House of Eratosthenes

“Obama” is is actually a Kenyan word; it refers to a large mistake made in the recent past, with great flourish and usually by a large number of people, and the tender egos of the ones who made it will not allow them to admit to the mistake.

Actually I just pulled that out of my ass just now. But it’s pretty believable at this point.

His Wonderfulness is convening a panel and taking suggestions. I’ve seen this before, and in the long run I have never, ever ended up happy with this kind of “leadership.” It’s disappointed me in school, it’s disappointed me at work, it’s disappointed me on Star Trek: The Next Generation. The oh-so-wonderful leader who is super-duper-wonderful, and when it comes down to arriving at that vital component of leadership which is the idea — the oh-so-wonderful leader solicits suggestions. Hey, if ya gotta do it, then ya better. But if coming up with the idea is not your cup o’ tea, then what makes you oh-so-wonderful?

Is there a school of thought out there, somewhere, that seriously thinks when a broken and hopeless people become hungry for oh-so-wonderful leadership, that what they’re craving is a showman who will claim credit for their best ideas with great panache, and oh-so-stylishly divert the blame to others when the worst ideas fail to pan out? There are people out there who think this is a rare and precious talent, and we need more of it?

I’ve never understood it.

You do have to give Obama high chutzpah marks for pulling this stunt, though

Seeking to show he is serious about reining in soaring budget deficits, President Barack Obama on Tuesday will kick off the work of a panel he created to try to solve the nation’s fiscal woes.

Obama has given the independent, 18-member National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility broad leeway to suggest remedies for the debt and deficits.
:
Obama has given the panel until December 1 to report back on its recommendations, enabling it to deliver its report after the November U.S. congressional elections.

Now, granted, Republicans under Bush were not exactly paragons of spending control, hence their low approval ratings from Conservatives. And Bush could have forced the Democrat controlled Congress to reduce spending during his last two years. That said, when Obama took over the White House with Democrats in full control of Congress, he apparently said “hey, Republicans, let me show you what out of control spending really looks like.” We then received the boondoggle know as Stimulus (which economists say failed). He signed a record high budget bill. He signed several special budget bills…

[D]oes anyone think that the answers to the budget problems will be “quit spending so darned much!”? Or, do we expect them to be “raise taxes along with implementing a VAT”? Democrats will not reign in any sort of spending. Remember that Pay-go rule they instituted, and then broke within 11 days? The one they have ignored ever since? Remember when Obama said he would go through the budget line by line and do away with pork?

If the Leader is supposed to be superlative and not a merely average leader…but He has to borrow His ideas from somewhere…then you know you’re looking at the Unconstrained Vision of Humanity identified by Dr. Thomas Sowell. It is a path that only leads to one place, and that place is Debt Hell.

Well, unless you’re a member of Jonestown or Heaven’s Gate. So make that two places.

I have to agree with the last part of Teach’s comments, although it certainly gives me no pleasure. This is all about the VAT. The VAT and the Tea Parties. Obama needs the Tea Party house fire to, if it cannot be extinguished, at least burn out slowly and not flare up any further. He needs to implement an idea without owning the idea. That is, of course, what commissions are all about: To introduce, or lend support to, ideas that would spell career suicide for an individual public figure were they too strongly affixed to his name. They’re all about the National Enquirer Effect. You know, nobody will admit to buying a trash-tabloid magazine, so if you believe what you’re told then you must conclude no one is purchasing it anywhere. And yet somebody is. That’s precisely the way a commission works. Nobody who was in attendance came up with this poison-pill of an idea. Someone must have, but there’s no single name next to it; it’s just “the commission recommends.”

Hello, VAT.

All you folks out there arguing about how we need the very smartest people in the country in our positions of leadership, this is why I give you that peculiar look. This is why I say we need someone not quite so sophisticated. Because when lowbrows like me are told the problem is skyrocketing debt, and asked what to do about it, we say things you only hear from a rube…like “Quit spending so goddamn much.” The tragedy of the times in which we live, is that “intelligence” is being re-defined as a habit of veering off from an unsophisticated boring answer like that, into other things. And, when the time comes to put some quality thought into whether or not that’s the kind of “intelligence” we really need, we vote on it.

I’m sure the time will come when we vote that we can’t afford anymore of this, and I’m reasonably confident we’ll vote that way at the very next opportunity. But that’s many months away, and I don’t think you even want to comprehend how many dollars. We need some unsophisticated, boring thinking more than anything else…and we need it PDQ.

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- House of Eratosthenes | 04/27/2010 @ 07:16
“Convening a panel to take suggestions” is code for “I’ve already made up my mind what I’m going to do, but I want to make it look like I solicited input before I actually do it.”

