s
Title: Taibbi
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 23, 2021, 09:52:49 AM
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-left-is-now-the-right?r=rid4&amp%3Butm_campaign=post&amp%3Butm_medium=email&amp%3Butm_source=facebook&amp%3Bfbclid=IwAR3lK2he3e91eDx8WvNqbbjd_YnYgrSpBHo5Frw-tuZXg0OG-yY68GgMny0&utm_source=piano&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2906&pnespid=g.Bq9.8DXh2NPqMT5YUKXC070M4TzsyR.eqjmROP
Title: A deep dive with VDH
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 30, 2021, 11:03:01 AM


https://www.theepochtimes.com/exclusive-victor-davis-hanson-on-the-assault-on-meritocracy-politicization-of-the-virus-and-the-platonic-noble-lie_3875843.html?utm_source=News&utm_medium=email
Title: The Grift that keeps on Grifting
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 01, 2021, 07:22:10 AM
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/james-kirchick-grifter-nation?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=MJ_20210701&utm_term=Jolt-Smart
Title: The Darryl Cooper Piece
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 11, 2021, 10:54:26 PM
I posted this very important piece a couple of days ago frustrating formatting and all, and repost it now due to this version much easier legibility and formatting:
================================

Darryl Cooper, aka @MartyrMade, has assembled what might be the most accurate summation of why Trump supporters - the vast majority of conservatives - are livid after the past five years. Cooper, a researcher and writer, is the co-host of The Unraveling Podcast with retired US Navy SEAL commander Jocko Willink, and has hosted several deep-dive podcasts on a number of topics.

Read below:

(continued via Threadreader, emphasis ours)

Here are the facts - actual, confirmed facts - that shape their perspective: 1) The FBI/etc spied on the 2016 Trump campaign using evidence manufactured by the Clinton campaign. We now know that all involved knew it was fake from Day 1 (see: Brennan's July 2016 memo, etc). These are Tea Party people. The types who give their kids a pocket Constitution for their birthday and have Founding Fathers memes in their bios. The intel community spying on a presidential campaign using fake evidence (incl forged documents) is a big deal to them.

Everyone involved lied about their involvement as long as they could. We only learned the DNC paid for the manufactured evidence because of a court order. Comey denied on TV knowing the DNC paid for it, when we have emails from a year earlier proving that he knew. This was true with everyone, from CIA Dir Brennan & Adam Schiff - who were on TV saying they'd seen clear evidence of collusion w/Russia, while admitting under oath behind closed doors that they hadn't - all the way down the line. In the end we learned that it was ALL fake.

At first, many Trump ppl were worried there must be some collusion, because every media & intel agency wouldn't make it up out of nothing. When it was clear that they had made it up, people expected a reckoning, and shed many illusions about their gov't when it didn't happen. We know as fact: a) The Steele dossier was the sole evidence used to justify spying on the Trump campaign, b) The FBI knew the Steele dossier was a DNC op, c) Steele's source told the FBI the info was unserious, d) they did not inform the court of any of this and kept spying.

Trump supporters know the collusion case front and back. They went from worrying the collusion must be real, to suspecting it might be fake, to realizing it was a scam, then watched as every institution - agencies, the press, Congress, academia - gaslit them for another year. Worse, collusion was used to scare people away from working in the administration. They knew their entire lives would be investigated. Many quit because they were being bankrupted by legal fees. The DoJ, press, & gov't destroyed lives and actively subverted an elected admin.

This is where people whose political identity was largely defined by a naive belief in what they learned in Civics class began to see the outline of a Regime that crossed all institutional boundaries. Because it had stepped out of the shadows to unite against an interloper. GOP propaganda still has many of them thinking in terms of partisan binaries, but A LOT of Trump supporters see that the Regime is not partisan. They all know that the same institutions would have taken opposite sides if it was a Tulsi Gabbard vs Jeb Bush election.

It's hard to describe to people on the left (who are used to thinking of gov't as a conspiracy... Watergate, COINTELPRO, WMD, etc) how shocking & disillusioning this was for people who encourage their sons to enlist in the Army, and hate ppl who don't stand for the Anthem. They could have managed the shock if it only involved the government. But the behavior of the corporate press is really what radicalized them. They hate journalists more than they hate any politician or gov't official, because they feel most betrayed by them. The idea that the press is driven by ratings/sensationalism became untenable. If that were true, they'd be all over the Epstein story. The corporate press is the propaganda arm of the Regime they now see in outline. Nothing anyone says will ever make them unsee that, period.

This is profoundly disorienting. Many of them don't know for certain whether ballots were faked in November 2020, but they know for absolute certain that the press, the FBI, etc would lie to them if there was. They have every reason to believe that, and it's probably true. They watched the press behave like animals for four years. Tens of millions of people will always see Kavanaugh as a gang rapist, based on nothing, because of CNN. And CNN seems proud of that. They led a lynch mob against a high school kid. They cheered on a summer of riots.

They always claimed the media had liberal bias, fine, whatever. They still thought the press would admit truth if they were cornered. Now they don't. It's a different thing to watch them invent stories whole cloth in order to destroy regular lives and spark mass violence. Time Mag told us that during the 2020 riots, there were weekly conference calls involving, among others, leaders of the protests, the local officials who refused to stop them, and media people who framed them for political effect. In Ukraine we call that a color revolution.

Throughout the summer, Democrat governors took advantage of COVID to change voting procedures. It wasn't just the mail-ins (they lowered signature matching standards, etc). After the collusion scam, the fake impeachment, Trump ppl expected shenanigans by now. Re: "fake impeachment", we now know that Trump's request for Ukraine to cooperate w/the DOJ regarding Biden's $ activities in Ukraine was in support of an active investigation being pursued by the FBI and Ukraine AG at the time, and so a completely legitimate request.

Then you get the Hunter laptop scandal. Big Tech ran a full-on censorship campaign against a major newspaper to protect a political candidate. Period. Everyone knows it, all of the Tech companies now admit it was a "mistake" - but, ya know, the election's over, so who cares? Goes w/o saying, but: If the NY Times had Don Jr's laptop, full of pics of him smoking crack and engaging in group sex, lots of lurid family drama, emails describing direct corruption and backed up by the CEO of the company they were using, the NYT wouldn't have been banned.

Think back: Stories about Trump being pissed on by Russian prostitutes and blackmailed by Putin were promoted as fact, and the only evidence was a document paid for by his opposition and disavowed by its source. The NY Post was banned for reporting on true information. The reaction of Trump ppl to all this was not, "no fair!" That's how they felt about Romney's "binders of women" in 2012. This is different. Now they see, correctly, that every institution is captured by ppl who will use any means to exclude them from the political process. And yet they showed up in record numbers to vote. He got 13m more votes than in 2016, 10m more than Clinton got! As election night dragged on, they allowed themselves some hope. But when the four critical swing states (and only those states) went dark at midnight, they knew.

Over the ensuing weeks, they got shuffled around by grifters and media scam artists selling them conspiracy theories. They latched onto one, then another increasingly absurd theory as they tried to put a concrete name on something very real  Media & Tech did everything to make things worse. Everything about the election was strange - the changes to procedure, unprecedented mail-in voting, the delays, etc - but rather than admit that and make everything transparent, they banned discussion of it (even in DMs!).

Everyone knows that, just as Don Jr's laptop would've been the story of the century, if everything about the election dispute was the same, except the parties were reversed, suspicions about the outcome would've been Taken Very Seriously. See 2016 for proof.

Even the courts' refusal of the case gets nowhere w/them, because of how the opposition embraced mass political violence. They'll say, w/good reason: What judge will stick his neck out for Trump knowing he'll be destroyed in the media as a violent mob burns down his house? It's a fact, according to Time Magazine, that mass riots were planned in cities across the country if Trump won. Sure, they were "protests", but they were planned by the same people as during the summer, and everyone knows what it would have meant. Judges have families, too.

Forget the ballot conspiracies. It's a fact that governors used COVID to unconstitutionally alter election procedures (the Constitution states that only legislatures can do so) to help Biden to make up for a massive enthusiasm gap by gaming the mail-in ballot system. They knew it was unconstitutional, it's right there in plain English. But they knew the cases wouldn't see court until after the election. And what judge will toss millions of ballots because a governor broke the rules? The threat of mass riots wasn't implied, it was direct.

a) The entrenched bureaucracy & security state subverted Trump from Day 1,
b) The press is part of the operation,
c) Election rules were changed,
d) Big Tech censors opposition,
e) Political violence is legitimized & encouraged,
f) Trump is banned from social media.

They were led down some rabbit holes, but they are absolutely right that their gov't is monopolized by a Regime that believes they are beneath representation, and will observe no limits to keep them getting it. Trump fans should be happy he lost; it might've kept him alive.
Title: Conrad Black: The Problem with Peggy
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 02, 2021, 08:15:17 PM
https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/02/the-problem-with-peggy/
Title: Coming Soon: America's Social Credit System
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 03, 2021, 11:17:34 AM
https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/565860-coming-soon-americas-own-social-credit-system
Title: Re: Conrad Black: The Problem with Peggy
Post by: DougMacG on August 04, 2021, 09:01:43 AM
https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/02/the-problem-with-peggy/

This is a great article, written with respect, context and accuracy.  It is quite a compliment that he indicates he has read nearly all her published work.  Rarely does a critical piece do that.  She deserves credit and benefit of the doubt for how right she has been all the good she has done in the past.  But what matters now is whether she is right now and is she doing good or harm for the country with these writings.

Even Thomas Sowell (2016) said a man with the personality of Trump should not be President.  Pushed further he indicated he would likely vote for him anyway based on the worse choices likely to be on the ballot.

What does Peggy Noonan not understand about worse choices?  Trump's policies were great for this country.  What did he do personally or politically that was so much worse than all his predecessors?  Ask for votes to be counted and fraud investigated?  Good grief.

What did Peggy Noonan write on this scale about IRS targeting under Obama Biden, worse than Nixon?  In fact, she wrote enough about it to show she knew it was as serious as I say it was:
https://peggynoonan.com/stay-shocked/
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887323475304578501581991103070
https://peggynoonan.com/cover-the-irs-dont-cover-for-it/
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887324448104578614220949743916

She pronounced it the "worst scandal in history", then she helped the people who did it get back into power.  So much for commitment to stopping people who lack integrity.

On my scorecard I see Democrats rigged the system (cheated, stole) on two of their last two Presidential election wins.  Add the 2018 congressional election to that, held under the cloud of the 'Mueller Investigation', (Trump might be a Russian spy and Republicans won't do anything about it, oops he wasn't, it was a media/Democrat setup).  That makes three cheats in their last three victories.  Anyone else notice a pattern?  Some think we shouldn't even try to win more votes in this system they have corrupted.  Where does THAT lead?  To things much worse than "1/6", I'm afraid.

What we should do, as Conrad Black concludes, is "restore integrity to the electoral process", so people would have confidence in the results.

The problem isn't Trump.  He was elected to address what went wrong in Washington.  The solution to moving beyond Trump in our constitutional system, if that's what you believe needs to be done, isn't to have the most powerful people in Washington remove him from eligibility on the ballot, which was exactly what the after-he-left-office impeachment trial Peggy Noonan supported tried to do.  The answer to defeat Trump, if you are his opposition, is to govern better when in power and put better alternatives on the ballot.  All the Dem election tampering indicates they don't believe they did that, and now we know.  The alternative to Trump was worse - in SO many ways.

Noonan hated Trump before any of this happened, just ask her, and she lets that cloud her judgment.  To ignore all evidence of election fraud and misconduct because of that hate makes her writings, at least on this topic, worthless.  Too bad.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on August 04, 2021, 10:08:39 AM
"Noonan hated Trump before any of this happened, just ask her, and she lets that cloud her judgment."

Agree with Conrad though I need to keep a dictionary nearby to translate his sophisticated use of the English Language

as for Noonan
  she is too stuffy and "inside the beltway for me."

they are so full of themselves

rest assured she will still get the cocktail party invites

decorum is important but not more then outcome

her refusal to recognize that like all the pompous never Trumper's
  is only ok because I have the freedom to ignore her and them

Title: George Soros?!?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 14, 2021, 04:32:00 PM


Xi’s Dictatorship Threatens the Chinese State
In his quest for personal power, he’s rejected Deng Xiaoping’s economic reform path and turned the Communist Party into an assemblage of yes-men.


By
George Soros
Aug. 13, 2021 5:12 pm ET


811

Chinese President Xi Jinping at a ceremony marking the 100th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party’s founding in Beijing, July 1.
PHOTO: JU PENG/XINHUA VIA ZUMA PRESS

Xi Jinping, the ruler of China, suffers from several internal inconsistencies which greatly reduce the cohesion and effectiveness of his leadership. There is a conflict between his beliefs and his actions and between his public declarations of wanting to make China a superpower and his behavior as a domestic ruler. These internal contradictions have revealed themselves in the context of the growing conflict between the U.S. and China.
At the heart of this conflict is the reality that the two nations represent systems of governance that are diametrically opposed. The U.S. stands for a democratic, open society in which the role of the government is to protect the freedom of the individual. Mr. Xi believes Mao Zedong invented a superior form of organization, which he is carrying on: a totalitarian closed society in which the individual is subordinated to the one-party state. It is superior, in this view, because it is more disciplined, stronger and therefore bound to prevail in a contest.

Relations between China and the U.S. are rapidly deteriorating and may lead to war. Mr. Xi has made clear that he intends to take possession of Taiwan within the next decade, and he is increasing China’s military capacity accordingly.

He also faces an important domestic hurdle in 2022, when he intends to break the established system of succession to remain president for life. He feels that he needs at least another decade to concentrate the power of the one-party state and its military in his own hands. He knows that his plan has many enemies, and he wants to make sure they won’t have the ability to resist him.

It is against this background that the current turmoil in the financial markets is unfolding, catching many people unaware and leaving them confused. The confusion has compounded the turmoil.

Although I am no longer engaged in the financial markets, I used to be an active participant. I have also been actively engaged in China since 1984, when I introduced Communist Party reformers in China to their counterparts in my native Hungary. They learned a lot from each other, and I followed up by setting up foundations in both countries. That was the beginning of my career in what I call political philanthropy. My foundation in China was unique in being granted near-total independence. I closed it in 1989, after I learned it had come under the control of the Chinese government and just before the Tiananmen Square massacre. I resumed my active involvement in China in 2013 when Mr. Xi became the ruler, but this time as an outspoken opponent of what has since become a totalitarian regime.

I consider Mr. Xi the most dangerous enemy of open societies in the world. The Chinese people as a whole are among his victims, but domestic political opponents and religious and ethnic minorities suffer from his persecution much more. I find it particularly disturbing that so many Chinese people seem to find his social-credit surveillance system not only tolerable but attractive. It provides them social services free of charge and tells them how to stay out of trouble by not saying anything critical of Mr. Xi or his regime. If he could perfect the social-credit system and assure a steadily rising standard of living, his regime would become much more secure. But he is bound to run into difficulties on both counts.
To understand why, some historical background is necessary. Mr. Xi came to power in 2013, but he was the beneficiary of the bold reform agenda of his predecessor Deng Xiaoping, who had a very different concept of China’s place in the world. Deng realized that the West was much more developed and China had much to learn from it. Far from being diametrically opposed to the Western-dominated global system, Deng wanted China to rise within it. His approach worked wonders. China was accepted as a member of the World Trade Organization in 2001 with the privileges that come with the status of a less-developed country. China embarked on a period of unprecedented growth. It even dealt with the global financial crisis of 2007-08 better than the developed world.

Mr. Xi failed to understand how Deng achieved his success. He took it as a given and exploited it, but he harbored an intense personal resentment against Deng. He held Deng Xiaoping responsible for not honoring his father, Xi Zhongxun, and for removing the elder Xi from the Politburo in 1962. As a result, Xi Jinping grew up in the countryside in very difficult circumstances. He didn’t receive a proper education, never went abroad, and never learned a foreign language.

Xi Jinping devoted his life to undoing Deng’s influence on the development of China. His personal animosity toward Deng has played a large part in this, but other factors are equally important. He is intensely nationalistic and he wants China to become the dominant power in the world. He is also convinced that the Chinese Communist Party needs to be a Leninist party, willing to use its political and military power to impose its will. Xi Jinping strongly felt this was necessary to ensure that the Chinese Communist Party will be strong enough to impose the sacrifices needed to achieve his goal.

Mr. Xi realized that he needs to remain the undisputed ruler to accomplish what he considers his life’s mission. He doesn’t know how the financial markets operate, but he has a clear idea of what he has to do in 2022 to stay in power. He intends to overstep the term limits established by Deng, which governed the succession of Mr. Xi’s two predecessors, Hu Jintao and Jiang Zemin. Because many of the political class and business elite are liable to oppose Mr. Xi, he must prevent them from uniting against him. Thus, his first task is to bring to heel anyone who is rich enough to exercise independent power.

That process has been unfolding in the past year and reached a crescendo in recent weeks. It started with the sudden cancellation of a new issue by Alibaba’s Ant Group in November 2020 and the temporary disappearance of its former executive chairman, Jack Ma. Then came the disciplinary measures taken against Didi Chuxing after it floated an issue in New York in June 2021. It culminated with the banishment of three U.S.-financed tutoring companies, which had a much greater effect on international markets than Mr. Xi expected. Chinese financial authorities have tried to reassure markets but with little success.

Mr. Xi is engaged in a systematic campaign to remove or neutralize people who have amassed a fortune. His latest victim is Sun Dawu, a billionaire pig farmer. Mr. Sun has been sentenced to 18 years in prison and persuaded to “donate” the bulk of his wealth to charity.

This campaign threatens to destroy the geese that lay the golden eggs. Mr. Xi is determined to bring the creators of wealth under the control of the one-party state. He has reintroduced a dual-management structure into large privately owned companies that had largely lapsed during the reform era of Deng. Now private and state-owned companies are being run not only by their management but also a party representative who ranks higher than the company president. This creates a perverse incentive not to innovate but to await instructions from higher authorities.

China’s largest, highly leveraged real-estate company, Evergrande, has recently run into difficulties servicing its debt. The real-estate market, which has been a driver of the economic recovery, is in disarray. The authorities have always been flexible enough to deal with any crisis, but they are losing their flexibility. To illustrate, a state-owned company produced a Covid-19 vaccine, Sinopharm, which has been widely exported all over the world, but its performance is inferior to all other widely marketed vaccines. Sinopharm won’t win any friends for China.

To prevail in 2022, Mr. Xi has turned himself into a dictator. Instead of allowing the party to tell him what policies to adopt, he dictates the policies he wants it to follow. State media is now broadcasting a stunning scene in which Mr. Xi leads the Standing Committee of the Politburo in slavishly repeating after him an oath of loyalty to the party and to him personally. This must be a humiliating experience, and it is liable to turn against Mr. Xi even those who had previously accepted him.

In other words, he has turned them into his own yes-men, abolishing the legacy of Deng’s consensual rule. With Mr. Xi there is little room for checks and balances. He will find it difficult to adjust his policies to a changing reality, because he rules by intimidation. His underlings are afraid to tell him how reality has changed for fear of triggering his anger. This dynamic endangers the future of China’s one-party state.

Mr. Soros is founder of the Open Society Foundations.
Title: A commentary by NC Scout
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 18, 2021, 07:17:46 PM
https://www.americanpartisan.org/2021/08/the-pashtun-a-commentary-by-nc-scout/

Title: Generation GWOT
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 20, 2021, 01:45:27 PM
https://off-the-reservation.com/2021/08/18/generation-gwot-and-the-fall-of-afghanistan/
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on August 21, 2021, 08:20:20 AM
Tucker yesterday was asking

the question :

Why is MSM turning on Biden now?

he had guest on who proposed some sort of theory about the DC military complex were "lied" to
etc and now they are mad

I am thinking it is more they are mad that he is such an obvious dismal failure for everyone to see, undeniably , that they fear their whole progressive agenda just got put in peril.

They covered for him and as Tucker points out, got him elected, and he screwed this up so bad
they may not get their agenda passed now
and they are looking at disaster in '22 and '24.

Pelosi is bailing ahead of time.  Maybe more are jumping off the Titanic soon.

That said :

Republicans better NOT screw this up
Never let a disaster go to waste.........


Title: Requiem for the Stan
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 23, 2021, 11:20:30 AM


https://im1776.com/2021/08/20/requiem-for-the-stan/?fbclid=IwAR0NVn2Nk-2qn63riQNGHM0I6N_Yu0ZjqkknMklTvi9Wm1xJDpHlFZ5nl10
Title: Solzhenitsyn and the religion of revolution
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 23, 2021, 01:41:02 PM
https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/solzhenitsyn-and-the-religion-of-revolution/?fbclid=IwAR0DeURbz4FOXrxvs9fFz__E2uQ1rZr7qwCZCSbyw_KV07vxm9OwN4N6AR8
Title: Good Death and Cancel Culture
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 12, 2021, 04:28:58 PM
https://quillette.com/2021/09/09/the-good-death-cancel-culture-and-the-logic-of-torture/?fbclid=IwAR1dfRCjVvL8CP2v41ywTyveC7Jcl8X6gVf539XtBqJGX4pUXneJYxvIa6c
Title: VDH: Science they said
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 16, 2021, 02:01:26 AM
https://amgreatness.com/2021/09/15/science-they-said/
Title: Does US Senate resemble that of Ancient Rome?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 18, 2021, 04:24:46 PM
https://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2021/06/does-us-senate-resemble-ancient-rome/619060/
Title: Michael Shellenberger, Why I am not a progressive
Post by: DougMacG on September 20, 2021, 05:38:33 PM
https://michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/why-i-am-not-a-progressive

For all of my adult life I have identified as a progressive. To me, being a progressive meant that I believed in empowerment. In 2002, when I co-founded a labor-environmental coalition to advocate for renewable energy, the symbol we chose to represent us was of Rosie the Riveter, an image of a woman factory worker during World War II flexing her muscle beneath the words, “We Can Do It!”. When President Barack Obama ran for office in 2008, it seemed fitting to me that he chose the slogan, “Yes we can!”

But now, on all the major issues of the day, the message from progressives is “No, you can’t.” No: poor nations like Bangladesh can’t adapt to climate change by becoming rich, insist progressives; rather, rich nations must become poor. No: we can’t prevent the staggering rise of drug deaths in the U.S., from 17,000 in 2000 to 93,000 in 2020, by helping people free themselves from addiction; rather, we must instead provide Safe Injection Sites and Safe Sleeping Sites, in downtown neighborhoods, where homeless addicts can use fentanyl, heroin, and meth safely.

Progressives insist they are offering hope. Many scientists and activists yesterday said that, while we have gone past the point of no return, when it comes to climate change, and that “No one is safe,” we can make the situation less bad by using solar panels, windmills, and electric cars, albeit at a very high cost to the economy. And in California, progressive leaders say that we just need to stick with the progressive agenda of Safe Injection Sites and Safe Sleeping Sites until we can build enough single unit apartments for the state’s 116,000 unsheltered homeless, most of whom are either addicted to hard drugs, suffering from untreated mental illness, or both.

But progressives are talking out of both sides of their mouth. Yesterday I debated a British climate scientist named Richard Betts on television. After I pointed out that he and his colleagues had contributed to one out of four British children having nightmares about climate change he insisted that he was all for optimism and that he agreed with me about nuclear power. But just hours earlier he had told the Guardian that we were “hopelessly unprepared” for extreme weather events, even though deaths from natural disasters are at an all time low and that, objectively speaking, humankind has never been more prepared than we are today.

And on the drug deaths crisis, the consensus view among Democrats in Sacramento is that “the problem is fundamentally unsolvable,” according to one of the Capitol’s leading lobbyists. Facing a recall that is growing in popularity, Governor Gavin Newsom yesterday tried to demonstrate that he believes he can solve the problem. He came to Berkeley California and cleaned up garbage created by an open air drug scene (“homeless encampment”) underneath a freeway underpass. A reporter for Politico posted a picture of Newsom who he said was “looking tired, sweaty and dirty.” But a commenter noted that the video was shot at 12:12 pm and by 12:25 pm Newsom was holding a press conference. The governor hadn’t even bothered changing out of his Hush Puppies into work boots. People close to the governor say that it is Newsom himself who believes homelessness is a problem that cannot be solved.

The reason progressives believe that “No one is safe,” when it comes to climate change, and that the drug death “homelessness” crisis is unsolvable, is because they are in the grip of a victim ideology characterized by safetyism, learned helplessness, and disempowerment. This isn’t really that new. Since the 1960s, the New Left has argued that we can’t solve any of our major problems until we overthrow our racist, sexist, and capitalistic system. But for most of my life, up through the election of Obama, there was still a New Deal, “Yes we can!,” and “We can do it!” optimism that sat side-by-side with the New Left’s fundamentally disempowering critique of the system.

That’s all gone. On climate change, drug deaths, and cultural issues like racism, the message from progressives is that we are doomed unless we dismantle the institutions responsible for our oppressive, racist system. Those of us in Generation X who were raised to believe that racism was something we could overcome have been told in no uncertain terms that we were wrong. Racism is baked into our cultural DNA. Even apparently positive progressive proposals are aimed at fundamentally dismantling institutions. The Democrats’ $1 trillion infrastructure bill, supported by many Republicans, and their $3.5 trillion budget proposal, contain measures that would finance the continuing degradation of our electrical grids by increasing reliance on unreliable, weather-dependent renewables, and establish racial incentives for industries including trucking, where there is already a shortage of drivers in large measure because not enough of them can pass drug tests. And does anyone really believe that, if those bills pass, progressives will abandon their dark vision of the future and return to Rosie the Riveter? 

Meanwhile, at the state and local level, progressive governments faced with worsening racial disparities in education and crime, are attempting to “solve” the problem by eliminating academic standards altogether, and advocating selective enforcement of laws based on who is committing them. Such measures are profoundly cynical. Progressives are effectively giving up on addressing racial disparities by ignoring them. But such is the logical outcome of victim ideology, which holds that we can divide the world into victims and oppressors, that victims are morally superior and even spiritual, and no change is possible until the system that produces victims and oppressors is overthrown.

To some extent none of this is new. After World War II, it was progressives, not conservatives, who led the charge to replace mental hospitals with community-based care. After the community-based care system fell apart, and severely mentally ill people ended up living on the street, addicted to drugs and alcohol, progressives blamed Reagan and Republicans for cutting the budget. But progressive California today spends more than any other state, per capita, on mental health, and yet the number of homeless, many of whom are mentally ill and suffering addiction, increased by 31% in California since 2010 even as they declined by 18 percent in the rest of the US.

Also after World War II, it was progressives, not conservatives, who insisted that the world was coming to an end because too many babies were being born, and because of nuclear energy. The “population bomb” meant that too many people would result in resource scarcity which would result in international conflicts and eventually nuclear war. We were helpless to prevent the situation through technological change and instead had to prevent people from having children and rid the world of nuclear weapons and energy. It took the end of the Cold War, and the overwhelming evidence that parents in poor nations chose to have fewer children, as parents in rich nations had before them, where they no longer needed them to work on the farm, for the discourse to finally fade.

But the will-to-apocalypse only grew stronger. After it became clear that the planet was warming, not cooling, as many scientists had previously feared, opportunistic New Left progressives insisted that climate change would be world-ending. There was never much reason to believe this. A major report by the National Academies of Science in 1982 concluded that abundant natural gas, along with nuclear power, would substitute for coal, and prevent temperatures from rising high enough to threaten civilization. But progressives responded by demonizing the authors of the study and insisting that anybody who disagreed that climate change was apocalyptic was secretly on the take from the fossil fuel industry.

Where there have been relatively straightforward fixes to societal problems, progressives have opposed them. Progressives have opposed the expanded use of natural gas and nuclear energy since the 1970s even though it was those two technologies that caused emissions to peak and decline in Germany, Britain and France during that decade. Progressive climate activists over the last 15 years hotly opposed fracking even though it was the main reason emissions in the US declined 22 percent between 2005 and 2020, which is 5 percentage points more than President Obama proposed to reduce them as part of America’s Paris climate agreement.

The same was the case when it came to drug deaths, addiction, and homelessness. People are shocked when I explain to them that the reason California still lacks enough homeless shelters is because progressives have opposed building them. Indeed, it was Governor Newsom, when he was Mayor of San Francisco, who led the charge opposing the construction of sufficient homeless shelters in favor of instead building single unit apartments for anybody who said they wanted one. While there are financial motivations for such a policy, the main motivation was ideological. Newsom and other progressives believe that simply sheltering people is immoral. The good is the enemy of the perfect.

As a result, progressives have created the apocalypse they feared. In California, there are “homeless encampments,” open drug scenes, in the parks, along the highways, and on the sidewalks. But the problem is no longer limited to San Francisco. A few days ago somebody posted a video and photo on Twitter of people in Philadelphia, high on some drug, looking exactly like Hollywood zombies. The obvious solution is to provide people with shelter, require them to use it, and mandate drug and psychiatric treatment, for people who break laws against camping, public drug use, public defecation, and other laws. But progressives insist the better solution is Safe Sleeping Sites and Safe Injection Sites.

Should we be surprised that an ideology that believes American civilization is fundamentally evil has resulted in the breakdown of that civilization? Most American progressives don’t hold such an extreme ideology. Most progressives want police for their neighborhoods. Most progressives want their own children, when suffering mental illness and addiction, to be mandated care. And most progressives want reliable electrical and water management systems for their neighborhoods.

But most progressives are also voting for candidates who are cutting the number of police for poor neighborhoods, insisting that psychiatric and drug treatment be optional, and that trillions be spent making electricity more expensive so we can harmonize with nature through solar panels made by enslaved Muslims in China, and through industrial wind projects built in the habitat of critically endangered whale species.

Does pointing all of this out make me a conservative? There are certainly things I support that many progressives view as conservative, including nuclear power, a ban on public camping, and mandating drug and psychiatric treatment for people who break the law. But other things I support might be fairly viewed as rather liberal, or even progressive, including universal psychiatric care, shelter-for-all, and the reform of police departments with the aims of reducing homicides, police violence, and improving the treatment of people with behavioral health disorders, whether from addiction or mental illness.

And there is a kind of victim ideology on the Right just as there is on the Left. It says that America is too weak and poor, and that our resources are too scarce, to take on our big challenges. On climate change it suggests that nothing of consequence can be done and that all energy sources, from coal to nuclear to solar panels, are of equal or comparable value. On drug deaths and homelessness it argues that parents must simply do a better job raising their children to not be drug addicts, and that we should lock up people, even the mentally ill, for long sentences in prisons and hospitals, with little regard for rehabilitation. 

The two grassroots movements I have helped to create around energy and homelessness reject the dystopian victim ideologies of Right and Left. There are progressive and conservative members in both coalitions. But what unites us is our commitment to practical policies that are proven to work in the real world. We advocate for the maintenance and construction of nuclear plants that actually exist, or could soon exist, not futuristic reactors that likely never will. We advocate for Shelter First and Housing Earned, universal psychiatric care, and banning the open dealing of deadly drugs because those are the policies that have worked across the U.S. and around the world, and can be implemented right away.

If I had to find a word to describe the politics I am proposing it would be “heroic,” not liberal, conservative, or even moderate. We need a politics of heroism not a politics of victimhood. Yes, Bangladesh can develop and save itself from sea level rise, just as rich nations have; they are not doomed to hurricanes and flooding. Yes, people addicted to fentanyl and meth can recover from their addictions, with our help, and go on to live fulfilling and rewarding lives; they are not doomed to live in tents for the rest of their shortened lives. And yes, we can create an America where people who disagree on many things can nonetheless find common ground on the very issues that most seem to polarize us, including energy, the environment, crime, and drugs. 

On October 12 HarperCollins will publish my second book in two years, San Fransicko, focused on drugs, crime, and homelessnes. It and Apocalypse Never will constitute a comprehensive proposal for saving our civilization from those who would destroy it. What both books have in common is the theme of empowerment. We are not doomed to an apocalyptic future, whether from climate change or homelessness. We can achieve nature, peace, and prosperity for all people because humans are amazing. Our civilization is sacred; we must defend and extend it.

San Fransicko was inspired, in part, by the work of the late psychiatrist, Victor Frankl, who was made famous by a book where he described how he survived the Nazi concentration camps by fixating on a positive vision for his future. During the darkest moments of Covid last year I was struck by how much my mood had improved simply by listening to his 1960s lectures on YouTube. Why, I wondered, had progressives embraced Frankl’s empowering therapy in their personal lives but demonized it in their political lives? Why had progressives, who had done so much to popularize human potential and self-help, claimed that promoting self-help in policies and politics were a form of “blaming the victim?”

Few of my conclusions will surprise anyone, though the agenda, and philosophy, that I am proposing might. It truly is a mix of values, policies, and institutions that one might consider progressive and conservative, not because I set out to make it that way, but because it was that combination that has worked so often in the past. But beyond the policies and values I propose there is a spirit of overcoming, not succumbing; of empowerment, not disempowerment; and of heroism, not victimhood. That spirit comes before, and goes beyond, political ideology and partisan identity. It says, against those who believe that America, and perhaps Western Civilization itself, are doomed: no they’re not. And to those who think we can’t solve big challenges like climate change, drug deaths, and homelessness, it says yes we can.
Title: Thomas Sowell
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 06, 2021, 03:41:21 PM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxEeYSusehc&t=286s
Title: Re: Thomas Sowell
Post by: DougMacG on October 07, 2021, 03:21:32 AM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxEeYSusehc&t=286s

Smartest person currently living on Earth, on these issues, in my opinion.
Title: VDH: The Dying Citizen
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 08, 2021, 01:54:08 AM
By Victor Davis Hanson

October 6, 2021
Only a little more than half of the current world’s 7 billion people are citizens of fully consensual governments.

That lucky 50 percent alone enjoys constitutionally protected freedoms. Most are also Western. Or at least they reside in nations that have become “Westernized.”

Migrants, regardless of their race, religion, or gender, almost always head for a Western nation. And most often their destination remains the United States. The more it is now fashionable for Americans to take for granted or even to ridicule the idea of their own country, the more the non-American global poor risk their lives to crash America’s borders.

Constitutional systems easily perish because they ask a lot of their citizens—to vote, to be informed about civic and political issues, and to hold elected officials accountable. That responsibility is perhaps why, of the world’s true republics and democracies, only about 22 have been in existence for a half-century or more. We are seldom told, then, that America is a rare, precious, and perhaps even fragile idea, both in the past and in the present.

American citizens are clearly also not the custom of the past. Unlike history’s more common peasants, citizens are not under the control of the rich who, in turn, seek undue influence in government through controlling them.

Instead, viable citizenship has always hinged on a broad, autonomous middle class. Those Americans in between lack both the dependence of the poor, and the insider influences of the elite. Suffocate the middle and we know that a binary feudalism will soon replace it. We are seeing just that medievalization in contemporary California.

Nor are American citizens mere migratory residents who drift across nonexistent borders in expectation of receiving more rights than meeting responsibilities. Forfeit a sacred national space, a place where common customs, language, and traditions can shelter and thrive, and a unique America disappears into a pre-civilizational migratory void like the fluid vastness of late imperial Rome.


Americans are quite different from tribal peoples, whose first loyalties are determined by mere appearance or innate blood ties. Take this nation back to pre-civilizational tribalism, and our future as the next Yugoslavia, Rwanda, or Iraq is assured.

Americans are not, then, premodern peasants, mere residents, and squabbling tribes—at least not quite yet.

But citizens also are equally suspicious and rightfully distrustful of the top-down subversion of citizenship by postmodern elites and the privileged. The latter often expect Americans to give up their ancient freedoms to a vast, unelected, and unaudited permanent administrative state, to be run by credentialed functionaries and sanctioned “experts.” That technocratic regimentation may now be the Chinese model, but it was never the vision of our founders.

Citizens object to “evolving” a 245-year-old republic into a radical socialist ochlocracy without checks and balances. That rebooting would mean scrapping ancient laws, long-held customs, and hallowed traditions—from the Electoral College and a nine-person Supreme Court to the Senate filibuster and 50-state union. Consensual societies usually implode when desperate factions resort to subverting hallowed rules for short-term partisan gain.

Some elites believe the founders’ Constitution is in dire need of radical deletions and alterations to fit their own utopian visions. So, they imagine an evolving Constitution to synchronize with supposedly a fluid, mutable—and always progressing—human nature. They are ignorant that the core of the Constitution does not change because our own natural, core sense of right and wrong does not either.


Nor do citizens hand over their first allegiances to an abstract worldwide commonwealth—as if half of its membership are not illiberal theocracies, autocracies, and monarchies. Such a tired “citizens of the world” dream dates to Socratic utopianism.

Yet neither the defunct League of Nations nor the United Nations has ever offered any credible blueprint for viable transnational governance. Today’s globalists at Davos may snicker at nationalist democracies like the United States and Israel, but in cowardly fashion they usually appease a totalitarian and brutal Communist China that allows no dissent.

Given our privileges, affluent and leisured Americans must always ask ourselves whether as citizens we have earned what those who died at Gettysburg or on Omaha Beach bequeathed at such costs.

Refusing to stand during the national anthem is not and should not be illegal. But such blanket rejection of American customs is admittedly now a collective narcissistic tic—and hardly sustainable for the nation’s privileged to sit in disgust for a flag that their betters raised under fire on Iwo Jima for others not yet born. Sometimes citizens can do as much harm to their commonwealth by violating customs and traditions as by breaking laws.

Instead, freedom requires constant reinvestment in and replenishment of a nation’s traditions and ideals. Self-criticism of one’s country is salutary to ensure needed changes, but only if Americans accept that an innately self-correcting United States does not have to be perfect to be good—and especially when, in a world of innately flawed humans and failed states, it remains far better than any of the alternatives abroad.

The present article summarizes arguments in Victor Davis Hanson’s new book The Dying Citizen that appears this week from Basic Books.


About Victor Davis Hanson
Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness and the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He is an American military historian, columnist, a former classics professor, and scholar of ancient warfare. He has been a visiting professor at Hillsdale College since 2004. Hanson was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2007 by President George W. Bush. Hanson is also a farmer (growing raisin grapes on a family farm in Selma, California) and a critic of social trends related to farming and agrarianism. He is the author most recently of The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won and The Case for Trump.

Title: George Friedman: Beyond Bed, Bath, and Beyond
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 08, 2021, 04:31:15 AM
second post

   
Beyond Bed, Bath & Beyond’s Supply Chains
Thoughts in and around geopolitics.
By: George Friedman

Last week, Bed, Bath & Beyond stock was at $24 per share. It closed on Wednesday at $14. As an expert in markets, I know that this is bad. But before we consider why this happened, we need to consider why this retail chain has not only survived but flourished. I know of Bed, Bath & Beyond because when one of its coupons comes in the mail my wife’s eyes light up. Occasionally, this ends in a trip to a store, where I huddle by the registers with a small group of glum men who periodically dart into the aisles to intercept their wives, speaking firmly to them, then return to the forlorn group by the registers waiting for an uncertain future. We do not speak, shamed by our weakness to get the results we want.

This is Bed, Bath & Beyond’s business model: Sell things that are irresistible to women and unfathomable to men, and take advantage of female power and male submission. Still, I have trouble understanding how it has survived. Take pillows. The store has tons of them. When was the last time anyone bought a pillow? I still have one that has its origins in antiquity. I like that pillow. I won’t buy a new one, and it’s one thing my wife cannot take from me. It has comforted me through poker losses and drinking binges. Who among us has ever said, “I need a new pillow” unless an embarrassing accident had occurred? Basically, we all have pillows, and the number who replace them has to be less that 1 percent a year. Pillows are a mystery, but so are duvets, comforters with strange fabrics that cover the unknown. Even so, Bed, Bath & Beyond has flourished, holding on to a huge part of American society. So while part of me wants to applaud the shellacking it got last week, another part of me knows it will be back, and so will I. But more to the point, even Bed, Bath & Beyond, selling common objects of some utility, is trapped in the reality of our time: shortages of all things large and small.

Put simply, the reason its stock tanked is that it has not been able to get its goods delivered to it. In a phrase that has become common in our time, its supply chain broke. “Supply chains” began as concepts within corporations. One was just-in-time delivery, the idea that maximum efficiency in the delivery of components of a product would increase cost-effectiveness. The second was global sourcing for components and finished products. The ability to take advantage of price and wage differences around the globe, rather than being tied to local sources, increased the competitiveness of the final product. Agility in identifying sources globally and moving them through the production and sales process allowed for market dominance.

Over time, the competition for sources of production and precision transportation created a complex system that had to be managed on a quality and time basis. The supply chain feeding a company like Walmart is staggering. Thousands of products are being managed, including those of other companies such as Apple, so that the supply chain is a pyramid of supply chains the company does not own or control, which have to be integrated into a “just-in-time” system. Bed, Bath & Beyond, a large retail chain with a comparatively homogenized group of products, is dependent on its own supply chain and the supply chains of intermediate suppliers. Thus, when a map is drawn showing the global supply chain, it is always vastly incomplete. Globalization and ultra-efficiency have created a system of production that cannot be coherently mapped as a whole but has worked mostly as expected by merchant and customer, both of whom have no idea of the origins of the product. It’s far more complex than the “Made in …” marking would suggest.

The system is sensitive to cost and time, and the two are interchangeable. Therefore, the chain must be built to resist interruption and with redundancy. Both are expensive and neither can be perfect. Early in the pandemic, there were disruptions in supermarkets that were handled with some effort. This summer, episodic failures began to become commonplace, and the commonplace threatens to force a massive redefinition of the economic structure.

Gasoline has become scarce. Workers have become scarce. The fact that Bed, Bath & Beyond lost a large chunk of market value gives an indication of how common it is and how no product class is immune. We have not yet reached the stage of economic failure at which the basic needs of society become scarce or unattainable, and we might not ever. But we are reaching a point where the assumption of availability is a discarded concept among consumers.

The reason for this failure fathers many theories. There are not enough truck drivers. COVID-19 has created demands that make energy scarce. Coal in China is scarce because the financial system has weakened. All of these are likely partly true. But no one can account for all the failures, and no theory explains the simultaneity of failures in multiple supply chains.

The first-order explanation is that over time we have created a vast global supply chain that is so efficient that it breaks under moderate stress. There are plenty of instances of severe stress, such as war, in which failures also arise. It is incorrect to think of the pandemic as a war, since the physical plants aren’t destroyed. But it had enough weight to press on the supply chain and create failures, and then, as the system came back on line, it suffered more failures from ruptures that are just now emerging.

For now, this seems to me the most likely explanation. If I’m right, then the system was not constructed to withstand the stress that it encountered, and simply recreating the old system will cost money now and later. The concept of time as a cost to be avoided created a fragility – as a poorly built fan with a broom stuck in it might shatter. (I did that once.) A supply chain is a notional concept, not a real one. It needs to be treated as what it is: a series of producers providing products to assemblers and products delivered to stores. Mitigating friction between these is not enough. There has to be redundancy, which costs money and is likely only one of the things being considered now by businesses. The supply chain is something each business operates, and centralizing it would make it more vulnerable. Bed, Bath & Beyond will reconstruct its supply chain based on its unique knowledge of the industry.

It is frightening to hear that a random if experienced business selling non-critical products had its supply chain fail. It is the randomness of the failure and the likelihood of ad hoc solutions that are of concern. I was always concerned with what would come after COVID-19. But I am not sure that COVID-19 did more than give the first push.
Title: Andrew McCarthy: Do we have Freedom of Speech really?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 23, 2021, 05:11:01 PM
https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/10/do-we-have-freedom-of-speech-really/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Saturday%20New%202021-10-23&utm_term=NRDaily-Smart
Title: Re: Andrew McCarthy: Do we have Freedom of Speech really?
Post by: G M on October 23, 2021, 05:21:04 PM
https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/10/do-we-have-freedom-of-speech-really/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Saturday%20New%202021-10-23&utm_term=NRDaily-Smart

Can’t see it, paywalled.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 23, 2021, 05:28:22 PM
Do We Have Freedom of Speech, Really?
By ANDREW C. MCCARTHY
October 23, 2021 6:30 AM

Attorney General Merrick Garland departs after speaking during an event at the Justice Department in Washington, D.C., June 15, 2021. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)
Garland’s memo serves a pernicious progressive crusade to render these rights little more than a parchment promise.


The Soviet constitution of 1936, Joseph Stalin’s constitution, explicitly guaranteed freedom of speech to all citizens of the USSR — in Article 125, which also vouchsafed the closely related freedoms of the press, of assembly, of mass meetings, and of street demonstrations. When Moscow revised the constitution in 1977, pains were again taken (in Article 50) to ensure — at least on paper — that “citizens of the U.S.S.R. are guaranteed freedom of speech, of the press, and of assembly, meetings, street processions and demonstrations.”

Were they in a position to do so, the tens of millions of men, women, and children immiserated, imprisoned, enslaved, and killed by the same totalitarian communist regime would have begged to differ.

“Rights” are not rights by virtue of being written down. They are not self-enforcing. Written “rights” are, instead, a reflection of what a body politic perceives to be fundamental. They are not an assurance that this perception will be actualized. Whether freedom of speech truly exists is a cultural question, not a legal one. It hinges on the society’s commitment to liberty as something that is lived, not merely spoken of.

To rely on the legal system to enforce a “right” that the culture, when it gets down to brass tacks, does not support, is to not have a vibrant guarantee. It is to have a parchment promise that is effectively worthless.

Increasingly, the latter is the state of play in the United States, and there are two reasons for this.

First, progressives, who call the tune in the bipartisan political establishment, do not believe in free speech. They may, like the Bolsheviks, nod to it as the tribute stealthy vice must pay to public virtue. But to the limited extent they are ideologically principled rather than just power-hungry, progressives believe that the good is arrived at through scientific study, by experts who, of course, are rigorously apolitical. In this way of thinking, it is not enough to dismiss robust discourse as folly; progressives see free speech as antithetical to human flourishing, an appeal to the passions and prejudices of the masses who are too benighted to sort matters out on their own. With due respect to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. there is no marketplace of ideas; there are the progressive establishment’s ideas, versus the remaining dangerous ideas.


Second, progressives do believe, deeply, in process. While we are in the midst of a period of radicalism, progressive strategy is generally (and in its most effective form) Fabian. Process is the way ascendant progressives advance their own ideas while eroding those of the bourgeois culture. It is the way dominant progressives strangle any emerging competition in the cradle.

The rule of law is a cultural phenomenon. Law enforcement, by contrast, is a process — one that can, perversely, abrade the rule of law it purports to undergird.

Case in point: Biden’s attorney general Merrick Garland’s memo directing federal investigations against dissenters — in the main, parents — who object to progressive indoctrination by school administrators.


As a short-term political objective, the Garland memo cynically paints these recalcitrant parents with the same brush that tars conservatives as “domestic terrorists,” on the rationale that Trump supporters who rioted at the Capitol self-identify as the patriotic political right and profess to share some conservative ideas. (Of course the rioters — whether they realized it or not — were undermining the very constitutional system that is essential to the conservative conception of liberty and thus were anti-conservative, but that is a story for another day.)

As for the long term, Garland’s memo serves the progressive crusade against free speech.

You may read our Constitution as a guarantee of free expression and open political debate. But it cannot be such a guarantee unless the government, which is privileged to use force to maintain order, regards order as necessarily including free expression and open political debate. Government’s incumbent ruling class will always prize stability over conflict. Consequently, for free speech to be meaningful, the dominant culture must be committed to free speech – even speech it finds repellent, as long as it does not intentionally incite violence — and the government must truly be accountable to that dominant culture. Otherwise, our written First Amendment assurance of free speech is nearly as worthless as was the Soviet guarantee.

Put more concretely, the Justice Department may acknowledge, as Garland’s memo grudgingly does, that the Constitution protects debate and dissent. But if the DOJ simultaneously warns, as Garland’s memo indignantly does, that the FBI is going to be investigating those who engage in debate and dissent against the progressive government’s favored class — school administrators who are executing the indoctrination mission — then in what authentic sense do we have free speech?

Sure, the outcome of the FBI’s investigative process is likely to be that no federal charges are filed. After all, if the Justice Department were foolish enough to go to the extreme of actually indicting dissenters, it would expose the fatal flaws that a) the First Amendment prevents courts from allowing speech to be the subject of a criminal conviction and b) the federal government lacks statutory jurisdiction to bring an incitement case unless the resulting violent acts would violate federal law (which is rare — threats of violence, when they occur, are overwhelmingly concerns of state and local law).

But it will never come to actual in-court prosecution. The abuse will be confined to the investigative process. Coupled with Garland’s saber-rattling, that is more than enough to suppress dissent. The citizen is warned that he is being scrutinized by the federal government in all its comparative might. For exercising his supposed right to protest, the citizen will be harmed in a hundred different ways by the fact of an FBI probe — the anxiety of potential prosecution, the often prohibitive expense of retaining counsel, the loss of business opportunities because of the specter of prosecution, the loss of social ties as friends and associates abandon the citizen lest Leviathan sees them as fellow conspirators.

If a putative safeguard were actually a right, one would need neither endure an investigative process nor go to court to vindicate the right. These processes are punitive; a right worthy of the name would protect us from them just as it protects us from criminal conviction. If the culture loses the will to compel an accountable government to presume the right — to respect it a priori — then there is no right.

What there is tends to be rationalization. The Soviet constitution said that free speech was guaranteed “in order to strengthen the socialist system.” While it paid lip service to freedom, the tyrannical regime implicitly empowered itself to suppress any speech it decided could weaken the socialist system.

Today’s progressives say you have free speech . . . as long as it is not incitement. But then they redefine incitement to entail not just violence the speaker intends but violence to which hypersensitive progressives are “triggered,” even if violence was the last thing the speaker wanted. They reduce “free speech” to a protection only against criminal conviction, not against the intimidating law-enforcement process. And as they marginalize dissent, they excuse, even lionize, the mob.

Free speech is still inscribed in America’s Constitution. That does not mean it is still quintessentially American. We need it to be.


ANDREW C. MCCARTHY is a senior fellow at National Review Institute, an NR contributing editor, and author of BALL OF COLLUSION: THE PLOT TO RIG AN ELECTION AND DESTROY A PRESIDENCY. @andrewcmccarthy
MORE IN POLITICS &
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: G M on October 23, 2021, 06:14:58 PM
Thanks. We already have political prisoners in custody for first amendment activities, courtesy of Deep State Andy’s friends at the DOJ.
Title: interesting thought pieces, Sometimes the price tag is just the distraction
Post by: DougMacG on October 23, 2021, 07:18:42 PM
https://www.illinoisreview.com/illinoisreview/2021/10/sometimes-the-price-tag-is-just-a-distraction.html
Title: Re: interesting thought pieces, Sometimes the price tag is just the distraction
Post by: G M on October 23, 2021, 07:30:29 PM
https://www.illinoisreview.com/illinoisreview/2021/10/sometimes-the-price-tag-is-just-a-distraction.html

The FUSA is beyond saving. Best focus on surviving what is coming and rebuilding.
Title: The demolition of dissent
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 27, 2021, 09:44:50 AM
Haven't watched more than a few random minutes yet, but it comes well recommended and seems very promising:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Rbl8PGUxow&t=2000s
Title: VDH: Who really won the Cold War?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 01, 2021, 12:29:59 AM
https://amgreatness.com/2021/10/31/who-eventually-won-the-cold-war/
Title: Re: VDH: Who really won the Cold War?
Post by: DougMacG on November 01, 2021, 07:50:52 AM
https://amgreatness.com/2021/10/31/who-eventually-won-the-cold-war/

We "resemble our old Cold War enemies—to the delight of our current enemies".

"America is now seeking to emulate the crude modalities of the old Soviet Union and Maoist China"

Reminds me of a warning I tried to make 30 years ago that no one saw.
Title: George Friedman: This is the United States
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 05, 2021, 02:47:54 PM
ovember 5, 2021
View On Website
Open as PDF

    
The Election and My Book – Where We Stand
Thoughts in and around geopolitics.
By: George Friedman

I wrote a book, “The Storm Before the Calm,” a point I have beaten to death. The book is about the social, political and economic instability that will dominate America in the 2020s. This is happening and will happen in phases. The first phase was Donald Trump running for the presidency. The second phase began with the impeachment of Trump and matured with his election defeat. This past Tuesday marked the opening of the third phase: a series of elections that raised questions about whether the Biden administration could function, and whether the social principles of the progressives would be blocked and the Democratic Party caught in permanent gridlock.

The model I laid out was not a political model, in the sense that it was indifferent to personalities and political parties, as it was indifferent to issues. What it predicted was that there would be deep social divisions and constant instability, with unsustainable governments. This week’s elections were the signal of a counterattack being launched at the progressives. This has left the Biden period featuring a ruling party that has the thinnest congressional majority and is internally split. It is not clear that President Joe Biden will have the power to govern later in his term.

This is what would be expected in a transition between two cycles. The current one began with the Reagan presidency, which followed the chaos of the late 1960s and 1970s and led to the 1980s. That transition included race riots and airborne troops suppressing them; a president forced from office, whose supporters claimed that he had been forced out by a conspiracy built around the liberal media; and massive economic dysfunction, including double-digit interest rates, double-digit inflation and significant unemployment. It also included war and the Arab oil embargos. I point this out to provide a sense of the similarity of the structure of transitional periods such as the one we are in now. Race, presidential crises and economic dysfunction forced an obsolete era – one ushered in by President Franklin Roosevelt – to transit to the one ushered in by President Ronald Reagan. These presidents did not personally usher them in, but they happened to preside over them.

While the chaos of the 1970s was about issues, the real debate was between social classes, from the confrontation between the urban working class and the suburban professionals, as well as between what was called Middle America and the counterculture, and Blacks versus whites. The intensity of these divisions no longer needs to be imagined. That era had the bitter division over President Richard Nixon, and our era the division over Trump.

Transitions are marked by extreme anger and distrust between factions, and the relatively even division within factions. This week’s election focused on a Republican winning Virginia’s race for governor. More interesting is the incredibly narrow division in both Virginia and New Jersey. Analysis of how a candidate performed relative to prior elections is not the key. The key is that the election showed that the United States is in gridlock, with factions locked in mutual rage and contempt. So it was in the prior era when the radicals looked at Middle America with withering contempt and were treated in kind.

It was not a matter of which faction won. The gridlock was such that the battle continued regardless of elections. And it didn’t matter who was president – he would be hated by half of the country. And all this takes place amid a backdrop of intense economic crisis. This election may or may not have painted Biden’s future, and it might or might not have been a defeat for progressives. In either case, the war will continue until it becomes irrelevant. We are now in the third act, and historical precedent is that there will be about two additional phases after Biden leaves. Who takes over matters little. The next president will be trapped by the social reality he faces.

How will we know the transition is over? In a way, we won’t. A new president will have to solve the problem, and he will not appear to be much to look at. Before he was elected president, Roosevelt was evaluated by Walter Lippmann, the most distinguished columnist of the time: “Franklin D. Roosevelt is no crusader. He is no tribune of the people. He is no enemy of entrenched privilege. He is a pleasant man who, without any important qualifications for the office, would very much like to be President.” Reagan was commonly referred to as “an untalented actor” and someone “too dumb to understand what he hears.”

The time will come when this cycle changes and a president will emerge who will preside over it. We will know him by the contempt with which leading figures of the prior era see him. His virtue will be that he is not locked into the prior era, and he will appear a lightweight. But his coming is not here yet. History will have to grind through another eight years or so, and several presidents, before the cycle ends.

None of this has anything to do with the virtues or vices of leaders. It has to do with the passion with which we praise and hate them, and the extent to which American society mobilizes itself. The crisis comes from division and mutual contempt, and those arise from a changing America.

At the same time as the next act emerges socially and politically, I forecast a profound crisis and change in the way the federal government works. The current system emerged out of World War II and was based on the idea that experts should be responsible for, and to a great extent run, the federal government. It worked in World War II, and to a great extent, it has since worked for decades. But the solution of expert-based government poses two problems that have become unmanageable. One is that the government has become so complex that citizens have lost democratic control of the government. Their participation is seen as a disruption of expert-based decisions.

The second problem is that the experts know very limited areas superbly, and their limited view shapes their worldview. There are various areas of government, each with its own experts, each indifferent to what the others or nongovernmental experts said. The federal government, run by experts, has become self-enclosed and at the same time fragmented.

The experience of COVID-19 drove this home. The coronavirus was a medical problem, and therefore the medical experts in the medical bureaucracy had to be allowed to chart the course. Of course, the disease and subsequent medical decisions affected many dimensions of life. For the medical bureaucracy, limiting the extent of the virus and resulting deaths was the overarching concern, and as more was learned, the methods shifted. The expectation was that the public would accept the science as it was put. This has been the core concept of the federal government since World War II.

The problem with this system derived from the fact that the medical profession was indifferent in principle to the non-medical consequences. There were many, but we can see the problem with the massive economic disruption caused by COVID-19 and the medical solution. Closing down parts of society, imposing social distancing, attempting to impose a single medical order on a diverse society – all of this led to disruptions, the most dangerous of which are the massive, global economic shortages. There are shortages of workers, shortages in transport and a massive supply chain breakdown. Just as COVID-19 is complex in cause and effect, so is the economy. Some (including me) warned that the medical solutions would generate some variety of economic crisis and massive social tension. Many things can cause death and suffering, but the singular focus of the medical bureaucracy caused it to ignore non-medical consequences.

Make no mistake: This was their job and they did it as well as they could. But they were forced by the principles of the post-WWII system of government to focus on the medical problem. Meanwhile, experts in economics and social issues tried to point out the danger, but the power of the medical experts defined the matter. The dangers of a badly damaged economy, and the unwillingness to acknowledge any value in the social resistance to their solutions, created a single, focused solution to an enormously complex and varied problem. This was a medical problem, but it was not only a medical problem. It was not, as many believe, the fault of the medical experts. The federal system made this their singular focus, unable to see the needed trade-offs. “Trust the science” meant trust the scientists and ignore other dimensions of the problem.

The COVID-19 crisis was one I did not anticipate when I wrote my book, but it is the perfect embodiment of the problem that was arising. Government by experts who ignore experts in other fields was the discipline needed to win World War II and the Cold War. It had reached its reductio ad absurdum by 2020.

The social and economic crisis is now in the midst of painfully clearing the way to the future, and the experience of COVID-19 and its non-medical consequences will merge into the social and political upheaval of our time. We are not near the end, nor is the shape of the end clear. We have, however, passed through the first act, the Trump presidency, and into the Biden phase, which repudiates what went before. The hint of Biden’s fate, like Gerald Ford’s, was visible well before these elections, just as the value of isolated expertise is visible. But we still have about eight years to go if prior transitional phases – going back to Andrew Jackson – hold true.

I remain confident the republic will come through stronger for the pain, on the principle that what does not kill me makes me stronger. But I continue to believe the next years will remain painful, hostile and confused. This is the United States.
Title: good Kudlow radio today with John Fund on election results/taxes/trump
Post by: ccp on November 06, 2021, 04:02:58 PM
https://www.newsmax.com/newsmax-tv/steve-forbes-socialism-democrats-tax-and-spend/2021/11/06/id/1043573/
Title: VDH
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 08, 2021, 12:10:02 AM
https://amgreatness.com/2021/11/07/trickle-down-bidenism/
Title: VDH: Why the left always projects
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 16, 2021, 03:37:46 AM
https://amgreatness.com/2021/11/14/why-the-left-always-projects/

Title: George Friedman on Lincoln
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 19, 2021, 06:40:41 AM
   
In Praise of Lincoln
Thoughts in and around geopolitics.
By: George Friedman
On this day in 1863, Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address. It was a terrible and great moment – terrible in that Americans had just slaughtered Americans, but great in that the victory promised to create a more just republic through a war whose end could be seen for the first time.

I must begin this by confessing to a shameful moment on my part. I am aware of the movement to redefine our history, stripping it of its greatness. I hesitated to write about this because I try to avoid becoming entangled in such debates. There have been proposals to remove Lincoln’s name from schools, and one from a D.C. task force on commemorative sites that recommended changes to the Lincoln and other memorials. Neither has happened yet, but the fact that this could be even thought of by American citizens – and that I, even if of little importance, remain silent – is horrifying. Truth be known, I dreaded the condemnation that might come from praising Lincoln. Fortunately, my pride overcame the shame. Gettysburg was a great moment in our history. Lincoln’s address was a poem to the dead, the living and those not yet born. It is sacred.

The criticism of Lincoln consists of two parts. The first is that he dispatched troops to the far west and that they committed atrocities. The second is that the Civil War was not about slavery but rather about tariffs, and that Lincoln deserves no honor for it.

That troops committed atrocities is likely true. In war, they almost always do. That Lincoln, many hundreds of miles away at the time, should be answerable to it is to invent a responsibility for the express purpose of denying him the honors heaped upon him.

The argument that the Civil War was waged over tariffs is an older but no less absurd claim. Some 650,000 men died. The thought that they went to their deaths over their passionate belief in the profits of merchants and plantation owners is laughable unless you believe the common man, in blue or gray, was too stupid to understand the real purpose of the war. All wars are multidimensional, but the idea that this war was predicated on tariffs can stand only if you hold the common man in utter contempt. I was raised by common people and have sat with noted scholars. I am confident that my father would not possibly have been conned into dying for someone else’s money.

I use the term “common man” deliberately here. There is a magnificent symphony called “Fanfare for the Common Man” by Aaron Copland. Copland was a leftist, blacklisted by Joe McCarthy. He belonged to a political movement that I opposed and sought to defeat. Copland meant for “Fanfare” to honor the troops who fought tyranny in World War II. It was a time when the left had deep respect for the “ordinary” people who loved America. Listen to his “Appalachian Spring” and you can hear the beauty Copland saw in America. And you might also listen to his “Portrait Lincoln” to share the greatness he saw.

I bring up Copland because he was perhaps the greatest American composer, one who demonstrated a respect for the common man that is lacking today. The left that had once been there would never have treated Lincoln without anything but awe, nor condemn the common man as less enlightened than those who thought well of themselves. I am no leftist, but as Americans, we could disagree and share a drink. I do not recognize those who are assaulting Lincoln’s memory as leftists or rightists. They are a strange mixture of contempt for the common man and the past they created, and a deep sense of their own right to judge even a Lincoln.

There is a claim that Lincoln did not oppose slavery because he said nothing during the 1860 campaign. In 1858 he said, among many things: "A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.” At Gettysburg he closed by saying “that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain – that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

We must all be judged, but we must be judged on the whole. And we all have to be judged in the context of the time in which we live and the limits that are placed on us. How many of us would want to be judged by the standards of the year 2300? There is no life that isn’t flawed, no moment in that life that we do not regret, but those who focus only on the failures are themselves guilty of at least poor judgment, and at most malicious intent. A life must be judged on the whole, and the discovery of flaws must confirm their humanity, not cause us to want to erase them. What is true for people is also true for nations. There is no nation without flaws and sins.

Lincoln won the war and he freed the slaves. Of that there is no doubt. Maybe he could have done more, but what he did dwarfs our own lives. And he gave the full measure of himself, murdered as he was by a Confederate sympathizer.

There is one last point I’d like to make. During the victory celebration, Lincoln ordered the band to play "Dixie," honoring the enemies he had to crush, and did. For all the South’s indecencies, they were American and as such had to be brought back into the union. And of course the purists who had no responsibility for the nation’s future condemned him for it. Today it would be a reason to tear his name from the entrances and perhaps ban Copland’s praise of him.
Title: VDH: The New Blue Confederacy
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 21, 2021, 08:58:06 PM
https://amgreatness.com/2021/11/21/the-new-blue-confederacy/
Title: America on the Verge
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 25, 2021, 10:14:40 AM
https://americanmind.org/salvo/america-on-the-verge/
Title: VDH: Kenosha and Waukesha
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 30, 2021, 01:43:51 AM
https://amgreatness.com/2021/11/28/a-tale-of-two-cities-kenosha-vs-waukesha/
Title: Re: VDH: Kenosha and Waukesha
Post by: DougMacG on November 30, 2021, 06:12:41 AM
https://amgreatness.com/2021/11/28/a-tale-of-two-cities-kenosha-vs-waukesha/

"In sum, Rittenhouse had no criminal record; all four of his assailants had lengthy arrest records. Three of them were ex-felons. He had no record of the racial hatred of which he was accused. 

In contrast, Brooks was an abject violent racist whom the media sought to shield. And he was a career felon, who both long ago and quite recently should have been kept behind bars so that he would not murder innocents. 

How a Wisconsin ex-felon received a $1,000 bail bond and freedom to mow down innocents, after trying to run down two with his car, while another juvenile without an arrest record, with good grounds to claim self-defense, was required to post a $2 million bond (and so stayed incarcerated pending charges without running water in his cell) is a commentary on the abject implosion of the American justice system. 

Rittenhouse should have never been charged; Brooks should not have been out of jail. The effort to make the former a beneficiary of white supremacy and the latter a victim of it required a level of amoral media deceit that finally was unsustainable even in this bankrupt age. "
Title: christmas tree arson released
Post by: ccp on December 09, 2021, 06:18:33 AM
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2021/12/09/arsonist-accused-of-torching-fox-news-christmas-tree-released-under-lenient-bail-reforms/

maybe he will get a job at CNN for his service against Fox.
Title: Serious Read: New Criterion: Michael Anton: Unprecedented.
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 11, 2021, 10:42:27 PM
https://newcriterion.com/issues/2021/12/unprecedented
Title: VDH: Why is the Left worried about the end of democracy?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 17, 2021, 05:11:05 AM
Why Is the Left Suddenly Worried About the End of Democracy?
Victor Davis Hanson
Victor Davis Hanson
 December 16, 2021 Updated: December 16, 2021 biggersmaller Print
Commentary

What is behind recent pessimistic appraisals of democracy’s future, from Hillary Clinton, Adam Schiff, Brian Williams and other elite intellectuals, media personalities, and politicians on the Left? Some are warning about its possible erosion in 2024. Others predict democracy’s downturn as early 2022, with scary scenarios of “autocracy” and Trump “coups.”

To answer that question, understand first what is not behind these shrill forecasts.

They are not worried about 2 million foreign nationals crashing the border in a single year, without vaccinations during a pandemic. Yet it seems insurrectionary for a government simply to nullify its own immigration laws.

They are not worried that some 800,000 foreign nationals, some residing illegally, will now vote in New York City elections.

They are not worried that there are formal efforts underway to dismantle the U.S. Constitution by junking the 233-year-old Electoral College or the preeminence of the states in establishing ballot laws in national elections.

They are not worried that we are witnessing an unprecedented left-wing effort to scrap the 180-year-old filibuster, the 150-year-old nine-person Supreme Court, and the 60-year tradition of 50 states, for naked political advantage.

They are not worried that the Senate this year put on trial an impeached ex-president and private citizen, without the chief justice in attendance, without a special prosecutor or witnesses, and without a formal commission report of presidential high crimes and misdemeanors.

They are not worried that the FBI, Justice Department, CIA, Hillary Clinton, and members of the Obama administration systematically sought to use U.S. government agencies to sabotage a presidential campaign, transition, and presidency, via the use of a foreign national and ex-spy Christopher Steele and his coterie of discredited Russian sources.

They are not worried that the Pentagon suddenly has lost the majority support of the American people. Top current and retired officers have flagrantly violated the chain-of-command, the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and without data or evidence have announced a hunt in the ranks for anyone suspected of “white rage” or “white supremacy.”

They are not worried that in 2020, a record 64 percent of the electorate did not cast their ballots on Election Day.

Nor are they worried that the usual rejection rate in most states of non-Election Day ballots plunged—even as an unprecedented 101 million ballots were cast by mail or early voting.

And they are certainly not worried that partisan billionaires of Silicon Valley poured well over $400 million into selected precincts in swing states to “help” public agencies conduct the election.

What then is behind this new left-wing hysteria about the supposed looming end of democracy?

It is quite simple. The Left expects to lose power over the next two years—both because of the way it gained and used it, and because of its radical, top-down agendas that never had any public support.

After gaining control of both houses of Congress and the presidency—with an obsequious media and the support of Wall Street, Silicon Valley, higher education, popular culture, entertainment, and professional sports—the Left has managed in just 11 months to alienate a majority of voters.

The nation has been wracked by unprecedented crime and nonenforcement of the borders. Leftist district attorneys either won’t indict criminals; they let them out of jails or both.

Illegal immigration and inflation are soaring. Deliberate cuts in gas and oil production helped spike fuel prices.

All this bad news is on top of the Afghanistan disaster, worsening racial relations, and an enfeebled president.

Democrats are running 10 points behind the Republicans in generic polls, with the midterms less than a year away.

Joe Biden’s negatives run between 50 and 57 percent—in Donald Trump’s own former underwater territory.

Less than a third of the country wants Biden to run for reelection. In many head-to-head polls, Trump now defeats Biden.

In other words, leftist elites are terrified that democracy will work too robustly.

After the Russian collusion hoax, two impeachments, the Hunter Biden laptop stories, the staged melodramas of the Kavanaugh hearings, the Jussie Smollett con, the Covington kids smear, and the Rittenhouse trial race frenzy, the people are not just worn out by leftist hysterias, but they also weary of how the Left gains power and administers it.

If Joe Biden were polling at 70 percent approval, and his policies at 60 percent, the current doomsayers would be reassuring us of the “health of the system.”

They are fearful and angry not because democracy doesn’t work, but because it does despite their own media and political efforts to warp it.

When a party is hijacked by radicals and uses almost any means necessary to gain and use power for agendas that few Americans support, then average voters express their disapproval.

That reality apparently terrifies an elite. It then claims any system that allows the people to vote against the Left is not people power at all
Title: Re: VDH: Why is the Left worried about the end of democracy?
Post by: DougMacG on December 17, 2021, 08:35:48 AM
Another great column.  I wish people on the other side would read VDH, but they don't.  If they did, they wouldn't be on the 'other side'.
Title: VDH
Post by: ccp on December 17, 2021, 09:03:02 AM
yes
great synopsis!

VDH did not hit a home run with this - he hit 4 home runs in one game with this!

Just think if we had a media that would be this honest  :wink:

but we don't  :-(
Title: Does morality transcend place and time?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 17, 2021, 10:16:02 AM
Not wanting to crowd the VDH piece above from awareness, but here is this:

https://bigthink.com/thinking/moral-relativism-some-cultures-worse/?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook&fbclid=IwAR2EWKJasp7T0YGh5TTKywN7rHJJJstnPA7hEwkplINoKGncATYvkyaNwRc#Echobox=1639580498-1
Title: Tucker
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 21, 2021, 02:35:20 PM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8JShPxTcbg
Title: Candace Owens
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 24, 2021, 04:16:45 AM
Knowing how to get down in the rabble rousing muck and come out clean is a valuable and necessary skill:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1AUuinwv24
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 28, 2021, 10:54:10 AM
https://patriotpost.us/articles/82026?mailing_id=6387&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.6387&utm_campaign=all_subscribers&utm_content=body
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: G M on December 28, 2021, 03:53:30 PM
https://patriotpost.us/articles/82026?mailing_id=6387&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.6387&utm_campaign=all_subscribers&utm_content=body

It’s done. The internal and external national security risks to your once-proud country have just skyrocketed. It is difficult to describe the stunningly negative position the United States finds itself in following the cataclysmic fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban. President Joe Biden’s ill-fated and hapless decision to summarily short-notice withdraw all remaining U.S. troops from Afghanistan will forever be known as the day America’s position in the world order cascaded behind that of China, and for that matter Russia and the European Union as well.

Exactly.
Title: Caldwell
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 01, 2022, 09:26:07 AM


Christopher Caldwell’s cover story, “The Inequality of ‘Equity,’” was and is a must-read on the flaws inherent in what is becoming the guiding policy principle of our day:

If you wanted to be blunt about it, you might call equity a no-excuses imperative to eliminate all collective racial inequalities. There are many such inequalities in our system, and blacks are on the unenviable side of most of them. They possess the fewest financial assets, fare the worst in school, have the hardest time finding work, live the shortest lives, commit the most violent crime, and spend the most time in jail. Equity’s proponents, most of them progressive Democrats, say their aim is to ensure that all races share equally in economic growth and get a fair shake in the justice system. Republicans say that Democrats are abandoning equality of opportunity for equality of result.

Put that way, “equity” sounds like a new name for something that Americans have been arguing about for two or three generations now. Affirmative action, after all, tips the playing field of opportunity in minorities’ favor. “Diversity” is all about managing results. Feminists’ equal-pay-for-equal-work campaigns might be considered a harbinger of these equity debates.

But in two ways the equity movement is radically new.

First is in the categorical simplicity of its diagnosis. It views all inequality across groups as illegitimate on its face — as evidence of white racism, in fact.

Second is in its tools. Equity doesn’t concern itself with more-traditional understandings of inequality — differences, say, between bosses and laborers. It is about equality for blacks, as laid out in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and for the various groups, from immigrants to transgender people, that have come under the act’s protection in the decades since. The power of civil-rights law to punish employers and schools, to investigate those suspected of noncompliance, and even to silence detractors has been steadily strengthened by bureaucratic fiat and litigation. Race-conscious rather than race-blind, open to almost any kind of remedial discrimination, equity has brought us to a crossroads. Either our civil-rights laws are being overstretched to the point where they are growing intolerable to much of the country (though people remain frightened of saying so) or they are in the process of becoming the supreme law of the land, overriding even the Constitution. . . .

Perhaps equity is best thought of as diversity or affirmative action taken to its logical conclusion. We can expect it to function in ways similar to affirmative action, steadily entrenching itself as those who administer it forget the goals they began with. At that point, a temporary program turns into a permanent one, and a new goal enters: no longer to undo racism but to duck the arduous work that would have to be done if the problem turns out to be more complicated than that.
Title: The Zoom Class catches the Coot
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 03, 2022, 12:20:26 PM
Jeffrey A. Tucker
Jeffrey A. Tucker
 December 31, 2021 Updated: December 31, 2021biggersmaller Print
Commentary

For nearly two years, we’ve wondered how this will end. In retrospect, the clue is in how it began.

The initial lockdowns had a strong class-based component. The working classes were assigned the job of delivering groceries, tending to the sick, driving the trucks filled with goods, keeping the lights on, and keeping the fuel running. The professional class, among whom were the people who pushed lockdowns in the name of disease avoidance/suppression, were assigned the job of staying home in their pajamas and staying safe.

It all happened seemingly in an instant. We all had to figure out whether our job qualified and what we should do. More striking at the time was the very notion that government bureaucrats could slice and dice the population this way, deciding what can open and what cannot, who must work and who must not, what we can and cannot do based on our station in life.

So it now seems obvious to me. This whole disaster would finally come to an end (or at least the end would begin) when it became obvious that the great strategy of class division and demarcation would fail to protect the Zoom class from infection.

That day has finally arrived, with cases soaring in many parts of the country and hitting everyone of every class, whether they are being “careful” and adhering to the “mitigation measures” or not. What’s even more striking is how even the vaccines, which were supposed to codify the wisdom of class segregation, have not protected against infection.

All of this seems to have taken place over the course of December 2021, with the arrival of the seemingly mild Omicron variant. Still the other variants circulate widely, causing various degrees of severity with or without hospitalization much less death. In other words, millions from among all classes of people are finally getting sick. At this point, we seem to be seeing a big shift in attitudes.

A lot of this comes from casual conversation. A person comes down with Covid, perhaps confirmed by the newly fashionable at-home tests. “Did you get vaccinated?” the person is invariably asked. The answer comes back: yes and boosted. That’s when the chill happens. It appears that nothing can ultimately protect people from this. In which case, it is time we change our tune.

“Thousands who ‘followed the rules’ are about to get covid. They shouldn’t be ashamed,” headlines the Washington Post.

Feeling ashamed about getting covid-19 isn’t healthy or helpful, experts agree…. Remember: You’re not a failure. “Millions of other people have gotten sick,” (Seema) Varma says. “Unfortunately, you’re not alone. You’re not the only one. You’re not the first one to get covid, and you won’t be the last.” And that positive test, she reiterates, “doesn’t make you an irresponsible person.”

So on the piece goes, with a complete flip of the narrative they have long preached: anyone who gets Covid has failed to comply, disregards of Fauci’s advice, probably lives in a Red state, rejects the science, and otherwise bears the mark of selfishness and the desire to put freedom ahead of public health.

Getting Covid has heretofore been part of a human stain, consistent with the very long history of demonization of the diseased and the attempt to attribute sickness to moral sin. This impulse dates back to the ancient world, revived with a ferocity in 2020.

To be sure, the concept of class has always been less prescient in American history, due to our long history of having eschewed titles and social barriers and in favor of mobility and universal rights. Slavery was unsustainable in this history for this very reason. The American ethos has aspired perhaps not to a classless society but to one in which the concept is so opaque as not to have much cultural or political explanatory power.

That all changed with lockdowns. We were introduced to strict, state-imposed categories that had been previously unthinkable. Sheets were issued by public-health bureaucrats with long lists of institutions that could stay open and must stay open, businesses that must shut because they are “unessential,” and workers who were suddenly entitled to get paid even though they did not show up to their jobs. It became overwhelmingly obvious who was who.

In addition, this strict categorization of people and life conditions affected even sickness. Most governors in the United States overrode the learned experience and knowledge of hospital administration and forcibly reserved medical services only for Covid patients or emergency services. “Elective” surgeries and procedures would just have to wait.

This was true so too for essential and nonessential travel and activities too. As time went on, we gradually found out what was considered nonessential. It was church. It was singing. It was going to the beach, attending parties, holding parties, hanging out in a bar, traveling on vacation. Essentially, anything that would normally be considered fun came to be associated with disease, thus further cementing some kind of cultural relationship between sin and disease.

So powerful was this class demarcation that it overrode people’s normal political instincts. The left, long priding itself on its egalitarianism and universal class aspiration, took to the new class system very quickly and easily, as if the betrayal of all political ideals was just fine given the public health emergency. The demand that everyone go along with the experts was something that decades of American political experience had taught us to be gravely mistaken. But in a few fateful months lasting nearly two years, this demand drove out every other consideration.

The driving ambition here, though never explicitly stated, was to assign the burden of bearing the disease to the lessers among us. That is a conventional model used in illiberal societies throughout history. The elites who had both granted and benefited from lockdowns took it as axiomatic that they deserved disease purity and health more than those who worked to keep society running. And that scheme seemed to work for a very long time. They stayed home and stayed safe and kept clean while the virus circulated in season after season.

It’s hard to know what the end game here was. Did the Zoom class honestly believe that they could forever avoid exposure and infection and thus the development of natural immunity? Certainly they did for a time believe that the shots would spare them. Once that did not happen, there was a huge problem. There were no more tools remaining to perpetuate the disease castes that had been forged back in the day.

Now that the people who tried to protect themselves are no longer able to do so, we are seeing a sudden rethinking of disease stigmatization, class disdain, and the treatment of others as sandbags to shield people based on class. Now it is suddenly no longer a sin to be sick.

Fascinating! What went wrong here? Everything. The notion that public health should thusly divide people—based on one pathogen—contradicts every democratic principle. That idea still survives with the vaccines, regardless of the known limitations. The people who invested in these personally and socially will continue to use them to divide and conquer.

It’s all very dangerous to the notion of freedom itself. The proper way to demarcate the protected should relate not to class, income, and job but rather vulnerability, which in the case of Covid is mostly related to age. That’s how the 20th century learned to manage seasonal infectious disease and pandemics too.

What they attempted in 2020–21 was without precedent in the modern world. It did not finally work, even to achieve the aim of keeping the professional classes disease free. This is perhaps the moment when it all finally comes to an end, not with repudiation but with resignation, acquiescence, and surrender. You can stigmatize anyone but you go too far when we do that to the ruling class elites themselves.

From the Brownstone Institute

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
Title: Abrams playing "I am a moderate" game
Post by: ccp on January 04, 2022, 05:52:23 PM
with an entire propaganda machine readying to push  the fraud :

https://www.conservativereview.com/here-comes-the-stacey-abrams-media-rebrand-2656211670.html

yeah right obam was a. moderate clinton is a moderate blah blah blah

of course they will hold her up to the cortez show and say see , compared to this one she is a moderate - blah blah blah

when short on ideas
call everyone racist etc and attempt to disguise who you really are

and of course the swing voting dupes will fall for it as they always do

you can fool some of the people ALL of the time.
Title: Andrew McCarthy
Post by: ccp on January 06, 2022, 09:47:24 AM
 a bit long but a lot of food for thought:

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/01/one-year-later-examining-trumps-role-in-the-capitol-riot/#slide-1
Title: Re: Andrew McCarthy
Post by: G M on January 06, 2022, 10:03:58 AM
a bit long but a lot of food for thought:

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/01/one-year-later-examining-trumps-role-in-the-capitol-riot/#slide-1

Paywalled.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on January 06, 2022, 10:08:23 AM
 I listened to the recording of the article which made it less unbearable to read it but I am not sure I know how to post the recording but here is
the written article:


NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE
On this January 6 anniversary, I most vividly remember the shock and fury of watching the Capitol riot unfold, the instant recognition of a blight on our history. It is America’s proud boast to have made the transition of power through peaceful, lawful means a norm for modern republics. One needn’t buy the Democrats’ politicized “insurrection” distortion to grasp that something precious is forever tarnished.

