After the leaders of three major British political parties concluded the UK’s first-ever televised debate before a handpicked studio audience there was some regret over how yet another vulgar American political practice had corrupted British culture. To the reality show and the “idol” contests was now added the dismal American practice of selecting leaders in a political beauty contest. But that was to miss the point.
Nick Clegg, David Cameron and Gordon Brown could vie with each other to describe how they would spend money they didn’t have because that was still the way the system operated. Within the British political consensus candidates were elected on the basis of who could best tinker at the margins. You didn’t ask more fundamental questions. But in time and with growing economic difficulty the British might import another institution finally making headlines across the Atlantic as the Tea Parties swept across America.
Perhaps the greatest distinction between the Tea Parties and the televised “debates” between candidates is that issues are raised at fundamentally different levels. In the first the money is for the candidate to dispense. In the second it is about how much he has a right to dispense not at the margins but structurally. The psychological difference is captured perfectly by Barack Obama’s response to the Tea Parties. ABC News reported that
Speaking at a Democratic fundraiser tonight, President Obama touted his administration’s tax cuts and said that the recent tea party rallies across the nation have “amused” him.
“You would think they should be saying thank you,” the president said to applause.
Members of the audience shouted, “Thank you.”
‘Thank you for what?’ the Tea Partiers might respond, ‘it is our money.’ The incendiary potential of that type of conversation may explain the heat which has been generated by the crashers and anti-crashers at these events. The Tea Parties are less a debate than political clash. Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit has a number of links to sites which have promised to infiltrate the Tea Parties and efforts repel boarders. It has the aspect of conflict and consequently generates many of the same emotions. Dana Milbank at the Washington Post was nearly beside himself at the sight of these “faux populists”, only recently described as hicks, but now revealed to have Harvard Degrees.
A CBS News/New York Times poll released on Tax Day found that Tea Party activists are wealthier than average (20 percent of their households earn more than $100,000, compared with 14 percent of the general population) and better educated (37 percent have college or postgraduate degrees vs. 25 percent of Americans ).
Milbank should be careful about opening that can of worms lest it lead to a discussion of whether the half of US households who pay Federal Income Tax so it can be transferred to the other half should have any say on how their money is spent. Because the only thing worse than the narrative that Tea Partiers are the ingrates who should be saying “thank you” to the quality that wisely governs them is the reverse: a narrative where the Tea Partiers are the quality who dare to question the ingrates that govern and write about them. Any idea that threatens to invert the positions of the elite and the peasantry is by definition subversive. The real problem with portraying the rebels as well educated and smart is that it begs the question of what their critics are.
Unlike the debate between Clegg, Cameron and Brown the Tea Parties are not about tinkering on a set of givens but they are in part about what the givens should be. Therefore they will be viewed as either attempts to redress system failures or exercises in illegitimacy. The words “November” can therefore be a threat or a promise. Like most opportunities the word is probably both.
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and, perhaps – in near future – Term Limits – and perhaps even Fiscal discouragements, to being a – Representative – congress, president – – no extraordinary profit – possibilities from being in public office –
only reward should be History, your recorded record of doing good – or bad – not any Monetary rewards, before – during -after – – this would discourage the – well, most of the – mob.
dream on, i suppose — but it would probably work — maybe
It took me a big chuck of my 48 years on earth to appreciate how truly radical and revolutionary our American republic is. I remain in awe of the wisdom of our founders. The retrograde forces which animate human-kind can pretend all they want, they can lay claim to the mantle of ‘progressivism’, they can label themselves revolutionaries or radicals, but in the swath of history we were the real deal, and can be again, if we get back to the basics and reclaim the treasure of Liberty from the smirking liars who’d steal it. And if we can’t do that, then we’d only prove unworthy of the gift.
The two broadly based parties excluded from the debate in the UK were the BNP and the UKIP. From this side of the Atlantic the BNP look like racists who have absorbed all the ideological prejudices of Socialism and conflated them with a narrow tribal vision of Nationalism. Have seen where that leads to my enthusiasm for their project is lacking. Practically as a defense against the subversion of England or any corner of Western culture it strikes me as a dead end. The BNP vision includes an acceptance of a powerful authoritarian government that divides all of humanity into the favored insiders and the despised outsiders. It is my expectation that they could flip on a dime and become a front for the Islamization of Britain.
The UKIP may seem more congenial to American eyes but that may be its weakness. Is it like the Tea Parties subject to attack as some alien Yank intrusion? The tragedy is that the Party whose intellectual origins were closest to the small government and free market vision that inspired the success of both the United States and Britain in the 18th to 19th centuries is the heir of the old Liberals, the Liberal Democrats. Unfortunately they are now the most Statist party advocating for the maximum transfer of sovereignty to the EU.
If I recall TV shows like Idol are copies of British originals.
The Tea Party is the tax payers that were asleep and now have set up and said enough is enough. Obama and the Congress cannot treat the Tea Party in the same lame way they treat the entitlement voter that supported the leftist now in office. The members of the Tea Party is not interested in fluff and BS they want responsible government and lower taxes and entitlements. Mr. Ego in the White House is just to smart to recognize this fact.
The number of implicit “givens” tends to rise with the lifespan of a system as people entrench themselves and pass themselves customary rights. In the UK, for example, the givens for the major parties are European integration, climate change, “tolerance”, immigration, multiculturalism and the extensive role of the state. For any other society, including Islamic ones, you can construct a similar list. And there’s almost no way to get one of these fundamental givens on a kind of yes or no ballot.
That’s why the meme-makers are the “unacknowledged legislators of the world”. They don’t necessarily write the laws, but over time they make the “givens”. Megan McArdle was in dispute recently with a professor over the question of why conservatives were positively discriminated against in the academe. The answer to McArdle was more or less than people who had crafted “Jim Crow” had no right to ask for civility. I would have thought, from reading history that “Jim Crow” would have referred to the Democrats, but of course that’s not the way it works. It has a meta-meaning, a larger sense and if you don’t get it, why you’re not an educated man.
Philosophically the Tea Parties are a war against the “of courses”, that body of assertion which has been inserted everywhere. The reason the Tea Parties are being treated by the Left as subversive is because they’ve chosen to make those “of courses” an existential issue. Politics which for conservatives is supposed to be largely uninteresting and occupy a time slot sometime between Friday afternoon and Friday dinner time is for “progressives” a matter of defining the nature of existence; the winners and the losers. There’s an asymmetry of attachment. Touch one of the liberal Third Rails and why — you’re a Nazi — even if the word does mean National Socialist.
In a world with no resource constraints, my guess is that conservatives would be happy to buy the progressives off just to shut them up. Mean-spiritedness is not the reason for the Tea Parties. If the Tea Partiers had more jack, it would be simpler to hand the progressives a wad and say ‘go away’. The problem is that there ain’t no more mazooma. And so certain unpleasant subjects of conversation are bound to crop up, including money, which progressives affect a disdain for, while secretly coveting it. And then the conversations leaves off the tinkering and gets into ‘whose money? Yours or mine?’
The real problem with the progressives is that while they’ve found all the conceivable solutions they want to the spin problem, and packed the academe and media to the greatest extent possible, they can’t solve the resource problem. Fundamentally the Tea Party phenomenon is a problem of resources. For as long as you “run out of other people’s money” you’re going to have tea parties and nothing the progressives can do will fix that. Their war is with arithmetic, not with tea.
Given that, its a safe bet that come what may the disquiet will continue in some form or the other. The only way out of the thicket is for the elites to produce results. And alas, we’re back where we started.
W/5–your third paragraph contains the key: the TP crowd have been busy with jobs, families, and quietly (mostly) paying their taxes. Then they also voted on election day (mostly).
The others made politics their life and patiently permeated the schools, unions, public policy groups, and of course, elective office.
One day the first group woke up, is waking up now. My brother-in-law said, “You know, I’ve always felt satisfied that I made a point of voting in every election. But I was kidding myself; it was nowhere near enough–they did what they damn well pleased anyhow!”
So now, will we have the follow-through? The other side has been at this a long time and that’s how they’ve come to control the ‘of courses’.
wretchard,
The only way out of the thicket is for the elites to produce results
Results are to hard to get but they can produce voters. The answer for the elites becomes electorate substitution by importation. This does not solve the problem in the sense of allowing more results to be produced, unless the imported labor/voter pool results in a marginal increase in productivity. During the agricultural and industrial eras the importation of unskilled labor did produce results. Now the importation of unskilled labor does not result in a net increase in national wealth. If we were importing large numbers of skilled professionals or if we had a functioning educational system that could transform costly low skill imported labor, or at least their citizen children, into highly productive labor that would strengthen the nation then it could work to try and expand the electorate. What the current immigration system does do though is empower the importing elites to more efficiently extract the wealth that exists. Any proposed amnesty plan would accelerate that effect. This only postpones the eventual collapse of the wealth producing system but that is of little concern to those planning on immigration ‘reform.’
My argument is not one for simply restricting immigration but is one for overhauling the education system and restoring on immigration system that first evaluates all applicants based on what is in the best interests of the United States.
The real problem with portraying the rebels as well educated and smart is that it begs the question of what their critics are.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Excellent post overall w.
Not that educated and smart deserve more breaks than anyone else, but some of us old folks remember the memes of the meritocracy. Those were the days, my friend …
I totally boggle at the Obama comment that they should say thank you for tax cuts, has he seriously no idea of what was in that Obamacare bill, on the eve of the Bush tax cuts running out, on the eve of the VAT being implemented, and while billions if not trillions of federal funds and federal reserve funds (whatever kind of f they are) pour into the pockets of the banks and bankers?
Sir Thomas Lipton sailed his sloop
Won an America’s Cup
He packaged tea and later soup
The people ate it up
For tea comes easy to the Brits
They like it hot and sweet
At five it’s tea time at the Ritz
With cuke sandwiches neat
But now it’s time for British men
And British women too
To look about and say Amen
It’s bad, what can we do?
Just take it back, tea party style
Demand the madness end
With luck and pluck and maybe guile
You’ll get what you intend
A country free from social ills
Old Blighty as of yore
With socialism’s obscene frills
Shown out the bloody door
Yes drink your tea and sail your sloops
Throw out each party hack
Just march behind tea party troops
And take your country back
At a Tea Party I attended yesterday, an infiltrator wandered unimpeded through the crowd with a sign reading “Tax Cuts = School Cuts”.
Not so long ago, that would have been the end of the argument. Of course it’s all for the children. If tax cuts mean less money for schools, then tax cuts are out.
The difference is that now we have lost confidence in the institutions, which progressives have dominated for so long. The schools are objectively doing a dreadful job of educating the children — and the problem isn’t lack of money. The standard left wing tropes about “the children” and “racism” are losing their hold. The world is progressing past the progressives, and they face the choice of change or be left behind.
In Britain, public pressure put immigration onto the political agenda, when Labour & Conservative were so recently united in their opposition even to discussion of that topic. It was the nominal focus of that first-ever British political leaders TV debate. The Tea Parties in the US have yet to get cutting the size of government onto the politicians’ agenda in the US. Maybe the Brits have something to teach the world yet.
Walt, you’re getting good.
“The real problem with the progressives is that while they’ve found all the conceivable solutions they want to the spin problem, and packed the academe and media to the greatest extent possible, they can’t solve the resource problem.”
When I was at the Pentagon the Congress came up with a fabulous new idea. In the past, if they wished to give $20M to a favored program they would have had to say “Take $10M from the B-2, because it is painted a really dark color we think will clash with the runways and take $10M from the ATF, because we don’t know what that acronym means and we are infuriated that you would make us look it up, and give it to the people at Sandia Labs to produce revolutionary new atomic powered pencil sharpeners that we believe are vital to future USAF operations.”
But that had the effect of P.O.ing the B-2 contractors and the ATF bidders – who happen to be both important constituants and major campaign contributors. So they finally decided to avoid the landmines associated with redistriubting the budget money and just say “Take $20M and give it to the Sandia people. And don’t ask us which programs to cut to get it from because you have $500M in R&D money so you can find it in there somewhere.”
Over the past few decades it has become increasingly popular to be a policy wonk in DC. It’s like being a politican without all that nasty and expensive campaigning stuff. And the explosion of policy wonks has in turn made it harder and harder to get anything done. You don’t just have NASA advising the USAF in space launch issues in which the agency has little real equity; you have people like the USMC doing so as well, who have no equity at all.
Policy development has become like having three equations and four unknowns. Adding in the resource issues would make it absolutely impossible to get policy development done at all. So they don’t do it any more. It’s just too hard.
#8 Josh “I totally boggle at the Obama comment that they should say thank you for tax cuts, has he seriously no idea. . . ”
You forget (?) he’s read the playbook. Lying is a deliberate tactic. It confuses people. I think you can assume that 98% of what comes out of his mouth is a lie. The remaining 2% will cover those times when he says, “I’m lying,” or “Kiss my ___.”
LifeofTheMind’s disdain for the BNP is a recipe for failure and Islamization of Britain. The BNP, as unlovely as it is, remains the only alternative to being run as a colony of Pakistan and North Africa for native Britons.
That’s it. Diversity, multiculturalism, as Wretchard alluded, is a failure. It is a failure because in crisis you cannot trust, in widespread terms, across racial and ethnic and religious boundaries. You just cannot, in any widespread social terms. Even in good times, the Bowling Alone professor from Harvard found people mistrust folks WITHIN their own ethnicity as diversity increases.
Britain will go nowhere but disaster until it kicks out most of the non-Britons. Israelis have come to the same conclusion — they cannot live with Palestinians and so desire to separate. South Africa is coming undone as weak and foolish Zuma falls prey to the burning desire of the Youth League President who wishes to on the eve of the World Cup cleanse South Africa of the Whites and seize all their property (by killing them all). He’ll get his wish too. Rainbow nation indeed!
In order for a complex society to function, even in good times, but particularly in crisis (and there is ALWAYS a crisis eventually), it has to be mostly from the same race. Same religion. Same general background. So trust can be spread across people who are fundamentally like you.
No, we can’t all get along. Good fences make good neighbors. Simple as that. We are all Israelis now. That includes a fence, and kicking out people unlike us.
Not the least of which is we ran out of money. So it goes further, the fewer have their cut. Someone will lose. That is what the Tea Party is all about. Who will lose, and who will win.
Yes. “Nazi.” “Racist.” Who cares? Really?
I’m with Whiskey. For the Britons, the choice is a statist government married to diversity, immigration and white-annihilation, or a statist government opposed to diversity and pro-white. Pretty simple choice to me.
You would think they should be saying thank you
- Barack Obama
When you have to kill a man it costs nothing to be polite
- Winston Churchill
Ultimately what may bring down Obama and the entire coalition of Pelosi, Emanuel, Reid, Franks, Schumer et al is just how rude they are. Occasional calculated invective can serve a purpose when used to rally your troops. It always has a cost. People can forgive many wrongs and injuries, just as a nation can make peace with another after a bitter war. The gratuitous insult sits deeper. It makes it impossible for old enemies to reconcile with you and it makes it impossible for erstwhile allies to fully trust your judgment.
Being a gentleman is not enough, just ask President McCain. Being vulgar though means that you never get to put down roots. Sooner or later the people will cast this lot off. What follows may be better or worse but those who rule by bribery and intimidation cannot conceal the contempt that they feel for all not subservient to them. Eventually even those who are will know that they and their Masters are united only in acting out of expediency. Six months after this lot is gone no one will admit to having known them. The down side for that is it makes them all the more tenacious in clinging to power.
The great American boy-men
- Earnest Hemingway, The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber
There are no second acts in American lives
- F. Scott Fitzgerald
For Barack Obama I doubt that there will be a second act.
whiskey and peterike,
Who cares? I care and I thank you both for unambiguously crawling out from under a rock and proclaiming yourselves for racism. I decline and I hope that the consensus on this blog is with me on this. If not I can depart. In the future however I shall not respond to your racist comments. I am just to damned fastidious to deal with it.
To be blogged under the title “Second Acts.”
No, I think RWE has it essentially correct.
The TEA party movement is essentially a debate about the resource question, writ
in populist terms.
1) what do we want? We want the country to live up to the Constitution.
2) what is important? Basic services by the government, and quit pestering us.
3) how do we pay for it? Big deficits mean higher taxes to come. How stupid do they
think we are?
And higher taxes are coming. Not just the expiration of the Bush tax cuts. Not just
the taxes written into HCR. Not just Lindsey Graham trying to get a $0.15/gallon
gas tax. They are coming from your state and local governments, because the
are all running behind. Must feed and pension the government employees, don’t
you know?
Wrechard said in #5: “That’s why the meme-makers are the “unacknowledged legislators of the world”. They don’t necessarily write the laws, but over time they make the “givens”. I just came across a quote attributed to Abraham Lincoln stating: “The philosophy of the school room in one generation is the philosophy of the government in the next.” I think that is what is going on here.
Whiskey. Just this evening, I read the transcript of a discussion sponsored by the Ethics and Public Policy Center that ties in to your post. It’s long but may be of interest.
http://www.eppc.org/programs/religionandmedia/publications/programID.37,pubID.4125/pub_detail.asp
Quoting Professor James Davison Hunter of UVA:
“How do societies hold together? The classic answer to that question was that traditional societies, that is agrarian, economically underdeveloped and non-urban societies were held together mainly by beliefs held in common by all of its members. Modern societies by contrast are held together through social and economic interdependence.
Now, the reason why this question remains a puzzle is that just as people and associations and so-called traditional societies depended heavily upon each other for the sake of survival, so too in modern societies we depend upon at least some common beliefs, some shared ideals, some collective myths to function smoothly. The question of how societies hold together gains new poignancy in a world like ours where even a minimal consensus of sensibilities, dispositions and attitudes seems elusive.
Where there are even fewer beliefs, ideals, commitments, and hopes held deeply in common and where there are few if any real meaningful traditions observed, or binding public rituals practiced, what else is there to hold such a society together? What remains to bind together its innumerable fragments? The answer in large part is power, the exercise of coercion with a threat of its use.
Now, in a democratic regime individuals and communities can’t exercise force themselves willy-nilly. Rather the final repository of legitimate force is found in the state. Clearly the state is not the exclusive domain of power in the modern world, nor is its instrumentalities the only means for ordering social life. But it is the final repository of legitimate force, and in this way it plays an exceedingly important role in modern societies. In its ability to make law, the state has the ability to assert its power positively or negatively on people and communities, to confer privileges or impose sanctions, to provide assistance or create difficulty, to bestow rights or to inflict punishment, harm, injury and loss.”
Some people never learn that brute force is not always the best strategy.
LOTM #16
I’m reminded of the movie “The Rocketeer”, in which Timothy Dalton played a bad guy British actor supposedly based on Errol Flynn. When he’s found out, he says defiantly, (am I a) “Spy? Saboteur? Fascist?! All of the above!”
The political system is completely controlled by accusations of racism and cruelty. People questioning the system, however mildly, (but hardly opposed to it and usually called “conservatives”) are forever trying to figure out what criticisms they can make without being called “racist” or “mean-spirited” and forever finding out there are none. Only when people are immune to the accusations liberal make of evil for opposing them can any real change occur.
I’ll cop to being a racist, as I believe Europeans are indeed superior to other races. I’m European, why shouldn’t I? I won’t cop to being cruel as I have sympathy for weak and afflicted people but I don’t believe the socialists have the right to take my money, take a big cut for themselves, and then give a little to those *they* regard as afflicted and tell me how much superior they are to me in the process.
I can hardly claim to be among the brave as I comment and blog anonymously but maybe someday soon a man will get up and say “Call me a racist all you want. I don’t care” and then things will start to move. I’m not holding my breath though.
As far as the BNP, and multiracial, multicultural libertarian society might conceivably happen, and might be a nice place to live, but if the alternatives are a MRMC socialist state based on the mythology of white evil or a white socialist state I’ll take the white socialist state. No reasons given, no explanations, and no apologies, it is just my preference.
From a Japanese commenter on the Japanese government:
“We are supposed to have a legislative, judicial, and executive branch government that has checks and balances. Instead we have an executive branch bureaucracy and a legislative branch that only argue behind closed doors on how to split up the money. They loot from the taxpayers. They steal from the pension fund for the populace while making sure the pensions for the elite are paying out more than the elite put in, they steal from the postal bank, and they tax everything else. The national debt not holding steady but growing. Someday it will all come crashing down, probably in my lifetime.”
Boy did that sound familiar. I really, really hope that conservatives of the Tea Party beliefs can get control of the House and Senate. I can see why the ruling elites in Japan are so big on gun control.
The real problem with the progressives is that while they’ve found all the conceivable solutions they want to the spin problem, and packed the academe and media to the greatest extent possible, they can’t solve the resource problem … Their war is with arithmetic, not with tea.
Thank you Wretchard. You have put your finger upon it. But the arithmetic is but one aspect of reality.The real war of the “Progressives” is against demonstrable reality itself, the idea that 2 + 2 can equal 5 if we just insist hard enough that it does. Or passing a law making it so.
That perhaps, is the history of the collapse of civilizations. When the political class becomes too isolated from reality the house of cards all falls down. 2 + 2 never equals five, no matter how important it is for the “right” people to insist that it does.
Forgotten Man in comment 4 identifies an important point. Reagan understood a very basic principal about human behavior in a capitalist society. One of the greatest gifts of the US system of government lies in the rewards that can be garnered from individual responsibility and hard work. Most people will gladly send in their money to the government to buy off the leftist entitlement crowd as long as the cost is not excessive. If the government cost to the productive class gets to high they either drop out or spend valuable capital (either cash or intellectual) to skirt the excessive burden.
My father-in-law was a successful businessman that owned a small securities brokerage firm (3 employees). On a number of occasions he has told me that in the bad old days when income tax rates could reach as much as 90% people modeled their behavior to control how much money they made. In his case once his tax burden reached a certain level (generally a tax rate number equal to a combined federal, state and local rate of 50%) he would slow down and spend more time on leisure or find ways to move the income around to reduce the burden. A more recent example of this activity occurred on this site with respect to a post on the new health care law. The comments section showed how quickly productive people begin to act. There were a number of posts discussing possible ways to avoid the new burdens by splitting up company operations to reduce overall company size below the minimum threshold for compliance and other ways to “legally” skirt the new burdens. These types of discussions are going on all over the country even before the full ramifications of the new law have been discovered.
Liberals can try to marginalize the Tea Party movement all they want but they can’t marginalize the consequences that will result from their actions. There is a serious amount of activity that is going on below the surface of the Tea Party movement that will have long-term effects on Congress and the President’s ability to grow the entitlement class. At some point without responsible government and lower taxes there is no incentive to produce. People will move more of their activities into the underground economy and our overall standard of living as a nation will fall.
Actually, I think even the Tea Party is tinkering at the edges.
Here is a key snippet from Sandra Mackey’s book “The Saudis” that says more than she probably thought it said.
Neil Armstrong’s walk on the moon in 1969 captivated the Saudi public to such an extent that an entrepreneur opened a restaurant named “Apollo 14.”
– page 251 from “The Saudis”
Think about that for a moment. The moon is the central motif in Islam. The United States planted its flag there. Our astronauts stepped on it. Then, the United States turned its back on the moon. Now, our President scorns going back, proclaiming, “We’ve been there before.”
At one time, the United States overawed most of the Third World. But now, where is the awe? New York City can’t even get the World Trade Center rebuilt!
There is a such thing as imperial diplomacy. Call it “Byzantine diplomacy” if you like. When the Soviets put out Sputnik, it awed the Third World. When the United States landed a man on the moon, it did likewise. Space exploration is an expression of power. It is an integral part of diplomacy and it is highly effective – sometimes more effective than the State Department.
Yes, we need to win against al-Qaeda militarily. We also need to awe people sufficiently so they will feel glad to give us the information we need to defeat our enemies.
Yes, we need to balance the budget. But if the United States is unwilling to defend itself against outside aggression, the value of our currency plummets regardless of what our national budget does. The value of our currency is at least partially dependent upon our national power. When America refuses to show resolve against enemies dedicated to our extermination, the value of our currency suffers.
I don’t care about science fiction. If anything, I’m annoyed at Gene Roddenberry for making space flight look far too easy. What I care about is power politics, specifically how an American presence on the moon will help us defeat our enemies in the Middle East.
Remember when Iraqis complained, “Americans can go to the moon, but they can’t keep the electricity on.” Within that complaint, Iraqis express respect, admiration, and awe for the fact that America at least at one time could send men to the moon. When we are dealing with Muslims, we need to understand what motivates them. In the eyes of Muslims, he who controls the moon is the most inherently legitimate state.
Let’s control the high ground.
LOTM, you set yourself up as moral arbiter and then say, in effect, “my way or the highway.”Some of your contributions have been stellar, but you’re not that valuable. If you want to go, don’t let the door hit you on the way out.
I would think that if you have any depth of insight at all, you should long since have come to the realization that accusations of racism simply will no longer be allowed to silence those who have serious concerns that deserve to be answered. I see a tremendous amount of anti-white racism on the leftist side, and it’s backed with an extremely credible threat of violence. You don’t think that those threatened by this should be concerned? Or would expressing that concern be racist, and hence, according to you, undeserving of your “fastidious” consideration?
Societies aren’t all equal, and neither are all cultures. The time is fast approaching where Americans will have to choose what they’re going to be. The left has already made their choice and is working very hard to force it down everyone else’s throat. They have made it clear they are anti-white racists. Their choice involves punishing the white middle class just for existing, and taking what they have to give to people they deem more deserving. Is leftist anti-white racism more justified than white racism? If you think so, you’re starting to channel Susan Sontag, of despised memory, and it really is long past time for you to leave the Belmont Club.
