Someday I’ll Meet You Again
Megan McArdle is willing to bet that there will no improvement in infant mortality or death rates over the next decade beyond those trends which were already established before its enactment. Nor will any of the reductions in bankruptcies nor costs claimed by health care “reform” advocates be observed. McArdle is waiting to see whether anybody will take her up. I think someone should. After all if health care “reform” is an improvement then its benefits should be measurable. If it’s not measurable then its not an improvement. But maybe she’s not broadminded enough.
Those who are reluctant to take up the McArdle bet are offering up another benefit. The President has “saved” his Presidency and shown that he could succeed where Bill Clinton could not. That doesn’t mean they’ll take McArdle’s bet; it only means they’re changing the currency of scorekeeping. They’re bringing history into the picture. Barack Obama has achieved something “historic” and that has a value which transcends mere death rates or dollars and cents. David Frum appears to share McArdle’s doubts about healthcare “reform”‘s efficacy while adopting the historical political scorecard. Frum argues that by not playing nice with Obama, the Republicans passed up a chance to mitigate the bill’s worst features.
Barack Obama badly wanted Republican votes for his plan. Could we have leveraged his desire to align the plan more closely with conservative views? To finance it without redistributive taxes on productive enterprise – without weighing so heavily on small business – without expanding Medicaid? Too late now. They are all the law.
It’s at heart a pacifist argument, one which might have been heard at the British Cabinet Crisis of May 1940. The question that divided Winston Churchill and Lord Halifax was whether one might get more by talking rather than fighting. David Sanger at the New York Times repeats Frum’s question, but reserves judgment on whether or not President Obama ‘won’ or not. Sanger thinks it’s too early to tell. “But there is no doubt that in the course of this debate, Mr. Obama has lost something — and lost it for good. Gone is the promise on which he rode to victory less than a year and a half ago — the promise of a ‘postpartisan’ Washington in which rationality and calm discourse replaced partisan bickering.” Sanger correctly identifies the key factor that drove Republican opposition to the health care “reform” bill: a grassroots tax revolt which was unalterably opposed to a further expansion of Washington’s powers. The question is whether the Republicans by betting on the revolt have backed the wrong horse. Obama believes that they have. The Tea Party is a chimera, an illusion. Sanger says the President is convinced that once people get used to an insurance entitlement they will never be able to give it up. The Tea Parties will flicker, fade and then go out. People will get used to the new way of things.
At the core of Mr. Obama’s strategy stands a bet that the Republicans, in trying to portray the bill as veering toward socialism, overplayed their hand. Fueled by the antigovernment anger of the Tea Party movement, Republicans have staked much on the idea that they can protect the country by acting as what the Democrats gleefully call the “Party of No.” …
Mr. Obama’s gamble is that what worked for Johnson and President Franklin D. Roosevelt will ultimately work for him. Once Americans discover that they can no longer be rejected for insurance for pre-existing conditions, he is betting, or that they can keep their children on their own insurance plans longer, the more they will come to appreciate the effect of the changes on their day-to-day lives.
The obvious difference between Roosevelt’s position in 1940 and Obama’s in 2010 was World War 2. That global conflict destroyed practically the entire productive capacity of the industrialized world with the exception of the US. It allowed for an unparalleled economic expansion and was followed by a burgeoning demographic explosion we know as the Baby Boom. Those two factors together made Roosevelt’s entitlements appear to be sustainable. Even Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society 20 years later could still count on riding those two trends. Today’s crisis is largely the result of the final exhaustion of those twin booms. Where FDR found himself at the beginning, Obama finds himself at the end.
A better historical comparison of what might befall Obama emulation of FDR is those policies would have fared without the World War 2 or the Baby Boom to susutain them. Barack Obama is trying to be FDR while in the throes of a huge economic crisis, perhaps on the scale of the Depression, without anything like the deus ex machina of World War 2 to save him. Barring the sudden advent of a productive miracle like Cold Fusion or affordable self-replicating nanotechnology what Obama will have instead is the deficit of a World War without a World War.
Given those differences in circumstance it’s not certain whether the Republicans in backing the Tea Parties, have put themselves on the wrong side of history. Unless Barack Obama can find a way to pay for his promises they will, perforce be broken. And then there will be no talk of Frum’s missed opportunity to make nice but rather of a last botched chance to prevent a disaster. To McArdle’s wager that there will be no improvement in health statistics, we should add another. What are the odds that the Democrats who voted for the health care reform bill will not be regarded in the same way that we now look back at the Men of Munich?
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Neville Obama waving a piece of paper proclaiming “Health care in our time.”
The idea of pro abortion Leftists (Obama the extremist ‘let the late-term aborted baby who dares to survive, die in a broom-closet’ Senator and by NO MEANS ‘save’ or give life-preserving procedures) ‘caring’ about infant mortality rates is laughable if not utterly sickening.
Abortion is evil.
Men with their cocks sticking in any hole that will service their needs are EVIL.
Women who service scum are EVIL.
ABORTION IS EVIL.
Never again will anyone have to make that AWFUL choice between spending the last of their money on medicine or on another pack of Camels.
McCardle isn’t counting the capacity of the owners of process to game life expectancy if they so choose. The US currently uses a very generous and inclusive definition of “live birth”. Simply choking it back to the standards used by oh, say, Switzerland, would produce a sudden and drastic apparent “improvement” in life expectancy, by removing a certain percentage of premature infants from the definitions.
To have a serious impact on age-specific mortality rates, the Democrats would have to reduce the unhealthy habits of their chitlin-chomping, dope-smoking, STD-ridden core constituency.
I would be very interested to see mortality/morbidity schedules for segments of the political spectrum. The folks at the tea party rallies I’ve attended looked pretty fit. I suspect that, if there were data available, they would show that libertarians and conservatives average longer and healthier lives than Democrat voters do.
Remember the antiwar movement? Seen them lately? So, yes, protest movements can turn out to be irrelevant. In fact, they almost always are.
Elections are what matter, not people in the street. Elections matter. We just saw how.
Another lesson from the antiwar movement is that victory makes protest obsolete. If health care reform actually delivers what it promises, more care for more people for less money, then the protests against it will be forgotten.
I doubt that will happen, but it’s important to remember.
Today’s crisis is largely the result of the final exhaustion of those twin booms. Where FDR found himself at the beginning, Obama finds himself at the end.
The (false) mental luxury the left has enjoyed since WWII in the US is that the good times will always roll and can be taken for granted, and that my poverty is your fault. Thus funding for strong defense is unnecessary and can be skimmed off (and then some) for social programs, promising extended childhoods to an ever-growing segment of the population, and ever-increasing votes for Democrats.
They take it for granted that the US is simultaneously a warmonger and can endlessly afford food, clothing, housing titles and unlimited healthcare for the whole population at everybody else’s expense. What a twisted American dream.
Barring the sudden advent of a productive miracle like Cold Fusion or affordable self-replicating nanotechnology what Obama will have instead is the deficit of a World War without a World War.
Then again, his hands-off approach to the Iran problem just may be meant to encourage a war — one which he can then use to solve his economic mess and consolidate his power.
I was listening to some local talk show today briefly during lunch and the issue of the US AAA bond rating being at risk because of this massive new entitlement was being discussed. It makes perfect sense to me. My credit is based on by income and verses future commitments and if I were to pile on huge amounts of barely sustainable debt it would stand that it would mean that I could borrow less and would have to pay more in terms of interest rates. It just seems foolishly selfish of the Dems to put “historic” legislation above prudent fiscal policy… insane really. This on top of a crisis that has put the whole world on edge and we are shopping for benefits.
Wretchard, re: “Barack Obama is trying to be FDR while in the throes of a huge economic crisis, perhaps on the scale of the Depression, without anything like the deus ex machina of World War 2 to save him.”
So? Who prevents him from manufacturing something?
To expect truth in argument from the Democrats, or in evaluating the results of the nationalization of our health care, is fantasy. The Democrats in general and the Obama regime in particular regard the entire concept of truth as a “bourgeois construct” that has no meaning compared to their revolutionary ideals. Keep in mind that the statistics we get about the economy are jiggered with horrendously as a matter of course. If they cannot gloss them, they are always “unexpected”. If they can gloss them, they make no contact with reality AND are always revised for the worse as soon as attention is elsewhere.
As far as Frum is concerned, he, David Brooks, and Peggy Noonan, et. al. are nothing more than the modern equivalent of “Lord Haw Haw” or “Tokyo Rose”. They are actively working for the enemy, which explains what they say.
Subotai Bahadur
One of the under-discussed aspects of this disastrous bill is that its passage seems to have taken place in a situational vacuum. By “situational vacuum” I mean that, in the course of debating and voting on the bill, it was only the internal logic of the health-care debate itself that mattered, only the measure’s symbolic value as a victory for Obama; as if the bill would never have to fledge from the peculiar, inside-the-beltway laboratory conditions in which it was born, and survive on its own in a world of real facts and forces.
Missing from the Democrats’ jubilation is any awareness that Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security are all already broke; that all the governments of the developed world are already deeply in debt, and there is no way to pay for this; that we are already fighting two wars in the Middle East, and may soon be fighting with a nuclear Iran; that a burgeoning trade war with China is just heating up; that the US economy is not coming back any time soon, if ever; that the unique demographic conditions that made American post-war prosperity possible in the first place are played out (as Mr. Fernandez mentions); or, most puzzlingly, that the electorate is steadfastly against them and that their own political necks are in the noose.
The cynics will say (and are saying) that the Democrats really do know these things, and mean to destroy the country on purpose. I’m sure the doctrinaire Alinskyites fit that description, but I’m not so sure about the run of the mill Congressional Dems. I think they really are caught in a world of moral and intellectual insipidity that renders them unable to think like genuine statesmen. They are themselves the worst fruits of our post-war prosperity: sheltered, bumbling neophytes and perpetual children who cannot distinguish reality from ‘Imagine.’ They are much, much too comfortable with themselves, and we need to make them uncomfortable. They feel much, much too safe, and we need to make them feel unsafe.
A case in point can be seen in the difference between Boehner’s and Pelosi’s speeches from the house floor last night. Boehner stood in the finest tradition of American constitutional liberty, upholding our timeless principles and calling on his peers to follow waht they knew was right. Pelosi gave some moronic rant about “being a woman no longer being a preexisting condition,” a piece of feminist-inspired cant which will not even be understood by anybody outside her own age cohort or the one immediately following it.
The mark of the true statesman is his perennial relevance and his full-spectrum awareness. His instincts are necessarily conservative because they are gestalt-preserving; they are true because they are tried. The political arriviste always needs some fashionable theory or other to propel him to power, and always wrecks himself on the shoals of reality when he gets there. This health-care reform will prove no better than the other communist and fascist experiments, whose empires now lay in ashes. The question, as always, is how much damage will it do before it is eradicated.
“Frum argues that by not playing nice with Obama, the Republicans passed up a chance to mitigate the bill’s worst features.”
A quote I read shortly after I got to DC in 1988: “The problem with the Republicans in Congress is that if the Democrats proposed a new bill that would burn the Capitol to the ground the Republican counterproposal would be to accomplish the same thing in a series of small fires instead of one major conflagration.”
Every year the USSR got better and better until the country collapsed. Treaties and agreements that we made with the Soviets that delayed the collapse were in the end not only counterproductive but pointless.
Forward progressives, ever forward … over the cliff. We will be ready with nooses and lampposts for the survivors.
“history; which is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.” Gibbon
Yes, it is historic.
Wretchard is leaving out the possibility of a “reproductive miracle” to save the parasitic Obama agenda – enter the20-30 million illegals (followed by 20-30 million more when the treason is complete) which Obama will next elevate to citizenship. They’ll remain less assimilated than prior waves of immigrants, being larger and coming faster than all others before. Further, Obama’s identify politics and class warfare will keep this group dumb enough to never figure out the flim-flam, angry enough to keep demanding patronage from the Dems, and poor enough so that their buy-offs will remain as cheap as possible while maintaing them within the hard Left Democratic fold. Why not? It’s worked like a charm with most blacks for over 50 years – they still haven’t figured out that they’ve been had by their Democratic handlers and “benefactors”.
Time will tell if the Latinos ever can become as productive as their European counterpoints. Is their social software sufficient to carry the staggering demands they already burden America with? At least prior immigrants seemed eager to come and blend in… Latins seemed more determined to retain their cultural software even if it’s malignant or harmful to America itself, beginning with breaking our laws by coming entering illegally, to operating vast and murky black market systems which avoid paying taxes while demanding growing subsidies etc. Two huge examples: 1. The illegals swamp our emergency rooms driving hospitals to levy extortive fees on the rest of us, and 2. Our schoolrooms are overflowing with the children of illegals whose parents pay nearly nothing to support. The illegal tsunami from Latin America is as responsible as anything for bringing our nation to its knees — and both parties are complicit, though it is an artform in the subversive hands of the Left.
Never doubt for a moment that when the inevitable future Republican administration or Congress takes office, the failures of this bill will be blamed on incapable governance by wingnuts who do not believe in effective government in the first place. Oh yeah, and they starved the health care system of needed funding, too. If only they had agreed to spend three times the amount, the system would have worked perfectly. But then the Republicans have starved the public schools all these years, too. The press and the Democratics will all point the fingers of blame elsewhere. From their standpoint it’s heads they win, tails the other guys lose.
We are full-tilt on a trade war with China. Meanwhile US businesses are pulling out, finding no profits and many losses. Not just Google either. China’s bubble is about to burst, their per capita income is only $2K per year, not enough in the failed attempt to boost internal consumption (their savings rate is sky high because there is no trusted retirement system).
Europe is collapsing with Germany and the Netherlands telling the Greeks “no” to a bailout, and wanting out of the EMU. As a practical matter Spain, Italy, Ireland, Greece, and probably France will have to leave also to devalue their currency to make exports (mostly agricultural goods within Europe, and cheap vacations) affordable to those with actual products worth money that people will buy (Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands).
Now American businesses have gotten more unproductive workers, with big payroll tax increases and other costs associated immediately. While a racial spoils system is underway. The LAT notes that White men support Obama by only 35% (White women by 43%). I am surprised there are that many SWPL White guys still left.
Everyone ran out of money at about the same time. Even China (or especially them). There is no money to pay for insuring another 30 million or so, not to mention the illegals soon to be covered, by court order or Obama’s legislation or both. This only intensifies the racial spoils fight.
