Archive for the ‘Ayn Rand Spins’ Category

Compassion Fatigue

Wednesday, August 26th, 2009

Gerard now has a hardcore case of it.

I’ve been told, so often and so stridently, to feel this and to feel that and to feel for the downtrodden of the world, that I find I no longer feel anything at all. I don’t think I’m alone in not caring. I think caring and compassion, now that it has been institutionalized enough to demand caring and compassion, has finally found its limit…Compassion can never be made compulsory and cash-flow positive at the same time. Whenever and wherever compassion has been made compulsory the people soon find they no longer have care or quartas to spare.

Perhaps what our friend in Seattle is feeling, is the onset of some deplorable disease.

Or perhaps it’s a recovery. A recovery from that wretched infestation known as…dramatic pause…drumroll, please…

Goodperson Fever.

It’s our modern plague. If you’ve ever done a good deed, and then just kinda hung around awhile to see if anyone noticed, and if so, how many, and what they thought about it all…you have been infected. And you probably still have it, unless you’ve since gotten in touch with your inner dark, uncaring, cynical bastard.

Cloward-Piven

Thursday, August 20th, 2009

Learn:

First proposed in 1966 and named after Columbia University sociologists Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, the “Cloward-Piven Strategy” seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse.

Inspired by the August 1965 riots in the black district of Watts in Los Angeles (which erupted after police had used batons to subdue a black man suspected of drunk driving), Cloward and Piven published an article titled “The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty” in the May 2, 1966 issue of The Nation. Following its publication, The Nation sold an unprecedented 30,000 reprints. Activists were abuzz over the so-called “crisis strategy” or “Cloward-Piven Strategy,” as it came to be called. Many were eager to put it into effect.

In their 1966 article, Cloward and Piven charged that the ruling classes used welfare to weaken the poor; that by providing a social safety net, the rich doused the fires of rebellion. Poor people can advance only when “the rest of society is afraid of them,” Cloward told The New York Times on September 27, 1970. Rather than placating the poor with government hand-outs, wrote Cloward and Piven, activists should work to sabotage and destroy the welfare system; the collapse of the welfare state would ignite a political and financial crisis that would rock the nation; poor people would rise in revolt; only then would “the rest of society” accept their demands.

The key to sparking this rebellion would be to expose the inadequacy of the welfare state. Cloward-Piven’s early promoters cited radical organizer Saul Alinsky as their inspiration. “Make the enemy live up to their (sic) own book of rules,” Alinsky wrote in his 1972 book Rules for Radicals. When pressed to honor every word of every law and statute, every Judaeo-Christian moral tenet, and every implicit promise of the liberal social contract, human agencies inevitably fall short. The system’s failure to “live up” to its rule book can then be used to discredit it altogether, and to replace the capitalist “rule book” with a socialist one.
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This was an example of what are commonly called Trojan Horse movements — mass movements whose outward purpose seems to be providing material help to the downtrodden, but whose real objective is to draft poor people into service as revolutionary foot soldiers; to mobilize poor people en masse to overwhelm government agencies with a flood of demands beyond the capacity of those agencies to meet. The flood of demands was calculated to break the budget, jam the bureaucratic gears into gridlock, and bring the system crashing down. Fear, turmoil, violence and economic collapse would accompany such a breakdown — providing perfect conditions for fostering radical change. That was the theory.
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The Cloward-Piven strategy depended on surprise. Once society recovered from the initial shock, the backlash began. New York’s welfare crisis horrified America, giving rise to a reform movement which culminated in “the end of welfare as we know it” — the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, which imposed time limits on federal welfare, along with strict eligibility and work requirements. Both Cloward and Piven attended the White House signing of the bill as guests of President Clinton.
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Cloward and Piven never again revealed their intentions as candidly as they had in their 1966 article. Even so, their activism in subsequent years continued to rely on the tactic of overloading the system. When the public caught on to their welfare scheme, Cloward and Piven simply moved on, applying pressure to other sectors of the bureaucracy, wherever they detected weakness.

Let’s not negotiate with these people. No matter what. Let’s just renounce this supposedly-noble objective of trying to find a midpoint or “common ground.”

I’ve spent a lifetime having it beaten into my head that only crazy old men in plaid shirts crusted with their own drool babble on about anything that comes close to “communists trying to ruin our way of life and tear down our country.”

But as I learn more about the turmoil that was taking place around the time of my birth, I find the facts point more and more toward this as the proper way to look at things. You don’t need to drink vodka and wear a big fur hat with a red star on the front to be a commie.

And negotiating with one is like negotiating with a rattlesnake. It is the straddling of a divide that stretches from one universe to a wholly incompatible other universe. It is a compromise between order and anarchy, creation and destruction, good and evil. It doesn’t take much at all to deserve a spot at a conference table, but one unalterable standard must be that you have to want a spot at the conference table. And commies don’t want one. They just want to tear things down.

Hat tip to Boortz.

Leave Barack Alone!

Tuesday, August 11th, 2009

On Thursday, James Taranto discussed the Obama healthcare plan and how it was being “promoted”…

If the plan were good, you would expect its proponents to be staking their arguments on its merits. Instead, they are turning this into a debate about the plan’s opponents. A telling video clip of Sen. Barbara Boxer (D., Calif.) on MSNBC’s “Hardball” has been making the rounds:

So all of this is a diversion by the people who want to, frankly, hurt President Obama. You’ve heard the Republican senator Jim DeMint say it: Let’s make this “Obama’s Waterloo,” let’s break him. That’s what this is about.

And by the way, I saw some of the clips of people storming these town hall meetings. The last time I saw well-dressed people doing this was when Al Gore asked me to go down to Florida when they were recounting the ballots, and I was confronted with the same type of people. They were there screaming and yelling, “Go back to California,” “Get out of here,” and all the rest of it–until I finally looked at them and I said, “You know what? Your hero Ronald Reagan is from California. You should show a little respect.” And then they quieted down.

So this is just all organized. Just go up on the Web site, Chris. You in the media have to take a look at what’s going on here. This is all planned. It’s to hurt our president, and it’s to change the Congress.

Most of the ensuing criticism has centered on Boxer’s weird fashion commentary. This may reflect no more than a regional difference: Californians tend to be more casual in their sartorial standards than regular people. Still, it’s a head-scratcher why Boxer would think it is to her opponents’ discredit that they are “well-dressed”–i.e., that they look respectable.

This golden-stater says — hey waitaminnit. Don’t go looking to me for an explanation about what my aging-hippie-girl senator was raving about. In fact, if DeMint is looking for a way to hit back, if you’re ever in conversation with the gentleman from South Carolina Mr. Taranto, you might recommend to him that the campaign commercials be made to directly address this strange culture war we have raging under the surface. Who deserves attention? People who request it respectfully, dressing like they have something important to say that’s of interest to more people than just themselves? Or the folks with whom Boxer apparently feels more of a kindred spirit, the assholes who block bridges with bicycles during rush hour? She seems to live in a world in which you don’t deserve attention until & unless you dress down. This is an apt illustration of the decision that was made last November, to put the kids in charge of the dinner menu, what’s on teevee, bedtime, et cetera. Remind the voters again, please. Boxer looks like she’s ready to help you remind everyone what she & hers are all about.

Taranto continues…

But what caught our attention was the plaint that ObamaCare opponents want “to hurt the president.” It reminds us of those hilarious “Leave Britney alone!” videos that were the rage on YouTube a couple of years back. How exactly does Boxer expect this to persuade anyone to support the legislation? Just imagine the thought process: I don’t want higher taxes and government rationing of medical care. But doggone it, I’m for it anyway, because I don’t want to hurt the president!
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So, let’s review the arguments:

• Republicans are bad, they lost the last election, and they have partisan motives for wanting to stop ObamaCare.

• People who are angry about this are crackpots who display swastikas and other invidious symbols. Also, their anger is insincere, and they are shills of the RNC. They wear nice clothes, and this is not to their credit.

• Some of the arguments against ObamaCare are false, according to Obama.

• If ObamaCare is defeated, Obama would be hurt.

Is there any argument for ObamaCare? In all the material we reviewed for this item, only this, from the Obama email:

Every day we don’t act, Americans watch their premiums rise three times faster than wages, small businesses and families are pushed towards bankruptcy, and 14,000 people lose their coverage entirely. The cost of inaction is simply too much for the people of this nation to bear.

In other words, the “crisis” is so urgent that any thoughtful deliberation would entail intolerable delay. This is the same old argument that has already failed.

If this is the best the president can do, he deserves to lose resoundingly. If that hurts him, there’s always aspirin.

If I wanted to motivate large numbers of people to make wrong decisions on a regular basis, I would take this list of ways to make such a thing happen and start fleshing it out.