Wretch, you’ve hit it again – “Idol” contests and the now elitist TP rebels; the sad face of future public debate. Well, maybe not, on 2nd thinking, as the attack on the TP for anti-party thinking is so far an epic fail. 11/2010 is the turning point for us.
mac@26–
Amen to that.
mac (26),
Indeed they aren’t, but what has that to do with race? A significant majority of the folks who voted in Obama are themselves white? How can that be???
For we Brits, the important date is not in November; it’s May 6th. Or at least it ought to be. It won’t be, because there is no real disagreement among the major parties about the really important parts of policy and the people who do differ have no chance at all.
The issues are immigration and the underclass, and they are connected but not the same. I am not a racist, but I dislike intensely the fact that Britain is becoming overrun with ethnic Pakistanis. And that in turn is because they bring their poisonous religion with them and then breed like bacteria – and the apparatus of government gives them preference for all sorts of things that are in government’s gift. Whether those things ought to be in government’s gift is a separate issue.
Indians are ethnically similar to Pakistanis, and look very similar to them to Western eyes, but only the deranged racists among us in Britain object to them. Why? Because nearly all of them are Hindu.
I have no objection to blacks per se, but I do object to the ones who use their skin colour as an excuse for sloth, licentiousness and criminality. There is a very good reason why blacks in London are stopped more often by police – they are far and away more likely to be criminals.
And of course, there is no real difference between the parties on the size of government. I have a very simple idea for reducing the cost of government. Make a list of those employed in government in a purely admin role, and go down the list firing every third person on it. I strongly suspect that nobody who isn’t one of them or related to them would notice any difference at all. Maybe the ones remaining would actually have to do some work for a change.
If I thought they had any chance at all of forming a government I would vote for UKIP on May 6th. They haven’t, so on the basis of “least bad of a rotten bunch” I’ll probably vote Tory.
I think it was the Daily Mail that had a story about the Crips and the Bloods are starting up amongst the Black youth of Britain. The Police have everything in hand though. Passing out revenue generating traffic tickets left and right.
To someone who is a postmodernist and considers the world to be post-Christian, it is essential to believe that anyone wo believes in any of the following is not just wrong, but actually EVIL:
-small government
-primacy of the private sector over the public
-military strength for their nation
-authentic Christianity/Judaism
-meritocracy
-family rather than the apparatus of state as the basic unit of a society
-Western values regarding science, math, and statistics
-the notion that some cultures/societies/memes/governments are objectively superior to others
Note what I said. It is ESSENTIAL for the po-mo, public sector, NPR crowd to believe that these things are not just wrong-headed, bu actually EVIL. This belief defines their narrative, which defines their world-view. No cracks or seams or inconsistencies are permitted, because the way the narrative is constructed, one wrong thing means the base premise is wrong and therefore everything else is wrong, creating a cognitive dissonance which is not resolvable.
The SEIU or ACSME member who shuffles paper in city hall or the associate professor of language studies at your local community college or the public school tenured teacher, all of whom relexively vote Dem, go to all the “right” rallies, listen to NPR and watch PBS, MUST perceive that a guy who owns a small business, goes to church on Sundays, believes in strong national defense, and believes that Western civilization and the U.S. constitution are the apex of human development is the same as someone who sends people off to concentration camps to die, or lynches black folks, or wants women to be barefoot and pregant their whole life, in order for the rest of their worldview to make sense.
And there’s literally nothing you can do to dissuade them from believing otherwise.
I don’t know what the equivalents are in the U.K., perhaps FC can supply the details.
Until the center/right realizes that the left doesn’t just want to win elections, they want to ultimately create a world where the ideas and memes of the center/right has been wiped out completely, making inroads against the left will be largely a defensive retreat. The next time a conservative government gets into power, retributions must be made. Despite the squabbles between Whiskey, LOTM, and others here, it appears that you all can see the truth of this.
Wretchard@5
I would have thought, from reading history that “Jim Crow” would have referred to the Democrats, but of course that’s not the way it works. It has a meta-meaning, a larger sense and if you don’t get it, why you’re not an educated man.
I was talking to a neighbor who voted for President Obama. Now, whenever I talk to him he becomes less confident of his choice but, after a week or so watching the news and reading the MSM, he bucks back up. So I thought I should warn him about that.
I told him I, too, used to watch the evening news and The News Hour on PBS (which he still watches) but no more! “These Journalists think they are the mental hygienists to the nation,” I said. “They only want us thinking the appropriate thoughts — so they will only provide the information that will lead us to the predetermined conclusion. They are like a bunch of licensed brain beauticians, and don’t want anyone without a license musing up their work.” Needless to say, I don’t have a license.
The alternative media — the unlicensed practitioners — are mussing with the nation’s mind. Which is why the Democrats would like to impose some sort of licensing regime on it. Good mental grooming is important! The nation needs standardization in the “thought” industry.
E. Nigma #17:
It’s difficult to separate the resource issue from the moral one. One leads to the other. As Governor, Jesse Ventura said that he was for social liberalism while also being for financial conservatism. Won’t work!
Social liberalism – the relaxing of traditional morals – inevitably leads to resource problems. Saying people can get laid anytime anywhere anyhow anyway results in a need to either take care of the unwanted children or pay for abortions and/or provide prenatal care. Drug legalization will lead to the need for larger treatment programs and more emergency services. Covering “gender issues” and other trendy ideas in school means you need more money for the schools. Merely saying that there will be no discrimination in hiring leads to a huge government bureaucracy. And so on and so on. And no matter how much you spend on these issues, it won’t ever be enough. Someone will always feel left out. For example, I think that even the politicians who support the teacher’s unions have concluded that no matter how much money gets appropriated the union will always demand more “support for education.” There will always be teachers bemoaning the fact that trans-gendered students don’t get the respect they really deserve (reference this week’s incident in New Jersey) or that there are not enough courses in French for third graders or to teach Sanskrit in high school.
Now when I hear of things like nanotechnology, genetic manipulation, turning coal into oil for 28 cents a gallon, and other such marvelous technological advances, I think it analogous to handing a loaded handgun to a 2 year old. If we can get out from under OPEC then the money that now goes overseas will simply be collected as taxes and used to make things Better and Better, the same way the USSR got Better and Better.
We have to strangle the Socialist baby in the crib, not just stunt its growth by refusing to buy it milkshakes and caviar every day.
Obama’s open disdain for the citizenry is appalling. Were it not for the constant propagandizing by the MSM he would be the most reviled person in America. Nobody likes an upstart kicking dirt in their face.
The amorphous nature of the Tea Party Movement is its greatest strength. Without any particular personality to savage, the Administration and its cohorts must attack the entire movement. That works when the movement is a handful of people who unwittingly cooperate by appearing and acting nasty but is political and societal suicide when the movement is 1/3 of the population and growing.
If and when even a fraction of the actual business people in the MSM start pointing out internally that their propagandizing has alienated their readers the house of cards will come down.
It is not too hard to imagine Obama spending the last year of his term as a recluse in the WH savoring his success at gaining a prominent spot in the history of the country while simultaneously railing against the public that failed to see his brilliance. Nero comes to mind. “The world is losing a great artist.”
Call out the instigators
Because there’s something in the air
History is folding the tactics of the radical left from the 60s back onto the originators like karmic jujitsu. I’m smiling.
154. Subotai Bahadur (from last thread, directed to BL)
Very nice piece of work, thanks. You are always informative and insightful.
Now where was that football when obama was at the fantasy soccer game?
Best,
Habu
“That’s why the meme-makers are the “unacknowledged legislators of the world”.
This remarkable observation by Wretchard has caused me to wax Waltish.
I write the memes that make the whole world scream
I write the memes that the protesters sling
I write the memes that make Opra cry
We need more verses. Help me out here, folks.
16. Lifeofthemind
Your contention that previously warring nations can end the conflict amicably and go on from there is a chimera.
Yes, it can occur for a certain period but it never holds up over time.
History is pitiless. For most of us its cruelty comes in the form of neglect. For others it comes in the form of not being remembered in the way we wished. President Obama may truly be hurt by the Tea Party reaction. He may really have expected people to be thankful for his “achievements”. He still hasn’t grasped that a significant percentage of people don’t want anything he can give them. They want to be left alone and think its his job to see that they are and not badgered and hectored and corralled at every conceivable “teaching moment”. Or maybe more prosaically perhaps a certain percentage simply can’t afford their own personal moral trainer, however important the trainer may think those services are.
For whatever reason there’s no accounting for people’s tastes — that goes for voters as well as President Obama — and consequently a skilled politician knows not only how to listen but to respect wishes that may seem to him irrational. The hardest thing for a ‘leader’ to say to himself in secret, when his self-opinion is most at its exalted, that ‘not my will but yours be done’. I think President Obama thought he knew better than the people who hired him.
Maybe the only way to endure the psychological blows meted out by politics and history is not to care. To laugh at yourself. Why does it happen that a haberdasher like Harry Truman will be remembered when an nuclear engineer like Jimmy Carter will be forgotten? Who knows?
Having looked into the Brit parties a bit, I don’t believe the BNP will *ever* be anything more than a rump party with a bit of protest support; they are just far too over the top with the Neo-Fascist imagery and rhetoric to ever be allowed to have power. To paraphrase a line from the Holy Grail, race hatred and race war are not the basis for an ethical system of government. I suspect that what disturbs LOTM is that there are always some people who are willing to use bad times to jump back into that old Fascist embrace – well, these will be with us always, as there were plenty here in the last go round.
UKIP, on the other hand, I think has a great deal of good ideas going for it, it’s main flaw being that it has had a series of tax frauds and other dodgy characters in the leadership, which has seriously wounded it’s reputation. But UKIP comes the closest of any Brit party to espousing the political and societal goals that I support.
The Tory’s have sold their soul, and Cameron is no “conservative” – he just wants his club to the men running the socialist Euro-state. Labour and Labour-lite (Cleg) are not worthy of mention, just more rent-seekers.
None of them have any idea what to do about the monetary crisis about to overwhelm them, and in that sense it really doesn’t matter who wins.
Kirk Parker:”Indeed they aren’t, but what has that to do with race? A significant majority of the folks who voted in Obama are themselves white? How can that be???”
It has something to do with the black American culture that has produced a black populace with an illegitimacy rate of 70+ percent, a black populace that commits more than half the violent crime in the nation while only approximately 12 percent of the people, and a black populace that is more dependent, per capita, on government handouts than any other segment of the American body politic. It is a culture that most non-black Americans think is outlandish, deeply dysfunctional, and the major contributor to the failure of black Americans to match or better the performance of other nonwhite immigrant groups in America.
The white people who voted for Obama voted for the hope of a post-racial nation. What they thought they were getting and what they got–a viciously anti-white, anti-Jewish racist, are two very different things. Are you truly so clueless as to not recognize in the deep anger Obama has generated the resentment of the mark who knows he has been suckered and who wants revenge? There are lots of Obama voters with profound buyer’s remorse, and those numbers grow daily. It wouldn’t be far off to say that is a sizable part of the motivation behind the Tea Party movement, particularly its Democratic contingent.
This critique of the Russians handling of their economy after the collapse in oil prices rolls along until a paragraph that starts with this sentence
“The main reason for this disconnect between growing oil and gas revenues and stagnating investment is the emphasis in the government’s anti-crisis policy on mitigating the impact of the decline by rescuing inefficient enterprises and expanding social payments.”
At which point it looks like the soviet handling of their economic crises bears remarkable resemblance to the UK & US handling of the economic crises.
Looks like Michael Yon is being kicked out of Afghanistan.
Oswald Spengler knew almost a century ago that a society has to be a community of shared values. I would add, rational values. I share few values with those who voted for Zero, whatever their race or ethnicity. Until those who do share values get together and take control of their country, whether it’s the US or the UK, there will be no lasting prosperity or internal peace. The only thing I have to say “thank you” to Zero for is for making the necessity for shared rational values crystal clear by showing how irrational his values are.
#32 no mo uro: I don’t claim to speak for all my compatriots, but it’s much the same as your description here – except that NPR and PBS aren’t a factor – except that the BBC is watched by many people and has been taken over almost entirely by the politically correct.
I would add authentic Buddhism and Hinduism to the mix here, both of which are pretty well invisible in the USA but fairly powerful here and both of which have very strongly defined moral philosophies. Note that Hinduism used to be pretty poisonous, but the British Raj curbed a lot of the worst excesses.
We have our own particular brand of insanity here – those who believe that Islam is just as morally upright as Christianity.
Incidentally, there are two varieties of leftist nutcases here and each has its own party. The statist (wannabe Stalinist in some cases) union members choose the Labour Party; the watermelons choose the Liberal Democrats. People with sense over here, by the way, are beginning to worry that the election will not have a clear result and that the watermelons will have the ability to dictate which of the major parties forms a government; if that happens, then some of the insane nonsense that the Gaia-worshippers want to foist upon us is going to become law.
Mac @ 42: “It has something to do with the black American culture that has produced a black populace with an illegitimacy rate of 70+ percent”
Racism is fast becoming a tired old insult — as meaningful as being accused of antidisestablishmentarianism. The accusation still casts fear only over the older folks — sorry, LOTM, but that is the way it is.
Since racism as a charge is now dying, we can be objective. In the aftermath of the Civil War, untold numbers of black men wandered the US trying to find the wives & children from whom they had been separated by slavery. In the Great Depression, Americans of African Heritage suffered more than many, and yet retained their dignity.
What has destroyed the current culture of Americans with African Heritage is the same thing that is destroying the culture of Americans with European Heritage — intrusive Big Government! It temporarily suspends the inevitable links between behavior & consequence, with horrible consequences. Look at the spread of illegitimacy & indolence & binge drinking among the native English population in the last few decades.
Big Government destroys societies, regardless of the history and skin color of the people involved.
RWE #34
“It’s difficult to separate the resource issue from the moral one. One leads to the other. As Governor, Jesse Ventura said that he was for social liberalism while also being for financial conservatism. Won’t work!”
Right you are sir.
A person who goes around saying “Well, I’m a fiscal conservative but a social liberal” is not a conservative at all, he’s a leftist who doesn’t like high taxes. If you don’t give at least a hat tip to the notion of social conservatism and cannot admit that social liberalism and its anarchic and expensive results undermine economic conservatism are generically damaging to a society your conservatism isn’t authentic.
I know that steps on a lot of toes, but it’s the damn truth.
Good post, RWE.
In the coming rough times, the divide in America will not be along strictly racial lines. The divide will be between those who feed at the public trough, and those who don’t.
When the state and local jurisdictions start to go bankrupt en masse and essential services are cut to the bone to protect the trough feeders, things will get real sticky, and then you will really see the Tea Party movement explode.
Maybe the Democrats are finally outgrowing their racism. The ruination they’ve visited upon black Americans they’re now extending to the rest of us.
***
I just got an email with some jokes attributed to the late-night comix. I never watch those guys –haven’t since 9/11 –so i dunno if the attributions are correct or not. Hope they are! Late night comix broadcast the mild leftward bias, right?
The liberals are asking us to give Obama time. We agree and think 25 to life would be appropriate.
– Leno
America needs Obama-care like Nancy Pelosi needs a Halloween mask.
– Leno
Q: Have you heard about McDonald’s’ new Obama Value Meal?
A: Order anything you like and the guy behind you has to pay for it.
– O’Brien
Q: What does Barack Obama call lunch with a convicted felon?
A: A fund raiser.
– Leno
Q: What’s the difference between Obama’s cabinet and a penitentiary?
A: One is filled with tax evaders, blackmailers and threats to society. The other is for housing prisoners.
– Letterman
Q: What’s the difference between Obama and his dog, Bo?
A: Bo has papers.
– Kimmel
Q: What was the most positive result of the “Cash for clunkers” program?
A: It took 95% of the Obama bumper stickers off the road. – Letterman
Our founders were wise to have presented a declaration to the world giving expression to the organizing principles(OP) for their revolution. Knowing the fallen nature of man to be a universal constant, their political structure was framed to provide checks and controls on power. Uniquely in history, sovereignty was acknowledged to rest in the citizen, not the state. The clearest expression of their humanity was their failure to deal with slavery, which was not legally purged from our system until the civil war, with consequences of that “original sin” continuing even today. Many appear to have been moved to vote for our current President in the belief that in so doing, we would move to a post racial political/societal order. They failed to recognize the commitment by many in retaining or even increasing the divisions within our country for the purpose of maintaining or increasing their power, both politically and economically.
If our country is to reestablish the exceptionalism built on the foundation of our founding, in my opinion, it is essential that, as a country, we be committed to assimilation of all who are citizens or wish to be citizens in a manner consistent with those OP expressed in our Declaration. We must strive to be “one out of many”. A patch quilt of separate groups, races, cultures, religions, with each demanding that their self- identity hold primacy in law and practice over the unity of the whole, will lead us in the direction of Europe or theocratic constructs which appear to be unsustainable.
There is not a perfect temporal order. However, our nation, as established at is founding, seems to be the optimal available in an imperfect world populated by people whose fallen nature requires that we seek a political order which rewards virtue and punishes vice.
“Be not afraid”- JPll
Leo2
mac (42),
I think some of you read it this way:
But I read it this way:
Is that too subtle a distinction? I think not. And also see #30 for a British take on the matter, which seems to be not far off from mine.
It’s good, L3 –if this is the bones of your talk today in Nacogdoches. Want a critique? Drop the second ‘fallen’ and sub in ‘human’ –cover more ground –
I need a short, catchy saying that communicates the pre-French revolution disconnect exemplified by Marie Antionette’s “let them eat cake”. This catch phrase, once seeded in the very tiny minds of the MSM (Katie Couric, etc.), would serve as a rallying call. This is something the Tea Parties are missing. Barack Obama had “Yes we can!” (even though he never did). Ideas?
No Mo Uro #48:
My concept of Conservatism is that of a practically minded libertarian. In principle you may agree that we should be able to buy heroin or cocaine as easily as we do caffeine, and to purchase machine guns at Wal Mart without even showing an ID, but you also realize the consequences of allowing that would be bad.
I think the Left looks at things in a surprisingly similar manner. I think they consider the implications of their concepts of Social Liberalism and then conclude that allowing people to own guns would be disastrous, as would not allowing abortions. In essence, they have concluded that if guns are allowed to exist, then it is morally wrong to keep them from 2 year olds, convicted felons, drunks, drug addicts, and the clinically insane, so we can’t have guns. Similarly, we can’t have a strong military or allow people to drive their own cars because the costs of fixing the problems that result from social liberalism will preclude the existence of those luxuries.
Unsk – “In the coming rough times, the divide in America will not be along strictly racial lines. The divide will be between those who feed at the public trough, and those who don’t.”
I agree. This is starting to happen at the state level where bankrupt budgets and high unemployment are forcing hard choices.
Unsk # 49
“When the state and local jurisdictions start to go bankrupt en masse and essential services are cut to the bone to protect the trough feeders, things will get real sticky, and then you will really see the Tea Party movement explode.”
This is already happening all across the country right now, at every level of government.
For the public sector worker, with vanishingly rare exceptions, doing a good job or even getting the job done never was the reason they took the position. It was the promise of perfect income stream security and a guaranteed pension and health care for life. Getting the job done is ancillary at best and a nuisance most of the time for the sort that populate that sector. Attack me for “generalizing” if it makes you feel better. We all know it’s the truth.
In towns and cities everywhere, as tax revenues decline with the economy, town and city governments will, rather than forgo their COLA’s, simply decrease the amounts of services they supply. An example might be that they’ll cut library hours, or cut youth center or elderly center hours, or cut sports and other programs and textbooks and the number of hours schools are open, or not fix the roads until next year because they’ve spent all their revenue on DPW salaries instead of hot-top or concrete, etc. They’ll keep cutting right up to the end point, which is that all the teachers and town workers will be getting paid and no services will be provided at all, and have no qualms at all about doing so. Essentially, all the workers and teachers will be sitting at home getting paychecks and every single facility and job they are supposed to do or staff will be closed down. If a town has four librarians working at the library, they’ll be sitting at home getting their checks (and health coverage and, eventually, their pensions) while the library is permanently shut down and mothballed.
If you think public sector employees won’t let this happen, take a look at the fisheries regulation agency in this country, where certain regions of the coast have three NMFS employees and grant receivers for every commercial fishing license, and are simultaneously pushing to shut down most commercial fisheries permanently. It’s not an imagined scenario of some guy commenting on a blog and blowing smoke, it’s happening RIGHT NOW in real time, folks. Our fisheries regulators look with envy at Europe’s regulators, highly-paid bureaucrats who purposely put nearly all small and medium fishermen out of business and now have fisheries which consist of a handful of de facto government owned giant factory ships which monopolize the resource. The regulators there get the same pay they always have, there are just as many of them, but they work way much less hard to do their “job” of regulating because the number of boats fishing is a tiny fraction of what it once was. If things aren’t checked soon U.S. fisheries will suffer the same fate.
I’m hoping that when the time comes (I believe that time isn’t far off) that the town and city and state and federal trough feeders finally say out loud what they’ve thought all along, which is “Screw you, private sector maggots, we’re not here to serve you, YOU exist to fund my life – we’ll take your taxes and give you nothing for it and you’ll just have to deal”, that the Tea Party movement will, as Unsk says, explode.
Alexis, I think we should return to space too, and pursue the High Frontier.
But in the long run, you first have to survive the short run, and we aren’t going to the mood with the current leadership class and current incarnations of institutions in our society. First things first, we need new people and new (or at least reformed and revitalized) institutions.
42. The white people who voted for Obama voted for the hope of a post-racial nation
No. Nice way of speaking the pomo language of the liberal elite though. The white people who voted for Obama are the same white people who wouldn’t be caught dead walking down the street hand-in-hand with a black person of the opposite gender. It comes down to “I’m not racist, my best friend is black.” That’s nice, SWPL white person, you can have black people over for dinner, but you know for sure grand-daddy will evaporate your trust fund should you ever show up to dinner with a belly pregnant with a black child.
It’s mere tokenism that got Obama elected by the white people who elected him. I feel nothing but pity for the black people whose knowledge of Obama was so strained by the MSM that they can’t see the truth of who he really is. And we on the BC all know there is at least some truth to the birther/Alinsky/Enquirer scandals.
Lordy. These liberal elites find the perfect Uncle tom to advance their cause, and still you racists like Mac, Habu, Whiskey, blame black people for taking the bait.
LOTM may live in the best of all possible worlds, but at least he’s not kissing the hand that feeds him BS.
#58 JMH
we aren’t going to the moon with the current leadership class and current incarnations of institutions in our society.
I suppose you’ve noticed too that the NASA event on Tax Day was totally phony– not a single NASA worker was allowed to attend Teh Won’s photo-op:
Quote from NBC’s science correspondent: BARBREE: …I’m a little disturbed right now, Alex. I just found out some very disturbing news. The President came down here in his campaign and told these 15,000 workers here at the Space Center that if they would vote for him, that he would protect their jobs. 9,000 of them are about to lose their job. He is speaking before 200, extra hundred people here today only. It’s invitation only. He has not invited a single space worker from this space port to attend. It’s only academics and other high officials from outside of the country. Not one of them is invited to hear the President of the United States, on their own space port, speak today. Back to you Alex.
http://directorblue.blogspot.com/2010/04/obamas-nasa-speech-completely-staged.html
I don’t think the Public Piggies (PPs) are quite as nasty as No Mo Uro makes them out to be. It could be that this current recession will give folks pause to consider just how many PPs they are willing to pay for. There is a fundamental disconnect in many states where the Government declares to the tax paying public that the State government programs are more important than the people paying for them. This doesn’t sit well with many people.
Are the programs more important than the people paying the bills? Sometimes yes, often times no. The problem is many tax payers don’t understand that nearly 90% of a State budget goes to PP salaries. So in essence “the program” bottom line is ultimately a staff of PPs.
At some point folks have to understand that there is a huge economic difference between private and public sector jobs. Obama pumped a lot of money into the troughs the PPs feed from and he justified it partly with the notion that PPs somehow create jobs in the private sector.
Off-topic:
For the last few weeks this site has taken a very long time to load, all kinds of stuff that I don’t know the meaning of. Whatever it is, it’s getting to be a real nuisance.
RWE #55
There is a huge difference, though, between being a practical, responsible libertarian and the social liberalism you describe. I don’t see them as being similar at any level except the abstract. There’s a big difference between saying “Firearm freedom is important, but perhaps some small percentage of individuals shouldn’t have them” and “Firearm freedom shouldn’t exist at all because some small percentage of individuals shouldn’t have them”.
The social and financial costs of the long litany of things you listed are so much greater than, say, firearm freedom that their degree of difference is a difference in kind as well.
By your own definition, social liberalism isn’t practical. That’s a major difference, too.
Agree about the need to strangle the socialist baby. Like I said in a previous post, the public sector has always looked at the private the way a tapeworm looks at an intestine. It’s just that now they make no effort to hide it.
dla #61
“Are the programs more important than the people paying the bills? Sometimes yes, often times no. The problem is many tax payers don’t understand that nearly 90% of a State budget goes to PP salaries. So in essence “the program” bottom line is ultimately a staff of PPs.”
1. Please give an example of a state program (other than national guard or LE) which is more important than the viability of the private sector.
2. Don’t you think that government workers making “the program’s” bottom line public sector income stream security makes the public sector employees “as nasty” as I described them? If so, why not? They violated the social contract they made with the private sector at its most fundamental level.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/16/AR2010041601998.html
Grover’s Fannie grubbing aside, these were the people who made over $100,000 who didn’t generally get it directly from government employment, contracting or litigation, versus that other rapidly growing class of 100k plus professionals in the fields of lobbying, carbon trading, corporatist (privatized profits, socialized demand and payment) health care bureaucracy expansion, and Hope and Change book publishing. Oh yes, and top media professional still standing while sacking your colleagues who actually do the news gathering (here’s looking at you, Katie Couric and your 10 mil a year for smiling a lot and asking catty questions of Sarah Palin).
