The Ten O'Clock Scholar

Prime Post

2011-08-16T19:36:00.002-04:00

Today this blog turns 7 years old, which is a prime number.

And, this marks the 1,013th posting, which is also prime.

Just Bad Luck

2011-08-15T21:00:00.003-04:00

On the campaign trail in Iowa, Obama says:

"We had reversed the recession, avoided a depression, gotten the economy moving again," Obama told a crowd in Decorah, Iowa. "But over the last six months we've had a run of bad luck." Obama listed three events overseas -- the Arab Spring uprisings, the tsunami in Japan, and the European debt crises -- which set the economy back.

How the Arab uprisings hurt the economy isn't quite clear to me, but be that as it may, recall Heinlein wrote in 1973:

Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded- here and there, now and then- are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.This is known as "bad luck."

UPDATE: Great minds thinking alike? Surely independently, Instapundit posted the exact same juxtaposition exactly one hour after I did!

Posted at 10:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds

Ha!

2012 Via Palantir

2011-08-14T11:16:00.003-04:00

Here is a hilarious guide to the 2010 election campaign, as seen through the lens of Middle Earth.

Orcs are public sector unions, ACORN, anyone who writes for Huffington Post, and every other evil, statist minion ever identified by Glenn Beck. Speaking of Beck, his closest equivalent is Denethor, Steward of Gondor — well-spoken and intelligent but more-than-slightly crazed.

The photographic juxtapositions alone are worth hitting the link and reading it all.

For extra credit, don't miss this "unused dvd commentary" dialogue by Zinn and Chomsky on the Fellowship of the Ring...

Judicial Engagement

2011-08-12T20:42:00.003-04:00

Perhaps some good news from the judicial branch:

In striking down Obamacare’s individual mandate today, the Eleventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals used the term “judicial engagement” to describe the proper role of courts in deciding constitutional cases. The Institute for Justice coined that term and today marks the first time a federal court has used it in this context. Instead of deferring reflexively to Congress as courts so often do, the Eleventh Circuit correctly observed that “the Constitution requires judicial engagement, not judicial abdication.” Institute for Justice president Chip Mellor praised the ruling: “We have more government at every level than the Constitution authorizes. This decision is an important step towards the direction of limited government.”

If Judicial Engagement is the opposite of judicial activism, by reining in government power to accord with the structure of the Constitution, rather than to arbitrarily expand it for the sake of expediency, I'm all for it!

Saving The Republic

2011-07-04T13:21:00.003-04:00

At the close of the Cosntitutional Convention in 1787, a woman asked Benjamin Franklin, "what have you given us, a republic or a monarchy?"

To which he responded, "A republic, Madam, if you can keep it."

And there are plenty of signs we are not keeping it, with far too much unbridled democracy leading to socialism leading inevitably to bankruptcy.

On this Independence Day, it is worthwhile to reflect upon solutions to restore the Republic.

Here is a link to a short paper from the Tennessee Law Review Symposium on proposed Constitutional reforms, entitled Divine Operating System.

Amongst the ideas are:

- adding the addendum, "And we really mean it!" to the 9th and 10th amendments;

- adding a House of Repeal, whose members are tasked only with repealing legislation, thus giving some politicians an actual incentive for smaller government

- the idea of "No representation without taxation", meaning that everyone should pay at least some income tax

- some kind of balanced budget process, or at least a line-item veto when the budget is out of whack

- a reduction of gerrymandered districts

These ideas are all good. I would add a few more.

1. Far too many people can now vote. Luckily, many choose not to exercise this right, and that genie is out of the bottle. We should at least endeavour to re-introduce a grounding in civic history in the schools, or in other words, remove the Marxists from the process

1a. As a symbolic gesture I would support raising the voting age back to 21, with an exception for members of the Armed Forces and Coast Guard.

2. The author of the above law article is not keen on term limits. I disagree. As for the cry that "we already have term limits -- just vote them out!", that's not the point, to simply turn them out. The idea is to change the incentives. Right now politicians have a strong incentive to avoid being voted out, by promising whatever is expedient in the short-term to the mob, which usually involved spending someone else's money (i.e., mine). Knowing that a career cannot be made out of false promises in perpetuity, a different class of person might be attracted to politics, and the ones there would perhaps at the margin think longer-term.

3. Repeal the 17th Amendment, which provided for direct election of Senators - Senators shouldn't be uber-representatives, who now get campaign cash from who knows where, and thus don't even represent the people of their states, let alone the states themselves as separate sovereign entities. I'm sure the process of appointing them by the states was corrupt, but so is the current process. At least we'd have one corruption in competition with another, which is the point of checks and balances.

For example, according to the Washington Post,

Harry M. Reid needed money, and lots of it....The senator began dialing old and new friends across the country, asking for their help. Many had one thing in common: They had a financial stake in legislation that Reid, as the most powerful member of the Senate, helps control....Sheila Krumholz, executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics, which monitors campaigns, said trial lawyers and other Democratic-leaning donors probably want to help Reid stay in power -- but other new outside interests may want something else from him.

Having him beholden to a Nevada political machine at least isolates the interests that control him, and pit them against others. Right now, one single big corrupt influence can buy any number of senators.

4. Term limits for the Supreme Court. This interesting idea I read elsewhere, in which members can serve up to two 18-year terms, with one new member appointed every two years. This has the added benefit of giving every President exactly two appointments per term, which distributes this power more fairly among Presidents, instead of opening the system to the gaming of ideological justices attempting to time their resignations to the administration of a favorable party.

5. The national popular vote movement needs to be stopped in its tracks.

Nearly 100 years on, it's time to start fixing the excesses of the Progressive Movement, and revive the Republic. Too much democracy is a bad thing.

Happy 235th Birthday, America!

May there be many more!

And let us honor those of an earlier, more confident age.

Marx Is Dead

2011-04-03T17:21:00.002-04:00

A simple evisceration of Marxist economic theories:

I read somewhere, written by a more literate person - I believe an economist - that the weakest point of the Marxist theories was that Marx, as an economist, was such a bizarre failure he never understood the role of resellers.
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This would only make sense for an academic who has lived in the city his whole life and is NOT aware of where his veggies come from. If you think your pasta grows on trees, you probably can imagine sauntering down to the local park and picking a bushel full. At worst, if you know it has to be made in a factory, you figure you should get it at factory price. Of course.

But the people who transport it have to make money too.
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But you really, really, really cannot study Marx for any length of time without seeing other holes.
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To Marx value was raw material plus work. The means of producing that work (machinery, etc) were just sort of there. And he made no allowance for invention. (Which is why though Marxist revolutions often recruit intellectuals they're the sort of intellectuals who never had an original idea in their life.) Of course in our day and age, invention and original thought are at least as important as machinery in creating product.

Also, the raw material fallacy means all the countries who have nothing else to sell feel "exploited" because we're taking their "value" away. Imbuing raw material itself with value means that it's sort of like stealing national treasure. This has given rise to an entire colonialist-exploitation-theory of history which has held more people in misery in developing countries than the most brazen robber baron could manage. And no one, NOT ONE seems to realize that their raw materials mean absolutely nothing if not used.
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I don't have time to go into all the crazy things that idea has caused, because the work=value thing fascinates me even more.

This is an idea SO loony only an exceedingly well educated person could believe it. We've all heard of the famous "if I take a month to polish a dog turd, can I charge by the hour of my labor?"
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This also discounts things such as human knowledge. Humans get better at tasks they do most often. This is the idea behind training. So, let's suppose what we're making is clay cups. I will undoubtedly take longer to make a clay cup than a master craftsman. I also - hey, I know myself - will end up with a lumpy product full of thumb marks. But I took longer. Therefore it's worth more, right? (Suddenly I understand how certain artsy shops charge for things.)

Now you're laughing and telling me no one believes that. Ah, but you're wrong. First of all people believed that - absolutely believed that, until they were in the place where they set production quotas and all the shoes available for sale were size twenty six and for the left foot.
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Good old Marx is also responsible for that most insane of ideas, the minimum wage. Dictating a minimum wage people have to be paid is the same as saying that labor has an intrinsic, minimal value. And before you scream I'm cruel or heartless, what the heck do feelings have to do with economics? Economics is the science of value. Value is what someone is willing to pay for something. NOT "but they need this to survive." THAT is an idea that work in itself has a value.

If that were true, we could hire an army of unemployed workers to polish dog turds for the international market. We'd be rich, rich I tell you!

Read it all!

Codex

2011-04-03T17:13:00.002-04:00

An unusual discovery. Whether forgery or authentic is as yet unclear, but it is potentially very interesting:

Lead Codex Found In Desert

If genuine, this could be the first-ever portrait of Jesus Christ, possibly even created in the lifetime of those who knew him.

The tiny booklet, a little smaller than a modern credit card, is sealed on all sides and has a three-dimensional representation of a human head on both the front and the back. One appears to have a beard and the other is without. Even the maker’s fingerprint can be seen in the lead impression. Beneath both figures is a line of as-yet undeciphered text in an ancient Hebrew script.

Astonishingly, one of the booklets appears to bear the words ‘Saviour of Israel’ – one of the few phrases so far translated.
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The samples were then sent to the Swiss National Materials Laboratory at Dubendorf, Switzerland. The results show they were consistent with ancient (Roman) period lead production and that the metal was smelted from ore that originated in the Mediterranean. Dr Northover also said that corrosion on the books was unlikely to be modern.

Meanwhile, the politics surrounding the provenance of the books is intensifying. Most professional scholars are cautious pending further research and point to the ongoing forgery trial in Israel over the ancient limestone ossuary purporting to have housed the bones of James, brother of Jesus.

The Israeli archeological establishment has sought to defuse problems of provenance by casting doubt on the authenticity of the codices, but Jordan says it will ‘exert all efforts at every level’ to get the relics repatriated.

The debate over whether these booklets are genuine and, if so, whether they represent the first known artefacts of the early Christian church or the first stirrings of mystical Kabbalah will undoubtedly rage for years to come.
The director of Jordan’s Department of Antiquities, Ziad al-Saad, has few doubts. He believes they may indeed have been made by followers of Jesus in the few decades immediately following his crucifixion.

‘They will really match, and perhaps be more significant than, the Dead Sea Scrolls,’ he says. ‘The initial information is very encouraging and it seems that we are looking at a very important and significant discovery – maybe the most important discovery in the history of archaeology.’

If he is right, then we really may be gazing at the face of Jesus Christ.

The Gut Speaks

2010-10-19T21:49:00.002-04:00

Bacteria rule the world in more ways than we know:

Researchers have found several reasons to believe that bacteria affect the mental health of humans. For one thing, bacteria produce some of the same types of neurotransmitters that regulate the function of the human brain. The human intestine contains a network of neurons, and the gut network routinely communicates with the brain. Gut bacteria affect that communication. “The bugs are talking to each other, and they’re talking to their host, and their host talks back,” Young says. The phrase “gut feeling” is probably, literally true.

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For example, it’s been known for a while that sick people get depressed and anxious. This seems so obvious as to be a no-brainer, but research suggests that some of the fear and fatigue associated with infections stems from immune responses affecting the brain.

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“For a long time, these deep sediments were thought to be devoid of any life at all,” he says. There’s life down there, all right, but talk about slow metabolism: When Parke analyzed 4.7 million-year-old organic sediment in the Mediterranean, he estimated the average time it took for resident microbes to reproduce by cell division at 120,000 years. And he reported finding living bacteria just over a mile below the seafloor, in sediments 111 million years old and at temperatures of 140 to 212 degrees Fahrenheit.

These and other new findings suggest that microbes deep in submarine rock may play a heretofore unrecognized role in the regulation of not just the oceans, but the global environment.

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But just how smart are they, really?

Giovannoni stops short of claiming that bacteria are actually thinking. But the litany of bacterial talents does nibble at conventional assumptions about thinking: Bacteria can distinguish “self” from “other,” and between their relatives and strangers; they can sense how big a space they’re in; they can move as a unit; they can produce a wide variety of signaling compounds, including at least one human neurotransmitter; they can also engage in numerous mutually beneficial relationships with their host’s cells. Even more impressive, some bacteria, such as Myxococcus xanthus, practice predation in packs, swarming as a group over prey microbes such as E. coli and dissolving their cell walls.

Glenn Reynolds CONDEMNED!

2010-09-18T13:24:00.000-04:00

They told me if I voted for John McCain...

Deep Thoughts

2010-09-12T18:41:00.002-04:00

Here's an amusing thought experiment.

If I proposed to burn an American flag, would Obama, the MSM, and the ACLU vigorously support my right to do so?

Now, what if it happened to have a Koran wrapped inside of it?

Sustainability

2010-07-28T21:11:00.002-04:00

Linking right in with this seemingly odd desire to limit our use of water, energy and resources, is this compelling claim at Pascal Fervor:

The single most debilitating thought in our world is not often spoken, but I see it underlying everything today.

S U S T A I N A B I L I T Y.

This is the arch concern of "very important" people who are acting on behalf of the fear that there are too many people on earth.

It means that a minimum number of people aim to maximize human decline with a minimum of fuss.
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Those who find themselves in positions of power and influence tend to be pessimists. Why that is I have done a bit more than speculate on my own and other sites. But why is not nearly as important to you, the individual, as first recognizing that the pessimism is there, in horrifying amounts, and then comprehending where all that angst is leading.

I find it logical and significant that Malthusianism which preceded Marxism came into being at roughly the same time that mankind achieved unprecedented liberty and then quickly gained the ability to thrive as never before. I also find it compelling to note that both deadly ideologies -- one from the start, the other proven to be -- have been and are heavily fostered and accepted by the highly positioned and/or the well-to-do who have self-styled themselves as "Progressives."

The furtherance of these ideas has become such accepted thinking in the splendid halls of "intelligentsia," that any who dare utter an optimistic word -- such as those who believe in a God who has promised to always provide -- are shouted down, marginalized, and persecuted.

And generic hatred of mankind other than oneself -- misanthropy-- underlies it all. I've witnessed it as have nearly everyone who is reading this blog when you bumped elbows with them. It is that sense of dread and loathing oozed by some in the upper classes for the "repulsive" middle class that ever strives upward to join them.

That ties together Progressivism, the hijacking of Environmentalism to rule every aspect of our lives, and the class warfare of the ultra-rich against middle America.

Belmont Club put it thus:

Once upon a time the future was going to be fun and the assumption was that things were always going to get biggest, faster and better. But today a significant current in public thinking holds that the coming years are going to be dark — that they literally should be dark. The UN’s has promulgated indicators to indicate how much of anything we shouild be allowed to use. Today efforts are being focused on the degree to which we can reduce energy consumption, limit intensity of materials use, cut down on water consumption, limit land use and curb mobility. The dream of the future is no longer the man in the flying car but the man/womyn/transgender person living in the smallest possible cubicle, limited to the narrowest geographic circle possible and consuming his own waste.
And we are getting there.

A future in which America will have no capability to send a human being into space is already in sight. And good riddance to it, some would say.

To bring it full circle, Belmont Club's link to the report on UN indicators above is entitled, gaggingly, "Sustainable Consumption", positing that consumption is destructive and bad.

There's that word again!

Sustainability is just a word to convince you to walk into the misanthropic tyrant's cage willingly.

Insufferable Busybodies

2010-07-25T19:47:00.004-04:00

Any doubt this monster of an adminstration and its fascist progressive allies want to control and regulate every aspect of human life, need look no further than this Department of Energy decree in May:

1992 federal law says a showerhead can deliver no more than 2.5 gallons per minute at a flowing water pressure of 80 pounds per square inch.

That in itself is a problem -- that they feel they can regulate that. But it gets worse!

But in May, the DOE said a "showerhead" may incorporate "one or more sprays, nozzles or openings." Under the new interpretation, all nozzles would count as a single showerhead and be deemed noncompliant if, taken together, they exceed the 2.5 gallons-a-minute maximum.

In May, the DOE's general counsel, Scott Blake Harris, fined four showerhead makers $165,104 in civil penalties, alleging they failed to demonstrate compliance for some devices.

Manufacturers and retailers say the new rules affect not just upscale systems but also those with hand-held sprays used by the elderly and disabled. Multiple showerheads often found in shower rooms at schools or gyms could also be at risk, manufacturers say. Customers will be disgruntled because of limited product range, they add.

"Did Congress limit consumer choice? Absolutely," the DOE's Mr. Harris says. "When you waste water, you waste energy." Each multi-head shower fixture uses an extra 40 to 80 thermal units of energy per year, equivalent to 50 gallons of gasoline, or one barrel of oil, he says.

If I want to pay for that, I WILL NOT stand for any busybody to tell me just how much energy I am "allowed" to use!

The showdown is a challenge to President Barack Obama and his energy secretary, Steven Chu, as they try to cajole—or compel—Americans to use water and energy more efficiently. Mr. Chu, a self-described "zealot" for energy efficiency, says he crawls around in his attic in his spare time installing extra insulation.

Send them back to the attic!

Compel?

I will now "waste" energy and water with glee just to spite them.

National Popular Vote Arguments

2010-07-20T19:54:00.002-04:00

A supporter of the National Popular Vote Initiative dropped by and anonymously left several lengthy comments on my previous piece. I won't be a repository for their propaganda; it can all be found verbatim on their website.

But I will address the main points raised.

And the main point to note is nowhere do the NPVI people address the fundamental (and little appreciated) structure of the Electoral College formula, that it was never meant to be a direct proxy for a citizen popular vote, but rather is a weighted average of TWO popular votes: one by the people, and one state-by-state.

Because those were the two power groups mentioned in the Constitution that ceded limited powers to form a Federal government, and thus are separately represented in Congress (House and Senate), and in choosing the President -- by the same Congressional formula.

The NPVI supporter ignores the state represention issue entirely, and thus we end up talking past each other.

On to the carefully-crafted misdirecting rhetoric:

The current system of electing the president ensures that the candidates do not reach out to all of the states and their voters.

Nor would a strategy to win 51% of the popular vote force a candidate to reach out to all states and voters. Indeed, such a strategy would foster targetting specific demographics, without regard to geographic diversity. If states only existed as subdivisions of Federal political power, this wouldn't be much of an issue -- but they aren't.

Another shortcoming of the current system is that a candidate can win the Presidency without winning the most popular votes nationwide. This has occurred in one of every 14 presidential elections.

Again, that is not a bug, but a feature. It's not meant as a poor proxy of a popular vote, but is a blend of TWO votes.

For example, though Gore in 2000 won the popular vote by a whisper-thin margin of 48.4% to 47.9%, Bush won the state-by-state vote in a LANDSLIDE of 59% to 41%!

Blended together by the electoral formula, Bush wins. There's nothing perverse or unfair in that outcome AT ALL.

The U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly characterized the authority of the state legislatures over the manner of awarding their electoral votes as "plenary" and "exclusive."

Indeed it is. The states can certainly do this. It's just foolish and wrong, as it further marginalizes states as separate political entitites with their own rights. The Founders believed the only thing strong enough to stand in the way of a government is another government.

There is no valid argument that the winner-take-all rule is entitled to any special deference based on history or the historical meaning of the words in the U.S. Constitution.

That too is true. If we wanted to make the popular vote piece of the electoral formula more representative, the reform I'd support is for States to assign their Electoral votes as 1 vote per Congressional district won (for the People's representation), plus the State's 2 votes to the overal state winner (for the State-by-state "popular vote"). Two states (Maine and Nebraska) already do this.

But, they'd never do that, because it would put a big piece of California and other large "blue" states in play for Republicans, and no Democrat could ever be elected President.

In Gallup polls since 1944, only about 20% of the public has supported the current system of awarding all of a state's electoral votes to the presidential candidate who receives the most votes in each separate state (with about 70% opposed and about 10% undecided).

Irrelevant. They surely don't understand the real issues at stake, and have been misled to believe the Electoral College gets in the way of their popular vote for no good reason. The importance of the States is largely forgotten by most -- but not by me.

I'll take the National Popular Vote movement more seriously as a principled stand, if it also stood for abolishing the Senate as an irrelevant body getting in the way of direct representation in the House.

Instead, it will increase the risks of populism and demogoguery, and identity-group politics at the further expense of the already near-moribund States, which are supposed to stand as important bastions between us and a Federal government that naturally trends to tyranny.

Too much pure democracy is a bad thing -- as Franklin put it, two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for dinner.

Another Willful Step To State Destruction

2010-07-19T23:28:00.002-04:00

Senate Action Moves Commonwealth of Massachusetts One Step Closer to Enactment

Last night, the Massachusetts Senate passed National Popular Vote legislation by a vote of 28 to 10, moving the Commonwealth of Massachusetts one step closer to giving voters an equal vote in electing America’s President. The Massachusetts Senate vote follows the recent 52-7 New York State Senate vote in favor of the bill—a victory supported by a 22-5 Republican margin (with 3 not voting) and 30-2 Democrat margin.
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National Popular Vote preserves the Electoral College by creating an agreement among the states. When enough states join (totaling 270 or more Electoral Votes or a majority of the Electoral College), the agreement triggers. Compacting states then award a majority of Electoral Votes to the candidate who wins the most votes in all fifty states, guaranteeing the presidency.

Terrible, misguided idea. More news and background here.

“Our proposal is consistent with the intent and wishes of our Founding Fathers and gives the American people what they want,” said Koza. “The compact addresses the serious drawbacks of the current system of state-by-state, winner-take-all rules. It ends a system that marginalizes two-thirds of America’s voters. With National Popular Vote, a vote in Massachusetts will always count as much as a vote in Florida.”

Wrong wrong wrong!!!

They make it sound so reasonable, but it is a deception. The talk of equal votes is a complete misdirection. The Electoral College system is intended to blend TWO separate votes, one a popular one and one a state-by-state one in choosing the President!

That fact is generally forgotten, as State's Rights have withered away -- but it is recognized in the Constitution that TWO groups, the States and the People, both ceded limited powers to the Federal Government, and thus that is why both are represented separately in the Senate (with all states equal) and in the House (proportionally to population, for the People) in Congress.

And so both also get to weigh in on electing the President through the Electoral formula. Thus we see the supposed "anomaly" when Gore lost to Bush though winning the popular vote really wasn't odd at all, because Bush won the state vote in a landslide -- and the blending of those two results together resulted in a Bush win.

EXACTLY AS THE FOUNDERS INTENDED!

So the first statement in the quote above, "Our proposal is consistent with the intent and wishes of our Founding Fathers" is a complete and utter LIE.

Massachusetts is poised to join Maryland, Illinois, New Jersey, Washington and Hawaii as the sixth state to enact the National Popular Vote bill. Companion bills have been introduced in all fifty U.S. States.

Idiots. how they so easily throw away their State's Rights! Those legislators are allowing their votes to be controlled by people outside of their own state. It is such outrageous foolishness that it is beyond belief.

And yet, here we are.

Who is really behind this National Popular Vote Initiative?

Class Warfare

2010-07-18T19:57:00.002-04:00

Class warfare is back, but this time it's the ultrawealthy and the "ruling class" setting out to destroy the middle class. Their perfect vision is one of perpetual power, created by dividing society into two parts: those who oversee the resources and hand out largesse for the Progressive public good, and everyone else who is dependent upon receiving those handouts.

The upwardly-striving middle class doesn't fit into that model.

This also requires resources, particularly energy, to be scarce. I've always argued energy should be cheap and used plentifully and never understood the rationers, but now it makes sense. And clearly the Green movement and the Global Warming hysteria play right into it.

But I digress. Here is the essay everyone is talking about right now, which lays it all out. It is long, and important:

Never has there been so little diversity within America's upper crust.
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Today's ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits. These amount to a social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins (against minorities and the environment), and saints. Using the right words and avoiding the wrong ones when referring to such matters -- speaking the "in" language -- serves as a badge of identity. Regardless of what business or profession they are in, their road up included government channels and government money because, as government has grown, its boundary with the rest of American life has become indistinct. Many began their careers in government and leveraged their way into the private sector. Some, e.g., Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, never held a non-government job. Hence whether formally in government, out of it, or halfway, America's ruling class speaks the language and has the tastes, habits, and tools of bureaucrats. It rules uneasily over the majority of Americans not oriented to government.

The two classes have less in common culturally, dislike each other more, and embody ways of life more different from one another than did the 19th century's Northerners and Southerners -- nearly all of whom, as Lincoln reminded them, "prayed to the same God." By contrast, while most Americans pray to the God "who created and doth sustain us," our ruling class prays to itself as "saviors of the planet" and improvers of humanity.
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Once an official or professional shows that he shares the manners, the tastes, the interests of the class, gives lip service to its ideals and shibboleths, and is willing to accommodate the interests of its senior members, he can move profitably among our establishment's parts.

If, for example, you are Laurence Tribe in 1984, Harvard professor of law, leftist pillar of the establishment, you can "write" your magnum opus by using the products of your student assistant, Ron Klain. A decade later, after Klain admits to having written some parts of the book, and the other parts are found to be verbatim or paraphrases of a book published in 1974, you can claim (perhaps correctly) that your plagiarism was "inadvertent," and you can count on the Law School's dean, Elena Kagan, to appoint a committee including former and future Harvard president Derek Bok that issues a secret report that "closes" the incident. Incidentally, Kagan ends up a justice of the Supreme Court. Not one of these people did their jobs: the professor did not write the book himself, the assistant plagiarized instead of researching, the dean and the committee did not hold the professor accountable, and all ended up rewarded. By contrast, for example, learned papers and distinguished careers in climatology at MIT (Richard Lindzen) or UVA (S. Fred Singer) are not enough for their questions about "global warming" to be taken seriously. For our ruling class, identity always trumps.
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As the 19th century ended, the educated class's religious fervor turned to social reform: they were sure that because man is a mere part of evolutionary nature, man could be improved, and that they, the most highly evolved of all, were the improvers.

Thus began the Progressive Era. When Woodrow Wilson in 1914 was asked "can't you let anything alone?" he answered with, "I let everything alone that you can show me is not itself moving in the wrong direction, but I am not going to let those things alone that I see are going down-hill."
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Our ruling class's agenda is power for itself. While it stakes its claim through intellectual-moral pretense, it holds power by one of the oldest and most prosaic of means: patronage and promises thereof. Like left-wing parties always and everywhere, it is a "machine," that is, based on providing tangible rewards to its members. Such parties often provide rank-and-file activists with modest livelihoods and enhance mightily the upper levels' wealth. Because this is so, whatever else such parties might accomplish, they must feed the machine by transferring money or jobs or privileges -- civic as well as economic -- to the party's clients, directly or indirectly. This, incidentally, is close to Aristotle's view of democracy. Hence our ruling class's standard approach to any and all matters, its solution to any and all problems, is to increase the power of the government -- meaning of those who run it, meaning themselves, to profit those who pay with political support for privileged jobs, contracts, etc. Hence more power for the ruling class has been our ruling class's solution not just for economic downturns and social ills but also for hurricanes and tornadoes, global cooling and global warming.
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Dependence Economics

By taxing and parceling out more than a third of what Americans produce, through regulations that reach deep into American life, our ruling class is making itself the arbiter of wealth and poverty. While the economic value of anything depends on sellers and buyers agreeing on that value as civil equals in the absence of force, modern government is about nothing if not tampering with civil equality. By endowing some in society with power to force others to sell cheaper than they would, and forcing others yet to buy at higher prices -- even to buy in the first place -- modern government makes valuable some things that are not, and devalues others that are. Thus if you are not among the favored guests at the table where officials make detailed lists of who is to receive what at whose expense, you are on the menu. Eventually, pretending forcibly that valueless things have value dilutes the currency's value for all.

Laws and regulations nowadays are longer than ever because length is needed to specify how people will be treated unequally. For example, the health care bill of 2010 takes more than 2,700 pages to make sure not just that some states will be treated differently from others because their senators offered key political support, but more importantly to codify bargains between the government and various parts of the health care industry, state governments, and large employers about who would receive what benefits (e.g., public employee unions and auto workers) and who would pass what indirect taxes onto the general public.
...
Nowadays, the members of our ruling class admit that they do not read the laws. They don't have to. Because modern laws are primarily grants of discretion, all anybody has to know about them is whom they empower.

By making economic rules dependent on discretion, our bipartisan ruling class teaches that prosperity is to be bought with the coin of political support.

Government needs a cleansing.