I’d demand people support my dumb ideas, for any number of conceivable reasons that had nothing to do with the content of the ideas. Prove you’re not a racist. Don’t hurt that guy. So-and-so might get mad at you if you oppose my dumb idea. We’ll have riots…

I’d end up behaving exactly the way the democrats really do behave. All the time. It seems to always be a question of “here’s today’s reason why you should do this…and notice I’m not discussing what’s going to happen if it goes through, I want to talk about everything else.” I miss the days when the bullshit was of a different grade, one that pretended to be concerned about what was going to happen to us. “Don’t let Reagan stockpile more nukular weapons, he’ll get everyone blown up” comes to mind. What happened to that?

To repeat: Is there any argument for ObamaCare?

About That Tax Cut

Sunday, August 2nd, 2009

Those CNN fact-checkers who you trust oh so well, last year, about The Chosen One’s tax cuts:

Obama, on his Web site, promises to “cut taxes for 95 percent of working families.” He and his campaign officials have, at times, inaccurately described his plan as a tax cut for “95 percent of Americans.” His economic policy adviser Jason Furman told CNN that the figure applies to working people and leaves out retirees.

Ah, but it wasn’t just on His web site — although it certainly was there. This is the dishonest politician’s twenty-first century flim-flam. How many times were you called a stupid idiot for noticing Kerry, Kucinich, Dean, Obama, Clinton, et al lacked a coherent policy about this-or-that thing…and the ardent supporter snottingly and sneeringly recommended you “go to their web site”? The problem with that is obvious: There’s absolutely nothing save for Google caching to offer that tomorrow’s web site will bear any resemblance to today’s. It’s a weighty issue in this modern age when a democrat can look all big and tough and bad and hawkish, screaming Let’s Go After Saddam Hussein, and then suddenly it’s the fashionable thing to become all peace-and-dovish and yammer away about how George W. Bush fooled you.

Being a democrat has a lot to do with lacking any concept of the passage of time. So with regard to that particular party — and really, in general — “Go To His Website” is complete bullshit.

But the 95 percent thing is bullshit too. Look what’s going on up above. Click on that CNN link and read it all. Barack Obama can’t get His own campaign pledge straight…not some tangential, decorative campaign pledge, but the primary centerpiece one…and McCain is called out by the fact checkers for not repeating Obama’s pledge the way Obama meant to say it. I would add here that, as we’ve pointed out before, “ninety-five percent” is a popular figurative expression as well as a literal one. This is a point CNN seems to have missed. When you say 95%, you could be talking nineteen-measured-out-of-twenty…OR…you could be using this popular backwoods idiom to say “not quite all, but as a practical matter might as well be all.”

Ninety-five percent of the time when a politician tells me to go to his website, his website is different the next day.

Ninety-five percent of the time when someone says “I’m from the Government and I’m here to help you,” he may be from there, but he’s certainly not here to help you.

Ninety-five percent of lawyers are crooks.

Ninety-five percent of the time when a child is being put on medication, it’s a male child, and it’s his mother putting him on the meds because she can’t relate to men.

See? Like that. When Obama & crew were running all over the country jibber-jabbering about this “tax cut for 95% of Americans” someone should have at least asked the question: Literal, or figurative? If it’s all about what He meant to say, it could plausibly be suggested that He could’ve meant either one.

Too late now. Not that it matters though (hat tip: Ace).

To get the economy back on track, will President Barack Obama have to break his pledge not to raise taxes on 95 percent of Americans? In a “This Week” exclusive, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner told me, “We’re going to have to do what’s necessary.”

Geithner was clear that he believes a key component of economic recovery is deficit reduction. When I gave him several opportunities to rule out a middle class tax hike, he wouldn’t do it.

“We have to bring these deficits down very dramatically,” Geithner told me. “And that’s going to require some very hard choices.”

“We will not get this economy back on track, recovery will be not strong and sustained, unless we convince the American people that we are going to have the will to bring these deficits down once recovery is firmly established,” he said.

You Obama zealots are really something else.

They didn’t even kiss ya first.

Cash for Clunkers Going Broke

Friday, July 31st, 2009

The Other McCain told me all about it last night, and this morning it’s burning up the news wires. Real life continues to play out like a free-of-charge “Palin in 2012” commercial:

In one of those fiendishly stupid examples of liberal logic that will be cited in Econ 201 texts for decades to come — typing is difficult when I’m laughing so hard — “Cash for Clunkers” is broke:

The program…was supposed to expire at the end of October. But in the one week since it took effect, it appears to have run dry of the $1 billion allocated to it…

Lots more at NTCNews.com, including a post from the Cato Institute’s Chris Moody, reminding us that Cato senior fellow Alan Reynolds figured out six weeks ago how to game the system: Trade clunker for crappy new econobox, collect fed bonus, sell econobox, add that to your bonus — congratulations, you’ve got the purchase price for a classic V-8 ’67 Impala or a second-hand SUV!

I’m reminded of something P.J. O’Rourke once said, in regard to “affordable housing”: Every time the government promises to give you something for nothing, imagine the result if you tried this yourself. You’d quickly find yourself with a severe shortage of something and a whole lot of nothing.
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Clever libertarians now hot-rodding around in their ’65 Mustangs and ’71 Camaros are no doubt very grateful to…the taxpayers who paid the tab.

Two flaws are exposed here, but few people will learn anything from this because these are flaws that have been exposed before.

One:

A crisis creates a news story. A program created to confront the crisis creates another news story. The program inevitably runs into another crisis, which creates yet another news story. The people who make money off of running news stories are supposed to be unbiased and objective with regard to everything, but nobody ever seems to ask them what their thoughts are about crises. We further presume the people who make money running news stories have little or no effect on public policy. And yet — things continue to be done this way. Crisis, program, program, crisis.

Two:

Once upon a time I was placed in proximity to a liberal who didn’t know he was a liberal. Actually this has happened to me many-a-time. This guy, however, was an interesting case study because he readily ‘fessed up, in so many words, that he didn’t believe in supply-and-demand. As in, prices go up when more people line up to purchase something, and more people line up to purchase something when the price goes down…pay people to do something you get more of it…tax them on something, you get less of it…he refused to allow such thoughts into his head. Wouldn’t even consider them. With regard to progressive income taxes, gas prices, anything.

Needless to say, he and I often failed to find agreement on what would be the wisest course of action with regard to this problem or that problem. And naturally, that was all my fault. I suppose this is to be expected: People who refuse to consider all sides of equations that involve human behavior, are never responsible for anything. Any disagreement anywhere is an unworkable conflict — another crisis — and disagreement is always the result of the other guy not doing the right things.

I don’t know if this is lack of knowledge, or a bristling ego, or both. I don’t even know if that matters. I suppose it does; we should find out why there are people who think this way, that economic consequences and rewards can be changed, and human behavior will either remain static, or flow along microscopically architected channels toward the goal desired by the bureaucrats, with no unintended consequences possible. So to me, the real story isn’t that C4C is going broke, it’s that this ignorance persists. I’m assuming it will persist, that this won’t be the lesson that will finally provide the education. No other lesson has.

We need to have a national dialogue on that, before we start talking about how you can end up handcuffed and being hauled downtown, right after showing your asshole side to a cop. That ignorance is a far more urgent societal crisis.

Hey…maybe it needs a new program.

I Made a New Word XXX

Wednesday, July 29th, 2009

For the thirtieth time, I have come up with a brand new word.

Autonopia (n.), a portmanteau of autonomy and Utopia.

au·ton·o·my
1: the quality or state of being self-governing ; especially : the right of self-government
2: self-directing freedom and especially moral independence
3: a self-governing state

Autonomy, it goes without saying, can extend to individuals. And it damn well should.

But…for the immediate future, you’re going to see no such tomfoolery taking place, not in Obama’s New Society we have going.

As I was pointing out earlier this morning in an update, Obama owes His presidency to the fact that some among us dream of Autonopia, and among us, some of us are sufficiently deluded to think we live in it. It is an asset to be guarded jealously, at least, when it is present: This quality a culture has in which one individual can be a dumbass, and the injury that results is inflicted on him, and him alone. So many of you were out there ready to go voting for the Chosen One, and so many others instinctively thought to themselves “that’s pretty stupid, but at least nobody else will be harmed by it.” This led to a decision, in too many cases, to stay home on Election Day and watch the teevee. There was no intellectual support for the idea that an election would be inconsequential; especially a Presidential election. Especially that one. But it had to do with how they were raised. Anti-activism. You do something dumb, that means you should be left alone to do your dumb thing and eventually you’ll learn not to do it. That took over, so they stayed home and let everyone else pick their leaders for them.

Who’s stupid now?