On the flip side, of course people with a little bit more discretionary income, or who used to have it, are more likely to protest. They have much more to lose! Folks who never had it are either down in line for food at one of the area church food banks or working two jobs just to scrape by while being counted as no longer unemployed so we can pretend unemployment isn’t at Depression-era levels.
What we have here is a clash of one motivated upper middle class (call them the petite bourgeoisie) against another motivated upper middle class (call them the Obamaklatura).
Notice I DID NOT include that other notoriously liberal group of professionals, college professors, in the Obamaklatura. Unless they’re experts in jet setting for green lecturing like Steve Chu, forget it (can’t wait for some wag at the next energy conference to ask him for the Iceland volcano’s carbon footprint compared to that of mankind). College liberals are sooooo yesterday, I don’t know why campus conservatives even bother picking on them anymore. College campus liberals/activists are maintained by corporatist limosine ‘liberals’ in much the same way that Roman emperors once kept exotic zoo animals while they go on creating carbon markets for Government Sachs to save the planet.
A lefty neighbor of mine is famous in our little town for being a “human shield” in Iraq and subsequently offering teach-in slide shows to educate the same minded populace. He has an attractive tidy house on the river. He often bragged that he paid no federal taxes, as he didn’t want his money flowing to a war he disliked.
So, if resources are at bottom the answer, why don’t we just enmass with hold ‘em.
X @ 65: Milbank is disgusting.
FTA: This is in line with a USA Today/Gallup poll last month that found 55 percent of Tea Party supporters had incomes of $50,000 or more (compared with 50 percent in the general population), and only 19 percent had earnings below $30,000 (vs. 25 percent overall).
The wealth advantage of the Tea Partiers helps to explain the rather un-populist message emanating from Freedom Plaza: Tax the wealthy less and the poor more.
That MINISCULE difference in income between Tea Party supporters and a more general public, and Milbank starts ranting about the “wealthy”? What was HIS income last year?
Un be f’ing lieveable.
Even $100k/year is barely making getting by in any large metro area these days.
Even $250k/year is only more or less what we used to think of as “middle class”, given the uncertainties in jobs and incomes these days.
We’re all f’ing peasants as far as I can see.
And if Glen Beck ENTERPRISES brings in $32m/year, I doubt Glen himself takes home 10% of that, and maybe much less. With a staff of 34, what’s the average burden for the average worker in an average small company these days? I’m sure Glen’s not starving, but Milbank again is throwing stones from his glass house.
Gordon @ 62: Yeah on the slow loading, esp if you’re on an old, slow, and mono-processor workstation. Everybody’s web page these days requires a dual-core processor just to say hello. Raising your security level to kill flash animations and activex addins, can help. Can’t even read lucianne.com with all the flashing garbage her site loads.
#61. dla
Are the programs more important than the people paying the bills? Sometimes yes, often times no. The problem is many tax payers don’t understand that nearly 90% of a State budget goes to PP salaries. So in essence “the program” bottom line is ultimately a staff of PPs.
The major problem here is that it gets to be a vicious cycle. When I used to live in Austin, Texas you could pretty forget about calling the police if your home was burglarized (mine was). They essentially told me that they would not make any effort to investigate it.
On the other hand, God help you if you attempted to drive down the street with an expired inspection sticker or without wearing your seat belt. The Law would be upon you in a heartbeat. Of course, the tickets produced revenue for the City so they could pay for more police who would disproportionately be placed in traffic enforcement rather than concentrating on the more serious crimes that most people are concerned with. And when there was a budget crisis? The powers that be ended a successful program that audited the serial numbers of items that were pawned. That put a lot of thieves and burglars in jail while it was active. At the same time they authorized the hiring of 30 “City Marshals,” whose duty was to find and arrest people who had outstanding traffic tickets. Not felonies, not misdemeanors, just traffic tickets that were issued by the City of Austin.
In a similar vein back some time ago Glenn Reynolds linked to some situation where a toll road had been erected with the notion that the tolls would be in force until the road was paid for. This happened, but the toll booths were not shut down. Why? Because they would have had to terminate the jobs of the toll booth attendants as well as their supervisors. So it wasn’t done.
I’m sure Alice or the Red Queen could explain the sense of it all to me, but I’ve lost Alice’s cell phone number and Nancy Pelosi is not returning my calls.
Josh – yes indeed. My own experience suggests that 50k a year AFTER TAX ($70-$80k before combined household) is about the U.S. floor for two adults to live a ‘middle class’ existence even in supposedly more affordable parts of the country in the South — unless one can grow one’s own food while magically driving less. 50,000 a year is close to the MEDIAN income, hello that means half the people are poorer. All Milbank is saying there is that Tea Partyers are about average with some outliers, which no one would deny. It is the middle class rather than the poor or super rich have been the most wiped out, why would he expect anything different?
One of my themes here at BC for months has been how little the media talks about food inflation while blaming the poor for their own obesity. Certainly millions could stand to watch TV less and exercise more but there are more gyms offering $25 a month memberships than ever before and this does not seem to make a difference, and I think massive quantities of food stuffed with preservatives are one reason why Mexican women in Mexico stay reasonably fit but on this side of the Border they balloon. Same genetics, different diets. If you eat organic for two adults, prepare to shell out $800 a month minimum with less meat – just some chicken and fish.
There is also something truly creepy about Obama saying that the Tea Partyers should thank him for their tax cuts and then some Democrasher clowns showing up on the Mall with not just an identical talking point but a freshly prepared banner. Coincidence? Probably not. SEIU thugs indeed. One of the guys on the video I watched had an incredibly thick Haitian accent.
Mr. X: “another motivated upper middle class (call them the Obamaklatura).”
Obamaklatura! Love it, Mr. X. You deserve a Gold Star for that.
To the reality show and the “idol” contests was now added the dismal American practice
Excuse me? Sorry to get huffy here, but reality shows and “idol” shows are a British and European invention (with additional ones originating in East Asia). Just another canard aimed at us “vulgar” Americans. We also invented modern environmentalism and had the first few oficial Earth Days and the first EPA before any European countries started to emulate us. We Americcans have long since gotten to equal footing with Europeans as far as worldliness and “sophistication,” whether good or bad. The Brits and other Euros need to stop deluding themselves about their phony cultural “superiority.”
I just want to say BRAVO to #26 Mac and @28 Marta, for their comment about @16 LOM’s post. You guys said it better than I could. Bye Bye LOM.
#67 Josh:
Even $250k/year is only more or less what we used to think of as “middle class”, given the uncertainties in jobs and incomes these days.
What gets me about the $250K threshold is that the majority of the people who currently make that amount or more (and that is often combined income) have only very recently reached that economic level. It’s not as if they’ve been making that amount — or even close to it — most of their working lives, nor are they likely to make that in perpetuity. Typically, these are folks in their peak earning years, more often than not adding up to about a decade-plus of that level of earnings from the time they attain that level to the time tey retire and/or are no longer able to earn those amounts. For having succeeded through hard work and education and initiative and rescourcefulness, they are to be penalized with a tax rate equal to that of multimillionaires.
Also typically, these are folks who can and will pay their kids college tuitions, and will live in better neighborhoods with serious mortgages. Because of how human nature works, most of these people believe in rewarding themselves materially, and of taking good care of their own children. The don’t have tons of money lying around. At the same time, they do have above average discretionary income, which typically goes into savings and investments. They are the backbone of the “investment class” which has grown both exponentially and demographically since the Reagan years. By punishing these people with higher taxes, we are robbing the country of a good chunk of its savings and investment pool, and insuring that the hyper-wealthy will have less competition from below than they do now. It is a staggering irony to me that the very same ideologues who rail against the rich would put policies in place that would entrench those same rich.
So this blog is officially a white supremacist rag now?
Fletcher Christian:
Thanks for your illuminating remarks about the situation in the UK and your views on the issues. Your clarity is much appreciated.
LOTM
You would make a passable leader on Big Rock Candy Mountain but you’re not a war leader and we are at war internally and externally. You are wobbly and lack guts to ever lead a group of men /women who are ready to go to war to take back this country from the socialists internally.Externally they’re ready to use the full arsenal on the SOB’s that are causing the problems…mainly islam.
I have been reading you now for six or seven months and have come to the conclusion that you have the spine of a chocolate eclair…..please feel free to huff your way over to your site and continue advocating patty cake with people who want to ruin this country or militarily defeat it.
Personally I’m sick of your appeasement and liberal,oleaginous,forbearance.
“Some people never learn that brute force is not always the best strategy.”
It is NEVER the best strategy. Sometimes it is the ONLY strategy. The difference between a politician and a statesman is telling when Only has arrived.
“Force is the vital principle and immediate parent of despotism.”
- Thomas Jefferson
Don Rodrigo @75, “By punishing these people with higher taxes, we are robbing the country of a good chunk of its savings and investment pool, and insuring that the hyper-wealthy will have less competition from below than they do now. It is a staggering irony to me that the very same ideologues who rail against the rich would put policies in place that would entrench those same rich.”
No irony. The ‘railing’ by the ideologues is false. It is the means by which they themselves become rich and entrenched.
76. Stephanie
Ah, say what sista? You must be a young’n.
No More Uro #63:
Yes, there is huge difference between “everything’s allowed” and “everything’s allowed and since we can’t allow that practically, we don’t allow some things for anyone.” Or as Robert Heinlien put it, it’s as if babies can’t eat steak so grown men have to eat pureed lima beans instead of sirloin.
Social Liberalism = Socialism applied to more things than just economics = Militant Mediocrity in all things.
Tcobb #70: Please note that that same police attitude prevails in places that have no real problems with a large enough force. Certain kinds of crimes committed by certain kinds of people go uninvestigated, since it as viewed as “Them again! What can you do?” or else the courts simply refuse to apply appropriate punishment in those cases when they are prosecuted. I have told here more than once the story of the man in South Carolina who lost his house for shooting in self defense a 17 prior conviction armed felon who was burglarizing his home. Completely aside from the incredible outrage of a burglar being given the net equity of a house he was stealing from, what in the hell was he doing out after 17 prior felony convictions?
Habu, take a Prozac and call me in the morning.
Talk of arsenals is not necessary. All your targets are Americans.
“To fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.”
-Sun Tzu, the Art of War
Take a quick run on the interstate. Look at all those trucks. A large percentage of them are taking food from a red state to a blue state. Rural to Urban. Listen to those truckers on the CD. Very little love for Obama there.
Stop those trucks for 5 days and the blue staters in their mega cities stop eating. 8 or 9 days without food and a lot of Democrats will see the light. After a few weeks, they will be eating each other. I figure the dogs, cats and rats will be gone by day 15.
That is when we accept their surrender and start the food flowing again. NO American city holds enough food on it’s shelves for more then 72 hours. After 48 hours, the stores will start to look empty and panic will start. After that is rationing and food riots.
What are the 4th worlders going to do? Send out starving welfare recipients to drive the trucks? If they could drive a truck they wouldn’t be on welfare.
No, the “Starve them out” plan is better then a civil war. Which is what you are advocating. All I’m advocating is a transportation strike, which is NOT illegal.
back to the topic
I found that on a french islamist blog
“Muslim voters may hold the key to UK election”
http://www.thenational.ae/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100417/FOREIGN/704169888/1013
Habu,
Age has nothing to do with the fact that I don’t understand why you presume yourself to be better than black people.
You also want this country to revert to the way it was when one ethnic group ruled with an iron fist, but I don’t know which ethnic group that is. Let me go get my crayola box and try to match up Scoth-Irish to taupe, Protestant German to beige, Anglo-Saxon to ivory…then perhaps I will be able to color your world and see the bigger picture?
#80 davidt
No irony. The ‘railing’ by the ideologues is false. It is the means by which they themselves become rich and entrenched.
Yes, I stand corrected. After all, Obama has been labeled a corporatist by some.
. We Americcans have long since gotten to equal footing with Europeans as far as worldliness and “sophistication,” whether good or bad. The Brits and other Euros need to stop deluding themselves about their phony cultural “superiority.”
A lot of commentary about the debates saw them as yet another American political import, the association of the reality shows with American culture, along with the singing contest idea, was my mistake.
In a similar vein back some time ago Glenn Reynolds linked to some situation where a toll road had been erected with the notion that the tolls would be in force until the road was paid for.
That’s exactly what the Golden Gate Bridge did. The tolls were supposed to continue until the bridge was paid for. The problem was that by the time the bonds were to be retired the bridge was a nice money-maker for San Francisco. What did they do about it? They retired the old bonds by issuing new ones with something like a 50-year maturity, and then proclaimed that seeing as how they were still in debt the tolls had to continue to pay for it.
It is a staggering irony to me that the very same ideologues who rail against the rich would put policies in place that would entrench those same rich.
That loses its irony when you realize how much more liberal the rich, especially the ultra rich, are than the poor and middle class. The Democrats call themselves the party of the poor, but its leadership is conspicuously wealthier than the Republican leadership. Entrenching the rich means entrenching Democrat power.
blockquote>In a world with no resource constraints, my guess is that conservatives would be happy to buy the progressives off just to shut them up. Mean-spiritedness is not the reason for the Tea Parties. If the Tea Partiers had more jack, it would be simpler to hand the progressives a wad and say ‘go away’.
The first 35 years of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society were pretty much exactly that. And I think that if you look at the mid-80’s to 2000 or so, it’s apparent that a prosperous society can support a rather large Wastrel Class. The problem appears to be that the Wastrels grow in number and appetite until they crash the system. Too much is never enough for them, or for their Political Class patrons who trade bread for votes.
Like the signs on the tables at Casa de Pico in San Diego’s Old Town warn the patrons, give that little bird your taco and soon you’ll have a whole flocko.
When the media asks you whether you stopped beating your wife, don’t answer the question and do change the subject. When the media asks you when you stopped beating your wife, don’t answer the question and do change the subject.
Racists, and liberal racists are no exception on this, will use skin color as a wedge to divide opposing groups. Dissident groups routinely get agents provocateurs that will either incite violence or split up the group with racial slurs. Nowadays, it may be an NBC reporter who asks a “black” participant of a Tea Party, “Have you ever felt uncomfortable?”
So, given the propensity of racists to poison the well of politics, we need to watch for agendas at odds with the continued existence of the United States of America.
Liberal racists want people to say, “I’m a Tea Party activist and I’m not racist.” Likewise, they will focus their cameras onto any sign saying “White Power” or some equivalent comment at a Tea Party rally. Likewise, “black” Tea Party activists are taking a great deal of heat for saying what they think. Agents from racist groups, the media, and the government have a vested interest in subverting the Tea Party movement to make it look like a “whites only” group.
The heat that “black” conservatives are facing is the tip of the iceberg. Once the freedom of speech gets portrayed as “whites only”, the freedom of speech will be curtailed for “white” people too. Let’s not let President Obama drag us down to his level. Instead, let’s lead America to a better standard than he is willing to set for himself.
It is best to refuse to play into racist bait by either saying “I’m not racist” or saying “I am racist”. Race is and ought to be irrelevant. I know very well what our President is like, and please note that I warned against him during the 2008 presidential campaign. That said, the opposition has a responsibility to show requisite maturity to lead our nation, especially when our President does not set that example himself.
Let’s take our anger against the Obama administration and channel it into not only winning the midterms and not only replacing our president with someone better, but also reclaiming a vision of America as an empire of liberty. We need to reclaim America’s future. If we can look forward to a post-Obama era and if we can look forward to an era where al-Qaeda is unequivocally defeated by American ideals, we can reclaim that future.
That loses its irony when you realize how much more liberal the rich, especially the ultra rich, are than the poor and middle class.
Bob Smith:
Yes, I’ve noticed that. What I call the hyper-rich are particularly inclined towards transnationalism and their own brand of leftism. While I don’t think that they are “conspiring” to do so, it does suit their purpose to help suppress possible competitors. One of the pillars of the American way of life is the periodic introduction of the newly rich to compete against and even transplant the Old Money. America at its best is a churning stream of economic dynamism. Supression of the middle class entrepreneurs will create a stagnant pond.
Stephanie-
Your theory that Obama is an “Uncle Tom” is an intriguing one I’ve never heard before. Can you substantiate?
Also, would you call me a racist because I believe Western civilzation is superior to others, and is especially superior to the government-plantation ghetto culture that has trapped black Americans?
A lot of commentary about the debates saw them as yet another American political import, the association of the reality shows with American culture, along with the singing contest idea, was my mistake.
Thank you Wretchard. It goes to my point that Europeans are stuck on the notion that only we Americans are cultural polluters. Also, a European may disingenuously claim that their origination of reality shows and the rebirth of talent shows was an imitation of “Americana.” Such an argumant would fall flat when one would simply ask: “Then why do you produce such dreck at all?”
Oh, I see I misunderstood your comment Wretchard. You were referring to the importation of political debates in a TV format. Oh, well, their getting the better bargain, since, these days, we seem hell-bent on importing their economic and social policies.
The accusation of racism is meaningless. Rev. Wright is a “respected civil rights activist” along with Al Sharpton (Freddy’s Fashion Mart, Tawana Brawley). It literally like the accusation of Nazism, fascism, and so on have no meaning. NONE AT ALL.
History, and people, don’t care about “nice to haves” which are moral preening, and the like.
A side-by-side comparison of Ireland, and the UK, both similarly broke, both generally of the same ethnic composition, and both facing the same the issue: how to react to the money running out, is in order.
Ireland, through drastic cuts to public employment, public spending, and tax increases, seems for the moment to have its house in order. Spreads over German bonds are higher, but nowhere near the levels of Greece, Portugal, or Spain. Which are perceived to be riskier.
Ireland is about 87% Catholic, and only 2.1% non-Christian, according to the CIA World Fact Book. It is 87.5% Irish, 7.5% other “White” (European, I would wager) and the rest Asian/Black and “Other” amounting to about 4.9%.
The trust nexus and network, by a homogenous society, allows far deeper pain, cuts, and unity in the time of this financial crisis. Since everybody is distantly related to each other, this makes perfect sense.
By comparison, the UK, (approximately 20 times larger), has Christian at only 71%, and White at 92.1% — HOWEVER, this is balanced out by most young people being non-White (higher birth rates) and large concentrations of exclusively Caribbean Black, or Pakistani Muslim, in various historically native UK cities. Particularly in the North and around Winchester.
There is no trust nexus. No trust network. About 40% of UK Muslim young people (remember, this is the near-majority of young people, i.e. non-Whites) want Sharia. They according to Dalrymple travel in packs and intimidate (and worse) non-Natives. In particular, lone White males and females are targets of violent action, which are NEVER described as hate crimes.
There cannot be a unity of action, shared pain, and across the board sacrifice. Cutting welfare spending, social programs, and various patronage government jobs and employment will as a practical matter result in RIOTS in UK cities by non-Whites. It has in the past during Thatcher’s time and there are far more non-Whites.
The UK is still a relatively White/Native nation, and yet its political unity is undermined by the fact that even a relatively small amount of non-Whites/non-natives, with an advantage in youth, and concentrated exclusively in various cities, can have “banlieu” impacts on national spending policy.
France has the same problem.
This would be an issue, if the Pakistani Muslims and Caribbean Blacks in the UK were magically replaced by Polish Plumbers, Catholic, non-English speaking, with vastly different views on almost every particular cultural and political subject. But yes, race does indeed complicate things, and forms racial solidarity. Since it is a question, at heart, of who is most closely and most distantly related to you?
There will in fact, be no “race war” in Europe, or the US. Middle aged White business people do not show up for street fights. The typical Tea Partier is a White woman, aged 55+, who owns her own small business or is a middle class professional such as an accountant or real estate professional.
HOWEVER, the question of who gets taxed, and where the money is spent, and who is let into the nation (instantly eligible for welfare and affirmative action preferences) and who will be the majority population are of intense political, economic, and cultural interests, and will be the scenes of titanic political struggles.
As long as the good times were rolling, ala New Orleans pre-Katrina, everyone focused on making money (and spending it). Inherent struggles over taxation and spending and immigration policies (and affirmative action, welfare, and so on) did not matter. Until Katrina hit and question of survival, and rebuilding, arose.
Look at what happened to post-Katrina New Orleans. I had considerable sympathy for Ray Nagin’s desire for New Orleans to be a Black Majority city. Blacks created in New Orleans Black High Culture, Jazz, Literature, Art, in a place where as Jelly Roll Morton noted, a Black man even in the worst of Segregation (1890-1920) could conduct himself as a dignified human being by simply avoiding interaction (humiliating) with Whites. Black Americans justly consider New Orleans the founding city of Black American High Culture, with world class contributions to Music in particular.
In a time of crisis, particularly the rebuilding after Katrina, Black natives lacked the social trust and cohesion to effectively rebuild. The City government stayed both corrupt and inept (and also immobile). What rebuilding was done, was done by Whites, both inside and outside New Orleans, in the CBD, Uptown, and the Quarter. The labor and manpower were supplied by Mexican and Mexican origin emigres, both legal and illegal, who would work at almost any job, no matter how disgusting, for relatively little, and showed remarkable ethnic unity despite the collapse of Mexican society inside Mexico.
Ray Nagin was neither evil nor stupid. He was no better or worse than say, Mayor Bloomberg or Denver’s Wellington Webb. His constituents, however, were unable to self-organize and render him the rubber stamp on rebuilding. Tragically, the great gift of Black Americans under Segregation to the world, will now soon resemble a combination of Disneyland, corporate Times Square, and Mexican exile El Paso.
The West since 1955 or so has had the illusion of safety, security, and constant economic growth papering over huge differences in race, religion, ethnicity, and culture. That seems in global stagnation at best, no longer the case and the cruel trials of crisis will put multiculturalism and PC and silly accusations of “racism” (La Raza, Louis Farrakhan, Al Sharpton, and Rev. Wright “good” while Tea Parties “bad”) to the hardest test.
My cynical side says that we will see a political version of the logic of the Dashiell Hammett story “the Big Knockover” where crooks decide the cut goes farther the fewer people are in on it. This is likely to be the case in the UK.
The Tea Parties cannot be marginalized by discussions of racism (although that is a tried and true tactic of the wannabe ruling class). The Tea Parties exist simply because the majority, not the minority, of Americans are feeling disenfranchised by Congress and the Administration. Simply.
“The West since 1955 or so has had the illusion of safety, security, and constant economic growth papering over huge differences in race, religion, ethnicity, and culture.”
Whiskey, you’ve just described a similar scenario to Yugoslavia before Tito’s passing and the wall coming down.
God help us.
Let me add that “we are all socialists now.”
There is no turning back. Any more than after 1918, the Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and German Empires could be restored. Or the Ottoman Sultanate continued.
I don’t see any return to “small government.” There just is not any way to do it, too many people depend on a fairly massive government. Which is the employer not of the last but only resort, given the sclerotic nature of Western investment, the crisis in demographics (young immigrants are not economically productive like say, young West Germans in 1960), and the soon to burst nature of the Chinese bubble.
Economic growth papered over a lot of issues. White men, young and old, found their opportunities in the Private Sector, who cared if government was an exclusive PC zone and “no-go” zone for unconnected White middle and working class men.
Well, now it matters.
My guess is that crisis and economic stagnation will create a system of trading blocs and a lot of economic autarky (get ready for the $20 Chinese sneakers to be replaced by $110 domestic ones) to pump up employment, lots of defacto devaluations and defaults (i.e. huge inflation killing the middle/working class), demands by the majority to kick out from the cut as many people as possible who DO NOT resemble their cousins, and naked resource grabs for unfortunate peoples who have resources a plenty, but not much in the way of military strength to defend it.
Imperialism, and colonialism, and mercantilism, unfortunately “work” for a short-run. It helped lift Japan in the 1930′s out of the world-wide depression. It has been France’s traditional solution to economic woes, and often Britain’s. China seems intent on repeating it. America could probably replicate this, as well as Russia. India, Pakistan, Iran, and other second tier nations can also probably do this.
Restraint by the West, has been based on good times and thus consideration for opinions of others. That is the first to go in a crisis that is sustained. As a practical matter, Europe has no young people (who are natives) so they will simply be ruled by whoever is the biggest man on the bloc, either Russia, various other powers in the area, or perhaps both. Iran has ambitions as the “protector” of Europe’s Muslims, an ironic copy of Europe’s role as protector of Levantine Christians a century ago.
America, China, perhaps Russia, certainly India, and likely Iran, have enough young people now to move. Pakistan also would fit there. Grab resources, and auction them off for money. It can be called the Cortez strategy. It is ugly. But is IMHO the likely long-term outcome to the crisis, because I don’t see any other structural situation to address economic stagnation.
Of course that “fix” is just a band-aid. But it has worked for a century or two. Which is likely to be the argument of policy makers in favor of it. [Need I mention, Europe, fat, rich, and old, is likely to be the equivalent of an old lady in a bad neighborhood with a social security check?]
@Whiskey on 96 and 99:
Well said, sir.
I have said this before and I will say it again. You have grown exponentially as a writer since I started reading your posts on BC. I don’t always agree with you, but you present your case well and logically. You catch flack because you take on the hard topics, head on, full steam ahead. For what it is worth, as the opinion of one old man in the midst of America, I do not see any racism or sexism in any thing you write, just thoughtful discussion of the knotty problems facing America today and how we got here. You promote a lot of thought and discussion. Seems like that is what our host is all about; thoughtful pondering.
I’m not looking for a drinking buddy (you don’t seem like a tea drinker any way), but I just thought I needed to say this.