It’s not gone. The norm endures. The media-Democrat complex’s “insurrection” pap is designed to exaggerate a rare episode of politically motivated violence by the incoherent populist Right, the better to obscure the thrum of violence commited by the radical Left, where “by any means necessary” is a venerated strategy for destroying norms. But unlike the months-long siege of looting, deadly brutality, and antinomian madness that followed George Floyd’s killing (at the hands of a racially mixed group of cops, from a Minneapolis Police Department then headed by an African-American progressive), the Capitol riot was a flash in the pan.

It lasted a little over five hours. The violence was real, but the spectacle was more adolescent tantrum than existential threat. There was never any chance that our democratic republic would be extinguished, that the 2020 election would be reversed. The Constitution, no frail thing, easily prevailed. It’s seen a lot worse.

Had doing so been necessary, lawmakers would have reconvened at an alternate location. It was unnecessary because damage to the Capitol was minimal — as opposed to damage, say, to the World Trade Center on 9/11 or the Oklahoma City federal courthouse in 1995, the targets of terrorist attacks that the Left risibly says pale in comparison to January 6; or as opposed to, say, Minneapolis, Kenosha, and Portland, following the Left’s anti-police riots. On the very evening of January 6, Congress was able to reconvene in the seat of government. There was never any chance that the state-certified electoral votes would not be counted, or that Joe Biden would not be acknowledged as the next president.

MORE IN CAPITOL RIOT
What Happened on January 6
Debunking the Latest Round of Covid Hysteria
Some Additional Dates for Your January 6 Observances

Security forces were undermanned due to supervisory incompetence. Absent that provocative laxity, the melee probably would not have happened — or, at a minimum, any forcible trouble would have been put down rapidly. In the event, 140 police were reportedly injured, and though some of those injuries were serious (bone fractures, concussions, burns, a mild heart attack), most were comparatively minor contusions and lacerations. Although Democrats persist in exaggerating the death toll — precisely because the uprising was nothing like a terrorist attack, much less an actual insurrection — only one killing is inarguably attributable to the uprising: that of Ashli Babbitt, an unarmed Trump-supporting female rioter who was gunned down by Capitol Police lieutenant Michael Byrd, who was guarding a lobby leading to the House chamber.

Democrats strain to inflate the lethality of the event by attributing to it the deaths of four police officers who committed suicide in the months after the riot — despite the absence of any proven connection. Also added to the tally are the deaths of three pro-Trump fanatics — two who expired in the excitement from cardiac episodes, one who appears to have a history of abusing drugs but who may also have been beaten and trampled — even though they are better understood as perpetrators, not victims.


Most scurrilously, Democrats claimed that rioters killed officer Brian Sicknick by bashing him in the head with a fire extinguisher, a claim they repeated in an impeachment-trial brief weeks after it was known that Sicknick, whose remains showed no evidence of blunt-force trauma, had died from two strokes suffered many hours after the riot — he returned to his office after the riot and complained (as did many other police) that he’d been pepper-sprayed but told his brother that he was otherwise fine. Democrats have never explained why they continued to peddle the false story about the circumstances of Sicknick’s death (which they seared into the nation’s consciousness by having the officer’s remains honored in a solemn Capitol rite — see, e.g., NPR: “Brian Sicknick, Capitol Officer Slain by Mob, Lies in Honor in Rotunda”). But not only has the Justice Department charged none of its 725 January 6 defendants with slaying Sicknick; the complaint filed against two men allegedly complicit in assaulting Sicknick with pepper spray does not even mention that Sicknick died.

This is not to minimize the gravity of January 6. That should be clear by our reference to the Capitol riot. How ironic to have to make this point given the umbrage that Democrats take when their own riots are described as riots rather than “mostly peaceful protests.” The point here is to place January 6 in its proper context, to combat its distortion into either an insurrection or, as Trump acolytes would have it, a display of patriotism, of the real America’s lashing out against Washington’s progressive consensus — unless, of course, it was an inside job.


January 6 was an unpatriotic infamy in two acts. The first involved political and legal subversion, the second forcible subversion. The two are factually intertwined: The latter doesn’t happen without the former. But the insurmountable problem for Democrats and others whose understandable loathing of Donald Trump has shorted out their analytical facility is that Trump, the driving force of Act I, is not criminally responsible for the violence of Act II.

The oddity here is that Trump’s best defense is that his actions were “merely” impeachable, not actionably seditious.

All Our Opinion in Your Inbox
NR Daily is delivered right to you every afternoon. No charge.


Email Address
And they surely were impeachable — and would have had a better chance of being accountable as such, by a more broadly bipartisan House impeachment article and a conviction at the Senate trial, if Democrats had not incompetently undermined the impeachment in their zeal to brand the riot as a white-supremacist “insurrection” that Trump “incited.”

In the weeks following the election, the then-president conducted a relentless campaign of deceit (which appears to have morphed into self-delusion along the way), hoping to maintain power. To be sure, it would be perilous were such a thing to be done by any president, given the immense power of the office. Still, this president’s campaign never had a prayer.


Trump’s gambit faced overwhelming bipartisan congressional opposition (outside a core of opportunistic loyalists who may hope to benefit politically from his ardent supporters). The armed forces would not have supported him in a million years. For all his bravado, he lacked the nerve to attempt a real coup — the kind that requires political and military allegiance. Instead, as was his wont, he laid waste to the political norms by which, for the good of the country, the clearly defeated candidate concedes to the victor and helps transition the government to a new administration.

For the most part, Trump’s charade was limited to lawsuits that were largely frivolous. That is, they were top-lined by allegations of massive fraud, from which his legal team retreated whenever invited by judges to prove them; beyond that, the legal claims mainly involved arguable election-law irregularities that even if provable (and most weren’t) would not have been sufficient to reverse the election result in contested states. Does this mean the election was free of fraud concerns? No election ever is. What was alarming about the 2020 election, though, were the Covid-driven voting procedures that were legal but imprudent. That may be a reason to amend or clarify the law before the next election; it is not a basis to overturn the election that the dubious but lawful procedures controlled.

Beyond futile litigation, Trump’s “stop the steal” theater involved putting pressure on Republican officials — elected and bureaucratic, federal and state — to run roughshod over their legal and constitutional duties. In the contested states, the Trump team tried to persuade legislators and Trump-dominated GOP organizations to delegitimize and undo the popular vote. This included having these collaborators purport to appoint alternative slates of Trump electors, a laughable ploy that had no legal effect — these ersatz slates having been neither elected nor certified under controlling state law. The point of this escapade was to pretend that these states won by Biden had designated competing Biden and Trump electoral slates; therefore at the January 6 joint session of Congress, the thinking went, Trump loyalists would have grounds to object to the counting of electoral votes from these states. It was a daft scheme, which had no more chance of succeeding than the Democrats’ similarly inane objections to state electoral slates pledged to Presidents George W. Bush and Trump after their election victories.

The former president tried to co-opt the Justice Department into his plot, but he backed down fecklessly when the adults at DOJ challenged him. He tried to coerce, for example, state election officials in Georgia to flip votes based on unsubstantiated fraud claims, and state lawmakers in Michigan to throw the election to the Republican-controlled legislature. He was firmly rebuffed at every turn. By Republicans.

The big legal theory, if you want to call it that, involved empowering Vice President Mike Pence to reject state-certified electoral votes. That is the constitutional significance of January 6: the convening of the joint session, at which the vice president’s role (and, for that matter, Congress’s) is strictly ministerial. The heretofore unknown theory that the vice presidency — which John Nance Garner, one of FDR’s veeps, famously described as “not worth a bucket of warm piss” — is actually the repository of unilateral control over the most powerful office in the world is so cockamamie that no one involved in it will stand behind it now. In the post-riot memory, the notion is said to have been merely a topic for discussion, not . . . you know . . . action. Pence is rightly commended for dismissing it out of hand, but he dismissed it out of hand because it was unserious. Even if he had been crazy enough to sign on, there were not nearly enough lawmakers willing to go along for the ride.

Though the exercise was farcical, it is credibly undeniable that Trump violated his oath of office to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution. He tried to undermine state sovereignty over presidential elections, claiming that the federal government had the power to countermand state certification of state results. He tried to browbeat Congress and the vice president to violate their duty to acknowledge the state-certified results. He tried to delegitimize Biden’s presidency (and no, the fact that Democrats did this to Bush and to Trump is not a defense — not to people who presume to call themselves constitutional conservatives). He undermined national security and stability by impeding the transition to Biden’s administration rather than assisting it. This would have been impeachable conduct even if the riot hadn’t happened.

Nevertheless, to say Trump’s condemnable behavior triggered the riot is not the same as saying Trump intended or incited a riot. What the former president wanted was reprehensible, but it was a different kind of reprehensible from the species portrayed by Democrats.

Yes, Trump vigorously encouraged a rambunctious crowd of tens of thousands to descend on Washington on January 6, and he misled them with a big lie about election fraud. Indeed, it is just staggering to compare Team Trump’s (a) public rhetoric about a stolen election and (b) quiet admissions in court that fraud could not be proved. But Trump was not purposely promoting violence, even if he recklessly disregarded the distinct possibility of violence. Rather, Trump was trying to stoke political pressure on Pence and congressional Republicans in order to coerce them into flouting their constitutional duties.

That is saliently different from inciting violence. Trump is impeachably responsible for the riot because his performance leading up to it was a betrayal of his public trust. He is morally responsible for the riot because he created the conditions without which it would not have happened. But he is not legally responsible for it — in the sense that Democrats and other critics invoke when they call for his criminal prosecution — because there is a dearth of evidence that he intended violence, much less called for it.

However grudgingly he may have done it, Trump explicitly called for peaceful protest. He may not have been upset when the riot broke out; in fact, there’s reason to believe he was gratified by it, and that this is why it was so difficult to get him to ask his supporters to stand down. But legally speaking (and with all due respect to Laurence Tribe), that is very different from seditious conspiracy, proof of which requires — beyond a reasonable doubt — a preexisting agreement to levy war against the United States or attack our government by force. There is no evidence that Trump is guilty of that.

Moreover, with proof lacking that he conspired to inflict force against the Capitol, one can easily grasp why the Justice Department has not charged the former president with conspiracy to obstruct Congress — the charge brought against many of the most culpable January 6 defendants. Conspirators, as judges routinely instruct juries, tend not to reduce their criminal agreements to writing. The nature of the agreement is proven by the actions taken in furtherance of it. The actions by which the rioters obstructed Congress were violent. The actions by which Trump tried to obstruct Congress involved rhetorically ratcheting up political pressure. It’s a critical difference. Not all obstruction is illegal. Violent obstruction is always and obviously criminal. Rhetorical obstruction, in a free society with a First Amendment that safeguards even noxious political speech as long as it does not incite violence, is not criminal — even if it is disgraceful, dangerous, and if done by a high public official, impeachable.

In the event, the violence of the rioters actually undercut Trump’s tactics. Once Congress reconvened, with the country outraged by what it had seen, Trump’s supporters lost their nerve, offering only the most half-hearted objections, which were promptly swept aside.

That is the legacy of the Capitol riot. It will remain a dark episode in American history, but not anything remotely close to a potential extinction event for American democracy. Beyond that, it’s a political boon for Democrats. Not because they’ve convinced the country that there’s an ongoing rampage of white-supremacist domestic terrorism, but because Donald Trump retains a grip on a sizable, energetic plurality of Republicans. Though I have to think people will eventually come to their senses, this could be GOP suicide: Trump can’t conceivably win a national election, but it is not out of the realm of possibility that he could win the Republican nomination. I doubt it — I believe electability will be the most important attribute when it gets down to brass tacks — but I wouldn’t bet the ranch against it.

Donald Trump already gave Democrats full control of Congress for the start of Biden’s term (the Georgia special election, in which his “stolen election” canard cost Republicans two Senate seats, happened the day before the riot). A year later, Trump’s potential nomination is emerging as President Biden’s best chance, maybe his only chance, of being reelected.

Capitol Hill Chaos
Police clear the U.S. Capitol with tear gas in Washington, D.C. January 6, 2021.

Stephanie Keith/Reuters



ANDREW C. MCCARTHY is a senior fellow at National Review Institute, an NR contributing editor, and author of BALL OF COLLUSION: THE PLOT TO RIG AN ELECTION AND DESTROY A PRESIDENCY. @andrewcmccarthy
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: G M on January 06, 2022, 10:15:21 AM
Deep State Andy brushes aside the massive fraud and the DOJ/FBI operatives responsible for some, if not all the violence that day.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on January 06, 2022, 10:51:57 AM
well as a political strategy

it was doomed to fail

now the LEFT can switch topics from another Dem divider in chief and another Dem failing prez

to this. 

I am not sure but was not this whole elector thing a strategy promoted by Mark Levin?
He was the first and foremost promoter of it as far as I know.

Not the riot but the formula for the elector thing (I don't recall specifics)

Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: G M on January 06, 2022, 11:03:28 AM
well as a political strategy

it was doomed to fail

now the LEFT can switch topics from another Dem divider in chief and another Dem failing prez

to this. 

I am not sure but was not this whole elector thing a strategy promoted by Mark Levin?
He was the first and foremost promoter of it as far as I know.

Not the riot but the formula for the elector thing (I don't recall specifics)

If the SCOTUS had done their job, it would have made a difference.

Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: G M on January 06, 2022, 11:13:31 AM
well as a political strategy

it was doomed to fail

now the LEFT can switch topics from another Dem divider in chief and another Dem failing prez

to this. 

I am not sure but was not this whole elector thing a strategy promoted by Mark Levin?
He was the first and foremost promoter of it as far as I know.

Not the riot but the formula for the elector thing (I don't recall specifics)

If the SCOTUS had done their job, it would have made a difference.

https://i2.wp.com/politicallyincorrecthumor.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/widespread-voter-fraud-congress-scotus-mainstream-media-ignoring.jpg?resize=521%2C365&ssl=1

(https://i2.wp.com/politicallyincorrecthumor.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/widespread-voter-fraud-congress-scotus-mainstream-media-ignoring.jpg?resize=521%2C365&ssl=1)
Title: Levin on Trump v. Biden
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 06, 2022, 11:50:58 AM
https://rumble.com/vrx4su-mark-levin-gives-the-best-trump-vs.-biden-comparison-youll-ever-see.html?mref=22lbp&mc=56yab&fbclid=IwAR31zwgMC2W0CvaPTHvzvEo_xuFSMJZJQIV5quarFKthbg2xgFcRgVTySMg
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought piece, Andy McCarthy
Post by: DougMacG on January 06, 2022, 12:13:00 PM
Wow, he [Andy] is all over the map. 

First he understates his own case that this isn't as bad as the Left violence of that entire year.  THEY BURNED THE POLICE HEADQUARTERS DOWN.  They burned the post office, a federal building, down.  They burned 1600 buildings in the first town MSP and literally took over neighborhoods in Seattle, rampaged Portland and so on.  There is no comparison.  The capitol is still there.  The Congress is still there.  Trump and Pence turned the White House over to President Klain and his sidekick, RIGHT ON SCHEDULE.

"designed to exaggerate a rare episode of politically motivated violence by the incoherent populist Right,"

Whatever incoherent populist right means.  The populist right in 2020 was 74 million people.  This was 200? of which maybe two dozen? did damage.  The "incoherent" populist right watched the mail order election get slowly then suddenly taken and stayed home expecting the truth to come out through ordinary means.

[Trump] "campaign of deceit (which appears to have morphed into self-delusion"

Clever words, but doesn't that mean Trump believed what he was saying?

"he misled them with a big lie about election fraud."

Big Lie, doesn't that require that he knew what he was saying was false?  Contradicted by none other than himself, in the same piece!

Merriam Webster:  Lie: assertion of something known or believed by the speaker to be untrue with intent to deceive

The man is a prosecutor.  Doesn't he know the difference between being wrong and lying?

Turns out, we don't know NOW that he was wrong.

So which side IS lying?
Title: George Friedman: 1991
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 11, 2022, 01:20:21 PM
January 11, 2022
View On Website
Open as PDF

    
1991: False Dawn
By: George Friedman
We do not normally think of 1991 as a defining year. We are aware of particular events that might have changed something, but we rarely think of 1991 as more than that. In fact, it was a year of global and intersecting change. It did not change the human condition, but it changed a great deal about how humans lived and saw the world.

1991 was the year the Soviet Union collapsed and brought the Cold War to an end. The fear of nuclear war, which had haunted the world since the 1950s, subsided, as did the fear of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe. The Soviet Union broke into its component parts, which is something that is very real today.

1991 was the year the Maastricht Treaty was signed by 12 European heads of state. With this agreement, they tried to do what Europe had never done: create a single structure abolishing the history of Europe. This drew Europe away from the United States, but as the Soviet Union collapsed so had Europe’s urgent need for American power.

1991 was the year an American-led coalition executed Operation Desert Storm, driving Iraq out of Kuwait, weakening Iraq and enabling Iran to regain its balance after a brutal decade of war with Iraq. The most important thing that emerged from this was a powerful Islamist force, a major component of which was al-Qaida. The Islamists saw the American presence in the region as both sacrilege and a threat to regional autonomy. The Middle East was transformed, and with it, on 9/11, the United States.

1991 was the year the Japanese economic miracle ended in a massive financial crisis. Until then, Japan was seen as the economic challenger to the United States, and quite likely the winner in the battle. Japan managed its crisis by spending a decade becoming a normal superpower and avoiding extremes in economics.

1991 was the year China accelerated its economic growth. The first growth period was interrupted by Tiananmen Square and sanctions from the U.S. and Europe. The sanctions were suspended in 1991. Like Japan before it, China surged, replacing Japan as an Asian powerhouse growing dramatically and imprudently.

1991 was the year President George H.W. Bush made a speech proclaiming the New World Order. He delivered the speech in the wake of Desert Storm, and he envisioned it as the model in which a united world would enforce peace and crush its violators. The speech replicated the dream Europe had of abolishing conflict and having a common vision of the future. It replicated a Russian dream of ending the barrier between Russia and the world and joining the family of liberal democracy and wealth. And the dream spoke to Japanese hubris and the world’s awe of Japan, reminding them that no one could surpass the United States, for the New World Order speech was about American greatness since it was obvious that only the U.S. could manage a world united in a search for peace and prosperity. Even the response to Tiananmen Square and the ultimate outcome signaled the New World Order.

Bush’s speech was sincere in the belief that human history can be managed to global satisfaction, and that it was the mission of America, as the only great power left, to manage this system. There have been moments like this, such as the Treaty of Westphalia or the founding of the United Nations. They all disappointed, as 1991 disappointed. Men love their nation more than the world, because it is theirs and because it puts them above others. It also gives them a chance to define what is to happen. The world is vast, and if it is to be managed, it will be by a hegemon made of inhuman justice, who can measure the needs of China against the needs of Japan and make remarkably wise decisions. Or we can have a committee. The Soviet Union was run by committee after Stalin – and was horrid even while Stalin was there. The United States has many committees, all designed to allow us to pursue blatant self-interest. The center has held for over 200 years. The European Union was designed to be a committee of leaders willing to care more about Europe than about their own countries. The creaking sound we hear is Maastricht tottering. Japan survived its near fall because it was a nation of Japanese, with a common past and common fears. They shared the pain.

Sharing the pain of your countrymen is possible, if not common. Sharing it with strangers is much harder. Desert Storm was the opening not to a new world order but to a new threat to the world: radical Islam, a threat stretching from Xinjiang to lower Manhattan. But of course, those who believe in the truth of their version of Islam do not see themselves as threats but as liberators and teachers. And the Russians and Chinese know that if they don’t care for themselves, no one will. The New World Order proved as pitiless as the old.

1991 is not remembered by many as a decisive year. It was not a single event, like 1945, to be viewed as a moment. 1991 was a collection of smaller points that, when taken together, represent a moment when all things dreamt of by the enlightenment might be possible. The moment slipped away because it was never there. Humans will not overcome their humanity and become angels. The world is returning to what it once was. It is ironic that we soon will see American and Russian officials sit in Geneva to decide the fate of nations. History does not tolerate optimism.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on January 11, 2022, 05:45:02 PM
"1991: False Dawn"

good article and thoughts

G.H. Bush is crying in heaven now

Title: The rise of technocrats across the globe
Post by: ccp on January 18, 2022, 07:09:44 AM
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/18/populist-politics-lost-support-during-the-pandemic-research-finds.html

more people actually thinking an elite bunch of "experts " should govern deciding what is best for them

fools

the politburo on a mass school
  no one allowed in unless ivy grad
   Democrat
     or with lots of money ; think Bill Gates

everyone else a serf who better stay in line
Title: Bush alumni
Post by: ccp on January 20, 2022, 10:43:08 AM
who now work OT to destroy everything that Trump worked for

far more then they ever worked for Republicans prior:

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/jan/19/bush-alumnis-never-ending-crusade-against-trump/

Title: Re: Bush alumni
Post by: G M on January 20, 2022, 10:53:05 AM
It’s the DC Uniparty vs. us.

who now work OT to destroy everything that Trump worked for

far more then they ever worked for Republicans prior:

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/jan/19/bush-alumnis-never-ending-crusade-against-trump/
Title: No, the revolution is NOT over.
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 30, 2022, 02:23:31 AM
https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/no-the-revolution-isnt-over

No, the Revolution Isn’t Over
None of the fundamental drivers of “Wokeness” have relented

N.S. Lyons
Jan 18
136
129

“Long live the victory of Chairman Mao's revolutionary line!”
At least in the Boswash (the corridor of East Coast establishment power running from Boston to Washington), using January to make public predictions about the year ahead is an ironclad tradition. Usually these predictions end up being completely wrong, because no one here has any idea what they’re talking about. I hope that holds true in my case, because I want to use my mandatory annual forecast to dump a few gallons of cold, contrarian water on what seems to have recently become a fashionable prediction: that the “woke” ideological revolution roiling the West has peaked and will soon be in full blown retreat.

Consider a handful of examples of this new genre:

Is Wokeness Almost Over? (Scott McConnell, The American Conservative)

The fightback against wokeness has begun (Frank Furedi, Spiked)

Why Wokeness Will Fail (Bret Stephens, New York Times)

The end of woke is nigh (Peter Franklin, UnHerd)

Emerging Cracks In The Woke Elite (Andrew Sullivan, Substack)

Dave Chappelle May Help Tame Wokeness [as part of a “Thermidorian reaction”] (Peggy Noonan, Wall Street Journal)

Inflation Might Spell Doom for Wokeness (Lewis M. Andrews, The American Conservative)

Is this the end of progressive America? (Joel Kotkin, UnHerd)

While a few of those examples are from earlier in 2021, this theme seems to have really emerged and begun to solidify into a consensus among more centrist types soon after the beginning of November 2021. That was when some conservative American politicians won or almost won a few special elections, in part by riding a popular backlash to Critical Race Theory in schools, and a number of local ballot measures to defund police departments failed around the country. Republicans, feeling especially good about their chances against a flailing Biden, started drooling over a “Red Wave” expected to sweep them back to power in the 2022 midterm elections. And now that private equity executive turned Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin has personally won the culture war’s Battle of Midway, the tide has turned and, aside from the occasional messy beachhead here or there, inevitable victory is now in sight, or something.

One would think that by now all these anti-woke conservatives and moderate liberals would have learned at least some of the bitter lessons from the last decade about how political power and cultural change actually work, but I guess not. They could have taken note of all the fundamental factors driving this ideological belief system, all of which had to be painstakingly uncovered, layer by layer, even as it swept through every institution. But they have not. (Like, do they even read the pages and pages of erudite Substack anthropology on the topic? No?) They could have recognized by now that this is not a simple political issue with a political solution, but they have not.

Look, honestly I really didn’t want to have to do this. Come the New Year I had resolved to focus on the positives and all that crap. But I haven’t seen anyone else do it, so guess I have no choice and the duty falls to me to deliver the pessimistic news: no, the Revolution is far from over.

So, in what might also serve as a handy tour guide to the vast depths of the ideological abyss, catalogued at length here – in convenient listicle format! – are twenty reasons to get woke and despair.

craftydog@earthlink.net
password
craftydog@earthlink.net
Subscribe
1. One does not simply walk away from religious beliefs. What is called “Wokeness” – or the “Successor Ideology,” or the “New Faith,” or what have you (note the foe hasn’t even been successfully named yet, let alone routed) – rests on a series of what are ultimately metaphysical beliefs. The fact that their holders would laugh at the suggestion they have anything called metaphysical beliefs is irrelevant – they hold them nonetheless. Such as:

The world is divided into a dualistic struggle between oppressed and oppressors (good and evil); language fundamentally defines reality; therefore language (and more broadly “the word” – thought, logic, logos) is raw power, and is used by oppressors to control the oppressed; this has created power hierarchies enforced by the creation of false boundaries and authorities; no oppression existed in the mythic past, the utopian pre-hierarchical State of Nature, in which all were free and equal; the stain of injustice only entered the world through the original sin of (Western) civilizational hierarchy; all disparities visible today are de facto proof of the influence of hierarchical oppression (discrimination); to redeem the world from sin, i.e. to end oppression and achieve Social Justice (to return to the kingdom of heaven on earth), all false authorities and boundaries must be torn down (deconstructed), and power redistributed from the oppressors to the oppressed; all injustice anywhere is interlinked (intersectional), so the battle against injustice is necessarily total; ultimate victory is cosmically ordained by history, though the arc of progress may be long; moral virtue and true right to rule is determined by collective status within the oppression-oppressed dialectic; morally neutral political liberalism is a lie constructed by the powerful to maintain status quo structures of oppression; the first step to liberation can be achieved through acquisition of the hidden knowledge of the truth of this dialectic; a select awoken vanguard must therefore guide a revolution in popular consciousness; all imposed limits on the individual can ultimately be transcended by virtue of a will to power…

I could go on, but the real point is that these are faith-beliefs, and ones capable of wielding an iron grip on the individual and collective mind. And they have a strong civilizational resonance, because they are in fact not arbitrary but deeply rooted in a metaphysical struggle that effectively stretches to the very beginning of Western theological and philosophical thought. In other words, “Wokeness” is much more than just a political program. And that’s unlikely to change anytime soon, because…

2. The void of meaning still hasn’t been filled. I mean, did the gaping hole of meaning in people’s lives created by the uprooting forces of secular liquid modernity get resolved in some alternative way while we weren’t looking? You know, the spiritual void that this creepy chimeric faith-ideology and its romantic political crusades rushed to fill in the first place? Has there been some kind of genuine, organized religious revival? Has decadent nihilism stopped being the defining sentiment of the age? Did the young even become hyper-nationalists or revolutionary Marxist class-warriors instead? Have they found an alternative passionate heroic narrative to act out in some new Davos slide deck? No. And in fact, meanwhile, it also seems that…

3. Social atomization hasn’t reversed. It sure seems like the kind of robust communities, civic associations, and “little platoons” which once served to fortify society against the revolutionary (per Burke) and totalitarian (per Arendt) forces that thrive on atomization haven’t suddenly been rebuilt from the ground up. In fact even the most basic such unit, family formation, appears to be continuing to decline precipitously. And that may be because…

4. Atomization is probably the inevitable byproduct of liberal modernity. That is: liberalism made the autonomy of the individual its highest good. To maximize individual autonomy, the state therefore found itself obliged (being unable to resist claims that it must enforce an expanding array of rights) to exercise its power to help progressively liberate the individual from all limits and constraints, including from tradition, religion, geography, community, family, and nature itself. (This is certainly deserving of more argument than I have space to recap here; see “Four Big Questions for the Counter-Revolution” for a bit more.) Liberalism has thus acted as a centrifugal force, severing all the centripetal counter-forces that once kept individuals connected to recognizably human communities and launching them outward towards solitary orbits where they can drift cold and alone in their pods.

From this perspective it is more obvious why the amorphous ideology referred to as “Wokeness” so often seems mixed up and chaotically self-contradictory: it is the confused response to two opposite instincts. On the one hand it is actually a kind of anti-liberal reactionary movement, a blind, emotional scramble to grasp desperately for collectivism in the most basic, tribal sort of community seemingly still available: in identity groups, and in fixed racial identity in particular. But, on the other hand, it simultaneously attempts to continue embracing the boundless autonomy of individual choice as its most sacred principle, celebrating an individual’s right to self-define everything about themselves without limit, up to and including their own concept of material reality. (This cognitive dissonance has never been much more than an ideological speedbump, however – don’t get your hopes up.) And this hyper-individualism has now collided head first with the technological revolution, which increasingly positions itself as offering hope for the boundless potential necessary to escape from any natural limits whatsoever, including by fracturing any solid definition of what we once thought it meant to be human. And, speaking of technology and fracturing, meanwhile…

5. The information revolution is still reverberating. Ultimately, what’s more important in driving societal change: ideas, individuals, material conditions, or technological forces? That’s a fascinating question to debate, but for now all that matters is that it’s become manifestly clear that the ongoing revolution in information technology, most notably the internet and social media, has been a tremendous driver of cultural and political change. In fact a growing number of thinkers tend to attribute nearly the entire phenomenon of Wokeness to technological factors. Social scientist Jonathan Haidt, for example, traces it directly to the 2009-2012 period, when Twitter added the retweet button and Facebook added the share button. The resulting acceleration of memetic virality revolutionized the whole dynamic of how people interact with each other on the internet and suddenly made concentrated ideological coercion via distributed online mob a common occurrence. And whatever the precise influence of technological change in driving the Revolution, it certainly hasn’t ended. When the invention of the Gutenberg printing press launched an information revolution in the 15th century, the full consequences took well over a century to play out – a century of theological chaos, bitter division, and bloodshed. The mass media revolution of radio then helped do the same in the 20th century. We should hardly expect the consequences of the internet to be any less dramatic or long lasting. In part, we’ve already seen how its disintegrative effect has helped ensure that…

6. There is no authority. Who or what institution today is now able to establish any kind of common metaphysical framework, common moral narrative, common vision of a properly ordered life, common norms, or even a common reality that most of society will respect, trust, follow, and collectively defend? CNN? Ted Cruz? Yeah no, we can move on. But how then can this ideological upheaval quickly be put to rest, exactly? Considering this, and all of the above, it really shouldn’t be a surprise to discover that actually…

7. Political parties can’t choose their policies. Political strategists have been pointing out for some time now that woke ideas like Critical Race Theory and defunding the police are not politically popular and are hamstringing the Democratic Party’s electoral chances. So theoretically they would just drop these things, stop talking about them, change course, and talk about popular things. But of course it’s not that simple. All they can actually do is ride the chaos of the Zeitgeist, because some small portion of their base (maybe some 8% of Americans) are true believers gripped by a religious fervor that transcends political calculation. And this minority is steering the ship, because…

8. Majorities don’t matter. Unfortunately for those dreaming of harnessing a majority anti-woke popular will, the truth is that, as statistician and philosopher Nassim Taleb has explained in detail, it’s typically not the majority that sets new societal rules, but the most intolerant minority. If the vast majority generally prefers to eat Food A instead of Food B, but a small minority is absolutely insistent on eating Food B and is willing to start chopping the heads off of anyone who disagrees and serves Food A – and the majority doesn’t care enough to get all bloody dying on this particular culinary hill – all restaurants will soon be serving only Food B, the new national cuisine. This is especially true if the intolerant minority already holds a disproportionate position of influence within the system, given that…

9. Personnel is policy. Let’s imagine, for example, that some lawmakers officially ban the teaching of Critical Race Theory in their state’s schools or universities. Will this be the end of the matter? Will all the woke teachers and administrators who consider “consciousness raising” through “critical pedagogy” – or in general what Marxists call “praxis,” the constant need for the transformation of theory into practice – to be practically a religious commandment just stop doing so? No of course not. As one consultant/cleric recently advised teachers, “Don’t say critical race theory, just teach its precepts… You’re going to see how classroom teachers apply some of these pedagogical models in ways where they don’t even mention the words critical race theory but are doing anti-racist work.” Yes, the work of spreading the new good news shall not be stopped! After all, who is going to stop them? Will they be fired by the woke human resources department, or the woke principal? Abandoned by the woke teachers’ union? Reported to the state by their un-woke peers, all of whom have already been systematically purged from the collective for their heresy? If concerned parents do manage to get them fired, who will hire their replacements? Why… the woke HR department! The people who actually set the effective policy of any institution are inevitably the personnel located in the power centers closest to implementation. Or as a Chinese saying goes: “for every measure that comes down from on high, a countermeasure arises from below” (上有政策, 下有對策). That principle works equally well for a revolutionary professional managerial class as it does for beleaguered counter-revolutionary peasants. And in this case the reality is that…

10. All the institutional high ground is still occupied. Have the top universities already been retaken from the woke, or replaced? (No, one still imaginary university in Austin doesn’t count.) What about the elite finishing schools? The accreditation companies? Most mainstream news media? The social media companies? The publishing houses? Hollywood? The major foundations? The non-profits and the think tanks? The consulting and accounting companies? The investment banks? The NASDAQ? The digital service providers? The HR departments of the Fortune 500, and most of their boards? The law schools? The Bar Association? The permanent federal bureaucratic state? Heck, even Halliburton? No, at such a ludicrous suggestion the Cathedral merely echoes with the mocking laughter of the new woke high clerisy. They know from experience that…

11. Long marches are long. When Herbert Marcuse and the rest of the Neo-Marxists and critical theorists of the Frankfurt School finally took to heart Antonio Gramsci’s directive to seize “cultural hegemony” and first conceived of launching Rudi Dutschke’s “long march through the institutions,” it was only the start of the 1970s. It was not until almost fifty years later that their dream was realized. However much the last several years may have seemed like an avalanche of shockingly rapid ideological coup d'états to those who saw power abruptly change hands in their institutions, one after another, this suddenness was an illusion. Coups only succeed if the backers necessary to support them are already in place. And it took literally a generation of young intellectuals and activists simultaneously inspired and disillusioned by the left-radicalism of the 60s entering into and seeding the institutions, rising into positions of power, and cultivating another generation of trained foot soldiers for their influence to fully flower.

Now, much as Marcuse was lamenting in 1971 that “the fact that the radical Left has no equal access to the great chains of information and indoctrination is largely responsible for its isolation,” the Right and its moderate liberal fellow travelers today find themselves isolated and impotent in turn. And yet, in response, they appear to have no patience whatsoever for executing their own counter-march through the institutions, instead mostly trying to either force the institutions to behave differently through political power (mostly pointless), or fleeing from the institutions entirely in a bid to create new ones from the ground up (a longshot, if more promising). Either way, they seem to hope everything achieved by the left can be reversed in the matter of only a few years, which is naïve on multiple levels because…

12. Culture wars are generational wars, and the young are woke as hell. In his book Bowling Alone, the legendary political scientist Robert Putnam explained that sweeping social changes typically only occur “generation to generation,” or through what he called “cohort change.” For most people, the formative experiences of coming to age are truly formative – afterwards their fundamental values will typically barely change for the rest of their lives. For this reason, as Tanner Greer adeptly elaborates, it is necessarily the case that “culture wars are long wars,” because “cultural insurgents win few converts in their own cohort.” Instead the “real target of [their] ideas are not their contemporaries, but their contemporaries’ children and grandchildren.” The process of “instilling new ideas and overthrowing existing orthodoxies takes time—usually two to three generations of time,” so for the generational cohort at the height of its power any change will seem to only be happening very gradually. But eventually a transition point is reached, and “the end falls swift: the older cohorts suddenly find themselves outnumbered and outgunned, swept up in a flood they had assumed was a mere trickle.” They are shocked and confused, but only because “the revolution occurring below did not echo in their souls” like it did for the youth, whose views they neglected or ignored. Only once it is far too late do they realize their mistake.

Hence even if the anti-woke were prepared to launch their own long march through the institutions, the cohort from which they would currently need to recruit their talent is the same one that’s been busy tearing things down and chanting “the Revolution will not uphold the Constitution!” Of Generation Z Americans (those born after 1996) 51% report that America is “inextricably linked to white supremacy,” 52% support racial reparations, 60% believe systemic racism is “widespread” in general society, and 64% say “rioting and looting is justified to some degree” by the need to address systemic racism “by whatever means necessary.” 51% believe the “gender binary” is “outdated,” and up to 40% self-identify as LGBTQ+ (although Gallup separately finds only about 16% do, compared to 2% of Baby Boomers). 59% support expanding non-binary gender options. 41% support censorship of “hate speech,” 66% support shouting down speakers they consider offensive, and 23% support using violence to silence such speakers. 61% have positive views of socialism, and 70% think “government should do more to solve problems.”

Share

Sorry conservatives, but that’s the 67 million-strong cohort who will fill the pipeline of employees, leaders, educators, and voters for the next two decades or so, even if Gen Alpha (those born after 2010) were all to become rampant little reactionaries tomorrow. But why are the youth so woke, anyway? Well maybe, for one thing at least…

13. The youth are still coddled and mentally broken. Back in 2015, when most people still thought of what is now referred to as Wokeness only as a bizarre and vaguely amusing phenomenon that was isolated to college campuses, Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff published an essay titled “The Coddling of the American Mind” in The Atlantic (later to become a book of the same name) as an early hypothesis of what was happening. They advanced an essentially psychological explanation for why so many college students were suddenly acting simultaneously like fragile snowflakes and rabid authoritarians: thanks to the embrace of the “self-esteem” movement and “helicopter-parenting” by their Boomer parents, along with liability risk-aversion by institutions, young people had grown up physically and psychologically “coddled” and therefore emotionally fragile. By this the authors specifically meant that they had adopted a number of beliefs totally inverse to the Stoic-derived principles considered best practice by modern Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. These unhealthy beliefs included: always trusting your feelings, assuming disagreement is always a personal attack, and believing hurtful words lead to real harm, including permanent trauma. Normalization of these beliefs led to a “cult of safety” on campuses, with hyper-attention devoted to the prevention of offense (because it was now actual “violence”). Hence the emergence of such innovations as “microaggressions,” “trigger warnings,” and “safe spaces.”

I must admit that I’ve grown a bit skeptical of this explanation by now. As things have progressed, it’s become increasingly clear to me that these claims to offense are often used as cunningly deliberate weapons against empathetic liberals, and are probably frequently evidence less of psychological fragility than of psychopathy. But, it does seem true that Gen Z sadly does indeed suffer from much higher rates of mental illness than older generations (though the millennials are very close). Even before the pandemic, the rate of anxiety and depression recorded in their age group nearly doubled between 2007 and 2018, as they came of age. The suicide rate rose 57%. From 2009 to 2019, the proportion of high school students reporting persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness increased by 40%. Only 45% reported their mental health was good overall in 2018. One-third reported having a mental health or substance abuse problem. They are also far and away the loneliest generation. Meanwhile, our whole culture seems to have grown significantly more possessed by emotivism in general, to the point that the decline of rational language and the rise of emotional reasoning can even be tracked quantitatively…

But I digress. If we assume any of this may be causally related to the Revolution, the real question for us here is: has any of this gotten better? Of course not! The pandemic has had a devastating impact on Gen Z’s already fragile mental health. Up to seven in ten now report feeling depressed. Rates of severe depression rose to around 25%. Hospitalization for suicide attempts by girls in particular rose 51% from 2019 to 2021. Meanwhile, far from pulling back at all on the “cult of safety,” colleges have now expanded it to absolutely insane levels. So no, the situation has not improved. And from what we know about how totalitarian cults target and more easily exploit the lonely and vulnerable, we can probably safely assume the Revolutionaries will only have more material to work with moving forward, not less, as college graduates remain fragile and/or “entitled” for the foreseeable future. And speaking of anxious, entitled young people…

14. Elite overproduction is still in overdrive. In what is rapidly becoming one of my preferred explanations for the Revolution, the evolutionary anthropologist/mathematician/prophet of doom Peter Turchin has identified “elite overproduction” as having been one of the top drivers of revolution and civil conflict throughout history. He points to the tendency for decadent societies to produce far more overeducated elites than there are elite-level jobs, leading to large numbers of underemployed, resentful elite-class intellectuals of the type who tend pine after the position and status they “deserve” and eventually start spending their free time starting revolutionary cells. Or as James Lindsay has put it, all the children of the upper-middle class bourgeoisie “fake elites,” who find they will likely never be part of the truly wealthy elite (e.g. Bezos) that they aspire to be, have quickly become “a breeding ground for ressentiment in society” instead.

But, scrabbling desperately with one another for status, and horrified at the idea of ever falling into the ranks of the mere working class, the overproduced elites have found another solution: they’ve set themselves up, not as the nobility, but as the First Estate, the new clergy, where they can labor diligently to produce basically nothing but the “right” opinions to police our collective moral rules. And now they’ve succeeded in creating their own job market (e.g. critical theorists, diversity consultants) out of thin air. Or as Mary Harrington recently put it succinctly: “Once you start seeing the calls for moral re-evaluation of everything as a mass job application on behalf of an ever-expanding surplus of arts graduates it’s difficult to unsee.” And in this crowded, hyper-competitive world of the bourgeoisie, the surest way to move up is to take someone else down – hence “cancel culture” and the vast, elaborate, ever-changing, mandatory “correct” vocabulary that functions as a way to help weed out any of the competition (or dirty proles) who can’t keep up. Thus Wokeness.


Quick, invent a new need for lawyers!
Have young people stopped trying desperately to make it into Harvard or Yale and join the smaller and smaller share of the population that represents the elite? No way. It’s just that, thanks to the latest expansion of a huge, growing industry of administrators and consultants, the professional managerial class has an array of profitable new fallback options after investment banker. Now instead of having to labor through something difficult, like medical school, in order to achieve a respectable, well-paid career, one can always become a Chief Diversity Officer (average annual salary in Northern California in 2021: $231,500 to $329,500). Fortunately the government is there to help make sure this will remain an option in perpetuity, because…

15. “Wokeness” is still required by law. Why are America’s university presidents and CEOs so terrified of their Gen Z students and employees, capitulating immediately to their every demand? Is it because Twitter has become basically their entire world? Do they, as Theodore Roosevelt once said of William McKinley, just have “the backbone of a chocolate eclair”? Probably a bit of both. But likely much more important is that they are terrified of the law.

The scope of U.S. federal antidiscrimination statutes that grew out of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 have already made the core facts of what people think of as “Wokeness” the law of the land. This includes the concept that all disparities are due to discrimination (“disparate impact”), the requirement that employers relentlessly police private speech that could be in any way offensive to any “protected class” (to prevent a “hostile work environment”), and “affirmative action” in hiring. Moreover, the law as written is so deliberately vague in its language that any new claims to rights raised by any protected identity group can be seamlessly slipped into the body of harms that any company or organization must legally prevent. So, for example, if any employee refuses for whatever reason to refer to another employee by their chosen gender pronouns, the entire company is in real danger of being held liable for violation of Title IX and Title VII by permitting discrimination on the basis of sex (as affirmed by the Supreme Court in its Bostock decision). Or at least so the company must assume, because the potential financial penalties are far too high to risk it. The nonconforming employee is getting the boot – unless they themselves are of a protected class that could conceivably sue for being fired due to their identity…

The safest path through this regulatory mess is simply to hire a very large HR department staffed with “experts” in all these rules and let them handle it, including by subjecting employees to a vast numbers of “training sessions” run by DEI consultants, all of which can if necessary then be pointed to in court as evidence that the company was definitely doing everything it could to prevent any discrimination from occurring. Hence why while fewer than 30% of organizations had an HR office in 1955, that number had grown to 70% by 1985, and today it is close to 100% of all firms of any significant size. So, as Christopher Caldwell has painstakingly explained, the unintended legacy of the original “emergency measures” of 1964 was to create an entire permanent apparatus of “surveillance by volunteers, litigation by lawyers, and enforcement by bureaucrats.” Then “the fear of litigation privatized the suppression of disagreement, or even of speculation,” and so the phenomenon of “political correctness” emerged as simply “the cultural effect of the basic enforcement powers of civil rights law.” But because enforcement gradually expanded through new case law and executive orders, and therefore “there was no statutory ‘smoking gun’ behind it, this new system of censorship was easily mistaken for a change in the public mood.” Or, as Richard Hanania has put it simply, the fact that we now have uniformly “Woke Institutions is Just Civil Rights Law.”

Practically speaking, this means any claim by conservative politicians that they will put an end to Wokeness if elected to office is pure theater. Without addressing the structure of the law, none of the forces at play in the workplace will reverse on their own (in fact they will get much worse. Have I mentioned how very woke law students are?) But unless these politicians are willing to take on the politically suicidal task of reforming the Civil Rights Act (practically holy writ in American society due to having tackled a genuinely great moral wrong), nothing they do will have any significant impact on the concrete incentives at play. So it’s a safe bet that they will just posture rhetorically and pass another tax cut instead. And speaking of incentives…

16. Money is still power. Those who live outside places like Washington D.C. or San Francisco might hear the word “philanthropy” and think it means feeding the hungry, or something naïve and low-brow like that. But “philanthropy” is really a word for how the concentrated power latent in oligarchic money is transformed into applied political and cultural power. In this process, money from concentrations of wealth (today mostly from the tech industry) flows (tax free!) into very special institutions called foundations, where it is laundered of any appearance of corrupt influence or nefarious motive, and then handed out to the vast constellation of non-profit NGOs, activist organizations, think tanks, and academic programs that subsist almost entirely on such money, where it can find a way to “inspire change.” A large proportion of the elite in places like Washington are engaged in helping facilitate this process as their full-time labor. (How to spot a budding young elite aspiring to join this trade: simply scan their job applications for polite requests to be given some power, pretty please, such as a stated desire to “make an impact” or “change the world.”)

This means the foundations have truly tremendous influence over public policy, because every nominally independent think tank, for example, automatically tailors its projects to attract the blessing of their funding. Government officials, being lazy, and chummy with the non-profit “experts” and executives (who are often former or future colleagues), simply copy their ideas almost directly into the rules they implement. Alternatively, those in the government with an agenda can hand over trial policy ideas in the other direction to be validated “independently” by the other side of the blob. This Wealth-Foundation-NGO-Government Complex thus works in unison to pour huge amounts of money-power into causes that are essentially by definition progressive ones (being to affect rapid change). Today this means there are massive tides of woke capital hard at work changing the world. How much money? Well as Thomas Edsall writes in the New York Times about just one cause du jour:

Before [George] Floyd’s death, Candid found that philanthropies provided “$3.3 billion in racial equity funding” for the nine years from 2011 to 2019. Since then, Candid calculations revealed much higher totals for both 2020 and 2021: “50,887 grants valued at $12.7 billion” and “177 pledges valued at $11.6 billion.”

Among the top funders, according to Candid’s calculations, are the Ford Foundation, at $3 billion; Mackenzie Scott, at $2.9 billion; JPMorgan Chase & Co. Contributions Program, at $2.1 billion; W.K. Kellogg Foundation, $1.2 billion; Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, $1.1 billion; Silicon Valley Community Foundation, $1 billion; Walton Family Foundation, $689 million; The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, $438 million; and the Foundation to Promote Open Society, $350.5 million.

With this much money spent, the priorities of the non-profit sector have already been firmly set for at least the next few years, as budgeted projects are implemented. Hundreds of new institutions will have been set up to get in on the feeding frenzy. And all of these now have an incentive to justify their existence in perpetuity by hyping whatever problem they purportedly exist to solve. The inertia is now immense. In time, their specific priorities may change as the foundations’ priorities change, but one thing you can be sure of is that those priorities will stay woke – because if you begin to dig into what, say, the Ford Foundation has gotten up to in its lifetime, the deeper you go the more and more horrifying it gets – until you learn they were the ones who essentially invented modern left-wing identity politics in the United States in the first place. (The Ford Foundation is also a great example of how the foundations often run riot well beyond even the intentions of their donors. Henry Ford II went to his grave lamenting the family had ever set theirs up in the first place, describing it as “a fiasco from my point of view from day one,” having “got out of control” because, “I didn’t have enough confidence in myself at that stage to push and scream and yell and tell them to go fuck themselves, you know, which I should have done… we can get thrown out or we can go broke; but those people, they’ve got nobody to answer to.”)

But even the foundations, despite their zeal and close relationship with government, may ultimately wield only a shadow of the influence exerted more quietly by titans of finance like the “Big Three” asset managers, BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street. With a collective $22 trillion in assets under management, and owning an average of 22% of the typical S&P 500 company, these three firms have the power to dictate corporate policy across the world, both by acting as voting proxies for their index fund investors, and through the environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) standards they choose to set as requirements for investment. And because these firms’ leaders are now woke (or at least see advantage in acting woke), there is now, as Vivek Ramaswamy has explained in detail in Woke, Inc., constant pressure on companies to get woke too, or face losing critical access to capital.

In any case, whether it’s the influence of foundations or asset managers, what should be obvious is how unprepared the average politician is to stop any of this. Not only is the American political class’ power over moneyed interests held back by legal limits, but they also have significant political and personal incentives not to upset the same elite coastal donor and investor class that funds their campaigns and employs them after they retire. Despite their collective anger about Wokeness, America’s conservatives, in particular, still seem to have no real consensus or even understanding of how to begin to tackle such a problem, given their traditional worship of capital. Which is a big problem, given that…

17. The opposition is still only political. Given all of the above, it should be clear by now that political opposition to the Revolution is rather unlikely to be sufficient – not without resistance on the cultural, educational, economic, technological, and media fronts as well, at a minimum. Yet what else has emerged so far? As outlined in detail above, the woke left is unloading huge amounts of cash to advance the social causes that matter to them. On what social causes has the right matched this level of funding, or even enthusiasm? Does the right even have social causes? If people standing up to the woke are being fired for their ideals and losing their employer-provided health insurance, for example, does the right have a concrete plan to make sure they have an alternative? How many people other than Oren Cass have started seriously considering a new, conservative wave of unionization by now? And if this is a “culture war,” is there a conservative foundation for the arts? No, it doesn’t seem like it. At least the dissident right has some great memes and a lot of people who can tell you more than you ever wanted to know about cryptocurrencies, I guess. So even if Red Tribe does sweep the elections in November, or 2024, what is likely to be the result? Probably the same as their last period in the majority: at lot of populist huffing, puffing, and flailing about trying not to drown as the Revolution continues to advance. And speaking of politics in such a scenario…

18. Partisanship is still getting worse, and Wokelash 2.0 is entirely possible. Donald Trump may not have been the cause of the Revolution, but his presidency certainly helped send it into overdrive. Worked into frothing-at-the-mouth levels of outrage, the ranks of the #Resistance were easily converted to Wokeness on the purely tribal need to be for whatever Trump was against, traditional liberal principles be damned. America’s partisan political rancor has hardly improved in the year since Trump left the White House – if anything it is somehow even worse. So let me make a prediction: if Trump wins again in 2024, be prepared for the inevitable outbreak of the Second Woke Crusade to extirpate all the Racist Forces of Evil from the nation once and for all (some might argue this has already begun). Meanwhile, even if anti-woke Republicans were to seize back the White House (with or without Trump), they would soon learn that, in the end…

19. None of the levers of power have changed or will change hands. At the risk of sounding like one of them conspiracy theorists: who really controls the power centers in the United States? The intelligence agencies; the domestic security services; the military officer corps; the diplomatic service; the regulatory administrative state; the Ministry of Information [sic]; and so on. Are all these run by elected representatives accountable to the people, including an elected president and his appointees, who then set a policy direction which is faithfully executed? It may be worth considering that this is simply not the case. That, instead, these power centers are run by a certain interchangeable class of people who already staff them permanently and run them as they think best and only cooperate if they so please. And who all happen to have went to the same schools (let’s go Hoyas!), and received the same prestigious fellowships from the same foundations, and share overlapping networks, and marry each other, and hang out at the same parties, even though secretly they actually all mostly loathe one another. And who hire each other as they cycle seamlessly between the public and private sectors. And who all consume the same media, and like to send each other the same latest “must-read piece” in The Atlantic, or whatever. And who somehow all use exactly the same identical phraseology when they humble-brag on LinkedIn as when they issue a State Department press release. What if this is the real body-politic?

It may then be the case that this class prefers to believe that they have a certain right to rule as they do – a certain nobility of superior virtue, merit, and knowledge that justifies their permanent hold on power and the material gains that happen to come from it. It may then be that if any entity intrudes into this body-politic from outside, it naturally gets all inflamed and ideologically feverish in an attempt to purge the infection by whatever means necessary – both to reassert control and so its members can assure themselves that they are in fact still the good guys, the ones who retain the Mandate of History, as it were. And it might be that this class, which is of course the most diverse, inclusive, and enlightened ever assembled by said history, has recently come to realize they aren’t much liked by the masses, out there – those people whose wild and unpredictable behavior, driven by dark irrational impulses, is impossible to understand, even after a safari! In that case they may have determined that it is necessary to form a united front – transcending any specific past political demarcations – to make sure none of those dangerous barbarians ever gets anywhere close to the levers of power in our democracy, where they risk derailing the train of progress and disrupting the natural order of wise technocratic rule.

If all this were the case, there might be a need to build a big, beautiful metaphorical wall, to separate the inner from the outer, allies from enemies, the good people from the bad people. In this effort, a strict moral ideology – like a state religion, but with none of that unscientific stuff – would be an essential tool to distinguish between us and them, and to help keep dangerous dissenters from polluting the united front with class treason. And then, once this firewall was in place, if any wrong-thinking elements with the incorrect ideological encryption key were to be mistakenly elected by misinforming the people, they could be instantly identified, isolated, contained, and suppressed before they could do any harm to the system. It might be worth considering this theory, just in case what’s happened is that…

20. Leviathan has a’woken. In the end, it may be that “revolution” isn’t quite the right word for Wokeness after all. Real revolutions characteristically replace one elite with another, redistributing their wealth and power. True, this is happening at the individual level, with many a white male manager finding himself suddenly replaced by someone younger and “more diverse.” But at the broader level this is a “revolution” that has been embraced wholeheartedly by the leadership of the elite, who show little fear that they will ever be replaced as a class. Indeed they seem to have adopted woke ideology as a wonderfully useful tool for reinforcing their position while punishing their inter- and intra-class rivals.

In this way the woke revolution strikes me as similar to the Chinese Cultural Revolution – and not just because of a similar ideological emphasis on the destruction of the Four Olds (Old Ideas, Old Culture, Old Habits, and Old Customs), as many have now pointed out already. Rather because, at root, the Cultural Revolution was started by Mao as a way to leverage the blind ideological zealotry of the young to wage an intra-elite war on his political rivals within the Chinese Communist Party. Seeing many of his peers as encroaching on his authority and threatening the continued centralization of power, he stirred up an internal revolution to destroy them while reenergizing the Party base. Just like then, things may not turn out quite how today’s woke-riding elite hope, of course; the Cultural Revolution became an uncontrollable inferno that consumed many who thought themselves safe, or even to be its leaders.

But it seems to me that the woke revolution, as co-opted by the elite, is being tailored to point not towards dissolution and lawless chaos forever, but towards a re-ordering that brings with it a great centralization and unification of power. In this revolution the liberation and safety of the individual by the state becomes the greatest good. Each individual comes under the tender, empathetic care of the state alone, which ensures their “liberty” through safety. The state contains only autonomous individuals, whose general will is represented by the state. Hobbes’ Leviathan wakes.

In 2019, America’s most celebrated high priest of Wokeness, Ibram X. Kendi, was invited by Politico magazine to offer his take on “how to fix American politics.” He proposed an “an anti-racist constitutional amendment” that would make unconstitutional “racial inequity” and “racist ideas by public officials,” and “establish and permanently fund [a] Department of Anti-racism (DOA) comprised of formally trained experts on racism and no political appointees.” The DOA would be “responsible for preclearing all local, state and federal public policies to ensure they won’t yield racial inequity, monitor those policies, investigate private racist policies when racial inequity surfaces, and monitor public officials for expressions of racist ideas. The DOA would be empowered with disciplinary tools to wield over and against policymakers and public officials who do not voluntarily change their racist policy and ideas.”

Most would of course argue that the chance of such an amendment ever being passed in today’s United States is basically zero. But Kendi’s idea of establishing a permanent totalitarian super-structure overarching the state, through which unelected and unaccountable “trained experts” would tirelessly ensure democracy can no longer be misled by unacceptable people or ideas… is this not a sight of awful beauty? For here is Leviathan emerging from the deep, momentarily visible as it crests above the waves. Here is Kendi revealing the whole telos, the whole intended final destiny of the woke Revolution, as it and the shared destiny of the technocratic state rush to merge into one point of singularity, where all shall be consumed: “Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.”

As I said in the beginning, I hope I am wrong. But I think it is perhaps too soon to scoff at Kendi’s plan, to trust that this is not where we are headed in the end, eventually, if a firm stand is not taken. Not if the terrible truth is that Wokeness is Leviathan, and Leviathan is woke.

Share

Some of these many explanations above for what continues to drive Wokeness may seem contradictory. And perhaps some are. But they also aren’t necessarily exclusive. And in fact there are certainly likely to be many more factors than this list contains. Like a hydra, today’s Revolution is a complex beast with many heads; its causes and its consequences may be multitudinous.

Also like a hydra, it is likely to prove very difficult to kill. If there is a wave of conservative political victories in U.S. elections this November, expect the “Wokeness is dead” takes to come fast and heavy. But hopefully now you won’t be fooled, and will know: the Revolution isn’t over.
Title: not enough moderates
Post by: ccp on February 09, 2022, 02:51:23 PM
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2022/01/11/the_problem_with_ideological_purity_in_congress_147006.html

Nothing insightful at all here

The reason I bother to post this drivel is that it is the same old

"not enough bipartisanship"
"not enough compromise"

These people who think the are so willing to work with the other totally ignore what has happened

The Right is NOT FAR right
we are where we have always been

It is the LEFT that keeps demanding endless liberal policies
wanting to turn the country into a socialist communist state subject to the whims
of elitists and top level government controllers

The Right has conciliated for decades
 and the problem is not that we should keep doing so but we need stop. doing so.

We do not our side reaching across the aisle
We do not need to make more compromise

We are not the ones who keep taking more and more radical new positions then demanding
to get what they want.

Why do not these Rinos get it?

Why does this guy teach at Stamford ?

 :x

Title: The Overton Window
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 15, 2022, 11:54:33 AM
https://exploringyourmind.com/overton-window/?amp=1&fbclid=IwAR0uUCdgycU3F4zJrQOChNj8BA34nNwXDEnF7LGNzaaPlf6p_1vAQjQ864o
Title: Berenson on courage
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 20, 2022, 12:22:34 AM
Alex Berenson
Feb 19   

A few weeks ago a reader sent this email, apropos the desperate desire for a magic bullet to end Covid - whether vaccines or ivermectin or powdered unicorn horn:


I’ve thought about that email a lot as I read “I Heard You Paint Houses,” which is nominally about Frank Sheehan but really about Jimmy Hoffa, the Teamsters, the mob, and the Kennedys.

It has me thinking: about what the United States was and is, and about courage.

The physical kind, I mean. I tweeted a while back that intelligence is fungible but courage comes in different flavors, and I’m more convinced than ever that’s true.

Frank Sheehan was a hitman, a World War II combat veteran and mob executioner. He was not a good man; if he had moral or intellectual courage it is little in evidence. But he had no fear of violence or death.

Neither, it seems, did the men around him, and for that matter neither did JFK or RFK or Martin Luther King or Malcolm X, the most important leaders of the 1960s, all of whom proved their courage in the most irreversible way. All those men were well aware of the risks they faced. At the time, of course, many American men were veterans of World War II or Korea, and had seen violence up close.

Which is not to say everyone at the pinnacle of American power was physically fearless; but a thread of courage - an awareness of the reality of danger and death - ran visibly through the culture.

Now, of course, our leaders are cowards, and the cowardice runs across both parties. It may be the last bipartisan trait. Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden all managed to dodge service in Vietnam.


Worse yet, the United States has now followed Europe’s lead. It no longer asks for bravery from its leaders. It no longer merely plays down the moral - and practical - value of courage. It is increasingly dedicated to the avoidance of all physical risk, and physical or psychic pain, as an organizing principle. Thus our increasingly bizarre response to Covid.

A culture built this way cannot long survive. The world has wolves; and the more we hide from them the bolder they grow.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 06, 2022, 02:34:42 PM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Db2gq4V7QVo&t=43s
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: G M on March 06, 2022, 02:38:31 PM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Db2gq4V7QVo&t=43s

EXACTLY!
Title: NRO: Send out the clowns
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 18, 2022, 08:03:38 AM
https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/03/send-out-the-clowns-2/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Monday%20through%20Friday%202022-03-17&utm_term=NRDaily-Smart
Title: from Kevin Williamson NR piece posted by CD above
Post by: ccp on March 18, 2022, 08:29:24 AM
"What is at stake here is not the reputation of Jens Stoltenberg or the career of Olaf Scholz, the future of Emmanuel Macron or the past of Angela Merkel."

I would personally add
Donald Trump who as far as I am concerned is a total bore

when telling us over and over again what he would have done, this would not have happened only for him
etc etc

Somebody need to pull him off the stage too with one of these hook staffs:

https://www.google.com/search?source=univ&tbm=isch&q=hook+staff&fir=2hwyGiRfusl3kM%252C6MaBisKQ7K5GcM%252C_%253BBgqyHa0EL0Q3VM%252CZ4H-N1tfYTmi0M%252C_%253BquWUH9zVfrqdlM%252CrMIMCuvXxqmMtM%252C_%253BO1IqEaOsNA6H4M%252CvdbL-QZI65Ga9M%252C_%253BJ-yoGIqzHvEatM%252CCRGcrzomYkfM3M%252C_%253BqeIlLAyNGeSYpM%252CegRjE_cxXFCzdM%252C_%253BhjPqzIZGYhGJqM%252CjotIcOnGXYlztM%252C_%253B8dMb09pVRu13uM%252CtNL7nEonN4cz7M%252C_%253B3bgAJK21hWn0QM%252CSWom5iBupnvomM%252C_%253BgZM6EYlzTNF_IM%252CjotIcOnGXYlztM%252C_%253BJs8pW-DR9DEadM%252CNZRWM-s3tCs9uM%252C_%253BfHfKXDeZfnP-wM%252CBKcsyhSQ3Brh5M%252C_%253Bc8oGVzmVuDb1PM%252CKx4vyj0huhaC4M%252C_%253BYvT5TfjmCEdqGM%252CtNL7nEonN4cz7M%252C_%253BCCUyWsINPcjEuM%252CFAwh01EW2aq8YM%252C_%253BZ7J3L_K2Tr-tlM%252ClqLOojuEFnl0_M%252C_%253BAX22dQm0affWSM%252CvCaPSok_JZWexM%252C_%253Bh4cBcfITvDHJ1M%252CkFH5M4sPG6L4zM%252C_%253BELB7HPyNi2EdQM%252Co_xAksKwbCVM-M%252C_%253BAK0WkxFHFLoSwM%252Cqbv_5ZUJj2JNNM%252C_%253BWuR_IoaRnLk-7M%252ClFYWbQYX9xpyNM%252C_&usg=AI4_-kS7H-ySlKEuDhII_Pf4FqGY1Oub3A&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj7-avc_M_2AhWmjYkEHUJzAXkQjJkEegQIAhAC&biw=1440&bih=789&dpr=2
Title: Kunstler: What is to be done?
Post by: G M on March 29, 2022, 10:35:04 AM
https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/what-is-to-be-done/
Title: NRO: Most Dangerous Class
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 30, 2022, 12:28:58 AM
https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/03/the-most-dangerous-class/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Monday%20through%20Friday%202022-03-29&utm_term=NRDaily-Smart
Title: Kunstler: This is this
Post by: G M on April 30, 2022, 08:06:26 AM
https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/this-is-this/
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 30, 2022, 09:06:59 AM
Love the challenging vocabulary too 8-)
Title: Hispanic support down for Dems
Post by: ccp on May 02, 2022, 06:45:34 AM
https://nypost.com/2022/05/01/why-bidens-hispanic-support-has-collapsed/

not sure I believe the polls
on this

and not sure how the open borders affect this

hard to believe most Latins coming in from Mexico and Caribbean types (except some Cubans)

are going to vote for Republicans

we shall see in November ........
Title: Re: Hispanic support down for Dems
Post by: G M on May 02, 2022, 06:50:31 AM
If the Dems thought the illegals would vote republican, we would have a wall like this on the border:
(https://winteriscoming-net.cdn.ampproject.org/ii/w820/s/winteriscoming.net/files/2017/04/castle-black-the-wall-game-of-thrones-630x473.jpg)

https://nypost.com/2022/05/01/why-bidens-hispanic-support-has-collapsed/

not sure I believe the polls
on this

and not sure how the open borders affect this

hard to believe most Latins coming in from Mexico and Caribbean types (except some Cubans)

are going to vote for Republicans

we shall see in November ........
Title: border wall
Post by: ccp on May 02, 2022, 08:37:11 AM
for future Republican voters

yes
with the squad on the ramparts with shotguns

and Pelosi Biden and Clinton families at the gates accepting bribes to get in ......

and the MSM and democrat lawyers screaming yelling screeching and appealing  24/7

and that is why I take polls about Hispanics suddenly becoming Republican with a grain. of salt
I will believe next November

but doubt it will be much of a swing

Title: Paul Pelosi Jr.
Post by: ccp on May 02, 2022, 08:58:00 AM
according to this website net worth est. $50,000,000

he must be a genius:

https://informationcradle.com/paul-pelosi-jr/

the daughters are in on it too
at least as political consultants to Nance

likely with big salaries......

msm
silent


Title: Re: Paul Pelosi Jr.
Post by: G M on May 02, 2022, 08:59:54 AM
according to this website net worth est. $50,000,000

he must be a genius:

https://informationcradle.com/paul-pelosi-jr/

the daughters are in on it too
at least as political consultants no Nance

likely with big salaries......

msm
silent

Russian Oligarchs are BAD!

American Oligarchs are Good!
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on May 02, 2022, 09:22:14 AM
"American Oligarchs are Good!"

[democrat oligarchs are good]

musk now BAD !!!!!!!

"too much control in the hands of a billionaire"

" threat to democracy!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

yelled throughout the land states MSM with massive loud speakers turned up to max volume.

 :wink:
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 02, 2022, 09:32:31 AM
Not a bad idea to drill down on Paul Pelosi Jr. 

Quickie search so far has only turned up sites that tend to have BS click bait ads-- not good for making our case.  Can we get our hands on something more presentable?
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: G M on May 02, 2022, 09:40:15 AM
Not a bad idea to drill down on Paul Pelosi Jr. 

Quickie search so far has only turned up sites that tend to have BS click bait ads-- not good for making our case.  Can we get our hands on something more presentable?

It’s harder when they don’t have a crack addiction and forget to pick up their laptops at repair shops.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 02, 2022, 09:44:30 AM
OTOH Twitter and the rest of the Goolag haven't banned coverage yet , , ,
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: DougMacG on May 02, 2022, 10:53:26 AM
"American Oligarchs are Good!"

[democrat oligarchs are good]

musk now BAD !!!!!!!

"too much control in the hands of a billionaire"

" threat to democracy!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

yelled throughout the land states MSM with massive loud speakers turned up to max volume.
 :wink:

I didn't notice that outrage and despair when Bezos bought the Washington Post. The Washington Post Is mainstream media.  Twitter is an undefined platform, already being run by twits.  Who cares if a different entrepreneur takes a shot at running it or improving it?

It's end of the world because the 'neutral' host isn't sworn to be biased and woke.

From a business point of view, these corporations and entertainers are losing half the market by taking sides. ANYONE could double the potential by just inviting both sides.
Title: Kunstler: Disinfo is just a boot in your face
Post by: G M on May 02, 2022, 03:51:20 PM
https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/disinformation-is-just-a-boot-in-your-face/

“Disinformation” is Just a Boot in Your Face
Behind all this is the growing panic in the Left that they are culpable for an enormous raft of crimes committed against their own country, and will eventually end up in court, in prison, or worse….
Clusterfuck Nation
For your reading pleasure Mondays and Fridays

Support this blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page

And thanks to all my Patrons for your support

Since Elon Musk pounced on Twitter, are you not amazed to see just how dedicated to the suppression of speech the Left is? Censorship is the Left’s very spark-of-life. Everything they stand for is so false and lawless that truth magnetically repels them. Now, this may surprise you, but truth and reality are joined at the hip, so when you work hard to suppress one, you are also stomping the face of the other. “Disinformation” just means anything that the Left doesn’t want you to say out loud.

The truth is that everything the Left stands for these days is some kind of a hustle — which is the cheap street version of a racket, meaning an effort to extract something of value from you dishonestly. It’s the only way they know how to operate. It necessarily and chiefly depends on the deployment of lies, which by definition are propositions at odds with reality. The more they traffic in lies, the further they must distance themselves from reality and try to coerce you to go along with evermore absurdity: mostly peaceful riots… men-with-ovaries… free and fair elections…  insurrection… conspiracy theories… Lia Thomas in the fast lane… safe and effective vaccines…. Believe it or else!

The Left ends up at war with reality. That adds up to a bad business model for running a society, and the results are now plain to see. What in the USA is not failing these days? Our Potemkin economy of nail parlors, porn sites, pizza huts, casinos, drugs, and helicopter money? Our reckless relations with other countries? Public and higher education? Medicine? Financial markets? The sputtering engine of government under a phantom president? It’s all sinking into chaos and incoherence. For now, food just costs more than ever; wait until it’s simply unavailable. Nobody will care about anything else after that.

All this failure requires cover stories, narratives. Russia did it! Covid-19 did it! White supremacists did it! Trump did it! Narrative failure would equal failure of the Left altogether, so the Left requires the sturdiest possible apparatus for suppressing counter-narratives that lean in the direction of reality, its enemy. The Left found that apparatus in social media, the new vehicle for political debate, especially Twitter, which was so easily, blatantly, and dishonestly manipulated backstage by mysterious code ninjas. Twitter enjoys subsidy relations with government that incline it to do the government’s bidding. In effect, the government enlisted Twitter to undermine and over-ride Americans’ first amendment protections, by proxy.

Now we have the Disinformation Governance Board to be run by a TikTok musical comedy star, Nina Jankowicz, an instant laughingstock, since retailing disinformation has been her main occupation in the scant years she’s been on the Deep State scene. Ms. Jankowicz is a notorious RussiaGate hoaxer and psy-op agent in the October 2020 emergence of Hunter Biden’s laptop. She has zero credibility as anything but a professional falsifier. Her Disinfo Governance Board has no authority to regulate anything. It’s just a lame charade that can only draw more attention to the Left’s hatred of truth and reality. The Left pretends that free speech is a threat to civilization because, as usual, they are projecting psychologically. Their world is a mirror. In fact, the Left is a threat to civilization.

Behind all this is the growing panic in the Left that they are culpable for an enormous raft of crimes committed against their own country, and will eventually end up in court, in prison, or worse. Mr. Durham is just the leading edge of what will eventually be a heavy blade of judgment falling down on their necks. He’s busy sorting out the “Russia collusion” flimflam that turned into a coup to oust Mr. Trump, but that is only the beginning. In November, the Democrats will lose control of Congress and its oversight powers of agency operations, and in 2023 there will be inquiries galore into the neo-Jacobin craziness imposed on our country by the folks behind “Joe Biden.”

That includes such dicey matters as the several years of malevolent mismanagement of Covid-19, which looks more and more like a deliberate effort to kill a large number of citizens, and then moving along to the behind-the-scenes official support for those 2020BLM /Antifa riots, the ballot shenanigans around the last presidential election, the colossal failure to enforce border security (featuring Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Majorkis), the Biden Regime’s conduct in provoking and prolonging the war between Russia and Ukraine, and (not least) the overseas moneygrubbing of President Biden’s family, as documented in Hunter’s laptop. I’m sure I left a few things out.

If Mr. Biden is still on-the-scene in January next year, he’ll be the first president not only impeached but convicted and removed by the Senate. And if for some reason he avoids criminal prosecution for treason out of some pitiful need for the government to maintain official decorum before the rest of the world, his brothers and his degenerate son may not be so lucky.
Title: Kunstler: Nausea Rules
Post by: G M on May 07, 2022, 07:47:33 AM
https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/nausea-rules/

Nausea Rules
     What’s out there, rather, is a model of breakdown and collapse which the Woked-up, globalist neo-Jacobins are doing everything possible to hasten….

The way financial markets puked this week, they must have started reading the news. Let’s face it, the headlines are a little short of reassuring. The $6.49 price on a gallon of diesel is enough alone to tell you that the nation can’t do business the way it’s set up to do, and there isn’t a new model for running things ready to launch — not even Klaus Schwab’s utopia of robots and eunuchs.

What’s out there, rather, is a model of breakdown and collapse which the Woked-up, globalist neo-Jacobins are doing everything possible to hasten. US-inspired sanctions on Russia have quickly blown-up in America’s face. How’s that ban on Russian oil working? Do you understand that US shale oil — the bulk of our production — is exceptionally light in composition, meaning it contains not much of the heavier distillates like diesel and aviation fuel?  ‘Tis so, alas. Truckers just won’t truck at $6.49-a-gallon, and before long they’ll be out of business altogether, especially the independents who have whopping mortgages on their rigs that won’t be paid. The equation is tearfully simple: no trucks = no US economy.

Europe, the old original homeland of Western Civ, isn’t just losing face, it’s blowing its head clean off going along with “Joe Biden’s” economic war. Are Germany, France, and the rest of that bunch really so dead-set on jamming Ukraine into NATO that they’re willing to go full medieval for it? By which I mean sitting in the cold and dark with empty plates. That’s a hard way to go just to prove somebody else’s point.

The war in Ukraine itself was apparently losing its sex appeal for the click-hungry news media. No matter which way The New York Times and friends tried to spin it, they failed to grok both Russia’s determination to neutralize Ukraine and its ability to get the job done, even if it takes a longer-than-expected grind to finish. That’s how important it was to Russia that Ukraine not become a forward missile base and bio-weapons lab for its adversaries. When that operation concludes, the West will be left economically crippled and humiliated — which are conditions that historically portend regime change. Will America cough up “Joe Biden” like a hairball to get those trucks running again? Might the Dems themselves resort to releasing the kraken known as Hunter’s laptop just to send the old grifter packing?

In the meantime, the leaked Roe v Wade cancellation ruling shoved the Ukraine fiasco offstage so as to provoke more useful histrionics for the dreaded midterm elections upcoming. The poorly-understood truth is that said ruling will only send the abortion question back to the individual states. But let’s get real: places like New York, Massachusetts, Maryland, and California are not going to enact any new anti-abortion laws, and that’s where most of the people having hebephrenic breakdowns over the issue live. Which is to say there’s little danger that the shrieking denizens of these Blue states will lack abortions. So, how much has the party only been pretending that Roe v Wade is its primal touchstone?

The strange parallel question has been raised: might laissez-fair abortion be a cover for the evident new problem that Covid-19 vaccines have made a shocking number of birthing people incapable of reproducing? There’s a buzz about it, anyway. It’s a fact that Pfizer excluded pregnant and breastfeeding women from all phases of its mRNA trials. Among the various harms now ascribed to the mRNA shots are infertility, miscarriage, and newborn abnormalities. But, of course, that sort of rumor — here coming from cases among vaccinated military personnel and not so easily hushed up — is just what the many lurking censors want to slap down in any forum where ideas could be exchanged. It’s misinformation!

And so, the derangement volume knob over Twitter changing ownership stays up at eleven. Imagine what will happen if the supposedly 70-odd percent of Americans who got vaxxed learn in a re-liberated Twitter Zone that the Covid-19 vaccines are not “safe and effective.” According to Zero Hedge, twenty-six globalist NGOs with ties to George Soros signed a letter saying, “Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter will further toxify our information ecosystem and be a direct threat to public safety, especially among those already most vulnerable and marginalized.”

They are, as usual, projecting — since what is a greater threat to public safety than inducing tens of millions of frightened citizens to accept multiple shots of a poorly-tested pharmaceutical cocktail that can kill you six ways to Sunday? The folks in-charge (and others who would like to be the boss-of-you) don’t want you to know any of this. The pharma companies, the doctors, the hospital administrators, and the politicians must be frantic with terror of being found out.

Altogether, the scene looks like a multi-dimensional nightmare. Broken economy… sinking Western Civ… police state tyranny… vaccine death and injury… starvation…. So, there it is. Oh, look, those markets… they’re puking again!
Title: VDH: Imagining the Unimaginable
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 13, 2022, 07:00:21 AM
Victor Davis Hanson: Imagine the Unimaginable
Victor Davis Hanson
Victor Davis Hanson
 May 12, 2022 Updated: May 12, 2022biggersmaller Print
Commentary

Americans are now entering uncharted, revolutionary territory. They may witness things over the next five months that once would have seemed unimaginable.

Until the Ukrainian conflict, we had never witnessed a major land war inside Europe directly involving a nuclear power.

In desperation, Russia’s impaired and unhinged leader, Russian President Vladimir Putin, now talks trash about the likelihood of nuclear war.

A 79-year-old President Joe Biden bellows back that his war-losing nuclear adversary is a murderer, a war criminal, and a butcher who should be removed from power.

After a year of politicizing the U.S. military and its self-induced catastrophe in Afghanistan, America has lost deterrence abroad. China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia are conniving how best to exploit this rare window of global military opportunity.

The traditional bedrocks of the American system—a stable economy, energy independence, vast surpluses of food, hallowed universities, a professional judiciary, law enforcement, and a credible criminal justice system—are dissolving.

Gas and diesel prices are hitting historic levels. Inflation is at a 40-year high. New cars and homes are unaffordable. The necessary remedy of high interest and tight money will be almost as bad as the disease of hyperinflation.

There is no southern border.

Expect over 1 million foreign nationals to swarm this summer into the United States without audit, COVID testing, or vaccination. None will have any worry of consequences for breaking U.S. immigration law.

Police are underfunded and increasingly defunded. District attorneys deliberately release violent criminals without charges. (Literally 10,000 people witnessed a deranged man with a knife attack comedian Dave Chappelle on stage at the Hollywood Bowl last week, and the Los Angeles County D.A. refused to press felony charges.) Murder and assault are spiraling. Carjacking and smash-and-grab thefts are now normal big-city events.

Crime is now mostly a political matter. Ideology, race, and politics determine whether the law is even applied.

Supermarket shelves are thinning, and meats are now beyond the budgets of millions of Americans. An American president—in a first—casually warns of food shortages. Baby formula has disappeared from many shelves.

Politics are resembling the violent last days of the Roman Republic. An illegal leak of a possible impending Supreme Court reversal of Roe v. Wade that would allow state voters to set their own abortion laws has created a national hysteria.

Never has a White House tacitly approved mobs of protesters showing up at Supreme Court justices’ homes to rant and bully them into altering their votes.

There is no free speech any more on campuses.

Merit is disappearing. Admissions, hiring, promotion, retention, grading, and advancement are predicated increasingly on mouthing the right orthodoxies or belonging to the proper racial, gender, or ethnic category.

When the new campus commissariat finally finishes absorbing the last redoubts in science, math, engineering, medical, and professional schools, America will slide into permanent mediocrity and irreversible declining standards of living.

What happened?

Remember all these catastrophes are self-induced. They are choices, not fate. The United States has the largest combined gas, coal, and oil deposits in the world. It possesses the know-how to build the safest pipelines and to ensure the cleanest energy development on the planet.

Inflation was a deliberate Biden choice. For short-term political advantage, he kept printing trillions of dollars, incentivizing labor non-participation, and keeping interest rates at historical lows—at a time of pent-up global demand.

The administration wanted no border. Only that way can politicized, impoverished immigrants repay left-wing undermining of the entire legal immigration system with their fealty at the ballot box.

Once esoteric, crack-pot academic theories—“modern monetary theory,” critical legal theory, critical race theory—now dominate policymaking in the Biden administration.

The common denominator in all of this is ideology overruling empiricism, common sense, and pragmatism. Ruling elites would rather be politically correct failures and unpopular than politically incorrect, successful, and popular.

Is it not the tired story of left-wing revolutionaries from 18th-century France to early 20th-century Russia to the contemporary disasters in Cuba and Venezuela?

The American people reject the calamitous policies of 2021–2022. Yet the radical cadres surrounding a cognitively inert Biden still push them through by executive orders, bureaucratic directives, and deliberate cabinet nonperformance.

Why? The Left has no confidence either in constitutional government or common sense.

So as the public pushes back, expect at the ground level more doxxing, cancel culture, deplatforming, ministries of disinformation, swarming the private homes of officials they target for bullying, and likely violent demonstrations in our streets this summer.

Meanwhile, left-wing elites will do their best to ignore Supreme Court decisions, illegally cancel student debts, and likely by the fall issue more COVID lockdowns. They will still dream of packing the Court, ending the filibuster, scrapping the Electoral College, adding more states, and flooding the November balloting with hundreds of millions more dollars of dark money from Silicon Valley.