I was alerted to the immediate necessity of coming up with this new word when I read about this Executive Pay Bill that managed to pop out of committee in the House of Representatives, and now goes sailing on to the floor for a vote:

Legislation that would slap new limits on U.S. executive pay won approval on Tuesday by a congressional committee, advancing a component of the Obama administration’s broad plan to tighten financial regulation.

The bill was expected to go to the floor of the House of Representatives for a vote on Friday, aides said.

Drafted by House Democrats, the bill would give shareholders the right to cast non-binding, annual votes on executive pay and on special pay packages, such as “golden parachutes, in instances of changes in corporate control.

Nanny StateIt would also empower regulators to ban pay structures that encourage “inappropriate risks by financial institutions … that could threaten the safety and soundness of covered financial institutions, or could have serious adverse effects on economic conditions or financial stability.”

Yeah, you pay your executives too much money, and you just might start another economic crash that’ll impact everybody. Better stop you before you start!

See what I mean by an asset to be guarded jealously? We don’t have it anymore. And we are conditioned to think that’s no great tragedy, because what has left us is a cynical personal isolationism that breeds resentment and jealousy. You dumbasses; I can see Charlton Heston pounding his fist into the sand, damning you straight to hell. That was freedom that left you. Now we’re “all connected, all in this together”…and so the statists get to leap to the microphones and intone to the rest of us that hey…we gots to have more rules. That dumb thing that guy over there can do, could result in an injury to that perfectly innocent fellow over here. So every business decision, personal decision, personal choice, is on the table. We’re all in this together. We have no Autonopia.

Hat tip to Boortz for the article, and he has much more to say about it.

Government officials never, ever call for a restoration of this autonopia, you’ll notice. They never call for a bubble-wrap arrangement in which one bubble can be popped and the other bubbles stay intact. Nope, it’s always we’re-all-in-this-together, and one-rule-away-from-complete-bliss. The idea that one guy can do something dumb and injure himself, and no one else, is always cast as an idea that someone else can do him harm. That’s the big lie from Washington. And we see nobody standing up to challenge it.

So. Government bureaucrats get to decide how much people in corporations make. But don’t worry, there’s a scope defined so it isn’t universal: “Covered institutions.” Aint’ that swell? The law doesn’t take effect unless the institution is covered. So who decides what’s covered.

So it’s settled. We can’t count on politicians, especially now, to say “I see there’s a possibility that one guy can do a dumb thing and bring harm to others, but nevertheless let’s leave this part of life unregulated.” They can’t be trusted to think such a thing or to say such a thing. Not now, not ever. Freedom, therefore, is synonymous with this new word I invented, and the concept it describes. Or to be more accurate about it freedom is dependent — completely — on it. It is a national treasure. We need to look at ways to preserve it, assuming such a possibility exists for us.

And if no such possibility exists, and autonopia is gone for good, then let’s just stop the charade. Every little thing we do is either regulated, or is about to be. We are “free” only to such an extent that the legislators haven’t quite gotten around to making us otherwise, which means we are not. In all aspects of life. Because we have lost that most precious of rights, the right to do stupid idiotic harmful things to ourselves with a realistic expectation that our stupidity will bring harm to absolutely nobody else. Lose that, and you lose everything.

The Half-Wit

Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009

Received through the e-mail…

A man owned a small ranch in Montana. The Montana Work Force Department claimed he was not paying proper wages to his help and sent an agent out to interview him.

“I need a list of your employees and how much you pay them,” demanded the agent.

“Well,” replied the farmer, “there’s my farm hand who’s been with me for 3 years. I pay him $200 a week plus free room and board.”

“The cook has been here for 18 months, and I pay her $150 per week plus free room and board.”

“Then there’s the half-wit. He works about 18 hours every day and does about 90% of all the work around here. He makes about $10 per week, pays his own room and board, and I buy him a bottle of bourbon every Saturday night. He also sleeps with my wife occasionally.”

“That’s the guy I want to talk to … the half-wit,” says the agent.

“You’re talking to him right now.”

How to Succeed as an Ayn Rand Character

Tuesday, July 21st, 2009

Hat tip: Smallest Minority.

What Problem Are We Solving?

Thursday, July 16th, 2009

NY Daily News dissembles this number of which we’ve heard so, so much…47 million. As in, uninsured. What’s in that number? The answer may surprise you.

Maggie’s Farm, linking to the above, ponders that which tends to go unpondered as these hardcore lefty proposals are debated: Exactly what problem is this bill supposed to be solving?

What a silly question to be asking right now, Maggie’s Farm. You’re supposed to actually pass the bill…watch everything go sour for a decade, maybe a whole generation…and then ask that when it’s far too late. You’re breaking form.

Nevertheless, Boortz has an answer in his latest newsletter, but don’t read it. Not unless you think you can handle it. Remember what Jack Nicholson said about the truth…

The Democrats want to make people more dependent on government. They are going to do this by offering something that more Americans now value above all: stability. Americans think they want freedom. What a crock. Americans will whine about their freedom to choose which sports team to root for or which Hollywood gossip magazine to buy. But when freedom requires any ounce of personal responsibility, people immediately wipe their hands clean and want someone else to do it for them. This is where the Democrats come in .. the Democrats will make sure that the government is there to do the things the people of this country no longer feel is their personal responsibility. The reason why the Democrats are willing to do this is also simple: power. Ensuring votes. Not hard to figure out, is it?

The New York Times has a thought-provoking entry (hat tip again to Maggie’s) about why health care m-u-s-t be rationed:

You have advanced kidney cancer. It will kill you, probably in the next year or two. A drug called Sutent slows the spread of the cancer and may give you an extra six months, but at a cost of $54,000. Is a few more months worth that much?

If you can afford it, you probably would pay that much, or more, to live longer, even if your quality of life wasn’t going to be good. But suppose it’s not you with the cancer but a stranger covered by your health-insurance fund. If the insurer provides this man — and everyone else like him — with Sutent, your premiums will increase. Do you still think the drug is a good value? Suppose the treatment cost a million dollars. Would it be worth it then? Ten million? Is there any limit to how much you would want your insurer to pay for a drug that adds six months to someone’s life? If there is any point at which you say, “No, an extra six months isn’t worth that much,” then you think that health care should be rationed.

Somewhere in the basement of some liberal headquarters, perhaps the DNC, perhaps the Speaker’s Office in the House of Representatives, perhaps the White House, where all the old stuff is stored, someplace between a giant portrait of Sam Rayburn and a stack of unpaid bills…I’m convinced there is a chart, and there may not even be any dust on the chart. I’m thinking across the bottom of the chart, there are days, maybe weeks, marking off the time some bold new initiative like health care has been in the public eye…one…two…three…four…etc. And then on the left side, counting up, there’s a percentage of interested voters who have figured out The Truth. The curve is something that starts out on the left side, a third of the way up that Y-axis, and then snakes up farther north, toward 100%, as you go out to the right. That curve is of pressing interest to your typical democrat politician. I envision a chart that has gobbled up reams of data to verify the accuracy of this curve, one that is revised constantly. So maybe it’s not in the basement after all. Just well hidden, very well hidden.

What is The Truth that people figure out? That some 30 percent of us already know, and that more and more of us learn as we debate back and forth on the latest “gimme”? Simply this: That the government doesn’t really have money; it spends only what it has taken from others, plus what it borrows on the credit of others. Which naturally means that one man’s “right” is another man’s burden. That when we debate these proposals, we aren’t debating how to make life more secure, we are in fact debating how to make our country less free.

Hillary-care was debated for an extended period of time, IIRC. Someone was saying quite a lot about it in ’93, and they didn’t nail the lid on that boondoggle until ’94. That really is what killed it. People talked for awhile about how wonderful it would be when no one “would have to worry about health care.” And then someone mentioned a rule…someone mentioned another rule…before you knew it, there were all these pages and pages of rules, naturally some noise was made about them, and people got concerned. It started to look like what it was: Just another hardcore liberal democrat way of making people dependent on government for their daily needs.

This time, they’re going to do it the right way by golly. Get that reeking shit sandwich sold and shoved down our throats before we even know what we’ve swallowed.

And then hussle down to the basement, and get that chart updated.

These Pussy Betas Are Killing the Country

Monday, July 13th, 2009

Ding ding ding! Blogsister Daphne takes the prize among all the blogger friends, for updating her sidebar link to our new location first…assuming there’s nobody out there who made the change even quicker, someone I haven’t found quite yet. Thanks Daph! You get a double-dose of linky love, and tonight you’re well worth it.

She’s thinking about eugenics, not from out of your history books, but in the very near future:

It’s too hot do anything more demanding than drink ice cold beer and wonder at the mind bending folly of liberals. I’ve attempted to understand their worldview, mark some sane tatter of rationale for the thought processes that would endorse one John Holdren as our president’s Science Czar. This man has some seriously disturbing views on population control. The whole czar thing is creepy to begin with, populating these pet posts with people of this weird caliber is more than a little troubling.