FDR deported every Mexican he could find, and prohibited Blacks from the New Deal. He too dealt with racial spoils politics, but he chose the White Majority and did not celebrate turning it into a despised, sudden, second class minority. All of a sudden. This is why despite FDR’s obvious failure to bring about recovery he kept getting re-elected. He put the White majority FIRST. Raw racial spoils politics.
Meanwhile, a nuclear free America without any real defense is at the mercy of Iran, North Korea, China, Russia, Pakistan, and others. Just as Obama wants it. Obama’s plan is to turn America into Vichy France, with himself as President for Life. Following his idealized father’s African tradition. Obama WANTS a devastating attack so he can force a surrender and make America into Sharia Lite. Ruling forever as America’s Vizier.
Obama’s play is to encourage an attack on the US so he can rule by martial law — while surrendering like Marshal Petain. He also plans to import about 30 million Mexicans and legalize (instant voters) the 20 million here. To make Whites a permanent and sudden racial minority.
Cap and Trade, Amnesty for all those illegals, that’s a pretty much guaranteed deal. Its going to happen in the same way as Health Care.
What this means, is that first White voters, particularly men (women will always stick with Obama, note the 8 point disparity between White men and women regarding Obama) must do what they can to destroy Obama and key Democrats, by the sort of attacks that Andrew Sullivan used against Palin and her family. Painting them both as trashy, inbred illiterates. Yes this means Obama’s kids and wife and his sexuality are not only fair game but fair targets. Because its Battle of Britain time.
Secondly, the House (and if it goes Republican, the Senate) MUST be prepared to impeach Obama AND REMOVE HIM. Ignoring Black threats of violence, cries of racism, and so on. Obama is owed nothing, and neither are Dems. EVERY DEM shares the vision of Obama wrecking America. Making Whites the despised, second class minority as “punishment” for past and obvious racism (that almost no one alive today had anything to do with).
Obama must be impeached AND CONVICTED. Removed in disgrace. The Kevin Johnson scandal (Johnson, former NBA player, Obama crony, started a phony Americorps connected charity and funneled money back to himself) is a good start. Obama intervened to fire Americorps IG Walpin to protect Johnson. It’s a simple tale of corruption and cronyism. Obama is obviously guilty and should be impeached AND CONVICTED on that alone. This would allow a chastened and scared President Biden to simply acquiesce to rolling back ObamaCare and Affirmative Action along with it.
Wretchard said:
“The obvious difference between Roosevelt’s position in 1940 and Obama’s in 2010 was World War 2. That global conflict destroyed practically the entire productive capacity of the industrialized world with the exception of the US.”
We Americans like to pat ourselves on the back in thinking how lucky we are in having the political and economic system that we inherited. We were also lucky in having a country that was extremely rich in natural resources (note the past tense). What worries me as an American is how much of our success was due to pure dumb luck versus the quality of our political and economic system.
I once heard an anti-American insult that really bothered me, i.e.
Americans are a nation of William Shatners.
I like William Shatner but it can be argued the he is (or was) merely a big dumb stud with almost no talent as an actor who’s only real claim to fame was in having the luck of being cast as Captain Kirk for “Star Trek”.
Are we really just a bunch of William Shatners?
I have to confess that the orgasmic joy the country seemed to experienced after electing Obama as president coupled with the decades long mismanagement of our economy are strong evidence of “Beam me up, Scotty”.
I would argue that nothing in this health care bill will work as advertised, but will lead to a real series of crises. These will be managed statistically, however.
Aside from ham-fistedly tuned statistical outcomes, certain health care tactics will emerge to keep the new system lookin’ good. Among these will be a new culture of eugenic editing through pre-natal screening and therapeutic abortion at the beginning of life. That will be complemented by end of life management featuring a new enthusiasm for euthanasia and a new class of euphoriants to smooth the “pathway” to “transition.”
Watch for stories of seniors unwilling to check into hospitals, because they see that their friends don’t check out.
In between, care will be carefully rationed, and if that leads to unfortunate near-term outcomes, well, new statistical categories will still reflect the superior performance of the system.
All of this is important because the target audience — healthy people — must continue to be reassured that their coverage is top notch, and they will be reassured, until they get sick or old.
Strategic herd management will feature long lines at the MRI barn, but short lines at the customer service kiosk, which will gain a reputation for short tempered clerks with vindictive ways.
OK I have to pay for every fat pig, junkie, drunk, criminal and illegal alien that can drag their asses to a doctor. So I say crash the system. I will maximize my use of services and take a more active approach to minimize the taxes I pay. From no on when anyone asks for a donation I will tell them sorry I gave through the government. Haiti, sorry TS. Chile sorry. Street person get the hell out of my face.
What this means, is that first White voters, particularly men (women will always stick with Obama, note the 8 point disparity between White men and women regarding Obama) must do what they can to destroy Obama and key Democrats, by the sort of attacks that Andrew Sullivan used against Palin and her family. Painting them both as trashy, inbred illiterates.
This would be wrong.
Back in the anti-Marcos days, and probably in every underground that has existed in history, there were discussions about whether it was fair to take on the children and relatives of bad people. The consensus, as I recall, was that it was unjustified. There are always operational advantages to unrestricted activity, but there’s a real price to pay too. Life as always makes you choose.
One of my themes on this blog, especially in threads relating to torture, is that one has the right to reject convenience to uphold one’s principles. You can forgo coercive interrogation knowing you are giving up advantages; even knowing you will take more losses. But you do this with both eyes open, unlike the liberal who thinks there’s a free lunch. Still you may do it and in later years understand that you did the right thing.
You are always going to show the scars of holding back. The question is whether you will bear them gladly. When the lions bit the Christians, it hurt. Still they went.
I am strongly of the belief that while the left never plays fair and always cheats, it is still right to forbear from vilifying the innocent relatives and friends even of the worst politicians. We forbear because it’s wrong to hit out at children, even if it costs us. And if you are uncomfortable with holding back be more active. The more active you are in the political fight, the more you have the right to insist on forbearance because you will bear the cost. Freedom always costs; morality always has a price. But if you’re paying, you can do anything you like, even be gallant.
None of us are going to live forever. It’s the way we choose to live that constitutes the art of our lives. This is our ground of freedom. You can say the Left sucks. Sure. Who wants to be like them? Of course these arguments aren’t very convincing if you regard winning in the here and now as everything. It is important; and it is something. But it is not everything. This is an argument from faith and it has all the force of the wind. Still you may believe in what is on the wind.
Some of the guys never made it through and I think of them sometimes. Of old Rey, Manny and Sonny. If they had been a touch more ruthless, would it have a difference? It’s an old problem. Bunyan in the Pilgrim’s Progress gives his answer.
That was Bunyan. Me, I don’t know about the trumpets. But like McArdle, I’ll bet.
“Where FDR found himself at the beginning, Obama finds himself at the end.”
Unless Obama concludes that entry into a WWIII in some part of the planet will reset the clock to those halcyon days of the Dems in the 1940′s. Wag the dog on steroids.
Some on this board say he’d rather we were attacked so he can declare martial law and surrender to whomever the attacker might be. Well and good, this is a plausible, even possible, outcome. I don’t think that Obama would respond militarily to a couple of our cities being destroyed, particularly if they were in red states.
However, I think it equally plausible that a major invasion and war somewhere else in the world which we can enter on any of a number of pretenses could provide for use of the War Powers Act, giving the O administration vastly enhanced autocratic latitude.
Unfortunately, in an era of nukes, the consequences of such a conflict will not be precisely the ones of the 1940′s, will they?
#10 grr if he tries to “wag the dog” he’s not in the financial position of Bush 2 but Bush 1- he”ll be passing the hat at a time of crisis-and he’s been pissing off his allies who might foot the bill.
#16 Morton-that is the nightmare scenario,grab enough illegals, give them the vote and the US is finished, the whole agreement between the people and their government is done. almost as effective as debauching the currency.
Eggplant,
Americans are a nation of William Shatners
Shatner is I believe an American citizen but he was born a Canadian.
ridgerunner,
would be very interested to see mortality/morbidity schedules for segments of the political spectrum
John Edwards was right. At least he convinced Barack Obama to follow his ambulance chasers model of America. There are Two Americas, one is full of productive people who are generally pretty healthy and often do not need much in the way of non-catastrophic insurance. The other is both unproductive and addicted to every conceivable pathology that the mind of man can conceive.
If Zeke Emanuel’s Death Panels really did allocate care by identifying key variables that indicate a propensity to both increase the costs to society while simultaneously generating a significantly below average level of wealth then he would perforce have to deny care to the key constituencies of the Democratic Party. Just as the key to winning an election is to staff the panel that counts the ballots the key to surviving politicized health care will be in having allies staffing the administrative agencies that this program will breed. The arbitrariness on its face, to mask thinly the bias as a principle within, that “Net Neutrality” will bring to the Internet is a dry run for the contortions that will be used in the name of fairness and cost savings to justify unfairness and corruption to support the profligate.
The constituents of the Democratic Party are the people who elected John Conyers and John Dingle. They are the retirees of the UAW. To save them from the consequences of destructive behaviors that were chronicled by Arthur Hailey in Wheels the Democrats first stole two of the Big Three auto companies and gave them to the union. Then they attacked Toyota in an orchestrated campaign to reduce competition. Now they have chained the rest of the country to pay for the health benefits of these people and their supporters.
White men who decry white women voting Democrat should have PAID THEIR FREAKING CHILD SUPPORT to their WHITE WOMEN.
I’m sure most of you men here are on the ‘up and up’ regarding your spouses and children, but, I have to laugh when I grew up poor to a mother who married four white men who fathered three of us who ALL PAID NO CHILD SUPPORT once the divorce was final.
My mother was a white whore and the men who fathered us were WHORE SCUM SLIMEBAGS pieces of vile SHIT.
CHANGE the mindset and change the voters.
There is plenty of BLAME to go around in the ‘manly-man’ department, boyz.
Well, we need to keep our hands to ourselves.
Delia,
The great thing about America is that everyone gets to choose who or even what they are. Barack Obama chose to be a Black American, although he arguably is not. Your mother chose, despite the minor evidence of her skin color, not to be a member of the majority culture and sought out men who fed that condition of dysfunctional dependency. You can if you choose seek out a better mate and raise functional children. The world is really recreated if you try hard enough. It is not a question of pigmentation.
Part of the culture that we hope you aspire to be part of, even if your mother failed to, is to often couch even our cries of pain in terms controlled enough to ensure that the meaning within the message is not obscured.
There is a strange scientific disconnect between looking at microbes under a microscope as actual ‘life’ and yet a fetus as ‘throw-away’ garbage.
In fact, when man searches for the existence of ‘life’ on other planets he/she often looks for such ‘insignificant’ life factors too.
Is it not strange that we can look at the ‘microbial’ as life even in its most ‘parasitic’ forms and yet view a child as a ‘non-entity’ even as they become so much more than mere ‘cells’?
27. bob:
“Well, we need to keep our hands to ourselves.”
-and with plenty of lube and porn! /sarc
Well said, Life of the Mind. It’s here that we can rise a little above our circumstances and that is what it is all about.
No sarc. Sounds as if you’ve been through some tough stuff, and have fought back, bless you.
Delia- that’s profound- just imagine”the search for extraterrestial clumps of cells” doesn’t have the same ring to it.does it? guess i just fell off the fence.
Frum’s an idiot for saying the Republicans lost by not playing nice with Obama. What would that have gotten them? Obama’s agenda during his first year was conceived along the lines of a Democratic super-majority. That means no Republican input was necessary. Republicans could not have played nice with Obama if they wanted to, and no doubt many did want to in the beginning. People wonder how the Republicans have suddenly found such unity, and the answer is easy: the Dems locked the doors. In every major piece of legislation in this Congress nary a Republican fingerprint can be found. This past year has been all hard Democrat, all the time, to hell with the rest. The post-partisan meme is among one of the best jokes in history.
Wretchard writes eloquently about the demographic problem as he zeroes in on the problem of the postwar boom closing. The problem is bigger. It’s not one of a postwar boomlet from 1945. The problem is widespread demographic collapse across the globe. Western Civilization has seen this happen before, and the results are known as the Dark Ages. Sorry if that’s alarmist, but it is true. From the Dark Ages until now, and from before the Dark Ages and up to them, generations of the western world saw constant increase of numbers, coinage, knowledge, you name it. The “progressive vector” held sway, as pies ever-increased.
The pies are not destined to forever increase. What a mistake to assume they will, when this illusion of progress can turn on a dime, in the flash of a generational eye.
I fear, and I submit, that we may be heading back into a Dark Age before too long. Fiscal strains and demographic reality point to a coming world of scarcer resources. And we’d be to blame for that, too, folks, because it doesn’t have to happen.
Megan McArdle got all riled up after the HC vote sounding almost conservative when she wrote:
But now she backtracks to her more liberal leanings looking for gold where there is none. In her HC predictions, she swallows whole the liberal meme that lack of healthcare is a major cause of bankruptcy. Her impeccable authority is none other than Dr. David Himmelstein, co-founder of Physicians for a National Health Program, who conducted an “unbiased” study which found that 2/3 of all bankruptcies in 2007 involved unpaid medical bills.
Well, Megan, not to worry, because according to the Manhattan Institute:
Wretchard in his decency describes how choosing to have limits leaves its scars. There is an important difference between an affirmation and a negation; Choosing to do right is unlike refusing to be as bad as your enemy.
It was once drilled into the heads of children the lesson that choosing to do good was a goal of good character. The Lessons of Good Character were repeated and metabolized until one came, if successful, to associate one’s self with these ideals, at least on some level. Without the leavening effects of humility, another and a True sign of Good Caracter, desire to Do Good can lapse into radical fanaticism. This is a Modern Plague.
\homily
Neo-cons are poison, and Frum is the worst. As von Mises pointed out long ago by other words, mixing wine and sewage will get you sewage, which is the leftist compromise playbook.
This is the clearest possible opportunity. I wouldn’t go back and trade Obama for McCain.
What is Frum talking about? The bill was entirely done in Congress, and as a matter of “principle” the demos would not seriously entertain anything the Republicans said.
Now, that’s not to say how hard any of the Republicans tried, but I am not aware of any receptivity on the dem side. Kind of like Israel talking to the Palestians. You can always tell a Palestinian, but you can’t tell him much.