I disagree that animus behind the Tea Party is a resource fight yet. Although that day may be coming, and it will be a sad day. Raw politics reduced to it’s essential becomes a spoils fight and that’s ugly as we start getting into von Clausewitz territory and the potential for violent struggles.
Something I’ve mentioned on this blog from time to time over the last five years or so is that eventually the Europeans will kick out the non europeans and especially the moslems.
One of my convictions from studying desalination research is that within the next 10 years or so the technology will be in place to cheaply move vast rivers of desalinized water inland from seas like the Mediterranean –so as to turn deserts like the whole of north africa’s sahara into the vast breadbaskets. The result will be that the opportunities will be significantly greater for european moslems in the places where they came from.
One very big problem in making this happen is providing the immense power to pump, say, a 30 ft diameter pipe full of water inland 1000 miles. And not just one pipe but 100′s. of pipelines. One answer to this is portable nuclear power plants. The USA does not have the regulatory means to use portable nuclear power plants here in the USA but American firms have already booked orders for nuclear power plants for delivery to other countries in 2112.
Right now portable nuclear power plants are expensive–but with mass production they will fall in price. The effect is to make these huge ubiquitous pipelines–while today still expensive–technically easy. You lay huge diameter pipe, drop huge pumps and portable nuclear power plants at intervals. Repeat.
I blogged about portable nuclear power plants a couple months ago
My stats just lit up with hits from all over the middle east and north africa.
With amnesty for illegals our ‘social security’ and ‘welfare’ will be in the hands of the ‘new’ Americans (if they can find work in the private sector, that is).
I disagree that the animus behind the Tea Party is resource competition, yet. Although that day may very well be coming. That will be a sad day if it comes, because politics reduced to its essential core is a raw spoils fight, and these are ugly.
Framers of the Constitution hoped for something better, and we’re better off distilling Madison than von Clausewitz. The balance our founding sought to achieve was a delicate one that hoped to stave off tyranny for the sake of maximal personal liberties. The Tea Party emerges straight along the lines of this philosophical tradition. It is a healthy development. Considering that we’ve seen over the past year from this Congress. This Congress has enacted legislation before it can be read or discussed; it has even enacted a major bill they hadn’t even finished writing (!!!); it has sought to sheild its activity from scrutiny by passing laws that fundamentally alter Americans’ relationship with the government in the dead of Sunday nights during Chistmas week and even on Christmas Eve itself; it has purposefully and willfully acted contrary to the expressed, easily discerned will of the people; and it has attempted to thwart, to silence, to shame and otherwise limit avenues of public discourse through the shambles of what’s become the town-hall meetings with constituents.
All this has gone on with the full support of the elected executive, one who seeks to obligate Americans to a $20 trillion deficit by the time his own reasoning according to his budgetary plans and expects us to thank him for it.
In light of these events, it is no surprise that Tea Party movement has begun, and it’s a healthy thing. What would be concerning is if there were not one. That movement is still at a stage of philosophical development, one of public dialogues to counter the creep of tyranny inside the American government.
It’s not a spoils fight yet, and if it becomes one we’ll know that the philosophical effort has failed and we’re headed for a very bad time.
So, let’s listen to Papa Ray and mobilize to vote.
The real conflict is cultural. Racism is a diversion, a rhetorical tool that is supposed to throw your opponents down to the moral low ground. The problem is that most cultures did arise from within a particular racial or ethnic group, so often there is a correlation between race and culture. But they should never be confused.
As a “white” American I am sure that I have a lot more in common with other middle class Americans of any race or ethnicity than I do with Europeans from the countries of my immigrant ancestors. Its really all about culture.
In any healthy culture a person should be judged by their character and their deeds, not by which identity group they fall in as a result of the great genetic lottery. The problem with “celebrating diversity” is that it polarizes society in a very ugly way. The different identity groups begin to perceive society in terms of a zero-sum game. In order for my group to get some new goodies (status, jobs, political power, whatever) we are going to have to take some away from one or more of the other groups. When everyone can gain from stabbing anyone else in the back it does not make for a pleasant party.
Its a plan for disaster. Nothing good will come of it. Screw “diversity,” identity politics, and all those who worship them.
Charles, I’m not a scientist or a farmer, but have a question about turning the Sahara into a bread basket. What do you use for topsoil? All the water in the world won’t make sterile sand grow anything will it? Desalinization might help us here in Tucson from running out of water so we can cram a couple million more snowbirds in the barren desert.
I am a farmer, and I have been wondering the very same thing, Trangbang68.
And I doubt that the Sahara sand is going to hold the irrigation water very well. Might kinda just sink out of sight. Like way below root level.
trangbang68 — make a day trip to Yuma sometime, if you haven’t, and be amazed. It’s one of the most productive agricultural regions in the world, smack in the middle of a desert. The soil’s incredible, and growing season lasts all year long.
But, yes, the target soils cannot be all sand. You need a good mix of sand, clay and humus. You can’t grow anything on a sand dune, at least without modifying it. But there are plenty of desert areas that would be remarkably productive given a little water.
Whiskey @99 “I don’t see any return to “small government.” There just is not any way to do it, too many people depend on a fairly massive government.”
Irregardless of any racial discussion, that is a realistic fear. Cutting the size of government down to a sustainable level is a very difficult problem. Whiskey is right in this respect; there are too many people are tied to the benefits and workings of massive government. There are too many subsidies, too much regulation, too many regulators and lawyers, too many people tied to the Quangos suckling from the public teat, and too much intrusion into the private lives of our citizens. The political power of the vast government apparatus is overwhelming, and many, if not most, of our political representatives that call themselves “Republicans” barely even want to fight this monster.
However, Whiskey’s “Cortez” strategy is not a viable solution. A balkanized Mercantile economy based on racial spoils and plunder will be less than the sum of it’s parts. The Mercantile economies of Japan and China only worked because they could feed off the growth of the US. They are parasites just feeding from a stronger organism. America’s free enterprise system developed only because of the freedoms and moral underpinning set forth in our Constitution. Undermine the Constitution and it’s spirit of E Pluribus Unum, and you undermine our free enterprise system and American Capitalism along with it.
Returning to the regulatory powers limited and proscribed by the Constitution is the solution. Our massive government could only grow to it’s current grotesque size by ignoring the Constitution. Most people, even conservative economists like Karl Denninger and Mish Shedlock, still don’t get how damaging our regulatory system is to our economy. Our current regulatory system is in reality an enormous tax on the productive power of our economy and our standard of living.
Under GW Bush’s eight years, real private sector growth barely nudged over 2% growth for only two years and the average for his presidency was clearly less than 2%, which is not sufficient to support stable employment or a stable standard of living. Basically we went backwards, even before the crash. The illusion of stable employment and prosperity growth was achieved only by unsustainable excessive government spending and fraudulent lending. That should have a huge Red Flag to many in government. Yet, no Republican member of Congress, except maybe Ron Paul, or any Bush economic advisor really even blinked. There were no red flags raised. The Republican Establishment submarined any talk or anyone in the party who dared to address where the economy was really headed. We have got to do better. Much better.
The Tea Parties are a good start. But only a start. However, they are for now really our only hope for a better future.
Good article, but don’t use ‘beg the question’ as a substitute for ‘invites the question.’ Beg the Question is a logical fallacy [admittedly poorly named] that has nothing to do with what you meant to say.
LOTM:
I have long admired your comments here; often you express thoughts similar to mine, but you do it far better.
Today though, it’s mac (@ 26) who expresses what I think.
Whiskey,
Very good insight at 96 with regard to the difference between Ireland and the U.K.
It was very interesting to me, in another lifetime when I seriously studied the British Raj, to see how much the British wanted to do, and how little they actually thought was possible politically. Plans were mooted for a great many more beneficial public works than were actually built. Instead, what got done was the stuff for which they could command overwhelming public support. They had learned the lesson in 1857 that a foreign government just didn’t have the legitimacy to push even the very divided Indian people into something that a sizable minority thought was wrong, even if it would eventually be of great benefit to all. They knew Congress would be off to raise a hue and cry about colonial oppression before the ink was dry on the proposal.
Consequently, they built some water projects and a lot of railroads. However, the real hard work of developing India had to wait until there was a brown face at the helm. The taxation and national sacrifice required for India to have an economic “takeoff,” as Walt Rostow coined the phrase, had to wait for an indigenous government endowed by race with sufficient legitimacy to be able to call for that sacrifice.
Ireland can do what is necessary to right its financial ship because its government has that legitimacy. The UK can’t, and neither can any U.S. government under our current system. Multicultural societies, as W has said, have no ties to hold themselves together in hard times. In an America with no shared ethnicity, no shared culture, no shared religion and the leftists chopping away at the national ideals with chain saws, what will hold this nation together in hard times? Anyone who doesn’t have an answer for that question needs to think that the answer may well be that it won’t hold together.
Wretchard, spot on and great thread as usual. I have to tell you about a colleague at work who was a huge Obama supporter during the election. Know that that he grew up in New York City and is Jewish, so he’s very liberal and thinks conservatives are evil and basically unbalanced.
Well, last week out of the blue he brought up the One and expressed that he was having serious second thoughts about the election and the direction Obama has taken. Understand that my coworker has actually described himself as a socialist and has stated that he believes government should provide in all matters. He’s a die hard Dem/progressive. So, what is disappointed about? Two things. First, he believes that Obama failed with much of his domestic agenda, especially health care in that he didn’t go far enough. I know, hard to believe. Second, and he was very animated about this, is Obama’s tone and actions towards Israel. As a Jew, my colleague is very concerned with the direction this administration is going. He was livid with the way Netanyahu was treated during his recent visit.
So what does this mean? What this tells me is that not only has Obama lost the Independents, but that he’s in serious trouble with the liberal/progressive (majority) Jewish vote. If he’s losing a dedicated super-liberal like my coworker over his Israel policy, I believe it will spell disaster not only for the Dems in the November elections but also for Obama in 2012. I know it’s a long way off but if the One is losing the NYC liberal Jewish community, he’s in real trouble.
@76 Stephanie
“So this blog is officially a white supremacist rag now?”
Don’t you think that’s stretching it, just a bit?
@93 no mo uro
Maybe an “agent provocateur?”
Irregardless of any racial discussion, that is a realistic fear. Cutting the size of government down to a sustainable level is a very difficult problem. Whiskey is right in this respect; there are too many people are tied to the benefits and workings of massive government.
In the Allies WWII Italian campaign, they found it very slow going since the Germans had booby-trapped the entire peninsula. I think this is a good analogy for what lies in store for any serious efforts to roll back government. Statists have “booby-trapped” the American system of governance with entitlements, new agencies, new constituencies of dependents, etc. We would be fortunate to just be able to get back to BIG government. What I mean by that is, we currently have collossal government, and that’s because we worked up to huge government under Bush, and the current all-Democrats-all-the-time regime has gone even further with reckless abandon.
I will define “big” government numerically: government we can afford based on how much revenue the government is able to collect with the current levels of taxation, tariffs and fees: $2.2 – $2.5 trillion/year. That amount of money buys a lot of government, but is apparently sustainable. Remember that we had big government under Clinton for about that much or a little less (allowing for the modest levels of inflation), and we achieved a rough “balance” (there is some dispute as to whether the budgets then were really balanced, but they certainly weren’t running spectacular deficits).
Our current regulatory system is in reality an enormous tax on the productive power of our economy and our standard of living.
Unsk — that deserves to be up in lights. It highlights a big part of the real problem — and it also points the way to the solution.
I support the Tea Party movement for smaller, constitutional government. But we need something else on the economic side — Re-Industrialization.
As Charles points out, there are huge technology-based opportunities to create value and make life better for billions of human beings. But we can’t access those opportunities while we are destroying our capacity to build things. And we can’t afford the unemployment associated with continued de-industrialization.
RWE@55:
I disagree with your core belief. You accept a priori that allowing people to buy firearms or drugs without government permission would be bad — I believe the consequences of government involvement are even worse.
There will always be some who cannot or will not control their impulses. For me this is NOT an adequate justification for the statist jackboot.
You either believe in freedom or you don’t. Perhaps you don’t?
Charles @ 102: I blogged about portable nuclear power plants a couple months ago
My stats just lit up with hits from all over the middle east and north africa.
Heh.
Then NSA and CIA probably put you on a list, too. And FBI. Hiya, fellas!
But you could probably flood the Qatar Depression with salt water right out of the Mediterranean, generate power from the fall, and desalinate out of the Qatar. Ditto the Dead Sea.
59 Stephanie:
Lordy. These liberal elites find the perfect Uncle tom to advance their cause, and still you racists like Mac, Habu, Whiskey, blame black people for taking the bait.
My views are pretty close to those of Mac, Habu and Whiskey, so I’ll respond:
Damned right I blame them. I don’t just blame black people though — I blame anyone who was willfully ignorant enough to vote for Obama. We are what we eat, and if they ate Obama’s bait^^^^bullshit well …
DR @ 75: They don’t have tons of money lying around.
Agreed.
Two more points on that (though we have wandered from the main topic).
First, that Obama is I think not personally unsympathetic to those with moderate incomes, he just doesn’t have the mathematical skills to distinguish between the comfortable and the rich. One can argue about his socioeconomic leanings.
Second, that I believe we really do have a fairly new problem with the distribution of incomes, basically the middle class is evaporating, with the very rich soaking up most of it, but with just enough going to the lower class that they are quiet and happy about their slightly improved situations.
So, there *is* an issue there, and that’s why no matter how badly Obama does in trying to address it, it has some resonance with the rest of the Democraptic party. And I seriously wish it had more resonance with the Republican party, because I cannot imagine how this country will survive in anything like its previous form without a strong middle class.
The federal government owns trillions of dollars worth of real estate. In some western states, it owns 90% of the property. It’s not counted as an asset on the national balance sheet. It seems to be assumed that the government would never sell it, why? If this property were sold off, it would put the federal government on a sound financial basis and also benefit the states because they could receive property taxes on it. Why is no one thinking about this?
There is a hunger for freedom amongst those who will be free. Those who seek control (slavery) can NEVER compete productively with the free. This latest effort to urge enslavement (socialism) on a free society, will founder as those busy being productive are forced to turn their attention from their production, to stamping out the erstwhile slave masters – leftists, Democrats, Republicans and other general miscreants.
Since the Tea Partiers aren’t forming another party, it seems to me inevitable that after much grumbling they will vote for Republicans, who only believe in limited government and fiscal responsibility when they are not in power. The two major parties are playing a rope-a-dope on the voters, and have been for decades.
#121. Josh
I believe we really do have a fairly new problem with the distribution of incomes, basically the middle class is evaporating, with the very rich soaking up most of it, but with just enough going to the lower class that they are quiet and happy about their slightly improved situations.
With all due respect, I disagree. However, if your above-quoted post was amended to read “the very politically connected rich soaking up most of it” I would agree with you. The “rich” aren’t the problem. The rich who manipulate the strings of government are. But then again, the distinction between them is hard to distinguish. In these days and times those who wield the strings of government always seem to be ending up rich, even if they didn’t start out that way to begin with.
I’m sure it all comes from the fact that they are “the best and the brightest.” Really. Yeah. Sure.
Obama’s snarky comment reminds me of the penultimate scene in “Conan the Barbarian.” You know: the one in which Thulsa Doom (who, years before, had slaughtered Conan’s family and people) smirks to The Cimmerian, “I am the wellspring from which you flow.”
As I recall, Conan expresses his “gratitude” by immediately hacking off Thulsa Doom’s head and torching his Mountain of Power…..
The middle and upper-middle classes are the “American Dream”…when that dies we gotza lot of really unhappy people.
Who in the hell (in their right mind) wants to work/toil/labor to the grave without so much as a vacation or a LIFE outside of the grind?
People will just throw in the towel over the hopelessness of it all.
Ahhhhh. Socialism.
whiskey
well from your nicely writtent rant:
Iran has ambitions as the “protector” of Europe’s Muslims, an ironic copy of Europe’s role as protector of Levantine Christians a century ago.
Iran despises the Arab muslims, they are not Shia and not Persians, so, they likely are not going to defend our suburbans that are Maghrebin Sunni Muslims, or Sunni Pakistani for UK. Also contrary to our mainstream Muslim population, Iranians are highly educated, and nothing is more difficult to ally, a well educated Persian with an incult Arab, or just good enough when the Arab is considered as a meat tank for fulffilling Iran’s agendas, like HBZ in Lebanon.
Also the difference with Persan Shia cult and Sunni Arab cult, is that the Shia are organized as a theocracy with responsible heads, no Shia iman can profess his own interpretation of the shia dogmas, while the Sunni imans can profess their own different interpretations of the Koran, this is why they have difficulties to forge a Arab union like dreamed by Nasser, then by Kadhafi. And since a few decades there is another interpretation of the Koran from the Muslim Brothers,the Wahhabites, coming from Saudi arabia. I can tell from having surfed on Maghrebin Muslim blogs that they aren’t liked. They even criticize them more than our laic society.
So I would be worried if our muslim immigrants were well organised, this isn’t the case, they fight each others in streets gangs.
119. Josh
Charles @ 102: I blogged about portable nuclear power plants a couple months ago
My stats just lit up with hits from all over the middle east and north africa.
Heh.
Then NSA and CIA probably put you on a list, too. And FBI. Hiya, fellas!
………..
That post did pull a couple hits from Lahore, Karachi and Islambad. And likely one part of discussions at the nuclear summit in DC was portable nuclear power plants. Nuclear power from portable nuclear power plants can’t be weaponized but they might provide material for a dirty bomb. I’m not sure about either propositions. So I’ll cheerfully be corrected.
……..
But you could probably flood the Qatar Depression with salt water right out of the Mediterranean, generate power from the fall, and desalinate out of the Qatar. Ditto the Dead Sea.
……..
The biggest consumers of desalinized water right now are the gulf arabs. For power they use their oil and gas. The saudis recently opened up a solar powered desal plant.
The Israelis have world class desalination technology. Their desal plant at Ashkelon is among the best in the world ie: it desalinizes water at just about the best price. Desalination plants are springing up all over Israel and rapidly rendering water issues on the golan and jordan moot: caveat ….they’re not there yet.
My impression of Israeli research is that they make lots and lots of little innovative–but evolutionary changes. US research does that but the US is also doing stuff that’s revolutionary. The Europeans, Singapore and Japan are the other big players in the desal biz.
The reason you hear more about desalinization is that the period of dam building is about done. For a successful 21st century –just as the world is going to need an order or two magnitude more energy — its going to need that much more water. Water coming from the mountains to the coast is tapped out. So it’ll have to be water coming from the oceans. Right now the name of the game is driving the price points down. Every time the price falls, more stuff becomes possible.
Memes aren’t just for liberals, folks…
Memetic Engineering.
I wander the interwebs,
by day and by night.
Looking for memes
That I know by sight.
I wander the intertubes,
by day and by night.
Spreading the memes,
that get you to fight.
I wander the internets,
by day and by night.
Covering the bets,
that will bring you light.
I wander the intertnets,
me and my memes,
changing the world,
to create new themes.
I wander the intertubes,
by day and by night.
Spending my time,
enlighten the rubes.
I wander the interwebs,
by day and by night,
creating havoc
for those who spin webs.
–
Mariner #118:
“You accept a priori that allowing people to buy firearms or drugs without government permission would be bad…”
Who said anything about government permission?
I object to handing a 2 year old a loaded gun. Or for that matter, allowing a certifiable head case from Korea to buy one. Or an Iranian student who decides the golf course across the street from his apartment is a suitable place for his .22 rounds to impact.
But it does not take “government permission” for such limitations to be in effect. Indeed, the official government permission failed in the case of the VA Tech shooter.
It takes responsible people, not necessarily the government.
#40 wretchard
Why does it happen that a haberdasher like Harry Truman will be remembered when an nuclear engineer like Jimmy Carter will be forgotten? Who knows?
maybe they way we view people and their value is wrong.perhaps being president during time of war is what Truman was good at, and being an engineer on a sub is what Carter was good at.University degrees may be specific and non-transferable.
what does a Harvard law degree enable you to do ?
Charles @ 129: Desalination plants are springing up all over Israel and rapidly rendering water issues on the golan and jordan moot: caveat ….they’re not there yet.
Good. We’re next. But even the best plants are expensive. Letting the hose run while washing the car in the driveway and all that, with desalinated water – hurts the head as well as the wallet.
TCobb @ 125: The “rich” aren’t the problem.
Not as such. Not individually. Maybe not even morally. But if the distribution of income really does change, that’s a problem, and it doesn’t go away if one – or all – of them make the money through merit. One can question how anybody could have that much merit, or what the social issues are if merit in a society is so distributed and rewarded. Do the 1/10 of 1% really have that much more merit than the next 9/10 of 1%, or the next 9%, or the next 49%?
The last big company to make many of its early *employees* a ton of money, seems to have been Microsoft, and that’s like twenty years ago. These days startups reward the promoter and the VCs, and the options to the employees tend to be of modest value. (Now, saying this, I would ask about Google – how many millionaires, deca-millionaires, centa-millionaires, and billionaires, have they made of employees, compared to Microsoft>? My impression is, basically zilch compared to I think a hundred or more $10m and better at Microsoft … but I’m open to enlightenment).
what does a Harvard law degree enable you to do ?
Apparently to act like a pompous ass, (I’m not really sure its acting) and pretend that you are an authority on each and every subject, from quantum mechanics to animal husbandry.
Oh yeah— it also gives you immunity from being called stupid, no matter how stupidly you act. Its a definitional thing you know. One man’s notion of idiocy becomes another man’s notion of genius if he just has the right piece of magical paper.
122 ken in SC: Actually some folks are thinking about just that. After the Weimar collapse Germany backed it’s new currency with land, since it had no other assets to negotiate with.
I suspect that is the targeted solution to be implemented after a currency crisis and hyperinflationary disaster destroys the dollar.
Not as such. Not individually. Maybe not even morally. But if the distribution of income really does change, that’s a problem, and it doesn’t go away if one – or all – of them make the money through merit. One can question how anybody could have that much merit, or what the social issues are if merit in a society is so distributed and rewarded. Do the 1/10 of 1% really have that much more merit than the next 9/10 of 1%, or the next 9%, or the next 49%?
Sorry–I don’t buy your argument at all. Distribution of the income really doesn’t matter at all. Its a distraction.
I ask you, which is the better society, an egalitarian system where everyone is equal and living on a bare subsistence level or one in which economic inequality is extreme but the people at the bottom of the economic pyramid have warm places to live and plenty to eat?
If you leave that question up to the people at the bottom of the pyramid, history suggests that they prefer the latter alternative. The examples of the Berlin wall and illegal immigration into the US strongly suggest that this is indeed the case.
The great sin of the 20th century was that we allowed “intellectuals” to interfere with society by treating the citizens like lab rats.
As for me I think we should redeem ourselves by using “social engineers” as targets for pistol practice.
Tcobb @ 136: But I don’t buy your argument at all, either. Who says these are the two choices? Neither sounds like the traditional USA.
The problem is if it’s either feast or famine, it’ll be famine every time, there is no ladder to climb, no reward for small virtues, you get a welfare society. I doubt that’s what you had in mind, but isn’t that what you described?
Thrasymachus,
Just to clarify: Are you saying that Europeans are genetically superior to all other races, or are you saying the European culture is better than all other cultures? The two are not the same thing.
Others welcome to reply too, since there seems to be some confusion going on in this thread.
Hope for the best and prepare for the worst
The problem is if it’s either feast or famine, it’ll be famine every time, there is no ladder to climb, no reward for small virtues, you get a welfare society. I doubt that’s what you had in mind, but isn’t that what you described?
Not at all. The subsistence state is what you get under collectivism. And sometimes not even that, like North Korea. Compare the fate of the poor in free market societies as opposed to those where the “Wise” control all.
Once upon a time in America, there was no welfare, and food stamps did not exist. Amazingly enough, vast hordes of people did not starve to death. The concept is shocking, I know. But true.
re: 102 et.al.- desalinization
” within the next 10 years or so the technology will be in place to cheaply move vast rivers of desalinized water inland from seas like the Mediterranean ”
this reverse/osmosis separation of fresh water, from salty-sea water, produces a larger amount of saltier water – as you are removing the h2o, and dumping back the – now concentrated – brine —
on a large scale, what are the consequences?
i am familiar with the process, on a small scale, from living on small sail boats with r/o units –
but at what capacity does it become a problem in large scale returning of concentrated brine in coastal areas?
and, as this thread seems to have faded, i shall take the risk of going somewhat off topic
as i know there is an interest in the sea, Marines, the Navy, History and Cats, among us
http://www.usni.org/news-and-features/CatsandtheSeaServices.asp
2×4 #139- That’s some scary stuff ,brother. That there is a military unit dedicated to stemming domestic unrest tells me the Dems and their international power brokers know something we don’t. What happened to posse comitatus restrictions on the use of the military for domestic law enforcement? Did that die at Waco?
Whiskey, you suffer from a major case of confirmation bias in your comparison to Ireland’s and Britain’s responses to their fiscal crises. Greece is an ethnically uniform country, and yet their response to this crisis is riots and an outright refusal of the public to accept the drastic cuts in public spending that are necessary.
Furthermore, if you read Dalrymple, you will note that the British underclass is largely white and yet has exactly the same social ills that the minority underclass has in the US. Specifically, high illegitimacy rates, drug use, welfare dependency and crime.
The problem is cultural. Socialist governments either reward bad behavior, or tolerate it by refusing to let its consequences come to fruition. Unfortunately, American Blacks got caught up in this social experiment and are paying the price.
And Stephanie, please explain how a blog run by a Filipino can be a white supremicist blog? We have the right to discuss issues of race without having to be terrified of the PC police. So pack up your plastic PC badge and go home.