“If some individuals contribute to general social deterioration by overproducing children, and if the need is compelling, they can be required by law to exercise reproductive responsibility—just as they can be required to exercise responsibility in their resource-consumption patterns—providing they are not denied equal protection.”

Obama’s okay with this viewpoint? How about this ripe nugget;

“Indeed, it has been concluded that compulsory population-control laws, even including laws requiring compulsory abortion, could be sustained under the existing Constitution if the population crisis became sufficiently severe to endanger the society.”

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I’m assuming liberals are fine with this scunty prick’s historical opinion, which just so happens to stomp all over the inviolate rights of women’s bodies and reproductive choices…I will never comprehend an individual’s willing subservience to the state. Never. We have too many grown men pining for the safety of momma’s tit and a handful who’d love to control the milk.

I believe women need to start raising more alpha males, these pussy betas are going kill the country.

Time to bring out our favorite Robert A. Heinlein quote. With my custom dessert topping to go with it:

Heinlein’s Observation: The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire.

Freeberg’s Corollary: Those who want to control tend to want, on some subconscious level, to be controlled; those who lack the desire to be controlled, are similarly disinterested in any opportunity to control others.

What can be more controlling than forcing people to languish away into obscurity and the grave, without benefit of reproduction, because you think there are too many of them?

Daphne continues with this theme

Do you read Roissy? I do. He’s a scandalous piece of work, spilling unwelcome truths about men, women and sex. He’s got a raw style of dealing with a topic that most handle with kid gloves. He calls it as he sees it and, from my jaded viewpoint, he’s usually right. He weighs on politics with this post;

In short, women are voting more Democrat because the Democrat Party is the prime force for turning the government into the world’s biggest provider beta. From the time of the “sexual revolution” (which was really a “sexual devolution” back towards pre-agricultural mating norms when 80% of the women and 40% of the highest testosterone men reproduced) women have been more free to choose mating opportunities based on their gina tingles and the economic and social empowerment granted, respectively, by their pointless humanities degrees and the disintegration of traditional slut shaming mechanisms. The life of serial monogamy and alpha cock hopping has never been more attainable for the average American woman, and the result has been predictable: Women are substituting the beta males they no longer want or need for marriage with a Big Brother Daddy government to help them foot the child-raising bills that their PUA, drug running and serial killer lovers won’t.

Ring any bells?

Yer goddamn right it does. It’s the Morgan Freeberg Theory of the Charismatic Wrecking Ball.

See, here’s what’s going on with these airhead women. They aren’t looking for men who will inject a stronger base of genetic material into their bloodline. Perhaps if they were exposed to danger as frequently as their ancestors from thousands of years ago, they would. But hey. It’s 2009, they’re one debit card swipe away from their next tank of gas, their next pint of Haagen Dazs, their next iced-mocha coffee drink that takes ten minutes just to order, their next feminine hygiene product…there are no snakes underfoot, they were all killed before the swamps were drained before the landscape was prepped before the foundation was laid before the building was built. No saber-tooth tigers. They, like the rest of us, are safe. Not perfectly so, but relatively so. Humankind suffers from a paucity of natural predators.

Boyfriend ShirtHow far into the depths of dumbth can our young Clinton/Obama Sex-in-the-City girl-women descend? Blogger friend Gerard brings us tales, tall tales but verifiable tales, of bored young strumpets forking out North of $200 for a “boyfriend shirt.” Gerard points out the obvious: “Or you can just get a boyfriend and steal it like women with standards since time out of mind. If you take it the morning after, he won’t mind at all.” Stellar advice, but only in an Idiocracy age devoid of natural threats or predators and liberated from Darwin’s purifying spirit, could any humans be in need of it.

And so their priorities change. They need that Bill Clinton charisma…in the next President, in the guy that repairs the copier machine after they sat on it, in the UPS guy. They select the guy who’s going to fix their car based on his charisma. And then bitch about having to pay five times as much as they think they should have.

Charisma, charisma, charisma. Don’t you blame the idiot-girls in my presence; our idiot-boys are just as susceptible, every bit as intoxicated on the elixir, every bit as disoriented and senseless. The charisma that was of such inconsequential value back when someone had to pump the water and churn the butter, and is such a central agent of “survival” now. The nectar of all people who’ve gone too long without really worrying about anything — and because they aren’t truly sane, their thirst for it is never quenched. They don’t really know how much they need or want of anything, for they have never been left for want of anything.

But let’s return to the central theme — now that I’ve qualified exactly how much we’ve robbed ourselves of our own common sense, in this world run by assholes whose hands have never known callouses, and women who’ve adored nobody save for the soft-handed assholes. Let’s inspect this Wrecking Ball theory. Just who, in this atrophied, stultified age, has this charisma? We are divided, fundamentally, into those who want to build things and those who want to destroy things. These two factions of person, do not think of things the same way. They do not live life the same way, so they don’t look at life the same way. Building things is infinitely tougher than destroying things, because things have to fit together with other things — you have to build them just right and line them up just right. You have to measure every step, and you have to adhere to a design. The design has to have taken everything into account that might become a factor during the building process, and this does mean everything. Temperature. Humidity. Slope. PH level. Altitude. Wind speed. Drag coefficient. If it matters, then the design must have taken it into account, and if anything is missing then this is all just a big waste of time.

Builders just aren’t very much fun to watch. They don’t build until they have a line inked in; they don’t ink the line in until they’ve penciled it; they don’t pencil it until they measure it, and measure it again, and again, and pencil it in ever-so-lightly, measure yet one more time, curse heavily, erase…I tell you, watching these people is like water torture.

Wrecking Ball of ChangeWrecking balls are fun to watch. Their mission is far, far simpler, and so they enjoy the benefit of moving in a straight line…to such an extent as they don’t want to move that direction anymore, then they swing back again. With sufficient inertia as to overpower everything else. A wrecking ball can afford to move that way — because it is concerned only with destruction, not with creation.

That’s how people are. If you’re out to destroy things and not build things, you get to move in a straight line just as long as you want. Your actions are utterly predictable, since it’s a physical impossibility for you to abruptly change course or speed. And yet you’re so much fun to watch.

And so our destroyers…our hardcore liberals, our eugenicists, our shrinks, our lawyers, our politicians, our hopey changey “There’s Just Something About Him!!” Christ-replacement iPresidents, they’re just so much fun to watch. Because they’re charismatic. Their movements are unalterable. Their mission is one of destruction.

They come off looking like alpha males, but that’s only because they enjoy the luxury of moving like a wrecking ball. Being fun to watch. They aren’t really alpha males though; alpha males are nerds. Alpha males build things.

These are destroyers. They are pussy betas, and Daphne’s right, they’ll kill the whole damn country if we let them. They don’t know how to do anything else. They cannot design, they cannot build, they cannot preserve…all they know how to do is go through the motions of doing those things, for campaigning purposes.

Their real passions always have to do with destroying things. That’s all they know how to do.

Update 7/14/09: Ah, I was afraid this would happen. Blogger friend Phil got his link updated at about the same time and probably deserves to split the first-place spot, but I shorted the poor guy. Ah well. We’ll wait to see who else climbs aboard and then figure out what to do.

Crowder Checks Out Canadian Healthcare

Monday, July 13th, 2009

You’ve got to watch this from beginning to end, folks. Especially about two-thirds of the way through where he starts exploring how the Canucks go about financing these “free” health services. Be afraid. Be very, very afraid.

This is what gets me so pig-bitin’ mad about almost anything that’s got to do with government services — down here. I’m looking across the desk at this government bureaucrat…usually one who’s renewing my registration tabs. And what’s the story every single time?

I’m frazzled.

He’s frazzled.

I’m having a bad day.

He’s having a bad day.

He’s got control of what’s going on…because…once upon a time, someone had a vision of a perfect Utopian society wherein everyone is the same.

His shitty mood — is the difference between life and death.

My shitty mood — means nothing. Less than nothing.

It’s that glaring contradiction that just wears on me. It would improve my outlook so much if the pencil-pushing bureaucrats just admitted it: They are there to support, and they benefit from, a society structured more like something straight out of Robin Hood. Those who work for the Sheriff of Nottingham, are the aristocrats who get to crush us lowly peasants on a whim. Just admit it! I can stand having to do business with someone who thinks he’s way better than I am…believe me, I have some experience in that matter…as long as he just admits it. It’s this phony-baloney, pretend-game at “I’m building an egalitarian society like something you’d see on Star Trek” that I can’t stand. It makes the veins bulge out right in the middle of my face, it really does. Just this craven dishonesty. Nothing at all unlike what Crowder found north of the border…again and again and again. It really does something to me. Something ugly.