Always trust the math. Whenever you hear the words “too big to fail” it is really someone arguing that they are exempt from operations of arithmetic. Like banks all over the world they’ll show you the grand office, the soaring columns and the marble floors and say, “how can this not stand?” But be careful: consider this hoary old story.
Impossible because it would amount to 2^64 -1 grains of rice, about 37 cubic kilometers worth. Always trust the math.
Obama’s only chance to square this account is to hope the math changes, that the coefficients are altered by technology. Otherwise subtract abortion from the numbers of new labor entrants, add illegal immigration, divide by higher taxes and multiply by entitlements and see what you get. Does it work? If it does then fine. Otherwise no amount of spin can save it.
My worry is that the numbers don’t work. If so it’s not a question of if, but when the smash will come. But for those long accustomed to simply having things happen it’s inconceivable. Perhaps it is only in politics that one can say, “I want to be the next FDR, to make my mark on history,” with a straight face. Those things are not dished up to order like room service.
Whiskey
“while surrendering like Marshal Petain”
uh, Marechal Petain was of the old school an thought that France was done, but he nonentheless tried to limit the damages. Before being recalled in France, he was in Spain as embassador, this explains that:
But Petain proved to be too clever by half. While he fought against a close Franco-German military collaboration, and fired his vice premier, Pierre Laval, for advocating it, and secretly urged Spain’s dictator Francisco Franco to refuse passage of the German army to North Africa, his attempts to undermine the Axis while maintaining an official posture of neutrality did not go unnoticed by Hitler, who ordered that Laval be reinstated as vice premier. Petain acquiesced, but refused to resign in protest because of fear that France would come under direct German rule if he were not there to act as a buffer. But he soon became little more than a figurehead, despite efforts to manipulate events behind the scenes that would advance the Free French cause (then publicly denying, even denouncing, those events when they came to light)
http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/marshal-petain-becomes-premier-of-occupied-france
Also he refused Hitler to set Lufwaffe bases in Marroco in order to attack the British convoys in atlantic
a funny article, an interview of De Gaulle in 1941 on Petain:
http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=950&dat=19410621&id=_6QLAAAAIBAJ&sjid=C1UDAAAAIBAJ&pg=4454,1994184
I must laugh of the the author’s description of de Gaulle, more of the “reserved englishman than of the of the popular conception of a gay electric frenchman”, seems that this reductive view isn’t dating from yesterday, then since when ? not sure that the “Poilus” had given such an exemple though ! or is it from some hairdressers that moved to america ?
So I doubt that the comparison of the actual american administration fits with the Vichy’s
David Frum has excellent political instincts. The problem is that his political instincts are Canadian, not American. It makes a difference. By American standards, a Canadian conservative (or “progressive conservative”) can act more like a “One Nation Tory” (British usage) or “Red Tory” (Canadian usage) – a variety of conservatism that is socially conservative and comparatively pro-business but is otherwise indistinguishable from statist socialism.
I like David Frum; he’s a nice guy and an excellent wordsmith. I just wish he would fully comprehend the meaning of the phrase “fundamental transformation of America”. Whatever else can be said, President Obama has not been particularly adept at calming people down. President Obama energizes people. Political leadership is not only about energizing people; it is also about setting a good example.
One can get almost anything done in politics as long as one doesn’t care who gets credit. Yet, President Obama is acting more like a man in a hurry who wants something big he can put his name onto. It’s as if he were bitterly clinging to a dream of doing something – anything – to get his initials written into the wall of history. “Obama was here.”
I’ve been through that phase. While I was done with that “man in a hurry” phase before I reached thirty, it seems as though President Obama hasn’t gotten that out of his system.
David Frum has excellent political instincts. The problem is that his political instincts are Canadian, not American. It makes a difference. By American standards, a Canadian conservative (or “progressive conservative”) can act more like a “One Nation Tory” (British usage) or “Red Tory” (Canadian usage) – a variety of conservatism that is socially conservative and comparatively pro-business but is otherwise indistinguishable from statist socialism.
I like David Frum; he’s a nice guy and an excellent wordsmith. I just wish he would fully comprehend the meaning of the phrase “fundamental transformation of America”. Whatever else can be said, President Obama has not been particularly adept at calming people down. President Obama energizes people. Political leadership is not only about energizing people; it is also about setting a good example.
One can get almost anything done in politics as long as one doesn’t care who gets credit. Yet, President Obama is acting more like a man in a hurry who wants something big he can put his name on. It’s as if he were bitterly clinging to a dream of doing something – anything – to get his initials written into the wall of history. “Obama was here.”
I’ve been through that phase. While I was done with that “man in a hurry” phase before I reached thirty, it seems as though President Obama hasn’t gotten that out of his system.
At least 6 million people will be killed by ObamaCare over the next 10 years. This is the low end of the estimate. According to Wikipedia there were 840,000 abortions in the US in 2005. When abortions are publicly funded, the number will increase.
Now some people will say these are not real people who will be killed because of their age and their obvious need for life-support and because the supreme court has ruled they are not human.
However if a person kills a pregnant woman he is guilty of killing two people. This is the law in all 50 states. If you beat up a pregnany woman and kill her baby, you are guilty of murder. Therefore while abortion may not be murder legally, there can be no doubt that 6,000,000 American citizens will die because ObamaCare was passed by the liberal wing of the Democrat party.
Bu the true genius of the Democrat plan is that it forces Catholics to help kill unborn children. Catholics are faced with a dilemma. Should they obey the law and kill babies or should they obey God and refuse to kill babies. Catholics are forced to choose between God and their country. No wonder the Democrats cheer “Yes we can!!!” They have destroyed Catholicism in the United States. Suddenly we are back in 1640.
However if a person kills a pregnant woman he is guilty of killing two people.
Right.
We have a case in our courts right now, here locally, on that very subject, he is accused of killing the woman, burning her to death, in a fire, and the baby too, when she could have killed the baby, no problem with that, by abortiuon. No legal problem there. It’s what the law is.
28. Lifeofthemind,
My mother’s many ‘paramours’ taught me to distrust men growing up. My husband of 23 years taught me that trust even over time can be violated quite quickly, frighteningly and ‘Tiger Woods-ly.
I have lost my faith in men. A ‘faith’ that didn’t belong there anyway. God has been the only father I’ve known and a psychotic whack job is the only mother I’ve known.
There are times when I just want to primal scream my guts out (and I do on occasion) but, the lights flicker and it ends up looking like a bad prison movie.
/giggle
42. sol vason,
“YES WE CAN!!…KILL BABIES”
Sickening.
We have regressed as a people.
32. reg:
“Delia- that’s profound- just imagine”the search for extraterrestial clumps of cells” doesn’t have the same ring to it.does it? guess i just fell off the fence.”
I’m glad someone ‘got it’.
There are 28 AG’s from 28 states so far who are ready to file suit against the healthcare bill on the grounds that it forces people to buy health insurance for their themselves.
Likely there will be more before the suit is fired off. Given the numbers of signatures on the suit–it won’t tarry long in circuit courts before going to the supreme court.
curiously O dissed those guys at the state of the union. hmm.
works for me. works for me too that the 9th circuit recently endorsed that our rights come from God.
So understand that its very much in play that the health care could be struck down. already states are writing laws to say that their citizens can’t be forced to buy healthcare.
these dems are going to jack knife.
Whiskey
Europe is collapsing with Germany and the Netherlands telling the Greeks “no” to a bailout, and wanting out of the EMU. As a practical matter Spain, Italy, Ireland, Greece, and probably France will have to leave also to devalue their currency to make exports (mostly agricultural goods within Europe, and cheap vacations) affordable to those with actual products worth money that people will buy (Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands
uh, not quite 40% of the Germans would like it, but from the dream to reality there is a long way, it will cost a lot to get back to the D Mark, besides both countries are facing elections in their own countries, Holland and Germany, so a clear response on the Greece crisis would alienate voters.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_pritchard/7494718/Has-Germany-just-killed-the-dream-of-a-European-superstate.html
Now Germany is accused of playing “personal” the « Beggar thy neigbours » part by most of the EU countries, within being stiff on the high euro rate and the inherent stabilisation of the prices (high), which are alienating the PIIGS countries exports, also France’s, not only goods to Germany, but our exportations for planes industry, Nuclear energy sites constructions…
as recriminated by christine Lagarde who opposed Germany, that wants to set a common economical policy on taxation and charges for the eurozone, naturally where Germany is the leading role model: Germany transposed 10% of the charges previously paid by its enterprises onto the labour force, blocated its wages, thus lowered the inner market, with low wages Germans can’t buy normal goods anymore, only those that come from low cost labour force countries, so tomatoes, aren’t coming from France, Spain Italy or Greece, but from Marroco… They don’t buy in normal supermarckets anymore but in low prices “Netto”, “Lidl”, “Aldi”…
This isn’t understood as respecting the agreements of the EU on the goods exchanges as they were forecasted at the beginning of the EU association
and Chermany wants to impose a global deflation http://bit.ly/bY451b
I’m not too confident in the state laws coming about now effectively blocking o’care. I’ve heard and read some con-law profs argue that today’s court would uphold the mandate. Also, many people are saying it can’t be repealed despite the arguments against the bill. If amnesty goes through we are done for. There will have to be secession in order to save the Union. I wonder how many state lawmakers are aware of that?
My worry is that the numbers don’t work.
They don’t. In that way, this is the biggest fraud ever. Bernie Madoff, you’re pardoned, go home. AIG, pikers. Citibank, pikers. Fannie and Freddie, pikers. Greenspan, you’re a punk.
OTOH, sometimes you just gotta take that first step. There is no particular sign that the Republicans were going to.
There is tons of time to arrange the numbers and repeal this in pieces. The problem is, it’s pouring gasoline on a fire in any case, how much gas can the fire burn? A lot. More than you’ve got.
Likely scenario – if Republicans can retake power, repeal and adjustments. If Democrats stay in power, deficits, inflation, and another, much larger crash. Which may be coming anyway, frankly. SO maybe a double-secret crash.
an excellent analyse of the dilemn (in french sorry)
http://www.observatoiredeleurope.com/Croissance-anemiee,-Europe-epuisee-la-France-doit-avancer-seule_a1354.html
Watching a fair chunk of the festivities last night, I guess I finally understood why Obama and Pelosi were doing what they were doing.
Sure, there are theories bandied about which, while they might well be true, for some reason have never struck me as a satisfactory answer to the simple question, “Why would they foist this garbage on the American people against their will?” The theories have ranged from the President hates white people to the Speaker is a crypto-communist, etc. etc. etc. Maybe they’re right, but man, I was still confused.
Then it became clear to me last night. They want to be remembered as the Lyndon Johnson or Franklin Delano Roosevelt of their time. Men who, in their minds, stood strong against a tide of hatred and atavism to enact the two greatest government programs in US history: Social Security and Medicare. That is why last night we saw, one after another, Democratic representatives talk about how Democrats have been the party of Social Security and Medicare. (Let’s skip over the fact that both were passed with bipartisan majorities. History is not a prerequisite for rhetoric.) That’s why Nancy Pelosi carried the gavel from the Social Security legislative session to the House. That’s why they pulled out all of the stops, knowing full well that it may cost them their majorities in 2010.
But here’s the punch line: they’re right, but not in the way that they think. Unless dramatically changed, Social Security and Medicare are destined to bankrupt our nation. Together, according to the Federal Reserve, they have an unfunded liability of – steel yourself – $90,000,000,000,000. Ninety trillion dollars. That is $300,000 for every man, woman, and child in the US. And given that the total private assets of US businesses and households is only $250,000 per person, these two programs alone have, quite literally, made the United States technically bankrupt. (In a related story, last week certain corporate bonds priced at lower yields than US Treasuries for the first time in history. Now back to our regularly scheduled broadcast.)
Legacies are often decided in the late innings. FDR and LBJ, to be sure, are seen today as bringers-of-good by those on the Left. But in the next 20 years, when it becomes widely accepted that FDR prolonged the Great Depression and LBJ triggered the metastasis of the Federal Government, and that their two “shining achievements” have put us on the road to penury – well, their legacies will crumble. As well they should.
So BHO will get what he wished for. He will stand alongside FDR and LBJ: three Presidents who created schemes to improve the human condition that failed on account of their hubris, their provinciality, and their historical ignorance.
Mr. President, Madame Speaker: enjoy the party while it lasts. I’m sure that in the final weeks before he was discovered to be a fraud, Bernie Madoff threw some great parties. But now he’s just another cheat who got the crap beaten out of him for crossing the wrong guy in prison. To paraphrase the late Johnnie Cochran: if the numbers don’t add, it’ll turn out bad.
The bad news is that there’s another crisis coming. The good news is that there are many fine people working hard to make sure it won’t go to waste.
L3
God has been the only father I’ve known
Delia, if you have lost faith in men, why do you call God your Father?
Some of us men have lost faith in women.
When I was going through some real bad times twenty years ago, a wonderful lady in my church got me to reading about death, and near death. There’s IANDS. It is wonderful.
Myth is truth.
There is light.
Leo,
Do you really think it’s that bad? In my mind, it is really, really bad when they start voting with an eye on “history”.
A lot of energy driving this vote has been variously ascribed to a sense of “history”, or saving the Obama presidency, or simply having some parcel of accomplishment in hand to display to the hometown folks come next November.
All those reasons are a joke. Obamacare obligates generations to buy palaces, and money is short.
This aspect where the heat of history’s call and whatnot really signals a disconnect. The American people are like first-time homebuyers going into the deal, and they are very suspicious of the terms.
Asshats who smooth all that over, meanwhile pointing to their own place in history due to the deal, should by rights be instantly dismissed as the charlatans that they are.
Why in the hell aren’t they?
The general consensus of the discussion here seems to be that three things are likely to happen, although the order may vary.
1. The enrollment of 15-20 million new citizens through an Amnesty process, with a similar number to follow under relaxed immigration rules including “family reunification.”
2. A severe reaction by the voters, the belief in which is justified both by recent special and gubernatorial elections as well as historical off year patterns, at the midterm elections that cost the Democrats at least control of the House and conceivably the Senate.
3. A series of disasters and humiliations that will befall America including economic trauma and foreign aggression.
The question seems to be as to whether the effects of the first and third events will be used to ensure a series of measures that place political control beyond the reach of the current moderate conservative majority. That theory has been advanced by Subotai Bahadur and Habu on the preceding thread.