Not up for reading 143 comments to see if anyone has pointed this out yet, but both Idol and Reality TV came to the US from the UK, and your wording makes it sound like they were imports from the US which have infested the UK along with political beauty pageants. The rest has no major errors and seems to be right, but the poor phraseology at the beginning detracts from the argument (unless you mistakenly thought that Idol & reality TV started in the US in which case the factual errors detract from the argument).
141. bits
re: 102 et.al.- desalinization
but at what capacity does it become a problem in large scale returning of concentrated brine in coastal areas?
…….
You don’t dump concentrated brine into a bay.
Typically the concentrated brine is remixed with a whole lot seawater and dropped back into the ocean at various points so the average salinity quickly mixes back to ocean levels.
Coastal California is easy because the water drops right off into the deep ocean–and there’s huge coastal currents.
imho ultimately what desalination will consist of off California is a pipe the ends with a mushroom shaped desalination membrane that juts offshore 100 yards from the coast –and pushes up from the ocean floor 100 feet or so. The device is someplace with a pretty good coastal current. The pressure of the ocean water will press through fresh water which will pipe to shore. There won’t be a disposal problem
Early tests for this are being done in some lakes in southern california by DVX Technologies. Current generation membranes however require that the submersible membrane be down about 900 feet.
Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy
We finally have a Self-Congratulator in Chief!
– Thomas Sowell:
The Vision of the Anointed
Charles,
So, at 900 feet it is “self powered?”
ie, powered by the difference in specific gravities of the fresh and salt water?
139. twobyfour
Would the army participate in such a scheme? A childhood friend of mine is a WP grad and a colonel in the army. I asked him that question back in January. The synopsis of his response: Don’t really know how it would play out if push came to shove, but the non-black officer corps in the US Army is rabidly anti-Obama mostly because of his ultra-dovish campaign to get into office and also partially because army officers are generally more socially conservative than the population at large and are thus distrustful of a wide swath of dem politicians. His assesment is that black officers (and troops) are Obama fans to the point that they are violating MLK’s most famous words. That whole wanting to be judged by the content of character rather than the color of skin thing has been thrown out the window as racial pride as trumped all questions about character.
I have often found Whiskey’s arguments to be irritating. They are also illuminating. Anecdotaly, the time I have spent discussing societal issues of lower income people v the issues of those who make more in income was at one time spent in discussing the relative advantages and disadvantages of opportunities to attain an education learn a whole craft or a narrow skill.
When speaking with gentlemen of similar stature to Thomas Sowell or Clarence Thomas it is rare that race enters into the discussion. Cultural bias and conceit will, but even more than culture the will imparted by a strong family expectations is the dominant factor in imparting habits of success v habits of failure. There are other factors involved at the genetic level but as near as I am aware none of those are tied to genes that determine skin tone and such traits are identical to the traits of the nonexistent “white” race as they are to the undefinable “black” race, the elusive “brown” or enigmatic “yellow” et cetera.
Unless one is referring to a “mill” race Which might have some value in describing certain familial traits, or the “human” race, the use of the term race in describing a group of like traits is nonsensical. But pending the discovery of a better word that would gain instant recognition many people retain the woefully inadequate. demonstrably antiquated and bitter in connotation use of the term “race”.
It is a distraction. TCobb is right. I am not in the habit of calling people racist nor am I in the market for that type of discussion. If there is no greater cure for poverty than a salable skill and the self esteem that accompanies meaningful work there is no greater shame and no worse state of mind than to have no skills and no prospect for work. It is where the “progressive” agenda leads, and has always led.
Progressives do not trust the rest of us to run our lives. Because of the pressure it them puts upon them to figure out just what we are supposed to be doing as well as figuring out how to get us to do it so it seems like their idea, they are afraid to leave any decision up to the masses. Not that they can run their own life with a measure of honor or grace. It is just easier to remark on the imperfections of others than to admit our own.
At the local tea party I saw a mixture of what I would call 60/40 between registered members of the GOP and independent or perhaps democrat tea party attenders. Not one of the attendees cared one whit about race (although I suspect one of the speakers believes in reparations as it is in his book). But every one of them had an opinion about low taxes less government and discussing in school classrooms what the implications of our Constitution are to life and liberty.
I think all of them felt betrayed by the behavior of our congressmen and senators as well as their votes. There were Seiu shirted folks in the crowd, but they did not act up, at least while I was there. I am sure they were waiting for the white middle aged chick to take the stage. I do not know how many, if any people there were on order from the local democratic union er party as that tea party opposition has exposed itself,
Charles
I think that mini nuclear power plants (MNPs) have enormous political and social implications.
At an initial cost of $1 MM per 1,000 homes, which is available technology that can be delivered tomorrow, even relatively small communities can easily afford to get off the gird and have nearly unlimited electrical power distributed within the community.
I can easily imagine “communities of character” springing up all over the world where where people of similar interests, however that may be defined, can aggregate in self sustaining social units that can choose a life style independent of national politics and national culture.
Fed up with being taxed and regulated to penury in Metro? Move to XXX where you can apply your skills in a community of like-minded people where charity is a private matter and taxation and regulation are minimal as public policy.
Cheap and unlimited electrical power not subject to the vagaries of oil prices, international incidents, cap n’ trade legislation or the discretion of regulators could be the basis of independent communities self sufficient in agriculture, industry, medical care, housing and social activities.
Obama is not the cause, but he is the most poignant reminder of how deep and irreconcilable the philosophical differences between Americans have become over the last 100 years. There are tens of millions of alert, bright, and enterprising Americans who have no intention of subsuming their liberty to the wreckage of statist idealism. MNPs are a way out.
I live in Ireland and I do not agree with Whiskey about fiscal responsibility here. There is a cleptocracy of cronies running the place and the most of the public sector unions have voted to reject the government austerity plan for them (but not the fat cats in government). The leaders of the largest union appear to have cut a deal and are encouraging their members to vote for the government plan. Those of us in the private sector have been handed an unimaginable debt and can barely make a living anymore.
Peter Boston, 151 if you go to http://www.thevillage.ie you will see something that could be the precursor of what you envision. If I do not move toward that kind of community, I think I might research the Catholic orders that live in self-sustaining walled convents and become a nun since I am long widowed and my youngest has reached the age of majority!
OT
This shop door at 109 East Palace St. off the plaza was the secret entrance for those working on the Manhattan Project in the 1940s.
#138: It is impossible to define European heritage in terms of genetics or race. Europeans are, and always been, so diverse in these aspects, that this approach simply does not apply. This heritage is more like long-distance relay: different tribes and nations were the leaders at different ages of European history. When one player get dry up, he passed the baton to the next: Greece to Rome, Rome to Germans, then to Portugal, Spain, England; different components of this complex had different routes of relay. But eventually, this the longest way of permanent elaboration and refinement in human history. That is why it is so rich in content and achievements, and this makes it superior to any other cultural tradition in scope and potential.
Actually, I think even the Tea Party is tinkering at the edges.
What I care about is power politics, specifically how an American presence on the moon will help us defeat our enemies in the Middle East.
Alexis -
Cart. Horse.
First comes the willpower to achieve, then comes the marshalling of resources and skills, then comes the accomplishment, then comes the prestige.
Your approach seems to skirt around the critical step of #2. Restoring American juju would be a good thing (to this American, anyway), and lunar exploration/colonization would be one way to achieve that, yes. But it is not enough to say, “If we think Moon, then we can achieve Moon.”
Even if we had the willpower, it is highly debatable whether we even could marshal the resources and skills necessary to pull off a lunar feat comparable to 1959-1969.
Everything conservatives want to do in terms of national status (the serious version, not the high-school version) right now is going to be like drawing water from the creek with a bucket full of holes. By the time you get back to the cabin all you have left in the bucket is a couple of spoonfuls of H20. The holes have to be patched. The myriad drains on effort and entrepreneurism and national will — suffocating regulations; progressive control of our schools, media, courts and popular culture; the political looter class; cultures of dependency and intergenerational failure — will, until rectified, continue to render all our efforts so low-yield as to be futile.
To the extent that Tea Partiers hammer the looters and their dependents on their “long train of abuses and usurpations,” all in flagrant violation of the Constitution; to the extent that the visibility of the Tea Parties gets non-TPers to think and care about the Constitution; and to the extent that the whole Tea Party movement ignites a national debate in which the Constitution’s ideals and actual, plain words are at the forefront … the Tea Party is most assuredly NOT tinkering around the edges, but is delivering a fundamental, indispensable message.
John Adams wrote: “I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.”
I truly believe we are back at the point where the Founding Fathers found themselves: in a generation forced to debate (and quite possibly fight over) the fundamental questions: What is government for? What relationship between the government and the citizen is most conducive to individual liberty?
The Tea Partiers are studying politics so that their children can study (without the govt administering all the loans to unaffordable colleges) mathematics, navigation, engineering, electronics, and biosciences … so that *their* children, God willing, can be the lunar and even Mars colonists.
Cart. Horse.
Constitution and Liberty first. The other things will follow.
At an initial cost of $1 MM per 1,000 homes.
Peter
What is your source and what is that number? Do you mean $1,000,000 per home? If so that is a very high capital cost.
I would love for MNPs to change the energy markets. I am aware of Hyperion and the Japanese product (can’t remember if is Mitsubishi or another big Japanese corporation.) Do you know of others? I would really like to invest in this space.
“Hey. can’t we just all get along here?”
Rodney King
“The Jews don’t like Farrakhan, so they call me Hitler. Well, that’s a good name. Hitler was a very great man.”
Louis Farrakhan
“They call them terrorists, I call them freedom fighters.”
Louis Farrakhan
A special one for you Stephanie
http://tinyurl.com/5qy3p4
Michael Jackson and the Jackson Five on full jive.
http://tinyurl.com/y3qza9s
buddy @ 53,
I would appreciate it if in future you would be so good as to not insult my father by mistaking him for me.
Cheers,
L3
“None of them have any idea what to do about the monetary crisis about to overwhelm them, and in that sense it really doesn’t matter who wins” wws@ 41.
I think you have summed it up very well.
Although I think we need a Conservative win, I do so in hope rather than real confidence. It may be that only after harsh economic realities barge into the room and kick the political “set of givens” all over the floor will there be some discussion as to “what the givens should be”.
“Socialist governments either reward bad behavior, or tolerate it by refusing to let its consequences come to fruition” elby@144.
I agree. Labour caresses the guilty and crushes the innocent, for whom there are always consequences.
“What is government for?” bogie wheel@155.
Ah, the Trillion Dollar Question…
Search for mini nuclear power plants. The current cost is about one thousand ($1,000) per home or $20 million for 20,000 homes. MNPs can also be tied together to increase output.
The cost of MNPs is below the cost of some luxury yachts and well within reach of even moderately sized communities. I would expect the cost to go down as the demand increased.
It’s just a theory but I think MNPs may soon become the epicenter of political division because the implications of communities of 100,000 independent-minded souls “getting off the grid” extends far beyond the length of electrical transmission lines.
One similarity between America today and Colonial America is that the Colonists were already the most free and most prosperous group of people on earth before 1776. Parliament’s attempts to tax and regulate the Colonists were a threat to a beneficent status quo and an even more prosperous future. I think it appropriate that the Tea Party Movement is so named because of this parallel.
I do not think that enough Americans will roll over and play nice to our modern Parliament and King George to permanently “change America” as Ms. Pelosi is oft to say. One party domination and economic distress create divisions and fracture the social cohesion that may have been taken too much for granted in good times.
One irony of Obama and the Tea Party Movement is that Saul Alinksy said before he died that his dream was to organize America’s middle class against the government/big corporatists who played them for chumps.
155. bogie wheel
“Everything conservatives want to do in terms of national status (the serious version, not the high-school version) right now is going to be like drawing water from the creek with a bucket full of holes. By the time you get back to the cabin all you have left in the bucket is a couple of spoonfuls of H20. The holes have to be patched. The myriad drains on effort and entrepreneurism and national will — suffocating regulations; progressive control of our schools, media, courts and popular culture; the political looter class; cultures of dependency and intergenerational failure — will, until rectified, continue to render all our efforts so low-yield as to be futile.”
As millions of Americans are now protesting what they should have been protesting for fifty years, it is almost too late to rectify and extremely difficult- as boggie wheel states, and as twobyfour’s (139) post illustrates: A ground up realization and rebellion. Which could – might be – quashed (murdered) in it’s infancy – At least that looks (to me) like what Obama and his cartel have in mind. And I believe that this is all of one plan from the start.
But, I pray that I and others are wrong about that, but the evidence is to the contrary.
Regardless the ““The holes have to be patched. The myriad drains on effort and entrepreneurism and national will — suffocating regulations; progressive control of our schools, media, courts and popular culture; the political looter class; cultures of dependency and intergenerational failure” will have to be done…and UNdone….
NO Matter What and no matter what the consequences!
As I have said previously, this will be not only up to the present conservative generation of Americans but will have to be carried forth by subsequent generations of America loving Conservative, Constitutional embracing – Americans.
It is not too late to start, but the start may be contested by our Enemies both within and without. It will be extremely difficult and require Conservative Americans to do what they dislike. To not only get involved in Politics but to volunteer their efforts in any and every way and every where possible.
Do we have the character, the fire in the belly that our Ancestors had? To pledge our lives, our liberty, our treasure to protecting and preserving America?
ONLY GOD knows. But he has said that he will help those that help themselves.
Papa Ray
“The accusation of racism” may be meaningless, but the reality of racism is not. Racism doesn’t suddenly become right merely because President Obama has made it fashionable. Just because his long association with Reverend Wright is a blatant example of habitual racism doesn’t mean that the opposition must learn from his example.
I don’t particularly think President Obama is a good role model.
I remember someone who claimed that President Obama would never win the presidential election because “white working class voters” would not let it happen. Obama won despite his prognostications otherwise. What I understood and he didn’t was the existence of a strong undercurrent of racism in America that wanted a presidency in blackface.
My big concern is the need for a “Jackie Robinson” or a “Thurgood Marshall” of the presidency – a man with the skills to do an excellent job. Instead, we got Barack Obama, a Harvard man with an exotic life story who is culturally tone deaf. I understand that a “black” man who does a bad job does no favors to “black” people in the long run.
I think we need to realize that old-fashioned Jacksonian racism is not the most powerful force of racism in American society today. It is rather the “white anti-white” racism, a racial masochism of a sort, of a powerful faction in America that equates culture with “black culture” or “minority culture” and assumes that anything “white” is boring. It is the culture of rich “slummers” who think they can be cool if they listen to the worst rotgut crudeness that “black” culture has to offer.
Just as their forbears sought to eradicate “Indian” culture in the nineteenth century, they seek to eradicate “white” culture now. In essence, their idea is to de-Americanize America, turn our culture inside out, and uproot our society, perhaps even by replacing the voices of one ethnicity with the voices of another. Think of it as a revolution without a cause, a revolution by the rich and for the rich, a revolution by those who equate “coolness” with rejecting their own heritage.
Acolytes of “inverted white racism” fail to comprehend how their manufactured identity cannot take the place of continuity. People crave continuity. People want a sense of tradition and a sense of connectedness with their past and their future.
To “white” racists who desperately want a “Get Out of Jail Free” card against charges of racism, the Obama movement offers an illusion of buying a racial indulgence. Yet, just as People’s Temple was a reflection of the Klan activity of Jim Jones’s father, all the Obama movement really offers is a stay at the House of the Rising Sun.
We can do better.
There’s a commercial, borrowing from a scene in Broadcast News, where people go to their windows and shout “IT’S MY MONEY AND I NEED IT NOW!” That pretty well sums up what’s wrong in Washington. IT’S OUR MONEY, NOT THEIRS?
Government in this country is, or should be, a stewardship. The people we elect and the bureaucrats should be as careful and frugal with our money as they would be with their own. They should be reluctant to tax, embarrassed to waste money and deficits should be anathema. Anything beyond that is just institutionalized theft.
This man is our biggest enemy
Barack Obama has removed all mention of Islam from the National Security Strategy document, which during the Bush Administration said: “The struggle against militant Islamic radicalism is the great ideological conflict of the early years of the 21st century.” Obama apparently agrees with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who said Monday: “Islam and terrorism cannot be mentioned together, because they are contradictory to each other.”
whiskey 96. “The trust nexus and network, by a homogenous society, allows far deeper pain, cuts, and unity in the time of this financial crisis. Since everybody is distantly related to each other, this makes perfect sense.”
I’m a little surprised that no one has called Whiskey out on this. Whiskey is implying that Ireland is loving unified entity because of race. UH HELLOOO! WHISKEY? EVERYBODY? ever hear of the IRA and decades of TERRORIST attacks in Ireland??
hardly a model of social cohesion and togetherness, granted the impetus was religion and nationality rather than race but that kind of proves the point I’m making, in that Whiskey goes too far in REDUCING all factors to tribalistic race as the bottom line common denominator.
The truth is America is a very tolerant society and probably one of the LEAST racist on the planet, Nowadays. The fact that we haven’t seen the kind of racial problems that other societies have seen is somewhat of a miracle. Oh sure and OJ Simpson trial and a Rodney King riot are certainly sensational, but these are fairly LOW-LEVEL incidents on the whole scale of things and this fact speaks to how LITTLE of a racial divide THERE ACTUALLY is in America– current pop journalism aside.
The SENSATIONALIZING of race in the media is however very common in our otherwise rather boring and mostly conflict free culture. Whiskey perhaps unwittlingly plays into this and buys into it a bit too much.
Its titalating to be sure. But is that REAL? are WE really THAT racially charged? are we really nearly at each others throats about race? i don’t think so. Race is a political/media issue largely and therefore that means its mostly a NON-issue and a diversion from what’s really going on.
The fact that its a diversion and a mostly phoney political tool has been made abundantly clear by the leftist media’s mostly failed use of the tool the past year to demonize its political opponents.
@ 144
Well I can explain how a blog run by a Filipino can be white supremacist if you all can explain how a country run by a black president can be racist against the poor, poor white middle class.
Human nature?
@ 166
You are right, Whiskey is grasping at straws, and also failing to note that whatever homogeneity present in Ireland is the result of hundreds of years of ethnic groups struggling for supremacy.
Which is exactly what is happening in our relatively young nation. What LOTM stands for, that the XENOPHOBES (i will henceforth limit my use of the term racists) detest, is the possibility that ‘amor vincit omnia’.
People are going to be attracted to and mate with whoever they want to mate with. I don’t understand Whiskey’s assertion that incest (breeding between ethnically related groups) is the way to go. Biologically it’s a disaster.
Whiskey if you want to have sexual relations with your cousins, that’s your business, but it won’t make for a very strong and healthy nation of patriots if we all follow suit.
I don’t see any return to “small government.” There just is not any way to do it, too many people depend on a fairly massive government.
Dear
whiskeyEeyore,Until I get the “America is done, stick a fork in it” memo from God, or until I see the angel with the flaming sword, Constitution impaled on the end of said sword, I am going to operate on the basis of the best knowledge that I have. And that is that I do not know the future. And as an American, I am duty-bound to stive to pass on the legacy of our Constitutional Republic and of individual liberty to Americans who follow me, to the best of my ability.
To operate on the assumption that (1) you know the future, and (2) it is a future in which the Republic is dead … yields you, what exactly? If the future is, quite literally, hopeless, why bother with anything? Subscribing to futility gives you no reason to continue and no plan even if you wanted to.
Oh, a person can blather on about personal honor in the face of certain destruction, yada yada, but we’re not talking about the 300 at Thermopylae here. You’re talking Mad Max world without even Mad Max, TEOTWAWKI with nothing but nothing redemptive about the aftermath. If someone is going to “sacrifice” for “personal honor” under those assumptions, then he may as well just paint a giant “F” for “fool” on his forehead right now.
I will freely admit (and have admitted in prior threads on this subject) that you could be right. But the difference between your POV and mine is that I don’t believe the death of the American Republic and Western civ is a foregone conclusion.
The thing that gives me the greatest hope about the future of the United States is my staunch belief that if all we were to consider were human plans and actions, the United States would not exist to begin with. This experiment in liberty, this great beacon of hope to the world, was never man’s accomplishment in the first place. The unprecedented nature of the vision, the overwhelming odds against us, all the events that somehow (providentially) broke our way to help our fledgling union be born, draw breath, thrive, prosper, and eventually illuminate the world … it was not within the ability of human beings alone to do all this. “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, rough hew them how we will.” That goes for our nation as well as the individuals therein.
Thus I believe, and will believe to my dying breath: “My country ’tis of THEE.” America isn’t over until God says it is … and, as I said above, until I get the memo from Him to that respect, I will, because I have to, continue to operate on the belief that He wants America to continue to exist, to continue to fulfill the cause for which she was born: to further the advancement of human dignity and individual liberty in this world.
For a person to hold to a view of American exceptionalism, on the one hand, and then on the other hand to proclaim with the certitude of a prophet, “It’s over,” is to underestimate/misunderstand what the nature of that exceptionalism is to begin with. OF COURSE we are unworthy of the gift! OF COURSE we are not smart enough, brave enough, strong enough, to pull this off! OF COURSE we are terribly morally compromised! Please name me the historical period in which the American populace were angels deserving of a cornucopia of divine blessings, or demi-gods with super-human wisdom and abilities.
This is what a lot of foreigners, and our own sadly rotten native Marxist contingent and those un-citizened by the public schools, do not understand about what I guess I would call traditional American patriotism. I don’t just appreciate America (though I do do that). I *love* her. Love her with the kind of virtually inexpressable awe that you have for that which you view as a supreme gift — something rare, precious, and of incalculable value, to be cherished and defended to the utmost. And while the awe itself might transcend expression, the object of that love and awe does not. That expression resides quite concretely in our Declaration and Constitution. Traditional American patriotism is not unmoored sentiment. Our founding documents and the principles they express are the anchor of Americans’ love for their country.
So when Americans with this traditional love of country chant “USA! USA! USA!” it is most emphatically *not* equivalent to “America uber alles.” That some listeners hear that is a misunderstanding or perversion on the part of those listeners. American patriots are highly aware that they are stewards of a particular gift … but otherwise, inherently, as human beings, neither better nor worse than other people in other countries all around the world. Our calling, to live in liberty and extend the gift to others who desire it, is what is superior. We ourselves are ordinary flawed people. The question before us, as it has been before every generation of Americans, is whether we are going to live up to the gift.
I stated above my greatest hope for this country. I would be remiss if I did not admit that I also have great trepidations. The degraded condition of the American population on so many levels — spiritual, ethical, civic — is so vast as to put us at what I think to be a lower point than arguably any other in our history. That would mean the odds against our survival as a free Constitutional Republic are greater than at any time in our history. I also fear that, in divine terms, the time for America’s usefulness as a beacon of liberty may have come and gone. The Bible, in the New Testament, talks about God moving his lampstand from place to place across ages. Strictly speaking I believe the reference is to God’s Church, i.e. particular locales where His Spirit is most visibly and fruitfully growing the Church. That Church growth is on fire in the Third World (particularly, Asia and parts of Africa) while Christianity is foundering in the West is *not* good news for the U.S. or Europe, in terms of the future of Western civ.
Thirdly, I fear for America for precisely the same reasons Jefferson did: “God who gave us life gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that his justice cannot sleep forever. Commerce between master and slave is despotism. Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free.” America has sinned, and sinned most abominably IMO, against life … God’s greatest gift. And no, His justice cannot sleep forever. And historically speaking, whenever it has been roused, it has been quite terrible for people and nations.
I, too, tremble for my country. But I will never stop loving her, first and foremost because of the precious gift of liberty that has been given, through her, by God, to me. If I believe this, how could I ever give up on her? How could I proclaim her dead and gone, without having done absolutely everything in my power (I will consider even defibrillator paddles, for pete’s sake!!!) to save her?
Last and not least … my Dad the Marine would kick my @ss if I did not try, and try again, and do exactly what Churchill said:
“Never give in. Never give in. Never, never, never, never — in nothing, great or small, large or petty — never give in, except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force. Never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.”
Sometimes it just helps to be pig-headed. Dad had that quality in spades. Let’s hope I inherited it, and all of it.
biggest enemy con’t
Now that the idea that Islam and terrorism have anything to do with one another has been relegated to the dustbin of history, it’s worth asking why anyone got this idea in the first place. Was it sheer bigotry? Racism? Let’s see. Could it have been from Osama bin Laden, who once praised Allah for the Qur’an’s “Verse of the Sword” (9:5), which instructs Muslims to “slay the unbelievers wherever you find them”? Or maybe it was from Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini, who once thundered: “Islam says: Kill in the service of Allah those who may want to kill you!…There are hundreds of other [Koranic] psalms and hadiths [sayings of the prophet] urging Muslims to value war and to fight. Does all that mean that Islam is a religion that prevents men from waging war? I spit upon those foolish souls who make such a claim.
Now that the idea that Islam and terrorism have anything to do with one another has been relegated to the dustbin of history, it’s worth asking why anyone got this idea in the first place. Was it sheer bigotry? Racism? Let’s see. Could it have been from Osama bin Laden, who once praised Allah for the Qur’an’s “Verse of the Sword” (9:5), which instructs Muslims to “slay the unbelievers wherever you find them”? Or maybe it was from Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini, who once thundered: “Islam says: Kill in the service of Allah those who may want to kill you!…There are hundreds of other [Koranic] psalms and hadiths [sayings of the prophet] urging Muslims to value war and to fight. Does all that mean that Islam is a religion that prevents men from waging war? I spit upon those foolish souls who make such a claim.”
168. bogie wheel
Well that would be two Marine fathers kickiing our butts. Mine from the grave but stilla good boot.
Great stuff Sir Winston gave us.