I mean, hell. Dilbert’s boss is running the government. We all know it.
- philmon | 04/27/2010 @ 18:24
It’s disappointed me in school, it’s disappointed me at work, it’s disappointed me on Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Yeah, it’s why I liked Captain Kirk best. He once said, “Gentlemen, I’m not a diplomat. I’m a soldier.” When the Gorn, the Romulans, or the Klingons attacked something belonging to the Federation, Kirk didn’t hesitate to put the Enterprise into warp drive and pursue the aggressor with the full intent of destroying it.

That, I think, is a good lesson for those who formulate American foreign policy – if attacked or even threatened, reach out and crush the threat mercilessly, remorselessly, using all resources necessary to do so. Destroy the aggressor and deprive him of his ability to make war.

Captain Kirk led on principle, not consensus. Were that the Democrats were bigger fans of the original series.

Sorry to always seize on the Trek references and run with them, but I think the Star Trek universe contains interesting analogies & comparisons to the real world. It is hard for me to resist the temptation to launch into commentary.
- cylarz | 04/27/2010 @ 23:24
The Trek references carry much importance, much more importance than one typically gleans out of my passing three- or four-word references to them. Star Trek represents one of maybe three or four occasions over my lifetime in which I might have been casually tempted to The Other Side. And all of those had something to do with an appeal toward parts of me that I don’t like. I’m sad to say, that includes the Kirk-era Star Trek as well.

Star Trek == liberalism. It is an electronic manifesto of secular humanists.

You read between the lines of it all and this belief comes churning to the surface of it, that technology has something to do with human evolution. We’re taking all these steps toward perfection, the final step of which is to eradicate all conflict in the universe. Step thirty-something is to meet each other, step twenty-something is to build starships and start the Federation. Somewhere in between there is all the wise, perfect rules and regs that the UFP has put together by promoting the right people to the right positions. Step eleven or so would be to invent warp drive, which means step ten is to get rid of hunger and disease. Step-approximately-five would be to STOPFIGHTING! Just make a decision not to do it anymore. The other fellow will surely be motivated to stop attacking you when you stop fighting back.

Which means, of course, that Step One is to cease and desist in this silly belief in this guy called God. Prime Directive says you cannot share technology with any civilization unless it is sufficiently advanced to appreciate it. All these civilizations Kirk & Picard meet that are below that waterline, have it in common that they worship something. That is an indicator that they are substandard and have yet to do the necessary evolving.

I find that blisteringly offensive. I can get past it when Kirk is sending a heat-seaking torpedo up Christopher Plummer’s Shakespeare-quoting ass. But just imagine what would happened if it was just the Muslim or Jewish faith being singled out this way!
- mkfreeberg | 04/28/2010 @ 05:25
Prime Directive says you cannot share technology with any civilization unless it is sufficiently advanced to appreciate it.

I *suppose* you could interpret it that way, but the PD actually says, “We adopt a policy of non-interference in the normal development of healthy alien cultures.” It was left up to ship captains, the highest-ranking Starfleet representatives actually deployed to the field…to define “normal” and “healthy,” and to bend or even break that rule if warranted – and of course the admiralty back home would want an explanation if that happened.

I always understood the PD simply to mean, “We aren’t going to get involved in civil wars or interplanetary conflicts being fought amongst pre-warp civilizations.” Meaning, we’re not going to send in Federation weapons or starships on one side or the other…and we’re not going to provide technology or cultural influence in peacetime either, which would have any meaningful effect on the direction taken by that civilization. I guess the thinking is that Earth wouldn’t have appreciated some alien superpower coming along and messing with it during it’s pre-warp era.

I often pondered that and thought, “You know, it’s a nice idea, and I suppose some would say that the PD ought to become America’s default foreign policy. Kind like what Switzerland has now.” The problem is that World War II revealed the folly of a purely isolationist strategy. The proper question to ask is, “What is to be gained by our involvement, and to what level, and how do we go about it?” Reasonable minds may differ.

The connection between the PD-inspired prohibition on the sharing of technology with civilizations “below the waterline,” and those same civ’s having yet to discard religion? Hmm. Honestly I never made the connection, but now that you mention it, it’s gotten me thinking. I’d have to go back and watch a few episodes from this series or that one to find some evidence for your claim, but I’m not prepared to dismiss it out-of-hand either. ST Voyager was particularly hostile toward religious faith (except Chakotay’s animist tribal beliefs), and most of the series’s, at least from NextGen forward, indeed were pretty liberal. Again, I think Voyager was by far the worst when it came to taking jabs at conventional American cultural values. The female captain and black Vulcan were just the tip of the hulking iceberg of left-wing social commentary.
- cylarz | 04/28/2010 @ 17:56

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Obama Convenes Panel to Solve Budget Problems He Helped CreateTuesday, April 27th, 2010

Obama Convenes Panel to Solve Budget Problems He Helped Create
Tuesday, April 27th, 2010