And I’ve got some laminated pictures from old drivers’ licenses to prove it.

That Wet, Slimy, Steep, Slippery Trail

Monday, July 13th, 2009

I’m going to try to make that a recurring headline. The trail of which I speak is much shorter than a lot of people think, and it ends in bondage. It begins wherever an individual’s desire to Make The World A Better PlaceTM becomes a little bit more brilliant than that individual’s understanding of human nature, history and current events.

It’s a reliable progression, one I personally find fascinating.

Today it’s a quote by Mark Levin, in his book “Liberty and Tyranny,” discovered by Boortz during some quiet-reading time.

For the Statist, liberty is not a blessing but the enemy. It is not possible to achieve utopia if individuals are free to go their own way. The individual must be dehumanized and his nature delegitimized. Through persuasion, deception, and coercion, the individual must be subordinated to the state. He must abandon his own ambitions for the ambitions of the state. He must become reliant on and fearful of the state. His first duty must be to the state – not family, community and faith, all of which have the potential of threatening the state. Once dispirited, the individual can be molded by the state.

It has been ever thus. And yet, this is a correlation shrouded in deep and widespread human ignorance. A clear majority among us fail to realize that there’s any danger involved in utopian fantasies whatsoever, let alone how treacherous the wisdom of hindsight has shown this danger to be.

Money Hole

Tuesday, July 7th, 2009


In The Know: Should The Government Stop Dumping Money Into A Giant Hole?

Just found this via Another Rovian Conspiracy.

I have got to get quicker about this stuff. Last month, when it went up, it was good satire. Now it’s three weeks later, and…uh…well what can I say. Good satire has a serious shelf life now. Nowadays, it’s more like a slightly surreal illustration of some bullshit that is really happening.

I see there are some real consequences to my laziness. I’ll try to do better.

“America Isn’t Hiring Precisely Because of Government Policy”

Tuesday, July 7th, 2009

Wanted to be sure and snag this beautiful piece of driftwood on the Internet River, before it floated any further out of sight. Valuable lesson for us all, or at least, those among us who need to learn it. Read…absorb…:

Jerry Bower, a guest blogger at CNBC, has good insight into why US companies are not hiring:

America isn’t hiring precisely because of government policy. Small business owners, who are usually the first into and the first out of the job pool, are standing by the fence and watching. They are paralyzed by regulatory uncertainty. If they hire someone who ends up doing poorly, will they be able to fire that person? Will they have to pay their health care bills after they’ve been terminated? If so, for how long? Who will pay for all these stimulus checks? If it will turn out to be small business, why would they hire instead of keeping costs low to prepare for the big tax bill? Where will the market move? Are you in the right business or are your clients in a politically disfavored industry? Are your clients in health care (being nationalized), autos (already nationalized), banking (somewhat nationalized) or any energy production process which uses carbon (pulverized)? Until you know, you don’t grow, and until you grow your market, you don’t grow your payroll.

Bowyer closes with a punchline that says it all:

Jobs aren’t languishing despite the government’s best efforts. They’re languishing because of them.

Update: And, you see where this gets ya.

Unemployment hit 9.5 percent in June, according to the Department of Labor, putting the figure 2.5 percent higher than the White House had predicted it would be if a government stimulus spending program went into place. Moreover, the new figure is nearly one percent higher than where the White House said it would be without any stimulus spending at all.

In fact, the White House never predicted that unemployment would rise above nine percent regardless of whether Congress spent the nearly $800 billion in so-called economic stimulus spending it recommended at the time.

Apologies in advance for what follows, I’m simply not a decent enough person to rise above it…

Hey all you Palin-haters. Yeah, you. Isn’t it great that we kept that know-nothing Tundra Barbie away from the seat of power? Really dodged a bullet there, huh? How many times do you think she would have used Air Force One to buzz-bomb Manhattan?

Best Sentence LXVIII

Monday, July 6th, 2009

It’s about time Neal Boortz snagged a Best Sentence I’ve Heard Or Read Lately (BSIHORL) award. And today he picks up the sixty-eighth one. Well done, Neal.

The best sentence:

Does it seem just a bit absurd to you to be celebrating freedom while the government tells you that you aren’t allowed to have fireworks?

So Did Janeane Make It to Dallas?

Monday, July 6th, 2009

I hope she did. This looks to me like an education she could use.

Hat tip: My Pet Jawa.

New Tune for the Free Credit Report Guy

Sunday, July 5th, 2009

Red Planet Cartoons product, posted at American Spectator, becoming more and more tragically true with each passing day:

Hat tip to E Māua Ola i Moku o Keawe.

The Worst Place to Do Business

Tuesday, June 30th, 2009

Carol Platt Liebau, writing in RealClearPolitics (hat tip to Conservative Grapevine):

As the end of California’s fiscal year approaches, the Governor and state legislators confront a $24 billion deficit. While Republicans and Democrats wrangle over how to address the gaping shortfall, some members of the press have started to look for a scapegoat for the fiscal train wreck. Many have blamed the California taxpayer’s only protection: Prop. 13, the 1978 measure capping state property taxes at 1% of a home’s assessed value.

Perhaps the most egregious example of the finger-pointing is a recent piece from TIME’s Kevin O’Leary, moaning that “Before Prop 13, in the 1950s and ’60s, California was a liberal showcase.” He insists that “at the root of California’s misery lies Proposition 13,” and concludes that “in California, the conservative legacy lives on.”

How ridiculous. Of all the problems contributing to the fiscal mess, state under-taxation is the least of them. California’s sales and gas taxes are the highest in the country – and it has the highest vehicle license fees and the second-highest top-bracket income tax, too. Its corporate tax rates are the highest of all Western states, and for the fourth year in a row, a survey of 543 CEO’s found that California’s toxic combination of high taxes and intrusive regulations made it the worst place in the nation to do business.

Said TIME article is here.

The financial crisis in California grew worse this week as state controller John Chiang warned that if legislators and Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger fail to come up with a budget-balancing package, he would begin paying California’s bills with IOUs on July 2. The last time the state did this was during the Great Depression.

What has brought California to such a perilous state? How did its government become so wildly dysfunctional? One obvious cause is the deep recession, which has caused tax revenues to plunge for all states. But California’s woes have a set of deeper reasons: direct democracy run amok, timid governors, partisan gridlock and a flawed constitution have all contributed to budget chaos and people in pain. And at the root of California’s misery lies Proposition 13, the antitax measure that ignited the Reagan Revolution and the conservative era. In Washington, the Reagan-Bush era is over. But in California, the conservative legacy lives on.

As a red voter living in this blue state, I find those last two sentences to be…interesting. More than interesting. Coffee hurts when it comes out your nose, did you know that?

Still, the Time columnist might have a point. Why don’t you look into things and decide for yourself, whether California’s problems are on the taxing end or on the spending end. But I would suggest including in that research a reading through California’s list of state agencies…out loud…maybe after you’ve put on Henry Mancini’s March of the Cue Balls. Start at A and work forward.

After you’ve finished, does this look like a state that just might be suffering from some bloat — maybe? Or does it look to you like “the conservative legacy lives on”?

Who is Glenn Beck?

Thursday, June 18th, 2009

Stossel wants to know:

Why is he so popular? Beck says it’s because he really believes what he says. I don’t buy that. Rachel Maddow and Lou Dobbs believe what they say, but their audience is a fraction of Beck’s. I hope he’s popular because of what he says, like: “Both parties only believe in the power of the party”; “if we get out of people’s way, the sky’s the limit”; and the answers to our problems “never come from Washington.”

“The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire.” — Heinlein.

Week Ending June 12, 2009

Saturday, June 13th, 2009

Do you realize what an incredible week this has been? I’m ready to go ahead and call it right now: In the months and years ahead, when Republicans and democrats try to figure out when the national scene all turned around, there will be bipartisan agreement that the fickle wheel of fortune did its spinning in the week ending June 12, 2009. That is when the Republicans really returned to power; when the democrats really fell out of it. When mainstream America figured out the Obama experiment was, in all the ways that mattered, a complete failure. Time to absorb the lessons of reality and let the tender bloated easily-bruised ego receive the punishment that had been coming.

There is, I confess, some wishful thinking involved in that. But that’s not really a bad thing. Every triumph against the odds, in human history, has started with that. And there certainly have been some. I’ll presume, for the thinking reader, no listmaking is necessary to bolster that point.