But wait, it gets worse!

In Congressional Government (1885) Woodrow Wilson left no doubt: the U.S. Constitution prevents the government from meeting the country's needs by enumerating rights that the government may not infringe. ("Congress shall make no law..." says the First Amendment, typically.) Our electoral system, based on single member districts, empowers individual voters at the expense of "responsible parties." Hence the ruling class's perpetual agenda has been to diminish the role of the citizenry's elected representatives, enhancing that of party leaders as well as of groups willing to partner in the government's plans, and to craft a "living" Constitution in which restrictions on government give way to "positive rights" -- meaning charters of government power.

Anyone who believes that way is an enemy of the Constitution and of individual Liberty.

We The People

2010-07-18T19:47:00.001-04:00

It's a trend!

I Am America

2010-07-18T19:28:00.002-04:00

The title reminds me of this post.

Losing the Republic

2010-06-24T22:05:00.003-04:00

See UPDATE below!

Chilling developments in a topic I've written on before that gets too little attention (see here, here and here):

Attacks on the Electoral College Gain Momentum

You won’t hear about it in the mainstream media, but the Electoral College is on the verge of being eliminated. One important legislative vote could occur Thursday. Two others could occur in the upcoming days and weeks.

A California-based group, National Popular Vote, is lobbying hard for a dangerous piece of anti-Electoral College legislation. My NRO article on the mechanics of the legislation is here. Five states have already approved NPV, but now three additional states are dangerously close to joining them: Delaware, Massachusetts, and New York. Another trio of state legislatures approved the scheme, but their governors vetoed the plan. These latter states remain important; a reasonable argument can be made that the gubernatorial vetoes are irrelevant.

If each of these states is counted, NPV could have as many as 169 electoral votes in favor of its plan. It needs 270. NPV has come startlingly close to success even as most Americans remain completely unaware that the presidential-election process is so close to being turned on its head.

The scheme is based on states colluding to cast their electoral votes for the national popular vote winner, rather than for the winner of their own particular state!

This is complete madness -- state lawmakers are essentially declaring that they will theoretically squander their citizen's votes on a candidate that zero people in the state voted for.

This wrongly strips out the state-vote aspect of the Electoral College, which was never intended to be a proxy for the popular vote -- it is a weighted average of the popular vote with a state-by-state vote, since both the people and the states ceded power in the Constitution to form the federal government.

And that is why both are represented separately in Congress.

States already had their interests gutted when the 17th Amendment changed Senators from being appointed by State governments (as their direct representatives) to being elected by popular vote. And now Senators receive national money to run their election campaigns, and thus are beholden to special interests instead of the State interest.

These "progressive" moves towards greater and greater democracy are not a good thing -- we were set up as a Republic for a reason.

UPDATE: Case in point on the destructiveness of the 17 Amendment -- Sen. Harry M. Reid building war chest by tapping donors beyond Nevada

Harry M. Reid needed money, and lots of it....The senator began dialing old and new friends across the country, asking for their help. Many had one thing in common: They had a financial stake in legislation that Reid, as the most powerful member of the Senate, helps control....Sheila Krumholz, executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics, which monitors campaigns, said trial lawyers and other Democratic-leaning donors probably want to help Reid stay in power -- but other new outside interests may want something else from him.

Clearly, it is a fantasy that Reid represents Nevada as a state.

Web Of Connections

2010-03-25T21:47:00.002-04:00

A Farm Story

2010-03-25T21:45:00.001-04:00

Speaker Pelosi was being driven back to the airport one dark Northern California night from her vineyard home. Coming around a bend, there was a terrific crash and the car skidded off the road. “What happened?” shouted the Speaker from the back seat. The driver said, “I hit something, it just appeared in the dark. Lemme see what it is.” The driver and the Speaker shortly thereafter stood over the expiring corpse of an cow. “Well, Madame Speaker,” the driver said, “I was raised on a farm, and from the look of this cow she was really, really old and wouldn’t have lived much longer anyway.” He looked up the hill to a small farmhouse. “I guess I’ll go tell those people the news, it’s probably their cow.”

The driver trudged up the hill, and was gone for several hours. Finally he comes back down the hill, inebriated and disheveled. “What happened to you?” screeched the Speaker, now several hours late for her flight. “Why were you gone so long?”

“Well,” began the driver, “I walked up to the door and explained who I was and what had happened. The family really didn’t seem that upset. They invited me in for a bottle of their own wine, which led to another bottle, and then we were hungry and they cooked us a fabulous meal, and since I had killed their cow I didn’t feel I could refuse. While we were eating, their daughter came home. She’s an Oakland Raiders cheerleader, and when they explained who I was she insisted on showing me the room she grew up in. Well, one thing led to another and she was really, really friendly, and how could I refuse?”

“That’s crazy!” shouted the Speaker. “Why would they react like that? What did you tell them?”

“Well, when they answered the door I told them I was Speaker Pelosi’s driver and I had run over the old cow and she was dead.”

Ba-dum-bum!

Your New Requirements

2009-11-12T00:28:00.003-05:00

Who knew the problem of providing health care to all Americans was so easy to solve?

Just make a law mandating that everyone buy insurance on pain of imprisonment! Problem solved!

That's what the current Bill proposes -- and if you don't buy it, the penalties are massive fines and up to 5 years in jail.

The audacity and offensiveness of this tactic is incredible!

Health care has gone from an entitlement to a "right" to a requirement!

Rights used to be things government couldn't do to you. Then they became things government had to provide you. Now they are things government forces upon you!

Why not use the same method to eliminate homelessness? Buy a (government approved!) house or go to jail! It would help out Barney Frank's Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac!

Think about the implications. The Federal government is asserting it has the power to force its subjects (because that's what we now are if they can do this: subjects) to purchase and consume particular goods and services.

Mandate everyone buys Obamabonds to help the deficit.

Or everyone has to buy at least one ~~Government~~ General Motors brand car, to help the auto unions.

Why not?

Obama endorses this concept according in an ABC interview:

“What I think is appropriate is that in the same way that everybody has to get auto insurance and if you don't, you're subject to some penalty, that in this situation, if you have the ability to buy insurance, it's affordable and you choose not to do so, forcing you and me and everybody else to subsidize you, you know, there's a thousand dollar hidden tax that families all across America are -- are burdened by because of the fact that people don't have health insurance, you know, there's nothing wrong with a penalty.”

Hold it right there!

The old specious "auto" analogy the anti-gunners liked to use for requiring tests and licenses for gun ownership is even less applicable here! To use that argument, Obama must be either stupid or deliberately lying.

First, not everyone has to buy auto insurance. If you don't buy a car, no insurance!

Second, even if you do own your own car, you don't have to buy collision insurance, which is the analog of health insurance -- the other insurance for the car is liability in case you injure someone or damage their property, which isn't an applicable concept.

And third, the Federal government has no such power to make people buy auto insurance, it's a State issue.

So how in the world do they think they have the ability to force me to buy a particular type of product whether I want it or not?!?

Just like in Star Wars: Liberty dies to thuderous applause.

Blogging Light

2009-11-08T22:10:00.002-05:00

Blogging has been light lately and will remain so for a while. Why? Happily, I am just too busy with moving into a new house and working with my fiance on our wedding details.

In the meantime, I suggest keeping up with events by reading the excellent essays at Belmont Club, checking the headlines at Drudge, and finding the interesting tidbits at Instapundit.

And tell your Senators to stop ObamaPelosicare in its tracks, it's our only hope!

Lesser Evil

2009-11-08T21:57:00.003-05:00

Found via Instapundit. Jerry Pournelle opines:

“Unemployment is over 10%. It wasn’t supposed to get that high. TARP was supposed to fix that. . . . If the health care bill passes, it will fundamentally convert these United States into a different kind of popular democracy, which generally means rule by a unionized bureaucracy organized to vote. Once that much of the economy is run by government, economic recovery as many hope for will simply be impossible. Permanent unemployment at 7% or so; median income perhaps 10% higher than it is now, but not much higher; and a long period of stagflation. Reluctance to take on new employees, and great incentive to export jobs. Is this a picture of the future? We will have to see, as Congress debates the health care and carbon tax bills. . . . With Detroit a ruin and manufacturing industries on the ropes, small business is the only possible engine of recovery from what they don’t call a Depression; so the Congress is going to add an 8% tax on employing people. We already have the longest period of increasing unemployment since the Great Depression; I presume we are going for a really big record setting period of increasing unemployment. . . . The incentives are now to the job black market — hire illegal immigrants who don’t have to have health insurance — or to export the job if that can possibly be done.”

All I can say is,

Moral Imbeciles

2009-10-19T00:23:00.004-04:00

Ready to be disgusted?

Need more proof Hollywood is out of touch with reality?

Here is the petition to free poor old Roman Polanski, where we can see who are the moral imbeciles.

It is quite a list of so-called luminaries including several big names.

But first let's dissect the wording of the petition, for its decadence is glorious to behold:

Petition for Roman Polanski

We have learned the astonishing news of Roman Polanski's arrest by the Swiss police on September 26th, upon arrival in Zurich (Switzerland) while on his way to a film festival where he was due to receive an award for his career in filmmaking.

Mon Dieu! What poor taste to arrest a great filmmaker! He should be immune while receiving our awards!

His arrest follows an American arrest warrant dating from 1978 against the filmmaker, in a case of morals.

You see, it was just a backward, Puritanical American morals charge -- not a real crime, just a case of morals. You know, morals, which are just a matter of opinion.

The "morals charge" these vile morons are speaking of is the drugging and rape of a 13-year-old girl (30 years his junior), in the face of her protests, to which (in spite of whatever "prosecutorial misconduct" his defenders rush to announce) he admitted his guilt, and was convicted. The unsealed details are here.

Filmmakers in France, in Europe, in the United States and around the world are dismayed by this decision. It seems inadmissible to them that an international cultural event, paying homage to one of the greatest contemporary filmmakers, is used by the police to apprehend him.

Do we laugh or cry at this? International cultural events are off limits to police?

These "people" are dismayed by justice, but not by Polanski's crime.

By their extraterritorial nature, film festivals the world over have always permitted works to be shown and for filmmakers to present them freely and safely, even when certain States opposed this.

The arrest of Roman Polanski in a neutral country, where he assumed he could travel without hindrance, undermines this tradition: it opens the way for actions of which no-one can know the effects.

What, they're diplomats now? The self-importance is unbelievable.

Then they demand his immediate release...or else Franco-American relations will suffer. The international filmmaking community stands by the predatory child rapist!

So do many others. They say the "alleged" victim wants the case dismissed.

Justice doesn't work that way.

It looks like 800-900 names so far, mostly French. Several are starlets and eurotrash directors. Others are big names, supposedly serious people. For example:

Woody Allen - no surprise there
Pedro Almodovar - "acclaimed Spanish filmmaker"
Jean-Jacques Annaud - directed Name of the Rose, Quest for Fire
Jonathan Demme - Silence of the Lambs
Terry Gilliam - Time Bandits, Brazil, etc.
John Landis - Animal House, Blues Brothers, etc.
David Lynch - Twin Peaks, Blue Velvet, Dune, Eraserhead, etc.
Jeanne Moreau - "greatest actress in the world" (said Orson Welles)
Martin Scorsese - Taxi Driver, Goodfellas, etc.
Tilda Swinton - Oscar-winning actress
Wim Wenders - Buena Vista Social Club, Wings of Desire, etc.

May they be jeered, shamed, and impoverished for their support of evilness.

Vespucci Day

2009-10-14T21:15:00.002-04:00

Monday was Columbus Day. Hurray for the New World!

The news of course trotted out the accounts of Columbus bashing in the schools.

TAMPA, Florida (AP) — Christopher Columbus' stature in U.S. classrooms has declined somewhat through the years, and many districts will not observe the explorer's namesake holiday on Monday.
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In McDonald, Pennsylvania, 30 miles southwest of Pittsburgh, fourth-grade students at Fort Cherry Elementary put Columbus on trial this year — charging him with misrepresenting the Spanish crown and thievery. They found him guilty and sentenced him to life in prison.

How nice.

More examples abound, like this tired complaint:

"You don't hear people using the world 'discovery' anymore like they used to. 'Columbus discovers America.' Because how could he discover America if there were already people living here?"

That complaint only makes sense in a multiculturalist context, because for Western Culture, which is my culture that I am not ashamed to defend as a very good and successful one, he DID discover it.

Or did he?

Amerigo Vespucci (born in Florence in 1452), whose name was given to the American continents by Waldsmuller in 1507, worked in Seville (where he died) in the business house which fitted out Columbus' second expedition. Here he gives an account of the first of his own four voyages. If his claims are accurate he reached the mainland of the Americas shortly before Cabot, and at least 14 months before Columbus.

Interesting. But that's not really the issue.

What's the issue is how we hear everyone complain how horrid the Europeans were to come to the pristine, innocent New World, bringing only disease and death to the noble indigenous peoples who were otherwise living in peace and harmony with Mother Nature.

Or were they?

From Vespucci's letter, we read some interesting observations:

Warfare is used amongst them, which they carry on against people not of their own language, very cruelly, without granting life to any one, except (to reserve him) for greater suffering.
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and the cause of their wars is not for lust of dominion, nor of extending their frontiers, no for inordinate covetousness, but for some ancient enmity which in by-gone times arose amongst them: and when asked why they made war, they knew not any other reason to give than that they did so to avenge the death of their ancestors, or of their parents:
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and so are they stirred up by fellow-feeling: they have no judicial system, nor do they punish the ill-doer: nor does the father, nor the mother chastise the children
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and we saw a village of only thirteen houses where there were four thousand souls: every eight or ten years they change their habitations: and when asked why they did so: (they said it was) because of the soil which, from its filthiness, was already unhealthy and corrupted, and that it bred aches in their bodies, which seemed to us a good reason:
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When they die, they use divers manners of obsequies, and some they bury with water and victuals at their heads: thinking that they shall have (whereof) to eat: they have not nor do they use ceremonies of torches nor of lamentation. In some other places, they use the most barbarous and inhuman burial, which is that when a suffering or infirm (person) is as it were at the last pass of death, his kinsmen carry him into a large forest, and attach one of those nets, of theirs, in which they sleep, to two trees, and then put him in it, and dance around him for a whole day: and when the night comes on they place at his bolster, water with other victuals, so that he may be able to subsist for four or six days: and then they leave him alone and return to the village: and if the sick man helps himself, and eats, and drinks, and survives, he returns to the village, and his (friends) receive him with ceremony: but few are they who escape: without receiving any further visit they die, and that is their sepulture: and they have many other customs which for prolixity are not related.
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they eat little flesh except human flesh: for your Magnificence must know that herein they are so inhuman that they outdo every custom (even) of beasts; for they eat all their enemies whom they kill or capture, as well females as males with so much savagery, that (merely) to relate it appears a horrible thing: how much more so to see it, as, infinite times and in many places, it was my hap to see it: and they wondered to hear us say that we did not eat our enemies: and this your Magnificence may take for certain, that their other barbarous customs are such that expression is too weak for the reality:
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we remained 37 days: and went many times to their villages: where they paid us the greatest honour: and (now) desiring to depart upon our voyage, they made complaint to us how at certain times of the year there came from over the sea to this their land, a race of people very cruel, and enemies of theirs: and (who) by means of treachery or of violence slew many of them, and ate them: and some they made captives, and carried them away to their houses, or country: and how they could scarcely contrive to defend themselves from them, making signs to us that (those) were an island-people and lived out in the sea about a hundred leagues away: and so piteously did they tell us this that we believed them: and we promised to avenge them of so much wrong: and they remained overjoyed herewith:

And they went and had their way with the evildoers, with cannon and lance.

Moral Adolescence and Leftism

2009-09-15T21:01:00.003-04:00

This blogger reveals fascinating research on morality and ideology:

With research in the field of moral psychology as a guide, we may discover that the split between the so-called “liberal” and “conservative” mindsets derives from a paradigm we already understand quite well.

Haidt: Ideology and the Moral Mind

The ideological key described above comes from what may seem an unlikely source: a self-described atheist and liberal academic – moral psychology researcher and U. Va. Associate Professor Jonathan Haidt. Through extensive research, Haidt and his colleagues have characterized notions of morality, and have quantified how these notions are expressed differently across various cultures and ideological groups. That expression, as Haidt’s and others’ research shows, is directed by a complex facet of our psyche which he calls our moral mind.

Professor Haidt explains his motivations -- they are not the typical ones often used to attempt to paint conservatism as a mental disorder:

If Democrats want to understand what makes people vote Republican, they must first understand the full spectrum of American moral concerns. They should then consider whether they can use more of that spectrum themselves. … Unity is not the great need of the hour, it is the eternal struggle of our immigrant nation. The three Durkheimian foundations of ingroup, authority, and purity are powerful tools in that struggle. Until Democrats understand this point, they will be vulnerable to the seductive but false belief that Americans vote for Republicans primarily because they have been duped into doing so.

The work of Haidt's group can be found here. Haidt's thesis in a nutshell is:

In brief, the theory proposes that five innate and universally available psychological systems are the foundations of “intuitive ethics.” Each culture then constructs virtues, narratives, and institutions on top of these foundations, thereby creating the unique moralities we see around the world, and conflicting within nations too. The foundations are:

1) Harm/care, related to our long evolution as mammals with attachment systems and an ability to feel (and dislike) the pain of others. This foundation underlies virtues of kindness, gentleness, and nurturance.

2) Fairness/reciprocity, related to the evolutionary process of reciprocal altruism. This foundation generates ideas of justice, rights, and autonomy.

3) Ingroup/loyalty, related to our long history as tribal creatures able to form shifting coalitions. This foundation underlies virtues of patriotism and self-sacrifice for the group. It is active anytime people feel that it's "one for all, and all for one."

4) Authority/respect, shaped by our long primate history of hierarchical social interactions. This foundaiton underlies virtues of leadership and followership, including deference to legitimate authority and respect for traditions.

5) Purity/sanctity, shaped by the psychology of disgust and contamination. This foundation underlies religious notions of striving to live in an elevated, less carnal, more noble way. It underlies the widespread idea that the body is a temple which can be desecrated by immoral activities and contaminants (an idea not unique to religious traditions).

Much of our present research involves applying the theory to political "cultures" such as those of liberals and conservatives. The current American culture war, we have found, can be seen as arising from the fact that liberals try to create a morality relying almost exclusively on the Harm/Care and Fairness/Reciprocity foundations; conservatives, especially religious conservatives, use all five foundations, including Ingroup/Loyalty, Authority/Respect, and Purity/Sanctity.

You can take your own test, and contribute to the research, here.

But back to Haidt's observation, here is a chart of the priority placed on the different types of morality by leftists vs. conservatives:

The blogger elucidates:

The first striking aspect is, of course, the wide separation at the liberal end of the spectrum, where the intuitive ethics of Harm and Fairness completely dominate the liberal definition of morality. The second striking aspect is how closely all five ethical foundations are grouped together at the conservative end of the spectrum.

Third – and striking primarily because these are the two areas of ethics most commonly cited by liberals, as indicative of conservative “heartlessness”, “corporate greed”, etc. – is the fact that while conservatives certainly associate Harm and Fairness with morality less strongly than liberals, the difference just isn’t really all that great on the overall scale.

Possibly the most critical aspect of the phenomenon exhibited in the graphic above is that Haidt, et al., see this same distribution in every culture they examine. Clearly, this is not an American or even a Western Culture phenomenon, but one grounded in basic human nature and, thus, driven by the rules of human psychological development.

The Nature of Moral Adolescence

Analyzing the data collected by Haidt, et al., and the amazing consistency he sees across various cultures in this regard, we recognize a number of critical points. First, we see that an individual’s political ideology is directly related to their definition of morality. Meanwhile, a moral mind which values only two of the five intuitive moral foundations has a strong affinity for the liberal notions of “social justice” and “fairness” as expressed in the collectivist ideologies of Marxism and socialism. Furthermore, a moral mind which values all five intuitive ethics in a holistic, comprehensive way is drawn to the conservative tenets of classical liberalism, as expressed in republicanism, individual liberty, right to property and capitalism, for instance.

Most importantly, in light of the first element noted up above, regarding the manner in which our morality evolves as we mature, we see that these two viewpoints – liberal and conservative – are clear expressions of moral adolescence and moral maturity, respectively. While Haidt avoids making this observation, this difference is the great insight his work provides. This is the Rosetta Stone needed to understand the fundamental difference between liberal and conservative views.

The blogger goes on to discuss why, therefore, it's useless to try to reason with or compromise with leftists as if they weren't adolescents -- instead they are to be educated:

In fact, outside the framework of scientific research in the realm of common experience, most conservatives – especially those frustrated with the downward slide our Republic has taken over the past 70-odd years – are likely to see moral adolescence as a perfect explanation for why an intellectually, physically and chronologically mature adult can espouse a political ideology that would only appeal to an adolescent with no life experience and no understanding of history. Furthermore, the appeal to ridicule fallacies, overwhelming and unnecessary use of profanity and tantrum-like behavior exhibited by many adult liberals certainly fits the notion of adolescent behavior.

In truth, for all those reasons and more, there are probably very few politically-aware conservatives who haven’t long ago viewed leftist ideologues as adolescents. Up to now however, there was no clear social science to support this view. That’s changed.

Great discussion there on the breakdown of education at the root of this cultural war -- read it all! Plenty of links, and a video of Haidt speaking on the topic as well.

Keep in mind that "moral adolescence is not Haidt's term; rather, he is interested in getting progressives to avoid groupthink in assuming conservatives are just dumb or misled, but instead have a well-defined different way of thinking. The key to his research is that humans are not born as moral blank slates, but across cultures have these five innate moral concerns, which can be shaped by experience.

And Haidt points out that the apparently "repressive" aspects of authority, ingroup, and purity in the conservative moral compass are there for an important reason -- namely, to maintain civilization -- which is a very tricky thing indeed, the difficulty of which leftists underestimate to the peril of us all. He supports this with social research into how group cooperation quickly disintegrates without some kind of punishment or other motivational mechanism (i.e. the conservative aspects of morality), and then we'd all be living in a Hobbesian chaos.

Interestingly, this other site also seems to have developed the notion of modern liberalism as a form of adolescent immaturity -- or in other words, a lack of understanding of the difficulty in building and maintaining a civilization, because all of its bounty was bestowed upon them semmingly without effort, when in fact it was created with enormous difficulty and is truly a miracle. They did not have to struggle to build it, nor did they vicariously partake in its construction through a proper education of traditional liberal arts -- too many "dead white males", apparently:

Under the creed of modern liberalism, the individual citizen is not called to maturity but is instead invited to begin a second childhood. Like the child at play, he is given, or at least promised, ultimate economic, social and political security without having to assume responsibility for himself. The liberal agenda requires him to remain in an artificial environment--the daycare program of the grandiose state--where he need not become an adult, take responsibility for his own welfare, nor cooperate with others to achieve what the state will give him for nothing.

Grow up and learn something!

The Government Can!

2009-09-07T19:00:00.000-04:00

Sea Levels

2009-09-04T18:14:00.002-04:00

More context for the boondoggle known as climate change.

Rising sea levels a sign of runaway global warming, which will doom us all?

For some perspective, a longer-term chart:

An observer makes these cogent remarks about the graph:

As it happens, the IPCC does present a chart of sea levels and its trend is more obvious than the temperature trend. It shows a steady rise of about 200 millimeters in the last 120 years. That's about eight inches. Is eight inches over 120 years significant or alarming?
...
First, look at the vertical scale. It ranges over about 120 meters (not millimeters), about 400 feet. On the page you see this graph, a change of 200 millimeters (or the change in the last 120 years per the IPCC) would be would be about the width of your eyelash. When the seas were 400 feet lower, people could walk from Russia to Alaska and from France to England.

We engineers have a saying: measure with a micrometer, mark with chalk, cut with an axe. That saying is meant to put things in perspective for young engineers who like to calculate things out to the number of digits visible on their calculators.

Global warmists are taking their micrometer, literally, to the last 120 years on this chart, an area that would probably fit in the upper rightmost dot on that chart. And from that, extrapolating that we are all about to die.

I no longer need to squint my eyes to see a one degree per century trend in a cloud of noisy data. The trends are stark. Thus, my epiphany.

If sea levels go along with global temperatures, as the warmists frequently remind us, then this chart makes blatantly obvious that

-- Man has just about nothing to do with global temperatures,
-- Any temperature changes in the last 100 years are insignificant compared to longer term changes,
-- And current trends are most likely just the final flattening out of temperatures after rising from the last ice age.

How can you blame man for sea levels rising when about 99% of that rise since the last ice age occurred before man built the pyramids, much less SUVs? A rise in sea level over the last century should not be surprising; it's been rising for the last 20,000 years.

More inconvenient questions from this author:

I've seen graphs of temperatures, such as the so-called "global" temperature. The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, for example, presents such a graph in its "Summary for Policy Makers." While this graph does present to the eyeball a rising trend, one could ask several questions.

The total range of temperatures is within plus or minus half a degree Centigrade. Are we sure we are seeing a true trend and not just randomness?

The total range of time is about 150 years, and the range of time in which an upward trend is apparent is perhaps the last 30 years. Is that a long enough time period to gauge a trend?

On the other hand, looking closely at the years since 1998, the trend seems to have leveled off or even dropped. Is that too short a time to gauge a trend?

Are the thermometers in enough places and the right places? Maybe we get too many readings from North America and too few from Antarctica, for example.

How do you get just one number for each year? How do you take all the temperature readings from all the thermometers and all the days and hours that temperatures were read, and get a single number?

If a computer algorithm is used to come up with the numbers, how sure are you that the algorithm did not add some artificial biases?

How do you compare temperatures over time? Weren't thermometers added, thermometers replaced, and whole new stations included? Are earlier readings comparable with later ones?

How do you know any given temperature reading reflects real climate, and not just what's happening near that temperature station? That is, do parking lots, buildings, air conditioners, etc. have a significant impact on thermometer readings?

Weren't all the thermometers used to make this graph on land? Doesn't that leave out the 75% of the earth's surface that is water?

If the warming trend were stark and obvious, the questions above would be less important. But one degree in a century? I can't feel one degree. I can't find two thermometers that agree that closely. The temperature regularly changes by 20 degrees or so every day where I live. On any given day at any given time, temperatures on the earth differ by more than 100 degrees F. What is signal and what is noise?

Can't Keep Up

2009-09-03T22:19:00.001-04:00

I can't keep up with the insanity -- and it's not just me!

Too many Democratic congressmen behaving like jackasses for bloggers to keep up anymore

Yep.

Read the Bill!

2009-07-15T21:24:00.002-04:00

Just what do these clowns think they're doing?!? Does it disturb anyone that "lawmakers" are voting on bills they haven't read? That aren't even fully written and have blank spaces to be filled in later?

How is this even minimally acceptable?

Lawmakers, read the bills before you vote

The majority leader “found the idea of the pledge humorous, laughing as he responded to the question. ‘I’m laughing because . . . I don’t know how long this bill is going to be, but it’s going to be a very long bill,’ he said.’’

Then came one of those classic Washington gaffes that Michael Kinsley famously defined as “when a politician tells the truth.’’ Hoyer conceded that if lawmakers had to carefully study the bill ahead of time, they would never vote for it. "If every member pledged to not vote for it if they hadn’t read it in its entirety, I think we would have very few votes," he said. The majority leader was declaring, in other words, that it is more important for Congress to pass the bill than to understand it.
...
Congress passed the gigantic, $787 billion “stimulus’’ bill in February - the largest spending bill in history - after having had only 13 hours to master its 1,100 pages. A 300-page amendment was added to Waxman-Markey, the mammoth cap-and-trade energy bill, at 3 a.m. on the day the bill was to be voted on by the House. And that wasn’t the worst of it, as law professor Jonathan Adler of Case Western Reserve University noted in National Review Online:

“When Waxman-Markey finally hit the floor, there was no actual bill. Not one single copy of the full legislation that would, hours later, be subject to a final vote was available to members of the House. The text made available to some members of Congress still had ‘placeholders’ - blank provisions to be filled in by subsequent language.’’
...
Fewer and shorter laws more carefully thought through would be a vast improvement over today’s massive bills, which are assembled in the dark and enacted in haste. Steny Hoyer chortles at the thought of asking members of Congress to do their job properly. It’s up to voters to wipe the grin off his face.