Last and not least … my Dad the Marine would kick my @ss if I did not try, and try again, and do exactly what Churchill said:
“Never give in. Never give in. Never, never, never, never — in nothing, great or small, large or petty — never give in, except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force. Never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.”
Given what I have presented in #169 and the hundreds of other callings by islamic leaders to kill us,and what is dictated in their philosophy, just how many of you want to continue down the path of braiding more rope so they can bind us before they behead us? How many of you want to follow obama over the cliff?
How may centuries of history does it take to alert you that an evil is on this earth that must be eradicated before it does the same to us.
To preach peaceful coexistence with islam is to p*ss into the wind and hope you don’t get blowback.
116. jason gray
“But is that REAL? are WE really THAT racially charged? are we really nearly at each others throats about race? i don’t think so.”
Well if you follow the black liberal blogs and local newspapers, it is!
It appears (from those blogs) and the few conservative blacks (and two liberal blacks) that I know and the many Mexican-Americans that I know (both legal and illegal) Racism is alive and doing well in America.
One thing that has been repeated (and reported) to me over and over again is that since Obama has been elected – Blacks feel the power, have been craving the power and now enjoy the power that having a BLACK President supposedly gives them.
Remember back just after Obama was elected, some idiot black left a nasty note for the waitress about how the blacks were now in charge and that America should now understand that?
(I’m too lazy to find the link).
Well, according to local blacks, that attitude is overriding common sense and courtesy.
Anyway, look for more along the racist line, the class line, any line or context that the progressive closet commies can generate. Americans need to understand that this battle between those that love America and the left, progressive idiots is going to be (now at least) a propaganda driven war.
Just be sure and not allow your children to believe and be taught the progressive lies, narrative and fake history. You must be involved with not only their education but in countering what they hear on the street and on the false American Media.
It is your responsibility to make sure that your children get the truth.
Papa Ray
Stephanie
Maybe you need to brush up on reading comprehension or whiskey needs to take lessons in writing.
Have a good Sunday…for tomorrow it is back to the salt mines.
Take water, and like I tell my grand daughters: “Everyday is a chance at learning new and wonderful things. So Pay Attention!”
Papa Ray
I did not post the link in 139 to imply that is gonna be. It is, in my opinion, something that can be used for its threat potential rather than in reality. At least not for a while.
From the POV of Obamaklatura, military is unreliable. They need that half a million OST (Obama Socialist Troopers), to have that aspect really wrapped up. There has not been time to build it. They also need police and security on their side. That is also not done, one of the impediments are States’ rights (10th amendment).
Even if illegal aliens amnesty is put in place, it is a lot of paperwork to process and some of you may know how slow ICE is. 20 or so million is a mountain of paperwork to process. So that is also unlikely to happen, though the stage may be set for the opportune time.
They let November pass, with some impedance (Acorn under the new name, union thuggery and “I see dead people – voting”) put in place so it is not as “landslide” as the trend may seem to be at the moment.
Sometimes in between 2011-2012, they’ll repeat the September 18 2008, possibly just before presidential elections. They know it can be done, so they would use that device to crash economy on GOP watch. And big time, the previous occasion was just a “dry run”.
They would use the untraced funds from the stimulus package (yes, they would essentially steal it) to build their storm troopers infrastructure and also trying to infiltrate the FBI and states police force by buying out dirty cops wherever they can.
Once the economy is crashed, they can point out that it obviously happened on GOP watch both in 2008 (untrue, but lie big and you have a chance, and who would remember that it was the Dem led House in power if the mantra that it was Bush is repeated over and over) and 2012, and that it is for everyone to see in plain light that GOP is simply incompetent and should be kept as far from power as possible, all they do is break and wreck stuff.
The fickle majority will buy it and reelect Obama or maybe other Dem candidate (Obama may be too damaged at the time). By then, all the elements of the game will be in place–the storm troopers established shortly after, and enough police/security bought out. The “Immigration Reform” would take place at that time too, to cement the “progressives” as a ruling element.
This is, I think, “The Plan”. Of course, there are some variables that may influence it in one way or another. For instance, Obama’s betrayal of Israel is not completed yet. What we see now is just a prelude. The timing is dependent on how fast Iran can produce actual nukes and whether they would attempt to use them first against Israel or against Moscow (which depends on whether mahdists have the upper hand in Iran at the time). Israel may try to to remove the threat before Iran gets its nukes, though Obamaklatura is doing what it can to prevent it. In any case, a BCOW would be opened.
Yes, beside the US domestic matters that seem to lead to an eventual civil war (impetus would be a) Dems trying to hold on power by any means coming November or b) Dems (or agents thereof) crashing the economy in 2011/2012), there is a big war coming (and I mean really big, the WW1 and WW2 were just squabbles in comparison). Don’t forget to factor that in your preps. I don’t want to hear myself saying “I told you so”.
Damn, Damn…bogie wheel, you are truely driven by our Founder’s spirit and our American spirit!!
GOD Bless you and others like you!!
“The thing that gives me the greatest hope about the future of the United States is my staunch belief that if all we were to consider were human plans and actions, the United States would not exist to begin with. This experiment in liberty, this great beacon of hope to the world, was never man’s accomplishment in the first place. The unprecedented nature of the vision, the overwhelming odds against us, all the events that somehow (providentially) broke our way to help our fledgling union be born, draw breath, thrive, prosper, and eventually illuminate the world … it was not within the ability of human beings alone to do all this. “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, rough hew them how we will.” That goes for our nation as well as the individuals therein.
Thus I believe, and will believe to my dying breath: “My country ’tis of THEE.” America isn’t over until God says it is … and, as I said above, until I get the memo from Him to that respect, I will, because I have to, continue to operate on the belief that He wants America to continue to exist, to continue to fulfill the cause for which she was born: to further the advancement of human dignity and individual liberty in this world.”
As once said, history is made by man. Men that not only make their mark but by men that believe in something greater than themselves.
Americans do believe in preserving and protecting our Republic and the present administration and progressive, communist democrat cartel is going to make us have to prove it.
And it will all be on their heads.
Papa Ray
It is your responsibility to make sure that your children get the truth.
Papa Ray
Papa Ray I am in full agreement. However, we face a terrible conundrum. The twenty and thirty something’s, even some in their early forties have never been taught even the basic civics lessons. They just don’t know and they usually don’t pay much attention to those of us that do because what they have been taught is THE UGLY AMERICAN side of the story by a largely liberal educational system. Certainly by the time they matriculate to college they immediately fall into the clutches of Marxist faculties who don’t teach, but rather brainwash.
The experiences of Vietnam and the Cold War are simply examples used by teachers and professors on most campus’ to deride what the US attempted to do during those periods….prevent the enslavement of millions from communism.
Until we break the anti American faculties your admonition rings through with crystal clarity and fits Boogie Wheel’s citing Sir Winston….
It is our responsibility to make sure that your children get the truth. and Never give up
Habu/177
As Besmenov said, “they are damaged”, a chunk of the 20-30 somethings. It would be nice if we could send all the leftists to some place for a 5 years excursion for them to see how it really works.
obama, the most dangerous man, Con’t
Osama bin Laden has quoted Qur’an 22:39 in his communiques. He is waging defensive jihad, not “war because of differences in religion, or in search of spoils of war.” The problem is that with unbelief itself constituting aggression for some Islamic authorities, and given the Qur’anic command to fight unbelievers until “religion is all for Allah” (8:39) It is cold comfort to unbelievers, and no restraint for jihadists, to remind them that they should only be fighting aggression.
barak hussein obama is demanding that Islam be separated from terrorism, and yet the conceptual apparatus establishing a peaceful Islam has never been presented. We are all supposed to take it on faith. But the stakes are too high for that.
2×4
Whose fault is that? My generation did not ask to not be taught the history you were taught, by the methods you were taught with. We didn’t invent the video games that take up much of our mental capacities, thank you very much. If we (or a ‘huge chunk’ of us) are damaged, the logical question is who damaged us, and why.
@180
Ya’ll were damaged by the Russians and their American acolytes. They aren’t quite done yet though. Tis the gift that just keeps on giving.
180. stephanie
The fallacy of your thought is that somehow you are incapable of inquiry and independent thought, that you lack the inquisitivness of scholarship that has marked mankind throughout the ages.
The marked trait of your generation is that you feel entitled, and want without sacrific,and as your puling contribution shows are too ready to blame others for challenges that are yours. You do not have to be spoon fed. The writing of the Founding Fathers and those philosophers of the Enlightmentment are at your keyboard NOW. You don’t even have to go to a library.
So get to learning and get over the blaming.
139. twobyfour
Thank you for this link. Every freedom loving person NEEDS to know this
Stephanie, there’s a good case to be made that the so-called “Greatest Generation” was also the Worst Generation of all at raising their kids. They did great service, but in terms of the values they passed on they were a generational failure.
And all of us have seen that in everyday life – how many hard charging, high income power parents have kids that are total derelicts? I’ve seen far, far too many of those personally. They grow up thinking the world owes them a living, because their parents (probably out of guilt for never having given them the time of day) have raised them to think that the world owes them a living. And the poison seeps on from there.
BUT – assigning blame does nothing to help us in the future. How do we move from a failed, slacker generation back to one that actually is willing to take responsibility for itself and do some good in *spite* of the mistakes of it’s predecessors? Because that’s the task that lies before all of us.
Taking responsibility for oneself means accepting that your task is to rise above all the baggage that’s been handed to you, and realizing that all the blame shifting in the world don’t amount to a bucket of warm spit.
workout time
Stephanie, go to youtube and search for Bezmenov. And listen to all what he had to say.
I came here to North America in 1984, the Orwel year. Actually, to avoid one, but seems that I can’t escape, don’t have where, so I’ll have to confront it head on, seems soon.
For my part, I did my best to inoculate both my daughters from the leftist infection. I hope I’ve been successful and it seems so.
Yes, my generation was asleep. And it is easy to point the blamey finger. What’s done is done. Now the question is–how to get out of that cage?
You know, Stephanie, that you may have been deprived. It is your task to seek and find, to learn. That is what the personal responsibility means.
I were taught history, but with the marxist coating, since I lived under a marxist regime. It was my responsibility to seek information (and mind you, that part was not that easy) sort it out and make my conclusions.
This time is no different. If you have any sense that something is wrong with the diet what you have been fed, you yourself need to go out and fill the gaps. That is valid no matter when/if education is even on the right track.
180. stephanie
“If we (or a ‘huge chunk’ of us) are damaged, the logical question is who damaged us, and why.”
I don’t think anyone “Blames” the recent generations for their education or attitudes or ignorance. Conservatives place the blame on the progressive liberals that have had a death hold on American education for the last few generations.
The fault is not yours, but your parents if they left your education up to the teachers and schools. But if they were brainwashed and given a limited, biased liberal education, then you were doomed, as they would never intervene in your liberal education. So you would never be able to see past the lies and bias of the liberal, commie teachers and professors that you had.
I suggest you go back and read past Belmont Club posts and threads if you have to ask those two questions. Or perhaps an easier way to understand would be to sit down and talk to someone over the age of sixty who does not profess to be a liberal progressive commie or an ex-anti-war hippy. Find someome one that loves America and the Constitution and distrusts government.
Papa Ray
L3, noted (“read the *whole* name, buddy!”). :-0
It’s interesting that you feel that way PR because I was introduced to the BC by LOTM, who fits the bills of ‘someome one that loves America and the Constitution and distrusts government.’ [sic]
Your theory of my miseducation would work had I only truly been indoctrinated (educated) by liberal commie teachers (professors is another story though, because I indeed was by my beloved alma mater. it was a welcome antidote). The teachers I had were of the sort who work in institutions where children are being systematically abused by the authorities, who would most definitely not be described as liberal commies (although in some parts of the world JP2 may have been? I don’t know I was miseducated in America and therefore know nothing, nothing at all, about Central European politics/history.).
Interesting too that your kind deems Ireland the ideal land where white supremacy reigns (thank g-d!). The very land where daily lately eruptions of a whole different kind are unearthing the true social fabric of the land.
Once you’re done sexing your relatives, their nearest and dearest suffice!
You all describe a particular type of vampirism that America only has the antidote for.
Back on topic for a moment — polls in the UK following the first ever televised “leaders” (yes! I know) debate surprisingly put the “third party” LibDem representative of the Collective ahead of both the Labour representative and the Conservative representative. Those who were last shall be first!
Government by X-Factor. There are clearly lots of Stephanies in the UK.
However, thanks to the cunningly contrived British electoral system, even if UK voters follow through on the polls and actually give the plurality of their votes to LibDem candidates, LibDems will still have the smallest representation in the House of Commons. The Collective knows what it is doing. Brits will get all the democracy they have earned.
“Taking responsibility for oneself means accepting that your task is to rise above all the baggage that’s been handed to you, and realizing that all the blame shifting in the world don’t amount to a bucket of warm spit.”
Ok but you (pl) are the ones blaming various ethnic groups for all the problems in your lives (the apparent end of the world). You tell me not to hold a generational grudge but you all have enormous prejudice against people simply based upon the fact that they aren’t like you in some way…There’s no difference. I call it xenophobia to encompass those who blame the blacks, those who blame the minorities (which may include black), those who blame the muslims, those who blame everyone who isn’t white middle class.
Stepahine, see, your thoughts are so passed through liberal prism that you can’t but repeat their talking points.
We are not blaming blacks (or whatever minority you elect to pick) for our problems! Just the opposite, they are blaming us for their problems! We point out wghere their problems are and then promptly called racists, or xenophobic, as you please.
Mind you, I ma the one stating that Whiskey and to a degree Habu are being played by a race card. But that does not invalidate the above.
Once you get that distinction sorted out, we can continue.
(We are on the cusp of history and all sorts of things are coming home to roost. The experiments of the second part of the 20th century proved to be a failures after the tally of unintended consequences is made. There is a plenty of blame to pass around. What matters now is what do we do now. We all here are trying to figure it out and no one has a failsafe recipe, yet)
Stephanie has me all wrong. While i am for the elimination of private property and the bourgeoisie, and possibly the handicapped, homosexuals, Gypsies and Jews, the aged and infirm, and Foreigners and Yankees, i have nothing at all against the various skin hues.
I’m so filled with bile and hatred, mere words cannot express.
So now I’m going to go act out physically.
Again.
Damn typos, did not wanted to burn my food, so no edit.
Buddy .. LOL! You sound like a commie from 1953. How did you manage to capture the exact mindset?
191. Stephanie
…but you all have enormous prejudice against people simply based upon the fact that they aren’t like you in some way …blah ,blah..
No Stephanie. Our distain for “others” is usually born of several factors. One experience provides the other verifiable data.
You are no doubt unaware that over two score ago the Federal government mandated that statistics on crime committed by ethnicities was a no no. That’s why on the news you never get a description of the perp that includes race. You get a photo,if that, for the news found a way around the Feds. Additionally over time there became other ways to gather the stats, usually by groups such as the NAACP who needed them to “prove” their cases in court that there was a disproportionate number of black men arrested, etc, etc. That of course begged the question that they were doing most of the crimes, far in excess of their proportion to society as a whole.
Now I repudiate that as racist. If you’ve got the data that shows a group of people are not playing well with others then you aren’t a racists for saying so…today it’s simply not PC which most of us here at BC could give a hoot about.
When Mexicans illegally cross over the border that isn’t nice. I don’t care why they are doing it its illegal, yet we have a large segment of our society that defends their illegal activity. The POTUS is even going to give them all amnesty. You’ll be working until the day you die to pay for that gesture.
We’re not racists we simply have lived through the liberal SCOTUS of the late 50’s and through the 70’s legislate from the bench that which was not and could not pass the legislative process. That is why I have written against the unconstitutional usurpation of SCOTUS via judicial review. That bench legislation turned the constitutional on it’s head, empowered a minority to extra-legal treatment and mandated (violating the 10th Amendment) the states to do certain things to implement those usurpations.
You need more experience and LOTS more education to even begin believing you can debate with this group, much less label us as racists. I suggest you get crack’in.
Personally, I am not *dis*heartened by the quality of mind and heart in the college students I teach (film courses at a Catholic university, FWIW). There are some very bright and very engaged young people in my classes. And I have encountered more patriotism, specifically of the pro-military kind, than I thought I would, as measured by how they have reacted to certain movies. I did have one student in 2008 (election year) who was enthusiastically pro-Obama and who made it a point to insert his politics into his classwork. I’ve also had several students who were, by turns, (1) vocally antipathetic to Michael Moore, and (2) concerned about the portrayals of our troops in war movies, and disgusted with the series of anti-military Iraq war movies of recent years.
I don’t really “talk politics” in my courses. If the students want to do so, okay, but generally I haven’t found that they want to do so. What they are far more interested in is movie content, analysis and how different directors approach filmmaking. Some of them get enthusiastic about wonky stuff, like cinematography and how certain shots are achieved. Others get enthusiastic about more abstract things, like movies that inspire them.
As I have recounted on previous threads, judging from how they react to the films we study, there is a great, great hunger in these young people for HOPE. They want to believe, and they want to be challenged to reach for something higher. They want to dedicate themselves to something that is not material but idealistic. They are awash in materialism and yet, deep down, they sense not only that this is not where a real, significant life lies, but that it is, in fact, a trap. They want someone to tell them there is hope, a destiny for their generation, a destiny that doesn’t lie in ever more consumerism.
If you want to know why millenials fell for Obama in such great numbers and with such enthusiasm, look no further. Obama exploited these kids by speaking all the right code words and coming across as an embodiment of that “otherness,” outside of the consumer/material culture, that they were looking for.
As various BC commenters have remarked, conservatives are not going to persuade anyone with a purely “this is who we are NOT” program. It is not enough, with anyone you are trying to engage, to position yourself solely by elaborating why the opposition is wrong. You have to offer a vision of something positive and desirable. I think this prescription applies even more so to young people. Their ability to respond to the positive and the ideal is so much greater than that of people who are older, because they are not yet weighed down by, well, the harsh practicalities that you have to worry about as you age. Being 15 or 20 or 25 is all about self-definition and discovery, yes? Deciding what you do and don’t believe, what you do and don’t care about, what your strengths and weaknesses are, testing both possibilities and limitations. There’s an opennness to youth, a willingness to risk, that most people lose as they get older.
Okay, psychobabble aside, what do conservatives have to offer young Americans beside a negative critique of Obama and progressivism? What would appeal to their idealism and their search for a cause they can dedicate themselves to?
A vision of liberty, is my answer. Not free love, but a free life. The millenials who are capable of being engaged are not stupid. They know they are racking up staggering debt just to get a college degree. They know there are a lot of job possibilities that are closed to them due to the recession. They look ahead and see … what? Diminishment at every turn. Debt, work, less success, later and fewer rewards and accomplishments, a massive amount of political and cultural crap being dumped on them that they did not ask for.
Democrats & progressives (but I repeat myself) want millenials to take a big bite of the crap sandwich and say “thank you.”
Conservatives need to be asking millenials: WHY SHOULD YOU HAVE TO DO THIS???
And then show them what a return to Constitutionalism, limited government, and individual enterprise can mean for them, in personal terms.
Engaging their imaginations, as movies do, with stories & characters, is a method of making the conservative case that conservatives should not ignore.
Culture matters!
The young people are worth it, IMO. I see, every week, young men and women who have so much to bring to the fight in terms of energy, eagerness, flexibility, and (as we are constantly being reminded, but it’s true) great facility with technology. What they mostly lack is context and perspective. That’s what us geezers (40 and up!) are here for, right?
The Pentagon and U.S. Central Command are updating military plans to strike Iran’s nuclear sites, preparing up-to-date options for the president in the event he decides to take such action, an Obama administration official told CNN Sunday.
The effort has been underway for several weeks and comes as there is growing concern across the administration’s national security team that the president needs fresh options ready for his approval if he were to decide on a military strike, according to the official who is familiar with the effort.
The official did not want to be identified because of the sensitive nature of the work being conducted.
A red herring? Sort of “maybe” umbrella that Israel is placated, and 0 will only act when he is sure the Israel got it first?
139. twobyfour et. al.
I checked with an old friend, a retired general officer who was in on establishing the US Central Command about the link. I sent him the link.
I thought we all might be interested in his thoughts presented here:
This is the second version of this story that I’ve received in the past couple of days… It’s 99% pure BS. The Army has had a disaster response team for such things since long before I retired. If you took all of the people stationed at Fort Stewart in every type of unit and role – ground combat, aviation and support you could not get anywhere near 80,000 troops. An Army Brigade Combat Team (BCT) is formed around an Infantry Battalion, may have a cavalry unit and/or an aviation unit as well some support and headquarters functions. I doubt that the entire strength would reach 8,000 much less 80,000. The 3rd Infantry Division, the parent unit is a Mechanized Infantry Division.
I personally suspect that we’re starting to see some deliberate planting of easily disproved stories by “Alinsky Liberals” seeking to discredit vocal critics of the Progressive agenda. There is some really far out stuff circulating at the moment.
Anyway thats he’s take on it.
197 thank you that was an eloquent summary of my generation. just like everything there is some bad but there is also some good.
what i take issue with here on the belmont club is the hysterical nature of some of these commenters. we all know things are difficult and times are tough but allowing fear to take over makes certain people sound like babbling idiots, even if they have some good points there. just as you say the older generation is here to provide perspective, so too must the older generation take care with how it portrays itself to the younger one.
no one my age will join the tea party cause if there are tea partiers are actively allowing themselves to be portrayed as racist and sexist as the Muslims and their culture that these conservative Americans rail against. What is the alternative to them if you see the world the same way, certain factions are ‘better’ than others? whether its by the color of the skin or the content of the creed, judging people subjectively won’t get you anywhere in the long run! you want to blow them up but it will only get you more airplanes flying into buildings.
most of these older male commenters picking on me are doing so with such egregiously gleeful ad hominem attacks, i can only think of them as having gotten seriously snubbed by some hot black chick in their past, and never gotten over it.
Bogie Wheel #197
“They want to believe, and they want to be challenged to reach for something higher. They want to dedicate themselves to something that is not material but idealistic. They are awash in materialism and yet, deep down, they sense not only that this is not where a real, significant life lies, but that it is, in fact, a trap. They want someone to tell them there is hope, a destiny for their generation, a destiny that doesn’t lie in ever more consumerism.”
Interesting. This sounds like what a lot of alcoholics go through. They often have a huge void that the material world just can’t satisfy, so they end up filling that void with booze. The millenials you describe fill it with crypto-marxist feel-good politics, and trust in earthly princes.
If Judeo-Christian ideals were more prevalent in society the latter of those two corrosive void fillers would be moot. If the education industry did a better job of teaching history (most people under 40 like Stephanie have never been taught of the atrocities of the far left, or even those of the far right done by non-whites, only those done by Hitler) they’d run from collectivism on sight, having been taught of its evil.
Reinstill Judeo-Christian values in the society and teach kids in school that Stalin and Mao were even worse monsters than Hitler and that collectivist, atheist regimes were the principle cause of violent death, rape, and oppression in the 20th century and the void that they have which could be filled by a demagogue like our president would be far less available.
Stephanie, please take a look at this.
Yuri Bezmenov, with extra photos and subtitles.
/hat tip Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler
200. stephanie
Do you believe some cultures are better than others?
Ah, Stephanie… I see, calling everyone here racist xenophobe was just fine and okey dokey, but pointing out that your narrative is taken from a leftist playbook is ad hominem. Ahm… yesiree, sure thingy.
And then you utter this pearl: no one my age will join the tea party cause if there are tea partiers are actively allowing themselves to be portrayed as racist and sexist
Are you serious? It is like calling the raped the guilty because they “provoked” it.
Well, maybe there is really nothing we can do for you here, Stef.
I’m glad that Stephanie isn’t French
BW, I would also add that your notion:
“It is not enough, with anyone you are trying to engage, to position yourself solely by elaborating why the opposition is wrong. You have to offer a vision of something positive and desirable.”
is incorrect, and actually insulting to the intelligence of young people.
What you are saying here is, fundamentally, indistinguishable from saying that telling young people that “murder is bad” won’t be enough to get them to stop doing it and that we really need to provide them with lists of other activities or they’ll do it anyway.
NO! Simply pointing out that it is bad should be enough. For anyone who is at all intelligent, that should be sufficient. The critique “party of no” is a crock, based on moral relativism and feelgood immaturity.
If the facts and history of the left – whether the name given at the time is communism, socialism, liberalism, progressivism, or whatever moniker they come up with next – aren’t enough to deter a person from making it their philosophy of choice, then they are inherently evil and stupid, and no amount of “Wouldn’t you really rather choose B, Stephanie?” will change that.
If Stephanie’s generation really does require that alternatives to evil be spelled out to them or they’ll naturally and reflexively be evil, then there’s no hope for our species.
nmu@206: “It is not enough, with anyone you are trying to engage, to position yourself solely by elaborating why the opposition is wrong. You have to offer a vision of something positive and desirable.”
I agree with that. I repeat it often: you can’t beat something with nothing.
You argue that just pointing out the bad is enough. Well, maybe it’s better than not pointing out the bad, but it’s just half an argument, and thereby less convincing than it might be. In certain venues, in rhetoric, debate, politics, you are far, far better off completing the story. In court, you can’t just stand up and say, “Not guilty!”, especially if there is evidence against you. You have to explain away the evidence, provide another story.
You have to be constructive.
Especially if what you’re doing is trying to be elected.
Any number of reasons why.
Habu/199
Yes, that is what I thought. It is a part of Obamaklatura psyops rather than something rooted in reality. Parts of the story may have true elements. Pollard usually is very thorough. Whoever slipped this to him, scored. As I said Obamaklatura considers military unreliable for the unrest scenarios.
MC, was it a sigh of relief?
I am purdy sure that there is enough Stephanies in France already. Stephanies there, Stephanies here, Stephanies everywhere!