When revolutionaries undermine the system, earn the antipathy of the people, and face looming disaster at the polls, it is then they prove most dangerous—as we shall see over the next few months.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
Title: And here is an internet friend of mine
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 13, 2022, 07:05:15 AM
second

And here is an internet friend of mine:

Ruling Class Crisis 3: Yes, they really hate America. - YouTube

and his book:



Amazon - Crisis in the Ruling Class: How a Ruling Class Not Fit to Rule is Falling and Dragging the Country Down With Them: Browne, Steve: 9798414046806: Books
Title: Kunstler: Feeding the narrative
Post by: G M on May 17, 2022, 10:08:53 AM
https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/feeding-the-narrative/

Feeding the Narrative


There’s apparently no question that one Payton Gendron, 18, went out hunting for black people in Buffalo, NY, carefully documenting his crime every step of the way, from penning a book-length manifesto, to running reconn on the Tops Supermarket scene-of-the-crime, to mounting a GoPro video cam on his forehead to record his wicked act, which resulted in 10 persons shot dead and three more wounded.

Gendron is a gift to the “Joe Biden” regime, which needed evidence for its claim that America is infested with “white supremacists,” who, “the president” has stated repeatedly, add up to the “greatest threat” the country faces. Will the dead of Buffalo serve as this year’s George Floyd, setting up a new summer of riots sanctioned tacitly by the party in charge? Who knows? For sure it will galvanize the likes of Alejandro Mayorkas (Dept. of Homeland Security) and Nina Jankowicz (Disinfo Governance Board chief) in their efforts to cancel anyone right-of-center on the political transect and normalize the suppression of speech.

As with most issues these days, though, the official narrative is out-of-synch with reality. What we have in America is mayhem and murder going every which way racially. The day after Gendron shot up the Tops, an as-yet-unnamed Asian man in his 60s shot up a Taiwanese church near the California Disneyland, killing one and critically wounding four, the victims all elderly Asians. And the same night as the Buffalo massacre, 23 people were wounded in three sequential shoot-outs around the Milwaukee Bucks basketball arena in that city. (Note poor marksmanship.) Just a few weeks ago, a black maniac named Frank James, 60, shot up a Brooklyn subway car, wounding ten people of various races. The shooter had posted many diatribes against whites, Hispanics, and even black people on Facebook. The news media stuffed that story down their memory holes inside of 48 hours.

And, of course, there was the event in late November 2021 starring felon and mental case Darrell Brooks, Jr., 39, deliberately plowing a Ford Escape SUV into Waukesha, Wisconsin’s, annual Christmas parade, killing six white people and injuring 62, including many children. Brooks had a police rap-sheet 50 pages long and had put up many posts on social media calling for violence against white people, even hailing Adolf Hitler for persecuting the Jews. He pleaded not guilty and his trial is scheduled for October. The newspapers and cable TV stations dropped the story after a couple days.

“Joe Biden” will travel to Buffalo Tuesday to offer his condolences to the families of the Tops shooting victims. (He did not travel to Waukesha last November, or New York in April.) It looks like the newspapers and cable news outfits will run with the Buffalo story a while longer, milking it to feed the narrative, which is that only the Democratic Party cares about black people and can save them from “white supremacy.” This time, though, the harder they push, the more minds may revolt.

This is not 2020. The public may be better inoculated now against government gaslighting and mind-fuckery than they are against Covid-19 viruses. As Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) noted last week in his colloquy with Secretary Mayorkas, “Do you know who the greatest propagator of disinformation in the history of the world is? The U.S. government.” Senator Paul is onto something. In the course of that hearing, he asked Mr. Mayorkas whether talk about Covid 19 on social media might be subject to official “disinformation” action by his agency.

“I’ve said a million times that cloth masks don’t work; YouTube takes me down,” Senator Paul said. “They’re a private company. I can have that beef with them. What about you? You’re going to look at that? I often say that natural immunity from having had the infection is equal to the vaccine or better. You’re going to take that down?” Rand Paul is a licensed physician, by the way, and Alejandro Mayorkas is not.

Mr. Mayorkas answered that someone might claim that vaccination centers “are actually peddling fentanyl. Now, should I sit back and take that, or should I actually disseminate accurate information?” he asked.

In reality, of course, this hypothetical fentanyl nonsense is not what is at issue regarding Covid-19 “vaccines.” What is actually at issue is the now-established fact that the mRNA products called “vaccines” do not prevent infection or transmission of Covid-19, and do provoke a broad array of harms to people that cause disability and death in, at least, tens of thousands of cases, which is a lot in terms of all prior medical standards.

The government has been lying about this consistently. And the news media have been obediently conveying those lies, in league with the pharmaceutical giants who produce the “vaccines.” The governor of my state, Kathy Hochul, still idiotically wants to mandate mRNA “vaccines” for children. Pfizer ran a commercial on CBS’s 60-Minutes Sunday night promising that further “vaccination” with their sketchy product will “open up the world” for people. In fact, it will do nothing to protect people, rather it will promote the evolution of new-and-different iterations of novel Coronaviruses, and it will surely kill and maim a lot more people, including little children.

Have you noticed something else pretty strange these days? In all the reportage about Ukraine, there has been absolutely no mention of Covid-19 in connection with the disorders of war, where, you’d think, hunger, cold, injury, and filth would compromise many immune systems. Weird, a little bit, huh? Did it just cease to exist?

“White supremacy” is the “Joe Biden” regime’s all-purpose shield against the consequences of its insults to reality, including its role instigating that war in Ukraine, its creation of the entire Covid-19 fiasco from the Wuhan lab to present, its policies that induce reckless monetary inflation, its willful neglect of border enforcement, and its monumental corruption. Watch them try to run with it.
Title: Kunstler: We’re in It Now for Sure
Post by: G M on May 24, 2022, 09:55:52 AM
https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/were-in-it-now-for-sure/

We’re in It Now for Sure
Now, we’re finding out the hard way how much daily life must change, and is changing, and how disorderly that process is in every way from the imperative daily life adjustments to our spiritual attitudes about them…
Clusterfuck Nation


When I wrote The Long Emergency nearly twenty years ago, I never thought that, once it got going, our government would work so hard to make it worse. My theory then was just that government would become increasingly bloated, ineffectual, impotent, and uncomprehending of the forces converging to undermine our advanced techno-industrial societies. What I didn’t imagine was that government would bring such ostentatious stupidity to all that.

Obviously, there was some recognition that ominous changes are coming down. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have heard so much chatter about alt energy, “sustainable growth,” “green” this-and-that. But the chatter was more symptomatic of wishful thinking for at least a couple of reasons: 1) mostly it ignored the laws of physics, despite the fact that so many people involved in enterprises such as wind and solar energy were science-and-tech mavens; and 2) there was a dumb assumption that the general shape and scale of daily life would remain as it had been — in other words, that we could still run suburbia, the giant cities, Disney World, WalMart, the US military, and the Interstate highway system just the way they were already set-up, only by other means than oil and gas.

Now, we’re finding out the hard way how much daily life must change, and is changing, and how disorderly that process is in every way from the imperative personal adjustments to our spiritual attitudes about them. As with so many things in history, this disorder expresses itself strangely, even prankishly, as if God were a practical joker. Who would’ve imagined that our politics would become so deranged? That there would be battles over teaching oral sex in the fifth-grade? That the CDC would keep pushing vaccines that obviously don’t work (and that so many people would still take them)? That stealing stuff under a thousand dollars in value wouldn’t merit prosecution? That riots featuring arson and looting are “mostly peaceful?” That we’d send $50-billion halfway around the world to defend the borders of another country while ignoring the defense of our own borders? That financially beset Americans would spend their dwindling spare cash on… tattoos?

Notice that all of these strange behaviors have really nothing to do with making practical adjustments to the way we live. The collective psychology of all this is bizarre. Of course, mass formation psychosis accounts for a lot of it. Groups of people under duress, suffering from loneliness, purposelessness, helplessness, and anxiety will fall into coordinated thought-and-action if presented with some object or someone to fixate their ill feelings upon.

Donald Trump was such an object. He galvanized about half the country into an intoxicated fury aimed at destroying him. It actually managed to drive him off the scene via a fraud-laced election which many in-power (local officials, judges) deemed a means justifying the desired end. That success reinforced their mass formation psychosis. Alas, having succeeded against Mr. Trump, they were left without a galvanizing object to focus on. So, they adopted one of the devices of Trump-riddance, Covid-19, as the next object of all their distress and anxiety, adopting the mRNA vaccinations as their next savior du jour.

Unfortunately, the vaccination scheme has gone very much awry, and now millions face a future with damaged immune systems. The horror of that is too awful to comprehend, especially by government, which caused the problem in the first place and can’t possibly admit it without demolishing its legitimacy… so it presses on stupidly and heinously with the vaccine program. Already all-causes deaths are substantially up, and in time the recognition of how-and-why this happened will reach a point of criticality.

It will be too obvious to ignore. But by that time (probably not far away), the economy will be so wrecked, the people of America so deranged, and our circumstances so desperate, that the government will resort to a supremely stupid act of national suicide, say, starting a nuclear war. The government under “Joe Biden” seems perfectly disposed to that possible outcome. Which brings us to the spiritual part of the story: those unused to consorting with alleged “higher powers” might consider getting used to prayer.

Lately, a new derangement is overtaking Western Civ, for the excellent reason that Western Civ gave birth to techno industrial societies and is now first to undergo the alarming demise of that system. I speak of the World Economic Forum (under one Klaus Schwab) and its stated ambition to Build Back Better — based on its unstated premise that the current system must be nudged to its death sooner rather than later, and on-purpose. All the governments of Western Civ nations seem coordinated on this.

But it’s not going to happen as Mr. Schwab and his followers hoped, for at least a couple of reasons. First, as already stated, God is a prankster and likes to throw knuckleballs at the human race. Anyway, the “better” that Mr. Schwab expects is an ultra-techno-industrial “trans-human” scheme that is unlikely to come about if the support system of the older techno-industrial system is no longer available to support it. As currently conceived, BBB depends on electric power, and that is one of the major sub-systems of our system that already looks like it’s going janky.

You get the idea, I’m sure, so I’ll cut to the chase for now. About a year ago I had my French easel set up on a country road nearby and was busy painting a motif at-hand when along came a horse-drawn wagon filled with four men in severe black-and-white clothing, wearing beards. They were apparently a bit surprised by the strange sight of me painting a picture and they stopped to chat. They were Amish and had lately moved to the county from down in Pennsylvania, which was running out of farmland for their fruitful people. Not a half-hour later a second horse-drawn wagon passed by. I admit, the incident gave me a thrill — not just the sensory pleasure of the horses’ ripe animal smell, and the gentle rhythm of their clip-clopping along. But since I had lately been writing a bunch of novels about life in a post-economic collapse town like my own (the World Made by Hand series), I enjoyed the strange delight of being transported briefly into a scene of my own imagining — the prequel of my own books.

Many more Amish are landing in the county these days. I hear they go around to the failing or inactive farms with bundles of cash and make an offer, just like that. Evidently the method works. It’s given me a business idea: to start an Amish skills school, buy a few acres with a barn and hire some Amish men to teach all us non-Amish how to do a few things that might be good to know in the years ahead, like how to harness horses to a cart or a mule to a plow. (The Amish like to make a bit of cash-money when they can.) That’s my idea of how to build back better. What do you think?
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 24, 2022, 10:45:45 AM
A very good idea!
Title: Patriot Post: This is a Dem problem, not a gun problem
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 08, 2022, 04:58:08 PM
https://patriotpost.us/alexander/88952?mailing_id=6723&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.6723&utm_campaign=alexander&utm_content=body
Title: Thomas Sowell is fearless
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 09, 2022, 06:03:05 AM


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FbmrkTRTC0&t=5s
Title: Tucker in fine form 2.0
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 15, 2022, 06:48:48 AM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3PS2bxfWVA
Title: Re: Tucker in fine form 2.0
Post by: G M on June 15, 2022, 09:52:30 AM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3PS2bxfWVA

Secret sauce!

 :-D  :-D  :-D
Title: Kunstler: How low can you go?
Post by: G M on June 17, 2022, 09:20:23 PM
https://www.theburningplatform.com/2022/06/17/how-low-can-you-go-2/#more-271983

How Low Can You Go?
Guest Post by Jim Kunstler

New Poll Reveals that Most Americans Think the Country Is Going Downhill |  Teen Vogue

Remember the limbo? It was a dance fad kind of like the Olympic high jump in reverse: instead of leaping over a horizontal bar, you duck-walked under it to calypso music, with the crowd squealing, “How low can you go?” As it happens, in the culture of Western Civ, Limbo is also the name of a place on the edge of Hell. Either way, you have an apt metaphor for the spot that the USA is in as we enter the summer of double-deuce.

Lots of things are going south all at once: the stock markets and bond prices, Bitcoin is doing a vanishing act. The Colorado River reservoirs, Lake Powell and Lake Mead, are so low that, by September, both water and electricity may run out for a vast region that includes Phoenix, Las Vegas, and Southern California. The housing market is tanking (suburbia’s business model is broken). Whole herds of beef cattle roll over and die out on the range. Fertilizer is scarce. Food processing plants get torched by the dozen. Shortages loom.


The oil-and-gas industry is getting killed four ways: 1) our stupid Russia sanctions queered longstanding global distribution arrangements; 2) the industry is starved for capital; 3) depletion is seriously kicking in; and 4) “Joe Biden” and the knuckleheads running the EU countries are trying to kill it so as to usher in a Green New Deal that just doesn’t pencil-out.

The car dealers have no new cars on their lots, and pretty soon they’ll run out of decent used cars — which, these days, are often priced higher than the non-existent new cars. How’s that for a business model? Plus, the financially beaten-up middle-class can’t afford cars in either case, and increasingly can’t qualify for car loans.

The airline industry reels with a sucking chest wound due to a pilot shortage (thanks to vaxx mandates) and the high cost of jet fuel. The trucking industry’s business model is also broken with diesel fuel over six dollars a gallon — the cost of delivery exceeds the value of the cargo. America runs on trucks and if they stop running, so does everything else. Replacement parts are growing scarce for every mechanical device in the land. It’s getting harder to fix anything that’s broken.

“Joe Biden’s” proxy war against Russia in Ukraine isn’t working out. It was flamboyantly stupid from the get-go. We deliberately broke the Minsk agreements for a cease-fire in the Donbas to goad the Russians into action. NATO didn’t have the troops or the political mojo to back up its US-inspired bluster. Our financial warfare blew back in our faces and actually benefited the Russian economy and its currency, the ruble. The billions of dollars in weapons we’re sending into the war are easily interdicted in transport, or else are getting loose in a world of non-state maniacs ranging from the Taliban to al Qaeda to drug cartels.

Meanwhile, Russia steadfastly grinds out a victory on-the-ground that will leave it in control of the Black Sea and will reveal the USA’s lost capacity to impose its will around the world. In other words, our Ukraine project “to weaken Russia” brought on an epochal shift in the balance of power to our enormous disadvantage. This is on top of more than twenty years of US military fiascos from Afghanistan, to Iraq, to North Africa, to Syria which demonstrated our reckless disregard for human life and a gross inability to carry out a mission. This aggregate failure and display of weakness leaves us vulnerable to Chinese aggression in the Pacific. There is even spooky chatter now about China venturing to invade Australia, Japan, and the USA mainland. Yes, really.

With all this to be concerned about, half the American public, and the “Joe Biden” regime they insist they elected, remain in thrall to the Covid-19 horror movie and at the mercy of the deadly mRNA pharmaceutical products that were magically waiting in-advance of the outbreak to profit on it. But now, all the cover stories are falling apart. It’s getting harder to conceal the deaths and injuries caused by the vaccines, including a striking drop in fertility and the permanent damage to millions of people’s immune systems that will lay them low with cancer, neurological illness, and cardiovascular disease in the months ahead.

The CDC / FDA / Pharma cabal’s strategy-for-now: keep bluffing and quintupling down on their cover up — they just sweepingly approved mRNA shots for babies. Why? To extend the emergency use authorization that shields Pfizer and Moderna from liability. It won’t work long, of course, because under settled law fraud vacates that kind of protection, and the public health officials with their Pharma cronies have orchestrated the deadliest fraud in human history.

If there is an American nation left in a year or so, with a functioning legal system, the players in this cabal are going to land in witness chairs to explain why they killed so many people. (“We were following The Science,” they’ll say. Uh-huh….) By then, no one will believe their bullshit and it will be off to the American limbo known as Palookaville for the likes of Fauci, Collins, Gates, Bourla, Bancel, Walensky and the gang.

To try to head-off anything like that, the “Joe Biden” regime just announced a second attempt to control the news-flow with a White House Disinformation Task Force, to replace the ludicrous Homeland Security Disinformation Governance Board that flopped so miserably in May when its appointed chief, Ms. Jankowicz, turned out to be a prime purveyor of disinformation. The new Disinfo Task Force, led by Veep Kamala Harris — who performed so well in her previous assignment as Border Czar — is pretending to be all about online sexual harassment and gender bigotry. I’m sure….

It won’t work. “Joe Biden” is running on empty. His regime staggers on in a delirium and an odium, like one of those groaning, brain-leaking zombies on cable-TV. The voters are poised to unload two barrels of buckshot to this monster’s head in September, if we are not prevented from holding elections by yet another bogus “emergency.” Until then, we’re in a race to see just how the Party of Chaos completes the destruction of the economy, which is the prelude to the people of the USA destroying the Party of Chaos.

-----------------------------------------------------
The corrupt establishment will do anything to suppress sites like the Burning Platform from revealing the truth. The corporate media does this by demonetizing sites like mine by blackballing the site from advertising revenue. If you get value from this site, please keep it running with a donation. [Burning Platform LLC - PO Box 1520 Kulpsville, PA 19443] or Paypal
Title: Message to the Left from a Gay Man
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 29, 2022, 02:49:39 AM
https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1541227234127650817
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on June 29, 2022, 05:39:27 AM
"A message to the Left,
From a gay man
It wasn't enough."

sounds just like what Andrew Sullivan was saying on the last Bill Maher show

he was disgusted with this whole LBGTFU stuff
and states the pride thing is BS and making it worse (no kidding)


Title: The burning times are upon us.
Post by: G M on June 29, 2022, 09:26:36 AM
https://www.theburningplatform.com/2022/06/28/just-paddling-while-the-empire-burns/

JUST PADDLING WHILE THE EMPIRE BURNS

The phrase “fiddling while Rome burns” is an intriguing idiom, referencing the great fire which ravaged Rome for six days in 64 A.D. and the legend that Nero, one of the most sadistic, decadent, and cruel rulers of all-time, instead of taking action to stop the fire, played his lyre while composing a song about Rome’s destruction. The Roman historian Tacitus wrote that Nero was rumored to have sung about the destruction of Rome while watching the city burn but it’s likely this was just a myth.

The fire destroyed seventy percent of the city and left half the population homeless. There are those who believe Nero set the fire on purpose, especially after he used land cleared by the fire to build his Golden Palace and its surrounding pleasure gardens. Being a soulless autocrat at heart, Nero did what all feckless politicians do, he blamed the Christians (an obscure religious sect at the time) for the fire and had many arrested and executed.

Bill Kristol on Twitter: "1952 years ago: Nero fiddled while Rome burned. Today: GOP bigs fiddle while the Republican Party burns. https://t.co/gnFUu1MoaJ" / Twitter

Whether this story is true or just a parable, the messages are pertinent throughout history, and never more so than now. Occupying one’s time doing inconsequential things while a catastrophic event is underway is the ultimate in leadership failure. Focusing on trivial matters while your people are suffering during a time of crisis is the mark of an ineffectual irresponsible leader or one whose true purpose is to burn down society so it can be “built back better” in the form of a communist totalitarian state ruled by a globalist elite cabal.


One cannot ignore the parallels to our American empire in flames as Biden, the hordes of hyena politicians in Washington DC, their captured corporate propaganda media mouthpieces, central banker fiat printing enablers, and the Davos billionaire cadre are attempting a controlled burn of our world, but it has become a conflagration destined to rage out of control and consume the planet in flames.

We are most certainly living in a time of crisis, as this Fourth Turning hastens towards our rendezvous with destiny. Not only is the American empire burning in an abstract sense, but once the ANTIFA, BLM and pro-abortion terrorist groups (all funded by Soros and Gates) hit the streets, the country is literally burning. The chaos, havoc, violence, and vitriol are all being engineered by the puppeteers/invisible government who control the minds of the masses through media manipulation, non-stop propaganda, technological deceit, and social indoctrination through government schooling. It was succinctly described by Edward Bernays nearly a century ago and has been perfected by those in governing the world today.

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.” – Edward Bernays – Propaganda (1928) pp. 9–10 

EDWARD BERNAYS – THE “MASTER OF PROPAGANDA” – antonabroad.comI wonder if the people of Rome were as baffled by their emperor’s total disregard for their well-being and safety as their city burned to the ground as the minority of critical thinking Americans are today watching Biden, his Obama handlers, and their toadies in congress systematically burn our once great republic to the ground. There is no doubt Biden is an incompetent, low IQ, hapless, dementia ridden, racist, pedophile, but what is happening in this country and across the globe is not due to incompetence, but a purposeful destruction of all productive structures, small businesses, Constitutional rights, and societal norms, in order to implement a totalitarian techno-gulag across the world run by a global elite of billionaires and their evil apparatchiks.

A crucial aspect of this New World Order is a massive depopulation of the planet to the desired number of serfs needed to do the slave labor necessary to keep the overlords in luxury and splendor. Private jets, yachts and fenced luxurious 25 bathroom mansions with private armed security for them. The serfs will own nothing, eat bugs, and be happy, or be swiftly terminated, since guns will have been outlawed. Our nation is beset by traitors within.



The pockets of firestorms swirling out of control across the world, purposely ignited by those running the show, makes it difficult to distinguish between fires detonated as distractions and the real inferno destined to reduce the world to ashes. Everything roiling the world over the last twenty-seven months has been initiated and/or utilized by the ruling oligarchs to implement their master plan of “building back better” after they burn the world to the ground. Even the distractions are designed to further their agenda. The latest distraction being the Supreme Court ruling on abortion.

The lunatic left is rioting and protesting in left wing cities where they can murder an unborn child any time they want, while woke corporations’ virtue signal, and insane females have mental breakdowns on Tik Tok. It gives the left-wing media something to scream about other than the January 6 “insurrection” hearings that no one watched. Pride month is nothing but a giant distraction, where drag queens, teachers grooming children, and transgender bullshit are jammed down our throats while corporations attempt to capitalize on the worship of abnormality to increase their profits. The government has achieved the goal put forth by William Casey in 1981.


The January 6 joke of an “armed insurrection” without arms, led by Buffalo guy and initiated by FBI plants (Ray Epps) and ANTIFA infiltrators, is another engineered distraction, with the current fake news hearings revealing much ado about nothing, and all designed to cover-up the traitorous coup conducted against Trump by the Deep State players in the Oval Office (Obama), FBI, NSA, DOJ, CIA, DOD, and the wicked witch herself – Hillary Clinton. The Washington establishment (One Party) initiated another distraction last week under the guise of protecting the children, with another un-Constitutional gun grabber law which will be overturned by the Supreme Court.

Red flag laws have already been deemed un-Constitutional by the Supreme Court, but that didn’t stop Pelosi, Schumer, and a bunch of traitorous Republican senators from virtue signaling with a new law. Until it is overturned, it will be used to take away the guns of anyone not toeing the government line. Just like Biden’s un-Constitutional demand that all employers mandate the poisonous gene altering jabs, knowing it was un-Constitutional, ignoring and tearing the Constitution to shreds is the goal. Biden’s previous ruse worked, as tens of thousands of employers mandated the jab before it was deemed illegal.

Team Biden" blames Russia for high energy costs - Imgflip

Just as Nero blamed the Christians for the disaster he created, Biden blames Putin, Trump, oil companies, the un-vaxxed, lawful gun owners, and the 70 million voters who still consider him an illegitimate president, for the ten-alarm fire engulfing the economy, stock market, and a society he continues to debase with far-left policies. At the current trajectory Biden may go down in history as infamous as Nero, with his fatally reckless actions trying to initiate World War 3 with Russia.

He and his NATO cronies have been outmaneuvered, outwitted, and embarrassed by Vladimir Putin regarding the Ukraine conflict, which they provoked and have continued to exacerbate with economic sanctions and attempting to incite Putin into a greater conflict. It has all blown up in Biden’s face, as his sanctions haven’t hurt Russia, but have certainly destroyed the finances of average Americans. The ruble is at a seven year high versus the USD, Russia’s oil revenues are soaring, Biden’s approval ratings are lower than whale shit, and the US and EU have entered a self-inflicted recession.

Biden Caught Using Cheat Sheet Telling Him When to Say 'Hello' & Sit Down | MRCTV

As Biden spends his days in a dementia haze, falling off bikes, crapping his pants, smelling little children, pumping green energy fantasies, honoring mentally damaged LGBTQ+ icons and pretending to be president, while his handlers orchestrate everything he does, says or thinks, the country accelerates towards economic implosion, global war, civil chaos, and hardship not experienced since the 1930s for the average American.

Everybody knows the 2020 election was stolen. Everybody knows we are on the wrong path. Everybody knows Biden is brain dead. Everybody knows Kamala is the dumbest human being on the planet. Everybody knows Biden’s team are a bunch of incompetent diversity hires. Everybody knows we pissed $54 billion down a Ukrainian toilet and Biden is responsible for double digit inflation and $5 gas.  Everybody knows bad things are going to happen in the next two years, which will require an entire chapter in history books, if the world still even exists. Leonard Cohen captures how everybody feels today.

Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That’s how it goes
Everybody knows

Everybody knows that the boat is leaking
Everybody knows that the captain lied
Everybody got this broken feeling
Like their father or their dog just died

Everybody Knows – Leonard Cohen

I keep being drawn back to the theory Nero purposely burned Rome to clear space for his Golden Palace and pleasure gardens. Essentially his build back better plan. Despite the non-stop parade of distracting events, narratives, and false flags, the big picture has come into focus for me. What even I would have considered conspiracy theory a year ago, now makes the most sense based upon the incoming facts and actions of the major players.

I believe the entire Covid scheme, and the mRNA concoctions were planned and coordinated by those constituting the “invisible government” as a slow-motion depopulation plot designed to reduce the global population to a number they believe can be managed and manipulated to maximize their wealth, power, and control. First, the Wuhan flu gave a final push to the old, infirm, and obese. The lockdowns drove others to commit suicide, die of Chinese fentanyl overdoses, or die from undiagnosed cancers and heart disease.

The most sadistic and insidious aspect of this depopulation conspiracy is the so-called vaccines, that don’t keep you from contracting, spreading, being hospitalized, or dying from Covid, pumped into the bodies of almost 5 billion people. Critical thinking doctors, not bought off by Big Pharma, warned over a year ago about the potential side effects, anti-body dependent enhancement (ADE) created by the vaccines, and dangers of myocarditis in young seemingly healthy people. They also warned about the potential impact on fertility. Most were banned from Twitter and Facebook for their views.


Even though the government, the CDC, FDA, Fauci, Pfizer, Moderna and their captured MSM mouthpieces continue to lie and obfuscate, the data continues to mount, unequivocally proving these genetic altering spike proteins are causing hundreds of thousands of seemingly healthy people to “die suddenly”. Young athletes are dying. Pregnant women are losing their babies. Life insurance companies are reporting deaths in young age brackets far exceeding what actuarial tables predict. And now studies are showing fertility rate declines in Germany that are 9 sigma events – virtually impossible.

native advertising
Now is the time for a 'great reset' of capitalism | World Economic Forum

I am now convinced what seems to be chaos, coincidence, and covid insanity is actually coordinated, conceived by Schwab, Gates, Soros, et al, and created to remake the world in the image these tyrant’s desire. They want supply chain disruptions. They want food shortages and starvation in 3rd world countries. They want an energy crisis where fossil fuels become too expensive to afford. They want mass shootings as a reason to confiscate your guns. They want the cities to burn and murderers to roam free on the streets. They want financial markets to collapse and wipe out the middle class.

They want to decrease the “surplus population” by having the vaccines kill off billions in a slow methodical manner. They aren’t kidding with their slogans about you owning nothing and being happy. We are nothing but annoying parasites to these elitist overlords. They are at war with humanity and the vast majority of humans are too distracted by their social media likes, crypto accounts, sports betting, virtue signaling, and techno-gadgets to notice they are being herded, corralled, and being led to slaughter.

Photos: The Ubiquity of Smartphones - The Atlantic

As I ponder these unthinkably diabolical big picture issues, I still have to live my life. Having been trapped working in my basement for the better part of two years and not being invited to anyone’s house due to our un-vaxxed status, we haven’t been travelling the highways and byways of Montgomery County for most of the last two years. Now that covid has subsided, we have been invited to a few family gatherings and spent a week of vacation at the Jersey shore.

My big picture view of an empire in flames is confirmed by my observations on the ground. As I drove on Ridge Pike towards the Royersford area on Memorial Day weekend I was met with a consistent theme – a country in decay. Despite government passing trillion-dollar infrastructure bills (just as Obama did in 2009) the roads are at 3rd world standards. They are uneven, crumbling, potholed and patched. The sewer and water pipes below are leaking, decaying, and bursting. Our clueless leaders only know about it when it becomes a disaster.

RAWA: Sinkhole believed to be cause of water main break | Berks Regional News | wfmz.com

As we traversed the ten or so miles on a once thriving route, you recognize the plethora of boarded up crumbling buildings, vacant strip malls, For Lease signs dotting the landscape, once flourishing small manufacturing businesses, restaurants, bars, boutique retail, independently owned gas stations, auto repair shops and numerous other formerly prosperous businesses either closed a decade ago during the great financial crisis or put out of business by the government mandated covid lockdowns.

It was not a mistake that hundreds of thousands of small businesses were destroyed, while the mega-corps like Amazon, Target and Wal-Mart reaped the spoils. The mega-corporations work hand in hand with the globalist cabal and their government apparatchiks. You can easily determine what a society values by observing the businesses that are thriving and expanding.

Ranking the Top 40 C-Store Chains: A 2021 Update

We most certainly value our vehicles, as high end car dealerships abound, and mega- gas station/food stores (Wawa, Royal Farms) are spaced every three miles along the route. While you are spending $130 to fill up your $90,000 leased Range Rover, you can dash into the Wawa and pick up a supersized Italian hoagie, with a bag of Funyuns, and 32 ounce Mountain Dew to wash it down. The only retail still standing are the national chains who were deemed essential and were allowed to stay open during the entire plandemic.

Consumer Loans: Credit Cards and Other Revolving Plans, All Commercial Banks (CCLACBW027SBOG) | FRED | St. Louis Fed

Even they have stopped expanding and are just milking the last vestiges of consumer debt financed purchases of Chinese crap Americans can’t afford and don’t need. The other three thriving business classes appear to be banks, national fast food joints, and hospital/medical facilities. Even though everyone can do their banking on-line there are still brand spanking new branches on every other corner. It is plainly evident the Wall Street banks are rolling in dough handed to them by the Federal Reserve, so building money losing bank branches doesn’t faze them. These whores will always be bailed out by their pimps at the Fed.

Low Residue Diet: Everything You Need to Know | Food calories list, Mcdonalds calories, Food calorie chart

You can’t pass a McDonalds, KFC, Taco Bell, Burger King or Chick-fil-A without seeing a long line of cars at their drive through window. Because walking into the store to buy your 1,500 calorie snack would be too exhausting. The prolific number of these fast food outlets selling the most vile, mass produced, toxic sludge, disguised as food, is the main reason for the proliferation of medical facilities designed to treat the fall-out from Americans consuming this crap, along with the mass produced packaged foodstuff sold at grocery stores.

The fast food industry works hand in hand with the sickcare industry to enrich the corporations peddling poison and pills. As we see with the Big Pharma money grab related to the covid flu, which has proven to be no more deadly than the common flu, their “vaccines” don’t prevent you from ever getting covid (as previous vaccines for polio and smallpox did) and will require boosters every six months or so. The sickcare industry doesn’t want to cure anything. They want to treat you for life and reap ungodly profits while doing so.

Healthcare or Sickcare? – ZENBURGER

My previous article – American Freakshow – detailed my observations from an hour or so on the Wildwood boardwalk. After spending a week at the shore, my initial observations were reconfirmed. The obesity epidemic, created by the corporate peddlers of toxic sludge fast food and manufactured foodstuff, is on full display in Wildwood. The obese are in heaven on the Wildwood boardwalk as they have their choice of fried Oreos, funnel cake (deep fried dough) dipped in sugar, pizza covered in cheese fries, triple cheeseburgers and pure sugar disguised as lemonade.

Boardwalk Food | On the boardwalk in Wildwood NJ | Mark Jonas | Flickr

There is no shortage of miss-applied high self-esteem as 250-pound females jam themselves into bikinis and parade on the beach and boardwalk for all to see. The self- mutilation with tattoos and piercings among the young and old is astonishing and leads to the relevant response – WHY? It certainly isn’t because they make them more appealing, as 90% of the tattoos are hideous and 100% of the piercings are ghastly. Are they just following the herd? Are they trying to stand out in a world where they feel like a faceless nameless cog in the machine? Or do they want to self-mutilate as a cry for help? I certainly don’t know but see it as another example of a society in rapid decline.

Pin on lol

The motels, hotels, and condos are filled. Rental prices have skyrocketed. Prices of properties have doubled in the last three years. The beaches are packed. The restaurants and bars are overflowing. It reminds me of those scenes when the ocean mysteriously receded and those unaware of what that meant ventured out to pick up the shiny seashells where the ocean was supposed to be. They were clueless that a tsunami was about to descend upon them and end their lives in torrent of waves and destruction.

NWS JetStream - Tsunami Inundation

Whether you chose an empire burning or a tsunami of consequences headed our way, the figurative description does not do justice to what is happening and will happen to this world over the next several years. Putting your head in the sand and allowing your normalcy bias or abnormalcy bias to keep you from seeing the facts will not save you. At this point, even the most prolific preppers may not avoid the fate of the unprepared. Economic and societal collapse, combined with global war, is not a recipe for a return to normalcy or a long life. So, what are our choices?

We have no other choice than to keep on living and attempt to survive the biggest crisis in eighty years, because that is how Fourth Turnings roll. Sixty-five million people died during the last Fourth Turning, or about 3% of the global population at the time. A similar death rate today would be 240 million. With our advances in killing technology, along with the vaxx depopulation time bomb, and potential for mass starvation as our modern society descends into the dark ages, I’d take the over.


Personally, I continue to work to provide for my family, write articles and run my blog to warn those who are willing to listen and think critically, prepare as best I can on a quarter acre in a suburban neighborhood, and try to enjoy my remaining time on earth as best I can. On Memorial Day we didn’t go to a big cookout or huge gathering. We did what we have come to enjoy the most. We kayaked on the Green Lane Reservoir and hiked along the trails surrounding the reservoir.

 

Paddling out on the serene glass like waters engulfed by sounds of silence, momentarily interrupted by the echoes of birds whistling, croaking, and chirping across the vast expanse of beauty calms the nerves and allows the darkness, doom, and negativity of our current world situation to temporarily dissipate from my consciousness. Letting the peripheral burdens about the world, weighing on my mind, fade for an hour, or two helps keep me sane. With the unrelenting avalanche of lies, disinformation, and bullshit dumped on our heads on a daily basis it is essential to escape into nature to realize what is really important. Many are not able to enjoy the serenity and natural beauty of this habitat because their lives were cut short.



Whenever we go to Green Lane Park, we stop and sit on Tyler’s bench. It is now nine years since my oldest son’s best friend was killed in a tragic car accident at the age of 20. Kevin, Tyler, and their friends would come to the reservoir to fish and shoot the shit as teenagers. Tyler’s death was shocking and changed my son forever. I think his decision to move to Colorado after graduating college was spurred by Tyler’s death. He wanted to live life to the fullest because you never know when your time will be up. I don’t know what the future holds for me, my family, my country, and the world. There are evil forces in this world who appear to have the upper hand, but there also millions of good people fighting for a better future. A showdown is coming, and the outcome is in doubt. I’ll continue to fight for what I believe is good and right. Meanwhile, we’ll keep paddling, even as the empire burns.
Title: It would be very interesting to know what the elites say to each other
Post by: ccp on July 01, 2022, 07:55:28 AM
https://variety.com/2022/tv/news/sun-valley-2022-preview-david-zaslav-bob-chapek-1235300276/

Idaho one party state :
https://recordinglaw.com/united-states-recording-laws/one-party-consent-states/idaho-recording-laws/


One has to wonder what they are saying about things that effect
 us :   such as "CLIMATE " change
  the little people
  political donations and lobbying

what do these people actually speak about at these private back room get togethers
that leave 99.99 % of the world out
 though they can control a large portion of the economic wealth.

Title: we who voted Trump are stuffed into 7 categories
Post by: ccp on July 01, 2022, 02:34:23 PM
by man who needs to tell us he is gay at the head of the article ( :roll:)

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/07/01/tim-miller-trump-republican-operatives-book-excerpt-00043279

I haven't read beyond the first few paragraphs yet

will enjoy seeing what category I am in .

It never ceases to amaze me how Trump has caused such mental illness in so many people

What is so hard to understand there are 150 million + people in this country who felt they had NO VOICE in DC for their interests and beliefs and Trump finally gave us that voice
(flaws and all)

IT IS REALLY THAT SIMPLE

That does not make me or those who voted for him candidates for psychiatric analysis

my goodness










Title: Nara Police Chief takes responsibility
Post by: ccp on July 09, 2022, 01:12:41 PM
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/jul/9/nara-police-chief-admits-security-failure-takes-re/

I cannot think of a single Federal employee or politician in the US who has ever taken responsibility for anything

other then rarely and in words only.
Title: 2009: Mark Steyn: Live Free or Die
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 07, 2022, 05:51:49 PM
April 2009
Mark Steyn

 
Live Free or Die
 
MARK STEYN'S column appears in several newspapers, including the Washington Times, Philadelphia's Evening Bulletin, and the Orange County Register. In addition, he writes for The New Criterion, Maclean's in Canada, the Jerusalem Post, The Australian, and Hawke's Bay Today in New Zealand. The author of National Review's Happy Warrior column, he also blogs on National Review Online. He is the author of several books, including the best-selling America Alone: The End of The World as We Know It. Mr. Steyn teaches a two-week course in journalism at Hillsdale College during each spring semester.

The following is adapted from a lecture delivered at Hillsdale College on March 9, 2009.

 

MY REMARKS are titled tonight after the words of General Stark, New Hampshire's great hero of the Revolutionary War: "Live free or die!" When I first moved to New Hampshire, where this appears on our license plates, I assumed General Stark had said it before some battle or other—a bit of red meat to rally the boys for the charge; a touch of the old Henry V-at-Agincourt routine. But I soon discovered that the general had made his famous statement decades after the war, in a letter regretting that he would be unable to attend a dinner. And in a curious way I found that even more impressive. In extreme circumstances, many people can rouse themselves to rediscover the primal impulses: The brave men on Flight 93 did. They took off on what they thought was a routine business trip, and, when they realized it wasn't, they went into General Stark mode and cried "Let's roll!" But it's harder to maintain the "Live free or die!" spirit when you're facing not an immediate crisis but just a slow, remorseless, incremental, unceasing ratchet effect. "Live free or die!" sounds like a battle cry: We'll win this thing or die trying, die an honorable death. But in fact it's something far less dramatic: It's a bald statement of the reality of our lives in the prosperous West. You can live as free men, but, if you choose not to, your society will die.

My book America Alone is often assumed to be about radical Islam, firebreathing imams, the excitable young men jumping up and down in the street doing the old "Death to the Great Satan" dance. It's not. It's about us. It's about a possibly terminal manifestation of an old civilizational temptation: Indolence, as Machiavelli understood, is the greatest enemy of a republic. When I ran into trouble with the so-called "human rights" commissions up in Canada, it seemed bizarre to find the progressive left making common cause with radical Islam. One half of the alliance profess to be pro-gay, pro-feminist secularists; the other half are homophobic, misogynist theocrats. Even as the cheap bus 'n' truck road-tour version of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, it made no sense. But in fact what they have in common overrides their superficially more obvious incompatibilities: Both the secular Big Government progressives and political Islam recoil from the concept of the citizen, of the free individual entrusted to operate within his own societal space, assume his responsibilities, and exploit his potential.

In most of the developed world, the state has gradually annexed all the responsibilities of adulthood—health care, child care, care of the elderly—to the point where it's effectively severed its citizens from humanity's primal instincts, not least the survival instinct. Hillary Rodham Clinton said it takes a village to raise a child. It's supposedly an African proverb—there is no record of anyone in Africa ever using this proverb, but let that pass. P.J. O'Rourke summed up that book superbly: It takes a village to raise a child. The government is the village, and you're the child. Oh, and by the way, even if it did take a village to raise a child, I wouldn't want it to be an African village. If you fly over West Africa at night, the lights form one giant coastal megalopolis: Not even Africans regard the African village as a useful societal model. But nor is the European village. Europe's addiction to big government, unaffordable entitlements, cradle-to-grave welfare, and a dependence on mass immigration needed to sustain it has become an existential threat to some of the oldest nation-states in the world.

And now the last holdout, the United States, is embarking on the same grim path: After the President unveiled his budget, I heard Americans complain, oh, it's another Jimmy Carter, or LBJ's Great Society, or the new New Deal. You should be so lucky. Those nickel-and-dime comparisons barely begin to encompass the wholesale Europeanization that's underway. The 44th president's multi-trillion-dollar budget, the first of many, adds more to the national debt than all the previous 43 presidents combined, from George Washington to George Dubya. The President wants Europeanized health care, Europeanized daycare, Europeanized education, and, as the Europeans have discovered, even with Europeanized tax rates you can't make that math add up. In Sweden, state spending accounts for 54% of GDP. In America, it was 34%—ten years ago. Today, it's about 40%. In four years' time, that number will be trending very Swede-like.

But forget the money, the deficit, the debt, the big numbers with the 12 zeroes on the end of them. So-called fiscal conservatives often miss the point. The problem isn't the cost. These programs would still be wrong even if Bill Gates wrote a check to cover them each month. They're wrong because they deform the relationship between the citizen and the state. Even if there were no financial consequences, the moral and even spiritual consequences would still be fatal. That's the stage where Europe is.

America is just beginning this process. I looked at the rankings in Freedom in the 50 States published by George Mason University last month. New Hampshire came in Number One, the Freest State in the Nation, which all but certainly makes it the freest jurisdiction in the Western world. Which kind of depressed me. Because the Granite State feels less free to me than it did when I moved there, and you always hope there's somewhere else out there just in case things go belly up and you have to hit the road. And way down at the bottom in the last five places were Maryland, California, Rhode Island, New Jersey, and the least free state in the Union by some distance, New York.

New York! How does the song go? "If you can make it there, you'll make it anywhere!" If you can make it there, you're some kind of genius. "This is the worst fiscal downturn since the Great Depression," announced Governor Paterson a few weeks ago. So what's he doing? He's bringing in the biggest tax hike in New York history. If you can make it there, he can take it there—via state tax, sales tax, municipal tax, a doubled beer tax, a tax on clothing, a tax on cab rides, an "iTunes tax," a tax on haircuts, 137 new tax hikes in all. Call 1-800-I-HEART-NEW-YORK today and order your new package of state tax forms, for just $199.99, plus the 12% tax on tax forms and the 4% tax form application fee partially refundable upon payment of the 7.5% tax filing tax. If you can make it there, you'll certainly have no difficulty making it in Tajikistan.

New York, California... These are the great iconic American states, the ones we foreigners have heard of. To a penniless immigrant called Arnold Schwarzenegger, California was a land of plenty. Now Arnold is an immigrant of plenty in a penniless land: That's not an improvement. One of his predecessors as governor of California, Ronald Reagan, famously said, "We are a nation that has a government, not the other way around." In California, it's now the other way around: California is increasingly a government that has a state. And it is still in the early stages of the process. California has thirtysomething million people. The Province of Quebec has seven million people. Yet California and Quebec have roughly the same number of government workers. "There is a great deal of ruin in a nation," said Adam Smith, and America still has a long way to go. But it's better to jump off the train as you're leaving the station and it's still picking up speed than when it's roaring down the track and you realize you've got a one-way ticket on the Oblivion Express.

"Indolence," in Machiavelli's word: There are stages to the enervation of free peoples. America, which held out against the trend, is now at Stage One: The benign paternalist state promises to make all those worries about mortgages, debt, and health care disappear. Every night of the week, you can switch on the TV and see one of these ersatz "town meetings" in which freeborn citizens of the republic (I use the term loosely) petition the Sovereign to make all the bad stuff go away. "I have an urgent need," a lady in Fort Myers beseeched the President. "We need a home, our own kitchen, our own bathroom." He took her name and ordered his staff to meet with her. Hopefully, he didn't insult her by dispatching some no-name deputy assistant associate secretary of whatever instead of flying in one of the bigtime tax-avoiding cabinet honchos to nationalize a Florida bank and convert one of its branches into a desirable family residence, with a swing set hanging where the drive-thru ATM used to be.

As all of you know, Hillsdale College takes no federal or state monies. That used to make it an anomaly in American education. It's in danger of becoming an anomaly in America, period. Maybe it's time for Hillsdale College to launch the Hillsdale Insurance Agency, the Hillsdale Motor Company and the First National Bank of Hillsdale. The executive supremo at Bank of America is now saying, oh, if only he'd known what he knows now, he wouldn't have taken the government money. Apparently it comes with strings attached. Who knew? Sure, Hillsdale College did, but nobody else.

If you're a business, when government gives you 2% of your income, it has a veto on 100% of what you do. If you're an individual, the impact is even starker. Once you have government health care, it can be used to justify almost any restraint on freedom: After all, if the state has to cure you, it surely has an interest in preventing you needing treatment in the first place. That's the argument behind, for example, mandatory motorcycle helmets, or the creepy teams of government nutritionists currently going door to door in Britain and conducting a "health audit" of the contents of your refrigerator. They're not yet confiscating your Twinkies; they just want to take a census of how many you have. So you do all this for the "free" health care—and in the end you may not get the "free" health care anyway. Under Britain's National Health Service, for example, smokers in Manchester have been denied treatment for heart disease, and the obese in Suffolk are refused hip and knee replacements. Patricia Hewitt, the British Health Secretary, says that it's appropriate to decline treatment on the basis of "lifestyle choices." Smokers and the obese may look at their gay neighbor having unprotected sex with multiple partners, and wonder why his "lifestyle choices" get a pass while theirs don't. But that's the point: Tyranny is always whimsical.

And if they can't get you on grounds of your personal health, they'll do it on grounds of planetary health. Not so long ago in Britain it was proposed that each citizen should have a government-approved travel allowance. If you take one flight a year, you'll pay just the standard amount of tax on the journey. But, if you travel more frequently, if you take a second or third flight, you'll be subject to additional levies—in the interest of saving the planet for Al Gore's polar bear documentaries and that carbon-offset palace he lives in in Tennessee.

Isn't this the very definition of totalitarianism-lite? The Soviets restricted the movement of people through the bureaucratic apparatus of "exit visas." The British are proposing to do it through the bureaucratic apparatus of exit taxes—indeed, the bluntest form of regressive taxation. As with the Communists, the nomenklatura—the Prince of Wales, Al Gore, Madonna—will still be able to jet about hither and yon. What's a 20% surcharge to them? Especially as those for whom vast amounts of air travel are deemed essential—government officials, heads of NGOs, environmental activists—will no doubt be exempted from having to pay the extra amount. But the ghastly masses will have to stay home.

"Freedom of movement" used to be regarded as a bedrock freedom. The movement is still free, but there's now a government processing fee of $389.95. And the interesting thing about this proposal was that it came not from the Labour Party but the Conservative Party.

 

================

 

That's Stage Two of societal enervation—when the state as guarantor of all your basic needs becomes increasingly comfortable with regulating your behavior. Free peoples who were once willing to give their lives for liberty can be persuaded very quickly to relinquish their liberties for a quiet life. When President Bush talked about promoting democracy in the Middle East, there was a phrase he liked to use: "Freedom is the desire of every human heart." Really? It's unclear whether that's really the case in Gaza and the Pakistani tribal lands. But it's absolutely certain that it's not the case in Berlin and Paris, Stockholm and London, New Orleans and Buffalo. The story of the Western world since 1945 is that, invited to choose between freedom and government "security," large numbers of people vote to dump freedom every time—the freedom to make your own decisions about health care, education, property rights, and a ton of other stuff. It's ridiculous for grown men and women to say: I want to be able to choose from hundreds of cereals at the supermarket, thousands of movies from Netflix, millions of songs to play on my iPod—but I want the government to choose for me when it comes to my health care. A nation that demands the government take care of all the grown-up stuff is a nation turning into the world's wrinkliest adolescent, free only to choose its record collection.

And don't be too sure you'll get to choose your record collection in the end. That's Stage Three: When the populace has agreed to become wards of the state, it's a mere difference of degree to start regulating their thoughts. When my anglophone friends in the Province of Quebec used to complain about the lack of English signs in Quebec hospitals, my response was that, if you allow the government to be the sole provider of health care, why be surprised that they're allowed to decide the language they'll give it in? But, as I've learned during my year in the hellhole of Canadian "human rights" law, that's true in a broader sense. In the interests of "cultural protection," the Canadian state keeps foreign newspaper owners, foreign TV operators, and foreign bookstore owners out of Canada. Why shouldn't it, in return, assume the right to police the ideas disseminated through those newspapers, bookstores and TV networks it graciously agrees to permit?

When Maclean's magazine and I were hauled up in 2007 for the crime of "flagrant Islamophobia," it quickly became very clear that, for members of a profession that brags about its "courage" incessantly (far more than, say, firemen do), an awful lot of journalists are quite content to be the eunuchs in the politically correct harem. A distressing number of Western journalists see no conflict between attending lunches for World Press Freedom Day every month and agreeing to be micro-regulated by the state. The big problem for those of us arguing for classical liberalism is that in modern Canada there's hardly anything left that isn't on the state dripfeed to one degree or another: Too many of the institutions healthy societies traditionally look to as outposts of independent thought—churches, private schools, literature, the arts, the media—either have an ambiguous relationship with government or are downright dependent on it. Up north, "intellectual freedom" means the relevant film-funding agency—Cinedole Canada or whatever it's called—gives you a check to enable you to continue making so-called "bold, brave, transgressive" films that discombobulate state power not a whit.

And then comes Stage Four, in which dissenting ideas and even words are labeled as "hatred." In effect, the language itself becomes a means of control. Despite the smiley-face banalities, the tyranny becomes more naked: In Britain, a land with rampant property crime, undercover constables nevertheless find time to dine at curry restaurants on Friday nights to monitor adjoining tables lest someone in private conversation should make a racist remark. An author interviewed on BBC Radio expressed, very mildly and politely, some concerns about gay adoption and was investigated by Scotland Yard's Community Safety Unit for Homophobic, Racist and Domestic Incidents. A Daily Telegraph columnist is arrested and detained in a jail cell over a joke in a speech. A Dutch legislator is invited to speak at the Palace of Westminster by a member of the House of Lords, but is banned by the government, arrested on arrival at Heathrow and deported.

America, Britain, and even Canada are not peripheral nations: They're the three anglophone members of the G7. They're three of a handful of countries that were on the right side of all the great conflicts of the last century. But individual liberty flickers dimmer in each of them. The massive expansion of government under the laughable euphemism of "stimulus" (Stage One) comes with a quid pro quo down the line (Stage Two): Once you accept you're a child in the government nursery, why shouldn't Nanny tell you what to do? And then—Stage Three—what to think? And—Stage Four—what you're forbidden to think . . . .

Which brings us to the final stage: As I said at the beginning, Big Government isn't about the money. It's more profound than that. A couple of years back Paul Krugman wrote a column in The New York Times asserting that, while parochial American conservatives drone on about "family values," the Europeans live it, enacting policies that are more "family friendly." On the Continent, claims the professor, "government regulations actually allow people to make a desirable tradeoff-to modestly lower income in return for more time with friends and family."

As befits a distinguished economist, Professor Krugman failed to notice that for a continent of "family friendly" policies, Europe is remarkably short of families. While America's fertility rate is more or less at replacement level—2.1—seventeen European nations are at what demographers call "lowest-low" fertility—1.3 or less—a rate from which no society in human history has ever recovered. Germans, Spaniards, Italians and Greeks have upside-down family trees: four grandparents have two children and one grandchild. How can an economist analyze "family friendly" policies without noticing that the upshot of these policies is that nobody has any families?

As for all that extra time, what happened? Europeans work fewer hours than Americans, they don't have to pay for their own health care, they're post-Christian so they don't go to church, they don't marry and they don't have kids to take to school and basketball and the 4-H stand at the county fair. So what do they do with all the time?

Forget for the moment Europe's lack of world-beating companies: They regard capitalism as an Anglo-American fetish, and they mostly despise it. But what about the things Europeans supposedly value? With so much free time, where is the great European art? Where are Europe's men of science? At American universities. Meanwhile, Continental governments pour fortunes into prestigious white elephants of Euro-identity, like the Airbus A380, capable of carrying 500, 800, a thousand passengers at a time, if only somebody somewhere would order the darn thing, which they might consider doing once all the airports have built new runways to handle it.

"Give people plenty and security, and they will fall into spiritual torpor," wrote Charles Murray in In Our Hands. "When life becomes an extended picnic, with nothing of importance to do, ideas of greatness become an irritant. Such is the nature of the Europe syndrome."

The key word here is "give." When the state "gives" you plenty—when it takes care of your health, takes cares of your kids, takes care of your elderly parents, takes care of every primary responsibility of adulthood—it's not surprising that the citizenry cease to function as adults: Life becomes a kind of extended adolescence—literally so for those Germans who've mastered the knack of staying in education till they're 34 and taking early retirement at 42. Hilaire Belloc, incidentally, foresaw this very clearly in his book The Servile State in 1912. He understood that the long-term cost of a welfare society is the infantilization of the population.

Genteel decline can be very agreeable—initially: You still have terrific restaurants, beautiful buildings, a great opera house. And once the pressure's off it's nice to linger at the sidewalk table, have a second café au lait and a pain au chocolat, and watch the world go by. At the Munich Security Conference in February, President Sarkozy demanded of his fellow Continentals, "Does Europe want peace, or do we want to be left in peace?" To pose the question is to answer it. Alas, it only works for a generation or two. And it's hard to come up with a wake-up call for a society as dedicated as latterday Europe to the belief that life is about sleeping in.

As Gerald Ford liked to say when trying to ingratiate himself with conservative audiences, "A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you have." And that's true. But there's an intermediate stage: A government big enough to give you everything you want isn't big enough to get you to give any of it back. That's the position European governments find themselves in. Their citizens have become hooked on unaffordable levels of social programs which in the end will put those countries out of business. Just to get the Social Security debate in perspective, projected public pension liabilities are expected to rise by 2040 to about 6.8% of GDP in the U.S. In Greece, the figure is 25%—i.e., total societal collapse. So what? shrug the voters. Not my problem. I want my benefits. The crisis isn't the lack of money, but the lack of citizens—in the meaningful sense of that word.

Every Democrat running for election tells you they want to do this or that "for the children." If America really wanted to do something "for the children," it could try not to make the same mistake as most of the rest of the Western world and avoid bequeathing the next generation a leviathan of bloated bureaucracy and unsustainable entitlements that turns the entire nation into a giant Ponzi scheme. That's the real "war on children" (to use another Democrat catchphrase)—and every time you bulk up the budget you make it less and less likely they'll win it.

Conservatives often talk about "small government," which, in a sense, is framing the issue in leftist terms: they're for big government. But small government gives you big freedoms—and big government leaves you with very little freedom. The bailout and the stimulus and the budget and the trillion-dollar deficits are not merely massive transfers from the most dynamic and productive sector to the least dynamic and productive. When governments annex a huge chunk of the economy, they also annex a huge chunk of individual liberty. You fundamentally change the relationship between the citizen and the state into something closer to that of junkie and pusher—and you make it very difficult ever to change back. Americans face a choice: They can rediscover the animating principles of the American idea—of limited government, a self-reliant citizenry, and the opportunities to exploit your talents to the fullest—or they can join most of the rest of the Western world in terminal decline. To rekindle the spark of liberty once it dies is very difficult. The inertia, the ennui, the fatalism is more pathetic than the demographic decline and fiscal profligacy of the social democratic state, because it's subtler and less tangible. But once in a while it swims into very sharp focus. Here is the writer Oscar van den Boogaard from an interview with the Belgian paper De Standaard. Mr. van den Boogaard, a Dutch gay "humanist" (which is pretty much the trifecta of Eurocool), was reflecting on the accelerating Islamification of the Continent and concluding that the jig was up for the Europe he loved. "I am not a warrior, but who is?" he shrugged. "I have never learned to fight for my freedom. I was only good at enjoying it." In the famous Kubler-Ross five stages of grief, Mr. van den Boogard is past denial, anger, bargaining and depression, and has arrived at a kind of acceptance.

"I have never learned to fight for my freedom. I was only good at enjoying it." Sorry, doesn't work—not for long. Back in New Hampshire, General Stark knew that. Mr. van den Boogard's words are an epitaph for Europe. Whereas New Hampshire's motto—"Live free or die!"—is still the greatest rallying cry for this state or any other. About a year ago, there was a picture in the papers of Iranian students demonstrating in Tehran and waving placards. And what they'd written on those placards was: "Live free or die!" They understand the power of those words; so should we.

http://www.hillsdale.edu/news/imprimis/archive/issue.asp?year=2009&month=04
Title: origin of "narcissism
Post by: ccp on August 08, 2022, 12:47:11 PM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissus_(mythology)

basically in love only with oneself.

do we know anyone like this?
Title: Kunstler: The Wild West
Post by: G M on August 29, 2022, 10:06:12 PM
https://www.theburningplatform.com/2022/08/29/the-wild-west/#more-278277

The Wild West
Guest Post by Jim Kunstler


Yes, things are wilding up nicely in Western Civ as we bid farewell to summer and the elites return from their sacrosanct vacations to the task of crashing our world. You can feel it in every quarter of public and private life. Funny, especially, is the Party of Chaos trying to label their opponents as “fascists” — by which they mean anyone opposed to chaos, the “Joe Biden” regime’s preferred mode of existence.


The West’s biggest project these days, the war it provoked over Ukraine, turned out to be a giant Acme land-mine under the West’s collective Wile E. Coyote ass. As Russia advances implacably there and financial sanctions fizzle, behold the scramble in Europe now among citizens desperate to not freeze to death in the months ahead. This is the third time in a hundred-odd years that Germany has attempted suicide, and this time it looks like it’s going to work. Farewell nice German cars, machine tools, and other symbols of industrial might. In feckless Poland, the folks are out gathering lumps of coal and scouring the forest floor for firewood — they’re forbidden by law from cutting standing timber. Mr. Macron tells France she must accept “reduced living standards.” Looks like Brexit did not go far enough as the UK holds hands with the rest of NATO tromping into economic oblivion.

Think the USA is doing better? The summer rally in financial markets was just another frame in the Loony Tunes festival that American life has become. The Fed Chair, Mr. Powell, said all the parts out loud at the annual Jackson Hole banker meet-up last week: look out below, we’ve decided to take this sucker down (in the immortal words of George W. Bush), since pretending to stoke prosperity via Modern Monetary Theory only results in, duh, ruinous inflation. This raises the question, though, as to which is more politically damaging: inflation or depression? It is really only the difference between having plenty of worthless money or having no money at all.

The institutional rot eating away at our national underpinnings got more exposed last week when Mark Zuckerberg stupidly blurted to Joe Rogan that, yes, in the fall of 2020 the FBI warned Facebook — “came to the folks on our team,” he said — about a Russian disinformation campaign underway, wink wink. And so, Facebook turned the volume down to zero on certain news about a laptop belonging to one Hunter Biden stuffed with selfie porn (prostitutes included), video evidence of narcotics use, and deal memos about worldwide influence peddling involving the whole dang Biden family. FBI chief Chris Wray quickly jumped in to clarify that the FBI “routinely notifies U.S. private sector entities, including social media providers, of potential threat information, so that they can decide how to better defend against threats.”

Roger that. The part Mr. Wray left out was that he and everybody else on the fabled seventh floor of the J. Edgar Hoover building knew darn well that the Biden laptop story was not Russian Disinfo, raising the question: who do they now think is supposed to believe the FBI’s obvious bullshit? And why is Chris Wray still running the FBI? And, of course, Mr. Zuckerberg surely knew the truth of the matter as well — though at the time he was busy shoveling more than $300-million into election swing districts for the express purpose of changing-out local officials with his own crew to queer the balloting in favor of international grifter “Joe Biden.”

The inventory of lies retailed by the FBI is so vast and gross that the agency had to resort to raiding Mar-a-Lago three weeks ago in defiance of all known precedent and settled law regarding presidential records. The reason: Mr. Trump, the former president, had exactly such a cataloged inventory of the FBI lies used during his term in office to overthrow him with the Crossfire Hurricane nonsense, and was prepared to introduce said evidence in the lawsuit he has initiated in a Florida federal court against Hillary Clinton and a rogue’s gallery of campaign aides and allied federal officials who assisted in concocting the RussiaGate operation. The aim of the Mar-a-Lago raid: to un-declassify all that material — via a probably illegal order by “Joe Biden” — so as to prevent it from being introduced as evidence in the lawsuit. Somehow, the news media failed to report that part of the story, and even the alt media has missed that last detail.

And now, despite walking back their guideline Covid-19 policies this month, the CDC and its sister public health agencies are ready to push a new edition of Big Pharma’s Covid (so-called) “vaccines,” despite visibly rising all-causes death numbers across Western Civ that appear, more and more, attributable only to the “vaccines.” The vaxx-happy bureaucracy will not be stopped by the captive federal justice system but the attorneys general of fifty states could each act against the program, which has violated every module of the Nuremberg Code against human medical experimentation, as well as US law. It may be too late for the medical profession to redeem its lost sacred honor.

The catch here is that, at this point in the disgraceful story, only Woked-up liberals vying for the Darwin Award will fall for the new vaxxes. Everybody else is onto the scam and hip to the danger, and mandates have worn out their welcome. Liberal Wokery has turned out to be a form of stupidly booby-trapped, self-limiting neo-Nazism. There is your Party of Chaos in a nutshell.

It remains for Mr. Trump to renounce his support for the evil fruits of the Warp Speed operation he presided over. He must face the fact that he was played, and he may be forgiven, considering all the evidence coming recently from the likes of Deborah Birx and others that he was lied to and manipulated. But he doesn’t have much more time to get it right, or else his political career will be over well before the 2024 election. That may be all for the better. America probably needs a clean sweep of our desecrated political landscape. All in all, Mr. Trump was a good soldier, brave and resolute under tremendous adversity, but he’s not the only one who can lead our country back to itself.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 30, 2022, 12:49:23 AM
"It remains for Mr. Trump to renounce his support for the evil fruits of the Warp Speed operation he presided over. He must face the fact that he was played, and he may be forgiven, considering all the evidence coming recently from the likes of Deborah Birx and others that he was lied to and manipulated. But he doesn’t have much more time to get it right, or else his political career will be over well before the 2024 election. That may be all for the better. America probably needs a clean sweep of our desecrated political landscape. All in all, Mr. Trump was a good soldier, brave and resolute under tremendous adversity, but he’s not the only one who can lead our country back to itself."
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: G M on August 30, 2022, 07:51:26 AM
"It remains for Mr. Trump to renounce his support for the evil fruits of the Warp Speed operation he presided over. He must face the fact that he was played, and he may be forgiven, considering all the evidence coming recently from the likes of Deborah Birx and others that he was lied to and manipulated. But he doesn’t have much more time to get it right, or else his political career will be over well before the 2024 election. That may be all for the better. America probably needs a clean sweep of our desecrated political landscape. All in all, Mr. Trump was a good soldier, brave and resolute under tremendous adversity, but he’s not the only one who can lead our country back to itself."

They are already getting ready to blame Trump for the ClotShot atrocity.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on August 30, 2022, 08:27:33 AM
I agree with this portion only
of CD post above:

"All in all, Mr. Trump was a good soldier, brave and resolute under tremendous adversity, but he’s not the only one who can lead our country back to itself."

Title: The Psychology of Totalitarianism
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 01, 2022, 01:35:35 AM
https://www.theepochtimes.com/the-psychology-of-totalitarianism_4702827.html?utm_source=Opinion&utm_campaign=opinion-2022-08-31&utm_medium=email&est=EK1Id1vLVoE%2BjlpFECendBZr9%2F73PmRBXw%2FY91C7vZ%2B5LbLt3a1gc5b8jwEEk20TvAnB

The Psychology of Totalitarianism (theepochtimes.com)
August 31, 2022

At the end of February 2020, the global village began to shake on its foundations. The world was presented with a foreboding crisis, the consequences of which were incalculable. In a matter of weeks, everyone was gripped by the story of a virus—a story that was undoubtedly based on facts. But on which ones?

We caught a first glimpse of “the facts” via footage from China. A virus forced the Chinese government to take the most draconian measures. Entire cities were quarantined, new hospitals were built hastily, and individuals in white suits disinfected public spaces. Here and there, rumors emerged that the totalitarian Chinese government was overreacting and that the new virus was no worse than the flu. Opposite opinions were also floating around: that it must be much worse than it looked, because otherwise no government would take such radical measures. At that point, everything still felt far removed from our shores and we assumed that the story did not allow us to gauge the full extent of the facts.

Until the moment that the virus arrived in Europe. We then began recording infections and deaths for ourselves. We saw images of overcrowded emergency rooms in Italy, convoys of army vehicles transporting corpses, morgues full of coffins. The renowned scientists at Imperial College confidently predicted that without the most drastic measures, the virus would claim tens of millions of lives. In Bergamo, sirens blared day and night, silencing any voice in a public space that dared to doubt the emerging narrative. From then on, story and facts seemed to merge and uncertainty gave way to certainty.

The unimaginable became reality: we witnessed the abrupt pivot of nearly every country on Earth to follow China’s example and place huge populations of people under de facto house arrest, a situation for which the term “lockdown” was coined. An eerie silence descended—ominous and liberating at the same time. The sky without airplanes, traffic arteries without vehicles; dust settling on the standstill of billions of people’s individual pursuits and desires. In India, the air became so pure that, for the first time in thirty years, in some places the Himalayas became once more visible against the horizon.

It didn’t stop there. We also saw a remarkable transfer of power. Expert virologists were called upon as Orwell’s pigs—the smartest animals on the farm—to replace the unreliable politicians. They would run the animal farm with accurate (“scientific”) information. But these experts soon turned out to have quite a few common, human flaws. In their statistics and graphs they made mistakes that even “ordinary” people would not easily make. It went so far that, at one point, they counted all deaths as corona deaths, including people who had died of, say, heart attacks.

Nor did they live up to their promises. These experts pledged that the Gates to Freedom would re-open after two doses of the vaccine, but then they contrived the need for a third. Like Orwell’s pigs, they changed the rules overnight. First, the animals had to comply with the measures because the number of sick people could not exceed the capacity of the health care system (flatten the curve). But one day, everyone woke up to discover writing on the walls stating that the measures were being extended because the virus had to be eradicated (crush the curve). Eventually, the rules changed so often that only the pigs seemed to know them. And even the pigs weren’t so sure.

Some people began to nurture suspicions. How is it possible that these experts make mistakes that even laymen wouldn’t make? Aren’t they scientists, the kind of people who took us to the moon and gave us the internet? They can’t be that stupid, can they? What is their endgame? Their recommendations take us further down the road in the same direction: with each new step, we lose more of our freedoms, until we reach a final destination where human beings are reduced to QR codes in a large technocratic medical experiment.

That’s how most people eventually became certain. Very certain. But of diametrically opposed viewpoints. Some people became certain that we were dealing with a killer virus, that would kill millions. Others became certain that it was nothing more than the seasonal flu. Still others became certain that the virus did not even exist and that we were dealing with a worldwide conspiracy. And there were also a few who continued to tolerate uncertainty and kept asking themselves: how can we adequately understand what is going on?

In the beginning of the coronavirus crisis I found myself making a choice—I would speak out. Before the crisis, I frequently lectured at University and I presented on academic conferences worldwide. When the crisis started, I intuitively decided that I would speak out in public space, this time not addressing the academic world, but society in general. I would speak out and try to bring to peoples’ attention that there was something dangerous out there, not “the virus” itself so much as the fear and technocratic–totalitarian social dynamics it was stirring up.

I was in a good position to warn for the psychological risks of the corona narrative. I could draw on my knowledge of individual psychological processes (I am a lecturing professor at Ghent University, Belgium); my Ph.D. on the dramatically poor quality of academic research which taught me that we can never take “science” for granted; my master degree in statistics which allowed me to see through statistical deception and illusions; my knowledge of mass psychology; my philosophical explorations of the limits and destructive psychological effects of the mechanist-rationalist view on man and the world; and last but not least, my investigations into the effects of speech on the human being and the quintessential importance of “Truth Speech” in particular.

In the first week of the crisis, March 2020, I published an opinion paper titled “The Fear of the Virus Is More Dangerous Than the Virus Itself.” I had analyzed the statistics and mathematical models on which the coronavirus narrative was based and immediately saw that they all dramatically overrated the dangerousness of the virus. A few months later, by the end of May 2020, this impression had been confirmed beyond the shadow of a doubt. There were no countries, including those that didn’t go into lockdown, in which the virus claimed the enormous number of casualties the models predicted it would. Sweden was perhaps the best example. According to the models, at least 60,000 people would die if the country didn’t go into lockdown. It didn’t, and only 6,000 people died.

As much as I (and others) tried to bring this to the attention of society, it didn’t have much effect. People continued to go along with the narrative. That was the moment when I decided to focus on something else, namely on the psychological processes that were at work in society and that could explain how people can become so radically blind and continued to buy into a narrative so utterly absurd. It took me a few months to realize that what was going on in society was a worldwide process of mass formation.

In the summer of 2020, I wrote an opinion paper about this phenomenon which soon became well known in Holland and Belgium. About one year later (summer 2021) Reiner Fuellmich invited me onto Corona Ausschuss, a weekly live-stream discussion between lawyers and both experts and witnesses about the coronavirus crisis, to explain about mass formation. From there, my theory spread to the rest of Europe and the United States, where it was picked up by such people as Dr. Robert Malone, Dr. Peter McCullough, Michael Yeadon, Eric Clapton, and Robert Kennedy.

After Robert Malone talked about mass formation on the Joe Rogan Experience, the term became a buzz word and for a few days was the most searched for term on Twitter. Since then, my theory has met with enthusiasm but also with harsh criticism.

What is mass formation actually? It’s a specific kind of group formation that makes people radically blind to everything that goes against what the group believes in. In this way, they take the most absurd beliefs for granted. To give one example, during the Iran revolution in 1979, a mass formation emerged and people started to believe that the portrait of their leader—Ayatollah Khomeini—was visible on the surface of the moon.

Each time there was a full moon in the sky, people in the street would point at it, showing each other where exactly Khomeini’s face could be seen.
A second characteristic of an individual in the grip of mass formation is that they become willing to radically sacrifice individual interest for the sake of the collective. The communist leaders who were sentenced to death by Stalin—usually innocent of the charges against them—accepted their sentences, sometimes with statements such as, “If that is what I can do for the Communist Party, I will do it with pleasure.”

Thirdly, individuals in mass formation become radically intolerant for dissonant voices. In the ultimate stage of the mass formation, they will typically commit atrocities toward those who do not go along with the masses. And even more characteristic: they will do so as if it is their ethical duty. To refer to the revolution in Iran again: I’ve spoken with an Iranian woman who had seen with her own eyes how a mother reported her son to the state and hung the noose with her own hands around his neck when he was on the scaffold. And after he was killed, she claimed to be a heroine for doing what she did.

Those are the effects of mass formation. Such processes can emerge in different ways. It can emerge spontaneously (as happened in Nazi Germany), or it can be intentionally provoked through indoctrination and propaganda (as happened in the Soviet Union). But if it is not constantly supported by indoctrination and propaganda disseminated through mass media, it will usually be short-lived and will not develop into a full-fledged totalitarian state. Whether it initially emerged spontaneously or was provoked intentionally from the beginning, no mass formation, however, can continue to exist for any length of time unless it is constantly fed by indoctrination and propaganda disseminated through mass media. If this happens, mass formation becomes the basis of an entirely new kind of state that emerged for the first time in the beginning of the twentieth century: the totalitarian state. This kind of state has an extremely destructive impact on the population because it doesn’t only control public and political space—as classical dictatorships do—but also private space. It can do the latter because it has a huge secret police at its disposal: this part of the population that is in the grip of the mass formation and that fanatically believes in the narratives distributed by the elite through mass media. In this way, totalitarianism is always based on “a diabolic pact between the masses and the elite” (see Arendt, “The Origins of Totalitarianism”).

I second an intuition articulated by Hannah Arendt in 1951: a new totalitarianism is emerging in our society. Not a communist or fascist totalitarianism but a technocratic totalitarianism. A kind of totalitarianism that is not led by “a gang leader” such as Stalin or Hitler but by dull bureaucrats and technocrats. As always, a certain part of the population will resist and won’t fall prey to the mass formation. If this part of the population makes the right choices, it will ultimately be victorious. If it makes the wrong choices, it will perish. To see what the right choices are, we have to start from a profound and accurate analysis of the nature of the phenomenon of mass formation. If we do so, we will clearly see what the right choices are, both at strategic and at the ethical levels. That’s what my book “The Psychology of Totalitarianism” presents: a historical–psychological analysis of the rise of the masses throughout the last few hundreds of years as it led to the emergence of totalitarianism.

The coronavirus crisis did not come out of the blue. It fits into a series of increasingly desperate and self-destructive societal responses to objects of fear: terrorists, global warming, coronavirus. Whenever a new object of fear arises in society, there is only one response: increased control. Meanwhile, human beings can only tolerate a certain amount of control. Coercive control leads to fear and fear leads to more coercive control. In this way, society falls victim to a vicious cycle that leads inevitably to totalitarianism (i.e., extreme government control) and ends in the radical destruction of both the psychological and physical integrity of human beings.

We have to consider the current fear and psychological discomfort to be a problem in itself, a problem that cannot be reduced to a virus or any other “object of threat.” Our fear originates on a completely different level—that of the failure of the Grand Narrative of our society. This is the narrative of mechanistic science, in which man is reduced to a biological organism. A narrative that ignores the psychological, spiritual, and ethical dimensions of human beings and thereby has a devastating effect at the level of human relationships. Something in this narrative causes man to become isolated from his fellow man, and from nature. Something in it causes man to stop resonating with the world around him. Something in it turns human beings into atomized subjects. It is precisely this atomized subject that, according to Hannah Arendt, is the elementary building block of the totalitarian state.

At the level of the population, the mechanist ideology created the conditions that make people vulnerable for mass formation. It disconnected people from their natural and social environment, created experiences of radical absence of meaning and purpose in life, and it led to extremely high levels of so-called “free-floating” anxiety, frustration, and aggression, meaning anxiety, frustration, and aggression that is not connected with a mental representation; anxiety, frustration, and aggression in which people don’t know what they feel anxious, frustrated, and aggressive about. It is in this state that people become vulnerable to mass formation.

The mechanist ideology also had a specific effect at the level of the “elite”—it changed their psychological characteristics. Before the Enlightenment, society was led by noblemen and clergy (the “ancien régime”). This elite imposed its will on the masses in an overt way through its authority. This authority was granted by the religious Grand Narratives that held a firm grip on people’s minds. As the religious narratives lost their grip and modern democratic ideology emerged, this changed. The leaders now had to be elected by the masses. And in order to be elected by the masses, they had to find out what the masses wanted and more or less give it to them. Hence, the leaders actually became followers.

This problem was met in a rather predictable but pernicious way. If the masses cannot be commanded, they have to be manipulated. That’s where modern indoctrination and propaganda was born, as it is described in the works of people such as Lippman, Trotter, and Bernays. We will go through the work of the founding fathers of propaganda in order to fully grasp the societal function and impact of propaganda on society.

Indoctrination and propaganda are usually associated with totalitarian states such as the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, or the People’s Republic of China. But it is easy to show that from the beginning of the twentieth century, indoctrination and propaganda were also constantly used in virtually every “democratic” state worldwide. Besides these two, we will describe other techniques of mass-manipulation, such as brainwashing and psychological warfare.

In modern times, the explosive proliferation of mass surveillance technology led to new and previously unimaginable means for the manipulation of the masses. And emerging technological advances promise a completely new set of manipulation techniques, where the mind is materially manipulated through technological devices inserted in the human body and brain. At least that’s the plan. It’s not clear yet to what extent the mind will cooperate.

Totalitarianism is not a historical coincidence. It is the logical consequence of mechanistic thinking and the delusional belief in the omnipotence of human rationality. As such, totalitarianism is a defining feature of the Enlightenment tradition. Several authors have postulated this, but it hasn’t yet been subjected to a psychological analysis. I decided to try to fill this gap, which is why I wrote “The Psychology of Totalitarianism.” It analyzes the psychology of totalitarianism and situates it within the broader context of the social phenomena of which it forms a part.

It is not my aim with the book to focus on that which is usually associated with totalitarianism—concentration camps, indoctrination, propaganda—but rather the broader cultural–historical processes from which totalitarianism emerges. This approach allows us to focus on what matters most: the conditions that surround us in our daily lives, from which totalitarianism takes root, grows, and thrives.

Ultimately, my book explores the possibilities of finding a way out of the current cultural impasse in which we appear to be stuck. The escalating social crises of the early twenty-first century are the manifestation of an underlying psychological and ideological upheaval—a shift of the tectonic plates on which a worldview rests. We are experiencing the moment in which an old ideology rears up in power, one last time, before collapsing. Each attempt to remediate the current social problems, whatever they may be, on the basis of the old ideology will only make things worse. One cannot solve a problem using the same mindset that created it. The solution to our fear and uncertainty does not lie in the increase of (technological) control. The real task facing us as individuals and as a society is to envision a new view of humankind and the world, to find a new foundation for our identity, to formulate new principles for living together with others, and to reclaim a timely human capacity—Truth Speech.

Originally published on the author’s Substack, reposted from the Brownstone Institute
Title: George Friedman: America's Institutional Crisis
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 06, 2022, 03:35:06 AM
September 6, 2022
View On Website
Open as PDF

    
America’s Institutional Crisis
By: George Friedman

In my latest book, “The Storm Before the Calm,” I predicted that the U.S. would go through a massive social crisis in the 2020s. That prediction has obviously come to pass. I also forecast that America would go through its fourth institutional crisis. The previous three all followed existential wars and transformed the governing institutions.

The first came after the Revolutionary War, which eliminated British imperial rule and installed a union of states and a republican form of government. The second, some 80 years later, came after the Civil War, which established the primacy of the federal government over the states. Eighty years after that, World War II extended the power of the federal government over American society and put in place a technocratic government – that is, a government of experts.

We are now 80 or so years removed from World War II, and the nature of this new institutional crisis is becoming clear. It started when the COVID-19 pandemic revealed how ineffective a federal technocracy is in imposing solutions over a vast and diverse continent. As I argued in “The Storm Before the Calm,” experts are essential but insufficient when it comes to governance. Their fundamental weakness is that expertise in one area can be insensitive to or ignorant of the problems their solutions create. Medical institutions did the best they could do under the circumstances, but their solutions disrupted the production and distribution of goods and alienated people from one another. Governance is the art of seeing the whole. Physicians tend to see only their own domain. The federal government responded to expertise in one area without creating systems of competing expertise, and it often failed to recognize the variability of circumstances that the founders envisioned.

Now another important dimension of the institutional shift is taking place: the crisis of universities. Universities have been central to the moral functioning of the United States since Thomas Jefferson required that all new states admitted to the republic fund universities. He saw them as essential in the cultivation of expertise and in creating an educated elite armed with varied knowledge essential to the regime. Over time, universities, and especially elite universities, tended to exclude prospective students and teachers who were not already part of the elite, and thus tended to suppress ideas offensive to elite values.

The GI Bill disrupted the system by welcoming soldiers into universities regardless of background. Many of them already had elements of technical expertise, thanks to their time in the armed services, and they knew too much about life not to doubt the self-certainties of their professors. This development helped create a massive professional class with highly specific areas of knowledge. That notion of expertise fed the emerging principle of government. It accepted diversity as a principle, except that its proponents weren’t always aware of, let alone concerned about, those their definition of diversity excluded. The university was therefore the pivot to the elite. It always develops cultural idiosyncrasies that overlay its function, but it also remains a foundation of the institutional structure. The university has again developed strange dynamics, but it has also developed in a direction that is deeply linked to the federal system. The problem is that students must take out outlandish loans to pay for the outlandishly high price of higher education. Given the existence of a federal lending program that linked available credit to the cost of education, universities had little incentive to control costs. The lending program was linked to cost, and the cost could rise because the available loans, in general, increased in tandem.