An alternative theory occurs to me. Perhaps the Republicans do take control of Congress and then take control of the White House in 2012 but the real bad news does not happen for another 24 months. The effects of an Amnesty and the political turmoil caused by widespread bankruptcies on the part of States during the near term could frustrate efforts to repeal the Democrats social welfare program. It will be argued that wasteful and unproductive as the millions of SEIU members employed under this plan are they still have jobs and it is hard to fire anyone during Hard Times.
Under this perspective it is better for the Democrats to lose massively in Congress now and then either have smaller losses or even hold their position in Congress while giving up the White House in 2012. So come 2012 the Republicans would own the entire government, with the entrenched and hostile alliance of New Americans and the Democratic Base in opposition, when the roof really falls in.
Many have speculated that the events of September 2008 were an arranged Black Swan. If that was to happen again then the Republican Party as a national institution would be destroyed. The whole scenario depends on whether the really bad news hits before or after the election in 2012. It is possible that to long range thinkers, Soros and the Chinese possibly, Democratic Party losses in the midterms are not a bug but a feature.
To be blogged under the title “Long Range Planning.”
Wretchard, you are arguing for not conducting an area bombing campaign against Germany, and the Japanese home islands. That would have lost the War. The RAF was almost destroyed, and the Luftwaffe winning, until Hitler switched to bombing London … in retaliation for Bomber Harris hitting Hamburg. Moreover, the bombing campaign drew the Luftwaffe back into Germany, allowing the Allies air superiority over Normandy during D-Day.
The campaign against Japan was even more critical. It hit Japanese cities, and industries, destroying much of Japan’s warmaking capacity. And let us be honest about what that entailed. It meant the Allies killing hundreds of thousands, of innocent women and children who had nothing to do with either Hitler or Tojo. Incinerating them in fact. Brutally. The Allies made war in part on children and women. Deliberately.
Because it was the moral thing to do.
Sherman argued that your line was in fact, immoral in the end. That it sought to reform war, by making it “palatable.” That the most humane, decent thing to do was win it by every means, as quickly as possible. So that war does not drag on, and on, and on. I recall you having some words on that regard also wrt terrorism. What do you expect, we can obliterate jihdis without killing, quite deliberately, little kids, old women, and the like?
In fact, hitting at a politician’s family to paint the whole family as disreputable, untrustworthy, and in particular, low-class, is VERY EFFECTIVE, particularly with women who were turned off Sarah Palin precisely by targeting her family. It is particularly moral in that, like the use of poison gas on both sides, in future conflicts there may be an informal agreement not to use it again. It is particularly moral in that allowing the political conflict to drag on and on and on erodes the social contract and allows a Stalin, a Napoleon, a Cromwell, or a Wallenstein to appear and kill millions, potentially.
What’s a few hurt feelings of politicians kids? Particularly when the OTHER SIDE OBSERVES NO TRUCE.
I agree with Patton, Sherman, and Machiavelli (and Wretchard too earlier): there is no use in reforming War or politics to make it pretty. Better to get the fight over with and the bloodshed (literal or metaphorical) as short and concentrated as possible. Anything else prolongs misery, bloodshed, and gives rise to tyrants.
Delia — Blame your mother. She chose poorly in men, wanting excitement domination over faithfulness. That she married four men who fathered three of your siblings is a red flag. Your mother wanted bad boys and got them well and good. She could have married and had kids by Joe Average faithful schlub, but wanted a faithful bad boy. A tamed Charlie Sheen.
Don’t expect any sympathy for no child support. Bad boys are bad boys. Don’t expect the rest of men to pick up the tab for women who chose them.
Obamacare is fiscally unsustainable and so will collapse of its own weight taking the US government down with it. There is no baby boom to foot the bill and we are not the only unbombed industrialize nation left on the planet. As it was Roosevelt’s New Deal drug out the Depression for a decade (look at the unemployment numbers in 1940 14.6%). Only the WWII pulled us out of the Depression and that is a hell of a way to fix an economy.
The real story of the events of the past week, the significant thing unreported and uncommented upon is that our political system is broken. In overwhelming numbers the public passionately opposed this legislation and still the legislature passed it on the narrowest of partisan votes. How does that happen in a democracy? The answer is it doesn’t. We have seen our elected representatives turn into oligarchs with many of the most extreme in sinecured seats gerrymandered to ensure lifetime tenancy and there they sit trading the public purse for votes. What faith can a nation have in system such as that and what happens when the people lose faith in the government they have? The bonds of public trust were broken this weekend in a truly Tiger Woodsian scale and there may be no regaining that trust without a sweeping rewrite of the rules.
This current piece of legislation was made possible because the Democrats did not need to work with the GOP in order to do the dirty deed. The bi partisan show only served to succor the dems, and strengthen the president’s hand.
A president who ran on “reforming” something, was elected with a clear majority. Thus, the figures that showed a vast majority of Americans did not agree with either the bill or the methods of passage are ignored in that light. So the lying and gross misrepresentations of the intent and probable economic effect of the bill, is required by democrat lawmakers to salve their Speaker applied presidential abuse to their ego. It also projects a hijab thin veneer of legitimacy to their constituency which in effect says “That is my story and I’m sticking to it”. All fact to the contrary is mere inconvenience.
So now the democrats pretend to legislate and we citizens are supposed to pretend we have decent and affordable health care. To act in any other manner is unpatriotic.
I suppose the fictions of this “health care reform” package make apropos the lies of the Honorable members of the congressional Black Caucus accusing tea party protesters of expletive spittle tossing.
So how do you combat such stuff? What degree of reality is necessary to cause such stuff to cease and desist? That has got to be some strong Kool aid those folks have concocted able to block out sunlight and deny death.
Well, someone else maybe could forgive them…it will not be me. It as it stands it is too great a burden to ask my children to carry and forgive me for not fighting against it and for not at least trying to put an end to such foolishness. There can be no dealing with the devil as every major piece of proposed “reform” legislation of the past 10 years, from NCLB, Immigration, Campaign finance, TARP and now this Government Health Insurance program, attests.
whiskey,
Don’t expect any sympathy for no child support
You ruin your argument by negating your moral credibility. Does a man need to feel any obligation to support a government entitlement program to care for the dysfunctional mother and her brood? Clearly to most here the answer is that he does not. The corollary of that is that the same man should feel some personal obligation to be kind to the child as an individual human being. A man should also feel a strong urge IMHO to punch the neglectful father in the nose.
I am confident that General Curtis Lemay would have picked up a crying child without regard to its race even while ordering the obliteration of that child’s home and family. The horror of the Nazis was not that they fought using the V-1 and the V-2 but that they could meet children and mothers as individuals and even speak softly to them and then kill them. Mohammad Atta did not earn his place in Hell by demolishing a building but by killing the women and children who were on that airplane with him.
Oh, I’m with you Joe Hill.
In my estimation the US Constitution, after decades of assault, is finally a dead letter.
It’s a dead letter.
The federal government of the United States has no legitimacy, after these last moves by the Democrats whose own new leader of the Rules Commitee said, “There are no rules. We make it up as we go along.” And he sits there still, an impeached federal judge no less.
All this means the rule of law no longer applies, if you are paying attention. Laws have been coming down first not even fully read, then not even fully written, and now in defiance of the will of not only the People but the States, too.
I’m hot mad, fighting, hot mad.
Screw this insulting basket of crap, I’m over it.
It’s time to either fight for the USA or go down swinging.
LOTM,
I read a recent account from a westerner in rural China where a newborn girl was tossed into a bucket of slop and drowned there, legs stickng up. It was portrayed as a usual course of affairs. Pigs fought over her body.
No question exists that the common people who did this are guilty of a high crime, and no doubt exists that the ruling public policy has driven them to these desparate measures.
What do you do?
At this point I say burn them all. Every one of them. The parents, the bureaucrats, the policy makers.
It is high time decent people in this world stood up to check the madness.
The China example might be dramatically extrem, … but it’s not. It is in fact a highly typical outcome in a world where both human life is cheap and statist policies exist to steer folks to this outcome.
Stop the socialists now; nothing good ever comes from them.
How bad is it?
By the end of 2010, the US Treasury will have to refinance US$ 2 trillion in short-term debt, plus additional deficit spending for this year, estimated to be around US$ 1.5 trillion (US$ 1.6 trillion today two months after the original article was published). Together, the US Treasury will need to borrow US$ 3.5 trillion (US$ 3.6 according some sources) in just one year.
In 1999, Alan Greenspan and Pablo Guidotti—published a formula in an academic paper. Kept secret for a long time, it is designed to predict with precision when a country’s public debt will lead it to be insolvent. Called the Greenspan-Guidotti rule, it says that to avoid a default, countries should maintain hard currency reserves equal to at least 100 per cent of their short-term foreign debt maturities.
The United States holds 8,133.5 metric tonnes of gold (the world’s largest holder). At November 2009 dollar values, that is about U$ 300 billion. The US strategic petroleum reserve shows a current total position of 725 million barrels. At current dollar prices, that is roughly US$ 58 billion worth of oil. According to the IMF, the US has US$ 136 billion in foreign currency reserves. Altogether, that is some US$ 500 billion in reserves (US$ 455.5 billion according to some sources).
Foreigners hold 44 per cent of US$ two trillion short-term US debt; that is US$ 880 billion. Total domestic savings in the United States are only around US$ 600 billion annually. If the United States needs to sell US$ 3.5 trillion (or US$ 3.6 trillion) in Treasury bills, and all domestic savings combined are put into US Treasury debt, the United States will still fall short by nearly US$ 3 trillion. Where is the rest of the money going to come from? Not from China. Last year, China has in fact proportionately reduced its holdings in US Treasury bills in relation to rest of its reserves and continues the trend.
Reserve Chairman Ben S Bernanke is warning the US Congress about the danger. In a statement before the House Financial Services Committee, he said that the US public debt might no longer be sustainable very soon.
“The bankruptcy of the United States is now certain”.
When? Fall of 2010 to summer of 2011.
What fixed the economy in 1940′s wasn’t the massive spending on the war effort, it was the massive destruction of most of the industrial world save the United States. We were the only game in town, so to speak, for over a decade. The world needed to be rebuilt and we were the only ones with the industrial base to do it. Add in to that there was a tremendous flow of captial, both money and human, into the United States during and after the war. Mix in the surpressed demand from the Depression and War and presto! Economic Boom. The problem is we Americans patted ourselves on the back thinking we had done it all and didn’t acknowledge that circumstances and sheer luck played a greater part of our success. Perhaps if we had been more humble, we would have been wiser and planned better for the day when the Germans and Japanese would make things better than us, and the Chinese cheaper. Buy American sounds great, but what does that get you except second-rate goods at a higher price. There is no fix now for the economy other than Americans returning to the core values that build this nation: hard work, thrift, sacrifice and gritty determination. We have a long steep hill in front of us with a mountain of debt on our shoulders, and there is only one way up. Until the rose-colored glasses collectively come off, we are so screwed.
Whiskey,
What’s a few hurt feelings of politicians kids? Particularly when the OTHER SIDE OBSERVES NO TRUCE.
I agree with Richard. Let me clarify. If there is a dirt on the other side that has a substance, then use it. But don’t make things up. That would backfire and very likely damage you on a personal level.
Delia — Blame your mother. She chose poorly in men, wanting excitement domination over faithfulness. That she married four men who fathered three of your siblings is a red flag. Your mother wanted bad boys and got them well and good. She could have married and had kids by Joe Average faithful schlub, but wanted a faithful bad boy. A tamed Charlie Sheen. [Which resides in a never land]
Don’t expect any sympathy for no child support. Bad boys are bad boys. Don’t expect the rest of men to pick up the tab for women who chose them [bad boys].
100% in agreement.
Once the bankruptcy of US economy is clear, it would be baaaad. It would be like a severe flu and it would spill to Canada pretty immediately due to the Canadian dependence on US economy. But because Canadian banking system is fairly sound, Canucks may have just a milder version. As for the rest of the world, it would catch pneumonia, bare a few EU countries (Germany and maybe France that would have the Canadian type of flu). Japan is still recovering from 90′s and nowhere near the end of it, it won’t be purdy. China — toast. Russia — crisp. The international trade screeching to a halt.
I don’t want to scare ya’. Just be proactive and prepare contingencies. Prepare for the worst and hope for the best.
I think some of ya’ll lost the point I was trying to make and failed making…
WHITE men (bad boys or what have you) failed my WHITE mother.
In other words: WHITE MEN can be just as big of jerks and losers as BLACK/BROWN thugs.
My mother used the welfare system to pick up the slack for her LACK of discretion in men.
Believe me, I have no sympathy either in that regards and I saw firsthand just how stupid and pointless the welfare system is because all it did was encourage my mother to keep whoring around and being a drug-addict.
YO.
Dad was 100% Finnish and a complete LOON btw.
Take that from a ‘suicidal idiot’, Whiskey.
-Out
2×4
http://www.energybulletin.net/node/23259 a comparison between 2 economy collapses: US vs USSR, and the winner isn’t the 1 you expect
Delia, whether they were all white or purple is irrelevant. I simply don’t grok the emphasis on white. Of course there are men and women that have no concept what a real relationship is, and it is not confined to a particular hue of skin. It is a result of many factors, mainly the result of “sexual revolution” in 60′s.
What is relevant is that your mother made some poor choices.
MC,
I read that article a while ago. So I know whom the author designated as a winner.
It is not that simple. If you have a group of people that know only a survival based on absolute necessities, yes they would survive, but they may not be able to cross from survival to thrival. On the other hand, if you have a spoiled population, the chances of a survival of a good portion are slim. But those that survive (the not so spoiled segment) may be able to see beyond survival and when the conditions are right, go the extra mile.
The LA Times and NYT say that the President’s most urgent task is to conduct damage control. They recognize that the President, like a pilot who has pushed the envelope to its limits is, despite the exhilaration, at a place where things can stop flying and start falling. Now Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama must perform the tricky maneuver of coaxing the ship back from the edge.
The problem is that task requires energy. Having expended a great deal of energy to get himself into hole, Obama now needs energy to climb out of it. Even victories have to be paid for. A victory you can’t pay for, ain’t.
Energy in politics is money and there isn’t enough of it to get things on even keel again. He’s sold the same bridge to too many different people; overbooked the same time share apartment to the extent that it’s going to take a little more than fancy explanation to get clean away.
Damage control in this setting means selling the bridge one more time to the next rube. More hope and change to push out there; but it gets harder. The really complicating factor is that in most of history a truly irrecoverable crisis happens when some point of no return is passed. And nobody quite knows where that boundary is. Not Obama, nor the Republican leadership nor the Tea Partiers. That watershed is a little like the divorce line, or the moment when the German General Staff told the Kaiser in 1914 that he couldn’t halt the mobilization of the army because it would ruin everything to wrench it into reverse. The Great War was started by people who didn’t know they were starting the Great War. Historians knew that afterward. The tipping point is imperceptible at the time. It is normally part of a chain that starts innocently enough until it spirals out of control. The “terrible ifs accumulate” until they acquire irresistible force. President Obama is betting he hasn’t already crossed that line. I think nobody knows if he has.
$658 Billion to insure 32 million people. It’s apparent that 0bama doesn’t know math. But, the bond market does.
The dollar will fall and inflation and interest rates will rise. Just like the top of a huge thunder cloud there will up-drafts then down drafts, inflation will peak and turn into destructive deflation.
Look at Germany before the war:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation
But, let us focus on the more sinister problem. That problem is the setting of precedents via the 0bama’s back door dealings at midnight – on a weekend. This corrupt conduct once put in place will continue as “Standard Operating Procedure” for Dem politicians for the foreseeable future. Not only is it unethical but it is politically addicting. Only misery and ruin will come from these unethical political practices.
It’s clear that the faster 0bama is legally removed from office the better. 0bama is the disease and removal from office is the only cure.
I say throw the book at 0bama and his cronies. Attack with any and all legal armaments at every opportunity. Harass and confuse the enemy with any/all political weapons until he is driven from power. Now, is the time to open fire.
Financial conditions will be paramount in arousing the center-right to take control, but the barbarism of Obama’s core supporters will convince many folks like bob that they must be prepared for more than electioneering.
http://cbs3.com/local/Police.Respond.Thousands.2.1579054.html
The LA Times and NYT say that the President’s most urgent task is to conduct damage control. They recognize that the President, like a pilot who has pushed the envelope to its limits is, despite the exhilaration, at a place where things can stop flying and start falling.
Which is exactly why we must re-double our condemnations of ObamaCare and Obamugabe himself.
Polls taken in the last few days by CNN show almost 60% dislike ObamaCare and over 50% now dislike Obamugabe himself.
Don’t let the dust settle. Keep this betrayal front and center where your fellow citizens have to look at it. And if that only pisses them off, the bright side is the issue hasn’t died. I’m flying my flag inverted all week, and then replacing it with a Gadsden flag until November.
Financial conditions will be paramount in arousing the center-right to take control,
This makes sense to me in a kitchen-table-budget-making kind of way, but would one of you financial geniuses explain just when this collapse might occur, give or take 5 years? Because my wife’s investments are doing just fine and she just looks at me like an alien has taken my body when I tell her the chickens will come to roost one day/year/decade.
Plenty of economists and business people are seeing an economy on the rebound. The Stock market is climbing, albeit in a sidewise manner. The signals are mixed.
#61 Tarnsman
Finally, after posting for years about the subject myself, receiving epithets and threats of violence, and not having any backup at all, I see someone else making a post telling the truth about America’s 1954 fetish.
I am alone in the wilderness no longer!
Instead of realizing the truth and doing something about it, both political parties lied and dissembled and let the vast majority of Americans go on believing that the affluence and income stream security of the postwar period was the norm, was a God-given right, and would go on forever. In the end, the rise of a trained global workforce with infrastructure was dealt with – of all the stupid ways – by looking the other way regarding illegal immigration while simultaneously promoting a regulatory and taxation environment (and worker entitlement mentality) which pretty much guaranteed the offshoring of American industry, instead of finding realistic solutions for mitigating the inevitable decrease in standard of living and income stream for the workforce.
Old Salt,
The Automatic Earth blog http://theautomaticearth.blogspot.com/
links to posts by many economic commentators per week. TAE’s “official” position is that deflation will accelerate over the next couple of years after which severe inflation is likely unless political control has shifted to adults = those who run businesses. I would advise anyone who looks at TAE to read a lot there before settling on a personal forecast because much of the soothsaying is contradictory, and some is politically biased.
Regarding the U. S. equity market, this week Nasdq retested from underneath the 2009 uptrend line that it broke earlier; that is a bearish condition. All three major averages are near the top of their large-scale bands. The best that I can see is several months of sideways undulation, maybe SPX 1270 as a top at best. I am not a long-term investor because I believe the 20th century’s spectacular progress was built on a petroleum energy-subsidy that is about played out. Economic activity is constrained by energy availability/cost, which will not easily return to where it was a decade ago. The problem is where to put conservative money if U. S. bonds are not trustworthy.
There’s a scene in Gaslight (1944) where Charles Boyer, who plays the villain Sergius Bauer, tries to convince Ingrid Bergman, the woman he’s tried to drive over the edge of madness, to forget about the diamonds he’s been trying to steal for so long and to simply remember the sunlit days in Italy when they were so happy together. That attempt at damage control failed because the Boyer character left it too late. The tipping point had come and gone. The President might bring up old memories again. He will recall with all the considerable power of his rhetoric the sunlit days as he approaches the “mad” conservatives and urges them to come back into the fold. ‘Get over it and cut me loose. Move on.’ The Left always says this after pulling a fast one. But one day the worm turns. It always does. What did the Bergman character say to Bluebeard in Gaslight?
#75 ridgerunner — Thanks for the info (btw, Old Salt and I are different commenters).
The problem “our side” has is making a convincing argument — to the average American — that Obamanomics spells doom.
Right now, they have an uneasy feeling, like an audience watching a magician endangering his showgirl sidekick, but they’ve seen similar stuff in their lifetimes, and it’s always ended well.
I’m haunted by the comment Robert E. Lee made after the war when a visitor asked him why he’d not advised surrender earlier than Appomattox, since he’d said he knew the war was lost by the Fall of 1864. “No. The people had to learn it for themselves.”
Some of you are confusing infant mortality rates with abortion which is a shame. They are two different statistics with different causes.
The problem is one of dollars, where will Obama get them?
We have massive tax increases in this bill, but it won’t be enough.
A value added tax is a near certainty, but it won’t be enough.
Those pesky private retirement accounts look mighty tempting,and I’d venture that they are already gone, but they won’t be enough.
We just have to get rid of “private property”, “for the children”.
Salt Lick,
The viewpoint that economic growth will not be there without cheap energy is supported by the chart in this link. Keynesian pump priming can’t work when the oil flow is weak.
http://economicedge.blogspot.com/2010/03/most-important-chart-of-century.html
AWM,
My wife and I made large withdrawals from our IRA’s last year and this year because of the possibility of confiscation into Treasury bonds and because taxes will be higher later.
74. no mo uro: “I am alone in the wilderness no longer!”
You and #61 Tarnsman are so right. The wilderness is going to get very crowded very soon.
#80 ridgerunner — Thanks again, but I’m not disputing your viewpoint; I agree with it. In fact, I think the one thing that could rescue us is, as wretchard suggested, a new development on the energy front, like the practical application of cold fusion.
Cheers,
Wretchard # 22
The Left has a standard tactic. They keep up a drumbeat. When conservatives or people who lean that way are in power they keep up a drumbeat about alleged crimes and failures. Take a look at the absurd list of grievances that the Left used to attack Pres G.W. Bush. The 30 year old DWI. The National Guard Memos. The 7 U.S. attorney firings. Valerie Plame. Iran’s Getting The Bomb. The Dubai Ports Deal. The Unfunded Medicare Drug Benefit. And of course, the street theater favorite, “Bush Lied Thousands Died.” Compare these to the real crimes of the Clinton Admin, which featured a real “Clinton Lied, People Died” in our intervention in Kosovo. No one has ever found those mass graves holding a hundred thousand people we were assured were in Kosovo; in fact they have not found any mass graves there at all.
Now compare the accusations against the Bush Admin against the Obama Admin’s short reign of terror. Looks pretty silly doesn’t it?
The fact is that the Left keeps up a drumbeat, even when they are in power. Except that the sound is not the hollow one that drums make but instead the thundering thuds of principles being tossed under the bus and over the cliff.
We don’t have to dig up records on parking tickets accumulated for a guy’s kid and unpaid water bills attributed to his second cousin. There are plenty of real crimes and failures to bring out. We don’t need a D-9 or even a backhoe; a cheap rake or even a broom will gather the stuff quite nicely.
And we are fortunate to have people like Wretchard and his merry band who can not only rake up the dry leaves of failed Left schemes and reveal the mess underneath but also put all this muck into context. And there are at least few in the media who will take note.
Oh, and my apologies to “two by four” for not seeing his #60 where he answers my questions with precision.
On the other hand, I’m anticipating that this summer Obama will attempt to “juice” the economy with more imaginary money and create jobs, jobs, jobs, even though it let’s loose the beast of inflation. It’s his only hope of a happy end to 2010.
50. Leo Linbeck III:
This post gets the history/legacy/narrative right. It also shows that that particular history/legacy/narrative is at an end–so far as it goes.
The end of the new deal is not big news.
Everyone knows it. I have an uncle up in the mountains of North Carolina who was a steel worker in the TVA projects in Tennessee and taught for years in the public school system in the mountains around Asheville. His father was a presbyterian minister. He is an atheist. He and his son my cousin–both say the same thing.
The new deal is dead. The systems that make the old man’s retirement comfortable are broken. They won’t be in place for the son.
53. Lifeofthemind:
Your post at 53 has the kind of symmetries that I like. And as well, the ring of truth. So at this exact moment in time — that post deals as the current political model: that is, crest to trough, crest to trough– of the stuff set in motion by the black swan.
Except that if you look at Leo’s post at 50–it would seem that the black swan was no black swan at all.
Understand that the beginnings of this narrative coincided and was inspired and maybe a little directed by the early triumphs of communism.
As well, the ends of this new deal narrative comes a bit after communism’s first collapse in the old soviet union.
All in all, its time to set a new pattern.
81. Prologue:
The wilderness is going to get very crowded very soon.
I’ve been there for a long time. I had this image of a huge balloon filled with the bullion and silver from WWII tin-can, fighter, bomber and tank sales, and post-war sales of every American product to the ruined cities of Europe and the Far East.
The balloon has been leaking for years and is almost deflated. OUR currency may be soon used for nether region cleanliness…
They have learned from us, and they were equipped with the newest, most productive machines post-war, and had lower labor costs. We were living in la-la land, on borrowed time until they caught up, and wanted their own lives to be as luxurious as ours have been.
The poorest of the poor in the US have so much more than many in the rest of the world. And yet, complaints are made. That is human nature.
The im-balance of trade was the slow leak in the balloon, and is unsustainable.
tomw
Don’t expect any sympathy for no child support. Bad boys are bad boys. Don’t expect the rest of men to pick up the tab for women who chose them.
Bad boys aren’t just bad boys. They cause social damage to our entire society by how they act. It doesn’t matter kind of economy we have; we all pick up the tab one way or another, if only because we are forced to put up with the existence of bad boys around us.
The real problem we have in America is a slave owner mentality. Slave owners often lacked self-control. Too many people, including descendants of slaves, admire the slave owners and want to become just like them. Hence, the pimp.
If men are absolved of their moral responsibility for pregnancy, men ought to be stripped of the right to vote. Yes, you heard me right. If a man isn’t man enough to keep his penis in his pocket, he should not have any say in running the affairs of our country.
When a woman is a slut, she gets pregnant. When a man is a slut, he will often find some way to push his squeeze to murder his child so he won’t be expected to pay child support. Of course women need to take moral responsibility for the men they choose to copulate with. She needs to know what kind of man she admires so she will know which man to reward with her favors. A man who would abandon her is not worthy of admiration.
The difference between boys and men is self-control. If a man won’t pay for the support for his child, he should be stripped of the right to vote – end of subject. If men want the right to be bad boys, men must be willing to socialize child support so women can raise their children without worrying about where their next paycheck is coming from.
Whenever men decide they can’t be relied upon to take care of the children they father, the community is forced to make a decision among monetary support for mothers, some form of orphanage, letting children starve, or murdering children. Taking a “boys will be boys” attitude ensures one generation after another of starving children. They may be starved of food. They may be starved of shelter. They may be starved of attention. They may be starved of love. Most importantly, they are starving.
Do we really want to burn down the public schools? Do we really want to burn down California’s state colleges and universities? Think about what you are saying! Public schools, for better or worse, function as publicly funded day care (or prisons) for children, and their ability to get any teaching done is directly dependent upon how emotionally deprived the children are.
What “bad boys” do has a social cost for everybody. Those who expect the entire social cost to be borne by women ought to expect the entire social responsibility to also be borne by women. And that would effectively mean denying men the right to vote.
Wretchard,
The Democrats in general have been out to wreck America for a generation now. They don’t care what else happens as long as they get the power doing it. That is what Obamacare is about.
The Democrats — AKA the Hard Left — has intentionally obstructed all significant reform of the American medical system for the past 15 years for the express purpose of making single-payer the only alternative.
ObamaCare is intentionally crafted to destroy the present medical system.
The Democrats are doing this intentionally so they can get single-payer through eventually.
See Karl Denninger’s market ticker blog. Mr. Denniger explains the mechanism whereby the Senate bill just enacted will destroy the existing medical system, and he too says this is intentional:
http://market-ticker.org/archives/2109-Health-Care-Arbitrage-Obama-And-The-Dems.html
“The intention of The Democrats (and liberals generally) in this legislation is clear and impossible to hide – they intend to completely destroy private health care in favor of a fully-government-run single-payer system. The efficient market guarantees this outcome given the law they passed, and they know it.”
ObamaCare will kill off private insurance in about 3-4 years. It was designed too.
ObamaCare also front-loads its revenue-generating mechanisms to disguise how much it really costs, so it will suck more more money from the American economy while not returning it for a while.
AKA — “Taxation without medication!”
This is exactly how the onset of Social Security, which was similarly front-loaded, prolonged the Great Depression by two years. (That and FDR absolutely poisoned the business climate…which Obama has also done.)
The inherent results of a massive tax increase, at what would otherwise be the tail end of a recession, is a larger, much deeper, much longer, recession sized disaster.
What is worse is that the healthcare tax increases will disproportionately hit capital formation, thus we’re looking at a full-bore economic depression.
The federal government will, by the time ObamaCare kills off private health insurance, have used up all the tricks and gimmicks available to it just to maintain existing government operations during a full-bore economic depression.
California shows you can only go so far with that.
That’s when the Federal money printing presses will roar, during 10-12% inflation plus 15-18% unemployment, for normal government operations.
The money for ObamaCare just won’t be there at that point.
That is only the beginning.
The USA’s debt lost it’s Moody’s AAA credit rating the day Obamacare passed in the House.
The increased federal interest obligations resulting from that change are going to be larger than the entire 2005 Federal income tax revenure stream inside of three years.
Just a couple of general observations late in the thread:
1: Congress has ignored the rules made in the very document that grants them authority. Therefore, they have lost legitimacy. We are living on Mars.
2: Yahweh ordered the Isrealites to kill every man, woman and child living in Canaan. Why, because they were throwing their children into the sacrificial fire. The Yahudim did not obey. The result: The essence of Hosea’s story is that Yahweh finally withdrew his protection from his chosen flock. They broke their covanent agreement, so he ended the relationship. Thus began the tragic history of the Jew. This story should resonate with Americans, people who have been sacrificing their children on the altar of convenience and affluence since the Roe v Wade decision.
Today’s crisis is largely the result of the final exhaustion of those twin booms. Where FDR found himself at the beginning, Obama finds himself at the end.
Yes, but we have some new cancers. A financial industry that delights in burning money with fantastic risks. A managerial culture that pays the execs and not the workers. A globalized economy the outsources nearly all jobs and production. A political system that has vomited up an insane clutch of democrats and an impotent band of republicans. An educational system that teaches kids not to try and not to care. No border control, so the poor can come and loot whatever is left. A failure of nerve, so we treat our enemies with an excess of gentility (which is still better then Europe, which is senile and comatose).
What we have on the positive side, is sufficient technology to build all the material goods, grow all the food, that we need, with just a fraction of our resources. So we are free to indulge all of the above idiocies. Except one: health care. There is an infinite demand for health care, you can always spend millions on every hopeless case, to buy a few more days of mostly miserable existence.
And those of our enemies who can be surfeited with material goods as we can, seem happy to be so. Is China our enemy? They have twice our population within their own borders, still to bring into modernity. Or maybe three times, who’s counting? And huge battles with pollution, not to mention the Gobi Desert, to deal with.
Only the further malignancy of Islam remains a threat, as they are not only not surfeited with material goods (being lead by the Saudis with trillions in disposable cash), but they apparently hate the goods and their production, and would tear it all down. That’s only a small element of their society, but it attacks a world that has forgotten how to defend. Rust never sleeps.
FDR had it easy, the cancers had not yet formed, other than the auto-immune disaster that is socialism. Of course FDR didn’t fix anything, the war fixed things, apparently, and to this day nobody really knows exactly how or why. Perhaps, as wretchard suggest, at the end he simply rode the trends out of trouble. In which case maybe what Obambus is doing is also epiphenomenal, and we are simply riding the trend – down, to the New Dark Ages, and all we can do is assume the position before we arrive at the bottom.
So there’s a little doom and gloom for your morning coffee!
Charles,
I see no conflict between L3‘s narrative and mine. He describes the expectations of the foot soldiers, the wannabe LBJs or Ickes of the new millennium. My effort was to square the circle between that desire and the more apocalyptic vision put forth by Habu and others.
No event including any which threatens the bankruptcy of the United States can be explained simply as the result of manipulations by powerful interests. Paranoia is a dead end because the evil genius of a virtual enemy will always be one step ahead of any effort to unravel their plans. Similarly ‘Great Man’ theories of History neglect the real interests and motives of the people who do the work at the behest of the leader in the fancy suit. As an aside a successful ‘Great Man’ such as Napoleon knew better than to fall for his own hype and always focused on the dreams of the soldiers who did the bleeding for him.
The strict reliance on Occam’s razor to ascribe to a complex political movement only the interests and motives of the average member also can miss important signals. In the case of the adherents to the legacy of the Vanguard Left their own myths trace back, like a criminal gang that can trace its lineage back to Quantrill’s Raiders, through the agents of the Third International and the Paris Commune to the members of the Committee of Public Safety in 1792. Their belief in the power of a small organized conspiracy to shape history matters.
Finally there is a third potential agency at work that could be acting in a manner that both resonates with the ideological constructs of the foot soldiers of the Democratic Party and could use those who see themselves as a guiding conspiracy for purposes external to those of either the many nostalgic for the New Deal or the few aspiring to the roles of Lenin or Svengali. Foreign powers have interests of their own. Not just Putin or Hu Jintao or whoever is this year’s blue suit in Moscow or gray suit in Beijing but their nations are at work.
The world is a complex place. It is a series of interlocking three body problems hurtling through time. We have interests groups and manipulating individuals or small would be conspiracies that operate according to visions or templates rooted in time and dispersed across space. The exist in every society and the more open and complex the society then the more such associations interact. They exist within the self defined boundaries of each nation and are also subject to interference by outside agents, occasionally hostile.
Over time just as the market provides information to produce a Pareto Optimum distribution of goods and services we hope that real information will be processed to support the increased influence of those movements and individuals who most effectively respond to reality. Given the ability of outside agents to distort the domestic political market and the persistence of attachment to historically failed ideological models that hope that the domestic political market will function to support effective responses to real conditions may be misplaced.
We need to conduct effective politics by crafting messages that use our own historical legacy to support a narrative that is as powerful as that of the Left. The fact that it also produces results that are proven over time to be more effective is helpful but not sufficient in achieving victory in the political arena. While we do that to win the allegiance of the voters from those seeking to relive the New Deal we also must expose the efforts of small conspiratorial groups to manipulate the broader movements and provoke crises and also be aware that outside agents may seek to crash the system for their own ends.
There are no easy answers to these problems except the one simple and old one, there is work to do.
Alexis,
Very good post on male responsibility.
To be blogged under the title “Three Body Problems.”
Regrettably, I have no time to read the rest of this thread right now, but I wanted to react to Wretchard’s marvelous comment @ 22.
Rene Gerard’s thinking has something to add here. Human sacrifice is the default religion of mankind, how men were kept from chewing each other up and encouraged to coalesce around some myth that said that adversity would be eliminated or overcome if the sacrificial victim was destroyed.
The Passion is, among many other things, the story of how we have moved beyond that means of controlling our violent impulses. It demythologized such sacrifices once and for all and led us to a more advanced level of awareness of how to live peacefully together.
That is the foundation around which the West, and this country in particular, has grown up. But we are far from immune to the use of scapegoating as a way of promoting group cohesiveness and motivational morale, let alone the residual capacity to lose ourselves in the rage of primitive mob violence.
Right now, such primitive tendencies are much more characteristic of the left than the right for obvious reasons, the most significant being faith in the absolute. The relativism of the left has led it into deeper and deeper depravity: the scapegoating of Bush most obviously, and the “sacrifice” of the unborn at the alter of their self-interest most profoundly.
We have to be better than that if we are to avoid the escalations of what Gerard labels mimetic violence: the unconscious impulse to retaliate and the consequent wholesale destructiveness that inevitably ensues.
Delia, I agree that men should be held responsible to financially support, along with the biological mother, all their biological children. That said, the larger issue here is when will women be held responsible for their actions?
Whiskey’s point of too many women pursuing endlessly bad boys or financial gain in their relationships rings all too true. The ‘women’s movement” released women from the bondage of shame and social humiliation to pursue their destructive sexual instincts without nary a finger of blame pointed their way. The cumulative effect of this pursuit has been the near total degradation of our social fabric and the promotion of the authoritarian Nanny State.
Sure, many women lead moral lives in spite of all the temptations our culture throws at them, and many of Whiskey’s points are gross over generalizations. Still, the core of his argument has great validity; the collective behavior of women in our society needs to change radically or our society, as we know it will cease to exist.
LOTM
A friend of mine in NYC just mentioned that he read through the book of Romans last night.I just posted back to him that you can’t really get much out of Romans in a nights reading.
You might find this helpful as well.
This is what I write:
I don’t think you’ll get it [Romans] in a reading. The reason is that Romans is also like a legal argument or one of Ezra Pounds cantos. A legal argument refers back to a zillion different laws. Pound’s cantos refer back to a whole bunch of poetry from romantic to Renaissance to medieval to classical Greek. Romans refers back to stuff all over the old testament–and how these logically relate to Jesus. Then you have these whole chapters that begin with “Therefor”. You have to answer the question “What is Therefor there for”.
It ain’t easy. I have read it twice in the last 15 years but both times in bible study with a bunch of guys. Because you have to kick the hard stuff back and forth–in just the same way as in movies you’ll see young legal eagles kicking the legal stuff back and forth. Both Romans bible studies– I’ve taken took five or six months. But the effect is amazing. You can see hovering in the back ground the mind of 1 st century Romans–because Paul is a roman citizen as well as pharisee(meaning the bible was not just the Pentateuch but also the later chapters and also there was such a thing as the resurrection of the dead as shown by Elijah)… Jew–within only 10 years or so of the destruction of Jerusalem. Stuff Paul would have known was a likely scenario–because he would have understood the circumstances that led to the destruction of the first temple. imho that’s partly why the tension is so enormous in Romans–
There is something else that a disciplined reading of Romans accomplishes. …
It re formats your brains. Maybe the way to say it is that reading Romans in a disciplined way–that is working through Paul’s logical arguments — cleans out the registry errors in your mind. That is your mind over time accumulates a lot emotional pictorial connections –that create a logic about things that just doesn’t bear any resemblance to reality.
Working through the logic of Romans cleans out those errors.
Reflecting on the medical care of my life this AM. As a child in the 1950′s in western New York, my mom worked for a general practitioner (weren’t they all then?), a kindly old gent who made house calls, did hernia surgery on me and took my tonsils out. When he retired she worked eventually for another g.p. who was her doctor until she died. My dad came down with industrial related cancer and although he eventually died of it before the age of 50, he received world class care at Roswell Park Cancer Hospital in Buffalo.
When we were married, my kids were mostly born using nurse midwives under our HMO plan which was reasonably priced and not bureaucratic. In Alabama, I had no insurance working in the woodworking industry and got in the VA system which I still use as I’m self employed. It has been okay mostly except now the bureaucracy is stifling here in Tucson.
While, by the grace of God, all the family is healthy, now we look to a future of dealing with petty bureaucrat or ideologue gatekeepers to get a dog’s breakfast of rationed care in our post developed nation with the cupboard bare. I don’t think we even begin to grasp what a nightmare this is going to be.
I would say that the core problem for humans is that of making the correct moral choice. If the enemy engages in acts of brutality and barbarism in pursuit of his goals must we respond in kind to stop him? And if we do are we able to somehow remain untainted by the very evil we are striving to defeat? By employing methods we profess to abhor when the enemy uses them are we making ourselves, to some extent, into the very enemy we are striving to defeat? I certainly have no answer to these questions and I doubt very much that any man does. In a conflict where sheer survival is thought to be at stake methodology has a pronounced tendency to become the servant of perceived necessity. All I know for sure is that we will have to answer for our decisions sooner or later and that while judgement may be delayed consequences are not (though it may take quite some time for those living through these to realize what they are or to tie them to the actions that generated them).
Values such as thrift, hard work and determination are not values at all. They are actions resulting from values (and by “values” is meant beliefs so deep and ingrained as to be considered reality). Leftists work hard and are determined and they practice thrift when it comes to expenses they think of as superflous or profligate. The beliefs that built this nation are that there are basic rights that come from a power higher than man and no government should work to suppress these. Liberty granted by God is the key. Once subtract the higher power from this formulation and law will become arbitrary and capricious and the ambitions of men will take precedence over “values” which become nothing more than a justification for oppression.
Obambus be speaking, prior to Signing The Bill.
It is argued that the Federal Government will spend the majority of the Stimulus money this summer and fall to prop up the economy until the elections. I don’t think that this is going to work, at least in so far as public works projects are concerned. The advertisements for bidding upon Federal and State projects continue at a low level. It just takes too long for the projects to get from the design stage and the environmental impact report stage, to the bid stage, then to the contract award stage, then to the actual construction process which is the first point at which a large amount of wages, equipment and material are paid. If it was going to happen, we would already be seeing the contract awards and we are not even seeing the advertisements for bids.
The government can hand out money directly to favored classes but they can’t even hire enough additional government employees in the short run to make much impact on the employment figures. Yes, they can create temporary positions, but they can’t process the civil service paperwork fast enough to get things moving by this Fall. Unless the whole process is changed by executive order: action by Congress still would not be fast enough. Feds can send money to the States quickly, but many of the States have the same problems with moving quickly.
I think we are looking at stagnant employment and economic numbers through the end of the year. Just sayin’.
One more thing. The calculus needs to include the impact of this “victory” on Barry’s narcissism.
He has shown himself, since his Philadelphia speech, to be quite mad. In the Hitler/Stalin sense. This will feed his megalomania and convince him that he is correct that he is destined to do whatever it is he thinks he’s doing. And he seems to be surrounded by enough “mirrors”, including the rubes in congress, to maintain and increase his inflated self-value.
What we will get now, if I’m correct, is a more confident, forceful, delusional and destructive Obama. So I think the question going forward is just how far he will get and how damaging the outcome before he suicides in a bunker, dies in his sleep, or finds some other chute to the basement.
That’s assuming he doesn’t go blind for 3 days on his way to Damascus.
#84 Salt Lick:
Hear hear. Although cold fusion, perhaps not. There are two approaches to hot fusion (focus and Polywell) that might work and also avoid the production of copious neutrons – a problem for tokamak fusion even if it can ever be made to work. There are also various other approaches that have not been tried.
However, focus and Polywell also hold out the hope of making even bigger changes – because either might work in small units (conceivably refrigerator-sized or smaller). Imagine this way of cutting global Islamic terrorism off at the knees, and also contributing to decentralisation of power; sell at cost fusion power units (using aneutronic P/B11 fusion) to anyone who wants one, world-wide.
Wouldn’t you like to have a fridge-sized box in your house, costing a one-off price of $5,000 or so, that would make you free of the power and/or gas and heating oil companies forever?
NO HONEYMOON FOR OBAMACARE
Those two factors together made Roosevelt’s entitlements appear to be sustainable. Even Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society 20 years later could still count on riding those two trends. Today’s crisis is largely the result of the final exhaustion of those twin booms. Where FDR found himself at the beginning, Obama finds himself at the end.
Excellent observation. One of the things that has allowed giant social programs to embed themselves solidly into the American fabric is the long honeymoon periods afforded by prosperity. The health care bill is not likely to have much, if any, honeymoon, since we are in a time of desperate financial straights.