Let us instead fixate our list-making obsession on the week just departed. And in doing that, let us start with the big kahuna:

David Letterman’s sad, pathetic, stupid joke. Does Letterman have a Republican plant on his writing staff? The damage done here was incalculable. The joke delved down deep into what everybody knew, in their dark subconciousnesses, and brought it bubbling up into the light where it all had to be consciously acknowledged: How humor itself has been re-defined in the early part of the twenty-first century. Blue-blood super-liberal Manhattan comedian makes a conservative look like a buffoon, and the rest of us give a courtesy laugh. Even though it’s NOT FUNNY. This has been a seriously powerful weapon in the liberal arsenal, because if you respond to this the way a reasonable person does — roll your eyes — in our modern, twisted culture, you’re a die-hard lunatic extremist. In a more reasonable environment it is acknowledged that it takes a die-hard lunatic extremist to do the laughing.

The punchline simply didn’t pack any humor. Nobody’s waltzing into a bar and saying “Hey, didja hear the one about Alex Rodriguez and Sarah Palin’s daughter?”

What Letterman did, was wake up the “mainstream” Americans who don’t give a rip about conservatives or liberals — but who could’ve easily been suckered into voting liberal with some well-placed signals that Republicans are subhuman, beneath contempt, it’s okay to abuse ’em so it certainly should be alright to vote against ’em without bothering to study up on the issues. Well from here on out, maybe that will still work, but I think America will have a little bit better idea of what’s being done to it now. And that can’t be good for the plan.

Elsewhere on the Manhattan-lib fashion-plate front, Katie Couric’s ratings plummeted some more, and fellow fashion-plate blue-blood Manhattan-lib Jon Stewart actually had the balls to made fun of her about it.

Paul Krugman, seldom correct but never in doubt, tried to lead a charge against right-wing hate by fastening the identity of the Holocaust Memorial shooter to the conservative movement. And everly ambitious, he thought as long as he was at it he’d try to revive some credibility for that discredited Homeland Security report. He failed on both counts; as is usual for Mr. Krugman, his point failed when it was discovered the facts simply weren’t on his side. Hating George Bush, hating John McCain, being a registered Maryland democrat…these are not traits that typically apply to conservative-movement agitators. But they applied to this nutburger who’s supposed to be our new icon for conservative hate. Swing and a miss.

By now, there had arisen an urgent need to prove what was supposed to have already been proven seven months ago: that the democrats were innately nice folks, and there was something about human nature that made Republicans inherently mean. Typically, democrats like to pursue this with an objective of purity: Everything anybody does that is nice was inspired by a progressive movement somewhere, and every anecdote about man’s inhumanity to man has some conservatism in it somewhere. The Letterman joke all by itself was plenty enough to upset that applecart, so now the effort was to recover the sentiment through saturation. President Obama’s former Pastor and spiritual advisor Jeremiah Wright demonstrated his impeccable timing by choosing this as the week for his comments about talking to his former spiritual pupil: “Them Jews aren’t going to let me speak to him.” Good one! That guy we elected President to start our new Hopenchange good-time rock-n-roll chapter in history, who’d inspire us all to do better and love each other — he received spiritual counsel from this bigot for two solid decades. Republicans tried to warn ya. Ya didn’t listen. It was, and is, a reality. Yet another reminder.

And the week was still young.

Ah, but our country certainly knew what it was doing. We had a skeptical, energetic and free press filling us in on what was going on, and letting us come to our own decision about who would get our vote. Right? Well…hope you didn’t put too much faith in that. If you did, it might have come as a bit of a shock when Evan Thomas went on record to say President Obama “is sort of God.” Chris Matthews agreed. Yup. Real balanced and objective, there, gentlemen. I don’t understand why anyone ever doubted you. They must have been a bunch of unreasonable, lying, irrational, bitter angry conservatives.

Perhaps this is why — also this last week — a San Francisco Chronicle editor said “Obama and the fawning press need to get a room.”

After all that, the solid meat is still just ahead of us. Remember back in January when, if the world went to war and caught fire, you’d never have heard a single thing about it because the news was all filled up with stories about Michelle Obama’s gowns, Barack Obama’s ten balls (!), and hope was in the air? About how much the economy sucked but it was all going to get more better because we had our hopey changey iPresident now and He was going to fix everything? Nowadays the hardcore liberals, the mildly liberals, and the main-street guys who don’t care or say they don’t care — still defend that because hey, it’s only been five months since then. Give Him a chance! He’s trying His best! It’s too early, and He inherited all this! Well…sit down for this one…now, according to Rasmussen, by a six-point margin Republicans are more trusted than democrats on economic issues. Yup, that’s from this week too.

Now how’d that happen? I see a link between that story, and the one about the study from Ohio that found conservatives are more open to opposing arguments than liberals. Call me Pollyanna, but I think even the Main Street folks who don’t give a crap about any of this, intuitively understand that you can’t make good decisions in life if you already have your mind made up about something before you gather the facts. What I’m trying to say is that people want to follow a good leader, they know in their guts what a good leader looks like, and they don’t want to see someone locked into a mindset and with that mindset, a narrow field of options from which to choose for any given situation. Which, ironically, is what the democrats keep saying, citing reasons why conservatives can’t be trusted. But it turns out, in reality as well as in public opinion, liberals are the narrow-minded ones. This was aptly demonstrated when the study hit the innerwebs, and some cloistered communities of liberals aired their reactions to it. It typically looked something like this.

It’s not news to anyone who’s really been paying attention. But liberals are not open-minded, they’re not receptive to all points of view, they’re not willing to listen to new ideas, and they damn sure aren’t tolerant of anything called “diversity” unless, by diversity, you’re referring to monochrome concentrations of dark skin.

President Obama also thought He would demonstrate His impeccable political timing. Now that the country He was supposed to be leading was showing its reservations about investing in Him all this godlike power, He thought He’d appoint a czar to limit executive compensation at private firms. Now, He may have found it politically expedient to limit the effects of this to corporations accepting taxpayer funds in the form of bailout programs…and He may want to promote that…but you just can’t get around that it raises serious questions about the relationship between government and the private sector. And how long would such a policy remain limited to bailout firms? We’ll have to wait a few weeks for the polls to come out, I think. But my gut says most people are on my side on this thing, or at least, are similarly concerned. This is an alteration of the fundamental relationship between our government and the people it purports to govern. The party hacks get to decide if I’m making too much money, and cut me off at the knees if they think I’m getting as big as they are? What country is this again?

The point is, I thought it was Obama’s predecessor who was supposed to be making us ask that question.

Affirmative Action was in the news this week. You know what that is, right? That’s where, if your racial makeup is caucasian and you try to make something of yourself, you are artificially injured to help make up for the abuse that was heaped on persons of darker skin in times past. It’s a tit-for-tat thing. No wait…it isn’t…supposedly, it’s an effort to help the disenfranchised and underprivileged, and it’s entirely color-blind, any thoughts muttered to the contrary are purely hardcore right-wing agitprop. It’s long been my impression that a bare majority of the country does support Affirmative Action, but because and only because they believe that last summation. In other words, by a bare majority, we are on board with helping the underprivileged but we do not want special race-based privileges to apply. So it was further damaging when it came out that Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayer ‘fessed up that she is an “Affirmative Action baby” in comments released by the Senate Judiciary Committee. Affirmative Action baby…as in…her test scores were not comparable to her classmates’ test scores. She leapfrogged ahead in line because of her racial background. Her statement that says that.

Is America on board with that kind of Affirmative Action program? An outcome-based one that confers the same prestigious position — Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, in this case! — upon members of beneficiary-groups with mediocre achievements, as it would upon a boring-old-white-guy who can offer spectacular achievements? Don’t forget, across all racial classifications, mediocre people vastly outnumber spectacular people. So what are the ultimate consequences of this? More to the point, could the country possibly become worried about such consequences? Want to have your next brain surgery done by someone who’d never been called on to truly distinguish himself, except by his or her race? Does Main Street USA’s support for Affirmative Action extend that far? Maybe we’re about to find out.

Congressman Barney Frank…whom nobody thinks is a Republican…demonstrated that much-lauded progressive-liberal patience and tolerance for diverse points of view during a live television interview. Wonder if they factored this in to that above-mentioned study.

And then we had that progressive-liberal respect for the rule of law demonstrated by our Climate Queen — yeah, that’s another matter, our liberals-in-charge want to control our weather. Climate czar Carol Browner apparently violated the Presidential Records Act.

So the picture’s pretty complete — as it has been for awhile, but in this damaging, damaging week, it was pencilled in, painted in, tinted, shaded, and framed to perfection in such a way that the apathetic mainstream centrist voters can understand it. And understand it well. These people are in power, uncontested, out of control, as closed-minded as any Republican has ever been, hateful, intolerant, impetuous, as pissy and resentful as any loser of elections has ever been. They are as dim and incurious as George W. Bush has ever been. They cannot get along with anyone else, even their own. They cannot deal with important decisions because they cannot deal with facts. They just want to have power over everybody else, and that’s all. Well, that and accumulate magnitudes of personal wealth as lofty and imposing as what they would deny to others.

The only thing missing from this week…and this may have happened too, if I missed it…was the usual, regularly “scheduled” embarrassing gaffe from Vice President Joe Biden. Other than that one cherry on top, everything else was there this week.

Small wonder that Biden’s old contender for the #2 spot, apparently felt so justified in saying I told you so.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News.

Pay Czar

Tuesday, June 9th, 2009

If you think Bush’s “warrantless wiretapping” was scarier than this, there is something wrong with you. Stop voting now.

The Obama administration plans to require banks and corporations that have received two rounds of federal bailouts to submit any major executive pay changes for approval by a new federal official who will monitor compensation, according to two government officials.

The proposal is part of a broad set of regulations on executive compensation expected to be announced by the administration as early as this week. Some of the rules are required by legislation enacted in the wake of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, and they would apply only to companies that received taxpayer money.

…that is, they’d only apply to companies that received taxpayer money for now.

This is truly a “Poll I’d Like To See” moment. What percentage of us think it’s just a swell idea for our country to have a Pay Czar? What percentage of us think this is a road our government should even be going down, even with the taxpayer-funded bailouts? What percentage of us recognize the danger in that? I’ll bet this is one of those fifty-fifty situations; it’s a given that some of these government busybodies think they might gain additional support by putting these rules in place, but the hushed and muted tones suggest they know they need to be careful when they talk about it.

A similar situation existed when Clinton’s Department of Justice went after Microsoft. If that case made the headlines every single day for months at a time, rather than several weeks IIRC…if it sustained the coverage as well as, let us say, the Iranian Hostage Crisis or the O.J. Simpson case…more people would have seen it for what it was. Which was, “Hey, you’re getting big enough your size might one day become comparable to the Government’s and we can’t have that!”

Yes, some people make vastly more money in the private sector than anyone could ever hope to “make” by working at any level in the Government. In the strictest and most technical measurement of compensation, that is true. Anyone who thinks that is the end of the story, is a fool. Government seeks to minimize and marginalize businesses, as a competitive measure against those businesses and against business as a whole. It doesn’t have anything to do with looking out for consumers or taxpayers. This isn’t coming as news to anybody, is it?

Biden: We’re Going to Waste Some Money

Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009

Gee, thanks for clearing that up, Joe.

The liberal vision is an endless source of fascination.

Eradicating pain for everybody certain targeted classes of fortunates — the vision is one of perfection. We’re as sensitive as the princess reclining on the mattress with the pea stuck under it.

Human-activity-related emissions of carbon and other greenhouse gases — again. Perfection. If you could buy a three-wheeled hybrid and get 70 miles a gallon, your 50 mpg isn’t good enough. (So say I, the lib-politician, as I streak around the country on a whim in my 747 with eight people riding in it.)

Efficiency…naw. Some money will be wasted. It’s just the way things are. Get used to it.

Blogsister Cassy Speaks

Saturday, May 30th, 2009

She explains, and exemplifies, what is good about America. The camera loves her.

If you agree with those and wish to tell her so, you can do that over here.

Pretty scary stuff, huh Janeane?

What Lies Ahead of Us, in Picture Form

Friday, May 29th, 2009

I guess the central question that arises to confront us from all these waves of turmoil ahead is: Is “I inherited all this stuff” a valid excuse for coming up with the wrong solution to a problem?

It took us just one meeting to discover that we had become beggars – rotten, whining, sniveling beggars, all of us, because no man could claim his pay as his rightful earning, he had no rights and no earnings, his work didn’t belong to him, it belonged to ‘the family,’ and they owed him nothing in return, and the only claim he had on them was his ‘need’ – so he had to beg in public for relief from his needs, like any lousy moocher, listing all his troubles and miseries, down to his patched drawers and his wife’s head colds, hoping that ‘the family’ would throw him the alms.

The mural is put together by our blogger friend Gerard, who’s making it day to day up in our old stomping grounds of Seattle. That’s right, Seattle. Like Sacramento, it is yet another “Can’t Blame Republicans, There Aren’t Any” megalopolis — in deep trouble, barely treading water.

So goes the country. Well, maybe now that hyper-postmodern-liberalism has engulfed us all, the entire nation’s fate will be different from Seattle’s…and Sacramento’s…and Los Angeles’…and San Francisco’s…and California’s…and Chicago’s…and Detroit’s…and Baltimore’s…and Washington DC’s…and Washington State’s…and…and…and…

…we try out these hyper-liberal ideas enough times, sooner or later they have to lead to total bliss. Or something like it. Eventually, right?

Nanny State Wants More Smoke-Free Movies

Friday, May 29th, 2009

CNN:

Smoking in youth-rated movies has not declined despite a pledge two years ago by Hollywood studios to encourage producers to show less “gratuitous smoking,” according to an anti-smoking group.

The American Medical Association Alliance, pointing to research that big-screen smoking leads teens to pick up the tobacco habit, called for an R rating for any movie with smoking scenes.

The head of the group that gives U.S. movies their ratings, however, said the smoke has been clearing from youth-rated movies, a result of the film industry’s sensitivity to the issue.

The alliance, the medical association’s advocacy arm, launched a summer campaign this week aimed at publicly shaming studios into making smoke-free films.

“Research has shown that one-third to one-half of all young smokers in the United States can be attributed to smoking these youth see in movies,” said Dr. Jonathan Fielding, head of the Los Angeles County Public Health Department.

Fielding cited another study that he said “found that adolescents whose favorite movie stars smoked on screen are significantly more likely to be smokers themselves and to have a more accepting attitude toward smoking.”

The Motion Picture Association of America, the industry group that issues ratings and parental guidance for U.S. films, added smoking scenes as a factor in ratings two years ago, but Fielding said it has not made a difference.

“In all, 56 percent of the top box office movies with smoking released between May 2007 and May 2009 were youth-rated films — G, PG or PG-13,” he said.

Joan Graves, who chairs the Motion Picture Association’s movie rating committee, offered her own statistics, based on all of the 900 films rated each year, not just the top movies included in Fielding’s numbers.

The association has given no G ratings in the past two years to a movie with smoking, Graves said.

Overall, 55 percent of the movies rated in the past two years showed some smoking, but 75 percent of those with smoking scenes were given R ratings, Graves said. Twenty-one percent were rated PG-13 and the remaining 5 percent were PG, she said.

A G movie is deemed suitable for all audiences, while a PG rating is a signal to parents that a film may include some material they might consider inappropriate for children. PG-13 indicates a stronger warning that some material may be inappropriate for children under 13.

No one under 17 can be admitted to see an R movie without a parent or guardian.

American Medical Association Alliance President Sandi Frost used as her chief example of a movie with “gratuitous smoking” this month’s blockbuster “X-Men Origins: Wolverine,” which was rated PG-13 “for intense sequences of action and violence, and some partial nudity.”

“Millions of children have been exposed to the main star of the film, Hugh Jackman, with a cigar in his mouth in various scenes,” Frost said. “I’m willing to bet that not one child would have enjoyed that movie or Mr. Jackman’s performance any less if he hadn’t been smoking.”

Interesting times. Back when I was a kid, people were worried we’d grow up to be racists and bigots, and this was thought of as a consequence of things we did not do…things we did not see. And so it was thought to be desirable to make us cultured. The result was a big push to get kids to socialize with other kids. Which was kinda stupid, because, being kids, we were all like “yeah he’s my friend anyway.” We didn’t see the race. The grown-ups were the ones bringing it up.

Now the push is on to make sure kids don’t experience things. The principle is the same, but now we’re thinking bigotry is desirable, if it’s bigotry against the right things. If we keep kids thinking of these vices as being alien, they’ll tap into their human instincts to think of those things as deplorable, and this will encourage them to grow up to be Good People.

Here’s where it gets interesting. The first paragraph indicates that movie content does not have a bearing on how much kids smoke. The second paragraph indicates that movie content does have this effect…based on “research.” How come, when we engage in these massive nanny-state efforts to change human behavior, and we fail, that isn’t thought of as “research” just as valid as what comes off the whiteboards of the pocket-protector Theory Boys? See, we’re valuing ideas from the egghead set over & above actual experience. This is how we get on these endless treadmills. We don’t pay attention to actual experience.

My suggestion: Stop stigmatizing smoking, drinking, et cetera. Just stop it. Yes it’s bad when kids do these things — but these are symptoms, not causes. Instead, stigmatize idleness. If there are laws on the books saying kids can’t work more than xx hours in a week if they’re under xx years old, then repeal them. Every single one. What’re we afraid of? Some Tammany Hall guy is gonna come by in the dark of some terrible night, abduct a couple hundred of our doe-eyed little waifs, and put them to work eighteen hours a day putting sweatshirts and sneakers together for Kathy Lee? Our goo-gooder liberals are supposed to have ended that problem in this country, about a hundred years ago. So if the problem is ended, let’s act like it’s ended. Let the kids do some work. Some work.