Places to look, from across the political spectrum, that are pushing for pledges to Read the damn Bills before meddling with our lives!

Let Freedom Ring

Read the Bill

Downsize DC

New Rights! Pay Here!

2009-07-15T20:44:00.002-04:00

Hey, is everyone excited about our new government-provided "right" to
healthcare, for which as a requirement of citizenship we will be "obligated" to
purchase insurance or face stiff penalties?

WASHINGTON – House Democrats on Tuesday rolled out a far-reaching $1.5 trillion plan that for the first time would make health care a right and a responsibility for all Americans, with medical providers, employers and the wealthiest picking up most of the tab.

The federal government would be responsible for ensuring that every person, regardless of income or the state of their health, has access to an affordable insurance plan. Individuals and employers would have new obligations to get coverage, or face hefty penalties.

Never mind the gross abuse of language to equate a man-given "entitlement" to a God-given "Right."

But why stop there? If they can make us buy insurance for our own good, why not make us also buy a "green" Government Motors car and a subscription to the NY Times?

Apparently they have that power now. Corporate fascism, right here in America.

I'd pose questions about whether abortions can now be rationed or regulated, since the motivation is economic rather than moral -- and if not, what makes them different from any other medical procedure -- but I'm sorry, it's time for me to run off to the Two Minutes Hate of Emmanuel Goldstein.

Oops, correction, I mean the 24/7 hate of Sarah Palin.

Hating Sarah Palin

2009-07-12T21:49:00.003-04:00

In a scathing satirical monologue, more like a modern-day political Screwtape Letter, the pseudonymous David Kahane reveals the supposed inner workings of the leftist mind, and how Sarah Palin drives them insane. It would be funnier if it weren't so accurate.

I'd love to post it all, but here is an excerpt -- read the rest!

I Still Hate You, Sarah Palin - The Republicans bring a knife to a gunfight, and lose again
...
Not only were we offended at the sheer effrontery of McCain’s pick: How dare the Republicans proffer this déclassée piece of Wasilla trailer trash whose only claim to fame was that she didn’t exercise her right to choose? Where were her degrees from Smith or Barnard, her internships at PETA, the Brookings Institution, or the Young Pioneers? We were also outraged that the Stupid Party had just nominated a completely unqualified candidate nobody had ever heard of, a first-term governor of Alaska whose previous experience consisted of a small-town mayoralty. As opposed to our guy, Barry Soetoro of Mombasa, Djakarta, and Honolulu, a first-term senator nobody had ever heard of, whose previous experience had been as a state senator (D., Daley Machine) in Illinois. After eight long, illegitimate, lawless years of &*^%BUSH$#@! tyranny, how dare you contest this election?

And so the word went out, from that time and place: Eviscerate Sarah Palin like one of her field-dressed moose. Turn her life upside down. Attack her politics, her background, her educational history. Attack her family. Make fun of her husband, her children. Unleash the noted gynecologist Andrew Sullivan to prove that Palin’s fifth child was really her grandchild. Hit her with everything we have: Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, taking a beer-run break from her quixotic search for Mr. Right to drip venom on Sister Sarah; post-funny comic David Letterman, to joke about her and her daughters on national television; Katie Couric, the anchor nobody watches, to give this Alaskan interloper a taste of life in the big leagues; former New York Times hack Todd “Mr. Dee Dee Myers” Purdum, to act as an instrument of Graydon Carter’s wrath at Vanity Fair. Heck, we even burned her church down. Even after the teleological triumph of The One, the assault had to continue, each blow delivered with our Lefty SneerTM (viz.: Donny Deutsch yesterday on Morning Joe), until Sarah was finished.

You know what? It worked! McCain finally succumbed to his long-standing case of Stockholm Syndrome (“My friends, you have nothing to fear from an Obama presidency”), Tina Fey turned Palin into a see-Russia-from-my-house joke, “conservative” useful idiots like Peggy Noonan and Kathleen Parker hatched her, and finally Sarah cried No más and walked away. If we could, we’d cut off her head and mount it on a wall at Tammany Hall, except there is no more Tammany Hall unless you count Obama’s Tony Rezko–financed home in Chicago. And it took only eight months — heck, Sarah couldn't even have another kid in the time it took us to destroy her. That’s the Chicago way!
...
This ain’t John McCain’s logrolling senatorial club any more. This is a deadly serious attempt to realize the vision of the 1960s and to fundamentally transform the United States of America. This is the fusion of Communist dogma, high ideals, gangster tactics, and a stunning amount of self-loathing. For the first time in history, the patrician class is deliberately selling its own country down the river just to prove a point: that, yes, we can! This country stinks and we won’t be happy until we’ve forced you to admit it.

In other words, stop thinking of the Democratic Party as merely a political party, because it’s much more than that. We’re not just the party of slavery, segregation, secularism, and sedition. Not just the party of Aaron Burr, Boss Tweed, Richard J. Croker, Bull Connor, Chris Dodd, Richard Daley, Bill Ayers, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, and Emperor Barack Hussein Obama II. Not just the party of Kendall “Agent 202” Myers, the State Department official recruited as a Cuban spy along with his wife during the Carter administration. Rather, think of the Democratic Party as what it really is: a criminal organization masquerading as a political party.

If you had any sense, you would start using our tactics against us. After all, you have a few lawyers on your side. Sue us. File frivolous ethics complaints against all our elected officials until, like Sarah, they go broke from defending themselves. (David Paterson would be a good place to start.) Challenge the constitutionality of BO2’s legion of fill-in-the-blank czars — none of whom have to be confirmed, or even pass a security check. (Come to think of it, neither did Barry.) Let slip your own journalistic dogs of war, assuming you have any, to find Barry’s birth certificate, his college transcripts, whether he applied to Occidental as a foreign student, and on which passport he traveled in 1981 to Pakistan with his friend Wahid Hamid, for starters.

You might also want to think about interviewing New York literary agent Jane Dystel, who a) contacted the totally unknown Obama in the wake of an adulatory New York Times piece in 1990 and b) got him a $125,000 advance for a memoir that c) he couldn’t write, even after a long sojourn in Bali, which d) got the contract canceled, whereupon e) Dystel got him $40,000 from another publisher, following which f) the book finally came out to glowing reviews and g) Obama fired her. Wouldn’t she have an interesting story to tell?

I'm sure.

Reality

2009-05-31T17:51:00.002-04:00

Reality has a way of ventually breaking through pretenses. An interesting flurry of disillusionment with leftism in general and Obama in particular is taking place.

Item: How to Become an Accidental Conservative

In an excerpt from his new book, SPIEGEL editor Jan Fleischhauer describes his childhood in a typical West German liberal family, with parents who wouldn't let him eat oranges because they were grown in countries ruled by dictators, and his coming out as a late conservative.

I am part of a generation in Germany that knows no other reality than the dominance of the left. Everyone was a liberal where I grew up.
...
The way we were supposed to feel about conservatives was obvious. They were either deeply reactionary, because they refused to accept progress, or dangerously narrow-minded. In other words, they were either despicable or pitiful characters.
...
Go to any theater, museum or open-air concert, and you'll quickly realize that ideas beyond the mindscape of the left are unwelcome there. A contemporary play that doesn't critically settle scores with the market economy? Unthinkable. An artist who, until George W. Bush left the White House, could associate anything with America other than Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and the Washington's refusal to sign the Kyoto Protocol? Out of the question. Rock concerts against the left? A joke.

The left has won, across the board, and has become the happy medium. When we search for a definition of what left means, we can draw on an impressive array of theories. Leftism is a worldview, as well as a way of explaining the world and how everything is interconnected. Most of all, however, it is a feeling. A person who lives a leftist life is living with the appealing awareness of being in the right, in fact, being right all the time. In Germany, leftists are never truly called upon to justify their views. In fact, their views have become the dominant views, not within the population, which stubbornly adheres to its prejudices, but among those who set the tone and in circles where they prefer to congregate.
...
Members of this social class are critical of the market economy, and yet are unable to specify an alternative. In their view, the current economic crisis is a gift from God, because it provides perfect fodder for all kinds of prejudices and practically eliminates the need for argument. All it takes is to mention words like "Deutsche Bank" or "Wall Street" in any discussion in which someone has dared to voice a cautious objection, and everyone standing around will quickly nod their heads in agreement, causing the troublemaker to withdraw, while mumbling apologies. In secret, however, they hope that this crisis of capitalism will not progress too far, because their own prosperity depends on capitalism and because, for the past 150 years, no one has been able to demonstrate that a comfortable retirement was not [im]possible under good old Karl Marx.

I missed the connection at some point. I don't know when it happened. There wasn't a specific day or incident that turned me off to the left. I cannot even claim that I consciously distanced myself. It just happened. Suddenly I no longer found it amusing to listen to constant jokes about the physiognomy of (former Chancellor Helmut) Kohl. I realized that I was relieved when my sons converted the puppet theater my father-in-law and I had built for them into a parking garage. When the discussion turned to the uselessness of marriage and family, I was the one who was secretly rooting for every married couple, hoping it would last as long as possible. Once, at a party, I even dared to put in a good word for nuclear energy during a conversation about climate change. It immediately put a damper on the evening.
...
I have since learned to go on the offensive with my conservatism. In fact, sometimes I even have the courage to address prejudices head-on. We recently invited a couple we have known for a long time, but with whom we had fallen somewhat out of touch, over to our house. He became a law professor at a university in eastern Germany not too long ago, and she promotes golf courses. The conversation quickly turned to the last Michael Moore film, and our friend suddenly claimed that the film could not be shown throughout the entire Midwest of the United States. He made it sound as if Moore were some French auteur filmmaker who was finally holding up a mirror to the Americans, which they couldn't abide.

I had a pretty clear idea of how the conversation would continue, and I knew that I would be upset with myself afterwards, once again, because I hadn't challenged him decisively enough. "To make it brief, because we'll get to this point anyway," I heard myself saying: "No, I don't believe that the CIA was behind the Sept. 11 attacks, and yes, we liked living in America." He was quiet, we drank our tea, and the two said their goodbyes before long. I was shocked by what I had said, but also a little proud of myself.

And at the American Thinker, we have a Letter of Amends from a Recovering Liberal in Berkeley, by "Robin of Berkeley", a psychotherapist:

Dear friends, family, loved ones, conservatives, Republicans, libertarians, my brother in law, Sam, and my cousin Joe: I am sorry and you were right.

These are not easy words for anyone to utter, much less a leftist from Berkeley, or a recovering leftist, that is. Even though I've been in recovery for 14 months, 2 weeks, and 3 days, leftists are always right in your face, in an I-hate-you-if-you-disagree sort of way. Hence, this letter of amends to all the people I've lectured, scolded, ranted and raved at, and otherwise annoyed during my 30 plus years of "progressive" politics.

Much like the revelation of the editor of Spiegel, Robin of Berkeley's transformation began with a realization that leftism was not interested in reasoned debate, but in social coercion, and that it was logically incoherent:

How did I go from a rabid, sanctimonious liberal whom you steadfastly avoided at family gatherings to a fan of Limbaugh, Hannity, and Savage? Recovery encourages us to share our story, so here's mine:

In February of 2008, I saw a new client, a bright and sensitive young woman who came in looking like she just escaped a war zone. In some ways she had; she had innocently shared with others at her job that she voted for Hillary rather than Obama. Immediately she was being targeted for abuse that put her in fear for not only her job, but her life.

We both suddenly became aware that something had grown really dark in the Democratic Party. I started hearing about many other incidents where loyal Democrats were being physically and emotionally threatened for supporting Hillary. A woman in Berkeley had her front window broken because it displayed a poster of Hillary. Randi Rhodes, an Air America talk show leftist, called Hillary a f______ witch. (Rhodes was recently promoted to a national talk radio show, illustrating another disturbing trend: the deafening silence about what Rush Limbaugh has dubbed the new "thug-ocracy.)

An acquaintance had her car broken into, and the only item stolen was a NoObama bumper sticker. A South Park episode featured an episode where a nuclear weapon was being aimed at Hillary's genitals. My local greeting card store sold very flattering cards about Obama, insulting ones about Hillary, and a Hillary "nutcracker." When I complained, the young male manager literally laughed in my face.

Things went from bad to worse when Sarah Palin entered the scene. When Geraldine Ferraro ran for Vice President, there was no debasement of her character, no sexual threats. But with Palin, a full scale "wilding" ensued that chillingly reminded me of the random sexual attacks on women by gangs of men in New York. She was called every vile name in the book by both male and female liberals.

Actress Sarah Bernhardt hoped a gang of black males would rape her. When Palin's church was torched with children inside, the press was missing in action (somehow I imagine the press would have been all over this if Obama's church were torched). Not only was the misogyny disgusting, but the classism was abhorrent. The Democrats, by ridiculing Palin's voice and her education, were acting like arrogant snobs. The party had changed, I had changed, and the differences looked irreconcilable.

The final straw for me was when a close friend flew into a rage at me when she learned I wasn't supporting Obama. The political became personal when she began impugning my character. Worse yet, she tried to intimidate me into changing my mind by threatening to dump me.

Suddenly a light went on. The peace and love and flower power of the old left was dead and gone (if it even existed to begin with except in my imagination). The Democrats had morphed into a power hungry Thought Police, and I was done with them. My new motto in life: don't PC on me.

Robin of Berkeley follows up with How to Deprogram a Liberal, well worth a read! We see the similar thread of indoctrination:

I wasn't just your garden variety liberal who voted Democrat and that was about it. I was a true believer. A zealot. Like many leftists who had abandoned Judeo-Christian religion, I worshipped at the altar of liberalism. For instance, I never missed watching the Democratic National Convention. I watched every speech, with tissue box handy. (What kind of a freak was I anyway?) The Democratic Party symbolized hope, love, compassion, promise, everything that was good and holy in the world. I gave money, my time, my heart, my soul. I cried with joy when Democrats won; I was distraught when they lost.

I was programmed from birth to be a devout liberal. My dad, a hard working first generation Russian Jew, would lecture me on a regular basis, "The Democrats are the party of the little people. The Republicans are the party of the rich guy." He would also get a little weepy when he watched the DNC (so that must be where I got it from). One of our rare moments of bonding was reading the newspapers together on opposite ends of the couch, interrupting each other with stories about the bad Republicans and the heroic Democrats.

Robin sees the light:

To my disbelief, the more I listened and read, the more these folks made sense. For instance, at first I couldn't understand why so many conservatives expressed concern about morality issues, like gay marriage. Berkeley is Lesbian Central, and I know many good hearted gay people. But the more I learned, the more I started getting the larger picture; that conservatives were not necessarily impugning the character of gay people, but they were alarmed at the breakdown of traditional values. If the basic structure of society goes, e.g., traditional marriage, religion, patriotism, common language, what remains? If everything becomes fluid, what is there to hold onto? Without any moral structure and traditions, a society descends into anarchy and mob rule, as it is clearly doing today.

As I educated myself, I started thinking and rethinking. I'd wake up in the middle of the night with the sudden realization that deeply held beliefs made no sense. Take the anti war stance of the left. Noble and sanctimonious and all that. But how easy it is to sit back and preach peace when you have an army defending you; to rail against the U.S. when you are protected by free speech laws; to demonize Israel, when you've never lived through the murderous pogroms of Tsarist Russia or the Holocaust. How hypocritical to lambast Big Business while you are making money from their stocks in your mutual fund portfolio (that is, until Obama took over). And how ludicrous to admire Chavez, Castro and all things socialist, when the closest experience you've had to standing on a bread line is queuing up for goat cheese/arugula pizza at Whole Foods.

And this love affair with Radical Islam -- what's up with that? I had previously thought of Islam as a quaint, folksy religion. But when I started actually reading about it, especially Dr. Phyllis Chesler's illuminating books and web site, I realized extremist Muslims were advocating some seriously scary stuff, like destroying Israel and the West. I had been oblivious of the horrendous treatment of women: the honor killings, beheadings, genital mutilation. It now seemed like the height of naivety, if not masochism, to embrace with open arms people who want to kill you. While as a liberal I was socialized to believe everyone was good, all cultures were the same, and We Are The World, We Are The Children, I began to understand that evil exists. The emergence of evil always offers warnings signs, and we ignore them at our peril.

In an even juicier item, the despicable far-left "cartoonist" Ted Rall (see this link for some examples of his "wit") is now "disillusioned" with Obama -- not that Rall has become rational and seen the reason behind conservative positions, but that he at least now knows that Obama is a charlatan. Indeed, Rall calls Obama a "monster"!

We expected broken promises. But the gap between the soaring expectations that accompanied Barack Obama’s inauguration and his wretched performance is the broadest such chasm in recent historical memory. This guy makes Bill Clinton look like a paragon of integrity and follow-through. …

Obama is useless. Worse than that, he’s dangerous. Which is why, if he has any patriotism left after the thousands of meetings he has sat through with corporate contributors, blood-sucking lobbyists and corrupt politicians, he ought to step down now — before he drags us further into the abyss.

Belmont provides more insight to Rall's disillusion:

Then we learn a piece of information which almost explains it all. Mr. Rall has been laid off. Editor and Publisher reports:

“I’ve been laid off,” reads the headline on the blog of cartoonist Ted Rall, president of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists. Rall, an editorial cartoonist for Universal Press Syndicate, has served as editor of acquisitions and development at United Media for the past two years. “My job was finding new talent — comic strip artists, columnists and writers of puzzles — to syndicate to newspapers,” Rall writes on his blog. “Considering the circumstances, I enjoyed remarkable success. … I am proud of what I accomplished.”

Transterrestrial Musings delivers a kick to Rall while he’s down. “It’s actually a sign of how good the economy has been for the last several years that a talentless hack like him could make a living in it.” Meaning that Rall had a job under George W. Bush and he ain’t got one now. Personally I think that the assumption that one was a function of the other is at the core of Rall’s disillusion. Perhaps the phrase “I’m from the government and I’m here to help you,” is a phrase that Mr. Rall misunderstood by taking it at face value. In the coming days, in areas ranging from the economy to foreign affairs to national security, how many people will confess themselves to being as they say, the last to know?

Oh, the schadenfreude...but before we get too deep in it, Belmont Club warns:

But its sobering to realize that every proof that Rall was wrong to support Obama will necessarily be another increment of public pain; job loss, fear or uncertainty. In a way keeping Ted Rall company is like being on a dinosaur island with someone who took you there believing it was a petting zoo. As the rustling in the bushes comes closer and hearing him loudly complain that nobody told him that t-rexes were meat eaters, you want to laugh; indeed it might almost be worth it even if in the end you know that the joke is on you.

Indeed. But otherwise, people would never learn, having things so good.

The blog The Other McCain quips, If Obama's lost Ted Rall, he's lost un-America

It is my firm belief that Reagan's background as an ex-Democrat, a labor union leader, and indeed something of a commie dupe, accounted for his tremendous courage and clarity as a conservative leader. He not only knew what ideas he was opposing, but he had some insight into the sentiments and character of the people he opposed.

I've described the Democratic Party as the Evil Coalition of Liars and Fools. Reagan had been one of those fools, and he possessed a very canny understanding of the liars who had misled him into believing in that progressive mirage.

Progressives are utopians, and it is important to remember that Thomas More coined the word "utopia" from Greek roots, so that the meaning of the word is, "nowhere."

The progressive is marching down the road to nowhere, seeking an objective that does not actually exist and can never exist. The progressive claims to cherish liberty and equality, yet supports a policy agenda that, if fully implemented, would annihilate liberty and render the great bulk of men the servants of a political elite.

Claiming to be humanitarian idealists, progressives in fact have succumbed to a form of malignant narcissism that compels them to pursue their vision -- The Vision of the Anointed, as Thomas Sowell so brilliantly described it -- because it reinforces their presumptions of moral and intellectual superiority.

Even Joe Biden is mocking Obama -- the delivery of this ad-lib quip (see link for video) doesn't sound at all "good natured":

[N]ot content to leave without a jaunty ad lib, Biden noted that heavy winds were gusting through the ceremonies. One of his two teleprompters had toppled over. Alluding to the jokes of Obama’s reliance on the speech-facilitators, Biden added, “What I am going to tell the president when I tell him his teleprompter is broken? What will he do then?”

Multicultural Poison

2009-05-27T22:24:00.002-04:00

Commenters at Belmont Club describe succinctly what is wrong with "multiculturalism":

viktor silo:

A nation is a body of people with common values. From common vales comes common behavior and from that comes a common culture. When a nation of people occupy a common territory we call that territory a country. Under this scenario, nation and country are synonymous.

It is only from a common culture (customs and values) that a form of governance called democracy (the will of the people) can work. From the will of the people will come generally agreed upon and enforcible laws.

Under the “rule of law” no one individual is above the will of the people as enacted in its laws.

The agents of the will of the people make the laws and the judiciary administers said laws.

If the territory devolves from being a single nation (a group of people with common values and occupying a common territory) to a common territory occupied by muliple cultures (value systems), then the laws do not represent the will of the people in the same way as in a common culture.

The laws enacted under a country comprised of multiple cultures do not have the same general authority as those enacted by common culture. These laws tend to be mere expedients to please various political constituencies.

But the people long for a common thread in their governance. So they put their trust in “The Courts.” Within the law, cultural differences are thought to be put aside so that no one culture dominates another capriciously. We are all thought to be equal before the law. Justice is thought to be blind.

Not so, under Obama. He does not even pretend that he wants justice to be blind. He wants the appointees to the court to be very aware of who is standing before them and to make their decisions accordingly.

We are in a process where the judiciary is becoming politicized and it will soon rule the country. The territory will divided into a series of jurisdictions and judges will become de facto oligarchs.

Inevitably, this will lead to a court rationale that the Constitution can be unilaterally amended by the courts.

Obama’s choice of Sonia Sotomayor to fill a vacancy on the Supreme Court is an example of how the court can be corrupted. What is breathtaking is that she is a such a nakedly political appointment. She says as much “being a wise latino woman.” I’m sure Obama would agree that she’s not “typically white.”

Beware Obama. Love him or hate him, he is a force to be reckoned with. Let no one say that Obama has not given notice. His intentions are clear. He thinks the Constitution is flawed and he is impatient. Do not underestimate this man.

May 27, 2009 - 4:51 pm

31. Herb:

Viktor has put his finger precisely into the open sore of Multiculturalism. It grew out of the ward politics of the immigration waves of the late 19th Century and was refined by FDR in the 30’s and carried forward by the Dems for the remainder of the 20th Century. The whole “Immigration Reform” and Bilingualism of the last several years is part of the final push to destroy a common American political culture.

A significant attack came in the latter part of the 20th Century in their attacks on the founders (Jefferson’s child by Hennings, Lincolns alleged homosexuality, all the slave holding)

Obama is the point of the spear. The utterly multicultural. That’s why he seems so unlike the rest of us.

Commie Thugs

2009-05-27T21:50:00.003-04:00

Obama closing Chrysler dealerships on the basis of their past political donations?

Data crunching and long list of updates on Dealergate are here.

Dealers closed had given millions to Republicans, but only $200 to Obama.

Lawyer Leonard Bellavia, of Bellavia Gentile & Associates, who represents some of the terminated dealers, said he deposed Chrysler President Jim Press on Tuesday and came away with the impression that Press did not support the plan...

"It became clear to us that Chrysler does not see the wisdom of terminating 25 percent of its dealers," Bellavia said. "It really wasn't Chrysler's decision. They are under enormous pressure from the President's automotive task force."

High sales volume would not save Republican-donating dealerships, but

Large Democrat Donor groups not only remain open in all locations, but have their competition eliminated... and/or can purchase for pennies on the dollar.

Obama administration manipulating the media?

Last Thursday afternoon, for example, the White House invited in journalists, mostly opinion writers, to sell them on the substance of the president’s big speech on Guantanamo and the treatment of detainees.

Unbeknownst to the writers until afterward, they had been divided into two groups, one more centrist with a sprinkling of moderate conservatives, the other more liberal. (I was in the liberal group.) The president made an unscheduled appearance at each briefing. As is his way, he charmed both groups.

The idea, as far as I can determine, was to sell the liberal group on those aspects of Obama’s plan that are a break from George W. Bush’s policies, and to sell the centrist group on the toughness of the president’s approach and the fact that it squares with Bush’s more moderate moves later in his second term…

The smell of "useful idiots" burning in the morning would be pleasant if nor for the fact we are all going down together.

People are already saying:

This country is going to look back on the George W. Bush administration as a golden age of responsibility and integrity.

Utter Failure

2009-05-27T21:40:00.002-04:00

Wretchard of Belmont Club opines grimly:

May 27, 2009 - 7:39 am

For whatever reason, and following from the NYT’s article, it seems unlikely that the current administration or anyone else will do anything but nibble at the edges of the problem. Freeze an asset here, make a gesture there, but really do nothing substantive to stop North Korea. I think the basic problem is that we are now looking at a breakout. The final, in-your-face collapse of the nonproliferation regime. Kim Jong Il has just buried Obama’s dream of “a world without nuclear weapons” on the White House lawn.

This is the fundamental crisis. In a little while, perhaps not very long from now, there will be similar challenges. From Iran certainly; and perhaps Pakistan will start selling to all comers. North Korea may start selling to non-state actors. Why not? If they haven’t stopped him at this point, will they do it when he has Tokyo and Honolulu in the crosshairs? The day of the exclusive nuclear club died yesterday. It had been expiring for a long time, but it finally climbed into the grave and shoveled itself in.

With this turn, we may now be palpably closer to the nuclear car bomb. It’s not there yet, but with North Korea on the loose and the sheriff impotent, the danger of nuclear terrorism is no longer unthinkable. One response will be to let the nonproliferation regime collapse entirely. If the US can no longer be counted on to deter the tyrants of the world, then other nations may feel themselves free to do so. And it’s not Kim that did this: the West did it to itself, by progressively undermining it’s authority until it has reached this nadir. It was Kim’s very insignificance that underlined the totality of the collapse. Because if Barack Obama can’t stop the ludicrous madman from a starveling nation from threatening the world, then the system is well and truly broken.

...

Now whatever anyone thinks of Barack Obama, these are ultimately insults aimed at the United States of America, and indeed at all civilized people. And due to the seriousness of events, there’s no room for gloating, because these maniacs, though ridiculous, can kill. We’re not even into the second hundred days yet and the challenges keep mounting. At some point the West has to pick itself up and act. “Words matter”, but they’re not everything.

The world is changed.

Happy Lenin's Day

2009-04-26T15:46:00.002-04:00

Mass-murderer, terrorist mastermind, and commie-in-chief Vladimir Lenin was born on April 22, 1870.

Did you enjoy celebrating his birthday?

Of course, much as Washington's Birthday is now obfuscated by genericizing its name to President's Day, we now call Lenin's Birthday:

Earth Day.

Indeed, the first celebration of Earth Day, on April 22, 1970 happened to be Lenin's centennial.

A coincidence? Who knows.

But considering Earth Day was the brainchild of democrat Gaylord Nelson, senator from Wisconsin, who explicitly linked anti-Vietnam war activism to the first celebration of Earth Day, it is obvious where his sympathies lay with respect to communism versus capitalism. Indeed, Nelson wrote in Beyond Earth Day: Fulfilling the Promise:

The economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment, not the other way around.

Spoken like a true commie.

In fact, wikipedia reports that from his biography by Bill Christofferson, The Man From Clear Lake, we learn

Asked whether he had purposely chosen Lenin's 100th birthday, Nelson explained that with only 365 days a year and 3.7 billion people in the world, every day was the birthday of ten million living people.

"On any given day, a lot of both good and bad people were born," he said. "A person many consider the world’s first environmentalist, Saint Francis of Assisi, was born on April 22."[13]

Yeah, like I'm buying that as a denial!

As for the saintlike-veneration of Lenin by commie sympathizers, consider:

According to Orlando Figes, Lenin had always been an advocate of “mass terror against enemies of the revolution” and was open about his view that the proletarian state was a system of organized violence against the capitalist establishment.