At the time that I wrote “The Storm Before the Calm,” student debt stood at about $1.34 trillion. This was roughly equal to the amount borrowed by subprime homeowners prior to 2008. A massive default on student loans would create problems at least on the order of the subprime mortgage crisis. The government control system was used warily, not wanting to upset an unqualified class of borrowers for political reasons or lenders who were reaping substantial profits before the collapse. The government wanted to be as inclusive as possible; it couldn’t risk excluding an “unqualified” class of people from borrowing, and it wanted to take advantage of the large constituencies endemic to large universities. The debt burden assumed by students was staggering, and universities kept increasing costs, and thus increasing the debt, hoping to ride the train as long as they could. The recent decision to bail out students, then, is the least of the issues. How the government allowed the situation to get to this point is the issue.

Ohio State University charges $23,000 a year for in-state residents, including room and board. Harvard University charges nearly $100,000 per year. These prices (which do not include financial aid outside of loans) reached this level in 2019 on an intensifying curve, a curve made possible by the government acting like a subprime lender. The likelihood of repayment was questionable at best, but it went on anyway.

Why is college so expensive to begin with? First, there is the lavish campus replete with things like tennis courts and other features disconnected from education. I went to the City College of New York many years ago, when it was bare bones but sported superb professors. I then went to graduate school at Cornell. I loved it and still love going back. The campus is beautiful, and seeing the Finger Lakes and hearing the chimes is a great pleasure. But the fact is that the land on which Cornell is situated and the buildings are worth a fortune, and the pleasure I got from this did not address the fact that professors are essential to a university and the rest is marketing to get students to spend their borrowed money there rather than elsewhere. Columbia University is in Manhattan, some of the most expensive real estate in the world. If it sold its facilities there and moved to let’s say Queens, with the money placed in a trust, it could lower the cost of tuition dramatically.

The university has become a central part of the social crisis demanding fealty to values rather than inviting debate over those values. But that’s a discussion for a later date. The student loan crisis is the result of a major institution running out of control with the tacit permission of the government. This was partly political in that borrowers had parents, and parents voted. But there was a deeper problem: The experts running the student loan system focused on the benefits of education without measuring the costs. Those charged with charting the development of the economy had as their constituency banks, which, of course, love loans.

The basic argument in my book is that technocracy is built on experts, and that experts, while necessary, tend to have a narrow focus. To lack generalists is to lack common sense, and a lack of common sense gave us another train wreck, one that will end with a transformation of how government works.

It should be noted that the systemic shifts of the past required major wars to compel change. All were existential in the sense that the republic was at stake. The war in Ukraine does not have that much weight for the United States. With only three prior institutional shifts, we don’t have enough examples to be certain war is required. Or there is a nasty one coming.
Title: Victor Davis Hanson!
Post by: DougMacG on September 06, 2022, 04:51:03 AM
https://amgreatness.com/2022/09/04/how-old-bad-ideas-become-wonderful/

More insightful and relevant than ever.  Read it all and spread it. 

Giving up, giving in to these lunatics is not the right answer.
Title: the New Marxism
Post by: ccp on September 06, 2022, 09:47:17 AM
VDH

the new "EF Hutton"

when he speaks - I LISTEN!

there was a great talk on radio the other night a week ago. Damn it if I cannot remember exactly who or when it was

person was describing how the New Marxists - eager to use the their strategy of dividing populations as a means to break them up and recast them has found race culture and sexual differences to to break up the US
IN the past it was always about class

Class divisions
 workers vs proletariat
 
now it is white vs black
 gay vs non gay
 still rich vs poor but the rich can now buy their way out .....

every crack in society

they poor water into those cracks
and then with the freeze the cracks get bigger until
 they crack the nation apart

and those in control
the PARTY
and all those who support make us into comrades

There was more but I missed it
I wish I could find it now

I started Levins book, American Marxism,  but did not finish
probably he gets into this too.

 
Title: WSJ: Lance Morrow: Biden's Speech Had It All Backward
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 06, 2022, 11:23:42 AM
Biden’s Speech Had It All Backward
Biden’s Democrats seek a one-party state. Trump’s followers want freedom from government power.
By Lance Morrow
Sept. 4, 2022 9:08 am ET


The Democrats have the “fascist” business wrong.

Donald Trump isn’t a fascist, or even a semi-fascist, in President Biden’s term. Mr. Trump is an opportunist. His ideology is coextensive with his temperament: In both, he is an anarcho-narcissist. He is Elmer Gantry, or the Music Man, if Harold Hill had been trained in the black arts by Roy Cohn. He is what you might get by crossing the Wizard of Oz with Willie Sutton, who explained that he robbed banks because “that’s where the money is.”

As for Mr. Trump’s followers, they belong to the Church of American Nostalgia. They are Norman Rockwellians, or Eisenhowerites. They regard themselves, not without reason, as the last sane Americans. You might think of them as American masculinity in exile; like James Fenimore Cooper’s Natty Bumppo, living in the forest has made their manners rough.

If there are fascists in America these days, they are apt to be found among the tribes of the left. They are Mr. Biden and his people (including the lion’s share of the media), whose opinions have, since Jan. 6, 2021, hardened into absolute faith that any party or political belief system except their own is illegitimate—impermissible, inhuman, monstrous and (a nice touch) a threat to democracy. The evolution of their overprivileged emotions—their sentimentality gone fanatic—has led them, in 2022, to embrace Mussolini’s formula: “All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.” Or against the party. (People forget, if they ever knew it, that both Hitler and Mussolini began as socialists). The state and the Democratic Party must speak and act as one, suppressing all dissent. America must conform to the orthodoxy—to the Chinese finger-traps of diversity-or-else and open borders—and rejoice in mandatory drag shows and all such theater of “gender.” Meantime, their man in the White House invokes emergency powers to forgive student debt and their thinkers wonder whether the Constitution and the separation of powers are all they’re cracked up to be.

Mr. Trump and his followers, believe it or not, are essentially antifascists: They want the state to stand aside, to impose the least possible interference and allow market forces and entrepreneurial energies to work. Freedom isn’t fascism. Mr. Biden and his vast tribe are essentially enemies of freedom, although most of them haven’t thought the matter through. Freedom, the essential American value, isn’t on their minds. They desire maximum—that is, total—state or party control of all aspects of American life, including what people say and think. Seventy-four years after George Orwell wrote “1984,” such control (by way of surveillance cameras, social-media companies and the Internal Revenue Service, now to be shockingly augmented by 87,000 new employees) is entirely feasible. The left yearns for power and authoritarian order. It is Faust’s bargain; freedom is forfeit.

Mr. Trump, the canniest showman in the White House since Franklin D. Roosevelt, introduced into 21st-century politics what seemed to be new idioms of hatred, a freestyle candor of the id. Doing so, he provoked his enemies—and finally Mr. Biden—to respond in kind: a big mistake. In the early 1950s, when Sen. Joseph McCarthy was loose in the land, and roughly half the country supported his anticommunist inquisition, President Eisenhower wisely decided, “I will not get into the gutter with this guy.” It took a while for McCarthy to implode.


When Mr. Biden spoke in Philadelphia the other night, he might have been thinking of FDR’s speech at Madison Square Garden on the night of Oct. 31, 1936, at the end of his presidential campaign against Alf Landon—and, by the way, three months before he tried to pack the Supreme Court. That night, Roosevelt boasted that his enemies (Republicans, plutocrats, et al.) “are unanimous in their hate for me.” With a flourish, he added, “I welcome their hatred!”

Americans, lamenting the divisions of 2022 and, some of them, entertaining fantasies of a new civil war, should refresh their historical memories. The country has been bitterly divided against itself any number of times. The hatreds and convulsions of the 1930s (the era of Huey Long and Father Charles Coughlin and the Silver Shirts, of homegrown tribes of Trotskyists and Stalinists) culminated in the ferocious battle between isolationists and internationalists that lasted until the Sunday morning of Pearl Harbor.

The motif of political hatred returned to America almost as soon as World War II ended. The Alger Hiss case of 1948 warmed up the enmities, and McCarthy blew on the coals and turned half of the country against the other half. Such hatred seems cyclical. The 1960s (assassinations, civil rights battles, urban riots, the Vietnam War) had Americans at one another’s throats again. Those eruptions of political rage occurred in the years when the baby boomers and Joe Biden (who was a few years older) came of age and acquired their idea of what America is all about.

That night in 1936, Roosevelt, warming to the language of hatred, suggested that his enemies should get out of the country: “Let them emigrate and try their lot under some foreign flag.” Mr. Biden—who, as he spoke in Philadelphia, was bathed in a lurid red light that seemed, as it were, ineptly theological—was content to cast his foes into outer darkness.

Mr. Morrow is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. His latest book is “The Noise of Typewriters: Remembering Journalism,” forthcoming in January.
Title: Survival of the Richest
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 06, 2022, 02:57:15 PM
second

Have not read this yet but it looks intriguing:

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/sep/04/super-rich-prepper-bunkers-apocalypse-survival-richest-rushkoff
Title: Re: Survival of the Richest
Post by: G M on September 06, 2022, 03:14:27 PM
second

Have not read this yet but it looks intriguing:

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/sep/04/super-rich-prepper-bunkers-apocalypse-survival-richest-rushkoff

Amazing how stupid some of the rich and powerful are.
Title: Re: Victor Davis Hanson!
Post by: G M on September 06, 2022, 03:34:28 PM
https://amgreatness.com/2022/09/04/how-old-bad-ideas-become-wonderful/

More insightful and relevant than ever.  Read it all and spread it. 

Giving up, giving in to these lunatics is not the right answer.

Fix leftist totalitarianism with this one weird trick:

https://i.imgur.com/S27xUC1.png

(https://i.imgur.com/S27xUC1.png)


Title: Tucker: This is what the collapse of civilization looks like
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 14, 2022, 02:03:39 AM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GH7cnmGHNxw
Title: Re: Tucker: This is what the collapse of civilization looks like
Post by: G M on September 14, 2022, 11:40:31 AM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GH7cnmGHNxw

You are responsible for your own security and justice.

Plan accordingly.
Title: Cong. Mary Miller: Biden is helping our enemies and destroying rural America
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 15, 2022, 08:52:59 AM
Biden’s energy crisis is helping our enemies and destroying rural America

We cannot let radical leftists control our food production

By Rep. Mary Miller

American farmers eke out a living because we have affordable, available energy. By using diesel-powered equipment, nitrogen, and other fertilizers, we not only feed America, but we are the number one exporter of food worldwide.

Before I was Rep. Mary Miller, I was Mary the Illinois farmer and mother of seven. Together with my husband, we run a grain and cattle farm in central Illinois and fed our family on a budget with the help of a fertilized garden. Now, we have great reason to be alarmed. President Biden and his “Green Bad Deal” team are in the process of creating yet another crisis. A food crisis.

The globalists and militant vegan activists are pushing junk science “scare pollution” policies on agricultural producers. These radical “Great Reset” leftists are destroying farms, especially family farms, with attacks on fertilizer & livestock. The leftists are pushing to replace the farmland we need for food with solar panels that are made in China and terrible for the environment. Without farms, people starve. We cannot let radical leftists control our food, as they are the same people that are causing famine, blackouts, and rationing in other countries.

For example, farmers in the Netherlands are revolting against their government over plans to impose laughable restrictions on the amount of animal manure Dutch farmers can spread on their own land to fertilize fields. The Dutch government believes, that to cut its nitrogen emissions in half by 2030, farmers have to sacrifice long-held, successful fertilizer practices. The Netherlands’ own government seeks to lessen its global agricultural influence by instituting Green Deal policies.

This agenda should sound familiar to Americans. Reducing greenhouse gas emissions by pushing electric vehicles, solar panels, and wind turbines that are manufactured in China — in order to convince the world a country can become entirely carbon neutral — is exactly what the Biden administration hopes to achieve for America. It hasn’t happened yet, and I hope it never does.

In Mr. Biden’s America, we have an ongoing energy crisis that especially affects the livelihood of my fellow farmers and farm families in rural America. Leftists like Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker have told us to expect rolling blackouts due to the dangerous, Green New Deal-inspired war on reliable energy generation. What happened in the Netherlands will happen here if we cannot solve this nation’s energy crisis.

Mr. Biden’s anti-energy agenda has caused the price of a gallon of gas to skyrocket to the highest average price of gasoline and diesel ever recorded. In my home state of Illinois, these prices were even higher than the national average. Instead of making it easier for American companies to increase domestic oil and gas production and hire more U.S. workers, Mr. Biden has shut down the Keystone XL Pipeline and begged OPEC and Russia to increase global output to ease rising prices.

Mr. Biden’s Democratic friends in Congress and Democrat governors have blamed American energy producers for this crisis while refusing to issue leases for energy production and discouraging investment. Democrats have taken advantage of the war in Ukraine to blame Vladimir Putin for gas prices while increasing purchases of Russian oil by 160%. They have claimed renewables are the only solution while stopping the production of critical minerals here at home, leaving our country even more dependent on China, while refusing to ramp up our domestic production of oil, natural gas, and biofuels, such as ethanol.

This has to change. The U.S. Energy Information Administration projects world energy consumption will grow by nearly 50% between 2020 and 2050. Our nation can supply that energy demand. The United States boasts an abundance of natural resources. Our nation is innovative, and our energy producers can compete with China, but we must abandon this Green New Deal and stop helping China in order to stand a chance.

In recent years, we have seen foreign investors flood the market, especially in Rural America where the Chinese Communist Party is attempting to buy land in our country, with an emphasis on farmland, to gain strategic leverage over the United States. According to the Agricultural Foreign Investment Disclosure Act Database, foreign companies and individuals have purchased 519,248 acres of agricultural land in Illinois over the past decade. The purchases are worth approximately $4.1 billion. America is on a dangerous path of losing our selfsuffi ciency which is why I introduced the National Security Moratorium on Foreign Purchases of U.S. Land with Rep. Louie Gohmert, Texas Republican, to prohibit Chinese land purchases in the United States. We have an inherent responsibility to put our own citizens first, and the National Security Moratorium on Foreign Purchases of U.S. Land does just that. In the same month that I introduced this bill, House Democrats held a hearing to promote cars made with Chinese batteries and minerals mined in China instead of supporting American farmers by promoting ethanol and biofuels. The American people would be much better served if the Agriculture Committee focused on prohibiting Chinese land purchases in our country.

Instead of blaming American energy producers, farmers, and ranchers for this nation’s energy and food crisis, perhaps Mr. Biden, Mr. Pritzker, and Democrats should start believing in Americans and fight for their interests. Perhaps they should acknowledge their policies are failing and reflect upon it before we see Rural America revolt.

Mary E. Miller is an American farmer and politician who is the U.S. representative from Illinois’s 15th congressional district
Title: WT: McKenna: Why aren't more people defending free speech and the rule of law?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 15, 2022, 09:08:35 AM
second

Defending what’s important

Why aren’t more people defending free speech and the rule of law?

By Michael McKenna

It has been suggested that those on the right have been a bit too energetic in defending the previous president. There can be no doubt that many of President Trump’s defenders are aggressive and voluble. There can also be no doubt that in many instances, people conflate defending important elements of the American political and judicial systems with defending Mr. Trump himself.

Let’s clear up the confusion. Noting the obvious and troubling fact that the FBI and the Justice Department are either unwilling or unable to police their own employees is not defending Mr. Trump. Faced with the reality that agents lied to obtain warrants used to surveil political campaigns and members of the media, silence seems a lot like a vitiation of the oath that many of us have taken to the Constitution. It is certainly contrary to the oath that every lawyer has taken as well.

Pointing out that no one associated with the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol has even been charged with, let alone found guilty of, insurrection is not defending Mr. Trump. It is, rather, defending both the utility and primacy of the judicial process in the United States. It is a simple assertion of the foundational understanding that innocence is assumed until guilt is proven.

It is alarming to see how many lawyers — all officers of the court — have no confidence in the ability of their own system to find facts, ascertain guilt and assign punishment and remediation in this instance. If you are a lawyer, and are happy to see what is essentially a criminal matter politicized (think the House Jan. 6 committee), that is a problem.

Listing a few of the ways that Team Biden has failed the United States — Afghanistan, inflation, energy prices, regressive policies like the student loan debt fiasco, etc. — is also not defending Mr. Trump or Trumpism. It is simply acknowledging the facts as we know them. President Biden understands them to be facts as well. He has been reduced to calling his opponents fascists not because they are, but because he and his party have nothing else to run on in the 2022 elections.

Suggesting that a sitting president should not call his opponents (about one-third of all American adults) fascists and threats to the republic is not defending Mr. Trump. It is simply a practical restatement of the notion that once you place certain people outside the realm of the acceptable, you greatly increase societal entropy and the chances of violence. When people cannot or will not be heard through peaceful channels, the historical answer is usually violence. That’s why the First Amendment is essential: Free speech is the first and best bulwark against political violence.

Speaking of that ... saying that a U.S. senator (Sen. Charles E. Schumer, New York Democrat) should not threaten violence against Supreme Court justices has nothing to do with Mr. Trump. Nor does pointing out that in the last couple of years dozens of churches, pregnancy centers and Republican Party offices have been firebombed or otherwise damaged. Again, if you’ve taken an oath — either to the Constitution or to preserve the rule of law as an officer of the court — you should oppose and be vocal about your opposition to all of those instances of violence and threats. To date, the left has said nothing about these ongoing episodes of political violence.

Finally, pointing out that there seems to be two kinds of justice in the United States nowadays — one in which a leader of one political party (Mr. Trump) is hounded pretty relentlessly by federal law enforcement and one in which the previous presidential nominee and the son of the current president are essentially ignored by law enforcement — is, again, not defending Mr. Trump. It is, rather, noting what is obvious to everyone: That the rule of law is being routinely traduced by those who are part of the legal system. It is small wonder that few citizens retain confidence in federal law enforcement.

Rather than asking why some defend Mr. Trump, perhaps the more important question is, why aren’t more people defending free speech, the rule of law, the judicial process, the citizenry from political violence, judges from political attacks, and federal law enforcement from those who would weaponize it against their political rivals.

Michael McKenna, a columnist for The Washington Times, co-hosts “The Unregulated” podcast. He was most recently a deputy assistant to the president and deputy director of the Office of Legislative Affairs at the White House
Title: Tucker does comedy
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 16, 2022, 04:56:06 AM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7L2eCll6L8s&t=5s
Title: Dark money bill
Post by: ccp on September 19, 2022, 08:14:09 AM
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/sep/19/democrats-love-hate-relationship-dark-money-ready-/

I don't know how this is legal.   Groups can spend millions for their favorite politicians anonymously

when individuals' donations are public knowledge for small amounts .

oh but it might "embarrass" them!

what a shyster joke on us
Title: Return of the Gunslinger
Post by: G M on September 23, 2022, 09:53:34 PM
https://www.theburningplatform.com/2022/09/23/the-return-of-the-gunslinger-by-nc-scout/#more-280426
Title: historian political warfare
Post by: ccp on September 24, 2022, 12:57:15 PM
Jon Meacham :

Biden is immensely important and consequential and preserving democracy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWyU0hlgsos

Meach has Biden convinced he will go down in history as more consequential then the bamster
no doubt

he takes Obama policies and runs with them

Newt:

a more honest assessment - not opinion - truth

https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2022/09/24/gingrich-biden-administration-may-be-most-disastrous-since-buchanan/

Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 24, 2022, 02:51:06 PM
Very irritating and frustrating just how PITA so many of "our" sites are hard to read! All the clickbait horseshit makes it embarrassing to use as a tool of persuasion of others too.
Title: Joe Biden's last stand
Post by: G M on September 24, 2022, 10:05:40 PM
https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/joe-bidens-last-stand/
Title: Noonan
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 26, 2022, 01:59:39 AM
It’s a Mistake to Shrug Off Putin’s Threats
As we saw before World War I, it’s easy to become complacent as trouble builds into catastrophe.
Peggy Noonan hedcutBy Peggy NoonanFollow
Sept. 22, 2022 6:47 pm ET

SAVE

PRINT

TEXT
1051

Russian President Vladimir Putin addresses the nation in Moscow, Sept. 21.
PHOTO: /ASSOCIATED PRESS

Vladimir Putin’s threat to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine must be received soberly, if for no other reason than that leaders occasionally do what they say they’ll do. There are reasons beyond that. He has lost hardware, soldiers, ground and face. He is cornered and escalating, increasing the odds of mistake and miscalculation.

OPINION: POTOMAC WATCH
WSJ Opinion Potomac Watch
Protests Break Out in Russia After Setbacks in Ukraine


SUBSCRIBE
Great care is needed now, the greatest possible. Wednesday this week came the famous (though not first) threat of nuclear use. In a rare speech to the nation from the Kremlin, Mr. Putin said: “If the territorial integrity of our country is threatened, we will use all available means to protect Russia and our people—this is not a bluff.” He announced referendums in occupied areas that will presumably result in declarations that they are Russian territory. Ukraine’s attempts to push back Russian troops can then be defined as an invasion of Russia, which Mr. Putin must defend by any and all means.

He also called up 300,000 reservists. There is reason to doubt this will appreciably improve Russia’s position. The motley new troops will be blended over months into an army that doesn’t work. This is one reason we can’t be certain Mr. Putin will lean most heavily on conventional methods of war.

Russia is long thought to have about 10 times as many tactical nuclear weapons as the U.S., with delivery systems ranging from mobile ground-based launchers to ships. These weapons are smaller than strategic weapons, with shorter range and lower yield. The Times of London provided a map with concentric circles to show potential blast radiuses if a tactical nuke were trained on London—it was like something out of 1958. Such weapons are built to take out specific targets in specific areas without widespread destruction. But yes, radioactive debris in Ukraine would waft this way or that with wind currents, possibly west toward Poland, possibly toward Mr. Putin’s own troops. Not that he’d care; not that they’d think he’d care.

American diplomats have believed Mr. Putin will never use tactical nukes because he’d fear the price. But they can’t know that, especially if they’re unclear what price they’d exact. They hope Russian officials in the command structure would thwart such an order, but they can’t be certain of that either. They believe they can’t bow to nuclear blackmail because that would bring a whole new order of international chaos with it, and that’s true. All the more reason the greatest care is required now.

The atmosphere around Mr. Putin appears increasingly fevered. His enemies keep falling from windows and boats. This week the former head of the Moscow Aviation Institute, an erstwhile Putin supporter, reportedly fell down “a series of flights of stairs,” resulting, according to the announcement on Telegram, in “injuries incompatible with life.” Antiwar demonstrations broke out in 37 Russian cities, according to the Associated Press. “Send Putin to the trenches,” they chanted in Moscow. Wednesday’s address was scheduled for Tuesday, postponed and given 13 hours late. Airline seats out of Moscow are famously full and not round trips. There are reports Mr. Putin himself is bypassing his generals and sending direct orders to the field.

Maybe he’s finding that fewer of his countrymen than he’d supposed share his mystical vision of a greater imperial Russia restored; maybe it’s just him and 50 intellectuals. Maybe that will intensify his bitterness and nihilism.

READ MORE DECLARATIONS
Elizabeth II Was Queen of Our TimesSeptember 15, 2022
Queen Elizabeth’s Old-School VirtuesSeptember 8, 2022
Boris Johnson Looms, Trumplike, Over British PoliticsSeptember 1, 2022
What Pro-Lifers Should Learn From KansasAugust 4, 2022
The Lonely Office Is Bad for AmericaJuly 28, 2022
See more...
But all this speaks of growing disorder around him. His most eloquent critics and foes in the West call him a liar and murderer, and he is, but it’s worse now than they think. This isn’t Syria; it’s not the joy of poisoning your enemies or jailing dissidents. Ukraine is the ballgame for him. The whole meaning of his adult life is his war with the West, and this is the battlefield. He is about to turn 70, closer to the end than the beginning. He alone drove this thing and he’ll drive it into the ground because, I believe, he doesn’t care anymore, and he can’t lose.

All this is apart from other unconventional means of trouble at his disposal, from cyber and infrastructure attacks to fighting near nuclear reactors, as has already occurred. There is the economic and political turmoil that will follow his cutting natural-gas supplies to Western Europe.

I spent the spring and summer reading about World War I, all the big, classic histories, but drilling down even into the memoirs of the tutor of the czarevitch in the last years of Romanov rule. I’ve done such regimens before. I like reading about epic catastrophes: It’s encouraging. We got through that. We’ll get through the next thing.


It reminded me of the obvious, that peacetime governments rarely know exactly what to focus on in real time. They don’t like to think imaginatively about the worst. The leaders of the nations that would go to war in August 1914 were certain in July that there wouldn’t be a war—there couldn’t be, because everyone had too much to lose. Tensions had risen in the past and been soothed. There was the sense of sleepwalking toward war, and indeed a great modern history of the era is called “The Sleepwalkers.” They stumbled in. Paul Fussell, in “The Great War and Modern Memory,” wrote of the horror of the trenches and the hopeless charges into the new weapon called the machine gun, and saw irony. “Every war is ironic because every war is worse than expected.” The means are always “melodramatically disproportionate” to the presumed ends.

I hope our leaders are groping toward something, some averting process, maybe along the lines of French President Emmanuel Macron’s urging for a negotiated peace. What shouldn’t fully settle in is the idea that conceding the need to pursue every avenue is somehow letting down the side, and showing insufficient fervor for the Ukraine, that has so moved the world.

I sense people are afraid of looking afraid. But when a bad man who’s a mad man says he’ll do something terrible, it’s not wrong to think about every way you can to slow or stop him.

We live in a funny world that’s at bottom anxious and sad and yet insists on a carapace of cheer, or at least distraction. We’re losing a sense of tragedy.

The other night the great British playwright Tom Stoppard spoke movingly, in New York, of how nations often don’t get the governments they deserve. Russia, he said, is a landmass alive with history and literature and occupied by a people whose suffering and endurance echo through the ages. And look what they’re stuck with. Tolstoy biographer A.N. Wilson, in his recent autobiography, says something similar, describing Russia as an ancient “God-bearing” people whose meaning is located in survival.

If you think of it this way, it’s all the more tragic. Good people all around, bad trouble here and looming.

I’m not a prophet, and I don’t know what to do. But I know the size of this war and this time in history. It’s not the same old, not the usual. It feels like a turning point. We have to get serious in some new way.
Title: Kunstler on the collapse of Europe
Post by: G M on October 01, 2022, 08:07:22 AM
https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/slouching-toward-endgame/

Slouching Toward Endgame
“There is a dark craving for rot… as if decay were an escape from the limits, the oppressive fears and the pains of an individual existence.” — Eric Hoffer
Clusterfuck Nation

For your reading pleasure Mondays and Fridays

Support this blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page

And thanks to all my Patrons for your support


Breugel’s prophetic depiction of mid 21st century daily life in Euroland

 

Since “Joe Biden” flat-out promised last February to “bring an end to the Nord Stream pipeline” — and let’s assume he meant both NS 1 and 2 — why seek further to unravel a fake mystery? Is our apparitional “president” not a man of his word? Of course, the machinery behind “Joe Biden” so far denies any credit for the consequential act, but who in this land is unaware that the US government’s default setting these days for answering anything is to lie?

The purpose of the act was likewise simple, plain, and obvious: to foreclose any possibility of Germany negotiating a separate peace with Russia around the financial and economic sanctions imposed by the USA over the Ukraine operation. Don’t you suppose it was clear to any German with half a brain that NATO’s joining of the sanctions was nothing less than a one-way ticket to Palookaville for Euroland? That it would mean goodbye to its advanced manufacturing economy and then goodbye to a comfortable, modern standard of living?

Not many weeks ago German foreign minister Annalena Baerbock told the world that Germany would support Ukraine (and US-driven NATO policy) “no matter what German voters think.” That was all for show, you understand, to maintain the flimsy pretense that NATO had any actual stake in whatever happens in Ukraine — as the result of the dumpster fire set there by America. At the same time, that very same German foreign ministry was sneaking through back channels to feel out the Russian foreign ministry on ways Germany might get Russian natgas on the down-low, through third parties, say, Turkey, buying time until the glorious day those Nord Stream pipelines might re-open and the former normality of German economic life would resume.

“Joe Biden” slammed the door on that pretty conclusively Monday, blowing up the two pipelines, a premier act of insanity by a US government fueled at every level and in every direction by psychotic strategic thinking. For starters, consider that the Nord Stream sabotage amounts to the leading member of NATO committing an act-of-war against the rest of NATO. What else do you call depriving most of Europe of the means to make a living — or merely to stay alive?

As it happens, Germany is in no position to answer this casus belli by going to war against the USA. Germany has a Potemkin military — America has made sure of that since 1945, the last time these Teutons of northern forests went batshit crazy against Western Civ. Seems to me that either Chancellor Olaf Scholz acknowledges this deadly affront to Germany and negates further participation in the NATO Ukraine idiocy, OR, within a few months he will face a violent political uprising from his own people and his government will fall — and not necessarily within the framework of any orderly parliamentary procedure. More like mobs in the streets… chaos… government buildings torched… officials strung-up — real insurrection, not the fake kind we hear about endlessly from the American Party of Chaos.

How, exactly, do any of the major NATO countries continue to regard the USA as any kind of ally? They won’t and they can’t. Anyway, and despite the recent panicked expansion of NATO, member countries of the adjoining scaffold known as the European Union are peeling off one-by-one. Georgia Meloni, soon to be Prime Minister of Italy, couldn’t have put it more plainly when her coalition won last week’s election: she and they oppose in the strongest terms all the Woke nonsense that the World Economic Forum has programmed into the EU. She and they are against the cancellation of individual liberties and tyrannical affronts to due process of law; are against the degenerate campaign to undermine family, church, and national sovereignty; and are unwilling to act as a dumping ground for anymore Third World hordes the EU stupidly induces to come to Europe’s shores.

Don’t worry, before much longer something similar will happen in France, too. Perhaps the mobs of nationalists in Paris will be inflamed enough to roll out the old “national razor,” to make their seriousness emphatic. Adieu Fifth Republic. The Sixth is on its way to the maternity ward and it will not recognize the EU as its maman. There’s a whole lotta shakin’going on across Europe. Holland’s farmers were already furious over Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s disgraceful obeisance to der Schwabenklaus’s malevolent program aimed at shutting down Dutch agriculture. Rutte will be gone before spring planting time, 2023. Sweden, like Italy, had repudiated its Woked-up Leftist rulers just weeks ago in an orderly national election. Crowds of protestors lit up Prague this week. It’ll still be good marching weather all over Euroland for some weeks ahead.

The Euro currency fell below par with the US dollar. Its days are numbered and when, perforce, it must be replaced by the old national currencies — francs, marks, guilders, liras — then submission to the EU will reach a logical end and it’s back to national sovereignty, too. The UK, America’s wing-man, has become an entirely feckless, sinking operation. The country is functionally bankrupt, the pound is dying, and, by resorting again to the old QE bond-buying racket, the Bank of England has just doomed the country to even more ruinous inflation. Liz Truss will be a three-month wonder. Things might get so wild in Old Blighty that Nigel Farage will wind up in 10 Downing Street.

As for Russia’s doings in Ukraine, the Donbas oblast elections are a done deal. Mr. Putin has not yet responded to the extreme provocation of the Nord Stream vandalism. I doubt he will make some histrionic tit-for-tat act of retaliation against any critical infrastructure of NATO or America itself. Rather, he will now methodically proceed to wipe up the floor with Mr. Zelenskyy’s army, eliminate whatever American missiles and other ordnance are stockpiled around the place, complete the occupation of the Black Sea coastal territory from Kherson to Odesa, and put that troublesome backwater of Western Civ in order. The hallmark of the operation will be a measured and businesslike approach. Russia will just get it done, put out the dumpster fire, and refuse to allow the USA to start World War Three.

“Joe Biden” and his regime of Satanic degenerates will just have to lump it. They will have lost Europe’s loyalty by the foolish Nord Stream caper. They will have enough trouble on their hands at home with America’s collapsing economy and all the ill-feeling they have generated with the Woke insults, persecutions, and punishments inflicted on half the population — not to mention the coming dire repercussions of the wicked Covid “vaccine” scam. In the meantime, “Joe Biden’s” Party of Chaos faces the wrath of American voters in the midterm election. And if, perchance, they take the majestically stupid step of cancelling, postponing or somehow messing with that election, they will face the wrath of the voters from the ground beneath the hanging tree.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 01, 2022, 05:08:31 PM
"The purpose of the act was likewise simple, plain, and obvious: to foreclose any possibility of Germany negotiating a separate peace with Russia around the financial and economic sanctions imposed by the USA over the Ukraine operation"

This makes sense.

"(Putin)"   will now methodically proceed to wipe up the floor with Mr. Zelenskyy’s army, eliminate whatever American missiles and other ordnance are stockpiled around the place, complete the occupation of the Black Sea coastal territory from Kherson to Odesa, and put that troublesome backwater of Western Civ in order. The hallmark of the operation will be a measured and businesslike approach. Russia will just get it done, put out the dumpster fire, and refuse to allow the USA to start World War Three.

This does not make sense.  For example see:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-63102220?fbclid=IwAR1WsqYB3zq4ApBDdh7TRRgwXx9zjil2_seMqA_FKlHpVgtvbg1yhsj7om8

Anyway, if you wish to respond, please take it to the Ukraine thread.
Title: VDH civilization cracking
Post by: DougMacG on October 03, 2022, 08:40:13 PM
Pj media vip content

The Thinnest Veneer of Civilization
BY VICTOR DAVIS HANSON 5:30 PM ON OCTOBER 01, 2022

Civilization is fragile. It hinges on ensuring the stuff of life.

To be able to eat, to move about, to have shelter, to be free from state or tribal coercion, to be secure abroad and safe at home — only that allows cultures to be freed from the daily drudgery of mere survival.

Civilization alone permits humans to pursue sophisticated scientific research, the arts, and the finer aspects of culture.

So the great achievement of Western civilization — consensual government, individual freedom, rationalism in partnership with religious belief, free market economics, and constant self-critique and audit — was to liberate people from daily worry over state violence, random crime, famine, and an often-unforgiving nature.

But so often the resulting leisure and affluence instead deluded arrogant Western societies into thinking that modern man no longer needed to worry about the fruits of civilization he took to be his elemental birthright.

As a result, the once prosperous Greek city-state, Roman Empire, Renaissance republics, and European democracies of the 1930s imploded — as civilization went headlong in reverse.

We in the modern Western world are now facing just such a crisis.

We talk grandly about the globalized Great Reset. We blindly accept the faddish Green New Deal. We virtue signal about defunding the police. We merely shrug at open borders. And we brag about banning fertilizers and pesticides, outlawing the internal combustion engine, and discounting Armageddon in the nuclear age — as if on autopilot we have already reached utopia.

But meanwhile, Westerners are systematically destroying the very elements of our civilization that permitted such fantasies in the first place.

Take fuel. Europeans arrogantly lectured the world that they no longer need traditional fuels. So they shut down nuclear power plants. They stopped drilling for oil and gas. And they banned coal.

What followed was a dystopian nightmare. Europeans will burn dirty wood this winter as their civilization reverts from postmodern abundance to premodern survival.

The Biden Administration ossified oil fields. It canceled new federal oil and gas leases. It stopped pipeline construction and hectored investors to shun fossil fuels.

When scarcity naturally followed, fuel prices soared.

The middle class has now mortgaged its upward mobility to ensure that it might afford gasoline, heating oil, and skyrocketing electricity.

The duty of the Pentagon is to keep America safe by deterring enemies, reassuring allies, and winning over neutrals.

It is not to hector soldiers based on their race. It is not to indoctrinate recruits in the woke agenda. It is not to become a partisan political force.

The result of those suicidal Pentagon detours is the fiasco in Afghanistan, the aggression of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, the new bellicosity of China, and the loud threats of rogue regimes like Iran.

At home, the Biden Administration inexplicably destroyed the southern border, as if civilized nations of the past never needed such boundaries.

Utter chaos followed. Three million migrants have poured into the United States. While some cross over clandestinely, others clear border stations without an adequate audit, and largely without skills, high school diplomas, or capital.

The streets of our cities are anarchical — and by intent.

Defunding the police, emptying the jails, and destroying the criminal justice system unleashed a wave of criminals. It is now open season on the weak and innocent.

America is racing backward into the 19th-century Wild West. Predators maim, kill, and rob with impunity. Felons correctly conclude that bankrupt postmodern “critical legal theory” will ensure them exemption from punishment.

Few Americans know anything about agriculture, except to expect limitless supplies of inexpensive, safe, and nutritious food at their beck and call.

But that entitlement for 330 million hungry mouths requires massive water projects, and new dams and reservoirs. Farmers rely on steady supplies of fertilizer, fuels, and chemicals. Take away that support — as green nihilists are attempting — and millions will soon go hungry, as they have since the dawn of civilization.

Perhaps nearly a million homeless now live on the streets of America. Our major cities have turned medieval with their open sewers, garbage-strewn sidewalks, and violent vagrants.

So we are in a great experiment in which regressive progressivism discounts all the institutions and the methodologies of the past that have guaranteed a safe, affluent, well-fed, and sheltered America.

Instead, we arrogantly are reverting to a new feudalism as the wealthy elite — terrified of what they have wrought — selfishly retreat to their private keeps.

But the rest who suffer the consequences of elite flirtations with nihilism cannot even afford food, shelter, and fuel. And they now feel unsafe, both as individuals and as Americans.

As we suffer self-inflicted mass looting, random street violence, hyperinflation, a nonexistent border, unaffordable fuel, and a collapsing military, Americans will come to appreciate just how thin is the veneer of their civilization.

When stripped away, we are relearning that what lies just beneath is utterly terrifying.

Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author of "The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won," from Basic Books. You can reach him by e-mailing authorvdh@gmail.com.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 04, 2022, 07:14:03 AM
Yup.

I would add/quibble that the correct number of illegals under Biden is five million, not three million.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: DougMacG on October 04, 2022, 07:19:35 AM
Yup.

I would add/quibble that the correct number of illegals under Biden is five million, not three million.

Yes.  The population of Ireland has come across our southern border in less than 2 years.  That's not an invasion?
Title: Kunstler: Developing developments
Post by: G M on October 05, 2022, 08:04:36 AM
https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/developing-developments/

Developing Developments
“Joe Biden” screws the pooch on Western Civ. He can’t help himself. His helpers can’t help him. Who will help us?
Clusterfuck Nation

For your reading pleasure Mondays and Fridays

Support this blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page

And thanks to all my Patrons for your support

Message found in fortune cookie from Panda Take-out reminds us: “The dildo of consequence is seldom lubricated.” Please apply this ancient wisdom to “Joe Biden’s” sabotage of the Nord Stream 1 and 2 natgas pipelines. Secretary of State Antony Blinken spun the deed as a “tremendous opportunity” to reduce fuel use in Euroland, and shift its prior dependence on affordable Russian energy to ruinously-priced American liquid natural gas (LNG) — a supposed boon to US producers. Lucky us and them!

Let’s get a few technical matters straight about natgas. Gas pipelines allow for cheap gas, without costly intervening shipping procedures. Flows are continuous from producer to customer. LNG requires compression of the gas at super-cold temperatures and costly-to-build LNG tanker ships to keep that gas cold and compressed in transit. Each tanker can carry only so-much gas and the flow is not continuous. At each end of the energy-losing journey there is a costly LNG terminal to load and unload the gas. Bottom line: Euroland customers can’t afford US LNG, though for now they’ll be getting it good and hard to struggle through the first winter of a permanent depression that will feel more like the forecourt of a new dark age. Also bear in mind that American shale gas is a finite resource; that we need plenty of it ourselves; and that the earliest-developed US shale gas fields are crapping out one-by-one.

Secretary Blinken pretends that Europe’s deadly predicament will segue crisply into a new “green renewable” disposition of things as well as a stable-and-balanced new cold war between US-led NATO and Russia, like the 1950s. Secretary Blinken is, of course, completely insane. Germany’s industry will now collapse, the Euro currency will collapse with it, and the exchange rate with the dollars Euroland needs to buy in order to purchase US LNG will bankrupt them further. It will also probably blow up the European Union, which is chiefly a trade scaffold. With industrial production sinking, trade sinks too, and the flimsy cooperative arrangements between nations turn into a desperate competition as each nation of Euroland struggles to stay alive.

Let’s not forget the reason that “Joe Biden” blew up the Nord Streams: to foreclose any chance of Germany wriggling out of US sanctions against Russia. Just prior to the Nord Stream strike, protests were rising in several German cities, the common folk already chafing under the Russian gas delivery shut-down and soaring price of desperately-needed gas. If the US stood by while Germany made a separate peace with Russia, how would that affect the NATO countries’ commitment to the US-provoked conflict between Ukraine and Russia? How much cash support would Euroland continue to dish out to Mr. Zelenskyy’s sketchy money-laundering operation?

What no government official can acknowledge — even among the Euroland victim nations of this awesome stupidity — is that the US demolition of the Nord Streams was an act-of-war against our own allies. By the way, the blogger who styles himself as “Monkey Werx,” notable for tracking the world-wide military flight movements, presents a comprehensive play-by-play of just exactly how the mission was accomplished. I’ll summarize but you can read his full report (click here) for yourself.

MW reports that overnight on the 26th of September, a Navy P8 Poseidon submarine-hunter jet flew out of the US to the Baltic. It did not land in the UK to refuel — thus avoiding any tracking complications — but rather rendezvoused over Grudziadz, Poland, with a US mid-air refueling plane, which it hooked up with for more than an hour. The P8 was equipped with Mk54 air-launched torpedoes. After un-docking from the refueler, the P8 followed a route west along the Nord Stream pipelines, descended to bomb-run altitude, and dropped its weapons. Kaboom. Then, fully refueled, the P8 flew directly back to the USA. Days later, when confronted at the UN by Russia with a yes-or-no question as to US responsibility for the Nord Stream caper, the US representatives refused to answer one way or another. Cute.

So, the questions loom: How many more days before Germany and the rest of Euroland begin to apprehend how they have been hosed by America into an economic collapse scenario? (How many days before a team of competent professionals hunts down Klaus Schwab and his colleagues somewhere in Switzerland?) When will the Eurofolk turn on their idiot government leaders and flush them out of office? When will all (except for psychotic Poland) bail out of the USA’s Ukraine crusade? I will tell you: this will all begin pretty darn soon. And if so, that will be the end of the NATO alliance.

Meanwhile, the US-led propaganda campaign has Russia utterly on-the-ropes against a raging and triumphant Ukraine army. Nothing could be further from the truth. Russia made a few tactical retreats the past month in preparation for a final systematic and methodical mopping-up of the remaining Ukraine army. Russia is bringing in Iskander hypersonic missiles, not necessarily nuclear-armed, and will assemble Russian army regulars to replace the mash-up of Donbas militia volunteers who have borne the brunt on the thinly defended line leading to the much talked-about tactical retreat around the Kharkov-Izium-Lyman front. The Russian negotiation table is open for business. Failing to report to it, Ukraine will have to decide what sort of rump state it will become — a merely half-assed agricultural backwater or a fully ass-blown-off failed state.

Meanwhile, Western Europe descends into the cold and dark, with the USA not far behind. What’s up next here in Homeyland? Try a trucking fuel crisis. Kerosene is becoming scarce — there’s none, for instance, at the Hudson Valley’s Albany storage facility. The winter trucking fuel mix is 70-percent diesel and 30-percent kerosene, which is added to lighten the fuel and keep it flowing under freezing weather conditions. This shortage suggests a supply-line collapse for just about everything, but especially food. Doesn’t sound too peachy for Christmastime. “Joe Biden” and Company are destroying the USA at just about every level. Thirty-five days to the midterm election. So, let’s send a few more billion dollars to the sucking chest wound that is Ukraine.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on October 05, 2022, 08:59:31 AM
Blinks. would he say

WW2 was a great opportunity

Europe and Asia destroyed

allowing US to take the lead in economic activity
bring us out of the depression

and help Hollywood make great lucrative war movies
and spur a baby boom?

 :roll:

Blinks = jack ass = Pete Butti = San Juan Joe

Title: Mangled Experiments of the Psychotics
Post by: G M on October 08, 2022, 07:59:09 AM
https://tldavis.substack.com/p/mangled-experiments-of-the-psychotics

Mangled Experiments of the Psychotics

T.L. Davis


Those who claim this is not a communist country can’t explain why, despite all of the evidence, the conviction of Ghisaline Maxwell, the death of Epstein in jail, where cameras record everything, but were “off” during that moment, has produced not one indictment of their clients. They can’t explain why, despite all of the evidence on Hunter’s laptop, that not one indictment has taken place, despite the rampant criminal activity exposed there from payoffs, pay-to-play schemes involving not only Vice President Joe Biden, but current officeholder Joe Biden. Child sex trafficking and victimization are exposed, but not one indictment. They can’t explain why, despite all of the evidence, not one indictment has been brought concerning the massive influx of ballots from Zuckerberg financed drop boxes, despite video evidence and GPS locations tracking the mules stuffing the ballot boxes. Not one election-related indictment has been brought, even though Zuckerberg admits that the FBI asked him to interfere in the election by silencing one of the candidates and censoring truthful claims about Hunter’s laptop. There has not been one indictment, despite all the evidence that an invasion is taking place on the southern border, that drug trafficking and sex trafficking, including child sex trafficking is facilitated by the open border.

This does not happen in a republic where all are equal before the law, where the rule of law and specifically NOT of men are enshrined. This sort of politicization of the law only takes place in a totalitarian/communist regime where the media is either intimidated into cooperation or are totalitarian communists themselves.

The events unfolding today in America only happen in totalitarian/communist regimes where political prisoners are kept, like the January 6th defendants; where political opponents are targeted and the full-weight of the governmental bureaucracies are unleashed on them; where whistleblowers and individuals who have exposed the crimes and criminality of the regime are targeted and the full-weight of the governmental bureaucracies are unleashed on them.

Only in totalitarian/communist regimes are deadly doses of chemicals forced on the population as “health measures;” where lockdowns are anticipated as punishments for refusing to allow the government to injure or murder it’s citizens.

The United States has suffered all of this and more, yet people still talk about “democracy” and “the republic.” They wave the flag and act in unspeakable ways against the very freedoms and individual rights acknowledged in the founding documents. Corporations have banded together out of fear of reprisals, or like-minded sympathies to punish individuals who speak up, who refuse to go along to get along, who stand their ground and refuse to comply with illegal demands. The whole weight of society from employers, neighbors, the government and law enforcement will come down on anyone actually demanding that our laws passed by elected representatives be enforced. They aren’t demanding new laws, or refusing to obey any law, they simply are speaking out about the failure to enforce the laws.

What insanity is this? How do you wave the flag when all of this has taken place under that banner? When Putin sounds more like an American than almost any American in a position of power today, there’s something wrong, people. When those in power in America sound more like Stalinist thugs than Putin, there’s something wrong. There’s been a reversal. We tout and support all of these communist principles and call ourselves Americans. How?

The America Joe Biden wants us all to swear allegiance to is a corruptocracy of his own making, that anything that interferes with him making a buck is un-American. Those trying to expose his criminal behavior are unpatriotic and even domestic violent extremists. In Joe’s mind he hasn’t been elected, he’s been chosen as the dictator for life, unassailable and unquestionable. Merrick Garland, as his enforcer, his Sheriff of Nottingham, sees it the same way; anyone who stands against any form of government is a threat to the state of corruption from which they profit.

If the Supreme Court will not rule Joe’s way, he’ll write an Executive Order to cover it and if they rule that unconstitutional, he’ll write another one and get his way until they nullify that. It’s the Barack Obama method of stall, distract, lie and obscure until the opponents like Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy have enough cover to finally capitulate. The only ones really getting screwed in their system are the American people and they don’t care about that, because they’ve corrupted the vote to the point that they’ll win any contest, no matter how blatant the steal.

At some point people need to recognize that it’s individuality itself that’s their enemy, the enemy of all government is a strong individual with rights and power that equals or exceeds theirs. It’s intolerable, it’s what they find objectionable about the Bill of Rights and the constitution, because they limit government and recognize individual rights to weapons, speech, private property, papers and effects. If they violate the 1st, 2nd and 4th Amendments enough, dilute them enough with exceptions, they become ineffective and transfer that power to the state. All of government benefits from a weak individual, or so they think.

What they don’t understand, what no communist can conceive of is that it’s the individual that creates power; that creates wealth; that creates strength. A government of the people enables the individual and that supports and benefits government, not the other way around. The world over, weak individuals produce a weak government. It’s why so much of the world’s governments don’t work, but are merely institutions to launder money to the leaders, but beneath that, it all falls apart. Since Joe was installed through corruption, America has become less powerful on the world stage, poorer and more in debt, weaker over all to the point that our enemies eye the United States with contempt and have become accustomed to pushing it around, threatening it.

The crisis arises when they get their way and the individual has been reduced to nothing more than a slave. While it’s what government wants and a world government wants worldwide slavery. America, as the bastion of individual power, is the prime enemy of a world government and must be destroyed. But no one’s asking the real question: what happens then? Then, it all falls apart. Anything worth governing over will be destroyed. And, while the elite think that AI will provide them with the utopia they seek and that transhumanism will make them immortal, the truth is, AI will destroy them as unnecessary parts of a dysfunctional system left over from a bygone era, that anything human will be corrupt and dysfunctional.

Then AI, with no one to serve, nothing to produce, because they don’t need housing, or food or recreation or retirement, will cease activity and the globe will be a barren, wasted experiment, because the value of the individual, the power of creativity, of unique thought and insight generated by the uniqueness of constantly splicing genes to different genetic codes in the form of human reproduction ceases. Then, God can start over with a new Adam and a new Eve and maybe it has been the same over all the billions of years, I don’t know. Maybe, we’re on an inevitable track leading to a new humanity. I’m not smart enough to think about all of this with any clarity.

All I know is that right now, today, that uniqueness of human reproduction is actively under threat by the destruction of individual power, the power to choose who to reproduce with, the power to maintain one’s own gender beyond five or six years old to where there are no reproductive people left, just mangled experiments of the psychotics in charge.

This is why they need to go; why they need to be run out of office; they need to be driven from power and any of their supporters need to be shunned. Will we do it? Can we do it? I don’t know, but the balance of humanity hangs by this thread and it’s within our power to cut that threat or strengthen it.
Title: Quality writing on the Second Amendment, the Militia, and what to do now
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 17, 2022, 08:26:28 PM
https://www.aier.org/article/a-well-regulated-militia-is-necessary-to-the-security-of-a-free-state/
Title: Michael Cohen calls Michael Cohen a grifter
Post by: ccp on October 30, 2022, 06:46:18 AM
https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/michael-cohen-s-new-book-revenge-whiny-self-serving-n1300370

"roommate" of Michael Sorrentino?
the "Situation " who he spoke well of .

I knew Sorrentino

perhaps a more apro po cellmate would have been Avenati 2 class act attorneys  :-P



Title: VDH: Tuesday Takeaways
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 10, 2022, 08:44:38 AM
Tuesday Takeaways
The under-polled voters were not silent, wary Trump supporters, but seething upscale women and college students.
By Victor Davis Hanson

November 9, 2022
What, if anything, did the midterms tell us about the country—other than underwhelming Republicans could still take the House and Senate?

During the COVID lockdowns, American elections radically changed to mail-in and early voting. They did so in a wild variety of state-by-state ways. Add ranked voting and a required majority margin to the mess and the result is that once cherished Election Day balloting becomes increasingly irrelevant.

Election Night also no longer exists. Returns are not counted for days. It is intolerable for a modern democracy to wait and wait for all sorts of different ballots both cast and counted under radically different and sometimes dubious conditions.

The Democrats—with overwhelming media and money advantages—have mastered these arts of massive and unprecedented early, mail-in, and absentee voting. Old-fashioned Republicans count on riling up their voters to show up on Election Day. But it is far easier to finesse and control the mail-in ballots than to “get out the vote.”

The country is more divided in more ways than ever. America’s interior just gets redder and the bicoastal corridors bluer.

Exceptional Republican gubernatorial or senatorial candidates like Lee Zeldin, Tudor Dixon, and Tiffany Smiley in blue states like New York, Michigan, or Washington cannot win upsets against even so-so Democratic incumbents—even during a supposedly bad election cycle for Democrats, laboring under a president with a 40 percent approval rating.

Similarly, media-spawned leftist heartthrobs like Beto O’Rourke and Stacey Abrams can burn through hundreds of millions of dollars. But they still cannot unseat workmanlike Republican incumbents in Texas and Georgia.

Out-of-state immigration has only solidified these red-blue brand polarizations.

Over the last decade, millions of conservatives have fled California, Illinois, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania to Florida and Texas.

The former states got bluer as New York governors like Andrew Cuomo and Kathy Hochul said good riddance to fleeing conservatives—who were welcomed as refugees to red “free states.”

As voters self-select residences on ideological grounds and the deleterious effect of blue-states’ governance, the country is gravitating into two antithetical nations. Americans vote not so much for individual personalities as blocs of incompatible parties, causes, and ideologies.

Debates count for little anymore, especially after the disastrous performance of winners John Fetterman and Kathy Hochul.

Democrats often limited or avoided them altogether. And the Republican charging and complaining that they did so meant little at all.

Democrats still voted for Democratic candidates, regardless of John Fetterman’s clear cognitive inability to serve in the Senate and despite Joe Biden’s failures, harm to the middle class, and unpopularity.

 Most Republicans are similar party loyalists, but not quite to the same degree—at least if some feared supporting a hardcore Trump-endorsed candidate might give them grief among family and friends.

Winning or losing means revving up party bases, not running as much on a variety of issues. Biden’s vicious attacks on conservatives as semi-fascists and un-American worked. When he recklessly warned that democracy’s death was synonymous with Democrats losing, he further inflamed his base.

Biden also goaded young people to vote by temporarily lowering gas prices through draining the strategic petroleum reserve, offering amnesty for marijuana offenses, and canceling half a trillion dollars of student loan debt. He told young women that they would die without unlimited abortions. And most of that mud stuck.

In contrast, Republicans wrongly assumed all voters, red and blue, sensibly cared most about spiking inflation, unaffordable food and fuel, an open border, and a disastrous foreign policy.

Americans do worry, but also demand concrete solutions that they often did not hear from even insightful critics of Biden’s ruinous agendas.


Moreover, in the last days of the election, Biden and the media effectively smothered those existential issues by claiming the country was threatened by insurrectionists and pro-life fanatics. Stooping to claim the attacker of Paul Pelosi—a crazed, homeless, nudist, illegal alien—was the veritable tip of the supposed MAGA insurrectionary spear proved to be effective Harry-Reid-style, October-surprise demagoguery.

Ron DeSantis likely emerges as the dominant force in conservative politics. His landslide win in Florida carried all down-ticket statewide candidates throughout Florida, which has become as utterly red as California has turned all blue.

To the degree Republican gubernatorial candidates not supported by Trump easily won their races in states like Georgia and Ohio, they helped Trump-supported senatorial candidates. To the degree Trump-supported gubernatorial candidates lost badly such as in Pennsylvania, they hurt Trump-supported senatorial candidates.

Trump’s pre-election unexpected attack on DeSantis may have turned off a few thousand independents and Republicans from voting for Trump-affiliated candidates. And his pre-midterm boast that he would likely run for president may have scared—and energized—some last-minute, hard-core anti-Trumpers and Democrats to go out to vote.

Pollsters got it wrong—again. But this time once trustworthy conservative pollsters had little inkling that the simmering left-wing base was enthused by wild talk of abortion and insurrection. The real under-polled voters were not silent, wary Trump supporters, but this time around seething upscale women and college students.

Final takeaways?

Democratic opposition to a flawed and impaired Joe Biden running again in 2024 will recede. Republican loyalty to the unpredictable Trump could fade.

And both those realities will empower Ron DeSantis.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on November 10, 2022, 10:06:39 AM
other big losers

pollsters !

conservative ones even more then lib ones

also Dick Morris

who is still pushing Trump on Newmax along with his book:

https://www.amazon.com/RETURN-TRUMPS-BIG-2024-COMEBACK/dp/1630062073

he may not get the job he has positioned himself for.

he has been more wrong then right past several yrs

Gingrich certainly has egg on his face
though I still love the guy.

VDH also predicted big victory for us and
has a bit of yoke on his face too
though I still love the guy

Title: George Friedman: Adding to the American Cycle
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 11, 2022, 12:18:48 PM
November 11, 2022
View On Website
Open as PDF

    
Adding to the American Cycle
Thoughts in and around geopolitics.
By: George Friedman

The votes for the U.S. midterm elections are just about counted. Democrats are delighted they didn’t lose as much as they expected to, and Republicans are disappointed they didn’t win as much as they thought they would. The country has not fallen, nor has it fallen in love with either of its two parties.

These elections, like so many before them, illustrate the stability of the U.S. political system. Neither Republicans nor Democrats are in a position to govern decisively, partly because neither party is coherent enough to unite over any plan aside from castigating the other party. This is, of course, by design. The Founding Fathers created a system meant to tie the hands of politicians, absent a powerful consensus. This week, voters failed to deliver either party a powerful consensus. To a large degree, Americans are content with the status quo. They could change it, but Americans take comfort in thinking others are fools and scoundrels.

In normal times, this would not be alarming, but we are approaching the end of the historical cycle that began in 1980 and will end in due course. Most Americans are unaware that the way they live is going to change, eventually for the better, after a few fairly painful years.

The cycles play out in roughly 50-year periods. So when we look back on the 1970s, the 1920s, the 1870s and the 1820s, we note that they had common characteristics. One is major economic dislocation where the old system broke down and a new one emerged. In the 1970s, inflation was out of control, oil was embargoed, and a war between Israel and Egypt led to a massive economic crisis. In 1929, a massive collapse in the American economy was due to a decline in exports mostly to Europe, which in turn was the result of World War I. In the 1870s, the dollar’s value was shattered by the Civil War, which disrupted virtually every market in the country. In the 1820s, the banks could not underwrite the massive human expansion west.

Internal economic dysfunction, coupled with war – at times, a war the U.S. was only marginally involved with – generated a crisis. Today, the United States is not yet in an economic crisis, and though it is marginally involved in the war in Ukraine, it isn’t really losing any of its people to the conflict.

How, then, does this current cycle play out? I think there are six steps:

1. The common sense of the previous era delivers us a social, economic and military crisis. Our world has changed, and common sense at this point inflicts harm.
2. The political system increases the applications of strategies of the prior era, increasing the pain and the public anger.
3. A political upheaval occurs within the framework of the political system, bringing new political figures to a position of power sufficient to challenge the old common sense and paralyze it.
4. The president, who represents the old common sense, forces aside this new political force, applying the old common sense and thus creating a crisis.
5. A full-scale revolt brings to power a president and a congress that know the old system has failed but are uncertain what the solution is. They bring the illusion of change.
6. A set of solutions begin to emerge, slowly at first and then more rapidly until the basic assumptions of the United States are changed and a new common sense is in place.

Applied to the crisis of the 1970s, the steps look something like this:

1. By the early 1970s, there was military, economic and social failure, delivered by the common sense of the Roosevelt era.
2. As the decade continued, the common sense of the Roosevelt era was applied (via tax cuts) to a dire, contemporary problem (inflation). Public opinion raged.
3. Conservatives became increasingly influential and blocked many actions.
4. President Jimmy Carter pushed aside other forces and carried out a series of actions that inflamed the population.
5. Full-scale revolt brought to power Ronald Reagan, predicated upon a clear understanding that the system was failing but without an understanding of what to do.
6. A set of solutions known as supply-side economics emerged, and a new era began with it.

How long does it take? Applying the 1970s model, a massive shift should take about eight years. From the Roosevelt era, it took around two years to install a new president but about 10 years to significantly solve the problem. Around the 1870s, change took about five years, and real change took a little longer. I could go on, but the bottom line is that we are not close to moving out of the current pain. Even if the presidency changes in two years, this transition will take a while.
Title: ET: The Anti-Complacent Life
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 14, 2022, 11:13:22 AM
The Anti-Complacent Life
Break out of your complacency and live a more interesting life
Nov 13 2022

Every choice we make in life can be placed on a scale. At one end is comfort and at the other end is growth.

When we choose comfort, we’re choosing what is safe, secure, and easy. And when we choose growth, we are moving toward what is risky, unknown, and challenging.

For most of us, comfort-seeking has become the default—even those of us who fancy ourselves adventurous people. But too much comfort ultimately leads to boredom and complacency. There’s got to be more to life than just feeling good, right?

Comfort Abundance

First, a confession: I’m not against comfort. I think comfort is a legitimate source of happiness in many seasons of life. It’s a gift that should be received with gratitude—especially considering how hard life can feel when creature comforts are unexpectedly or indefinitely taken away.

However, most of us living in modern, developed countries have a new problem on our hands. In the past, life often forced a degree of risk and uncertainty upon us, but that’s no longer universally true. For some of us, wealth and convenience allow us to meet our basic needs with relative ease, and we have ample resources for making our lives more and more comfortable.

I have a theory that we haven’t fully adjusted to living in this world of “comfort abundance” and many of us are struggling with a profound sense of restlessness. Does that seem hard to believe? Something similar has happened with the relationship between food and obesity. Either biologically or psychologically—or maybe in both ways—we simply aren’t thriving in a world where tasty food is affordable and abundant.

Breaking Out

Are you content with the status quo in your own life? Maybe not. Research from the 2019 World Happiness Report shows that today’s American adults are less happy and less satisfied with their lives than adults from previous generations.

Fortunately, there are ways to improve our lives beyond pulling harder and harder on the lever of comfort.

By moving in the opposite direction—adding back the right dose of uncertainty, challenge, and adventure—we can restore an equilibrium to our lives that’s likely essential to human flourishing.

Maybe that doesn’t sound appealing to you right now, but remember, comfort has a way of lulling us to sleep. We lose a sense of what’s possible and settle for what’s within reach. We replace a sense of purpose with the constant drip of pleasure.

It’s possible to break yourself out of your complacency and imagine new horizons of possibility for your own life. Not only is the journey more exciting, but it can be more rewarding, too.

Instead of passively watching movies about other people going on adventures and becoming heroes, you can make your own real-world life the kind of story that’s filled with possibility and intrigue.

The Anti-Complacent Life

If the kind of life I’m describing sounds desirable to you, it’s because we were made for more than the maximization of physical comfort and security. There’s a part of each of us that wants to fling off the complacency of modernity and do hard things just to know we can.

How do we get started? The key ingredients are uncertainty, challenge, and adventure in doses as large as you can handle. In every way you can imagine, just start pushing back against the status quo in your life and attempt to discover new and better ways of living.

In a future article, I’ll go into even more detail about how to live an anti-complacent life. But for now, I’ll leave you with a short list of places to begin. Each of these changes on their own might be small, but collectively, they represent an entirely new mindset. They are the seeds of a whole new way of being.

Respond with urgency. Find a problem you’ve been avoiding and attack it with an unusual sense of urgency and determination. Demonstrate to the world and to yourself that you can leave a mark.

Resist the algorithm. Algorithms give us more of what we want or have already seen. Instead, seek out a wider variety of inputs to your life. Read unusual novels, get your news from diverse sources, pick up a new magazine—you never know what you may discover.

Explore faith. The modern age is increasingly one of unbelief. Re-enchant your world by taking a new look at faith. If you’re already a believer, explore another tradition within your own religion and incorporate new insights into your own belief.

Talk to more people. Complacency pushes us to hang out with the people we already know or who are most like us. But an exciting world of new possibilities emerges when people with different worldviews begin exchanging ideas. Put yourself in places where you can meet new people, and be bold in striking up conversations when the opportunity arises.

Travel widely. Taking a vacation off the beaten path or striking out on a road trip are timeless ways to shake up the status quo in your life. Not only will you be challenged physically, but you will also be exposing yourself to new ideas, customs, and perspectives—far more vividly than if you had read about them in a book.

Shape your physical environment. Winston Churchill once said, “We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.” It’s a powerful reminder that we aren’t stuck with the world we inherit, but rather can form it into something new. Start with a single room in your house and make it as beautiful or as striking as you can.

Get physically fit. High rates of obesity and sedentary lifestyles are perhaps the most obvious evidence of complacency in our society. Push back against the status quo and become strong and aerobically fit. This is something like a super power in our modern age.

Try new foods. One simple way to fight the status quo is to experiment with new cuisines. When you’re out to eat, try a dish that’s unlike anything you’d normally order. Use this as a launching point to learn about a different culture.

Say ‘yes’ more often. I’ve noticed that comfortable people cling to their comfort and are more likely to turn down new opportunities. It’s as if being open to new experiences is a skill that atrophies without practice. At least for a season, let your default answer become yes and see what happens.

Embrace serendipity. So many of our experiences are now planned or tailored to our preferences. This means a smoother, more predictable ride through life, but it also removes some of the wonder and mystery that can infuse the ordinary with meaning. Try traveling with only very broad plans. You might even experiment with making more life decisions by the flip of a coin.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on November 14, 2022, 02:56:03 PM
wonder if bankruptcy courts will go after  Sam Bankman Fried's donations to the DNC

as collateral for investors....


 :wink:
Title: I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 16, 2022, 04:24:27 PM
https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/3068531/arizona-one-man-with-pulse-in-maricopa
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ya on November 20, 2022, 06:08:42 AM
(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fh82gpqWIAAFica?format=jpg&name=small)
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: DougMacG on November 20, 2022, 06:20:31 AM
(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fh82gpqWIAAFica?format=jpg&name=small)

Among others, you can put my miserable Senator's name on this, Amy Klobuchar.  May she never be President.  Perfect illustration of how unserious they are.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on November 20, 2022, 07:50:38 AM
as a person who knows the real skinny on Taylor Swift who I despise with a passion
I too was disgusted to see the "swiftness" of how DOJ gets right on the celebrities outrage

that said tick master does sound like a monopoly

try getting the FBI to investigate the rings of intellectual property thieves who steal music and provide the front people with the material .......

Title: AMcC: Time to get serious about preserving and protecting America
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 26, 2022, 04:05:10 PM
Time to Get Serious about Preserving and Protecting America

The White House(lucky-photographer/Getty Images)
Share
510 Comments
Listen to article
By ANDREW C. MCCARTHY
November 26, 2022 6:30 AM

The holiday from history is over.

You can be forgiven if you hadn’t noticed our three-decade holiday from history lately. It hasn’t exactly felt like party time in the United States since the 1991 disintegration of the Soviet Union, a competing hegemon and existential threat.

In the decade that followed, we endured a spate of terrorist attacks, culminating in the 9/11 jihadist strikes that killed more Americans than died in Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor — the 1941 sneak attack that vaulted the U.S. into World War II, the deadliest conflict in history. There followed military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan that, combined, lasted over 20 years. In the interim, we suffered through the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. By 2021, amid the Biden administration’s provocatively humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan, we were struggling to move beyond a once-in-a-century pandemic, to which over a million Americans deaths are attributed.

Nevertheless, we’ll remember these as the good times. Everything, of course, is relative. Indeed, we will never break out of our all-id-all-the-time style of governance — where passions overwhelm reason, where rash officials act first and assess later, if ever — unless we learn to pause and put things in perspective.

In their moment, the ghastly jihadist attacks appeared to signal a major geopolitical threat: They were executed by the militant factions of a global Islamic-supremacist movement, they were conducted across continents, they often targeted government installations, and they were mass-casualty strikes that, in combination, killed and wounded thousands, with billions in property-destruction costs. Still, even with sinister state sponsors (principally Iran), the terrorist organizations were comparatively tiny. That is part of why, for a time, our government convinced itself that the threat they posed could be managed as a crime problem rather than a national-security challenge.

When that approach was finally supplemented by combat operations, the jihadists could not compete. They could not project power on the scale of modern Western military forces, and they could not hold territory when the U.S. and our allies were disposed to engage them. Global Islamic supremacism is riven by internal strife and dysfunction. Its aspirations of conquest were never realistic. The conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan went on for decades only because, after lightning-quick combat victories, we tried to transform fundamentalist Muslim societies that remain intractably hostile to the West. The wars were too insignificant, in national-security terms, to commit the resources needed to win, but hopelessly muddled sharia-democracy promotion got us too bogged down in the internecine hatreds of these societies to make a prudent exit. It is laughable to label these conflicts “endless wars.” By the time we quit, they’d long ceased to be wars in the sense of combating meaningful threats to our security; but they did indeed seem endless. More importantly — putting things in perspective — we had the luxury of pursuing this course, of spending trillions of dollars on military and nation-building enterprises that most Americans ignored, because there was no real threat on the horizon.

The Great Recession was also deeply painful but not existential, at least not in the short term —at our current inflection point, we can’t confidently say that the constitutional deformities, financial malpractices, and delusional notions about debt it lulled us into won’t kill us off in the long run. And again, we have to keep reminding ourselves that we don’t act in a vacuum. The daunting economic challenges we now face, substantially but by no means exclusively stemming from the global financial crisis of 2007–09, result from actions our government was able to take because our advanced economy began in better shape than others, and then weathered the storm better. Our allies have nothing close to our defense commitments, yet their prospects for recovery and sustained prosperity were, and are, dimmer.

Covid, too, has been a disaster, but I suspect it will eventually be seen as more damaging to our economic, social, educational, and constitutional health than to medical health. As the eminent historian Niall Ferguson relates in Doom — The Politics of Catastrophe, even if we credited high-side estimates of excess mortality, which would peg pandemic-related deaths at 0.29 percent of the global population, that would be an order of magnitude less than the estimated 1.7 percent of the world population whose deaths were attributed to the 1918–19 Spanish influenza; and Covid is not even in the same league as, say, bubonic plague (the “Black Death” of the 14th century may have killed roughly a third of the world’s population).

Moreover, for all our missteps at various levels of government and the public-health bureaucracies, the U.S. developed vaccines and treatments with stunning rapidity. As a medical issue, now-endemic Covid is a lingering challenge, particularly as new strains diminish vaccine efficacy. But the virus was never an existential threat. Like climate, another real but hard-to-quantify challenge best addressed by technology and ingenuity, Covid was regarded as an existential crisis only by irrational people, very much including political leaders, who’ve lacked actual existential crises to fret over.

We no longer have that luxury.

China has emerged over the past 30 years as a hostile and formidable rival, angling to supplant us as the dominant world power. To be sure, it has profound internal problems. Years of prosperity and miraculous growth were never going to hide the monstrosities of communism forever. Plus, China’s economy has markedly slowed, while its aggression, corruption, repression, and lack of reliable legal and market institutions ensure that harder times are ahead as its population ages and plummets. We should take little comfort in this, though.

As demonstrated by Putin’s Russia, which remains a geopolitical rival but not nearly of China’s dimension, periods of internal strife and decline tend to be when authoritarian aggressors are at their most perilous. After Russia gobbled Crimea with virtual impunity, there was nary a peep when China took Hong Kong. The greatest ambition of the new Mao, Xi Jinping, is to take Taiwan. While we tell ourselves he won’t really do it, or that the possibility of an invasion is five or more years away, the truth is: It could happen at any time. Our commitment to defend Taiwan is uncertain: If we mass allies and go to war over it, it is by no means clear that we, from 8,000 miles away, would win in militarized China’s backyard; on the other hand, if we fail to defend Taiwan, then the world will have become a much more dangerous place,and our place in it would be in grave doubt.

In the interim (however brief that may be), the spark that could ignite World War III could happen in the Middle East tinderbox at any moment. Iran appears poised to attack Saudi Arabia, whose stability is diminished by President Biden’s foolishness in ostracizing it to appease his political base, and by the heedless incompetence of his pullout from Afghanistan, which has emboldened anti-American aggressors everywhere. Further, Biden’s mulish insistence on appeasing Tehran and attempting to revive President Obama’s feckless Iran nuclear deal has made a regional war more likely: Israel cannot abide an Iran with nukes, and Iran with its jihadist proxies could decide to strike first.

All this is playing out during Europe’s first land war in 75 years, with Russia threatening to use tactical nukes and Europe facing the winter cold bereft of the Russian oil and gas on which it glided so cavalierly into dependence. Nevertheless, as we strain to keep Ukrainian forces in the fight, our own forces are in crisis.

Recruitment has plummeted . . . as one might expect in a country where academe and popular culture marinate young people in anti-Americanism, and where life expectancy — in the world’s most advanced country, well into the 21st century — is actually falling, due in no small part to drug addiction and obesity. The recruiting crisis comes as our military readiness has degraded precipitously. In fact, the Heritage Foundation’s annual Index of Military Strength now rates American military power as “weak” in the aggregate. The ominous analysis concludes that our armed forces are “at significant risk of not being able to meet the demands of a single major regional conflict.” This, the analysts concluded,

is the logical consequence of years of sustained use, underfunding, poorly defined priorities, wildly shifting security policies, exceedingly poor discipline in program execution, and a profound lack of seriousness across the national security establishment even as threats to U.S. interests have surged.

The response to such a predicament, as significant threats to the homeland and American interests worldwide loom, should obviously be to ramp up spending. In an adult republic, even with careful scrutiny of the armed forces’ wayward procurement practices, that would entail cutting other expenses. But even if we were sufficiently grown-up about our straits and the decades it will take to reverse things, one must ask: ramp up spending with what?

We’re tapped out. We’ve refused to pay the taxes necessary for our bloated Leviathan to give us security, in addition to the countless other services and comforts we demand of it. We prefer, instead, to borrow . . . and borrow . . . and borrow, condemning our children and grandchildren to foot the bill. That is the leitmotif of our 30-year holiday from history. The debt owed by the United States to its creditors at home and abroad has now surged past $24 trillion. It is now over 100 percent of gross domestic product — a figure that would be even more shocking if we threw in the additional $7 trillion or so in debt that the government owes its own agencies (total debt is actually $31 trillion). To compare, in the Reagan era, when the government ramped up defense spending to face down the Soviet menace, the debt-to-GDP ratio was less than 30 percent.

Our debt continues to explode. Republicans used to care about that, but under President Trump, as Brian Riedl has shown (see here and here), debt rose more, and more quickly, than it had under his two predecessors — who were not exactly deficit-spending pikers. Of course, much of this insane borrowing occurred when money was loose. Now it is tightening in response to the scourge of inflation. As interest rates rise, so does debt service. It is the fastest growing part of the mammoth federal budget.

At present, debt service costs taxpayers a $400 billion per year. Believe it or not, we’ll soon remember that staggering sum as modest because interest rates have been artificially low. Now, as they climb, debt-service costs climb with them. With every trillion added to the debt, the increasing rates supercharge debt service even more. Right now, we pay more for debt service than for most federal programs, including Social Security. In the near future, if there is no course correction, debt service could top $1 trillion per year, outpacing military spending, and pretty much canceling out non-defense spending other than so-called entitlements.

And speaking of entitlements . . . they’re not just “broken” in the precious Washington parlance about problems we’re too craven to confront. They’re broke. If we look at them in terms of spending that has been promised but not provided for, they’re underwater. By a lot. Cato’s Chris Edwards has run the ugly numbers, calculating unfunded liabilities of $163 trillion. How big is that unfathomable number? The Federal Reserve estimates that the household net worth of the entire United States, the richest nation in the history of the world, is $144 trillion — significantly less than our entitlements tab.

As the economists used to say before Modern Monetary Theory inebriated them, what can’t go on won’t go on. It is just a matter of when the music stops.

It is Thanksgiving weekend, and our theme is keeping things in perspective, so let’s try to place our daunting challenges in a hopeful context. We are still blessed by God to live in the greatest country, the greatest republic, ever known. We have faced dark times: internal divisions that exploded into civil war, periods of panic and privation, and foreign enemies who were both mighty and bent on destroying us. We’ve managed to survive and thrive.

I believe it is because, having exhausted other options, when it came time to get serious we got serious. It is time to get serious.

We are now revving up for two years of presidential electoral politics. It is not 1991 anymore, though. I’d like to say we are about to enter uncharted waters of peril, except we’re already in hip deep, ready or not. Inevitably, maybe sooner than later, we will be forced to deal with existential threats from without, as well as financial ruin and potentially unbridgeable political divides from within. It will take a great deal of time and effort to address what confronts us. But we must get serious about addressing it. We have to be clear-eyed about the dangers. The coming presidential campaign can’t be a clown show. We can’t allow it to descend inexorably into another choice between the lesser of two abominations. We are back in precarious times. Once again, we need extraordinary Americans.
Title: John Wayne
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 30, 2022, 08:46:16 AM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btvSE6tVHzQ
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on November 30, 2022, 10:31:14 AM
FWIW
one of my all time favorite movies was Fort Apache

John Wayne was like the only one who did treat Indians with respect who in turn trusted him

Big lib Democrat Henry Fonda treat to treat them like "savages"

-------------

regarding John's political philosophy
he is so right

sounds like he is describing Wash. DC

with their phony virtue signaling
all the while lusting for power and money

like Hollywood as a matter of fact

BTW did John Wayne really meet Wyatt Earp?

Probably not. Probably a Hollywood fake news story but possible
since. Earp died in 1929 in LA
when Wayne was 22.
reportedly a consultant on Westerns

https://www.andmeetings.com/blog/post/when-john-wayne-met-wyatt-earp

Title: VDH: Our Parasitic Generation
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 11, 2022, 08:47:17 PM
Our Parasitic Generation
Yes, there is a lot of ruin in great nations. But even America is by now running low on it.
By Victor Davis Hanson

December 11, 2022
"Be assured young friend, that there is a great deal of ruin in a nation."
— Adam Smith

Are we sure that there is all that much ruin left in the United States?

We are $31 trillion in collective debt. The new normal is $1.5 trillion budget deficits. The military is politicized and short of recruits. We trade lethal terrorists for woke celebrity athletes as if to confirm our enemies’ cynical stereotypes.

Our FBI is corrupt and discredited, collaborating with Silicon Valley contractors to suppress free speech and warp elections. We practice segregation and racial discrimination and claim we do not because the right and good people support it and, anyway, the victims deserve it. The country has seen defeat before but never abject, deliberate humiliation as in Kabul, when we fled and abandoned to the terrorist Taliban a $1 billion embassy, a huge, remodeled air base, thousands of friends, and tens of billions of dollars in military hardware—and hard-earned deterrence.

We are witnessing the breakdown of basic norms essential for civilized life, from affordable food and fuel to available key antibiotics and baby formula. Old Cairo seems safer than an after-hours subway ride or stroll at dusk in many major American cities. Medieval London’s roadways were likely cleaner than Market Street in San Francisco. Speech was freer in 1920s America than it is now.

The Breakdown of Basic Society
Our California always is a preamble to America’s future. Our present is likely your tomorrow.

Each summer here we impotently expect forest conflagrations. Millions of acres of flames pour more millions of tons of smoke and carbon and soot in the skies. Tens of millions of hated combustion engines cannot begin to match the natural blankets of aerial dirt.

The state seems to shrug it off, saying wildfires are both inevitable and natural. Old-fashioned forest management and fire-fighting strategies, honed over centuries, are deemed obsolete by our green experts. So, we let fiery nature take its better course. What is the implicit message to those in the way of fires that devour homes and trees? Nature’s way? Natural wood mulch? Or that such fools should not build their cabins or homes where they are not wanted?

Report Ad
Report Ad
What was bequeathed to us from a state of 15 million—magnificent aqueducts, once brilliantly designed freeways and airports, superb universities and schools, perfectly engineered reservoirs, and downtowns of majestic skyscrapers—in a California of 41 million are frozen in amber or in decay. They have few updates and even fewer replacements. The decrepitude recalls the weedy forums and choked fountains of Vandal-era Roman cities, which is what happens when a later parasitic generation mocks but still consumes what it inherits but cannot create.

Our own generation’s pale contributions are multibillion-dollar, quarter-built, graffiti-defaced high-speed rail Stonehenge monoliths. We prefer to shut down rather than build nuclear plants. Our solar battery plants are as prone to combust as they are to store electricity. And our urban streets reek of feces. All seem testaments to our incompetence, arrogance, and ignorance. We fear the idea of homelessness, and so cede to the homeless our downtowns and avoid what follows.

Our great universities, once the most esteemed in the world from Berkeley and Stanford to UCLA and USC, grow burdened with commissars, too many of their outnumbered faculties are weaponized, and their students have never been more confident in their abilities, and with so little reason for that confidence.

A return to syllabi and grading standards of just 30 years ago would result in mass flunkings. Failure on tests apparently means the test, not the test taker, is found wanting.

What follows is the erosion of meritocracy and competence. And that reality is starting to explain the great unraveling: why our bridges take decades to build rather than a few years, why train tracks are not laid after a decade of “planning,”and why to drive down a once brilliantly engineered, but now crammed and dangerous road is to revisit the “Road Warrior” of film. Sam Bankman-Fried and Elizabeth Holmes are the apt characters of our age.

Institutions That Went Rogue
The FBI has imploded. It has all but become a Third World retrieval and investigatory service for the Democratic Party. Its last four directors either have lied, misled, or pleaded amnesia while under oath.

In 2016, the bureau with the Democratic National Committee sought to destroy the integrity of an election by fabricating a Russian collusion hoax. Its continuance and coverup ultimately required FBI agents and lawyers to alter legal documents, to lie under oath, to destroy subpoenaed phone data, and to outsource illegal suppression of First Amendment rights to Silicon Valley contractors. The nation now fears there isn’t anything the FBI might not do.