The European social democracies have enjoyed a long double-dip honeymoon thanks to two factors: 1) the solid (not yet social) democracies that grew out of the Marshall Plan which laid the groundwork for the kind of prosperity that Europeans took to mean they could indulge themselves with massive social programs. 2) the American economic engine and the massive military it could afford us provided Europe with a second honeymoon period for their social experiments.
All these “wondrous” progressive initiatives were predicated on an American exceptionalism that was almost never acknowleged that is now being killed off. When we are no longer exceptional, there will be no shelter from the coming economic storms.
St. Paul was a confused fellow, but his paen to love is truly beautiful–
38 For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons,[a] neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, 39 neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Living in the bluest of environments, I am surprised to see and hear little celebration regarding the Obama victory. The metro fish wrap is celebrating, but there’s no buzz on the street.
I keep my comments regarding Obamacare strictly financial. How do you pay for it? Press this question button a few times and even the most loyal Obamabot soon exhibits a glimmer of recognition. But the Obamabots still hope that “it’s elephants all the way down.” The Obama scheme rests on rich people, who stand on rich people, who stand on rich people. It’s rich people all the way down.
People want their kids to succeed. But people are getting the idea that the country is eating the seed corn that might have provided the harvest for future years.
One time an African pastor was preaching in my church, on Psalm 126:
5 Those who sow in tears
will reap with songs of joy.
6 He who goes out weeping,
carrying seed to sow,
will return with songs of joy,
carrying sheaves with him.
Why, he asked, are the sowers weeping? Shouldn’t they be happy in the springtime, rejoicing in the act of planting?
Modern people such as Americans, he said, cannot understand this weeping. At the end of the dry season, he said, the village people have no food left. They have only their seed grain. The children are hungry, the parents are weeping for the hunger of their children. The parents could feed the children the seed grain, but then the community would starve and die. So the parents weep as they sow, for their children, even as they know that they will rejoice, finally, in the harvest.
The socialists hate the rich. The socialists envy the rich, and especially they envy the desires of the rich. This mimetic rivalry is at the foundation of what the Democrats are doing. Socialists desire the destruction of their rivals, and the destruction ultimately requires the destruction of capital and the rules governing capital. Alcee Hastings understands this. Detroit understands this. You can’t eat envy, but apparently it’s more desirable than food, at least as long as you can still squeeze some food from the rich.
A lot of parents have been saving seed to plant for their children, hoping to send them to college or launch them in some way. I see a lot of anxiety now, as if the parents know that someone sold them blighted seed. Or the parents bought the seed from the companty store, and they owe the store all the proceeds of the harvest.
Expect a plunging birth rate:
http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1423/home-for-the-holidays-boomeranged-parents
Relative to Obamacare and the litany of victim anecdotes that was the Democrat “argument” for this legislation and indeed their whole legilative agenda see this clip of the Rogers and Hammerstein “Oklahoma”…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpNeHMlJiD4
The optimism, “can do” attitude and simple embrace of the bedrock values of the midwest seem at polar opposite of what this legislation expects of our country… everyman a victim to be bailed out by the gov’t.
#3 abouve said it all… I get oh so tired of the unisured victim whose very LIFE is saved by expensive medical skill and technology and then whines “I shouldn’t have to pay for it!” …they want to keep all their toys afforded by not paying for insurance or the Dr.
rwe@83: And there are at least few in the media who will take note.
Don’t count on it. Not only are the more vocal critics on Fox being slowly marginalized (blame Beck), but reportorial content, is dominated by three elements – process, process, and process. Health care was classic. Throughout 12 months of daily coverage, a few facts managed to escape before the Congressional doors slammed shut, but even that was primarily because internet reporters/bloggers took the time to read the legislation. (Guess which reporter said on air that it wasn’t his job to read the bill? That would be Lawrence O’Donnell. Guess which reporter from which paper said on air that the details weren’t as important as the general concept? That would be a media bimbette – Lisa Meyers move over – whose name I can’t recall from the NY Post making a guest appearance on Brett Baier.) What we got instead was a never-ending litany of the chess moves, like watching a new Olympic event complete with sotto voce voice-over. The reporting should have been filed by the sports staff if it was going to be treated like an athletic event.
On the subject of this post, “what does (the) man want?” Heilemann and Helperin write that Obama wants a place in history. I don’t have a problem with that (I am skeptical of the active seekers of which Bill Clinton and Obama are twins), but the Obama administration – the man and his advisers – are using the old playbook and that’s a problem. Of course, the Republicans didn’t even have a playbook towards the end.
Which brings me to a prior point – the political class requires overhaul if the historical trajectory leading from revolution to democracy to entrenched tyranny is to be disrupted; but the media – broadcast more than print but both are carrying water – sustains the old ideological divides with their playbook reporting of Congressional Gladiators. Your tax dollars at work.
Both sides would do well to remember the indignities of history.
Mark, #103, re: “plunging birth rate”: The article you linked doesn’t cover the half of it. If we are indeed on the cusp of a new Dark Age in the West, as many other commentators here have argued – and I have no cause to dispute them – that implies that not only is the next generation already screwed, but so is at least the generation or two after that. How many young people are going to want to have kids at all if, by all appearances those children are going to be much worse off than they are anyway? One subset of American health care should thrive under Obamacare at least: the contraceptive industry.
(And before we start talking deferred gratification, it’s one thing to sacrifice for your children, but something else altogether to sacrifice so that they can sacrifice, and their children can sacrifice, etc. so that maybe your great-great-great-great-grandchildren, who are so far off in the future as to be little more than an abstraction to most folks, will be better off than you are. The collapse of Communism suggests that deferred-gratification regimes just don’t have quite that long a shelf life before people start getting fed up with them – and in any case, there’s just too much else that can go wrong in the intervening generations for it even to be reliable.)
Alexis – great post on male responsiblity. Makes me think of a man I know here, a black guy who does tree cutting work for me when I need it – he works cheap and fast and is usually available. Charming guy, fun to talk to, it’s easy to see why people (women) like him even though he’s never had two nickles to rub together ever in his life. (he’s one of those who instantly spends every cent he has as soon as it hits his pocket, no matter how much or how little)
Anyway, he laughs about how he has 9 kids with 9 different women. 1 of them he kind of keeps up with. No one even bothers trying to hit him with child support because he’s never had a steady job in his life – just odds and ends, here and there, nothing but cash. The jokes on us – we’re the ones who paid to raise all those kids, and we’re the ones who will pay to keep them in jail if they go bad because they grew up without any male figure in their lives.
And now the oldest boys are following their dad’s bad example and doing more of the same. Thanks a lot.
And for Mark, who said expect a plunging birthrate, the final indignity -the plunging birthrate only happens for those who are responsible. The descendants of this guy, who couldn’t care less about any consequences, are going to inherit the earth. Or at least our corner of it.
Alexis you say “If a man isn’t man enough to keep his penis in his pocket, he should not have any say in running the affairs of our country.” You seem to think that women have no control over getting pregnant and thus mentally incompetent so none of them should be able to vote.
Not sure what color the sky is in your world but let me clue you in on a few things if a woman does not want a child she has more then a couple options, such as keeping her legs together, using birth control, getting a abortions, putting the kid up for adoptions, and in many states now just leaving the kid with any police or fire station. In most cases the desires of the father are irrelevant.
While I am sure you will continue your ‘all the fault of men’ nonsense the fact is there would not be these “bad boys” if women didn’t want them.
That’s why Nancy Pelosi carried the gavel from the Social Security legislative session to the House.
The unintended irony of Pelosi holding that huge hammer (I refuse to call something that big a gavel) was hilarious to me. It symbolized the brute force methods she used to get this abomination passed, as well as the contempt she has for the American people.
Delia
Men filed 16.4% of sexual harassment claims in 2009, up from 15.4% in 2006. Have any theories why? http://on.wsj.com/czKTGh re-equilibrium has started
Don Rodrigo
you forget that our democracies worked well before WW2 too, the problems of rebuilding an economy without infrastructures (bombed) were evident, if one didn’t want chaos and civil wars, or that communism became the rule
I blame it all on the French. They were the first ones to have mistresses, and drink wine.
“In most cases the desires of the father are irrelevant.”
Years and years ago the wife got pregnant. I wanted the child. She did not. “It isn’t the right time.” “When will it ever be the right time?” She had a friend take her to the clinic and paid for it from her money (she was working at the time). Even though she did bless me with a wonderful son (now 20) later on, I have never ever forgiven her, nor will I ever. I will carry the thought of the child that never was to the grave. It was that moment that I stopped loving my wife as if she were my life. She became just my partner, my companion. Not the center of my life. She destroyed more than just an innocent life. And that was her decision and hers alone.
In case you haven’t met any of us, Delia, there are plenty of men that want to be fathers in every sense of the word. We are the ones that make this country work, the ones that everyone turns to when the chips are down and the ones left holding the bag went things go to sh*t. We don’t like the last part one bit, but we suck it up because that is what fathers do. And the greatest title for us is that of “Dad”.
‘Men filed 16.4% of sexual harassment claims in 2009, up from 15.4% in 2006. Have any theories why? http://on.wsj.com/czKTGh re-equilibrium has started.’
The result of the demise of “don’t ask, don’t tell” in the workplace. FTA, many of those increasing claims are male on male.
Vivictus wrote: “While I am sure you will continue your ‘all the fault of men’ nonsense the fact is there would not be these “bad boys” if women didn’t want them.”
Not true.
One of the greatest problems of the Islamic world is that it consists of a huge number of “bad boys” that women don’t want. Nothing left for them to do but find a target and go blow themselves up next to it.
It’s far healthier for a society to find a way not to create men like that. And the cure starts with Fathers. Mothers are important, but a present and involved Father is what turns the boy into the man.
Tarnsman 114,
I am so sorry that you experienced that. You’ve been living a life of awful pain and quiet dignity ever since, and I pray that the good Lord will comfort you now and reward you in the life to come.
It seems like people are opening up today on this blog. Maybe the grief of Obamacare passing is just too much to bear, and we all need to do a little reaching out. It strikes me that many of us “conservatives” are walking around with a some kind of secret pain. Sure, we like to express ourselves in learned and abstract terms (political theories, historical anecdotes, religious conviction, philosophy, psychological insights) as if our conservatism was simply the result of a long and studious reflection; but more often than not conservatism results from a close encounter with genuine evil. It’s hard to have a keen appreciation of family unless one has suffered a serious betrayal. It’s hard to know the value of work and sacrifice until one has been homeless, or heard his own child crying from hunger. It’s hard to know the fragility of life unless one has been beaten within an inch of losing it. The kind of wisdom that really counts doesn’t come cheap.
Yes, I have my own horror stories. And no, I’m not quite ready to spill. I’m working on it.
When the Lord says “blessed are they who mourn” he can only mean this: that the capacity for heroic virtue is born only in those conditions that seem intolerable, those conditions that by rights nobody should be asked to bear. The scandal of the cross redeems the world, and Good Friday must precede Easter Sunday. Before all is consummated, there is always “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”
By branding us with the stigmata of his terrible love, the Lord has raised up in us a people worthy of this age, a people ready to stand and fight the horror that threatens us from all sides. We must be true and strong, for the hour is coming when all truth will out. The conflict is fast approaching and is now inevitable. The day of the Lord is nigh, and a very different kind of history we will make.
Matt Beck 13: Wonderful comment!
Wretchard wrote:
Having expended a great deal of energy to get himself into hole, Obama now needs energy to climb out of it
Has anyone else noticed that for all his fitness (if you overlook the cigs) and this adminstration’s emphasis on healthy foods, Obama seems curiously lacking in what JFK called “vigah.” It first occurred to me during the campaign, when Obama seemed to need an awful lot of vacations and whined about being “tired.” I’m no big fan of McCain, but you have to hand it to the old guy, or to his DNA, he kept up a pace during the campaign that would have killed me and I’m closer to Obama’s age.
Reagan, Clinton, even Dubya, before the travails of his second term began to grind him down, were bursting with energy – an energy that seems oddly lacking in Obama. That’s what strikes me as “metrosexual” about him – not his suits or his arugula eating or his poor bowling and baseball throwing skills. Unfortunately, Rahm has enough energy for both of them.
There are 28 AG’s from 28 states so far who are ready to file suit against the healthcare bill on the grounds that it forces people to buy health insurance for their themselves.
Why am I not reassured by the legal challenges to Obamacare? Because by the time they reach the SCOTUS, another Obama appointee might be sitting on the bench. Do I trust the “wise Latina” and any other activist Obama names to the court not to make it up as they go along, which is the popular Democratic approach to lawmaking? Not in the slightest. Even with the present lineup – I’m a bit nervous about the fate of American freedom depending on what sort of mood Justice Kennedy is in that day.
45. Charles
That won’t work as well as you think.
The Supreme Court will twist themselves into pretzels to rule it constitutional — they know very well that if they don’t they will be demonized for seeking political payback.
87. Alexis
This is a perfect example of the bullshit feminist “everything is men’s fault” mentality.
I thought the feminist cry was “My body my choice”? Today a woman makes a choice to be pregnant, or at the least makes a choice not to prevent pregancy. Given that the means and the legal right are all within the woman’s control, just what is a man’s “moral responsibility for pregancy”?
I say, if a woman can’t keep her legs together she should not have any say in running the affairs of our country.
98. erc rodson
They don’t need to. All they need to do is lie about the employment level. They’ve done this already, with “jobs created or saved”. The lies will just get bigger.
The left and the lamestream media lied about the economy throughout G.W. Bush’s presidency, trying to convince Americans that things were worse than they really were. I don’t see how anyone could expect them to tell the truth now that Obama is in office and the economy is well and truly screwed up.
Land rich, cash poor, is the only way to be.
That keeps a man with his pecker in his pocket, and out of the inner city.
Mr. Fernandez,
The LA Times and NYT say that the President’s most urgent task is to conduct damage control. They recognize that the President, like a pilot who has pushed the envelope to its limits is, despite the exhilaration, at a place where things can stop flying and start falling. Now Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama must perform the tricky maneuver of coaxing the ship back from the edge.
This is probably true. However, considering that the next couple of items on the checklist are immigration and Cap & Trade it does not seem that the Congressional leadership or the President are considering that there may be a tipping point. These two are as or more contentious and divisive, and will become more so the more they are discussed. There will be a backlash, Jimmy Carter bears as much responsibility for the ‘Reagan Democrats’ as RWR does himself. November should be a historic horror show for Democrats, and rushing these other large and transformative legislative packages in before November will only make the Tea Partiers and the disaffected independents, who have already deserted Obama in droves, dig in deeper.
This is not a normal political calculus. I would say that this is precisely the kind of path that you can take if you know there’s a Reichstag fire coming up, but that would be paranoid and I do believe there will be elections in 2010 and 2012 in which the Democrats, for reasons that are unclear to me at this time, believe they will be successful. With ObamaCare and the means by which it has been enacted, it seems to me that they have bombed the bridge between our current point ‘A’ and a future point ‘B’ in which the Democrats have control of Congress. They have lost 4 of 5 major contested interim elections, and every action they have taken has improved the status of the GOP, something the GOP has not been able to do themselves.
I’m just confused as to the endgame. It is as if they do not fear consequences. Either they’re so far out in their own worldview that they don’t see their coming doom, or they don’t believe they will be forced to deal with their consequences. They act as if there will never be a tipping point.
I can’t believe these idiots are in charge of my country.
Alexis –
Please. Women want bad boys, and deliberately select men who have high excitement, social domination, “transgressive” qualities (thugs for the lower class, Charlie Sheen for the upper class), and so on.
Women get EXACTLY the kind of man they sleep with.
If women REALLY wanted dependable, decent, faithful, caring, and “boring” men they would sleep only with them. They would select men carefully on these qualities. “Jersey Shore” would feature accountants, carpenters, mechanics, and dentists.” “The Situation” would not be exposing his abs, but his pocket protectors and calculators.
WOMEN WANT THEIR BAD BOYS. Then complain when they get what they want.
I have zilch zero nada none sympathy for women who get pregnant by bad boys who pay nothing for their kids. They got JUST WHAT THEY WANTED.
Don’t expect me to pay for them — THEY ARE NOT MY KIDS. I could care less about them or their mothers.
Boys will be boys because that’s who women sleep with. Call me when women pursue the Chess club not the local bikers.
Why should I care a damn about the UC and Cal State? Not only is it for people not my race (Whites need not apply) but for the illegitimate spawn of women pursuing bad boys. Why should I (a non-bad boy) pay for the bad boys spawn and their defacto harems? Let the single mother who in this age of near perfect contraception, who chose deliberately to have a kid with her bad boy, pay for the kids education herself.
Let me add — this rationalization is TYPICAL of women. Wanting no accountability for the personal choices of women who have kids with bad boys and want the rest of the male population (that 90% that is sexually and romantically invisible) to pick up the tab.
Let me repeat: not my kids, not even my race. Why again should I CARE?
Let me add that today Ace of Spades has a story on John Liu, candidate for the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, stating on the record that Whites need to provide non-Whites with reparations, including transfer of money, property, and giving up jobs to non-Whites. Explain to me WHY I should care about Latino, Asian, or Black kids? Particularly when I as a White guy am expected to give up everything I own in shame for being White? So women of all races can have kids with various bad boys, and I put forward my tax money to enable that?
Cause I’d really like to know.
Please. Women want bad boys
O for
Christ’s sake, that is so wrong, and so demeaning to women.
Whiskey, I DON’T KNOW WHAT’S THE MATTER WITH YOU BUT YOU ARE NUTS.
You are NUTS, Whiskey, too many drinks.
Women are not like that at all.
Get a job, maybe some woman will like you too.
WOMEN WANT THEIR BAD BOYS. Then complain when they get what they want.
O shit, it’s insane.
Our country has turned into Enron.
Ken Lay went on for years about growing earnings 15%/yr into perpetuity, even when no one else in the industry could come even close to that. But he was the Pied Piper and everyone, the analysts, employees, shareholders, etc… WANTED TO BELIEVE. That is the role that Obama plays today. No one really thinks that we can afford any of the current entitlements, more or less new ones.
Enron went on as long as someone was willing to fund them. But when Cliff Baxter committed suicide and Jeff Skilling left when he looked like Heir Apparent, everyone (except the Houston Chronicle) began to wonder what was really going on. Banks quit lending and their CP market dried up. What took ten years to build unraveled in six months.
So what would a US insolvency look like? Here’s one opinion. First, we’ll have to have a failed Treasury auction or two. Because once the Treasury cannot borrow, the game is up. Not enough time to spin the presses; the hole is too big and the interest payments and debt refundings come too fast and furious.
I suspect that the Treasury holders will look like the Secured creditors while the entitlement holders will look like unsecured creditors. Who will sit on the Secured Creditors committee? Maybe PIMCO, the Chinese Govt, some Euro banks, Fidelity? What will they do? They may be happy to extend the maturities of Treasury debt, but at what cost?
As in any traditional bankruptcy (GM and Chrsyler don’t count), the unsecureds will get rolled. Who are they? That’s L3′s 900T in unfunded entitlement obligations. That means that the true default will be felt by all of those counting on entitlements like Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. That’s the easiest way to make 900 T in go away. Maybe Grannie will get to keep some. Meanwhile, sorry Charley. We need to keep access open to the lenders, but we don’t need you.
Just hope that all of the BCer’s here are making their plans so that no of you or yours are dependent on any of these programs.
W
“You can forgo coercive interrogation knowing you are giving up advantages; even knowing you will take more losses. But you do this with both eyes open, unlike the liberal who thinks there’s a free lunch. Still you may do it and in later years understand that you did the right thing.”
I don’t know where you got this idea or words, but I lived it. Long ago and far away we had a bud that was missing and we knew that he had been captured by the NVA. Their tunnels were all over, miles of them and we knew that he had been taken there. We captured one NVA, a mid level officer, and we were determined to get him to tell us what he knew to get our soldier and friend back. We knew we had little time and less than a chance in hell finding him but we used what we had, this poor unfortunate NVA that was stupid enough to be taken alive.
We tried, but he wouldn’t talk at all, he was well trained and indoctrinated and it was apparent he would not help us.
Several of us wanted to kill him (or at least make him think that) and one of us put his M16 to the NVA’s head, and told him to help us or he was going to die right then and there. Our LT that was there, told him NO and to back off. I told the LT that if he was not going to talk to let him go and follow him. The LT said no, to take him back with us.
We never recovered our friend nor his body.
I dream frequently about this as well as other times in my far past war and the endings are never good.
But I have talked with him (my long lost friend) in my dreams and he says to me that he understands and that I should go on with my life…and that he loves my two sweet grand daughters.
You might and may say this is all in my mind. You would be right but it is as real as holding both my sweeties in my lap, and I can feel in my heart and soul, my friend’s approval and wishes for all to be right for us.
Did we do the right thing.
Only God knows.
Papa Ray
Bob, or bob, you know who I mean…
You need to sharpen your arguments a bit and quit slinging the insults, try flashing us with your elevated intellect instead. The last intractable fool that called me an idiot didn’t have that luxury down at the aft steering gear. Was probably the only thing he would have understood, anyway. Soft words and harsh actions work best, sitting behind your keyboard you can bask in your safety and smugness, but you’re only losing credibility when you throw dirt. At a point you’ll get the troll hammer and be ignored.
Please. Women want bad boys
O come one, LFMayor, you believe that?
Bless you, but it wasnt’t my grandmother, nor my mother, it isn’t my wife, nor my daughter, not any of my aunts, nor my sister.
If you’ve got women like that, in your life, hell on you.
Laying this out as best I can.
You all political types missed a big chance here. What has happened will not improve medicine and puts the whole thing on a much worse basis. A Faustian bargain for the proponents, a defeat for the rest.
You are the next patient in the waiting room. Nobody is going to ask whom you voted for. Payment will be addressed before you come see the doctor.
So far as I can tell this is little more than a redistribution of the status quo. Time for the young ‘uns to pony up – decent jobs or not.
Produce tomorrow my fellows because work is a gift and what else is there anyway when the sun comes up? Nobody is assured anything here except that your back will be a bit heavier from now on.
I dunno. Sail on America
Spin
“First, we’ll have to have a failed Treasury auction or two. Because once the Treasury cannot borrow, the game is up.”
steeple for all practical intents and purposes that has already happened. How many Treasury Bonds did the Fed buy last year or is indirectly on the hook for through the bank bailouts? Truthfully we are very close to insolvency now and the one big domestic pool of untapped liquidity out there is in 401ks. If the SCOTUS allows allows the Commerce Clause to be used to force people to engage in commerce in order to buy health insurance then there is no leap at all to force them to put their 401Ks in Treasury Bonds rather than securities “for their own and the common good”. The idea has already been bandied about and I will be shocked if it tacked on to one bill or another in the next year.
When this house of cards comes apart it is going to happen with shocking rapidity, and the thing that really frightens me is what little imagination the average American has. They go through life thoroughly convinced that housing prices going up 20% a year makes perfect sense until one day the bottom falls out and they are caught under water on a large second mortgage never putting the housing price inflation together with the stagnant real wages in the country and thus the declining pool of buyers for extravagantly over priced houses.
I gave my wife my well warn and dog-eared copy of Incredible Popular Delusions the other day so she could read about the Mississippi Bubble because she became interested in Gulf Coast history from tracing her family tree. She didn’t get far in to it before even she started to grasp the essence of fiat currency for the first time. She turned bug-eyed and said this is what is happening today. To which I replied “No sh*t Sherlock?”
Now if I could only get Timmy Turbotax, Barney Frank, and that mental Titan in permanent campaign mode in the White House to read it would it do any good?
Hey, folks, this is the club room. If you want to have a verbal smackdown about unwanted breeding, complete with anatomical references and “stick” this and “stick” that … the locker room is that-a-way.
Alexis – FWIW, I highly doubt the irresponsible breeders are the type who vote anyway.
Joe Hill, #133: Truthfully we are very close to insolvency now and the one big domestic pool of untapped liquidity out there is in 401ks.
Good thing for me I haven’t had a 401k in over six years. I rolled mine over into a regular IRA and have basically let it sit there while putting all my “real” retirement savings into a maxed-out Roth. That will be my one-finger salute to this administration when they start messing with 401k’s.
135,Joshua: I read the same thing Joe Hill did and I believe they plan to come after -all- retirement accounts, not just 401Ks. He was using 401K as a generic term.
Which begs the question — where do you hide your money in a place they can’t confiscate -and- that has a reasonable chance of not be completely inflated? Over to you, L3.
Cowboy@58,
Propbably time for the productive class to use their wallets.
Instant defunding is the only available action that can deliver the “shock” you describe. April 15th is the earliest opportunity. Everyone should file for an extension. Even with the 16,000 new agents, the IRS won’t be able to keep up, and tax courts will be swamped. Amnesty for the patriots.
How can a tax strike be either immoral or illegal? Answer me that.
51. bob:
God has been the only father I’ve known
Delia, if you have lost faith in men, why do you call God your Father?
Bob, you seem supremely confident that God is male …. could it be so because the entire history of all religions were originally written by men?
Each religion’s history is not histroy with primary source documentation. All were codified sometimes centuries after the tale.
But let me put to you a position: If what has been written is true then war is the natural state and peace the interstitial brevity between war.
Papa Ray, you and your brethren did the right thing. The threat of killing doesn’t work because for anyone with a certain level of dedication it’s not a threat, it’s the best way out of a bad situation and thus something to be desired.
There are always ways to break someone, but you would have lost your humanity in the process. Better that you and your squadmates never went there. The sad thing is that it doesn’t really take that much imagination to know how – I think most of us have that dark knowledge in us somewhere. But if there’s a way for a man to truly sell his soul and pass beyond redemption, that is it.
129. Papa Ray
I understand your angst.
I am looking at my “achievement” wall and can see two letters of commendation among other medals and citations. One for the Phoenix Program, the other for CORDS, both signed by the DCI.
During my training I trained a few months with the Special Forces. One piece of advice they followed was “never take prisoners”. I remembered that, the only caveat being if the captive was of intelligence value.
War is hell and killing and winning its sole purpose. If you retreat from that premise you have lost before the action even begins. I have no regrets other than I could not kill more of those who would kill me, and did indeed kill many of my brothers in arms.
I wish you well in your life. Those of us who have seen the carnage can never forget it and I’m not so sure that’s a bad thing.
But once it begins, finish it in victory.
Best,
Habu
Darn y’all. I got off a night shift of 12.3 hours intending bed three hours ago – now, I’ve got about 3 hours to sleep. Thank you, I could not disconnect.
124. whiskey
Whiskey, so many , even here at BC can’t handle the truth of the situation we are in currently.
You speak with a boldness and veracity that no doubt actually frightens some; but it is the truth
Keep poundiing the keyboad and preparing for what is coming … for as you know, it is coming and Herbert Spencer will be proved once again, stating his phrase:
“Survival of the fittest” is a phrase which is commonly used in contexts other than intended by its first two proponents: British polymath philosopher Herbert Spencer ( who coined the term ) and Charles Darwin.
Herbert Spencer first used the phrase – after reading Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species – in his Principles of Biology (1864), in which he drew parallels between his own economic theories and Darwin’s biological ones, writing “This survival of the fittest, which I have here sought to express in mechanical terms, is that which Mr. Darwin has called ‘natural selection’, or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life.”
Darwin first used Spencer’s new phrase “survival of the fittest” as a synonym for “natural selection” in the fifth edition of On the Origin of Species, published in 1869.
http://tinyurl.com/my3gk
Bonfire of the Intellectuals
Paul Berman’s outraged attack on Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s attackers.
Comment by Alan Lothian…
I am not a “public intellectual”, so forgive me if I use a foreign language to describe the behaviour of most of those who are: La Trahison des Clercs. Cowardly, sucking up to power or cringing exquisitely to gangsterdom: es war immer so, from Plato on down.
Fortunately, there are more than a few of us non-public intellectuals willing to stand up and be counted, and, yes, to fight if necessary, same as our fathers — and by God, our mothers — did, too.
Note that I deeply resent having to use some teenybopper login device in order to make this comment. I don’t Digg things, I don’t Tweet things, and if I Face a Book it’s one with pages that I turn. This sort of thing is in itself a betrayal, you know: kiddyNet, the domain of the nymskull.
But it’s ill-tempered old buggers like me who will hold out against Islamists and their lickspittles. Thank the Lord we are not yet an endangered species. “Enlightenment fundamentalism”: oh, dear. Count me a fundie. Oh, an aside to Mr Rosenbaum: good piece, many thanks.