Figes also claims that the terror, while encouraged by the Bolsheviks, had its roots in a popular anger against the privileged.[65] When Kamenev and Bukharin tried to curb the “excesses” of the Cheka in late 1918, it was Lenin who defended it.[66] In 1921, the Politboro, chaired by Lenin, expanded the Cheka's use of the death penalty.[67]

Lenin remained an advocate of mass terror, according to Richard Pipes. In a letter of 19 March 1922, to Molotov and the members of the Politburo, following an uprising by the clergy in the town of Shuia, Lenin outlined a brutal plan of action against the clergy and their followers, who were defying the government decree to remove church valuables:

“We must (…) put down all resistance with such brutality that they will not forget it for several decades. (…) The greater the number of representatives of the reactionary clergy and reactionary bourgeoisie we succeed in executing (…) the better.”[68]

Estimates of the numbers of the clergy killed vary. According to Orlando Figes[69] and The Black Book of Communism[70], 2,691 priests, 1,962 monks and 3,447 nuns were executed as a result of Lenin's aforementioned directives.
...
Yakovlev stated that Lenin was "By every norm of international law, posthumously indictable for crimes against humanity."[73]

Wikipedia also tells us the following predictions were made during the first Earth Day:

Denis Hayes, the chief organizer for the first Earth Day, wrote, "It is already too late to avoid mass starvation." [13]

Senator Gaylord Nelson, the founder of Earth Day, stated, "Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct." [13]

Peter Gunter, a professor at North Texas State University, stated, "... by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions.... By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine." [13]

Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb, predicted that between 1980 and 1989, 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, would starve to death. [13]

Life Magazine wrote, "... by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half." [13]

Ecologist Kenneth Watt stated, "The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age." [13]

Watt also stated, "By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate…that there won’t be any more crude oil." [13]

Nelson, like most environmentally-oriented anti-growth neo-Malthusians, wanted to stop population growth. Oddly, that makes the socialist welfare state unsupportable, as the Ponzi-scheme of Social Security and other wealth confiscation-and-redistribution policies rely on a growing pool of new young workers to pay the growing class of dependents.

The only solution is to encourage, then impose, euthanasia. Watch for it.

Oh wait, we already have euthanasia now being suggested not just for the sick and dying, but for the well and healthy, to join their loved ones at the moment of death; "suicide clinics" in Switzerland -- which have a profit motive in convincing the depressed and mentally ill allow themselves to be murdered -- are doing just that:

A British man and his wife, neither of whom was known to have a terminal illness, died at a Swiss euthanasia clinic Apr. 1 [2003]. Robert Stokes, 59, had epilepsy, while his 53-year-old wife, Jennifer, was diabetic and had other problems. They arrived in Zurich Mar. 31 and died the next day after ingesting barbiturates provided by a doctor from the Dignitas euthanasia group. They became the fourth and fifth Britons to die with the group's help, but are the first who weren't terminally ill.

Indeed, the founder of the Swiss death chambers says, "we never say no"; and why not, death pays according to Swiss law:

The founder of Dignitas – a Zurich, Switzerland, clinic that assists those with illnesses end their lives – says he wants to open a chain of "suicide clinics" in other countries to give everyone, including the mentally ill, the "the choice of a choice."
...
Minelli has helped 450 people commit suicide since founding Dignitas in 1998 – Swiss law permits the act of assisting someone with a "medical indication" to die. The organization charges members – there are 5,500 who pay a modest annual subscription – $3,500 for a planned death, the payment covering all administrative fees and compensation to the "collaborator" who mixes the lethal cocktail of sodium pentobarbital with a glass of water. The client must be able to drink the from the glass on his own – no assistance is given. A deep coma follows after five minutes and death, 20 to 30 minutes later.
...
One Dignitas member who suffers from manic depression is fighting in Switzerland's Supreme Court to have Minelli assist him in his death without the required medical indication or a prescription for the life-ending drugs – an action Dignatas encourages.

"If we lose, I'll take the case to [the European Court of Human Rights]," Minelli said. "I tell members suffering from mental illnesses: I am fighting for your freedom."

"We never say no," he said. "Even those suffering from Alzheimer's will have lucid moments in which they may choose to die once a certain point has been reached, such as when they can no longer recognise their children.

And they scoffed at the slippery-slope arguments surrounding Terri Schiavo and more recently Eluana Englaro...

Minelli, of course, is a ghoul and a demon who needs to be put to death, but the "sustainable population" environmental people must love him.

And One Was Assaulted...Peanut...

2009-04-25T18:17:00.004-04:00

OBAMA: Wait a minute now, I didn't authorize ATTACKS on the Pirates, I authorized A TAX on the pirates!

(received via e-mail)

More Hot Air

2009-04-20T20:14:00.005-04:00

Now according to the Government, Carbon Dioxide, which we exhale everyday and is essential for life, is classified as a "pollutant" to be regulated under the Clean Air Act!

New pollution limits seen for cars, big plants

The Environmental Protection Agency took a big step in that direction, concluding that carbon dioxide and five other greenhouse gases are a major hazard to Americans' health.
...
The court case, brought by Massachusetts, focused only on emissions from automobiles. But it is widely assumed that if the EPA must regulate emissions from cars and trucks, it will have no choice but to control similar pollution from power plants and industrial sources.

And why does it necessarily stop there? You now officially breathe out a pollutant.

Everyone who wants to save the planet, stop breathing.

Look at this chart:

Another blogger refers to that chart and points out cogently:

The sharper-eyed among you will notice that the great civilisations of the Ancient World arose and spread during a period of global warming a great deal worse than Al Gore's worst-case-scenario predictions.

Presumably Agamemnon drove everywhere in his 747.

The Goreite priesthood must therefore logically deduce that polar bears sprang out of the Void into existence about the same time Jesus did. Because the earth was too hot for them to survive before then.

And then they did so again after they were all wiped out ~1,000AD.

Persistent little bastards, aren't they?

See also the nice graph here showing the climate-change a larmists are essentially extrapolating a short-term trend and have missed the the real story -- see the little green arrow pointing to the red dot? We're diverging downward already!

THE IPCC’S FAILURE OF PREDICTING THE TEMPERATURE CHANGE DURING THE FIRST DECADE

Syun Akasofu
International Arctic Research Center
University of Alaska Fairbanks
Fairbanks, AK 99775-7340

The global average temperature stopped increasing after 2000 against the IPCC’s prediction of continued rapid increase. It is a plain fact and does not require any pretext. Their failure stems from the fact that the IPCC emphasized the greenhouse effect of CO2 by slighting the natural causes of temperature changes.

The changes of the global average temperature during the last century and the first decade of the present century can mostly be explained by two natural causes, a linear increase which began in about 1800 and the multi-decadal oscillation superposed on the linear increase. There is not much need for introducing the CO2 effect in the temperature changes. The linear increase is the recovery (warming) from the Little Ice Age (LIA), which the earth experienced from about 1400 to 1800.

The halting of the temperature rise during the first decade of the present century can naturally be explained by the fact that the linear increase has been overwhelmed by the superposed multi-decadal oscillation which peaked in about 2000.
...
The high temperatures predicted by the IPCC in 2100 (+2~6°C) are simply an extension of the observed increase from 1975 to 2000, which was caused mainly by the multi-decadal oscillation. The Global Climate Models (GCMs) are programmed to reproduce the observed increase from 1975 to 2000 in terms of the CO2 effect and to extend the reproduced curve to 2100.

It is advised that the IPCC recognize at least the failure of their prediction even during the first decade of the present century; a prediction is supposed to become less accurate for the longer future.

More details from Dr. Akasofu here.

He states:

Some of the weak points in the present IPCC Report are:

--There has recently been so much attention focused on the CO2 effect, the Little Ice age has been forgotten. The recovery rate from the Little Ice Age may be as much as 0.5°C/100 years, comparable to the present warming trend of 0.6°C/100 years. The warming caused by the linear change must be carefully evaluated and subtracted in determining the greenhouse effect.

--There was no critical analysis of the mid-century change; the temperature rose between 1910 and 1940, similar in magnitude and rate to the present rise after 1975. Further, the temperature decreased from 1940 to 1975, in spite of the fact that the release of CO2 increased rapidly. At that time, we had similar debates about imminent “global cooling” (the coming of a new ice age) in the 1970s.

--It is crucial to investigate any difference between the 1910-40 increase and the increase after 1975, since the former is likely to be due to natural causes, rather than the greenhouse effect.

--The most prominent warming (twice the global average) took place in the Arctic, particularly in the continental arctic, during the last half of the 20th century, as stated in the IPCC Report, but it disappeared during the last decade or so. Further, the IPCC models cannot reproduce the prominent continental warming, in spite of the fact that the measured amount of CO2 was considered. This particular warming is likely to be part of multi-decadal oscillations, a natural cause.

--It is also important to know that the temperature has been increasing almost linearly from about 1750, or earlier, to the present, in addition to multi-decadal oscillations, such as the familiar El Niño. These are natural changes.

--Both changes are significant. Until they can be quantitatively more carefully examined and subtracted from the present trend, it is not possible to determine the manmade greenhouse effect. Therefore, there is no firm basis to claim “most” in the IPCC Report.

--The IPCC should have paid more attention to climate change in the Arctic.

--The mid-century (1940-1975) alarm of a coming Ice Age teaches a very important lesson to all of us, including climate researchers. It is not possible to forecast climate change (warming or cooling) in the year 2100 based on a few decades of data alone.

--Further, it is very confusing that some members of the media and some scientific experts blame “global warming” for every “anomalous” weather change, including big snowfalls, droughts, floods, ice storms, and hurricanes. This only confuses the issue.

At the International Arctic Research Center, which was established under the auspices of the “US-Japan Common Agenda” in 1999, our researchers are working on the arctic climate change issues mentioned in the above, in particular, in distinguishing natural changes and the manmade greenhouse effects in the Arctic. The term “most” is very inaccurate.

We must restore respectability – by that I mean scientific rigor - to the basic science of climatology. We must also stop “tabloid” publications in science. Only then, can we make real progress in projecting future temperature change. Although I have been “designated” by the news media as “Alaska’s best known climate change skeptic,” I am a critic, not a skeptic. Science without criticism could go astray.

Common Sense

2009-03-23T01:44:00.002-04:00

Lay down your misplaced global burden!

See also the Tenth Amendment Movement, in which many states are moving to re-assert their sovereign powers under the re-discovered 10th Amendment.

Contrast

2009-03-09T21:32:00.002-04:00

Note how Bush is received like a rockstar by the Marines, versus the "tepid" response noted by the CNN newscaster to Obama:

A difference in setting to be sure, but still the contrast is stark.

Watchmen

2009-03-08T19:37:00.002-04:00

Warning -- Spoiler Alert for The Watchmen movie!

A. O. Scott of the New York Times gave Watchmen the lowest review of the 15 critics cited on the movie's Yahoo page -- a lowly D rating.

Scott complains:

But brutality is not merely part of Mr. Snyder’s repertory of effects; it is more like a cause, a principle, an ideology. And his commitment to violence brings into relief the shallow nihilism that has always lurked beneath the intellectual pretensions of “Watchmen.” The only action that makes sense in this world — the only sure basis for ethics or politics, the only expression of love or loyalty or conviction — is killing. And the dramatic conflict revealed, at long last, in the film’s climactic arguments is between a wholesale, idealistic approach to mass death and one that is more cynical and individualistic.

This idea is sickening but also, finally, unpersuasive, because it is rooted in a view of human behavior that is fundamentally immature, self-pitying and sentimental. Perhaps there is some pleasure to be found in regressing into this belligerent, adolescent state of mind. But maybe it’s better to grow up.

Scott seems turned off by the moral issues raised by the movie -- if we all just "grow up" all this fighting and killing will go away, apparently. Scott also hated even more the movie 300, about the Spartans defending Western civilization in manly-man style.

Sacrifice, honor, killing...how immature.

I find it ironic that the reviewer's comments actually parallel a speech by the villain Adrian Veidt from the Watchmen graphic novel! Here, Veidt believes he has tricked the world into a utopia of international cooperation, saving it from the brink of nuclear war -- the only price was a few million innocent lives (as is typical of left-wing utopian programs):

NITE OWL: Veidt, you Bastard. If you've hurt her, I'll...

VEIDT: Oh Daniel. Daniel, Daniel, Daniel...Please...Do Grow up. My new world demands less obvious heroism, making your schoolboy heroics redundant.

I'm sure Scott would agree with Veidt!
Veidt goes on to babble about humanity being about to "reject the darkness in its heart."

As if!

Rorschach of course will have none of it. He demands to expose the Truth -- that Veidt murdered millions to manufacture a fake external threat against which to unite humanity.

No compromise, even in the face of Armageddon. Evil must be punished. People must be told.

This review, and the movie's moral dichotomy, illustrate well the different mindset between utopian Leftist and individualistic Rightist thought. I struggle to articulate the point, but Brian Doherty of Reason Online nails it:

Rorschach Doesn't Shrug
The Watchmen's hero as Objectivist saint

The moral center of Watchmen, both the original graphic novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons and the new, much-discussed movie based on it premiering today, is a curious and prickly masked vigilante who goes by the name Rorschach.
...
Both Rorschach and Watchmen’s villain (who I’ll avoid naming, for slight spoiler protection purposes) are willing to kill in the name of what they think is a higher good. Indeed, given Rorschach’s contempt for what he sees as the moral stink of the Watchmen world, it's easy to imagine that he might have been willing to accept that each and every person killed in the movie’s central scheme might have actually deserved it (as Rand did in a smaller-scale disaster; Atlas Shrugged’s train wreck scene).

But Rorschach would deliver that as a personal, individual judgment—breaking what bones needed to be broken with his own hands—not from a world away with indiscriminate techno-gimmicks and no sense of actual individual guilt. The opposition between Rorschach and the villain is easy to read as that of individual, true justice versus the state’s collectivist version.

This illustrates another subtle mischaracterization in Scott's review -- Rorschach's violence isn't about "mass death" like Veidt's, he is responding to it.

Doherty continues:

Rorschach’s sense of justice may make him hate most of humanity—he brags to himself at the beginning that if mankind begged him to save them, he’d justly say “no.” But by the end he sacrifices himself in the name of avenging the deaths of millions who he doesn’t know. He does it for another reason as well, one of particular holiness to the Objectivist: the truth, the facts of reality. Whether or not the villain’s scheme might result in some “higher good,” it did so at the cost of Faking Reality—a cost no Objectivist will bear. We don’t know if Rorschach’s attempts to set the record straight will do any good—but he’s willing to bear any burden, let the very heavens fall, to stay square with reality.
...
Yet he’s also the only man around who stands up for everyone’s right to be judged individually on the basis of their character and actions, their right not to be a means to someone else’s higher end—no matter what one might think of that end. He knows what it means to be human—that’s why he has to condemn those he kills as having betrayed the essence of man qua man, relegating them to the status of dogs to be put down.

But always, Rorschach judges as an individual mind, and judges individual minds. Rorschach is no handsome Rand hero as she imagined them; but he’s still probably the most vivid and well-thought-out Objectivist hero that Rand didn’t create.

And Veidt's planned utopia is doomed, as Rorschach gets the last laugh...

Other reviewers, however, "get it". At E! Online:

But most likely everyone will get a kick out of Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley), a sort of Dirty Harry gone rogue, whose Clint Eastwood rasp could have been really silly but stays just this side of camp. Investigating the murder that kicks off the story—and ultimately uncovering a much larger conspiracy that will determine the fate of the world—he serves as the film's moral compass, in a weird way, even when he's splitting open a guy's head with a meat cleaver.

Especially when splitting open a guy's head with a meat cleaver!

Hey There Cthulhu

2009-03-06T00:04:00.001-05:00

Phn'glui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wagn'nagl fhtagn
Boy, that's really quite a mouthful, can't quite cram it in my noggin
Not today
I try to say it anyway
I feel my soul begin to fray
Still I await that frabjous day
Cthulhu calay!

Cuteness!

2009-02-27T23:40:00.003-05:00

More cuteness here!

Gun Bans Explained

2009-02-05T21:18:00.003-05:00

One of the many frustrating things about government gun-bans is the seemingly naive imperviousness to the argument that it only disarms the law-abiding citizen, keeping the criminals armed.

It's so obvious -- why wouldn't they see?

What, do they want to give criminals an advantage?

The answer is stunning -- in Chicago's notoriously draconian gun-ban, it turns out that is EXACTLY what was intended!

The aldermen were crooked, and wanted to create a monopoly for the Mob:

Recently,The Justice Department prosecuted The Chicago Mob in a landmark trial. The Chicago Tribune reports:

In one of the biggest strikes in Chicago's history against the mob, federal authorities today began rounding up alleged organized crime figures—including outfit boss Joseph "The Clown" Lombardo—in connection with a string of 18 unsolved murders and one attempted murder dating back to 1970.

In the culmination of what officials dubbed "Operation Family Secrets," a federal racketing indictment unsealed this morning took direct aim at Chicago's three dominant mob chapters: The Grand Avenue crew of Lombardo; the Melrose Park crew of brothers Jimmy and Michael Marcello, and the 26th Street crew of imprisoned mobsters Frank Calabrese Sr. and his brother, Nicholas, who has turned mob informant.

Just whose name came up at the Family Secrets Trial as an unindicted co-conspirator of the massive racketeering enterprise? Chicago Alderman Fred Roti. Alderman Roti was named by the Justice Department on pages 27 and 47 of this civil racketeering indictment as a "high ranking made member" of The Chicago Mob.

Roti was no ordinary member, his job was to hijack Chicago's City Council which he did for 23 years. The Chicago Tribune explained how Alderman Roti ran Chicago's City Council in 1982:

Roti has placed nearly as many city employees on the payroll as the city personnel department,and many of them are his own family members...Roti's name is always called first during council roll calls, and he revels in that privilege. His initial response gives other administration alderman their cue as to what Roti-and, therefore, the mayor-wants. It's often said that roll calls could stop after Roti votes-the outcome is already known. Roti,an affable fellow, controls the Chicago City Council with an iron fist.

What could be more frightening than a "made member" of the Mob hijacking America's third largest city? Alderman Roti decided he wanted to ban guns in Chicago so honest citizens couldn't fight back against Chicago's Mob.

The Roti family's union power goes back to two late organized-crime figures, Ald. Fred B. Roti and Chicago Outfit boss Anthony Accardo, according to union investigators.

Bruno and "Toots" Caruso are nephews of Roti. The three were among 47 men identified by the FBI in 1999 as "made" members of the mob. "Made" mobsters, according to the report, pledge loyalty to the Outfit "and would carry this oath of commitment and silence to the grave."

If you take a oath to a racketeering enterprise you can't be serving the "public interest" of the citizens of Chicago. This means every ordinance that Alderman Roti voted on between 1968 and 1991 has the potential to be part of a racketeering enterprise. Which,of course,includes Chicago's gun ban.

So it's not misguided innocence.

It's not a philosophical difference of opinion.

It's a deliberate criminal enterprise designed to disarm you for the benefit of predators.

There it is, in black and white.

The need to be armed and suspicious of government motives is no crazy conspiracy theory anymore.

And President Obama came out of that very same corrupt Chicago political machine.

Some Amusing Videos

2009-02-01T14:05:00.003-05:00

Happy baby in time-lapsed play -- hilarious:

Extreme basejumping with wingsuits -- thrilling and amazing:

wingsuit base jumping from Ali on Vimeo.

Of course, we don't get to see the valley floor, littered with all the experimental wingsuits that didn't quite work...

Polywell Fusion Moving Forward

2009-02-01T11:56:00.002-05:00

In mid-December it was reported:

The experiment, funded by the U.S. Navy, was aimed at verifying some interesting results that the late physicist Robert Bussard coaxed out of a high-voltage inertial electrostatic contraption known as WB-6. (The "WB" stands for Wiffle Ball, which describes the shape of the device and its magnetic field.)

An EMC2 team headed by Los Alamos researcher Richard Nebel (who's on leave from his federal lab job) picked up the baton from Bussard and tried to duplicate the results. The team has turned in its final report, and it's been double-checked by a peer-review panel, Nebel told me today. Although he couldn't go into the details, he said the verdict was positive.

"There's nothing in there that suggests this will not work," Nebel said. "That's a very different statement from saying that it will work."

By and large, the EMC2 results fit Bussard's theoretical predictions, Nebel said. That could mean Polywell fusion would actually lead to a power-generating reaction. But based on the 10-month, shoestring-budget experiment, the team can't rule out the possibility that a different phenomenon is causing the observed effects.

"If you want to say something absolutely, you have to say there's no other explanation," Nebel said. The review board agreed with that conservative assessment, he said.

The good news, from Nebel's standpoint, is that the WB-7 experiment hasn't ruled out the possibility that Polywell fusion could actually serve as a low-cost, long-term energy solution. "If this thing was absolutely dead in the water, we would have found out," he said.
...
Nebel and his colleagues have already drawn up a plan for the next step: an 18-month program to build and test a larger fusor prototype. "We're shopping that around inside the DOD [Department of Defense], and we'll see what happens," he said.

Nebel said some private-sector ventures are also interested in what EMC2 is up to, and that may suggest a backup plan in case the Pentagon isn't interesting in following up on WB-7.

For the time being, Nebel said his five-person team is getting by on some small-scale contracts from the Defense Department (including these three). "I've got enough to cover the people we've got, and that's about it," he said. "What we're doing with these contracts is trying to get prepared for the next step."

He's also waiting to see what the Obama administration will bring. Will the White House support EMC2's low-cost, under-the-radar fusion research program alongside ITER and the National Ignition Facility? "We just don't know," Nebel said.

See earlier posts here and here for background.

Real Scientists Repenting on Human Global Warming Fraud

2009-02-01T10:39:00.003-05:00

Well well well, the now-retired NASA supervisor of James Hansen, the researcher who has made a 20-year career out of hyping global warming (and who is known to be VERY sloppy with his data), is slamming his former colleague.

In an e-mail to the U.S. Senate Committee for the Environment and Public Works, Dr. John S. Theon writes:

I was, in effect, Hansen’s supervisor because I had to justify his funding, allocate his resources, and evaluate his results. I did not have the authority to give him his annual performance evaluation. He was never muzzled even though he violated NASA’s official agency position on climate forecasting (i.e., we did not know enough to forecast climate change or mankind's effect on it). He thus embarrassed NASA by coming out with his claims of global warming in 1988 in his testimony before Congress.

My own belief concerning anthropogenic climate change is that the models do not realistically simulate the climate system [That is true. --ed.] because there are many very important sub-grid scale processes that the models either replicate poorly or completely omit. Furthermore, some scientists have manipulated the observed data to justify their model results. In doing so, they neither explain what they have modified in the observations, nor explain how they did it. They have resisted making their work transparent so that it can be replicated independently by other scientists. This is clearly contrary to how science should be done. Thus there is no rational justification for using climate model forecasts to determine public policy.

NO. RATIONAL. JUSTIFICATION.

That's a scathing indictment.

Dr. Theon states:

As Chief of several NASA Hq. Programs (1982-94), an SES position, I was responsible for all weather and climate research in the entire agency, including the research work by James Hansen, Roy Spencer, Joanne Simpson, and several hundred other scientists at NASA field centers, in academia, and in the private sector who worked on climate research.

So he knows of what he speaks.

Hansen, on the other hand, has publicly called for those questioning human-caused global warming to be put on trial for crimes against humanity.

Is that science, or Stalinism?

MOre are speaking out against him. In Launch Magazine, NASA physicist and Apollo 7 astronaut Walter Cunningham writes:

NASA should be at the forefront in the collection of scientific evidence and debunking the current hysteria over human-caused, or Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW). Unfortunately, it is becoming just another agency caught up in the politics of global warming, or worse, politicized science. Advocacy is replacing objective evaluation of data, while scientific data is being ignored in favor of emotions and politics.
...
It doesn’t help that NASA scientist James Hansen was one of the early alarmists claiming humans caused global warming. Hansen is a political activist who spreads fear even when NASA’s own data contradict him.

Warming in the upper atmosphere should occur before any surface warming effect, but NASA’s own data show that has not been happening. Global temperature readings—accurate to 0.1 degree Celsius—are gathered by orbiting satellites. Interestingly, in the 18 years those satellites have been recording global temperatures, they have actually shown a slight decrease in average temperatures.

Cunningham goes on to review how hard data does NOT support human-caused global warming claims, and that given how thin our atmosphere is, the greenhouse effect is nearly maxed-out already -- which is why most of the time historically the Earth is actually a frozen ball of ice!

When former NASA mathematician Ferenc Miskolczi pointed out that “greenhouse warming” may be mathematically impossible, NASA would not allow him to publish his work. Miskolczi dared to question the simplifying assumption in the warming model that the atmosphere is infinitely thick. He pointed out that when you use the correct thickness—about 65 miles—the greenhouse effect disappears! Ergo: no AGW. Miskolczi resigned in disgust and published his proof in the peerreviewed Hungarian journal Weather.

For nearly a decade now, there has been no global warming. Even though atmospheric CO2 has continued to accumulate—up about 4 percent in the last 10 years—the global mean temperature has remained flat. That should raise obvious questions about CO2 being the cause of climate change.
...
In the face of overwhelming evidence for natural temperature variation, proponents of AGW are resorting to a precautionary argument: “We must do something just in case we are responsible, because the consequences are too terrible if we are to blame and do nothing.” They hope to stampede government entities into committing huge amounts of money before their fraud is completely exposed—before science and truth save the day.

Make no mistake, cap-and-trade is just a massive wealth re-distribution fraud.

The reality is that atmospheric CO2 has a minimal impact on greenhouse gases and world temperature. Water vapor is responsible for 95 percent of the greenhouse effect. CO2 contributes just 3.6 percent, with human activity responsible for only 3.2 percent of that. [In other words, one one-thousandth of the effect, or 0.1%, at best. --ed.] That is why some studies claim CO2 levels are largely irrelevant to global warming.

But wait, there's more!

The scientific tide is changing, even as the political clamor to be irrational grows; according to the Senate EPW site:

The prestigious International Geological Congress, dubbed the geologists' equivalent of the Olympic Games, was held in Norway in August 2008 and prominently featured the voices of scientists skeptical of man-made global warming fears. Reports from the conference found that Skeptical scientists overwhelmed the meeting, with '2/3 of presenters and question-askers hostile to, even dismissive of, the UN IPCC' (See full reports here & here).

Also,

the U.S. public has grown ever more skeptical of man-made climate doom predictions. [See: Global warming ranks dead last, 20 out of 20 in new Pew survey, and Survey finds majority of U.S. Voters - '51% — now believe that humans are not the predominant cause of climate change' - January 20, 2009 - Rasmussen Reports]

Can't fool all of the people all of the time! Indeed, as 9% "aren't sure" about global warming, only 41% blame humans -- which is a 9% drop since last July!

So in spite of the propaganda from the MSM, people are finding the truth in droves. How? The internet. For example, blogger Tom Nelson has been publishing very interesting graphs, which you can scroll through here. A few of my favorites are below.

The upshot is:
-- The sun is very important in driving temperature changes
-- Solar activity decreased rapidly from 1650-1700, starting the Mini Ice Age, and then increased from 1950-2000 back to medieval levels
-- Atmospheric CO2 has been MUCH higher in the past, and temperature has been all over the place
-- The "climate models" failed to predict the decrease in temperature we've seen over the last 10 years
-- James Hansen, rather than being muzzled, has been an outspoken alarmist to whom the MSM has given a sympathetic ear

Odd News

2008-12-24T15:05:00.002-05:00

Oops!

Facing a state budget crisis in July, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger fired about 10,000 temporary and part-time workers and ordered the 200,000 permanent employees to be paid only the minimum wage of $6.55 an hour until the legislature passed a crisis-solving budget.

However, a week later the State Controller John Chiang pointed out that state payroll records could not be changed to accommodate the cut because they were written in the antiquated COBOL computer language, and virtually the only state employees who knew the code were some of the part-timers Schwarzenegger had just fired. [Sacramento Bee, 8-5-08]

Rewarding Sloth

London's Daily Mail profiled two 10-children British families in October to illustrate the inconsistencies of government benefit awards. Sean and Anne Tate and their children live on Sean's truck-driver salary of the equivalent of about $23,000 a year, plus the government's standard per-child benefit.