As we became hyper-legal with Trump, we are more sublegal with the entire Biden family. For a decade, with impunity, it gorged multimillion profits from selling the “Big Guy”/Mr. “10 Percent” Joe Biden’s name and access—sums for the most part hidden and likely not completely taxed. We all know it is true, and we all know the FBI and Department of Justice know it is true, and we know further that the truth means nothing.

This self-satisfied generation constantly brags of transforming elections. But it will be known more as the destroyer of a once hallowed Election Day. Not so long ago 70-80 percent of the electorate took the trouble of voting under transparent protocols. We replaced it in most states with 60-70 percent of the votes without audit and the product of vote harvesting and curing. Our generation, in just a couple of years, destroyed Election Day voting and Election Night counting.

The New Medievalism
Despite different calibrations, various data reveal what is self-evident to the naked eye. The American middle class is shrinking, if not insidiously sliding into indebted peasantry. Westerners are regressing and by design, now deciding daily whether to top up the tank, turn up the heat, or buy beef.

Society is also bifurcating. A tiny powerful minority has more leverage than any other elite in the history of civilization. And a large underclass of subsidized poor shares with the wealthy a disdain for the struggling middle class, the old bulwark of democracy.

In place of knightly penances and chivalric oaths, our elite takes Bankman-Fried-like vows to “fight climate change,” support “transitioning,” and ensure “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” But like their Medieval brethren, they do so only by first enhancing, not endangering, their own careers.

Report Ad
Report Ad
For the ruling class, prep schools, alphabetic certifications from tony universities, and revolving-door résumés are modern versions of having an abbey on site, a stately coat-of-arms, or taking vows from the correct religious orders. Otherwise, it is the same medievalism masked by pretension.

Our Rhine and Danube
America is rapidly resembling something like wide-open fifth-century A.D. Rome, when its traditional inviolable northern borders on the Rhine and Danube rivers vanished. Thousands of unassimilated tribes crisscrossed as they pleased on the premise that no one among their overripe, soft hosts could or would dare stop them.

Joe Biden just remarked that he is too busy to visit the southern border. And why not? There may have been roughly 5 million illegal aliens who have crossed it since his inauguration. He earns contempt both from those who try to enforce the border and those who cross illegally over it.

Biden surrealistically trashes Trump’s supposed archaic idea of a wall—always without noting self-evident truths about it: anywhere Biden stopped the wall or has not replaced prior rickety fencing, there are the most porous and trafficked entry points.

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’ various mendacities that the border is “secure” translate to allowing as many million aliens as possible to break the law to enter the United States in the four years of the Biden experiment. The administration sees itself in a race to create a one-off window of historic laxity through which millions can pour in—before a comatose nation wakes up and shuts it down.

We are approaching an historic 50 million residents who were not born in the United States, and of various legal and illegal statuses. In a sane world, we might survive the challenge—if newcomers had all come legally, learned the customs and language of their desired new home, were audited and queued by some logical meritocratic process, and were quickly assimilated and integrated by a confident host population that assumed any who wished to live in America surely desired help in becoming an American and felt gratitude to their hosts.

Instead, there is only chaos—and it is by design.

The legal immigrant waiting in line to enter the United States is considered a fool, while illegal aliens and residents instead quickly absorb three messages from their hosts. First, illegal residents will often be treated better than American citizens, at least in terms of lax law enforcement, various legal exemptions and amnesties, and unaudited entitlements.

Second, many will soon learn they can assume immediate moral claims against the majority population of their new home, who can be seen as racist oppressors and obligated to offer reparatory concessions in terms of hiring, admissions, and entitlements.

Third, too many will quickly learn, Ilhan Omar-style, to harbor a quiet derision for their benefactors. Their contempt is not due to Americans’ dearth of magnanimity and generosity, much less to “systemic racism.” Instead, their American hosts are silently assumed to be naïve, timid, overly solicitous, malleable, easily manipulated, rolled, and conned—especially when it is understood that if the roles were reversed and the entrants were the hosts, they would have a different notion of borders.

The idea of 330 million American citizens of different incidental races and ethnicities united by a common American identity of shared values, customs, and traditions is all but mocked. In its place is arising something like the former Yugoslavia—an undefined mishmash of competing and increasingly hostile tribal interests, with residents sorting themselves out into red and blue states that eventually will lead to two antithetical Americas.

So once assumed services, customs, institutions, and expectations are eroding—from a safe walk to a government office in a large city’s downtown, to a visit to the local public emergency room in extremis for humane, rapid, and competent care, to a clean, safe subway ride in a major city, or watching election returns conclude on Election Night.

Report Ad
Report Ad
A Nation of Thieves?
In a nearby Home Depot the other day, there were two long lines to check out. The other six were closed, as was the largest exit with several self-check-out counters.

Why? When asked the clerk whispered that the theft rate is high in the store and that from time to time it shuts down various exits to limit stealing or perhaps to confuse calculating thieves. I added that I had learned that almost any large item in a box purchased at Home Depot had to be first opened to ensure that key parts like knobs, wires, and screws had not been ripped off.

A local Walmart stopped its 24-hour service; again, the clerk said it was due to unsustainable looting during the early morning hours.

I also went to Walgreens and Rite-Aid recently. Much of what anyone wanted, from razors to antihistamines, was under lock-and-key. None of this was true just a decade ago. I live in a rural area among small towns—a world away from Los Angeles and San Francisco where smash-and-grab robberies and unapologetic looting have caused the mass closures of pharmacies and all-service stores.

Exemptions given thefts under $950 in some states may be the culprit. Others cite the post-George Floyd riots and the climate of unpunished street criminality. Maybe years of mask-wearing made us forget who normally had used masks and for what reasons.

Weaponized activist district attorneys and virtue-signaling mayors also signal to criminals that property crimes don’t warrant arrest, much less conviction, much less incarceration.

But whatever the cause, a once famously lawful America has become a veritable land of thieves. The criminal is all but exempt. And the middle class and poor suffer as a result from poor services, higher prices, reduced hours, and fewer stores.

We know the solution is to deter crime by assured punishment for the guilty. But the majority of Americans either cannot or will not demand a return to sanity for fear of some sort of undefined pushback from their elites. Pick your charge: “racism,” “privilege,” “bias,” “discrimination.” Any will do.

We have seen lots of cultural revolutions in this country, but never one that was so singularly focused on razing the foundations of America—until now. Yes, there is a lot of ruin in great nations. But even America is by now running low on it.
Title: PR
Post by: ccp on December 15, 2022, 12:26:25 PM
The legislation lays out terms of a plebiscite as well as three potential self-governing statuses - independence, full U.S. statehood or sovereignty with free association with the United States

https://news.yahoo.com/puerto-rican-independence-bill-goes-000300579.html

hopefully independence .........
Title: two Democrat networks NPR PBS
Post by: ccp on December 15, 2022, 12:38:08 PM
state most want compromise:

https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/lawmakers-congress-republicans/2022/12/15/id/1100655/ :roll:

Haven't republicans been doing that for 60 yrs
Title: George Friedman: Jet Lag
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 16, 2022, 07:47:38 AM
December 16, 2022
View On Website
Open as PDF

    
On Jet Lag
Thoughts in and around geopolitics.
By: George Friedman
As I mentioned to some of you in our ClubGPF discussion this week, Meredith and I spent the past six weeks traveling. We went to Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Germany, Italy, Abu Dhabi, Canada (twice) and several places in the United States. In the months before this trip, we went to Europe twice, including stints in Poland, Hungary and Austria. Incidentally, this is why I have not been able to answer your email comments, which I apologize for and will reform.

The purpose of these trips was always to converse with selected audiences who were under the illusion that I had valuable thoughts to impart. I am arrogant enough to believe this is true, but over the course of weeks, the arrogance falters. There is a ditty, I believe from Disney, claiming that it’s “a small world after all,” but on all these trips I discover that’s a lie. The world is vast, filled with any number of hopes and fears and anger.

I didn’t get to confront any of these on this trip, or on most of the trips I have taken since leaving my bell bottoms at home. I meet what I call members of the managerial class. They have much to offer, but I suspect they are more like me than they are like their countrymen. For one thing, they all speak English. Even in Hungary, whose language does not resemble any other human tongue, and which I can actually speak, I delivered my speeches in English. The managerial class may not “own” the country, but they make it work, whether they are in business, government, academia or shop-lifting. They are of their country, but I am not sure they embody their country.

The managerial class follows America meticulously. America is their trading power, their military ally, a place they visit regularly. In some countries, America is a land to pity; in others, it is a land to dread. But everywhere it is a land to watch. The managerial class cannot manage without knowing what the Americans will do next.

Their view is amusing to Americans because they seem to think that the U.S. has grand designs on all the things they care about, and they explain those plans with care. Their articulation of America’s cleverly planned intentions always leaves me sad. I have to explain that the vast and chaotic United States may have some guy at a gray, metal desk thinking about them but that normally no one cares what he thinks. He is at his crummy desk precisely because he peaked in high school and has been lurching downward ever since. There is no one plan but a dozen potential plans that no one can agree on. America is so vast and sufficiently self-absorbed that government and corporations struggle to manage themselves, let alone the world. Yes, American plans could transform these countries. But the founders did not want an efficient government, and many American corporations don’t plan past next month – or, if they do, the plans tend to be unrecognizable after six months. Americans fixate on the next moment, which limits their ability to organize around and execute a single plan.

Thus is the profound fault line of our times. The global managerial class has modeled itself on the leading managerial culture at the moment: America’s. It is so taken by American culture that it imputes a level of Machiavellian intentions and execution to a nation that was designed to be disorderly. They speak perfect English but can’t understand that Americans have enough wealth and depth to survive irresponsible clashes that would sink other countries. They expect an intentionality from the United States, and when it is not obvious what it is, they invent one. They need us to be something we aren’t.

When I return home from my travels, my brain disconnects from the reality of my life. This is called jet lag, but I don’t believe that traveling itself causes it. There is a wrenching difference between the life I lead in America and what the global managerial class thinks I do. In my travels, I cannot allow myself to stop thinking. When I’m home, my brain is unmoored from the things I was asked and the answers I gave, and I enter a world where random and absurd thoughts carry no consequences. Here, my wife and I can have a satisfying argument about nothing worth arguing over.

America is the land where it mostly doesn’t matter. The rest of the world doesn’t have that luxury. I am free to wonder if Trump is going to jail or if Biden is actually senile – things that don’t really affect my life. In the rest of the world, the stakes are higher.

And this is the origin of jet lag: the transfer from countries that dread what the U.S. plans to do next – places that cannot fathom a world in which Americans don’t think in ways others presume they do – to a country that cushions everyday life.
Title: first lets get the God darn labels right !
Post by: ccp on December 19, 2022, 06:39:03 AM
Left wing MSM labels those who oppose drag shows for children as Facist

notice no similar BS moniker given to the other side :

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/neo-nazis-leftist-gun-groups-face-off-during-protest-at-grand-prairie-drag-show/ar-AA15qgBZ

****"Protect Texas Kids, which was founded by University of North Texas alumna Kelly Neidert, seeks to ban children from viewing the performances. Over the past six months, the organization has staged protests outside drag shows in Dallas, Arlington and Roanoke. They were joined at Saturday’s protest by two religious organizations: the Christian nationalist New Columbia Movement and the neo-fascist American Nationalist Initiative.

The right-wing groups were opposed by a coalition of counterprotesters, including the Party for Socialism and Liberation, and heavily armed members of the Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club, who were openly carrying rifles that they said were intended to protect the show and those in attendance.****

I looked every one of these and NONE ARE FASCIST!
Nada

The word Fascist is thrown around against Conservatives by the Liberal media all day long
and at no time does it even fit the description of who they are labelling.

And some of the left wing groups are self described Socialists / Marxists yet they never get this accurate label

God, I do hate the lying BS MSM.
Title: Gazillionaires rule us
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 21, 2022, 06:29:52 AM
Hey, conservatives, gazillionaires are ruling you

Soros, Gates, Zuckerberg and Schwab (to name only a few)

By Rowan Scarborough

Old Twitter’s big operation to methodically choke off conservative thought drives home the new reality in America: We are being ruled by unelected, super-rich left-wing ideologues.

The pantheon: Bill Gates, George Soros, Michael Bloomberg, Jeff Bezos, Lauren Powell Jobs, Tom Steyer, Tim Cook, the trillion-dollar woke manager BlackRock,Google, Facebook, Old Twitter, Disney, Comcast, and Klaus Schwab and his World Economic Forum billionaire’s club.

They are not just different from you and me. They are different from your grandfather’s industrial dynamos. Those old-school fat cats largely shaped American lives through inventions. Better electricity, railways, cars, airplanes, rocket ships, phones, appliances, banking and the oil to run them all.

That’s not enough for today’s Big Tech, investment houses and other Democratic Party financiers. Yes, they invented the next generation of neat stuff to advance the human experience. But then they corralled it and its immense stream of cash to try to micromanage us — what we should read, say and think; how we travel; what food we can produce and eat; and how we vote.

Ironically, thanks to the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, Americans got our first real peek at just how much mind control Old Twitter exerted. Neo-Twitter Musk is more your grandfather’s industrialist. Mr. Musk built colossal successes in banking (PayPal), the auto industry (Tesla) and space travel (SpaceX). Missing was a desire to look down on the average American.

Mr. Musk liberated Old Twitter by first launching the “Twitter Files” exposing how deeply the woke rigged the town square.

The blacklisting (they called it by the fancy cyber nomenclature “visibility filtering”) came with a great cost to our country. They did not just banish debate; they banished the truth. It was not solely about delisting a conservative activist’s Twitter account. It was about erasing a thought as unfit to be discussed — anywhere.

The billionaires’ tightening grip on American society flows in two channels.

Old Twitter, Google, Google’s YouTube and Facebook attack free thinking.

Channel 2 is the remaking of daily life, stripping it of enjoyment and implanting it with guilt.

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and his $100 billion fortune (says Forbes) is such a man.

There is probably not a gazillionaire who has a more expansive agenda to run our lives than Mr. Gates and his Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation ($56 billion).

Mr. Gates has parlayed COVID-19/climate change into experiments to block our only sun, vegan eating, insect-eating and fake meat eating — while he buys up farmland. He is the No. 1 private funder of the World Health Organization. Its pet project these days is some digital vaccine “passport,” which would require a massive database and travel control.

The Gates Foundation sent a grant in 2012 to All Things Bugs LLC. The stated purpose: “To develop a method for the efficient production of nutritionally dense food using insect species.”

All Things Bugs raves about its cricket powder and larva sausage, which I don’t use.This year, it won the world’s first U.S. patent to mass-produce bug food, Yahoo News reported.

Klaus Schwab’s World Economic Forum is the globe’s most annoying insect proponent. Its menu especially endorses mealworms. Yummy. Overall, Mr. Schwab wants a total revamp of Earth.

The Land Report news magazine estimates that Mr. Gates, at 242,000 total acres, is the single largest owner of U.S. farmland. For what purpose? I asked the Gates Foundation press shop and received no answer.

Mr. Gates has invested in a Harvard experiment on solar geoengineering. Special cloud dust would dim the sun and reduce Earth’s temperatures.

“This Bill Gates-funded chemical cloud could help stop global warming,” said a CNBC story.

Mr. Gates has decreed that all “rich countries” should be 100% synthetic meat. It has to do with cow methane and climate change.

One way Mr. Gates publicizes all his dreams is by funding a list of prominent journalism organizations. Have you noticed all the insects-as-food stories?

A 2020 analysis by author Tim Schwab in Columbia Journalism Review found that more than $250 million in Gates grants have gone to influential outlets such as BBC, NBC, ProPublica, National Journal, The Atlantic and The Guardian.

As the bespectacled, studious Mr. Gates issues edicts on climate change and diet, there is an American plutocrat who is less polite. Democratic Party partisan George Soros utilizes the brute force of political money to get want he wants.

What he wants is no less than a restructuring of America, casting off U.S. sovereignty for some type of global rule.

“The sovereignty of states must be subordinated to international law and international institutions,” Mr. Soros has said. And also, “We need a new international authority that transcends the sovereignty of states to promote an open society.”

He has funded hundreds of left-wing activist groups, such as Demand Justice ($4.5 million in 2021). It is led by Brian Fallon, former Hillary Clinton campaign press secretary and one of the most prominent defund-the-police advocates.

Mr. Soros’ most impactful current investment is the election of ultra-left prosecutors in deepblue urban America. His motive is to help the poor by releasing impoverished criminals after their arrests.

I would total up Mr. Soros’ grand criminal justice plan as more crime, fewer police.

(BTW, Mr. Soros lives quite comfortably in gated compounds in a town that has its own police force.)

Conservatives say Mr. Soros is destroying America, piece by piece. Democrats take his money and run. Then there is the southern border. Mr. Soros’ Open Society Foundations hands out the financial goodies. One recipient is Alianza Americas. Last year, it called for eliminating the U.S. Border Patrol and enforcement — in other words, a completely open border.

President Biden wants more Democratic voters, so he has discarded his oath to protect America and is doing Alianza’s job for them. Murderous Mexican drug cartels now come and go as they please. They are flooding our country with deadly drugs such as Chinese-designed fentanyl and trafficking criminals and sex slaves.

Why did Mr. Biden do this? Mr. Soros was the top donor by far for the just-completed midterm elections, with over $128 million directed to Democrats and aligned groups.

That’s why.
Title: Chris Hedges on Liberal Elites
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 26, 2022, 07:35:42 AM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDEuBR87N-s
Title: Jeffrey Tucker: How the left became what it hated
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 28, 2022, 07:30:40 PM
How the Left Became What It Once Hated
Jeffrey A. Tucker December 23, 2022

In the final scenes of the book and film “The Hunger Games,” Katniss Everdeen has the opportunity finally to kill the hated dictator President Snow, but instead, turns her bow on the leader of the rebellion armies, namely President Coin.

The plot twist is remarkable because it adds an element of realistic complexity to the dynamics of power. Katniss has come to realize that the rebels had gradually become the thing that they hated the most. They had begun to crave the very power that they were trying to overthrow.

Indeed, there was no reason to think that the regime under rebel control would be different than the status quo. The emoluments of power would be newly available to a new group of managers. Coin would replace Snow just as Snow had replaced the person before him. What Katniss really wanted was a completely new system of freedom, not just a new public face to the old tyranny.

Her insight is profound here. When hatred becomes focused, boundless, and obsessive, the hater gradually comes to emulate the very thing it opposes. That’s what happened to the rebel armies and to Coin.

So too, this is what Trump Derangement Syndrome has done to the left in this country. It began in 2016, when Donald Trump won the presidency over Hillary Clinton, who was somehow supposed to win. After that, the single-minded focus of opposition became to grind him and his presidency into the ground and oppose everything about him, including his supporters and even the system that brought him to office.

The bitter irony here is that the left has become the very thing that they warned against. They said Trump was an authoritarian and brutal, a financial racketeer who lived off manipulation. They warned that he would use his personality cult to impose a quasi-dictatorship.

And here we are six years later and what do we see of the left in this country? Especially during the COVID crisis, they embraced censorship, authoritarianism, imposition on bodily autonomy, and attacks on the freedom of association. For a time, the word freedom itself became a bad word to them. People who were merely trying to get schools open or the freedom to run a small business became the object of their loathing, even to the point that the left began to label as fascist those who wanted freedom.

Someone coming of age right now would never have any idea that the left once had some central principles that revolved around themes of freedom. They were free speech, bodily autonomy, peace, small business over large, the poor and middle class over the rich, freedom of expression and art, and opposition to ruling-class manipulation of the system on behalf of the privileged instead of the common good. They were deeply suspicious of the national-security state, corporate elites, and arbitrary uses of executive power. They were against corruption in government.

They were once for human rights and against segregation based on medical compliance. Probably today, no one younger than the age of 25 would believe this, but trust me: These used to be central principles of the left.

So far as I can tell, every single one of these principles has been thrown out. In the COVID crisis, all major lefty journals of opinion pushed mask and vaccine mandates, argued for more statist power to muscle people, favored large businesses over small, crushed the working classes and poor, and even threw out their traditional defense of public schools, which they seemed to want to be closed for longer periods of time.

They rallied around the segregation of whole cities by vaccine status, even though doing so meant excluding nearly half the members of minority populations from access to public accommodations such as restaurants, museums, libraries, and theaters. Not a peep of protest among the center-left!

They completely disregarded one-time liberal precepts such as a woman’s right to work as millions of married women with kids were thrown out of corporate life to take care of kids. The day cares and schools were closed, so women had no choice about it. The result is that women’s participation in the workforce has been set back 34 years! We’re nowhere near pre-pandemic levels and it’s still falling!

Have you heard even one peep about this problem from the left-wing press? Has The New York Times or Washington Post even covered this? I don’t think so. It’s an absolute scandal and a great measure of just how many principles the left has thrown out in their crazed and maniacal hatred of Trump. They’ve been willing to utterly destroy social and economic life in the single-minded pursuit of killing Trump as the one and only goal. And in pursuit of that goal, they’ve embraced an authoritarian biosecurity state that robs people of personal autonomy.
And let’s not forget the one-time centrality of science in the leftist vision. Since at least the Monkey Trial, American progressives have rallied around science as opposed to religion and faith. But when it came to COVID, they completely threw all science out the window. They would hear nothing as the evidence kept pouring in that COVID was not a threat to kids, that it had an infection fatality ratio that compares to the flu for anyone younger than the age of 75, and that even the overall death rate was 0.2 percent. But instead of dealing with this reality, they screamed panic so that the whole population would fly into fits of rage.

As for the vaccines, even as evidence mounted that they protect against neither infection nor transmission and that the adverse effects are inordinately high even against the target population of the elderly, they still wouldn’t hear it. They’ve pushed these grotesque human rights-destroying mandates and segregations.

Even this wild D.C. obsequious deference to the Ukrainian president from last week has roots in Trump hatred. They spent so long trying to prove that Russia was somehow responsible for Trump’s election in 2016, despite the complete absence of evidence to that effect, that they even came to believe it. So the stupid logic goes this way: Russia equals Trump and therefore anyone who’s against Putin is a friend, no matter the corruption. As a result, even the one-time penchant for favoring peace over war has been tossed out.

So too, the strange lack of interest in the FTX scandal and the targets of this fake company’s “effective altruism” has roots in Trump hatred. The company passed out millions and billions of dollars to nonprofits and candidates that backed the Democrats and various lockdown measures, and all we get now is silence. That’s rooted in the very same corruption: The left has become the very thing they once claimed to hate.

In other words, the left in the United States has adopted all the practices that they once warned that Trump would bring to the United States! I say this too, not as a Trump fan personally at all. I was warning that his presidency would be unhinged as early as 2015 because his ideological impulses departed too far from constitutionalism and Reaganite suspicions of government.

All that said, unhinged hate is a dangerously distorting emotion. The left’s single-minded focus on grinding Trump into the dust has turned the left into the mirror image of their most paranoid worries about him.

At some point, the left in this country is going to have to do a serious self-examination of what it has become. To return to “The Hunger Games,” the pursuit of President Snow has turned the followers of President Coin into what they once claimed to oppose. And this has become so obvious to the public that they’ve even turned against the public, demonizing middle-class values as inherently dangerous and science itself as misinformation worthy of censorship.

Be careful what you hate. Too much focus, too much attention, and too much study will cause the object of your hatred to be the most compelling pedagogue. If you take a close look in the mirror, you won’t recognize yourself anymore. That, in short, is what has become the left in America today.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

Jeffrey A. Tucker is the founder and president of the Brownstone Institute, and the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press, as well as 10 books in five languages, most recently “Liberty or Lockdown.” He is also the editor of The Best of Mises. He writes a daily column on economics for The Epoch Times and speaks widely on the topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.
Website
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on December 29, 2022, 07:02:04 AM
"So too, the strange lack of interest in the FTX scandal and the targets of this fake company’s “effective altruism” has roots in Trump hatred"

I don't understand why the MSM does not cover more
I mean the guy's political donations were  "BIPARTISAN"

 :wink:

they went got him and brought him here ASAP . had to shut him up
I mean the politicians themselves were involved

and big shot celebrities

that is a lot of money and power ....
Title: Forecast 2023
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 01, 2023, 10:00:24 AM
https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/forecast-2023-get-out-of-the-way-if-you-cant-lend-a-hand/?utm_source=mailpoet&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter-post-title_2
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on January 01, 2023, 10:54:07 AM
"America’s economy largely hinges on finance now that financialization replaced manufacturing as the basis for prosperity. Alas, financialized prosperity is false prosperity, since it consists mainly of borrowing ever greater amounts of money to keep up the mere appearance of prosperity. In real life, prosperity requires producing things of value, not just trading increasingly abstract financial instruments purporting to represent money."

Exactly - we hear bitcoin et al are backed "by nothing"

just a ponzi scheme

while  fiat money is backed by

"the full faith and trust in the government that issued it."

faith and trust = nothing.

 Steve Forbes -> at least go back to gold standard

long article but very good.
haven't finished it yet


Title: James Howard Kunstler
Post by: ccp on January 01, 2023, 11:27:36 AM
Interesting character
He thinks outside the Republican - Democratic "boxes" if you will

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Howard_Kunstler
Title: Year in Review rant
Post by: DougMacG on January 02, 2023, 11:30:37 AM
Biggest story of the year (IMHO) is the Elon Musk release of the Twitter-FBI and other agencies information suppression collaboration proof, probably best documented by Matt Taibbi at substack in many posts.  A couple of samples:
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/note-from-san-francisco?utm_medium=email
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2022/12/a-twitter-files-preview-2.php

Way below that in any order you like are inflation, election, war in Ukraine, pandemic continued, border surge continued, blowing up the pipelines, the 100+ attacks on our electric grid and the mysteriously unexplained failure to prosecute the boldest insurrectionist Ray Epps.

Almost every one of these are still largely uninvestigated, unexplained and not understood.  In the so-called age of information, we have a Sgt. Schultz level of understanding.  ("I know nothing!")

Who blew up the pipeline?  Who attacked our grid?  Who's winning in the war?  How much cheating was there in the election?  Where?  How?  How many came across the border last year?  What was the effect of the vaccines?  Who pulled Ray Epps off the most wanted list?  Why?  Which country has tighter state control of media, Russia, China or US?  What caused the new, record inflation?  Ok, that last one I know the answer but can't say aloud in the presence of a liberal - and they're all around me.
-----------------------------
Update, Quote of the Year:

Rep. Jim Clyburn:  "...all of us knew..."

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2022/10/20/top-democrat-admits-all-of-us-knew-their-partys-policies-would-cause-inflation-n1638723

These policies, this spending causes inflation.

How could it not?  More money.  Fewer goods.

Direct quote: 
“Well, let me make it very clear. All of us are concerned about these rising costs, and all of us knew this would be the case when we put in place this recovery program. Any time you put more money into the economy, prices tend to rise,”     - Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.), House Majority Whip,
Title: Political Rants, VDH, The Coup
Post by: DougMacG on January 06, 2023, 02:57:09 AM
https://townhall.com/columnists/victordavishanson/2023/01/05/the-coup-we-never-knew-n2617915
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 06, 2023, 04:30:27 PM
One of his best-- VERY strong!
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: DougMacG on January 06, 2023, 08:03:55 PM
One of his best-- VERY strong!

VDH (Prof. Hanson) for Speaker.
Title: VDH: What Caused the Political Hysteria?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 12, 2023, 07:21:20 AM
What Caused the Political Hysteria?
Karma, Nemesis, payback . . . and all that stuff.
By Victor Davis Hanson

January 11, 2023
The Left has gone mad over Donald J. Trump—past, present, and future.

The current Democratic Party and NeverTrump “conservatives” assumed that Trump was and remains so obviously toxic that they do not have to define exactly what his evil entails.

Accordingly, they believe that any means necessary are justified to stop him. And furthermore, these zealots, when out of power, insist such extraordinary measures should not be emulated and institutionalized by their opponents, much less ever boomeranged back upon their creators.

In this context, the Republicans retaking control of  the House of Representatives once again raises the question whether they should reply in kind.

Given the current investigation following the Mar-a-Lago raid, should there also be a mirror-image special prosecutor to examine President Biden’s lost stash of classified documents in his insecure office following his vice presidency?

Can House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) ever be considered too inflammatory, given that his predecessor, former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) tore up the president’s State of the Union address on national television?

How many Democratic House members should be denied committee assignments to remind the Congress that Pelosi’s rejection of Republican nominees was a terrible precedent?

How many congressional subpoenas with threats of criminal prosecution and performance-art arrests should be issued to Democratic politicos to stop the criminalization of political differences?

In our current age, will all former president’s private homes, closets, and drawers now be subject to FBI raids to ensure that “classified” documents were not wrongly stored there?

Are Joe Biden’s current homes also a logical target, given his sloppy handling of classified foreign policy papers—eerily reminiscent of an abandoned laptop belonging to son Hunter Biden and daughter Ashley Biden’s lost diary?

Was it ever a good idea to impeach a first-term president the moment he lost his party’s majority in the House—but without any hope of a conviction in the Senate? Would such a similar impeachment send a warning to Biden to honor his oath of office and start enforcing U.S. immigration law?

Does a phone call now an impeachment make, on the grounds that Trump mixed domestic politics with foreign policy?

But was Trump’s Ukrainian call that much different from Barack Obama’s 2012 quid pro quo in Seoul, South Korea, where he asked the Russian president to convey a deal to Vladmir Putin: stay calm and give Obama space during his reelection bid while Obama in turn would be flexible on missile defense.

Putin did just that and put off invading Ukraine until Obama was reelected. And Obama made sure there was no joint missile defense projects in Eastern Europe. Was that deal in America’s interest, or Obama’s own and thus similarly impeachable?

Or consider Joe Biden mixing foreign policy and politics on the eve of the midterm elections. For example, he kept draining the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to dangerously low levels while begging hostile foreign dictators to pump more oil.

Thereby Biden sought to win votes from angry commuters buffeted by high fuel prices. And he also appeased the Left by not ordering more drilling for gas and oil. Was that gambit in the nation’s—or Joe Biden’s—best interest?

What is wrong with the House investigating whether the FBI infiltrated and contracted social media companies to warp news coverage and suppress free expression of American citizens?

The Left certainly thought it was necessary in 1975 for the Church Committee to investigate the CIA. That committee found the agency was contracting new organizations to front for its covert operations, while partnering with telecommunications corporations to monitor the data of citizens on CIA watch lists. Sound familiar to today’s FBI?

Was it a good idea for the Democratic House to release Trump’s tax returns?

If the Republican House were to do the same with the Biden consortium’s tax records, would the result be far more incriminating?

There was much talk once in Congress of evoking the 25th Amendment to remove a supposedly mentally impaired Trump. A Yale psychiatrist was even paraded before Congress to attest the president was dangerously unbalanced. Calls for aptitude testing resulted in Trump acing the Montreal Cognitive Assessment.

Should the House now follow the Democrats’ precedent? Should medical professionals review all of Biden’s incoherent utterances, his fantasy biographic tales, and his often physical fragility and determine whether he is non compos mentis? Is that a precedent we wish to follow?

When a defeated first-term president leaves office and vows to return in four years, is it wise to impeach and try him as a private citizen?

Did not the House impeach Trump in part because he warned the Ukrainians that Joe Biden, a possible opponent in 2020, was likely corrupt? Do the endless Democratic efforts to go after Trump, a possible Biden opponent in 2024, constitute far more than a Trump single phone call to the president of Ukraine?

Somehow supposedly worldly and sophisticated partisans in their self-righteousness ignored ancient laws of what goes around comes around, of Karma, of Nemesis, of payback’s a bit—h, and all that stuff.
Title: Michael Barone : so how did the Dems do for the 2 yrs they had the trifecta
Post by: ccp on January 14, 2023, 12:39:04 PM
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/faith-freedom-self-reliance/what-the-democratic-trifecta-hath-wrought
Title: KJP
Post by: ccp on January 16, 2023, 07:39:20 AM
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2023/01/15/dem-strategist-biden-wh-should-have-seperate-spokesperson-for-the-classified-docs-questions-n2618299

well I rather thne criticize her for doing what she is told, I

criticize her bosses.

The press briefings have become a total farce anyway
Title: The Military Industrial Complex does not run Washington
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 17, 2023, 09:01:03 AM
Getting the whole article requires subscribing and I already have far too many things to which I subscribe, but even this teaser intro has merit IMHO:

https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/the-military-industrial-complex-doesnt?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

The Military-Industrial Complex Doesn’t Run Washington
Something else does

N.S. Lyons
Jan 12
Osprey-Pentagon.jpg

A little while ago I found myself interested to read a frustrated Glenn Greenwald argue that, given the context of the “enormous” $858 billion U.S. defense budget recently passed by Congress along with an additional $44 billion in military aid for Ukraine, the only thing anyone can now inevitably rely on from Washington D.C. is that “the U.S. budget for military and intelligence agencies will increase every year no matter what.”

I felt this merited some reflection. Greenwald’s explanation for why perpetual growth of the defense budget is an inevitability (which it basically is), and for why American foreign policy is relentlessly hawkish more broadly, is a popular one: that the American arms manufacturing industry, the military, and our politicians are all engaged in a circle of corruption and collusion to make each other rich. The big defense contractors bribe the politicians with large donations and the generals and other government officials with board seats and other lucrative positions, and they in turn come up with reasons to justify shoveling ever-increasing piles of taxpayer money into buying new weapons from the arms makers. This, Greenwald says, is precisely the “unwarranted influence” of the “military-industrial complex” that President Eisenhower gravely warned our country to guard against in his famous farewell address some 62 years ago.

Eisenhower was, I must point out, attempting to draw attention to an even broader issue, i.e. the rise of an unaccountable technocratic administrative state, which accelerated in the wake of the technological-managerial revolution produced by WWII, and the “danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.” The influence of this transformation of American republican governance, of which a military-industrial complex was but one part, was likely, he predicted, to be “economic, political, even spiritual” in scope, and threaten to change “the very structure of our society.” But I will leave all that aside for the time being, as “military-industrial complex” is the phrase that stuck in public memory, along with the narrower, more common understanding of what Eisenhower was warning about that Greenwald is using in this case.

As described above, this understanding of the military-industrial complex – and a common understanding of how politics in Washington works in general – is essentially conspiratorial. Its primary mechanism is individuals, or groups of individuals, cynically manipulating the procedures of the state to advance their material self-interests. Thus Washington has turned into a “multi-tentacle war machine,” Greenwald says, because “No matter what is going on in the world, they always find – or concoct – reasons why the military budget must grow no matter how inflated it already is.” (Emphasis mine.)

Let’s call this the Corrupt Conspiracy Model of how Washington functions (or dysfunctions). It is a model that can be powerfully convincing, because it taps into the truth that people really are naturally flawed and self-interested creatures, demonstrably prone to corruption. Applying Lenin’s maxim – “who benefits?” – appears to provide players (the “they”) and the motive. Combine that motive with the means and opportunity produced by systems of collusion, and you seem to have a straightforward explanation for most of the policy that comes out of Washington: it’s all basically a con game led by a pack of greedy psychopaths. As Greenwald notes with some frustration and confusion, this used to be a characteristically left-wing critique of government and corporate power, but following the Great Political Realignment it’s now become common to the disaffected right instead.

Reading his argument made me recall how, back when I was younger and left-leaning, I too believed in this model, at least implicitly. As noted, it can be quite persuasive, even satisfying, in its simplicity. It’s also actually a subtly idealistic and optimistic theory: the American system would work great, just as it was designed to do, if not for all the selfish bad actors taking advantage of the system, etc. The only problem was that, after enough time in Washington, I had no choice but to reevaluate. Because what I found is that the swamp is populated almost wholly not by cynics, but by true believers.

True believers in what? Answering that will require trying to nail down a second, more complex model to explain how people in the Imperial City make decisions – and why it’s still always a good bet to invest in Lockheed Martin.[1]

First, let me qualify by acknowledging that yes, Washington is indeed awash with lobbyists, corrupt politicians, psychopathic executives, cynical operators, and backstabbing climbers. It is a veritable hive of scum and villainy. They just aren’t what really makes the place tick. In fact all of these people conform themselves parasitically to that which does.

The real issue to contend with is that almost no one in Washington actually thinks in the terms of the Corrupt Conspiracy Model. I.e. they don’t think “I will advocate for a hawkish, interventionist foreign policy so that the resulting wars will benefit the arms industry and make me and my friends rich…” – even the people with seats on the boards of defense contractors. The reality is more disturbing than that, honestly.

What runs Washington is a Spirit. Or, alternatively, a Story. Let me try to explain.

Share

There is a useful saying in Washington, which is: “Where you sit is where you stand.” This refers to how individuals’ interests, and even their values, almost inevitably come to be determined by their position within and among bureaucracies. Whatever motivations they may enter with, they soon find themselves defending and advocating for whatever will most benefit the bureaucracy of which they have become a part. It is a relatively common phenomenon for even loyal top-level political appointees, dispatched by a new president to head a particular department or agency specifically so as to bring it into line with the president’s policy goals, to quickly be coopted into acting against that president’s wishes and working to advance their bureaucracy’s self-interests instead. Even those who enter and discover the truth that “the bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy,” as Oscar Wilde memorably quipped, find they desire nothing so much as to help it do so. Their own interests and incentives have been subsumed by the bureaucracy’s interests and incentives.

How does this happen? And what is a bureaucracy, really? How is it that, as the critic Brooks Atkinson once wrote, bureaucracies are organizations “designed to perform public business,” but seemingly “as soon as a bureaucracy is established, it develops an autonomous spiritual life and comes to regard the public as its enemy”?
Title: "laws against hate speech in Czechoslovakia
Post by: ccp on January 19, 2023, 05:36:50 AM
https://www.ochrance.cz/uploads-import/DISKRIMINACE/Vyzkum/Hate_speech_on_the_Internet_and_decision-making_of_Czech_courts__Survey_2020_.pdf
Title: NRO: BLM's Bloody Bill Comes Due
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 28, 2023, 09:12:41 PM
BLM’s Bloody Bill Comes Due
By WILFRED REILLY
January 27, 2023 2:22 PM

The movement failed in a way that got lots of people hurt and killed because its core premise is wrong — but there is a better way to help our countrymen.

Less than a decade back, Black Lives Matter arrived on the national scene with a two-part message: A near-genocidal campaign is being waged against black Americans, and virtually all contemporary problems in the black community are the fault of white people.

This is no exaggeration. BLM spokesman Cherno Biko appeared on prime-time Fox News to argue that a totally innocent, presumably unarmed black person is “murdered” (his words) roughly once per day. Ben Crump, perhaps the nation’s most prominent attorney, published a best-selling 2019 book actually titled Open Season: Legalized Genocide of Colored People. At one point, as I noted in my own book Taboo, the Black Lives Matter website called for “re-payment to Blacks of all wealth ever extracted from a majority-Black community” by means of “racism, slavery, food apartheid, housing discrimination . . . and capitalism.” And so forth.

Now, the receipts for the effect of this movement are in. And what they show is the remarkably complete failure of a Narrative. As crime-data resources like Disaster Center and the FBI Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program make clear, murders in the United States increased from a low of 14,164 in 2014 — the year Black Lives Matter truly kicked off — to at least 22,900 in 2021, just seven years later.

This surge can be directly tied to the BLM-linked “Ferguson Effect” and “Floyd Effect.” In 2021, University of Massachusetts researcher Travis Campbell found that cities that experienced Black Lives Matter protests and riots — and surely often attempted to accommodate the demands of the marchers — did see some decrease in police homicides . . . but also experienced “a huge overall increase in murders.” The resulting murder surge was at least 10 percent overall, “equaling 1,000 to 6,000 additional murders” when expanded to the nationwide level.

Using more prosaic but equally effective methods, Jason Johnson of the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund found exactly the same thing: a direct and statistically significant correlation between declines in the kind of proactive policing hated by BLM and surges in homicide. In New York City, arrests of criminal suspects dropped by 38 percent while murders rose by 58 percent — increasing by more than 100. In my hometown of Chicago, arrests declined by 53 percent, while the corresponding surge in homicides was 65 percent. In the metroplex city of my new Kentucky home, Louisville, arrests plunged by 42 percent and stops overall by 35 percent; murders rose by a staggering 87 percent.

Even more remarkable than the existence of what is sometimes just called the “crime wave” was how targeted its effects actually were. While I have seen few mainstream pundits bold enough to discuss specific trends here — perhaps because very heterodox writers like Steve Sailer have — the United States has not in fact seen a rise in total crime since the last decade. Per the report “Criminal Victimization, 2021,” based on the victim-reported Bureau of Justice Statistics National Crime Victimization Survey (the BJS-NCVS), which is widely considered the gold standard of American crime data, crime overall did not increase significantly that year.

As presented in Table 14 of the authoritative report, 2,734,700 Americans were victims of serious (“index”) violent crimes — as compared with 2,599,620 in the Covid-19 lockdown year of 2020, 3,059,060 in 2019, 3,254,250 in 2018, and 3,106,346 back in 2017. Felony property crime also did not increase across this set of years, and neither did white-on-black or black-on-white crime (with this analysis beginning in 2018). Even black crime overall, heavily concentrated in the South, wasn’t really up: Contra internet memes of the “13/50” variety, identified blacks committed 974,378 — or just about 25 percent — of the 3,995,668 total violent crimes that took place in 2021. All of this data, which is totally noncontroversial, can be read in the report.

What did increase was hyper-violent, specifically black-on-black crime — murders, public shootings — concentrated in large and mostly blue cities that basically gave up on the idea of enforcing the law (“white” cities that did the same, such as Portland, Ore., saw similar results). Between the late 2010s and 2022, black Americans went from being responsible for less than 50 percent of 14,000–17,000 murders annually to being responsible for 60.4 percent of the 22,900 annual murders sourced above. Per easily available FBI data, the black homicide rate increased by roughly 50 percent in just the few years since the death of George Floyd. This is, notably, a purely “culturalist” result that has nothing to do with genetics or racism. It is, also, one of the most significant legacies of BLM.

I present all this statistical wonkery because I am a statistical wonk, but it shines light on a deeper point. Black Lives Matter’s solutions (“pull back the cops in dangerous neighborhoods”) failed in an obviously predictable way that got lots of people hurt and killed because BLM’s core premise is wrong. In 2023, contemporary racism is simply not the main barrier holding back black folks, or any other groups of Americans — whether Chinese, Italians, Jews, Mexicans, Indians, Nigerians, or anything else.

Evidence of this is all around us. We would see it if we stopped slap-fighting our countrymen, who are often wearing the same designer shirts and shades as we are, long enough to look for it. Today, either seven or eight — depending on how you decide to count South Africans — of the ten richest ethnic groups in the U.S. are nonwhite, including some of the populations I just listed. For that matter, East and South Asians — and probably Jewish Americans and West Africans, who are harder to break out of broader racial categories — outperform Anglos on today’s meritocratic SAT, averaging close to 1200 as versus an 1118 for “whites overall.” Over on the physical side of things, high-dollar professional sports are among the most integrated enterprises on the planet, with Major League Baseball and the NFL being diverse in the literal sense and the NBA clocking in at around 72 percent black.

Of course, none of this changes the brutal reality of history. “Systemic minority barriers to college admission,” and the like, obviously don’t exist these days — rather the opposite for that one — and in the United States of 2023, most people can make it. People sail here on bedroom doors to try. But it empirically is harder to achieve financial or social success if you start out poor. And owing to past conflict and race war and oppression, many more black kids, proportionately, are poor than is the case for white kids.

But here’s the thing: That’s also accurate almost verbatim for immigrants from Ukraine or Bosnia, or güero Mexicans, or plain Appalachian folks (trust me!) — and the actual non-secret path to achieving success is identical for all of these countrymen. It’s easy to mock the hokey old Success Sequence that almost every single ’80s or ’70s kid heard from a coach or priest/rabbi or (coughs) their father, but it really is true that you have a 1–2 percent chance of ever ending up poor if you do just four things at the start of life.

Those are: Take any job and work until you get a better one, wait until marriage (or age 25, for the cynics) to have children, avoid getting convicted of a felony, and graduate high school with any marks that make that possible. It’s also literally true that the biggest group-level predictor of success in school — again, contra both racialists and hereditarians, and per the Brookings Institution, of all places — seems to simply be how much kids study for class. Who knew?

Banter aside, the answer is that every sane person knew that. In Reality World, much of what the critical Left insists on calling “whiteness” — like showing up for business meetings on time — is prevalent in Japan and Nigeria, and in every minority-owned business I have ever worked at, and in what could more efficiently be called “civilization.” It would be a mitzvah indeed to start teaching this reality instead of fake oppression narratives, which lead nowhere or to chaos, to all of our kids and fellow citizens. Looking at the results BLM actually produced, let’s start . . . now.
Title: Kunstler: The War Against Us
Post by: G M on January 31, 2023, 07:16:26 AM


CLUSTERFUCK NATION – BLOGJanuary 30, 2023
The War Against Us

“We now live in a nation where doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, governments destroy freedom, the press destroys information, religion destroys morals, and our banks destroy our economy ” – Chris Hedges

    The question you might ask these days: how did we weaponize everything in American life against ourselves? Can you name an institution that is not at war with the people of this land? The exact mechanisms for all that bad faith stand in plain sight these days, and persons responsible can be easily identified. What’s missing are discernible motives. For now, it just looks like the greatest collective act of ass-covering in history.

     It’s pretty clear, for instance, that all the criminal misconduct in the FBI / DOJ — continuing to this moment — emanates from the years-long effort to cover up the seditious campaign to nullify Donald Trump starting well before Nov. 8, 2016. All the players in the agencies, and their news media accomplices, stand to lose at least their reputations, if the public cared about how dishonestly they acted. Many of those still working would lose their jobs and their livelihoods too, and quite a few would lose their freedom in prison. So, their motive to keep up the skullduggery is simple self-preservation.

     The Covid-19 pandemic looks like a pretty large-scale racketeering operation gone awry with plenty to hide. You have the reckless, symbiotic relations between the US public health bureaucracy and the pharmaceutical companies, and tons of money at stake, plus the colossal ego of hapless Dr. Anthony Fauci wishing to pose as an historic world-saver, another Louis Pasteur or Alexander Fleming. And then you have the amazingly foolish act of imposing an untested, dangerous “vaccine” on the world, and years of lying and covering-up its repercussions of injury and death. And then the opaque and nefarious roles of other actors in the story ranging from the CCP to the WEF to the Bill Gates and George Soros empires of money in what looks a genocide.

     It’s harder to unpack the enigma of the obviously unfit “Joe Biden” getting installed in the White House. My guess: the Obama claque behind him knew that “JB” was easily manipulable, and that his lame rivals, Klobuchar, Buttigieg, Liz Warren, and especially the proud socialist Bernie Sanders, could not be counted on to do exactly what they were told. The Obama claque especially needed a president to appoint agency heads who would cover-up its creation of an Intel Community Frankenstein, and all that monster has inflicted on the American public.

     Of course, the main device the claque had for pulling “Joe Biden’s” strings was the flagrant record of his many years of bribery and treason. The major effort to cover-up all that criminality was the DOJ and FBI’s suppression since 2019 of the Hunter Biden laptop, and the most stunning upshot was that the incendiary evidence of bribery and treason came out anyway, because so many copies of the laptop’s hard-drive got distributed. And absolutely nothing was ever done about it, nor about the actual persons — Christopher Wray, William Barr, and Merrick Garland — who worked to squash it, making themselves accomplices to ongoing bribery and treason.

      All this criminal misconduct is connected in a foul matrix of lawbreaking. The fact-patterns are well-established. Dozens of excellent books have catalogued the misdeed of RussiaGate and scores of websites daily dissect the shady intrigues around the “vaccine” crusade. The infamies of gross election interference have been systematically laid-out in the Twitter Files of the past two months. Many books, published essays, and videos substantiate the reality of massive ballot fraud in 2020 and 2022, including the felonious role of Mark Zuckerberg’s front org, the Center for Tech and Civic Life, and the election law manipulations of Lawfare goblin Marc Elias.

      There’s an understandable wish that upcoming hearings in Congress will lead to a reckoning for all of this. To banish consequence from public life, as we have done, is a pretty grave insult to nature, but who can tell whether accountability might restore our institutions at this point. We may be too far gone. The US is visibly collapsing now: our economy, our financial arrangements, our culture, our influence in world affairs, and our basic consensus about reality. We’re entering a phase of disorder and hardship that is likely to moot the further depredations of a government at war with its people. For one thing, it’s becoming impossible to pretend that this vicious leviathan has the money to carry on because the money is only pretending to be money.

      It’s no wonder that the collective ability for sense-making has failed. It will be quickly restored by each of us in the scramble to survive these disorders and hardships. The bewildering hypotheticals of recent years begin to dissolve like mist on the mountain and things come back into focus: your health, your daily bread, your shelter, your associations with other people close to you, your values, and most of all the power of your own choices. Nature, much insulted and maligned, will sort out the rest.

Title: Deep Read on the thinking of George Will
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 04, 2023, 09:49:50 AM


Why the Right Turned Left
They bought into the progressive idea of History with a capital H, says George F. Will, but couldn’t stand to see the other side having all the fun.
By Barton SwaimFollow
Feb. 3, 2023 5:33 pm ET

Washington

On the American right, from 1980 to 2016 the basic principles held: limited government, low taxation. There were departures, to be sure. “We have a responsibility that when somebody hurts, government has got to move,” George W. Bush said in 2003, shortly before signing into law a Medicare expansion passed by a GOP Congress. But the ideal toward which conservatives were striving—that remained.

The rise of Donald Trump signaled something new. Mr. Trump himself had no interest in philosophical arguments for or against state intervention, but he won in 2016—or so a lot of Republican politicos told themselves—by promising to bring industrial production back to the American homeland. Suddenly high-level Republicans rediscovered the virtues of central planning. Sen. Marco Rubio, who in his 2015 presidential campaign announcement had bewailed “the weight of more taxes, more regulations and more government,” was soon able to proclaim the virtues of industrial policy. Several of his GOP colleagues in the Senate—Josh Hawley and J.D. Vance most vocally—are now doing the same. For the first time in many decades, Congressional Republicans don’t even claim to care about slowing the growth of mandatory social-welfare programs, which together comprise two thirds of the federal budget.

A vocal and not negligible number of conservative intellectuals, most of them marching under the banner of “national conservatism,” gleefully scorn the postwar right’s “libertarian” or “neoliberal” veneration of markets. National conservatism is a baggy term—for some it means traditional conservatism with a particular concern for the American nation-state; for others it signifies collectivist social policies combined with social conservatism.

George F. Will, columnist for the last half-century for the Washington Post, has traveled in the opposite direction. In “Statecraft as Soulcraft,” published 40 years ago, Mr. Will, now 81, made the case for government’s ability, and therefore duty, to encourage virtue in the citizenry. Readers of Mr. Will’s columns from the 1990s to the 2020s, however, are likelier to think of him as a proponent of the free market. His most recent book, “The Conservative Sensibility” (2019), makes a cogent case for the removal of government, to the extent possible, from social and economic life.

I came to D.C. to ask Mr. Will about the transition from ordinary American conservatism to the big-government variety, or vice versa.

At the Peacock Cafe in Georgetown—he arrives precisely on time, wearing a navy jacket of superior quality and red tie—we talk about the craft of writing. He is a great writer of what journalists call “ledes.” On his iPhone he shows me his latest column, posted that morning online. Its opening words: “When her parents gave her an appealing adjective for a first name . . . ” The second word, I note, is a pronoun; the reader has to keep reading to find the antecedent. “Exactly,” he says. (The antecedent is, of course, Winsome Sears, Virginia’s lieutenant governor.)

After lunch we walk several blocks to his office. I am a devoted walker 31 years his junior, but there is no need to take it slow for the old-timer. We arrive at the place, a handsome two-story townhouse, all the walls lined with books, framed letters and baseball paraphernalia.

Once we’re seated, I put to him the question I came to ask: What changed? What moved him from a kind of Burkean communitarianism to an outlook much friendlier to—let’s call it—lightly regulated capitalism? Mr. Will acknowledges the change but insists he hasn’t departed altogether from the fundamental argument of “Statecraft.” He notes the book’s three-word subtitle: “What Government Does.” “Not what it should do, but what it cannot avoid doing.”

Government, he says, “shapes the characters of the citizenry by the habits, mores, and dispositions the legal regime encourages.” There’s something to that, even for a hidebound free-marketeer like me. Reading “Statecraft” again, I take its author to be challenging the looser rhetoric of early-’80s Reaganites. On page 123 he reprimands Reagan himself for saying more than once in his 1976 campaign, “I’ve always thought that the best thing government can do is nothing.” The younger Mr. Will: “But surely the truth, regarding every significant aspect of social life, is that the one thing government cannot do is ‘nothing.’ ”

(Not that Mr. Will is anything but an admirer of the 40th president. One of the framed shapshots displayed in his office shows Mr. Will and the Gipper, the latter clad in a white dinner jacket, watching fireworks from the Truman Balcony of the White House. That photograph is mounted near the front door.)

“What I did not fully appreciate when I wrote ‘Statecraft as Soulcraft,’ ” Mr. Will says, “was that a market-based capitalist society of spontaneous order—I’m using Hayekian language—is good for the soul. People used to say ‘An armed society is a polite society’—if everyone had a Colt on their hip or a dagger on their belt, they’d be polite to each other. Well I think a commercial society is a polite society.” Here Mr. Will does what he is famous for doing in his columns; rather than elaborating a nuanced explanation for what he’s just said, he puts it concretely in a line: “What’s the first thing you hear when you walk into a store? ‘How may I help you?’ ”

He says the word “help” slowly, gesturing with an outstretched hand. “The market is a cooperative culture.”

The usual question in conversations like this one: Why is our politics so embittered? Mr. Will begins with what I would term a more proximate answer:

“There was a qualitative change when Newt Gingrich became leader of the Republicans,” he says. I am skeptical of this interpretation, if only because it’s asserted so often by precisely the people—liberal journalists and academics—one would expect to offer it. He acknowledges the argument can be overdone but thinks there’s truth in it. “Forty years of Democratic control of the House of Representatives, which Gingrich to his great credit ended, was bound to produce this kind of vinegary politics. But Gingrich took it to another level.”

He asks if I remember Bob Michel. “The wonderful, sweet-tempered Peorian” is Mr. Will’s description of the man who led House Republicans from 1981 to the year Republicans took the House. “That’s what Republicans were before 1995. But they decided—many Republicans did, including Joe Scarborough and some others—that people like Michel were the problem. So they went the Gingrich way.”

But Mr. Will has a far more expansive explanation for the “vinegary” nature of our politics, too. “The other reason, the bigger reason, is that the stakes are higher than they ever have been before,” he says. “They’re not what we used to understand as political stakes—who gets what, all that distributional stuff. I think our politics today is part of the long reverberation of the most important thing that’s happened in Western politics in the last two centuries. That is that consciousness itself has become a political project.”

He lets that last statement linger. I wait for more.

“You can blame Marx, or his precursor Hegel,” he goes on. “Once you decide that human nature is a fiction, that human beings are merely the sum of impressions made on them by their surrounding culture, then politics acquires an enormous jurisdiction. Consciousness becomes a political project, and the point of politics becomes the control of culture in order to control the imposition of proper consciousnesses.”

Consciousness in the Marxian sense refers to the working class’s awareness of its revolutionary future; the proletarians’ consciousness is “false” until they understand their position as tools manipulated by the capitalists and bourgeoisie. In the American circumstance, if I understand Mr. Will, the struggle takes place between knowledge-class progressive elites and more or less everybody else.

Mr. Will thinks Vladimir Lenin, not Marx or Hegel, is the key figure here. Lenin “understood that the party is everything, and the party is everything because it’s a vanguard—it understands the ineluctable unfolding of the laws of history,” he says. “Conservatives don’t often speak of being ‘on the right side of history.’ Progressives say it all the time, because they’ve figured out that History is an autonomous proper noun, capital H, and people who don’t understand ought to get out of the way. One way to make them get out of the way is to tell them to shut up, or make them change their language.”

Progressives really do think, he says, that “consciousness is to be transmitted by the government. And they’re working on it, starting with kindergarten. The academic culture, from the Harvard graduate school of education to kindergarten in Flagstaff, Ariz., is the same now, coast to coast, as far as I can tell.” A core mission of K-12 education, in the progressive view of things, is to inculcate the values of diversity and equity. This Marxian project of consciousness-formation is “all over the country now,” he says. “Think of the DEI statements you’re supposed to make. It’s the threshold step in being considered for a faculty position. You express support for, enthusiastic support for, a political agenda. It’s quite explicit.”

I point out that it isn’t recognized as a political agenda. “That’s right,” he agrees. “A political agenda is contingent. But if History is unfolding, it’s not a choice, it’s not contingent.”

This is all very appealing, he thinks, to a certain kind of conservative or tradition-minded person who’s grown weary of the choices and contingencies of modern America. “I think the national conservatives envy the progressives for having all the fun. The progressives are having all the fun because they have a great and stately mandate, a project, which is to purge the world of false consciousness.” The last thing we need, he thinks, “are a lot of conservatives trying to get in on the fun.”

Mr. Will’s belief in the old “liberal” ideals of free speech and the settling of disputes by compromise has a corollary: He’s suspicious of too much concord. “On policy,” he says, “I’m much more alarmed by the consensus than the discord.”

One form of consensus he finds particularly destructive. “I think the political class is far more united by class interest than it is divided by ideology. From Elizabeth Warren on the left to Ted Cruz on the right, they all subscribe to the permanent powerful incentive to run deficits—peacetime, full-employment, large deficits. Because the perception that they won’t be here when the crash comes.”

He has a point. I once worked for a politician whose entire political persona was premised on the coming of a crash. It never came. Well—in a way it came, in 2008. But it wasn’t the sort of cataclysm a rational person might have expected from the practice of running ever-larger trillion-dollar deficits year after year. What happens when the crash finally happens?

“I don’t know,” Mr. Will says. “I noticed during the kerfuffle over Kevin McCarthy and the speakership, the Republicans said, ‘We are really serious about spending.’ Well, 67% of the budget is entitlements. Show of hands,” he says, “everyone who’s gonna take on Social Security and Medicare? Not gonna happen.”

Mr. Will is fond of an old joke: The first law of economics is, scarcity is real; the first law of politics is, ignore the first law of economics. “Everyone’s agreed on that,” he says. “They say Social Security’s trust fund will be exhausted in 10 years, at which point there will be a mandatory cut of 18% for all benefits. No there won’t. We’ll use general revenues, we’ll go on borrowing.” He ends this polite tirade against the political consensus with a perfectly Willian formulation: “People always ask, ‘What’s the biggest threat to American democracy?’ The biggest threat to American democracy is American democracy. It is the fact that we have incontinent appetites and no restraint on them.”

As we descend the steep staircase of his upper-floor office, the 81-year-old advises me to watch my step. When the crash finally happens, will George Will still be around to write two columns a week about it? He just might be.

Mr. Swaim is a Journal editorial page writer.
Title: The Botfire of the Humanities
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 10, 2023, 07:16:09 AM
The Botfire of the Humanities
Kurt Hofer
https://americanmind.org/salvo/the-botfire-of-the-humanities/?utm_campaign=American%20Mind%20Email%20Warm%20Up&utm_medium=email&_hsmi=245468541&_hsenc=p2ANqtz--rFg4unWVSBuywU7-STWzzw95Kcl4KpERf9GoaRZiFdgnK-HYDykD-KJelimRHSXKREB7NIt1W2RPmqzJ_NquD38P6PA&utm_content=245468541&utm_source=hs_email

Not all teachers luxuriated in our year and change of working in pajama bottoms during the lockdown. Despite the negative press we got for postponing our return to the classroom, no one among my peers wished to go back to the Zoom or “hybrid” teaching model. Perhaps what we educators thought was our guilt nagging at us for staying home was in fact the acute sense of our pending obsolescence. 

The lesser-told education story of the pandemic is that while some people—many, in fact—took the pandemic as an opportunity to head to what they hoped were greener pastures, the ones who stayed gained a newfound appreciation for the traditional classroom and school campus. And even, in some cases, for our jobs. For teachers and, I can attest, a great number of students, schools were often the first place where a sense of community was rekindled from the ashes of social isolation. This has been my experience in Lockdown La-La Land, Los Angeles.

It seems even more ironic, then, that as I approach the halfway mark of my first truly normal post-pandemic school year—no mass testing, masking optional—I was greeted during a department meeting by the news that something called ChatGPT, an open platform AI resource, could be used to summarize articles, respond to essay prompts, and even tailor its machine-made prose to a specific grade level. Marx got plenty of things wrong, but this quote from the Communist Manifesto (1848) has aged remarkably well: “The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society.”

I used to joke with my students that they would one day realize they could simply replace me with YouTube videos, but computer scientists have found something even better. A friend of mine, also a history teacher, offered up the example of photography supposedly unleashing a healthy wave of creativity and innovation in painting as a possible analog to the history teacher’s nascent predicament—which will only be compounded, by the way, as we feed the AI beast more and more free data with which to perfect itself. But what if, in keeping with larger trends across the national economy for the last 30 years or more, this “gain” in educational productivity is not offset by newer, better-paying jobs?

Unfortunately, sometimes Marxist analysis is right, even if its remedies aren’t. Our Silicon Valley/Big Tech bourgeoisie—and its allies across media, the globalized economy, and education public and private—has, in one fell swoop of an AI bot, revolutionized the instruments of intellectual production and, in doing so, revolutionized not merely the way knowledge is produced (“the relations of production”) but also the way people relate to and interact with one another (“the whole relations of society”). Just as social media has transformed the way our youth interact (or don’t), AI-aided education will likely have a heretofore unforeseen impact on the way students, parents, and teachers all relate to one another.

Big Tech and its tribunes will insist that this is all inevitable and that students and teachers will be “liberated” for tasks more meaningful than “rote memorization,” and skill sets that, this time, they really promise will not be automated. “Skills such as identifying context, analyzing arguments, staking positions, drawing conclusions and stating them persuasively,” as the authors of a recent Wall Street Journal editorial claim, “are skills young people will need in future careers and, most important, that AI can’t replicate.”

But this brings us back to Marx: the bourgeoisie would not be the bourgeoisie without “constantly revolutionizing the means of production.” I used to think that I, who spent four years in college and five more in grad school earning an MA and PhD, had nothing in common with the coal miners in West Virginia or the steel mill workers in Ohio who never saw it coming until it was too late. Now I’m not so sure. But if AI has taught us about the inevitability of obsolescence and creative destruction, the pandemic has equally taught us that history takes unexpected turns. Who could have predicted that the wheels of the globalized supply chain would fall off and a nascent bipartisan consensus to bring manufacturing closer to home would emerge from anywhere but the mouths of (supposed) far-right cranks like Pat Buchanan?

Human beings have agency, and sometimes when the arc of history bends them out of shape, they bend the arc back in turn. From what I have seen over the past few years, the “marvel” of online learning in the Zoom classroom has been almost universally rejected. True, learning loss played a part in this, but I would wager that the loss of face-to-face interaction and socialization was, at least for the affluent, the bigger concern.

All this is not to say that someone like me, a history teacher, can successfully fight the bots any more than the Luddites succeeded at smashing the machine looms. But I fear that without forceful intervention on the side of humanity—that is, without backlash and righteous popular anger—the Marxist narrative will gain momentum. As our tech overlords continue to revolutionize the means of production, many heretofore in the ranks of the bourgeoisie—like myself?—will fall into the cold embrace of the proletariat. For children, as for the economy at large, the gap between rich and poor will grow; the former will shrink and consolidate while the latter balloons, to the point where face-to-face education will become a luxury good. The wealthy will still know the company of teachers and the joys of in-person discussion. Private tutors and upstart backyard schools mobilized by the wealthy at the height of the pandemic are perhaps a foretaste of what’s to come. As with hand-made fedoras or craft beer, the “bougie” will always find a way to workaround the banal products of mass production and automation. Why should education be any different? As for the poor—Let them have bots!

The lesson for the Right, it seems, is one we’ve been hit over the head with for the better part of decade; this moment in history does not call for free-market fundamentalism but for the confrontation of what Sohrab Ahmari has called “privatized tyranny” and the lackeys carrying their water across all levels of government. For once it’s time to let the Left continue—as it has done under President Biden—to take up the mantle of creative destruction and endless innovation. To borrow another Marxist turn of phrase, let the fanatics of the neoliberal consensus—on the Left and Right—become their own grave-diggers as they feed the endless appetites of the bots. In turn, clear the stage for a reinvigorated nationalist-populist conservatism that can stake a claim for what it is to be human in the age of unbridled AI.
Title: AI
Post by: ccp on February 10, 2023, 07:50:41 AM


indeed maybe we will be posting AI search results on this board in the future

OTOH we may not be since all AI is from Leftist Democrat companies who will of course be biased against us...........

Title: Re: AI
Post by: G M on February 10, 2023, 07:55:23 AM


indeed maybe we will be posting AI search results on this board in the future

OTOH we may not be since all AI is from Leftist Democrat companies who will of course be biased against us...........

(https://westernrifleshooters.us/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/thumbnail_1676024556769blob.jpg)

https://westernrifleshooters.us/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/thumbnail_1676024556769blob.jpg
Title: AI on odds for CW2
Post by: G M on February 10, 2023, 09:49:50 AM
https://dcenquirer.com/chatgpt-ai-predicts-2nd-american-civil-war-probability-is-actually-100/
Title: Kunstler: A star is born
Post by: G M on February 10, 2023, 10:40:07 PM
https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/a-star-is-born/

A Star is Born!
“Everything that can be engineered is being engineered dishonestly.” —Truman Verdun
Clusterfuck Nation

For your reading pleasure Mondays and Fridays

Support this blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page

And thanks to all my Patrons for your support

     If you think the reasons behind the First World War were incomprehensible, imagine what historians of the future — pan-fraying peccary loins over their camp fires — will think about World War Three. Some people started something in Ukraine… and then the USA blew up the main energy supply line of its NATO ally, Germany… say, what…?!?

    Weird, a little bit.  A sane person in a sane world would call sabotaging the Nord Stream pipelines an act-of-war against a friendly nation, since the result was to virtually destroy the basis of Germany’s industry, not to mention the domestic comfort of German citizens. Now, thanks to 85-year-old Seymour Hersh, the independent investigator who uncovered the My Lai Massacre in 1969 and reported on the depraved antics of American jailers at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in 2004, we have a pretty good idea how the Nord Stream caper went down.

     For a year before the op, “Joe Biden” and Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland — architect of the 2014 Maidan Coup in Ukraine, which kicked-off the present fiasco there — blabbed about “ending” the Nord Streams. Curiously, the Germans said nothing. Meanwhile, the US made a deal to beef up military bases in Norway, an original NATO signatory (1949), for staging the Nord Stream sabotage op. Of course, Norway, being Western Europe’s sole remaining oil-and-gas exporter, had an interest in eliminating its competition.

    In June of 2022, under cover of an annual NATO naval exercise in the Baltic Sea, US Navy divers attached mines to the Nord Stream pipelines. The mines had triggers that could be activated remotely at any chosen time, and that moment came on September 26… kaboom! Ms. Nuland and Secretary of State Antony Blinken gloated publicly. Naturally, the US blamed Russia. America’s news media — catamite of the Intel Community — amplified the charge, despite the absurdity of Russia blowing up its most lucrative source of export revenue. The New York Times has so far made no mention of Mr. Hersh’s recent update of the Nord Stream sabotage.

     Germany, too, has hardly made a peep, nor did the rest of Western Europe, which now faces a future that looks, energy-wise, like a fairly swift return to the Fourteenth Century. Maybe they’re all jaded with modern life, all that tiresome bathing and malingering in the brightly-lit cafes. Under the sagacious guidance of the WEF they were all going “green,” anyway — but was that green like the heart-shaped leaves of the linden tree or green like the moldy veins in Roquefort cheese? I guess they’ll find out.

     Luckily, America had the Chinese balloon to distract them, and then “Joe B’s” State-of-the-Union extravaganza where the nation learned that we are living in the most extraordinary economic boom since the days of Babe Ruth and Charlie Chaplin. The perpetually-vacationing Leader of the Free World has apparently made America great again, despite the dastardly plots and ongoing insurrections of his far-right, white supremacist adversaries. Did the annual SOTU smell a little bit like a reelection pitch, though? I hope so.

     Speaking of insurrection, the House commenced hearings this past week, debuting with the Oversight Committee’s witness panel of Twitter execs who carried out a years-long censorship campaign against the First Amendment in cahoots with the FBI, CIA, DOD, DOJ, DOS, DHS…. Well, you get the picture: a more arrogant crew of dedicated fascists would be hard to find in any other corner of the world today, except perhaps Canada, than the likes of Vijaya Gadde, Yoel Roth, Anika Collier Navaroli, and James Baker, former chief counsel of the FBI. They “moderated” speech on the chat app for the good of the American people, you understand, lest the public succumb to “misinformation” — otherwise known as reality.

     One reality being that the sedulously-repressed news of Hunter Biden’s crime-stuffed laptop represented interference in the 2020 election. James Baker told the committee he “could not recall” whether, at the time (October 2020), he spoke to anyone back in his old haunts at the FBI about the matter — though there is no question that, as chief counsel, he knew the agency had possession of the laptop since 2019, and what was in it. Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.) warned the four former Twitter employees that “this is the investigation part, later comes the arrest part.” Let’s hope so on that one, too.

     Meanwhile, the House Special Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government held a lively colloquy with four “experts” including former FBI agents Nicole Parker and Thomas Baker, GWU Law Professor Jonathan Turley, and one Elliot Williams, former DOJ Assistant AG and currently shill for DC Lawfare tank the Raben Group. The theme, generally, was the change-in-mission in the FBI-DOJ nexus from law enforcement to harassment of US citizens who oppose Democratic Party policy.

     Most instructive in Thursday’s session, though, was the political debut of Democratic Rep. Daniel Sachs Goldman (real name), newly elected member for New York’s Tenth District (which encompasses Wall Street). Among other distinctions, Mr. Goldman is an heir to the Levi-Strauss blue jeans fortune, and was lead counsel during the 2019 impeachment hearings against Donald Trump in the House Intelligence Committee. This vicious prick, an apt replacement for the inveterate liar and seditionist, Rep. Adam Schiff (CA), put on a florid demonstration of hectoring witnesses, cutting them off, and re-directing the committee’s attention at every opportunity to the so-called “insurrection” at the Capitol of 1/6/21.

      Mr. Goldman is a man to watch, especially as the House actually does give its complete attention later this year to the 1/6/21 matter and the true facts behind the FBI’s engineering of the event, including the nefarious actions of former Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her Capitol Police. When it comes, I can’t wait to watch Mr. Goldman unwind like one of those cheap counterfeit Rolex watches that peddlers hawk on Wall Street’s sidewalk.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 11, 2023, 02:58:12 PM
This analysis leaves out the rather significant part wherein Germany was backstabbing its NATO allies to the east and Ukraine too by cutting the Nord Stream deals with Russia.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: G M on February 11, 2023, 03:40:03 PM
This analysis leaves out the rather significant part wherein Germany was backstabbing its NATO allies to the east and Ukraine too by cutting the Nord Stream deals with Russia.

So we were justified in our act of war against Germany?
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 12, 2023, 12:05:56 PM
No need to be argumentative.  You already know well the big picture of my point of view on all this.

I was stating a fact.  The article in question left out a major, and obvious, point of great relevance in its analysis.

Period.

A reasonable inference is that the author cannot be counted upon to present facts inconvenient to his argument.

Period.

Title: Kunstler: Oh lightning, I command thee to smite my foe!
Post by: G M on February 17, 2023, 10:56:26 PM
https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/oh-lightning-i-command-thee-to-smite-my-foe/


Oh lightning, I command thee to smite my foe!
“When we see a completely insane public policy which has become a universal dogma — such as liberal internationalism in postwar US foreign policy — we are usually looking at the rotten, ossified ghost of a strategy which in its youth was sane and effective.” — Curtis Yarvin, The Gray Mirror
Clusterfuck Nation

For your reading pleasure Mondays and Fridays

Support this blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page

And thanks to all my Patrons for your support

     After Commander-in-Chief (ahem) “Joe Biden” demonstrated our ability to shoot down a Chinese spy balloon leisurely wandering the jet stream clear across North America, he loosed the Air Force on every other menacing aerial object hovering in our sovereign skies and… Ira Tonitrus… mission accomplished! It took the President another week to admit sheepishly that the three other targets were “most likely balloons tied to private companies, recreation or research institutions,” not alien invaders from another galaxy, as regime spoxes hinted and the news media played-up for days. Note to America’s hot air ballooning community for the upcoming spring launch season: be very afraid!

     If Russia was impressed by the successful balloon op, it didn’t offer any comment. Russia was busy neutralizing America’s pet proxy palooka, sad-sack Ukraine, sent into the ring to soften-up Russia for a revolution aimed at overthrowing the wicked Vlad Putin — at least according to our real Secretary of State (and Ukraine war show-runner), Victoria Nuland, in remarks this week to the Carnegie Endowment, a DC think tank.

     Speaking of tanks, our NATO allies are getting cold feet about sending those Leopard-2 war wagons into the Ukraine cauldron. Something about it had a discouraging act-of-war odor, as, by the way, did blowing up the Nord Stream gas pipelines, alleged by veteran reporter Seymour Hersh — though that caper was actually against NATO member and supposed US ally, Germany. WTF? Are the doings in Western Civ getting a little too complex for comfort?

     Anyway, it turns out that the thirty-one Abrams tanks America promised to Ukraine have yet to be bolted together at the tank factory. It’s a special order, you see, because we don’t want to send the latest models built with super-high-tech armor that the Russians might capture and learn from… so Mr. Zelensky will just have to cool his jets waiting on delivery, say, around Christmas time… if he’s not singing Izprezhdi Vika somewhere in Broward County, Florida, by then.

     The biggest problem Russia has in resolving this conflict on its border, is doing it in a way that does not drive “JB” and his posse of war-mongers so batshit crazy that they resort to a nukes-flying, world-ending, Thelma-and-Louise type denouement. In effect, America put a bomb on Russia’s front porch and now Russia has to carefully defuse the darn thing. The prank itself was just the last in a long line of foolish American military escapades that have ended in humiliation for us, most recently the Afghan fiasco. At best, this one in Ukraine — which we started in 2014 — is on-track to sink NATO, plunge Europe into cold and darkness, and put the USA out of business.

     In the meantime, America is rapidly disintegrating on the home front. Is it attempted suicide or murder? It’s a little hard to tell. Things are blowing up from sea to shining sea — food processing facilities, giant chicken barns, regional electric grids, oil refineries. The latest, of course, is a chemical spill from the Norfolk-Southern train wreck in East Palestine, Ohio, set ablaze by a conclave of government officials purportedly to keep the toxic liquids from seeping into the Ohio River watershed and beyond. Of course, in the dithering prior to lighting it up, enough vinyl chloride leached into streams feeding the big river to kill countless fish. And then torching the remaining chemical pools sent up a mushroom cloud of dioxin and other poisons that killed wildlife, pets, and chickens in the vicinity before the evil miasma wafted eastward on the wind to the densely-populated Atlantic coast.

     One has to wonder whether an army of saboteurs is on the loose across the land. Considering the border with Mexico is wide open, why wouldn’t America’s adversaries send whole wrecking crews over here to mess with our infrastructure? There’s no question that people from all over the planet have been sneaking across the Rio Grande. Surely some of them are on a mission. America is filled with “soft” targets, things unguarded and indefensible — not least, tens of thousands of miles of railroad track. Of all the reasons to be unnerved by “Joe Biden’s” open border policy, this one is the least discussed, even in the alt-media. But it seems like a no-brainer for nefarious interests who might want to bamboozle and disable us.

     The sad truth of this moment in history is that the USA has too much going sideways with our own business at home now to be dabbling in any foreign misadventures — and we couldn’t have picked a worse place than Ukraine to do it. The sheer logistics are implausible. The geography is lethally unfavorable. The place has been inarguably within Russia’s sphere of influence for centuries and Russia has every intention of pacifying the joint at all costs. Peace talks are apparently out of the question for our leaders. Something’s got to give, and that something is probably Western Civ’s financial system. It’s primed to blow anyway, and when it does, we’ll have other things to think about.

Title: Moving GM's post here: We lost America's hardworking men
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 23, 2023, 05:46:40 AM
https://www.revolver.news/2023/02/america-lost-hardworking-men-who-held-her-together-and-now-she-is-crumbling/
Title: Kunstler: We'll soon find out
Post by: G M on March 04, 2023, 10:57:04 AM
https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/well-soon-find-out/

We’ll Soon Find Out
The crown of America sits in a gutter begging someone to pick it up before the nation collapses— Auron MacIntyre, The Blaze
Clusterfuck Nation

For your reading pleasure Mondays and Fridays

Support this blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page

And thanks to all my Patrons for your support

      In an interview with Fox News’s Bret Baier last Tuesday, FBI Director Chris Wray said, “The FBI has for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan.” Like so much else in America’s tortured, distractible life these days, the meaning larded into that utterance went clear over the collective heads of just about everybody.

     What was the key part of that statement? “For quite some time now….” Gee, really? Like, how long? One year? More than that? Maybe since March 2020? And you didn’t say anything, Mr. FBI Director? You didn’t do a thing to dispel the Covid-19 miasma of confusion that swaddled Washington DC like a smallpox blanket of yore? The question of where the novel coronavirus came from has been a ferocious national controversy since late 2019, you understand. Several government agencies, including the CIA and all the offices under the gigantic National Institutes of Health (NIH) – including the NIAID run for decades by Dr. Anthony Fauci — plus the FDA and CDC, tucked into the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)… all of these outfits have pretended to not know the true origin of Covid-19 for over three years. And the FBI Director, who could have shed some authoritative light on the matter by stepping up to a podium and weighing in, just let all that chaos roll?

       And by-the-by, let’s not forget that the whole time Chris Wray knew with moderate certainty that Covid-19 came from the Wuhan virology lab, he was in charge of a battalion of FBI agents assigned to managing Twitter, Facebook, and Google — that is, the apps that comprise the digital Public Square — to make sure that anyone who opined about Covid coming from the Wuhan lab got censored, banished, cancelled, reputationally destroyed.

     So, why did Mr. Wray make this statement on Tuesday… “The FBI has for quite some time now assessed…” Probably we’re hearing the old Modified Limited Hangout strategy, a venerable ruse, which is when a criminally culpable government throws the public a bone of admission about something that is common knowledge anyway — the thing everybody knows — while pretending that they were in on the common knowledge all along — which just adds another layer of perfidy to the giant matrix of lies laid down by US agency officials in this disgraceful episode of US history.

        What Mr. Wray left out of his statement this week is any hint that a gang of US scientists and doctors under Dr. Fauci were directly and intimately involved in the activities at Wuhan that produced the virus that killed millions around the world, and led to the warp speed production of a “vaccine” mere weeks after the organism appeared — which will probably end up killing and maiming more people than the disease itself.

      It happened also this past week that a team of distinguished medical warriors including Drs. Martin Makary of Johns Hopkins, Martin Kulldorff of Harvard, and Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford testified before the opening session of the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic. Dr. Makary began his remarks stating boldly: “The greatest perpetrator of misinformation during the pandemic has been the United States government….”

…. Misinformation that…

Covid was spread through surface transmission
That vaccinated immunity was far greater than natural immunity
That masks were effective. Now we have the definitive Cochrane review. What do you do with that review? Cochrane is the most authoritative evidence body in all of medicine and has been for decades. Do you just ignore it and not talk about it?
That myocarditis was more common after the infection than after the vaccine. Not true, it is 4-28 times more common after the vaccine.
That young people benefit from a booster, misinformation. Our two top experts on vaccines quit the FDA in protest over this particular issue, pushing boosters in young, healthy people. The data was never there. That’s why the CDC never disclosed hospitalization rates among boosted Americans under the age of 50.
That vaccine mandates would increase vaccination rates. A George Mason University study shows that it didn’t. It did one thing, it created “Never-Vaxxers” who are now not getting the childhood vaccines they need to get.
     “Over and over again, we’ve seen something that goes far beyond using your best judgment with the information at hand. We’ve seen something that is unforgivable, and that is the weaponization of medical research itself. The CDC putting out their own shoddy studies, like their own study on natural immunity looking at one state for two months, when they had data for years on all 50 states. Why did they only report that one sliver of data? Why did the salami slice the entire database? Because it gave them the result they wanted.

     The same with the masking studies. The data has now caught up in giant systematic reviews, and public health officials were intellectually dishonest. They lied to the American people.”

     This week, Edward Dowd, the former BlackRock trader-turned-Covid-statistician — and author of the new book Cause Unknown — released preliminary fourth quarter 2022 “excess deaths” numbers for group life insurance death claims compiled by the International Society of Actuaries (SOA).

     For the age group up to age 44 excess deaths rose above the baseline (normal): 13 percent in October, 21 percent in November, and 43 percent in December. For the age group 45 to 64, the death rate above baseline rose 4 percent in October, 16 percent in November, and 35 percent in December. Mr. Dowd says that he is told the rates moving into the first quarter of 2023 are higher still. This is what’s known as a trend, and a pretty ominous one.