There are too many laws on the books designed to make absolutely, positively sure that nobody ever experiences — certain things. A “no” answer from a bank evaluating a home loan application. Creepy guys at work that like to stare at beautiful women. A movie with a guy riding a motorcycle with no helmet on his head. When I say “too many” laws, what I really mean is “some.”

There shouldn’t be any laws like this. Humans are much more resilient than this.

I Made a New Word XXVIII

Saturday, May 16th, 2009

Goodperson Fever (n.) is an obsessive-compulsive disorder involving the demonstration of certain positive attributes to strangers, for purposes of self-validation. It becomes a self-perpetuating cycle if these positive attributes don’t really exist, or if there is a great need to achieve this validation for purposes of acquiring social status, contrasted with a much lower level of confidence that these attributes really exist.

The fever has one distinguishing symptom, the recognition of which provides a conclusive, undeniable diagnosis that the fever is in its advanced stages: The more that has been achieved as far as getting the word out that the patient is a Good Person, the greater the impulse to do it again.

Eco CupLesser symptoms include: Expressing one’s political beliefs about something when the topic of conversation is different or unrelated, and when nobody inquired; isolating classes of people as targeted beneficiaries of one’s helpful efforts, for purely obsequious purposes, such as “women” and “minorities”; excessive concern about the environment, but purely as a social issue and without any regard to cause and effect — such as drinking coffee out of a “green” eco-cup, but then commuting to work in a Ford Explorer or Toyota Tundra. The litmus test is that the incentive to do these good things that good-persons do, suddenly dissipates when it is perceived that nobody is paying attention.

In government and in other positions of authority, Goodperson Fever is the cause of nearly every bad law in human history. Someone, somewhere, wanted to demonstrate to strangers what a good person he or she was.

There is very little that can be done to treat Goodperson Fever, since ignoring it doesn’t make it go away, and providing the validation that is so desperately craved by the patient, just makes things worse. Experts say there are lots of things we can do to prevent it though. Some significant responsibilities for potential victims in the childhood years, will give them an opportunity to measure their self-worth from within and therefore mitigate the need to go seeking such validation from total or near-total strangers later on. Also, Goodperson Fever epidemics take hold most often in social circles and in geographic regions where there is little work to do, or what little work there is, is done by “everybody” with little or no opportunity for individuals to distinguish themselves. It seems to be a natural consequence of propagating the “Together We Can Do This” meme with a little too much zeal. People start to hunger for ways to establish an identity and ultimately fall into the trap of proving themselves to be the “Most Extraordinary Ordinary Person” around.

Some say our susceptibility to this may be a holdover from thousands of years of evolution, from when man lived in villages that operated as a commune. The theory is that after a bleak harvest season, when food and other resources became scarce, people began to look for ways to prove themselves worthy in case the sustenance on hand was insufficient to accommodate everyone, and some villagers would have to be cast out for the survival of the rest. According to this, those who were less inclined to engage this vicious cycle of proving themselves, were the ones who were ostracized. They died off, and were thus removed from the gene pool. Those who are alive today, therefore, are descended from the sycophants who managed to straddle that illogical line: Everything that is worth doing, is worth doing by everyone, and nobody should go off and do anything by his lonesome — that would imply a specialty, and we can’t have specialties because everyone is worthy and everyone is equal. But oh, by the way, just in case the hunting is bad and the crops are withered, here are the reasons why I’m more worthy than most.

Whatever the cause, it is responsible for a great deal of damage, although, it must be said, no hard scientific correlation has yet been found between Goodperson Fever and global warming.

But — for the good of society — we’re sure as hell going to try to come up with one.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News.

Serving His Country

Saturday, May 9th, 2009

Before...AfterBlogger pal Gerard has remitted a service to his country of priceless value.

Maybe not priceless, actually…the piece o’crap he started with cost just north of 350 big ‘uns. That’s a lot for a picture, you know. If you tasked me to go out and find a camera that costs as much as a house, I wouldn’t even know how to begin. How did it come to cost that much? In case you’ve been living in a cave, this is that debacle that had those frightened Manhattan folk scrambling around like ants beneath a magnifying glass…our wonderful in-touch-with-the-common-folk Prez, doing His wonderful work, with His finger on the pulse of America, knowing what we’re thinking before even we are too sure about it. Someone in His office didn’t understand that flying a huge plane low over the 9/11 site might not be too swell of an idea. There’s that Holy Empathy for ya.

On a related note, a scapegoat that is supposed to be that someone…just threw himself on his sword. Wonder if that’s the right guy. Ya think?

Anyway, why don’t you give a quick glance and see if something’s improved over what our wonderful (soon to be auto-manufacturing and healthcare-providing) government put out. Before…after.

He did it in two minutes, he claims, and I’ll bet you he didn’t even scare the bejeezus out of anyone in order to get it done. Van der Leun for Prez, I say. Or Picture-Czar at the very least.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News.

Barbara Ehrenreich and Adam Shepard

Saturday, May 9th, 2009

Stossel, in his latest column Making It. He’s writing about the economy and asking people to keep just a little bit of old-fashioned perspective…

…Barbara Ehrenreich won fame by claiming that it’s almost impossible for an entry-level worker to make it in America. She wrote Nickel and Dimed, a book that describes her failure to “make it” working in entry-level jobs.

Her book is now required reading in thousands of high schools and colleges. I spoke to her for my ABC special “Bailouts, Big Spending and Bull.”

“I worked as a waitress and an aide in a nursing home and a cleaning lady and a Wal-Mart associate. And that didn’t do it.”

If you do a good job, can’t you move up?

“That’s not easy. Wal-Mart capped the maximum you can ever make.” But if you do a good job, you could be promoted to assistant manager, store manager.

“Well, I suppose.”
:
“I read Nickel and Dimed,” Adam Shepard told me. He was assigned her book in college and decided to test Ehrenreich’s claim.

He picked a city out of a hat, Charleston, S.C., and showed up there with $25. He didn’t tell anyone about his college degree. He soon got an $8/hour job working for a moving company. He kept at it. Within a year, he told me, “I have got $5,500 and a car. I have got a furnished apartment.”

Adam writes about his search for the American Dream in Scratch Beginnings. It’s a very different book from Nickel and Dimed.

“If you want to fail, go for it,” he said.

Barbara Ehrenreich wanted to fail?

“Absolutely, I think she wanted to fail — and write the book about it.”

I asked him for evidence.

“She is spending $40 on pants. She is staying in hotels. I made sacrifices so that I could succeed. She didn’t make any sacrifices.”

I sure wish Stossel went to the universities and asked why, exactly, Nickel and Dimed was required reading. Not that he’d get an honest answer, but some of the tortured excuses might have been interesting. (Update: The DUmmies have more than a few things to say about this.)

Regarding the subject at hand, it really comes down to two fundamentally different ways of looking at the world: If one guy can’t make it somewhere, then nobody’s really guaranteed to get it done anywhere; and, if one guy can do something somewhere, then anyone else can do the same thing anywhere.

California May Cut Jobs of 2,000 Firefighters

Friday, May 8th, 2009

Yup, we found a place to make a cut. Fire halls.

Radio guys are busy reading off a list of California state agencies that could, possibly, absorb some kind of a cut so the firefighters might be able to stay on and fight some fires. But these agencies are not absorbing any such cuts, and nobody’s asking them to. So they must be running lean-n-mean.

It is quite a list. Gay/lesbian/transgender caucuses…womens’ studies, department of…lottery…Native American heritage commission…optometry, board of…professional fiduciary bureau…mediation and conciliation services…motor vehicles, department of…workers investment board, workers’ compensation adjustment board, workers’ compensation advocacy board, workers’ compensation sweetening board, workers’ compensation this, workers’ compensation that…astrologers’ union…(okay I made up some of those). This has been going on for, dare I say, twenty minutes and is starting to make for some medium-to-poor radio. Just keep in mind: They aren’t giving a one-paragraph summary of each. Not even one sentence. They read the name and go on to the next one. Twenty minutes. And then some. Twenty-five, almost.

None of these can be cut. Nope. The firefighters have to go.

Because it’s high time we got the government to do what it’s really supposed to do: Lecture young chubby goth chicks on what towering assholes men really are…and let the buildings burn to the ground.

Socialism-Free Vacation!

Thursday, May 7th, 2009

So remember boys & girls, you have to have your tax dollars pissed away on a whole slew of “They’re Too Big To Fail” bailouts, or else you just might get cholera.

Enjoy a little bit of False Dilemma on your next vacation.