Harry Crompton has been out of work for 15 years, and his wife, Tracey, has never held a paid job, yet they receive the equivalent of $48,000 in various government benefits, which The Daily Mail said would require a tax-paying family to earn the equivalent of $68,000 a year to draw. The Daily Mail reporter also noted that the Tate home is immaculate and the Cromptons' home, messy. [Daily Mail, 10-17-08]

No pithy headling for this one because it's too grimly serious; this is what's called a slippery slope:

Two of Oregon's unique public health markers clashed dramatically for resident Barbara Wagner this summer when she was informed that the universal medical care available to everyone in the state (but with certain service restrictions) would not pay for her expensive lung cancer drug (because her five-year survival likelihood was poor), but was told, at the same time, that the state would pay for any necessary drugs under its Death With Dignity Law (i.e., suicide). [ABC News, 8-6-08]

Universal health care could mean sending the infirm to the glue factory to save you, the taxpayer, money. Dystopian science fiction has predicted this for years.

And here it is.

Global Warming Sham

2008-12-24T14:43:00.002-05:00

This report by a panel of nongovernmental scientists calling themselves the NIPCC (Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change) tears apart the UN-sponsored IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) conclusions.

Their document, Nature, Not Human Activity, Rules the Planet, takes down the IPCC's political, agenda-driven whitewash with cold hard facts.

The IPCC's core claim is that modern warming is "very likely" due to human influences. They have no real basis for that claim.

The NIPCC's main points are:

-- the so-called "hockey-stick" temperature diagram has been discredited;

-- CO2 and temperature correlations are weak;

-- the computer models are based on curve-fitting with made-up parameters, not basic science;

-- some logical consequences of the human-caused warming theory, if it were true, are not being seen;

-- most of the warming is due to natural causes, depending on the Sun and clouds;

-- the computer models ignore many important effects;

-- the computer models fail to agree with other observed phenomena;

-- the IPCC economic models are strange, predicting North Korea and Estonia, for example, to be richer per capita in 2100 than the Unites States will be;

-- modest warming is a net positive effect anyway.

Embracing a carbon tax for a non-existent problem is ludicrous.

It is nothing more than a deliberate plan to limit our propserity, steal our wealth, and hand it to foreigners.

With Al Gore skimming off the top.

What We've Lost

2008-12-14T19:58:00.003-05:00

The loss of aristocratic gentlemanliness (what I wish a return of when I speak of neo-Victorianism, and relate certain historical events in support), Judeo-Christian religiosity, and a classical education leads to faulty mental programming and nihilism which is exploitable by demagogues.

Their goal is the eradication of our Constitutional Republic, to be replaced by their personal social utopia.

Wretchard illustrates the depths of mental illness to which some segments of our population has descended in this video clip of Earth First!ers wailing and whining the loss of trees in a drum circle of absurdity.

This essay by J. R. Nyquist sums up the background of the problem:

At least two writers in the 19th century foresaw the advent of totalitarianism. The first was Dostoevsky and the second was Nietzsche. Both writers grasped the intellectual trend of their day. As education advanced, as the human spirit was given new opportunities for understanding, the result was intellectual radicalism.

In the 18th century Edmund Burke warned his contemporaries that education without religion or aristocratic principles would turn against mankind. Burke wrote: “Learning will be cast into the mire, and trodden down under the hoofs of a swinish multitude.” Burke added, “In the groves of their academy, at the end of every vista, you see nothing but gallows.” Overwhelmed with a similar insight, Dostoevsky and Nietzsche updated Burke’s lament. In Dostoevsky’s novel, The Possessed, a radical young intellectual advocated a world in which Cicero would have his tongue cut out, Copernicus would have his eyes put out, and Shakespeare would be stoned to death – in the name of universal equality.

[As discussed here, today's modern "liberal" prizes "equality" in this sense over individual liberty, unlike the conservative. --RDS]

Dostoevsky predicted that the radical mentality – emerging in the 19th century – would kill 100 million people in the 20th century. [And he was right! --RDS] Those without vision, without a sense of where the world was headed, disbelieved Dostoevsky’s prophecy. Such a calamity could never happen, because the world is not a madhouse.

Enter Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin. Enter, as well, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, Fidel Castro, Ho Chi Minh, and today’s politically correct mob. What characterizes them, besides their egotism and narcissism, is their false idealism and moral posturing. According to Edmund Burke: “Nothing is more certain, than that our manners, our civilization, and all the good things which are connected with manners and with civilization, have, in this European world of ours, depended for ages upon two principles; and were indeed the result of both combined; I mean the spirit of a gentleman, and the spirit of religion.”

Since Burke’s time, modern intellectuals have overthrown the spirit of a gentleman and the spirit of religion. Every structure, every religious precept, every honored tradition, came under intellectual attack. God and country were targeted. Religion and patriotism were targeted. The main surviving ideals of our day are those of leveling, equalizing and taxing into penury. Envy is the Holy Grail of our intelligentsia, and the annihilation of all values is their ultimate end.

Be sure to read the rest.

The commenter Mongoose at Belmont Club elaborates with an eloquent tour de force:

Really, there is not much difference between man’s relationship to “nature” in the past as opposed to today; certainly little has changed since Shakespeare’s day. Excluding better science, knowledge and capability, these psychotic ninnies and the vile propagandists of the Left that manipulates them are the chief differences.

OK, here is the chief difference: Today we actually take these lunatics seriously and, unbelievably, give them power over the rest of us. This is because we have become a tribe of fearful, sentimental, dimwitted and spoiled children who are afraid of their heritage, particularly their religious and material ones. This is sentimental hogwash that only a society with piles of spare wealth can tolerate. No society can survive this silliness for long should it allow itself to hold these notions as core beliefs. In Shakespeare’s day these nincompoops would have been laughed of the stage. Literally.

Political environmentalism at this level is just a modern expression of the crudest form of paganism or animism; to more refined “acolytes” it is a sort of parody of Christianity, complete with its own Genesis myth, Original Sin and even Indulgences. Hitler was surrounded by the same sort of tree hugging idiots, and should our collectivists’ propagandists achieve his sort of power for their masters then these loon’s fates will be the much same as that of their coreligionist way back then.

Moreover, if the voters cannot see through this nonsense, then they deserve what they get. Environmentalists and their Marxist puppetmasters have to be constantly exposed for the fools and knaves they are, and at every level they are encountered.

Mankind apart from nature? How can we be anything else but apart? This is what it means to be human. This is one of the signal points of the human experience: Man is perforce apart from yet amidst “nature”. It is the core mystery of our experience.

This is an age old question with many facets: The faces of which are alternately sentemental and emotional, physical and practical, intellectual and philosophical, and, most importantly, religious. Man is unique among all creatures in his ability to pose this question or seek its answer, and that metaphysical fact precludes man ever being “at one” with nature or “at peace with nature” in the senses that these sentimentalists maintain in all their dreary treacle. The West came up with unique and powerful answers to this problem and we would be wise to stick with them.

Most certainly at one level, the sentimental level, “nature” is mostly a point of view. It rests as much on imagination and inclination as it does on experience or reality, though it is colored by one’s experience and circumstances. However, no matter what poets say to their patrons, for most of history man viewed “nature” as a dark force to protect against or a powerful mystery to placate. The whole business was hardly seen as a walk in the park, so to speak. The sentimental regard of “nature” as a paradise would seem to require considerable distance from nature itself.

Here these yahoos expose themselves for the fools they are for they would not survive 2 month in the woods. “Nature” is a reverie they have while they are showering in their air conditioned room at the local Holiday Inn after one of their “outing”.

Whatever the case, one is free to feel as “close to nature” as one wishes; our times hardly require a particular view on “nature”, particularly when on can purchase all that nifty outdoor gear and all that dehydrated camp food to boil and eat.

In a physical sense it is, of course, an impossibility for man to be truly “apart form nature” altogether, though thankfully modern science can limit the damage which being “part of nature” generally incurs. Thank the heavens for pharmaceuticals.

One does imagine that at times people in the past would rather be all too glad to be “apart from nature” for a day or two, say like during a plague year.

On the positive side more people have more access to “nature” — and more leisure time to enjoy it — than ever before in history. What do you imagine that the poor folks of London did for “nature” 500 years ago when their extremely short and brutal lives where one of grueling day to day struggle to survive. On top of that, we have far greater understanding of “nature” and more control over it. This is a very good thing.

But does knowledge subdue awe? Only in savages. Does our great store of scientific and practical knowledge really diminish nature before us? It only increases our amazement.

Again, our command of nature, to the extent that we have it, is an altogether good thing.

But “nature” or the worship of it will not answer the fundamental problems of being human.

Chesterson once said:

The essence of all pantheism, evolutionism and modern cosmic religion is really in this proposition: that Nature is our mother. Unfortunately, if you regard Nature as a mother, you discover that she is a stepmother. The main point of Christianity was this: that Nature is not our mother: Nature is our sister.

We can be proud of her beauty, since we have the same father; but she has no authority over us; we have to admire, but not to imitate.

(please, let us avoid any discussion of evolution — it is a completely absurd and irrelevant issue to me. I am making a point about the human spirit in the world.)

There have been nature cults throughout history and they have all lead to barbarism. Modern Scientism can be view in a way as a nature cult. They all miss the point for there is no useful morality to the natural world in and of itself and all attempts at find it through animism, shamanism, spiritualism and all other forms of paganism leads to darkness. Judaism threw back this darkness; Christianity added to the light. From the Christian POV, God removed himself from the world after he created it and only through the mediation of mankind in the world can sanctity reenter it and god be immanent in it again. Man can only do this through redemption.
(OK, there are lots of variations on this, but you get the point I am sure.)

This is a main lesson of the West, and no matter what one’s beliefs, the working out of the Christian faith has created our humanworld, and that world includes our sciences for science would have been impossible without Christianity fecund base.

So the response of the Christian West to “nature” is a singularly profound and rich heritage — it is exquisitely more powerful in real terms than that of any other civilization, religion or culture past or present.

We forget this at our peril.

Indeed.

Another commenter, Programmer, adds:

What I am pondering is that the human brain, is to a great extent, a computer, or more to my point, the computer models a human brain,… as well as it can be made to do so. Computers resemble human brains more and more because humans think, design, and build computers to extend the reach of the human mind and extend the range of human senses, to magnify the ability to store and retrieve information. However, in my opinion, for this very reason computers are not to be feared, as some sci-fi writers would have. Humans teach and condition the computer to do as they wish. (I choose to avoid discussing Windows Vista at this time).
...
So now, it seems, we have large numbers of people who are subjected to constant bombardment of false and foolish information. In a video game, kids learn that if they need to win, they just die over and over again until they get it right and go to the next level. Games, television shows, and movies beat the constant drum for solutions to problems that just don’t work in the real world.
...
So my question resolves to simply: What effect is the cognitive dissonance between observed reality and politically correct falsehoods having on the programming of young brains? There is an old saying in the programming trade, “Garbage in, garbage out”. The human brain is a marvelous thing. But it must be programmed well. Truth, or the very best information we possess is required. And those truths need to be tested rigorously and constantly. Good critical thinking skill must be taught and absorbed. Anything else leads, in my opinion, to a form of mental illness.

Those poor lost souls, sitting in the drum circle, mourning and keening for loss of they know not what may be just the end result of faulty programming. Their brains have been damaged by constant bombardement with bad data and untested algorithms. So instead of being able to do something useful with their lives, they use up resources and clutter up the air with noise. Instead of becoming one with the forest and learning how to husband and harvest the valuable resources therein, benefitting others with their skills and in nonce, learning applied physics, applied chemistry, applied botany, and a whole other host of really neat stuff, they sit and whine.

Something is dying in America. I fear it is the ability of a lot of Americans to engage in critical thinking. They cannot discern what is real, truthful, and what isn’t and they have no idea how to do so if they even wanted to try. No wonder we have economic issues. These hippies and others are merely consumers and produce nothing.

The answer is to learn something, and one can start by reading these great books by Dead White Males.

Dangerous Ignorance And Its Cure

2008-12-01T22:58:00.006-05:00

Ridiculous and pernicious ideas are striding across the globe -- moral equivalence, CO2 as a pollutant, collectivist statism, retreat and appeasement in the face of islamic banditry.

And we're the lucky ones, here in the West and particularly in the Anglosphere, who have the luxury of undeservedly coasting (for the time being) on the legacy of our forebearers who hewed our political rights, rational mindset, and economic opportunities from the Hobbesian darkness.

Hobbes postulates what life would be like without government, a condition which he calls the state of nature. In that state, each person would have a right, or license, to everything in the world. This inevitably leads to conflict, a "war of all against all" (bellum omnium contra omnes), and thus lives that are "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."

How to reclaim our heritage?

How to fight the tide of pernicious ignorance?

The answer is education.

Indeed, self-education!

Getting back to basics.

The classics.

Specifically, the canon of great books is the place to start -- including the foundational texts of our political and economic systems. (I am dismayed, for example, at the lack of knowledge -- indeed, of disinformation -- concerning how the U.S. Electoral College works, the real purpose of which I explain here and also here. There's really a good reason for it, and it's not to thwart the will of the people!)

See a fascinating discussion of some potential lists here. The first list by David Allen White (DAW) is novel-heavy; the second list by John Mark Reynolds (JMR) is more to my personal liking with a balance of important political and historical treatises.

The two professors discuss their picks in the accompanying transcript. For example:

People who don’t have time to read are going to be ineffectual, rotten at what they do, and are not going to be the leaders that we need, particularly in the conservative movement today.
...
JMR: Yes, so sorry. I think Virgil’s Aeneid is also important. If you’re going to read Dante and Homer, Virgil counts. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that everybody in your audience should go home and memorize Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, if they haven’t done it already. That’s what I’m going to work on this year, actually, as a private project, and read and totally imbibe the spirit of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address. We’re at war, but we’re not at war with human beings, in one way, but with bad ideas. Christians, at least, my tradition, are called to love their enemies. That doesn’t mean we can’t do justice on them. But we need to start thinking about our enemies, I think the way Lincoln thought about his enemies.
...
DAW: My sense is, and this is personal opinion, it’s a miracle we’re here at all, it’s quite extraordinary. But one of the things I, at least, think most people should do in the time that they spend on this planet, is have a sense of the greatest [gift] that’s been given to us. A life itself is the greatest gift, to have an immortal soul is extraordinary, but in beginning to understand what that means, I think you’ve got to turn to the greatest writers who can give you some sense of what it’s all been about, why you’re here, what it means and where you’re going. And that means you’ve got to delve into the great writers.

[As an aside, since fiction writers can "stack the deck" in terms of plot and outcome, I've always advocated studying the history of war to understand the human condition, because it's all there -- tragedy, triumph, sacrifice, irony, etc. -- and it's all real. -- RDS]

HH: John Mark Reynolds, why this list? What’s it do?

JMR: We need young men and women with souls that are good, true and beautiful. And if we’re going to form souls that are good, true and beautiful, we can’t begin with our own souls, because all of us are in process, too. The great writers know how to shape us morally, to get to goodness. They know how to help us find the big ideas, the truths that never change from culture to culture. And they know most importantly how to make us beautiful, so that we don’t fall into the trap of thinking only things that work matter. We need beauty in our lives as well.
...
The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States are miracles of modern thought, taken the 18th Century forward as modern, and we sometimes forget that just because we’re Americans doesn’t mean that we can’t be proud of something we did. I also think to understand those works, you should have read the Federalist Papers, and Democracy In America.
...
JMR: Everybody should read Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, and its contrast, the Communist Manifesto by Marx. If you’re ever tempted to be a socialist, the Communist Manifesto will argue you out of it.
...
DAW: Well, here we go. I agree with the Odyssey. The Odyssey’s got to be on there. Here’s a curiosity. It’s the first complete play we have. It’s Aeschylus’ Oresteia. And it’s about the establishing of the courts of justice in the city of Athens. It really is in a way the dawn of Western civilization, and one of the great plays ever written. So I’m going with Aeschylus’ Oresteia.
...
I’m going to include one of my favorites, everybody who wants to be married has to read it, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.

HH: Oh, that’s a disaster for the men listening here.

DAW: No, no, no. It’s a great book, and boy, they can learn something about being a man. She had a better sense of manhood than most men in our time…

HH: Can we watch the movie instead, David Allen White?

DAW: No, you’ve got to read it. The sentences are exquisite, and the wisdom of this woman is profound. Here’s one, again you can call it a cheat, but this book actually exists. And in fact, I bought it when I was in high school. It’s still out there. It’s called the Immortal Poems of the English Language. It’s an anthology – Sidney, Spencer, Marlowe, Jonson, Donne, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Browning, Hopkins, Whitman, Dickenson, Frost, all in one volume.
...
JMR: If you’re at war, you ought to be reading Boethius, the Consolation of Philosophy.

HH: Wait. What? That is alien to me. I have no idea what you just said.

DAW: Oh, it’s a great work, Hugh.

JMR: Yeah, it’s the work that deals with fate and God’s relationship to fate. The world’s a tough place to live in, and how should we handle the tough things that happen to us?

HH: Go back over the title and the author again slowly.

JMR: It’s Boethius, the Consolation of Philosophy. And for about five hundred or six hundred years, it was the most widely read book in the Western world.

HH: Wow.

JMR: So it’s an important one to take a look at. I’m going to agree with the Orestia. And then for my students, I’m going to add Cicero on Friendship and on Duties. These are must reads for modern people who have forgotten all about doing their duty, and the nature of friendship as well. And then finally, a book that I think is vile and evil, but everyone should have read at least some of, is Hobbes’ Leviathan, if you want to see the kind of state we want to avoid at all cost.
...
Now I’ve got to ask you both, given that there is so much agreement about the canon, and there really is. If you talk to educated people who are serious about ideas, they always say the same thing. Why isn’t it taught, David Allen White?

DAW: Because modern universities and colleges are the biggest fraud on the planet.

JMR: Here, here.

DAW: And they continue to get away from it. They loathe Western civilization. They hate Western civilization, and they will do anything to destroy it, which means destroying the canon. If you don’t teach the young where they came from, and the greatness of the past, you can do away with the whole thing. And sadly, I think that’s what’s happening.
...
JMR: We end up with waiting lists of people begging to get into this kind of thing. You know what? People eventually understand that they’re being defrauded of their roots, they’re being defrauded of a good education. And as you start to help them get a hold of the real thing, they become hungry for it, with a passion that passes anything you’ve ever seen. Our students aren’t worse than they were 100 years ago. The teachers are worse. We’re worse.
...
JMR: Some things are hard to learn, but they’re worth learning. You need to press on and trying to get what you can. Repetitive reading of books is a great idea. If a book’s worth reading once, it’s generally worth reading multiple times.

[I've always believed in repetitive drill, especially in math -- "rote" learning has gotten a bad name. -- RDS]
...
DAW: ...in the Divine Comedy, when Dante’s taking his journey, he’s got to have Virgil there to guide him, and then Beatrice and then St. Bernard. You know, you’ve got to have a guide.

Read the full transcript carefully, and start reading those books!

And make your own lists of essential reading!

And share with your friends and children!

The long hard slog of re-education is essential for defeating the leftist disease rotting out the core of our civilization. We must reclaim a pride in our heritage, which first requires knowing what it even is!

Otherwise our society could easily end up like this commenter at Belmont Club observes of certain others -- that our civilization is different is an incredible gift; it didn't have to be that way:

Witnessing the differences in culture up close for so long has changed my mind about the likelihood of success. The nature of the Arab/Muslim society is so dysfunctional and unsuited for modern democracy and a free society I don’t see how we can withdraw in three years with any chance of lasting change.

The symbiosis of tribal life and Islam seems to mold a society that is at the simultaneous moment aggressive and abrasive and claimant to victim status. The shame culture leads to perpetual deceit and the inability to reconcile one’s mistakes and make changes. The perpetual degradation of women is abetted by other women and results in a male female dynamic we in the west would never tolerate. From my discussions with our guest, who blamed her sister for her brother’s repeated beatings of same sister, the entire nation suffers from battered woman syndrome.

Then there is the Inshallah syndrome, which means you never have to take initiative or sort anything out really, much less think rationally.

Perhaps that assessment is too pessimistic -- maybe the culture can change, especially if they can get away from the bondage of islam.

But if we can't be bothered to pick up a book and learn where all our freedoms and bounty came from, we are unworthy of these gifts.

The solution is to get serious and learn.

The notion of discrediting the "dead white males" was designed to weaken our culture so it could be destroyed.

Don't fall for it!

Here are the lists; the side notes are from the Professors:

Professor David Allen White, U.S. Naval Academy
Bible
Shakespeare
Dialogs of Plato
Homer's Iliad
Dante's Divine Comedy
Cervantes' Don Quixote [I read it every year]
Dickens' David Copperfield [great story, great storyteller]
Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov [historical, philosophical]
Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
The Gulag Archipelago – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn [the great book of our age]
Homer's Odyssey
Aeschylus' Oresteia
Aristole's Ethics
Virgil's Aeneid
Aquinas' Summa Theologica
Pensees – Blaise Pascal [French for "thoughts"]
Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen [everyone who wants to be married has to read this]
Immortal Poems of the English Language – edited by Oscar Williams
Moby Dick – Herman Melville [greatest book written by an American]
Sophocles' Oedipus Rex
Song of Roland, Chanson de Geste [great battle poem of all time, extraordinary character study]
Canterbury Tales – Geoffrey Chaucer
Alice In Wonderland – Lewis Carroll [understand the modern mind]
Through The Looking Glass – Lewis Carroll [here is the modern world in spades]
Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
Collected Poems, 1909-1962 – T.S. Eliot
Witness – Whittaker Chambers
The Complete Stories – Flannery O'Connor
Of A Fire On The Moon – Norman Mailer
Lost In The Cosmos – Walker Percy

Professor John Mark Reynolds, Biola University
Homer's Odyssey
Aristole's Ethics [learn to think about things correctly]
Plato's Republic [I reread every semester of my life]
Sophocles' Oedipus Rex [understand the nature of truth, and where theater comes from]
Augustine's Confessions [I read every year]
The Divine Comedy – Dante Alighieri [great poetry, great science, great theology]
The 2nd Treatise on Government – John Locke [one of the hardest books to read]
Virgil's Aeneid
Lincoln's Gettysburg Address
Lincoln's 2nd Inaugural Address
Declaration of Independence [miracles of modern thought]
Constitution of the United States
Federalist Papers – Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay
Democracy In America – Alexis de Tocqueville
Wealth of Nations – Adam Smith
Communist Manifesto – Karl Marx
On the Origin of Species – Charles Darwin [it's not fascinating, it's important]
The Birth of Tragedy and the Genealogy of Morals – Friedrich Nietzsche
Civilization And Its Discontents – Sigmund Freud
Abolition of Man – C.S. Lewis [best essay written in the 20th Century]
Aquinas' Summa Theologica
Canterbury Tales – Geoffrey Chaucer
The Prince – Niccolo Machiavelli
The Faerie Queene – Edmund Spenser [C.S. Lewis described as a psychologically purifying moment]
Calvin's Institutes
Paradise Lost – John Milton
The Consolation of Philosophy – Ancius Boethius [tough things, fate, God's relationship to fate]
Aeschylus' Oresteia
Cicero's On Friendship and On Duties
Leviathan – Thomas Hobbes [a vile and evil book]

Grow Up and Learn Something

2008-11-23T20:09:00.003-05:00

The resurgence of piracy and the seeming inability to stop it by Western navies points to a downfall of civilizational confidence.

The pirate city of Eyl is Somalia's only boomtown. In a country that has seen 14 provisional governments since 1991 — all of them corrupt — high-seas hijackings have been the best business in town, and may net upwards of $100 million this year.

The seizure of an Iranian-owned ship in the Gulf of Aden Tuesday was only the latest in a series of assaults that have accelerated drastically since the summer.

The International Maritime Bureau's Piracy Reporting Center said before Wednesday's hijacking that 88 attacks have been reported in the area this year, including 36 successful hijackings. About 14 vessels — and 250 crew members — are still being held hostage. Intelligence sources believe the number of vessels held presently is about 15.

Some coverage even seems sympathetic, seeing a sort of advantageous Robin Hood situation:

And in an impoverished country where every public institution has crumbled, they have become heroes in the steamy coastal dens they operate from because they are the only real business in town.

"The pirates depend on us, and we benefit from them," said Sahra Sheik Dahir, a shop owner in Haradhere, the nearest village to where a hijacked Saudi Arabian supertanker carrying $100 million in crude was anchored Wednesday.

These boomtowns are all the more shocking in light of Somalia's violence and poverty: Radical Islamists control most of the country's south, meting out lashings and stonings for accused criminals. There has been no effective central government in nearly 20 years, plunging this arid African country into chaos.

Life expectancy is just 46 years; a quarter of children die before they reach 5.

But in northern coastal towns like Haradhere, Eyl and Bossaso, the pirate economy is thriving thanks to the money pouring in from pirate ransoms that have reached $30 million this year alone.

In Haradhere, residents came out in droves to celebrate as the looming oil ship came into focus this week off the country's lawless coast. Businessmen started gathering cigarettes, food and cold glass bottles of orange soda, setting up small kiosks for the pirates who come to shore to re-supply almost daily.

Dahir said she is so confident in the pirates, she instituted a layaway plan just for them.

"They always take things without paying and we put them into the book of debts," she told The Associated Press in a telephone interview. "Later, when they get the ransom money, they pay us a lot."

For Somalis, the simple fact that pirates offer jobs is enough to gain their esteem, even as hostages languish on ships for months. The population makes sure the pirates are well-stocked in qat, a popular narcotic leaf, and offer support from the ground even as the international community tries to quash them.

"Regardless of how the money is coming in, legally or illegally, I can say it has started a life in our town," said Shamso Moalim, a 36-year-old mother of five in Haradhere.

"Our children are not worrying about food now, and they go to Islamic schools in the morning and play soccer in the afternoon. They are happy."

Meanwhile, towns that once were eroded by years of poverty and chaos are now bustling with restaurants, Land Cruisers and Internet cafes. Residents also use their gains to buy generators -- allowing full days of electricity, once an unimaginable luxury in Somalia.

There are no reliable estimates of the number of pirates operating in Somalia, but they must number in the thousands. And though the bandits do sometimes get nabbed, piracy is generally considered a sure bet to a better life.
...
The attackers generally treat their hostages well in anticipation of a big payday, hiring caterers on shore to cook spaghetti, grilled fish and roasted meat that will appeal to a Western palate. They also keep a steady supply of cigarettes and drinks from the shops on shore.

So it's a "business" now.

Note too how the "innocent" townspeople support piracy, and are thus culpable.

Why is not more done?

Not long ago, pirates were clearly seen as threats to civilization, and, as unlawful combatants, were eradicated with military force, and could be summarily executed if captured.

Today however, they've acquired more "rights" than traditional soldiers, apparently, due to the suicidal interference of lawyers, left-wingers, and "human rights scolds" that wish to see this as a criminal justice problem rather than a military one:

The key problem is that America's NATO allies have effectively abandoned the historical legal rules permitting irregular fighters to be tried in special military courts (or, in the case of pirates, admiralty courts) in favor of a straightforward criminal-justice model. Although piracy is certainly a criminal offense, treating it like bank robbery or an ordinary murder case presents certain problems for Western states.

To begin with, common criminals cannot be targeted with military force. There are other issues as well. Last April the British Foreign Office reportedly warned the Royal Navy not to detain pirates, since this might violate their "human rights" and could even lead to claims of asylum in Britain. Turning the captives over to Somali authorities is also problematic -- since they might face the head- and hand-chopping rigors of Shariah law. Similar considerations have confounded U.S. government officials in their discussions of how to confront this new problem of an old terror at sea.

It's as if people have no concept of history, or how things ought to function.

Oh wait, that's EXACTLY the problem!

In this Civic Literacy Report, a survey found an appalling lack of basic knowledge by American citizens about fundamentals of the Constitution, our institutions, and market economics:

Seventy-one percent of Americans fail the test, with an overall average score of 49%.

You can try the 33 questions yourself here.

Even more shocking, our leaders are even LESS knowledgeable than the average American!

OF THE 2,508 PEOPLE surveyed, 164 say they have held an elected government office at least once in their life. Their average score on the civic literacy test is 44%, compared to 49% for those who have not held an elected office. Officeholders are less likely than other respondents to correctly answer 29 of the 33 test questions.