Okay, I just stuck up for millenials in my last post.
Now for the downside. And yes, Stephanie, this is for you:
Progressive code words like “tolerance” and its antitheses, “prejudice” and “racism,” have been so relentlessly hammered on, and in particular, the past two generations so relentlessly indoctrinated to believe that *they* were the virtuous, enlightened ones, that the progressives’ intended result has how come to fruition: most young people think that, simply by virtue of being young, they are prejudice free, and they converesely think that older people, simply by virtue of being older, are natural bigots.
Flattery and appeal to elitism are age-old tactics, and in this case they worked like a charm on the kids. The reek of moral superiority among youth on the issues of race and homosexuality is world-class dead-skunk reeky. The kids know better, nay, ARE better, than their parents and grandparents, because, well, THEY are the *special* generation. *They* are the ones who are destined to lead the way. *They* are the first global generation!!!
My GenXer’s acceptance of racial diversity and the extent to which skin color per se is irrelevant to me is pretty much indistinguishable from that of millenials. The difference between me and them is that I don’t run around acting like the Race Police. Guess what, millenials, I voted for a black guy for president way back in 2000, and I didn’t need every organ of the media and all my peers to tell me that it was cool and enlightened of me to do so!!! Know what else? His blackness was incidental to my decision to vote him. What counted with me was that he had a clearer understanding of the Constitution and our founding principles than anyone else who was running. Know what else? I didn’t feel compelled to advertise my vote for a Black Guy!!! to all my friends and co-workers, even though I was living in Los Angeles and working in Hollywood at the time. Because I didn’t vote for Black Guy!!! because he was a black guy, it never occurred to me that I could have parlayed voting for a Black Guy!!! into some claim of moral superiority or enlightened status over all those liberals I worked with. As I said, I am not the Race Police, and I don’t have a ticket pad that requires me to judge people based on the skin color of the people they vote for. Why would I spend my time obsessing over something like this?
The real story here is that millenials and, to some extent, younger GenXers, have been trained to be vigilant for incidents of white racism that have already largely disappeared, having diminished exponentially from just a few generations ago. The real story is that Democrat-progressives, not conservatives and not most white Republicans, are the ones still living in 1964. Crying “racism” is the only way to win an argument when all your ideas are 40+ years old and largely discredited.
The reason kids and young people are easy marks for the progressives’ brainwashing on the need to act like Race Police is that they lack older people’s experience and perspective on how things used to be. It is, alas, all too easy to convince a child that some kind of National Disgrace is still occurring on a daily basis when that child has nothing to compare to. Anyone who has personally seen a “Whites Only” sign over a water fountain or bathroom entrance knows better.
If you want to hear shocking and disgusting racist comments on a regular basis, however, you *could* probably get an earful in some all-black establishments. If Rev. Wright’s church is even representative of thirty or forty percent of black churches, that would go a long way towards explaining why the victimhood & entitlement mentalities are still crippling inner city black communities. God bless the black pastors who are preaching the true Gospel. I know we have them in my city because I have heard them on the radio. I just don’t know how many of these good shepherds there are. Safe to say, though, not nearly enough. Sames goes for white pastors, BTW. Good, sound, Bible-based preaching is MUCH more difficult than most people think.
2=4
uh, things would have been worst for her on board
Is stephanie a SEIU/ACORN/Obama program commenter OR is she a Facebook stalker? I’m uncertain. Either way she’s sure fixated on being a hot black chick on some middle aged white dude’s arm. I think she might be hot for Habu!
197. bogie wheel
I thought your advice was very good. You are a good deal closer to the young’ns than I am and your insight is appreciated, at least by me.
I truly wish Stephanie’s generation the best but the left has been so insidious over the past thirty years that they definitely have a tough row to hoe.
I believe it was the English conservative of the Enlightenment Edmund Burke who said that each generation must answer the challenges presented to them during their time since it is not in the facility of man to see the true future. Exogenous events too often totally change the path we are following.
While we may see in Stephnies generation mistakes they are making we should remind ourselves that the children of the 1960′s were WAY out of control by comparison and now the society as a whole is paying for it. I guess it is the “don’t make the same mistake I made thingy”, that kicks in when attempting to instruct young people.
Anyway I’m running on but great job dude.
212. Lugh
Hot damn! Just gimme a minute to find my false teeth and my portable oxygen bottle …hit that bong one mo time.
Bill Maher says Tea Partiers are racist. Al Sharpton is on Drudge, as Obama’s “lighting rod to the street” by one of Obama’s mentors at Harvard Law. Bill Cosby says if you don’t like Obama, you are a racist.
Racism means nothing. Or rather, the functional definition of racism is someone, who is White, who does not wish to be last in line for everything.
As for Ireland, the IRA long ago devolved into thugs and goons running rackets. However, being unified, with no major cities turned into defacto no-go zones for natives, occupied by people alien in race, religion, and culture, Ireland was able to make deep cuts in spending and massive tax increases. [Trust networks are necessary but not sufficient, as is mono-ethnicity. Greece's occupation by the Turks, as Britain's White Chavs collapse of cultural conservatism, make trust networks impossible. Ireland's history of disunity however makes its reorganization of finances remarkable. Considering feuding within Celtic peoples was a characteristic going back to Caesar's observations.]
Why?
Because the pain could be shared across a high-trust network.
All sorts of blather about how America will get through is nonsense. Because it won’t, at least not in the way people think: return to the status quo of 1989, or even 1994. Socialism is here to stay. America has a huge population, which needs jobs, and no other employer even possible, if Obama, Biden, Pelosi, and every Democrat in Congress suddenly moved to an alternate universe to study Yoga, and were replaced by hard-core conservatives tomorrow. It would take decades to restart the private sector economy. Period. Including massive tax reform, accumulation of private capital, productivity investments in workers, economic protectionism, national industrial policy, and massive space and defense spending to create a center or centers of industrial skills and people and resources.
Nevertheless, if racism is defined by Bill Maher, Frank Rich, the NYT, Bill Cosby, it ceases to have any meaning. Whites, by and large, do not feel guilty about much of anything, rather put upon, and I notice massive increases on the comments of the many failings of the Black and Latino population online, stuff that would not be possible even two years ago. So much for the post-racial fantasy.
This is Jackie Robinson Week in Baseball. The sixtieth anniversary of his debut with the Dodgers. Obama is the reverse Jackie Robinson. A man who is proving, to all concerned, that a Black President is a massive failure, always about race, and critically about racial spoils (when that matters).
America’s strength, its margin, was its huge natural resource advantage and relatively unsettled nature. It allowed Civil War wounds to heal by national expansion, by industrialization and exploitation of natural resources in the West. Its industrial power, existing but dormant, was the only reason America, almost completely disarmed, was able to survive much less win in WWII.
As a practical matter, “We Are All Socialists Now.” Because, only the Government, marshaling “Big” resources, can restart to any degree the economy. This is essentially Cameron’s “Big Society” argument. Clegg seems to have won the debate by being anti-corruption and “independent” but of course will only produce a hung parliament with Labor still in power, drifting towards total collapse.
Who then is left? Only the BNP. Britain is collapsing culturally and socially, the elites have proven not only corrupt but incompetent and unwilling to face reality. Any cuts in spending will result in Muslim riots (and Caribbean Black riots) in England’s cities, which many are now no-go areas for natives. Denmark faces the same, though there more mainstream conservative parties have suggested a fix — kick out Muslims by paying for them to leave, as Gert Wilders in the Netherlands has suggested.
The bottom line is that Obama’s regime is an alliance of Upper Class Whites, seeking hereditary advantage, against lower class Whites, mixed with Blacks and Hispanics. Seeking as Harold Myerson put it “an End to Whiteness.” An end to America as a White Majority nation.
Realistically speaking, that makes Whites somewhere between the Chinese Diaspora in Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines, subject to periodic purges, riots, killings, and limits on employment in government and private enterprise, and that of Whites in South Africa (i.e. subject to inevitable ethnic cleansing out of the nation).
ALL Multi-racial, multicultural societies have this weakness — once the money stops rolling in, various factions form around race, and the struggle begins. Various individuals might not conform to it, but enough on the averages do that it ends up this way.
Look at the Netherlands. Gert Wilders has proposed to send Muslims back to Muslim nations, with payments for leaving. He’s found many electoral takers, not the least of which is that even the lump sum payments are cheaper and allow more goodies for natives, who fear being discriminated against second class citizens. Also, his policy of deporting non-Native criminals is very popular.
The “hope” that “someday when we are the minority we hope to be treated as we treat Muslims” expressed by Swedish Democrats is not a winner in the US, or many other places.
Accusations of racism have ceased to have any meaning. Overuse made it like calling someone an Albigensian Heretic. What?
Middle aged, upper class, mostly White women do not engage in street fights. Or burn crosses. They do vote, however, and the current 8 point split on Whites (White men favor Obama by 35%, White Women by 43%) is likely to narrow in the downward direction.
At heart this is all about who gets what from the Government. Basic spoils. If its not racist for Blacks to vote 98% for the Black guy, it’s not racist for Whites to do the same for the White guy.
OT…
But has the BC noted that the dust-up between the SEC and Government Sachs revolves around a custom Syn-CDO that, naturally, blew-up?
The Syn-CDO market is destined to destroy pension funds far and wide, especially government funded local pensions.
It’s the nature of the beast that the originator of the Syn-CDO is dumping risk onto the buyer. Naturally, the covered ‘assets’ are stinkers — selected by the true originator in manifest adverse-selection.
Syn-CDO’s are fraudulent conveyances of risk.
In the SEC pleading it is apparent that the selector was Paulson’s hedge fund. The loser was a German retirement pool.
If there is any justice the Syn-CDO market will be shut down as against public policy ASAP — before total market detonation.
bogie wheel
“The young people are worth it, IMO. I see, every week, young men and women who have so much to bring to the fight in terms of energy, eagerness, flexibility, and (as we are constantly being reminded, but it’s true) great facility with technology. What they mostly lack is context and perspective. That’s what us geezers (40 and up!) are here for, right?”
Yes, and that is why I recommeded that she talk to an older person. Because as you state, we have walked the walk, explored the possibilities, seen the light and made our choices.
I’m gonna brag again about my contribution to my family.
I have two grand sons in the Military right now and one who is now 14 who states that he is going to be a United States Marine.
Now, I would like to say that they came to these decisions about life, liberty and serving our Nation on their own. But I know that would just be a lie. They came to where they are because I knew, distrusted and have fought the local school system for the entire time that they have been in school. I have tutored, assisted and shown them the truth where the school system wouldn’t or couldn’t. I have spent hundreds of hours talking, reading and arguing with them with good books from our local library. I have purchsed for them books that I thought were important that they keep. But first I had to help instill in them a love for learning, reading and knowing. Our school system just was not up to the task.
Too bad that I didn’t take the time on my own two kids, but you know…working for the man and all. And my stupidity.
But somehow my kids didn’t get brainwashed, but no credit for me or their mother is deserved.
But millions of others did. Millions over the years have been fed liberal socialist, commie propaganda and you can see how Obama and others like him look like the answer to the last few generations of our kids.
That was the democrat’s plan. Start with the children. And don’t forget the similar plan for the minorities. Get them in the welfare line and then just move them over to the line where they can vote for more from the democrats.
And it has worked.
I’m pleased that bogie wheel has a good opinion of his students. Which reminds me, two of my oldest grandson’s high school friends have just joined the Air Force because of him and what he has told them. I’m sure they will be cussing him during Basic training but I know these two kids and they are typical young Texans. They will make it OK and be an asset to whatever unit they are in.
All three also plan on going to the same college after their service. I hope they can stick together but life has many surprises and challenges ahead of them.
Well heck, forgot my closer. Just say that yes our American Kids are the future of our Republic, but it is us grownups who have the responsibility to make sure that they are not fed lies without having the chance of learning and knowing the truth.
Papa Ray
How so, MC? France has nothing to do with it. Trust me.
BTW, what happened to that young French lady that some called Modern Joan of Arc? Last I heard of her was 4-5 years ago?
@210
In my original post I said this: “The white people who voted for Obama are the same white people who wouldn’t be caught dead walking down the street hand-in-hand with a black person of the opposite gender. It comes down to “I’m not racist, my best friend is black.” That’s nice, SWPL white person, you can have black people over for dinner, but you know for sure grand-daddy will evaporate your trust fund should you ever show up to dinner with a belly pregnant with a black child.”
I didn’t qualify the age of the white people voting for Obama; since I did not it’s fair to assume I mean the young and old. So I’m not on here arguing that we millenials are some poor innocent lambs; on the contrary I recognize they are A problem, and this proves my entire point that ‘us vs. them’ language always fails rhetorically. We have to judge people by how they behave, not by who they are.
@212
actually i get banned from commenting on liberal sights such as gawker media for saying the exact same things i’m saying here. apparently i piss off the extremes of both parties. and i am neither a hot black chick nor am i seeking an old white man. quite opposite actually.
blert @ 216: If there is any justice the Syn-CDO market will be shut down as against public policy ASAP — before total market detonation.
I don’t think the CDO/MBO market is bad in principle, but the loan originators and syndicators both have to guarantee the rating, directly, with reserves, not with CDS.
Not to mention the math needs to be corrected: the high-risk tranches should yield like 20%, and even the prime tranches should never be rated much better than the underlying instruments.
220. stephanie
…and i am neither a hot black chick nor am i seeking an old white man. quite opposite actually …. so you’re really a white male or tranny, not hot and you’re seeking a young black man?
dang honey , i dun found my false teeth…wanna party?
LOL, Habu, just wanted to ask the same, except I got she is a cold white chick!
Syn-CDOs- ARE NOT CDOs…
They are originated by a player who has bad paper — high risk paper — who wants to shift the default risk to chumps.
The buyer/loser believes that they are investing in very high quality securities (AAA or government paper) and receiving a kicker/sweetener in the form of insurance premiums for which the buyer/loser agrees to insure a certain pool of debt-assets. ( ie RMBS, CMBS, CDOs of all stripes, etc. )
When the balloon pops, the originator takes away ALL of the buyer’s equity and hands over the junk, non-performing paper.
In the case at issue, the true originator was the Paulson hedge fund, Government Sachs was their front/ co-con and RBS, and others were the buyers/losers. The paper blew-up in less than six months. Paulson netted about $1,000,000,000 for just this one deal. The funds came from pension funds all over Europe, and in particular Britain and Germany. This ONE DEAL has already destroyed one major bank in Holland.
GS pitched to the suckers that the pool of insured assets was not adversely selected — that a neutral party had assembled them. That is a bald-faced lie, according to the SEC pleading. In truth, there were no decent securities ANYWHERE within the covered pool!
is incorrect, and actually insulting to the intelligence of young people.
What you are saying here is, fundamentally, indistinguishable from saying that telling young people that “murder is bad” won’t be enough to get them to stop doing it and that we really need to provide them with lists of other activities or they’ll do it anyway.
No, it’s not incorrect, and what I said was quite distinguishable from your “murder is bad” example, which is pretty silly.
In a healthy culture, life is a self-evident good to virtually all people even at the earliest ages, so they are already aware of the positive example(s) long before you would start in with the negative “don’t” lectures. It’s the culture in which there are vanishingly small numbers of positive examples of respect for life where “murder is bad” lectures will be like talking to a brick wall.
Scare tactics alone begin to have diminishing returns with children the older they get. There’s a reason that those high-school films that are solely horror stories showing only a series of (1) bloody car crashes (don’t drink and drive!), (2) gross-out STD pictures (don’t have sex!), and (3) stoner kids in misery (don’t do drugs!) become jokes. The all-negative, all-the-time lessons are what insult the intelligence of young people as they begin to develop more sophisticated moral faculties. First, the teens will mock … then they will ignore.
With respect to abstinence education, “don’t have sex!” is a woefully inadequate message because it will simply not endure against both peer pressure and any physical pleasure a teen gets from sexual encounters. The perceived positives are going to overwhelm the perceived negatives, for a time at any rate. Respecting the young person’s intelligence by giving him or her age-appropriate, positive lessons about the rewards of abstinence (and, BTW, if you wait until they are 15 to start doing this, you have waited too late, at least in American culture), and you greatly increase your odds of success.
You may think a sticks-and-vinegar-only upbringing is less “insulting” to a child’s intelligence. That they will get the message from just the negative restrictions. But I predict you will raise a legalistic little beast of a human being.
223. a cool white chick taken by a black man.
white supremacy’s nightmare, and only in america folks
In the case at hand, Paulson didn’t even have a position in the lousy paper. They wanted, effectively, a Credit Default Swap payoff in their favor when the RMBS trash defaulted.
This is how Paulson was able to synthetically short the mortgage market — the sub-primes in particular.
2=4
if I had, or whatever French, said, say, the 1/4 of what Stephanie said, I would have got a sample of the smartest vocabulary that the good Americans love to dress us up with
uh, what Joan of Arc ?
OK, here is the issue… Whiskey and Habu (most dominantly) seem to think that when the society breaks down (and IMHO, at some point in the near future, it will), it will align along the racial lines. This is not racist, or xenophobic on their part, they simply extrapolate based on their interpretation of history and experience.
In my case, I don’t believe that to be true, or at least to the degree they seem to think that would happen. I think the division would be along the urban/non-urban populations. But I may be wrong. Or they may be wrong. It all boils down to whom you can trust when the order breaks down. There are people with the same tone skin as mine, but I would trust them only with a 30 ft pole between us, horizontally. And there are people with a different tone that would be on my side of the 30 ft pole.
That is all this discussion is about.
As for muslims, sorry, I have to say no. Mind you, Stephanie, muslims are not a race, so if you try to pin that on me, I have one universal sign in a store for you, to put it bluntly. And it is not xenophobic either. I just would rather err on the side of safe than sorry. It has little to do with them being muslim, it has all to do with being adherents of Islam. I may not have seen it that way a decade ago, but a lot has changed and I studied the damn thing inside and out. I have a very good reason, in my mind, for my position.
Your issue is that you swallowed the multi-cult hook, line and sinker and you refuse to deal with realities, and escape into a safe construct of multi-cult as it would be a scare place to be if you left that construct. Just visit some of the no-go zones in Europe, to get a bit of bearing on reality. Stet that, it may be a suicide, though you may be lucky and get away with being raped only.
You decry stereotyping, but happily engage in the same. You decry ad hominem, but it is ad hominem only when other people are doing it, not you. That simply does not fly here.
Try to change a tack, and infer less. Don’t presume you know everything (yes, I remember what an arrogant prick I was when I were 20-24!) and us old geezers are just a bunch of senile dinosaurs. Then maybe you can start learning.
b@216: If there is any justice the Syn-CDO market will be shut down as against public policy ASAP — before total market detonation.
I expect you’ve heard about Jim Cramer’s defense of Goldman, one link being here. Briefly, Cramer’s argument is caveat emptor. Goldman published full disclosure of the investment and risk profile. The “not so bright” buyer apparently didn’t deal with that particular bit of documentation.
I have nothing but contempt for GS, but Cramer’s argument is valid. Want to run with the big dogs, can’t p^ss like a puppy.
One of several things that I objected to is how deeply this mess impacted conservative investments here and around the globe by creating bank runs that froze the credit markets. Utterly shameful barnacle encrusted hubris.
By a Fed system of private for profit banks that we are told did not fully understand the risks of securitized investment grade paper.
MC@228: sort of tend to mostly agree that the local gal is getting some kid glove treatment. Dunno why.
MC, I don’t think that being French makes much difference. I am on boards where there are some French participating, and they are very respected. There is that thing, they don’t engage in asshat-ery, so that may have some bearing.
And puzzled, why would you say the same as Stephanie? I am sure that the shredding would be commesurate with the scope of your contribution.
OK, maybe the young lady is is getting a preferential treatment, but you are not that young, you should know better!
If I say something really inane, I expect to be shredded without mercy.
As for the French lady, she was a young republican conservative, anti-socialist, with religious background (presuming catholic, I think hugenotes were exterminated in France). Wish I can recall her name.
No wonder African Americans don’t like Honest Abe
In 1858 the Lincoln Douglas Debates took place in a number of locations. In Charleston, S.C. Honest Abe expressed this thought on the Negro situation.
“I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races, that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race I say upon this occasion I do not perceive that because the white man is to have the superior position the negro should be denied everything. I do not understand that because I do not want a negro woman for a slave I must necessarily want her for a wife. My understanding is that I can just let her alone”
Doesn’t appear to be any nightmare here …but we could look back at Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemmings …hot…hot…hot
148. Doug
Charles,
So, at 900 feet it is “self powered?”
ie, powered by the difference in specific gravities of the fresh and salt water?
……..
water desalination byo of reverse osmosis–consists of semi permeable membranes which allow fresh water to pass through but not salt –but only when extremely high pressure provided by massive energy hog pumps presses the saltwater against the membranes.
The deep ocean mimics this pressure for the current generation semipermeable membranes at a depth of about 850-900 feet.
A membrane from company out of UCLA may have a membrane that will bring that up to about 600 feet this year.
220. stephanie
@212
actually i get banned from commenting on liberal sights such as gawker media for saying the exact same things i’m saying here. apparently i piss off the extremes of both parties
I’m telling the principal and you’re going to get detention. P*ssing off both sides ….you’re not very discriminating or you have a bladder problem.
“Respecting the young person’s intelligence by giving him or her age-appropriate, positive lessons about the rewards of abstinence”
I will concede that this is a good thing, but it is quite different than what you seemed to be saying in your original post.
On the Goldman Sachs charges, I have to wonder why they remain a civil suit and not a full-up criminal RICO indictment for racketeering. Such a charge seems warranted against them in this case, and also against Pauslon. It is as if Paulson contracted a hit and GS was the hitman.
Yet there are no criminal charges. This announcement was made on a Friday, during trades, and it coincided with a fax-blast from the White House regarding the financial regulation reform package set to be taken up by Congress next week.
Am I too cynical by concluding that this SEC move is meant to shape the ground over debate on this bill more than anything else? If so then it’s an unserious manipulation disquised as regulatory move. How can you trust a mentality that, in the name of safeguarding the public welfare, games the safeguarding debate itself towards its own advantage?
I conclude that you can’t. You cannot trust these “regulators” to act on your behalf just as, if you were a client of Goldman Sachs you made a huge mistake if you thought the “financial services” they sold you on were actually meant to benefit you. They knowingly sold you a ticking timebomb calling it a safe and sound, secured investment.
I would be a fool ten times over if I ever relied again on regulators to protect me or if I ever believed for one second that Wall Street banks were seriously interested in making their clients money.
Fortunately I learned these lessons years ago. Never trust Wall Street. Never trust the Fed. Never trust the SEC. Assume the value of a dollar will decline under their combined stewardship. Plan accordingly. The latest round of reforms isn’t going to obviate this advice.
2=4
but those French usely don’t interven where they know that they would encounter such ashaterinesses, too bad, I’m born under a marsian star, I prefer difficulties
Besides I learn more with people that don’t have the same approaches as my compatriots.
uh, my contribution to the shredding with stephanie? I’m too old for having illusions anymore, 30 years ago, I might have abounded into her argumentation
“republican conservative” ? then, she must live in America !
there are still Huguenots in France, before that Islam became the 2nd religion, the Protestants had the 2nd rank
Geeeze Louise, must be cuz there is still a “hope”
237. Cowboy
Man you said it, you said it. The entire political, Wall Street connection should be RICO’d…
I can tell you from working for Wall Street firms for fifteen years that there isn’t a slimier group of people on the face of the earth. Worst job I ever had ….except the money and I’m far from any paragon of virtue but if I won a trip I never went on it. Won a trophy I’d skip the presentation lunch.
It’s like the mob or some syndicate has a fatwah on the American middle class. Just keep buy’n ammo, you can never have enough ammo.
MC, republican in the sense of anti-EU. France as France, not a part of the Neo-Roman Empire, ruled by the elite in that chocolate producing city up north. I think she was 19, maybe at that time. May have been one year phenomenon, maybe she went to university and did not have time anymore to go on as an activist.
As for the French guys in the other forum, no, not echo chamber members. Stand on their own, but older guys, so maybe that is a factor, they do not have the unwarranted rusophile traits, so maybe that makes up the difference.
229. ad hominem, an argument directed to the man, attacks the man personally. sarah palin is currently being ad hominemed to death by the liberal media and particularly Obama’s gang. They ridicule her because of who she is: a woman, from a small town, and powerful.
You and your pals are responding to my arguments likewise. MC is doing it in French. You aren’t taking apart any of the positions I’ve outlined in any of my posts. (Bogie wheel is, which i appreciate for being productive) You are simply writing me off because you know if you read this blog that I’m friends with LOTM and you all have your differences with his line of reasoning, which is quite parallel to my own.
So yeah what you are all is doing has nothing to do with race or age or gender. It’s personal, but I don’t take it personally. It’s as funny when the right wing does it to me as the left wing. All I’m asking for here civil and polite discussion but your kind brings it down to the mud-slinging level.
MC if you don’t speak a language fluently, don’t go around insinuating that someone who DOES would theoretically be dressed down by you if you DID. I am not running to the nearest internet translator to cover up my admittedly imperfect french so I can sling mud back at you.
If you don’t have something nice to say don’t say anything. (you can talk about awful depressing things without being depressing and awful about it!) And for our grammatically challenged here, if you can’t say something nicely you sound, sorry Mrs Palin, retarded.
Oh and talk about shredding all you want . Talk is cheap.
Here’s a real challenge.
Make a sentence using “moral ethos”, Wall Street, and the US Government together and not get laughed at.
229. OK, here is the issue… Whiskey and Habu (most dominantly) seem to think that when the society breaks down (and IMHO, at some point in the near future, it will), it will align along the racial lines. This is not racist, or xenophobic on their part, they simply extrapolate based on their interpretation of history and experience.