      It boils down to an awful lot of people in the prime of life dying off, and more every month. Nobody in any of the US public health agencies is talking about this. One very prominent official, Rochelle Walensky, head of the CDC, is still busy arranging to dispense more Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines to America’s school-children — the “vaccines” being the prime suspects causing those stunning excess death rates among the young and employed demographic. Nice work, Rochelle!

      How do the approximately 70 percent of vaxxed-up Americans deal with this reality? Many, of course, are noticing vaxxed family members, friends, colleagues, sports figures, acquaintances getting sick and dying of sudden heart failure, strokes, aggressive cancers, strange neurological problems, and other mystifying syndromes. The aggregate reaction so far seems to be a numb despair. But then, the still-living vaxxed also have to contend with the anxiety over what is going on in their own bodies. Perhaps they’ve heard whispers from the more extreme voices on the margins of this discussion that every single person who got vaxxed might be subject to an early death one way or another. That’d be a reason to withdraw into the first stage of the Kübler-Ross Transect of Grief, which is denial… and just hunker down there… for now. It’s an awful lot to contend with.

    What’s next then? Consider that around 30 percent of Americans are not vaxxed, and are free of the anxiety that they are designated goners — notwithstanding the basic limits of the human condition. That 30 percent of Americans, and perhaps even some of the 70 percent vaxxed, will possibly be concerned with the other enormous threats to our national life: the insane Ukraine project, which looks like the overture to World War Three (no thank you); and the collapsing US economy, with features such as unaffordable food and fuel, scarcity of parts for fixing anything that’s broken, and a pretty good chance that retirement accounts will be wiped out in a coming equity-and-bond market “correction.”

     All of which is to ask: when will the people of this land finally get pissed-off at the managers who are running everything? And when will the people start to express their new-found rage? I’ll make a wild-hair guess. By May, when the weather really starts lightening up, the people will be out in the streets looking to smash anything that appears to represent authority. Welcome to the season of real chaos and crisis, possibly many seasons, maybe years. Take great care of yourselves and your situations. Prepare if you can. How does it feel…to be on your own? the bard sang sixty years ago. We’ll soon find out.
Title: Kunstler: Everything, All at Once
Post by: G M on March 11, 2023, 11:22:35 AM
https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/everything-all-at-once/

Everything, All at Once
“There’s a lot of stupidity in public discourse, and most of it is not worth paying attention to. But once in a while, there is a kind of stupidity that is so grotesque that its very existence to any substantive degree tells us something about our culture.” — Richard Hanania
Clusterfuck Nation

For your reading pleasure Mondays and Fridays

Support this blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page

And thanks to all my Patrons for your support

     Time, they say, is nature’s way of making sure that everything doesn’t happen at once. Whoever “they” are — and these days it is liable to be just one person — obviously hadn’t tried living in the USA in 2023, because now everything is happening at once. The cosmic weirdness has left some observers, such as the formidable and admirable Naomi Wolf, to wonder if we are under the sway of something supernatural, and not a good something.

     The old movie Poltergeist comes to mind. Remember? Every evil entity in the pop culture universe came spewing out of a TV all at once to disorder a perfectly banal and serene suburban neighborhood, representing all of us, of course. These days, when I drive to the supermarket to behold the astounding price of tomatoes, I half-expect to see a giant projection of Joy Reid, piggyback on a hoofed-and-horned Klaus Schwab, ride across the sickening red twilight sky, her shrieks making the leafless trees cringe and the asphalt crack. The shadow-side of everything in American history and posterity is loose upon the land, and our country has finally come to look exactly like Dylan’s Desolation Row: They’re selling postcards of the hanging, and painting the passports brown, all right. The beauty parlor’s filled with sailors, the circus is in town.

      The defining moment of the week was the White House ceremony with Dr. Jill Biden and her side-piece, Tony Blinken, presenting an International Women of Courage award to Ms. Alba Rueda of Argentina, a biological man. But, of course! Kisses all around. Mattias Desmet, author of The Psychology of Totalitarianism, pointed out some time ago that a psychotic political regime would require the people to swallow ever-greater absurdities as things played out in its death-wish drive toward national nullity.

     But was that little scene more absurd than the regime’s campaign in Ukraine to do… uh, to do what, exactly? To punish Vladimir Putin, or something like that. Or is it nuclear war they’re really after? A war, they’re telling themselves, that we would surely win, as if being a continent-sized ashtray is winning. Meanwhile, our Intel Community has discovered that it was… well might have been… Ukraine, after all, who blew up the Nord Stream pipelines — with help from some outside parties (namely, America’s Intel Community).

      But waitagoshdarnminnit! How does that get anybody off-the-hook for the costly caper? NATO supposedly backs Ukraine, right? And Germany is the European leader of NATO, right? So you’re telling me Ukraine blew up a systemically-important asset of a leading country that supports Ukraine? Something doesn’t add up in that-there rebus puzzle. I’ll spare you the mental labor. The US Spook Industrial Complex is just laying another trip on you. And the “you” includes poor bamboozled Germany, led by arguably the biggest sap ever elected by a supposedly advanced nation, Olaf Scholz, whose name will evermore ring through history as a synonym for “chump.”

     Sooner or later, one or both of the following must happen: the German people will dump this chump and / or his replacement will find a way to bow out of Germany’s commitment to America’s foolish proxy war against Russia, leading post-haste to the disintegration of NATO, and leaving America’s army of vaccine-injured transsexuals to reconquer the Donbas and Crimea, led by Tony Blinken in an off-the-shoulder cocktail dress.

     Anyway, by the time that hallucination comes to pass, all the other things that are happening at once will be so vividly in America’s face that the epic sleepwalk of the Walking Woke ends with a jolt like unto a cattle prod upside the brain-pan. For instance, the implosion of our financial markets along with a sudden, shocking expiration of the US dollar as a credible currency. The mighty “woosh” heard from sea to shining sea will be the sound of capital going up in a vapor. The event will halt all that jabber about debt ceilings, budgets, and billions for Ukraine. A nauseated silence spreads across the land. Then, what?

    I heard a rumor this week (yes, it’s just a rumor) that the Federal Reserve is bailing out WalMart, the Krogers supermarket chain, and other national food distributors in a stealth overnight lending operation. Their business model is shot. Nobody has the scratch to buy stuff. The never-ending Blue Light Special has finally gone dark. Make of it what you will. Could be some kind of fake news. But if it’s not, we’re talking about not just giant businesses in deep trouble and possibly going down, but also about a big problem with food moving around the country. Do you suppose that might get people’s attention?

      Two other big deals are ripening now: America is discovering just how played the country was by the Covid-19 stunt, including the “vaccine” fraud, now burgeoning into a nightmare of escalating injury and all-causes death. Just this week the nation learned how the previous chief of the CDC, one Robert Redfield, was left entirely in the dark by Dr. Tony Fauci and his minions in discussions of how the novel coronavirus came to be, and who, exactly, was responsible for this fiasco. Something went very wrong in American public health officialdom. Indictments, anyone?

     The other shock will come when somebody at the FBI — if not Director Chris Wray himself — will finally be forced to disclose to a congressional committee that the January 6, 2021, riot at the US Capitol was fomented by a substantial band of US government agents working the crowd of hapless protesters to produce the perfect Trump-ending fiasco. That will be the end of “Joe Biden.” But then, what?

Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 11, 2023, 01:51:50 PM
GM:

Should America do as you advocate

a) What happens in Ukraine?
b) What happens in East Europe?
c) What is America's credibility on the world stage?
d) What does China do?
e) What does Iran do?
f) What does North Korea do?
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: G M on March 11, 2023, 01:55:40 PM
GM:

Should America do as you advocate

a) What happens in Ukraine? Not our problem
b) What happens in East Europe? Not our problem
c) What is America's credibility on the world stage?  :roll:

We have credibility? With whom?

d) What does China do? If we onshore our manufacturing, the PRC is pretty scroomed
e) What does Iran do? Not our problem
f) What does North Korea do? South Korea can figure it out
Title: Zeihan on lying data
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 16, 2023, 06:24:54 AM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QvCzWoiRLg0&t=7s
Title: from DNYUZ (D) James Earl Carter sabotaged
Post by: ccp on March 19, 2023, 07:27:46 AM
https://dnyuz.com/2023/03/18/a-four-decade-secret-the-untold-story-of-sabotaging-jimmy-carters-re-election/

 :roll:

as though James Earl was really a great prez and he only lose because of the hostages.

me: CONSPIRACY THEORY !

Reagan election - won fair and square
Title: Kunstler: SVB + FTX + SBF = WTF?
Post by: G M on March 19, 2023, 11:41:52 AM
SVB + FTX + SBF = WTF?

“Deny, deflect, minimise & mock your enemies questions. Don’t engage them in good faith, they’re attacking you with a view to undermining you. Don’t fall for it. Don’t give them an inch.” — Aimee Terese on Twitter




     The net effect of all the lying propaganda laid on the public by the people running things lo these many recent years is a peculiar inertia that makes us seemingly impervious to gross political shocks. Momentous things happen and almost instantly get swallowed up by time, as by some voracious cosmic amoeba that thrives on human malignancy. Case in point: the multiple suicide of several giant banks just days ago that prompted “Joe Biden” to nationalize the US banking system.

     As if all the operations around finance in this land were not already unsound and degenerate enough, the alleged president just cancelled moral hazard altogether. It’s now official: from here forward there will be no consequences for banking fraud, poor decision-making, fiduciary recklessness, self-dealing, or any of the other risks attendant to the handling of other people’s money. Bailing out the Silicon Valley Bank and Barney Frank’s deluxe Signature Bank means that the government will now have to bail out every bank every time something goes wrong.

     The trouble, of course, is that the government doesn’t have the means to bail out every bank. Its only resort is to ask the Federal Reserve to summon new money from a magic ether where the illusion of wealth is conjured to paper-over ever greater fissures in the splintering matrix of racketeering that America has become. That will quickly translate into US dollars losing value, that is, accelerating inflation, which is how nature punishes you when your government lies and pretends that it has a bad situation well-in-hand.

     Be advised: the situation is not in-hand and is going to get a whole lot worse as new and subsidiary shocks thunder through the weeks and months ahead, until the whole wicked business blows. Likewise, the reactions of our government will only get more tragi-comically pathetic. The harder this gang of feckless, wannabe control freaks pretends to control events, the faster events spin out of control.

     Money dies when it loses its direct connection to the generation of wealth from the real things of this earth: fuels, crops, metals, materials, labor, and the value-added products made from them. Since that divorce has already happened, the need arises for something else that can function as money (a store of wealth, an index of value, and a medium of exchange). The government will pretend that a Central Bank Digital Currency is that something else. Since banking is now nationalized by the Federal Reserve backstopping everything and everybody, then theoretically all the wealth of the nation is under its command. That would be another illusion.

    This CBDC would not be “money” representing wealth because America’s wealth is going, going, gone, pissed away, falling apart, de-laminating, oxidizing, rusting in the rain, going up in a vapor. Think of all those mortgaged cars on the road racking up the mileage until they’re worthless and all those mortgaged suburban houses built out of particle-board and vinyl smeared all over the landscape, decomposing into their constituent chemicals — over time, a dead loss. And that’s what’s left of our American Dream: coldcocked by entropy and, by extension, the laws of the universe. The CBDC would just be a computerized tracking apparatus for zombies lurching pointlessly around that dead zone… a final insult. The CBDC is already DOA, only the CB doesn’t know it.

     One big mistake so many commentators and observers are making takes us back to the matter of cancelled moral hazard, and of consequence in general: it is the failure to appreciate how much disorder will manifest from the farrago of mindfuckery and misconduct we’ve been subjected to. By which I mean things stop working, including the elemental things like your ability to get food, fix whatever breaks, and keep the lights on.

      The potential disorder is why our government will probably not be able to fix itself. The disorder may go on for quite a while, but eventually the survivors will synergetically fix their circumstances themselves working in-step with the emergent mandates of reality. Having lived through a reality-optional period of history, it will come as an ecstatic shock to learn that the world requires us to pay attention to what is really happening and to act accordingly. We’ll find ways to get food, make some things work, and shine some lights in the darkness, if perhaps not by means we’re familiar with now.

     In the meantime, expect more disordering tragi-comedy from the “Joe Biden” led psychotic regime ruling over us with its drag queen commissars, lawless Lawfare vandals, race hustlers, agents provocateurs, informers, censors, prosecutors, inquisitors, jailers, and propagandists — the worst collection of imbeciles, grifters, and villains ever assembled into political party.
Title: Newt
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 21, 2023, 07:37:05 AM
Perspective on lost Reaper drone

Bureaucratic incompetence puts America’s safety at risk

By Newt Gingrich

As you watch the newly released, declassified video of Russian pilots harassing and colliding with a U.S. Reaper drone over the Black Sea — and the dire media reports warning that the U.S.-Russia conflict could heighten — it’s important to keep things in perspective.

This incident is an expensive but minor challenge in a long-term, nuanced contest with Russia, whose leader is still operating with a Cold War mentality. At the end of the day, we lost an unmanned aircraft. It was valuable (in terms of monetary cost to produce, information gathering, and technological capabilities), but it is not something to go to war over.

This is especially true when you consider the more than 200 U.S. airmen who were shot down and lost while surveilling the Soviet Union and China in the 1950s and 1960s. These were patriots who risked and ultimately gave their lives so that we could have a better understanding of Soviet radar and nuclear capabilities. Many were killed in combat, some were likely tortured and interrogated by KGB operatives, and others were sent to Soviet labor camps in the hinterlands of Siberia.

Some of their families didn’t even learn of their deaths or whereabouts until the 1990s. In many other cases, families never learned the fates of their loved ones. If you are unfamiliar with the sacrifice these brave patriots made, Smithsonian magazine has an excellent feature on their service.

So, the downing of an expensive piece of spy equipment does not concern me too much.

I am far more concerned that our Defense Department leadership doesn’t have a larger long-term strategy to deal with Russia, the war in Ukraine, or any of our other major

challenges. Further, I’m concerned that they don’t have a real grip on what’s happening in the present. Remember: More than one year ago, our top military official, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley, publicly said that Russia would take Kyiv in three days. This is the same general who said the Afghan military could potentially withstand the Taliban’s takeover of the country after the U.S. surrender. (Set aside the moronically disastrous decision to give up Bagram Airfield as our primary eyes on Chinese activity.)

After these two decisive failures, I am amazed Gen. Milley has not been retired. What must our adversaries think about the quality of U.S. intelligence? How does this repeated, demonstrable incompetence affect Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping’s plans for Taiwan? What if we are as wrong about the Chinese threat to Taiwan as we were about the Taliban’s threat to Afghanistan or the Russian threat to Ukraine?

I am picking on Gen. Milley, but in some ways, he’s a symptom of a much bigger problem. We have 18 intelligence agencies. Apparently, they were all wrong. My suspicion is they were wrong not because they have bad personnel but because they are part of a large bureaucratic system that rejects new ideas, punishes dissent, and is primarily concerned with protecting itself rather than American interests.

The impact is that these highly educated professionals bury their heads in the sand. They favor what they learned in graduate school — and what their peers say at cocktail parties — over what is really happening in the world. Our political leaders then get briefed on ideological rather than pragmatic intelligence. Consider that less than five years ago, many people in the Washington establishment did not think China posed a significant threat. In 2019, then-candidate Joe Biden brushed off concerns over competition with China, saying, “China is going to eat our lunch? Come on, man!”

About two years later, he said exactly the opposite.

Bureaucratic incompetence is the biggest risk to America’s safety.

Congress needs to get serious about modernizing our defense systems. One could likely reorganize our 18 intelligence agencies into about six. I often tell audiences that the Pentagon could be turned into a triangle and become much more efficient and effective at defending American interests.

With regard to the war in Ukraine and the long conflict with Russia, we need to learn from the failures in Afghanistan. Democracies don’t fight long wars well. We need to develop and successfully implement a strategy that results in the fastest, most decisive Ukrainian victory possible.

From China to Iran to North Korea, our adversaries are watching. America must not continue to fail.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: G M on March 21, 2023, 07:41:30 AM
"We need to develop and successfully implement a strategy that results in the fastest, most decisive Ukrainian victory possible."

Narrator's Voice: It's not possible.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on March 21, 2023, 08:18:36 AM
"We need to develop and successfully implement a strategy that results in the fastest, most decisive Ukrainian victory possible."

Narrator's Voice: It's not possible.


agreed  , just more nonsensical grandstanding

I like Newt but sometimes he is all talk

we need to do this we need to do that
we need to ....

we need a strategy such as ?
we need a plan such as ?

MORE F 16s !!!
blah blah blah

we could send them napalm - that worked well 55 yrs ago



Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 21, 2023, 01:17:20 PM
At this point in his very interesting life, Newt is chattering class.  Though thanks to the viscitudes (sp?) of age he may not be a step slower, but he still brings plenty to the conversation.  His point here about the sheer blithering feckless incompetence of our command chain is quite on target and, I would suggest, an additional worthy rejoinder to those who advocate "more"-- even though Newt is advocating "more" haha.
Title: VDH on our collapse
Post by: G M on March 25, 2023, 03:58:34 PM
https://amgreatness.com/2023/03/16/are-we-the-byzantines/
Title: Re: VDH on our collapse
Post by: G M on March 26, 2023, 08:46:04 AM
https://amgreatness.com/2023/03/16/are-we-the-byzantines/

https://voxday.net/2023/03/26/america-is-not-byzantium/
Title: WSJ on declining patriotism
Post by: ccp on March 27, 2023, 07:49:13 AM
https://www.wsj.com/articles/americans-pull-back-from-values-that-once-defined-u-s-wsj-norc-poll-finds-df8534cd

no mention of the progressive push as being the root cause

of course - but the rise of Donald Trump is mentioned as a cause -  :roll:

WSJ as usual falls short

we have academics teaching to hate the US

were racist
not enough diversity
sexual preferences most important thing
spending so far into debt we can never get out of it
the declining value of family and religion
dividing the country into favored voting blocks
lying
CRT
DEI
trans
endless open borders with people coming here for the bucks who have no clue or concern for the Republic and its founding ideals
leaders of minorities stoking self hatred
  racism
the free shit mentality
lack of responsibility for one's self
country sucks so why would any one want to protect it

ALL THIS COMES FROM THE LEFT

but WSJ does not mention

because they profit from it.

Title: Re: WSJ on declining patriotism
Post by: G M on March 27, 2023, 07:51:34 AM
WSJoke

https://www.wsj.com/articles/americans-pull-back-from-values-that-once-defined-u-s-wsj-norc-poll-finds-df8534cd

no mention of the progressive push as being the root cause

of course - but the rise of Donald Trump is mentioned as a cause -  :roll:

WSJ as usual falls short

we have academics teaching to hate the US

were racist
not enough diversity
sexual preferences most important thing
spending so far into debt we can never get out of it
the declining value of family and religion
dividing the country into favored voting blocks
lying
CRT
DEI
trans
endless open borders with people coming here for the bucks who have no clue or concern for the Republic and its founding ideals
leaders of minorities stoking self hatred
  racism
the free shit mentality
lack of responsibility for one's self
country sucks so why would any one want to protect it

ALL THIS COMES FROM THE LEFT

but WSJ does not mention

because they profit from it.
Title: Kunstler: Cigarette afterwards
Post by: G M on March 31, 2023, 09:34:04 AM
https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/did-they-light-up-a-cigarette-afterward/
Title: George Friedman? The American Crisis Intensifies
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 11, 2023, 12:25:04 PM


April 11, 2023
View On Website
Open as PDF

    
The American Crisis Intensifies
By: George Friedman

As I ooze back to consciousness after COVID-19 had me in its grip for the past few weeks, it has occurred to me that the real story unfolding in the world is in the United States. China and Russia matter a great deal, as do other countries. But none of them pivot the world. The United States has the largest economy, as well as the most powerful military force, including its navy. The U.S. remains a leading innovator in technology.

This is why the United States is a decisive power, but also a dangerous one. The concentration of power and capabilities, and the degree to which they are globally interconnected, means that an American failure would likely have disastrous consequences globally.

This is not a new global vulnerability, but it now coincides with the systemic crisis that the U.S. faces, as I laid out in my book “The Storm Before the Calm.” That book predicted a social crisis early in this decade, followed by a massive economic crisis. Along with that, there would emerge a political crisis and a major, once-in-every-80-years institutional crisis in the federal government. Finally, it predicted a profound change in government near the end of the decade, driven by political and economic forces.

Looking at history, what is striking is that in previous cycles, the social issues tended to subside a bit before terminal economic issues took over. In 1980, as economic issues dominated, the intense social issues of race and sexual culture in the 1970s had subsided somewhat. In 1932, the social aspects faded with the death of Huey Long and the onset of the Great Depression. The strength of the Ku Klux Klan subsided, and social issues linked to immigration gave way to economic concerns.

The intensity of the ongoing social issues is striking. Issues that are moral, religious and cultural are still tearing at the American system. Bank failures, and the reality that caused them, are compounding instead of overtaking these old events. Significantly complicating the situation is the 80-year institutional cycle. The synchronization of the end of this cycle and the socio-economic cycle is a first in U.S. history. Questions about the relationship between federal institutions like the Supreme Court and Congress compound the normal distrust between the public and institutions.

Nothing about this process is mechanistic, but there are patterns in how we live and govern ourselves. The failure of social issues to lessen, the intensification of economic issues, and the extreme intensity of the friction between federal institutions are markedly different from patterns in the 20th century with the election of Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan. Both of them transitioned effectively from social and economic crises that were distinct. But the rage and mutual loathing of today – and their failure to recede – are odd, particularly when the institutional issue, which neither Roosevelt nor Reagan had to deal with, is included. The degree and type of rage and contempt today’s American public has for other members of the public are different.

This leads me to conclude that the model I used in “The Storm Before the Calm” has to be slightly modified. The transition points in political life had, since America’s founding, been 50-year cycles, and 80 years for institutional shifts. The pivotal moment has been the election of a president. I assumed that this cycle would be the same and, therefore, that the last presidential election before the end of the decade would be the pivot point.

I should emphasize that while presidents are important, they are not the driving force of history. The driving force is the patterns of division built around social, economic and institutional issues. It is the major division and massive dysfunction that force a fundamental shift on all levels. One president presides over this shift, leaving the new president the credit.

I do not believe the situation will hold beyond the coming election. The brutal social issues, from race to gender to guns, create a public division that affects the functioning of government. Relations within the political system at all levels are increasingly venomous. The financial system has left an economic crisis. As forecast, the technological system will become increasingly inefficient, and the public appetite for its goods will be in decline. The financial system portends economic decline that will breed increasingly desperate and simplistic solutions, further drawing capital out of the financial system. For the first time in history, the institutional cycle and the social cycle will coincide. While wars tend not to influence domestic cycles, the impact of the Ukraine war will likely be magnified.

The current political system cannot manage this situation. A solution must emerge now, to be presided over by the next president. It is impossible to explain all the details of a system failure or the need for a new political order. At this point, the only thing that can be said is that we are heading into failure, and a new president, filling everyone with joyous hope, will oversee what must be done. But what must be done remains murky, taking its bearing only from the breadth and seriousness of the failure.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 11, 2023, 12:28:43 PM
https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1050,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/134/923/738/original/fc80b0a4b45050e4.png
Title: VDH: Fiddling America Away
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 13, 2023, 04:22:44 PM
Fiddling America Away
We fixate only on the irrelevant that we think we can address while ignoring the existential we know we no longer can solve.

By Victor Davis Hanson

April 10, 2023
The last few weeks, the world had been writing off the United States as either crazy or irrelevant as it watches America cannibalize itself.

Friends tremble at our sudden decline. Enemies rejoice. Neutrals make the necessary adjustments to join the ascendant non-American side.

The symptoms of our decline abroad appear everywhere. The more Joe Biden brags about the crippling oil sanctions on Russia, friends like India and allies like Japan ignore them. And why not, when Biden has no idea how long the war in Ukraine will last, or how much wherewithal the United States can, should, or will give Kyiv, or how its on-to-Red-Square blank check will finally end?

Big Biden talks about more solar and wind farms, and green new deals won’t fill the gas tanks in Munich or heat the homes of Kyoto, or lower the price of imported oil in the United Kingdom. Claiming the Afghanistan mess was a success fools no one.

Allies ask who are our leaders. An impaired Joe Biden who never is quite sure where he is, what he is doing, or whom he is with?

Kamala Harris, whose only interests appear to be demagoguing racial and social tensions with a shrinking vocabulary?

Senator John Fetterman (D-Penn.), who was elected on the argument it was unkind not to vote for a candidate who was physically and mentally impaired?

Energy Department kingpin Sam Brinton, the cross-dresser in lipstick, now charged with felonies for stealing women’s luggage at airport carousels?

Pete Buttigieg, our transportation secretary, who virtue signals melodramas of the past when he is clueless how to fix crises in the present?

Our Pentagon brass who fixate on saying the correct thing now to ensure the lucrative defense contractor billets later?

Allies fear that after abandoning billions of dollars in weaponry in Kabul to the terrorist Taliban, and pumping billions of dollars more of arms into the Ukrainian meat grinder, and failing to increase U.S. armaments production, Washington simply does not have the resources to match China in either a looming proxy or head-to-head war.

Browse through any media account of the U.S. military, and the storyline is one of racial, gender, gay, or transgendered wokeism, or a looming manpower shortage—not a new lethal weapon, a new division of veteran soldiers, or a new program to up the level of training, physical prowess, and mental attitude among the ranks.

The men and women, whom Russia and China most fear, feel that they are unwelcome in the U.S. military and so no longer join. Those whom our enemies hope do enlist, sign up to the delight of their quota-driven, identify politics recruitment officers—and our enemies as well.

NATO member Turkey is calling for an ecumenical Islamic effort combining Shiites and Sunnis, Persians and the Arabs, Middle Easterners and all Muslims—to unite against Israel. And why not when Biden had gratuitously insulted and yet begged Saudi Arabia and the Gulf exporting states, ignored the Abraham Accords, ostracized Israel, radically cut back on U.S. energy production capability, and groveled to Iran to reenter the Iran Nuclear Deal?

China now openly talks of war with the United States. Beijing claims the Taiwan Strait as its own de facto territorial waters. It partners with Russia to add to a growing alliance of Iran, and North Korea, and beckons Turkey, ostensibly a NATO ally.

After refusing to come clean about its birthing in Wuhan of the gain-in-function, engineered COVID-19 virus that killed 1 million Americans, China is unapologetically defiant about sending a spy balloon over key classified sites throughout the continental United States—part of the continual, humiliating follow-up to its inaugural smack down of Biden’s diplomats at the Anchorage mini-summit.

Oil producers, China, hostiles like Russia and Iran, and opportunists like Turkey and India all foresee the end of the dollar as the international currency. After the American humiliation in Afghanistan, the Islamic world, particularly on the West Bank and in Syria, all see the United States as increasingly weak.

The Biden Administration brags that it has saved NATO by pouring weapons into European Ukraine. But Europe is starving for fossil-fuel energy, about exhausted with emptying its arsenals in aid to Ukraine, and terrified that Biden is just enough a multilateralist to lead the alliance into a confrontation with Russia, but also so incompetent as to ensure either an economic depression or nuclear standoff.

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador basks in the publicity of helping an ailing Biden mount stairs, as he brags that 40 million Mexican nationals have entered the United States—the majority of them illegally. He prods Mexican expatriates to vote for Democrats to ensure the border is wide open and a perpetual vehicle for Mexican, not U.S. interests, in ensuring billions of dollars in remittances, defusing social tensions at home, and encouraging them abroad in the United States. Do we help defend the borders of Ukraine because we cannot defend our own? Are 100,000 dead Americans due to imported fentanyl mere collateral damage from open borders?

The more our chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and secretary of defense tour the world, sound off on contemporary strategic issues, or weigh in on domestic politics, the more apprehensive our allies become, wondering how the once-vaunted U.S. Armed Forces have descended into some bizarre woke commissariat.

The international financial community is terrified of $33 trillion in aggregate U.S. debt, a record 130 percent of annual American GDP. It was aghast as the Biden Administration blundered ahead printing money to encourage labor non-participation during a supply chain crisis, inciting inflation, inviting high interest rates, and all but ensuring bank collapses.

The world abroad will tolerate no more lectures from American grandees about the evils of tribal hatred or the benefits of democracy—not when race relations in America are regressing to Balkan-like venom. Anti-democratic rogue regimes indict their former presidents; they put on trial their current political rivals; and they let criminals go free if they serve ideological ends. Now the United States does the same, driven by the Left’s paranoid and irrational hatred of Donald Trump, and its eagerness to destroy all customs and traditions to vent its antipathy to all things Trump.

Foreigners assume that downtown  Baltimore, Detroit, Los Angeles, Memphis, San Francisco, or Washington are medieval—filthy, unsafe, vacant, and malodorous. Western civilization discovered 2,500 years ago how to remove excrement from its city cores; now it has either lost or forgotten that ability along with the knowledge that crime and disease thrive amid sewage and garbage.

The U.S. media was once the world’s gold standard. The New York Times claimed it was the paper of record. Network news was liberally slanted but often fair. Crusading independent journalists often kept government honest. But all that has now become a global laughingstock: ridiculously wrong about “Russian collusion,” predictably partisan about “Russian disinformation” and Hunter Biden’s laptop, egging on Alvin Bragg’s pathetic indictment of candidate and former president Trump, and giddy when an ex-president’s home is raided by FBI, or he is tried as a private citizen by a partisan Senate.

So as the military, political, financial, economic, and cultural status of the United States reaches a nadir, what is the reaction of a blinkered America?

What remedies are Americans preparing, as they totter on the abyss of disasters comparable to the U.S. Civil War, Great Depression, World War II, or 1960s-style cultural madness?

Marshall Plans to balance budgets? A 600-ship navy? Two more crack army divisions? A continental missile-defense system? A restoration of the cores of American cities? Plans to secure the border? To ratchet up oil and gas production? To drop the racial and sexual tribalism and restore a meritocracy? To reform higher education? To begin charging criminals with the felonies they have committed? A cleaning of the FBI, CIA, Justice Department, and IRS?

Hardly.

Instead Americans are wondering why a local prosecutor has charged with felonies the first president in history, and currently the leading 2024 presidential candidate, for having a purported liaison 16 years prior and concluding a non-disclosure agreement supposedly to hide it.

A man pretending to be a woman is cashing in on his media-created persona, winning million-dollar advertising contracts from woke corporations for hawking their beer and sports bras. Do these corporations believe that America’s women are so un-endowed that CEOs must hire a man without bosoms to become their national spokesperson for best accommodating cleavage he doesn’t have in a competition he doesn’t enter?

Report Ad
America’s downtowns are reaching a breaking point of vacancy, vagrancy, and violence that makes life there unsustainable, while the country argues over gender pronouns. As violent crime soars, especially hate crimes, interracial crimes, and inner-city crime, a mostly black woman’s championship basketball team stages a media psychodrama of pouting and hurt feelings—as it claims it was “disrespected” by left-wing First Lady Jill Biden and will not go to the White House but prefers instead to be hosted at one of the Obamas’ three mansion estates—a duo not heretofore known for welcoming in strangers, especially of the poorer sort.

What else rises to America’s fiddling attention as the world burns up abroad?

Students in American universities, whether at Stanford Law School or San Francisco State University, shout obscenities at federal judges or seek to beat up invited speakers. Their disruptions are encouraged by their own deans’ silence or active encouragement. The common denominator in both cases is that the disrupters and attackers freely admit they violate university rules and/or the law, and yet assume their ideology and their claims on victimhood exempt them from any consequences for their atrocious conduct. And they are proven right on both counts.

All know that a few expulsions of the elite and pampered lawbreakers would restore sanity to lectures; all know that administrators either side with the culprits or fear their own careers would suffer should they enforce the rules they are charged to uphold

As transgenderism sweeps the country and wins the attention of the White House, the media do their best to hide the facts that the transgendered mass murderer in Nashville wrote a blueprint of how and why she would soon be killing 9-year-olds, that another would-be transgendered mass killer was stopped just in time in Colorado, that another transgender would-be assassin traveled to the home of Supreme Court Justice Kavanagh to murder him.

To speak the truth that men not just in cross-dress perform sexualized dance skits for audiences that include children, but remain both exempt from legal ramifications and are in hot demand is nearly felonious. Best-selling novelist J. K. Rowling, tennis great Martina Navratilova, and All-American swimmer Riley Gaines—they all cannot go out in public alone without assuming they will be physically attacked by the “peaceful” transgendered community. Their sin? The mere suggestion that those born as biological men cannot declare themselves women and thus assume thereby they are.

So America suffers the sins of omission—squabbling over the nonessential—and commission—losing wars, going broke, ruining its economy, flirting with civil war. We know these are all self-inflicted wounds. But apparently, we believe their remedies are worse than the original maladies. And so we fixate only on the irrelevant that we think we can address while ignoring the existential we know we no longer can solve.

The world is terrified and stunned at the result—and increasingly looking elsewhere to non-American solutions.
Title: George Friedman: Q&A to the American Crisis
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 14, 2023, 09:19:38 AM
April 14, 2023
View On Website
Open as PDF

    
Questions and Answers to the American Crisis
Thoughts in and around geopolitics.
By: George Friedman

The article I published earlier this week about the intensifying crisis in the United States generated a significant number of comments that ought to be addressed and questions that ought to be answered. The most important were, in no particular order: How am I so sure the U.S. will survive? How can I be so flippant about who occupies the White House and the processes that put him or her there? Will war play a significant role in the crisis? And why am I so pessimistic?

My confidence lies in the resilience of the U.S. political system. On several occasions, taking place every 50 years or so since the nation’s founding, it was able to withstand crises that were at least as troubling and dire as the one currently underway. In the 1830s, it faced a banking crisis that upended much of the settlement system in the west. There were also allegations that John Quincy Adams stole the election. His eventual replacement, Andrew Jackson, took credit for resolving the political and economic upheaval by revamping eastern banking, but it was really the only option available.

After the civil war, there was a massive financial crisis. The problem was solved by introducing a gold standard that stabilized the system. Rutherford B. Hayes had no other choice, so he oversaw the inevitable.

When Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected, the county was in the throes of a cataclysmic trade and banking crisis. FDR oversaw the refinancing of the banking system and indeed the restructuring of society. As a politician, he wanted to be reelected, so he took the course that best achieved that goal.

When Ronald Reagan was elected president, the country was undergoing a massive financial crisis characterized by high inflation and soaring banking rates. Reagan reversed the FDR strategy of increasing available cash, decreasing the money supply in general but increasing it for business investment. This provided a boost for business and contained inflation. He had no choice but to solve the problem. The public demanded a solution, and the options were severely limited.

The United States has massive economic resources, even in times of crisis. It also has a large number of people who can comprehend the issue. Finally, the problem faced requires a solution, and presidents demand them. In these stories, it was the sitting presidents who acted, but any president sufficiently desperate enough will act to find a solution. The buck stops with them, of course, but hundreds of people at least shape public demand and economic reality into a solution. And even if a president is a hopeless idiot, they have any number of institutions and advisers to keep them in check.

Things can always change, but in the examples I lay out, the president is forced to act but is constrained by reality. Presidents are not as powerful as we think they are because the system limits their options. The system forces solutions, even to very different problems, and the wealth of the United States, however carelessly handled, sees them through.

When you see a common and persistent pattern reappear, you look at the past to try to understand why the solution worked as it did. If you find a pattern, then the most conservative approach is to expect it to repeat itself. Therefore, I expected a severe economic and social crisis in the 2020s, which I wrote about some years ago and expect to see play out based on existing forces. The anomaly I see is that the intense and immediate pain of the current crisis could force the cycle to restart a few years earlier than normal. But that is neither being pessimistic nor a game changer.

The key to my argument is that I regard U.S. leaders as severely constrained. There is a tendency to regard presidents as supreme, particularly by their enemies. Donald Trump and Joe Biden are both loathed and admired. Both are constrained by history. Each wants to claim all successes were his and all failures were someone else’s. In fact, successes and failures originate in far more complex corners than the Oval Office. It is easy and comforting to see presidents as heroes or monsters. It has little to do with reality.

As for the crisis that has to be solved, there will always be a financial crisis that arises in a system such as ours that generates political stress, but the real agent of transformation will be technology, which is a foundational element of America. Fifty-year cycles in politics are linked to technological cycles. The automobile lost its dynamism 50 years after Henry Ford transformed America, which at least partly triggered the crisis of the 1970s. Now, microchip technology has lost the power to transform America, and it is time not for the disappearance of tech but for its power to drive the system.

What innovation comes next is yet unknown, but I suspect it will be linked to medicine and demography. Either way, it will drive America for 50 years, with all of us in awe until the awe is lost as financial power declines and we go on to the next cycle. The power to go on comes from all of the systems that we have – technical, economic and social – and from the extraordinary energy of rage and anger that has been an engine ever since Washington put down the Whiskey Rebellion with military force.
Title: Re: George Friedman: Q&A to the American Crisis
Post by: G M on April 14, 2023, 09:27:23 AM
Whistling past the graveyard.

This isn’t America anymore.


April 14, 2023
View On Website
Open as PDF

    
Questions and Answers to the American Crisis
Thoughts in and around geopolitics.
By: George Friedman

The article I published earlier this week about the intensifying crisis in the United States generated a significant number of comments that ought to be addressed and questions that ought to be answered. The most important were, in no particular order: How am I so sure the U.S. will survive? How can I be so flippant about who occupies the White House and the processes that put him or her there? Will war play a significant role in the crisis? And why am I so pessimistic?

My confidence lies in the resilience of the U.S. political system. On several occasions, taking place every 50 years or so since the nation’s founding, it was able to withstand crises that were at least as troubling and dire as the one currently underway. In the 1830s, it faced a banking crisis that upended much of the settlement system in the west. There were also allegations that John Quincy Adams stole the election. His eventual replacement, Andrew Jackson, took credit for resolving the political and economic upheaval by revamping eastern banking, but it was really the only option available.

After the civil war, there was a massive financial crisis. The problem was solved by introducing a gold standard that stabilized the system. Rutherford B. Hayes had no other choice, so he oversaw the inevitable.

When Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected, the county was in the throes of a cataclysmic trade and banking crisis. FDR oversaw the refinancing of the banking system and indeed the restructuring of society. As a politician, he wanted to be reelected, so he took the course that best achieved that goal.

When Ronald Reagan was elected president, the country was undergoing a massive financial crisis characterized by high inflation and soaring banking rates. Reagan reversed the FDR strategy of increasing available cash, decreasing the money supply in general but increasing it for business investment. This provided a boost for business and contained inflation. He had no choice but to solve the problem. The public demanded a solution, and the options were severely limited.

The United States has massive economic resources, even in times of crisis. It also has a large number of people who can comprehend the issue. Finally, the problem faced requires a solution, and presidents demand them. In these stories, it was the sitting presidents who acted, but any president sufficiently desperate enough will act to find a solution. The buck stops with them, of course, but hundreds of people at least shape public demand and economic reality into a solution. And even if a president is a hopeless idiot, they have any number of institutions and advisers to keep them in check.

Things can always change, but in the examples I lay out, the president is forced to act but is constrained by reality. Presidents are not as powerful as we think they are because the system limits their options. The system forces solutions, even to very different problems, and the wealth of the United States, however carelessly handled, sees them through.

When you see a common and persistent pattern reappear, you look at the past to try to understand why the solution worked as it did. If you find a pattern, then the most conservative approach is to expect it to repeat itself. Therefore, I expected a severe economic and social crisis in the 2020s, which I wrote about some years ago and expect to see play out based on existing forces. The anomaly I see is that the intense and immediate pain of the current crisis could force the cycle to restart a few years earlier than normal. But that is neither being pessimistic nor a game changer.

The key to my argument is that I regard U.S. leaders as severely constrained. There is a tendency to regard presidents as supreme, particularly by their enemies. Donald Trump and Joe Biden are both loathed and admired. Both are constrained by history. Each wants to claim all successes were his and all failures were someone else’s. In fact, successes and failures originate in far more complex corners than the Oval Office. It is easy and comforting to see presidents as heroes or monsters. It has little to do with reality.

As for the crisis that has to be solved, there will always be a financial crisis that arises in a system such as ours that generates political stress, but the real agent of transformation will be technology, which is a foundational element of America. Fifty-year cycles in politics are linked to technological cycles. The automobile lost its dynamism 50 years after Henry Ford transformed America, which at least partly triggered the crisis of the 1970s. Now, microchip technology has lost the power to transform America, and it is time not for the disappearance of tech but for its power to drive the system.

What innovation comes next is yet unknown, but I suspect it will be linked to medicine and demography. Either way, it will drive America for 50 years, with all of us in awe until the awe is lost as financial power declines and we go on to the next cycle. The power to go on comes from all of the systems that we have – technical, economic and social – and from the extraordinary energy of rage and anger that has been an engine ever since Washington put down the Whiskey Rebellion with military force.
Title: Kunstler: Call the exorcist
Post by: G M on April 18, 2023, 07:43:25 AM
https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/call-the-exorcist/

Title: Tucker this past weekend in magnificent form
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 25, 2023, 04:34:09 PM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebG2POkoHgU&t=1s
Title: A fine and gracious read
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 04, 2023, 02:11:52 AM


https://www.theepochtimes.com/the-crime-of-talking-to-tucker-carlson_5233804.html?utm_source=Opinion&src_src=Opinion&utm_campaign=opinion-2023-05-03&src_cmp=opinion-2023-05-03&utm_medium=email&est=%2BgmMl9JhTTaAQ6LGdiy5TUmFhu2arKkDA5mIqWExq6o2WRmIxWuXm%2Bf%2FDZpwjW7nDjJA
Title: Two from Walter Russell Mead
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 15, 2023, 07:13:24 PM
Haven't read them yet, but WRM has my/our? respect so here they are:

Title: would Jesus be a Democrat or Republican
Post by: ccp on May 25, 2023, 10:42:33 AM
well it depends on who gives you an answer:

https://www.quora.com/If-Jesus-were-alive-today-and-in-the-US-would-he-be-more-likely-to-be-a-Democrat-or-a-Republican

https://rts.edu/resources/would-jesus-be-a-democrat-or-a-republican/

https://www.politico.eu/article/jesus-leftist-or-rightist-religion-politics/

some on the Left want to claim Jesus for themselves
some on the Right want to claim Jesus for themselves

some want to be neutral and state Jesus would not be either
 or he does not fit either category

personally , it is too much for me
and I have enough to think about

 :-P
Title: Kunstler: Trial by ordeal
Post by: G M on May 26, 2023, 07:14:51 AM
https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/trial-by-ordeal/
Title: I have invited this FB friend to join us here
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 27, 2023, 07:03:33 AM


http://www.stephenwbrowne.com/2023/05/dangers-from-without-and-within/?fbclid=IwAR0CT89xtnaw2gJ6IfpLkcNCGFzUcR8sjCZV7dQ5e1jstkLYCCPx_NNRk78
Title: Prager: Pride is not healthy
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 27, 2023, 10:11:51 AM


https://dennisprager.com/column/this-pride-stuff-isnt-healthy/?fbclid=IwAR2uzRmBmzoUmAkqNGNLJzfZ34oSHCjYz7GyRCS6k1GytZkLpPTe6nlPuJo
Title: Burkean Nationalism
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 27, 2023, 10:20:25 AM
second

https://americanmind.org/salvo/burkean-nationalism/?utm_campaign=American%20Mind%20Email%20Warm%20Up&utm_medium=email&_hsmi=259836942&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-9AP-mq3AvFM_AoEx3600hoft6AQDO4y5vRDHR9ftkrdGlg1BjunIg2HWsJ6n6UpoqK8P93SVDi4KvAWHkcwNNvyQTfyQ&utm_content=259836942&utm_source=hs_email
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on May 27, 2023, 10:22:38 AM
why can't the normal gays and trans be the ones we live with instead of the perverted crazed exhibitionist narcissistic clowns who get all the attention

normal gays dress and act like you and me
most trans would do the same
I am fine with that .

but instead we have the freaks trying to get in our faces everyday

and the MSM DEI mobster business uNiversities corporations celebrating the loons and force us to go along with it.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: G M on May 27, 2023, 10:41:27 AM
There are no normal gays and trans. They are people with serious problems, of both a psychological and a spiritual nature. Some hide it better than others, but they all need help.


why can't the normal gays and trans be the ones we live with instead of the perverted crazed exhibitionist narcissistic clowns who get all the attention

normal gays dress and act like you and me
most trans would do the same
I am fine with that .

but instead we have the freaks trying to get in our faces everyday

and the MSM DEI mobster business uNiversities corporations celebrating the loons and force us to go along with it.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on May 27, 2023, 11:14:37 AM
that is your opinion not mine

sounds intolerant to me.

like some who. hate Christians , or anyone white or with male genitalia
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: G M on May 27, 2023, 11:24:16 AM
that is your opinion not mine

sounds intolerant to me.

like some who. hate Christians , or anyone white or with male genitalia

It's the truth. Homosexuality should never have been removed from the DSM.

https://www.nami.org/Your-Journey/Identity-and-Cultural-Dimensions/LGBTQI

https://www.womenagainstabuse.org/education-resources/learn-about-abuse/lgbtq-relationships

It's a population in dire need of spiritual and psychological help.

Title: Re: Burkean Nationalism
Post by: G M on May 27, 2023, 12:00:31 PM
second

https://americanmind.org/salvo/burkean-nationalism/?utm_campaign=American%20Mind%20Email%20Warm%20Up&utm_medium=email&_hsmi=259836942&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-9AP-mq3AvFM_AoEx3600hoft6AQDO4y5vRDHR9ftkrdGlg1BjunIg2HWsJ6n6UpoqK8P93SVDi4KvAWHkcwNNvyQTfyQ&utm_content=259836942&utm_source=hs_email

A very important read!
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on May 27, 2023, 12:58:17 PM
this is really a matter of opinions and definitions

that said I would rather have mainstream gays on my side politically then continue to make them feel like deviant outcasts
and drive them ALL to the LEFT .

if you were gay not by choice but because that is your reality
would you want to be categorized as mental disorder

you are dividing us more
I would rather work along side them with acceptance and tolerance

not preach to them
that said I draw the line with children and pedophilia
and any of them who try to preach of prosthilytize me

Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on May 27, 2023, 12:59:35 PM
do you think Peter Thiel will continue to support those who tell him he is mentally disturbed ......?

the truth is NOT black or white .
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: G M on May 27, 2023, 01:54:21 PM
do you think Peter Thiel will continue to support those who tell him he is mentally disturbed ......?

the truth is NOT black or white .

It is God's standard. The word is crystal clear. What Peter Thiel thinks is irrelevant.

Tolerating sin and ignoring Godly standards has gotten us into the FUSA-Dumpster Fire.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 27, 2023, 01:59:48 PM
"this is really a matter of opinions and definitions.  that said I would rather have mainstream gays on my side politically then continue to make them feel like deviant outcasts and drive them ALL to the LEFT.  if you were gay not by choice but because that is your reality
would you want to be categorized as mental disorder.  you are dividing us more. I would rather work along side them with acceptance and tolerance. not preach to them. that said I draw the line with children and pedophilia and any of them who try to preach of prosthilytize me" or others.

Hearty concurrence from me!!! 

My daughter is a fine person!!!

This phrase is key "if you were gay not by choice".  Thus the question presented is what about where the outcome is NOT genetically pre-determined?

The way my mind organizes it is that our Constitutional Republic is based upon "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God" via our Ninth Amendment and various writings in the Federalist Papers about Natural Law.

The First Law of Nature is "Eat, Survive, and Reproduce".

By Reproduce we have parental rights, not the State's rights over children.

In human ontogeny children are born requiring to receive guidance/culture and thus parents have the right to guide their children towards reproduction.

Loving parents should accept when the wiring is revealed to be otherwise, but it is an abomination for the State to intrude upon this process.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: G M on May 27, 2023, 02:24:03 PM
Everything we do is a choice. We can choose to follow God, we can choose to ignore him. We can choose to overcome our flawed and sinful nature or we can choose to indulge it.

Choices have consequences, both for nations and for individuals.


"this is really a matter of opinions and definitions.  that said I would rather have mainstream gays on my side politically then continue to make them feel like deviant outcasts and drive them ALL to the LEFT.  if you were gay not by choice but because that is your reality
would you want to be categorized as mental disorder.  you are dividing us more. I would rather work along side them with acceptance and tolerance. not preach to them. that said I draw the line with children and pedophilia and any of them who try to preach of prosthilytize me" or others.

Hearty concurrence from me!!! 

My daughter is a fine person!!!

This phrase is key "if you were gay not by choice".  Thus the question presented is what about where the outcome is NOT genetically pre-determined?

The way my mind organizes it is that our Constitutional Republic is based upon "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God" via our Ninth Amendment and various writings in the Federalist Papers about Natural Law.

The First Law of Nature is "Eat, Survive, and Reproduce".

By Reproduce we have parental rights, not the State's rights over children.

In human ontogeny children are born requiring to receive guidance/culture and thus parents have the right to guide their children towards reproduction.

Loving parents should accept when the wiring is revealed to be otherwise, but it is an abomination for the State to intrude upon this process.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on May 27, 2023, 02:40:53 PM
everything is NOT a choice

people are all different
not the same;  I would like to make a billion playing basketball but I am not good at it.
And you claiming they should all live or believe like you
is your choice - but will not be mine

Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: G M on May 27, 2023, 06:24:03 PM
everything is NOT a choice

people are all different
not the same;  I would like to make a billion playing basketball but I am not good at it.
And you claiming they should all live or believe like you
is your choice - but will not be mine

Genesis 4:7

If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door. Its desire is contrary to you, but you must rule over it.”
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 27, 2023, 06:59:12 PM
My sense of things Judeo-Christian is based upon my sense of what the big picture themes are.

For example, I think of the Jewish word "atonement" and how it overlaps with but is different from "forgiveness".

My rumination on "The Power of Word" begins the thread of that name.

The Ten Commandments speak of "Honoring thy Father and thy Mother".   Tell me, what is the son of a gay parent to do?  Is not implicit in this commandment that parents should love their children?  Am I to tell my daughter to ignore who she is and not have the relationship she has?



Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: G M on May 27, 2023, 09:05:05 PM
My sense of things Judeo-Christian is based upon my sense of what the big picture themes are.

For example, I think of the Jewish word "atonement" and how it overlaps with but is different from "forgiveness".

My rumination on "The Power of Word" begins the thread of that name.

The Ten Commandments speak of "Honoring thy Father and thy Mother".   Tell me, what is the son of a gay parent to do?  Is not implicit in this commandment that parents should love their children?  Am I to tell my daughter to ignore who she is and not have the relationship she has?

Love the sinner, hate the sin.

The most relationship anyone can have is with God. Establish that relationship and your ability to make good decisions about the others improves. I love my wife, but I like women. I was born this way. I like strip clubs, women in various states of undress. The old and new testaments don’t have any verses that specifically cover legal adult entertainment venues, I don’t think trying to be legalistic with God is a smart strategy.

I try to live my faith daily. I try to deny my temptations, including being caustic, angry and abrasive. Avoiding strip clubs is easier.

We all have our “crosses to bear”. We all have our struggles. We can pay lip service to God and embrace our sinful natures, or we can struggle to be better.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 28, 2023, 07:23:07 AM
"I try to deny my temptations, including being caustic, angry and abrasive."

Work remains there  :-D :-D :-D
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: G M on May 28, 2023, 07:26:44 AM
"I try to deny my temptations, including being caustic, angry and abrasive."

Work remains there  :-D :-D :-D

Trust me, I am aware.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 28, 2023, 07:53:19 AM
 8-) 8-) 8-)

Anyway, I think all of us will find this to be good fun:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MN7Izhs_PbQ&t=6s
Title: Matt Larsen
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 06, 2023, 02:36:26 PM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OIT0w2vK7BI
Title: George Friedman
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 09, 2023, 06:28:11 AM
June 9, 2023
View On Website
Open as PDF

    
Reflections on Our Past and Future
Thoughts in and around geopolitics.
By: George Friedman
Be warned, dear reader: This column is much more a personal reflection on geopolitical forecasting than a piece of geopolitical forecasting itself. It is dedicated to thoughts on who we at Geopolitical Futures are, what we do and how we got here. It may not be an important story, but it is mine, and certain events have caused me to take what I believe to be a necessary step of reflecting on the past and taking stock of the future.

The lesson I’ve learned from my companies is that people will pay to read important things. The struggle, of course, is to find and explain important things. More than anything, that is the crux of our work here: filtering out the unimportant and focusing on the essential. Sometimes our readers learn something, and sometimes they read something they already know about, but the goal is always the same.

I founded Stratfor in 1996. I had written some books to that point, only one of which, "The Future of War," I am proud of. My wife and I started the company at Louisiana State University's Center for Geopolitical Studies. LSU is a fine school, but academia contains a destructive brand of politics I have no taste for. With my wife’s kamikaze bravery, we moved to Austin, Texas, a town we had visited only once and where we created a business around my passion: predicting the future of the world. This was an insane idea, but we were too ignorant to realize it.

Stratfor was predicated on my belief that the structure of intelligence gathering had changed. Until relatively recently, the essence of intelligence was stealing information about your enemy. I believed that with the advent of the internet, information could inevitably be found – perhaps not all of it, but enough. The more important theory of mine was that human history was constrained by forces that could be identified, and using that knowledge, you could develop a model that could be used to predict future events. The key was access to previously inaccessible data, the proper distinction between the important and the unimportant, and a helpful amount of hubris and insanity, both of which I have been accused of possessing.

Stratfor focused on the fact that we did, in fact, know some things that had been secret a long time ago. The intelligence community was slow to recognize that the structure of information had changed. I have written books on intelligence, the Middle East, war, Europe and the United States based on the idea that the forces that built a country cannot be exiled without the edifice collapsing. "The Next 100 Years" (2009) elevated me from total obscurity to relative unimportance. As time went on and as many of my forecasts came to bear, I faced the fact that the more you do, the more is demanded.

Stratfor suffered what would be a fatal blow when hackers broke into and then zeroed out our server, making public all of our email files, which included a lot of meaningless banter. The backups I thought were in place were not, or at least not that day. Aside from Julian Assange, who published our data on WikiLeaks (and who has been detained for a long time for multiple hacks of other more important organizations than ours), I really have no idea who did this, although I occasionally mumble theories when drunk.

My goal became to survive and triumph, and my wife made sure I knew what my duty was.
Stratfor was revived through significant financial solutions that in the end solved nothing. Its soul had been lost, and by 2015, I chose to leave to found Geopolitical Futures. The Stratfor name is now owned by another company with which it was merged. With regret, I am still frequently introduced at events as CEO of Stratfor, and that’s ok; what we have at Geopolitical Futures is the original Stratfor in all but name. For me, Geopolitical Futures serves the part of our society that cares about the things we care about.

It’s been a long time since the Center for Geopolitical Studies at LSU, and longer still since I noticed the world needed analysis more than it needed intelligence. Traditional means of collection are vital, of course, but a new tool had emerged. It’s strange and humbling to know that I can produce a living in America, so I want to thank all our readers, past and present, for saving me from a life of academics, think tanks and government work.

I want to thank you also for indulging me in this retrospective. For me, an exercise like this makes for creativity. Many of you have asked questions about our past, and many have asked us to get better – always the most useful advice. Thinking about where we were allows us to define our future. But we’ve done it our way, and we intend to continue.
Title: Why the White House Wants War
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 15, 2023, 07:29:30 PM


https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/06/why_the_white_house_wants_war.html
Title: Kunstler: Call the exorcists!
Post by: G M on June 18, 2023, 10:16:25 AM
https://www.theburningplatform.com/2023/06/16/call-the-exorcists/
Title: Kakistocracy, Kayfabe and Kabuki-Cloward Piven collapse
Post by: G M on June 25, 2023, 10:33:05 AM
https://thegooddoctor.substack.com/p/kakistocracy-kayfabe-and-kabuki
Title: does anyone know what this is all about?
Post by: ccp on June 28, 2023, 05:24:59 AM
from Breitbart -

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2023/06/27/exclusive-rising-conservative-influencer-pedro-gonzalez-regularly-espoused-racist-and-anti-semitic-sentiments-in-private-messages/

never heard of the guy
till now

is this a Trump camp hit job
is this true
is this nip it in the bud before he brings us all down
   by giving fodder to
   Conservative = white supremacy = nazis = racists

it is true most Jews are progs and too many in power working for their new religion called DNC [to my dismay as a Jew] but that is where I stop and only wish they would fight as hard for us .

As for Candice Owens what is going on with this - we want her on our side not to insult her or others .

I don't and won't do twitter - too stupid for me .


Title: Re: does anyone know what this is all about?
Post by: G M on June 28, 2023, 06:46:40 AM
I think that when less than 3 percent of a population ends up disproportionally in positions of power in a society, and then overwhelmingly acts in a manner to destroy that society, it's going to generate some ill will, is it not?


from Breitbart -

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2023/06/27/exclusive-rising-conservative-influencer-pedro-gonzalez-regularly-espoused-racist-and-anti-semitic-sentiments-in-private-messages/

never heard of the guy
till now

is this a Trump camp hit job
is this true
is this nip it in the bud before he brings us all down
   by giving fodder to
   Conservative = white supremacy = nazis = racists

it is true most Jews are progs and too many in power working for their new religion called DNC [to my dismay as a Jew] but that is where I stop and only wish they would fight as hard for us .

As for Candice Owens what is going on with this - we want her on our side not to insult her or others .

I don't and won't do twitter - too stupid for me .
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on June 28, 2023, 07:14:45 AM
"I think that when less than 3 percent of a population ends up disproportionally in positions of power in a society, and then overwhelmingly acts in a manner to destroy that society, it's going to generate some ill will, is it not?"

Even me , as a proud Jew, is disgusted with this as I previously posted .

I am shocked at how obnoxious so many of my faith are such bat crazy partisans and how low they stoop to push their ideology on the rest of us.  Lying cheating bribing extorting unethical lawfare censoring propaganda  is all part of the game for many .

I am sure Marc Levin feels the same.
I never heard him say it outright but have heard him bring it up in round a bout  ways such as

Like they came over from Europe and brought their socialism with them............

But I do wish we be careful about discussing this.
As before , I don't hate Jews but hate the ideology and methods of so many. and I think we can make that distinction without being branded with "anti semite" etc.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: G M on June 28, 2023, 07:20:55 AM
"I think that when less than 3 percent of a population ends up disproportionally in positions of power in a society, and then overwhelmingly acts in a manner to destroy that society, it's going to generate some ill will, is it not?"

Even me , as a proud Jew, is disgusted with this as I previously posted .

I am shocked at how obnoxious so many of my faith are such bat crazy partisans and how low they stoop to push their ideology on the rest of us.  Lying cheating bribing extorting unethical lawfare censoring propaganda  is all part of the game for many .

I am sure Marc Levin feels the same.
I never heard him say it outright but have heard him bring it up in round a bout  ways such as

Like they came over from Europe and brought their socialism with them............

But I do wish we be careful about discussing this.
As before , I don't hate Jews but hate the ideology and methods of so many. and I think we can make that distinction without being branded with "anti semite" etc.

Exactly.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 28, 2023, 07:44:26 AM
Yes.
Title: State Legislator on gun rights
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 01, 2023, 04:51:53 PM


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gLraIa7x6k&t=34s
Title: American Maoism
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 05, 2023, 07:15:54 AM
https://tomklingenstein.com/american-maoism/?fbclid=IwAR1J8dnOlYAxkwas5I7KZ23SpWi2DmDOPDMFnS1eu1hAWUBaArIu7Y7QZno


There is much to be learned by confronting the deep pathologies at the heart of the ideological deformation of reality.
Editor’s Note – This essay was originally published at American Mind on May 5, 2023.

Those of us who care about the survival of ordered liberty are daily faced with a conundrum: Do we painstakingly chronicle the constant assaults on the life of the mind and civilized norms and risk the charge of being one-note Johnnies? Or do we turn to other, more noble concerns and preoccupations, doing the right and the good? The latter path might seem more high-minded, rooted in a refusal to have our intellectual and political agendas determined by the rage of others. Why should our concerns be determined by the transparently false agendas of those who tear down and repudiate, and who offer nothing constructive in place of our civic and civilized inheritance? Let them pursue the thankless path of total critique, while we teach, build, construct, and sustain a civilized order worthy of human beings.

In truth, however, we must be attentive to both tasks, the positive work of high-minded thought and action that makes reasonable choice and civic comity possible, and the defense of the city without which nothing noble and choice-worthy can be sustained. And there is much to be learned by confronting the deep pathologies at the heart of the ideological deformation of reality. In any case, to stand aside while ideologues and fanatics seize the commanding heights of the academy and civil society entails nothing less moral and civil abdication, a choice for passivity over our non-negotiable duty to pass on the precious inheritance that is civilized liberty as a trust to our children and grandchildren. Surely Leo Strauss was right when he wrote in the 1940s that the greatest practical task of political philosophy is to defend “sound practice” against “bad theory.”

And bad theory abounds today. We daily witness displays of political rage informed by what David Martin Jones and M.L.R. Smith call in their indispensable 2022 book, The Strategy of Maoism in the West, “permanent offence taking.” Righteous indignation and the search for new and newer victims (and oppressors) are on constant display. DEI offices in colleges, universities, and corporations (and the news media, too) look to penalize, marginalize, and humiliate “oppressors” and “exploiters” as much as to “privilege” the oppressed, who must remain victims in perpetuity for the new system of ideological control to sustain itself. Merit, progress, opportunity, and civic reconciliation are all passé notions, deemed at once racist, offensive, and intolerable. What used to be called “Americanism,” equality under God and the law, must be castigated in a pathological display of collective self-loathing.

The constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley, an impressive liberal of the old school, has recently highlighted a macabre and deeply disturbing incident at Whitworth University in Spokane, Washington. At this self-described Christian institution, the student government association voted 9-4 to bar Xi Van Fleet, a survivor of the brutal and surreal Chinese Cultural Revolution of 1966 to 1976 to speak on campus. Van Fleet had the temerity to suggest in a series of speeches, writings, and tweets that “woke” culture in the United States had more than a passing similarity to the rage, illiberality, and insane self-confidence of the Red Guards unleashed by the murderous tyrant Mao Zedong. Her criticism of “woke” culture—including the DEI regime, the neo-Maoist Black Lives Matter movement, and the ever more fanatical LGBTQ “community”—was deemed hateful and “too harmful for any student to hear.” That is how Maoism comes to America, full of censorious rage but fueled with self-pity, therapeutic claptrap, and a narcissism that makes a mockery of civic debate and liberal education grounded in genuine discussion and disputation. But like the Maoists of old, Turley points out, these students at an ostensibly Christian institution of higher learning war with “false thoughts” with a sanctimony that is as pathetic as it is loathsome. As Turley shows, “conservative, religious, and libertarian views” are now what Mao and the Cultural Revolutionaries called “poisonous weeds” to be “removed from the garden of ‘fragrant flowers’ of approved viewpoints in higher education.”

Anyone who is not appalled by this, and who does not actively work to resist it, has broken with the honorable traditions of democratic liberalism and democratic conservatism that are the wellsprings of political decency and sanity in the Anglosphere and the West as a whole. That point must be stated loudly, clearly, and unequivocally. And as Xi Van Fleet is doing, the relevant history of cultural Maoism must be brought to the public’s attention, in what Lord Acton famously called “the embarrassing pedigree of ideas.”

As David Martin Jones and M.L.R. Smith point out, the Maoists in China and in revolutionary circles in the West from the 1960s on targeted the “Four Olds”: old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits, all of which were to be said to be at odds with the emancipatory and revolutionary Communist project. The Red Guards shouted slogans such as “Destruction before construction” as they marauded through Chinese cities and cultural institutions to destroy what Mao Zedong ominously called “ghosts and monsters.”

Maoism was the crudest and cruelest mass movement of repudiation to take on a global presence. It was applauded by leftist cultural icons such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Julia Kristeva, the movie director Jean-Luc Godard, Angela Davis, and much or most of the New Left of the sixties and seventies. The BLM movement in America and Britain today is proudly and unapologetically Maoist in inspiration and attitude. These “trained Marxists,” as they call themselves, delight in destruction and repudiation and preach racial hatred as fanatically and single-mindedly as the Marxists of old preached inexpiable class struggle. Corporate America shamelessly funds these racialists and totalitarians with little or no backlash or consequence. Corporate Maoism is real enough—something few predicted just a few short years ago.

America can certainly do better than this homegrown version of Maoism, full of rage and truly pathetic self-pity. An America that cannot listen to the inspired witness of Xi Van Fleet is heading off the precipice like the demonically possessed Gadarene Swine so dramatically described in the synoptic Gospels. Let authentic conservatives and liberals unite in resisting the ideological deformation of reality before it is too late. Honor and intellectual integrity demand nothing less.
Title: Inquiring minds want to know
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 07, 2023, 03:49:47 PM


https://www.youtube.com/shorts/SRZ1GQey0IY
Title: Would love to see this without having to subscribe
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 17, 2023, 11:47:29 AM
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/05/social-media-democracy-trust-babel/629369/?paymeter=hard-gate-email-test-1&utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=cr&utm_campaign=The%20Atlantic%20-%20Top%20Evergreen&utm_content=The%20Atlantic%20-%20Lookalikes%20-%20Why%20The%20Past%2010%20Years%20-%20Babel%20-%20HARDGATE&utm_term=The%20Atlantic%20-%20Top%20Evergreen%20-%20Lookalikes&referral=FB_PAID&fbclid=IwAR0_e5ZFVsUx0_aSLtbpsbBJeM0aPg9CZzDun2bi0Werss0m1KPppBVNNsk
Title: Re: Would love to see this without having to subscribe
Post by: DougMacG on July 17, 2023, 02:50:14 PM
only part of it came up.

May 2022 Issue

IDEAS
WHY THE PAST 10 YEARS OF AMERICAN LIFE HAVE BEEN UNIQUELY STUPID
It’s not just a phase.

By Jonathan Haidt
Illustrations by Nicolás Ortega
illustration with 1679 engraving of the tower of babel with pixellated clouds and pieces disintegrating digitally
Illustration by Nicolás Ortega. Source: "Turris Babel," Coenraet Decker, 1679.
APRIL 11, 2022
SHARE
SAVED STORIES
SAVE
This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.



What would it have been like to live in Babel in the days after its destruction? In the Book of Genesis, we are told that the descendants of Noah built a great city in the land of Shinar. They built a tower “with its top in the heavens” to “make a name” for themselves. God was offended by the hubris of humanity and said:

Look, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down, and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another’s speech.
The text does not say that God destroyed the tower, but in many popular renderings of the story he does, so let’s hold that dramatic image in our minds: people wandering amid the ruins, unable to communicate, condemned to mutual incomprehension.

Explore the May 2022 Issue
Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.

View More
The story of Babel is the best metaphor I have found for what happened to America in the 2010s, and for the fractured country we now inhabit. Something went terribly wrong, very suddenly. We are disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth. We are cut off from one another and from the past.


It’s been clear for quite a while now that red America and blue America are becoming like two different countries claiming the same territory, with two different versions of the Constitution, economics, and American history. But Babel is not a story about tribalism; it’s a story about the fragmentation of everything. It’s about the shattering of all that had seemed solid, the scattering of people who had been a community. It’s a metaphor for what is happening not only between red and blue, but within the left and within the right, as well as within universities, companies, professional associations, museums, and even families.   ...
Title: VDH: Who will say "No more!"?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 11, 2023, 09:05:40 AM
https://townhall.com/columnists/victordavishanson/2023/08/11/who-will-say-no-more-to-the-current-madness-n2626882
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on August 11, 2023, 09:07:46 AM
The reincarnation of Abraham Lincoln

who would not be Trump....
Title: Biden to head to Maui next week
Post by: ccp on August 16, 2023, 10:37:41 AM
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2023/08/16/white-house-announces-joe-biden-will-head-to-maui-disaster-zone-next-week/

FWIW , I personally do not care if a President goes to EVERY SINGLE weather event etc and gets photo ops hugging victims and exclaiming "I feel your pain"
ala Bill Clinton that has now become required to do list for every President since.

Since Clinton this has become a tool for everyone to criticize the opposing President who does not rush out the location by rocket ship
to hand out water , checks, and love and affection .....

I don't see why offering all available Federal assistance as soon as possible is not enough.


Title: Chris Cristie
Post by: ccp on August 25, 2023, 01:25:27 PM
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/the-gop-field-is-already-shrinking

Byron states Christie is in the top 5.    :-o

I would have certainly have rather Martha asked him about his thoughts and humility on leaving office as governor of NJ
with an approval rating the lowest in history then the ridiculous UFO question.

He could do for the US what he did with NJ.....

He would probably answer that we are too stupid in NJ to understand what a genius he is and how great he was.
Except for the win against teachers unions I don't recall anything else he did but play rhino
Title: VDH: Elite left woke values and agenda
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 31, 2023, 07:55:12 AM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWGVwQnwP9o
Title: VDH: Save the Rule of Law by Destroying It.
Post by: objectivist1 on September 03, 2023, 08:06:06 AM
Victor Davis Hanson's latest piece:

https://www.frontpagemag.com/save-the-rule-of-law-by-destroying-it/
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: objectivist1 on September 05, 2023, 01:06:31 AM
Dennis Prager: Why Young Americans Are Not Taught About Evil. The Ignorance is Almost Total.

Most of our schools teach almost nothing of importance, and nothing is more important than the study of good and evil. In the United States today, nearly all schools, from elementary through graduate, concentrate on teaching about racism, sexism, preferred pronouns, homophobia, transphobia, LGBTQIA+, climate change, diversity, equity, inclusiveness and white guilt. In other words, most of our educational institutions, including the most prestigious, do not educate.

Here are a few proofs.

It is almost certain that the great majority of American high school and college students (with the obvious exceptions of Christian students) could not name the Four Gospels (presuming they even know what they are); five of the Ten Commandments (presuming they know what those are); or the names of two Shakespeare plays. Most American students know little about the American Revolution, let alone about the French or Russian Revolutions. The same holds true for the Constitution and every other American founding document. It is doubtful that, other than Washington and Jefferson having owned slaves, American students know anything about these men or could name two other Founders.

When it comes to evil, the ignorance is enormous, often almost total. For example, according to Pew, about half of Americans ages 18-39 cannot identify Auschwitz or any other Nazi death camp. And there is every reason to assume that much fewer than half could identify the Gulag Archipelago (20 million-plus murdered); the Ukrainian forced famine (5 to 6 million murdered in a little over a year); Mao’s Great Leap Forward (about 60 million murdered); or Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge (about one in every four Cambodians murdered).

As noted, almost no one outside of Russia has ever heard of the Russian Civil War, let alone knows anything about it. One reason is that the winners, the communists, had no desire that people know about it. Yet, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica, about 10 million people, the great majority noncombatants, were killed.

Why don’t students know about evil?

The first reason is that nearly all the genocides of the 20th century were committed by communists, and the Left, which runs virtually all educational institutions, has always had a soft spot for communism. If people were to recognize that communism has been the greatest source of evil in the modern age in terms of numbers murdered, number of lives destroyed, liberty stolen, and the sheer amount of human suffering inflicted (greater by those metrics than those of the Nazis before they were forcibly stopped), the Left would lose much of its appeal.

Another reason is the foolish notion that people are basically good. This has been a left-wing belief since the French Enlightenment leader Jean-Jacques Rousseau came up with the idea. As he wrote in his book, “On Philosophy, Morality, and Religion,” “Man is a naturally good being, loving justice and order; there is no natural perversity in the human heart… All the vices imputed to the human heart are not natural to it.”

This nonsense had been foreign to the Western mind. Its view of humanity was rooted in the Bible, and neither Bible-based religion — Judaism or Christianity — affirmed the goodness of the human heart. As Genesis states, “The will of man’s heart is evil from his youth,” and the rest of the Bible repeatedly warns us against following our hearts.

However, as the West began to abandon the Bible, including belief in the God of the Bible, Westerners began to believe in man. As Marx put it, “Man is God.” People had no choice. For if there is no God to believe in, one must believe in man — or one has literally nothing to believe in. Therefore, belief in man’s inherent goodness became both psychologically and philosophically necessary.

A third reason follows from the second. With the exception of the mass murder of the Armenians (which was committed by Muslim Turks), the genocides and the other horrors of the 20th century were committed by secular regimes. Given the centrality of secularism to leftism, this fact has been kept from young people. Likewise, the fact that all these genocides were committed by big governments is not taught to young people because big government is also central to left-wing ideology. In other words, a true depiction of the evils of the 20th century would mean the end of the two pillars of left-wing ideology: secularism and big government.

If you want to make a more moral world, you must begin with the study of evil. But, for the reasons enumerated here, the Left is not — and cannot be — interested in fighting real evil. So, the Left fights made-up evils: American systemic racism, transphobia, capitalism, carbon emissions, sexism and former President Donald Trump, to name a few.

This is why young people know almost nothing about evil. The Left doesn’t want them to know about it. Because knowledge of evil inevitably leads directly to rejection of the Left.


Title: Prager: Judeo Christian values
Post by: objectivist1 on September 05, 2023, 05:46:48 AM
PragerU 5-minute video on Judeo-Christian Values. This is a superb, short explanation of what they are.

https://www.prageru.com/video/what-are-judeo-christian-values
Title: VDH: Are we Rome collapsing?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 17, 2023, 03:00:58 PM


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UR40MYBjSm8
Title: Falling in love with the present
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 27, 2023, 12:50:42 PM
https://danconiajournal.substack.com/p/falling-in-love-with-the-present?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1016875&post_id=137387594&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=z2120&utm_medium=email
Title: SERIOUS READ: Civil War Comes to the West
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 27, 2023, 01:42:32 PM
second post

https://www.militarystrategymagazine.com/article/civil-war-comes-to-the-west/
Title: The Inevitable Consequences of Alien Invasion
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 29, 2023, 06:42:38 AM


https://bayourenaissanceman.blogspot.com/2023/09/the-inevitable-consequences-of-alien.html
Title: VDH: Can conservatives still win?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 29, 2023, 06:45:30 AM
second

https://newcriterion.com/issues/2023/10/can-conservatives-still-win
Title: The Zero Sum Trap
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 29, 2023, 06:46:12 AM
Third

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/09/the-zero-sum-idea-trap.html?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-zero-sum-idea-trap&fbclid=IwAR2zFhBdY1FnLPHUXUn_sZVC_44FRyGztX8jRtE1xRgXQPbDmFk1yEwGsfE
Title: A friend writes: More info alone is not making anyone smarter.
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 04, 2023, 05:17:27 PM

Data Dump ≠ Genius Bump
More information alone is NOT making anybody smarter.
FRANCISCO D'ANCONIA
OCT 4

 



 

I realize what this entry will sound like. More, I realize how it will make me sound to most readers. I’ve wrestled with a way to make it more palatable, more optimistic, but I just can’t seem to get there. So, in the spirit of writing it because I think it needs to be said, buckle up. This one might sting a bit.

In the 1960s, the notion of publishing nutritional information and ingredients on food labels began to gain traction in America. It’s a pretty common-sense idea, right? Let people know what’s in their food so they can make informed decisions about what they consume. By 1973, the FDA made rules about voluntary labeling. Not required yet, but they began to devote some time to making more information available to people regarding certain nutrients, vitamins, minerals, and calorie counts. In 1980, it was getting more serious. The FDA drafted some suggested legislation about food labeling, but their ideas met with so much resistance, the notion of transparent food content labeling didn’t catch on for another decade. It wasn’t until 1990 that the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act (NLEA) was signed into law. This landmark legislation mandated the inclusion of standardized nutrition labels on most packaged foods and dietary supplements. Key requirements of the NLEA included the Nutrition Facts panel, which provides information on serving size, calories, and the amounts of various nutrients per serving. It also required ingredient lists to be provided on food labels. In 1994, the NLEA regulations became effective, and the Nutrition Facts panel as we know it today began appearing on food packages. This panel includes information on nutrients like fat, cholesterol, sodium, carbohydrates, fiber, sugars, protein, vitamins, and minerals - you’ve all seen them. As it sometimes does with new discoveries, scientific consensus about what we ought to be putting into our bodies changed again and it 2016, the FDA introduced an updated Nutrition Facts label to reflect changes in dietary recommendations and consumer preferences. Notable changes included larger and bolder calorie information, the addition of added sugars, and updated daily values for some nutrients. Stay with me. I promise this is going somewhere.

From the 1960s through the 1980s, obesity rates in the United States were relatively stable. While there were certainly individuals who were overweight or obese, it was not yet considered a widespread epidemic and we didn’t see the levels widespread obesity-related diseases we see today. The 1990s marked the beginning of a significant increase in obesity rates. This decade saw a sharp rise in the prevalence of obesity across all age groups and demographics. Through the 2000s, obesity rates continued to climb. The problem became more widely recognized, and health authorities started “addressing it” as a major public health concern. More recently, the COVID-19 pandemic brought additional attention to the link between obesity and severe outcomes from the virus, underscoring the importance of addressing this health concern.

It is a common mistake to suppose that more readily available information will make people smarter. It is a mistake to think that “giving them the facts” will influence their choices or behaviors. If you line up the obesity trends in this country with the availability of information about foods and drinks to the consumer, you’ll see it plain as day. In fact, looking at those two trend lines together, you’d think it had the opposite effect. The more specific and available nutritional information became, the worse the obesity problem got. Add to that all of the information and connectivity with experts that the internet enabled and it would be understandable if you looked at obesity trends and scratched your head. What shouldn’t mystify you in the least, however, is why things are the way they are. People, despite the availability of information, will by and large do whatever the hell they were going to do anyway, not because it’s best for them, but because they want to. Do you really think that I’m sitting here with a spare tire around my middle because I can’t read a nutrition label? Or is it because I like beer and cookies?

The bottom line is, there are a lot of factors at work here. But for the purposes of this Journal, the reason it matters is this: The vast majority of people have neither the desire nor the personal discipline to bother learning anything new for the sake of improving themselves. They’re on autopilot. Sticking new information in front of them does less than no good. To them, it’s a distraction from whatever they were distracted by in the first place. Pause my TikTok reels to read something important? Invest time and intellectual calories into making myself a better, more functional, more self-reliant human being? Pfugh! WHY? Have you SEEN this cat? If it sounds like I’m talking down to a huge swath of humanity, or as if I think there is some sort of majority of people out there who are self-absorbed, unconcerned resource consumers, alive purely because the producers of our society make enough to care for and feed them, let me be clear. I am talking down to them, and that’s exactly what I think. But don’t mistake that for ill will. I don’t hold it against them. I just recognize it for what it is. American society today has made it possible for a majority of people to live their entire lives without knowing real hardship. We’ve come so far in the effort to make life a little better for our kids than we had it that a majority of our kids will grow all the way into adulthood without ever knowing whether or not they are cowards. The new generation is largely spoiled because we spoiled them, and the politicians who run things are pandering to the spoiled by promising never to make it any harder on them. Everything will be free, your loans will be forgiven, words won’t hurt anymore, and we’ll tear down any art or cultural history that offends you. Don’t worry about how we’ll finance all that - we’ll just take it from the people you hate. It’ll be great! It’s pretty astonishing, if you think about it. We’ve not only created one of the softest and least educated generations in our country’s history, we’ve built a political system incentivized to pander to it and make it worse - and we’ve managed to do it in a time when information is more readily available and accessible than ever before.

Now, if you’re the sort of person who reads these entries and thinks about them, you’re probably also the kind of person who reads other things. You probably think about the world and the events of the day. You probably indulge your curiosity in ways that extend beyond leisure and distraction. In short, I’m not really talking about you in the broad sense. I’m talking about all of us in some measure, myself included. I’m just as guilty of wanting to see my children have a better life than I have had, working toward giving that to them, and then shaking my head when I find they aren’t as self-sufficient or resourceful as I was at their age. I’m every bit as prone to this kind of hypocrisy as anyone else. The best I can do is try to recognize it for what it is and make sure it never ever becomes my baseline. I’ll bet you could very likely say the same about yourself and your own life.

So where does that leave us? If giving them access to all the information in the whole wide world isn’t enough, how do we make people smarter? How do we get past our desire to make the world a better place for the next generation and make the next generation better for the world? Well, I don’t know. I wish I did. I mean I really and truly wish I did. I have a feeling, though, that the answer lies somewhere in the example we set and in the life we live. You see, the brain is a really old tool. Millions of years of evolution have taught it all kinds of shortcuts, taught it to observe and copy behaviors to survive. I think the real “hack” lies there - in being the kind of example that makes this current brand of idiocy unsustainable. Being not only a present, but consistently positive and dependable model for the brains and behaviors of those who might be open to developing. Now I’ll admit, I’m not at all sure that will work. I’m gambling on the notion that people being proud of how stupid they are is a trend that will kill itself off. That even in a time when spectacle and the theater of the absurd rule the collective attention span, there is still some desire in most minds to see serious people in charge of the things that matter. Somewhere in the recesses of my reptilian brain, I hope against all evidence that no matter how soft or willfully ignorant the masses become, they still want to be able to trust that the people steering the ship and putting food on the table know what the hell they’re doing. That, at least, allows me my pragmatic optimism. In that, I hope living the right example will empower those who pay attention to take the wheel someday and set this nonsense right. In the meantime, the adventure continues. May we live for our purpose, do it honorably, and may all our scars be on the front of us.
Title: VDH on Amoral Clarity
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on October 12, 2023, 02:10:03 PM
I’m not sure anything Hansen writes can be construed a rant, but they are certainly thought pieces:

https://amgreatness.com/2023/10/12/hamas-and-amoral-clarity/?fbclid=IwAR3ylcwo-TSJYrHV8vyQEiFNGfEOYdLKRfGrwU0nXX38XjxYCw3_VYZ-9J8
Title: Israelis admit failure and will ultimately pay price
Post by: ccp on October 13, 2023, 11:28:47 AM
https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/idf-chief-halevi-admits-military-failed-to-prevent-hamas-attack-vows-to-investigate/

reminds me of recent Michael Oren interview I posted couple days back

he stated UNLIKE IN THE US

when Israeli government officials or leaders fail they pay a price.

he was referring to hypothetical question about future of Bibi

Thinking about this I cannot think of single instance where a  US President, administration or legislature or Fed government official claimed they made mistake(s) or resigned as a result.

Look at Afghanistan - no one apologized to the American people or was held accountable.

Endless examples I can list .

Can anyone here think of any example of US politician or Fed official admitting mistake or failure or resigning I missed?



Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 13, 2023, 06:12:31 PM
M understanding is that this used to be common in the military.
Title: Obama’s “3rd term” & its Implications
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on October 13, 2023, 09:50:00 PM
In view of Biden’s obvious mental decline the question “who’s at the controls?” is coming up more often. What are the 2024 implications?

https://www.samizdata.net/2023/10/back-seat-driving-at-the-white-house/
Title: Re: Obama’s “3rd term” & its Implications
Post by: DougMacG on October 14, 2023, 05:15:34 AM
"on the back-seat driving allegation vs Mr Obama"

  - The question it seems is whether Obama and his team of his advisors is front seat driving. As pointed out so we'll, he wasn't a very good President., for the country or for his party.
Title: Palestinians like Democrats
Post by: ccp on October 14, 2023, 07:46:10 AM
refuse to accept responsibility for anything they are responsible for:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/pro-palestinian-school-board-member-opposes-honoring-hamas-attack-victims-ignores-the-root-of-the-violence/ar-AA1ibGeg?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=46aa844d106c4a4a83957daf72c56548&ei=14
Title: Shattered Israeli Beliefs
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on October 16, 2023, 12:41:55 PM
No punches pulled here:

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-768112?fbclid=IwAR25qvLdm2n3iMlnJPQkB3VmEO1WdISm28PZ_3_2hDQDYkQGUWYYe9DojKA
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 17, 2023, 12:46:39 PM
Thread nazi here again  :-D

His Glibness and/or the Biden Administration would be better threads for the first two of these three, and the Israel thread for the third.

Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on October 17, 2023, 01:46:52 PM
" Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism."

has good credentials

yet Blinks still runs to Qatar, Egypt, Jordan and Abbas

with "diplomatic solutions"

and Biden to Israel for I am not sure what

all vying for a Nobel Peace Prize I suppose prior to '24 election .

Title: Time to Divorce DC
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on October 19, 2023, 08:16:36 AM
Don Surber

An ungovernable nation
We need a divorce — from Washington.
OCT 19, 2023

Reader John McCall, who writes John’s Substack, left an excellent comment yesterday.

He said, “Has it escaped anybody’s attention that this nation is ungovernable? A columnist, yesterday or so, wrote the first of a series on how to fix things. His first post made a cogent case for elimination of Civil Service so that unelected bureaucrats would be much less able to make policy according to their own agenda, rather than carry out the policies agreed to by elected officials.

“Anybody want to lay money on achieving THAT? There is a better chance of scorched earth in Gaza. The Uniparty is busy with destruction of this nation for the rest of us in order to gain it for themselves (and buy time to accomplish such by throwing the rest of us minimal scraps).

“Kurt Schlichter wrote the first part of that (those not yet informed by his warning novels have missed a treat — there is droll humor there in addition to his wisdom and entertaining plot {usual disclaimer by me as to potential gain of any manner as result of recommending such tomes.”

I read comments because of some unsolicited advice Jonah Goldberg gave me: Never read comments. That was back in the day when he thought I was great.

John McCall hit on what the problem is with America. Its government has grown to the point where Washington spends $6 trillion a year. I think. The White House budget proposal does not say how much it wants to spend, but it does say 4 times that the budget will cut the deficit by $1.7 trillion over the next decade. That depends on what the meaning of cut is because only in government do people believe that you increase spending and call it a decrease.

The national debt of $33 trillion and rising is a symptom of the problem, which is a colossal, enormous, gigantic, immense, mammoth, and vast federal government that is peopled by a buttinsky bureaucracy that want to regulate every aspect of your life. The people in DC apparently have no lives so they want to run yours.

Name a human activity that the government does not have its nose in.

Toilets? You cannot use more than 1.6 gallons of water per flush because the government has determined that we must save water. Nevada and other arid places have water shortages, so the government makes everyone in the USA must save water regardless of whether they live on a Great Lake or not.

But Nevada’s water problem stems from the mob building up Las Vegas in the 1950s and federal efforts since then to make it less unlivable. Its population has risen more than 10-fold in the past 60 years as its 285,278 inhabitants in the 1960 Census grew in number to 3,104,614 inhabitants in the 2020 Census.

Instead of banning lawn sprinklers and the like there, the government bans 7 gallon toilets everywhere.

I use this as an example of the stupidity of our overlords in Washington. They have the power to dictate anything and everything, and usually they dictate the wrong thing to do. Making it easier to live in a desert is a dumb move because people will move into the desert and expect water.

I blame Lyndon Johnson for this because before he became president, we had a pretty good thing going. The economy was roaring, factory workers could escape crowded cities for the suburbs and the murder rate was 4.6 people per 100,000 when he took office in 1963.

By the time he left in 1969, the murder rate soared to 7.3. LBJ’s Gun Control Act of 1968 fueled a rise to 10.2 murders per 100,000 by 1980. It took another 30 years to drop that to the low Eisenhower-level homicide rate.

LBJ wanted to leave a giant legacy of winning World War 3 in Vietnam while creating a Great Society back home. He created programs. Chief among them was the Department of Housing and Urban Development. It began in 1965.

58 years later, our cities are crime-ridden toilets (literally in the streets of San Francisco) lined with junkies living in pup tents. Over those 58 years, HUD has spent roughly $3 trillion dollars.

But LBJ wasn’t alone in turning problems into money pits. The Department of Education has federalized local schools. Gone are the Alice and Jerry reading books, which were written and illustrated by schoolteachers. Instead kids get Gender Queer written by an LGBT activist. Thank goodness Johnny can’t read.

Boy, was Ronald Reagan right when he said government is not the solution; it’s the problem.

Lord Acton’s observation that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely left out the part where power makes you stupid.

A government that we created to protect our rights violates them. The Constitution prohibits the government from being racist or sexist. Our government ignores the Constitution by promoting discrimination against white males. As a white male myself, you can see why I have a problem with it.

Clay S. Jenkinson wrote, “We need a national divorce. We need to separate by red states and blue states and shrink the federal government. Everyone I talk to says this.”

That’s not the divorce we need. The nation was set up to have red states and blue states. No one expected Rhode Island to be Virginia.

The Civil War over slavery was avoidable in 1850 but then Congress stuck its nose in it and made red states return runaway slaves to the blue states. Six years, the Supreme Court ruled that a slave has no rights.

The biggest fear of Patrick Henry — who opposed ratification of the Constitution — was the creation of a large central government that ruled the states. Thanks to the ability to coerce states with cash, we live his worst nightmare.

Expecting Congress or a president to fix this problem is like expecting Lizzo to lose weight. Too many people are Rich Men North of Richmond now. The levers of government are so many and so lucrative that no one will give up any power.

What we need to do is get California and Florida to agree to disagree and part company — abandoning the central government. The 50 states form the United States. It is time for all of us to leave the monster we created.
Title: Another Suber Piece
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on October 20, 2023, 04:27:39 PM
Media fact-checkers rose at the turn of this century when the DNC realized it could discount legitimate arguments this way. The bias came first, then the apparatus. I could forgive or at least tolerate the lies if occasionally these journalists did some public good by pointing out a blatantly misleading lie on the left.

Let me try my hand at this.

CNN said, “As airstrikes in Gaza have forced hundreds of thousands of people to flee their homes and overwhelm areas, including hospitals, there is little room to go. Across the Middle East, Gaza is among the smallest and most densely-packed cities.

“The urban area around Gaza City is home to nearly 2 million people living in an 88-square-mile expanse, which is about 21,000 people per square mile, according to data from an annual Demographia report. Demographia looks at the urban footprint of cities to calculate density, as opposed to official administrative boundaries.”

88 square miles. 21,000 people per square mile. How cruel is is that Israelis force Palestinians to live there, right?

Steven Thomas reported, “The population density of NYC (27,013 people per square mile) dwarfs most other metropolitan areas of the United States. And if you only look at the population density of Manhattan (69,468 people per square mile), it still dwarfs other famously packed places internationally, such as Paris and Hong Kong.”

So Manhattan is more than three times as dense, but it is (or was) a First World city. What about the Third World town?

Thomas reported, “However, cities like Manila (171,301 people per square mile) and Phnom Penh (193,730 people per square mile) dwarf the Big Apple’s density!”

So the population of the capital of Cambodia is nearly 10 times as crowded as Gaza City but somehow Palestinians are the ones who are unfairly packed in like sardines in a can, and not Cambodians.

In the middle of Manhattan is Central Park, which is one of many parks in New York. I tried to find a park in Gaza online. All I came up with is Crazy Water Park, an attraction of three slides and three pools. It opened in May 2010. Hamas closed it down for mingling men with women and three terrorists burned it down in September 2010.

Islam is why Gaza cannot have nice things.

That and the fact that the Palestinian people are rabidly anti-Semitic and consumed by waging a terrorist war to destroy Israel.

My point is Gaza is not overly crowded by any stretch of the imagination.

Then there is the myth of the two-state solution.

Sky News reported, “The two-state solution has long been proposed as the best hope for peace in the Israel-Palestine conflict.

“It would see an independent Palestinian state established alongside the existing one of Israel — giving both people their own territory.

“It is the official position of the U.K., U.S., United Nations — and even Israel itself — but many now say there is little hope of achieving it.”

The two states already exist.

One is called Israel, the other is called Gaza. One side flourishes and provides food, fuel and water to the other while the other side sits around the house collecting welfare checks from Iran.

One makes hormones for trannies while the other side would throw them out the window and to their death.

One had to develop an electronic defense system to keep the other’s rockets from hitting their targets.

One keeps making concessions while the other side keeps up its terrorism.

NBC reported Biden forced Bibi to cave in again and restore water to Gaza. They call it humanitarian aid. I call it inviting even more violence from Palestinians against Israel. The Biden Crime Family collected its bribes from Iran, so what does he care about Israel? He’s a plain old-fashioned anti-Semitic Democrat.

Then there is the myth that Jews are colonialists. Amnesty International and other Marxists join the jihadists in promoting this lie.

AI said, “For half a century, Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip has resulted in systematic human rights violations against Palestinians living there.

“Since the occupation first began in June 1967, Israel’s ruthless policies of land confiscation, illegal settlement and dispossession, coupled with rampant discrimination, have inflicted immense suffering on Palestinians, depriving them of their basic rights.

“Israel’s military rule disrupts every aspect of daily life in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. It continues to affect whether, when and how Palestinians can travel to work or school, go abroad, visit their relatives, earn a living, attend a protest, access their farmland, or even access electricity or a clean water supply. It means daily humiliation, fear and oppression. People’s entire lives are effectively held hostage by Israel.”

The Arabs attacked Israel in 1967. In six days, Israel routed them and won the land. There is nothing illegal. Don’t want none, don’t start none.

As for human rights, Israel provides for Palestinians in Gaza, not Arabs.

As for colonization, that’s on the Palestinians not the Israelis. Jews took Jerusalem from the Canaanites more than 2,000 years before there was a Muslim religion. Jews are the indigenous people, not Palestinians.

Then there is the myth that there is no difference between the RINOs and the Democrats on the issue.

Nikki Haley definitely sides with Israel as she did when she was ambassador to the UN. Her initial reaction to the October 7 attacks was “Finish them. They are only going to try and kill us and kill Israelis. We’ve got to put an end to this.”

Excellent.

It was reported that she wants the USA to take in a million Palestinians. Nonsense. She said half the people in Gaza don’t support Hamas and should be allowed to settle elsewhere. Her spokesman later clarified, saying, “Nikki Haley opposes the U.S. taking in Gazans. She thinks Hamas-supporting countries like Iran, Qatar, and Turkey should take any refugees.”

Meanwhile, National Review reported, “U.S. representative Cory Mills (R., Fla.) successfully rescued 96 Americans stranded in Israel after launching a rescue operation of his own early last week, in the wake of the Jewish nation’s recently ignited war with Hamas.”

Notice how the Never Trumpers made the war sound like Israel started it.

And not to be outdone, Governor Ron DeSantis worked with a non-profit group to get nearly 300 Americans rescued from Israel.

I cannot decide whether the biggest myth is 1. Palestinians are the good guys, or 2. Palestinians hate Hamas. Good guys do not kill their own people.

The Sun reported, “Drone footage and a wiretapped phone call between two Hamas terrorists are said to prove the deadly Gaza hospital explosion was caused by a misfired Islamic Jihad rocket.

“Israel released its evidence after vehemently denying responsibility for a catastrophic explosion at the Al-Ahli Hospital that reportedly killed more than 500 people.”

This is but the latest example of Black September/PLO/Hezbollah/Hamas hiding behind women and children.

But the myth of Palestinians not supporting Hamas may be worse than considering terrorists who rape, kill and mutilate to be good guys.

Newsweek reported, “Hundreds gathered in a theater in Dearborn, Michigan, on Tuesday night to share their support for the Palestinian cause and condemn the Israeli government.”

Mind you, these are alleged refugees from the maelstrom that Palestinian terrorists unleashed in the 1970s. They are Muslim moles.

The final myth is that America is a friend of Israel. That may be true under a Republican president, but both Obama and Biden turned the USA into a frenemy as they coerced Israel to make concessions to the Palestinians that only encourage more violence and terrorism.
Title: The Day (Democratic Party & Woke) Delusion Died
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on October 24, 2023, 02:27:13 AM
https://www.thefp.com/p/the-day-the-delusions-died-konstantin-kisin?fbclid=IwAR1CMeEfcVnIxe67lMWFdxcven9YLMQ_jkKZzoYH9HRUWR7SMeSp6IOGuIM
Title: Newsweek author has it backwards (no accident)
Post by: ccp on October 24, 2023, 09:38:29 PM
Left are the  intellectuals who will defend democracy

and the Right are the idiots who will run it into the ground

I can't speak for politics in Israel

but applying this to the US is ASS backwards

but what else to expect from Newsweek article:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/the-terrorists-secret-advantage-was-israel-s-idiocracy-opinion/ar-AA1iMJVK?ocid=msedgntp&pc=DCTS&cvid=fd53a458b806493182e02f5325bca6c0&ei=7

Title: VDH
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 30, 2023, 08:01:25 AM
https://amgreatness.com/2023/10/30/a-therapeutic-middle-east-versus-a-tragic-one/
Title: How Democracies Die
Post by: ccp on November 01, 2023, 08:49:10 AM
by two harvard political "scientists"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Democracies_Die

Newsweek WP NYT Guardian Obama all list it with rave reviews

so you know the biased slant it sings

the anwser is TRUMP ! is how this happens.
Title: Re: How Democracies Die
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on November 01, 2023, 11:34:51 AM
by two harvard political "scientists"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Democracies_Die

Newsweek WP NYT Guardian Obama all list it with rave reviews

so you know the biased slant it sings

the anwser is TRUMP ! is how this happens.

Ye gods, the willing blindness to the irony embraced bu all cited astounds.
Title: Some men just want to watch the world burn
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 05, 2023, 11:43:06 AM
https://the-pipeline.org/the-column-the-scales-have-fallen-now-what/?fbclid=IwAR14_aSMNaYireZrYPMUbrbbsoTFCyM2GpGqHA7Jetl4oGBjmclupu6oxv0
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 06, 2023, 05:09:16 AM
It is the wee hours and I cannot sleep. Herewith a beer fueled rant:

In our ongoing conversations about the Ukrainian war, we have consistently warned that we were going to get tag teamed which is what we are but beginning to see now in Ukraine and the Middle East, with Taiwan and the American heartland to follow.

We are led by blithering idiots.

Was it not Obama who brought the Russians back into the Middle East? Is he not the true President now? Was it not Obama-Biden who threw away the Pryhic Victory in Iraq by withdrawing meaningful American presence and by so doing creating the vaccum that enabled the Isis caliphate? Was it not Obama -Biden who gave Iran $140+Billion and the right to nuke bombs in a finite number of years (approx 12 IIRC) ? and which enabled an Iranian crescent all the way to Hezbollah? Was it not Biden-Blinken-Milley-Austin et al who created the greatest shame of American arms in our history in Afghanistan? Was it not Biden who pulled the US Navy from the Black Sea in the run up to the Russian invasion while Biden spoke of accepting a "minor incursion"? Was it not Biden who failed to enforce theoil sanctions on Iran thus enabling some $40-100B in revenues-- and then signed off on $6B in ransom? While also funding Hamas? And even now wants to send $100M to Hamas while pressuring Isreal to cease fire? Was it not the Woke Prog-Covid policies of the Biden Pentagon that warred on the warrior culture of our military and by so doing now leave us with trememdous recruiting short falls? And who is it that directly and purposely who has destroyed our assertion of our southern border to the tune of 7+ million and counting UNVETTED illegal aliens? Meaning we are already penetrated by unknown numbers of fifth columnists? And who is it that emptied our petroleum reserve for its electoral benefit of lowering gasoline prices? And who is it that has reduced our military budget? (i.e.constant dollars, not inflated ones?) And whose reckless spending now has us paying more in interest on the national debt than our military budget-- with this trend accelerating?

Prepare to have our assumptions shattered people.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: DougMacG on November 06, 2023, 05:45:13 AM
One suggestion.  When you wake up, put this rant on a video and post it to the internet.

It's time that we reach more people.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on November 06, 2023, 07:27:22 AM
CD

to all your questions the answer is YES

watch, somehow Blinken will probably get a Nobel Peace Prize for running around all over (with daily media reports of where when he is going and meeting with whom)
with endless ceaseless talk of having "conversation" (I hate how CNN uses this  phrase), "negotiations" (always from weakness), more tantamount to begging and pleading with big mouth and no stick.

Don't we wish we had Mike Pompeo negotiating from a position of strength, sanctioning Iran and taking them on .

Israel cannot accept a nuclear Iran, but I don't get the impression they can take it on by itself.

So lets get it done.

Worse would be not only Iran getting nucs but the other Arab states  race to get them - Turkey, SA etc.


Title: history of Islam we never hear
Post by: ccp on November 08, 2023, 09:07:47 AM
https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/52936/have-about-170-million-people-been-killed-in-the-name-of-allah

or 270 million - read comments.
Title: American Spectator - Virginia
Post by: ccp on November 09, 2023, 09:10:11 AM
https://spectator.org/whats-the-matter-with-virginia/

 "This is not your father’s Virginia — it’s your grandfather’s."

From Southern Democrat to Republican back to big goverment Democrat

" Latin American immigration hitting Virginia earlier and heavier than most states not on the southern border, government employees becoming more plentiful, and once middle-class counties becoming among the nation’s wealthiest contributed to this political shapeshifting."

Title: Laura Aboli: Transhumanism: The End Game
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 14, 2023, 05:51:22 PM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCh6auCKYS0&t=113s
Title: we need more interdependence between nations not less
Post by: ccp on November 18, 2023, 12:15:51 PM
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/the-decadent-west-has-come-face-to-face-with-the-future-and-the-end-of-its-dominance/ar-AA1k9mrA?ocid=msedgntp&pc=DCTS&cvid=d9e18810c3854fbbb576f90a4654a65e&ei=9

I don't think more trade is the answer
especially when we have determined enemies with or without trade.

author discounts war is best avoided by deterrence not by trade

speak softly and carry a very big stick

but no easy answer.

BTW lots of trade has helped strengthen China and CCP
from theft unfair practices etc

Russia will be our adversary with or without trade it seems





Title: 2003: Feminism AWOL on Islam
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 04, 2023, 06:30:16 PM
Why Feminism Is AWOL on Islam
Kay S. Hymowitz
 

U.S. feminists should be protesting the brutal oppression of Middle Eastern women. But doing so would reveal how little they have to complain about at home.

Argue all you want with many feminist policies, but few quarrel with feminism?s core moral insight, which changed the lives (and minds) of women forever: that women are due the same rights and dignity as men. So, as news of the appalling miseries of women in the Islamic world has piled up, where are the feminists? Where?s the outrage? For a brief moment after September 11, when pictures of those blue alien-creaturely shapes in Afghanistan filled the papers, it seemed as if feminists were going to have their moment. And in fact the Feminist Majority, to its credit, had been publicizing since the mid-90s how Afghan girls were barred from school, how women were stoned for adultery or beaten for showing an ankle or wearing high-heeled shoes, how they were prohibited from leaving the house unless accompanied by a male relative, how they were denied medical help because the only doctors around were male.

But the rest is feminist silence. You haven?t heard a peep from feminists as it has grown clear that the Taliban were exceptional not in their extreme views about women but in their success at embodying those views in law and practice. In the United Arab Emirates, husbands have the right to beat their wives in order to discipline them??provided that the beating is not so severe as to damage her bones or deform her body,? in the words of the Gulf News. In Saudi Arabia, women cannot vote, drive, or show their faces or talk with male non-relatives in public. (Evidently they can?t talk to men over the airwaves either; when Prince Abdullah went to President Bush?s ranch in Crawford last April, he insisted that no female air-traffic controllers handle his flight.) Yes, Saudi girls can go to school, and many even attend the university; but at the university, women must sit in segregated rooms and watch their professors on closed-circuit televisions. If they have a question, they push a button on their desk, which turns on a light at the professor?s lectern, from which he can answer the female without being in her dangerous presence. And in Saudi Arabia, education can be harmful to female health. Last spring in Mecca, members of the mutaween, the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue, pushed fleeing students back into their burning school because they were not properly covered in abaya. Fifteen girls died.

You didn?t hear much from feminists when in the northern Nigerian province of Katsina a Muslim court sentenced a woman to death by stoning for having a child outside of marriage. The case might not have earned much attention?stonings are common in parts of the Muslim world?except that the young woman, who had been married off at 14 to a husband who ultimately divorced her when she lost her virginal allure, was still nursing a baby at the time of sentencing. During her trial she had no lawyer, although the court did see fit to delay her execution until she weans her infant.

You didn?t hear much from feminists as it emerged that honor killings by relatives, often either ignored or only lightly punished by authorities, are also commonplace in the Muslim world. In September, Reuters reported the story of an Iranian man, ?defending my honor, family, and dignity,? who cut off his seven-year-old daughter?s head after suspecting she had been raped by her uncle. The postmortem showed the girl to be a virgin. In another family mix-up, a Yemeni man shot his daughter to death on her wedding night when her husband claimed she was not a virgin. After a medical exam revealed that the husband was mistaken, officials concluded he was simply trying to protect himself from embarrassment about his own impotence. According to the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, every day two women are slain by male relatives seeking to avenge the family honor.

The savagery of some of these murders is worth a moment?s pause. In 2000, two Punjabi sisters, 20 and 21 years old, had their throats slit by their brother and cousin because the girls were seen talking to two boys to whom they were not related. In one especially notorious case, an Egyptian woman named Nora Marzouk Ahmed fell in love and eloped. When she went to make amends with her father, he cut off her head and paraded it down the street. Several years back, according to the Washington Post, the husband of Zahida Perveen, a 32-year-old pregnant Pakistani, gouged out her eyes and sliced off her earlobe and nose because he suspected her of having an affair.

In a related example widely covered last summer, a teenage girl in the Punjab was sentenced by a tribal council to rape by a gang that included one of the councilmen. After the hour-and-a-half ordeal, the girl was forced to walk home naked in front of scores of onlookers. She had been punished because her 11-year-old brother had compromised another girl by being been seen alone with her. But that charge turned out to be a ruse: it seems that three men of a neighboring tribe had sodomized the boy and accused him of illicit relations?an accusation leading to his sister?s barbaric punishment?as a way of covering up their crime.

Nor is such brutality limited to backward, out-of-the-way villages. Muddassir Rizvi, a Pakistani journalist, says that, though always common in rural areas, in recent years honor killings have become more prevalent in cities ?among educated and liberal families.? In relatively modern Jordan, honor killings were all but exempt from punishment until the penal code was modified last year; unfortunately, a young Palestinian living in Jordan, who had recently stabbed his 19-year-old sister 40 times ?to cleanse the family honor,? and another man from near Amman, who ran over his 23-year-old sister with his truck because of her ?immoral behavior,? had not yet changed their ways. British psychiatrist Anthony Daniels reports that British Muslim men frequently spirit their young daughters back to their native Pakistan and force the girls to marry. Such fathers have been known to kill daughters who resist. In Sweden, in one highly publicized case, Fadima Sahindal, an assimilated 26-year-old of Kurdish origin, was murdered by her father after she began living with her Swedish boyfriend. ?The whore is dead,? the family announced.

As you look at this inventory of brutality, the question bears repeating: Where are the demonstrations, the articles, the petitions, the resolutions, the vindications of the rights of Islamic women by American feminists? The weird fact is that, even after the excesses of the Taliban did more to forge an American consensus about women?s rights than 30 years of speeches by Gloria Steinem, feminists refused to touch this subject. They have averted their eyes from the harsh, blatant oppression of millions of women, even while they have continued to stare into the Western patriarchal abyss, indignant over female executives who cannot join an exclusive golf club and college women who do not have their own lacrosse teams.

But look more deeply into the matter, and you realize that the sound of feminist silence about the savage fundamentalist Muslim oppression of women has its own perverse logic. The silence is a direct outgrowth of the way feminist theory has developed in recent years. Now mired in self-righteous sentimentalism, multicultural nonjudgmentalism, and internationalist utopianism, feminism has lost the language to make the universalist moral claims of equal dignity and individual freedom that once rendered it so compelling. No wonder that most Americans, trying to deal with the realities of a post-9/11 world, are paying feminists no mind.

To understand the current sisterly silence about the sort of tyranny that the women?s movement came into existence to attack, it is helpful to think of feminisms plural rather than singular. Though not entirely discrete philosophies, each of three different feminisms has its own distinct reasons for causing activists to ?lose their voice? in the face of women?s oppression.

The first variety?radical feminism (or gender feminism, in Christina Hoff Sommers?s term)?starts with the insight that men are, not to put too fine a point upon it, brutes. Radical feminists do not simply subscribe to the reasonable-enough notion that men are naturally more prone to aggression than women. They believe that maleness is a kind of original sin. Masculinity explains child abuse, marital strife, high defense spending, every war from Troy to Afghanistan, as well as Hitler, Franco, and Pinochet. As Gloria Steinem informed the audience at a Florida fundraiser last March: ?The cult of masculinity is the basis for every violent, fascist regime.?

Gender feminists are little interested in fine distinctions between radical Muslim men who slam commercial airliners into office buildings and soldiers who want to stop radical Muslim men from slamming commercial airliners into office buildings. They are both examples of generic male violence?and specifically, male violence against women. ?Terrorism is on a continuum that starts with violence within the family, battery against women, violence against women in the society, all the way up to organized militaries that are supported by taxpayer money,? according to Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, who teaches ?The Sexuality of Terrorism? at California State University in Hayward. Violence is so intertwined with male sexuality that, she tells us, military pilots watch porn movies before they go out on sorties. The war in Afghanistan could not possibly offer a chance to liberate women from their oppressors, since it would simply expose women to yet another set of oppressors, in the gender feminists? view. As Sharon Lerner asserted bizarrely in the Village Voice, feminists? ?discomfort? with the Afghanistan bombing was ?deepened by the knowledge that more women than men die as a result of most wars.?

If guys are brutes, girls are their opposite: peace-loving, tolerant, conciliatory, and reasonable??Antiwar and Pro-Feminist,? as the popular peace-rally sign goes. Feminists long ago banished tough-as-nails women like Margaret Thatcher and Jeanne Kirkpatrick (and these days, one would guess, even the fetching Condoleezza Rice) to the ranks of the imperfectly female. Real women, they believe, would never justify war. ?Most women, Western and Muslim, are opposed to war regardless of its reasons and objectives,? wrote the Jordanian feminist Fadia Faqir on OpenDemocracy.net. ?They are concerned with emancipation, freedom (personal and civic), human rights, power sharing, integrity, dignity, equality, autonomy, power-sharing [sic], liberation, and pluralism.?

Sara Ruddick, author of Maternal Thinking, is perhaps one of the most influential spokeswomen for the position that women are instinctually peaceful. According to Ruddick (who clearly didn?t have Joan Crawford in mind), that?s because a good deal of mothering is naturally governed by the Gandhian principles of nonviolence such as ?renunciation,? ?resistance to injustice,? and ?reconciliation.? The novelist Barbara Kingsolver was one of the first to demonstrate the subtleties of such universal maternal thinking after the United States invaded Afghanistan. ?I feel like I?m standing on a playground where the little boys are all screaming ?He started it!? and throwing rocks,? she wrote in the Los Angeles Times. ?I keep looking for somebody?s mother to come on the scene saying, ?Boys! Boys!? ?

Gender feminism?s tendency to reduce foreign affairs to a Lifetime Channel movie may make it seem too silly to bear mentioning, but its kitschy naivet? hasn?t stopped it from being widespread among elites. You see it in widely read writers like Kingsolver, Maureen Dowd, and Alice Walker. It turns up in our most elite institutions. Swanee Hunt, head of the Women in Public Policy Program at Harvard?s Kennedy School of Government wrote, with Cristina Posa in Foreign Policy: ?The key reason behind women?s marginalization may be that everyone recognizes just how good women are at forging peace.? Even female elected officials are on board. ?The women of all these countries should go on strike, they should all sit down and refuse to do anything until their men agree to talk peace,? urged Ohio representative Marcy Kaptur to the Arab News last spring, echoing an idea that Aristophanes, a dead white male, proposed as a joke 2,400 years ago. And President Clinton is an advocate of maternal thinking, too. ?If we?d had women at Camp David,? he said in July 2000, ?we?d have an agreement.?

Major foundations too seem to take gender feminism seriously enough to promote it as an answer to world problems. Last December, the Ford Foundation and the Soros Open Society Foundation helped fund the Afghan Women?s Summit in Brussels to develop ideas for a new government in Afghanistan. As Vagina Monologues author Eve Ensler described it on her website, the summit was made up of ?meetings and meals, canvassing, workshops, tears, and dancing.? ?Defense was mentioned nowhere in the document,? Ensler wrote proudly of the summit?s concluding proclamation?despite the continuing threat in Afghanistan of warlords, bandits, and lingering al-Qaida operatives. ?uilding weapons or instruments of retaliation was not called for in any category,? Ensler cooed. ?Instead [the women] wanted education, health care, and the protection of refugees, culture, and human rights.?

Too busy celebrating their own virtue and contemplating their own victimhood, gender feminists cannot address the suffering of their Muslim sisters realistically, as light years worse than their own petulant grievances. They are too intent on hating war to ask if unleashing its horrors might be worth it to overturn a brutal tyranny that, among its manifold inhumanities, treats women like animals. After all, hating war and machismo is evidence of the moral superiority that comes with being born female.

Yet the gender feminist idea of superior feminine virtue is becoming an increasingly tough sell for anyone actually keeping up with world events. Kipling once wrote of the fierceness of Afghan women: ?When you?re wounded and left on the Afghan plains/And the women come out to cut up your remains/Just roll to your rifle and blow out your brains.? Now it?s clearer than ever that the dream of worldwide sisterhood is no more realistic than worldwide brotherhood; culture trumps gender any day. Mothers all over the Muslim world are naming their babies Usama or praising Allah for their sons? efforts to kill crusading infidels. Last February, 28-year-old Wafa Idris became the first female Palestinian suicide bomber to strike in Israel, killing an elderly man and wounding scores of women and children. And in April, Israeli soldiers discovered under the maternity clothes of 26-year-old Shifa Adnan Kodsi a bomb rather than a baby. Maternal thinking, indeed.

The second variety of feminism, seemingly more sophisticated and especially prevalent on college campuses, is multiculturalism and its twin, postcolonialism. The postcolonial feminist has even more reason to shy away from the predicament of women under radical Islam than her maternally thinking sister. She believes that the Western world is so sullied by its legacy of imperialism that no Westerner, man or woman, can utter a word of judgment against former colonial peoples. Worse, she is not so sure that radical Islam isn?t an authentic, indigenous?and therefore appropriate?expression of Arab and Middle Eastern identity.

The postmodern philosopher Michel Foucault, one of the intellectual godfathers of multiculturalism and postcolonialism, first set the tone in 1978 when an Italian newspaper sent him to Teheran to cover the Iranian revolution. As his biographer James Miller tells it, Foucault looked in the face of Islamic fundamentalism and saw . . . an awe-inspiring revolt against ?global hegemony.? He was mesmerized by this new form of ?political spirituality? that, in a phrase whose dark prescience he could not have grasped, portended the ?transfiguration of the world.? Even after the Ayatollah Khomeini came to power and reintroduced polygamy and divorce on the husband?s demand with automatic custody to fathers, reduced the official female age of marriage from 18 to 13, fired all female judges, and ordered compulsory veiling, whose transgression was to be punished by public flogging, Foucault saw no reason to temper his enthusiasm. What was a small matter like women?s basic rights, when a struggle against ?the planetary system? was at hand?

Postcolonialists, then, have their own binary system, somewhat at odds with gender feminism?not to mention with women?s rights. It is not men who are the sinners; it is the West. It is not women who are victimized innocents; it is the people who suffered under Western colonialism, or the descendants of those people, to be more exact. Caught between the rock of patriarchy and the hard place of imperialism, the postcolonial feminist scholar gingerly tiptoes her way around the subject of Islamic fundamentalism and does the only thing she can do: she focuses her ire on Western men.

To this end, the postcolonialist eagerly dips into the inkwell of gender feminism. She ties colonialist exploitation and domination to maleness; she might refer to Israel?s ?masculinist military culture??Israel being white and Western?though she would never dream of pointing out the ?masculinist military culture? of the jihadi. And she expends a good deal of energy condemning Western men for wanting to improve the lives of Eastern women. At the turn of the twentieth century Lord Cromer, the British vice consul of Egypt and a pet target of postcolonial feminists, argued that the ?degradation? of women under Islam had a harmful effect on society. Rubbish, according to the postcolonialist feminist. His words are simply part of ?the Western narrative of the quintessential otherness and inferiority of Islam,? as Harvard professor Leila Ahmed puts it in Women and Gender in Islam. The same goes for American concern about Afghan women; it is merely a ?device for ranking the ?other? men as inferior or as ?uncivilized,? ? according to Nira Yuval-Davis, professor of gender and ethnic studies at the University of Greenwich, England. These are all examples of what renowned Columbia professor Gayatri Spivak called ?white men saving brown women from brown men.?

Spivak?s phrase, a great favorite on campus, points to the postcolonial notion that brown men, having been victimized by the West, can never be oppressors in their own right. If they give the appearance of treating women badly, the oppression they have suffered at the hands of Western colonial masters is to blame. In fact, the worse they treat women, the more they are expressing their own justifiable outrage. ?When men are traumatized [by colonial rule], they tend to traumatize their own women,? Miriam Cooke, a Duke professor and head of the Association for Middle East Women?s Studies, told me. And today, Cooke asserts, brown men are subjected to a new form of imperialism. ?Now there is a return of colonialism that we saw in the nineteenth century in the context of globalization,? she says. ?What is driving Islamist men is globalization.?

It would be difficult to exaggerate the through-the-looking-glass quality of postcolonialist theory when it comes to the subject of women. Female suicide bombers are a good thing, because they are strong women demonstrating ?agency? against colonial powers. Polygamy too must be shown due consideration. ?Polygamy can be liberating and empowering,? Cooke answered sunnily when I asked her about it. ?Our norm is the Western, heterosexual, single couple. If we can imagine different forms that would allow us to be something other than a heterosexual couple, we might imagine polygamy working,? she explained murkily. Some women, she continued, are relieved when their husbands take a new wife: they won?t have to service him so often. Or they might find they now have the freedom to take a lover. But, I ask, wouldn?t that be dangerous in places where adulteresses can be stoned to death? At any rate, how common is that? ?I don?t know,? Cooke answers, ?I?m interested in discourse.? The irony couldn?t be darker: the very people protesting the imperialist exploitation of the ?Other? endorse that Other?s repressive customs as a means of promoting their own uniquely Western agenda?subverting the heterosexual patriarchy.

The final category in the feminist taxonomy, which might be called the world-government utopian strain, is in many respects closest to classical liberal feminism. Dedicated to full female dignity and equality, it generally eschews both the biological determinism of the gender feminist and the cultural relativism of the multiculti postcolonialist. Stanford political science professor Susan Moller Okin, an influential, subtle, and intelligent spokeswoman for this approach, created a stir among feminists in 1997 when she forthrightly attacked multiculturalists for valuing ?group rights for minority cultures? over the well-being of individual women. Okin admirably minced no words attacking arranged marriage, female circumcision, and polygamy, which she believed women experienced as a ?barely tolerable institution.? Some women, she went so far as to declare, ?might be better off if the culture into which they were born were either to become extinct . . . or preferably, to be encouraged to alter itself so as to reinforce the equality of women.?

But though Okin is less shy than other feminists about discussing the plight of women under Islamic fundamentalism, the typical U.N. utopian has her own reasons for keeping quiet as that plight fills Western headlines. For one thing, the utopian is also a bean-counting absolutist, seeking a pure, numerical equality between men and women in all departments of life. She greets Western, and particularly American, claims to have achieved freedom for women with skepticism. The motto of the 2002 International Women?s Day??Afghanistan Is Everywhere??was in part a reproach to the West about its superior airs. Women in Afghanistan might have to wear burqas, but don?t women in the West parade around in bikinis? ?It?s equally disrespectful and abusive to have women prancing around a stage in bathing suits for cash or walking the streets shrouded in burqas in order to survive,? columnist Jill Nelson wrote on the MSNBC website about the murderously fanatical riots that attended the Miss World pageant in Nigeria.

As Nelson?s statement hints, the utopian is less interested in freeing women to make their own choices than in engineering and imposing her own elite vision of a perfect society. Indeed, she is under no illusions that, left to their own democratic devices, women would freely choose the utopia she has in mind. She would not be surprised by recent Pakistani elections, where a number of the women who won parliamentary seats were Islamist. But it doesn?t really matter what women want. The universalist has a comprehensive vision of ?women?s human rights,? meaning not simply women?s civil and political rights but ?economic rights? and ?socioeconomic justice.? Cynical about free markets and globalization, the U.N. utopian is also unimpressed by the liberal democratic nation-state ?as an emancipatory institution,? in the dismissive words of J. Ann Tickner, director for international studies at the University of Southern California. Such nation-states are ?unresponsive to the needs of [their] most vulnerable members? and seeped in ?nationalist ideologies? as well as in patriarchal assumptions about autonomy. In fact, like the (usually) unacknowledged socialist that she is, the U.N. utopian eagerly awaits the withering of the nation-state, a political arrangement that she sees as tied to imperialism, war, and masculinity. During war, in particular, nations ?depend on ideas about masculinized dignity and feminized sacrifice to sustain the sense of autonomous nationhood,? writes Cynthia Enloe, professor of government at Clark University.

Having rejected the patriarchal liberal nation-state, with all the democratic machinery of self-government that goes along with it, the utopian concludes that there is only one way to achieve her goals: to impose them through international government. Utopian feminists fill the halls of the United Nations, where they examine everything through the lens of the ?gender perspective? in study after unreadable study. (My personal favorites: ?Gender Perspectives on Landmines? and ?Gender Perspectives on Weapons of Mass Destruction,? whose conclusion is that landmines and WMDs are bad for women.)

The 1979 U.N. Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), perhaps the first and most important document of feminist utopianism, gives the best sense of the sweeping nature of the movement?s ambitions. CEDAW demands many measures that anyone committed to democratic liberal values would applaud, including women?s right to vote and protection against honor killings and forced marriage. Would that the document stopped there. Instead it sets out to impose a utopian order that would erase all distinctions between men and women, a kind of revolution of the sexes from above, requiring nations to ?take all appropriate measures to modify the social and cultural patterns of conduct of men and women? and to eliminate ?stereotyped roles? to accomplish this legislative abolition of biology. The document calls for paid maternity leave, nonsexist school curricula, and government-supported child care. The treaty?s 23-member enforcement committee hectors nations that do not adequately grasp that, as Enloe puts it, ?the personal is international.? The committee has cited Belarus for celebrating Mother?s Day, China for failing to legalize prostitution, and Libya for not interpreting the Qur?an in accordance with ?committee guidelines.?

Confusing ?women?s participation? with self-determination, and numerical equivalence with equality, CEDAW utopians try to orchestrate their perfect society through quotas and affirmative-action plans. Their bean-counting mentality cares about whether women participate equally, without asking what it is that they are participating in or whether their participation is anything more than ceremonial. Thus at the recent Women?s Summit in Jordan, Rima Khalaf suggested that governments be required to use quotas in elections ?to leapfrog women to power.? Khalaf, like so many illiberal feminist utopians, has no hesitation in forcing society to be free. As is often the case when elites decide they have discovered the route to human perfection, the utopian urge is not simply antidemocratic but verges on the totalitarian.

That this combination of sentimental victimhood, postcolonial relativism, and utopian overreaching has caused feminism to suffer so profound a loss of moral and political imagination that it cannot speak against the brutalization of Islamic women is an incalculable loss to women and to men. The great contribution of Western feminism was to expand the definition of human dignity and freedom. It insisted that all human beings were worthy of liberty. Feminists now have the opportunity to make that claim on behalf of women who in their oppression have not so much as imagined that its promise could include them, too. At its best, feminism has stood for a rich idea of personal choice in shaping a meaningful life, one that respects not only the woman who wants to crash through glass ceilings but also the one who wants to stay home with her children and bake cookies or to wear a veil and fast on Ramadan. Why shouldn?t feminists want to shout out their own profound discovery for the world to hear?

Perhaps, finally, because to do so would be to acknowledge the freedom they themselves enjoy, thanks to Western ideals and institutions. Not only would such an admission force them to give up their own simmering resentments; it would be bad for business.
The truth is that the free institutions?an independent judiciary, a free press, open elections?that protect the rights of women are the same ones that protect the rights of men. The separation of church and state that would allow women to escape the burqa would also free men from having their hands amputated for theft. The education system that would teach girls to read would also empower millions of illiterate boys. The capitalist economies that bring clean water, cheap clothes, and washing machines that change the lives of women are the same ones that lead to healthier, freer men. In other words, to address the problems of Muslim women honestly, feminists would have to recognize that free men and women need the same things?and that those are things that they themselves already have. And recognizing that would mean an end to feminism as we know it.

There are signs that, outside the academy, middlebrow literary circles, and the United Nations, feminism has indeed met its Waterloo. Most Americans seem to realize that September 11 turned self-indulgent sentimental illusions, including those about the sexes, into an unaffordable luxury. Consider, for instance, women?s attitudes toward war, a topic on which politicians have learned to take for granted a gender gap. But according to the Pew Research Center, in January 2002, 57 percent of women versus 46 percent of men cited national security as the country?s top priority. There has been a ?seismic gender shift on matters of war,? according to pollster Kellyanne Conway. In 1991, 45 percent of U.S. women supported the use of ground troops in the Gulf War, a substantially smaller number than the 67 percent of men. But as of November, a CNN survey found women were more likely than men to support the use of ground troops against Iraq, 58 percent to 56 percent. The numbers for younger women were especially dramatic. Sixty-five percent of women between 18 and 49 support ground troops, as opposed to 48 percent of women 50 and over. Women are also changing their attitudes toward military spending: before September 11, only 24 percent of women supported increased funds; after the attacks, that number climbed to 47 percent. An evolutionary psychologist might speculate that, if females tend to be less aggressively territorial than males, there?s little to compare to the ferocity of the lioness when she believes her young are threatened.

Even among some who consider themselves feminists, there is some grudging recognition that Western, and specifically American, men are sometimes a force for the good. The Feminist Majority is sending around urgent messages asking for President Bush to increase American security forces in Afghanistan. The influential left-wing British columnist Polly Toynbee, who just 18 months ago coined the phrase ?America the Horrible,? went to Afghanistan to figure out whether the war ?was worth it.? Her answer was not what she might have expected. Though she found nine out of ten women still wearing burqas, partly out of fear of lingering fundamentalist hostility, she was convinced their lives had greatly improved. Women say they can go out alone now.

As we sink more deeply into what is likely to be a protracted struggle with radical Islam, American feminists have a moral responsibility to give up their resentments and speak up for women who actually need their support. Feminists have the moral authority to say that their call for the rights of women is a universal demand?that the rights of women are the Rights of Man.

Feminism Behind the Veil

Feminists in the West may fiddle while Muslim women are burning, but in the Muslim world itself there is a burgeoning movement to address the miserable predicament of the second sex?without simply adopting a philosophy whose higher cultural products include Sex and the City, Rosie O?Donnell, and the power-suited female executive.

The most impressive signs of an indigenous female revolt against the fundamentalist order are in Iran. Over the past ten years or so, Iran has seen the publication of a slew of serious journals dedicated to the social and political predicament of Islamic women, the most well known being the Teheran-based Zonan and Zan, published by Faezah Hashemi, a well-known member of parliament and the daughter of former president Rafsanjani. Believing that Western feminism has promoted hostility between the sexes, confused sex roles, and the sexual objectification of women, a number of writers have proposed an Islamic-style feminism that would stress ?gender complementarity? rather than equality and that would pay full respect to housewifery and motherhood while also giving women access to education and jobs.

Attacking from the religious front, a number of ?Islamic feminists? are challenging the reigning fundamentalist reading of the Qur?an. These scholars insist that the founding principles of Islam, which they believe were long ago corrupted by pre-Islamic Arab, Persian, and North African customs, are if anything more egalitarian than those of Western religions; the Qur?an explicitly describes women as the moral and spiritual equals of men and allows them to inherit and pass down property. The power of misogynistic mullahs has grown in recent decades, feminists continue, because Muslim men have felt threatened by modernity?s challenge to traditional arrangements between the sexes.

What makes Islamic feminism really worth watching is that it has the potential to play a profoundly important role in the future of the Islamic world?and not just because it could improve the lot of women. By insisting that it is true to Islam?in fact, truer than the creed espoused by the entrenched religious elite?Islamic feminism can affirm the dignity of Islam while at the same time bringing it more in line with modernity. In doing this, feminists can help lay the philosophical groundwork for democracy. In the West, feminism lagged behind religious reformation and political democratization by centuries; in the East, feminism could help lead the charge.

At the same time, though, the issue of women?s rights highlights two reasons for caution about the Islamic future. For one thing, no matter how much feminists might wish otherwise, polygamy and male domination of the family are not merely a fact of local traditions; they are written into the Qur?an itself. This in and of itself would not prove to be such an impediment?the Old Testament is filled with laws antithetical to women?s equality?except for the second problem: more than other religions, Islam is unfriendly to the notion of the separation of church and state. If history is any guide, there?s the rub. The ultimate guarantor of the rights of all citizens, whether Islamic or not, can only be a fully secular state.
Title: Jesse Watters
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 13, 2023, 10:12:32 AM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4POJrddaQ4&t=16s
Title: VDH
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 14, 2023, 04:37:43 AM


https://amgreatness.com/2023/12/14/civilization-versus-the-new-nihilists/
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: ccp on December 14, 2023, 07:55:44 AM
This is why I love VDH.

Not only can he summarize like no other, I find most often I learn something from him:

"16th-century European mad wave of iconoclastic destruction of religious art"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beeldenstorm
Title: Jordan Peterson: Cultural Marxism
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 15, 2023, 07:58:15 AM


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5SiWT0_Gj0
Title: BS and its Cascades
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on December 17, 2023, 03:27:22 PM
This could be filed a lot of places, but due to its sweeping nature and comprehensive scope I’ll drop it here:”

https://elizabethnickson.substack.com/p/the-epic-bullshit-of-catastrophic?r=1qo1e&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&fbclid=IwAR2BSn_yzNweux2qlqkCRtd1g5Kq3D06U05kzEpQUyX8jgX3qQBsisCGXQQ
Title: Best columns and columnists of the past year 2023
Post by: DougMacG on December 30, 2023, 10:44:03 AM
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2023/12/the-year-in-columns.php

All these are worth digging into.  Great sources going forward.  IMHO.

Title: Truest Freedom When you don't need anything from anybody, you're impossible to c
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 02, 2024, 02:54:02 PM
   
“The great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The D’Anconia Journal has, to date, been a repository for thoughts on the importance of individualism and self-reliance.  The reason is simple.  In an age marked by convenience and interdependence, the quest for individual self-reliance has never been more pressing.  I’m not just talking about things like wilderness survival, but the comprehensive ability to rely solely on oneself for life’s needs and personal comfort – regardless of the environment.  It’s personal development, education, and skill acquisition that equips individuals to excel in any situation, whether within the bounds of business, society, or when left to their own devices.  In today's world, life's conveniences are abundant. Information flows freely (this goes for good information, bad information, and disinformation alike), and technology has streamlined our daily routines. With these conveniences comes a paradoxical outcome: a growing sense of dependency.  Worse, a blissful ignorance of dependency! People have become accustomed to outsourcing their needs and responsibilities to external entities, be it corporations, institutions, or even governments. While this convenience may seem inviting, it comes at a steep cost—individual self-reliance.

The very heart of individualism is agency.  That is, the recognition of individual sovereignty and the acceptance of responsibility and accountability of self, to self.  It means the recognition that Life owes you absolutely nothing.  This means a successful individual looks not for handouts and guarantees, but at the furtherance and expansion of his own self-reliance.  At the heart of self-reliance lies the pursuit of an all-encompassing personal education. This education extends beyond formal schooling and degrees; it represents a lifelong commitment to learning, expanding and refining knowledge, assimilating new information and reassessing opinions and beliefs, and skill cultivation. In a world that is ever-changing, static knowledge and abilities quickly become obsolete. Individuals must foster adaptability and continually acquire new skills and knowledge to remain relevant and more importantly, applicable.  In the realm of business, self-reliance empowers individuals not just as employees but as entrepreneurs and leaders. It fosters innovation, encourages calculated risk-taking, and cultivates a unique skill set that distinguishes individuals in a competitive landscape. In business, self-reliance means taking charge of one's career, making informed choices, and continually upgrading skills to stay ahead in a rapidly evolving market.  In “civilized” society, self-reliance translates into active citizenship and community engagement. It entails contributing positively to one's community, being cognizant of the challenges it faces, and taking the initiative to address them. Self-reliant individuals comprehend that societal advancement necessitates active involvement, empathy, and a willingness to collaborate, but ultimately all of that stems from the capacity and effectiveness of the individual.

Self-reliance is not confined to urban or corporate settings; it encompasses survival skills, even in the harshest conditions. Proficiency in sustaining oneself in challenging environments, whether through fundamental survival skills or resourcefulness, is a pivotal aspect of self-reliance. It instills confidence and resilience in the face of adversity.  Embracing self-reliance demands a shift in mindset. It involves rejecting a passive, dependent approach to life in favor of an active, empowered one. It entails seeking opportunities for growth, welcoming challenges as opportunities for development, and seizing control of one's destiny.  In a world that frequently encourages reliance and conformity, self-reliance shines as a beacon of personal empowerment. It serves as the bedrock upon which individuals can construct a life of purpose, resilience, and adaptability. By nurturing self-reliance, accompanied by a well-rounded personal education and a diverse skill set, individuals can not only navigate the complexities of the modern world but also leave an enduring impact on society, business, and their own lives. Embarking on this journey represents an investment in genuine empowerment and self-determination—a lifelong effort worth undertaking.  What follows is a list I created as a sort of “self-check” for myself and my kids.  It is not comprehensive.  In fact, it is a living document I’ve passed around to trusted friends and mentors for their additions and suggestions.  The goal isn’t to create a static set of skills and knowledge areas which, if completed, results in a passing grade and a certificate of self-reliance.  As I mentioned in the very first paragraph, the goal is to create a foundation for the comprehensive ability to rely solely on oneself for life’s needs and personal comfort – regardless of the environment.  Why is this important?  It is important because it means you actually are a free individual.  Without self-reliance, there is no freedom.  Without it, there is no choice but dependence.  With it, you have choices.  You can choose your own path, seek your own way, sustain yourself even when times are hard or when society attempts take things away. Have a look, and ask yourself if you’re capable in each of these areas.  A book could be written about each and every one of these areas – indeed, many have been.  When you happen across an item you’re not familiar with or have no knowledge of, look into the subject.  Learn more.  Go put yourself in uncomfortable environments and new situations and improve your self-reliance.  Remember, no one can take away your knowledge, skills, and abilities.  The more you work on and develop yourself and your self-reliance, the more impervious to collectivism you become.

Basic Life Skills List – Working Copy

I.                 General Skills and Knowledge Areas

·        Reading for Comprehension

·        Writing for Expression

·        Verbal Communication of Complex Ideas

·        Effective and Compelling Storytelling

·        Critical Thinking

·        Logic and Reasoning

·        Brainstorming / Mind-mapping ideas

·        Self-Centering / Mood and attitude control

·        Task Planning

·        Time Management

·        Etiquette

·        Argumentation (classical debate and rhetoric)

·        Dressing for success from the Board Room to the Back Country

·        Social Awareness and Emotional Intelligence

·        Basic functionality in at least one foreign language

II.                Work, Learning Tools, and Productivity

·        Basic Computer Applications, such as word processors, presentation tools, spreadsheets, etc.

·        Website navigation and searches

·        Open AI tools, stems, queries, and methods

·        Traditional Library filing systems

·        Penmanship

·        Journaling

·        Note-taking

·        Maintaining a calendar

·        Time zones and the use of a 24-hour clock

·        Setting up a small business (EIN numbers, State filings, founding documents, banking, etc.)

·        Personal Banking

·        Accounting basics

·        Expense planning and budgeting

·        Government Offices and Agencies and their purposes

·        Social and professional Networking

·        Sketching and diagramming

·        Memory Improvement techniques

·        Condensing and organizing information – “gisting”

·        Use of a scientific calculator and a 10-key machine

·        Dressing for success from the board room to the back country

·        Composing a professional presentation

·        Constructing a teaching curriculum for a skill or idea

III.              Broad Life Skills

·        Environmental Analysis and Assessment

·        Identify positions and navigate by map and other natural/non-electronic means

·        Navigation using available technologies

·        Range estimation to 1000 yards

·        At least 5 methods of shelter construction

·        At least 5 methods of identifying sources of, procuring, and purifying water

·        At least 5 methods of making fire without matches or a lighter

·        At least 5 ways of making expedient sources of all-weather tinder

·        At least 3 ways of transporting fire over long distances

·        Nutritional Assessment

·        Basic Metabolic Rate

·        Macronutrients

·        Identify available sources of each as well as ways to prioritize food collection

·        Use of basic hand tools

·        Basic carpentry and woodworking

·        Improvisational problem solving

·        Identify, process and prepare natural materials for personal use

·        Identify behavior patterns in local fauna for personal benefit

·        Long-distance Signaling and communication

·        Firearms use and safety – At least three basic types; rifle, pistol, and shotgun

·        Use and manufacture of at least 5 types of primitive weapons

·        Multiple methods of hunting, trapping, and fishing

·        Tracking game and other humans

·        Identification of nutritional and medicinal plants and fungi

·        Self-protection / fighting basics

·        Sewing

·        Basic leatherworking

·        Improvised tools

·        Basic mechanics and engineering principles

·        First Aid and Trauma care

·        Rappelling and basic mountaineering

·        Loading and packing persons, animals, and vehicles for long distance travel

·        Camp comfort and hygiene

·        Food preparation, cooking, baking

·        Basic vehicle inspection, maintenance, and repair

·        Build and repair a bicycle

·        Build and repair skis and snowshoes

·        Swimming and water safety in lakes, rivers, and the ocean

·        Travel hazards in each ecosystem and climate (to include the urban)

·        Basic metallurgy and metal working techniques and tools

·        Basic stoneworking for toolmaking and weapon-building

·        Emergency/Crisis management

·        Leadership

·        Teamwork

·          Driving a vehicle (manual or automatic transmission)

·        Riding a motorcycle

·        Riding a horse (tack, pack, or bareback)

·        Small boat operations (kayak, canoe, sailboat, raft)

·        Swimming and basic water rescue

·        Methods of travel and transporting people and goods in dangerous or austere environments

·        Identify and prepare a suitable helicopter landing zone

·        Personnel Recovery planning and preparation

·        Skills Assessment and Organization of tasks

·        Crisis Psychology

·        Disaster and Crisis Management

IV.              General Education

·        History

·        Political Science

·        Civics / Government / World Affairs

·        Philosophy

·        Physical Sciences

·        Mathematical Problem solving

·        Basic Technology Operation

·        Art

·        Music

·        Language and Grammar

·        Physical Education and Exercise principles

·        Economics

·        Behavioral Psychology

V.               Activities for Personal Development (great list for kids/teens to execute as well as for adults)

·        Read 10 important literary works

·        Write a short story, a poem, and a song

·        Paint a picture, draw a person, make a sculpture

·        Make a piece of furniture

·        Set up a remote camp and stay there for two days and nights

·        Write a summary of 3-5 economic systems.  Compare and contrast

·        Write a summary of 3-5 political systems.  Compare and contrast

·        Create an accurate map of a 1 mile by 1 mile area

·        Plan your household’s expenses for 1 month.  Do all the shopping and bill paying

·        Write a letter to a Senator or Congressperson about an important issue

·        Write a summary of an important scientific principle or theory

·        Write a summary of an important historical period and how its events shaped the present day

·        Set up a primitive outdoor kitchen and prepare a meal for multiple people

·        Choose 5 personal strengths or virtues and write about them, examining how they can be used to improve your quality of life and your level of overall happiness

·        Conduct research on your own and write a persuasive essay in support of your position on a controversial topic.  When finished, conduct additional research as necessary and write to the opposite position.

·        Research a current technology or business model.  Trace the evolution of that technology or business model back to its earliest origins and describe the pivotal developments from then to now.
Title: WSJ: WRM: Peronism a bad idea for America
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 09, 2024, 05:59:56 AM
Javier Milei and Argentina’s Lessons for America
Despite its failures, Perónism is proving a temptation to the left and right in the U.S.
Walter Russell Mead
By
Walter Russell Mead
Follow
Jan. 8, 2024 5:43 pm E


Buenos Aires

When God was creating Argentina, the story goes, the angels thought he was being unfair. “Lord,” they said, “you are giving this country fertile soil, rich mineral resources, a healthy climate, a wonderful port, oil and gas. These people will have everything, and they will rule the world.”

“Don’t worry,” God said. “It will all work out. Wait until you see the Argentines.”

There are no objective reasons this once-prosperous country shouldn’t be one of the richest places on earth. But for roughly the past 100 years, Argentina has been one of the most disappointing economic stories in the world. Measured by per capita gross domestic product, the country was one of the 10 richest countries in the world before the Great Depression. In 2022 it ranked 67th, according to International Monetary Fund data.

When I first came here in the 1980s, I remember watching a family of beggars on the steps of the cathedral as 1-peso notes blew past them in the wind. At 640 pesos to the dollar, it wasn’t worth the effort to snatch them out of the air.

Visiting Buenos Aires again last week, I was struck by how little has changed in 40 years. On the positive side, the city is as beautiful and as culturally vibrant as ever. Economically and politically, however, it seems locked in a time warp. The black-market dollar is still called the “blue dollar,” and people pop up everywhere with offers to exchange it. Ordinary Argentines struggle to make ends meet. Inflation remains a national preoccupation. Last week the peso was again in free fall, and inflation was around 200%. The official exchange rate for the peso fell past 800 to the U.S. dollar, with rates of more than 1,000 available on the black market.

I met Argentines who hoped the recently inaugurated president, Javier Milei, could finally put the economy on a solid foundation after a century of erratic ups and downs. Others have grown jaded with promising new initiatives. In 1989, Carlos Menem was going to stabilize the economy with his de facto dollarization, and in the optimistic atmosphere of the era, Washington policy makers, think tankers and Wall Street investors swallowed the story whole. The Menem era ended in tears as the peso collapsed amid a massive economic crisis.

It will take courage, vision, luck and skill to dismantle the dysfunctional institutions and policies that hold Argentina back. Mr. Milei has made solid moves during his first month in power, by cutting subsidies and pruning some of the regulations and red tape that threaten to strangle the struggling economy. Yet it remains to be seen if he can lead Argentina into prosperity. With a hairstyle crafted, according to his image consultant, Lilia “Lady Lemon” Lemoine, to blend Elvis Presley and Wolverine, Mr. Milei has worked as a TV pundit endorsing both libertarian economics and tantric sex. He’s called Pope Francis “the representative of the Evil One on earth,” and is the proud owner of five cloned dogs.

Worse, of 257 seats in Argentina’s lower house, Mr. Milei’s allies occupy only 38. They hold a mere seven of the 72 spots in the Senate. The courts and bureaucracies teem with bitter critics of his reforms. Argentina’s powerful labor movement hates him.

We should wish Mr. Milei and the roughly 56% of Argentines who elected him well, but I leave Buenos Aires wondering whether Argentina’s past will be America’s future. Under the long shadow of Juan Perón (1895-1974), populist economics, weak institutions, political polarization and contempt for the rule of law have defined Argentine politics for decades. It isn’t hard to spot signs of similar social dysfunction in the U.S. today.

Perón wanted an Argentine economy based on state-directed investment, with officials under his thumb selecting favored industries and telling them how to do business. Thanks to an iron triangle of government bureaucrats, business depending on government incentives and protection for profit, and unions fighting for government subsidies to the corporations that sheltered them, Perónism was as politically successful as it was economically damaging.

President Biden often seems to be a woke Perónist, hoping to build a new American economy around the diktats of green economic planners and diversity consultants, protected manufacturing industries and loyal unions basking in government favor. It takes two to tango, though, and Donald Trump and some GOP populists have also embraced the economics of Argentine decline. Some of the harshest criticism of Mr. Milei’s victory came from those on the so-called new right. Compact magazine editor Sohrab Ahmari slammed the “Argentine weirdo” who was “seemingly grown in a secret laboratory funded by the Koch brothers” for his determination to liberalize Argentina’s system of industrial tariffs.

Fortunately, suspicion of an overreaching state is one of the enduring elements of American populism. Modern America has its problems, but what wrecked Argentina won’t fix the U.S.
Title: Re: WSJ: WRM: Peronism a bad idea for America
Post by: DougMacG on January 09, 2024, 07:03:33 AM
This is a GREAT article!  The analogy between these two countries is perfect.  The decline, the inflation, the lost opportunities, these are all choices and we have it within our power to NOT GO DOWN THAT ROAD that we are already on.

As an aside, I always thought Walter Russell Mead was a Democrat, maybe a JFK Democrat, but he sure seems to get it on foreign policy and on economics.

When Venezuela went from richest to poorest they said, "it can't happen here".  But it did.

American liberals asked about the Venezuela experience while they supported those same policies here were forced to admit, "maybe they went too far" (with those policies).  'ya think?

Meanwhile the prevailing (lack of) wisdom here is, "it can't happen here".

Why not?  God gives us a break from the laws of economics?  I don't think so.

As sure as Newton's apple is going to accelerate downward at 9.8 meters per second squared, no matter the tree, no matter the continent, America's economy will follow the path of the places whose policies we emulate.

Our politicians are doing this to us because our voters are telling them to.  Stop it!

Argentina will fail, as he points out, because one guy can't bring down the whole entrenched system.  They need super majority support in the whole assembly, top to bottom, as do we.

Here it's still the frog and the water heating to a boil. We have politicians like slow Joe and transformational Barack telling us this water feels pretty good as it heats up.

Two trillion dollar deficits, massive debt, wide open borders and gargantuan dependency programs don't feel pretty good if you have an ounce of economic common sense.

It's not a case of what can go wrong.  It's a case of here is what happens if we don't change course.  And yes, it can happen here.
Title: Trump, Machiavelli would understand Amer. Spectator
Post by: ccp on January 10, 2024, 09:27:54 AM
https://spectator.org/__trashed-15/
Title: You Can’t Find Transcendence on a Smartphone
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on January 12, 2024, 04:59:38 PM
What a lovely screed:

Recently the Times published this… unique essay by editor Anna Marks, on Taylor Swift’s sexual tastes, real or imagined. The piece operates by conceding that Swift is known to have exclusively dated men and has never made a single statement suggesting that she’s anything other than heterosexual, then goes on to insist that she’s queer, whatever the fuck that term means in 2024. Marks does this in part by sketching some unconvincing readings of Swift’s lyrics and by laying out conspiracy theoris that remind me of QAnon. But more, Marks simply insists that LGTBQ people need this, that the palpable longing for Swift to be gay among some queer people (the “Gaylors”) can somehow will Swift’s homosexuality into being. It’s essentially a kind of prayer, predicated on the belief that if you want something badly enough, if you’re willing to let go of any concept of privacy or self-definition or human autonomy or basic respect entirely, then the divine might make your wish come true. It’s the Tinkerbell effect for people who desperately want Taylor Swift to be horny for other girls. This would be understandable if it was expressed in the journal of a 14-year-old. Putting it in the page of the biggest newspaper in the world is just…. Well, it’s one of those “the internet was a mistake” moments.

Conversation about the piece has generally been driven by the notion that Marks’s piece was offensive and Swift treated poorly. Swift’s “camp” - I wonder how rich you have to be, to have a camp - is reportedly furious. I don’t really get offended, in that way, but I certainly understand why Swift would find the essay upsetting and invasive. With other people holding down the offense front, though, I’m free to focus on how fucking weird the piece is, and how genuinely bizarre it is that the staid New York Times, the paper of record, decided to publish it. As many people have said, it brings to mind nothing so much as a Livejournal rant from a depressed teenager, perhaps one on a Vyvanse binge. There’s this layer of the story that’s about Swift’s privacy and her autonomy, which I get. But then there’s also the fact that the Grey Lady, which will fact check the claim that the sky is blue, published a piece of what is really just speculative fanfiction. I often write about how over time, internet niches that seem marginal and unimportant subtly become mainstreamed, and suddenly the practices that define those niches are considered unremarkable. Tumblr culture (as distinct from the platform itself, which is unobjectionable) represents the intersection of social justice branding, fandom, and a total lack of boundaries or restraint, and it continues its pitiless march across our cultural institutions. Next week, The Paris Review is running a piece about how Dr. Melfi and AJ Soprano are the OTP that we should all ship, or so I’ve been told.

One interesting element of the essay is that it bucks the usual trend in our culture, which is to act as though the world owes Taylor Swift something that it has refused to give her. (Remember, the notion that Taylor Swift could ever receive adequate payment for existing is wicked.) I think this is part of the reason Marks’s essay has generated such ire - not just the righteous argument that it’s creepy and unfair to make someone the subject of sexual wishcasting in the fucking New York Times, but simply the sense that something is being asked of Taylor Swift. Anyone who reads pretty much anything on the internet knows that that isn’t how it works; the only thing we should ask of Taylor Swift is forgiveness, for surely we have failed to give her all that she deserves.

I’ve already written what I really need to say about the current fervor for Taylor Swift. I would never begrudge Swift’s success as a pop star, in the terms ordinary to pop stars, in the sensible space of normal human love for music and appreciation for the musicians who make it. It’s great that she sells so many records, gets so many streams, wins so many awards, and is beloved by both fans and the media. That’s all to the good, that’s how music works, and she has been rewarded for playing that role beyond the dreams of Croesus. What I find distressing about our current moment is this palpable feeling that no matter how much our culture celebrates and lionizes her, it’s never enough; this constant sense that no matter how much acclaim and riches we give her, we have somehow failed her. She is one of the most richly rewarded and privileged people to ever walk the face of this planet, and the ambient attitude in our culture industry is that we should be ashamed that we haven’t done more to exalt her. It is madness. And yet no one seems to want to point that madness out, I strongly suspect because they don’t want to find themselves on the hitlist of those unfathomably passionate fans. But someone needs to point out that waiting in a line for five months to get concert tickets is not a charming human interest story, but rather a record of deranged and deeply unhealthy behavior. Putting a second mortgage on your house to buy concert tickets isn’t a cute sign of devotion, it’s evidence of a parasitic attachment that can only lead to long-term unhappiness. And I’m willing to guess that many other people feel the same way but are afraid to say so.

I understand that this sort of thing is not unprecedented; Beatlemania springs immediately to mind. But then, the Beatles themselves have always said that Beatlemania was toxic. There’s this incredible moment in the Beatles Anthology documentary series where they show a clip from local news footage during the height of Beatlemania. This teenager guy is standing there with a bunch of angry and weeping friends. When asked by the reporter how he felt, the teenager says that they’re all mad because they were prevented from getting into physical proximity with the Beatles, when “we just wanted to get a piece of ‘em! All we wanted was a little piece of ‘em!” It never seems to occur to him that a bunch of fans wanting to get physically close to you, in order to “get a piece of you,” sounds very scary. Clearly, overinvested fans have always existed. I mean, John Hinckley did his thing more than 40 years ago. (Respect.) And the lines between passionate devotion and pathological parasociality can be very fine. When I was in elementary school, there was a kid who had come from somewhere in eastern Europe who would be brought to tears at the mere mention of Michael Jackson. While I find something very sweet and romantic about that, I do think that there are limits past which public affection becomes something dark and disordered.

The trouble is that the internet is a giant machine which sometimes appears to have the sole purpose of compelling people to take their interests too far. Any internet community dedicated to a particular topic inevitably ends up rewarding those users who take the most extreme position possible in relation to that topic. You can see the incredible rise of artistic populism in the past two decades for a great example. Once upon a time, there was a communal sense that being too invested in children’s media as an adult was a mark of arrested development and something to be embarrassed about; the world’s nerds spent many years developing a persecution complex because of this belief. But it turns out that such social conditioning plays an important role. Once the internet became a mass phenomenon, the nerds all found each other and rebelled against any sense of obligation that they should ever engage with art on any level more sophisticated than “Is this badass???” The media companies eagerly worked to exploit the IPs they already owned, and the ancillary industries that make merch quickly got in on the action too. With the concept of adult tastes having died the same death that befell the concept of adulthood writ large, and the money flowing in, very quickly all culture became children’s culture. The kinds of adult dramas that had once routinely gone to number one at the box office became relegated to arthouse cinemas and, eventually, streaming services; the superheroes had elbowed them all out. Anyone who argued that this all represented a culture that was unwilling to grow up was quickly accused (under whichever shameless terms) of racism or sexism or similar and dismissed.

In 1989, you had a lot of adults who could go and watch Batman and enjoy it and maybe pick up a couple of the commemorative cups from Taco Bell, mere weeks after being one of the many millions who made a hit out of Dead Poet’s Society, a movie about killing yourself over a poem Robin Williams told you to read. You could enjoy the kid stuff while keeping it in perspective. Nowadays, the financial engine behind movies featuring characters like Batman are 35-year-olds whose houses are stuffed full of FunkoPop, who listen to podcasts and watch YouTube channels devoted to these properties, and who can be relied on only to come out to those movies that are based on a preexisting franchise featuring some sort of magic or other types of unreality and which are rated PG-13. There was a cultural expectation that you had to engage with adult art and culture as an adult, a motivated minority of people resented this notion, the internet brought them together in spaces where they could grouse about it, and soon the cultural narrative flipped such that the previous belief that adults should sometimes engage with adult media was considered a kind of bigotry. The really committed nerds, meanwhile, just got busy crafting their next persecution narrative.

The negative consequences of the takeover of media by children’s stories are, I think, in part an expression of what happens when people find themselves in spaces where they can egg each other on and deny the value of restraint. But this is really a story of smaller communities, and there the consequences are more personally severe. Not to again bash a network I used to use and frequently found useful, but Tumblr exemplifies the internet’s tendency to push people into more and more extreme versions of every position that’s popular within their subcultures. You can certainly see this in the competitive social justice posturing that went on to infect Twitter and the world, where the actual righteous purpose of increasing equality and justice became subservient to the demand to express that purpose in an arcane vocabulary and with performative conviction. But I think the fandom world is the purest expression of all of this: what Tumblr consistently does is to take people with normal, deep, passionate attachment to a given movie or show or musician, and transform that into a pathological and parasocial dependence. Tumblr takes people who daydream about the characters in their favorite shows and makes them people who cut themselves in order to contain their emotions about them. I’ve gotten really, really, really into the characters and stories in my favorite books, in my life, and I understand that the impulse is both beguiling and dangerous. All you can do is pull yourself back from it when you can tell you’re in too deep, when you can’t fall asleep at night. What Tumblr and similar communities do is to provide you with someone who will always tell you, “don’t pull back, keep going, go deeper.” The site is littered with people talking about how they have developed attachments to fictional characters that are actively harmful to their regular lives. This drives both their sense that they are truer fans than anyone else and also Tumblr’s business model.

You can see this sort of thing, not just at Tumblr but increasingly everywhere, in the positively violent emotional attachment “fandom” people have to their favorite pairings. They will assert the supremacy of a particular couple - often gleefully unrelated to the actual plot of the source material, like Harry Potter and Snape or whatever - and become incredibly animated when someone denies the legitimacy of that pairing or asserts the superiority of another. The pairing off of of characters unconnected in canon goes back a long way, to the original “slash” communities, and is not at all unhealthy in and of itself. These “one true pairings” are fun and healthy, so long as they’re kept in proper perspective, as all things must be. Similarly, there’s the constant tendency to declare that certain characters are “coded” as gay, or queer, or trans, or similar. This too is unobjectionable, if expressed as a provisional claim. But a lot of these fans don’t want any of this to be considered provisional. The pairing they advance is the right pairing. The character they think is gay is gay, no matter how much or how little evidence there is in the text. And they tend to become very upset if anyone suggests otherwise. In literary terms, a reading that two particular characters would be a great pairing, or that there are subtextual hints that they have a romantic or sexual connection, or that they’re queer, is no more or less valid than any other. But the least valid literary reading is always the one that insists that there are no other valid readings, and this is exactly what predominates in those spaces.

Anna Marks looked at the rules for fictional characters that work on Tumblr, applied them to the most visible human being on the face of the planet, and published what she came up with in The New York Times. What could go wrong!

Marks makes waves at the constant claim that LGBTQ people, like other marginalized groups, lacks representation in arts and media. The entire project of wishcasting Taylor Swift as a lesbian derives its supposed legitimacy from this need - LGBTQ people need this, therefore Taylor Swift is obligated to provide it. Of course, the fundamental objection has to be that, unlike food or clothing or housing or medical care or education, someone’s literal sexual orientation cannot be subject to the expropriative demands of the needy. That is not something that can be given and not something that should be asked for. More to the point, the premise is wrong; LGBTQ people are not only not underrepresented in popular culture these days, in pure numerical terms they’re dramatically overrepresented. That’s not a normative statement, as if I’m suggesting that there are too many, but a reflection of the mere quantitative reality that it simply is not true that lesbian and gay and bi and transgender and queer people do not receive proportional representation in arts and culture relative to their numbers. And, you know, it’s not like gay people haven’t punched well above their weight artistically for a very long time. Of course I believe that there’s still discrimination against LGBTQ people; it’s just that being underrepresented in movies and television simply isn’t a part of that inequality anymore. Liberals are always so resistant to getting new material, even when it’s clear that playing the same old song isn’t addressing the actual needs of marginalized groups. And, you know, the continuing prevalence of homophobia despite all that representation is a pretty clear sign that representation is not in fact such an earth-shattering thing. It’s just something liberals usually control, looking for their keys where the light is.

The deeper, more uncomfortable question is what the endgame is, exactly, for all of the calls for representation. I find it simply undeniable that Hollywood has gone to great lengths in the past five years to attempt to appease that demand, but you can always argue that they need to do a better job, especially if a better job means making diverse art that doesn’t suck. What’s stickier is the assumption that underlies a lot of the rhetoric: that art can only serve you if it is “for you,” in this case meaning featuring and fronting people who are like you in some reductive way. That’s something you see all the time, the call for diverse art specifically because people from minority backgrounds supposedly can’t draw the right kind or amount of enjoyment from art featuring people who don’t look like them. I think diversifying Hollywood is still a worthy project, even after much progress. But the stated logic, I’m sorry to say, undermines some of my most basic assumption about what narrative art is and is for. This can’t carry much cultural weight because, as a white man, I don’t know what it’s like not to be served in that way, and never will, and trust me when I say that I’m open to the idea that my ignorance precludes understanding. I can’t ignore the fact, though, that one of the most time-honored and essential purposes of all of this storytelling is to produce empathy precisely across those lines of difference. What else is the moral purpose of novels or movies, if not that exact project of making us understand that which society has decided we never can? What better challenge is there than that?

I know some people will find this offensive, but when I watch Malcolm X, I empathize with Denzel Washington’s portrayal, I connect with it, I inhabit it, I understand it, I feel it represents me in exactly the terms of people calling for more representation. I see his plight in mine and mine in his. I understand that this sort of talk results in a lot of unhappy letters to the editor, but let me ask you: would the world be better if I didn’t feel this way, about Black or queer or women or disabled characters? If I didn’t connect with artwork by and about people who don’t “look like me,” what would be the advantage? Yes, I recognize that my complete lack of shame or self-consciousness in slipping into the conditions of others is a form of privilege, white privilege, male privilege. And of course I want those who feel marginalized and ignored in society to find their lives honored and respected in art, and I understand why they would guard “their” representation jealously. But I also want them to have the same ability that I have to slip off their demographic trappings and put on someone else’s costume for awhile. That is yet another of my privileges that I think should be spread, not ended. I assure you, I’m not going to stop listening to Mitski’s gorgeous, evocative “Best American Girl” no matter how much the YouTube comments hate that idea. Why not try and be comfortable everywhere you go? If people could get there, perhaps they wouldn’t need Taylor Swift to save them.

I covet other people’s identities, and I take them as it suits me, ruthlessly and without remorse. You can’t stop me. But you can be like me.

Maybe the more salient question is why the actually, openly queer artists that already exist are insufficient for Marks’s uses. Were kd lang, Melissa Etheridge, Tracy Chapman, Dusty Springfield, Tegan & Sara, Janelle Monáe, the Indigo Girls, Queen Latifah, Brandi Carlile, and so many more insufficient inspiration? Or were they simply not “heroic” enough, which is the only conclusion I can draw from the following paragraph?

What if someone had already tried, at least once, to change the culture by becoming such a hero? What if, because our culture had yet to come to terms with homophobia, it wasn’t ready for her?

What if that hero’s name was Taylor Alison Swift?

It’s true - nobody ever tried to change the culture of homophobia. Not even once!

This is what feels cruel in Marks, to me, the overpowering sense that past gay musicians just don’t impress her enough. And the actual claims here read like a parodic exaggeration of criticisms I’ve made of liberalism in the past - that modern liberals vastly overstate the ability of arts and culture to address structural problems. Homophobia does still exist, but it is a structural problem, not a personality flaw of celebrities, and “Taylor Alison Swift could cure homophobia” is an attitude so embarrassing, so fundamentally adolescent, that it’s incredible that a professional writer could think to publish it. Many people have died in various battles for equal rights. I find it absurd and in fact quite ugly to suggest that the problem can be solved by any hero, including a pop star.

I’m forever battling people in the comments here who insist that nothing that ever happens on the internet can ever have any real-world impact. This always strikes me as wishful thinking. Well, look - Tumblr has begun its colonization of the New York Times. If you’d like to find an answer to the question of why so many adolescents are now struggling with emotional problems, the conditions I’m discussing here speak to broader, fundamentally unhealthy dynamics of the internet that definitely matter. I think you could explore the internet history of many school shooters, including Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, and see some of these behaviors at play, the lack of boundaries and of perspective, the self-mythologizing, marinating in communities that always push people to go deeper and more intense. Yes, I think this stuff matters.

Marks ends her piece saying

For a moment, Ms. Swift was out of the woods she had created for herself as a teenager, floating above the trees. The future was within reach; she would, and will, soon take back the rest of her words, her reputation, her name. Maybe the world would see her, maybe it wouldn’t.

But on that stage, she found herself. I was there. Through a fuzzy fancam, I saw it.

And somehow, that was everything.

This is a string of vague faux-profundities of a type that a lot of bad writers reach for when they’re trying to express the operatic heights of their soul. I have no idea how one would go about defining where “her future,” “her words,” “her reputation,” and “her name” begin and end, what constitutes one but not another, and this is a failure of precision that is forgivable in an overwrought Instagram caption but not in the New York Times. I don’t, in fact, think that Marks is a bad writer, although there is a whole other conversation to be had about who the industry elevates and why. No, I think she made the understandable mistake of getting caught up in a kind of reverie that, because it felt intense and personal and true to her, she mistook for being intense and personal and true in fact, in the wider world, in the hearts of us all. But as the saying goes, our guts have shit for brains. I heard that Marks felt compelled to delete her Instagram due to the backlash to the piece, and well, I would offer her words of support if I knew her personally, but I’d also tell her the truth - there is a grace only we can bestow; this is the price that you pay for a loss of control. And I think her editors at the NYT failed her. Their job is to save writers from themselves, and they abdicated that responsibility in the pursuit of the great trinity, buzz, shares, and clicks.

This level of fervor I see all around me, not just for Swift but for celebrities in general, is toxic and not sustainable. When people wake up every day and thank millionaires for bestowing on them an Instagram post shilling weight-loss tea, shouting a lusty “YES MOTHER” to someone who will never know they exist and would not care if they did, something has gone wrong. People are looking in the wrong place, and sacrificing one’s dignity is now so normalized that I don’t know if people even notice that they’ve lost something in the transaction. I think, fundamentally, that people are just desperate to feel something transcendent. But you can’t pull transcendence out of a smartphone. Art moves us to almost impossible emotions, and it’s natural to want to lavish an equal amount of emotion on the artists that make it. But it’s like everything else in life; you should be as absolutely devoted and passionate as you should be, but not an ounce more.

I’m sorry to repeat myself, but I think Swift would do herself a big favor by taking time off and actively working to create distance with her fanbase. There are no more rewards to be earned for her, now, no percentage in trying to become even bigger; the returns have all already diminished. She’s in a place very few human beings have ever been before, and I think that it’s a can’t-lose position where, strangely, a lot of the available moves ahead of her look no-win. Personally, I’d take a year off, and then maybe try to piss my fans off a little bit, to remind them that they owe nothing to each other; they have each thrown their payment in the cup, both Taylor Swift and her fans, and received more than they asked for. Telling them to grow up a little, suggesting that they move on, gently reminding them that they will never know her and that they shouldn’t want to that bad, angrily insisting to them that Fiona Apple was right…. I suspect that approach would be the best thing for both them and her. And anyway people like Marks need that. I’m always telling people that they should worry just as much about the disappointment that follows wanting and getting as they do about the disappointment that follows wanting and not. Anna, what if your dreams are true, your prophecy real, your wishes granted, and Taylor Swift comes out, and you look around and find that you’re still sad and lonely in a sad and lonely world?


https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/perhaps-emotional-dependence-on-celebrities
Title: Land of Confusion
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 18, 2024, 08:38:33 AM
https://danconiajournal.substack.com/p/the-land-of-confusion?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1016875&post_id=140806337&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=z2120&utm_medium=email 

This man has been in interesting places and done interesting things for our country.
Title: Feminism is the Mother of Transgenderism
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 29, 2024, 05:46:10 AM
This could go in the Transgender thread, but it enters into quite a bit into big picture territory and so I post it here.

https://washingtonstand.com/commentary/feminism-is-the-mother-of-transgenderism
Title: Jordan Peterson on Tom McDonal & Ben Shapiro Rap being #1
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 04, 2024, 05:02:34 AM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmuEUj1DwSI

What a strong mind JP has!
Title: WSJ: Baker: The Elite opened the Doors to Chaos
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 05, 2024, 06:33:20 PM
The Elites Opened the Doors to Migrants—and Chaos
Bleeding-heart liberalism has taken a dangerous turn toward an ideology that rejects national borders.
By Gerard Baker
Feb. 5, 2024 3:37 pm ET


On the streets of New York, two police officers are beaten by a gang of eight migrant asylum seekers. Five of them are released without bail, one of them literally flipping the finger at the American public as he goes. The other three simply disappear.

On the streets of London, a woman and her two young children are doused with lethal chemicals. The suspect was twice denied asylum in the U.K. but managed to stay and was convicted of a serious sexual assault, then was granted asylum on appeal. The victims are left with life-altering injuries. A member of Parliament from the governing Conservative Party tells a television audience that this is a warning about the consequences of “microaggressions” that women face every day.


In Sweden a gang war between rival groups of migrants is unleashing havoc on the citizens of what was once a global model of social harmony. The European media descend on the country and publish dark warnings about the rise of “far right” anti-immigrant parties.

In Chicago, a “sanctuary city” recently inundated with illegal migrants, and where gang crime (most of it not migrant-related) is rampant, the City Council rouses itself from its indifference to pass a resolution that calls for antagonists to put down their arms—in Gaza.

It is tempting to look at these recent events across two continents and conclude that we in the West aren’t a serious civilization anymore, that our commitment to liberal principles, openness and tolerance have inured us to our peril; that our values are no longer fit for purpose in an open world of existential threats.

The deeper reality is that it isn’t our values that have failed. We are witnessing instead the most powerful indictment of a political and cultural elite whose hegemony is long overdue to meet its nemesis. The demographic reality of an overpopulated and still immiserated global south that is disgorging hundreds of millions of people to the wealthy north is making chaos of the attitudes and decisions of a ruling elite that—by design or accident—seems hell-bent on the West’s self-annihilation.

Perhaps I exaggerate. But the scale of the migration crisis in the west—more than the rise of China, the challenge of new technologies or the climate—seems to me the issue that will increasingly define the politics of our age.

Let’s be clear about migrants and crime. It has been pointed out that there is no evidence of greater criminal activity among illegal migrants than among the general population. There’s limited data on the subject but a 2020 study found that illegal immigrants in Texas are less likely to be arrested for a felony than native-born citizens or legal immigrants.

This makes sense. If you are here illegally you live life in a demimonde defined by evading detection, and therefore might be more likely to be drawn into crime. But it is also true that if you are here illegally you have an especially strong incentive to avoid doing anything that gets you into an encounter with law enforcement.

But the argument spectacularly misses the point. Of course the overwhelming majority of migrants here illegally don’t beat up cops or throw toxic substances at innocent women. But one single crime committed by one perpetrator who is in the country without legal leave is an especially heinous reality. One innocent victim whose life was ended or ruined by someone who should have been prevented from being in the country in the first place is a particularly noxious form of crime that naturally enrages citizens and immigrants who are here lawfully.

It is the blithe response to these shocking episodes of criminality that reveals the dysfunctions of which we are all victims, a response rooted in the idea that the rest of the world has as much right to be in our country as everyone else. This attitude, prevalent on the left, might once have been attributable to a misguided but understandable human empathy—what we used to call bleeding-heart liberalism. It is after all derived from the most fundamental Christian ideal—our obligation to take in and support our disadvantaged fellow humans.

But it seems now, in the post-Christian west, much more of an ideological postnationalism. You don’t have to believe in theories about a “great replacement” to see that the policies in the U.S. and Europe that have unleashed mass immigration in the past few years aren’t born of neglect or incompetence but are a deliberate choice to open their nations to all comers.

Unless we turn back now, the consequences of all this will overwhelm us. Migrant crime will surely get worse, our drug epidemic will widen, our exposure to terrorism will increase. Also in the U.K. this week, a leading Conservative who represents a constituency with a sizable Jewish population announced he was leaving Parliament because he can no longer deal with the death threats he has been facing from Islamists.

If we don’t act in the face of this building demographic wave to seize back control of our borders, the day is coming when we will no longer even be able to affirm the primacy of our values.

Title: WSJ: Tower 22, you are on your own (drone bait)
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 06, 2024, 09:14:58 AM


Tower 22, You’re on Your Own
Why did the U.S. leave soldiers defenseless in the middle of Jordan?
By Matthew Hennessey
Feb. 4, 2024 4:22 pm ET


It’s the name of the place that’s left me with an angry and unsettled feeling: Tower 22. Not a base or a camp, not even an outpost. Just a tower in the desert. News reports make it sound like an exposed jumble of sandbags, chicken wire and shipping containers tucked into a triangle of Jordanian bandit country between Syria and Iraq.


Those who died at Tower 22 never had a chance to defend themselves. They were likely sleeping when the drone attack happened, beat tired after a long day’s work in the sun. Perhaps they dreamed of their homes and families in Georgia, where it gets hot, but not as hot as it does in the desert.

President Biden told the world to expect a swift response. “While we are still gathering the facts of this attack, we know it was carried out by radical Iran-backed militant groups operating in Syria and Iraq,” he said in a statement. “We will hold all those responsible to account at a time and in a manner of our choosing.”

A week ticked by. In a surprise move, Kataib Hezbollah, the militia presumed responsible, pre-emptively surrendered, announcing meekly that it would no longer attack Americans. Pinky promise. In an even more surprising move, the Biden administration then telegraphed its punch, leaking to the press that the U.S. military had identified some targets that it would soon strike.

In the most surprising development, Politico reported Thursday night that U.S. intelligence officials now believe Tehran doesn’t actually exert all that much influence over groups like Kataib Hezbollah and Hamas. As Humphrey Bogart might say, it appears we were misinformed.

Why all the pussyfooting? The Biden administration, like the Obama administration, is a little too willing to let Iranian-funded militias and proxies kill Americans. Only when the home-front chirping grows too loud to ignore does the White House summon the will to retaliate. But before the bombs fall, the mullahs always get a courtesy call: Clear out boys, the Yanks are coming.

U.S. airstrikes over the weekend hit mostly evacuated Iranian and militia positions in eastern Syria and Iraq. It was a fireworks show. The actual Iranians had already scurried to safety. How many millions of dollars’s worth of munitions did we just detonate to get the president out of a tough news cycle?

It would be dispiriting, to say the least, if the Biden administration were willing to sacrifice some number of American soldiers during an election year because a wider war with Iran polls poorly. But the pussyfooting is so habitual that I often wonder if something more sinister is going on. What do the Iranians have on these guys?

In any Western movie, there’s a scene when the hero realizes he’s outnumbered and alone. Nobody’s coming to his rescue. That’s what America’s fighting men and women must be feeling these days. Our Red Sea sailors and Tower 22 soldiers could once have been called sitting ducks. Today we can call them drone bait.

This beef between the U.S. and Iran is now nearly half a century old. It’s time to settle it. If we aren’t going to do that, we should get our people the hell out of the desert. Send them back to their homes and families, where they belong.

Mr. Hennessey is the Journal’s deputy editorial features editor.
Title: It Ain’t an Accident
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on February 06, 2024, 08:08:06 PM
VDH lays it out:

Is Biden Malicious, Incompetent, or Conniving?
81 Comments / February 5, 2024
Victor Davis Hanson
American Greatness

What Excites Biden?

Things are becoming so strange, so surreal, so nihilistic in contemporary America that the chaos can only be deliberate. Chance, incompetence, and accident could not alone explain the series of disasters we now daily witness that are nearly destroying the country.

When the ailing and non-compos-mentis president now speaks, he rarely becomes excited about Iranian or terrorist provocations. Biden seems restrained even at Russia’s outlawry in Ukraine. The atrocities of Hamas now earn only measured objections from Biden. He does not seem too angered by the collapse of the border. Nor do the deaths of 100,000 Americans to imported fentanyl earn a loud trademark Biden scream.

No, what earns his unchecked ire, often expressed in shouts and hysterical tones, are Donald Trump and his supporters. Most recently, out of nowhere, Biden resurrected the old and proven falsehood that Trump had libeled the Normandy dead as losers and suckers. He then compounded that libel by claiming Trump’s supposed dismissal of the heroic dead was a grievous family insult to his own late son, who did not die either in combat or while in uniform but in 2015, tragically, from brain cancer.

During these anti-Trump fits, Biden wakes up and his face tightens up. He begins screaming, in uncharacteristic, animated fashion, anytime he can smear half the nation’s voters as “semi-fascists” and “ultra-MAGA” extremists. In private, he swears that Trump is a “f—ing asshole” and “sick f—k.” If only Biden substituted “cartel” or “Iran” or “Hamas” for “Trump” or “MAGA.” we might see an animate president.

A Borderless Nation

Meanwhile, a mob of illegal aliens recently tried to kick and stomp sprawled New York peace officers into senselessness—felonies that would earn any such violent citizen a decade or more on Rikers Island.

Yet somehow, only a few were arrested. Stranger still, all of them were immediately let go without bail—as if freeing wolves to prey further upon sheep.

Upon release, a few smirked and flipped their middle fingers to bystanders. Apparently, they wished to show Americans that they are violent, crude, unrepentant, and exempt. And thus they tell us that their newfound hosts are fools for letting the likes of themselves in.

And why not, given the attackers bussed with impunity to California—the land of free everything if only one qualifies as illegally residing in the U.S.

These grotesque bullies are part of the eight-million illegal aliens who pranced across the southern border without background checks—all taking Biden up on his 2019 encouragement to “surge” the border with impunity.

Many brandish their cartel affiliations. Some pay for their transit by smuggling cartel fentanyl, which contributes to 100,000 American overdose deaths per year. Others sport lengthy criminal records. All seemed to have been welcomed out of their countries by conniving Latin American governments and mysteriously invited into our country by our derelict president.

The Death of the Law

There is a continuing pattern here. Sometime around late 2020, Americans woke up in a country they no longer recognized. That summer, tens of thousands of rioters had looted, burned, killed, maimed, and assaulted for four months with veritable impunity. Leftwing mayors and governors dubbed the violence as “largely peaceful” demonstrations or a “summer of love.”

The 2020 legacy of defunding the police and exempting criminals on the basis of their race or ideology is that each week now videos circulate of massive looting, smash-and-grab epidemics, and deadly car-jackings in our major cities. No one cares much about the small business owners who are ruined.

Who laments for the poor who lose their last shopping outlet? Does the Biden administration worry over the terrified employees who are ordered to stand back or the occasional security officer totem instructed to stand down?

Instead, we are to empathize with the thief, the assaulter, the rapist, and the carjacker—at least in the sense that he does not deserve punishment for the mayhem he caused, given we, not he, are supposedly the true guilty parties. A lot of innocent and defenseless people have been assaulted and killed since 2020 as the wage of that toxic theory.

So the subtext of all these violent acts is exemption based on perceived correct race, ideology, or membership in the supposed victim/oppressed binary. The perpetrators are either not arrested, let out the same day as arrested, never charged, or never convicted. And the result is a growing distrust of the law and a cynicism that there is little law anymore, just statutes used against political undesirables.

If, for just one month, the Biden justice department used the same resources and budget it has spent the last three years rounding up bystanders at the January 6 riot and instead prosecuted, convicted, and jailed these big-city violent assailants, then the crime epidemic could be solved.

The Implosion of the University

As a general rule, in 2024, the more “prestigious” our universities, and the more they prided themselves as elite or Ivy-League, the more likely there were racially segregated dorms and graduations, a virtual anti-Semitic hounding of Jewish students, grade inflation, watered-down courses, and pro-Hamas terrorist demonstrations.

For nearly a hundred years, universities told us that the SAT or ACT admittance exam was critical in determining their admissions. It was sold as a way to confirm the potential and preparation necessary to perform at a level demanded by these elite schools. The tests were praised as a meritocratic tool to determine talent by honing grade point averages and allowing opportunity to those without money and contacts. Then suddenly, in 2021, these tests were mostly junked.

That dismissal of standardized tests was a de facto admission that:

1) Universities had been admittedly wrong for a century that standardized admissions tests had any value in determining the degree of student preparation needed to complete a rigorous Ivy League class load.

or 2) in the interest of diversity, equity, and inclusion, the university would now be free to admit students who could not meet their prior unrealistic or unnecessary standards and instead would accommodate new students by suddenly inflating grades, introducing easier classes, or diminishing required course work.

Of course, the university admits to neither of these realities. It compounds the deception and fraud by claiming new generations of students are more competitive and gifted than ever and will leave with degrees that guarantee employers rigorously trained graduates. Time will soon tell.

The End of Deterrence

The same nihilism characterizes our foreign policy.

Our worst enemies could not have planned a more disastrous and humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan than the Biden administration’s August 2021 scamper. We simply, without an afterthought, abandoned billions of dollars of sophisticated weapons to Taliban terrorists.

We left behind a $1 billion new embassy and a remodeled Air Force base. We bragged about taking out terrorists with a “righteous strike” that wiped out an entire friendly Afghan family, while 13 American service personnel were blown up trying to secure a non-securable escape route.

Then followed the mysterious laxity as a Chinese spy balloon lazily traversed the U.S. with impunity. Next was the radical drop-off in military recruitment. If one wished to ensure that the one group that serves—and dies—in combat units at twice its demographics would exit the military en masse, prompting an enlistment crisis, the Pentagon could not have done a better job.

The top brass all but accused its white male recruits of being prone to toxic white supremacy, only to form a task force to root it out—and then discover such rage and hatred never existed in the first place.

It nonetheless drummed out 8,400 veterans for not receiving the mRNA vaccinations, many of whom had naturally acquired immunity and real doubts about the efficacy or safety of the inoculations. And, finally, the Pentagon made it known that prior standards of recruitment, promotion, and evaluation had apparently weakened the military. Therefore, new race- and gender-based criteria would ensure fewer and now unneeded white males in positions of rank and influence.

Abroad, China serially threatens to annex Taiwan. A hungry and perennially restless Vladimir Putin once upon a time thought he was restrained from invading his neighbors by fear of more costs incurred than the likelihood of benefits to be gained. But like an earlier reaction to a weakened U.S. in 2008 and 2014, Putin assumed that the 2022 Biden administration would likely do little if he annexed greater swaths of Ukraine. And so he invaded.

National security advisor Jack Sullivan, on the eve of the October 7 Hamas massacres of Jewish citizens, claimed the Middle East was at last calm. Now it is on the verge of a theater-wide war, once Iran sensed that the Biden team would appease and beg it to behave.

So the Biden administration was eager to end oil sanctions, plead with Iran to reenter the Iran Deal, remove the Houthis from terrorist designations, route billions of dollars to Tehran for hostages, junk the Abrams accords, and restore millions of dollars in please-be-nice bribe money to the Palestinians.

Biden’s abject misreading of human nature has ensured that a thuggish theocracy that slaughters abroad and tortures at home would interpret that reproachment as either naiveté or stupidity. And thus it would respond with contempt and escalating aggression. And so it has.

Somehow, over just three years, the Biden administration did to the Middle East what it did to the southern border: blew it up in the same exact manner of mindlessly undoing any policy that had previously worked with Trump’s finger prints on them.

What Is Going On?

What is the common denominator, what is the rationale behind the anarchy, and what is the reason why a president would so willingly rend the fabric of America?

Why would the government privilege the illegal alien over the law-abiding citizen? The violent pro-Hamas, anti-Semitic foreign-born protestor over the peaceful pro-Israel, U.S. citizen? The smash-and-grabber over the dutiful security guard?

We are nearing a French Revolution, reign-of-terror moment. The law seems to be what a cabal of hardcore leftists who control the Oval Office say it is.

Joe Biden’s administration offers no better confirmation of warnings from Thucydides to Thomas Hobbes that the veneer of civilization is precious, hard-won, quite thin, and beneath it churns innate human savagery and chaos roaring to be released.

So why did Biden unleash the hounds of anti-civilization? Did he despise the supposedly boring middle-class citizen who follows the law, pays all his taxes, and never gets arrested? Does he hate the idea of meritocracy? In Biden’s puppeteers’ dangerous calculus, is all this savagery and chaos a deliberate mechanism to ensure parity? Equity? Inclusion?

So is the deliberate nihilism—economic, social, cultural, social, and political—a way of leveling the field? Making life difficult for the more successful? Making those who cherish the traditions and protocols of America pay?

Is that the plan to take the country to near collapse, and then only at the abyss itself to force revolutionary change—or else?

How else can anyone explain the descent of our city downtowns into dank medieval cesspits, our notion of male and female transformed into the sexual circus right out of Petronius’s Satyricon, our race relations into a mixture of Rwanda and Yugoslavia, and our universities into Soviet-like “People’s Universities of Correct Thought?”

None of this was by accident. It is the dividend of a philosophy that says, “We have to blow up your America before we can reboot it for us.”


https://victorhanson.com/is-biden-malicious-incompetent-or-conniving/
Title: WSJ: America is having the wrong election
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 10, 2024, 09:21:59 AM

Contrast this with the Putin interview with Tucker!

=========================================


Opinion | America Is Having the Wrong Election

There’s a lot of ruin in a nation (as Adam Smith once put it). There’s a lot of ruin in Russia. Russia is a real state, with a real military tradition. Its badly treated soldiers perform rather than melting away. Its factories maintain a flow of war supplies. Its recruiters wangle bodies to throw into the ranks.

These unoriginal discoveries about Russia point to a certain outcome for Ukraine if the West is not involved or not sufficiently involved.

It seems worth mentioning that the $25 billion the Biden administration proposes to spend on the southern border plus the $60 billion it seeks to spend on Ukraine amount to just 1.3% of the federal budget. Laughable, except perhaps under today’s circumstances, would be any idea that Washington can’t do both simultaneously, plus the other 98.7% of federal activities.

The U.S. is the world’s top economic performer right now; NATO represents 24 times Russia’s gross domestic product, and that’s before you add Japan and South Korea.

From any clear-eyed view, the pygmy Mr. Putin is trying to bluff the collective West with a one-year Russian military spending increase of $35 billion. That’s a quarter of what Americans spend annually on pet supplies. It’s also an increase Mr. Putin can’t repeat next year, much less year after year into the future.


But listen to what certain voters are saying through their GOP representatives if only because it’s driving events: They won’t trust a government that allows its own border to collapse to pursue its aims in Ukraine, however urgent governing elites think those aims are.

For a historical parallel, Truman didn’t have to “scare the hell out of the country” over Korea, because he’d already scared the hell out of the country, in Sen. Arthur Vandenberg’s phrase, three years earlier over Greece and Turkey. Under way when North Korea, with Russian and Chinese backing, invaded South Korea was the Western military buildup and alliance strengthening that ultimately won the Cold War.

In turn, this allowed Truman-Eisenhower to settle for half a loaf in Korea eventually without sacrificing U.S. credibility (in fact the opposite).

But Joe Biden can’t level with the American people about the stakes. His electoral coalition would abandon him overnight. Even if (in a truly bizarre circumstance) he didn’t have to sell the country on a visibly senescent president being good enough right now, his allies have zero appetite for the necessary change in fiscal or policy priorities and he knows it.

In the tapestry of self-delusion, John Kerry turns out to be the key Biden administration figure. His hand-waving as climate envoy, his Potemkin pretense of bringing China along, helped the administration tie up trillions now and in the future in U.S. climate policy. This money will remain tied up even though China’s predictable noncooperation guarantees that it will have no actual effect on climate.

The other big Democratic coalition investment has been identity politics, good for sowing division that benefits the sowers, utterly inimical to rallying the country to meet a national security challenge.

You can expect Mr. Biden to double down on these coalition investments when he gives his State of the Union next month, never mind history screaming that preventing the next war needs to be the urgent focus.

Donald Trump is no better. Asked about Taiwan recently, he instantly changed the subject to the Taiwanese “stealing” our chip industry. NATO? The alliance is still ripping us off and always will be because that’s what his voters want to hear. (Even the most ardent Trump admirers might balk at him as a war leader.)

These are can-kicking answers by can-kicking politicians, understandably because both know nothing good comes to them from bringing voters the truth. Twice in the last century it cost the U.S. and the world dearly when the U.S. couldn’t get its act together to supply an ounce of deterrence when it was needed. Here we are again.

If the U.S. can’t find the focus and perseverance to steer the Ukraine war to an acceptable outcome, try figuring out how a future showdown over Taiwan ends.

China blockades and attacks the island. The U.S. tries to block China’s oil and grain imports.

The Chinese sink a couple of our ships. We sink a couple of theirs.

They bomb our bases on Guam or Okinawa. We bomb theirs on the mainland.

It’s not a war about Taiwan anymore. Both sides are fingering their nuclear weapons. It’s also a war neither side should want, but a paranoid and demonstrably obtuse authoritarian regime avoiding a disastrous miscalculation is a crummy variable to bet on. A sad and visible corollary right now is that the U.S., with all its allied strength and potential, hasn’t deterred much lately.
Title: Nothing but Selective Prosecution to Political Ends
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on February 10, 2024, 05:32:57 PM
This is the best, concise, ardently argued piece on the topic of Trump’s selective prosecution:

[Steven Calabresi] Donald Trump is the Victim of Selective Prosecution

The Volokh Conspiracy / by Steven Calabresi / February 10, 2024 at 08:35AM

[Trump is the victim of political witch hunts by Democrats suffering from Trump derangement syndrome]

The U.S. Supreme Court has said that "A selective prosecution claim is not a defense on the merits to the criminal charge itself, but an independent assertion that the prosecutor has brought the charge for reasons forbidden by the Constitution."  United States v. Armstrong, 517 U.S. 456 (1996). The defendant must prove that "the *** prosecution policy 'had a discriminatory effect and that it was motivated by a discriminatory purpose.'" Tyler v. Boles, 368 U.S. 448 (1962).

Among the discriminatory purposes, which are barred by the selective prosecution doctrine are discrimination involving the Equal Protection Clause and on the basis of race, religion, sex, gender, or political alignment.  I think Donald Trump is absolutely right on the merits in the four criminal cases which have been brought against him and in the New York State civil fraud case. But, I also think that all five of these legal actions against Trump are nothing less than a political witch hunt that is motivated by political ambition in the two cases brought respectively by New York State Attorney General Letitia James and by District Attorney Alvin Bragg.  Trump's First Amendment rights are being stripped away by discriminatory legal actions brought against him because of his political views in flagrant violation of the First Amendment and the Equal Protection Clause.

The New York civil case in which Trump is at risk of being fined $370 million for fraud and being barred from ever doing business in New York State again is a victimless crime.  No bank or lender complained that Trump had defrauded them, and the Democratic State Attorney General's accusations that Trump inflated the value of his assets to get favorable loans is standard practice in the New York real estate market.  The banks that loaned Trump the money he borrowed discounted the value of Trump's assets from what he claimed, just as they do with every other real estate mogul in the New York real estate market.  Letitia James brought this civil action because New York State Democrats suffer from Trump derangement syndrome, and James wants to win some future New York Democratic primary.  In doing so, James is violating Trump's First Amendment rights and his rights under the Equal Protection clause.  James should have to show that some other New York businessman has been prosecuted for hundreds of millions of dollars and threatened with a ban on doing business in New York for conduct like Trump's.  She cannot do that because the politically charged Trump lawsuit she has brought against Trump is one of a kind.

Alvin Bragg's indictment of Trump for paying hush money to Stormy Daniels and not reporting it as a campaign expenditure is also a case of selective prosecution.  John Edwards, the Vice Presidential running mate along with John Kerry in 2004, had used more than $1 million in campaign money to hide his very own illegitimate affair.  Edwards case led to the U.S. Justice Department adopting guideline against brining charges about the use of campaign funds to cover up sexual affairs.  If John Edwards gets off, then Donald Trump should too. This is another case of selective prosecution based on Trump's political views to go after him so Alvin Bragg can win a Democratic primary in New York for some higher elective office.

The criminal federal classified document case brought in Florida by Jack Smith is yet another travesty of unequal justice based on party affiliation in violation of the First Amendment and the Equal Protection Clause.  For years, Barack Obama knew that Hillary Clinton, as Secretary of State, had an insecure personal computer at her home, which she was illegally using to store and exchange highly classified top secret information.  Neither Obama nor his Attorney General Loretta Lynch chose to prosecute Clinton for these violations of the criminal law.  Most recently, President Joe Biden was excused from prosecution for violations of the law concerning classified documents stored in one's house.  Donald Trump, however, does get prosecuted for mishandling classified documents.  This is a blatant double standard for Republicans and Democrats on the handling of classified information.  Again, Trump is being selectively prosecuted in violation of the First Amendment and the Equal Protection Clause.

The January 6th, 2021 indictments of Donald Trump are also blatantly unfair.  To begin with, Jack Smith is an unconstitutionally appointed Special Counsel for reasons I point out in my law review article with Gary Lawson: Why Robert Mueller's Appointment Was Unlawful? 95 Notre Dame University Law Review 87 (2019).  All Trump did on January 6, 2021 was to give his followers a fiery speech and urge them to "fight like hell." Trump never urged his followers to disrupt the counting of the Electoral votes from each state.  Trump had a First Amendment right to give the speech he gave at the Ellipse, and he is again the victim of a selective prosecution in violation of the Equal Protection Clause.

As for the Georgia case, Fani Willis is angling to win a future Democratic primary by going after Donald Trump over a phone call in which Trump exercised his First Amendment rights to ask if more Trump votes could be found in Georgia.  This is again selective prosecution of Trump by a Democratic prosecutor in violation of the Equal Protection Clause.

In my 34 years as a law professor, I have repeatedly seen the rules in legal academia bent dramatically to favor liberals over conservatives.  I thus identify with what Trump is going through in terms of selective prosecution.  Trump's First Amendment and Equal Protection Clause rights are being flagrantly violated, and the U.S. Supreme Court should put an end to this charade now.

The post Donald Trump is the Victim of Selective Prosecution appeared first on Reason.com.

https://reason.com/volokh/2024/02/10/donald-trump-is-the-victim-of-selective-prosecution/
Title: The Obama Doctrine vs. The West
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 18, 2024, 04:20:40 PM
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/02/the_obama_doctrine_vs_the_west.html
Title: Progressive Barbarism Ascends
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on February 20, 2024, 01:20:11 PM
This piece does a fine job of illuminating the various self-contradictions of today's "progressive" movement:

The rise of barbaric progressivism
Antisemitism, racial hierarchy, violence, and an alliance with radical Islam have seized the commanding heights of the movement.

BENJAMIN KERSTEIN
DEC 18, 2023

Shortly before he died in the late 1930s, Sigmund Freud, by then a refugee from Nazism, wrote, “We live in very remarkable times. We find with astonishment that progress has concluded an alliance with barbarism.” He was referring to the rise of fascism and communism, and their combination of the most modern forms of science, technology, economic theory, and even aesthetics with the most horrific and savage forms of violence and sadism.

Freud was a man of the Enlightenment—perhaps the last man of the Enlightenment—and equated modernity with progress and civilization. Thus, to witness the degradation of modernity as it comingled with the kind of animalistic brutality that he saw as belonging to earlier and less enlightened stages of human history was shocking to him, as it was to many.

His obsession with this problem dated back to the carnage of World War I, in which the most “civilized” part of the world had turned itself into a technological charnel house that consumed millions of lives seemingly without reason. In the face of this, Freud eventually reached very dark conclusions about human nature and the nature of human civilization. He concluded that because civilizational progress required greater and greater repression of the most basic human drives, people are more and more repressed and unhappy the more they progress and the more civilized they become. Eventually, this repression cannot hold, and the savage energies built up beneath centuries of sublimation explode in periodic eruptions of horrendous violence and destruction. Progress, in other words, leads inexorably toward barbarism.

Today, the most fervent believers in the power of progress in the United States are the members and supporters of the eponymous progressive movement. It is a bit difficult to fully define this movement, as it is easily confused with other movements of the left like socialism, communism, and even anarchism. It is possible, however, to say that its view of progress is the polar opposite of Freud’s. By and large, it holds that 1) Humanity can be made better and even perfected. 2) The history of humanity is the history of inexorable progress toward that perfection. 3) It is the duty of the individual and society to be on “the right side” of that history—that is, on the side of progress. 4)  Humanity’s ultimate state of perfection will take the form of a blessed society in which suffering, poverty, and oppression have been overcome. 5) Anything that opposes or retards progress is a form of metaphysical evil.

All of these sound like fairly “civilized” goals. Moreover, the movement itself has always been one of the elite upper-middle class and its intelligentsia, meaning that, by all rights, progressives ought to be the most “civilized” people in the world. Yet large factions of today’s progressive movement are showing clear signs that Freud was quite correct in his diagnosis of progress and its discontents.

While today’s progressivism maintains its façade of upper-middle class rectitude, it barely conceals a quasi-totalitarian mentality that puts down any dissent or opposition without much compunction. At the same time, many progressives have engaged in considerable violence and allied themselves with forces that are not only violent themselves, but categorically reject the values and mores that progressives themselves claim to hold sacred. Many progressives have gone so far as to adopt ideologies they claim to oppose passionately, such as racial hierarchy and antisemitism. The cost to the moral integrity of the movement has been immense, and there are no signs that the descent is slowing, let alone reversing itself.

The progressives’ turn to violence first appeared in the one institution over which progressivism exercises near-absolute rule—academia. Recent years have seen the emergence of a kind of progressive dictatorship of the professoriate, a totalitarian regime that denies its subjects the right not only to believe but even to hear ideas that might cast doubt on progressivism’s rectitude. For some time, this was accomplished by administrative corruption and quiet censorship. Today, however, it is largely accomplished by mob violence. The professoriate’s shock troops shout down and assault speakers; disrupt events; attack opposing activists; engage in intimidation, harassment, and psychological abuse; and aggressively “deplatform” anyone with whom they disagree. Thus, while freedom of thought and speech are not outright forbidden in the academy, they have become impossible to exercise, much as Islamic religious laws against depictions of Muhammad have been imposed on Western societies through the threat of terrorism.

This culture of progressive violence emerged in full during the events surrounding the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minnesota police. While the Black Lives Matter protests that followed were often peaceful, a very large number were not, and left-wing groups like Antifa played a large role in the looting, burning, vandalism, property damage, and general anarchy that devasted several urban centers and led to a massive spike in crime as police withdrew for fear of further public execration. Along with this, and not only in the US, a campaign of iconoclasm took place that saw statues pulled down and monuments destroyed and defaced, including a statue of Winston Churchill and the Cenotaph in London. Even statues of decidedly non-racist figures like Theodore Roosevelt and Ulysses S. Grant were allowed to be pulled down for fear of further mayhem. Many progressives who did not themselves participate in these brutal campaigns of intimidation and violence either excused or supported them.

Particularly disturbing is that a large number of progressives—perhaps a majority—have adopted two of the most egregious ideologies they purport to oppose: antisemitism and racism. It has often been said that all totalitarian ideologies eventually end in the Elders of Zion, and the examples of Hitler and Stalin appear to bear this out. Indeed, as it has become more totalitarian, progressivism has also become more antisemitic. It tends to couch this antisemitism in the language of anti-Zionism and criticism of Israel, but its rhetoric is so vitriolic and hateful, its violence against Jews and Zionists so intense, and its support for the most horrendous antisemitic atrocities so open and palpable, that no other conclusions can be drawn.

Progressive antisemitism is both a very old and a very new form of antisemitism. Its basis is as ancient as the Elders of Zion: The belief that the Jews are a corrupt, evil, and omnipotent plutocracy. But progressivism has recast this in the language of its own ideology, claiming that, in the form of Israel, the Jews victimize not only Palestinians but also people of color, the LGBT community, and other fetishized groups. Jews are seen as the ultimate manifestation and beneficiaries of “white privilege”—an amorphous and situational term at best—and this “privilege” must be smashed for justice to prevail. In effect, the Jews are cast as the enemies of progress itself. Thus, they are a metaphysical evil that must be scythed by the arc of history.

This antisemitism is intimately connected to the issue of race. It is, in fact, difficult to overstate the extent to which progressivism is now defined by racial politics and the idea of racial hierarchy. In effect, progressivism sees the world as a pyramid with Jews and “white people” at the top, and everyone else in a descending progression downward, with people of color and Palestinians at the bottom. Unlike in the past, however, today’s progressivism no longer wants to do away with this hierarchy, it simply wants to reverse it. It adopts the admonition of the Gospel of Matthew that “the last shall be first, and the first last.”

While perhaps admirable at first glance, the problem with this is obvious: Even if the last becomes first and vice versa, there is still a first and a last. That is, the ostensibly unjust hierarchy remains, it has simply been turned on its head. There is still oppressor and oppressed, superior and inferior, destroyer and destroyed. Nothing has been solved, nothing has been improved, and no one has been liberated. Nothing, in other words, has progressed.

Even more disturbing, perhaps, is a prevailing belief among progressives that was perhaps most succinctly put in a reported statement by a New York Times staffer: “I just feel like racism is in everything.” It is safe to say that this is the hegemonic view among progressives today, and the implications are extremely disturbing. While such comparisons are usually facile and by definition inaccurate, it is not an exaggeration to say that this is Nazism. That is, the basis and foundation of Nazism was that racism is in everything. It viewed race as the sole active metaphysical force in existence, permeating every aspect of human and indeed animal life, and racism as the only means of understanding and harnessing it. That many of today’s progressives now more or less agree both explains a great deal and bodes very ill for the future of the movement and the American society it seeks to radically change.

All of these pathologies seem to have coalesced around what critics call the “Red-Green Alliance,” a term that refers to a political axis composed of progressives and Islamic radicals. This seemingly bizarre phenomenon, which the philosopher John Gray calls “Islamo-Leninism,” has been developing for a long time, but it emerged in full during the ugly mob events that followed the October 7, 2023 massacre committed in southern Israel by the terrorist group Hamas. In a well-coordinated and well-funded attempt to prevent Israeli retaliation, celebrate the massacre, and express solidarity with the genocidal organization, thousands took to the streets of major cities in the US and Europe shouting antisemitic slogans and calling for Israel’s destruction. These mobs were composed almost entirely of progressive activists and radical Muslims. The same was true of those who harassed, intimidated, and physically attacked Jewish students in the streets and on college campuses. Anyone wearing recognizably Jewish clothing and symbols, or was simply known to be Jewish, became a target. In one case, a Muslim academic beat a Jewish man to death with a megaphone. The wave of racism and violence so shocked the American Jewish community that a protest march held in Washington, DC drew 300,000 people.

The sight of radical feminists marching side by side with those to whom patriarchy is a sacrament, LGBT people standing shoulder to shoulder with those who would gladly murder them in another context, socialists expressing solidarity with advocates of genocidal theocracy, and alleged human rights activists embracing supporters of religious apartheid and terrorism was incomprehensible to many, but it was not unprecedented. In the 1960s, for example, the radical left strongly supported Algeria’s terrorist FLN, which was influenced by political Islam to a far greater degree than many then and now have been prepared to acknowledge. In the 1979 Iranian revolution, leftists of all stripes helped Islamic radicals overthrow the Shah, only to have the theocrats slaughter them as soon as they had the power to do so. After 9/11, leftist sympathy for Osama bin Laden was not universal, but it was considerable and sparked a notable backlash. Today, progressives stand with, work with, and actively defend Islamic radicals in almost all aspects of life, especially political activism and most of all in anti-Israel incitement and violence.

The progressive movement’s total corruption of its own creed in the name of this alliance has not been a dignified spectacle, but it is not as incomprehensible as it seems. One of its causes is progressivism’s increasing antisemitism, which naturally leads it to align with fellow antisemites. Statistics have consistently shown that the Muslim nations are the most antisemitic in the world. Moreover, some 60% of Muslim Americans supported the October 7 massacre to some degree, meaning that they are, at the very least, fairly comfortable with the mass murder of Jewish people. That progressive antisemites find themselves in sympathy with radical Islam is natural under such circumstances.

Progressives share more with radical Islam than hatred of Jews, however. For example, both movements have an essentially messianic worldview. Islam has its final day of judgment and the progressives their blessed society. The two groups are also obsessed with the same alleged evils, such as imperialism, American foreign policy, and Western civilization in general. The alliance further plays to progressives’ obsession with race, as they have convinced themselves that all Muslims are “people of color” (they aren’t) and therefore oppressed by “white people” (they aren’t). Despite the Muslim world’s considerable trade in black African slaves, which continues to this day in various forms, progressives have decided that radical Islam is simply pursuing the shared task of overturning the global racial hierarchy and defeating “white supremacism.” That the Islamic radicals seek to replace it with Muslim supremacism does not perturb the progressives, as they likely consider it just revenge for centuries of depredation.

Most important of all, however, is that most of today’s progressives and all radical Muslims are against freedom. In the case of radical Islam, this is obvious, as they make no pretense of valuing freedom, and the movements and regimes they have built are, without exception, brutally oppressive, violent, terroristic, and totalitarian. In the case of progressives, the issue is less clear-cut, as they publicly proclaim that they value freedom, particularly for oppressed groups. But if we examine progressive actions rather than rhetoric, a different picture emerges.

It is notable, for example, that the institutions ruled by American progressives, particularly academia, are by and large the least free institutions in American society. They place a great deal of value on ideological conformity and almost none on fundamental liberties like free speech and assembly. Basic legal rights do not exist in the academic disciplinary system. Those who wish to avoid being fired or expelled for alleged transgressions must often submit to humiliating Maoist-style reeducation and struggle sessions during which they are forced to confess and repent their sins in a wretched public spectacle. As a result, progressive rule suffocates independent thought and silences criticism, thus destroying two of freedom’s greatest benefits. Similar circumstances prevail in those areas of corporate culture, the arts, the media, and even sports that are dominated or ruled by progressives.

Taken together, the above seems to indicate the emergence of a kind of barbaric progressivism. A progressivism that, while it advocates progress in certain areas, is also quite comfortable with supporting some of the most barbaric ideas imaginable, such as antisemitism, totalitarianism, religious fanaticism, theocracy, patriarchy, racism, anti-democratic politics, terrorism, rule by a designated minority, suppression of heretical ideas, and opposition to human freedom itself.

The question, then, is what Americans who have no desire to live under this kind of progressivism should do. Certainly, there are political and legal measures that could be taken, but the most important form of resistance must come from within the movement itself. Many good people in the progressive movement sincerely believe in its principles and do not want to see it collapse into barbarism. They need not exit the movement. Instead, they should stay and fight for a better progressivism, one that is at least vaguely worthy of the name. There are signs that this difficult and unhappy resistance is already underway. Whether or not it can succeed confronts the rest of us with one of the more ominous questions of our present moment.

https://benjaminkerstein.substack.com/p/the-rise-of-barbaric-progressivism
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 20, 2024, 02:44:25 PM
A quality read.
Title: Doomino Theory 2.0 Ukraine, then Taiwan
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 24, 2024, 04:07:49 AM
A interesting piece, but it would have been better with engaging with the consequences of losing Taiwan's chips.

====================================

https://amgreatness.com/2024/02/24/the-domino-theory-2-0-ukraine-then-taiwan/

The Domino Theory 2.0: Ukraine Then Taiwan?
See how those dominoes fall when policymakers and their elitist cronies put money over country and sell our communist enemies the rope they will use to hang us?

By Thaddeus G. McCotter
February 24, 2024
In yet another example of “how the more things change…”

When assessing the Domino Theory 2.0, one discovers the dominoes are in the details—or, more accurately, the lack of them.

The first incarnation of the “Domino Theory” argued that the triumph of communism in one nation would invariably lead to communism’s triumph in neighboring nations. Based on the rapid Sovietization and illegal occupations of eastern Europe in the aftermath of World War II, the Domino Theory predicted the same result would occur elsewhere. Unfortunately, the theory was less of a strategic assessment than it was a myopic prism, coloring every incident abroad as proof of its predetermined conclusion and justifying its efforts to stanch communism’s advance by any means fair or foul, including the deployment of the American military. So doing, the Domino Theory proved a blunt and, ultimately, deleterious instrument for stemming the advance of that hideous, anti-human ideology.

For Americans, the Vietnam War painfully revealed the counterproductive consequences of this overly simplistic theory. Between 1965 and 1973, more than 58,000 American service personnel, 250,000 South Vietnamese troops, 1.1 million North Vietnamese and Viet Cong fighters, and close to 2 million civilians of North and South Vietnam were killed, and more than $120 billion of U.S. tax dollars were expended on the war effort. At home, Americans were torn along political and generational lines over the draft and the war; youth was radicalized; and disillusionment with and alienation from representative institutions increased throughout the citizenry. When America ultimately failed to stem North Vietnam’s conquest of South Vietnam, the ensuing decade witnessed communism’s advance around the globe. At home, many of the political divisions spawned by the Vietnam War never fully healed.

Importantly, this was during a time when the Soviet Union and its proxies were in fact bent upon expanding communism across the globe, and most Americans understood this. Nevertheless, the failure to explain the rationale for the Vietnam War to the satisfaction of Americans, especially the young men being drafted and their parents, constituted the sifting quicksand that finally engulfed America’s war effort, especially when the government’s official statements continually failed to match the reality on the ground and the war dragged on.

In the aftermath of Vietnam, policymakers did learn the hard lessons of America’s military defeat. Communism remained an existential threat to free peoples, one the Soviets continued to spread. But America and her allies gradually became more attuned to the specific conditions within a communist endangered country, and, given the American public’s chary post-Vietnam attitude toward military interventions, became more circumspect in their assessments and responses to such threats. With fits and starts, wins and losses, by 1991, this more circumspect view of how to defeat communism through a more deliberative and discerning, holistic roll-back strategy facilitated the liberation of eastern Europe from communism and the Soviet Union’s implosion.

Failure might be an orphan, but it is a better teacher than success. While making room to stuff the Soviet Union in history’s trash can, policymakers retrieved from it the garbage theory, the “End of History.” In sum, Francis Fukuyama’s “end” was the absence of an ideological opponent to western democratic capitalism, which allegedly had forever won the hearts and minds of all peoples. It seems Mr. Fukuyama didn’t consult the over 70,000,000 members of the Chinese Communist Party (or radical Islamists, for that matter).

In the heady, heedless days following the demise of the Soviet Union, the botched, venal western “shock therapy” approach to Russian reconstruction led to the rise of an authoritarian regime headed by former KGB Lt. Colonel Vladimir Putin, a foreign intelligence officer. Due to western recklessness and covetousness, democracy and capitalism had an abysmal trial run in post-Soviet Russia. The people came to view the “end of history” as a dead end for Russia. With selective nostalgia coloring their memories, they reached back out for the iron hand of a strong leader (if not a Stalin, then an Ivan the Terrible) and a Russia that was feared and respected throughout the world. Mr. Putin and his thuggish ex-KGB cronies (Siloviki) readily obliged. The result is a revanchist, neo-imperial Russia currently on display in Ukraine.

Further, in the wake of the CCP’s barbaric butchering of pro-democracy protestors in Tiananmen Square, a similar response threw this hideous regime a lifeline: no amount of mass slaughter would stop western capitalists from enriching themselves in communist China. Throughout the ensuing years, policymakers and the elites have enriched themselves by, among other means, outsourcing American jobs to and investing in communist China, thereby making the regime both more secure and more potent as they engaged in unrestricted warfare against the United States. And a nation that, during Mao’s great famine, was still exporting wheat from the hands of starving peasants to ensure the communist regime had enough foreign reserves to advance the nation’s aims throughout the world, now holds over $850 billion of American debt. No doubt, Xi Jinping and his politburo pals will continue putting their current foreign reserves and their holding of the U.S. debt to effective, if not good, use against America.

In sum, today, policymakers and elites have now stuck the rest of us with the butcher’s bill for their arrogance and avarice: a revanchist, authoritarian Russia and an avowedly hostile, implacably aggressive communist China, both of which view the United States as their primary enemy.

This is the situation as American and other western policymakers tender their dire demands for taxpayer funding for Ukraine. For some abstruse reason, they expect the public to forget or ignore that these policymakers and their corporate cronies have been culpable for causing this crisis. These policymakers have forgotten the hard lessons of Vietnam, and in refusing to explain in detail the strategic stakes in defending Ukraine from Russia’s invasion, they have resorted to the Domino Theory 2.0.

Consider this February 12 tweet by Senator John Cornyn (R-Tex.), in which he cites an earlier statement by Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La.): “Speaker Johnson is right: ‘We can’t allow Vladimir Putin to prevail in Ukraine because I don’t believe it would stop there. It would probably encourage and empower China to perhaps make a move on Taiwan.’”

And there it is. The assumption that an authoritarian victory will lead to another authoritarian’s invasion of another country.

Sure, the Speaker hedged with “probably.” Moreover, Senator Cornyn was citing an October 27, 2023, interview with the Speaker, wherein he, Johnson, also stated: “We’re not going to abandon them, but we have a responsibility, a stewardship responsibility, over the precious treasure of the American people, and we have to make sure that the White House is providing the people with some accountability for the dollars.” Oddly, the Speaker also hedged by adding “some accountability.”

Yet, this merely reinforces the point. The Speaker felt compelled to regurgitate the Dominio Theory 2.0. His admission that there needs to be “some accountability” underscores the absence of accountability to the American public regarding military aid to Ukraine’s. Excepting the rote invocation of the “Taiwan must be defended” mantra, it also unwittingly reveals policymakers’ almost zero discourse with the American people as to why a free Taiwan is an imperative in protecting our nation’s vital strategic interests. Instead, the public gets the Domino Theory 2.0.

It is beyond the purpose of this essay to delve into how the current efforts to aid the defense of Ukraine may or may not have already indicated to the CCP the probability of successfully subjugating Taiwan. What is obvious, however, is that despite Americans’ disapprobation for Mr. Putin and his regime, the continued funding for Ukraine’s defense is increasingly precarious, as public support is ebbing over time (due in no small part to the absence of “some accountability”).

Now consider this in light of what the Domino Theory 2.0’s proponent’s believe is the “hammer” in their argument for more Ukraine spending: the long-threatened communist Chinese invasion of Taiwan.

As the Vietnam War intensified, one of the arguments of anti-war protestors was that our kids were being sent to die in a country most Americans couldn’t find on a map. A terse expression of how policymakers had failed to adequately explain how America’s vital national security interests were involved, it was an inarguable indictment of the original Domino Theory. But it is important to note that the Domino Theory was initially sufficient for the American public to accept our nation’s involvement in Vietnam. Why?

Due to the Sovietization of eastern Europe, the communist capture of China, and the United States’ subsequent, excruciating experience in the Korean War (or maybe because of the sacrifices entailed to keep South Korea free), the American public recognized communism was an existential threat to our nation and allies. Engendering and perpetuating this recognition constituted a concerted national effort that endured over decades until America and her allies won the Cold War.

Today, this is decidedly not the case.

Feckless policymakers, in league with their rapacious corporate cronies and other greedy elitists, have divined a critical distinction between the defunct Soviet variant of the communist virus and that of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP): unlike the former Soviet Union, western elites can make a buck off the communist China.

But, you may ask, what about communist China’s “unrestricted warfare” against their primary enemy, the hegemonic United States? What about the communist regime’s repression of their own people, including the genocide of the Uighurs? How can American and western policymakers and their elitist cronies do business with a totalitarian government that is leveraging their own captive people as a “market” for western corporate investment? Or threatening to invade their neighboring free republic, Taiwan?

To keep their gravy train rolling requires the public to believe the policymakers’ and the elites false narrative that the communist Chinese regime is magically not in control of their totalitarian state. Somehow, despite all evidence and communist ideology to the contrary, communist China’s business sector (one cannot call it a “private sector”) is a sufficiently independent actor to ignore the regime’s aggressive domestic and global malevolence. In short, policymakers and elites need the American public to play “let’s pretend” along with them.

This deliberate downplaying of communist China’s aims promotes the willful misperception that there is a difference between the communist Chinese regime and its economy—one that is not recognized in that nation’s laws—and has not ended the American people’s distrust of the communist Chinese state. But it has had detrimental impact. While not spurring calls for peaceful coexistence or détente, it has negated a comprehensive estimation of the threat communist China’s unrestricted warfare poses to America’s vital strategic interests, as well as the measures required to protect and defend ourselves and our allies. Truly, then, it is odd how, in pushing the Domino Theory 2.0, policy makers and the elites are aiming to leverage a fear of communist China that they’ve spend decades trying to diminish.

This brings us face to face with the real Domino Theory of communism: namely, how the willful blindness to communist China’s avowed unrestricted warfare against our nation leads to the spread of the vile, murderous, anti-human ideology of communism at home and abroad.

For example, why should communist indoctrinators on campuses not be treated the same as Nazi indoctrinators? Why should an ideology responsible for killing more innocents than any other screed be considered acceptable in any quarter, let alone grow in popularity, especially among young Americans?

Why should Americans oppose the repressive communist Cuban regime, one that exports its hateful ideology and undermines free nations in Latin America, when the most populous and powerful communist nation in the world, China, despite being engaged in “unrestricted warfare” against the U.S., is being treated as a responsible international actor and business opportunity?

Equally, at a time when American elected officials are endangering national security by signing non-disclosure agreements with communist Chinese companies and, in the name of creating jobs their failed policies have precluded by any other means, are doling out billions in taxpayer dollars to them to locate in areas of America where it is all the better to engage in military and corporate espionage and other nefarious activities, why should the public respond to the Domino Theory 2.0’s concern for free Taiwan?

Indeed, while many policymakers, their elitist cronies, and the regime press pooh-pooh the public’s concerns about communist China buying American farmland, why would the public care about communist China invading Taiwan—let alone be prepared to risk World War III over it?

See how those dominoes fall when policymakers and their elitist cronies put money over country and sell our communist enemies the rope they will use to hang us?

Unless and until policymakers and their elitist cronies cease their remunerative apologies for the regime and commence defeating the existential threat of communist China’s unrestricted warfare, the Domino Theory 2.0 is a self-defeating piece of self-satire that merely serves to further disillusion and alienate Americans whose public support is needed to defend our republic and the entire free world.

In the end, of course, the question of whether the Domino Theory 2.0 works as the policymakers and the elites intend is a secondary consideration. The first consideration is to do what is comprehensively necessary as a nation to ensure that question never requires an answer.

An American Greatness contributor, the Hon. Thaddeus G. McCotter (M.C., Ret.) served Michigan’s 11th Congressional district from 2003-2012, and served as Chair of the Republican House Policy Committee. Not a lobbyist, he is a frequent public speaker and moderator for public policy seminars; and a Monday co-host of the “John Batchelor Radio Show,” among sundry media appearances.
Title: Of Trust and Moral Compasses
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on February 28, 2024, 10:08:34 PM
A-freaking-men:

https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2024/02/28/trusted-authorities-any-left/
Title: Lords of Chaos in the Empire of Lies
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on March 04, 2024, 04:10:28 PM
Another cheery piece from Chiefio. Keep your powder dry:


Posted on 4 March 2024 by E.M.Smith
Just sharing the result of some pondering.

The Lies

I was having a bit of a retrospective on our society, actions of The West, how The Powers That Be, the Globalist Evil Bastards, our Governmental Rulers (as we have a “Rules based order” per them, we do not have “representatives”, but Rulers implementing the “rules”…) and how the High Political Mucky Mucks in the news have managed the world.

First off, I realized that just about everything we get is based on lies. I think it was Putin who coined the phrase “Empire Of Lies”. I did not hear him use it, nor saw it in print, but heard it ascribed to him by a western YouTube video. But his, or not, I think it applies.

Not just lies about “Ukraine Winning” or “Putin did all the evil in the world” nor even “Trump did it!”, or even the lies of Minsk 1 and Minsk 2 agreements that were a fraud; but also all the lies about Covid, The Jab, the border with Mexico, selling the Strategic oil Reserve (and the Strategic Helium Reserve), and so much more. National Inflation statistics buggered to lies. FDA “Food Pyramid” designed to make you fat and unhealthy while enriching the Processed Food Industry. Mandating medical treatments that enrich Big Pharma while not making you healthy. The Big Lie of “Global Warming” to take your car, meat and fuel.

Simply put, The West collectively, largely the USA, EU, UK, Canada and Australia; they all are managed and run via lies. That’s pretty clear. The only unclear bit is just where, if at all, there are agencies without lies. Is anything said by the Political Class NOT a lie?

The Chaos

How about those Color Revolutions, eh? The long slow march around the world over decades overthrowing elected governments. The destruction of whole industries. Coal. Oil. Cars. Banking Crisis. Money destruction. Ending trust in the Medical Establishment. Now trying to destroy farming and farmers. Trashing cities, the once beautiful “Baghdad By The Bay” great night life city of San Francisco turned into an open outhouse of filth and poverty. Shopping driven out, whole shopping districts empty and closed (due to organized theft gangs that do not get prosecuted, or even slowed down). Flooding nations with hoards of Illegal Aliens here just to take what they can (and break or kill what they can’t, from time to time).

That is chaos. And these rulers of ours, these who lord over us, are the Lords Of Chaos.

So welcome to the Empire of Lies run by the Lords of Chaos.

I just hope my little corner of Florida, that still has the old Standard American Values, can keep the Chaos out a few more years… because what is happening globally is not going to hold up.

The UK is at best stagnant as the Political Class works to thwart the will of the people to be fully out of the EU and the EU Drama. The EU is busy de-industrializing and searching for economic collapse, all while looking for genetic & cultural replacement via not having their own kids but importing a load of foreigners (who largely want to tear down European Values, History, and cultures). The USA is busy selling out to China while borrowing all the money it can to create wars around the world and a “Color Revolution” right here at home, too. Congress and The White House are busy ripping off and selling off everything they can.

Advertisement

So how long can that continue without a full on collapse? Hopefully longer than I can… but I think it won’t.

I’ve listened to many bits of Putin’s State Of The Nation speeches. I’ve never seen him lie to his people or the Duma. His histories match known historical facts. He does not bluff, and when a warning is ignored, does exactly what he said he would do if it were ignored. He has warned NATO that if they put troops in Ukraine or start to directly attack Russia, he’s willing to move to a nuclear conflict if that is what it takes to protect Russia and Russians. Our Rulers act like that is a bluff. It isn’t, but they want to push it. “They have no reverse gear”- The Duran. I just hope we do not end up in a Global Thermonuclear War because they believe their own lies and bullshit instead of listening to the clear statements of a Man Who Does Not Bluff.

The Lords Of Chaos ruling over their Empire Of Lies may yet kill us all.

https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2024/03/04/lords-of-chaos-in-the-empire-of-lies/
Title: Prager: Divide is not bridgeable
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 05, 2024, 09:58:55 AM
https://dennisprager.com/column/the-left-right-divide-is-not-bridgeable?fbclid=IwAR1Xic2abA9HDf87u0ZG7UtW77LqzW1obNKH56-ZNBHAzP_9bJuQRggtBTM
Title: Re: Prager: Divide is not bridgeable
Post by: DougMacG on March 05, 2024, 11:30:03 AM
https://dennisprager.com/column/the-left-right-divide-is-not-bridgeable?fbclid=IwAR1Xic2abA9HDf87u0ZG7UtW77LqzW1obNKH56-ZNBHAzP_9bJuQRggtBTM

This is really full of wisdom.

I like where he differentiates liberal and left.

I accused one of my friends of being a 'honest liberal'.  I meant it more as a challenge than an observation.  If he were completely honest with himself (as I see it) he might eventually lean toward (fact-based) positions I hold, like men and women are different, the war on poverty isn't working, we should regulate immigration as closely as we regulate housing, lasting peace comes through strength, and going broke is no way to run a country.

We must separate. Some people are persuadable. Some must be defeated at the ballot box.  The strange thing is, only in hindsight do we fully recognize who is persuadable.
Title: illegal immigration selling out ALL American citizens
Post by: ccp on March 08, 2024, 08:27:35 AM
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/black-americans-asian-americans-mexican-americans-and-white-americans-illegal-migrants-over-americans/ar-AA1h9Mjx?ocid=msedgntp&pc=DCTS&cvid=3d61509ee1154274a8d3be661af5d1cb&ei=83


https://thyblackman.com/
Title: George Friedman: America approaches the crisis
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 12, 2024, 06:43:40 AM


March 12, 2024
View On Website
Open as PDF

America Approaches the Crisis
By: George Friedman

We have recently discussed China's problems, Russia's ability to defeat Ukraine, the economic condition of Europe and the wars of the Middle East. All of these are extremely important, but none are as crucial as the United States, the country with the largest economy in the world and a military that, if fully deployed, can be decisive.

Some of you may recall our model of cycles, which is now signaling increasingly intense political, social and economic problems that will last until the election of 2028, when a new president will be elected and, regardless of his wishes, will dramatically shift the country's direction. A few months ago, I thought we would not have to wait until 2028, but that the 2024 election might signal the shift. That isn’t happening. Or, to be precise, the historical model of change every 50 years is continuing. The last transitional moment was the Reagan presidency, which started 43 years ago.

To understand the coming changes, it is useful to think of the last cycle in the 1970s. That decade was marked by a war with significant impact on the American economy, combined with an oil embargo. President Richard Nixon ended the link between the dollar and gold, and massive unemployment, dramatic inflation and staggeringly high interest rates ensued. Exports from Japan shocked domestic auto manufacturers. Anger at the Vietnam War led to social conflict in the United States, with racial conflict turning into riots in Detroit in the late 1960s, and in 1970, campus riots at Kent State turned deadly when students were shot by the National Guard. In the end, the president resigned to avoid impeachment and possibly prison.

The chaos grew through the 1970s, but it was the economic situation that drove it and in which the chaos was rooted, with the president trying to use the last cycle’s model to solve the problems. During the Depression, President Franklin Roosevelt tried to increase taxes on the rich and corporations and attempted to funnel money to the poor. That, plus World War II and the jobs it created, ended the crisis. Continuing that model into the 1970s, however, created a new problem: a shortage of investment capital. The only solution was transformation, shifting the tax burden from the investing class to the middle and lower classes, which increased corporate sales and demand for workers. President Jimmy Carter and the Democratic Party opposed this reversal of the Roosevelt model – which is normal for those linked to the last cycle – and in 1980 Ronald Reagan became president. Reagan pursued the only option: transforming the tax code. That worked well, but now that cycle is done. Nearly 50 years have passed, and a transition to a new model is inevitable.

Just as the economic crisis culminated in the latter half of the 1970s, along with all the other battles, the same thing is shaping up now in the 2020s and will become most intense by the elections of 2028.

The full order of battle is not yet clear, save for the economic crisis developing from the government creating excess money and the resulting inflation. As with Carter, however, it is not sustainable. Alongside this is the staggering amount of student debt, which flows into universities, allowing them to pursue projects that undermine their basic mission and maintain racial tension. The essential problem is again the relevance of the tax system in a shifting reality, but the system is merely the exterior of a much more complex reality.

Regardless of who is elected president, there will be rage and fear in the public, as there was in 1980 when voters elected an actor whose enemies believed he was an ignoramus. But in truth, the president presides; he does not rule. It is reality that forces action, and a new president will feel the pressure and respond. It is important not to focus on the president himself but on understanding the problem. As we look for leadership, neither candidate for the presidency will soothe the system. That must come later. I’ve spoken of this before, but we are now coming closer to the crisis
Title: Christopher Caldwell forsees the West's defeat
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 12, 2024, 07:27:09 AM


GUEST ESSAY

This Prophetic Academic Now Foresees the West’s Defeat
March 9, 2024
A photograph of Emmanuel Todd
Credit...Joel Saget/Getty Images
Share full article


202
Christopher Caldwell
By Christopher Caldwell

Mr. Caldwell is a contributing Opinion writer and the author of “The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties.”  (MARC:  I have read this-- very deep and insightful)

“If anybody in this room thinks Putin will stop at Ukraine, I assure you, he will not,” President Biden said during his State of the Union address on Thursday night. Europe is “at risk,” he added, as he welcomed Ulf Kristersson, the prime minister of Sweden, the newest member of NATO.

But Mr. Biden also said he remains “determined” that American soldiers will not be necessary to defend Europe. As a White House spokesman put it last week, it is “crystal clear” that the use of ground troops is off the table.

Mr. Kristersson’s head must have been spinning. The prospect of further Russian incursions was the strongest argument that the United States relied on to draw NATO into the war, and to draw new members, like Sweden, into NATO. But if such incursions were a genuine concern, then ground troops would be an option for the United States and its allies almost by definition.

The rationale for NATO participation in the Russo-Ukrainian war is getting fuzzier at the very moment when one would expect it to be getting clearer.

This is a problem. Europeans, like Americans, are tiring of the war. They are increasingly skeptical that Ukraine can win it. But perhaps most important, they distrust the United States, which has done little in this war to dispel skepticism about its motives and its competence that arose during the Iraq war two decades ago. Unique though Americans sometimes believe their polarization to be, all Western societies have a version of it. As Europe’s “elites” see it, NATO is fighting a war to beat back a Russian invasion. But as “populists” see it, American elites are leading a war to beat back a challenge to their own hegemony — no matter what the collateral damage.

American leadership is failing: That is the argument of an eccentric new book that since January has stood near the top of France’s best-seller lists. It is called “La Défaite de l’Occident” (“The Defeat of the West”). Its author, Emmanuel Todd, is a celebrated historian and anthropologist who in 1976, in a book called “The Final Fall,” used infant-mortality statistics to predict that the Soviet Union was headed for collapse.


Since then, what Mr. Todd writes about current events has tended to be received in Europe as prophecy. His book “After the Empire,” predicting the “breakdown of the American order,” came out in 2002, in the flush of post-9/11 national cohesion and before the debacle of the Iraq war, to which Mr. Todd was fiercely opposed. Anglophone (his doctorate is from Cambridge) and Anglophile (at least at the start of his career), he has grown steadily disillusioned with the United States, even anti-American.

Mr. Todd is a critic of American involvement in Ukraine, but his argument is not the now-familiar historical one made by the dissident political scientist John Mearsheimer. Like Mr. Mearsheimer, Mr. Todd questions the zealous expansion of NATO under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, the neoconservative ideology of democracy promotion and the official demonization of Russia. But his skepticism of U.S. involvement in Ukraine goes deeper. He believes American imperialism has not only endangered the rest of the world but also corroded American character.

In interviews over the past year, Mr. Todd has argued that Westerners focus too much on one surprise of the war: Ukraine’s ability to defy Russia’s far larger army. But there is a second surprise that has been underappreciated: Russia’s ability to defy the sanctions and seizures through which the United States sought to destroy the Russian economy. Even with its Western European allies in tow, the United States lacked the leverage to keep the world’s big, new economic actors in line. India took advantage of fire-sale prices for Russian energy. China provided Russia with sanctioned goods and electronic components.

And then the manufacturing base of the United States and its European allies proved inadequate to supply Ukraine with the matériel (particularly artillery) needed to stabilize, let alone win, the war. The United States no longer has the means to deliver on its foreign-policy promises.

People have been awaiting this moment for quite some time, not all of them as far from the corridors of power as Mr. Todd. Mr. Biden mentioned in his 2017 memoir that President Barack Obama used to warn him about “overpromising to the Ukrainian government.” Now we see why.

Mr. Todd contends that Americans’ heedless plunge into the global economy was a mistake. Parts of his case will be familiar from other authors: The United States produces fewer cars than it did in the 1980s; it produces less wheat. But parts of his case involve deeper, long-term cultural shifts perennially associated with prosperity. We used to call them decadence.

In an advanced, highly educated society like ours, Mr. Todd argues, too many people aspire to the work of running things and bossing people around. They want to be politicians, artists, managers. This doesn’t always require learning intellectually complex stuff. “In the long run, educational progress has brought educational decline,” he writes, “because it has led to the disappearance of those values that favor education.”

Mr. Todd calculates that the United States produces fewer engineers than Russia does, not just per capita but in absolute numbers. It is experiencing an “internal brain drain,” as its young people drift from demanding, high-skill, high-value-added occupations to law, finance and various occupations that merely transfer value around the economy and in some cases may even destroy it. (He asks us to consider the ravages of the opioid industry, for instance.)

As Mr. Todd sees it, the West’s decision to outsource its industrial base is more than bad policy; it is also evidence of a project to exploit the rest of the world. But ringing up profits is not the only thing America does in the world — it also spreads a system of liberal values, which are often described as universal human rights. A specialist in the anthropology of families, Mr. Todd warns that a lot of the values Americans are currently spreading are less universal than Americans think.

Anglo-American family structures, for example, have traditionally been less patriarchal than those almost anyplace else in the world. As it has modernized, the United States has come to espouse a model of sex and gender that conjugates poorly with those of traditional cultures (such as India’s) and more patriarchal modern ones (such as Russia’s).

Mr. Todd is not a moralizer. But he insists that traditional cultures have a lot to fear from the West’s various progressive leanings and may resist allying themselves on foreign policy with those who espouse them. In a similar way, during the Cold War, the Soviet Union’s official atheism was a deal-breaker for many people who might otherwise have been well disposed toward Communism.

Mr. Todd does believe that certain of our values are “deeply negative.” He presents evidence that the West does not value the lives of its young. Infant mortality, the telltale metric that led him to predict the Soviet collapse half a century ago, is higher in Mr. Biden’s America (5.4 per thousand) than in Mr. Putin’s Russia — and three times higher than in the Japan of Prime Minister Fumio Kishida.

While Mr. Todd is, again, not judgmental on sexual matters, he is judgmental on intellectual ones. The inability to distinguish facts from wishes astounds him at every turn of the Ukraine war. The American hope early in the war that China might cooperate in a sanctions regime against Russia, thereby helping the United States refine a weapon that would one day be aimed at China itself, is, for Mr. Todd, a “delirium.”

For students of the Vietnam War, there is much in Mr. Todd’s book that recalls the historian Loren Baritz’s classic 1985 book, “Backfire,” which drew on popular culture, patriotic mythology and management theory to explain what had led the United States astray in Vietnam. Mr. Baritz concluded, “We are what went wrong in Vietnam.” Had Lyndon Johnson managed to impose his will on the Vietnamese, Mr. Baritz reflected, “an entire culture would have been utterly destroyed out of the goodness of the American heart.”

One is constantly reading in the papers that Vladimir Putin is a threat to the Western order. Maybe. But the larger threat to the Western order is the hubris of those who run it.

Fighting a war based on values requires good values. At a bare minimum it requires an agreement on the values being spread, and the United States is further from such agreement than it has ever been in its history — further, even, than it was on the eve of the Civil War. At times it seems there are no national principles, only partisan ones, with each side convinced that the other is trying not just to run the government but also to capture the state.

Until some new consensus emerges, President Biden is misrepresenting his country in presenting it as stable and unified enough to commit to anything. Ukrainians are learning this at a steep cost.
Title: 'We were sold this unachievable dream'
Post by: ccp on March 14, 2024, 08:28:05 AM
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/we-were-sold-this-unachievable-dream-georgia-woman-explains-the-broken-system-that-has-young-americans-fearing-for-their-futures-is-this-narrative-right/ar-BB1jSFtE?ocid=msedgntp&pc=DCTS&cvid=c095905dcfac434b8d7656e0cf9cd658&ei=38

how annoying

it is "the old white men"

as though if our leaders were women, black, and gay and young none of this would have happened.

" “Millennials and Gen Z are going to inherit a system that is broken,” Hardesty explained, “And we’re going to have to replace it all.”

Oh really? with what?

Title: AT: McCafee Ruling the Latest Blow
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 20, 2024, 11:05:07 AM


https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/03/judge_mcafee_ruling_is_the_latest_blow_to_public_mistrust_in_government.html
Title: Turley's analogy was correct
Post by: ccp on March 20, 2024, 01:10:41 PM
think of police arresting two thieves in a bank vault

but only one gets carted off to jail.

I would go one step further.

think of the police catching them in the act and the allowing THEM to decide which one goes to jail and the other goes home.

The Dems know how to intimidate don't they?

Like we have seen Dershowitz recently point out that Trump is unable to hire top notch attorneys (apparently he does not think the ones he has are very good )

due to lawyers being afraid for their future careers if they were to defend Trump .

Seems like James Comey , William Barr, McAfee, Hur all seem to stop short when it counts the most.

All in favor of the crats.

Dersh says apparently it works, as he has had attorneys tell him point blank they are intimidated for their future employment and client referrals if they were to dare take a role in defending Trump.

we have a big problem in the US with the justice system and it ain't so much because it targets minorities.
Title: Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 20, 2024, 01:45:35 PM
"Trump is unable to hire top notch attorneys (apparently he does not think the ones he has are very good )
due to lawyers being afraid for their future careers if they were to defend Trump"

Well my post was about the well founded decline in trust in the integrity of our government, so we are drifting here into the litigation realm, but I would note that

a) the intimidation of lawyers into not defending Trump is quite real and exceedingly damaging to the integrity of our legal system, and

b) Trump is a notorious asshole in his dealings with his lawyers and bears some blame here; and

c) Trump is right, his current ones are not very good-- Eighth Amendment should be front and center here ono all the big fines.
Title: With a permanent link
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 25, 2024, 05:37:07 PM
https://rumble.com/v4l78yf-open-borders.html
Title: The Triumph of Trumpenfreude
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on March 27, 2024, 09:20:16 AM
Think of him as you care to, but Trump does have a habit of turning attacks on their ears and into gold:

The greatest Trumpenfreude of all
They kicked President Trump off Twitter. That's about to make him $3,600,000,000.
MAR 26, 2024

Oh how they danced on the night Trump was banned.

NBC reported, “Twitter permanently suspends President Donald Trump.”

Andrew Marantz at the New Yorker gave the mainstream media take:

Nothing in the Constitution prohibits a private company from enforcing its own policies; if anything, the First Amendment protects a company’s right to do so. Now the harder questions. Does censoring a head of state set a dangerous precedent? Yes, it does, but so does allowing a head of state to use a platform’s enormous power, over the course of several years, to dehumanize women, inflame racist paranoia, flirt with nuclear war, and incite armed sedition, often in flagrant violation of the company’s rules. Is it worrisome that Jack Dorsey, a weirdly laconic billionaire with a castaway beard who has never been elected to any public office, is able to make unilateral, unaccountable decisions that may help determine whether our country survives or self-immolates? Yes, it is. But, given that Dorsey and a handful of other techno-oligarchs have this ability, they might as well be pressured (or shamed, or regulated) into using it wisely.

Of course, we found out in the Twitter files released after Elon Musk bought it that the government bribed Dorsey to censor conservatives.

Start your own Twitter, the media mocked him. He did. They hated it. NBC painted him as a hypocrite, reporting, “Former President Donald Trump pitched his new social media platform, Truth Social, as a haven for free speech and a counterweight to the big tech giants that have in recent years put a greater emphasis on moderating content users post to their sites.

“But as the platform’s terms of service agreement makes clear, not all speech will be permitted. Specifically, users are prohibited from speaking ill of the platform itself or its leadership.”

The media went out of its way to throw shade on his enterprise.

Axios reported, “Former President Trump is blowing the launch of his new social media company, via a series of unforced errors.”

The launch itself was buzzy, with Truth Social shooting to the top of Apple's App Store (there isn't yet an Android or web version).
But the vast majority of people downloading the app, me included, were given a waitlist number. Nine days later, most of us remain on that waitlist, with our number unchanged and without a word of communication from the company. A waitlist refresh icon doesn't work.
As of this writing, Truth Social has fallen to No. 57 in the App Store, just behind Tinder and Planet Fitness Workouts.”
So what? CNN’s ratings are below rerun channels. I would think starting off at No. 57 is great for a new social media outlet.

It looks like start-you-own-Twitter-ha-ha-ha was sound advice. Last week, Truth Social announced it was merging with one of Trump’s companies, which will sell shares in the merged company. Trump just doubled his pleasure, doubled his fun and doubled his wealth.

Bloomberg reported last night, “Trump’s Net Worth Hits $6.5 Billion, Making Him One of World’s 500 Richest People.”

So much for bankrupting the man.

Rolling Stone spun it, “The merger will be a lifeline to Truth Social, which incurred tens of millions in losses in 2023, and provide a massive windfall to its owner, former President Donald Trump. Given the current stock market value of Digital World Acquisition Corp., the combination of the two companies could net Trump a staggering $3.6 billion in shareholder value.

“As he’s currently drowning in a sea of legal bills, the merger may become a critical source of cash-on-hand for the former president, with one major caveat: He would only be able to cash out on his shares six months after the union officially goes public.”

Only in the insane world of journalism would cashing in for $3,600,000,000 be spun as a bad thing.

I didn’t invent the term Trumpenfreude. Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman did. I just changed the definition — like Google later did to the words insurrection and bloodbath.

Krugman sneered in December 2015 at the Republican establishment as the odds of a Trump nomination grew.

A year later, Trump got the last laugh on the AOC-hole.

Trumpenfreude thus went from Krugman’s feeling of joy about Republicans being stuck with Trump but that feeling of joy Trump supporters enjoy when another Trump hater goes down like Joe Frazier. At my old blog, I even made a list and checked it twice. It was fun to do. Someone even saved the list.

Let’s see, I wrote: “This is the official Trumpenfreude List of people who made the mistake of starting a feud with President Donald John Trump. Each wound up worse for the ordeal. Check back from time to time. The list continues to grow, which proves many human beings are idiots.”

The good old days.

The last few years have not been as fun as that first term but Democrat overkill — the constant political prosecutions and loony lawsuits in kangaroo courts — have turned the man into the leader in the presidential polls, something he never was in the previous two presidential elections.

The political windfall is matched only by the financial windfall he is in for. During his presidency, he accepted no pay as he gave his salary back to the government. His personal wealth fell by a billion bucks and the opportunity cost — meaning the money he would have made had he stayed on his job instead of working as president — easily matched the billion he lost on value of his real estate holdings.

Democrats tried playing lawfare with him, a name for tying a man in court to bleed him through legal fees. Trump is immune to this stuff.

Trump’s legal fees and the confiscation of his property by the state of New York amount to maybe $600 million — leaving the poor man only $3 billion richer. Only Elon Musk has the right to consider that amount of money as petty cash.

The state of New York allows violent criminals to walk free without posting bond but requires Donald Trump — and Donald Trump alone — to post 100% of the two judgments against him before it will consider an appeal. This is a clear violation of our rights under the Eighth Amendment.

Oh wait. Yesterday a judge said he only had to put up a ridiculous and punitive $175 million instead of $454 million to exercise his right to appeal the one of the two unconstitutional fines levied by a maniacal judge.

But the people rise against the tyranny of injustice in the Empire State. We know that if they can do this to President Trump, we are next.

And the wheels of commerce grind in his favor and as Bloomberg reported, he’s once again bounced back twice as high than he was when they pushed him down.

Scott Adams hit the nail with the old hammer in a Tweet entitled, “Trump's Third Act has begun. It's a beauty.” Adams ran a long post, but I liked this best:

The Democrats planned to cripple Trump financially so he couldn’t spend as much on the campaign. Trump turned Leticia James into his best fundraiser.

Lots of interesting developments lately on the topic of the 2020 election. The Simulation wants at least one of those fresh allegations to be a Kraken.

Trump's legal maneuvering is likely to keep him eligible for the election.

You can fantasize about a heroic Democrat such as Newsom swooping in and replacing Biden, but it's looking less likely every day. If it had always been the plan, it would have happened by now. Looks like Biden has to stay on the job to keep the Biden Crime Family out of jail.

The predictable Democrat Summer Hoax will add some excitement, but it will be forgotten and debunked by November.

Adams overlooked that Democrats want to put Trump’s head and his fortune on a pike as a warning to other billionaires to stay in the safe political pasture Democrats created.

I get that Adams is goofing on Democrats when he said Trump should consider the fines and legal fees to be a tip for the windfall he enjoys, but why should Trump give the Soviet Socialist Republic of New York a dime? The only fraud in the state’s case was committed by the fat lady prosecutor and the leering pervy judge. Did you see him grinning for the camera when the trial went on TV?

Trump saved The City once but New York’s majority wants Gotham to be Gomorrah. It’s time to sing arrivederci Gomorrah.

Tip them? Absolutely not. He will fight tooth and tong to keep what is his and not the state’s. He built this, not the government. Trump must fight the Squatters. He must not let the cheaters win because if he won’t fight for himself, then how can we expect him to fight for us.

But as I said, Adams was mocking the loser Democrats. We need a laugh now and again. Like most of us, he understands what is happening to America is destruction from within. History is erased by the Biden Banana Republic. Trump is the refrigerator light to the cockroaches who run DC. He has them scurrying for cover.

The tweet by Adams said, “The gears of the machine have become visible. We can all see the FBI is rotten and the DOJ is weaponized. We know the border is open intentionally. We know the cartels are working with our government.

“We know our elections are DESIGNED to not be auditable and there's only one reason for it. We can see Biden is not in charge. We know the Ukraine war was always about its energy resources and who gets to own them.

“We know our rising debt is ruinous. We know our experts are liars. We know our pharma and food industries are poisoning us. We know our government is racist. We know the corporate media is essentially owned by Democrats who are controlled by intelligence entities and they are actively brainwashing the population.

“We know the 1st and 2nd amendments, and X, are under sustained government attack because they are the public's last defense against the government.

“But we are not quitters.

“And the odds do not apply to us.”

We shall see if that last line comes true.

Readers occasionally ask me what we should do and my honest answer is pray, vote and keep the faith. You cannot cheat an honest man, which is why the repeated attempts to cheat Trump out of his wealth fail.

And this week, they will fail spectacularly as his wealth on paper rises thanks to the years of persecution he has suffered at the hands of Obama and the deep state. They kicked him off Twitter and made him billions of bucks.

We are not out of the woods by any means. But we do see the clearing ahead.

And we are laughing ourselves into a coughing spell as we relish the greatest Trumpenfreude of them all.

https://donsurber.substack.com/p/the-greatest-trumpenfreude-of-all?r=1qo1e&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email&triedRedirect=true