No wonder things are in the sorry state they are!

But when schools are become softer, social-organizations instead of rigorous halls of learning (witness the mission-creep of having students perform community service -- why isn't that time spent on math drills or reading the classics?), that's only to be expected.

Newt Gingrich calls for an end to the extended adolescence we've created; in other words, grow up and learn something:

It's time to declare the end of adolescence. As a social institution, it's been a failure. The proof is all around us: 19% of eighth graders, 36% of tenth graders, and 47% of twelfth graders say they have used illegal drugs, according to a study by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the University of Michigan. One of every four girls has a sexually transmitted disease, suggests a recent study for the Centers for Disease Control. A methamphetamine epidemic among the young is destroying lives, families, and communities. And American students are learning at a frighteningly slower rate than Chinese and Indian students.

The solution is dramatic and unavoidable: We have to end adolescence as a social experiment. We tried it. It failed. It's time to move on. Returning to an earlier, more successful model of children rapidly assuming the roles and responsibilities of adults would yield enormous benefit to society.
...
The costs of this social experiment have been horrendous. For the poor who most need to make money, learn seriously, and accumulate resources, adolescence has helped crush their future. By trapping poor people in bad schools, with no work opportunities and no culture of responsibility, we have left them in poverty, in gangs, in drugs, and in irresponsible sexual activity. As a result, we have ruined several generations of poor people who might have made it if we had provided a different model of being young.

And for too many middle-class and wealthier young Americans, adolescence has been an excuse to delay work, family, and achievement—and thus contribute less to their own well-being and that of their communities.

It's time to change this—to shift to serious work, learning, and responsibility at age 13 instead of age 30. In other words, replace adolescence with young adulthood. But hastening that transition requires integrating learning into life and work. Fortunately, innovations in technology and in financial incentives to learn offer hope.
...
Indeed, going to school should be a money-making profession if you are good at it and work hard. That would revolutionize our poorest neighborhoods and boost our competitiveness.

The fact is, most young people want to be challenged and given real responsibility. They want to be treated like young men and women, not old children. So consider this simple proposal: High school students who can graduate a year early get the 12th year's cost of schooling as an automatic scholarship to any college or technical school they want to attend.

An interesting idea.

Something perhaps is in the air; also recently Prof. Victor Davis Hanson proposed:

Four years of high-school Latin would dramatically arrest the decline in American education. In particular, such instruction would do more for minority youths than all the ‘role model’ diversity sermons on Harriet Tubman, Malcolm X, Montezuma, and Caesar Chavez put together.

Nothing so enriches the vocabulary, so instructs about English grammar and syntax, so creates a discipline of the mind, an elegance of expression, and serves as a gateway to the thinking and values of Western civilization as mastery of a page of Virgil or Livy (except perhaps Sophocles’s Antigone in Greek or Thucydides’ dialogue at Melos).

After some 20 years of teaching mostly minority youth Greek, Latin, and ancient history and literature in translation (1984-2004), I came to the unfortunate conclusion that ethnic studies, women studies—indeed, anything “studies”— were perhaps the fruits of some evil plot dreamed up by illiberal white separatists to ensure that poor minority students in the public schools and universities were offered only a third-rate education.

In other words, grow up and learn something!

Hanson also notes a related symptom of this clinging to childishness: a civilizational emasculation that takes us right back to not knowing how to deal with pirates any more:

Something has happened to the generic American male accent. Maybe it is urbanization; perhaps it is now an affectation to sound precise and caring with a patina of intellectual authority; perhaps it is the fashion culture of the metrosexual; maybe it is the influence of the gay community in arts and popular culture. Maybe the ubiquitous new intonation comes from the scarcity of salty old jobs in construction, farming, or fishing. But increasingly to meet a young American male about 25 is to hear a particular nasal stress, a much higher tone than one heard 40 years ago, and, to be frank, to listen to a precious voice often nearly indistinguishable from the female.

How indeed could one make Westerns these days, when there simply is not anyone left who sounds like John Wayne, Richard Boone, Robert Duvall, or Gary Cooper much less a Struther Martin, Jack Palance, L.Q. Jones, or Ben Johnson? I watched the movie Twelve O’clock High the other day, and Gregory Peck and Dean Jagger sounded liked they were from another planet. I confess over the last year, I have been interviewed a half-dozen times on the phone, and had no idea at first whether a male or female was asking the questions.

All this sounds absurd, but I think upon reflection readers my age (55) will attest they have had the same experience. In the old days, I remember only that I first heard a variant of this accent with the old Paul Lynde character actor in one of the Flubber movies; now young men sound closer to his camp than to a Jack Palance or Alan Ladd.

Another observer made the same point two years ago:

You hear this soft, inflected tone everywhere that young people below, roughly, 35 congregate. As flat as the bottles of spring water they carry and affectless as algae, it tends to always trend towards a slight rising question at the end of even simple declarative sentences. It has no timbre to it and no edge of assertion in it.

The voice whisps across your ears as if the speaker is in a state of perpetual uncertainty with every utterance. It is as if, male or female, there is no foundation or soul within the speaker on which the voice can rest and rise. As a result, it has a misty quality to it that denies it any unique character at all. It is the Valley Girl variation of the voices that Prufrock hears:

I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.

It's parting wistful wish for you is that you "Have a good one."

Above all, it is a sexless voice. Not, I hasten to add, a "gay" voice. Not that at all. It is neither that gentle nor that musical. Nor is it that old shabby lisping stereotype best consigned to the dustbin of popular culture. No, this is a new old voice of a generation of ostensible men and women who have been educated and acculturated out of, or say rather, to the far side of any gender at all. It is, as I have indicated above, the voice of the neutered. And in this I mean that of the transitive verb: To castrate or spay. The voice and the kids that carry it is the triumphant achievement of our halls of secondary and higher education. These children did not speak this way naturally, they were taught. And like good children seeking only to please their teachers and then their employers, they learned.

This is not to say that the new American Castrati of all genders live sexless lives. On the contrary, if reports are to be credited, they seem to have a good deal of sex, most often without the burden of love or the threat of chlldren, and in this they are condemned to the sex life of children.

No, it is only to say that this new voice that we hear throughout the land from so many of the young betokens a weaker and less certain brand of citizen than we have been used to in our history. Neither male nor female, neither gay nor straight, neither.... well, not anything substantive really. A generation finely tuned to irony and nothingness and tone deaf to duty and soul.

Here there is discussion about why men are marrying later and later...if they marry at all. Partly it is another symptom of this extended retreat from adulthood and responsibility; partly it is a reaction to the anti-male tendencies in popular culture, wrought by a misguided and extreme offshoot of feminism, and ties right in with the emasculated male phenomenon:

“The dating and mating scene is in chaos,” writes Hymowitz. “SYMs [Single young males] of the postfeminist era are moving around in a Babel of miscues, cross-purposes, and half-conscious, contradictory female expectations that are alternately proudly egalitarian and coyly traditional.”
...
But the real question, in an age that cops to an over 50% divorce rate, isn’t “Why aren’t more men getting married under 30?” It’s Why are any?

Some of the commenters offer further insights:

The true reason is that there has been an ongoing concealed, systemic effort to stigmatize the men, starting from the age of 2, by decades-long educational, social and technological hindrance of their natural developments and ignore them for the sake of the females. The results? The men of today (age 18 to 30) are not the same kind of men from the decades before 1965. So what happened between 1965 and now? Feminists, radical sexual liberation theorists, leftist/Marxist wonks & academic scholars and powerful entities have conspired to make women more empowered and men less empowered in the years that continue to this day.
...
It’s ALL about unrealistic expectations and lack of adulthood on both sides.

If you’re sitting on your butt with your buddies watching CartoonNetwork, you are not an adult. If you’re hanging with your girlfriends and your most serious topic of discussion is affording new shoes, you’re not an adult. Being not an adult is not a lofty goal, nor is it an excuse. It’s just a fact.

Society is supporting a generalized overall tilt towards remaining in adolescence. Like the lifelong hunt to stay 18 is something laudable and to be glorified. From looks to behavior, the grownup is dying.

Sorry, one can talk about the woman’s movement or the men’s movement, or anyone’s movement and it only touches on a part of it. It truly is about a global avoidance of all things adult, unless there is some sort of payment for it.

It was never meant to be easy. It was never meant to be completely fulfilling or one big date. It was never meant to meet all of one’s needs, that is what a balanced life is for.

And if you spend your time blaming someone else for what you cannot do, that makes you basically lame. But it fits the basic picture. Children blame others, adults own their own lives. This attitude is gender non-specific in my eyes. I’ve met just as many adolescent females as I’ve met males.

In other words, grow up and learn something!!!

And then go and eradicate the pirates with military force and raze Eyl to the ground as an object lesson to its criminal-enabling scum of a populace, with the true self-confidence of a neo-Victorian.

A French Soldier's View

2008-11-23T19:58:00.002-05:00

An interesting view of the American army in Afghanistan by a French soldier, is translated here:

Heavily built, fed at the earliest age with Gatorade, proteins and creatine - they are all heads and shoulders taller than us and their muscles remind us of Rambo. Our frames are amusingly skinny to them - we are wimps, even the strongest of us - and because of that they often mistake us for Afghans.

Read it all, for it is good!

Victory In Iraq Day

2008-11-22T18:18:00.003-05:00

Time to celebrate Victory in Iraq Day!

Hip-Hop Conservative

2008-11-06T00:33:00.001-05:00

Conservative Values

2008-11-05T22:46:00.003-05:00

It is time to refocus on just what conservative values are, as the Republicans seem to have forgotten.

As this site makes clear (lots of good references and resources there), "conservatism" is not a blind adherence to the past.

Here, "conservative" is equivalent to "classical liberal", as opposed to the "modern liberal", who takes the opposite view on each of the basic principles.

The six basic conservative principles are:

1. Belief in natural law
2. Belief in established institutions
3. Preference for liberty over equality
4. Suspicion of power—and of human nature
5. Belief in exceptionalism
6. Belief in the individual

The first of these principles, the belief in natural law, means simply that conservatives believe in a higher order of things. Good and evil, justice and injustice, rights and responsibilities are not subjective concepts to conservatives. Human beings do not make the laws of morality, nor are rights conferred upon us by governments but rather by a higher power.

[These are the "inalienable rights" that cannot be taken away by any government, no matter how large the majority --RDS]

What conservatives agree upon is that these natural laws exist independently of human beings, and that we are subject to them even more so than written (or "positive") law. The majority of conservatives believe that these natural laws originate with God, whereas a minority believes they exist Platonically, which is to say above God and man.
...
The fourth principle that defines conservatives is their suspicion of power and their hatred of big government.
...
And yet, what separates conservatives from anarchists is their reluctant concession that government is a necessary evil, as without it the good are often at the mercy of the evil.
...
The fifth and sixth beliefs of conservatives are closely related. Conservatives believe in exceptionalism because they do not believe in perfect equality. Conservatives realize that some people inevitably have superior abilities, intelligence, and talents, and they believe that those people have a fundamental right to use and profit from their natural gifts.

While it has become commonplace to regard the exceptional among us as "winners in the lottery of life" who are lifted up by the tired shoulders of average citizens, conservatives believe quite the opposite. Conservatives believe that exceptional people exist to lift us up, to improve our lives, and to give us hope.

Interesting sub-types are discussed in this formulation; for example, those who emphasize points 1 and 2 are social conservatives, whereas those more interested in points 2 and 5 tend to European-style "conservatism", favoring aristocracy.

This is distinguished from modern liberalism, which holds the following six core opposite core beliefs:

1. Belief in positive law
2. Faith in progress
3. Preference for equality over liberty
4. Belief in the benevolence of government and individuals
5. Belief in the perfectibility of human beings
6. Belief in the community

Too much to summarize here, just explore that site!

And the Planet Began to Heal

2008-11-05T22:18:00.004-05:00

Obama said you can all now tell your children,

this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.

I, too, hope a bright future and a successful Presidency emerges.

Unfortunately hope, rather than evidence, is all I have to go on at this point.

The President doesn't write laws and events will likely dictate foreign policy. My biggest disappointment is in the (apparently)
lost chance to moderate the composition of the Supreme and lower courts away from judicial activists, who will continue to plague us for another generation.

Let's hope he didn't really mean it when he spoke of supporting higher energy prices, higher taxes, redistribution of wealth to non-taxpayers, and loss of secret ballots in unionization.

The stock market sold off today, with coal stocks down -10.5%, as he's said his policy will be to "bankrupt" coal-fired electricity plants, which will hurt the coal industry (i.e. Pennsylvania and Ohio, that's you!). His view is the only "clean" coal that's acceptable is one with zero emission of carbon dioxide -- but CO2 is not a pollutant and does not drive global warming!

The "good" news is it will no longer be possible to hide behind "hope" rhetoric and a shockingly fauning press -- expectations for results are enormously high.

The other good news is now maybe half the country can get over its Bush hatred and its unwillingness to do anything but obstruct; now try governing for a change, ha ha ha.

One-party rule ruined the Republicans; it will do so to the Democrats in short order as well.

Noted ex-blogger Steven Den Beste has some chilling predictions. Read it all:

I think this election is going to be a "coming of age" moment for a lot of people. They say, "Be careful what you wish for" and a lot of people got their wish yesterday.

And now they're bound to be disappointed. Not even Jesus could satisfy all the expectations of Obama's most vocal supporters, or fulfill all the promises Obama has made.

I think Obama is going to turn out to be the worst president since Carter, and for the same reason: good intentions do not guarantee good results. Idealists often stub their toes on the wayward rocks of reality, and fall on their faces. And the world doesn't respond to benign behavior benignly.

But there's another reason why: Obama has been hiding his light under a basket. A lot of people bought a pig in a poke today, and now they're going to find out what they bought. Obama isn't what most of them think he is. The intoxication of the cult will wear off, leaving a monumental hangover.

And four years from now they'll be older and much wiser.
...
I would have enjoyed watching lefty heads explode if McCain had won. But we're going to see lefty heads exploding anyway; it's just going to take longer.

I would have enjoyed that too.

Now, a few predictions for the next four years:

1. Obama's "hold out your hand to everyone" foreign policy is going to be a catastrophe. They'll love it in Europe. They're probably laughing their heads off about it in the middle east already.

2. The US hasn't suffered a terrorist attack by al Qaeda since 9/11, but we'll get at least one during Obama's term.

3. We're going to lose in Afghanistan.

4. Iran will get nuclear weapons. There will be nuclear war between Iran and Israel. (This is the only irreversibly terrible thing I see upcoming, and it's very bad indeed.)

5. There will eventually be a press backlash against Obama which will make their treatment of Bush look mild. Partly that's going to be because Obama is going to disappoint them just as much as all his other supporters. Partly it will be the MSM desperately trying to regain its own credibility, by trying to show that they're not in his tank any longer. And because of that they are eventually going to do the reporting they should have done during this campaign, about Obama's less-than-savory friends, and about voter fraud, and about illegal fund-raising, and about a lot of other things.

and 6. Obama will not be re-elected in 2012. He may even end up doing an LBJ and not even running again.

For a lighter side of the aftermath, see the Onion:

Obama Win Causes Obsessive Supporters To Realize How Empty Their Lives Are

Voting Machines Elect One Of Their Own As President

They Love Us, They Really Love Us!

2008-11-05T22:12:00.002-05:00

Suddenly, it may be cool to be an American again

Oh, bite me!

It was, is, and always will be cool to be an American, except we never think about it that way.

In the linked article, William J. Kole, AP's Vienna bureau chief, revels in European adulation, and recounts having had to pretend to be Canadian or other nationalities.

But now everyone loves the American expats.

A Frenchman even gives him the permission to wear red, white, and blue again!

I'm a marathon runner, and I have a red, white and blue singlet that I've seldom dared to wear on the Continent. Marathons are difficult enough without enduring catcalls and jeers from spectators.

But my best friend and training partner — who is French — just gave me his stamp of approval.

"Will you wear your Stars and Stripes shirt now? You're allowed!" he told me.

Gee, thanks.

Let's see how long this honeymoon lasts.

Final Push

2008-11-02T21:35:00.002-05:00

Here is an interesting analysis that says, assuming the latest polls are correct (and they probably aren't), that McCain just has to pick up about 430,000 disgruntled Hillary voters (the PUMAs) in key states (out of 18,000,000) to win the electoral college handily, or less than 2.5%!

Less than 200,000 would flip Pennsylvania, for example.

Certainly seems within the realm of possibility.

Make it a reality!

Al Gore vs. Irena Sendler

2008-11-02T19:10:00.006-05:00

Photo by Mariusz Kubik (open source).

Irena Sendler, born February 10, 1910, died on May 12, 2008.

Have you heard of her?

Have you heard of Al Gore?

From wikipedia, a few facts:

During World War II, she was a member of the Polish Underground and the Żegota Polish anti-Holocaust resistance in Warsaw. She helped save 2,500 Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto by providing them with false documents and sheltering them in individual and group children's homes outside the ghetto.
...
Helping Jews was very risky—in German-occupied Poland, all household members risked the death sentence if they were found to be hiding any Jews, a more severe punishment than in other occupied European countries.
...
As an employee of the Social Welfare Department, she had a special permit to enter the Warsaw Ghetto, to check for signs of typhus, something the Nazis feared would spread beyond the ghetto.
...
She organized the smuggling of Jewish children from the ghetto, carrying them out in boxes, suitcases and trolleys. Under the pretext of conducting inspections of sanitary conditions during a typhoid outbreak, Sendler visited the ghetto and smuggled out babies and small children in ambulances and trams, sometimes disguising them as packages.
...
The children were placed with Polish families, the Warsaw orphanage of the Sisters of the Family of Mary or Roman Catholic convents such as the Little Sister Servants of the Blessed Virgin Mary Conceived Immaculate at Turkowice and Chotomów. Some were smuggled to priests in parish rectories.

She hid lists of their names in jars in order to keep track of their original and new identities. Żegota assured the children that, when the war was over, they would be returned to Jewish relatives.

In 1943, Sendler was arrested by the Gestapo, severely tortured, and sentenced to death. Żegota saved her by bribing German guards on the way to her execution. She was left in the woods, unconscious, with broken arms and legs. She was listed on public bulletin boards as among those executed. For the remainder of the war, she lived in hiding, but continued her work for the Jewish children.

After the war, she dug up the jars containing the children's identities and attempted to find the children and return them to living parents. However, almost all the parents had been murdered at the Treblinka extermination camp.
...
After the war, she was at first persecuted by the communist authorities, for the "crime" of being related to the Polish government in exile and association with the Armia Krajowa resistance. She was imprisoned, miscarried her second child, and her children were denied the right to study at a university.

In 1965, Sendler was recognized by Yad Vashem as one of the Righteous Among the Nations, which was confirmed in 1983 by the Israeli Supreme Court. She also was awarded the Commanders Cross by the Israeli Institute. It was only that year that the Polish communist government allowed her to travel abroad, to receive the award in Israel.

In 2003, Pope John Paul II sent a personal letter to Sendler, praising her wartime efforts. On 10 October 2003, Irena Sendler received the Order of the White Eagle, Poland's highest civilian decoration. She was also awarded the Jan Karski Award "For Courage and Heart," given by the American Center of Polish Culture in Washington, D.C.. On 14 March 2007 Sendler was honored by Poland's Senate.

In 2007, at the age of 97, Irena Sendler was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

In their immeasurable wisdom, the Nobel Peace Prize Committee instead chose to honor Al Gore, for giving a deceptive slide show on global warming.

Previous postings on the pernicious myth of man-made global warming:

Global Warming
Pesky Temperature Fluctuations
No Starvation for Biofuel
Icecap
Global Warming Over
Getting a Clue
Courage to do Nothing
Global Warming RIP
Propaganda 101
The Awkward Truth
Sun Power
The Big Lie
The Optimistic Scientist

I have no further comment.

Silent Majority

2008-11-01T20:10:00.002-04:00

McCain pulled ahead of Obama in two major polls yesterday.

Yet, the media has pulled out all the stops to convince everyone the election is over. The latest ridiculous "news" story:

AP poll shows Obama backers gleeful, McCain's glum

They're already celebrating their victory.

WASHINGTON – That smiling guy walking down the street? Odds are he's a Barack Obama backer. The grouchy looking one? Don't ask, and don't necessarily count on him to vote next week, either.

Supporters of John McCain, long less enthusiastic than Obama's, have become increasingly glum about the presidential campaign in recent weeks, according to an Associated Press-Yahoo News poll released Saturday. Their feelings have turned more negative during a period that has seen Obama, the Democratic senator from Illinois, take a firm lead in many polls.

Firm lead? Really? How about this from Zogby's latest tracking poll:

Pollster John Zogby: "Is McCain making a move? The three-day average holds steady, but McCain outpolled Obama today, 48% to 47%. He is beginning to cut into Obama's lead among independents, is now leading among blue collar voters, has strengthened his lead among investors and among men, and is walloping Obama among NASCAR voters. Joe the Plumber may get his license after all. "Obama's lead among women declined, and it looks like it is occurring because McCain is solidifying the support of conservative women, which is something we saw last time McCain picked up in the polls. If McCain has a good day tomorrow, we will eliminate Obama's good day three days ago, and we could really see some tightening in this rolling average. But for now, hold on."

And a foxnews poll had McCain leading by 49% to 47%.

Of course, the margin of error in all these polls is much higher than they let on, so they should be IGNORED until the real poll of election day:

the formula for margin of error simplifies to

Margin of Error = Who the hell knows?

Because, in this case, so-called scientific "sampling error" is completely meaningless, because it is utterly overwhelmed by unmeasurable non-sampling error. Under these circumstances "margin of error" is a fantasy, a numeric fiction masquerading as a pseudo-scientific fact.

The left-wing is trying to create a fantasy-land of "informational conformity", in which be declaring Obama has won, they wish to convince everyone that it is inevitable. The media is complicit in this campaign of attempted brainwashing:

Two campaigns are being waged right now for the presidency of the United States. No, I'm not talking about the Obama campaign and the McCain campaign. I'm talking about the real-world campaign and the meta-campaign.

The real-world campaign involves speeches and proposals and facts and scandals and political positions and news events. These details, however, are becoming increasingly irrelevant, and have become subsumed by the meta-campaign, which consists of perceptions, polls, reactions, analyses and summations. Until very recently, elections were decided by real-world facts -- but not anymore.
...
McCain supporters often complain about this strategy by the Left, going to great pains to point out the poll stuffing, the deceptive photos, the crowd overestimation, the slanted media coverage, and so forth. But should conservatives be so concerned? I propose that McCain supporters should be GLAD this is happening -- because the Left is in fact making a disastrous strategic blunder.

Zombie goes on to consder in detail the "clever Hans" effect, Asch experiments, bluffing strategies, informational versus normative conformity, and why the creation of this alternate reality may be for naught. Read it all!

Zombie concludes,

However, if Obama does win, it will be IN SPITE OF the counter-productive antics of his supporters, not because of them. I feel that all the exaggerations and bias polling and online poll-stuffing and comment-spamming have only served to increase a desperate come-from-behind energy in the McCain campaign, and induce a sense of complacency and inevitable victory among rank-and-file Obama voters. However: If McCain wins, then Obama's supporters will only have themselves to blame.

Will the exaggerations become a self-fulfilling prophecy, as assumed, or are Obama supporters spinning further and further away from reality, constructing one unsupportable exaggeration on top of another -- only to be stunned on election day when the actual results, once again, don't match either their pre-vote opinion polling or their post-vote exit polling?

Yet it may very well be that an army of glum, dispirited and pessimistic conservatives will reluctantly trudge to the polls on November 4, each one imagining they are the only remaining person in the entire country voting for McCain, and lo and behold -- they'll turn out to be a silent majority after all.

The media of course is complicit.

Prof. Hanson notes:

The media has succeeded in shielding Barack Obama from journalistic scrutiny. It thereby irrevocably destroyed its own reputation and forfeited the trust that generations of others had so carefully acquired. And it will never again be trusted to offer candid and nonpartisan coverage of presidential candidates.

More Democrats for McCain?

2008-10-29T01:43:00.001-04:00

Can't say whether this report is true or not but it feels right:

Tonight we spoke with a friend from Hillary Clinton’s campaign who is now working for McCain/Palin — and is specifically working with Democrats for McCain in Pennsylvania. We worked with her in Texas, Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania for Hillary and have spent many LONG hours with her in the trenches in all of those states. She’s smart, doesn’t BS, and never lies.

She says the same thing we do: John McCain will win Pennsylvania.

On November 4th, the news networks are going to be spinning and sputtering and playing catchup, but everything we see on the ground in PA is what we saw during the primaries: Obama has no shot of winning the Keystone State.

Here is specifically what we talked about tonight: never in any of our careers have any of us ever seen members of one party switching sides and voting for the other party as we see in this election with Democrats for McCain. There has never been anything like it. Not even the “Reagan Democrats” who voted for Reagan over Carter, for the simple fact that these “Reagan Democrats” weren’t identified and labeled until AFTER the election.

No, Democrats for McCain are real, are voting for McCain right now, and are open and organized, as well as self-identifying. Lynn Rothschild might be our poster gal, as one of the most prominent of our ranks, but it’s telling that everyone from Team Hillary that we know now works for McCain. ALL OF US. Whether they are open about it, like we are, or are working quietly behind the scenes, we can’t think of a single person we worked with on a daily basis for Hillary who is now working on behalf of Obama.

We all truly believe that John McCain will work more closely with Hillary Clinton in the Senate and make it a priority to team up with her on legislation than Obama ever would. We also believe Obama winning this election means his supporters would actively seek to eliminate all Clinton loyalists from the Democratic Party, to consolidate his power base and purge anyone who is not 100% loyal to him. For obvious reasons, those of us loyal to the Clintons will not let that happen without a fight.

But, this is all talking about leadership, and those of us who have invested two years of our lives in all of this — and have, in all honesty, spent every cent we had on this campaign. What about the regular voters?

Union members repeatedly tell all of us that they are lying to pollsters because the unions have been polling these people — and the unions will threaten people’s jobs if they don’t tow the union line. So, the people lie when asked whom they are supporting. But, the unions can’t control who they vote for on Election Day. And that’s when things are going to get interesting.

We do not believe Obama will carry Pittsburgh or Harrisburg in PA. He’ll win Philly, but not by the large margin he needs to take the state. You’ve heard Governor Ed Rendell is “worried” about Obama’s chances in Pennsylvania. That is an understatement. Obama will lose a state that hasn’t gone red in generations.

What’s happening here that’s not being reported is that “Reagan Democrats” who vote Republican whenever they feel that Democrats are out of touch, socialist, or too liberal are voting for McCain…and these people are being joined by PUMAs, DeMcCrats for McCain, Hillocrats, whatever you want to call them, who don’t like or trust Obama and who believe McCain/Palin would address the wants and needs of centrist Democrats much better than Obama ever would.

We personally believe this here at HillBuzz. That’s why we are doing this. We do not believe Obama will put the best interests of Americans first — instead, Obama will do what is best for Obama, the way he has always done. We do not trust this man or his socialist Kool-Aid and want no part of him.

In Pennsylvania, we are not alone.

The same people who ran the board for us in the primary — who assured us daily that the polls the media was pushing were wrong in claiming Obama would beat Clinton in PA — tell us on a daily basis that McCain is going to win Pennsylvania. There’s a damn good chance this won’t even be close, if what people are seeing on the ground right now holds, and is indicative of the whole state.

DEMOCRATS are staffing McCain offices across the state. DEMOCRATS are phone banking and canvassing for McCain. DEMOCRATS are raising large sums to fund this last week of campaigning.

DEMOCRATS.

This has NEVER happened before — and the media is ignoring it. The media consistently claims that Obama enjoys the support of 85% of Democrats, versus only 80% of Republicans who supposedly are supporting McCain. We call BS on all of this — we’d say 90% of Republicans are supporting McCain, and 65-70% of Democrats are actually supporting Obama. At least that’s the case in Pennsylvania, and in Ohio too. Our mission this next week is to reach out to every Democrat we can and let them know it’s okay to vote Republican this year — because the Republican is the better choice.

There are two things Hillary Clinton and John McCain have in common that we’re thinking about right now: (1) both love America more than anything and truly want what’s best for the country, and not themselves and (2) Clinton has a framed photo of McCain in her office, while McCain has a similar photo of Clinton in his.

Clinton and McCain are friends for a reason — and we know they will work well together these next four years. We’re going to face some tough challenges in McCain’s administration, and we sincerely do pledge to all Republicans reading this that the bipartisan spirit we’ve fostered during this campaign working together with Republicans to elect McCain will continue in these next 4 years, because America needs us working together.

We are all Americans right now — working together to stop a socialist from becoming president and taking all of us down a very dangerous path. Hillary’s Army is strong and mobilized, and is working its hard out for McCain/Palin. If you Republicans can match our enthusiasm and dedication, we will win this, and not just in Ohio and Pennsylvania, but all across the country.

We have the potential to make this a crippling loss not just for Obama, but for the far-left liberal wing of the Democratic party and the liberal elite media itself. We have the potential to wipe all of these kooks and loons off the political landscape with a loud, resounding loss for all of them on November 4th.

What we have learned about the state of Pennsylvania tells us our continued efforts are paying off — and that we just need to stay focused and keep working hard the next 7 days to win this for McCain/Palin and, in all honesty, win this for AMERICA too.

It’s an honor to be in this fight with all of you — if we work hard, we will indeed win.

Obama "Redistribution" Comments Gone Viral

2008-10-28T01:33:00.004-04:00

The Obama audio comments about "redistributing wealth" from a 2001 Chicago Public Radio program have gone viral.

Posted on YouTube on Sunday, in less than 48 hours it has received over 1.7 million views and garnered over 17,000 comments. UPDATE: Now over 2 million views and 25,000 comments!

It was the most-viewed video on YouTube yesterday by far, and #8 for the week.

Dick Morris just said on Hannity and Colmes he's "hemorrhaging votes" over this.

See here for a transcript.

Spread the word!

Ace summarizes:

Translation [ace]: As lefties are suggesting idiotic interpretations, and even some on the right are getting it wrong, here's what he's saying:

1. The Supreme Court never considered "redistribution of wealth" or "economic justice" among the guarantees provided to citizens.

2. Even the Warren Court was not "radical" enough to do so -- to impose real "redistributive change" on the nation.

3. The courts have generally provided negative constraints on the government rather than positive obligations the government owes to its citizens (specifically, here, such as economic justice and redistribution of wealth).

4. Therefore, it is a "tragedy" that the civil rights movement became so courts-focused, because it limited what redress they could actually obtain -- and it took attention away from the "community organizing" efforts which could assemble "coalitions of power" (political power, that is) to actually achieve "redistributive change." Such change simply could not be had in the courts, still laboring under the "constraints" imposed by the Founding Fathers.

5. "And in some ways we still suffer from that."

And do note that Obama is currently on the brink of achieving the ultimate "community organizing" position, the ultimate assembler of "coalitions of power," and the current top legislative position (and yes, the President is the most important legislator in the country, through proposing/advocating legislation and signing it into law) that will allow him to pursue the "redistributive change" the Warren Court was, tragically, insufficiently radical to contemplate.

Obama's SS

2008-10-27T20:51:00.004-04:00

Here is Obama calling for a "Civilian National Security Force", as a parallel army "just as well funded" and "just as powerful" as our current military!

Because "we cannot continue to rely only on our military" to achieve his goals!

Obama needs a more reliable and pliant National Security Force? Did he just suggest that?

What in the world would somebody need a whole new parallel National Security Force for?!? What could possibly be its purpose?

This is exactly what Hitler did in creating the SS, as it would be more loyal than the regular army.

This is patently insane.

UPDATE: This clip is from a July 2, 2008 speech. Apparently Obama deviated from his prepared remarks to deliver these lines. Bloggers (but not the MSM) picked it up at the time, affirming that it needed further explanation. As Hot Air said,

Note to desperate Obama apologists: the Peace Corps is not a “national security force”.

Obama's Evil Communist Tactics

2008-10-27T20:10:00.005-04:00

Report your parents for ThoughtCrimes, kids! Use emotional blackmail!

These are the tactics described at Obama Campaign Headquarters for kids to use, which cross the line into sheer evil:

The one thing most grandparents have in common is that they have the most wonderful grandchildren in the world - so clever, so handsome, so pretty, ever so precious. Even if you are still unsure of your path in life, and even if your parents and friends occasionally wonder about you, your grandma and grandpa love you and have faith in you.

That is your weapon! "Precious" needs to get on the phone and say, "Grandpa, Grandma, I am asking you to vote for Barack Obama. This is really important to me. It's about my future. It's about the world I will be living in. It's about the world I want for my future children. (They will love that one!) Please! Do it for me!"

...The really great part of this strategy is that everything you could possibly say to your grandparents about how important Barack's election is for you is one hundred percent true.

When it comes to your family, you are Barack's most effective advocate. There are less than two weeks left in this election. If you haven't already talked to your family, now is the time.

If you've already talked to your parents and grandparents about Barack and what's at stake in this election, let us know how it went, and what advice you would offer fellow supporters who are thinking about having the talk themselves.

Using children as emotional political weapons against their parents and grandparents!

And then REPORT BACK on how your parents will vote!

No, this isn't a "different kind of politics."

This is old-school communism. This is how the Maoist Cultural Revolution started.

One great irony of the Socialist Education Movement is that it called for grassroots action, yet was directed by Mao himself. This movement, aimed primarily at schoolchildren, did not have any immediate effect on Chinese politics, but it did influence a generation of youths, from whom Mao could draw support in the future.

It didn't end until a million people were murdered by the student Red Guards.

Marketing to children is generally restricted, but not when it comes to indoctrination by The One.

Here is the campaign's official page on how to have "the Talk" with your parents to Vote Barack:

Are you sure if your parents are voting for Obama?

If not, you may be the only person who can convince them. If you haven’t already, it’s time for you to have “The Talk” with your parents and other family members.

And tell all your friends to do the same!

By the way,

He [Barack Obama] supports measures that would make it easier for young people to vote, such as Election-Day registration and no-excuse absentee balloting.

Children and illegal aliens running the country.

Not directly affiliated with the campaign is this group, TrueLoveWaitsForADemocrat, which takes a different approach to healing rifts in our society:

THIS ELECTION SEASON SEXY DEMOCRATS ARE TAKING A STAND:

“Just Say No to Sex with Republicans.”

Breakthrough video from an award-winning team of top fashion and advertising creatives,
makes its debut on YouTube. The video takes a tongue in cheek look at the Republican led abstinence movement and turns it on it’s head. In on-camera statements, lovely, scantily-clad patriots, both men and women, pledge to ‘save themselves’ for people who vote Democrat.

Lovely how they mock the notion of abstinence and use sex as a political weapon.

One commenter however points out,

In other words vote conservative and avoid contracting crotch rot from one of these skanks at their next hot tub party! (Thanks for the warning)

These are classic totalitarian tactics.

Don't say you weren't warned.

Get out and fight!

Obama 2001 Bombshell on Redistributing Wealth

2008-10-26T22:03:00.004-04:00

Here is a shocking audio interview with Barack Obama from 2001 on WBEZ-FM, Chicago Public Radio, in which Obama laments that in spite of the progress of the Civil Rights Movement,

the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth, and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society.

He goes on to state the Warren Court was not radical enough in that it adhered to the notion of the Constitution restricting government power, instead of decreeing what government must provide to you!

He also says one of the "tragedies" of the Civil Rights Movement was it was too court-focused and did not succeed in creating the coalitions of power to legislatively seek what he then calls (twice!) "redistributive...change."

But, he doesn't think it's too late to make the "administrative" changes to do so legislatively.

He also says,

Any three of us sitting here could come up with a rationale for bringing about economic change through the courts.

Is is clear: Obama is a radical Marxist.

His policies will ruin us all.

When he calls for "Change!" I'm sure many of his duped supporters don't realize he means "Redistributive Change."

As in, taking your money.

UPDATE: Here is a full transcript:

MODERATOR: Good morning and welcome to Odyssey on WBEZ Chicago 91.5 FM and we’re joined by Barack Obama who is Illinois State Senator from the 13th district and senior lecturer in the law school at the University of Chicago.

OBAMA: If you look at the victories and failures of the civil rights movement and its litigation strategy in the court, I think where it succeeded was to vest formal rights in previously dispossessed peoples. So that I would now have the right to vote, I would now be able to sit at the lunch counter and order and as long as I could pay for it I’d be okay.

But the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society. And to that extent as radical as people tried to characterize the Warren court, it wasn’t that radical. It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution, at least as it’s been interpreted, and the Warren court interpreted it in the same way that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties. It says what the states can’t do to you, it says what the federal government can’t do to you, but it doesn’t say what the federal government or the state government must do on your behalf. And that hasn’t shifted. One of the I think tragedies of the civil rights movement was because the civil rights movement became so court focused, I think that there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributed change and in some ways we still suffer from that.

MODERATOR: Let’s talk with Karen. Good morning, Karen, you’re on Chicago Public Radio.

KAREN: Hi. The gentleman made the point that the Warren court wasn’t terribly radical with economic changes. My question is, is it too late for that kind of reparative work economically and is that that the appropriate place for reparative economic work to take place – the court – or would it be legislation at this point?

OBAMA: Maybe I’m showing my bias here as a legislator as well as a law professor, but I’m not optimistic about bringing about major redistributive change through the courts. The institution just isn’t structured that way.

You just look at very rare examples during the desegregation era the court was willing to for example order changes that cost money to a local school district. The court was very uncomfortable with it. It was very hard to manage, it was hard to figure out. You start getting into all sorts of separation of powers issues in terms of the court monitoring or engaging in a process that essentially is administrative and takes a lot of time.

The court’s just not very good at it and politically it’s very hard to legitimize opinions from the court in that regard. So I think that although you can craft theoretical justifications for it legally. Any three of us sitting here could come up with a rationale for bringing about economic change through the courts.

No Truer Words

2008-10-26T20:55:00.002-04:00

At the U.N., Many Hope for an Obama Win

An informal survey of more than two dozen U.N. staff members and foreign delegates showed that the overwhelming majority would prefer that Sen. Barack Obama win the presidency, saying they think that the Democrat would usher in a new agenda of multilateralism after an era marked by Republican disdain for the world body.
...
Many U.N. rank and file are less circumspect, saying they see in Obama's multicultural background -- a Kenyan father, an Indonesian stepfather and a mother and grandparents from Kansas -- a reflection of themselves. "We do not consider him an African American," said Congo's U.N. ambassador, Atoki Ileka. "We consider him an African."

U.S. Presidents should be natural-born Americans not only in the technical sense required by the Constitution, but also in spirit. Clearly that is the intent of the requirement, as it would be meaningless otherwise.

As an aside, those left-leaning Obama-apologists at Snopes.com, the supposedly definitive source for urban legend debunking/verification, confidently declare the claims that Obama is not even technically qualified to be Presdident are false.

But as for McCain's technical qualification?

They call it "undetermined."

I Must Be Racist

2008-10-26T17:34:00.004-04:00

Just got a charming comment from an Obama supporter!

Erica has left a new comment on your post "Just Spreading the Wealth":

Do you seriously listen to yourself??? Anti-Christ???

Actually I said I didn't know. But Obama's comments about building a Kingdom on Earth are...interesting...and those votive candles with his likeness sure are cute !

Hey Bush has destroyed this country along with his cronies...how are people overlooking the last 8 years AT LEAST!!!

Even if true that Bush destroyed the country, which is ridiculous, he and his administration are not up for re-election.

In regards to your stupid act against that hard working waitress that SERVED you, YOU ARE DISGUSTING!

To anyone who can read it would be clear I was relating a story from someone else.

And a moment's thought would reveal it is likely an apocryphal story, meant as a metaphor.

Of course it's unfair! That's the point of showing how unfair Obama's plan of "spreading the wealth" is!

Obama may give that homeless man more job opportunities so he can provide for himself, but Obama is not going to "redistribute" anyone's wealth to give someone who is not working a free check

Giving further tax breaks to people already paying no income tax sounds like a free check to me.

Do you have a personal issue with an African-American as President? Be honest with yourself...maybe that explains why you will believe ANYTHING negative about him!

And there it is! I must oppose Obama because I'm a racist, rather than because he's a Marxist!

AntiChrist

2008-10-25T00:31:00.004-04:00

Is Obama the AntiChrist?

I don't know.

But the more he talks like this, the more I worry:

GREENVILLE, South Carolina (CNN) -- Republicans no longer have a firm grip on religion in political discourse, Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama told Sunday worshippers.

He finished his brief remarks by saying, "We're going to keep on praising together. I am confident that we can create a Kingdom right here on Earth."

Whoa, isn't that what Jesus is supposed to do?

From the mouth of Obama himself!

In Christian eschatology, the Antichrist or anti-Christ means a person, office, or group recognized as fulfilling the Biblical prophecies about one who will oppose Christ and substitute himself in Christ's place.

'Antichrist' is translated from the combination of two ancient Greek words αντί + Χριστός (anti + Christos). In Greek, Χριστός means “anointed one” and Christians apply it to Jesus of Nazareth.[1] αντί means not only anti in the sense of “against” and “opposite of”, but also “in place of".[2] Therefore, an antichrist opposes Christ by substituting himself for Christ.

Interesting.

Paul writes that this Man of Sin (sometimes translated son of perdition) will possess a number of characteristics. These include "sitting in the temple", opposing himself against anything that is worshiped, claiming divine authority,[11] working all kinds of counterfeit miracles and signs,[12] and doing all kinds of evil.[13] Paul notes that "the mystery of lawlessness"[14] (though not the Man of Sin himself) was working in secret already during his day and will continue to function until being destroyed on the Last Day.[15] His identity is to be revealed after that which is restraining him is removed.[9][15]

The term is also often applied to prophecies regarding a "Little horn" power in Daniel 7,[16]. Daniel 9:27 mentions an "abomination that causes desolations" setting itself up in a "wing" or a "pinnacle" of the temple.[17].

A "wing"?

The West Wing, perhaps?

Some Futurists hold that sometime prior to the expected return of Jesus, there will be a period of "great tribulation"[40] during which the Antichrist, indwelt and controlled by Satan, will attempt to win supporters with false peace, supernatural signs.

This is not an original observation, of course:

The London Sunday Times Online ran a brilliant satire piece called "He ventured forth to bring light into the world."

A sample paragraph: "When he was 12 years old, they found him in the temple in the City of Chicago, arguing the finer points of community organization with the Prophet Jeremiah and the Elders. And the Elders were astonished at what they heard and said among themselves: 'Verily, who is this Child that he opens our hearts and minds to the audacity of hope?'"

The AntiChrist is also associated with deception, and the destruction of Jerusalem -- Iran, anyone?

As a final sign of the Apocalypse, check out these votary candles on sale in San Francisco:

Democrats for McCain

2008-10-25T00:30:00.000-04:00

Just Spreading the Wealth

2008-10-21T20:17:00.002-04:00

Obama says he wants to "spread the wealth around", for fairness reasons, whether or not it results in greater revenue for the government (lower taxes tend to promote growth and hence actually increase tax revenue).

An interesting experiment, found on a comment page attributed to a reader of the Eagle Tribune:

Today on my way to lunch I passed a homeless guy with a sign the read "Vote Obama, I need the money." I laughed.

Once in the restaurant my server had on a "Obama 08" tie, again I laughed--just imagine the coincidence.

When the bill came I decided not to tip the server and explained to him that I was exploring the Obama redistribution of wealth concept. He stood there in disbelief while I told him that I was going to redistribute his tip to someone who I deemed more in need--the homeless guy outside. The server angrily stormed from my sight.

I went outside, gave the homeless guy $10 and told him to thank the server inside as I decided he could use the money more. The homeless guy was grateful.

At the end of my rather unscientific redistribution experiment I realized the homeless guy was grateful for the money he did not earn, but the waiter was pretty angry that I gave away the money he did earn even though the actual recipient deserved money more.

I guess redistribution of wealth is an easier thing to swallow in concept than in practical application.

Interestingly, Obama claims he'll give a tax break to "95% of Americans" when only about 60% pay income taxes.

That means the 40% who already pay no income taxes are going to be just handed cash.

Your cash.

That's welfare, not a tax cut!

Indeed, that 5% that would not get a tax cut is already paying HALF of all taxes collected!

Imagine suddenly everyone were given twice as much money as they had before, but no actual productive increase in goods or services had taken place -- that's what handing money to people is like.

Because the cash did not come from generating wealth in the form of new goods or services, prices of everything will quickly double to absorb the extra money (because things are just as scarce as they were before), and nobody gets ahead!

Indeed, the disincentive to work will cause a contraction of living standards for all.

That's Obama's socialism.

They argue people pay other taxes, however; as the Wall Street Journal points out, giving someone a Social Security tax refund out of Income Tax revenue is a shell game.

Another complaint is "tax cuts benefit the rich" -- well if they benefit you too, why not? The rich are paying much more to start with anyway. This explanation of unknown origin is actually close to correct numerically:

Suppose that every day, ten men go out for beer and the bill for all ten comes to $100. If they paid their bill the way we pay our taxes, it would go something like this:

The first four men (the poorest) would pay nothing.
The fifth would pay $1.
The sixth would pay $3.
The seventh would pay $7.
The eighth would pay $12.
The ninth would pay $18.
The tenth man (the richest) would pay $59.

So, that's what they decided to do. The ten men drank in the bar every day and seemed quite happy with the arrangement, until one day, the owner threw them a curve. 'Since you are all such good customers, he said, 'I'm going to reduce the cost of your daily beer by $20. Drinks for the ten now cost just $80.

The group still wanted to pay their bill the way we pay our taxes so the first four men were unaffected. They would still drink for free. But what about the other six men - the paying customers? How could they divide the $20 windfall so that everyone would get his 'fair share'? They realized that $20 divided by six is $3.33. But if they subtracted that from everybody's share, then the fifth man and the sixth man would each end up being paid to drink his beer. So, the bar owner suggested that it would be fair to reduce each man's bill by roughly the same amount, and he proceeded to work out the amounts each should pay.

And so:

The fifth man, like the first four, now paid nothing (100% savings).
The sixth now paid $2 instead of $3 (33%savings).
The seventh now paid $5 instead of $7 (28%savings).
The eighth now paid $9 instead of $12 (25% savings).
The ninth now paid $14 instead of $18 (22% savings).
The tenth now paid $49 instead of $59 (16% savings).

Each of the six was better off than before and the first four continued to drink for free. But once outside the restaurant, the men began to compare their savings. 'I only got a dollar out of the $20', declared the sixth man. He pointed to the tenth man, 'but he got $10!' 'Yeah, that's right', exclaimed the fifth man. 'I only saved a dollar, too. It's unfair that he got ten times more than I'. 'That's true!!' shouted the seventh man. 'Why should he get $10 back when I got only two? The wealthy get all the breaks!' 'Wait a minute,' yelled the first four men in unison. 'We didn't get anything at all. The system exploits the poor!'

The nine men surrounded the tenth and beat him up.

The next night the tenth man didn't show up for drinks, so the nine sat down and had beers without him. But when it came time to pay the bill, they discovered something important. They didn't have enough money between all of them for even half of the bill!

And that, boys and girls, journalists and college professors, is how our tax system works. The people who pay the highest taxes get the most benefit from a tax reduction. Tax them too much, attack them for being wealthy, and they just may not show up anymore. In fact, they might start drinking overseas where the atmosphere is somewhat friendlier.

Media Smears Average Americans

2008-10-21T01:22:00.004-04:00

All pretense of objective journalism is gone.

This has gone from "too far" to total war: the media is now smearing half the country as racists...unless they vote Obama:

Hate-filled attacks on Obama have many roots

WASHINGTON — An ugly line has been crossed in this presidential campaign, one in which some people don't mind calling Barack Obama a dangerous Muslim, a terrorist and worse.

...

Experts agree on the reasons: Obama, the Democratic nominee, is different from any other major presidential candidate in history in many ways, and people often don't accept such change gracefully.

The implication is this rejection is because he's black.

No, it's because he's socialist!

"A great many people think they're about to lose power. The world is changing around them, and they can't stop that change. So their anger is boiling over," said Mark Potok , the director of the intelligence project at the Southern Poverty Law Center , which tracks hate groups.

The nonstop bile flowing toward Obama has been expressed in many ways:

— Racism. People for the American Way has found that since the McCain campaign very publicly has accused ACORN, a grass-roots community group with strong ties to liberal politicians, of widespread voter-registration fraud, "ACORN offices across the nation have been subjected to an onslaught of racist and threatening voice mails and e-mails."

The fraud is pretty clear-cut; notice how ACORN's illegal activities and Obama's ties to ACORN are deflected by charging the critics are racists.

In addition, Pier said, many older voters grew up when racial segregation was still legal, haven't necessarily accepted blacks in positions of power and are afraid of having a black president.

"Everything these people have stood for is sort of being questioned and to some degree eliminated by Obama," said David Bositis, a senior research associate at Washington's Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies , which studies African-American voting trends.

The angry voters have a 21st-century way to come together instantly and share misinformation. No longer do most people get news from newspapers or major television networks; instead they can access talk shows or Internet sites that are sympathetic to their own views.

So being against Obama is, a priori, racism.

And the internet will have to be regulated for hate speech to correct the misinformation by the Ministry of Truth.

This is the last straw in a rapid series of ever-more outrageous partisanship by the media:

Orson Scott Card lays out a laundry list of one-sided reporting, including the role of Democrats in the Mortgage Crisis, in an open letter to the media:

If you do not tell the truth about the Democrats — including Barack Obama — and do so with the same energy you would use if the miscreants were Republicans — then you are not journalists by any standard.

You're just the public relations machine of the Democratic Party, and it's time you were all fired and real journalists brought in, so that we can actually have a news paper in our city.

A vile non-newsworthy attack piece on Cindy McCain makes the front page of the New York Times...but where is any such scrutiny of Michelle Obama?

Numerous questions about Obama go unasked by the media, such as Obama's apparently illegal acceptance of speaking fees while in state government, or his associations with self-proclaimed anti-Americans like Rev. "God damn Amerikkka" Wright and William "We set bombs" Ayers, or shady characters like slumlord Tony Rezko and Saddam Hussein's financier and international criminal Nadhmi Auchi, or his membership in the socialist New Party...

...yet "Joe the Plumber" gets reamed with an in-depth media probe for the audacity of asking Obama a question when picked out at random for a photo-op!

Which resulted in the unguarded comment that Obama wished to "spread the wealth around."

So Obama then had to mock the plumber. Mocking an average working American at a public campaign rally!

Not to mention the disproportionate scrutiny, e-mail-hacking, and social savaging of Sarah Palin.

But no, it's poor Obama who is the victim...

And yet, all the real violence and thuggery is coming from the Left:

Item: McCain's Straight Talk Express bus was reported to have been hit with paint pellets and a window broken by a .22 rifle bullet this weekend in New Mexico.

Item: intimidation directed at McCain supporters by Obamatrons who were exhorted to "get in their faces" by Barack himself. Just following Dear Leader's orders...

Item: A woman with a McCain sign in New York City has the sign torn away by an enraged Obama-supporting man who then beats her with it.

Oh, and those supposed shouts of "Kill him!" at a McCain rally that Obama complained about at the last debate?

Never happened! The Secret Service investigated and nobody could corroborate the reporter's story -- he was the only witness who heard that said. Everyone else thought it was "Tell them!"

Here is the Real Barack Obama.

Find out all about his friends here.

Here is Obama's Rhetoric vs Record.

Vote accordingly.

Obama's Terrorist Pal

2008-10-19T23:24:00.004-04:00

Obama says unrepentant terrorist William Ayers was "just a guy in the neighborhood."

Seems there's more to their associations.

Ayers also mentions Obama by name in his book (page 82!).

And a few weeks before Obama's review was published, on Nov 20 1997, Obama and Ayers were both on a panel organized by Michelle Obama:

Children who kill are called "super predators," "people with no conscience," "feral pre-social beings" -- and "adults."

William Ayers, author of A Kind and Just Parent: The Children of Juvenile Court (Beacon Press, 1997), says "We should call a child a child. A 13-year-old who picks up a gun isn't suddenly an adult. We have to ask other questions: How did he get the gun? Where did it come from?"

Ayers, who spent a year observing the Cook County Temporary Juvenile Detention Center in Chicago, is one of four panelists who will speak on juvenile justice at 6 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 20, in the C-Shop. The panel, which marks the 100th anniversary of the juvenile justice system in the United States, is part of the Community Service Center's monthly discussion series on issues affecting the city of Chicago. The event is free and open to the public.

Ayers will be joined by Sen. Barack Obama, Senior Lecturer in the Law School, who is working to combat legislation that would put more juvenile offenders into the adult system...

... the system is "overcrowded, under-funded, over-centralized and racist," Ayers said.

Michelle Obama, Associate Dean of Student Services and Director of the University Community Service Center, hopes bringing issues like this to campus will open a dialogue between members of the University community and the broader community.

Not to mention the fundraiser for Obama in the living room of Ayers and the even more loathesome terrorist Bernardine Dohrn, which during the last debate Obama simply dismissed as "untrue" -- which can only be accurate if he's splitting hairs over the claim it "launched his political career" or not, as the event surely happened.

And not to mention Ayers getting Obama a position on the Chicago Annenberg Challenge board where they gave out money to support educational "reform."

Reform, as viewed by an unrepentant Marxist-Leninist domestic bomber who likes to say "guilty as hell, free as a bird!"

Educational reform, from this person:

The Weatherman leadership, including Bill Ayers, pushed for a radical reformulation of sexual relations under the slogan "Smash Monogamy"

Why does Obama not only associate with such terrorists, but then tries to deny it?

Why the ridiculous counter-claim that Obama was "only 8 years old" when the Weathermen were bombing things? That's not the point.

The point is lefties see Ayers as an acceptable member of society, but not Sarah Palin.

Note the odious defense of Ayers by the token leftie at the Wall Street Journal in which the author expresses astonishment at the vilification of Ayers, because he himself is a friend of Ayers just like Obama, and Ayers is some kind of inspiring humanitarian, and a "model citizen"!!!

He volunteers for everything. He may once have been wanted by the FBI, but in the intervening years the man has become such a good citizen he ought to be an honorary Eagle Scout.

No, he ought to be in prison.

Now, factcheck.org makes light of the Obama-Ayers associations.

Interestingly, factcheck.org is funded by the Annenberg Foundation -- yeah, the same foundation that funded Ayers and Obama to give out money for the Chicago Annenberg Challenge.

Worth Another Look

2008-10-19T23:21:00.002-04:00

Liked this video lecture before, well worth another look now:

How Modern Liberals Think

"Good is Evil, and Evil is the victim of Good."

Hubris

2008-10-17T16:47:00.002-04:00

Nation could face short Election Night

Network news executives said they are preparing for an unusual Election Night challenge: How to be honest with the audience, and still keep them tuned in, if the race between John McCain and Barack Obama is effectively decided before most Americans have finished dinner.

After two elections in which the suspense went far into the evening (and, in the case of 2000, for 36 days afterward), the executives said they are contemplating how to manage their newscasts in the event of an Obama blowout — in which the Democrat’s victory would be obvious while polls are still open in most of the country.

Effectively decided?

They mean, as the article makes clear, that if they can "call" Virginia for Obama the moment the polls close at 7 pm, the race is "effectively" over.

If it is clear on Nov. 4 that Obama has won in Virginia by the time polls there close at 7 p.m. — it will still be daylight west of the Mississippi — the obvious conclusion will be that Obama is headed to the White House.

Of course, calling a state the moment polls close relies on unreliable exit polling data.

Or so we're told.

In "effect", it relies on simply the media's "declaration" of an Obama victory the moment polls close, which the 2004 election showed us can be in error.

What they will in "effect" be doing is attempting to influence voting in western states where polls are still open, to discourage turnout by McCain supporters by declaring an early 7 pm victory for Senator Government, whether it's true or not.

That's the cynical way of looking at it. At the very least, this eagerness to view the outcome as simply a question of the size of Obama's victory is a sign of uncontrolled hubris.

One wonders why they're even waiting until Nov. 4.

Silver Lining

2008-10-12T12:31:00.002-04:00

Economic woes chill effort to stop global warming

Only months ago, the prospect of climate legislation passing in the next Congress and becoming law looked promising. Both presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain support mandatory emission cuts and a Democratic majority vowed to act on the problem early in the new year.

But the most popular remedy for slowing global warming, a mechanism known as cap-and-trade, could put further stress on a teetering economy by raising energy prices.

Democrats in both the House and Senate have unveiled draft climate bills. But their supporters acknowledge that the bills may have to be changed, given the economic situation. For example, a proposal to auction off emission permits — a source of money to help refocus the nation's use of energy away from fossil fuels — may have to be abandoned with permits distributed for free.

But some Republicans argue the whole idea of a climate bill ought to be scrapped for the time being. Limits of carbon dioxide would increase energy costs and lead the country "off the economic cliff," said Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas.

Frivolity being put aside when it collides with reality, what a quaint notion!

McCain Unleashed

2008-10-07T01:39:00.001-04:00

And they said McCain would suffer once the debates turned to economic issues!

Pwned!

What Just Happened?

2008-10-07T01:33:00.003-04:00

Hear the Democrats on tape in their own words:

Example, Barney Frank (D-MA): "But I have seen nothing in here that suggests that the safety and soundness [of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac] are an issue and I think it serves us badly to raise safety and soundness as a kind of general shibboleth when it does not seem to me to be an issue."

He received $42,350 in campaign donations from Fannie and Freddie.

In more detail, tape from 2004 Congressional hearings in which Republicans desperately call for more regulations as Democrats insist nothing is wrong, and throw the regulators under the bus; incredibly shocking:

Who Created the Subprime Credit Crisis?

2008-10-01T23:31:00.005-04:00

Over-leveraged banks are at the core of the problem.

But why did they make so many loans to people who couldn't afford them?

Simple greed?

Or were class- and race-based politics involved?

See this well-documented revealing video!

The villains are Democrats Chris Dodd, Barack Obama, and Barney Frank, using the government-sponsored agencies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, to direct patronage in the form of govt-backed mortgages to their non-credit-worthy constituents.

Banks that balked were threatened with lawsuits for being racist, by lawyers like Barack Obama...

Who (along with other dirty Congressmen, mostly Democrats) then received hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from those government agencies...

And who then turned around and employed the same corrupt officers of those institutions in their campaigns!

John McCain and President Bush tried to reform the agencies at various times but were rebuffed...

And the Democrats have the gall to accuse the Republicans of causing the crisis!

See the video.

The highest receivers of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac political contributions, directly, are:
1. Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT), $165,000
2. Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL), $126,000
3. Sen. John Kerry (D-MA), $111,000

How does a junior Senator like Obama get so much money, even more than Kerry? Talk about machine politics!

John McCain received a whopping $862 from Fannie Mae between 1989 and 2008, according to the video.

Bottom line, the housing bubble and subsequent subprime loan crisis was pumped up not by poorly-regulated markets or by "failed economic policies of the Bush administration", but by Democrat political meddling and shenanigans.

Find out more at the video creator's homesite.

Iraq Now A Success

2008-10-01T23:24:00.002-04:00

Well what do you know, the public is now seeing the Iraq War as a success!

For the first time since Rasmussen Reports began polling on the issue, a plurality of voters in September say the U.S. mission in Iraq will be viewed as a success in the long term.

In a national telephone survey Monday night, 41% said history will rate the war in Iraq a success versus 39% who said it will be seen as a failure, with 20% undecided (see crosstabs). These findings echo those of the previous two weeks (see trends).

By contrast, in August of last year, 57% believed history would judge the U.S. mission in Iraq a failure, and only 29% disagreed.

Similarly, 46% say the United States is safer today than before the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, but 34% disagree.

Funny how this breaks down:

The partisan gap on these questions is enormous. Seventy-three percent (73%) of Republicans say the U.S. mission in Iraq will be viewed as a success in the long-term, but only 16% of Democrats agree. Unaffiliated voters are evenly divided.

Seventy-six percent (76%) of Republicans say the situation in Iraq will get better in the next six months versus 23% of Democrats. Just over half of unaffiliated voters (51%) think the situation will improve.

Eighty percent (80%) of Republicans say the United States and its allies are winning the war on terror, but only 36% of Democrats agree, as do 52% of unaffiliateds.

Democrats: invested in failure.

Even if one dismisses the Republican optimism (and the reality on the ground), the stark difference between the Democrat pessimism and the evenly-divided stance of the unaffiliated voter (with apparently no political ax to grind) is revealing.

Who Supports Obama?

2008-09-30T22:29:00.002-04:00

One wonders just who in the world would support Obama.

What could they possibly be thinking?

Now we know!

In this eye-opening Rasmussen poll on the Supreme Court,

While 82% of voters who support McCain believe the justices should rule on what is in the Constitution, just 29% of Barack Obama’s supporters agree. Just 11% of McCain supporters say judges should rule based on the judge’s sense of fairness, while nearly half (49%) of Obama supporters agree.

That sums it up!

McCain supporters ovewhelming respect the Constitution.

Obama's tend not to.

They expect he'll ram through their notions of fairness, for their concept of the "greater good", regardless of carefully crafted Constitutional procedures, checks, and balances -- the classic set-up for revolutionary dictatorship. And all with the best of intentions...

Also shocking is that of all American voters, fully 30% don't understand the importance of the Constitution -- and they are almost all Obama supporters:

During his acceptance speech last night at the Republican National Convention in Minnesota, John McCain told the audience, “We believe in a strong defense, work, faith, service, a culture of life, personal responsibility, the rule of law, and judges who dispense justice impartially and don't legislate from the bench.”

Most American voters (60%) agree and say the Supreme Court should make decisions based on what is written in the constitution, while 30% say rulings should be guided on the judge’s sense of fairness and justice. The number who agree with McCain is up from 55% in August.

The educational system has failed completely.

Secret War With Iran: Author Interview

2008-09-16T20:03:00.002-04:00

I was left this helpful comment at my previous post on the revelations from the book, The Secret War With Iran:

Ronen Bergman [the author of the book on the Secret War] will be my guest on News Talk Online at 5 PM Wednesday September 17.

To talk to Bergman please go to www.garybaumgarten.com and click on the Join The Show link. There is no charge.

Thanks.

That's tomorrow!

I've never read the reporting and commentary of Gary Baumgarten before, but here is his bio:

Award winning journalist Gary Baumgarten hosts the News Talk Online show on Paltalk.com. He asks critical questions, and invites people from all around the world to talk directly to his newsmaker guests using Paltalk's voice over IP technology. Gary came to Paltalk as director of news and programming from CNN where he was the radio bureau chief and correspondent in New York for a decade, where he covered, among other things, the 9/11 attacks in New York and Hurricane Katrina. He was previously reporter and assistant news director at CBS all news radio station WWJ in Detroit. Prior to that he was managing editor at Detroit Radio News Service and a reporter for the Jackson (MI) Citizen-Patriot, the Detroit News and a number of weekly newspapers. Paltalk is the largest multimedia interactive program on the Internet with more than 4 million unique users. News Talk Online is also syndicated by CRN Digital Talk Radio to cable systems serving an additional 12 million households.

It sounds like an interesting interview!

Thirty Years War

2008-09-07T22:36:00.002-04:00

And I don't mean the war from 1618-1648, but rather the one with Iran that's been going on since 1979!

Though both are "religious" wars.

Is a counterstrike finally coming?

The Secret War With Iran

In August 2007, because certain intelligence agencies were not convinced of Israeli claims that President Bashar Assad was engaged in the construction of a nuclear weapons facility, Israel sent sent 12 members of the Sayeret Matkal commando unit into Syria in two helicopters to collect soil samples outside the site in question.
...
The results provided "clear-cut proof" of the nuclear project," investigative journalist Ronen Bergman writes in his new book, The Secret War with Iran.

A month later, Israel bombed the site, and in so doing reemphasized the Begin Doctrine - Israel's insistence that, for the sake of its own survival, it will not allow the deployment by hostile neighbors of weapons that might be used to destroy it.

Bergman's book, which will be published next week in the United States, is an expanded, updated version of his Hebrew-language The Point of No Return, which was Israel's best-selling non-fiction work in 2007.
...
Plainly, the author has been allowed access to a range of material hitherto kept classified by various intelligence services. Plainly, too, what he is publishing is material that Israel is content to have widely disseminated and some of which cannot be independently verified. The book was submitted to censorship, and not all of its content was approved, he told me when he dropped off a copy a few days ago, though it did sometimes seem as though he had run into the censor on a relatively benign day.

Most notable, perhaps, in this context, is the fact that the guardians of Israel's military secrets have allowed Bergman to provide a fairly extensive account of that September 6, 2007, raid on Syria's nuclear facility - whose purpose he states unambiguously was "the production of plutonium for the manufacture of atomic bombs" and whose construction, he reports, was a tripartite endeavor: "At a series of secret meetings between representatives of the three sides, held mainly in Teheran, it was decided that Syria would supply the territory, Iran the money [$1 billion-$2b.], and North Korea the expertise..."

Last year's raid was the subject of some of the heaviest military censorship that I have encountered in the past 25 years: Israel was desperate to take no official responsibility for the attack, and in this way to allow Damascus plausible deniability, to avoid a deterioration into war. There was no official confirmation of the raid, and for a long time after it, all references in the Israeli media had to include conditioning phrases such as the "reported" Israeli strike.

Apparently such concerns no longer apply. Bergman has been freed to describe, without the censor's usual required attribution to "foreign sources," the entire process by which the Syrian facility was built - with details of the shipments of material from North Korea and the dispatch of Korean scientists. He sets out the circumstances of that high-risk August fact-finding mission by Sayeret Matkal. And he is allowed to note that "a number of North Koreans" were killed in the Israeli attack.

Although destroying the site was an Israeli operation, Bergman makes clear further that "the Israelis and the Americans decided to act," and that the two countries coordinated on the official silence policy after the raid was successfully completed. "Prime Minister Olmert and President Bush decided that both countries would maintain a policy of total nonreaction, without exceptions, and without winks or nods. If the Syrians had not been in a hurry to issue their own statements, the whole matter might not have been disclosed at all."
...
A few weeks ago, the White House took the unusual step of issuing a specific denial of a report on Army Radio, picked up by the Post, which claimed that a Bush official recently told his Israeli counterparts that the president is planning to strike Iran's nuclear facilities before leaving office. Only this week, a newspaper in The Netherlands claimed that Dutch intelligence has abruptly halted an "extremely successful" ongoing operation to sabotage Iran's nuclear program because of an assessment that such an American strike is indeed just weeks away.
...
[A]s of May 2008, "the Mossad's estimate" is that Bush, "out of religious and ideological motives, will order a strike."
...
But the real threat - the player that gave Iran the vital resources to stride forward - was Pakistan, via its notorious nuclear salesman Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan.

Plenty more, so read it all...

Palin Prediction

2008-09-03T20:41:00.005-04:00

I predict that the media, after setting up tonight as the "make or break moment" for the GOP, based on Palin's upcoming speech, will declare her to have failed to dispel the "controversy" over her selection.

And that therefore the election is already lost for McCain/Palin and there's no need for even holding a vote.

Regardless of what is actually said tonight, that will be the spin.

Just like they said Kerry "won" all the debates against Bush.

I think they're afraid of actually having to debate.

UPDATE: I was wrong! The election WAS decided tonight:

McCain/Palin in a landslide!

Cooling Sun

2008-09-03T01:04:00.002-04:00

Uh-oh.

Sun Makes History: First Spotless Month in a Century

Drop in solar activity has potential effect for climate on earth.

The sun has reached a milestone not seen for nearly 100 years: an entire month has passed without a single visible sunspot being noted.

The event is significant as many climatologists now believe solar magnetic activity – which determines the number of sunspots -- is an influencing factor for climate on earth.

According to data from Mount Wilson Observatory, UCLA, more than an entire month has passed without a spot. The last time such an event occurred was June of 1913. Sunspot data has been collected since 1749.

When the sun is active, it's not uncommon to see sunspot numbers of 100 or more in a single month. Every 11 years, activity slows, and numbers briefly drop to near-zero. Normally sunspots return very quickly, as a new cycle begins.

But this year -- which corresponds to the start of Solar Cycle 24 -- has been extraordinarily long and quiet, with the first seven months averaging a sunspot number of only 3. August followed with none at all. The astonishing rapid drop of the past year has defied predictions, and caught nearly all astronomers by surprise.

...

In the past 1000 years, three previous such events -- the Dalton, Maunder, and Spörer Minimums, have all led to rapid cooling. One was large enough to be called a "mini ice age". For a society dependent on agriculture, cold is more damaging than heat. The growing season shortens, yields drop, and the occurrence of crop-destroying frosts increases.

Get ready for the Big Freeze!

Do your part to warm the planet -- increase your carbon footprint!

Little Known Palin Facts

2008-09-03T00:50:00.003-04:00

Little known facts about McCain's running mate Sarah Palin!

Sarah Palin is the reason compasses point North.

To prep for her role as Tracy Flick in “Election,” Witherspoon spent the ‘98 seal clubbing season with Palin

Jesus has a bracelet that says, “WWSPD?”

Death once had a near-Sarah Palin experience

Sarah Palin was not flown to Ohio in charter jet- she ran as part of morning workout.

Sarah Palin begins every day with a moment of silence for the political enemies buried in her yard.

Sarah Palin’s finishing move in the VP debate will be pulling Biden’s still beating heart from his chest & taking a bite.

Sarah Palin doesn’t need a gun to hunt. She has been known to throw a bullet through an adult bull elk.

Sarah Palin will give birth to the man who will lead humanity’s war against the machines..

Sarah Palin is on loan from the Justice League.

If placed into Schroedinger’s experiment, both Sarah Palins remain alive.

Iran’s nuclear program is a response to Sarah Palin.

Global Warming doesn’t kill polar bears. Sarah Palin does - usually with her bare hands.

Sarah Palin knows the location of DB Cooper’s body because she threw him from the plane.

The raw energy of Sarah Palin melts the Alaskan ice roads every spring.

It’s not raining in DC. Those are God’s tears of joy that McCain picked Sarah Palin.

More facts are being unearthed every day!

Only the Beginning

2008-08-27T02:23:00.002-04:00

The calm before the storm?

North Korea is reneging on its denuclearization deal.

Supply lines to Afghanistan through Pakistan are becoming more and more unreliable as that country disintegrates.

Russia is imperialistically resurgent, to monopolize Europe's energy.

And Iran's nuclear program speeds ahead.

And the media is all a-tingle with the Obamamessiah.

Musings from Belmont Club's Wretchard:

North Korea has decided to suspend the decommissioning of its nuclear facilities because the United States has insisted on verification before removing it from the list of the state sponsors of terrorism. This new crisis comes on the heels of Georgia and events in Pakistan. About the only good news is ironically from Iraq. What’s going on? The question is whether we are still in the End of History, at “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow, and our planet began to heal,” or whether the stars are veiled; a sleepless malice is stirring, and a new menace is taking shape, not for the last time but in our time.

...

It appears the public no longer thinks it is our “mission” to save the poor Afghanis, the noble Iraqis, the wonderful Darfurans or die for the Zionists and S Koreans - but to save America and our way of life - instead.

Suppose we take this as a starting point. What are the givens? A large dependency on Middle Eastern energy. A large European dependence on Eurasian and Central Asian energy. A declining Western demographic. A political culture that is obsessed with trivia, political correctness and pointless celebrity.

How does a civilization with these givens respond to a challenge?

Can it?

Admittedly the challenges are still in rinky-dink places, but that’s only because they’ve just gotten started. Although still based in these hick places, their targets are already downtown New York and DC. If the problems on the periphery were going to stay there, then fine. But they’re not. September 11 should have shown us they are not — because of the weaknesses outlined in the paragraph above. What’s there to keep them out?

The West is extraordinarily vulnerable and the fight can move from the periphery to the center, I think, with shocking rapidity. What really scares me is what people in Denver are talking about; how the media is treating it like an entertainment extravaganza. That’s what is truly frightening. Not what we see out the window, but what we see in the mirror.

...

The truly unthinkable today is to imagine that something bad could really happen. September 12 was an exception. But that’s history now. The generation of the 50s and 60s understood that really, really nasting things could occur. They had a human memory of it. But now survival is assumed to be assured. We talk about reproductive rights, gay rights, the right to immigrate illegal and so on.

Civilization has forgotten what it is like to eat its pets from hunger.

And as so often happens when disasters can no longer be imagined, they most often occur.

History is supposed to protect us from forgetfulness; curb arrogance; guard against complacency. But who have we put in charge of our altar to memory? Open your TV sets and watch the talking heads.

Maybe it was always thus.

Whatever else we do, we need to immediately begin to:

(1) raise at least 12 more combat brigades of volunteers

(2) build more nukes

(3) ready the public for the actual use of (1) and (2)

Interestingly, the Green insistence against expanded, vigorours drilling for oil and natural gas in this country, as well as building more coal and nuclear power plants, virtually guarantees we will be required to spend more blood for oil to maintain our way of life.

The Democrat Versus The Marxist

2008-08-26T20:28:00.004-04:00

This election season it seems we have the choice between the (old-style) "Democrat", i.e. John McCain, and the (new Democrat) "Marxist", i.e. Barack Obama.

The Socialist, Hillary, got left out.

We are at a shifting point in the political landscape.

Look at the history of political parties in this country, and you'll see a pattern: at times of stress, the major parties fracture, and many smaller parties form, but rather quickly the different factions re-arrange themselves once again into two major coalitions but with a new focus than before.

It appears to be happening again. The names Democrat and Republican may go on, but their meaning is changing.

Besides the ascendance of the far left in the Democrat party, among the Republicans we see the small-government conservatives in disarray with the "RINO" John McCain now at the helm and serious talk of the very real possibility he could choose "DINO" Joe Lieberman as his running mate! Though the odds of that may not be great, that they are non-zero is an important signal.

Predictions:

(1) A new "centrist" party of RINO/DINO moderate Republicans and Democrats will form if John McCain is elected and he picks some Democrats for his cabinet as a unity gesture. Maybe this party gets a new name but probably it will keep the Republican name. This party will probably spend too much but with luck will have a vigorous hawkish neo-con foreign policy. It might even embrace the separation of State and Federal government (the new rallying cry of the 21st century?) and select judges who believe the Constitution says what it means and means what it says.

(2) An even more furious far-left contingent of Europhile high-tax pacifist Democrats (the Kucinich, Obama, Gore & Kennedy types) who are really neo-Marxists will become even more extreme, and split from/alienate the rest of the party.

(3) Some small-government conservatives will waste their time getting behind paleo-conservatives like Pat Buchanan or wacky libertarian-types like Ron Paul. They might make a go of a third party nuisance for a while but won't amount to much unless they get under the Republican umbrella again.

(4) Evangelical types seem to be splitting, with the pacifist/socialist leaners looking to the far-left Democrats, and the social conservative family-values types left with the Republicans.

Some highlights from the Kucinich speech at the DNC tonight that brought the crowd to a roaring fever pitch:

Kucinich electrifies convention arena

It will become known as the “Wake Up, America” speech.

“Fellow Democrats, are you ready for November?” he asked.

“It’s election day 2008 and we Democrats are giving America a wake up call. Wake up, America!”

In 2001, the oil companies and the war contractors seized the country and added four trillion dollars to the national debt.

“Millions of Americans have lost their jobs; trillions of dollars for an unwarranted war paid for with borrowed money; tens of millions of dollars in cash and weapons disappeared into thin air at the cost of the lives of our troops and innocent Iraqis.”

Meanwhile, with the U.S. helping to rebuild infrastructure in Iraq and Afghanistan, “there is no money to rebuild bridges in America.”

Then he launched into a “Wake Up” litany:

“The insurance companies took over health care. Wake up, America!

“The pharmaceutical companies took over drug prices. Wake up, America”

“The speculators took over Wall Street. Wake up, America!”

With each refrain, the delegates grew more frenzied.

I suppose Government is supposed to take over health care, drug prices, and Wall Street?

What a disaster that would be!

He played on the terror alert level “color chart.”

“Every day we get the color orange while the oil companies, the insurance companies, the speculators, the war contractors get the color green. Wake up, America.

Yeah, the alert level is all a big joke.

“This is not a call for you to take a new direction from right to left; this is a call for you to go from down to up.

“Up with peace!” Kucinich yelled to approving roars. “Up with prosperity! Up with education! Up with Democrats!

The delegates continued to cheer through the first part of the next speaker’s remarks.

Gag.

More like Up with Chuck!

Update: Must be something in the air, just saw these relevant comments at Belmont Club to the effect of McCain salvaging what remains of the traditional Democrats:

wretchard:
Mike Moran recalls George McGovern’s rueful remark after Chicago, the exact moment when something had perished. “I opened the door to the Democratic party and 20 million people walked out.” Maybe the significance of Denver is that what begun in 1968 has finally been achieved in 2008. Ayers is now inside the tent. But where will all the 20 million go? I realize that John McCain may know in his bones that he can’t be the candidate of the Republican Party as conservatives would like it because the Democratic party as we know it has already died, and he must hasten to pick up the pieces.

whiskey:
Also, yes Wretchard you are quite correct.

The old, FDR-LBJ party is dead. McCain does know, that he can only win with Democrats, including Clinton-ites. Not even Bill Clinton is persona grata in the Hard Left Democratic Party.

Eventually, the Republican Party will fissure, but the rump of the Democratic Party, the Hard Left Rich (same thing) will still dominate the wealthy metropoli with the hard left angry minorities: San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Chicago, Atlanta, Philly, etc.

Slogan

2008-08-20T20:24:00.001-04:00

Heard from a clever person:

"I'd rather have Sense than Change!"

Labor Day Is Back By Popular Demand

2008-08-13T00:09:00.003-04:00

The Tyson chicken plant in Shelbyville, Tennessee and the workers' union have reconsidered their hare-brained decision to drop Labor Day as a paid holidav in favor of the muslim holiday of Eid for Ramadan -- public pressure worked!

This year they will get both as holidays, i.e. a total of nine instead of their usual eight, as a bonus for this glitch.

Next year they revert to the normal 7 standard holidays (including Labor Day) plus an 8th day that used to be the worker's birthday but now can be any "personal day", allowing the muslims to take Eid if they desire without forcing it on everyone else and taking away a true American labor holiday -- which makes perfect sense!

It turns out the city mayor, the county mayor, a State Democrat representative and a State Republican senator all wrote a letter to Tyson strongly suggesting they change course:

After thinking about the issue, [County Mayor Eugene] Ray said because Tyson Foods is a private enterprise, he couldn't tell them what to do, "but I didn't think it was a good thing to do as a business."

But then, Ray began to receive a series of calls asking "what in the world is taking place," he said, relating that the callers thought Tyson's actions "were a bad thing," although Ray said callers expressed it more forcefully.

"I think Tyson needs to go back and reconsider this," Ray said. "They need to sit down and renegotiate this. They had honorable intentions to try to do something for the plant, but it's a mistake."

Ray said that a majority of the people Tyson serves "are upset with it."

Sweet!

Interestingly, reading the comments to this report at the Shelbyville Times-Gazette, it seems many locals still want Tyson run out of town.

Labor Day Cancelled for Ramadan

2008-08-02T09:59:00.004-04:00

UPDATE: Labor Day Restored!

---------------
The Shelbyville, Tennessee Times-Gazette reports:

Tyson drops Labor Day holiday for Eid al-Fitr

Workers at Tyson Foods' poultry processing plant in Shelbyville will no longer have a paid day off on Labor Day, but will instead take the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Fitr in the fall.

A recent press release from the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) stated that a new contract at the Shelbyville facility "implements a new holiday to accommodate the ... Muslim workers at the plant."

Even if the plant were 100% muslim that would still be a dangerous and outrageous sign of the decline of our national culture.

However, 250 of the 1200 workers there are Somali, and no more than 700 total are muslims.

Eid al-Fitr means "Festival of the Breaking of the Fast" in Arabic, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica, and marks the end of Ramadan, the Muslim holy month of fasting.

The festival "is distinguished by the performance of communal prayer (salat) at daybreak on its first day. It is a time of official receptions and private visits, when friends greet one another, presents are given, new clothes are worn, and the graves of relatives are visited," the encyclopedia said.

Mickelson said that "Eid al-Fitr is one of eight paid holidays for all Team Members covered by the contract, while Labor Day is not a paid holiday."

"Based on the contract, the other paid holidays include: The Team Member's birthday, New Year's Day, Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Thanksgiving Day and Christmas Day," Mickelson said.

"Implementing this holiday was a challenge, since it falls on a different day every year and is declared on fairly short notice," RWDSU Representative Randy Hadley said in the press release. "But the negotiating committee felt this was extremely crucial, since this holiday is as important to Muslims as Christmas is to Christians."

One wonders then why the muslims also get Christmas off.

I would also assert that 100% of the workers at the plant are, you know, workers, and Labor Day was created as a National Holiday just for them!

The pandering and special treatment continues:

The union also claimed that in addition to the observance of the Muslim holiday, "two prayer rooms have been created to allow Muslim workers to pray twice a day and return to work without leaving the plant."

Mickelson said that Shelbyville's Tyson plant "does have a prayer room to accommodate the needs of Muslim Team Members."

No other faith has a special prayer room of course.

I've never been a big fan of the labor movement, but Labor Day is an American holiday that should not just be thrown away for the alien habits of foreign cultures. From the US Department of Labor,

"Labor Day differs in every essential way from the other holidays of the year in any country," said Samuel Gompers, founder and longtime president of the American Federation of Labor. "All other holidays are in a more or less degree connected with conflicts and battles of man's prowess over man, of strife and discord for greed and power, of glories achieved by one nation over another. Labor Day...is devoted to no man, living or dead, to no sect, race, or nation."

Labor Day, the first Monday in September, is a creation of the labor movement and is dedicated to the social and economic achievements of American workers. It constitutes a yearly national tribute to the contributions workers have made to the strength, prosperity, and well-being of our country.

That a union would request dropping Labor Day from its own contract to add ramadan is diabolical

Don't buy Tyson, it's un-American.

Pesky Temperature Fluctuations

2008-07-23T23:50:00.002-04:00

You don't say?

Fossil Suggests Antarctica Much Warmer in Past

A college student's new discovery of fossils collected in the East Antarctic suggests that the frozen polar cap was once a much balmier place.

The well-preserved fossils of ostracods, a type of small crustaceans, came from the Dry Valleys region of Antarctica's Transantarctic Mountains and date from about 14 million years ago. The fossils were a rare find, showing all of the ostracods' soft anatomy in 3-D.
...
"Present conditions in this Antarctic region show mean annual temperatures of [minus 13 degrees Fahrenheit]," said Mark Williams of the University of Leicester, co-author with Ashworth of the fossil-find report in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. "These are impossible conditions to sustain a lake fauna with ostracods."

...the warmer climate that supported the ostracods would have existed "when Antarctica was pretty much in its current location," said study co-author David Marchant of Boston University.

Marchant estimated that the summer temperatures in Antarctica would have been about 30.6 degrees F warmer than they are now.

So...the South Pole was 31 degrees hotter than now?!?

How did that happen? Was somebody's carbon footprint out of control? Burning too many fossil fuels? Oh wait, the fossils fuels were just being formed...

This warmer period started to end when the first continent-sized ice sheets began appearing on Antarctica around 34 million years ago, around the end of the Eocene epoch. These ice sheets expanded and contracted until around 14 million years ago, during the Miocene epoch, when a dramatic cooling took place and transformed the tundra into an environment "that today looks like Mars," Marchant told LiveScience.

Marchant said climatologists are uncertain exactly what caused this intense period of cooling.

So the ice sheets fluctuated, without human intervention, for 20 million years.

Then, it suddenly got much colder.

And they aren't sure why.

But somehow we're to believe they're sure we're going to warm up?

Except it's looking more and more that solar activity drives climate (CO2 is largely irrelevant -- at least the human component), which perhaps depends on changing tidal forces from the alignments of the planets, and we're going into a cool cycle right now.

Maybe the Global Warming Prophets like Al Gore are so intent on getting immediate measures passed, so they can claim a credit for the inevitable cooling that's just around the corner.

Don't fall for it! Antarctica can change its temperature by over 30 degrees all by itself; to think we can control that is ridiculous.