In my case, I don’t believe that to be true, or at least to the degree they seem to think that would happen. I think the division would be along the urban/non-urban populations.”
Actually, if this ever were to happen, it would be my hope that the division would be between the productive class and the unproductive/parasite classes. And it would, of course, be my hope that the productive class would win.
re 146 Charles — Desalinization
” Typically the concentrated brine is remixed with a whole lot seawater and dropped back into the ocean at various points so the average salinity quickly mixes back to ocean levels. ”
ok – that will work -the ocean is a big place, and dispersed reject brine could be accommodated – and very probably to any practical Human use degree – yes – similar to our co2 production – which i also do not see as significant
and # 148 Doug – yes – I’m unsure about that explanation – something doesn’t seem right –
” Early tests for this are being done in some lakes in southern california by DVX Technologies. Current generation membranes however require that the submersible membrane be down about 900 feet. ”
am reading this – will take a few days for me to absorb and research —
other problems, – are a lot of pipe, and pumps — not insurmountable, imho, and experience – but significant – details – to work out — all this depending on scale, capacity – area.
a long time ago – i worked as a day labour with the – government subsidized – attempt off the Kona coast in Hawaii, to bring cold water from depth, to the surface, to produce electricity –
i think the plant is still there – and it now grows shrimp in the cold water pumped out – maybe it’s own electricity – it did work, but only at a too small profit to be continued privately — i haven’t checked in a long while – it may still be tax-payer subsidized –
the problem, was cost / benefit – anything in the sea, will get fouled with sea stuff – keeping any tubing clean, ultimately proved to be the deal breaker – just couldn’t do it –
anybody attempting to do this large-scale desalinization, should research that experience, and see what has progressed in keeping sea-growth, from clogging pipes. – there were a lot of ideas, and experiments – i haven’t followed them or any success -
220. stephanie
…and i am neither a hot black chick nor am i seeking an old white man. quite opposite actually …. so you’re really a white male or tranny, not hot and you’re seeking a young black man?
dang honey , i dun found my false teeth…wanna party?
now i dun thought i broked down yur logic thar pretty dang gud. ain’t one hominy in dat critikue …. jess good ole deductive reason’nin….
pleeze stop now yur gett’n ta be a huge bore.
243. Kev
Believe me if the shoot’n starts it’ll be like shirts and skins ….you won’t define your target after a debate…it’ll be skin tone….and it’ll be too bad for that but that’s what it will be…..well that an cars with old obama stickers on ‘em.
After two days I have not heard from Wretchard, which is most disappointing, a two day break from the BC feels like a vacation. Today I walked almost 10 miles around town and visited the Metropolitan Museum, will blog about that later.
The key point here is that I criticized the BNP in the UK as being national socialist in ideology and a potential stand in for Islamism. That is what triggered the assertion by whiskey that he is for ‘national socialism’ and he is for ‘racism.’ He was unambiguous about that and peterike who is I believe a Serbian chimed in to back that. I have been concerned that people here are getting played by Russian sympathizers, who even if they offer interesting information always should be considered as having their own agendas. So my basic charge about whiskey and peterike, no matter how much hand waving they or others try to lay on after about culture, remains. They need to be called out and hammered on that with a focus not an interactive discussion. It is possible that peterike simply did not understand what the initial dispute between whiskey and myself was really about and got caught up in a bandwagon effect.
Habu is simply a cyber bully, full stop. That is an actual legal dangerous condition, people have died because of it and the blog owners and administrators can be liable for any harm they cause either emotional damage or by stalking conduct. There are many resources and information available on the Internet on how to identify a bully and what to do with them. The rules on dealing with a cyber bully are;
1. identify,
2. do not engage, it is the response that they crave,
3. rally support and isolate them,
4. encourage authorities to remove them.
Four times he has attacked me and then followed up with apologies. Recently I myself tried to cover for him and drew a distinction between his efforts to claim special authority based on his claimed family or personal history beyond what is proper, and his actual erudition based on his education. I can no longer do so because he uses his learning and skills to enable the abuse and cover for advocacy for violence. His mood swings are remarkable and troubling. He has had a pattern of choosing a victim and pursuing them with escalating attacks and insults to bait them and drive them off the blog. Over last Summer into the Autumn he was doing so serially attacking one person every couple of weeks. Twice women communicated to me privately that they were being driven from the blog by his abusive bullying. Habu talks of guns to instill fear in people, that is why I keep my name off my blog. So let me be very clear here, if Habu is talking about how he is not afraid of combat and knows how to track and kill a man in order to make me fear him then I need and I think that the people in Pajamas Media need to know that. Threats and stalking are not to be taken lightly. If his insults and disparagement of my manhood as less of a combat leader than he is are meant to make me seek a personal confrontation with him then I will note that anyone as erratic as he has been is not someone I want to follow, lead or have on my flank. If he is attempting to instill fear in me, or threatening to stalk me, or daring me to meet him in person, I will just note that in America we hire people to deal with threats like that. It is part of being civilized. Let me be clear that in his policy proposals, as opposed to his personal attacks, he is not exploring the possibility of trends reaching conclusions and discussing how other similar situations have been resolved. He is calling for the preemptive extermination of millions indeed hundreds of millions of human beings both overseas and of US citizens. He is not calling for us to defend the principles of the Declaration and the Constitution but is instead calling for them to be rejected and replaced with a reign of terror to be guided by those he approves of. BTW, just to as is my nature go the extra bit to be fair neither he not whiskey are stupid, his advice to Stephanie on what to read is good. Habu is not I think a racist but he is a bully and obsessed with violence and his own sense of authority.
Whiskey has his monomania to motivate him, so he has perceptive energy. That does not change that he is a bigot and damages the credibility of the venue and all who participate in it. For example Leo Linbeck III has poured time and money into a charter school educational program that serves almost exclusively black students in NYC. Any linkage to the likes of whiskey could imperil that worthy effort. The reason I came back to post this is that I have three supportive comments on my blog plus three other aupportive communications by Facebook and email.
What made this so galling is that anyone who actually read my posts knows damn well that I am no leftist and no softy about the need to actually engage these issues and do what really needs to be done to win the Long War. The fear and panic and cries that anything short of gotterdammerung or selling ourselves out to the likes of the BNP are useless is what discredits us and enables the real enemies of Western Civilization to advance. At the risk of repeating, what triggered the attack on me was my mild defense of the UKIP position, although they are soft on the War and focused on a domestic agenda, as opposed to the BNP. They did not respond with an argument for the BNP position versus the UKIP or any other but rather gave a full throated endorsement of ‘national socialism’ and ‘racism.’ Go back and read it.
If efforts to explore policy options, other than rope+lamp post+global thermonuclear war, result in charges of cowardice and calls to get out of the blog then this blog will die or simply become a junior version of Free Republic. That niche is already filled and frankly this place can be better than that. The fact is that over the last few months many of the best commentators have faded away. wretchard has on several occasions shared with me his frustration at the repeated calls for violence and closed threads or tried to politely warn people. No one especially me wants a LGF style regime in here. That does not change that there must be some standards and when people damage the venue and make it risky to be associated with clearly and explicitly racist comments they must be stopped. It is also important that real and repeated bullying is something that must be stopped. Ideally everyone in here would have read what triggered my reaction but they did not and the blog owner has allowed this to run on without comment. He can either do something or ignore it or attack me. I still hope he does right and wants support to do so.
What Habu is doing to Stephanie now is bullying, others are just criticizing her ideas, he attacks a person.
Habu, that’s a lay-up:
With the moral ethos of Wall Street the nation’s top military officer said on Sunday that a U.S. (Government) strike against Iran would go “a long way” to delaying its nuclear program.
Ah, Stephanie, thanks for the lecture, if you did not explain what ad hominem is, I’d never know!
Still, it seems that ad hominem is, in your particular case, something that is directed at you, not something that is directed from you at others. Is that a new definition? Please elucidate.
I don’t care if you are a friend with LotM, or not. I have nothing against him. He may have been attacked lately for some of his opinions, but he is a big man (well disregarding the age, most of us here are somewhat on the decrepit has been track), he can defend himself, I believe.
You make sweeping generalizations, but the moment someone points that to you, you immediately pull the ad hominem card. Cute, but not that cute.
Say what you must, opinions are welcome, but once you pull racists and xenophobes and white supremacists at BCers, it is almost a three-quarters-Goodwin law and you’ll get a slap on the wrist. Hell, I’ll get a slap on the wrist too, if I did that.
Just because you are young, that does not entitle you for a pref treatment, ok? Sometimes, we are grumpy old men and women and prefer to say thing plainly rather than wrap them in bushido niceties.
@231
Staphanny is here putting stink bait on snag lines hoping to catch something to report to her handlers back at party headquarters. Ever watch dung beetles roll up feces to make a food-home for their younguns?
Has to be work for everybody.
W
You have no choice. You must ban Habu before his mean old words make someone cry. Now I don’t recall saying anything about tracking men, but I do remember something about a chocolate eclair.
So do your duty W.
MC if you don’t speak a language fluently, don’t go around insinuating that someone who DOES would theoretically be dressed down by you if you DID. I am not running to the nearest internet translator to cover up my admittedly imperfect french so I can sling mud back at you.
you hit my nail (uh, not from the translator) now I rejoin the spirit of the BC corps, actually, you are the one that dress the popole of this place with mud, and if my vocabulary doesn’t find your agreement, it’s the last thing I want to be bothered about, damn, I’m a boorish that doen’t attend the Delikatessen coffee houses, unlike you.
If you don’t have something nice to say don’t say anything. (you can talk about awful depressing things without being depressing and awful about it!) And for our grammatically challenged here, if you can’t say something nicely you sound, sorry Mrs Palin, retarded.
who are you to tell me that you’re a more valuable person than me and or than Ms Palin ? your intervention doesn’t imply that, you are not that pure charming young person against racism, it’s more insidious, you have already the suffisance of a old person that knows it all and wants to lecture the primitive plebe that doesn’t fail in your intelligent program
Funny, as I wrote, LotM got his say already.
But that was not really what I had on mind.
LotM, Habu, guys, can you take your tit-for-tat to some private area, maybe a park and resolve it there? Gloves, swords, pistols… don’t care.
248. Tony
Great sentence…now you may be in violation of your first amendment rights by saying stuff like that. I’m just glad for you that you didn’t say something like “Gun” or “pop goes the weasal” cause that could cause a myocardial infarction.
I mean Tony, you know I’ve actually read syndicated columnists saying the same things I say and I’ve even watch the war in Iraq on TV which is probably dangerous and hurts peoples feelings and I am so hurt they feel bad. I know you feel the same way..
Just be careful who you address on the blog, they might cry.
MC, I have to say, I like your “French”!
253. twobyfour
He’d never show up, whoever he is, plus I am a man of peace, a pensioner at 62, so I have senior rights not to have to go to parks.
Good gravy.
I don’t care what damned shade of melanin ANY AMERICAN PATRIOT possesses. What I DO care about is our country going to hell in a hand-basket and feeling helpless to do anything about it!
I’m not a Belmont Club regular but, I hope for everyone’s sake that people can mellow the frick out and have adult discussions without devolving into actual threats of any kind not only out of respect for the host but out of respect for each other.
Thank goodness there’s an edit function because what I originally wrote in response to a certain commenter here was much more heated than just, “Some people never learn that brute force is not always the best strategy.”
I do appreciate some of the survival tips and whatnot but yeah, sometimes this place gets damned creepy-freaky-WEIRD. ;p
I saw some guys in the airport the other day, one bald, one mil haircut, saying funny words like sergeant and Anbar, and the bartender carded them. I tried to make fun of them, but they just laughed. “Duh duh duh” they said, made me laugh.
2=4
“they do not have the unwarranted rusophile traits, so maybe that makes up the difference.”
I had the pleasure to visit st Petersburg, and have only good souvenirs from the russian people.
this “russophile” feature appears occasionally, when I don’t share the ambiant conspiracy against the usual suspects. Probably I would have been more restraint if I had experienced a soviet occupation. Though be certain that if Russia had shown any vindicative intention towards my country, I would be the first to fight her.
whenever i hear ‘ad hominem’ i think of redbone gravy, and ‘add hominy grits’ and dam i git hongry
Ad Hominem Grits
251. Habu
W
You have no choice. You must ban Habu before his mean old words make someone cry. Now I don’t recall saying anything about tracking men, but I do remember something about a chocolate eclair.
So do your duty W.
Habu you’re just really a bad, bad man and the world needs shelter from men who use latin quotes ans Shakespeare to embellish their prose. But oh no , you go futher, you excoriate our foes, the islams who have killed thousand of Americans by actually saying we should kill them in the manner and numbers that Curtis Lemay did to the Japanese and Harry Truman did to the Japanese.
No don’t try to muddy the water by bring up the facts, that would simply make people cry. Look Habu you can’t make a man out of a rag doll. It can’t be done so just have W; ban you. Then some sissy can have a say without fear of contradiction. You’re just a big ole bully Habu.
So everyone please write W and have me ban before I hurt someone elses feelings.
Well, Delia, we are all freaking out, the upcoming train wreck is too big to miss and 911 has a prerecorded message playing over and over. But a good point, the edit function is a goody-goody, unless you have a goose in the oven and just about to stick fork in it when you are engaged in a post.
220. stephanie
“quite opposite actually.”
Well the opposite (in your words) would be that you are a plain jane white chick seeking a young black man.
Good luck, but I would think a bad choice. Unless of course you cull your choice wisely, because many, many young black men can’t and/or won’t help support any woman no matter their color or age. Nor will they support any children that come from the union, unless of course published statistics and Bill Cosby are wrong.
They also have occupations usually (if they have one) that do not pay well, because statistically they don’t have skills that garner better wages.
Well except for some occupations that are not exactly legal.
Like I have told my grand daughters, money is not the thing that will give you a good life nor happiness, but it sure helps, but a good man with a good heart who can at least earn a fair living…well that is a different thing and has nothing to do with…
the color of his skin or the make, age or color of his car.
Papa Ray
gotta admit, the Sunday-night sober-up pissed-off dissension in the ranks is awfully fun to read –shame on me!
Well goodnight everyone. I hope you have pleasant dreams,and if you don’t hear from me again, well that’s the way it is. Banished.
I’d like to thank the director of protocol and faux legal scholar for producing such fine material and keeping the Marquis of Queensbury rules in play.
To the producer ..props to you
To the contributors … what a gas.
MC: Probably I would have been more restraint if I had experienced a soviet occupation.
Yea, that is one quite sobering experience. My father was kinda russophile, until August 21, 1968. Then he wasn’t.
oh, bullshit, habu –you ain’t going anywhere –(heh, what a double meaning –but i mean it the good way) bloodless blogs bode bored b b b b *help –Belugas?
Meanwhile, take a look at Glenn Reynold’s collection of thoughts on the implications of Bill Clinton’s bringing up Oklahoma City. Then think of Obama’s free-fall in the approval polls.
http://pajamasmedia.com/instapundit/97814/
…and here’s The Hayride –a regular old local Louisiana blog that has decided to keep up with that outbreak of SS -style street control in New Orleans –
twobyfour/232
re: >>As for the French lady, she was a young republican conservative, anti-socialist, with religious background
Her name was Sabine Herold. I don’t know what she’s up to now, but she was a refreshing anomaly at the time.
Habu – lol – you always make me lol – thanks – keep up the high work
meanwhile – we doing it again – http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/shuttlemissions/sts131/news/landing.html
is this a great country or what? —
to the rest of you kids – settle down, night comes – sweet dreams.
tomorrow, will come all too soon – focus – we all headed in the same direction – help each other -
tharkun/268
Hey, thanks! Knew it was Sabine, but forgotten the last name.
I’m hesitant to get in the middle of someone else’s fight, but here goes anyway:
I’m a regular reader but infrequent commenter, and I’d just like to say that I don’t want to see any of the regulars leave. Lifeofthemind, Habu, whiskey: I value all of your contributions to BC. Some of the best discussions on the internet are right here. I don’t agree with everything everybody says, but I enjoy reading and learning.
America is facing gravely perilous times right now, so it’s not surprising that, among those of us who are aware of the magnitude of the danger, nerves are getting frayed and tempers are getting short. I see it in myself, too.
As Franklin said, “We must all hang together or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.”
Dang, what a bunch of racists:
Arizona Clears Strict Immigration Bill
And gun nuts:
Arizona to allow concealed weapons without permit
Hear that multitude of “pop pop pop” sounds?
That is liberals heads exploding when they read these two tidbits.
Papa Ray
Tony,
I thought it was an advertisement for Hominids.
—
Lugh,
When you’re talkin “Habu,” you ain’t talkin middle aged.
You’re talkin OLD!
But, who’s to say that isn’t Steph’s turn on?
—
I think Ms Sabine has been busy getting raped.
PR/272; Arizona, that’s Tombstone, where the Gunfight at the OK Corral was. i’d imagine that whoever brought in Wyatt Earp back in 1884 was concerned over local property values –which are extremely sensitive to the trendlines of the various inputs.
***
…watching Geraldo at the moment –he’s caught on to the Richard Holbrooke poppy policy –$2.50/’bump’ heroin hitting the high schools –
That Lincoln Douglas debate was in Charleston, one of seven cities in Illinois where debates took place. I think even in 1858 Honest Abe would have been shot dead for expressing such abolitionist sentiment as he allowed in public in a southern venue. One can only imagine the change of tone or sentiment re the slave owning population that would have shaped the debate as the result of holding the contest for the a seat in the US House of Representatives from the state of Illinois… in South Carolina.
“Father Abraham” was aware of the painfully deep and wide chasm between the majority of slave’s education and that of others in our American political and economic culture. He could also not fathom that as former slaves, the emancipated population would choose to remain in the United States and not start anew in Libya or in Central or South America (Panama?) anywhere but in the USA. But the former slaves in the south with relatively few exceptions considered themselves American citizens, especially at forty acres and a mule.
The pain and travesty that became the reconstruction era, stood rife with lessons for US Soldiers in Baghdad and Kabul. Who knows maybe some of those lessons learned can be applied soon in Damascus or the materials can be used to supplement lessons in Tehran. Preferable I think to dropping a nuke on em…if it can be avoided.
As for the Albigensian Heresy, Are you claiming to be Innocent? Or are ye anti papist?
Sabine Herold has been busy as a de facto president of Alternative Libérale (Libertarian party, pro-American, free enterprise, thatcherian, personal responsibility, anti-statism). She organized the protest against unions in 2003. At age 17.
Sabine debate at American Enterprise Institute 2008
148. Doug
244. bits
I wrote this piece on desalination on the big island back in Dec 2008. Unfortunately, I wander around for awhile before getting to the point so click Edit/Find in your browser and put “Big Island” in the search box and start reading at that paragraph.
Hawaii Governor Signs Ocean Thermal Energy Deal
Go Here for a blog that I did on DVX technologies in July 2009. They are currently running the desalination unit in 900 feet of water in southern California. Only its not actually desalinating water. Because the water is not salty. The test is in a fresh water lake. Rather they are taking impurities out of the water–just to see how it works–before sending it out to the ocean.
Doug–Reverse Osmosis has been around for quite some time. You may have been referring to Forward Osmosis–which is only now going through test trials. I have posted an image on my blog here which gives detail to how the two different processes work–based on a picture in this month’s (April) national geographic.
bits–yeah bio fouling is still a big issue. The latest innovation to halting bio fouling has come out of UCLA. I mention the innovation in my latest post here. It comes in the context of an argument that feds or somebody need to apply a recent Princeton University Math solution which Makes Computer Modeling 100,000 Times Faster….to a materials research software that models for semi permeable membranes–so as to accelerate the pace of membrane research for both hydrogen separations and salt water fresh water separations.
Doug…
I was afraid something Roman might happen to her.
odds n ends, on The Hayride blog (referred to above in #267), if you scroll down a ways to
UPDATE, 11:00 p.m.: When we were first starting to research who these Iron Rail Collective folks were….
…and read the next few paras, if becomes clear that the Jindal staffers may have –in a none-too-circuitous way –been attacked by agents of the government itself –thru one of the aid organizations funded by the Dep’t of Health and Human Services. Don’t call me crazy ’til you take a glance at it & give it a 1930s mitteleuropa thought or two.
2=4
First time I heard of Sabine Herold, (I’m not a TV lurker) though her name appears on the net, but apparently her blog and facebook stopped in 2003 and 2009, she still writes some ironical sentences on Twitter. Apparently, also, she wanted to become a European deputé last year, can’t see that she managed it, therefore she wants to follow the prints that makes a curriculum that counts in Europe, and it isn’t precisely respecting the ideas that she learnt in HEC. She is a bit categorical and lacks of experience.
Well she’ll have to swallow some grass snakes if she wants to stay in the political spectrum, there are much more bigger sizes that are playing more or less on the same lawn, like Marine Lepen, that also are aware of the ground realities.
Otherwise she works in an organisation that helps the small enterprises to find “hedge” founds, so, at the moment, she must be worried with the crisis and its pervert tricks. But, now, that I know her, I’m going to follow her career.
MC, give her time, she’s just 25!
mC/280; swallow some grass snakes –Good grief, woman, what do you think, we’re a bunch of Frenchmen ? –next thing you’ll be telling us people eat snails or sumthin!
Speaking of snails, did you hear about the snail that got mugged by some turtles? He told the cops, “well, it all happened so fast….”
HABUuuuuuuuuuuuuuu !!!!
got sumthin fer ya :
“Worried about where to take refuge in case of an asteroid hitting the Earth, a nuclear attack or some other apocalyptic event?
An American business has the answer: an underground bunker equipped with all the modern comforts.”
“Surviving the apocalypse — in comfort”
http://www.terradaily.com/reports/Surviving_the_apocalypse_in_comfort_999.html
Buddy
all the net is tlking but only of that
http://tinyurl.com/y4hpjdg
Buddy, if the last analyses of the plane crash interest you:
http://tinyurl.com/y548mad a Smolensk inhabitant describes precisely the facts and the landscape (with pics)
that contradicts this supposed global whatever security expert says:
http://www.worldreports.org/news/283_polands_suspicious_second_katyn_massacre_tragedy-news what a load of crap
and if you can read french, there’s more from the pilots point of view, from where I picked the Smolensk link, also discussed here :
http://www.securiteaerienne.com/node/194#comment last analyse of the Polish plane crash
Thanks. MC –and i agree, the first link is sober and good, the second is a load of crap –if i was a conspirator, i would WANT to see articles like the second.
***
Thanks –yes, i read French just fine. I just don’t know what any of the words mean, is the only problem.
But my computer can TRANslate! magic!
***
all the authorities now say there was but one approach –the crash. i wonder, where did all the stories come from, about four approaches being ‘waved off’ before the fifth and fatal? And the story of dumping fuel –what was that all about? What the hell was (is) going on, anyway?
Whisky …is this proof of your postulation? Have a good laugh BC’s!
https://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=2&ik=cbeecd5cb2&view=att&th=1281695371969e63&attid=0.1&disp=attd&zw
Stephanie,
While I admire your tenacity, you can propitiate and equivocate only so long as bad things don’t happen. Then you must pick a side. Being neutral benefits only your enemy. I think most of your responders here at BC are simply advising you that your outlook won’t help you to survive your first encounter with real danger.
Of course, if you see no signs of danger ahead, you’ll be surprised and helpless…a slave to chance and gov’t control.
g@289: you can propitiate and equivocate only so long as bad things don’t happen. Then you must pick a side.
Some of us did pick sides. We were played for fools by the Bush Republicans. I do not believe the Republican Party can underestimate the extent of the loathing and contempt they left in their 8-yr wake under Bush, despite, by all accounts, giving it their best shot. If Dick Morris is right that the Republicans take both the House and the Senate this November, then I’m the love child of Elvis and Mamie van Doren. IMO incumbents will be ousted and I am (now) guessing that their replacements will come about evenly from both Parties who will be forced into issues-based platforms that will redefine – to a degree – the ideological identity of this country, which I predict will move in the direction of the first Party to dent the incestuous corruption that now dominates Washington as a single monolithic and overwhelming entity.
A little retail deal-making is good for legislative commerce. Wholesale liquidation of principle for profit – not so good.
RE syn-CDO’s. The GS lawsuit is generating some interesting conversation on the distinction between innovation and fraud. These products were created to provide yield – and nothing else. They serve no other useful function (economic growth or job creation.) Criminalizing the product is imposing a social judgment on the markets. I would, however, have no problem with burying this product under mountains of regulation that effectively destroys it as a yield-producing instrument.
RE SEC charges against GS. This is about as depressing as it gets. GS is a pimple on the @ss of Wall St and America, but the current charges are designed (?) to bury the case in arcane disputes over the proper disclosure base to accompany syn-CDO’s. “Innovation or fraud”? Wake me up when you decide.
In the meantime I can’t help but wonder how many people are familiar with the common practice of hiring GS to underwrite the purchase of a company (a big revenue stream for them – often companies small enough to sail under the radar of the news media) and then expand the existing Board of Directors with GS people in order to facilitate votes to sell the company in pieces – in the absence of shareholder approval – the shares of whom are readily dumped into the nearest PBGC receptacle (not unlike the Too-Big-To-Fail ($50B?) receptacle in the current financial reform bill opposed by Olympia Snow). So much for supporting small business.
Maybe the debate should better focus on the difference between illegal and disgusting.
Thank you, Massa.
[I am sure such an obvious response has been made elsewhere, but I haven't seen it. This comment is of no relevance to the discussion on racism here which I unfortunately have no time to read.]
I generally read this blog for the content and not for any prose stylings, but I will copy-and-paste this memorably true quote: